How y'all doing everybody? Happy Friday and welcome to the WAN Show. We've got a fantastic show lined up for you guys today.
See, I told you guys I was gonna do it. Lots of great topics, more trouble for Intel Arc as board partners reportedly bail on the project.
That's a little awkward. In other news, Amazon apparently wants to buy iRobot for 1.7 billion.
Not the movie. We're talking about robot vacuum cleaners.
They needed some inspiration. They wanted to buy the movie.
I actually have a lot to say about Amazon buying iRobot. What else we got?
We have NCX Tales from Behind the Counter, which I'm gonna throw one in for, which is not from when I worked at NCX.
But I'm gonna throw a Behind the Counter tale into the pile.
I'm gonna put this in. Luke's cryptic story that Linus doesn't know.
I think. I might have told you at some point. We've had a lot of conversations.
Also, other stuff.
Europe is mad at me.
Yeah.
We'll talk about why.
Sup, Europe? How you doing?
It's gonna be a good show.
The video is brought to you by Shortform.
I think that was Squarespace. It went by pretty quick. And MSI.
Alright, why don't we jump right into our first topic for the day. More trouble for Intel Arc.
It feels like just a few short weeks ago that we had representatives from Intel here on the show telling us that things are going swimmingly for Arc and we should be expecting a launch imminently.
Wait, that is exactly what happened.
Yeah.
That exact thing I just said.
It's literally a few short weeks ago.
Yep.
Like that was a thing.
Yep.
Okay, cool.
Well, according to Igor's lab, as if all the other rumors of Intel's GPU misadventures haven't been bad enough for Team Blue, it now seems, according to rumors allegedly, that third parties are abandoning Arc.
Igor says there are lots of unsold but already produced graphics cards sitting in inventory, likely thanks to the fall of cryptocurrency values and the scramble to keep production high to meet that prior demand.
That is a bad time.
Yeah.
Anthony writes, which as Linus should know, is a pretty bad time when it comes to tying up your capital.
As a result, Intel has been focusing first on OEM partners, but they face a chicken and egg scenario.
In order for system integrators and OEM customers to place orders, there must first be a demand for the products to begin with.
But since Arc is an unknown quantity, I mean, all we've seen is the small demos that Intel has done, since it's unproven, there is apparently little to no interest from prominent European distributors and dealers.
And this was the case long before A380 benchmarks reared their ugly head.
There's another angle.
That was still a weird way to launch it, considering it's basically always been Halo product and then dropping down from there.
And they did like the opposite.
AMD pulled it the other way once when they launched, I think it was Polaris, I want to say.
Okay.
Mind you, I don't think they had a high end product for that generation, like at all. So maybe they were just pitching it as no, no, they launched because they did 474.
No, they launched the whole stack.
They just didn't have a high end product.
I remember now.
No, no, never mind.
Yep, you're right.
Yeah, it's weird.
So I think that that set people off on a weird foot as well.
You generally try to put your your best foot forward when it comes to launching a generation of products.
Now, there's another angle here. Intel allegedly didn't want to give price guarantees.
And the conditions around RME returns were worse than their competitors, which is a tough pill to swallow for system integrators whose margins, at least on desktop computers, are often low.
You know what I want to know?
I want to know where these RME conditions for returns are coming from, because back at NCIX, we couldn't return jack **** when we bought something it was ours.
How did we get hosed so hard? Is it because we were Canadian?
That sucks.
It's a pretty good joke.
Okay, to be clear, we did occasionally get stock rotation and price protection.
But once once you committed to having something, you pretty much you pretty much had it.
If I was Intel, though, I would recognize that I'm going to have to offer price protection of some sort for these ARK GPUs.
Because if I was a reseller, I mean, I remember going through this back when we did the original WAN hoodie and our strategy for international sales was working through resellers.
And we basically had to bend over in order to get the thing in stock in the store because they were sitting there going, well, if we don't sell it, then we want this to be entirely your problem.
We want you to cover shipping back to you take back the entire thing for the entire the entire value.
And because we were just, you know, small and had absolutely no leverage whatsoever, we pretty much had to take whatever offer was given to us.
So hilariously, we had, I think, three partners, I want to say it was either two or three.
I can't remember.
It's been a long time.
I think we had three partners, though, and the only one that didn't manage to sell through and that we did end up taking inventory back from was NCIX.
Yeah, I know, right?
They weren't even the ones that gave me a really hard time about terms.
I just told them, like, just look, look, just don't worry.
We'll get it taken care of.
And then they just, like, didn't sell it.
I mean, that's NCIX, right?
And just, yeah, if your product sells itself, then great, you'll be fine.
And if it doesn't, if they have to actually do any work, then it could be a challenge.
The site was so bad.
It was atrocious.
Yeah.
Anyway, without interest from commercial customers, then board partners are kind of left out in the cold.
I mean, man, if you guys have been following along with the screwdriver and the backpack saga, I mean, these are relatively uncomplicated products compared to.
Well, first, you've got this highly complex integrated circuit, right?
You've got you've got this ASIC, right?
Then you've got the highly complex board designs, the development that goes on around those, the mass production that has to happen in order to reach the kind of scale that it even makes any sense economically to produce these things.
Then there's the distribution.
You've got to kind of you've got to kind of bet, move all your pieces into play globally.
You've got to bet on where people are going to buy these things and which ones they're going to buy and what volumes.
Like it's so it's so complicated and all of this has to take place in the in the years and then months and then weeks leading up to actually pressing go.
This is available and it's all got to be basically perfect or you end up looking like an amateur, right?
Because you're going up against AMD and Nvidia who've been doing this for decades.
Yeah.
So without interest from commercial customers, board partners are left out in the cold and one has allegedly halted production altogether.
And this is due to quality concerns.
Whether these rumors are true or not, they are emblematic of the challenges faced by anyone attempting to enter the GPU market in this day and age.
Without a clear value proposition or brand recognition, SIs are going to have a tough time accepting it.
Without SIs accepting it, board partners are less likely to hop on board and without performance leadership or aggressive back end agreements on pricing, especially price protection.
Not to mention RMA support.
Neither situation is likely to change.
So the cycle continues until either Intel blinks or the proverbial plug gets pulled.
Now we do have some discussion questions here and I don't like this first one.
Is ARK going to be another Larrabee?
I don't I don't think that's a realistic outcome at this point.
Like I think I do think Intel is a smart enough company to not go completely sunk cost fallacy.
Well, we've already put billions in. What's another few billion?
But it is very clear from a strategic standpoint that having a GPU play is what the A players do today.
You must have in addition to your x86 compute product, you must have a GPU compute product.
And it's also clear from AMD and Nvidia strategy that in order to hit the kind of volumes that you need, you want a consumer product.
You don't just want it to be a data center compute product, which is ultimately where Larrabee ended up, if I recall correctly.
So I don't see it happening.
I think Intel has to go down this path, even if it's like beating their heads against a wall in order to get there, even if it takes another three years.
I think it's I think it sucks. I don't remember the exact problem.
There was there was some type of problem which is causing a lot of these performance issues.
We talked about it last week. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I think that's like really unfortunate,
especially considering that you would kind of hope that with the pedigree that they brought on board, that they would they would have been able to avoid something like that.
But it is extremely technical concepts, and it's not like they can exactly just copy paste what these guys have done in the past.
Yeah, I don't think like Roger Kaduri like just recreated.
Yeah, that would be a big problem. So you can't exactly do that. So you're going to run into some issues.
It's unfortunate, but I do agree with with Linus. I think they're going to try to make it work. I hope I hope they're going to try to make it work.
I hope you're right. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see.
There's another discussion question here, courtesy of Anthony.
Gamers probably share the concerns around pricing, RMA and driver support that system integrators do.
How will this impact the role of early adopters? I think early adopters are absolutely critical to Arc.
And, you know, from talking to Shrout and Tap about it, they seem to understand that they're going to have to be priced very aggressively to drive some of that early adoption.
But if they don't have the buy in from upper management, if they don't have, you know, tens, hundreds of millions,
a billion bucks to just kind of get some Arc GP freakin use out there into users hands,
they even really want to if it has a lot of issues with this generation. I think they produce them allegedly.
Yeah. Supposedly they just have wafers upon wafers upon wafers of our GP.
They're going to have to make them incredibly cheap if there is.
You don't just grind them up, make new GP use, although the biggest recycling effort ever.
Yeah, exactly. Don't bury it in the desert like the E.T. video game. Just grind them up and make new ones.
Yeah, I will see. There was a comment earlier about like no brand recognition.
I don't think that's fair at all because it's going to have Intel on it.
And people that are building computers know who Intel is. And Intel's onboard graphics, to their credit, have gotten a lot better in the last five years.
Continually. They've gotten continuously better ever since they introduced them back.
Well, I shouldn't say introduced them, but OK, sorry. Jaden just said something in full plane chat.
If they allow VGP, they'll move them. Yeah, there's there's absolutely 100 percent strategic levers they can pull.
And Epos Vox did a video recently talking about their AV one encoder.
I haven't watched the video yet. I do need to watch it, but I did at least make it to the headline.
Apparently, it's outstanding. Like it is it is a better video encoder.
So as long as OBS get support for Intel's AV one encoder, I could see a bunch of streamers just throwing it in in addition to their Nvidia GPU just so that they have AV one encoding.
That would actually be pretty cool because then you can lift a lot of the it hasn't really been worth it to have like a dedicated invent card.
But I mean, it could be if it's like actually really killer. Yeah, it's legitimately better. I mean, remember, too, we're talking about people that will build an entire separate machine so that they can use CPU encoding for the best possible quality.
If AV one meant you just don't have to do that, although there are other reasons to use a separate machine, like if your game crashes, it means your stream doesn't crash, et cetera, et cetera.
But if money is no object or if maybe it's the money is a partial object that that's here, if just adding one of these arc cards for one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty bucks, getting that AV one encoding means that your stream will just immediately look sharper, look better.
I could absolutely see people doing that.
Yeah, if they do, if that's genuinely really good and they have the GPU support, they'll move them 100 percent. They'll move them. There's a comment from from Anthony saying regarding brand recognition, it's more about the Intel HD graphics being poor performers and people generally seeing Intel graphics as low into bare bones.
That's fair, but I do also think that Intel is like a household name that people trust. And like maybe if you're if you're very technical and you've like messed around with Intel HD graphics a bunch and stuff like that, then you have that opinion.
But if you're just someone who like you'd like building your own computers, you build one every like three, four years and you've had Intel chips since you were fairly young, like I think it's going to hit for those people.
And then on the other end, like we've just been saying now, there might be specific scenarios where with the highly technical people, it just it slays.
And like, I don't know, I we tried to tell them here and I'm going to try to tell them again, you'll solve, in my opinion, you'll solve your problems if you enable VGPU.
One of the issues with that is it's going to be hard to take it back. Oh, yeah. With Battlemage or whatever the ones are.
Oh, it'd be really hard. Oh, yeah. So. You know, I think you shouldn't, to be fair, I think you should just send it out there and just leave it out there and just, you know, drop it on the table.
Be like, hey, we're actually doing it. We might have cards that have issues, but we have this enabled.
People are going to buy it. And if the competition doesn't answer to this, we'll just take our piece of the pie and run with it.
But I don't know. All right. Let's jump into a couple of merch messages very, very early on, because naturally the big news for us this week was we finally, finally launched the LTT backpack.
Thank you. Massive shout out to everyone who ordered one. It's hilarious.
Everyone who watched the video internally is like, hey, when are the, when are the staff ones going out? And I'm like, oh, not soon.
Okay. They're going to paying customers first, guys. There was people from FlowPlane that asked if we're getting like backpacks and screwdrivers.
And I was like, I seriously doubt it because I did the math and I was like, and then you sent that message and I was like, oh, okay.
Yeah, I guess so. We're going to, we're going to do it, but it's going to, it's going to take some time. It's going to take some time.
Stock needs to stabilize, stuff like that. Anyway, we can do a couple of merch messages now.
If you guys want to send in a merch message, anytime we're live, when you're checking out on lttstore.com, you can check that you want to send a merch message, enter your merch message.
It'll either pop up down here. It's our replacement for like super chats or, or bits on Twitch or anything like that.
Because this way, instead of just throwing money into a void, you can throw it into a void and the void will spit out a high quality t-shirt or backpack or,
or hoodie or whatever else it is that you happen to need. And it'll arrive at your door eventually, depending on, depending on where you are.
All right. Hit me, Bell.
From Jack, I've been following the backpack for a while and loved the unboxing on ShortCircuit.
Hey, thanks.
With the thought of other LTT products working with the backpack, do you expect to release products that directly work with the backpack, such as hooks or lockers or carabiners?
We had people ask about rain covers.
Okay. So I've, I've seen quite a few requests for a rain cover.
If we can find something that folds up compactly enough that it could fit in the hidden passport pocket,
I would love to have a rain cover that kind of sits in there and then you can pull it out in an emergency.
So you, so you swap the luggage strap for that is basically what you're saying?
Yeah, exactly. There wouldn't be a place for your luggage strap at that point.
Just store it somewhere.
It can't hold everything.
Yeah.
I'd absolutely love to do a rain cover. We are already working on some attachments for the front.
I think I just saw a secret thing.
Yeah. We are already working on some attachments for the front for things like, oh man, Matthew has this adorable little like wireless headphones holder that will clip on right here.
So it'll just sit right here so you can just tuck your wireless headphones in.
It's big enough for AirPods Pros in a case or like a large bulky one like the Sennheisers.
