328: Shared Resources, Shared Problems

Brad, I had a really weird dream last night. Hit me. You're familiar with the humble hedgehog? The humble hedgehog? I mean, I'm familiar with hedgehogs generally. I think they're humble. I feel like a hedgehog is a humble animal. I was just making sure that wasn't a capital H, like there's a cartoon character called the humble hedgehog or something. Hold on. We got to stop talking about this. I just emailed it to myself. I'm saving that one. That one's really good. But no, I had a dream last night that I saw a hedgehog in my backyard. And as far as I know, we don't have hedgehogs. Hmm. Hedgehogs are like a Europe thing. They're, they're not endemic to California. Wait, they're not even endemic to the continental United States. I don't believe so. Everybody look, I've, you know, I, you know, you know how I feel about animal influencers and the fact that I do tend to follow, you know, like I have a chinchilla person. I got some Guinea pig people, got a bunch of corkies and dog and cats. And, and I have a, I have a hedgehog person. Okay. Uh, and, and she does, uh, she builds little hutches, like little houses that are hedgehog size in her backyard and then puts things that hedgehogs like to eat inside them and little cameras and they come in and they do hedgehoggy things inside their little house. But only during certain times of the year, apparently, for some reason. But I'm pretty sure she's in the UK. Yes, I mean, I'm looking at it right now. There are no hedgehogs native to Australia and no living species native to the Americas. Yeah, I mean, I think the closest we get is a porcupine, which also I've never seen in the wild. Oh, wait, is there a distinction? Yeah, porcupines have spines and hedgehogs are just cute. I thought hedgehogs also have spines. Well, they have spines, but they're not barbed and pokey like porcupine. They're a little prickly when you pick them up, not, ouch, get this thing away from me. I don't get the sense that they're prickly even. I think they're just like, what's the least prickly, prickly thing you can imagine? It's like one of those succulents that doesn't have spines? Sure, yeah. Yeah, I imagine that they're like the rodent equivalent of a succulent. I'm looking at side-by-sides. there's definitely a distinction in spine severity yeah like porcupine like we we had an irish setter one time that got into a porcupine and it was bad news for her like she had barbs all in her face and it was it was awful that that does not look nice uh speaking of animal influencers yeah where do you land on punch coon what punch the monkey i don't know this wait what okay maybe you're better off then. Is the Punch the monkey's name or do you Punch? Yes. Punch is the name of a baby monkey at a zoo in Japan. Oh. It's kind of sad. I don't know if we should get into it. I haven't fully consumed all of the lore. I've just kind of encountered it in passing, but the monkey was separated from its mother or its mother died or it was raised as a baby by humans. I'm not clear, but there was definitely a lack of socialization and parenting in a natural sense. and then this baby monkey was later introduced into a group of other monkeys that did not know it. Were they rude to it? They have been rejecting it largely for the most part. And it's a small baby animal, so of course it's very cute and sympathetic. And also they gave it a stuffed monkey as a surrogate mother. Wow, that's messed up. For large swaths of the last couple weeks, there have been videos of this baby monkey being like, I'm going to say more bullied than brutalized, like not violent, but the other monkeys have definitely been pretty physically unkind toward him. And then he immediately goes and runs and clutches the stuffed monkey that he is using as a mother in a way that is like a Disney movie level tragic to watch. Okay. So, so two things. One is that when I went to Google and I typed punch the monkey, I got results and like hearts fall from the sky with punch the monkey's face on them. That's that is, that is a route straight to bonsai buddy yeah the second thing is no no no like google the search page had had things dropping from it oh like literally like like they made an event of it it's they're celebrating this monkey violence monkey on monkey violence but the second thing is that i feel like punch the monkey is really kind of a metaphor for 2026 and the state of the world right now because i feel like we've all been rejected by our moms and and uh and like the best thing that we can get is a shitty stuffed animal yes we're all clinging to some kind of surrogate for any amount of solace we can find yeah that we're desperately clinging to trying to find a moment of peace in in an otherwise grim world anyway welcome to the podcast Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. I strategically made a poor decision to drink in the middle of water, to be clear. I feel like when you use drink as an intransitive verb, people might assume you are drinking, which I am not doing at 8 in the morning here. I was drinking water, but right in the middle of the intro. It could be gin. It could be vodka. I'm not judging. we're just here to make a podcast there's a long history of people talking into microphones with the barely controlled substance abuse problems boy that's for sure um but yeah welcome welcome hello um hi i'm freaked out by this monkey story how did i miss i've not i've not seen anything about punch the monkey he's he's a macaque yeah wow a snow monkey you got to say that real careful m-a-c-a-q-u-e yeah macaque i think that's pronounced macaque yeah uh it's wow i i believe he is like slowly being accepted maybe he's just an asshole yeah that's definitely come up that's yes the the maybe the child has bad vibes argument has surfaced a couple of times for sure he could be like the hitler of monkeys and the other monkeys sussed it out and we're like hey man i want nothing to do with you i can tell this whole story is getting to me by the gut revulsion i feel when i hear you say that well look i don't have any personal connection with punch don't you talk about punch that way why why did they call him punch if all he's doing is getting beaten up by the other monkeys that's so questionable perhaps yeah that's like it's pretty it's pretty rough to watch like when the when the when the human caregivers come in to feed and stuff he just runs and grabs onto one of their thighs and refuses to let go desperate for any kind like look if you need something if you need something that's a little cuddlier and a little more warming and endearing uh the marine mammal rescue on twitch does uh otter sea otter live cam 24 7 and like look if you're pro mollusk you're gonna have a hard time with it but otherwise pretty good okay um but we're not here to talk about mollusks or otters or macaque or uh if people want to write in about those things i guess we are but i mean yeah or other i think wait are hedgehogs echidnas I think that's what they are, right? I believe if I can find the tab I just had open. Yes. Yes. Yes. Uh, actually, maybe not. Sometimes laying eggs. That's weird. I don't think I want to try to even read most of this taxonomy. What? You don't want to talk about the spiny anteaters, quill-covered monotremes, egg-laying mammals, belonging to the family Tachyglucidae? It is of the order Eulipatifia? Yeah. Or something. okay it's too much it's too much like quasi latin oh this for this hour echidnas aren't actually hedgehogs yeah so yeah there we go i think that's a that's that's the whole that's the whole sonic and knuckles dichotomy right wait sonic and knuckles aren't both hedgehogs no knuckles is an echidna famously and not only now that you're saying this do i realize they must have introduced him as an echidna as a foil to the hedgehog protagonist i mean i i often have said that the egg-laying mammals the monotremes are the evil versions of the other non-egg-laying mammals now suck it platypus yep yep all right should we should we answer some questions yeah if you have a question you can send it via email that's electronic mail to techpod at content.town or if you are a member of the patreon which you can find out about by going to patreon.com slash techpod uh then you can go into the question seeking answers channel and post it there and it will kind of disappear. Now, I'm going to go and tell you there was some proprietary knowledge dropped in the questions channel this month. So you should know those questions do disappear after a moment. But if somebody else happens to be in that channel at the same time, they will see exactly what you write. And there's nothing we can do about that. So don't post secret stuff in there. Send secret stuff via email. Did you redact? There's at least one message in here with some large redacteds in it. And did you do that? Someone put a place that they worked that i know that they would get in trouble for posting and i did some redacting it's a big giant company i think we can do that one first if you want uh that that one um is exactly the one i was talking about yeah so all right well now that we've talked about it i guess let's go ahead and read it it's this notepad plus plus one yeah okay yeah we got a lot of feedback on notepad plus plus yes like some people were of the yo man this is just one developer doing his thing for free leave him alone be nice to him because like they thought we were mean about the way we said that he kind of muffed the security alert. I thought our discussion was pretty like descriptive in nature and not necessarily judgmental. I mean, look, if there's one thing that doing the FOS pod taught me, it's that we should all be nice to our open source maintainers and you shouldn't yell at them ever. Yeah. And also like it was, well, I'm not an expert here, but from my perspective, it was largely the fault of the hosting provider. But also it seems like the, again, as we said last week, the updater was maybe lacking some fundamental checks against integrity of updates. But anyway. Yeah. Anyway, to be continued. Yes. Ian is the author of this email. From a security researcher perspective at Redacted, the Notepad++ event caused a lot of noise for us and you were spot on with it being targeted at corporate software developer folks. Notepad++ is widely used by software devs, and it also happens to be a common approved editor for production environment machines that can edit, run, and deploy code in production. While I wasn't