Tech Over Tea - #54 Enjoy Your Computing Experience - feat RetroEdge.Tech

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

I've been wanting to bring RetroEdge.Tech onto the show for ages, he's a Linux enthusiast, runs a computer repair business, owns way too many Thinkpads and is all around cool dude who does a lot of videos only the line between retro and modern tech. ==========Guest Links========== Website: https://retroedge.tech/ Odysee: https://odysee.com/@retroedge.tech:4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/retroedgetech Mastodon: https://distrotoot.com/@retroedgetech ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Hello, as always, I am Brody Robertson, and today we're back with episode 54 of Tech of a T. And today's guest is a creator over on Odyssey known as RetroEdgeTech. He also runs a computer repair business. And I don't know how else to do an intro. How about you just introduce yourself? Welcome to the show, Matthew. Thank you. It's good to be with you, Brody. Yeah, I'm just a guy who is interested in

Linux especially. So Linux is my main thing. I've been doing Linux stuff probably since 2003-ish and really got into it in 2004 and then onward. So Linux is definitely the thing that I'm most interested in. And I like having fun with that. But yeah, I do computer repair and sales. So I fix broken computers, lots of upgrades. And then I sell computers as well. But on Odyssey, a library, I do Linux types of things, some short tutorials. And a lot of it is just publishing my thoughts or something that I'm interested in, but usually retro type related, kind of like older hardware, Linux related, and some newish stuff as well. So it's retro edge, like retro, but also pushing

things and sometimes doing things with new things as well right i was gonna ask you what the um where the name came from but that you already got to it before me so yeah um that i do like the name it is a much better naming scheme than i have there's a reason why i call all of my channels like the only channel that has a name is my podcast channel because that's already enough names for me to come up with i'm awful at naming stuff so it's just you know what i'll just use my own name why not that works coming up with business names is hard because then you're stuck with them for a long time so like my orange computer you know i came up with that more than 10 years ago and it's a color and a fruit so it's easy to remember and so it's easy to brand for color-wise as well. But I'm stuck with it as well. I can't on a whim change it.

I've got to stick with that name for my local area, of course. So it takes some time. Yeah. Well, luckily, in Australia, if you run a sole trader business, you don't necessarily have to actually have a legal business name. But still, if you're going to market yourself, you still need to have some name you're going to be operating under. I've got some relatives that own a gardening business.

And sure, you could go and rename it very easily. But then what's going to happen with the existing clientele you have? If not all of them realize you've changed your name, then you're going to lose some of your clients. Exactly. So I know a lot of your earlier videos were also videos that are accompanying some of your blog posts as well yes and i i hope to get back to that as well and i was experimenting with bspwm tiling window manager

about the same time you um so i have some stories with that if it's okay to uh yeah sure i'm entirely fine on this podcast makes Makes my job easier. I have been using Linux pretty much regularly, primary operating system since 2004 when Ubuntu first came out. And I used Ubuntu for over a decade. And I'm pretty Linux hardcore. I'm known in my area as knowing Linux pretty well. I do tons of stuff on Linux. hardcore. I'm known in my area as knowing Linux pretty well. I do tons of stuff on Linux.

I had never really even known what a tiling window manager was until about a year ago. And so I think that niche of the kind of things that I hadn't been exposed to at all, but you were exploring and a few other people on on library were exploring i was like wow this is cool this is a lot of fun um and i'm not always in a tiling window manager now but kind of interesting that about a year ago or a little bit more than a year ago i had no idea what that was so i was kind of exploring it even though i had a good linux background i just never played around with tiling windowagers before. It's a bit of a weird thing to get into because I started using Linux about two or so years

ago, so I kind of started with the Tiling Window Managers, but judging by what you've said, you've been around way longer than that. It's always cool when I see people who have been using Linux for a very long time and they come to my channel and like,

Hey, there was one dude I saw who was like, I've been a network engineer for 30 years. I've never explored desktop Linux, though. And that's always a cool thing to see when someone comes to my channel for that. Yeah, no, I had used the defaults uh for linux stuff and so essentially just the default ubuntu environments yeah it's very proficient at that it works and it worked great for a long time um and then uh when they switched to gnome 3 things didn't work quite as well and that's when i started exploring yeah yeah. Yeah, I have never

used Ubuntu before at Gnome. I've used it in VM a couple of times for some of my uni classes but I don't know, I've never really been someone who's had that much of an attachment to what it was before so what was it about the previous way it worked

that actually made it compelling? Well, when I started, it was on the Gnome 2. And so it looked very much like Mate looks now, Ubuntu Mate. And it was just simple. It was easy to use. It was easy to find your way around. And I think most people were used to that. And then when they switched to Unity, which, I don't know,

that was a long time ago too, 2012 or 2010 or something like that, that was a kind of a big shakeup and they were going to try to do their own desktop environments. And there were some really cool things about that, but I never became proficient in the things that it was good at. Like they had this heads up display with all these keyboard shortcuts and all of this kind of stuff. And I never really used that, but I liked the Unity environment and it was easy to use. I liked how they had the dock on the left because it kind of got out of your way on a wider screen. So it was just very easy to use. And so when they switched away from Unity and there were some performance issues on the GNOME 3,

I was like, I mean, I've been using Ubuntu for a really long time. Let's explore and look at other things. And so that's when I started exploring and did that for probably about two years with different things. Really liked Ubuntu Mate. But then when I started watching your channel, I found you on Library. Yeah, okay.

And then I was like what are these tiling window things I think I would have joined library around the time I was actually starting to look at BSPWM because before that I was doing I was using I3 before that but I didn't really properly

explore that window manager it was more like hey I have I3 installed that's basically it but BSPWM was when I'd started doing a lot of the like, breaking down how the window manager sort of works. Yeah. Yeah, that was fun. So it was an interesting introduction. You know, my trying to get it to work for the first time is essentially loaded it in and there's just a cursor on a black screen and I have no idea what to do. So it was that learning curve and it was hard and it pushed me a little bit. And it's like one of those things that now I know what's going on.

It's like, oh, that was easy. Well, no, it wasn't when I first started. And that's kind of an interesting thing from a, you know, I'm a hardcore Linux user for years and years and years over a decade. But that interface, the tiling window manager, just confused me like crazy for a short time. And then once I figured it out, I'm like, this is awesome. And I switched back and forth. I mean, I don't, I'm not always in a tiling window manager, but that, that was kind of this weird learning curve

that I experienced about a year ago. Yeah. BSP is a bit of a, um, a deep end to jump into because things like I3, at least the default configuration gives you sort of like a rough idea of what's happening you get a bar that comes with it you get some little prompts when you first open it that tell you like how to open up a terminal um awesome wm also actually i think awesome is probably a really good spot to start from because everything just sort of works with awesome it's configured kind of weirdly but bspwm you get nothing like unless you download an existing config it's just like okay here's a blank screen you don't know if your system's just not working like the first time i opened it i didn't realize that uh anything was functioning

because unlike i3 it doesn't have a uh a built-in hockey daemon so you open it and you literally cannot do anything yeah yeah so that was fun but going through some of the things and i certainly watched some of your videos to get me started on that i never did really some of the advanced things like um finding out the window ids and moving things around based on that because those windows were not very good i need to go back and do some of them again because they were really bad. Well, now you've learned a lot more. And now I'm experimenting with Nimdo, which is a window manager

written in the Nim programming language, which I have a small interest in, but it probably will be a passing phase and I'll probably move on to other things. Um, but it's kind of fun to, you know, just explore different things and, and, uh, I'm having fun with Nimdo for now, but I might switch to something like awesome or just, just something that just works while I work on more experimental things.

So that way, you know, I can kind of have a config with awesome or something else. Um, so I might switch back to something that you're using. And I did get, I think awesome was the first tiling window manager that I ever successfully got up in working and I'm like, yes, I like this. Okay. Now let's go work on B SPWM. The thing about, uh, working with awesome though, is everything's written in Lewis.

So then you have another language you have to learn. Right. Speaking of programming languages, my kind of retro interest has been peaked recently. Also in 2004, about the time that I seriously started using Ubuntu, I read Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters book, which is kind of a programming book that was published in that year, 2004, Hackers and Painters. And in there, he kind of extolled the virtues of the Lisp programming language. And I had never heard of it before.

And at that time, I was like really interested, but I really didn't get programming concepts. I mean, that's not something that I had studied much before. I'd always been a wannabe programmer, but I really didn't get that stuff. And so years later now, now I do get programming stuff. I kind of like a couple of years ago, about three years ago, I pushed myself to really understand a lot of the concepts and work with some JavaScript and Python. And my kids actually got further along with it faster than I did. But then I got it too.

I'm like, okay, now I know what I'm doing. I understand basic programmatic concepts, for loops, assignments, you know, if that while that sort of thing, but before then it really, it didn't click for me at all. So now I'm going back and I remember, oh, I really wanted to do Lisp stuff back in 2004 when I read that book by Paul Graham. And so now I bought some Lisp books that were maybe published in the late eighties, early nineties. And again, my, my, my 10 year old is making a lot faster

progress with it than me. And he's like, this book is really awesome, which is fun because the book was published when I was nine years old and he's's about the same age now. He's 10 now. So that's fun. And I like those retro things. And so I'll probably start doing more things with Lisp with the understanding that, you know, computer repair and sales and all that keeps me busy enough that I don't really have a whole lot of time to do it. But my excuse is, hey, I'm getting the kids started on it. I have three sons and a daughter and they'll make more progress with it than me. And then they can teach me. That's what I think will happen. Maybe. The four kids is already enough work to deal with. I don't know how you managed to do that

and a business and learning to do stuff on the side as well that's that's a lot of work yeah and and we just moved into a new place which is great but has tons of work with it as well at least you've got uh at least got one that's old enough to look after the others so yes yeah they're all pretty they're all pretty grown ish now that okay yeah the youngest one is nine okay okay yeah that that puts you in a good position i'm sure if it was a couple of years earlier you wouldn't have had uh that much time to do stuff no i didn't even start looking at programming again until maybe 2016 and my oldest child was born in 2006, so a decade later, you know. So, yeah. I've got a couple of Lisp evangelists inside of my Discord server,

so I'm sure they're going to love this section. Well, Lisp is one of those things where, you know, it was invented in the 60s, and then Common Lisp, the one that most people use, was launched in 1981, so it's about as old as I am. But it's one of those things where it's a language that won't die. You know, there's always that Lisp enthusiast or evangelist, that there's a lot of stuff that's written in it that continues to hold people's interest. And so from a retro perspective and kind of just because of how different it is, it seems

like every thought or part of it is encapsulated in parentheses. That's so different and confusing for most people from a programming language perspective. But for me, there's also an appeal to that because you can like i can figure out where this expression is because i can deduce by elimination of parentheses that's where this thing is that's going on i've never looked into the language myself but i probably should at some point because i've i've looked at like the modern languages people are using now, things like TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, things like that, but I've never gone back and looked at something that has a lot of history, obviously, besides C.

C, that doesn't count because C is still very much in use today and it's a very different language than it was back when it first came out. But I've never looked back at things such as Lisp or Fortran or COBOL or anything that's been around for a really long time which just has a very very tiny uh tiny i guess group of people who still absolutely adore the language which for fortran and kobol there's probably not all that group is probably a lot smaller well that group is also probably close to retirement. Yes, or yeah, or have gone into retirement already.

But of course, there's a few systems that still run that stuff where people get hired to maintain it. That's the problem because there's no one learning those languages and everyone who does know the languages is either retired or getting close to retirement. And yeah, there's going to be some problems come the next few years.

Yeah. So, and I'm not sure how much stuff is written in lisp and i have zero desire to get a programming job but i'm very interested in programming yeah so um so for me is figuring out how i can justify spending a significant amount of time on it um it's like something I want to do for fun and that I want to learn and get better at, but I don't have a real good use case for actually how to profit from it. So for now, it's just going to be fun stuff and me sharing what I learn on the retro tech stuff.

That'll be some programming things, some Linux stuff configuration. It's more like, hey, I'm doing this thing for fun and I like it and I'm going to share it. I don't necessarily have a great plan necessarily how to make money with it, though I have a few ideas. I have some ideas, but it's nothing that my main computer repair and sales is is is what pays the bills yeah yeah that's fair i wouldn't want to completely uh uproot what you already have uh that already works just just because you want to try out something completely new right yeah i don't think that you know my aspirations of becoming a list programmer would be great to bank on uh for paying the bills yeah

unless we have a sudden shift in the software industry, I think that's a safe bet to take. Yeah. But yeah, I'll do some fun things with it and publish what I learn along the way. Hopefully, it'll be kind of a long track. The other thing that's interesting about choosing Lisp is that it is a retro language,

so it fits in with all the other stuff that I'm doing with retro things, but there's still a lot of people using it in its current and things kind of cutting edge like the GNU geeks, GNU geeks, that Linux distribution, they use their package manager, they use a Lisp variant, I think a scheme variant to do their package management configuration. And I haven't played with that yet, but that's an example of something that's pretty cutting edge that's recently released that uses Lisp.

