355: Spindly, Greebly

0:00Brad, what are the longest serving pieces of tech in my house, died last night? Oh man, that's, hmm, how many years really? Well, hang on. Yeah. I already know what it is. I was going to play a guest in game with you and say, I have an old is it and I'll try to figure out what it is, but spoiler, I know what it is. So my coffee scale let loose the coil. Oh man. I know. It was 15 years old. I bought it in a minute. Wait, you don't have anything older than 15 years serving in your house? I said one of. Okay. Yeah, like look, I have a microwave oven that's older. I have a, uh, huh. Wow, this is like going around and finding what the oldest piece of tech in the house is would probably be an interesting one of those receivers. That's probably there. That's a fun challenge. Wait, do we have the same? Oh, yeah, you do have. We have the same sony receiver. Yeah. I think I got mine in 2012. Yeah, that's about when I got mine. What's getting up there? I think these, these Cambridge sound works speakers are probably always going to be id for me. Oh, yeah. I think the sound works far and away. Easily at least 25 years old, a little more 26, 27.

1:03I think my sony 90s TV, but that hasn't had to be continuous, continuous service. Yeah, the, I don't know if you see it, new CRTs count. Those are like a vintage eye. That's like something you came in. Even though it is old, you came into it recently. So I don't know if that's quite the same thing. Like something you bought new and are still using, I think, is the spirit of the question. I went back, I went to my storage unit last week and I realized I had a 19 inch sharp in there that's just been aging. That's the time I'd completely forgot. Oh my god. It was way back in the back. So anyway, yeah, the scale died. I somehow managed to get coffee into it. It capillary actioned around the edge of my, my brewer and up and around and over and down. And when I picked it up, water poured out of the coffee poured out, technically I guess, of the USB port, which was already a little hinky. It was one of those ones where I had to hold the micro USB in the exact right position for the charge. And anyway, it already had USB charge on it 15 years like that sounds early for micro USB

2:07charge. That seems early for putting USB charge ports on non computer devices, but maybe that's been a thing for longer than I remember. It was, it was probably right after the EU. So it was a Hario, which is a Japanese brand. It was probably right after the EU decision that said anything that was rechargeable had to have USB, because it was micro, which would have been around like the rise of Android like it would have been like 2012, 2011 somewhere there that checks out. And yeah, so anyway, I took it apart and I looked at it and I was like, okay, I can clean this up and probably make it work. But then I have to resolder the USB and a bunch of other things. And also I wanted to make coffee the next day. So I ordered a Buku B-O-O-K-O-O scale, Ultis I think from Amazon, who's here the next day. And it's real fancy. It's like, I think it's a Chinese knockoff of the fancy like flow rate coffee scales that does like ratio brewing or flow rate brewing. You can connect it to an app with Bluetooth.

3:09I'm sure there's an ESP32 in there. I think it's smart and I'm a little frustrated by it. These are priced like real kitchen implements. These are not. I was envisioning like $10 to $15 for a kitchen scale that's not what we're talking about here. Kitchen scales aren't $10 or $15 anymore. Well, some of them are maybe they're not worth having though. If you want a tenth of a gram precision, you're buying a weed scale or a coffee scale. And I want a tenth of a gram is what you use for coffee. They ranged from like 70 to 100 bucks. Well, okay, they ranged from 70 to more than I was going to pay. I think they got this one for 70. It was on sale the other day with a coupon or something or some business. And it's fine. It does ratio brewing, which I like. But it doesn't have labeled buttons. It just has two kind of touch sensors on either side. Yeah. I'm having a little hard time parsing the interface on this thing.

4:11It's got graphic design on it. No, no, that's clear. You can see the electronics through the top shelf. Oh, which is what I do. That's why I've got that one because I was like, this looks cool. This is very future and cool. It's also small, which I like. It's real fast. The registration on the temperature impact is very fast, which is good. It has like three modes. One is just normal scale. But I want in that normal mode, I want scale plus timer because like I use the timer when I bring coffee to figure out how, whether I'm going too fast or too slow. It does flow rate, which I didn't have a stand for until I 3D printed one last night. So now I can have just the brewer on the scale and not have the, you know, just the, the craft on the scale and not the brewer. Did you design that stand or download a thing? I download from the internet. I like like the three here. Here's the dark secret of 3D printing bread is that. If I like this and I end up using this on the day to day, I'm going to design one that I really like rather than use this one.

5:13But when I could just load it up my phone last time, be like, Hey, I should print a brewer and then four hours later it was done. I was like, I'm just, I'm just hitting the button. Okay. So it also has a bunch of auto features, which you can turn on automatically and like the controls are weird because like if you want to change it from grams to ounces, you tap the left button eight times. Okay. Which is kind of a crazy. That's a lot of interaction for something you're probably going to do often. Well, it turns out usually in the old scale, I had to unscrew the back to change it from grams to ounces. Wait, that's worse. So usually I just used my phone to convert grams to ounces when I needed ounces. I need to get the thing I realized is I'm wearing two scale kitchen, right? Because like this scale is good for up to three kilograms, which is quite a bit. But I really need also is like a baking scale that has pretty good precision and has a removable eyeball like a removable gauge thing so that I can have like a big giant bowl on the

6:17scale and then still be able to see the numbers because this one's too small to do like a big bowl of flour on or something. Anyway, it has this auto mode that's inexplicable and every time I update the software on the firmware on the scale, which is a whole other thing. I don't even think I need like I'm I don't like having scales that have firmware. I don't think every time I do that, it changes the way the auto mode works. So like when it's in the auto mode before you put the thing on it, you put the brewer on it and it would tear and then you pour some water in and then after a minute or two, it would tear again for no apparent reason. So it's completely useless for the way I brew coffee. The new one seems to work better because you can set it to only tear when stuff comes off. But like there's I'm happy to learn how to I'm working my coffee flow around the machine, not making the machine work around my coffee. I guess man should not have to fight with his kitchen scale just to make a cup of coffee. You damn right.

7:30Welcome to Brad and Will, maybe tech pod I'm Will. I am Brad, there's one other thing I was going to say about the scale as I gaze at it, which is that they have integrated Chinese characters into their company logo on this scale. Yeah, right. And I'm kind of way into that. Like the whole aesthetic is real good. Let's just make all of our let's make everything look like Blade Runner. Let's just realize the Blade Runner future literally. I looked at it and I was like, Oh, right, this is Blade Runner. Right. I should buy this if we're going to get the shitty dystopian future. Can we at least get the coolest FedEx that go along with that? Yeah, it's it's weird. So I bought the Themus Ultras, what it's called. And like I said, I this is like this is a thing that knocks off four or five other scales that have been around for a long time at a third of the price, basically. So a lot of that going around.

8:32There's a lot of stuff in. Let me we talked about the Hodo power tools last week. Like there's a lot of like, I don't want to say race to the bottom stuff necessarily, because I think these are generally pretty good. But like knock off also sounds, it's hard to describe these in normal language without sounding like you're denigrating them in some way, because I think most of them are like probably doing fine for their price class. Yeah, it's I mean, like, look, this is what happened with Anker. Anker came in and kind of took over the cable and USB battery and stuff space. But then they went and inflated themselves back up to previous levels, you know, like the their stuff was gotten pretty pricey at the top end now. But you know what I mean? These are like facsimiles of very much higher end devices than you used to see knockoffs for. That's true. It's happened in 3D printing and laser cutting actually a lot. So like the laser cutters, the Chinese laser cutters went from being a thing you got if you kind of didn't like to have functioning eyes.

