On this month's email show we talk about our love of astrophysics, a PC that could last you forever, bad interface design in consumer electronics, why e-ink screens aren't everywhere, Android longevity, the social niceties of Discord, and a bonus segment with Will's thoughts on gaming at THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY HERTZ. 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
On this month's email show we talk about our love of astrophysics, a PC that could last you forever, bad interface design in consumer electronics, why e-ink screens aren't everywhere, Android longevity, the social niceties of Discord, and a bonus segment with Will's thoughts on gaming at THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY HERTZ.
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
Will: [00:00:00] I'm having a hairstyle crisis.
Brad: [00:00:01] What kind of crisis? I mean, what
Will: [00:00:04] Look
Brad: [00:00:04]It’s does hair, man? What's what is, what kind of crisis could there be? Just get the Clippers and remove it.
Will: [00:00:10] there's cool hair. I do not have cool hair. My hair is flat and limp. And like, I'm looking at hairstyles that don't involve getting my hair cut every three weeks by my wife, which she does an excellent job. And I love her very much. And she's awesome. But it takes so long. Like it's not,
Brad: [00:00:25] Really, are you trying to get, trying to cut to a specific length? Is there like some precision
Will: [00:00:30] She’s just trying to give me my normal haircut and it takes like, it takes a long time. I'm not going to say how long, because it's embarrassing now that I'm thinking about it.
Brad: [00:00:35] look, we all have to make sacrifices right now. Okay.
Will: [00:00:37] Yeah. So I think what my sacrifice is going to be, I think I'm going to go for the Keanu Reeves, like shoulder length, long hair, the man hair. Yeah.
That's where I'm going.
Brad: [00:00:47] That's the opposite direction of where I thought you were going to go,
Will: [00:00:49] just, no, I, my head's too weird shape to shave. I can't do that.
Brad: [00:00:52] have you tried it?
Will: [00:00:53] it's not a good look for me. It's happened in the past. Yeah. Positive.
Brad: [00:00:57] I was going to say, though, with the full length of the mountain man level beard accumulation that you've got going on, I feel like it would be a good offset. In fact, you would get the full on like head inversion.
Will: [00:01:09] Here's the problem when you have a giant beard and a shaved head and there's, there's, there's subcultures that I do not want to associate myself with that associate themselves with that specific look.
Brad: [00:01:19] Yeah, but how often are you going outside the house to mingle with those subcultures or any others
Will: [00:01:24] I don't want people to like, look at a thumbnail on Twitch and be like, man, that guy's probably a white supremacist.
Brad: [00:01:29] Oh, that's okay. That's not even what I thought you were talking about,
Will: [00:01:32] No. I'm fine. Bikers are cool, man. I like them. They're okay.
Brad: [00:01:34] I feel like a cue ball and giant beard combo has a lot of versatility
Will: [00:01:40] I don't know. Anyway, like the real thing is I can't use sunscreen, so then I have to be a hat guy full time and like, that's a whole other problem. I don't, I don't, I don't like the Keanu Reeves, like the shoulder, like the chin length, but cut with the split down the middle ish. That's a good luck.
Brad: [00:01:55] I see. I mean, well, if your goal is to minimize maintenance, then either shave it all off or never touching it and just letting it go are your two options. So
Will: [00:02:04] Yeah. It's either that or like a Caemac ponytail. We don't need to talk about that.
Brad: [00:02:08] yeah who would, nobody in their right mind would do something like that?
Will: [00:02:11] No that's a bad idea.
Welcome to Brad and Will made a techpod. I'm Will,
Brad: [00:02:46] I'm Brad. I have emails, but you have stars. What's up with your, are you in space?
Will: [00:02:52] Oh, behind me, I can put emails behind me. You want, you want
Brad: [00:02:55] No, no, no, no, no. Keep the space please. I'm hold on. Can you okay. Turn.
Will: [00:02:58] Do you know what this picture is? This is a famous picture.
Brad: [00:03:01] Hold Still , turn your, turn, your head and hold. Still bouts. That's. Yes, hold right there. Okay. So, what does it control? I'm sorry. No, it's it's a window key shift.
S
Will: [00:03:12] Want me to take a screenshot and OBS?
Brad: [00:03:13] Nope, too late. Got it. Snagged it. The snipping tool, the window 10 snipping tool to the rescue. Uh
Will: [00:03:19] Do you know what this is? This is a famous picture.
Brad: [00:03:21] don't tell me if you were to move your chair and head. Would I be able to tell as the, as the focus of the picture right in the middle of behind where you're sitting? Okay. I thought it might be the fingers of creation, but it's not that. Um, it's not the, it's not the Horsehead Nebula.
Will: [00:03:38] No,
Brad: [00:03:38] Uh, those are probably the only two cosmological photos I know by name.
Will: [00:03:44] this is the humble 25th anniversary, deep field
Brad: [00:03:47] Oh, is that the deep field?
Will: [00:03:48] Yeah, this is a deep field. So this is like,
Brad: [00:03:50] wait, wait, how many, how many deep fields have they done?
Will: [00:03:53] They do them all the time. They, they like, they, they do, um, they, they, I mean, they don't do them all the time because it takes a lot of exposures over a long period of time
Brad: [00:03:59] It takes like months, right?
Will: [00:04:00] But yeah, the point is this was the aimed at what was an empty patch of space and then took a bunch of exposures over a period of months and then composite them altogether.
And this is what empty space looks like.
Brad: [00:04:10] right if you gather light from that patch of empty space for let's say three months constantly.
Will: [00:04:16] Yeah. Or, or like three months? Yeah. It's it's, uh, I like the deep fields. The deep fields are my favorite pictures.
Brad: [00:04:22] I may not have seen this particular deep field. Maybe the, maybe it's the first one they did that is so famous that I've seen
Will: [00:04:27] The first one is the famous one. Yeah.
Brad: [00:04:29] But that one is incredibly revealing. If you are into quantifying the vastness of the cosmos, when, when you actually look at the numbers of what you're looking at, it's like, Hey, each one of these dots is a galaxy.
Will: [00:04:42] that is hundreds of millions of light years away from us.
Brad: [00:04:44] right. But yeah, it's just like, Hey, these are, these points of lights are not stars. These are galaxies. And these are each one of these points represents billions of stars.
Will: [00:04:51] the thing I like about this one is that the blue stars are moving toward us and the red stars are moving away from us. You can see the red shift and the blue shift
Brad: [00:04:58] the, that's the, that's the Doppler effect, right? Doblin totaled a little Doppler Redshift there. Um, I'm about to, we're not even getting it to emails at this rate. I'm about to type into Google. How many galaxies are there in the universe because, uh, okay. 2 million million,
Will: [00:05:15] little Doppler. Redshift is my, uh, is my rap name
Brad: [00:05:19] Hang on let type that into yet another tab here, so I can remember the episode title. Um, so this has been, you tell me, I don't know how much you keep up with cosmology, but hasn't this been revised upwards pretty dramatically. The number of galaxies thought to exist in the known or in the observable universe.
So I thought that for a long time they thought the number, it was like a hundred billion and now they are saying 2 trillion.
Will: [00:05:42] This is the scan. This is so I keep track of space at certain scales, like solar system scale, totally down on like regional neighborhood scale. Pretty good at like, I know what's up with beetle juice right now. We got a couple of hundred thousand years before that thing blows, but we're in the window now.
Brad: [00:05:57] solar system, pretty limited dataset galaxy,
Will: [00:06:00] Sparse.
Brad: [00:06:02] relatively easy to keep track of.
Will: [00:06:04] Yeah,
Brad: [00:06:04] Get much beyond that.
Will: [00:06:05] I've not been keeping track beyond the galaxy scale. Um, but I do know
Brad: [00:06:11] You're not, you're not into you're.
Will: [00:06:12] For a while we thought it was infinite and static
Brad: [00:06:13] You're not, you're not, you're not into your friendly neighborhood, local cluster.
Will: [00:06:16] Look, I did read the Katie Mac book about the end of the universe, which was intense and good.
Brad: [00:06:20] We got to, Oh my God. I didn't know that existed. I should probably also read that
Will: [00:06:24] you should read, it just came out earlier this year.
Brad: [00:06:26] we should try to try and get her or another cosmologist on the show. Whoever whoever would put tolerate us, whoever would tolerate my inane questions for 45 minutes.
Will: [00:06:36] I'm sure we can find somebody who would be into our nonsense
Brad: [00:06:38] I have, there is like, there's honestly no topics that I am.
I get more gooey about, but, um, I mean,
Will: [00:06:44] What about hagfish?
Brad: [00:06:45] I'm in like a figurative sense, like an emotional GU let’s say
Will: [00:06:49] You're not okay. Nevermind. I wasn't going to, I was going to reference the, no, nevermind. Let's just move on. Move on emails.
Brad: [00:06:57] Sure. I'm a lot of galaxies out there.
Will: [00:07:00] Brad. What's that email address? Do you remember?
Brad: [00:07:02] Tech pod at content, dot town
Will: [00:07:03] Nice joooob that's techpod@content.town
Brad: [00:07:06] I have a secret I've never, I've never not remembered the email address
Will: [00:07:10] I know. I know somebody looks
Brad: [00:07:11] it's just a badly executed bit..
Will: [00:07:14] on every podcast. You have to have somebody who plays dumb and asks questions and somebody who has the answers to the questions and yeah.
Brad: [00:07:22] Um turns out, little peek behind the production curtain. Sometimes it's easier to be dumb rather than to play dumb.
Will: [00:07:28] It's true.
Brad: [00:07:29] sometimes you actually want somebody to show up, not having done the reading.
Will: [00:07:32] That was always my, my process on tested was to be the person who'd never had to. No, I always did the reading. Uh, actually I know, I wish I could say I was cool and didn't do the reading, but I liked doing the reading
Brad: [00:07:43] somebody, somebody has got to know the facts.
Will: [00:07:45] Yeah, it's good. It turns out, um,
Brad: [00:07:48] anyway, this, this week we've both done the reading on these emails,
Will: [00:07:51] Yes, there are, uh, a Passal of emails here that are, that have cues that, or, or maybe just statements that need to be turned into A’s.
Brad: [00:07:59] Sure. A spate of good questions here, uh, that I'm going to begin reading here with this one from Alice in Los Angeles, uh, she's writing in about a conversation she had, uh, with someone back in 2005, they were trying to convince me they could spend a $3,000 on a PC that would be quote good enough for the rest of their life. Bear in mind. Again, this is 2005.
Will: [00:08:28] Ancient times.
Brad: [00:08:29] yes. Do you think this is true? I've always balked at the idea but recently I've been wondering what would be the breaking point. Uh, the core 2 duos around that time were three gigahertz, but also it feels like the baseline requirements for browsers and day-to-day stuff only gets higher as time goes on, uh, additional caveats they were a Linix nerd, and mostly played open source games.
