Coding Blocks - The 2020 Shopping Spree

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

It's our favorite time of year where we discuss all of the new ways we can spend our money in time for the holidays, as Allen forgets a crucial part, Michael has "neons", and Joe has a pet bear.

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 144. Subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more using your favorite podcast app. Oh my gosh, go to the website already. I've said this 143 times. Gosh. And send your feedback, questions, rants to comments at codingblocks.net. You can follow us on Twitter at Coding Blocks or head to www.codingblocks.net where you

will find all our social links there at the top of the page. And with that, I am Alan Underwood. I'm Joe Zach. And I'm Michael Outlaw. This episode is sponsored by Datadog, the cloud scale monitoring and analytics platform for end-to- end visibility into modern applications and teamistry, a podcast that tells the story of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways to achieve remarkable things. All right, everybody. So it's that time of the year.

Again, we got Black Friday coming up in a few weeks weeks and this is the episode where we like to nerd out and geek out on the things that we're excited about that we've either bought or we want to buy and we're sharing that stuff with you because all three of us well, two of us. Wait, that we want to buy? I did this wrong. Huh? Like, I'll be

I will. Okay, hold on. Let me go. What's a Lamborghini cost? Hold on. Right? Within budget. Within budget. Oh, oh, hold on. Let me go. What's a Lamborghini cost? Hold on. Within budget. Within budget. Yes. Yes. Within budget.

You can go get a remote control one. So two of us, that would be outlawing myself, love to research stuff. Like if anything's over, I don't know, 50 bucks, like we go down this rabbit hole. Joe Zach just relies on us to buy his stuff. So this should be interesting. But it's that time of the year. We have set a $3,500 budget limit for each one of us. And we're going to tell you the stuff that we're interested in buying. And I'll tell you.

So Tippett, if you're out there, Michael Tippett, hello from the States. So I hear you. And I know you and I are on the same page about this stuff. But I've got some interesting stuff for you. So hang in there. All right and I are on the same page about this stuff, but I've got some interesting stuff for you, so hang in there. All right. I'm excited about this. But first, we've got a little bit of podcast news.

Not much, but we're going to go ahead and start off. So Outlaw. Okay. So because of the way the recording time worked out when we last did it, last uh, we only had one new review come in and, and you know, we're always thankful for every new review we got, but I thought, well,

we could each take a stab at like how you might pronounce this one. Uh, I, okay. Yeah. I like it. So, uh,

from Stitcher, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have,

we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, weer, we have Wisha. No. Okay. No, from Stitcher, we have Sparacoin for your Wisha. It's the valley of plenty. All right. So, you guys took my... I'm going to say from Stitcher, we have W Shaw.

I don't know. Yeah. Uh, okay. W Shaw, the, the other, uh,

Shaw encryption, uh, pattern. I don't know. I don't know where I'm going. This one of us may have gotten it right. Oh, thank you.

Yes. Yes. So thank you for it right. Thank you, anyways. Yes, yes. So thank you for the review. And just a heads up. So we mentioned what this episode is going to be. This episode is going to be chock full of items and gadgets and everything else. And just know in the show notes, these are going to be probably most of them. Not all of them are going to be affiliate links.

So if you click on them, you are helping the show out. You won't get charged anymore for them or anything like that. But that is our disclaimer up front. And we basically recommend things that we like. So whenever someone says like, hey, I want to help out. Can I give you money? Like click on these links. Yeah, just click on them. And even if you don't buy that, you can go buy something else and it'll still help the show out. You know, like if you're going to buy some bubble gum and whatever, that will help us. So, yeah. Yeah, one other thing I wanted to mention here.

So, we're talking about doing a game jam. We're thinking about it. Super good, Dave. Fantastic. Super good idea. Had an idea of doing a game jam. I've never done one. So, I've got some research to do on exactly how we organize that.

I really don't know. But just hang out if you're in the Slack. We've got some research to do on exactly how we organize that. I really don't know. Just hang out if you're into Slack. We've got a GameDev wannabe channel and also I'm sure I'll send something out on the mailing list and we'll mention it again or blog or something. Be stay tuned if you're interested and if you you've got any experience like running that sort of thing or knowing how that stuff works,

reach out and we'll figure out something. Oh yeah, and a big shout out also to Adam Hughes. We forget to mention it, but join the Slack community, like super incredible people. They're super good. Dave's one of them. Microgi, we've mentioned him many times. Sean, like there's so many people. Arlene, I like, I feel bad even saying anybody because now I feel like I'm going to, I'm going to hurt somebody's feelings by leaving somebody out. There's hundreds of awesome people in there, right? Like the thousands actually. So go join it. Um, Adam Hughes asked a question the other

day. He joined Slack and he's like, uh, do, do Alan and outlaw and Jay-Z actually come in here and yeah, add us, like get in there, say hi to us, whatever. Like we respond, like we may not be fast at it. Just ask Merle. Um, but you know you know, we do get in there and we talk and we have a good time. So if you haven't been up there, like, and you want to be surrounded by other developers that are truly enthusiastic about helping each other out and kind of having a conversation, it's an amazing place. So go do that. All right. So now I'm off that. All right.

So now apparently I'm going first. I don't know that I've ever gone first on this one. So I'm both nervous and excited. So I'll go first then. You can go second. No, no, I'm going first. We got to stick with tradition. No, no, we can't do this, man. My name is there now. So here's what stinks about this is like, I don't want to go too slow and I don't want too fast like i gotta pace this right but i gotta i have a bunch of junk so so i i'm going to try and do my best not to belabor any one of these but i have two themes in mind this time so first let me go ahead and paste in my theme here so you guys can see where this one's headed.

Boom. What? Didn't see this coming. Content creation are us. So this is category number one of the things that I'm doing here. Oh, this is the category. I thought that was the thing. I'm like, what? No, no, no, no.

This is the category. So basically everything that I'm going to be doing in this, I sat down and I thought about what I've been excited about and the things that I've been spending time on and all that. If you're subscribed to our YouTube channel, you know that I like putting together videos like I love doing that stuff. It's fun. It lets me do some of the artistic things that I don't get to do when I'm coding. Right. So that's one thing. And I got to thinking about too, we're all stuck at home, right? Like most of us are stuck at home. So I was thinking, go ahead. I just want to take issue because like my code is art, sir. Okay. I won't dispute that. You do write some pretty good.

Thank you. But so I was thinking, what could you do? We get asked a lot. And I know, Joe, Zach, you have Outlaw. I think you have. There's been probably at least 10 podcasts that have sprung up because of people that have come and chatted with us in Slack. And they're like, hey, you know, I like this. I like sharing. It helps me learn and all that. So we so we get asked questions all the time. Like,

Hey, what gear should I buy? What microphone should I get? Whatever. Right. And I'm like, yo, if you want to put everybody else to shame on your zoom calls and on your team's calls and all that, I got the gear for you. So that's what this section is going to be. So it's, it's all about, if you want to have this virtual thing go well, and you potentially want to create some content that maybe you put up on YouTube and help move your career forward, because believe it or not, if you put yourself out there as, as somebody that knows this stuff and you're willing to share it, good things will probably happen for you. Assuming that you don't have, you know, a really terrible attitude, but you know, can't help with that.

So that said, I squeezed every penny out of my budget that I can, and we'll get to that later. So the very first thing, and I know this is going to be probably at least on one other shopping list here is the Elgato stream deck. So the three of us picked one up. I have woefully been behind and actually doing anything useful with it. But I hope to make that change here in the near future. So what this thing is, more or less is just a big digital button panel, right? That you can assign whatever you want to, which is super cool. Like you have a button, you put a picture behind it digitally and you click it and it can run a macro. It can open a program. It can adjust your smart devices in your house.

You can do whatever you want it to do. And so that's amazing. Well, for those who aren't familiar with it, the way I describe this thing is it is a 15-key keyboard. And each key of the keyboard is a 72 by 72 pixel display that you can program to do whatever you want and you can make it look like whatever you want. And I do. And Joe, Zach, and Outlaw have absolutely spent time and made this thing do all kinds of stuff. Like, Joe, you've got some things that you're doing work-wise with it. Oh, yeah. Every day I hook up some new script to it.

And it's just amazing. And you can change profiles. So it's really more than 15 buttons or however many buttons you end up with. So it's easy to kind of change. I just hooked it up with a stream. It integrates great with streaming. But, I mean, we're coders here. We're programmers.

We know how to do stuff with stuff. So you can really go great with streaming. But we're coders here. We're programmers. We know how to do stuff with stuff. So you can really go nuts with this. I can push it and put a light bulb on downstairs and let my wife know that I'm hardcore gaming and leave me alone. Yeah, and Outlaw. So you've done stuff like that, right? Yeah, yeah. I have it set up. So like I have, I have different actions, different buttons set up so that like, if I'm on a call, then it can set like lights to red around the house so that, uh, you know, because I'm downstairs in the, in the cellar, you know, in the basement, like they can know like, you know, before they even bother to come downstairs, you know, whether or not I'm going to be on a call

or something, you know, uh, because obviously if I'm on a call, then like, you know, they can kind of know that like, okay, they might not be able to get 100% of my intention depending on the call. Right. And so that way, you know, they can know before they even bother to come downstairs. Yeah. So super cool stuff. And just so you know, Joe said that, yeah, you can have more than 15 buttons. What he means is you have 15 true digital little display buttons on there, but you could have multiple pages that you can switch to basically. So you can swap in and out and say, well,

I want to go to this profile and that profile, and it could be an entire new set of buttons. So, so you can do more than just 15 things with that. But there are just 15, at least on the ones that we got, we got the the original stream deck, not the XL or the mini. So, um, that thing's 150 bucks and it's a developer's dream, right? Like just being able to hook up all kinds of garbage to it. So show of hands, how, or maybe just say eyes, uh, how many of us actually put this one on

our list? So I know I did. I would have if I wasn't a jerk. If I wasn't a troll. I knew Outlaw was going to have it on his. That's why I said at least one other. I have no idea what Joe's done. There's probably some gargantuan jet full of cheese dust about to come our way.

Only the good Doritos. only the good Doritos, only the good Doritos. All right. Okay. So moving along the next thing, and I'm not kidding you guys. I spent hours on this one item. I'm not even kidding. It drove me absolutely crazy. So basically what it is, it's an HDMI capture card. All right. So here's the thing. We use webcams for when we're recording. And they're okay. Like the ones that we've suggested, I still suggest and I still recommend to people, if you want a no-fuss way to get some video that's pretty decent,

this camera that we've suggested several times on the previous shopping sprees works great. However, it's a webcam, which means you get webcam quality. Say again? And it's not available. And it's not available. Because it's been sold out since the beginning of the pandemic and hasn't been available and is still not available. So if you want truly excellent video, the way to get that is to be able to use an HDMI input into your computer, right? And be able to treat that thing as a camera that you can open up in Zoom or in OBS or whatever the case may be, right?

So, I'm going to mention some of the other ones that I looked at, but I didn't go with just so you'll have an idea. So, there's one, the Elgato Cam Link. It's 130 bucks. It's super popular. It's a 4K input. You can plug an HDMI into it, but it's just an HDMI in and it goes straight into the USB port on your computer. So there's no pass through, right? If you wanted to record video games or anything like that, this would not be what you do. This is literally just to hook a camera up to your computer and it's 130 bucks. And I was like, okay, well, let me look and see what else there is. So there's the Elgato HD 60 S plus. Now this allows you to do the same thing, except it also has a loop out. So you can plug an HDMI into it and then plug it into your

computer via the USB. So you have that video available there. But then let's say that you wanted to record some video games from your PlayStation 4 or something else. You can loop that HDMI out back to a TV. So then that way you have the best of both worlds, right? You've got your camera input and you've also got a gaming device type thing that you can do, and it can capture 4K at 30 frames per second or HD at 60. So all good. That one's $180. Well, I got looking at it and there's really nothing that special about them, right? They're hardware devices. They are not doing any encoding on the hardware themselves, and it didn't really look like they had any software that they were shipping with it. So it's basically relying on the drivers of Linux, Windows, Mac, whatever.

