Coding Blocks - Developer Shopping Spree 2019

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

We discuss this year's shopping spree only to learn that Michael spent too much, Allen spent too much, and Joe spent too much.

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 119. Subscribe to us and leave us a review on your favorite place, be it iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, using your favorite podcast app. And you can go to the website, codingblocks.net, where you can find show notes, examples, discussion, and a whole lot more. Send your feedback, questions, and rants to comments at codingblocks.net. Follow us on Twitter at Coding Blocks or head to www.codingblocks.net and find all our amazing social links at the top of the page.

And with that, I'm Alan Underwood. I'm Joe Zack. And I'm Michael Outlaw. This episode is sponsored by Educative.io. Level up your coding skills quickly and efficiently whether you're just starting preparing for an interview or just looking to grow your skill set and data dog the monitoring platform for cloud scale infrastructure and applications allowing time to talk about our developer shopping spree again. It's that time of year.

So without further ado, let's get into the news. Yep, so from iTunes, we have rwerksen181, harbinger2009, ardove, and porknubbins. That's awesome. And then from Stitcher, we also have SpartanFanDMD. And a huge thank you to all those who took the time to go up there and write us a review. We truly do appreciate it. And even mentioned it in the, we got a bunch of thanks over in the Slack channel today, yesterday, sometime in our episode discussion channel.

And again, seriously, huge thanks. We do appreciate it. And it truly does motivate us. It helps us buckle down, read a bunch, do a lot of research and do this stuff. So thank you for all that took the time to do that. So in other words, what you just said was, thank you. It makes us work.

Nothing like a good old pat on the back to make you go back and do more of it. That's awesome. You have some weird motivation there, my friend. I'm actually much more motivated by the negative. So it's just funny. Whoa. Keep letting me know what I mess up on. I'm actually much more motivated by the negative, so it's just funny. Keep letting me know what I mess up on. I appreciate it. I especially enjoy getting a lot of texts and messages from people letting me know

that Outlaw was right last episode, so appreciate that. That was super great. Yeah, you know, funny thing is I got a lot of those saying they were with me and that they were on the fence. So, I don't know. I think people were citing. They just like to kick you in the shins, Jer.

Yeah, I think it was really good. All the feedback was really good and I really enjoyed hearing it. And it was fun just kind of hashing it out. And so we hope you enjoyed it too. Yeah, definitely. And then one last little bit for the news is I've started a podcast. Yeah, I've started a podcast. So basically I've been thinking about it for a while, is creating like a series of videos on YouTube that are going to be like tips.

Like hopefully faster. This first one wasn't quite as quick as I wanted to do. It was like 20 minutes, but I think there was a lot of meat in there. So, you know, we'll have a link in the show notes here. Go check it out. This is basically how and why you might want to do SQL Server in a Docker container and then a bunch of tips along the way, right? Like just things that randomly came up as I was doing it

that hopefully will help you in your day-to-day development life. All right. Well, before we get started, let's do a joke first, we say. Let's do that. We got a few jokes here that Arlene happened to share with us. What's up, Arlene? So, what do you get if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter? Pumpkin pie. Oh, gosh. pumpkin by its diameter pumpkin pie oh gosh that's awesome i'm only counting on my fingers over here like radius uh times two there's two radiuses in there i think all right well let's

get into it so uh with this episode we're going to be doing our shopping spree like we typically do around this time of year. So you'll find a bunch of things in the show notes for this, a bunch of products and a bunch of links. And just heads up, these are helping us out, but I want to make it obvious to you. I want to call it out and make you aware that, hey, it is an affiliate link in case if you're opposed to it for some reason. And a heads up, by saying it's an affiliate link, in no way are you getting charged any more for it. It's just that if you click it, we'll get a few pennies on it, and then we'll buy somebody a beer in the future is basically what it boils down to. So, yeah. And, and also different from past years, you know, in past years, we've kind of done this, this type of episode as like, oh, here's the, the drool worthy gear that I want to buy or, um, uh, you know, that, that I would like to buy or things like that. But, you know, because you clicked on the things that we did last year, you know, this year we were able to buy some things.

So these are the things that we actually did buy. Most of them. Oh, somebody cheated. I might have broke the rules because that's what I do. You know, he does it every time. It's tip of the week, man. I don't think you understand. I have 30 tips of the week

i'm not a rule follower yeah i get it by any stretch you know all you california motorcycle types that's right that's right we break the law that's what we do all right so um with the uh you know allotted budget this year i decided to build a new rig. Wait, wait, wait. We got to tell what the budget is, right? So last year, what was it? $2,500, I think is what we had said? No, I think it was more than that, wasn't it? What was it? $3,500.

No, I think last year when we did the shopping spree, it was a $3,000 budget, if I remember correctly, I thought. I'm going to look it up. I'm still trying. You continue with what you... We're all searching now. Yeah. I mean, that's how it look it up. I'm still trying. You continue with what you – we're all searching now. Yeah. I mean, that's how it works.

Right. Who's fastest? I don't even remember. I mean, I'm looking at the episode now, but – I thought it said it at the top. Did it not? No. No.

And it's not totaled up. We just had – I mean, obviously, Joe's cheese dust, that right there is like $2,500 alone. So there's no way. How long ago was that particular episode? Was that like three or four years ago? I'm pretty sure that was the 2017 Shopping Spree. All right. So apparently –

Because the 2017 Shopping Spree was $2,500, by the way. Okay. So, yeah, I think we were like at $3,000. All right. So that's what our budget was for this one, right? It was $3,000, and I'm going to at $3,000. All right. So that's what our budget was for this one, right? It was $3,000. And I'm going to break that because that's what I do.

But that was kind of what we were going for. And for the record, the Kraft cheddar cheese powder was episode – or was from 2017. So it was the episode 70 version of the shopping spree episode. That's amazing. So, okay. So, so we, we set ourselves, you know, Hey, give a $3,000 budget. You know, what, what can be done with that? Right.

So, uh, give me a minute here and we'll start one by one. So, um, let's start with the boring stuff first like the case right let me find the link here for the case and i will paste this in so that joe and alan can follow along did you say that yours was a rig build yes yes well i i said build and i don't know if i clarified it any more than that but yeah um yeah this was a custom build that i did so we start with the case that i ended up with which is the corsair crystal 570x rgb mid tower case so not a small one but it's pretty i like it a lot so this case, if you've never seen it, is glass on all sides except for the very back and the bottom. Those are the only two sides that aren't glass. Everything else is see-through.

So, you know, it is a little bit bigger than what I wanted. Now, I'm going to give you another link here. Let's see. Copy that guy. Because this was actually my first choice for cases. And this is the Fractal Designs Meshify C Compact Mid-Tower computer case. Hey, so I feel better already because you cheated too. You didn't buy this one, but it's in your shopping list so we're all good i'm including this one as an honorable mention because i did buy it and i had to return it oh okay yeah oh that's right i remember yeah don't don't don't say why yeah i won't spoil it yes um i had to return this case but the fractal design was

it is the just the build quality of the case itself was amazing. I loved everything about it. It was so smart, the layout, the way everything they thought about it. It was just such a beautiful case. But unfortunately, it turned out to be too small for my needs. Even though when I was reading the description and everything, everything said it was going to be fine when I was looking at description, everything was like, you know, said it was going to be fine when I was looking at the documentation and whatnot. But then when I actually got it,

it turned out, no, it really didn't, you know, meet my needs. So I had to pick an alternative. And that's where I, that's why I ended up with the Corsair Crystal 570X. Now that one, you know, it's considerable price difference between the two. The Corsair is like double the price because it's bigger and you're paying for all that glass. And it comes with three RGB fans in it. But the only thing that I don't like about it is that it does have unsealed edges. You know what I'm saying? But aside from that, everything else I like about the computer.

Plenty of room to work in. A little bit of dust can creep in. Yeah, but can it really though? Because I mean really the dust is going to be drawn in by the fans. So it's not going to come in from some random place on the side. You hope not, yeah.

I got some cats and some dogs and there can be some random stuff that gets on anything and there's no size limit you can get a tumbleweed yeah point point taken um but anyway so so that's the case that i went with and and i'm still happy with the case don't get me wrong i just it was just i was a little bit heartbroken when I had to switch from the, from the fractal because that was my first choice and it was such a nice case. All right. So then, hmm, how do we want to do the build? Should I build up from there and be like, you know what the next component be put in? Maybe how about you do whatever you heart desires. Let's stay boring. And my heart desires that we cover the power supply that I chose. So this is the – you're going to notice a theme here.

This is the Corsair RMX White Series, RM750X. And I should mention too, by the way, that that Crystal 570X case that I chose was also white. So all of the inside of it is white. And then you have glass on it. So that's why this power supply is white. You're going to notice the theme like I said. So, oh, yeah. You know what?

I didn't even mention any prices. Do we want to mention the prices for those? Yeah, yeah. You know what? I didn't even mention any prices. Do we want to mention the prices for those? Yeah, sure. Like that fractal design case was... I mean, it's currently like $89. Like $90, let's call it. Right. Versus that Corsair 570 case is currently like $190.

Yeah. So it's a bit more. No, that fractal case has the coolest grill of any case I've ever seen. It is pretty, isn't it? Doesn't it? It's such a nice case. You mentioned wanting a new case earlier, and that's why I was like, oh, I got something for you. Hey, but you want to know the thing that you glossed over that I think you're doing a disservice on?

Is when you got the case, it was short by like two millimeters. Yeah, we're getting to that. We're getting to that. Because I thought you just completely glossed over it. And I was like, man, I remember the pain that that caused you. Because you're like, dude. Yeah, I mean, it literally was two millimeters too small. Like less than a credit card.

I'm not even kidding when I say it was two millimeters too small. Like less than a credit card. I'm not even kidding when I say it was two millimeters too small. Like I measured it with a, with a, uh, uh, micrometer, micro, micro.

no, no, no, no. What's the term? Oh, dang it. Uh,

tape measure. A what? Pencil. A pencil. No, no, no. I can't,

I can't remember the name of it. Micrometer is what I was thinking of. Mic A pencil. No. I can't remember the name of it. Micrometer is what I was thinking of. Micrometer? No. I don't know. Anyways. Caliper. Measured it with a caliper.

Got it. All right. So, yeah. So, here's the Corsair RMX White Series power supply, 750 watt. It's currently like 136, we'll call it, if you round up the change on it. And it's worth saying this thing's fully modular. Yeah. That's important on a full supply, in my opinion.

Yes. In my opinion. Yes. And then 80 plus gold. Yep. Yeah. So. East Bueno.

Yeah. All right. So that's some of the boring stuff out of the way let's see where do we go next how about if we do do we want to skip ahead to the motherboard what if we do the motherboard your heart's desire yeah man actually no i want to stay i want to stay on brand do i want to stay on brand oh you're trying to go all corsair to start oh did you notice okay well since you kind of like you know gave that away then gave it away stay on brand sorry sorry listeners all right. So here is my choice for memory that I went with. Now, if you learned anything about me from every past year of the shopping spree, then you should know that I kind of like, you know, I like some bling to my stuff, right?

Like, you know, I want to put some stickers on stuff. I already told you that my Corsair case had, came with RGB lights, which by the way, I forgot to mention that that case also has other lights on it for the actual Corsair logos on the front and on the inside of it. There's a Corsair logo that lights up. So here's my Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 64 gigs of RAM. And it's also white. So if you haven't caught on, I'm building like a, what I called in my mind, it was the storm trooper build. That's what, that's what I refer to this. So this is my storm trooper build. So yeah. Uh, 64 gig RGB. It's just so pretty, such a fan. And that was right now about you know we'll call it 335 so you know not awful

not horrible let's see we did the memory and we did that and we did that so then here comes another fun one this will round out the Corsair topic and let me paste this in here Here comes another fun one. This will round out the Corsair topic.

And let me paste this in here if I can find the right place. Paste. And this is the Corsair H100i RGB Platinum. How much of other letters? Liquid CPU cooler. They really don't make it easy to call out the name. No, they don't. They really don't. So I included the link, by the way.

This is the link to the one that I actually, like at the time, that was the link. But there's another link. If you look, you'll notice that they'll say, like, there's a newer model of this item and um that one is 156 but uh basically i wanted to water cool my build right because like as quiet as some of those um what's that one noctua noctua that you have i mean it's ugly but it's just like they're so big and just ginormous and in your way. And then it's like difficult to get the RAM. And I knew I wanted to have things lighten up. So I was like, man, I don't want to have like some gigantic CPU fan cooler that's just like in the way.

Like I want to be able to see things, right? So water cooling, whether it was more efficient or not, because there's some debate about that, right? I was like, well, I want to water cool it. So got the Corsair H100i. And again, this is white. So keeping with the Stormtrooper build theme. And, you know, it's the RGB platinum. So it has RGB fans that it comes with. And the actual piece that sits on the CPU has its own lights as well. So, um, and you know, like we,

like Alan gave it away with everything being Corsair. Like part of the reason why I did that was I was like, well, I mean, it wasn't like I was like everything. Absolutely. A 100% has to be Corsair, was I was like, well, I mean, it wasn't like I was like everything absolutely 100% has to be Corsair, but there was like, well, there is an advantage to like, if it is all in the same family, then all the light synchronization can work together. Right. So I was like, well, there is some kind of benefit to that. Now that said, uh, you know, there is like cross brand, um, compatibility,

you know? So, uh, you know, where like the, the take, for example, the Corsair IQ software that's used to set your, your color themes and whatnot. Uh, it, it can control things that aren't necessarily Corsair, for example, you know, that, but, um, Hey, so, so one thing I want to call out on this one real quick, because I do have the Noctua, I think the D 15 or something like that, which is like one of the top rated fan coolers on the market. Ugly is all get out, right? Like it is straight up ugly, but the main reason I bought that was for how quiet it was, but I've heard yours run and it's silent.

