I’ve Got 99 Problems - WAN Show December 20, 2024

Summary

Podcast Summary: The WAN Show - "I’ve Got 99 Problems" (December 20, 2024)

Released on December 21, 2024

Hosts: Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere
Podcast: The WAN Show by Linus Tech Tips
Description: Every week, Linus and Luke discuss the most current happenings in the technology universe.

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1. Introduction and Episode Overview [00:00 - 02:16]

Linus Sebastian opens the episode addressing previous technical issues with stream audio cuts, assuring listeners that the first words will remain uninterrupted this time. He introduces the episode's theme, "Tech Gripes," inspired by his song title "I’ve Got 99 Problems," indicating a focus on minor yet bothersome tech issues. Linus highlights the intention to gather and verify gripes from the audience to provide practical solutions rather than just airing complaints.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [00:42]: "We're gonna be doing a video soon on kind of Tech Gripes. And so that's where the title comes from."
• Linus [01:29]: "HP is downgrading printer features when you don't buy genuine ink. It's not as bad as it sounds, but given that it sounds so bad, that's a really low bar."

2. Tech Gripes Deep Dive [02:16 - 25:08]

a. Email Spam and Filtering Issues [05:02 - 09:14]

Linus shares a personal frustration with email spam filters, recounting an incident where an important introduction email from Nirav, the CEO of Framework, was mistakenly marked as spam. Despite marking the email as "not spam," it failed to appear correctly in his inbox, causing communication breakdowns. He emphasizes the lack of a reliable "mark as safe" function in modern email systems, leading to persistent issues even within a Google G Suite domain.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [07:12]: "That's mine. That's my contribution to the tech gripes Video."
• Linus [09:14]: "Assaf 400 says happened to me this week marked not spam. Same sender went to spam."

b. File Transfer Between Android and iOS [09:14 - 11:06]

The hosts discuss the persistent challenge of transferring files seamlessly between Android and iOS devices. Despite technologies like Google Quick Share and Apple's AirDrop, interoperability remains limited, especially for quick transfers like sending a photo spontaneously. Linus expresses frustration over the lack of a unified, easy-to-use solution, noting that alternatives like Discord are subpar and "actually sad."

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [10:23]: "That's what we're talking about. We're talking small things like how cookie settings are specifically designed to be user hostile and intimidating."
• Luke [10:23]: "Google Quick Share. That works. I love it."

c. Windows Settings and Notifications [11:06 - 13:52]

Linus and Luke critique several aspects of Windows 11, including the limitation of having only one Settings window open at a time and the poor organization of the Settings sidebar. They highlight specific annoyances such as the placement of "Time and Language" at the top, unnecessary power-saving mode icons, and the cumbersome context menu that now requires multiple clicks to access previous options. They argue these changes degrade user experience by making the interface less intuitive and more frustrating to navigate.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [11:12]: "There’s still no good way to transfer files from Android to iOS. Android has Quick Share, iOS has AirDrop, but there is no rock solid way to share files between devices."
• Linus [12:34]: "I mean, why exactly is it that time and language is deserving of space here? When display, sound, power, and battery. These are all things that do not merit the top level of the sidebar."

d. Microsoft Teams and Communication Tools [24:26 - 28:12]

The discussion shifts to frustrations with Microsoft Teams, particularly its restrictive features such as the inability to schedule messages in group chats and poor handling of attachments. Linus criticizes the cumbersome reply threads and the platform's uncooperative nature compared to alternatives like Slack, where file attachments are handled more gracefully. They also touch on the limitations of iMessage's reply functions, lamenting the lack of intuitive features that other messaging apps offer.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [24:31]: "They request not to create or install anything offensive or inappropriate."
• Luke [27:14]: "Another thing I have is the amount of times that I’m in teams calls and people go, is my mic working? Because they can’t see it light up."

e. YouTube Music and Account Integration [29:35 - 31:56]

Linus delves into the complications of using YouTube Music with multiple Google accounts. Specifically, he highlights how YouTube Music's premium features are tied to a single primary account, causing issues when attempting to use voice controls or access premium features across different accounts. This limitation led him to switch his primary Google account to one with a YouTube Premium subscription, despite it being inconvenient.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [30:50]: "Google Gemini replacing Google assistant. Can’t do 80% of assistant functions, but can hallucinate Google sheets."

3. Noteworthy News and Announcements [31:56 - 57:24]

a. Terry Fox on the Canadian $5 Bill [40:04 - 41:35]

Linus shares heartwarming news that Terry Fox, a Canadian hero known for his Marathon of Hope, will finally be featured on Canada's $5 bill. He underscores Terry Fox's immense contribution to cancer research and his enduring legacy through annual runs that have raised significant funds globally.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [41:00]: "He's actually the most coolest, wholesomest, awesomest, most inspiring guy, like, ever."
• Linus [41:35]: "Annual Terry Fox runs have been held all over the world and have raised another $800 million for cancer research."

b. Geocache USB Drive Find [49:03 - 54:17]

The hosts discuss a successful geocache hunt where a specially designed ferroelectric USB drive containing $500 in LTT store gift cards was found by a community member. Linus explains the intricate process of encoding the QR codes within a rail fence cipher and the teamwork that led to the cache's discovery. They also touch upon the controversy within the geocaching community regarding the introduction of prizes.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [51:42]: "Here's the solution. If you don't want spoilers and you want to try to solve it for yourself by watching the video, you can totally do that."
• Linus [54:06]: "It was a very niche."

c. Reviver Digital License Plates Hack [75:22 - 127:50]

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to discussing the vulnerabilities found in Reviver's digital license plates. Linus explains how attackers can replace the firmware to change the license number via a phone app, potentially circumventing tolls and parking tickets. He details past security breaches and the ongoing challenges Reviver faces in securing their digital plates against such hacks. The conversation highlights the broader implications for digital security in connected devices.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [127:00]: "Attackers can replace the firmware on Reviver brand's digital license plates, which are currently installed on 65,000 vehicles."
• Linus [128:28]: "If you want to give it a cool border, buy a plastic one that have existed for a trillion years."

4. Lifestyle, Fitness, and Personal Stories [08:27 - 119:35]

a. Workout Challenges and Fitness Regimens [07:11 - 35:59]

Linus shares his intense workout routines, including using a rowing machine and StairMaster, leading to physical strain like tennis elbow and back pain. Luke recounts his own fitness experiences, emphasizing long-duration workouts and the camaraderie involved in activities like badminton. They discuss balancing fitness with work commitments and the physical toll of rigorous exercise routines.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [24:01]: "So if there's anybody here that is like, 'Oh my God, sometimes my display doesn't turn off,' I bet you it's that."
• Linus [35:47]: "It's so weird to be able to... see the desktop background would constantly make me think that it's not actually there."

b. Family and Games Night [65:48 - 137:52]

The hosts talk about engaging their families in games like Hearts, praising its blend of luck and strategy. Linus describes how introducing high-quality playing cards enhanced the experience, while Luke reminisces about playing Hearts during family fishing trips. They also discuss other games like Cheat/Bluff and Uno, expressing both nostalgia and frustration with the declining quality of modern game accessories.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [66:02]: "I like to see Hearts Night because it's a nice mix of luck and strategy."
• Luke [72:36]: "Malarkey is a trivia game that incorporates bluffing into the gameplay. It was super cool."

5. Merchandise Updates and Product Reviews [47:43 - 157:02]

a. Backpack Rain Cover Launch [47:43 - 55:30]

Linus introduces the new rain cover for LTT's commuter backpack, highlighting its durability, reflective design, and ease of attachment via a carabiner. Despite positive reception and praise for the product's quality, Linus and Luke express doubts about its practicality for motorcycle use and overall fit. They also demonstrate the product live, showcasing its features and discussing potential improvements.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [48:22]: "It's on purpose since most rain covers are not big enough to accommodate the sheer girth of the LTT backpack."
• Linus [50:16]: "It's an extra layer of protection to keep your stuff dry while also adding visibility to your bag in the dark."

b. Floatplane Exclusive Merch [54:17 - 55:31]

The hosts announce new Floatplane-exclusive merchandise, including themed T-shirts designed by Sarah Live. They showcase the designs, emphasizing their unique aesthetic and limited availability, urging listeners to purchase before the items sell out.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [54:17]: "These fly out onto the store on January 1, 2025. Oh wait, they fly off the store. So if you're interested, buy yours before then at lmg.gg/fp exclusive."
• Luke [54:17]: "Whoa. This is awesome. It looks like those old comics."

c. Custom USB Cables [146:53 - 157:02]

Linus discusses the development of high-quality USB-C cables, focusing on their durability, performance, and design. He explains the technical aspects like coaxial conductors and silicone sleeving, emphasizing the importance of reliable specifications physically marked on the cables. Despite internal skepticism, Linus is confident in the product's market potential, aiming to compete against overpriced and low-quality alternatives with sustainable pricing and premium build quality.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [147:03]: "We have coax in there. Something, something."
• Linus [154:02]: "I think there's room for an extremely premium cable. It's not the last thing you'll ever buy to a degree. Cables are consumable."

6. Community Engagement and Feedback [57:24 - 139:02]

Throughout the episode, Linus and Luke interact with audience comments and feedback, addressing various questions and suggestions. They emphasize the importance of community involvement in shaping their content and products, while also managing negative interactions and maintaining a positive environment.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [75:22]: "Our discussion question is."
• Linus [105:08]: "So, we have some people backing me up in chat here, so apparently this isn't just me being crazy."

7. Industry Insights and Opinions [41:35 - 129:47]

a. Issues with the Gaming Industry [112:06 - 124:46]

Linus and Luke critique aspects of the gaming industry, including YouTubers being paid to create misleading content and inconsistencies in game ratings related to gambling elements. They discuss how games like "Balatro" receive higher age ratings despite minimal monetary involvement, contrasting with mainstream games like EA Sports FC that incorporate monetized features without similar scrutiny.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [124:06]: "It could be both. It could be a little bit of both."
• Luke [123:44]: "And the results were exactly what you would expect."

b. YouTube Policy Changes [131:04 - 133:53]

YouTube's new policies aimed at eliminating clickbait in India and providing creators with options for AI training were discussed. The hosts express skepticism about YouTube's motives, suggesting that policy changes might be more about gaining press attention than genuinely improving the platform.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [131:04]: "It's completely separate from the other, so this is a completely separate from the other."
• Linus [132:28]: "This is just YouTube announcements this week."

c. Digital License Plates Security [75:22 - 127:50]

The vulnerabilities in Reviver's digital license plates, including firmware hacks that allow unauthorized number changes and potential circumvention of tolls and tickets, were extensively analyzed. Linus emphasizes the serious security implications and Reviver's struggle to patch these vulnerabilities, highlighting the challenges faced by connected device manufacturers in ensuring robust security.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [127:00]: "Attackers can replace the firmware on Reviver brand's digital license plates, which are currently installed on 65,000 vehicles."
• Linus [128:28]: "Reviver plates will send a notification to the owner if they are detached from a vehicle."

8. Personal Anecdotes and Off-Topic Discussions [02:31 - 157:02]

Beyond tech discussions, the hosts share personal stories, such as Linus's experiences with intense physical workouts and family interactions, and Luke's reflections on workplace dynamics and friendship within a growing company. These segments add a personal touch to the show, showcasing the hosts' personalities and relatable challenges.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [35:47]: "It's so weird to be able to... see the desktop background would constantly make me think that it's not actually there."
• Luke [118:35]: "There's also politicking and there's people that like, might. You don't necessarily know them well enough and it might make sense for them to hold a certain position publicly, but they don't actually feel that way internally."

9. Upcoming Projects and Future Plans [154:18 - 157:02]

The hosts briefly touch on upcoming projects, including enhancements to their product line and the ongoing development of custom tech accessories. Linus expresses excitement about the potential of their high-quality USB-C cables and their strategic approach to product design and inventory management.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [155:05]: "I think this is going to be something that's going to be really appealing to the folks who are willing to sort of buy once, cry once with their cables and everyone else kind of need not apply."
• Linus [156:24]: "See what happens. See what happens."

10. Closing Remarks and Final Thoughts [157:02 - End]

As the episode wraps up, Linus and Luke reflect on the discussions, emphasizing the importance of community support and the challenges of managing a growing tech company. They tease future episodes and projects, maintaining an engaging and forward-looking tone.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus [166:35]: "I think there's a ton of exciting things, probably maybe maybe that have been thought of for zfs, some of which are kind of being actively worked on, some of which are not being actively worked on."
• Linus [178:05]: "The show is also brought to you by Rocket Money."

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Conclusion:

In this episode of The WAN Show, Linus and Luke navigate through a myriad of tech-related frustrations, industry news, and personal anecdotes. From email filtering woes and cross-platform file transfer challenges to significant security vulnerabilities in digital license plates, the hosts provide insightful critiques and engage deeply with their audience's concerns. Additionally, they celebrate community successes like the Terry Fox honor and the geocache USB drive find, while also revealing updates on their merchandise and upcoming projects. The blend of technical discussions with personal stories ensures a comprehensive and relatable listening experience for both regular followers and newcomers alike.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

This episode is brought to you by Dutch Bros. Big smiles, rocking tunes and epic drinks. Dutch Bros. Is all about you choose from a variety of customizable handcrafted beverages like our Rebel Energy drinks, coffees, teas and more. Download the Dutch Bros app for a free medium drink. Plus find your nearest shop, order ahead and start earning rewards offer valid for new app users only. Free medium drink Reward upon registration. 14 day expiration terms apply. See DutchBros.com I would like the first words I say to not be cut off this time. Oh, I've been told that the last couple streams we've done, the first word's been cut off, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, you're too fast.

[Linus Sebastian]

I gave myself a longer millennial pause and it is gonna be a great WAN show. Worth waiting for for a couple of seconds. We are gonna be doing a video soon on kind of Tech Gripes. And so that's where the title comes from. I've got 99 problems and I'll make a. So we're gonna be giving you guys some of the gripes that we found. We'll be taking suggestions from you guys, getting some verification from you guys. Cause hey, if there's an easy workaround, then we don't wanna waste anybody's time in our Tech Gripes video. We are looking to have things actually solved here. In other news, HP is downgrading printer features when you don't buy genuine ink. It's not as bad as it sounds, but given that it sounds so bad, that's a really low bar. What else we got this week, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We have an update on FTC banning hidden fees from hotel ticket prices. I believe last time we talked about it, it was a possibility. And now there's a date.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is good.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's three topics, though, that are, like, not going to keep people engaged for a whole show. Can you pick one good one? Oh, terrible, Terrible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's definitely going to be inappropriate mods for Final Fantasy 7 that'll keep them here. They'll be alert. They'll be attempted.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you today by Ridge, Rocket Money, Pulseway, and the quiet move we pulled where we doubled our sponsors with LG as our laptop partner, DBRAND as our rap partner, and Secret Lab as our chair partner.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was quite the gamer move, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

No one called us on it. Yeah, literally no one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good stuff. The business team over there, man, they're just. They're just cooking.

[Linus Sebastian]

Go business team. Just wait till we double it again. You're gonna. You're. You're gonna see. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How can we do that? There's gotta be a way.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, so we are making a video with complaints about tech. Not big complaints, like the ongoing march toward zero ownership and liking it. The complete disregard for the ecological impact of AI or the insificification of absolutely everything. We're talking small things like how cookie settings are specifically designed to be user hostile and intimidating. So you'll just click invade my primus primacy. Invade my primacy. Do it now. Invade my privacy. Or how power saving Mode on Windows 11 renders the battery icon useless. You ever notice that? No power saving mode comes on, you get the little icon. You can't tell how. Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because it puts the thing in front.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because it puts the thing in the front. We've got other good stuff to do with the notification tray on Windows, like how if you have a bunch of them queued up and you're trying to click something behind them while they one after another come up and get in your way. It's actually impossible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Windows Search has gotta be in here.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, we won't. This is supposed to be like nitpicks. It's supposed to be little specific details.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Major problems.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it can't be major problems. So one of the ones that bothers me a lot for this one, we're gonna go. And so the goal here, guys, is for you to tell us, hey, there's a super easy workaround to that. All you had to do was this so we can make sure we don't waste anyone's time. You guys are. You guys are being our fact checking department here. So we're gonna take a little trip to my inbox. Going to Linus laptop. Here we go. Boom. My spam folder. Let's go. Oh, I'm getting some info from Scientology. Here we go. So this is something that drives me absolutely knocking futs if I find something in here like, oh, oh, this Zoom meeting. Or here, let's find something that's just absolutely, like the worst. Sure. Bright hr. I don't even know what Bright HR is, but I don't recommend it because they spam me. Okay, so I'm going to click on this. Okay. If I say not spam, watch what happens. Watch what happens. What happened, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It went away.

[Linus Sebastian]

It went away. I'm still in my spam folder.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you know where it went?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm assuming to your unread.

[Linus Sebastian]

It went to my inbox. It did not mark unread. Oh, it goes in a red state.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To your inbox, so it disappears so it disappears. It's no longer on your screen and it's now marked red.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which I have been. Which I have been. Which I have been meaning to deal with, which I've been meaning to talk about for a long time. Because this is the kind of little thing that drives me absolutely nuts. I haven't replied to this, I haven't actioned it in any way. All that happened was I saw something that I was like, oh, shoot, that's not spam. And the reason this came up was an introduction that Nirav, the CEO of Framework, wanted to make for me. So he emails me, he's like, hey, here's someone who's working on something cool that might interest you. Are you interested in an intro? I go, yes. And then he says, okay, sure thing, I'll make the intro. And then it never happens. And then the intro never happened. A week later I get a ping. I think it was from Nirav, I don't remember, but he's basically like, I thought this was. Hey, I thought I was making an intro. You said you were cool with it. You don't reply to people. Maybe he didn't. Maybe I projected all of that onto myself when I found a week old email in my inbox from buddy who's working on the cool thing that just went to my spam and get this, get this. It gets even worse because I did realize that this would happen because I've encountered this before and it annoys me. So I found it, I marked it not spam. And remember how Gmail used to have a function to mark a sender safe?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that's gone. So I've had people multiple times email me and end up in my spam because there's no obvious way to mark a sender safe. So anyway, so anyway, I go, I dig it out of my inbox, I make sure I remember the name of the person who sent it, right? So I can go search for it in my inbox. Because I use my inbox like a to do list. So I have like sometimes a hundred unread items in my inbox and anything that's red is gone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'd be okay if it doesn't exist, basically reload, like if it moved it and then reopened it for you, sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'd be fine with that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That would be fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'd be fine with that if it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If it had to be that.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I went, I remembered the name, I went, I got it and I replied to it. I was like, hey, can you have your people Schedule a time with my people. And I cc'd my people get buddy replies. He's like, here's some good times for me. Vance had to go to his spam. So he only saw it to set up a time because he happened to check his spam.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is, what is this person sending from? It sounds like their domain is.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I can, I can check now. I can check now. It's probably a relatively new domain, I can tell you that. No, it's a Gmail account.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Amir a in full plane chat said read the notification. It does mark the sender safe. So maybe it's just like a combo button now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Except if it didn't, I swear to you, I swear on my mother's grave that I have had it. My mother's not dead. That I've had it happen where I have said this is not spam. And anyway, we work in a Google G suite domain. I marked it safe. So why is it going to Vance to spam then? That just happened? Like just. Just now just happened?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I don't know if like marked safe senders is. Is workspace wide.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, should it be a. An indicator.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe from. I don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To be honest, I don't think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Cuz I mean, okay, I could see. Because while it could be a good indicator for safe senders, assuming everyone is like savvy and does it properly. Yeah, it might not be, but it could also. It could also amplify bamboozlement. So that's potentially dangerous. You're right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. If you. If you like. Yeah. I don't know. If you. If you convince someone through social engineering on a completely unrelated team but within the same organization that you are a safe sender and then you send garbage to other people on the team knowing that you're manually flagged as safe.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

From this random person in the company.

