Mhm. Hi, today is July 14, 2024. I've got a glass of war with my good friend, a good doctor, John Westfall. And this is my podcast 518. I have to look at my notes. There's been so many and so many momentous moments that we've shared that we need those notes more than ever. Absolutely. And when when Microsoft, I'm not Microsoft, but when Google's notebook LM gets better. So we can summarize more than five documents at once. It would be even more awesome or more awesome, probably correct. Yeah, we'll go with that. Yeah. So today I'm trying something different. Although John tested this with me a week and a half ago, I think I got my Microsoft Surface Pro 11 co-pilot plus PC. They really need shorter names in and we did John and I did a really quick test to see what the sound quality is like and the video qualities like. And I'm using neither. It's camera noise microphone. Oh, that's pretty good. I thought it was pretty bad. Yeah, it wasn't bad. It's purpose. So I would say it wasn't too bad. So I am I'm back using a Yeti Nano USB microphone and I have a OBS light to LBS to OBS tiny like to, I think, which is a really neat, literally tiny 4k webcam that if I could remember how to use the gestures can zoom in and out and follow me. But it's really unnecessary for a talking head video. So I'm not going to worry about it. Because I think it just does a really nice job. And today we're going to answer a bunch of John's rhetorical questions to cheat knows his answers, but we don't know everybody else's answer. And but first I wanted to expound my weekend and half or so of experience with the Surface Pro 11. And I don't know if John has any questions because he's mostly Mac these days, but so a couple of things. But one of the things I do want to talk about is actually a Windows thing in a few moments. So I may have questions. I might surprise you. We will see. Okay. So first thing is I bought this from Costco, which as you know, I've long called the center of technology. And in this case, this is really interesting because I found out. So I've got the Snapdragon X plus, right, which is the lower tier Copilot plus PC, the Swen your Hansen, our buddy Swen your Hansen bought the Snapdragon X Elite, which is the higher tier. I think it has 12 Korns to the 10 core and a lot of other nice stuff. It also has a nicer screen. He has an OLED screen. I just have a regular LED screen. But anyway, one of the things I did discover is that if you try to order this Snapdragon plus Snapdragon X plus Copilot plus PC for Microsoft, the largest solid state drive you can get is 512 gigabytes. You can get 256 or 512. However, if you buy the bundle from Costco, it comes with a terabyte. And I don't know if it's available in this configuration from any place else, but Costco. But so for those looking for, you know, a lower end, well, we'll learn it's slightly cheaper, you know, less than two brand. Copilot plus PC surface 11, Surface Pro 11, anybody still want a terabyte of storage and go head over to Costco and they have a bundle, which has a terabyte of storage, 16 gigs of RAM, which is the minimum, by the way, for Copilot plus PCs. And the slim pen, which is this guy right here, the, which is pretty good. Yeah, like an architects pencil. Yeah, carpenters pencil, architect architect. Yeah, architects probably don't want that big of a fat that carpenters like it. And, and, and there's a, what I think they call the business, Surface Pro business keyboard, which means that it is not the fancy, dancy one that's when got with Bluetooth, it is mechanically attached, what make it while I should say magnetically attached with a, you know, mechanical connector, or you know, it basically needs a connector. And it's okay as a keyboard. I mean, I can touch type on it and stuff, although I did get a Bluetooth keyboard for it, which works great. It's one of these folding keyboards with a, let's see if I can get the turning around here. And with a nice space bar for, oops. Well, okay, I'm not doing it. I probably should turn off the background. But anyway, it has a nice space bar because it's not, it's not too small and it's not split. And by that, I mean, so I got this is a relatively new keyboard from Puerto Arc, which makes really nice keyboards in general. But I think you might be able to see that the economic keyboard, it's split, you know, by, because it's ergonomic, but still I keep hitting the blank spot because that's how I type right in the middle of the keyboard or the space bar. But those have always been interesting to me that, you know, the natural design, you know, ever since Microsoft came out with the natural keyboard back in the 90s, some of them look like they work really well. And some of them just do not look like they work really well. I think it's just purely up to your individual typing style, which is interesting to think about that even as touch typists, if you're a touch type, or you don't have exactly the same style as ever other touch typists out there. Right. And you also don't have the same table height, you know, your your height, your chairs, and so all of that. So I'm not an ergonomic expert, but I have gone through a lot of keyboards just this year. Over the last 40 or 50 years. And, and you know, I've tried a whole bunch of the ergonomic keyboards, including this one from Puerto Arc, which is pretty nice actually. And what I found really was I had to learn to type differently, because I do have like a bit of carpal tunnel, not enough for, you know, surgery, thankfully, I've had friends go through that and they're never quite the same. But I do have a bit of carpal tunnel, but it hasn't flared up because I've tried to learn to type as we've seen Hawaii, Mobera. Yeah, and I have a foldable