Our Fall cornucopia of emails contains such succulent questions as: How future-proof should your new smart home be? To prebuilt PC or not to prebuilt PC? Where are all the HDMI 2.1 accessories? How do you wrangle a monitor and a TV in Windows? Plus, a whole bunch of tech that we--and you--have been thankful for in this trying year. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Our Fall cornucopia of emails contains such succulent questions as: How future-proof should your new smart home be? To prebuilt PC or not to prebuilt PC? Where are all the HDMI 2.1 accessories? How do you wrangle a monitor and a TV in Windows? Plus, a whole bunch of tech that we--and you--have been thankful for in this trying year.
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
Brad: [00:00:00] What does one do with five old routers? Stacked in a pile Will, actually hang on one two, four old routers and one old switch.
Will: [00:00:11] Maybe recycle them. I'd keep the switch.
Brad: [00:00:13] I can't, it's a, it is a 100 megabits switch. It is a 10 based T-square
Will: [00:00:18] I would just put that on the curb with a, posted this as free on it and let nature take its course.
Brad: [00:00:23] It’s so small. I don't think anybody would see it.
Will: [00:00:27] Put like a big post-it on it.
Brad: [00:00:28] it's not big for, for being such an old switch. It's a tiny switch.
Will: [00:00:32] Why do you have four old routers and one switch piled up in your hallway right now, Brad?
Brad: [00:00:36] Cause you buy routers over the years. As, as standards evolve, you say, man, I need faster wifi.
Will: [00:00:43] Yeah,
Brad: [00:00:44] I'm going to buy a new router.
Will: [00:00:45] but then, then that's when the old router leaves the house
Brad: [00:00:49] No that’s when the old router goes into storage at, by storage, I mean a stack in the hall. Well, I've been going through, so let's, let's let me be clear. I have not had a stack of routers in my hallway for the last 15 years.
Will: [00:01:00] Look, that's some hoarder business. I'm a it's on brand for me, but you have a reputation to uphold
Brad: [00:01:05] They have been in storage, but I've been cleaning out and reorganizing storage, which is why they are currently homeless, because I don't know where to put them because one of them is a Linksys W R T 54 G. Is that the model?
Will: [00:01:17] That belongs in a museum.
Brad: [00:01:18] Hang on. Let me, let me see if I've got that right.
Will: [00:01:20] W R T 54 G is the blue and gray
Brad: [00:01:22] G is. That is absolutely the model number.
Yes. That is the classic.
Will: [00:01:26] Yeah. The original tomato router.
Brad: [00:01:29] Like I think in that South park episode where there was a giant router, I believe it looked like one of those. That's how Iconic that router. Yeah.
Will: [00:01:34] Yeah. You know where he belongs either in a museum or the electronics recycling bin at your local recycler,
Brad: [00:01:43] what if I think of a use for it?
Will: [00:01:44] you buy another one for $5 at a flea market someplace.
Brad: [00:01:48] What if I think of something I could have done with it and I no longer? Have it.
Will: [00:01:50] Well, then you'll be sad for like four minutes, but think of the joy that having that empty space or that thing that you don't use anymore, you used to be, I can't believe you have twisted me around until I am on the side of getting look Brad.
We cleaned out our kitchen this weekend. We took everything out of the cabinets. The, you know, the cabinets that you have in the kitchen that are like where all the crap goes that you use, like once a year, maybe.
Brad: Yeah
Will: Yeah. So we took all that stuff out and we put it out on the dining room table and on the kitchen table and on the floor around the kitchen table.
And then we looked at it
Brad: [00:02:21] It's like having your own yard sale in like an internal, a recursive yard sale.
Will: [00:02:26] yeah, we had some real hard conversations about how many, uh, unslotted metal spoons we need.
Brad: [00:02:31] How many do you
Will: [00:02:32] and I have very different ideas about this.
Brad: [00:02:35] I get it. I get it.
Will: [00:02:37] I was like, you have four burners, five burners on the stove. That means we could conceivably have five pots at once. We need five metal spoons in case that's the spoon we need for that project.
Brad: That’s just math
Will: And she was like, look, the most things we ever have on the stove at once is Thanksgiving. And, uh,. And we don't ever, uh, have more than four things going at once on Thanksgiving. And most of them are wooden spoon things of which we have plenty. So now we have two metal spoons that are not salted and one slotted metal spoon.
And I'm very sad.
Brad: [00:03:06] I started to ask who won the argument, but I guess I don't need to ask.
Will: [00:03:09] Look, we, the, the compromise I made some, we made some tough cuts. The food processor that goes on the front of the kitchen aid is gone. We're we're, we're giving that to a friend. Uh, but I kept the meat grinder that we've used twice in the last 13 years. And I put a, I put a sticky on it, a little dot on it.
That that's the indicator. If it, if by the next time we do this, that dot has not been removed because it has been used at least once my veto power on the meat grinder is gone.
Brad: [00:03:37] Wow. That's a, that's a pretty interesting system that you have that's
Will: [00:03:42]Look, Gina has dealt with my bullshit for a long time and she knows how this works.
Brad: [00:03:45] that is tangible accountability.
Will: [00:03:47] Yeah. Well, I mean, don't you do the, don't you do the closet, the coat hanger thing. When you flip your clothes around. Like every once in a while, I just take all the clothes in my closet and I hang the coat hangers on backwards.
And then if, if the clothes have not been, if those hangers are not turned around the next time I go clean out the closet, obviously I haven't worn that stuff in whatever period of time. Since the last time I cleaned up the closet.
Brad: [00:04:08] Ah considering I've put on long pants exactly. One time in the last seven to eight months. But I think that the system might be in need of suspension right now.
Will: [00:04:17] Okay. I mean, fair. The Rhoda has caused some lifestyle changes. I'm just getting rid of all my jeans. That's the takeaway here. I have one pair of jeans. Now
Brad: [00:04:25] That's okay.
Will: [00:04:27] athletes are 24 seven sweat pants, baby.
Brad: [00:04:30] toss the jeans, keep the routers. Is that what I'm hearing?
Will: [00:04:32] No toss everything, get rid of it, all
Brad: [00:04:34] Except the routers.
Will: [00:04:35]That things that you own end up owning you, the things that you don't let the things look, there's something that Chuck Palahniuk said in that book about fighting people in banks.
And it was right. You should get rid of the crap because you don't need it.
Brad: [00:04:47] Yeah. Well, Tyler Durden never had five routers. So what does he know?
Will: [00:05:19] Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I was on a show last night and I, yeah. And they introduced me as the host of Brad and Will make a tech pod and I had to actually, then I was like, actually, it's past tense. And they're like, Oh, you're done with the show. I was like, no, it's ongoing. And it, like, there was a whole conversation.
It was awkward.
Brad: [00:05:38] did you throw a half a gigantic to fit a peak?
Will: [00:05:42] No, I was very cordial
Brad: [00:05:43] You said you expect me to be a guest on your show when you can't even get the tens of my show. Right?
Will: [00:05:48] Yeah. I mean, it is fair. That is a fair critique, but, uh, no, it was a very cordial, uh,
Brad: [00:05:53] I'm joking.
Will: [00:05:54] yeah, no,
Brad: [00:05:54] I can't even, we can't even keep it straight half the time around here.
Will: [00:05:57] look, it is, it is in, I'm sure there's a discord log of the conversation that led to the naming of the podcast. Um,
Brad: [00:06:06] I don't remember it even being that, uh, that formal.
Will: [00:06:11] I think, I think it was, Hey, I put something in the, in the, in the field. What do you think? And you were like, yeah. That's okay. We'll just leave it. That's a good placeholder.
Brad: [00:06:18] I think that's exactly what happened to somebody. It got to the point where somebody couldn't hit save on something until there was a name in there and somebody just typed it in, Oh, this is here we go with another public discussion about renaming.
This podcast,
Will: [00:06:30] like it's it's uh, it's uh, it's Thanksgiving week.
Brad: [00:06:34] sweat, sweat tech pod is right there.
Will: [00:06:37] Look, if I had known that I was going to spend most of 2020 wearing sweat pants, I would have been a hundred percent on board with sweat pants. techpod.
Brad: [00:06:44] God, we were so forward thinking.Oh well, Oh, Well
Will: [00:06:48] Yeah. Yeah.
Brad: [00:06:50] theres always next year.
Will: [00:06:51] w mean, when we left the sweatpants comedy pod next year, we'll be, we'll be ahead of the game. So, um, W let's talk about stuff. Uh, you know, it's question's episode first off, cause it's been a little bit since we've done one, uh, next week Thanksgiving. So we'll, you know, we'll do something that I don't know what we'll do with, but we're going to do something there.
Um, and it's, it's a, it's a time to be thankful and it's a time to reflect upon the, the podcast past and the questions that we have from, uh, from listeners, from the audience.
Brad: [00:07:23] Yeah. Although I will, I just real quick, a little bit point of order, uh, on next week's episode,
Will: [00:07:29] Yes. Hello?
Brad: [00:07:30] by time it posts, we will be past Thanksgiving,
Will: [00:07:33] Yeah.
Brad: [00:07:34] meaning I think we'll have a Christmas tree up by then.
Will: [00:07:38] Yeah. We got to get our Chris, our holiday podcasts lights on.
Brad: [00:07:41] Which is insane to think about. This is the Thanksgiving episode. As far as things go,
Will: [00:07:46] Yeah, this is as close to a Thanksgiving episode as you're going to get this year
Brad: [00:07:48] I like feel like our lives are just like slowly trickling down the tree. What is, what is time it's still in the back of my head. It's still March some somewhere.
Will: [00:07:58] It's it's um, it's funny, Gina and I were talking about this the other night and. Like, I'm fine. Most of the time, I’m sitting here. I'm like, I'm really coping pretty well with the fact that I haven't essentially left the house in nine months, eight and a half months now. Right. And then every once in a while, I'm just like, you know what?
This is some fucking horse shit. I have lost an entire year of my life. Yeah. And I'm really going to be alternately mad and angry and sad about this, this, uh, this whole thing, because it was mostly avoidable.
Brad: [00:08:30] As you as you should be,
Will: [00:08:32] And, uh, and then like, I have the benefit of having my kid here. Um, which like is a positive. I know some people maybe if you don't like your kids, that would maybe not be as much of a positive, but like,
Brad: [00:08:43] not gonna open that can of worms.
