Coding Blocks - Toys for Developers

Episode Date: November 10, 2015

The holidays are coming sooner than we realized, so we gotta get our wish lists together. After all, no one wants to sit around the Festivus Pole without their favorite dev toys. This week we discuss some of the toys we love, as well as the ones we drool over, and even the ones we're not so crazy about.

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 34. Subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes, Stitcher, and more using your favorite podcast app. Visit us at CodingBlocks.net where you can find show notes, examples, discussion, and more. And send your feedback, questions, and rants to comments at CodingBlocks.net. Follow us on Twitter at CodingBlocks or head to www.CodingBlocks.net and find all our social links there at the top of the page. With that, welcome to Coding Blocks. I'm Alan Underwood. I'm Joe Zach. And I'm Michael Outlaw. This episode is sponsored by Infragistics. Design before you build with Indigo Studio.

Share and collaborate on designs with indigodesign.com and build high performance, enterprise ready desktop and web line of business apps and mobile apps in the platform of your choice wpf windows forms asp.net html5 and javascript ios android or xamarin so uh head on over to infogistics.com to view sample apps and see these tools in action and get started with your free trial all right and so with that let's get into our favorite section of the show the podcast news so with that in mind i actually made a mistake last episode and surprisingly none of you guys called me out on it i was actually uh like dodged a bullet there so i don't know what it is. Is that the OSX thing? What? No. VARCAR? No one would say OSX.

They're wrong. It's OS10. And, of course, it's VARCHAR. VARCAR. Team CHAR, baby. All right. No. In the last episode, I had mentioned that we started recording in 2012.

Yeah, it was 2013 it was 2013 october right october 2013 was our first september something like that whatever yep now now see now you're trying to prove me wrong again by like october september i believe it was october i'm never gonna believe another thing you say that's right dang tough crowd but at any rate yeah so uh it was actually 2013 so should anyone feel the need to call us out on that hey we beat you to it and in that time we've gotten a lot of fantastic reviews uh including some recent ones from uh it's juggernaut but there's some sixes in there uh javid dill 101 and another one from panu o that we wanted to talk about yeah so he he kind of he gave us a two-star review which i mean fair enough everybody has their own opinions it did hurt i'm

not gonna lie like it kept us up at night a little bit um but he said that like this basically this section right here is his least favorite part of the show and he said that we spend a third of the show you know talking about the news and you know sometimes it does run a little bit long sometimes it doesn't um but you know it just we kind of wanted to address it because this is a part that we kind of do our water cooler talks this is the free form yeah this is free form this is kind of the fun where i get to say silly stuff yeah so i mean i get it you know sometimes some people just want to listen to nothing but the deep dives and and i totally understand that i mean i get it you know sometimes some people just want to listen to nothing but the deep dives and and i totally understand that i mean as a listener of podcasts i get it too like

there's some shows where i break up the monotony there yeah and that's the thing like i mean some shows are literally you know nothing but chitter it like chat and you know we try to minimize that as much as possible about like yeah movies we've seen or tv have you seen any good movies lately the martian oh yeah did you like it did you cry i didn't watch it oh but you know i i guess just to address that i mean yeah you know we we appreciate what you're saying and you know we try to minimize it like i said you know we we try not to let it run too long but well the main point being is like it didn't go unnoticed yeah we appreciate the feedback i mean it did hurt it was it stung a little bit but you know you took the time to actually write us and tell us what

you what you were thinking and i may have cried yeah i think we're all we're all keeping our eye on the clock now yeah yeah so talk faster i think we're in like a minute so we're all keeping our eye on the clock now. Talk faster. I think we're in like a minute, so we're done. All right, so moving on. No, well, backtracking for a moment. It was September. September 3rd. That was our first release.

That was the first recorded episode. That was the first release. Oh, I'm sorry. First release. Yeah. What? Wait, what? We recorded in October, but we released in September, right?

Because we had to edit it. What kind of calendar do you work on? Hey, man, I won. Wait, what? I was correct. That's all I'm saying. Your calendar is weird. We released in September, but recorded in October?

Oh, wow. No, that's totally wrong, isn't it? Yeah, that's why I'm like, wait, what? Uh, yeah. See, that's not even a Mayan calendar. Yeah. I have this time machine. All right. Anyways. All right. I guess next episode, you'll get to talk about how you messed up with the calendar. Yeah. Apparently. All right. So, uh, let's have a little bit of fun with this one. Okay. So maybe, maybe this will make up for, up for anything else that you've already heard so far that you're upset about. So we've done a giveaway before

and so we thought, hey, why not? So I joked about us being lazy and not getting any business cards last time. So this time we have business cards to give away. Oh, wait. No. No, we don't. Close. We didn't take our own advice but uh we are looking to get some

shirts made up and uh so one of the things that i did was i found some place that you know does some shirt printing and had a couple samples printed up to see like what we thought and uh you know they weren't like i probably won't go back to that company necessarily. So I won't mention them by name. But, you know, I thought, hey, we could give away these shirts. So, you know, full disclosure, these are man size. So, you know, if you don't want to be swallowed up by a XX shirt, then these might not be the shirts for you. But they are Hanes shirts, T-shirts.

They have the new logo on it. And on one side it has the logo, and on the other side it has the www.codenblocks.net on the back. And one is a blue color. One's supposed to be a gray color. neither color shirt was exactly what i thought but we're going to have a picture of the shirts on the site so you can see what we're talking about and similar to how we did the contest for joe's design pattern book giveaway it's going to be similar to that so what you're going to need to do is go to the show notes for this episode, which will be codingblocks.net slash episode 34,

and leave a comment to enter yourself into the drawing. And like last time, this will be a random drawing that we will, uh, post the results to our vine and, uh, winner will be randomly selected. Same as last time. And what else am I leaving out here?

Guys? The only tree is encouraged. Yeah. What'd you say? Oh, poetry is encouraged. We did get some wonderful haikus last time. Yeah,

they were fun. And I will say too, this, these are Hanes beefy t-shirts. So if you like them thick, this is a good t-shirt. And, and I don't think I mentioned this to you. Like, uh, we have, you know, worn these, uh, I think one of them has been worn twice. The other one's been worn once, you know, and we were seeing what we thought of and everything. So again, full disclosure, um, but they will be clean by the time you get them. Uh, they are,

well, they already are clean, but, um, yeah, so no fear there. They'll be washed again. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, so no, no foul odors. And these will be collector's items, right? Yeah. Cause these are rare.

These are going to be immensely valuable. These are like B sides. Yeah. I am absolutely not signing it because I'm not trying to get somebody stealing my identity or anything. You really think that your signature, your pen and paper signature matters? Have you seen some of the signatures that pass on a point of sale? Well, that's kind of what mine looks like anyway, so it doesn't matter. Oh, man.

I'm looking forward to reading some of the comments that we get back this time. Yep. And if the news is too long, then burn it and take a picture of it. Send it back to us. Wow. That kind of hurt. Hey, and here's another idea, too, though. Because even if you think, well, I unfortunately am not man-sized at XXL, but maybe you know someone who is.

Is a fan of the show or could become a fan of the show. And they like to wear a tent. Wear what? A tent. This is not like... Wow, man. It's really not that big. I mean, it's a XX.

Really not that big. Everyone in Europe is like, oh my God. It's gigantic. It's more than a medium. Yes, this is America-sized. So, I guess now we need to talk about what we're actually going to talk about today, huh?

What are we going to talk about? It's probably going to be something boring. Today is going to be toys. Toys that we want. Because it's coming up on that time of the season, right? We had a ton of fun doing this last time, and there's nothing better than talking about all the gadgets you want you may or may not get so um yeah so this is the toys for developers show yeah not quite as popular as that other uh you know not-for-profit organization that gives away toys this one is not nearly as popular but every bit as desirable

yeah and just so you know this this is going to be link heavy in the show notes like you know we link to everything whether it be on amazon or whatever site that these things may show up on so you know go up and click around if you do find something you like please if you do decide to buy um you know definitely click our links it'll help us out i mean it we're not going to make much off of it but you know it'll help get the t-shirts buy shirts yeah buy shirts or whatever else that we might do for a giveaway whether it's more books in the future or something but you know we're going to do something fun with it and i want to go ahead and throw this out there too at the beginning um alan already referenced that we've

done a show like this once before so there are going to be references to that episode and that is episode eight so codingblocks.net slash episode eight and you can find uh you know all the fun stuff that we talked about then all right so let's get into it let's start off with mice critters meeses yeah so I just got a new one actually and I've been using it for about a week now it's the evoluent vertical mouse I've been having some really bad carpal tunnel problems which

we should do an episode just on ergonomics and problems with getting old that might go on a long time because I have lots of those problems because we're all young here what kind of mice are you little whippersnappers using? And the thing about it is when you use it, it's almost like you're shaking someone's hand all day. Which is actually quite comfortable, I think.

So I'm a big fan of it. But I have had a problem with really fine-grained stuff. Like I was doing something in paint and I was trying to get the pixels perfect. And I had to grab my other mouse i just couldn't deal with it trying to do that kind of precise action oh have a support like you know a placeholder for your dentures so i'm looking at this thing so the curious thing about this one is it's got three buttons on the vertical no four buttons on the vertical with the scroll wheel so that's kind of nice you really gotta like for those trying to picture this thing like take your

current mouse and just like tip it on its side yeah that's pretty much it except it's got like a solid base to it and it looks way bigger yeah they are large so tell me this joe because one of the ones that i put in here for my pick you might as well go ahead and mention it yeah is the anchor vertical ergonomic so it's funny because i looked at this one that he's talking about the the evoluent and it's about it's a little over 100 bucks and the anchor i think is like 20 something and when i was first looking at mice these were the two that i was looking at and really i ended up going with the anchor because because I was like, I don't know if I'm going to like this thing or not. They're both like, this style, maybe I'm making this up, but I thought that there was somewhere where this style mouse was referred to as a shark fin.

I've heard that before. It kind of looks like it. The Anchor looks very much like a shark fin. For those not familiar with that brand anchor is not like spelled like the boat anchor but a n k e r yeah they make all kinds of gadgets and and pretty honestly like they're fairly decent quality gadgets so here's the interesting thing okay so i i also changed uh the mouse that i was using too a while back and and i switched over to the Logitech M570 and that's a trackball mouse you know it's the one of the you know the more traditional kind where you use your thumb

to roll the the trackball Logitech makes another one where the trackball is in the center where you use your center fingers to do it but um what I find interesting though is that like we all talked about mice last time and none of us have a repeat of our mouse from last time like yeah you know joe and i i think we're just drooling over the mad cats and i right oh my god i still love that mouse but as much as i would like to have it it's just it's expensive and and you know there's other gaming mice out there too that are similar or that aren't as expensive. I will mention all the ones that we just did say, these are all wireless. They're not gaming mice by any stretch of the imagination. These are daily use type mice.