So if you haven't really got much into programming before the past couple of years or so, back when you first started using Linux, I'm guessing you didn't really do much in the way of scripting your system. Very basic things. I actually taught a Linux system administration course for a local tech college for two years. course for a local tech college for two years. And so, but you know, since it was an overview class and all of the rest of the course material was Windows and networking stuff, and they just had to take this one Linux class, we didn't get super in depth with scripting. It was just some basic stuff. Here's how you do some things. And I had some good work, things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so nothing super in depth.

I wrote some short scripts for my own use, but I found that I didn't really keep on using them. I just most of my Linux experience was essentially just using the default desktop environments and using default software tools, you know, certainly like Firefox and Thunderbird to do most of my work. And that's essentially how I used Linux for probably close to a decade. Oh, well, I guess I did a lot of like local server stuff. Right. So I would host my own wiki and keep my documentation for my employees and that. I would host my own wiki and keep my documentation for my employees and that. And so, you know, I would configure and set up the wiki with web services and that sort of thing. My kind of points of sale system was written in a Ruby on Rails application by my brother as a school project. And we just kept on using it.

brother as a school project and we just kept on using it um the interesting thing about that is it doesn't work um well on anything newer than ubuntu 2004 so you know a version of linux that's close to a decade old now um so you're doing about as good as all the uh the point of sales point of sales software running on windows xp then So it's not that bad. Yeah, exactly. So I just, I mean, but all it is, is essentially it's just a web server that is local to me. I don't have exposed to the internet. So there's not really a security risk. And I just keep on using it. But one of my goals is like,

hey, if I get good enough at programming, I can program a replacement for that. And then that would be a use case. It's not like I need it for my business, but it would be for my business. So it'd kind of be a good programming excuse yeah yeah that's fair i did have something i was gonna say then we kind of went like way off track uh where where were we at um let's see oh so um what has your your distro experience been like then? Because I know you've said you've used a lot of Ubuntu, but besides Ubuntu, what have you used over your history

and what are you actually settled on at this point? Or are you still like hopping around at this point? I'm still hopping around to some degree, but I like stable things. So right now, what I'm talking to you on is MX Linux, which is based on Debian. So it uses the Apps Package Manager, which is very familiar to me, of course, from the Ubuntu days. But it uses a different init system, so it doesn't use Systemd, though it has like these kind of like software shims for software that expects systemd so that those can still work.

So I think that's kind of a creative solution. So right now I'm on MX Linux and I have that on my current workstation and my laptop. But for the last year, I've had another workstation that is behind me that I've had Manjaro on. That's the primary one that I kind of played with and did a lot of my early videos and stuff on was man jarrow Interestingly, I shut that down For a couple months during the process of the move and then brought it back up and was using it again But then when I did a huge update after it being off for that long Everything works except in including USB keyboard and mouse, but anything else that I plug in with USB, like USB webcams or external USB drives or anything like that, none of that

shows up whatsoever. So something in the Manjaro Arch update process of it being off for a while and me not doing updates and then doing a bunch of updates, that broke something weird. And of course, I'm not going to bother fixing it. I'll just migrate to something else and get my data off and wipe it. So with distro stuff, I have interests, a big interest in Alpine Linux, but there's some usability problems as far as using that as like a daily driver for a workstation, you know, sound isn't, you know, out of the box configured. It doesn't use the same compiler. Like GCC isn't installed by default. It uses a Moosil instead. It always uses open RC for an init system instead of system D. So I have, I have a real big interest in Alpine Linux,

but I probably wouldn't use that as my daily workstation distro. And then eventually I'll probably play with the BSD stuff, like OpenBSD, but there's no pressing need for that. I'll probably do that a bit later. Yeah, I'm in sort of the same boat with that. It's like oh at some point maybe i'll try bsd i've got like a bunch of like with the lisp evangelist a bunch of bsd evangelist saying hey bsd is great bsd is great it's like it probably is but yeah my system works right now and i don't have any like absolute there's nothing wrong with what i have and anything I want to address at this

point where like, I desperately need to try out something new to see if I can fix it. So for me, it's sort of like very much on the back burner. Plus if I'm going to switch to something like BSD, it's going to be for the sake of content. And that's a pretty big project to take on to actually do like reasonable videos on. That'd be a commitment.

Absolutely. And so that stability is one of the reasons why I like Debian based distros, especially since I had, you know, 10 plus years experience of using Ubuntu every day. In my dissatisfaction with Ubuntu was what I loved about Ubuntu is that the defaults just worked great. And when they switched to GNOME 3, the defaults didn't work great for the first six months to a year as they were doing that transition process. And now that they've figured it out, I've become more of a minimalist fan or retro fan and that sort of thing. So I kind of like using stuff that isn't as resource intensive as the default Gnome shell. So and I'm not a huge fan of snaps. You know, I'm not super against them either, but I just I kind of looked into the technology and I'm not a super fan on that. So I've kind of settled on really stable things like MX Linux or Debian or

Linux mints that are Debian based. And then for software that I need more recent versions of, I like app image because it's just like, it's just one file. I can keep them all in one place. I can sync them. They're not complicated. And so I find that kind of balance to work well of using something pretty stable. And then if I want something more recent

or that's not packaged for it, if it's got an app image for it, that's great. Yeah. I don't use that many app images. I think I have like maybe two or three. I can't remember how many, but i i do like them as well they they're a very convenient way to especially with older applications things that have dependencies that are going to be removed from the repositories they really do help with that and i don't know i

think they they they hold a place whereas with Flatpaks, while I have used both of them before, my problem with Snaps is Snaps really like to make loopback devices and they just clutter up your system. That's honestly my biggest problem with them. And Flatpaks, they're fine, I guess. I don't have anything really against them. But both of them are sort of trying to address

the same problem with your package manager whereas app images are because like snaps still have the exact same dependency issue if you have a snap that has dependencies and other snaps if those snaps get removed then well you're stuck or if they get updated then you're basically stuck whereas app images come at it from a completely different approach and you can still sandbox them if you want to sandbox them but you don't necessarily have to do that and the sandboxing doesn't work properly on flat packs anyway someone's gonna yell at me if i don't say that um but i i think that averages do actually serve a pretty good uh what's the word i'm trying to think of do actually have a pretty good... What's the word I'm trying to think of?

Do actually have a pretty good use case. At least that's the way I look at them. There's probably a much better way to phrase that, but... Yeah, older software is exactly right. So I mentioned the point of sale that I'm using on Ubuntu 12.04. It's a Ruby on Rails app. Essentially, if I upgrade the Ubuntu system, it gets newer versions of Ruby on Rails and the dependencies and breaks the previous system so that my point of sale doesn't work

on it anymore. So it's very dependent on those older dependencies. And when the new ones change, that breaks that system. Well, I haven't made an app image for my point of sale. I just run it on the older system and it keeps on working fine. But for regular applications, if you can take those older dependencies and like, hey, this app does what I want it to, and I can just kind of freeze it in time, have it in an app image, and then you can run it on newer systems without worrying about library conflicts. I see, yeah, that's a great use case. And from the retro point of view, you know, that also makes a lot of good sense because you can keep on using software

on different systems, on older hardware, or even older versions of the operating system. And as long as it supports the basic app image stuff, then it works. For example, Alpine Linux doesn't, last time I checked, work with app images. So that's one of the reasons why I wouldn't necessarily use it as a daily driver, Alpine,

because last time I worked with it about a year ago, when you try to run app images, it just doesn't work at all. Speaking of, you mentioned Linux Mint just before. I don't know if you follow too much about Linux news. Did you see the article a couple of days ago about how Linux Mint, like there's a lot of Linux Mint users who just haven't updated their system. Yep. That's very much my use case. So when I would install Linux for my customers, my local customers, most of them were that type of person where essentially the reason they switched to Linux is because Windows was giving them a bunch of problems and pop ups and junk and all of that kind of stuff.

And they'd come to me, you know, a couple of times a year to do virus removal. And I'd be like, well, hey, all you're doing is browsing the Web. Maybe Linux would be a good solution for you. And a lot of times it did end up being a great solution for them. But then they never do the updates because their purpose was essentially, you know, you start the computer, start the web browser, do the things that they want to, like check their email in the web browser or browse their news sites or look up their articles and recipes. And that's it. They didn't do anything else. So I would sometimes get computers back several years later. And eventually, you know, they'd usually get a message that would say, oh, you're, you know, this version of Ubuntu is out of date. Do something.

And then, of course, you have to go up several releases. And I would end up doing that for them. So, yeah, that's definitely, I can totally see that is a lot of my customers were that way. And now I'm loading Linux mint on for those types of customers too so i think that exact same thing will happen um i don't yes i was gonna say um i think this is sort of uh it's sort of something that's going to happen regardless of what they're running like some people are saying this is like a problem with mint or they should force the updates it's the problem with this and problem with that it's sort

of just the fact there's a lot of people who use a computer who don't really care about what they're actually running on their computer they just use the computer as a magical black box it does what they want it to do they don't want to worry about updates and regardless of what they ran they could run literally anything and the exact same problem would happen. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had tons of customers on Windows XP. Years and years and years, even several years after it was stopped supported. Windows 7 wasn't as much.

I mean, I just talked with somebody yesterday who was still using Windows 7, but for a very particular purpose. He said it doesn't go online. It does this thing in my business and it keeps on working and up until recently all of the software that he wanted to use on it worked just fine and so now he's calling me about getting another one with Windows 10 because he's like ah this one application that I want the current version of doesn't work on Windows 7 anymore and it will on Windows 10. But if it wasn't for that, he might not even have called me. You know, he might just keep on using that.

So, well, I think he wanted another laptop, too. But it's stuff like that where if it works, especially in a business case, you just want to leave it and let it work. in a business case, you just want to leave it and let it work. And I think there's a lot of people like that, not necessarily people who aren't tech savvy, but sometimes they're very tech savvy. And they say, for technical reasons, I just want to leave this alone, air gap it, not have it on the internet, just keep on letting it do its thing. Yeah, I fully understand that. Like if it's a business case, if it's functioning, that makes perfect sense why you would never understand that. Like, if it's a business case, if it's functioning, that makes perfect sense why you would never touch it. Like, at my work right now,

I got a picture of the security system there, and it made me stop for a second because I noticed what the window borders look like, and they were the Windows 98 borders. Yeah, wow. I was like, all right then. That's actually kind of impressive. Yeah, no, I mean, I haven't used Windows 98 borders. Yeah, wow. I was like, all right then. That's actually kind of impressive. Yeah, no, I mean, I haven't used Windows 98 stuff

for a long time. So yeah, that's one of the things with retro things. Most people who are into retro, like used those retro things a long time ago. They're like, oh, the old version of Mac OS, like Mac OS 8 or 9 or something before it switched to OS X is so awesome. I love those retro things. I want to play retro games. Like that's not me. And I have zero

desire to run like Windows XP for retro stuff. I get a few customer requests, like sometimes people want to run old games and load up a virtual box with Windows XP on or something like that for them. Or sometimes they want a retro computer with an older stuff. So I get a few of those requests, but not very many. And I'm not a retro gamer. A little bit. I like Tetris. That's my favorite retro game. Other than that, I don't care about retro gaming. And of course, that's the topic that most retro people are into is retro gaming and i have zero desire to do that in my own free time anyway yeah that's fair like i'd rather be playing around with cool linux stuff yeah i can understand that um i get why people want to and i think

that's it's a good thing that people do like uh retro gaming because that is what is sort of keeping that like that industry alive and that's how that's how you have things like how there are um i think it's like windows 95 you can get an add-in card for a lot of like the support of windows 95 an add-in card for a lot of boards where you can just use like an sd card for your storage which yeah things like that would never have happened if there wasn't an interest in retro gaming yeah there's a huge um on youtube there's a there's a channel phil's computer lab or something like that and he does a whole bunch of stuff with old and that was kind of inspiring to me early on when i started doing videos as well i was like wow there is a huge audience for

this and people are interested in it. And one of the things he said in one of his videos, even though he has gaming in almost every single one of his videos, he said like, well, I'm not really a gamer, but for the views, essentially he puts gaming stuff up because he knows that there's a huge interest. There are lots of people that, and that's part of the nostalgia, I think, is that it's like, yeah, I played this when I was a kid or I have fond memories when, you know, my family and I used to do this together or I'd have friends over and we'd do this together.

