The WAN Show - Story Time! - WAN Show May 27, 2022

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

Try Vultr today with an exclusive 30-day $100 code for signing up at https://getvultr.com/LTT Use code LTT at MechanicalKeyboards at https://geni.us/RecNBTI Save up to $130 during Secretlab’s Spring Sale at https://lmg.gg/SecretLabWAN Timestamps: (Courtesy of NoKi1119) 0:00 Chapters 1:24 Intro 1:52 Topic #1 - Linus struggles with smartify-ing his house 4:10 Light switches, issues & costs 6:30 Presence detection, efficiency, money savings 7:50 Switches didn't work, default behavior, motion sensors 10:02 Luke on "bedroom motion," Linus's options 10:45 Issues with home assistant, firmware & updates 13:15 Navigating through JASCO's site 16:26 Linus contacts JASCO, firmware discussion 19:44 Linus asks for fanart of the executive 21:36 Video on JASCO, home hubs software 25:00 Luke tells developers to quit, Linus's frustration 36:33 Linus discussing potential options with 100 switches 42:54 Linus recommends watching the videos 44:22 LTTStore headphone shirt, new promo 47:02 Merch Messages #1 47:08 Inspirations from trip to Intel fab 50:55 Supreme Commander races 51:13 Password managers, self-hosting, authenticating 1:01:50 Sponsor - VULTR  1:03:08 Sponsor - Mechanical Keyboards 1:04:20 Sponsor - Secret Lab 1:05:43 Topic #2 - Kotaku V.S. Xbox Game Pass tweet 1:07:06 Elden Ring seamless co-op overhaul mod 1:10:28 Game pass is very profitable, game library burnout 1:12:36 Neither Linus nor Luke have game pass 1:14:12 Topic #3 - AMD Ryzen 7000 launching by fall 1:15:58 Topic #4 - iFixit selling Steam Deck parts 1:18:00 Topic #5 - Twitter fined $150M for misusing 2FA data 1:22:00 Merch Messages #2 1:22:38 Advise on tech educating, Linus orders an Uber 1:25:02 White desk pads 1:27:12 Xbox gold controller & diamond button PC 1:28:18 LTTStore Backpack update 1:30:39 Firewalla gold ft. muted Luke 1:31:16 Good multiple bay NAS brand 1:31:41 Situations where the right to repair should NOT include third parties 1:33:15 Product they wished they reviewed when it was relevant 1:35:40 Game pass & cloud future pricing speculations 1:36:40 Major exploit on Chrome & Firefox 1:37:12 Convincing that 24-Inch is worth the investment 1:38:57 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

welcome to the WAN show ladies and gentlemen we've got a fantastic show lined up for you today some big topics AMD is launching their Ryzen 7000 CPUs this fall and you know what okay Luke I'm gonna give you the good topics for a change because you complained and it was very complainy so I don't want I don't want I don't want you to feel complaining bring it up one time in 10 years and it's very complaining anyways i think it starts selling steam deck parts calls out consoles get wrecked consoles um and twitter fight 150 million dollars for misusing 2fa data 150 million also i will be explaining my incendiary tweet yesterday i had a very negative experience with one jazz co maker of smart home accessories so i'll be talking i mean really i

guess i'll be catching you up luke on what exactly happened there and why i'm a lot more angry than just if i bought a product and it didn't work as I expected. That's right. It's going to be a heck of a show today, guys. I'm going to try really hard not to have any of it be a hot take, though. Okay? It's all going to be very reasonable and grounded. Don't you have literally a topic that is a hot take?

Uh, yes. I guess it comes down to what a hot take is. Yeah. Maybe a legitimate complaint isn't a hot take exactly good yeah and you know what else isn't the intro boom show is brought to you today by vulture axiom and secret labs all right why don't we jump right into our headline topic today i don't remember what it is what did we put in the thumbnail and title? You're $10,000. Ah, yes. Okay, Luke.

Here's the problem. Great to just go? Yes. When I set out to smartify my head, honestly, I don't even know why I did it. It was partly morbid curiosity because I think you and I have talked about this fairly extensively in the past.