I've got to ask you, Joe, because you bought one of these vertical monstrosities. Did you find that the first few days, every time you went to move your hand and it wasn't on the mouse, you knocked this thing over? It wasn't that bad. It was just fatiguing to try and use it for, you know, clicking on menus and stuff. It was frustrating. Interesting. Yeah, I've grown accustomed to mine. I really like it because it's like you said, your arms are just in a natural position.

Your thumbs are up in the air and it's pretty comfortable, but it does take some getting used to. You know what though? Normal mouses feel small though. They really do. Now I can't go back. Yeah. Yeah, these things spread your hands out. They have a nice feel to them.

It's weird, but you got to try it to know. Oh, and I did want to throw out there on that. So I was having some really bad pains. It was waking me up at night. It was really bad. And I changed a bunch of things, but it's been a lot better since then. So I don't know if it was necessarily the mouse or, like, the, you know, other posture-related type stuff that I did. But I'm definitely feeling better. So, woo.

Very cool. So what about the new Magic Mouse 2 that Apple just released? No excitement there? I haven't seen this thing, Mouse 2. I was never all that crazy about the original Magic Mouse. Really? I like the trackpad. I really like the trackpad.

Well, there's a second version of that, too. Really? Yeah. What's the big deal with these? I think one of the, well, there's a couple of differences. One of them is the one that I like the least is the rechargeable battery. It's not a replaceable battery like it was. Oh, yeah.

That's no good. It uses a lightning cable to charge it. Oh, dude, that trackpad 2 is 130 bucks yeah and i think i think the big deal there for that one is that it has the um force touch or whatever they're calling that now that's what it does um yeah i mean i don't know the force touch is cool and i've used it and it's a nifty thing but like well so here's here's the problem with well you know one of my problems with that new mouse uh the magic mouse 2 is that where the um connector is because like if you look at the shape of this mouse right there's nowhere to plug this in and still be

able to use it right so the the charging dock for it is on the bottom yeah so you can't use that magic mouse too while it's being charged no no now the keyboard and the and the trackpad you know don't don't suffer that but yeah that was unfortunate design decision yeah it's funny like i don't know how long this thing's been out but it's only got a three star rating which is pretty low for an apple product it hasn't been out long at all yeah that's that's really low for an apple product so yeah no no excitement there yeah but it was on last year's and that's why i brought it up right right uh there's one uh i was actually just clicking on around amazon before we started recording and i saw a mouse that i hadn't seen before and it was 150 which you know excites me because i like expensive things

and i look at the picture i'm like wow this looks kind of like the one i've got like how did i not see this when i was researching and you know look cool and i'm clicking through the pictures and i get to the fourth one uh-huh and this thing's like the size of a quarter i mean it's just ridiculous and small this would kill my hand to use it. You got to look at the picture. It's called the SwiftPoint GT. Yeah, SwiftPoint GT. It looks, yeah. Oh, my God. It looks like a mouse.

It's a thick eraser, right? This is a mouse that is literally like, you know, look at your thumb and where that first knuckle is on your thumb. This mouse is that size where like that portion of your thumb, that first half of your thumb is going to cover the entire mouse. But dude, it's got good reviews overall. I know. I would bet that the people that really like this probably travel. Because this would be perfect for traveling.

Oh, but people who don't like it, not good for Mac. Oh, weird. Yeah, I can't imagine using this. So if you've got a good experience with this, weird. Yeah. Yeah, I can't imagine using this. So if you've got a good experience with this, let me know. But this looks like

a nightmare to use for me. Yeah, I couldn't do it. It doesn't really look very ergonomic. So your old man hands and there's definitely no space for your dentures

on that. It's way too. It's like holding a quarter. That's what it looks like to me. Well, they refer to it as the same grip as holding a pen. And they actually, in the picture there, in that fourth picture that you mentioned, they contrast that there's a picture of holding a pen

versus using this mouse, and it's the same exact hand position. Yeah, the reviews are great. Hmm. Yeah. All right. add to cart gonna try it out all right so so alan's favorite uh or one of his favorites in this group the keyboards yeah i feel like they're in the wrong order at this point in time though

what yeah it's because i i pasted these links and so i did it in a funky order i'm looking at split keyboards now and so i put the splits at the top so up the um we've talked about the kinesis not the freestyle figure what we talked about before it was that yeah go ahead uh i don't know the name it's i'm gonna look at right now it's it was the advantage 60 dollars yeah and it's just crazy and it looks crazy but i i can't do that but the the Kinesis does have another one that's around $90, the Freestyle 2, that I think looks really cool. And you can kind of set the pitch and split. So for whiter people like me, you know, man-sized, right? I think that might be a little bit more comfortable. I mean, so just to describe this thing and what this thing looks like.

Like take a traditional you know ibm compatible 104 keyboard right and literally just cut it in half right in the middle and have two distinct pieces of them but with a wire connecting them that's what this thing looks like now i've actually put my hands on one before joe um one of the ladies i used to work with had one set up and she had the tent on it so that her hands were at an angle and it was interesting I mean I'm more of a fan of the ergonomics you know the way the keys flow this is not that this is literally your standard you know IBM keyboard just split in half but it does have a nice feel to it especially when you tent it yeah so I gotta

say I was looking at ergonomic keyboards and I read a lot of reviews and so many of them said this would be great if I wasn't a programmer because they do weird stuff like move keys, the function keys and stuff out of the way. Those are things that maybe, you know, what's the muggles?

Muggles don't use those keys but we programmers, you know, I need those functions. I need that delete key. F5, F8. Yep. I mean, this thing's got a strong review on iTunes. Not iTunes. On Amazon.

Yeah, it's got a really strong review. So that, the Kinesis Freestyle 2, and there's two actually gold touch split models that both were highly rated by programmers. So those were the three I was looking at. I really can't tell the difference between the two gold touches. So I just think of them as the gold touch splits. Yeah. I mean, this one again is, is similar to the other one where it's a, you know, your same keyboard split in half, except the two pieces are a little bit more connected.

The other one on the Kinesis one it was literally just a wire that held them to you know that a very bendable you know flexible wire that connected them whereas this one looks like it's got a little bit more of a joint connecting them yep i think you know what i don't even know that we have a link in here but it made me it made me remember there's one so this might be something you look into joe because this is something that programmers really like it's called the ergo dox e-r-g-o-d-o-x and it's also a split keyboard but it has keys down where your thumbs can go as well so that once you get used to it it's not just a space bar that your thumb is delegated to

you can do like different things um yeah if you if you search for ergo docs dox oh yeah those are kind of nice and here's what i'll tell you too if you are somewhat interested in that you should check out mass drop because they'll occasionally have them on there for like pretty decent discounts so um yeah i just thought i'd throw that one in there while i was thinking about it seeing so that's kind of is this the one that started out as an indiegogo yes i believe so and it has gotten all kinds of people backing it like people create them and this one's kind of cool because a lot of times what you'll see is people will do like clear casings and then you can put any kind of switches you want on there because some people are into the cherry switches

and that kind of stuff. You can actually change out the type of switches that go behind the keys. This is something that a lot of people love. This is cool. If you look at the Indiegogo pictures of it, some of the prototypes they have here, you can see that they 3D printed

the tray that all the components would sit in, the physical bulk of the keyboard. You can actually tell that it was 3D printed. It's a pretty neat little setup. Apparently, you just get software and you can map the keys to be whatever you want. Some people put blank keys on the thing, so you can't even see what they are. You can do whatever you want

some people like so hot it's pretty cool right like you can even get backlit led keys if you wanted like you can go crazy with this thing man i don't see how you could get your thumb to do some of these buttons though because like on each side there's six different buttons that your thumb could use it's like the kinesis so the advantage that you were talking about if you look at that that's got that concave there's a bunch of buttons at your thumbs. And everybody I've ever talked to that has worked on that says that, yeah, it takes some getting used to, but after you do. But I get that, though, because that's like putting your hand in a bowl. Right, and so your hands are sitting up on it.

But this one, though, it's like some of these buttons your thumb would have to reach for, or at least it seems like it would have to reach for. You'll be able to play guitar better after playing on this thing. Maybe. So, yeah, at any rate, I just wanted to throw that one out there. That's a pretty cool one. Oh, and then we did mention the Kinesis Advantage right here. Now, the one that I have that I absolutely love, it's my favorite keyboard I've ever bought.

I've seen him travel with this thing. Yes, I actually bring this thing with me because I love this keyboard. It's the Microsoft Sculpt. And I think I even mentioned it the last time we had this episode. And I was so frustrated. I wanted to put my hands on this thing

because I've bought enough keyboards that you don't get a chance to put your hands on. And because i've bought enough keyboards that you didn't that you don't get a chance to put your hands on and you get it home and you're like yeah it's okay but you know man i finally found one of these things i think it was at a at a micro center and they had the box sitting out and i broke that baby open and it was done like i i love this keyboard now correct me if i'm wrong, full disclosure here, right? Yep. Isn't this the one that has the small function keys?

I hate the function keys on this keyboard. Oh, okay. So here's the thing. All right. So here we go back to muggle keyboards, right? This is a muggle keyboard. This is full disclosure. So there's a couple things about this keyboard that drive me absolutely crazy.

And that is, one, the function keys. So everything else has a nice travel. It's like a chiclet style, like a MacBook Pro. things about this keyboard that drive me absolutely crazy and that is one the function key so everything else has a nice travel it's like a chiclet style like a macbook pro it's almost identical feel to that the function keys are not they're just like they they're a really cheap feeling clunky push which is bizarre and then the other thing too is is they redid the like the page up page down insert key uh that whole conglomerate of keys over on the right so that they could make it you know a certain size and i'm not gonna lie it took me a while to get used to it and i'm still not a fan of it but the thing is i love the key feel and the way that my hands lay on that keyboard

so much that i'll deal with the deficiencies it's like as an industry we all agree on where what the numbers and letters in the space bar like what their position should be anything else it's a free game yeah it's frustrating let's try it so so and what i mean by that is like you know because the keyboard i use it has like an odd grouping for the function keys. They're not like your standard group of four, minor groups of three. Yeah, it's really not cool. And you know what's frustrating about this particular keyboard, like you said, with the function keys? Dude, it wouldn't have been that difficult for Microsoft to say, okay, let's throw these same switches up here at the top.