keyboard here that's got track. But, but about six months ago or so, and I still have not been able to get my hand to be used to the layout of it. Yeah, but yeah, I got it thinking, you know, there's times I'm using things like a Raspberry Pi or something where I need to have a wireless Bluetooth keyboard. But yeah, I just can't get my hands to wrap around strange new keyboards. It's, it does take a while. Some, you know, I've, I've got a bunch in the last year, foldable keyboards and other things. And some of the new ones with, you know, without the split right in the space bar are just working out way better than earlier designs I've used. And I've been using foldable keyboards since the early 2000s and aughts, I guess, we would say, the beginning of the millennium. It just sounds so epic. I know. By the way, you know, I look for the price so that this, this, this Surface Pro Business keyboard with the pen retails for $280. Okay, I get that the pen is like a hundred and twenty or thirty, which is same price as Apple Pencil. But I do not understand why this keyboard is so expensive. I mean, you know, the Bluetooth one that I just showed you is like 40 or 50. It's very useful. Oh, the other thing is the, the slim pencil is slim, which is, and it's flat. So it doesn't fall off. But look how short it is. So let's see if can I shoot you? Yeah, okay. Yeah, that is much shorter than the Apple Pencil. I'm a bit shorter than the premium. Yeah, and this is, this one over here is a USI 2.0 pencil that works with Andrew, well, some Android tablets and Chromebooks. And you can see how, you know, ethically short it is. So I have got a third party, a non-Microsoft USB-C charged pencil, a stylus coming in I think today. By the way, I will say that the, that the slim surface pen charges magnetic and wirelessly. And it's a little nice little slot right in the keyboard. And so it's always charged. And it works pretty well. If you look behind me, I tried the co-create mode in my off paint. And so on the, on the, let's see, I guess it's on your behind my fat head, which is on your right, John. Yeah, I see the, I see the larger over. Yeah. Now I see over your left, right, your right shoulder. Yeah. So that's my little, you know, five minute doodle. I'm using Microsoft paint and stylus. And I think I make it bigger, but the little large, the slightly larger than a thumbnail, thumbnail is co-create. And I said it uncreatively kind of on less than half, because it got way creative and they could be resemble my little doodle. But I thought it was kind of interesting. I'm not sure it justifies pain, you know, a lot of money to buy a surface plus or copilot plus PC. But it's, it's kind of interesting tool. Really without recall without Microsoft's recall feature for copilot plus PC, there's no real significant AI on this box. In fact, one of the things I discovered is, you know, it's supposed to have this smart mode for webcams. It only works with webcam built into the Surface Pro. It does not work with any of my, you know, very high end, well, higher end webcams, these are, you know, $100 webcams or whatever, that have, you know, tilt and all that stuff. And it's own AI features. They're 4K like this one that I'm using right now. So anyway, so that's, that's that. I've got a longer pencil coming in, but the surface pen, slim pen, is simply is MPP 2.6. So Microsoft pen protocol 2.6. The one I've got on order is 2.0. So I think I lose something. I'm not quite sure what. That's less has less resolution than this in terms of, you know, how it detects where you are on the screen. But we'll see sometime today, probably after the podcast. Oh, a couple of things, apps. So the one thing I really wanted to use as I have a terabyte of storage is Insta360 Studio for their 360 degree cameras and other cameras they have. It won't even install on here. And this is the ARM version. It says a lot of compatible device. It is beta. So, you know, I'll give them that I'll try to be patient and I'll use a, I'll use a Mac or something else until then. But that would not install HP smart apps for their printers installed but would not, would not launch until I restarted the PC. I too, you know, like in the old days I had to review with the PC to get the app to work. But, and as I mentioned, AI Windows Studio effects only works with the Surface cameras as far as I can tell. I tried to do two other 4K webcams and Nada. Everything else seems to install pretty nicely. Affinity, Affinity Studio and Affinity Photo, which are like very reasonable priced alternatives to Adobe's products, which are, you know, on a subscription. These are one-time calls. Like ARM version, by the way. So, I've been really happy to, unlike my Surface RT experience in 2012, where- Oh, the experience we shall not speak of. I think for a lot of people, the Surface RT was the experience we shall not speak of. Yeah. And it's a bit like I said, I wrote a very nice article about it because I had a lot of hope when I first got it. But that was very disappointing. So, anyway, so even though this has a really nice camera, in fact, I can switch to it temporarily. Let me switch up. So, I've been using, like I said, the OBS Bot Tiny 2 Lite. What a mouthful. And I'm going to switch to the Surface camera front. And as you can see, it's a much wider angle. So, the Surface camera, much wider. I should note, by the way, I was going to do something fancy. I was going to try to use my Pixel 7A as a webcam to show you things like a keyboard. But Google Meet, which we're using for this recording, said that my camera's shutter is on. This has no shutter. All the privacy settings are set correctly. I think I'll go talk to Swin because I know he got it to work. So, I'll talk to