9:34Or if you wanted to have a laser cutter that was going to last for like a hundred hours or 150 hours to the market leaders almost in like the space of 10 years basically. So yeah, anyway, it's interesting. I like it's a weird product. I don't know how I feel about it. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep it. I'm still in the return window. But I do like the design on the top. They did a nice job with the kind of like if I can figure out how to get the software to do what I want. It's going to be exactly what I look what I was looking for for ages. And I did 3D print the flow rate stands. So I'll let you know how that goes next week. Cool fabrication fabrication. It's a so you were out a little bit over the last couple months and we had some questions left over from that time period that were explicitly Brad questions. We had a huge crop of questions last week when we did the questions episode. Yes, we've got a bunch of extras there too. So we're digging back into the question well, we have just as a point of order for the

10:38next couple of weeks. This is the time that if you were going to watch general magic while you're off for next lander next week, I think is where I'm never going to call it. I called it practical magic yet again last night when I proposed this. I never going to stop calling it practical magic. Look, when I went to see Spider-Man with the kid of the other day, there was a trailer for practical magic too. Wow. A 30 to 40 year sequel to a movie from the 90s. What if I show up next week having watched practical magic? Then we'll talk about practical magic. I love that movie. That's great. I've never seen it, but I've also I'd much rather watch general magic. I mean, general magic. So general magic is the story of general magic, right? The cut. Yeah. So I didn't realize until this is again to be clear. This is for next week's episode where I think it's just good to give people heads up that we're going to be watching a thing for next week. But this is a documentary about, yes, a company also called general magic. And I did not realize that was the case that the company was the same name as the documentary. My assumption is there will also be midnight margaritas. So what? That's the scene that's the famous scene from practical magic when they get midnight

11:40margaritas and dance. Wow. There's a whole cultural education. I have yet to undergo, I guess. Yeah, I'm excited about general magic because when you, it's one of those places, it's like Xerox Park where a lot of the underpinnings of the modern age took place there. This is this is the pretty much the limits of what I know about this documentary and the company that's based on is that it was founded by a bunch of former original Macintosh team people. Like I'm looking right now at list of founders and it's Bill Ackinson and Andy Hertzfeld, like those are pretty much some of the biggest names around the original Macintosh that you will ever see. It's a lot of the initial Apple diaspora folks left and went there. Right. Kind of rivean to Apple's Tesla. That's great. And it sounds like they are indeed a lot of very foundational technology that we kind of take for granted that's everywhere these days. Like touch screens was one of the things that they were really excited about. Should I tease it by reading off this list on Wikipedia real quick? We can. The company developed precursors to USB software modems, small touch screens, touch screen,

12:44controller integrated circuits, ASICs, multimedia email, network games, streaming TV and early e-commerce. Yeah, they were just a wealthened technology think tank back in the days when that was a positive thing instead of a negative. Yes. So anyway, general magic is the name of that documentary about that company and we were going to check that out and talk about it next week. So watch that ahead of time if you would like to keep up. I think what our AMC friends say is watch this space in this time frame. So anyway, but this week we're going to go back and delve into the well of questions and get some more good questions out. Ready? Anything cute up or you're going to be a vamp for a minute. Oh, the email address. I always say is techpot at content.town. You can send an email there and we may or may not read on the show. Try to keep them short and to the point we love those. Yeah. How about we start with a cake batter? Okay. I recently adopted a Casio watch. No smart technology just a watch. How do you feel about dumb tech stuff that doesn't need an internet connection or subscription

13:46to operate for decades? I kind of like it. It turns out my I missed my scale that was dumb. I can didn't have a yeah. I started with this question exactly because of your scale and now well, I mean, how smart is the new one? It's I mean, it will continue working. You don't need to use an app to make it work. So it will continue working indefinitely. My feeling is that once I have it set up the way I wanted, I'm probably never going to touch the app again. Sure. But yeah, like like it's neat because I can lock in the ratio for the like I can lock in the amount of beans that I brew, which is the same. It's always 25.2 or 0.3 grams. So now I have a thing that will tell me exactly what the ratio of brewing is, but like, I don't know, I would look. We'll see. Yeah. I can do wet brew versus dry brew with it. Like it seems nice, but I miss my old scale. This is maybe not the most egregious example. Well, it is an egregious example. It just didn't affect me that much. But the first example that comes to mind for me is that we inherited and this is hard to say and ANOVA. Oh, yeah. So you need thing, the company ANOVA.

14:48You probably need an old Android phone to make that thing work. Right. Right. So by the time we inherited it, they were about six months away from intentionally end of lifeing the app that controls that thing and effectively rendering it useless. Like there was no supported company provided way to continue using that thing. Now I think somebody hacked together like a Python control system for it. They could still technically talk to it, but I just didn't bother even caring at that point. Yeah. I have a couple of things like that. I have a digital. I bought that electric objects frame from Kickstarter when it was the first big photo frame and then jiffy bought them and then somebody bought jiffy and now that doesn't get, it doesn't work anymore because it required a service on the internet to work. But somebody wrote a hacked firmware for it that just you point your, you point your firmware to a flicker gallery. So I still have a flicker account with like 12 photos in it that this thing cycles through. So I also people have done like that.

15:48There's a nice in between where when people have done have bought enough of them and it's the right kind of people, then you end up with like weird hacked. Firmwares or solutions. I don't know that I would disassemble a sous vide cooker just because of the proximity to water and electricity. But yeah, that's annoying. I'm sending you a link bread that you should look at for things that are analog and are dope. Somebody on, I was looking on Make a World last night. You don't have to hand it to bamboo because they have some problems right now. But this popped up on my feed on one of my, one of my, one of my feeds on my glance app. And it's a double, it's an aliens cat double Cassio wristwatch. Was that a thing in aliens? I don't remember. I think it's a double wristwatch and aliens. One of the characters wears an alien, a double wristwatch and alien, not an aliens. Oh, it's an alien, really? Alien, I believe. Oh, I see it. Oh, it's Gourney Weaver is wearing that apparently. That's okay. Anyway, yeah, sure. Somebody seems to have made that basically. You can make that and jam two of them onto your, you can take, take the guts out of two

16:54Cassio watches and jam them into this 3D printed band, which I love. That's pretty eye catching. It's one is yellow and one is purple. Those are complimentary colors. Yeah, exactly. That's cool. I think they did a G-shock maybe. It looks like or an AE 1200W is what they want. That's neat. Yeah. Speaking of smart stuff, did you, I don't know where I got this link from was on our discord or did you send it to me about smart TVs and what a lot of the apps are doing with IP proxying these days? Yeah, I sent that to you. It was, they were talking about the discord later, but yeah. Yeah, like effectively, there are, and it's mainly on WebOS, which is LG's TV. OS and Tizen, which is the Samsung one. I guess this is forbidden on like Google TV and I think it was also on TCL. TCL's Roku TVs maybe. No, it's in that article Roku also banned this practice, although it seems like they were a bit late to the party on, on forbidding it. But effectively, it's all these like screensaver apps and little like done arcade games and like, you know, fireplace apps and stuff like that that force you to agree to terms of

17:57service that allow them to proxy their own internet traffic through your home IP, through your house. Yeah. And none of them really come out and say exactly what that traffic is. Well, the assumption is that it's AI web crawlers. Right. Mostly web scraping is seems to be the case, but because there's a big business right now in blocking AI web traffic to your site because it's enormously invasive. Yeah. We took this. Yeah. Like audited something like 6,000 apps and like a third of them were doing this basically and it's kind of horrifying. And like I presumably these are at least like above board enough companies that they would not be sending anything out right illegal through your connection, but like aren't you on the hook for any traffic that goes in and out of your house. Well hold on, it's not, it's not the company, but it's not the TV companies that are doing this company that are publishing the app on the TV stores? Which is like, it's actually it's not even that it's, it's because these are middleware. like SDKs or whatever. So it's actually these like pure data broker firms that are providing

