Coding Blocks - The 2021 Shopping Spree

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

The Mathemachicken strikes again for this year's shopping spree, while Allen just realized he was under a rock, Joe engages "no take backs", and Michael ups his decor game.

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 170. Subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more using your favorite podcast app. And, you know, if you can leave us a review, leave us a review. We would greatly appreciate that. Whatever your app of choice is, we would be forever in your debt. Hi, and you can go to codingblocks.net where you can find shows, samples, discussion, and a whole lot more. And you can send your feedback, questions, and rants to comments to codingblocks.net. We can find shows, samples, discussion, and a whole lot more. And you can send your feedback, questions, and rants to comments at codingblocks.net. Why did you make the rants so fancy?

Rants. It's my favorite part. It is good. Or follow us on Twitter at codingblocks or head to www.codingblocks.net and find all our social links there at the top of the page. And with that, I am Alan Underwood. I'm excited. And I'm spending money am Alan Underwood. I'm excited. And I'm spending money. That's what we're all doing.

This episode is sponsored by Datadog, the unified monitoring and analytics platform built for developers, IT operations teams, and businesses in the cloud age. So, yeah, you going to lead us in here, Jay-Z. Uh, yeah, sure.

So it's the shopping spree episode, uh, again. So, uh, sorry, Michael Tippett. I know this is the least favorite episode every year,

but you know, uh, this is how it is. And I think you got a keyboard last time. How can this be the least favorite? Yeah. I don't know. Michael,

Michael and I, we, we have some similarities in our souls he doesn't like to shop yeah okay okay awesome uh first a little bit of news yep yep so as always we like to thank those that took the time to leave us a review even when they're not so lovely um so in itunes we have bold as love 88 and from audible tammy that is the most complicated name i've had to read all day and uh let's hope it stays that way yeah thank you very much i appreciate it all right so obviously we're going to be spending some money this episode so let's get into it so uh we should just say what we're doing well that's okay okay yeah go what were you going to do i i thought we

were going to jump in i was gonna say in case this is someone's first episode or hasn't been around for the last couple years oh okay yeah so i was going to say that uh for you know as a disclaimer for those that aren't familiar with the way this works, one, you might want to hide your wallet just in case, because there's going to be a lot of, you know, things that we're going to talk about that you're probably going to want to buy that you weren't already familiar with. But when you do look at the show notes for this full disclaimer, these are going to be affiliate links to Amazon. But yeah, I think that was pretty much the big disclaimer, right, Joe? Was there something else that you wanted to talk about? Like we give each other a budget and try to figure out like what would we spend if we – what would we buy if we could – if we had that budget for real?

And sometimes these are things that we actually have already bought throughout the year. And sometimes there are things that we have our eye on that we would like to get. And in past years, we've set the budget limit. I think we did maybe $2,000 one year, $2,500 the next year, $3,500 I think was one year. This year we decided on $3,000. If we had $3,000 fake monies... Uh-oh. Oh. This year we decided on $3,000. If we had $3,000 fake monies. Uh-oh. Oh. Last year was $3,000. This year is $3,500.

No, no, no. This year is $3,000. Last year was $3,500. But it's all made up money that we just like, hey, okay, with that money, these are some things that I think would be nice to have. Well, I'm going to need a minute. He's got to revise his list. It's a heads up for, for anybody that hasn't done this for the links that we do have to Amazon as affiliate links. You don't get charged anymore for clicking them. It just, if you do buy something through that, it will help the show out. That's all it

is. So, um, just be aware of that. And that and and honestly i have a couple of things that aren't on amazon because i couldn't find them on amazon which was a shocker to me yeah almost nothing i have is on amazon awesome awesome all right well let's get started well um so i thought i was going to be slick here and just tell you about a really fancy espresso maker called the Jura X8, which, from the description, lets you grind, dose, tamp, and extract espresso and steamed milk to the perfect temperature with a push of one button. How did I know he was going to come up with one item to spend the entire budget on? I thought he was 500 over. Yeah, well, I mean,

I'm going to discard this and just kind of go with the fly. Go with the fly. It's kind of seeing my pants here. But yeah, anyway, I would never spend my money on this. But if it's Coding Box money, absolutely. I don't want to make my

coffee. I don't want to go buy it. don't want to go buy it i just want to drink it hey but but hold up in all fairness um does this thing have good reviews no i don't know oh no it has no reviews because who buys a 3500 coffee maker yeah no no no about this and the people that do buy a 3500 coffee maker don't bother to leave reviews yeah they're not gonna review it they don't care if it's good or not. They're like, hey, if it's bad, I'll just go get another one. Yeah. No.

And you think it'd be bigger, but it's like one of the size of like those Nespresso's or, you know, those pod things. Yeah, man. Listen, if I don't like it, if it's bad, I'll just put it in the guest house. Right. And, you know, I'll get a different one. The West Wing. Yeah. The West Wing.

This is not for coffee lovers. This is what you get for other people. This is a gift. Yeah, exactly. $3,500 gift. You get a different one. The West Wing. Yeah, this is not for coffee lovers. This is what you get for other people. This is a gift. Yeah, exactly. $3,500 gift. You're a baller. Okay, so is that – honestly, that's the end of your list? No.

Oh. I had a second list. How much of this $3,000 did you spend? About $10,000 of it. The math chicken strikes again that's right get ready for it there's going to be a lot of funny business going on here math of a chicken I thought I was doing all of our lists

I misunderstood and I went over 500 apiece. Second item is MacBook Pro. They just announced M1 Max chip. You can get a 16-inch with the big M1 Max chip. It's a 32-core GPU, 32 gigs of unified memory. It means to share it between uh video and the regular processing stuff terabyte of storage six inches and you can get that for right at three four nine nine with no

tax so you're gonna have to figure out how to not pay tax on that that's up to you but uh yeah so there's the full budget right there and i say that every year i'm just like just max out a macbook although this is not maxed hey for everybody that's been following along for a while, he says it every year, right? Like just max out of MacBook. How many times you bought one? I did this year. This year. One once.

Yeah. I'll tell you, there's a lot of things I like about it. They've returned to the MagSafe, which I really appreciate. You know, USB is nice. I like the keyboard. The smart bar is gone. Touch bar. Since 2013. Yeah. Yes smart bar is gone. I've been waiting since 2013.

Yes, it's gone. Yes. Very excited about that. So yeah, I'm really excited about this year's model. I'm really excited to have it and I should have it. It's getting delivered sometime in November. So I'll let you know how it goes. Awesome. So we're at $7,000 of your $3,000.

Yep, $7,000. And that is something I actually would and did buy. So, yeah, that's pretty sick. So, yeah, so let's get into the fun stuff then, right? Because, you know, it is the season, I guess. Okay. I thought it would be fun to look at what you can do, like, as far as, like, robotics. Because it's kind of like one of those things where it's a transferable kind of hobby.

Things that you know how to do with your, you know day job or uh your career uh transfer and so you can do some cool stuff with them and uh this one is dedicated to mike rg who is a lego maniac absolutely and that's the mindstorm kit uh it's 359.95 not cheap at all that's um you know american dollars uh but it's basically a robotics kit it's uh comes with a kit with a bunch of It's $359.95. Not cheap at all. That's American dollars. But it's basically a robotics kit. It comes with a kit with a bunch of motors and sensors. And you can kind of hook it up to a computer. I'm sure it's all wireless now.

And my school had one of these like a million years ago. And it was nowhere near as cool as this. It's just a bunch of different robots. You can make it. And, of course, you can always go make your own. It's got really cool motors. It's got cool stuff. It's got like a crane you can use. And you can program this stuff. And've also sold activities and labs you can

kind of work through if you got kids or something might be a lot of fun uh so that just looked fun especially if you had kids it's awesome hey so real quick to piggyback on this just so you know these things are really cool there was a talk that was done at ndc london last year where the guy used one of these kits and he did an ai program of a self-driving car using this kit and strapping a cell phone on the top for a camera so yeah you can do all kinds of creative stuff with this it's pretty pretty awesome yeah it's really cool and it's really beginner friendly it's not i mean it's not something you're going to give like a you know six-year-old or something it's definitely uh more advanced than that um you know i would say probably middle school age they probably tell you what the age is

they say 10 plus on the box okay they mean it yeah definitely uh probably gonna want some adult help on that one but i'm like i i don't have kids i don't i don't want any kids getting my stuff all dirty. I want to play with it for me. Kids don't wash their hands enough. So number two. So this I happened to stumble across when I was trying to figure out which kind of Lego Mindstorm kit I wanted. This thing is a Sphero Bolt. And what it is is a robot with a bunch of sensors that's in like a plastic ball and you can control it uh you can program it and it kind of you know rolls around like a little hamster

wheel uh so it's got these motors that turn the ball and so um it's just really cool to have this uh this is basically the size of the one i got here is the size of a baseball it's 149 and it's got a like a led kind of screen on it looks like about uh eight by eight so you can do little things like have a smiley face or a heart or whatever you can kind of program to like roll around and um it's like just do cool things so i just kind of like the idea of like having this thing like rolling around my house like scaring the animals or, uh, scaring me or whatever. Uh, there's some downsides. Like it's,

uh, I got two hours battery life, uh, and six hours is charged. So it's not something you could just have like rolling around behind you, like R2D2, but it just looks really fun. Did you see that?

Uh, one picture is Pac-Man. Like one of them is Pac-Man has the icon of the ghost and the other one are like pinky specifically. And then the other one has pac-man yeah and you really got to see an action i mean you just got to mention a couple of clear ball just kind of rolling around almost like if you've ever seen that game like monkey ball or super monkey ball it's kind of like that uh but you can program it to kind of uh it's got

cameras on it so you can like set up little courses and stuff with like basically tape and so it won't you know it'll kind of navigate the maze or whatever without uh you know they're just kind of using a little bit of computer vision there and it's got a phone app that you can use probably ipad or you know tablet 2 uh to program it but it's not um you don't have full access to like the coding environment so you can't like call apis and stuff so it's definitely limited you know it's considered a toy now um there is a smaller model that's only 50 it's uh you know it's basically the size of a golf ball uh and so that looks kind of cool too but um this is really kind of aimed at like kids and kind of getting them into stuff it's also waterproof just cool videos of like them rolling off like these kind of like marble mazes and like going

into water and stuff and i don't know it just looks neat but uh like schools will do is they exit this casing by with holds 15 of them and they'll charge them all so you just imagine like opening it up and like doing little battles with the kids they're having them like you know tape out mazes on the floor or whatever and having the balls you know kind of to do that and they're pretty durable apparently so people have like pets batting at them we're kind of doing little ramps and stuff it just just looks fun. That's awesome. I want to do this for our next game jam. Like we get three of these and we like have a race to see who could. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's really fun.

Even the Mindstorms are cool to have kind of a Lego jam with. That was the robotics. That RVR looks pretty cool too though. The one that's like a little, it's got little tank treads yeah on it oh yeah a little car and actually if you just google robotics kit you'll see a lot of

really cool stuff i was kind of disappointed to see like i wanted a robotics kit that just had like the motors and the sensors and like an arduino or something but a lot of them are like very um catered they're basically designed to make one robot and you've kind of followed instructions to put it together which is cool you know that's cool too and they're usually cheaper catered. They're basically designed to make one robot. You've kind of followed the instructions to put it together, which is cool. That's cool too. They're usually cheaper, but I wanted to make my own robot terribly.

So, yeah. Lego Mindstorms looked like my best way of doing that. You can buy different sensors and expansions to your stuff if you want to make a bigger, cooler one, whatever. Yeah. So that was fun.

I thought robotics was just kind of a neat little take on, you know, spinning other people's money. I like it. I like it. Wait, other people's. Well, yeah. I mean, this is imaginary money. Oh.

Sort of the imaginary people. Yeah. This is the $8,000 imaginary money. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're definitely up there now. Yeah. We're at $7,500 easily.

So, next section, we'll call it. What was the first section called? Robotics. No, the first section with the coffee maker and the Mac. Oh, those are my funny jokes oh my funny joke sections oh oh okay yeah you didn't you didn't how did you not know that i thought that was very apparent yeah so next section uh entertainment so uh i uh had have had playstations uh since the first one uh playstation one that's not we

called it back then we just called playstation anyway a lot of people don't know that back in the day yep but you know as much as i can make fun of that uh good luck figuring out which freaking xbox was first because like there's no numbers sometimes there are sometimes there's letters sometimes there's not who knows sometimes they're all like named crazy the first one was just the xbox well yeah but i mean the current one is just the xbox series x or series s well yeah that one you can't figure but the first one was easy well except there's also an xbox one right which was not the first one was easy. Well, except there's also an Xbox One. Right.

Which was not the first one. That was not the first one. It was actually the third one. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. It was ridiculous. And 360 was the second one. Yeah.

So see what I mean? See what I mean? It was terrible. Nobody said they were good at math, but I took the challenge of being able to name the first one. Yeah, that's a good job. Yeah. So Xbox Series X. And that's switching to Xbox

for a couple of different reasons. But I want to say PlayStation has the exclusives. A lot more of those are coming to PC now. It's all the latest God of War has now been announced to come to PC, which is pretty cool. So that's exciting.

And also those AAA games, like the games that are the best, like the ones like I don't know, Last of Us and the Drake games and stuff, they're like time eaters, right? They're like 40 to 50 hours. And like, if you don't make it to the end of those games, you

lose a lot of the values. Like, you're not seeing the coolest stuff that they kind of stack up there. The best levels, the coolest interactions, the culminations of these stories always happens at like hours 30 to 50 which is just like that's rough i don't have a i just i'm not able to get there and so uh i really like xbox series x this year which is uh ringing in at 499.99 because of xbox game pass which is i think i said this last year too it's incredible it's basically netflix for games uh except the games are ridiculously good uh there's a lot of kind of triple a you know newer hot titles psychonauts 2 back for blood scarlet nexus halo infinite's

coming out uh bethesda games so things like doom uh wolfenstein, just free, right? PC and Xbox. Also tons of casual games, which I really like because there's a ton of games out there that probably cost, you know, anywhere from like $5 to $20 to maybe $30 on Steam. And they're just really cool and really interesting. And, you know, it takes a lot of time to kind of research and find them. And a lot of times you kind of take chances on them because they just look cool and really interesting. It takes a lot of time to research and find them. A lot of times you take chances on them because they just look cool or whatever. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. With Game Pass, those games take no time to install.

A lot of the Chipotle games now you can actually stream, so you don't even have to install them at all. You just click play on Back 4 Blood. I just noticed the other day. It just starts streaming over the internet. If you've got a good enough internet connection, you got it. Isn't that a crazy idea to stream a game? It's crazy.

But wait, did you get the series X? Do you have it now? I'm still trying. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say that they're still hard to get ahold of. Um,

but you know, one other thing that's worth mentioning here. So you did call out that it's four, four 99 99. If you buy it outright yep Microsoft also has a program to where you can basically it's not a lease purchase but you you can purchase this thing basically using Game Pass to where you end up saving money if you if you sign up for Game Pass the 15 the ultimate one right like 15 bucks a

month or whatever and you end up owning the xbox series x over a two-year period and you get xbox live game pass and you save like 100 bucks in the process yes it's crazy yeah it makes the game pass basically free and i think it's like ends up being like 34 bucks a month or something so where did you find it because you don't you didn't have put a link up yet. Oh yeah. So I don't have a link to that plan. And that is only certain realty retailers and whatnot. Well,

I meant just to the Xbox period. Cause yeah. Okay. Cause I couldn't find it available on Amazon. No, I mean, I can, I was going to try to link it to Amazon, but I think they might have taken it off.

And Walmart still got it listed, but it's basically scalpers. So people have it listed for like $1,000 or something. Yeah. You know, the retail price is the mandated retail price is $499.99. So that's the price I'm sticking with because I'm trying to watch my monies here. Well, I think the thing that Alan's talking about is $35 a month. Yeah. Yeah.