Who cares that it's going to be an extra half inch taller? Just do it. Like seriously, if they had done that, people would probably be like, toss all your other keyboards. Like this thing, this is it. So I don't know. Even with its deficiencies, I still love the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic. Yeah, I'm still a fan of my logitech uh keyboard which we mentioned it last time too but um we have it listed in the last episode as an mk550 i thought it was an mk350

but we'll sort that out yeah it's called the wave if you were to go and look for it yep um and yeah i'm a fan of it but but like i said the only one gripe I have about it is that the function keys are not your standard grouping of four. But these are like, you know, proper sized function keys, not like your itty bitty little Lego size. I'm not a fan of the Lego size. But this is like the one thing I like about this keyboard, though, is it's almost like a combination of all of these concepts, right? Like it's on a curve like, you curve like the old natural keyboards were, right? Like instead of being completely split, it's just on a curve. But yet at the same time, it's not on a flat plane.

So it's kind of like the Kinesis Advantage in that there's some curvature to it. So I'm a fan of it. Your'm a fan of it it's also an affordable keyboard um yeah it's i've typed on it i like it um i just the sculptor ergonomic is just where it's at for me yeah all right let's move on but wait you have one more the apple magic keyboard yeah i mean i threw that in there about the what about because again you know going back to um you know what we talked about in episode eight right like you know we'd made references to the um magic mouse and the magic trackpad and i thought well since this one did just come out you know i'd go ahead and mention it but again like i don't like i'm not crazy about the not replace non-replaceable battery in it because if I'm going to have to charge it up,

then I'm kind of okay with a dock, which is one of the keyboards that we mentioned last time. I'm not sure how to pronounce this, but the Logitech Dynovo, I guess, which has a dock, and it looks really great. It's like this piano black dock that it sits in when you're not has a dock and it looks really great. It's like this piano black, you know, dock that it sits in when you're not using it and it charges it up. But, you know,

this other one is going to run off of a Thunderbolt connection. I don't know. Maybe it'll turn out to be awesome. It, you know, one of the, you know, notable features of it is it has the new uh what what does apple call it the butterfly the new butterfly uh mechanism for the for the key press so the keys are lower than you know even uh you know your standard chiclet keyboards they do feel good i mean apple makes a nice feeling key click but i don't know that thing looks weird and again it's not ergo so i'm not into it but um i mean

it's like um yeah it does have it does look like it has a little bit more uh oomph to it than than the previous one because the previous wireless keyboard you know it had that barrel and that's where the batteries went and then you know there's a little bit of a gap there right but it was sitting on somewhat of an incline and it was like a it's not like one of these keyboards where you could like lift the legs open right like that one was just stay in place and this one looks like that too except now it's just like one solid piece that's on this incline yeah but yep none of us have touched it yet so who knows you know one thing about macs that are kind of funny is that when i'm on my laptop like i can use the mac shortcuts no problem but if i try to use like a windows style keyboard and i can never remember

to use the you know the wrong button for my keyboard shortcuts the wrong button yeah because you know you can flip those in the settings, though, right? Yeah, it's just a pain. Yeah, agreed. All right, so I think we're due for some age-old. Yeah. Why don't you go ahead and introduce this one? While you stay here.

So, actually, I've added a new section called wrist guards. And I know a lot of programmers. Have you been playing soccer or football or something? You will know someday. Actually, I know a ton of programmers. It's kind of like a little secret that wear gloves, especially at night. Because when you get really bad RSI or carpal tunnel syndrome, it'll wake you up at night, which is terrible. So a lot of people will wear it at night, and a lot of people actually wear them during the day, too, when they're typing.

It's basically a glove that keeps your wrist from kind of bending, and it enforces good hand posture. Does it have sequins on it, this glove? No, but it kind of smells funny. It didn't at first. I don't know. After a couple of months of wearing it, it's just a little salty. You should probably wash that thing. I'm just saying.

My wife washes them for me sometimes. I don't know how she knows when it's time. Wow. So you have two of these guys listed here. Yeah, I wanted to mention too, the ones I sleep with are a little bit different. I recently just discovered these guys. The IMAX Smart Glove, this was a recommendation from my buddy Kirk. And I really like this one.

It feels nice and tight. It's got kind of like a little sandbag in the wrist, which is kind of cool. But the thing is, it's a little too tight for me. So at first it's good, but after a while I kind of feel like I'm suffocating. Your fingers start throbbing, lack of blood. That doesn't happen, but I don't know, I just get fatigued. So maybe I need to build up to it, or maybe I just have fat hands. I don't know.

Man, you've got some serious carpal tunnel going on. Yeah, man i i've had a lot of problems with it lately it's terrible man when you wake up and you like you want to like scream in the middle of the night it's horrible i mean this was supposed to be a fun episode but now i'm sad like are you seeing anyone for this are you seeing any professionals are you taking anything for it you have all new programmers listening to the podcast. I am your future. 100 pounds heavier. The ghost of future present. Can't sleep through the night.

You lost two inches because your head's stuck forward. Did you just say the ghost of future present? Wouldn't that be? Well, that goes back to my whole september october thing right right like i got this this is all working for me all right yeah english yes that's all right all right so here here is definitely a favorite section all right let's get into the monitors and i get to start this one because i started the trend with just about every person i know so i think we mentioned this back on the previous one the lg 34 inch ultra wide i was drooling over this monitor for so long we did but i think that at that time though

we were all kind of leaning more towards like the 4k route yeah and so yeah and we'll talk about that in a second because we have one of those on here too dude the the lg and there's multiple variations of this thing i only put the one in that i bought um the 34 um 95 dash p i think outlaw got one like the 94-P or something. Actually, I think you wrote down mine, right? No, that's the one I got. So the thing is there's a couple different ones that are basically the same thing. They come with different warranties.

One's for the consumer. One's for a business. And then there's also the curved one. And the thing is these things have come down in price. Like now for about $700 you can get one of these. And I'll go ahead and say like some of my favorite things about this one are the amount of pixels 3440 by 14 yeah 3440 by 1440 which is absolutely killer man like you can you can open up visual studio and have three easily have three files side by side open in visual studio and be able to look at all of them at

the same time it's amazing yeah it they are fantastic yeah and i mean there were people that complained about like light bleed or stuff like if you look at some of the negative reviews on it you'll see people say oh well there's light bleed okay well let's take a look at your apple thunderbolt you're gonna see the same light bleed like if you were there people may have some problems but i there are the you know whatever the audio file equivalent for a monitor is yeah you know yeah i'm sure maybe there's some kind of problem but for regular use dude um i'm not seeing any problems with this thing and it's got thunderbolt right like that well that was what did it that that is what sent me over the top where I was like, I'm getting this. Okay. So I'm not seeing problems with it in terms of light bleed.

But let me keep it real right here. Okay. Because like Alan said, you know, once I saw one in person, the first thing I did when I jumped on Alan's was like, oh, my God. Look, I can just drag this tab off and I can drag that tab off. And before you know it, I had like four files and I could see each one of them like side by side, and it was a beautiful thing, but that does come at something of a cost though, so there are slightly different model numbers for this, so like Alan mentioned, the one that we have the link for is the 34 um 95p and the one that i got was the 94p and from what i read the only difference between the models that you got versus the one that i got was literally the warranty yeah yours was longer mine mine came with a three-year warranty and yours came with a

one-year warranty yep um at least from what my research was at the time. But there are a couple things that bother me about this monitor, and that is, and they're like little nuisance things. One is sometimes it, and I haven't figured out a pattern to it, but when the machine needs to cut off the monitor for whatever reason, you know, it goes to sleep, it's locked, whatever. Sometimes when I wake the machine back up and bring it back up, then once I log in, Windows have been repositioned to random places. Yeah, you've told me.

I've never had that problem. Now, that does seem... Okay, so I do use this connected in both OS 10 and Windows 8.1. And only, I only see that weird problem happen in Windows 8.1. But it is an extremely frustrating problem, though, because, you know, if you go to launch and you come back and now all of your windows are moved over. And it's weird because it's almost as if when the monitor goes to sleep that in that low power mode it reports its resolution is something different than what it actually is because what ends up happening is not only

not only do all the windows get moved over you know because because i have a dual monitor setup so not only do all the monitor all the windows from the second monitor get moved over to the first one but they also get resized in that 34 to where they don't even take up the entire 34 inch display question for you is that thing hooked up through thunderbolt through windows or is it hdmi through windows uh neither so this thing has multiple ports, inputs, and that wasn't one of the things that I liked about it. And so I'm actually using DisplayPort.

Okay, interesting, because I'm doing HDMI on that one. Because of Mac's Windows driver stinks for Thunderbolt. Mac's Windows driver? Yeah, so for boot camp. Like the boot camp drivers for's not um that's not an apple driver that's a microsoft okay it's horrible like you can't unplug the thing and plug it back you have to restart your that is a known that thunderbolt problem is a known microsoft you can't daisy chain them yeah you can't hot swap them okay so it's garbage um

and so that's why i have mine hooked up through hdmi for that very reason because if the power goes out or you accidentally unplug it or whatever you literally have to reboot your system to get it to recognize the thunderbolt that's why i have mine in as display port and actually the second monitor that was referring to is coming in as thunderbolt interesting but yeah so i don't i don't know it's weird and i've only seen to notice that in in Windows not in OS 10 and then I noticed another weird one that has seemed to go away this one actually scared me because the controls okay because I was switch okay so, well, first let me backtrack. The other major nuisance thing about this monitor is that it does not auto sense the input.

So if you have multiple sources connected into it through the different inputs and you disconnect one of them or turn one of them off, it doesn't recognize that it's something on another one and automatically switch to it nor does it if there's nothing plugged into it and you happen to plug in on a source that wasn't last used it doesn't switch to it when that device cuts on right you have to use you have to manually switch it so this is where we get into the third nuisance one and the one that scared me so on the bottom of it there's this little you know jog wheel mouse stick whatever you want to call it that's on the bottom of the monitor that you use to go through the menus well at random i don't know why but the directions were flipped so so like what used, like, pushing up became pushing down. And what was kind of annoying there is that the way it was before is that, you know, if you pushed down, then it would turn off the monitor. Right. Well, so what I needed to do to switch inputs was to push up, but then up became down, so I would push up up and then that would turn it off and i'm like

wait what just happened and then but then worse than that what was also kind of weird about that is that not only did the left and rights get switched but what should have been a left right no longer worked like i couldn't so um or maybe i had that backwards but i couldn't go to that working i couldn't go the other direction and so yeah so that was really weird and nothing touches that joystick it's not like that it's not like that button has been banged on the desk or anything like that like literally nothing's touched it but the and the only reason why i even interact with it at all is because when you switch inputs, you have to. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, you'd never touch it. I mean, literally, you'd never touch it. Yeah. So, those are my major gripes about it. I mean, as far as like, you know, you're talking about people having issues with the color. I haven't noticed any of that.

