Boom, we should be live on the Wan Show, I'm gonna yet again pull it up on my phone because
of the should that I just, did you get them?
No.
Okay, you guys are gonna witness some fly hunting throughout the show because there's
one that just will not leave us alone and I believe Lewis is gonna murder it before
we're done.
But to introduce people here, Lewis Rossman, fighter of Apple, repairer of everything,
what's your like channel and stuff, what various callouts?
Rossman group with two S's and two N's.
That's a good way to do that.
Level one techs, Wendell.
How's it going?
Linux Master Man.
Oh.
Oh, hit me now.
Ready to go.
This will be a recurring theme.
It's a big one too.
Oh, it's been feeding for a while.
It would be an honor to be assaulted by Lewis Rossman.
Yeah, he'll repaire it afterwards.
I'm also down to be a target.
Just go for gold.
Yep.
Let's go.
I'm down.
Right on the face.
I love how you're like, I'll take it and then it goes, okay, here we go.
Right here.
Yeah.
Okay.
Any other callouts?
Any other callouts you want to do?
How's it going?
Yeah.
There we go.
Wendell.
Jay's Two Cents.
You guys probably know Jay.
Jay's Two Cents everywhere.
Yeah.
With a Z.
It's not Jay Z on Twitter.
No.
But if you're going to tag me, tag Beyonce too.
Yeah.
Might as well include it.
And this wench will probably not be super standard.
We have some news topics.
I don't know what almost any of them are.
We know that there's some updates to the MacBook Pro.
Chrome is using more RAM.
Wow, that's surprising.
And some other stuff.
But I doubt we'll get to a ton of it because we'll probably go into crazy tangents and
we might kill a fly.
I'm going to roll the intro and we'll be back in a second.
Private Internet Access, VPN, and Savage Jerky are the sponsors for this show.
I'm going to try to reset this and then go back to main.
So new MacBook Pros coming out.
They have replaced the keyboard.
But as we were talking before the show...
It's not going to fail anymore?
Wrong.
You're not typing wrong?
It is a third generation butterfly keyboard.
However, this design was not intended to solve the recently highlighted butterfly keyboard
issues.
That's a direct quote from Apple, isn't it?
I believe so.
It's not in quotes here, but I believe so.
Well, I mean, there was no problem with it to begin with, right?
You just typed too hard.
So what was the actual...
I generally stay away from those, but what was the actual problem?
Well, people would say that the key is either not working or it'll type 20 times when you
press it once.
And usually people would show up and say, I didn't get any water on it.
It just happened that I'd open it and it would be yellow and brown and ugly.
But some of these look like they're just new out of the box and the keys just don't work
on them.
And then it started to be something where once a day somebody would show up, then five
people a day would show up.
Then when we had like 20 to 40 people showing up a day with the same problem and calling
and emailing about it, I realized this is going to be a thing.
Yeah, yeah.
That's the super shallow, flat, real thin key design, right?
Yeah, it's the thin key that goes, like every time you type it, that really obnoxious, annoying
one.
It's not like a nice mechanical keyboard noise.
It's a mechanical keyboard noise without any of the mechanic part.
There's no bass to it.
It's just...
Yeah.
They just have like this...
I was not a fan of that keyboard at all.
Like I couldn't type on it.
Yeah.
The throw is just so short.
But basically what I'm hearing here is we got a new keyboard, but it could potentially
have all the same problems as the other ones.
Well, yeah, they specifically didn't even roll this keyboard out to fix the problem.
So I assume there will be...
Because it was never a problem.
Right.
I got to put the Apple hat back on.
Do you have a sense that if it's more than like a year old, it's exponentially more likely
to fail unnaturally?
Or is it age related at all?
I don't know.
I think it's even age related because some people showing up with this have had it for
six or eight months and they'll show up and ask if we can fix it because they don't want
to wait a week or two for the Apple store to do it.
Right.
Not good.
Well, just like I come forward.
Just don't hold it that way.
Yeah.
It's just this really weird level of utopianism where I think...
It honestly reminds me of what my history teacher used to talk about with Russia and
the Soviet Union, where somebody would be...
We called it counter revolutionary because they did something wrong and that guy would
get thrown in prison.
And then the guy that was throwing him in prison would wind up getting thrown in prison
by somebody else.
But somebody will say, my machine is getting really hot and I get lines on the screen.
And they'll say, why didn't you get Apple Care?
If you had Apple Care, then it would have been covered.
And then the guy that says that winds up one day out of Apple Care with a machine where
it'll just start randomly crashing.
And he's like, oh my God, maybe that other person was right.
But then he'll post in the forum and they'll go, why didn't you get...
They released the replacement program for it.
Why didn't you get it?
And one of the funny things was the 2010 MacBook where it had a crashing problem because they
used the wrong capacitor.
They released the replacement program in 2013 that only covered the machine three years
from the date of purchase.
And the machine was manufactured in 2010.
In 2010.
So if you were sitting there going F5, F5, F5, F5 on their warranty page, maybe you would
be able to get it.
But if you believe that Apple products are this great, because in some ways they are,
they're easy to use, they use PCI Express SSDs in 2013, they have really great screens,
they don't crash as often if you're comparing its older Windows, and something goes wrong,
you really don't want to believe that the product is bad.
So you either have to admit that they have faults or you have to deny your own experience.
And what drives me nuts is when people will actually believe I'm typing on it wrong.
I'm holding it wrong.
I'm encoding video on it wrong.
And that's what drives me nuts.
It's not that the product itself is terrible, it's that when something goes wrong with it,
people will just treat themselves as if they did something wrong rather than if the company
did something wrong.
Because they truly believe the product is fail proof.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, it's not like other companies don't have faults too, it's just if somebody
buys an HP and that happens, they will yell at HP.
They won't, but if something happens with an Apple product and it's the same fault,
they'll just believe that they did something wrong and it drives me up a wall.
Yeah.
And it's a frustrating experience too, because I've generally liked Apple's ecosystem because
I will send certain people there.
Like for instance, my mom, I tried to get her to get an iPhone, then she got used to
Android, so there's no point trying to flip that over again.
But I tried to get her to get an iPhone because like you said, they're quite easy to use,
they're usually fairly intuitive, all that kind of stuff.
But then when you start having these problems, it's like, oh, okay.
You're spending, with this new Macbook, up to like $7,000 if you want to get the crazy
Macs here.
Wait, what?
Oh, they get pretty expensive.
What?
You can get six cores, 32 gigs of RAM, like four terabyte SSD, so you can get the specs
ridiculously high, which is, I guess, part of the factor, because anytime you tear up
anything in Apple's customizer, it's really expensive.
And there's things that they do well, you know, like if David Bowie was coming back
to life for 20 minutes, and I have one chance to record you've been around again, I would
want to do it on a Mac, not Windows 10.
It's just, I don't want to deal with all these other problems as well.
Windows 10 might try to, you know, like, use Cortana or update, yeah, yeah, some nonsense
like that.
Man, okay, so for LTX, which is tomorrow, we have two guests here from the forum, two
guys that I've never met before, which I think is actually really cool that they're coming,
I haven't seen them yet, but two admins on the forum, and one of them came over here
with his business laptop, and he had a Windows update hit him while he was here, and it bricked
his Windows.
I don't remember the exact details, but he had to rush here in the morning and borrow
a computer and a flash drive so that he could get Windows onto a flash drive so he could
completely reformat everything so he could keep working.
Microsoft genuinely earned the reputation that they have, and they earned the people
that will put up with this nonsense from Apple just to escape it.
I completely understand it.
Well, I've had two systems completely fail on update, to the point to where the system
was completely unsavable.
And I remember getting Windows Vista with a new machine where, when it first came out,
you couldn't even run programs without running an update.
You would just try to open a new browser, and it would just sit there, and then 20 minutes
later it would open.
Yeah.
There's a big, I don't know, it's sad.
Really bad.
My computer was one of the, admittedly, I guess probably over the overall spectrum of
the amount of people that had this happen to them, not that high percentage, but my
computer was one of the ones that, when they forced the upgrade to Windows 10, I wasn't
even at home.