18:59these SDKs to app makers and they're integrating. It's like bright. Oh gosh, I forgot that I am bright data. I think is one of them. Yeah. So, but like that's always been my understanding. And it's always been why I've been paranoid about things like open Wi-Fi is that like if your Wi-Fi network is open and somebody comes on it and does something like extremely illegal. Then like guess what? They're guess who's going to have to find a new provider. Right. Like the law or even worse. Like the law is coming at you if this you're going to have to prove it wasn't you. Right. Right. Yeah. And yeah, good luck. I mean good luck in the modern law enforcement bureaucracy where people are getting arrested for having user names that are like one character away from the pamphlets. The perpetrator. They're actually looking for her. Really good luck. Yeah. I think it's if it's encrypted, you're probably okay if the proxies are encrypted. But yeah, I look, this is why I turned off the Roku TV on my home. Like I had a Roku in my bedroom TV for years. And I turned on the pie hole and saw how many the voluminous

20:04number of DNS hits that that thing hit going to a million different scripting and ad services in a bunch of nonsense. And I was like, no, I'm not, I'm not going to participate in this anymore. Yeah. I think that that article has convinced me to, but I do think you should put your TV online long enough to check for updates because they do push out actual software updates that fix basic problems with smart TVs like things like input selection or HDR or whatever. But what's it works, man? Just don't don't let it ever talk to the internet again. Or you know, like never put Wi-Fi credentials into it. Only plug it into a network to do that. And then pull the cable when you're done. Like and specifically, I think I'm done signing into my TV. Oh, yeah. I think I think it's like Apple TV or nothing for me now for TV apps. This is this is why I like the dumb TV. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, that's just not a bad will never be if I have fully abandoned the idea of like, oh, the home theater monitor, why isn't nobody doing that? Why isn't it? I'm just making a nice screen with no compute in it or no apps. And it's because you see how much money they are now making from the apps and the data harvesting and marketing that

21:07goes along with that. Look, you just need to get a really nice projector. Okay. Yeah. Maybe those probably have apps to you at this point, right? Sure they do. Yeah. Here's an interesting one from TacticalTug. Okay. Do either of you have any experience using Cron and the RTC Wake feature on the motherboard? Do you make your PC turn itself on in the middle of the night, run an update script and then turn itself back off? I've never tried to do that. I've known it was a thing to do. I've been playing with the idea, but not sure how well it would work as I technically still do a boot my system. Have you also considered a similar thing using other tools? I'm going to say, hey, I've never considered doing this. B, I don't know if we're talking, I mean, he's talking about dual booting. So I assume auto updating Linux is what he's talking about here. I think so. Yeah. I would not I don't. I don't. I would not advocate for unattended auto updating. Why would that stuff is just rickety enough that it's it's a good idea to do it intentionally

22:11when you are ready to do it and to keep an eye on what's being updated. Even on the rolling, especially on the rolling. Yeah. Because like, like, often I will do something and it will throw an error and then I'll have to wait a little while to do it again because like the mirrors are out of sync. Like, there's one package that's out of sync with the other packages on the mirrors and yeah, it depends different distros are more or less prone to this kind of thing, but some distros this seems like a good way to come back to a not entirely working system the next morning. Yeah. In extreme cases. So I think I would not pursue this strategy, although it actually does bring up the interesting aspects of the RTC wake feature, which I've never even fought about before. Like, you see it in the UEFI because it's right next to like the wake on land, at least in my bios settings. Some biases don't have it. Like my B-link bias doesn't have it. It's there, but it's like not exposed to the UI. I guess we should say RTC is real-time clock in this case, the thing that runs off of watch battery that keeps the time in your PC, but effectively, and again,

23:14I've never even thought about what this feature did before, but I guess it's basically allowing you to have the PC turn itself on at a specific time, as opposed to the wake on land letting you turn it on over the network, et cetera. So when I first put a server in the house, I did that. So I said to turn on at like seven o'clock, six o'clock in the morning and turn off at like 1am or 2am. Yeah, because I had never really thought about what the use of that feature would be, but I guess that is one. Yeah, because then, but then the thing I realized was a one time when the kiddo was sick, and we were like watching curious George at three o'clock in the morning, the server cut off, and curious George went away, and then I had to get up and like go turn the server back on. It was a big pain in the butt. And also I was turning off the power, I was saving power when the power was the absolute bottom cheapest that it gets here. So it wasn't super useful. What is sidebar here real quick about electrical plans? Speaking of time of use, electrical plans, PG&E, my power company, the dashboard on my account has been saying for a little bit like,

24:18hey, you could be saving money on a different plan. Yeah. And I clicked in there, and they have estimates from the last like six months of your use data, like how much you might save on other plans. I'm, we're currently on the time of use plan that is like, I think it's 4pm to 9pm is the most expensive, which is maybe not the best, because that's when I, well, you're not working too much at 4pm. No, the desktop is off, but the TV is, I guess it's probably still better than, I'm sure, the desktop is pulling more power than like the TV and the PS5. Yep. Although, I think the PS5 is like 30 something watts at least, so it's probably not that much. Anyway, but the one, the plan they're pushing me to is the one intended for, I believe it's the one with people who own EVs. Well, you have to have an EV to get the EVs. So yeah, that's what I thought was strange is that, because I want to showing like savings of $200 a year, but it's very explicitly targeted at people would have been in. We'd put a vent in when we switched to that. Okay, so I didn't click through enough to see if it would let me do it, because I didn't want to commit to it. Yeah, without knowing

25:20what I was getting into, but okay, so I didn't know you had actually literally verified ownership of an EV to get that. I got a vent. All you need to get a vent is source to walk around to see an EV, and then look at the windshield. You know what I mean? Okay. I get you a vent by 3 o'clock today. All right. Let's talk later then. So the time you used to been really good for us, but it does require a little bit of a shifting, and it means that we like never run the dishwasher until like we always set the dishwasher in the timer to run at like 3 a.m. Yeah, right. Yeah, we definitely avoid stuff like that outside those hours when possible. The washing machine and dryer are like it's weird, because like all of our heavy duty stuff is gas here, except for the car and the computer and the TV and the rest of it's the rest of it's more or less, you know, the same as always. Yeah. I feel like PG&E is screwing us at a really high level though when I look at what electricity costs everywhere else in the country. I think that's probably true of numerous things around here. Yeah. What can you do? Move. You can move, right? Well, not necessarily. Well,

26:25we're here. A large number of concessions would have to be made. Yeah, my personal life, too, for that to happen. So, look, I'm stuck here until my kids don't have a high school. Right, this is an interesting question from Steve, I think is how I'm going to pronounce that. I thought that was Steve. It might be Steve, but there's no E on the end. You've mentioned fast mail a bunch of times. Do you use your custom domain for all of your email? Are you concerned about domain hacking or theft? In other words, someone gaining access to your DNS records and changing your MX records, thus stealing all future incoming emails. A wonderful way to reset all your passwords and steal your life. One of the online security rules I've always practiced was to use a major provider's domain for important accounts. As it's unlikely, a bad actor could gain access to Google's domain registration of gmail.com. Yeah, I think that goes without saying. In practice, what this has turned into is using my Gmail address for account creation and my custom domain for personal emails. Turns out all that information related to online

27:30accounts is the stuff I'm interested in getting out of Google's hands. Also turns out other than my kids' school, I don't send or receive very many personal emails these days. Should I be worried at all about losing access to my custom domains DNS record for email or am I being paranoid? Well, so there's a couple of things here. One is if you lock down the domain transfer, you have to provide them with a code in order to move your domain. Yeah, which you should do for any domain use for anything serious. Yeah, so you should also two factor up. If you're anything that your domain registrar, if you use a separate DNS service, anything that controls your domains, you should have as secure as possible. Yeah, and if your domain registrar doesn't support two factor or I guess past keys at a minimum, I use a hardware key for my domain registrar's. But yeah, have all that stuff done, lock down, do the domain security thing so that the domain is locked down and can't be transferred and you're okay. Anything serious, I still do run through that.