Dude, it's beautiful. Like, I've got it next to a 27-inch Thunderbolt. And here's the cool part because the pixel layout it literally is the same exact height as a thunderbolt 27 inch like the screen size is identical yeah an apple thunderbolt an apple thunderbolt display and it's gorgeous like the display on it's wonderful so yeah i i'm a huge fan of it the only thing i will say is if you're a gamer and you want to do this, you better have a fairly beefy gaming card.

You at least need to have a 960 GTX and probably higher because you're pushing a lot of pixels. Yeah. Yeah, I doubt a lot of games will even support that high. I don't know how that's going to work. I know a lot of games don't support my ultra-wide right now. But I guess the aspect ratio is different there. But I'm hesitant for 4K.

Well, so that brings us to the next monitor, which is a Philips 40-inch 4K. And here's the thing. I was telling the guys before this, for me to go 4k, because I've seen the 28 inch monitors out there. The thing is 4k is so tiny. I mean, just so incredibly small, unless you do the scaling, which windows has gotten a little bit better with, but it's still not perfect. But I mean, if you're really going to get a 4k display, you want it, you want those 4k pixels to be doing something right. and so i think 40 inches is probably about the right size if you're going to use it for a computer and one of our buddies got

one and he loves it he swears by the thing now you want to talk about gaming dude you better you better shell out some cash for a 980 ti because that's what you're going to need to be running much of anything on a 4k display i mean video cards aren't quite there yet i mean there's a lot of people to go out and buy these monitors to game on and you better be willing to go ahead and shell out as much as you did for the monitor for another video card so at least one or more yeah or more i mean a lot of people run those in sli just to get frame rates that are pretty good so i mean it's no joke but i mean 4k 40 inch for a developer is is pretty outstanding yeah now we're getting ludicrous yeah i like it yeah me too um all right so the desk setups yeah so the first one that i've put on here so i you know i work at home now and one of my big things was is getting set up so i've got my ergonomic keyboard i have

my ergonomic mouse all this stuff right and i get no exercise like i literally it's it's it's terrible man like the most exercise i get is running to my car to go to five guys which is terrible so so um you know one of the problems with that is like literally and we know it as developers i need a wrist guard i probably will soon i'm probably gonna need all kinds of guards here pretty soon if I don't get some exercise. But one of my things was I literally sit down for eight, nine, ten hours a day, right? That's what you do as a developer. And so one of my big things was I wanted a desk.

We talked about this last year. Like, what would your perfect desk be? Yeah. Desks were definitely one of the items. And dude, like when I started working from my house, I was like, I have to have a setup that is going to be conducive to me wanting to be here. So what I did is I ended up building my own desktop. Outlaw did a similar thing and he can tell you about it in a second. But with that, I didn't just want to build a desktop. I wanted a sit-stand desk. And so there's a set of legs called uplift 900 and we'll

have a link in the show notes as with everything here but basically you can buy these legs stand alone and then just attach them to your desk dude these things are freaking fantastic i can't tell you how many times playing with these after i got them before I even put the desktop on it, where I would sit my entire family on top of the rails of this thing and just push the up button and like raise ourselves to the ceiling and go down. It'll support 350 pounds. I have three monitors on it. I have a computer mounted underneath the desk. I have my desk on it.

I have hard drive. I have tons of stuff you hit the button and it's just like so so let me let me a little commentary you know unbiased outside commentary so you know as alan mentioned i too uh decided hey you know what i'd like to build my own desk and i was actually i actually had built mine before i I believe it was before Alan finished his. Yeah. But, you know, so yeah. So I had, you know, researched, you know,

because we had talked about the TBC consoles last time. I love those setups. They're so beautiful. But I really didn't want to spend that kind of money on like a custom made, you know, if you got it, you know, on that kind of desk. But, you know, there were a lot of custom-made desks that were out there and like if you go and just do some googling on your own for like you know you know we've mentioned battle stations before like there's a whole subreddit for that um there

are some beautiful setups and oh by the way we'd like to see yours too so why don't you uh tweet us a link oh absolutely tweet us a picture of what your battle station setup looks like. But, yeah, so, I mean, there are some beautiful setups out there. And so, you know, I did some searching around and also trying to keep things real. Like, you know, okay, well, what's in, like, the realm of realistically, you know, that I could put something that I could pull off that's not going to take a ton of time, you know, relatively quick. So I built this desk and I was rather proud of it. Right. And I mean like really proud of it. I was showing people pictures all the time.

It's a good looking desk. I was really proud of it. It's a design by Anna White, but my wife had actually seen it. It's a good looking desk. Uh, and then Alan told me what he was going to do. And you know,

he was only going to do the top of the desk and then he was going to buy the legs for it and at first i was like wow really that sounds kind of crazy i wonder how it's going to work out and then i saw what he did and honest to god i'm jealous i'm like i went the wrong direction i should have just i could have just made i could have just taken a piece of wood and just you know sanded it down really good and get really smooth painted that and been done and slapped it on top of this uplift 900 and this thing is amazing yeah it's pretty cool so i will say i did a little bit more than just sanding the top i actually just sanded it so that's pretty much it so i so here's the thing and for anybody who's thinking about this like one of the things and one of the reasons why i did not buy a desk was I couldn't find anything that met all my requirements.

Yeah, that was my problem too. And that frustrated me. So one of my big requirements was it needed to be wide enough to where both me and my wife could sit at it, right? Because I didn't want her trying to take up my computer space when I needed to be doing something. And I didn't want to take away from hers, right? So that was one the other thing is I didn't I needed a little bit of storage but I didn't want a lot of storage right so what I ended up making was three cubby holes that are basically they're slightly bigger than an eight and a half by eleven so that you can put sheets

of paper in there if you wanted right like there I think they might be 13 inches deep or something like that. So you can actually slide paper back in there. And then the other thing was I wanted something to hide wires. I'm so tired of seeing wires everywhere that I was like, I need some place for this. So what I did is my cubbies that I built, I built the desktop to where the top of it and the cubby is about four inches tall. So I've got enough room to put a surge protector in the back of this thing to where I can plug all my wires up and hide them all. So, so like all these things were literally the reason why I built this. Now it took me probably, I don't know, I think I started on it. It might've, it might've taken me two or three

weeks to get the whole thing done. That's sanding, cutting doing all that kind of stuff so i mean it's done over time but man i'm so happy with it like it is probably one of my favorite things i've done yeah and joe i mean what did you end up landing with i know that you've got a whole new setup there did you did you change your desk at all no i cheaped outed out. I've still got an Ikea desk. And I do like that there's no drawers because I definitely am a fidgeter. And I hate having drawers on the desk because I just keep banging my knees on it. So I don't hate this desk. And it was a lot easier to just kind of go to Ikea.

And putting them together is a nightmare. But not as hard as what you guys did. Well, it's funny. I mean, yeah, it took some time. But I will say guys did well it's funny i mean yeah it took some time but i will say like the top of it's gorgeous like i don't know like when i sit down at it now i actually enjoy sitting at the desk because i look at it i'm like man this thing looks nice i can push one button dude this uplift 900 is so fantastic because you can set memory points on it it has four memory spots so like if you wanted to if you stand at a certain height and you want this thing, you can set that at memory one, right?

And your wife is at a certain height, that could be memory two. Dude, it is absolutely fantastic. I'll take some pictures and try and get it up here along with this. Maybe it'll give some people some ideas. How high does it go? Oh, dude, it's pretty tall like it will go um so sitting down it's like the perfect height i think the the desk is right at 30 inches off the floor the top of it which is what standard desks are that you go to a store and buy

um stay i think when you hit this thing it'll go up 54 or something like the thing will get close to my shoulders which is you know i'm six feet tall so it's you know it goes up pretty high that's ridiculous yeah dude i love it it's and i'm telling you dude i'm not kidding you i have my whole family sitting on the thing just pushing the up and down button my kids are like hey can we ride the desk again yeah it says it says that for the the frame of it the legs of it it goes from a height range of 23 and a half inches to 49 and a half inches and that again is without the the desk top it's so cool oh and here's one thing to know about it that so if anybody's interested in those things when i did my desk

width i did an entire sheet of plywood so it was eight feet wide so 96 inches now i said that in inches so for those on the other side of the pond that are in meters that's gonna be like a babillion centimeters or like one meter right oh so here's the cool part like they show measurements on the thing that say, this is how far apart these things need to be. The legs. Yeah. These things. Yeah. The legs, right. Here's the thing. There's like a middle section. And when I talked to the person on the chat, the, they, or no, I actually called on the phone. They said, you don't even need that middle piece. So literally I took that out. I was able to move the legs a little bit further apart to

give it better stability and then just screw that into the bottom of the desk and everything's good to go so i've literally got a full eight foot wide desk that is just beautiful which is why the next topic the next item here is so important because with these custom-made desks handmade desks and with things moving up and down it's important to mount these gigantic monitors to make sure that they're sturdy so once again back on the list for the second time is the ergotron lx desk mounts and if you have never seen these they are like picture a mount for a monitor or tv but one that actually looks good one that you don't mind showing somebody that that's what these are these are beautiful i don't even know how to i wanted to

say like a predator but it's not predator they're like chrome and black i don't even know how to describe it but we need to note though last time we talked about these because they were items that we lusted over i've got two of them now you've got two of them yeah and better yet this hands down okay now let me tell you what if you go if you were to go look on amazon and you find the ergotron lx desk mounts, you'll find that Amazon has an Amazon Basics version that looks extremely similar. Yeah. Okay. Minus the curl.