[Linus Sebastian]

Assaf 400 says happened to me this week marked not spam. Same sender went to spam. Also, other emails from the same sender still stuck in spam, each needing to be manually put in the inbox. So that's mine. That's my contribution to the tech gripes Video. We've got a couple of other ones. Here's one. There's still no good way to transfer files from Android to iOS. Android has Quick Share, iOS has AirDrop, but there is no rock solid way to share files between devices. Furthermore, it can be a challenge to get files to a PC as well. That should be with wi Fi Direct. That should be such a solved problem. And there are, there are ways to do it. Like, it's not like you can't pair your Android phone to your. To your Windows PC. It's a whole thing. When you're setting up Windows, it prompts you to do it and everything. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about Luke snaps a quick picture on his phone and is like, hey, can I send this to you? And I'm like, yo, I just turned on my sharing airdrop style and it just farts over onto the laptop. That, that, that, that needs to, that needs to be a thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Google Quick Share. That works. I love it. Isn't that more Android? Android, not KDE Connect.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I can already tell you just from the name of it that that is not going to be what like my aunt is going to use. Sale. Esh says share. It used to be the app to do it until Apple removed it from the App Store. Oh, man, I love that. It's Android.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Android to Windows. Yeah, it doesn't solve the problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

I love that. I'm gonna put down, I'm gonna put down a few of these for us to look into. I've got local send here. Someone's like, I just use Discord. Oh, that is so sad. That should not be the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is largely what I do, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is actually sad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I agree.

[Linus Sebastian]

Actual ass.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I fully agree.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is ass. And I don't mean like, but I don't mean like attractive, like thick ass. I mean like, like with hair everywhere. Oh, yeah, like everywhere. Like long, like, like on your head long, like, like just like shaggy. Yeah, shaggy ass. What else we got Windows probably into that. Windows Settings. Here's a good one. Why is Windows settings limited to a single window? Have you noticed that the modern settings menu, you can only have one window open?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's annoying.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. What the heck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's not like game breaking, but it's annoying. Okay. I think, I'm thinking I'm starting to embrace the theme.

[Linus Sebastian]

And since we're in the settings menu, since, since we're talking about it, why exactly is it that time and language is deserving of space here? When display, sound, power and battery. These are all things that do not merit the top level of the sidebar. Are you kidding me? That's pretty rough. How often do you change the time on your computer in the age of. You've got it knows the location and automatically adjusts your time zone, your time and everything. Because obviously I do find that to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Be kind of weird too. The amount of times that I have to uncheck and then recheck automatically set time zone to be like, hello. And then it wakes up and does it for me. It's like, okay, thanks Eternal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Griever says this is actually something that's been grinding my gears recently. Right. Okay, what else we got? App section is the most random assortment of settings, offline maps, video Playback. The Windows 11 context menu right clicking now has show more options. You click it and 80% of the options are the same because it just goes to the old menu. Just show me all the options. I actually really, really hate that there's. It's two clicks now to get to a lot of the right. Right click context menu stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can do that like God mode thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I do think that's solvable.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

You can also remove it as well. I think we talked about that earlier in the week.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

There are solutions on this computer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're not default, so it's still annoying, but there are solutions.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think they're registries. That's a big part of the tech gripes Video is we want to present solutions. And if the solution is here's a quick registry, you know, D word that you can reconfigure, then that's great. Or if the solution is, hey, if you could just add like three lines of code. Hello Anyone? This is not going to make it into the video because no one cares. Because no one uses Xperia phones. But I, I saw a post recently asking why none of the big tech tech youtubers review Xperia phones. And the answer is because no one cares. They're super expensive and limited availability outside of Japan in certain regions. But for me, I can tell you the reason that I don't daily one is because even now, after all these years, all these years, Sony still hasn't added like the, the like three lines of code that it would take to swap the back button and the task switcher button or whatever the, whatever the square one is called. I prefer the back button on the right. I have homunculus hands. I am right handed. I cannot reach back all the way across on the left. I use back a lot. You might say everyone's going to. I like back. I'm a back enthusiast. Okay. I like it. I like to be able to reach it. I like to be able to get my thumb weight. Okay. The point is just that I need that button a lot and if it's over on the other side, it's really Hard for me to reach. I could reach around. Sorry, let's just continue. That works. If anyone from Sony is watching and didn't get totally bothered by all of that, I will immediately. I want the headphone jack. I want the taller form factor. I want the gorgeous display. I want the camera. I want everything that is really good about the Xperia.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just allow me to swap it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It just let me move the buttons.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't even have to do it by default.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just let me move the Hong Kong one.

[Dan]

We can root it and just switch it over.

[Linus Sebastian]

Panthamus. Pathomus says they're never going to do it. Yeah, I. I know, I know, I know, but they're. They're never going to do it. Oh, man. Yeah, I think center, start, menu. That's more of just like a design thing. Sorry, I'm just going through some of the stuff in my dock. We've got. Oh man, this is amazing. Anyone here on macOS, Shout out if you're on Mac OS in the chat. Okay, hit me up. Apple finally added window management with snapping. Finally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They didn't have snapping.

[Linus Sebastian]

No. You could get it with a third party app for like $3 or something. But it'll be a cold day in hell before I pay $3 for basic window management functionality. That's been in Linux since I worked at ncix. Like, no. So they added. They added Windows napping. But it has a border for no apparent reason. Jake showed me this and my mind was blown. It has a border around it where you can see that your desktop wallpaper.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what?

[Linus Sebastian]

For no reason. Oh no. That would bother me so much for like no reason. I am.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought you meant it was like framed like a photo. And I was like, that's weird. But it doesn't bother me that much.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's so weird to be able to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See the desktop background would constantly make me think that it's not actually there.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can turn it off. Okay, you can turn it off. But the fact, the fact that that is the default behavior that they show the user is absolutely mind blowing to me. That's so annoying. This next one. Oh, this is great. On the. On Macs that have the gaping wound in their display. The island. Sorry. Oh, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sounds so much more metal. Dude. The gaping wound.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was. Sorry, wrong phone. Where's my. Oh, right. I put it away because it was buzzing the mic on my iPhone. I was, I was looking at some meme. Like one of those like, like four pictures from Lord of the Rings with captions. Style memes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I literally couldn't read the top one because of the stupid island thing. And then I was watching. I was watching a movie. I was watching a movie on my phone. And my choices were basically, because Plex is not perfect. Not a perfect application. I either had, like, giant black bars around everything, or I had a hole in the movie. And I was like, I can't. I actually cannot watch a movie with a hole in it. That's impossible. Like, I'm not gonna be one of these pretentious Hollywood directors that's like, my.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Movie is mastered for the theater.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, if it's not watched in the theater, then I'm afraid it simply cannot be enjoyed by your primitive eyes. I'm not like that about it. But you put a hole in the screen. Are you kidding me? Like that? I have lines. I have standards. Anyway, so on. On Macs that have the island, you can. You can like, full screen. Like. Like Mac full screen, Like. Like distraction free mode or whatever, but your taskbar goes away at the top only for it to be filled with black pixels because of the. Because they have to have a border for the entire top because of the stupid hole in the screen. Because there might be content there. Really funny. I don't. I don't know if that's one that'll make it to our gripes, because nothing could really be done about that other than make better hardware in the first place. This is a good one. This was almost an entire video. And maybe it still could be at some point, just like diagnosing computer sleep issues, like sleep, wake, screen turning off issues. So I was having a problem. When we set up the LAN center in the basement, I had five identical machines with five identical monitors with five identical sets of peripherals. And I couldn't figure out why half of them were going to sleep properly and half of them weren't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's annoying.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what? It was?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, technically. But no.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Thank you for. Thank you for not ruining my setup for once, Luke. I appreciate you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thanks, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I almost made a whole video on this so that we could just. As a springboard to talk about how to diagnose these issues. But what it ultimately was, was I got into the administrator level command prompt and power config. It was Steam, but it was specifically because I had Steam open on all of them. And what I found out was that Steam will not let your computer go to sleep if you are open to the store tab, even if Steam is minimized.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So you had. So the ones that were sleeping were on LBRY Because I read that and I was thinking like, I always have Steam on like all my computers.

[Linus Sebastian]

On your library? Probably.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's probably on lbry.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's probably on lbry. So the reason. It's a good reason. The reason is that it's something to do with video playback on the store page and how if you're playing back video, your computer doesn't go to sleep. So if there's any video playback or a video player that is open, the system won't sleep. It blew my flipping mind. Blew my mind. Or sorry, not sleep. Display. Display. Unwaking. Maybe it'll still sleep. Sorry. Sorry. But specifically what I was working on was my displays wouldn't blank.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I was thinking like it's to have never been. Because my computer always goes to sleep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This current iteration of my computer has no sleep problems. It's very nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm used to having some weird sleep issue.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So. So if there's anyone here that is like, oh my God, sometimes my display doesn't turn off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I bet you it's that. Because if you think about it, the Steam Store page is just a browser.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

And any ad for any game or whatever is just a video. If you have a video open in your browser, even if it's in the background, your screen's not going to turn off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I wonder how much bandwidth just leaving the Steam Store page up on your screen for like a week takes.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have no idea.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because it's a pretty solid amount of video. Actually. It's probably very like low res, but still.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, I was thinking of making that entire video just as an excuse to talk about like sleep and screen timers and all that kind of stuff. But then we just kind of never got around to it and we didn't have a great title for it. And anywho, Smart TVs LG lets you go offline and not get ads. But if you want to use an app, it asks you to update, you can use the app but have to navigate around the prompt you must log in to update. And then our second one is the entirety of Tizen os. I think that's too broad. I think that's too broad, Adam. I don't think we're going to do that one. They're supposed to be nitpicks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like. I feel like Adam has a TV.

[Linus Sebastian]

With Tizen OS monitors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Personally bothered.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why do certain presets lock me out of certain features without any rhyme or reason? Actually, Adam, I can probably, I can explain some of that at least. There are certainly ones where it's like, no, I don't get that at all. But like filmmaker mode, for instance, will lock you out of a lot of the TV settings because it wouldn't be filmmaker mode if you were allowed to change a bunch of stuff. However, most TVs in filmmaker mode will allow you to set the white point up. Some of them will lock you in warm because that is like a filmmaker. I do not like the warm preset. I prefer 6500 kelvin. And don't, don't touch my white point. Um, but anyway, the point is that some of them do make sense. Some of them absolutely don't. If there was one that we were going to. If there was one that we were going to rant about, when it comes to monitor settings, then I would say it's the one where you're not allowed to change any settings if you don't have an active input. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why not?

[Linus Sebastian]

Old monitors used to, used to let you have them on and play around with all their settings and everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whereas now you can't tell sometimes if your computer is broken and not outputting or if your monitor is not on and not receiving a signal. It drives me absolutely crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't know that was an issue, but I have used that to try diagnose if my computer is properly sending out display or not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Drives me flipping really annoying. Crazy. Beltrick says, well, the settings are tied to signal type. There are plenty that aren't. And I just want it to be on so I know it's on so that I. So that I know what input it's on and that it's looking for signal. Give me something. Give me something. Okay, we've got a lot of teams ones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like I'm hesitating. I could add so many more, but I feel like it would just take up. It'd be a whole video.

[Linus Sebastian]

So like one of these is notifications. Steal input, focus. For some reason, teams notifications have gotten me killed in deadlock. Don't ask me why I'm on teams and playing deadlock. Teams notification is separate from Windows integrated pop ups. That's actually super annoying. Especially because they're in the same place.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Come on, Microsoft. You literally make this software. Why can't I schedule a message to a group chat that I haven't messaged before? So if you have like a shoot in the morning or something like that, and you put together everyone that's on that shoot and you just Want to, like, schedule something. You just can't because, I don't know, whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It wants me to keep going. I can send a bunch of stuff later. I mean, I've ranted about this on the WAN show before, and I think people are a little tired of it. So I don't want to go through way too many of it. But, like, my. The main two that frustrate me is that I can't schedule a message to a group chat that I haven't sent a message to before. Adam added, and this is super annoying. Why can't I schedule a reply to a thread? Just like. And I understand some of the theory of not being able to schedule a reply to a thread because I think they're worried that, like, other things will be sent before that one. I could see that my team's general, like, etiquette for this is just put scheduled in brackets. This is super normal. Everyone does this. We're not big brain solvable. This is extremely solvable. Stop. Like, not allowing us to do. Okay, I'm going to relax. The other primary annoying thing that I have is the amount of times that I'm in teams calls and people go, is my mic working? Because they can't see it light up. Yeah, just.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whoa. The spider.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, he was there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is he in my headphones?

[Luke Lafreniere]

He might be. He's a crafty little guy. For people that weren't part of the pre show, there was a spider that climbed up onto the desk and went directly. There was a spider that crawled up under the desk and went directly into one of my USB ports and hid under the little USB finger. And then he took off. Like, I think it was like a minute into the show and maybe went into Linus's headphones.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would strongly prefer to not put these headphones on if there could be a spider inside them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, definitely. Small enough to crawl in your ear.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Okay. No, now I'm really. I'm really creeped out right now. If there's a spider in my headphones, I. I would be. I would be super, super unhappy. Words could not describe the level of unhappy that I would be if a spider, like, crawled across my face.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Another. I'll add another one too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I know it's not poisonous. I don't care. I do not like it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not the poison part. It's the digging into your ear part. Anyways, it's not even that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just. I don't need a reason to not like spiders.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

From an evolutionary standpoint, a fear of spiders and snakes and like dead things and all the stuff that I kind of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is what kept my ancestors alive. And damn it, I'm gonna uphold their legacy here and continue to be afraid of those things, however irrational it might be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're all watching down on you, not wanting to put your headphones on and cheersing the glass, being like, yeah, no, I'm okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have thoroughly searched them. Dan was gonna bring me new headphones, but it's okay, Dan, I'm ready. I'm ready.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The last thing I'll say about teams is if I'm in Slack and I attach something to a chat message or even just attach something in general, I can just press send right away before it finishes. Att.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And the message will just send when it's done attaching. You try to do that in teams and I don't remember it like opens it or something. It does whatever it does. It's annoying and it doesn't send it. That's all I. So I have to sit there and just wait for it to attach. And if it's like a video, it might take a little bit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I've never. I've Never really used iMessage because no one that I know uses imessage, so why would I? Yep. But man, the reply function is awful. Oh, like you, like you. When you. When you hold on something to like reply to a specific message, you know you don't use WhatsApp, but you know how it works in any sensible program where it just gives you like a preview of the original message and then just has it indented and like has the reply to it. It creates this like new pop up window and then like getting out of it is like, you have to like click somewhere else entirely on the screen and it kind of has like these like reply threads within the thing. It's ridiculous. I was like, how did a trillion dollar company design this? I couldn't believe it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That seems not awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I never used it during my time with the iPhone, but it was something that I encountered just the other day because I was chatting with John from Eshtech about some Hexos thing and I had to reply to something specific because we kind of had two threads going. We were talking about Christmas plans and also talking about like future Hexos plans and you know, you know how those things could get a little bit confusing, right. Because he could be like, you know, oh, I had a close relative die, so this will be our first Christmas without them. Also, we've got this great feature plan. And I could be like, wow, that's so cool. Which one was I replying to? Who knows?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, reply. Reply threads are good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, reply threads are good. Anyway, the point is. Yeah, it's. It's awful. Yeah, we've got a couple people backing me up in chat here, so apparently this isn't just me being crazy. I think we could actually. Adam, who's obviously watching the show right now, I think we could even steal some of the stuff from the. The iOS time video. Oh, dude, YouTube music. Don't get me started on YouTube music. Okay, Adam, here's one you probably don't know. If you, if you have your main Google account on your phone for some reason as a different account from the one that has a premium subscription, it has YouTube Music. You will not be able anymore. It used to work, but you can. This is what ultimately made me switch from my like G suite account as my main account on this device to my like personal random Gmail that I don't even really use other than to have YouTube Premium on you. In with Android Auto, you can't use voice control to play a specific song on YouTube music unless your Google account, like your main one that you're like mainly signed into the phone with is the one that has premium. So just like having another one, you can't select which account you have. And. And oh, it's so annoying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I really wish, like, I think this would be a pretty cool feature is if you could like claim your like network of Google accounts basically. So if like I could have a personal Google account and then branch under it like, okay, this is my personal account, this is my work account, these are my whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I, if I buy premium, I want it to give it to all of them. I don't want to see YouTube ads. I don't want to open a YouTube video that I need to watch for work in my work browser thing and then get an ad and go, ugh, and copy the URL and bring it over my personal browser. Watch. Okay, watch it there.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's the same with YouTube Music. That was actually what Adam was talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

How if he's YouTube music and YouTube must be logged into the same account on the browser. You can't be like, yeah, I have music here and I have this. There's. Oh, so annoying. So he has to open YouTube Music and Edge so you can be logged into two separate accounts. You can also use. I think Brave has really good support for multi Google accounts across different things. Or you can Use Incognito mode. There's other options.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Technically, most of them do like even, even Firefox does. Firefox is just clunky compared to Chrome's. Chrome has extremely good and easy to use multi account stuff like profiles. And Firefox has them as well. It's just not as clean. People are saying it's great. Maybe I just wasn't good at it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know, dude. I just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Other people are saying it's clunky.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wouldn't care about anything to do with YouTube music. I would accept everything that's kind of crappy about YouTube music in a heartbeat if they brought back quick, painless casting to my Sonos stuff. But ever since Google and Sonos got at it, that's gone. It was perfect. In Google Play Music, it was literally perfect. On the player page there was a cast button, like how a cast button works. And then it would just bring up the pop up for what you want to cast to. And you would go, this one, this one, this one and this one and press go. And it would just, oh my gosh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is incredibly annoying.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then it would just go, I need to stop using this phone. But it's so tedious switching phones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mine's below the table. Well, it was happening when it was above the table too.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just gonna put it under my thick, juicy thighs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

That should block it.

