On this busy week we threw together a delightful potpourri of different topics, from gadget repair to drilling through PCBs, lust for 4k TVs (or not), making the lightest mouse in history, the huge potential of handheld lidar, and a quick glimpse at what's coming next in big-budget video game development. Support the show and join the Techpod Discord for as little as $2/month at https://patreon.com/techpod.
On this busy week we threw together a delightful potpourri of different topics, from gadget repair to drilling through PCBs, lust for 4k TVs (or not), making the lightest mouse in history, the huge potential of handheld lidar, and a quick glimpse at what's coming next in big-budget video game development.
Support the show and join the Techpod Discord for as little as $2/month at https://patreon.com/techpod.
Bearded Bob's YouTube G Pro switch replacement video (the whole channel is good too!):
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Will: [00:00:00] I've always thought grandmas come in two flavors. Potpourri and rosewater
Brad: [00:00:04I’m going to be honest we are picking, we are artificially resuming this conversation from before we started recording
Will: [00:00:11] you can't tell them that
Brad: [00:00:12] you can't just say something like you just said out of context and just roll with it, man.
Will: [00:00:17] My grandmas are both rosewater grandmas.
Brad: [00:00:19] We were talking about jeopardy. We were talking about the fact that jeopardy had a common category called popery. And then you said you wouldn't know about puffery without the Jeopardy category called popery. And I was like, wait, you're granma never put popery out or whatever. And then, and that's when you said the infamous line.
Will: [00:00:35] Grandma's coming to flavors, rosewater in lab. And popery
Brad: [00:00:38] what is Rosewa?
Will: [00:00:40] Rosewater is water that smells like roses.
Brad: [00:00:41] Okay. That's the truth and advertising.
Will: [00:00:45]I mean I think there's probably also like a sub genre of grandma. That's that's a fork of the popery brand. That's like lavender, like dried lavender because my English grandmother was a dried lavender technically.
She wasn't so much on the rosewater.
Brad: [00:00:57] Somebody swapped out rosewater dot H and subbed in lavender dot H.
Will: Yep. Yeah.
Brad: Okay. Boy,
Will: [00:01:05] my grandmother's house always was a little musty smelling.
Brad: [00:01:08] Ooh, no, that’s no good.
Will: [00:01:09] not like dirty musty, but just like old stuff. Musty
Brad: [00:01:14] Ah okay mothbally kind of
Will: [00:01:15] mothballs are kind of accurate. It was more of a, more of a kind of like old books, like, you know, like good, bad old book smell that makes you sneeze.
And then there's good. Old book smell that you're like, man, this is a good ass book.
Brad: It's like comforting
Will: that one.
Brad: [00:01:27] Okay. My grandmother kept a very floral house. Let's say a very. It was a bit, it was a bit much, but it was not unpleasant.
Will: [00:01:36] It’s like The Chuck Berry, this, the nasal equivalent of the Chuck Berry wall of sound.
Brad: [00:01:40] Uh, sure.
Will: [00:01:42] Like you just hit there and you were like, wow, I know where I am.
Brad: [00:01:46] That's a lot of mental gymnastics to put that analogy together. Sure. Yeah. What you said,
Will: [00:01:51] look, Brad, you're tired. I get it. You've had a week, like when was the last time two consoles landed in the same week. Um, ever.
Brad: [00:01:58] The, I would have to say, I mean, unless I'm missing something, the PlayStation three and wii both released within like two days of each other, which I know, because I went to New York to cover both of those launches back to back.
Will: [00:02:10] But the X-Box and that year had launched a full year before, right?
Brad: [00:02:14] Yes. The 360 came out a whole year before that stuff.
Will: [00:02:18] Yeah. So, uh,
Brad: [00:02:19] The last time around, I want to say they came out a week apart, PS4 and the xbox one, I want to say we're right around a week apart. And even then that was like, Oh my God, they're going head to head.
I can't believe they're launching just a week apart. And now here we are barely 48 hours separates them. And it's been a ride.
Will: [00:02:38] How you holding up, man? You guys did a lot of video this week over on the other thing you do.
Brad: [00:02:40] Uh we did a lot of streaming this week. A lot of recording stuff, a lot of behind the scenes work too.
That doesn't may not be obvious that. It's been a lot
Will: [00:02:53] well those games won’t test themselves,
Brad: [00:02:54] even, even without navigating a change in corporate ownership, it would have been a lot.
Will: [00:03:00] Yeah,
Brad: [00:03:01] try going through all of your corporate, new company onboarding in the middle of it, all that stuff.
Will: [00:03:06] Oh, hey have you done your harassment training and, uh, selected your new, uh, healthcare options.
Huh? What about your disability insurance? Your life insurance, your
Brad: Nope. Nope, Nope.
Will: No time off. Oh, wow.
Brad: [00:03:19] Yeah, they did set up my email account. Okay. I've got that far baby steps.
Will: [00:03:23] Nice work.
Welcome to Brad and Will made a techpod. I'm Will,
IBrad: [00:03:58] I'm Brad. How's it going? Wll,
Will: [00:04:00] it's look, look, Hey, check this out. I'm going to, I'm going to do a thing with my face that you can see that the audio listening won’t be able to see..
Brad: [00:04:06] Good This is going to play. Oh man. You look a little manic. What is going on there?
Will: [00:04:09] Both sides of the face work.
Brad: [00:04:10] Oh God, what is wrong with me? I'm just congratulations. I'm sorry to, God. This is how. Disconnected from, from daily reality. I have been that I completely forgot about your situation, which you seem to have overcome in record time.
Will: [00:04:23] Um, Gina's pissed off at me because she had this like 10, 15 years ago.
It was, it was six weeks before she was able to move left side of her face at all. So
Brad: [00:04:30] did we actually talk about it by name? last week.
Will: [00:04:33] Maybe not,
Brad: [00:04:34] but I think you, I think you just glossed over it because you sounded normal. So we just didn't. Touch on it, but,
Will: [00:04:38] Oh, well maybe we should not talk about this then
Brad: [00:04:40] Well we already talked about it and I, you just have to put a name to it.
Will: [00:04:43] Okay. So, um, I had bells, I have Bell's palsy, which is a temporary neurological thing. It caused it's caused by a pinching of a nerve in your upper neck. And it basically causes one half of your face to stop working. And I lost my sense of taste too, which has been an exciting, like or smell, I guess, more than taste.
I can still taste salt and sweet and all that, but it's been. I I've never had that happen before. Even like, even when I have a cold, I can still smell enough that like food tastes like food. Uh, and it was profoundly weird to eat like, you know, ice cream and have it be sweet. And you can tell you, like, it's it lets you separate.
How much of it is T of each sensation is like taste and how much is like. Texture. And then how much is smell? Uh, it was, it was very interesting.
Brad: [00:05:28] It’s a really Double whammy. At this particular time in history to both have at the side of your face, go numb and also lose your sense of smell. Like you could, you get to worry that you're having both a stroke and coronavirus at the same time.
Will: [00:05:41] I was going to say, but I went to, when I drove to the hospital at two o'clock in the morning or one o'clock in the morning on election morning, like Monday night, Tuesday morning.
Brad:Oh my God.
Will:I thought I was having a stroke. So when I got there and they were like, Oh no, it's just Bell's palsy. Everything.
After that, it was literally the best news I've ever heard
Brad: [00:05:56 This is all just gravy at this point.
Will: [00:05:58] So he was like, he couldn't. And I, of course I had, we had masks on and I was making a face because half of my face wasn't working in the other, the other, eye was doing overtime. He was like, are you okay? You look like you're upset.
I was like, no, I'm just really happy. I thought I was gonna be, I was, I was gonna have like seriously impaired cognitive function or death. So like, Hey, your face is going to be jacked up for three months. No big deal.
Brad: [00:06:17] Stick me with needles, straps, some electrodes on whatever you want to do. It's all just to icing.
Will: [00:06:24] Hashtag winning.
Brad: [00:06:25] Yes. Hashtag not a stroke,
Will: [00:06:27] not a stroke. Anytime. It's not a stroke. That's good news.
Brad: [00:06:30] It's probably not going to be the episode title.
Will: [00:06:33] I hope not. Please, please make it. No, not the episode title. Um, so, so yeah, we have a, it's a weird episode cause you've been slammed. Usually we, we like figure out what we're going to do earlier in the week or even the week before.
And we're kind of like. We were talking about Alex. Trebeck a little bit, we're going to do a popery episode.
Brad: [00:06:49] Yeah. We're just going to grab bag some stuff here. Let's just talk for a few minutes.
Will: [00:06:54] We have a few things. We have some things that like, like we're going to talk about fixing stuff. Cause I replaced the mouse switches on my logictech G Pro I had a bad switch.
And I got to learn how to Desolder, thanks to twinkle Twinkie in the, in the chat.
Brad: [00:07:07] I didn't realize that any soldering or Desoldering, that's interesting to hear. I guess we'll talk about it some more.
Will: [00:07:12] We'll talk about that. Um, talk about like things we've fixed and origins of fixing, and then if we have time, we're going to talk about some tech.
We're excited about that's coming down the line,
Brad: [00:07:20] some random stuff.
Will: [00:07:21] Yeah. Um, but also shout out to Alex Trebeck, uh, who, uh, ruled for a long time and was maybe the first nerd I saw on TV as a kid. So love that guy and yeah,
Brad: [00:07:34] real interesting bedside manner. He had, I've seen some clips going around, actually, you know, what's weird is this was a decent number of the clips or photos I've seen of jeopardy going around are being posted by.
The people who were on the show at the time,
Will: [00:07:46] oh yeah.
Brad: [00:07:47] A surprising number of people were just popping up on Twitter, going like, Oh yeah, here's the clip from when I was on jeopardy. And it's like, wow. A lot of people have been on jeopardy apparently.