And so I was like, man, I'm sure there's some sort of knockoff out there that does it. And this is where I landed on the T-Display capture card that is $70 instead of $170, and it does all the same stuff as the HD 60 S plus. So this is where I landed. The reviews on Amazon are excellent on this thing. Um, people say that you can hook something up to it and it'll show up as a camera input in zoom. It'll show up in OBS. It'll do all that. It supposedly can do 4k 30 HD, um, 60, all that goodness, right? So $70 is, is over a hundred dollars savings. It's not name brand. You're not going to get the El Gato name behind it, but you can buy two of them for, for less than the other one. So, you know, hard to go wrong there. So one more time, if i am streaming and i want to you know stream my desktop why would i use this instead of just recording my desktop i've never understood like

i understand you got a playstation or a switch or something you need to capture the output but on the computer is a different source i i see people doing this all the time with just their computer like am i missing something um so i'm not sure why they would do it with only a computer i don't think that's the case for the most part i think a lot of times they have an x turtle camera hooked up as well okay and they want that better video from their camera also but i maybe they're streaming from a different computer so like this is the game this is the computer I'm gaming on, and that's the computer that's streaming. That's how you would get no lag, right? So that's one of the problems, right?

Let's say, for instance, there used to be a recording software called Fraps, I want to say is what it was. And the problem is, I mean, think about it. You have your beefy computer that you want to run at 144 frames a second because you have your nice 144 Hertz monitor, all that, right? So you want the highest frames. If you have something that's also trying to record that video and spit it out the disc, you're going to take a hit on your frame rate. You're going to take a hit on your IO and all that. So yes,

if you have a gaming computer sitting there that you're just letting it do the graphical processing and all that. And then you push it into one of these things and you have another computer that's recording that video. You've removed any lag from your gaming setup. So that would probably be why you did it. And yes, my guess is like, I know that you've seen Jeff Fritz's setup because he does Twitch. Dude, he's got three laptops sitting there, right?

Yeah. And a bunch of things all piping into each other with these type of setups, right? So yeah, these things are super handy. But for me, the reason I wanted it was that video camera input to be able to use a high quality camera to get good stuff in there, right? So I'm curious because I really thought that you were going to – I thought that – I expected that the brand that you were going to pick was going to be a Blackmagic brand.

They're super expensive, and they're not specced as well. Believe me, I looked at them. And I want to say the Blackmagic ones start at $400-ish, and they don't have great reviews on these, at least on the breakout box ones. Now, if you go – so that's another key point here. I wanted an external box. You can buy the PCI cards to go in, but I wanted something portable. Yeah, that's the key because like you could get the uh um the cards the

pci cards which is what uh i was curious like why wouldn't you go with the card because i mean at this you're kind of like limited to it's a usb3 connection so you you know likely you have like plenty of bandwidth you do uh you know but uh yeah with it with the Blackmagics, though, you have obviously a little bit more bandwidth because it can be on the motherboard. Yeah, if you're on the PCI lane, you could actually get some of those cards that will do 4K60. Yeah. I personally don't care about the extra 30 frames per second, not for what I'm trying to do. And, again, I want it to be portable. I want it to be something I can plug into anything, my laptop, whatever.

So that's, that's why I went with that. And that's actually a really good call out. Yeah. Black magic cards get quite expensive. I'm seeing like a thousand bucks, but I guess this is like pro. It is. Yeah. Black, black magic is kind of like, you know, I want, I don't know if I would call them industry standard, but they're well known in the industry when it comes to video-related work, right? Yeah. And they have capture cards that you could get.

I looked at a 4K mini one that started at like $195, and it on it, but you know, it's not $70. Right. And that's, that's kind of what it boiled down to. Like I said, when I started looking at them spec wise and everything, there wasn't anything that special about any of them. They all sort of do the same thing. Right. So, um, yeah. All right. So next thing up on my list, anybody that knows me knows that while video is good, it's all about the audio, right? Like if your audio sucks that you might as well hang it up. Like I, I've, um, you know, I kind of harass Sean. They created the podcast that we mentioned, um, before. And I was like, dude, what microphone are you using? This is trash. And he went out and bought a microphone. And I was like, yes,

sir. Thank you. Thank you very much. So that said, one of the things that's been bugging me lately is these mics that we use for our podcasts, I think are amazing. These are the ElectroVoice RE320s. I think they're outstanding. The problem is when you're doing video, you can't just pick these things up and lug them around, right? Like they're, they're, they're almost like a piece of furniture.

You know what I mean? So what I wanted was I wanted a shotgun mic that is good for internal dialogue stuff. So my next thing up, and I went a little bit overboard on this one. That was heartbound podcast, by the way, check it out there on episode 11 coming out soon.

It's really entertaining. And Sean's audio has dramatically improved. So, yes. That's it. So this thing that I linked, and I also put a link for YouTube on this

as well, because when I was doing the research, you know, there's 5 million microphones out there. It was like, man, I got to get something that's good, but I don't want something that's going to be insane. So, so this one is $329, but before you go crazy, you can actually get a $210 version of this thing, which isn't terrible for a quality mic that is just a hypercardioid capsule on it. I believe this one comes with three different capsules. It comes with a hypercardioid, a cardioid and a Omni. So this is a microphone that you can use in so many different situations and it sounds absolutely fantastic. And the cool part is if you're doing video,

you can boom that thing up out of view and just point it down at yourself to talk. Nobody will ever see the microphone. You don't ever have to try and keep in front of it like I need to do with this thing. It'll pick you up and everything's good. So you want to up your A game? That's one piece of equipment that'll make it happen. All right. This next one, man, this one's so exciting to me. So as mentioned, there's been several people that ask us about stuff. Uh, Joe Zach can tell you from experience that recording with software is wrought with peril. You want to say anything about that? Oh, yeah.

It crashes all the time. I have several problems. So just, you know, coding blocks a couple crashes a year, but also just other podcasts among, like, have frequent problems with it. I definitely don't recommend it if you can help it. If you're going to be spending, you know,

hundreds of hours doing something, I definitely recommend an audio recorder. Okay. So he set it up perfect. Now I'm going to try and knock it off the tee here. So here's the deal. All three of us use hardware recorders when we're recording this show. We all have H6s. That's stuff that we upgraded as we were able to as time went on,

right? And they are incredible devices. I don't think any one of us would say that we haven't enjoyed using them. They have made our recording process very smooth. But when pre-COVID, when I would record over at Outlaw's house, like we have a fairly complicated setup, would you say? I mean, like it's not something that anybody's just going to go look at in two seconds and be like, okay, I got it. Like we have to run, we have to run things through a mixer because we need to mix minus. If you don't know what mix minus is. It's basically when we send audio back out to Joe, we need to make sure that Joe doesn't get looped back into his own audio. Otherwise it'll create a feedback loop, right? So we have to subtract him out of the mix that goes back out to him. Although we need him in the

mix that we're recording. So we have to do some special stuff with the mixer there to make it get into the H6. And then on top of that, when we're all in the same room, we all need headphones on. And if you're not using the same exact set of headphones, they all have different sensitivities. So you need to be able to set the volume separately. So we have three pieces of hardware on various desk sections to make all that work. This next thing that I'm putting is ridiculous so i don't remember how much we paid for our h6s i want to say they were in the ballpark of 360 370 around the time that we got them right weren't cheap they weren't cheap and that was like when we were first starting

out you know so it was like a little bit of a pill to swallow to be like, okay, fine. Right, right. I guess we're going to do this for a while. That's right. That was us digging in, right? So check this out. Zoom has come out with this product called the PodTrack P4. It's P-O-D-T-R-A-K P4. I have, I believe I included, no, I don't have the YouTube video. I'll have to put one up there.

But here's the crazy part about this thing. It's $200. It's essentially all three of those devices I just mentioned in one device. This thing has four XLR inputs. It can do a mix minus on two channels at the same time. It also has four headphone outputs with individual volume controls on them. It also has the ability to do 70 decibels of gain per microphone. There's not a microphone out there that this thing won't power with almost no noise floor on it at all. And it also has a sound pad on it. So if you want to do sound effects like people clapping or whatever, it's got dedicated buttons on the freaking thing to hit it. And let's go one further. It will record up to 10 tracks at once because it records your four XLRs

independently on their own tracks, the four sound pads on their own tracks like dude for 200 if you are considering anything recording go buy this thing yeah like don't get the h6 go buy this thing like just just do it it will it will make your your entire setup portable and easy to do. So I don't know if you remember, because I think I pinged this back to you guys, this product back a month or two ago, because there's another podcast that like, it's, you know, this is like super meta, but, you know, if you're into podcasting, there's a podcast for podcasters by uh the a company that we use to host our our feed called libsyn and uh they have a uh podcast called the feed which is super easy to google for uh Uh, no, um, but, uh, no, yeah, I mean, it actually is.

Um, but yeah, they were talking about this because they got their hands on it. Uh, one of the, the hosts of the show, I think, I believe his name is Rob. He got his hands on this product early and did a review of it and was talking about it. And it is, it sounds awesome. Like I don't need it, but I want it. Right. Does that make sense? Honestly, I've thought about getting it and selling the H6 that we got over there

and the mixer just being like, yo, let's simplify. Yeah, exactly. It would simplify. Okay, so the way – this is super meta. The way when Alan talked alan talked about you know coming over to my house to record because in a pre uh covid world or even back when uh you know joe uh before he moved away from us dang you for breaking up the band um uh you know we would the preference is to record together to be in the same room and record

together and you know there's benefits in in regards to the quality of the audio and whatnot but my my preference for it is just like you can feed off of each other's energy so much easier in person than you can over uh a camera right right Right. And, you know, I'd like to think that we've done a pretty good job during this pandemic, but, you know, it's not to say that I don't miss, you know, getting together in person, but so, you know, over the years we have, you know, it's kind of shifted as to like whose house was the house that we would record at. Right. You know, I mean, you know, in the early episodes, it was Joe's house. And then, you know, there was a period, a long period of time where it was at Alan's house. And,

you know, here in like, you know, recent years, it's been at my house, but whoever's house it is, there's just like a mess of wiring for the show. Right. And, and like, that's fine, but I would just love to simplify all of it and just have one device to rule them all. And it can happen. And it can happen at nearly half the price of just the recorder. That's not even including the mixer, which was already a couple hundred extra dollars.

And then the headphone amp that was probably 50 bucks. Like we're talking about a device that does it all for 200 bucks and does it well. Like I've heard the recorded audio quality. It's nuts. So if you are somebody that is recording a podcast, and like I said, software kind of stinks when you're recording, if it crashes, you're done. Like you, there's no recovering it, right? We have never, I don't think ever, had a problem with our hardware. We had one where we didn't format a card one time, and it was really weird, but we were able to salvage the audio. Some weird way.

We lost one. Did we lose one? I thought we lost it, and we had to use a backup. No, no, no. Maybe. Let's be clear, because the Zoom products, which, by the way, when you go look for the Zoom devices, it's zoomcorp.com, not to be confused with the Zoom that everybody knows these days for video streaming. Yeah. Um, we have never once had a hardware issue with the zoom recording device. That wasn't our fault. Right. So there was the, there was the time where

we put in a new card and forgot to format the card to the correct format. And then, uh, and then after having recorded the episode realized,, oh, no, the SD card that we recorded on wasn't formatted and there's nothing on it. Oh, God, what do we do? And yet somehow this device still had everything in cache that we were able to go back after the fact, format the card, and it wrote it to the disc. I don't know if you've heard any of our back catalogs or even this episode, but we're a little bit long-winded, so these episodes can be long. The whole thing was still in memory like, okay, fine, no worries.

Then there was one time where Joe, you forgot that you didn't have yours plugged in the power and the battery died. I thought it had the power plug plugged in, but it wasn yours plugged in the tower and the battery died. You can do battery. Yeah, the battery died.

But I thought it had the power plug plugged in, but it wasn't plugged in the other side. Yeah. Because here's the thing. Even with this P4, it can run off of batteries. You can take this thing out into the field with you. And that's the one cool thing about – I haven't dug into the P4 to pod track P4 to see how this works.

But with the H6 that we have, there's all kinds of add-ons that you can buy for additional microphones. So I think the one that I have, I'm set up for six microphones. But then there's also additional one. If you actually wanted to it itself be the microphone, there's an attachment that you can add onto it. And then you can shove the whole device into somebody's face and actually be getting on the microphone, you know, where were you on the night of the fourth?