So I don't think gaming would be a hard requirements. Uh, I've tried to use a laptop from 2011 in the last year, and it felt extremely slow. But what if those are just my expectations changing from SSDs and the like,
Will: [00:09:03] So I'm going to say. First off my Macbook is a 2013 edition Macbook pro it's the last one with the good keyboard before they started going to the butterfly keys with the weird touch bar and that laptop still pretty. Okay.
Brad: [00:09:17] Oh, my God, I don't, I don't want to get off on a tangent here, but the Friday before work from home started literally the last Friday we were in the office in March. I had way exactly the same laptop you're talking about right now. Uh, 20, uh, 2013 retina MacBook pro,
Will: [00:09:30] it's a good Macbook. The last of the great one.
Brad: [00:09:33] Which I was totally fine with IT came along and requisition that laptop and issued me a 2019 MacBook Pro in its place.
Will: [00:09:42] Oh, the 2019 is the last one without the good fixed keyboard, right?
Brad: [00:09:46] what do you mean by fixed
Will: [00:09:47] Or did it have the fixed keyboard?
Brad: [00:09:48] fixed keyboard?
Will: [00:09:49] Well, so the keyboard, the super thin butterfly switches, they started putting in the 2016, 15th, 14 Mac book. And all the MacBook pros with the low-profile key is, has a flaw in that if any dust gets under the keyboard, the key just stops working.
And there's nothing you can do about it.
Brad: [00:10:06] I haven’t had any problem with keys, not working, but they do feel very thin and slight in the action. So I don't know if that's the same, the same mechanism or not, but it's, I
Will: [00:10:13] that's the bad mechanism, but they fixed it at some point
Brad: [00:10:16] Okay. I wouldn't say it feels great to type on buts. Yeah know, also I hate that touch bar.
Will: [00:10:21] The touch bar is useless, but touch having touch ID on the laptop seems like it would be nice.
Brad: [00:10:26] That’s nice, I will admit that's nice to not have to log in with a password.
If they had just put a physical escape key. I could live with the rest of the touch bar, but ah, anyway, I'm sorry. I don't mean to derail Alice's question here, but I mean, the question basically is. I did. I feel like maybe we should take this more in a current day context rather than a 2005 context, because even if it's possible now it was too early then to expect to build a PC that would last you forever.
But, but, but are we going to get to that point?
Will: [00:10:53] I, so here's the thing. Three gigahertz then. And three gigahertz now are very different amounts of math happening inside a processor. Like we, we didn't, we, we talked about this a little bit last week and we didn't get into it, but we should have like your, your older CPU and my newer CPU, even though they're running at the same clock speed are doing dramatically different amounts of math, each clock cycle.
Like that, that's the benefit of what we get is that we're doing more math at lower power and the same clock rate with newer hardware these days. So I mean my mom had a desktop computer that was from that era in 2005, the hard drive conked out, and she had to buy a new computer. I was like, literally go buy any laptop that you can find.
And it's going to be faster than what you have. And when she got it, she was like, I had no idea. Windows could actually be this fast. Um, partly because the amount of memory you get now, Ram you get now is dramatically higher and that makes you feel faster. And partly because as, as Alice said, SSDs, Now are a massive, massive performance increase in terms of like load time and stuff like that for your apps.
My hunch is we're in that same boat now with future hardware, right? So if, if we're talking about buying a laptop, buying a computer today, A computer from 2005, the physical hard drive is going to have broken. Your fans are going to be gunked up and noisy at best, and probably not working as well as they should.
Like, there's a reason we replaced computers every five or 10 years. And it is that this stuff does not last that long. And ma you know, memory starts going my memory, the memory in my streaming PC just concked out last week and I had to replace it. And it's just because like the stress of running at high temperatures with a lot of electrons running through it eventually causes the electrons to bleed through the transistor channels and stop working as well.
Brad: [00:12:41] CPU's will die after enough time. Right? Just it's just, I think it tends to be a good bit longer than most people are likely to actually use them. Right.
Will: [00:12:48] Well, they don't the moving parts, right? So there's no like friction wearing down bearings causing the bearings to fail and the no lubricant to fail, stuff like that inside the actual, the semiconductors. But yeah, they do still fail and, and, yeah, so I, I would say like in, in, I think a decade is a long time.
For any, anything with moving parts or that runs at high temperatures or high clock speeds or whatever to continue working. And once you get past that threshold, you're going to assume that things are going to start to fail. And when you have parts that are that old, it's probably more like if your Ram dies in a 15 year old computer at this point, it's probably cheaper to buy a new computer than to replace that Ram with new, with new, I mean, you can probably find used relatively inexpensively, but even like, 2005, you could even be looking at like Rambus, probably not in 2005, but 2003, you'd be looking at Rambus and God only knows where you get Rambus in 2020.
I mean, I'm sure it costs a fortune because it's only like some poor schmuck who has a mission critical server that runs Itanium or something. Then they need that for those ancient pieces of hardware, because they need that to keep it running
Brad: [00:13:55] Was DDR three available back then? Or are we still on DDR DDR two still at that point, uh, lay that stuff or even like, you know, a socket compatible motherboard. If your old motherboard dies can be damn near impossible to find, depending on how old it is.
Will: [00:14:07] Yeah. W when I, when my, um, when my last desktop machine conked out, it was a DDR three machine getting triple channel memory. That was the right. Configuration and speed and all that was just, it was going to cost a ridiculous amount of money. And it was, it made much more sense to invest in a current platform where the hardware is readily accessible than to continue fixing the old thing.
Brad: [00:14:32] Sure I’d kind of like to to approach this question or reframe this question in a more abstract way though, like setting aside just the mechanical, like practical concerns of things, physically breaking down over time. Do you think we're going to get to a point where let's say like, what are the common pieces of software that everybody has to use?
Like an operating system, a web browser. Um, is there anything else, like those are the two common denominators, right?
Will: [00:14:58] I think so
Brad: [00:14:59] I can't think of anything else that like you are basically required to use on a computer, right?
Will: [00:15:03] maybe some sort of messaging app, like Slack or WhatsApp or something like
Brad: [00:15:05] sure. I mean, but a lot of that stuff is browser based at this point, but let's, you know, let's, let's kinda like your it's like your, your parents' software lineup, right?
It's like the things that the most casual, like light computer users are going to need. Are we gonna, are we gonna get to the point where like, You know, the windows 10 requirements, the Chrome requirements, whatever are just going to stabilize and not continue.
Will: [00:15:26] I think that happens 10, 15 years ago.
Brad: [00:15:27] Right? Like that's kind of what I'm getting at, you know, like, could you, let's say you buy like a nice computer now, could that last, let's say, you know, if again, if it doesn't break down in a ideal world where the hardware holds up, could you use it for the next 20 years?
Just doing those, those basic things.
Will: [00:15:43] I think the increasing Ram requirements are going to be the thing that gets you always like phones on phones, on desktops, on the laptops, whatever, because if you think about it, like when I went to a 32 gig machine on this I nine, 9,000 9,900 machine a year and a half ago, two years ago, it felt kind of extravagant.
And now we're starting to see some games that actually will use more than 16 gigs of memory. If you give them the option.
Brad: [00:16:08] Yeah I think flight simulator is one of those.
Will: [00:16:10] Flight SIM is one of them. Um, I feel like one of the call of duties is one of them. Like, there's, it's, it's shocking, but it's happening now. So,
Brad: [00:16:18] to be fair games are kind of an edge case layer though.
Will: [00:16:21] I mean, I think so, but, but he, I mean, that's fair.
Yeah, absolutely.
Brad: [00:16:26] If you’re just using basic OS stuff like that, you know, there's no reason that those requirements have to keep going up.
Will: [00:16:31] I mean, there, isn't a reason that they have to keep going up, but, but. Like, if you keep upgrading your OS and keep upgrading your software with OS upgrades, like, like you don't really have a choice, whether you upgrade Firefox now or Chrome now just updates automatically in the background. So I feel like, I feel like maybe we are on an eternal upgrade cycle.
It's not like you can run your 2005 era version of Linux and be safe on the internet in 2020. Yeah. So I think, I think, you know, the thing to do, if you want to make hardware last a really long time is when you get to the end of the life cycle, for whatever type of memory you have in that machine or whatever the spec is for your hard drives, right?
Like at some point the sata ports will go away and we'll all have NVME drives and that's all we'll use. So
Brad: [00:17:20] I can't wait for that day.
Will: [00:17:21] I mean, you'll want to wait for, um, you'll you want to stock up on the Ram so that you have a spare when, when that's needed? I think,
Brad: [00:17:31] No such thing as a forever computer
Will: [00:17:33] I don't think we're going to have forever. I mean, the closest thing to a forever computer is a Chromebook that you plug in and it just downloads all of your crap from, from Google's cloud.
And it just works exactly the same on the next one as the current one.
Brad: [00:17:46] Um, all right. Well, I have to, I have to read this email next, cause it's about a very similar topic. Uh it's from Jeff. Very pleased to hear you sing the praises of upgrading and otherwise improving old tech in favor of constantly purchasing the latest and greatest and contributing to our disposable culture.
I don't know how it works in the iPhone world, but there is at least one Android project maintaining up-to-date versions of the OS for old model phones, namely lineage OS, uh, he's got a link here, but you should be able to Google that pretty easily. I've been using them for several years now on my one plus one released in April, 2014.
And I am now on Android, 10 released September, 2019. I'll upgrade eventually for more storage, but otherwise I'm quite happy. Thanks for the podcast and for taking a stance against electronic waste. That is the great thing about open source and community driven, open platforms like this, right? Like if there's a need for something like this, that enough people feel collectively they're going to get together and just do it.
Will: [00:18:50] Yeah, I think that's, that is the argument against buying Apple products because for a long time, they were really bad at supporting old, old hardware, older hardware.
Brad: [00:18:59] They still are. Well, I mean, what's your, what's your cutoff? Cause I've got an iPhone five that I use as kind of a workout phone. Like I take it out to walk or jogging. I just want, you know, I don't want to drop my current phone and break it
Will: [00:19:11] like an MP3 player or something and a TA and a distance tracker and stuff.
Brad: [00:19:14] I should, I should just find my old diamond Rio probably, but you know what I mean?
Will: [00:19:18] Uh, get that SD card. Oh, no. Sorry. See, what was, what was that weird flat cards that those things used?
Brad: [00:19:24] was it's compact. It wasn't compact flash. No.
Will: [00:19:26]I feel like they used compactflash, but they use the other one. The flimsy one that felt. Um, smart media,
Brad: [00:19:33] smart. I don't even know what that is
Will: [00:19:34] smart media. Yeah.
Brad: [00:19:36] Um, yes.
Will: [00:19:38] so, so Apple supports back to the iPhone 6S now with iOS 14, which is, which is like your signal to, it's probably time to think about upgrading a phone.
Um, I don't. Like, I feel like they cut, they have a history of cutting loose hardware way before they should like the Apple watches, the most egregious example where they like the first general one, the series zero was three years old, I think two years old when they stopped supporting it with new versions of the OS.
Brad: [00:20:08] I mean, that's insane. I agree with that
Will: [00:20:09] It’s offensive. Yeah.
Brad: [00:20:11] but, but by, by cutting loose, you mean stop offering upgrades for software upgrades.