So I think it's very much that nostalgia that people have that drive that interest for retro gaming and then therefore retro PCs and retro stuff. Well, in some cases, the retro option actually is better. It's not always true, but when it comes to things like some of the higher-end CRTs,

if you're looking into retro gaming, there is definitely a use case, or not just retro gaming, just gaming in general, there is a definite use case for why you may prefer a crt over a um over any modern display regardless of what panel technology it's using just because of the improved refresh rates they have that physically isn't possible with the way that we're making display tech now yeah that's really interesting and i've had zero requests for crts

uh locally anyway and then of course then shipping then if i did start selling stuff online selling a crt would be kind of difficult to box and ship that up and send it i certainly wouldn't send it to australia sorry brody still good i'm sure there's uh there's some dumpster i can find it in yeah yeah and most of the crts that i get are not the good ones you know they're yeah they're like general office ones yeah yeah they're not not very good ones the cheap ones um but i still did get a few in recycling i try not to get them in recycling i do like free electronics recycling too okay and uh because that's a cool way to get retro stuff and it also helps out my clients because they're like, what do I do with my old computer?

I'm like, well, I can take it. And then I work with other recyclers and I get to reuse the fun stuff that I'd like to. And then also then pass it through the recycling stream. But I try not to get CRT monitors because I have to pay for their disposal. Right. And I've always been like, well, maybe I can sell one. Like maybe there's this retro person you know gaming person that wants one I still haven't found it but

yeah there's a very very small group of CRT monitors that anyone's looking for and if you come across one of them they are worth a lot of money like the Sony Trinitrons are one like in only

certain models though too that's the thing yeah so yeah no I'll be surprised if I actually find one that's worth anything and then I'll be even more surprised if I'm able to sell it mm-hmm I'm sure there'll be someone out there who wants it but finding that customer is the hard part if you're not doing stuff online. So what do you actually do with your computer business? Because you said you do also computer recycling as well, but besides that, what actually goes into your business?

The main part of it is upgrades and selling refurbished computers. So let's see here. Is that a ThinkPad back there? Yeah, I've got something here. So this is the kind of machine that I normally sell. Yeah, there you go. So this is, you know, that's a ThinkPad T450. So I'm going to get this out to a customer. And before that

customer, they had a T520 laptop that they used for years and loved. So I'll be transferring the data from that onto this. So that's a big part of my business is reselling refurbished ThinkPads, other computers too. I sell Dell a little bit as well, like the Dell Latitudes and Dell Optiplex workstations. But the vast majority kind of what I've known for locally is the refurbished Thinkpads, which is fun because now there's starting to be this retro movement. So laptops that I've sold for years are now being like,

oh, the new hot thing for things like libre boots or core boots um and so you know i'll get another laptop there are people who absolutely adore thinkpads who make linux videos out there um so here's an x230 i just got i just got a new supplier so i got a box today of new laptops this is is an X230. And my favorite ThinkPad was an X220, so the model just before this. And so now these laptops that I've been selling and working on for years are now becoming popular again. And so I'm having some fun with that. And I think I can explore that both from a fun standpoint and a business

standpoint. And so in that shipment, I got a T61, ThinkPad T61. And of course, I sold a lot of these years ago, like I would say probably eight to 10 years ago, I sold a lot of thinkpad t61 laptops um and now people are loading libre boots up on them which i haven't done yet i'm going to explore that very soon um so libre boots and core boots and stuff like that i want to explore and have fun with so i gotta i actually purposely bought a t61 where a couple years ago I would have thought, why would I do that? So that's kind of something I'm exploring. But for my main business, a lot of it's hard drive replacement. So spinning hard drives are just terribly slow, especially with Windows 10.

Windows 10 just grinds to a halt and barely performs at all if it's on a regular hard drive. Well, a lot of these laptops, even brand new laptops that are sold, come with a 5,400 RPM hard drive. And it's just ridiculous. And so out of the box, they're terribly slow. And so very frequent, at least a couple of times a week, I'm taking out the slow hard drive, putting an SSD in, either doing a fresh install or a migration from the hard drive to the ssd so that's a big part doubling the memory you know the laptop came with uh you know four gigs of memory you know doubling it to eight gigs that's very common types of things that that i'm doing yeah that makes sense um i even like really new stuff i i tend to look at a slightly like higher price range where you do tend to get ssds but yeah a lot of new stuff still does come with mechanical hard drives which is

really weird with how cheap ssds have got now it's it's like one of those things where this isn't a good word but it's it's a crime right it's a crime that they're selling it that way. And not necessarily in the legal sense, but just in the sense that it seems wrong that manufacturers are putting this slow of a drive. Like from my standpoint, I mean, I sell computers, right? I would never want my customers to experience a slowness like is on those computers from a computer that they've purchased from me. That'd be terrible for my brand if I sold computers that slow. And I sell old computers. So why would I want to sell something with a regular hard drive in that is just terribly slow on Windows 10? And it's slow on Linux too, but at least it's bearable on Linux.

Yeah, so from that perspective, kind of the big story that I remember, and I tell this a lot, is that just a few years ago, Apple, in one of their new iMacs, put a 1,400 RPM hard drive in. And this is an iMac that sells for like $1,100, $1,200. So over $1,000 just recently. And the special sauce on the top of that is that 29 team model yeah it's an iMac that you can't upgrade easily because if you try to take the screen off to get to the hard drive you'll probably break the screen so they essentially put a slow hard

drive that you can't get it out and upgrade it in. And they sold it to you for well over $1,000. So that's the story that I tell about manufacturers doing crazy stuff. Like, why would you do that to your brand? Why would you give somebody such a frustrating experience? And they do. I mean, you can go to Walmart today and buy an HP Pavilion laptop or whatever the brand name is for the cheap ones. Now, I forget. Probably Pavilion still. Yeah.

Yeah. 15 something or whatever with a hard drive. And then whatever the ridiculously string of long string of numbers after it is. Right. Yeah. And so but yeah, no manufacturers still do that. And I don't know why. It'll keep me in business with SSD upgrades for a long time.

I think part of the reason, before we get to that, I looked up the 2019 iMac and the first video that shows up is from Lewis Rossman, is the new iMac Trash. And that's very fair. I love Lewis's content. It's great.

Yeah. But I was going to say, wait, I lost it um oh right right i think the part of the reason why they still do it is because when you put a one terabyte hard drive in a computer that sounds like it's so much better than putting a 256 gig SSD because it's a bigger number. That's definitely it. And meanwhile, almost all of my customers are using less than 100 gigs of storage. And most of those are under 50 gigs of storage. So, you know, Windows takes up 30 gigs.

And then if they're using 50 gigs, well, it's still only 80 some gigs. So in practical terms, 128 gigabyte solid state drive is going to be so much better for the vast majority of people than a one terabyte hard drive. Even though the one terabyte is, oh, that's a thousand gigabytes. It's so much larger than the small SSD. Well, the large drive is so much slower and worse out every other way except storage than the SSD. Yeah, but I think you're right.

Absolutely, it's that marketing thing of, hey, look, you get a terabyte with this. But I remember when SSDs were first coming onto the market. Like, I'm still quite young, but I can still remember that happening in the computing industry. I remember how I remember how expensive they were when they first came out it's just like oh you want to pay a thousand dollars

for like 128 gigs and I'm like no I don't want to do that and I was looking at because I've got a Windows drive on my computer right now because I needed Windows to do some stuff at uni. I bought a 256-gig SSD for like $30. Right.

Yeah. No, the price difference is amazing. So right now, it makes zero sense for anybody to use a hard drive as their main drive. Now, as extra storage, that's completely fine. Yeah, yeah. It's still a good use case for hard drives for extra storage. Yeah, if you want to have all your family photos and videos on a hard drive, that makes sense. Please don't store them on one hard drive, though.

Please don't do that. Right. Backup drive. But what I'll often do in desktop workstations is the main drive, the operating system drive, will be on an SSD, and then I'll have an additional drive in there and set it up with automatic backup. So that way, they'll probably never use it, you know, most of my customers won't touch it. But then if it comes back to me later, and something's messed up with the operating system, well, then,

you know, it's been doing its daily backup or whatever onto the other drive. And chances are that hard drive will be fine. Yeah, and then I the data yeah the way i'm running my system right now is i've got a nvme drive which is my os drive um i think that's like a 256 gig or something like that and then i've got my just general storage drive that's a two gig mechanical drive which it's fine i don't care it takes a while to access like some pictures and stuff yeah it would probably speed up editing but it i don't do 4k video editing so i don't really need the extra speed like a mechanical hard drives fast enough honestly the bottleneck is my cpu rather than the drive itself okay for the editing part, yeah.

If I was doing 4K, yeah, there would probably be a problem there, but Linux video editing is not great anyway, so there's just bottlenecks everywhere. Yeah, I've been watching your adventures with that. For me, I pretty much don't edit. The biggest edit I did is I figured out how to use FFmpeg command line to like chop the end of my, one of my videos. Cause I like messed up the ending and I was like, well, the rest of the video is good.

And so instead of doing an editor, I actually figured out how to use the command line to trim off what I wanted to. Yeah. And that was fun. I like stuff like that. But yeah, no, 1080p is a great format. And for library, I guess there, or Odyssey, they're still recommending

that we do 720p. But for doing tech stuff where you want to show code or commands on the screen, having that crisper is pretty nice. So I think 1080p is pretty much the perfect resolution for that. I still try to make my content...

I know a lot of my viewers watch on mobile. So I try to make my content actually watchable for them. So I end up zooming in a lot of my... On my terminal. So I probably am running like a 48 point font or something like that during my videos. Like when I regularly run my system, that would be horrible to use.

But when you're looking at like... A phone screen is still fairly small. even with how big phones are now it's still what at most seven eight inches maybe nine inches if you have like a big like phablet phone which is ridiculous phone shouldn't be that big um I think mine's five and a half but I still try to make my content actually viewable on that so even if it is 720p if the font's at 48 point you can probably still read it yeah yeah absolutely so do you publish?

you publish in 1080p right? I publish on YouTube and use the syncing and publish in 1080p yeah right right yeah for me that it ends up being such a good size that i probably will stick with 1080p for i mean even if like everybody starts publishing in these higher resolutions in the future i guess maybe that's my retro stand as i'll stand with 1080p for years to come because yeah i don't see a reason for the kind of things that i want to do to use a higher resolution i think 1080p is probably gonna actually i reckon 1080p is probably gonna stick around

oh yeah things like seven anything below that it kind of gets hard to read any of the text but i think monitors aren't going to get any bigger because they're already at the point now where they take up way too much desk space. You can get like 34-inch monitors. At that point, sure, 4K does make sense, but I don't think like 24-inch and 27-inch monitors are going to go away anytime soon. And 4K on something like that really isn't that worth it i've used it before it looks basically the same right yeah and i don't see the use case for anything over 1080p

on laptops because you know if you or phones phone it's dumb really dumb on phones i've seen 4k phones i'm like that is battery drain for no reason. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, even a lot of the laptops have lower resolutions, but 1080p is nice. I like 1080p or what is the 16 by 900. That's what my ThinkPad T420S is. And I use the ThinkPad T420S as my daily driver laptop. And that's, I guess that's retro now that's close to eight, nine years old or something like that. It works great. And that's 16 by nine. It's like the 16 by 900 resolution. And that's nice, but it's kind of this weird thing where, you know, like the 720p videos are smaller than that resolution. And then the 1080p videos are bigger than the resolution um but i still like the 16 by 900 as well like i think it's pretty comfortable

yeah yeah definitely on a on a mono that would be yeah a bit iffy um the only problem with 1600 by 900 is everything is going to be scaled and it's not going to be a exact scale right yeah yeah so that's yeah that's the only problem so besides besides that i mean and i could look at doing upgrades and that sort of thing to see if i can get a 1080p screen in my you can there's an upgrade or something yeah i probably can it's not a very high priority. But, oh, speaking of, we were thinking of, we were looking at like kind of retro things. Yes. Core boots and that sort of thing probably won't show up very well.

But this is a Gigabyte motherboard. It's the only one on the compatibility list for Libre boots. And so most people, when they think of Libre boots and core boot, they're doing everything with laptops, but I really enjoy working with desktops and sure I've been a think pad guy. And that's what people know me locally for, but I like playing around with desktops. And so I bought this board. I haven't messed around with doing a Libre boot stuff on it,

but it is the only desktop board that's on the LibreBoot compatibility list, and I've got it, and I'm happy I've got it. Now I've just got to find time to play with it. So I have not looked at all into LibreBoot. Some people have mentioned it before, but what exactly is LibreBoot? People have no idea, myself kind of included.