Will: [00:07:53] Well, I mean, look, we, you, and I know at least two people that have been on jeopardy to really work with one
Brad: who
Will: Ted was on jeopardy
Brad:really.
Will: I mean, just try it out. I can't remember. I know a couple other people who have been on jeopardy, my friend Gun ficemen was on jeopardy a few times and like, like, um, like a lot of people, I mean, they've done a bazillion seasons of that and they do like 60 episodes a year or something. So, uh, or sorry, more than that, they do five episodes a night for 30 weeks a year.
So
Brad: [00:08:20] five a night?
Will: [00:08:21] five, five a week. Sorry. Okay.
Brad: [00:08:23] Okay.
Will: [00:08:23]It's it's a lot of episodes.
Brad: Yeah, for sure.
Brad: [00:08:26] he did that. He'd had that certain, like, uh, what's the word I'm looking for?
Will: [00:08:29] He was just Nonplussed all the time
Brad: [00:08:31] Yes. Yes. He was a little bit, uh, not cold. Exactly. But he could be very hard to impress.
Will: [00:08:38] Yeah. Like,
Brad: [00:08:39] like you'd get a lot of, like, somebody would sit there and spend 30 seconds telling him their life story and it'd be like, that's it.
Huh?
Will: [00:08:46] Well, it wasn't mean though. It was like,
Will: [00:08:50] thanks for sharing.
Brad: [00:08:51] Yeah, he was a little blunt. He could be very blunt
Will: [00:08:53]He was kind of like mr. Rogers, but just slightly, just like 8% edgier, the barest edge,
Brad: [00:08:59] the slightest. So just a slight crotchety, I guess
Will: [00:09:03]like you didn't want to disappoint, Alex is what I would is where I would have landed.
.
Brad: [00:09:07]Right Uh, I hadn't even started thinking about who might take over, but I saw a push for LaVar Burton, which I was like, that's probably about the best choice I could think of right now.
Will: [00:09:17] Look right now, the leading candidates that I've seen on the internet, where no one's opinion matters are I think LaVar who'd be awesome.
And, and Wolf Blitzer who had the, my generated my all-time favorite. Favorite celebrity jeopardy screenshot, which is like him and Andy Richter. And I can't remember who's in the middle, but Andy Richter has like $35,000 on the board. And Wolf Blitzer is like negative 18 grand. And on celebrity jeopardy, they don't, they, they get to play final jeopardy, even if they're negative because celebrities, um, yeah.
Anyway,
Brad: [00:09:54] I've I've seen, I've seen that clip go around of that instance for a long time and I've never actually been able to watch it. Cause I know what happens just for fear of vicarious embarrassment.
Will: [00:10:03] I, I, you just feel bad for Wolf, right? Right.
Brad: [00:10:06] Yeah. Yeah. I can't, I can't bring myself to view someone else's shame in such a way, but
Will: [00:10:12] anyway, um, I always loved the popery episodes when I was with the appropriate category.
Cause I assumed that that was just the cat and the questions that like the writers loved and they couldn't find a slot to put it in normally. So they had like the, on the, on the whiteboard at the end of the season, there's just a bunch of cards with all these good questions and they're like, well, fuck it.
Let's just put it up here. Let's get these done
Brad: [00:10:33] Now that we've said the word popery enough times just because I, this whole podcast is about knowing what things are and how they work. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here looking up. What goes into popery
Will: [00:10:43] it's like dried herbs, dried herbs, right?
Brad: [00:10:46] A Mixture of dried naturally fragrant plant materials, but I just, okay.
Let's see all spice, uh, Cedar wood shavings, which apparently is a moth repellent. Um, cinnamon bark, cloves, Cypresswood, fennel, fennel seeds. Weird. It doesn't feel like a big thing. It's sausage.
Will: [00:11:04] fennel , Like a fancy Italian sausage. Yes. Sweet sausage always has a lot of fennel
Brad: [00:11:07] apparently also in popery.
Will: [00:11:09] It smells nice.
Yeah. I got no beef with the fennel
Brad: [00:11:11] a lot of stuff. Your Jasmine GGB flowers, Juniper wood lemon peel. you could make popery out of just about anything.
Will: [00:11:20] You could just herbal tea bag and dump that in your drawer and call it a day. Put some bark in there.
Brad: [00:11:25] You can make popery out of, uh, tales of fixing gadgets and also some tech you're excited about
Will: [00:11:30] exactly.
Um,
Brad: [00:11:32] yeah, you, you fixed the switching, your mouse, which is what occasion to the idea of talking about fixing things.
Will: [00:11:38] Yeah. I, I, um, the Logitech mice, these days are shipping these Omron switches that have a propensity toward double-clicking after some use.
Brad: [00:11:47] Well, how much is some use? Cause it's like,
Will: [00:11:49] I don't think it's been more than a year, probably
Brad: [00:11:51] not to get too deep into it.
I mean, I think you, you received that mouse from Logitech for full disclosure, is that right?
Will: [00:11:58] Yeah, this was, this was a, uh, I stream the video games on Twitch and logic tech makes an effort to send free shit to people who stream the video games on Twitch. And as part of that transaction, they sent me a logic G pro wireless mouse, which is like a, it's a, it's a high end mouse.
It's their light. It's their like lightweight model. Okay. Uh, and, and I like it because it's really nice and precise and it's so light. You kind of hardly feel it it's there. So when you didn't like flick shots and stuff like that, you just zap right on the right on the old noggin and dome somebody
Brad: [00:12:27] I just wanted to clear that up in the interest of radical transparency.
Yeah.
Will: [00:12:32] Yeah we don’t want the FTC coming down on us,
Brad: [00:12:33] no, but by the same token, I also just bought a Logitech mouse a couple of weeks ago
Will: with money,
Brad: which is. Yes. Okay. It's just an annex five 18. It's the,
Will: [00:12:41] that's a dope mess.
Brad: [00:12:41] It's the legend reborn is how they describe it. Cause I, you know, I had, I loved the MX 518 back in the day and I was like, it's weird to be nostalgic about a mouse.
And they, it was 20 bucks. So I went and got it cause it was on sale. But anyway, the reason I bring that up is like, Logitech to me has always been like the Rock of mouses of mice over the years. Um, but then when I got this thing, like you had this issue with your, your G Pro and some other people on the discord had some similar stuff to say that like, maybe they're not lasting quite as long as they used to like the G five that I am replacing that just died.
I had for a decade. I bought that literally about that G five, because I needed a new mouse for StarCraft two, his original release. If that's tells you anything
Will: [00:13:22] Oh I remember when you bought that, because you used one of my desk, there was on my desk, I think, before you bought it. Right.
Brad: [00:13:26]I think, I think that's right, like literal decade before that, and I will start a dying.
And so if they're dying faster than a decade, now I'm going to be bummed
Will: [00:13:34] well. So the, the thing I've found, um, uh, having reviewed mice for a really long time is that logictech has a pretty good reputation for build quality. The. The thing that they're better at is warranty support. Like I've had I've I have, I have sent mice, I've called them about mice that were multiple years out of warranty.
And they were like, yeah, just, uh, what's your address? We'll just send you a new one, no need to send the old one back, just, you know, recycle it or whatever, same thing for like harmony remotes and stuff like that. So while they may not like, while the devices may not. Be infallible because you know, nothing's infallible and mice, mice as special mice and keyboards, especially see a lot of abuse in my experience.
Um, they're pretty good. Assuming you haven't been just outright negligent about fixing flaws and workmanship or stuff like this, and they probably would have replaced this. Had I, I, I, I don't, I don't do warranty stuff on products that people send me for free cause that's shitty. Um, if it hadn't been something I had bought and it did this and I'd called them, then they would have absolutely replaced it.
I have no doubt of that. But, uh, as I was getting ready to go buy another mouse, I was like, Hey, maybe I'll, uh, maybe I'll see about fixing this one. Cause I like to not put things in the landfill, that seems like a good thing to do. And sure enough, there was a guide on YouTube by this guy named, um, I'll have to look it up and put a link in the show notes, but he's bearded something.
Uh, and he had a video guide on like, okay. A, this exposed me to a whole sub culture. I didn't know, exist that I'm now in love with of like ultimate mouse, weight reduction people. So. There was a picture of a G pro that somebody had taken all of the outside plastic that Logitech provides off and they built a frame out of carbon fiber and honeycomb to the base.
Brad:Wow.
Will: And like the whole, the, all that was in the mouse was like a little bit of a, a hump on the back, like two wires. You could kind of have your hand on and then like Wells, where you went down and hit pads that were just physically mounted on the switches.
Brad: [00:15:30] I have to see what this looks like. You have to send me.
Will: [00:15:32]and it weighed like 24 grams. It was really light.
Brad: [00:15:33] Do you have any way that I could Google that right now? Cause I've really want to see that
Will: [00:15:37]Just search ultralight Logitech G Pro mods
Brad: [00:15:43] Logitech G Pro carbon fiber.
Will: [00:15:45] There you go. So. I was looking at that. And I was like, okay, that's too far. But he had a good tutorial for switching the switches and it like the disassembly of the mouse. Isn't too hard. You have to pull the, the Teflon feet off and then unscrew like seven screws and separate the bottom from the top disconnect, a couple of cables, pop out the battery, uh, unscrew the retaining clips that hold the buttons in place and then pull the buttons up.
And then you can access the board, pull the board that the, that the switches are on out and desolder the switches and all that. But, but the switches are three pole switches, which means there's three wires that come out of the bottom of the switch, go through holes on the, on the board and dishonoring stuff that has one hole, really easy desolder things that have two holes, pretty easy do desolder things that have three holes.
Traditionally has been beyond my skill level.
Brad: [00:16:35] That's just one extra hole.
Will: [00:16:37] Yeah. But, but like with two you can kind of heat what up and then lift it up a little bit and wiggle, and then you can heat the other end up and wiggle and it just kind of shimmy shimmy it out. But with three, that doesn't work because the two that are still in place, we'll keep it pretty locked down.