I had denied the upgrade so many times.
Then I was at work, and while I was at work, my computer upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows
10 and bricked itself.
That was when they implemented the, like, click here now before this countdown's gone
if you don't want it.
Yeah.
Because they knew people were leaving their systems on, walking away, going to work, whatever.
You come back suddenly mid-update.
And I had even ran the scripts that are supposed to stop it, but then they'd release some update
that would get around that, and it was just very frustrating.
One thing I've enjoyed this entire conversation is that Wendell has been almost silent.
I take it this way.
If Wendell hasn't said anything yet, we're not wrong.
No.
Well, no, yeah, okay, yeah, I agree with that, but it's just the Linux man.
It's just like, huh.
Linux, there are systems that I have that have uptimes of like 600 days, which is actually
really bad, because there are kernel updates and security updates and stuff like that,
so those machines are potentially a typhoid Mary, but yeah, 600 days of uptime, whoo.
Yeah.
I like running Windows in a virtual machine, because then it's like, oh, look, Windows
update broke itself, I can just hit a button, and it's like, oh, look, it's the way that
it was yesterday.
Nice try, Microsoft, you failed.
One of the things we're actually working on back in my studio right now is, he landed
on my hand right now, so we're going to get him.
Okay, okay, he's back.
We're actually going to do some rollbacks and force updates, and we're going to do comparative
benchmarks to see how much it actually impacts your system, both high-end and low-end, because
there's times when we're doing benchmarks and we're like, what the heck, suddenly something's
weird.
So when we start going really super stuttery or something, we realize, oh, look, a background
process update's happening and it's eating 25% of our resources.
Yeah, Anatec ran into that with their Zen Plus coverage.
The Rise of the Tomb Raider and a whole bunch of games were running as good or slightly
better on AMD than Intel, and it was because they had the high-precision timer, which reading
and writing from hardware registers triggers the Meltdown Spectre mitigations more, I guess.
So depending on what you're doing, you could have a significant reduction in performance.
Right.
It's an interesting situation.
Do you want to talk a little bit about, not too much because we got a video to release,
but do you want to talk a little bit about what you were doing here with Anthony earlier
in the week?
It was exciting.
Yeah.
I spent Monday and Tuesday with Anthony doing Linux stuff, and it's Linux on gaming, gaming
on Linux.
And so we look at native Linux on gaming, which is pretty cool, it basically works,
and then gaming through wrappers like wine and all the various flavors of that, running
12 different versions of wine at the same time easily, and then finally virtualization
and the horizon for doing everything through a virtual machine and not really sacrificing
anything in terms of performance.
So I'm really looking forward to that.
That'll be really good.
We'll have companion guides and stuff on the forum for really nitty-gritty step-by-step
if you want to do Fedora or Ubuntu or Arch or whatever.
And everything he just said is why we were talking earlier about how Apple is sometimes
more easily accessible, running 12 different versions of wine.
Oh, so you're running a game for Mac?
Well, you're going to have to do the Metal API.
Sorry.
It's gotten a lot better now compared to let's say 15 years ago if you wanted to do a digital
audio workstation, Linux was terrible for it.
But it's gotten a lot better.
It's not, you know.
Yeah, it's still got some rough edges.
I extremely rarely do the hip things and go to clubs and stuff.
But the only time I ever will is for one of my friends and on his birthday.
And we went to one place and I noticed that the DJ had a giant MSI laptop with a full
RGB keyboard and stuff.
And I was even thinking like, that's just like weird.
Like I took a photo because I was like, oh, it's cool.
But it's usually a MacBook and even just it was one of the like thick ones because I believe
it was one of the mechanical keyboard ones.
So like this is huge.
Yeah.
It's a massive, massive cumbersome laptop that he brings to shows.
I firmly believe that this like we want laptops as thin as paper.
I don't think that a lot of consumers really want that.
I think consumers like thin and light.
But I think if you tell a consumer, hey, you can get five more years out of this machine
if it's got a replaceable keyboard and it's just a hair thicker, that doesn't seem unreasonable.
You've talked about this a bunch with phones, not to admit that I watch a huge amount of
your content and have since way before I made videos.
But you're talking about how you see a lot of reviewers review a phone and it's different
than consumers looking at a phone.
Yeah.
Thickness, plastic backs, all that kind of stuff.
There's this big disconnect when I read a review and then when I talk to people who
come in and say what they want on a phone, just while, you know, let's say we're fixing
somebody's phone, we can have a 15 minute conversation.
I've never heard a normal person that I've met in real life talk about the bezel of a
phone.
Every single reviewer, they'll spend two or three paragraphs talking about the bezel,
you know, how it goes out to the end and how we find no casing at all.
I've never heard somebody talk about that or care.
You know, in real life they think, you know, it would be nice if I dropped my phone from
here to here that it not break.
They don't care about the bezel or they'll say the back is made of premium materials
but the regular person will say, I can see fingerprints, that's ugly.
Yeah.
Or they're going to stick it in a case anyway.
Yeah.
And it has to, you know, like a phone like this has to go in a case because it's, it'll
crack if I go from here to here and the back of it looks nice but if I actually touch it,
you can feel fingerprints.
The only thing I care about with bezel is whether or not it's slippery without a case.
Yeah.
Phones are getting more slick over time, you know, and that's always bugged me.
But other than that, that's why you don't really see phone reviews on my channel because
I'm one of those people that just don't care about any of that.
Yeah, if you sold a phone, imagine if you, I think that if you put it in a bullet point,
two years from now it will still work, the battery can be replaced and it's not going
to slow down too terribly that somebody may actually consider buying it over something
else, you know.
You have an extra eighth of a millimeter but you can replace the battery.
I have a LG G5 for just that reason, it's, you know, ancient by today's standards but
removable battery and metal back and still has a fingerprint sensor and it's not like
super heavy.
And I see a lot of people say, yeah, but in two years you're going to get a new phone
anyway.
It's like, okay, you may get a new phone anyway in two years, but somebody that doesn't want
to spend an extra two or four hundred dollars isn't.
Yeah, I think G5 is.
I used to be, I'm sorry, I didn't, I used to be an annual upgrader, but not anymore.
Like I'll go, I'll go two years plus and usually the only thing that will make me upgrade is
if I start seeing battery degradation and that's only because I've been on iPhone for
the longest time now.
It's because it's super simple and that's only because it's not easy to service battery
swaps, you know, for an average consumer and user.
I think that design kind of peaked around probably the Galaxy S3 because the removable
battery, upgradable storage, and it still had a plastic back.
And there were cases for it that you could replace the back, like you could take the
back off and have like a leather back if you wanted.
When I was still working in IT, we had an entire fleet of S3s out there and you could
do the extended battery with the extended back cover, you know, we were sending those
out into the field.
Yeah.
I don't, I don't know why that went out of vogue.
Yeah.
A lot of people said, well, the battery life on modern phones is good enough that you don't
need a second battery to get through the day, but that totally ignores the fact that after
it's not even that, that that's not even the issue so much as it is one year or two years
later when it barely has any battery life.
I want, I'm going to keep this thing for longer than two years.
No reason to buy it.
I think more people would buy it if you actually advertise that and I haven't seen anybody
advertise longevity as a feature, but it could be.
One thing in Twitch chat, I posted a poll cause I'm, I'm interested on the exact percentages,
at least for our audience, which is a terrible section if we want to be scientific, but whatever.
I want to see the exact percentages of people that care about ultra thin bezels.
So check straw poll in the chat and S3 specifically, I have one interesting story with that that
ties into what you're talking about with, it should be able to fall, right?
I was, I was at university and I was late for class, so I was sprinting and I ran down
a huge set of steps and I had too much momentum and there was one of those like polls that
stopped cars from going into areas, so I decided I'll just hop over it and I jump and I remember
that my, as I'm midair, remember that my phone is in my sweater pocket, not in my jeans pocket.
