Coding Blocks - There is still cool stuff on the internet

Episode Date: January 21, 2024

This episode we are talking about keeping the internet interesting and making cool things by looking at PagedOut and Itch.io. Also, Allen won’t ever mark you down, Outlaw won’t ever give you up, and Joe took a note to say something about Barbie here but he can’t remember what it was. The full show notes […]

All right. So what's this episode about then? What are we talking about tonight? I don't like this intro. You want me to redo the intro? Okay, hold on. Hold on a second. It's right there.

I got it. I got this. I got this. Hold on. It's right there. Hey, how you doing? What are we talking about? See, that one was way more polite, right?

Because I said, hey, hello, you know, introductions, salutations. And then, let's talk. Let's just get into it. Let's do it. We'll get into Cutting Blocks, episode 226. Who are you, sir? Who are you? Me?

Either one of you. Oh, I thought you were talking to him. I thought I was talking to him. Good God, man. I'm Alan Underwood. That you are. Who are you? I'm Michael.

All right. We got a good one for you today because we have some cool stuff to talk to you about. A lot of it courtesy of Micro-G, who we know and know and love yep so we'll be getting into several things there's a paged out e-zine easing easy yeah easing uh there was one one that he submitted that was like merge commits versus rebasing and large repositories and then we got just a bunch of random other things we're going to talk about before we get into the more research intensive things that we plan on doing here in the very near future. So with that, though, it's time for Outlaw to work on his proper noun pronunciation. Wait, I thought you said we weren't doing the more research intensive parts of it.

Well, we heard that you'd actually done some of these pretty well here the past couple episodes. That's right. That's right. Thank you. Thank you for recognizing. Yes, yes. Okay. So from iTunes, we have I never write reviews.

Right? Maybe. Maybe. I think so. I think we should just say it. Just say it. Just pronounce it. Yeah.

Thank you. See, I get I think so. I think we should just say it. Just say it. Just pronounce it. Yeah. Thank you. See, I get the proper nouns. And Ivan, that's definitely not. So in dumb America, you know, I read that and it looks like Kuchen. And I don't know. I'm going to assume that like Kuchen and I don't know. I'm going to assume that's wrong. And I apologize, Ivan. Even if I got it right, I still apologize for assuming I got it wrong.

But I tried and that's what matters. That's right. It's not terrible. All right. So we also thank you for the reviews that I never write. No, actually, it was Ivan Kuchin that was hilarious because it was a five star bad review. No, three stars. Yeah. Hold on. Three stars. Yes. That was excellent. Thanks, Jay-Z, for confusing everybody that will ever read reviews here going forward yeah but by the way but let's be fair sorry jay-z but i never write reviews their review they're basically the the most interesting reviewer in the world yes they

were i love the meme yeah by the way you're uh mispronouncing that's killing me it's actually in ever right uh sorry in ever writer reviews yes i i did i did stumble on that for a minute because i wanted to pronounce it something similar to me i had to i did stumble on that for a minute because i wanted to pronounce it something similar to me i had to i had to do that i'm sorry well actually yeah and it's 1337 1337 that's just some number i don't know yeah yeah you guys you can save that for boomer hour we have no intro We have no intro. We have no intro. No, speaking of Boomer Hour, I guess we're already there.

We're going to complain about the intro. There we go. All right. So what do we got coming up here soon? Hey, Orlando Code Camp coming up February 24th. It's a great event. It's always great. The 16th to any one.

You should go. It's going to be amazing. I'm not going to be there. I'm going to be living in Georgia. So I'm going to have to miss this this one i'm excited about living in georgia i'm bummed about missing earlier cooking but if you're in the area you gotta go actually he's gonna drive back down there we know he is probably the timing is not conducive to that yeah probably not hey so i have an update to the last episode so we were talking about the wireless microphones and whatnot, and Outlaw pulled out the one that he bought from Shure that he uses with his guitar.

And because he pulled it out and showed the guitar one, like when I went searching for this stuff on Amazon so that we could have some affiliate links in there, they actually had like a guitar setup kit. And so that's what I included, but he's actually the one that he has does come with microphones as well. So you can, you can buy that wireless transmitter kit that will work with both the guitar or, or with microphones.

So wanted to clear that up. I might even have some, some links to that in this particular episode, just to fix it up. Let me say it a some links to that in this particular episode just to fix it up let me say it a different way just to make it abundantly clear like it doesn't come with the microphones you can buy it's a dual band configuration and you can buy it in a variety of configurations so you can buy it where it comes with a lavalier mic or like, what's the other mic where like, looks like it's the color of your skin,

but Britney Spears. Yeah. Whatever, you know, get the Britney Spears mic. You can get the traditional mic setups. There's, you know,

whether or not you want, even for the guitar setup, there's like, do you want a rack mount version of the receiver or do you want a pedal board version of the receiver there? So there's a whole variety of things. And the point was, is because you were talking about using a lavalier mic, a wireless lavalier mic. And this is what was super important. The point I was trying to make at the time is the fact that it's a dual band.

So, right. So, so that it wouldn't interfere necessarily with like your wi-fi or get interfered with with your wi-fi or whatever else yeah it'll it'll find the best signal that it can find across this uh you know all of the all of that spectrum on both bands and it'll automatically flip to it and it's so seamlessly easy too that's the thing it's like pair you know the receiver to the transmitter like i've i i went down a super right you know how we do i went down a super rabbit hole how do we do yeah you know now you know jay-z don't know but come on different rabbit holes you know what i'm talking about i do but so i was like i went down the super rabbit hole trying to figure out like you know find a wireless system that i liked and especially for like

guitars with active pickups uh you know some of those some of those systems get um you know that the active pickups will bother them and uh but just seeing like the process that you had to go to pair the transmitter and the receiver on some of the other systems was kind of a headache. And in this one, it was super non-eventful. You turned it on and it was like, oh, it just already worked. Yeah, which is what you want. I did actually go look up what microphone Britney Spears uses. Oh, yeah?

It's the Crown CM311A. This is from equipboard.com, which if you don't know, it's a site you can look up to see what musicians and artists use what equipment, and it'll cite sources in there. So they just want to let you know. There's a special note on this one that says this is what she uses and has used on many tours.

But she definitely lip syncs. She's not singing through. So you're saying she's Milli Vanilli Part 2're saying she's millie vanilli part two yeah i mean all the dancing stuff i think they all do now you couldn't do it i mean seriously you know how out of breath you'd be it's ridiculous all right so one other piece of information so jay-z i love the tip that he left on last episode with obsidian and how he kind of keeps things organized and all that so i actually went and created a little youtube video just to to sort of introduce some people to obsidian because a lot of people i don't think have ever heard of it and then two to show some of

the tips that he had because i thought they were truly awesome and yeah so if you if you got like i don't know 10 minutes and you speed it up to 1.5, you know, it's actually probably not a terrible watch. So with that, let's get into some random things first. So I think I mentioned the wireless stuff, right? Like I'd mentioned the TP-Link, Omada, and some other things. And going down all that, I realized I need a network switch and some cabling in my house. Like, I just don't like it that I don't have it. It drives me insane. The problem is, is running. It's going to be a real pain in the butt, like seriously going to be rough.

But when I started going through it and you know how we do, we do, are you going to tell me, I know how we do. So I start looking bad and things have progressed since the last time I bought some network cable. Like I want to say when I first did this, you know, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, like cat five E was like the fast stuff. So I start looking around, man. And you would think, okay, well, they moved on from cat five.

Now it's cat six. Then you got cat six, eight. Then they have a cat seven. Then they have a cat eight. Then they have a cat eight, eight. And I start looking and I'm like, man, what in the world? So cat seven is not compatible with the others, which I find absolutely ludicrous and insane. And cat six, eight is actually pretty fast actually pretty fast cat 6a you can find basically

everywhere it's reasonably priced and it's it will do up to 10 gigabits per second over basically a i think it's 300 meters that's i think that's a pretty long run it's either it's either 100 meters or 300 meters look if you're if in the triple digits for your runs, then that's a lot. Okay, it's 100 meters, so it's 300 feet. Okay, so I wanted to make sure I get that right. So 10 gigabits a second over 300 feet. That's pretty good, right? Pretty good.

That's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing. That's killer. He has higher standards than you, apparently. I do have higher standards. So then I'm like, well, all right, well, what will Cat 8 do? Because it is backwards compatible.

It will work with Cat 6, Cat 5, all the older equipment. It'll work with everything. Cat 8 will do 40 gigabits per second over 30 meters so 100 feet but then it'll actually fall back to like cat 6a standards if you want to go to 100 meters so it'll do your 10 gigabits over 300 feet so i'm like well i need that right like i mean why i mean why haven't i already had it you know right why wouldn't i why am i punishing myself but i don't have to buy and get you some yeah dude you can't find that stuff

anywhere and it is you think it was gold-plated so here here was mean monster doesn't make a cat eight cable that you bought i don't buy monster cables because i'll never forget honestly the reason why i don't buy monster cables is i went to a demo one time and they had their cable hooked up to a light bulb and they were like look at how bright this light gets and i was like are you freaking kidding me you were you were trying to sell a hundred dollar cable to people by showing them how, how bright that light bulb gets. That is snake oil salesman garbage to the core. Right. And from that point on, I was like, I will, I will find another cable.

