Our 50th episode doesn't quite have 50 emails, but it's close: tune in for listener mails about bugout bags, evacuation tips, data over HAM radio, the resilience of municipal fiber, and very, very high-end broadcast video. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Our 50th episode doesn't quite have 50 emails, but it's close: tune in for listener mails about bugout bags, evacuation tips, data over HAM radio, the resilience of municipal fiber, and very, very high-end broadcast video.
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Show art credit: Chechu Risk
Gemini (a Gopher-like protocol)
(Use 2x Camera clamps + one tripod extender to make a monitor arm mountable camera mount)
Will: [00:00:00] [Will Coughing]
Brad: [00:00:02] Sound like you've got a frog in your throat Will
Will: [00:00:04] Well, it's not a frog. It's a small particulate matter. It turns out.
Brad: [00:00:08] More of a clog.
Will: [00:00:10] Yeah. Well the good news is the fire stuff. Uh, the fires around us have receded a little bit like they're getting under control. The smoke is less bad. It's all going to Chicago and Montana and places like that now.
Brad: [00:00:22] Have you looked at any of those national maps of smoke and fire coverage? Cause it's. Kind of like a third of the country or it was at the peak, at least
Will: [00:00:31] I talked to Fitz the other day and he said that they were expecting in Chicago to get our smoke like three days before that.
Brad: [00:00:40] That is that that's just gotta be a pure quantity of smoke thing. Right. Cause I would have fought, it would dissipate long before it got that far. So there must be that thick that it kind of coheres for that far.
Will: [00:00:51] I don't, I can't, I haven't seen pictures. We've got a couple of letters from people, somebody who's in Montana said they were getting our smoke too. My guess is that like, Bad smoke in Chicago from California fires is like a awesome day right now for us. And like our, I think, I can't remember maybe it was Jeff set up in the North Bay, his part, his PM 2.5, which is, I can't remember what that number is, but it's the number of what he looks at for a particular matter was like in the high two hundreds,
Brad: [00:01:22] Yeah, I think he said it was over 301 one day.
Will: [00:01:25] Yeah. And that's, that's, it's like, that's when, like you go outside and start coughing immediately in my experience, it's really unpleasant.
Brad: [00:01:33] that is half of the AQI, the air quality index,
Will: [00:01:36] Oh yeah. What's the other half?
Brad: [00:01:37] It's the PM 2.5 and ozone is the other rating
Will: [00:01:40] a yes,
Brad: [00:01:40] That they combine together. We've we've actually been back in the green for the first time, in like a week.
Will: [00:01:45] So, so the wonderful thing about Pacifica being on the coast is that when the fog hits at the end of the day, usually it takes about an hour for the water droplets to pull all that stuff out of the air. And, uh, we've been able, we've been lucky enough. We've been open our windows for multiple hours each night and like air out the house.
But,
Brad: [00:02:03] Did that wonderful Bay area evening reprieve
Will: [00:02:06] yeah, I'm at, I'm at, uh, 36 right now,
Brad: [00:02:08] 36.
Will: [00:02:10] 39
Yeah, 39 real good. And then, because the windows have been open, our carbon dioxide inside the house is 440 parts per million.
Brad: [00:02:18] Wait, how do you know that
Will: [00:02:19] I have a sensor. Yeah.
Brad: [00:02:21] you had your own weather sensor?
Will: [00:02:22] I have multiple weather sensors. I have an indoor sensor that measures the temperature, the bare metric pressure, the relative quietness, the humidity and the carbon dioxide.
And then I have a outdoor sensors that measure the PM 2.5 number the temperature, the bare metric pressure, the dewpoint, the humidity, the accumulated rainfall, uh, and, uh, the speed and gustiness of wind.
Brad: [00:02:48] How do you get into all this action? You have to get certified or something. Are you in meteorologists now?
Will: [00:02:53] Look, I'm going to go and tell you when you become a dad suddenly and you don't wear ties, father's day is challenging. So, um, a few years ago, my daughter and wife bought me a weather station because I had expressed some interest in it. And it has been a very fun, but almost completely useless thing to have, because it basically just says like what, the one that's wired to the roof of the school, around the corner from us says
Brad: [00:03:19] my very own weather station, every man's dream.
Will: [00:03:22] It look, I remember looking in the back of boy's life and I was like, x-ray specs. That's kind of cool. I love what a hovercraft. You can, you can turn an old vacuum cleaner into a hovercraft. That's great. But where am I going to get an old vacuum cleaner a weather station? I would love this. And dad was like, where are you going to put a weather?
What is it? What good is a weather station going to do? But now, now he can't tell me what to do. I'm my own dad.
Brad: [00:03:45] yeah, true. You're armed with the power of numbers.
Will: [00:03:49] Yeah. And it's connected to the internet.
Brad: [00:03:51] Well, now you gotta throw it in the trash.
Will: [00:04:25] Welcome to Brad and will made a tech pod. I'm Will,
Brad: [00:04:28] I'm Brad. It's email time.
Will: [00:04:31] you know, it's also something else, Brad we're this is episode 50.
Brad: [00:04:35] Whoa, that's a lot. That's not quite, not quite a year, but just under
Will: [00:04:40] Now, if we're going to do a big rebrand or something, no, we gotta get right on it. Cause I like, I feel like the past tense thing maybe was a mistake and we got one more chance to make it right.
Brad: [00:04:50] Is it the first time you said this publicly, it's not the first time you said it privately.
Will: [00:04:53] I can't remember.
Brad: [00:04:54] I don't know you actually floated this idea in front of the audience or before,
Will: [00:04:58] I think it was just to you.
Brad: [00:05:00] the idea of changing the name of the podcast has come up.
Will: [00:05:03] Yeah. Brad and Will are making a techpod?,
Brad: [00:05:05] Yeah. You know, when you put it, put it that way, like the past tense makes it sound like it's not happening anymore
Will: [00:05:11] but I mean, yeah, that's true.
Brad: [00:05:14] is that your, is that your big reasoning? You never really gave me much of a pitch for. Exactly. Why
Will: [00:05:18] Look I, yeah, that's it is it, it feels weird to be talking in doing something in the present tense that we're discussing in the past tense.
Brad: [00:05:24] I don't know that either of us were ever particularly happy with this name. It's just, we couldn't think of anything else.
Will: [00:05:30] I mean, I kind of like sweat pants, tech pod, but it's, it's very dumb. And also like, I never wear anything but sweat pants now. So it would be entirely true
Brad: [00:05:38] Also that I don't think that name got spoken nor suggested until we had already recorded. Like that came out on and
Will: [00:05:44] tech pod or Brad and Will
Brad: [00:05:45] I think I came out during an episode, so we were already doing the podcast
Will: [00:05:49] it's possible
Brad: [00:05:50] we do have that Twitter though.
I think I'm fine. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not opposed to it necessarily.
Will: [00:05:56] Let's hear what people think. Let's get some feedback.
Brad: [00:05:58] Name our podcast.
Will: [00:05:59] Yeah. Help us name this podcast that we've been doing for a year almost now.
Brad: [00:06:02] Also we own all of your work.
Will: [00:06:04] Yes. We emailed it to ourselves already. It's ours. Um, but emails, you said emails. So you're, you're saying that people sent electronic communiques
Brad: [00:06:13] Yes
Will: [00:06:14] to tech pod@content.town.
Brad: [00:06:17] I've got way more than I think we have time to read.
Will: [00:06:20] Yeah. That's always the case.
Brad: [00:06:22] There are 19 emails labeled here in this Gmail inbox, some of which have two and even three labels on them.
Will: [00:06:28] That's too many labels.
Brad: [00:06:30] We've been nesting labels inside of labels. If anybody knows a way to arbitrarily order emails in Gmail would love to know about it.
Will: [00:06:39] Aye. Look, we have to have somebody that listens to this that works at Google. I just would you tromp over to the Gmail team and plop your, your, your, whatever, Google teams thing that you use? Look, you can't go to their desk. I realize, but just. Send them a note in Google's version of Slack, whatever it is, they call it and be like, Hey, these guys do this podcast and they want to be able to drag the emails in whatever order you want, instead of having them reverse or reverse sorted by date.
That's all we want.
Brad: [00:07:07] do you know how much do you know how much cognitive overhead there is associated with trying to figure out which emails read next after the last one? Because I can't put them in the order. I would like to read them ahead of time.
Will: [00:07:16] Yeah, no, there's a reason that we have to have two people to do the podcast. I couldn't do that and answer questions at the same time. That would be impossible.
Brad: [00:07:22] is just, yes. Um, all right. Let's dig in here. I love email week. I have to confess not having to think of a topic once a month. You don't understand the relief of just knowing what next week's episode is going to be and not having to worry about it,
Will: [00:07:40] We should come up with another thing we can do on like the other, like the even weeks.
Brad: [00:07:45] that sounds like cheating. I don't think we can get away with that.
Will: [00:07:47] Okay. Okay Okay
Brad: [00:07:48] mean, if I, if we, if we could serialize every other week, I would be all for it, but I don't know that. I don't know if we can get away with that one. All right. Um, where to start? We've got a lot of stuff here. Uh, this is just a
Will: [00:08:02] about disaster stuff.
Brad: [00:08:03] yeah, I guess.