Um, yeah. So I don't know if the pod track, if P4 does all that too, but I mean, it is really more geared to, uh, from,

from what I've heard and seen about it, like, uh, simplifying your life for, you know, doing podcast. Yeah. Super exciting device yes all right so moving on the next one's actually pretty easy like i this will take me about 30 seconds so

i got the octava mk 012 um shotgun microphone for internal you need a windscreen for that thing it's seven bucks so uh not much to be said about that. Although, actually, I lie. So here, I'm going to be long winded about this. I have people all the time ask me, like, do you really need a pop filter? Do you really need a windscreen or whatever? Yes, you do. So basically what it does, you'll notice that if you ever hear anybody record without one of these things, it sounds, if you put in headphones and you listen to somebody that doesn't have a pop filter over their microphone, it'll sound like a kick drum going off in your ear when they say a P or a B

like it, it seriously will flex your eardrums, right? That's what these things do is they block that. Well, to be fair, you could also use a sock. Although I'll warn you,

the pictures that you might take of persons speaking into the sock can look a little weird. So, you know, you, the pictures that you might take of the person speaking into the sock can look a little weird. So, you know, you have to consider that. That's what happens when you brute strap your podcaster. Yeah. I have the best picture of Vlad from episode nine and I can never share it because it looks awful. Yeah, that's hilarious. All right.

So the next thing that I have on this list then is we're still sticking in the microphone territory. You need a shock mount. Okay. So all a shock mount really does for you in case you've never messed with this stuff is like right now, if I tap my thing here, other than you hearing it squeak, you won't hear like crawling up the thing. And what the shock mount does is it, it allows that microphone not to get that sound traveling up, whatever's like holding it. Right. So it's like typically like a rubber type mount that will shake. And so it absorbs the sound, keeps it from hitting the microphone and all that. So it's, it's really good for making sure that noise doesn't travel up your desk or whatever your stand is.

This thing's $17. So not crazy expensive. Now, here is a bigger ticket item. Now, this is something, this completely depends on whether or not you are actually thinking about being a content creator as a coder or as somebody that wants to do stuff like the reviews and things that I've been doing on YouTube. But I use this software. I know Joe does. We can both vouch for how amazing it is or at least one piece of it.

And that is TechSmith's Camtasia. And I did the Camtasia Snagit bundle because it's only $25 more. And I love Snagit. So, yeah, Camtasia, if you were trying to do any kind of screen recording and you want to be able to zoom in or annotate things or just any kind, it's so good. And that software by itself is like 250 bucks. And Joe, I know you've upgraded yours. Like, what are the yearly upgrade costs to go up a major version? I want to say it's like 20 bucks a month, but you get a bunch of other stuff.

You get access to their media library with music and lower thirds and a few other things like that, which I use all of that stuff. Yeah, and I love it. So it's every video you've ever seen on Pluralsight or Udemy or whatever, like if it was good quality and you liked it and they zoomed in and things look fluid and natural and you were able to see the the mouse when it clicked or whatever like all that stuff like they're probably using camtasia and probably took them like five minutes yeah it's it's really really good software if you were doing anything doing cbt's uh computer-based trainings or anything like that this is probably the de facto stuff out there for for setting that stuff up yeah the usability is really was the seller for me because there's other you know there's all sorts of video editing program, but the, the usability for doing screen share type stuff is just phenomenal. Yeah. All right. So the next one up, and this is,

this is the other big ticket item on here. And I struggled on this one. I probably spent another couple hours looking at this. So, so the whole reason I wanted that capture card and everything is because I wanted a good camera to hook up that wasn't a webcam, right? Like I want some good depth or some focus, some bokeh in the background, some depth of field type stuff. And so what I've got in here is the Sony a6400 mirrorless camera. Now, this thing right now with the lens, I believe it's a 16 to 50 or 16 to 55. I guess I could click it and tell you for sure. Um, let's see. This one comes with the 16 to 50 millimeter lens. All right. So without going too incredibly meta on this thing, I'll just go a

little bit. This is an APS-C sensor. It's not a full frame. So it's got a crop factor, usually a 1.5. So that basically means if you take that, what did I say? It was 16. I think I said 16. If you take 16 and multiply it by 1.5, then that is what your true 35 millimeter equivalent would be. So this thing would probably be about a 24 millimeter lens equivalent on a full frame camera. Um, there are a couple of reasons why I chose this particular camera. Uh, one of them is it does 4k, which is awesome. Another one is Sony has a ton of lenses that you can get for it for, because they opened up their spec to anybody that wanted to make a lens for their mounts. So you can get cheap lenses from third

parties. You can go with more quality or higher end lenses from Sony or whatever, but like, you're not limited. Like you can truly mount just about whatever you want on this camera and it'll work. Um, so that's another one. And the third is their autofocus is almost bar none, just amazing. And if you want something that will stay in focus without having to do a fixed focus on it, that's killer. So this thing truly has a ton of features for a thousand bucks. And oh, another reason why I went with a mirrorless camera is they don't weigh as much. They're typically smaller than an SLR type camera because there's no mirrors in it.

It's just computers, right? It's computer chips and stuff. Is that the one you ordered, though? No, this is not the one I ordered. There's so many different reasons. We can talk about that one later, but, um, but this thing, if you just want to shoot really good video and also have a good stills camera, this is like the perfect hybrid camera. If you want something that you can use, like awesome. If you want to use it while you're on

your computer for video calls, if you want to go out and take videos or take good still shots, when you're out and about, just take it off the stand and take it with you, right? Like you truly have a good hybrid camera that can kind of give you the best of all worlds. If you're using this as your webcam, we need to talk. Oh, dude, you wait. Talk about going overboard. Dude, what I'm about to use for...

Yeah. My next one. Go ahead. I was going to say, I couldn't imagine having like a big lens on this, like a telephoto or something. It just doesn't look like it would fit. It looks too light.

But I could totally see this on a little stand over your computer, just kind of hovering over the monitor. Yeah, man. You wouldn't do a telephoto as your webcam. But in all seriousness. Well, maybe you want to see that one nose hair. Yeah. Right? You want to zoom in on that thing real good but but yeah i mean like seriously that this at a

thousand bucks for a camera that truly has like a great set of specs and sony has they they're not quite as good in canon and the color science and and to be fair there are a number of cameras that are in that 750 to a thousand dollar price range that would work for this setup. If you have camera lenses and let's say that you had a Canon 70D or something from the past, maybe it makes sense for you to look at like the Canon RP or something like that. It's about the same price. So it's not that it was just, you know, hey, this is the only one I'd recommend. You know, if you have other lenses and setups and that kind of stuff, definitely there, there are choices out there. So that, that's a, that was the big ticket item on this. And to be fair, if you are actually

interested in doing something like this, the setup, you don't need a 4k camera either. You can save yourself probably half that and go get you a $500 1080p camera that's a year or two old now that at the time was the cream of the crop. And you'll still be light years beyond anybody else. And you'll have some extra money to go get some lenses and stuff too. All right. That's nice. Yeah, man. Um, and, and to be fair, the camera that I've got coming that I am going to use as my webcam is a Panasonic, uh, DMC S five. It's a full frame. So it's going to be a

little ridiculous. Um, it's a little overboard for, for a webcam, but we're going to see what it looks like. Oh, all right. So the next thing on my list, and I think we've definitely mentioned things like this in the past. And this is really cheap. It's inexpensive. But we were just talking about it the other day. So I'm going to give you a little bit of an HTC Vive. I think it might have been on my shopping list last year, right? And the problem is it has these little lighthouses that are always on, and they consume a decent amount of energy, and they kind of buzz sometimes, and it drives me crazy. And I don't want to have to go unplug them from the wall all the time. It drives me nuts. And then also, my mixer that's plugged up to my computer,

that thing's always warm, so I know it's eating up some electricity. And there's just all these devices around that are always on. Don't really need to be. And I wanted some way to turn these things off easily, right? Like I don't want to unplug them. That's annoying. So what I've got here on the list, it's 27 bucks for a pack of four Kasa smart plugs. Now, my problem is I have real trust issues with most smart devices. Like I don't, I don't trust anybody. These at least are owned by TP link. It's, it's a shoot off of them. It's a subsidiary of TP link. So it's backed by a pretty well-known company and these things are really inexpensive and they work well with everything. Like you can hook it up to your Apple shortcuts on your iOS

device. Like I have a thing in here that's like, Hey, turn on VR. Right. And it'll turn on all the plugs that are associated with my VR setup. Like I don't have to go turn on each one individually. You can do groups and that kind of stuff. So that's amazing to me. So do we call foul if we reuse any from the past, any tips from the past or shopping spree stuff from the past? Because yes. Yeah, I don't call foul. I'm just now stumbling onto these.

This was the TP-Link Kasa smart Wi-Fi plugs. This was, this was, uh, the, the, the TP link Casa smart wifi plugs. This was mine from, uh, 2018, sir. Okay. Well, that's fine.

So happy with them. So I will, I will say though, I will say, I will agree with you though. They are, they are awesome. Like I,

I love them. And there's like so many cool useful things. Uh, it's even better than what you said though. because like it doesn't have to necessarily be. You mentioned you mentioned the Apple shortcuts. You don't even have to be in the Apple ecosystem to use these things. Right. You could just stay like, for example, in the if this, then that world.

Yep. And you can set up. So like one of the things that I have set up because I have these as well. You can have like a geofence set up. And so I'm always afraid when I leave the house, like, oh, did I leave the coffee maker on? Nope. Never have to worry about that again. Geofence automatically makes sure that that is turned off.

Dude, it'll work with Google. Like the Google Home device, It'll work with Amazon. It'll work with Apple iHome. They truly, they're integrated with everything. Yeah. And these are the plugs that you have, but they also have switches as well. And so I have some of those and they're great because I can have, the bulbs themselves don't have to be smart, but the switch is. And so I can have switches that'll cut on, you know, at a sunset, for example, and then go off at sunrise, you know, things like that. And, and these little things here, um, cause you have the four pack here. Sometimes you can, you can watch the prices as we get closer to christmas because sometimes they'll go on sale like ridiculously expensive because that's where i've like gotten

most of mine and where it's like oh hey uh if you buy this like you can get these for five dollars right and so i paid five dollars for these things and they're amazing and then you can like have all your christmas lights just set up to where like they just automatically cut on. All right. Yeah, they're good. So now here's where I'm going to take it a step further. And this is something that drives me crazy. So I know we all have this problem, right? Like you have a surge protector, like a power strip.

All the devices you plug into these things have wonky connectors. So you plug it in and it covers up two ports or you plug in one and it's a sideways runner and it eats up three ports, right? Like, dude, I can't tell you the anger that that fills me with. Like it drives me crazy. So I was looking for, and, and believe it or not, Casa actually has this, they have a wifi, um, or a smart power strip. But my problem was I didn't want to spend 70 or 80 bucks on that thing, because if I did it, then I was going to have this problem where there were going to be multiple ports covered up because all these connectors are wonky, right? So what I found is there are these little, um, like just little one foot long extension

cables that you can plug into your power strip. And then that way you don't have this thing eating up your entire surge protector, plug these things into that and then plug your little wifi smart plugs into those things and then plug everything in. So now you've just got these dongles hanging off your surge protector and life is good. So this is a way for fairly inexpensive. And this thing's like 15 bucks for a pack of, I don't know how many,

there's a few in there. Six. There's a packet. It's only six. Okay. So there's a pack of, I don't know how many, there's a few in there. Um, six, there's a packet. It's only six. Okay. So there's a pack of six in there. I think there's another one. It's a pack of 10 for a few bucks more, but, but yeah, so you get six of these things. That'll cover the four that you bought anyways. It's now you're not going to eat up all your ports and you can use these things. So that's just me trying to get around my, my frustrations with, with things in my house. All right.

So now that we've got this, I'm going to blow through these pretty quick here. Good God, I've taken time. A little bit. This is the Alan show. Yeah, I'm going to go through these pretty quick. So the next few here are just really kind of just so that you can get the things set up that you've bought, right? So the first one, oops, wrong paste. This one is an 11 inch articulating arm that you'll use to mount your camera, right? But in order to mount your camera, you need something to mount it to. So

here is a pole that you can use. Doggone it. I pasted over it again. This is something that you can actually mount to your desk. It's a little over a three foot pole that you can hang all these other arms off of. Right. So I will tell you a little bit of backstory on this here in a second. Here's the so what is frustrating, though, is this pole didn't come with the actual mount to mount to your desk. So you need that. So the, uh, the 11 inch arm was 30 bucks. The mounting pole itself is 13. This, this mounting bracket that clamps to your desk is 15.

So we're, we're really not at a lot of money right there. Um, and here's the interesting thing. These are all just random brands that I found on Amazon, right? So that was about 50 bucks for that entire setup. And that's an arm that you can mount multiple of these things on there. Elgato has a system, but they're sold out all the time of everything. And so in good conscience, I couldn't put it on here. I will have a link to Elgato on here so you can go look at it. I think it's called their multi-mount setup.