Except that it's all black. Yep. Now, I'm not going to try to take anything away from Amazon, right? I mean, they may have even had these made by Ergotron. I don't know. But what I can say is that in terms of customer support, this has been the best experience I ever had from a company. So what happened was because I had made the desk myself, I had purposely left some space on the back because I knew I was going to want to mount the monitors to the desk. And I knew that I was going to want a mount that would clamp to the desk, right? And so I had purposely left some space on the back for such a mount, except when I got these Ergotrons in the mount didn't quite, the, the, the mouse that they came with included this, um, the, the, the knob on the

dial that you would turn to screw it in to make it tighter. It was gigantic, like much larger than it needed to be, but that was their de facto knob that, you know, that they used. Right. And ergonomically, I mean, it was like, you know, it was good to use. I mean, you know, there was nothing wrong with it, but if they had had a version where, you know, instead of using your hand to tighten it, if you used some tool, then for my purposes, then, you know, that would work better. Or if this knob just wasn't, you know, so gigantic. So I reached out to them because they have all kinds of accessories that you can get for this arm for this desk mount right like if you want to extend the distance that this arm and you know reaches out there is extensions for that and one of the the great things about this monitor is this is supposed to be like once you

set it up and you set all the tension on the springs correctly then you never have to use any tools or anything like that to move the monitor around. You can freely move the monitor in whatever position you want. And because the tension is set, it'll just stay wherever you move it. And so they have all kinds of accessories for it. And so I couldn't find a replacement mount for this. And so I hit up their support was like, Hey, you know, here's what I'm trying to do. But you know, this knob is just too big. You just too big. I can't find anything like that. The guy custom made two mounts for me and sent

me pictures. Let me rephrase that. He custom made two different styles. Sent me a picture and said which one do you think would work for you? Then I said I think this one would work for you? And then, and then I said, I, you know, I said, well,

I think I'll, I think this one, you know, would work best. And then he sent me two of them. Yeah. Of that, of that style.

At no charge. Yeah. At no charge. No, not even shipping. They, it was all, they,

he was just like, yeah, we've never had anyone. He's like, that's a really cool idea. And no one has hit us up for that. Uh, you know,

and it was only because of the space constraint, because that knob like literally there was enough space for it to fit but you couldn't but you couldn't turn it right because of where the the back wall of my desk was and you know so like looking at the directions like oh no there's enough room yeah that's i mean you don't get customer service like that and i can attest to it like it is holding up a 27 inch thunderbolt apple thunderbolt which is nothing but a chunk of metal and it's also one heavy monitor it is heavy and then it's also holding up my lg 34 inch dude those things are amazing just flat out amazing well holding up the lg isn't such a big

deal though because that that's a lightweight monitor i think without the stand that one's like 14 pounds but apple that that monitor is like 22 without a stand on it it's a heavy piece of metal it's a big one yeah but then you have to have a place to sit at these wonderful desks and so also for the second time on the list my favorite the herman miller arion like there's no more comfort Like if you got to spend your day as a developer sitting in front of a desk writing code, you want that to be, that should be a throne.

That's, that's your throne. That's where you're going to sit. That's where you're going to spend your time. Yeah. I got one of those bouncy balls. What? Hey,

what chair are you sitting in? I'm strengthening my core. I don't remember what it is. It was actually, it was a cheapie. So, you know, here's my thing with the cheapies, and I've gone that route. You know what drives me crazy about them more than anything else? Other than the fact that they break down over a year or two,

is the fact that they pop and crack and creak and squeak. I cannot stand it. And I think part of it is because I'll record a video for coding blocks or something like that and i don't want to have to worry about every time i move it going pop crap yep i can't stand it um so here's what's funny i actually have a leap too which is a nice chair like it's it's really good um but i'm not recommending that one as much because i went and bought this work pro quantum 9000 from office depot and if you get it on sale you can usually get it for somewhere in the

ballpark of 280 bucks and they call it the baby herman miller it's an excellent chair for the price it's solidly built it does not have the nine gajillion adjustments that the Herman Miller Aeron has, but it feels just about as good. You have, I mean, the bottom's the mesh, the back is the mesh, super comfortable, stays cool. For my money, that's one of the better chairs I've purchased. The Leap is very good, but the Leap is also up there in Herman Miller territory.

But this Work Pro, if you're looking for a quality chair that's not going to break the bank, this is a really good one. But if it costs more, it's better, right? That's right. Five times better in this case.

Right? Alright, so who's in this case. Right? Wait. All right. So who's got this next one here? Me. I think we all have them, though. These are the laptop stands. I have an M stand, so it's just kind of nice,

so I don't have to bend down so far. And what I really like about laptop stands, it kind of puts it up and it puts the keyboard at kind of an angle, so it's awkward for typing, but it's great for viewing. What I really like about it is I just, you know, it kind of reclaims some of that desk space. So I like that I can kind of slide stuff underneath the laptop now. But you said to bend down, like where you have the stand.

No, I just feel like if you're sitting kind of a proper, you know, proper ergonomic posture, then you're going to be looking down at a laptop compared to like a monitor that's got you know maybe a six inch stand or something yeah the uh we i think we all do have the same exact stand and it's it's a pretty quality one the other thing i like about it too like we all have macbooks that sit on it do those things turn into little turb like they go hot fast, especially if you're doing a Google Hangout, right?

So it also opens up the back of it to where it has a place to actually vent out that hot air. So that's one just kind of side nice feature of it other than the elevation of the screen, which is good. It's expensive, though. It's like – it was either $49 or $50, something like that for, uh, you know, essentially a piece of aluminum. Yeah. That's really all it is, but there is nothing fancy about it, but it does. The box was very fancy.

The box was, it was like an Apple box, wasn't it? Yep. But it is a nice piece of it and it looks nice, right? Like, so you're paying for decor and functionality and it happens to handle both just fine now if you want a slightly smaller footprint for something like this right uh i actually have and use one made by a company called just mobile and it's the aloe base like like aluminum base but they decided to concatenate it aloe base uh laptop mount and what this what this is is the you just stand the laptop in it vertically right so you know

i like it i actually in the picture they show it where like they show like an apple laptop where you can actually see the logo but because that means that the heat sinks are then pointing down that makes no sense to me. So it makes sense to like have it pointing up, you know, so that the heat sinks are, you know, the logo might be upside down,

but the heat sinks are up to get rid of all the heat. But, you know, it's, it's even less aluminum than that M stand, but yet it's not too far away from the price. Yeah, exactly. But, well, it's because they called it

the aloe base i mean they got it yeah so i'm not getting it yeah true that but it's basically like if you look at this thing though it so here's the beauty of it though because not only can you use this thing for work but you should go look at the pictures for this thing too because you can also use it for taco night because it looks like it would perfectly hold your taco and you can be like put all your dressings in your taco and then you know eat it and make another one like this thing's beautiful for that man that's some pop right there and depending on like you know what your diet for tacos is there's like two different inserts so you know you could have big tacos or little tacos. Man, if you're spending $40 to get a taco holder, you're living large, my friend.

No. Again, this is multi-purpose. This is taco holder and laptop holder. What part of that did you understand? You definitely want to dip your MacBook in your Taco Bell leftovers. Now, hold on now. That's blasphemy. We said tacos. Nobody's bringing up Taco Bell. We're, hold on now. That's blasphemy. We said tacos.

Nobody's bringing up Taco Bell. We're talking about good tacos. Oh, come on. Taco Bell. That's not good tacos. That's fantastic, man. You can't beat a Mexican pizza. I can't have a conversation with this man.

Don't even. Really? Really? How can I even talk to you anymore? That is insane. Joe, what say you? Taco Bell rules. No.

High broken. No one in their right mind would say that's a good taco. I mean, it's, you know, I don't even know. Can you say it's edible? I mean, like, I guess you don't die from it, so maybe. Well, ever since. But I could eat paper and not die from that, too. Oh, man. Taco Bell is fantastic.

Does that make paper edible? So here is from that, too. Oh, man. Taco Bell is fantastic. Does that make paper edible? So here is, yeah. A number four, man. A Mexican pizza and two crunchy tacos. It's on. I can't take this man serious, but maybe you can. And so here's what you should do. You should head over to www.codingblocks.net slash review and find your choice of either itunes or stitcher or whatever your favorite

aggregator might be leave us a review we greatly appreciate it every time we see one you know well most of them almost every time we see one we get excited except for that that one that we mentioned earlier the one that shall not go the one that shall not be mentioned we we normally don't cry when we read them was the voldemort what are you doing man but uh yeah and and hey we've said this before too if you find another aggregator that you prefer let us know because you know we're curious to find out like how people are getting to find us and, you know, spread the word to tell a friend or three or four. And we, we do really appreciate that. This episode is sponsored by digital ocean. Over 550,000 developers have already deployed to their cloud. You could deploy your own droplet

in 55 seconds. Their options start at $ five dollars a month and you only pay for the time used when your droplet is live use the offer code coding blocks no spaces and get a ten dollar credit towards your new digital ocean account all right so you know vlad is probably wanting to kick somebody that we haven't already mentioned this this uh this section here let's talk about storage yeah man he's he might be the person who like made us all think differently about this because he's like look man i i don't even need good processors give me an i3 no no nay give me a celeron but give me he didn't quite go that far he all his stuff was running i3s dude no i thought he was i5 no he i3s and ssds because i was like dude you're crazy he definitely was of the opinion

to spend all your money on on the the disc versus the cpu and you know what he was right yeah really it's i mean honestly in the past two, is there anything that gives you better bang for your buck performance-wise than an SSD? Not for the stuff I'm doing. No way. Two decades, man. Two decades? Yeah, man. Seriously.

Because you've always been hampered by those slow hard drives, right? But you're wanting to go back to 1995 computers? Yeah, man. All the way back. I don't even care. Really? You want to go back to the release of Windows 95? SSD is where it's at. We're going to compare. Yes. if we had ssds back then we might not have even developed anything

else that's what i'm saying like this we're done yeah windows 95 is so good look at how fast oh yeah it was so good but no i mean like seriously like i've i've actually bought a couple of these um the samsung evo uh 950 one terabyte no 850s the one terabyte you had 840 i thought i have an 840 i have an 850 and an 840 i have an 850 in uh in a desktop and i have the 840 on my laptop but yeah a terabyte do allah well i mean they're 300 bucks now like that's that's insane and joe went and bought a few of them right yeah i did good lord you gotta have one for windows you gotta have one for your games i have one dude you're behind apparently i mean the thing was is like when they dropped seriously down to

about 300 bucks for a terabyte i was like okay this is just silly now like i need this i want to buy some now just because i really love them yeah i mean like the next thing i'm going to get stupid and i'm going to start striping them in raids like i i can't even take it but if it weren't for the next product we're going to mention here in a second i probably would do that but dude they've even got a 2 terabyte Evo now. Oh, yeah, man. It's a little rich. Yeah, that bad boy is $740. Yeah, it's not cheap. And, I mean, you have to, like, if you're doing serious amounts of video editing,

something like that is just stellar, right? Like, if you threw that into an enclosure that you could hook up to a Thunderbolt on something and just, you know, out wherever you are. It'd have to be Thunderbolt. Otherwise, what are you doing? You wouldn't keep up with up with it um but i mean for transferring video and that kind of stuff would be fantastic but i mean honestly at the prices like you can get a 512 uh 850 evo for what 200 bucks now like or maybe even less like 150 it's ridiculous all right add to cart actually the 250 850 uh the the ah this is a lot of numbers 512 the samsung 850 evo 250 gig is 88 on amazon that's that's ridiculous you have to have that now like i mean if you don't have an ssd and you really want to find but you're explaining to

the wife why i bought this yeah that's fine um yeah i don't i don't yeah that's fine but here's the thing man so that's that sounded great right like these things have close to 500 megabit read and writes and that's why the evos had like their claim to fame like their reads and rights are both outstanding but then comes along this new m2 nvme slot that's coming out in all these computers now. And one of our buddies just bought this Samsung 950 Pro. Dude, this thing has 2,500 megabit per second reads and 1,500 writes. That is five times the performance read-wise of the Evo 850. Five times.