Sure. Well, I don't know. It's fresh. It's pretty dark, but, uh,
Will: [00:08:10] you don't want to start with a showstopper.
Brad: [00:08:12] No, I suppose. You're right. Um, all right, well, you know what? I'm going to read my favorite, one of these emails, uh, about evacuation and disaster preparedness
Will: [00:08:19] Sorry Everyeone else
Brad: [00:08:21] let me know nothing against him. You'll see why I like it so much when I read it right now.
It's from Eric. I listened to your most recent episode on disaster preparedness. And I think you guys forgot to mention cash.
Will: [00:08:34] Yeah, no, we absolutely did. Cash is important.
Brad: [00:08:36] Yeah, we did. We really didn't think about cash,
Will: [00:08:38] I like seeds too. Just in case you need them for the after times.
Brad: [00:08:41] Yes, clearly cash does not rule everything around us. Uh,
Will: [00:08:45] also we forgot water. Water is imporant too
Brad: [00:08:48] yeah, I actually believe there's also an app or an email about water in here that I should pull out as well.
But, um, It seems like a good opportunity to just talk about the role of cash in daily life. At this point, granted to be fair. I should preface that by saying like, if you're in a severe disaster situation and it's not exactly routine daily life anymore, so maybe cash has more importance in that scenario, but like day to day, what's your cash life?
Like at this point?
Will: [00:09:17] Uh, mr. Softy, he comes to town on Tuesday and Thursday. I usually walk over to the ice cream truck at least once during that, uh, visit and I exclusively pay in cash, uh, and leave, uh, bringing exactly the amount that I know that I will need. Everything else becomes the tip. So I don't have to take any money back from mr. Softy.
Brad: [00:09:36] Because you don't want to touch things that other people have been touching.
Will: [00:09:38] I do not want to touch anything. I don't, I don't even want to touch myself. I'm gross.
Brad: [00:09:41] I saw some, I saw some research going around about hand washing, actually being useful again,
Will: [00:09:47] There was a super duper good article in time magazine yesterday or day before that Aaron Bebo, who is a science journalist who used to write for us on tested in his written in, on, in the Atlantic and all sorts of places.
Brad: [00:09:59] seen her on Twitter. Yeah.
Will: [00:10:01] Um, that she's a good Twitter follow. And she shared this, uh, said that the science is vetted.
Like the, it was basically a Roundup of ways you can catch the Rona and, um, it, it is worth reading. I will make sure I put the link in the show notes cause uh, everybody should read it
Brad: [00:10:20] because it felt like, it felt like there was a period for the last few months where they talked to like surface transmission was not really a concern. So.
Will: [00:10:27] I mean the TLDR on surface transmission is that it is a low percentage compared to like aerosolized droplets and, and, uh, and, and stuff like that. I mean, that, that that's it, but it's possible but unlikely,
Brad: [00:10:39] not, no, not no chance though.
Will: [00:10:41] Yeah. Not no chance
Brad: [00:10:42] Okay. That's good to know.
Will: [00:10:43] You have to mess up.
Brad: [00:10:44] yeah. Uh, yeah. I don't know, like, what is, uh, what's a good, like cash stockpile for your bug out bag? Like
Will: [00:10:52] Oh, man. I don't, if I want to say that on a podcast
Brad: [00:10:55] maybe not.
Will: [00:10:56] couple, I mean, I, I have enough money that I could pay cash for enough gas to get me
Brad: [00:11:04] Clear of the disaster.
Will: [00:11:06] a thousand miles. Let's say probably with at least one car and maybe two.
Brad: [00:11:10] of course. You got to eat and on the way as well,
Will: [00:11:13] Yeah.
Brad: [00:11:14] hopefully you're going to have some food of some nature
Will: [00:11:16] Probably going to bring some food. Yeah. I mean, I mean, we talked about this when we did the coronavirus episode, but the weird thing about that is like all the other disasters we've ever prepared for are ones that like you drive 200 miles and you're good.
Like you get a hurricane, you get an earthquake, you drive a few hours, you're fine with that. You can't drive, you can't outdrive it. And that kind of changed my perspective on a lot of that stuff. Um, but yeah, I always keep a few, I mean, I do, I do keep a few thousand dollars worth of cash probably around.
Brad: [00:11:50] It's way more than I would have suggested. Do what you're comfortable with, I guess.
Will: [00:11:54] the ATM won't work, right?
Brad: [00:11:56] That's fair. Uh, as you know, as a, as a follow up to the soup wallet fiasco, I was looking around, I was looking around it, looking around a wall it's a little bit, uh, it's just, it's kind of, it's amazing how many wallets treat cash as an afterthought at this point?
You know,
Will: [00:12:12] I on the day to day, I never carry cash.
Brad: [00:12:14] really no kidding
Will: [00:12:15] Never, almost never. Uh, I would be subject to vagrancy laws in places where they still have vagrancy laws.
Brad: [00:12:22] Alright. Uh, I like to have 30, 40 bucks on me if I can, at least just in case, but, you know, uh, but yeah, like, you know, a lot of wallet signs out there are pretty much purely built around cards and stuff at this point, so.
Will: [00:12:36] I think I might have a 20 wedged into the center, like between my driver's license and my insurance card.
Brad: [00:12:42] Okay. That'll get you somewhere,
Will: [00:12:45] I think I can get a cab to the bus to someplace my clipper card will work probably.
Brad: [00:12:50] Um, there's another email
Will: [00:12:53] hold on. What's your cash. What's your cash hoard at the house you got where you got it as in like cookie jar.
What's your,
Brad: [00:12:59] well, I'm not going to say that on this podcast are you trying to bait me here.
Will: [00:13:03] I just am curious. That's an honest question.
Brad: [00:13:07] actually, I don't have that much right now. Cause I was slowly spending it down because it was just too convenient to reach for it when I needed it. But, uh, probably not as hidden as it should be. Would you hide it in the building?
Would you hide it in like a, I don't know, a ventilation duct or secret compartment of some kind. Would you trust that?
Will: [00:13:29] Probably not. Um, I have a place.
Brad: [00:13:33] Okay. Oh, huh. Alright. Oh, you do have to talk about your crawlspace last week.
Will: [00:13:39] I mean, it says that's not accessible. It's not in there, but it's, it's someplace, it's someplace where I can get to it quickly, but it's safe.
Brad: [00:13:45] Okay, fair enough. Alright. Uh, next email is from Zach. Uh, one thing you didn't mention was extra fuel. Uh, I've lived, I've lived my whole life in the suburbs South of Houston and have evacuated twice. A fuel was always a problem. During the current evacuation around Laura people in Houston are waiting 45 minutes or more to fuel up.
Uh, people will get stuck on the side of the road without fuel. Uh, you can store several gallons in the red tanks, uh, with fuel stabilizer. And it's good for a year. I didn't know. That was a thing I didn't know. That was not stable. Otherwise
Will: [00:14:19] Yeah. Um, if you're, if you haven't filled up your car since the quarantine started in probably it's time to think about, uh, running that gas out and replacing it. Um, the, the, this is a good tip. Uh, usually. So we have a rule here that once we get below half a tank, we usually fill up since we're in an earthquake zone.
So we always have one car with at least half a tank of gas.
Brad: [00:14:42] Man that is very well prepared,
Will: [00:14:43] Um, maybe I'm a secret prepper. Maybe I just didn't realize this,
Brad: [00:14:47] sensible prepper though.
Will: [00:14:49] But yeah, like if I get below a quarter of a tank, I start getting anxious here. And a quarter of a tank for me is about a hundred miles. So I, 85 miles. So it's enough to get reasonably far.
Um, but yeah, gas, I know I had friends who had to evacuate from Katrina and they like, they stopped and helped people who, or some of them probably got ran out of gas on the side of the road and were hosed.
Brad: [00:15:12] yeah, yeah. He, yeah, he, he, uh, he, he finishes by just saying you can, you can store several gallons of the red tanks with fuel stabilizer and it's good for a year. I know a lot of people will, uh, once fill their cans up at the start of hurricane season and then in the fall, empty those into a vehicle and wait until next season.
Will: [00:15:28] It's a good call
Brad: [00:15:29] yeah, but as a
Will: [00:15:31] and the fuel stabilizer, you can get it like any auto parts store, like AutoZone or pregnant or whatever your local brand is.
Brad: [00:15:36] yes, uh, was that it for we've got a whole bunch of disaster preparedness here. Um, how about, Oh yeah, here's the water episode for Herman episode email from Jimmy. Um,
Will: [00:15:54] This is Jimmy.
Brad: [00:15:55] Yes, this is in fact, a Jimmy writing in about water. Uh, this be as important in an evacuation since we're probably heading to some known place, but it is good to have water on hand or have some idea how to produce drinkable water.
Um, my neighbor likes the two pass method where he uses a mesh to filter out most contaminants and then uses strong UV light to kill any lingering bacteria. I mainly stick with these Sawyer micro filters, but I do have three other methods. If my family has to drink dodgy water, I'll be running it through as many methods of filtering as I can.
Uh, even a small bottle of iodine tablets would be better than nothing to have in a kit. Uh, there's a company called blue can do we, we might've mentioned that plus
Will: [00:16:39] I haven't heard of that. I had never heard of this one before.