I'm not that huge into the home automation thing. I never have been. I am a young, able-bodied young man, and I don't mind getting up and pressing a light switch, and that's always really the way that I felt about it. But I figured, okay, we're moving into this new place. We're ripping off a ton of the drywall anyway. I don't know if I've told this story publicly but we found this um shoot you would your dad would know for sure but there's a

there's a kind of there's a kind of in wall uh plumbing piping that's really terrible but that was used extensively in the 90s oh yeah he's he's for sure told me but i'm not gonna remember the name basically you find it in your house you rip it out you replace it there's no other way to go about it because it's not a matter of if it will fail it's a matter of when it will fail so we ended up peeling back a lot more of the drywall and a lot more of the ceilings than we had originally intended because polly b polly b thank you twitch chat uh there we go because we had to pull all of that stuff out of the house and there's bathrooms everywhere so once that was done I kind of went well shoot

this was originally built back in the mid 90's it is now the early 2020's by the time I'm done with it it will be I don't know the 2040's the 2050's the 2060's god willing when it comes to resell this place if it is not wired up for I don't know, the 2040s, the 2050s, the 2060s, God willing.

When it comes to resell this place, if it is not wired up for smart home, a smart home is just going to be a home by that point, if things keep going according to the trajectory they're on right now. So this is the opportunity to put this stuff in and do it in a way that is clean and professional instead of just little nail-on cable management things all over the house. So fine, let's go ahead, let's freaking, let's wire it up then. And part of that was figuring out light switches. Now, there's a wide variety of different smart light switches,

and they all come with some kind of terrible deal-breaking problem, pretty much. Whether it's the outrageous cost or the super-closed ecosystem. In some cases, I mean, Insteon, that's the one that shut down outright, right? That gives you an example of how bad it can be if there's a hyper-closed ecosystem associated with this particular light switch. Lutron, I tried so lutron i tried so hard i tried so hard to like their switches i bought a caseta i don't even know how to pronounce it but i bought one of their switches a while back i installed their stupid little hub that you need with it

and the second i walked into the room and wanted to use it manually i was like nope pulled it out no tactile feedback on it whatsoever and the switches themselves are like like like pennies bad not tens of pennies bad pennies bad like it felt like it felt like pushing down on like rotting food or something like it had it had no It had no click whatsoever. We've got the chat talking about this. I get it. From a smart control standpoint, they might be alright.

Anyway, I came across this one from GE, or so I thought. I will get more into that later. I came across this one from GE that I really liked. If you're reaching around a corner, given the room that you'll more into that later. I came across this one from GE that I really liked. Okay. It has, you know, if you're reaching around a corner, given, you know, given the room, the old reach around, it's easy to tell which part of the button is up, which part is down. It works like a dimmer switch.

How I would expect it to work. You press and hold for dim up, press and hold to go down. You know, I'm a, I'm a nineties boy had my CD Walkman, all right? You press and hold track skip to fast forward instead, all right? So it was intuitive to control for me, and what I really liked about it was that every single switch for a nominal increase in cost has a motion sensor in it. What's cool about that is that while motion sensing is not a perfect way to handle presence detection, it certainly is an additional data point.

And if you've got these motion sensors all over your house, well, all of a sudden, you've got a really cool bit of data to throw at what we're probably going to add to it with cameras. But you've got a really cool data point to add to presence detection, which can save you a freaking ton of money, especially in the summer months when you don't need to be running air conditioning in rooms where there are not people. That's the main concern, is how can we make this place more efficient?

Because if I blow five or ten, I think it's somewhere between five and ten thousand dollars I spent on these freaking light switches, but if I blow that money today over 10 years they could pay for themselves with a good implementation okay right okay so that's why i kind of went you know what sure let's do that and while we're at it heck let's do the blinds too because you throw in some temperature sensing and all of a sudden you can kind of go or you throw in weather data you can be like hey when it's too sunny close them or when it's in when it's the morning open them up so that you have a more natural waking experience or you know whatever like i want to try that stuff because part of being a tech personality is that i'm supposed to i'm

supposed to try stuff and i'm supposed to have some kind of experience with it. So this was my one shot, my one opportunity. Now, as it turns out, these GE switches that I not only bought, but also paid to have installed throughout the entire house, which as you can imagine, is not particularly cheap. Well, they didn't work. There's a whole bunch. We got them adopted. They're Z-Wave devices. We got them adopted in Home Assistant. We could see all the different parameters. Lots of cool things you can adjust.