It goes flying, smacks into the ground, the battery goes one way, the bat goes the other
way, the rest of the phone goes the other way, tiny chip in the corner, put everything
back together, turn it back on, works perfectly.
What phone was that?
S3, Galaxy S3.
That was a hard phone to break.
Yeah.
And then like I think one of the things that actually helps is that it kind of explodes
and it like, I can't remember the correct terminology for it, but the force of the impact
goes with each part and lets it blow out.
Was it the S3, one of the earlier Gorilla Glass phones here?
Yeah, yeah.
When that actually meant something.
Yeah.
Before they kept making the Gorilla Glass thinner, which then just made it as brittle
as anything else.
Yeah, yeah.
With the G5 where it's got the replaceable battery and still kind of modern, I've replaced
the battery in it twice.
78%.
Yeah.
I mean, it was basically a launch day phone and you just slide it out and slide a new
battery in.
It's eight bucks from China.
Yeah.
That's the other thing.
You can get those batteries so cheap if you buy them third party.
So the poll results for people that didn't click on results when they ended is about
78% of people do not care about ultra-thin bezels and 28, well I guess yeah, 22% of people
do.
That's the experience of people watching a tech review channel.
Yeah.
So it's skewed, but I don't necessarily know in what direction.
It's such a high percentage that like...
We've seen it though.
We've seen these early polls.
You let them go for five minutes or five days.
It tends to whatever, like the first few minutes ratio of the scene, it just goes.
It won't change a ton.
Yeah.
It'll generally stay there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, the thing is if you expose that poll to a much different audience, it might shift
it a bit more, but I kind of doubt it.
I have had a similar experience.
I'm sure you've talked to more people about it, but I've had a similar experience talking
to just friends and family.
Yeah.
Like what would you want in a phone?
I remember reading so many phone reviews for this and I saw one Eli the Computer Guy clip
of a video with his $500 camera pointing at it saying, this is me loading Google Maps.
This is it not lagging.
And I just thought, sold.
Yeah.
Because that's all I really care about.
Yeah.
The things that I do every day.
When I go to hail an Uber, is it going to take forever?
When I want to scroll around, is it going to take forever?
Does the battery last?
Yes.
With phones these days that can play relatively decent graphic fidelity games at relatively
decent frame rates, they can probably open Uber and Google Maps relatively easily.
I just feel like we've progressed so far in the mobile computing technologies and how
passings are.
Like the early days of smartphones, back when I had my Blackberry Storm and the Droid One
was out and the iPhone 3 and 3G or 3GS, it's like back then it was a big deal.
This one scrolls smoother where the Android was choppy and stuff where obviously there
was big variance between the devices, but now everything's so damn close.
It's really hard to differentiate a winner.
It really comes down to the interface.
I think the interface battle is the thing that keeps Android, iPhone, and then I think
like, I'm surprised Blackberry is even still around, but it's still around.
You're the only other person I've met that had a Storm.
That was-
I had a Storm because-
How did you feel about the first generation Storm?
It was terrible.
I never used the- because I think I had a physical keyboard too if I remember correctly.
No, there was no physical.
That was the one that clicked.
That's right.
It clicked.
Like the whole screen went down.
Yeah, but it only had one button in the middle.
Right.
So as you got further out to the edge, you had to go-
It got weaker.
A little bit more of a tilt.
I got it because, I mean, I was on Verizon and we didn't have any other options at the
time.
Yeah.
iPhone obviously didn't come to Verizon until the 4S was out and then-
It lagged so badly.
Right.
It took seven minutes.
When the original Droid came out, I replaced the Blackberry with that.
And then I carried both iPhone and Samsung at work for quite a while.
So I've got a very unique perspective of at least back in 2013, what it was like to be
a dual wielder.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I never had any experience on the other side of the road back then, but I remember when
the first Android butter update came out.
That was the biggest deal I had seen in a while because it massively improved the usability.
I think U-Clair was one of the first ones I was on.
Yeah.
You know what phone was massively underrated?
Was the last generation T-Mobile Sidekick.
I heard a lot of people really liked it.
Yeah.
It ran Java, which is like you would think it would be a pile of garbage because Java.
Especially in those days because that was before Android.
But the thing with the phone is that if it does what you want it to do really well, that
it's a really good phone.
It doesn't need to be a status symbol.
The Sidekick was kind of like, it looked like a toy, but it had a good keyboard and the
screen was decent.
But it also had a color LCD that was reflective.
So you're not going to get photorealistic color, but you could get color.
And so the battery life would last forever, like days, because it wasn't actually having
a backlight unless it was dark outside.
You mentioned status symbol too.
Here's a straw poll that might be interesting.
How many people choose a phone based on it being an accessory or a status thing?
Yeah.
Right?
Because I think a lot of people choose their phone based on where people are going to think
of my phone.
I think it's kind of sad, but I feel like there's a good percentage of people that care
about that.
A lot of people are going to admit to that though.
Probably very few.
It's not really much of a problem anymore, but there was a while there where the pricey
phones couldn't connect to corporate email and stuff like that properly.
And so I was on the receiving end of that and it's like, you need to get this phone
or this phone if you want it to work properly with your email system.
And they're like, I'm going to buy this because it looks like I'm wealthy.
That was one of the reasons why I had the Blackberry to begin with, because when I was
working in software at the time in our IT department, we had all of our own mail servers
and stuff.
We didn't have a standard pop or any of that stuff.
It was the phone that could connect to it.
But I'll be the first to admit that one of the reasons why I got iPhone back when it
first came to Verizon was simply because it was something I couldn't get before and suddenly
I could and everyone had it and I wanted it because of that.
And I literally, it's just stayed with it ever since because I got used to it and I'm
comfortable.
I'm not really a mobile power user and I don't need anything crazy.
By the iPhone 4, it was not completely unusable, but the iPhone 1 that didn't have copy paste,
I just can't imagine that world.
Yeah, see I joined long after that obviously.
Speaking of not being able to imagine that world, we'll start from over here and go across.
What was your favorite phone?
Like at that point in time, I guess.
At that point in time, I think the HTC incredible in 2010 because the other Android phones were
slow and clunky.
I was coming from a Blackberry storm, so six minute boot time, opening browser takes a
minute.
Every time you do something, it stutters and I got that phone and when I would tap something,
it just opened immediately.
There was no lag.
I'm sure if I upgraded to a new version of Android with it or a newer, I shouldn't say
new, it would be slow.
It also actually fit in your hand comfortably.
Very few phones will fit in my hand comfortably now because they're large.
Just really big.
Linus has a similar problem to that.
He likes old iPhones because they're much smaller.
What about you?
I've never had a phone that I like for more than six months.
It's okay for six months and then with the software updates and whatever I'm doing to
it, it starts to run really bad.
What phone had the best six month period then?
Probably the T-Mobile Sidekick, like the very last generation one because you could really
quickly switch between a bunch of tasks.
The web browsing wasn't terrible, instant messaging wasn't terrible, email was pretty
good.
There was one device before that that was like really, it was a little before that era.
It was like a Motorola pager thing.
It was not a phone, but that thing was awesome.
I don't remember what it was.
I had that before I had a cell phone and that was like, because then people couldn't call
me, it was great.
Mine would probably be my S3, I'm going to be easy.
Basically that story was awesome.
The thing was a tank, I had it for so long, I think it still works.
We got close.
It's on your shoe.
I know.
I had that phone for a very, very long time.
I hit him, did you see it hit the ground and he spiraled and he came back up.
You actually hit him.
You got him.
But he's not dead, he spiraled and he flew back up.
I think we're at one love.
He's going to get sucked into that machine and be on one of the fans with all the friends.
You guys can't see that, but that fangirl is pretty gnarly.
Yeah, he's right there.
There's another one right there.
Wait, there's another one?
Yeah, there's two.
There's three.
Wait, there's one over there.
I was so excited.
I felt like my leg was going to be the death platform for this fly and I was stoked.
But yeah, my S3, what about you?
I really liked the S3 just because it was a good size improvement, but I don't want
to copy your answer, so probably my original Droid because I actually played around back
then with a lot of rooting, different ROMs, actually wrote my own soundboard app back
then for playing my daughter's first words and I wrote that for my wife so she could
have it in her phone.