And this will probably be one of those things where like it fits best on this backpack.
Oh yeah.
But it'll work on anything that has like a.
We definitely want to keep our accessories generic in terms of their compatibility with other bags if we can.
The last thing you want to do is make something that then is married to.
OK, even if I think these things are going to last you 10 years, they're not invincible.
So if you'd be able to carry on some of the accessories to a future bag, then great.
Even if it's a future bag that we potentially made.
Yeah, whether it's us or whether it's someone else.
Or if you find a use for it that isn't even a bag.
So that's something we're working on. Another cool one is this.
We recognize that not everyone is necessarily going to prefer just that that that compartment of holding,
as I as I like to call it, the just uninterrupted, you know, place to stuff everything.
So this is an accessory that we are currently working on that's going to be called the tech pouch.
It's built to the same standard of quality as the backpack, which means, you know, we've got entirely unnecessary,
like reinforced stitching on the handle on the end, uses waterproof zippers, even though, like, come on, get real.
This has to be rain proof. But it does anyway. And then this is really cool.
So it opens up into like an accordion style thing that is just chock full of data.
Are you trying to do something here? Should I be switching to that camera? Is that shall be switching to the loop cam?
Yeah, here you go. So it's got like, you know, a little spot for pens.
You know, we only have one spot for a pen, like a native spot for a pen in the in the backpack as it is.
This is an this is an earlier version.
We actually already have a newer version than this one that has changed this to either two medium sized ones or one big and one small.
I can't remember, but I just found this three by small configuration was not that useful.
I need to take my you know what? No, it's fine. I'll just leave that in there for now. That is an old school flash drive.
Yeah, I know. Right. There's these are supposed to be knitted.
So when they're knitted, these are going to be stretchy. And then this is supposed to be elastic at the top.
So there's like a stretchy thing here. And then you can also undo the zipper here.
There's like a zipper thing. Basically, you can just kind of like cram it with whatever you want.
There's another thing of like so this would also be forget one side is going to be stretchy and one side's not.
Because when you fill up the stretchy side, we want it to bulge out.
And when you fill up the not stretchy side, we want it to bulge in so that you can still fit the spacing of this elastic.
Here has been changed so that you can kind of put tools in it or you could put like thumb drives in it.
You can kind of put whatever you want in it. And then it'll also be tighter because right now it's a little loose.
So once it wears out a bit, it's going to have a hard time holding things in place.
But this is basically exactly the width of the bottom of the the the chamber of holding pouch of holding or whatever.
And it'll be it'll just kind of sit there. And then the idea is that because it's made of that same sturdy reprieve fabric,
you just kind of roll up, put it on your desk and it just stands on its own.
You can get whatever you need. Put all your stuff back away, whether it's like tools or USB drives or your testers or whatever it is that you're that you're using.
And then you tuck it away. So that's that's something that's something cool.
You could also use it for toiletries and stuff like that. Yeah. People have have clued in that.
Yeah. It could also be great for travel. So we're working on that. When? When is? No idea.
Yeah. Can't promise anything. Sounds good. I shouldn't even be showing it to you.
I was wondering when you put it over there, I was like, I've never seen this before or heard of it.
Yeah. It'll absolutely work standalone, but it's kind of made to sit in.
Well, that's yeah, that's just that's a good idea to do everything that way, right?
Well, you could use it without it. You don't even have to use that with a bag, technically. Like you said, it could just be like a travel thing.
Yeah, exactly. Have it in the car. Question is from Brian. Could the lab possibly do USB hub reviews?
Everyone I've purchased has been terrible. I think that's a fantastic idea.
I don't even know where we'd begin. I mean, obviously, you'd want to know how how hot it gets when you're pulling the maximum amount of power that it can support.
You'd want to know what its internal inefficiencies are. So if you could test how much power you could draw with a device that's actually plugged in on the other side of it,
you'd want to you'd want to create some kind of like a torture test, right, where you have data streaming over.
Let's say it was a USB hub that has HDMI and also USB type A's or something.
So if you have some kind of data storm going on over the USB ports, does the HDMI cut out? You know, I'd want to know things like that.
Yeah, that is a good question, because that's one of those types of things where, like, if you go on like Amazon or whatever and you want to buy one,
there's just like a billion of them. How are you supposed to know? The brand recognition isn't going to be there.
It's from like thirty thousand brands you've never heard of. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. That would be one of the things that I would I would like there to be some some kind of like answers for.
Yeah, if we could find a way, I'd love to. I get so frustrated. I get so frustrated.
But we went through this with dash cams recently. We actually have a video coming where we bought every hundred dollar and under high,
like the top hundred dollar and under dash cams on Amazon because I just I went on the site.
I'm like, I don't understand. Most of these reviews are obviously fake, but they all are rated pretty well.
And even some of the real users seem to say, like, it's really good. So why would why do three hundred dollar dash cams exist if there are seventy dollar dash?
Yeah, like it was just it was overwhelming. Even as a as a tech savvy person, it was absolutely overwhelming.
So I kind of went, well, conveniently, I'm in a position where I can commission my own independent test.
I need a freakin dash cam. You buy all the dash cams and then let's share our findings with the people.
So that video is coming pretty soon. But that's actually cool. I will I will genuinely very likely buy one based off that video.
That's the type of things that I like, where, like, to be completely honest, they're almost more interesting to me than computer stuff reviews,
because at this point I can often like suss out what I need to know about computer hardware.
But when it goes into something like dash cams, like USB hub, stuff like that, it's like, I don't know.
Even something like a thumb drive. Yeah. OK. I still need a thumb drive for whatever reason.
I got to carry around a lot of ISOs. Who knows? How do you know if it's good?
Which one? Which one's good? Yeah. Cables. Cables are going to be huge.
That's going to be the main like tertiary product thing. That's I'm I'm very excited about about the cables.
Well, the ones that we're planning to make or the testing, the testing mostly, to be completely honest.
That's why I'm hoping that the ones that we make are like some of the best ones that come through testing. Right.
So I should hope so. If they're not, then we suck and we need to start over. Yeah.
See, this is this is hilarious. Scali over in Twitch chat says Garmin makes decent dash cams.
No, they don't. I see. I would have thought that to Garmin's like a brand name, right?
Like they're they're a trusted name. They made like GPS is a direction that I would likely go in.
Exactly. And instead, no, it turned out it just cost another 10, 20 dollars and was not better at all.
All righty, then. Great. Now I know, but I didn't.
And it's so hard to tell because your intuition might tell you this.
But then when you go empirically test it and you go, oh, yeah, I can't see jack it at night.
Oh, great. Well, it's good. It's really good to know it. No, for sure. Oh, really?
Everyone's using your sensor. Everyone's using one of the same two Chinese chipsets. Oh, all right, then.
That's interesting. That's very interesting. That's not something that you're going to be able to easily figure out in any other way.
No, no, not at all. You're going to you're going to tear down some some fanboy fences with that one.
I think there's already people charming and like the anchor Garmin, whatever. And it's like, we'll see.
Yeah, we'll see. Cobra related to that. I asked if there's any plans for the labs to release a spreadsheet list or ranking chart for the products you test, whether it's paid or free.
Yeah, I don't know. We still I still have to sit down with a lot of people from labs that that have experience at related websites and figure out exactly what we're going to do.
Because we've been waiting to get development on staff. But there was paperwork signed. Really? OK.
Done deal. Love to hear it. So very soon it'll technically be before that person actually starts.
But I want to get these meetings started anyways. And he's volunteered.
So we're going to have a call just to go over some of the roadmapping stuff before he actually starts so that we can start doing design so that we can start hitting it hard.
Right. When he's actually full, full time. Can I tell you something wild? Sorry.
Hold the hold that thought. I want to hear the rest of that. That what you're about to say thing.
You manage a larger team now than I did when we moved into this building.
Nice. And there's a lot more coming.
Yeah. By the way, if you just heard that backpacks. Yeah. Fair. If you just heard that that that that contract thing, you're like, what? I didn't get it.
I'm still still working on it. I need a few of you guys, not just one. So.
Yeah. In summary, yes, our intention in the longer I mean, screw it. Should I just should I just bring up the doc? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm serious. Do not. There are things on there. We're not showing.
No.
I'm serious. I'm getting a maybe I will switch off. I will switch the camera off his screen. I'm getting a maybe vibe.
I'm getting a maybe vibe. No. What do you what do you think?
OK, can I at least can I at least talk about MVP? Yes. OK, I'll tell you what.
Why don't you talk about it? OK. OK. I thought you were going to say, why don't I just show that part of this?
Yeah. Why don't I just show that? The MVP, the chat screaming, do it.
Oh, my God. Is someone calling me to prevent this line is speaking.
I don't know what this is. No, definitely spam. Definitely spam.
That's a hilarious spam call. Very. It started with. Yo.
We're all out of vaccines. And then I hung up because it was obviously very stupid.
I was going to say MVP is is is minimal, minimally viable product.
Sure. Yeah. It's. It's not technically 100 percent locked down.
The general features are, which is what's on that sheet, but exactly what the site will actually look like is not 100 percent locked down.
We still have to nail that in. But so you want me to read it or do I need to share this with you or like share it with me?
OK, I'm not going to share. It's it's mostly I actually might have to see it.
Yeah, you can go. Yeah, it's essentially like the MVP, to be completely honest, is essentially like a really fancy blog.
Because that's I mean, that's what it is, right? You're you're reading. So there will be there will be reviews.
We're going to try to make sure that the search is very strong. The fuzziness of the search is very good.
So you can find things that you're looking for. There's all going to be categorized to some degree.
We want to be able to generate and display graphs and tables, obviously, which already sort of works.
It just needs to work on the website as well. We can't be painstakingly, you know,
graphing things and making tables by hand like we do on the video production side of things.
And yeah, they might not be as pretty, but they need to be fast.
I'm going to be taking in goals and desires from a lot of different people on the on the technical side of labs so we can figure out what they want on the website.
I can tell you one of the really wild things they want. I had a chat with Gary recently or someone did.
Somehow this this floated back to me. And apparently the target maximum throughput for headphone testing is 50 a month.
Oh, yeah. So hopefully you guys are ready to store a lot of data.
Well, that's the graphic. Yeah. Yeah. I just mean, like, that's a frickin lot of headphones.
Yeah, that's fine. Are there even that many headphones? I think you're going to run out of headphones.
Yeah, I think we're going to run out of headphones before we run out of testing throughput.
What was I going to say? Yeah. But so one of my two OK, two core concepts that I'm going to try to champion.
One of them is that it needs to not be like overwhelming and intimidating when you land on the website.
Yeah. And when you're looking through the website, to be honest, there should be deep, hardcore information, but it should feel accessible.
You shouldn't land on the website and be like, oh, my goodness, this looks like a UI from the 90s.
We're going to trick you into thinking you can handle this data. Pretty much. Yeah.
But like, actually, though, we want to make it a comfortable experience to dive really deeply into something to encourage people to actually take that extra step.
So that's one of my things. The other one is I want the CMS to be really strong.
The CMS is actually extremely important because I don't want someone to have to spend their whole freaking day building these articles because they because I don't know if we're writing individual articles for each one of those 50 headphones that we're testing a month.
What's all this? No, you're good. You're good. So the CMS has to be pretty strong. If we're if we're building a little thing like a graph or whatever, it should be very easy to add that.
Not labor intensive. As few clicks as possible. That type of stuff. So there's going to be a lot of work in that regard.
We want to have product browsing by category, by tags, by search. We want to have pictures and videos embedded.
We obviously want to have affiliate links working because they got to pay for this. It's so expensive. Yeah.
We shot a video this week. Oh, man. I'm excited for you guys to see this thing. Have you seen the PSU tester we bought?
I have heard that it was purchased. I've not seen it. It's here.
It arrived on I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday. And we did our unboxing video, which is an uncrating because it's taller than you are.
It's an entire 40 you cabinet.
Uh huh. Uh huh. Full of AC load generation, DC load generation, oscilloscopes. Loads themselves. So you need like the you need the power supply and then you also need the loads logging like monitoring and logging hardware.
It's it's it's packed. It is stuffed to the gills. It's apparently a better one than Seasonic has.
Yeah. And they're an actual Sonic power supply manufacturers. Yeah. Like a lot of your favorite power supplies are probably once you go down to see Sonic.
Xpear asks bigger than the one Gamers Nexus got. Yeah, definitely. It's big. We go big or we go home. It's good we had the land when we did because you guys are going to fill that space up pretty quick.
Pretty quick. Considering the anechoic chamber was just like leaning against the wall the whole time.
I had to point that out to a couple of people because I guess when it's deconstructed, people don't necessarily recognize what it is.
But yeah, that was that was pretty that was pretty crazy here. I can I'll show you I'll show you the company that we got it from.
There has been a lot of mentions about getting electric boom to come check out the space once it's set up.
Yeah, I mean, sure. I'm down for whatever. So, yeah, it's basically like one of these. So they're highly configurable.
Kyle actually went through a whole did a whole bunch of research working with Seasonic.
And I believe, you know, I'm not sure who else he talked to, so I'm not going to name anyone else, but working with Seasonic as well as engineers from Chroma to ensure that we have exactly what we need for the ultimate the ultimate configuration for testing PC power supplies because they make gear for testing all kinds of stuff, batteries, any kind of power system.
And the only piece that we don't have yet, the only piece that was not included in our one hundred and thirty three thousand US dollars.
