November 7, 2025 • 54 mins
This week’s TechtalkRadio show is joined by Andy Taylor, Shawn DeWeerd and returning after an absence Justin Lemme. The guys opened up with some radio war stories and how On-Air has changed in many large cities but it does open up a even bigger conversation about where broadcasting is headed—automation, “canned” shifts, and even AI DJs which has already been experimented with. That segued into a broader AI discussion: hype vs. reality (is there an “AI bubble”?). Shawn is not happy with the AI Enabled toys we should see around the holidays and questions how some can hold back kids’ creativity and also raises privacy concerns. A discussion on AI in Media continues with Shawn not a fan of the obvious AI ad spots (Coke’s holiday commercial came up). Andy and Justin seemed to feel it brought out the essence of the Holidays and Coke however Shawn shares how the AI ran over a street of crowded people which delivered a honest natural reaction from Justin.
Justin dove into DIY smart-home tinkering: using low-cost ESP32 microcontrollers with Home Assistant to build sensors (soil moisture alerts, mmWave presence for stair lights, temperature monitoring for a garage freezer). The takeaway: you can replicate pricey off-the-shelf gadgets for a fraction of the cost and power them via USB-C, battery, or small solar. Listener Q&A covered everyday computing—when a Chromebook or budget laptop beats a custom PC if you’re mostly browsing and watching video—and a heads-up that RAM prices have spiked recently. We also hit the streaming mess (YouTube TV vs. Disney/ESPN) and why “cutting the cord” keeps getting pricier and more confusing.
A Fun group on Facebook, IT Humor and Memes Shared a post about gaming in the late 80's which opened up a discussion on Gaming nostalgia: Making the list for Andy, Shawn and Justin were titles like Wolfenstein 3D, Command & Conquer, Diablo II, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Leisure Suit Larry, and more—plus places to play DOS classics right in your browser with a great link from Shawn. Justin flagged the Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition (bundled with expansions) and told a story about navigating parental controls with Fallout. There was also a quick troubleshooting win: an HP Omen laptop that crawled after a Windows update was fixed by rolling back recent updates—sometimes it is Windows.
We wrapped with “sites of the week.” TV Garden lets you hop around live channels worldwide (including NASA TV streams), a delightfully distracting Pong-style clock, browser-based emulation libraries for retro games, a global web SDR directory for ham-radio listening, and a quick-fix image cleanup tool. Last week’s background remover got a nod again for simple cutouts. Check out the Website TechtalkRadio.Com for Links talked about on the Show and see the Video Version on our Blog.techtalkradio.com and Subscribe!
Justin dove into DIY smart-home tinkering: using low-cost ESP32 microcontrollers with Home Assistant to build sensors (soil moisture alerts, mmWave presence for stair lights, temperature monitoring for a garage freezer). The takeaway: you can replicate pricey off-the-shelf gadgets for a fraction of the cost and power them via USB-C, battery, or small solar. Listener Q&A covered everyday computing—when a Chromebook or budget laptop beats a custom PC if you’re mostly browsing and watching video—and a heads-up that RAM prices have spiked recently. We also hit the streaming mess (YouTube TV vs. Disney/ESPN) and why “cutting the cord” keeps getting pricier and more confusing.
A Fun group on Facebook, IT Humor and Memes Shared a post about gaming in the late 80's which opened up a discussion on Gaming nostalgia: Making the list for Andy, Shawn and Justin were titles like Wolfenstein 3D, Command & Conquer, Diablo II, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Leisure Suit Larry, and more—plus places to play DOS classics right in your browser with a great link from Shawn. Justin flagged the Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition (bundled with expansions) and told a story about navigating parental controls with Fallout. There was also a quick troubleshooting win: an HP Omen laptop that crawled after a Windows update was fixed by rolling back recent updates—sometimes it is Windows.
We wrapped with “sites of the week.” TV Garden lets you hop around live channels worldwide (including NASA TV streams), a delightfully distracting Pong-style clock, browser-based emulation libraries for retro games, a global web SDR directory for ham-radio listening, and a quick-fix image cleanup tool. Last week’s background remover got a nod again for simple cutouts. Check out the Website TechtalkRadio.Com for Links talked about on the Show and see the Video Version on our Blog.techtalkradio.com and Subscribe!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The following program is produced by the Tech Talk Radio Network.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hi, this is a Colin Macria. Whose line is it?
Speaker 3 (00:05):
Anyway you're listening to tech talk Radio. I don't know
how it works. It's all magical stuff to me.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor,
I'm Shonda Weird, and I'm Justin Lemey.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Welcome. Look at that we got Justin. But you've been
gone for a while. How you doing, dude, I'm doing.
I'm just I've been busy, man, I've been busy with work.
And then, as I was mentioned in a pre show, man,
I'm getting old. Man, I'm going to bed. I'm going
to bed by the time you guys start recording. But
now that we're on daily savings time, you know, it
(00:38):
actually helps me because I'm like, hey, I can do
this now, but no to bed.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
You know the number of times that I've missed the
show because I've fallen asleep with my kids.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Oh, yes, happened.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I mean it happens. It happened one time when it
was just you and me. I was sitting here, correct,
where is he?
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Where is he?
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I'm actually falling asleep at the microphone when I was
working at KLPX. I fell asleep at the microphone. I
think I remember.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Hearing about that. That was quite We got quite a
bit of fodder for that one.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
That was good. Yeah, you hear about that overnight guy. Yeah,
Jonas had to call in and I was like, I
was like answering the phone, and I'm like, He's like like,
first off, like why are you calling me so late?
And You're like, why are you sleeping?
Speaker 1 (01:19):
This supposed to be on the air of one of
the many stations that I work at, or have worked at.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I'll say it that way.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
One day I was driving into record Yeah, not this show,
another show, and I noticed that the top of the
hour came by and I didn't hear the DJ on
the air, and matter of fac it was twenty minutes
in my drive. I'd never heard the DJ once and
there was certain parts that that DJ had to do.
So I called the boss and apparently she had forgot
(01:46):
to come in and her shift.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Was at two. This was at four. Oh my god.
They didn't realize it for two hours. Computer systems nowadays
do they just keep on just going right? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Radio automation is interesting because if you're in the studio. Uh,
and like this show that we do here, and of
course my show that I do in the afternoon and
throughout the day, we.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Have live d days.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
They're they're, they're in there, and you know, yes, you
could say, all right, I wanted to play the next
three songs without having to interact with them, but generally
you you just play each one. I mean, we're there live,
and it's rare these days unless.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
It's a morning show.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
When I was working for one of the big network groups,
I could say Westwood One, I was on seventy stations,
and while is while I was working here as well,
seventy stations. I go home and I would record. And
the thing is, you'd record two hours ahead. But if
something happened in that radio town, you know, whether it
was in you know, Florida or Pitty News.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
I was in Pittsburgh, it was in DC. I was everywhere.
But if something happened, how what am I gonna do?
There's nothing you had. Everything had to be recorded an
hour ahead of time. That's that's That's the one thing
I never understood about canning. Like, Okay, I understand, you know,
radio stations they want to save money. A lot of
it is canned. Now. When I say canned, I mean
like pre recorded. But the thing is is, if you
(03:10):
go back in history, radio DJs are technically I mean
they started out as journalists. I mean they they were
there to provide you news and entertainment. And radio used
to be just simply news.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
When I was in broadcasting school, we had to go
rip the news off the teletype.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
They actually had a teletype and.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
It would it would, you know, give you news, the
biggest news stories, and then you would always have to
do the news at the top of the hour.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
How do sit back in the Old West? Are you
you making a reference to my age young man? Maybe
just a little bit, No, But I mean, seriously, you
think about it. This is what they were designed to do.
They were They weren't designed to just simply do like,
uh music. They were you know, radio DJs were there
to uh one, run a station. Make sure that you know,
(04:01):
you take your meter readings and make sure the towers,
you know, all lights are everything's yeah, the lights are on,
and the towers are broadcasting at the right frequency and
the right wattage. You're there to provide news, you provide
entertainment and then music in between and then eventually just
kind of got less and less news and more and
more entertainment radio, more and more commercials, more and more commercials.
(04:25):
And then and then everything became automated, so then you
don't have to take your readings anymore. Everything was automatically
logged by a computer. And then and then it just
got to eventually was like, oh, we don't even need
DJs anymore. And and now some radio stations are even
using AI DJs.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Let's face it, guys, it's getting really good. Some of
the some of the stuff they're able to do is
pretty amazing. And you know, one of the big worries
that some radio people that you know, I know have
is that you think about all the audio we've recorded
over the years, that's an audio print, it's you, yeah,
that could be manipulated now using AI to say the time,
(05:04):
the weather, the song that was just played, the song
that's being played. AI is is scary not only for
radio but also for television. There is it's gotten so
good that you know, at some point those that are
delivering the news on TV have to be concerned.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
But have you also heard about and this is this
is starting to make kind of waves in the tech industry,
is this thing that they they're calling the AI bubble.
They're they're talking about this as if this is going
to be another one of the dot com busts, you know,
back from the two thousands, you know, when everybody was
all in on the internet and the Internet was the
(05:43):
big thing, and then all of a sudden, boom, everything
just failed. And all these companies are putting so much
money into AI, you know, open Ai getting like a
five hundred billion dollar investment from like Nvidia, and then
blah blah blah blah blah. People are saying this is
this is a yeah, like this, it's gonna fail. And
I kind of think that's the way I think. I
(06:05):
think the hype has just gotten too big and AI
is really not going to do what everybody thinks it's
gonna do.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Now.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Yes, granted, maybe in I don't know, five, ten, twenty years, yeah,
maybe we'll all be redundant. But I think right now,
I think it's a bubble.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, it's it's I think people are gonna get burned, well,
if they're not already burned out, because every time you
turn around, oh ai AI, somebody wrote on and I'm
gonna just say I saw this on next door and
it was AI with a round circle and a slash
through it, you know, And so I went ahead and asked,
(06:42):
I said, just wondering what facet of AI do you
dislike the most, And the person responded said everything.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
I dislike how it's incorporated into every app.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
Now.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
I just like how many people were fired. Let's face it,
that's happened because they were replaced by AI. I just
like how people normalizing it when it shouldn't.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
I just like it's coming from toys. Right. We talked
about this a couple of months ago. Right, has Bro
is looking at putting AI and toys, Yes, and that
just doesn't sit right for me. We talked about this
a couple months ago. There was an article that came
out that said Hasbro is looking at incorporating AI into toys.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Right for what reason? Yeah? This is it's ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (07:24):
My frustration with AI is you are sucking the creativity
and the artistic vision out of the human soul. And
when you start taking that away from people, what's left?
And it if kids are now just going to be know,
they're going to be entertained by AI? What why do
they need to be creative anymore.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
That's good.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
Did they need why did they Why do they need
to think anymore?
Speaker 3 (07:48):
This is exactly what I was having a conversation with
my family about. This is that, you know, with AI
and what we weren't centered on the AI aspect of it,
but we were more centered on the creativity portion of childhood.
And Eric, you know, Eric is constantly like, I'm bored.
I'm bored. And I saw a post. I didn't remember
it was read it or Facebook or whatever, but it
(08:09):
was like talking about it. It's like, it's okay to
be bored. Children should be bored because that's what sparks creativity.
That's what makes them go, hmm, what can I make?
What can I do? You know? And if they have
a screen in front of them the whole time, it's
never gonna spark that creativity. It's gonna just give that
dopamine hit and then that's it. And and so now
(08:31):
then they're gonna be addicted to the dopamine hit, which
is the screen. You know. My My also concern is reading.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Uh, let's face it, there's stories that kids aren't reading
as much as they used to. Teachers will say that
as well, And now we're finding books that will read
to them.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Now they're reading along. But I don't know that that
that makes me.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
That makes me nervous as well. You want your kids
to learn the words and learn how how that sentence
is going and read, and now it's just reading it
to them.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
And I just just think of like even just from
like the safeguard, get to put into place, like what's okay,
So let's say this children's toy has AI in it.
Does it connect to the cloud? Does it? Is it
learning connect? Right? So it's like we all know that
everybody has a recording device in their phone, you know,
in their pocket with their phones, like it's always listening
to your TV's, listening your whatever. But now just adding
(09:29):
all these other kids toys in kids spaces, listening to
what your kids are doing, listening to what I just it,
It's just freaks me out.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
I'm starting to see TV commercials where and I think
we're becoming a little more attuned to what artificial intelligence
is in the media. And I'm seeing TV commercials where
they'll cut to a shot of a couple sitting around
a table. I can tell right away, well that's AI.