[Dan]

Thanks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Taylor immediately stopped.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a lot of water. What can I say?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, no joke. The second he put his leg back down, it was over.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, dude, I've been hitting the StairMaster lately and the rowing machine. Dude, these thighs are getting firm. Yeah, they're getting to be firm thighs. Yeah, I, I actually like go to the gym now. He's never going to get me to lift anything because it's just like you lifted things. It's not. What did I lift?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Your body? The StairMaster.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I mean, yeah, sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, dude, that StairMaster is a real.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've never been on a StairMaster StairMasters.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a real workout, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, like, I've been meaning to send you like pictures of what the machine looks like when I'm done one time. Like, dude, I'm in the. I'll do like half an hour of cardio and I can't do one thing, like at the, at the, like go hard, like level that I want to do it for the full 30 minutes that I like to do. But you know my thing where I like to do 30 minutes of cardio like every day. Ish. I try to do every day, but it doesn't happen every day. So the thing that I've been. So the thing I did the other day was I hit the, the rowing machine for 10 minutes. Then the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is this at the Smash gym?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Then the bike for five.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do they have the cleaning stuff yet?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then the StairMaster for 10 and then finished off with another five on the bike. So in 30 minutes, the 40 ounce bottle. I had drained two of them to give you some idea. Insane.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. That's nuts. I, I'll, I'll go to the gym and I, I tend to go for like a while. Like I, for, for whatever reason, I'm not really into like the, When I'm doing weights, I'm not really into like the 30 minute workout. I like going for like quite a, quite a bit of time. Um, and there will be like, there'll be some chick on the StairMaster when I walk in. She's like not moving that fast, but she's on the StairMaster. I'm noticing like I'm close to wrapping up my workout like an hour and a half later and I'm walking by like she's still on there. Like what the hell? Oh my God. Like I would fall over. There's no possible way. It would not happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

I could do it at a low pace for a long time, but I, I don't know what the settings are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's probably like two hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know what the settings are equivalent to, but I'm trying to think. Like what's the, what's the, what's the pace that it's at? I'll have to check sometime. But it's, it's at 16, whatever that is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's going to be machine dependent.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So I forget how many stairs per minute it is. But it's. Oh, dude. It's a lot. It's painful. It hurts a lot. Okay, what else we got here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone said. I would like to hear more about Luke's fitness habits as a fellow lifter. I'm trying to get a float plane exclusive.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, that would be cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Where we get a bunch of. Not me, but a bunch of different. Of the people including myself, but a bunch of different people at the company that, that like to gym often to do like a roundtable discussion thing. We film it for floatplane.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that'd be pretty sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

None of it's, none of us are like, I'll participate trainers or any that'd be cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't. I. Oh, wait. Well, does it count if it also includes like badminton stuff?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, can I just do, like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's just like a fitness discussion.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think, dude, I had a. I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Think it'd be neat.

[Linus Sebastian]

I like did not realize how hard I destroyed myself yesterday because I wasn't in the gym. Gym. I was playing badminton. But what I did was we played a format called box game. And don't worry, I was playing with my wife.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, box game makes the. In front of the service line is out and behind the double service line is out. So it's like a shortened court. And typically you play on a half court, so it's a little bit wider than half of a singles court because you use the doubles line and you play directly across from each other. Directly across from each other. Or diagonally. Or diagonally. But I'm playing a format with Yvonne to help even things out because I'm a bit of a stronger player than her where she takes half a court, right. Half a half a box. And I take a box that is the entire width of the singles chord on the other side. So I put on a 20 pound weight vest yesterday and I played that against her with. Dude, I could barely emerge from my bed this morning. I destroyed myself. I am in so much. I'm in so much pain today. Like, it's. It's actually awful.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's. Yeah, there's a certain level where it's like, okay, that might have been good, but it might not also be worth it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it's hard because when I'm having fun, I don't. Yeah, I don't realize. I don't notice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'll sometimes get in a zone where like, I don't register the level of strain properly. And then like the next morning or that night I'll be like, I'm really tired. And then I'll be like, oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Radon man says pain is weakness leaving the body. No, sometimes it's just. Sometimes it's just overdoing it. We've got one here that is. Why can't I just plug a USB A to a USB A and transfer files between computers? There's a lot of security reasons for that. I don't think we'll include that one. I mean, there are some good points here. You can plug in a phone, which is just a portable computer and copy files from that. But. But also, I don't know, I'm sure there's reasons for that. I'm sure there's reasons for that. Google Gemini, just in general. Okay, that's too broad, Adam. I don't know if we'll do that either, but Google Gemini replacing Google assistant. Can't do 80% of assistant functions, but can hallucinate Google sheets. Yeah. And I can't. Okay. Admittedly, I haven't dug too deep into this, but it switched to a default male voice. And I don't know, I just don't like my phone talking to me in a male voice. Mine's switched to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I had. I did this whole gambit, like, years and years ago where I set up a.co.uk email address to get, like, a specific voice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, just to get like a British. Yeah, like a sexy, like, cool lady voice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really? Even the goal. I just thought it'd be, like, neat. And then. Yeah, it changed it. I was like, that's annoying. I don't even. It doesn't really matter that much. It's just weird. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, let's maybe jump into our second topic. No, we have to do a second topic. I'll do a quick one. Okay. Dan. My hero. My.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

My hero. Yes. My guy, Terry will be featured on Canada's $5 bill. Okay, this is not really tech related, but we have talked. We have talked about the actual, rightful king of Canada, Terry Fox, before on this show. He is a. He's a Canadian hero. And the only reason he's only a Canadian hero is because most of the world doesn't know about him. If you don't know who Terry Fox is, go read about him. He's actually the most coolest, wholesomest, awesomest, most inspiring guy, like, ever. And he is finally, finally going to be in his rightful place on our money. Damn it. So he's going to the $5 note. The process of replacing Wilfrid Laurier began almost five years ago, apparently. And the bank of Canada got more than 600 submissions to their open nominations for the honor. They made the right choice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

After losing part of his right leg to cancer, Terry embarked on his marathon of Hope, an attempt to run across Canada on his prosthetic leg, raising money for cancer research. His run was tragically cut short in 1981, but he was still able to raise $24.7 million. That was a dollar for every person living in Canada at the time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Since his death, annual Terry Fox runs have been held all over the world and have raised another $800 million for cancer research. That's Canadian dollars, unfortunately. But still, it's a lot of money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not a ton of amazing news coming out of Canada over the last little while. Yeah, this is cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is cool. We're finally doing it properly and putting Terry on the money. So that's good. Yeah, it's finally time. Okay, fine. We'll explain Merch messages, Dan, Merch messages are the way to interact with the show. You can have your merch message pop up there. You can have it go to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What the.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can have it go to producer Dan, who will reply to it. He might forward it to someone internal to better address your question or he might curate it and it will go to me and Luke to reply to you live on the show. Dan, do you want to show the fine people out there how it wakes?

[Dan]

Sure. Hey, dll question for Linus. Primarily, you've mentioned before that you like to see employee candidates, personal projects. What are some of the coolest projects you've seen?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude, I haven't been a job interviewer in like years and years. Luke's probably seen some cool stuff though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sean's home lab was sick. That was cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Our IT guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. If I remember correctly, Nick Harris had some cool stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

I remember someone showed me a cool Plex server at some point, but they like cobbled together. It was like very janky. And I was like, I've had a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Surprising amount of software dev applicants that would just have nothing to do with anything to do with hardware here. Show me their computers or servers or whatever. Just because I often get into those types of questions like what kind of stuff are you into? And then it'll naturally lead to showing into those things. That's some really cool software projects. This was way too tough of a project. We've significantly toned it down since then. But the first developer hiring wave that we did for Floatplane. Do you remember this? The game Make Us a Game. That was way too big of an ask. It was also way too open ended. We were new, did not know quite what we were asking of people at the time. But the developer that did get hired and is still with us from that wave, we basically asked make us a game. And then we listed some things that would be cool for it to have. I don't remember the exact details. And they made what was essentially like PvP asteroids and it had a chat.

[Linus Sebastian]

I remember that. That was sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Set up some notification thing so he would be able to know when I connected to it. So when I jumped into it, it's supposed to be PvP asteroids, he also jumped on. And then we, like, fought against each other and were able to talk in the chat. And I was like, whoa. Okay. That's pretty cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have some people who work here who are, like, probably too good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What can I say? What can I say? Luke's a great boss. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thanks for sticking with me. Oh, man. But, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Someone's like, I want to play that now. It was genuinely entertaining.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. You showed it to me. I tried it. It was really fun. It was, like, super fun. Hey, Rod. Piping up in the chat, he says, some freaking amazing people. Heck, yeah, Rod. Rod knows a lot more of the team than most average floatplane viewers would because he's come up and hang out, hung out with us a few times. Rod, you're coming up for softball night this spring, right? I know it's a little early. It's December still, but you're gonna come join us for at least one softball night, right? I want a commitment. I want a commitment today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll make it out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's see it. Yeah, you better. He says, for sure. All right. Heck, yeah, Rod.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I still probably can't bat or throw properly, but I'll make it out.

[Linus Sebastian]

For those of you who don't know, Rod is a was on the BS Mods episode of Scrapyard Wars. He's an incredible PC modder and has been a long time, just sort of awesome supporter of the show. I didn't remember this. I don't know if it made it into the cut because I haven't finished watching the video yet, but we did that. Me? No, it's you. We did Nick from Creator Warehouse. We did Nick Light's AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade recently, and he reminded me the time that we had to get seven gamers, one CPU to CES for a sponsor, and the only way for us to get it there safely was to drive it down to Bob and Rod BS mods in Seattle. Nick took it down there, and then they took it down to CES for us because they were driving to Las Vegas because they had all of their system mods for all of their sponsors. So I totally forgotten about that. That was. That was the early days when everything was like, just like, get her done by any means necessary.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was in the trailer, wasn't it? Or something? I don't remember, because I remember I was telling someone this story recently, but I couldn't remember why I went down there. But I took a train down there to pick up the old suv, which is probably What Nick dropped it off in.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that. Bring it back. Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was a little rough. I still remember when I realized on the highway that it didn't have abs.

[Linus Sebastian]

I still remember my parents telling me what great condition it was in when we bought it from them. Anyway, never buy a car from a family member.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All the other company vehicles have lasted a long time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, because, like, I picked them. Anywho. Oh, it's not Nick Light. As opposed to, like Nick Full Fat or whatever. It's Nick L, I G H T. It's his last name.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Definitely not the opposite of. Wait, Sorry. Oh, what are we supposed to be doing? Oh, yes, good. Nick Dark. No, not that either. Just Nick Light. Oh, dude, man, I made. I made the funniest jokes about. About Nick Light. I was like, I don't need. I don't need a filming light because I've got two lights. When he was, like, holding his baby.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You should have seen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. A lot of light jokes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Can I get a light? You know. Okay. It doesn't matter.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If I remember correctly, there was no. No, I'm not gonna use names. But there was someone else's name that went well with it. That's all I'll say.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Oh, no way. Yeah, it's finally here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Introducing the chocolate. No, wait, Sorry. Introducing the backpack Rain cover. You should all know it's always best to protect your load, especially when things get really wet outside. Seriously? That's the marketing spiel. That's why we designed this rain cover for your LTT backpack. This is one of the times that size really does matter.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, so it's on purpose.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's on purpose since most rain covers are not big enough to accommodate the sheer girth of the LTT backpack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is this you? Now? Is this in the writing or you just doing this?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's not in there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's an extra layer of protection to keep your stuff dry while also adding visibility to your bag in the dark. With a snazzy mountain landscape, inspired reflective design genuinely looks really sharp. It also packs neatly into a zippable carrying case that you can attach to your bag's carabiner or accessory loops and is now available at LMG GG Slash Rain Cover.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's also durable.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was a surprisingly long project to get the costing and the quality and the reflectiveness right, and the printing quality and the just. Oh, my God. Anyway, are you looking for a last minute gift? It's never been a better time to purchase an LTT store gift card for that special LTT enjoyer in your life. Why? Because nothing says I didn't leave this to the last minute better than an excuse that you had to wait for the brand new LTT commuter backpack to launch the day after Christmas, since that's why you got them a gift card and not an actual gift. Yeah. So cover your ass at lmg gg. Notalastminute gift.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Question that you might not know the answer to. Yeah, I see there's a pull thingy on this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if they can see it very well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Would this fit on the commuter?

[Linus Sebastian]

I doubt it, but we can find out. It's probably a little big for the commute.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably a little big.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was designed before the commuter was like a sparkle in the eye of our designers. We actually started on the rainfly or the rain cover, I think almost immediately after the launch of the backpack. So, like, it's been a while.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Already said it would, but it would.

[Dan]

Be to the forum.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, hey, no, no. I got my computer bag on me. We can check it right now. We can have a look.

[Dan]

Art, are you gonna fix that link? That link brokey.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, apparently the link goes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

The link's broken. Okay. So.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, the link is not broken.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so now I just gotta find out if there's two layers on the rain cover. Someone get me a knife.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The link's working fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. I wouldn't. I wouldn't recommend this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Too loose.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, this is. This is not. This is like clown level.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe in a pinch situation. Don't buy it for that.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, don't buy it for that at all. Not even in a pinch. No pinch. It's not for that now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I mean, like, if you have both bags and you just need something, you already have the COVID anyways. Like, you could use it, but you should know it for that reason.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just take your other backpack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just. I just wouldn't. No, no, I don't like it. So we'll. We'll work on a rain cover for the commuter bag eventually, now that we have a good supplier for them and now that we've, like, got most of the hard stuff out of the way, we've got good printing quality and everything. It shouldn't be too much work for us to get on something. Okay. Also, flow plane announcing Evon week. We're supposed to watch a video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

His wife.

[Linus Sebastian]

My wife. Oh, wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

They got her to do this. Look at the look on her face. You can tell exactly how Thrilled. She is about being dressed up as Burger King.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is the closest resemblance, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. Okay, well. Sorry, Burger Queen. Excuse me. Sorry, sorry. My bad. Oh, I do want to mute that first. Sorry, My bad. One sec. Where. Where'd I put it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, she's in the thumbnails of all of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't put that together.

[Linus Sebastian]

They replaced me in all the thumbnails.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was like, she hosted the ferroelectric RAM video.

[Linus Sebastian]

She really didn't. This one's the best. Okay, here we go. We ready?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey, everyone, it's Yvonne Week. And to start, we're gonna clean up some of the LMG stuff on here. Let's get rid of some of this controversial stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Perfect.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, now we're gonna have the best house. Awesome. Okay, now to celebrate, here are some of the Yvonne Fluid Clean exclusives this week. Holom says, do you want your husband to grow out his beard again? Yes. So we're actually up to five cats now. This is Panda over here, and this is Missy. I feel inadequate. How do you deal with people with short attention spans?

[Linus Sebastian]

Feel personally attacked right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, five minutes per ornament. If we need, let's say, what, like 20 ornaments? That's 100 minutes. What did I say it was going to take us an hour? Best relationship tip that you always follow. And why. At first, my answer was communication. But then I realized as I was thinking that through that it's commitment. You might not want to compromise or affect change. You're just talking to somebody about how you feel. That is his unhappy. I want to get out noise. That'll be fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, so it's Yvonne Week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like the people weeks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Three special floatplane exclusives. A Q and A decorating a tech tree, and meet the cats. Yvonne may also appear on a video or two outside of floatplane next week, so keep an eye out as we celebrate one of the OG estimates of the OGs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Two fantastic comments under the video, Steve J3D says, Finally, the real owner of LMG. Getting some screen time. Another one is Bezaken said an entire week of evontent. Yes, please.

[Linus Sebastian]

Evontent. I thought those were pretty cool. You know what? I actually. I like it. I like it a lot. That's. That's very good. That's cute. Okay, more floatplane exclusive merch. Oh, we have merch.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

For LTT floatplane subscribers. Our second floatplane XLTT store collab drops today. Second image after the backpack. Rain cover on LTT store. Okay, Luke, I'm gonna have you show them that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I haven't seen this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Included in this drop are two shirts. The Content Cosmos tee, which was designed by Sarah live on Floatplane fueled with ideas from chat legally distinct Firefox Pyrokitsuni. I don't know what that means, but that's on there. And the floatplane exclusive T. A simple floatplane logo on a light blue T shirt which you all have requested.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whoa.

[Linus Sebastian]

There you go. Oh, that's super cute. Does it really have a flying fox? Oh, legally distinct Firefox pyro. I get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is awesome. It looks like those old comics.

[Linus Sebastian]

An adventure through the Content Cosmos.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is actually very cool. Good price too. Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

These fly out onto the store on January 1, 2025. Oh wait, they fly off the store. So if you're interested, buy yours before then at lmg, gg FP exclusive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, there, that's all the announcements. We are done with announcements, Dan. Sure. You want to show us how merge messages work?

[Dan]

We already did one, but let's do another one. How about that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Dan]

Hi, ldl. I'm going to be setting up my very first nas. Yes, I'm considering Hexos. I just want to set up a system to manage my Linux isos. Has there been any update to the issues you've had with Plex?