I will never buy that. But I digress back to the, the cat eight thing. So here was my reasoning and it may not be legit. It may not be valid at all, but I at least wanted to throw it out there. I like how he's open for some honesty here, because he's saying it may not be legit. It may. I may not need it. Yeah, so, here's why. And actually, I think this is fair because, Jay-Z, you were looking at it on the internet, right?

And you're like, should I get the 1 gig, the 2 gig, the 5 gig? Five. So here's my point. And this is where things are really frustrating. So if you buy 1 gig, all the cabling out there in the world right now will basically support you, right? I think even Cat 5e will go up to a gigabit and it may be maybe it's a little bit lower i can't remember but cat 6 for sure will cat 6a will more than do it and cat 8 you're good but if you start going to two gigabit internet think about it all the network cards that you have in all your devices are all gigabit like

they won't even do it so in order i found this out when i got in comcast cable here for the first time i think i got 1.2 or whatever and the ethernet port on it was 2.5 gigs and then i realized oh crap i've got to upgrade stuff to even be able to take advantage of this thing. And so unless you just have one Wi-Fi access point that can cover your entire place without dead spots, you're basically throwing away money if you go to something like five gigs, because you need something that's going to take that signal further and take the entire bandwidth. So what about the idea that you have five connections at one gigabit um so maybe yeah maybe maybe that carries some weight so i mean like buying the sir the point i'm making is that like having that service there's still an argument to be made for that service there and that's why jay-z chose poorly when he didn't get the five i think we all agree on, right. I think we all agree on that.

But here was the reason why I went and bought Cat 8 stuff was – Oh, you did go this route. Oh, wait. What? Did I not make that clear? No. That was – Was there any doubt?

That was my mistake. I thought – I mistakenly assumed that you were setting this up to like where I would have said like, yeah, you should have gotten the eight. But you were going to tell me why I'm silly for have wanting for have wanted to get the eight. And now I learned my mistake that you, in fact, did get the eight. So I apologize. No, it was a stupid decision. But I will I will sort of back it up with the sort of things are moving in the faster direction.

Now, what I don't get is I think things are moving further in the wireless direction than they are the wired and wireless is actually getting faster than wired in a lot of cases, but you still have to deal with like the, the ACE is set up that I have right now. It's six E what they don't tell you is that six gigahertz frequency those things need to be almost line of sight otherwise they drop connections like crazy it is incredibly frustrating so i ended up turning off the six gigahertz bandwidth bandwidth for talking to my devices because my whole family was getting mad at me like i keep disconnecting and i'm like okay i got you so at any rate i had remember

there's some problems on those problems on those devices if you had the 6e turned on then like iot devices would drop it was a pain so so basically what i'm getting to is everything's getting faster like if you go buy a cable modem or, or a lot of the, the routers nowadays, they have 2.5 gig, uh, ethernet ports and stuff on them. So being that we're pushing in that direction, I was like, you know what? I'm going to future proof this because nobody likes to pull wires through the house much. You do that once and you're done with it. So that's why I bought it. But I will say it's ridiculous. You can get the cat six,

a like a Keystone Jackson stuff. You can get those for a song. Like they cost nothing for a pack of 48 of those things for cat eight. I got them on alley express for 160 bucks. If you buy them anywhere here in the U S like $4 a connection. Yeah. If you buy them here in the U.s double that it's ridiculous man so like everything cat a related was our cat eight related was just ridiculously expensive and what i found is and we probably all know this if you shop on amazon if you find it in the store here and it's you know eight bucks you go on AliExpress, you'll find the exact same thing for half the price, but you're gonna have to wait a month to get it.

Right. So as long as you can play the waiting game, you're fine. So that's what I was going to say to the person's drop shipping from AliExpress anyway. Yeah, they are. That's totally what they're doing. What were you going to say? See, you're pulling the wire yourself through the house then you're saying yeah i i don't know i guess it depends on how hard

it is um but i've got a lot of fishing tools and whatnot to be able to do that so i got a lot of fishing tools too and it's the it's the between wall to wall isn't the problem between the floors is where it gets tricky yeah i won't be cutting out some some sheet rock and throwing big drill bits up through so i don't know we'll see how that goes down but but that's the plan so um yeah seriously if you're looking at that now the cable interestingly enough the cable i'm probably going to buy from home depot they actually did have a bundle a thousand feet of cat cat eight that i'll probably end up getting from them so anyways i super super expected that you were gonna say and i'm also a little disappointed that you didn't i expect you were gonna say you're gonna get it

from costco oh man i looked and and the network racks also like i'm gonna buy probably a 12u rack which by the way okay all right this this will be really short you know the last tangent of the night this is no this is the last tangent on this subject so you know like when you were building your computer like ram clearance is a thing oh yeah right like if if you if you want that big beautiful rgb ram you better make sure that your air cooler is high enough off of the processor to make it fit so the same type thing happens with network racks so if you're looking at a network racket or if you're planning on setting up something like like i'm going to

don't necessarily buy the 17 inch deep one because oh well, the thing that I'm looking at, it's only 15 inches. No, no, no. Your racks where the things mount to are an inch or two back from the front of the panel. So now your effective space that you could actually put something in there is probably only 13 inches, right? So you really have to look at what you're going to do and what the dimensions are inside the box. So if you, if you happen to go down that route and and it sounds like fun to you just be aware and consider how you're going what the rails that you're going to use too because if you're going to put it on uh like like sliding rails then you're going to need additional room in the back for the cable management system to collapse while the

machine is in and then when you pull it back out, but you know, your mileage may vary. I don't know if you plan on doing anything that to that extent. No, mine's probably just going to be network switches and networking stuff. I don't know that I'm going to put any server type stuff in there, but, but you know, I mean,

I might want to, you know, so, and then, all right, so that brings me into the next subject and this one will be super fast. All right. So over the holidays,

I don't know if it was because everybody was sick and i was bored i needed to make a trip to micro center and upgrade my nas so the reason was i used plex and if it was if it needed to transcode i was using dude i was using the old processor that we used to run coding blocks.net off of so i had that old z on with with that stuff that was the motherboard that i had the nas that was one machine like we're talking about from 10 years ago yeah yeah because i had actually built that machine before we even started coding blocks and i was using it for other stuff so yeah i mean we're talking about 11 12 year old processor i mean a little bit of like how the sausage is made.

When we started this, the server that we hosted this on was sitting in Alan's office, like in his home office. Yeah. Like there was no worry of the network. You know, it was just, did Alan lose internet service at his house right and if you remember when we found out when we needed to change that was i think we were using pingdom or one of those and we would see just random outages and it was like is my internet really that garbage at my house and it was and so that's why we started hosting. So yeah, yeah. How the sausage is made.

So getting back to this, if you have a NAS, by the way, I highly recommend Unraid as the OS. If you plan on doing your own, it's awesome. It truly is awesome. But one of the beautiful things about Unraid that I like a lot is you can run basically any Docker thing in there. It'll host the Docker things easy and it's through its own interface. And one of the ones is Plex. Well, Plex is awesome. If you're streaming media or whatever in your house, I truly love the service, but transcoding

with that old processor was bogging down. Like it just could not hang. Well, I started looking at, well, how would I get it to do hardware transcoding? Because that requires almost no CPU, right? Like with the new AMD and the Intel chips, like video encoding and decoding is handled on the chip, and it takes none of the processor to do it. Well, doing some research, Plex does not like amd chips hard coding so if you're going to do it go the intel route if you look at like an 11th gen or newer processor that has the gpu built in it's beautiful plug that thing in you could actually pass through which i learned something about docker that i didn't know about you can actually so you know how you can mount dry or mount on volumes and stuff you can mount a device

didn't know that so you basically mount the hardware encoder into that docker image and then all of a sudden plex can use it to do the transcoding and life was was great so yeah okay so all right now now on to more interesting things So this is one that micro G had sent to outlaw that is kind of interesting. I guess I'd never even really thought about it, but it's an article by actually, I don't know if I have the article link here. I'm pulling it up now. Okay, cool. So it's by the company that actually does something to help with this.