Will: [00:20:16] Yeah. I'm going to have the timing on that wrong. I'm sure it was, it was, it was. That came out in 2015 and by 2018, you weren't getting the new iOS releases. They released though two O S releases in the first year, I think. So it was like the iOS, the Apple iOS four Apple. Watch us four or something that it didn't support.
Brad: [00:20:35] But, but again, to clarify by cut loose, you mean like you can no longer install the next iOS on this device.
Will: [00:20:40] Yes, that is correct
Brad: [00:20:41] like, I feel like it's in my experience, that's been the opposite I've had. Um, my first iPhone was a 3g. My second one was a five. In both of those cases, I kept taking the updates.
They offered me until the phone became unusable.
Will: [00:20:53] Well, so that that's the thing is they will let you update it to the point that it is no longer usable.
Brad: [00:20:57] That's what I'm saying is like this, this iPhone five. I, I, it's not even on the cell network anymore. I literally just put podcasts on it from wifi and just trying to scroll through and play podcast is a, quite, is beyond infuriating. I mean, it's literally, it's literally a touch device that is giving you no feedback.
When you swipe your phone for like seconds at a time, it is awful.
Will: [00:21:16] So I think they're better at that now. Um, I don't have a 6S around to test it. Actually. I might have a 6S because I think it was Gina's last phone before she went on the upgrade plan. Um, but, but like, I feel like the work that's happening in Android is much better in this space. And lineage is the, probably the gold standard for that.
I know there are several other distros that are similar.
Brad: [00:21:39] but yeah, that's, that's awesome. I wish I had an option like that,
Will: [00:21:43] I mean, on the other hand, Yeah. I mean, I guess as phones become less of a commodity devices, unless something you just upgrade every two years, because if you don't, you're getting hosed by your, by your a carrier. Cause you're not, you know, you're not letting him subsidize a new phone for you. Um, when we're looking at phones that cost a thousand $1,300 in some cases, It's it's a different situation and yeah, we should.
These things should last, especially, especially if the batteries are replaced, like the way the phones are put in, even the iPhones. Now they're much more replaceable and much easier to get out, much easier to fix. If something goes wrong. I I'm, I'm all for not trashing the old stuff and continuing to find use for it.
Brad: [00:22:25] absolutely. Uh, I wanted to ask you, I don't know if you know or not, but do you have any sense of why the iPhone, why there are no similar projects available for iPhone nobody's been able to get? I don't know. You name it new. Is it, is it just, this is the security, just that impenetrable.
Will: [00:22:40] It's harder to route and unload the unlock. The bootloader is, is my understanding like, like you'll have a, the thing about iOS bootloader exploits is that they are ephemeral in that they will be good. Like you'll have one that's good for three point releases of iOS 12. And then once you upgrade to the next point release or to iOS 13, that bootloader exploit goes away.
And as a result, like there's no. It's it's much more difficult to reliably put your own software. And because of that, the market for people doing that is probably pretty small. Like the people who are doing the bootloader exploits on iOS are jail breakers in a very small percentage. But I think it's mostly security people who are trying to find ways to get data off of, you know, uh, seized iPhones and stuff like that.
Brad: [00:23:29] Sure. Sure. Yeah, that's a shame I would totally install by. I don't know what, I don't even know what form that would take some, some other alternative OS on an old iPhone, if that were an option.
Will: [00:23:39] I mean in a perfect world, I Apple, I would say, okay, here, your phone is reaching end of life. You know, here's the minimum viable OS for this phone and we're going to make it. You know, put it in grandma mode at this point or grandpa mode at this point where it's good for mail and browser. And we turn off all the other background crap, and we're going to let you know when the battery starts to get hinky and you should probably take it in to get the battery service.
Cause like that's the other side, like with these devices that have batteries in them, I know I need to go out and clear the stuff out of my garage because I know that there's a PSP in there that has a battery in it. It's a ticking time bomb. And I know that I have a. Um, a couple of other old handhelds that had have lithium polymer, lithium ion batteries in there that I need to, to pull the batteries out of and probably just get rid of the devices before they cause a problem for me. Or I could just put a smoke detector in the garage and call it a day.
Brad: [00:24:32] it'll probably be fine. I'm sure nothing else will be ruined if it's packs deeply in the box next to those things.
Will: [00:24:39] Look at this point, a good garage fire would probably be a favor for me.
Brad: [00:24:44] Blessing in disguise. Yes. Um, let's see, Daniel in Iowa. Why don't we see E ink in more places? Why hasn't E Ink taken over the world with low power persistent displays? For example, in my cordless vacuum only shows the power level when it is running, using it using an led screen wouldn't an E Ink display that could show the power, even when it wasn't running, be more useful.
Are there cost barriers or other barriers that prevent this type of use?
Will: [00:25:13] So, if you don't know what E ink is, uh, they're really neat displays that have a little bit of fluid, uh, floating with balls, floating in them, and the balls are, have charged sides. So when the right charge is applied, the balls spin all in one direction. So the light side is up or the dark side is up.
And that, that gives a persist. So the only time they draw power. For the most part is when the, when the state of each pixel changes from dark to light. They're really cool. They're used in stuff like the original Kindles, uh, but not the Kindle fires. Those are LCD or OLED or whatever. Um, they're really neat cause they, they, once they are lit, once they fire, then the, the display stays in that state more or less without any power added.
Uh, the reason I think you don't show them and you don't see them popping up in consumer electronics more often is that they're inexpensive. But when you compare them to the price of a comparable LCD and the controller to, to display stuff like that, like just browsing Mouser. I wasn't able to find an LC like a super small E ink display.
That's that's, you know, like, you know, two inches wide by one and half an inch high that didn't cost a couple of bucks. With the controller and another couple of bucks for the controller, whereas you're able to find LCD displays in that price range with a backlight and a controller for like 35 to 75 cents in some cases.
So you're like, you know, 10 times the price, you know, five times the price, 10 times the price for a comparable display means that the electronics world is never going to use them.
Brad: [00:26:45] Is that a chicken and egg aspects of that problem of it's just an economy of like economy of scale thing have enough devices don't use them. So they haven't gotten cheap enough to, for a lot of devices to use them.
Will: [00:26:52] that's it's because we sell a billion phones that use LCD screens a year, and we don't sell a billion E ink devices that us e-ink screens a year.
Brad: [00:26:59] sure. Um, do you think there were, was there a kind of a secondary issue there with like, I don't know if this cordless vacuum is a great example of this, but like he's talking about having the static screen display, what you assume is a constant charge when you're not using the thing, it just stays at the same battery level that like batteries do sort of leak or dissipate over time without use.
Right? So like something would have to be there updating that screen to be accurate because if you don't use the vacuum for say X number of weeks, The state that screened the state. I mean maybe, maybe I'm splitting hairs here. Maybe that's not actually a huge consideration.
Will: [00:27:31] I mean, that's a UI problem, right? You make your, your, your icon for your battery life is, has like five chunks in it. And you just, when it goes from 80, a hundred percent to 80%, you just update it once over that three month period.
Brad: [00:27:44] Just engineered yourself a bunch of wiggle room. That makes sense. That's smart thinking you should go into vacuum design.
Will: [00:27:50] If only I could get a job there, that sounds great.
Brad: [00:27:53] I could see that being all right.
Will: [00:27:56] I would love, I would love to be the consultant that comes in and yells at people who do consumer electronics about how shitty their user interfaces are. like, like the people who designed microwave ovens and washer, washing and washer and dryer interfaces.
They should be in the Hague.
Brad: [00:28:11] I feel like this is an episode idea in the making right now is we need to just do it a whole show on terrible consumer electronics UI.
Will: [00:28:19] we say, I say that, but then like I look at what's the smart, the June smart oven thing. It's like a little convection oven for your desk for your countertop that has like it's, it's smart. It has software and stuff. Um, they've released, they announced the third generation of that thing. And every time I've looked at that, I was like, why would anybody spend money on this stupid thing?
And then I go and yell at my microwave oven. Cause it's like, there's no way, like, I, I physically can't get it to run at a low enough power to not make butter explode when I'm trying to melt butter in it, which is really anyway.
Brad: [00:28:49] Answer your question.
Will: [00:28:50] Yeah.
Brad: [00:28:51] Yup. Uh, let's see here. Here's a very self-serving email on my part from Chris. Uh, it says Brad for. I'll explain the context of your Brad for your poster. Just hanging at green screen poster behind you and show a cycle of different posters on it. That would be a fun project. The context is if you've seen any of the giant bomb streams we've been doing at home here, I've got a couple of movie posters behind me.
They're full on like 40 by 27, one sheet size. Like you would get one of them. Actually. It's a Sin City is actually the one from a movie theater, uh, that I got from a friend of mine who was managing a theater at the time. Yeah. Like I have nothing against sin city, but I don't love it. I just thought it was cool that I got an actual theater poster.
And I wanted to frame it, anyway, long story short, I have been trying to think of other movies I want to buy posters for, but a, I can't decide on any movies and B the ones I do, like, like it's impossible to get one sheets of any quality for less than like $500. Cause they're like super collector's items.
So I wonder if this is actually a, is he joking or is this any kind of viable solution
Will: [00:29:57] On no we did this at whiskey. It was in the basement. We have remember Vinnie made one out of green poster board or maybe Rory did.
Brad: [00:30:03] it sounds too easy to be actually viable,
Will: [00:30:05] No, it'd be simple. You just stick it in your frame, hang it up there. Put it. Don't put glass on front of it. So there's no reflection
Brad: [00:30:10] I was, I was, I was going to say you probably couldn't use the frame part right.
Will: [00:30:13] Well, you use the frame part you just take the glass off
Brad: [00:30:14] not, not the I'm sorry, not the frame. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah,
Will: [00:30:17] And then, uh, yeah, you can put whatever you want. And the trick is you'll have to read a line at every time you change the camera position, but like, as long as your shots pretty straight, it won't be a problem.
Brad: [00:30:27] Wait, are you talking about just manually compositing and into the scene and OBS or, or like track like it? Well, I mean, if, if, if I was doing that, I don't need poster board. I could just do it
Will: [00:30:36] No you do because you're in front of the, in front of the frames.
Brad: [00:30:39] it's for the cutout when, when I get in front of the frame yes.
Will: [00:30:41] otherwise you have to rotoscope yourself and you don't want to get in that business.
Brad: [00:30:44] I see. Uh,
Will: [00:30:45] It’s of manual labor.
Brad: [00:30:46] yeah, that makes sense.
I guess.
Will: [00:30:48] You should a hundred percent do this. I encourage this. Actually. I think this is a brilliant idea. Nothing could possibly go wrong with it.
Brad: [00:30:54] And then I'm not, not even constrained to movie posters at that point. I can put whatever I want in there.
Will: [00:30:58] If you want to put like a little bit of gameplay up there, you could do that. And you can, if you want to do the weather,
Brad: [00:31:02] But something animated
Will: [00:31:03] do the
Brad: [00:31:03] in there. Yeah. The weather you have, man, I've been, I've been needing to get that weather channel simulator going for a very long time.