There's not non-member wiggle.
Brad: [00:16:50] Sure, sure.
Will: [00:16:52] So I posted on the discord and I, we have a lot of really good electronics people in there. Um, and twinkle Twinkie who we've talked about before in regards to mechanical keyboards.
Brad: [00:17:01] Yes. He's, he's great.
Will: [00:17:03] Um, shared some, like did a really good thread that I'm actually gonna write up and put on like a newsletter or a medium post or something, uh, next week, uh, with a bunch of desoldering tips, like temperature range , tools that you need, um, tools that are optional, but will help you a lot.
And I felt I ordered the stuff that was recommended. I got a good solder sucker. Um, hold on.
Brad: [00:17:30] Will's reaching for his solder sucker I imagine he just leaned aggressively out of frame.
Will: [00:17:36] I am reaching
Brad: [00:17:38] I hear some chair creaking over there.
Brad: [00:17:41] his, his, chair is very orange
Will: [00:17:43] Nevermind. Um, It makes a real good popping noise and it sucks really good.
And it has a removable silicone tip so that you can, uh, you can, uh, like you can, it's it's heat hits, heat safe at the soldering temperature you're gonna use. So you can jam it right up against the soldering iron and like get a good seal, then pop it loose while without taking the solder hand off. So you don't have to be fast or anything.
Brad: [00:18:05] And you're literally just suctioning the warm or the hot, I mean the liquid solder off, right?
Will: [00:18:10] Yeah, exactly
Brad: [00:18:12] is that reusable. Or what would you do with the solder after that?
Will: [00:18:14] It kind of falls out. You kind of bang the tip and it just knocks off and then you throw it in the trash. Cause it might be toxic depending on what kind of solder you use.
Cause the home solder usually has lead commercial. Solder is usually our OHS compliant, so it doesn't have lead, but uh, anyway.
Brad: [00:18:30] does it lose its conductivity though? Is that, would you not want to use it again for that?
Will: [00:18:35] You don’t want to. So you don't want to reuse old solder because the flux is built into the solder, usually in the flex is what makes it flow well,
Brad: [00:18:41] I see.
Will: [00:18:41] So there's like, it's like an acidy thing that just makes the solder, uh, you know, how solder it goes from being shiny to like mercury, to like kind of mat as it cools as the solder, as the flux burns away. That's what happens is you're literally like the smoke that comes off solder. Isn't molten metal. It’s the flux burning away.
Brad: [00:19:00] Oh nteresting. Okay good to know.
Will: [00:19:02] So I bought that stuff. I bought some good flux. Um, I think that's it. I think it's all I bought. Uh, twinkled Twiggy recommended a reflow station that was like 35 bucks. And I looked at it and I thought, Oh, I don't want to have to store this in my house. But, uh, I, uh, about two hours into the desoldering process, I really, Oh.
And I bought some, um, some copper, copper wire to kind of wick up the solder, which is the other way you can get solder out of existing joints. About two hours into that, that desoldering process. I wish I'd spent the $35 because it would have been money well spent, even if I just took it out, threw it in the trash, the moment I was done.
Um, but I got it all done. It took, it took a really long time. It was frustrating. I need to buy a pair of magnifiers. That's the thing I realized is that like, I've reached the point now where I can't. Like when I'm doing small, small work like that, having the magnifiers would be really useful.
Brad: [00:19:56] Do you have a grabby arms that we've talked about before
Will: [00:19:58]I have the grabby arms? I already had them, uh, well, I, I can post all this stuff in the show notes so that people can find it if they want, um, And I went down the whole process. It was, it was super good. The mouse is perfect. You wouldn't know that anybody had done anything to, except for, I replaced the black feet with white, with the fancy hyper skids white feet.
Brad: [00:20:17] Something, you'll never see. Cause it sits on the deck.
Will: [00:20:21] Yeah. But they're a little bit higher than the default one. So it's like, I got lifts for my mouse it’s pretty good
Brad: [00:20:26] a little bit more glide on there. So, and so it clicks the same. It doesn't click better.
Will: [00:20:30] Uh, it clicks slightly louder.
Brad: Okay.
Will:Ever so slightly louder, but yeah, the same click,
Brad: [00:20:35] a mouse click as a mouse click right.
Will: [00:20:37] It’s a little bit more hair-trigger and well no, cause it's just like keyboard switches where you can get like different, different forces and all that.
Yeah.
Brad: Um,
Will: it's it's a pretty good, like, I mean, I hear , here.
Brad: [00:20:47] Yeah. I hear that click. Yeah. That sounds like a mouse click.
Will: [00:20:50] Yeah, it's a pretty good click. I was pleased.
Brad: [00:20:52] I have a question
Will: yes.
Brad: That you may or may not have an answer to. Um, when it comes to electronics manufacturing,
Brad: [00:21:01] do you have a good sense of, I mean, I guess we could use the mouse as an example, although we could talk video game consoles or whatever you want, but like, I would love to know, and this probably varies by product where the automation ends and the human intervention begins.
Like obviously if it's like a, you know, if it's a PCB with a bunch of stuff, Uh, I'm trying to think of some, give you some terms here. Resistors, resistors, capacitors, whatever,
Will: [00:21:23] transistors, whatever. Yeah.
Brad: [00:21:24] I assume a lot of that stuff is assembly line. Like robot, arms jamming, a lot of that stuff on there. But when you talk about something that has wires being soldered to something like at what point is it not really practical to have to automate stuff like that.
And humans are having to sit there and finish off that assembly. Do you have any sense of that?
Will: [00:21:42] So you can often tell when you look at the boards, because if there's blobs of solder and it's not just like perfectly, like if they, if they, if it's made by machine, like by a pick and place machine, which is like a little robot that picks up the components and puts them on the board and then squirts a little solder on the, on the pads or whatever.
And then that board will like roll into an oven or into a special thing that heats up the solder without any, like, without anything touching it. It's just, it's just hot enough to melt the solder, but not destroy the devices. Um, then. Uh, that that puts you in, like that's made by machine. Uh, most of the time that there's some hand assembly.
So for example, like an iPhone is probably assembled entirely by machine. At this point, because all the little cables and stuff can be connected by machines. And, um, often if there is hand soldering that looks like it's happened in there, that indicates it may be, it was built someplace that you probably don't want to support because they were using like child labor and stuff like that. Which is shitty
Brad: [00:22:38]Yeah. That is kind of the dark side of this question.
Will: [00:22:41] Um, Like machines, this is a situation where machines are unequivocally better than, than not machines. Um, the actual assembly wildly varies is my understanding that my, my, uh, my data is let's say the last time I've had a conversation with this about somebody who knows and.
People who are listening probably know better than I do. Uh, but as recently, as 10 years ago, if you had a multiplane board, so if you have boards that are like that, uh, stack on top of each other, like a raspberry PI or a Mister, does you know where, where they just kind of slot into things on the board.
That's something that the machines can do. But if you're talking about a mouse where there's like, Boards that are on the side for the side buttons. And there's a board up under the front. That's at a different angle because of the camber of the, of the buttons. Those often have to be assembled by hand, uh, on an assembly line.
So somebody will be sitting there and we'll place every single one, or at least we'll make sure that they line up right. And, and chunk them in there.
Brad: [00:23:40] Cool. That's good to know.
Will: [00:23:41] Yeah. Um, the, the other way that they do the, um, The re soldering the soldering on the machine is called. Hold on, hold on, hold on.
It is called. Um,
Wave soldered.
Brad: [00:24:07] That's like a good motorcycle revving Um there.
Will: [00:24:10] Yeah. Well, I'll cut all that bit out probably, but, uh, it's called wave soldering and I don't know what that means, but you can ask twinkle Twinkie in the, in the discord. So
Brad: [00:24:18] yeah. He knows his stuff for sure. Yeah. His, his, his workstation is pretty serious for what I see.
Will: [00:24:23] Pretty cool. Um, but yeah, so this is the thing about, this was, this was the first time I've ever done, uh, uh, a soldering job that I didn't finish and feel like a hack. Like every time I've tried to desolder something complicated before it often ended with me doing things that are really, ill-advised like getting a drill bit that's the right size and just kinda reaming out the through hole a little bit with that, which is just to be clear, absolutely not the right way to do that.
That is, that is like, it's not going to be good for what you're doing
Brad:Did it work?
Will: Uh, well, yeah,
Brad: [00:24:54] I mean, you can only complain so much then, right?
Will: [00:24:56] Well, but the thing, the thing is, you know, reduce the life of the board. So like, um, so like on this, I use the flux. I used a lot of flux to keep the solder flowing and keep it moving and wick up into the braid and all that.
And it, it took a long time. Uh, but at the end it looked perfectly clean. And when I put the new parts on, they looked like they were meant to be there even though they were different colors than the switches that I started with. So I was pretty stoked
Brad: [00:25:19] I'm just going to ask another question.
Will: Yeah.
Brad: Tangential to this. Cause I guess that's what I do, what I want to hear about things.
Will: Um, that's why were here.
Brad: Yes, I guess so, uh, and again, I apologize, my brain is motion. I'm trying to think how to phrase this question. Like, is there anything, is, is, is the PCB part of, or is the, the, you know, the, the, the board part of a PCB totally inert, like as long as there, as long as you don't see any traces running through a given part of the board is anything ill.
Are you going to be any ill, chronic consequences? If you like drilled a hole through that part of the board, you get what I mean? Like, is there no, like an electrical traces or anything similar? In that's spot.
Will: [00:25:58] So it depends on the board. I'm on a single layer PCB. You're probably fine. Uh, I, my understanding is I've never tried to actually drill through a board because that like, they're a little brittle.
So you might explode it and doing that. I don't know..