Oh, was an oscilloscope. So once we get the scope in the front of it, it's that price tag goes to what goes up a little bit.
Goes up a little bit. Oh, boy. No, we're not going to be blowing any breakers. The plug on it's like this big.
It's got its own special plug. There's a lot of power in that building. Yeah. Oh, there's tons of power in that building.
I mean, we ran like a 200 plus person land in there. No problem. Whatever. You know, no problem. Yeah. Well, that's crazy.
Yeah, I can't wait, man. We're going to be able to churn through like the capability, the capabilities of this thing are so cool. The AC, the AC power source, for example, you can get it to run automated scenarios for things like.
OK, what's it like if you're on, you know, a really crappy set up and someone like flicks on a blender somewhere else in the house?
So you can find out, you know, hey, if I if I live some if, you know, in a developing country and my power is really inconsistent and there's brownouts, frequent brownouts.
Yeah. So you can you can create all these test scenarios where it'll it'll simulate a brown out here and then another brown out there.
And then, you know, a really a really I'm trying to remember what the problem is. Certain types of motors, though, when they spin up, they can cause problems for other devices that are on the same circuit.
So you can have those spin up the DC. Oh, man, this is super cool.
So the we have we have like a DC power source. And the reason for that is that it allows us to fake our power supply accidentally oversupply, like overvolting.
So we can we can take whatever our power supply is outputting and we can actually add a little bit to make sure that overvoltage protection works, for example.
So we're going to be able to test safety mechanisms and power supplies if there's anything that's not safe. We can hook it up, run through our automated test suite, and it'll tell us that we're going to build a chamber for it.
That will be both acoustically isolated and thermally isolated.
So we'll be able to tell you, OK, under different load scenarios, how loud is it going to get? How hot is it going to how efficient is it going to be if it's in a particularly hot environment as the world heats up?
I guess that could become more and more of a concern for people. And this one's really cool.
We have I think it was it's either six or seven of the 400 watt loads. And the reason that we got so many was actually not because we needed that much sustained load, but because of the there like transient performance.
So by having that many in parallel, we are able to simulate the effect of like an RTX 3090 having a momentary power draw spike.
Yeah. Now, Nvidia might have kind of kind of screwed us here with some even higher power draw GPUs coming.
Oh, yeah. But I mean, we won't know that for sure until it actually happens. So we might actually have to get more of those modules.
There was a comment for that. There's a comment in FlowPlane chat about hoping that we don't like squeeze Steve out.
That's not going to happen. Well, you need multiple independent sources. So if anything, it should bolster because then people are going to be looking for that type of content.
Exactly. We're bringing it back. Yeah. Bringing it back. And we have literally always said that you should look at multiple reviews for products that you're buying.
So, like, no, that's that's not happening. Not a thing. I mean, another thing, too, is that, yeah, this is pointed out by Dafuit over on in the FlowPlane chat is we don't intend to just focus on PC components.
I mean, one of our first hires has a ton of experience in mobile phone testing.
So that's I mean, that's not something Steve touches as far as I can tell at all.
In fact, doesn't he still use like a dumb phone or something? I know last time I talked to him, he used ancient, ancient phone.
I just don't think he cares about it at all. So so we are we are absolutely going to be looking at different verticals.
And we also think that even for the things we both cover, there is.
And yeah, a lot of situations, validity to more than one testing methodology, too.
So, you know, maybe maybe one of us, you know, tests coolers with an artificial load.
Maybe one of us is all about, you know, embedding a thermal diode in the IHS, maybe, you know, whatever.
Right. Like and to be clear, that's a bad example, because obviously we would both care about it from both perspectives.
But I just mean that there is not always the one and only single way to test something.
I mean, OK, games, games are a really good example. Maybe, you know, we really feel like, yeah, our audience has moved past 1080p.
So we're really focused on how good cards are for 1440p and up.
You know, that that could be something that could realistically happen in the next two to five years.
Or if we start automating the if we start automating custom benches instead of custom runs, instead of just running the canned benchmarks or something like that.
I don't know. More, more sources is good. You should you should read slash watch both.
Yes.
And we've literally always said that. So, yeah.
One note for people who are thinking about the backpack, we do have a promo on right now for the WAN hoodie and backpack.
So if you get a WAN hoodie and a backpack at the same time, you save twenty dollars.
And that's only valid until tomorrow evening. So no pressure.
But you should do it.
Question here from Nathan for Luke and Linus. What is your favorite piece of freeware or open source utility software like Ninite or something else?
Favorite piece of freeware. I mean, we're streaming on OBS right now.
I think it sort of has to be OBS. Well, I wouldn't say favorite. I don't have an emotional attachment to OBS.
There's a lot of stuff that's not that perfect. Imagine it didn't exist.
I mean.
I was I was using you know, I was using XSplit before and like it had some problems, but I actually kind of want to try it again, to be perfectly honest with you.
See where it's currently. Yeah, see where it's at. They've sponsored the show a couple of times and it kind of made me think, oh, yeah, XSplit.
I mean, I have a lifetime license for it. I might as well maybe I'll do like a game stream at home or something like that.
Fire up XSplit, see how it does. Play some, play some Obsidian. When it worked well for me, it worked great.
Or Divinity, sorry. Yeah, like there were things that XSplit did way better for me than OBS. The game detection was so sick back in the day.
Yes. Yeah. And OBS is still sucks. We also had a lot of problems with it. We did. But that was a long time ago.
And the WAN PC had a lot of gremlins. I don't know how much of that was XSplit. That's fair enough.
Honestly. So, man, favorite free utilities. I mean, you can't, you can't not mention your, you know, your paint dot nets of the world.
Paint dot net, Notepad++, Night Night.
Yeah, Winderstat.
Putty, someone said putty.
Yeah, putty.
7-Zip. Oh, there's so many good ones. VLC.
You already said Notepad++, right?
Yeah.
Okay, heck yeah.
Love Notepad++.
I actually. I used to do that thing. I think I told you about it way back in the day where you can overwrite all the like, you can essentially like regedit windows.
So anytime you even try to open Notepad, it just opens Notepad++.
That's hilarious.
I don't remember exactly how it works, so I might have said something wrong there, but it was actually really nice because you should just never use Notepad.
You should use Notepad++.
I thought about resurrecting LSD. Remember?
Oh, yeah.
Luke's software discoveries.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chocolatey is apparently a Night Night alternative that's like way more powerful, way more customizable.
Really?
So I thought maybe we'd like check that out. And then I found something really cool. Oh, no, did I misplace the name of it?
Chocolatey software.
Okay, I can't find the name of it right now. I have it written down somewhere. But this is so, this blew my mind.
There's this utility that lets you turn your USB drive bootable, which I know won't impress you yet.
But turn your USB drive bootable so that it just loads like a list of all the ISOs that you've drag and drop onto that USB.
That's cool.
So it's like the ultimate utility USB.
That's sweet, actually. I really like that.
You just literally drag and drop your mem test ISO, your Windows install ISO, and then you just plug this thing in and it just goes, which one would you like? This one.
That reminds me a lot of like the-
So cool.
No, it's not Rufus. Ventoy, that's the one.
Geek Squad used to have this tool that was actually really good.
And I don't remember the name of it, but this was back in the day when every computer had a CD drive.
So they were on CDs and you could like burn the like Geek Squad tool onto these CDs.
And people used to effectively like sell them outside of Geek Squad because they were so good.
They were actually valuable.
And like local repair shops would buy the updated versions of these like Geek Squad CDs that were bootable and they had like mem tests and like all these other types of things on them.
They were actually really good.
It was just all arranged really nicely.
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
God.
It was nice like in one place, but-
Yeah, Ventoy is what it's called.
Super, super cool little tool.
Yeah, that's sweet.
All right, what else we got from-
I think we brought down Ventoy's website.
Oh, man.
MRI, yeah, Geek Squad MRI.
Way back in the day, way, way, way, way long ago, that used to be really genuinely good.
I have no idea if it even exists anymore, but it was awesome back in the day.
Yeah.
From Aiden, any updates on the big, tall, or women's sizes?
Hirons Boot CD, yeah.
No.
We got a lot of stuff going on.
Yeah.
A lot of stuff going on.
There's always like, man, it's kind of amazing how many projects they have rolling right
now for how few people work at Creator Warehouse, relatively speaking.
A lot of stuff going on.
Yeah, yeah.
Apparently, Geek Squad still uses MRI and it's still pretty cool.
All right, there you go.
That's actually good to hear because I know they've outsourced a lot of their repair and
stuff.
You just plug the computers into a network connection and then people fix them remotely
and stuff, which kind of made me really sad.
But the fact that MRI is still cool is pretty sweet.
Also, Hirons Boot CD and all that type of stuff.
There's lots of cool things.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'd be super down.
From Dominic, hey Linus, I noticed wrist rests for keyboards are super boring.
Have you ever thought of creating your own wrist rest in the typical L2T quality and
style we all know and love?
Why are you going to read it like that?
So far over the top, dude.
In all seriousness, yeah, we've thought about it, but the way that I see it, the custom
keyboard market is so saturated.
There are so many players.
There's so many boutique wrist rests and keyboards and cables and all that stuff that I just
feel like we'd just kind of be adding to the noise at a certain point.
And the reason that it's occurred to me to make that product is because my wife is an
avid wrist rest user.
She uses a SteelSeries 7G, which has that super long wrist rest on it.
She just basically won't touch any other keyboard because it really is way better.
And so if we were going to do one, it would probably be in that long, gently inclined style.
And she also uses a wrist rest for her mouse.
But I think the mouse one would be more likely just because there are so many options for
keyboard wrist rests due to the explosion in enthusiasm for mechanical keyboards and
super cool keyboards.
A mouse wrist rest, I could actually see us exploring because the Razer one that she's
been using all these years, it's kind of disgusting.
Yeah, it's pretty gross at this point.
You maybe just haven't looked in the right spots or maybe deep enough or whatever, but
there's a lot of options for wrist rests.
I have this wooden one right now that's pretty sweet that I got from my mom for Christmas.
And I like it, but it wasn't like sealed super well.
Yeah, I know.
I know it's wearing out.
Yeah.
So it's just like, dang.
Because it aesthetically is really nice, in my opinion.
And then it's actually, yeah.
And then it's, I find it quite comfortable.
I actually like that it's just solid wood.
I know not everyone would like that, but I do.
But yeah, it's like, I'm like wearing through it pretty rapidly.
So that's the only disappointing part.
Now that's an interesting idea.
I do a wooden one instead of using a stain like they did.
I think I know the one you're talking about.
It's kind of reddish, right?
Was that the land?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Instead of using a stain, if we used something like a Danish oil, then we could just like,
man, I bet we could just do like a little bottle of it included.
Yeah, a little maintenance kit.
That would actually be sweet.
Because it will wear away a little bit, but when it does with something like a Danish
oil, you just recoat it and it will actually match the surroundings even.
It'll look like new.
That would be awesome.
That'd be pretty sweet.
Okay, maybe we'll do it.
I'd be interested in that.
I would genuinely like, yeah, I, if there was that option and it was advertised as like,
look, it looks like this.
It will change over time because it's wood and your hands are on it all the time, but
you can maintain it.
Here's how, and we're going to include some that would have, that would have sold me at
the time pretty much for sure.
Huh?
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
Let's talk about it.
Yeah.
Uh, I did get a message from one of our labs folks.
I don't know.
Is, uh, is, is he off probation yet?
This particular one?
Uh, I think as of like a day or two after the land.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
So, well, do you know that for sure?
Not technically 100%.
Okay.
Then I'm not, I'm not going to say it just in case, but, uh, one of our software developers
for the lab says, read the USB hub testing question that came up.
Yes, we can.
And Gary and I have already had a chat around testing USB power banks, et cetera, as well.
That's something that I really want to know because you buy these things, they say however
many million powers they are, but we all know that even on something like an iPhone, right?
And Apple for all their faults does have pretty strict quality control even on something like
an iPhone, I think is it plus or minus 5%.
That's quite a bit.
For the battery capacity?
Yeah.
Like, I'm sorry, what do you mean plus or minus 5%?
So on something that's, you know, might handle a screen on time of, you know, eight, nine
hours, you mean my friend might get an extra hour if I get the worst one and they get the
best one?
That's ridiculous.
I also, I have some battery banks that are still working from like 2013 that I have thrashed
and they're still like, they have a decent amount of charge.
Like I'm very impressed with some of them and then I have a small army of other battery
banks that are essentially like decommissioned because they're, they've just completely done.
Yeah.
This is another perfect example of one of those techie product categories that even
as someone knowledgeable, you can go in and go, well, I know the reviews are horse.
I know that the specs are horse.
So I'm basically just like taking a complete shot in the dark, hoping that I hit something
decent.
Yeah.
There are brands that have built a reputation over the years.
Brands like an anchor, for example, I expect to be better.
Most of my anchor ones are pretty solid.
But you know, good brands can release a bad product or they can, sorry, or they, or they
can turn bad, right?
You can have a good, a brand that starts out good and then leverages that trust that they've
built with their audience to start cranking out crap.
We've certainly seen that time and time again.
Oh yeah.
Definitely.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm super into that.
That sounds great.
And then dad dude over on float plane chat says, Hey, and remember too, that the million
power rating, even on an honest company spec is based on the battery capacity, not what
it will output at the ports.
Yes, that is true.
It also doesn't account for, Oh, I guess this is kind of the same thing.
So any inefficiencies that exist within the design of the bank, any loss, well, there
you go.