Will: [00:31:09] Yeah look I think that there's a real market as a Patrion look as a tech pod to premium. If you did an annual, a daily weather report at the 10 or $15 tier, I bet people would sign up for that.
Brad: [00:31:21] Local Brad on the eights.
Will: [00:31:23] Yeah. Brad, Brad, traffic and weather on the nines.
Brad: [00:31:26] I think if I had green screens in those frames, I would, I don't know if this actually exists. Surely somebody digitized this. So at this point, the very subtly animating, uh, paintings portraits from the Disneyland haunted house. You know, what I'm talking about
Will: [00:31:42] Oh those Yeah,
Brad: [00:31:43] is that Disneyland.
I think that's Disney,
Will: [00:31:44] Disneyland and Disney world both have the haunted mansion.
Brad: [00:31:47] Yes, but, but I mean, with the portraits, with the people's faces that like you stare at them and you can't quite tell if they're moving or not, but they totally are.
Will: [00:31:53] Well, there was a, like around the time we started tested that was briefly popular in like a really specific art world niche that was making still photos that were very subtly animated called cinema graphs, I think. And they were like super high Rez GIFs they were huge. And there was even, um, the people who bought, who made Jiffy.
Bought the company called electric objects. That's like a photo. It's like a digital picture frame that can play GIF and yeah, it was a cool thing briefly, but not like Boing. Boing. Cool. Not real people. Cool.
Brad: [00:32:32] do you know how proud I am of myself that I did not bring up your pronunciation of that word
Will: [00:32:36] What Jiffy.
Brad: [00:32:37] through three separate usages?
Will: [00:32:40] Look the site it's how fast, how fast can you watch this thing? It's in a Jiffy. It's not like it's equiviy. That's a stupid word
Brad: [00:32:46] I just decided to live. I just decided to live and let live on that one.
Will: [00:32:49] Yeah.
Brad: [00:32:49] So let's move on with our lives
Will: [00:32:51] it, you lose all kudos. You got for your restraint earlier on.
Brad: [00:32:55] Small victories. Okay. I might do that. That's very tempting. I mean, it would look,
Will: [00:33:01] You should do that, get a piece of poster board go nuts.
Brad: [00:33:02]I would look really ugly for the decor in this room when I'm not on a stream though.
Will: [00:33:07]WellI mean, when are you ever not on a stream though?
Brad: [00:33:09] Oh, God, that's really depressing.
Will: [00:33:13] Look, I have a gigantic green curtain hanging behind me. I don't want to hear about it. Yeah.
Brad: [00:33:19] Do you, there's I'm fully going to derail this podcast. Do you have any amount of your stream set up that you take out? Like you put up and tear down between streams or is a hundred percent of it just there permanently, like as a fixture now,
Will: [00:33:30] Um, I
Brad: [00:33:31] including the green screen, I suppose.
Will: [00:33:32] So I can roll up the green screen if I want. Um, it's on, it's on, I got a film roller and, uh, like the thing that the, you know, the thing is, if you go to like a photo studio, they have the paper drapes and they're on those. So I have those hooks screwed into the ceiling and there's a cord that I can pull that makes it go up and down.
Um, but it's still hanging up there. Like it's, it's there. It's not great, but
Brad: [00:33:57] You know it's there.
Will: [00:33:58] But I mean, the nice thing is there's a lot of good storage back there where I can just pile shit up and get it out of the way. And then there's nobody knows it's there. Nobody will know
Brad: [00:34:06] It's pretty convenient.
Will: [00:34:07] it's where the spare chair is that my daughter sits in when we play games or something togehter
Brad: [00:34:12] Uh, I mean, I asked because like, I've got, I've got this big key light and nice mirrorless camera rig and all this other stuff that I use for streams. And so far. Between streams. I take this whole light and camera rig down. I wind up every cable that is around and put it away. Like, you know, we've talked about how much I desire a, an extremely and eminently tidy desk,
Will: [00:34:33] I've been shaking my head this whole time. You should leave the, like the amount of time you're burning, setting up lights and nonsense is ridiculous. Just leave it set up. It's your job.
Brad: [00:34:41] that's why I asked because it's becoming prohibitive. Like I think, I think the stream deck that I got this, the Elgato
Will: [00:34:46] Did you get the big boy,
Brad: [00:34:47] yes, I've got the XL here, which. I think the XL, I think was maybe a bad choice because there were so many buttons that I've just put off, setting it up.
I literally looked at the application and I was like, this is so many buttons. I have no idea what I'm going to put all these. And then I just have
Will: [00:35:02] Just start with one row.
Brad: [00:35:02] I have not bothered to do any setup on that thing for the month that I've had it because I just, I
Will: [00:35:07] Oh, it's really handy.
Brad: [00:35:08] I don't, I know it is, but, but
Will: [00:35:09] if you want a smaller one, I can hook you up. I'll trade you straight out the gate. No problem.
Brad: [00:35:13] take that into consideration. But anyway, I asked, because I think that stream deck might be one device, too many for me to want to set up and run cables and plug stuff in blah, blah,
Will: [00:35:24] If you're, if you're breaking lights every time, that's insane.
Brad: [00:35:27] it's not that bad. It's on a stand it's on a portable, like a weighted stand.
Will: [00:35:32] Oh, so it's not like bolted the desk. It's not one of those stands.
Brad: [00:35:34] no, no, no, no, no. god, no, that would be insane.
But, uh, it's, it's on a free moving stand that I could just set in the corner of the room and I'm not using it, or the camera is attached to the light. So that's, but I still have to wind cables and run stuff all over the place.
Will: [00:35:46] No dude, don't do that. Just leave it up. you look, look, imagine thinking about this. What if you're, what if something you're playing a game? What if you're playing, you know, Splunky two. And like something amazing happens. You're like, shit, I got to stream this right now. This is so good. I don't want people to miss it.
Right. Think about the time you'd have, like, if it's all set up, you just turn on the stream. PC, hit the button and boom, you're gone. You're up there. You're ready to go.
Brad: [00:36:10] Living out our whole lives on the internet
Will: [00:36:12] Yeah.
Brad: [00:36:13] at this point.
Will: [00:36:14] Yeah. Well, you know, there's a whole other conversation to have about the wisdom of that, but, but assuming we're too late to have that conversation, what would it being 2020?
And you having done this for 20 years now, should just move on and answer the next question. I think.
Brad: [00:36:28] Okay. Read more emails than question my life decisions. Um, let's see here a question from CJ, my wife and I just had our first kid. Congratulations. Uh, so we're taking a lot of photos. We started a Google.
Will: Congratulations
Brad: Yeah, totally. We started a Google photo album that we share between us for adding all our photos of our daughter.
You guys always talk about backing up all of your files multiple times. So I was wondering if there was a simple way to automatically download these files from our share Google, Google photo album to my computer's hard drive. Um, you, you tell me if you disagree, but I feel like if you've got your stuff on Google, probably fine of all the commercial services for you to host files on like.
I don't know. I feel like, I feel like if something so catastrophic happens that you cannot get your photos from Google, we have got way bigger concerns than archiving photos. At that point,
Will: [00:37:29] So
Brad: [00:37:30] you tell me
Will: [00:37:32] I'm of two minds here. Cause one is that yes. If anybody is going to not fuck this up, probably it's Google. On the other hand, Google closes. Kills products with reckless abandon all the time.
Brad: [00:37:44] Yes. That's fair.
Will: [00:37:45] I assume that because Google photos is tied to one drive and there's money attached to it and all that stuff.
Like they're not going to kill it without some sort of a heads up and time to back up yourself. Uh, the other thing about Google is it's pretty easy to use Google takeout to grab just the photos from your Google photos library. If you so desire, you'll hit a button and you'll tell it what you want to get.
It'll bundle that all up into a bunch of zip files, and then it'll give you like 10 terabytes of shit to download a day or two from then. So. I dunno, I back up my photos separately before they go up to Google rather than after. But I also, I guarantee you, their photos on Google photos that are not backed up anywhere else.
And I feel like I'm probably okay with that. Like the, the number of things that they would, I trust Google more than most other companies to not make a mistake that would cause loss of data on their end. And realistically, if they did something, I probably would never know. Because there's just so much stuff up there.
Like we went, we went from taking like 1500 photos a year to 12,000 for the first five years that she, that our daughter was born.
Brad: [00:38:50] That's a lot of photos
Will: [00:38:50] it's, it's just, it's just like going through and making the photo albums of those first few years was a multi-week process by both of us in like spending an hour or two a night at it.
And it was horrific.
Brad: [00:39:04] That's like, I'm just fuzzy math in my head. Isn't this like 30 plus photos a day or something.
Will: [00:39:10] But, I mean, there's burst photos and all sorts of
Brad: [00:39:13] Oh, sure. Yeah. If you're just hitting, if you're, if you're, if you're planning to like take 12 photos, per instance, and only keep one of them or like pick the best one, I guess that's different.
Will: [00:39:21] Also, but so the lesson there is delete the bad ones immediately. Don't think you're going to do it in the future because you're not right.
Brad: [00:39:27] never will.
Will: [00:39:28] Right. You're never going to go back and be like, well, maybe I should delete this one. Um, the other thing is like, you end up like when one person's at work and one person's at home, the person at home often is like taking pictures.
Cause like, I want to show you this cool thing that happened today. And like that's, that's awesome. I love that. So, whereas I was taking pictures of my lunch, so I had that going for me too. I don't know. The answer is probably I. People are going to say Google kills everything all the time. Google photos is a service that is used by millions of people that has not stopped Google from killing stuff in the past.
However, there is money tied to this in Google, and it is one of the main selling points of ant. Like if you buy a pixel phone, you get free storage for every photo that you take on that pixel phone. And that is a major, major, major selling point and a key differentiator for Apple who charges you to store all the photos that you, that you take on their devices.
And, and I think that that is. I, I feel confident that that is not a product that is going to go away. It might change form. We may not like what they change it into. I feel like it's probably okay.
Brad: [00:40:28] Yeah, but for, yeah, peace of mind, I could see having a local backup being nice. What did you say the Google takeout is that the name
Will: [00:40:34] Google take out. So I think it's just takeout.google.com, but,
Brad: [00:40:37] it is that is a Google product, not a third party thing.
Will: [00:40:39] it fits it fits. Did that. Um, yeah, that was, that was his, one of his things before he left Google.
Brad: [00:40:44] Oh, that's cool. There you go. Yeah. Grab those photos and, uh, I don't know, put them on a USB hard drive and put them in your safe deposit box or something.
Will: [00:40:53] Yeah, take out.google.com. And when you click there, it asks you which account you want to use. You sign in, you do all your stuff, and then you tell it like you can even download all of your YouTube uploads and stuff there. You can download all your YouTube comments.
Brad: [00:41:06] is that, wait, wait, is that literally just a portal to anything you've ever put on Google?
Will: [00:41:09] If you would like to get all of your calendar entries and all of your Gmail and all of that stuff, you can choose which services you want to pull from. And then it'll give you a bundled file with all of that stuff. And also like the Jason stuff that you need to make sense of it or XML, depending on which services it is.