Brad: [00:26:13] Yeah this is very theoretical hypothetical. Not something you should actually try. If you care about the device,
Will: [00:26:18] most modern boards, like the one on a raspberry PI or a motherboard or something, or a video card are multilevel multilayer boards.
Brad: [00:26:25] Okay. So there’s stuff in there
Will: [00:26:26] instead of having one, one conductor, you know, it's a sandwich of a piece of fiberglass, a conductor, and then another piece of fiberglass and there's some stuff in between.
Um, and the traces, the traces are cuts. In that conductive layer. Um, so if you have a multi-layer board where the holes go, where like one hole is connected to the level three and one holds connected to level seven, one holds connected to level five. You may not be able to see where the traces are in the middle layers.
They may just be visible in the top and the bottom layers. So, um, don’t drill holes in motherboards.
Brad: [00:26:58] yeah, yeah. Again, I'm not recommending it. I just mean just, just theoretically though. If, if you hit a spot on the board, that was nothing but pure fiberglass. Like it wouldn’t effect anything?
Will: [00:27:07] Yeah. If it doesn't explode your probably fine.
Brad: [00:27:08] Interesting. Okay, good know.
Will: [00:27:10] I think, I don't know. Discord will tell me if I'm wrong. we’ll have a correction next week, uh, you had talked about, um, like you learning to fix stuff by, by like taking apart console's back in the day,
Brad: [00:27:22] Yeah I know of floated that idea. When you started talking about your mouse, it's just Scott. Maybe we should just talk about our history of taking stuff apart.
But, uh,
Will: I like that.
Brad: I don't, I don't know how much I have to talk about there, but yes, modding Will: PlayStations was my very first exposure to soldering.
Will: Ooh,
Brad: which I think we've talked about at some point in some capacity, but
Will: [00:27:39] yeah, your, your long history of console game piracy has been a topic of conversation
Brad: [00:27:44]No I have three or four of them total in my life, but actually how much more there is to say that other than I had a cheap $10 radio shack, soldering iron, that I did it with and never actually upgraded.
Will: [00:27:59] So I never, I never actually did that.
Brad: Um, really?
Will:No, I never, I never had a plan. I never, I, so I skipped from the, and 64 to the XBox one PS, two generation, and I never got a PlayStation, I guess I got a dreamcast late. Yeah. Well, cause I was like, it was the nineties man. I was into quake. I didn't want to play any of your tomb Raiders.
I could've played that on their PC. I had a video card.
Brad:That's fair.
Will:Um, what, what was involved with modding? The PlayStation?
Brad: [00:28:26] It was like a four wire chip. I forget. Uh, exactly what the, it is like one ground wire and three, whatever, whatever.
Will: [00:28:32] Yeah.
Brad: [00:28:33] But yeah, you literally just soldered like four wires to four different points on the board.
It was very easy, pretty hard to mess up.
Will: [00:28:39] So did, but did you have to hit like a jumper or did you hit a pin like a through hole? It was something else or was it like a place where the, like, was this all those little leads that came off old-school CPU's
Brad: [00:28:49] Oh gosh, I don't know how to describe it. It's like the it's kind of the pointy that's like, uh, something that was attached on one side of the board and like had a point.
Oh, sticking through to the, is that a through hole?
Will:That’s a through hole.
Brad: Okay. Because you don't see a hole there, you just see the metal.
Will:Yeah the hole is filled with solder
Brad: [00:29:02] Okay. So I didn't realize that that's how you would refer to that. But yeah, that's what it was. I, if I remember if memory serves and I’ve got, my last police station that I, that I modded in the closet somewhere, so theoretically I could open that thing up and look at it, look at the job I did 20 and 20 years later.
Will: [00:29:19] Did you have to play games from Japan?
Brad: [00:29:23]Yes so that was for everything.
Will: Okay.
Brad: Um, and then, gosh, what was it eventually like toward the end, they started shipping games that defeated the modchips with software,
Will:like would kill them?
Brad:Yeah like or it wouldn't boot. It would just like, it would not make it to the title screen if it detected the chip.
Will: [00:29:40] That's a trip.
Brad: [00:29:41]Uh, yeah. So that last chip that I put in, I, I had connected it to a toggle switch that would. Kill the power to the chip.
Will: Oh really?
Brad: So I could still play the games that, that wouldn't boot because the, you know, the dyno crisis was one of those.
Will: [00:29:56] Oh, that's a trip.
Brad: [00:29:57] Yeah. So drilled out a little hole on the back of my last PlayStation and just screwed a little radio shack, rocker switch toggle, switch in there.
Turn the matchup on and off at will. It's pretty fun.
Will: [00:30:08] Huh?
Brad: [00:30:09] Um, anyway, I don't, I don't know. I think we've, I, I always second guess on this podcast, anytime we talk about a thing like this, like we must have talked about this before. Right. I have to just be repeating myself from like 30, 30 episodes.
Will: [00:30:21] I mean, we, we did, we touched on it a little bit early on.
I remember.
Brad: [00:30:24] Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
Will: [00:30:28] I also don't remember like a pretty substantial chunk of the episodes from like February of this year to maybe April of this year. So
Brad: [00:30:36] I don't think people understand. When do you do this for a living your capacity to forget all of the things you've said over time? Like in my, in my other life, people will be like, Hey, remember when you gave so-and-so PS two game was six point whatever.
And I'm like, I don't remember ever playing that game, let alone reviewing it.
Will: [00:30:55] Well, you know, it's funny. This is, this is a sidebar, but when I was at maximum PC. I always fought. We had this, when I started, we had this list, like we just kind of casually stuck up a cut off. We cut off the cover of every magazine of every issue and just stuck them up on the wall.
And in rows of 12 or 13, however many issues we did that year. So, and when we moved offices, I always fought to keep that to the point that like I got a bunch of poster board and glued them to the poster board so we could pick them up and move them with us because it was so useful to have a physical reminder of.
Like what work was in which months, like with the cover and, you know, like here's the five things that were in that issue. And then that would prompt everything else that when that issue.
Brad: Right.
Will: And because there were discreet stops and stops, like each issue was a discreet thing, right? Like November, 2000 was I still remember a home theater, PC, first home theater, PC build.
Right. And, and we would go through those. Like having those on the wall where you could glance at them, let you know exactly where, like I could remember where everything was there. And then we started tested and started working on the web where it just never there's no stop ever. You just always keep going and it's all gone.
Brad: [00:32:04] I think that is a big part. And that's a big part of it is that? Yes. It's just one long unbroken chain of yeah.
Will: [00:32:11] Yeah.
Brad: [00:32:13]Anyway, um, but I started to say, like I took apart my receiver, my AV receiver. Uh, a couple of years ago,
Will: [00:32:19] the Sony one.
Brad: Yeah.
Will:Oh, wow. What for?
Brad: [00:32:22] It's a long story. I had some work done on it, but then some other stuff got broken in it.
So I actually ended up, I actually ended up having to buy an entire new faceplate for it. Like, that's kind of what happened is the face plate got broken in the process of fixing the big led display on the front. Yeah. So I had to straight up go find whoever Sony's like warranty parts. Supplier is and buy a new face plate from them.
Will: Wow.
Brad: Yeah. So I'd have to take all that stuff apart and reconnect all the ribbon cables and blah, blah, blah
Will: [00:32:47].Those ribbon cables. Like the ribbon cables are the hardest part of taking apart, modern, modern stuff in my experience.
Brad: Yeah.
Will: It's really worth, especially if you're taking apart something you haven't done before and you don't know how to do it, it's worth taking a it's worth, having nylons spudgers around, which are, um, they're like little, little plasticky sticks that are non-conductive and pretty soft.
So it's really hard to kind of Jack something up, but it's worth learning how those connectors work. Cause some of them flip up, some of them pull like out away from the socket. Some of them have weird connectors that I've never seen before. So I'm flip up from the far side of the socket. And if you, if you, once you mess those up, you're basically hosed.
Brad: [00:33:26] Yeah. I was, it's a pretty harrowing process. I'm not going to lie. I was pretty proud that it all worked. When I put it back together. Also the power supply inside that thing looked like something that I should not be anywhere near with a screw driver or anything else.
Will: [00:33:38] Th that's the way the old TiVo where I used to do TiVo upgrades for people, uh, for friends. When, when remember TiVo, that was a thing.
Brad: Oh yeah.
Will:Um, people would buy like the 14, 14 hour TiVo or whatever, and be like, Hey, this thing doesn't hold enough. Can you do anything about that? I was like, yeah, I got you. Bring me up, bring me a hard drive and bring your TiVo over here. 10 o'clock behind the best buy we'll take care of you.
And then you have to bless the hard drive.,
Brad: [00:34:01] Yeah you bless the drive.
Will: [00:34:01] So we had to take the old drive out, you had to bless the drive, which basically was like putting some weird file system business on there. Cause it was a Linux machine,
Brad:dark magic.
Will: Uh, but, but those power supplies were just some exposed fat, fat capacitors that look like, look like a real heart stoppers if you, if you hit the wrong point on them.
So, and all sorts of goopy grease stuff there to cool. Anyway,
Brad: [00:34:25] indeed, I've got something today. AV receiver related that I want to talk about that would have made sense in the tech. We're excited about part, but I don't know if I should save it for that not.
Will: [00:34:35] I mean do you want to do the tech? We're excited about we can go, It’s potpourri man it’s whatever, all bets are off.
Brad: [00:34:40] we can just move into that. Well, okay. It's actually the third item on that list, but I'm just going to read it first because we have got this awkward segue. Here's what I wrote new. TV's kind of maybe because consoles, but not really
Will: [00:34:53] nailed it. That's that's a good read.
Brad: [00:34:55] Like I was trying to come up with,
Will: [00:34:57] hold on.
Can you do that one, like a little more enthusiasm about because consoles and a little more dejected Nuss on, but really not really.