directly involved in the investigation at Redacted, a colleague of mine works in containment-focused efforts, and a lot of folks found themselves with non-functional work laptops and production laptops after that event happened because we went with the better-to-be-safe-than-sorry containment approach and just nuked a bunch of laptops. A lot of people were worried it was layoffs, but no, just security. For alternatives to Notepad++, you hit on the gold standard of Sublime Text. You mentioned VS Code, which is pretty heavy for just text editing. But a neat thing there is that you can actually run the text editor piece of VS Code separately. It's called Monaco Editor. It's an NPM package, and you use a browser as a text and code editor essentially with it. So, okay, two things. One is I want to know, obviously, they made the laptop stop working remotely because that's the thing you can do in corporate environments. Yeah. And in fact, I would guess wiped them. I don't know if you can go that far. I just maybe you're just like kind of like barring them from the network until they're wiped or something. I don't know. Well, I think they can do things like remote bit locker keys and stuff. Sure. So the data is essentially gone. That would effectively be an easy way to wipe it. I love that. Not to go off on a tangent here, but I think I've talked about before. That's how that's how NVMe drives can be zeroed out. I think it's part of the spec these days is that they have on hardware encryption at all times and to quote unquote erase an NVMe drive. You just have it wipe the decryption key and then the data is effectively gone forever. The other thing I think is that like like part of the concern with the machine that's been compromised at that level is that then it's compromised in some sort of firmware way. Right. Or that there's something living in the firmware of the drives or whatever. So all the hardware is suspect. And I wonder if they just like if these get chucked in the e-waste pile or if they end up in the shredder or like what the what the disposal process is for potentially compromised laptops at a big giant fortune 100 company. Yeah, I want to see a laptop. I mean, it's kind of it would be kind of sad to watch perfectly good piece of hardware be destroyed, but also. But is it perfectly good? Yeah, that's the question. You can't be sure, man. I guess you'll never actually know. um i also installed sublime text on all my computers this week okay and holy crap it's really good is it i i tried it like years ago and i don't think i still have it installed but i thought it was pretty good yeah it might be it's it's weird because because linux people tend to use vi or nano or one of the the t yeah the cli based um text editors there's kind of not a ton of really good plain text. There's a lot of stuff for like editing markdown and doing like light word processing, but there's not like there's a weird void there and sublime fills that really nicely for me. So I've been I've been using that for the last week or so. Last thing I'll say real quick. I don't remember who said this, but somebody in the thread for last week's episode on the discord said effectively, I'm paraphrasing. I have bad news for you about how widespread notepad plus plus is in government institutions. Yeah, extremely. It seems like it's around quite a bit. I thought, I mean, I thought it was interesting that they seem to be targeting people building software at commercial places, right? Like that, that, like you imagine somebody who's shipping software to millions and millions of people. If you compromise one machine that's in the production pipeline for that in a way that you can put zero days that nobody knows to look for into those, those pipelines, then all of a sudden you turn one hack into an installed hit of hundreds of millions or billions of people potentially. So, yeah. All right. Here's a pair of questions that I find amusing. Adam writes in first, when I was a child, my mother painted murals in people's homes. These were wealthy and extravagant homes that could afford a bespoke mural of ponies in their child's bedroom. So they usually had crazy tech products. I remember one of these homes having quite possibly the largest TV I had and maybe have ever seen. It looked like a CRT built into a massive cabinet. Kid brain is not the best at remembering dimensions, but I remember it easily being six feet tall and nearly eight feet wide. This would have been around 2003, give or take a year or two. Did I actually see a massive tube TV or was it some sort of early plasma TV? My wife has a similar story from a similar era, so I definitely didn't imagine it, maybe just exaggerated it. I double checked. There was that video going around a year or two ago about, you know, we found the biggest CRT ever made, which was a sony this was probably not a c or something it was 45 so this was probably not a crt you're thinking of because the biggest crt screen ever made was only 45 inch and it was like 400 pounds and yeah and like that was i think it was barely made i think they didn't even make that many of them it was unclear if they even made one like before they found the one that was in the japanese restaurant that was unclear that it was actually produced yeah right um now there were CRTs that were built into giant wooden cabinets as like furniture back in the day that you could be thinking of, but even that wouldn't be anywhere near the dimensions you're talking about. So I went down the other side of this rabbit hole and I looked up when, when plasma started taking off. And in the early two thousands, the biggest plasmas were about 40 inches, 45 inches were about 10 grand, 15 grand a pop. Uh, the, or later in the early two thousands. So like 22 that like sometime between the start of Twitter and 2010, 2012, Panasonic sold 100 inch version of its plasma that was driven by 220 volt power in the US. Yikes. Kevin Smith famously put one at the foot of his bed. Yes, I've heard that story. And I think I think like for a while it was on display in the shopping center in the Westfield downtown where Nordstrom used to be. So you could go and look at one and it was hanging in that center like that. That's a shopping center that has a center column that has escalators that go up around the edge, and they hung it in the center there so you could actually see it. It was extremely large, but that would have been too late for this. So I bet what you saw was some sort of projection TV would be my guess. That was my guess. The other thing that came to mind when I read this was DLP, which was getting pretty big around this time, which is a form of rear projection. Yeah, DLP would have been after this, I think, though. I looked it up. The technology was invented in like 87. Oh, right. Pretty sure by the late 90s, they were starting to get out as consumer sets. I mean, that wouldn't look like a CRT. So maybe unless you're forgetting what the screen type was, I'm not sure if that would apply. But DLP TVs got huge. So they were, I think, probably the biggest screens out there at the time. Well, so I bought a rear projection TV in 2000 that was 55 inches. And DLP wasn't an option at that point, really, because I would have absolutely bought the thinner one. Because the benefit of the DLPs was that the throw. like to get a crt rear projection tv you had to have three big giant tubes in the bottom that then were projected onto the screen um the dlps either they didn't exist or the bulbs burned out maybe that that might have been why i didn't buy it is because you had to keep replacing the bulbs every 400 or 1000 hours or something um but it could have also been front projection is the other thing a lot of people like i know a couple of friends when i was a kid had front projection TVs embedded in those big cabinets that looked like it was built into the wall, but it was actually a projector hanging from the back of the room. And you may not have noticed that as a kid. The mystery giant TVs, man. Yeah. The mystery deepens the other the other email here about TV related stuff is a bit more informational. Or in fact, I kind of want to put this to maybe the audience because I know you and I are both using old solutions for this. Jessica writes in the bane of my existence is my HDMI switch. I've tried multiple different brands and cost points. However the ones I've owned have been hot trash. What do you both use for HDMI switching if needed or do you avoid it entirely? I've got a PS5, Switch 2 Series S and a Raspberry Pi 5 used as a retro console and Roku replacement. I just want something my wife and I can push a button to switch inputs reliably. So I think you and I both are still using pretty old Sony receivers with HDMI inputs. So this is like not super helpful to Jessica, but I'm hopefully hoping people can write in or on our discord if you have better options. Now that you have HDR, an HDR TV that does newer HDMI, are you just using the ports on the back of the TV? So my my receiver is on the cusp where it supports a 4K, but not HDR of any kind. So, yeah, I would strip HDR if I even ran anything through that. So my TV has four inputs and three are just straight devices, consoles and stuff. And then the receiver currently is getting one input for everything I have that does not need HDR. Okay. But if I get an Apple TV, that's all going to have to go out the window because then I'm going to have not enough ports. Or you could just, yeah, pull the receiver out of the pipeline. Yeah, I'm trying to avoid having to get up and juggle cables every time I want to use something that's not hooked up. I see people talk all the time about HDMI switchers these days in relatively positive terms. But I mean, like Jessica here, obviously has had a bad experience with those. So I certainly don't have any recommendations for which ones are good. Yeah, I don't. I used to use physical button HDMI switchers that were like like you hit a clicky button and it would switch the connection. Yeah, that was in the pre HDMI two days. I'm using that receiver still because I'm still on a non HDR TV. So it's great. But also the only things I have plugged into the TV these days are a Switch the Xbox Series S and the Apple TV So I have enough ports on the back of the TV theoretically I would look for a switcher that supports eac uh sorry the new what the new spec called um yeah you thinking of e e yeah e-arc for audio there's hdmi 2.1 for all the video features there's like that's another reason