They're a little bit pricier than everybody else, but they've done a really nice job on it all. But they are truly always sold out. And I was like, okay, well, that's out. But what did make the cut was this Elgato

key light. We're still only in the content creation category. Say what? We're only in the content creation category. Yeah, my other one, I'm going to go fast. I'm going to fly through these here. The Elgato Key Light is the big one, and the primary reason I wanted it is because it will key light everything,

and it hooks up to the stream deck real nice. So you can push a button, set up your lighting and everything, and you're good to go. I keep thinking about getting two ones because I like the idea of having, like, one that's kind of like this color, one that's like that color. But I don't know. Maybe I'm just crazy. But I keep looking at them all the time.

They're not RGB. So keep in mind, these just go from, like, a cool light to a warm light. They don't allow you to modify the actual color. It's just a little bit of the temperature. But I did have two in there, but I blew out my budget, so I you to modify the actual color. It's just a little bit of the temperature. But I did have two in there, but I blew out my budget, so I had to back down to one. Two of the big ones or two little ones? Two of the big ones.

You know how I like gadgets. Word. Alright, so here's you another gadget. So seeing as how I needed to save some money on that other key light, because those things were $200 a pop, by the way. There's this Aputure Amaran MC RGBWW. This that other key light because those things were 200 bucks a pop by the way there's this aperture amaran mc rgb ww this thing is a little light that is full rgb that you that is also a smart light that you can control with your phone here's some of the cool things you can do with it if you

have some sort of scene that you want to set you can pick a color you can take the camera on your phone and pick a color that you see in in your's image, and it'll set the light's color to that. So you can do all kinds of cool stuff with this thing, strobes, everything. That thing's $90. You don't need it, but it looked like a lot of fun. All right, so that entire setup, I think it's worth telling the subtotal here, that was $2,435.89. Now, that sounds crazy, but keep in mind the camera was a thousand bucks of it right off the top, right? So the rest of that stuff is a pretty good.

All right. So now let's blow through my next category, which shouldn't take too long. And I'm actually planning on doing this here pretty soon. And this is a NAS. So I want some network attack storage and I don't want to buy one because I just don't believe in buying stuff rebuilt. Did you say network attack storage? Yeah, that's what I heard. Attached, attached, network attached storage. Wow, man, talk about an adversarial relationship you have with your network, man. Right, right. All right. So this one is the big key item on this particular NAS setup, and it's the case. So it's a Silverstone CS380B. Now, the reason why I went with the expensive one here is because it's a full ITX or a micro ATX even, but I wanted the full one in case I wanted to dual purpose this thing, right? Like maybe turn it into some sort of, uh, I don't know, VM server

on top of being a NAS or whatever. So, so at any rate, that's that thing. And it's got eight hot swappable drives, which is beautiful. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah. So that's 186 bucks. Yeah. That's expensive for, for just a case, but that's's what's going to be holding all your stuff. So the next thing that's important is the processor. And man, I struggled with this one. I wanted to do the Ryzen 3600 because price for what you get is just amazing, the performance. But I wanted something with dedicated graphics. So I went with the Ryzen 5 3400G. So this has the Vega 11 chipset on it. So it's already got the graphics baked in. It's $140, man. And this thing will do everything you

need it to do. So we'll be overkill for a NAS and probably be good enough to even be a lightweight gaming machine. If you wanted it to be. Yeah, it looks pretty nice. All right. So the next thing is you need some Ram for this thing, man.

Ram's gotten cheap. So you get 32 gigs of silicone power Ram. That's a 3,200 megahertz for 99 bucks. I mean, come on. That's, that's ridiculous. Uh, next up, you gotta have a drive and I'm going to admit, I took some shortcuts here because you would never have just one drive in your NAS, but because I needed to stick to my $3,500 budget. That's all I got right now. But so for anybody that's interested in this, a lot of what people will do when they're doing DIY NASAs is they'll do what's

called shucking an external drive. So I basically got the W or the Western digital easy store, 12 terabyte. The thing's going for 217 for $218 right now. It's an external drive. You could open this thing up. If you buy the Best Buy version, a lot of times those things ship with Western Digital Reds, which are their NAS drives. If you buy them from Amazon, it looks like they're the blue Western Digital drives.

But again, you're still getting it at probably $50, 60 bucks less than just buying a bear drive and sticking in there. So you can buy these. Um, you'll probably kill the warranty, but you saved a lot of money. Um, and I believe is that that wait, hold on. Is that, Oh, one more thing you need a power supply so i found a dirt cheap thermal take power supply that was 45 and nothing really all to say about that so that's it and i ate up a whole bunch of time with that so apologies oh good oh oh and that entire total for that one for the NAS setup. And this is actually a working NAS here is $689. And that's kind of a beefy, powerful NAS. So, oh, I didn't get a motherboard. It's not working, but it's close to working.

But my grand total for everything was $3,490.05. So I had $9.95 left. So wait a minute. Very nice. I'm going based off of the pricing that you copied in here, and I'm at $3,125. Get that motherboard, man. Yeah, man. You got money for a lot of motherboard.

Did I miss something? I think you missed something. I did, but that's fine. If I find it, I'll throw it in your pocket and paste it over something. I probably did that too. All right. Well, while one of us are going in, you can, you can like review your list in the background and, and cause I want to know where that other money went. Oh, the other one. Yeah, no, there is $365. I'm sorry. This one was totally separate. And this is because you found this.

Oh, man, that dollar amount. I'm going to be mad. Go. No, I'm going to let you do it because it is what you think it is. Okay. I was like, oh, that dollar amount is just too unique. No, no, you do it. It is that.

So that will bring me up to that price. Okay. Teaser. All right. Today's episode of Coding Blocks is sponsored by Datadog, the unified monitoring platform for full visibility into all your serverless functions. Yeah, with Datadog, you can troubleshoot performance issues faster by seamlessly navigating between logs, Lambda metrics, and distributed request traces all within one unified platform.

Datadog provides real-time screen boards and service mapping so you can get complete observability into your serverless environment. And, you know, I like to talk about the Datadog website and all the different ideas you can get from it and just the inspirations. Well, did you know they have their solutions broken out and described by kind of category too? So, of course, you can go by technology and go look at what they've set up for Amazon Web Services or Azure or GCP or Kubernetes. But what's kind of cool to look at, if you've never looked at it before, is the industry. So if you are in financial services or, say, retail, e-commerce, in government, media and entertainment, you can go look at it. There's a whole bunch more. I just started. And gaming, actually.

Let's take a look at gaming here. If you go and look at what they've set up and what they do for people in those industries, you can see the kind of metrics that they look at, the way they organize things, the kind of dashboards they set up, and the metrics that they look at, which is just really cool and really inspiring. It's great for industries that you are familiar with just to see what they're doing. And also just like for me, it's fun to look at things like gaming for things that I'm totally not familiar with and look at the way that they kind of set those up and the kind of things that they look at and how they solve those problems. It's just really cool and inspiring. All right. So you can go ahead and get started with monitoring today with a 14 day trial and receive a free Datadog t-shirt after creating just one dashboard. Visit datadoghq.com slash coding blocks to learn more about how Datadog can help

you optimize your serverless environment. All right. So it's that time of the show where we ask you if you have a chance and you would like to, you know, extend a smile to us, go up and if you wouldn't mind, leave us a review. You can head to codingblocks.net slash review and we have links to Stitcher and iTunes up there. And again, it just it really makes our day. We appreciate it. We love seeing that stuff. So if you're feeling like giving, that's a great way to do it. All right. And well, with that, we head into my favorite portion of the show survey says,

all right. Uh, so a few episodes back, we asked, what's your favorite? No, no, no. Sorry. I did that one last time. Do you prefer that your laptop keyboard dot dot dot and your choices were includes a numpad because I'm a number crunching accountant. Tax season ain't got nothing on me. Or does not include a num pad. Just center the 84 and be done with it. I don't need carpal tunnel and just one wrist. All right. I think Mathema Chicken went last last time. So, i'm gonna let you go first we're gonna save because you know he has a track record of doing so well actually no i think you did go in last one uh he he did he should go first yeah yeah joe okay uh does not include a numpad with uh 99 does not include with 99 okay on a laptop yep and he didn't even have to think about it he just like blurted it out Does not include a numpad with 99%. Wow. Does not include with 99%. Okay. On a laptop.

Yep. And he didn't even have to think about it. He just like blurted it out. All right. So I'm going to say does not include a numpad with 60%. 60%. And it's kind of interesting too that Mathema Chicken actually gave us a percentage that makes sense. All right. too that Mathema Chicken actually gave us a percentage that makes sense. Alright.

Well, only one of you can be a winner, or none of you given the choices. We have Joe with does not include a numpad at 99%, or Alan

with does not include a numpad at 60%. And the winner is Alan. Really? 67%. You're shocked that 99% of people didn't know. Man. 67% said does not include a numpad.

Okay. You said 77 or 67? 67. Nice. Okay. Yeah. had okay you said 77 or 67 67 nice okay yeah so that was that made me factually feel good that in my heart that like you know the majority sided with me on that one because i was like little sigh of relief now i'm surprised though that youtube picked that as as now did you pick that because you just thought statistically that was going to be the winner or because that was your choice as well, your vote?

I don't even want a numpad on my keyboard. So, I picked it statistically, but honestly, over time, I've gotten to where I don't care for the numpad. You don't care for it or you don't care about it being there? Don't care for it.

Don't want it. You don't want it. Oh, okay. Yeah. I, it's like I used to want it, but now it's just like, I don't ever use it ever.

Yeah. Yeah. On my main keyboard, on my laptop keyboard, nothing. I just don't, it's, it's useless for me.

I'm a fan of it on my desktop keyboards, but not on my laptops. And, and that's going to become a point of conversation later. So let's just put a little pin in that. A little pin. And hey, how about a joke? I would like a joke.

All right. Well, then we'll move on. So for today's survey. No, I'm just kidding. Burn. Ow. Burn. Somebody get him some Neosporin for that burn.

Okay. So Jim Hummelsine from Slack, also known as the Design Pattern Evangelist, gave me a joke. Dad jokes are the best. He says that I was fired from a calendar factory. Why? I took a day off. Pretty good. To which Aaron,

also known as, he was Mad Viking God. Now he's like Mad Viking Great Scots, something like that, on Slack. He replied back with i was fired from a clock factory i was cutting the hours a bit short nice all right so thank you for those those jokes uh they were always funny uh all right so for today's, also very topical and very surprising that it wasn't in Alan's list. We've got the holiday season coming up and guess what's coming out? It's the Xbox Series X, the fastest, most powerful Xbox gaming fridge ever.

I will give you guys some links to these. Or the PlayStation 5. The PS design, though, is pretty foul. And I'll send you some pictures of that. And I will include those in the show notes as well. So the memes going around with the designs, with the new Xbox Series X, which they couldn't have made the name any more confusing.

Uh, you know, people started like mocking it as a refrigerator. And then with the new PlayStation five people, like one of the, one of the best memes for it is that it looks like the, uh, a duck bill.

So yeah, it's quite hilarious. This episode of coding blocks is supported by Teamistry, a podcast that tells the stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways to achieve remarkable things. Each episode of Teamistry tells a story, and in each story, you'll find practical lessons for your team and your business. Okay, we got a sneak preview of Season 2 of Teamistry. And I wanted to mention one of the things that I really liked about it was the episode about Wildbook and how this company was using artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to identify animals. And what really struck me as really exciting was the way that they combined technology and teamwork. And so they were able to get people like biologists and data scientists and citizens

and people just taking pictures with their phones, you know, public people who live in these areas to take pictures and combine them all and process them with technology in order to get all these different groups of people working together in order to solve problems. And that's just one of my favorite episodes that's coming up here real soon. So I definitely recommend you checking out the show. Yeah. And for me, one of the things that I really enjoyed about Team History in general is the way that they approach telling the stories, right? It's a very interesting thing. It's fun to listen to. And you're learning while all hearing about things that have actually happened historically,

like with the Seiko group and how they had teams working in different manufacturing plants that were both competing and working together to solve problems and compete in the world market. Like it's just a fantastic way of telling the story and letting you know how teams can work together to make better products. Yeah. And these are stories that entertained packed with business cases you can actually use.