So I if I could have known that because it's not like you can demo these things before you buy them. I probably would have gone with this over it. So just, you know, for anybody that's like sort of on the fence of do I want to spend one hundred and twenty bucks on a water cooler like this one? Or do I want to spend ninety bucks on the fan cooler? this one or do i want to spend 90 bucks on the fan cooler i probably would have spent the extra 30 bucks having now heard and seniors in operation because it really is prettier and and i mean it's just a cleaner install yeah i mean yeah that's the thing i wanted that clean look i mean um I don't know if you've seen it. I know Alan has seen it in person.

And like this build, when you look at the inside of it, there's, you know, everything, there's fans going across the side, the top and the back. And they're all, and all the fans are lit up. So the entire inside is lit up. And then you have the memory lighting up and there's other stuff that I'm going to get to this lighten up too. So inside is lit up and then you have the memory lighten up and there's other stuff that i'm going to get to this lighten up too so everything is lit up so so you can just see everything in there and i wanted like an ultra clean kind of install so no wires so i'm gonna put you on the spot here um so as a promise for this episode he will be posting pictures and i

even think you should do like a little video. I mean, you got an iPhone with a nice camera. Do like a little drive-by video of it, right? Yeah. Put it up on YouTube. I mean, we have a YouTube channel. You can find that at codingblocks.net slash YouTube. If you do that, I'll do a tweet of mine.

I love it. No, no. We need little videos. We need little videos of these things. I like where we're going with this. This is going to be a competition. Because I got one too with a big, ugly Noctua cooler in it. But otherwise, it's kind of pretty. Ever seen the

show that had Beverly Hillbillies? You got wires in it? My case was also two picometers short. But instead of getting a new case, I just took out one of the grills and the cooler is slightly sticking out. Well, okay. So thank you for reminding me.

Because this was part of the reason why I couldn't do that, Joe, was because the CPU cooler was why it wouldn't work out for the Fractal case. Yeah, I was able to just remove a drill to have it poke out just a little bit. Yeah, it was too short to be able to put the radiator above the motherboard. And to be able to put it in front of the motherboard, their documentation was a little, um, like misleading. Like, you know, now having have built it, I'm like,

Oh, okay. I would read that differently and be like, Oh yeah, I get where they're coming from. But at the time I'm like, I think they're saying it'll work, but it turned out no.

And so like literally it was the radiator, uh, pushed out too much to where there's something else that I haven't gotten to that literally wouldn't fit by two millimeters. And when he says radiator, yes, he's referring to that thing that's at the front of your car. The air blows across. It's truly that. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, with this other case that I got, though, I will have endless room for everything in there.

I mean, because like literally like you could put in your own home brew water cooling setup and, you know, where you get like really colorful with the water, you know, with the way, because I did go with that 570X, the Corsair Crystal, and it's glass, even on the backside where you would typically hide all your wires and just shove them in and then sit on it like it was luggage until you can close it and then screw it in, right? But I couldn't do that because this is glass. You're going to be able to see it. So even on that side of the install, I had like try to be as clean as i could possibly be with the wiring yep um so yeah all right so that that rounds out the corsair portion of the show corsair if you're listening and you'd like to uh sponsor an episode you can reach us at info at codingbox.net there we go all right um let's see what else have we got here okay so now let's get into uh some fun bits so for the motherboard that i went with

i picked this beauty here which is the gigabyte z 390 Aurorus Ultra. And, you know, this is their RGB Fusion gaming motherboard. So when I mentioned there were going to be other things that had lights that the Corsair IQ software could control, this was one of them. Now, you know, I wasn't, it wasn't like I had to have, really the only thing that I really wanted lights on were the fans and everything else they had. Well, maybe the memory, but, you know, and then, you know, the fact that the motherboard was going to have, it was just a bonus, right? The, the real criteria that I had for this though, was I wanted multiple NVMe slots on the motherboard because I wanted, I wanted that future expansion capability, and this one has three. So that was one of my main criteria in looking for a motherboard. I wanted something that would kind of grow with me, if that makes sense.

So this thing has plenty of capability. This will last me for a while. Imagine I probably won't need to rebuild a computer until like you know march so all right so then uh oh and did we say the price yeah we said the price for the cpu cooler so the price for this motherboard is currently like $243. Actually, I don't think you did say the price on the other one. Yeah, on the Corsair H100, it's $156 is the current price. Now, some of these prices have changed, by the way. Like I paid less for it, a little bit less,

but like the memory is cheaper now than when I paid for it. The motherboard is actually more expensive now than when I bought for it. The motherboard is actually more expensive now than when I bought it, so that's weird. All right, so sitting on top of that bad boy as the heart and soul of this thing is this guy here, which is the Intel Core i9-9900K 8-core processor up to 5 gigahertz. And that bad boy is currently 472. So I forget what they call that weird case that it comes in. Yeah, it's such a waste of money. Yeah, it's very weird.

Yeah, man. I can't stand that stupid box that it comes in. I thought I threw it my way, but I just hated seeing it in my house. I mean, like, hey, shave $30 off the price and package it in just a box, please. It's like an alien egg. Yeah, man. It's kind of ridiculous. What's the stupid name for that thing?

I don't know. Does it have a name? It's got 16 sides. Is that what it is? Doe-deck-edred? Is that 12? I have no idea. But, yeah, it's obnoxiousious it's kind of cool for a minute and then you're like wait how do i store this thing oh you can't because you can't put it on top of anything

or under anything because it just takes up a ridiculous amount of space yeah yeah i can't i can't remember the name of it i don't want to say it's like hexa something but at any rate yeah it's hexa stupid how's that but it uh it it it does run really fast and really nice and uh really happy with it and uh and it's it's unlocked so if you wanted to overclock it you are free to do so all right and uh where to go next? Where to go next? So, okay. How about this one?

The most exciting part of the build would obviously be the thermal paste that I chose to mount that I-9 Arctic Silver. Oh, come on, man. That's lame. You didn't go liquid metal? No, I-9. Arctic silver. Oh, come on, man. That's lame. You didn't go liquid metal? No, I didn't. You know what? I put that as stupid as it is to bring up that paste. I was like, you know what?

I bet Alan's going to give me grief about not going liquid metal. But no, I didn't. So lame. Yeah, so I did that. That was for your benefit. You can't call yourself a builder anymore. Yeah, right? did that. That was for your benefit. You can't call yourself a builder anymore. Yeah, right? So.

Right, exactly. And, okay, so then for storage on this bad boy, now, I did have to, like, wait for this guy to actually be released as part of this build. I went with the Samsung 970 EVO Plus. Okay. 970 EVO Plus, MVME M.2 SSD, 2 terabyte. And it is awesome. It is awesome. Yeah. This is currently about $450.

But like I said, I had to wait for it to even be released. Because around the time that I was thinking about building a new build, I was like, well, you know, let's see what's going on. And the 970 was going to have like even better performance than what was already out. Then yeah, the Evo Plus was going to have better performance. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to, I'm going to hold out. I'm going to wait. Cause I'm like, you know, what's, what's the, why not? Right. If it's, you know, a few more weeks, what's a few more weeks in the grand scheme of things, right. You know, versus being impatient and going ahead and building it and then being like, oh man, I could have just had that one if I'd waited. So I think we've

covered almost everything. Let me just double check my list real quick here. And you're going to say, but outlaw. So we did that one. We did that one. We did it, did it, did it, and about to do it, did it, did it, did it. All right. So then, so then here's the bad boy. Okay. So, so we gave ourselves a budget, right? And by the time tax was included, uh, this bad boy here here like definitely took me over at the top. Absolutely. So you had to come out of pocket on this one. Absolutely had to come out of the top.

In fact, it basically worked out to be that the CPU was the amount of over budget that I went all because of this very next item. This very next item was also not just itself expensive, but it's the whole reason why the fractal case wouldn't work for me. It's such a shame for good reason. And that is, Hey, wait, did you say the price of this nine 70 Evo plus, or did I miss it?

I thought I did. It's a four 50 at the moment yeah i don't remember okay so 450 all right so so this bad boy is the gigabyte auroras geforce rtx 2080 ti ti people not the 2080 yeah ti now this card has gone up a little since i bought it. So it's currently at $1,300, but it is now, now this was another one, much like the motherboard where it's like, Oh, Hey, as a bonus, it has lights on it too. Right. So just about everything in this build has lights on it that light up. And, you know, with the Corsair IQ software, you can control everything in it and uh you know i was really torn because i was like well do i get the ti or do i not and i forget what the difference is i'm pretty sure like the

difference was about the cost of the cpu if i remember right and and at a time i was like well you know hmm i mean i could i could wait and not buy it or I could just go ahead and buy it because like, what's the chances, like, you know, with all the Bitcoin crap that's happened in the last several years with, you know, the,

what they've done to, to the cost of video cards and everything. I'm like, it's not like it's ever going to get any cheaper probably. And in fact, it hasn't, it's gotten more expensive since I bought it. So I was like, you know what what forget you live once right like i'm just going to go ahead and get it and you know if

i end up regretting it later fine whatever but um you know and and i looked around at all the different um 2080 ti's because another one that i had strongly considered was the Founders Edition NVIDIA, which was at the time a little bit cheaper. So one of the reasons why I chose this one was that without having to do any – because I mean, let's face it, they're already overclocking it for you. I mean, that's the reason why you're buying something that's not directly from Nvidia. Right. Um, as well as like other little things, you know, like the fans or whatever, you know, that they might add to it. But, um, this one had, uh, the fastest, it was the second fastest one on the market.

And the next fat, the next one that was faster was made by Zotac, and it was double the price. Right. It was like $2,500, $2,600, and I don't know why, but I was like, well, okay, fine, whatever. Oh, and this one has a really cool fan idea too where there's three fans on it, and the middle fan turns in an opposite direction of the other two fans.

So one's pulling air in and the other's blowing it out? Yeah, I thought, oh, that's neat. Because there was, by the way, a water cool option for this, if you wanted to, like, you know, instead of using like, like if you weren't doing your own custom water cooling, and you just wanted to like, okay, fine, they're gonna hear, you know, they're gonna add in the radiator. And here's the it's already pre plumbed, you know, then, you know, they did have that, but I didn't go that far. I thought, you know, the fans are going to be good enough. But a big reason, though, that I did choose the TIs over the non-TI versions is that for machine learning purposes, memory on the video card is like one of the key factors in the performance of like how of like how, how well things are in calculates.

I thought, well, okay, fine. I mean, not only can I rock some, um, counter-strike,

you know, so counter-strike needs the 20 80 TI. Let's be clear. I mean, come on, man. If you're gonna play some CS go, you're not playing until you played it on a 20,

the frame rate. It just stopped counting it because it was like i can't it's the numbers too high yeah but but i thought you know okay then you know uh you'll just spend time less time waiting for models to train and everything so i thought you know okay fine let's do it so let's live so yeah so like before tax uh i think i added up like i was you know about about $300 over. And then by the time you included all the tax and everything, and like I said, it was... Whatever, don't judge me. So what?

So all in, your build at the time of doing it was what? Roughly right about $3,400, sounds like? I want to say it was like just below below 3500 if i remember correctly but that let's be clear that is a bonkers system that is going to last you five six years just yeah like i said i'll easily get by to march it was it was monstrous all right so was that the end of your shopping list yeah that was the end yeah because i kind of i kind of video card kind of so why aren't we playing borderlands 3 right right how about we just cap this make a three-parter let's go all right we're out later all right and that's the episode

and uh with that we head to the tip of the week Make a three-parter. Let's go. All right. We're out. Later. All right. And that's the episode. And with that, we head to the tip of the week. This episode is sponsored by educative.io. Every developer knows that being a developer means constantly learning new frameworks, languages, patterns, and practices. But there's so many resources out there, where should you go? Meet Educative.io. Educative.io is a browser-based learning environment allowing you to jump in and learn as quickly as possible without needing to set up and configure your own local environment.

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You can try any course or track. And so, for example, maybe you want to pick up React. So they just announced reintroducing React v16 and beyond. So I guess like React has now gotten like Angular and gotten crazy with the versions. And, you know, I shared this one earlier, maybe like last week or the week before in our Twitter feed, but kind of related to some of the recent conversations we had with containers, the practical guide to Kubernetes. Yeah, very nice. And it's funny that you mentioned React

because I had been planning on looking at the machine learning stuff, but I've kind of switched courses a little bit, and now I'm doing a little bit more React. And there's some major gaps in my React knowledge that i just think so just don't know how to do like dealing with uh like state but there's a lot of things about react that i know very well so i'm really looking forward to being able to skip to the parts that i'm kind of missing the knowledge on and following those in so i'm really looking forward to using the using bar to great effect. Oh, that's nice. That's a great call out. Excellent.

So you can start your learning today by going to educative.io slash coding blocks. That's educative.io, E-D-U-C-A-T-I-V-E dot I-O slash coding blocks and get 20% off any course. All right. So before we get to Alan's shopping list, what if we did another joke? I think we should. Does that sound like a good break? Yes.

I like it. All right. So here you go. Uh, I figured this one was fitting cause I read something in recently in the Slack channel where people were talking about, uh, coffee.

So what do you call it when you are attacked by a coffee cup? Joe? You know, I got nothing. A mugging. Oh, gosh. Thank you, Arlene. Yes. Thank you, Arlene.

It's awesome. Oh, by the way, Outlaw, I don't think you were looking at our Hangouts messages. You should go over there and visit that real quick. Oh, yes. There's a picture of our builds over there. That's hilarious. This should be in the show notes as well, I believe. That's a good way to describe it.

Outlaw's machine looks like the Tron motorcycle. And the new Tron. So, like, super cool, super modern. Very cool neon lights. sexy and yours looks like uh so al oz is r slash battle stations mine is r slash trashy so with my case uh we'll talk about but i used a case that i had i've had for like 15 years so like it's a beast of machine in like this ugly little case that now has a hole in the grate and you have budget left over he he absolutely needs to go buy this thing but why did you say you didn't want to do it well it's just already in the closet right right now now you're gonna have to go do some work

and hey look oh yeah oh yeah why don't buy it now so yeah i don't have to go do some work. And hey, look. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Why don't buy it now? So yeah, I don't have to swap everything out. It's already working. Wait, you store your computer in your closet? I had a case in my closet just for years. Oh, that's where the case was. Okay. We'll talk about the clamp it build later. Yeah.