Yeah, so if you're sort of techie in most of your audiences, the best way to describe it is that it's a replacement for the manufacturer BIOS. So instead of having the regular BIOS, it replaces it with Libre boots is the free and open source one. So that's the GNU one that says like is freeze and freedom. There's no binary blobs in the Libre boots and that sort of thing, but that's not possible on all models. So then core boots and several other projects have sprung up that have some binary blobs, but are mostly open source. And so there's some advantages from a speed point of view. I think they boot faster, which really, of course, that doesn't matter too much.

You press the power button. If it takes a little bit longer from a practical standpoint, that doesn't matter. But a lot of people like that. And I think there's some configurability things that you can do, some things that you might not have been able to do with the regular BIOS. but there's also some things that you might not be able to do because you know, that, that, that custom BIOS, that essentially BIOS replacement has to have all of the hardware features recognized and coded in. So if you're trying to use it on a model that, you know, sometimes it's like,

Oh, this particular thing doesn't work on the laptop because we don't have that included in Libre boot yet. So because it's a BIOS replacement, it's got instructions, basic instructions for some of the hardware. So maybe your ethernet won't work or your sound won't work or that sort of thing. I think for most of the models they do now that they support, but it's a very limited list. Like I said, there's only one desktop motherboard and that's a LGA 775 board. So like the Core 2 Duo processors, that old.

Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Which is still a viable platform for a lot of people's use. I just sold a computer with a Core 2 Duo not that long ago to somebody who just wanted to use it for a particular task, and they were fine with that. But, you know, but the problem with the newer stuff for people who are concerned with security, you know, with the i5 processors, they had the Intel management engine and, you know, they've got stuff in there that you can't turn off and stuff like that. So I actually predict there'll be, again, a resurgence of interest in things like the Core 2 Duo processors, because

at least then people can say, well, I know what's in there for the most part. And I know it doesn't have the Intel management engine spying on me and that sort of thing. And I don't know a ton about privacy stuff, but I'm not a security researcher. I just have an interest in these retro things that end up having this crossover with free software stuff and LibreBoot. And so, yeah, if any of your viewers have a good resource for getting started with Libre

boots, feel free to post it in the comments because that is probably of interest to a lot of people, but the documentation, yes, there is documentation, but for somebody who's just getting into it and is somebody who's, I'm pretty techie. know my stuff i have you know i've been working on computers a long time it's still intimidating and i still don't know where to start so somebody has a great resource of like hey here's how i actually did this i know there's resources out there but feel free to share them if you know a good one yeah definitely do that if

um or if you if you remember actually youtube comments are about it the odyssey comments you'd probably be fine because youtube likes to remove links for no reason uh if you do want to post it on youtube um you're probably better off doing on like mastodon or something and i can uh i'll i'll send it through i guess but um yeah you mentioned the uh the core 2 duo if i remember correctly i think my first computer was running a core 2 duo uh i think it was a core 2 duo and it was something like generic dell box thing um i think it was running vista yeah it would have been yeah um so i may have had a computer before that. That's the only one I remember.

I vaguely recall something earlier with XP, but I don't remember if that was my computer or if that was like a family friend's. But I have used earlier things. It's just the earliest I remember using a lot of was definitely Vista. Yeah, I remember the Windows 3.1 days,

but I wasn't very good at computers back then. My parents got us a computer in 1993, and I liked computers. I explored it, but they found the receipt for that, and they paid well over $2,000. Oh, wow. For like a 486 and 93. And so in 1993 dollars, that's a whole lot of money, you know. So I'm glad that they did and gave me that exposure to computers.

But yeah, no, I don't think I'd have any desire to use 486 on a regular basis anymore. But Core 2 Duos are fun because you can do most things that you'd want to do on them. And my favorite model for the Core 2 Duos is a Dell Optiplex 780. It came in four different form factors. And I did an early video on blog post on it on retro edge tech. But it's the Optiplex 780. And the neat thing about that is the form factors, the three largest form factors have four memory slots. So they can be upgraded to 16 gigs of RAM. It's DDR3 memory. And then the Core 2 Duos, you can put Core 2 Quads in them as

well, which is kind of a weird name, Core 2 Quad. But yeah, anyway, Core Quad. But so they can actually be pretty capable machines and you can end up doing a lot with them. So the Dell Optiplex 780 is one of my favorite, you know, quote, retro computers. I mean, I sold a ton of those things not too long ago in my business as regular computers. They weren't retro back then. And I can still, you know, sometimes people will contact me and they're like, do you have anything that's not very expensive? And I'm like, yes, I do. And this is actually a great computer too. So it still works. so there's some crossover between retro and still practical to use on a daily basis and so the core 2 duo the recent ones with ddr3 memory like the

last ones in the lineup still end up being really good computers yeah i was actually considering getting like getting one of the newer core 2 duos but like the what were they? When did they come out? I don't remember. When Intel decided to redo the Core 2 Duo lineup just because they were really cheap and at the time because

my main use case was going to be gaming most games don't use more than a dual core. Right. Even now most games don't use more than a dual core so right yeah so like the the if you even now most games don't use more than a dual core yeah the intel core 2 duo like e8600 processor i think is off to like 3.2 gigahertz or 3.3 gigahertz or something like that it's just got two cores but if you were doing certain kind of retro gaming, that was awesome.

You know, it still is awesome. And those processors, I think, sell for less than $10 right now. You know, so in my favorite core two-duo processor, it's a E8400, which is a three gigahertz dual core. And I think those processors also, you know, less than $10, you know. So it's kind of one of those things where you can get this system, core 2.2 system that, you know, is barely cost any money, or you might get it free from a relative or something

like that. And for less than a $10 upgrade, you can put a pretty decent processor in there and throw some more RAM in it, put an SSD in it, load your favorite version of Linux and have a whole lot of fun. I think now is actually a really good time to get like for getting kids into computing. Cause back when you were growing up, like yeah,

$2,000 for a computer in the nineties is that's not exactly a, um, approachable amount of money for a lot of people but even though like consumer computers now are very locked down things like the raspberry pi exists now which is a a really cheap system you can use to get a kid interested in like programming get them interested in actually how electronics works things like that and it's just a or if you want to you could actually go and as you said buy a really cheap older system that at the time would have cost hundreds or thousands of dollars yeah um yeah and it's i think i think more people should

actually explore outside of the uh the general consumer electronic space because yeah, you're not really gonna, sure. You can do programming on a modern computer, but you're not, I try opening up a modern laptop and see what you can actually do with it. You can maybe replace a hard drive. If you're lucky.

One of my hard drives in my laptop is soldered in. I don't know why it doesn't make any sense. No, no fun. Okay. Lucky lucky it had a second uh it had a second slot luckily right right yeah i think the core 2 duo platform um uh i wrote some articles and did some videos about this kind of the raspberry pi versus you know adele optiplex or core 2 duo it depends on what you're doing, of course, because the Raspberry Pi is a lot of fun. And one of my sons is doing a project where he's got this camera project and he's got the Raspberry Pi and he like used rubber bands to put inside of a tea box and then he rubber banded a battery pack to it, which is just USB because

the Raspberry Pi can be powered up that. And then he rubber banded a webcam onto it and so he's got this little box that he can carry around set up in different spots and then he's doing some bash cell scripting to figure out what you know like doing short video clips and that sort of thing to his other computer so yeah absolutely you can experiment and have fun with things like the Raspberry Pi and they're cheap and that sort of thing. For the most part, you still have to buy them. And that's what's interesting about, say, the Core 2 Duo era of computers. Of course, there's the AMDs, AM2, and that sort of thing in that era as well. But oftentimes, there'll be a computer sitting in somebody's basement or garage that's been unplugged for a couple of years. And you can take that and start doing really interesting things with it,

with Linux and programming, and even external things as well, because you can start doing some USB or pinout things with the serial port or parallel port. A little bit more complex, but very doable, and very similar to the pinouts that are available on the Raspberry Pi. That's actually a fair point. I didn't think about that. But yeah, I'm sure that

yeah you probably could find something like that maybe it's like a grandmother who bought a computer when her grandkids come around or anything like that like there's a lot of people maybe they just bought a new computer then didn't know how to get rid of their old one because like

some people will just throw them in the trash but there are some people who just don't really know what they're supposed to do with it and i i'm sure there are people who have whether it be in their like storage container or their garage somewhere just whatever maybe it's a bit older than the core to do maybe it's i i don't know maybe maybe even something like running a 486 maybe it goes that far back, but there'll be some sort of old computer

you can probably get your hands on. But yeah, that's actually a really good point. And there's fun things that you can do with them. And that's kind of the interesting thing from a computer point of view is like, what do you do with a computer? Well, for us, a lot of it is making things. Well, that's, you know, quote, contents.

You know, we publish things or we communicate. And I think for the vast majority of people, they use computers as a communication device. So for email and messaging and that sort of thing, when you think about that as that's the primary use of a computer. Almost any computer from the last 10 years will do just fine. But then when you want to experiment with other things that a computer can be used for, say computation, well, any processor from the last 20 years will do just fine on most basic computation things. Most of us, when we're experimenting or learning, or even commercial professional use cases of doing computation or controlling things or figuring out mathematics for something, there's zero reason to buy a current processor to need to do that. Of course, we can use a new processor, but we don't need a new processor to do that.

And so that's the interesting case with the older computers as well, is that when you start like, hey, controlling external machines like for CNC, computer numerical control, or doing switches to turn things on and off, sensors, external USB devices for, you know, communicating with the external physical world. You don't need a new computer to do any of that and so that way it's kind of like older quote retro hardware um can have a new lease on life and so that's definitely an interest of mine yeah because yeah like if especially if you're doing something like that like i i guess with when it comes to computation there are use cases for having newer hardware. If, say, you're working on some big project, sure, compilation time is being reduced. That is nice, especially when it's a really big project. If you're, say, working on the Linux kernel or a web browser,

it makes sense why you'd want to have the most up-to-date hardware because waiting a day to compile Linux just to find out there was a bug with it isn't something you really want to do but right if yeah if you're just learning and most of the times you're just learning it's going to be something fairly small that'll work maybe there'll be a fraction of a second difference but really it doesn't actually matter yeah so i guess i guess I would encourage people, if you've got a spare computer around

and you've just said, oh, that's old, maybe reconsider and say, well, really, how old is it? And could it be useful if I just did one upgrade? Maybe the reason it was frustrating to use is because it had a slow hard drive or because it had Windows 8 on it, or Windows Vista, one of those off years of the Windows releases that everybody hated. Maybe that was the reason that it was terrible. With a few simple upgrades, it would actually be very useful again, and a whole lot of fun, because you don't

necessarily have to worry about the latest thing. You can use whatever Linux distro you want to use and start having fun and experimenting with hardware integrations. What happens when I plug this in? Can I get sensor data just using a regular PC? Well, the answer is yes. Yes, you can. It just requires these extra steps of figuring things out. But you have to do the same thing with a Raspberry Pi too.

But you might already have a computer that's sitting there that's not being used where you'd the same thing with a Raspberry Pi, too. But you might already have a computer that's sitting there that's not being used where you'd have to go buy a Raspberry Pi. I'd never actually run 8 on my system. I ran 7, I ran 8.1, and then I ran 10. I didn't even, like, when 7 came out, or when, sorry,

when 8 came out, I was like, I'm just gonna, I'll just wait. It's not gonna end of life. It won't end of life until the next one comes out after that. It's fine. That was a great decision. Yeah, what is the joke that every other Windows release is a good one.

So, it's like Windows 95 just didn't quite have the support, but 98 was great. Windows ME was terrible, but Windows XP was great. Windows Vista, people hated Vista, but Windows 7 was the best thing ever, and people wanted to keep on using it forever. Windows 8 did that whole tiles thing with the start menu that nobody could figure out.

It was terrible. Well, then Windows 10 was the best thing ever. you that nobody could figure out that was terrible well then windows 10 was the best thing ever you know and so like every other one is what ends up being good for the windows releases which interesting now is that essentially there are going to be no more windows releases it's just windows 10 and yeah they're basically doing mac os x which is the reason Yeah. The same number. And then every version or every release of windows 10 that they do is a little bit more like Linux. So now they're kind of cheating, right?

With the windows or the subsystem of Linux on windows, the WSL stuff, like all the stuff that people like, Oh, Linux is really good for this. When Microsoft is, Oh, we can have that too.