28:33So years ago, I set up the advanced account control or the I can't remember the call, but Google has like an account type for people who are likely to get hacked. Journalists. We did an episode about that even years ago at this point. I can't remember when. It's journalists, politicians, anybody who's experienced identity theft, stuff like that. And I set that up years ago and use that for anything, anything serious. So like my domain registrar account goes through there, I have to use a hardware pass key or my hard work key, pass key or the pass key on my phone to log into that. You can't be there's no other logins without that. So I feel like I'm pretty safe there. I don't use most of the stuff that goes into the fast mail accounts are the kind of throw away accounts. Like if Domino's wants an account to order a pizza, I put a that goes into fast mail into a one-off email. Or yeah, man, expendable email addresses seems like a nice thing to have.

29:38It is like the fact that it also integrates with my password manager is the best. Like I literally can open up a password manager. It's like, hey, do you want to create a mask email for this? And then I have it and it's tied to that. It's not hooked to my Apple ID, which is really nice. Speaking of your password manager, or should I bring this up? Is this a sore subject? Are you going to stay on one password? I'm hoping I sent him an angry letter that was like, you know, I've been paying you guys for 15 years at this point. I will absolutely move. If you if you give for folks who don't know, the guy who makes Omar Chi, DHH is a noted white supremacist and kind of shitheele. And Omar Chi is a, I don't know, it's an opinion of the Linux distro is what he calls it. Yeah, a lot of people would argue that it is very generous to call that thing a distro. But yeah, like I before I realized what a bad guy was, I installed it on a test machine when we were doing dual boot diaries. And then like five minutes

30:40after I installed it, I got the, hey, this guy sucks. Note popped across the news feeds. And he basically, like it's basically just hyperland with some stuff pre-installed for AI coding basically. He put he got some of his cronies to put what $9 million into a foundation. I think it was past town at this point. Yeah, to drive to drive money toward open source projects that align with his goals. And one password, which is the default password manager on Omar Chi put money in framework has given them a couple hundred dollars a month here and there. I don't think they are anymore. I can't write I'm not sure. Yeah, although that's a difference of scale here because the contributions we're talking about are in the six to seven figures. Yeah, 300K from one password is a is a deal breaker for me. And they've already doubled down on the contribution. So that they're not walking that back. I don't know if you saw the really slack messages being leaked. Yesterday that from management basically making it clear they are standing by this.

31:42Well, my one password is annual and it resubs in about 11 months. So I'll cancel and see if they change between now and then. Yeah. Anyway, yes. We have one password and it grates with fast mail in a really lovely way. Yeah, I'll say real quick that Warden is still working fine for me. Although there have been some recent concerns about just kind of plain Jane in shittification there. Nothing nothing like socially objectionable, but they like the leader there's a big leadership change there and some like kind of private capital people who specialize in acquisitions and stuff have come into the leadership there and changes in language on their page about their mission statement and stuff like people are pretty worried they're they're gearing up to try to get bought and and then shouldify themselves. Is there not an open source at this point there? It's key pass and it's derivatives are still the thing in the open source world. I get the sense I had I did a little bit of looking around at this one this all when the bit working thing first started spinning up. I think don't quote me on this, but I get the sense that key pass XC is probably the most robust

32:46key pass fork that people recommend. Okay. I have not done a ton of looking into it, but I think that's probably the one to look at if you want to go a whole hog open source, which I'm not sure that I do honestly like I don't I don't know that I want a purely self hosted self maintained. I don't pass word manager solution like I kind of would like a little bit of of more institutional resilience there, but like like one of the nicest things about one password from a family perspective is that if something happens to me or Gina, then we can I can hit we can hit the button in the one password control panel that gives us access to the other person's password without having to have it the whole time. Right. Yeah, like like some people asked when we did the notes episode, like some people seem, you know, given my proclivities, some people were surprised that I was hosting the joppelman database on Dropbox, but it was because Dropbox has way more redundancy than my NAS or my VPS, you know, like that's a single point of failure if I'm hosting that myself and to not be able to get to secure notes and stuff like that at any time. And I also I didn't want

33:51to have to VPN for time. I wanted to access that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, sorry, let me get back to the original question here because there's one other thing I wanted to say about this idea of not being on Gmail and hosting your own email domain and that kind of thing. And to be clear, that is hosting just your own email domain, not your own email server. Don't host your own email server. Nobody with the exception of maybe a couple of people on our discord should be hosting their own mail server. But so we had a we had all I will say is I would describe it as a very minor security incident with email this week with with Gmail nothing, nothing, it turned out to be kind of nothing. I think you did. Yeah, we'll get into the details, but like it was a there was a brief moment of of like, oh man, didn't was that a bad thing to access. Oh boy. Like in terms of, I'm going to run a virus scanner now like long story. It's not worth getting into. And it seems like it was nothing. It seems like it turned out to be nothing, but it was enough to raise my hackles and make me go digging into the the Google like admin console for the kind of corporate tier.

34:57Gmail like, you know, workspace, that kind of thing. Yeah. And like I've talked recently about wanting to get off of Google because of their embrace of AI and having AI scraping all of your emails and all that stuff. And it's just kind of gross. I might have thought twice now about getting off of Gmail after this incident because I was really I was fairly heartened. Let's say at what I found in the admin console, the level of the level of like security auditing and access logs from from eight different angles that they keep. And like the easy ability to basically see by IP, by device, by sort of session attestation, you know, by all these different parameters who's accessing all of your Google resources on a given account. And there's like some other subsystems, which I don't know if I'm sure these are not totally unique to Google, but I'm guessing they're pretty like leading edge on some of the stuff. Like for example, they're doing a thing now where browser sessions are now tied to, I believe it's hardware identifier. It's like DBSC is the

36:01acronym. Let me let me just remind myself what that stands for. It's a huge pain in the butt when they do when you do a boot because it sees the same hardware ID on two different machines. And then it logs you out on one of them constantly. Is it abstracted by OS as well? I believe that it's I think that that's the pro. So I dug in. I talked to remember I talked about this a few weeks ago where one of my Linux machine keeps keeps getting logged out of all the Google services. And I believe that this is the cause, but from investigation. But okay, device bound session credentials is what this is called. That's what the DBSC thing I mentioned. What it means is basically something I found out in the course of this brief moment of panic was the session hijacking is becoming a pretty pretty common vector for taking over people's accounts for things because the session is kind of like the set of cookies that that's what keeps you logged into a site that you have already authenticated with. Like if you've logged into and two factored your way into a site that you then don't have to do that for for 30 days or whatever. There's an active browser session that can be hijacked. And if somebody is able to access that, then they can get into your account past your password