So it makes sense that they wrote the article. But basically what they're saying is larger repositories, repositories that have a lot of pull requests. They're basically going the route of banning merge commits. And what does that even mean? I'll give layman's terms and then I'll let outlaw speak the the the more uh technical bits because i'm sure he knows it off the top of his head but basically a merge commit is when you have a commit that is pointing to two different parents so the best way i know how or more yeah two or more parents so the easiest way i know how to demonstrate it in terms of like a commit flow would be,

let's say that you started off, um, they call them dev now, right? Or trunk, uh, you start off the trunk, you, you branch to a new branch, right? Let's call it feature branch. You make some commits on that feature branch. Well, at the same time you're making commits on the feature branch, somebody else is also putting commits in on the trunk. Now, when you go to merge that stuff back into trunk, that commit that's made there is a merge commit because it's pointing to the last commit from the feature branch.

And it's pointing to the last commit from the, from the trunk branch. And that is a merge commit and outlaw. Did I miss anything there no but i didn't want to be clear though that this article like you know i've had some other things that have pulled my time away so i haven't had a chance to read up on that so uh i was afraid you were gonna like pull out something very specific and i'll be like you read that right i'm like no no no just just a good example is that have you ever been uh you

know working somewhere and you had some sort of problem that you know with the latest build so you go check it out and uh you see the problem in a file but the weird thing is the commit is from back in like june like how has this been working through june what the heck is going on and you do a little bit of research and realize oh the commit the commit was old, but it was just merge yesterday. But it was just the commit that brought it in, merged the histories of the branch you merged to and the branch that it came from. And so it kind of interweaved those things and kept the dates on them.

So while it looks like it was just added back in June or whatever, it actually just came in with the pull request. That's actually one of the big problems that we talked about when we did our Git series. Not the most recent one, but when we were talking about our Git flow versus the cherry picking or the Microsoft way, that was one of the big reasons why if you have multiple branches that you have to bring things into, like let's say that you have release branches or whatever, Git flow kind of sucks for that very reason, right? branches that that you have to bring things into like let's say that you have release branches or whatever git flow kind of sucks for that very reason right like when you merge things it's

merging the history of two long-lived branches and you end up getting crazy conflicts because it's they're both changing over time and that merge is difficult so that was what this said 90, by the way, good Lord, that's been a long time ago. So that's why they say in this particular article, a lot of these repositories are actually blocking these merge commits because just like what Jay-Z said, it's not clear. If you look back at the log history after that merge, you're going to see something that happened in master or in,

or in trunk. And then you're going to see something happen in your feature and then something in trunk and trunk, and then yours, it just goes back and forth because it's all interleaved. What they're saying now is they want people to either do the get rebase or to do the get rebase squash. And all that really does. I mean, I say all it really does, but if you had your feature branch off, you know, doing whatever, when you rebase that onto trunk again, it takes all those commits and rewrites them at the very end. So it's the last commits on that history of that particular chain.

And so that does two things in my mind and two things that I very much like is one, it gets rid of that interleaving. So there's no more of this. Well, he was doing that at the same time this was done. It doesn't matter. Right. The intent of it was I made these changes to make this code different and it puts them all together. So if you go back and look at your Git log, you can see that, Hey, Jay-Z did five commits to do this one thing, right? Or outlaw had three commits and those were at the very end,

even though they weren't done at that exact time, they're stacked on at the end. So you can actually make heads or tails of what's going on. Okay. So that's where I was trying to figure out, like I hadn't, like I said, I unfortunately haven't had a moment to read this yet. But I think the telling thing that they're talking about here is that, and we kind of talked about this too before, and it goes along with what you were saying that, you know, by doing the, like, for example, you know, even recently we talked about doing the get rebate get pull dash dash rebase type of workflow right and by by putting all of your commits together at the tip of the branch together then like they're they're they make sense you can you can kind of like see that they all came in together instead of them being scattered throughout the history in the example that jay-z gave and there was a sentence in here that was like um over the past decade more

and more closed source repos started banning merge commits on trunk shifting to the squash rebase and merge workflow the benefits clear rebasing creates a cleaner more understandable history and state of the world without the clutter of merge commits. Yep. Another thing they said in the article that, you know, you don't have to read the whole thing here, but that I thought was telling, and I never really considered is another reason on top of making it more clear or clearer is it's faster. So when you have a merge commit, Git actually has to traverse all the parents to find out the information, which was interesting. I never really thought about it, but it makes sense, right? Like it's not going to store all that stuff in that one place. Whereas when you have a rebase, it puts them all in line, right? So it doesn't have any parents to traverse. It's

just, you know, the commit before it is in the same, in the same branch. So you're totally fine there. So it's, it's faster. And I think that's why they said that larger repositories, ones that have like a thousand or more pull requests, they're going this route because it makes the repository cleaner and,

and faster to just operate. So that one was good. Yeah, I'm still a big fan of doing that rebase before, you know, personally, before I do any of my pull requests and whatnot, just because I want everything to be together, but I've also gotten into the habit too of squashing everything if it's not done in like whatever pull request tool I'm using

then I you know I'm definitely doing it the command line beforehand and and like I shared like a few episodes back like I'm even getting into the habit of like or or the pattern of well it makes sense that somebody might want to cherry pick this collection of commits without all this other clutter of the of this other commit and so i'm like you know in that uh rebase equal interactive you know two e you know collectively grouping the things together that i want um to give someone the ability to cherry pick or not. Yeah, I still use that all the time. Yeah.

Now, I will say this article came from this website, graphite.dev, which the whole purpose of this tool apparently is to make like rebasing and pull requests and all that stuff easier. I've never used it. This is the first time I'd actually heard of it, but it might be worth checking out that. I mean, that was kind of their selling point in their article is, you know, people don't rebase because they can get into nasty, hairy situations with it, but our tool makes it better. Right. So, you know, maybe, maybe go check it out. They do have a free tier. So if you wanted to play with it, it looks like, you know, it'd be, it'd be a good way to get started with it. But you know, again,

I have no experience with it, but the article is there looks cool. So maybe check it out. Definitely. All right. So now my favorite part of the show. So page thousand, another item that we got from uh micro micro g and uh what is this an easing if you're not familiar with that it's like a magazine that you can get on the internet what's that uh yeah the internet is http colon that's the two dots i'm sorry i only have cat 3 can i still get to it no you can't actually do that great to eat a that makes you install acrobat reader i have flash though can i oh it's been a minute hasn't it i i killed them i went too far

and what is it is it's a you know e-magazine that has a bunch of articles. They say one article per page. People have submitted them. They've compiled them. And they're on a variety of really cool topics. And some of them are definitely not going to appeal to you. Some are going to sound really interesting to you. And some are going to be talking about things that you've never even heard of. And so you're probably going to want to look at those too.

Hey, so going along with this, now this one's interesting. When I lost Senate, I was like, what in the world? I don't know how we're going to talk about this for long. But so here's the thing that I kind of hope it does go after looking at it. But the very first one that was released, so the first issue of the magazine was in August of 2019. So, you know know four years ago issue two oh doggone it i killed it hold on issue two came out 2020 2020 so no no number two was november 2019 so august and then november so they had two in a couple months. Yes. I just call for speakers. They as said in episode two,

like, Hey, please have your stuff to us by 2020. Right. And then episode three or issue three, I should say came out in December, 2023. So there was a little gap of say four years,

which I mean, I'm surprised it came back, but i do want to say like what jay-z just said a second ago like there's all kinds of crazy articles in here and i started listing out ones that i thought were kind of interesting but the more i went through this this pdf which by the way is a really bizarre way of doing this like why not just have it available on the website with links and stuff and then maybe somebody wants to download a pdf sure whatever but i digress there are tons of articles in here and the cool part is it's like they're almost capped at a pdf length page yeah so so people had to get their ideas across really quick, right? With some

implementation details, some of it is absolutely mind boggling. Or you just change your font size. Or you change, which they did. I get a lot in there with like, you know, two, three point font. Yeah. I think the smallest one that I see is about a five points. But again, they were kind of restricted to a single page. But the topics are all over the board, right? Like, let me I'll just mention a few that I saw on here that I thought were just, again, I probably could have listed all of them on the page. Like, if you truly like geek out stuff, man, there's some, there's some really interesting, cool stuff in here that I would have never gone out of my way to look for, but because it was in this easing, I looked at it. You were about to say something about law. Well, I was going to say that it reminds me of 2600. Did you guys ever?

Yeah. Yes. That was amazing. They still make that. They do. If you happen to find yourself in a Barnes and Noble, which maybe, maybe, maybe not. You'll still see them. Yeah.