You know it's the filmmaking.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
You see. Coca Cola released their new AI generated holiday commercial.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Oh no, they did it again, so.
Speaker 4 (10:07):
Last year, so they've they've Last year they did it
and it was really bad. You could truly tell this
year's just not any better. The animals look awful, the
backgrounds look awful, the ending is awful. The whole thing
is just awful. One of the one of the other
frustrated things I have about AI is everybody thinks AI
is just going to make everything cheaper, cheaper and easier. Yeah,
(10:30):
but you've sacrificed a lot of quality. You sacrificed a
lot for that. Like it's getting to the point where
it's what is becoming acceptable to the viewer.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
I just I just watched that Coca Cola ad. Yeah,
I mean, honestly, I don't know, man, it feels Coca Cola.
I watched it, and I can tell certain aspects of
it or AI. But but the thing about Coca Cola ads,
especially the holiday ads, they've done CGI for so many years,
this doesn't feel that different. Friend, then they're normal c
(11:02):
g I ads.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
It's just it's just pushing the boundaries of that uncanny
valley where it's just you know, the polar bears are animated, right,
that's just a fundamental fact. But this just pushes it
to another level with some of the other animals they
put in there, the transitions, the snow, the the driving.
If you look at the shot at the end with
the semis, it plows over some people, Like what, just
(11:26):
just watch the end. Watch the end again.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
I watch the end.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
Watch people tell you that Semi does not run over people.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Oh okay, all right, I'm watching the end of it.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
Just watch the end and tell me it does not
plow over people at the end.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
All right, Oh my gosh, this is Oh my god,
I'm telling you, dude, it's it's and and okay, yeah,
the wide shot of the crowd, all of the people
in the last wide shot, right, their their legs.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
Are moving funny. Their arms are moving funny.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
It used to be it was the fingers. Right now,
it's the way they move.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
It's it's probably up on YouTube or will they take
it down, you know, will Coca Cola.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Say no, way to the official Coca Cola channel on
YouTube and just look for the one. It's called Coca Cola.
Holidays are coming.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Oh boy, we're a subject of media and I would
love to hear from you our listeners. You're listening to this,
you're thinking, you know, guys, I'm tired of it too.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Let us know.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
I want to I want to get your thoughts or
if you do use it, you know I've had fun
with it, like uh, Sora is a part of Chat GPT,
which you know I use Chat GPT. It was weird
because the other day I needed I needed a graphic
and I wanted a video graphic, a moving video graphic
for a news story that was on Fox eleven, and
(12:46):
I thought, well, why didn't I try and.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
See if it used to be?
Speaker 1 (12:49):
It was baked right into chat GPT, and I asked,
all would do was give me the stills, And I asked,
I said, well, where's the video and they said, oh, it's.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Not incorporated anymore.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
And it base lied to me because it is with
a CHATGBT account open AI. It's just you have to
access it a different length Sora dot and then you know,
go to the full web length. And I thought, well,
that's kind of where I found that out the next
day when I was doing some research, Sora too is
now going to be available on Android devices and so
(13:19):
I found it.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
Now Sora is a part of my Android. And the
other day my grandson was over.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
He brought up one of those you remember those little
horses that have the stick, They have the head and
then they have the stick they run around with. So
of course I asked Sora to put them on a
horse with a picture of head, and it did and
it was great. You couldn't have told I mean, it
did not look AI generated. So again it's it's it's
frustrating because now we're seeing so many tools coming out
(13:46):
on so many different sites that do so many different things.
You have to wonder, like, really, this is where we're going.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
I wanted to get Justin's opinion on this, right, So
with the Sora stuff, you mentioned the Sora the video generator, right,
have you seen the stuff where Studio Ghibli is suing
Sorrow because that copyright in fringement.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Not necessarily just Sora, but I knew know that about
eight nine months ago, chat GPT was in hot water
with Studio Ghibli because people were basically taking photos and
saying make this in a style of Studio Ghibli. And
I even have some photos of my family in the
studios a police. Remember you did that, and it does
(14:28):
the very very good job. Now, I don't know about
the Sora aspects. So if again, if you're trying to
if you're listening to this, you're like, what is Sora?
Sora is the video generating application built into chat GPT,
so it uses AI to generate video instead of just
text or photos. Yeah. No, I had not heard about
(14:49):
the video aspect of it.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
So the content oversees distribution Association, which represents a ton
of Japanese anime. Yeah, is basically written a very strongly
worded letter to open AI and Sora saying you got
to stop using our stuff to train your models. Yeah,
because it's pumping out copyrighted content. So yeah, that's the
(15:11):
kind of stuff that is inevitable.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
We're talking about media.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
So let's let's talk a little bit about something we've
talked about for the last couple of weeks.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Justin was out. Justin said, hey, I found this website.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
This website is really cool. I would love to, you know,
give my thoughts on it. And of course that website
TV Garden. Justin, you finally got a chance to check
it out, right?
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Yeah? Actually, uh yeah I did. You guys were talking
about it. I missed lost a couple of shows, but no.
I also I also check out TV Garden and it's
actually really cool. I mean, you know, it's I like
how you're you're presented with a map, colored map of
the globe and you just pick on the country and
then it lists what channels are available. I'm personally right
(15:55):
now as we're doing the show, I'm watching a Japanese
news channel, isn't that. Yeah, And it's all and it's
done via YouTube, so it's like a YouTube embedded channel,
but it's streaming live. And yeah, I mean there's there's
there's like at least thirty channels from just Japan alone,
not to mention the other countries. But yeah, TV dot
(16:18):
Garden is really cool.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
So I will mention that Andy and I talked about
this about two weeks ago, and when we watched it,
it had every available ESPN channel.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Oh really, it does not anymore.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Oh, so for we're talking about tv TV dot Garden,
which is a great resource for fighting local televisions just
really kind of niche TV stations around the world, but
a lot of people this past weekend. Yeah, we're really
we're really upset, specifically Notre Dame football fans. So Notre
(16:55):
Dame's game was on ESPN this past weekend. If you
have had YouTube TV, you lost access to ESPN the
night before the football game, yep.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
And also Monday Night football. I wanted to watch Monday
Night FOOTBA last night because I like to watch the
Peyton and Eli Manning cast on ESPN two, and they
had Baker Mayfield, which is one of my favorite NFL players.
I just like Baker and he was on it, and
I couldn't watch it because ESPN and well Disney, Disney
and YouTube are just having a spat. And the craziest
(17:29):
part is I heard a story this morning or maybe
yesterday yesterday yesterday morning talk about how Disney approached YouTube
TV and said, look, well, actually Google, because that's the
parent company. They said, look, we got elections, We got
elections on Tuesday. We want our viewers to be able
to know what's going on with the elections. Can you
(17:51):
please just put our channels back on at least at
least just for Tuesday, May May maybe Wednesday morning. And
YouTube was like nope, wow, wow, yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
And the a lot of the driving for this decision
was that ESPN launched their own complete content streaming application.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Yeah, so a lot of people were just like, like,
I don't want to like what is happening with the
streaming world right now, Like we're just it's worse than
it was when cables a thing. It's more this is
the thing.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
That ever mentioned in the beginning.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
Yeah, it's it's more confusing, it's more frustrating, it's more expensive.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I have been contemplating making the change to YouTube TV,
and people are saying, oh, wait, you might want to
wait a little bit because you may not get all
the channels you want.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
That's been my problem with the cable company.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
You don't spending two hundred dollars a month, and yet
I really don't get anything.
Speaker 4 (18:53):
I want to go back, go back, go back seven
months ago when my or eight months ago, maybe a
year ago, when my in laws got YouTube TV. If
we go back and listen to that episode, you should
pull a clips to that episode. Yeah, because it was like,
they're gonna save a ton of money because they're cutting cable,
they're not using it, they're bundling out the Internet. It's
gonna be fantastic. They're paying seventy bucks a month or
(19:15):
whatever for everything. It's like over one hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Now, oh yeah, I pay like one hundred and twenty
five just for YouTube TV.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
Yeah, and they're even going at it like this was
a good deal when we got it.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
Yeah. Now that's how they do it. That's how they
gettin I kind of wonder if it's corporate greed.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
If people decide, Okay, I'm gonna leave you to TV,
then their options are well. Of course the antenna and
ATSC three might change some of that for some people.
But I'm thinking, okay, so maybe TV Garden it's gonna
be that's gonna be the next place to fall fall
down the rabbit hole with. I want to talk a
(19:53):
little bit about this because I've never been, and I
want to go justin you did take a little vacation.
Uh you made a trip to Aspen, Colorado, and I've
never been to Aspen. I've always thought that's where the
celebrities skied, that's where you know you went.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
I mean, is it really like a ski town to
go there. I'm a celebrity. Of course I'm gonna go there.
Of course. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
He's the voice of the Voice of the water World.
The co host of tech Talk Radio. No, people say, wait,
tech talk radio, what's that a water world? Oh my god,
and I have your autograph.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
So how was it? It was interesting. Uh. We went
up there on a Friday, and I expected, you know,
traffic was going to be bad. So from from our
house to Aspen is about four and a half hours
by car because you got to take I seventy up
into the mountains to Glenwood Springs and then you drop
south into Aspen and that's about an hour from Glenwood Springs.
(20:49):
So I expected it. I was like, okay, it says
four and a half hours, it's probably gonna be more
like six, you know, because of the traffic. There was
no traffic. It was great. It was no traffic. The
weather was beautiful. The colors. Everybody also said, oh, you
missed all the fall colors. They are all gone. No,
it was great. It was awesome. The colors were amazing.
(21:10):
We got into Aspen on the afternoon of a Friday
and Mesa and her friend wanted to go walk around
and do some shopping. They wanted to go to some
of the high end stores. I mean, there's it really
truly is. I mean, there's there's a lot of high
end stores there. Now, I gotta say, though, I do
think that when I went there, I kind of imagined
(21:30):
aspen As being more like a picturesque mountain town with
like Rodeo drive of LA with all the shops lined up. No,
it's not it. It truly feels like just a normal
like mountain town. I mean, with just people living there.
(21:51):
It doesn't feel like a rich escape. You know, there
is one street that has a lot of the high
end shops, but there's also just a lot of regular
shops mixed in too. So it was very interesting to
be where we're at, and I was just kind of like, wow,
this it doesn't feel like a rich person's place. So
(22:11):
me and me and the the husband of of of
of Mysa's friend, you know, we walked around with the kids,
We went out to lunch, we got some beers, and
we we we we met up with Mesa then and
her friend at a I don't know what the name
of what was called. There was a high end leather
store of something like like Italian leather, like bags and
(22:33):
shoes and things like that. Anyway, she was looking at
buying something there, and I was talking to the storekeeper
and I was like, oh, I bet you guys serve
a lot of you know, a lot of celebrities around.
She's like, oh yeah all the time. She's like, as
a matter of fact, if you were here, just just
like a couple hours ago, Leo was in here. WHOA.
(22:53):
I was like, wait, Leo me like Leo DiCaprio, and
she's like, yeah, he was.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
She was.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
He was in here with his girlfriend and they were shopping.
And I was like, wait, Leo's in town. That's cool.
So yeah, we got you know, that was really cool,
and then kind of fast forward, went out to dinner.
We had a good dinner. Walking back to our hotel,
we had to walk across a large park. They called
it a rugby pitch. I'm sure they probably play a
lot of rugby up there. But anyway, walking across this
(23:20):
rugby pitch, I really wasn't paying attention, and I'm approaching
this black object in the middle of this rugby field
and I finally look up and I focused my eyes
on it, and it is a black bear. Oh did
you turn around an aisle? A juvenile black bear. Now
I'm not talking about a baby, because baby is the
(23:40):
most dangerous, because that means mom was around. Yeah, this
was a juvenile black bear just strolling through the park. Wow.
And he just kept on walking. He just kept on walking.