i have never bothered upgrading all this stuff um part of the reason i wanted to read this is i think i've mentioned this before i've kind of gotten interested in maybe a more modular form of i need something to drive speakers and I need something to switch HDMI. But I don't necessarily, I definitely don't need most of the features in a very expensive AV receiver that does all those things. So like some more modular and maybe smaller solution that's like a switcher and some kind of amp that are separate, I'm kind of interested in these days. But again, I don't have good recommendations for what switchers are good for this sort of thing. I also, I always worry about latency being introduced or weird processing stuff. like interfering with image quality or stripping parts of the hd of r signal or whatever like i'm always paranoid about sending the video signal through too many intermediaries it shouldn't like if if the switch is set up right it shouldn't do any of that stuff it should just pass straight through no additional latency particularly like the hdmi 2.1 spec seems so onerous to implement that i would assume if you're compliant then it's doing what it's supposed to be doing but who knows um i what i was gonna say is you should look for one that supports cc oh yeah yeah so that way because because the beautiful thing is if all the stuff in your chain supports cc which all those devices should when you hit the button to turn it on it should just switch to the right input on all the devices in the chain um and and it's a the technology is a little fiddly um but i'm sure that there are options out there and i i bet folks in the audience will have some recommendations. Yeah, that's my hope in reading this is that people will have feedback. The last thing I'll say real fast about CEC, did you see people on the Discord two months, three months ago, something like that? Linking, I think the last time we talked about CEC, linking a project a guy did to effectively hack the CEC signals in his device chain with like a Raspberry Pi. Whoa, what? There are, I'd have to go revisit this to fully describe how it worked, but I think over the HDMI port on a Pi, he was able to like use it as a serial interface to detect the CEC signals coming in or there might actually be like a Python library that kind of does that for you and he full on posted some code examples of him like intercepting and parsing the signals and then wrote a little utility to control them. That is wild. Like to basically, it was basically to like adjust the bad behavior of some of the devices that are which we talk about all the time. Yeah, yeah. Some things like some consoles behave badly like they always want to change inputs when they're you know turned on or whatever there's like undesirable behavior in the way cec devices will sometimes take control of the tv and this guy basically was like writing a layer to stop some of that stuff from happening it was fascinating i really need to go back and revisit that um yeah it's it's i'm looking at a thread on reddit right now that talks about the best hdmi 2.1 switch and they're talking about things like dropped drop frames at 120 blackouts at 120 hertz 4k video and um hg my cc signals not passing so like this this unfortunately this might be one of those categories where you just have to keep buying and returning things until you find one that works is the other thing yep yep yeah like there's no wire cutter review on hgmi switches because only weirdos like us have that stuff sadly yes um all right uh this is from francisco I'm curious if you guys have ever messed around with Microtik's stuff it seems well liked and fairly affordable for brand new switches and routers. Microtik is a network hardware company in the kind of prosumer space I should jump in real quick if it's kind of in the ubiquity vein TP-Link Omoto that kind of stuff I've heard the interface for managing them is a bit arcane and they make interesting choices on what ports to include and what standards to bake in maybe that's how they keep costs down Some of their gear seems like it's aimed more at small ISPs, but they have plenty of home lab friendly stuff like the RB5009 router and CRS310 and CRS309 switches that I've personally been eyeing. There's definitely people on our server who like my, in fact, even outside the server, I see a lot of love for Microtik for sure. the one thing as he kind of mentions here the one thing I've been a little skittish about and maybe you tell me if I'm getting too like too zealous in this pursuit or not but they use like a custom OS and I'm really trying to get away from like kind of vendor specific anything these days and just go as generic as possible and stuff like this so like if you get Microtik stuff you're learning their OS and their interface and their way of doing things as opposed to a more generalized solution much like ubiquity so yeah it kind of reminds me of your old it reminds me more of the older the last generation of ubiquity software that your edge router runs not necessarily like the modern gooied up yeah classy version of the ubiquity software my my impression again i haven't used it but my impression of the microtik software and interface it is is it is definitely pretty networking grognard like hardcore type of stuff i don't i think um it has a little bit of a softer edge than that but yeah yeah the folks i know who who are into it are very like hey let's write the rules for our firewall in a text file yeah people seem to love it though like i've kind of seen almost entirely positive stuff about microtech from people who have it yeah i think like i'm looking at their router page right now and like for 200 bucks you can get something with a bunch of 10 gigabit, sorry, 2.5 gigabit ethernet ports. Oh, and one 10 gig SFP cage. So yeah, like that seems pretty like that's, that's, that is an appropriate price for that hardware from what I look at. Yeah. You can get a lot for, for a good price from them as I, as far as I've seen. Yeah. I, I don't have any personal experience though. This is an interesting question from Danny. PCs have more than enough power nowadays to multitasking efficiently. why as a standard in windows can't i separate user input devices so i can check emails while my kid is playing disney speedstorm video games can already take keyboard and controller inputs separately for same screen multiplayer i don't i don't know of any technical reason that couldn't exist i'm assuming it's just because microsoft has not built such a feature the os is don't like having made games where people are like hey man why don't you have split screen in this game before it's really hard to have multiple viewports on modern graphics cards because they're not designed to be time sliced that's that's the one thing i was going to say that i realized as i was saying there's no technical reason you couldn't do this is that yeah if you're on a single gpu system like that does exist now i think that's the type of thing where you need like yeah it does exist in some stuff i think sriov is the thing you need that lets you yeah partition resources on pci express devices but i don't know how many graphics cards support that like i like you'll see the odd like Linus Tech Tips video where he's got infinite money to throw at some problem like this and makes things like this work. Maybe it is actually a harder problem at the hardware level to solve than I'm giving it credit for, but I think it is solvable or will be at some point, but whether Microsoft ever builds a feature like that for something that's a pretty major edge case, I think, for most people or edge use case remains to be seen. The kind of killer app for consumers for SRI IOV is running two GPU, like a GPU accelerated host and a GPU accelerated VM and slicing off some of that. So yeah, in the same way that you can say, hey, give your virtual machine two of my 16 CPU cores with this, you can say, oh, give, give the virtual machine 10% of my GPU, right? It's not shipping in any consumer version of Linux that I'm aware of. And Microsoft hasn't looked at that yet yeah but but i mean i think when that comes online then we'll see a bunch of weird applications where people do hey assign this mouse to this vm and assign this keyboard to this vm and that's essentially what you're talking about doing yeah like running a hypervisor with multiple virtual machines running underneath it that some run on for your kid and some run on your on your thing when you like for example when you run when you connect to geforce now i'm sure that's what's happening you're not getting a whole machine right maybe you're getting a whole gpu but you're probably not getting a whole machine anyway yeah of course nvidia you know has access to slightly more exotic hardware to make things like that work than the average consumer at the moments but yeah it's hopefully we'll get there i mean and the other thing is it's always the business decision right is like how many people are going to use this and is it just cheaper to like rather than building one giant beefy computer that three people can use at a time is it cheaper to do that or is it cheaper to use uh to to buy three cheap computers right and like having having started like when i worked for the for the for my congressman he had a wang mini computer which was a giant like filing cabinet sized computer that had or three filing cabinet sized computers from being real that had five terminals hung off of it and five people could use it at the same time but if somebody was doing a mail merge then the whole damn thing got slow so like you know it's it's like shared resources means that you have shared problems and often not desirable yes fair uh As a quick aside, I have kind of enjoyed boning up on, I guess you'd call it the colloquial terminology for old computers that were used back in the day. Like when you say mini computer, that was mini relative to mainframes, to room-sized or refrigerator-sized computers at the time. And then I gather that microcomputer is what kind of desktop-sized, like traditional personal computer-sized computers were called when they first came along. that yeah they quickly replaced that with personal computer because that made more sense right because it was a one person computer versus a shared shared computer yeah but it does it does kind of throw you for a loop when you hear a mini computer these days and have to remind yourself that again it was mini compared to a gigantic computer