How y'all doing everybody? Happy Friday and welcome to the WAN Show!
We've got a fantastic show lined up for you today. No, no, no, really. There's actually a lot that has been going on this week.
One of the big pieces of news is that our Lab32 branding for LTT Labs, well, might have gotten a little awkward as some of you messaged me about this week.
So we have been hard at work on that behind the scenes and we'll have an update for you guys.
Also, we, uh, okay, no, no. Oh! VESA has created clear MR certification to replace response time grading.
If that sounded like jargon to you, don't worry. It's super cool and we're going to get a little bit more into it later. What else we got?
Valve releases Steam Deck Booklet and gaming hardware prices are just whack right now.
Okay. You made the Steam Deck Booklet sound really boring, but there's a ton of cool nuggets and, and guess who's in it?
Why are you, why are you in it?
Not by name, not by name. Apparently they didn't think I was cool enough to actually put my name in it, but I'm definitely in it.
I'm gonna talk about that later. It's actually like a pretty exciting moment for me. Let's roll that intro.
Oh, I know. I've seen it before. I've seen it before. It's very good. I should have looked at it.
The show is brought to you today by Wellfront, Backblaze, and Team Group. Why don't we jump right into our first topic?
Thank you. Thank you, Frandal Wandle for the WAN Show intro.
Yeah, thank you. Totally hilarious. Loved it. Thank you very much for sending that over.
Lab 22. No, you did not mishear me. I said Lab 22. Let's go ahead and jump over to my screen real quick here,
where I've got the one and only Sarah Dietschy rhymes with Peachy announcing Lab 22.
Her lineup of stands for the iPhone, iPad, and well, really any headphones. It doesn't have to be Apple headphones.
You can see she put a pair of Sony headphones on there with the Lab 22 branding now live on Kickstarter.
In all seriousness, these things look super cool. They were built in collaboration with oh crap.
Moment. That's right. Moment.
And this is a super outdated tweet because they have absolutely annihilated their Kickstarter funding target.
Three hundred and forty thousand Canadian rubles. So huge congratulations to Sarah on this fantastic launch of these products.
And oh, the timing, though, to be clear, Sarah has been at work on this for over a year.
OK, we've been at work on the lab for I mean, it's been it's it's been a twinkle in my eye for four years at this point.
But the branding actually only started to come together in the last like weeks.
So with absolutely no knowledge that she was working on this whatsoever, we were like, oh, man, you know, it'd be really cool.
Lab 32. OK, there's that chrono trigger lab.
There's the potential to retcon the meaning of LTT if we ever decide to take Linus's name out of it and make it more just like the group Lab 32 LTT.
There was all this like it had all this stuff, math, it had all this stuff going for it.
Right. And then, oh, no, it is awfully similar to Lab 22.
So obviously, as soon as I saw people tweet at me about it, the first thing that I did was contact Sarah.
Fortunately, she's someone that we are in touch with. We've worked with her a number of times in the past.
I consider her I'm maybe not a friend. I don't know. We're not like super close, but I wouldn't withhold information.
I feel like I can speak very openly with her. So I'd say she's she's an industry friend.
And so we were able to have a quick email exchange about it. We're going to talk in more detail on Monday.
But initially, I just want to shout her out for being absolutely amazing about the whole thing,
because she was absolutely working on this before us. I want to make that extremely clear.
And her response, tentative, temporary placeholder response. I'm not going to hold her to any of this.
But her response after I explained what our long term goal is for the lab, what our mission is for it.
The fact that we could very well have physical merchandise with lab branding as part of funding our expansion.
LAB32 could test LAB22 products at some point.
Right. I mean, you know, and, you know, obviously this is a really big deal for her, right?
Like she's she's launching a brand and it's going well.
The first thing she said back to me and just like massive shout out, Sarah, for being super cool is your main product is pretty far off.
And with supporting merch being clothing, I don't see how that interferes with desk accessories.
I don't want to say too much about her future plans, so I'm going to redact some of this.
I don't have an issue moving forward with our own names. If you don't, maybe we can meme it up in the community and then just move on.
The comments have been fun. And I just want to say that's just about the coolest possible response she could have.
She could have given me. So even if we ultimately change our mind, look, she was there first.
It's that simple. So even if we ultimately change our mind and we decide to pivot on our branding, I just wanted to say, hey, super cool, Sarah.
Really appreciate you being willing to kind of share, especially because our draft branding for LAB32 is I wouldn't describe it as similar necessarily, but it shares some some thematic kind of elements.
Like we both went for kind of futuristic, like a futuristic look. Hold on, let me see if I can bring up the email here.
I can never remember how to spell her name, but it's OK. Thank you, Otto. Thank you, autofill. Here it is.
OK, so I haven't shown you guys. Here, I'm just going to do a snip. Don't worry, I will do this very safely. I will not leak any information.
I will not leak anything. I will leak, I will leak nothing. Heard that before. I will, I will leak absolutely nothing, not even this.
Yeah, there, there. I have LTT store up. It's fine. OK, cool. So we're on Linus's screen.
So we showed her some draft, draft branding for LAB32, which was done up by our Sarah, Sarah Butt, that I think looks absolutely fantastic.
And, you know, I wouldn't I wouldn't say that it's oh, sorry about that, Luke. There you go. I love how. Did you call it a.
So popular today, it's the same people. I'm actually really mad. Oh, OK. Well, here, let me finish this up real quick.
And we should talk about that. Yeah. So I wouldn't say that it's that similar to LAB22's branding.
There you go. You can see them side by side, but you can tell we were both kind of going for going for a thing here.
So that's the update on that massive shout out Sarah for being awesome. Massive shout out our Sarah for being awesome.
I sincerely hope that the LAB32 branding you worked on hasn't been wasted.
I mean, it probably won't be wasted anyway, because even if we ultimately call it LAB something else, I really like the style of it.
I really like the LAB. Yeah. So I like any anytime you have something like that's like space themed in some way and you have an A.
It never has the crossbar. Yeah. It's just a rule of life. Exactly. If it's in space and it's an A, there is no crossbar.
That's just how it works. So go check out LAB22.
The as Sarah describes it, the ultimate line of adjustable tech stands. Maybe we can move the dial a little bit on her on her preorders.
They really do look really nice. Very aesthetic, I think, as the kids say.
And we will keep you guys posted with respect to our own LAB branding and what that's going to end up looking like.
Oh, also later in the show, I have an update from Gary. Gary Key is the head of labs and he's given me sort of a roadmap for what tests are sort of ready to roll now.
Which ones will be ready soon? And I probably won't talk about it, but what's planned for the rest of the year?
And I'm really, really excited to share that with you guys. So don't let me forget. Do do not let me forget.
Blow up in chat if if I seem like I'm going to forget. Luke. Yeah. Would you like to tell me about that phone call?
Sure. Yeah. OK. So I I've been a Telus customer for a long time now. I have talked on the WAN show a bunch about how if you're in B.C., you should like almost certainly be with Telus if you can for your for your Internet.
If they have fiber optic in your area. Yes. If they have ADSL in your area, then you can tell them to pound sand or rather dig up sand and carry some fiber optic lines in it.
Yep. Yeah. Because Shaw's whole fiber thing is like fake, basically. And Telus actually runs fiber into your house, which is fantastic.
And it's been very, very stable over the years. And things have been good. Something that I really liked was that every two years, like clockwork, every two years, they'd give me a call because my loyalty discount would end.
Yeah. And I would no longer be locked in with them. Sure. And they would give me a call and they would give me a. This guy's a flight risk. Call him now. They give me a preemptive counteroffer.
Right. Right. They'd be like, hey, your thing is over. You're going to go up to standard rates. What if we lock you back in for another two years?
We'll upgrade your plan to a better plan slash and or it'll be cheaper or something like that.
One time they called me and my plan went from 300 to 750 and it got cheaper. And I was like, OK, 300 megabit to 750 megabit.
Yeah. See, I thought you were talking about dollars. I was like, A, why are you paying so much to your ISP?
Just going to say there's no way I would pay that much. Yeah. I don't think you've ever paid that much for anything.
No, no. So I was like, this is sweet. And every two years, like I would completely forget about it. And then randomly I get a call from Telus when I never get a call from Telus.
And I'd be like, hey, how you doing? This is going to be great. And I'd pick it up and some customer support person is like, all right, we're going to like double your speed and drop your price down.
And I'm like, this is one of the best calls I get every two years. I love this process.
And then I realized the other day, hmm. I should check my bills. And I noticed that my Internet bill was like, oh, really high, way higher than it should be.
And I'm like, what the heck? And I was like, oh, it's been more than two years. They never called me.
OK, so I look into this last time that the person called me, they gave me free TV. I told him I didn't want it. I don't watch TV.
They were like, it's like part of this thing. Just take it. It's free. And I was like, OK, the thing expired.
So I've been paying for TV that is unplugged, sitting in the corner. Oh, no, I don't watch TV. Right. And I went off the discount rate, which I looked at the plans on their Web site.
And there are plans that are significantly faster than what I have and are also noticeably cheaper than what I am paying when they're not discounted.
So I'm paying a not discounted rate. And not only is the discounted rate that everyone pays all the time way, way, way, way cheaper,
but the not discounted rate is also cheaper than what I'm paying and is like considerably faster. So I'm just getting completely hosed right now.
So I call them is that tell us is a Canadian ISP. And yet every single one of you can relate.
All you have to do is take the word tell us. Yeah. So then whoever your horrible local ISP is.
And you can follow along with Luke's story and share his misery. Yes.
Carry on. So I call them up and it's none of the people on the phone's fault. Of course not. So whatever.
Right. I'm chilling. But I am expressing like, like, why did what happened? Why didn't I get called?
It's a really unfortunate thing, but you almost have to get mad to get escalated.
I found a lot of companies. I didn't get mad. I was just confused. And I had to go through a couple people because I had multiple things on my plan.
The TV. I've seen it before, though. Yeah, I usually it's usually it's fine.
But most of them didn't know why, because they were like, oh, yeah, I've heard of those calls in the past.
I don't know why they stopped or you didn't get called or whatever. So I was like, OK, like, there's no whatever.
Whatever. Eventually I get to the customer loyalty person and we, like, borderline get in a fight.
Because she's like. I just keep saying, like, please cancel my TV.
And she wants to go on this huge tirade about, like, how what they used to do was bad and people would complain about it and no one complains anymore.
And I'm like, OK, I don't care. I've expressed that I wish I had the call.
And if they could happen in the future, I would like to get them. That would be cool. Just cancel my TV, please.
And then she'd be like, nope, because I guess she like needed me to agree with her that it's cool that they didn't call me.
And I'm like, OK, by the end of it, I'm like, I'm like very, very, very unhappy with this experience.
But I got my stuff canceled and everything's fine. And I'm moving on. Now they call me.
Yeah. Now they call you all the time. Really. But it's like twice in the last half hour.
It's like third party studio studio that like they're called Monet Studio or something.
That call on behalf of Telus to try to sell me more crap.
So I think that I think that person I think it's M-O-N-E-T. Oh, interesting. There's an autocomplete for like Monet Studio Telus or something.
Yeah. Yeah. So this is like this is a thing. Yeah. So I think that person that.
I was angry with on the phone because they wouldn't stop trying to push their point,
instead of just canceling my TV and letting me get off the phone, just signed me up for like every Telus marketing thing they could.
Which was not my point. What a day. I didn't want that. What a day.
I just want to call every two years when my things expires. So you just like, are you staying with Telus?
No, I'm staying with Telus. Cool. We're going to like update you to one of our new plans. Everything's good.
That's all I want. I don't want the freakin marketing calls. Stop it.
So annoying. Oh, no. And it isn't usually that common.
I think the reason why they called me that second time was because I told them to take me off their list and they were like, nope, we're going to get through to you.
And like every time that I've answered so far and tried to like talk to them, they're going to sell me stuff for TV.
Which is why I really think it was that person. I don't watch TV. I don't. I really don't. I don't want it.
I'm not interested. So, yeah, I don't know. I was extremely happy, like very, very, very happy with Telus customer service for a long time.
Yeah. Because those calls were just a beautiful, amazing thing. Because who doesn't like being called?
Yeah, come to think of it, every time I complain about the experiences I've had with Telus over the years, you are you kind of either just like.
I've had great experience. Or you're just like, I don't know.
Yeah, I'm not going to tell you your experience is wrong, but like I've had fantastic experiences.
To be clear, I've had good ones, too. And the product is great.
Yeah, the product is outstanding. Your home is great and it's super stable.
Yeah, it's like I don't think I've had Internet downtime since I signed up for it. And it's been like two or three years.
It's very, very stable. It's super stable.
It always stuns me when I'm like gaming with someone from like another country or something that is like very developed and sorry, my Internet.
Yeah, it's like that happens. Yeah, well, we live in like a storm area and never back in the mid 2000s.
It's not like we didn't have the same problem. Yeah, I remember my my high school girlfriend's house there, their ADSL lines.
So that was one of my terrible experiences with Telus because they came out and tried to fix that thing literally like half a dozen times over the span of a year.
And every time they're like, yeah, it's fixed. You didn't do anything. No, it's not.
All you did is like power cycle the frickin' ADSL modem. You didn't do anything. I'm telling you, it's not going to.
No, it's fixed. See you later. Like it was it was an awful, awful experience. But what would happen?
I think they eventually figured it out was like somewhere along the line, it kept getting flooded or something like that.
Rod Rosenberg was like, I haven't got my call from Floatplane. Darn it.
Well, yeah, but doesn't he just auto renew? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. He's already grandfathered in at the low rate anyway.
This is my it's like if you if you want a comparison, it's like two years from now,
we release three new subscription plans on Floatplane that are better and cheaper than the current ones that we have.
Sure. But if you were subscribed to the old ones, we just leave you there. Yeah.
Which sucks. Like that's obviously stupid. And their whole excuse was like, oh, we had a bunch of people complaining about those calls.
I strongly don't believe that people were upset that they called once every two years and said, hey, things are going to be cheaper and better.
See you. Yeah, that that sounds very unlikely. Well, OK, actually, it's possible.
It's possible that people would just get angry about a call from their ISP because they just don't want to hear from them.
But the solution to that is just to put them on a no call list that actually works like I have that issue with our bank.
Actually, with our banks, because personal and business, they call me probably each at least once a year to ask me if I'm interested in some new service
or if I need any help with my account. And every single fucking time I tell them.
I don't deal with that stuff. You need my wife. Here's her number. I don't touch any of it.
No, but really, you don't need to talk to the man or whatever or whatever it is going through your head that makes you want to talk to me about this.
Honestly, drives me crazy. Contractors, man. My girlfriend and I were well, she was buying a car, right?
I told you this story. No, but I already know where you're going with it. I went with her.
Yeah, she did incredible research. She had literally like she's old school.
She likes paper. She likes documents. She likes writing things. She had like a binder full of research that she had done on all these different cars,
on all the different deals from all the different dealerships, all the different prices that people are getting. Very, very organized, very, very well informed.
I'm coming along like derp derp derp. Don't know cars. I'm going to throw in some opinions, I guess. I like my Acura.
Yeah, I'm completely fine with my car. The person that was trying to sell her this car, the one that we test drove, it isn't the one that we bought.
I think this might be a small part of it, but it definitely wasn't the whole part, would only talk to me about things.
She would ask him a question and then he would look at me and answer the question and I'd be like,
I do this. I've talked to you about this before. I do this body language stuff every once in a while.
So he would look to me and start answering the question. I would just do this.
I do the exact same thing.
And he would just keep talking to me. I'm like, brother, I did not ask you this question.
If that doesn't work, I will even just go.
I will point, I will point to her while they talk to me. It drives me crazy.
It was so annoying. It was such a bad experience.
So anyway, the bank will call me or the banks will call me periodically and ask me about this stuff.