And you know, part of the storytelling that Alan talked about, like part of that is because it's hosted by an award winning documentary filmmaker, uh, Gabriella copper, the weight, the director of black flip blackfish,

uh, season two of team history is out now. So search for team history anywhere you listen to podcasts and we'll include a link in the show notes and our thanks to team history for their support. All right. So it's my turn and, uh, I get to,

uh, see if mine can keep up with Allen's here. Uh, I didn't have quite the categories though that he did, but I did have, um, uh, some thought to it. Like there, there, there, there's some, there's like a pattern to it. Like there,

there, there's some, there's like a pattern to it. So a little bit. So the first one though here, and I'm going to start out swinging. Like Alan started with a bunch of little piddly ding stuff. And then,

you know, it was like, Oh yeah. And here's a thousand dollar camera. No, that is not my style, sir. So I've actually talked about this in the past,

and I never was able to talk myself into breaking down to do it. And then finally this year, I decided to do it. And so that is the iPad Pro, the 13-inch or technically 12.9-inch iPad. And specifically, I picked the – there's like four storage choices. So I didn't pick the smallest one. I went, you know, just because for longevity, you know, we talked about how like these things outlast, you know, iPads can outlast Android tablets. But, you know, if you get the smallest capacity, you might have some run into some issues with that might shorten that lifespan a little bit. So I got a little bit, I went up one on that, and I love this thing, you know, because we talked

about it before when I, when I talked about it in the past, it was because I wanted it so that, uh, you know, I could put that on my music stand and, uh, you know, have a, have a, just a quick screen where I could see a bunch of music at one time. And then depending on the apps that you're using, like you could have the app move the music through with you as you're playing along. So you don't have to touch anything. There's no page flipping, you know. It's so awesome. Plus I can, with my amp that I use, I can make a Bluetooth connection from that to the amp.

And because iOS introduced that split screen functionality, I can actually see the controls for my amp while I have the music there. So there's like plenty of real estate on it. So that's why I went with the large one. It's because I wanted all the real estate. If they made a 27-inch iPad, I would buy it for this purpose, right? I'm not saying it would be the most convenient thing to walk around with, but if they make one, I'm getting it. All right. So, you know, so then, so then little things though, to go along with that purchase that are just recommended. So, you know, you can get, pick up which one you want, but I've had good luck with this company called Amfilm. It's a glass screen protector for it.

Oh, yeah, by the way, that iPad Pro, I said I was starting big, and I wasn't kidding. That one on Amazon was $1,079, so a little bit. But I think they start at like $1,000, so $80 for the extra 256 storage. It's not a bad deal. Right. And then this screen protector, it's $13, and it's a two-pack. And basically what it is, it's a sheet of glass that you're going to stick on top of the other glass. And you're like, wow, you're going to put glass on top of glass? And yeah, because that way if you were to have something bad happen to it,

that glass breaks first and not the expensive glass that Apple shipped with. And by the way, I actually feel like it feels so much better with the glass screen protector on it. Have you guys ever noticed this? They're like the, the, the phone or the iPads, the iPhones or the iPads, like the glass, the quote raw glass, let's call it. Like if you just bought it brand new, like my fingers kind of, it's a little grabby, you know, as you're like sliding your finger around, but yet you put this glass on top of it and no more, it's like super silky smooth. I love it. I don't know if you guys have experienced that. I have. And then, and then, um, because again, think of like, you know, the main use case that I said

that I wanted this thing for. So I don't want a big bulky case on it. But yet at the same time, I kind of do want the occasional convenience of having a tilted case available with it. So there's this Pro case for it that it was $22 on Amazon that is just fine for me for this purpose. And it folds nice and flat so that, again, when it's on the music stand, it's not but because another thing too is like, uh, with the, with the latest iPad, the super, you know, one that everybody is like really, uh, interested in is that magic keyboard, which is like $350 for it. And if you're going to use it, uh, you know, for my purpose, like that wouldn't work. So I would have to take the, it magnetically attaches to it. And then I would have to set the iPad, you know, raw up against the, uh, the, in the music stand, which, okay. I mean, fine, but you know, maybe over time, like little scratches or whatever are going to get into that aluminum case. And it's like, ah, you know what? I don't even, I'd rather not even have to deal with that. And so like this case, uh, adds a little bit of extra protection. So I don't have to worry about like the camera lens itself is like on that metal for the music stand or anything like that. Right. So, so it's, it's, it's thin enough to be out of the way, but yet there's the convenience of if I want the, uh, uh, to, to have it, up, you know, stand on its own, then, you know, you can do that.

All right. Now, here's another one that Alan is going to totally hate. So, but, you know, in the treat yourself category, since he gave his other categories, and by the way, like, obviously, the iPad is in a treat yourself category since, since he, since he gave, uh, his, his other categories. And, and by the way, like obviously the iPad is in a treat yourself category. Uh, and if you don't get that reference, you should definitely watch parks and recreation. Um, is I finally broke down. I, when these things came out, I was like, no way don't, they look silly. I don't want them. I don't need them. I've got other headphones, whatever. And I finally did buy, they, they look silly. I don't want them. I don't need them. I've got other headphones, whatever. And I finally did buy, they, they came down in price and I broke down and I bought them and it's the Apple AirPods. Now not, I noticed, I didn't say the pros, the new pros. So like these

things over the years, even before the pros came down, like they came down silly in price. So you could get these for like $130, uh, before, even before the pros came down, like they came down silly in price. So you could get these for like $130, uh, before, even before the pros came out. And the thing that I w I never thought that they would, they would stay inside of my ears. Like I would see other people and I'm like, well, that works great for you, but they're going to fall out of my ears because the wired ones do. Right. And yet somehow they don't. And what I think is the reason is that, uh, and I know I'm like super late to the review game on, uh, Apple AirPods, but, but I think the reason why they don't fall out is because they don't have the weight of the wire or anything pulling on it. Whereas like your ear pods did. And that's why those would have problems staying in. But with

the AirPods, because there's, they don't have that, then they just stay there. Now, I'm not saying I would go crazy and go mountain biking with them, although I have a friend that does, and I think he is insane for doing that. But the most genius thing that I love about these things that I think that Apple nailed, and I'm not saying that other companies can't, because really there's that new, the Beans. Was it, oh, shoot. Who's making the Beans? Is it Samsung that's making that, or Bose? I can't remember. Do you know the one I'm talking about? I've seen it. I don't know. There's another set of wireless headphones that are like this.

But they go in your ear and they don't have that stick hanging down. And they just look like a little bean that you're sticking in their ear. I have some. But they're not a name brand. No, no, no. The ones I'm talking about are. They're like a major competitor, like a Samsung or something. I'll find it later.

I think they are the Samsungs. I've seen them, but they look... But the beauty of these things, though, is that the case is just perfect for these. Because there's that old thing about what's the perfect camera? It's the one that you have with you. Well, what's the best headphones. It's the one that you can have with you. And these, the case is to me what they nailed because it's, it's ridiculously slick and smooth with no hard edges on it at all. Everything's perfectly rounded. So it just easily slips in and out of your pocket so that it's super convenient to take with you, even in your skinny jeans.

Right. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. And that's the thing. So, you know, as an honorable mention, sure, I have the the AirPod Pro, but I'm not – I know, Alan, you have – you like the headphones where you can put like a comply tip on it, you know, just stick in your ear, which is like the pros, the tip that they come with is more like the tip that the Be of them. Um, where, where it's not quite like the comply tips where it's like a foam piece, but it is a piece that'll like sit in there a little bit more. And I wasn't sure, like, cause I have the, the beats wireless pro and that's what I do use when I go mountain biking because they have like a clip around your ear. So there is no worry about

that thing falling out. And it has like button controls on it, um, where, you know, you want to turn up the volume or pause it or whatever, because definitely while riding a bike, I have never had any luck getting Siri to hear me, let alone follow any direction. And so like, you know, I, I really appreciate the buttons, but, um, I immediately switched the tip out on those beats to the comply tip. So I couldn't remember like what I, what my impression was of the other tip. And so that was why I was like, well, I'll give an honorable mention to the pro the air pod pros, but my, my heart still is with the original ones though, just because simplicity, they're just, they're small,

they're right there. And they, you know, they're perfect because they're the ones you have with you. It is worth calling out on the ones that you've got here. There's the AirPods. They have two versions of the AirPods that aren't the pros. One's with a wired charging case and one's a wireless charging case. And I think there's like a $30 or $40 difference between the two. Yeah, just save the money and get that wired one is my opinion on it. Because really, you're going to plug the case to charge it maybe once a day. So who cares?

And at the time when Apple made that wireless case is when they were trying to do the, I think they called it the power pad. And they ended up giving up on it, like not doing it. Because the idea was they wanted this power pad that, if I recall, it was going to be pill-shaped, like a giant pill. And you could put any device on it anywhere in any position. You could just throw it on it, and it would charge. And I believe they wanted it to be able to charge up to three devices. Your phone, your watch, and your AirPods.

There were some technical difficulties they had with getting it to work to where you didn't have to set it in a specific spot. If you have any wireless chargers, you've seen where you have that thing a little off center and it's like no i'm not going to charge have you have you seen that like i know with mine i have or it'll it'll keep toggling on and off yeah um so uh that that's that's my treat yourself category of uh apple products and and And of course, Apple fanboy had to have some Apple products in there. That's probably what you're thinking, right?

Okay. So also, I know we joke about this. And, you know, because I know Alan's joke is like, you know, because you got to have some neons. He always says neons, plural. You gotta have some neons on your car. Right. And, and, and, you know, like when we talked about like my, uh, my rig that I built last year, my storm trooper build and, and, uh, you know, cause I like the lights on it.

Like, do you never had neon on your car? Am I the only one? All right. Should I be embarrassed? All right. A little bit. Like, do you never had neon on your car? Am I the only one? All right. Should I be embarrassed? All right. A little bit. Uh, but I'm not.

Uh, so, so, uh, now, uh, keeping with that, I can get them for my desk.

So I am seriously looking at these. This is the Phillips hue, uh, light strip, LED light strip that you can add. So this is 80 bucks. And, uh, you know, you could just glue it. Like it's got like a strip on a tape strip to, so you could add it to the bottom of your desk and then your desk could be like, it would be amazing. And I think, I think it would be awesome because I have a bunch of Hue lights already, and it is super cool because you can set it to like when you're playing a game, for example. You could have it mimic the screen to light up the room in different ways and whatnot. So imagine your desk lighting up.

But put the light on the bottom so it glows like it would under your car, right? Because that's the only way it's going to make sense. All right. So keeping with the how to light up the place, though, like I mentioned, I have the Philips Hue lights in several rooms. And I don't know why I didn't get these sooner. If you are going to get any hue lights, any at all, then without a doubt, you need to get the indoor motion sensor for them. So this is $39 and it is so awesome that you can just walk into a room and immediately like the lights just pop on. And when you leave, they'll pop off and you can like set schedules to where like at certain times of night when you walk into that room, you know, you don't get blinded.

It'll be like a soft light because it's nighttime. Shh, quiet. You know? But in the daytime, it's like, hey, how you doing? Let's get to work. Right? They're awesome. i love it okay so so okay so some some of my thunder did get a little bit still in there because i too had the

elgato stream deck the 15 key version because while you're pimping out your desk with the neon lights underneath it why not have a keyboard that has little displays on it that you could also do all kinds of cool stuff with it. And like Alan said, like, uh, I won't hop on it much too much, but like, there's an amazing things that you can do to pro all the things that you can program on it. Uh, so yeah, we're, I think we're all a fan and now in the hashtag awkward category, um, I too picked some, some microphone related things. Oh, nice. So, uh, you know, even in past episode, past shopping spree episodes, and I think maybe even as recently as uh this year when we did like a working from home kind of special there is a uh audio technica atr 2100 usb

microphone that we have mentioned in the past and i'm surprised that that wasn't you know the microphone you picked when uh i forget the name i don't remember how to pronounce the name of the one that you picked. Uh, Oh, the Octava Octava. Um, the, uh, the beauty of the, the, uh, ATR 2100 is that, you know, you can connect it to your computer via USB or via XLR. So depending on like how serious you decide to up your game, you know, you can baby step your way into that, but it's also convenient by using it as a USB mic, because then if you are on like a KVM, for example, for like a work computer and a home computer, you know, as you flip between computers, so does your microphone. Right. But, uh, we never really talked about anything to go along with that microphone. So I recently got this bad boy for it and love it. And it is a shock mount that is quite similar to the one

that you picked out, Alan, except the difference is this one is specifically for the Audio-Technica ATR2100. So there's $20 for that shock mount. And if you ever saw it, like this is one of those kind of shock mounts that looks kind of like old school with the bands, you know, and the mic is hanging in between the bands. So the microphone is suspended. So it's going to do a really good job of protecting it from your accidental bumps and whatnot. And, and especially, uh, important, you know, depending on like what kind of mount you're going to use, then, um, you know, if you're going to use, I specifically wanted this because I changed from a boom arm type, uh, stand for my mic to a desktop stand. And I didn't want like any banging around on the keyboard or the mouse to then

transfer, you know, through the, the mic stand and into the mic would like any banging around on the keyboard or the mouse to then transfer, you know, through the, the mic stand and into the mic would then catch it. And so, uh, you know, with this, with this kind of suspended, um, mic stand, you don't have to worry about that. And then, uh, because if you have listened to our recommendations for the Audio-Technica ATR2100 when we originally just talked about it, which, man, I want to say it was some years ago that we originally talked about it, then you've probably had that thing. It's probably a little long in the tooth, and you are probably due for a new windscreen. And so you should get the onstage foam ball type microphone windscreen for it for three bucks. So,

yeah, yep. So, uh, what am I at so far? I am at, uh, blah,

blah, blah. I'm a little over 1500. All right, so here we go. So here's the one. Now we're still pimping out the desk.. Now we're still pimping out the desk. Okay. We're still pimping out the desk. Now, uh, I didn't share the specific mic stand that I got,

uh, you know, with the, um, but, but by going with the type of mic stand where it sits on your desk, the immediate problem that you're going to have is like, you know, typing around that, that thing. So I have been on a hunt for the year because I've had this idea where like, I wanted the microphone dead in dead center in front of me on a stand that was just on the desk, but that would mean that I would really need a split keyboard. And we've talked about keyboards in the past, and I have right now the DOS Keyboard Professional 4, or DOS Keyboard 4 Professional. professional. I forget is one of those two things. It's either the professional four or the four professional, but I love that keyboard. It is, it is amazing. It's got a USB three hub built into it. It's got great media controls and volume controls right there, but otherwise it's just a normal keyboard, a normal mechanical keyboard that is amazing and fantastic.