Yeah. They still have them up there on the shelves. I always got it from the local computer store. If you went into a Micro Center, they always have the magazine section. That's where you can find it. I don't know that I've ever seen the magazine section in micro center what it was near the front oh it's when you're checking out it's up there yeah actually i saw hacker news because it's every or it's quarterly right 26 quarterly the hacker quarterly yep yeah 600 yeah it was sitting up on the top shelf in there when i was um looking for

something recently i think it was the Intel. So here's a couple of them that were just to give you a taste of what's in there. And this is kind of crazy. So there was this one page that was the Alistair or Alistair Cryptly, a GPT-fueled sock puppeteer. Okay, that title tells you nothing. Basically what this person created is he wanted to have a fake online persona that actually looked like a real person posting things. So he wrote this little thing, this little application that uses chat GPT that would occasionally write content to Twitter and it would look like a real person and it does a good job of it. So there's one, uh, another one, this, this one was excellent. So if you've ever had to look into SSL or cryptography or TLS

communication or anything, like everybody thinks it's magic. It's really RSA encryption is, is a mathematical formula is what it boils down to. And this whole article is about being able to break it and figure out the private keys if somebody didn't create it properly. So you can actually backwards reverse engineer your way into the private key using the RSA encryption if they didn't create stuff properly which was i thought really interesting and cool it's just math is all it is yep uh let's see what else we have oh and they also say never roll your own crypto if you ever think that you're going to please just back up and don't you're doing it wrong do not do it every every professional out

there steve gibson he said it i don't know how many times on his show don't think you're smarter than everybody else that's been working on this for years right um this one i thought would be interesting because i know outlaw you've you've had the moon lander and these other ones, right? They all have these custom firmware things that you can load onto them. So there was this article about hacking a keyboard with QMK. Oh, I know that one. Quack, marry, kill. Right?

Wait. Quack, marry, kill. That's what it stands for. Yeah, that's it. Okay. I got it right. Quack, marry, kill. Okay.

Oh, man. Something seems wrong as I say it out loud, though. So here's what's interesting they were able to basically hack the firmware to where you could hit a keystroke and it would run like a terminal app type thing on there it was like oh man and they even made a joke in the article about i bet your security scanning software isn't looking for firmware in your keyboard right like like that's crazy think about that it's kind of scary uh this hardware serial cheat sheet oh uh serial communications there was an article in there about how that stuff works so if you've ever wondered how data goes across the wire on that it's kind of cool and true to the days of like 2600 there's

source right oh yeah yeah yeah all of these articles almost every one of them have source code or mathematical equations or like there was one that had a hex dump of of the various different things so i didn't even list it on here but it was somebody that tried to combine png and zip into a single file format and and he had like hex dumps of stuff and i was like man my brain i can't but uh i think somebody's got one here yeah i have this one this one is there's one page article on changing the color of your blue screen of death on windows so if you want purple you want pink something like that here's how you can do it and it's just such a weird novel thing and it's interesting to see how they did it, how that stuff kind of works.

And it's interesting that someone took the time to do that. It's just cool. It's like when the internet was weird. Do you remember, like, back in the day, Angel Fire, you know? Yeah, because it's so not weird now. Yeah. That's right. It's just normal.

By the way, we're only touching on the super high-level summary of these articles. They go deep into detail in their page that they have. So truly highly recommend looking at these because they really are interesting. This next one, mind-boggling. It reminded me of one of the iPhone hacks that people were trying to do where they would basically clone an iPhone to be able to try and log into it multiple times. I think I heard about that on Steve Gibson, one of his security now podcasts when they're trying to break, break into one and the iPhone will lock you out after so many times, right? So they just clone the entire thing. Try a number of combinations when it failed, they just, you know, reclone it so it crazy so this one is called a

cold boot attack on the raspberry pi and i think the gist of it was they would have something in memory the dude would then freeze the ram on it by spraying it with like a super cold like nitrogen type thing unplug the thing for 20 minutes, plug it back up. See if he could do a memory dump of it. And I think they were doing like the, a picture of the Mona Lisa and they'd see how it would degrade over time. But after 20 minutes,

they would be able to recover a lot of things depending on how cold they froze the Ram. Yeah. I've heard about tricks like this, like a freeze in the Ram in order to save state on the RAM wow, and literally freezing it yeah, literally freezing it not doing some sort of

electrical trick, freezing it insane what do you think of next? right? yeah, I wrote down a couple things I wanted to call out here too one thing, they mentioned demo scene as the type, like good example of the kind of things they might include in the magazine i couldn't find an article on the machine but i just wanted to say uh demo scene because i haven't said that a long time and it's awesome if you're not familiar with it google it you're

welcome it's great you should get into it it's a hobby i've never heard of international computer art subculture focused on producing demos if you remember back in the day people used to pass around discs or share stuff online and stuff and what would be is like a little program that did some sort of weird audio visual thing and people would uh they had like competitions to be like what can you do with uh one kilobyte or two kilobytes or something and they would make this cool like 3d world with music playing that would flash colors and do spirals and just weird psychedelic stuff it was just this whole scene that grew up about uh making weird stuff happen on your computer monitor and speakers you know

just a little bit of ram uh it was fantastic and this goes back to adobe flash i think again you know older way older way way easy yeah like as in like you put the floppy in and you know load it's funny when you put it in here i was googling around in the article or not googling i was doing a control f in the article i was like i don't see demo scene i don't know what he's talking about yeah yeah i didn't need it they just mentioned something so if you want to get uh featured in this magazine do something demo scene no one's done it yet there you go yeah that's great is it because kind of like a almost like a flex like this is what i could do with a computer you know that's great so you mentioned the uh about the the paged out being in pdf but that's so that

you can share the magazine yeah which is just like email a copy of it open it's a free experimental uh magazine technical magazine yeah no hosting no nothing you just download it there you go i think the only thing that they said in the very top was if you plan on selling it then you need to contact them. But any, anything else you want to do with it, if you want to, if you want to get this and make a podcast and just read it out loud, they said you can do that, right? Like,

so they're very liberal with what you can do with the content. As long as you're just not selling the PDF outright that they want to be free and available. Yep. I did read a little bit about what they're doing and why they brought it back and they changed editors and they kind are basically bringing it back to life. And they are talking about maybe doing some limited print runs, and so they might bring it to a conference or something, give it out, just kind of promote whatever. But they don't have any way to make money or anything.

It's kind of like an open source magazine. So they're talking about maybe figuring out some way to kind of print on demand or something but really it's just about sharing information right now oh and and that's another thing they do want authors so if you have something cool you're working on some raspberry pi project or anything you can put together like a little one-page article and submit it to them and and it'll find its way into this thing you want to say you're published that you're right you can yeah like it's something cool about like curated content now and it's like this name age where you can like look up anything you want and just like read wikipedia for hours just something cool about someone saying here you go here's a collection of weird stuff i don't know i like it

speaking of um they come with wallpapers yes every basically the cover of the magazine is a downloadable wallpaper which is i am now using the skull one from 2019 it's so good yeah it's really cool that's my favorite it's so good and you know the crazy part is they made them for 8k displays so you won't have any problem with some garbage looking thing like it is crystal clear yeah there's a bonus wallpaper too did you see that one yep oh i didn't see the bonus yeah it's like below like look past the first step the first issue and there's like this crazy one with like you know android robots helping out some

oh devil woman i guess i don't know. She's got so good. Like weird horns. It's got like an Iron Man standing. Yeah. And then there's like a guy in the background with a Mohawk, like pointing out some planet. Like that's the one we should destroy. Yeah.

It kind of looks like so good. Yeah. The art is incredible. Yeah. It's really good. It's really good. He kind of looks like the monster from that Fred Savage movie. Anyway, boomer hour.

So the point is, yeah, but the point is, yeah, there's some great stuff in here. Go read it. Go check it out. This should take off. I hope it does. I really do because, like I said, the thing that I really loved about it was

I would have not gone and searched out most of the topics that were in there no way but because they were all like one pagers i found myself just like at least skimming the first several paragraphs of each one of them because it's like i mean why not this is just kind of cool interesting interesting stuff. Oh, man. I feel like I just hacked the Internet. So because, of course, I did. But so the artist on you look at the cover art, it's a cover art by blah, blah, blah. And then below it, it'll have like their Facebook or Instagram or Twitter handles or whatever. So that one that did the second issue with the skull one that you were talking about

jay-z if you go look at that artist's instagram page oh my gosh like there's so many other cooler examples of like some of his art oh wow oh wow yeah there's some awesome stuff in there talented yeah super talented do you notice that on that particular wallpaper uh has two versions one with 30 transparency and one at 10 more or less skull yeah so did so the other ones are like that too or there's like oh the one has a light version in the dark yeah the first one's light and dark yeah well no that's issue three is light and dark but issues issues 1 and 2 are 10% versus 30% transparency. Yeah. These folks are talented.

Seriously. But I thought that that was referring to the paged out logo. Because if you notice, it's the paged out logo that kind of on the 10% kind of disappears on it. I mean, it's still there, obviously. Well, it's a PNG. So if you're looking at it in your browser, you're probably not going to see the transparency. But if you were to open that up and put it in something with an overlay, you'll probably see that transparency more. Well, the background's still gray, though.