So it was a lot of fun.
But then I think back then obviously there was a lot of limitations to their first Moto
Droid and battery life kind of sucked and early Android wasn't as smooth.
It was clunky.
It took them like a year to make touch whiz, not a giant oligarch.
But my problem with the Samsung phones was the amount of bloatware they came with.
That drives me nuts.
That's one reason why I'm on a Pixel right now.
It's just the stock experience is always preferred for me.
Most other phones that I've had, I've tried as hard as I possibly can to revert it to
a stock-based experience.
I do not like any of the custom UIs.
I don't like any of that kind of stuff.
It's all garbage.
This phone's too amazing.
Let's crap it up, boys.
I've never seen somebody ask, I would like this phone to run slower, please add your
own software to it.
You've never seen anybody ask for the Bixby button?
I would like a little bit more lag.
Well, it's kind of like laptops now where MSI is notorious for a crap ton of dashboards
and bloatware and stuff.
It's like you get rid of all that stuff, it's a good experience.
When you work in a shop that sells, not necessarily a repair shop, but when you work in a shop
that sells laptops and one of your main services is making them not junk out of the box, that's
like a weird place to be.
We have poll results for the question.
Not surprising.
I don't think it's true at all.
You don't want people to choose based on status.
Oh yeah, definitely.
Those people are lying.
Well, it might be a little bit of lying, it might be a little bit of subconscious shifting
where you've decided that you want that phone because of status anyways and you'll justify
it because of performance or feature reasons.
But I think probably the strongest factor is the audience that we have.
Well, there's smartphone MVP, right?
If you have a crappy phone, the guy next to you pulls out the latest version, you're kind
of like, oh, right?
I want that one.
And the same thing, if you've got the latest one, you kind of want to be like, everyone
look at my phone.
You know what I mean?
Because it's sad, but it really is like an accessory.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But again, with our audience though, it's a bunch of PC performance freaks.
I'm not that surprised that PC performance freaks want high performance and high feature
phones.
With this survey across everyone on the planet and everyone answered honestly, I bet you
status would probably be higher than anything else.
Probably.
But with this audience and with natural skewing, I'm not surprised it was 95%.
Wouldn't people really admit that?
Because then they have to admit to themselves, I spent an extra $400 for status and that's
not a pill that I think most people would swallow.
Yeah, it's an interesting question.
Do you buy things for like functionality over aesthetic or aesthetic over functionality?
I think a lot of people will say that they buy something for functionality, but they
might even be buying the aesthetic of functionality, if that makes sense.
If something looks like it's highly functional, then they want that thing.
It's a really interesting mind game scenario because you might be convincing yourself of
something and not even realizing.
There's a dimension of that that's sort of related, which is taking your customizations
and your settings and stuff and that has always been like if you spend a lot of time customizing
your phone or customizing whatever it is to make it exactly just so, you will be punished
because every time there's an update or every time you switch phones, it is super difficult
to get all those customizations from one device to another and it shouldn't be.
That's one of the few things I liked about Apple's operating system is that when you
use Migration Assistant and Time Machine, it just copies everything.
Even the settings within your applications, even your third-party applications, all get
copied over perfectly.
It's truly one of the reasons why I stayed on iOS for so long was simply because new
phone copied from previous backup, restore up and running and everything's exactly how
I left it.
I don't even use the ecosystem.
I don't have a watch.
I don't have an Apple or what's the Apple TV thing.
I don't have anything.
I have no other part of the ecosystem.
I even have a MacBook, but even they aren't connected.
Yeah, Microsoft really screwed the pooch with the registry because the registry was supposed
to be that and also your application data folder and theoretically you can move that
between machines, but in reality, you can't.
It ends badly every time.
You can copy certain features of certain applications, but not everything and you have to reinstall
the applications yourself.
I noticed that when you upgrade to a new device, it doesn't save the apps or anything.
It saves the app data and then redownloads the apps fresh and then repopulates data,
which before it used to be, like you said, a direct copy, which I believe in the earlier
days was even copying the battery data, which was making new batteries perform like poor
batteries because of that efficiency scale.
I did notice that when I upgraded this one.
Yeah, that was one of the worst things like working in a computer shop and you'd be doing
services and someone would buy a new computer and they'd want a data transfer because I
tried to be at least somewhat honest.
I would try to explain to them, this is pretty easy to do on your own, but if they wanted
it anyways, sure, whatever, sounds good, and you go to do it and then you have to tell
them that they can't bring any of their programs and there's just that kind of...
That's a 20-minute conversation and there's like this ratio where like as the customer
is older, the conversation is longer and then you have to explain, well, you have to remember
your own Wi-Fi password and you'll have to do this and that because we do data recovery
and sometimes we can recover it to where you can use Migration Assistant when you get all
their programs and sometimes you can't and I'm just copying your data folder from here
to here and a lot of people, even if I explain to them, you have to reinstall your programs,
your settings will not be the same.
When they show up, they go, where's my stuff?
Yeah.
It's all in this folder?
I'm like, yeah, your music is in the music folder.
Okay, but where's the library?
I don't have my library.
Well, no, it's in there.
You just got to load up iTunes.
I got to load up iTunes.
Yeah, I've had people actually break down with tears because they didn't remember their
email password.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Their email password was in the, I'm like, I can't get you that.
It's like, what am I doing?
Yeah, and the email password is an interesting one too because one of the biggest things
is like they won't have a password manager, they won't have written their passwords down,
which I guess that's good, but they won't know how to log into anything and it's just
like, ugh.
It's painful.
So carrying those sessions over would be super nice.
Yeah, what they're paying for is not for you to transfer the data, they're paying for the
half hour conversation you're going to have about every single program.
Yeah.
There's some people that it's literally, it's just not even worth upgrading the computer
because they would just lose all their stuff and it's like, okay, well I guess I'll deal
with this slow, terrible experience because it's better than losing all my programs and
all my settings and all my logins and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, and that especially winds up being true in broadcast or in the music business because
people will have certain plugins and if you upgrade to a new operating system, they won't
work anymore and you'll have to find alternatives or this program, like once they get a rig
that works, it works and they just, they want to keep it as is.
And that stuff can cost a lot too.
Yeah, like a new operating system will mess up, this is always used to happen with OS
10 and Pro Tools.
New OS, Pro Tools wouldn't work right or it's just, that stuff can be a nightmare for people.
Yeah.
The copy protection, they bury things somewhere on the system and sometimes it's just a software
compatibility thing.
Yeah, both of those things are terrible.
What is it like on Linux that I've never actually tried?
Every single Linux version that I've had has been full, pure from scratch every time.
So that's an interesting question.
I've never tried to migrate from machines.
Mostly it's okay.
So like I have a file that customizes the command line and provides some aliases and
shortcuts and stuff like that and I've been working on that for 20 years and I've never
lost it and it's great and it's just like the best thing ever.
So it's like literally 20 years of preferences in that file.
Other stuff...
That's the most Linux thing I've ever heard.
Other stuff, not so good.
Like other stuff, the migration is a little bit more of a pain.
One of the things Ubuntu has done recently is they have this thing called Snaps and so
because you have this version of this library that this program needs and you need a slightly
different version of that library for some older program, that can be problematic to
run those combinations of things.
And so one of the things that Snaps does for you is that it packages all of your dependencies
inside this file, which uses more space, but makes it aware that you have to worry about
being able to run those things less.
So in terms of like, I want to migrate all my programs and just be able to run it with
those kinds of technologies, generally you're a lot more successful.
But like a lot of the things with like Caden Live, Caden Live is a great example because
we get lots of support requests for Caden Live on our forum.
Caden Live is a great program, but 90% of the problems with Caden Live, not actually
Caden Live, it's the libraries, there are bugs in the libraries and so you can have
audio sync issues and things like that.
And that is just the libraries on the system.
And so Snaps can help with stuff like that on Ubuntu and other technologies on other
distros can help with that.