[Linus Sebastian]

I have found that downloading is a little better. In general, I have found it to be a little improved. They have not addressed all of the issues that I kind of laid out as my requirements for us to work with them in an official capacity. Again, I still am a Plex user, but I won't do sponsored stuff with them until they actually fulfill all the like stuff that bothers me about the software that was part of what I supposedly have as a lifetime Plex Pass owner. Yeah, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

It is what it is. For now asks, do you transcode down on download? That's the part that really sucks. Yes, that's exactly the point. I don't want to copy full size files onto my phone for like the plane or whatever. I want to put like, like 320 kilobit or whatever per second. Like just the crappiest possible thing as long as the audio is listenable. Because I'm just like I'm on a plane. I don't care. I don't want it to take up a ton of space on my phone. I'd rather have a bigger library to pick from, especially if it's for kids or whatever. So they can Start sort of browse and stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're not gonna care. Yeah, well, they'll care about the library. Yeah, they won't care about quality, especially video quality. Everyone cares about audio quality up to a certain point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it says two more topics. Dan doesn't talk to us anymore. He just puts paper on the monitor. I don't blame him. Honestly, we're awful.

[Dan]

I mean, do you want me to yell at you more? I can yell at you more.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can yell at me all you want.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm into it.

[Dan]

I thought you were still doing the merch message.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I'm done. That's all I have to say about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do we talk about gaming industry stuff?

[Linus Sebastian]

Coffeezilla do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Coffeezilla, known for his investigative videos on scam topics, including crypto related scams, released a video going after the csgo gambling scene. I think we all knew it was just an amount of time until that would happen. In the. In the video, Coffeezilla says that he was paid an embarrassingly low amount of money by CS Go Empire, a CS Go gambling site, to investigate their competitor, CS Go Roll. So you just put CS Go and then anything after it for scamming users in the CS Go gambling scene, Coffee then decided to flip the script, denying the offer but still making a multi part series.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'd like to interject for a second here. What were they thinking?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was really dumb.

[Linus Sebastian]

Drawing attention to their whole grift and their whole deal by involving Coffeezilla in it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like there's so many things, so many things going on in the crypto world. They could have just let him focus.

[Linus Sebastian]

Under the radar like forever and they could have just done their skins and their gambling and their holographic whatever. Damascus paid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We didn't wait.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Offer. He was offered to be paid. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Yes. He didn't take the offer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did I not say the denying their offer part?

[Linus Sebastian]

It doesn't matter.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The next line.

[Linus Sebastian]

It doesn't matter. The point is. I will clarify. They made an offer to pay him to investigate their competitor. He didn't take it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Potentially. The next line was Coffee then decided to flip the script, denying the offer. So it was. Yeah, it shouldn't have said paid in the first part, but still making a multi part series about the CS Go gambling epidemic. That, that. For a ton of you watching, thanks.

[Linus Sebastian]

For a ton of you watching, Elijah did this one. It's okay. He tries.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

We really like him. He's kind. He's a kind person.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's an Elijah note here. As well. That says YouTubers have been getting in trouble since at least 2014. I mean, this is probably since YouTube existed. People just don't care anymore. It has become so accepted in our society. It's crazy. This is literal multi billion dollar industry that so few people even know about. But like coffee Zillow highlights in the video, it's really dangerous to try and go after these companies as they will literally hire hitmen and rioters. Okay. Wow, that sounds like a. Interesting video to watch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, this is a, this is sort of to go along with, to go along with Elijah's commentary here. This is such a great question.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why was this a slap on the wrist, legally speaking? And why has everyone just kind of like forgotten about it? Forgotten that these, that these two people were pretending to gamble on a site that it turned out that they owned. They claimed to have a sponsorship, but actually they owned it. No financial settlements, no fines, no jail time. As they promoted this, this gambling site that they owned and were pretending to win big on to minors. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Wacky. The same week award winning indie game Balatro, which is a roguelike poker game but with no actual gambling.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, just fine, just read the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It got an 18 plus rating for including. Including gambling elements.

[Dan]

It's got roulette in it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yet games that. Wait, what?

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, but the Pokemon game has a casino in it. Yeah, Pokemon Blue has a casino in it. Yeah, calm down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yet games that have actual gotcha mechanics with actual money tied to them continue to be rated 3 plus. For example, EA Sports FC is, is a 3 plus rated game that you can like buy. I'm assuming you can buy some form of like card opening thing for their. What is it called?

[Linus Sebastian]

Loot boxes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, no, I know, not loot boxes, but I think you get like player cards and you use them in their like pro league thing or something.

[Dan]

I don't know who.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't play it. So. Yeah, whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. They don't. I don't need to contribute to their billions and billions of dollars.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you buy FIFA points to open card packs. Just.

[Dan]

Have none of these people heard of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A rogue like ultimate. There we go. Yeah. Discussion question. How do you think the games industry is able to skirt around traditional gambling laws?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I genuinely have no idea. We've been talking about this.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't, I don't understand it. It doesn't make any sense to me. I mean that whole thing with Syndicate. I remember talking about the time because like this was, this was one that like kind of I don't know. It felt closer to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This was huge at the time because.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because I know the guy. Like, I've met him a couple times, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I'm just like, I've. I've actually run into him since then, and I just, like, had no idea what to say because I'm just like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How are you still here?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. And I hate to, like, you know, pull an L is for narcissist and make this about myself, but. Are you kidding me? The kind of flack that I took.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe you should have gone harder. Maybe that's. Maybe that's your lesson.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe I should have rug pulled a crypto coin.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And people. And instead, people have been like, that guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe I should just be my stick. Maybe I should do it every six months and then nobody would bat an eye.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Linus coin, dude. Should have done it. Should have done it. Next question is, do you think the rating on Balatro is fair? It only has gamble elements even though there is zero monetary gate.

[Dan]

It's a rogue.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like. No, it's not fair, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, man, like, I sort of maybe understand.

[Linus Sebastian]

I do. But you gotta have consistency in the enforcement.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Big problem. If it was just Balatro that got hit by this, which it is. That's a problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If it was like, everything that has gambling elements gets hit, then it's like, okay, well, that's. That's a different thing because I could totally see someone getting into Baltra. Is blackjack based, right? Poker? No, poker based.

[Dan]

It's made up, sort of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's based on.

[Dan]

Yeah, basically.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I could see someone getting interested in real poker based on. And probably getting really bored.

[Linus Sebastian]

Brings up an excellent point in the chat. Tynan from Creator Warehouse. Whiffy still at work. Before you leave, do you mind bringing us an update for Mayor McCheese here on the bit holder? Just if you could bring over the. The finished one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He's not.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's being super. Oh, is he not here anymore? Okay, I'll go get it later then, then. Okay, McCheese, chill. Stop being cheesed. Tynan brings up a good point. By that logic is rolling a die to see the damage you hit, not gambling, then I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. My reason.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's lots of dice games, boys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My reason for this is that. Oh, is there any dice game that's specifically based on that, though that isn't just dnd? Because, like, Balatro is specifically based on Pokemon.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. I don't know every dice game, but I do know that just like rolling dice and seeing if you win said craps is a hundred percent gambling. It's a. It's like a gambling game. You just. You just. You just dice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Either way, quite literal, actual gambling being rated as 3 plus, while Balatro is 18 plus is just bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's not good.

[Linus Sebastian]

I haven't tried Balatro. Apparently. It's phenomenal.

[Dan]

It's like one of the best roguelikes ever made.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like it.

[Dan]

And it doesn't matter that it's poker.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hands other people like, but I like it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Finally getting my kids into cards. Yeah. We just. We just never did it. We just, like, never played cards. We've. We've sat around and we've had like family hearts night twice this week. Have you ever played hearts?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like hearts, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I love hearts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hearts is fun. It integrates a lot of the cool things about, like, card games in person.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's a nice. It's a nice mix of luck and strategy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because the rounds are not the rounds, but the game is long enough that if you're a good player, you can give yourself a much better chance to win. But obviously a little bit of an element of luck is fun. I also like the card passing. Yeah, the card passing element and the strategy involved.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you didn't have card passing, honestly, I just wouldn't be anywhere near as good of a game.

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hugely important part.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, I know. And. And it's been. It's been really interesting to see how super, like, hyper engaged the kids have been with it. Like, they. I'm like, hey, do you guys want to. Do you want to do hearts night? After the first night, it's like, hey, do you want. Guys want to do, like, hearts night? And they were like, immediately at the table.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Clean up the table. We got some really nice cards. We went to Hidden Wonders again, local magic show. Absolutely phenomenal. If you live in the Vancouver area or if you're visiting soon and you haven't been to Hidden Wonders, it's pretty great. Take your hand. Okay. Just bring it. Like, watch this. Just put it right here. And then it's pretty good like that. Okay. Because you're doing yourself a disservice, Go to Hidden Wonders. The point is, I bought some of his cards because he claimed. And I would never trust a magician, but he claimed that they were the best playing cards in the world. I love them. So I was looking for an excuse to play with them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we went Last weekend. So anyway, so anyway, afterwards I was like, hey, do you guys want to play? You want to have hearts night again? They were like cleaning up the table so that we can keep our nice cards nice and clean and everything, like getting ready. Absolutely stoked on it. And yeah, it was a blast.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I used to, when I was considerably younger, my best friend's family would bring me out fishing for like two weeks in the summer, which was awesome. We'd camp and fish and it was great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And one of the things that like the, the boys would do at night was, was play hearts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it was awesome. It was very fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nooch says get them into crib. It's great for math and counting skills. It is. I find cribbage to be a little bit luck based for me to enjoy it as much as I enjoy hearts. We. We. I played a. My. My grandfather loves cribbage and so I, I would play that with him when I was a kid and it was, it was pretty cool getting to see my, my eldest and learn to play it with him. Like we went over and we kind of like learned to play with my grandfather and it got to the point where I could be like kind of helping in the kitchen and, and they could play a game. So it was cool. That was, that was pretty cool. But I can't say that I enjoy crib as much as I enjoy hearts. My main issue with hearts, I also love presidents and holes. That one's a lot of fun with the big group. My main issue with hearts is you gotta have four players.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can't have five, can't have three.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah. Binky draws says bluff is a great game to play if you have a bunch of incomplete decks. Yeah. We call it cheat. That's what I always knew it as if you played cheat cheat, cheater, bluff or is it's also called.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's. It's not as much fun with a small group, but with a big group, like probably five to eight, I would say would be your, your optimal group size. And then you play with a couple of decks or you claim how many.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Of a card you have is it.

[Linus Sebastian]

That and you put them down, face down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I've never played it, but I've heard of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a lot, it's a lot of fun if you've got, if you've got a, like a, a good vibe and, and people are kind of in a high energy state because it gets really ridiculous because there are wild cards. Plus if you've got two decks. You'll get people making just utterly wild claims, like 11 kings. And you'll be like, cheat. You pick it up like, holy. Like six kings and five wild cards. Like, oh, okay. And then when you, when you call it and you're wrong, you pick up the entire discard pile and bring it into your hand. So when you've got like two dec and someone gets a couple bad calls wrong, they've got like 48 cards in their hand.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anything at that point. Yeah, yeah. The. I think that's called a bunch of different things. And you can play it with like dice or, or I, I think, I think people do it with like serial numbers on bills and like all this other type of stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, cheats. Cheats a lot of fun. SOP Cannon says Uno is fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've only played Uno once.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. What? Yeah, I unironically agree. Uno is actually a super fun game. And it's like, I think maybe it gets a bad rap for being kind of like for kids or whatever. It's basically crazy eights.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We just never had it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's crazy eights, but there's like more. There's like more cards and the cards are tailored for the game rather than just being a standard playing card deck. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uno's actually like unironically a great game. Buy giant UNO decks. One of my biggest problems actually with UNO is buying the first party cards. They suck. The quality is so low. Like it's low enough that it, that it impedes my enjoyment of the game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like, it's hard to do considering it's a card. They're sticky like, and I'll take a brand new deck out of the box and they're like, they kind of get stuck on each other and like, they just suck. I don't remember them being like that when I was a kid. Uno cards didn't suck. And so, yeah, Yellowjacket Zack says I have vintage ones that are probably older than me. And you know what? They're probably way better quality because when I was a kid, I don't remember them having costed them down so much. Yeah, like, it sucks to see stuff that used to be good. Steph Dut says phase 10 is the same issue where the cards suck. Now. I've never, I've never heard of phase 10. I don't know what that is, but yeah, just come on, man. I just, I want quality stuff that lasts. How. How much is that to ask? Apparently a lot. Apparently a lot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Crystal says they didn't used to suck, but they changed distributors or something. It's like. Well, they. Then they shouldn't. They should find a good one. Just. Ah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyway, we used to play the. The main board game that we used to play was called Malarkey.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have you heard of Malarkey before?

[Linus Sebastian]

Can't say I have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if it's like, still a game that's sold, but this is like the exact box that it was on its Wikipedia, so I doubt it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, thank you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Malarkey is a trivia game that incorporates bluffing into the gameplay. And it was. It was super cool because you would. So everyone with. That's Canadian af. Is it. Is it a Canadian game? I don't know. You would get handed out cards.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And one person would get a thing that just is like, figure it out. You're gonna have to, like, make up a lie and everyone else will get facts. And then it's like, about a thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that sounds similar to Balderdash, where you are given a word that people are unlikely to know what it means.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When you have to say the definition.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you have to make up so it's plausible definition.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Super similar to that. Yeah. And then you have to, like, sell your thing and why it's correct. And man, it was like. It was pretty fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. That. Those types of games are a ton of fun. Do you remember this? I don't know if anyone else remembers Nightmare, the board. The video board game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like I've heard of this.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know this frame for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, apparently it was called Atmosphere somewhere else. Well, it was called Nightmare in North America and it had this, like, the. It had these creepy, like, video VHS tapes that would go along with that. Would go along with it. Yeah. Here's the. What? $350? Are you kidding me? No, no, no. Here's one for 60 bucks. Nightmare, the video board game. Dude, I would. I would totally play this. I would totally. I would totally play this thing. Hold on. Nightmare. I. I bet it sucks, but I played this with my family, like, a bunch of times when I was a kid. Why have I on caf. Oh, Canadian, French. Well, whatever. I'll deal with this another time. But yeah, Nightmare. Is it any good?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're going for it tonight. Is what any good? Nightmare.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't know. I. I don't remember. I'm probably like nine or whatever when I played it, so who knows? All right, what are we supposed to be doing? Oh, shoot. Dan's. Gone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sponsors.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, we can't do it without another topic. The FTC is banning hidden fees from hotel and ticket prices. New rules set to take effect in April of 2025 will require upfront disclosure of the final price of hotel stays, vacation rentals and live event tickets before you reach the checkout. First proposed more than a year ago, the rules target resort convenience and service fees that are often used covertly increase profits. The fees are still allowed. The new rules just mean that they must be disclosed earlier in the process and that the total price must be displayed more prominently than most other pricing information. Shipping fees and taxes, however, are not subject to the new rules, though they must be disclosed before payment info is collected from the customer. I wish taxes were our discussion. Question is, can someone point the FTC at ticket scalpers next?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no kidding.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We'll see what this. The FTC keeps doing now that Lina Khan's out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Ripley Na Khan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because this is a Lina Khan era thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Come to Canada, Lena.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, please.

[Linus Sebastian]

We. We'd love to have you here as the. I don't know, we just. We just got a bunch of new ministers. Like that would have been a perfect opportunity. Minister of Everything not being shit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whatever title you want.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, whatever. Whatever you want, Lena. Just come on up. Just. We're in Surrey, so if you just head up to Surrey, just knock on the door, just tell them Lina Khan's here, and we'll. We'll get it worked out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll take care of everything.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll call up my friend JT. Mr. Trudeau. And I don't. I don't know, Justin Trudeau. No, But I'll do everything I can. I'll do everything in my power to get you in touch with, you know, whoever you need, whoever you need to be, like, in charge of something important because might not be him for much longer. Yeah, might.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what? I think this is one of those things where the right thing for him to do is just resign. And the problem is that for better or for worse, the Liberal Party of Canada has absolutely no one, no one waiting in the wings with any kind of charisma. So. Oh, yeah. Good luck, everybody. Okay, so here's an update for Burger McCheese or whatever. I forget what your username was. Yes, we are working on our bit holder thing. You do not have to use a third party bit holder for much longer, I promise. It has a keyhole thing on the back so that you can put on our magnetic cable management thing and you can just, like Click it onto things. It has like a soft silicone style thing that's feels really nice and is really like, oh yeah, quality.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Feels like it probably won't degrade the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, the, the. Oh, okay. This one's derp because it's pre production but it's supposed to, it's supposed to come apart so you can pop the thing off, I think. Anyway, the point is Tynan says soon. He says soon. Tm There it is. All right, all right. We good? We good? No and no. It's not going to take like another two years. This is, this is almost final and I think we do have like final tooling for this thing, so. Is actually actually very soon. No, just the one size for now. I'm still over here waiting for the scribe driver pencil mint. Things take time. Do you have any idea how many people work at Creator Warehouse? Like it's. It's only a team of a couple dozen people, of which at least two, I think only about half are actually in like product design because you have to have the administration and like customer service and like all those other things. So you look at the number of products that that team creates.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's crazy amount.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're actually incredible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So there you go. World class. World class.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's just significantly bigger teams that make one product.