37:05to factor in all that stuff. So like seeing stuff like that in there, like I'm sure it creates some headaches in different contexts. But like knowing that if my session had been stolen, that somebody couldn't necessarily just use that session to get into the account if it blocked it on the grounds that it was from a device hundreds or thousands of miles away was maybe somewhat encouraging. Yeah, like, yeah, I mean, that stuff is that stuff is interesting and and I yeah, I don't know. I actually don't know. Like I'm honestly, I'm so annoyed at this point that when I order something from Amazon, it says a home goods item has shipped instead of the actual item because they don't want Google to know what you've gotten that like I'm I'll take the chance. Yeah, that's fair. And I mean, I may get a bunch of feedback on the discord about why some of these security measures are bad actually. But yeah, more research to do there. But I mean, there are systems in place that seem like they are actually handy. But the thing you want on all your domains

38:05that you're using and and buying is the transfer lock and then the authorization code stuff. So in order to turn that off, I have to get an authorization code from my vendor. I have to I can change that. I can generate new ones constantly. It's it's it's worth it's worth making sure that stuff's on on your domains. Yeah. Yeah. Peter Capricio writes in, it's not even a question so much as it's just a link to virtual os museum.org. Oh my god, this came in while you were gone. It's so cool. Yeah, I had actually seen this right before I left and was quite excited about it when I saw it. It is a collection of I believe there. Yes, they are over 1700 installs now of basically, it's a bunch of pre-made like VMs that you can download that they claim on at least on Windows and Linux are basically one one double click launch for like kind of every operating system in history. Basically, well old stuff for sure. Yeah, yeah, I mean, not not necessarily modern stuff, but it's like

39:08I'm just scrolling through here like if you want to see I've never even heard of a lot of these operating systems like every every very like CPM and all these like Unix works like Unix variants on the big heavy workstations of the 90s and QNX. Oh god. Planned 9. Yeah, yeah. Planned 9 here are two temple os VMs side by side. It's basically just a gallery, a runnable gallery of what they claim is 1948 to the present of kind of every operating system you can think of if you just want to very quickly try one out, which I think is kind of red. Yeah, I thought it was very cool. Did you know that there's an Amiga Unix apparently? I apparently did not know that, but I'm not surprised. Somebody somebody made Unix for the Amiga. I've been kind of interested in the history of the Amiga recently. I never had I never knew anybody within Amiga. No, I have no absolutely not like I reference at all. I didn't even know anybody with a Commodore 64 before that, you know, like I just have no insight into that world of computers at the time, but apparently the

40:08Amiga like really could have been a thing because like I I think I think I saw like a bite magazine that somebody linked on Blue Sky at some point and I actually read their cover story on the Amiga when it came out. I barely looked at this if I get any details wrong, please forgive me, Amiga fans, but my understanding of the Amiga is that they went and made a bunch of like custom silicon on it to handle things in hardware that we're not being handled in hardware at the time. That's it. Like this is this is back when the Apple 2 was still fairly supreme or you know, it was like all the Abit computers that just had an Abit CPU and not much else, right? And they went and made a bunch of custom chips to handle like graphics and multimedia stuff. Sound of color and all sorts of stuff. Yeah. Like the Amiga was apparently just like pretty ahead of its time in hardware design and all the hardware accelerated capabilities that it had and like it could have caught on in a way that could have like changed things more than it did. I mean, people who love the Amiga really, really love the Amiga. But the thing is interesting to me about that is it's from the time before

41:13okay, so this is an aside. Phil Tippet shut down his studio last week, which we didn't talk about in the show, but in the tested days we regularly went over there and shot video with them because A, it was convenient and B, Phil and his the folks who worked for him like Mark DeBoe and but Frank Frank Ippolito and a bunch of other folks at the time were awesome and fun to talk to about making movie props and doing stop-motion animation, doing computer animation and stuff like that was really good. Walking around that studio was kind of like walking around Phil's memory palace in a lot of ways because like you'd you'd walk around with him and he would tell stories about he like he literally had stories about every single thing that was on display there from like the cane, RoboCop stop-motion animation, figurine, all the way down to like you know a gloopy a gloopy slime monster from from Mad God and one of the things that he had to

42:15on display there were the armatures that they built to animate the dinosaur you know because the story on Jurassic Park is that Spielberg originally hired him to do stop-motion on the dinosaurs and then the computer animation came back so good that they were that that he was like well I guess I'm extinct and that's where the line in the movie comes from where Grant says I guess I'm extinct at the end I guess you're extinct or Ian Malcolm says you're, anyway the point is they didn't have tools to do 3D animation in software at that point right like there's no frame animation tools for computers and their solution was they built an armature that was instrumented so they could measure the position of each joint on the on the on the dinosaur model and they aligned those armatures with the way the bones and stuff in the in the rigs on the on the dinosaurs were lined up so that when they moved to the head you know half a degree then it moved to the the eventual render of the dinosaur half a degree they were able to get really believable animation out of that

43:19that stuff's just sitting around it was just sitting around there it was like in a glass case and you got to look at it and it's the same time frame because like the amiga was building all the stuff that we didn't this is a this like I said I got me bring it all back around here but the amiga was building they were building stuff for the amiga they didn't know that they needed and this was the same thing they built this because they didn't know nobody hit up at that point thought oh we need to do a computer animation thing they can take these really complicated models and and generate you know frames of animation out of it so Phil just did it the old fashioned built a digital version of an analog the analog way that you've done this for 30 years at that point 20 years at that point anyway the little magic left the world went to a lot to show the studio that we could see yeah I'm sad I never went over there I mean I could have gone for the fire sale or the I mean it wasn't an auction they were just selling stuff yeah they stayed sale they hired a state sale people to come in and I mean to be clear they pulled off a lot of stuff as my understanding sounds like all the two oh nine wasn't there right like all the high value stuff was gone to more private channels by the time they opened it up to everybody but yeah what one of the other at the other

44:24Phil story I'll tell we when we went over the first time it was when he was they were remaking they were making basically a cane hot toy the cane is the bad guy from Robocop too the notable thing about can is that they designed it to be impossible for people in the east to make knockoff toy versions of it it's like incredibly complicated has a bazillion moving parts really hard to cast because one of the things that annoyed Ed was when I was one of the things to know Phil was when Robocop one came out and immediately there were toy versions of Ed 209 that were bootleg unlicensed ones because it was really easy it was too easy for them to make so cane when when 30 years later when people wanted to get toy versions of cane it turned out to be incredibly complicated to make that and and the manufacturing was was no worthily complex it is a it's a real I don't like him I don't know what the term is for that kind of robot but it's a real

45:25spindly rebly it's tons of gribly griebles it's all it's it's really really I want to say it was like 300 and two pieces when we saw the original cane the first time was it just in a box and all the pieces were loose because it had fallen apart at some point it was fiddly at that level kind of I mean you can google what it looks like but it kind of is like a proto michael bay transformers design of just a bunch of tiny little intricate parts everywhere I feel like the the mechs from the third matrix movie pull a lot from cane sure look they goofy design of putting the fleshy human bits on the on the on the battle side I had no idea that that was a primary design consideration I have a soft spot for a robot to you I'm not sure it's actually good but I liked it a lot as a child and and I had no idea that's part of where the cane design came from that's yeah yeah feel feel took it as it was personally offended that they knocked off ed 209 so quickly sure the failed robo