So I don't think that you're going to. It's still like a shade of gray. It's. Yeah, I think the transparency they're referring to is the paged out logo. OK. I think the transparency they're referring to is the paged out logo. Okay. Cause even on the, even, even if you go look at the issue one,

it's the same way. The paged out logo is like, you know, really difficult to see on that 10%, but I digress. At any rate. So cool. Uh,

yeah. So with that, it's time for my favorite portion of the show i forgot what i called this part mental blocks this is mental blocks i'm suffering a stroke yeah so yeah something's going on i don't know um all right so let's see what this is 226 so jay-z according to tutco's trademark rules of engagement you are up first and i'm on a one game winning streak even with his confidence well last time remember there was

an asterisk on that last win yeah there was an asterisk on that last win. Yeah. There was an asterisk. I still won it. Yeah. I still won it. There was an asterisk there. Did you? All right. So let's see here. Your categories are, and the state capital is, and I'll give you a state and three cities

in the state, and you'll have to tell me which one is the capital. Come on, man. That's too easy. United States state or another state? Oh, that's a good question. I guess you're going to have to find out. All right. Going on.

Famous TV spoilers or Joyce Carol Oates. And given a literary title, you'll have to tell me whether it's by James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, or Joyce Carol Oates. So I hope that's, you got that? Yeah. Okay. The Mediverse. Mediverse. that yeah okay the mediverse mediverse blunt bios of brand mascots or lastly a bundle of fun and fun is in quotes okay um what was how do you spell mediverse? good question, I'm glad you asked that

that is M-E-D-I wow okay, well let's do Joyce Carol Oates for never, no way no way I don't know, it's either State Capitals or Famous TV

Spoilers there's something wrong about Famous TV Spoilers. I feel like I'm going to be spoiling stuff for people. So for your sake, dear listener, let's go with State Capital 4. Of course. Man, I really wish you'd pick the TV Spoilers. Okay. Dang it.

Okay, so here it is. Tennessee. Chattanooga memphis nashville wait you just want to know what the capital is it's literally the title of the category and the state capital is but you told like you i'll give you the state and three cities in the state and you'll have to tell me which one is the capital can i have that category it's so easy yeah i mean it's nashville well why would they do that it's like i'm like waiting for the trick and you only went for four all right it was five it's ridiculous fun florida oh come on jacksonville orlando tallahassee what it should be i mean maybe the one that's central to the state not way up in the north uh that's so funny man all right

okay what are my categories that aren't going to be so easy i do like just get here's an example of what you missed on famous TV spoilers. Who is Cartman's dad? Jack Tinnerman, who was cooked into a pot of chili. And the answer is South Park. Okay. All right, Alan, your choices are rising up, big screen ballads, European country nicknames. I'll give you the nickname. You provide the country computing milestones.

Name game. And lastly, what a load of BS. Each correct response will have the initials bs keep that in mind let's go computing for three oh boring i know all right if you get this wrong i fail i mean we're never gonna let you down for this okay you picked the category that everybody would expect you would pick right yeah in 1997 an ibm computer named deep blue beat grandmaster gary kasparov that's what I said. At this game. What is chess? Has Germany just gotten easier over the years? I feel like when I was a kid, it was like,

what year was the Magna Carta signed? And now they're like, what's the game with basketball? How about what's the state capital? We'll give you three. And the state! And the state! Come on! There's multiple choice. Why is Germany giving you multiple choice?

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is mental blocks, sir. I'm sorry. I'm booming out again. Yeah, you are. This is the celebrity edition of the game, though. That's why.

Did you want the more difficult ones no no we're good don't come next time it's celebrity i want to feel you know smarter okay okay all right your turn jay-z all right your choices are is state planning three digit prime numbers that one State Planning, Three-Digit Prime Numbers, That one. Atatomi in Latin, Bygone Tech, Scientist Rhyme Time, and No Cap. We'll show you, well, I don't know how this would work.

We'll show you words with the letters C-A-M-P removed. You'll tell us what the word originally was. Yeah, that'll be hard. Yeah, that one I think we're going to have to do. But yeah, that one's fun. I mean, I kind of want to do the primes, but I definitely don't have all the primes with three digits just at the ready here. So there's got to be some sort of other clue

that's going to be like, what's the one after? What's the 57th prime? But I kind of want to do a scientist rhyme time just because it sounds fun for three. Okay. Penicillin discoverer. Alexander's Arctic dwelling rodents.

Penicillin Discoverer. Alexander. Penicillin Discoverer. Alexander's Arctic Dwelling Rodents. There aren't that many rodents that live in.'s got a rhyme though discoverer i don't know otter what are otters you got to say the name and the thing oh i don't know i don't know what's going on i messed up y'all i messed up on celebrity jeopardy too so you don't ever tell me that i'm gonna tell you the pressure is too much so what was the answer i can't think who made penicillin

no fleming's lemmings ah get out of here with that can you tell can you do a prime one just pull a prime one out of three let's see what that one was. Okay. Yeah. This largest U.S. state by area surprisingly only has one area code, 907. Alaska? Well, it didn't even ask. I thought it was going to ask me what the prime was. What the heck? Yeah. But 907 is the prime.

907. I didn't know they were going to give me the prime. I thought it was going to have to be like, oh, gosh, 517. Right. It's probably different on all of them. All right. He's like, I got you. Here you go.

Here you go. Here you go. Hold on. This is what you wanted, then. Giddy up. This Beach Boys song about a Chevy hot rod shares its title with a household cleaning product. What is? Uh-huh.

Fuck. Isn't it? Uh, no. Little Boop Cube something. 409. 409. Yeah. What is a hall? Isn't it? No. 409. 409. Yeah. Dang it. Okay.

I'm glad I didn't pick. All right. My turn. I have a chance to go into the lead here. Okay. So we decided you guys were going to put in your uh on row 86 there for all the and i'll and you can play at home and long play along at home too on row 86 just entering your bet amount entering your number and then i'll i'll plus or minus it afterwards but oh wait no you should

have to reveal what your bet's going to be. No, I need to know what your bet's going to be. We have to tell you. We have to tell you privately. So you just go ahead and look down at row 126. You know what I'm doing. I'll put mine over in I-96. Outlaw's got to scroll all over the document. I just moved it to A-96. Alon's got to scroll all over the document.

I just moved it to A-13. What is going on here? Where is yours, Alan? I said 126, man. I don't see anything on 126. C-126. Oh, C. The letter C. Okay, yeah.

That wasn't confusing at all. Well, I just changed it so you changed his yeah all right all right we're gonna have to come up with a better way for this because the the category is world landmarks uh all right now i can't see what the things are. Where did you put yours, Jay-Z? You moved yours. I just put it up there. I deleted it.

I mean, you know what it is. I'm going all the way four. I don't care. He ain't scared. He's got four. I'm going all in, too. Okay, so you're both all in. All right, fine.

You're both all in. So, okay, you guys are going to have to figure out how to give me the answer but also famously cracked like the liberty bell this 14 ton landmark still sounds its distinctive bong every hour uh you got to write it down somewhere because it because he okay yeah well now make sure he's not looking at what you write down you can totally see what is did you really see what i saw what he wrote okay is it right i I don't know. I can't think of anything else. Say the thing one more time. It's cracked, you said.

Also famously cracked, like the Liberty Bell, this 14-ton landmark still sounds its distinctive bong every hour. Mine is not right. No, I don't think yours is right. I don't have anything. I can't think of it. not right. No, I don't think yours is right. I don't have anything. I can't think of it. All right. So Alan went all in for three, and Jay-Z went all in for four, right? Yeah.

And I said I would do the minus or pluses as we got there. So let's see. Alan. Okay, wait a minute. Hold on alan did you you deleted your answer oh i see i see i see jay-z's alan didn't answer at all correct so that definitely makes yours a negative i think it's just fair to say right like we don't have to carry the one okay so uh big ben is the correct answer oh serious wow okay i didn't know it was cracked doesn't seem like it should be 14 tons it seems like way bigger like american cars are 14 tons now that's because new winning streak

and also no asterisk so yeah legit right yeah what if i didn't actually believe in my answer does that count against me no i mean you wrote it i didn't know it was correct i learned something apparently neither did he. I just didn't know how much it weighed. I would have guessed like 76 tons. That's a lot to be suspended on a building. That's true. That's true.

I guess it depends on where you start weighing it. Yeah, that's the thing. I'm like, wait, is that? I mean, the building has got to be more than that, right? Or is it? Maybe it's a small building and I just didn't realize. Which part are they talking about? Yeah. Is it just the top? I don't know.

I don't know. It's just the crack. Can we just for a moment just acknowledge, maybe give kudos where kudos are due? Because that's a proper noun and I got it right. Yeah, good job.