We'll just like put it in as this little layer inside Windows 10. And so I see that as like kind of this interesting thing where maybe 10 years from now, we'll still have Windows 10. But the vast majority will have been rewritten to be more like Linux. Windows 10 Snow Leopard. So yeah, and I still do upgrades. I mean, I've got a laptop behind me that I'm going to be upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10. And I was joking, the owner of that is a tech person as well and in the IT industry.

And that interest in Linux is a common thing there. And so seeing Windows adopt more and more Linux-y things is fun to see. It doesn't make me want to use Windows as my daily driver anymore. No, neither. Right. But it's still interesting to see. Like all the cool stuff that we've been geeking out about for a while,

well, now Windows is legitimizing that and including it in what they're doing. There are a lot of people who are talking about how Windows embracing Linux is kind of bad for the Linux desktop, but I think that people are looking at it in a very short-sighted way. I don't think Linux necessarily needs to be its own separate thing, because if you have extra Windows developers who are actually using Linux now,

ultimately they're still developing for Linux. If they're making new Linux applications, making new drivers, making things like that, all of this is still... Actually, drivers are probably a bit of a different one, because then you're probably interacting with Windows as well. But if they're making say, like, new terminals, making

new graphic applications, making new... I don't know, making new... even entire new window managers, it's still something that is being made for Linux. And if it's being made for Linux, you can still use it yourself. The only reason I mentioned

Drive as being a weird one, because there actually is DirectX support on WSL, but it yourself the only reason i mentioned um drives being weird one because there actually is direct x support on wsl but it requires the windows kernel i'm not sure why it's even there like what's being written on linux for with direct x support i i have no idea i i i agree with you that uh windows embracing and bringing in uh linux is just going to get wider exposure for Linux, both from the people who use Linux that might benefit from some applications that are written by those developers. But also those developers are then familiar with Linux concepts and things and may end up using it themselves, too. So I see that as a good thing of course I still think of the embrace, extend extinguish as

one of those things that will also likely happen to some degree I don't think Microsoft embracing Linux is a good thing but Windows users embracing Linux I think there's some benefits from that yeah so

even with that, I think there's some benefits from that. Yeah. So even with that process, I think, yeah, more people using Linux, exploring how to use their computers to do things instead of just, oh, this is what was provided with it. I don't know anything except the default applications or what somebody sells me. That open source opportunity, I think is great. So I agree.

Yeah, I know that WSL either has or is getting Wayland support. I can't remember if it's already got it or not. WSL Wayland. I think it's still a work in progress, but previously you could technically get graphical applications working WSL through like an X11 server, but it wasn't great. It was sort of a hack.

But with Wayland, that opens up a massive, massive new opportunity for Windows users who actually work with WSL. Because before, sure you could use terminal applications but what about using all of the cool GUI stuff that's available on Linux that just doesn't work on Windows or if there is a Windows version

isn't actually designed to be a good Windows application I think my favourite example of things like that is not a GUI application but something like Docker. Docker was first designed with Linux in mind. There is a Windows version. The Windows version is way behind the Linux version.

And I don't know of anyone who actually uses it on Windows. Yeah, I mean, I think Docker is the reason why we have the subsystem Linux on Windows, the WSL. Essentially, people were saying, we need Docker. And corporations were saying, you still need to use Windows. And they're like, we need Docker. So I think that was the primary motivation for that. And as a technology stack, I get frustrated with Docker. I actually don't like it that much, but I can totally see why people do

and why they, quote, need it in corporate enterprise stuff. But yeah, that's my belief, is that Docker is what fueled all the Linux stuff on Windows. That could definitely be the case, eh?

Hmm. I can see that. Are you going to say something? No, go ahead. Ah, let's see. What else do we have on here? I don't know what topics we've hit to be honest I think we've hit a bit of random stuff

oh did you hear I know you said you were going to start using Gab a bit more on I think you said on Mastodon did you see the Gab the Gab hack I did not follow much how long ago was that was that just recent or a couple weeks ago

yeah there's some updates that happened just yesterday, actually. The CEO of Gab blamed the hack on demon hackers, which is amusing. But this is The Verge, so I don't expect a good article here. I'm not too surprised that it happened, to be honest, because like with Parler, it seems like they didn't exactly have stuff well set up. But they were ahead of Parler on a lot of things. Essentially, you know, they did have their own infrastructure and that they did base it on Mastodon.

Of course, they've changed quite a few things and done a lot of their own development after that. But at least they based it on their own infrastructure and they based it on Mastodon. And Mastodon is a Ruby on Rails application, if I'm not mistaken. So right there, I believe there might be some security issues that if they weren't super on top of it I'm sure there were injection hacks and stuff like that could have gone on problem that I'm not sure entirely if this is what happened but what I've heard

is that or judging by what I've read is that there is a SQL injection vulnerability because they had handwritten SQL queries rather than yeah I don't know what they were thinking with that um it was only with judgment what i've seen it seems like it was just a

problem waiting to happen and the fact that it wasn't worse is uh sort of lucky yeah i was i was kind of excited for gab for a little bit. And it had some performance issues when everybody was switching to it. When it first came out, it was unusable for a while. Yeah. And so now the performance issues seem to have been fixed. But I joined DistroTube's Mastodon server, and I've actually really enjoyed that. And so I post a few things on Gab, and there's some people there that have then followed me to DT's Mastodon instance. And so that's been kind of cool.

But, yeah, I just post a few things on gab and i plan to continue i plan to like post links to my videos and things like that on there and maybe get a little interaction i followed a bunch of linux people but uh i don't expect it to to work out great necessarily as uh an alternative a twitter alternative though i have quit using twitter i yeah. It's kind of been a waste of my time. But that's a story too. I was the social media expert in our area for quite a while, especially with Twitter. And that was about 10 years ago. And I did talks on it and I spoke quite a bit about it and using Twitter for your business and stuff like that. Yeah, it was eight to 10 years ago that I did that. So it's kind of interesting that I've quit using it. But I see Mastodon or the Fediverse

as the practical replacement for that, for techie people and regular people too. It does make sense as kind of like this interoperable, they can talk, you can subscribe to people, even if they're not on your same network. That fixes a lot of the problems with something like Twitter or Facebook. Of course, it doesn't fix all of them. And there's still things that work better on a closed walled garden. But I like the Fediverse. garden um but i i like the fediverse i've had a good time using it with dt's mastodon server i tried a few others before then and it just didn't seem that nice or work that well but maybe now i'm hanging out with people on there that it actually makes sense to and it works and it's fun before then it was like maybe just posting into the void yeah yeah um but yeah now now i like it um so i'm using mastodon dt's um uh server as is my primary thing i'll post there quite a bit and it's cool i've been able to hang out with people and

find people who have similar interests um there and not like that but i haven't really found that to that much extent on gab i was just having a look at the um a theory of what happened with the the gab hack so someone's looking through the source code and they found uh some interesting interesting development choices so you'll write about it using Rails. Yeah. Basically what happened is they didn't sanitize user input. And so basically they broke out of the SQL statement. And because they were using a function called find by SQL method, if you can break out of the SQL statement, you can basically inject your own text into that function,

which allows you to pretty much call whatever SQL function you want. Yeah, and it's a matter of discovery to just figure out what query is to get the information you want. Yeah, and apparently the Rails documentation doesn't really mention this pitfall with the function. So, yeah.

So just me, you know, I'm using a Ruby on Rails in my own production, in my own shop, and I feel like I can blame that on Rails to some degree. You know, we can blame it on Ruby on Rails. Because, you know, if there was any other company that was as high profile, that probably would have happened to them too, is my guess. Apparently, Facebook also does some stuff in Rails,

and there was a dev there that mentioned the same problem. I'm sure Facebook has enough money to realize that's something you should probably address. Hopefully. Hopefully, they have more security engineers with their payroll. Yeah, they've got all that money. I'm sure they can afford devs to do something. I'm actually a really big fan of Mastodon as well.

I personally use LinuxRocks.online. One of the things I like about this server is that there's... I don't know. I haven't looked at DTs, but on this one, basically nothing is blocked. I can't think of a single server that has been blocked. Even things like Gab, Kiwi Farms, things like that. Even all of that is completely open. Basically, the only rule on the server is be an adult.

The only role on the server is be an adult. If you, like, just understand that if you do something really dumb, yeah, you're probably removed. But if you just act like a reasonable person, you can basically be fine here. If you want to hang out with people on anywhere like that, that's fine. We don't really have any reason to stop you doing that. And I think that's one of the things that a lot of Mastodon servers sort of miss out on because a lot of them want to be their own sort of walled gardens.

Like, no, you're not allowed to talk to these people. You must only talk to the people that I like and things like that. Yeah. Yeah, DC server, I think, does block a few things. And so I might be missing out on some interaction, but I can follow and message you just fine, which is pretty cool. I mean, that's a really neat feature of the Fediverse. But I mean, I haven't explored the technicalities of it that much,

and I'd like to. That's definitely an interest of mine. And I can see it making sense to explore more as, you know, part of what I do with retro computers but it's retro edge you want to do current fun things with them as well and the Fediverse kind of matches that because you know you there's a lot of different options for clients there's a lot of uh there's a lot of different you know like the what is it the the video peer tube with the videos that you do um I don't know all the other types of servers,

but there's quite a few different things that you can do with the Fediverse instead of just a Twitter clone. And I really think that's cool. I think it works well. It works well with my interests. So I plan on exploring a lot more. But so far, I've just done the simple signed up for DT's instance and posting away there and following people.

And that's about it. Yeah. Okay. I know there's like a Instagram-like thing. There's a Imgur-like thing. There's like a Bitly sort of thing as well. I don't understand. The Bitly one doesn't really make much sense to me why it's there.

But, hey, it's cool that something like that can be done. Yeah. So there's a lot to explore with that and because it's essentially this open protocol that you can subscribe to yeah i think that's pretty powerful and it works like the web was kind of supposed to work you can go to somebody's website or go to somebody's thing or you can subscribe to somebody's feed and you actually get it you know instead of some other company deciding what should be shown in your timeline or not so it's very appealing uh but i'm certainly don't know that the technicalities of it are completely understanding yet i think that's one of the things we do miss out on with a lot of the

modern web where it's just like a lot of older websites did have things like rss feeds but stuff like that has slowly just been taken away or if it's still there it's going to be hidden behind some massive link tree like most news websites still have rss feeds it's just that it's not on their home page it's like hidden under 10 different other links you have to get to it's because they want you to go through their way of showing you, because if they, if they just gave you the RSS feed, then they wouldn't be able to serve you things like ads and they wouldn't be

able to get you to click on their other articles. You'd only see the articles you want to see. And I don't know. I do have a bit of a soft spot for the way, a bit of a soft spot for that, like a bit of a soft spot for that like feed-based and connect to whatever you want to connect sort of way of using the web. Yeah, I agree. And I think there's going to be a resurgence of that. There's certainly this kind of cultural interest there, you know, the kind of subgroup of Linux and geeky kind of stuff that we're into,

it's actually pretty large. I mean, there's a lot of people. I'm really surprised. Yeah. You know, I thought, hey, I'm interested in Linux. Hardly anybody else is interested in that. And then you look at the number of subscribers or the searches or the downloads for some of this stuff.

They're like, no no there's a whole lot of other people interested in this too like dt has what 103 000 subs on youtube 104 000 on youtube now that's insane yeah i mean that's a whole lot of people like for going over tiling window managers and command line stuff and programs that you wouldn't think of necessarily a whole lot of people being interested in. 100,000 subscribers, that's a whole lot of people. And that's on that tiny niche. I don't know what it would be

if you had a really big general Linux channel. I know there's a couple of them and some of them, I think, hidden like the 300,000 hundred thousand range i'm sure there's way more people out there who are using it who just don't really care to watch content oh yeah i don't know how many people are really using linux yeah and they really can't figure that out um which is kind of interesting it's just serious how many people are using this like uh i think i watched a podcast with one of the guys from Ubuntu and they were saying, well, we think there's about this many Ubuntu users, but we really don't know for sure.