Brad: [00:35:06] New. TV's kind of maybe because console's, but not really
Will: [00:35:11] perfect. Nailed it like that. Okay. We'll ship that one.
Brad: [00:35:14]Yeah Okay. Um, yeah, I was just trying to come up with some items to populate this list with and.
I'm kind of in new TV mode. Not really, but I'm sort of at least thinking about it kind of a little bit. because of these consoles,
Will: [00:35:26] we, we went down this path a couple of months ago.
Brad: Yeah.
Will:And we talked about it a little bit. And then I decided after, after looking at what was available and like either the amount of money you would have to spend to get all the shit that I want in my next TV or the sacrifices I would have to make to buy a reasonably priced TV that did the things that I wanted.
I was just like, Fuck it I'm waiting.
Brad: [00:35:48] What are the things you want?
Will: [00:35:50]Well I want the new HDMI Spec
Brad: [00:35:51] HDMI 2.1 goes without saying, that of course , although like the shitty thing, I think we've maybe mentioned this before. The shitty thing is you can have. Those ports on a TV and still not support all of those features,
Will:right
Brad: Like it's possible to like do 4k, 120, but not support the variable refresh or the auto low latency. You know, like you could still leave features out of that spec and still say that you're compliant.
Will: [00:36:14] So I wanted that. I wanted variable refresh. Ideally I wanted like a G sync or, you know, free sync type situation.
That's going to do the frame buffer, the smart frame, buffer, uh, writing. And, um, I wanted all the HDR business. I want something that has actual, real black levels, not, not a bad LCD, although I think at this point, like the LCDs that do bad, like black levels don't exist in the.
Brad: Yeah.
Will: Even in the low end big set sizes
Brad: [00:36:38] I've been keeping up with the reviews of the, um, God, I want to make sure I keep this straight, the mini led.
Not the micro led is the magic feature technology.
Will: [00:36:48] micro led is the future. Mini led is the backlight
Brad: [00:36:50] micro led is the successor to OLED. Crazy awesome tech. Yeah, you're right. Mini led is just those standard LCD, but with a very high resolution, backlight
Will: [00:36:59] right? Micro led is when the, the LEDs are actually the pixels, not.
Brad: [00:37:03] Yes which is what OLED is as well.
Well, it's just that OLED is made with organic compounds, which is what the O stands for, which my understanding is that's why they test and to degrade faster, those compounds breakdown,
Will: chemistry.
Brad: Yes. Yeah. Um, anyway, the, the, the mini LEDs, apparently, like they're not OLED, but they're like shockingly good for LCD is what the reviews have been saying that I’ve been looking at.
Will: [00:37:24]So that, that's what, yeah, that's what like TCL and all those guys.
Brad: [00:37:27] TCL has gone pretty hard into mini LED as a kind of lower costs, uh, competitor to OLED.
Will: [00:37:33] It's no quantum dot Brad,
Brad: [00:37:35] What if, what if, what if you had both
Will: [00:37:37] one cool word and one kind of okay. Word.
Brad: [00:37:40] Sure. Um, But, uh, anyway, I don't know. It's not really necessary yet.
I mean, be, it's kind of a nice to have, but eh,
Will: [00:37:52] the quantum dots or the?
Brad: [00:37:54]Oh no just a new TV. Oh, sorry.
Will: [00:37:56] Yeah. I mean, It's funny when the end result of that whole conversation for me was that like, the thing I was excited about was having HDR and the, the TV part of it, I could kind of feel like the higher resolution.
Yeah, yeah. Frankly, the high resolution seems like a real pain in the ass because it seems like, like everything is kind of poorly supported and. Like, like, like, are you going to get 4k worth of pixels across your Apple TV or your Roku or whatever? No. Cause no streaming service is going to stream 4k at a decent bit rate.
It's probably still, you know, anyway. Yeah. I just couldn't be asked
Brad: [00:38:33] I, I am increasingly of the mind of trying to run these console games at native 4k is a fool's errand because like, is it really worth the performance hit? I really don't. I think so, like, I think, I think saying that you are running at 4k on the box as a marketing point.
Is way more important than actually doing it in terms of the practical benefit, as opposed to like running it at, let's say an 1800P with nice upscaling or, you know, something like that. Like, like, I don't think you need to actually tax the machine to get native 4k versus the benefits that you're getting.
Will: [00:39:04] I mean, the lesson of the 3080 for me is that like I have, I have a 3080 on a, uh, Intel I nine 9,900 K right 32 gigs of Ram. It is not an insubstantial computer. And in order for me to play something like watchdogs Legion at 4k, with Ray tracing on, I have to do a whole bunch of other stuff. And then the frame rate is like hinky around 30, 30, maybe 45 frames, a second.
Brad: [00:39:30] That’s and again, to be clear, the machine you just described is like pretty significantly better than these consoles.
Will: [00:39:36] Yeah. So
Brad: [00:39:37] what does that tell you about the, how taxing it is to run games with a native 4k?
Will: [00:39:41] Well, and at the same time, I'd much rather play. I would much rather have a solid 60 frames per second with ray tracings cranked all the way up at 1080P.
On a 1080P monitor then than do the 4k stuff. So yeah, that's, that's, that's where I ended up on that
Brad: [00:39:57] And of course the PC gives you the freedom to actually make those choices, like on console. You're generally stuck with the one or two modes that you are provided by the developer. But like the thing I was going to say is like, half the people I know with 4k TVs are, are preferring these performance modes that all these console games are shipping with right now.
Like everybody I know is using the performance mode, which in a lot of times is like 1080P. Just because the frame rate is so much more noticeable than like somewhat higher resolution.
Will: [00:40:21] The up scalers are really good is the thing, even without doing all the machine learning stuff that like DLSS and the direct X multi-sampling machine learning super sampling do
Brad: [00:40:30] Like even last gen, you had like the checkerboard rendering techniques and stuff like that, that help help you approximate.
You know, a lot of that detail
Will: [00:40:37] well, and, and having the colors and having the reflections and all of that stuff is really good. And having the resolution just makes the frame rate bad. So I, I, um, I mean, look, I also, I probably would feel differently if I had, I kind of made a half-assed effort to buy a PS five and then when the pre-orders were a disaster, I just, I just was like, I'll deal.
Like when I could go to target and buy one, I'll do it. Um, I can wait, I can wait until the next year. Like, I would love to be playing miles Morales right now, but I'll happily wait until I have the new console to do that.. Um, so. So, yeah, like if I had a new console to sit in my, in my, you know, taken up, uh, 18 cubic feet on my entertainment center right now, I'd probably be pretty excited about it might have a different feeling,
Brad: [00:41:16] God it’s so big.
Um, and then the last thing not to ramble about my TV situation all day long, but like I've got a 55 inch and that's probably what I would get in this apartment. I don't think I would want to go to 65 and the size of the living room I have.
Will: [00:41:31] You gotta think about the future, Brad.
Brad: [00:41:31] Well, that's the thing, like that's really what it comes down to for me is like, I'm just not going to buy a TV.
When I, I don't, I kind of don't want to live in this apartment forever and I'm just not going to, like, nobody wants to move it. Nobody wants to move a new TV, you know?
Will: Yeah.
Brad: Like just tough it out on the one you got and like give it away or sell it or
Will: [00:41:50] put it out on the curb with a free sign on it
Brad: [00:41:51] sidewalk with a free sign.
It will last about 15 minutes.
Will: [00:41:55] Some kids, some kid will be so stoked that they'll have in their bedroom, a 55 inch, 1080P plasma set.
Brad: [00:42:01] And wait, wait until you get where you're going and then buy the new TV instead of shipping it once and then shipping it again.
Will: [00:42:06] That's it? I mean, cause you can work with that box. You don't have to keep that box someplace.
Brad: [00:42:11Totally ] just screwed up all of that. But at the, in the meantime 55 inch, like 1080P at, I would guess eight, nine feet that I said away from that. Yeah. I would guess that that's probably pushing most people's capability of noticing the difference set of size and distance of. that type. What do you think?
Will: [00:42:30] I think you'd probably, I mean, you'd probably notice a higher resolution.
Brad: [00:42:33] You probably see a little bit of difference, but I bet it's right on the edge.
Will: [00:42:36] Like, so Gary has one of those LG has a big LG, uh, OLED. And when we went over to check that out, uh, and have a kiddo play date, Uh, the thing that struck me more than the resolution was the, was the HDR. On HDR content the HDR is astounding, like watching Thor, Ragnarok, or wonder woman or planet earth or something like that. It was mind blowing
Brad: [00:42:58] HDR and 120 Hertz are both way more noticeable eye-popping features than higher resolution.
Will: [00:43:03] Yes. A hundred percent agree.
Brad: [00:43:05] Yeah. So anyway, whatever, I'm just kind of, we're just rambling about new TVs.
Cause I was kinda kind of on the brain, but I can tell you that I've played both of these consoles on that 1080P and they look quite good
Will: [00:43:16] and you're getting real solid frame rate. I bet.
Brad: [00:43:18] Yes.
Will: [00:43:18] Even, even at the quality settings, that resolution,
Brad: [00:43:21] um, yeah, I mean, well, you know, it it's game dependent. It's, it's all entirely up to each developer.
Yeah. Most, most of the quality are kind of, you know, they're using different terminology. Some of them in like resolution mode, some of them it's like fidelity mode or quality motor, but yeah, but typically that's 30 frames a second for what I'm seeing.
Will:Interesting.
Brad: Um, The thing, the thing I'm noticing is most of these games, for whatever reason, they use some, you know, they use a rendering technique.
That'll just let you flip back and forth without having to like, restart a checkpoint or, you know yeah. Do a Devitt underscore restart in the quake three parlance. Uh, you know what I mean?
Will: [00:43:57]Oh yeah I Remember
Brad: [00:43:58] the point is that is letting a lot of people who I wouldn't normally think of as frame rate snobs, see the difference basically real time.