He walked right down the shopping street and people were
coming out of the shops and they were like, oh
my god, you know, like screaming and running back in
the shops and they were locking the doors. And the
bear was just like dude, yeah, yeah, do doo. Like
(24:02):
he was just walking around town.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Man.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
He was just chilling, having a good times. Cool. And
it was like the closest I ever come. I probably
came within about I want to say, probably within about
fifty yards of a black bear. That's cool. And I
didn't even realize it. That could have been bad, but
it's good. That could have been really bad. Yeah, all right,
we got to.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Take a quick break. We come back. We talked more.
We've got some great lengths. We've got a couple of
listener questions and some news and of course you had
a problem with the laptop, which will play nicely to
one of our questions as well when we come back.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean Twird, and I'm Justin. Let
me find us on the web at Tech talk radio
dot Com. We'll be right back now back to tip
talk Radio. So y'all know that I have a smart home.
I run Home Assistant, which is an open source, free
home smart home management software, and I've got a lot
(24:55):
of smart home devices.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
You know.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
I've got Zeus, I've got Loutron, I've got a little
bit of phillups. I've got a lot of different things
that operate different light switches, mostly light switches and light bulbs.
But I've been yearning to just get back into the
smart home thing because it's been a long time since
(25:16):
I built my smart home and it just kind of
it does its thing, but I'm like, I just want
to make it better. We even reached out at one point.
This is a couple of years ago. We reached out
to Reed's Smart Home, who's a YouTuber. He was actually
gonna come on the show. I just never followed up
with him. I really need to reach back out to him.
But anyway, there's this new thing that is really taking
(25:38):
the smart home world by storm, and it's this little
sensor and it's called an ESP thirty two. Now, this
little this little microcontroller is the brains of the sensor.
Now you can build whatever kind of sensor you want,
but this is the brains of it. So what you
do is you plug that into your Raspberry Pie or
(26:02):
wherever you're running your home assistant. You set it up.
Then you introduce the sensor that you want. Now, it
could be a temperature humidity sensor. In my case, I
bought five of these what are they called here, capacitive
soil moisture sensors. Oh wow. So what this does is
(26:27):
I basically stick this sensor in a plant, a potted plant,
with my ESP thirty two next to it. Now, I
can run the ESP thirty two off of a small
solar panel, or I can run off a battery pack,
or I can just find an outlet and plug it into.
But anyway, you stick this capacitive soil sensor into a plant,
(26:47):
and then you program the ESP thirty two to say, hey,
when soil moisture reaches less than twenty percent, send me
an alert that tells me, hey, it's time to water
the plate. So you don't overwater, you don't underwater. It's exactly.
And then there's other sensors you can do. Like I said,
you can do temperature humidity. A lot of people do that.
(27:09):
And if you try to buy like a temperature humidity
sensor off of Amazon that's off the shelf, that basically
is an ESP thirty two chip built in with a sensor,
you're looking at spending thirty forty to fifty sixty bucks
even on a single sensor. You can build an ESP
thirty two with a temperature humidity sensor for a total
(27:33):
of fourteen dollars. Oh wow, that's amazing. That's great. And
so I've got these capacitive soil sensors. I've also got
I got some millimeter wave sensors. Now, what that does
millimeter wave is a is a presence detection. But it's
not like a true motion detector. Because motion detectors they'll
(27:56):
read anything across the room. A cat, a cat thirty
free away, walks across boom, it triggers the motion sensor.
Your alarm goes off. No no, no, no, no, no no,
you don't want that. A millimeter wave sensor uses millimeter waves,
that's why it's called that, and it's very accurate and
it's very short range. So what I can do, for instance,
(28:17):
is I put a millimeter wave sensor just around the
corner of my stairwell leading up to the upstairs, just
kind of out of view of anybody walking around the
living room. But the moment that I crossed that threshold
onto the stairwell, that millimeter wave sensor says, hey, there's
somebody here, and it sends a signal to home assistant says,
(28:39):
my sensor just went off. Now Home assistant says, okay,
I've been programmed to say that when this millimeter wave
sensor goes off or on, excuse me, I'm supposed to
turn on the stairway lights. Wow, and it does that.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Could this be used in a case too, and you
dealt with this unfortunately flooding in a basement.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
Yeah, absolutely yes, Now not the ones I have here.
The capacity of soil moisture will not work for that.
But there are just straight moisture sensors that you can
just simply lay on the floor. And I just you know,
the one that I had with my with my flooding
thing that I had a year ago or a little
bit over a year ago. I ended up buying a
(29:24):
two d and fifty dollars sensor that also has an
automatic shut off, so like if it detects moisture on
the ground. It will automatically shut off the hot water
of the hot water heater, the tankless water heater, it'll
shut off the supply line to that water heater. That
(29:44):
was two hundred and fifty bucks. Now that I look
at this with an ESP thirty two, I probably could
have built that same thing with an actual physical device
to turn off the valve. I probably could have built
that for about eighty bucks. Wow, that's pretty good. I'd
never heard of this technology. What is it again, it's
called E S E SP Now, I don't know what
(30:04):
ESP stands for. Maybe Sean has done some wiggle ESP
dash thirty two and again they are they are powered
by USB. So I got the ones with the USB
C connector because it's just a little bit easier because
everything's USB C now. And they have pinouts just like
a g P IO. I don't know if you can
(30:26):
see this on the screen. I'm trying to put it
on here, but yeah, little little pinouts that you can
then put into a bread board to program it or
put it into your own circuit. But but now that
I also have a three D printer, I can print
custom cases for these little sensors nice and then put
them wherever I want.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
So ESP just stands for Expressive Systems, which is the
company that made yem H and it's thirty two bits
p thirty two thirty two bit micro controller. They've come
out they can about twenty sixteen, so they've been around
for a long time. But just with the with IoT
and does the world of that, you could just do
(31:08):
so much more now. So there's tons of tons more
and I mean it's it's on the same line of
like Adrenocord, Raspberry Pies, et cetera. So if you're into those,
this is gonna be very familiar territory for you.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
Well, first off, though the ESP is it does not
run an OS like Raspberry Pie. Raspberry Pie is much
more powerful. Yeah, yeah, so the ESP runs very basic
like a Python or a basic basic color like Python
or something like that.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
Right, So, just to clarify though, Raspberry Pie does make
a Pie zero, which is essentially an EESP.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Yeah sure, o, yes they do.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
So there are versions of Raspberry Pie that are very
similar to ESPs, but you can't get full fledged in
OS zero.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
The Pie zero even runs Linux. These ESPs cannot run
Linux correct, all right, Yeah, so so they're even even
the zero is a little bit more powerful than ESP.
But yes, Sean is correct. One other thing I can
do with this is, you know I have an outdoor freezer, well,
I mean well garage freezer. Yeah. I can buy a
temperature sensor, mount an ESP controller on the side of
(32:13):
the freezer, and I can monitor the temperature of my freezer.
So and like what happens, Like, oh my god, I
left the freezer door open accidentally. I'll get an alert saying, hey,
the temperature has risen in the outdoor freezer. Oh shoot,
I need to go close the door to the freezer, right,
Like those are the kind of things you can do
with this. That is pretty cool. I like that. Where
(32:34):
would somebody find this? Amazon? Amazon? Nice Amazon.
Speaker 4 (32:37):
You can buy a six pack for twenty dollars.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Yeah, all right, cool. I just bought a five pack
for like fifteen. Yeah all right. We got a listener
email and from Rick in Selwarita.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Rick says, Hey, I'm wanting to get a new PC
with Windows eleven for the house. A friend told me
to build it myself, and I'm not that tech oriented.
Would that be too much of a challenge. I don't
play games, only use it to read news stories and
check out videos on YouTube. Should I try it? Or
am I better off buying ready to Go at Costco
or best Buy? If so, which is a brand to
(33:10):
look at?
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Rick? Rick? If all you do is to read news
stories and check out videos on YouTube, you don't need
to build a PC. Just go buy a Chromebook really chromebook, or.
Speaker 4 (33:21):
A or a relatively inexpensive bottom end of your budget laptop.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Dude, he's talking about using it to browse the web.
He doesn't need to build a PC for that. Yeah,
that's true. That's true.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
So on the topic of building computers, have you seen
RAM prices recently?
Speaker 3 (33:38):
No? Are they up or down?
Speaker 4 (33:40):
So RAM prices have tripled in price over the last
three or four weeks. Yes, No, it's the it's the AI.
It's it's all of the d d R five rand
that's being eaten up for AI computing and all the GPU.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
It's just any RAM.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
Yeah. So I mean you just go and look at
PC par picker, New Wag and look at the trending
prices for RAM, and you are gonna see double, if
not triple.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
There is a story we talked about this Sean. If
you remember this that people are ditching the desktop. You know,
you had that desktop, you had that tower. I think
we all started with. You had that Square one that's sat.
I had a laser one eight I think it is
what it was.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
We had a Hewett packard at home.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Yeah, and then you went to a tower gateway, oh
the gateways yeah, uh and then uh. But people are
ditching them now to have a laptop because you can
put a laptop on your desk if you want, buy
a monitor attached another monitor, or.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
You buy the station.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Yeah, buy a docuentation and get two monitors on it.
And they're saying that they're pretty happy with it because
it does what they needed to do if you're going
to game. Though, I wouldn't. I wouldn't do that for
a gaming situation. No, I know about that, dude. I
got you know that new Hpomen. I'm going to talk
about my problem with that Hpomen.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
But that Hpomen's got a fifty seventy in it, an
RTX fifty seventy with thirty two gigs a ram Man.
I can run any game I want on that line.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
And I've got I've got an older a sus Rog
that's got a twenty eighty in it so twenty eighty
mobile in it, and that was great for what it is.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Yeah, yeah, I think I got a twenty eighty TI
in my desktop that I'm doing the show with. Right.
I don't play games on this computer anymore. I basically
just play them on the laptop.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
But you know, yeah, and that's the thing. We play
them on the laptop or our phones. I mean, that's
the whole bit.
Speaker 4 (35:37):
They're even saying that computer literacy is down.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Oh that's not good with.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
How how little, how little children interact with computers now,
you know, like when I grew up and I had
computer lab, like we had a lot of computer this
week in typing, yeah maybe speaking type a Mario Mario
racing type, Like you were interacting with computer a day
to day basis, typing, writing, you know, whatever, Internet, et cetera.
(36:04):
Now everybody does on their phones. So you're you're getting
into this newer generation with.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
The kids that are in there bell correct.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
Yes, the kids that are into into their teens don't
know how to navigate an operating system on a computer.
They don't know how to do keyboard shortcuts, they don't
know how to do basic functions on a computer. Because
they're always on a mobile or a tablet or another
handheld device that has a completely different functioning operating system.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
That's exactly what I went through when I was, you know,
when I was working back at Fox five in San Diego,
you know, being an IT person. We would get remember
remember remember the girl, the reporter girl that came in
and I was like, here's your laptop and then here's
your USB hotspot dongle, and she's like us B. That
was like a famous little story because she's like us B,
(36:56):
I don't know what USB is. And I was like,
oh my god, like what what this is? Back in
like twenty twelve, it's even gotten worse, But now I
understand it. You know, I was like, how can you
be in the year of twenty twenty five and not
know how to use a computer? Sean just perfectly summed
it up right there. Yeah, yeah, you're seeing you're seeing it.
Speaker 4 (37:17):
So with some of my younger, young, younger cousins or
my friends that have kids that are, you know, fifteen, sixteen,
seventeen years old, it's it's bizarre how they just don't
know how to navigate a computer.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
And it's gonna get worse with Ai.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Yeah, we have somebody new at the station and uh,
she needed to get her laptop configured for our printer.
So I said, well, just bring it on in and
we'll go through it. And it did not have any
USB A ports at all on it.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
It was everything just two USB C ports and that
was it.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
And that's the thing when you're out buying a laptop,
make sure you get what you're gonna need, you know,
And that's the thing you just go especially now we're
coming up to Black Friday, we're gonna see sales. Make
sure it has everything you need.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
Oh basically, don't buy an Apple Apple. You don't get anything.
You get one port and then you have a bit
of dongle for everything. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
They've got they've, they've they've it's historically been that way.
You can't get some of their newer MacBooks do have
a USBA, a guesty card slot and four usbcs plus
an plus an actual HDMI output.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
All right, we gonna take another quick break. We come
back with more of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor,
I'm Sean de Weird, and I'm justin.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Let me send us an X at tech Talk Radio.