That's amazing. All right. So let me drag mine over here. So what I'm going to try and do, seeing as I broke the rules, I'm going to at least try and go in the order of things that I've already purchased. And then I'll try and hit the things that I've either planned to purchase or already did and bought it on my own dime or whatever. But so the first big one, we'd all had this conversation earlier in the year about, about, you know, a couple years ago,

we were recommending, people would ask us, what should you buy? And we were like MacBook Pro, right? Like that, it wasn't even a question. It was, dude, it does everything. You have macOS, you got Linux or BSD Linux. You know, you can do a VM and run Windows. Like you have everything.

And you could run a VM and run Linux if you wanted to run full on Linux. Right. You could totally do that. But we've mentioned it over time. It's fallen out of our favor for a couple of reasons. One, they've gotten ultra ridiculous about not being able to upgrade one. Right? Yeah.

You buy one, you buy what you get at that time. And that's all you get. You buy something with 16 gigs of Ram, you're stuck with 16 gigs of Ram. I mean, when we started this podcast, you could still replace the memory, for example, and the drive and yeah. And in the, in the MacBook pro laptops, which is what we'd both done. Like I'd maxed out my Ram. I'd bought a terabyte SSD. Like I had a 2011 MacBook Pro that was perfectly legit as a usable machine all the way up till about this year. And the only reason I was even thinking about replacing it is because when we were doing this podcast, it sounded like a jet taking off. Right. Because when the video would run, that old chipset just didn't have the encoding needed to do like video chat stuff, right?

Like all the new chipsets, all the new. I mean, I'm recording right now off of mine, which is a 12. And I think I have one for the wife that's a 13, a 2013. And yeah, both of them, you could replace parts in them. I mean, in mine, I could even swap the DVD drive out with another SSD if I wanted to. There was definitely a level of modularity there that used to exist, which was the reason why we were such fans of them for a while. So it was not only – a big part of the selling point for me was not just – because I took the modularity, I guess, is like for granted there for so long. But, you know, one of the big selling points for me was the fact, like you said,

it was the one piece of hardware that you could legitimately, like, quote, officially run every operating system on and do anything you wanted to do because, you know when apple supported you running uh windows on it for example yep right so so you recovered right but just over time man man they've gotten so expensive and they've gotten super restrictive with the hardware like i said if you buy one like if you wanted to get one spec'd out i think i'd price it at one point to get one with 32 gigs of Ram and a decent I seven or whatever, you're at $3,500. Right. And that's with a subpar video card, but good hardware, but just it's, I mean, 3,500 bucks. And it was like, man. And when I say subpar video card, we're talking something that's the equivalent of a, an MX two 50 Nvidia, right? It's probably somewhere in that ballpark. It's, it's a dedicated GPU, but it's not

super strong now there is something to be said about when they do their amd graphics cards and those things they're geared towards final cut pro or whatever so if you are a video editor it's awesome because they wrote the software to use the video card so at any rate all that aside yeah i mean i mean just to finish this game for a minute. The 15-inch. What do you think the 15-inch starts at? 25. Starts at?

22. 23. 22. So I got. What was your final? 22. Where did you finally land? 22. And Joe said 23.

I said 21. $2,400 is where the 15 starts at. And they offer it in two base models, and the next base starts at $28,000. Yeah, man. And I can't bring myself to buy myself a 13. I know people. I know. There are people that love that size, that prefer it.

It's great for portability. For portability. Right. that size that you're, you know, prefer it, but great for portability for portability. Right. But to do any actual development on it, it's just so like, there's, I would have to have an external monitor in order to use that thing because that 13 inch monitor is just too small,

unworkable, especially for what we do. Right. When, when you're staring at text all day, it's, it's not the, I don't think my laps can get 13 inches together.

Like I need that extra two inches to be able to pop it up it just if yeah yeah i'm man spread on my couch and you'd be able to set that thing up i i want to be able to see it for sure so so all that 76 that's what i'm looking at now yeah just saying so here's here's where i ended up landing so at the beginning of the year i struggled with this i really did so i was debating do i just do i spend all of it on a macbook pro call it a day right because that's actually what joe had said last year you know hey uh at the end of it all probably what i do is just go buy a macbook pro so i was thinking about that but here was what bit me first the rtx series of graphics cards were coming out at

the time that I was looking at this decision, right? And these things are beasts. They've got some serious processing power. And I could get a PC laptop with a monster video card and RAM and everything else for $700 to $800 less than the weaker graphic card version of the MacBook Pro. So where I landed, and this was after a lot of debate, and I actually have recorded a YouTube video and I haven't published it yet. I will probably do it in the future. But where I landed was this, and I should paste the link so that you guys can see it. This isn't the exact one. This is the updated one, the updated version of what I've got with the newer processor in it.

How come that's not a link, man? I don't know. Copy and paste your stuff? Cheater. That's weird. I don't know. Here, let me try it again. I would do it one more again.

Let's see. No worries. I don't know why it's not pasting that that's weird all right so at any rate this thing is the gigabyte arrow 15 and mine was the x9 now let me tell you why i landed with this so the contenders at the time where the macbook pro threw it out the window um this well that's why your macs are so expensive you're using them wrong you throw them out um i was looking at the giga not the gigabyte that's what i got i was looking at the msi gs65 stealth which i really like that one a lot oh you're gonna have to give me links for these okay i'll get links to you so that they'll be in the show notes the gs65 stealth that was also one that was seriously in contention and then

there was the razor 15 series so here's the msi i remember that one because i went and looked at that one okay i remember this one now it was gorgeous on paper. Beautiful. It, like, just spec-wise, everything about it was amazing. It had the bling factor that you know I love. It does have the bling factor. Because it had a full RGB keyboard on it. Yep. Just the dumbest trackpad design, though. It was stupid.

It truly was. The trackpad was literally, your – if I remember right, it was like your entire left hand just covered the trackpad. It was huge. It was huge. Yeah, but it was shifted to the left of center on the keyboard. So your left hand sat entirely on the trackpad. So as you're typing, I remember, um,

because our, our local best buy had one. Yep. Yep. And I wanted to see this thing in person. Cause when you shared it, I was like, Oh man,

I might get that. It was sweet. It is nice. But then I was just doing like a typing exercise. Just be like, well, let me see what life would be like with this thing. And then as I'm typing along,

it, it would pick up my hand because there was no other place to set my hand except on the trackpad. And so just randomly the cursor would move around and suddenly I'm typing somewhere else. Yep. And so here's what I'll break it down. That's not actually what kept me from buying it.

So here was the – I didn't love it, but I was going to live, I was going to live with it. But ultimately what it boils down to is because I do video and I do audio and I do all those things. I wanted a laptop that had the horsepower of the i7 and also one of the graphics card, but I also wanted a 4k display. And there were so few of those available that that's ultimately what drove me to the gigabyte. Now in the defense, it ended up coming down to that in the razor 15 advance, I think is what it was called. Now here is what pushed me from the

razor to the gigabyte. The razor had one NVMe slot in it, and that was it. The Razor or the gigabyte that I ended up going with came with 32 gigs of RAM. It had a one terabyte NVMe already in it. It had another slot for an NVMe additional one in there that you could do. And it had a 4k screen on it and everything. And it still came in at well under $3,000. At the time, I think it was $2,699. Well under. We're being loose with our words here. But here, let me paint the picture, though.

The Razr was over $3,100 for the same one, right? For similar specs, it was over $3,100. The MacBook Pro at the time was pushing $3,800 for similar specs. They've actually come down in price a little bit. So I was looking at getting a machine that was probably twice as powerful as the equivalent Mac for $1,000 less and still spending $400 less on the Gigabyte. And I love it. I truly do love the machine. Yeah. I mean,

if this was a, an Indiana Jones movie, you'd be told that you chose wisely. Yeah. It, it ended up being everything I wanted it to be. So I use this thing to go do talks. Like I have it running Docker all the time.

I'm, I'm constantly doing things that had a Thunderbolt three port, which was also something that I was wanting on it. It has USB-C it has everything I need. The only thing that it did not have that I wish it did was separate ports for the headphone jack and a microphone. It's got a combo jack instead. And I was like, Hey, I'll deal with it. Wait, why was that the thing you didn't like? Because I do a lot of audio and video editing stuff. And so I would love to have had a separate microphone in and the other instead of having to have a four pole connection for the splits.

But it's such a minor issue that it was like, ah, whatever. So overall, I love the thing. And I'll tell you the reason I ended up going with it. We mentioned that Mac used to be everything. Windows, Windows subsystem for Linux, right? Yes, I was going to say that. You now have the ability to do the same stuff that you could always do on Mac on Windows. So it's like, wait a second, I didn't lose anything. And being that I have sort of become a fanboy and fallen in love with the Docker or the container way, like I don't need the other

stuff. Like I just don't need it. The only downside to go into the windows world of things from my view for what I do is I bought final cut pro five years ago on the Mac. I have never had to pay for an upgrade. Right. They constantly keep it up to date because they say, we are a hardware company. We would make money on our hardware, right? I spent 300 bucks on that five years ago, and I still have an up-to-date copy of Final Cut Pro. On Windows, not so much, right?

I do my editing in Adobe Premiere Pro. I have to pay for a sub for that, right? That's a yearly cost that I can't get back. So, you know, whatever. But that's where I landed. I love the machine. I use it all the time. It's been fantastic.

Yeah, there was even a recent tweet at us where he was talking about using the Windows system for Linux as your console replacement in Windows. It's so good, man. And then you could just use it for everything. And here's the thing. WSL 2 came out not too long ago and is even better than the original WSL.

Like, they're truly making this thing to where you're running Linux inside Windows, and you truly are. You're running Ubuntu, or there are other types. You can run CentOS, I think Debian, and some other flavors that are in the Microsoft Marketplace that's literally installing it, and you're running it on your system live. Debian or Debian? I always called it Debian. I call it Debian. Nobody calls it Debian. I do. I think you're wrong.

Well, now we have a poll. Debian. I do. I think you're wrong. Well, now we have a poll. Debian. Is it CentOS or is it CentOS? Cent OS. CentOS. You call it CentOS? I call it CentOS. Well, I do know how you say Ubuntu.

So there we go. It's Ubuntu. Ubuntu. Isn't it? Yeah, I feel like even to your point, though, of Windows 10, I'm abusing docker oh yeah man i mean like it's amazing if i don't like if i can docker up something without having or not docker up that would be a but if i can docker run something yeah

rather than installing it then i'm like oh guess what i'm gonna do totally i gotta run yeah dude i can't tell you how long expenses i've had SQL Server installed on any machine of mine. I just don't do it. I don't blame you. Which, by the way, there's a YouTube video that I just did that shows you why and how. Oh, yeah. And, you know, to the bling factor in me, this one does hit that. It hits the mark. I mean, it has the RGB keyboard and, you know, the back of it lights up.

So when if you see Alan giving a talk, the the lid lights up and says gigabyte on it. So like the whole room will be dark. And then there's a glow. There's gigabyte in white. The soft glow of Alan up in the front. Yeah, it's it's pretty good, man. Like, honestly, I've been super happy with the machine and and i abuse it right and then that brings me to the next thing so so it had an extra nvme slot in it so what you gonna do i mean you gotta fill that thing up right so you went with the 970 uh plus Evo Plus. It was a little too rich for my blood because I'd already blown a lot of my budget on my laptop.

So I'm at $2,700 because I didn't have to pay tax. So I had $300 left. So I had to make something happen with this. Dude, I've told people about this in the Slack channel. I know several people that have gone and bought these because I've said, hey, you check this out. The Intel 660P NVMe is amazing. You can get one for 200 bucks. Actually, I think I paid 185 for this thing at the time.

And it's a two terabyte NVMe. Now, here's the thing. Like the Evo that you got, it's probably like 3,500 read and 3,200 write, something like that, right? I'll look it up. It's ridiculous. All right. This one is actually really good. It's not quite that fast.

The specs on it, I want to say are something like 2,700, right? And 3,200 read. Um, I'm trying to find it. It doesn't say where I can find it on this page, which is super fun, but there are some people that have pictures up where they've actually taken it. So this one, uh, let's see. Yeah. You see yeah you you were um just a quick google search i'm not looking at any specific article but it's saying uh 3500 megabytes per second yeah uh read in 3300 megabytes not bits but megabytes it's fat per second right right sequential right and this intel 660p is not quite that fast but it's's still faster than the standard SSDs that were on the SATA 6 connections. This thing still blows them away.

I want to say some of the pictures that people have posted down here on Amazon on the link that we've got are showing 1600 read and 1600 write. So 1600 megabytes. So it's still fast. Like it's really fast. And we're talking about less than $200 for a two terabyte drive. So that was where I spent another, you know, 200 bucks of my budget. And it's amazing, right? Like I now have three terabytes of SSD storage in my laptop and that's going to go a long way now have you read anything because like i mean a laptop you're so compressed for say i assume it doesn't have room for like a heat sink on top of it right actually so they give you this is man i'm telling you like gigabyte did a nice

job with this they actually shipped it with those uh i don't even know what you call them but they're they're heat absorbers they're they're almost like uh they feel sort of gummy you know what you call them, but they're heat absorbers. They're almost like they feel sort of gummy. You know what I'm talking about? If you open up any kind of motherboard on a laptop, you usually see these little pieces of – they almost feel like clay. I know they're not, but it's – they put them on top of like all the chipsets or whatever to keep the heat from – it dissipates the heat on them. At any rate, they actually give you that with the laptop. So if you buy an NVMe, you can put it on top of it, and it helps with the heat.