Also some batteries will actually discharge at a less efficient in a less efficient manner
if they are discharging quickly compared to others.
So depending on the chemistry, depending on the quality of that particular battery, if
you use slow trickle charging versus fast charging, one or another could perform dramatically
different.
Yeah.
There's so much boy, is there ever a lot to it?
Eternal salt says like Pyrex when that Chinese mega company bought them out.
I actually didn't know that Pyrex got bought and I didn't, I don't know if the quality
has gotten worse.
I heard that they got bought out.
I have no idea about the quality because I mean the old school stuff lasts forever.
Yeah.
Literally forever.
Yeah.
I don't know.
There's some people saying beeswax seals would really well against like hand oils and stuff.
Oh, interesting.
Well, that's cool.
I'm sure.
I'm sure the greater warehouse engineer team would, would figure out what the best option
would be.
Too bad.
There are not going to be any bees.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's sad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Uh, from Benjamin.
Next question.
Uh, hello.
I'm Germany.
Do you think the escalation with China and Taiwan could crash the entire tech industry?
Yes.
Sure.
Could.
Like.
Yep.
Immediately.
Overnight.
Sure.
Could.
TSMC is by far the largest player for chip fabrication, uh, particularly advanced chips.
Uh, Samsung is, is a distant second, if I recall correctly, or is Intel still ahead
of them, but that then Intel until they really ramp up their third party fabrication strategy
is not really doing that.
As far as I know, they're mostly fabbing their own products as it stands right now.
And TSMC, um, it's right in the name is in Taiwan.
So looking at the, the chip race that's going on right now, you look at the chips act in
the U S you look at the way, uh, China has been, uh, fighting to get their hands on high
end lithography equipment.
Uh, I forget what that like Chinese state owned, basically, uh, chip Faber is, I forget
the name, but I think they're doing up to 14 nanometer right now.
And they're trying to get their hands on more advanced stuff.
Look at the way this, this technology arms race is ramping up right now, cause it's so
obvious that next generation weaponry, unless it is AI powered is going to be utterly useless.
Um, and the incentive that China has to just claim Taiwan, um, is higher than ever.
You know, up until now, it seems like it's been mostly an emotional incentive to claim
the island nation, but it was big industry.
Yeah.
And now with what a technological hub Taiwan is, uh, I can only see it going up SMIC.
That's the one.
Thank you.
Uh, thank you.
Flow plane chat.
They fired missiles over Taiwan like a couple of days ago.
Yeah.
Well there was the whole thing with, uh, Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan, which I got to say,
I'm not a huge fan, Nancy Pelosi, but ballsy move.
Yeah.
I mean, respect for that.
Yep.
Um, you know, maybe it's a bit of a, bit of a weird move given the, you know, um, profiting
that her husband technically, I guess, um, has, has done, uh, with like, uh, through
chip stocks and, and not definitely not insider trading.
Um, you'd think they wouldn't want to disrupt the tech industry, but then, you know, who
knows, maybe they're shorting it now.
I don't know.
Inferno says nobody likes Nancy Pelosi to be Frank.
I mean, yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's fair.
Uh, where are we going?
We've got another question from Liam.
Wondering what your take is on the Hasbro selfie series, where you use an app to take
pictures of your face, then Hasbro sends out and has your face made into custom action
figure head.
Uh, well Hasbro selfie series.
Is that, is that pulse?
What's Oh, hold on.
I thought I, yeah, here we go.
I thought I searched for this.
What happened?
Create your own custom action figure.
Choose your location.
Uh, not Canada.
Okay then sure.
I'm German today.
Make room on your English.
Of course.
For yourself.
Sure.
I'll take your cookies.
Okay.
New Rangers.
Look at this.
Uh, okay.
Boba Fett in disguise.
Sorry.
What is this?
How's my face on this?
I think you need to do the U S cause the page change where you did Germany might not be
available.
Yeah.
Mine's work.
I clicked on us and mines.
Well, I don't know.
These are, that is definitely not the green and black ranger from the show that I watched.
So this has gotta be it right.
There's been a new show.
What's the lightning clip.
Yeah.
This is one of the retro uniforms though.
This is definitely the retro Megazord.
Should we show Luke screen?
Yeah.
I think you're totally off.
Yeah.
I think you're totally off.
So this is the Hasbro selfie series.
Not what you were just looking at.
This is the tagline that I liked a lot.
Make room on your shelf for yourself.
I think that's hilarious.
Okay.
That's pretty good.
It's pretty classic.
Yup.
They have this thing, which is I guess trying to represent you getting scanned.
Yeah.
And then just to stay in, you know, stay in the know thing, nothing really going on.
This one of a kind experience will be launching in fall 2022, exclusively on the Hasbro pulse
mobile app for fans aged 16 and older in the U S only.
So that's yeah.
That's why it didn't show.
All right.
Why did they even give me the option to go to Germany then who knows a sign up below
for the exclusive selfie series mailing list.
Would you do it?
Um, do you get an action figure of yourself?
I mean, I could see myself just being like, well, uh, then again, I don't, I don't know.
Hard to say.
I don't actually buy that much wall kind of stuff.
Yeah.
I could definitely see a lot of people doing it though.
Oh yeah.
Like this is, this is next level, like genius tier product management.
I think if Hasbro really wants to pop off with this, they should let people merchandise
them.
Oh, like, like.
Off for like a bulk rate.
You know what?
I think the way they're going to be manufacturing these though, they're going to be inherently
like low volume.
I don't think it'll, there'll even be much of a savings.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I just, I just think there's, there's creators out there that would want to sell like an
action figure of themselves.
Hasn't Hasbro already done partnerships like that though?
I think so.
I don't know, but if they, if maybe if they use this to like widen that flow plane chat
reminds me that I already have multiple 3d printed action figures of myself, but I didn't
buy them for me.
Yeah.
So that doesn't count.
Oh, as a gift though, I could see myself buying someone an action figure of themselves.
Yeah.
For sure.
Okay.
I thought you were going to say as a gift, you could see yourself buying them an action
figure of you and giving it to them and I was gonna be like, whoa, I can see him doing
that.
It's like, dang dude, okay.
That's brutal.
No.
What do I think of it?
I think they're geniuses.
I think as long as they can make the economics work, they're going to sell so frigging many
of these.
Yeah.
Why not?
I assume they'll start with just faces and then from there you'll actually be able to
like, you know, design what you're, what you're wanting to be wearing and all that kind of
stuff.
So I think you're going to see some wedding cakes.
Oh yeah.
With action figures on top, especially with, with the way that like Marvel's been popping
off and stuff.
The whole like superhero action figure thing is like totally.
Yep.
A hundred percent.
And the number of people that do like a star Wars themed wedding or one that I saw recently
cause I was, I was checking out covers of the romantic flight, a song from the soundtrack
of how to train your dragon.
There are some amazing, amazing covers of it.
Um, anyway, I saw someone walked, someone had it as they had a live orchestra at their
wedding playing how to train your dragon music while they walked up to the altar.
Yeah, no kidding.
Right.
Uh, but anyway, you know, with that in mind, how realistic would it be to have Astrid and
Hiccup with the, with the, the heads of the bride and groom on top of the case?
Like, obviously by the time you hire an orchestra, you know, what's a custom figurine from Hasbro
99 99 easy.
That you can peep forever, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
I could totally see people, people manufacturing like landfill like that.
It's good.
Read a really interesting article recently.
Actually.
I don't think I talked about this on land show.
I think I was talking to you about it at some point though, about how one of the big industries
that is just popping off right now is junk removal because millennials have like no space
and baby boomers had nothing but space and a compulsive desire to acquire shit.
And so as they are downsizing or passing away, there's just this, there's this mountain,
this veritable mountain of garbage that the next generation either doesn't want or has
absolutely nowhere to put.
And this generation of people that are like, yeah, we accumulated this bone china that
I'm sitting here.
Like I was in, I was in thrift store the other day picking up like cheap Archie comics for
my kids.
And I was like, I was looking at all the, like the fine china gold leaf stuff.
So I'm like, who the fuck want any of this?
Are you like, are you for real?
This is worth nothing now.
Right.
And this is like a prized possession for silent generation or for, for your baby boomers out
there.
Oh, we, we won't eat on this because it's like the nice, it sits in the cupboard and
never gets taken out until no one wants it.
Nah, give me some melt.
Mel Mac.
Is it called a, is, is that what that like super cheap?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mel Mac.
No.
Yeah.
Melamine from American science.
I animate here.
Let's, let's check.
You and I have talked about fast fashion before.
Yeah, here we go.
My girlfriend told me about this website.
Give me some Mel Mac.
This is my childhood right here, boys.
Yeah, definitely.
Okay.
Uh, my girlfriend told me about this website.
I'm probably going to pronounce it incorrectly, but she and she and shine she and bell recognize
it.
Yeah.
I think it's she and she and there's like $8 shirts.
Yeah.
Pants for six bucks.
Oh yeah.
So like, there's no way these things last beyond like a season a hundred percent and
like, I don't know.
Yeah.
It is super cheap.
It is super cheap.
It definitely has that going for it.
And they like look relatively trendy and stuff.
Yeah.
Fast fashion.
It's like environmental disaster.
Oh yeah.
Actually there's this whole thing, um, how like the, the donated clothes, they have too
much of it.
Yeah.
They're just like, there's just like mountains of donated clothes.
I don't have anyone to give it to like, okay.
Brutal.
Yeah.
And there's gotta be stuff that you can just like make out of it.
Like just shred it and like make stuff, you know, like it can't be that hard.
Can it?
I think you'd have a lot of inconsistency and like fabric quality and stuff like that.
Yeah.
Getting back down to like string is going to be basically impossible.
No, you wouldn't, you know, no, you wouldn't need to get back down to string.
You would just like, like I, Oh, okay.
Like for example, that insulation that we have, that's made out of recycled blue jeans
where they just shred jeans and then just like turn it into like blue jean cake that
you stuff in your walls.
Like it.
I mean, that's pretty much what it is.
Um, yeah, I don't know.
I think, I think in like shirts and stuff, it's going to be more inconsistent though.
Yeah, no, I don't think you wouldn't be able to make shirts.
Oh, Oh, you mean just like the materials in them?
I mean, I don't know.
Here's a question.
If it costs half as much and there was a chance that from one bat to the next, the performance
was going to be plus or minus, you know, nevermind 5%.
Like we were talking about for batteries, I'm talking 25%.
Would you just, would you buy, would you buy fabric, fabric insulation?
That's just like, ah, yeah, it's like, I don't know what's made of shirts or some skirts
in there.
A few buttons.
Oh man.
Maybe I got to find something to do with it.
Um, yeah.
Used clothing ends up in, in landfills.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pretty much.
That's bad.
Question here from Luke.
Hi Linus.
I do cell phone repair.
That's not really a question, Luke.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Got him.
What's going on Luke?
Classic Luke.
But I was also curious if when labs is up and running fully, there'll be any testing
of durability of mobile devices or Ted tear downs like I fix it does.
I don't think that we are going to get into either of those.
Durability testing is not useful on a sample size of one and quite frankly, it's not even
useful on a sample size of 10.
We showed back when we toured one pluses manufacturing facility that what it takes is specialized
equipment, whether it's for drops or whether it's for tumbles that is run on many, many
devices and they have the luxury of many, many disposable devices to Chuck into these
things that are not finished quality, right?
That might have engineering sample grade S O C's in them.
For example, they literally couldn't sell the best is ready to test exactly.
Or they could make dummy ones that have exactly the same body and they can investigate it
for screen cracking without actually wasting hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of
internal hardware on them.
We, we just don't, we don't have that kind of a luxury and that's the kind of thing that,
you know what, Hey, three to five years from now, if the community said, we want this,
we might even create a system, actually, this is a really good idea.
We should write this down, but we could create a system where our community could, could
fund could specifically fund specific tests.
They could say, Hey, we want to see, we want to see 10 iPhones in a tumble dryer.
And then we would have basically build a mechanism where they could, we could say like, look,
we're not going to work.
No, we're not paying out of pocket for that.
There is, there is no way that we could make up that $10,000 worth of iPhones on this video
or this article or just this data sheet, right?
It's not happening.
But if you guys really want to see it, then sure, yeah, we're into it.
We could even see manufacturers potentially funding something like that.
Like if you're a, no, I don't know.
That'd be tough.
That'd be tough.
Like if I'm an OtterBox and I just said, Hey, I want independent third party testing of
how well the iPhone holds up to this thing.
There's no way that they're going to just write the check and walk away and not expect
us to also test OtterBoxes for example.
So that's, man, that's tough.
Is that an acceptable thing?
As long as they don't interfere with our data and they understand as long as, as part of
our agreement, we basically say, yeah, you got to understand that once you write the
check, we're publishing the data regardless of the outcome.
I don't think it's bad to test OtterBoxes.
I could see us doing it for LTT, but I don't think that's something that the lab would
just do and publish the data.
So that's something where LTT could use the lab.
Yeah.
I would kind of draw the line there.
That seems fair.
Yeah.
Question here from William.
Hi Linus.
And one of your, sorry, no, I'll get to that one sec.
As for iFixit.
I think they do a great job.
I don't think we'd be contributing anything to that particular space at this time.
Low priority.
We love iFixit.
Uh, from William.
Hi Linus.
In one of your at home videos, I saw a Zuma plush in your kid's playroom.
Is Zuma your favorite Paw Patrol pup or do you prefer a different one?