Swin later and see what he has to say. But that's sort of my 10 days of experience the Surface Pro. Oh, and I mentioned that when we're day one, when we got it, this thing can run hot. It got up to 170 degrees around Google Meet. It feels pretty warm right now. And that hasn't leveled out. You know, because I could see some people saying that that might be something, how many do with the initial setup or? Yeah, I don't know. I don't have IR thermometer handy. It's about 20 feet away from me. But it's not uncomfortably warm. I can, it's over 100 degrees, I'm pretty sure. Fortunately, because the computer itself and the, you know, the, well, all of the innards are in the screen. It's only the screen getting hot. So the service keyboard, you know, the one with the connector on it, which attaches magnetically, is, you know, cool as a cucumber as people. And because, you know, it's got no electronics other than the keyboard. And I guess a little charger for the slim pen. So, because I thought you were going to explain why people say cool the cucumber, you know, explain the oddities. I mean, I can have cucumbers that are kept cold, but also have warm cucumbers, you know, depending on what you, I guess no one ever intentionally tries to eat a cucumber. But I mean, if the salad sits out long enough and it comes up to room temperature, it's not very cool. It'd be warm as a cucumber. Yeah, warm as a cucumber. Yes, English is a funny language. Very true. Speaking of side note, John, since I know you are a writer of fiction, among other things. So you know who Michael Crichton was, the late year, Jurassic Park and Timeline, a whole bunch of other very entertaining novels. One of my favorite novels of all time was Andromeda String. Oh, yes, first. It still holds up. I still read it every few years just to enjoy it. It is a great novel for sure. I remember reading it as a kid. And I read it again as an adult, still enjoyable. Watch the movie. But anyway, so here's a state apparently is doling out some of his notes for books and having, you know, actually alive authors write them. And so James Patterson, who's a well-known writer of thrillers, I guess was contracted to write and take the notes from one of his unfinished works, which they've titled Eruption and published it. I just got the audiobook. And it's the reason I got it, by the way, aside from the fact that, you know, Michael Crichton was at least from the basis of the story in Patterson's a well-known writer. So Eruption is based on the Big Island of Hawaii. So I said, okay, well, that's interesting to me. And the premise is that Mona Loa, which is a, no, it's not even Darwin. It's actually an active volcano. It erupted fairly recently, is going to have an eruption so massive, it's going to destroy the whole island. Okay, that's sort of interesting. You know, the disaster premise is always interesting as an object. And the other premise and then says, so then blah, blah, blah, you know, super volcano explode the island, will destroy the island. But that's only the tip of the story about, you know, that some kind of US army secret going on. So I said, okay, I'll buy up. All right, so interesting premise, I just started it. Because it's based in Hawaii, Patterson, I guess, did some research and, you know, learned a lot of local places and got them all right, by the way, as far as I can tell, having especially lived on the Big Island for a while, you know, got the places right and got a lot of Hawaiian words right. But then delve into having the characters speak in our little dialect called Pigeon English, which is a creole language, where even the syntax are a little different, the verb object verb placement is a little different sometimes. And the word choices are different. And pronunciation is way different. But you know, when you have a non-Hawaii born person speaking Pigeon English, it's basically like, yeah, you're trying your best, but really it's Pigeon English with American accent. What else? Yeah, it is what it is. People put a good effort in. I find it very interesting as a psychologist, thinking about culture and how we integrate cultures and how we want to be respectful of other cultures, but also be true to them. And it just anymore, I don't think there's any way to ever get it 100% right. If you try to do certain things, you will not get it right. And some people will be offended by that. You cannot try to do those things because you don't want to offend those people. And then you'll offend other people that you didn't even try to do these things. So there's really no winning anymore as an author. The best thing I can advise is be like George RR Martin and just create your own universe. In that way, it can't be wrong. Yeah, it can't be wrong at that point because you created it. Yeah. Of course, if you live long enough and it gets popular enough, people will tell you that you're wrong about your own creation, which is always kind of humorous as well. Microsoft Conference was, but that's another story. Well, that was because they were wrong objectively. So we weren't telling them, we weren't telling them anything that wasn't true. Anyway, so far, I'm only like, I'm a chapter two in, but it's very entertaining so fast pace. If you like a thriller, it looks like it's got to be a good one. If you're from Hawaii, just kind of ignore the pigeon English attempts. They made an honest attempt that don't fault them for it, but it is funny to us. And I have to pause and laugh sometime. I would note that my daughter used to speak Japanese with an American accent. But over the years, when she went, she went to do a business internship there for three months last year. And my wife went over to help her set up within an apartment and