That's a big bit. That wasn't mental blocks. Hey man, don't judge me. I got it right. I got a win. You did. Two three letter words. Still a W. Doesn't matter how we got there. Speaking of props, don't forget to drop us

some number of stars in that review you know we love it we appreciate it especially when there's more of them yes and yeah that's great the more the bigger the smiles yes thank you much I think two is the max there right they changed

the star system now you're doing it. What happened? Did you guys collaborate beforehand? We're like, hey, let's wreck it. I think we already covered having a stroke on air, right? So maybe... Was it not two?

Five and up only, please. I give. So hey, I got some fun stuff talking about so uh some fun project ideas uh sometimes people say like they want to have a side project and they don't know what to do i got some kind of some stuff for you like you know i love game dev i think it's really cool uh one thing i've really struggled with has been like the art side of it so there's been a bunch of projects i started i'm like all right i'm gonna learn pixel art that's too hard i'm gonna learn 3d modeling that's also too hard i'm gonna do other people's assets uh somehow also even that is hard like how can i do stuff without art

that's pretty funny dude it's too hard so i have this brilliant idea of uh just making tools yeah i like making tools right so uh some things that we can kind of play around with in that space i've just been like making kind of tools or like i mentioned like making soundtracks and stuff and being able to put those up on websites or even sell them in marketplaces like unity has a marketplace unity uh unreal has a marketplace i Unity, uh, Unity, Unreal has a marketplace. I think Godot might even have a marketplace where you can sell stuff. Itch.io is a marketplace for multiple engines. You can

sell stuff. So it's just kind of a fun idea. So if you are looking for a cool project to do and you want to get into game dev-y type stuff, but you don't want to make a game, you don't have to. And so, I got a couple ideas here. I wanted to point out a couple just cool projects that you can get for not that much money and sometimes even free and you can look

into them for inspiration or uh just you know just look for fun uh and so the website that i'm looking at here is itch.io which we've talked about a few times about itch.io and they have a category of uh it's like a store and you can search for games but they also have tools there so if you search for the category of tools i'll have a link in the show notes uh you can see a bunch of stuff so some ones i just thought it'd be cool to kind of talk about one is called kenny shape that's k-e-n-n-e-y and we've talked about Kenny several times actually. Kenny makes really cool game assets like art that you can use for free in your projects.

Makes tons of building a studio I think in the Netherlands or somewhere. Just really cool. But he also makes a couple tools and he uses the sale of those tools to support the workshop he's putting together over in the Netherlands I think. And one of these is KennyShape. And what it lets you do is take some size grid. I forget what the max size choppy's putting together over in the netherlands i think and one of these is candy shape and what

it lets you do is take uh some size grid i forget what the max size is it might be 32 pixels and you draw a little uh you know 2d picture and then you go and you add like a height map using just numbers so like let's say you draw a smiley face or something and you want um the border of that smiley face you know around the circle to be recessed and you want the eyes to be further out. Well, you would go and maybe set a height of one on the border, set the yellow inside to two and set the eyes to three. And then you can kind of stretch it, rotate it, have some fun with it. But you ultimately end up with a 3d object out of a 2d picture and that doesn't sound that cool until you go look at the page and look at some of the

things that they make like little scooters or uh like a fighter jet spaceship type things x-wings you can get really creative with it and it turns out looking really cool and stylized and so sometimes you know having limitations of like color palettes and number of pixels can really end up becoming a style if you embrace it and so that's just a example of a cool tool that uh it's something if you're interested in like making 3d stuff or 2d stuff that's totally manageable you could totally make this um it'd take a while to get to the level of polish that this is at but it's just an example of something that's cool and creative and really useful and this particular so uh this particular tool is on sale uh every day for the low low price of 399 american dollars so it's just something cool to

check out and if you want to use it awesome if you want to make something like it awesome it's crazy because it's like um when you first look at it it looks like a paint by numbers type of type of thing but instead of the numbers representing the color it's how many blocks wide is that thing or is that is that area of it yeah it's really cool uh yeah it's surprising how good it works out and then they've got some several examples and stuff. And, of course, you can compose them into other shapes. So if you want to make a big robot, like maybe do the foot first and then you do the leg and then you do the hip bone attaches to the pelvis bone or whatever. Make a big robot.

I don't care. Speaking of assembling things, here's another one. This one also from kenny uh this one will run you 1995 us or uh 39.95 if you do the deluxe package which has more shapes and what it lets you do is it has a bunch of shapes uh sorted by category so you might have one like uh town and you go to town and it has walls and it has doors and it has windows and has roofs and it has sidewalks like just these little super basic shapes but you can compose them together and you take a couple windows take a couple walls take a garage door and a roof and you just made a

little house and uh you can take that stretch it change the colors make this part taller you know rotate it around flip it it around, whatever. And just make 3D assets that are, again, like really limited. Like this is obviously very limited compared to like a blender or something like a heavy-duty 3D modeling tool. But because of those limitations, it comes out looking really stylized. And it's just cool. So it's cool if you want to get into 3d modeling and you're looking to kind of baby step your way in you can get this or if you want to make some sort of kind of tool or package that deals with 3d shapes like here's a way to kind of get your foot in that door and

learn a little bit more about it and at the end of the day all you're really doing is just spawning objects from some sort of prototype stretching them and saving the position, and then you export it. So it's not super complicated, but it is really cool and really useful. Huh. I'm looking through. So I found their actual website. Instead of looking through it on itch.io, you actually see more information, and it's easier to traverse and see all the stuff that this person or persons have created and it's super awesome yeah one called like mini skate so you

could all the all the assets that you might need to build a skate park yeah oh yeah those are you just go wild it reminds me of like back in like the uh commodore 64, I had this, I don't remember what the name of the game was, but you could build your own racetrack. And there were all kinds, like looking at this mini skate park, there was stuff like that. Like, do you want it to be a curve? Do you want it to be a ramp? And stuff like that. And you could set gravity.

And is it mud or is it a tar surface you know, like a rate, a tar surface or concrete surface or is it dirt? You know? Yeah. Um, that's what it reminds me of. Like in your ability to create your, your map. Yeah. Yeah.

It's really simple. It gets snaps to grid. I can go in and you'll see there's a lot of polish in there. So I don't mean to say that this is like some easy project that you can do in a day, but uh, you can see that you can get the bones of it working quickly and you can see where it's going. And you just got to put that extra time on getting all the exports right and having the user interface be really good and easy to use. Oh, man, there's one called Pixel Platformer. Like you could basically redo a Mario type world.

Oh, yeah. You're looking at his assets. So, yeah, he puts a ton of assets out and they're all totally free uh royalty free you can use them and you can sell stuff i think he does have one stipulation in uh the license agreement that you won't use it for nfts really hates nfts and i think other than that you can do whatever you want with it yeah i was looking at the license for this it says uh what are the licenses for the creations made in asset forge and you can just use them anything that you make in it it's yours you can use it personal educational commercial

whatever you want and you don't even have to credit because you paid you paid 19 bucks for it or whatever it's creative commons zero for some of these because some of the assets you don't you're not they're just creative comments zeros you're not okay paying anything you're just downloading that's pretty cool it's great for game jams stuff like that but you can always just make assets directly and put them up on each io io and just help the world out it's nice another one i want to mention is really cool this is an old one but it's a it's aie. Tiled is the name of it. And what is a sprite map?

A sprite map editor. So the idea with a sprite map is basically you've got a collection of sprites, like a 2D sidewalk, a 2D tree, a 2D whatever, and you go into a map and you can lay it down and say, here's all my grass tiles. And what it is is it's basically indexed. So rather than it being like an 8-pixel by pixel by eight pixel image stamped over and over and over again like obviously it like links back to that index and says this is sprite number one it points over here and so you

know magic computer magic type stuff uh it's just more efficient way of working and then if you want to change that tile out you change it one spot because it's indexed it's gonna swap everywhere uh which is just a nice way of working. And because this is a fantasy editor, it's got layers and stuff like that. And you can tag the layers. You can add all sorts of annotations and do cool stuff. So you can say, this is my ground layer. It's static, so it's not affected by gravity.

And this is going to act as the floor. And my next layer is trees. And I want trees to be a wall layer, meaning the player can't walk through them stuff like that but it's basically just a tool that you can use to make games easier you can make your maps and stuff in this external tool and then import them into a unity or goodo or whatever it's just really nice and like who doesn't like messing with that stuff it's amazing to me the number of niches out there yeah for i mean when you get into something like this like this stuff is super helpful like you don't have to it's like you said you don't get bogged down in in that stuff yeah someone just made this tool and people use it do you go

look at the like the games that were made with tiled? Oh yeah. There's a, there's quite a bit of like, like legit games using, using it as well. Yeah. As well. Like he linked the author links to a bunch on, uh, itch IO, but there was some on the website, the child website itself that were like links to steam games. So, you know, I don't know if that like adds more credibility if you, you know,

but like some legit games is, I guess to your point. I mean, they're beautiful. I mean like this one, super cat boy is a really pretty game. And you see people do, uh,

other school stuff too. Like you can imagine like not all layers have to be visible. So I could actually, uh, set like triggers for example. So when the player walks here, I'm going to trigger some sort of action. But you can go ahead and specify that in the map and import and export it. And what it does

is it lets an artist, for example, or a game designer work just with this tool and not get bogged down with the compilation errors and whatever. And they can just kind of spend their time really focusing on the visuals and the maps and how the game's going to work. And then it's easy for them to go in there and adapt stuff,

so they're not going to be breaking the project if they go and move the spawn point, for example, from here to there or whatever. It's just cool. Somebody made this tool and put it up for free. It's amazing. Yeah, it is. I got two more.