46:27cop to use sequence from that movie is like one of my favorite movie sequences from the 80s it's funny I remember like that was a movie I watched a lot because it was on we had satellite at that point and it was on whatever movie channel was on the satellite we were usually pointed at but I don't remember anything about it other than that and also that was the one that had like the drug trailer right with the yes it has nuke the yeah that's one of the best fake drugs yeah yeah and also I'm also a pre-pubescent drug lord oh right like the child in that movie becomes like a drug kingpin and he's like if I remember isn't he wearing a suit he's like 10 years old and he's wearing a suit with his hair slick back because he's like the cuz deities he's been he's a corduroy he has become a crime a drug boss I don't remember that part I like a child villain though okay question from cat will mu I would like to know the answer to this does money fiend actually specify that they should be referred to with an octo thorpe or is that just how you choose to pronounce the pound sign I I call the pound sign by its given name I thought I would I had never

47:34heard the term octo thorpe before you started saying it for that occasionally they have said octo thorpe in the in the in their name but which came first oh I started calling it octo thorpe years before that okay Wikipedia calls that symbol the number sign that's their canonical name for that's fine they can call it what they want I think these days I would usually reflexively refer to it as a pound sign I so when people started calling it the hashtag there was a conversation about what it's actually called but that but it's not it in itself is not a hashtag it's like that plus a word is a hashtag people well I mean it's so it's a hash then I guess that is that is that is historical though yeah but the but the actual name as I understand it for the sign that is a tic-tac toe board is the octo thorpe okay because it holds I don't know why it's called octo because it has nine holes actually that came about 1968 I can tell you oh there you go according to Wikipedia

48:37the octo thorpe was invented by workers at the bell telephone laboratories in 1968 there you go octo thorpe the more you know there was a I feel like there was a 99 PI episode or something about it a hundred years ago which her hashtags took off that seems like something they would do here's a quick question from Jamie or maybe not super quick but I'm looking to upgrade my router from a tp link archer ax 73 to something that's a bit more prosumer I'm not I'm not a network expert but I'd like something that supports vlan and routing settings so I can manage the data coming and going to devices like my smart tv you green nass and other internet of shit things what would you recommend for this get a cheaper router that supports open wrt or just get something like a ubiquity dream router and don't mess with the firmware I think I answered this but I am worried about running your own router unless you're a specific unless you have specific knowledge about that well yeah but that that brings into question what do you mean by running your own router because

49:38that's running something with open wrt is not running your own router then you're just replacing software yeah that's that's a hundred percent right so frankly at this point I would say the only thing that really qualifies as rolling your own router is running just a stock OS on it and doing all the network configuration yourself because even something like pf sensor open senses like intensively maintained yeah yeah certainly more intensively maintained than the issue software on your issues router oh hundred percent for a longer time too like having having had to fix a kind of half broken net gear router in the last few months for someone like the the kind of low tier relatively inexpensive like vendor consumer routers like that software is not what I would describe as robust or secure or well maintained at all the benefit of using one of those ubiquity dream machines used to be that it ran your ubiquity manager tool and the router as well and you can also run a couple apps on it almost like you would on a like a synology NAS or something like that yeah I think at this point I would do a pf sensor open sense rather than rather than do that that's what I would it would have

50:42and did recommend for the last several years the only problem with that now is that hardware to run that is getting so insanely expensive like that proposition like getting a little mini PC and putting your own RAM and SSD in it was awesome when you could get the RAM and SSD combined for like $75 because you don't need that much of either but like even at a minimum now you're looking at like several hundred dollars just to populate one of those one of those many PCs and run open do you have a sense of what you need to run like different speeds of internet like sort of like I I've always wondered because you know I have gigabit realistically I'm going to die with gigabit at this point I don't think I'm going to see faster internet where I live unless I move I mean well I mean in this area if you stayed in that house for the rest of your life I could absolutely see like Sonic is like fairly aggressively expanding 10 gigabit around here maybe but but not many ISPs are going to do it the way they do it yeah like I could I could get five gigabit here right now from 18t right it's pretty expensive and also I'd have to rewire the run the pain in the ass run

51:45from my garage to my office yeah right yeah yes that's a complicated question because you get into the territory where if you're if you're running your own like just little x86 box with open sensor whatever on it it's doing all of the routing and packet filtering and software on the CPU yeah and a lot of the consumer router even consumer routers and especially prosumer ones are doing a lot hardware acceleration so they might have much weaker CPUs than you would put in your x86 thing but they have specific like closed source drivers attached to little a6 that are doing the hardware like NAT and packet filtering and stuff like that that makes it much faster so it's a weird case where you could have like an x86 box that can't keep up with gigabit where you're a little hundred dollar router can because it's got that custom hardware in it so that that said to route one gigabit and you don't need that much CPU at all like those but the N100s which have been out for several years now 10 pretty comfortably route 10 gigabit is my understanding or or pretty close to that's all they're doing yeah pretty close to saturate 10 gigabits so that's not

52:47really a problem these days okay yeah interesting okay the only other answer I'll give to this question and this is barely an answer because I have just started looking at it but I saw somebody on the discord talking about it GL iNet which is a company that is mainly known for their little travel routers okay that's how I became aware they're kind of the go to if you need a good solid travel router that just runs stock open WRT okay there the go to but it seems like they have been expanding into your more like TP link archer style all in one home router with Wi-Fi antennas on the back of it so it's like a box that you can plug in but it's running open art it like it's a box you can buy that runs open WRT yeah so as far as I'm like all their products like I saw the the GL iNet Flint 2 talked about on the discord recently I think they're like the Flint 3 is out and the 4 is like on the way now okay but they all run open WRT which is an open router operating system which I assume would handle like VLANs and stuff like that but they're pretty reasonably priced

53:51like the Flint 2 is 170 bucks it's got Wi-Fi 6 in it and they claim VPN speeds like wire guard and open the VPN speeds like close to gig bit so it must be pretty powerful okay but I frankly if you want to stay in that like I just want to buy a router with Wi-Fi in it and not think about it too much area but don't want to be tied to like again like an Assusor in it year that's probably going to end of life the model in two years and never updated again like these things seem like maybe a thing to look at because open WRT is very actively developed and should stay up to date for the foreseeable future I mean in fairness they don't they don't end the life stuff in two years it's just it's just it depends on who we're talking about okay fair so like I'm okay not to get to into the weeds here but I'm I'm in the extreme end of that with the edge router that I have but you bought that when it was already old no do you think it was a month old when I bought it oh it came out in early 2018 and I bought it in May 2018 oh what happened is exactly what I was talking about earlier which is that that thing has an SOC in it from a company called cavium

54:54yeah that makes little or made little low power embedded so C's that had like network closed closed design network acceleration hardware on them which made them perfect for things like ProSumer routers like the edge router huh they then immediately got acquired like six months after that came out they got acquired by Marvel and Marvel like killed that whole product line and stopped supporting it and so nothing will never get a kernel update again because the company that provided the closed driver to make all that shit work no longer exists has been absorbed into a giant corporation that that killed all of its products so like gotcha that thing is a fantastic piece of hardware that is insanely out of date on the OS and purely for like corporate fuckery reasons and like stuff like that is why I want to get away from closed vendor type of you know what yeah no it's the right answer yeah but like not not being beholden to some

55:57venture right like the thing that you bought like the Linux kernel on my router went end of life almost four years ago like end of life like end of support not not yeah came out four years ago I'm not getting security updates anymore yes they stopped doing security updates four years ago and now we're in this world of of LLM's finding like way more vulnerabilities and things constantly I don't think I would want to run that anymore I'm feeling more and more antsy up about running this router that's not getting security updates we're not getting kernel updates at least like it's yeah I didn't realize I thought I thought you bought that when it was coming up when it when it was an elderly product and I realized it was three months old when you bought it just a a dratter four like was basically brand new when I got it sucks and they kind of abandoned it way too quick anyway that that's one of the that's one of my origin stories that is driving me onto like a generic open router platform that I will never have to worry about you welling again yeah I would do one or two more yes I have one okay if you want it