stuff. And she came back and she says, you know, her Japanese doesn't have an American accent anymore. So she was really impressed when she heard her speaking over there. Alrighty. Sometimes all it takes is the right exposure to what you need to figure it out. Alrighty. So some things you are, you are, oh, before I forget, the whole AT&T data breach or all customer data was apparently leaked. Oh, yes. That's how much fun. Yeah. Thank you, AT&T for that. And I made fun of T-Mold people earlier this year, but well, whatever. Yeah. What goes around comes around. I mean, these things are, it is what it is. Any more you look at it and go, oh, another day where my team did not lose, but your team will eventually lose. So don't worry. If you're thinking that you've gotten away, stop free. You have not. You are not. Alrighty. So you've got a bunch of things that I'm interested to hear about from you. Well, yeah. I had a few thoughts, especially this time of year with all the announcements, you know, Samsung had an announcement last week where they were talking about their new galaxies, as well as the ring that they're coming out with. And so they're taking on Aura, but in the truest sense of shooting themselves on the foot, you have to have a Galaxy phone to use it, which kind of makes me think, okay, well, I don't know if you're going to throw stones in a sense and say ours is better because it doesn't have a subscription, even then also only works on your hardware. That's a limitation that cancels out your advantage. But Samsung is kind of famous for that, right? I mean, yeah, pins and all kinds of stuff. So that got me thinking a lot about new stuff and, you know, WDC and Google and all that. It was basically what are features that you have seen demoed and you go, gee, that sounds like a really fun feature. I think I'm going to use that all the time and then multiple years later, you're sitting there going, you know, there was a feature that I heard about that I just never set up. And, you know, what are the things that you think you might actually use if you gave them a quote, unquote, serious try that you didn't just sort of go, well, that's cute, but I don't think I'm going to even try it out. And I have a few examples that I've thought about. One is focus modes on iOS. I use the sleep focus mode because it stops people from bothering me when I'm sleeping. And I use the I use the driving focus mode, but that started off as do not disturb all driving. And, you know, just kind of morphed into a focus mode. And then I don't that's not it. I've tried using the work focus mode, but I can't quite get the settings just right to let through the notifications I want to not let in others. And it just there's a lot of functionality there and a lot of ways to hook into it with shortcuts that I just don't, I don't really use that much. But I think if I got it down, it would become a pretty cool part of my life because I do like the idea of it in theory. Do you use focus modes at all in iOS and Mac world? I'm not in this way, but no, I have not in interest. No, I've never used them. I can't see I haven't been interested in them, but I just felt like I guess I was felt like I had the appropriate amount of focus time I needed for the most part. There were some exceptions, there were some jobs that were that was, you know, not, you know, I, you know, what really helped focus mode. I used to have many years ago when I was young and much more annoying even than now, which maybe I'm surprising to you. I used to have a sign outside of my door, especially when I was doing programming and I was deep in, you know, when you get into the zone, John, or you get into the zone and seek prepare for that, I used to have a sign outside of my cubicle, not even a door. So out of my cubicle, they said, talk to me and die, which people knew what I was doing. So they're fine with it and overly aggressive. I mean, I had at one point a sign that said, if you steal my chair, I will find you and rip your skin off, because it was someone that, or it was something might be my chair or something like that. I was in a communal office space and it wasn't actually people from my group that would ever start to do this sort of stuff. It was people that, you know, just were in there after hours and thought, oh, I can just borrow this chair or I can borrow this phone or I can do this or that. So yeah, I literally had, if you steal my chair, I will find you and rip your skin off. But and that stopped stealing my chair. But sometimes a good, well framed message really can get the plane across. And that's a short and to the point. Yes. Right. Like, if you do this, then if then, you know, like a good programmer is then this. And then it's very clear. This is not a good thing to happen to you. But no, I really, I really haven't. I also haven't tried, like, I think I downloaded drafts once for, you know, visual. But it's like, you know, despite my undiagnosed ADHD, I felt like I could focus without it. So I kind of dropped it. But how about you? I know a lot of people love these, these kind of tools. Yeah. And like I said, I think if I really, you know, if I slowly integrated it into what I do, I think it would work well. I just don't think I've ever had the ambition to do the slow integration and the tweaking and the okay, that didn't work so well. So let me try it this way. It just gets frustrating after a while when it's not working. I just go out of the heck with it. I'm not going to do it. Well, the other thing is, you know, kind of behavioral adaptive behavior, behavioral adoption to my shortcomings in mental faculties is that I know I can't focus for more than 20 minutes at a time. So why try? I will focus for 20 minutes, get as much