$35 a month, you have to do it for two years. But that includes paying for your Xbox and installments as well as getting the Xbox Ultimate Game Pass. So it's truly a killer deal if you can get it, which the availability is still just garbage here in October of 2021. How much is Game Pass, though? Because isn't Game Pass like $100? There's two. No. So there's a $9.99 version, and there's also a $15 version.

And that's if you pay per month, you get discounts for paying more. And the $15 version is the one that allows you to get all the latest titles as they come out. Or not all of them, but a lot of the main titles. Like I want to say Madden's in there. Like there's a bunch of AAA titles that you get when they come out. If you're on the $10 one, you'll kind of get yester years, you know, AAA titles,

which are still really good, but you're not getting the latest ones as they come out. So you'd save about, um, well, what would that be about? Like six bucks then is what you say. If you,

so no, I'm saying like if you bought the standalone xbox and you kept it for two years and you got the all access you know the 15 plan that alan was talking about uh that is six dollars more than if you did this xbox all access for 35 a month i think you save 20 bucks total i thought it was more than that it's a good one so if you do 35 times 24 you get 840 if you do 15 i had a typo there yeah if you do 15 times 24 you're at 360 so 500 plus 360 would be 860 right so you're saving like 20 bucks total, but it was more than that. But still, even then you're getting the thing just for paying for, you know, it's, it's a great deal is basically what it boils down to if you can get it and you have games day one, right?

Like you don't have to go out because that's another thing about a lot of these newest gen systems, right? Like the price is finally like, I don't know. You guys remember when video games used to be 30 bucks brand new and then they bumped up to 40 and then 50 and 60. Well, this year seems to be the year that 70 is like the new cost of a video game, a AAA game. So now you don't have to just go out and spend 500 on this thing

and then go spend another 70 just to get one game. You have Xbox Ultimate, and you've got a whole slew of games that you can just play. But what am I thinking? How am I overthinking this, though? Because if you bought that Xbox All Access, the consoles last longer than two years, so they're not going to have a new Xbox out in two years. Right.

You can continue paying for Ultimate when it's done, but you have to pay the $35. So you keep paying $35 after the two years right yeah you can continue paying for ultimate when it's done so you have to pay $35 for after the two years no no no you pay 35 for the two until the thing's paid off and then you can continue your xbox pass at 15 bucks a month after that or not you could also just you could also cancel it if you wanted but yeah you're you're only required to pay it for two years while you pay off the Xbox. I see. I see. And it's awesome to have a game one. I'm glad you brought up having games, obviously, day one for

the kiddos to play or whatever on holidays. I have one other item here, but I did want to mention, too, that also with Game Pass, you get big discounts on games if you do choose to buy them. So a lot of times, if you're in Game Pass, maybe you get 20% off or whatever. So, you Pass, you get big discounts on games if you choose to buy them. So a lot of times, if you're in Game Pass, you may even get 20% off or whatever. So that's an option, especially because a lot of times the base game will be free on Xbox.

But the DLC, you have to buy or whatever. So it's nice to have that discount. So speaking of day one games, have you all heard about the Playdate? I have not. It's HTTPS Play.Date. And it's like a pocket sized, it looks like

an old school Game Boy. It's got two buttons, a weird little crank, and it's really neat. I don't even know what kind of screen it is. It's got this really high resolution kind of black and white screen that is reflective. It's supposed this really high resolution kind of black and white screen that is reflective. It's supposed to look really great in the dark.

And here's the thing about this thing. It comes with a season of games. You get two games every two weeks once they start shipping this thing. You don't get to choose them. Just whatever they send you. Every two weeks you get two games just delivered to it. And then presumably next year there's going to have – Oh, sorry.

It's two games every week for 12 weeks. And then presumably there's going to be another season. And you can see the games that they're going to have oh sorry it's two games every week for 12 weeks and then presumably there's going to be another season and uh you can see the games that they're going to be releasing now but there's something really interesting to me about having these kind of games forced on you in this little pocket size thing uh it just kind of reminds me of you know kind of being younger and kind of just being stuck with what you have you know and just kind of appreciating and having fun with it and so i think sometimes we get kind of lost when we with what you have, you know, and just kind of appreciating and having fun with it. And so I think sometimes we get kind of lost when we have a lot of choices

as to what to play or what to do. And so there's something fun, just funny to me about like, it reminds me of like almost like shareware disks or something. You remember back in the days you get like a floppy disk with a bunch of games on it and like most of them were awful and you didn't even know how to play them. But it was like, there's something just kind of fun about just exploring and just, you know,

trying to find fun with what you had. And so I don't know. I just thought it was deep. And that's why Netflix is dead to me. There's just too much. Yeah. So I need three channels. Yep.

Yeah. The first two games you get one's called casual birder, which who knows what the heck that's about. The other one doesn't have the title on the website. It just got like a weird clown thing with like a bubble coming out of its nose, which I don't know what the heck it is. It's like a Tin Man. Okay. You see he's got the wind-up thing behind him?

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned the wind-up because I mentioned this thing has a crank on the side. So if you go to this website, you got to see this thing. It's like a little Game Boy with a crank. And the crank can tell if you're cranking it forwards, backwards. And it's got a third motion, too. I think we're kind of like you can fold the arm down.

And if you kind of watch some of the videos, you can see how this kind of factors into the games. But I've never seen a crank on any video game system and so they're just doing weird things with it it's almost like a you know analog control so you can do crank it fast or crank it slow gives you some kind of circular motion and go backwards forwards and it's just weird so this is just a weird thing to exist in the world it doesn't make any sense that you have no control of the games you have no clues making these games they're totally curated You've got a crank on this thing that fits in your pocket. And, uh, I don't know why this thing exists, but I'm glad that it does. I gotta say on the website, if you are watching like the crank thing with the 10 man,

uh, drag it and flip it around while it's doing it so you can watch this thing from all it's kind of beautiful the website's beautiful the price on it seems a little insane yep and it's been delayed a few times uh so i forgot when it was originally supposed to come out so uh you can pre-order it and supposed to ship in in 2022 and it's 179 dollars i mean it's stupid this thing should not exist. Yeah, it really should. By the way, that 10-man game is called

Crankin's Time Travel Adventure. Nice. It looks like when you crank the thing backwards it looks like maybe the time kind of rolls backwards. I thought you were totally off your rocker whenever you started talking about this. Now that I'm looking at it, we're sure you totally off your rocker whenever you started talking about this and now that i'm looking at it we're sure you're off your rock yeah yeah but it's interesting i

might be off my rocker a little bit with you here i'll say this is something i really like about game pass too there's like a side effect of uh of kind of a more limited selection you know the xbox like back for blood just came out this week and it's a kind of a larger title that came out what's interesting about it is because there's so many people that have xbox game pass a new exciting game hits everyone that you know that's also on this kind of game plan train with you they're all excited about this game they're all playing this game right now so it's like you and your buddies your friends just got the same cool new game all at the same time and everyone's excited about the same time it's not we're not swimming in this you know world where uh you are you know getting excited about

games getting into it but your friends aren't into that one or this one's busy or whatever it's like everyone's on the same train together and same with this thing too it's like everyone's getting the same two games released at the same time you know there's just something cool about being a part of this kind of social the social experiment together can i tell you my favorite thing about this website and and this is totally stupid yeah but if you if you flip this thing around if you pay attention to the screws they're actually hollow. And I'm super impressed with this visualization because as you rotate it around, you can actually see that it shows the color behind the page. All the way through. Because if you turn it in the right way, you will see the sides.

And you can actually turn it to where you can actually see the reflective light going into it. So it's not just like a black cylinder that you're looking down it's actually got uh color to it if you can get the light to reflect it yeah if you scroll down you can see it's got uh there's like a speaker attachment you can get for it it will charge it and you can kind of just pop it on via those hollow screw holes i'm far more impressed with the website yeah the website's great and there's a developer kit and stuff in case you want to make games and get on this but yeah it's just a weird thing uh and i'm glad that exists yeah they use it as a pencil holder or a pen holder they do look at it the stereo dock is a pen holder pencil holder it reminds me of like the little clock from uh uh oh god uh loki oh it seems like something that he would like kind of transform

into like what you know to hide interesting i don't know why that one came to mind because they don't look anything like yeah uh i'm up to plenty of money now. Yeah, like eight grand. Yeah. Something like that. So let's get into the next to last category, the penultimate category, which I'm just going to call health. So I was running out of ideas here. So I just kind of wanted to pick some things I like. And I got a new bicycle, like, I don't know, somewhere in the last year. And I really like it. So I'm going to tell you about it.

It's a Trek dual sport three i think trek is now the biggest bike manufacturer um you know i don't know if that counts kind of like more like commodity kind of um department store bikes like walmart or target bikes whatever but as far as i know it's the largest one at least in the u.s and um the stores at least my I've ever lived, there's always been a truck store within like 30 minutes of it. And I got the dual sport three. I'm going to nerd out here on bicycles for a minute. It's a hybrid bike. So it's got a, you got to pay some links, sir.

Oh yeah. I keep forgetting. I got the link. You can't see my links. Everybody else got a nerd out, you know, um, virtually I need to see this. Yep. Well, no, that's not true uh if you are listening to this you in a lot of podcast players you can simply uh see the show notes within the uh podcast player now that said though apple did make a change in ios that

that's no longer the case so that's sad sad face yeah all right go go ahead with the nerdy no so it's a trek dual sport 3 and it's a hybrid bike which means it's kind of um you know it's a nice all arounder it's got a more comfortable geometry so it's nice for people that are not serious riders it's got some pretty thick tires for uh you know compared to like a road bike whichever those things that look like um basically you're riding on spaghetti or something um so you know it's like basically double the thickness of a road bike, whichever you see those things that look like, basically you're riding on spaghetti or something. So, you know, it's like basically double the thickness of most road bikes that you'd see, but it's also thinner than most mountain bikes.

And so it's not going to be as slow on like, you know, concrete or whatever. It does have a front shock, which I like. You can lock it out. So you can kind of disable that. If you're on more steady terrain, you don't want to lose the efficiency because that's the problem with shocks.

It's like when you're pedaling either uphill or just straight like some of your energy is being lost in that shock moving up and down so you lock that out and that doesn't happen or if you're going somewhere that's a little bumpier maybe some gravel maybe you're going over the curves or something you can unlock that shock and get the benefits of a cushy or rye which is really nice it does have what's the color what's the color oh that's the best part it's lithium gray uh it's this very dark gray almost black uh with a uh the like logos uh in like a kind of a lighter gray color that's very muted and it does have some um blue highlights i don't know if you can really see it but it's just um very few like kind of shiny blue highlights oh for the lock to lock out the shock yeah lock out

the shock there's one on the um what we call the head i forget number three yeah and also the the what like the water bottle cage kind of screws oh right okay yeah it's a pretty looks great yeah i love it and uh yeah so it's got disc brakes and stuff so it's really great for like kind of concrete type stuff and but it's just a nice all-arounder it's fast versatile so i like it it's not cheap uh as far as bicycles go so if you're into bikes let me tell you it's about $900 retail. And you're going to say, well, I thought you were talking about bicycle, bicycle. But if you are not into bikes and you probably just spit your drink all over the place, because a thousand dollars for a bicycle probably sounds ridiculous to you. And you can go to a department store and target and get one probably for $50 for an adult,

you know, or less than a hundred. But I tell you people, if you want to ride a lot of miles, uh, I, I think it's worth getting a nice bike. Maybe this one. The hybrids are very, to me at least, I haven't read like the specific differences, but they seem very similar to the gravel bikes with the only difference being that the handlebars,

like the gravel bikes typically have like a road, uh, handlebar with a drop uh on it and the hybrids have like the easy commuter kind of straight bar handlebar okay so let me let me put this in terms of people who are not bicycle riders like myself so what outlaw is talking about is the gravel bikes have the curved handles like the ramp on the road bikes and then no not the ram horns those are something else joe um and then this one that he's got here has the straight handlebars like what you remember when you're you know riding bikes as a kid yeah i'm talking about like the down curve kind of yeah i was i forgot like, cause the Ram horns do curve down.

So I get it now. I thought you were talking about like the add ons that you could add on to like your straight bars that were called like the bull horns. Oh yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. I like those two. Yeah.

I want some of those actually. So this is more for an upright writing position, right? Instead of like the ones which were your laid over. So this is definitely more for a comfortable type. Yeah is not an aggressive sorry yep this is not an aggressive ride right yeah and it's not just the height of the handlebars too it's actually um the geometry of the bike so your hands are closer to your knees because you're meant to be more sitting upright than like leaning forward you know trying to kind of get that rim resistance down so it's really nice for just more comfortable rides yeah cool yeah so i love it uh and i'm

almost at i'm like right around the corner from a thousand miles this year holla nice yep and to go along with that uh i also recently got a fitbit charge 5 which is I guess you can call it a smart watch. It feels more like a Fitbit to me which is not owned by Google than a smart watch. So it tracks my heart rate and I get to see how I slept and it's got a really nice app that goes along with it.

It does a whole bunch of other stuff too which I don't even understand like VO2 measurements and sleep and stuff. I never really know how accurate that stuff is. But I really do like the heart rate monitoring, you know, in particular. Because one thing about the bike rides, and I was going on long bike rides, is like sometimes if you don't eat enough or if you didn't get enough sleep or whatever, you can kind of get out pretty far from like where you need to get back to and just be kind of wiped out.

And then the last, you know, get back to and just be kind of wiped out. And then the last, you know, half hour getting home can be really crappy. So I was always afraid of like, you know, pushing too hard on the way out and having a rough, miserable time on the way back. And so having the heart rate monitor has kind of given me a, some sort of measure. So I can kind of keep an eye on that and know like, Hey, you uh i've been pushing it a little too hard this time maybe we should ease up or i can say you know what my heart rate's not where it usually is on rides like this like let me step it up a notch man what rock have i been under to where i didn't know they were bought by google when did this happen uh you were under a rock and then you got like moved from that rock and then that rock

got so yeah yeah it just happened that rock got packed away with this information yeah 2021 oh so it did just happen okay that's when they completed yep but they announced it in 2019 oh geez man so so i guess here's my question for you. Why this over like the Apple Watch or something? So for me, it was mostly just battery life, and I don't have an iPhone either. So that was part of it too. I don't even know if you can use Apple Watch with Android. It's much cheaper too. I don't think so.

Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah, so it was $179. It's got great battery life. It doesn't do a lot of stuff. I could probably get text on it or something. I don't know. I could probably get text on or something. I don't know. I haven't even tried to hook it up. It's really all about the health, though.

Like, yes. OK, cool. Got it. Yeah, it's been tracking calories and all sorts of stuff on there, too. So it's just a really nice app. So it's kind of funny that I bought the hardware just to kind of buy into the app ecosystem. All right. I bought the hardware just to kind of buy into the app ecosystem. All right.

So out of my $10,000, $10,500 budget I gave myself, I've got $871 left. Do you? Yeah. Do you really? Okay. I couldn't figure out anything to spend it on. So I've got a recipe here i'll drop for uh dorito powder cool ranch and uh i know this kind of flies in the face of my uh you know kind of health idea here but uh it's basically if you take two different kinds of cheese powder get some ranch powder

a little bit of tomato powder i think it's like one other other thing. It's basically four, five, six ingredients. You got yourself some cool ranch powder. You can put that thing on chicken, cereal, soda, whatever. You can put on all sorts of stuff that Doritos would just never have the courage to do. Why do I have to put it on anything?

I'm excited about this. Seriously excited about this. If you look at the picture of the stuff in the jar, like, oh my gosh, like, oh man, I just want to start licking my fingers and just looking at that picture. I mean, how excited are you when you pull that Cool Rich chip out of the bag and you can't even see chip? Yeah. Because of all the spice.