It's only flaw is that it's not a split keyboard that I now need. And that's the only reason why I'm replacing it. Now, truly, truth be told, if I did have to give the DOS any negative comments, I would say that at the one that I have, the keys aren't backlit. And that's because when I bought it years ago, that wasn't an option. They have since, you know, they do have versions of the DOS Professional 4 that does have backlit keys. So if I were to do it again, I would definitely get that. But still, I need the split keyboard. And so I bring to you the Moonlander Mark I, which you got to go, you're just going to have to go see this keyboard and look at it. It is awesome. This is, it's unclear to me. I don't know, Alan, if you were able to figure this out

since this was also in your list, but it's unclear to me, like, is that the same company as Ergodox? Because it's weird. If you go to the, if you go look at an Ergodox keyboard website to go buy your Ergodox keyboard, then they have the link there like they are the same company, but yet it links you off to another company and website that's called ZSA Technology Labs. ZSA is the parent company of ErgoDocs EZ. It is weird though. It is totally weird, but yeah. So, okay, fine. So then from the makers of the ErgoDocs keyboard, I bring you the Moonlander Mark I, which is basically like their latest evolution of it. And maybe one of the best features about it is if you've ever looked at the Ergodox and

you're like, oh, I want to buy it, but then you got to like pick this and that. And do I want the tinting option? I don't know. Do I need the palm rest? I think maybe I do. I probably don't. Moonlander, you don't have to worry about all that. It comes with all of it, and fine. And it also comes with a convenient travel case for you to carry this thing in, because you're probably

going to want to take it with you to work. But I can't really see that you would be taking it to and from work. I don don't know they include a case but this is their latest uh design in ergonomic keyboards and like really everything's fully uh customizable you can choose like how you tent it and if the thumb pieces rise up or down which i believe on the ergodocs if i remember right, those were solid. The thumb pieces didn't move on the Ergodox, but on the Moonlander, they do. You can fold them down. So basically, picture you put your hand around a ball, for example, right? And so there's that natural, the way your fingers kind of curve around the ball, right? Well, you could have the keyboard

to where your fingers curve around the keyboard too because the way you uh fold all the various bits right of course you can like customize what all the keys do and anything and yeah so it's awesome uh you'll have to go look at that that's it's beautiful too yeah and it looks fantastic too and it actually looks like it's a little bit thinner than the Ergodox. It is. And I got to point out here, this is totally not important to the keyboard, but they have the best use of the parallax scrolling on their website of anywhere I've ever seen. So you need to go down there and scroll down to the part where it says the carrying case is

included and enjoy you not gone to any of the apple websites because their scrolling is amazing no this is better this one makes me feel so good okay i think maybe you need to go to an apple website just occasionally there's like okay well of course the apple fanboy was going to say that but here's an important thing i forgot to mention. One of the other cool things about this keyboard is that you can use it just one side of it. So you can unplug the right-hand side of it and just have the WASD side. Why? Oh, guess what? Because you're gaming and you don't want that other half in your way. And so you just have that one side. Of course, you can't like chat with your friends unless all your words end up on that side. But whatever. That's why you have Discord, man.

Yeah, exactly. So that was $365. That was a little bit, but it's so worth it. In full disclosure though, mine is on order. So from the reviews and everything I've seen about it, these things are amazing. I haven't yet gotten to type on it. I can't wait to type on it. But if you are interested in buying one, you should go ahead and place your order ASAP because they wait until there's a bulk before they actually ship. So that's one little nuisance about it. All right. So going back into pimping the desk out, I don't know that we'd ever talked about this. And I went back and looked and we never had.

But do you guys use a mouse pad? No. Yeah? No? Yeah. You do, Alan? What? So, Alan, you're alone then because I use a mouse mat. What about you?

Do you use a mouse mat? Mine's a mat, too. Well, no, not a big mat. Mine's a pad, I guess. Yeah, mine's not a mat. No, sir. I use a mouse mat. It's a triple X sized mouse mat, 24 by 48 inches.

Oh. Oh. Use a desk mat. It's called a mouse mat. The Glorious Gaming Extended Gaming Mouse Mat. it's it's called a mouse mat uh the glorious gaming uh extended gaming mouse mat uh this is 50 bucks on amazon but it's amazing because the thing that i love about it is you have uh you don't have to worry about like oh my mouse is on the edge of the the pad you know because that's not going to happen with 24 by 48.

That ain't happening. Right. But also you don't have that awkwardness of like where your keyboard might be at a different elevation than your, your mouse, because your mouse is raised on this elevated mouse pad or whatever. Or maybe like you have one side of your keyboard on it. So now your keyboard's at a slant, like none of that's going to matter. You know, and because it's so big, like technically you could, you know,

it's protecting your desk a little bit too. So, you know, I feel like you are hypersensitive to the 10 millimeters of distance between your keyboard and your mouse height. It's like, you don't even know me. Of course I am.

What? Have you not known me to pay attention to details about things? Like, of course I catch that, and I'm like, I can't have it. I gotta commend you, though. You did at least pick the right color on this thing. Like, they have a white one. You can't, like,

so we need to back up to the keyboard. There's two colors on that keyboard right there's white and black and which one did you get the black yeah and why did we do this the why did i pick the black yeah keyboard well i mean like realistically you know keyboards over time you're they're gonna like the oils from your skin are they're they're gonna leave stuff like even if regardless if you don't eat around it, which, I mean, we already talked about like that in a previous episode as a survey. Of course, you're going to eat around it.

You know, it's still going to get nasty. So at least with like the black keyboard and the black mouse mat, it's not going to show. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's kind of my point, right, is, truth be told, they get nasty over time. Why would you buy a white mouse pad? It doesn't even make any sense. It's going to look nasty after a few months. And to be honest with you, until you pointed it out, I didn't even realize that that was an option. Yeah, it shouldn't be an option. All right. I digress. Uh, all right. So keeping with that, you know, we've talked about my love of the, uh, razor death adder, uh, mouse and, you know, which is, uh, I prefer the wired mouse. And so, uh, a great little accessory that you need with that then would be a mouse bungee.

And Razer makes a great one for $20 that, you know, just a simple little thing. It does its job. It allows you to have plenty of slack for your mouse cable, yet not be in your way, you know, when you don't need it. Wait, what the heck is a mouse bungee? Does it, like, you know, when you don't need it. Wait, what the heck is a mouse bunch? It just like suck the cord back in or something. Uh, no,

no, no. If you, if you, okay. So click on that link that I gave you. They don't even have a picture up there. It doesn't.

Yeah. Not a useful one. It's like a picture of the box. Yeah. We need, we need a customer picture because this is a picture. I'm looking, I'm looking,

but it doesn't show you what it does. I'm looking. No, I'm looking. It doesn't show you what it does. Uh, okay. Oh, I see it. I see. So if you go down to the customer pictures,

this person said it's a game changer. I feel like they're overblowing with this thing does it just straight up lifts the cable up off the desk a little bit. So it doesn't, but, but it's on, but it's on a spring. So like it can move with you and it's got like uh like a little strap you can you can it's got like a place where you can like hold extra cable and everything so you can have look i'm sorry what you can't put this on your desk that's ridiculous i got one on my desk what are you you talking about? I love it. Can you use this right now? Yes.

Can you tweak this, please? This is ridiculous. Have you seen the neon that I have from my – I'm sorry. Have you seen the neons I have from my desk? It's like you're on the other side of fishing. You're on the bad end of fishing. Game changer. Wow. Hey, I didn't say it was game changer

In fairness I didn't say that, but I do love it It is awesome Wow, okay It's a little thing That does its job well If you like a wired mouse Then

This allows you to Have that extra wire, but yet it not being your way when you don't need it, right? Yeah, it just puts it up a couple inches into your eyeline. I just don't understand. Your eyeline? No way, dude.

No, we're talking about this thing probably sits like three inches tall. What are you talking about in your eyeline? Well, I kind of... Yeah, I'm you know it's like i dropped my car you know i'm like chill well i'm a computer okay okay i'm nestled in this chair here you know three inches i mean that's you know that's eyeline now i guess i mean i guess it's all right i do have like this big floppy cable just like bouncing around my desk and i hate it so uh see. I do have this big floppy cable just bouncing around on my desk, and I hate it. See?

So he will have a Razor bungee cord soon. Yeah. A Razor bungee riser lifter thingy. I've got a mouse bungee, sir. I mean, there's all kinds. And they can get crazy. There's some that are actual USB hubs in addition to it, and I'm like, I don, they can get crazy. Like, you know, like there's some that are like actual USB hubs in addition to it. And I'm like, I don't need all that.

It's basically just like a heavy weight. The bottom of it is a heavy weight so that it doesn't move around. But, you know, it's got this spring that's holding the cable out of your way. And, you know, if you pull back because you need it to, then that spring is going to allow it to move with you. So you have the extra cable when you need it, but otherwise it's held up out of your way. I see that there's some that have, like, a built-in headphone stand, too. So you can have, like, a headphone stand in your mouse

and then, like, a little cable here. It almost looks like a playground. It's like Castle Grayskull or something. They set, like, disco- a christmas tree on your desk i mean look i am gonna back off a little bit of my of my laughter and joking about this so because there are 3165 reviews of this and we know we know that not everybody who bought this clicked any kind of rating. So this is on a lot of people's desks around the world that we clearly are not in the know on this. Yeah, I should say I never trust my opinion on most things, including style. Like, for sure.

So, yeah, my aesthetic sense is not so great. All i can say is i'm a fan how's that did you get the quartz pink one is that what you got or uh oh that's the mouse no no that's the mouse no i i the the link that i gave which was to just the bungee is the one that i got all right so i i didn't i didn't buy one of those combo deals with a pink bounce, but now that you've told me about it, I guess I'll have to get that Christmas tree. Here you go. All right.

So here's the next big one on, on my list. And, uh, sorry, I'll move by link. Yeah. Yeah.

My white, sir. Uh, okay. So, you white, sir. Okay. So, you know, several years back, I know Alan and I especially, I don't think Joe got one of these. But there was the ultrawide, the LG ultrawides, the 34-inch ultrawide monitors, which it was like 3440 by 1440 pixel monitor. And at the time, like they weren't curved or anything like that. But I think Alan got the consumer grade version. I got the business grade version of it just because, you know, at the time that was the way

that, you know, the sales worked out. And I ended up having to pour one out for mine because it died. And LG was great about it. LG, I guess because I had the business class version of it, LG was fantastic. They were like, well, we don't make that monitor anymore. So we don't have one that we can ship to you as a replacement. So instead, we'll just give you a check back for your original purchase amount. So after I had owned the monitor for like, I think I had it for, I think it died after two years, if I remember correctly, which was a short amount of time. But yeah, they paid, they reimbursed me in full for the full amount of the monitor. And it was great. But ever since then, I was kind of in limbo of like,

man, I kind of missed all that extra real estate. And I went on this hunt because I wanted more real estate, but I also wanted curved, right? And so Joe and I ended up landing on an awesome little monitor made by Alienware. That is the Alienware AW3418DW. It's a 34-inch curved monitor, 3440 by 1440 pixel monitor. Now here's the keys, right? 120 hertz refresh rate, but also one thing that I was super looking for in my next monitor, G-Sync compatible. And if you remember my build from last year, you'll know why I wanted the G-Sync capability, right? So that was the monitor that we landed on.