Will: Yeah.
Brad: And all of a sudden, a lot of people who previously super didn't give a shit about frame rate are suddenly going. Like, I can't do it with these resolutions modes like I have to use performance. It looks, I think there's psychologically something going on that makes the. The lower frame rate. Look that much worse when you see it side by side, literally flipping it back and forth like that.
Will: [00:44:24] It's definitely a thing that I noticed more if I can, if I can, like, if you can go from slow to fast and then back to slow again, slow looks bad.
Brad: [00:44:31] Yes, for sure
Will: [00:44:32]. Um, I got a new phone this week brand.
Brad: Oh
Will: my iPhone 12 pro uh, the, the upgrade to my, the squall to my iPhone pro 10 or iPhone 10.
Brad: [00:44:44] Okay.
Will: [00:44:45] Which was a four-year-old phone three.
Well, this is the third year I'd had the phone. So it came out in 2018.
Brad: [00:44:51] That's the same guts, Is that the same guts as the iPhone eight? Which is what I have.
Will: [00:44:55] Uh, I think I had, I think it had one newer processor, but maybe it came out the same year as iPhone 8.
Brad: [00:45:00] I'm going to have to look that up. I'm just sitting here thinking if you, if you got rid of that phone, maybe I should also, get rid.
Will: [00:45:05] well, so I wasn't, I was thinking I wasn't gonna upgrade.
And then they had the LIDAR scanner on the back of the. Of the 10 of the 12 pro,
Brad: [00:45:13]Wait, is that what pushed you over the edge?
Will: [00:45:15]Yeah.. I can use it for work. It turns out
Brad: Oh, uh, go on
Brad: [00:45:20] well, back up, I think we may have, we've talked about LIDAR before, but refresh my memory.
Will: [00:45:24] Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, LIDAR uses, uh, uh, uh, basically uses infrared lasers to scan a room.
So imagine a Kinect , Kinect one, but good.
Brad: Okay.
Will: Um, and Apple is putting on the phones because they want to use these for AR positioning so they can get precise positioning using like there's, there's a couple different ways to do precise position inside, out tracking, right 3d space. And one of them is using a LIDAR scan, a sensor.
Uh, one of them is using slam, which is, is used two cameras that are, uh, just normal cameras that are spaced at different places, you know, far enough apart that they can do binocular vision to do the math based on image recognition and stuff like that.
Brad: [00:46:01] Slam got to be the most aggressive. And in your face acronym for tech I've ever heard,
Will: [00:46:06] Look, you got some slam devices in your house, you know it, you got Kinect two that's a slammer
Brad: [00:46:12] boy sure was.
Will: [00:46:13] You've got a Lenovo windows, mixed reality headset. That's a slam device. Yeah. So, uh, both, both are good for different things. The LIDAR stuff lets you do some interesting things that don't work as well with the slam, like the, like the scanning. So I downloaded Scandi pro, which is uh, the, kind of the gold standard for uh, iPhone scanning shenanigans.
And just waved around my room and got a 3d mesh of my room in about 15 minutes.
Brad: Wow.
Will: So phase two is to make a steam VR load screen. That's the room that I'm standing in.
Brad: [00:46:50] Oh my God.
Will: [00:46:51] While using steam VR.
Brad: [00:46:52] That's incredible. How would you, how would you square the positioning though?
Will: [00:46:56] I’ll have to line it up manually?
And then, you know, there'll be a little fiddling, but, uh, that that's, that's a minor problem you can use, um, steam, the steam VR, advanced tools, whatever that thing is called to like rearrange the room.
Brad: [00:47:07] So as you're doing the phone waving around and filling in the room. Can you see on the screen, like how much it's in real time, like you kind of see where you need to continue waving.
Cause it has doesn't have enough data. That's incredible.
Will: [00:47:18] Yeah. So it shows you the camera feed and then it also, so I have a 3d scanner that I used for this early on in the foo days, uh, that was made by a place called structure uh the structure sensor that clipped onto an iPad. And you did that and it was great, but the problem was it lost tracking in 3d space fairly regularly.
So you had to go back and then line it back up again, and then it would resume and pick back up with this because the accelerometer and gyroscopes are really good and the LIDAR sensor is fast and presumably hardware, there's some hardware acceleration going on in there too for the, for the spatial calculation.
So that the AR stuff is rock solid. This, you just kind of move it around and it like paints over. So you, you start with seeing the camera. Like there's the real light camera of the walls. And then as it builds the mesh, it kind of paints 3d white over that mesh. And, um, when you save it, you, you see, you see the mesh of your room.
You can scan people's heads, you can do all sorts of cool stuff
Brad: [00:48:11] any, any old object, basically
Will: [00:48:12] anything so Scandi. Uh, I've only done a couple of, cause I'm not paying for Scandi right now. Cause it's kind of expensive. It's like 50 bucks a year, which isn't like, just to be clear, I paid $500 probably for the structure sensor when it was new.
Um, but, but like. It's incredible. tool
Brad: [00:48:29] That's cool. That is kind of insane, actually, that you can do that. It's not, um, I assume that the end result is just a physical model, right? It's not taking any photography and overlaying it on the model.
Will: [00:48:39] Oh, it'll do it. It'll skin the model with whatever the pictures of the world are yeah it overlays that pretty well.
I haven't. So I haven't gone through and loaded it up into, into something on my desktop yet. That's the next step? I literally just got it yesterday afternoon at like Eight o'clock so
Brad: [00:48:52]finally you can fulfill the. 25 year long dream of making a doom level out of your office.
Will: [00:48:59] I, I w I can make a Doom level out of my whole house.
I can just walk. I mean, it'd be probably not super performing because I have way too many polys, but, um, yeah, it's, it's like, this is one of the things that I'm not excited about for me to use necessarily. Cause I don't have the right skills to make that a useful thing. Uh, for the, without aside from some like easy hacks, like making it my steam VR loading screen or whatever, but I'm super interested.
Like the, the, every time some piece of novel technology has gone from like an expensive thing, that's hard to use to an expensive thing. That's easier to use to a cheap thing that anybody can use, like magic stuff has happened. And we've seen that with like, You know, accelerometers and gyroscopes in phones, begat, you know, drones and 3d and, and stepper motors and microcontrollers like Arduino, beget, 3d printers.
And like the fact that now anybody who buys this thousand dollar phone can scan, you know, can scan. 3d scan stuff for practically nothing. 50 bucks a year from Scandi is, is going to be transformed. I think it's a transformative technology that like we don't. I, I like, I I'm, I have no idea what people are gonna use it for it, and I'm absolutely fascinated to see.
I think, I think the first thing we'll see is a lot more, um, stuff like the, like the stock photo libraries, but for stock 3d scans of weird objects in the world.
Brad: [00:50:23] That's awesome.
Will: [00:50:24] But like, I want to go to museums and scan sculptures and stuff like that. Right? Like I want to get out there and do some, do some weird scans.
It doesn't work great on glass or reflective stuff. That's the, always the problem with LIDAR that slam doesn't necessarily have
Brad: [00:50:38] stands to reason. I assume that in the product could be important than to like a Maya or something similar. Pretty easily.
Will: [00:50:44] There are pipelines often you'll run it through a thing called Meshmixer first, which kind of lets you munch down the, the, the, uh, usually on 3d scans.
I don't know. I don't, I haven't used Scandi in a long time, so I don't know how it works now, but it used to be that you had imported it into a tool that would convert the point cloud into, um, a normal human. Uh, like a normal human, like a mesh, basically. Uh, and then from there you can, munge the mix, the mesh down into like a reasonable number of polygons and apply the skin to it and push it out,
Brad: [00:51:15] turn dots into faces.
Will: [00:51:17] Yeah. Once I got to clean my office up, cause the area behind the green screen is a horrific mess right now. Uh, but once I get through that I’ll
Brad: [00:51:24] that's just more complexity to challenge the app with
Will: [00:51:26] It’s not, I don't want to show anybody what it looks like back there. It's shameful.
Brad: [00:51:29] Is it the bad kind of complexity
Will: [00:51:32]it's it is. It is. It is. Uh, look, we, we it's D it's borderline hoarding at this point, so.
Brad: [00:51:39] Okay Fair enough. Um, two, two points real quick about this. Cause everything. Yeah, everything you just described. Sounds amazing. And like, not at all. What I expected to hear about the iPhone 12, like not even close, uh, point number one, this feels like another major step toward an iPhone.
Just becoming a tricorder.
Will: [00:51:56] I, I mean, I, yeah, I think so.
Brad: [00:51:59] Like We're getting there just slap some radiation sensors. And I think we talked about that before. It's not like that stuff doesn't exist.
Will: You can get those
Brad: turned into a Geiger counter and like two or three other things. And it's like, basically, a tricorder.
Will: [00:52:10] I think there's a micro particulate sensor in there now, too.
I can't remember.
Brad: [00:52:14] That's ridiculous. Uh, the bigger thing I was going to say, and this may be, is a decent segue into our last little topic here. Um, Is the implications for asset generation that has yeah. For cranking out 3d models for real world objects that you might be able to use pretty quickly.
Will: [00:52:31] So, I mean, I think it's more, I think it's one step further removed from that. So sure you look at like
Brad: [00:52:38] Like, I don't, I don't mean you're liking to drop the tea kettle on your stove straight into your unity level or whatever. But
Will: [00:52:45] yeah, we, we did an episode of the foo show where we went in and scanned a bunch of stuff in Adam savages shop and, um, like space, everything from space suits to one of his Maltese Falcons to, um, I don't know, a bunch of stuff.
And like those scans came back. With as many polys as are in like one of those unreal levels, like each scan was like three or 4 million polys, which is a lot, it was an incredible amount of data. Um, you know, you're able to clean those up and kind of munge them down and turn a lot of the poly detail into like normal maps and displacement maps and stuff like that.