Huh, interesting. So yeah, they gave it. So you can't put a heat sink on top of it, but they did give you that stuff there's there's a name for that stuff and i can't remember what it is yeah i mean that was one of the things i was looking at when i was doing my build was because you know there are uh various articles out there where they talk about the the effects that the heat has on it and you know turns out heat sinks are actually a thing for your nvme s ssds and that gigabyte motherboard that i mentioned one of the things that i liked about it was like i said it had three slots it comes with three heat sinks for it as well yeah i mean that's one thing i will say about the gigabyte is it's a thin chassis and so you know

heat can be a thing and and there's ways around some of that gigabyte laptop the laptop the laptop totally all right so the next thing i've got up here is actually the last thing that i bought a thing and and there's ways around some of that stuff by laptop the laptop the laptop totally all right so the next thing i've got up here is actually the last thing that i bought with my budget and i'd been eyeballing these things forever and this is basically a drawing tablet for your computer so because i do a lot of instructional things and i like to and even even in my day job right right? Like if, if I take a screenshot of something, I'm drawing arrows and I'm, and I'm, you know, circling things on it. Like it's super helpful to have that thing available. Well, I was always torn because

if you look at the, the Wacoms, those things, like the one that I wanted, I think it's the Pro M, it's $350 regular price. And man, I did so much research. And really what it boiled down to is it looks like you can get a lot of tablets out there that are really good because Windows has great support for them. So you don't necessarily need to go to something like that $350 one so what i ended up buying sorry no you're good i was gonna say i was gonna ask for a link yeah i think i put it in there did i not or wrong one there yeah it's there it's the third one on there right now oh okay so you had okay so you only had three things. I thought you had four. No, three. Okay, my bad. So this is the XP Pen Deco Pro Medium. This thing is awesome, and I truly mean awesome. So I'll give you a couple reasons why.

First, it's the same size, roughly, as what that Wacom Pro Medium is. It's got the same drawing area and all that. It also has, like, a little place on the left that you can use as a mouse so if you only wanted to roll with this thing ever you could truly use this because the little button or the big looking button thing on the left that's a dial is also a capacitive to or yeah capacitive touch for using it as a mouse you You can use it to drag. You can, you know, move your mouse cursor around. It's like a circular touchpad. Yeah. Yeah, it is a small circular touchpad, but it is now that's also a dial. So you can do things like zoom and zoom in and out. You can, you know, have it cycle through features or whatever. Really well done.

Another thing I like about it is the pen has no batteries. It's all powered by the USB that the thing's plugged into. So you always have it. The thing is amazing. The sensitivity, all of it, it draws super well. It does have tilt functionality. So if you're drawing with something like a pencil in an art program, it will actually identify that you're leaning it so that you can do shading and that kind of stuff. So it has all the features you'd want to do as an artist. But for me,

I'm using it more for productivity type things. And it's amazing. Like it truly is good. Now, wait, I did. I, I heard you right.

There's no battery at all. And that no battery, that stylus, none. How does it happen? So kind of voodoo magic magic have you got going on here? So I think it's a capacitive type. Well, it's not even capacitive.

That's the wrong thing because you can put your finger on it. It doesn't do anything. Like if you touch the drawing surface, it does nothing. Magnetic or something? I don't know. Maybe. Throw some magnets on that bad boy. See what it does.

It comes in with some nibs so you can replace the nibs on it. So if you wear it down, but the drawing surface is also really good good you know how like uh i know you have a surface right you know how like if you do the pen on it it's really smooth so there's not really any friction that makes it feel like a normal writing or drawing experience this actually has a little bit of texture so it has a little bit of resistance so it feels really natural or or maybe for those that don't have the Surface, like if you have an iPad with the Apple Pencil. Yeah, it's super smooth, right? It's just, you know, you're literally drawing on glass, so the pen just slides. Yeah.

The pencil slides. And this gives a little bit of resistance to it. So feature-wise, the thing is awesome. Now, I will tell you, one thing that kind of got on my nerves is it's big, any kind of tablet or any kind of drawing thing. If you're going to be using it regularly, then you kind of want it there where you can use it. But I use a mouse a lot and I found that the little, the little track pad, while it's useful, I didn't like it being my daily driver, right? It was just, it was too much because I've got a big screen and so like trying to get from one side to the other was like five swipes across the thing right

and i was like i don't want to do that little big thing it'd be like 15 swipes you got to turn up the sensitivity so why you turn up the sensitivity now you know why my mouse is jacked up so check this out what i ended up doing this is so amazing, and this is where you know that you find ways to make things happen. This thing is like a good size for a mouse pad. So what I did is I took my mouse pad thing that I had on my desk and I just put it on top of the drawing area there. And it's where I use my mouse now. So my mouse pad is on top of this thing. And then I use my mouse. And that's like my mouse pad now. Why don't you just use that as the mouse pad is on top of this thing and then i use my mouse and that's like my mouse pad now

why don't you just use that as the mouse pad i didn't want it scratching against the surface right like i knew that on the mouse just keep me i couldn't do it yeah i couldn't do it so but here's the really cool thing i can actually take that pen and I can draw on top of my mouse pad and it works. It works. It's got to be magnetic then. Dude, I don't know. It's magic is what it is. It's magic.

It's magic. Okay. But it's truly – I love this thing. I really do love this thing. I've debated using it in presentations and I'm scared. I haven't done it yet. I may at some point, but yeah,

I mean, truly super happy with this. This one was 130 bucks compared to 350. Absolutely a no brainer. Like if you are in the market for a drawing thing and you want it as an input device, save some money. Like super happy with this thing.

Huh. Interesting. All right. So I think I beat that one up. Let's see. What have I got next? All right. Cheese dust.

Cheese dust. So to be clear, that's what I spent my entire budget on, right? Like those three things. And I could not be happier with it. Like super excited about that. Now on to the extra stuff um so we've talked about in the past sit down stand up desk love them uh joe has one you have one yeah yeah he has one yeah i have one outlaw wants one one of the things that stinks about when you go

that route though is unless you have super long cables and just a rat's nest of cables around, you've got to figure out a way to mount everything or keep everything with your desk, right? So as it moves up and down, you could think if your computer, if your CPU is sitting on the floor, you're going to have to have cables that will stretch out to go up with it, right? I undermount my CPUs on my desk. So the way that I built my desk, I actually have three spots where you can mount a CPU. And so one of the links I have here is one that I just bought today because I have another PC coming, which is sort of ridiculous. But, man, why is it not pasting the links?

Don't worry about it. so at any rate that thing right there man this thing is only 50 bucks it's 50 bucks has perfect reviews right now not a lot of them 17 but i'm about to find out how good it is um but it looks like it will hold a pc of basically any size that you can reasonably get and mount it. And then that way, you don't have the problem of it tugging cables as it goes up and down. As long as it'll reach your monitor, you're good, right? It looks like something you'd see at your grandma's house

to help her get to the bathroom. It does look a little bit like a walker. Oh, a walker would probably be better. Yeah, yeah. But here's the cool part about it is it looks like it's really sturdy. It'll hold up to 66 pounds. I hope that mine's not that heavy. If you build a 66-pound rig, we have to have a talk.

It'll be awesome. Yeah. I imagine the only way you could get close to that is if you started with a Mac pro cheese grater and then you like just load it up with hard drives weights. So, so that one, that's, that's one thing.

So I truly just bought that today. Um, now the next thing that I have up is something that came about because I did something crazy. So last year I mentioned that I was considering either getting a 43 inch 4k or I was going to take a 55 inch 4k TV and make it my monitor. Well, it came to be. So the reason it came to be is because I used to have the side-by-sides. We've talked about my 34 inch ultra ride in the, in the past. And I had a 27 inch Thunderbolt that sat next to it. Well, the Thunderbolt power supply died. And so I had a

dead weight sitting on my desk and I was like, man, I, this is driving me crazy. And, and that's a lot of width, right? Like that 34 inch wide plus that 27 inch Thunderbolt, which is no small piece of equipment was massive. So I took my 55 inch 4k off the wall and made it my monitor. So I am happy to report that. I like it. It is, it's a little big, but it took me a minute to get used to it, but overall it's really good. But here was a problem with it. So TVs typically only have HDMI inputs. I don't know of too many TVs out there that have DP or display port inputs, right? Display ports usually have higher bandwidth, can do higher refresh rates, all that kind of stuff. You have to. So the MacBook pro that I do for work and even my own or whatever, having a refresh rate of less than 60 on any display

will drive you nuts because you'll move your mouse and it will like jerk across the screen. It will absolutely drive you crazy. And what I found when I was looking on Amazon is the adapters for the display port to HDMI is a lot of them are misleading. A lot of them only support 30 Hertz. And so I actually had to do some digging and I found one that actually takes a mini display port to a 60 Hertz HDMI works like magic. So that is the next one on here. I want to say it was like 15 bucks. Like it wasn't super 16. Okay. 16 bucks, not super expensive, but worth every single penny because it got rid of that herky-jerky mouse movement. So, you know, what I see, what I envision in near, near future is going to be a KVM. So, I've been looking at those.

I didn't add it to my list. But those are frustrating, right? I've yet to use one that worked like half as well as it should. And you think it's the simplest thing in the world. Like, I just want this to swap one that worked like half as well as it should and you think it's the simplest thing in the world like i just want this to swap to that and i've yet to get one that uses that gets that usb and the monitor switching over well at the same time yep and it keeps the signal alive yes yes for your usbs and all that stuff now there's one that that are um that the wonderful people in our Slack channel have shared, which is from Level One Tech. It ain't cheap.

Yeah. That seems to be about the closest thing that I've found. You're talking about $400 or $500. Nope. Yeah. Nope. Yeah. Not for that.

Like $200 is about where i'd be willing to go yeah that's that's the number in my head i was like that's what i can do for this right and that's that's the same problem so me and joe we've talked about this in the past man kvms are irritating man most of them just don't and i think it's got to do with the newer technologies that require handshakes like the hCP for HDMI and all that kind of stuff. Like they just don't work well or not well enough, at least for me. Well, there's two things in my mind. One is, you know, keeping the signal alive so that when you do switch inputs, the other computer that no longer has the display doesn't think, oh, well,

the monitor just got removed and then it resets all the window layouts because Windows decides it's stupid. That's one thing where macOS is still superior. Yeah, it is. Is in the window layout management. But the level one tech also is at 60 Hertz. Yeah. Which matters.

So like if you wanted to be able to like have a gaming rig on one input and, you know, maybe a work rig on another, like, you know, you're, you're not going to want to cut yourself short, especially on like your giant 55.

Yeah. It's amazing. So here's, here's the thing that level one for a single monitor KVM is three 45 and currently sold out for the dual monitor yeah is 565 i mean ain't cheap right like that's i'd almost rather just buy another monitor and stick on my desk so yes what you do is you buy a 30 usb switch and you just change the monitor by hand that's what i do and actually with a tv that's so much better because there's remote control oh

yeah man okay and that's that was the thing that i got tired of with the 34 inch the ultra wide is that little nub that was underneath it i hated that thing yep yeah man so so overall i i really am enjoying my setup i think honestly a 50 inch 4k at a regular desk would be amazing 55 is a little too big but but you know i'm just a little though i'm living with it yeah yeah it's it's bearable like he's getting by i'm making it i like the way he's he's wording this so here was the next problem right so i talked about the sit down stand up desk thing right well i needed this thing to move up and down with the desk now i've got a got a 55 inch behemoth which by the way ended up not being as wide as my 27 inch plus my 34 inch next to each other but now i got four 1080p quadrants in front of me that i can do things with so the next thing

was i needed a stand for this and man this thing is awesome so I put the link in there it's for the hue vibe universal tv stand base tabletop swivel blah blah blah blah more or less it can handle up to a 65 inch screen tv and here's the deal it looks like it shouldn't be able to hold it quite honestly you look at this thing. That's always comforting. Right? When you shop for anything, I want to find something that doesn't look like it can do the job, yet somehow surprisingly does.

Dude, not only does it do it, it does it amazingly well. Like that thing is so sturdy and it does swivel so you can move the screen left and right easily. It's got a tilt swivel on it as well, but I'm going to be honest, a 55 inch screen, a few inches away from your face. The only way you can tilt that thing is down because you're actually looking up at it for the most part, but it's truly awesome.

This thing, it's 40 bucks, $41 and love it. So it sits on top of my desk, all the cables along with the computer move up and down with it, right? I'm just waiting for the next thing that you're going to add here to your list is either going to be like a neck brace or a chiropractor appointment. Those are to be determined. Oh, hey, by the way, by the way. Yes. We were talking about the, oh, shoot, what was that thing called?

That weird mount thing that you had that looked like grandma's. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the PC mount. Yeah. Yeah. So I got curious because you said it holds up to 60-something pounds? 66 pounds. 66 pounds.

And we were talking about the old cheese graters. It's probably 30 pounds. So I Googled. I was curious because I was like, hey, if you go back if you go back to like say a 2005-ish Mac Pro cheese grater, like just how heavy were those things? Because they were a beast, right? It's got to be 40 pounds. And so what I found from everymac.com is on average, depending on like how you spec it out, 44.5 to 48.8 pounds. Golly, man. That's a half to 48.8 pounds. Man,

that's, that's a, that's a workout. Yeah. So this thing will hold it. Grandma's Walker will hold it. All right. So we're good at marketing.

Grandpa also has walkers. We're not going to leave them out either. We're, we're really good at marketing. They should, they should reach out to us, right? We can fix up their Amazon listing.

All right. So the next thing I have up here, what did I just paste? I don't know what I did. Let's see. This one. Oh, okay. So this is interesting. So I gave a talk.

Let me paint the picture here. So I gave a talk at, I think it was Atlantic Code Camp. And I'm up in front of the room. I've got my laptop plugged into the picture here. So I gave a talk at, I think it was Atlantic code camp and I'm up in front of the room. I've got my laptop plugged into the projector system. And typically you're standing at the front of the room with the screen behind you, right? So, so I can see what I'm doing on my laptop, but typically when you're presenting, you have one screen for what you're trying to present. And then you have another screen set up so that you can move stuff around and do things that people aren't watching.