And I've been ridiculously happy with this monitor. It's a really great looking monitor. Works well for gaming purposes. Also too, hey, true to me being true to myself and consistent, it's got the bling factor with the lights on the back of it that you can customize. So of course I like that. But that had nothing to do with my decision to buy it. but, um, that monitor is no longer available. So the closest, uh, that they make to it now is I'll give you guys a link right here. It is the Alienware AW3420DW, which is same specs. It's just the newer version. That monitor is $1,030.

So that is the bulk of my budget. And then that puts me right under three grand. So to wrap it up, we go back to the treat yourself category because as we talked about in the survey, it's that time. And I am throwing down the gauntlet

for the Xbox Series X because two things. Number one, it's all about Halo Infinite. Which sadly has been pushed back. Thank you, coronavirus pandemic 2020. It's been an amazing year. And also Game Pass.

Because that $60 Game Pass, you could just get so much with it, right? So my pick is for the Xbox Series X, $500. That takes me up to a grand total of $3,499.85. I dare you to get closer without going over, Joe, because I'm pretty sure I beat Alan. You did. I think I'm going to win something. Look at this. I got it on the dot.

What? All right. Oh, you lose. Yep, that's right. So, okay. So, you know, we've used some time on this episode. You know, I value everybody's time here. So, I'm going to go kind of quickly here.

You know, it's such a shame. Gosh, it's awful. Let me make some room in the notes here, though. So, I'll tell you what I'll be using. Excuse me, two lads. And, I mean, well. You know what? Before he says it, because I know it's going to be something silly, because I, honest, I hunted for something in years past to hone my inner Joe, right?

Because I hunted and hunted and hunted. I wanted to buy just hundreds of dollars worth of Cool Ranch powder. But I couldn't find just the powder. Not Cool an official doritos cool ranch powder you can buy like you know uh cool ranch dressing powder but that wasn't what i wanted yeah it's not the same i know ain't nobody yeah okay so yeah i do have one you know like i am a bit of an obnoxious troll and i do have a joke to get out of the way, so let's just go ahead and do it. I'm surprised no one guessed this already. This isn't my real answer, so this would not win. This one doesn't count. How did y'all not know that I was going to pick the scorpion chair?

What? I haven't seen this. Oh, I've seen this. Yeah, everyone's seen it. If Alan's seen it, everyone's seen it on their net. I don't know what you mean sir yeah so this is a the computer chair if you've not seen it it looks like a scorpion is the only way to describe it where instead of a stinger uh the tail is a monitor and it's a powered chair monitors uh yes and it's got legs too and you sit down into it it's like a dentist chair yes three monitors three monitors my bad three monitors and you uh it's all it's all powered so

you can like have this tail swing down so it basically puts the computer around you so you don't even need any other furniture in your room it's just an amazing chair you sit in it like it's all power and so it'll bring the keyboard to you the monitor like goes down your face you just have to read the picture i'm sorry you have to go to the show notes and look at the scorpion chair and it's 3300 you can actually get uh increased voltage um it doesn't look like it's any extra which is crazy well the voltage i think would be like depending on where you live would it not okay or no i guess it wouldn't be for that it does not come with the monitors by the way yeah this is just for the chair yeah yeah i mean i don't need the monitor i just need the chair

yeah but uh i mean it it is insane uh if you look at like the website yeah i mean it okay so no parallax but scorpion chair it's got lots of pictures of it so i think this wins the uh wins the award adjustable backrest i mean it's a chair you can live in you can actually buy a toilet attachment in there and just be done oh man okay so that was my troll answer so moving along here's my real answer here's i seriously want to buy this thing, though. I know. Isn't it cool? No. No, I don't. I have no desire.

Yeah. This is one of those things like you can't buy this unless you weren't already married or had kids or whatever because it would just ruin everything. You got to choose. You got to dedicate yourself to life for this chair. All right. So, here's my real answer. And I, let's see. I love, sorry. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, uh, 11. Uh, and I'm going to trim some out just to make these a little bit easier. So there's however many I just dumped in there. So, uh, here's eight.

So did you know there's a whole bunch of ways to invest money in all sorts of really interesting things? So let's start with this one. I think I've mentioned this on the show before. Flippa.com is a site where you can buy websites and apps. And people will publish how much money they make with them. And so there will traditionally be some sort of, uh, multiple, and you can actually sort by this multiple when you go to Flippa, F-L-I-P-P-A. So you can say, Hey, I want a multiple of 0.3. So, uh, here we go. This person's asking for

$3,000 for a wedding site that is making a $700 a month. That's a pretty good deal. Here's one that goes way up. Here's $140,000 for one that's making $7,000 a month. Wait, what is this? You're like investing in a company or something? No, you can buy the website. This is Flippa. We'll get to what you just said, though.

Wait, this is somebody who started a company, and now they're like, oh, I don't want to have this company anymore. Exactly. So if you want to buy basically a company or a product that's already making money. So I'm looking at a company that I guess sells wet socks and they're like, hey, we're tired of selling wet socks. Yeah. Okay.

Hey, you ever want to be a game developer but you don't want to develop the game just check out the ios app category for games hey cosmic typer they make 75 profit per month and they're willing to sell you this business for uh the current bid is at 700 so you make that money back in 10 months now if you want to put some sweat into it some marketing you just have some fun with it maybe you can make it even bigger who knows but it's pretty cool right so you can go on here and just go on a shopping spree and spend $3,500 and uh have a bunch of companies i like how you think man yeah and you'll make your money back that's right so next time you're hanging out on the couch like why don't you go browse that site and see if hey maybe you don't want to spend all $3,500 there.

Don't worry. I got more ways. But maybe you want to buy this Ultimate Pizza Maker. That's not making money. Zen Habits making $38 a month. I don't know. It's kind of fun to browse around while you're watching whatever TV show you're watching. Raised by Wolves.

So that's pretty cool. How do you verify that the net profit per month is accurate they have a whole big faq about how they do that sort of stuff and how people do things and there's also uh kind of like preferred sellers like verified status people have sold stuff before so there's a whole bunch of people out there who just go make games get them making 20 bucks a month and then go sell it for 600 or whatever and so they're just in the business of making stuff and selling it so i can be like mark cuban i can be a shark you can yeah and you know what i'm glad that you mentioned that let me see okay so you mentioned uh being able to invest in businesses and uh you can absolutely do

that and so let me see which site this was on because uh you know my favorite shark is mr wonderful yep uh he's the best he tells it how it is he is ruthless about taking your uh you know favorite loved ones behind the shed as he likes to put it and uh taking care of them for you so uh here it is um startengine.com is a website where you can invest in companies that are basically trying to crowdfund uh raising money for their business so they tell you the business plan it's kind of like kickstarter except instead of getting uh something you know 3d printed mailed to you 18 months later, you get to actually have a chance at making some money back when the company goes public or gets sold. And right on the front page of StartEngine.com is the opportunity to invest in a company backed by Mr. Wonderfulvin o'leary and they have raised one million dollars on this

website for the company and they basically the the product behind it's called bean stocks it's basically like a kind of robin hood like stock investing app except that you don't pick the stocks you just say like retirement or growth or you know whatever and then you chuck in $50 a month or whatever, and they just buy the stuff for you. You pay like $5 a month. And then at some point, it's like a savings account that they invest for you. And this one is actually considered to be over-invested in or over-subscribed because they got more money than they expected.

And there's one more day to get in this if you want to get in it. But it's just kind of a cool way. So if you've got $3,500 exactly to the penny that you want to put into something, then you can do this on this website. And some of them have – I don't think this site has minimums, but some of the other sites I will mention here have minimums. I made sure that they are all less than. I kind of feel greedy now because like, you know,

Alan and I picked like the things that we wanted for us. And Joe's like, oh, hey, let me help these other guys start their company. Or else. Okay, how about this then? Other guys or else. What if you want to support open source projects? If you are an open source maintainer, you can also get hooked up to this and basically ask for money.

And also, if you just got money and you want to put it into stuff and you just want to give it away, then you can go to this site and browse for open source projects that are basically asking for money. And again, it's kind of like Kickstarter. You say, here's how much we want, here's what we want it for. You know, please consider supporting us.

And you can say, okay, sure. Okay. Wait, wait, wait. Is this, is this the GrataPay thing? Yep. Uh, you saw right there, it says update. Unfortunately, GrataPay is being shut down. Oh man, that sucks.

Okay. Well, we'll get into that one. It's on the – actually, that's interesting, though, because this particular one says it was last updated November 9th of 2019. And that's when they say that they're shutting down. So it's been shut down for a minute, I guess. Oh, that stinks. Well, don't do that one then. Don't do that one. Don't do that one.

Oh, man. So, WeFunder. Same kind of thing. And, you know, I kind of like these because for me it's just fun to go look at what people are getting funded, what kind of people, you know, what kind of business people are doing. You can scroll through here. Here's one where somebody is starting a business where it's kind of like, what do you call it, like with the bikes. Jeez. It's like, all right, stand up, everybody. right stand up everybody okay huff huff keep that oh cycle classes yeah um spin class spin class that's it yeah yep so here's one um that involves a uh oculus rift uh and so you know the oculus quest

you can go in there and uh that's pretty cool here's a company that's doing smart tire recycling they'll recycle rubber. Here's electrical motors. Just cool stuff like that. So if you want to invest in those kind of technological things, wefunder.com. Hey, going back to your GradaPay thing, it looks like it's now LiberaPay? LiberaPay? Oh, okay.

Do I have that one on here? No, I don't have that one. I saw that one. I thought that one was the one that went away, though. I got mixed up. I don't know if they changed names or yet maybe another one got created, and so Grotta Pay shut down in favor of the Libraria Pay. They really should have linked one to the other.

They did. That's how I found it. Oh. There was a page talking about how Grada Pay is dead and Viva La Libra Pay. Y'all are so much better at this, buddy. The internet. Definitely not in pronouncing these names. Hey, you ever wanted to be a investor in a comic book company?

BrickCave Media LLC for a minimum investment of $1,000. Will you be an investor in their publishing company? Here's the elevator pitch. Company overview. There you go. That's pretty cool. Let's see how much have they raised so far. They're trying to get 400,000.

Ooh, current reservation zero. So how are some of these different than like a Kickstarter though? Well, you don't get anything. You just give money. Yeah. And maybe when they get sold uh you know then you get to make a whole bunch of money but you know i was kind of wondering like the next google you know like uh the next company starting up today they go around silicon valley or wherever they talk to angel investors and different boards and basically try to you know kind of uh gather up investors in

order to uh make the amount of money these companies are basically kind of turning that a little bit and said, you know what, instead of you going out and trying to convince the Googles of the world and the AT&Ts and these big corporate entities to back you and get your business started, why don't you talk to your customers? Why don't you talk to people who might believe in your vision that aren't big corporations? Because the corporations, you know, it's fine if your company is doing their own, but it selects a certain kind of startup, the kind of startup that want different things

than maybe you as an individual person want. So this is an opportunity for you as a human to just kind of go back something that you believe in and maybe you make some money. Yeah. I mean, the reason why, like, if it's not for money that you want, like you, and the only tangent that caught me on was that, you know, when you mentioned about if you wanted to start your own comic thing. Because my nerddom knows no bounds. So, of course, I would be into comics. And some of the indie comics that I like, they actually use Kickstarter as the way like,

hey, this is the next issue we're thinking about printing. And if we get enough on Kickstarter, then we'll print that issue. And that's how they go from one to the next. Yeah, totally. I guess the difference there being that you're one to the next uh but yeah totally i guess the difference there being though like you're not like owning the company you're just like you know maybe getting the issue yeah no it's you know it's just different like in this sense you have the opportunity to make money of course you also could lose it all um what about this one have you ever driven past a property and you're like oh man that they want uh five million dollars for that 20 acres that's

in a great spot. It's on commercial. Like someone's going to make a lot of money. If only I could afford to buy that land because I could hold onto it for two years and probably double my money. That'd be great. Maybe if I knew, you know, other people that could go in, you know, a whole bunch of us could put in and buy that land, but that's pretty risky. And I don't know, I don't want to go bug my friends and family to put in on something. If only there was a website where people could go in and put in $1,000 or $10,000 or $500 or whatever amount of money and invest in properties, and then you just get whatever percentage of that property when it sells,

minus, of course, some sort of small fee for the website. Well, that's fundrise.com. So if you want to get into the landlord business, probably not great in 2020, but hey, maybe that's a great time to invest, then this is the way to do it. And I'll go quick here. Are they just treating the land as stock instead?