So it's very user respecting, but it's still not quite as slick of a solution as it could
be.
Right.
I am going to take this slight intermission to do something that I actually completely
forgot that I had to do, which is sponsors.
So just give me a sec guys, sorry.
First up we have Private Internet Access.
Private Internet Access is a VPN, you guys probably know what it is at this point.
It has encryption, authentication services, it works for Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS,
Linux.
Again, it still says Linus in the doc, it drives me nuts.
It does not work on Linus.
It works on Google Chrome and it has support for several other platforms coming soon.
You can connect it to five devices under one account at the same time, so you can have
like your phone and your laptop and your desktop and whatever else all connected.
It has an internet kill switch, so if your VPN disconnects for whatever reason, it will
disconnect you from the internet so that you don't accidentally send any data under a non-encrypted
channel.
And you can check it out today in the link in the video description or this thing here
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There we go.
Next up, we've got Savage Jerky, which we have a box of beef jerky here.
So you guys don't have to talk, but if you want free beef jerky, just go ahead and we
will.
I'm in the original.
Oh, I ended up with habanero.
This is not good.
You can get a different one if you want.
I had the habanero, the mojo habanero earlier.
It wasn't that bad.
Mojo habanero?
Yeah.
That's what, three or four, is it?
I don't remember.
I'm going to go for a nice safe teriyaki.
There you go.
Are we going to try this now?
You can if you want, I don't care.
You can also just take it home if you want, it doesn't really matter.
Their jerky is made with the best ingredients, without nitrates or preservatives.
Their goal is to create a snack that is full of flavor and spice that isn't bad for you.
They've got 13 different flavors of jerky.
We've got, which one is this, teriyaki and original here.
Teriyaki's pretty good.
Yeah.
Maybe more teriyakis.
My favorite one is mojo jalapeno, if I remember correctly.
That one's actually pretty good.
They have sauces, which I don't think we've shown on the show before, but this one is
reaper hot sauce, so that's made with carolina reaper, careful with that one.
And then this one is mojo jalapeno, so that's my favorite jerky, and now they have a sauce
for it, so that's pretty cool.
Original's my favorite.
Pretty good.
There you go.
Use offer code LTT to save 10% off on all of their products at savagejerky.com.
And then the last sponsor, I really wonder what the notes are for this.
It's in all capital letters.
It says, it's going to be dope, it's tomorrow, July 14th, get your tickets now, we will have
tickets at the door, but the quantity will be limited, smiley face, ltxexpo.com.
So yeah, if you live like within range of Richmond, BC, and you weren't already planning
to come to LTX, come hang out, it's going to be awesome, there's going to be people
there.
Do I get a badge?
I don't know.
I don't know if there are badges.
You want a badge?
We'll make you a badge.
We'll make sure you get a badge.
We don't need any badgers.
Start playing the badger video.
And 10 hours of badger.
That's it.
No more, no more sponsoring stuff.
But I'm still going to enjoy your sponsor for a minute.
Oh do it.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I've done that for the entire rest of the show, sometimes before.
Are you going to be at LTX?
Are you going to?
Yeah.
Cool.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I wasn't sure.
He's going to offer to break your iPhone and then fix it.
Oh boy, I don't have an iPhone.
Anyone.
Now I want to go get one because that would be cool.
If you see Lewis, he'll smash your screen and replace it on site.
Nice.
That would be great.
Are you doing something out of boot?
Or are you just kind of wandering around?
I don't think so.
Just wandering around.
I wasn't even informed anyone sitting here was going to be here until like the beginning
of this week and then I only knew you were going to be here until today.
So I'm actually quite excited.
We talked about that earlier.
I actually knew for three months.
Yeah.
Communication around these parts is just absolutely fantastic.
Yeah, I just thought I knew how to open or close an iMac.
Was that his whole, okay.
I told him, yeah, you realize I've had employees to put those back together for the past five
years.
You don't know how to open or close this and I said, I don't know, I'll figure it out.
Yeah.
I'll just grab the board and go blink and he goes, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And then the whole thing started shipping.
Oh yeah, when I was just, I don't think it's fitting and I'm like, yeah, let me just push
it hard.
No spoilers, but I legit got anxiety watching you guys work on that iMac.
I turned around and sat down on the wall like I didn't even like, I was out of sight cause
I was getting anxious watching.
I gave him the same service that I give every customer.
That's the, that's the best ad I think I've ever heard.
No, I think that's like a, my store manager come to me and say, can you stop like showing
customers, reading the letters that customers write on screen because I'll be sitting there
fixing a board and I'll go, Oh, this thunderbolt doesn't look good or the other USB circuit
looks mess bent that we can always put that stuff back on.
You don't really need that.
And I'm saying it's kind of a joke cause I'm going to get rid of that circuit and I'll
put it back on once it turns on.
But there'll be people watching going, Oh my God, what is he doing to my board?
And they'll call them and say, is that my board on the screen that you just ripped all
that stuff off?
You should know when you were getting.
That's fantastic.
Why is everyone spamming numbers?
I don't understand.
I'm just going to mass ban people.
Oh, when people type F, I don't know what that means either.
That is...
Well F is pay respects, right?
Yeah.
People keep doing this.
So that's a, that's a call of duty meme where you like walk up to, I believe they're lowering
the coffin of your like friend into the ground, your, your friend and fellow soldier.
And you like, you have to press F on your keyboard.
Why don't you type R for respect?
What is F?
I think F is just like, it's like an easy macro key.
So if your fingers are on like WASD, you can, well, usually the two interact keys on a game
on a computer is E and F.
I've never played Call of Duty.
Oh, everyone's spamming F. I thought everyone was doing numbers and I was like, all right,
I'm just going to go and start banning people, but you know what?
F is okay.
Is it because the stream died?
No, no, it's just not showing here.
This is okay.
Yeah.
My eyes aren't great.
So I'm like trying to monitor the chat for me.
You have good enough internet that you could watch your own stream while you're streaming
it.
That's on two different devices.
Oh yeah.
You experienced New York internet.
I'm so sorry.
If I play this stream while I'm watching it, I'll get dropped frames.
This guy from Russia actually made me a little plugin for open broadcast or it'll say this
many frames stolen by Time Warner with a little logo and it'll go up and it matches the open
broadcaster count.
Why is internet in New York bad?
Oh, it's real bad.
We've done news stories on it.
It's so controlled.
It's such like there's so many little agreements from all the little ISPs there that they don't
compete with one another, that there's basically no service or infrastructure upgrades last
15, 20 years.
I either have Verizon DSL in my location, which is three megabit down and 0.7 megabit
up or you get Time Warner, which is 20 megabit up half the time for 409 plus stacks.
The hotel I'm staying at, the hotel I'm staying at in Richmond right now gives me 0.6 down,
0.1 up.
I went to upload a video today using the connection upstairs and I thought, oh, it says six minutes
remaining.
I must have uploaded the wrong file.
I must give you audio by itself and it's like, no, that's 18 gigabytes and it says six minutes
remaining.
It's like at home it'll say, yeah, 14 hours your video will be, wow.
That's weird because like we have... I couldn't operate.
Australia is horrible for internet and I've been learning that, doing the Floatplane stuff
that I've been doing.
Speaking of which, sponsor spot, floatplane.com, heck yeah, Scrapper Wars this weekend.
Okay, I'm done.
But it's like even just getting servers, like renting a server in Australia is ludicrously
expensive because the internet is so crazy expensive and Canada has a similar problem
of one of the problems that Australia has, which is large landmass, not a ton of people.
They also have the problem of being kind of isolated and kind of off the main path of
most of the undersea cables, but Canada's problem, we're all extremely spread out.
All of Canada has less population than just the state of California and then a massive
country.
So you put those two together and it's not a really great combination.
Luckily, we're all mostly nestled in these like cities that dot around the country.
It's like Vancouver itself does pretty well.
This place has 1,000 down, 1,000 up.
My house, my like random suburbia house has fiber, 150 down, 150 up.
And I pay significantly less than you do, 409 a month is like, that hurts my brain.