as I can done, shift to something else and then come back to it. And that's something that works for me. I don't know, probably doesn't work for anybody else, but it works for me. And so it's more. You never know, it might work for way more people than you think. You might not be the exception to it. Another one that I think you and I both have talked about in TV, we're trying to think about is co-pilot and just AI, LLM, AI is in general, large language models, you know, where do they fit in our workflow? Do you think if you really forced yourself to do it for your, you know, for months, you would start using it regularly, or do you think it's just not the way your mind thinks about technology? I use it regularly now. And I don't even, I'm not, you know, I'm retired. I don't even work work, right, except that sort of my personal little hobbies, like my little doodle a day project and trying to get my Pixel 7a to work as a webcam with Windows 11. And in fact, I use co-pilot this morning to, you know, say, well, how do I set it up? And so told me how and then I got this kind of a blocking message, which I don't understand. So I will do some further research so I can use it as, you know, as again, the idea was I would put something here and use this as a, as a kind of overhead camera to, you know, demonstrate something. And so that was my idea. And I was hoping to use today for the keyboards and the styluses that, you know, we discussed earlier. I thought it'd be a great help. It's, you know, sometimes it does some weird stuff that doesn't make any sense or some of them do weird stuff and some don't. For example, one of the things I found is if you ask Google Gemini or Microsoft co-pilot who the current president of the United States is, it will say I will not answer that. But if you ask Siri or open AI, a chat GPT or meta, meta's messenger AI, I forget what that's called, it will all give you the answer and provide some reference. So, you know, it depends what you're asking. Especially confusing when you're asking very, you know, straightforward questions that it's jumping ahead of you and presuming that you want to get dicier about this thing. I mean, you're, you know, you're almost like, well, if I really didn't know, like imagine traveling to another country where you didn't know who the president of that particular country was and you wanted to know and you ask and you're told, I can't tell you that. Now that seems really suspect. Why can't you tell me that when we know that it's, you know, it's trying to avoid a fight in a sense, but I don't really want you to infer that I'm going to start fighting with you large language model. I think I just want the answer to what I literally asked. In fact, I don't, I don't, you know, I didn't try that. But you know, imagine you're visiting the United Kingdom a week or two ago and right after the election or the not the election, but right after the whatever they called it there. I guess it's an election. You know, you found out, you found, oh, there's a new prime minister. Well, who is it? Oh, I can't answer that. Yeah, I can't tell you who won the election. But, you know, every new site on the, you know, in the island can tell you, but yeah, I can't. Yeah, it's sort of a weird day. I've really been working to try to do more with AI and, but I still am finding that I'm not, I don't natively think to use it in the way that I think its designers would hope I would start natively going, oh, I'll just ask this AI and it will tell me. Yeah, yeah, maybe you're just too smart and, you know, I truly believe that, you know, for me, you know, being not on the smart side of the scale. I, I just ask it a lot of questions about, like I said, sometimes it doesn't answer me. In a way that, you know, for the detail, like trying to get this thing to work as a webcam, I'm sure it's just a privacy setting that I can't find so far that I need to, you know, flip on or off. But it's failed at that. But it got me pretty close, you know, it got me, you know, nine out of 10 steps. And other questions I've had, mostly how to like, you know, how do I do this? And especially on Windows 11, which, you know, or the, or the co-pilot plus PC, which is brand new to me literally, it's been really helpful. Like, you know, what are the major new features in co-pilot plus PC? That's really good a question. It works well. I, I, I don't have a professional subscription for either Gemini or Microsoft. I know you have the Microsoft co-pilot subscription. So even with my lower end AI, I think it does a pretty good job. And I'm, I'm pretty impressed by what it does. My lower end AI, it's like you're using a bargain basement one, like you went down and just, you know, bought the cheap stuff. Well, you know, you know, at some point, what they're going to do, is they're going to have to create a new scale, let's call it a cute artificial clothing. And, you know, you will say, you know, like how when you, when you subscribe to virtual machine, like, what is it? Windows, is it called Windows 365? Yeah. Or you can subscribe, you can get a virtual Windows 365. They'll run on anything. And, um, you, and you can scale it to having so much memory and so much process, so many processors. We may have a a cute artificial quotient that says, how smart do you really want it to be? It's like a hundred, you know, throw is like a 125. And for a million dollars, you get the genius level in 160 or something, a cute. It would be really funny that if it knew your IQ, it could, you know, say, well, for you, you're not going to get out of the base package. So you should go for some higher or, oh, you're probably going to get a lot out of the base package. You know, we could, we could confidently say that