Will: [00:08:45] Like I like my kid and I've gotten to spend an incredible amount of time at, or with her at an age that I normally wouldn't have.
So like, I feel bad that she's had this year stolen from her, but like at the, at the same time, I'm kind of grateful that I got to spend a lot of it with her that I wouldn't have otherwise. So yeah.
Brad: [00:09:02] That's actually, that's a good point. I feel way worse for people. Young people let's say between like child age to, I don't know, college ish than I do for working adults.
Will: [00:09:11] Yeah, well, and like, it's lucky. Cause she was seven when this started. And like, that's like when, if you have, I have some friends who have like, we have friends who have three and four year olds and all they know, they don't know why they can't go to the playgrounds and why they can't go to daycare and see their friends.
They just know that like they haven't been to a playground in a year, but they remember what it was like before. And
Brad: [00:09:31] because those are formative years for people in that age range. you know once you’re crusty and old and past your prime, like us. Like it's just like every year, one year is just like the next,
Will: [00:09:40] yeah. One more candle on the cake.
Brad: [00:09:42] that's right.
Will: [00:09:44] Um, but yeah, so I think we should turn some Qs into As Brad. Uh, the email address as always is tech pod at content downtown that's tech pod@content.town.
Brad: [00:09:55] That's a good email address. You should use it
Will: [00:09:58]It’s the number one domain. Fuck.
Brad: [00:09:59] If you’re listening you should use that email address,
Will: [00:10:01] They said that I was a much better guest than PJ from reply all yesterday on that show.
So I was very excited about that.
Brad: [00:10:07] I don’t know who that is but congratulations.
Will: [00:10:10] Look, reply all is a really good podcast. Yeah. Don't don't tell anybody.
Brad: [00:10:15] I won’t surely no one will hear you say that. Oh boy. Okay. Should we get into some emails?
Will: [00:10:22] Yeah, sure.
Brad: [00:10:23] Here's an email. I, I feel a little hesitant here. Feel a little self-conscious. This person is from Finland and has a finished name as they point out. And I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
Will: [00:10:34] You mean to do it?
Brad: Yes
Will: Is it the question about future proofing
Brad: [00:10:38] Yes, that is the one
Will: [00:10:40] You Sue you holla.
Brad: [00:10:41] I to, yeah, that's, that's my question. I don't know how Jays are pronounced and finish.
Will: [00:10:44] Yeah.
Brad: [00:10:46] Is that yeah.
Will: [00:10:47], well, that's how J’s are pronounced in Swedish, but they're close to each other. So I'm going to assume.
Brad: [00:10:51] I'll buy that. Okay. There you go. Okay. Thank you.
Will: [00:10:54] I'm a noted pronunciation expert, as we all know
Brad: [00:10:56] Al of course. Yes. I'll let you handle all the finish emails from now on.
Will: Please
Brad: I'll read the body though. Um, let's see how much future-proofing should one do. I'm planning to build a house in a year or two and was wondering where I should go overkill and where anything decent will be fine. For example, I'm going to want ethernet ports and every room. And if I don't say anything, there will most likely be cat five E cables running in the walls.
Uh, but is cat six good enough for years to come? Or should I look into running fiber in the, in the house instead, uh, another, well, it comes to mind is USB power outlets. But with those, I remember them being five volt, one amp just six years ago, uh, which would feel pretty insufficient today. Uh, so would that kind of thing be worth installing if you have to upgrade it every five years to keep up with new tech, uh, assuming it's possible to do that without tearing the walls open every time.
Uh, there's probably a ton more stuff like this. Evie charging, smart home integration server rooms, et cetera, that one could or should consider.
Will: [00:11:55] Okay, this is a good question.
Brad: [00:11:57] Yes. I don't have a ton of good answers other than the network cabling, but, uh, yes, it is a very good question that I would love to hear people's opinions on. Um, I double-checked. Uh, cat six is good for up to 10 gigabits. So if you want to run copper, that should be fine for quite some time for networking.
Will: [00:12:13] I would assume for the rest of your life, probably for what normal people do at home.
Brad: [00:12:18] you think,
Will: [00:12:18] I don't, I don't
Brad: [00:12:19I don’t] know the rest of. Well, like what are we kind of, are we talking
Will: [00:12:22] I mean, look, we're, we're, I'm almost 50, I'm halfway to 50 at this point. So I can't have that much time left.
Brad: [00:12:27]This podcast is getting really dark, but what, what, what kind of time span are we talking about when you say the rest of your life? 30 to 40 years?
Will: [00:12:33] I figure 30 years, like, you know,
Brad: [00:12:37] Well, where were we? 30 years ago?
Like
Will: [00:12:39] Look, 30 years ago is we were on the part of the curve that was flat 30 years ago. And then all of a sudden, like 15 years ago, it started going up and then now it's in the vertical part, but I think we're plateau for network bandwidth. I don't think you need it at that much. Really. 10 gigs. Pretty good.
Brad: [00:12:56] I guess. You're right.
Will: [00:12:57] So I would say put CA can't say what I was going to say is the cost of putting cat six in now versus the cost of pulling all the cat five E out and putting cat five in is probably justified. Even though it's going to cost you like double for the wire,
Brad: [00:13:11] is it really is the difference that big?
Will: [00:13:12] It’s expensive, but especially cause you want plenum, that's not going to make toxic smoke.
If the house catches on fire, um,
Brad: [00:13:19] I would definitely go cat six minimum. The fiber question is maybe a bigger concern though, because you are starting to see a lot more fiber based home networking stuff.
Will: [00:13:28] I think, I think there's an, I think you can make an argument that it's worth putting dark fiber in your walls. Cause it won't cost very much like the same argument, right? Like it doesn't cost that much to put it in the walls when the walls are open. If you put it in after it's going to be really expensive.
Um, but you want, like, you want to be tactical about where you put it. Like you want to put it into where your, what do you think your entertainment center is going to go?
Brad: [00:13:49] because you probably don't need fiber to every single room.
Will: [00:13:51] Yeah, no, you want it where your PC is going to be. And you want like a run to like the garage or wherever your network like, think about where your network cabinets going to go and put power and ventilation and, and star all your network stuff into there.
Um, and, and go out from there. The, the USB power plugs are an interesting question because like, I don't like those. I think they're bad. Um,A. because that, that power, those power standards are changing dramatically on the year to year and be like, I don't use them when I'm out in public, because I think they're a security problem.
I think if you wanted to route somebodies phone real easily, you replaced one of those power outlets. And like Nathan's at the Las Vegas convention center that people use while they're eating a hot dog and charging their phone and lunchtime. And, um, yeah,
Brad: [00:14:40]I mean obviously not going to have security concerns about your own wall, USB ports,
Will: [00:14:43] I don't know. You trust home Depot.
Brad: [00:14:46] man, how deep does this conspiracy go?
Will: [00:14:48] Look all the way down, Brad.
Brad: [00:14:51] that's fair. He can't be too careful. Um, I would add to that. I mean, you said the power standards are changing there, but the form factor standards are also changing.
Like it's, it seems like we're finally getting to the point where USB-C is becoming the standard
Will: [00:15:04] What about USB DS?
Brad: [00:15:06] what does that actually exists?
Will: [00:15:07] No, it Deez nuts.
Brad: [00:15:09] um,
Will: [00:15:12] I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Brad: [00:15:15] says there is a USB type D connector.
Will: [00:15:18] Oh no.
Brad: [00:15:19] No. wait a minute. Nevermind.
Will: [00:15:22] Is it just a page that says these nuts and then points to the USB connector?
Brad: [00:15:25] that's not actually real.
Will: [00:15:27] Oh,
Brad: [00:15:27] It was the first thing that came up, says USB D connector unveiled.
And then I clicked through, and it was April fool's joke.
Will: [00:15:36] thank goodness.
Brad: [00:15:37] but I'm trying to think the last four or five consumer electronics things I've bought that have involved USB have all been USB-C the controllers on both of these consoles.
Will: [00:15:48] Yeah.
Brad: [00:15:48] Uh, the pair of headphones I just got, which we'll actually probably talk about in a minute on another email use USB-C for charging.
I'm trying to think one or two other things I got recently. Oh, the, uh, the, um, stream deck. The Elgato stream deck that I got also USB-C
Will: [00:16:06] It uses USB C?, mine's only, yeah, mine's only a, uh, the iPhone ships with a USB-C to lightning cable and no power brick
Brad: [00:16:16] I guess that's progress.
Will: [00:16:17] fantastic. I guess. I don't know.
Brad: [00:16:19] not quite getting the USB straight. You see straight into the phone, but that's something
Will: [00:16:22] Yeah. We're, we're getting there. Um,
Brad: [00:16:24] I saw like a fair amount of people upset that the 12 doesn't actually just use USB-C, which I don't really, I'm not sure. I entirely understand, like, what is like, what is the use case?
Do people just want to consolidate cables? Is that what it is? They just don't want to keep carrying lightening cables around.
Will: [00:16:39] it would be nice not to carry like lightening cables or kind of like lightening cables have a shockingly short life span in my experience. Yeah.
Brad: [00:16:46] don't think I've ever had one die before.
Will: [00:16:48] Well, so maybe moisture where we are, but there's one pin that always corrodes on them in our cars. Um, and it, it may be because of like outside humidity, cause it is wet here.
But, um, anyway, uh, let's see other stuff. So the car charging the solar, I think, I think the solar, the smart home integration makes sense. Cause you, if you're going to do smart switches, Get the electrician to put them in when you're building the house. So, uh, strongly encourage you to get all the same kind of switch.
And whether it's something that uses a proprietary hub, like the Levitan caséta stuff, or sorry, LuTron Caseta, or the, uh, Levitan, um, Z-Wave and ZigBee or whatever, you know, think about that. Uh, put your hub where you want it to be. Uh, the thing I would say is that you can't, but you're in Finland. So you know this, but if you're a building in America, they will let you put way less insulation in your house than you should when you build it.
Uh, and you should insulate the Holy living shit out of everything windows before those drywall walls are on, go through and take loose insulation and spray it in the cracks or on your window frames. Because most, most contractors in the U S at least don't do that. And you will, it'll make your house drafty as hell.
And it's really hard to fix that once the, once the drywall's on. Cause then you have to. It's just a pain in the ass. Um, uh, what else? Um, I mean, I think solar makes a ton of sense, depending on your latitude, where I, where we are in the North half of the U S it makes a ton of sense. Um, Uh, especially if your local power company subsidizes or buys based on demand.