57:00uh Willem Pacificer writes in hey guys thanks for uh for the advice last week I ended up getting a lot of notes from people oh the one I went with was software I already had on my devices fantastic how it turns out it has a fairly reasonably priced annual service that will keep multiple calendars in sync there were several others out there that will do the same and uh right now it's set up so that it copies all of my uh met my info in in a shared like bidirectional way where I see the the the contents of the of the meetings from the external client email addresses into my main calendar and then dumps free busy stuff back out from the main calendar into the other external calendars okay that's pretty reliable so far it's been fun yeah okay all right that sounds applicable yeah uh it's interesting because I I was grandfathered into a lot of the fantastic

58:01Cal premium like annual subscription services because I paid for fantastic how to when that was a paid product uh it's like an overcast situation where if you paid at some point then they give you some of the stuff but some of the services are walled off still yeah and I didn't realize this was even a service they offered I just saw that when overcasts raised their prices recently but if you had gotten in before certain date you were not subject to the increase but yeah but now it's like thirty bucks a year for if you're a new customer yep uh software pricing look he's got to pay for all those mac minis you know I saw a picture of his rack with all the mac minis on it that seems like he bought this is Marco Arment we're talking about who runs the popular podcasting app overcast yeah among other things which is yeah he just launched some new like to do app thing because everybody has to have a to do he's always been about productivity stuff but he also makes the tool that you use to do chapters and stuff on the next podcast yeah Vinnie uses that I I have not got what is that I spend so long since I use that I don't remember what it's called

59:01what is that chapter tool he released from aco s it's it's basically there's limited tools to do this and that's the one that he liked that's the like he made one because there wasn't one that existed that was good so I also did that I wrote my own three years ago and Python and have been using that ever since well very good should open source that I thought about it I've I've what I thought about it was it was the first like long thing I ever wrote in Python it's like 375 lines or something and I thought about going in the code channel and the discord when I did that and saying like hey rate my work but I was too insecure about it yeah you just I'm pretty sure that I tortured the concept of a Python class beyond recognition and that thing take a take a cue from cloud just submit it to to a bunch of get get hubs the other thing is it is so bespoke for my exact workflow and needs I don't think it would actually be super useful to anybody else that's like that's yeah you need you need to fulfill like six different conditions for that thing to be useful you know like you need to be using audacity and and doing this with chapters and uploading

1:00:03to a thing called next you know what I mean like anyway I got real acquainted with a with a Python MP3 library and the course of figuring out how to do those chapters yep it was seems right but it saved me a lot of time since the okay last question from tactical tug at one point is hardware ready for an upgrade I know the obvious answer is when it's no longer working as you wanted to but when does the upgrade in efficiency and performance become worth the actual cost for example I'm on a rise in nine fifty nine hundred X and 64 gig of DDR4 I almost can't believe that they're asking this question at this particular point yeah I was gonna say history but do I upgrade to AM5 and DDR5 do I wait until DDR6 and AM6 when does good enough stop being good enough for context I do a bit of everything Python gaming 3d modeling photos and editing basic browsing I'm on Linux thanks Will so no Windows limitations or anything else to take into consideration okay so two things

1:01:05one is AMD a friend of the show Adam Patrick Murray last week wrote in to let us know that AMD is carrying through with AM5 through 2029 now that they've committed to it Computex um so that's like probably two more CPU generations or maybe yeah at least one and then some stragglers like like they they often will do like bend down versions of the flagship parts of the flagship parts two different regions and stuff man if if if they only launch one new CPU generation in the next three years we are really in some uncharted waters I don't know man I used to be those used to be annual yeah or at least every 18 months yeah I can't the RAM and storage prices are such now that we're getting 64 gigs of DDR5 is going to cost you almost a thousand dollars it's it is and and that's like you're not exactly on a bad system for a DDR4 system no I was gonna say 5900x should be fine the the I think that they're making 7800 x 3d or sorry 5800x3ds again 5900x3ds again

1:02:11uh so if you want an upgrade then you can a probably upgrade your CPU yeah but although was the 5900x is this 12 core one right I think that's the two yeah two six core ccds if I remember right yeah so like that's you're still pretty good there I like like look I think you're firmly in fine territory yeah yeah did not mention a GPU here crucially we don't know that could be another variable but yeah so okay so for me when I start thinking about an upgrade when I start getting antsy about upgrading is when I'm doing things that are that start to feel slow and I know that they could be faster that hasn't been because of desktop software use in 15 years yeah yeah I will say that that 7700 uh god I'm losing my mind it took me a minute to remember what the chip was 7700k but I was using yeah but the one I used for like eight years the one I was on for way too long until three years ago like well it goes both ways like you're like I think definitely was getting clunky and slow in windows

1:03:14yeah but also you don't necessarily know what you don't know like I don't I didn't feel it because I didn't have a frame of reference I had been using that machine for so long and if that was a quad core you know that's a quad core chip from like 2018 yes 17 even so it was definitely slowing down in windows 10 at some point but like I didn't really notice it until I upgraded and then I was like oh this is way faster but like you might not necessarily notice some minor slowdowns if you can live with them I guess it's more of a it's more of an experiential just like does this feel bad to you or not well often the thing that drives my upgrades recently has been something's getting janky too like your memory starting to get wobbly and then the machine gets unstable and as a result of that it's like is do I want to spend X amount of dollars on some old ram that I'm never going to use on another computer or is this is this the sign that it's timed upgrade right and a lot of whether I do that depends on whether the old computer is going to find a new home downstream right so if the if the old computer is going to roll downhill to my daughter then then I might do an upgrade right I

1:04:14might I might buy the ram if I'm going to e-waste or give it to a friend or something like that then I'll I'll you know cut the cut that hardware loose and just do a clean upgrade the the ram pricing right now is such that I wouldn't do any it unless something's on like literally I posted a thing on blue sky that did numbers the other day that was like hey if ram prices if my ram gets wobbly I'm just going to sell all my worldly possessions and become a monk and people are like hell yeah that's that's where I'm at yeah because it's it was it is so freaking expensive right now yeah yeah I can definitely tell you if it were me and I have the system you're talking about I would sit tight on it for as long as possible like I would basically use it until the wheels fell off and like it it really calls into question where we're at in this whole thing like where are we at in the curve like have prices peak yet or are they going to keep going up because like you could you could definitely ask your you could you could do the risk analysis of okay things are expensive now but if I wait even longer is it more likely they're going to go down or further up you know because like you

1:05:17could be in an even worse shape in six months you could be in better shape if we have peaked and don't know it yet yeah or or maybe it's not a curve or you know maybe it's not going to be like a bell curve in prices maybe it's going to be a plateau like maybe things are going to peak and then never come back down we we just don't know yet I want to say last month micron said that they expected to continue to increase through the end of 2027 yeah let's look at their earliest there have been comments and Samsung also just put out something that they've sold through their whole memory allocation through I forget and if next year or something like that like it's it's not looking good for the next at least couple of years unfortunately but yeah yeah so I mean if you're on a system that's falling apart or like truly out of doubt data like eight or 10 years old you might need to hold your nose and do the best upgrade you can right now to try to make it through whatever is to come but like if you're on a pretty decent modern system modern-ish because that's a and that's pushing six years old now for that ship so that's yeah but it so that was the first of the good the real good rise in I think that generation yes and three was the first generation