you'll, you'll benefit even from the free product here. People might find that a little bit offensive if the, that the AI starts saying, don't worry, we got you on the free tier. You're good. You know, there's a short form of MBTI for the personality thing. We need a short form. Thank you. Tony, don't bring up the MBTI. I do not recognize that infernal instrument as anything useful in any way, any time. We need a short form, a Q. It asks you 20 questions, you know, besides what level of AI you need. I mean, it will be interesting future, future. It's almost like we should go into business creating it now, because it seems like that's something that would take off like the MBTI, you know, be able to sell it to gullible people. Hey, I like it. Yeah. When you put the creds, you know, right after this podcast, we'll found our AI startup. Aq, artificial gold. Thank you. So, next up, I had, you know, home automation. I feel like I have a lot of home automation, but when I see people doing really cool things like my, you know, this and that, and it knows when I do this and it has this presence defection and all that, like, wow, there's more I could do there. What about you? Do you see AI or not a home automation is something that you could get into if you gave it a more shot or you just happy with what you got now? I'm reasonably, I don't have a lot. Basically, at the moment, my home automation is, well, maybe not even automation, but my home, digitalness, is limited to some lights that will respond to you know, voice control, although one of the voice controls just died, I think. So, I have to try to run a turn on my light, which is like, there must be a button here that turns it on somewhere. Somehow I turn on this light. Yeah, and I'm not really sure this, the, the light itself on this one is not smart, but I had a pretty well-known brand, you know, to plug in as a smart switch. So, it was plugged into like the power and the lamp cord is plugged into it. And one day it just didn't work, you know, the light went on and stayed on. And what I had it programmed, or had it configured to do, I should say, was that it would turn on at sunset and turn off, yeah, and turn off at 10.30, I think. So, I thought that was reasonable. Yeah. So, I thought that was pretty good, especially the part where it turns on is sunset, since, you know, sunset varies every day, literally throughout the year. And so, you know, without even looking outside, I could tell if it was sunset, which is not always obvious by the way, because there's often actually a lot of light still at sunset. But yeah, so that stopped working. I have other lights like that. Do I have anything else? I don't have any, I have some security cameras and things, but they're not really automated. And they, you know, they're there, and I can check on them. And I guess they let me know the alert me when things happen. Like, I saw in Mongoose, in date, our rabbit pen area the other day, it slipped through the, it slipped through the fence somehow. It was a skinny little thing if you've never seen a Mongoose. So, I had to put a double fence into twine. So, hopefully, I'll stop it. Although, as our, my vet said, he says, you know, they're pretty clever. Figure that one out. But that's about the limit of what I am trying to think of anything else. And, you know, nothing, you know, except for, I guess, the home assistance, which I guess is not home automation. They play a part, but I'm not really the automation itself. What about you, Johnny? You have some speakers and speakers. I played around with it a lot. And I still don't feel like I have exactly the right setup for things. But it is interesting when you add something that does more than you thought it was going to. So, you talk about your light going on at sunset. We have a hall light over here that has a three-way switch that was never wired up completely correctly when the apartment was built in the 1970s. So, while both switches at both ends of the hallways should, in theory, operate the light, they don't. If one switch is in the up position, the other switch doesn't work. If the one switch is in the down position, the switch does work. It's just a very strange sort of thing. I'm exactly what you're saying. So, we've just never used that light very much. We'll use it occasionally. But I realized a couple of weeks ago, I had a spare Wi-Fi LED bulb, and the wall just throw that in there and keep it on all the time. And now, I'm very happy to have that light, because I haven't turned on it, sunset, and have it turn on when I unlock the living room door, so that it kind of lights up a darker area of the apartment. And I can see if there's a lurking cat waiting there for me to step on it, to be angry at me. So, it's those little things with home automation where I go, I think there's more to it than what I am doing. And if I would just figure it out, I'd probably have a much higher quality of life, but I just don't know to even think about it at the time. Yeah, and I think our expectations are pretty low. I won't include you. My expectations are pretty low. I'm pretty happy when it goes on at sunset and turns off it in the mirror. In fact, I thought the whole going on at sunset thing was amazing. If I could just get it to work again and be more amazing. Otherwise, I'll probably have a spare switch to re-automated. It is really impressive when you see people that do all of these extremely complex things. Oh, yeah. When I get home on this day, on the 13th of the month, it should be this color, because that's kind of neat. I'm like, "Okay, I'm glad you've had time to build this all out. I do not." Or people who have window blinds that go up or down or sideways or whatever on command. I'm really