I'll say, put me on your do not call list. They'll say, yeah, of course, sir.
And I'll say, no, but really put me on the do not call list.
And it is something that I have, I've gotten kind of angry about because when I ask specifically not to be called,
I wish to not be called. So if they were calling people who had already explicitly said,
put me on an actually functional do not call list. Yeah.
Then, yeah, they're going to get angry no matter what you're saying to them, because they said, don't call me.
So I can see their side of the story there. And that's fair enough, but there's an easy solution to that.
I don't call list. Yeah, exactly. And that's fine.
And if people want to pay way too much for a service that's worse, let them.
Whatever. But I don't think the majority of people are going to be like that. I don't know.
It's just frustrating. Like maybe I don't like an excuse, in my opinion, to rake a bunch of people for money because they had this system that,
like, I'm definitely not the only person that figured out this pattern.
I figured out this pattern over the course of like six years. They were doing this for a long time. Yeah, for sure.
So a bunch of people were in this rhythm and then they stopped doing that.
I guarantee you I wasn't the only one with hiked up bills because the second the discount drops, the bill goes up by a lot.
Yeah. Oh, tons. Because a lot of the time it's like free for some period, six months a year.
Long enough for you to forget about it. And stuff like that. And then, yeah, you don't get the call.
You don't think about it because you're used to this cadence. Pretty much everyone uses automatic billing now.
So then some amount of months, unlike basically everyone, they probably had these cranked, more expensive bills, which is brutal.
I don't like that. Mystic Man on Twitch asks, what if people want to keep a grandfathered rate indefinitely rather than get a temporary great deal that goes away after a year or two?
It's just that the thing about Internet service is that assuming that, you know, your ISP is making any kind of investments into their infrastructure and that they have any kind of competition,
even a duopoly is better than nothing, assuming that a couple of years down the line, your Internet should be cheaper, even the great deal.
I mean, remember back when, OK, so I was in high school, like late high school, so you would have been like late elementary school, I guess.
I remember how, you know, the best time to get a cell phone was Christmas because they would always have deals with all these minutes bundled and all this texting.
I'm used to pay per text anyway. That was like the best time to get it.
And you could really get a smoking hot deal on a cell phone plan around Christmas time that would legitimately be better than anything you could get for the next couple of years.
But after that couple of years, there was almost always a better deal to be had.
And that's just the way it works. That's technology, baby. It's the only thing that doesn't freaking inflate. Let's embrace it. Let's love it.
There's two things I want to address, too. How much does your TV cost per diagonal inch, Luke? How does that compare to the 1950s?
A crazy one that I looked into recently was just SSDs, because I remember when we first started working together, that was when we were crossing the dollar per gig threshold.
Yeah. And now it's like.
Penny's the gig. Yeah, it's incredible. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.
No, no, no, you're good. So Bubbly Charizard in full plain chat said, why not have a reminder set to call or chat? Yeah, I do now.
Yeah, but if you don't need to, then why would you ever set it up if they are there?
There was precedent set over the course of many, many, many years. And then the other one is someone.
The question you were addressing, what if you just want this grandfathered plan? That was my main counterargument on the phone, which was that the current plans not discounted.
So I'm paying before I do this call, I'm paying a not discounted plan. So I'm looking at a new plan, but not the discounted rate. The website wants to show you the discounted rate, but you can find the non discounted rate.
So I'm not looking at the discounted rate. It is faster and better in every single way and cheaper. There is legitimately zero reason whatsoever why you would want to be on your old plan.
It is only better to be on the new plan, even if you're not locked in. You know what else is better? I, you know, shout out VESA for actually making monitor specs easier to understand.
I think there's still a lot more work for them to do here, but having VESA display HDR certification has made it so much easier. Not just to test a monitor because we have the equipment to test the peak brightness of a display, for example.
We could tell you guys, hey, the HDR experience of this is not going to be great because here's the total possible contrast ratio. And here's why that's a problem. It really doesn't get dark enough. It really doesn't get bright enough.
So the HDR metadata, yeah, sure. It can be interpreted by the display. It's not going to break the chain of correctly interpreting the metadata that accompanies your video file, but it's not really, the dynamic range is not really that high.
But VESA makes it simple by having these, and actually I was initially opposed to them having even VESA HDR 400 and 600 in particular. Those two are, they're not, it's not, internally we call them HDR-ant because they're not.
And I was opposed to that because what I felt like was that it was an easy way for manufacturers to market their display as HDR when it really wasn't capable of it. But I've kind of come around on it because the sort of unintended ironic consequence of them creating that HDR 400 and HDR 600 branding
is that folks like us can quickly and easily look at a monitor and go, hey, you got the wrong certification. You suck. And it's an easy thing for people to understand.
Like if I tell you guys, if you see something that is HDR 400 certified, it is undeniably unmistakably a bad HDR experience. By all means, still consider the product, just not if you're expecting to game or watch movies in HDR and have it really pop.
As for HDR 600, well, you know what? That actually covers a pretty broad range because I don't believe there's anything between 600 and 1000. So some VESA display HDR 600 certified monitors can actually be pretty decent, but at the bottom end, they're not that great.
And then VESA display HDR 1000, we know that those are going to be pretty strong. And then there's, there's one that's above that. It's like, yes, very, very HDR.
So, you know, just shout out because monitor manufacturers are notorious for publishing utterly meaningless specification sheets.
I mean, do you remember, do you remember back in the day, right? Mid 2000s, you know, going back to when I was product managing at NCIX, mid to late 2000s, you'd see monitors, okay?
That had advertised, advertised pixel response times of, you know, five milliseconds or, or like, like, like single digit milliseconds, right?
And you could look at them and almost watch the seconds tick by on your clock while a pixel switches from white to black and back again.
Like it was ridiculous. It was just clearly not right. Or they would achieve that under very specific conditions that produced horrible, horrible ghosting artifacts, excuse me.
Well, motion blur artifacts when you are, no, sorry. Overdrive, sorry, excuse me.
Overdrive artifacts where you would have, not only would, because the pixels are slow, not only would you have a trail behind the object,
but you would actually have a ghost out in front of the object as it tries to drive those pixels ahead of time.
It's like, nobody would play like that. It looks, it looks horrendous, right?
Refresh rate on TVs was always a frustrating thing too.
Oh, oh, oh, refresh. Yeah. Remember 960 Hertz refresh rates on TVs that could only do 60?
Yeah. Stop it. Literally just worse. But companies seem happy about this as well.
Oh, we haven't even said what it is yet.
So, so in VESA's next move, they've created ClearMR, a certification that will replace response time grading.
So just a little bit of background. Response time would be the time that it takes for a pixel to change from one state to another.
There's different response times. Some of them require them to go to and then back.
And some of them are gray to gray or black to white. Like there are different states.
There are different, some more and some less challenging ways to measure it.
But this ClearMR certification is hopefully going to put that particular bit of marketing nonsense to rest.
Okay, go ahead. Sorry about that.
Oh, I was actually just looking up what BlurBusters thinks about this, but I didn't find it yet.
But anyways, yeah, go for it. I'll keep looking it up.
All right. So basically it's a compliance test specification that applies to both LCD and emissive display products.
So that would be, OLED would be the most common one of those. And CMR is the Clear Motion Ratio.
This is intended to be a clear numerical value based on the ratio of clear pixels to blurry pixels.
They, wow, that's, that's actually, oh wow, that's a really interesting way of doing it. Sorry, I'm just looking at this now.
They say that motion picture response time and gray to gray metrics fail to reflect the true nature of blur
because a solely time-based metric can't account for image enhancement and blur mitigation techniques like overshoot and undershoot.
The ClearMR standard and logo program limits the use of these enhancement techniques during testing,
which is good because a lot of the time you can tune something like overdrive to achieve a really good measurement in a synthetic test.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's actually a good experience for the viewer.
There are grading slash rating tiers based on the ratio of clear to blurry pixels as a percentage.
Okay, so ClearMR 7000 would be 65 to 75 times more clear pixels than blurry pixels, for example.
So each tier provides a visually distinguishable change in clarity.
So the bigger the number, the more better, and the range is from ClearMR 3000 to ClearMR 9000.
I guess we can't be over 9000.
As Luke, sorry, as Luke was saying before, Samsung Display and LG Electronics seem pleased with this change.
Here's a statement from Samsung.
We applaud Vasa's global standardization of the clear motion ratio metric in ClearMR,
a specification for blur-free viewing that we fully support and to which we have already certified our newest OLED display.
I love that they're focused on OLED.
How funny that the OLED manufacturers are the ones that are like, yay!
Now everyone can know how much better we are.
And then LG said they will continue to collaborate with Vasa to ensure that their monitors not only meet the high standards demanded by Vasa's performance tests,
but are also well equipped to satisfy the expectations and diverse needs of today's consumers.
So it sounds like Hardware Unboxed, which they do a lot of really fantastic monitor reviews.
They really do.
And BlurBusters are a little uncertain about this whole thing.
There's some funky stuff.
There's a Twitter thread that I found with both of them discussing it actually, which is very interesting.
You can throw my screen out.
Every once in a while something good happens on Twitter.
Yeah, it's rare, but it does happen.
Hardware Unboxed is talking about how Vasa's new ClearMR display certification is ranking 138Hz OLED panels and 165Hz LCD panels in the same clarity tier.
Apparently it was deemed unfair that one has like some tech behind it.
Hardware Unboxed said Vasa, this is an interesting little Vasa, let's test clarity and blur.
Also Vasa, but let's disable all the blur reduction and clarity improving features.
So that's a little weird because I don't personally like that because why would you turn those features off if you were a consumer?
I think that it's okay.
But then companies can also potentially cheat.
It's a double edged sword.
Yeah, because if it's a feature that harms the viewing experience in some other way.
Let's say hypothetically it reduced the overall color depth or something like that.
Then we would not recommend that you use it, right?
Or if it turned off some kind of...
Oh, man.
I'd say affecting color would be one of the biggest concerns that I would have.
Brightness.
Yeah, brightness would be another big one.
If you had a feature like backlight strobing that was designed to enhance the clarity of the image,
but like you said, came at a significant brightness cost,
then I would say that almost you need to test that display under both conditions.
With features, without features.
Well, it's kind of like native versus dynamic contrast ratios.
You'd almost have to have both numbers reported.
With that said, for my part, I would rather just buy the superior panel in the first place
without some kind of backlight strobing technology if I don't need it.
But then if you do develop a workaround that works really well, well then that sucks.
And that's pretty unfair.
Yeah.
I don't necessarily have the right answer here.
I'm going to, just on a personal level,
I'm going to keep my eye on Hardware Unboxed and BlurBusters and see what they think moving forward.
But yeah, interesting.
Interesting, interesting, interesting.
Anytime specific companies in a space are extremely happy about a new standard coming out,
or a new certification coming out, sorry, it can be cool or not cool.
And it's a little tough to tell unless you're really on the ground floor.
It's probably better than nothing, which is what we've had up until now.
But that doesn't mean there won't be room for improvement.
And VESA has made changes to their certifications in the past.
So I hope they'll take all the feedback that they get and continue to improve this.
In the meantime, here's how they're testing.
So they're using a digital high-speed camera, which takes pictures of a test pattern moving across the screen as it changes from one frame to the next.
A colorimeter will verify pattern luminance, and products will be tested at ambient room temperature, native resolution, maximum refresh rate.
So here's something that gets kind of complicated.
Handling variable refresh rate motion can be very challenging, and that's something clearly this test will not address.
Default power-up configuration and all after warming up.
There will be no backlight strobing, and limits will be placed on overshoot and undershoot.
Okay, then the rest is this.
So my initial take.
Better than nothing, but clearly not a replacement for independent reviews.
Some flaws, yeah, yeah.
But that's, I mean, we've always pushed that forward, right?
More stuff, more better. More info, more better.
Well, the thing is, that's why we've never really boiled products down to a score.
That's something that I've been opposed to, I mean, I think pretty much since we started, right?
I know there was at least one time, because I remember I was really surprised.
Did I give a score to something?
I think it was like a Razer laptop, and it was like when we were still at the NCX studio or something.
It was forever ago.
I think I gave something an Editor's Choice Award or something like that.
But I don't do awards.
Yeah, not a point score.
Yeah, I don't do awards, and I don't do scores.
Because the reality of it is, if you really want to know about the product, you need to know the pros and the cons.
It is always more nuanced than just eight out of ten.
Six out of ten.
Six what?
What are they?
Why do I want ten of them?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I find that with gaming, I really frown at point score ratings for games.
Because it's so nuanced, and there's so many different things that people might not care about.
And I find that when people get less passionate about writing these reviews for the games,
they will stick to very rigid point score systems.
And if you look at something like Valheim, Valheim's a fantastic game.
It was really fun for a while, and then you beat it, and it's fine, whatever.
But Valheim's great.
Valheim's graphics?
Not good.
But that's not the focus.
You shouldn't take an exact fixed amount of points away from that game for those graphics.
And you shouldn't award that same fixed amount of points to another game that is a junk game with good graphics.
Because you could go through and have maybe a specific section just for that,
but your overall score reflecting that is garbage, in my opinion.
And you run into that same problem with almost everything.
Because what if this monitor is the best monitor ever, but the stand looks a little weird?
Does it really matter?
Or let's say RGB is part of your rubric.
Yeah.
And it doesn't have it.
But also, what if someone in the audience wants to not have that?
The reality of it is that you need some subjectivity.
And I think that's something that, particularly in the gaming space, could be classified as a hot take.
But I think subjectivity used responsibly is a really, really important part of conveying the experience of actually living with something.
Like, yeah, Valheim's a perfect example of a pretty rudimentary-looking game.
But that has highly addictive gameplay.
And I would also argue that if you get really into Valheim, you can see the beauty of it at times.
The lighting system that they have, the way it'll catch something in the right way.
Every once in a while, you'll be sailing across somewhere and you'll be like, wow, this game is actually like, it looks really cool.
And then you'll look too closely at something and you'll be like, wow, this game looks like junk.
But it's interesting and it's a very unique art style. It's very easy to pick out of a crowd.
It doesn't look like generic shooter number 47 that is a modern warfare spin-off of whatever.
This time with zombies.
Yeah, some games have a particular art style, which is like I would even argue like old-school Super Mario games.
They don't look bad. It's just pixel art.
It's a specific art style.
I read one of those clickbait articles, why Final Fantasy 6 was the best Final Fantasy game.
Obviously, I'm going to click on that because I definitely agree.
But anyway, it kind of talks about a lot of what I've talked about where like Final Fantasy 7 gets held in such high regard in large part because it was the first JRPG to really be a smash hit in North America.
And 6, in my opinion, has actually aged a lot better than 7, which might be part of the reason that it got a pixel remaster, whereas 7 required a remake.
Just saying. Anyway, I just wanted to get that barb in there to all the Final Fantasy 7 fans.
To be clear, I quite enjoyed Final Fantasy 7.
It's not like I didn't play it all the way through like 8 or something like that, but Final Fantasy 6 is the best.
Oh, my God. Someone showed me this. Who was it? Was it Plouffe?
While you're bringing that up, as we were talking about the next topic, the Vase Amount thing, multiple people in FlowPlaint chat, and that's like that's a subset of a subset, right?
Multiple people in FlowPlaint chat mentioned that they had the same problem with Telus.
So it's not just me.
Got him.
Geez. Anyways.
So I think it was Plouffe who showed me this. It's a 1, 6th scale statue of the protagonist of Final Fantasy 6, Tara Branford, riding Magitek armor.
That is one of the most ornately detailed pieces of game memorabilia that I think I have ever seen in my life.
Hold on. There's a here it is next to an actual human person. Look how big this thing is.
And this too can be yours for the price of just $13,800.
OK, I got to level with you.
There's probably so much work that goes into that.
For like $1,500, I would seriously consider this as like a backdrop for my streaming stuff, which I know I haven't used lately. I'll stream again, I promise.