Right? Like you want it to be clean. The problem I had was I couldn't see what was on the big screen behind me that everybody else was looking at. And so the entire time I'm basically like, Hey, sorry guys. And I'm like, turned around trying to see what's happening on the screen, making sure I'm typing things, right? Like, you know, pasting a command, typing a command, whatever. And so it was super awkward. I felt like I was almost having to apologize to the people that I was presenting to say, Hey,

sorry guys. I mean, it's kind of hard to type with my head turned at 180 degrees, you know? So setting the stage there, I said, never again, right? Like I will not do that again. So it turns out there's a market for some really cool stuff out there. There's portable monitors that you can buy. And I got this thing on Amazon and it turned out to be amazing. So what this thing is, it's a 15.6 inch display. So it's the same size as my laptop display. So it works perfect sitting next to it. I made sure I got a 1920 by 10 81 because having a higher resolution at that size doesn't make a ton of sense unless you're going to scale it.

And I didn't want that. And also I was thinking most places where you present, they're probably 10 ADP displays, right? In today's, you know, age. So I got this thing.

It's awesome. So one of the other reasons why I love my gigabyte is I mentioned it has a USB-C and it has a Thunderbolt 3 port. So they're both the same type connections, right? Like they look like USB-C connections. One's Thunderbolt 3 capable. The other one also has a display port built into it. This thing is amazing. I can plug one cable up to it from either one of my USB-C connections and it will power it and also send the display over to it from either one of my USB-C connections, and it will power it and also send the display over to it. So what I'm able to do now is I can plug that thing up to one of my ports. I can plug up the projector to another one of the ports, and Windows is actually really smart. You can say, hey, mirror the displays from two and three, which happen to be this portable display and the projector, mirror those, but then make mine my own, right?

Like it's a separate screen. Right. And then that way I could do all the stuff I needed to on mine. But when I was working on what I wanted the people out there that I'm presenting to to be able to see, I could see that right next to me as well. Right. So you can have your laptop's monitor as your notes for the presentation. Right. And then you can have this other monitor as what you're presenting behind you, but you

can be able to see and engage with the audience as you are able to make sure you're not making typos. Yep. Right at it. This is another company, by the way, that's in desperate need of our grand marketing skills here. Because I don't know if you said this, but the product name for this thing is literally Portable Monitor. Portable Monitor.

Yeah, so also reach out to us. So here's a couple of things that I want to say about this. There's a few of these on the want to say about this that ended up being like, there's a few of these on the market, just like anything, right? Like people rebrand these things or whatever. There's a couple of features worth mentioning on here that were really cool. One is there's a hole in the bottom left of the screen where you can put a pencil in that will help it prop up at basically whatever angle you want. It's really stupid simple.

They have a picture of it here. Like it's the third. Yeah. It's really stupid simple. They have a picture of it here. It's like the third picture down. Take a look at it. It's a way to prop the thing up. It's really interesting. They put it in portrait mode. Yeah. Dirt cheap way of doing it.

The other thing is, like I said, you can power it with, if you're doing a USB-C or a display port, it'll automatically power it. If you don't have that, it also has the ability to power it through a regular USB, and it comes with the plug and the cable that you can plug it up to a wall or an outlet, and it will power it, and then you can pass in an HDMI connection. So for anybody who just wants a bigger screen for your Nintendo Switch, this is also a really good option because you can totally plug up whatever device you want to this thing because it's got hdmi and you can have a little portable display you can take with you well i was gonna ask did you try hooking your phone up to it i did yes i did um it works it did not do the dex mode though so i think i need to i need to try and

get one of those dex ports because it didn't do what I hoped it would. But I did hook it up to it, yes. Of course I did. Why would you do that on your phone? I told you about the DeX thing. Like if you hook up a Samsung S8 or above phone, it turns into a different OS, which is really cool. So at any rate, this thing was amazing. It's $170 listed right now, but they have a coupon that you can take money out. I think I paid like 150 for it or something like that.

Fantastic. I will be taking it with me to every presentation I do. Presentation, presentation, whatever. How heavy is that? It's going to matter for travel. It is a couple of pounds. Especially if you're like flying. It's a couple of pounds.

Two pounds. 1.99 pounds. There we go two pounds sweet i was right on yeah nice all right let's see what else i got i only got a few more here i'll try and blow through them as quick as possible so this one um this is just an honorable mention i had it in there last year i get this question all the time so i'm putting it back in this one in hopes that it will answer other people's questions outlaw joz Jozak, myself, we all have this. This is the C930E Logitech webcam. If you're going to buy a webcam, get that one. It does all the encoding on the camera and leaves your CPU

alone. Yeah. The very important thing here, when you look at this link on Amazon, for example. The third bullet point here is the one that is ultra important here where it says, UVC H.264 encoding frees up system bandwidth and delivers a smoother video stream by putting video processing in the camera. And that is – That should really be like the first bullet point. Believe it or not, it actually matters. For people that have laptops, I've seen people with laptops do Zoom meetings and their graphics card or their CPU is getting pegged. With this thing, you see nothing. Your computer's not sweating. And maybe even more important than the video encoding happening on the camera itself is the fact that this is Microsoft link 2013 and Skype certified.

Right. So that's important. That's only a couple of years old. That matters. Yes. All right. So next one up is, and this is funny.

I'm putting this one on here because I actually really love this product. It's a, a card reader, just a, you know, SD card, um, mini SD, all that kind of stuff. But it's a card reader, just a, you know, SD card, mini SD, all that kind of stuff.

But it's a USB three one. And that's so important because it's so much faster than card readers. You probably got laying around. I hate wasting time. I'm impatient. This thing's 16 bucks. I love it. So you're assuming that that SSD, that micro, you know, SD card is going to read at 10 gigabytes?

I have some that are 95 megabyte per second reads. And those, I mean, yeah, whatever. I know that it doesn't matter as much. But for whatever reason, what I don't get is... One of the things is actually bigger than I thought. Holy moly. It's not that big. It's actually...

I mean, the picture of it looks gigantic. It's about half the size It's actually, it's. I mean, the picture of it looks gigantic. It's like a jazz drive. It's about half the size of my S8 Plus. Okay. That's big. That's big. Yeah. It's like a jazz drive.

I mean, whatever. All right. So don't hate on it. It's amazing. Let's see. What else I got? That was that. You have to be way over budget by now.

I've actually bought most of these things over the year just on my own. So got the portable display. the card reader okay so this one this one is where i was smoking crack and i did it i absolutely did this so i made fun of your uh always a good uh right right i made i was high when i bought it your arctic silver i made fun of it. So there's good reason because. Did you do it? Because I did do it. So my gigabyte that I spent $2,700 on, I said, you know what? I need better thermals than this thing. So there is a site, and I need to find it, and I will provide the link for the show where I think it was one of the big

places that does a lot of PC builds. I don't know if it was like one of the magazines or what, but Tom's Hardware something. They took like 60 thermal compounds and compared them all, the performance of every one of them right and this one thermal grizzly conduct a knot is liquid metal and it was basically it placed top two or three in every one of the results right now let me preface this by saying i do not endorse or condone you doing this unless you're super comfortable with the fact that you may completely fry your entire system and this is a one-way operation this is this is a one-way operation once once you do this and you attach that uh cooler or heat sink

it's it's attached no no no it'll pull It'll pull apart. But it does do a chemical melding of the two. But it's not like it's glue, I guess, is my point. You can pull it apart. As a matter of fact, some people usually take it off and redo it every year. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. I thought once you did it, it was done.

No. But here is the important part. It is metal. So unlike, so the reason why, first off, this stuff doesn't come on computers out of the box because they say that it can actually drop the temps in your CPU, in your computer by 20 degrees. It's been proven. There are so many people that have done it and posted these results. Totally legit, right?

The reason they don't do it is because you have to be really careful with this stuff because it is metal if some of this spills off onto your pcb or somewhere onto your motherboard and it touches something else while it's running it can completely fry whatever computer you put together to be conductive it's conductive right you have electricity flowing through it but here's the important part of it the reason why it's it's as good as it is is because the way that heat is dissipated from your processor to whatever the heat sink is is there's got to be the connect it's's got to touch, right? Which is what that Arctic silver does. It gives it a layer to where it allows your CPU to touch your heat sink and it conducts or, or puts that heat through that way. There's a lot of heat that is, that is not transferred across that because any kind of air is not good for heat transfer, right? This chemically combines your processor with your heat sink. And so you have a metal,

you know, touch point in between the two. And so it's much better at moving that heat from one place and getting it into your heat sink. So I didn't get a 20 degree improvement on mine, but I think it's because the chassis is so incredibly thin on my laptop, but it did improve it. Like the fans don't run as much and all that kind of stuff. How much of a drop did you get? What do you mean? Like what was the average drop?

I need to go back and measure it again. I want to say it was closer to 10. Okay. That sounds reasonable for a laptop. So here's the thing. Like I'm looking at – sorry, but I'm looking at one that was like one of the reviews. I'm just like flipping through the pictures and the reviews that people left. And one of the guys on a desktop build, he said his average was 15 degrees Celsius.

And that's massive. That's a lot of heat dissipation. Celsius. Yeah, that's like 100. No, no, that's what I'm talking about. Maybe 1,000 degrees. Everything is talked about in Celsius. So here's the important thing.

Well, we can't possibly do the conversion to American. So here's the deal, though. It's probably a couple of megabytes. Or some megabytes. Oh, God. Here's where you really notice things though and and i want to caution anybody that goes after i9s and laptops thin and light laptops they're thermal throttled almost all of them so there's programs out there called eta64 and there's other ones that if you run these you'll see that your computer starts

throttling because as soon as it hits some of them 90 degrees other ones that if you run these, you'll see that your computer starts throttling because as soon as it hits some of them, 90 degrees, other ones, when they hit a hundred, it automatically cuts back to CPUs. Cause it's like, Hey, you're going to melt me. We're done. Right. And so what I did notice was I was getting before doing this, I was getting 35 to 40% thermal throttling. Now my, it maxes out at at maybe 15 so it cuts back on the amount of throttling it does and this is running the gpu and so i put this on both the cpu and the gpu right so you know just a heads up it's really cool it's not it's not for the faint of heart because you could totally toast your 2700 laptop which i was willing to do because I'm a performance nut. So, but this is,

so I'm looking at another one in the guys said he, uh, got a 20 degree drop on it. Yeah. But he's also talking about like delidding the CPU. Okay. So, uh,

and I'm like, man, that's not for the faint of heart. So let's just to do this real quick. Delidding is for desktops, right? Yeah. Yeah. On a laptop, there is no lid on it.

So on a desktop, which you don't, most people don't even know this. When you get a CPU, it looks really pretty, right? Really what it is, there's a lid on the top of the CPU and underneath it, somebody put a compound like Arctic silver that actually touches the top of the CPU itself to that lid. When people talk about D-lidding, they're pulling that lid off, removing all that compound that was there, and then they put this stuff on here directly.

So on a laptop, I didn't have to do that. On a laptop, I just put the stuff directly on there. Which when you look through the reviews in here, I mean, like you'll see a lot of pictures where that's what people did. So the big numbers that they're getting is because they delidded it yep and then reapplied new uh well the not compound but you know this right yeah it's uh the delidding is a big one because there's a lot of temperature that's built up between that cpu and the lid so yeah really really cool stuff. It was fun. I don't know

that I recommend it for everybody because not everybody has this level of insanity that I do, but you know, it was fun for me. All right, let's see. I think only have a couple, I have two more. So the next one, I don't necessarily have a real suggestion on this other than you should get something. And this is some sort of form of VR. So get it. I don't care. If you got a PlayStation 4, get the PSVR. If you have a beefy computer, get a Vive or an Oculus. If you don't have anything, get the Oculusculus quest i have one link in here for the quest man outlaw joe you did it too so our buddy john we had on episode 100 i think and 101 and 101 so he invited us all over he's like guys i got the vive you need to come check it out and i think all of us went over there like okay whatever and then at least one of us walked away with, I'm buying that today.

And that was me. I was going to say, it's so awesome. Is it not? Oh yeah. Yep. Oh yeah. I mean, Joe, Joe, didn't you say you usually get sick with, with like any kind of depth things? It's a, I get like a headache and I have a hard time with astigmatism, so it's just hard to see. But it worked out surprisingly well, so I was able to see much better than I expected. I still just wasn't super comfortable, so I think I'll be skipping. Wait, wait.

Didn't you play it for multiple hours, though, from what I understand? But in fairness, I didn't know that it was hours. That's what I'm getting at. So if you have the opportunity or you have the means or whatever, like, and you really want people to enjoy something like I bought it because I wanted to see my whole family experience it. And my wife,

when she saw it, she's like, we're not keeping that. And I was like, um, I'm sorry. And she got it. And now she loves it. Right. So in it, and now she loves it, right?

So it's truly game-changing type stuff. Now, the one you sent, though, doesn't need a PC at all. Doesn't need a PC. The Oculus Quest doesn't need room tracking. It doesn't need a PC. It's a self-contained unit that you can do everything in. Now they have two varieties. They have the 64 gig and the 128. But from

what I understand, it'll play most everything that the regular Oculus S will do, but it's not quite as powerful. You can connect like your Steam library to get to... Yeah, I believe so. I believe so. Like through all through it like it... I believe so. I thought you had this.

I have the Vive. I have the HTC Vive. I like the Vive, but it does require some room setup. This thing is self-contained. You plug it in and you go. You have fun, right? Okay. I missed that part.

I'm sorry. So I put that one in there because that's the one that everybody can do without having a beefy PC or anything. And you just sign up with your Facebook profile since that way they can know what you'd like to play. That's probably why I don't have an Oculus because I'm not a fan of Facebook. But that's it. I'm done. I'm done. I'm out.

You had to be way over budget, though. Oh, totally. I didn't. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the laptop pretty much killed most of the budget. It did. The laptop was my budget. You're like double the budget or something?