impressed by those folks. I don't know if I want to do that. I'm okay with opening my window blinds by myself. But I can see why you would want that. Or if you kind of use it as a law alarm, so your shades go up a certain time and the light flows in and helps wake you up. I thought about getting an alarm clock like that once, where it slowly lights up. And then, at some point, if that doesn't wake you up, the audio alarm goes off. But I usually get up before my alarm. It never really became a thing I want. I'm really thinking of anything else I wanted to automate. I guess there's some pet things I thought about. Some feeders and stuff like that. But that was more for my amusement to see if they could be trained to hit a button or something. But actually turns out that non-digital, non-electronic behaviors are much more interesting. I got a little foraging box for our rabbit. And it's got a little round wooden cover with a rope on it. And our rabbit, after a while, got pretty careful with it. He started off just kind of going into the side, but now he just gently moves it to one side and eats the food. So those kind of things are even more amusing to me. The last thing I had, and I'll put something in the show notes that we can talk about next week, because it's coming this week. But I know you'll find it interesting. So there's a teaser for next week's podcast. Modern programming languages. I'm still very much a script programmer and very much a duct tape programmer. And I look at what you can do with modern programming languages, like Swift and Xcode or Flutter and all those things. And I think if I actually spent some serious time figuring this stuff out, I would be able to write some really cool stuff. But then I realized I have no ideas. And so that's kind of a problem. That's the thing. Right software. Yeah, when I was younger, and you're probably seeing, because I know you were a developer of shareware and all kinds of, when I was younger and had actual problems to solve, you know, by myself that were not like, I couldn't buy a solution for it, I was writing all kinds of stuff. Some of it you would consider idiotic today, like I need something to print out memory in hexadecimal, which was very useful at the time when we needed to figure out what was going on in, you know, in memory and you can't see it right, unless you do stuff like that. Or I had to write a terminal emulator from my TRS-80, because I couldn't buy a terminal emulator and add a brand new modem that I couldn't use. But these days is like, by the way, even back then, basic was still way too slow. You had to write a terminal emulator in 8080 assembler. But yeah, I don't know what languages I mean, you mentioned Swift. I mean, some of the languages that I know of that are new to me, but I've never used are not new at all, like Rust and a few other things that I read about. I have not learned a new language in 20 years, I think. Yeah, I think it would be interesting if you ever want to do it, you and I should try it out and pick the same language and see if we come up with anything that's kind of remotely interesting. But I don't know. It's like I said, every time I play with it, and I do the tutorials and I walk through stuff, I go, wow, that is so cool and so fast compared to what I used to do 20 years ago. But then it just kind of falls flat. I realize, oh, I don't have any problems I'm trying to solve right now. So I don't have any motivation to keep doing this. I'm trying to learn the last languages I knew to me back then. The last two languages I remember learning that were new back then was over 20 years ago at the turn of millennium, and they were Python and Ruby. Yeah. And I don't remember learning anything since then. I mean, anything new, you know, there's been some interesting no code, low codes kind of stuff, but that's not quite the same. Yeah. Well, all of these things are, like I said, I think if I were to spend more time actually investigating them, I would find them much more interesting. Are there any technologies or anything that you've thought about? Gee, if I just spent more time with that, I'd be a convert. I'd want to use it. Oh, golly. Well, there's just so much out there these days, you know, I think I really would like to spend, well, I shouldn't say that because I have a lot of time. I just don't want to do it. I have been interested in all the AI related things, you know, the prompt writing and that sort of thing, which is really not that hard to do. With a lot of it, it's just logic when I look at some of the tutorials. But it's an interesting thing. And I would, if I had, if I had the Microsoft Copilot professional, I might try to use it to do more stuff in Excel and, you know, other, not so much automation, but to do more complex writing for it. I think that'd be kind of interesting. And similarly for Google workspace, I guess there's some, there's some really things you can do if you sort of apply yourself to write extensions and things like that. I think those are the things that would probably be mostly to me writing extensions or tools I already use, which is, you know, I forget if you are a Unix geek, but, you know, having started up life as a Unix geek in the 1970s, that is a very Unix-Linux kind of philosophy is, you know, you take a lot of little tools and you build a bigger one. Yeah. Well, and then the only thing I have left this week is a little bit of a rant about Whivings, the company. I find you like them. Well, I do own a number of their products. One of their products that I owned was their body scan scale. I still technically own it. But it started about two months ago, giving me very, about three months ago, very kind of inaccurate readings, you know, you weigh