so even a mini computer is quite big it was a trip because that mini computer had some basic software that you could run on it but it also had a couple of like custom programs that they'd had written that were basically for generating mailed responses, like physical mail responses to letters from constituents. So like as an intern there, one of my jobs was to open up all the mail and type in what the person was pissed off about or needed help with. Oh God, by hand, by hand, I guess there was no OCR widely available. Not in 1993 and 94. No. And so like you got a fair amount of, Hey, my disability got canceled or my VA benefits are having problems or stuff like that. And those you'd hand off to the person in the office who handled that stuff. But then if it was just somebody who was pissed off because they worked at a jeans factory and NAFTA was going to destroy their life, then you put them in the pro or anti. You went to the NAFTA category and then you went to the pro or anti. You had to suss that the 18 year olds were in charge of figuring this out. And then and then you had to type in their name, address and name and address and like a note from their letter, which was usually handwritten in some unintelligible scratch and then send that put that in the database. And then at the end of the day, we generate a mailing list that was like, hey, I just wanted to let the Congress let you know the congressman got your email. We really appreciate the feedback. Here's how he feels about this issue that you're upset about. And most of the time it was like one of 20 form letters that got sent back. But sometimes you had to like you had to come up with a new form letter for a topic that somebody like if somebody was upset about the watershed for a TVA lake, then you had to take that. The chief of staff had to write an email and then we had to take it to the Congress. But it was a whole process. but the wing mini computer man at least at least somebody was reading the letters yeah I don't know if that's still the case these days but anyway the point the point though is I mean that is that is the answer to this question I think for now is that it's certainly way easier and probably also cheaper to just get like a two three hundred dollar mini PC that can run what was a Disney speed storm or whatever it was like you can get very cheap computers to do things like that now yeah I mean this is also a good opportunity for shit running downhill where like you next time you get an upgrade not that that's an easy thing to do and this is the time of our the season of our memory discontent but you know next time you get an upgrade you kick that old machine downhill one notch and the kiddo gets an upgrade yep alright real quick speaking of children playing video games Antonio do you have any video game recommendations for a two year old where they can just move the stick around and see fun things happen on screen. I firmly believe in Patrick Klepek's philosophy of not forcing my interests on my kid, but my toddler is always intrigued when she sees me play games, and she took to fidgeting with gamepads around the house at like six months. I've tried sharing the controller with her a few times in Geometry Wars Retro Evolved, where she moves us and I shoot, but we die in just a couple of minutes. Sadly, there's no God Mode or infinite lives in Geometry Wars, Everyday Shooter, or even Vampire Survivors. Also, she eventually tries stealing the whole controller from me, So if I ever found a game we could vibe with, I had to even try modifying the controls to split them across two controllers. Consoles are good for this, though. I think I can tinker with something custom by using software like DS4 for Windows. Got any advice or recommendations? OK, so I think I've been a success at this. My daughter is 13 now. She plays games with a mouse and keyboard as the Lord intended. And, you know, I hear yelling about noobs in Fortnite and whatever other games she's playing on the reg. um i started her with actually super mario maker so we loaded up super mario maker and i put her in one of those levels that dan reichert and patrick kleppich made for those no no i'm kidding that would be horrible oh god uh they made they made they made famously cruel levels to taunt each other with for a series of years um i did the opposite so i built really simple levels like i looked at the the ethos of one one where they teach you to jump and they teach you to run and And I dialed it back like 15 notches. So I just taught her how to move Mario first with no enemies and nobody on the screen. Then I gave her a couple of guys to stomp and jump over. I gave her the ability to hit hammers. And I just built increasingly complicated levels until she kind of understood what was going on. Then I eventually gave her access to the building controls. right and i taught her how to build levels and she built levels to see if i could beat them which was which was challenging and uh that led to her wanting to play like mario and playing more mario games we played you know we played it turns out a lot of the kind of i guess it's we maybe we era on mario nintendo platformers have pretty good kid modes where like in yoshi's woolly world what's the what's the one that came out on the wii u yoshi's uh sounds right i should remember that anyway one of the one of those one of the yarn games uh riyoshi's crafted world maybe i think is what it is i think those are both games there's definitely a woolly world there might also be a crafted anyway they had yes that's correct they had a mode where you could play both of you once once she got the gist of the platformer controls um then i then we set her up in one of those where if she fell then she just got bubbled and then i had to pop the bubble so she'd come back out again and like the penalty some of those even do things like when you fall down into a hole it just bounces you right back out again yeah i think like super mario wonder on the switch yes some like most most of the recent nintendo games do you have some level of assist like that yeah it's like an extreme little kid mode and that was enough to get her over the hump and then eventually she was like hey why don't you die why do you die when you go in the hole and i don't and um then you have to have a hard conversation well no no but it ended up being like sometimes that was really cool because like she would fall and get she she would fall in and get bounced back out and i would be dead and she'd have to bring me back to life which was like a real moment of joy for her she's like look i did something dad couldn't do and and um like that that was some of the stuff that made her excited to keep playing games but mostly like mostly your kids just want to spend time with you right especially at that age like you're their favorite person and you you and you and their the other parent are the favorite persons and spending time with them is incredibly valuable and and so figure out the things that they're into like i play roblox games with my kid i play minecraft played like the the other big one was minecraft when she was old enough to get into minecraft just a few years like four or five i think i would go in when i was traveling a lot for work and i would build stuff in my hotel room at night so that when she would log into our shared world she'd see like there'd be an enormous 30 foot you know 300 block tall mario sculpture or a stormtrooper sculpture or something like that and uh that was always that was always a kick that's fun yeah that's fun but also i don't have a good specific game recommendation but you know there's a ton of games that just have like very highly granular difficulty options these days that let you adjust like you know health and damage and like kind of everything you can every knob you can think of to tweak difficulty they expose i think i think that's good like here's the thing you it's the thing to remember is that kids at that age aren't obsessed with winning they're just like moving the guy on the screen and watching like having control over the world is really fun so you don't you don't have to like you know you don't have to bring our old gamer extreme mentality into it right like they don't have to get the pacifism achievement in geometry wars they can just hang out and have fun yeah yeah all right let's do at least one more email I want to make sure we have time for some discord questions as well. Here's one from Tim. I believe you guys mentioned the Apple TV plus show Pluribus on a recent episode and that it was creepy and you were debating watching it with certain family members. Can you expand on what you heard? I've been about ready to add this to my watch list next, but I don't enjoy creepy at all. I've probably watched about three horror type films in my life and they were only horror adjacent at best. I watched these shows on my lunch break from work and have even less desire to creepy to see creepy stuff then so i'd love to hear more was that you saying that i don't remember if i said that yeah i don't think i remember saying that because i had been avoiding as much about pluribus as i could it's not um did you watch it yeah i watched the whole thing it's great it's it's it's my favorite one of his shows ever so so this this email is very well timed because we finally cracked into it and watched i've only seen the first episode so far but it was one of the strongest first episodes of a tv show i have ever seen the first episode has some like disturbing you know it's about apocalypse right yeah it's but like a goofy kind of a goofy one i mean there's definitely some pretty unsettling elements to what happens again i've only seen the first episode but like i don't know if i'd quite go as far as to say it's horror ish it's it's like it's adjacent but it's less adjacent than say something like cabin in the woods which is like a horror a slasher comedy movie yeah i mean you know if if your bar it sounds like tim's bar is incredibly low basically non-existent for horror like this might actually be too much if you like literally have never seen a horror movie and have no desire to but i would certainly not rate it as like it's unsettling yeah yeah the thing i would say is the first the first episode is i think as bad as it gets yeah i can see that um everything afterwards is inching back towards some semblance of normality dying to see more of it it it is i had to i had to pace myself because i would have gone through and watched