It's 460 something after taxes.
409 a month for what?
460 after taxes.
It's 20 megabit up, 300 megabit down, but the 20 megabit up, it's like sometimes 20,
sometimes 10, sometimes 5.
I actually had to get Verizon DSL along with the Time Warner because the Time Warner goes
down so often that I got a PF Sense router that will automatically switch over to the
$100 a month Verizon DSL when it dies so that I can still process credit cards.
Wow.
That's pretty typical for New York.
Yeah.
I expect the Time Warner that costs 409 a month to go down often enough that it's worth
it to have another internet connection.
My studio is in the greater LA area and I've got 300 by 300 fiber for 99.
Yeah, I'm paying, I believe it's 99, but I had like a signing bonus lowered for a temporary
period of time thing for a while now for my 150.
There's a new construction a little bit like 30 minutes south of where I live and there
were big old billboards as they were like, you know, getting the land ready that it's
going to be, it was a fiber community or gigabit community and it's like, it was like 59 bucks
a month.
The other thing is on the commercial side.
So like a lot of commercial internet is often much worse than residential internet at the
lower tier just because Verizon and the Time Warner and those companies, they want at least
$2,500 a month for the internet connection, even if the company's like, and they try and
guarantee that 99.9% uptime, which is absolutely PG with something 99.9 or I've had to put
a sign up on the door and uptime just to cash only no internet tape that that is so aggravating
when you know that you're spending over $450 on internet, I was gonna say with both of
those internet connections.
That's insane.
Oh, right.
Uh, is this local to LTX only or can you buy this stuff online?
Can you buy it online?
None of it.
Okay.
So if you're watching this and are going to be at LTX, nice little combo, you can get
a tech linked pin and LTX lanyard, which has like a, some actually pretty cool graphics
stuff on it and a little quick disconnect thing at the back.
This shirt, which I've never seen before.
Oh yeah, I have.
This is pretty cool.
This is just like a straight up Linus Tech Tips shirt.
What?
Oh, okay, okay, okay.
This one's one of my favorite.
I don't really understand why we did this, but I think it's awesome.
It's one of the editors.
So this is one of the editors, Dennis, just making a face on a shirt.
It's great.
I personally love it, but I can understand how, uh, some people might think it's a little,
little funky.
Uh, then I think we just have two other, yeah, this, this is the Linus Tech Tips, like circuit
logo shirts and we have different graphics being given out or being sold to LTX.
I believe so.
Yeah.
This is another one of the circuit designs.
Um, I thought there was another shirt as well, but that might've been only for the VIP people.
I'm not really sure.
Uh, but yeah, you can buy cool shirts at LTX, uh, if you are watching this and going to
be there and didn't notice that you could buy shirts and happened to see this.
There we go.
Best ad spot ever.
Yeah.
Um, what was I going to say next?
One thing that I wanted to get through and I think we, we might have time is cause I
always find this quite interesting and we'll again, actually we'll switch it.
We'll go from this way over.
Uh, what got you into computers and technology in general?
My dad, my dad, uh, after the military, he was a project manager and he was one of the,
he was one of the first, I don't want to say pioneers, but he was a VP, a senior VP for
a company that was building mainframes and doing, you know, crazy old school tape drive
backups and stuff.
And he basically talked to the company and was like, guys, we need to get off the mainframe
and we need to get into computer, uh, product management, computer based stuff, PC stuff.
And this was back in like 79, 80 and, uh, they didn't listen to him.
And of course that company went belly up because they were one of the leaders in the mainframe
and everyone was getting off the mainframe and, but he, uh, so when, when that happened,
he ended up going to business for himself, writing project management software.
And from my earliest memories, I was always on his lap while he was on the computer doing
his thing.
Um, that he said the best thing he ever did for me was when I would try and touch the
computer, he never was like, no, no, no, no, don't touch, don't touch.
He was always like, he would save his work and just be like, have fun, just type away
and mash on the keyboard.
So he never once told me I couldn't touch anything.
Right.
So I've always done that with my kids and it's kind of gone, you know, three generation
or two generations at this point now.
My youngest daughter now is, she's three and a half and showing interest in the computer,
which is, I think it's fantastic.
Sure.
It was, it was just my dad and that was just life was computers and as long as I can remember.
So that simple.
I think I've told my story a million times, so I'll, I'll do a very brief version of it.
Uh, but I, I just wanted to play Diablo and the computer stopped working, so I learned
how to fix it so I could keep playing Diablo.
Um, and it's gone from there.
Uh, there's, there's longer versions, but you've probably heard it a million times.
It's I don't really, I mean, I don't really know where to start.
There was, I find yours kind of interesting because you were like super in the middle
of nowhere, right?
Yeah.
I was, I was super in the middle.
The first event really that led to that was, uh, there was this old guy and well, I was
sort of bored in school and they're trying to figure out how to do deal with that because
it was like kindergarten or first grade or something and there was an old guy visiting
from the Stevens Institute and he's like, all right, let's figure this out.
So we set up an Apple two, two with like a wooden break to measure your reaction time
when like you hit the thing, it would, there was like a basic program that would run and
tell you what your reaction time was for like breaking in a car.
And so he walked me through soldering wires into something inside the Apple two and then
writing a program on the Apple two and doing all this stuff and it was like, I have to
learn more.
And so you were in kindergarten and grade one.
I was very young.
Yeah.
That's quite an impressive project.
Cause I like took everything apart.
I got in trouble for taking apart like the TV in school, which is what led to that.
Okay.
So I needed a machine to work on some sessions and logic pro and the studio that I was working
at had closed down.
So I bought a Mac book because I was broke, used on eBay and it arrived broken.
I got a discount on it.
So I bought the screen that I needed to fix it.
And then when I didn't need it anymore, I sold it and I realized I made a profit of
two or $300.
So I thought, let me do this again.
So I was buying and reselling them for a month or two.
Then I wanted to start offering the services to other people.
I didn't think it was economically viable, but then I realized the part is 80 to $90
and Apple charges 1200 at the time to replace the entire screen assembly.
So I just kept doing that over and over again.
People started bringing liquid damage ones eventually.
So I started sending them off to a company in China that would fix them.
They were doing worse and worse job as time went on.
So I figured if I've been working on recording studio equipment and consoles component level,
let me see if I can figure out how to do this.
So after a lot of, I think a few years of painfully messing around and failing a lot
and recording a lot of it for YouTube, I got decent enough at it that I could offer it
to regular customers.
That was that.
I think the YouTube thing started from making a video because Reseller Ratings was trying
to up the rate by about a thousand percent.
So I did a video on their process that got 120,000 views that I thought would get 10.
That was that.
Cool.
And you've mentioned audio stuff a few times, this WAN Show.
So what was your involvement in the music industry?
I went to Avatar Studios and I said that I would, I remember saying something like, I
would rather wash the toilets here than work at any other place for money.
And I remember I showed up for my interview and the guy asked, what is this thing that
I have in my pocket?
And it was a SIMOI headphone amplifier that I put together myself from stuff that I bought
on eBay.
And he said, you're hired.
I think that was Roy Hendrickson that hired me.
So I worked there and I cleaned the toilets and I cleaned the, you know, all the floors
and the consoles and everything for three months.
And then I, after working for free, after three months, I got to work in the tech room
with the other people working on SSL consoles and Eve consoles through tape machines.
And that was that.
Cool.
Sweet.
It was fun.
I think with that we are, oh no, we have about 10 minutes left.
Let's see if there's any actual topics to talk about.
No topics.
No.
Turns out recycling garbage in like the poor part of the thing, that's also a really good
way to get technology.
That's how I got most of my first computers.
It's like, let's Frankenstein stuff together.
I think I feel like most people that are into computers have a similar story that like,
my favorite one is, I went to a, like a country high school.
We didn't have very much money, especially not in the tech departments.
And the way that we built a new computer lab, because we needed one really badly, because
there's a lot of kids in the school that were interested in computers.
It was just designed as a country school, so it was the most trades and stuff.