I can't say that I have a favorite pup, but I can definitely recite the, the intro theme
song from my kids' watch.
Thankfully they're over Paw Patrol at this point.
They're, um, man, they don't really watch much TV lately actually now that I think about
it.
They'll watch Wild Kratts if they're, if they're just like down to, never even heard of that.
Never heard of that.
I've heard of Paw Patrol, but not the Kratts brothers.
Like Zaboomafoo?
Oh, okay.
Who knows Zaboomafoo?
Sure.
Okay.
I don't know what the heck Zaboomafoo is, but.
Oh wow.
Zaboomafoo's legit, dude.
Okay.
You don't know the good stuff.
Well.
This question's from Ryan, but we've had a couple of people ask if we had any information
about what the backpack's warranty will be now that we've started getting ready to ship
out.
It's a wonderful question.
Right now we are, we're holding firm with, we're not formalizing anything, but we will
stand behind our products.
I think that we have a pretty good, I think we have a pretty good track record for just
kind of dealing with it.
The last thing that I would want to do is create some kind of like legal liability for,
you know, like, I don't, I don't know what the future holds, right?
Like I could die tomorrow and let's say, let's say my, you know, my, my, my muse, my, my,
my flame, uh, Yvonne is like, I can't do this.
Like I can't walk in every day and you don't see Linus all over the place.
And she's just like, yeah, I can't write that, that that's, that's possible.
And I respect that.
Um, so the last thing I want to do is create some kind of, of legal obligation because
of some kinds of T some kind of T's and C's that we have created around our, uh, our,
our warranty policy, for example, and like, yeah, I guess that does put you guys in a
bit of an uncomfortable position, but it's not our intention to go away.
It's not our intention to do anything about our current policy of just dealing with it,
but um, it's not our primary business making backpacks.
And so the last thing I would want to do is hang this albatross around my family's neck.
Um, when they're already have other stuff to deal with.
So that's where, that's where we're at on that question here from Chester, any suggestions
for ethernet cable routing along the inside of brick walls?
I mean, other than just running it along the mortar and then using like those, um, using
just a like plastic drywall anchors, you kind of drill them out, you put in the anchors,
you screw it in.
So they expand.
So they, so they grab on.
I mean, I don't know what else to tell you.
If the brick wall is painted, you can paint the cable to match.
Um, it's just always going to look pretty bad.
Yep.
Painting it to match never fully solves that problem.
You briefly mentioned it in the pre-show.
And so we got a few people asking if there are any new house updates.
Actually we shot two today.
We say you were, I heard you're at home.
Yeah.
I did away with my 48 inch monitor, 48 inches.
It's pretty big.
It's it maybe is too big.
So I tried a couple different options.
The Alienware 34 inch ultra wide with the QD OLED screen.
But then LG also has the C2 42 inch, which also looks almost as good and is bigger, but
not as big as 48 inches.
So that one's going to be pretty good.
I also, uh, in that video we update, you know how I changed my microphone?
Yeah.
So I do that in that video.
Got it.
Um, what else, what else did we do?
Oh, and then we also shot one.
It's about sort of fun, novel, interesting charging solutions.
It doesn't sound very interesting, but I will tell you that within the first 10 seconds
of the video, you're going to be hooked because I managed to rip a car charger out of the
ceiling of my house.
And I can't promise that there won't be other shenanigans.
We're actually not done shooting that one yet, so I don't know what else will happen.
Okay.
We should, um, we should probably hit the sponsors.
Oh, do we have sponsors?
Are there sponsors for the show?
Maybe not.
Uh, well, I think you, I think you called them out at the beginning.
I don't even have the right doc open, so I guess you're doing the first one.
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The show is also brought to you by MSI.
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Satir in floatplane chat, if you sent in three support tickets and didn't get a reply, the
problem, I don't, I can't possibly understand how that happened, but they reply to every
ticket that they receive.
So what you might have to do is, um, you can try tweeting, uh, at Nick and then maybe just
say like, Hey, here's my order number or my ticket number, ideally, and then they can
go track it down.
Nothing is perfect, but if you're, if you're not getting a reply from support, eventually
sometimes we do get behind, then something is wrong.
That's not how that works.
All right.
What else we got to talk about today?
Should we talk about the, uh, tales behind the counter?
Do we save that for another time?
Uh, we can save that for another time.
I want to talk about Amazon buying iRobot.
Okay.
Yeah.
You, you have strong opinions about this.
Uh, my reaction to it was just like, Oh, okay.
They just move closer to being an entire country, but yeah, what's, what's, uh, what's up with
yours?
I signed an agreement to purchase iRobot maker of the Roomba for $1.7 billion.
Almost as much as Twitter loses every year.
In specific money talk, it is an all cash transaction.
Wow.
For $61 a share.
No, that's a big deal.
That's a big deal.
No, I know.
That's why.
Yeah.
Earlier this year, iRobot launched its latest iRobot OS and AI platform for its vacuums
and mops.
So iRobot OS was designed to separate Roomba from the rest of the vacuums out there.
Amazon has not detailed plans for what it intends to do with iRobot.
Um, and the big A actually launched their own smart home robot last year called Astro
for a thousand dollars.
It could map out floor plans, listen for commands and recognize faces.
It could not clean.
So here is kind of on the surface.
You can kind of go, okay, Amazon is buying competent cleaning technology.
So that's one thing, but hear me out.
What I think is Amazon just wants yet another camera in your house.
Oh, they're also mapping your house.
Yet another sensor array that patrols your house and monitors what the heck it is that
you're doing and where you're going.
Recognize your face.
A vacuum definitely needs to do that.
What you like to spend your time on.
Yeah, this is brutal.
Don't buy it.
Please.
I mean, you can buy it, no, but like just know what you're getting yourself into.
That's all I ask.
That's all I ask.
I asked that you don't buy it between Ring, Roomba, Astro and Echo.
Amazon will now be able to basically, not basically, literally follow you around and
know exactly who you're talking to about what and what you're doing anytime you are at home.
Isn't that wild?
Super cool.
Oh, man.
Very, very cool.
Yeah, that was it.
That was it.
I just wanted to kind of laugh at how Amazon is basically the by and large from Wall-E
at this point.
Yeah.
Stop bending over and giving Amazon so much money, please.
Thank you.
People complain about all these working conditions and stuff, and they're like, still can't drive
to the store.
Still going to buy everything off Amazon.
Yeah.
And then I'll go protest Amazon at the same time as supporting them financially as hard
as I possibly can at all points in time.
I have a prime membership.
Come on, guys.
I know.
I know.
But it's so convenient for business.
Oh my goodness.
I've talked about this too much on WAN Show.
People don't like my spicy Amazon takes.
It's fine.
I get it, guys.
Just keep supporting them.
Eventually they'll own your house and your car and you, but that's okay.
That's fine.
No, no.
Tesla will own your car.
Buy the vacuum so that they can track your face, because that's definitely required.
That makes a lot of sense.
Cool.
Anyways, Europeans mad?
We got to tackle it at some point.
Yeah.
Okay.
People in Europe are mad about the LTT backpack pricing.
Amazon has free shipping.
Why does an LTT store?
Okay.
Well, hold on.
Hold on.
Don't be condescending.
A lot of people don't necessarily...
Okay.
I know.
I was just trying to tie in the Amazon topic.
Thank you.
For one thing, when we assess tax in the checkout, that's the one time that tax should be assessed.
That's not Canadian tax.
And then you pay your own country's tax after.
If you're getting assessed tax again when the package arrives, you need to take that
up with the last mile courier, because they are doing it wrong.
You already paid the tax.
To be clear, I don't think the way that we communicate it is the same way that it is
normally communicated.
I'm not necessarily saying that we're communicating it poorly or that we're not communicating
it, but I think it is abnormal.
So when I think when people see it, they're assuming that it is different.
Okay.
For another thing, so thing number two, the expensive shipping we have, I believe it is
capped at either $50 or $60 on average, looking at our order history and the quotes that we
got across many couriers.
We really did work hard at this.
Already our average costs and our average amount that we're charging are subsidized
or sorry, already the costs are higher than what we're actually charging.
We are subsidizing backpack shipping to, I believe, everywhere but Canada and the US
who are helping us subsidize the other regions, but nominally.
So yeah, I think we're eating somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 to $20 on pretty much
everything outside of North America per shipment.
There just is not more that I can do at that point.
Someone said my shipping was $89, so there is no cap.
You probably had other things in your order.
So that was a judgment call that we made on backpack, knowing that it wasn't going to
be in stock for, I believe wave one ships out September 20th by September 20th.
So we made a judgment call because either we were going to have to hold people's entire
order until their backpack was ready.
And if we did that, we would be able to charge one shipping fee or we were going to ship
out everything else on your order.
And then the backpack separately, which meant that, well, because we were paying for the
shipping twice, we have to charge the shipping twice.
And there wasn't a way with our limited internal systems right now to have that be a toggle
option that people could choose.
So we made the call because we know no matter how many times we say it, no matter how clearly
we say it, there are always a very significant number of people who get confused and frustrated
when they order something, even though they know one of the items is going to be delayed,
whether it's a custom printed shirt or something like that.
There are always people who get confused and angry and message customer service and create
a ton of work because they haven't received the other items from their order yet.
And so we made the call to ship out everything we have and follow up with the backpacks later.
So for the backpack itself, there was a completely separate shipping fee assessed.
If there is a legitimate problem and you legitimately did encounter something else, then please
do message support.
Oh yeah, there was also the sticker controversy.
If you ordered a backpack and just free stickers, you got charged shipping for the stickers.
We are dealing with that.
Yeah.
It will take some time.
It's being refunded.
It's been fixed, so it shouldn't happen anymore and it's being refunded.
So we're taking care of it across the board.
I don't fully remember, and I think some other people might be interested.
What are the complications about setting up distribution from Europe?
Do you have to like-
Tax.
Be a company there?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's a lot.
That's like-
It's not trivial.
Yeah.
So aside from just the cost of running a physical location there, the logistical nightmare of
splitting our inventory, there is also the taxation and reporting obligations that come
with being now an EU company.
We're all of a sudden a multinational.
Do you think it's a coincidence that OnePlus started out as having one location, web only,
in which they shipped all phones that charged $300 for a phone to becoming a multinational
that has support and service centers in multiple countries that charges $600, $700, $800 for
a phone?
It's not-
There's no free lunch.
You have to pay for it somewhere.
Yeah.
Aiden, yeah, go for it.
But then I'd rather wait.
I don't want to pay 2X shipping.
I literally don't know what that means.
Yeah.
No, they would prefer to have a single shipment.
Oh.
Yeah, I get it.
Unfortunately we didn't have a way to do it either way.
So we're working on- I mean, we're constantly doing development on our Shopify store.
It just takes time.
It just takes time.
And fortunately, thanks to the amazing support that we've gotten from you guys on Backpack,
we have some money that we are spending.
We are actively spending on hiring developers.
I mean, how many are you hiring right now?
A lot.
Okay, thank you for that.
No more for the store, but a huge amount of the effort that's gone into store development
for a while.
The person who does that is in FlowPlane Chat right now, I think.
I saw him in here recently.
A lot of that effort has gone to a big redesign that we wanted to happen because we wanted
to freshen up the site, but also because we need to move on to a new theme just because
of like, I mean, we don't own the platform and things are changing and we're moving to
the Dawn theme.
And that's really good for a wide range of reasons.
Once we are on the Dawn theme, then we'll start being able to get back to features and
stuff specifically for the store, but there's been a very big effort to get us to the new
version.
Yeah.
Aria Lux in Twitch Chat asks, have you ever looked into variable pricing based on location?
It might ease shipping costs if it appears not to exorbitant.
The problem with that is that it will, for the people who live in areas that are very
well serviced by couriers or by their local postal service, it will be a savings.
Yep.
You're right.
Unfortunately, what it will do is it will basically put ordering from LTT store completely
out of reach for people in rural areas.
It generates, it's just like the situation we're running into now where the people who
are fine with the shipping costs will be fine and they'll be quiet and the people who are
upset because they are at the high end of the shipping costs will be absolutely outraged
and will bring that outrage online and into our customer support inbox.
What are we supposed to, there's a trade-off no matter which way we do it.
In a perfect world, I would say, yeah, sure, that makes total sense that people should
just pay exactly the amount that the shipping cost, maybe with a slight surcharge so that
we have a slush fund for running shipping promos or whatever else, yeah, I'd say something
like that makes a ton of sense.
But unfortunately, in the real world, we can't charge $19 for shipping to Vancouver and $362
for shipping to Iqaluit.
Sorry, we can't give the middle finger to that customer in a remote region that hard,
even though that's how much it costs.
I don't know that that exact amount is right.
But it is not inconceivable within Canada alone for shipping charges on a product like
the backpack to exceed a hundred Canadian dollars easily.
So yeah, if you're somewhere where typically you're accustomed to it being cheaper, you're
probably subsidizing someone else.
We've said that forever, to be fair, that is not new information.
Shipping is really expensive.
Ima Flanker says one additional warehouse would cover all of Europe and slash shipping
times.
I know, but you're not listening.
What it wouldn't do is decrease our overall overhead.
Our costs would go up.
Our prices would just go up.
Once we have a physical location in a region, it gets really complicated.
We will need a team of people to manage it.
Right now, the entire Creator Warehouse team is like 10 people.
So what?
If you hire another team, well, you're going to pay for it.
So I don't know.
It's tough.
It's tough.
There's no perfect answer.
We would love to do it.