it like eight hours in a row i easily could have watched another episode i we like to space things out at least no more than one a day but i felt like whatever gauging reaction to things like tv shows from your social media feed is fraught and highly subjective and anecdotal but i kind of felt like people seemed kind of mixed on it as it was airing but i don't know i don't know maybe some people were just expecting another breaking bad or something but i know it's obviously very different compared to some of his past stuff it definitely has the breaking bad like we're going to write ourselves into a corner and then figure out how we get out of it in the next episode vibe in a way that i really like i really love that that was the thing i liked about breaking bad it's it's another antihero show but it's not um as as an unlikable antihero as uh what's his name is in breaking bad yes in some ways in some ways she's much much worse i was i was going to say again with only the benefit of the first episode under my belt like i would in some ways she's much more insufferable than than walter like walter white does terrible things but like he does for mostly well not mostly no it's all selfish by the end yes he is revealed to be kind of a selfish monster, but the woe is me. I'm such an unhappy, wildly successful celebrity author. Stuff in the first episode is a bit insufferable, but her agent or whatever. I don't want to talk too much about the show, but she is called out on her shitty attitude for how privileged she is by a person in the first episode. The show is very aware of that. It's very good. It opens with some real contact vibes, too, which I love. Yeah. Yes. Like one of the better like society falling apart rapidly depictions I've seen in a while. It's it's it's way more fun than something like Don't Look Up, which I found incredibly real and impossible to ever consider watching again. Yeah. I would watch it. I watch the first episode. If the first episode is is not too much for you, you'll be fine. Yeah. Is the TLDR. Cannot wait to watch more of that. OK, let's get into some discord questions here. tactical tug, frequent asker. I know you've touched on the subject a couple of times over the years, but could we maybe get a full 3d printing episode at some point in the future? I've done a dumb and gotten deep into the rabbit hole of the printing hobby. It would be great to get your opinions and or experiences with it. Maybe ask Norm to join as an expert too. So I bought some 3d printed stuff lately. Okay. Just like under desk mounts for stuff that I want to hide that's like is specific for that particular piece of equipment and stuff like that. My Motu audio interface is held up by a 3D printed, like bespoke custom designed mount. I'm holding it right now in my hand. Yeah, I have a project that I am kind of excited about right now that's pretty stupid, but that would really benefit from 3D printing. and also I've been watching the people making whistles like uh for the show Dan Sinker and and uh some of his Chicago cronies are printing tens of thousands of whistles a week right now and um like it the the utility seems there finally oh yeah and the hardware is not that expensive the plastic's easy to get um it seems like maybe I should get a printer again yeah yes it's time Yes. If we do such an episode, I think I will be the interested interrogator of that episode, especially if we have Norm on as well. Like, I just like I respect the field and all the things that it is becoming useful for. It's just probably not something I'm ever going to get into, or at least certainly not in an apartment, maybe down the line at some point. But I would be much more in the question asking role. having sat in a room with a 3d printer printing abs for years and years and years i don't ever want to be sitting in the room with the printers going again yep um i i don't know the norm's doing all that much printing anymore but um anyway i i can i can ask him i'm sure if he is he'd be willing to come on and talk about it i think the fdm printers especially like the stuff that bamboo and some of those folks are doing with decent speed fdm printing is pretty remarkable so cool question from Max. What purpose do PCI Express retaining clips serve when the cards get screwed into the case anyway? Trying to remove a GPU next to a Noctua NH14 brought me to the brink of madness. Definitely been there. If there weren't a retaining clip on the slot, it wouldn't have been an issue. I don't have a good answer for this. I don't know if you do. Oh, I know the answer for this. Well, okay, go ahead. So in the olden times, back in the day, before they started putting the retaining clips. So what Max is talking about is the little clip on the typically the first or second PCI Express slot that kind of latches into that U-shaped notch at the end of the slot. And you have to push it down to release the card when you pull the card out. This is on the right end of the slot, to be clear. Yeah. and in the old days when you had single slot gpus where you only had one bracket you would often when we would get ship a system shipped to us for maximum pc we would often receive a dell or an hp or something and it would get to the office and the gpu would be rattling around inside the case so they started putting on the second the second the bracket on the end of the clip so that that wouldn't happen so the the cards wouldn't come loose in shipping wait again to the point of the question though was it not also screwed to the rear well mount with a single slot card it's a u-shaped screw it's not the screw doesn't go through a hole it's just like it just slots in so there was able to work its way out wiggle loose yeah multiple times we had them show up with the with the gpu or the cpu cooler that was the other one just flopping around in there so they added the retention clips so that they could ship more reliably interesting um as cards have gotten heavier it's more important because they will like a card that weighs as much as a 4090 or something like that will get loose over time. The thing I will say is that newer, especially nicer motherboards tend to have retention bracket release mechanisms that are away from all that. Yeah. Like a button off to the side that you usually can access better. Although as you say, as with many nice motherboard features, unfortunately, those are often limited to the very expensive models. yeah the the trick the the trick that gordon and i used to do at the at the maximum pc lab is that you would grab a um a slot cover and just slide that down the back of the video card and you could hit the edge of the of the pusher with that usually okay to pop them loose the the there's all sorts of innovation in this space because everybody knows it sucks uh asus has a new thing on some of their new motherboards where you kind of tilt the card once it's unscrewed in a weird way like you apply a certain pressure in a certain direction it just releases automatically but that was so confusing to people that they had to put a sticker on the slot before you put the card in so the people knew that the feature was there so they didn't break the retention mechanism apparently so yeah it's not it's not a like look if I have to ship a PC these days and I'm putting a big giant video card in it I usually ship the video card in the computer separately yep yep that's the way to go in fact I was sitting here thinking why didn't they just do that in the first place but of course the big point of a pre-built computer is you don't have to put it together yourself so yeah most people would not accept that um like honestly if i'm carrying if i'm carrying a pc someplace even in the car and it's not laying flat on its back so that the motherboard is down and the gravity is pushing the card into the into the slot i usually take the gpu out yep yep that is the way to go i think the last thing i'll say real quick because i've done this before it is possible to non destructively remove that clip from the slot uh on the ones that it's just a clip that you can't the ones that there's like a weird button or lever mechanism you almost never can yeah although in that case hopefully things are arranged in such a way you don't care because it's easy to just push the button to get it out but um i had that problem because i bought a um an nvme drive with a heat sink on it and the socket on my board was so close to the slot right above it that it could not get the drive into the socket because it was but i you could just get in there this is a cheaper board but you could just get in there and like very gently bend the bend it outward and take it off, which I did, and then put it back on when I stopped using that board. It was just fine. The new, my new least favorite thing, like that, usually the good NVMe slot is right next to your video card. It's usually just above the video card slot. And on air-cooled systems or systems with big GPUs or whatever, you almost always have to take most of the computer apart to change the damn drive, which is just obnoxious. I hate it. Oh, it's terrible. Yeah. Okay. All right. I've got a pair of phone-related questions here that I think are pretty good. Pat McSee. When did the average person start having a cell phone? Granted, I may be a little younger than the average listener, but in my head, most people didn't have cell phones until right before the iPhone came out, so circa 2005 or 2006. Then the iPhone happened and suddenly everyone had a cell phone. Or maybe I just happened to live in rural late-happening place. When I left Tennessee, it was unusual. to have a cell phone that was in 2000. Like young people often would have cell phones, but they were very much of the, I have this and I'm paying for service that I can use it in an emergency, but I'm not going to use it to actually talk to people. Yeah, that's roughly my memory as well. This is easy for me to remember because I got my first cell phone shortly after I moved out here, which was early 2003. Yeah, when I moved to California, the pack at the time, Pac Bell, what later became AT&T was charged. Like it was the beginning of unlimited talking, basically or really high talk times. Sure. And for a while ourself, but we just had, we didn't have a home line here. Yeah. That was exactly the calculation I made when I came out here. And I think that's why I finally got a cell phone was I got here and I was like, well, I can register a landline now that I've gotten to California