Brad: [00:16:41] sounds familiar, but. Excuse me. There is a company called blue Cannes that supposedly produces 12 cans of water with a 50 year shelf life.
I carry, I carry a well-protected 24 in the trunk of my car. I'm waiting for the five year Mark before I pop one open to give it a taste test. Uh, the saying that goes to is one. One is none. I first heard in prepping forums. So have at least three methods of doing something because one or even two methods can fail just as with data backups.
Will: [00:17:14] I, um, I like this a lot. It speaks to me. I'm curious about the 50 year old water.
Brad: [00:17:21] Let me be a little less curious about that one. Uh,
Will: [00:17:24] I want to say Vinnie introduced me to the filter, then, then blast with the UV strategy for water cleaning when we were camping once a long time ago. Um, and it worked well, the water I drank straight, straight ass Lake water, and it was fine.
It tasted good.
Brad: [00:17:40] Boy, man, those amoebas, you gotta watch out. Just don't get it up your nose.
Will: [00:17:44] Look, you put it through the filter and then he did the UV thing. He was like, this is fine. You try try this and then let us know if you feel weird after a couple hours.
Brad: [00:17:51] Great. Can you drink? I assume you can drink the amoebas. You just can't snort them.
Will: [00:17:55] With the, in order to get the brain in me was you have to pretty much power flush your sinuses with lake or pond water.
It's my understanding. So you have to do like a front somersault and not blow out.
Brad: [00:18:04] Oh boy, let's, let's move on, uh, to something cheerier. These are not cheery though at all. Uh,
Will: [00:18:13] This is a real, maybe this was a bad idea to start with this stuff.
Brad: [00:18:15] let me find the one, hang on. Let me just search here real fast. Find the one about getting hit by a bus. Here it is. Uh, this is from Brian. Maybe this will be the last one of these.
Will: [00:18:26] Yeah, I think that's a good idea.
Brad: [00:18:28] From Brian, you've talked about your backups, but how do you as well, this is sort of half disaster preparedness, half kind of data retention type stuff.
You've talked about your backups, but how do you ensure your wife or other loved ones are able to retrieve and decrypt if applicable your information, if you, or you and your wife get hit by a bus? Uh, I worry about my wife having to figure out how to retrieve photos of her and our kids. If I kick the bucket or grandparents or siblings, if we both kick the bucket together.
Will: [00:18:55] It's real upbeat, upbeat the questions. Uh, so, uh, the password manager that we use in my family provides a, a throat for a fall over basically, so that you can. Access somebody else's account on the family plan, but it doesn't do it silently. So it's like, it will remove, it will change my act. If she accesses mine, I'll know, um, I'll get a message that basically says, Hey, somebody has access to your account.
You've got to do this and this and this. And it's specifically for that use case. Like if I, if something happens to me and I'm not able to, to give her access to the account or give her the password, then she'll be able to fall over. So I don't have to share it with her. I don't have to give an okay. You know, I don't have to give unfettered access to my passwords, to my private stuff.
But if in case of an emergency, she can access that. And, and all of this stuff that we're talking about in this case is lives there. So, uh, things like, you know, uh, logins for insurance and healthcare and banks and business papers and all of that lives inside the password manager.
Brad: [00:20:02] Just to be clear. That is just a courtesy notification to you. I assume it just goes through for her. Like, no, no, no
Will: [00:20:08] it's actually an encryption type thing. I think it, I think in order, I think what happens is it jacks up the password so that my old password will not work, uh, when, when she does that. But I, I don't, I haven't, I haven't actually tried it, which is probably a mistake. We should probably do that.
Um, just to see what happens,
Brad: [00:20:28] Two is one. One is none.
man.
Just keep it in mind.
Will: [00:20:31] you're gonna make that the name of this episode.
Brad: [00:20:33] It's your mantra? Yeah. I had a different episode title in mind, but I think that has to take it. Um,
Will: [00:20:39] Hold on. We might get an unsavory element. If we do that, we might get the prepper crowd.
Brad: [00:20:44] You know just think of it as odd outreach to new audiences.
Will: [00:20:47] Okay.
Brad: [00:20:47] see. Um, alright. Uh, this
Will: [00:20:51] Next week, malicious.
Brad: [00:20:53] boy, man, let's not, uh,
Will: [00:20:55] to real, sorry.
Brad: [00:20:56] Um, I didn't think of this email as related to disaster preparedness, but you said it kind of is. So I'm curious to hear your angle on this, but, uh, this one is from a Matti, I guess. I hope I'm pronouncing that right from Finland.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Will: [00:21:11] Mmm. Since you've been talking about gopher a lot lately, how you should know that there, man, we're all about that gopher over here. You should know that there's a new protocol out there called Gemini. Uh, you can think of it as a beefed up gopher or a very stripped down worldwide web, uh, as someone who was too young to experience the early gopher and web, I first, I first got on the internet in the early two thousands, uh, but who is getting extremely bummed out by the modern web Gemini feels really comfy, no ads, no tracking, no JavaScript, just a bunch of interesting people writing their Gem logs as opposed to weblogs and other text-based content.
And then he will put this in the show notes, but he includes, uh, the official website for this protocol is Gemini dot circum, lunar.space,
Pretty good URL
Brad: [00:22:03] an incredible adress. That's circ circle, lunar, CIA, R C U M L U N AR. We will put it in the show notes. Gemini does circum lunar.space, but, uh,
Will: [00:22:16] So this one kind of goes with the one that I was going to say, Tatum, but it's Ted sent in.
Brad: [00:22:22] Yeah, we'll get to that. Maybe we should read that next.
Will: [00:22:25] Um, yeah, this is really cool. And I think, so the thing that's occurred, that, that, that we'll just read the, read the read the next one next. I think that's really cool. I think everyone should check it out. I've spent some time on it this afternoon.
It's weird and neat. And I might set up a Gemini node, I think that's yeah, SLO
Brad: [00:22:41] how does it, I mean, could you answer how it differs from gopher or you that deepen that you can, that, you know,
Will: [00:22:47] it just seemed like it was maybe a little bit more, um, Uh,
Brad: [00:22:58] Actually I'm, I'm skimming the FAQ here. Uh, it's a protocol in the traditional client server request response paradigm and is built on mature, standardized technology like URIs my media types and TLS. So it sounds like maybe it's gopher-esc, but with more modern standards underneath it.
Will: [00:23:17] and I may not be the right person to describe this because my, when I clicked on the link, it opened my gopher client, which also I have a gopher client. Um, so yeah, I don't, I don't know how it differs, but like if it's, if you can run it on a, it may just be that it's easier to run on a modern infrastructure is the big thing, but I don't know for sure.
Brad: [00:23:36] That's that's cool. Uh, okay. Yeah. Uh, on, on that note
Will: [00:23:41] This page I'm on now says welcome to the SDF public access unit system established 1987. So yeah, that's cool.
Brad: [00:23:49] That's what I had old as a UNIX stuff is all I want to mess around with these days. So
Will: [00:23:53] that's the internet I crave.
Brad: [00:23:55] I'm going to go check that out for sure. Uh, alright. Yeah. As you, as you said, this next email comes from user Ted
Will: [00:24:02] Yeah, Ted.
Brad: [00:24:04] who says. I just got my ham radio license because I live in Northern California, where there is a better than average chance I will be without power and potentially trying to escape a fire at the same time, it seemed like a reasonable way to channel my existential fears into something potentially useful.
Anyway, uh, during the course, they talk about using the hammer network repeaters for data transfer. This is not software defined radio stuff, but actually transferring data over the 70 centimeter UHF ham radio band. It got me thinking about how useful it might be to have a network of battery or solar powered raspberry PI light devices in a mesh that could provide data.
If you didn't have access to data because mobile tower batteries went down like they did last year during fire season in California. How viable do you think it would be to build an over the air textile only network of low power devices available for emergency access. And then he mentions, I have found a project.
Let's see, I didn't click through to this. Oh, well, it's on, it's on spectrum Dot I Dot EEE dot org. So, you know, it's serious. Uh, Yes, I have, I have found this project using IPV four around this at 500 kilobytes per second. Or I wonder if that's actually killed kilobits per second. Geez. That's that's pretty rudimentary.
Uh, then there's Hamnet in Europe, plus uh, there is, I don't know how to pronounce this acronym.
Will: [00:25:28] ARDEN
Brad: [00:25:29] Arden
a R E D N a would be cool to standardize on a set of protocols and have people start setting these up. Look forward to your thoughts. That is bad. I didn't know. You could do that. That's well, of course you can.
It's a transmission. So of course you can send digital information rather than analog audio. Right. But that's still cool as hell. I had never thought about that.
Will: [00:25:46] Yeah. So like I was in one of the areas that the, that the cell towers went down when the power was out for fire season last year, because the batteries are good for about 48 hours. And. I, this is a fascinating idea to me. It reminds me a lot of, um, Sean Bonner's Safecast, uh, thing. So he's one of the people who's been working on that, uh, and the Safecast nodes are basically these little, it's like a box, the size of an old eighties, Walkman that's waterproof.
It's like a clear plastic box and there's a bunch of circuit boards in there. And there's a bunch of sensors for like air quality and radiation and things like that. And he, they started working on that after Fukushima, because they're like, there wasn't. A monitoring network for the kinds of things that you cared about, like radiation, radiation, and particulate matter and stuff like that after that kind of disaster.