BFXR is an elaboration, they call it, of another tool called SFXR, which was an old, basically it's a digital synthesizer. So you can make sounds and say, I want a square wave and with this much attack, and then I want it to go up at the end. So it goes whoop, and you can use it for little sound effects like jumping or shooting a pew-pew gun. You want to make the sound of fire. You can do that by adding a little bit of noise maybe in some modulations or fire sounds, just like that.

It's just a cool tool. And somebody actually ported that to JavaScript too. I have the wrong link in here, but yeah, I will fix that. So someone put it because it was open source and that was easy to do. Easy-ish. So wait a minute. Are you saying that for the next game jam, you don't want my, you know, Michael trademark made with care sound effects? These are for the port snaps that don't have access.

Yeah. Those are for the poor snaps that don't have access. Yeah. Those are excellent. You know, I think I actually, um, I used, um, I used the asset forge for the, the 3d stuff in, uh, eat my dust, the game that we worked on a couple years ago. That was my 3d modeling software. All right. The next one's going to blow your mind. It's free.

It's called Rex paint. And what it is, is an assy art editor. Asky. Yeah. I don't know what you said, but this is a, this is a friendly show.

That's right. Yeah. Sorry about that. Uh, yeah. Asky art editor. And if you just go to this website uh you'll see the kinds of art that people make with ascii ascii anyway it's super cool and i believe the editor is actually all ascii as well uh you can change color stuff like that but everything

else is basically just made using fonts and And you might think that sounds basic, but when you see the kinds of art that people are doing with it, it's pretty incredible. And it's got tools for doing things and kind of batch and aggregate, adding noise, shading, all sorts of cool stuff. You would never expect people to do with ASCII, but they do. I don't know why, but it looks super cool. And the stuff you find is

sort of mesmerizing. It's my rabbit holes. Yeah, you can get lost in these things for sure. Is he the dwarf miner? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you go to the galleries tab, there's like a whole bunch

of other stuff in there oh yeah yeah something like the guns and weapons and stuff looks super cool yeah just the people the characters even the maps look super cool and it's all asking so if you want to say like oh i can't do art like i said earlier i'm like well uh you don't i mean it is still art it's just you're using a different kind of brush i guess welcome to our podcast this should have been our our logo yeah i mean it still can't be it's good chat gpt to do it i just love the look i just think it's super cool and it's something about the limitations like who would have thought like you could make such cool stuff with uh asking sometimes the uh the limitations set you free it's awesome yeah we'll have links in the show notes but i just thought it was cool so it's nice to look at

for inspiration or if you if you want to use a game here's great tools if you just want to make a tool here's a you know some inspiration and if you just want to have some fun and look at weird stuff people are doing on the Internet, here you go. He's got something for everybody. All right. Remember when we said that the Internet was normal now? And you're saying like weird stuff on the Internet. But I guess.

There's still weird stuff out there. I guess so. I guess so. All right. Well, with that, we'll have links to all this stuff. And we head into Alan's favorite portion of the show. It's the tip of the week. All right.

Hey, if you subscribe to Audible and if we had a promo code, we would insert it here. If we don't, then we don't. But if you subscribe to Audible, don't forget they have a ton of free content available. And sometimes that's in the form of like dramatized episodic podcasts with like vampires fighting dinosaurs. And it's all, you know, got the foley and the footsteps and all, you know, pew pew type stuff. Police sirens, they'll scare you when you're driving. All that stuff's great. They also have what they call the great courses which is a list of basically kind of college level ish courses that uh you know available for you to listen you do have to be a member but you don't have to pay for it past that so if you're paying uh you know the the 11 a month whatever it is uh you know the the eleven dollars a month whatever it is for you know the token a month whatever they call it uh then you have access to this and the

one i'm listening to now is part of a large series of courses uh on the fine arts uh specifically fine arts and music and the one i'm listening to even more specifically than that is How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd edition. And what it is is basically like a music appreciation course. If you ever took one of those in university, I did. It wasn't great. This is way better than that. And this is a 36-hour course that dives through history,

talks about music and like religion for example and how the music tied into religion and how those two things evolved together and how that changed whenever you know this happened and that happened and whatever and how how basically culture and music kind of changed and evolved together and uh it's just super cool like i'm i'm basically i've just passed the renaissance now and i'm into um i don't know like the 16 maybe 1700s so that's which is quite a bit past the renaissance i should say i'm in the 1600s uh now and uh it's just really cool uh and i recommend it and because it's an podcast, it's really easy for them to do things like playing segments of songs. And, of course, all these songs are, you know, public domain now.

So it's really easy to say, like, here's the Prelude and C-sharp minor. Let's, you know, focus on this 30-second segment because it's a good example of something else. Just really cool. And you should listen to it. And so the one course I mentioned is 36 hours. And there's, I don't know like 20 something of these courses so you're looking at hundreds of hours just on music and there's a whole bunch of other courses too but who cares about those okay so you're gonna have to sell

me on this a little bit so that's pretty interesting on not necessarily the course but audible so my my biggest thing with audible has always been you spend $15 a month and you get a certain number of tokens. And you can't even listen to a whole audio book usually. They changed that. Oh, really? I have not seen a book go more than one token in years. Okay, but you only get like one or two of those, right, for a month. One month for $15.

So you can listen to one audiobook in a month, which... Well, you keep it. You trade that token in, you keep that title for life. Unless they remove it. Huh? Yeah. Okay, so, all right. So what you're saying is, I buy audible for $15 a month

and I use my token on whatever, like, uh, one of the Daniel Suarez books, right? Like demon, I'd get that. Then I can listen to that forever from now on, as long as I pay $15 a month in that token or, or if I quit paying, do I still get to listen to it or no yep yours forever okay so so basically you get to pick one book a month that you want to listen to forever yeah and if you don't like it you can return it you get your token back yeah and as far as i know uh there's no limit on it so you can go back to book you listen to three years you're gonna be like yeah i'm returning this junk because i never did listen to it because that's always been my thing is like 15 bucks a month to be able to listen to one audiobooks kind of i don't know like i've that's why i've never

bought it i and i love audiobooks but that's always been like man it doesn't seem doesn't seem like a great value yeah i agree that's expensive especially back in the day when like you can go get a novel for five dollars or you can get a digital version read to you for like a 15 and back in the day when audiobooks first like came online on amazon they were like 30 bucks yeah it's crazy and they did stuff like 30 bucks for the first third of it right which is uh yeah it was super crazy but they don't do that anymore so i've been a member off and on looks like since 2009 and i've got hundreds of books okay and here and i can go look at the ones from 2009 and listen to them right now so the podcast things

that you were talking about like where you know vampires killing dragons or whatever is that something that only comes if you are an audible member yes like you don't have access to okay okay so so there's additional stuff that you can get on here that it's i guess not obvious to anybody that's not subscribed to it then yeah they call it the plus catalog and it's super high quality their podcasts like their their dramas are really high quality i forget the name of the one i was talking about there there wasn't actually dinosaurs and it was just vampires as darkness or eternal winter or something that yeah i mean it's great i just uh i listened to another one that was sci-fi it It doesn't matter, but

they're all really good, and they're all just part of the Plus catalog. It's all included with membership. And there's also books. Yes. There's actually just a bunch of books that are available with membership, and you just go grab them. It does look like I can't return

books from 2009. I don't know what the terms are there but uh yeah everything in the last year i can return i might give this a shot at some point you've almost sold me all right yeah i mean frankly for me right now it's worth it for the course like 15 bucks like and of course like if you buy that's 15 bucks is like if you do monthly if you buy it you know pay for a year, whatever, all that stuff. And they have all sorts of credits.

If you've never signed up before and you use someone's promo code, if we had one here, you would get a free month. The deal I just did recently because I just quit. And then I started listening to the course and decided I wanted to stay. And they sent me an email, like, hey, come back for $5 a month. Right. For a limited time. I was like alright

I could quit as soon as it goes back to the normal price so I did it and I don't think I'm going to quit again and how much of that series do I have to listen to before I get an artist that I recognize I don't think

that course is ever going to get to one you'll recognize unless you recognize Bach. Sebastian Bach. Bach. No. The other one. Another one? Another one you're talking about.