I can't even comprehend that. It's not actually released yet though but he's getting one this week apparently yeah it actually yeah but here's the thing right it's not even that expensive it's just that you have to have one of these newer motherboards that has a slot to support it's kind of expensive you can if you consider it's about 350 dollars for 512 gig but five times the performance, dude. Well, yeah, it's insane. Like, you blink and everything is done.

Oh, it's so sick, man. I totally want that. I just don't feel like buying a new motherboard, processor, memory to make that happen, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, it depends on what your computer is, though. Like, you know, some of the Macs already have that, or already use that slot. Mac Pro, right?

Or iMac. The Airs use that slot. Oh, really? I'm pretty sure. Can you crack it open and change it? Well, I mean, come on. Can you crack open either of them? No.

Well, the Mac Pro you can. That's what I was saying. Oh, wait, Mac Pro. I was talking about laptops. I thought you meant MacBook Pro. Oh, no. MacBook pro you can that's why i was saying oh wait mac pro i was on my laptop i thought you meant macbook pro oh no macbook pro you can't change anything on yeah well i mean like your mac you're technically that's not a serviceable hard drive either but uh um but yeah i'm pretty sure they're not errors though they use that same at least it's the same form factor i mean but it might not be the same speed. But it's also an error. But this, you know, going back to like Vlad's point of where, you know, smaller processor, but yet ridiculously stupid IOS.

Fast disk, yeah. It is amazing. You know, I built a computer last year, thanks to Patrick Dolan's inspiration. And when I would boot, after installing the SSDs, it would take seven seconds to get to Windows. And I was really impressed with that. I just found out last week there was actually a BIOS setting that delays the boot to give you time to hit whatever the key for BIOS. Oh, right, like the F12? Yeah.

I dropped that from three seconds down to one, and now I have a five-second boot. Oh, man, that's amazing. That was ridiculous. I dare you to just turn it off half a second yeah what's the lowest what's the lowest value it'll allow uh well it actually does go down to zero but i was kind of scared because i did not you know if i need to get back in there yeah you're done well i mean is it fractional or is it oh so it's integer whole seconds yep yeah man i'm telling you yeah seriously lazy developers like i'm not Is it fractional? Oh, so it's integer. Whole seconds, yep. Yeah.

Man, I'm telling you. Some lazy developer is like, I'm not going to support decimal or fractional parts on this. Right. I just imagine they're like, zero seconds, be careful what you wish for. Never getting into BIOS again. I'm sure it would be fine.

Man, it really is. It's exciting to see that kind of performance gain just from replacing a drive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bring some new life into your old machine. It really will. I guess your machine can't be too old, though, if it has that M2 slot. Well, the M2 you can't do, but you could.

I mean, even if you get like the 850, you can even put that in one of the old SATA 2 connectors. It won't be as fast as it could be on something else. Well, then you're limited to SATA 2, which is like, what, 3 gig per second? SATA 3 is 6 gig, something like that. But, I mean, you're still going to see a performance boost over a spinning drive. Yeah. The next one, this one's more along the lines of anybody who's wanting to do something like what we do, where maybe you're helping people out code or something, and you need a microphone.

Now, this comes with a caveat. Both Outlaw and I have one. He got one first, and I really like the way it sounded. The Audio-Technica ATR2100. Now, it sounds fantastic. Here's the caveat. You're not listening to that right now. You're not listening to that right now, but you have.

The times that Outlaw is recorded remote remote that's what you've heard and it sounds great here's the problem windows 7 works perfect mac os 10 or x sounds perfect for whatever crazy reason microsoft changed their audio drivers in windows 8, 8.1, and 10, and the volume is so ridiculously low on it that you have to bump the gain on it like insane in post to get it up to good volumes. And there are complaints all over the web about it. So if you're going to do it, one of the ways that people have gotten around it is they'll run Windows 7 in a VM and do the recording in that. So if you needed to do something,

that's one thing, but I mean, one of the, one of the great things about this microphone that, um, Alan has not mentioned yet though, is that this microphone is a dual input microphone so you can either use this as an as a usb microphone or an xlr microphone so you can do it as both at the same time that's amazing again but the whole you know part of this is you know the appeal to this microphone though is that if you're in an environment where you don't have xlr right yep so uh you only have usb as an option then you can use this microphone um you know for that purpose and it really does sound incredibly clean and and the reason i recommend that over something like a yeti uh or a blue microphone or something like that this is a dynamic mic so if you have any ambient noise or you're in a room that's not perfect like there's you know hardwoods and that kind of stuff

it'll cut back on some of the echoes and the reflections and the background noise whereas a condenser mic like the yetis uh those pick up everything like you'll hear a flea fart in a hurricane with that thing so um like there's the there's there's a lot of things got graphic that's what we do here oh so that that was it that's that's kind of like a side pick uh but i thought it would be something people would you know if you're interested in this that's that's a cool one yeah and speaking of audio yeah this is where things are about to get crazy we did talk about headphones a bit last time and i I'm actually wearing my modern price. I forget what they are now.

$83.23. Yeah, I still like those, but I never wear them. And I have gotten into the Apple earbuds, and it's because I work at home, and I spend some time on the phone, and I don't want to go scrambling every time for my headphones, so I basically just keep my headphones plugged in in between podcasts and

phone calls and Skype and whatever else. It's just so easy to just kind of answer the phone and go. I also have gotten into using Siri. Your recommendation is the headphones that come with my phone? Yeah, not the ones that came with the 4S, which were horrible. But whenever they started doing

the kind of weird sculpty ones that look strange. Yeah. Yeah, you're crazy. but whenever they started doing the kind of weird sculpey ones that the oblong strange yeah yep uh yeah you're crazy you don't like them i i don't i hate no there's no base well there's definitely none of that and you know it's it's all about that base and there is a little bit if you push them in real hard and hold them there it doesn't even like fit my head right i don't know what's i guess i have weird ears but yeah they're not comfortable for me uh all right so along those same lines because it is all about that bass a set that i do like and i recommend highly for a couple reasons are the v moda m100s now they're not the cheapest on the planet they're

about right now on amazon they're like 230 bucks but here's what i'll tell you 235 i've never seen a set of headphones ever and i've got more than a few i've never seen more than any man should yeah probably i've never seen any as durable as these period flat out none they they are ridiculous on top of that they come with multiple cables one that has an inline mic that actually works very well you can use it for gaming you can use it for calls you can use it for a number of things um and these things while they do have great bass they've also got a good rich rich mid range and the highs are nice as well. So if you're looking for like an all around good set of headphones, these are excellent. And they fold up to tiny, like literally, um, they're probably about the size of a softball

all folded up. So they're easy to take with you, throw in your bag. Um, and they come with a nice little carrying case. So that if you want a good set of headphones that you can use for pretty much everything those are them yeah they look very alien they do ish yeah and if you're into customizing you can have custom plates made for the outside of them so they're beautiful yeah they're cool man they're a nice set of headphones they are not my favorite sounding I've ever heard by any stretch. But they are modular. They are modular, and they're very good.

You can replace the ear cushions on it, the plates, like Alan said. You can daisy chain them. They have an in and an out, so you can in one, and if you want to share that audio with another one, you can chain the two. They even have plates. Not only can you get just a different color plate, but some of the plates have different designs on them. Oh, you can order them from V-Moda.

You can actually upload a design, and they'll etch it onto the metal and send it to you. Wow. Great. Now I've got to go buy that. Yeah. And then the other thing that's cool, too, if you are a gamer, you can buy a boom mic for it.

So, I mean, like, literally, these are the set of headphones if you wanted to buy them to do everything. Are you saying a boom mic because like when you're playing a game boom outlaw just woke up my baby we're in trouble so yeah i i really like those oh i'm in trouble so then now on to one that i dude i was talking about this earlier i want this thing so bad but i don't think i'll ever be able to justify it the microsoft surface book like i haven't been this excited about a piece of hardware in a super long time but the problem is i've bought into the mac world like i have final Final Cut 10, I have, you know, I've already bought this software that first off is already cheaper on Mac and is in some ways superior to what you're going to get

on Windows. Dude, the same software on Windows costs double to three times in some of these cases. So not only would I have to shell out at least $2,300 to get the minimum one that I want, then I'm going to be in it for another thousand bucks to buy software that I need to shell out at least $2,300 to get the minimum one that I want, then I'm going to be in it for another thousand bucks to buy software that I need to put on it. And that just, man, I want that thing. But it, oh God, I want that thing. But so, so instead you're going to buy the iPad pro, right? But so here's the thing, right?

Like here's what's frustrating. The iPad pro is not something that I would replace that with, right? So here's the thing, right? Here's what's frustrating. The iPad Pro is not something that I would replace that with, right? Because I see the Surface Book as being something that you can really do work on. But at the same time, when you want to lay down and read an article, right? You just detach it and you do it. The iPad Pro, like I've never ever used an iPad for creating things. Like they don't, they're consumables. I mean, That was their entire

pitch for iPad in general at the last keynote, especially iPad Pro was that it was used to be a device for consumption. That's all it is. Now it's all about a device for creativity and productivity.

Microsoft was there to talk about here's all the things you can do with office so here's my thing right like and here's the here's the comparison that frustrates me if the ipad pro ran osx to where you could put final cut pro on it i'm sorry os what osx 10 and and you could run final cut on it right like then that to me that's a creating device you hook a keyboard up to it maybe mouse you're perfect right you You hook a keyboard up to it, maybe a mouse. You're perfect, right? You can hook a keyboard up to it. But you're not running Final Cut.