But this, this is, this is taking it one step. This idea is I was talking to Ted the other day and this came up. It's a weird coincidence. I know. Look who'd, everybody knows Ted user Ted, um, So user Ted and I were talking and he was like, why isn't there like a mesh node network for that, that, that you could set up on your towers, relatively inexpensively hook, a small solar panel up to it and just let that thing run and either.
Get data to, uh, via the via, um, like ham radio and then, but, but then the trick is you also have to have wifi modules so that people can like walk over to the, to the tower and get information when, when like the radio's down. And, and I saw this, the Gemini thing that came in from, from, uh, uh, uh, Maddie. Uh, and it was like, Oh, these two things go great together.
Right? Why don't we build, why don't we as a community, we have a bunch of wonderful nerds out there. Let's let's do this. Let's build something that lives on a pie uses these low power unlicensed radio spectrums, whether it's 900 megahertz or 70 millimeter or whatever it is, how many, I can't remember what the frequency, uh, Ted said.
But like, you don't need a massive amount of throughput for this to work, like,
Brad: [00:27:53] if this is this a text based protocol.
Will: [00:27:56] But, but at the same time, it would be incredibly useful to have a way for somebody that has internet on like one side of town. Or that has information from that's talked to the fire department, says, Hey, you know, the fires are 10 miles South, and then you can just walk out to the phone pole up into the corner and get the, get update on what's going on without having to like, listen for 15 hours on the radio for them to update your paticular small area or whatever.
Like, yeah. There's an opportunity for local information that is. Infrastructure proof and doesn't require outside power doesn't require outside communication. That's really interesting and weird, I think.
Brad: [00:28:34] Man I'm sitting here like feeling these kind of warm, fuzzy feelings about the idea of not that I'm capable of it, but of the idea of putting a project like that together, and actually building a standard and a kind of community driven system that could actually benefit people like that. That sounds super cool.
Will: [00:28:50] Yeah, I think so too.
Brad: [00:28:51] And now I hope somebody on the discord picks this idea up and runs with it because I would love, I would love for there to be a communal open source project driven by our community. So I could just, so I could watch the channel devoted to it as people argued over how to standardize it and like what direction to go in.
And that would be highly entertaining.
Will: [00:29:10] This, this brings me to, uh, the new spinoff project that we're announcing at the end of our first year called scene drama. It's a scholarly, uh, look at, uh, no, I, I w we were talking about stuff in the discord today, and somebody was talking about scene drama and the mechanical switch key space.
Brad: [00:29:26] I have to go read that
Will: [00:29:27] And I was like, shit, we could do a whole podcast.
That's a whole like series of podcasts. It's just like the scene drama and all the, like the BSD scene drama, the mechanical keyboard scene drama.
Brad: [00:29:37] Oh yeah, totally.
Will: [00:29:42] But, yeah, I like, I think, I think this is something like, if you look at what happened in Iowa last month or last week, I guess seems like a month ago.
Brad: [00:29:49] Still ongoing is my understanding.
Will: [00:29:51] like the power's been out for two weeks now.
The there's no internet being able to get. Updates from authorities and community members and having like a, like a bare ass text message board for posting, hopefully things that are more useful than what's on next door, um, would be really nice. And if you build a phone app that lets you grab that stuff, then more power, you know, that, that sounds cool.
Brad: [00:30:14] Also God helped the people on the Gulf coaster. Is it roughly where those tar canes are? Bear Barrow barreling down on?
Will: [00:30:21] So Marco landed as a tropical storm and Laura seems to be gaining strength and is going to land between new Orleans and Houston. It seems like which is bad.
Brad: [00:30:29] it seems like potentially a majority of the nation is going to be dealing with the aftermath of natural disasters. Very soon.
Will: [00:30:38] Yeah. The West is burning. The East is flooded. The South is the South is flooded and the East is about to get all the rain that came from Marco. So yeah, it's, it's a great weather month right now.
Brad: [00:30:46] Statewide was still flat from down.
Will: [00:30:50] I mean, I was always flat in fairness
Brad: [00:30:51] Well, or, you know what? I'm no more flat.
Will: [00:30:53] 43% of crops lost, I think was what, uh, from the director, which is how you're supposed to pronounce that apparently.
Brad: [00:30:59] Yes. Actually, we got an email about that didn't we
Will: [00:31:02] we got multiples. People in Iowa were upset at my pronunciation of that last week.
Brad: [00:31:07] Okay. Yeah. Somebody wrote
Will: [00:31:08] they were very, they were nice. They wasn't, nobody was mean, but
Brad: [00:31:10] Let's see,
Will: [00:31:12] it's a German word apparently.
Brad: [00:31:14] I would not have that as the old, probably the last language I would have thought that belonged to.
Will: [00:31:19] I didn't realize there were CHS in German, but the more, you know,
I guess I should have.
Brad: [00:31:23] you didn't flag this one, but should I read this one about the derecho and fiber? So, okay. I haven't screened this one.
Will: [00:31:31] I thought it was good. It was about municipal fiber.
Brad: [00:31:33] I haven't been screened this one, so I don't know.
It didn't make it into the.
Will: [00:31:36] in, um, in our research about places to potentially move, there is a lot of municipal and like electrical co-op fiber in places that are very rural.
Brad: [00:31:45] Oh, that's great to hear,
Will: [00:31:46] yeah.
Brad: [00:31:48] like, are we, are we at the point where I can just admit this openly and not be embarrassed by it that like, I don't want to move anywhere that doesn't have fiber at this point.
Will: [00:31:54] I it's, it's like I would maybe move someplace that has gig gig cable, but I'd have to really think about it a lot.
Brad: [00:32:05] We should, uh, maybe a big can of worms to open. We should maybe think about doing like networking above gigabits as an episode sometime soon. Like I've just been starting
Will: [00:32:17] No one is ever going to need more than a give you a bit of Brad.
Brad: [00:32:18] I've been starting to look into that stuff a little bit, uh, Q-nap, have just announced a consumer grade, uh, network switch, but does 2.5 GBE
Will: [00:32:29] That's not a 10 gigabit or bust
Brad: [00:32:31] so that's the thing, you know, it's like 10 gigabit has been around as a spec for God, how long? 15 years or something.
Will: [00:32:37] longer than that. Yeah.
Brad: [00:32:38] but it hasn't proliferated in the consumer space, you know? And all of a sudden, like there were, I guess there were motherboards shipping with 2.5 gigabit ports on them. And now they're out now, like a hundred dollars switches are starting to come out, which is like getting into the territory of like, yeah, I'll just buy one of those.
Sure.
Will: [00:32:51] Well, and also SSDs are fast enough that they can actually feed a faster than one gigabyte connection now.
Brad: [00:32:58] So I've got, I've got an NVME drive in my free nas machine is it's where my jails live. And it's also just like, as a scratch drive cause it's terabytes. So it's like a nice place to it's like, Oh, if I need to, I need to export a 50 gig video file. Instead of writing it back to the same storage pool, I'll export it to that scratch drive.
And I was just faster, not reading and writing all the same drives at the time anyway, but you're totally right. Like how much, how fast can you read from a PCIE three SSD? Like. Couple of gigabytes a second or something.
Will: [00:33:27] Uh, it's a lot. I don't, I don't remember off the top of my head.
Brad: [00:33:30] at some point it feels like a bummer that you can only transfer like a hundred megabytes a second for your network when you have a drive that fast and you're in your NAS. So there is a need for it.
Will: [00:33:39] Uh, yeah, I would say, I mean, look, I can almost saturate a gigabit on my NAS with five drives in their array. Like it'll, it'll, it'll go, it'll get real close.
Brad: [00:33:49] So anyway, anyway, that that was just a, kind of a burgeoning topic that seems like it's going to become more of a thing soon. Anyway,
Will: [00:33:54] you need to get real into sintering fiber Brad. That's the next step you gotta, you gotta blaze us. You got to burnish those ends.
Brad: [00:34:01] so is that the thing where you like, have to like melt it, terminate it somehow, like kind of like bond bond, the fiber together or something like that. I barely know what that's about.
Will: [00:34:08] every time I've ever been in a room where somebody was doing that, they looked like they would spend a lot of time practicing. And we're really good at,
Brad: [00:34:13] Yeah. The only reason I even know about that is cause, uh, we actually talked to Wes about this a little bit when he was on a few weeks ago. One of, I forget the name of one of his coworkers who did an article on a, I guess it was on PC gamer. Wasn't it? A couple.
Will: [00:34:26] Twan got the gigabit or
of years ago.
five gigabit or
Brad: [00:34:29] two. I think it was two, he got two gigabit service to his house and how they had to dig up the street and then they brought the gigantic awful.
Plasma machine, whatever it is, the thing that you have to like burn the fiber together to. And if you don't align the fiber kit, like the cables properly, when you do it, apparently it's like totally useless and you have to do it again anyway. All right, I've rambled enough. I'll just read this email real fast from Patrick.
Best from the cornfields. He says, cause he's an Iowa. Uh, I am an Iowa guy with fiber. Luckily the area I live in, uh, Dubuque, Dubuque, Dubuque
County.
Will: [00:35:04] I'm not going to try it.