It's just great. So you're like, you're like moving up to your mouth and sort of real slow. You don't want to drop anything. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that is fantastic that's awesome i know what i'm having for lunch tomorrow right yeah oh and i should uh should mention too i had a couple quick subs so xbox series s not the x the s as in i don't know shenanigans uh is a cheaper version of the x it's

not as powerful but it's gonna be just be just fine for streaming and casual games too. So if you can't get that X and you just get tired of it, like I'm getting tired of it, then you might just want to buy that. No, don't do it. Don't do it. It doesn't have a drive and it's not as powerful. Don't do it.

Yeah. I mean, it's got a drive. Is it S? Yeah. So it doesn't have an optical drive. Right. Yeah. It doesn't have an optical drive right yeah it doesn't have an optical drive yeah don't do it so um i'm curious because uh let's see you are now at a total of ten thousand five hundred and twenty eight dollars and you said that the first two items of your three thousand dollar budget were just fake.

So that's $7,000. We'll just knock that one off the books. So you're at $3,500. Yeah, $3,530. So even for what you thought was $3,500, you went over by $30. Yeah, I don't know what happened there. I don't know. Was that the end of the list?

Yeah, it's like for whatever my spreadsheet added up right yeah but how did you get the extra 871 here at the end on the spices like that's what i'm trying to figure out yeah yeah where did that come from the spices 800 bucks so if i if my maybe i missed the paste uh but uh when i add up my column here, I get exactly $3,500. Well, I did have to add the price for the play date because you didn't have that price in there when you pasted it in. So maybe that was the gap. No, I got it. So I got Legumine Storm, Sphero Bolt.

Oh, my gosh. I totally missed a whole section, man. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I went out of order. Okay. So gonna go quicker yeah there's totally more i missed a whole big section uh so i got the healthy uh i got the the i don't know i got the entertainment robotics uh and uh here i'm calling this the level up pack. So these are things for your mind.

And these are mostly services. And so I was trying to think, you know, always try to be like a better programmer, kind of advance that career or whatever. And so I tried to think like, what if I wanted to spend some money on, you know, making money? And this one, a coding book sponsor full disclosure uh educative.io has a monthly plan and fuse uh keep on code coding blocks you can get 10 off of 199 per year if you pay for a whole year and we've talked we've talked about these so i won't give you the whole ad review but in fairness though i don't know if that ad is still, you know, that code is still valid because they're not a current sponsor.

So just in case, I don't want anybody to like, hey, wait a minute, they said... Oh, yeah, yeah. Give it a shot. You can try. Yeah, sure. And so what I like about this is that they've got a curated list. And this is kind of something I keep coming back to.

It's like they've got a curated list of like really cool courses and it helps guide you to things that just are kind of hot and in demand so just by finding on this website it's like you know it's something that kind of uh is interesting to developers right now and so i really recommend it in particular as part of this kind of level up pack for the system design and machine learning kind of angle everything else is bonus it's all you know really good stuff so if you want to learn something this is a great way to do it they've got courses they've got um text they've got playgrounds it's a great way of really kind of reinforcing what you're learning by making you do it and as companion to that i've paired paired it with a leak code subscription.

Now, leak code is a website I've talked about many times where you can go and do a bunch of problems and, uh, the, you know, ranging in difficulty. If you were looking at interviewing at a fan company,

Facebook, Amazon, you know, Netflix, whatever, Google, Microsoft, this is the website that you want to be grinding on.

Uh, grinding is unfortunate, but, um, this is the way to do it. So if you really want to make some money, these companies are hiring more than ever before. So even if you're not in the area, it's the way to do it.

If you do buck up for an additional $159 per year, they have some really nice tools like code completion, debugging, and also some curated lists. Like basically, like, hey, go into Facebook uh look at facebook like go for this list but the code completion debugging is really nice because

it kind of helps steer you to things that maybe if you're learning a new language or maybe just you know some good stuff that you may not find otherwise otherwise it can be really annoying especially like library imports and stuff that's like when you know the function you want but you can't remember where it is it can just be annoying to go looking for it and It's like when you know the function you want, but you can't remember where it is, it can just be annoying to go looking for it. And that's not what you're there for. You're there for the algorithms, not for trying to remember whether it's systems.collections or systems.generics, you know?

So, yeah. Finally-ish, ACM subscription. Something we've talked about a lot. If you do pay $149 per year, then you get access to the digital library in addition to all their other great content. And that the digital library includes the O'Reilly, which caught O'Reilly library.

And I think this used to be 99, but they've kind of changed plans. Now there's a $99 plan and also 149. And the 149 was the one that includes the digital library now. But what's up? So just a heads up on the digital library, and this is really confusing. The digital library is not the same thing as the O'Reilly stuff.

So the $99 plan will still get you all the O'Reilly digital books. I'm changing it. Yeah. So that was really confusing to me when I signed up for mine. The digital part is more for like white papers and like technical articles written for publications as opposed to like the o'reilly publications like books and whatnot okay i don't care about that yeah yeah i didn't change it so now you're getting 921 dollars and 22 cents worth of cheese powder or doritos powder uh but yeah so um what i like about that and where it differs from educated io

is uh it's not curated at all. It's tons of books, tons of content, tons of video, lots of good stuff. So if you want to learn about something kind of more niche, like, I don't know, like a Flink or a Kafka or a ClickHouse or, you know, I don't know, some Cassandra. This is a great way to get like a whole book and spend a month reading that book and studying on that technology because you want a specific job or you want to do something specific at your job. Educative is more like you're going to spend 12 hours going through

learning Python course and you're going to come out the other end being ready to get started with Python stuff. Very nice. I just had to throw in freecamp.org for if you're just getting into programming like start their free code camp what did i say free camp free camp oh yeah don't go don't go to free camp.org do not especially not on your work machine team. Sounds like you've done that before. So, okay.

So then, again, I have to ask because then we're at $3,987 of your $3,000 budget. No, no, no. I removed that. You had an extra $180 for the game thing. So it's now $3,499. An extra $180 for what game thing? It was in there twice. The monthly game plan was in there twice.

I removed the second one. Play date was in there twice. So now you're at $3,499. Oh. Weird. Yeah. So if we had been doing a $3 you know budget he would have been spot on it could be i went first because now it's kind of looking like y'all made a mistake

yeah yeah shame on us i'm not good with hardware what can i say all right so i guess then it's my turn and unlike years past i didn't buy a whole bunch this time like I only focused on a few different things so I too had a cut like one throwaway thing only because this was last second and actually I have another throwaway thing because I have to put out there if you're looking at something like that playdate for 180 bucks like wouldn't this make a whole lot more sense so i i actually did this one on the fly wouldn't you just want to go get the steam deck like oh yeah i mean yeah i want that thing too dude that thing looks amazing and it's 400 bucks but that wasn't on my list i just had more than twice the price of the other

one yeah but this thing will play all your Steam library. And look at the controls on the thing. It's unreal. No, no, no. You completely discounted the point, though. The point of that play date that Joe said was that you were locked in. I get it. Because you were limited, then you would have fun.

Now you're back to every game on the planet yes which i don't know man this thing's just so sick looking all right all right so i i i'll go away from this now all right back to the real list that or my first fake part of the real list okay yeah i mean i did it wrong so i thought as as I was confirmed, that Joe Zach was going to say, I would just get a MacBook Pro. Done. Right? So I have to counter that with this. So we saw Tim Corey at the Atlantic Code Camp recently.

Good to see him again. And he brought with him this new laptop that I was like, oh, man, that thing is really pretty. And he had just gotten it. It just came out. It is called the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio. And it's a 14.4-inch thing. Man, it comes with Windows 11. And this thing is gorgeous.

It's what I always wanted Apple to do. And it's the first time I've seen this thing come to reality. So when it's just sitting there, it looks like a regular laptop, but what's cool is you can basically fold, like click the screen out and fold it flat on top of the keyboard. And you essentially have a tablet or what Microsoft wants you to consider is their studio, like their portable studio. So if you've ever seen the Microsoft studio computer, it's really cool. Like it's, you know, this big panel that you can draw on and it's got windows like really sweet.

Well, this is like the portable version of it and it's got some real beef. Like you can get, I think it's the, um, 30, 50 RTX processor, graphics processor can come in this thing. So this thing can be an absolute powerhouse if you equip it. Right. So, you know, definitely if you are in the windows ecosystem and you're looking to upgrade and you want something that's pretty slick and just beautiful, this thing's awesome. All right. That thing, the one that I configured on here right now is, um, $2,700. Uh, so, you know, 800 bucks less than the MacBook pro that Joe Zach just told us about. So pretty interesting alternative. All right. So that was my one that I'm not really counting, but you know, if I did, it would,

it would hurt my budget a little bit. Okay. This is where I get into things that I actually really do. Um, I drool about, I think about way too much. I've always, I mean, we've talked about it just about every year. We're always talking about different screens and whatnot, right? And I was watching Linus Tech Tips and he was talking about an OLED monitor, gaming monitor that he got, which I'll share in a second. But as an alternative to that, you can get a 48-inch LG OLED TV with 120 hertz actual refresh rate that has G-Sync built into it. And this thing's 13, it's $1297. And for those that have never actually seen the difference between your typical LED screens versus an OLED screen, everybody talks about the blacks being the thing that's so amazing, right? And it is, truly, because when you're showing black on an OLED, there is no light coming through. So like on an LCD screen or on an LED backlit LCD screen, there's light coming through those pixels, right? It's trying to block it off on an OLED. It actually blacks out that there's no light coming through that pixel. So it's true black, which really matters if you're like on a traditional TV and it's trying to show like a black surface, then,

you know, because it's still lighting up a pixel, then the room that you're in is still getting lit up. But with an OLED, the entire room would just be dark. Yeah. If you actually go view an OLED in a completely blacked out room, it'll look like a picture is just floating in the middle of the room.

It's truly beautiful. But here's the thing that is even better about it. So if you're a gamer or anybody at this point that uses a flat screen TV, like most people have one thing that all the flat screen TVs out there, minus the OLEDs are terrible at compared to our old clunky CRT monitors. You remember those things and the TVs is motion. So when you have horizontal motion on any kind of, you know, flat screen TV, typically there's like a little bit of a judder. It's not completely smooth, right? OLED does not have that problem. If you see it panning across a stadium of people, it's buttery smooth, right? And it's because it's so fast at refreshing that you don't have that same jitter that

happens on that. So if you're looking for something that you could double or triple, I guess, as a TV monitor or a TV as a monitor and as a gaming panel, this thing could be your answer, right? Like it's, it's truly amazing. And at the price point and, and being a person that has gone through several monitors at different sizes. Now I can honestly say that 48 is about the perfect size for a 4k display. If you're going to have it about two and a half to three feet back from you so highly highly recommend checking this out now if you do go that route just know depending on your video cards and all that kind of stuff you'll need special cables like you

can't just go buy any hdmi cable you're going to have to make sure it's one that can actually do i think 18 gigabits per second like it has to be rated to be able to handle the bandwidth that 4k at 120 hertz will support so you'll actually have to look into that so truly awesome hey just one thing i wanted to add to that because you mentioned g-sync but it also supports free sync as well free sync as well yeah depending you know regardless even if you're on amd you're you're still going to be at a game just fine on it hey and the cool part about this is is that means that this will work with your xboxes in in your playstations and your gaming pcs right

like it's it's truly like the best of every world um And from what I understand, the C1 series that I've got up here, this is like the newest version of the LG OLEDs. The burn-in problems that used to be there with OLED definitely doesn't seem to be an issue with these. So I would take a look at it. If you're just somebody that leaves the same screen on all the time, then maybe you don't want to look at this, but, but I would say definitely check that out. If it's something that may interest you. The reason why I was trying to make a big deal about that, the game sync, the free sync and the G sync is that like a lot of gaming monitors that you go by, they're one or the other, right? You don't often see one that supports both. Right. Yeah. And the thing is, is the reason why your G-Sync monitors are typically more expensive

is because companies have to pay a licensing fee to NVIDIA to include that technology in their screens. And for this to be in an OLED TV is pretty amazing. So now that I've sold you on why you should check this thing out, let me tell you why you might not want to. The price? Well, the price. I mean, the thing is, if you're looking at OLED, you're already looking at $1,000, period, on any size. However, really the main downside to this, and this really boils down to what your pc can push and what its hdmi output capability is

is when you buy a tv you're not getting display ports and that can be a big deal because display ports have been set up to work with pcs like super well right like if you have a 1.4 i think display port you're good anything you hook up to it's going to display the full gamut four by four by four pull down and all that kind of stuff, right? Your chroma key is all going to be good. When you're dealing with HDMI, you want to make sure that your computer can output like a 2.1 HDMI signal, I believe, in order to push the proper bandwidth and color spectrum and, you know, sub pixel support to your TV. So you'll want to look into that. And that is the one downside is you'll need to make sure that your laptop or your PC, whatever you're pushing that display with has that capability.

And that's why this may not be the best choice, but I did want to throw in here. This is one that Linus tech tips actually reviewed and i will get a link to this um in in this in the show notes as well there is a gigabyte auris gaming monitor that is also a 48 inch um now this thing is more expensive um did i not copy the price? This thing is more expensive than the, than the actual TV, but it's probably because they built in the monitor bits, right? So if we look at this thing here, it's $1,500, but it does come with, with your display ports. Now, um, this is also 120 Hertz. Um, you know, got all the same type stuff, HDMI 2.1, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, the one thing that you might want to watch his videos for. So his first one was like, Oh my God, I love this thing. His second one was, he seemed to have

a little bit of burning problems with his, um, and he went in and was able to adjust some things to sort of fix it, but he said it was kind of a pain so just know it's out there if you need um you know display port type stuff to get past some of the oddities with hdmi and and how they keep changing the standards on that but um just wanted to throw it out there okay so now that brings me to my next thing and i actually did buy this so i haven't bought these tvs or this this other display yet although i'm considering it i did buy this so i i i think i've mentioned in the past that you know it was actually jay-z and outlaw my buddy called us up one day was like yo you got to come over and check out the vr headset that i got and he had gotten the original htc

vive and this was probably what three years ago guys i think it's been a minute it's been a sure so jay-z's like dude i don't even know that I can try this because I usually have like issues with that kind of stuff. And I had very low expectations, right? Man, I promise you, I think all of us put this thing on and we were like, I need it. Like, I need this in my life. And I went and bought the original one. I had to have it. Well, the HTC Vive Pro 2 came out this year and the resolution

is 5K. They switched from, man, is it just incredible. You are surrounded in whatever environment you're in. And the experience is just amazing. Now, there are some downsides to it. They have what's called like the God halo effect or something where if you are looking at a completely dark screen with like some light text on it because of the Fresnel lenses in it, you'll actually see some halo effects. It's not noticeable during most gameplay,

but you'll see it on menu screens and stuff, which is a little irritating. But for the most part, this thing met most of my expectations. I don't love the speakers that came with it. Um, the headphones that came with it, they're not as good as what the head strap used to be on the old HTC five. And the price is a little steep at 800 bucks for just the headset, but the experience outside of pro level headsets that cost like three grand, this thing is absolutely phenomenal and will immerse you into the VR world that is just amazing. So you're probably asking, well, why are you doing this on a developer type show?