And in my experience, that's the case as well. I mean, you know, I install Ubuntu for somebody or, you know, Linux, but Ubuntu or Ubuntu based stuff for the most part. And, you know, they just use it and they weren't part of the community. They weren't watching Linux videos or how to do this or that. They were just using it as a computer. So I think there's a very large install base

that it's hard to figure out and it's hard to know, but it's kind of cool as well. Yeah, it's hard to know but it's kind of cool as well yeah it is it's good to know because i don't i don't i don't think at least any time in the near future linux is going to be like the main operating system people use but it is cool that there are definitely other people out there and there's a lot of other people out there who at least to some extent share a similar interest even if it's just they use their computer and it just happens to have linux on it it's still cool there are people out there who are at least willing to try that out yes absolutely um oh i

wanted to mention also that um you introduced me to luke smith's videos. I had never really, I think maybe I had watched Luke Smith's like on accident just because of, you know, some thing that I was searching up and I had watched a video and it's, it's him. And I realized that a little bit ago, because when I went back and looked at a video about sync thing, which is a syncing program,

I was like, Oh, I've watched this video before. It's a Luke Smith video. But anyway, I had never heard of Luke Smith before you had kind of mentioned him on your channel. But then since then, I watched a lot of his stuff and a lot of the things that he talks about. I'm like, yes, yes. And especially the kind of like move out to the country, move to the woods type of a thing, because that's exactly what I've done. I can't see it. But essentially, I have my workshop out in the country now.

I have a beautiful sunset out to the west. And so I've kind of moved to the woods. I was going to do that anyway. And so I've kind of moved to the woods. I was going to do that anyway, but I think it's kind of funny that that coincided with a lot of the things that he was talking about. Yeah. I'm, I'm definitely the same boat about wanting to, to leave the suburbs. I'm not like deep in the city or anything like that.

That would be a horrible experience. I don't know why anyone want to do that. I'm close enough where things like convenient, but I would still like to get out to a rural area because I do have a lot of family out there as well my parents live out there all my aunts and uncles live out there and

whenever I go out there it's just nice and quiet there's not cars driving everywhere you can just go lay down somewhere and just chill if you want to it's it's lovely and it's quiet yeah and people just seem to be genuinely more friendly like i was there with my stepdad the other day and this dude just came up to us and started like standing in front of like the frozen fish section and just started talking to us about fish. Like, I don't care, but have a nice day.

Yeah, I agree. You know, there's all types everywhere, of course, but I think generally people are a little bit more relaxed and not quite as nervous, and they feel more confident. Like, you know, hey, I've got this. I can survive out here. I don't need an infrastructure to take care of me. And so the people that are out in the country usually aren't as stressed out. And so that

leads for more peaceful interactions for the most part. So yeah, that's been fun. And well, on the tech side, there's this pull, right? There's this almost anti-technology type of thing where you're doing things that are really old school and things that don't necessarily have to do with technology at all. And those are really worthwhile things. You know, I'm going to be growing a garden and splitting wood and making sure that I have enough firewood on hand for the next year and stuff like that, which is not very related to technology. But of course, there are things that you could make it be related to technology if you wanted to.

We talk about pies and Arduinos and sensors and that sort of thing. You certainly could do a lot if you wanted to with, you know, especially with growing things. You could automate some things you could do things to do sensors or you could do especially you know you can automate uh watering yeah and uh these with livestock and chickens so i will probably be getting into that time type of thing but i'm not now but i can certainly be exploring a lot more of that kind of rural tech life in the future yeah i i don't know where you would even go with that but i can i can think of like

really i can only like scratch the surface so things like say automating your sprinklers and things like that keeping a track of like your water usage especially if you have rainwater for example um but i'm sure there's so much further you can go with that that i just can't even think of because i'm not actually living that life right now yeah there's so much that there's opportunities where a lot of it is the well what happens when the electricity goes off well in the city you have some problems because everything's you know built into Well, here, I have a few more options already. But if I wanted to explore that more, I can. I think there's good things about preparedness that certainly technology could help with. You know, you could use it for planning. You could use sensors to figure out,

you know, hey, am I getting low on this particular thing? Have you used too much? There's a lot of automation that can be done with actually energy generation, like solar or burning wood for heat, energy, et cetera. And a lot of those to do it well. Some things with tech and automation could help you do it so that it's actually worth doing, where you get a good enough efficiency out of it, where if you're trying to do it all by hand it's just sometimes just takes too much time and you've got other work to do where if you can use a little bit of technology to help that along well then it's worth doing because you don't always have to babysit it yourself unless i'm running a wood stove here firewood isn't exactly very important in australia so

at least i could save time on that gets to like maybe 10 degrees in the winter I think I'll be fine without firewood yeah no you don't have you I saw that you just recently did a video about how hot it was there yeah here oh man it was really bitterly cold for about a week and a half here and it's just sort of to warm up and that's barely above freezing is warm up like we've been so happy that we've got sunshine and it's barely above freezing. It's wonderful now. So very, very different climates. I've got an Indian subscriber who always just likes to tell me how hot it is in India.

Apparently, it got to like 45 degrees Celsius over summer, which for the people who are too lazy to convert that themselves, I'll put that into freedom units. 45C to F. that is 113 Fahrenheit. That's, no, I'm good. Yeah, that's crazy hot. I mean, I can remember a few times. So I live in a climate where it gets really cold and also really hot. Oh, lovely.

Usually not for very long at either extreme. lovely usually not for very long at either extreme uh and so certainly here it's been you know 102 degrees 103 degrees but that's very rare um and i think i remember that when i was a teenager i can't remember anything recently of it getting that hot here um fahrenheit's uh you know yeah yeah i don't think it's gonna be celsius no you. No, you'd be long gone with that. But yeah, so there's this interesting thing of how much do I do with tech stuff in rural life? I mean, how much do I just need to, you know, use my muscles and make stuff happen? Use an old fashioned axe to split the wood, you know, plant the garden the old fashioned way, you know, and I think there's probably going to be a mixture of both, you know, I'll just make sure I get the basics taken care of, but if I can have fun using some tech stuff along the way, I probably will. So before we did the podcast, you were saying that you were doing some upgrades

to your workshop, so what were you actually doing to it? The big difference is I actually have my own space. So when we move from the city to out here, I now have a separate building. It's not in a house. It's in a separate garage. And it's a really large space. You probably can't see it from the background here,

but I actually have a pretty large space. And then I have a storage area above that. And so a lot of it is getting organized because I've got lots of stuff. And so getting it organized and some of the upgrades. So, you know, the workstation that I'm using now, there's certain upgrades that I want to do and get things in place. I want to get my kind of my scheduling and my to do lists. And I've actually been using Vim to do that. Before that, I was just using just a plain old GUI text editor. And I keep all my to-dos just in a line, and then I move them to completed. Well, now I've learned more of the Vim commands, and I'm starting to use a Vim-based editor to do that. It's actually an

editor called Moe that is written in the Nim programming language that I had an interest, and it has some cool feature-complete stuff and tabs, and it works slightly different than the Vim. It might be closer to NeoVim, which I haven't explored in depth. But that's not quite where I want to be, and I need to organize more of my stuff. And so it's this, this clash of how much time do I spend organizing and how much time do I spend on the pile of work that's waiting to get done. And so sometimes it's like, just like do a sprint of, okay, I'm going to work on this project and knock it down and get it done. So that way it'll make my work better and easier to do. So most of its organization, um, in some of its infrastructure, like I need to set up a backup server. So I use backup C and I've got an old one that's working, but I want to split that on a different service.

And I want to use Alpine to do it. I just haven't done it yet. So I'm going to set up my backup PC server. I want to move my CloneZilla infrastructure to its own machine and then set it up with NFS because that way it might transfer faster than using SSH because I don't have the processor overhead to do the encryption and that sort of thing. So that's on my to-do list to do is get these separate machines set up where it's like this machine does this and this machine does that. And most people are like, oh, why don't you do virtualization or Docker and that sort of thing? And I've got that right now on one Dell PowerEdge server. But the problem is, is I don't have spare parts for that. Right. So when you use this higher end server hardware and that sort of thing, yeah,

it's great and it works well and you can do this virtualization and Docker and all of that kind of stuff. But from a resiliency standpoint, and I don't have a lack of computers, I probably have well over 100 computers, right? You know, desktop computers, older ones. So I would rather set up separate services where each thing does the thing that I want. And then if for some reason that dies or has a problem or an issue, well then it only affects that one service. And I'll probably have spare parts for it where the Dell power edge, I don't have spare parts for that. Yeah.

I think that that's probably part of the reason why companies like Google like to run a lot of just generic PCs to do a lot of their server stuff because it's, if one dies well whatever it I can fix it or chuck it get another one exactly and so I've kind of embraced that mentality and then moving towards that but not fully implemented so that's one of the big things is is getting my local services the things that I use on a day-to-day basis. I use NextCloud as well.

I found that I more use it just for the calendar feature. So using the whole NextCloud is kind of overkill, and I could probably move that stuff off into separate things as well. And since I've been getting interested in Lisp, the programming language, Emacs comes along with that. Vi versus Emacs. And I've always been sort of like the casual user of Vi or Vim. And Emacs has always been this kind of like scary thing, like maybe I'll look at that in the future. and i'm not

sure if i'm gonna fully embrace that or not but i've certainly done some research and do like well yeah i could do my to-do lists and calendaring and all my document stuff and all that sort of thing in emacs but i'm not sure if i'll go down that road or not but i'll certainly research it more yeah i've considered trying out emacs as well, but as with a lot of other things, it's a very big project and I don't actually have any Lisp experience. So I would have to learn that along the way as well. But for my calendaring right now, I'm just doing stuff in Thunderbird because I check my emails in Thunderbird. So I might as well do my calendar there as well. That works. I was looking for some different email solutions as well. It just kind of,

it kind of is a reaction to some of the stuff recently with Mozilla and, uh, Thunderbird is such a great program though. And I've been using it for like 15 years. Um, so there's that resistance to change, uh, that's there and it does work well. There's some things that I want to, um, uh, experiments with, but they would also require a separate server for me to do. does work well there's some things that i want to um uh experiment with but they would also require a separate server for me to do so there's one called sift i think it's spelled c y p h t or something like that um sift um and that looks really nice and it has a web interface and that would do um rss feeds and then it would would integrate all the email stuff into a web-based interface that I would host myself. It's kind of like an IMAP client. And I really like that idea. But again,

taking the time to set up that server, I probably will in the future. I think that's a really good one. So that's another one on my kind of setting up my workspace um list is is um that a replacement for thunderbird but right now i'm using thunderbird too and but i use uh yeah i mean i suppose i could just use the calendaring and thunderbird yeah do you need to sorry do you sync it between more than one computer or just i don't know i just use on one yeah that's what i was gonna say that that can you do that i i don't know if i think you can i think it's essentially just you know there's ways that you can do it either the manual way of just you know finding where it writes that data yeah of course computers i think it's just a basic ical format so you could easily do that um and i think there's a plugin that you can get for Thunderbird that does it too.

Probably. There's a plugin for everything in Thunderbird. Yeah. But I've just been using Nextcloud because we've been using that for a while for my family stuff. And I started using Calendar recently. I'm like, this actually works pretty well. I'll keep on using it. But I'll be looking for other options too.

Yeah, that's fair. be looking for other options too. Yeah that's fair. So did you ever get a Ryzen CPU thing fixed? No, no I didn't. My problem was that I've got, there was a little bent pin I didn't realize, and it might have bent a little too much, so that was also a problem um but there was also a little there's some um they all basically got onto the underside of the cpu so it was yeah that was that was a really dumb experience i i don't know what i was doing there killed a 900 cpu yeah and from a hardware you still have it or no? I do, yeah. Okay. Maybe one of your Australian viewers would want to buy it off you on the chance that they could revive it.

I've considered selling it, but also I just want to... Maybe I'll keep it as a memento and stick it on my wall or something. Yes. This is how you don't... Don't do this to a $900 CPU. Yeah.

Well, my channel, uh, um, logo is, is a CPU with a Sharpie written on it. Um, and I keep that one. It's kind of like a memento,

right? So yours would just be a more expensive one. Yeah. That, Oh Lord. I, if anyone building a computer, um, know what you're doing. I know how to build a computer. Know what you're doing.

I know how to build a computer. I've done it before. It'd be in a couple of years, though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just recently got into building more Ryzen stuff. And even though I do this for a living, I still make some mistakes.

And so the recent one, I've got this just weird issue where everything works perfectly. Ryzen-based board, I've done this build with this motherboard two other times before. I like it. It works. Weird issue where Windows just hangs and won't shut down fast. Not to be a major problem, right? It's just like when you click the shortcut key to shut down Windows, you know, Windows X, you or you click on the cart and press shutdown. It just sits there and does nothing for quite a while and then eventually will shut down.