It is, it is a phenomenal thing. It works like 90% of the time in my experience
Brad: [00:41:29] pretty awesome. That's pretty awesome. I love when companies open things up like that and just let you have at it.
Will: [00:41:35] The important, it's really important to look at the size of like, at one point I was like, we should back up all of the tested YouTube videos, and then I mashed the button to do it. And it gave me a file that was larger than every hard drive we had in the office at the time. So yeah.
Brad: [00:41:49] That’s pretty intense. Wait, what format is that file?
Will: [00:41:51] It's just a, it's like a series of zips.
Wasn't one file. It was a series of zips that were like each 500 gigabytes or something. And it was 24 terabytes of, of video.
Brad: [00:42:01] That's pretty intense.
Will: [00:42:02] cause they saved the uploads, right. So they saved the uploads and then transferred them down to the shitty. So they fit in with everything else on YouTube.
Brad: [00:42:08] These are the source files that you have uploaded.
Will: [00:42:10] source uploads.
Brad: [00:42:11] Oh my God. That's amazing.
Will: [00:42:12] Yeah. But like also, yeah, it was a lot.
Brad: [00:42:17] That's intense. Wow. That's cool. But job fits. Um,
Will: [00:42:22] He hasn’t worked on it in a long time. He hasn't been there like eight years or something, but yeah.
Brad: [00:42:25] Yeah. Uh, let's do a couple more quick emails. Here is a question from Rahul. I was curious how you use discord. I'm a Patrion number and have popped into the tech pod discord on occasion, but because it works in such a different way to other social media, I find it quite daunting to jump into any discussions because it feels like it feels a bit like hovering near a group of people having a chat at a party, but not knowing when you can join in.
I'm going to give you a little piece of advice. If you are self-aware enough to have that feeling of, of being an interloper.
Will: [00:42:57] You're fine.
Brad: [00:42:58] you're probably, you're probably cool enough that you're not going to bother anybody.
Will: [00:43:01] Yeah. Get in there. If you feel like you have something to share, I have a question to answer. Go for it.
Brad: [00:43:05] like quite, quite literally, that is a good litmus test of if you were concerned enough about other people's feeling and feelings and level of comfort to think about things in those terms, then you're probably fine.
Uh, but I'll finish reading the email here. Um, Perhaps your experience is different, especially because you have more of a history of using discussion boards, but I'm interested to know how you use this discord in this context. Um, I totally get what he's saying. Like, I don't join a lot of big public discords.
Like I, that you usually like.
Will: I’m not in any
Brad: Yeah. Like I only got joined the OBS one when I needed some specific OBS help. And like I got on the classic gaming one when I needed some Mister help, but like, it's kind of pretty, uh, targeted usage of servers like that. But like, I, I get it, you know, like it's, it can be a little intimidating when you've got a big crew of regulars and you don't want to just like butt in.
Will: [00:43:54] Well, but I mean, so here's the thing. I hope that what we've built with the tech pod discord specifically, like I use different discords in different ways. I definitely have ones that I dip into for tech support, help on specific products that are product. Like when I had a problem with Hades frame rate, I posted in the super giant discord.
And one of the, one of the folks that works at super giant respondent was like, Hey, send me your DX, diag. And then he was like changes to these two settings and stuff will be fine. I was like, okay. And it worked fantastic though. Like that is a beautiful tech support experience.
Brad: [00:44:23]A plus interaction.
Will: [00:44:24] Yes. Um, if I didn't already love that game, I would love it even more after that.
The, the other one is that like I'm in a lot of community discords for like Twitch channels that I subscribe to or follow or whatever. And those are much more like, I want to dip in and see what people are talking. Like if I want to dip in and see what people are talking about about like a new game coming out, or like, if like, if there's a podcast, I like then I, I know that like the spunky show, like, which is now I think called eggplant is going to have like all the hot roguelike information about the games that I should be like, keep kind of, maybe not playing right now, but keeping my eye on stuff like that.
Um, Aye. Aye. On something like the tech pod discord or my Twitch discord, or I assume the giant bomb discords are like this, but I don't know, like I'm, I kind of dip into the things like I graze. I don't, I definitely don't try to read everything that's in there because even on the tech pod discord, which is like 1200 or 1300 members, it's way too much to read everything that happens in every channel, even if that was my full-time job.
Um, but like I dip into the, to the PC one. When I have something new or interesting that I'm curious about there, I dip into the HAdes one, the game section one, when I want to talk about Hades and see what builds people are using, stuff like that. And I just kind of dip in and dip out. I don't know if your experience is different on that.
Brad: [00:45:44] Oh, depends on the, you know, how, uh, invested I am in being part of the community, but like this actually reminds me all of going all the way back to like IRC in the nineties. Like, like the, the, the best advice I could give, if you want to actually really become, like, part of a community is just lurk for a while.
Like just ha just hang out and listen and watch, like, that's what I would even do on IRC channels where I was new, you know, like that's
Will: [00:46:07] what I did when I started posting on Shaq news 20 years ago right.
Brad: [00:46:09] I was literally going to mention Shaq news as being or. Excuse me, the quake. Holyo when I started there.
Will: [00:46:15] Yes of course.
Brad: [00:46:16] Um, but, uh, yeah, like that's the best way to become, that's the best way to go from being an outsider to a regular is just to hang out and look and see what everybody's mannerisms are and what the kind of modes of interaction are, I guess, for lack of a better term, you know what I mean?
And just like kind of hang out and get the vibe of the place. And then just like, once you feel comfortable and you will. Eventually you will feel comfortable just by having absorbed enough of kind of what the tone of the place is to begin with.
Will: [00:46:41] I mean, and the thing is even in the tech pod discord, where we have like, like we have literal rocket scientist, right.
Brad: Yes, it still blows my mind.
Will: Um, it's it's right. I mean, it's still, it's still a place where you are going to have. Some expertise that you probably don't even realize is expertise that you can share. And that people will be super stoked about like, like, you know, somebody the other day was talking about repairing, I think tractors in my discord and somebody else popped up with some really specific information that he was like, Oh, this is incredibly useful.
He's like, yeah, I never thought I'd be talking about this here, but, but like, We all know something that's amazing and useful and good. This is the lesson of tested is that if you, if you sit down and start talking to somebody who cares so deeply about something that they're willing to spend their time and or money on it, right?
Like they're going to have information that is worth sharing and worth spreading and worth appreciating. And, and, you know, when every we sat down and talked to somebody, be it some high school kid who had done a project on like Maglev build at building a scale model, Maglev train. Yeah. Or, um, you know, a person who made a electric skateboard from scratch.
Like you, you, everybody's interesting that that's the TLDR.
Brad: [00:47:58] Yeah, that's kind of how it, whoops, careful microphone arm. Uh, that's kind of how I've always felt about communities that are really passionate about like deep subjects like this, especially technical ones, like they're to me, they're kind of, there are two ways you can bring value to a community like that.
You can offer your own knowledge or you can give someone else an opportunity to offer their knowledge. You know what I mean? Like you can either bring, bring something new to it yourself or. You know, people wouldn't be there unless they were very passionate about subjects that they love talking about.
So if you don't have something you want to offer yourself, but you want to give them a chance to offer you something that, you know what I mean?
Will: [00:48:33] Well, it’s like
Brad: [00:48:33] it's, it's, it's equally gratifying to either learn something or to teach somebody something
Will: [00:48:36] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And like, we all have weird, weird things that we know way more about than we should. Right? Like, like even if you think, you know, nothing about nothing there's, which is, I feel like that's the, that's the thing that, that people like. I was talking to a friend the other day, who's helping with fundraising on some, some stuff for their kids' school.
And, and they were like, it turns out I have gotten, I've been doing this for like six years. Cause I have two kids and I've been doing this since the first one was in first grade. And as a result, I have a lot of endemic knowledge about how to do fundraising stuff. And I never, ever in a million years would have thought it would be useful.
But when they joined a community full of people that are like trying to learn how to do fundraising stuff, because they, I suddenly have kids that are in that, in that age range. Then then, then they were able to give a lot of valid and really useful information and share a lot of insight that it usually is gained the hard way.
So yeah, just jump in. Like we have an inclusive community. Don't be rude. Yeah. That's the only rule is don't be a jerk to other people and try not to be a mansplainer, like, like, you know, don't come in and, and start explaining how. Car stuff works because probably there's somebody who, if you don't really know, because there's somebody there who probably designs cars
Brad: [00:49:52] Yes. Yeah. Well, we had was really, honestly, from what I've seen, haven't really had any issues of that nature. It's been a,
Will: [00:49:58] the, the most gentlest of feedback has helped solve any of the problems that we've had, which is always a good sign. We don't have mods
Brad: [00:50:05] uh, yes, we've, we've we've never had moderators on that discord, which I feel like is pretty telling.
Will: [00:50:09] We could, could argue that maybe we would use better well-served by adding some people to help wrangle content and like perk the good stuff up to the top. But that's a different conversation.
Brad: [00:50:18] Yeah. Last email real quick from Eric. What would be the ramifications of just deleting Numlock from every keyboard right now?
Will: [00:50:26] I mean, I use num lock. I bind my mute soft key to Numlock. So when it's lit, my discord is muted and when it's not my discord, isn't.
Brad: [00:50:36] that is the true use of Numlock is that is just a dummy key for whatever else you want to assign to it. At this point,
Will: [00:50:42] You know what? That's not true. Cause I'm on a 10 keyless. I used scroll lock for that. Not num lock.
Brad: [00:50:46] I see
Will: [00:50:46] Yeah.
Brad: [00:50:49] On this Apple keyboard Numlock is actually labeled to clear and does not have a light on it.
Will: What?
Brad: And yet there are plenty of windows applications that might need you to use the number pad and, uh,
Will: [00:50:59] how do you knock your in the lock? Your numbs?
Brad: [00:51:01] It's still. No, it's still, that's what I'm saying. It's still works as Numlock, it's just called clear and doesn't actually tell you if it's locked or not.
If the numbs are locked, there's no way of knowing,
Will: [00:51:09] The light using scroll lock for the mute was, has been, uh, is, is like before I got the stream deck and have a physical button for it, it was real good because I would hit that. And I would know I was clear. Um,
Brad: [00:51:21] probably get a full, another keyboard. I've got that. I've got that amazing mechanical.
Will: [00:51:26] Look it’s time man.
Brad: [00:51:26] I've got, I've got the, uh, Amazing mechanical keyboard that TwinkleTwinkie sent me from the discord,
Will: [00:51:32] There's a whole channel about those keyboards.
Brad: [00:51:35] I just, I am so attached to that. One is a 10 keyless, I believe is the level that one's at, right.
Will: [00:51:41] That is a 10 keyless. The one that they sent, maybe it's, it might be a 60%. Does it have F1 keys?
Brad: [00:51:45] it's a, yes, it does have function
Will: [00:51:46] Yeah. So it's a 10 keyless, probably.
Brad: [00:51:49] I've just, I am, so I don't know.