What I had wanted to do way back in the day was, especially back when Hong Kong was so
heavily subsidizing international shipping, like you could get a package shipped from
Hong Kong for like a dollar.
You could buy stuff.
You could buy stuff on like AliExpress or whatever for like $3 with free shipping.
And you're sitting here going, how does this make any sense whatsoever?
Well, it's all state subsidies, right?
So what I had wanted to do was find a region like that where there's heavy state subsidies
in international shipping and just take advantage of that.
But to my knowledge, nobody is really doing that to the same degree anymore.
Yeah.
And shipping in Canada in general is quite brutal.
Yeah.
Canada.
Yeah.
Even just shipping something like you actually mentioned just a minute ago, shipping something
inside Canada, not even leaving the borders can be like astronomically expensive.
Shipping something from my house to your house would cost me like 20 bucks.
Exactly.
I was just going to say, even if you're not going to a quality or whatever, if you're
going basically down the street, it can still be really expensive.
And I mean, the reality of it is that the backpack launch was a smash success.
So did we get it perfect?
Maybe not, but we did get it pretty good.
And if huge shipping costs are a concern for you, but you want to support the channel or
whatever else, we do have things that don't weigh as much.
Screwdriver is coming really soon.
It's a lower cost item and it's a much smaller item.
If you're frustrated with how much backpack costs to ship, something that I would recommend
that you do if you want to understand it a little better at least is look into the concept
of dimensional weight.
The backpack itself is not that heavy, but in shipping, because their costs are less
to do with the actual weight, unless it's air freight, in which case weight matters
a lot, but less to do with the actual weight, but more to do with the dimensions of it.
Backpack is huge and it takes up a lot of space on a pallet and every time a pallet
gets moved, there's a cost.
So the farther it goes, the more it costs and the more of the pallet takes up, the more
of the overall cost of moving those goods around has to be borne by that one package.
This is some assumptions, but well, I'm assuming they're correct.
I don't know.
Maybe you can correct me because I know in the boxes for the backpacks, the backpacks
themselves are filled with airbags.
They are.
It's to help them keep their shape.
Because the reprieve fabric is really strong and we want it to be in good quality and with
the proper shape and holding its form and all that kind of stuff.
So if it gets crushed really badly, like sits crushed, crumpled, it gets delayed in shipping
and it sits in a warehouse for six weeks under a giant pile of other stuff, it could have
a hard time bouncing back.
It is meant to retain.
Yeah.
Cause there's a lot of other like purses or backpacks or small bags or whatever that will
come flat, but they're like, like tent material.
Yes.
It's, it's very different.
So it's not made for that.
Yeah.
Yep.
That's correct.
Have you, this is another thing, I think you're just reading comments, so I'm just going to
keep riffing.
Sure.
This is, this is another thing that I had thought of recently is we talked about this
with graphics cards.
He released the halo product first.
Have you considered releasing a like LTT backpack light?
Um, I, I hadn't, uh, I mean the backpack was built to be the one that I want, which that's
what I want.
There's a lot of stuff around and I, I like that whether I, well, whether I like it or
not, that's my life, but I have seen so many requests for it that I feel like we'd be morons
to not at least explore it.
I can't guarantee anything right now.
It's absolutely not something that we have in development at the moment, but we had had
people ask about it internally and we have had so many people ask about it from our audience
that we'd be, yeah, there's just, there's just no way we won't at least explore it.
Cool.
Interesting.
Yeah.
All right.
Want to give us another one, Bell?
Sure do.
How about a softball?
Yes.
I'm going to pick a different one then.
Just kidding.
This question is from a whale from the LAN event.
Oh, hi.
The event was super fun and I hope we get to focus more on LANs at LTX in the future.
That's not a question.
Luckily they followed up with a question.
I wanted to ask one thing about headphone testing at the lab.
Oh, sure.
Do you have any plans to do frequency response at different volumes versus an equal loudness
curve?
It's something I've always wondered about frequency response graphs.
Interesting.
I don't know.
That is a tremendous, wonderful question.
I don't know that I'll be able to get you an answer back in a, in a convenient way,
but what I can do is I can definitely forward that.
Actually, I'm going to have Bell forward that to the head of the lab.
And that's something that they can at least explore for the creation of our test suites.
Thank you for asking.
And I'm glad you had fun at the LAN.
I also had fun.
The LAN was awesome.
Yeah.
I had a, I had a blast.
We should probably, wow.
We should probably talk highlights, eh?
Yeah.
I'd be down.
Beating everyone.
Beating everyone at Left 4 Dead.
I mean, okay.
That was kind of mean though.
Was it?
Like Bell was.
We told them it was going to happen.
They all knew.
They signed up for that.
Yeah.
We, we basically assembled a team, uh, like a crack team of Left 4 Dead players.
And I got up on the microphone and said, assemble a squad.
If anyone can beat us, I will give every member of your team a backpack, an early screwdriver,
and built by Kyle, head of engineering at Creator Warehouse, and 250 US dollars in store
credit at LTT store.
So naturally teams were assembled, people signed up for the tournament and one by one,
we absolutely crushed them into the ground.
It wasn't even fair.
We had Chase who is just like a mad lad in general and who is really good at Left 4 Dead.
We had Bell who streamed probably hundreds of hours of Left 4 Dead back in the day.
We've got me.
I've got 250, 300 hours of Left 4 Dead 1 and Left 4 Dead 2 under my belt.
It's been a while, but like there's a big difference between having 250 hours of Left
4 Dead playing on like public servers and me, the vast majority of my hours were with
a crew that did nothing but get home from work and play Left 4 Dead with some really
like legit games.
You sharpen that sword a lot, a lot more than just like randomly playing against pubs.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And so the vast majority of my hours are playing with that, with that crew.
I have significantly less hours than everyone else that was on that team, um, by like probably
hundreds, but, uh, I've only really played with all of them.
Yeah.
So, and you follow orders.
Good.
Yeah.
And your FPS skills are.
Yeah.
That's, that's nice.
Every, every once in a while I was, I usually did okay every once in a while if I got like
the right zombie characters, I'd like top damage or whatever I really, my favorite one's
the spitter.
Oh, spitters.
So much.
So much.
So much fun.
Yeah.
And like, it's not like Linus is quiet.
So anytime that I'm like not necessarily sure what I should be doing, I just like, Hey,
where am I going?
Or like whatever.
And I'll, I'll get information quickly, but yeah, it was good.
We ended up playing against, um, like essentially my family and friends in the final.
So that was weird because like their team name is generally the team name that I'm under
and we like had to beat them up, which was kind of funny.
Had to crush them.
It was, it was, there was a few funny moments where like I would just like take someone
out or just like there was a boomer time where I got all four of them and I was just like
brutal.
There was one time I was a smoker, I was on top of the building.
You guys hit them all at the same time.
And I 100 to KO'd someone with the smoker and I was like, yeah, let's go.
Um, Linus against again, my crew did a charger run down a set of stairs and hit literally
every single one of them, which was pretty good.
It was pretty fun.
It was good heart.
I mean, as much as I love just crapping all over noobs though, I'd say the most fun that
I had at the land was halo CE blood Gulch.
You can't, you can't plan.
We can show the clip.
I was looking for it just now.
Okay.
You, I haven't found it yet, but you cannot plan this out.
Okay.
You can't have ranked players go into a tournament and set up teams this even.
And we basically just Luke and I started up a lobby.
Each of us went to one of the teams and then we just broadcast the password on discord
and people flooded in randomly populated to the teams.
We broke it into separate discord chats and I kid you not, I have never seen a competition
so even in my life.
We played eight V eight on blood Gulch capture the flag, three full rounds with neither team
scoring a single flag capture and it got close to the end of the fourth one as well.
And then finally, finally, and it was like, it was not because people didn't know what
they were doing or weren't following instructions or weren't good FPS players.
If anything, it was just that each team had the perfect mix of elite tier players and
slower in scrappers.
And there was just this per, it was like playing Warcraft one, right where, where the orcs
and the humans are exactly equivalent.
Like you would have a swordsman and a, and a, what are they called?
Grunts.
They're, they're just like swordsman equivalent ish.
And they would just go, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, and then the last two swords would hit
each other at the same time and they'd both die.
Right?
Like that, that would, that would actually happen in Warcraft two as well.
Uh, so, so it would, that was just how every conflict would go down.
Both teams would annihilate each other and respond over and over and over again until,
until finally, finally the stalemate was broken by just a fluke, lucky situation to watch
it back.
If, if anyone's in the Whaleland discord, cause it's still up.
Uh, if you can find the video and post it in general, cause I can't really find it right
now.
I don't know.
I just don't remember what channel it's in, but if you can post it, it'd be really cool
to show.
Cause it's actually crazy.
Like it's, it's pretty sweet.
Oh man.
I was raging out so hard.
Luke, uh, Luke mentioned that I'm not a quiet gamer, which is fair.
I like it.
I'm not complaining.
It's just, it's a fact.
So when my driver, the driver of my Warthog, who I asked to take, asked very politely and
calmly asked, Luke was actually sitting next to me so he could hear me just like to my
mic the whole time.
I would try not to, I would try to mute my mic when I heard you actually saying commands.
And if I heard like, okay, we're going in whatever amount of time, I would not relay
that information.
I'll try not to act on it.
But sometimes it was so loud that it would go through other people's mics in the convention
and I would hear you saying it through my headphones from someone else.
And I was just like, okay.
So I tend to be a bit of a loud boy gamer.
We got it.
Uh, okay.
Uh, do you want to send it to you on posted in the chat or, Oh yeah, sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you send it to me here, I can just play it.
Um, okay.
So someone's hiding behind the base.
Okay.
And they went, they stole one of the Warthogs from that base, happened to pull up right
as some lone wolf rogue came out the back of the base with the flag, grabbed them.
Like it couldn't have been timed more perfectly if we were professional players.
Where will I find this?
I'm just trying to figure out where to send it to you.
Oh, in the dock.
Yeah.
The dock is good.
Just right at the top.
Perfect.
Um, so they're coming back and I'm like, guys, guys, you got to talk.
You got to communicate.
Communicate.
They're like, we got the flight.
Okay.
Where, where are you going?
What can we do?
What can we do to support you?
And they're like, okay, we're coming back.
Like which side?
Where are you coming back?
Like, Oh, so I'm talking to my driver.
No, go, you got to go, go up here.
My driver bless his heart, bless his heart, soul, mind, and body.
Okay.
Drives headlong into the warthog that is coming back after literally an hour of stalemate,
an hour.
No one can score.
Okay.
Drives headlong into the warthog that is carrying their flag back.
This is an eight V eight.
We are right next to the portal that comes out of their base.
I just should be under the, uh, right above Intel slowing down right above that topic.
Okay.
I'm like, I'm getting anxiety.
Just thinking back to it.
Okay.
Here it is.
Fortunately.
Uh, fortunately the, the capper, I believe.
Yeah.
The, the capper managed to manage to, uh, screen record and upload the whole thing.
So this particular player on our team was kind of playing hide, hide up near the base,
kind of take pot shots or whatever.
One of the things we were trying to do was accumulate all the work hogs so that we could
do like a four warthog push.
Look at this.
Didn't know they were coming because people don't communicate.
I had no idea in CE you could get in the gunner's seat with a flag that also confused the crap
out of me.
I was shooting at the passenger seat, so we're actually missing them.
Nice.
So this is my hog that drives headlong into them.
I didn't see it.
Our hog crashed, so I didn't actually see that they landed on all four wheels.
Nobody talks, so I didn't know what the heck was going on.
We have someone in their base grabbing their flag who goes out the back, which you would
think would be smart, but that's actually where they pulled up their flag.
They like barely make it through, but they cap it.
Crazy ending.
Score.
Oh man.
So cool.
One nothing after four full rounds.
It was absolutely wild.
I mean, that's the kind of thing I love at LANs is the second that happened, you could
just hear, oh yeah, just all over the room.
Like you can't, oh, there's playing online.
Yeah.
It's fine.
I guess.
Right.
You don't get the same.
But it's not the same.
Like there's nothing better than dueling someone, finishing them off with a headshot and being
like, ah.
The first round Linus and I were like fighting over kills.
And then I thought it was me, it was, oh no, I won the second.
Yeah.
Not even close to the first one.
You weren't even close.
I stopped going for kills because I started realizing no one is ever going to win the
game.
And I followed suit because their team got way more organized.
Yeah.
Cause it was like the respawn timer, what I think the shortest respawn timer is like
five seconds and then you have eight people and the flag return is instant.
If you touch it, it's just gone.
So actually getting one of the flags out is really hard.
But that's just.
I mean, one of the teams pulled it off, just saying, just saying, I mean, one of the teams
had a commander who was able to, I did make some sus calls here and then your, your four
warthog push thing was never going to work by the way.
We had, we had like beautiful strategies for that.
Yeah.
Sneaky boy warthog though.
We also did sneaky boy with like the spring bounce.
If that's one thing that I think my people not, people might not know is there was like
grenades and stuff under that hog.
If it stayed on the ground, it was dead.
The fact that it got ran into and did a perfect flip in the air and landed with like still
having momentum, like what was amazing.
It's actually such a cool clip.
I seriously doubt there's clips that have like the exact same series of events and it's
an ancient game that people played a ton.
So that's super cool.
Yeah.
It was, it was awesome, man.
Yeah.
That was, that was really sick.
Love land gaming.
Although I think my favorite moment was when I hoodwinked literally everyone at the entire
event.