So first off, it's just amazing, right? Like most developers like playing games or a lot of developers like playing games. So it's cool from that aspect, but I've also wanted to, at some point, crack open a unity and mess with it because unity is, is already set up to be able to do VR stuff. And it's, it's built into the framework. You can get started. There's tutorials out there. And I have honestly thought about trying to do something with it i haven't gotten to it yet but maybe one day now let me know when you do i've been playing with a lot really i love it it's so good yeah man so good you need to get you an hdc vive pro 2 man yeah um oh and and i will mention

i bought this over something like the quest 2 because i am not logging into facebook every time i want to play a video game and and have them track everything that i'm doing i just no i can't do it so i will probably never own the quest 2 even though it's one of the highest rated ones out there so with that, how are you going to get on the Oasis then if you're not going to get the, yeah, I can't do it. Apparently I will never be on the Oasis. We'll see who gets that reference.

I do. It's ready player one. You weren't supposed to say it, Alan. I don't get it. Mute me. Um, all right.

So here's the other thing. And I actually held off on buying these. Mute me. All right. So here's the other thing. And I actually held off on buying these. So there are the controllers that come with the HTC Vive, the original one. They were okay. I mean, they've been around for a few years now and they get the job done. But if you want a truly, truly immersive experience, one where it tracks your fingers, when, when you're doing things like you don't even have to hold these controllers, you strap them to your hands. And when you're doing things in the game, like Arizona sunshine, man, that game is so fun.

You're basically shooting zombies, right? Like they're sneaking up on you. You hear them coming in your ears. If you want to pick something up, you grab it. You close your hand and you grab it. And there's like this tactile feedback when you're doing that stuff to where your mind is tricked into you're doing it. And if you close a finger on the controller, you'll see it move in real life. It's absolutely amazing. So these controllers are $279 for the pair, which honestly seems a little obscene, right? Like it's a little over the top, but it does add to the experience so much so that I have

to recommend it. And with that $279, you also get a copy of Half-Life Alyx, which is a $60 game. So really you're paying 220 bucks for it. But in Half-Life Alyx is seriously, if you get the headset, you must experience this game. It is mind boggling. It's just amazing. So, um, that is one. All right. So now my next thing up is I'm switching gears. I didn't put things into categories like Jay-Z did, although I probably should have looking back on this. I'm confused because even you're over budget. You're at 6,500.

No, no, man. I told you the Microsoft Surface one didn't really count. And then the Gigabyte. Well, then you're at 3,800. No, no. And then the Gigabyte, I didn't buy two monitors. I'm just saying if you need a display port you can use the gigabyte that one oh oh that one was a honorable mention i got yes that was

in case you need that i would actually go after the uh the oled tv first all right so yes uh all right so both those things out of the way i'm not over budget yet yes um yes um the kines all right so if anybody's been following our YouTube channel, you know that, um, I was on a roll doing some keyboard reviews, but now I'm homeless. So, um, I don't have anywhere to record reviews at the moment. So I've actually been pressing pause on it, but I've gone through several keyboards and last year, both outlaw and myself recommended the moon lander because it looked amazing. We've both now tried it and I still like it, but of all the keyboards I've tried so far, the one that I fell in love with the most after I got used to it was the Kinesis advantage too.

So here's my selling point to you. It's expensive. The one that I've got here is $339. That's the one with the silent key switches, which outlaw hates. And they're very linear. They're kind of spongy feeling. Um, I don't love the way that particular key switch feels, but there's only two options. There's the clicky ones and then there's the spongy ones. I need quiet. I don't want the clicky ones, but here's my selling point to you. It's 340 bucks. Most keyboards I've ever gotten, I've used for at least six years, right? So if you were to divide that out for how much you'd spend over a six year period for that thing, you're looking at a little more than 50 bucks a year. And I'm pretty sure this thing would last even longer. It is built so well, but here's the real thing for developers. The way that they've laid out that keyboard is

truly, truly the best ergonomic experience that I've had so far, meaning you move your fingers the least amount of any keyboard I've ever tried. Your arms are separated to a degree to where if you're, I guess, an average build, I don't know the best way to put this, but your hands are separated enough to where they're not crunched up together to where you're jacking your wrist at crazy angles to make that stuff happen. It's a natural feel. And once you get used to it, you can type incredibly fast on that thing, and it just feels nice. So I take back my recommendation of the Moonlander from last year, and I replace it with this. All right.

So now I'm down to the last couple. We've talked about this in the past. You can't game on this keyboard. Yeah, it's not a gaming keyboard. I'll give you that. You could game on it, but I don't know that it would be all that fun. You absolutely can't game on this keyboard.

The space is on the wrong side. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it would be hard. It would be very hard. Every game you'd have to like be very every game you'd have to like remap your your spacebar yeah if you're a gamer probably not if you're just doing it for coding this keyboard is fantastic or if you do a lot of typing document typing type stuff it's it's amazing just get xbox yeah just get an xbox agree get it get a real controller the controller for sure oh by the way that's why i would get the ps5 over the xbox series get it get a real controller the controller for sure oh by the

way that's why i would get the ps5 over the xbox series x i didn't say this earlier but the controllers on the ps5 are just amazing all right so i digress um so we've all drooled over various nvmes and you know storage as they've gotten faster over the years. I remember when we were talking about the first Samsungs that came out that had like 2,500 megabytes per second writes and reads, and we were like, oh my goodness, check this out. So you can get a Corsair MP600 Core 2 terabyte NVMe PCIe X4 SSD. This thing has a 4,950 megabytes per second read and a 3,700 megabytes per second sequential write rating for $240.

That is insane. So, man, like, this is, by the way, guys, this is what disgusts me about when you go to spec out one of the Apple MacBook Pros. To upgrade from one terabyte to two terabytes is a $400 increase in price. You can buy things to solder in. Dude,

you could buy a two terabyte, 4,950 megabyte per second read drive for 240 bucks. But yet they're going to gouge you $400 to double the space from one terabyte to two. That's, it drives me crazy. But at any rate, if you're doing any kind of video editing, like anything that where speed will save you time and, and give you quality results, man, this is a killer deal. Um, yeah. Unrelated. I'm not, I'm, I am by no means trying to accuse Corsair of this,

but, uh, have you heard about some of the dirty things that SSD manufacturers have been doing though? No, where, where they have, uh,

they've been caught and I, I don't remember this. Yeah, definitely. Uh, I don't remember like who it was or like where I read it. Um, otherwise I'd provide a link to you guys but there was an article

and they talked about it I think on like a security now episode or something recently where the manufacturers were caught giving the reviewers one thing and then after they would write their reviews they would you know over time ship some they'd be shipping

something else oh man and and their justification for like swapping out parts was because of um the supply chain issues and whatnot oh that's garbage and so rather than like changing the model number giving the buyer any indication that hey this thing isn't going to live up to the reviews of what you previously saw. They just kept going with the same same model. Yeah, it was it was total dirty. It was very dirty. I mean, I will say on that, that's terrible, at least with Amazon.

If you are on the product page itself, a lot of times and this is what I do before I go buy one of these things, I'll scroll down and look at the customer images because a lot of times there will be customers that run it through Crystal Mark or something like that to where they'll show you the actual read-write numbers and all that. So you'll know what you're getting is decent or not. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Where I thought you were going to go with that though, it was to sort by most recent of the reviews. You can do that too.

Yeah. Because sometimes they'll, they'll go out in lots that are, you know, garbage. So, but yeah, definitely go down and look at the customer reviews and I would do exactly what outlaw saying, you know, sort by most recent and look at the images for those things so that you can see if people have been doing the pass marks and all that all right so right now right now my total is 2954 and i ended up going over budget on this because it's funny when when jay-z said that he was going to do a robotic section i too have been wanting to do this for a long time and I just haven't gotten around to it. So

this little bit right here puts me over budget by $17, but I did it anyways, because you know, whatever. Um, so this is the Arduino ultimate starter kit and this thing looks really cool. And it's 63 bucks. And I mean, I don't even know how many pieces it comes with. It's ridiculous, but it's got screens. It's got, it's got all kinds of motors, button switches, like just all kinds of stuff. So you could play around and create some pretty cool projects. Like I've been thinking for a while, I would love to create some sort of project where I had like motorized window blinds, right. Um, for, you know, if I have a theater room to where, you know, I turn on, I turn on the projector and when I hit that

button, then it also triggers this thing to close the blinds or something. Right. I know that you can buy that stuff, but it'd be really fun to program it. So at any rate, this thing looked like a whole lot of fun for a 63 bucks and it's got 5023 ratings with a 4.7 out of 5 stars so i figure you know what i'm gonna toss that in there so with that that is my slightly overblown three thousand dollar budget for 2021 so you got like a tv remote there that looks fun you're like controlling things around the house with a little number pad. Wouldn't that be cool? And I mean, you can program all this stuff.

So yeah, man, this really does look like it could be a lot of fun. Well, I'm going to go ahead and tell you guys. It looks like I won the shopping spree this year because I did not go over like you guys did. So I'm just saying, I'm not trying to brag. Hey, man. We've lost $17 in the sofa somewhere. I'm just saying. This episode is sponsored by Datadog,

the monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Datadog provides customizable dashboards, log management, and machine learning-based alerts in one fully integrated platform so you can seamlessly navigate, pinpoint, and resolve performance issues in context. Monitor all your databases, cloud services, containers, and serverless functions in one place with Datadog's 450 plus vendor-backed integrations. If an outage occurs, Datadog provides seamless navigation between your logs, infrastructure metrics, and application traces in just a few clicks to minimize downtime. You know, we mentioned 450 plus vendor-backed integrations. That's awesome. You know,

you can also just create your own? So if you have your own metrics that you care about, they're just custom or specific to your business. And that's easy to set up with Datadog. So you can monitor that stuff and also tie it in with those other 450 plus vendor backed integrations. And this episode, we're talking a lot about, you know, shopping and spending money and whatnot. It's really easy to monitor your cloud spending with Datadog as well. It's great. You know, and we're always talking about their blog too.

So while you're checking out Datadog, you should probably poke around their blog because it's an amazing resource. Whatever you might want to monitor, they've got more than like, I'm sure they've got three articles at least on that topic. But I just found this other new section that I hadn't really like paid attention to before called the pop culture. Did you know they have a hackathon or at least they had one for 2020? So it's gonna be curious to see if they have a hackathon in 2021 and see what comes of that. But yeah, they they in that section, they have section, they have a mention of their internship program.

They have COVID resources where they've been, what they've been doing there and how that's been working for them. Information about them as a company, you get to know them and they're just such a great company and put out such great information to us.

So it's worth your time to go check it out. If you try it yourself today by starting a free 14-day trial, you can receive a Datadog t-shirt after installing the agent. Again, so you want to visit datadoghq.com slash codingblocks to see how you can enhance visibility into your stack with Datadog. All right. Well, uh,

it's that time of the show where, um, I think I'm going to give up on the radio voices. So, uh, you know, you're welcome internet. And instead I'm going to say like,

Hey, you know, if you haven't already left us a review, we would greatly appreciate you can find some helpful links at www.coding blocks.net slash review. And, uh, yeah, we really do appreciate reading those, and we appreciate you taking the time to leave those reviews. And so with that, we head into my favorite portion of the show,

Survey Says. All right. So every time you guys try to make fun of me, I see your faces. I'm not blind. You got to get like the proper Doppler effect, you know,

with the movement. Totally, totally. Okay. So, a few episodes back, we asked, hey, for your next laptop, are you leaning? And oh, by the way, this is rather topical

considering both of the shopping lists that you two have presented so far as well as the recent announcements from Apple. So for your next laptop, are you leaning something with Windows 11? It'll be fine. Or something with Apple Silicon? it'll probably be fine or something running some linux distribution app install fine or probably a chromebook it's good enough or laptop i'll stick with my desktop. I don't go anywhere anyways.

All right. So this is 170. So Techco's trademarked rules of engagement. Joe, you are up first. Oh, geez. This is tough. I think. So something with Windows 11. It'll be fine with 37%.

Okay. All right. You know what? You did me wrong last time, sir. So I believe it's also something with Windows 11. It'll be fine at 38%. Okay. All right. It'll be fine at 38%. Okay. All right.

I'll go 39. I'll give you some buffer. All right. 40. I'm going to regret that. 40. We'll go 40. 40.

No takebacks. Okay. Hey, okay. Well, no takebacks have been engaged, so therefore we have to call the game there. And Joe goes with something with Windows 11. It'll be fine with 37% of the vote. And Alan is locked in at something with Windows 11. It'll be fine at 40% of the vote. Yeah, no take-backs, apparently. Right, right. That's why you're locked in. Yep. That's right. Yep.

Well, you're both kind of right, but you're also both kind of wrong. Oh, that's not possible. You can, you know, because I learned from a very wise woman one time that sometimes when you win, you really lose.

And sometimes when you lose, you really win. I see Alan trying to think through, like, what is this reference to? I got nothing, man. You don't remember the movie White Men Can't Jump? I never saw it. Me of all people. Rosie Perez, I believe, was the actress. Woody Allen? Yeah, Woody Allen. Woody Harrelson. I never saw it. And what was it? Of all people. Rosie Perez, I believe was the actress. Woody Allen.

Yeah. Woody Allen. Woody Harrelson. Woody Harrelson. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Well,

it would be funnier to see Woody Allen doing it, but yes, it was Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes. Yeah. And Rosie Perez, but never saw it. I don't understand that as, as a fan of basketball.

How did you miss that? Maybe you need, I don't know that. As a fan of basketball, how did you miss that movie? I don't know. There's your homework assignment, sir. I dressed like Wesley Snipes in that movie for a good five years of my life. In his car. Can we talk about his car for a moment? I don't know about his car. Exactly.

It's so overlooked and not even really mentioned, but he drove a vintage 1970s classic Smokey and the Bandit, Burt Reynolds, Pontiac Trans Am Black with the thunder chicken on the hood of the car. And yeah, it was beautiful. The car was beautiful. And it was all in the movie for like maybe 60 seconds. I don't remember that. Yeah.

Um, okay. But yeah. So anyway, going back to the, the winners and losers, um, that you two are,

that was rather harsh. That was, it hurt a little. Wow. That's who I, uh, I guess I woke up on the wrong side of the bed or something. That was rude of me.

So something with Windows 11 was the most popular answer. But you both overshot it. Really? Yeah. Alan overshot it more. Yeah, he lost more than you lost. I lost bigger. Yeah. Yeah. He lost more than you lost. I lost bigger. Yeah.

Um, but yeah, it, it was like 34% of the votes. So Apple had to be real close then. Like super. It was, it,

Apple was the number two choice at 28%. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Now there was an interesting choice on here. Wait, what was third then? A desktop.

The desktop. Okay. That's okay. Do you want to know the interesting thing that I thought? Yeah. Nobody picked the Chromebook. Really? Imagine.

Zero. Actually. No, I, I, you know, when you're,'re i know you're you're saying that but like and some of the chromebooks you know they're nice pieces of hardware they're expensive to be things that run a browser yeah i mean couldn't you say that about an ipad they are expensive for things that run a browser. Wait, which one are we talking about now? I'm confused. Both. Both. But at least the iPad is a little bit more useful, right?

There's a lot more apps being written for it, whereas the Chromebook is literally like, you know, if you could live your world in a Chrome browser tab, you know, here you go. Yeah. There have been people, there have been people who've said that like in school, it was a cheap thing. They could use visual studio code online, that kind of totally get it right. Right. But I personally would even go buy a cheap windows laptop over a Chromebook.

Just, you know, I don't know. I remember there was a Samsung one, uh, a couple of years back that I drooled over and almost pulled the trigger on. And it was like maybe seven, 800 ish, something like that. So it wasn't quite like high end iPad price range, but yet you were getting like a 13 inch,

uh, you know, display on it. Right. So it, you know, and it was touch, uh, you know, display on it. Right. So it, you know, and it was touch, uh,

touchscreen and you could like fold it back to where it was like a tap, you know, worked as a tablet. So it was basically like your laptop that you just, you were talking about, except it was a Chromebook. Right. I like that.