You're going to run iMovie, which they made for the iPad. But that's not a full-blown experience. And that's kind of what my frustration is, at least with the Surface. And I was waiting for this one to come out because I was like, they're going to do something. And it's close. Like I think that I might get might get it i don't know but i just don't i don't want to have to buy that same software that i've already bought once on another platform here's here's the decision criteria here's how you decide this okay on the one hand you have

on your left hand let's say you have the microsoft surface book and in your right hand you have the Apple iPad Pro. It really comes down to your choice of one of two things. Do you want the Surface Pen or the Apple Pencil? You got to pick. I haven't felt the pencil one yet. Because even though they kind of sound like they're the same, I mean, a pencil is different than a pen. One's permanent.

You're doing the keynote right now, aren't you? One of them you can erase, and the other one is there. It's going to leave its mark. Oh, God. No. It really, at this point, right, like when you've bought into a particular, what am I trying to say not

environment ecosystem ecosystem you kind of get stuck in it right like i don't know it's frustrating like if you're an android user you probably bought a ton of android apps and so buying an iphone you're like oh god i don't want to spend a hundred dollars to buy these same apps on iphone i find it funny that the windows developer is saying that he hasn't bought into the Windows ecosystem. Here's the thing. Here's a perfect example. The screen cast that I've

done that I've uploaded to YouTube for coding blocks. That software to record your screen is $100 on Mac. It's good. Screen flows there. Camtasia is also $100. On Windows, that sameasia is also 100 bucks on Windows that same software is $300 and it's like it's the same software why am I having to pay three times the price and so not only am I going to have to buy it for the other you know ecosystem I'm gonna have

to pay triple the price for it and that's the kind of thing that is killing my decision and if it weren't for that if it was 100 bucks i would probably just buy the thing and be like okay i'm gonna love this device but when it comes down to the software on top of it like there is no equivalent to final cut pro for 300 on windows the closest is vegas pro and that's 650 and so like you start talking about you know economies of scale greater so but dude avid had like an entry-level. Entry-level? I'm talking about pro-level. Which Final Cut Pro is?

Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot who I was talking to. I mean, look, I've done the iMovies. I've done all that. You've seen his movies in the theater. That's right. Alan Underwood. In a world where a man both writes code and makes movies.

Yes, that's right. One tool to rule them all welcome oh god so yeah at any rate i do want that thing i don't know that i'll ever get it but it looks like one nice device all right so i don't know when you guys we didn't mention the other one that he was crazy we mentioned the ipad okay the ipad air two oh yeah i mean ipad air two i you know only because if we're talking about like uh tablet kind of devices i was like well you know is that is that um you know in the what about category uh yeah yeah i feel like we've uh we've hit on because pro air what's really the difference the pencil oh right which is a hundred bucks and doesn't come i forgot my own decision criteria man i'm i'm bad about that apple they kill me all right well we're almost getting to the most

important part but i did want to interrupt uh and say that i a KVM. I want a good KVM. I feel like the world has turned and left me on this one. They have. Man, I guess it's just a lot of people don't have multiple computers. They want to be able to switch quickly. Well, on that LG 34, you don't have to. You can just have them both simultaneously. Yeah, I guess so well i did i did

have you tried that on your on that lg it's all right yeah i don't love it you you've had multiple inputs on it yeah i don't love it no i mean i just i don't like cuts it in half yeah i don't really care to have that so then what is that going to become like uh 17 20 by 14 40 i don't want any part of that it's like it of it. It's like a weird ratio. It is. Is it a 4.3 ratio at that point? I don't know. Do some math.

It's not quite 4.3. But there is a KVM that I had that was really good that used DVIs and it had USBs. It was 90 bucks though for that KVM. Yeah.

I'm okay if it's a good one but the thing about KVMs too is they don't switch the inputs on the monitors and how could they? But it's so annoying one, but the thing about KVMs too is they don't switch the inputs on the monitors. How could they? But it's so annoying to have these multiple steps in the monitor. It's maybe like six little thumb clicks and I've got to reach for it.

But I guess it's just not a common problem. But I've got a Mac laptop and I've got a desktop and I've got a work Windows laptop. And I want to be able to switch between these. I want to be able to check my bank statements on my desktop i want to do macky things on the mac and i want to do my work on the work laptop yeah is that too much to ask this goes back to our windows uh thunderbolt driver problem where even if you did have that option to kvm a thunderbolt monitor it would be problematic on a Windows box. It's so frustrating. But, I mean, even then, you're talking probably, for what you want to bring together Mac and

Windows properly in a KVM and all that, you're probably talking about a $200 device. Well, yeah, and just the outputs alone, like desktop is DVI, the MacBook is, you know, I guess it's got HDMI too, but the Thunderbolt and the Dell's got, I think it's DisplayPort. I was like, come on! Your Mac will do DisplayPort also. Out of those Thunderbolt ports, it'll actually do mini DisplayPort.

I just don't want to have a bunch of adapters. Yeah, it's kind of frustrating. I'll have to look and see if there is anything like that. I'd be curious. I've seen a couple, but they all look crappy. No matter what, it ends up being a lot of cables going somewhere. Yep. Yeah, you're going to have a big nest of wires. So let's get into the favorite section of this then.

Because as a developer, you're going to spend a lot of time, a lot of seat time in front of a monitor, right? And so sometimes you just need to trade one monitor for another monitor and you might as well on that other monitor you know play a game or two you got some time to kill kill it correctly you know slay that time properly kill it so there's several games either coming out or just did come out and i there's so much excitement like i don't even know which one of these on on the list is your favorite alan or joe but definitely i think that the world would agree with me that call of duty black ops 3

november 6th is going to be the big one no way man, man. The last one was too good. It's just going to be downhill from there. It left a lot of unanswered questions in the storyline. Here's what I'll tell you, though. I have every Call of Duty known to man for years, but I have always

enjoyed the previous one because they skip every year. This is Treyarch. I like the last one. The skip every year this is trey arc so i like the last one like the controls on theirs is always so good and then this is trey art so they're doing this so the same one did it twice in a row no this is trey arc that's releasing black ops 3 or the developed black ops 3 who did the one last year uh what was it activision right it's always activision oh activision is like the company the company that owns the title, but the developer company I think it was like Sledgehammer last year.

The controls in Modern Warfare 2 were so good. And it seems like every other year that is when the controls are so good. And then the other years, the game's still awesome, but the controls don't feel as tight to me. But no doubt, like of all the games that I could think of,

unless Uncharted were to come out here in the next month or two, this would be the one that I'd be the most excited about. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Ad-Ats? Which ones? No Speeders.

Come on, man. Star Wars Battlefront? No Love? Dude, I haven't even seen it. I know that's blasphemy. I know, I haven't even seen it. You know, I was looking at the game, some of the videos for this and the gameplay. This one looks really cool.

It really does. Call of Duty or Battlefront? No, the Star Wars Battlefront. Yeah, I haven't seen anything yet. It looks awesome. And it comes out November 17th. And it really, I mean, of course, you're going to want it for your Xbox One. Wait, nobody has an Xbox One.

Wait, what? Wait, what do you have, Joe? I have a PlayStation. Oh, my have, Joe? I have a PlayStation. We actually wanted to play our games at 1080p. Whatever. And leak all your sensitive personal information at the same time.

I'm fine with that. It's Swedish Coder's fault that I ended up with a PlayStation. You got a new computer I had to follow. You got a PlayStation. I had to follow. It was Sledgehammer, by the way, that did Advanced Warfare, which Advanced Warfare was awesome. Advanced Warfare was outrageously good. That one was.

Yeah, so Black Ops 3 is going to be Treyarch. And, you know, like I said, that comes out on Friday, November 6th. And it's a Friday release day so that you can play all weekend, which is going to be awesome. And if you pre-ordered it, then you get something. They're doing it a little different. They're not doing the day zero thing

like they did last year for Advanced Warfare. You get to play all weekend if you don't have a baby and you have kids that are over 10. It's like if you pre-order the season pass, then you get a map for... Oh, I remember what it was. Nuketown?

No, you get a zombie map pack for Black Ops. And if you pre-ordered the game, then you get the Nuketown map pack. And this is just like the regular version. It's not like the super digital, ultra ultimate, exclusive collection. Nuketown is a lot of fun. That's one of my favorite maps. But one of the big things, too, about it is that zombies is going to be a bigger deal now.

So you've mentioned before on the show about the monotonous zombie mode of Call of Duty, but this is not that. So even in Advanced Warfare, the zombie mode in there, there was some semblance of a co-op storyline that arced across all of the DLCs that came out as the season passed, released its different components. In Black Ops 3, zombies is an even bigger storyline. So it's its very own campaign mode now. Single player campaign mode set in the 1920s.

So all mobsterish, but zombified. People love them some zombies. There's no doubt. And then there was, when did that come out? Last week, the Halo 5 Guardians release. Of course, for your Xbox One. Apparently, Halo's a big deal. I've never really heard of it. What? ago i'm totally kidding it might have been probably actually that might be more

than any other game the one that made me fall in love with fps's because do you guys remember like this was back wait a minute what it was so slow no no because no, because it was... What about... No, you're not going to say Doom or Quake? No, I love Doom, but it wasn't one of those ones. Unreal Tournament? So I'd never really played Unreal, but Halo was the first one where literally people I knew would all grab their Xboxes and we would set up TVs everywhere. I mean, I thought you were going to say,

because at least this was the case for me, that Halo was the one that made me enjoy Xbox Live. Right? No, this was before Xbox Live. The whole idea of playing with just random people. I'm talking about Halo 1. There was no Xbox Live. This is what I'm saying. It was the one that made me love playing with other people.

But this is what I'm saying. But way before that, right? I've never been a PC gamer. Man, come on. You missed out on all the LAN parties. How did you do that? That was before my time. Whatever.

I know Joe was there with me. Yep. I think maybe Alan had more of a social life than I did. Wait, did I just say something about this? Okay, forget it. I won't talk about it. But here's Joe's favorite one, the next one up. Yeah, I love Destiny.