[Linus Sebastian]

Speaking of which, Ridge, our sponsor now, they make way more than just wallets now. But they used to, they used to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Be called Ridge Wallet.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's time to scrap your old bulky wallet. This was so weird to watch.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Our sponsor, Ridge, is having a holiday sale now and you can get up to 40% off. If you're not familiar with Ridge, they're a longtime partner of ours, known for making slim, minimalist wallets that can hold up to 12 cards. Unlike traditional wallets, the Ridge wallet is built to last. And they don't just make wallets. They have key cases, luggages. Look how durable it is. And more. Whether you're treating yourself, someone in your family or a friend, Ridge's deals mean the perfect gift. This holiday season doesn't have to come with a huge price tag. If your loved ones are also our viewers, you can even gift them an LTT circuit board wallet which is on sale right now. Don't miss out on their holiday deals. Head to ridge.comwan to get up to 40% off. Man, AI is a trip, dude. The link is in the video description. That is weird. The show is also brought to you by Rocket Money. Sorry it's long. They require it to be at least 60 seconds long. I'm 100% sure that I wasn't supposed to read that. Speaking of wallets, our sponsor, Rocket Money, helps you stay on track with your finances so you can stop hoarding hotel mini shampoos or sauce packets. Can you name all of the subscription services you've signed up for off the top of your head? If you can't, that's a problem, especially when you've registered for an app's free trial and completely forgotten about it afterward. Here's what Rocket Money does. It shows you all your subscriptions in one place, and if you don't want them, you can go ahead and cancel with just a few clicks. Rocket Money can also build you a personalized budget based on your spending habits, helping you grow your savings and lower your bills. And that's not all. Their agents can negotiate better rates on things like your phone or Internet bill, all on your behalf. Their new Goals feature can even automatically save money for you by transferring funds from your Linked checking account into a non interest bearing custodial account. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, with members saving up to $740 a year when using all of the app app's features. So stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to RocketMoney.com Wan finally, the show is brought to you by Pulseway. Do you have more important things to do during work hours? Whether you're grabbing coffee, binging your favorite show, or just stepping away, our sponsor, Pulseway has got your back. With their powerful platform, you can inspect all of your endpoints in minimal minutes, roll out preconfigured policies in bulk, and get systems up and running fast. It's like you're physically sitting right in front of every machine, managing files, running apps, and controlling systems seamlessly. With their mobile app, you can monitor, troubleshoot, and solve problems in real time, anytime, anywhere. Pulseway even automates repetitive IT tasks and fixes issues before they snowball into bigger problems. And you'll get instant notifications when something goes wrong, so you'll never miss a thing. Artie just came in here and took something off the table. Artie, what'd you take? What is it? Oh, all right. See you later. And for our viewers only, Pulseway is offering 25% off all plans, so try Pulseway for free at LMG GG LTT24. How mad do you think the business team's gonna be that I read that thing about it needing to be 60 seconds long.

[Dan]

They should know that you read off the prompter.

[Linus Sebastian]

They should know. Oh, you. San Diego. Oh, no, wait. Sorry. Go yourself. San Diego.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We had a topic we were gonna do a while back which was like your favorite WAN show moments. And I still have bookmarked when Adam Sondergaard wrote that thing in the script. And I was just like, whatever, and just read right through it. The like yuffie smart camera thing. Do you remember that there's with your.

[Linus Sebastian]

What was it? Your taint and balls or whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it was so good.

[Linus Sebastian]

For those of you in San Diego who are upset it's an anchorman reference. It's not. I don't actually. I don't actually care enough about the city of San Diego to have feelings about it. I mean, which maybe is worse. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who knows? Oh, no, it was good. I don't have the link anymore. I had the link when we were doing the topic, but we didn't end up getting into it for whatever reason. But it's a very funny clip. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Dan, hit us.

[Dan]

Hi, Linus. I was sad to hear that the tall WAN V3 hoodie was off the table. What's the minimum order for it to make sense? I have a Silicon Valley money. How many do you need me to buy?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man.

[Dan]

Investors.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like you, you're cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, here's the thing. Minimum order on something like a full custom designed hoodie can be a little bit all over the place because it depends on how many embellishments you're getting that are like custom sourced. So let's say you're getting a custom draw cord or you're getting like a custom zipper pull, or you're getting a custom this, custom that. Depending on whether it needs to be injection molded or depending on whether it's machined or depending on who the supplier is and what your negotiated terms with them are, it can be all over the place. But if I was to say, if I was to give you a rough number of how many we would need to produce of a hoodie, like a quite custom hoodie, like the Wan hoodie, I'd say somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 to 3,000 units.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So that's for all the sizes combined.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it's complicated, right? Because depending on whether your limitation is a custom dyed roll of fabric or whether your limitation is how many you have to buy of some weird carabiner, zipper pull or whatever it is that can impact it. So if the limitation is fabric, well, you can get around it that's one of the ways that we're able to do so many different prints of the underwear because we can make onesies out of them and we can go through a bunch of the fabric by doing onesies. And that's the reason why I'm trying to think of something that was quite limited by a custom thing instead. I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but there's areas where you can kind of account for that in your product mix by using it here so that you can just do a few of that kind of fun underwear pack or whatever. So what I'm trying to say is it's all over the place. But in general, for a custom hoodie, I'd say somewhere between, let's say 2 and 3,000 units to get a run done. All right, so. Oh, yeah, right. So I was going to say another thing is sizing. So if you think that it's a design that's going to skew quadruple xl, then you don't have to produce that many of them to use up like a custom dye. Lot of fabric, for instance. So back to wan hoodie. Wan hoodie tends to skew pretty standard for our seismics. So we'll probably go from, I think, small to triple XL on that one. Don't quote me on that because I don't remember exactly. But here's the issue. We don't have a tall hoodie. We don't have our tall hoodie grading done yet. And grading refers to the process of taking your reference sample, which is often created as a medium because I'm deeply involved in the development process and I like to be able to try it on in order to give feedback. And also because medium is the best selling size, obviously, because that's why it's medium. So we have other mediums try them as well to make sure that it's not just made for me. But we start with a medium. And then grading is the process of taking that medium and building it up and building it down to accommodate different sizes. The issue is that we don't have our grading done for a tall hoodie. It also means that we would need to figure out ahead of time what our mix would be when we order these thousands of hoodies. So across our sizes, let's say we go small, medium, large xl, double xl, triple xl, that's six. If we add tall sizes right. We just doubled our SKU count, which is brutal. Okay. Then we have to make sure that we get the mix across all those different sizes in the regular and the tall variant. We have to make all of that fit into some reasonable order quantity. Let's say, you know, let's say 2500 units for something like that. Then we have to also balance that with that. If we absolutely completely flub one of them, it's going to be out of stock for like six to eight months while we wait for a restock of all the little bits and bobs that go on it and production and ship. It is a lot to manage from a logistics standpoint and I think that often people do not consider or they don't have experience with how difficult inventory management can be. The number of times that we've had people say why don't you just have an EU distribution center so I don't have to pay as much on shipping when I'm kind of sitting here going yeah, do you think we didn't think of that? We thought of that. But now, now I get to take that, let's say a 3,000 unit order because I can sell more because I have tall sizes and I have better shipping to the EU. I now take that 3,000 unit order. I have to get the seismics right. And then I have to nail, I have to nail.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Size mix might be different.

[Linus Sebastian]

Of course it will. And so then I have to nail how many of them I send to our EU distribution center or to our NA distribution center or you're going to end up paying more for shipping anyway. Because we're going to be out of smalls in Europe where people walk everywhere and we're going to be out of XXXLS in the US and it's like crap. So now all we have is an inventory management nightmare. Because you gotta understand we're a small company still in the grand scheme of things. We are not Uniqlo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're not Lululemon. We aren't producing a style on the order of 50,000 units in one shot. We're not doing that. We're making maybe 2,000 units. Units. So splitting that across all these distribution centers is just, it's not, it's not feasible for us right now. Not at our current operating scale. And I know it's easy to say, well your operating scale would probably be better if you guys accommodated larger sizes and if you had multiple distribution centers. Yeah, but how much investment do I want to take?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I will say, I will say, do.

[Linus Sebastian]

I want to take VC money? Do I want that to impact our product development and the way we run our business?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Want to do that. But I Will say, yeah, the tall blank shirt is sold out in long and short sleeve in every single possible size that we have. It's very, very, very strongly rated. Five stars. The top review on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I'm going to cut Luke off. I actually muted his mic. I've muted your mic. I'm going to cut Luke off right now because I have good news for you. When we bring in our new colors of T shirts, which are coming soon, I think we've got five new colors of T shirts. I want to say they will be available in tall sizes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

So not just black, but you gotta give us time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, that's awesome. That's awesome. I'm just, I'm not. I understand. It all takes time. I'm just saying the most recent review says, please bring back more to the store. I need 20 of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, I'm aware. I'm aware. Frostblade says yes. A lot of people underestimate how small LTT is. Yes, it's bigger than the two person coffee shop in my town, but even a company like critical role is maybe 10 XLTT. And even then they're small compared to something like a Mr. Beast. We are. Any creator company is insignificant, you know, compared to the multinationals.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And honestly, even then I see comments all the time that are like, how can they not do this? They have 100 employees. And like, okay, but do you have any idea how much stuff we do?

[Linus Sebastian]

We do so much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All of those people are incredibly busy. It's not.

[Linus Sebastian]

I actually don't know if Critical Role is ten times our size. I don't know how big Critical Role is, but I'd be pretty surprised.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would be very surprised.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was reading the comment verbatim. I mean, how many people, how many people work at Critical Role?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Honestly, llc. They're smaller, but I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I have no idea. I mean, they have like eight founding members, so they definitely have some stuff going on or something. Yeah. Does anyone know like, how many people work there? I legitimately have absolutely no idea. I'm over it. Okay, what do you want to talk about next?

[Dan]

About another merch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, right. Merch. Messages.

[Dan]

Celebrating getting a new job at an AWS data center. Coming from it at a K to 12 school district. What are the biggest mindset shifts or skills I should focus on for success in a data center?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We don't work in a data center.

[Linus Sebastian]

Critical Role is about our size. LinkedIn says 50 to 200 people. So they're somewhere in the same kind of neighborhood as usual. Just don't care.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool. Nice. What, what exactly was they went for? They went from teaching and now they're working in a data center.

[Dan]

It from like elementary, high school to working in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ah, okay, so it at a school.

[Dan]

To it for a school district, I should say.

[Linus Sebastian]

Man. Security.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, probably.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean there's a lot of privacy and security concerns in something like a school, but man, compared to the stories you hear people telling about like, like, man, seriously going to. Going to Equinix and like hearing that there's cages that literally if anybody even touches the outside of them, like they have touch sensors on them. Like the head of. The head of security gets a call like immediately. It's like, that's like, that's wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I feel like the stakes are going to shift. Like if, if the TVs in the hallways of the school aren't receiving the thing that you're trying to send over them, I'm sure somebody's going to be upset about it. But now you're working at a data center that is serving data for any number of different types of businesses. And it's likely going to be a more intense environment, I suspect. I don't know though. Again, neither of us have worked in a data center.

[Linus Sebastian]

Danny says I had to get an FBI background check to get a tour of the switch data center here in Vegas. Yeah, that doesn't. It doesn't surprise me at all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've heard now you're working in the data center, not the software development side. I've heard the software development side of AWS is quite the meat grinder when it comes to employees, so I don't know. Keep your head down.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, Dan, one more.

[Dan]

Yeah, last one. Hey, Dll. I've had my backpack for one and a half years. To which my kid and significant other both wanted one, which are already under our tree. Would you ever sell LTT colored carabiners to help a family differentiate bags?

[Linus Sebastian]

That is so funny. Do either of you have your LTT backpack on you?

[Dan]

I do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can I, can I borrow yours for a second? Dan, do you still have your thing on it? Yeah, the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, the name thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So here's our solution. We gave them away at our Christmas party one year. And here, hold on. Linus, Cam. There we go. We put. There we go. We put little tags on them with little laser engraved tags with people's names because we did foresee that it was going to be a huge problem that literally everyone in the entire company had the same backpack. All of A sudden overnight.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hasn't really helped, really. Not really. So mine is to look at them, I guess, is to find some little.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's heavy. You got some stuff in it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know I have. Find some little embellishments or something to hang off of. Yeah. To hang off of your poles and to help to differentiate your bag. That's really. That's really all you can do.

[Dan]

I've got my dopamine beaker and I've lost my little whale from ltx. I still have the little gold chain, but the whale has gone and I'm sad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've got a couple of things on there. The floatplane team went on a float plane. So I have the, like, luggage tag from when we did that still on my bag. Bag. And I've got the. The like morphologist, the like architect, Star citizen guy. He gave me a pin for his, like star citizen clan or whatever it is. And I have that on my bag because I think it looks cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Mine is a Mighty Car mods lanyard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

From our recent collab. And then I also have my little Linus Sebastian thing. I stole that from my full size backpack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, mine's still in my full size.

[Linus Sebastian]

And this is a snake. Snake, yes. That my daughter made for me. I'm. I mean, yeah, it's kind of a snake. Snake life.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Put a bird on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. She actually gave me a new thing that I might have lost. Oh, bad dad. Oh. Oh, shoot. I might have lost the little lizard she gave me. Well, neat. Whoops.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is there anything important in there? Because you really flop it around.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it's all my screwdrivers. Oh, yeah. I have like five screwdrivers in there because I put all my different bit sets in my different screwdrivers. They're all color coded.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, can I do a. Can I do a business pitch to you live on the show?

[Linus Sebastian]

Business pitch, AKA a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, can I do one of those?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Yeah, you can at me. Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice. So open sauce was amazing. And some of us are going to go again just like, regardless. Yeah. But I was thinking it's a maker event. What if we had a make your own screwdriver booth?

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't pitch it to me. No, no, pitch it to. Pitch it to someone else because that is going to be a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it. So what is it? Is it. Do the machines become a problem or like, what are. What are the downsides here?

[Linus Sebastian]

Tynan is saying, Yeah, I already kind of somewhat. So there's a number of issues. Issue number one is getting the dyed plastics. There's minimum order quantities often for getting dyes. So we cheated on a lot of the ones that we had for the make your own screwdriver booth at ltx, where we were able to piggyback on top of the Mega Pro red that they already are buying in bulk. And we were. Get a little bit of it from them. And some other colors. They had a blue already that we, that we borrowed. There were a couple where we had to like buy too much dye. It goes back bad. It's like great. And like plastic dye goes bad. Like, okay, sure. That sucks. Oh, Tynan says it's an excited E. Okay. I am not committing to anything. So there's, there's, then there's the, like getting the production time for it because you're, you're basically. You don't know what you're gonna make.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you have to make like extra of everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're gonna have a huge bin of garbage at the end of it, essentially.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, we made.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not really.

[Linus Sebastian]

We made lemonade out of garbage because we made the mystery screwdriver, the random color screwdriver. So that's fine. We got rid of it all. That, that's okay. We could solve that. But the other issue is transportation. We have to carry. We have no idea what we're going to make. Everyone at Open Sauce might make an all orange screwdriver. We don't know. And obviously you can kind of run out of something, but if you run out of like half of it, that sucks. That's, that's, that's taking a W and turning it into two Ls, you know, like, that's not, that's not good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you come up with that on spot?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I've used it before, but it is a me thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Taking, taking a W and turning it into L's or taking two L's and turning them into a W. I love it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you gotta, so you gotta carry a bunch of stuff down. So that's, that's a real pain in the butt. And otherwise, you know, you have people show up at the booth and it's like, oh, yeah. I mean, this would be kind of cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't wanna create the right colors for me.

[Linus Sebastian]

You don't wanna create negative experiences.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I waited in line now and there's none of this left.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then there's also the fact that that would mean that instead of our cool team of cool people hanging out with other cool teams and cool people, they're like manning A booth, which, I don't know, maybe you guys are super into it and you just want to work at a booth at Open Sauce. But like, are you sure? Just. All I'm asking is that you just think about it. Are you sure?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because it's not something that I would. That I would assign to people. I wouldn't be like, oh, yeah, that show that you really like attending. How about you work at it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

They want us going again anyways. Yeah. So that's cool. So we're going to have some amount of presence there regardless when it happens. Whenever the date is. I don't remember.

[Linus Sebastian]

Diego San says that's why you have employees. Duh. I'm talking about the employees. The shit doesn't just, what, Roll down a hill indefinitely. At some point, somebody has to work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What did you say? Lou can do it. I honestly somewhat agree with him. I don't want to man the booth. I don't want to do that part maybe for like a little bit. I don't want to do it for the whole time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Get volunteers to help. Now you guys don't understand. What's so cool about the screwdriver booth is you get to talk to the people who designed it. What's cool about the screwdriver booth is that they, like, know it inside out. And what's safe about the screwdriver booth is we have people who are really familiar with the arbor presses and that can make sure that nobody squashes a finger and all that important, important stuff. Yeah. So I. I don't know. I. What I would rather do, what I'd rather do in the longer term or the medium term is figure out how to do like an Xbox controller configurator, but for the screwdriver, where you can just configure your own custom one online. Yeah, that's where I'd like to get to. But we are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We can build the configurator no problem. But we even have a 3D version of it that's like semi made already. Have you seen that? It.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think so, actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

With a 3D hovering screwdriver in. In any background environment you want.

[Linus Sebastian]

The logistics of it are tough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that part's way harder. Yeah, for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because one of the big challenges is that we have to stock the entire ratchet assembly with the selector ring on it already. If that were not the case, it would significantly simplify the lead times of that part because we have to have the injection molding done here, then we have to have it assembled onto the ratchet assembly in China. Then we have to have that assembly sent back over here for final assembly of the driver. And handling that across like six or eight different colors or whatever is just like, it's going to mean that for extended periods of time you're going to have certain colors out of stock. It's just, it's a lot of logistics to manage when we're already having trouble keeping T shirts in stock. So. And that doesn't mean that the team isn't smart and doesn't work hard or whatever. It just means that, that the logistics of managing a store with like over a thousand SKUs is, is really tough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's also like if you, if you look at customized versions of products on stores. Yeah, I can think of a couple where like, I don't know, you can get your name etched onto it or whatever. It's usually surprisingly not that cheap.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Oh yeah. Oh, 100%.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a lot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude. We've got. We were looking at what the pricing would probably have to be if we ever did the resin infused wooden screwdriver or the. Sorry, yeah, the resin infused wood screwdriver. And those screwdrivers, instead of being like buying a resin infused wooden screwdriver, you would probably buy that one and it would probably be listed on the site for like 7, 800, $900. Because realistically it would have to be like hand monitored. Like we would take that piece of wood, like that one, and then we would probably do it here and it would have to be like hand assembled by someone on our engineering team as opposed to just some random or whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because of it still has to meet specs, etc.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. And, and the cost of, of those things, like it's like when you look at like knives and stuff that have this resin infused wood in the handle and stuff like that, they're. They're like a thousand dollars. Because getting it is. Is really expensive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

On top of all the other complications.

[Linus Sebastian]

Of making the thing, you can't get them at volume.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Citizen 5391 says bespoke screwdrivers would go crazy for the whales. I know, I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm sure you could sell like 5 of basically anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Probably it's just a question of like, it's balancing whether that would even be worth spending our time on, like the opportunity cost of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We also have this, the whole thing with the store where we're trying to make something new and better and while it might be expensive, it's really good.