But I would seriously consider it for like SetDeck or something like that. I love this game.
It was such a huge part of my childhood. And this seems like a definitive collector's piece for it.
I'm assuming I'm assuming it's probably like a lot of it's probably done by hand. It's all painted by hand.
Yeah. So like there's I mean, that's obviously too expensive for my taste, but like I'm sure a very significant amount of work went into that.
Yeah, but there's no way. Yeah, there's no way I believe someone's probably going to get it, though, like there.
Well, yeah. Oh, I'm oh, I'm sure someone will. Yeah, I'm sure someone will. They've got plenty of time to buy. The release date is actually November 2023.
This is preorders right now. And they're going to make a maximum of six hundred. That's actually a well, that's a pretty cool amount of revenue.
What is thirteen eight hundred? Did I say thirteen thousand eight hundred? Yeah, that is eight point three million dollars.
Yeah, I was going to say like that's that's actually a lot of units. I was expecting you to say like 60 or 100 or something.
Yeah. Yeah. Six hundred units. I mean, six. I don't know. One six of a six foot human is one foot.
So it's pretty big. Yeah. But she's riding the magic armor. Yeah. And you don't go in that, right? You ride on top of it.
Yeah. Yeah. So like it's it's actually way bigger than that. Yeah. Absolutely wild. Looks so cool.
Oh, I guess it's time to talk LTT store stuff. The biggest update that I have for you guys is that we have officially shipped our screwdriver to Project Farm.
Yeah. Per his usual approach, he insisted on paying for it. We would have been happy to provide one for for nothing.
So it wasn't it wasn't about that. But he wanted to pay for it. So obviously we're going to respect that.
And we shipped him a unit out of our inventory that we are currently producing. I actually built some myself.
I sat on the production line for a bit, which is harder than you might think, because the way that the plastics work, they come out of the molding machine.
It's man, this videos I've worked on production lines. It's going to be a trip. It's for bread, not screwdrivers.
But it's OK. So, you know, that it can be pretty grueling. You got to keep up. You got to you got to keep up.
So the reason it's really important in this case is because once they come out of the molding machine, it just like drops.
It comes down like like a little vending machine. Here's your two screwdrivers, because each each shot makes two handles.
So you you clip off your sprues, you throw them in the thing, you take the drivers, you are the handles, you inspect them, you put them on the little thing.
And then you you put the the ratchet assembly in its its directional.
OK, then you take these little like like press press things, you put them on the top so that it's not just pushing down on the actual socket for the bit because it could scratch it.
So you put a hole that you put a thing in it. Then you pop it into this thing.
It automatically goes to press fit the the ratchet assembly into the handle.
And it's really important to do it while it's hot because more malleable. You do the press fit and then it contracts.
Yeah. So that's what's going to keep the driver together for our press fit. Right.
So then your other machine, OK, is doing the where is it?
I'm assuming there's a video of this. It will be. So then your other machine is doing the press fit on the on the bit holder.
So you take it out of this one, take the thing off. You got to do both of them two at a time. Mind you, you put it over here.
You put it in this way. You put your bit holder thing on the top and you plop this one in and then it kicks to out the other side.
You take those, you put it in the finished thing where someone else will will beg it. Your next one is out.
OK, so you grab this one, you cut the spruce, you inspect them, you put it into the other side of that thing.
You put in your ratchets, you put on your things, you put you take this one out, you put it in the other side.
You do the thing, you pop it, you put the 40 seconds. That's the injection mold time.
That's how long you have. I'm sitting here going. And the really wild thing is the lady who was at the station that I that I hijacked made it look so easy.
She's just like. Like, she might as well have had her headphones in, chillin to some tunes, watching, you know, watching a show she likes or whatever.
She's just like, she's doing it. She's going. And I got to say, I'm really happy to have the QC done here because the kinds of things that they were rejecting parts for, I was like, yeah.
And to be clear, that doesn't mean that that is going to be wasted. We can actually re-grind up to 25 percent of the new plastics that goes into the next shot.
So we can take those parts that are no good and cut the sprues, take the bad parts, throw them back in the hopper, grind them up with the fresh plastic.
And as long as it doesn't exceed 25 percent, it doesn't affect the quality of the finished product.
So really glad to have the QC done because, yeah, they were taking just tiny scuffs and they were like, no, no dog.
Good. Yeah. Get rid of it. Good. I mean, it's a tool. So realistically, you're going to beat the hell out of it anyway.
But but it should show up nice. It should show up looking like new. Yeah.
Yeah. Really game in a suit. And yes, we absolutely did film it. It was. It was pretty cool.
This has been such a long freaking journey and the timing couldn't be better because actually,
I guess now's as good a time as any to talk through some of the plans for the lab over the next little bit.
Like this is this is really. It feels like a lot of dreams are coming true for me right now.
The screwdriver, the backpack is the backpack is moving actually really well.
I think we're going to see another burst once people can get that instant gratification. Yes, I know.
I'll do sponsors. Bell, thank you. I think people are going to I think people are going to move on it when they can get that instant gratification,
when it's actually in stock. The first two waves are already completely resold.
I think people are going to be absolutely stoked when they get their hands on it. Screwdriver, same thing.
We've got our pop up shop tomorrow. So if you're in the Vancouver area, hopefully we will see you there.
Bell, do you want to post the details in the chat? Maybe. Thank you so much.
It's finally coming out and it's all happening in time to build out the test lab of my dreams.
Sorry. One thing about the pop up shop, we are streaming it. We are streaming a specific table where people will be welcome to share live their thoughts on the screwdriver compared to the competition.
And I will talk in a little bit more detail about that after, because when we actually launch back orders on the page is going to depend on you guys.
You guys are going to decide. One thing I would say about that is, as far as my understanding goes, this is not my thing, but I'm just confirming right now.
As far as my understanding goes, it is not being streamed on the Linus Tech Tips channel. Short circuit.
And I don't think it's being streamed on Twitch. Oh, I don't know anything about that.
OK, I was told no. Sure, we can throw it on Twitch. I don't know. Let's throw it on Twitch and FlowPlane.
It's going to be on FlowPlane. But yeah, the short circuit YouTube channel is the YouTube channel that's going to receive this stream, not LTT.
If you're watching on YouTube. So anyway, yeah, back to the lab. I mean, I've traveled all over. I've seen amazing product validation labs.
And honestly, like consumer electronics, you know, obviously I love them. I use them every day.
But the thing that really tickles my my nerd fancy these days is that that scientific grade equipment.
Like I and and and it frustrates me, too, because I see this stuff and I go, well, yeah, but but all this data and all this testing, it's all behind closed doors.
I want to see that stuff. I want to know that stuff. Like it's all hidden behind slick marketing, right? Like show it to me.
I want to see it compared. Right. Like I remember at at Cherry at Cherry, remember, they had that machine that went
and press the keys like this on the keyboard. Right. So that they could validate their 50 million keystrokes that not only the 50 million keystrokes is like,
at least with that machine validating was like 50 million heavy keystrokes, heavy keystrokes.
And the way the validation worked was that the 50 million keystrokes, it had to still perform within some some tight tolerance of what it was like new after that.
It wasn't just that it like still functioned at all. And I was like, guys, how do I get my hands on this machine?
I want to test all the keyboards like this. And they were like, we don't want to be seen as denigrating competitors products.
So we don't want to get involved. And and so even going back that far, it's been it's been so so frustrating to me.
And as I've as I've watched fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer publications do this kind of testing,
I've felt like there's just a responsibility at this point to to build it out ourselves.
And so I want to talk a little bit about some of the really cool stuff that labs I keep bringing this message up and it keeps switching to a different conversation.
Hello, teams. To talk a little bit about what's going to be going on over the next little bit.
Apparently, our robot is already moved to the new building and set up in a new enclosure and fully working now with keyboards, which is really exciting.
So the robot that you guys saw last time that was just in the early stages of beginning to figure out how to work with is now completely ready to go.
The computer vision is working to identify where the keyboard is, where the keys are.
It can move around and it can measure the actuation force of key caps, which is going to be just one part of our keyboard test suite.
A time consuming one. We're working on a really cool video.
So there's a lot of fear mongering going on right now about buying used mining GPUs.
And oh, I've been an advocate for buying used hardware for as long as we've been doing this.
Can't afford the latest and the greatest. Don't buy something crappy.
Buy the not latest, greatest. There's like there is this kind of this shame or this stigma or this having old hardware.
I don't know what it is about buying things second hand, but I don't get it. Is it still cool?
Yeah. Sweet. Yeah. Does it get the FPSs? Yeah, exactly. Well then, OK, let's go.
That is that is something you do have to consider. You can run into trouble, obviously.
But man, compared to back in the day when we were like taking part in hardware swaps on OCN or red flag deals or whatever,
the buyer protections that are in place now for buying secondhand hardware online are unbelievable.
So anyway, this is really cool. Our automated testing suite that we used on our mining card testing video.
We bought 20 used mining cards just from random eBay sellers.
We bought 20 cards so that it's, you know, I'd say a reasonable sample size.
And it was just it was too much to manually test. But the team over there has been hard at work on an automated testing suite.
And apparently it is working flawlessly. You hit a button, you come back in four hours and the card is completely tested.
With graphs spitting out and all this stuff. Super cool! We're going to be expanding it.
And that system is going to scale into more things, which I don't want to get into too much.
But that system is part of the idea of building that was building a framework for it to scale.
I didn't get any details on some of the cell phone testing that we're apparently working on, and we have our mouse tester beta 0.8 running as of today.
So what you can expect to see is we're getting we're getting past the, you know,
pretty much everything we're doing is issuing POs and waiting for shortages.
We're getting kind of past that stage to the point where I think as of probably, if not mid-September, definitely early October,
you guys can expect to see content coming out either about the lab or from the lab on at least a weekly basis.
And it's been it's been such it's been such an endeavor. I've had it's been really interesting.
I've had a lot of people internally and externally question the ROI of the lab.
I mean, I think it's pretty clear. What's our head count up to now? We're close to 10, aren't we?
Oh, just for the lab? Just for the lab.
Because you're hiring developers. Four developers now. Gary's hiring engineers.
Two of them aren't actually here yet, but there's four developers.
I think there's more than six engineers or maybe there's exactly six. There's the facility.
We've obviously talked a little bit about some of the equipment we're buying.
So we showed the power supply tester from Chroma. Oh, a little bit of an update on that, by the way.
We heard from the one and only Johnny Guru.
He actually suggested that we change out our loads in a way that will help us better validate ATX 3.0 compliance.
So, hey, shout out, Johnny. Appreciate you. So we're going to work with Chroma on getting that all sorted out.
It's a little frustrating that it wasn't right in the first place, given that Chroma did help us with the spec
and we did make it very clear what we were trying to test. But I mean, realistically, they're a gigantic company
and they build these testers for everything from PC power supplies to...
Everything else.
Yeah, everything.
Things that receive and deliver power.
Anything that gets or outputs power or both. So things happen and I am very confident that we're going to get it sorted out.
Another, man, another little update on that video is I had a lot of people, like a surprising number of people,
leave comments on the video or message me directly saying that they were really upset about this, you know,
this YouTuber money flexing that I was doing in that video.
And that kind of ties into the conversation that I was just having with you about the Labs ROI.
Either the Labs ROI is super questionable and this is something that we are doing as a moonshot
and investing in because we just really want to build it and really want this data or I'm flexing, you know, spend...
Like, it's not a toy. Like, I don't really...
It's not a car.
Yeah, it's not Supreme or Gucci or like Jules.
And I don't know, maybe this is one of those things that I just don't get, but I was kind of taken aback by it
because it wasn't the point of the video.
The point of how much it cost was this is the kind of gear that up until now could only be found in a product development lab.
Well, now we're bringing it to a validation and review lab,
which means that instead of all these numbers being locked away and hidden,
they're going to be accessible to everybody. That's the whole point.
Democratizing access to this data.
I think the title and the thumbnail might direct people that way.
Sure, but why send me a message with concern about it if you haven't even watched it?
Yeah, I haven't watched it, so I don't know.
Basically, well, it's a piece of like scientific testing equipment.
No, I know. It's just the thumbnail being unboxing 133K
and then the title being the most expensive thing I own with expensive being in capitals frames the experience around the price tag.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's fair. It is expensive, though.
And it's like a lot of you are observing. It's an expense that doesn't have an obvious direct ROI.
We're building out this thing in hopes that it will make the content way, way, way, way better.
And we'll make consumers way, way, way smarter shoppers.
I think spending money in the direction of trying to my beard keeps getting stuck in the pop filter.
I should cut this off. I think spending money in the direction of bettering the data that we have
and increasing the data and knowledge in the space and those sorts of things is good.
I don't know. I mean, yeah, we've got to spend it on something. It's better to spend it on that than a car.
You know, there's a lot of people in the comments talking about how, like, right, but clickbait title is clickbait.
And I guess, you know, for better or for worse,
I don't see a problem with playing whatever game we have to play to attract people to learning more.
You know, if I have to if I have to do what works and you know what, that was the top performing video on the channel in the last two weeks.
I'm sorry. It works. But the video about the stance on clickbait a million times.
But the video itself is setting the stage for because a lot of people like if you read through as many comments as I do,
you can see a lot of people would come on to something like that,
not knowing until they've watched the video that a piece of equipment like that even exists or not even fully understanding,
you know, why we why we need it. You know, I had people questioning why anyone would need it.
They only need this for developing power supplies, not for testing them.
But that's a big part of how I can understand how to be that good.
Yeah. How to make how to make these videos more digestible in the future.
Like a lot of the time we're putting out a video that doesn't have all the information in it so that I can see what questions people are asking.
And so it's an important tool in our toolbox to get as many people as possible to watch
these videos that are impossible to get people to look at if we don't play the game.
So, yeah, I could have called it unboxing the chroma, whatever model number it is, power supply test unit.
But at the end of the day, if we take our mission seriously, which is to ignite passion for technology.
Well, then we're not doing a very good job at that point. We need to bring in new people who don't know who chroma is,
who don't know why you need a power supply tester. We need to make it exciting.
We need to make it accessible and we need to start priming people for what this stuff is.
So when all of a sudden we start coming out with content that's built around data we've collected from this machine to go.
Oh, right. That. Stuff.
Yeah. So I forget where I was going with this, but I think I was doing LTT store update at some point.
Yes, I know. I know. I will. I promise. So we shipped a screwdriver to Project Farm.
Talking about LTT store, there's a deal. I got you, Nick.
The deal is if you spend one hundred dollars on anything, you get a free meme face sequin pillow.
Free pillow. All right. Excellent. Cart value is one hundred dollars or more.
And then you add the meme face pillow. You get it for free.
And we haven't done any of our we haven't responded to any merch messages yet.
Hey, thanks, Edward G. Picking up a backpack. Love it. We haven't responded to any yet, but we will be responding to merch messages later on in the show.
So, guys, stay tuned. And if you place an order during the show, pay close attention in the checkout because there is a field for merch messages.
You can either put a little message up there for everyone to see at the bottom of the screen or Bell might respond to you.
Or he might curate it for me and Luke to have a look at later on.
In the meantime, what do you want to talk about now? Let's do one more topic, then we'll do sponsors. One more topic.
There was a few good ones this week. Apple self-service, Valve Steam Deck booklet.
Let's talk about the booklet, because I am a little lost on this. Sure.
I think it's interesting. Valve has released a very pretty booklet. And you know what? That is true.
It is pretty. To introduce the company and Steam to new markets, namely Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
And it doesn't cost two hundred and fifty dollars or whatever Apple's book cost. They just send you a PDF and you can print it out for yourself.
Yeah. The Steam Deck will be released in these markets through Japanese company Komodo later this year.
The booklet is available in English, Japanese, Korean and traditional Chinese.