We'll do rep back and now back to tech Talk Radio.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
So during the break we talked a little bit about
a segment that we want to talk about. This was
posted on the IT Humor and Memes group on Facebook.
Love that group between nineteen ninety one and two thousand
and nine. So take a trip back to the early
days of the Internet. What's the most memorable computer game
you played in that timeframe?
Speaker 3 (38:58):
There were so many good ones.
Speaker 4 (39:00):
So let's start with Justin. Justin, so between nineteen ninety
one in two thousand and nine. So that's a pretty
it's a pretty good chunk of time.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
I mean, I see the list that you provided here,
These are some of the ones that were in the
in their their Oh yeah, we just.
Speaker 4 (39:14):
We populated our own list of games that we played
at that time frame. And remember PC games console games
is a whole different category.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
Yeah sure, yeah, a lot of a lot of this stuff,
but yeah, definitely PC games. I gotta say my first
my eyes move it right to Wolfenstein three D. That
was one of the very first games I ever played.
But my favorite, I have to say, my favorite was
probably either Command and Conquer or The SIMS.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
The SIMS was fun. My daughter still you know, still
plays the SIMS. She has SIMS four. I think they're
up to now, I mean, or maybe even beyond that.
She still has fun with it. That was a that was.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
A lot of fun to play. I also did really
like Roller Coaster Tycoon. But Sean, what for you? I
think I know the answer? Can I can I say what?
I think the answer is going to be absolutely World
of Warcraft.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
So I think this timeframe is a little too unfair
because it covers such a prop progression in the computer
gaming world. Right, Yeah, ninety one to two thousand and nine.
That's that's a long time. It's almost two decades, right,
So I have to break this up into I think
three different games for this time period.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
I just I have to because there's.
Speaker 4 (40:34):
Just like you, I grew up getting PC Magazine with
the discs and the demos and stuff.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
I still have it.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
It's a disc that is a demo disc for APIG games. Oh,
they made some of the best shareware games that existed.
You had Wolf Centred, which is a classic. But there's
an apergy game called Blakestone Aliens of Gold. I still
play that game to this day because it's on gog
It's if I shooter. It's just fantastic first person or
(41:03):
it's a first person shooter. Really, it's a very doom.
It's a very doom doom. Wolvenstein asked, you know a
platformer it's so good. Then Diablo too, Lord of Instruction
probably the game I've spent the most time in my
life playing. Then World of Warcraft, and then into some
other games down the road. But those ones, the Blizzard games,
(41:26):
Blizzard North.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
I mean, I think you probably played a game or
two back then I did. Doom was one of those
that I played a lot. I loved Duke Nukem. Duke
nukemb was just an absolute blast.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
Uh. But there's one Okay.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
So I was looking over the list of some of
the ones that people were mentioning, and Loom was on
the list.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
But I don't remember Loom. I like I can.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
I remember it was a big game, but I don't
remember exactly what it did.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
I don't remember Loom, but I I'm I'm actually a
little bit of fan. Did that Leisure Shoot, Larry did
not make this list? Good old Lasry. Yeah, leisures all right,
So what have you got there?
Speaker 4 (42:10):
Okay, So there's a couple that I missed for sure,
So I'm gonna rattle off a couple in my seat.
I have my actual install jet Fighter.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
To gosh, look at that.
Speaker 4 (42:20):
Oh my gosh, I've got all my I've got Oh
my god, I've got so many.
Speaker 3 (42:25):
What are those shiny discs?
Speaker 4 (42:28):
So these are gonna be some. These are a ton
of These are so many good memories. Jet Fighter, Super VG,
A Harrier nice of the Old Republic. This classic deer.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
Hunting I remember, I remember Deer Hunters.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
The Medal of Honor, Games worl Wind jet Fighter to
Battlefield nineteen forty, the Original Diablo, I've got that in
there too, Commanded Conquers, Age of Empires.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Wow, it's great if you most.
Speaker 4 (42:58):
Of my PC childhood in there.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
If you go to that group on Facebook again, a
great group. It humored memes.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
You can see what other people have said and maybe
reminists a little about some of the games that you
played and had a good time with.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Speaking of video games, there is an anniversary edition of
a famous video game and it's actually I'm just all
about this series right now because of the TV show
second season coming out here next month. But it is
Fallout four fall for anniversary Edition. Now it has been
(43:35):
over ten years since Fallout four was released. Over ten years,
I don't want to say eleven or even twelve. Actually
right now comes out on November tenth. It muddles the
base game, yeah, Monday. It bundles the base game with
several expansions. Fallout four Anniversary Edition will be available digitally
on the Xbox Series S, X, Xbox One, PC, PlayStation five,
(43:59):
and play Station four. Now I'm actually playing Fallout four again.
So in the last few weeks. I guess maybe I
probably started this one last time. I was on the
show here a few weeks ago, but I really got
back into Fallout seventy six. Now seventy six is the
MMO version of Fallout. It's online, you're playing with real people.
(44:21):
But I've been playing Fallout seventy six like mad. And
then I wanted to get Eric. I wanted Eric to
be able to play fall Out with me, so I
signed up. I got him a copy of Fallout seventy six,
and I put it on his computer and we launched
the game. And Bethesda, who's the maker of Fallout, the
(44:43):
first message as soon as he launched the game. It says,
we have detected this is a child account. He is
not allowed to play this game. Wow. And I was like,
wait what? So I contacted Fallout, I contacted Bethesda support
and I said, look, i'm his parent, I'm I am
granting permission for him to play this game. And because
(45:03):
you know, yes there is there's blood and gore in it,
but it's kind of like a cartoonish blooding gore. It's
not like super realist. So I was like, I allow
this and they're like, okay, well, you got to fill
out this legal document. They sent me a legal document
that I had to fill out, signs scan, then email
back to them, and then they were like okay, we'll
(45:25):
go ahead and process this and then boom, you're good. Nope.
Even after I said that, Bethesda was like, no, we
are not allowing your child to play unless he's thirteen
years old. Oh. And I'm like, okay, then give me
the reason why I have already provided you parental consent,
and they said, we don't care about parental consent. It's
because the reason why is because it has online chat.
(45:48):
There's voice chat. Okay, there's no text chat, but there's
voice chat in the game, right, and they cannot control
the voice chat because they don't have moderation.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
Yea in some of the safeties. Now there there are
list faces. There are a lot of people out there
that are gonna pray on kids.
Speaker 3 (46:05):
Yeah, and I get that, and that's why I don't
allow him to play Roadblocks. So then I said, okay, fine, fine,
fine fine. He was really upset. He's like, I just
want to play Fallout with you. So what I did
was I installed Fallout four, which is a single player game.
You know, there's no multiplayer aspect single player. I installed
Fallout four to his computer and I said, look, Bud,
(46:25):
here you go. You can play Fallout now. He started
playing it. Dude, he doesn't even play Minecraft anymore. Wow,
that's crazy. That is his favorite game of all time.
He's like, nope, I want to play Fallout. Fallout is
so amazing. He's like, and I'm like, thank you. This
is this is what I'm telling you. There's so many
other games out there besides just Minecraft. I've never played
(46:47):
Fallout oh, like at all. God, dude, fall so good.
Speaker 4 (46:52):
They're fun. They're not my style of game. I'm not
a big fan. I mean, they're good. I will give them,
but it's.
Speaker 3 (46:59):
Just not it's not for me, right right. I was
just thinking though, when you mentioned seventy six.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
One of the games that I used to like playing, well,
two of them Redneck Rampage and the other one is
Interstate seventy six, which was.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Kind of like the Mod Squad Car. You're driving around
in a car. It was. It was a lot of fun.
That one was a good game too. The reason they
called this one Fallout seventy six is because it's supposed
to be that you're in vault seventy six. Oh, that's right,
that's what it means. All right.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
I want to I want to find out a little
bit about the problem you've been having with your HP omen,
which is a pretty high end HP computer laptop.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
I just I just got this computer like six months ago,
and it's a it's a very high end laptop. It's
got the AMD Rizin nine, it's got thirty two gigs
of RAM, it's got the RTX fifty seventy graphics card.
I mean, this thing is a beast and it's been
great for me this whole time. And I've never really
been an HP fan. All of a sudden, this last Saturday,
(48:00):
I go to get my laptop at night. I'm i'm, i'm,
it's in my bag. I grab it out to go
do something, and the computer is just slow as molasses
to boot up. Like I finally get to the login
screen where I can log into Windows, and then the
screen goes blank and I can barely move my mouse.
When I move my mouse, it's like it's like one
(48:22):
frame a second, where the mouse is like it kind
of jumps around the screen one frame a second. And
then there's no Windows Explore at the bottom, like you know,
you got the Windows button and all the all the
pinned icons. Nothing was at the bottom. And it took about,
I want to say, about ten minutes, and then all
of a sudden, everything just got really smooth. And I
(48:45):
was like, Okay, think about this from an IT perspective.
What causes this kind of thing to happen? And I'm thinking, Okay,
it's got to be a bad SSD because everything is
being loaded into RAM, and once it gets loaded into RAM,
it's all nice and smooth. So I downloaded the HP
Diagnostics tool. I ran it within Windows. I even ran
(49:09):
it with Uefi before Windows boots. I ran all the tests,
everything said everything passed with flying colors and I'm like, okay, fine,
So then I went I ran check disc and I
did check disc slash C, slash F or whatever the
commands are. It went talk about thirty five minutes. It
(49:30):
scanned my entire tear a bit hard drive. It said
everything was fine. Then I'm like, okay, it's still not fixed.
What is going on? Why is this so slow? I
went to Windows Update and I noticed a couple updates,
but they weren't installed right around that same time. They
were installed a couple of days earlier. But I was like, okay,
well that doesn't make any sense, but I want to
(49:50):
Oh you know what, I'm just gonna uninstall the last
three updates that Windows made. I uninstalled those three updates.
I rebooted the computer, Bam, every is back again. So
it's a Microsoft update that didn't one one more time.
It's Microsoft's fault. Wow, they released a faulty dude. Microsoft
is getting really bad, like they're they've been releasing updates
(50:12):
lately that have just been bricking computers.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
Yeah, and it's the SSD one. And well Microsoft said no, no,
that didn't really happen. Other people are saying no, no,
we we had this issue where it was wiping on
an SSD.
Speaker 4 (50:25):
Hold on, we can't talk about about Microsoft. We might
get canceled.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
Oh gosh, you.
Speaker 4 (50:30):
Can't talk about how to bypass Windows local logins either
anymore because you might get booted form YouTube?
Speaker 3 (50:37):
What really?
Speaker 4 (50:38):
Oh yeah, so you're talking about the issues with Microsoft,
and the content creators on YouTube have been getting videos
removed that have been talking about how to bypass local
logins for Windows leven. I've talked about it on the
show before, so I just know that they're really cracking
(50:59):
down on anything.
Speaker 1 (51:01):
Like RUFUS, pulling videos that talked about RUFUS. Really yep, Wow, amazing.
All right, we're gonna take another quick break. We come
back with more of tech talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor,
I'm Sean de Weird.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
And I'm Justin. Let me find us on the facebooks
at Forward Slash tech Talkers. We'll be right back and
now back to tech talk Radio.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
I don't want to buy just the absolute primo system
out today. That usually wastes money, So I'll be doing
some digital photography, maybe some video editing, don't do any
gaming at all, so I don't have that demand on
the computer. It's wondering what you guys would suggest, either
brands or just in general speed. And where do you
go to get the maximum bang to the buck right now?
Speaker 3 (51:40):
Sounds like you want to max. So websites are the week.
Cool websites. We found a couple. I know we normally
don't do this because we never find any cool websites,
but I found one that's kind of cool. It's a
Pong style clock. Wait pong like in the game Pong. Yeah,
like the game, like the game where you're basically a clock,
but you're watching two computer characters just play pong, but
(52:04):
it keeps up with the time. And so the website
is big job by dot com, Big job By dot
Com Forward slash Pong, and somebody actually has watched these
two little ai things. They just bounce the thing back
and forth and eventually, when the minute is up, one
of them loses, and then the minute goes to the
(52:27):
next minute, and then it just kind of repeats.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Just like watching sports. Pretty much perfect. Okay, So the
website to get to that is Big Jobby Jobby dot
Com Forward slash Pong. Have some fun with that one, schun.