It's every FPS game all in one, all the time. You just got to get to a high enough level. I really like the new expansion, too. The Taken King. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I've told Joe I would love that game if I wasn't a level 9, because it is such a drudge trying to love that game if i wasn't like a level nine because it is such a drudge trying to play that game when you're weaker than everybody like you're sitting here

blasting away at this dude for like 10 minutes and then some dude comes out of nowhere and shoots him once and he's dead and you're like man i really don't i don't want to play this anymore yeah the beginning campaign's terrible so this time time last year, there were a few games that came out, like obviously Call of Duty. They have to print money every November. But Destiny was one of the big releases for this time last year, and Titanfall was another big release around this time last year. And specifically from the developer point of view,

there were all kinds of credits for it, you know, because it was backed by Azure. But, you know, I got all, you know, I had each of those games, but definitely I got sucked into Call of Duty. And I'm with you on destiny like i tried destiny you know or at least gave both destiny and titanfall uh uh you know go and just didn't get into them or enjoy them as much as i did advanced warfare right but i mean my kids definitely love destiny and so does joe so it's got a massive either that says something about the game or it says something about joe's mindset i'm not sure i just can't i have such a hard time you know it's almost like you know you picked up a book before that you start reading stephen king is a perfect example if you've ever tried to read a stephen king book if you can get

past the first 10 chapters of where he's talking about how the grass looks then maybe it gets good right but it's like a neil steven Stevenson where he goes into way too much detail. Yeah, and that's kind of what Destiny is. It feels like it's so much of an effort to get to the point to where you're having fun, to where it's just like, man, I'm just going to put in Call of Duty and shoot somebody. Or get shot. You really have to also get used to the concept, too. And it's massively online, but it's not yeah some of the other ones but yet at the same time that you're doing your uh you know whatever your mission is you could see other random people

running around doing theirs too it's kind of cool it's so so like the the quote campaign isn't really a campaign it's a co-op campaign but it's not but it's yeah but yet it's people will help you you have to most levels are kind of sandboxed. In the early levels, especially in the early levels, though, it's not, you're not working

with anyone else. No, I wasn't. I was totally getting killed. Yeah, you gotta go to these own little zones that are kind of instanced and you're the only one there unless you're specifically

with that person. So I see it's weird, but there's so much once you get to a high level, you can just walk around and you're like, like hey there's people that are doing this thing that i want to do let me go join them and we'll all work together and there's a lot more of what you want the whole game at the very end yeah maybe i'll get back into it one day probably not but i'll try well speaking of time sucks uh the other big release is definitely Fallout.

I just can't do it because I feel like my life is just flying out of my hands when I play games like this. What, you don't like giving up 200 hours of your life? Well, you know what it is? I can spend 200 hours on, say, Destiny or Call of Duty in little chunks. But I don't like this thing where I feel like uh it's like it's like a job like i need to go save the stupid farm so i could save the stupid city so i could save the stupid world you know and it just becomes this like big long 60 hour trudge just for you know the main chunk of things and man i just i don't have the patience for that it sounds like your problem is similar to mine. If I never read a review on a game, I might play it and enjoy it.

But the problem is, you read a review on it. Skyrim is the perfect example for me. It kills me. I read a review and they said, if you want to play this game from beginning to end and only do the main storyline, it's 250 hours. So I know where that finish line is. If. So I know where that finish line is, right?

Like if I didn't know where that finish line was, maybe I could play that game and enjoy it. But knowing that it is 250 hours away from me is like, hold on a second. How many days do I have to devote? That's more than six weeks of a full-time job of like just playing the game. If you'd put in an eight-hour day. Seriously, it makes

me weary. The longest game I've ever played beginning to end was Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. That was 40-some-odd hours. I felt like I'd aged 20 years by the time I'd done it. I don't know, man. I love Fallout. I actually enjoyed Skyrim,

the five hours I played of it. But I'm the same way. I can't look at that. Are you sure about that 250 hours, though? Supposedly. Really? Yeah. And if you wanted to play all the side quests, too, it was over 600 hours of content.

And that's amazing. Well, maybe they just mean there's a lot of bang for buck there. But it's not necessarily the storyline. No. The main storyline is over 200 hours. That's amazing. Well, maybe they just mean, like, there's a lot of bang for buck there. But it's not necessarily the storyline. No, like, the main storyline is over 200 hours. That's crazy. And that's what I'm saying. I'm with Joe. How do they fit all that on one disc?

I don't know. Oh, they do Witcher the same way. It's supposed to be hundreds and hundreds of hours. Wow. I mean, Call of Duty, boom, boom, boom. Get on, play for 45 minutes. You feel refreshed or frustrated because some 12 year old kicked your tail yeah but with both i forget which one it is it's either call of duty um black ops 3 or halo

five guardians one of those two games the campaign i kind of appreciated this because like the campaign uh is they said there was an advertisement for it where it says you know the average uh time to play the campaign is 12 hours that's perfect so like i was like well that's kind of funny that you know they they clearly put all their it was actually i'm looking it up right now it was halo 5 they clearly put all their effort on the multiplayer aspect of it because they realize like that's where it's at right for this game for at least for this title that's where it's at, right? For this game. At least for this title, that's where it is. And so maybe in the case of like a Fallout, it's not on the multiplayer aspect as much as the other one. So they make the storyline count more, right?

Maybe that's what it is. I'm more apt to play a 12-hour game. So Fallout 4 comes out on November 10th. And there's a reason to get an Xbox One because if you pre-order it for Xbox One, you get Fallout 3 included in it if you pre-order. Oh, there goes the entire rest of your life.

A thousand hours. If you feel like losing a year of your life, hey, but I can definitely say I have lost a year of my life playing Advanced Warfare. Oh, there's no question. Definitely, this last year is, is gone. And next year is going to be that way with,

uh, black ops three. So yeah, there's no doubt outlaw has. That's awesome. Wait, why am I, why are you binging man?

I don't know. I turned it off on something. Okay. Uh, anyways. All right. So what have we gotten next? I think we're getting into our tip.

We're in your favorite portion of the show right now. It's the tip of the week. And Joe has something. Our tip of the equinox. You know what? I'm not even going to try to say this one, Joe. Yeah, I'm going to try to say it, and I'm going to try to describe it, and both are gonna you

know gonna fail but uh it's beoding balls and you've probably seen these movies it's like you'll see the villain of the movie and he'll be sitting there with his palm facing up with these two big you know it's like steel balls on his hand and he's kind of like making them go round and round his paw his palm while he's laughing maniacally. And this is just getting back to the whole hand-paint kind of thing. I heard this was supposed to be good. I haven't already tried this, so full disclosure, I haven't actually got these yet. But I'm going to.

We'll have a link in the show notes. And I'm going to sit here, and my wife's going to come in here to my office while I'm working, and I'm going to say, yes, what is it? Well, that was weird. I think that might be what he was going for. Yeah, maybe we'll have a little vine to be just kind of like... All right, so it's going to be even weird that this one's next. So we went to several conferences recently

and I think we had mentioned ConnectJS. And Alan and I were at Atlanta Code Camp. We didn't even mention. We ran into a listener there. That was fantastic. Shoot, I forgot his name. I'm going. I'm going.

Okay. But, so at ConnectJS during the keynote speech for that, the presenter, he mentioned a site that I thought, this was a great little resource that I thought I'd share. So if you want to get started in an open source project and you are, but you don't know where to start. Like, you know you want to, but you don't know where to start. Like, you know, you want to, but you're not sure like, well, how do I find a project that I might be interested in around technologies that I, I know, or am want, you know, that I want to learn, you know,

how do I find that? Right. So it's called up for grabs and the and the URL is up-for-grabs.net. And this is a resource for finding open source projects that are out there on GitHub that are looking for, you know, that have open issues that they're looking for developers to help fix and work on. That's really nice. It was Matt. It's.Matt on Twitter, but Matt Slay maybe. That's who we met, and it was really cool having a conversation with him

at Atlantic Co-Cap. It was neat. Hey, I recognize that voice. Huh? Yeah. All right, so my tip of the week is it actually harkens back to episode 31 where we talked about promises. So here lately, I've been messing around at night with some Node.js and MongoDB and some other things. And one of the things that I found that I really liked and I wanted to mess with was Promises and Node.

So one of the frustrating things is if you go look at Node, like one of the things that they talk about or you'll hear people talking about callback hell, right? Where it's just this nest of callbacks. Well, one of the cool parts is I think one of the frameworks we might have mentioned about Promises was called bluebird you can actually get that for node and they have this promise promiseify all method where you can point it at an existing library like the mongo db native driver and you can say promiseify all this thing and then basically it will turn the entire library into where you can use it as a promise.

So you can say basically whatever their methods were previously, like the MongoDB client, one of them is connect. Well, all you have to do is add capital async at the end. So you can say connect async and then you can use the dot then to use promises. And I thought that was really cool. So that's kind of what I've been doing is playing with that server side with Node. And I promisified the MongoDB connectivity. And it's pretty awesome.

So if I could put that in my own words, promise all the things. That was that episode, wasn't it? Yes. No, wait, was it? No. I think it was. No.

No? But yes, you can promise all the things. Promisify all. It's fantastic. It's pretty cool. And so really what it buys you, though, is now you can make sure everything that you call is non-blocking. It takes a little bit of extra code to do it. And I'm probably going to put together an article on it because I had a hard time coming up with some of the

using stuff because Bluebird suggests some ways to do it but they weren't clear in their documentation so I'll probably put a little something together on that in case anybody's interested but that is my tip yeah and so with that we hope you've enjoyed this episode

of our toys for for Developers. And as we said before, please do be sure to leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or your favorite podcast aggregator if you haven't already. And also, we'd greatly appreciate it if you would tell a friend or two about the show yep and contact us with any questions or topics and leave your name preferred method of shout out on you know whether it be twitter or whatever and we'll mention you on the podcast and visit us at codingblocks.net where you can find our show notes examples of discussions and more and send your feedback questions and rants to comments at codingblocks.net Go ahead. And follow us on Twitter and check out our Facebook page.

Yeah, and one last thing. Again, if you guys want to be entered for the contest to win one of the pre-worn t-shirts, go to www.codingblocks.net slash episode 34. We will make sure that in the show notes, at the very top of the show notes that we put

a link so that if you're on your phone or something, you don't have to go type it because I hate typing on phones. So you'll be able to slide over to your show notes and just click the link and go directly to the website. But yeah, we'd definitely love to hear from you and we'd love to give you one of these shirts. Vintage shirts. Yes, yes.

We'll have more coming soon. oh you know what what we should also mention too just along the lines of full disclosure i just remember too uh these shirts may look you know when he says vintage that's the way they're made oh yeah yeah the way they're kind of distressed looking yes, distressed. There's the good word for it. Thank you. They're really talking about these shirts, guys. Yeah, man. They are beefy, though. I mean, like, seriously, if you want to stay warm, they'll keep you warm.

Right. I might be entering this contest. Joe wants one of the shirts. Cool. All right. That's a wrap.