And that gets it to the point that it'll run in real time. But I think what'll happen is my guess is that somebody is going to take a, build a clearing house for these scans and then build some sort of game or something that will get people to do that work for you. And then use those two inputs in the output to train the machine learning algorithm, to do that stuff at the same time.
That like, if the problem right now with doing that, as it's hard to get the data, cause there's, you know, there's a big difference between there being 500,000 3d scanners in the world and every iPhone five years from now having a 3d scanner built into it. Right. So, so. You know, I th I think my guess is that that's where this is all gonna be end up
Brad: [00:54:06] Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was getting at. Not that it's going to happen tomorrow, but it's that same process you were just talking about of, it goes from expensive and hard to do to expensive and easy to do too cheap and democratized for everybody. And that's when that's when crazy stuff starts happening.
So
Will: [00:54:19] pretty soon everybody has a podcast Brad. That's all I'm saying.
Brad: [00:54:22] That's nobody should do that.
Will: [00:54:23] They're already there.
Brad: [00:54:25] Oh my God.
Will: [00:54:26] If Brad and will, can have a podcast. Anybody can have a podcast,
Brad: [00:54:28] man. Truer words have never been spoken.
Brad: [00:54:32]All right. Last thing here,
Will: [00:54:33] this, this, you showed me this early today and it blew my mind.
Brad: [00:54:35] This did it. Okay. I went on the, uh, one of our discords and was just like, this looks really good. And I was worried I was being hyperbolic cause nobody else really seemed to bite, but then you saw it and
Will: [00:54:47] I think they're busy.
Brad: [00:54:48] You acted similarly. And I was like, okay, maybe I'm not like, totally crazy here.
But, um, I pulled this because the new consoles came out and I feel like we have still been kind of fighting through a wave of people going, like, when are these going to look like new consoles? You know, it's like, when am I going to see something that looks truly next generation. Which like my first response to that is just remember every other console launch in history there's always happens. it always takes, it always takes some number of months, to years before they really start showing their worth.
Will: [00:55:17] I like, I started playing ghost of tsushima the other night, which I hadn't played when it came out and like, That game is, is the, is the, is the opposite end of that spectrum. Like, that's the difference between that and what a PS4 launch title looks like is astounding
Brad: [00:55:30] Oh my god dude it's basically different, it might as well be different hardware, like, to think that, to think of the last of us too, and ghost of tsushima came out this year up against a knack or.
And nothing against Nac or whatever,
Will:No nac fuck dude nac sucks
Brad: but you know, like that happens every, every generation though, you know, it's like, like put perfect dark, zero up against whatever the last gears was. The shift on the three 60, you know it's always like that
Will: [00:55:55] anyway. You know, I, I wouldn't, I would not, but I'm just saying I would not have, if you showed me gears, show me ghost of tsushima in like what 2000.
10, whenever the PS4 came out and said, this is going to run on more or less the same hardware. I would not have believed it.
Brad: [00:56:09] Totally. Yeah. That's what I'm getting at. So like as much as a lot of people are sort of tech skeptics about new consoles, I am always a tech optimist about new consoles. Like I at least like to think I have enough of an understanding of what the underlying capabilities are to like, not, not like see in my mind what they're going to result in, but at least like, know, that they're not full of shit, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
You know, it's like, it's like, it's like, we know how fast these SSDs are. You know, we know what these GPU's can do. Like we know X, Y, and Z technical specs about these things. And like, we might not be seeing it yet, but like, if it's going to manifest sooner or later, anyway, that's kind of a long-winded preamble for this thing.
I stumbled on last night, which is like, Probably the most next gen looking thing from an actual production game that I have seen so far,
Will: [00:56:54]Uh the clip that you shared of the guys running through like the sand field and stuff like that. I wouldn't have realized was from a video game on first glance, except for the animations a little bit, a little bit like stilted.
Brad: [00:57:05] You can see just enough of the, these yeah. The stilted transitions between one run animation on another. But, but yeah, I first came across this, on Twitter, on my phone. So it was a small, it's like a small animated GIF on my phone. And I thought, I quite literally thought it was a video of the real world.
Will: Yeah.
Brad: I thought it was, I thought it was like, Real people running around shot on camera, not a video game.
Will: [00:57:28] Is this unreal or is this their own engine?
Brad: [00:57:30] I believe it is. Yeah. Says yes. This does say it's unreal. I wonder it might be unreal five.
Will: [00:57:34] It looks like the new, like infinite polygon, unreal stuff that, that Tim Sweeney.
And they were showing off earlier this year.
Brad: [00:57:39] I should actually say what we're talking about.
Will: [00:57:42] Oh yeah. That's a pretty good idea.
Brad: [00:57:43]It is it's embark studio, which is the studio that Patrick Soderlund of dice NDA. Founded after he left EA
Will: [00:57:51] Oh, creator of the frostbite engine..
Brad: [00:57:53]Sure Yeah.
Will: [00:57:55] He was the creator of the frog, but he was there when they were creating frostbite
Brad: [00:57:58] yeah.
Dice. Yes. Dice a long time. Well-known like rendering house, right? Like they make some of the best looking games in, in the industry. Um, anyway, uh, I'm trying to think how to point people to this. I mean, we'll just put it in the show notes, but uh, they put up a blog post or Patrick did on medium. Okay.
Yeah. You can just go to medium.com/embark studios and it's to the post is called our continued journey.
Will: [00:58:22] We'll put it in the show notes too, though.
Brad: [00:58:23] Yes. But, uh, it's just a short, like how long is this loop? Five, six, seven seconds. Just a little short animated GIF here
Will: [00:58:31] Something like that,
Brad: [00:58:33] but it's like, yeah.
Rendering quality, like rent, lens effects, uh, you know, camera shake, all that stuff. Animation like, like terrain. Kind of surface quality, like all that stuff. It's just the, probably one of the best looking things I have seen to date on a video game console
Will: [00:58:50] Well, and I mean, it was, this was the context for this, that like, this is what it's going to look like.
This is what, like the future it looks like for these console, like this,
Brad: [00:59:00] well thats the game. I mean, like this isn't like a tech test. I mean, that's,
Will: [00:59:04] Oh, this is a game that they're actually making.
Brad: [00:59:05] That is, that is their first game.
Will:Wow.
Brad: [00:59:08] Yeah.
Will: I mean
Brad: [00:59:11] Oh, go ahead.
Will: [00:59:11] I was just gonna say the thing that's interesting to me about this generation of consoles is the addition of all the Ray tracing stuff and the machine learning hardware on the, on the chips.
Like in some ways the 360 and the, and the, and the PS4 generations, you know, the last two generations were. Like there, there weren't a lot of leaps because the things that you could do to required a lot more work in order to get something out, like in order to get some, it's not, it's not like the old days where the 3d pipelines were fixed function and like going from the PS one to the PS2 they added a bunch more stuff to that fixed function pipeline that could do, you know, smoke effects and volumetric fog and all sorts of weird stuff that you hadn't seen before.
Bump mapping with the, with the Ray tracing and the machine learning stuff. There's. It's a real open field in terms of what's available and how people use it. And on, on, on that hardware. And like, it could be everything from like sound design, you know, it's, it's, it's not like, Hey, we can turn on God, rays.
If we're on the right hardware, now it's like, Oh, we could use this Ray tracing stuff to make an incredible sound field. If you're wearing headphones and, and make a game that takes place mostly in between your ears and not on the screen. If we want, or we can go completely the other way and like use this, this, this new tool to, to do stuff, and, and the thing is it's so still, so like, There've been Ray, there's been ray tracing hardware in the market for like two years.
Right. It's still, that's not even a full development cycle for a triple a game at this point, probably. Right. It's still so early. We have no idea what people are gonna use this for and how they're going to use it
Brad: [01:00:45]. And, and like the, the market reality is that the consoles dictate what gets developed 99% of the time.
Right? Like occasionally you'll get some, like, you know, the days of Crysis , one where it's like the tour de force PC only. Like technical showcase. Don't really, those days are kind of long gone,
Will: [01:01:02] Well Crysis one kind of was a flop because they were the tour de force PC only.
Brad: [01:01:07]That’s what I’m saying like, nobody does that anymore.
What I mean is like consoles that can do Ray tracing, which dictate largely what types of games get developed. I've been on the market for 48 hours. Right. So like, like a large scale application of these techniques is just starting
Will: [01:01:21] well, but at the same time, because the tools are a little bit easier to use, you see stuff like ghost runner, where they're doing Ray tracing in like a kind of small scale.
It's not an indie game. I, I dunno, I don't know where 3d realms falls these days, but like, It just seems like a small studio game and, and they punch way above their weight because they were able to use this stuff really effectively.
Brad: [01:01:42] Yeah I actually I'm really excited to see Indies and smaller studios and see what they're going to do with, with some of this tech on some of these APIs.
Will: [01:01:49] Yeah. The nice thing about the Ray Tracey stuff is for the most part, it degrades gracefully. If you're playing on hardware that doesn't have it. So you just, it just turns off and you replace it with the normal specular maps and, and, you know, reflection, maps and stuff like that. And it doesn't look quite as cool, but it still plays the same.
And I I'm just I've, I haven't been this excited about new consoles in a long time, even though I didn't pony up for either.
Brad: [01:02:11] Yeah. I'm totally with you, even though, even though there's not that much a launch to actually show that stuff off right now, but, uh,
Will: [01:02:17]Dude you that new that Spiderman. Like I. I don't know.
It's hard for me to be bummed about the launch situation when like you have bugs snacks and Spiderman on the PS5.
Brad: [01:02:27] Well, I mean, purely from a technical standpoint.
Will: Oh yeah.
Brad: Most, most of these with the exception of demon souls and like I'm trying to, uh, God fall, I think like every single other one of those games, a launch also runs on the previous gen console.