The way we built a new computer lab was my teacher waited for the truck that went to
all the different schools and picked up all their broken computers, because they did it
once every few years, and called him, the guy directly, I don't know how you got his
number, and diverted him to our school, which originally he wasn't planning to go to, because
we had no computers to give up.
And he was like, yeah, yeah, we got some stuff, just like leave the truck for a little while.
And he left the truck and we offloaded everything that was on there, which was like not supposed
to happen.
I'm not going to say your name, but thank you very much teacher.
Because I think the hard drives and stuff that were on there.
But we took everything, we shoved it all in one room, and then my teacher was just like,
okay, bye, thank you, leave now.
And we spent the next few months, that whole computer class, just like, we would lay out
like, oh my goodness, okay, this motherboard actually works.
Let's find all the CPUs and all the RAM and everything that can go into this board and
test all of it and mark everything as good or bad, and like, find all the, use those
to find all the motherboards that work, and like, blah, blah, blah, blah, and we ended
up building like one and a half computer labs out of it.
That was a really, really cool project.
That was a lot of fun.
We had, I was accused, by the time I made it to high school, I was accused of black
magic because the local repair place would always replace the motherboard whenever a
PS2, whenever a kid would, something, the PS2 ports were really bad, because like, if
you pulled the keyboard the wrong way, it would blow the fuse on the motherboard.
And so, it was not surface mount, it was through-hole, it was really easy to replace, and I would
be like, well, let's just crack it open, take the motherboard out and replace the through-hole
fuse, and the local computer repair company was like, black magic witchcraft, burn him,
burn him at the stake, he's bringing, we've got to replace the motherboard, we can't just
repair them, that's like three cents, we can't do it.
So yeah, that was not fun in a poor high school where they can't afford a thousand bucks a
machine to replace stuff.
And you, I'm just, I don't know why I'm jumping back to this now, I kind of skimmed over it
when you were first telling the story, but you built an amplifier, you said?
Yeah, it was a Simoi.
I mean, they have all these guides online on how to build them, it's a headphone amplifier
that you build into an Altoids can that's powered off a nine volt battery.
So what got you into that, though?
I just enjoyed Hi-Fi audio.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, so you wanted to, like, kind of build some of the...
Yeah, I just thought it was something cool to do in my spare time.
And I've seen, if I remember correctly, you have those, like, the, I'm going to use the
wrong term, but the sound dampening panels?
Yeah, I have those sound dampening panels.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, piles of panels.
Yeah, in my office and at home.
Yeah, are you still into custom Hi-Fi stuff?
Yeah.
Yeah, cool.
What's like the most recent custom Hi-Fi project you've done?
Like just the Vanderstein set of speakers that I have at home.
You really don't need really expensive stuff to make it sound good, you can find new stuff
online like Vanderstein speakers for $400, a cheap amplifier, and some of those Corning
703 panels, and it'll sound amazing.
Yeah, I've actually been, for a while now, I've wanted to copy your sound dampening panel
project.
You just can't have a cat, because if you have a cat, then...
Yeah, yeah, I don't have a cat.
Yeah, they use it as a scratching post, they've made it, that entire section of my apartment
look like garbage.
That's not good.
The cat is cute, so it gets away.
You worked in IT for quite a while.
I had several hats in that company, but I worked very close, well, I started actually
doing energy audits and stuff within the company, and we also wrote our own software to run
on various devices, either iPads or the Samsung devices I mentioned.
We had major contracts with the power companies, and then our IT department was extremely overworked
in supporting all these devices, upgrading them, getting ready to go, repairing them.
We also had our in-house software development team, and then the more they realized that
I was the guy that was actually going around in the field helping other field people...
So if you had a problem, you had to call in to the help desk, and our help desk was three
guys trying to support a company of 350 field agents, and it was just like, that could get
overworked really easy.
Yeah.
And that was the same, our IT department of three was the same guys also building and
managing our three country-wide, six major cities VPN that kept all of our offices in
communication.
So if they were doing that, or they were out at a data center or something, we were just
down in person.
So I was the guy that everyone started calling out in the field to come help them if they
had tech problems with their equipment, or somebody was broke and needed it fixed.
When the company realized I was doing that, then they were like, hey, do you want to manage
our help desk?
And I was like, I don't know, we'll see.
Because they knew I had all the end-user experience, as well as the technical know-how to keep
it all working.
Well, once I got into that role, they realized I also knew an okay amount of coding and design
from my dad being a software developer.
So then they were like, you want to be a part of our QCQA team and be a part of our automated
testing?
And I'm like, wait, so you want me to do help desk management and this?
So basically I ended up having these three hats at one time, which really burned me out,
to be honest.
Because I did that for almost 10 years.
And then that was when I started doing the YouTube thing and just kind of moved out of
there.
But it was fun.
I learned a lot.
Obviously, it was unique to have this kind of a Venn diagram of experience of all three
of those aspects, development, support, and then end-user, which really gave me a unique
understanding of what it's like from top to bottom when it comes to product testing and
use.
So I try and take everything from a very practical perspective of how I approach tech.
But I do have a very high level knowledge, too, on where a lot of it starts.
But I try not to really go into any of that in my content, because I leave stuff for that
like Wendell and Gamers Nexus.
The guys who can actually communicate that in a manner which people can understand.
Because I'm very good at practical use, but I'm very bad at technical explanation.
And I'm going to take something that you said and something that you explained.
So you got into YouTube because you wanted to kind of express annoyance from, who was
it?
Customers?
Recelerating.com.
Recelerating.com.
And you mentioned that you started to get into YouTube at that time, but why did you
start to get into YouTube?
It was a dare.
Oh.
Someone dared me.
Okay.
That's different.
Yeah.
Well, I was live streaming Call of Duty 3 Close Quarters when it launched.
Because Nick, Coconut Monkey, and I were good friends, and we played that all the time.
And I had started live streaming it because when it dropped for premium access, early
access, he was like with a family on vacation.
He couldn't play it, so he was all butthurt.
So I basically was like, okay, I'll find out how to stream it so you can watch it and see
the early access.
Another gentleman by the name of Holiday Doc came in and just randomly found my stream.
And he was a pretty well known Call of Duty CODCaster for MLG.
And he just thought that I was funny and entertaining, and then we became friends.
And after a couple of months, he's like, you should do YouTube.
People would find this tech stuff interesting, because I became the guy he asked PC questions
to, because he didn't know anything about PCs.
And then he was like, you should do stuff like this on YouTube.
And at the time, I didn't know Linus Tech Tips, I didn't know people made livings on
YouTube.
This is 2012.
I was super ignorant to what was going on.
I was like, who the heck would watch a channel about computers?
That sounds like the most boring thing anyone would ever spend their time doing.
He's like, well, just try it.
So I basically told him, I'll try it, but when it fails, will you leave me alone?
He kept bugging me about doing it.
And so I was like, fine, I'll try it.
And then, of course, it just sort of steadily took off.
And I've since built him a computer and sent him parts, because I was like, thank you.
Yeah.
Thanks for pushing me.
It's one of those things where I only did it to show that it would not work.
And fast forward six years, it's now incorporated, and it's now helping other people pay their
bills, because now I have employees.
So it's crazy.
I that's actually really cool.
And I like the part where you sent him a computer and parts and stuff.
That's kind of cool to pay it back.
I got into YouTube because I was really, really into mechanical keyboards before America really
had very many mechanical keyboards.
That sounds rare to people really into that.
Yeah.
There's forums dedicated to it and stuff.
It's just not that big of a community.
And I had my own imported from Taiwan keyboard and all this kind of stuff.
And I wanted to show it off, because I was proud that I had finally actually gotten a
mechanical keyboard instead of just researching them online all the time.
So I filmed a video of that and then never released it.
And now there's some people watching this have probably seen it, but there's a video
of Linus and I watching that video, both just essentially making fun of me.
Oh, yeah.
Because that was when it was like critiquing your first video, like a lot of people were
doing that.
Yeah.
And he critiqued a video that no one had seen because it was never released anywhere.
Right.