Will: [00:51:53] You hate things that are awesome.
Brad: [00:51:54] I'm so married to the non numeric keypad. I need, I need the, I need 104 keys, man.
Will: [00:52:00] look Brad for about $10. You can get a USB key, a numb pad
Brad: [00:52:05] Yeah. But that's not the same
Will: [00:52:05] you pull out when you need it.
Brad: [00:52:07] that's one more cord across my desk. And you know how I feel about that
Will: [00:52:09] Well, then get a Bluetooth one for 20 bucks.
Brad: [00:52:12] You know what I did though? I, uh, buy a, it was a, I bought one of the new Logitech MX five eighteens best buy had them for 20 bucks.
Will: [00:52:22] The mice? the second it's like the re-spin of the old mouse.
Brad: [00:52:25]Hell yeah, man. It's the best mice ever made. Did you ever have , have an MX
Will: [00:52:29]Yeah I used to. When that came out. I was reviewing mice still it's a good mouse. It's fine
Brad: [00:52:34] MX, the MX 518 is the last mouse I had before uh actually, is this true? I was going to say, I think I put Teflon tape on the bottom of that one, but maybe that's not true. Maybe it did have Teflon.
Will: [00:52:44] It had Teflon feed.
Brad: [00:52:45] Did it?
Will: [00:52:46] It would have. Yeah, it has. Well, it has the little discs that had small pads. The pads were smaller than you might like.
Brad: [00:52:52] Okay. Maybe it was the intellimouse I have before that, that I put the Teflon tape on.
Will: [00:52:55] Yeah the intellimouse you definitely had to replace the tape yourself.
Brad: [00:52:58] Anyway, MX 518 is the best mouse ever made.
Will: [00:53:03] Um,
Brad: [00:53:04] I'm going to go pick it up from best buy soon
Will: [00:53:06] I, wow.
Brad: [00:53:08] because it was 20 bucks.
Will: [00:53:09] I really like my logitech G pro.
Brad: [00:53:11] Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there were better mice, but it was 20 bucks.
Will: [00:53:14] 20 bucks is right price. Is it, is it a laser sensor now, or is it an optical?
Brad: [00:53:17] no, it's like, it's updated to like, so their, their, whatever, their modern internals are.
Will: [00:53:22] It's real comfy for a Palm, for a Palm grip person
Brad: [00:53:25] Yes, that's me. I think,
Will: [00:53:27] I've switched to a, uh, a claw as I've gotten older. It turns out
Brad: [00:53:31] I’m midway between a claw on a,
Will: [00:53:33] Oh, in modified grip.
Brad: [00:53:34] something like that, a hybrid grip,
Will: [00:53:37] Brad, I've got one more thing.
Brad: [00:53:39] one more thing. What is this on the Apple keynote.
Will: [00:53:42] there's nothing under your chair. If that's what you're asking. Uh, I have been testing for the last couple of weeks. One of NVIDIA's new 360 Hertz G sync displays with reflex latency analyzer.
Brad: [00:53:54] That’s too many hz.
Will: [00:53:55] It's a lot of hz
Brad: [00:53:56] That's a lot of times per second.
Will: [00:53:58] Look, I'm gonna go ahead and tell you, I'm not going to say it made me better at games, but I'm pretty sure it's made me better at games.
Like, I don't have any data. It just, the games feel good. And I'm real fast now. Like, I feel like I'm about 10 years younger and I got instincts and got the eye of the tiger. I got the thrill of the fight. I've been, I, I killed a professional streamer in PUBG the other day.
Brad: [00:54:18] wait, how did you play a professional streamer in PUBG?
Will: [00:54:20] There's not that many people playing PUBG anymore.
So when you, when you get in there that like, they just like to show up in your games and you're like, Oh, that's a famous name. I know that person.
Brad: Wait, is PUBG dieing ?
Will: Uh, Brad, I got bad news for you.
Brad: [00:54:32] Just a bit. Is this a bad question to ask? Is this a sensitive subject
Will: [00:54:35] When was the last time you played PUBG
Brad: [00:54:36] Oh, about two years ago.
Will: [00:54:37] yep. So same for everyone else. They had a cheater problem and then they had some look that's a whole different topic for another day. There's still a lot of people playing PUBG, but there's not, there's like five or six games going at any given moment, not like 30 games going at any given moment
Brad: [00:54:53] Maybe if my monitor was able to refresh 360 times a second, I would play more PUBG
Will: [00:54:58] It's well, okay. So first off PUBG is not a great game for the three and six, because it's like even with a 3080 and a pretty good CPU and fast ram and all that business, I peak out at like 240 250 frames a second, but, uh, moving from a 60 Hertz monitor to a 360 Hertz monitor, I will tell you that. Oh right out of the gate, uh, flick shots, head shots, seeing stuff in windows when you're driving by at a hundred miles an hour, um, uh, peak advantage goes like gets trimmed way down peakers.
Do you know, do you know about peaker's advantage?
Brad: [00:55:30] varley, like intuitively from the name. Yes. But I'm not quite sure I understand the, I, I don't understand it on a mechanical level of why it happens. Exactly.
Will: [00:55:37] Okay. So the basic idea is if you are sticking, if you're, if you're like playing Valora or CS go something that's really, really fast runs at a ridiculous frame rate, and you stick your head around the corner,
Brad: [00:55:50] So you are
Will: [00:55:50] to cover a corner,
Brad: [00:55:51] you are the peaker,
Will: [00:55:52] You're no, no. At that point you are the person that is defending.
Brad: [00:55:55] were the Peaky.
Will: [00:55:56] You're you're the person who is being peaked. The person at the other end of that hallway, who sticks their head around the corner has an advantage in, in that your computer will not draw them until, uh, the packet that says, Hey, this person's peeking around the corner. Travels to the server comes down to you.
And then your computer has to still render that stuff through the CPU pipeline, through the GPU pipeline and through the frame bumper and out to the monitor.
Brad: [00:56:21] is this a, is this an artifact of a client server client side prediction?
Will: [00:56:25] This is an artifact. It's a little bit about client side prediction, but it's mostly just like time to flight of packets. So the upshot is if you are peaking a corner in a game like Counter-Strike or, or PUBG or Valurent, You have an advantage in that you will not be just drawn on your opponent's screen, who is holding that corner for, you know, anywhere from a 50 to 150 or 200 milliseconds, depending on what their, their network latency and the render latency, the system latency of the rendering pipeline on their computer
Brad: [00:56:56] Trip. Triple digit latency sounds like plenty of window for somebody to straight up headshot you before you even have a chance to see them.
Will: [00:57:05] That is, that is so in games where the time to kill is low so something like a halo or maybe a battlefield, um, it doesn't matter as much, right? Cause like who gets the first shot and halo matters a lot less than who managed to hold the hold the stream of bullets on the person the entire time and more so even than like two people shooting at the same person makes, makes more of a difference.
Brad: [00:57:27] I that that said, I will say that even, um, the little bit that I dabbled in, uh, trials of, of, sorry, I don't know. It was that by the time I got to it, it was trials of the nine, not ocyrus in destiny. You know what I'm talking about? Like, like the, the weekend that I spent with some extremely Savage people at destiny multiplayer,
Will: [00:57:44] It was horrific it's horrific right,
Brad: [00:57:45] well what I was gonna say is they, they, I mean, they got me my kill streak or my wind streak, but, um, Uh, even in a game like that with shields and recharging health and all kinds of like time to kill buffers, they were still pre firing corners and all that stuff, you know, like they were still doing all the compensation that you do to try and get around this.
Will: [00:58:02] Well, so that's exactly it. Like the people who are really good at a game or people who are professionals. Learn tricks. So for example, they will accelerate past where they, where their eyes and the monitor tell them that they should be putting the cross hair because they know that by the time they shoot in the bullets register, the server will have the other player in that spot.
Brad: [00:58:20] That is really interesting that you mentioned that because there have been a number of times, mostly in single player games. Cause I guess I'm just, I'm not good enough in multiplayer these days. I'm too old for this.
Will: [00:58:30] I'm like five years older than you dude, more than that.
Brad: [00:58:32] Uh that’s true and you are a, you are a prize winning PUBG player. So.
Will: [00:58:36] I have won money playing video games as an adult.
Brad: [00:58:39] what I was gonna say is like, uh, I never consciously realize I'm going to do it until after the fact, but there are definitely times where I feel like I will whip the mouse past where I think the person is and shoot in front of them.
And obviously that's leading them, which is pretty standard, but like, I feel like there might be a gut level reaction that sort of helps you compensate for the stuff, even when you don't think about it.
Will: [00:58:58] Well, when Nvidia rolled this stuff out and we were in the pre-brief for the reflex stuff specifically, which we'll get to in a sec, they explicitly said the difference between pros and normal people is that normal people react to what's on the screen and the pros train themselves to react to what they know that's happening.
And part of that is simple stuff like pre-filing corners and things like that. But a lot of it is just, you know, you. You gain an innate sense when you play thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of the same game as to what you need to do and, and what Nvidia posited. I don't know if I buy it yet.
Um, is that having a higher refresh rate display helps cut down some of that disadvantage. For more normal players or people who play, maybe they're, maybe they're not normal. Maybe they're not your, your, you know, your, your nine to five, I'm going to play like four hours of games a week guy. But, but there's somebody who devotes themselves to Fortnite or PUBG or Valora and, or, or call of duty or something like that.
And that, and that's the main game that they play. So I've been testing the three hundred and 60 Hertz stuff. I don't have a ton of experience with like with lower refresh rate monitors that aren't 60 Hertz monitors, but huge, huge performance increase going from 60 Hertz to anything faster than 60 Hertz is what I would describe so far.
Um, The, the latency testing, the system latency testing stuff, and the reflex API bits are interesting too, but I think less interesting to normal people and more interesting maybe to us, um, uh, re reflex is an API that Nvidia rolled out that basically moves the kind of gsync and anti judder and anti frame rate, uh, like, like, like micro judder compensation stuff a little bit further back in the pipeline for games that support it.
So if you have a game that's really, really, really GPU bound, where the CPU is hardly doing any work, it can, it can feed more, more, more information than the GPU pipeline needs really knows how to handle. If that makes sense, so that things can end up getting rendering all at once or really fast. So, so it's basically timed things out so that the GPU is getting the most accurate information for each time.
It has to render a new frame. Uh, and, and the upshot there is that you don't see as many micro stutters when you're running at like 360 frames a second in CS go, well, CS go is not a good example because it doesn't actually support it. But in fortnight, in, um, in, uh, Valorant in. Uh, Cod and I think in Overwatch, I'm not sure about Overwatch no It's just more as a, it's Call of Duty War Zone, Call of Duty modern warfare, Valorent and Fortnite. Right now,
Brad: [01:01:33] Okay. And I believe this goes back to the, what does the 900 series the Maxwell cards? is that Maxwell?