That's what I'm getting at.
Will: Yeah. Yeah.
Brad: Everything that practically everything that's out still has a foot in the previous generation right now. Well, just again, like again, trying to satisfy that demand from a lot of people have, like, I want to see something that really looks new, this, this, this game, which apparently still doesn't have an announced title, uh, that, uh, embark put up in this post to like just this like seven, second animated GIF.
Is by far the newest ass looking thing. I have seen graphically
Will: [01:03:03]. It looks like a star. Yeah.
Brad: [01:03:06] But that's actually not the thing. I really got interested in reading this post. Um. Again, I don't want to oversell it. I mean like this, this, this footage they put out is very iterative. You know, like it very much looks like a much better version of the types of.
You know, battlefield and Battlefront games the dice was doing for years already,
Will: [01:03:23] and they do the clip thing where they're like, it's just a bunch of short takes. You can't really look at anything long enough to get a good look at it,which is
Brad: [01:03:27] there might be a bit of clever trickery. I don't know. But, um, the thing that I'm really interested in though, is if you scroll down the page a little bit to this shot of a bunch of character models that they've got.
Will: [01:03:38] Yeah. This thing, this is true. This is a trip
Brad: [01:03:40] like this, the stuff that actually got me excited because they're basically, they have a shot here. That's. Uh, have a bunch of quite nice. I mean, I think they look like quite nicely realistic human character models. I don't know what you think, but caption says are procedurally aided and nondestructive character pipeline tool is significantly reduced the time it takes for us to create an iterate on in game characters.
And there's a whole section of this article here that talks about I'll just kind of read from it, real fast. Traditionally the biggest chunk of time in game development is centered around simply producing and polishing game assets. For large AAA games. This is painstakingly tedious involving a lot of manual and boring work and a big reason why burnout and crunch is such a prevalent problem for the industry.
Um, to solve this in the longterm, we need to become smarter about the way we build games. Those are the exciting part right now. There's a combination of technical breakthroughs happening in tandem in fields like procedural, ism and reinforcement learning that will lead to a big shift in how we're able to create and scale game content.
Um, our ambition as a studio is to make use of these breakthroughs and remove as many of the tedious manual tasks from our own workflows as possible. In certain areas like hard surface modeling or character creation, our artists are now able to create content in days where it used to take weeks by applying procedural tools.
Will: [01:04:55] It, it looks like, have you ever seen that Twitter account, this person does not exist?
Brad: [01:04:59] Yes. It looks like faces from that.
Will: [01:05:01] it looks like, it looks like they've built that
Brad: [01:05:04] totally
Will: [01:05:05] From some sliders that they can control.
Brad: [01:05:07] Yes. Like to, to spit out on those are like probably still 2d images that, that. Stuff like that Twitter account is spinning out in these are 3d, 3d character models.
Will: [01:05:15] Well, but I think, I think that in order for that Twitter account to work, it has to like the machine learning thing has an idea 3d shape of a face should look like
Brad: [01:05:23] sure. Yeah.
Will: [01:05:25] Occasionally it makes a nightmare. Uh, of course
Brad: [01:05:27], of course. Oh yeah, we've talked about, so, this person should not exist
Will: [01:05:31] yeah. Um, um,
Brad: [01:05:33] but, uh, I've just has been curious conceptually about this for a long time and I wish I got a chance to talk to more game developers than I do, but just the idea of procedural generation in your asset pipeline.
Um, I assume, I assume reinforcement learning is another. There's a synonym for machine learning,
Will: [01:05:49] machine learning stuff is by understanding
Brad: [01:05:51] neural neural net type stuff.
Will: [01:05:52] W w I mean, a lot of times when you do game stuff, like if you're, if you're painting terrain in unreal, unreal engine or something like that, right?
Like you, you're just, you're just applying layers. Of a, of a, of a map. And like one of those layers is often a noise layer too, to add just, you know, random, the kind of randomness that exists in the real world, right? Like imperfections in the, in the earth and, you know, trails and stuff like that.This is a trip this is really cool.
Brad: [01:06:19] They actually, there's another not to go on and on about this, but there's a, a blog from like a year ago that I had not seen that they linked to off of this blog posts. Um, It has a little like 45 second video of a terrain that they created with some of these tools. And if you, if you go look at it, uh, I'm sorry, I'm pulling it up right now.
It's one of the nicest, it might be the nicest looking 3d environment that would be appropriate for game that I've ever seen. And they say that it took three artists, like two or three weeks to make. So it seems like, yeah, I don't know, whatever I'm, you know, I'm quickly getting out of my league here, but.
It seems like the potential for these tools to empower artists to really just completely go crazy with their creativity and not be hamstrung by like, you know, again, the tedium of the workload, like you said, could, could be huge.
Will: [01:07:09] Yeah. I mean, I think that the goal isn't to take the artist's hand out of any of this work, but the goal is to give them more time to work on the things that matter versus the kind of scutwork of
Brad: [01:07:22] right. You know, it's just, uh, yeah, it's just a way of moral, like fully. Expressing, whatever vision they have. Right.
Will: [01:07:27] I'm very into this. And now this is all unreal engine, so yeah. What a cool thing.
Brad: [01:07:33] Yeah,there’s some cool looking shit. And again, like both from a human perspective and from a technical and artistic perspective, the idea of.
Being able to make it more and better looking stuff without burning people out and get more of it into every game. Like that's just like extremely cool in every aspect
Will: [01:07:48]. It's just another reason that splunky is going to be the, uh, the game that changed the games industry most
Brad: [01:07:54] because you're right. Um, while I said that, I just thought of, I was talking to some people on the discord about this this morning, and someone pointed out on there.
Um, With the insanely high SSD speeds in these machines, when you've got this much more detailed being produced for your games, you can stream so much of it into memory so much faster. Like you can pack more detail, more variety into very small areas and just stream stream in and out as you move around much faster than you could before.
So games like the
Will: [01:08:22] game are going to be so big,
Brad: [01:08:23] it seems like it seems like the richness and variety of detail you're going to be seeing in games in like two to three years is going to be pretty. Pretty eyeopening.
Will: [01:08:30] I it's exciting because the impact of machine learning in this instance and, and associated technologies is, you know, there's hopefully, I mean, it's not going to happen because the games industry sucks in a lot of ways.
And there's always a horrible crunch for the art teams and the programmers and everybody. But
Brad: [01:08:48] yeah, like I don't, I don't, I don't mean to imply this is going to like solve crunch or anything like that, but,
Will: [01:08:53] but, well, but I mean, yeah, at least. I mean, if it shifts things from things that are less fulfilling to work on to things that are more fulfilling to work on.
That's good. That's a good thing.
Brad: [01:09:04] Yeah. Stuff looks exciting.
Will: [01:09:05] Um, well, cool well Brad. Uh, this has been fun. We should do this. Yeah. Next week.
Brad: [01:09:09] Yeah. Okay. Sure. But you just show up and talk sometimes and, see what happens
Will: [01:09:15] um, as always, uh, thanks to all of our patrons. Uh, there are something like, hold on. Oh, I clicked the wrong button.
There are something like 1,275 of y'all right now.
Brad: That's a good number.
Will: So thank you all so much. And we love chatting with you in the discord. I said about, uh, we talked about it last week. We opened, I, by the way, I made that parenting channel last week after we recorded the show and then meant to unlock it once we posted it and forgotten until somebody reminded me later this week.
So it's up now,
Brad: [01:09:46] it's just been sitting there.
Will: [01:09:46] Um, it's been popping off. People are, people are sharing like, like everything from like. How like what their strategy is for screens and for young kids to like dealing with teenagers, which seems like a nightmare. Um, uh, you can check that out. It's, uh, all the way at the bottom of the real life section.
Um, thank you as always to our executive producer level patrons, Jacob chapel, Andrew Cotton, and David Allen. We really appreciate you guys, but we also appreciate everybody, um, whether you're posting in the discord or, or supporting us on the Patrion or. You're just sharing, sharing the podcast with your friends.
If you can't support the Patrion right now.
Brad: [01:10:21] Thank you so much.
Will: [01:10:22] Um, the, uh, the, the parenting channel, I've spent a lot of time in, since I remembered to flip the switch on it. And, uh, man, huge shout out to everybody who posted desoldering tips because I would have really fucked up that mouse if I had not.
And, uh, and that's nice. Cause now the one that's coming as a spare instead of a replacement. So
Brad: [01:10:41]. That’s always nice to have.
Will: [01:10:43] Yeah. Um, I guess we'll be back next week. It's uh, we're coming up on Thanksgiving. Oh, the other thing is people last week after we did the Patriot episode last month, and we talked a little bit about Thanksgiving, convinced me to post Thanksgiving recipes.
So I'll post them in the food channel. Um, and I'm probably gonna do a blog post or an email newsletter or something like that. So you have to,
Brad: [01:11:02] I have to afford the food channel. my secret my secret confession. I have not been in there in months because it makes me very hungry and very jealous
Will: [01:11:10] look, man, look, if we, if we can't eat, if we can't look one of the things that's funny, Gina and I.
Um, we're talking about this today, but we're both really sick of eating our own food, the food that we make. Um, so we've, uh, we're in the lead up to Thanksgiving. We're going to do an eat out week. Cause we also, we have to buy a bunch of groceries way in advance and we want them space in the fridge for regular meals.
And then we're hoping to work that out of our system and get back on the, on the, the cooking at home train for Thanksgiving
Brad: [01:11:42] reverse pallet cleanser, he might say. Now I'm scrolling through the food channel.
Will: It's really good. It's good.
Brad:And it’s dinner time We got to get out of here.
Will: [01:11:52] Yeah. Um, uh, thanks everybody.
We will see you all, uh, next week, uh, with another episode of Brad and Will made a Tech Pod.
Brad: [01:11:59] that salmon. The salmon looks so good.