yourself and it tells you that you're at 3% body fat and you go, I don't think I'm in that good of shape. I think I don't know if I dropped from 18% to 3% overnight and then, you know, I'd clean the contacts or I'd move the scale or something would happen and then I'd get back to normal and then it just slowly devolved into, you know, it just wasn't useful. I spent more time cursing at the thing and trying to clean it in random ways than actually using it. So I contacted support and went back and forth with support. Then support went MIA for about a month. And then finally said, okay, we think yours might be defective. You tried all these things, we'll replace it under warranty because it's less than a year old because all of them are less than you. So I said, okay, and they sent me a shipping label. I printed it out. I sent it in. And I got this cryptic message from them that said, oh, when your item is received, we'll send you a message to, you know, order a replacement. You'll get a code and all that. All right. Now, when a company tells you they are going to send you a message, I assume that that's going to be the same way I've been interacting with this company thus far and that would be email, right, a message saying we've received your message. We've received your device. Here's how you get in replacement. I had the FedEx tracking information for the return. So I knew that they got the device on Friday or Thursday, sometime in the last two days. And no emails came through. And then about, I guess, a couple of days after it came through, I looked on my watch and I was looking at my notifications on my watch. And there was a notification from the Whittings app that I just dismissed without reading. So while listening bothering me about, and then I hit me, was that the notification? Surely they didn't send me a push notification through their app to reorder this when all of our support interactions have been through email. Oh, no. I went looking in the app. I couldn't find any notifications. I, you know, et cetera, didn't think so much of it. Well, eventually, this will something will happen. And then today, about three days after I dismissed that notification, I went into the Whittings app and there was a notification there going, it's time to reorder your replacement device. And I tapped on it and it processed it. And two seconds later, it was ordered. But depending on a user could go into your app and see a push notification, there should be other ways there other than that. There should be an email notification or a text message notification or a permanent sort of notification other than just this temporary pop up and hoping that they noticed the little bubble on the app that says they have enough because that's the same way that Whittings tells me that I've got, you know, a certain number of miles in this year or a certain number of weigh ins. I don't, I don't think of that as, oh, important financial related things like get your replacement $300 scale. So that's my little mini rant on Whittings. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Hopefully they'll send me a new one that doesn't die after a half a year, knows that I didn't magically drop 15% body fat in a night. Let's see, I'm trying to, can you see out there, before we, that is horrible. Yeah, that's at least here, at least you got a notification. I was, I thought that the story was, and ladies, they told you, we don't know who you are at the end. Yeah, that could have been it too. It would have been worse, true. Yeah, I just want to know that behind me, this photo, that's the, uh, the ops light, I can never remember the name. Ops bot, sorry, LBS, BOT, tiny too light. And it is just, it's literally a tiny thing. In fact, I'll switch my camera. I tested this with Jared Corriiva shortly after getting it. Let me see service camera up front. I'm going to switch cameras, and I'm going to pick it up. And this, this is it. It's just kind of a little thing. Yeah, here's a mouse. Here's the camera. And it doesn't have a shutter. I'll see the camera. Well, the camera keeps pointing at me. Yeah, it won't show you. Yeah, it won't show me. It doesn't like me. It only likes you. Actually, I guess I did turn tracking on, but the, it's a pretty nice little camera. And it's, you know, like I said, smaller than the height of a mobile mouse. And so I thought that was pretty cool. And, uh, it's, it does a, it does kind of an amazing job for, I think it's less than $150, maybe less than that. It's pretty affordable. So, um, I'm going to switch back to it. I need to light. Very good. Um, and oh, and it's got my old thing back there, but I think I can change it. There we go. There it is. There it is. Oh, anyway, I shall look forward to seeing your new surprise thing to discuss. Oh, I should, while you were mentioning your, your situation with weddings, I looked at what is three body person, three percent body fat safe. And so there's kind of, you know, some people say, yeah, that's okay. But there's at least one guy that's a registered dietitian, one person, I should say, um, that says that, uh, body fat percentage below 5% can be a warning sign of poor health, even for elite athlete. Yeah. Well, living was very, you know, and obviously if you've ever looked up the pictures of the male physique at different body fat levels, you can very easily tell that you're not 3%. Yeah. You know, just get a mirror and you'll realize I'm not anywhere near that. Yeah. You add a zero on to be about right for me. But, uh, okay. So, movies, podcasts, 518. Thanks for the discussion as usual, John. That was a lot of fun. That was lots and lots of fun. Okay. Let me, uh, let me see. That is it. Then by the team in the We'll talk to you next time.