Physical booklets will be available at the Tokyo Game Show next month.
And there's a bunch of things in the booklet, including I'm just scrolling through it right now, including you.
Yeah, I made it in. I made it into the booklet. Where? Hold on.
I got to I got to find it. This was like, honestly, such a, you know, I made it dad moment, right?
I'm trying to I'm trying to find a spot where it is.
Gabe Senpai recognized me. Yeah, exactly right here. Or someone else did.
Let me see if I can find it. But yeah, here it is. There it is. OK, OK, OK, OK.
The Steam Deck's physical design was built with comfort in mind. The rounded grips make it comfortable to hold for long gaming sessions.
We tested many different grips. The hardware was also designed to be repaired, replaced or upgraded.
The PC community is full of people who love to tinker and upgrade their machines.
So we've made it easy to open the back cover with standard tools. Parts are clearly marked.
And it's possible for an experienced customer to replace many of the main components.
We've already seen the Steam Deck community successfully replacing the they called it a hard drive.
Oh, no. Attaching an external GPU. Shout out UFD.
And I think there was someone else who did that. But don't quote me on that as well.
3D printing stands, cases and attachments. I know dbrand's been working on attachments.
And even attaching a PC grade heatsink to the back of the device. For fun, we definitely don't recommend this one.
Come on. Get owned. It's faster, runs cooler.
And in my humble opinion, looks freaking awesome. Looks so good.
Alex outdid himself with the design on that one. I helped. Hilarious.
That's very funny. All of these cool things and this other cool thing that you shouldn't do.
But it was awesome. And the booklet was about more than just Steam Deck.
It was a pretty cool window into Valve's processes, their way of thinking.
They see their company as being based on principles of openness and access that define the open PC community.
I mean, I think that they have done a pretty good job of walking the walk over the last little bit,
particularly with respect to Steam Deck. I don't know that it was always that way with their hardware products,
but it's definitely moving in the right direction.
Overall, it's been good guy Valve for the better part of at least the last couple of years.
They provided a brief summary on how Steam was created to automate game updates,
really did solve a very real problem and was a huge, huge motivating factor for me to essentially completely stop pirating games.
I don't own or play a single pirated game anymore. It's like.
Oh, no, I shouldn't say that because like, OK, technically, even if you own a cartridge, downloading a ROM is pirating the game.
So, OK, no, no. But PC games, I don't think I own a single pirated game.
Everything's just in my Steam or Uplay or whatever library, because, man, things being auto updated absolutely solved a major,
major pain point, especially with respect to multiplayer, which was really taking off at that time.
Man, it was it was real weird back in the day when you had to get updates, not even from like the game publisher's own website.
You had to get them from game facts or like whatever is the name of that. It had like military, major geeks, major geeks.
You had to get updates from major geeks back in the day and stuff like that was that was a weird time.
I remember if you installed Call of Duty, Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare back in the day and you went to the server list.
Yeah, it looks the same. That's awesome. I actually love that.
If you went to the server list on Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, if you just installed it and went there, there was no servers.
Yep. It just you had to go to major geeks and download two updates and then it would work like how people even figured that out.
OK, you would say like, oh, YouTube views and stuff. This was, you know, Internet was in a different time.
OK. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, I do have some issues with automatic updates.
People are talking in the in the floatplane chat about removing features.
Yes. And Beat Saber in particular is super annoying because every time they release a new like map pack,
it breaks all my mods for like a week and like shout out the Beat Saber modding community.
You guys are amazing. The fact that you're able to turn around these updates so quickly for no pay at all.
Yeah. Like just the passion in that community is incredible. There is often ways.
But as a gamer, it like still blows. Right. Yeah. You know, you don't want to just not be able to play your custom songs.
That rarely happens anymore, actually. It hasn't happened in a long time. That's something I've been trying to do.
But like leaderboards and stuff as my like I've grown up in my financial situation has improved is like open source software that I use that is free, that has like contribution links.
I've tried to recognize sometimes you don't really think about it. I've tried to recognize like, oh, that's fair.
I use this. I'm going to go contribute to the creator and more than just a coffee.
And I've been trying to do that more consciously over time. But, yeah, I just would like to issue a correction.
I meant private tiered games. That's very good.
So they shout out their hires from the mod community, namely the devs of Day of Defeat, Counter-Strike, Dota 2, Team Fortress and Portal.
Yeah. Yeah. The fact that they like basically bought their best game is like.
Like, what has Valve actually developed like internally? Portal came from a group of students.
Counter-Strike was purchased, I believe. Is that the one you're talking about? I think it was a mod, right?
Portal, I was counting as their best game. But OK, I mean, obviously it's open for debate.
Yeah. Like, don't don't come at me. I think if I this is old memory, but I think Counter-Strike was like a mod for Half-Life that they bought or something or brought in or did something.
Yeah. And then Portal was a group of students that they ended up hiring. Team Fortress is also a Half-Life mod that they like brought the team on board for, if I recall correctly.
Yeah, cool. So amazing. Dota 2 was clearly a Warcraft 3 mod initially. Yeah, a little bit.
I didn't realize how many of these things came externally. How many games Valve has actually made.
Well, they made them, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have pretty photos of all the prototypes. That was actually a very cool page.
That was fun to see. I love that kind of stuff. Super into that. Yeah. Like, why hide it? It's so cool.
They have plans for shipping a SteamOS general installer for consumers and other manufacturers. And that's super cool. Very cool.
OK, let's say I prefer the hardware of an Ioneo device or something like that. Why don't I just dual boot?
That'd be sweet. Super cool. Yeah, it's going to be awesome.
The Steam Deck interface will soon be available on PCs plugged into TVs and in VR, which is super cool because they've done a lot of really great work on it since launch.
And the most important note, Steam Deck represents the first in a new category of Steam handheld gaming PCs.
In the future, Valve will follow up this product with improvements and iterations to hardware and software, bringing new versions of Steam Deck to market.
So I believe this is the first time that they've actually committed to new Steam Decks, although it was fairly obvious based on the colossal success of this product.
There was a couple of things that Gaben said that would be like pretty hard to interpret in any way that isn't. We're making another one, but I don't think he ever specifically said it.
I could be wrong about that, but yeah.
There is some discussion questions. Do we go into these?
Let's do sponsors. All right.
Yeah, yeah. Well, it looks good. The show is brought to you by Wealthfront. Right now, the economy is in an interesting place. Is it a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going on with inflation?
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What would you like to talk about next? Should we do a couple of merch messages?
Sure. I feel like we should probably do that.
I do want to pick a bone with the people really quickly about merch messages.
I have I have a thing to say. There's been a debate. There was a Reddit thread about it.
I've seen comments about this before about how such a high percentage of the show is ads.
And they're including merch messages as ads, which is, I think, a little bit of a stretch.
But I do understand they are revolved around people giving us money. So, OK, I can give them that.
But my counter argument would be the length of the show, which is something I've never seen anyone talk about.
If you look at the length of the show from like the pandemic era shows and a little bit before then and a little bit after then, they're like an hour long.
I have seen some that are less than an hour long. I've seen some that are a few more minutes, an hour long, but they're mostly an hour long.
It is true that quite a bit back, they were like an hour and a half long, pretty consistently.
We used to aim for an hour and a half. We stopped doing that because it was because there wasn't enough news, basically.
So we went down to an hour. Merch messages got introduced. And roughly around that time, now we have shows that are like two and a half hours.
So I think the percentage of the show that is topics has changed. Sure. Right.
But the show's just longer. Some shows we're going to have more topics to talk about, some shows we're going to have less.
Sometimes that is our fault. Sometimes we miss major topics.
There was a topic that we should have talked about last week where there was this song that would crash.
I really want that is so interesting and so cool. It wasn't in the doc. Yeah, I know.
And that's brutal. So that sometimes it is on us, but it has always sometimes been on us.
We have missed things forever. So I don't know. That's my counter argument. Take it or leave it.
But yeah. I also really like them a lot better than some of the previous ways that we had of of interacting with chat.
Also that like throwing extra money at Google for no reason through super chats or twitch through bits.
I mean, we're we're going to briefly touch on the most recent twitch controversy.
Not going to not going to not going to say too much about it, but I've had enough people message me about it that I've been advised by Riley to avoid.
Yeah, we need to at least acknowledge it. But, you know, whether whether you want to give these, you know, giant fang sized corporations your money or not,
you know, that's that's up to you. But we feel like it's a lot better to if there's going to be overhead,
like to be clear, our take on a super chat is higher than our take on a merge message overall.
Well, but at least it has no implicit profit. So, yeah, so so but at least with a merge message,
the money is going to, you know, the hardworking people at Innovation Tool and Die or pH Molds or our overseas ratchet manufacturer,
or they're going to our local T-shirt printing company or they're going to like they're going to someone.
They're not going to fang. So I I strongly prefer them. And honestly, a lot of people have I mean,
people send us just like really good discussion topics. Yeah, like it's good.
Yeah, I like it. Why don't you hit us with some merge messages, Mr. Bellavance?
Starting with this one from a non just something light and easy.
What was your most embarrassing childhood phase? Oh, Lord.
I mean, well, that was always cool. Wow. I didn't have an embarrassing face.
That was a cool as a cucumber response. I had many embarrassing phases.
I used to suck two fingers like like at school, like I was I was like seven or eight by the time I I didn't do that anymore.
Oh, man. I bet I was a bed wetter till I was like 14 or 15. Like when you are when you are like rapidly approaching dating age and like like like almost at the point where you're like going to sleep in a bed with someone else and you are still like peeing the bed.
It's pretty stressful. I could see that. Definitely. You know, I I don't know.
Maybe it maybe I'm just maybe I'm just I guess internally embarrassed. Yeah.
Yeah. Is that embarrassing? Was the reason why have you ever peed yourself at a sleepover?
No. Okay. And had to like hide your sleeping bag. Okay. Okay. All right.
I was going to say, I don't think anyone else is involved. Tone deaf much. Well, I was going to say, I don't think anyone else is involved.
And I didn't know, like, does embarrassing need to have other people involved?
Can you be embarrassed without anyone else? I think you can be embarrassed. I didn't know if it was a different term through fear of someone else being involved.
I would I would get up at like five in the morning at summer camp to make sure that I didn't need to like stash anything.
I'd go to the bathroom and I would hope that nothing would happen between then and when everyone else would wake up.
Like, oh, man. Yeah. So, okay. There was that there was that period in high school where I was like, man, man, I was weird.
I did like weird stuff, like not just dyeing my hair. Like I did this thing once where I bought metallic gold spray paint and I spiked my hair and I spray painted my hair like metallic gold and went to school like that.
That looked cool. It sounds like it might have looked sick. Yeah. I mean, that's embarrassing. Well, I'm embarrassed now.
Why? I mean, it sounds sweet. I don't know. Okay. Here's the thing, though.
Whether or not something is cool, it's not a function of what the thing is. Right.
It's a function of who's doing it. So was spray painting your hair gold? Cool.
Sure. If somebody else did it. But I wasn't cool. So it wasn't. I still would have thought that was pretty sick.
Yeah. Well, I wish you went to my school. Then we could have we could have met earlier.
I could have had some muscle protecting me back then and would have been a good thing for me.
I don't know what you would have gotten out of it, but something. Yeah. Yeah. I looked it up and I guess it is pretty independent of what I thought.
I thought embarrassment had like you had to be embarrassed because of whatever. But embarrassment can just be a feeling of shame.
So that would mean that it is kind of irrelevant. Doesn't matter. Actually. Oh, this is fun.
This is not related to the merch message, but I actually had my former high school reach out to me today.
The high school, like the school itself? Yeah. Well, the principal of the high school, which I guess functionally is the same as the high school reaching out.
I follow my old computer Twitter teacher on Twitter and he follows me, too. He's really cool.
So, like, I'm very that's actually awesome. That's pretty sick. Yeah. So this is this is the school I went to.
The Garibaldi school community has a rich and diverse history. I don't see a ton of diversity in there, but.
Bell's hiding from the mic.
Then they go on to talk about how they are on the shared unceded territories of two of the BC First Nations.
So. Yeah, that, I guess, is diverse. Anyway, they have some notable graduates.
And this was really cool because I had absolutely no idea that some of these people, like, existed.
Check this out. This buddy is the world record holder in tree climbing.
And he went to the same school as me. This is absolutely wild. This is him.
OK, check this out. Eighty feet. Ready, set, go. Holy. He I don't think I could crawl that fast on level ground.
He looks like an actual animal, like a bear. Is this when they have the like rope around the back or whatever chain or whatever it is?
Yeah. Yeah. Look at him come down to apparently they can go as fast as 40 miles an hour coming down.
So he stopped competing in that and started competing in other events.
That's pretty cool. And then even though there's this other event that's like, oh, yeah, here, here, here's a good still of it.
This is this is this is wild. This is wild. Check this out.
So you have to make yourself somewhere to stand and chop off the top. Well, you have to make yourself two places to stand.
You cut in and you put the plank there and then you stand on it. Yeah, that's right.
So he was talking about I was reading like an article about him and he was talking about how compared to the other guys who compete in some of these chopping events.
He's like almost 100 pounds lighter than some of them. Like, like tree climbing.
Yeah. All the dudes are kind of small like him. Well, small ish, like he's 5'10 or 5'11.
It's not small compared to me, but whatever. The point is, he's like, yeah.
So in that event, I made sense physically. But in these other events, I, you know, was a bit of an odd one out.
And so I had to make up for it in precision. Let's take a moment to observe that nobody is watching Buddy over here anymore because he's already done.
Unbelievable with an axe. Anyway, I've never really, I don't want this to come across wrong, but I've never really cared about what another person who I feel like has been arbitrarily put in the same group as me has accomplished.
Like, I don't, I don't feel like a sense of, of pride that another Canadian ran really fast. Like, I love, I love watching, you know, high level athletics.
But I don't, you know, I don't feel like I necessarily have anything in common with that person.
I always cheer for Canada at the Olympics, but that's mostly just like, because it, well, what else are you going to cheer for?
It makes it slightly more fun. Everyone else on the couch is cheering for Canada. Are you just going to sit there and like.
Oh, no, I don't. Right. Like, I usually watch the Olympics alone these days. Oh, wow. Okay. That's uncomfortable.
Just a lot of other people don't really care. My mom and dad do. So like, if I watch it with them, that's cool. But yeah, I don't like, I'm not like, oh, if the Canadians lose, I'm not like, oh my goodness.
I lost. I'm taking this personally. Like, no. Yeah. So it's, and like, I have relatives that are on like huge ancestry kicks right now.
Like, did you know your great, great grandfather did this? And I'm like, I guess it had nothing to do with siring me.
I like it. It didn't, it didn't make me like smarter or faster or stronger or.
What difference does it make to me? And I know that culturally for a lot of people, that kind of stuff is super important.
I think it can maybe be inspiring in certain cases. Like if you're like, oh, someone in my ancestry went down some path of expertise or education or whatever.
Maybe I can do that thing. But it goes the other way, too. Like, you'll hear about people who feel a sense of shame that they, you know, are distantly related to some traitor or criminal or whatever else.
Like, you didn't commit the crime. You're good. Yeah. Like you seem, you seem chill. Everything's, everything's good. But it was, it was, it was kind of fun.
It was kind of fun going through and looking at some of the, some of the other former graduates.
I think it says a lot about the high school I went to that the, there was like 15 people and the school has been open for like 70, 70 years or something like that.
It also, I mean, part of that is like, did they actually check in with what everyone's doing?
No, no, they didn't. That's going to be a huge part of it. And you know what? This might be something that they're just now starting on, like going through and trying to figure out where the heck everybody's at now.
I would also potentially argue that they might be very focused on physical competition and business success instead of potentially other things.
athletics was pretty big at our school. Nothing that I could compete in. It was all rugby, volleyball, basketball. Yo.
There's a, there's a role in rugby that you actually wouldn't really get at.