You have virtual desktops, you know, there's a lot to be said for being this kind of snapshot, your environment and, you know, open it up, whatever. Uh, but I don't know not for me not yet i think the problem is that maybe we just like the command line too much and that's where it might be that that's where we're drawing the line okay well for this episode we ask, what's your favorite feature on the new MacBook Pro?

And your choices are the return of the function keys. Bye, Touch Bar. You got to think of like bye Felicia when I say it like that. All right. The MagSafe charger. I love proprietary cables. Or, I need an SD card slot, not a USB card reader that requires a USB A to C dongle. Or, that shape that harkens back to those early 2000s MacBooks.

Or, obviously it's all about the M1 Macs. 10 CPU cores, 32 GPU cores, this. Or your favorite thing is that I don't need to buy or enable a TPM 2.0 module to run the latest operating system. Looking at you, Windows 11. Or, wait, Apple had another announcement oh you missed one actually oh did i yeah who's not excited about the notch oh right i did miss the notch yeah and all the fun that your mouse can have traveling it yeah that's gonna work the like the phones there's a notch in the top of the display for the camera oh no really i think we just lost alan it looks like it's basically the smart bar it's just like there's

two of them now and they're on either side of the knots golly man apple stop experimenting just give us a laptop that people want yeah i mean you know you got to put that camera somewhere somewhere it's better than one that's you know looking up my nose on my laptop right now so it's got to be better than that that's terrible i didn't know how to talk to you about that but yeah since you've brought it up yeah it is terrible do i need to shave i mean it's awkward that you need to shave there, but yeah. I think Joe just turned a shade of purple. All right.

So now I think it's outlawslaw's got a few items to share. Okay, so here's the thing. Here's the thing. I'm surprised. I took this stuff serious. We had a job to do. We had one job to do. Well, how did I not take it serious?

You went over budget, sir. By $17. That's over budget. That's a McDonald's meal nowadays. Well, I didn't do that so how's that uh all right so i do have a bunch of things but um also uh you know i have some honorable mentions that i will i will throw out there too so oh so you cheated also mr no the honorable mentions are not part of my budget.

Okay. Yeah. No, I thought like, hey, this is a cool option, but I honestly did not include that as part of the budget. Okay. So the first thing that I'm going to talk about are things to like, I've talked about this kind of category in the past about, um, you know, like smart home kind of stuff. Right. And so, uh, you know, I take, I labeled this category as my smart home can beat up your smart home. So we start with an old favorite of, uh, the Casa smart light switches. And I think I talked about these before, but I just wanted to like remind her by, cause you know, you probably need another one anyways. But the great thing about that I love about these smart switch light switches is that, you know, you can have smart bulbs inside your house if you wanted to. And that's fine. But,

uh, those bulbs are most of those bulbs that I'm aware of are not rated for outdoor. And if you did put them in outdoor usage, then the manufacturer tells you like, well, you're definitely like lowering the life expectancy of the bulb. But the great thing about these that I especially love is for outdoor lights, you can, you know, make your porch lights and whatnot, you know, your garage, exterior garage lights or whatever, um, you know, come on it at whatever schedule you want. So, you know, that's, that's a nice one, but there's also a couple of variations of that that are fairly recent. So one is the smart dimmer switch, uh, which, um, actually I think I, Oh yeah, no, no, that's the right one. Um, yeah. So, so a smart dimmer switch and in that first light switch, by the way, 15 bucks,

this one is 17 bucks on Amazon. So like these are super affordable for what they are. Right. And you know, these are all in the same cost of family that we've talked about before. So, you know, I think you'll like them, but speaking of, and we did mention in the past, they are Casa is actually owned by TP-Link, so it's a really big company. Yeah. And we've talked about this one before, but they have a new version of it,

of the smart plugs. So they have a... If you buy the new version of the smart plugs, you can get a four-pack for $27. So these are indoor smart plugs that, you know, you would plug something else into this. So it would add a little bit of bulk to the, you know, the outlet, right. Cause you know, uh, it would be protruding a little bit, but you know, depending on your case, that might work out fine. And I thought, Hey, Christmas is coming up and I love

these things for Christmas, right? Put your Christmas trees on or your Christmas tree lights on it. Uh, like if you have any Christmas decorations inside the house that might require lights or electricity, for whatever reason, you can put it on to where like these things automatically come up so that when you wake up in the morning, your house is lit up for Christmas. And then when you go to bed, they automatically turn off so that you don't have to worry about setting your house on fire in your sleep. But I like – like in the holidays, I like to have everything lit up. And it always was a bit of like a pet peeve where like the family might only turn, you know, the, the family might only turn on the Christmas tree at night, you know, but not during the day.

And I'm like, but, but, but, but, but, but it's Christmas. I want it on all the time. So, so I love these things for that. But keeping in line with that thought, Casa also has an outdoor version of the smart plug that takes two. It's one, one plug, but it has two outlets.

And for that, it's $18. And that one is outdoor rated. So for all of your outdoor Christmas lights, you could also have those on a smart outlets. So I love it. Now, one thing real quick to call out about these,

I'm noticing in the bullet points on every one of them, they all require a 2.4 gigahertz signal for your Wi-Fi. That's not uncommon, right? It's not uncommon, but just know if you've gone straight to a 5 gigahertz and you've turned off your 2.4, these won't work with that. So you need to be aware of it if you're going to go buy these, but they are awesome. The bigger call-out that I would make on the two switches, because the two plugs that I mentioned, I mean, you can unplug those as needed, right? Plug them in, plug them in, unplug them as needed. But the two switches, you're going to need to take off the faceplate and rewire a switch and the bigger deal there is that because these are smart switches they need to always be on even if you've turned off the switch so you need the neutral so you'll have four wires going into this into these switches a load a line uh neutral and a ground. So, all right. So, um, like Joe, um, I had a category here cause I, I,

I like to that whole like quantification of self that started back a couple of decades ago. Like I've all like, I've, I've loved that ever since it became a thing. And Joe went the Fitbit route, but I am already in the Apple ecosystem. I don't know if you've heard before, but I have a couple Apple products. And I want the new Series 7. So I already have the 4, and it's done me well, right. You know, on all my rides, it's done me really well, but I think maybe, uh, because of some of those rides, like maybe the battery is like not what it used to be. I don't think, I'm not sure. Like maybe I've put it through his paces plus like wearing it to sleep as well. You know? Uh, I think maybe

I I've, I probably technically do for a battery and instead I'm just like, eh, I'll just use it as an excuse to get a new one. Right. Um, so the series seven is definitely on my list and that one is, I want the one with the cellular specifically so that like when I do go cycling, I don't have to take my, um, phone with me. And then that way I can still, uh, all the GPS, you know, I can still track my ride and use whatever apps to, you know, track the, where I'm going and I can still make phone calls. Um, you know, if I needed to, if, if there was a bad situation and the new series seven even has like features specific to cycling to where it can detect like

a cycling fall, for example, different than like, uh, you know, you were standing and fell kind of thing. Um, and they also added in the ability to check your oxygen level on the latest version, too, which I thought was pretty cool. You know, because they've talked about like heart rates and EKGs and things like that. And so they're always adding like, you know, another little thing here and there where they can where they're able to sneak it in. And this time, you know, oxygen readings was another one of the things they were able to add in. So I thought that's pretty cool. So. Then you got to like power things right and i i realize i'm a little late to some of the games on that like uh you know i would might say that i was like uh quote famously late to the airpod

game but now that i'm in the airpod game, I'm like, Oh my God, these things are amazing. And like, you know, Alan was like, those things will fall out. And I'm like, yeah, I thought that too, until I actually tried them and I swear somehow they magically stay in and they're just, it's amazing. It's an amazing experience. And, and of course, you know, last year we talked about the new pros that they came out with and they came out with an even newer version of the pros this year. But, so the thing that I'm late to this time though, that you would think like you'd be kind of surprised, like, well, I didn't think you'd be late on that one is the mag safe charger for the phone.

So with, I believe it was with the 12 that they introduced the MagSafe charging for the phones. And it basically like, like, like it sounds, it's just magnet just snaps on and it's just so awesome. You can, you know, just keep charging while and use the ports if you needed to. So if I wanted to plug it into, you know, some speakers or something to bother Joe, then I could, that was a joke. Cause you know, it doesn't have the headphone jack. And so I would need a dongle to do that. Um, but, but yeah, so, so the point is that, uh, like I was reluctant to get it, but then when I, once I did and I forget why I need,

Oh, I just need another charger. I was going somewhere and I was like, well, I needed to, I didn't have the charger with me and I'm like, Oh, I need a charger. So I'm like, well, I might as well just buy this one instead and try it, give it a shot. Um, but yeah, I've been a big fan of it since I got it though. Um, cause I've had the other type of chargers, I think that we've talked about in the past where like, um, that you can just like kind of cradle your phone in and, you know, but the phone isn't like necessarily held to the charger in any kind of way. Um, which, you know, is usually not an issue, but I, I just kind of liked this one because it, it's kind of small and purpose built but the

magsafe accessories in general though uh it does seem pretty awesome and especially with like the new ones that they've introduced like uh they had already introduced a magsafe battery pack that you could add on but then this year they they previous last year they'd introduced the magsafe wallet accessory and now they've added in a new one. I didn't understand from the recent thing if it was a new one or if it was now they could tell you where they last saw the one that was previously attached or not. But anyway, I thought that was pretty cool that they added that, though. All right. So then there's this little guy. So I mentioned the

Apple watch and wearing the Apple watch while asleep. So because I only have the one, the one watch, uh, you know, the question is, well, how, how do you charge this thing when you're, um, while you're wearing it? Right. And I'd previously shared the, um, that little USB one, the small portable travel one. But, and honestly, I questioned if maybe like, this is where some of my battery problems started happening, because what I noticed was that, that, um, the, this, the orientation that I had that charger on was vertical. And so there is a little bit of a stand that it has from like the USB cover, right, that forms a little stand for the watch to sit on. But what happens is because the, um, the bulk and the weight,

you know, the heft of the, uh, band is so far out, right. It ends up acting as like, you know, uh,

a lever that's pulling the battery away from that charger. And so like, you're relying on the little magnet in that charger to hold onto that thing. And what I kept noticing was that like the, you know, I would take the, the watch off of it and then, you know, put it on my wrist and it would be really hot. And heat is not a fan, you know, batteries are not fans of heat. So like, I I'm kind of questioning if, like, maybe that's why I was having some battery problems, too, on my watch. But I think I maybe previously shared something like this before, but I ended up buying a new version of this for my desk, which looks like this. And if you go look at that, it's a little holder for your watch.

And this one, like, traps the watch. So the watch can't move away from the charger in it. But the beauty of it is it's shaped like the original iPod. And your watch display is the display of the iPod. So it looks like you have this tiny little iPod on your desk that is your phone. And I previously, I'm pretty sure I mentioned another one that I had that the same company makes where it looks like the classic,

the original Mac, right? Yeah, this is super cute. That's pretty cool. And okay, so here's my first honorable mention to go along with this thing. Because we know how I am crazy for cables, right? Some people are crazy for Cocoa Puffs, and I'm crazy for cables. super short 0.3 meter charger for your watch that is unfortunately pretty expensive at $29.

But that part aside, that part aside, it's super short cable. So yeah, the one meter cable is less funny. It didn't used to be. Maybe that might just be an Amazon thing at the moment because it didn't used to be. Okay.

So then I forget. It was earlier this year that Apple announced this, but I don't know if we ever talked about it. I'm pretty sure we had talked about the tiles in the past. I love mine. Yeah. She's all the time. Yeah. I,

I used to love them and now I have a hatred of them. I can't stand the tiles. Yeah. With the problem, the problem that I had with the tile was 100% with the customer support. When you, when you had a, if you, because they had a subscription service where they would like, oh, hey, we'll just ship your batteries automatically. And I forget what else it got you, like better tracking or like more history or some, something like that. And,

uh, other people who are, I think subscribers can see your device and like, let you know. So it'd be like, Oh, someone, uh, someone at the bar you were just at,

you know, saw your car keys or whatever. Yeah. So the number one problem that I had with it was that when I actually did need to use the tile, this was, you know, a few years back when I did need to use the tile, was you know a few years back when i did need to use the tile

unbeknownst to me the tiles battery were they were all dead so i couldn't find the thing that i had lost which were my keys because the thing was and i and i come i asked uh you know tile about it and i don't remember the entire conversation at the time, but it just bothered me that it was like, why don't you at least give a notification that like, hey, the battery is low or something? And they later did. And they later did put out an update to the app, you know, that I saw like a year later that like, oh, it did tell you that the battery was low. But I'm like, well, that's ridiculous. And, and I don't remember any rate. Uh, I remember the customer support person at the time that I dealing with,

it was just extremely rude and awful about it. And I was just like, well, this is, this is a bad taste. I'd rather just cancel the membership then. Um, and, and so like, I've long waited for apple to make these they've been long rumored which are the apple air tags and if you haven't already tried the apple air tags they are awesome and they will you can see the battery levels uh you, straight from the app. There's not an issue there, but if you, you can like tell it, um, Hey, this is, you know, don't, don't alert me if, if I leave it in this area, because that's fine. You know, like that's, that's the house that's where I live. So of course I'm going to leave stuff there as I, you know, might go for a walk or something like that.

But anyway, the bigger thing to go along with that though are these. So I'm going to give you, actually, I'm going to give you two, I'm going to give you both the, the choice and the honorable mention. And all at the same time, Alan, I'm going to do you the favor. All right. So these are cases for the Apple AirTags for your pet's collars. Oh, pretty cool. So I have one for my dog and my cat so that if they were to ever get lost, then hopefully I can find them through the AirTag. And of course, like if you've never seen the AirTag demos too, by the way, if you ever do lose one, the phone integration, it's like so amazing. Of course, Apple would have it like tightly integrated, but like it'll point in the direction

that you need to go. And like, oh, you're three meters away. You're one meter away. You're standing on it. How do you not see it? You know, kind of thing. But anyway, so I put two sizes in there because depending on your pet, you know, like the cat is really small, right? So his collar is thinner. So I have a different type of holder for him that

has a better grip on the, on the collar. Cause you want one that would, um, you know, you don't want a wide grip cause then the, the holder could, could kind of, what am I trying to say here, Alan? It could bother it. Well, not bother, but it would, it would, because the, because the holder, the, the tag would hang down lower than the width of the collar, then there'd be nothing to hold the air tag in place because basically the way these,

these work is these are trapping the air tag against the collar and the, this case. And so you need to keep the collar on the center of it in order for it to like have that type of, um, support, if that makes sense. This is pretty cool. Yeah. And Oh, by the way, these are not, I forgot to mention this too. So like the four pack of the air tags, you know, on Amazon, $97 and change, right? The collar cases that I'm talking about, the large one for two of them is $11, like 1099. And the smaller ones as a four pack are 1488. So, you know, buy one and have a, have an extra so that if something should happen, if, if your dog or cat should tear it up or whatever, then you still have another one you can put on it.