No, not quite. Four times the budget? Maybe. Did you even add up everything as you were going along? No. Oh, man, that's totally cheating. Hey, I told you on mine, the $3,000 was blown on those three items. So, yeah.

All right. All right. yeah all right all right well then with that let's move on yes let's move on all right but first gotta ask you to leave us review because it means the world to us we really appreciate all the ones that we've got and we really uh need those reviews so please if you have a moment just take a moment to go to codingbox.net slash review and click one of the links there. We try to make it easy for you. It'll take you somewhere. We can drop us a fantastic review and leave a creative name because, you know, we love those. Or, you know, if you can't think of a creative name, just hit some random letters and we'll make outlaw say it.

Gee, thanks. Totally. All right. Well, with that, we will head into my favorite portion of the show survey says all right so a few episodes back we asked what's the first thing you do when picking up a new technology or stack. And your choices were take a course like on educative.io or Google the pros and cons and share the ones that support your opinion or being the best practices. Pray there are some. And lastly, find the Stack Overflow answer that you most agree with and supports your theory. All right.

So I think Joe went first last time. So, Alan, you go first. Which one do you think was the winner? Man, this one's actually tough. What was the first thing you did? I think I'm going to say Google the pros and cons and share the ones that support your opinion. And we'll go with 33%.

33%. Okay. Alright. And I'm going to say 50% picked up that keyboard and headed on over to stackoverflow.com whenever they ran into any sign of trouble. Okay. So you learn by doing. Okay.

Okay. So 50% Stack Overflow for Joe and 33% Google the pros and cons for Alan. Is that right? Yep. Yep. All right. Well, it should come as no surprise. Is that right? Yep. All right. Well, it should come as no surprise. You both lost.

Wow. Top answer was take a course. Really? Yep. Okay. Interesting. Top answer. 30, 38.

Well, if I were going to round it, that would be rounded to a 39%. Very nice. What was number two? Here's where it gets interesting. Number two was Google the pros and cons. And if you wanted to round it, it would be rounded up to 34%. Oh, wow. So when you said 33%, I was like, well done.

I was close. Picked the wrong horse, but I was close. Stack Overflow was the bottom answer. Really? Okay. Yeah. All overflow was the bottom answer. Really? Okay. Yeah. All right. Color me impressed. Yeah. That's like surprisingly being,

being beat out stack overflow. Wow. Can you believe that? I thought just having the word in there was going to be detrimental to the, to the answer. That's what I thought too. I guess I was thinking of like a kind of a short thing, but I guess we do say like when you're picking up a new technology

or stack stuff, if it's something you're going to be investing serious amounts of hours in and it makes sense, I think you've got to take a step back and do things the right way. I like it. Wear it up. Alright, so since we're talking about everything related to

buying or building a new computer or replacing your computer with a laptop, today's survey is how often do you replace your computer? And your choices are every few years, my guild needs me. Or after every Apple announcement. Or I upgrade it until I can

no, until I no longer can and can't stand the wait. Or never. And this 486 is still rocking doom. And lastly, every time my company gives me a new computer when I change jobs.

This should be an interesting one. Yeah, those are great. This episode is sponsored by Datadog, a monitoring platform alerting, application performance monitoring, and log management in one tightly integrated platform so you can get end-to-end visibility quickly. Visualize key metrics, set alerts to identify anomalies, and collaborate with your team to troubleshoot and fix issues fast. When Datadog talks about the ability to monitor any stack at any scale anywhere. They're not kidding. You can set up your own agent in a matter of minutes, right? So as soon as you log in and create your account, the very first thing that you're going to be presented with is the instructions on setting up your first agent on your machine. And it's like they've simplified

it so much for you. Like here, just copy and paste this one liner. Like for example, if you were on a Ubuntu, copy and paste this one liner and boom, here you go. It'll install the agent for you. And you know, that's just your starting point. But then you have like all the integrations that they have, and there are a ton of integrations that they have available. So really any where. Awesome. Also, I really want to show a shout out there. Their engineering blog,

it's got some really great articles on just technologies that I really like, but actually the, the latest article I was reading was about basically using machine learning for notifications. And they, they described it in terms of notifications, user experience, so UX. And so they talk about kind of static thresholds and the problems with them and then what they

do with their algorithmic alerting. So in addition to the product just being really cool and having the stuff built in, it's really cool that you can go check out the site. So you go to datadog.hq, sorry, datadoghq.com slash blog and read about algorithmic alerting and read what they're doing in the product with forecasting, anomaly detection, outlier detection, which is just really cool. Yeah, so try it yourself today by starting a free 14-day trial and also receive a free Datadog t-shirt when you create your first dashboard. Head to www.datadog.com slash coding blocks to see how Datadog can provide real-time visibility into

your application. Again, that's datadog.com slash coding blocks to sign up today. All right. So my turn. So. Well, you know what? Real quick, though, I'm going to interrupt you, Joe. Okay.

Because let's stay with tradition here that we've done so far for this episode. So tradition goes way back to the beginning how about we do a joke before we we do yours love it you ready okay how do you cheer up an unhappy tree root for it? You console.log. Oh, no. Console.log. That's pretty good. Console.log. Wow.

Wow. That's high praise right there. Joe, I got a wow. Yeah, that's good. All right. Very nice.

All right. Well, thank you again. I'm not, I'm not going to be able to follow that up. Uh, so I'm not even gonna try. Uh,

we'll have a link to the show notes for the stuff that I got. Palette of cheese dust. And, uh, yep. And, my, my Bitcoin empire has fallen. So, i'm back to working for a living

unfortunately and uh so what i did for my build is because i'm not very creative and i you know i'm a software guy because i don't i would never never in a million years do the liquid metal thing because i try not to do anything that i can't control Z. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I like undo. I'm a big fan of the command pattern. I like my undoes. So, yeah, I'm way too scared to do that. I might pay somebody to do it, but I'm not going to do it.

So what I did is I took Nick Craver from Stack Overflow's build, and you should go follow him on Twitter because he's awesome anyway, and he posts the build that kind of he created for Stack Overflow's build, and you should go follow him on Twitter because he's awesome anyway. He posts the build that he created for Stack Overflow's employees. It's a super great, awesome build that would be amazing

for just about anyone's work computer, I imagine. I'll take you through those right now. I did make one small adjustment, which I'll tell you about in a second here. I also kept track of whether the prices went up or down since I got these items. So without further ado,

paste. Oh, how do you paste? Let me, let me stack over this real quick. How to paste? How to paste in Google Docs. All right.

I'm pretty sure that should be like the top answer on Stack Overflow. I do a lot of pasting. So I went with the i9-998K. I already talked about it. And also, I don't actually know what those numbers mean or anything. So I'm just going to let the past stand there but it did come in a weird box and I

definitely have lots of opinions about that box it was plastic and awkward and it like split in a weird spot so it just like it was just it's a bad box man how about you've got you both have a 16 thread 8 corepu and the most that's been talked

about is how poor the box design was yeah it's really awful it's a really bad box like yeah i can't i can't stress that enough it's $500 c. It's just so dumb. And everybody's like, man, what is up with that? I never would have bought it in a store. I've been like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm going AMD. Let's be honest. We've all bought a CPU before. We know how big it actually is.

Now figure out a way that you could make the packaging for it like 100 times larger than the thing that's actually, you know, being purchased that you care about. And now imagine that you have to like put all of these on a pallet to ship around the world, you know, from your, wherever you manufactured it. Right. It truly is dumb.

It really is crazy. By the way, the K on the processor, you guys know what that is, right? It's for whether or not it's over, you can overclock. Yeah. You can bump the clock speeds locked or unlocked. Yep. If it has the processor, you guys know what that is, right? It's for whether or not it's over... You can overclock it. Yeah, you can bump the clock speed on it. Locked or

unlocked. So if it has the K, it's unlocked. If it doesn't, then you can't overclock it. So these letters and numbers mean stuff, I guess, on all of these products, but I've never been able to affect the code, so... Gotta be careful with that

stuff, and that's why I choose to uh use other people's builds uh what the heck and next up is a video card so i did upgrade this so this is the one deviation i made from the build here where uh he advocated for a 2070 and I got a 2080 for FPS on video editing, of course. So, I figured I wanted to splurge a little bit there and so that's where I did it. And I still ended up coming under budget, so good choice, I guess. But yeah, the video editing

60 FPS, no problem. Have you done anything with the ray tracing on it? You play any games with it? Nope. Really? Nope. I did try Tomb Raider but it did perform like garbage um the like the new one but i don't think that was the ray tracing i just think it was just it's a super intense game like you need like whatever the next one up is the ti for it to work that's ridiculous wait what resolution were you gaming at oh 4k okay yeah yeah yeah i was gonna say yeah because even even on

mine the with ray tracing at 4k it's like okay forget it yeah 4 4k is not ready yet you just can't you just can't play it like that so i did that i tried battlefield one too but i mean it just looked like a war or something so i just you know i need i don't i can't i can't do the war games i need more uh fantasy or aliens or something. Slay the Spire looks fantastic. I don't think that you said what brand and model

card you got. He didn't. I thought I did. I thought 2080 was it. I got a Evja GeForce RTX 2080 XC. None of those are words, by the way, so I don't know. You're giving me a hard time.

That hurts my soul, man. Let me say that for everyone else. For the normal people, how they would pronounce this, Evja GeForce RTX 2080 XC Gaming. I'm sorry. I thought it was the barcode. I didn't realize that was a bug name. Oh, right.

Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah. And so we mentioned the CPU earlier came in at around $450. So the price on this guy? The price on this guy, it was $789. Now it's up over $1,000. So this was the biggest price change. The CPU actually has dropped about $50. So, you know, kind of cool there. But yeah, up

a third on the video card. I kind of thought video cards were going to be getting cheaper now that my Bitcoin empire has crashed, but apparently they are still very expensive. I must have clicked on the wrong link. I'm seeing $9.01. I'm seeing $9.14. Really? I don't know what happened there.

So the three of us are all getting different charges from Amazon. I love Amazon. Yeah, thanks. Let me see. Yeah, I see 901 now. I don't know what happened. Oh, I remember this card, too, because this card, the fans on it have the little E logo,

which, if I remember right, it was to cut down on the sound. Oh, okay I remember right, it was to cut down on the sound. Oh, okay. Alright, well, so only up $110, and that's not too bad. I did go with 128, no, 64 gigabytes of RAM, DR4-26666. I heard that the RAM doesn't matter too much, but I did hear that the RAM speed does matter a lot for AMDs for some reason. That's all I hear. I don't know what that means. Yeah, there's minimal

difference on Intel builds. There's all kinds of YouTube videos that are dedicated to showing you the difference in memories, the speeds, and usually on high-end games, it's less than one frame per second. it's it's tiny yeah so that's why i thought i was you know i kind of shaved some of that but not getting more

expensive rent but i did hear after the fact that uh for some reason something about andy's order uppers uh makes that number more important i understand but if you leave a link in the show notes in the comments uh i'll surely read it. Very cool. So were you going to say like the model and price? Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-26666. Yeah, so that was oh, you didn't say the price yet.

The price so now it's $273 then it was $432. So the price has dropped dramatically on the RAM here. Yeah, so this is currently about $60 less than the memory that I picked. Yep, but it doesn't have any lights on it. Right. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Yep. But they're both white. They are both white. So they either would work for the Stormtrooper build. Yes. Yes. Next up is a Samsung SSD970EVO2TB. I think that it is two terabytes, which is nice because I get tired of kind of moving stuff around on hard drives.

So I wanted a bigger hard drive. I didn't want multiple. I didn't want to have a separate OS drive. I just wanted to have one hard drive. Dang it. That's what I did. And so this is the non, this is not the plus version. Right.

Okay. Yes. But the speeds are very similar. I think your writes were a little bit faster on the Plus. I'm curious now versus. So this is 3,500 megabyte per second reads. And the writes are, should be somewhere. So how the Pluses. Oh, the writes. Yeah. So yeah so the rights are 2500 megabytes per second so

yours is actually quite a bit faster on the rights that's why is the plus that's that's a weird naming thing yeah the plus so they were both 3500 read megabytes megabytes but the plus is 3300 megabyte per second read in this and you said right sorry and you said that the the not plus is 500 megabytes per second right gotcha so you're getting a lot faster write speeds okay on the other one but this is like let's you're splitting hairs at this point right like nobody's gonna notice the difference here it's fast oh yeah well i mean at the time too that he did this build that plus wasn't even an option right wasn't available so like this was the this was the baddest you know this was the best of the best at the time right because he you built yours like what six months before outlaw did

his something like that sounds about right yeah. Yeah. Like January, I think. Yeah. So, and the price then was $500, and now you can get it for $400. So, down 20% on that price, which is amazing. Probably has something to do with that plus coming out. For me, it's more

expensive. For me, it's $490. Yeah, that's what I'm seeing. Like, it's cheaper to buy the plus than it is this one. Uh-huh. Man, so I don't know what's $490. Yeah, that's what I'm seeing. Like, it's cheaper to buy the Plus than it is this one. Uh-huh. Man, so I don't know what's going on here. I grabbed these prices, and now they're changing. So maybe Amazon knows that our account is looking at these. Because that's where I copy and paste these numbers.

That's interesting. I mean, now, in fairness, they could be changing who their sellers are and all that. But, yeah, I'm seeing 490 also for the 2 terabyte. Yeah. What the heck? All right. Well, I don't know what the heck that's about. Whatever.

It's what I'm hearing. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Definitely know that. Next up is the motherboard, which is a whole bunch of letters. Do I really have to say all these letters? Gaming Edge AC.

Is that enough? No. Okay. MSI MPG Z390 GAMING Edge AC LGA1151 There we go. It has copious

USB ports, which I appreciate. And also a headphone jack, which I like. Sorry, a headphone jack, which I like. Sorry, I'm the worst at this. I just don't really know the difference between motherboards. Yeah, you truly didn't care about this stuff. No. I mean, I just wanted a cool computer.