or I could just go ahead and finally get a cell phone and not worry about it. And that's what I did. Although I remember being pretty resistant to the idea of getting one prior to that, because I felt like I didn't want to be contactable anywhere I was at any time. Like it felt a little invasive to me, but I feel like I also remember feeling like I was like behind the curve of most people I knew. See, I had a crappy car. So having a cell phone was a really, saved me from walking 10 miles down the freeway to get somebody to come tow me. Fair. Um, the, the, the, yeah, for me, it was the jump from the old CDMA phones. Cause I was on Verizon or Sprint or somebody in Tennessee and getting GSM and having just like more talk time honestly was was like it became a thing eventually we had to get a landline because we needed to get dsl um but yeah until then and then and then the next big jump was when all the phones switched from being phones to smartphones at least here that that to me i have a really distinct memory of standing on a muni platform in like 2010 around the time we launched tested um and looking around and being like wow every single person on this platform is holding an iphone looking at the internet right now that is wild that was his iphone 4 i think iphone 4 yeah yeah like three three the the first one didn't the first one was expensive they didn't subsidize it so it was it was like 700 the second one had bad battery life and a kind of crappy camera compared to a lot of what we now think of as dumb phones 3g you mean the 3g yeah 3g is the first one i got but the 4 was a real was a real jump ahead and there was 3gs in the middle of that which was just kind of a minor bump but yeah i i still i kind of regret never having gotten an iphone 4 like i forget i can't remember why i didn't get one it's the one i have on the wall behind me blown up oh okay yeah i mean you know to a lot of people i think it is still like the iphone or at least a very major milestone but yeah to me it was the thing when it went from being a novelty to um to uh like the like the a thing that must have yeah technology device yeah and it was the first one to double the pixel density on both dimensions among other things like i know it did a lot of things but in fact i think probably the thing it did was increasing double again doubling the resolution well on the x and the y like the i think that was when they came up with the retina display term right but i just remember thinking at the time like that is an impossibly high resolution for such tiny screen why are you doing that and then you see it and you're like oh that's why and also at the same time the phones had been around long enough that people were building websites they worked with the phones and apps were starting to come available for like the app ecosystem was really taking off at that time like it was it was the confluence of things right that made it that made it good yeah and if you held it the wrong way the cell phone that's right that's right you know you had that going for you too and also it was all very exciting to watch it happening you're not realizing all the while that it was going to destroy society yeah but anyway Hal Seeker has another phone question here more of an existential question are phone numbers becoming functionally useless? every day my work and cell number get bombarded with at least 20 spam calls my work service provider does an excellent job marking them as spam my Pixel 9 does an equally proficient job but what happens when someone you may not know is actually trying to reach you? have our Pavlovian reactions to an unknown number and the immediate decision to dismiss the call or market as spam created an environment where the use of a phone for contacting someone is functionally useless this is i wish i had a better answer to this question other than to say like yeah kind of i the verizon anti-spam tool that i i that you get free if you're a verizon member now marks the spam calls pretty reliably yeah but it was horrible when i was applying to jobs actively and would get random calls from recruiters. And like I had to pick up every friggin phone call that I got if I was waiting for somebody to call me. Is the spam marking happening at the carrier level, not the phone OS level? Oh, both. Yeah. So the Verizon tool, there's an API apparently that can mark. Oh, interesting. That can tag something as spam from the Verizon tool, but also it seems like the phone does it as well. Got it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've had this experience literally in the last two weeks And I was in one case waiting for a call from a doctor that I had not called before. So I didn't know what their number was going to be. Same thing with the financial service. Well, and often the doctor calls are unknown. Like my doctor is always unknown, which means it's going to get the spam filter if I'm not careful. Or the call was coming from a scheduling office, which was not the number of the main kind of front office. And so I had no idea who to expect to call from. It led to me picking up and answering what were not entirely spam calls. I mean, they were not like literally like scams. They were other, I guess you'd call them legitimate. They were like upselling marketing. Yeah. Kind of, kind of. It was just like, it was like a call. Well, it was a call from my bank trying to upsell me on like, do I want to engage with their, you know what I mean? It was just like, it was, they were, they were calls targeted to me, not just like random scams, but they were still people I did not want to talk to because I had no interest in their services. And yes, it is a nightmare. And I don't know a solution other than legislation that currently will never happen. like look if you want to win a national public office then come out and say hey i'm going to fix the phone problem it really seems like that could actually gain a lot of political currency in the current climate like people are really fucking fed up with stuff like this and like i bet there are a lot of people that would pledge their lives to a candidate who literally ran on an on an unshittification platform look like i'm going to unshittify again it seems like like remember when the phone used to ring and you were happy about it you're like oh man somebody wants to talk to me that's cool i like talking to people yeah i'll try that's so long ago i'm not sure if that ever happened for me but sure i i i was playing i was doing a resident evil requiem video for pc world looking at frame times in that game because it's kind of wild how how for not a twitchy game they've done a really good job making it feel like it's fast even at like 30 frames a second with full path tracing and everything turned up but there's a scene at the beginning where the phone rings and and and one of the heroes has to pick up a phone that's just sitting there and she's to pick it up and it's like man i wouldn't pick up that phone there's no way i would pick up that phone that's the most unrealistic part of this whole thing that's the true horror yeah um this is an interesting question from the lodge a weird thing happened recently i found out there's a whole ai generated internet footprint around my high school band 20 years after we stopped playing shows in our hometown. It's built almost entirely of pages scraped from a few lyrics that we posted online as kids. It felt equal parts flattering, eerie, and most importantly, out of my control. You've both created work that's reached far more people than I ever have. When you see your work echoed back at you through algorithms, summaries, or content you didn't create, how does that make you feel? Do we really own our work once it lives online? No. Yeah, I guess that's the answer. once you post it it's gone yeah you can't get it back um i haven't really had that experience though maybe you have i or maybe i just don't go looking for it i see people like i don't go looking for it but occasionally it pops up like my daughter occasionally will come out and be like hey dad is this you and i'll be like yeah that's me um some of the stuff that i did tested has been kind of evergreen like some of the food stuff and some of the coffee stuff and things like that like I think my that AeroPress video that we shot in the in the Sausalito office like the fifth day I was at work has been James Hoffman posted in video like references in videos occasionally because it's one of the first AeroPress videos on YouTube and like it's always weird to see that stuff show up the the the big one for me I think is the the the picture that Norm took of me wearing the original oculus rift um which haunted me for years to the point that like i've told this story before i'm sure but like i went to pitch days where people would pitch their vr startups in on a stage in front of a bunch of a bunch of spectators and also a handful of vcs and there were eight pitches that day i think or nine pitches that day and five of them had my picture in them great by so the like by the time the third one popped up i laughed out loud and the guy who was doing the pitch was like what are you laughing at i was like that's me you everybody's using the same picture of me nobody has pitches nobody had put that together no that you were sitting in the room no that nobody realized that i was sitting in the room yeah so yeah i should say i guess i'd obviously have seen a zillion references to work we have done i guess i was i was interpreting this more literally from the the ai or programmatic angle like i have not seen much or any of my stuff extruded through the algorithm machine and turned into some new type of content. Extruded is such a good word for that. It really is. Yes. Thank you. But you know what I mean, though. He's talking about something minor, like a minor input they put online that has now been turned into something bigger. I haven't seen, other than those pitch emails we get all the time of people, or not people, but LLM summarizing things we said in podcast and turning it into some kind of pitch like i haven't seen much that i've done that's gotten turned into new things look brad i really loved the way that you uh highlighted the charming use of a shed as a place to store your old technology in the 23rd at 23rd february 23rd episode that's very flattering um yeah i i don't for me it's more it's always been human touch at this point because i don't I feel like our stuff isn't big enough to get extruded