Brad: [00:35:05] I had to be, I'm going to say to say Dubuque
Will: [00:35:07] This is your, this is your funeral man,
Brad: [00:35:08] is, is my guests was spared the worst of the direct Derico Derico I can't, I'm just gonna stop talking. This is too much,
Will: [00:35:16] No you're You got it. You're owning.
Brad: [00:35:19] you mentioned that, you know, someone in Iowa who has had some trouble, can you share any more details?
I don't have a lot more details other than the, some, it seems like health has been slow in coming. Um, I haven't heard too much from out there, but, uh, in Eastern Iowa, there is an electrical co-op, that's set up fiber to the, be the backbone of their power stations and decided that they might as well offer a, to their power subscribers, the same option for fiber internet.
Uh, currently I subscribed to a 500 up and down for $80 and it's only $10 more to get full gigabit. I'm man, you gotta treat yourself. Go for the gig. Um, yes is much better than the only other option in the area, which is Mediacom. They are equivalent to Comcast on other horrible cable giants in their lack of quality service, lack of quality customer service and misleading advertising due to the derecho a Mediacom subscribers, lost internet for a minimum of three days.
Uh, even in the less affected area where I live and in the more effected areas, some are still without it. The venerable co-op however, kept the internet on throughout for most customers and was quick to restore service for those with more substantial damage, not quite a municipal internet provider, but I am very happy with them.
That's awesome.
Will: [00:36:32] Uh, I mean, that's what, that's what, um, the power company did in the, in my hometown. They rolled out dark fiber to connect their power substations and stuff. And then when they had it throughout the whole town, they just flip the switch and were like, Hey, by the way, we do internet and TV now.
Brad: [00:36:46] At the risk of consuming the rest of this episode, what can you explain? Dark fiber.
Will: [00:36:51] Oh. So they, when they were buying power lines that ran to down streets to people's houses, they just bought the ones that had fiber bundled on there, as well as the power cords,
Brad: [00:37:00] Okay. Okay. So, so these are discreet power work cables, just all in kind of the same bundled into the same run is what you're saying.
Will: [00:37:06] as I was, as it was explained to me, it was like a little bit more expensive, but not like the cost of doing that of, of running fiber. Is people going out and running the lines? Not, not the actual fiber, the fiber is relatively inexpensive. So when they had to replace the lines, they just started replacing them with fiber already on those, on the line.
And so then when it was time to turn on the fiber, like all the expensive shit was done and they just had to like run wires to people's houses
Brad: [00:37:34] Okay. I was, I was sitting here trying to figure out, like, how are they running power and fiber on the same line, but it's okay. It's just a bundle.
Will: [00:37:40] It's a, it's a, it's literally a cable with like a fiber component and a copper component.
Brad: [00:37:44] right, right. Uh, all right. I'm excited about this email. This is, I've been waiting for this one.
Will: [00:37:50] We need one of those.
Brad: [00:37:51] I've been waiting for this one. This, this email is insane and I love it. Uh, it's from Brock. It's about FTGA's in broadcast. Just bear with me on this one. All right. I'm going to do my best.
Will: [00:38:02] We gotta do disclaimer, on this one. Cause I looked at this one, I was like, I made a kind of stink eye. I was like, I don't know what any of this stuff means
Brad: [00:38:10] Obviously I forgive me if I mispronounce any of these acronyms, should we just say it up front? I was going to mention it at the end, but I reading this email a, I love this, but B I imagine this is what it sounds like when we talk about very jargon, heavy stuff to people have no idea or no experience with what we're talking about, because this is very much that this is just stuff that I've
Will: [00:38:31] It's like Carmack tweet level of density.
Brad: [00:38:33] I've never come into contact with before, but it sounds super cool.
Uh, in a previous episode, you guys wondered where else you could find FPGAs hiding. Uh, well, I work as an engineer for a systems integrator designing and building broadcast facilities, TV trucks, uh, sports venues, et cetera. And I can tell you that the professional broadcast industry is full of FPGAs. Uh, pretty much every piece of Procor rack equipment has an FPGA or two in them.
Uh, unsurprisingly low latency hardware, emulation comes in very handy for video. Especially now that the broadcast industry is creeping more and more into the IP video range, low latency is key for encoding and decoding video in the packets for switching over a fabric. I'm going to stop there. Do you know what he means
Will: [00:39:16] I was good right up until you said fabric. And then I was like, huh?
Brad: [00:39:19] Yes I fully knew what was going on in this email until we hit fabric. I assume it's probably some kind of super, super high performance network based on the.
Will: [00:39:29] I always thought it was when you take fibers and weave them together in a crisscrossing pattern.
Brad: [00:39:33] That was in the old days, I mean, talk about horse buggy era.
Will: [00:39:40] Look, sometimes you use a loom.
Brad: [00:39:42] Yes. Um, yes. You've mentioned NDI before and NDI is kind of the prosumer IP video standard. Uh, but like Will said, it's limited on bid rate. This is where it gets kind of wild to me. Much of the high end pro market is going SMPT 2110.
Which is a standard that just throws uncompressed video down bandwidth lanes of 1.5 gigahertz, three gigahertz, six, even 12 gigahertz or whatever you need for your resolution and frame rate. But data is completely raw. So to tell each side what is going on, you need an SDP equivalent, which in the SMTP Adams S MPTE 21, 10 world is in Moss.
That's the NMOS I assume that's how you say that n-moss.
Will: [00:40:26] I mean, you say CMOS C-M-O-S. So why not?
Brad: [00:40:29] Uh, in N-Moss allows devices to be discoverable automatically by the main video switch and assign it a multicast address and endpoint control. So it can virtually be plug and play. These switches are either built into a video router, uh, by the manufacturer, or they can be a cost solution, which has consumer off the shelf from a company like Arista with a management application layer from a broadcast company over top.
Usually the port speeds are between 25 gigabit and a hundred gigabit
Will: [00:40:57] Holy Crap
Brad: [00:40:58] depending on needs. Then those are parsed out across the plant using fanned out fibers and splice panels. Uh, do you have older base band, STI gear you want to use with new SMP VTE 2110 IP bills? No problem. You wrap the SDI signals using a gateway device that uses tons of FPGA power to flip and encode the signals.
This can also be done for NDI applications as well with different devices. Uh, lots of, lots of info there. I know, but the worlds broadcast tech is extremely fascinating right now. And I could talk about this stuff for hours.
Will: [00:41:31] That is Buckwild.
Brad: [00:41:32] is super crazy
Will: [00:41:33] like they're just taking a while. So this is using some sort of high end. So are they running this over at like SDI that just has infinite bandwidth because it's a giant fat, thick piece of copper
Brad: [00:41:43] I don't know. That's a good question.
Will: [00:41:46] need to, we need to, maybe we, we needed to find somebody. We need to find
Brad: [00:41:49] please, maybe
Will: [00:41:50] broadcast technology expert.
Brad: [00:41:51] Maybe I mean, Brock Brock sounds like he qualifies. Maybe we should just get him
Will: [00:41:55] we'll see what kind of microphone he has. Maybe it's even, ,see if he knows how to work microphone?
Brad: [00:41:59] I that's, that's wild to me to hear, because I was always only under the impression that uncompressed like fully raw and compress video was just prohibitive to work with.
Like it just wasn't realistic. So
Will: [00:42:08] Well maybe not anymore life finds a way Brad.
Brad: [00:42:09] Yeah, I guess, I guess,
but stuff's crazy. Uh,
Will: [00:42:14] yeah, like, like, just to be clear, an NDI stream, a 1080PNDI stream is like 50 or a hundred megabytes megabits, depending on what kind of like what the software thinks you can handle. So 25 gigabites is played just bonkers.
Brad: [00:42:31] That's super crazy. I've seen some people on the discord recently. I'm saying that NDI is not the most reliable for them. Like, you know, like even though it's only like a hundred megabits stream, like even on a gigabit network, you can't necessarily rely on it, not choking here and there
Will: [00:42:45] If, if you, if you need it to be reliable, you need to do point to point for each end point or, or at least put it on a separate network away from your normal network stuff.
Brad: [00:42:58] Which granted not.
Will: [00:42:59] But it's definitely not the best thing out there for even like this better options for home use. Even I think these days
Like what?
SMPT, 20 PT, 2110.
Brad: [00:43:10] Yeah. Let me just run a 25 gigabit link straight between my PC and NAS and I'll be good to go.
Will: [00:43:15] Yeah. You need to get a bunch of FPGAs first. You're going to need that.
Brad: [00:43:18] Sold. Um, let's see here. I want to do a few uni taskers.
Will: [00:43:24] Oh yeah sure
Brad: [00:43:26] Is now that it has now that is now the time.
Will: [00:43:28] Yeah, we can do some it, we got it. We got a bunch of good uni taskers. We had to kind of whittle it down. Some,
Brad: [00:43:32] Yes we did. Um, how about, I'm going to start with a this e-mail from Tom I'm just here to tell you that I just bought two sets of rollerblade wheels for the office chairs I have at home, and they are awesome.
They handle transitioning over. We talked about this, right? Did that come up on
Will: [00:43:51] you, you, you were enthusiastic about them. And I was, I questioned.
Brad: [00:43:55] they handle transitioning over different surfaces and over thresholds really well. They're silent and never lock up. So they never leave gouging marks on your floor. If you have hardwood and have a floor protector, you can toss that big sheet of plastic in the trash because these, these things are never going to lock up and dig in like cheap plastic casters.