I care about the results. I care about the UX. Full stack. It's a nice motherboard. Yeah. What can I say? It looks cool stack. It's a nice motherboard. Yeah. What can I say? It looks cool. It looks like a little city.

If you get down and look at it. A little city. Imagine all the electrons driving around and going to work. All right. Next up is power supply, which is Corsair RMX, RM750X. So probably 750X is in there. So that's hopefully more than I need. Okay.

So there's a lot of similarities I'm noticing in our builds here. So this is the same power supply that I got except mine's white and yours is black. Okay. And my case I did not buy a case. I used a case from the closet

which I bought a couple years ago. I mean, it's a nice case actually. It's an Antec something or other. It's got lots of fans on it. It's got blue neon. It's pretty cool, but it's just kind of small. So I feel like I did the Stormtrooper build and so far it looks like Joe

did the Imperial TIE Fighter pilot build. Yeah, his are all dark. Yeah, everything's black, I think. Except for May of the Ram, which is white, because maybe they were out of black. But I can't see that side anyway. He didn't build this for pretty sake. He built this to game on. Right, this is the Clamp It build.

We've already covered that, right? Yeah, you mean run intellijay and docker right that yes light theme heck yeah man dark computer light theme uh next up so i got a spinning drive just for storage uh seagate barracuda to utb i don't remember if that was on a creative rebuilds cravers build or not but i just wanted some extra space for videos and stuff like that. Raw files that I'm tired of shuffling stuff around and trying to decide what to delete.

Dude, why only two terabytes? Yeah. I don't know. You have an SSD that's that big. Yeah. How many terabytes do you need? All of them? Either way, I'm not seeing that in the Craver belt.

So I think. Good to know. Let me see how much space I've used on that hard drive. I mean, you get about like an eight terabyte. Yeah. Really? Yeah. That's a lot of TVs.

10 terabyte. All right. Well, I've used. 14 terabyte. 800 gigs of it yeah so that's like half yeah maybe I should get another one yeah I

would have totally gone bigger on that but what does a 14 terabyte drive cost and that was the Seagate Seagate Barracuda yep and I have lots of room for more hard drives so you know i'll just pop another one in and do the thing i said i didn't want to do by having lots of hard drives

all right and last up is a cooler uh i got the be quiet which is strangely lowercase uh but you know hey that's what they got on amazon that's the dark rock 4 it's the one that the cruiser recommended unfortunately did not fit in my case it was just a little bit off but i wasn't able to remove a little bit of grate there so like a little bit of edge sticks out uh but uh it was just a cosmetic kind of great anyway just preventing some of those tumbleweeds that i mentioned i'm getting in wait are we talking about on the kate you modified the case yeah the case i basically took out a fan that was on the side and then like i had to kind of like poke a little hole in the grate which oh yeah you would have had a fit you would never have done this i just picture like picture like do you remember like a fast and furious 2

right and like brian pulls up to the race in the beginning of the movie right and the exhaust is like hanging out the front like fly flames are like shooting out the side like yeah you know that's that's what i'm figuring thinking of like when i you know joe cranks up his you know turns it on and like flames you actually can't even tell with the great uh because i just basically snapped on it was like one little corner but you would look at you and say like isn't there supposed to be a fan there that was very noticeable that there should be a fan there how about you're like i just poked a hole inside of it yeah it was like two millimeters off uh so you know after i removed the fan it was two millimeters off that is a that is a very appropriate name

for their product though or for their brand i should say yeah be quiet and it's lowercase yeah which is funny i guess i like it i will say 21.4 decibels at maximum fan speed is super quiet that's what they're that's what they're saying here so yeah there is a chance i might i might buy a bigger case uh because the one i've got i don't know it's probably 10 years old like it still looks you know cool whatever but it's just kind of small, so it's cramped in there. And the cooler didn't fit very well. So I might just go ahead and buy another case and bite the bullet and move that stuff over. I don't think it'll take that long.

I'm just being lazy. I think we forgot some prices to mention on some of these. Did we? Yeah. Did you say the motherboard price? The motherboard was one 65. Yeah. Uh, we already talked about the, the power supply, but the, well, I think the black one was a little bit cheaper, I think.

Cause that was like 120 and then that, uh, two terabyte, um, Seagate Barracuda drive. Well, that's not even available now. So, yeah, but it looks like, it looks like, well, there's a newer version of it. That's available for a cheaper price than I got it for. Right? Yeah.

The, the, the, there's a newer version for 50 bucks. And by the way, I was curious. So I did search, uh, if you wanted to get the,

um, 14 terabyte Seagate Barracuda, that won't be cheap. Five 45. Yeah. Nope. Nah. I mean, seagate barracuda that won't be cheap 545 yeah nope nah i mean the sweet spot on drives i think is in the eight terabyte realm like that's where you can still get things for a reasonable price and a lot of storage and uh for bonus stuff um so i still have a couple hundred dollars to spend um i'm not probably not going to spend it unless I do it on the case. But there are two things I wanted to mention that I kind of have my eye on, but I don't actually know what to get. So I wouldn't mind a Drobo or something like that, some sort of NAS box.

I hate the price of the Drobos, but i like not having to mess with it so i don't know i might just get an old laptop and like i don't know some some uh what's called uh i don't know extension drives or something and like a bunch of external connections you can always try and free nas it you get a free nas machine yeah so i might try to do something like that but it's tempting sometimes just to go buy the drobo and spend like a thousand dollars a lot of drives and just plug it in and just never think about it anymore. Right. Yeah. There's the ease factor for sure.

Outlaw has Drobo's. Yeah. There's definitely the ease factor, which was a big part of the reason why. Yeah. Yep. Plus, plus I liked the fact that,

um, with the Drobo's you don't have to be, uh, which I mean, it's not like others don't have this, but with Drobo they have, um, the beyond raid. So you could just put in any mixture of drives and be like oh i'll figure out how to raid them all together it's not like the old days where you had to like match all the drives so you could get the the drobo 5c for like 344 dollars and if you have some old hard drives

laying around you could just throw those in there and away you go. Yep. I could also just buy a couple of Raspberry Pis to make the money up. Just buy however many it takes to fill it up. And then, I don't know, I could do talks and walk around the cluster of Raspberry Pis. I always think it's really cool when people do talks and they have Raspberry Pis in them or around them. I should also mention, too, though drobo that like you know if performance is the thing if you're looking for ultimate performance then that's not your your go-to

nas solution probably like there's faster you know purpose-built solutions than that it's you it's utility right it's yeah it's just ease of use yes convenience is high i don't need like a i don't need a media streaming center whatever so it's just ease of use. Yes. Convenience is high. I don't need a media streaming center or whatever. So it's just about having backups and stuff locally. It would be nice. As long as it's resistant to cheese dust, we're good. Yeah. I try to keep the cheese dust in the bathroom. So the last thing I want to mention is I've got kind of my eye on it.

I would not mind a bigger, awesome monitor. Just an amazing, like, every once in a while I just Google expensive monitor and just look at them. I'm like, hmm, that sounds nice. Then it's got more letters. I'm so with you. I'm so with you on the monitor, man. I want a bigger one, 4K and curved. I i'm not convinced i'm not in alan's camp though

for the 50 inch yeah telling you that just seems a bit on the bonkers side 34 might be fine it seems like there's quite a bit at the 35 34 size and then there's this weird gulf where things disappear to 40. What's the size in front of you right now, Alan? This is a 32. 32. Yeah, so just a heads up. The 34 looked absolutely tiny after I put the 55 up there. I bet.

So here's the thing. The one with 21 inches more look so much bigger. So I have to defend this a little bit. Here's the thing that absolutely drives me nuts, guys, is how many 4K monitors are on the market that are 32 inches or 28 inches. And it's like you cannot run those things at 4k resolution and read anything on that screen. They are itty bitty, right? So for it to be usable, a true 4k, if you want a hundred percent scaling, you're at 43 inches minimum, right? No scaling, just full resolution. So somewhere between there and what I've got is probably the sweet spot. Like in all honesty,

the monitors that are made are 43s, right? If you wanted to go TV size 40, like 49 is what I see. Like there's a site called RT INGS.com. Oh yeah. We talked about this. They have a recommendation tool

to where you can actually plug up what usage it is that you want to do. And what I did is I just killed everything and said, hey, show me everything between 45 inches and 51 inches. And the top one on there is a Samsung Q70. And my guess is you can probably

pick that thing up at that for probably 800 bucks is my guess. Hold on. I'll tell you right now, as a matter of fact, on Amazon colors to be just sick on the blacks to be black. And I don't want there to be any ghosting. Then. All right. So if you want to do that, first off, there's no, there's not even a game or a monitor that's going to give you that, right's no, there's not even a game or a monitor that's going to give you that, right? Because typically there's a trade-off between IPS or VA panel, right? So the IPS is going to give you truer colors at all the viewing angles, but you're not going to get the black blacks. If you want something like that, then something like this Samsung will actually

give you those dark blacks with some of the tradeoff of the viewing angles. So there's no perfect solution unless you go OLED. But now you're starting to spend some real serious cash on this. So there is no perfect solution. But, you know, I do think that honestly, the sweet spot, if you want 4K, is probably somewhere in between 43 and 49 inches on something that's not in your face, right? Like sitting back on your desk a little bit is probably where it needs to be. But see, here's the thing that I want. I want big in that kind of range, 30 to 40-ish kind of range, curved, 4k. Yeah. You know, that, that to me would be the sweet spot,

you know, and, and a high, uh, you know, refresh rate. Yeah. I'd say a curved 43 would be amazing.

I don't know if there is one. I know the ultra wide Samsung that is ridiculous. The 49. Yeah. But that's, I mean, that's like just a long skinny wraparound yeah i don't want that i don't need that yeah that one i want you know that one that one is ridiculous because

yeah you like look all the way to your turn your head all the way to the left and there's where the left edge of the screen is and then turn all the way to the right and there's the right hand you know i know that that's a bit that's too extreme. Yeah, that one's ludicrous. But yeah, so you should definitely do some research there, Joe. But I mean, that's the thing. That Samsung, that Q70, that is actually a super highly rated TV for all kinds of purposes. And you would get excellent, excellent type stuff out of it. And it'd be 800 bucks, which is less than what you'll pay for most monitors.

What was the model number on that one again? Q70. Q70. Yeah. Q70. Yeah. It's always hard. I think my want for a awesome monitor is going to still wait for a while.

Because I also want it to be good for gaming purposes too. I think that's where some of the rub is. It's like trying to find something that would be, solve the work need, right? So I want a big screen, a lot of real estate, you know, for work purposes. But then for gaming purposes, like really gaming, you just 10 ADP is good enough, right? Once you get beyond 10 AP,

like it's just whatever it's, you can do it. There's really not much. You're not problems driving it, but. So the question is though, are you looking for something that has a, what is it? There's free sync for AMD. What's the, are you looking for something that has, what is it?

There's FreeSync for AMD. What's the G-Sync for NVIDIA? Like, is that something that's a requirement? Yeah, I looked into those, too. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I've definitely looked at it to see, like, okay, hey, you know, is there a monitor that fits my need that is g-sync right but so tell me this joe what is when you say you look for expensive

monitors like what what's the uh top dollar you'd be willing to spend on your perfect monitor thousand bucks thousand oh yeah i don't you going to have a hard time finding exactly what you want. Oh, come on. That's a lot of dollars. It is a lot of dollars. But if you remember, our 34s were pushing that when we got them. No. Yeah, man.

Yeah, those were like $700, $800 when we got them. Yeah, when we bought those, they were $800. That's impossible. Yeah. The monitor I'm looking at right now? No, no, no, no. Not the 32 that you're using now. He's talking about the LG

Ultra Wide, the 34-inch Ultra Wides. That we bought several years ago. Yeah, pour one out for that guy. Yeah, this 32 is... I like the size uh i hate the color i hate the i don't know i hate that when i move like this it's like yeah so you need you is this thing not ips though hmm that's interesting yeah i don't know yeah i mean what you're talking about is you don't want the colors to wash out at angles right i just wanted to look like real life oh this definitely is yeah i see what you're

talking about like when i come down your color's correct when i go up you're you're super ghosty yeah and if you have it like a dark theme it's super noticeable yeah so you need an ips panel is what you want okay um so just in case you do go shopping for it but anyways all righty yeah that's it for me so we got a couple resources that we like yep a few yep and uh you know we mentioned there were some notable uh honorable mentions that i'm going to have included in there so uh you know system 76 was brought up i'm going to have included in there. So, uh, you know, system 76 was brought up. I'm going to have a link to some of that, some of their laptops in there. Um, as well as, uh, we talked about the level one techs, uh, KVM. So I figured I'll include those as well.