Speaker 4 (52:42):
And so we've been talking a lot about classic games,
so there if you want to. So two places you
can go that I know of half the time my
head Internet archive. Oh yeah, and Classic reload dot com
will allow you to play doss games in your browser.
Doss boxes a right application if you want to.
Speaker 3 (53:01):
What was that Classic Reload Classic.
Speaker 4 (53:03):
Reload dot com? All right, so go there check those out.
But during the break we were talking about being distracted
on the Internet. With the TV Garden website, you can
stream the NASA ISS TV, which is just basically like
a live stream of the ISS going flying.
Speaker 3 (53:20):
Where is that one on TV?
Speaker 4 (53:23):
It's just scrolled down you'll see NASA TV. I've got that.
I had that full screened up and I was just
mesmerized of staring at it.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
Yeah, watching it go by a little more visual than
three D punk or punk.
Speaker 4 (53:34):
Yeah. So the TV Garden stuff is just incredible. We
talked about it a while back on the show. Another
one of my favorite. If you we're talking about TV,
we're talking about radio garden. WebSDR dot org is for
ham radio people. We've talked about that one. We talked
about it when we talked about TV Garden two weeks ago.
WebStar dot org. If you're in the hand radio at
(53:54):
all right, I encourage you go check that out, tune in,
tune into your your local net, or tune in a
net around the world.
Speaker 3 (54:01):
It's all right. I got one.
Speaker 1 (54:03):
We talked about background remove dot BG last week, where
you can remove the background out of a photo. Here's
another one, cleanup dot pictures. Cleanup dot pictures, and it's
online image editing. So if you're looking for you just
want to remove somebody out of a picture real quick.
You know, I wouldn't say use this all the time,
(54:23):
but if you're looking for something real quick, you want
to test it out, play around, cleanup dot pictures might
work for you. All right, that's it for this week's
Tech Talk Radio. Thanks for tuning in. If you have questions, comments,
we'd love to hear from you again on We're on YouTube,
so you send us a comment there, TikTok, of course,
Facebook X, wherever you want to reach out to us.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird, and I'm just
(54:47):
let me have yourselves.
Speaker 3 (54:48):
Great week, We'll see you next time.
The following program is produced by the Tech Talk Radio Network.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hi, this is a Colin Macria. Whose line is it?
Speaker 3 (00:05):
Anyway you're listening to tech talk Radio. I don't know
how it works. It's all magical stuff to me.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor,
I'm Shonda Weird, and I'm Justin Lemey.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Welcome. Look at that we got Justin. But you've been
gone for a while. How you doing, dude, I'm doing.
I'm just I've been busy, man, I've been busy with work.
And then, as I was mentioned in a pre show, man,
I'm getting old. Man, I'm going to bed. I'm going
to bed by the time you guys start recording. But
now that we're on daily savings time, you know, it
(00:38):
actually helps me because I'm like, hey, I can do
this now, but no to bed.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
You know the number of times that I've missed the
show because I've fallen asleep with my kids.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Oh, yes, happened.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I mean it happens. It happened one time when it
was just you and me. I was sitting here, correct,
where is he?
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Where is he?
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I'm actually falling asleep at the microphone when I was
working at KLPX. I fell asleep at the microphone. I
think I remember.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Hearing about that. That was quite We got quite a
bit of fodder for that one.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
That was good. Yeah, you hear about that overnight guy. Yeah,
Jonas had to call in and I was like, I
was like answering the phone, and I'm like, He's like like,
first off, like why are you calling me so late?
And You're like, why are you sleeping?
Speaker 1 (01:19):
This supposed to be on the air of one of
the many stations that I work at, or have worked at.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I'll say it that way.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
One day I was driving into record Yeah, not this show,
another show, and I noticed that the top of the
hour came by and I didn't hear the DJ on
the air, and matter of fac it was twenty minutes
in my drive. I'd never heard the DJ once and
there was certain parts that that DJ had to do.
So I called the boss and apparently she had forgot
(01:46):
to come in and her shift.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Was at two. This was at four. Oh my god.
They didn't realize it for two hours. Computer systems nowadays
do they just keep on just going right? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Radio automation is interesting because if you're in the studio. Uh,
and like this show that we do here, and of
course my show that I do in the afternoon and
throughout the day, we.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Have live d days.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
They're they're, they're in there, and you know, yes, you
could say, all right, I wanted to play the next
three songs without having to interact with them, but generally
you you just play each one. I mean, we're there live,
and it's rare these days unless.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
It's a morning show.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
When I was working for one of the big network groups,
I could say Westwood One, I was on seventy stations,
and while is while I was working here as well,
seventy stations. I go home and I would record. And
the thing is, you'd record two hours ahead. But if
something happened in that radio town, you know, whether it
was in you know, Florida or Pitty News.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
I was in Pittsburgh, it was in DC. I was everywhere.
But if something happened, how what am I gonna do?
There's nothing you had. Everything had to be recorded an
hour ahead of time. That's that's That's the one thing
I never understood about canning. Like, Okay, I understand, you know,
radio stations they want to save money. A lot of
it is canned. Now. When I say canned, I mean
like pre recorded. But the thing is is, if you
(03:10):
go back in history, radio DJs are technically I mean
they started out as journalists. I mean they they were
there to provide you news and entertainment. And radio used
to be just simply news.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
When I was in broadcasting school, we had to go
rip the news off the teletype.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
They actually had a teletype and.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
It would it would, you know, give you news, the
biggest news stories, and then you would always have to
do the news at the top of the hour.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
How do sit back in the Old West? Are you
you making a reference to my age young man? Maybe
just a little bit, No, But I mean, seriously, you
think about it. This is what they were designed to do.
They were They weren't designed to just simply do like,
uh music. They were you know, radio DJs were there
to uh one, run a station. Make sure that you know,
(04:01):
you take your meter readings and make sure the towers,
you know, all lights are everything's yeah, the lights are on,
and the towers are broadcasting at the right frequency and
the right wattage. You're there to provide news, you provide
entertainment and then music in between and then eventually just
kind of got less and less news and more and
more entertainment radio, more and more commercials, more and more commercials.
(04:25):
And then and then everything became automated, so then you
don't have to take your readings anymore. Everything was automatically
logged by a computer. And then and then it just
got to eventually was like, oh, we don't even need
DJs anymore. And and now some radio stations are even
using AI DJs.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Let's face it, guys, it's getting really good. Some of
the some of the stuff they're able to do is
pretty amazing. And you know, one of the big worries
that some radio people that you know, I know have
is that you think about all the audio we've recorded
over the years, that's an audio print, it's you, yeah,
that could be manipulated now using AI to say the time,
(05:04):
the weather, the song that was just played, the song
that's being played. AI is is scary not only for
radio but also for television. There is it's gotten so
good that you know, at some point those that are
delivering the news on TV have to be concerned.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
But have you also heard about and this is this
is starting to make kind of waves in the tech industry,
is this thing that they they're calling the AI bubble.
They're they're talking about this as if this is going
to be another one of the dot com busts, you know,
back from the two thousands, you know, when everybody was
all in on the internet and the Internet was the
(05:43):
big thing, and then all of a sudden, boom, everything
just failed. And all these companies are putting so much
money into AI, you know, open Ai getting like a
five hundred billion dollar investment from like Nvidia, and then
blah blah blah blah blah. People are saying this is
this is a yeah, like this, it's gonna fail. And
I kind of think that's the way I think. I
(06:05):
think the hype has just gotten too big and AI
is really not going to do what everybody thinks it's
gonna do.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Now.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Yes, granted, maybe in I don't know, five, ten, twenty years, yeah,
maybe we'll all be redundant. But I think right now,
I think it's a bubble.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, it's it's I think people are gonna get burned, well,
if they're not already burned out, because every time you
turn around, oh ai AI, somebody wrote on and I'm
gonna just say I saw this on next door and
it was AI with a round circle and a slash
through it, you know, And so I went ahead and asked,
(06:42):
I said, just wondering what facet of AI do you
dislike the most, And the person responded said everything.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
I dislike how it's incorporated into every app.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
Now.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
I just like how many people were fired. Let's face it,
that's happened because they were replaced by AI. I just
like how people normalizing it when it shouldn't.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
I just like it's coming from toys. Right. We talked
about this a couple of months ago. Right, has Bro
is looking at putting AI and toys, Yes, and that
just doesn't sit right for me. We talked about this
a couple months ago. There was an article that came
out that said Hasbro is looking at incorporating AI into toys.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Right for what reason? Yeah? This is it's ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (07:24):
My frustration with AI is you are sucking the creativity
and the artistic vision out of the human soul. And
when you start taking that away from people, what's left?
And it if kids are now just going to be know,
they're going to be entertained by AI? What why do
they need to be creative anymore.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
That's good.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
Did they need why did they Why do they need
to think anymore?
Speaker 3 (07:48):
This is exactly what I was having a conversation with
my family about. This is that, you know, with AI
and what we weren't centered on the AI aspect of it,
but we were more centered on the creativity portion of childhood.
And Eric, you know, Eric is constantly like, I'm bored.
I'm bored. And I saw a post. I didn't remember
it was read it or Facebook or whatever, but it
(08:09):
was like talking about it. It's like, it's okay to
be bored. Children should be bored because that's what sparks creativity.
That's what makes them go, hmm, what can I make?
What can I do? You know? And if they have
a screen in front of them the whole time, it's
never gonna spark that creativity. It's gonna just give that
dopamine hit and then that's it. And and so now
(08:31):
then they're gonna be addicted to the dopamine hit, which
is the screen. You know. My My also concern is reading.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Uh, let's face it, there's stories that kids aren't reading
as much as they used to. Teachers will say that
as well, And now we're finding books that will read
to them.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Now they're reading along. But I don't know that that
that makes me.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
That makes me nervous as well. You want your kids
to learn the words and learn how how that sentence
is going and read, and now it's just reading it
to them.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
And I just just think of like even just from
like the safeguard, get to put into place, like what's okay,
So let's say this children's toy has AI in it.
Does it connect to the cloud? Does it? Is it
learning connect? Right? So it's like we all know that
everybody has a recording device in their phone, you know,
in their pocket with their phones, like it's always listening
to your TV's, listening your whatever. But now just adding
(09:29):
all these other kids toys in kids spaces, listening to
what your kids are doing, listening to what I just it,
It's just freaks me out.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
I'm starting to see TV commercials where and I think
we're becoming a little more attuned to what artificial intelligence
is in the media. And I'm seeing TV commercials where
they'll cut to a shot of a couple sitting around
a table. I can tell right away, well that's AI.
You know it's the filmmaking.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
You see. Coca Cola released their new AI generated holiday commercial.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Oh no, they did it again, so.
Speaker 4 (10:07):
Last year, so they've they've Last year they did it
and it was really bad. You could truly tell this
year's just not any better. The animals look awful, the
backgrounds look awful, the ending is awful. The whole thing
is just awful. One of the one of the other
frustrated things I have about AI is everybody thinks AI
is just going to make everything cheaper, cheaper and easier. Yeah,
(10:30):
but you've sacrificed a lot of quality. You sacrificed a
lot for that. Like it's getting to the point where
it's what is becoming acceptable to the viewer.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
I just I just watched that Coca Cola ad. Yeah,
I mean, honestly, I don't know, man, it feels Coca Cola.
I watched it, and I can tell certain aspects of
it or AI. But but the thing about Coca Cola ads,
especially the holiday ads, they've done CGI for so many years,
this doesn't feel that different. Friend, then they're normal c
(11:02):
g I ads.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
It's just it's just pushing the boundaries of that uncanny
valley where it's just you know, the polar bears are animated, right,
that's just a fundamental fact. But this just pushes it
to another level with some of the other animals they
put in there, the transitions, the snow, the the driving.
If you look at the shot at the end with
the semis, it plows over some people, Like what, just
(11:26):
just watch the end. Watch the end again.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
I watch the end.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
Watch people tell you that Semi does not run over people.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Oh okay, all right, I'm watching the end of it.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
Just watch the end and tell me it does not
plow over people at the end.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
All right, Oh my gosh, this is Oh my god,
I'm telling you, dude, it's it's and and okay, yeah,
the wide shot of the crowd, all of the people
in the last wide shot, right, their their legs.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
Are moving funny. Their arms are moving funny.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
It used to be it was the fingers. Right now,
it's the way they move.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
It's it's probably up on YouTube or will they take
it down, you know, will Coca Cola.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Say no, way to the official Coca Cola channel on
YouTube and just look for the one. It's called Coca Cola.