So like in California, we, if you have solar panels on you sell during the day at the, at the, at the time that the rate is the highest in the afternoon, when manufacturers is running everything and you buy back at night when it's dark and it's way cheaper. And it's a, it's a good thing. And if you pair that with the EV charging rates, then you can get incredible deals on electricity.
Um, if you put panels on your roof,
Brad: [00:18:48] Do you have any sense of whether the panel efficiency is there at this point for the average person?
Will: [00:18:53] Yeah. I mean the third gen and, and on panels are real good. Like, like if you most, unless you have really exceptional electricity needs or you do something goofy, like have an electric dryer or something like that, you can, you should be even in California, at least,
Brad: [00:19:10] And do you think, uh, I assume local storage solutions are probably modular enough that as those improve, you can kind of both those on after the fact.
Will: [00:19:18] Yeah, they're, they're pretty expensive. Like, I don't know that the local storage makes as much sense
Brad: [00:19:22] what I mean, like
Will: [00:19:23] batteries are expensive. Still.
Brad: [00:19:24] That’s what I mean five, 10 years from now. Cause assuming you're probably going to be in this house for quite some time, like, let's say 10 years from now, something like a power wall just makes sense for everybody.
Will: [00:19:32] Yeah, the, the, um, I don't know if I would call that modular. It's not like a USB thing that you plug in. Like you have to, if you want to use those and have them be live when the grid is off, you have to have a cutoff for your, your, on your end of the network. That turns off power going out of your house.
Into the, into the network so that like, if the power out and, and the electric linemen are out their line, people are out working on downed, you know, downlines or whatever. There's not current coming back into the lines from your house that could hurt them. Um,
Brad: [00:20:02] Do you know if that’s something they would toggle themselves if they were out there doing maintenance or do you have to be around to make sure that that stuffs
Will: [00:20:08] it shouldn't, it should be automatic. Like it works. It works in the same way that like a failover generator. Like if you have a, if you are someplace where the power goes out and you have, uh, you have like a gas generator, a natural gas generator that fails over when, when the power goes out, you have, you're supposed to have that same kind of circuit on and it should be automatic when the generator comes on.
Brad: [00:20:24]So it would sense that the lines are dead and just stop sending current out.
Will: [00:20:28] Yeah. It basically toggles a switch that flips when the, when the power and when the power comes back on it switches back on and then the generator turns off. Um, I think, I think like if I were doing my house again, I would find a place to put a small server rack and, and
Brad: [00:20:44] absolutely. Network closet, if not network basement.
Will: [00:20:48] yeah, like router switches, um, uh, probably not wifi cause wifi makes sense to put in places that are, are more central than maybe you would want to put this.
Brad: [00:20:59] Yes. That is ideal use case for having your router separated from your access points. So you can put those where they need to be.
Will: [00:21:04] Absolutely. Um, and, and I would, when I'm. So when I placed the ethernet in my house, when I did it 13 years ago, um, I, I did it based on where I thought like PCs and like streaming devices, like Sonos is and stuff would be, I wish I had been foresightful enough to put a couple of power over ethernet lines
Brad: [00:21:24] Oh, yeah
Will: [00:21:24] in places that wifi mesh nodes would make sense to, to live like up, maybe even up in the attic where they're inaccessible for the most part or hanging off the ceiling or something like that.
Um,
Brad: [00:21:34] Yeah. Poe is crucial for wifi access points. If you don't want to have to run external power to those things, which would be a real pain in the ass if they were on the ceiling.
Will: [00:21:42] Well, but that said, if you're doing the wiring for the house, it costs practically nothing to have the electrician add a couple more power outlets in weird places. So for example, I have a power outlet in the crawl space that the, that the switch that lives under the center of the house can go in.
There's a wifi access point on that as well. Um, you can do that in the attic as well. Like just put it by the addict door make it easy to get to if your addict's not normally accessible.
Brad: [00:22:05] Yeah, I think any old modern, ethernet cable can do Poe, right? You don't need specific.
Will: [00:22:11] Any, any for ethernet four or five or something? I can't remember, but it's, it's, it's real low. It's low power. Um, and you can buy adapters that plug in on either side. So like it,
Brad: [00:22:22] That's actually what I've got for my Ubiquiti access point, because I don't have a Poe router. So it comes with it, it came with it actually in the box, just a little
Will: [00:22:29] yeah.
Brad: [00:22:31] AC adapter plus pass through ethernet
Will: [00:22:33] You just to make sure that the DC end on the, on the down wind side of the Poe is the right DC for whatever device you're plugging in.
Brad: [00:22:41] man. Future home building is a lot.
Will: [00:22:44] Man, I am. I am.
Brad: [00:22:46] I wonder if there, do you think there are like general contractors out there now that are starting to sub specialize in this kind of like smart home future home type stuff or.
Will: [00:22:55] Uh, yeah, there's a, there's a whole spec. I did a story about on tested years ago, um, about like super green homes that are insulated appropriately and like, don't, there's a specs for like how drafty they can be. Um, how you handle things like radon buildup and a house that's completely sealed because like normal houses are leaky enough that radons not a problem.
Um, so stuff like that, that was absolutely fascinating. And it's very popular in, especially Northern Europe, but most of Western Europe, uh, included Germany and France. And then in the U S there's like 12 houses that at the time in 2010 or 11. When I wrote the story, there were, I think, 12 houses in the U S that had been built to that spec.
And, you know, it's, it's this normal American stupidity where it costs like 10% more upfront, but it saves you 30% or 40% in, in, in utility costs every single year that the house exists. So over the 50 year life span of the house, it will save an unbelievable amount of money, but, you know, 10% more upfront, eh, I don't know.
Brad: [00:23:58] Yeah. Also the, you know what the value of being able to say you can't tell me what to do. It's priceless.
Will: [00:24:02] Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks American exceptionalism.
Brad: [00:24:05] yes. All right. Well, let's move on. Um, question from Matthew. Uh, I finished my hardware upgrades for the year and was lucky enough to secure both new consoles, a 3080, and two LG B9s
Will: Damn.
Brad: That’s quite a haul. Uh, they all work great excusing some driver issues, but my capture card and receiver are all HTMI 2.0 or earlier. Uh, do you know when we can expect AV receivers HDMI splitters and capture cards to catch up to the news 2.1 standard. I don't have a good answer for this. I hope that you might have some insight, but like, I just kind of have more questions around this because it feels like from what I've seen so far, the answer is a giant question, Mark.
Will: [00:24:46] It's a problem. Um, I, my guess is we'll see HDMI 2.1 stuff at CES in January, if we, or whatever CES in January is, um, I don't expect. Like that stuff will roll out over the six months after that, probably from that. So it'll be announced in January. It'll roll out of the first half of the year. My guess is that we'll see like El Gato and black magic, kind of the big, big G the, you know, the, the high end capture companies rollout.
HDMI 2.1 parts early on. Um, and then we'll see the, the kind of fast follow. Um, you know, Chinese electronics vendor or market vendors follow shortly after that? Um, I, I don't, I mean, I think the, the secret is if you're using one of these new consoles, you probably want to plug straight into the TV and let the arc and the CEC stuff, bring the audio signal back to your receiver, and then it doesn't matter.
What, what it is assuming, assuming that the audio spec that your receiver supports is the audio spec that the console is outputting in and is on the media that you're using. It gets, this stuff gets really complicated. Is the, is the bad news.
Brad: [00:25:59] Um, yeah. For cards on the, on this list, that's the category I'm the least concerned about because like, I cannot imagine a time when you're going to really need to be capturing 4k, 120, which is really that's, that's the only benefit of having 2.1 in the capture card. And like when, when does it any major streaming service going to carry 4k 120 content?
Will: [00:26:17] well, you can put on YouTube, but you'd have to pre well, you have to, you can do 4k 60. I know. I don’t know if you can do 4k 120
Brad: [00:26:21] Yeah. That's, that's what I mean, like, yeah. I don't think they take 120 of any resolution do they?
Will: [00:26:27] I don't know. I I'm, I'm really curious when Twitch is gonna up to 4k or 1440 P um, I I'm, so,
Brad: [00:26:36] I am too, but I mean, I think the bigger question there is when they're going to start letting you, or what are they going to start allowing ingest of more modern, codecs
Will: [00:26:44] Well, that, that is a whole other thing. Yeah. If we could do H.265 on Twitch, the image quality would immediately go up at the same bit rates
Brad: [00:26:50] or like VP9 AV1, like name all these modern codecs, but like, there's, there's a lot higher efficiency codecs that like H.264 is not going to cut it.
If we're going to move past 1080, 60,
Will: [00:27:01] Yeah. Um, I think, I think the solution though, in the short term is to plug everything into your TV and hope you have enough. HTMI 2.1 ports on the TV.
Brad: [00:27:11] that's probably the right answer. Although that makes me mad. Cause I don't like having like six consoles hooked up at one time. It gets, it gets messy.
Will: [00:27:18] It's it's it's really funny. I dug out the, I hooked up the X-Box one because my daughter started playing human fall flat with a couple of her friends. And, um, I forgot that the, that the first gen Xbox doesn't support any of the, any of the EAC stuff, any of the HDMI CEC stuff, it changed channels by using the connect IRR emitter.
Brad: [00:27:41]Yeah the IRR blaster,
Will: [00:27:42] Oh God.
Brad: [00:27:43] uh, via the,
Will: [00:27:44] I had to teach her how to use a remote. It's a disaster.
Brad: [00:27:46] uh, the one X actually also did that straight out of the front of the console.
Will: [00:27:49] So stupid,
Brad: [00:27:51] It continued to IRR blast for, uh, years later after the Kinect went away.
Will: [00:27:55] so stupid.
Brad: [00:27:56] all that stuff's gone, all the series X removed everything. No, no one guide, which was the app that you use to handle, you know, TV channel management, uh, No support for those USB over the air tuners.
They used to be able to plug in that I used for a long time. So it's just a hundred percent gone. So
Will: [00:28:13] Real loss.
Brad: [00:28:14] end of an era, um, yeah, I guess so, yeah, stay tuned to CES for this I hope
Will: [00:28:22] I would be shocked if Sony and onkyo and kind of Denon and all the big AV manufacturers don't have HTMI 2.1 4k 120 Hertz receivers announced and out by like March,
Brad: [00:28:34] Okay. That's encouraging. That's encouraging because yeah. They have like, they're basically none on the market right now. And it really made me concerned. Like, are AV receivers just going away?