But takes minutes to do so. I have no idea why. So I've done a fresh install of Windows. I think it's something to do with the Ryzen board or CPU. I've done a fresh install of Windows. I think it's something to do with the Ryzen board or CPU. I've ordered, essentially, I'm ordering replacement parts to figure it out and just swap things out piece by piece. So having issues with new hardware, I think that's something that a lot of people have. The frustrating thing about new hardware is it's expensive when you make a mistake, where with the RetroCore 2 Duo hardware that I like and having fun with, it's like, you make a mistake where with the retro core 2 duo hardware that i like and

having fun with it's like oh no problem i've got plenty of those to spare i can get easier cheap you know yeah the ryzen stuff is still not cheap um also don't make the mistake i did which is buy an intel board when you bought a ryzen cpu because i did that i bought a board at like 1am don't don't buy pc hardware at 1am because you won't look at the product number properly. Yeah, so you bought... Essentially, you were looking at that board at the AMD version, but then you accidentally

switched to the... They were identical boards, except they had a... The pin name was slightly different. It was like the LGA and then whatever that MD one is called. And I accidentally bought the LGA version because I'm an idiot. Um, yeah. Oh, okay. Well that one you'd be able to sell or do you still have that one? Uh, no, that one I sold. Okay, good. Yeah. It was, it was literally new in box. Um, yeah. Excellent. So yeah, no, I mean, I enjoy building hardware

too, but occasionally I w I would say that the newer stuff is actually frustrating and not as fun to work on. And from like just having fun with computers, which is essentially what we do, really, you know, like, hey, let's explore the thing with Linux or let's, you know, find this new package or what can we do with this tiling window manager? What's this new software thing on Linux that we haven't done before? That having fun with computers? For me is a lot less stressful and much more fun on older hardware

Because I don't have to worry about bending the pins like I pulled that horizon CPU out So I actually have it on the back counter right behind me. Um, yes, a guy was building his PC locally and He needed an older rise in CPU to flash the BIOS so that his new Ryzen CPU would work. And I pulled an older Ryzen CPU out of one of the computers that I got in recycling and it was compatible with his board. And so I just loaned it to him and said, yo, yeah, hey, see if it works through the firmware upgrade. Well, I saved him $150 because if he would have had to buy a CPUpu to do it himself it'd be you know 150 i mean that's a lot of money for that mistake of not knowing that you needed to

do a firmware update on your motherboard to even get your cpu that you bought to work yeah i i don't really like that that's one thing i don't really like about the way the cpu um and motherboard versions are being done right now where you have i think the amd cpus work across like three or so generations right now but the oldest generation it's just like they might maybe possibly work possibly but it depends on the board depends if they decide to support it it might need a firmware upgrade you You don't really know though. Unless you've done specific research on that exact model number and your exact CPU,

it's not always clear whether it's going to work unless you're buying the same generation motherboard as the CPU. Right, which can be frustrating. And so, yeah, I mean, as far as new new hardware I would go Ryzen all the way that's my recommendation I think if you're buying anything even even used hardware within the last couple years go with Ryzen I've had a great experience with it for the most part and it seems to be a lot more pleasant to work with. And the performance for doing useful things, Ryzen seems to be great for that. Especially the video stuff and multitasking and having lots of things running stuff is more fun for me to work with.

So it's kind of that weird thing where like, hey, if you're using older computers, Intel's the way to go. If you're getting something newer, AMD is the way to go. I would absolutely love to just have a secondary system, then use my main system just to capture it.

But I don't exactly have room here because my bed is like literally touching the back of my chair so oh i just got a um you had mentioned capture cards it was literally on the box here and i'll pull it out because it's just something i got cheap oh you probably won't show up in the video very well now but it's just something yeah it's this HDMI thing like this oh it's another generic HDMI thing I love it yeah and so I think it works like a webcam so Linux doesn't actually see it as like an import card it like sees it as a webcam yeah and then but what I'm hoping to do, um, if it even has a brand name, it's just whatever it says in the box,

I'll probably be able to find it. Well, the one that I liked, the reason I liked this one is it had the HDMI in and out. There we go. Yes. Yeah. That might work.

HDMI in and out. So, and then it plugs in with USB. Um. And so I haven't tried it yet, but I think what I'll be able to do is even on quite old computers, I'll be able to, you know, have like digital output or add a video card. And then I'll be able to, you know, work on, you know, computers up to 15 years old and do hardware stuff and then pull that in and record that on my other workstation um and i think for older hardware that really makes a lot of sense because you don't want the overhead of recording

the screen and doing all the video stuff on that older hardware you know and some of the stuff it could do it but yeah it'd be nice to see the native performance and do the things that i'm wanting to do without having the video overhead yeah Yeah, I would, I would like to do, I actually might have to get one of these because my capture card is, do I have a second one sitting around here? I think I do. I'm going to find it. Um, I can't unplug my main one because my camera's plugged into it. Uh, let's see. And I can bring my mic with me. Um,

do I have one sitting around here? I should is it inside of my drawer? calm down because I am just running cables stuck around me I'm just running one of these yeah focus on it no not on my fingers right right right i can sort of see the text it's essentially just a usb hdmi capture but it's only got one input right yeah yeah yeah this camera is just not having it's just not going well for me today what is it uh yeah why is it focusing on my fingertips

there we go you can kind of read it whatever i'm not i'm done with that so the thing about this is then i can loop back and it has no name. There's no... No, I did find it. On eBay, it is HDMI 4K 1080p video capture card screen record USB 3.0 video audio loop out. Yep. Search for that and you'll find it. And this one has the two HDMI things so that way I can have my regular retro screen and be imported into the thing. So, yeah, when I get time, I look forward to doing some stuff with actually on the hardware instead of a virtual machine. Yeah, right now, I've actually, I haven't got one of those, but the way I'm capturing my PS4 is actually doing something similar.

So, I've got a HDMI splitter I got from eBay. Basically, it's a one hdmi in two hdmi out basically perfect the only problem with it is it's mono audio um which is a bit of a problem because then you don't have any positional sound but it's fine for doing stream captures yeah yeah oh yeah i suppose on a game yeah you would not be the full experience yeah yeah with single channel sound got it um for me that wouldn't matter and i haven't even looked and this thing says 4k on it but like we had talked about before i don't care about the 4k i'm just gonna do 1080p anyway i wonder if it works that 4k though that's the question

10 a b anyway i wonder if it works that 4k though that's the question i have no idea um and like i said i think it just emulates a webcam in linux and that's how it works in linux so that's gonna yeah concept so 4k webcam generally what those things do is they will be basically treated like a regular UVC camera. So anything, like any USB capture camera, basically. That's the way my actual camera is being treated right now. So when this thing plugs in, basically it shows... Now it works. Yeah, there you go. Basically what happens is it just shows up as,

I think, like HDMI capture or something. I just select that and then it just shows up as i think like hdmi capture or something i just select that and then it just works it just thinks it's a webcam yeah so i'm hoping it'll be pretty painless because i'm looking forward to doing more stuff on actual hardware and like you said you i think we talked about this because we was like it'd be nice to have a separate pc to do this and that and that's the thing and yeah i absolutely agree um and for your setup i'm not sure you know it depends on what projects you do of course but you know that that certainly could be you know you could look at older hardware that's free or almost free um depending on what projects you're doing well i would love to do some, like some maybe OpenBSD stuff or maybe like Artix, anything of that,

and actually try it on hardware rather than doing it in a VM. Yeah, I'd certainly be interested in that. And I plan to eventually get around to OpenBSD. So if you get to it before me, then I can watch your videos about it. Yeah, maybe one day at some point no no guarantees i've said i'm going to do openbsd stuff for a while same with things like nixos and just

haven't got around to it yeah it's the same with me i mean a year ago i said i was going to do a series on alpine linux which i'm still going to, but I haven't done very much on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the, it's the eternal problem. You have so many things you want to do and you cannot justify spending time on things that when you actually, when you have other things, you know, you should be doing.

So like, oh, I should, maybe I should be working on my business, but I've got these Linux things I want to try out as well. Yeah. Now you do programming stuff as well, right? You do. I do program, not as a job though. Okay. Okay. Well, I'm a wannabe programmer.

So. I studied four years at university to not program. Okay. Okay. Well, yeah, I did four years at a university to not program. Okay. Okay. Well, yeah, I did four years of English literature. So yes,

we both have useful degrees. In my defense, I will say that I use the language analysis and communication skills every day. Have I gotten that without spending that much money at private university? Probably yes. Well, okay. Yeah. To be fair, I may not be a developer right now, but I do use my, uh, my skills to think like developer.

Did I need to pay $30,000 to do that? Not really. No. Right. Yeah. Agreed. So that's the conversation we're having about our kids is like hey do we want to do the college prep and so we talk about that a lot and uh for for me i'm very entrepreneurial and i'm like i'll just work with them to set up a business and then they'll be good to go you're like they can four years of college and be right into a field so i mean we'll keep on exploring that but that's one of the cool things about technology and especially programming

since you can do it remotely now um is that you know it does open up a lot of opportunities i think the tough thing is finding a niche or a specialty that would allow you to be a consultant or a business owner um because yeah i'm not huge in favor of working like the regular kind of programming job though you don't want to be a number you don't just want to be a number on a payroll no well in part of it is like some of the culture that goes along with the deadlines. You have all these strict deadlines and you're always stressed to work on this thing. But sometimes for it's a project that, you know, will actually never see the light of day of getting published or that isn't really important at all. Yeah. So there's that kind of. You've got to work really hard on it, but is it really the thing that

you should be working hard on? Well, because it's your job, yes. But that's kind of the frustration that I see a lot of other programmers dealing with is that kind of frustration. And for me, I'm happy fixing computers and messing around with my retro stuff. So I think I'll keep on doing that and just explore programming as something for fun that eventually I might make money on with no specific plans on how to do that for right now. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, well, I do have that degree that I can go and actually do development work if I want to. I've done a dev job in the past. I think I did it for like six or so months or so.

And yeah, I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. But I was also basically the only dev on the team. So I sort of had a lot of creative control. I don't know how it would be actually doing development at a regular company. And right now I'm sort of focusing on doing this this youtube stuff and this odyssey stuff and i'm enjoying it i'm not making a i'm not making tons of money from it

but i'm making enough and that's that's fine with me yeah no i think it's something to explore and and it's it's one of those things to really i think when you get a sense of accomplishment, essentially when you publish a video, you got something done and it's like, you've done that, you've published it. And then you've also, it's cumulative. So you've built up over time and each of those steps along the way matters and contributes to the larger thing of what you're trying to do. And I see that as very rewarding and fulfilling. So yeah, keep on doing it, man. Thank you. I have kind of a different idea for monetization

that I eventually want to do is essentially, I like selling things. I enjoy the sales process of helping somebody find what works for them or what they might want to use. And so I enjoy that sales discovery process with people. So instead of doing ads, because right now I'm just publishing to Odyssey Library and not publishing to YouTube. So instead of doing ad revenue or or, or Patreon, or some of those other things, all legitimate, fine things, I think what I want to do is build up an audience doing the things that I'm interested in doing, and then selling physical things that go along

with that. And that'll probably be retro computers, cpus ram motherboards retro stuff uh and then eventually just selling that it's like hey if you like what i do buy some of what i've got and um i i have a guess that that will work it's just it's you've got to do it for so long and experiment to see if it actually will yeah i would love to do something physical as well right now. I've had some people be like, Hey, sell some shirts, sell this, sell that. I was like, will anyone buy them though? That's, that's the, the big question. Like I can do all this set up, but will anyone actually buy them? And I don't know. I think,

I think for bigger brands like a, uh, so the YouTube channel, like Linus tech tips. Yeah. Uh, I, I laugh every time he does his shameless promotions for like his water bottles and t-shirts and stuff like that. And it works. I mean, like he does, obviously he does sell them. Otherwise he wouldn't do that. Um, but, uh that but uh i i i can agree with you i think would anybody buy my t-shirt yeah maybe a couple people but yeah you're right was it worth the setup i mean maybe if you have a t-shirt that you plan on selling for the next 10 years that has some value then cool maybe but if it's something that's more on trend i could see spending a lot of time doing that setup and then selling five shirts and

the rest not yeah they're not working i feel like someone at the size of like distro tube could probably do it but as i am right now i don't really think that makes any sense to go and do maybe in a year or two, maybe it will. But right now I think it's something, maybe I can start looking at designs, but actually setting something up at this point, I think is probably going to be a waste of effort at this point.