Holidays are coming.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Oh boy, we're a subject of media and I would
love to hear from you our listeners. You're listening to this,
you're thinking, you know, guys, I'm tired of it too.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Let us know.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
I want to I want to get your thoughts or
if you do use it, you know I've had fun
with it, like uh, Sora is a part of Chat GPT,
which you know I use Chat GPT. It was weird
because the other day I needed I needed a graphic
and I wanted a video graphic, a moving video graphic
for a news story that was on Fox eleven, and
(12:46):
I thought, well, why didn't I try and.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
See if it used to be?
Speaker 1 (12:49):
It was baked right into chat GPT, and I asked,
all would do was give me the stills, And I asked,
I said, well, where's the video and they said, oh, it's.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Not incorporated anymore.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
And it base lied to me because it is with
a CHATGBT account open AI. It's just you have to
access it a different length Sora dot and then you know,
go to the full web length. And I thought, well,
that's kind of where I found that out the next
day when I was doing some research, Sora too is
now going to be available on Android devices and so
(13:19):
I found it.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
Now Sora is a part of my Android. And the
other day my grandson was over.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
He brought up one of those you remember those little
horses that have the stick, They have the head and
then they have the stick they run around with. So
of course I asked Sora to put them on a
horse with a picture of head, and it did and
it was great. You couldn't have told I mean, it
did not look AI generated. So again it's it's it's
frustrating because now we're seeing so many tools coming out
(13:46):
on so many different sites that do so many different things.
You have to wonder, like, really, this is where we're going.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
I wanted to get Justin's opinion on this, right, So
with the Sora stuff, you mentioned the Sora the video generator, right,
have you seen the stuff where Studio Ghibli is suing
Sorrow because that copyright in fringement.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Not necessarily just Sora, but I knew know that about
eight nine months ago, chat GPT was in hot water
with Studio Ghibli because people were basically taking photos and
saying make this in a style of Studio Ghibli. And
I even have some photos of my family in the
studios a police. Remember you did that, and it does
(14:28):
the very very good job. Now, I don't know about
the Sora aspects. So if again, if you're trying to
if you're listening to this, you're like, what is Sora?
Sora is the video generating application built into chat GPT,
so it uses AI to generate video instead of just
text or photos. Yeah. No, I had not heard about
(14:49):
the video aspect of it.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
So the content oversees distribution Association, which represents a ton
of Japanese anime. Yeah, is basically written a very strongly
worded letter to open AI and Sora saying you got
to stop using our stuff to train your models. Yeah,
because it's pumping out copyrighted content. So yeah, that's the
(15:11):
kind of stuff that is inevitable.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
We're talking about media.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
So let's let's talk a little bit about something we've
talked about for the last couple of weeks.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Justin was out. Justin said, hey, I found this website.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
This website is really cool. I would love to, you know,
give my thoughts on it. And of course that website
TV Garden. Justin, you finally got a chance to check
it out, right?
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Yeah? Actually, uh yeah I did. You guys were talking
about it. I missed lost a couple of shows, but no.
I also I also check out TV Garden and it's
actually really cool. I mean, you know, it's I like
how you're you're presented with a map, colored map of
the globe and you just pick on the country and
then it lists what channels are available. I'm personally right
(15:55):
now as we're doing the show, I'm watching a Japanese
news channel, isn't that. Yeah, And it's all and it's
done via YouTube, so it's like a YouTube embedded channel,
but it's streaming live. And yeah, I mean there's there's
there's like at least thirty channels from just Japan alone,
not to mention the other countries. But yeah, TV dot
(16:18):
Garden is really cool.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
So I will mention that Andy and I talked about
this about two weeks ago, and when we watched it,
it had every available ESPN channel.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Oh really, it does not anymore.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Oh, so for we're talking about tv TV dot Garden,
which is a great resource for fighting local televisions just
really kind of niche TV stations around the world, but
a lot of people this past weekend. Yeah, we're really
we're really upset, specifically Notre Dame football fans. So Notre
(16:55):
Dame's game was on ESPN this past weekend. If you
have had YouTube TV, you lost access to ESPN the
night before the football game, yep.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
And also Monday Night football. I wanted to watch Monday
Night FOOTBA last night because I like to watch the
Peyton and Eli Manning cast on ESPN two, and they
had Baker Mayfield, which is one of my favorite NFL players.
I just like Baker and he was on it, and
I couldn't watch it because ESPN and well Disney, Disney
and YouTube are just having a spat. And the craziest
(17:29):
part is I heard a story this morning or maybe
yesterday yesterday yesterday morning talk about how Disney approached YouTube
TV and said, look, well, actually Google, because that's the
parent company. They said, look, we got elections, We got
elections on Tuesday. We want our viewers to be able
to know what's going on with the elections. Can you
(17:51):
please just put our channels back on at least at
least just for Tuesday, May May maybe Wednesday morning. And
YouTube was like nope, wow, wow, yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
And the a lot of the driving for this decision
was that ESPN launched their own complete content streaming application.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Yeah, so a lot of people were just like, like,
I don't want to like what is happening with the
streaming world right now, Like we're just it's worse than
it was when cables a thing. It's more this is
the thing.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
That ever mentioned in the beginning.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
Yeah, it's it's more confusing, it's more frustrating, it's more expensive.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I have been contemplating making the change to YouTube TV,
and people are saying, oh, wait, you might want to
wait a little bit because you may not get all
the channels you want.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
That's been my problem with the cable company.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
You don't spending two hundred dollars a month, and yet
I really don't get anything.
Speaker 4 (18:53):
I want to go back, go back, go back seven
months ago when my or eight months ago, maybe a
year ago, when my in laws got YouTube TV. If
we go back and listen to that episode, you should
pull a clips to that episode. Yeah, because it was like,
they're gonna save a ton of money because they're cutting cable,
they're not using it, they're bundling out the Internet. It's
gonna be fantastic. They're paying seventy bucks a month or
(19:15):
whatever for everything. It's like over one hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Now, oh yeah, I pay like one hundred and twenty
five just for YouTube TV.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
Yeah, and they're even going at it like this was
a good deal when we got it.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
Yeah. Now that's how they do it. That's how they
gettin I kind of wonder if it's corporate greed.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
If people decide, Okay, I'm gonna leave you to TV,
then their options are well. Of course the antenna and
ATSC three might change some of that for some people.
But I'm thinking, okay, so maybe TV Garden it's gonna
be that's gonna be the next place to fall fall
down the rabbit hole with. I want to talk a
(19:53):
little bit about this because I've never been, and I
want to go justin you did take a little vacation.
Uh you made a trip to Aspen, Colorado, and I've
never been to Aspen. I've always thought that's where the
celebrities skied, that's where you know you went.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
I mean, is it really like a ski town to
go there. I'm a celebrity. Of course I'm gonna go there.
Of course. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
He's the voice of the Voice of the water World.
The co host of tech Talk Radio. No, people say, wait,
tech talk radio, what's that a water world? Oh my god,
and I have your autograph.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
So how was it? It was interesting. Uh. We went
up there on a Friday, and I expected, you know,
traffic was going to be bad. So from from our
house to Aspen is about four and a half hours
by car because you got to take I seventy up
into the mountains to Glenwood Springs and then you drop
south into Aspen and that's about an hour from Glenwood Springs.
(20:49):
So I expected it. I was like, okay, it says
four and a half hours, it's probably gonna be more
like six, you know, because of the traffic. There was
no traffic. It was great. It was no traffic. The
weather was beautiful. The colors. Everybody also said, oh, you
missed all the fall colors. They are all gone. No,
it was great. It was awesome. The colors were amazing.
(21:10):
We got into Aspen on the afternoon of a Friday
and Mesa and her friend wanted to go walk around
and do some shopping. They wanted to go to some
of the high end stores. I mean, there's it really
truly is. I mean, there's there's a lot of high
end stores there. Now, I gotta say, though, I do
think that when I went there, I kind of imagined
(21:30):
aspen As being more like a picturesque mountain town with
like Rodeo drive of LA with all the shops lined up. No,
it's not it. It truly feels like just a normal
like mountain town. I mean, with just people living there.
(21:51):
It doesn't feel like a rich escape. You know, there
is one street that has a lot of the high
end shops, but there's also just a lot of regular
shops mixed in too. So it was very interesting to
be where we're at, and I was just kind of like, wow,
this it doesn't feel like a rich person's place. So
(22:11):
me and me and the the husband of of of
of Mysa's friend, you know, we walked around with the kids,
We went out to lunch, we got some beers, and
we we we we met up with Mesa then and
her friend at a I don't know what the name
of what was called. There was a high end leather
store of something like like Italian leather, like bags and
(22:33):
shoes and things like that. Anyway, she was looking at
buying something there, and I was talking to the storekeeper
and I was like, oh, I bet you guys serve
a lot of you know, a lot of celebrities around.
She's like, oh yeah all the time. She's like, as
a matter of fact, if you were here, just just
like a couple hours ago, Leo was in here. WHOA.
(22:53):
I was like, wait, Leo me like Leo DiCaprio, and
she's like, yeah, he was.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
She was.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
He was in here with his girlfriend and they were shopping.
And I was like, wait, Leo's in town. That's cool.
So yeah, we got you know, that was really cool,
and then kind of fast forward, went out to dinner.
We had a good dinner. Walking back to our hotel,
we had to walk across a large park. They called
it a rugby pitch. I'm sure they probably play a
lot of rugby up there. But anyway, walking across this
(23:20):
rugby pitch, I really wasn't paying attention, and I'm approaching
this black object in the middle of this rugby field
and I finally look up and I focused my eyes
on it, and it is a black bear. Oh did
you turn around an aisle? A juvenile black bear. Now
I'm not talking about a baby, because baby is the
(23:40):
most dangerous, because that means mom was around. Yeah, this
was a juvenile black bear just strolling through the park. Wow.
And he just kept on walking. He just kept on walking.
He walked right down the shopping street and people were
coming out of the shops and they were like, oh
my god, you know, like screaming and running back in
the shops and they were locking the doors. And the
bear was just like dude, yeah, yeah, do doo. Like
(24:02):
he was just walking around town.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Man.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
He was just chilling, having a good times. Cool. And
it was like the closest I ever come. I probably
came within about I want to say, probably within about
fifty yards of a black bear. That's cool. And I
didn't even realize it. That could have been bad, but
it's good. That could have been really bad. Yeah, all right,
we got to.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Take a quick break. We come back. We talked more.
We've got some great lengths. We've got a couple of
listener questions and some news and of course you had
a problem with the laptop, which will play nicely to
one of our questions as well when we come back.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean Twird, and I'm Justin. Let
me find us on the web at Tech talk radio
dot Com. We'll be right back now back to tip
talk Radio. So y'all know that I have a smart home.
I run Home Assistant, which is an open source, free
home smart home management software, and I've got a lot
(24:55):
of smart home devices.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
You know.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
I've got Zeus, I've got Loutron, I've got a little
bit of phillups. I've got a lot of different things
that operate different light switches, mostly light switches and light bulbs.
But I've been yearning to just get back into the
smart home thing because it's been a long time since
(25:16):
I built my smart home and it just kind of
it does its thing, but I'm like, I just want
to make it better. We even reached out at one point.
This is a couple of years ago. We reached out
to Reed's Smart Home, who's a YouTuber. He was actually
gonna come on the show. I just never followed up
with him. I really need to reach back out to him.
But anyway, there's this new thing that is really taking
(25:38):
the smart home world by storm, and it's this little
sensor and it's called an ESP thirty two. Now, this
little this little microcontroller is the brains of the sensor.
Now you can build whatever kind of sensor you want,
but this is the brains of it. So what you
do is you plug that into your Raspberry Pie or
(26:02):
wherever you're running your home assistant. You set it up.
Then you introduce the sensor that you want. Now, it
could be a temperature humidity sensor. In my case, I
bought five of these what are they called here, capacitive
soil moisture sensors. Oh wow. So what this does is
(26:27):
I basically stick this sensor in a plant, a potted plant,
with my ESP thirty two next to it. Now, I
can run the ESP thirty two off of a small
solar panel, or I can run off a battery pack,
or I can just find an outlet and plug it into.