And it works out really great. And because it's pressed up against the collar, I previously had the tiles on my pet's collars as well. But the tiles, if you recall, they have like a hole and they want to use like a key ring. So they would hang. Right. And especially on the cat, cause he was so small, like that was, that was some significant like droop, you know, to the collar. Right. So when he would go to drink water or whatever, like, you know, I was kind of concerned like, well, is he going to get it wet like you know but because with this type of collar you're pressing it up against the collar itself so

you don't have that problem at all and they do make like real for real collars i have seen collars that do have holders for the air tag built into them but at at the time, uh, they were like one availability cause they, uh, you know, and this all, I got all this like right after Apple announced the air tags. And, um, cause basically once tile made me mad, then I was like, okay, well, as soon as Apple comes out with their air tag, they had been rumored for years that I'm, I'm going to buy that immediately. And, uh, you know, these, these cases were the first things that were like reasonably available in price. Um, cause some of the other ones, like the purpose book collars I was talking about were kind of pricey, but also,

uh, the availability was limited and, you know, pet owners, I'm sure we'll, we'll understand that like, there is something to be said about, like about you want a specific type of collar for your dog or your cat. For a cat, I want a breakaway collar so that in case if he did get hung up somewhere, because cats can climb trees, so you don't want them to accidentally climb a tree and then get hung up on their collar and now they're hanging themselves. So that's why you want a breakaway collar and uh for the dog you know some people want the uh i don't know like the choker style some people want the ones that don't have the choke there aren't a choker and then there's the type that's like an in-between kind of thing like so you want something to work on any of them yeah so so my point is is like depending on the type of collar that you want for your pet right everybody has their preference and and even depending on the animal too there might be some variety like different animals might

respond differently to different types of collars especially dogs you know might respond respond differently if you're trying to like uh train them train them to, you know, and whatnot. So, uh, you know, you might have a particular preface there and this one can work on either, either thing. Okay. So, uh, then let's talk about this category. So funny that you mentioned the Kinesis advantage because in my category that I called, I need to get some work done. So, yeah, we both did recommend the Moonlander last year. You know, or at least I would say that I don't know that I would say there's recommendation. I would say that at the time we were both drooling over it. Excited. Yeah, because it seemed like it had so much potential.

And in fairness, it's not a bad keyboard depending on it, um, which is hard, which is a hard, hard pill to swallow considering its cost. Right. But, um, one, okay. The, the, you can't game on it. Period. We talked, like we talked about the shift key is like just too small of a hit point, you know, for your pinky because, or at least for me,

because I shift my hand over one whole row so that my pointer fingers on the D key. And so that shift key being the same size as every other key just doesn't work out for me. So I can't do that. And then, um, you know, the best I ever got, like I, I put in my solid hours trying to, uh, you know, learn how to use that particular layout. And it just took way too much mental, you know, awareness of like, wait, where did I remap that key? Oh yeah. Because like, you know, so many keys come blank. Unlike the Kinesis advantage that you shared, right?

Like that one isn't programmable. The keys are just where they are. And that's why. Not true. Not true. Oh, you can't totally. Yeah. You can absolutely remap the keys.

You can set up macros, all kinds of stuff. Oh, so then maybe you could game on it if you were to like get a key puller, move the space bar to the other side. Cause the keys are printed on that one is the point. They are printed. Yeah. But you can, you can remap them without moving the actual physical keys. So you, you can do it. So at any rate, the best I ever got to on that keyboard was I think my highest accuracy was maybe 97%, and my fastest words per minute on it was 75.

So I was getting into respectable ranges, I thought, but it still just took a lot of effort to get there. And that was after months of effort of like daily practicing on it too. So I'm really leaning heavily towards just going back to a mechanical keyboard, just a straight up, normal, solid one piece mechanical keyboard. Your old one. Hey hey this would be a good time to like get you guys on the spot hey can we go ahead and like just buy some mechanical keyboards and do reviews of just straight up mechanical keyboards normal solid mechanical keyboards and forget this ergo nonsense we probably could i like it so are you gonna buy a new mechanical or are you gonna use use your old one?

Well, that's what I'm saying is like this one here that I posted here is the one that I have my eye on the most that I think would be the way to go, which is the code version three keyboard. So this is the keyboard that Jeff Atwood teamed up with the people from WASDE Keyboards, and they made this keyboard. And it checks a lot of boxes for me, right? One, I can get this key switches that I want. That sounds awesome. It's got backlighting, like all the LED lighting that a lot of these keyboards, like I do love my bling. I'm not going to lie to you. I do love my bling, but in a minimum I would love, I would, you know, want some backlighting because the DOS keyboard right now, which by the way, I'll go ahead and throw the link out there. That's an honorable mention. Uh, of course, of course it is. That is my, that is still my gold standard, um, at the moment. So the code V3 keyboard with, uh, the MX cherry blues or the cherry MX blues, always say that backwards. You can get on Amazon for

180 and the DOS for professional, you can get same key switches, obviously, cause you know, you have good choice, um, would, uh, is $170 on Amazon. So $10 cheaper. But, um, that DOS keyboard I have loved and it, it is my gold standard. It is the king of the hill to knock down for me. But the one thing that it doesn't have that that code has is the code has a replaceable USB cable, USB-C cable specifically. And to me, that's a big one is the fact that I could like, you know, buy a cable of any length because the DOS keyboard comes with a six foot cable that's permanently attached. And that's a lot of cable when I literally, I am, my keyboard right now is maybe five inches away from the hub, right? So to have six feet of extra cable laying around, that's a bit much.

But so there's that. I will throw out one more honorable mention here. And this one was provided from our Slack community in the gear channel as to one I should try out. And I wanted to say it might've been Mike RG. I don't remember who said this one, but this is the one, the drop shift mechanical keyboard. And this one's a bit pricey. It's $280. But the thing that is interesting about this one of these three mechanicals, if you look at the profile of it, it is more like the moon lander where the keys are not contained in some kind

of a, you know, they're not sucking into a closure. Yeah. They're sitting on top of the thing. And so you get more sound from it. Cause that was the, They're not sucking into a closure. Yeah, they're sitting on top of the thing. And so you get more sound from it because the Moonlander sounded amazing when I would type on that. I loved the sound of it as I was typing.

And so I think the drop would be nice in that regard. But the one thing I'm not crazy about that I don't know that I would like is the choice that they made for the keys surrounding the arrow buttons, because it is a full size keyboard, but they kind of compressed it a little bit. And so as a result, they made the shift key smaller. They made the zero key on the numpad smaller, you know, to, to kind of go around the arrow. Does that make, or the arrow keys? Does that make sense what I'm trying to say? Yep. Yeah. You may not have noticed, um, this one's got RGB lights. Um, yeah.

So, so now the look of it, it does look beautiful though, with the lighting that you can do on it. And cause the lighting is coming from the bottom part of it. So it, it, it does look really cool in that regard. But, um, that, that, uh, I want to come back to one point later in a minute, uh, later in a minute, if I could, that sounded really good, huh? Later in a minute. I could that sounded really good huh later in a minute i'm gonna use i would struggle with that key layout too though i think um around those arrows it's that's the only thing it has me like kind of like i don't know about that one but uh but actually the one that was mentioned in the the gear channel was the drop makes another one called the drop control keyboard. And it is, um, a tenless

keyboard, which I, I, if I'm going to go with the full size, I prefer the numpad then, um, except on my laptops. And, you know, that's just because I know it's up. All right. So, uh, all right. but, and this is a big, but if you had to go with the ergonomic keyboard, I am going to call Alan and say he's wrong. Cause I think that this Kinesis freestyle gaming edge, RGB split keyboard, it is of the ergos that I've tried so far.

And granted, not nearly. I've used two far and granted, not nearly, I've used two of these split keyboards. Alan has used a lot. So he's definitely more of like the, uh, yeah, not thought leader.

What would be the word I'm looking for? Alan, uh, Gourmand more experienced. Well, I was just trying to like find a fancier word to say he's more knowledgeable in this area, but you know,

instead I'll just say he's more knowledgeable in this area. How's that? Sounds good. You know? Um, so yeah, so I'm like the, I'm like the pad one here and he's the Jedi when it comes to, uh, these ergo split keyboards. But the thing is, so going back to the moon lander for a moment. So I told you that 75 words per minute, highest accuracy was 97%. And that was after months of constant, constant, you know, every day. And when I would sit down at my desk, I would spend some time, uh, going through typing exercises, right? I've had this Kinesis freestyle now when was code camp. So I've had it like what, less than two weeks yeah it'll be it'll be two weeks this weekend so we're like maybe a week and a half call it right i've already gotten up to because i you

know you do have to do a little bit of like relearning well one i have to unlearn everything from the the moon lander because oh by the way this was comical my first typing on this uh kinesis was eight words per minute. And I was like, what? Cause I was, I was so, I gotten so acclimated to the ortho linear column layout of the moon lander. So I had, I did have to go back and like relearn some of that. And then there's that whole controversy of where do you locate the six key on these split keyboards? Cause some people argue that it should be on the right hand side. Some argue that it should be on the right hand side some argue that should be on the left um so at any rate on this keyboard a week and a half in i'm already typing like 74 words per minute with a 99 accuracy yeah and that's after a week and a

half of like going back to this keyboard and better than all of that, guess who's back? Back again. Michael. That's right. I'm playing Overwatch again because I can. Because you know why? The shift key makes sense on this keyboard. So, yeah.

Come find me. Come at me, bro. It's a pretty keyboard too, right? Like it really is a pretty keyboard. Yeah, it does. It does have, um, there, there, there are, I do have a couple of gripes though. One is it has a really cool feature for, um, the game mode. So what you can do is you can say like, Hey, I'm in a game mode and that will disable like the Windows key.

Right. So that you can't accidentally get out of the game. Right. Makes all the sense in the world because I've actually had that happen before. Like I'm for real playing a game and I accidentally hit that Windows key and then I'm like, oh, my God, what just happened? But, you know, you can disable that. Except I got the Mac modifier keys because I'm on the Mac for work purposes the majority of my day, and for whatever reason, that feature no longer works.

Huh. And I don't understand it. I assumed that when they would redo the, when you would say like, okay, hey, because they have a program, in the configurator program, they have a specific thing for like, oh, I'm going to use the Mac modifier key,

so it makes the keyboard aware, right? And so I just assumed that it was literally just flipping the position of the alt in the windows key with what would now become the command key and the alt key for the Mac. But apparently it also disables that game feature because now if I put on the game mode, I can still press what is the command key, which acts as the windows key on windows. So I don't understand it. I'm sure there is somebody would know the reasons, but I don't, I got to take a sip of water. All right. So much talking. The other major gripe though, that I do have, and this one is a big one about this keyboard is I cannot stand the, um, the wrist pad on it.

And the reason why I can't stand the wrist pad on it is not because of the feel or anything like that. It's because they made this, uh, aesthetic choice. At least I believe it's an aesthetic choice. Maybe they'll say, no, no, no. It was, it had to be that reason because of the tenting or something, but it, it starts out at a decent width, like what you might want in the center of the keyboard. Like, um, well, what would be the center if you were to squeeze the two halves together? Right. So like underneath the B key and underneath the, you know, the, the Y row on the right hand, right. It starts out at the width that you would want, but then it tapers off as it gets to the edge. Well, the way my hands sit on that thing, on that, those wrist pads,

it ends up rolling off of the wrist pad because it's tapering off. It's, it's, you know, there's, there's nothing there to hold my wrist where I need it. So I'm not sure if that's telling me like, well, maybe I shouldn't have my wrist that far back or what, but it, that is like the one gripe that I have with that one major gripe that you can't do anything about with that keyboard. Um, the tenting options on it are great because like you can actually tent this one higher than you can the moon lander, which I love. Um, so yeah. So if you had to get a, if you had, if you insisted on getting an ergo keyboard, then that's an honorable mention. It's not a bad choice. But here's one thing that I've learned about myself.

Life's a journey, right? And we constantly learn a little bit more about ourselves as we go through it. And have you ever noticed that sometimes you learn something and then you can't un unknow it and it almost makes things worse for you now that you know, does that, does that make any sense? Like once you experience the feel of driving, say an M3, well, you don't want to go back to, you know, a Yaris or a Toyota Corolla, right? Like you want, you're like, well, no, I want an M three. That, that was, that was amazing to drive.

And then you drive now that you have the M three and like you get to drive a Lamborghini, like, Whoa, I want the Lamborghini, right? Like you can't, you can't like,

I know that kind of thing, right? Well, cars. No, I was talking to sports. Yeah. So figure it. Okay. that explains it yeah yeah so uh as all of those keyboard efforts though another thing where the moon lander completely ruined me that i never knew that i would care about or that would mean anything or matter to me is the moon lander wisely ZSA

wisely made the choice of using key caps that are made from a chemical called PBT. And so they're there. If you were to go shopping for keys, he's caps, they are double shot PBT key caps. And I never, like I, I started using those and I'm like, Oh, these kind of have like a weird feel about them, right? Like they're, they're different, but they feel awesome. And that was actually one of the reasons why, when I first started using the Kinesis Freestyle after the Moonlander, one of the problems that I had with it was because the key caps that it has are ABS plastic. And so my hands were slipping around. So if you've ever seen a keyboard with like really shiny key caps on it, then those are

ABS plastic and the plastic, it starts out already smooth and shiny and it'll just get smoother and shinier over time. Right. But PBT key caps are gritty and it's just due to the nature of like the different chemical, the PBT chemical compound versus the ABS chemical compound. Like they're, they're ones, one's grittier than the other. And it turns out that I super, super super love i'm a big fan of the way those those keycaps feel and so that um what what did i what was my word per minute on this thing like 73 74 words per minute on the the kinesis i pulled every printed keycap off of the Moonlander and put it on the Kinesis Freestyle. So I still have some keycaps, some of the original Kinesis keycaps on here because the Moonlander didn't have them printed or they were like different shapes or whatever.

But every keycap that I could switch, I did switch. And I totally love the feel of these, these, they, the PBT key caps do not feel, um, slippery like the ABS key caps. And now I can not ever not have those. And that is circling back to the code keyboard. The one issue that I have with that, both it and the DOS use ABS plastic. And now knowing what I know, right? Like, well, I want the PBT and the code keyboard. You can't buy the PBT keyboards, even though it's made by WASDE keyboards. And if you go look at WASDE keyboards, uh, you know, they, they will let you configure a keyboard in any way you want,

except you cannot configure it like the, the code keyboard. So the code keyboard, you can buy it as is, but you can't customize it at all. Uh, you know, from, from, from the manufacturer, at least, I mean, once you get it, you can do whatever you wanted with it. And the thing is, is that like Jeff Atwood in his wisdom made some, what I think are wise choices in the choice of the printing of the, of the lettering and whatnot on the key caps, but also even like the locations of some of the functions. So for example, on the code keyboard, uh,

you, you typically on a full size keyboard have a cluster of six keys above the arrow cluster, which are like the delete, um, the page up, page down home end and insert insert. Thank you.

Um, those keys on the code keyboard also act as the media keys, but here's one of the smart things that he decided on was the keys are double printed. So the top part of the key cap is your normal delete, insert home and whatever. And then the front face of it is the media function, right? And you use the, there's like the, you know, the function key

close to that cluster on the bottom row. And so that way you can like access those functions. So I thought that was like a super smart decision that was made there, right? But you can't get that key cap for those, uh, that six set of keys there where it's printed on both sides. If you go to Wazi keyboards and you have them print anything else, you can't get that combination there. And the thing that's frustrating, I love Wazi keyboards. You can like print what font you want your key caps printed in. You can pick the location. Do you want it printed on the center of the keycap? Do you want it printed on the top center? Do you want it printed on the top left, top right?

Do you want it printed on the front? Do you want it in super big letters because our old eyes can't read it anymore? Or maybe you're still young and you can read an 8-point font on your keyboard. Whatever your case is. Of course, I went with the 10 point cause it's being 21 and, but you can't get that one. So that, that's the one frustrating thing is that like, uh, I kind of want to get the code version of the WASD keyboard. Cause it's really just a WASD keyboard that's been rebranded, but I'm not sure like how i'm gonna like maybe over time i'll forget my love affair with these uh um pbts or maybe i'll just like pop the moonlander keys off

of the uh freestyle and put it on that one yeah so whatever you need to take a picture of this um hybrid keyboard frankenstein thing you got going down and share that on this show notes page. It really wouldn't photo. Well, there's cause it, cause, um, I would have to put it under like to see it under light. Like I can technically tell the difference, but I don't know that the camera would catch it, I guess is what I'm saying. Okay. Um, but looking at it right now in my room, I can see the difference between those key caps, but I don't know that a camera would pick up that subtlety. Okay. So the point is, I say all that because, you know, you can go out and just buy keycaps that, you know, turns out to me, keycaps really matter.