Will: [00:28:42] Now remember HDMI 2.1 just got ratified. Like it is, it was recent,
Brad: [00:28:48] Yeah. I mean, it's like TVs have only had it in some form for the last year or two, a couple of years.
Will: [00:28:53] and they were shipping with pre-release hard, like final hardware with pre-release software, probably pre pre really spec.
Brad: [00:28:59] some of those, some of those first TVs that have the ports didn't even support all the features,
Will: [00:29:03] Yeah, I think, I think, uh, one of the things I saw over the last couple of weeks was that people were having to do firmware updates on their TVs to support the X-Box one X series, sorry, Xbox series X and the PS five
Brad: [00:29:14] Yes. That is the biggest reason I have still held off on TVs is that the support is just finalizing now. It seems like,
Will: [00:29:20] I'm with you on that one.
Brad: [00:29:21] yeah, we'll get there. Um, Uh, Dylan in Ottawa, I recently spent a week meticulously comparing and pricing out a bunch of PC components for my first new bill since 2007.
However, on the day I was about to order everything. Dell suddenly had a crazy discount on their Alienware's, which meant I could get a machine with a 3080 in it for around a thousand dollars off. Pretty big discount Yeah. Jumped on the opportunity, but now I can't help feeling buyer's remorse.
On paper, the Alienware is much faster than the PC would have built myself, but I can't shake the feeling. I've made a mistake, getting a Dell, any thoughts about Alienware and whether or not I made a bad choice. I haven't actually received the computer yet. Really go into a lot of detail about why he's wary of the Dell or Alienware brands.
But
Will: [00:30:10] I mean,
Brad: [00:30:11] I guess maybe you
Will: [00:30:11]It’s a big brand. He was like, that's the thing.
Brad: [00:30:14] could probably expand this question out to just say like, did I make a mistake getting a prebuilt machine versus a, especially a highly integrated pre-built machine over building my own, because some of the, you know, some of the, you name one, I can't think of them off the top of my head.
A lot of the prebuilt vendors out there we'll just build with off the shelf parts. Right. But, but I think like Alienware's probably in that category where everything is built to their specs. So it's very tightly integrated and you can't necessarily just like. Put a bunch of new drives. Like the case may not accommodate a bunch of extra drives or like, you know, stuff like that.
Will: [00:30:44] So I haven't, I haven't tested off the shelf computers in more than 10 years. So I, I don't know that I'm a conversant on what's going on in the, in the, like the big, the big market. Like the Dells and the, and the Alienware's, uh, in the olden times, Alienware Alienware machines were more off the shelf than Dells.
So Dell's would have like custom other boards with weird shapes and holes in the wrong places and all sorts of nonsense. Uh, so you couldn't really work on those machines too much. Uh, the, the Alienware's were, were, um, just, you know, normal computers with. You know, fancy plastic cases. I don't think there's anything wrong with building a machine is like, I, I, I actually know a couple of people who have with the rise in shortages and the 3080 shortages who have gone out and built an off the shelf computer just to harvest to the CPU motherboard and video card out of them.
Brad: [00:31:39] I've seen a number of people say that they bought built machines, just cause that was the only way to get those things.
Will: [00:31:43] Um, I, I do like often recommend. So, so there's kind of two scales of PC vendors. There's people that have like giant factories. And I think Dell, Dell slash Alienware fits in that category, right? Like it's a big operation. They sell tens of thousands of computers a month. And like, they, they, they, they do things at massive scale.
I think there's also a pretty strong argument for buying one of what we call the boutique vendors at maximum PC. So places like Falcon, Northwest, and, and, uh, origin and main gear and, and. Places like that, where they're relatively small, they're bigger than like, your local screwdriver shop where it's some guys just like ordering cases from Amazon or new egg or whatever, and putting stuff together.
Uh, so they have a lot of, and they specialize usually in high-end hardware. Um, so like, You know, origin, I recommend origin a lot. So I'm familiar with the, they do, they have a couple of like off the shelf skews that are basically like, you know, uh, pretty good all around PC, like a 3070 with a mid range, you know, Octa core CPU and 32 gigs of Ram and a one terabyte SSD.
And, and it's all going to jam into a nice ITX case. And it'll be quiet and small and it has a good warranty. And the thing that you get with those small boutiques that you don't necessarily get with Dell or Alienware is actual hands-on support if you need it. So like when I have friends who are maybe not, not going to like be comfortable, swapping out a motherboard, if they need to replace hardware, at some point in the future, I usually push them toward, you know, origin or Falcon or one of the, one of those places.
Um, because th they'll get the help that they need. And then I don't end up doing support for them.
Brad: [00:33:20] sure that's a good, good reason to do that. Um, my preference has always been, and I mean, I, I am just picky to the point of obsessiveness about the nature of every single part in the machine down, down to what kind of Ram it is like the brand and the specs of the power supply, like everything, you know, and I just, I just want to know and have control over all of those details then.
You know, you're probably going to get a perfectly fine machine for most of the pre-built vendors, but you can't necessarily guarantee like, you know, a lot, a lot of the specialists you'll look at, we'll just say like 750 watt gold rated power supply, but it won't say what kind for example, stuff like that.
Will: [00:33:56] 1TB NVME, SSD, like it's going to be fast, but is it going to be the fastest thing that you could buy for that money? Probably not.
Brad: [00:34:02] Or, or especially like with SSDs, is it going to be one of the ones that last, the longest, you know, like there's, there are details there to consider that you can't always account for, with that stuff.
Will: [00:34:10] Yeah but at the same time, you also trade, you know, if you're buying an Alienware, or Dell, you're trading the ability to make those decisions for when something breaks, you just call them and they send you a new one. You send the old one back and then the problem is solved, right?
Brad: [00:34:23] You know, it saves you hours and hours of hardware research that you have to do to make all those choices yourself, which, you know, I, long ago, I long ago came to terms with the fact that I enjoy a lot of things that most people find very boring. So I'm fine with that. But, you know,
Will: [00:34:38] Well, yeah, like I don't think I don't, I, I really don't. My preference is to build my own computers. Um, if I was in a dramatically different financial situation, I might change my mind on that, but I don't think so. I kind of enjoy the, like, I enjoy the process and I like knowing how everything goes together.
And I like, I like doing that still. Um, but I mean, there is an argument, there is something nice about calling origin and being like, yeah, I want something that is like a screaming fast Corvette and is going to have the living shit over clocked out of, it's going to have a dope water cooling rig because like, you know, doing that stuff yourself is scary and you can mess up and you cost yourself a lot of money.
If you, if you end up dunking your video card or something. So
Brad: [00:35:20] And, and like you said, those come with enough warranty and support that you have peace of mind about the longevity and stability of the things. So that's fine.
Will: [00:35:27] I mean to the point, even that, like, if you decide a year or two later that you want a new video card, you, you can like, they'll let you send the system back to them and they'll put the video card in for you, if you don't want to do that stuff. So, yeah, like you're, you're, you're building a relationship and I don't think there's anything wrong either
Brad: [00:35:41] no. That's yeah, that's fine. I have a, I've started thinking about a Ryzen build enough to start going down the apparently very deep rabbit hole of memory spec for Ryzen systems.
Will: [00:35:51] so the thing Gordon said is that it's not as everybody's fear. Is that the Ryzen memory situation? He's
Brad: [00:35:58] I’m not talking about stability and compatibility and stuff like that. It's more about peak performance. It's the, what, what it actually is is that like Ram speed never mattered that much with Intel. You know, it's like, ah, you might see a percent difference or something like that. There are, there are much bigger performance deltas depending on dialing in the right speed of memory with Ryzen than than I expected.
Will: [00:36:16] And latency. It's not just speed. It's also latency for Ryzen.
Brad: [00:36:20] And the crazy thing I've come to find out because it was, again, this is a lot is there's a fall off. If you go too high because the memory, what is it? The infinity fabric, I believe is the controller right on the package that
Will: [00:36:31] Yeah, something like that
Brad: [00:36:32] That handles all the talking between core complexes right, you want, you want to one-to-one match your speed of memory with the speed of that thing.
And if you go too far past what that thing can do. You're actually going to see performance drop because the memory is it's out of sync with the, with the controller on the chip, basically.
Will: [00:36:49] Um,
Brad: [00:36:49]there’s a sweet spot. There's a sweet spot. There's a curve there like a bell curve where if you, if your memory is too fast, you're actually going to be worse off.
So
Will: [00:36:56] Everything's everything's a spectrum. Yeah.
Brad: [00:36:58] a lot of research.
Will: [00:36:59] the, the one thing, the unreal engine games, a lot of unreal engine games are real memory bandwidth dependent on Intel. So like pub G if you crank up your memory band with you see almost a one-to-one increase in performance.
Brad: [00:37:10] That's wild. That was, that was never the conventional wisdom in past years. But
Will: [00:37:14] Yeah.
Brad: [00:37:15] how things have changed? Um, let's see. Gosh, maybe one more email. Before we get into the thankful business, the, the thankful segment of the podcast, um, Martin in Dubai currently, I have my 3080. That was very hard to find connected to, uh, I’ll skip all the model numbers and stuff here, but an LG monitor that runs at 1440 P at 144 Hertz through a display port cable and an LG c6 OLED that runs at 4k and 60 Hertz through an HDMI cable.
My question is it possible to set up a macro key or install software that will allow me to press one button on my keyboard and to turn off one display off and change the windows display settings to match the max settings with the other display. currently. I have to turn off one of the displays, then use the display settings options and windows doing this multiple times a day is going to drive me crazy soon.
My use for this is to play more story-driven games at 4k on the TV with the controller and play more frame rate dependent games on my fast refresh rate model.
Will: [00:38:18] I just went through this the other day.
Brad: [00:38:20] Oh, what was your solution? If you have one?
Will: [00:38:22] I have a 4k panel up top and a 1080P, 4k 60 panel up top and a 1080 60 panel down below. Um, so there's a windows hockey that's really useful. This is windows windows, plus P, P is for projector, I think. Uh, and that lets you choose between main display duplicating, main display, extending the main display and secondary display only.