[Linus Sebastian]

And is somewhat reasonable. It also has to be somewhat. Within reason, expensive but reasonable. Yeah. We had a $600 backpack, but everyone who bought it was thrilled with the Lux backpack because the materials are great. It has all the functionality of the regular backpack, and it's a head turner. Like, when I was daily driving the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Lux backpack, dude, I saw you get questions about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

People are like, wow, what is that? Because not everyone's into it, and that's totally fine, but the people who like it, like it. Like, one of my friends in Taiwan, like, badminton buddy, tried to buy it off of me, and I was like, dude, this is the only sample, like, I have to wear. Test it. You can't. He's like, what's the. What's the retail price? I'll buy it for full retail price. I'm like, dude, look, I would give it to you if I could. It's not about the money. You just can't have it. It's the only one that exists.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Exists. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Top Gear asks, have you guys surpassed a million screwdrivers yet? Stubby and full size combined? No. No, I think. I think we're close to 300,000 or so, which is a ton, which is unbelievable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I think our Shopify order number is over a million now. But I don't think we actually have a million orders because there can be, like, cancellations and stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So we're getting. We're getting super close to a million orders through Shopify. We. We apparently are actually, like, a very sizable, like, store for the Shopify platform, which is something I never would have thought. I never would have thought would happen. Citizen5391 asks, how's the gold controller doing? It's doing great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Appreciating, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. If anyone wants to buy it, you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Could buy an appreciating asset.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would be very open to selling it. I don't actually have any kind of emotional attachment to it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's actually kind of annoying to use.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It's not great to use.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Weighs so much.

[Linus Sebastian]

It is, but it's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And you'll look cool in front of all your cool friends. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you wanted to. Yeah. If you wanted to. I don't even know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Slap a big and tall label on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll engrave a little whale. Okay. I'll engrave a whale. Okay. How crazy would it be, like, to celebrate a million screwdrivers to do, like, a golden screwdriver or something like that? I actually. I don't even know. I don't even know if I don't even know if we'd have to wait that long. I think that doing a golden screwdriver for like 500k, the metal screwdriver launch or something like that would be kind of cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, you mean to sell it? No one's gonna buy it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no, no, no. Metal screwdriver launch.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know what you're talking about. Anyway, what are we supposed to be doing? Dan Topics HP downgrades printer features when you don't buy genuine ink According to a post on R$, an HP printer owner named Mickey Mitch had multiple features of his Deskjet 2700 removed or revoked because he lost his HP benefits when he installed non HP replacement ink in his printer. Some HP benefits include cloud based printing, automatic updates and fixes, improved print quality, advanced scanning features, extended warranty, and enhanced security features. Now, now, HP's version of this is that HP plus is a free upgrade available on many HP printers. When you set up an HP account, use genuine HP ink cartridges, and keep your printer connected to the Internet. Additional benefits include the optional HP instant ink. Oh, so you pick a plan based on how often you print, not how much ink you use, starting at $1.89 a month for 10 pages. Oh, that whole thing. Is that still a thing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

See, you don't get to just spin, you know, you can't just spin. You can't say, hey, it's an upgrade if you do all this stuff. No, it's not. It's a downgrade if you don't do all this stuff. You have a gun to my head. This is a stick, not a carrot. Ugh. Ah. Brutal. $1.89 a month. Qu. Not $189. Oh, you just. Luke's on it in the chat.

[Dan]

Just 100% believable.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know what to say about that other than I was just like.

[Dan]

That sounds about right for hp.

[Linus Sebastian]

Brutal. Let's move on to our next one. Somebody found our geocache. Yeah, at the end of Tuesday's video. Oh, our original here. We might as well. We might as well show the. Hey, they found it. And they look exactly Genuine smiles. Exactly as wet as I would expect them to look. So that has a $500 LTT store gift card on it or something like that? I think so. This was really cool. At the end of Tuesday's video, the most expensive USB drive on Earth per gig, we revealed that we'd hidden that ferroelectric USB drive in a geocache somewhere in the Vancouver, BC area with $500 of coupon codes on it, and we left clues throughout the video. A flurry of activity in the comments, our forums and Reddit followed, and the device was found about six hours later near a geocache in Port Coquitlam. Here is the solution. If you. If you don't want spoilers and you want to try to solve it for yourself by watching the video, you can totally do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll put both hands up when you're good to tune in again.

[Linus Sebastian]

There you go. First, the video had four quarters of a QR code hidden in it. Connor was responsible for hiding the QR codes and he determined the spots. The timestamps are 502, 543, 643ish. It's a single frame and 1012 in the outro. Once you assembled the pieces of the QR code, it led you to a picture of a broken fence. The fence was a rail fence, which references the cipher used to encode the text surrounding the QR code. Since the fence in the image had three rails, so did the rail fence cipher. I added space and line breaks to the encoded message, which makes things a bit more difficult. I did not include an offset. So here's an example of a rail fence cipher.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was this Connor's idea? Because this was sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I believe this would have been Adam working on this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good job.

[Linus Sebastian]

I had intended to have an extra step using another ciphered message within the railfence cipher. The next hint would have been liberty, freedom, Tyranny is dead. A line from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to indicate that the next code was using a simple Caesar cipher. A to B, B to C, C to D, et cetera. Even when only a portion of the message had two layers of encryption, it made it very hard to know if you were on the right path. Also, I ran out of time to make it more complex, so we didn't do that. Instead, I just included the name of a geocache that could be found near where I stuck stashed the drive to avoid too much disruption to the geocache. I didn't actually hide the drive inside of it just nearby to get the exact coordinates. You just had to solve the geocache puzzle, which I will not spoil here. Adam says I did my best to be hands off, but did end up providing hints by reacting to comments on the forums when it seemed like people were getting really far off, like thinking that we hit it in Enderby or started calling phone numbers. Adam.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh boy. Yeah, okay, that makes Sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Congrats to Redditor Betty Bratt and her husband. It was great to see the teamwork of the community. Many viewers outside the Vancouver area were helping out those who were close enough to have a chance at the prize. We did manage to generate some mild controversy in the geocache community. Geocaches are created by community members and are meant to be done for the fun of it rather than for any sort of prize. And introducing a bunch of normies to any hobby is usually met with a bit of resistance as new folks might not understand the culture or best practices. Some people did point out that plugging in random USB sticks is a bad idea. You don't know what's on it. In this case, I really doubt that someone was able to find it. Flash the firmware, program something malicious to put on the USB drive, then put it back where it was supposed to be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's possible.

[Linus Sebastian]

It is possible, however, very unlikely. I'd also be surprised if someone decided to purchase similar looking USB keys with malicious stuff on them and litter them around geocaches caches in the Lower mainland. It's like needles and candy apples. It's not really a thing that actually happens except when it does happen. So yes, that is a really good point. But it was also a very distinctive looking USB drive with very distinctive functionality. Like you. Yes, good point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Would have been tough, but also very, very unlikely.

[Linus Sebastian]

The level of. The level of gatekeeping that was going on with a couple of members of the geocache community was actually comical. Yeah. And y'all need to calm down. Down. But yeah, it was, it was fun. It was fun. We had a lot of. We had a lot of fun with it. And the team has a lot of fun creating content like that. I saw a lot of people that were angry about the sort of detective interrogation and like the lawyer conversational skit that took place in the video. And anyone who said it wasn't their cup of tea. I kind of noted that. And anyone who got super angry about it is now officially shadow banned from the channel. Channel forever. Because guys, we gotta, we gotta do stuff. Don't, don't get mad. Just express your thoughts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's so exhausting sometimes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, our comment section is legitimate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's getting better.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like way better. I don't know whether it's the threat of shadow banning or, or that it was just a very. Because I haven't actually done it to that many people or whether it was just a very small number that we're creating. As far as the vast majority of the nonsense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of these are actually very small numbers, like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of communities are often ruined by a very small group of people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because it doesn't take much to taint the bunch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope, it really does.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Part of the problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you know what? I had an interesting conversation at the Smash Champs, the badminton club. At the Smash Champs Christmas party. I now have to attend multiple Christmas parties. I'm running too many companies. It's a very relatable problem. I know. So we had a really interesting conversation because they finally dug up a data point that I'd been asking for. And you know how I can never turn off work? So we're at a Christmas party, we're talking about work. Anyway, the point is that because we've been offering it for free, we've had free drop in for our soft opening. There have been people who have been signing up and then not showing up because there's no consequences for not showing up. And what we discovered that there was a group of repeat offenders who had done it over 30 times in a span of just a couple months that we've been soft open. And so we were having a conversation about, you know, what, what our reaction should be to something like that. And the team. I want to get out ahead of this. The team already made their case. And I gave in. I gave in. They said they wanted to give a warning to these people before issuing any kind of suspension or anything like that. But what I told them I wanted to do was just. Just permanently ban them forever. Because doing something like missing a booked session once in a while, that happens.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's gonna happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

That happens.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Doing it dozens of times over a span of 30 times, over a span of a couple of months.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Knowing that by booking the session, somebody else can't sign up for it because it's a limited number of slots. That just means you're a f ing hole.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If they're gonna do that, what else are they gonna do?

[Linus Sebastian]

What else are they? I just don't want them around.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You really want them on your course.

[Linus Sebastian]

And here's the numbers. 2.5%. It was 2 1/2% of the total people who have come to play that were engaging in this sort of egregious level of abuse of our online booking system.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And would you let people appeal?

[Linus Sebastian]

Why?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why? Yeah. No. Why? Give me a good reason.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. That many times is tough because that means you spent a month in the. How long? Two months. How long it's been over. So you spent half of the time since it's been open booking and not showing up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So, like, you know, maybe you have a slew of unfortunate events and you end up not making, like a few in a row even, and it, like, looks kind of bad. You're like, yeah, like, I just. I wasn't trying to be a jerk. I just. I thought I could go. And then, you know, just life. Kids got up right now and it just kept not working. But spending a month out of two to two and a half months doing that is. Is too much.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Chris429 says, honestly, it's crazy that 2% of the time you've been open, you couldn't rent that space. That's crazy. That's not how that math works. The way the math works is that if you have 2.5% of the people, of the people that have come and played doing this 30 plus times, we would have sessions that are fully booked and have like a third of the people there, because 2/3 of them weren't there. That's what this kind of egregious repeat offending does to a community. It destroys it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it actually. Yeah. It makes it less interesting. And when there's less people there, it's less interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because in my limited experience with badminton people, you'll kind of jump the courts a little bit sometimes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Go play with other people, do whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Especially during drop in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's. It's very much a community thing. So having such a reduction in the amount of people that are there can be bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hazafia says there has to be some advance payment for booking. Yes, yes. And once we. Once we're taking payment. Absolutely, there will be, but we're soft opening and we wanted people to be able to come and try the courts and enjoy some free badminton. I mean, this is why we can't have nice things. We actually were trying to, like, do a solid. Obviously, there's an advantage for our business. Right. Like, we're giving people that first. That first hit, you know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Smash.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the first Smash. Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But, like. Yeah, like, I don't know. Yeah. So obviously we're gonna figure it out. But no, it was free, so people were taking a free thing. It's. And. And so, like, the 2% of people were showing up at the door where the bowl of candy is out. Please take just one. And just taking all of them, ruining it for everybody. Brutal. So, yeah, I don't know. I just. I. I just. My state of mind. Yvonne disagreed. She supported the Smash team and. And they ultimately have decided to issue a warning to all these people. And even that it's like a manual process. It's creating unnecessary work for us to go and, like, tell them to not be a hole. Right. Like, why? So they're gonna do it. They're gonna do it. We're gonna give them a warning or whatever. But honestly, I'm not. I don't support that. I think we should just not bother with. I don't eat them. I'll take the other 97 and a half percent of good eggs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Because we have an attendance problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

Most people are pretty awesome. Most people are pretty chill. It just takes. So that. That was what I thought was interesting. It was that number two and a half percent was the number of people who were just egregiously. Just jackasses.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I bet you it's really not that far off for, like, most things. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Genuinely.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, looking at communities that I've modded before and stuff, it's like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or like, really a small sitting in a theater watching a movie. It only. It's only. It's only like, two people that won't shut up or have their phone on or whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apparently. I was reading an article about this. Is this true? Apparently disruptions in movie theaters are becoming, like, way more of a thing because.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People aren't used to not being on their phone. So they'll just be on their phone the whole time.

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And they don't do anything. They don't just, like, kick these people out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I guess not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, that's the. That's the thing that really blows me away because as the proprietor of the business, I feel like it's my job to ensure that my customers have a good time. And I don't care about one person if they are impacting the other 99 that are not able to enjoy my facility.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I am wondering a little bit, like, I've heard this as well. You've heard this. I've heard this. Neither of us really go to movies that often anymore, so we haven't experienced it. Is this. We're all hearing about it or have people in the chat actually genuinely experienced this? Because like Elijah said. Yeah. PEOPLE cheering it's so true. People cheering Sometimes also, is this from Elijah going to the theater or are you hearing this?

[Linus Sebastian]

There's no way Elijah ever went to a theater. No way. And Elijah says it's hard to kick people out. It's a bigger disturbance to do that than to let them be annoying. No, no, no, no. No, that's the thing. Because you. You only have to kick them out one time. They will be a disturbance forever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You go to theater once a month. Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, really? Well, then why haven't you ever seen any movies? What are you even doing there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Modern bad ones.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know, man. Maybe just theaters. The staff is just a person for popcorn. Yeah, dude, I don't know. As a moviegoer and I used to manage one in the 2010s, there's way more talking during the movie and phone usage than there used to be. Yeah, okay. Avid movie goer. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Apparently it's more of a thing, huh? Okay. I don't know, dude. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's because it's the new Lord of the Rings movie. Conrad. That's my take on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He said nobody goes anymore. We went to go see the new Lord of the Rings movie and there's only five people there.

[Linus Sebastian]

What new Lord of the Rings movie? Is there a new Lord of the Rings movie?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. Which is the whole.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are you talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Part of the problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's no new Lord of the Rings movie. No. You're drunk. Hold on. What? No. Oh, animated movie.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The War Within.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I don't know if it's not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not the War Within. The War of the Rohirrim.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that. Is this rich cut off? Is this like actually based on anything Tolkien wrote? Or is this just like gonna have final season of Game of thrones syndrome plot. 183 years before the events.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's animated and not promoted. Well. Yeah, this doesn't seem like a fair comparison necessarily.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oof. Oof. 11 and a half million box office on a budget of 30 million.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that's not that high of a budget though. An animated movie.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's. That's a high budget for a like, not Pixar animated movie.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I don't know. I don't know who the heck this is. Oh, Peter Jackson's involved though. Interesting. Don't live animated movies don't do well. You can't really say that because, like, inside out 2 was low key.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, huge insert 2 is good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Also Mario Movie. Like there. There are. Yeah, there are big. There are big animated movies. Yeah, the big ones do really well. All right. Yeah. I honestly had no idea there was this. Final Fantasy 7. Rebirth's directors have asked fans not to make inappropriate mods.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Again.

[Linus Sebastian]

They told the Epic Games store, while the team has no plans for official in game mod support, we respect the creativity of the modding community and welcome their creators. Though we ask modders not to create or install anything offensive or inappropriate. Community developed mods can provide everything from bug fixes and quality of life features to entire expansion for games, but can also add less wholesome content. Some pcr, some PCMR members question if this is a genuine request or a clever way to market the game based on potential Mod content and 100% what it is. Luke seems to be. Luke seems to be on that side. But I'll say this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I bet the bank on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll say this. If. If this was. If this was Ubisoft, I would agree with you, but it's not. And the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They've done this before. This exact person, I think has done this before.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And the results were exactly what you would expect.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And they're doing it again probably because last time it got a ton of press and a ton of people talking about how the game was moddable and like, oh my God, of course there's gonna be inappropriate mods. Teehee hooray. And I'm sure they know the same thing's gonna happen again.

[Linus Sebastian]

What if. What if there are potentially cultural differences and this may genuinely be a case where they are just respectfully asking again, knowing that nobody listened last time and hoping that someone will actually listen. Do you think that is possible?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's possible. Yeah. I do agree that that's possible. I think at the same time that if it. If that is the case, I hope that they realize that it is doing completely the opposite thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but either way. There are currently over 1400 mods to FF7 remake on Nexus mods and at least a couple hundred of them are not safe for wan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tynan asks, could it be both? Yeah, it could be both. It could be a little bit of both. This particular individual or there could be members of the team that, that really I'm actually offended by.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, I'm sure at least someone there doesn't like that those are happening.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. And I'm at least desecration of their beloved characters and art and, you know, whatever else.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I'm sure that at least someone else there is seeing dollar signs and it's like, wow, this works really well last time. I bet you we could do the exact same thing and the news media will do the exact same thing and it will be great. And then that's exactly what happened.

[Linus Sebastian]

Revivers digital license plates hacked to dodge tolls and tickets. I had no idea that these were A thing Until I saw this in the wan. Doc. Stop it. Stop it. Okay, okay, okay. So digital license plates had no idea. Screenshot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How is that legal?

[Linus Sebastian]

Who could have possibly foreseen that somebody would hack them and change what's on the screen?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nobody.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who could have. Who could have foreseen it? So the topic here is all about what's happening with Revivers digital license plates. That is like, completely besides the point from.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How do these.

[Linus Sebastian]

How the fuck do these exist?

[Luke Lafreniere]

How are they legal at all?

[Linus Sebastian]

This is so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, you're not even allowed to put, like, a piece of plastic film over top of your license plate here because it makes it more difficult for the traffic cameras to photograph them. Yeah, people do it anyway. But technically you're, like, not supposed to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Huh?

[Linus Sebastian]

Who the f. Thought this was a good. Why? What is even the point of it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It doesn't even look that much different. And it like. Like, would take some amount of energy. It seems very weird to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, they're super cool. Like, you can change the, like, outer. You know, a border of it, Like a vanity thing or whatever. Like, yeah, they're super cool. I can do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can understand why somebody would want one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that unquestionably.

[Linus Sebastian]

No doubt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All the license plate flipping, motorcycle people. Yeah, definitely.

[Linus Sebastian]

But how anyone in any kind of position of authority could look at this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And go, that's fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Gee, I don't think anything could go wrong. Wrong with this. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I was stunned.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's what's going on. Somehow I don't know how this happened. Attackers can replace the firmware on Reviver brand's digital license plates, which are currently installed on 65,000 vehicles.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Attackers.