through the AI machine usually. Yeah, I think that's right. But also yes no you don own anything you put online It just out there for anybody to take and do with what they will there was an anacrusis video that chet and i made that asmongold embedded in one of his videos that was bad that one was that was not okay yeah on many levels oh yeah uh okay let's do a few more here before we get out of here really short ones uh leonadar i guess is how you want to say this my nephew recently purchased a used pc that took some work to get going he said he put atlas os on the machine and it's performing a lot better i looked up atlas os online and it appears to be a modified windows 11 install am i wrong in thinking that's super sketchy from a security perspective yeah it'd be a cold day in hell before i use any of that stuff yeah so i've been aware of atlas os and there's another one called like revi os or like revolution os i think which are which purport to be Windows distributions, which is not a thing that exists. Windows distros is not a thing. They are just modified installs of Windows. I did look up Atlas OS again last night, and I think at this point I don't think they are distributing modified ISOs, to be clear. They'll do an ISO injection for you if you want. I believe it is a thing you pair with an ISO or an install. It's a deep loader. It's a glorified deep loader, which is what most people call things like this. yeah but but also they're not signing their executables or anything like that so like their their process is install windows and then run this thing that you have to turn off all your security protections for yeah like if you're going to do if you want to de-bloat windows then learn how to de-bloat windows don't i i would generally advise against using one of these tools yeah uh same thing like running the ltsc version which is the basically embedded terminal version of windows yeah but you're not going to get security updates for in a timely manner a lot of the features are yeah implemented in the same way things are going to be weird and and also there's a real chance if they become popular to the point that people are actually using them in large large numbers that microsoft will just break key things that you need for your os to work and then you'll be in a hey i have to reinstall in order to fix this problem situation yeah i i don't trust these things from multiple angles. There is the obvious one of they're pretty vulnerable to like supply chain malware type attacks. So they're a vector for people to do bad things who are bad actors. There's also just the aspect of I don't trust what they are fiddling, even if they are coming from a noble place in terms of intentions, I still just don't necessarily trust them to tinker with the innards of something like Windows because a lot of the things they would be looking to disable in a modern Windows are liable to break. You know what I mean? Like edge. It's going to be downstream consequences. Yes, like Edge, Edge, Edge. The way you might disable Edge in Windows install could very well break functionality you do want in Windows. And I don't trust them to always have a good handle on what they're doing. And in fact, if you go through the Atlas documentation, and again, I hate referring to these things as like a separate name, like they're just Windows with modifications, like they're not separate operating systems. But if you go through the list of things they can turn off, they have them broken out into sections of, okay, here are things that once you disable them, you can't get back. You're going to have to reinstall Windows entirely if you want to re-enable these five things that we turn off. Like, here are things that with some hoops jumped through, you can maybe restore properly. Like, that's a level of modifying my operating system that I'm just not comfortable with. And the difference with something like Linux, where there are actually distros, where people have intentionality about things that they change, about how the OS works, is that fundamentally Linux is designed to be kind of interoperable with other software. So you can use different systems to do the same things because at a low level, the systems are designed to communicate in a generic way, right? So like when you draw a window in X windows or Wayland, it's basically the same processes that you're sending commands that are just text commands that get sent over a pipe between one process to another. And Windows doesn't have that. So like they're trying to mimic something that doesn't exist on windows in a lot of ways. Yeah. And the results are going to like, it's going to be fine right up until the moment that it's not. And the way that it is not fine is TBD. Yep. Yep. Yeah. If you really want to strip down an operating system to this degree, you should just use Linux. Or alternately go to one of the 50 million guides on places like Tom's Hardware PC World that tells you how to turn off all the copilot stuff and all the Bing stuff. Because there are registry keys for that. In a large part, that's what these people are doing. It's the stuff that goes beyond that that's bad. And also, it's packaging it as a, like, the way they present it feels really gross to me. Yep. Yep. Agreed. Agreed. Also, there's maybe some self-flagellating aspect of this to me of, like, if you're going to use Windows, you should bear the full brunt of its shittiness because you need to know. But that's more of a subjective position. i i will tell you it's way easier to switch to linux than you think it's going to be yeah like you know it's it's it is it is much less painful than i expected yeah yep let's go go go give mint a shot and yeah go from there um okay a few more quick hits before we get out of here modest ghost any thoughts on the esp32 just wanted to know what your thoughts are man i have seen this pop up so much lately uh the tldr on it is it's a little microcontroller that has bluetooth and wi-fi built in and very cheap is the other thing very inexpensive there's also a framework for it called esp home that basically lets you connect it to home assistant so people are using them to make really inexpensive things like home assistant connected co2 sensors and air quality sensors and motion sensors and all sorts of other stuff um i i it's been on my list to futz around with it. I haven't had time yet. Same. I don't know about you. I have a list. I have a tiered list of would like to do projects. The top tier is stuff that is critical in some way. It's like getting my NAS backups going finally because I need backups because that's an important thing to have. It's doing something interesting with that VPS I paid for every month besides letting it sit there idling on IRC, which is not a good use. You know what I mean? There's like there's projects that are... Are you protecting a channel or something when you do an irc i just just farting around i miss irc i miss yeah sure i miss irc is really what it is yeah we could set up an irc channel on it irc server what it really is is i missed my calling in the late 90s by not having access to a shell account where i could run like an irc bot or something so i just am i'm just kind of living out those fantasy anyway the point is like the projects that have some urgency to them whether it's to like secure data or stop wasting money on something always are going to come first and i never have time to get through all of those so the like would be fun to futz with projects like doing something with an esp32 are kind of just perpetually on the well maybe i'll get to that someday list i really want to like i've i have wanted to buy a co2 sensor for my office since i sitting here with the door closed most of the day so i'm i'm fully with you and i had been looking at them for a while and until recently they were all like two hundred dollars and that was just a little more than i wanted to spend there are starting to be some like cheapish ones i think ikea has like a 40 one now like there are finally there's a few options out there for like under 50 bucks for a decent co2 like particulate sensor because it's funny like i notice um like recording dual boot diaries in this podcast we sit in here for an hour or two the doors shut the fans off i notice when i turn the fan on after a long recording session and start getting fresh air forced in from the outside I feel instantly better. Yep. More able to concentrate. So we've, we've also been doing that every morning, even when it's cold recently, my girlfriend introduced me to the term burping the house. Oh yeah. Which I guess is a European construction. I can see that. A lot of some, at least some European countries, they call it burping. That's funny. Your home. You just blast all the air out and get fresh air in. Yeah, pretty much. Do you do the thing with the front door where you slam the door open and close and it works like a bellows? No, but we have a pretty good through line through the house from the back door to the window right next to me that just kind of gets a good cross breeze going and we're close enough to the water that there's kind of always a breeze. Yeah, I just I I one of the things I wanted to put on and at some point we have to redo the roof and I'm probably gonna put electric heat pump in when we do that because it's all up in the attic. I want to do a whole house fan so that we can which is a like a high flow really loud obnoxious fan that will just exhaust all that we open three or four windows and then you flip that thing on and it sucks all the air out of the house and you get fresh air on the inside. My dad installed one of those when I was pretty young in our house. Just a giant exhaust fan. I think it roars when you turn it on. You don't want to stand under it. It's so loud, but it really cycles the air. The problem is once we got that, he never wanted to use the air conditioning anymore. It was like if it was too hot in the house, he was just like, just turn the fan on, cycle the air out. Don't waste money on the electricity. The thing about where I live is even on days when it's like 90 degrees out, usually when the fog hits at six o'clock it gets cool enough that if i could get the air the the hot air that's trapped inside the house out easily i wouldn't need to run there because maybe this is a dad thing yep uh last thing i'll say real quick the esp32 project i always want to do is i like led light strips that are programmable and you can straight up just buy those by the foot now