Will: [01:01:42] this stuff works on a lot of older cards. Yes. Uh,
Brad: [01:01:46] At least at least Pascal though. 1080, the
Will: [01:01:49] Yeah, they, they recommended some testing on a, uh, 1660 so that you could make it so that you can make the games GPU bound it a little bit easier. Um, and it seems like the reflex, uh, the, the, reflex support in engine, uh, is only like the games have to actually actively support it.
So.
Brad: [01:02:10] And that's separate. That's totally separate from like your fancy high refresh monitor, and also like plugging a mouse straight into that monitor and all that stuff. Right.
Will: [01:02:17] That seems to be the case. I'm not a hundred percent on that. When I think about it, it's something I didn't ask if the reflex stuff is hardware specific. So, um, I will I'll check that and maybe post on Twitter when we post the podcast. Um
Brad: [01:02:32] Well, what I mean is like, I think you get some benefit from the software reflex implementation,
Will: [01:02:37] absolutely.
Brad: [01:02:37] even if you don't have the fancy hardware is what I'm saying.
Will: [01:02:41] If you, if you have a G sync monitor and a supported video card, you will see benefit and you're running games. It's, it's probably more likely that you're not running games in GPU bound configurations, rather than like, like, like this really benefits when there's a deep render queue.
When there's a lot of information queued up in the, in the, in the pipeline, the graphics pipeline. Uh, than it does in like the way you would play the game. Like realistically, in order for me to get Fortnite GPU bound on a 380, I had to turn on Ray tracing and a bunch of nonsense that I would probably never turn on if I was a competitive Fortnite player, if that makes sense.
So this is, this is a little bit more of a. Um, this is something that, that professional people who play professionally and in a really high level are probably gonna use, I think, more than, um, normal people enless, enless. I mean, I do know that some people are much more sensitive to the micro stutter stuff than, than we do.
So. There you go. Um, this, and then the other part, the thing that I think is super neat, cause we tried to, we tried to test this 13 years ago at maximum PC and couldn't figure out how to do it on the budget that we had available, uh, is that they've added a system latency tester to the monitor. So you can actually, and I apologize for the woodchipper.
That's going into one of my neighbors is cutting down a tree, but there's like a low grumble that I'll try to edit out, but I don't know if it's going to happen.
Brad: [01:04:04] slice of life, man. People enjoy it sometimes.
Will: [01:04:07]Where not recording in the studio right now. So, um, anyway.
Brad: [01:04:09] when your neighbor fires up his boat, sometimes people think it's a fun, little detail, a little, little window into will Smith's life and not so much in a recording annoyance.
Will: [01:04:17] Yeah, no, I did manage to filter that anyway. Um, the, so the average system latency tester lets you break down the CPU part of the pipeline, the GPU part of the pipeline. And then also now the mouse click to CPU part of the pipeline. So you can see how much latency your mouse adds, how much latency your CPU part of the pipeline adds and how much latency the GPU part of the pipeline ads.
And you can tell. Overall how much latency there is between the time you click and the time the shot registers on the screen, which is I think super cool.
Brad: [01:04:51] that's pretty wild and wait. So does the monitor, read that stuff out or is that on. Are you getting through that, getting that through software in windows, or like how, how does that stuff work?
Will: [01:05:02] the way it works, because you plugged the monitor, the mouse into the monitor,
Brad: [01:05:05] Okay. And then that's the whole, that's a situation where there's like these specific reflex USB ports that you have to use.
Will: [01:05:10] There's a RED USB port on the Asus monitor that I'm using. Uh, yes. And you, you, so you plug the mouse into there, you tape off the bottom of the mouse when you're doing benchmarks so that you don't actually accidentally move the mouse and Jack up the frame timing for the scene. Once you pick the spot that you're going to figure, you're going to test in, and then you.
Uh, shoot. And you put a box using the HUD, like the, like the onscreen display on the monitor on the place where the muzzle flash displays.
Brad: [01:05:40] That’s wild, So it's literally looking for like frame changes to calculate
Will: [01:05:43] Yeah, it's looking for pixels to get, go from dark to bright. So you need to find a dark spot in the scene and you, you, uh, put that up there and then it pops up in Geforce experience. You can put that up the little performance HUD up, and it will show you exactly how long it takes between the time the mouse has clicked.
And the muzzle flash happens.
Brad: [01:06:02] So they do, they recommend specific games that have like an instantaneous muzzle flashes. Cause I'm sure there were some games where the firing animation takes a longer to really ramp up like more frames to truly ramp up than others. So I wonder what, like what, what is the fastest gun in the West? As far as like first-person shooters are concerned.
Will: [01:06:17] Well, so fortnight had shockingly good latency compared to the other games I tested. Um, I was seeing like 18 frames, a second with reflux on, uh, sorry, 18 milliseconds, 18 to 19 milliseconds. The average was like 18.6 with reflux on and, uh, with reflux off, I was seeing 22 to 23 with an average of like 22.4.
Um, milliseconds. So like it's not, it's like a six, six millisecond swing, basically, which isn't, isn't huge. But I did notice a significant reduction in micro stutter, uh, when I was actually playing the game, which, which is, which is, I think the big win here. Um, the. Call of duty numbers were closer. Like I didn't see as big as a drop also Call of Duty was running at a much lower frame rate than, than Fortnite was, um, in the situation like with, with Ray tracing on and all the stuff I needed to do to get the game GPU bound on the, on the hardware and the system.
Brad: [01:07:12] was that last year's game or the beta for the new one
Will: [01:07:14] This is a modern warfare. And I was testing that actually in the, in the, uh, battle Royale training mode, where you go to the quarry and there's a tower, there's a specific spot. They listed several spots that were good to test stuff in each of the games, uh, Fortnite was happening in creative mode. So there was less stuff on screen.
It wasn't, it was just those little small areas that they start you out in, not the larger kind of, you know, main Island with twist tilted towers and all that business.
This wood. Chipper is really loud.
Brad: [01:07:48] I can't even hear it, but I assume that this video call is filtering it out for me
Will: [01:07:51] The noise gate is probably getting it on my mic. Um,
Brad: [01:07:54] uh, maybe they can't even hear it
Will: [01:07:56] Hm. I like that optimism.
Brad: [01:07:59] anyway. All right. So like you get the latency number on the monitor. I mean, I think you also can get it in windows right.
Will: [01:08:05] So you can, it, it pops up like an overall latency on the monitor with the frame rate display, that's built into the monitor. If you turn that on it's, it's huge. And like the top left of the screen. So I wasn't using that. Uh, there's a special version of GeForce experience. That was pre-released for our testing purposes, that you bring up the performance overlay and send it to the latency one and it breaks down everything.
Uh, with like, uh, PC latency, uh, GPU CPU latency, GPU latency, mouse latency, and then they bundle all of that together as system latency. Now there's a couple of gotchas. Uh, one of them is that only certain mice work. So there's like a list of, I think, six mice, including the Logitech G pro the, uh, Asus chakram core,
Brad: [01:08:48] Oh, wait, are these existing, are these existing mice not in mice that have been rolled out for this feature
Will: [01:08:53] These are, these are, these are mice that were commonly used in the e-sports world is my understanding
Brad: [01:08:56] Oh, interesting. Oh, is that, do you think that's something where they are having to add support for those mice in software or something like that?
Will: [01:09:02] My guess is that they worked with the mouse manufacturers to add whatever it is. They need the
Brad: [01:09:08] I mean is whatever what I'm getting at though, is it's not like you need a specific mouse with, you know, you know, the way that G-sync monitors need g-sync hardware in them. You're not, it's not a situation where the mouse needs specific hardware in it or something like that.
Will: [01:09:18] I don't believe so. I mean, I assume that that is not the case. I assume that they're doing something on the driver level so that geforec experience can tap into the mouse to see. The two, my guess is that they're looking at pipeline numbers and then the total click registered by the monitor and going forward from there.
And, and, and they're subtracting the system, the CPU and GPU latency from the total latency reported by the monitor. And that's how they get the mouse latency. Um, I, so I was able to, the G pro is a wireless mouse. I was able to test it wired and wireless. I tested this, uh, chakram core mouse from a Asus.
Uh, the chakram core was consistently half a millisecond. The Logitech mouse was like 2.6 milliseconds wireless and like 1.6 wired. Um, I don't think that one millisecond is enough for me to wire up the cordless mouse.
Brad: [01:10:05] probably not.
Will: [01:10:06] Uh, but it's like,
Brad: [01:10:08] is that the, to be clear, is that the mouse CPU latency specifically
Will: [01:10:12] That is the, that is the time between when the mouse registers the click and the system
Brad: [01:10:18] the game acting on it. Yeah. Okay.
Will: [01:10:20] Uh, the, the interesting thing about all this is that we tried to do something similar to measure, click to photon latency on a system in like 2007 at maximum PC. And we got to the point that we were looking at renting, you know, 10,000 frames per second high speed cameras.
And that's when we stopped, because those were too expensive to rent on the magazine's budget at the time. So,
Brad: [01:10:42] I love, I love how there's something just delightfully mechanical about the way you have to measure this stuff. You know? Like you'd like typically you feel like, Oh, there must be some sort of, sort ether of programmatic way to just profile this performance and pull these numbers out of the, either a bit like you're sitting here talking about pointing a camera at a monitor and putting a piece of tape over a sensor on the mouse.
You know what I mean? Like this is, so this is so fast that you have to like get back into the physical realm. So to actually to measure it, you know,
Will: [01:11:08] Well, I mean, realistically, the way you would measure this, if you weren't doing. The, if it wasn't built into the monitor and would support for the mice is you would get a really high-speed camera pointed at a screen. Have it lit bright enough that you could actually see the mouse button move on the high speed and then you'd have to measure when the actuation point is on that, on that button press, and then you'd count frames.
And you you'd, you'd multiply that by the frame rate of the camera and get the number of milliseconds it took on the screen and it, and it's incredibly fiddly. It takes a long time and like, Realistically, it takes a couple of hundred iterations to do it, to get a reliable number here. Cause I saw pretty good variance on the, on the, on the frame results.
Uh, and most of the games that I'd tested. So yeah. Yeah, it's, it's a, um, if you plug in, uh, so there's a couple things to note. If you plug in a mouse that is not on the supported list, then you get, um, then basically they have common mice in a database, and they'll just give you the number that they've recorded, which I think is probably fair.
Um, because I didn't, I, once, once the mouse part was not the part of the very, the CPU and the GPU parts were the parts of that, that varied more than anything else. Uh, occasionally the monitor wouldn't pick up the flash if something happened, like if, if there was lightening or something on the screen. Um, but yeah, that's, that's, that's pretty much it.
And the, the mice that are supported out of the box are, uh, Logitech G pro. Um, uh, Asus Republican gamers, chakram core, the razor deathader V two pro and the steel series rival three. Um, the Logitech will be the, I have a special bios firmware for the mouse that is not going to be available at launch, but it'll be supported later on this year is my understanding.
Brad: [01:12:55] Okay. All right. I, I have, I have one real actual question here, which is once you have that big fat number, is that actionable information? Is that something you can actually use to optimize or is that just like for funsies to gawk at and go like, Oh, that's good to know.