There's going to be a heavy link, uh, show notes. So with that, we will head into Alan's favorite portion of the show. It's the tip of the week. All right. So, um, so Mike RG, Hey, he's never heard his name mentioned. Uh, he, you know, he shared a, uh, um, a link in the, in our Slack channel with, uh, we've talked about in the past, the, for IntelliJ, there was the ideacolorthemes.org site where you could find like themes for, it didn't have to be IntelliJ, but it could be, you know, like even WebStorm, for example, you know, you could work with, which that site unfortunately seems to no longer be a thing. But in that type of vein,

MicroG shared Studio Styles, where it's.es. So I love the new top level domains, like all the creativity that you can get with it. Well, I guess that was not too new, but whatever. So Studio Styles, where it's studiostyle.es, I guess is how you might say that, where you could find various styles for Visual Studio, a whole bunch of them. Now, in full disclosure, I'm already happy with the light theme, but since we were talking about themes, I thought, oh, this would be relevant considering the conversation that we had last episode. So I thought I'd share that. And then one other share we've talked about in the Chrome DevTools, like various cool things that you could do with this. And it never dawned on me, but to, to like go and enter this myself, but if you were ever in that network tab and

you're like, Hey, I would just want to like filter on certain requests. And like, you see that filter box there where you could like randomly type things in. And in the past, I've always just typed in the name of whatever the API, uh, that I'm trying to hit so that I could see that one particular API, right? Or maybe there's like a section of APIs that all share like a common route and I want to see all of them. So I would enter that route in and see all of them. But it dawned on me earlier this week, I was like, you know, I wonder if you can filter out to see like, just show me all the errors, right? Like I need to see everything that is in an error state, like all of the, you. So it's not the selected answer. So I'm going to have a

link to a Stack Overflow answer. And it is not the accepted answer. But I really question like maybe it should be because one, it is a more current answer than the one that is the accepted answer by like four years. But you can type in something like status-code colon, and then the status code that you want to filter on. And so for example, if you wanted to, so you could say something like, hey, status-code, colon, 403, right? Or maybe you want to look for, like, server 500 errors. So you just, colon, 500, right? But if you just wanted to say, like, oh, just show me all of the errors, then you could say minus status-code, colon, 200. And you can see all of the API calls that

returned some form of an error. That's actually pretty sweet. Isn't it? It was so helpful for me to figure out because I'm doing a big refactoring effort and it was like, hey, how many things did I just break? Right? You know, like how many

API calls aren't right anymore. So that's very cool. Well, now I only have one request per page. So one big old GraphQL thing. All my right. Yeah. Well, I mean, you did until I broke it. That's why I had to do this.

Yeah. So you're welcome. So now you filtered out the one request that we were going to see. Thanks. You're welcome. All right. So you stole the one for MicroG. So I had to erase that off my list. I didn't notice that one. All right. So. Oh, stole. Stole. Yes. How do you steal it if you go first? That's what I said. Oh, all right. So I wrote mine first. This one's actually really amazing. So we've mentioned that we're going to be talking about designing data intensive applications here in probably next episode and for the next several whatever. So that's an O'Reilly book, right? So something that was pointed out is I shared a link, I think in Slack, maybe even on Twitter,

where like, hey, we're going to be looking at this book. It's pretty awesome. You can go check it out. Well, Jim Hummelson, who is also the design pattern evangelist over in our Slack channel, this guy has awesome tips all the time and really good conversation. The one here that's amazing is if you buy a membership to acm.org, it comes with an O'Reilly membership that gives you access to a ton of books. And it's more than just O'Reilly books because it's the original Safari membership. So not only do you get access to a ton of books, but you also get access to a lot of video and,

and other things that come along for the ride. So as a regular member, it's 99 bucks a year. That's a lot of awesome books that you get access to for that plus a ton of other things. So I have a link there to the membership benefits as well. On top of it though, if you're a student, I want to say it's $20 a year, I believe is what he told me. So if you want to follow along and not everybody's going to be able to win a book when we do this kind of stuff. You know, if you want to follow along, this is a fantastic resource to be able to go get a lot of learning material for a pretty low price.

Whoa, man. So O'Reilly puts on killer conferences, like probably the best conferences. It looks like, I don't know if it's all, but they have a ton of ORL videos up there on Safari, which I did not know about. Yeah, man. And that's what he was saying too, is not only do you get access to the books, which again, if you go to this resources page and you search for Safari, you'll see that this is what it's talking about, but you'll get access to webinars, new innovation stuff that's coming out. There is a ton of information in here that, I mean, that's, that's just killer. And for that price, I mean, that's, that's amazing. I mean,

this, this one book designing data intensive applications, 35 bucks, right? So that right there is already a third of a yearly price of being able to have access to a, a lot of not just O'Reilly, you know, tech. It looks like, unless I'm reading this wrong, like just to get a Safari subscription by itself, like if you were to go directly to O'Reilly, that's $400 a year? Uh-huh. This is a fourth of the price.

Right. Yeah, when he shared this the other day i was like that is insane like you're getting access to that and a lot more right so i'm starting to sound like an infomercial but anyways definitely you know if you buy today you'll also get a steak knife for free so call now yeah exactly call in the next 15 minutes so definitely check that out. That's an amazing tip. So seriously, anybody that is interested in learning and doing some continuing education, go look at that.

And the next 15 calls will also get a set of Ginsu knives. Yes. All right. So the next one is from Pony out in Slack, also Lucas. This thing's called Chrome Discards. This is really interesting. If you take what I've got here and just paste it in a new tab, it's a feature in Chrome where you can see what's running, what's happening, what's getting thrown away, what's being used. Like, it's really cool. And, and what Lucas was actually saying initially was, Hey, if you're interested in seeing kind

of what's happening with ad blockers and you really want to be disturbed by it, run this and then go to a site with your ad blocker turned off and then turn it on and see what all is happening. So really, I didn't even know this thing existed. Like this is a feature of Chrome to where you can actually go see what's happening. It's, it's pretty cool stuff. Uh, so there's a graph tab too. I don't know if you guys have looked at that.

I don't even know what it's doing. So anyways, very cool. Neat little tip. Check that one out. And then the last one is from Sean Martz, one of our folks over there in Slack also who does awesome things, he provided a link to just kind of a fun thing on GitHub where it's like build your own and then fill in the blank, right? This is a Git repo that's got tutorials on how to do all kinds of stuff. Build your own 3D renderer, augmented reality, BitTorrent client, blockchain, cryptocurrency, bot, etc. Tons of things on this page.

So if you're kind of bored and you're looking for a project to do that, you know, you can have some fun and do some learning at the same time with JavaScript, C++, whatever. This is a good place to go have some fun while you learn. So with that, that is it for my tips that I borrowed from everybody else. All right. Well, I am now now mr intelliJ so i'm going to tell you about an intelliJ theme material theme ui which is actually a bunch of themes in one but it's actually got a couple other really nice options too so as soon as you install this plugin and restart it it fires up a wizard where you like start with the basic theme but then it

kind of walks you through some basic customization options and it's like a seven step wizard it's really nice so uh it's a nice way to uh set up your stuff and then recently i discovered there's a the ability to sync your settings to your jetbrains account which i didn't know about that because i use intellij on three computers, you know, just based on whatever I'm doing at the time. And so it's nice to be able to kind of make a change, install a plugin on one of them. Like I just installed Prettier for JavaScript and just be able to like click it and have it sync to all the others, including any customizations that I've made.

Very nice. But really. I didn't know about that either. Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's getting nice to where, like because Visual Studio has a similar thing where like when you sign in with your profile it's like oh uh you like the dark theme and it'll automatically apply it right yeah great time so nice now now i gotta tell you about the reason 417 why i like kotlin why i love we're up that high i didn't think we were up that high oh i'm way higher than that i that high. Oh, I'm way higher than that. I'm jumping.

Oh, oh. Just based on how I feel. That makes sense. Yeah. So let me tell you about the apply method. So y'all are familiar with C Sharp and how you can do object initializers, right? So you create a class or create a list, for example. And then in curly brackets, you can put in the properties of that object or the items in that list or map or whatever, right?

And so you can do that. And so it effectively becomes a one-liner because you create your object, you put your brackets after, and you fill in the information. And what's nice about that is you don't have to put the name of the variable. So if you do var p equals new person instead of doing p.firstname equals p.lastname equals p.accountname equals whatever you just like leave off the p, put it in the brackets and you just set each of those properties afterwards. And it's nice because it keeps it all in one block. So it keeps other people from like moving stuff around.

It's just a clear message to developer like, hey, all this stuff is one thing. This is one notion. We're just creating this person. We're setting these fields on it. And we didn't want to have a constructor with 17 things some of which are optional so this is what creates object well good nope so the apply method is very similar and the way they describe it is that it calls the specified function block with this value as its receiver and returns the value. And that's kind of a weird kind of thing to digest

there. But what it really means is that you can do a dot apply on any object and it will go ahead and set that object as the this inside the block that follows. And this is optional. You can leave it off. So effectively, it makes it so you can turn any object into an initializer. So in C Sharp, I can only do this on constructors. Say p equals new person brackets, first name equals last name equals whatever in kotlin i can do this dot apply and have the same kind of behavior anytime so anywhere that you've ever had somewhere

where you're doing p dot this equals that p dot this equals that p dot this you got all that stuff can be wrapped in an apply block and you can drop the p it just cleans up the code makes it tidy by having inside brackets it makes this this one cohesive unit it feels great on the eyeballs ah okay so i see when i click through it it okay it makes sense i see what you're talking about so this would unlike in c sharp though where you're talking about object initializers, in those object initializers, you're only able to access public properties. I assume that's the same type thing that's going on here. Yep, same thing. But the difference is with C Sharp, it has to be initialized.

So I can only do it when I create the class and only the next line, next lines after I create the class. So a new person. This is anytime. Anytime. And I can also do it after a function. So I can say like P equals get person dot apply, slap those properties on. I like it. Okay.

So you can set a number of properties prettily all in line. Yeah, prettily. On any object, anytime. I like it. But if it's this operator, is it limited like it but if it's this operator is it limited to public because this well no it's this but only in the sense that um it's like you're inside that class but it think of it like inside the class yeah but you're not really extension method it's just syntax candy so it kind of like it gives you a block and it sets the this equal to that object

but you are still on the outside. Yeah, so think about it like an extension method in C Sharp where this is the implied object that got past it. I like that. I like that analogy. Yeah, it's exactly like – which reason 514 about Colin that I really like. So I figured out that you can import just a function from a class. Oh, that's amazing. Which seems like a goofy thing to do, but it's perfect for extension methods.

So like C Sharp, if you have like, say, one file that's got a bunch of extension methods for string. So you can like do dot capitalize or do whatever goofy stuff you want to do. You import that whole class. Maybe there's a way to do it at the function level. I just don't know. But in Kotlin now, I've gotten the handy of saying, like, import my extensions class dot method. And then I can just bring in that one method.

And it just really slicks. And so what it does is it just makes things really nice for a developer. I think it makes it easy to see what's going on. And it's just wonderful to you. And it's just like a good friend. Hey, while we're pouring on the love for Kotlin, there's one other thing that I have to add here because actually I accidentally found this the other day. And this is an IntelliJ thing or a JetBrains thing with their IntelliJ products is, I don't know about you, Joe, but sometimes trying to convert something from Java to Kotlin is like mental meltdown, right?

Like it's... It's supposed to be generic, so it's like, what? Yeah, the syntax is so different because you go from incredibly verbose to very terse, right? In IntelliJ, take the Java code that you're trying to convert and just paste it into a Kotlin file, and it'll say, hey, I see that you pasted some Java. Do you want us to convert that to Kotlin for you? And, of course, you just, well, yes, yes, I do. Thank you.

But it is actually that easy in a lot of cases. Instead of you trying to do the mental work of, okay, how do I map this to this and all that? It will do it for you. It is awesome, awesome, awesome. One thing, too, you were mentioning the use of the C-sharp object initializers and how you could use those at the time of constructing an object. But if you have the it almost begs the question, you're doing that at the time of the construction. If your object

requires those things, then maybe you'd be better suited to just have a constructor that took those things instead. Well, it doesn't do it at the time of construction. Object initializers do it after the constructor hits. No, but okay. I mean, technically, I understand where you're going with that, but I'm saying you can only use the object initializer when you do a new.

So when you're trying to create the object, right? So yes, to your point, technically, a constructor call does get called first, and where you're setting properties in an object initializer that you really need to have, then you shouldn't be using them in an object initializer. You should have a constructor that takes those things because if that object requires those things in order to be able to function, then you should make it clear by having a constructor that says so. Yeah, totally. Not having like a parameter list, for example, a constructor. Yeah, I mean, if it's always required for it, then it should be part of the constructor.

But it's not necessarily required. Right. Not necessarily required. That's what I'm saying. If you find yourself in a situation where you are. You should revisit. But in the case of what you're talking about, like a DTO is a perfect example, right? Like you only have X number of properties, you know, initialize DTO with it or or like you said, a list, right? A list is a perfect example. There's really no constructor that you're hitting, but you're adding values to it. That's an excellent example of where that initializers is a good use case yeah like a builder pattern is really nice too so you can say like you know hey get factory dot create builder and that's a function call it returns you a builder now on

kotlin you can say create builder dot apply set whatever specific fields which may or may not you know like are not really required you can do whatever order whatever ones you want and the end you do a dot build and it's effectively one line, which, you know, like I'm going to not type that on one line. I'm going to space it, but it's just so nice to have one thought. And the reason 611, why I love Kotlin, is for functions, you can also just do an equal sign if it's a one-liner. So you can see, like, fun, you know, get builder equals, and then do your one-liner. And it just cleans up the parentheses, like it cleans up the brackets.

Everything's on one line. So it's just like a very terse pipeline of what happened. And I think it's just super readable. That's the thing. It's readable after you understand it. The first time you look at it, you're like... Yeah, you paste some job in and all of a sudden it turns into two oddly tabbed over expressions.

You're like, what the heck just happened? Right, right. It took my 20 lines and put it into one how is that even possible right right yep all right well uh we hope that you have enjoyed listening to uh this episode on uh how to make your wallet lighter and uh you know if you haven't already, if you know, if someone, uh, if a friend pointed you in the direction of this show or, uh,

you're listening to it from a friend's device, um, be sure to subscribe to us. You can find us in iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, all of your favorite places to find podcasts. And,

uh, if you haven't already, we'd really appreciate it. Like Joe mentioned earlier, you can leave us a review. Uh, you can find some helpful links at www mentioned earlier, you can leave us a review. You can find some helpful links at www.codingblocks.net slash review.

Yep, and while you're up there, do take a look at our show notes. In this one, we'll have tons of links and, you know, hopefully some stuff that will put a smile on your face. And we always have good examples, discussions and more. And you can send your Kotlin feedback, Kotlin questions, and Kotlin rants to me because that would be really great.

I'm super jazzed about it. And you can find me at KotlinBox as well as everyone else. And you can head over to KotlinBox.net and find the social links at the top of the page there where we'll also be talking about Kotlin stuff because it's super awesome. We're going to have a Kotlin link because it's super awesome we're gonna have a Kotlin link at the top of the page