You can tell it, hey, you know, have a longer delay to start sensing again once you're turned off so that like you can walk away from it without it just like turning on immediately. Oh yeah, the default behavior does that. So you've been to my house, how annoying is the default behavior it's it's it's a little annoying yeah i also like i'm not used to my house has like almost no smart stuff it's not a house

it's a small apartment so i don't really need anything like there's no there's if i'm like oh i'm going to bed and i have to go turn off all the lights. It's like, darn, that'll take me 15 seconds. So it doesn't really matter. But being in a room and having it just turn off on you, like that happened to us the last time I was there, actually. We were standing around in the room, like horsing around. We were moving around a fair amount and the light still turned off. That's a little annoying. Yeah. and the light's still turned off. That's a little annoying. Yeah, and the really stupid thing about it

is that the second you turn it off, once it reaches off, the motion sensor's active again. So as you compress it, walk away from it, and it'll turn back on. Come on, stop. I actually wish for it to be dark now. No problem, though, because these are all parameters that you can adjust.

You can change the ramp on and ramp off speed. So we were playing around with it, and one of the maybe not first things, but one of the first few things that Jake and I wanted to adjust was turning off the motion sensor in places where it doesn't make sense because there could be areas where we want to use the motion sensor in places where it doesn't make sense because there could be areas where we want to use the motion sensor for presence detection, but we don't necessarily want it to control the lights. For example, in a bathroom, I might want the motion sensor to control the lights, whereas in something like a, oh, I don't know, a bedroom, okay? I don't want motion to turn on

the lights. I'm freaking sleeping unless i unless i set it on some kind of a schedule like i could create uh is this a sex thing that you what are you gesturing about you're talking about motion turning on lights in a bedroom you you have to have set that up there's no way you didn't set that up. I actually was thinking about it completely in practical terms. Okay. Practical terms. Yeah, sure. Okay.

I mean, look, speak for yourself, but people like me, we don't need the lights on. Okay. In the bedroom. You can find your way around. My face might be all right, but there's things you don't want to look at. Okay. Oh, no. Oh, no.

Oh, no. Okay. So we tried to turn the motion sensor off. It completely didn't work. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Home Assistant team, okay? My immediate reaction was, man, bloody open-source software, bad product. Home Assistant, come on, guys.

You got to get your act together. I didn't say it, but I did think it. I thought it for a couple of seconds and so we first tried to troubleshoot through Home Assistant. Okay, do we need to apply the setting in a different way? Do we need to try it again?

Does the switch... Then we thought, does the switch need a little while for it to apply? But then we had a different model of switch that's not a dimmer. It's the same. It looks identical. It has a different model of Switch that's not a dimmer. It's the same. It looks identical. It has the motion sensor, but it's not a dimmer.

And that one worked fine. We were able to disable the motion sensor. And we went, oh, hold on a second. What's going on here? So we checked the Home Assistant dashboard, and the Switches are running very different firmwares. After some quick Googling, we realized the Switches I just bought are running firmware from, as far as we can tell, four or five years ago.

And I'm sitting here going, who ships a product like that? I literally went to OnePlus's factory, like Oppo's factory, and they showed me how it works when you apply software or firmware to your product on the way off the assembly line and there should be no reason why they can't just load a newer better image so that it ships with updated firmware so supposedly the newer firmwares have fixed this it's not selling problem right so okay luke tell me you realize the firmware is out of date on your product what should you do update okay how i'm assuming because it's a smart home device you could you could ota over the air okay so because i'm using home assistant um which is like uh i don't do i don't

do home automation stuff no that's fine no no no no i'm just this is my assumption it's all good that that could be that could be a valid way because i'm using uh because i'm using home assistant uh you can push an update through home assistant but it's it's not it's not just one ecosystem right like it's this it it's an amazing, amazing platform that ties in through like third-party plugins and all kinds of cool stuff, ties in like most smart ecosystems into one cool platform, one integrated platform.

But what it needs me to do is it needs me to point it to a firmware file okay so i can click the device i can go into advanced update firmware and then it prompts me for a file so what's my next step then um you you get the file and you give it the file okay well i mean where should i get the file is this so this so this is firmware from JASCO, right? I'm just kidding. From JASCO. Yeah.