Yes. Just like there's a role in rowing that I could technically participate in. No, the rugby one's like major.
Because he has to like get the thing or whatever. Yeah, but I'd get killed, Luke.
My, one of my buddies, you met him at the LAN. He was the guy with the really disgusting keyboard.
He, he played that role. It's called hooker. I wasn't sure if I wanted to say it or not, but it's called because they use their heels.
Yeah. So he played that role and I played eighth man.
And there was one game where I was already super pissed off because I got a clotheslining penalty while I was actively on my knees.
Yeah, it's rough to be tall, Luke. I feel so bad for you. Being alpha Chad, you know, gigantic guy so you can clothesline people on your knees.
Oh, woe is Luke. Yes, carry on. Please tell me more. I should not have gotten like removed from the game.
Yes. For something that was very obviously unintentional. Tell me more about your father.
I mean, my dad's also a Chad. Yeah, I know. Right. But I had to like throw people off of him because they were, there was like a dog pile basically.
Yeah. And they, they wouldn't get off him. And that's one of my like favorite memories is like, get off my friend. It's ripping these people.
Yeah, but he could have been damaged at the bottom of that pile. That's what I'm trying to say.
He's a durable fighter. He's actually terrifying. He trains like MMA and stuff.
Oh yeah. I'm, I'm not terrifying, dude. I'm not terrifying. Yeah, but you could be. Oh, speaking of being terrifying.
It is now, I believe, confirmed that we have an upcoming channel, Super Fun, where I will be fighting Dennis.
Like actually? Like sparring, but. Okay. But yes. Are you guys going to like where, okay.
So many questions.
What, okay. What kind? I believe it's going to be like Taekwondo sparring. Okay. Yeah. So going to like a place for this.
I mean, we'll have to go somewhere. Yeah, we'll have to go. We are going to allow takedowns though, but like no, no ground brawling.
So we'll allow takedowns. We'll allow, we'll allow sparring and the stakes. Oh, go ahead.
You have a pretty fancy belt in that, don't you? I'm a black belt in a different, it's kind of like it's a mixed.
Okay. I don't want to call it a mixed martial art discipline because MMA has taken on a very,
very different definition over the last 10, 15 years. But it is, it does not fall squarely under Karate or Judo or Taekwondo.
It's a mixture of different disciplines. So yes, I do have a black belt. However, it has been a big fat 20 years since I trained.
Yeah. There's a few things like that for me as well. So I'm a forget some stuff, but let's talk about the stakes because this is pretty fun.
As you guys probably remember from, I believe it was last one show Dennis with some help from buddy Colton did some damage to the hardwood floors in my house.
I've had some people reach out saying that there are ways that you can repair even tongue and groove flooring by apparently like precision routing out the board.
And then like gluing down a new one and like, yeah, it's not like done right anymore, but it looks pretty good cosmetically.
So there might be there might be ways to fix it without completely sanding down the whole floor.
So maybe the cost will be less than I thought. But what I will tell you is at least here in Vancouver,
getting anyone to even come quote a job that small can be a very can be very challenging.
So we'll we're going to we're going to pursue it. But yeah, it might it might not be it might just not be practical to get the floors repaired.
So the stakes are that as restitution, if I win, Dennis will do eight hours of any chores at my house.
But obviously I had to put something up to. Yeah. Yeah. So because I am pretty confident,
I offered up an equal bet eight hours of chores at Dennis's house if I lose.
So we have a full day of basically doing any work around each other's household at stake here,
which I think is going to compel both of us to prepare for this pretty.
What I'm upset about is that when I've done things that you haven't liked in the past past, we have not ended up in a ring.
What is going on with this? Why is there unfair treatment of employees? I'm not I feel personally wrong.
You're in such a different class. Freaking guy. No, I'm not fighting you.
The one time he looked angry enough to hit me. I ran. Not only ran, I left a fence.
Yeah, I was I was getting away from the other one. I was like, you didn't run.
Connect for stuck in a car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Almost got you.
You did. Which is why I left the fence because I can't I can't do them in speed.
It's going to have to be agility, boys. By the way, I just want to clarify this.
A lot of people are commenting on LMG clips that if I don't want people to wreck my floor,
I shouldn't have video editors moving my furniture. I didn't know they were in my house.
He did not actually ask them to do that. I feel like I feel like there was just a lot of anger directed at me in the comments of that video.
Bill, did you look at the comments under that video? Yeah. Subscribe to LMG clips.
But the comments were all over the place. I just couldn't fathom it.
And it wasn't it wasn't one of those things where you know how it is right where you'll read a thousand comments.
And the three mean ones are the ones that you remember. No, it was like a lot of them.
And I'm sitting here going, how did you guys get this so wrong? I didn't ask for this.
I I'm just confused. Why? Why did they I didn't I haven't watched I've watched bits of it.
I watched Dennis fall on the stairs like forty seven. They moved the bed to troll me by doing a bad job of painting a wall in my house because they know I'm particular about paint finishes.
Got it. And then they did paint the wall. And then they did paint the wall. They paint the wall. And they did do a bad job.
OK. So mission accomplished, I guess. There was just a fair bit of collateral damage.
You should have had a lot of feet. People are asking who picked the challenges. They picked the challenges.
I didn't know anything about it. Like I don't know what it is, but I feel like I feel like there's this assumption that I
micromanage everything that happens here or that I somehow dictate the way that we do everything you even could.
There are 80 people working here. That would be a lot of work. Yeah.
There's another there's another really big one I've seen lately. I saw a lot of this on the power supply tester unboxing.
What is with Linus always asking how much of my money you spent. It's a really simple explanation.
There's particularly a handful of people internally. Jake, Kyle.
Trying to think of who else loves memeing on this. But there's there's a number of people internally who love memeing on any time,
any time they buy something expensive, they'll bring me over and be like.
Look, how much of your money I spent. I'm just like, come on.
Like it's it's people it's people memeing and the number of psychological at an analysis that I've seen of of of of my behavior around talking about it as my money when it's company money or or or using it as or using it as a way to to put others in their place or whatever else I'm sitting here going.
Whoa.
Whoa.
Let's all slow down. I mean, I guess I guess it's one of those things where people don't have the back story.
They don't know that that we're memeing. But I guess what I would ask is if you're not sure, maybe don't assume.
Not sure about what? Like if I'm if I'm subjugating people.
Oh, like using microaggressions. Yeah. I don't know. It's.
People like the my money lingo, maybe why it strikes people wrong. Right. But that's what they do. That's what they do.
They they they they talk about it that way. And I mean, if we want to get if we want to get really if we want to get really technical, you're right.
It isn't my money. Yeah. It belongs to Linus Media Group Incorporated, which is held by a hold code that I don't even know the name of because it doesn't really matter.
It's just like a legal structure thing. It's a hold code that I want to call Yvonne Umbrella Corp. But I haven't really gotten a lot of buy in for that.
But it's a vote for it. Yeah. It's held by the same hold code that also holds float plane and also holds create a warehouse.
So float plane streaming service, create a warehouse, merch run by Nick. And so, yeah, yeah, the money technically belongs to that company.
But if we were to choose not to invest it back into the company, which I think we've made very clear over the years that we are super into.
The second that I pay income tax on it, yes, it actually does become my money because Yvonne and I own the company outright.
So I could call it that, actually. But the reason that I do is not to make any kind of point to anybody.
It's because people internally think it's frickin hilarious. To rub it in my face when they are spending my money.
So there's the full context, guys. I don't know. It's just been it's been those two videos in particular.
There's just been some pretty wild theories about, you know, why I'm doing the things that I'm doing when actually it's what is it?
Occam's razor. Sometimes the forget I forget I forget which razor it is where the simplest and malice or whatever.
Not that one where the simplest explanation is generally the right one. The correct one. Yeah, it's Occam's razor.
What do you want to talk about next? There's still actually a lot on the docket. There is there is.
Oh, I didn't know this at all. Did this like really recently get added to the doc? Starlink V2 will connect directly to cell phones.
Oh, cool. That is cool. That's super cool. So you could like be on your.
Because it's not Wi-Fi. It's like, wait, why would you even so what hasn't like the hotspot by direct going to read?
I'm not sure. OK, tell me more. Musk and T-Mobile CEO Mike Sivert.
Sivert. Going with Sivert. Roll with it. Yeah, I love it. Announced on Thursday that the next generation of Starlink satellites will launch with the capability to provide Internet connectivity.
Internet connectivity, period. OK. The partnership is called Coverage Above and Beyond. T-Mobile says in the US.
T-Mobile says in the US, but Musk says worldwide. Interesting. Got it. Musk at the live event said there will be no dead zones anywhere in the world for your cell phone.
It will save lives. That is actually arguably valid. That's super cool. Yeah. There's even like I drove pretty far into the bottom.
I rode, I guess I was not doing the driving pretty far into the interior this weekend.
And there was many times I didn't have cell signal for a very extended period of time. Yeah, for sure.
And like if something happened, honestly, there's a lot of cars driving by. But like if we went off road for whatever reason, something happened like could've been pretty bad.
And like, yeah, you can say you should have other things with you, but a lot of people aren't going to do that.
Any 5G cell phone will be able to take advantage of this service without modification. It's actually interesting.
T-Mobile's contribution to the project is a portion of their 5G spectrum called mid-band PCS for a balance of speed, capacity and penetration.
Ideal for device-dense metropolitan areas. No, not limited to continental US, which in this case, which has always been confusing to me, and maybe someone will explain it, does not include Alaska, even though it says continental.
Yeah, Alaska's on the North American continent last time I checked. Yeah, because remember when we did Highlander?
It could be that they've drifted off toward Russia. Remember when we did Highlander, it was like the second tallest mountain in the continental United States.
And I was like, isn't there tons of taller ones in Alaska? And they're like, nope, doesn't count. I'm like, oh, weird. That's actually a thing.
Oh, I just, I don't understand. I see. Yeah. Anyways, it is not limited to that. Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico and territorial waters are all covered.
Per Musk on Twitter, connectivity will be two to four megabits per cell zone. So it will work great for texting and voice calls, but not high bandwidth. That makes sense.
The service will be beta trialed in selected areas at the end of next year and will be included for free with some T-Mobile plans. That's pretty cool. That's cool for T-Mobile.
Tesla vehicles currently connected to the AT&T LTE network will also be able to connect to Starlink V2 for a speed increase. Tesla breakdowns in remote areas will no longer leave drivers stranded without a signal. Interesting.
Cool. There's a discussion question. Is the two to four megabits per cell zone figure per user or in total? Will other cellular carriers around the world cooperate with Starlink?
Will Tesla drivers have any control over their connectivity when crossing international borders? All legit questions.
These are all very good questions. You can't answer it all. Yeah, we have no way of knowing. I mean, I think that I think that SpaceX has done has shown that they have a pretty clear idea of what the path into the future is for Starlink.
In terms of the actual infrastructure itself. But with respect to how billing works, how crossing geographical arbitrary lines on a map works, there's there's still so, so, so much to be sorted out.
It's exciting to me. I really like this idea in general. I hope Starlink over time is able to come down in cost. Just talking to a bunch of people. I know a lot of people that would move to less densely populated areas more quickly if things like Starlink were more easy to get, including a story that I don't think I'm going to get into for reasons that I'll maybe explain to them later.
One of the floatplane employees has been thinking of moving somewhere that's actually super cool. Yeah, but there's major Internet hookup issues. And Starlink came up, but then availability of getting it there is like kind of potentially a problem and all these other types of things.
And I didn't see the end of that story. And there's reasons why I don't think we should talk about it. But yeah, like being able to enable people to move more places and to hopefully make it less a requirement for career advancement to be in densely populated metropolitan areas.
Yeah, that'd be awesome. You can go now, by the way, if you want. Where am I going? Just away from leaving. Yeah. One of the YouTube commenters said they just feel so sorry for you on the WEN show. They feel sorry. Like you can tell you just don't want to be in the chair anymore.
Oh, yeah. I just want to. Oh, yeah. I just want to. Oh, it's terrible. A little bit more body language analysis going on here. Sorry, we were talking about this before the show. Yeah. Oh, boy. Do you need to have some birds to take care of or like, actually, that stuff is done.
Oh, do we have an update on the burbs? We are done. Okay. So for two weeks, it's a long period of time. Have you told people about this on stream much? I don't know. I know you talked about the smoke hurting the birds, right? Yeah. I don't know if it was pre-show or main show. I can't tell.
Okay. Well, we're getting an update on Luke's burbs health issues. Yes. Yeah. I have two small birds. They both got sick. We were thinking we're fairly certain that they both got sick because of smoke inhalation.
No one, my roommate nor myself, nor my girlfriend smoke in the apartment. My girlfriend and I don't smoke at all.
It's not us, basically, you know? But there is considerable, like very considerable, like I start getting headaches from the amount of secondhand smoke that I'm getting. Smoke floating into our apartment from people that smoke below us in the apartment.
And smoke can kill birds extremely quickly. Both of our birds weigh roughly 30 grams and are like mostly made of air because of what fills feathers and stuff.
So they don't have a lot of mass to like deal with processing that type of stuff. So they can just like take them out. They both got sick. We think that was why did some stuff to better like seal the apartment.
So less of that starts coming in and needed to feed them antibiotics for two weeks through syringes where we had to catch the birds.
This is like almost like trigger warning level, like upsetting content warning. Yes. Go ahead and describe it. It's bothersome.
So they have really bad low light vision. So we turn the lights down. So it's very, very dim and I can barely see, but I can see. They can't see. I have to catch the birds and I have big clobbering hands and they weigh 30 grams.
So I have to try to not crush them. But I also have to hold them firm so that they don't squirm around with their wings and break a wing.
So I have to make sure that they can't move their wings, but I'm not crushing them. And then I have to hold their head in place so they can't get away from it.
And then my girlfriend, I have to take the syringe, which has like just a plastic and it's not a needle, but I have to take the syringe and work it into their beak and feed them the medicine.
And the one was hilarious because I would catch him and then he would complain, which would involve opening his mouth. So it's really easy to deal with.
He's funny. And then the other one is more on it. And he would not complain, but he would close his eyes, which was always heartbreaking.
If I had him in my hands, he would try to get out of the grip and he would try to bury his head in my hand, which was sad, but also cute.
But yeah, he would close his eyes, he would close his beak and he'd tuck it. And it made it really hard.
And that was, they were clearly upset about it. We'd have these moments where they'd be like making it very clear they were upset.
One of the things they do when they're angry is they spread their little wings out. Little 30 gram thing is like, I'm big!
Come at me bro! It's like basically like me doing it.
Yo! Come on! Come on you like bats! Come on dad motherf***er!
But then there would always be like a moment later where they're like, okay, we're cool.
But doing that for two weeks, like they were clearly very unhappy about seeing hands.
Like if I was talking to them near their cage and I moved my hand on my leg, you'd see the bird go like, sup, what's going on over there?
So that was unfortunate, but that's over now. So very happy about that.
Yeah, you know, I, Floatplane chat was talking about this. I never really thought about how kind of dark the canary in the coal mine saying is.
And like the use of birds for that, but it totally makes sense now.
Like I always just thought, oh, canaries have a particular sensitivity to whatever particular gas was a problem in that particular type of mine.
I never really thought about that generally birds just do have very little actual mass.
So any kind of toxin just knocks them out, just takes them out. Yeah, really fast.
And like when they get sick, they try to hide their sickness because there's this hunting thing where people will talk about how like,
I don't want to misquote this like lions if they're hunting zebras. Sure.
They'll often go after the like weak ones or whatever.
But the reason why they do that is because it's the easiest one to individually identify.
Oh, so they just all know it's not going for that. It's not because it's weak. It's because they can all identify it.
So there was there was a problem where there was like researchers that were they would add like a tag to a zebra and they would find that those ones would just always die because the lions would get them every time.