Because I assume like you're not like going to get the, like be a part of a business that's like okay you own this building with you know here's 51 other people that you own the building with and you know have fun with your taxes both so yeah and i have got a little a little spiel about that coming up so it's both you can actually get involved in like apartment complexes and things like that and you get paid dividends so if you own one percent of an apartment complex or a condo, then you get some sort of payment monthly or, you know, but it's treating it like it was a stock though, like, and not a business.

Yep. Right. Yeah. So I don't know how the taxes work. Yeah. But I don't know. It's kind of interesting. It's like, Hey, you got a hundred bucks or 3,500 bucks and you want to put it in something that, you know, it's kind of interesting. It's like, hey, you got $100 or $3,500 and you want to put it in something that is kind of an investment then. It's an interesting way to go. I'm too scared to do it though. Local stake is all about collecting money and collecting people and crowdfunding kind of small local businesses.

They specialize in the restaurants and the bars and the know the cities that you live in which is pretty cool so you're probably not going to make like you know say like amazon going public type money but maybe you could be part of making the things that you want to happen uh in your area like maybe you want a greek restaurant near your house like maybe this is a way to do that and finally you see to invest is just another way to find businesses and their value. These are businesses that someone has gone and vetted. These are businesses we think have good plans. It's not just anyone coming in here and signing up the website and saying, hey, I got a startup idea.

Give me money. These are companies that have actually, I'm seeing like robotics companies and artificial intelligence power diagnostics for cancer and things like that that people um you know some special group of people uh seem to think is gonna go pretty well and these are all like way overfunded actually that's pretty cool oh wow i gotta say i like how you came with a completely different set of ideas. Because now, like, you've given me some rabbit holes to go down. Yeah. I mean, hey, it's the next time you're watching something on TV or whatever. Oh my gosh.

You guys see this? I've never been able to capture this on film. What's happening back there? My cat is opening my closet and crawling in for no reason. That's a cat? Yeah. That's... I thought there was a bear in there. I know.

He's a big boy. So I always feel so trashy because I'll be on Zoom meetings at work and I'll see my closet door open. They just got to think I have to live in a barn or something. It's like my doors are always open. And no, that little fella goes around and opens all the closets every day. That's hilarious. And he crawls in. He'll and opens all the closets every day. That's hilarious. And he crawls in. He'll probably be out of there in another minute.

I've never got it on camera, though. This is very exciting for me. There you go. It's a little – I'm going to say it. That door is open. You need to teach him to close the door. Tell him he's not born in it. He's going to go to the bathroom closet now.

This isn't a barn. Yeah. Well, yeah. You can check it out. I feel totally guilty now. I'm glad that Joe went first because definitely upstaged all of us. And, yeah, he got it exact by being a good person and giving away money on 12 different websites. Oh, no.

I want to make my money back. You're wrong. It's not a charity. World peace as long as I make some profit. I guess technically. If you want to find charity, there's another way to do that. Yeah, I guess technically. Don't think that he gave away $3,500, though. though he he really spent uh 3 299 on the scorpion chair and then had 201 left over to spread across

12 other investment sites yeah i bought a game where you like throw dice at uh politicians heads that was the other 300 it makes like 10 bucks a month but i thought it looked cool so whatever hey hey by the way my wife was telling me the other day that your cat opening the door reminded me. We know that's actually how coronavirus started, right? Like there was a cat and there was a vial sitting up on a counter somewhere. You know that cat was like sitting there tapping it until it just fell off the edge and smashed off the ground. That's how it really happened. Yep.

I believe it. All right. Well, we won't have any resources we like per se for this episode it will be heavily uh loaded with lots of affiliate links except for all of joe's um we won't make any money off of you clicking on joe's links uh but either way you probably but maybe but you might maybe you might you might and with that we will head into alan's favorite portion of the show it's the tip of the week and i promise i'll be faster on this one oh so i i've been dealing with uh gcp google cloud, and Dataproc. And it's a pretty amazing setup product that they have.

But one of the frustrating things is in order to run anything, you kind of got to push it up to Dataproc. And there are times that you just want to be able to code locally, right? Like I don't want to deal with a bunch of infrastructure that I keep messing around with, especially when you have deployment pipelines and all that kind of stuff. So I found this thing that makes life really dandy. It is a Docker image that Google provides, and it's called Cloud-SDK. And here's the beauty of it.

A lot of what you do in Google Cloud, you can do with the G Cloud command line. And there's also a GSU till command line. And I want to say there's even another one, right? Well, one of the cool parts is if you run this Docker thing and you basically call Google auth login on it, it will go ahead and authenticate you. It'll tell you, hey, open up your browser, go to this page, and it'll give you back a token that you can use for an OAuth token. You can run this thing. It will store it in a Docker volume for you on that image. So now anytime you go to do a gsutil command inside your

Docker container, it's authenticated. You want to point it at a particular set of GCS storage buckets. It's authenticated. You don't have to keep dealing with that stuff, right? You don't have to run up in the cloud on everything you're doing. So you can develop locally and talk to all the Google services you need in your Docker container. So super useful for me, especially because I, you know, I didn't want to install everything locally on my system and have to have multiple versions of Python installed, multiple, you know, I can put all that stuff in my Docker container. So the way I use this is I use this as the base image, and then I put together my own Docker file, I say from this one,

and then like for the Python stuff I'm doing, I'll have a requirements.txt with all my pip requirements that need to be there. I also include things like PySpark and all that, and then that way I can build up my image with everything I need, and it has all these Google authentication bits in it, and so I can use all the cloud services just like it was installed on my local machine and it's all sandboxed, right? So all my requirements are exactly what I need them to be, which is exactly what they should be on Dataproc. And I can work in that way. I'm kind of sad then. I don't think this is going where I thought it was going. So basically this would be like if, for example, if I were to build an Ubuntu Docker image from the Ubuntu image,

if I were to build a Docker file that was from Ubuntu, and as part of my Docker, let's say that I did an app get install for cloud, Google G cloud SDK, right? Like that's basically what this kind of is, right? Like it's just basically like the, the G cloud tools already there.

But the cool thing is that like when you do authenticate, this one is going to like create that volume for you so that you don't lose it. That's the, that's the cool bit that this is doing. And they set up some environment variables and whatnot that you can that so for instance one of the things that was sort of a pain is even if you install google cloud and you do the authenticate and all that kind of stuff

it doesn't necessarily flow into python like so because it's part of your os right so if you use the one that they've baked in sure you, you could start up your own Ubuntu image and grab it and you could download the Google Cloud and all that kind of stuff. But there's still some things that they don't hook up properly. If you use theirs as a base, then what you can do then at that point,

you set two environment variables. And when you go into Python, it automatically knows and can talk to, within within Python to your Google Cloud, right? I kind of feel like this is my Kanye moment. Like, you know, I'm gonna let you finish, but you know, Beyonce had the greatest Docker container ever. Because like where I was like a little bit sad was that where I thought you were going with it i kept waiting for it i i super thought that what you were saying was like they had built a docker uh image for you that mocked uh google cloud so like for data proc for example and i'm like oh my god how'd they do that no they don't i i so to walk down that path just a little ways,

they do have a Dataproc like Kubernetes type thing that you can use, but it is in beta and I'm not sure. It seems like there are some things that just aren't fully the same as running a Dataproc cluster. But yeah, no, it's not quite that glorious. Well, that's why, based off of the generic name of Cloud SDK, that's why I was thinking like, oh, is it like all of everything? Because you mentioned GCS storage buckets, and I was like,

is that too? This is amazing! Not quite that beautiful. I just said some stupid stuff to the internet that's like, no, of course it's not that. No, no. But what it did allow me to do, though, and it's the same thing we've talked about. It's the reason we all love Docker is I didn't have to install five million things on my local system to make this happen. Right.

Like I started up this image. I told that image, hey, I need PySpark installed. I need this installed. I need this installed. It's all in that image, right? Like it's not on my system. I don't have to worry about conflicting versions and all that. It's, it's in a runtime that I can just use. Very cool. All right. So, uh, what are your other eight tips? That's it. That's it for tonight. You told me that I didn't have one tonight and I was like, Oh, you're right. I don't. So I guess I just got to come up with something.

What? One tip, Alan? That's not even a thing. Like, who is this guy? I know. It's awful, man. It's awful. All right.

Well, fine. I guess we'll just like, you know, go on to Joe. All right. Well, I got three tips this time. That makes more sense. Yep. So I'll make it up for you. And my tips, I'll blast it off real quick. Hades, Hades, Hades. So I'm a big fan of rogue lights. yep so i'll make it up for you and my tips uh i'll blast it all real quick uh hades hades hades

so uh i'm a big fan of rogue light uh type games where you basically have some sort of like arcade type experience you can play like in 20 minutes 30 minutes 40 minutes whatever i picked this game back up uh in in uh early access like a couple months ago uh thanks to uh g flanks so g thanks for that and it's just really great. It's just really well done. There's a lot of reasons for playing. It's got great story, great action, and it's just fun.

Every time you go through a run, you come back, there's interesting things that happen, and it's just interesting all around. So I think it's just a great kind of specimen of what a video game can be. And even if you're not into that genre, it's just like, cool.

Don't necessarily play it if that's that your thing whatever but it's just kind of i think uh it's a it's kind of like a landmark game because it's just so well done at what it is it looks like they're coming go ahead yeah the graphics are beautiful yeah it looks like a comic book version of diablo yeah yeah yeah or. Yeah, or League of Legends. It's that kind of like top-down view. What's that view called? The isometric. Yeah.

Oh, is that what it's called? Yeah. I always called it the God view because it looked like you were like, you know, playing the role of God. You're like looking down at all the little things, you know, rolling around. Well, there are plenty of gods around. It's all based in like Greek mythology. And it's just the story and the narrative is really what kind of... Everything is really good about it. It's just an example of a really good

game. It's only $25. It's on pretty much every platform. It just came out in version 1.0 a month or so ago. I've beaten it like four or five times now and I have plenty more to go. Alright,, there's

my Steam wish list. Thank you, Drew. All right. And your other... You said you had... Oh, Hades, Hades case. All right. So, of course, I would bring a Git tip

for you. So, I think we talked about, like in the last episode, I talked about like migrating from Team Foundation version control into Git. And, you know, sometimes as part of that process, you know, you want to like, while doing the, the migration, you kind of want to like every now and then do some like little checks and balances to make sure that like, Hey, did everything really migrate over that I think should have migrated over? You know, did I, did I have any errors, you know, imagine if you had a, a large repo, well, large in terms of

commit count. Right. And you wanted to kind of like verify some of those commits that, you know, that what you saw in, uh, team, the Team Foundation version control matched what was in the Git log. Specifically, what if you wanted to go all the way back to the beginning, right? So in that case, what you can do is use Git log dash dash reverse, and it will reverse the output of the git log for you starting from the beginning of time for the repo. So, yeah, comes in handy, depending on your needs.

That was, you know, my need was as part of my repo migrations. Your usage may vary. All right. Well, with that, you know, hey, happy shopping or investing. You know, thanks, Joe, for showing us up. And, you know, be sure to subscribe to us if, you know, maybe a friend passed you a link or handed you advice so you could listen to the silly things that come out of my face. You can hear more things that we've said over the years by subscribing

and to also be sure that you hear future things that we will say. You can find us on all the major platforms, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever your favorite place to find podcasts are. And as Alan mentioned earlier, if you haven't already, we really do appreciate the

reviews so you can find some helpful links at dub w dub dot coding blocks dot net slash review well done sir well done and while you're up there you can check out all our show notes again this one is going to be just link heavy so you know go enjoy yourself and you know you know maybe pick you up some black friday deals and and join in on the discussions up there. Share the cool stuff that you found. Maybe maybe there's something else that you've got. So, yeah. And hit us up on Twitter at CodingBlocks or head over to the website, which we mentioned a few times, CodingBlocks.net and find all our social links at the top of the page.

Boom.