Um, if you, the trick is it cycles between the last mode used for each of those. So, Oh, and also I have a capture card set up that, that duplicates the 10 80 P display onto the stream machine. So that, that, so I can capture 1080 P 60 for streaming. Um, if you, you need to use the Nvidia control panel to do the cloning.
Is the trick and you need the order in which you click the monitors matters. So if you clone the secondary monitor, the 60 Hertz monitor onto the 144 Hertz monitor, then it's not going to work. Right. You're going to get, you're going to get everything running at 60 Hertz, but if you clone the 144 Hertz monitor onto the 60 Hertz monitor, it just works. So order of operations matters.
Brad: [00:39:43] Geez, man.
Will: [00:39:44] Um, it's stupid. It's like
Brad: [00:39:46] get into PEM dos for monitors here?
Will: [00:39:48] I literally was complaining about this to a friend of mine who also streams. He was like, Oh, you just did them in the wrong order, dude. You just need to click the click, the good monitor first and then click the second, the crappy monitor. I was like, you've gotta be fucking kidding me.
Brad: [00:39:58] that's terrible because I've known about windows P for years, but I've never been able to figure out the logic of what exactly what you're describing right now, which is how it decides what it does when you make one of those choices, because it seems so random and this sheds a lot of light on why
Will: [00:40:11] Yeah. It's um,
Brad: [00:40:13] That's good to know. And also terrible that's bad interface design
Will: [00:40:18] I mean, you gotta think about it in terms of like, how windows, like this has made for people who are plugging a laptop in probably.
Brad: [00:40:25] You’re totally right. And this actually plays right into the problems I've been having with these monitors. I got that have the display port and hot plug on and off stuff,
Will: [00:40:32] Yeah.
Brad: [00:40:32] which is that it? Yeah. It's exactly what you said. It wants to assume that the person using windows has no idea what's going to happen when they turn the monitor on or off.
Whereas, like, I don't want it to mess with my windows when the monitor is off, even though the things the display is missing, but a normal person does not want windows on a monitor. That's no longer there. Right. So they, they always, I guess the point I'm making is they always lean towards trying to think, describe it like the most simplistic use case, I guess I would say are the most like straightforward one for somebody who's not a lunatic like us.
Will: [00:41:02] Well, and th the other good one is that windows always treats the origin as the top left corner on the first monitor. They use the primary monitor. So if you have, let's see, is it, if you have monitor windows on the left of that, And they disconnect and reconnect to the name. It shifts all your windows around Jimmy jams.
I'm all over the place. If all of your secondary monitors are right of that primary monitor, everything just works
Brad: [00:41:25] Okay.
Will: [00:41:26] above or above or below. But if they're left, it's bad, don't put them a lot. Don't put secondary monitors to the left. The left-most monitor should always be your primary
Brad: [00:41:33] Always be the primary.
Will: [00:41:34] Always be the primary.
Um, the, okay, so what did we learn? Uh, so my setup, I have duplicating the primary monitor onto the capture card. And then the 4k monitor is a secondary above hitting windows P from. I don't see what it says right now. Right now it says duplicate. So it's duplicating one and the capture card, and two is extended.
If I changed it to extend only the capture card will un-duplicate. If I change it to projector only, only the 4k monitor up top will be the only thing on if I put it on primarily the 10 80 P will only be on it. They put it back on duplicate. I think it'll just work. The TLDR is, I just don't change it anymore.
Cause it's too scary.
Brad: [00:42:16] Yeah. Wow. My eyes are starting to cross a little bit here. Just play around with it a little bit. It sounds like if you set up the house of cards just right, you might get it where you want it. So you can just hit, hit window P and be happy
Will: [00:42:26] the secret is getting the extend and the duplicate. Right. And then just using windows P to switch between those two
Brad: [00:42:31] and then never touch it again.
Will: [00:42:32] and then never touch it again and always, and always click on the good monitor when you're doing the duplicate, not the crappy monitor.
Brad: [00:42:39] yes. Um, the other suggestion I was going to make is, uh, our wonderful friend nursoft to the rescue.
Will: [00:42:44] Oh yeah.
Brad: [00:42:45] Um, I use a tool called multi-monitor tool. It's the thing I use for automatically switching, which desktop is the primary. Uh, but it does a ton of stuff. And it's got a pretty decent command line interface that you could probably script to do multiple things in one like batch file or something like that.
Will: [00:42:58] Put that on an El Gato button too.
Brad: [00:43:00] that. Yes. You probably could do that. I'm sitting here looking. Yeah. Some of the stuff you can do enabling display disabled, specified monitors, switch, specified monitors, uh, set the primary and secondary, um, do do do, Oh, you can save a current. Oh wow. You can save a config. In a dot CFG and just load that config.
So you can actually set up a pretty extensive configuration and just load that, I guess, um, do do do a bunch of a bunch of stuff for switching. What primary, secondary monitors. I don't know if you can set refresh rate with this though. That might be a problem.
Will: [00:43:35] I got to the point that I was looking at that when somebody took, when my friend told me about the duplicating in the right order thing, and then I was like, okay, I don't have to fool with this. Cause I can make what I want work within the confines of windows.
Brad: [00:43:46] Yes. Sometimes you can just bend it to your will, but, uh, it's become, it's become a little bit of an inside joke on the town that our discord, that you kind of can't think of an esoteric tech problem in windows without there being a nursoft tool to address it.
Will: [00:43:59] there's always a nursoft problem solution for every problem.
Brad: [00:44:02] when I was first wrestling with these monitors, trying to make them do what I wanted, people pointed me at the, he actually made, I needed the ED ID of the monitor.
Will: [00:44:10] Oh, yeah, I've used as he EDID finder before.
Brad: [00:44:12] he actually has two there. He has two, two separate utilities that can both dump that, that information from the monitor. It’s ridiculous.
Will: [00:44:21] I
Brad: [00:44:22] The man, the man thinks of everything.
Will: [00:44:23] I broke a Dell 30 inch monitor or no, what was it? There was a video card in compatibility with the Dell 30 inch dual DVI monitors at one point. And I had to rewrite the EDID, which was real exciting. Um, and I used a nursoft tool to do that I believe, or at least to find the right one and then write the correct one back anyway.
Brad: [00:44:44] Is, um,
Will: [00:44:45] Thanks nursoft .
Brad: [00:44:46] upstanding member of society
Will: [00:44:48] Wonderful, wonderful human being.
Brad: [00:44:49] doing a lot of public. Good. Um, all right. Let's get into some emails from people, uh, talking about things they're thankful for. Uh, I'm going to read this one first.
Will: [00:45:00] I'm thankful for email's Brad.
Brad: [00:45:01] Yeah. Yes. Thank you everyone for sending them. So we can do this episode. Um, this is from Tom Apple crumble on our discord.
Uh, this kind of ties right into that nursoft stuff. Uh, I'm thankful for opensource and thankful for everyone who puts their spare time into working on open-source applications often with little thanks and rarely any compensation, what open-source tools and applications couldn't you live without,
Will: [00:45:25] Wow. Uh, I mean, we're using audacity right now.
Brad: [00:45:28] Yes. We use audacity all the time for both this podcast and my day job. Um,
Will: [00:45:33] I use the voice meter a lot, which is an incredibly useful like audio routing tool. I don't know that it's I can't remember if it's open source or if it's just like a shareware
Brad: [00:45:43] I'd have to, I'd have to check. I don't know that that one's open source. I'm not sure. Um, I've come to rely on FFmpeg very heavily over the last six months.
Will: [00:45:52] It's an incredibly useful
Brad: [00:45:54] It's crazy how capable of that thing is like, there's a reason they call it the Swiss army knife of audio and video, um
Will: [00:46:00] voice meters donation where, or not, not, but I gave him 50 bucks cause I use it all the time.
Brad: [00:46:05] Yeah. Um, I really gotten into using open-source software for a variety of reasons.
Like it's, it's always a bigger pain to set up. On the front end,
Will: [00:46:15] Not always, but often
Brad: [00:46:16] well, not always, but often say it's maybe not the absolute best about it, but quite frequently, a lot of work to learn and figure out how to configure the way you want it, but it almost always gives you so much more control over what it is you're trying to do then off the shelf commercial software
Will: [00:46:32] You want to do something really ridiculous that no sane human being would ever want to do. There's an open source program for that probably.
Brad: [00:46:39]absoulutly It's my favorite thing about it.
Will: [00:46:41] like, I, I feel like, um, Free NAS is kind of waning in my regard right now, but like stuff like home assistant and the Mr. Project like these, these, like the Mr is a perfect example of a thing that wouldn't exist if it weren't for this large community of people who were interested in archiving and preserving like the, the ways to play these old games on original hardware.
Brad: [00:47:03] in fact, we have a great, uh, we have a great counterexample to that, which is the analog stuff. Because because the analog stuff is how a commercial company is handling that exact same goal, except in their case, they are producing a different $200 box for every single console under the sun.
Will: [00:47:18] Yeah, that doesn't seem great for me. I'm much more into the buy one.
Brad: [00:47:22] yeah. Whereas yes, you can, you can build a Mister for probably less than that at this point or right around that. And then it doesn't, it plays every console under the sun. Um, So, um, yeah, home assistant is another great example. Like that home assistant is working again. It took a while to set up, but it's working so much better for me than the Apple home stuff ever even came close to thinking about.
Will: [00:47:44] Yeah, well, and, and like, once I realized that you can turn automations on and off from inside other automations, then like it's opened up a whole world of ridiculous, like simplicity. So that.
Brad: [00:47:58] Sounds great.
Will: [00:47:58] Yeah, it's very good.
Brad: [00:48:00] That's pretty good. Um,
Will: [00:48:03] I'm scrolling down my list of applications that I use on the day to day. And like VLC is another one that I use all the time that is incrediable
Brad: [00:48:08] VLC is huge. Yes. Yes. I use VLC as a capture card viewer. Like that's another example of, uh, so I, it's kind of just right there in plain view and I just never noticed it for a long time, but if you go under media and then open capture device, it'll.
Will: [00:48:24] HOLY crap.
Brad: [00:48:25] So it'll, it'll let you open any direct show device, or I think a lot of the UVC ones as well.
I don't know if you're familiar with that distinction.
Will: [00:48:31] Wow.
Brad: [00:48:32] UVC is like a webcam it's it's what makes webcam show up in Google meet and stuff like that, or Jitsi. Uh, whereas direct show is what a capture card generally comes in as.
Will: [00:48:42] I had no idea.