But anyway, you stick this capacitive soil sensor into a plant,
(26:47):
and then you program the ESP thirty two to say, hey,
when soil moisture reaches less than twenty percent, send me
an alert that tells me, hey, it's time to water
the plate. So you don't overwater, you don't underwater. It's exactly.
And then there's other sensors you can do. Like I said,
you can do temperature humidity. A lot of people do that.
(27:09):
And if you try to buy like a temperature humidity
sensor off of Amazon that's off the shelf, that basically
is an ESP thirty two chip built in with a sensor,
you're looking at spending thirty forty to fifty sixty bucks
even on a single sensor. You can build an ESP
thirty two with a temperature humidity sensor for a total
(27:33):
of fourteen dollars. Oh wow, that's amazing. That's great. And
so I've got these capacitive soil sensors. I've also got
I got some millimeter wave sensors. Now, what that does
millimeter wave is a is a presence detection. But it's
not like a true motion detector. Because motion detectors they'll
(27:56):
read anything across the room. A cat, a cat thirty
free away, walks across boom, it triggers the motion sensor.
Your alarm goes off. No no, no, no, no, no no,
you don't want that. A millimeter wave sensor uses millimeter waves,
that's why it's called that, and it's very accurate and
it's very short range. So what I can do, for instance,
(28:17):
is I put a millimeter wave sensor just around the
corner of my stairwell leading up to the upstairs, just
kind of out of view of anybody walking around the
living room. But the moment that I crossed that threshold
onto the stairwell, that millimeter wave sensor says, hey, there's
somebody here, and it sends a signal to home assistant says,
(28:39):
my sensor just went off. Now Home assistant says, okay,
I've been programmed to say that when this millimeter wave
sensor goes off or on, excuse me, I'm supposed to
turn on the stairway lights. Wow, and it does that.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Could this be used in a case too, and you
dealt with this unfortunately flooding in a basement.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
Yeah, absolutely yes, Now not the ones I have here.
The capacity of soil moisture will not work for that.
But there are just straight moisture sensors that you can
just simply lay on the floor. And I just you know,
the one that I had with my with my flooding
thing that I had a year ago or a little
bit over a year ago. I ended up buying a
(29:24):
two d and fifty dollars sensor that also has an
automatic shut off, so like if it detects moisture on
the ground. It will automatically shut off the hot water
of the hot water heater, the tankless water heater, it'll
shut off the supply line to that water heater. That
(29:44):
was two hundred and fifty bucks. Now that I look
at this with an ESP thirty two, I probably could
have built that same thing with an actual physical device
to turn off the valve. I probably could have built
that for about eighty bucks. Wow, that's pretty good. I'd
never heard of this technology. What is it again, it's
called E S E SP Now, I don't know what
(30:04):
ESP stands for. Maybe Sean has done some wiggle ESP
dash thirty two and again they are they are powered
by USB. So I got the ones with the USB
C connector because it's just a little bit easier because
everything's USB C now. And they have pinouts just like
a g P IO. I don't know if you can
(30:26):
see this on the screen. I'm trying to put it
on here, but yeah, little little pinouts that you can
then put into a bread board to program it or
put it into your own circuit. But but now that
I also have a three D printer, I can print
custom cases for these little sensors nice and then put
them wherever I want.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
So ESP just stands for Expressive Systems, which is the
company that made yem H and it's thirty two bits
p thirty two thirty two bit micro controller. They've come
out they can about twenty sixteen, so they've been around
for a long time. But just with the with IoT
and does the world of that, you could just do
(31:08):
so much more now. So there's tons of tons more
and I mean it's it's on the same line of
like Adrenocord, Raspberry Pies, et cetera. So if you're into those,
this is gonna be very familiar territory for you.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
Well, first off, though the ESP is it does not
run an OS like Raspberry Pie. Raspberry Pie is much
more powerful. Yeah, yeah, so the ESP runs very basic
like a Python or a basic basic color like Python
or something like that.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
Right, So, just to clarify though, Raspberry Pie does make
a Pie zero, which is essentially an EESP.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Yeah sure, o, yes they do.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
So there are versions of Raspberry Pie that are very
similar to ESPs, but you can't get full fledged in
OS zero.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
The Pie zero even runs Linux. These ESPs cannot run
Linux correct, all right, Yeah, so so they're even even
the zero is a little bit more powerful than ESP.
But yes, Sean is correct. One other thing I can
do with this is, you know I have an outdoor freezer, well,
I mean well garage freezer. Yeah. I can buy a
temperature sensor, mount an ESP controller on the side of
(32:13):
the freezer, and I can monitor the temperature of my freezer.
So and like what happens, Like, oh my god, I
left the freezer door open accidentally. I'll get an alert saying, hey,
the temperature has risen in the outdoor freezer. Oh shoot,
I need to go close the door to the freezer, right,
Like those are the kind of things you can do
with this. That is pretty cool. I like that. Where
(32:34):
would somebody find this? Amazon? Amazon? Nice Amazon.
Speaker 4 (32:37):
You can buy a six pack for twenty dollars.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Yeah, all right, cool. I just bought a five pack
for like fifteen. Yeah all right. We got a listener
email and from Rick in Selwarita.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Rick says, Hey, I'm wanting to get a new PC
with Windows eleven for the house. A friend told me
to build it myself, and I'm not that tech oriented.
Would that be too much of a challenge. I don't
play games, only use it to read news stories and
check out videos on YouTube. Should I try it? Or
am I better off buying ready to Go at Costco
or best Buy? If so, which is a brand to
(33:10):
look at?
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Rick? Rick? If all you do is to read news
stories and check out videos on YouTube, you don't need
to build a PC. Just go buy a Chromebook really chromebook, or.
Speaker 4 (33:21):
A or a relatively inexpensive bottom end of your budget laptop.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Dude, he's talking about using it to browse the web.
He doesn't need to build a PC for that. Yeah,
that's true. That's true.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
So on the topic of building computers, have you seen
RAM prices recently?
Speaker 3 (33:38):
No? Are they up or down?
Speaker 4 (33:40):
So RAM prices have tripled in price over the last
three or four weeks. Yes, No, it's the it's the AI.
It's it's all of the d d R five rand
that's being eaten up for AI computing and all the GPU.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
It's just any RAM.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
Yeah. So I mean you just go and look at
PC par picker, New Wag and look at the trending
prices for RAM, and you are gonna see double, if
not triple.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
There is a story we talked about this Sean. If
you remember this that people are ditching the desktop. You know,
you had that desktop, you had that tower. I think
we all started with. You had that Square one that's sat.
I had a laser one eight I think it is
what it was.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
We had a Hewett packard at home.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Yeah, and then you went to a tower gateway, oh
the gateways yeah, uh and then uh. But people are
ditching them now to have a laptop because you can
put a laptop on your desk if you want, buy
a monitor attached another monitor, or.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
You buy the station.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Yeah, buy a docuentation and get two monitors on it.
And they're saying that they're pretty happy with it because
it does what they needed to do if you're going
to game. Though, I wouldn't. I wouldn't do that for
a gaming situation. No, I know about that, dude. I
got you know that new Hpomen. I'm going to talk
about my problem with that Hpomen.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
But that Hpomen's got a fifty seventy in it, an
RTX fifty seventy with thirty two gigs a ram Man.
I can run any game I want on that line.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
And I've got I've got an older a sus Rog
that's got a twenty eighty in it so twenty eighty
mobile in it, and that was great for what it is.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Yeah, yeah, I think I got a twenty eighty TI
in my desktop that I'm doing the show with. Right.
I don't play games on this computer anymore. I basically
just play them on the laptop.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
But you know, yeah, and that's the thing. We play
them on the laptop or our phones. I mean, that's
the whole bit.
Speaker 4 (35:37):
They're even saying that computer literacy is down.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Oh that's not good with.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
How how little, how little children interact with computers now,
you know, like when I grew up and I had
computer lab, like we had a lot of computer this
week in typing, yeah maybe speaking type a Mario Mario
racing type, Like you were interacting with computer a day
to day basis, typing, writing, you know, whatever, Internet, et cetera.
(36:04):
Now everybody does on their phones. So you're you're getting
into this newer generation with.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
The kids that are in there bell correct.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
Yes, the kids that are into into their teens don't
know how to navigate an operating system on a computer.
They don't know how to do keyboard shortcuts, they don't
know how to do basic functions on a computer. Because
they're always on a mobile or a tablet or another
handheld device that has a completely different functioning operating system.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
That's exactly what I went through when I was, you know,
when I was working back at Fox five in San Diego,
you know, being an IT person. We would get remember
remember remember the girl, the reporter girl that came in
and I was like, here's your laptop and then here's
your USB hotspot dongle, and she's like us B. That
was like a famous little story because she's like us B,
(36:56):
I don't know what USB is. And I was like,
oh my god, like what what this is? Back in
like twenty twelve, it's even gotten worse, But now I
understand it. You know, I was like, how can you
be in the year of twenty twenty five and not
know how to use a computer? Sean just perfectly summed
it up right there. Yeah, yeah, you're seeing you're seeing it.
Speaker 4 (37:17):
So with some of my younger, young, younger cousins or
my friends that have kids that are, you know, fifteen, sixteen,
seventeen years old, it's it's bizarre how they just don't
know how to navigate a computer.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
And it's gonna get worse with Ai.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Yeah, we have somebody new at the station and uh,
she needed to get her laptop configured for our printer.
So I said, well, just bring it on in and
we'll go through it. And it did not have any
USB A ports at all on it.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
It was everything just two USB C ports and that
was it.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
And that's the thing when you're out buying a laptop,
make sure you get what you're gonna need, you know,
And that's the thing you just go especially now we're
coming up to Black Friday, we're gonna see sales. Make
sure it has everything you need.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
Oh basically, don't buy an Apple Apple. You don't get anything.
You get one port and then you have a bit
of dongle for everything. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
They've got they've, they've they've it's historically been that way.
You can't get some of their newer MacBooks do have
a USBA, a guesty card slot and four usbcs plus
an plus an actual HDMI output.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
All right, we gonna take another quick break. We come
back with more of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor,
I'm Sean de Weird, and I'm justin.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Let me send us an X at tech Talk Radio.
We'll do rep back and now back to tech Talk Radio.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
So during the break we talked a little bit about
a segment that we want to talk about. This was
posted on the IT Humor and Memes group on Facebook.
Love that group between nineteen ninety one and two thousand
and nine. So take a trip back to the early
days of the Internet. What's the most memorable computer game
you played in that timeframe?
Speaker 3 (38:58):
There were so many good ones.
Speaker 4 (39:00):
So let's start with Justin. Justin, so between nineteen ninety
one in two thousand and nine. So that's a pretty
it's a pretty good chunk of time.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
I mean, I see the list that you provided here,
These are some of the ones that were in the
in their their Oh yeah, we just.
Speaker 4 (39:14):
We populated our own list of games that we played
at that time frame. And remember PC games console games
is a whole different category.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
Yeah sure, yeah, a lot of a lot of this stuff,
but yeah, definitely PC games. I gotta say my first
my eyes move it right to Wolfenstein three D. That
was one of the very first games I ever played.
But my favorite, I have to say, my favorite was
probably either Command and Conquer or The SIMS.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
The SIMS was fun. My daughter still you know, still
plays the SIMS. She has SIMS four. I think they're
up to now, I mean, or maybe even beyond that.
She still has fun with it. That was a that was.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
A lot of fun to play. I also did really
like Roller Coaster Tycoon. But Sean, what for you? I
think I know the answer? Can I can I say what?
I think the answer is going to be absolutely World
of Warcraft.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
So I think this timeframe is a little too unfair
because it covers such a prop progression in the computer
gaming world. Right, Yeah, ninety one to two thousand and nine.
That's that's a long time. It's almost two decades, right,
So I have to break this up into I think
three different games for this time period.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
I just I have to because there's.
Speaker 4 (40:34):
Just like you, I grew up getting PC Magazine with
the discs and the demos and stuff.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
I still have it.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
It's a disc that is a demo disc for APIG games. Oh,
they made some of the best shareware games that existed.
You had Wolf Centred, which is a classic. But there's
an apergy game called Blakestone Aliens of Gold. I still
play that game to this day because it's on gog
It's if I shooter. It's just fantastic first person or
(41:03):
it's a first person shooter. Really, it's a very doom.