1:06:20words like oh this might be better than Intel now yeah and and I feel like like the up the benefits you're going to get from upgrading at this point aren't going to be substantial enough to justify having to buy a thousand dollars or two rounds yeah you're the upgrade that's where you're at yeah the upgrade from the system you're talking about is going to be incremental right like it's going to be it's going to be better but it's not you know it's going to be marginally better not like a sea change in what you're able to do it's right it's a tough time for that stuff should we do this always be corky when at the end sure sure what's the earliest memory you have of your fellow co-host is it meeting at the whiskey media offices passing each other like quake ships in the night on a land or did you manage to cross paths in the magazine game coverage days so I think the first time I met you was at quake con wasn't it you've I my memories getting not great for certain things like that did we we might have known each other before can I usually I've only been the one quake on yeah I remember you and Rob Smith and I sitting in a bar at the at the okay that I think the gay lord and mesquite or wherever it is and that is possible I

1:07:24definitely knew Rob Smith yeah I think Rob introduced you to you and me to each other okay by that point I knew Dave I'd known Mike Tatum at who was at CBS with you all at that point for a hundred years at that point I'd kind of casually know no Jeff just because we saw each other around the game stuff but I didn't know and I knew Greg because I interviewed for a hardware editor job at at game spot at one point wait did I know that did I have I ever told you though I know that it's possible maybe you came in the off maybe you walked right by my desk at game spot and I didn't even know it so they have the beard then I did not have that I would not have had the beard then I don't think they in like 2004 2005 decided they wanted to do PC hardware and Tatum who's at CBS at scene at the time was like hey you should come interview for this oh wow and referred me over and I came towards like did a writing test I talked to Greg for like two hours they I think the the reason I ended up not taking is because they'd already hired someone who was a little more junior

1:08:24and we couldn't figure out how to make that work without being crappy for them and me and and and then and then I ended up getting a promotion at maximum PC the next day out of nowhere like it's as I said no so it worked out but yeah I do remember when we hired a hardware editor so I know roughly when you're talking about yeah it was it was it was after steam kind of yeah started you all were like hey we think this might be a real thing yes good instincts there but no the the that quite quite that quite only went to two or three quake cons and I remember distinctly going to get drinks and Rob was like oh hey this is Brad from Dragon Bomb he's a great guy yeah I was like okay that sounds from game spot sure that sounds plausible I the earliest the earliest mental like the earliest memory I can recall like a mental image for yeah is that is just in solstice when when we came downstairs yes yes yes podcast you all had to be quiet God is did that happen why don't you we didn't have a closed-off podcast area how am I forgetting so much you guys really podcasted downstairs in our area only for like three months I have no memory of that man

1:09:30because we moved in June out of solsalito right in the summer yes yes we launched I have to go July 2010 is when we moved to the city yeah and and we launched the tested site in March so we had three or four months of podcasting I think a lot of the time we did it in the evening normally I might stay late so so you're out of your way that sounds a little more familiar I have a really good memory for hard information like dates for example and apparently a terrible memory for more fuzzy memories like who did like when did I meet you or at what event you know or like where did we go like what did we what did we you know what I mean it's funny I have the exact opposite so I'm bad at actual dates and real good at the at the fuzzy stuff yeah um but yeah we so we used to sit down at that at that wobbly IKEA table and Ryan had set up that M audio that bad M audio audio interface we plugged into our MacBooks and recorded using Garageband and we were down to the like you'd go down the stairs and to the right was giant bomb and the left was like just a table in like

1:10:32a little nook kind of but it wasn't like sealed or anything yeah yeah yeah I've had a question to yes to listen to some old bomb casts recently and all I can hear is the questionable audio production I mean like none of us knew or cared about things like audio baffling or like you know the furniture not being creaky the thing was sitting on those chairs were so creaky like just the audio quality is so not up to modern standards let's say well we we leveled it up and we moved into the basement I think because we had the closed room yes although even podcasts recorded in there have like way too much reverb on them because walls were too bouncy and that room was too small and stuff uh the the at maximum in PC when we did the no BS podcast we did that with headset mics like not good headset mics just crappy like gamer heads we literally went into the lab and pulled a bunch of gamer headsets off the shelf to record the first episode yeah and then we recorded it over Skype I think these days you could probably just hold your iPhone up to your face and have a pretty good sounding podcast that is that is the thing I have had a couple of guests do in the past yeah

1:11:36um so yeah that's it I'm sorry I wasn't memorable Brad I think I really it was a really I was like oh man this is Brad from GameSpot I love those guys too excited then knowing the rage was on the premises look I was a game I was that was I think that was the trip that I that that uh gearbox was like hey I saw your indexes you want to come see borderlands yes I absolutely did that I absolutely did the like hey before you leave town why don't you come check out once you come like test this or yeah I think I feel like it was informal it was not for like a formal preview it was like hey do you want to like come play borderlands off the record just to see where it's at they they were in retrospect now it was a monitored play test because they were absolutely watching us all play to see how we engage with it sure uh after everybody left I played a long time I was having fun and they were like they keep going whenever and Randy was sitting there watching me play and then I turned around and talked to Randy for like 15 minutes I was like hey do you mind if we record this no PR people around and Randy was like oh yeah sure whatever so I plop the audio recorder down and that was the interview that he was like yeah the thing I

1:12:38most worried about in PC gaming is Valve hmm uh which you know like yes his instinct of having one company in charge of distributing all PC games probably is not great hmm continued to this day uh the way he said it was pretty inflammatory and it was like the front page had dig for 36 hours or something dig dig we're just dating yourself now two kpr got real upset with me on that one if I recall I could see a long history of that man he said it I that's what I said I have I was like I'll send you the tape I have audio recording if I'm saying it I didn't disclose or anything there like say anything you can do is like well yeah I could just not change it and then not make this worse for you anyway yeah sometimes I just need to grow out yeah that's that's that's it probably they needed to be able to tell their boss that they made an effort to do something about it and probably somebody should have been in the room if you left ran like like they should have known by then mm-hmm it wasn't a surprise what he was gonna do like we've we've all learned a lot

1:13:39in the last 20 years yeah um Brad I think that's a good it's good as good a time as any to wrap it up if you if you have questions you can send them to techpot at content.town or if you're in the discord you can post them the questions seeking answers channel and if you're not in the discord how do you get in there you might ask how do you get in there well you go to patreon.com slash techpot where for five dollars a month you can support the show and get access to the discord and get access to that question seeking answers channel and get the monthly patreon exclusive episode where we I feel like we just talked a bunch about a bunch of random stuff this month it's it was a nice conversation yeah as I recall I couldn't tell you a thing that we talked about right now oh hotkeys hotkeys yeah and dishwasher and dishwasher I didn't put them the show notes but anyway um yeah uh it's we we appreciate everybody who supports the show we don't take ads uh so we wouldn't be here without you all and and we appreciate each and every one of you again

1:14:40it's patreon.com slash techbod uh if you want to have your name read every month though you have to sign up for the exact every week though you have to sign up for the executive producer tier uh just like infillicitous rips uh bunny jerk Jordan will lip it David Allen and James Kimick have thank you also oh yeah did I say bunny jerk guys that bunny jerk yes no octahorps this time no octahorps this time thank you all so so much yes thank you uh and that'll do it for us this week we will be back next week with another episode reminder watch general magic or if you're Brad watch practical magic I'm sure they're both the saints yeah I'm sure there's plenty of overlap there I can't believe you're seeing the midnight margaritas it's a famous scene it's they referenced it in the trailer for practical magic too uh wow yeah yeah it's speed yeah okay uh see y'all next week as always please consider the environment before printing this podcast