They weren't weak. They were easy to identify. So there's something with birds where they will try to hide that they're sick.
Right. Yep. So it's really hard for us to identify. And there's like little, little things that you can you can kind of pick up on.
But they try to hide it. But something about the canary in the coal mine thing. I know this is not a tech topic, but I'm going to share my screen really quick.
Yeah. I thought this was really cool.
Canary in the coal mine oxygen tank, a canary resuscitator. So the miners felt bad for the birds. No way.
And they made little their little tank and it has an oxygen tank built into it and they can bring the birds back.
Shout out. I knew there were good miners somewhere. And like, yeah, it's like they a lot of them actually cared.
That is so cool. Yeah. And like it's still rough, right? Like it's not it's a tough job, but someone's got to do it.
And I'm not saying like you should use animals for whatever. And I don't want to get into those types of topics, but I just after getting birds, this conversation came up and I looked into it.
And the fact that I don't know what the heck this is. I don't know what that is, but that is.
But the fact that they like cared and some of the people went and made this thing, I just thought that was really cool.
That's and they gave it a little perch. Yeah. It's comfortable and stuff like, I don't know. It doesn't look like the most comfortable.
No, and it's very small and yada, yada, yada, yada. But it wasn't like they just like let it die and didn't care.
Oh, true. Scott says it wasn't due to the feelings about birds. It was due to a shortage of canaries. That honestly makes sense.
But I'm going to think of it. Thanks, capitalism. Darn it.
Canary shortage. All right. I still think it's cool. Why don't you hit us with a couple perch messages?
It's brutal. From Aaron. Do you know at this point if Lab 32 will be obtaining accreditation under a standard for their testing for credibility or anything like that?
OK, so they ask ISO 17025, I don't know if they're competent at testing calibration laboratories, a sure must for credibility.
Honestly, I'm going to leave that to I'm going to leave that to Gary.
I mean, if it's just a matter of us having our own internal best practices that we publish, not even best practices, our own internal policies that we publish,
where we publish how often we check calibration of our of our tools or whatever else, then if he thinks that's good enough, then I support it.
If he thinks that's not good enough, then I support that, too. I mean, that's the thing about hiring experts is you've got to kind of trust them one way or the other.
And so far, man, that that whole team has been just like a dog on a bone every time I'm like, hey, could we do this?
Like, OK, I had the idea, like toilet idea, right? I'm like, man, with the way that SSDs are going from SLC to MLC to TLC to QLC to PLC,
I mean, we're going to have five bits per cell soon, which has a significant impact on write performance to the NAND flash, right?
I'm like with the way that SSDs are actually in a way getting slower and with the way that Internet speeds are at the same time getting way faster,
it could conceivably happen that your system SSD could be a bottleneck when downloading games.
Like you could actually like there could be some validity to buying a gaming SSD because you need to be able to sustain a hundred and in some cases,
one hundred and twenty, thirty, one hundred and fifty gigabytes of constant data flowing in.
I mean, here and here and even Bumble Bumble North America, you know, I always love hearing Japanese people talking about how fast their Internet is now cheap.
It isn't like, well, the whole world can't be Tokyo. OK, so I mean, even here in North America, we're getting residential Internet connections that are two and a half gigabyte.
Now, that's two hundred and fifty megabytes a second, which sure, when we look at the marketing data for SSDs doesn't sound like that much.
We can do seven thousand megabytes. Right. But can you do it sustained, though?
Can you, though? And so I was so I'm messaging Gary, it's like middle of the night. I'm like, hey, here's an idea.
And he's like, oh, and the other thing that I that I wanted to look at was the other like toilet idea I had was the standard for like Cat5e or Cat6a cabling or whatever else is, you know, X amount of speed at Y distance.
Right. And I was like, yeah, but does anybody actually test that? Like, what if this adapter like doesn't doesn't do 100 meters?
That would be a good thing for people to know. So I so I sent him over these things and he like immediately responds, which he's not like supposed to because he's not working.
But he's like with this like long thing typed out, he's like, yes, we have actually considered both of these and we will we will be adding these to our test suites for like these categories.
And this is the part of the lab that we're going to build it out. And I'm sitting here going, why do I even why?
Why do I even send these messages? Because clearly you guys. OK, to be clear, I have actually come up with things they didn't think of.
But no, I'm I'm really, really, really, really excited to have a really talented team working on this.
We're I've some of some of them are public now. I've seen a couple comments. People have noticed we never really announced it, but they have quietly noticed that our keyboard guy, Antoine, has a pretty cool work history, as does our audio guy, Sam.
We are very serious about the talent that we're recruiting. And.
Yeah, it's going to be good. Yeah.
You mentioned Japan. I did. Matias asks, hello from Japan. Oh, sup Matias, Matias J.
What's your most memorable tech experience from your visit to Japan? P.S., we still use fax machines daily in the office.
Well, but are they Internet connected fax machines running at one point six terabits per second?
No, probably not. The airport Wi-Fi was pretty crazy. Yeah, I I forgot about that completely.
The airport Wi-Fi was mind blowing, actually nuts. And this was back when, you know, here in.
Oops, I think I bleeped in the wrong spot. Well, whatever.
North America, our airport Wi-Fi was like barely functional at that point in time, because I was going through purging some pictures.
Right. Like a week ago or something. And I came across the airport Wi-Fi from when we were there because I took a picture of it.
I was like, this is insane. At that point in time, not now, but back then, that was faster than some people's Internet that I knew personally.
Oh, yeah. At their house. 100 percent. Like, that was crazy.
Sorry, everyone's virgin ears. My most memorable tech experience, I mean, I'm going to cheat a little bit and I have to say the Omron factory tour.
It was it was it was such a moment for me where all of a sudden I was getting insight, not just into that switch that Logitech sponsored us to go watch being made or Omron, the company.
But I got far more insight than I was expecting into the Japanese work culture and quality culture.
Yeah. It's just it's different from the Germans who we had just visited at ZF and Cherry.
It's it's it's different, but it's like it was these two completely different paths to exactly the same goal.
And doing those two tours back to back, roughly, not quite, but you know what I mean, was really cool.
It gave me it gave me a ton of respect for the the dedication to quality that culturally, at least within within these companies.
Right. You know, obviously you can't just paint with broad strokes, right?
Yeah. You know, everyone in Japan is X or everyone in Germany is Y.
Like, it doesn't work like that, obviously. But it was it was very cool just seeing how proud they were of the redundancy they built into the switch.
They said, yes, it's extremely precise and it's very high quality. And the best part, there's two of them might drop.
Right. I remember specifically I don't know if this end up on camera or not, but I remember specifically having a conversation about like one approach is excessively high quality.
Do it once. The other approach is really high quality. Make it redundant.
Yes. That was that was the German approach versus the Japanese approach in a nutshell, having seen, you know, the manufacture of precision mechanical switches in both countries, essentially.
Question here from Adam. I have a quick question regarding satellite Internet systems for gaming here in Australia. Our broadband network is terrible, especially in rural areas. And I was wondering how viable Starlink would be in terms of latency.
It's not great. It's it's it's just got to go a long way. And, you know, yeah, Australia also just is a really long way, like even across the surface area that have wildly better Internet.
Yeah, well, it's not excuse. Figure stuff out, Australia. Well, it's a long way. OK. The excuse is that long of an underground cable to serve that many people is expensive. And I'm not saying it's a good excuse, especially for what Australians pay for their Internet.
It's a bad excuse. Australians get hosed for Internet and I have felt bad for them for a very long time. There are other countries that are in just as bad of a situation that or similar, I guess, that have way, way, way, way cheaper access to way better connections.
I don't know. That's it. Ben Rousey says, finally, New Zealand has great Internet. Well, Australia sucks. That's over in floatplane chat. Is that true, though? As far as my understanding goes, yeah. Well, that's I don't necessarily know. Well, that's not very neighborly. Maybe they should share their pipe.
OK, to be clear, they are completely separate countries and not actually that close. I don't know enough to say that it's great Internet or not. But many years ago, the last time I looked into this, it was faster and cheaper.
I don't know, though. It's been a long time. All right, then.
From Bennett. Hi, Linus. I prefer manual screwdrivers, but my friend prefers electric ones. What made you decide to go with a manual screwdriver instead of an electric one?
I mean, they both have their pros and cons. The big thing for me is that I'm well, not the big thing for me. I'm really used to using manual screwdriver. I always forget to charge things. I really wanted bit storage in the driver and really organized.
And obviously, if you took up the internals with a motor and a battery, it would be a little more difficult to do that. I don't think it's impossible for us to do a motorized screwdriver at some point in the future. But it would have to be there would have to be a reason for us to do it.
We'd have to have identified something that we can do better. In the case of our manual driver, it was really clear to me that the perfect combination of ratchet feel bit storage and ergonomics had not yet been achieved.
So that was what we set out to do. But with a motorized driver, just because I don't personally use them, it would be less obvious to me and I would really need to spend some time trying to answer that question.
I think there's also a sacrifice, like you're gaining speed and potentially also power, but I think you're giving up a certain amount of control, which like computers are still a relatively small electronic, I don't know.
And one of the big things with computer screws in particular, I mean, to be to be clear, it's designed for you to work on anything. But one of the things about computers is most of the screws are pretty short.
So to think that an electric driver is going to help you go a lot faster than like this, I legitimately often all you have to do. Yeah.
Question here from Rowan. Linus, you often say Nick is going to kill me for showing this about prototype LTT products.
Sure. Yeah. But why? What's the reason for keeping the business under these products under wraps?
The reason is that it creates a bunch of demand for products that people can't buy.
And what if that product's like two years out?
Yeah. What if what if someone's like, oh, well, I was going to place an order, but that product's not available yet. So I'll wait.
I'm annoyed that I have known about Skull and Bones for 10 trillion years and it's still not out yet.
Yeah. So there you go. Like it's I completely understand his perspective. I just get really excited about things sometimes and I really want to talk about them.
So that's how he and I end up butting heads occasionally.
And to speak more specifically about the Skull and Bones thing too, like what we were shown in like 2017 or whatever looked like, oh, we're probably going to have a game very soon.
But it could be the same type of thing with this type of stuff.
I mean, the screwdriver was like that for sure.
Exactly. If you have a version of the screwdriver that like works and you can show off and it's like, oh, wow, that looks really close to being done.
And then maybe there's a hiccup here or a misstep there or whatever happens.
Some company falls under that you were working with. So now you need to work with someone else and things change and things happen.
And and it can be very frustrating as a consumer. So you just don't really talk about it until you're more confident that will be coming soon.
We talk about that in the video that is going to be accompanying the screwdriver launch. The difference between making one screwdriver and mass producing a screwdriver is colossal.
And we learned a lot. We learned we learned a lot. Oh, oh, I need to talk to you guys about something.
OK, so I've talked through already about I've talked to you guys already. Those of you who watch regularly will know what I'm talking about.
But I've talked to you guys already about my issue with preorders, right? When you provide money for something that has not yet been seen, you are essentially inviting a company to screw you over.
They could they could cut corners on the product before delivery. They could just not deliver it. You are you are essentially giving your money interest free to someone else to hold it.
And who knows? Right. So. We haven't taken preorders on backpack or screwdriver.
With that said, I've talked about how these have been major, major investments for our company.
So with backpack, what we did was rather than make it preorders, we did a small pop up shop and we opened up orders after the pop up.
Once people who bought the backpack legitimate real world actual customers had had some time to review the product and leave their reviews on LTT store dot com.
So at that point, from my point of view, that is that is a backorder. That's not a preorder.
The bulk of the shipment is still pending arriving at our warehouse, but there are real backpacks reviewed by real customers that are available to anyone who's looking to make a decision.
And thankfully, that strategy has paid off really well because the reviews are excellent.
And, you know, as you guys have probably seen, we've sold over twenty thousand backpacks already, which is a huge, huge relief and a long way toward the break even point in the project.
As I said earlier, I think we're going to see another big boost once they're actually in stock.
And as we head into the into the holiday season and gift giving season and all that.
So overall backpack success. It's been it's been a relief.
Yeah. Anyway, screwdriver. Now, what we're planning to do tomorrow is we're planning to have a live stream.
I already announced that we shipped to Project Farm already. Right. Yeah. OK. So we are going to do a live stream tomorrow and we've got two separate dates that we could go live with screwdriver preorders.
Do you mind to set up a poll? Yeah, please. OK, awesome. Thank you.
We've got two different dates that we can go live. We can either go live at the moment that the live stream goes up where we will be allowing.
I mean, I can't say completely unsupervised because when things are live, spicy stuff can happen was going to talk to you.
I know. I know it is what it is. But well, there's some potential solutions. Oh, OK.
This is actually a good time to bring it up because I wonder what other people think. So something that we could do is have it so that like we have a producer.
Yeah. And the stream goes to a rig and we can either cut out parts or mute parts if people say things that are like.
Obviously not good. And I don't mean about the screwdriver. Oh, that could be construed incorrectly.
Yeah. I mean, like someone walks up to the mic, grabs the mic and just starts yelling a bunch of like stupid, ridiculous things that we wouldn't want on our channels ever.
Not that it like with nothing to do with the screwdriver. Because that could be bad.
Yeah. OK. So to be clear, the point would not be to censor any impressions of the screwdriver just to make that abundantly clear.
But is that is that like OK or no? I mean, because the original idea of having it just on float plane was to try to make the impact of that potential reality less.
But now you guys want it on YouTube. Yeah. And that's.
Because we would have essentially the whole idea was to not have editorial control and now we would have some amount of editorial control.
It's for a good reason. Yeah. I'm wondering what the community thinks about that.
I think that overall, we've had really good experiences with our community at in-person events. We have never had a problem with that.
And that's not to say that it'll never happen. I'm sure it will at some point.
But I think that by and large, the kinds of people that show up at an event like this are are not looking to, you know, to to hurt people for no reason.
So I think that from my point of view, we should probably just go with a straight live feed.
I think that if anything were to happen, we can just cut that out of the VOD.
But that would be that would be in the VOD, not the live stream, because for me, the important thing is that where that live stream is going to be set up.
So it'll be I believe it's a two camera set up one for the person.
They'll be probably small in the corner. And one overhead is at a desk where we'll have screws and wood and some computer components like dead ones from from Free Geek,
where people can actually use the driver and give their firsthand impressions.
That's the idea behind the live table. Cool. You guys are still working with Free Geek.
Yeah, those guys are those guys are great.
So here's the idea or here's the question. Should we go live for back orders during the live stream?
If you guys are sitting there watching people's impressions, we're we're not able to control what they say.
If they don't like it, they're going to say they don't like it. If they like it, they're going to say they like it.
Or do you guys want us to wait, give people a couple days with it, a few days with it and go live with our back orders?
Maybe like Tuesday or Wednesday, like sometime mid next week.
I'm going to leave it up to you guys, because we've had a fair bit of debate internally about which date is right.
So we've got our poll going up on float plane. Yes, when we go live, it will include the black version for backorder.
Show the results. Let's see what the people think. Good lord. They are quite split on this.
Yeah. Well, I'm actually pretty surprised. Now, a lot of wow.
A lot of people are it's it's like quite settled in at 60, 40. Yeah, that's wild.
Do we does here. Well, we'll wait for people to vote a little bit more and we should probably we should probably provide like to Stropel still work.
I know we were having a lot of problems with a different one. I don't think it's thought me anymore. Oh, yeah, it's like gone.
Yeah, I think it's not calm now. Oh, OK. Is it like the same or what?
I think sort of. OK, create a poll. Here we go. Schedule meeting.
But there's a schedule meeting button on struggle. I don't even know.
Yes, you would still get an email notification. The email notification would just go out the moment that we open up backorders.
Yeah. OK. Bump, bump, bump, multiple choice. Here we go. I'm just going to wear it the exact same way.
Your admin rights are only temporary. OK, I think that.