Well, I would think so, but did they not, they don't have, I went to JASCO's website and the support section of their website. Okay. Let's just, why don't we visit JASCO together? Let's visit JASCO all together. I'm trying to find it. Uh, all right. So let's, uh, let's go on a little, what?'s do this right now all together i'm trying to find it uh all right so let's uh let's go on a little what no not right now okay by jasco.com wait what why is there what

is by jasco.com why do you have by jasco.com as your ad and then jasco.com oh because jasco applied sciences is completely different yeah it's it's byCO. Okay, byjasco.com. Okay, so maybe I might click support. Does that seem like a pretty cool place to go? Mm-hmm. FAQ, resource library, refund return policy, contact us, order support, promotion details. Well, resource library maybe, right?

I mean, come on. Luke, let's go through it let's let's go through it together let's go through it together i i yeah i'm trying to uh the the interesting thing to me is google is auto filling a lot of this so people are looking for this stuff right and are clearly unable to find it uh but yeah okay i'll go along specifically with you so so what i clicked on here was resource library yep okay. Okay. Ooh. And then I scrolled down and found nothing interesting at all.

Ooh, energy tips. All right. Well, what's our next path here? What do we do next? At this point, the next thing that I did was I left the BuyJazzCo website and I just went to Google. And I because I was like, whatever.

I don't know. Maybe it's weird navigation on their website. Maybe I don't know how to find it. Who knows? So I just Googled BuyJazzCo firmware download or firmware update. I did both. Both of them auto filled. It knew both of them were things that people are going to look for.

Yeah. And neither of them got me anywhere. were things that people are going to look for yeah um and neither of them got me anywhere uh the the first page that came up was the support page because that's probably where most humans are going when they're looking for this thing um but there's clearly nothing there um they have an faq yep but it's like i don't know Maybe I don't understand this so much, but I expected there to be... Oh, this is just an... Wait, hold on. So what exact product do you have?

It's a GE and Brighton dimming motion sensor switch. So they don't have a section called switches. They have Wi-Fi, Z-Wave. Yeah, you could open up the Z-Wave FAQ. Sure, sure. I'm you could open up the z-wave faq sure sure i'm gonna open up the z-wave faq why not now let's control after firmware nope no nope nothing about that nothing about that okay so then i mean so now i would get angry on twitter i don't know i went one step further i mean come on you can't go straight to being angry on Twitter. I don't know. I went one step further. I mean, come on. You can't go straight to being angry on Twitter. Yeah, no.

I would email them or something. I would have contact support. Well, you know what? Good guy, Jasko. Their number, both their local and toll-free, are listed on their Contact Us page. They have product support. You can actually contact their product support

both via phone and via live chat so we tried both of them okay and you know it seems like a pretty straightforward thing hi i have an outdated firmware i would like to get the updated firmware what pray tell mr lafreniere do you think was the response um what I hope was the response and what based on the information that I have, I think was the response are very drastically different things. I'm expecting that the response was like, there is no updated firmware or no response.

That's what I expect the response was. Really? Okay, you're actually wrong on both counts. Nice. There is updated firmware. There is updated firmware there is there is updated firmware from as recently as i believe earlier this month this product is absolutely still receiving updated firmware that as far as we can tell from the information we found online seems to resolve the exact issues that we're having with the product.

This sounds great. Sign me up. Oh yeah. And we got responses both by phone. I waited about 12 minutes on hold and via live chat. So we got responses and there is new firmware. So why am I mad? Is there no way to like upload it to the device? Oh no, there's a way to upload it to the device it's through the home assistant interface very simple yeah you can up home assistant will allow you to update your z-wave device all you got to do is plunk the firmware file into the into the browse file explorer thing and it'll it'll upload it for you will it will it update the device oh yeah does it just store it okay so the new so the new firmware is on the device?

No, no, no, no. Well, I don't have it. Oh, they just told you that they have new firmware. They didn't give it to you. No. Well, why would they do that? Why? What?

What did they say? Did they say they just wouldn wouldn't do it or like what how did this communication happen i don't understand so they immediately so they very not immediately but they very very quickly responded and told you that they do indeed have exactly what you need and it is digital and they can give it to you. No problem. But they won't. But that's what they said. Why did they say that firmware is proprietary?