And you can go out and find the the crazy keycaps yeah well you can also go to like some places and spend some really obscene money like buying custom keycaps even and by custom i don't mean like you know they necessarily have like fancy pictures or anything like that on them i just mean like if you say like hey these are the fonts this is the location and all i want are the keycaps that i'm going to replace on my existing keyboard. You know, some of those companies will charge anywhere from like 50 to a hundred bucks for those things. Right. But you know, maybe this will work for, be good enough for you. So Razer, the gaming company that makes my absolute favorite mouse we've talked about, they make a double shot PBT key cap upgrade set that'll work

for, you know, most any traditional mechanical keyboard. It's 30 bucks on Amazon. So I put that in as my honorable mention, uh, you know, in case if, if that kind of thing mattered to you as well, especially if like the thing is like once you start becoming an educated consumer about keyboards, you learn things that you're like, Oh, I didn't know that I really cared about that. But now that I do know it and I've experienced it, then now I do care and great. Now my life is ruined. So these are the problems that plague me. But there's also another set here that I wanted to share from HyperX called the Puddin' Keycaps.

These are also double shot PBT keycaps for $25. And if you look at these, if you like to have some color and some bling about your world, which we all know how I feel about that, I love it, Then these are actually really cool. What these are is they only like the, the bottom two thirds of the key cap are still like translucent. So if you have an RGB keyboard, it looks like the letters are just floating on a bed of color. And I actually had an opportunity to experience these key caps in person at a local Best Buy. And, uh, you know, it w it was kind of neat. I don't know that I would want, you know, I like to have variety of color on the key caps because I like to be able to like, you know, have the WASD cluster green. And I like to have F5, F8, F10 and F11 red and, you know, things like the deletes in the backspace and the escapes are, you know, like a, an orange,

like, Ooh, color, you know, like, uh, you know, warning, but, but, um, you know, it, it was a, it was a pretty cool option to see, like, so if you didn't want to have like your keys colored for like specific function, but maybe just instead, because you like to have, uh, RGB, then maybe those would look pretty nice for you. All right. So, um, because of that though, there's a new category of, well, there's things I got to buy again because I gave my DOS keyboard to my son along with the wrist pad that I had with it. And so I'm strongly considering going with this. HyperX makes a wrist pad that is a, uh, got a cooling gel memory foam wrist pad for $20 on Amazon. And I am kind of considering it. It's got, it's highly rated. It looks like

over 5,000 reviews. I don't remember exactly, like maybe 5,400 or something like that, but, um, very highly rated wrist pad. Now that is competing against though. My, uh, my personal King of the Hill, which is the glorious gaming, uh, wrist pad. And that, but that one is $29. So, you know, that hyper one is almost $10 cheaper. So I don't know. I'm kind of thinking like, well, maybe I try it, you know? Um, and so, yeah, but the, the glorious gaming window doesn't have the memory foam it doesn't have the cooling gel but also like i never i was never bothered by that but then again maybe this is the like the pbt keycaps and now once i experience the cooling gel memory foam i'll be like how did i ever live

without this the other one's actually rated better and it's cheaper the hyper x yeah it's rated it is rated higher like the the gloryorious, well, hold on. I don't remember what the rating number was, but the Glorious Gaming, they were both highly rated. And the Glorious Gaming had like maybe 4,400 and the HyperX had like 5,400. So the HyperX has almost 6,000 now. Really? The gaming one that you've got here is a 4.5 out of 5.

And the other one is, I mean, it looked like it was a full 5-star. It is a 4.8 out of 5 with almost 6,000 ratings. So, yeah, it's rated higher and it costs $10 less or 30% less, if you want to go that route. I mean, some of the things that I read about the complaints of the Glorious Gaming one was that people said, hey, at this price point, I expected it to be memory foam or cooling gel. And I'm like, hmm. Read the description. Yeah, exactly.

That's what I thought. It doesn't say anything like that, so I don't know why you thought that it would be. But okay, whatever. say anything like that so i don't know why you thought that it would be but okay whatever um now here's here's another honorable mention though but i don't know that i would i don't know that i would want this one so this is the this is one by razor which similar to the hyper x it is a memory foam and cooling gel but if you look at the profile of this one, this is why I'm not sure about this one, because it looks like it could tilt forward like it could pivot. Because like both the HyperX and the Glorious Gaming, like they're just a flat slab, you know, that's laying on your on your desk. This Razer one isn't.

And it's it's also the most expensive one to it. Thirty five dollars. But, you know, it was another well reviewed one. So I don't know. I thought like, well, you know, some people that might be their thing, but, uh, I think for me it would be between the HyperX and the glorious gaming. And since I've already tried the glorious gaming one, like maybe I'll give the HyperX a go. So, uh, there's that then if, uh, you know, sometimes things go wrong and when they do go wrong,

you need the right tools for it. And I am a big fan of tools. I love, I love tools, especially tools that are like purpose made for the thing. Like if this was the early 1900s, I would totally be like a Ford mechanic and have all the Ford specific tools to work on like the Model T's and whatnot. I love that kind of stuff. So iFixit, which I'm sure we've all been to their websites, we've all seen their teardowns, but they have a line of tools that just looks so amazing. So for $70, you can get the iFixit Pro Toolkit. And I'm going to throw in a honorable mention here of their iFixit Manta Driver Kit that's $65. And I'm really, like, honestly, I would be torn because the ProTech toolkit comes with some things like little suction cups to pull screens off of devices

and little, what do they call those little wedge tools? Just that, i think they're little wedges yeah no but there's there's a tool so there's a name for it that starts with a p but i can't remember it off the top of my head um they look like guitar picks right they do yes those things to plungers they have like little plungers um and like it comes with like a variety of different little plastic plungers for it and everything. Anyway, so there's other tools that come with the Pro Tech Toolkit besides just the driver kit. But that driver kit comes with bits that aren't available otherwise from iFixit. So I'm like, huh.

Because you can get all the other stuff from iFixit separate from the toolkit. So I'm like, huh. Cause you can get all the other stuff from iFixit separate from the toolkit. So I'm like, I don't know. Uh, yeah, I'd probably never need like a, most of those things, but you know, be nice to have. Cause when you do need it, then you want it. Right. All right. So we're in the, we're in the, you know, we're nearing the end of the pandemic, but that doesn't mean that, you know, you haven't had to like up your zoom calling game. Right. And this is going to seem like a weird choice here, but we last, we last year we were really drooling over the, the zoom pod track P eight, which I'll go ahead and throw that in here as an honorable mention,

by the way. And, um, it looks so promising and we were big fans of, of the zoom products already. Cause we were already using them for the production of this show. And so we felt like, Oh,

this would be a natural, natural transition. And before we were using the zoom H six, if I recall was the model number. Yep. And before we were using the zoom H six, if I recall, it was the model number. Yep. And, um,

so when these P eights came out, we felt like, Oh, these things are amazing. Like it had six inputs, uh, that you could take into it. It was $550.

Uh, you know, it was basically like, um, a headphone amplifier, a mixer, and, um,

well, I guess maybe it's just those. It built into one, but you could also like easily connect phones to it or tablets, computers. You had a whole sound pad of things that you could do with it. You know, they looked, it looked really promising, but what we ran into is that it only supported 44.1 hertz, kilohertz audio, which doesn't work well for any of the video work that we would want to do, which we wanted to be able to use the same equipment because we're probably sitting in front of the same computer to do the same thing. So we ended up switching to the Rodecaster Pro, which is, you know, it's $50 more, but, uh, unlike the zoom, you automatically get the built in Bluetooth cause that was an add on to the zoom, but you lose two inputs to it, two mic inputs into it. Um, so that was the only downside there, but it has been rock solid and super easy to use.

And I've really loved it for that. So I thought it at least deserved a mention, even though it is super specific to podcasting or any kind of – you have to be in the content creation kind of world. You're either live streaming on Twitch or YouTube you know to want to have that set up but you know i know that we have audience members that ask us about stuff like that so i thought i would add it and then yeah i will say if you are trying to do anything with twitch or anything it makes it stupid easy right like it's yeah it's uh it kind of i don't want to say it dumbs things down but it makes it really easy to be your audio interface into your computer if you're having to do anything plus it's a recorder on top of things so it really is a joy to use yeah yeah and have you ever like been on a

call with like customer service you're like man, man, I wish I could easily record that. Guess what? You can with this. Um, I use it for phone calls all the time. It's fantastic. Just failed it. Like hands-free. I've got my great headphones. I got the great head, you know, microphones. It's great.

Yeah. I do the same. Yeah. Have, have your phone Bluetooth into it and just talk over it. Yeah. Or even hardwired into it. Yeah. Yeah.

You can do that. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. So while we're on the topic of like, you know, setting up your environment for recording stuff, I've become a big fan of this little guy. So rather than having like a microphone mounted to something, some kind of a boom pole, that's, you know, always there and in the way and inflexible because it's mounted to the desk. OnStage makes this super small. It was the smallest one I could find microphone stand.

It's like four inches tall, and it's like $13 on Amazon. But because of the cage that our microphones use, it works out perfect because this giant microphone cage ends up adding all the height that I need to get this microphone exactly where I want it. And that cage is necessary in order to support the, the shock mount, you know, system so that it doesn't vibrations don't transfer to the microphone, but for $13 well spent in my opinion.

Also in that camp or similar camp of, uh, you know, you want to look good when you're doing your Twitch live streaming, you know, gaming and whatnot. We talked about the Elgato lights last year, like just the plain light. I think, uh, Joe and or Alan were a fan of those, but I like the ring light. And, uh, because I don't want like too much light blasting me in the face, you know, but I want enough to make it count. And the Elgato ring light, I think, uh, you know, solves that niche just perfect for me. It's, it's, it's the right amount of light without overwhelming me. Um, and has all the same features as the, as the previous one. Um,

so worth it in my camp. And then this little guy has also been super duper handy. And that is the Elgato HD 60 S plus capture card, which allows us to take whatever camera we might want, which could be a high-end camera, plug that into that. And now I have a USB connection from that capture card to my computer. And the beauty of that setup, and this is where also the Zoom, the, the Rodecaster Pro or the Zoom come into play is that the audio coming out of the Rode is USB to the computer. The video signal from the capture card is to the computer is also USB. So that means I can have a USB hub that takes in both of those two signals. And then with a USB switcher, I can switch the USB signal from my work computer to my personal computer.

Meaning I get to use all the same mic camera, everything, regardless of which computer I'm on. And that is worth its weight in gold. It makes it so easy for me to have good-sounding audio and a good-quality picture if I need to do something for work. There's no excuse for not hearing me. But also then for the production of the show, like it works out perfect. And I'm so in love with this setup. It is, it is, you know, in the past, uh, in previous years,

I used to have like one set of headphones connected to my work computer and another set of headphones connected to my personal computer. another set of headphones connected to my personal computer and i literally have like you know personal headphones were on the right of my desk you know hanging on a hanger and work were on the left and you know i was constantly flipping headphones back and forth it was such a hassle uh yeah this this has made life so much easier so one quick call out on this hd60s plus i almost made this a pick for me too because i really do like this thing a very very important thing to know and we found this out the hard way with jay-z he had purchased the hd60 initially. Oh my gosh. Yes. You need to know, don't, if you want to plug a camera up to this input card and be able to use it on things like zoom calls or whatever, just know the HD 60 S does not have the driver that makes your computer think that it's a webcam. The HD 60 S plus does have

that driver that lets your window that lets your either Mac or windows machine recognize the input signal as a web camera that can be used on zoom, WebEx, whatever else, right? So just know there is a distinction between the two and it, they also, Elgato has the HD cam. I think is what it's called. So it's, it's the cam link cam link that is made specifically for, if you just want to plug a camera up and not do game capture or whatever.

So just know if you're trying to grab something that will allow you to do game capture and other more advanced things, get the S plus because it actually does matter. Yeah. And I forgot to mention, um, I don't know if I said the ring light was $200 in the Elgato HD 60 S plus is $160. So, uh, there's your, here's your prices. Now, all of this is building up. Okay. We're, we're building up to the climax of this list here because in my category for what I like to call music to your ears is maybe, and I do have this, I absolutely do have this as my, maybe my favorite purchase that I've made in a very, very long time. The Cali audio LP six studio monitors. Now these are, these are six and a half inch speakers.

All right. Uh, we have the woofer is a six and a half inch woofer. These are about $149 each on Amazon. So, you know, you're looking at just under $300 for the pair. And I swear these things like my ears are just so in love with the audio from these speakers. Now they are huge. They're there. These are studio monitors. So these aren't your typical, you know, little your typical little Logitech speakers that you might put underneath your monitor or whatever. These require some setup. And plus, you'll want to have them properly angled at your ear and whatnot, but they're just, they sound so amazing. And Cali did such a wonderful thing. They made it so super easy to set up because on the back of the box, there's a bunch of dip switches. And depending on where you have the speaker located physically within the room, proximity to walls. And if it's like sitting on a desk or whatever, they're like flip this switch to there, that switch to there, that switch there,

whatever you need to do. And it, the speaker is configured for that room and they're just gorgeous. I play my guitar through them. I play video games through them. I use them when I'm on my calls. I use them for that. These speakers, if I could snuggle with them, I probably would. They're super awesome. So that's Cali with a K. Picture Cali as in California, but with a K, and it's because they're from California. And in fact, the LP stands for lone pine because I was like a California reference to,

I don't think it was the name of Parker. I think it was just the type of tree that's like, you know, native to California or something. But Eric, they are gorgeous. They sound amazing. And I'm going to give you several honorable mentions in this category, though, because, you know, your taste may vary.

And, like, between the three of us, we all went and listened to different ones, and we had a variety of different tastes that we walked away with. So there's the KRK RP5 Rocket G four studio monitors, which are $189 each, the Yamaha HS sevens. And I put here in the lit in my notes here, specifically the HS seven eyes, which you can get for three 80 each. So those are the most expensive on this list, but there's two things that I liked about. One is that the Yamaha's, uh, the HS seven eyes have mounting points on the top sides and bottom of it. So you could like, uh, you have a lot of mounting options on it.

Like that's rare. Most of these studio monitors, you can't hang from a wall or, or on a pole or anything like that at all. But the HS sevens, you have't hang from a wall or on a pole or anything like that at all. But the HS7s, you have a truckload of options. But the mount that you need for it, it's not a standard mount. It's a Yamaha specific mount and it is kind of pricey for what it is. But T5Vs and the JBL 305 PMK2s. So the, the Adam audios were $200 each and the JBLs were 155 each. And really, you know, I went and listened to them in a proper like sound, uh, room that was set up at a local guitar center. They had a specific room set up for just that. And I say proper because there were some like choices that they had made,

like, you know, where they had placed the placement of some of the speakers. But, you know, what are they going to do? They had a lot of speakers to sell. So they did it as best as they could have for as many options that they gave you. But I went in there expecting to buy the KRKs, and I left with the Calis because I just was so blown away by how they sound. Yeah, fun point. You mentioned LP earlier. Did you know that KRK is owned by Gibson?

Huh, no. Yeah, I didn't either. I just found that out recently. And I should say, you know, famous, they make Les Pauls, a famous type of guitar. So, yeah, sorry for that. Those are no slouches either, right? Those KRKs sound amazing. For the price.