Uh, you have to be careful though. My wife has a standard office chair and I have an Ikea Marcus. Uh, by far the best chair I've ever put my ass in his language, not mine. Uh, it turns out Ikea uses a different size post for their casters. So you have to make sure you get the rollerblades that say works with Ikea on them.
They're a little expensive, but these things are going to outlast the chairs I have, but sound. That sounds great.
Will: [00:44:38] It sounds pretty good. I looked at Amazon after this and I kinda I was like, I had my finger hovered over the buy button. I was like, I don't know about this. Cause I didn't really recognize any of the companies. So maybe people, if people have done this and have recommendations, I would like a brand recommendation maybe.
Brad: [00:44:53] Yeah, dude, I feel like that is a whole episode. In fact, we should probably do this as an episode, but like the process of buying a seemingly simple item on Amazon or similar online retail at this point is such a nightmare.
Will: [00:45:06] Generic is kind of dead in a, in a bad way for, for, yeah.
Brad: [00:45:11] I need a new lamp, just a basic ass adjustable, like a gooseneck type desk lamp. You know, I want something that I can bend and kind of point around the rooms since I have to live stream from here now. And sometimes you want to control your lighting a little bit.
Will: [00:45:22] You should get a ring light, man.
Brad: [00:45:24] No, no, no. This is for like a bit of the back corner of the room.
Uh, something I can kind of backlight with a little bit, but I've been on Amazon for days trying to find a lamp. I already bought one, which seemed like it was going to be nice and do the job and it got here and the plastic base. was, so cheap and flimsy and light, but it literally would not hold the lamp up.
If it's an adjustable lamp that can't be adjusted because it will tip over because there is no weight in the base whatsoever. it cause it, the base like it's made out of like 40 cents of cheap plastic. So that went back. But like there are no name brands, uh, on Amazon
Will: [00:46:01] Well, this is the
Brad: [00:46:01] lamps of that nature.
Like, like where are the decent, like mid range product anymore, you know?
Will: [00:46:06] I would go to like Ikea or target or something to look for that stuff. And it's not really an option right now.
Brad: [00:46:10] Right. Well, that's, that's part of it. I checked target. They actually don't have much right now. Like that's the other thing is like the Amazon-ification of other online retail, like new everything from like new egg to Walmart to you name it. I think Target's doing it too now. Like they've all adopted that model of like hosting third party sellers in there.
Kind of standard storefront or inventory system, you know what I mean?
Will: [00:46:31] I'm shaking my head.
Brad: [00:46:32] just becomes, it becomes inpossible to like parse quality and figure out what's decent. And like, you're going to buy some cheap junk, like I did on knowingly. Like it's just,
Will: [00:46:41] Well, so, so. Okay, let's break this down into three. My light solution is to buy just a normal light that you can put a normal light bulb in and then get a smart ball, but that you can control the temperature of the, of the light and the depth and the brightness.
Brad: [00:46:56] Yeah.
Will: [00:46:57] Um, that's worked really well for me.
Brad: [00:46:59] I just want a lamp that isn't going to fall over and or burn my house down.
Will: [00:47:03] I, my other question about the roller blade wheels is. Are they going to get caught? Like, I, I hate it when cables get tangled up in wheels as a VR developer. Cause I always have cables around and if I roll over one of those cables, it's like a hundred dollar mistake if I Jack up the cable. So, um, yeah, like I want cables.
I want, I want cable safe wheels more than I want high-speed or bumper clearance. So yeah.
Brad: [00:47:30] That would be good to know. Um, but yeah, you're right. There are seemingly endless brands of these on Amazon and granted, I bet half of them are all made by the same factory. And even that is hard to tell.
Will: [00:47:42] can I get like some skateboard trucks and put one of those on each of the, each of the wheels and like have a, you know, have a skateboard chair.
Brad: [00:47:49] sounds, that sounds pretty good.
Will: [00:47:50] that'd be cool.
Brad: [00:47:52] The only thing stopping me from ordering those wheels at this point is that I probably shouldn't put them on this 17 going on 18 year old chair.
Will: [00:47:59] You can take them off.
Brad: [00:48:00] I know, but I should hold out treat myself, you know, to get the new chair and then get the new wheels.
Will: [00:48:06] That's true.
Brad: [00:48:07] Um, let's see, there's an email from Ash. Last Christmas Santa brought my five-year-old a hot wheels track, which required four D-Cell batteries to run the motor. Uh, the batteries lasted about 30 minutes before losing the power required to propel the cars around the track.
This quickly became expensive. Uh, so instead I went to Amazon and bought this and he links a variable voltage power adapter. Uh, the great thing about this adapter is you can specify the voltage output from three volts to 12 by rotating a dial on the adapter. It comes with eight interchangeable tips that fit most devices, including a tip that let me connect to the hot wheels, motor wires directly to the adapter.
This beats spending $10 an hour on batteries. Plus, as a bonus, if you crank up the voltage, you can send the hot wheels flying across the room.
Will: [00:48:56] I love this. I love this so much. Um,
Brad: [00:48:59] that's pretty good. I've never seen something like this before.
Will: [00:49:02] Oh, you never had one of these
Brad: [00:49:03] No,
Oh two. This
the, the adapter, not the hot wheels.
Will: [00:49:06] Yeah, no, we had, we always had these, like we've had, I've had these in my life. I used to go to radio shack and buy these and you'd get a, you'd get a, just a bog standard, um, like AC DC, DC transformer. And then it would have 50 million little tips that you would immediately lose the first time you used it.
And then you'd have to the little, there's an array of like tips on the side. And like, there, there was one for like, You know, there was one that was like a three volt, two amp with an internal poll and all that. I've never seen one of these bricks that you have a knob that you can adjust the, adjust, the output.
That's the cool thing.
Brad: [00:49:42] I meant. I ment. I've never seen that either.
Will: [00:49:45] And then if you want to do something really risky, this one comes with a, um, with screw terminals. So you can just bare wires, jams, and bare wires in there, and then shinz them down and hook whatever the hell you want up to it. I think this is great.
Brad: [00:49:58] Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod is not liable for any damages incurred based on purchasing recommendations, aired on this podcast.
Will: [00:50:04] reading email does not indicate endorsement.
Brad: [00:50:06] Yeah. Please be, please be careful.
Will: [00:50:09] that said, yeah, if you're going to do this and use this thing, make sure you understand what the internal poll and the external poll on your DC adapter is. Cause if you like, some of the plugs are physically compatible with other plugs and if you plug like the negative into the.
Brad: [00:50:23] Yeah the polarity.
Will: [00:50:24] Yeah, the polarity, if you had plugged the negative into the positive, the smoke that makes your thing work will go out and it will be bad. So,
Brad: [00:50:34] Practice care, with this sort of thing,
Will: [00:50:37] Yeah. But I liked the idea of like rocket power to hot wheels. That sounds awesome.
Brad: [00:50:41] That is pretty good. Uh,
Will: [00:50:42] It's also incredibly shitty that hot wheels would sell a fucking thing. Like I assume, Duracell or something probably pays money to Mattel. So that hot wheels keeps shipping things that eat D cell batteries. But that is lame.
Brad: [00:50:54] like everything else is probably a racket. Um, let's see, uh, this email comes in from, uh, I started to say friend of the site, Pat bear, but I guess it's more like friend of the pod.
Will: [00:51:08] Yeah. He's a pod friend.
Brad: [00:51:09] Do we say that
Friend of the podcast? I don't know.
Will: [00:51:14] A noted, noted reader.
Brad: [00:51:16] I'm still not sure how I feel about the using the word pod in a sincere manner, but
Will: [00:51:21] I don't well, okay.
let's just, let's just,
This is another rebranding conversation.
Brad: [00:51:25] This is just where the world is at these days, I guess it is right there in the name.
Isn't it? Um, yeah. So, uh, Pat wrote in, uh, uh, just a short email, just got caught up on the podcast. Here is a couple of, uh, my favorite, uh, pieces of hardware.
Will: [00:51:39] Are a few of his favorite things.
Brad: [00:51:40] and, you know, Pat has a lot of, uh, theater. Kind of gear experience, you know, working in theaters and so forth.
Will: [00:51:47] If you want to get really good at learning how to make stuff with whatever you have on hand, hang out with stage techs at theaters.
Brad: [00:51:54] Oh I bet.
Will: [00:51:55] Cause like those and the people who make props are the most industrious, I will build someting out of nothing something out of nothing. People
Brad: [00:52:01] I can't imagine that's probably all, that's gotta be like most of what that job is, right. Is just like figuring out how to make this kind of mechanical situation happen with whatever I can find in 30 minutes.
Will: [00:52:11] MacGyver. Yeah. They're all. MacGyvers.
Brad: [00:52:14] Well, that sounds fun actually. Uh, let's see, uh, camera clamp.
I use this to attach my webcam to the top of my dual monitor stand. I've also clamped this onto a mic stand when I needed to set up a camera in a tight area where I couldn't fit a tripod. Uh, and it is a like pretty rugged looking industrial sort of clamp with two, three different ways to adjust it.