on like aliexpress for insanely cheap and they're like cuttable or you know they're they're you can cut them to size and you can pair each strip with a cheap little ESP 32. And then those go on your wifi and can hook into home assistant and you can just kind of script them to do whatever. So that that's the thing I would use those for. Okay. We're going to wrap up here with what I'm going to call the me block. Oh, these are all very short and they're all very me. DC actual asks, Hey Brad, what is the software you were or are running to make a raspberry pie into an airplay receiver? if you mean receiver as in a thing you can play audio to and out and then that audio will come out of the audio output on the pi that's shareport sync s-h-a-i-r port it's a terrible spelling oh it's like air yeah it's like it's like airport that's from the days of apple making a product called the airport yeah it's s-h-a-i-r port dash sync now you should know as is common with open source stuff. You want the one that is being updated frequently today because it was actually forked from the original Shareport sync, which is no longer worked on and has been kind of moribund for years. I think it's Mike somebody is the guy who owns the repo of the Shareport sync you want. Shout out to Mike. Yes. Mike is doing good work, but that's probably the one that'll come up if you Google it. If you mean the thing that can stream to AirPlay devices, that's own tone, but I don't think that's what you're asking for. But anyway, there's that uh wild ryle brad did you rma that dbx yet i sure haven't i sure i'm just staring at the camera chat sure haven't he's just staring at the camera just shaking his head he's disappointed himself i can tell should we start rma watch 2026 this is i mean look it's on the list man if you don't rma it soon you can just put it out on the curb in like six months and then call it a day i've got until november okay i should really get that done though honestly i mean since i got this little triton compressor in line that's keeping me from peaking like that's most of what i wanted that dbx for it would be nice it would be nice to get it back in the chain if they sent me a good one here's the thing even if they don't what you do is you rma it and then you just sell it as used not knowing whether it's good or bad you assume that the one they sent you back is good true you sell it and you're like hey i you know i'd replace this is something I like better. Yeah. Alright. Probably the last question. Last question from Patch. There's been talk on the show before about macOS being a certified Unix operating system. Oh boy. Yes. Then there's obviously Linux, but does any other Unix actually exist at this point for a desktop now that IBM and Sun Microsystems are gone? Well, IBM's not gone. They're just... Just not in the Unix business these days. Not exactly in the Unix business. So this isn't quite the question you asked but i have the entire list of certified unixes in front of me wait is bsd not a certified unix no absolutely not he says knowing the answer to the question we're not also unixes unices unixy unix i'm gonna say unixes do you know the original spelling of unix was unics right because it was based on uh it's a play nix yeah no it's a play on multix which was a Oh, Multics. I love old operating system history. Multics was an older time sharing operating system that they kind of based Unix on in design. So Unix was just a kind of a joke name, basically, as if we were making the single version of Multics. Look, on this Unix list, I see a BSD in here. Okay, well, wait, what are you looking at? Because that's not Wikipedia page, the list of Unix systems. That's that's that's like Unix likes. Oh, we're talking about what we're talking about here. is that the Unix name was passed from corporation to corporation and is now owned by somebody called the Open Group and they only will certify your operating system as a Unix if you pay them money. A, it has to pass a ton of like technical checks and functionality tests. B, you have to pay the money to have the certification. Of course. Here are all the Unixes still in existence. Mac OS, IBM's ZOS and AIX, Hewlett Packard's HP UX. and Unixware and Open Server Release 5 and 6 from the SCO group. That's it. Those are the Unixes. It's funny. Those are all the closed source ones too. Well, I guess Mac OS is mixed. Yeah, yeah, they're absolutely like you can compile and run the kernel of Mac OS that's open source. But yes, most of these are for enterprise. And in fact, if you filter I'm sorry, it's probably more than most people want to know, but there are actually multiple unix standards so like some of those i just rattled off are actually part of the unix 95 standard oh yeah of course i everybody loves unix 95 it's everyone's favorite 95 os let's see mac os oh yes is part of unix 03 see it's funny this family tree says it's derived from unix version 8 which one there's one i'll post a link in the in the discord are you looking at that insane infographic from wikipedia oh yeah it's fantastic it's like maybe one of the biggest chart I've ever seen in my life. And it's an SVG too. So you can scale it infinitely. Yes. I've seen this one. I'm sorry. I was thinking of the Linux distro chart, which is way bigger than this. That one is true. True madness. Anyway, to answer the actual question, no, Mac OS is the only certified Unix on the desktop. If you mean Unix likes though, like Minix, Linux, all those count, right? I think, well, I don't think there's a desktop version of Minix. Minix was so much like Multics informed Unix. Oh boy. Minix is basically what spawned Linux. Like Linus Torvald, if you go back and read his original Usenet post, he kind of made Linux in the image of Minix, which was another Unix-like operating system floating around at the time. Anyway, I think the actual spirit of this question is just like, what are Unix likes on the desktop? It's macOS, Linux, like FreeBSD is a desktop. You can run, I think you can run most of the OpenBSD. All the BSDs, so there's OpenNet and Dragonfly. Open Solaris counts still. Yeah, that's dude. Open Solaris and the Lumos and that whole thing is like its own rabbit hole of operating system family stuff to talk about. Anyway, there's definitely like other Unix like operating systems you can run on a desktop, but I'd say Linux and Mac OS are the two that matter. Yeah, that makes sense. I've been running a Mac at home lately, which we can talk about in an upcoming episode. Yes, yes. I think we might do a hands on Apple update here in the not terribly distant future. i'm running blue bubbles man oh oh okay i was wondering what that way what are you running it on a mac a mac mini i grabbed one from pc world it turns out as a company that has had a bunch of people that worked there over the years had a big giant stack of old mac minis and i was like hey can i have one of these and they were like yes not an arm mac mini right uh i did not i felt like that was gratuitous for the use that i'm putting it to sure fair so i took the like the last of into i took like a 2018 basically yeah it's not terrible it runs one it runs sequoia but not tahoe i think is that uh but yeah uh any i just need something that was newer than ventura was what i was looking for sure yeah we'll talk about it i think we'll do a project episode soon that we can talk about it on yeah we'll get back to it mac os is a good operating system it's neat i don't somehow it keeps getting swept up in the anti-windows crusade recently and for reasons i don't entirely understand but we can get to that later well i yeah i mean we can talk about that in the in the in the mac apple episode but i was surprised by how kind of lightly it's not as in shitified as windows is but it's definitely more in shitified than mac os was the last time i messed around with mac os i'd say lightly so sure but it's not it's nowhere near as in your face it's in your anyway i'll make a list yeah we'll get to it later yeah um that'll do it for us this week though if you have questions you can send them to tech body content.town or if you're in the discord you can post them in the questions seeking answers channel and they'll go they'll be there for a minute and then they'll disappear but other people will see them in there if they're in there at the exact same time so you know cake batter is going to see him because cake batter is in that channel a lot it's true um this is a great time for us to remind you that if you're not in that discord you can get there by going to patreon.com slash tech pod where for five dollars a month you get access to the discord which is full of beautiful people who are into all sorts of amazing nerdy stuff uh and talk about things like uh like the notepad plus plus breach honestly we had some fascinating conversations about that that i hadn't really considered among other things um we also we also had a what i would describe as a surprisingly measured and reasonable conversation about the challenges of people like us talking about AI in the feedback for last week's episode, which was, which was really helpful because like understanding and distribution of that as a technology is fraught both from a ethics perspective for a lot of folks, but also like the way somebody like you or I who are kind of shade tree, pearl, uh, Python programmers at best are going to have a different experience with that than somebody who's writing code that ships for hundreds of millions of people to use. So it was very helpful. Yeah, I have not. I've been a bit ill this week, I'll say. I have not had a chance to look at all that stuff yet, but I need to catch up on it. It was a good conversation. But yeah, you can go to patreon.com slash checkpod and get access to all of that. This is the part of the show where we thank our patrons, so thank you, patrons. Thank you, patrons. We are listener-supported, so without you, patrons, we wouldn't be here, and we appreciate each and every one of you. But we want to give it an extra special thank you to our executive producer tier patrons, including Jason Lee, OpenAI Delenda Est, which is very funny, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippitt, Hesitation Fiends, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you all so, so much. We appreciate each and every one of you. Yes, we do. And that will do it for us this week. We'll be back next week with another edition of the TechPod. 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