Yeah. I, I, I agree. I'd wait on that. Um, and I think the Patreon or subscriber model works really well because essentially if people like what you do

in chipping in a small amount every month or tipping or that sort of, I like the tips model as well, but the subscription model works well. The tips model works well because maybe somebody who's not a regular follower, but they just really got a lot out of one of your videos and they say, that was really helpful. Thank you, man. Here's 10 bucks. Well, if that happens every once in a while, that's just like this extra bonus that's really nice. And then the subscription model ends up being like the staying power where you kind of say, well, I know I have this many subscribers and this many people who are in that pay tier of subscribers, and that will work too. Cause I know that I can see how I can build up my business to

do that. Um, so I see both of those as very valid ways to do it. Um, but I don't think I don't have to do that because I've got plenty of other work that I'm doing. So I think I'll just not do those and explore something different as a way to monetize. That's entirely fair. But with the tip model, I definitely like the way that Odyssey is doing it compared to YouTube, where YouTube will take like a 50% cut in some cases, which is just like, yeah, if you get,

if you have, there's a thing called, um, uh, cheer on YouTube. Basically it's like a, you can tip a video. Uh,

yeah, it's, it's, I think it's about 50% cut they take, which is ridiculous. I could see them doing that. I didn't know it was that bad. 50% basically for a bank transfer,

which is that's not how that fee structure should be right and of course that's one of the advantages of crypto where you can do these smaller micro transactions um i read a book by scott mcleod it was in the kind of the understanding comics series series years ago. If you're a comics guy, I know you like some of the manga, Japanese art type of stuff. I've never read a comic book, though. OK, OK. I used to be into comics a little bit when I was younger. But one of the books that I loved was Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. And then he had some follow-up ones where he talked about kind of like

the payment structure for artists. And this was, I think in the 90s, maybe 2000 era, but it was 20 some years ago. And he talks about micropayments on the internet. And this was very much pre-crypto. But essentially now with library we have that i mean it's already something that we're we're doing and using so it's kind of neat to see that

idea presented in the book and we're living in that reality now yeah have you seen how much the platform's been growing recently because i think yeah it was tim paul just recently got to 100k subs just the other day yeah i mean that's amazing so he's the other first channel to actually the first actual channel so obviously like the library channel and library cast had more than 100k but tim is the first one to like the first actual creator to hit 100k subs which is absolutely massive my views have been going up and you know i don't publish very often but i see in its views from non-logged in people so you don't get the auto tip thing um but my views on the videos that i've done recently have gone way up higher than I thought they would be.

Still tiny, but yeah, I agree. And so I think that a lot of people are maybe browsing to the website and seeing, hey, what's here? And so there must be a whole lot more people doing that. Just kind of like opening up the web browser, typing in odyssey.com or library.tv and then exploring it without necessarily being logged in well i i think there's definitely something to be said about that because i uh kind of a little flex i have the most popular video uh on on odyssey released on youtube um if you search for odyssey

i believe my video is okay it's second now, but it has the most views. And that video has been getting more and more views every single day, like the amount of views as well. And it's just going up and up and up. And yeah, I think there's definitely a case for that. A lot of people are definitely trying out something new because YouTube has just been doing a lot of things that have a lot of users just don't like.

Well, I appreciate you doing that video because essentially that means you're bringing more people in to that audience chip. And then all of us who are publishing there get seen more. I think one of the concerns I see with the people who are library only publishers is you only get people who are interested in library i get the idea of like publishing on library having good exclusive content there but i think it makes more sense to exist on both platforms and then release exclusives there to bring people over for that content i get if you

like starting out that's different you don't really have a established viewer base on another platform. But if you do, I think it makes more sense to try to bring that user base over to somewhere new. I agree. And I think I watched your video

where you talked about where you publish on multiple platforms and why. And I totally agree with that. And I eventually want to start publishing on more platforms, but probably not eventually want to start publishing on more platforms but probably not like uh probably not youtube i was publishing on youtube and i was like uh i just don't want to bother with it and uh some of the political stuff or the sensory thing i was like i'm small enough where i don't have much of an audience either way

though if you kind of another strange thing if you search for alpine linux um one of my videos comes up like first or second uh on youtube so i have like thousands and thousands of views on that but uh um it's i haven't checked it recently so it's probably the same i'm gonna see yep yeah full video yeah so if you search for Alpine Linux I'm one of the top videos I think for a while it was like the first video if you search for Alpine Linux and so I got thousands and thousands of views on that and so and then since I hit the links to library and that sort of thing that might have made a difference so I mean I'd consider publishing on YouTube again especially if I had like maybe had already done a series and then just maybe republish

it to YouTube after I published it to Library. And I also want to publish on more than one platform but I haven't decided what other platform besides Library that would be. Yeah, yeah. Right now I'm

also on the developers of Uchurion contacted me not too long ago. They're a very small platform. I think I started last year, actually. Their entire thing is based around the subscription model, basically just giving the creator a... You can still watch the content for free, but their subscription model is...

The creator gets a decent cut of it it's not like we take 30 i think they take basically platform fees so enough to just keep the platform operating yeah that's a neat model i'd be interested in you know learning more about that so that's good and obviously on uh bit shoot as well but bit shoot still stuck with like 480p video and in the year like like why you why 480p video like really in search doesn't work very well no it doesn't it's it's basically a simple regex search it's hard to find stuff and it's not a great video platform it really needs a lot of work plus it looks like um whoever did the css has just never done css for a website before i think bit shoot works if you want to see what people are talking about today yes right yes you're you're a news junkie and you like what did so-and-so say about politics or news or

that sort of thing today yes you can go to bit shoot and watch it and it'll work fine for you that way but if you want to search for a particular topic or an older video it's really hard to do on bit shoot yeah that's very true odyssey has better at it. It's still pretty broken in some cases. Like when I try to search for your channel, unless I specifically write out the name exactly the way it's written, it doesn't come up. That's true. That's true.

But searching for topics is pretty decent. But yeah, if you want to find somebody in particular, yeah, it doesn't work for general search very well. I think, I don don't know maybe it's just the fact that you have a dot in your name yeah because mine comes up just fine and most others come up fine but yours is one of the few that i've seen as a bit of a problem and i don't know if i can change that after the fact i suppose i could look into that but i honestly they it's just a problem that odyssey needs to address at some point but they are working on some pretty cool stuff

recently like live streaming which is being tested and okay uh yeah they did a test not too long ago and actually had that working which is awesome it's still very much in like a closed beta but at some point they'll be live streaming publicly on odyssey um and also uh video transcoding so having videos that can play back at multiple resolutions right which is really big as well on one of my so right now they have the option to what is it like kind of optimize where you have fm mpeg installed on your machine and then it does that well on the most recent video that i tried it with it like garbled the audio it was like off sync like it wasn't it wasn't the audio didn't match up for the video but it was really weird it only happened for like maybe the first 10-15 seconds and then it like somehow syncs back up again for the rest of the video so I tried

re-uploading the video I'm not sure if that fixed the issue or not but then I left it unchecked like don't optimize because yeah I optimize stuff before I upload when I like for my podcast I manually upload it to um odyssey uh with that I just chuck it in handbrake and I've got a setup for handbrake that just does it exactly the way I want it that's cool yeah another great linux application in one second my dog's barking she's barking at nothing because that's what dogs do my family wants to get a dog i'm resisting even though i like animals and dogs like me and we have no excuse now because i live out in the country um i'm resisting for a while longer i won't be able to hold out forever because there's no good reason not to have a dog

and my family would like one so we'll get one eventually one day yes when you can eventually when you eventually give up hope of not having a dog so they're a lot of work but my kids are old enough and my wife has promised that she'll take care of it and i won't have to do hardly anything we'll see how that goes we'll see how that goes yeah that. That's a good point. Uh, well, we are just past two hours and 15 minutes now. I think this is as good a time as any to,

to wrap up the podcast. So towards the end, usually what I do is, uh, give some random channel a shout out. Is there anyone out there that you've been watching or you think deserves a bit of attention? Oh, and I always put people on the spot.

Yeah. You put me on the spot. Yeah, you put me on the spot. There are some great things that I've been watching. I guess things that lots of people other know about that I just kind of found is that the Alpha Nerd is on Library and he publishes something something different on YouTube? I forget who that is. I've been watching a few as his videos and like in the comments. Sorry Yeah, I think it's somebody who you you you know, you think you've mentioned him as well Babe what was the channel, sorry?

AlphaNerd. Oh, AlphaNerd. Okay, yeah. The name? Oh. Oh, it's Mental Outlaw. Yeah, that's who it is. And I haven't watched it.

I think you followed him for quite a while. Yeah, that's who it is. And I haven't watched it. I think you followed him for quite a while. And I just found it on Library because there was a few of the video topics that I was interested in. And so I clicked subscribe and I've watched a few of those.

But I don't know that channel very well, but I think he's already super popular. Oh yeah, no, he's got a pretty big channel over on YouTube. I think it's like, it's not nowhere near as big as like DT, but still one of the bigger Linux channels. Yeah. And there are definitely some other smaller things,

but it's more of kind of a topic interest that I've seen. I would say the shout out is probably DT's Mastodon instance. That's fair. That's been a lot of fun. So it's not a video channel, but if you haven't got on Mastodon before, I would recommend signing up either at the Linux Rocks one where Brody is on

or the DT one, it's called distrotoot.com. And that has been a lot of fun. So not video content, but there's some cool people there who are doing interesting things. And if you also have questions, I've seen that where, hey, I'm wondering about this, or I can't get this to work, or I'm curious about this. I see people responding and giving helpful information. And that's really useful um so i think my shout out would be to um if you're not on mastodon or the fediverse already um to join

uh either dt's instance or the one that you're on yep yeah i can agree that those are both really good instances the only the only problem with uh dt's is a couple of the bigger instances have decided that they don't like a DT and have blocked him. Right. So I don't know what I'm missing. Not much. Boring people who don't like fun. So be aware of. Yeah.

It's a problem you get with some instances, but it's not a major deal. As for me, I'm going to say, if you like doing video editing, doing stuff with FOSS tools, or working with things like Blender and stuff, there is a channel out there called Tux Designer. They're just on YouTube right now. But they've done tutorials for things like Blender, for Shotcut, for Olive, for Kdenlive, for a bunch of other free and open source video editors as well. So if you want to know how to do like any sort of video editing with tools like that, this is a really good channel that's worth

checking out. They only have 26,000 subs, so not a massive channel, and I've learned a lot of stuff from these guys as well. Also, I've done stuff on GIMP as well, apparently. I've learned a lot of stuff from these guys, and I absolutely recommend checking them out. Excellent. And will there be a link in the description

or something like that for the meeting? If I remember to put them there. I usually forget to put those links. I'll put your links there. Your links will definitely be there. These meeting. If I remember to put them there. I usually forget to put those links. I'll put your links there. Your links will definitely be there. These ones, if I remember. Well, you asked for a shout out about a channel. And when you said that, now I do think of a channel.

TJ Free. So the letter T, the letter J in Free. And he does a lot of just really simple, fun stuff. Like one of his showing what you can do with open source and free software yeah and like one of the recent videos he doesn't even commentate that at all he's just like uh does some stuff in some graphics programs it just shows you the screencast of it with some music and I actually think it's really helpful because it just gives this very short introduction to people like oh you can do

that i didn't know you could do that i want to do that so i think tj free is a great channel um and he does a lot of stuff with free software awesome yeah i haven't actually heard of this channel but the name did ring a bell so yeah maybe i've seen something from him. I'm not too sure. Anyway, where can people find you? On library, retroedge.tech. But as we discussed, that's kind of hard to find. My website is retroedge.tech. And I have RSS there and some blog posts that are older.

But plan on posting more of my links to videos and more updated topics there as well so retroedge.tech website. Awesome there'll be links to all of those in the description as well if people forgot how to type I guess. So before we go, actually do you have anything else you want to say before i do my bit of outro um it's been fun uh this is the first kind of podcast uh like this that i've been a guest on i think i did some podcast stuff years ago but uh that was audio only so it's been it's been pretty cool hanging out with you and talking about tech stuff. Awesome. Yeah.

I had a lot of fun as well. And you're more than welcome to come back on if you ever want to. Yeah. Later on. We'll definitely let's do that. Maybe on specific projects or something. If you're curious about some of the stuff that I end up doing, that'd be great.

I'd enjoy that. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. Before we go, then I'd like to thank my supporters, so a special thank you to Chris, Joachim, Donald, Michael Andrew, Nathan, David, Ron, Will, Brennan, Chico, Bento

Jamie, Joseph, Mitchell, Piddity, Stephen, Tony, Tushar and all of my $2 supporters If you are listening to the audio version the video version is available on Odyssey, Library and YouTube as well, and if you're watching the video version, the audio version is available basically anywhere. If you can type tech over T into a search engine,

you will probably find it. Yeah. I don't know who's going to be the guest next week. I'll work it out before then, I guess. Yeah. I'll let you do the outro. What do you want to say? It's been great talking tech. We'll see you next time. Cool. See you do the outro. What do you want to say? It's been great talking, Zach.

We'll see you next time. Cool. See you guys next time.