Will: [00:52:38] Yeah. So, um, these things are great. Uh, it's basically like a, they're sold as like universal camera mounts. Uh, I use them, I found these the first time because I needed a way to attach a Vive lighthouses to some light stands or to like a pipe in somebody's office or something. And they're fantastic. I'm using.
Two of them and like a eight, 18 inch or 12 inch rod with one quarter inch, female, and one and one quarter inch male on the other end to make like an armature rig for my webcam, for my GoPro that I use when I'm streaming and it works great. Highly recommended.
Brad: [00:53:14] And looking at the shape of the grip on this thing are, these are mainly made to be mounted on poles. Is that right?
Will: [00:53:19] Yeah, I think, I think the intended use is probably to hang them on the side of like a light pole or tripod, if you want to light, or if you want something to go on a tripod that is not going on the main mountain on the top of the tripod
Brad: [00:53:32] Right. Like, what I mean is because they're like, it's got a rounded shape to the grip. Like it probably wouldn't to hold onto a flat surface, like a vice grip type thing, oh wait that does?
Will: [00:53:40] It'll it'll, it depends on which one you get, but the ones that, like, I have some of the ones like Pat linked, I also have a couple of metal ones that I use for heavier duty stuff, including my wind meter out in the backyard, which is on a pole on the top of the house. Um, and, and, uh, it'll bite on something flat they'll they'll bite on something flat for sure.
Brad: [00:54:00] Okay. That's good to know. Um,
I've got, or something
okay. I've got some stuff like this on the way from the latest kind of quarterly budget by at work, got a nicer, nicer camera than my, yes, my servers and my shitty old C920 , uh, on the way, but I've got a clamp very similar to this on the way. And I was wondering, I was going to try to Mount it to the, um, using, one of the multi mounts for the El Gato key light, which was just a very heavy.
Will: [00:54:25] Yeah it will totally work for that.
Brad: [00:54:26] I knew it would for that, but I thought about trying to Mount it to the, uh, my monitor arm. Like he said, he's doing with this,
Will: [00:54:32] That's what I've done and it works great.
Brad: [00:54:33] But because it's it's not a rounded,
like pull like shape, I was worried this type of grip wouldn't hold on to it, but it sounds like maybe that might be worth a shot.
Will: [00:54:38] So the problem with mounting it on the monitor arm isn't that it won't stay on it. I mean, you, if you have a really girthy monitor arm, it might not, might not work, but mine is like two and a half inches and it barely clamps on the problem I have is that when you adjust the monitor arm, it jacks up your camera aim every single time.
Brad: [00:54:56] Oh, sure.
Will: [00:54:56] So like, you know,
Brad: [00:54:58] Yeah. Maybe I'll just Mount it to the key light. Cause I mean, if I'm using, if I'm using the camera, I'm also using the lights, so it might as well just make those, uh, one contraption. Uh, the other thing he listed as a flexible arm clamp, again, instead of using a tripod, I clamp this onto one of my, uh, the arms of my monitor stand for my model kid, building streams, probably the best purchase I've made for my streams.
And that is a. Kind of snake like. It's like a very flexible bendy sort of
Will: [00:55:24] It's like a gooseneck, a gooseneck kind of like with the hard, like armature wire inside of inside a thing. Um, I've given, I have a couple of relatives that have chronic pain problems and you can get these that have like a tablet or phone holder as well. And they use them on their bed. To like, hang a Kindle above them.
So they don't have to hold their arms up when they're laying in bed reading at night and yeah. Wonderful, wonderful devices. And they're like 10 bucks.
Brad: [00:55:51] Yeah. This one says a max load weighed 1.1 pounds. So
not, not, you're not gonna Mount like a super heavy camera with it, but
Will: [00:56:00] but like, you're like I use, I have one, I have one of them on my desk that I use when I do like a top down thing on a, on a cutting mat or something for, uh, for a build that same, same thing, same exact thing, Pat uses it for I'm sure.
Brad: [00:56:10] sure. Uh,
Will: [00:56:11] By the way if you don't, you should check out pet's Twitch channel.
He builds model kits and Lego and does good stuff at twitch.tv/pat bear.
Brad: [00:56:19] Uh, let's see. Should we do one more email?
Will: [00:56:23] Yeah, I got one more in me. This one, we got through a lot of these. I wasn't expecting a.
Brad: [00:56:28] How about uh, Oh, I lost it. Let's just do a good old PC email.
Will: [00:56:37] We got we, we have two good PC emails. The Josh Fink one is good too, I think.
Brad: [00:56:42] Yeah, that's the one I was going to read. Cause, uh, cause we have potentially sounds like new hardware
Will: [00:56:47] Shit I just said his last name, but he didn't say not to say his name, so,
Brad: [00:56:51] cross our fingers. Hope it's okay. Um, yeah. So as there's hardware announcements potentially, uh, NY on the horizon, it sounds like
Will: [00:57:01] Oh, you don't say.
Brad: [00:57:02] this is the word on the street out there.
Will: [00:57:04] nvidia has been doing a different day of their GPU history for the last 20 years for the last 20 days. And, uh,
Brad: [00:57:12] What could they be building up to?
Will: [00:57:13] it's I don't know.
Brad: [00:57:15] Uh,
Will: [00:57:16] I think they have a stream the first, I don't know.
Brad: [00:57:18] Josh from Colorado. Uh, how often do you rebuild your gaming PC? I have an 6,700 K with a GTX 1070, and I have then contemplating when to upgrade, uh, what pushes you over the edge and gets you to upgrade? What are you currently running? Uh, some extra info to keep the actual question short, uh, I'm running and A 1080P 144 Hertz monitor, but I don't get the full 144 frames per second.
Uh, I should probably buy a new GPU when those come out, but I don't know if my CPU or GPU is the true bottleneck. Um, well, the big, big picture question first for you. I mean, like I've never, I've never been in the position where PC companies were sending me a bunch of hardware, so I've always bought all my PC stuff.
So like, let's say that let's exclude that phase of your life and say like,
Will: [00:58:05] The getting free hardware constantly phase?
Brad: [00:58:07] Yes, like,
Will: [00:58:09] Yeah.
Um,
Brad: [00:58:11] Do you have you have a barometer? Or like, for me, there's this kind of like this. Nebulous upgrade itch that starts kicking in after a while. And that used to,
Will: [00:58:21] yeah.
Brad: [00:58:24] like they used to back in the day that ran on like a, what, 18 months, two year cycle or something, which got very expensive, you know? Uh, but it's been much longer now.
Will: [00:58:33] Yeah, I like it was really nice. Nice. When I left tested and suddenly didn't have to use my main computer at home as like a way to test stuff,
Brad: [00:58:41] Yeah. That's that would be really lousy.
Will: [00:58:44] yeah. It's it's cause it was always kind of like at Maximum PC, I was always bringing stuff home to get more like data points on like what it, what it was like in an actual working like.
Cause like having testbed machines in the lab was great. Cause we could wipe them really easily. We had shared images, it was really easy to do testing, but you kind of didn't get to see what something worked, how it worked like in a crufted up actual used machine. Um, so it's been, it was, it's been really nice the last few years, not having to constantly open the computer and like, like having the computer closed for long enough for there to be dust in there.
That's a new thing in my life. Um,
Brad: [00:59:24] it's the small things.
Will: [00:59:25] I mean, I like it. I know this is sound. I sound like a total asshole here. Um, I'm I'm so since I left max, since I left tested, I built a PC right before I left that I bought the hardware for, um, and that was a, hexa core 60, 5,800, maybe 48. It was a, it was a Broadwell Hexa core. That machine, that CPU had some problems and just out of warranty, it died. Um, because it wasn't look the pump in my, all in one water cooler, crapped out. And I didn't know, and it ran really, really hot for a long time before it finally crapped out. Anyway, I replaced that. That was in probably 2016, like end of 2016.
And then I just upgraded that machine this year because I got a, um, uh, I participated in some Intel gaming tournament and they sent me a CPU as a result of that. Um, so I'm running, uh, I nine 99, a hundred K. And a 2080TI right now, uh, with 32 gigs of Ram and, um, um, a couple SSDs, a couple of NVME SSDs and a big giant, like eight terabyte, regular hard drive.
Brad: [01:00:45] Yeah, I, for whatever reason, I feel like I'm on about a five year cycle at this point. Thinking like, thinking back the last couple of machines, like in 2010, I built an i7 860 I believe. Which was the gosh, was that a quad core? I forget. I,
Will: [01:01:00] That would have been an early quad core or a late dual core. I can't remember.
Brad: [01:01:03] Yeah, that was, yes. Um, use that for five years, built a 6,700 K in like late 2015, early 2016. Um, ended up putting a 7,700 K into that same machine. Down the line cause I needed the other CPU for something else. And that's what I'm still on at this point, 7,700 K and a 1080. Not, nota TI, just a plain old GTX, 1080 with a 16 gig of Ram.
So I'm feeling the upgrade ditch like I'm, I'm
Will: [01:01:31] I was going to say, do you, do you feel like things are not running? Like, are you, have you hit stuff that doesn't run right on the 1080?
Brad: [01:01:37] not at all. And that's well games, you mean games wise? Like kind of maybe like nothing, runs poorly. But there's some stuff that could run better, you know, like I'm not, I'm certainly not like in agony, you know, I'm not dealing with any like 40 frames per second type situations or anything like that.