Yeah, the Kallies are just crazy good value for the price. And. The, the Cali's are just crazy. Good value for the price. And they, they're so musical sounding too. Yeah. They, when they were introduced in, uh, 2019 or 18,

I forget. They, they, the, the, the guys that made them introduce them at like one of the, um, Oh God,

what's the, uh, the, Oh God, what's the, uh, the expo for the media, like Rocky mountain. Nam. Yeah. They, they introduced it at like Nam and it was like the,

uh, you know, the star of the, of the, the conference that year when they introduced it, uh, everybody, you know, walked away loving these. Um, so in the reason why I say like, that was like building up to the climax, right? So like when I was talking about those roads, like the one thing that is

kind of nice about either having the road or the zoom available to you is that from either of those devices, you can go out from the device as a, like a TRS, like a, uh, uh, what is it? The eight inch, eight inch, um, like a guitar cable, uh, that they would use. You could use that out into the, uh, quarter inch, uh, into the back of the speaker, or you could use XLR. So depending on like what your device is, uh, quarter inch, uh, into the back of the speaker, or you could use XLR. So depending on like what your device is, uh, you know, you have those two options. You could also do RCA cables into like the Cali's for example, but, uh, they tell you like, Hey, you're going to be limited in like what you're gonna be able to do. Like, you know, your best connection is going to be the XLR cause it's going to be the balance. The then next down from that would be the guitar and the, uh, the quarter inch and then

lower. That would be the RCA. Um, but now this one, this one I haven't bought yet, yet being the operative word. I'm super, super, super, super, super. I think I'm going to go ahead and do this. I think I might pull this trigger and get the Cali 12 inch sub to go with it. So I'll see if I get the sub to the tempting. The sub is five 99.

And this is the only Amazon link that, uh, this is the only link that I couldn't find on Amazon because Amazon technically does say like, how he has a store, you can find it on there, but there's like a product thing. It's weird.

Like the pictures don't match up, but some of the description does. And so rather than confuse anybody about what I'm talking about by giving an affiliate link to Amazon, I just thought, you know what? Here's the link to Sweetwater. It's the same price everywhere. And, you know, it'll do. But the thing is then the way that what wiring would work is you would wire into the sub first and then from the sub, you'd come back out to the satellite speakers.

Right. Uh, and again, with the way Callie has it set up, there's like dip switches on the back to be like, Hey, where are you going to place this thing? And what kind of speaker are you going to connect it to you're going to because they because cali makes a couple different varieties and by the way these sixes are the or actually six and a half are the smallest ones so i gotta love that like there's a little bit like the audiophile of me is like ah or or not even audiophile like the you know loud bassy guys like ah i just love that the smallest one that they have is still gigantic for my desk.

I mean, on this subwoofer, the crazy part about this thing is you think, hey, man, that's kind of crazy. $599 for something that you're using for this. This thing has 1,000 watts of power, which is insane already for a little um you know monitor sub but what's even more impressive is this thing has a range between 23 and 160 hertz which beats a lot of home theater type how low did you say 23 oh that's crazy yeah that's. And it's max SPLs dude are 123 decibels. I know. Right. It's amazing.

And you could support eight of the, um, uh, one, one of their lines of speakers is the IN8. You can support eight of those from what I recall reading. That's crazy. Off of that. 123. I mean, that's like recall reading. That's crazy. Off of that.

I mean, 123. I mean, that's like a jet. It's like, yeah, man. And if you can actually put out clean base at that kind of SPL at that low

frequency, that's unreal. And, and it's, and you might be thinking like, well, outlaw, you'd be crazy.

Like that thing is going to be over my, that's too much for your desk. You read their their descriptions it's actually made to be put under a desk i mean i'd love to hear i'd love to hear how clean it is because that's that's shocking they they do they do have uh like it does have like proper like handles on the side of it like what you might do for like your your um musical gear, musical gear, you know, if you were, if you're any kind of musician, but, uh, they do say like, you could take it on stage or you can put it under your desk. You know, they, they have it configured for either. And, you know, so yeah, so I'm strongly considering that now, now here's something that

I wanted to throw this in there because I thought, well, you know, for a lot of people, maybe they want the speakers, but they don't want, um, to buy a zoom or a roadcaster. Cause that's a big expense, especially if you're not doing any kind of like content production or whatever, or maybe you're not on calls.

And so I get it right. And so in that case, what I found, and now this is, I haven't tried this, so I can't speak to how well it works. OK, but it seemed to have some good reviews. I found this thing from Palmer Audio and it is they really intended it to be like an option to where you could have like a single device to do muting and have single volume control. So you have like a

dedicated piece of hardware that is the volume control, right? But it takes just your regular three and a half millimeter audio as one of the inputs or, you know, it can be one of the inputs. It also has like XLR, uh, and as well as a quarter inch. But then you could go from your, at least from what I was reading, you could go three and a half millimeter from your computer into that and then XLR out of that into the Calis, for example. And so like, you know, for $65, if you didn't want to have, if you didn't have a need for the Rodecaster or the Zoom P8, then, you know, that seemed like a reasonable alternative. Now,

there's also another alternative here too that I thought I'd throw in as an honorable mention, which is the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. So you could do a similar kind of thing here, but except instead of a three and a half millimeter audio, you'd be going in USB to it, but you could accomplish the same type of thing. Now that, that one is $170 and this isn't really its intended purpose, but I was just trying to think like outside of the box, like, well, what if you don't want to buy a road, you know, what if you don't want to spend $600 on a road caster, but you do want some like proper studio monitors, like how could you get around it? So there might be other options out there. Um, you know, I, I didn't go too wild looking into like how, how you might be able to do that.

I mean, obviously you could probably like get a, a, a different kind of mixer that might be able to take like a USB input into it and then have that as an option to go back out. Um, but you know, some of the mixers, you know, depending on how crazy you get, you can get back up into there and the price of the focus,

right. And, and the issue there though might be desk space. So both the Palmer and the focus, right. These are, these are pretty compact devices for what you're, you know, if, if your only goal was like, I want the studio monitors connected to my

computer, how do I do that? Then these are, these are small, but instead of like buying a giant So I should be roughly $35 away from the cap if I were to – where am I at right now? Let's see. Yeah, you're correct. $35.55. Yeah, yeah. Here we go. You ready? So for the ultimate here, I'm going to give you a whole bunch of options.

And in fact, I'm just going to throw these all out at one time. So I got a whole bunch of options of honorable mentions along with the choice. But, you know, we live in this new world where, you know, because of the pandemic, everybody's working from home. And, you know, you got to pandemic, everybody's working from home and, you know, you gotta, you gotta treat yourself right. Treat yourself and, and, you know,

decorate your house. Now that said, I will, in fairness, uh, when it comes to like decorating a house, I'm probably not your best, you know,

choice to turn to. I mean, uh, I've seen the way Alan and Joe decorate. They are far better. Like you walk into their houses and you're like, wow, did you guys hire like a professional interior decorator? And I'm like, no, I just went to the store and found some stuff I liked. And I'm like, whoa, I would have never.

But this is where I up my decor game. You ready? So there are a whole bunch of, uh, you know, keeping with keeping in true fashion of, I like the funnies. And I think that, I think that everybody could say, I have a good sense of humor and I appreciate a good joke. And so, um, my favorite pick here is imagine you walk into your friend's house and you're like, Hey man, I need to use your restroom. Can I go use your restroom real quick? And then, yeah, sure. No worries. It's down the hall. And you walk in there and they're hanging on a wall. 24 by 36 inch picture is a picture of, uh, Oh shoot. I forgot his, the actor's name now. Uh,

I can't think of it either. Oh shoot. No. Uh, Daniel, uh, Oh, come on. You look it up.

I'm looking, but, but we all know that scene from dumb and dumber where, uh, Jeff Daniels Jeff Daniels means to use the restroom while he's on his date right and it

was a really I'm gonna call it a really explosive moment in the movie if you recall the scene I'm talking about so imagine you go into your friend's house and you see this big picture greeting you

as you are doing your business, right? That's kind of funny. Can we admit it? That's pretty funny. So all of these are $35 to round out my list, but they're basically pictures of like comical bathroom scenes whoa what are you doing dude why'd you do that i was filling in prices for you i already did that they're to the left um yeah but it didn't sum correctly well not for these are baseball these are honorable

mentions so they are part of the list yeah yeah let's let's call this out real quick though. So outlaw cheated. He said that we went over, but he's got like honorable mentions for all of his things. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah. Cause I'm, I'm good like that. So totally whatever. So the, um, you know, like there's a whole bunch of them, right? Like there's? There's more than I even found. But here's the ones that I found. So if you're familiar with The Big Lebowski, there's that scene. Pulp Fiction with John Travolta before he meets his maker, there's that scene. There's Friday.

Do you remember that? Come on in here, boy. Remember that scene? Don't go in there for 30, 45 minutes. I've been smelling yours for 18 years you can smell mine for five minutes like there's so many bunnies man i swear it's hilarious in the friday one by the way there were several great ones of their of that view it was so good there was one with like ice cube like kind of holding his nose like with his arms crossed and holding his nose like looking with a frown on his face it was so funny and then uh there's one with like both both actors and then

i can't remember the the actor that played the father but there's one scene with like him trying to like you know he's grunting like you know uh just hilarious and then there was one of uh from jurassic park the first jurassic park where like the building had been torn away and the lawyer was sitting on the toilet, uh, right as the T-Rex is coming, there was an injury. Yeah.

There was another one of, uh, from bridesmaids where, uh, do you remember the scene where Melissa McCarthy had to, uh, hat hat was in a rush and, uh,

you know, only the sink was available. And then, and then to round it out if you remember from something about mary the frankenbean scene they're so funny i was like we all need a little bit of humor and you know what potty humor is humor is the funniest thing ever. Let's just say it. We can all admit to it, right? That's not up for debate.

So that rounds up my list. You get a C- for decoration. Oh, come on. It's funny. It's funny, though. I get an A+. Come on. You know that choice. That's a solid pick right there.

But I am going to say again, you, sir, did blow your budget. You can't have an honorable mention for everything on there and then act like you didn't go over budget. No, the things that I picked for me were within the budget.

But I called out other things. I'm like, well, other people might – would say like, well, this would be the better one or whatever. I think you came in like a few cents under if we're going with that. Yeah, I think it – I'll allow it. It was, yeah, 56 cents. that. Yeah, I think it was $0.56. So, you know, back in the 80s, I'd have enough money to get a Coke and still have some change.

Right? Not now. Yeah, so I think the only resources would be Amazon. So there'll be a bunch of links to Amazon and other places in this one. But with that,

we head into Alan's favorite portion of the show. It's the tip of the week. All right. And I have a tip for you. If you go to vscode.dev, just try it now. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about GitHub.

You can go and push period on a push call and a repo. And you have to be logged in, I think. And it popped up in VS Code. Why don't I just pop open VS Code? So, yeah, this is what it looks like. It's literally VS Code running in a website. And you can install extensions. They're working on supporting more.

Not all of them work right now. Of course, there's a lot of things that require server-side support. But, yeah, I mean, it's literally VS Code and a website. So, yeah, don't even bother installing it more. Just use the website. That's crazy. So good. Where does it say it?

What's it? I assume this is a Microsoft site. I assume so. I would think so. I saw it on their blog. That's where I originally got the tip from it's tightly integrated with github so yeah oh it is saving it to github okay because that's what i wanted well i click open folder and it opens my computer my local computer no it doesn't

it sure does oh my god it did oh your current browser doesn't. Okay, so I'm using a browser that it doesn't like for that. Yeah, how does that work? Okay, so if I point this thing to a real browser, oh, I guess it's going to upload everything to GitHub, then it would upload whatever folder you pick? I don't know. So when I picked the folder, it said, hey, do you want to give your permission to your browser to access these files?

And I said, yes. Yes, I do. Well, that's brilliant. And shortcuts work, too. Try the command P or whatever. Oh, B. Yeah, if I go to Chrome. And installing extensions, I was like, how is that going to work?

But, yeah, it's a limited amount. But if you look, when we think about it, most extensions that you install are client-side. So things like IntelliSense, like I'm installing the Python, what you call it, extension right now. It does say it has limited functionality. So there are some things that it doesn't work. It's probably like a debugger, you know, stuff like that maybe. You might have a problem with, but the IntelliSense,

all that kind of normal jazz you're used to is all fine. That is absolutely crazy. Sure enough. And this is why the Chromebook was not a bad option, Alan. Yeah, I mean, honestly, this is when things like this become the norm,

then, yeah, then Chromebooks and thing clients are going to be viable, right? That's pretty nice. We talked about video games earlier where you just click play and you're playing. You're streaming it. Yeah.

That's interesting. It's wasteful. You're seeing a lot of traffic over the internet. All right. Well, for mine, I wanted to point out that we've talked about the beauty of Scaffold before, but I don't know that we've talked about with the command line interface that you can make your life even easier with environment variables. So one of our buddies that we work with pointed out to me that you could set up some environment variables with scaffold and then it would just automatically

assume that. So for example, your kube context, rather than specifying it on the command line, every time instead of typing in dash dash kube dash context, it would just pick up the environment variable and you could let that be your default. And you can, if you needed to override it, then you still can in during those times, but there's things like that. You could set up port forwarding, for example, there's a whole truckload of options. So I'll have a link to the, a very, the, um, various environment variables that the scaffold command line supports that you can use to make it a lot easier. There's also a limited support for environment

variables in a few of the other basically custom. So this is some variables that you have to set that it looks for. But there is limited support for custom environment variables. So if you wanted to have set values in a what's

called chart you can actually do some limited templating where it's like oh like your curly bracket yep so if you wanted to like use your computer name or something in there you could do that i got you huh i did it's only in certain certain areas i think it's like set values or not set value set files well one of the few places you can do it it's interesting this length that i'm going to uh i'll give they talk about um there's the global environment variables but then they have environment variables for the specific uh areas too so like for the scaffold build process like what you're talking about where it might need to do uh the you know render a helm chart if you had any kind of templating in it. Like, maybe that's where

that section is? Yeah, so the thing I'm talking about is for specific deployments, like if you say, like, you want to pass a variable and do three nodes instead of, you know, two, or three replicas instead of two replicas. And that's where you can kind of do stuff like that where it's not necessarily, you know,

available for that command, but it's whatever you want it to be. I only know how to do it for Helm. I assume other things work too, but Helm is the only one I've tried it for. Very cool. I'm still playing around with the VS Code.dev. That's nice. You can install extensions up here. That's crazy.

It doesn't make any sense. All right. So mine, because we just got done with the Atlantic Code Camp, one thing that, and I know we've all experienced this when we've gone to conferences or talks or whatever. if people are using themes in their browsers or IDEs that are dark themes, they don't work well when you're presenting to a group. It just doesn't show well. The contrast of projectors typically don't get that in a, in a well lit room. And on my talk,

I was showing some Kubernetes stuff and, you know, we've talked about our love of canines on here. Well, the default canines theme is dark, right? Like it's, it's very much a command line type thing. Well, they have one called solarized light that if it's something you need other people to be able to see, this is actually a really good theme. And I think Outlaw had mentioned in a previous episode that, you know, one of the things that he liked about canines was the fact that you could do skins and all that. Well, when

I was looking for a theme for this, one thing that I found really awesome about this is if you go to the directory where it has your skin for canines, if you paste in the new configuration for it and just hit save, it auto-updates the interface. So if you have canines running, if you modify the skin, it identifies that it changed and it shows it to you immediately. So it was really easy to kind of cycle through these things and find one that worked. And the Solarize Lite one that we'll have a link for in the show notes worked extremely well for showing to an audience,

you know, when you're, when you're doing this in front of, in front of a group of people. So, uh, thought I'd call that one out. It was a good one.

Well, is that it? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. yeah sorry i uh it's a little short i was like wait a minute where are the other 85 tips that alan usually has caught me off guard there yeah man um it's like when you get on a long road trip and you finally get there and you're like huh all right well then uh with that subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, more using your favorite podcast app. Like I said before, we greatly appreciate it. If you would take time out of your busy day to head to www.codingblocks.net

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