[Linus Sebastian]

The new firmware allows an attacker to change the number on the plate at will via a phone app. App. Potentially sticking other drivers with their tickets and tolls. The hack may also enable users to access other plate features without paying Revivers monthly subscription fees, which are apparently 35. Oh, okay, $35 a year. Yeah, $35 a year.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why would I want to pay $35 a year?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, you don't want to, which is why you hack. So Reviver says the hack voids the warranty and requires fancy tools and rare expertise. But researcher Josep Rodriguez counters that now that the hack has been discovered, a bad actor only needs to plug in a cable and upload a new firmware.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sounds about right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Reviver plates will send a notification to the owner if they are detached from a vehicle. So attackers may need to jam or overcome the that feature in some way. There's apparently no way for Reviver to update the software to prevent the jailbreak. It is apparently in hardware, and this is not the first time their system has been compromised. In 2022, vulnerabilities in Revivers web infrastructure allowed attackers to gain administrative privileges on their backend database, allowing the ability to track and change plates at will. Digital plates are currently legal to buy and register in California, Arizona, and Michigan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow. How.

[Linus Sebastian]

Our discussion question is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't know automated speeding tickets didn't exist there anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

What problems are being solved with a digital license plate?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nothing. I don't understand its point at all. Okay. Other than getting away with speeding tickets and tolls that I completely understand vanity themes. But like, is that even. What are you really allowed to do? Because, like, in the picture that we have, it's just a super normal license plate.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, you can. You can put like cute things on it anyway. There's a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that any different than just like putting a sticker on your normal license plate?

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I don't know. Custom banner messages? Oh, my God. At $75 a year, they limit how many custom banner messages you can put on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why are you allowed to put custom banner messages? Like, that's. Is that not like distracted. Distracted driving, dude. How is that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, no, you would do that while you're not driving. It can pay your tolls, display Amber alerts, and track your location. I think you can also use it for. You can use it for like, anti theft.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think it can track your location. They have a. They have a statement specifically saying Reviver reached out with us with a statement saying that the license plates do not have GPS capabilities.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, maybe this is a different. Maybe this is a different startup than. So I don't know what this is. Anyway. Okay. Yeah, I don't know. Oh, yeah. Revivers plates, though, don't come cheap. Oh yeah, Did I mention the plates? $500, duh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you want to give it a cool border, buy a plastic one that have existed for a trillion years. And if you want the old cool banner things, just put stickers on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure thing, grandpa.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sheesh. Sheesh. Okay. With being old, if that's the line.

[Linus Sebastian]

Reboot. Rewind has started their crowdfunding campaign. It's over on GoFundMe. Just wanted to promot this real quick because it's a super cool, super cool mission. The. The show reboot was like, kind of part of our. Our childhood, especially here in Canada.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the original tapes have been found but it's a lot of work to get them fixed. So I think we could, I think we could probably throw a thousand bucks at it. If you guys want to throw a little bit of money at it. That'd be, that'd be super cool. I'm gonna, just gonna forward this to accounting. If there's anything else for you to say about that topic, go ahead. But I. I need to do this. So. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

YouTube announces slash changes this week. Clickbait slash voice reply/third party AI training. YouTube announced starting in India it will be removing egregious clickbait defined as videos where the title slash thumbnail don't match the content. Wow. Interesting. Some examples they use are in quotes. The president of the USA steps down. Down. Where obviously that didn't happen. What if it's a skit though?

[Linus Sebastian]

I have heard, and I haven't experienced it personally, but I have heard that misinformation is a particular problem, like, especially in India in like WhatsApp groups. And apparently I don't know this. I have not experienced this, but apparently it is. It is. It just spreads like absolute wildfire and it's caused some serious problems. That's all I really have to say about that. That's. That's all I've heard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Interesting. YouTube also allows creators to opt in to third party AI training. What are they training, question mark? Who knows? But at least creators have the option to opt in. It's not on by default.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is just YouTube announcements this week. So this is completely separate from the other, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, yeah, for sure. That's just so weird. YouTube is also testing a new voice reply feature in comments. This can only be done by the creator of the video. That's actually really cool. It has to be a reply to someone else's comment. And only on iOS. What? For select channels. Why only on iOS?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know, man. This is kind of based on something that I had asked them to do a while back. I definitely didn't ask it for it to be only on iOS, but you gotta understand, iOS is probably. If I had to guess, I'd say it's like 90% of top YouTubers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but it's not their own thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, doesn't matter. They. At the end of the day. Look, look, I could make this argument the other way too. Should they serve their customers or should they serve their own platform?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do both. Well, sure, but just release on Android and iOS. That's not the question I was asking.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, and when you're. When you're Trialing a new feature that might not ever even go full release. Release. Like, do you do the 50% of the work that reaches 90% of your users, or do you do the 100% of the work that reaches 100% of your users? I understand it. I don't have to like it, but I do understand it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Discussion Question Team Green Acting sus A user posted this week on X that they were experiencing up to a 15% penalty in performance while having the Nvidia app installed on their computer. Computer. Several other users and publications also tested this claim with a variety of games. And while some may reach up to a 15% penalty, it seems that across the board, every game that was tested saw between 2 and 12% on average.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think there was some solution here. I think you just had to, like, turn a particular setting off.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. And Nvidia is working on fixing it, so we just wanted to make sure people know to go ahead and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do we know what the setting is, though?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't remember. Google it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's.

[Linus Sebastian]

You'll figure it out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Definitely Googleable. It's a very easy and quick fix. It like, it sucks, but it's not difficult to solve.

[Linus Sebastian]

Citizen 5391 asks, how much flexibility do you have with accounting? You gave away $500 and now $1,000 donation. I mean, how do I. How do I. How do I put this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's all his dollars.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it's not sort of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's all yours and Yvonne's dollars.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's. It's mine if I decide to give it to me, which means it's yours. But it isn't yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Until such time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you have full control of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

As I decide to give it to myself.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Means it's yours.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it isn't yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you own it, which means it's yours.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You do, though, because you own the company.

[Linus Sebastian]

I own the company. That is a separate and distinct legal entity.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you own that. That owns it and it owns that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I do. But that entity, with its board of directors, through inheritance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You own the money. You own the company that owns the money.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're being very literal right now, Luke. You're being very literal, Luke.

[Dan]

I could stab you. I just haven't yet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, same thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's not.

[Dan]

I have a knife.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's. No, it's not the same thing at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's not the same thing. Yeah, it is the same thing.

[Dan]

The government has to get involved after I do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not the same thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Elijah, enough. Anyway, the point is that at the end of the day, if it's just down to money, as long as I'm not doing something that's going to get Yvonne mad at me or that is going to affect someone on the team's goals or like their, like their KPIs or their quarterly bonus or whatever else, if it's just out of the profits of the company, then I have basically, to Luke's point, full discretion to do whatever the f. I want with it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, you could technically do all those things anyway. Anyways, that's self control.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, well, no, no, no. I just mean. I just mean in terms of like what my rules are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's what I mean though. It's self control because you own it.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I know that Yvonne's not gonna be upset about us donating that amount of money to a cause that we think is cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I don't think accounting's gonna be bothered.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's another check.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like it's. It's. Yeah. So whereas if I was doing something like in the middle of WAN show, I took a brand new product that we launched and I marked it down 90%. Right. The creator warehouse team now has to scramble to get a new order in. They now have to figure out what the heck they're going to do about all the sales that were cannibalized by this new product that is now priced way under it. They have goals around profitability for the store and inventory management that I've now just completely screwed up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Self sabotaging your own company.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And, and, and, and the people within it.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the people within it. If we're creating a bunch of work for people, that's not okay. But if we're contributing some cash that isn't mine because I haven't decided to give it to myself yet, then towards a, like a project that's kind of cool and is aligned with our corporate values and with mine and Yvonne's personal values, then that's not a problem. Yeah, that's fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just wait till. Just wait till. I'm not saying he's gonna do this, but this is pretty normal. Just wait till he sets up a charity. Then you just. Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's. I. It's more of a thing in the U.S. yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not as applicable.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's, it's. It's less of a. Just like, like infinite money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Isn't it weird how when especially American, but business people in general get really, really rich, they suddenly become Philanthropists. Wow. I wonder why.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a whole thing. It's a whole rabbit hole. And it's not all conspiracy theory nonsense. There is a lot mixed in with it, which is kind of annoying and frustrating, but yeah, it basically, yeah. Like, okay, Mackenzie Scott seems to be actually doing it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which one's that?

[Linus Sebastian]

That's the one that used to be Bezos. Yeah. But it turns out he prefers like nice 400 pound lips, so I've genuinely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No idea what you're talking about.

[Linus Sebastian]

Fine, don't worry about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't follow that at all. I was like, wow, this has no relevance at all to my life.

[Linus Sebastian]

Jeff Bezos's ex wife seems to be like, like actually giving away a ton of money in a way that's legitimately actually helpful.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not, not buying all the farmland in the States.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, we can move on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, they want me to fix my sleeve. Sorry about that. All right, Rancho after dark merch massages. Let's do it.

[Dan]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, we all. We also got to go purple. There we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Dan]

You didn't do it within three seconds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I just, I, I trying to help.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Why do you gotta ride people like that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

He's gonna stab me now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I don't blame him.

[Dan]

I might as of yet. I'll do it. For reboot Luke, I just got Oblivion on sale from Steam. Do you have any suggestions for greatest enjoyment? Should I wait for skyblivion before I start?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You might want to wait. I don't know. Skyblivion different, right? Like there's, there's new voice actors, there's been changes to some of the items. There's all this stuff going on. It's also not out yet. It is, it is theoretically releasing in the year that's going to start in a couple weeks. But we, I. We don't technically know how good it's going to be. And it will technically be a different experience. Now if you just got it and you're going to play all of Oblivion and then play all of Oblivion again when Sky Oblivion comes out. That sounds like too much.

[Linus Sebastian]

That sounds like a lot of oblivion.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I played Oblivion approaching on two decades ago. There's probably been enough time for me. But yeah, I might wait if I were you. But I don't know. Make your own decision. Go watch the Sky Bliv videos and then figure it out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And whatever you do, don't mod Sky Oblivion with not safe for work character models.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Zero hot coffee.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's none of those. Those don't exist for sure.

[Dan]

Will there be a luxe version of the commuter backpack?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Doubt it. People would. Yeah, people would probably like it super limited run.

[Linus Sebastian]

So our relationship with our previous backpack supplier got a little strained. We haven't been a perfect partner either. There have been some projects that we started with them that they did work on, you know, sampling and stuff like that that ultimately did not make it to mass production with. But we did move forward with and, and create as products. You know, they're not understandably thrilled about that. There, however, were some things on our side that we were not thrilled about either. Like the fact that we bought 40,000 backpacks that were supposed to have a double layered bottom and instead did not. We weren't thrilled about the design flaw with the carabiner. Things like. Yeah, could we have caught them earlier? Yeah, sure, that would have been nice. But we like didn't design them or validate them. That was supposed to be, you know, the backpack making experts that we were partnered with. So, so, so that. So, so the Luxe products were made in cooperation with our previous backpack supplier.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So you'd have to like redo.

[Linus Sebastian]

It is possible that we could do another Luxe something maybe with an apple leather, maybe with apparently banana fibers are like super cool. There's some really cool stuff from there. This came up actually during our last merch meeting. We were having a conversation about this. The problem is that the volumes are really small and the opportunity cost of working on a Luxe product is very high. There's a lot of other stuff that we could do instead of faffing about making, you know, a couple hundred backpacks. So will we ever do it? I'd like to, I'd like to have a Luxe commuter backpack. And the people who bought the original Luxe backpack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very happy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are extremely. Are extremely happy with it. Like, look at this thing. 19 reviews. This is a 600 bag and like the nice looking, best functioning backpack I, I've ever owned. Okay. Someone hasn't got it. Okay, well, we'll have to get that sorted out. I mean, customer service should be looking into any tickets or any reviews that are, that are particularly. Oh, they got a refund.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, well, I got a refund. Exchange rates. Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, the accounting of that is very complicated and I'm not going to get into it here, but I'm sorry that it worked out that way. Basically, my daily six days a week bag, five stars. The point is, the people who have it flipping love this thing. Five stars. Five stars. Easily the nicest Backpack of our best looking bag I own. People talk about just getting comments on it and people asking where it's from. It really is, it really is an attention grabber but we just didn't sell that many of them. And yeah, I don't know, I don't know if it's gonna happen and I'd like to, I'd like to, it's a cool product but we gotta, we gotta work on stuff that somewhat, you know, has a, has an opportunity to scale.

[Dan]

What technology would you like to see become more widespread than it is now?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Technology is like pretty widespread.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh man, I'm trying to think like, I mean one of them I'm, I'm currently investing in, I, I want to see NAS become more widespread. Yeah, like I think the vision behind, I think the vision behind some of the storage coins and stuff was actually pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I jumped on that, man. I really wanted that to be a thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

For those of you who don't know, the idea was that you would contribute like you would mine the coins coin that like whatever the storage coin was, I forget what it was called, but some kind of storage coin by providing space to like a decentralized cloud essentially and then people could pay, they could buy coins in order to back up their data to this decentralized cloud. I, you know, I'd love to see a future like that where, where NAS is just mainstream and like kind of everyone has one and you just kind of, you don't have to just surrender your data to cloud providers. Hexos hopefully is going to be a step towards it being easier to. Easier for. I wouldn't say necessarily normies. Normies yet, but kind of tech savvy people like content creators and gamers to bring their storage on prem. Yeah, I'm going to go with that. I'm going to go with Nas.

[Dan]

Hi, Mr. Tips. It recently came to my attention that most of the data USB cables I have are. What is the status of your USB C launch? I need like a 10 gigabit per second cable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is he gonna do it? I think he's gonna do it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I had a quick chat with Tynan before the show today. So we were talking about spec versus real world observed results and talking about where the line's going to be for our C2C's where we switch over.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fran says don't talk too much. Oh, don't talk too much to be specific.

[Linus Sebastian]

He says it's a bit more complicated than I thought. Oh, okay. Well anyway, I was chatting with Tynan. And this is a cable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a nice cable. It feels great. I really love that the speeds and feeds are printed on the plug. That is so not really printed. It's like stamped I guess on the, on the plug. Embossed. Sure. It's, it's so cool because a ton of different USB cables, they don't even tell you when you're buying it what the specs are at all. And then if they do tell you when you're buying it, it's just on the box. So you take the cable out of the box and it's gone. You'll never know again.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So just permanently on there.

[Linus Sebastian]

We just have the watts and the speed embossed onto both ends.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you can never mistake what the capabilities of the cable are. This one, which I'm not going to show you the full length of because I don't know if we'll be able to deliver, deliver this length at this speed. This is a 20 gigabit per second 240 watt cable. As you can see. She is thick. Like she, like I've got this, I've got this cable. Like she is, she's thick boys. So I've got this USBC width wise and lengthwise here. So you could see it is like as thick as the entire housing is going in there. Like she's so thick. We don't even need a strain relief necessarily. Like we've got a little bit of one kind of built into the, the molding for the housing. But she's just, she's just only got so much turn radius.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it still does that fairly nicely.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, the reason for that is that we're using. So in spite of the fact that they are, they are coaxial conductors inside here rather than twisted pair because only the finest for our, for our loyal customers. Where was I going with that again? Right, we have coax in there. Something, something. Shoot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was talking about how it works around nicely.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. So the way that we managed to make them supple anyway and like Flopsy Doodley is that we're using a very similar like silicone style sleeving to what you would find on like hobbyist grade wiring. So they're, they're just gonna have like a, like that really nice kind of soft touch feel and they should be extremely resilient against UV as well as just, you know, the, the ravages of time. As for some of the very, very detailed questions, I am going to leave that to Tynan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, he's in Full plane chat?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I just unplugged my head and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe, maybe we can talk more publicly about stuff later when things are a little bit more locked in, but not right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

So anything. Yeah, anything Tynan is willing to kind of talk about in the float plane chat I'm willing to let him talk about because realistically he's probably going to be a little more conservative in terms of, of what he'll say and he also is the most knowledgeable one on the team about this project. All I'll say for now is I'm really excited because they're nice. I think there's room in the market for this product. I think that from what I've seen, there are premium cables, but I don't think the pricing is reasonable. There are a lot of cheap cables that I think are being marked up up extremely high and the build quality of them is extremely low. I think that there is room for an extremely premium cable. It's not the last thing you'll ever buy to a degree. Cables are consumable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

They connectors are. They're rated for insertions and strain and all that stuff. Nothing is going to last forever. But I think there's room for a very premium manufacturer, standard cable, very high quality materials, good shielding, good design choices. Cable that is not ridiculously expensive due to an extremely high markup. We're going to mark them up in such a way that this will be a sustainable business for us. But I think that much like our magnetic cable management. Right. Which seems like an obvious product for someone to clone. Right. Like why wouldn't you just clone it? It's just a plastic arch with a magnet in. In it. It's really hard to clone it because the cost is in the neodymium. So unless you just make a worse product, you're not going to be able to clone it and out compete us on price. So in much the same way, yeah, you can build a cable that's like cheaper or you can whatever. But these are. There's just a lot of copper in them. There's just a lot of shielding in them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I think, I think this is going to be something that's going to be really appealing to the folks who are willing to sort of buy once, cry once with their cables and everyone else kind of need not apply.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. You might not need super fancy cables is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Top Gear says order double your initial predicted quantity. You will blow them out in the first week. That's what I think, think. But I have, I have not Had a lot of success communicating my confidence to some of the other members of the team. And this is where, this is where, like, you know, consensus is important and it's not as simple as me just like whipping it out and being like, just buy it. Right. Because other people's KPIs are tied to managing stock on the smaller end. It could be running a reasonable business.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It just is because of personal rules, which is good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. I did kind of pull it a little bit with this one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because they wanted to order fewer SKUs instead of having more granularity in the lengths. And I was like, what's the dollar value on this? Just order them. Like, I don't want to talk about this anymore. Every once in a while I will pull this, that cart.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because time efficiency.

[Linus Sebastian]

To me, part of the value of this product is that we're going to have different lengths and I want it to be a really good companion product for our cable management products. So I want, when we're doing stuff like setup doctor I want us to have the right length bloody cable. Right. So there's, there are business reasons for it aside from just like, sorry, how many dollars is this? Just put it on. It's. Just put it on the corporate card. We'll deal with it later. You know, it's not, it's not entirely that, like, I did have reasons for it, but. Yes, yes. Canceled Netflix for this. We're going to have, we're going to try to have lots of different lengths so that you can have a nice tightly managed setup.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's their username. Canceled Netflix for this.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's good. Love it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought for a second, I was like, did they cancel Netflix to save money for the cables? Like, what are they talking about anyways?