Including me.
And I was sitting right next to it.
In the minor VGA competition.
Okay.
Minor VGA, pretty tough game.
Pretty unforgiving game.
All right.
We gave people, what was it?
10 or 15 minutes.
Yeah.
It wasn't that much.
To accumulate as much money in their bank account as possible.
And at the end of it, I was like, yo, there's no way that anyone's going to beat me at minor
VGA.
And we actually had someone who did shockingly well, like they had what, like 5,000, a lot,
like a lot, like far and away more than anyone else.
Did they win a gaming PC?
I think so.
Yes they did.
Yeah.
They won an absolutely wild prize.
But anyway.
They got sick gaming PC too.
Before, before I admitted that they, that they won it, I, um, I went back to my machine
and I was like, I'm going to win this one.
And I managed $15,000, $15,000.
That's nearly end game for minor VGA.
I had like all the items, I had the four leaf clover.
I had the wedding ring.
I had the condom.
Okay.
I had everything.
That is an item in the game.
That is an item in the game.
Okay.
You got to get the condom.
Okay.
Play it safe.
Know what I'm saying?
So I had the condom and, uh, you know, everyone, Luke included, I was like, Luke, did I cheat?
He looks over at my computer.
He's like, well, not only that, I, I was playing next to him partway through.
I'm like, man, this is really hard because I've never really played before because I
knew it was coming, but I didn't like practice or anything.
Um, and I was like losing money and I thought I was doing the right strategy, but I wasn't
Linus told me how to play after that.
Uh, but I glance over and he has this amount of money and he's like basically given up
and I was like, what you have, whatever the thing that convinced me about it was that
you didn't seem to care, which was really, I was very smart cause he just kind of like
shrugged it off and you're like, yeah, no, it's going to beat me.
And I was like, Oh, okay, all right, sounds good.
So I was convinced cause I was sitting right next to him.
Never saw him open the VM cause I was focused on trying to learn the game, but so I had
a game that I had already played for like two hours because I was ripping footage for
the upcoming channel super fun where Colton and Dennis attempt to hide in my house again.
Um, and the way that the downloader works from the ubiquity UI is that you, it breaks
up the files and you can only confirm the save location of the file once each one is
done.
Oh, and so I was just stuck sitting at my computer confirming downloads cause it's like
200 files or something stupid like that for all the different cameras and all the time
span that we, that we had to record them for it.
So I was like, ah, screw it, I'll, I'll play minor VGA and the other tab.
So then what I did was I left my computer in a state where I would land on minor VGA
in kind of a believable scenario.
So I went down, sat at my computer, like started one fresh and then it was like, team viewer,
hide interface.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm doing good.
And I even had Luke check my computer and I was like, yeah, I did way better.
He's like, no, it's legit.
It's legit.
I'm like, are you sure?
He's like, yeah, it's legit.
I didn't notice there was, there was the little like, cause it was a full screen and stuff.
He's just the little tiny dropdown thing at the top.
And I think there was like a mic in the way or something.
Someone on the other side of the table was like, no, it's there.
And I had to lean around to be able to see it.
It was awesome.
Yeah.
Oh boy.
I had so much fun with that.
The winner of space cadet table played on a steam deck.
Yeah.
That's actually pretty cool.
That was hilarious.
There was, there was the counter-strike tournament, which I enjoyed because usually at most lands
that I've been to, that there is a counter-strike tournament, some like local team will show
up and it's just like, not even remotely close, but all the like, like quarter, semi and actual
final, every single one of them was down to the wire, which was really cool.
And like that's super cool.
That was, that was actually sweet.
It like actually felt like a real tournament despite being kind of the opposite.
Cause it was mostly just a bunch of randoms, but it wasn't like just a complete slaughter
by like one pro team or something like that.
That's so important for fun.
I would rather have lost that halo match than won it easily.
Yeah.
Like just a close game is so much better than a blowout no matter which side you're on.
Yeah.
The, the multi like flash game style tournament thing was really cool.
I'm very happy that it culminated with Nidhogg because Nidhogg is such a cool, like one V
one like stressor type of game.
Oh yeah.
So having it end with Nidhogg was awesome.
The fact that I got robot unicorn attack in there was cool.
Um, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We had some good space cadet table players there.
I thought I was pretty good.
I played a lot when I was a kid, but I was not even close in fairness to me though.
You saw how leggy it was running on my machine.
Mine was pretty brutal.
I could barely even shoot a new ball.
Like it was, it was totally, totally glitched out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, land was really good.
All right.
Why don't we jump into another topic?
Uh, what else did we say we would talk about?
When did we start the show?
I don't know.
Oh, how long have we been streaming?
That's what I was wondering.
It's eight.
It's about two and a half hours.
Oh, we should probably call it at some point.
Jeez.
We have, we've hardly even touched the merch messages.
Um, there's just been a lot.
I don't know if the rest of the topics are like all that.
Well, I definitely want to talk about how there are now two Google Meets.
Okay.
Yeah.
I heard about this and my eyes rolled into the back of my head and I moved on because
I didn't even want to know what was happening.
So yeah.
What, what is it?
Um, Google now has two, two Google Meets.
It's not enough for them to have competing video chat products internally.
Now they actually have the same name, even though they're different programs.
In fairness, in fairness, Microsoft I think was the first to this innovation with their
multiple versions of Skype and now multiple versions of teams wasn't okay.
Hold on.
Wasn't it Skype for business?
Yeah, but still that's clear enough.
Just log in with a business login fricking account and have business features.
You idiots.
No, I know you don't have Skype for business and Skype.
I think there's different ways that it's like actually built.
Well, then pick the one that's good and use that one.
Yeah, it's probably more expensive.
I mean, it's like, wow, back when they used to have two separate fricking kernels for
their operating system, the good one for business and the crap one for home.
So to get rid of the crap one, that one's less defensive, obviously, obviously who's
in charge?
Skype for business was link.
Yeah.
In my opinion, that was a better name, to be honest.
Sorry.
I get kind of angry about this kind of crap.
So tell me about the two Meets.
All right.
Google Meet was originally launched as a Zoom-like video communication successor to Hangouts,
which hilariously still exists.
The fact that all the video, like video to video communication companies allowed Zoom
to like become what it is, is pathetic.
I'm sorry, but it is.
From January to April, 2020 Meets user count grew by a factor of 30 with roughly a hundred
million users per day.
Google Duo was launched earlier as a one-to-one and group call app meant for smaller scale
use.
Think FaceTime, Skype, or Discord.
If it's scalable, then use it.
If it's not scalable, then put it on the shelf.
Goodbye.
Why do you need a good scalable one and a crap not scalable?
Sorry, sorry, okay.
As the pandemic went on, the need for both styles of communication grew and so did the
apps.
As a result, Duo as the smaller service has been free branded Meet and will receive the
features from both apps and Meet is still Meet.
So we have two Meets.
So Meet-
What?
So it's not even like a business?
They're both business or consumer.
So Meet is compatible with both Duo and Meet, but Meet is compatible only with Meet.
Eventually, the old Meet app will be phased out in favor of the Duo app with Meet functionality,
which is now being called Meet.
Ah, this is horrible.
How did this stuff happen?
Users of Duo don't have to do anything.
The app was updated automatically with Meet support last month and has icon changed earlier
this week.
I'm assuming its name.
Want to see something that makes me really angry?
As someone who used Hangouts as our internal business chat as part of G Suite for so long,
then switched off of it first to Slack, which we had issues with.
Was it Slack?
I wasn't a part of that.
I think it was Slack.
Not just Slack, then to Teams, both of which we've had numerous, numerous issues with.
Hangouts for all its warts and all its simplicity did mostly just work and was convenient because
it was always open in your Gmail tab.
Every time I see this, I get irrationally angry because they told me Hangouts is going
away, so we rush migrated off of it.
Now when you go to share something in Android and you click Gmail, it fricking prompts you.
Gmail or chat?
No.
No, no.
Gmail.
You told me.
Chat, which is what Hangouts is now, the one that's built into you.
You told me it was going away.
I believed you.
That's what I get for believing anything you say.
When I click Gmail, I mean a fricking email.
That's what I mean.
Don't make me press more buttons.
Don't make me press more buttons.
And the hilarious thing is that, oh, okay, it doesn't right now, so I'm not sure why,
but there used to be a chat.
This is chat.
This is different chat.
No, no, that's because there's a standalone chat app aside from chat built into the Gmail
app.
How are they so bad at this?
So Bell said that the Meet app on his phone is now named Meet and then Original in brackets.
Yeah, just updated one day on my iPhone.
I was like, what is this long name?
That is so funny.
It's Meet Original.
Yeah, mine is that too.
What the heck?
Wow.
Crazy.
All right, let's talk merch messages.
I got a lab to pay for.
Read me merch messages.
Wow.
From Calvin.
Hi, I've been following your coverage on the use of HDR video very closely.
Any updates announced to HDR in the future?
We did one.
We did one recently.
The video on glossy monitors on the, excuse me, doe spectrum is in HDR.
So if you watch it on an HDR compatible display with HDR enabled, you will experience it in
HDR and four videos about displays in particular, it is a huge difference maker.
It really helps you to better see through the screen the differences between two different
experiences.
It's more true to life.
Milutin.
Oh, hold on.
I saw a little bit more to that merch message and yes, we've learned a lot.
We are working closely with Adobe and with YouTube.
There seems to, I don't know if I can take credit for it, but there seems to be a fire
lit in the online video streaming industry to better support HDR and I'm really excited
for it.
HDR, we are moving slowly but surely toward HDR, particularly on LTT, there have been
two to three videos.
Someone in flow plane shot said there have been two to three HDR videos on flow plane.
There has been, um, but I will admit they're quite the pain to get going.
Um, and we do need to update our steps so that it can be done better.
Fortunately the king has returned.
Yeah.
Well that we're not.
Yeah.
That's all I'm saying.
Yeah.
Flow plane.
People will know.
Sure has.
I had a wonderful day.
Me too.
Actually my day was pretty chaotic, but that was a good, that was a high point.
It was a good moment.
Yeah.
Uh, from Milutin.
Hi, Luke and Linus, long time fan.
I wanted to ask what you think of smartwatches.
Are they a fad that have run their course?
Will they become a ubiquitous gadget on everyone's wrist or remain a niche product like I feel
they are now?
I really want them to be good, but I give up.
So I'm just using, uh, the withings, you know, one that is a clock and lasts for a month.
And I guess there's like some heart recording stuff, but I don't really care about any of
that.
I have always done really, really bad with any accessories that you wear.
Uh, if they're glasses, I will lose them or drop them or step on them.
Um, is that why you don't wear glasses?
Yeah.
Oh, that's sort of sad.
Yeah.
I'm not even kidding.
I have a pair of glasses.
Don't you have a close, uh, a close associate who literally works in the glasses industry?
And that's why I have two.
I have sunglasses and I have those.
The sunglasses, you don't wear them.
Never leave my car ideally, because if they do, they will be gone.
Cause you know, you know how like if I leave your house, what percentage chance would you
say that I have to come back to get my keys?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Just there's no number.
It's just, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So like I, that type of stuff, if it's a ring, if it's a watch, if it's glasses, if it's
a necklace, it's gone.
And I just like know that about myself, so I don't wear any of it.
Um, and that's it.
So like, I think they're cool.
It's not for me.
I would go with something like that where it's relatively simple and tone it down.
Cause I honestly wouldn't want to like daily charge a watch.
That would just be very annoying to me.
Yeah.
It's all about battery life.
I wear the fossil hybrid HR for the same reason I get steps and basic stuff for two weeks
and that's better than charging an Apple watch every day.
Yeah.
That's pretty good.
Yeah.
Uh, from Sal question for Luke, you mentioned did freelance IT work before fully committing
to LTT.
What did you do to find work to make it possible?
Um, this is an entirely above board, but I haven't worked there in forever.
So whatever.
Uh, back when I used to work for geek squad, there was customers that would come in that
would want things that are services that geek squad could not provide.
Um, so in those cases I would potentially step in.
Uh, that is how I got one of my clients.
Um, that was pretty one of my main ones.
It was stuff that they literally didn't do.
Yeah.
You're just like not really supposed to do that.
No, for sure.
Yeah, for sure.
Yep.
Yep.
I was very good with that and extremely poor.
So that's, I did, I did what I did.
I mean, at least you didn't steal toilet paper.
Um, but yeah, like I, there, there was, there was one guy who needed server work done like
on location.
Like this is not something that would ever do.
They'd never touch that.
No.
Like I only did stuff where it would never be something that they would do.
Um, and then that got me some other jobs because he was business person who charged to other
business people that had the same problem and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it just kind of growed from there, grew from there, um, um, some say, yeah, something
that you can do though, it's just like, go talk to businesses, find, I've talked a few
times about how like notaries and law offices and, and, uh, medical practices and stuff
like that.
They need very good, uh, data storage and security.
Yep.
It needs to be extremely reliable, et cetera.
Be good so that you're not screwing them over cause there is liability.
Um, but yeah, then just go walk into places and be like, what is your solution like?
Do you need a better one?
Et cetera, et cetera.
This is great.
And then he graduated to grossly misrepresenting his qualifications on his LTT application.
Love it.
All right.
What's next?
Uh, next one we have here is from a radioactive Twinkie.
Hello, as PC enthusiasts and gamers, do either of you do routine wrist exercises to keep
your wrist limber and to reduce the risk of carpal tunnel?