Brad: [00:48:43] It's pretty fiddly. I won't get into all the details here, but I ended up having to set up a command line to make VLC open my capture card properly because the UI that they have for it is not great for doing that.
Right.
Will: [00:48:54] Of course.
Brad: [00:48:55] Uh, it's a little bit, it's a little bit half-baked, but again, you can make it, do exactly what you want and it's like a perfect, like little preview window for your capture for what's coming into your capture card.
Will: [00:49:04] and, and also shout out to Firefox, which has like, probably the most used open-source piece of software on my computer right now. Um, I, I, it is nice to use a browser that I'm pretty confident is not selling my business.
Brad: [00:49:18] they unfortunately cut a bunch of jobs a few weeks ago. I don't know if you saw that, which is not, not encouraging, unfortunately, but hopefully that's stuff bounces back. Um, let's see here. How about. Got so many of these, um, boy, this was a somewhat dark one, but, uh, scoot from the discord wrote in, I've got a tech thing that I'm thankful for, but it comes attached to a painful story.
Earlier this year, I was deployed on a six month Naval operation where while I was able to have some truly life-changing experiences tragedy also struck, uh, during a routine flight in April, 2020, our ships helicopter crashes at sea. And all six souls on board, people that we worked with and ate meals with and spoke to every day were killed.
Uh, the initial recovery operations were unsuccessful and it was determined that the remains of the helicopter and our crew were at a depth of 3000 meters, absolutely unrecoverable by divers, but with the help from multiple countries and deploying special underwater drones, the complete recovery of the remains of the aircraft, as well as our friends inside was made possible.
Uh, and their families and friends were able to properly put them to rest. Something that I feel would have been unachievable or feasible, uh, with the technology of a previous era, uh, perhaps even, uh, 10 years ago. Uh, and for all of us on board, it was something that brought a lot of peace of mind as something that I felt thankful for this year.
And I'm glad I could share,
Will: [00:50:53] Wow. That's incredible.
Brad: [00:50:55] yeah, that's wild. I, I. Hadn't really thought a lot about under sea drones. Like you hear the word drone and you just think aerial drone these days. But I wonder if similar technology I assume is making its way into kind of nautical stuff, under, underwater stuff.
Will: [00:51:10] well, there's all sorts of stuff, both on commercial and like, like amateur level you can buy for under a grand and open ROV kit. Uh, or at least I haven't looked at the newer models for a long time. You were able to buy for under a thousand dollars, a tethered open ROV kit that, uh, that they designed to make underwater ROV is accessible.
And like, I don't wanna say disposable because a thousand dollars isn't disposable, but like more, more disposable than the traditional. Quarter of a million dollar underwater drones that they were using prior to this. And it was basically a like a home, you know, it was a plexiglass box with that was sealed with motors and buoyancy control.
And like people use it to explore sonatas in Mexico and cave systems and all sorts of places that you wouldn't want to send a normal human. And you also wouldn't want to send something that costs half a quarter of a million dollars, because if you lost it, it would be gone forever. And if you lose the thousand dollar thing, who cares.
Um, this is amazing. I didn't, I did not know this story and I, I really appreciate, uh, scoot sharing it.
Brad: [00:52:14] Yeah. That's I mean, it's, it is sort of uplifting at the same time as being quite sad,
Will: [00:52:20] Look, Yeah.
Brad: [00:52:21] It's cool that they can do stuff like that, I guess. Are, are most of them the underwater ones still tethered, I guess, I guess that would make more sense. Obviously.
Will: [00:52:28] Well, radio doesn't work. Great underwater.
Brad: [00:52:30] Right. And a tether is much more feasible than, than with an aerial drone of course.
Will: [00:52:34] Well, yeah. And the, and the tether also gives you a recovery chance of something. It turns out the ocean is unforgiving
Brad: [00:52:39] So I've heard you, um,
Will: [00:52:43] I mean, there, there are, um, the Navy. Yeah. I know experiment. I don't know if they're actually using them, but they experimented with like hydrofoil style drones that you do perform propulsion with buoyancy changes.
So they, they kind of like do this wave motion up and down and they're riding up and down and they can go incredible distances. Um, they come to the surface to charge with solar power. And, uh, they use them to like, they used them for all sorts of stuff. I also, I believe that we also use those to track fisheries, but I'm not sure drones are cool.
That's the TLDR.
Brad: [00:53:22] usually, yeah,
Will: [00:53:23] I mean,
Brad: [00:53:24] until they totally all developed collective consciousness.
Will: [00:53:27] I'm not so much a fan of the kid who has one down the street that flies it over to the house all the time, too low, but
Brad: [00:53:32] they can, but they can be used for ill as well as good. But, but, you know, um,
Will: [00:53:39]ain’t that technology?
Brad: [00:53:40] Yes, Travis in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It's hard to imagine this being used for anything but good for me. I'm thankful for wireless thermometers, especially this time of year when smoking a Turkey for the holidays, not having to go out into the cold to monitor temperatures is a major plus hope you guys have a wonderful Thanksgiving has the range gotten pretty good on those, I guess it must have at this point.
Will: [00:54:01] Yeah. They're like two. Yeah.
Brad: [00:54:02] you could put one out in the backyard and just hang out on the couch with a beer and keep an eye on it.
Will: [00:54:07] I mean, look, even if, even if you don't, even if it doesn't go that far, you can put the thing in the, like in the room near it's the smoker and just get up and walk to the smoker room rather than the, um, yeah, I, I, uh, that's, that's, uh, wired wireless things. I was explaining this to my daughter the other day that like the phone used to be a thing that plugged into the wall and you had to stand next to it.
If you wanted to talk to somebody. And she thought I was joking, uh, the fact that, you know, unlicensed spectrum is available and easy is definitely a thing to be thankful for.
Brad: [00:54:37] For sure.
Will: [00:54:39] And definitely we're not using it for bad things. It's only for good. It turns out. So yeah.
Brad: [00:54:43] Well, smoking turkeys is a hundred percent positive.
Will: [00:54:47] turkeys. Won't smoke themselves.
Brad: [00:54:48] That's true. Uh, apparently I read the other day of the pandemic and this is pretty common sense, but apparently the pandemic is hitting Turkey demand pretty hard for this Thanksgiving
Will: [00:54:57] Really? I would think it would be up.
Brad: [00:54:59] specifically larger turkeys is what I read, like the demand for.
Will: [00:55:01] Oh, that's true
Brad: [00:55:02] smaller turkeys, because the gatherings are just generally so much smaller this year for people that are getting together.
It's a lot more like four people, six people, stuff like that. So,
Will: [00:55:09] I mean, we usually do a 21 pounder and we ordered a 13, I think so.
Brad: [00:55:14] That's exactly what I saw is that. Demand for the turkeys and the 20 pound range or so is, uh, not what it's been, which is
Will: [00:55:22] fat turkeys get to live another year.
Brad: [00:55:24] uh, well start great for farmers though, that specialize in that kind of stuff.
Will: [00:55:27] Well, that, that does seem to, I mean, I guess we could do our part in order and 21 pound Turkey and the deceit Turkey for 10 days.
Brad: [00:55:32] That’s kind of what I was getting at.
Will: [00:55:34] I mean, look, if you want to come down
Brad: [00:55:36] I will do my part.
Will: [00:55:37] if you want to come down and pick up a thing, I will put, we will put out a container with food for you on Thanksgiving morning. Brad.
Brad: [00:55:43] I will do my part for America's farmers eat through weeks where the Turkey,
Will: [00:55:48] Look, I have a picture of you knowing on a Turkey leg from at least at least two years. Uh, so
Brad: [00:55:54] I always went one Turkey leg too far.
Will: [00:55:57] look, there's no such thing as too many Turkey legs.
Brad: [00:55:59] oh boy, what's your, what is your ideal Turkey sandwich? Do you have a good,
Will: [00:56:02] Uh, yeah, I like, I look, I like white bread. mayonnaise , pepper, lettuce, Turkey, cranberry sauce, more mayonnaise a little bit of pepper and then close it up.
Brad: [00:56:13] Man that's serious.
Will: [00:56:14] Yeah.
Brad: [00:56:15] Not so sure about the cranberry sauce. The rest sounds pretty good.
Will: [00:56:18] Canberra sauce adds a tartness to it. That's delicious.
Brad: [00:56:20] I can see it.
Will: [00:56:21] It's just a tiny it's like you don't have the cranberries in there. You just take the jammy part
Brad: [00:56:25] Okay. I was gonna, I was just about to ask it's depends on, are you using the canned stuff that comes out in the shape of the can?
Will: [00:56:32] Have you ever had the canned stuff when you were at my house at Thanksgiving, Brad?
Brad: [00:56:35] I don't know that I've ever had cranberry sauce. Chimping in general period.
Will: [00:56:39] We put the cranberries on the stove with a cup of sugar and a cup of water. They cook for about an hour until the cranberries all pop, and then you cover it and you let it come down to room temperature and put it in the fridge. It’s delicious
Brad: [00:56:50] Okay. Maybe, maybe I've been missing out then.
Will: [00:56:52] also a little bit of orange peel, little orange, orange zest.
Brad: [00:56:55] All we ever have was the canned stuff, so I can understand why.
Will: [00:57:00] I grew up on the canned stuff too. It look, here's the secret. If, if somebody asks you what you want to bring don't okay A. don't go to people's houses for Thanksgiving this year, because it's a terrible idea of here in the United States. Well, if you're in, if you're not in the United States, we're probably not gonna celebrate Thanksgiving.
If you are in the United States, don't go to people's houses for Thanksgiving
Brad: [00:57:14] unless you're in Canada, in which case I hope you didn't go somewhere on Thanksgiving.
Will: [00:57:18] Um, if, if somebody asks you what you want to bring for future Thanksgivings volunteered to do cranberry sauce. Cause it's the easiest thing in the world to make
Brad: [00:57:27] That does sound pretty easy.
Will: [00:57:28] You buy a bag of cranberries. He makes sure there's no rocks in the cranberry bag.
Cause that is a thing that happens. You take out any of the soft, squishy, cranberries. You only want the hard ones. And then you put them in a pot with like a cup or two of water, a cup or two, a sugar. Some literally you scrape a little bit of orange zest off. You can just put a peel orange and if you want it doesn't matter.
Chuck it in there, cook it. When all the cranberries pop you're done, chill it and take it. It's easier than anything.