[Linus Sebastian]

Couldn't you just do a pre order thing? Pre orders are tough because it means we're taking your money now. You're not going to get it until lord knows how long. Like, what if we run into an issue? Like, what if our supplier completely screws us over like we had with the ratchet on the screwdriver? Or not the ratchet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The shielding.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. What if we get the initial order in and it's like, oh my God, they produced the whole thing wrong or something like that. Like, it's just, it's so much. My life is so much better if I just don't have your money. Honestly, I don't need it yet. I only need it once I have something of value, value to exchange for it. I don't, I don't need it now. I just need it later.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, never mind.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm so excited for this, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're very nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just. People are gonna. People are gonna see the price and they're gonna be like, that's insane. Who would be insane enough to buy a cable from LTT? LTT is overpriced. They're. They're garbage. They're YouTuber tax, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the people who get it are gonna order it. It and they're going to touch this thing and they're going to be like, holy crap. Are you kidding me right now? Have you ever held a USB cable like this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's because no one is insane enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm so curious to make this to know how much they're going to cost. I have no idea. Today's today. This is not right now, but today is the first day that I've seen.

[Linus Sebastian]

These people are going to hold these and they're just gonna be like, this is beyond compare.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It might seem stupid, but the embossed thing on the plug is, like, worth money.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's other brands that do it. We're not the only ones. We're one of the only ones. But we aren't the only ones who do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I haven't personally seen it, but there's.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's. There's more to it than just that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, of course. I just like that part a lot because I find it super frustrating digging through cables and being like, I have no idea what almost any of these. These really are.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's just that the cable industry expects, like, ridiculous margins.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so we're coming in it. We're coming in, and we're kind of going, okay, well, like, we have a model where our margin is sustainable, and we think that there is. There's room for us to take our margin model and bring it to a category where no one's really building a product that meets our quality expectations. And.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. See what happens.

[Linus Sebastian]

See what happens.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

See what happens. Tynan says we aren't looking into lightning, even though I have an iPhone that uses it. That is true. Lightning is the past. And I think that probably we would have other priorities like HDMI and DisplayPort beyond USB. That would come before lightning.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I know. USB cables are cool, but you get some, like, really Sick HDMI and DisplayPort cable.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't worry, we'll sell some of those.

[Dan]

Even though. Did they just say what they are on them?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I know, right? It's gonna be Good. I'm excited.

[Dan]

VGA cables win. As someone who's going to start hosting game servers and other IaaS, what would you like to see out of cloud provider?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stability and price.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a. That's a fairly solved game, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Archived.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry.

[Dan]

Go on. Hello, my parasocial friends. Linus, how is your bike painting project going?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, finish it up, dude.

[Dan]

We want the beard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's going on?

[Linus Sebastian]

I haven't touched it in ages. I didn't touch it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How could you be that rude to Yvonne?

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Dan]

She wants the beard? Yeah, she said in her.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, you forgot that. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought you meant, like. I thought you were going, like, like. And I haven't, like, dropped it in ages, so that's, like, disrespectful to her or something. I was like, what are you talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. Okay, that makes sense. In the Yvonne week thing we watched today.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I'm. I'm in a lot of pain right now. I have tennis elbow. I still have residual sprained ankle. I pulled my back in that tournament. I need to go easy on my body for a little bit, and I'm kind of thinking maybe instead of hitting the gym and badminton so much, do some bike painting, I might do some bike painting for a bit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Dan]

Hey, Dll, are you guys excited for any of the booths that will be at ces? I always enjoy watching the videos of the new monitor technology. Love the show.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't tell you anything. I'm excited to see because I'm excited for probably embargoed multiple things that I can't tell you about, but yes. Oh, I'm going for the first time in a while.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Quite a while.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not super excited about that part.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's go Las Vegas.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't like Vegas.

[Linus Sebastian]

Viva. Viva. Las Vegas.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Dan]

I'm going to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan's going.

[Dan]

I'm going for vacation.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. What?

[Dan]

I've never been before. I'm super excited.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. All right, sure.

[Dan]

Quote, unquote.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I assume Luke was like, don't bother. Do you like shows, though? Like, do you like theater and shows?

[Dan]

I want to go to ces. I'm into. I'm into technology. I work here. I want to see the Super Micros branding material. Shut up, both of you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The show is, like, so disappointing. If you really want to see one of those shows, you should have gone.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Dan]

I did Nab, which was super dry. It's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

You Know what? I have never actually attended CES as just like, an attendee, so maybe that's part of the problem for me. There is cool stuff there. Like, if you're just going around and just like. And because he gets to wear a Linus Media Group badge.

[Dan]

Nope, nope. I'm not going.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For the company has a different invite.

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Dan]

Cause I'm not going on your behalf.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I just assumed you would just badge up with Linus Media Group so people will talk to you.

[Dan]

I don't want to get talked to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh.

[Dan]

I mean, I just want to hang out. It's also Vegas.

[Linus Sebastian]

Good luck.

[Dan]

You guys don't like Vegas?

[Linus Sebastian]

Good luck. Do you have any idea what percentage of the people watching this show are going to be at ces? Dan? Like, you are not going anywhere.

[Dan]

Need to buy a mask.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, crap. I keep forgetting I work here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think I'm realizing I don't think I've ever traversed the CES show floor when not like, either speed walking or tactically maneuvering through a crowd. Like, I haven't really. When I see things, it's because I'm glancing at them when I'm walking by. But when I see things, it's phone cases. Dan.

[Linus Sebastian]

That sounds cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, why?

[Dan]

It's been a lot of development in that sector.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're lying.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's also Vegas.

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You like Vegas.

[Dan]

It's okay. It used to be better, now it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What does that mean?

[Dan]

I don't know. It's not as adult anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah.

[Dan]

They tried to family friendly it up because, like, post. Post Covid, they lost a lot of money. Right. It used to be more like bars and like gambling, and now it's like things to do with your kids because please come to Vegas and spend money. You know what I mean?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That seems weird because a lot of other places go in the opposite direction. Like, people are talking about how Disneyland is like, for adults now and stuff.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apparently child free spaces in like, South Korea are like, huge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, that makes sense looking at their population.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stats.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, cool.

[Dan]

Why does my company only allow us to use WI fi with VPN and not Ethernet for quote unquote, quote security?

[Linus Sebastian]

I have no idea. That does not make any sense to me. Other than that maybe your network administrator is just like, stupid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't want to deal with the cable runs or something.

[Dan]

You'd have to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well said. They won't let them use the VPN when they're connected with a wire, but they can Use it when they're on WI fi. What? Like, maybe just like whatever their infrastructure is, they've taken some kind of shortcut that's built into their like, like wireless management thing. Instead of doing it at a. At like a router level or something like, that's the only thing I can think of is if it's. If it's only. If they've only implemented something at the like WI fi controller level or something. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. I understand you're just trying to figure it out, but that would be so weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, no, I. I guess that's the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Only reason I could think for sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I know. I.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why did all hotels rip the ethernet jacks out of the rooms? They were already fucking there. Yeah, why did they take them out? It's just copper. Just leave it there so I can have a reliable connection. I don't know. I don't know. I don't. I don't understand it.

[Dan]

Hey, Edlo, is there a type of video you would have made 10 years ago that you wish you could make today, but it wouldn't perform well on YouTube?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, just like the. The low key. Like, hey, check out this like, random thing I'm working on. Like, okay, here's an example. Boreas. Like, check this out. Oh, man, I can't even. I can't even find this. Oh yeah, here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People are saying like, yeah, like our firewall doesn't let you connect a VPN from inside the interface. And it's like, okay, but then it shouldn't let you do it on WI fi either. Like, I can understand that Use case.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I was just like, oh, yeah, here's like two tech coolers and I like hooked them up to like a weird thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, this would totally work now. No, this would 100% work now. You just need to do it with Alex. And it would need to be like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but this is just me holding it and like, just like showing what.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm like, yeah, but this is the. This is the, like filming quality and the production quality, not the concept. This concept would do just fine though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It would do fine. You and Alex could do it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hybrid technology, zip ties. Yeah, we've never really changed, have we? 14, 14 years ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Any tech tips on cleaning the bearings in the precision screwdriver? Mine has a 60 plus second spin and quickly went to 30 after adding a tad bit of oil as recommended to a hybrid bearing. It's now, I don't Know if it's better or worse.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It got cut off.

[Dan]

Just stops there.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's now hilarious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's now character capping.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. No, I don't know. That's a good question.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For support. Ty9 said it's a struggle. Struggle or tis a struggle to be exact.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean bearings are. That's. There's a reason we don't guarantee a particular spin length and we do definitely know that there is some variance. And yes, lubrication can be helpful.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Tynan said cleaning that bearing is a struggle. The amount of inertia for the end cap means that anything in there will slow it down.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, like we don't have our. Like we want to do like heavy like. Like more fidget. Spinnery end caps at some point. But we haven't done that yet. And those ones are pretty light. Yeah.

[Dan]

Even dust, I guess. Ild Linus is the Rog Ally still your main portable gaming console. Current games on it tricked out Rog.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ally when it's my main in the sense that it's still the one that sits on my nightstand. But I haven't really been using it much lately. So what did I fire up the other day? It was this weird game where you're like on a boat and you manage stuff and. And you like fight stuff or something. I don't know. But I got a bunch of stuff in the steam still that I've been meaning to pick up, but I just haven't had time. Like I haven't even had time to paint my bike. How can I justify playing video games?

[Dan]

Hi Wan dlo what is the most dangerous?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, hold on. And just to clear something up. Yeah. I think it is called dredge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was gonna say a ton of people just said dredge.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Just to clear things up. It's not because necessarily the Ally is the best. Like if I was picking the thing that I like the most. Steam deck. OLED is sick. Or if I wanted more performance. I like the Ally X right now. There's also might be some new stuff coming soon. But just the Ally like has my stuff on it and so I haven't bothered changing it. Okay.

[Dan]

What is the most dangerous moment you've had? Showing off a piece of tech like a hoverboard that shot out from under you or something going haywire.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. I mean, I probably don't even remember.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Them at this point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like there's definitely been some dangerous stuff. I've never had something just like almost, you know, hit me in the head or something like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I had a Dremel saw blade get stuck in the face mask that I was using or strike it or something. It broke and it did something with the face mask. It was so long ago. I don't remember the exact details.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think I probably could have killed myself working on this though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Self balancing uniform cycle V3. Get a little balance in your life.

[Linus Sebastian]

I used to try to put like a fun tagline after the title. You know, I felt a lot less stable than I look here and I don't look that stable on it. And like, you can tell I'm. I'm moving nine years.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember this at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's because you didn't work on it. I did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But still, I. This was when I would do a lot of the, like. Basically this video was entirely me other than somebody, like, setting up a camera. Like I wrote it. This is. Oh, my goodness. That's Baby, my boy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's kind of weird now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. So that was Yvonne filming that for me. So I basically did most of the like, B roll and stuff for this. And then we just had. We set up a quick shot in the kitchen. I scripted the video. But yeah, so I. I learned how to use this. And you know, it's not the hardest thing in the world, but there's a little bit of distracted operation going on when you're trying to film yourself using something that you're not necessarily a total expert at. Yeah, I don't know. I really liked the whole like, e vehicle thing, but it just doesn't get. It just doesn't get views. Can't really justify the time spent on it. It. And I understand why. Like, they're. They're niche. They're inherently niche. There's all these, like, different types. There's skateboards and scooters and bikes and unicycles and when I was in France.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A very surprising amount of people in Paris use them. A variety of different E vehicle things, usually scooters. And I don't just mean the, like, rental ones. They had their own.

[Linus Sebastian]

Remember when you could just like fly drones wherever you want?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it was pretty cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was pretty cool. Remember when we sucked at operating drones?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that was pretty cool too.

[Dan]

Is the backpack rain cover motorcycle wind speed approved?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Motorcycle wind speed. Okay, got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna say no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Say no.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It has a little.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, but I'm just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But we're not.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just gonna say no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Good. Way to go. I saw somebody mounted a metal box with MCM on the back of their bike. And like, all the comments were like, don't do that.

[Dan]

Oh my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Dan]

Oh, I didn't. I thought that they had a metal box that they attached MCM to. Now that's very dangerous if you attach it with the MCM them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It, it, like, it looked cool. And then you think about the ramifications of it, like being on a road and bumps and wind and stuff. And it was like, oh, boy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Magnetic cable management, not mighty car mods, by the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ah, yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

Linus and Luke, how do you fare making friends at work while being in a position of quote, unquote power?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's gotten harder.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, it's. Some people, I find that it comes down to a lot of the same things as anyone else, like the amount of time you spend working in proximity, the kind of enjoying successes together, experiencing failures together. You know, a lot of the things that people just sort of bond over in general. But I find that for me, like, I can kind of be friendly with anyone, but I only, I don't like anybody. I only have, have room in my, my social battery, you know, for a handful of. Of closer relationships for, you know, and, and that, that room is, you know, somewhere between zero and, and, you know, our total number of people on our team, which is like 100 plus, and it's probably closer to zero than it is to a hundred. So, you know, a lot of it is. A lot of it is just that proximity and a lot of it is people's willingness to, like, be a friend with me because I can't, I can't dictate that, like I'm me. I'm just, I'm just kind of me and I'm kind of a lot sometimes, as you guys could. Can probably imagine, he's a handful. Yeah. That's regardless of being in a position of power or not a position of power. And, and for some people, you know, that's an impediment for, for other people, just my position in the company is, is, is a problem for some people. Just, you know, me being a 1 percenter, you know. Right. Could be a problem. Well, no, I'm serious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know. It's just funny hearing you say, well.

[Linus Sebastian]

I try to be a realist. Right. And, and some people, like, I, I have experience. I'm not going to name any names, obviously, but there's people who work here now that, you know, obviously treat me extremely differently that, you know, I don't think I would be able to be friends with just because of the amount of, like, kissing that takes place. Like, I, I, I personally don't like that. I don't like to be treated that way. But for some people, it just, it's just something that they, you know, that they do naturally or that they feel is important for, you know, advancement in work or like, whatever perception they might have. Like, everybody is so different and, you know, so there's people that, that, you know, I wouldn't be able to be close to because they don't treat me like a friend. There's people that wouldn't be able to be close to me because they just couldn't see me as a friend. And then there's people that just don't give a. And, you know, we'll hang out and bro out and kind of talk about anything and, and just like be a normal human being with me. And I very much like hanging with those folks and that's great. And I don't have any, I wouldn't say I have more difficulty with that today than I ever did, but I will say that the percentage of people who are able to just treat me like a normal human these days is lower as a function of how many people work here. What about you? Because it used to be, you used to very much just be like an employee, a rank and filer, and now you, like, run like three departments and, and I think can be a little bit intimidating. And you're naturally more intimidating than me. You're just like, bigger and have a deeper voice and taller and stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I get that. I literally get that as feedback is that I'm unapproachable. Usually people on my own teams don't give me that feedback.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I get that feedback back externally sometimes. Not as much as I used to, but still. Still, sometimes. I don't know. I've, I've questioned, I don't think I've talked to you or anyone else about this, to be completely honest, but I've questioned, like, is this a problem with me? Because I find that to be an issue. But then you and I became friends when I was employee to you boss, and now it's like, I don't know. But then some of it's like the company's also just sort of changed.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Things are different now. We're, we're a real company now. Kind of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And that does create barriers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

To be honest, because, like, when you, when you work closely with everyone at the company, you kind of know where people's boundaries are and stuff. Stuff. Whereas, like, if I act like Myself in a group setting now, I could easily say something that is offensive to somebody. Like maybe we have very different positions on, say, for example, religion or politics or whatever else. When you have six people, you could say something like, you know, f some politician and know with a pretty high degree of confidence that everyone think about. Yeah, everyone's kind of on the same page where. Whereas when you have a hundred people, I guarantee you there is no single issue that every single one of them could agree on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's also politicking and there's people that like, might. You don't necessarily know them well enough and it might make sense for them to hold a certain position publicly, but they don't actually feel that way internally. And if you really knew that person, you might kind of know, but now you might only know them on a certain level that you're unsure about and yada yada yada. And I don't know. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Willing Spy says lies. I bet they all like tech. Actually. Not Nest.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, actually, I like definitely no.

[Dan]

I hate it with a burning passion.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, not even.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just not what we're talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know.

[Dan]

I know what you mean.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are people that work here that like, genuinely have no interest at all. Yeah, they got hired to do the job that they do. They like the job that they do. They do that job well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or maybe they don't even like the job that they do, but they're good at it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But they do it well. Good enough, to be honest. That's technically all that's needed.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, we're like any other company. Like, think about your company. Think about where you work. Is everyone passionate about refrigerators or like, whatever. Whatever the crap it is that your company did. Not necessarily. Yeah, you know, and we like to have passionate people. That's something that we care about and that's something that we try to foster. Sure, but it's not reality. Right.

[Dan]

More.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sure.

[Dan]

Moving on. Would I see much of a performance hit on a GPU, for example, the RTX 50 series PCIe Gen 5 on a PCIe Gen 4 motherboard at 4K resolution?

[Linus Sebastian]

Probably not. But we won't know for sure until we have a PCIe Gen 5 graphics card to put in a slot. And I assume that your question is based on both the slot and the card being by 16. That can change once we're looking at cards that are by eight or even by four, because if you put those in an older gen, you can run into some performance differences.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, this is all something we've. We've already talked about diving into. Yeah, cool.

[Dan]

And last one I've got for you today. Hello, DL. I run unraid so I can upgrade one drive at a time. Just heard about RAID ZV dev expansion. Can you talk about this? Does this give truenas the same upgradeability?

[Linus Sebastian]

All I can say about that for now is that there's a lot of exciting things, probably maybe that have been thought of for zfs, some of which are kind of being actively worked on, some of which are not being actively worked on, many of which are good cool ideas, and I'm very excited to see what the future holds.

[Dan]

That's all I got.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I'm very excited to talk about the future WAN show you might watch, because you sure as heck won't be watching any more of this one. See you next time. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye. Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

So just got rated 6.9 out of 10. Oh, I'm so excited for our cables. I have very little support for these internally, but I. I don't care.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are we off yet?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.