OK. Yep. Yep. Twitch, you're getting a poll. You're getting a poll. I'm dropping it in there. I'm working on it. I'm working on it.
Here you go. Here you go. I got to confess, I thought that it was I thought that it was fairly.
I thought it was a fairly simple matter that if people were there giving live impressions like it's not.
I don't feel like this product is as complex as a backpack. I feel like you can learn a lot of what you would need to know about it from using it for five or 10 minutes.
Is it comfortable? Is it, you know, whatever. But but, you know, we've had some debate internally.
We've had some people that agree with me. We've had some people that take the other position.
So the only conclusion we could come to was to just have you guys decide, because at the end of the day, I personally just wouldn't care.
Because, like, I understand the people that say wait a few days, but I would just personally wait a few days.
Like, I don't know. Right. Yeah. I don't know. So, yeah, I mean, it's up to whoever.
I just like if I would be interested in seeing, like, oh, someone took it home and like really thrashed it or whatever and whatnot and like, OK, that's cool.
I'm very slow about making purchasing decisions, though. So that's just me. Yes.
That's that's a thing forever as a kind of slow. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
But like, that doesn't impact when I think they should go up. Like, I don't.
But we'll see what other people say. All right. It looks like it is basically split 60 40.
Well, actually, 57 to 58 percent. Wait a few days.
Forty one percent during the live stream. So I think it's I think it's that simple.
I think basically we just leave it. What were the percentages? Sorry. Say again. Fifty eight percent.
Wait a few days. Forty. Well, it's moving a little bit. Forty one percent. We probably shouldn't bother multipole in the future because it's one percent off.
Yeah. Clearly didn't make much of a difference. I mean, you never know. We have seen cases where the sentiment around something is very different within the floatplane community versus this one.
The broader sample size of one is stupid. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, I got to I got to tell you guys, like I would have I would have preferred to do it during the stream.
I think it would have been pretty hype and pretty fun. But putting it live a few days later is not the end of the world either.
So that's what we're going to do. We did kind of rush. Sorry, Luke. To get don't apologize to me to get a lot of work done.
Just in case we were going to be in case we were going to be launching tomorrow and we're not doing that. Thanks. But yeah, he got done.
Got it done. Yeah. Rob, the tank says it's not an issue of trust. It just seems pointless to not do preorders, but then backorder it before reviews.
Well, that's the thing. Like I, I thought that form of review people standing there, that's a form of review, saying whatever they wanted was was pretty solid.
OK. All right. No zero. We will not be doing that forever. Sorry, I do like I'm one of those peeps that would wait until what was his name?
Farm. Project farm. Project farm. I would wait until like a project farm or someone like that got their hands on it.
So but but again, that too, I don't care what it's available for backorder in that situation.
I would wait for whatever my mark is for some people that might be text version of reviews or people have taken over a few days for some people that might be like another independent creator or whatever.
But yeah. Oh, speaking of ordering things, someone I don't know what your username was. I copy pasted part of the part of the thing and not the whole thing.
Someone apparently wants to order twenty eight backpacks. Don't pay full price. We'll sort something out.
Contact customer care. Give us a little bit. We're working our way through the well, maybe they have like their whole team or something like that.
I don't know. I like not not not personally. You're not just going to like make a wall out of back. I will never back bed.
I plan to live three hundred years and I will never use any other backpack. Go.
No, I don't think it's like that. But yeah. Yeah. Make sure make sure you get in touch with support. It could take a few days.
We're working our way through a pretty colossal backlog ever since the backpack launched.
It's been a little heavy, but we should be mostly caught up by the time screwdriver goes live, which will then probably.
Apparently it's a yeah, it's a whole office. Yeah. Some people said they they saw the comment. Got it.
I that's a super cool like office gift. Yeah. That's like super cool.
As baseline as possible, as calmly and as balanced as possible, I'm going to bring up.
Some people have asked about the warranty for the screwdriver. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We have all the wording done here.
Is it going to be posted? It'll be on the product page. Cool.
Is it currently Conrad? But no, I don't think it is. I don't think the actual description is on there yet. OK.
Here's the product description. Work in progress. Will that be on the product page before we start taking the preorders?
It's already done. I just need to find it. Find the wording. OK. I'm going to read it to you.
So cool. None of you guys cover your ears.
Oh, my goodness. This is the wrong one. Did he send it to me in teams or something? Sorry, I need a minute.
Oh, my God. Why is it doing this? Maybe I can try to find another topic. Yeah, sure.
Gaming hardware prices are all over the place. Too late. I got it.
Here's the final copy approved by legal. The LCD screwdriver is covered by a limited lifetime warranty against breakage due to defects in materials or workmanship for the usual and customary life of the tool.
The limited lifetime warranty does not cover bits as they are considered a consumable item. Tools which have been subject to abuse, misuse, negligence or improper storage.
Tools which have been used improperly, e.g. using the screwdriver as a pry bar or a hammer, especially ratcheting screwdrivers.
Guys, come on. Tools which have been altered in any way. Normal wear and tear, including breakdown of materials over time, cosmetic damage, including scratches or changes in the finish of the plastic handle.
Products purchased from unauthorized dealers to complete your warranty claim.
You'll send the product to the address provided by our customer service team. Freer to warehousing preserves the right to inspect your product to determine if it is subject to this warranty.
If we determine that your product is covered by this warranty, we will add our discretion. One, repair the product at no charge for labor or parts to replace the product with the same model product.
Three, replace the product with a comparable product should your product be discontinued or otherwise unavailable or four, provide you with a voucher to be used toward the purchase of other products on LTT store dot com.
In order to make a warranty claim, you must be the original purchaser of the LTT screwdriver from LTT store dot com or provide a copy of the original proof of purchase.
I thought you were going to wrap God partway through there. No, no, not so much. Just going for it, sending it.
Some people are asking, so at the event, it's limit one per customer, right?
Uh, oh, I didn't really think about that. Yes. Is it? Okay.
So people are wondering if there's a limit when you're doing the pre-orders.
Oh, I don't think there should be. I don't think so. I don't think there should be because we're going to have a hundred thousand of these freaking things.
Like I got some screwdrivers to make. I can understand maybe limits at this event just so you don't sell out before the end of the day.
Yeah. And maybe near the end of the day, you lift the limits or whatever. Yeah. I mean, this is not like a major scalping concern.
I don't think, um, it there, they could be kind of short at the beginning, but our production capacity for screwdriver is higher than our production capacity for backpack.
Um, about like a lot coming. We have a lot. Well, okay. We, we have a lot coming, but there will be, there will, they're going to kind of come in waves like backpack.
And there are certain parts of the process that can be bottlenecks and, and that could be delayed.
So if you want to get it, um, if you want to get it, like, like get an order in, but also I don't think it's going to be necessary for us to say limit one per customer.
If you want to buy one for your friend or like buy some for your office or whatever else, then by all means go for it.
Good old Mape has a good point. Uh, definitely not hoping for a limit bulk ordering for a few people for shipping to New Zealand.
Yeah. And you can expect shipping to be a lot lower worldwide on the screwdriver. Cause it's a lot smaller.
Uh, Nick has confirmed there is no limit online.
Okay. There you go. Yeah. Cool. I see a lot of people commenting about why there is no warranty on the bits.
Um, that's, that is industry standard. There's, there's, there isn't a warranty on, on bits.
Um, if you, if you wear out your bits, which are made of S2 tool steel and screws are specifically made of materials that are softer than, than bits.
The idea is that the screw is supposed to wear before the bit.
Uh, if you do manage to use that bit enough to wear it out, uh, the idea would be that the cost of a replacement bit would be fairly negligible.
Uh, we're going to be selling bit packs for, I believe, uh, it's either $6 and 90 cents or something like that.
$6.99 online.
Yeah. Nice.
Ah, took me not that long, but a little bit longer than I'd like to admit.
It's a really aggressive price considering how many bits are in a pack, but I.
That's cool.
I had to, I had to mean.
Always down with the aggressive pricing.
So they'll be, they will be, they will be available in different types of packs. There'll be one that is the default loadout.
Uh, there's one that's like all like Phillips focused.
We've got a list here actually.
We'll have.
Metric hex bit set, Phillips bit set, Imperial hex bit set, Torx slash security Torx bit set and specialty bit set.
I'm assuming the specialty bit set has like been in the, like the Y and all that weird stuff.
Ben Mitchell asks, uh, is there some kind of weird shipping situation, like the stickers or the backpack?
Would it be cheaper to just order separately or should be bulk order? You and your friends should order together.
Uh, for the screwdriver, there were enough people confused by the backpack, how we were shipping part of the order and then billing and shipping the backpack separately later that we've canned that this time.
Not for backpack. Backpack will stay the way that it is just to avoid confusion, but screwdriver, your order will ship complete.
So it will delay other items you order. I want to make that abundantly clear now.
Uh, especially because screwdriver were a lot more solid on when it's going to start to ship backpack.
Like we had one of the shipments, we had one of the shipments get delayed by four weeks.
Fortunately, one of the other ones got moved up by two weeks. Yay. It worked.
So we should, assuming nothing else changes, still be able to hit our, um, we should still be able to hit our shipping windows on them.
I wonder how many backpacks are floating in the port of Vancouver.
As always, we will strive to under promise and over deliver. So take that for what it is. We got you.
And speaking of taking things for what they are, uh, we screwed up with a story last week. The Apple ads story.
Uh, last week we were covering a story about Apple's personal personalized ad system on iOS following a report claiming Apple plans to prioritize.
You keep doing that and it. Oh, I'm so sorry. I, I wait while I read.
And it's not, it's not the fact that the text changes color. It's a fact that it like it's Google talks.
It says the name of who it is and it puts that on top of the words. So it makes it literally impossible to read.
But Apple plans to prioritize growing its ad revenue from four billion to ten billion dollars a year.
Wouldn't that be nice? By increasing the amount of ads Apple users see, even on subscription only services like News Plus.
What we got wrong after trying to set up a new iPhone and noticing and not noticing any pop up requesting tracking permission.
Linus accused Apple of following a. I mean, I did go through the setup process.
It wasn't an entirely unreasonable thing for me to think that it isn't. Yeah, I did.
I did like say a bunch of times that we didn't really know, but accused Apple of following a rules for the but not for me type of approach.
Since third party apps are required to present such a pop up when the app comes up.
A user. Famous exam or 207. OK. Nice. Pointed out on the LTT sub Reddit.
Apple displays such a permission pop up when opening the app store.
So we didn't get to that part. As of iOS 15, it claims Apple does not track you or share your personal information with any third parties.
We're thinking the Apple does not track you prompt is is basically saying that it doesn't track you across third party apps and Web sites, which they which they indeed do not do so.
So what we should have said, Apple plans to increase the number of ads shown to its users just after it instituted stricter privacy rules that weakened its ad reliant rivals.
So it's less just blatant toxicity and more like antitrust stuff. As we said last week, Apple's ad revenue has tripled as competitors have dropped.
The issue here is not Apple being hypocritical or increasing user tracking. It's that they are using their power and reach to fundamentally alter the mobile ad industry in a way that benefits them.
That's fair enough. But I would still argue that like they're they're playing the same game.
Yeah, but they're just increasing their make the rules of the game, which are which are good, which are we want these, which are better.
Yes. Yeah. They're better rules. They're good rules. Well, you should be happy about these. Yes, they are. They are. They are better.
I think we'd all rather have just like less ads on devices. A thousand dollars for.
But I don't think there should be any ads like the fact that there's ads in Windows is insane.
Samsung TVs. We did a review of one recently and literally like when we press home on the TV, it was either 60 or 70 percent of the pixels were ads on a device that you purchase.
That's crazy. So I'm not I'm not defending that. That's actually like super ridiculous. I hate it.
It makes me want to have not smart TVs, especially because smart TVs are often like so slow and incapable that I don't want the stupid TV to have built in stuff anyways.
Just let me do it with my own devices and whatnot. But anyways, that's a different topic.
Yeah, there's a lot of questions about screwdriver. Oh, boy. Hold on a second.
No, if you order additional items, they will not be sold out while you wait for your order to ship.
They will be put aside and they will be marked as as as sold. Spanner security bit. That's going to be in the FU bit set because it's the one where manufacturers say FU.
So that includes like tri-wing and like stupid stuff. Is that the specialty bit set? Yeah. Oh, sorry. Internally, we call it the FU bit set.
It's not from us to you, from the manufacturer to you that you should even need them. Yeah, I'm not even like, are you sure about that? That's the specialty bit set?
Yes. Okay. Okay. I believe there's a spanner in there. Okay. Yes. Bit sets will be released at the same time.
Garron Ninja. Yes, there will be Robertson bits. If you know, you know. Superior, superior Canadian technology.
Man, there's a lot of people asking questions about this. I just got to I got to scroll. I got to scroll. There was another one. I think I oh, I might have scrolled past it.
Okay. Well, at any rate, there you go. Yep, I'm over it. I'm not going to find that last one.
All right. So. Yeah, I guess that's it for the Apple thing. The other thing, Apple doesn't track you outside their own ecosystem, but they don't need to when their users increasingly stay inside their walled garden of hardware, software and recurring revenue subscription services.
Yes. Okay. Not not unfair, but it's not unclear either. And that that is, I think, the the main place where this could be a problem is if they have the pop up and it's clearly stated and you say yes, then you're saying yes.
And if they have the pop up and it's clearly stated and you say no and they only ask once, I think that's cool. All right. I don't know. Whatever.
Riley does note that it still feels a bit unfair to me that Apple can ask you once for permission to track you across all their apps and services, but other companies have to ask you again for each individual app.
Yeah, that is a slight advantage. I don't think there's a ton of companies that have a bunch of different apps.
Anthony is also mad. I would argue that due to the bundled nature of Apple's applications and the permissions that they have by default, any ad served to you by them constitutes an unfair advantage, especially if you're asked the moment you open the app store.
Also, I've been getting ads in Apple News Plus despite paying for it, and I hate it.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with the Apple News Plus thing. I don't understand or agree with it being bad that it pops up when you open the app store.
Well, no, he's upset that it only happens once, that you're never prompted again. So it's like, I mean, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I have never noticed it.
I've never noticed that that's what they're asking me when I first opened the app store.
And I would have thought, oh, okay, I haven't, I haven't used iOS 15. I would expect to find it in the setup of the phone.
Me too, which is why I got us to try that.
So when it wasn't there, I was like, it's not here.
I would read the prompt and not want more pop-ups. I can understand why people might want more pop-ups.
As long as there is a prompt at some point, I don't necessarily mind it.
I also think I would probably side with Apple on this one, which is against Riley and Anthony.
Come at me, bros. In the needing other developers to ask every time, because that sounds like a system that could be abused.
Like some, some new thing trying to sign up under the account of some other like bro company that they're friends with so that they can skirt this thing because they think everyone's going to be okay with this one app, but not with this other one.
That would absolutely, there's lots of paths for abuse. So I wouldn't, I do not want that personally, but it's okay for Apple to have that abuse vector.
It's, I mean, yeah, to be completely honest. So, cause it's pretty obvious when you're installing an Apple app and when you're not right.
Riley didn't say, I don't think it's, I don't think it's a hidden thing that you're installing an Apple application or using an Apple application.
This is my whole point. So like, I actually, I'm going to take that back and say, no, I don't think it's the same abuse vector.
Cause one of them, I'm talking about them like cheating and, and, and abusing the system.
And that's why I don't necessarily want the system to exist.
But the other one is if you're using an Apple application, you're probably pretty darn sure it's an Apple application. So you know what's happening.
I don't know.
Okay.
I don't like ads to be super clear. I'm not reading the chats. I don't know how people are taking this.
I just don't like, I have always been a proponent of wanting to, I think there's a lot of things you can go after Apple four.