It's not that one. That's awesome. Okay. All right. So for my tips, I actually had a couple. The first one, I think that outlaw like, so it's actually the second link there. The first link is to, is to this repo that sort of has these things about visualizing get. And the reason I included that one is they have some common ones, like what a

rebase actually does. They have the things there, but I think what's more interesting is click that second link. And what's really neat is if you ever want to be able to actually visualize what's happening when you do get commands, this does it out. So you can put in very simple things like get commit and then put in dash M and put in a message and, you know, first commit or something like that it'll actually pop another bubble on the screen and point the arrows then if you say something like get branch um uh dash b or get checkout dash b i'm sorry get checkout dash b i'm gonna call it new branch it will actually show that hey it branched off master at that one spot.

And then if I do another git commit, you know, some commit, then it's going to draw another bubble and you'll see that the thing branched off. And then if you go back to master and do a commit, then it'll show them diverging. And then if you do a git merge, it'll actually show the merge commit and everything that we were talking about earlier. So this is actually a really good way just to be able to see what your commands are actually doing behind the scenes in a, in a get world.

So I thought it was pretty cool. I mean, we, we see these bubble drawings all over the place with the lines when, when they're trying to explain it, but when you actually get to run the commands and see what it's doing, it feels like it puts it together uh better mentally at least for me so i thought that one was pretty cool yeah and then this one i've got to give uh

i've got to give jamie a little bit of credit for this one so when i did the video on the obsidian thing like the the tips that that jay-z had last episode one of the ones i said is you can also use uh emo emojis or emoticons i don't even know what they're called anymore but you can use them in obsidian right like so when you're doing notes and i saw this one time because i you know jay-z was sharing his screen and he had this big fire emoji that he had like you know 90 point font or whatever i was like oh i didn't know you could put these in here. That's awesome. So in your markdown, you can have your emojis. Well, I would always like for check marks or something, I would actually have like the green check that is sort of standard in there.

And Jamie was like, Hey, you know, you can just use the checkbox markdown. And I swear to you, I've tried to use it before and I could never get it to work, you know, because I always thought it was the open square bracket, a space, a closed square bracket. I could never get it to work. It's because that's not actually the markdown for it. It's a dash or a minus, whatever you want to call it, space, open square bracket, space, closed square bracket, space, close square bracket space, and then type in whatever the message is. After you hit enter on that, it'll actually pop a checkbox in Obsidian.

And what's so cool about it is it's actually functional. It creates a real list for you. So if you like create a list of things on there and you click that checkbox, it'll actually mark it checked and it'll put a strikethrough on the line to let you know that you've done it. So it's actually a really nice way to do a task list, a task list in Obsidian that you can check off things as you go. So I might even do another little video on this because when I found it, I was like, oh, that's super cool. And that's way better than the way I've been doing it. So, it. So if you haven't seen that, try it out. Yeah, the usability is really good.

It's interesting that they managed to mix stuff like that in when you're still in markup mode. Because you would think in your markup mode, it's only going to show the markup, but it doesn't. It shows it, but when you click that line, it will give you the ability to edit it. So it just works out really well in practice. Yeah, you don't have to go to the viewing mode to do things like this the only thing that i don't like about obsidian that i still switch back to to visual studio code for and this is more how the sausage is made here like we kind of do our show notes and markdown inside a Google doc, right? Obsidian. I take that stuff to visual studio code and I'll say,

Hey, show me the markdown view or show me the, the actual viewing view of the markdown. And then I'll just tweak whatever we had in the show notes to make it look good. Then because visual studio code outputs that in HTML ish type stuff in the viewer, I can just copy that and put it into our WordPress thing and I'm good to go. Right? Like it's, it's not a terribly difficult process. Obsidian for whatever reason, the viewer mode in that doesn't work. If I go to copy that and put it into a rich text document, it's just flat text. Like it's, it's complete garbage. And I wish that whatever magic they had in visual studio code they also had an obsidian because i would love to be able to copy like my checklist or whatever and put it somewhere else

for viewing but i don't know maybe there's a plug-in for that there probably is i have a bonus tip for you oh here we go so uh one thing that i i really hate about jira and obsidian is that uh you can't easily paste your markdown from like obsidian into like a ticket for example uh the markdown that uh jira uses like this their their syntax for kind of tickets and formatting all that stuff it's just older it predates markdown and they stuck with it and uh so i did find a plugin for markdown that supposedly lets you convert your markdown to jira format basically in your clipboard it didn't work so well for me like because i had links to like other files and

stuff it just it threw all these weird warnings in and i couldn't delete them like it actually generated like these like warning areas in the output and that so i was like having to go through my notes clean all that up so i went and looked at what it was based on and i ended up finding a visual studio code plugin that does the same thing so now what i can do is with this plugin i take my notes from obsidian throw them into visual studio code just in a new window run the plugin and then it converts that to uh the markup used by jira so i can then go take that and paste it in and it keeps all my formatting keeps keeps like the code blocks, it keeps the links, like everything just works beautifully. So I don't have to go through and like kind of massage that stuff. Yeah.

I mean, the massaging is painful. That's where you spend most of your time because you've already done the markdown to get what you wanted in the first place. Yeah. I love having the markdown. So like my, you know, Google Drive, like how I can share it and share my notes with other people. All that stuff works great in plain text. If they have an editor, even better. But then I go to JIRA and paste it and it looks like garbage.

So now I have a solution for that. That's very nice. Very nice. I just thought your JIRAs looked like garbage cause you're doing it wrong. But now, now I just feel bad. Now I just feel bad. Oh,

no, I'm just kidding. All i just feel bad uh i'm just kidding all right so uh my tip of the week is if you haven't already done this if you and your family haven't already done this then stop what you're doing because i'm about to go do this so um a couple of major versions back in 15.2, Apple released the ability to add a legacy contact for your Apple ID. So if you haven't already done this, you go do it. You can find it under the settings app. I don't know if Google has a similar thing, but you'll need to do this in your settings. If you do it like, like, let's say you did it for your spouse, right? All you're doing is allowing your spouse to be a legacy contact in the case,

in the event that something should happen to you. It's so it's not, it's not, you know, you're not giving each other. It's just one way. So if you want to your, your, if you wanted to be the legacy contact for your spouse, your spouse would also have to set it up is the point that I'm trying to make. So, but this will allow you to gain access to a family member's account should, you know, you ever have a need to. And it's not something you're going to do on a whim,

right? Because once you start the process of the legacy contact process and Apple approves it, then there's a three-year timer on that account before Apple deletes the account altogether. So you're not going to like, just be able to gain access on a whim so you know let your family members know like hey there's nothing uh no harm there right you know but should you need to gain access to a family member's account you can and in fact now that i remember it too um i didn't put this one in the notes but i could find the link for it but i remember like um well it's it's the uh password manager whose name we should not say anymore i don't know i know that you two it's falling out of favor with you two i think especially but uh i think last pass has a similar feature where

you can uh specify that um you can specify both the who and the amount of time. So if something were to happen to you, a family member can request access to your vault, but they have to wait a certain amount of time that whatever you've specified. So three years, you know, in my case. I'm kidding. Obviously not three years. You got to time it right.

You know, be careful about when you request that legacy contact. Right. But no. So yeah, if you, if you haven't already done that, go ahead and do it because if you wait until.

And when you do need it, then it could already be too late. Yeah. So, or at least more difficult for sure. And for what it's worth, the last pass fell out of favor with me when they kept jacking the price up. And then they had the breach.

Then it was like, okay. Oh, I didn't say why. I just, you know. Yeah. Bit Warden does have, they call it emergency access. Do you remember years ago, Atlanta B-Sides? It's a security conference in Atlanta. Someone did a talk basically

on how to kind of politely leave your stuff to the next people because they had a situation where a friend's family member died. They were trying to get back in and pay bills and figure out finances and stuff. So they were trying to help their friend

through this terrible situation and had a heck of a time because the person who had passed away was like a techie and so they had a really complex setup and even just like the wireless and stuff and their home network was even tough to really get into and figure out what was going on and like try to even figure out what computers they use and what accounts they had and stuff man just wait till i get my network set up. Yeah. This is going to be amazing. Nobody will figure it out.

Right. Including Alan. No, just kidding. Including me. Probably not far off. Awesome. Well, yep, that's it. Thanks for listening. no hey i actually did make a

mistake on the video i said hey subscribe to us on itunes stitcher and somebody was like yeah stitcher's dead i was like oh i forgot my bad so yeah hey subscribe to us anywhere else but stitcher so itunes spotify that kind of stuff and yeah hey join our slack group we still have a bunch of awesome amazing people on site you can get there by going to cuttingblocks.net slash slack i think that's good enough i don't know so i see you opted to go with the verbose outro rather than i could i mean we we went on the super skinny intro we need the super well-fed outro how we talked about this we agreed on the no we didn't agree on anything i don't want to do yeah all right