It's a very doom doom. Wolvenstein asked, you know a
platformer it's so good. Then Diablo too, Lord of Instruction
probably the game I've spent the most time in my
life playing. Then World of Warcraft, and then into some
other games down the road. But those ones, the Blizzard games,
(41:26):
Blizzard North.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
I mean, I think you probably played a game or
two back then I did. Doom was one of those
that I played a lot. I loved Duke Nukem. Duke
nukemb was just an absolute blast.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
Uh. But there's one Okay.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
So I was looking over the list of some of
the ones that people were mentioning, and Loom was on
the list.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
But I don't remember Loom. I like I can.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
I remember it was a big game, but I don't
remember exactly what it did.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
I don't remember Loom, but I I'm I'm actually a
little bit of fan. Did that Leisure Shoot, Larry did
not make this list? Good old Lasry. Yeah, leisures all right,
So what have you got there?
Speaker 4 (42:10):
Okay, So there's a couple that I missed for sure,
So I'm gonna rattle off a couple in my seat.
I have my actual install jet Fighter.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
To gosh, look at that.
Speaker 4 (42:20):
Oh my gosh, I've got all my I've got Oh
my god, I've got so many.
Speaker 3 (42:25):
What are those shiny discs?
Speaker 4 (42:28):
So these are gonna be some. These are a ton
of These are so many good memories. Jet Fighter, Super VG,
A Harrier nice of the Old Republic. This classic deer.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
Hunting I remember, I remember Deer Hunters.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
The Medal of Honor, Games worl Wind jet Fighter to
Battlefield nineteen forty, the Original Diablo, I've got that in
there too, Commanded Conquers, Age of Empires.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Wow, it's great if you most.
Speaker 4 (42:58):
Of my PC childhood in there.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
If you go to that group on Facebook again, a
great group. It humored memes.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
You can see what other people have said and maybe
reminists a little about some of the games that you
played and had a good time with.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Speaking of video games, there is an anniversary edition of
a famous video game and it's actually I'm just all
about this series right now because of the TV show
second season coming out here next month. But it is
Fallout four fall for anniversary Edition. Now it has been
(43:35):
over ten years since Fallout four was released. Over ten years,
I don't want to say eleven or even twelve. Actually
right now comes out on November tenth. It muddles the
base game, yeah, Monday. It bundles the base game with
several expansions. Fallout four Anniversary Edition will be available digitally
on the Xbox Series S, X, Xbox One, PC, PlayStation five,
(43:59):
and play Station four. Now I'm actually playing Fallout four again.
So in the last few weeks. I guess maybe I
probably started this one last time. I was on the
show here a few weeks ago, but I really got
back into Fallout seventy six. Now seventy six is the
MMO version of Fallout. It's online, you're playing with real people.
(44:21):
But I've been playing Fallout seventy six like mad. And
then I wanted to get Eric. I wanted Eric to
be able to play fall Out with me, so I
signed up. I got him a copy of Fallout seventy six,
and I put it on his computer and we launched
the game. And Bethesda, who's the maker of Fallout, the
(44:43):
first message as soon as he launched the game. It says,
we have detected this is a child account. He is
not allowed to play this game. Wow. And I was like,
wait what? So I contacted Fallout, I contacted Bethesda support
and I said, look, i'm his parent, I'm I am
granting permission for him to play this game. And because
(45:03):
you know, yes there is there's blood and gore in it,
but it's kind of like a cartoonish blooding gore. It's
not like super realist. So I was like, I allow
this and they're like, okay, well, you got to fill
out this legal document. They sent me a legal document
that I had to fill out, signs scan, then email
back to them, and then they were like okay, we'll
(45:25):
go ahead and process this and then boom, you're good. Nope.
Even after I said that, Bethesda was like, no, we
are not allowing your child to play unless he's thirteen
years old. Oh. And I'm like, okay, then give me
the reason why I have already provided you parental consent,
and they said, we don't care about parental consent. It's
because the reason why is because it has online chat.
(45:48):
There's voice chat. Okay, there's no text chat, but there's
voice chat in the game, right, and they cannot control
the voice chat because they don't have moderation.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
Yea in some of the safeties. Now there there are
list faces. There are a lot of people out there
that are gonna pray on kids.
Speaker 3 (46:05):
Yeah, and I get that, and that's why I don't
allow him to play Roadblocks. So then I said, okay, fine, fine,
fine fine. He was really upset. He's like, I just
want to play Fallout with you. So what I did
was I installed Fallout four, which is a single player game.
You know, there's no multiplayer aspect single player. I installed
Fallout four to his computer and I said, look, Bud,
(46:25):
here you go. You can play Fallout now. He started
playing it. Dude, he doesn't even play Minecraft anymore. Wow,
that's crazy. That is his favorite game of all time.
He's like, nope, I want to play Fallout. Fallout is
so amazing. He's like, and I'm like, thank you. This
is this is what I'm telling you. There's so many
other games out there besides just Minecraft. I've never played
(46:47):
Fallout oh, like at all. God, dude, fall so good.
Speaker 4 (46:52):
They're fun. They're not my style of game. I'm not
a big fan. I mean, they're good. I will give them,
but it's.
Speaker 3 (46:59):
Just not it's not for me, right right. I was
just thinking though, when you mentioned seventy six.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
One of the games that I used to like playing, well,
two of them Redneck Rampage and the other one is
Interstate seventy six, which was.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Kind of like the Mod Squad Car. You're driving around
in a car. It was. It was a lot of fun.
That one was a good game too. The reason they
called this one Fallout seventy six is because it's supposed
to be that you're in vault seventy six. Oh, that's right,
that's what it means. All right.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
I want to I want to find out a little
bit about the problem you've been having with your HP omen,
which is a pretty high end HP computer laptop.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
I just I just got this computer like six months ago,
and it's a it's a very high end laptop. It's
got the AMD Rizin nine, it's got thirty two gigs
of RAM, it's got the RTX fifty seventy graphics card.
I mean, this thing is a beast and it's been
great for me this whole time. And I've never really
been an HP fan. All of a sudden, this last Saturday,
(48:00):
I go to get my laptop at night. I'm i'm, i'm,
it's in my bag. I grab it out to go
do something, and the computer is just slow as molasses
to boot up. Like I finally get to the login
screen where I can log into Windows, and then the
screen goes blank and I can barely move my mouse.
When I move my mouse, it's like it's like one
(48:22):
frame a second, where the mouse is like it kind
of jumps around the screen one frame a second. And
then there's no Windows Explore at the bottom, like you know,
you got the Windows button and all the all the
pinned icons. Nothing was at the bottom. And it took about,
I want to say, about ten minutes, and then all
of a sudden, everything just got really smooth. And I
(48:45):
was like, Okay, think about this from an IT perspective.
What causes this kind of thing to happen? And I'm thinking, Okay,
it's got to be a bad SSD because everything is
being loaded into RAM, and once it gets loaded into RAM,
it's all nice and smooth. So I downloaded the HP
Diagnostics tool. I ran it within Windows. I even ran
(49:09):
it with Uefi before Windows boots. I ran all the tests,
everything said everything passed with flying colors and I'm like, okay, fine,
So then I went I ran check disc and I
did check disc slash C, slash F or whatever the
commands are. It went talk about thirty five minutes. It
(49:30):
scanned my entire tear a bit hard drive. It said
everything was fine. Then I'm like, okay, it's still not fixed.
What is going on? Why is this so slow? I
went to Windows Update and I noticed a couple updates,
but they weren't installed right around that same time. They
were installed a couple of days earlier. But I was like, okay,
well that doesn't make any sense, but I want to
(49:50):
Oh you know what, I'm just gonna uninstall the last
three updates that Windows made. I uninstalled those three updates.
I rebooted the computer, Bam, every is back again. So
it's a Microsoft update that didn't one one more time.
It's Microsoft's fault. Wow, they released a faulty dude. Microsoft
is getting really bad, like they're they've been releasing updates
(50:12):
lately that have just been bricking computers.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
Yeah, and it's the SSD one. And well Microsoft said no, no,
that didn't really happen. Other people are saying no, no,
we we had this issue where it was wiping on
an SSD.
Speaker 4 (50:25):
Hold on, we can't talk about about Microsoft. We might
get canceled.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
Oh gosh, you.
Speaker 4 (50:30):
Can't talk about how to bypass Windows local logins either
anymore because you might get booted form YouTube?
Speaker 3 (50:37):
What really?
Speaker 4 (50:38):
Oh yeah, so you're talking about the issues with Microsoft,
and the content creators on YouTube have been getting videos
removed that have been talking about how to bypass local
logins for Windows leven. I've talked about it on the
show before, so I just know that they're really cracking
(50:59):
down on anything.
Speaker 1 (51:01):
Like RUFUS, pulling videos that talked about RUFUS. Really yep, Wow, amazing.
All right, we're gonna take another quick break. We come
back with more of tech talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor,
I'm Sean de Weird.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
And I'm Justin. Let me find us on the facebooks
at Forward Slash tech Talkers. We'll be right back and
now back to tech talk Radio.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
I don't want to buy just the absolute primo system
out today. That usually wastes money, So I'll be doing
some digital photography, maybe some video editing, don't do any
gaming at all, so I don't have that demand on
the computer. It's wondering what you guys would suggest, either
brands or just in general speed. And where do you
go to get the maximum bang to the buck right now?
Speaker 3 (51:40):
Sounds like you want to max. So websites are the week.
Cool websites. We found a couple. I know we normally
don't do this because we never find any cool websites,
but I found one that's kind of cool. It's a
Pong style clock. Wait pong like in the game Pong. Yeah,
like the game, like the game where you're basically a clock,
but you're watching two computer characters just play pong, but
(52:04):
it keeps up with the time. And so the website
is big job by dot com, Big job By dot
Com Forward slash Pong, and somebody actually has watched these
two little ai things. They just bounce the thing back
and forth and eventually, when the minute is up, one
of them loses, and then the minute goes to the
(52:27):
next minute, and then it just kind of repeats.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Just like watching sports. Pretty much perfect. Okay, So the
website to get to that is Big Jobby Jobby dot
Com Forward slash Pong. Have some fun with that one, schun.
Speaker 4 (52:42):
And so we've been talking a lot about classic games,
so there if you want to. So two places you
can go that I know of half the time my
head Internet archive. Oh yeah, and Classic reload dot com
will allow you to play doss games in your browser.
Doss boxes a right application if you want to.
Speaker 3 (53:01):
What was that Classic Reload Classic.
Speaker 4 (53:03):
Reload dot com? All right, so go there check those out.
But during the break we were talking about being distracted
on the Internet. With the TV Garden website, you can
stream the NASA ISS TV, which is just basically like
a live stream of the ISS going flying.
Speaker 3 (53:20):
Where is that one on TV?
Speaker 4 (53:23):
It's just scrolled down you'll see NASA TV. I've got that.
I had that full screened up and I was just
mesmerized of staring at it.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
Yeah, watching it go by a little more visual than
three D punk or punk.
Speaker 4 (53:34):
Yeah. So the TV Garden stuff is just incredible. We
talked about it a while back on the show. Another
one of my favorite. If you we're talking about TV,
we're talking about radio garden. WebSDR dot org is for
ham radio people. We've talked about that one. We talked
about it when we talked about TV Garden two weeks ago.
WebStar dot org. If you're in the hand radio at
(53:54):
all right, I encourage you go check that out, tune in,
tune into your your local net, or tune in a
net around the world.
Speaker 3 (54:01):
It's all right. I got one.
Speaker 1 (54:03):
We talked about background remove dot BG last week, where
you can remove the background out of a photo. Here's
another one, cleanup dot pictures. Cleanup dot pictures, and it's
online image editing. So if you're looking for you just
want to remove somebody out of a picture real quick.
You know, I wouldn't say use this all the time,
(54:23):
but if you're looking for something real quick, you want
to test it out, play around, cleanup dot pictures might
work for you. All right, that's it for this week's
Tech Talk Radio. Thanks for tuning in. If you have questions, comments,
we'd love to hear from you again on We're on YouTube,
so you send us a comment there, TikTok, of course,
Facebook X, wherever you want to reach out to us.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird, and I'm just
(54:47):
let me have yourselves.
Speaker 3 (54:48):
Great week, We'll see you next time.
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