I don't think it's good that they're increasing their ads. I think it's reprehensible that they have ads on this news plus thing that apparently Anthony's paying for that blows.
I would be super pissed if I was a user of that. I think there's a lot of things to go after them for here.
I just, to me, the prompts thing is like, I don't know, whatever.
Anthony is updating the doc in real time.
I'm watching that. I want to see it.
It's an issue with the app store thing because I would associate that prompt with the app store, which I might want to track me to recommend apps.
This is instead system-wide, which is an unfair advantage that Apple has.
It is.
It's a different set of rules.
That is pretty minor.
Well, he's not happy about it and he's a user.
That's fair. In this case, that's fair.
And the fact that you are served this before even being able to download any additional app, Apple or otherwise, is pretty sketch.
You have to look at this even if you don't look at any Apple apps.
Because of his point about I want to get recommended apps, but I don't want to get recommended ads, I think that's fair.
If that wasn't a thing, then I don't know.
But I think it is fair because of that.
What else do we have to talk about?
Oh, we're hiring. We're hiring more social media people.
Must live in Canada already.
Also, we're still trying to hire another writer for MAC address.
Jonathan Horst doing a great job, but he needs some help.
Let's go. Let's go.
If you think you've got what it takes, we'd love to see your application at linusmediagroup.com slash jobs.
Yeah.
If you want to edit MAC address applications, linusmediagroup.com slash jobs.
That's actually, that's not it at all.
That's pretty fun.
That's really not it.
That would be great if it was.
Not even a little.
Okay, so the only thing we're going to say about hashtag Twitch respond is that that is a developing, an absolutely developing story right now.
Basically one Twitch streamer who was banned from the platform for an offense related to like hate attacking someone else's stream.
Permanently, permanently banned for the offense has called out Twitch for a perceived difference in their application of rules depending on the gender, race or any other of the lines we use to divide ourselves from each other.
And I think the only thing I really have to say about it for now, because as we have here in our doc, it's very much a developing story is that Twitch does have a problem to solve with respect to even application of their community guidelines.
YouTube's having the same problem right now.
It's genuinely, I have never even heard of this hashtag.
I have no idea what creators are involved.
I don't know what's going on.
All I would say is that it is actually a very difficult thing because it's one of those things where people will look at this company as like a person or a single entity.
But you have to, you have to figure out the actions and resolutions of an entire team of people that is managing this.
I'm not saying they can't do better.
I'm just not surprised that there's problems.
I mean, all we need to look at to kind of end cap a discussion about Twitch's opacity when it comes to application of their rules is the Dr. disrespect ban.
What's even happening there?
No one knows.
Yeah.
No one knows.
And it's quite possible.
My understanding is some kind of settlement was reached.
So it's quite possible that the world will literally never know what happened there.
I have no idea.
And that's another thing that I know nothing about.
I didn't follow it.
I don't know.
I just don't care.
Apple extends the self repair program to add M one and pro and max Mac books.
After the successful launch of the self service repair program that initially targeted iPhone 12, 13 and SEs Mac books are finally getting parts availability and the parts available are actually surprisingly comprehensive.
I'm going to read them now, logic boards, displays, batteries, track pads, keyboards, key caps, touch, 80 sensors, hinges, screws, lid, angle, sensor, Meg safe board, antenna module, vent module, fans, coolers, audio board, flex cables, uppercase, and bottom case.
The fact that they actually have chassis components available is impressive.
That's the only word I can really use for it.
I have not seen that before.
Steam deck.
Can you buy a chassis for the steam deck?
I'll look it up.
I want to check that because I know I've had, I know I've had conversations with Microsoft around that surface component that we bent trying to get it open.
And they were like, no.
So the fact that Apple is making these available is pretty freaking cool.
With that said, the tools provided are similar to the tools provided for phones, including the option to rent a toolkit for seven days at $49.
They do back plate and front plate.
Hey, good guy.
Val 25 bucks each.
While purchasing these parts for ourselves, we noted that it was possible for M1 max skews to purchase logic boards that did not match the original configuration.
So additional memory, more GPU cores and more storage were all available.
It was also possible to purchase weaker configurations, including M1 Pro.
The store indicated that we would only get a $378 40 cent rebate from downgrading our most expensive MacBook Pro to the least expensive option.
It's not clear if this is a bug or not, but the fine print says that selecting the wrong parts may prevent completion of the repair.
So it sounds like they might actually just ship the wrong thing if you order the wrong thing.
Pricing in general appears to be high considering the cost of the devices themselves, presumably to prevent people from simply assembling their own MacBooks.
Not that they could anyway, because the parts are locked behind a serial number filter.
So go f*** yourself, Apple. Discussion question, would this kind of parts availability have completely prevented the iMac Pro saga and reduced it from a massive undertaking to merely quiet grumbling at pricing?
Yes.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
I mean, it was like a $5,000 computer or whatever.
I would have, I would have gladly paid $500 extra for a logic board just to be able to fix it.
That was what I asked for at the time.
I still think that there's absolutely room for them to do better, but this would have prevented most of my anger.
I think our last big topic is gaming hardware prices are all over the place.
Yeah, I think there, there might have been one other one, but I don't really remember.
Let me find this one.
Yeah.
Nvidia says that excess inventory is dragging down its balance sheet. I wonder why you have excess inventory. You said it wasn't because of mining.
I can't imagine what else it could be.
Jensen mentioned this during their Q2 2023 earnings call. To deal with it, Nvidia will reduce the number of GPUs it sells to manufacturer, manufacturers of its GPUs, also known as board partners, and laptops so they can clear, clear put?
Clear out.
Ah, you put your thing there again.
They can clear out existing inventory first.
Nvidia has also instituted programs to price position our current products to prepare for next generation products.
Price cuts coming.
Very good.
Let's go.
That's cool.
Especially because they're already back down a fair amount.
They got hiked. Not only was there scalping that increased pricing, both from retailers and people, but there was also MSRP price hikes during the big mining push, so it coming back down is good.
Jensen also hinted at exciting next generation GPU update in September.
I look forward to next month's GTC conference where we'll share new advances of RTX reinventing 3D graphics in gaming.
Cool.
I don't know about reinventing, but sure.
Meanwhile, Sony is raising prices of the PS5.
We're seeing high global inflation rates as well as adverse currency trends impacting consumers and creating pressure on many industries, says Jim Ryan, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Could be as much as a 20% increase for disk and diskless models in every major market except the US.
Is it still impossible to get one?
Back in July, meta slash Facebook increased the price of the Quest 2 headset by 100 pounds.
That's a 33% increase, and Microsoft is currently the good guy.
They announced there will be no price increase, but did state they are constantly evaluating the market, so an increase could come further down the line.
It sounds like the Game Pass subsidy is going well, essentially.
Jose LMG, I don't know what you mean by variable tax products, but we don't use Squarespace for our store, so it would be a Shopify thing anyway.
Sorry.
They just keep posting this in floatplane chat.
Oh.
Yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
Yeah, I just looked right now, and PlayStation 5 on Best Buy's website, bestbuy.ca is listed as coming soon.
Yeah, I know, right?
Oh, there was other big Sony news.
It's not in the dock, but they're getting sued big time.
Yeah, each consumer might be able to claim back $600 because of the alleged overpricing of games, but the thing about games is maybe this is going to be an unpopular take, but I don't think you can overprice a game.
You don't need it to survive.
It's not food.
It's not water.
It's not shelter.
This is a luxury good.
If you don't like it, you can buy some other game.
I don't really understand this, to be honest with you.
How do you get $600 for that?
Well, it's over an enormous span of time.
I thought they had the same price games as Xbox.
I don't know the details.
It's not in the dock.
It's a UK suit for the UK store, so maybe it was just a matter of the currency conversion or whatever else.
I feel like there's something more.
If they win this, basically any product anywhere that got an unfavorable currency conversion is going to be affected by this.
This could be an enormous, enormous precedent.
And the problem with that is that it could result in a big issue for particularly developing markets where they get lower pricing that is essentially subsidized by developed markets.
If you force companies to charge exactly the same around the entire world, on the one hand, yes, you in the UK or we in Canada or in the USA or wherever else, we might get better pricing.
But there's going to be a whole world of other people that are going to be adversely affected by this.
Apparently, they listed a $70 game for 70 pounds instead of converting $70 into pounds.
These are like 80 USD in the UK, so that increased by $10.
Part of it as well is like the Apple and Epic thing of the 30% commission.
Therefore, they're overcharging because they're just adding a commission to the sale price of a game.
Sure.
So I think this is going to be this is going to be a complicated one, and I'm going to need to give it a little more thought, do a little more research before I have a clear idea of which side I stand on because it's obviously not cut and dried.
It says much due to locking into the PlayStation Store, much like the App Store suits.
Yeah, I need to know a lot more about what's going on here.
Yeah, that is part of it that there's that there's so it's kind of following up on the stalemate, I guess is what you would call it between Epic Games and Apple over the fact that there are no alternatives to that 30% cut, which does it is baffling to me that any consumer was siding with Apple on that.
It literally costs you anywhere from whatever percent to 30%, somewhere between zero and 30% more to buy things from a monopolistic seller.
Okay.
You shouldn't be a fan of that.
That's bad for you.
For you.
Yes, you.
Unless you're an Apple shareholder, in which case, I don't know, maybe you're coming out.
Maybe you're coming out even or coming out ahead.
I don't know.
Oh, we should do some rich messages.
Hit me, Bell.
Not too hard.
First one here is from Skyler.
How did the both of you handle being interrupted while in a workflow?
I get distracted for a long time.
Yeah, it depends.
Sometimes it can really derail me to the point where it's like, I think it depends how much of a groove I was in.
If I was like really flowing really well and I was moving quick and someone derails me, I can find it hard to get back there.
But if I wasn't in as, and it's like very frustrating and it's like mentally taxing, but if I wasn't in as good of a groove and someone derails me, I find it easier to get back to at least there.
That might sound like a weird comparison.
So if I'm doing like really well and someone derails me, I'll get stuck doing bad for a while.
If I'm doing okay and someone derails me, I can get back to doing okay pretty easily, if that makes sense.
Yeah, hopefully that makes sense.
Question here from Anon.
Been watching since the beginning.
Has there been any tech that has come out since you started doing this that you've considered life-changing?
I mean, I guess smartphones existed before I started making videos, barely. Barely.
It was close, but technically, yeah.
Yeah, technically, yeah. So what would be life-changing? I mean, fiber optic internet, super life-changing.
Ooh, RTX graphics. Nvidia, am I back on your good side?
Is your life RTX on?
What is that article? Did you live slightly longer with RTX in your life or whatever that was?
I don't remember that from forever ago.
Just buy it. That one, right? Yeah, yeah. Man, life-changing.
I think practically nothing, to be completely honest.
Electric car is kind of life-changing for me. Like, I don't go to the gas station. That is a change in my life.
Yeah, I don't have one, so it doesn't count for me.
There's, like, really minor stuff, but I don't think it changed my life.
Like, I guess technically almost anything could change your life. Having this conversation changed my life.
Jaden posted in Floatplane Chat. When you look back at your life, how much of it do you want without RTX?
Yeah, what a ridiculous thing.
I think one of my favourite things to now exist is just way better induction charging.
Like, having my mouse that is wireless and never needs to have battery changes or be plugged in or anything like that is great.
Did you just do that? Nope.
We'll see how this goes. What's next?
Anon asked if we've considered having a run of left-handed screwdrivers.
They are very ambidextrous. We don't need a left-handed screwdriver, but thank you for the suggestion.
From Jet, back in the day of YouTube Originals, were you guys ever approached to start a new series?
No. We kind of came up with some ideas that I thought were sort of cool.
Like, back when YouTube was, like, 60% pranks, I thought, like, tech pranks would be kind of neat.
So each episode would be setting out our goal, working on whatever technology we need.
One of the ideas was, like...
Oh, I remember this. You had me developing theories for this.
Yeah, yeah.
This was a long time ago.
I tried to kind of pitch it to them a couple of times, but there was never really any momentum.
So we would come up with, like, harmless, like, nothing awful, but, like, harmless pranks that were enabled through some combination of technology, hardware, and software.
And then you'd have, like, a payoff.
And some kind of learning outcome, like, you know, oh, and we did all this with an Arduino, or we did this or we did that.
But it didn't really get off the ground.
I remember a couple of those.
From Noah. Been watching for a long time, and we know a lot about you guys, but we don't really know you.
What's something that we might not know about you that we really should?
Why don't we do each other?
Okay, so we both know too much about each other.
I also don't know, like, what people might know.
People might know something.
I don't know.
I don't know what people don't know.
Okay.
How do we, I mean, I feel like if I'm going to disclose anything about you, I need to at least, like, make sure, make sure you're chill with it.
Yeah, I can't.
You're on camera so much that I don't witness that I have no idea.
I bet nobody knows that.
No, for reasons.
But no.
Okay, okay, so not that.
Sorry, yeah.
Okay, thinking.
Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe it was a bad idea.
Okay, I'll try to think of something about me.
I don't know.
I'm pretty, I feel like I'm a pretty open book.
What do they not know about me?
I'll tell you what, you can do both of us.
I can't even think of something for you.
You can't?
Not really.
I don't know.
Okay, well I can do that.
That's why I tried to shove it off on you.
Like you said, there's like little, like, I can't think of a specific fact, but I think the statement of, like, we don't really know you guys is fair and true.
Parasocial relationships are bad and you don't see us off camera.
Yeah.
You don't know us.
But, like, the things that I can think of are very, like, uninteresting.
I don't know.
Okay.
I was born posterior.
I don't even know what that means.
It means that I was, I took a lot longer and was a lot more painful.
And my mother reminds me regularly.
Gotcha.
I was extremely quiet as a child.
That's so not interesting.
Like, I think I bored myself just saying that.
I thought you said you were cool.
His farts are really bad.
I don't know if you guys know this.
You have the loudest sneezes.
Yeah, that's actually true.
I have extremely loud sneezes.
And they hurt.
It's, yeah.
Yeah, I think that's it.
This is over.
Next one.
That was so boring.
Sorry.
That was the qualifiers that we really should know.
It's like born posterior and quiet as a kid.
I forgot that qualification.
There is nothing you really should know.
If you should really know it, we have said it.
And that's all you need to know.
I've said some things you shouldn't really know.
Yeah.
Yeah, there was that really awkward thing a couple weeks back.
Yeah.
All I'll say is cigarettes.
From Mattu.
Hi, Linus.
What's your take on the cloud?
Or are you a more on-prem kind of guy?
Seems like everything's moving the cloud,
and I just can't see myself giving all my data
to Microsoft or Amazon.
I do not, other than for work.
There's forms of cloud that aren't companies
like Microsoft and Amazon.
You can form your own cloud.
Yeah, Backblaze sponsored the show today.
Just saying.
You can work with a server hosting provider
to get your own servers and make your own cloud,
if that's what you want to do.
I don't have a cloud subscription service
that's not for work.
I have an expanded drive thing for my work email
that I just get so many emails with so many attachments.
I don't really have a choice.
I'm not going to go through and prune them.
That's not really a good use of my time.
So I just have a big data cap on my work drive account.
But other than that, I don't.
I just store stuff on my own NAS, or I will,
since I conveniently have a super ballin'
internet connection at work,
that I can just set up servers on the other side of,
I can just back up stuff there too.
Question here from Anon.
Linus, one time during a video,
you had a Dale Jr. NASCAR driver hat on.
Are you a NASCAR fan?
No, that was given to me by Ivan.
And I asked him, what the f***?
And he didn't really, as I recall,
have a great explanation for why he gave me that hat.
Sounds about right.
Yeah, or he did have an explanation,
but it made no sense to me, so I don't remember it.
That's also possible.
And I think that is pretty much it for the WAN Show.
We will see you guys again next week.
Same bad time, same bad channel.
It's a bad time and a bad channel.
Bye!