We do not provide that firmware to end users. Oh, my God. So I want Okay I want to have I want to have a little Fun here okay Wow I'm so Bothered right now

It's not even me I'm so annoyed Wow oh man I would like our audience members who are artistically inclined okay sorry sorry i should be muted i would like you guys to draw i i'm actually going to request fan art for i think the first time ever i would like you to draw for me the executive who made this decision that firmware cannot be provided to end users due to because it's proprietary i feel like i don't i don't want to offend golfers but i feel like you should have him golfing while he says it i just i just want to see i just want to see i i want to see

what what this story inspires you guys to come up with. And so naturally, I mean, I have to confess, I kind of lost it. Because I just, I don't, I had the same reaction as you, except that I'm out like 10 grand plus installation fees. So my anger is extremely, extremely high right now. And to be clear, my anger is not just because I wasted money. I've lost money. I've lost lots more money than this.

Running a business, you make mistakes. You lose money. You screw things up, right? You hire Colton. You have products that don't work the way that you expected them to. I mean, we lost a ton of money on those URSA 12K cameras. You don't hear me putting black

magic on blast because of it because at the end of the day we didn't do our due diligence validating it and that's you know that's that's our bad it just didn't end up being as good as we had hoped this is not that this is not a product not meeting my expectations so i'm this is just a blatantly anti-consumer action. Having it be your policy, your official, actual policy to refuse to provide firmware updates. Okay, so do you know how you're supposed to get them? How?

Do you, like, mail it in or something? Through, like, a compatible... I believe you actually can mail them in actually i don't want to rip them all out of my wall mail them in and then put them all back in my wall though that is not happening um especially when the real solution is so easy to provide me the firmware update so the way it actually works is that you are expected to go get a smart hub that is able to, I don't know, that JazzCo maybe provides the firmware update to and then updates the switches for you. But here's the thing. Since we shot the video we've actually done a little bit more work already on this.

Step one is that there was literally nowhere within driving distance for me that I could go get a smart home hub and bring it back in order to try this. So they're just, they're not terribly accessible. So really what this means is that probably from some integrator, there's going to be some kind of hub that maybe, and JASCO would not guarantee this, maybe would have newer firmwares that might help me, but they... But they wouldn't guarantee it because they already shipped you a device that had firmware that was four years out of date.

So they don't know. They wouldn't guarantee what version. Maybe the hub's eight years out of date. Because here's the model. Here's the model. What they basically embraced is the U.S. telecommunications carrier model. Whereas the manufacturer of the device, you write good software with new features.

I mean, maybe it's not good. I don't know. I mean, we've seen the level of incompetence here. But you write software, okay? You write software that presumably is helpful. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't bother writing it, okay? presumably is helpful, otherwise you probably wouldn't bother writing it, okay? And then instead of sending it to the end-user's device, you willfully insert smart home controller hub manufacturers as the gatekeepers who get to decide

whether you will or won't get updated firmware that has functionality fixes and new features. And making it even worse, you willfully, obstinately refuse to allow end users, who by the way, can buy your products. I bought them off Amazon. They didn't come from an integrator. So this is a product I can buy and that I can adopt in my Z-Wave with my Aeotech Z-Wave stick and my Home Assistant controller,

which is running on a Raspberry Pi right now. So I absolutely can get it and use it, but I cannot update it. I can't use it properly because you will not provide me the firmware update that I need in order for it to actually work. How does this make any sense? Help me, Luke. I would bring up right now, if you're a developer that works for Jasko and you spend

your time making these pieces of firmware that, as far as i can tell by this story literally no one ever gets to use um i would just make sure that you know that it is a vibrant uh tech space out there right now and there are many other jobs you could have and if you all quit at once um you could all have new jobs very quickly. I don't know. I don't know how much Shazco pays, but it's very likely you could even be paid more. You could live pretty much wherever you want. There's tons of different companies that are offering work from home right now.

Yeah, I would take this opportunity for a potential career change so that more people can use what you work on and it might be more impactful. career change so that more people can use what you work on and it might be more impactful. I'm just, I'm so, I'm so, I'm so frustrated right now. And it's just, it's one of those things where like you said, you see, you see the auto completions in Google search because it's just flipping obvious that if there's new firmware for a device that you should be able to download it. This is how like basically everything has

worked forever yeah yeah unless you're unless you're just i don't know unless you're jazco unless yeah yeah i would i would say if i had to guess i would say that some non-tech savvy executive level individual who doesn't really understand that giving the like giving the firmware files to a customer uh does not give them the source code of the firmware like maybe they just don't maybe they don't understand the difference between this is this that that statement right there is actually why i brought up that like seek a new career thing, because clearly the people leading your company have like no idea what's going on with you. Um,

and probably have taken none of your feedback because I can't imagine, I can't imagine developer not bringing up like, Hey, we should just let them have the firmware updates. Like we can even control the pipeline somehow if you want to do it that way, whatever. But like we should let our customers update their own freaking firmware.