Um, I play badminton, which involves a lot of, uh, squeezing and like, like these motions,
these motions, squeezing motions.
So I probably unintentionally do a ton of wrist exercise, but no, I don't go out of
my way to do it.
Uh, when I was rehabbing a problem that I was having with my arm, I spent a lot of time
with the power ball, um, like a gyro gyro ball.
And that worked really great for me.
But other than that, no, I can't say that I do, uh, nope, never been even remotely a
problem with me though.
Um, if I use a mouse that does, is not compatible with my grip, um, I'll get like, like ice,
like shooting feelings through my wrist.
Um, but it hasn't been a problem with the Corsair M40 or 45 or whatever that one that
I used for so long was.
And it hasn't been a problem with the G Pro wireless.
So I'm pretty happy with where I'm at for that right now.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I've never had any thing like that.
My wrists are kind of huge.
I don't know if that like helps at all, but yeah.
Question here from Alex.
A few years ago, I managed to make my hard drive burst into flames.
Despite having built multi multiple computers at that point, I'd never heard or assumed
that PSU SATA cables were not cross-compatible.
Do you have any other explosive stories?
I'd say my best story, just like lighting something on fire was probably, Oh, I mean
I had one recently actually.
Okay.
I got a couple of them, right?
I, I tried to install a PCI card.
Oh man, no, I, Oh man, I don't remember anymore exactly what I tried to do.
I wrote this out on the forum, like back in the early, probably nine years ago on the
forum.
So I might tell the story wrong, but in a nutshell, I tried to install a PCI card into
a, uh, Oh no, I remember.
Okay.
I, there was a PCI card that had some kind of a four pin header on it and probably it
was for something to like some kind of breakout cable or something like that.
I mistook it for a four pin floppy female connector for like auxiliary power for the
card.
So I plugged it in, powered on the system and promptly released the magic smoke that
was inside that card that made it work.
Um, so I had a buddy who, sorry, I thought you'd done, no, no, go ahead.
I had a buddy who was, uh, fairly aggressively overclocking a computer and shot some blue
flames out of the back of the power supply.
I like it.
But I have never, I think been in that scenario.
I managed to scorch the back of a motherboard just, uh, just a couple of weeks ago.
Nice.
Yeah.
I was helping the neighbor build their PC and a young, young neighbor and, um, one of
my son's friends and I wasn't paying close enough attention.
This is at least partially on me.
And he was trying to put it into the back of the IO shield spot and dragging it around
on the standoffs, knocked a couple of caps off the back.
So I made a clumsy attempt at putting them back on knowing that it was probably dead
anyway and whether it was the scratches to the traces around it or whether it was something
else, you know, when you hear that sound, it's bad.
So that was, that was pretty recent.
Yeah.
I haven't killed anything with like fire, you know, but I've, I've bricked some stuff,
but I guess it doesn't fit in this story.
Hit me.
From me sale.
Excited to get my backpack.
Hope.
Have you guys thought about making wallets?
I'm a simple man.
I like to put my stuff in my wallet.
I feel like I just don't really, I don't demand much of a wallet.
I use this, I use this homemade one from Yvonne and I'm sure there are wallet connoisseurs
out there who would, who would ask for so much more performance from their wallet than
I do.
But for me, it's just like, yeah.
Can I, can I reach the card?
Can I, can I flash my identification?
I've had wallet ever since we went to Germany for, um, the, the cherry tour.
Oh wow.
That's a long time.
I bought a wallet while I was there cause mine like literally fell apart.
I'm exactly the same one.
I've only ever owned three wallets in my entire life.
I have probably similar to me, used all of them until they disintegrated.
And then I have gotten a new one that is as simple and usually a gift actually.
I, yeah, I think two of them were gifts.
So I've gotten whatever simple, basic black men's leather wallet has been handed to me.
Nice.
Yep.
That's how I roll from Sergeant Kilgore.
Great name.
Uh, do you guys think modular phones will ever make a comeback?
Also do you have any opinions on V tubers?
Man, I had a vtuber conversation with the whales at the whale land when I was doing
the studio tour where I was basically saying, you know, I'm getting too old for this.
I'm getting too old to be the front man of this band.
And um, they kind of laughed, right?
And I was like, no, like for real, I'm going to be 40 like in a few years, I'm going to
be not young and cool at all.
I mean, I was never cool, but I won't be young either.
And you know, I think the next generation of tech enthusiasts are going to want a face
that looks more like theirs to tell them about their, you know, their, their tech purchases
or whatever else.
Like we have to, I have to realize that there's a shelf life.
How many YouTubers can you name who are over 50?
Yeah, not many.
They definitely exist, but not many part of that's because the platforms age itself.
Sure.
Right.
But then that's where I was going next.
How many, how many prominent TikTokers are over 40?
Yeah.
Right.
So there's going to be new platforms.
There's going to be new ways that the younger generation prefers to communicate.
And I am not necessarily going to understand it.
I'm not necessarily going to be there.
So one of the, one of the solutions to aging out of your, of your media platform is going
digital.
Right.
And I think a really good example of this is Ryan's Toy Reviews.
Ryan's Toy Reviews started as a cute little kid unboxing toys.
Right.
But obviously his parents who seem to manage that particular media empire recognized very
early on that their son wasn't going to be five forever.
Right.
And so they built up a team of animators and writers, and they built out content around
Ryan's persona, around Ryan as a character.
Right.
And part of that is just making sure that he wasn't being exploited.
Right.
That he wasn't working 60 hours a week, making, making YouTube videos.
But part of it is the longevity.
And so...
Greg and Link.
It's yeah, it's a viable strategy.
And I, you know, I could just pursue cosmetic surgery, right.
You know, try and look young for as long as possible, try and stay limber, but that's
going to run out at some point.
And I've got a lot of people relying on me.
So it's definitely something that I've considered, like, would you watch an animated review of
something?
I don't see why not.
Who cares?
I think, and I've kind of always thought this, and I know, I know, I know, but I think you
put too much stock into it.
I think if it was a piece of technology that was like totally out of your realm, sure.
But I don't think you lose legitimacy with like phones, VR tech and computers just because
you get old.
Sure.
That is something from our generation.
Yes, but there will be things that are not from our generation.
Like I don't have a ton of interest in things like smart speakers because I just grew up
without them and I don't care about them.
And so I think that whether it's, whether it's just the face, like, okay, so I won't
look like someone who knows about whatever that new thing is.
And people do, they do generalize, they do stereotype, right?
So I just, I think it's something to be aware of.
We've had people in chat bring up Adam Savage.
Adam Savage is a great example of someone who has transcended, you know, generational
gaps, right?
I think Adam Savage is cool pretty much across the board, but maybe that's the millennial
in me talking.
Maybe Adam Savage isn't cool to young people.
I wouldn't know because I think he's cool.
So yeah, I don't know.
Bixby says, I see Old Man Tech Wizard as more legitimate.
Sure.
But how many of them do you actually watch every day?
I just don't think there are that many.
Sure there are.
I mean, you could watch, you could watch Get Connected.
Does he even still make YouTube videos?
You could watch Rodney Reynolds.
I feel like I can hear Hi, I'm Rodney Reynolds in my brain.
Does Lea LaPorte still make content?
I believe so.
Get Connected.
I can't find, oh, here?
Lea LaPorte podcasts like, yeah, I think so.
Eight days ago.
Well, you guys got to make more content.
Here you go.
Yeah.
See, look, Pixel Buds Pro.
You can hear about Pixel Buds Pro from Mike, right?
Like it's one of those things.
Well, no, I think this is someone else now.
What?
Hold on.
We've got a Mr. Beast ad for Snackables.
That's a face that we recognize.
Yeah.
Okay.
So they've hired a host.
Yeah.
He's definitely still hosts some of it.
I know that.
Okay.
I looked at it not that long ago.
So, you know, it's tough.
It's something that I think about a fair bit.
Floatplane says I should get the Tom Cruise package.
Yeah.
I was watching Top Gun with Yvonne.
I remember it being a lot cooler when I was a kid.
The original Top Gun?
Yeah.
It's like pretty hard to watch actually.
Anyway.
And I was looking at the other people in that movie, whether it's Val Kilmer or whether
it's, is it?
Hold on a second.
No, no.
Robin Wright played the princess and the princess bride, which I had no idea because when I
was a kid, I didn't care about like who the cast was or whatever.
So I saw that in like my plex.
No way.
That was Robin Wright anyway.
I don't know who that is.
Really?
Yeah.
She plays Jenny in Forrest Gump.
She plays the wife in House of Cards.
Okay.
Okay.
Well anyway, Meg Ryan's in Top Gun.
And so you look at like, you look at everyone else in Top Gun literally, okay.
Literally 35 years later, right?
None of them have aged anywhere close to as well as Tom Cruise.
So yeah, whoever's doing his work, man, got to get me some of that for realsies.
It's Xenu dude.
For realsies.
He's making it happen.
Keeping him young.
All right.
What else we got?
From Mark with the steady progression of human enhancement tech, what would be your line
for what is too much to replace?
Would you get an RFID implant or digital eyeball or something else?
Oh, I'm down.
As long as it's probably pretty safe and or I have nothing to lose.
If I lost my hearing, I'd be first in line for a cochlear implant.
Let's go.
If you guys start getting into biohacking, I'm in dude.
Next question here for Luke from Alex.
How do you and your engineers approach planning and roadmapping and how do you guys organize?
Do you leverage Scrump?
Scrump.
Yeah.
The whole thing of Agile and Scrump is almost been paying attention to a lot of spaces.
A lot of people are kind of moving away from it.
It was very much the rage when we first started and we've kind of landed on a bit of a weird
mix, which seems to be true for a lot of teams.
I don't know for everybody and I'm sure people are going to be like, well, my team does.
I know I'm not talking for everybody.
But our mix is that we do twice a week meetings.
So we do a meeting at the end of the week and we do a meeting near the end of the week,
Monday and Thursday generally.
Those meetings are supposed to be fast.
They're not supposed to take a lot of time.
We've had those meetings that last less than five minutes in total, not per person.
They're supposed to be quick.
They're not supposed to take a lot of your day.
And that's like the stand up from the Scrump mentality stuff that we do.
But then we dive into Kanban with issue tracking and task tracking boards that people manage
themselves and yada, yada, yada.
Planning and roadmapping.
Planning as much as I can try, often just has bombs dropped on it all the time.
And if people are in this space, I think they probably have experienced the same thing.
Whether that's Linus just randomly coming in and be like, hey guys, we're doing all
these things now.
Good luck.
I need it in a month.
Or if it's...
I don't usually give you a month.
Yeah, usually it's less than that.
Or if it's me doing effectively the same thing, to be completely honest.
Because I'll be like, oh wait, this creator wants this thing.
So you're halfway through that.
That's cool.
What if you worked on this thing now?
Especially with a small team, sometimes there can be staffing challenges and it's beyond
our control.
Like, yeah, they were going to do that, but they didn't.
So here we go.
And it's not anyone's fault.
It just does still need to be.
The show must go on at the end of the day.
Development is inconsistent progress.
That is going to be a thing that you experience as inconsistent progress.
You'll have someone who will make absolute leaps and bounds in like two days.
And then they get stuck on something that actually wasn't that difficult for two weeks
because they just happened to not approach it in the exact right way or see it from the
exact right angle.
And they spend a bunch of time trying like more difficult solutions than what it actually
needed.
And then they figure out that it's something simple, whatever, and that's going to happen
and that's fine.
That just happens in this space a lot.
This is hilarious.
Sorry.
I'm just going to jump in.
This is from Twitch chat.
Nido says it's easy to say we need to plan better and end up in an infinite loop of meetings
discussing how to plan and never end up doing anything.
Yeah.
And a lot of times you just need to act.
So in regards to architecting too, like, I don't know, we do our best.
We try to figure out all the different components that are going to end up going into something.
But a lot of times Linus or me or someone else on the team, it doesn't matter, is going
to change what we need to do because we'll learn something or we'll experience something,
right?
We'll go, oh, this tool that's currently in development actually needs to work this way.
Or we'll get user feedback.
Or that.
So like sometimes things are going to change.
So we architect the best that we can to try to set ourselves up for the best possible
result, but I never, I think it's a fool's path to go into it, assuming that, uh, it's
not going to change sometimes potentially drastically.
Hopefully that answered your question.
This is, I could talk about this for a long time.
So that's, that's the compressed version, but yeah.
Nice.
The last question we have here is from Anon.
As a frequent phone switchers for smartphone reviews, how do you manage the transition
of data apps, messages, and contacts between your temporary daily drivers?
I haven't found a reliable message.
It sucks.
That was one of the main reasons that I daily the note nine for so long was that I just
got tired of switching my daily driver, actual daily driver phone all the time.
So what I would do is I would mostly sloppy transition over to whatever I was reviewing.
I would just have my note nine in my pocket for certain things.
Like I just didn't want to move my Aussie onto the one that I was reviewing or I didn't
want to move my, uh, we chat was one that was really annoying.
Like I lost my entire, we chat history a couple of times because the process for backing it
up and restoring it is like kind of arcane.
Um, so yeah, I'm sorry, I don't really have like a perfect solution for you.
It sucks and it will always suck as far as I can tell.
It is what it is.
And it is over.
Thank you for tuning into the WAN show.
Yeah, we'll see you again next week.
Same bad time.
Same bad channel.
Bye.
Sorry, I got it.
I didn't even, I wasn't even like, thank you.
I would do the choice.
Oh yeah, yeah.