Will: [01:13:09] I feel like it's probably a number that reviewers will care about. Um, more than anything. Although I will say I had a problem with the driver installed my computer and it told me that something was wrong. Like the numbers I was getting were enough to know that something was jacked up with the driver install, which had me then re-install windows on another SSD.
See if it worked there. Everything was fine. So I came back and did like a bunch of driver cleaning and, and got everything back in.
Brad: [01:13:35] Is that actually a thing? I kind of, assume that in modern times that it was just, it was either leftover FID from back in the day, or it was just kind of an urban legend that bad, bad driver installs can actually Jack things up.
Will: [01:13:47] I don't know. I didn't. Troubleshoot to see what was actually happening. But I, my performance was two and a half times less than it was supposed to be than it is now. Uh, yeah, it was, it was some something, my guess is that when I installed the 20, the 3080 on top of the 2080 drivers, something got jacked up during that driver re-install since I was putting the same version of the driver on top of the same version of the driver and didn't do a clean install.
So the lesson here is probably do a clean install when you update your video card. Of the driver, but anyway, it's all good now. Um, and then the last thing is that these are coming out by the end of the year. I think as early as next month is when they're going to start shipping. Uh, but I don't think we have official prices yet.
Nvidia didn't. I was, I'm waiting on a couple of words from a couple of vendors to see anything, but I haven't heard back yet. Uh, and we have, we have run out of time. So, uh, The one thing I will say is that the model, these monitors are listed on some e-tailers at 700 bucks, I think for a 1080P 360 Hertz monitor, which is like, it is a one of a kind device.
My understanding is that the latency stuff is just part of the core G sync hardware. It won't be rolling back into old monitors. Uh, but it will be in it's up to the manufacturer. All the manufacturer has to do is put the special USB port in, which is an, uh, and I was told an extremely low cost change.
Uh, so I I'm hopeful that this will be a standard feature in G sync monitors going forward.
Brad: [01:15:21] I started to say that makes that a definitely an enthusiast item, but I think actually it's more of a professional slash like competitive level item.
Will: [01:15:28] Well, so yeah, I think the 300, I think there's two different things here. One is the 360 Hertz. One is the one is the, um, one is the latency testing. The reflux I think, is supported everywhere. Um, the latency test.
Brad: [01:15:40] I'm sorry, go ahead.
Will: [01:15:41] No. I was gonna say the latency testing. I think like I would have spent a thousand dollars to be able to do that when I was testing video cards in mice regularly.
Um, the 360 Hertz is for people who are incredibly serious about a very small subset of games that actually run at that speed.
Brad: [01:15:57] Yeah, that's what I meant is the, the, the refresh at that level is, is the one that's like pretty niche use case. Like there, the latency stuff obviously has much broader applications.
Will: [01:16:06] Like, like what, what games does DOTArun at? 360 frames. A second?
Brad: [01:16:11] I don't know if there's like, if there may be like arbitrary engine limitations there, but if not, like, it is definitely a very fast performer, if that's what you mean. Like it's one of those games that, you know, what really fucking screams on a good graphic card
Will: [01:16:24] StarCraft two.
Brad: [01:16:25] quake three
Will: [01:16:26] Oh man.
Brad: [01:16:27] it's pull down the console punch in calm underscore show FPS 1. You're off to the races. I bet you could deep. I mean, you could get, you could get more than 360 frames a second and quake three, like 10 years ago,
Will: [01:16:40] Maybe we should throw it all away, Brad, and just be Quake 3 pros.
Brad: [01:16:44] play some Quake well it's quick live now, but you know,
Will: [01:16:47] I want to get back to the real stuff. I don't want any of this bouncy physics. I don't want any of the, yeah. I want the real, the real business.
Brad: [01:16:53] I assume that I imagine the quake live is actually a better product in every way, but. In the magical, optimistic, idealized future, where I set up those Quake servers, it'll be a Quake three servers. Cause that's what I grew up with.
Will: [01:17:09] I, the, the thing I'll say is I was kind of a skeptic on the high refresh rate stuff for a long time, until I started doing more VR work. And I've, I've held off mainly because 1440 is hard for streamers because it's not a streaming friendly resolution to scale down to 1080. Um, and I had a 4k panel that was running at 60 Hertz that scaled down to 1080 beautifully.
Cause you just, you know, run every pixel four times.
Brad: [01:17:33]integer scaling yeah.
Will: [01:17:34] Yeah. Um, the, the difference in the way, like playing Hades at 360 Hertz, even at 1080 P it looks like a piece of paper that's just animated, almost like it's still back lit and all that, but it it's, it's bonkers.
Brad: [01:17:51] actually, when you put it that way. I would almost be more interested in seeing that than something like a Fortnite or a PUBG or some 3d shooter.
Will: [01:17:59] I mean, I don't think there's any appreciable benefit. It just looks, it just looks nice. And I, and again, I don't think that there's any, like, I think that the takeaway here should be, you know, get next time you buy a monitor, get a fast refresh rate monitor. Not necessarily. Get a ridiculous 360 Hertz e-sports monitor, right?
Like, like I will, will this. But I'm going to, I, so I haven't been able to track my, the kind of stat of the performance stat that most people pay attention to in PUBG is average damage per round, because it's a last hit game. So like the person who gets the final shot in can do one damage and get the kill, um, which I know is familiar from other things, uh, the.
The, I haven't been able to track because of stuff that we don't need to get into, but I've been playing in ways that don't necessarily reflect overall performance. Uh, I'm going to take a week or two and just play like I normally would and go at it hard and see what the ADR, see if there's an increase in ADR.
Since I've gotten this monitor versus the times before. Cause my, my average damage has been really static at around 202 between 200 and 250 for like years now. So we'll see. See what changes. Yeah. Science, uh, it's been fun. This is a neat thing. It's it's weird having such an incredibly low resolution monitor on my desk.
Again. I will say that.
Brad: [01:19:23] Well fine. Can't have everything, man.
Will: [01:19:26] Oh, and, uh, these are all IPS panels. Uh, they do all sorts of strobing on the backlights to reduce blur. So the, like you can set it to a backlight setting that produces good blacks and makes videos and stuff like that. Look like they should. Uh, when you put it in the gaming mode, it, it, it blows out everything because that's the way, you know, that's the way the high refresh rate, anti strobe, anti blur gaming stuff works.
Yeah. So, I mean, it looks good with video and all the things you'd want. It also has HDR, but when you turn on HDR support, the, the High refresh rates stuff gets changed. So it's, it's, it's a little fiddly. Um, I think that's just a necessity of the bandwidth on HDMI port though
Brad: [01:20:06] We're in the future
Will: [01:20:07] the future.
Brad: [01:20:08] 360 Hertz is a lot of hurt.
Will: [01:20:12] it's a lot of Hertz. So, yeah, that's it, that's the 360hz. If you have questions about the 360 hz stuff, I've been answering them in the discord and the PC channel, uh, all day. And we'll continue doing that. Or you can send in questions to tech pod at content dot town. Um, should we, should we thank our patrons Brad?
Um, as, as always, this podcast is brought to you with the support of, uh, let's see, I think 1300 and some wonderful patrons.
Brad: [01:20:41] Wow Gezz Thank you so much.
Will: [01:20:42] 1,204 wonderful patrons.
Brad: [01:20:44] very flattering.
Will: [01:20:45] Uh, thank you all so much for your support and especially thanks to our executive producer level patrons, Jacob chapel, Andrew Cotton and David Allen. Um, as always, if you would like to support the tech pod, you can find out how to do that.
By going to patrion.com/tech pod, for as little as two bucks a month, you can get access to the fabulous tech pod discord, where we talk about things like 360 Hertz monitors and cooking, and there's a movies and TV channel I noticed today.
Brad: [01:21:10] yes, I made that on request yesterday. I also made a channel for work.
Will: [01:21:14] What
Brad: [01:21:15] Like word work and like career development stuff. People wanted a place to talk about work.
Will: Oh that’s awesome
Brad: And so they got their virtual water cooler.
Will: [01:21:21] There you go. I like it. We have a big tech announcements channel, so we don't pollute the general chat when there's a new iPhone or Android phone announcement happening. Um, all sorts of cool stuff.
Brad: [01:21:29] Yeah. The new Radeonis coming up next week. So I guess that channel we'll get some more action
Will: [01:21:33] a little, little heat. Yeah.
Brad: [01:21:36] yeah, the $5 tier you get the monthly I don’t know bonus episode, I guess, I guess is what we call it.
Will: [01:21:44] What are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about the jont this month
Brad: [01:21:46] yeah, God,
Will: [01:21:47] Man. That was a don't. I don't want to burn it
Brad: [01:21:49] don't burn the material. I, we should have recorded that conversation like right after you finished that story.
I'm so excited to talk about this.
Will: [01:21:55] I'm glad I've had a little bit of time to digest. It's a lot. There's a lot going on there.
Brad: [01:22:00] Yeah. Um, do you read anything else on that book?
Will: [01:22:03] I have, I, it turns out I had read that book before
Brad: [01:22:05] Okay.
Will: [01:22:06] I was reading the one, the kind of, um, the, the one about the monster, the oil slick monster in the pond in the Lake,
Brad: [01:22:13] Oh, yeah, yeah. Um,
Will: [01:22:14]The Raft I think is what that one's called
Brad: [01:22:14] oh the raft is of this. Yes. There's some pretty gruesome imagery in that one.
Will: [01:22:18] it's the thing that I will say about that collection as a whole is that it is a delightfully McCobb in the same way as like old Twilight zone, like 50 rod Serling, Twilight zones. I I've enjoyed it quite a bit.
Brad: [01:22:31] It's good stuff. But yes, we will be talking about the Stephen King short story at the Jont on the next
Will: [01:22:35] Not the Jont VR, which is a different thing.
Brad: [01:22:37] On on the next, um, next patron, a bonus episode in the week, week and a half
Will: [01:22:43] That's sometime in the next week, we can record that this weekend, if you want, if you want to just bang it
Brad: [01:22:46] just, I just want to talk about that.
Will: [01:22:47] I think I'm going to reread this story again, so it’s fresh
Brad: [01:22:49] think it is, I, I think it is, in some ways it is one of the most horrifying things that I have read or seen or consumed in any media related fashion.
Will: [01:22:57] So if you want
Brad: [01:22:58] I'll explain why.
Will: [01:22:59] that's in a skeleton crew, uh, which is, I think his Stephen King's first short story collection
Brad: [01:23:04] That's a second, second one night night shift was, I think night shift might actually be even better than skeleton of crew.
Will: [01:23:10] His short stories are very
Brad: [01:23:11] They're both fantastic. They're two of my favorite books ever.
Will: [01:23:14] I love when Stephen King writes science fiction. It's my favourite
Brad: [01:23:16] Yes. Yes. For sure.
Will: [01:23:18] Um, so that'll do it for us this week. Thank you all for listening. Uh, again, the address is patrion.com/techpod. If you'd like to find out how to sign up and support the show and get some fabulous benefits for doing so.
Uh, but yeah, I guess we'll see you all next week. Always a pleasure, Brad. Bye everybody.