But like, there are spots certainly where getting into Minecraft shaders was probably the most taxing thing I've done on that card in a while.
Will: [01:02:03] noted a 29, 2010 graphical powerhouse Minecraft
Brad: [01:02:08] Those some of those shaders look pretty damn good, man.
Will: [01:02:10] Crisis of its generation.
Brad: [01:02:12] but, uh, yeah, it's, it's less so, especially on the CPU and it's less that I feel like I'm hitting any kind of wall as so much as just like, it's been a while. There's way better stuff out there these days, you know, it might be nice to,
Will: [01:02:27] I mean, my general strategy has always been, if it's not, if it's working, don't mess with it.
Brad: [01:02:33] Yeah.
Will: [01:02:34] And, um, You know, buy a CPU and motherboard and put enough that that are going to last for as long as, as you, as you five, five years is a good target, I think for the core kind of components and then like plan to do a mid, a midlife GPU upgrade.
Um, and, and, and you'll be in pretty good shape is kind of the way I look at it.
Brad: [01:02:57] Yeah. Um, so him being on a 6,700 K you feel like he's kind of, do I feel like
Will: [01:03:03] I feel like that's probably that's right on the border. Cause 6,700 K is the min spec for a VR machine when Oculus and valve or HTC launched the like, Hey, make your games run at this. And you're going to be CPU. If you like, if you buy a 3080 or a 3070, I don't know anything about those GPUs. But what I know about, if you put a 2070, or 2080 in that machine right now, you would want a hundred percent CPU bound.
Brad: [01:03:31] I would, this is just my gut feeling, but I would guess let's say mid, late, next year, once games that are designed for the PS five and the series X start getting ported, the PC, you'll probably start feeling it even more
Will: [01:03:46] I would think so. I mean, I think, I think we're like console. It's always dangerous to buy into the first generation, the generation that lands the same year, the consoles land. Cause sometimes new stuff takes a little while to trickle down. I feel like. with the way modern games work and the way the kind of render scaling works on a lot of games automatically.
So you, so they, you can kind of set the target frame rate and resolution you want, and then it'll do the internal resolution at whatever it needs to, to make the game run. I feel like you can have a pretty good experience on almost anything like my laptop, which is a 1060 plays stuff at, at a resolution.
I would play on a laptop, shockingly well.
Brad: [01:04:24] Yeah. I mean, obviously that's just good business sense to said, make sure your game runs on as much or as wide a range as possible. But you know, I have a guess. Most people listening to this podcast want to be on the higher end of the range
Will: [01:04:35] Yeah. And, and like 144 Hertz monitor is a little bit of a crinkle, a kink in the, in the plan, because like, be like, you do need a, you're looking at two point something times the amount of frames per second, that you're, that you're trying to draw, and that is going to require more horsepower. But at 1080P it's like, like, Like the choices.
Are you going to play 4k games at a lower frame rate, or are you going to play 1080P game games at 1080P at a higher frame rate? And, and like my personal preference is that single player stuff. I usually play at the higher, higher resolution and multiplayer stuff. I usually play the higher frame rate.
So.
Brad: [01:05:14] I think it remains to be seen. Things can always change. But I don't see a situation where I don't transition to AMD for my next machine at this point.
Will: [01:05:25] I mean, I just did the 9,900 K or I probably would've done a Ryzen machine this year. Yeah,
Brad: [01:05:30] Yeah. It's, it's, it's getting really hard to argue with that value proposition,
so
Will: [01:05:36] The reason Intel makes sense is if you're not paying for hardware
Brad: [01:05:39] yes,
Will: [01:05:40] at the high end, especially.
Brad: [01:05:41] yes. Uh, all right. That's it for emails we got through, uh, like you said, more of those than I expected.
Will: [01:05:48] Yeah, we really hammered through them. The bummer is at the beginning where
Brad: [01:05:52] I know where to go, but up
Will: [01:05:55] Look with that. We brought that on ourselves.
Brad: [01:05:56] talking about the buses and meeting spouses and so forth.
Will: [01:06:00] Do you know now what time we're at? What time of the podcast we're in.
Brad: [01:06:05] I don't
Will: [01:06:07] One of my favorite times. It's when we thank the patrons who make the podcast possible
Brad: [01:06:11] the best part. Yeah, we wouldn't be here without them.
Will: [01:06:13] and, and some things have happened.
Brad: [01:06:15] Oh,
Will: [01:06:17] Well, first off we have to, we have to shout out a shout out Julian, who is Julian wheels in the discord who sent an email in last week and was like, Hey, maybe two weeks ago now I was like, Hey, I would like to, um, Uh, like I've been experimenting with this transcript generation stuff.
And I think you guys should have transcripts for your podcast. We, you send me some split audio files, so I can like noodle around with this and see if we can figure out a way to do it. That's not going to cost a fortune and will deliver decent results. So for last week, there is a transcript for episode 49.
Um, and if people like that on our Intuit, please let us know. So we will figure out a way to a pay Julian for his time and efforts, or at least make sure he isn't losing money. And, um, and we'll keep doing it. Cause I think it's a good thing. I've never had a, I've never done a podcast with a transcript before and we're set up to do it here, which is nice. Um, so yeah,
Brad: [01:07:12] Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for your time and effort. I had missed that stuff. I didn't is that actually out on the server?
Will: [01:07:17] It's out now. Yeah, I posted it this morning. I finally figured out how to post it to simple to the entire podcast host
Brad: [01:07:23] I had one of those days where I was so busy, I didn't really have time to look at the server and there's always like. There's always feel like bad days. Cause I, cause I want to keep up with everything that's going on in there. And if I, if I turn off that information valve, I start feeling like something is a miss, you know, it's like, ah, I didn't.
Will: [01:07:37] I dip in and dip out that like, like, even if it's just a few minutes at lunchtime, I'm in there reading. Um, but it's, it's, uh, uh, we are for people who. For people who ask for people who are wondering the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, uh, kind of a book club, the goal we're at, uh, when I looked before the start of the show, we were at 968 Patriot patrons.
So we're closing in 32 to go, I think. Um,
Brad: [01:08:06] If we hit the magic number, is that my cue to start reading. That's not our cue to record the episode. Right.
Will: [01:08:11] I figure we're going to give people a heads up when we hit the number. And then, and then if we dip back below, we'll just pull it, pull, pull the carrot back away away right.
Brad: [01:08:18] I just, I don't want it. I'm getting flashbacks from college of trying to cram the entire book
Will: [01:08:23] You're going to, you're going to look. You can just watch
you can just watch the movie. It'll be fine. Nobody will know. They're all exactly the same.
Brad: [01:08:30] Oh, I'll get a head. Start on it.
Will: [01:08:32] Yeah. Um, but yeah, uh, I want to thank our patrons. Uh, so, uh, thanks to our executive producer level patrons, Andrew Cotton, David Allen and Jacob chapel.
And, uh, also thank you to our associate level associate producer level patrons. Uh, Arthur geese, CJ, Roberta, uh, Dan Brockman, Dave Julian, Graham banks, Jad, Rita, Sam buck, Sam buck, rather not Sam bunk. That's a different person. Uh, the buddy fiend. Really loves the bunnies, uh, and Thomas Shea. So thank you all so much.
And, uh, if you would like to find out how you can support the pod, uh, for two bucks a month, you can get access to the discord, which is an incredible resource full of wonderful people. Um, and at five bucks a month to get our monthly patron episodes, which we're going to record sometime in the next couple of days, when I get my home assistant server running and I have something to talk about that isn't just failure.
Brad: [01:09:29] I don't know.
Will: [01:09:30] I'm almost there. I think I'm real close
Brad: [01:09:32] Yeah. I was trying to think of something nice to say about home automation when it was coming up blank. Cause I've had my own issues of late
Will: [01:09:38] here. Here's the, I have something nice to say about home automation in the old days when we were talking about like X, 10 home automation, it just didn't work. No matter what you did
Brad: [01:09:47] At least. It was predictable.
Will: [01:09:49] Yeah. Nothing you could do would make it work. Um, now in 2020, With no standards and a bunch of other things. The difference is that now it does actually work, but setting it up requires huroic measures if you want it to work. Right. So,
Brad: [01:10:14] Also I found occasionally it just works and then it doesn't.
Will: [01:10:18] So the good stuff, once you get it working, I have not had that. Like once you get the stuff that uses Z-Wave and ZigBee and like hubs and all that stuff working, once you get it configured and working, it's pretty solid.
Brad: [01:10:29] This was, well, I should save it, but this was, this was using home bridge to add some Casa devices to Apple home,
Will: [01:10:36] Oh no
Brad: [01:10:36] which was fine
Will: [01:10:37] You use HomeBridge.
Brad: [01:10:38] right up until it was that you don't, you're not a fan
Will: [01:10:40] No I use HomeBridge. It's great. I've never had any problem. My, my instance of HomeBridge has been running faithfully for like three years now, without me having looked at it at all.
Brad: [01:10:47] I suspect that the problem is not HomeBridge, but rather Apple home.
Will: [01:10:51] Oh, that's possible.
Brad: [01:10:52] I think is that's my guess. I did well, we'll talk about it.
Will: [01:10:56] Yeah. This is a future topic, but, um, thanks for listening everybody. And, uh, we will see you all next week, I guess.