So that the director's commentary thing we were talking about, like as it's airing, and
then you're so embarrassed because you're like, oh my God, I can't believe I said that.
Yeah.
At the time you think like you nailed this video, you go back and you look and you're
like, wow, I'm an idiot.
Especially because I said something that was like factually incorrect.
What was your first mechanical keyboard?
DK-9008 G2 from Ducky.
Oh, see, I mean Ducky's a monster.
It's still the keyboard that I use.
My first was a Razer Black Widow.
Oh, yeah.
I remember.
I mean, nothing super special, but it was a blue switch without that was super cool
until I started streaming.
I still stream with it.
I don't even care.
People are going to deal with it.
Model M or Bust.
Do you use one?
I do.
Okay.
I've got a black Model M. I actually actually have a fairly impressive collection of the
SSK Model M's as well, the numpadless ones.
Yeah.
I have a mask.
I should be able to make it until I'm about 80 if I only use the SSK's.
That's pretty sweet.
And the Unicomp still makes the Model M, but it's a little lighter.
It's not quite the same construction.
It's not the same.
Yeah.
The earlier ones are better.
The later ones, they've got a lot of money from the healthcare industry and stuff, so
Unicomp is making higher quality products than they were even a couple of years ago.
It's almost as good, but man, those SSK's, it's nice.
The only thing I really miss are the extra keys, so I've had to remap my keys for things
on the right side of the keyboard, but it's not bad.
I have one properly functioning Model M, but I generally don't use it.
I've got a bunch of the ones with the Num Lock.
You can totally have one.
Or with the numpad.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's fine.
That'd be cool.
I can even give you a new inbox.
I've got four of those.
Of the original?
Yeah.
Holy cow.
That would be pretty cool.
We'll talk later on.
But how did you get into YouTube?
The very first video that I made was actually even before the thing.
Well, I don't know, it's a long story.
But even before all of that, there is a video that I'm surprised that no one found, and
it was when Windows Vista came out.
I was so angry, I probably should have been medicated, and I was really worried about
privacy and things like that, but I made a driver showing how Nvidia had completely screwed
the pooch on 64-bit drivers under 64-bit Vista.
They literally took their 32-bit driver and pasted it into a 64-bit wrapper.
I was so mad.
I could not see straight.
I was seething with anger, because it was right up to the beta launch and Nvidia was
like, we're going to come out with a driver.
And then after Vista went into production, they were like, OK, cool, here's our real
driver.
And it was still the same garbage that had been for the last six months before that.
And so there's a video on YouTube of me losing my mind and ranting about this horrible pile
of garbage driver that doesn't work, and it'll work for five minutes and then crash.
And the whole reason was that as soon as a program would try to do anything outside of
that 32-bit address space with that 64-bit driver, it would crash, because it wasn't
really a 64-bit driver.
So there's that.
And that's the very first thing I did on YouTube, technically.
I guess, yeah, if I want to be specific, the very first stuff I did on YouTube was, again,
this is the only reason why I thought of it even.
I usually forget about this.
But you mentioned no one found it.
So far, no one has found this.
I checked a little while ago, and it was still there.
I don't know why the titles are so bad.
It's probably why people can't find it.
But no clickbait here.
But this was, I used to do guides on how to get 100% sync in Assassin's Creed levels.
Like no one cared.
It was great.
So another thing I want to ask you about is, you recently developed and started selling,
why am I forgetting the name of them right now?
KVM?
Yes.
KVMs with really, really, really high-end features.
So that was another thing that made me almost as mad, but not quite as mad, as the Nvidia
driver thing.
That's why I brought it up.
And it was like, all right, I can do something about this.
This is a thing that I can fix, because the world of KVMs for 4K and DisplayPort 60 hertz,
it's terrible.
It's really terrible.
Most I know of even now are still VGA stuff.
Yeah.
But the USB functionality, it's designed for the $5 USB keyboard, which has one of three
of the cheapest USB chips known to man, but if you get an RGB keyboard, it doesn't work.
Or if you've got the Corsair keyboards, once the driver loads, it's not even really a keyboard
anymore.
And so good luck getting that to work with a KVM.
And so I found somebody in Taiwan that had basically the hardware that I needed, but
I got them to tweak the hardware for me, and I got to do software that solves the problems
for people like us that would be trying to do things with a KVM that has a 4K, DisplayPort,
1.2, whatever.
And I basically already had a customer lined up for them, so I was just sort of selling
the seconds, but they sold so well that we did two other runs, and it is shocking the
people that have come out of the woodwork to buy the KVMs, and generally it's done really
well.
Interestingly, Macs are the things that have the biggest problem, like the trash can Mac
Pros don't actually follow the DisplayPort spec at all.
No way.
Yeah, so.
That's the most surprise no way I've ever heard.
So they're a little problematic with Macs.
The modern Macs, you have to use like a Thunderbolt dock that has like a DisplayPort socket.
You can't just use a cheap cable, and I don't know what that's about, so I'm working on
that.
I know that every MacBook, since the Touch Bar with the dongle, if you use a dongle that's
not the Apple dongle, these devices won't work.
Yeah, it's a real pain.
I had planned to do a real review of that, and once I got to the point where I plugged
it in and I realized the dongle didn't work unless you use the $80 one, and the $30 one
worked in the two other machines I had, I just couldn't stop buying.
Well, one of the design choices on the KVM is that it does not have a repeater, and so
a lot of the signal out of that DisplayPort cable is just barely enough that if it's going
into the monitor, it's fine.
But if you send it in through the connector and then into the KVM, which is like another
four inches of cable, and then back out again, the signal to noise ratio is not high enough
for it to do a proper digital sync or whatever on that cable.
And it's infuriating because the spec says that it should be able to push an unamplified
cable that's like eight meters or something like that, and you're lucky to get four.
I'd be interested in what chipsets the trash can one uses, because I think I've only opened
one of those ever.
It's a D300, but I think it goes through the board in the bottom and then back out the
connector in the back, and so they have a repeater or something in the board in the
bottom, and that's the problem.
Oh, yeah.
Because if I just solder a little dongle directly on the D300, it's fine.
So you'd have to tell your customers to solder it directly to the Mac Pro.
Yeah, it's some of the witchcraft after the D300 before it makes it out of the Mac.
Some assembly required.
You mentioned the, I think it was like four inches or whatever of cable within the box.
That was a, I'm going to tangent here a fair amount, but that was a really interesting
situation.
When USB 3.0 first started becoming popular, and you'd have those cases that have front
IO, USB 3.0, but that were just cable extensions that would go all the way out the back of
the case and plug into the back of your motherboard, and then you'd have people with really long
USB 3.0 cables.
So you'd have people with like 15 feet worth of total actual distance for USB 3.0 and then
it won't charge their freaking devices.
That remains a problem on cases.
I mean, the front panel on USB 3.0 is still hit and miss on a lot of cases.
It's frustrating too when you were finally in the era where it isn't those weird extensions
that have to go out the case and then into the motherboard in order to make it so you
can plug in USB, but some cases will still have USB just like header cables for USB 3.0
that you could plug into a different case.
Like it's like, why is it so long?
This is actually really bad, but yeah, most people, most people don't know about that.
That being said though, I think we're going to cut it here because you have to grab a
plane.
I have a flight.
Yeah.
He has to get out of here.
Thanks for watching the WAN Show.
This was a bit of a, bit of a different way to do the WAN Show.
We half covered one topic, but I think it was good.
It was fun to talk about a whole bunch of different stuff.
I'm going to let people shout out their channels again.
So Lewis, Rossman group, two S's, two N's, two S's, two N's, level one techs, J's, two
cents.
Perfect.
There we go.
I will see you guys next week.
I will possibly see you guys at LTX.
I'm going to enjoy some more of this.
I'll be there tomorrow.
Do it.
What do you think?
These things?
Uh, so there's only one of the grasses, uh, what was the first week of the second week?
That was, uh, the guy wearing the French shirt.
Yay, temperature E.
Yay.
I need to get shilling scenes in open broadcasting.
Dude.
That's great.
That's great.
I have to do it manually.