Brad: [00:57:55]talking like low, Medium hea?.
Will: [00:57:57] Like you want it to simmer?
Brad: [00:57:58] Okay, God I'm getting hungry. Like why does that always happen on this podcast?
Will: [00:58:02] Look, we, I don't, but when you don't leave the house much food is what you have to look forward to.
Brad: [00:58:07] My go-to was just leftover Turkey, sliced tomato and mayonnaise. That's it just
Will: [00:58:13] I'll see. No tomato, no tomato and a Thanksgiving Turkey sandwich.
Brad: [00:58:16] No, oh man, Wham. Bam. Thank you. Turkey sandwich.
Will: [00:58:18] I'll also do a, I'll also do a, uh, open face with some gravy, like white bread. Like w not, I'm not talking to like fancy white bread. I want like wonder bread, right? Like the squishy,
Brad: [00:58:28] Yes for sure. Just plain old. Yes.
Will: [00:58:30] A thin layer of stuffing, some thigh, like some, some carved thigh meat.
If I do the Rulad, then I'll do that on there. And then gravy just poured over the top. Just slathered.
Brad: [00:58:42] Good Lord man.
Will: [00:58:43] It's not a healthy sandwich.
Brad: [00:58:45] Oh, no, it is not. Uh, let's see here. Travis says, uh, I have to say the tech I'm most thankful for is gaming this year. Uh, the lockdown, natural disasters and political situation in the U S have been much more bearable with releases. Like half-life, Alyx letting me escape from reality and do maternal and getting some angst out video games still feel normal, even though not much else does.
Uh, I still need to play half-life Alyx I, now that I've got this, now that I've got it, 3080, I was kind of waiting on getting a better GPU so I can play it full everything. And I should probably do that. I should probably do that.
Will: [00:59:23] play that. You should play it. It's a good game.
Brad: [00:59:25] I’m going to do that. I'm going to do that. Uh, also I fired up Doom Eternal the other day on this 3080 for the first time.
And Holy shit,
Will: [00:59:33] yeah,
Brad: [00:59:34] everything as cranked as it could possibly get. I did not see it drop below 250 frames. A second.
Will: [00:59:39] No, it's, uh, it it's, it, it works out. Um, the one thing. I, I said this during extra life, but it was like, honestly, one of the things that helped me keep my mental state over the last four years as I watched American democracy crumble, um, was that I was able to hang out with my friends every night and play pub G and like just.
Like play, play a game that required full focus all the time and was engaging. And, and yeah, it kept me from doom scrolling at night. And for that, I am, I am grateful
Brad: [01:00:18] Yes, there's absolutely something to be said for diverting your attention for a little bit.
Will: [01:00:22] if you have that luxury. It is, it is okay to do.
Brad: [01:00:27] Uh, Cole from Montreal thankful for many pieces of tech in my life this year, but two things have really stood out to me, a good pair of wireless headphones for my PC on using these still steel series, artists seven, for example. This is especially nice if you work from home and are a frequent participants of long meetings.
Uh, I just got my hands on some Astro A20s, which is like, there's like their budget, their budget, uh, uh,
Will: [01:00:53]are they Earbuds. Are they headphones
Brad: [01:00:54] No, no, they're full reach over and grab him here. Basically the full Astro shape headset, but it's not like, I guess the a fifties are they're nice ones. These are, these are a little bit on the lower end.
They feel the, maybe the build quality is not quite as robust as the. There's the, the plug-in ones, but, um, I'm kind of shocked at the latency and the quality or like right there. Honestly, I was, I was pretty surprised
Will: [01:01:18] are you are using for consoles, like in the living room or something,
Brad: [01:01:20] I have not yet. I got the, um, the, it comes with a transmitter or USB transmitter and you have to make a console choice.
Will: [01:01:29] Got it
Brad: [01:01:29] got, I got the PS5 ones so I think, I think buying the transmitter for the other type of console was like an extra 20 bucks. I haven’t got my hands on that for the X-Box yet, but I've just used them on the PC so far, but I was just like, I just didn't, I guess I was always a little skeptical of wireless audio, but it's pretty good.
Will: [01:01:46] So. I don't, I don't like it for PC stuff because when I'm sitting here, I want to have the good headphones with the good mic on them for streaming stuff. Most often.
Brad: [01:01:55] Yes. So you'd want to plug in for if you're streaming or something like that, but this is just for like listening to music or YouTube videos or whatever. It's totally, totally fine.
Will: [01:02:02] Well, I mean, we used to have like when, when we lived in the apartment and we lived in, I lived in a loft for a long time in our bedroom was in the loft area. So like, if I wanted to play games on the big TV and Gina was asleep, she had to get up early. Cause she had a grown up job. Um, I would, I had.
Something like 900 megahertz wireless headphones. And it was, it was really nice to be able to just lounge in the living room with headphones on and not bother everybody else in the house with, with whatever, you know, loud, stupid movie. I was watching her loud, stupid game I was playing. So yeah, I'm into it.
Brad: [01:02:33]I really appreciated the, on the last generation of consoles adding the, uh, eighth inch headphone Jack to the controllers. Like I use that all the time,
Will: [01:02:43] The 360 did that too. Didn't it. You had to by and adapter I think.
Brad: [01:02:44] no, rather than there might've been an adapter, it was definitely not in the controller.
Will: [01:02:50] Oh, no, it was the PS three. You can do wireless. You can do bluetooth
Brad: [01:02:54] Yes. Yes. Yes. PS3 has had external or separate wireless headphones for a while, but just having every controller essentially also be kind of a, kind of a wireless pair of headphones. Not quite, I mean, you're tethered to the controller, but
Will: [01:03:07] It's very convenient.
Brad: [01:03:08] yes, it certainly is. Uh, Cole says, secondly, my rock solid local and wifi network, I've been using a Ubiquiti edge router and some wireless access points in mesh mode.
Team Brad for networked here. Fancy routers, man
Will: [01:03:22] look, I'm increasingly on team Brad. When it comes to this, I haven't made the move yet. I haven't made the move yet, but I I'm. I'm. The number of problems that come from having this stupid at and T router that sucks. Like it just, it it's, um, I think the next time there's a problem. It's going to be like time to hit the old Ubiquiti store.
Brad: [01:03:45] that's yeah, that'll, that'll do it. Uh, I don't know how I feel about Ubiquiti these days. They feel, it seems like, I'm sorry, you're taking your glasses off now. I must've said the wrong
Will: [01:03:57] Oh crap.
Brad: [01:03:59] but I mean, they're really pushing into the consumer space and it seems like the stuff they're doing there is really good for that.
But the edge router line is kind of languishing from what I've seen. And I don't know some of the, like the,
Will: [01:04:11] How often do you need to update router? Like it's not, if it can do gigabit, who cares? That's all anybody has right.
Brad: [01:04:16] if you're only on gigabit, you're probably fine. Let's let's say that internet connections were going to get faster than gigabit someday. You might think about
Will: [01:04:25] Upgrading your router. When gigabit, when connections are faster than gigabit someday.
Brad: [01:04:29] yeah, we'll talk about it later.
Will: [01:04:31] Okay, Oh, no.
Brad: [01:04:32] but I don't know. I, whatever that is, that is potentially for way down the line, but, um, Uh, I, I almost, at this point, if I, if I had to do over again, like, I, I don't obviously, but I think I would probably go the West Fedelin route and build a nice little PF sensor open sense box, because I mean, like, I'm all about
Will: [01:04:51] Don't tell me this.. Don't tell me this.
Brad: [01:04:53] all about modularity these days.
Just, just like pulling the wifi out of the router and making it an extra access point is nice because you just swap those out whenever you want. What if you had a PF sense box and you could just swap the network card out on that, let's say, if you had a need for something, you know, like, let's say you went to fiber instead of copper in your house or something like that, you know, like maybe, yeah.
Like if you could put like relatively cheap, 10 gig fiber network cards are getting pretty ubiquitous at this point. So like
Will: [01:05:20] no, no.
Brad: [01:05:21] having things be upgradeable is, is the way to go
Will: [01:05:23] You're thinking about this, the wrong way. It's what, 200 bucks for a Ubiquiti edge router that'll do a gigabit to people's house. Yeah. It's like 180 bucks maybe.
Brad: [01:05:32] I got mine on sale for one 50. They can, they can be had pretty cheap.
Will: [01:05:35] Yeah, the market, the resell market for that is going to be real good. So your opportunity costs to have that and not have to fool with the other stuff for the next N years until you actually get 10 gigabit in the house. And two gigabit to the curb is 40 bucks, probably. So, you know
Brad: [01:05:52] probably. Right.
Will: [01:05:53] yeah. Don't, it's, you'll spend more than power on your PF sense box unless you, unless you are really careful.
Brad: [01:06:01] Fine.
Will: [01:06:03] Don't do it. Brad don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. It's already complicated enough.
Brad: [01:06:07] it's kind of rain on my parade.
Will: [01:06:09] Dang it.
Brad: [01:06:10] Um, let's see here. Let's do one or two more. Uh, Oh, here's actually, this was an interesting question. That's kind of ties into the holidays, uh, from Jacob. I'd love to know what you and other listeners are doing to make some sort of normal quote home for the holidays experience, work digitally.
Uh, I'm especially thinking about how to do a more easy to use wide-field video presence. Like you're on either end of the table from one another. Uh, I know in my case, I bought a bunch of ridiculous streaming equipment to improve my digital presence, but I don't expect that my family or friends would have the same or know how to set up a more complex video rig.
Ultimately, I'm wondering if things like Facebook portal, which I'm against, because I’m a no Facebook account holder, Google nest hubs, echo shows, et cetera, are the right way. Uh, or if there are other simple consumer friendly solutions that anyone has tried. My current plan for Christmas is to have everyone join a Skype call and I'm going, I went to live switch videos for multiple households to create a produced style video.
That's ambitious. I'm impressed
Will: [01:07:12] I liked that. Yeah.
Brad: [01:07:13] impressed with the amount of thought going into this. That's pretty good, but also I admire the commitment to like trying to have togetherness, but not actually going just straight up, going to somebody's house. Because again, you should not be going to somebody's house.
Will: [01:07:25] Don't get, don't go to somebodies house. Um,
Brad: [01:07:27] in, we're in deep shit right now.
Will: [01:07:31] the, um, On the video front, like the best home video conferencing experience I think I ever had was using Skype and a kinect two on an Xbox one. Like consistent. If you had those on both ends, it was really good. It kind of fast tracked a little bit. So zoom in on the person that was talking or whatever.
Um, I, we do a lot of like setting up a Mac book or an iPad on a stand and putting that in front of the TV and then airplane the, the FaceTime call to the TV. And like, it's not a great experience. You get a lot of like audio feedback from the TVs and. Like people are like, Hey, I can't hear you because you're too far away from the microphone.
Um,
Brad: [01:08:15] we also do. We do, we also do a lot of like targeted FaceTiming for that exact reason, which is that it's not, it's not the most enjoyable way to communicate for long periods of time. So we just kind of get in and out.
Will: [01:08:26] we focus like on Christmas morning with the kiddo, we do, like, we saved the grandma and grandpa presents to open until they're on FaceTime. And we do FaceTime with them to open that stuff when we did the same thing for all the aunts and uncles and like it's it's, uh, but it's a lot. Um, I like personally, I wouldn't want to do the streaming setup because I don't want to have to, like, I wanna be able to pay attention and not have to manage that.
But if somebody in the family wanted to do that, it'd be all for it. Um,
Brad: [01:08:59]Yeah I half the reason I wanted to re read this email is I'm curious if anybody is doing like an extended everybody at the table kind of session for stuff like this.
Will: [01:09:07] So we're going to do that for Thanksgiving and you're more than welcome to join. It'll be the sister-in-laws and all that. It might be a debacle.
Brad: [01:09:12]You’re actually going to like sit down and have a whole meal while on a thing?
Will: [01:09:15] That's that's the intent. I don't know how long it'll last,
Brad: [01:09:18]what if, what if you get jealous somebody else's food, cause everybody's going to be eating a different meal.
That's an interesting, that's like a, that's an interesting way to like remove part of the shared experience, which is that like, when somebody just like shows up and orders a pizza, I was like, Oh, I didn't feel like cooking. I'm just gonna eat pizza over here.
Will: [01:09:33] What if our Turkey's on fire and everybody else's is really nice and moist and succulent and like, yeah, I, I, um, uh, I don't know that like the Facebook portal, so I haven't had, I mean, have you used, you don't use any of the voice activated stuff, right?
Brad: No
Will: Yeah. So I don't have one of the, I I've not used one of the nest hubs or the Facebook portal for similar reasons to Jacob.
Um, same thing for the echo show. I, I, I ordered a nest hub for Gina.
Brad: [01:10:02] What is a nest hub?
Will: [01:10:03]It’s like a, it's like one of those Google mini speakers with a screen on it. Um, because she spends a lot of time watching like news and stuff in the kitchen when she's doing other stuff. So I did that as like, instead of getting a TV for in there.
Um, cause you can,
Brad: [01:10:17] How big is the screen? Is it like,
Will: [01:10:18] it's like eight inches. It's like smaller than an iPad. Um, I, yeah, I don't know. I know that the Facebook portal, I have seen demos of it and it seemed pretty good. I you, you solve the, Hey, does everybody have a Skype account problem with Facebook by, by doing that thing? But like, I don't, I don't want to have that in my house,
Brad: [01:10:42] I agree
Will: [01:10:43] so I don't know.
Brad: [01:10:44] Yes. This is kind of tangential to this topic, but that was kind of fascinating to me. Have you seen any of the AI driven video conferencing stuff that Nvidia is working on?
Will: [01:10:56] Yeah, we did in the demo, in that briefing, we did a few months ago.
Brad: [01:10:59]I don’t think they had that in there. This is specifically video chat, like, just like we're doing right now. Just over a call people talking to each other with webcam.
Will: [01:11:06] It's the thing where they, they, um,
Brad: [01:11:09]Maybe they did touch on it. I
Will: [01:11:10] face analysis and measure your yeah.
Brad: [01:11:12] So, you know, like a normal video chat, you were sending it just a static video feed, right.
It's just, just frame data. Right. Which is like what megabits per second of data.
Will: [01:11:21] Something like that.
Brad: [01:11:21] They were saying, this is down to like hundreds of kilobits.
Will: [01:11:24] They're sending button shapes, I think.
Brad: [01:11:26] Right? Right. So like the way it was described as that they are essentially just sending a deep fake of your face or they're manipulating a deep fake of your face locally on the other person's computer, which is just kind of creepy, but they can do things like, uh, diverting your eye line to make it look like you're looking into the camera.
So that both people,
Will: [01:11:44] FaceTime does that now? I think.
Brad: [01:11:45] Oh really?
Will: [01:11:46] I'm pretty sure,
Brad: [01:11:47] Huh.
Will: [01:11:48] like, it looks like if you're looking down at the screen, it looks like you're looking up at the camera up 10 degrees or whatever.
Brad: [01:11:53]Wow I wonder if that that's probably only on the newer models
Will: [01:11:55] It might only be on the newer phones. Yeah.
Brad: [01:11:57] facial analysis stuff, right.
Will: [01:11:58] Yeah. Maybe, um, that, that stuff's a trip. I don't know
Brad: [01:12:02] Like it's both fascinating and yes, totally. It's, it's fascinating that they can do it. And also I'm not sure if they should,
Will: [01:12:08] It's. I mean, it's, it's, it fits in the DLSS category of this is really magic and it seems good, but I'm not sure. Right. I mean, we talked about with Gordon and a little bit, a couple weeks ago, but I don't, I don't know how, like, I can't imagine you're gonna run 4k stuff or even 1440 piece stuff with Ray tracing on, even on the new cards without having DLSS on.
Brad: [01:12:30] you're probably right,
Will: [01:12:31] But are those benchmarks true? Cause they're just making stuff up at this point, like filling. Yeah. I don't, I don't know. It's complicated.
Brad: [01:12:38] Yeah, I'm, I'm really, I mean, I want to play cyberpunk, but I'm also really excited to get my hands on cyberpunk as a test case for that stuff, because that seems like the big one of like in a big open world, a lot of effects stacked on top of each other. Like what what's that Ray tracing performance going to be like, how is DLSS going to work?
There
Will: [01:12:55] Watch watchdog Legion is a pretty good, pretty good test case.
Brad: [01:12:57] That one from everything I've read, like the CPU demands of that thing are so extreme. Like it.
Will: [01:13:04] That is true.
Brad: [01:13:04] My 7,700 K was not remotely up to snuff for that thing.
Will: [01:13:08] Um, the, the one thing I will say for people who are thinking about doing this for the first time for Christmas or Thanksgiving, as, as like the first couple of years, my daughter was around, when we were doing Christmas, we would just have the FaceTime thing going all day. And it ended up being a real low value kind of interaction with the grandparents and the aunts and uncles and stuff like that, because like, it just ended up being annoying for everyone.
So it's better to do like a focus limited time where you're actually paying attention to and enjoying each other's company. Then I think for me, at least than it is to try to do it all day, like you were actually in the same room,
Brad: [01:13:44] Agreed.
Will: [01:13:45] like we don't need the drunk uncle yelling about how, you know, Q or whatever nonsense this year will be about.
Brad: [01:13:53] let's just not
Will: [01:13:54] Yeah.
Brad: [01:13:54] let's just not. Instead of let's call it into the emails.
Will: [01:13:59] Uh, you know, if you wanted to send an email to the next email episode, you would do that by emailing techpod@content.town. Uh, and if you wanted to have more conversations like this on the day to day, it turns out there is a fabulous discord, which is one of the things I am. Like I said, this on a different show the other day, but like the last year.
I don't know how I would've coped with the last year, if it hadn't been for the communities that have sprung up around this podcast and my Twitch stream. Um, the, the thing that amazes me about, about Twitch and discord and how those two things work with each other is that like, like I w I mean, we both had incredible communities at other properties and other sites and stuff like that.
And the, the density of. Fabulous conversations and interesting people. And at the same time, like very little need for moderation or any kind of like, like people who are able to just be responsible and grown up and have nice chats on the internet is something that I hadn't expected to get in 2020.
Brad: [01:15:05]Yes just an invaluable little, extra boost of social contact camaraderie for sure. Um, also, and we just, we just get so many fascinating people in that discord. Uh, one of our, I don't know if you saw one of our, um, One of our discord members worked for embark studios that we talked about last week
Will: [01:15:22] I was shocked.
Brad: [01:15:23] is working on a lot of that future tech.
So that was like super awesome to see
Will: [01:15:27] I'm I'm very, we, I had a conversation with one of the folks there about how they do that stuff and like the results that they, there's more, there's more blog posts that we talked about last week, but yeah, like it's, it's opened a lot of really interesting doors for me personally. I think everybody is enjoying.
Uh, being part of that conversation, it seems like, and, and you can find out how to do that by going to patrion.com/techpod, which sounds like the silliest thing I've ever said. Um, but like, I mean it a, we, we don't, we charge basically the minimum you can charge on Patrion and still like make a little bit of money to get into the discord.
Um, it's two, so it's two bucks a month. Um, I feel like, um, I would pay that, um, I don't have to obviously, but, but, um, but we really appreciate everybody who supports the pod, um, and contributes to the discord, talks to us on Twitter. Um, uh, we've talked about starting a subreddit, uh, with a couple of folks.
Now, if people are into that, uh, I want to make sure we think Julian who has done transcripts for all of our recent podcasts, starting with like episode 52, I think 51. Um, and, and so if you have friends who are deaf or hard of hearing, or just don't want to listen to us, talk for an hour and a half, they can read the transcripts of that Julian's doing.
Um, and yeah, thanks to everybody who supports the show. Like I said, whether it's on the Patrion or by telling other people about it, the thing that helps us more than anything else is letting other people know about the show and, and, and we really appreciate it. And, and, uh, I'm, I'm thankful that you all choose to spend your time with us.
That is, that is a real treat.
Brad: [01:17:03] endlessly gratifying.
Will: [01:17:04] Um, and I'm especially thankful for our executive producer level patrons. We think every week, Jacob chapel, Andrew Cotton and David Allen, As well as the other, hold on. Let's see. There are. 1,294 patrons on the tech pod right now. Uh, so yeah. Thank you all. Uh, if you wanted to subscribe and you didn't want to do monthly subs there, we have an annual option now with a little bit of a discount attached to that.
And, um, I guess we'll see you all next week on another edition of Brad and Will Made a tech
Brad: [01:17:41] Go on
Will: [01:17:43] pod. Everyone.