I can't imagine one of the developers hasn't brought that up. What I can absolutely imagine is whoever came up with this policy just doesn't care at all about what the developers say. That's the only thing I can think of either. No engineer in their right mind. If I was, in fact, if I was an engineer,

what I would probably suggest is that we not only have the latest firmware or two, but we have a form where you can request even older ones. I wouldn't necessarily say, yeah, you should have an archive of every possible firmware for it. That could be potentially irresponsible. But actually, you know what? With the way that they roll out

updates hmm that's interesting maybe the maybe you would want to have that because that's probably the reason that they ship it with such out-of-date firmware because there are probably smart home hub manufacturers that are running like ancient firmwares as their as their official platform and they need to have an earlier one to update from in order to go to that one so so i probably would say like hey um we should have the last couple and then as a as a nuclear option we should have this like og ancient one so that we can point people to it as customer support and say hey why don't you try flashing that one and then you can re-adopt it into your thing yeah and it'll it'll make its way up to the one that that's needed um so i i'm at the point now where it's

time to decide what to do there is not an alternative that has a good feeling switch with a motion sensor in it so if the goal and, and like I said, you've been over it. Like the motion sensing, like lights turning on as you walk down the hallway, walk into the bathroom, go into the garage. I mean, it's kind of cool, right? It's generally quite good. Yeah.

The only thing, and this is always my problem with them. The only thing is when, if you're just chilling in a room and they turn off. That's the only thing. But yeah, other than that, it's fine. And I will admit, I pressed the buttons sometimes, and they felt alright. Yep.

The quality of the Switch itself, the actual hardware seems fine. I just need the firmware. And, you know, I feel like I, And you know I feel like I feel like a lot of the time I kind of go off the rails And I get really angry about stuff

And people don't understand it Like it might seem like In a world where so much is going wrong Really? You can't get the latest bells and whistles On your smart light switch? Wow, so out of touch Linus But it's not about

that. It's not about the magnitude of the grievance. It's about the unnecessariness of the grievance. It's about the shocking stupidity that led to my time and probably countless other people's time being wasted

for no reason. In a lot of situations we we bring this up all the time right like if it takes if it takes an influencer using their platform in order to get something done then it's it's not necessarily a win that that thing gets done it's only a win if the entire process changes and that's honestly that's i've already told them that's the only outcome that i'll accept if they say look we'll send you an nda and we'll send you the firmware file i'm going to send them one of these because that's not a real solution the real solution is that they have a download portal on their website for the firmware for their products that's the only solution yes some way for them to have a pipeline for updating their devices i mean i've seen well they have

a pipeline it's just a stupid one with stupid third-party gatekeepers but i want nothing i don't mean i don't mean with some weird hub i mean like through software or something like that but yes um so what i was going to say is sometimes when you are in this situation, you have to become disproportionately loud, if that makes sense. I'm talking to the audience right now, not you, because I think you get it. But when you run into something like this and you're like, oh, I'm potentially the first person with a large platform or whatever else that has ran into this problem. And it's looking at how this goes

through communicating with the company. It's not like they're like, oh yeah, here you can have it. We don't have like a public download form, but you can just have it because that would be fine, whatever. It's not great, but who cares? You have to be very loud

so that actual change happens and they don't just fix it for you. Yes. Because the actual goal that you want is you want actual change to happen that's exactly it and so if honestly we didn't manage to finish the video the video was supposed to be kind of a puff piece like it was supposed to be just hey linus Linus and Jake are horsing around for a few hours, like, setting up some cool automations and home assistant integrations and showing you guys the potential of this, like, really cool technology that, yes, costs a lot more than a regular dumb switch, but if you were upgrading anyway, and you have a Raspberry Pi kicking around, maybe it doesn't cost as much more than you thought, and for a couple of key rooms could actually be really cool. Like, the idea was to just show this technology being used in a way that's really practical and makes a ton of sense, and turned it turned into this just angry bashing our heads against a brick wall why is this happening and i i just i'm sorry i i don't remember how i started the sentence anymore

but it was just it was so infuriating jasco managed to through their own utter incompetence and or ignorance turn what should have just been basically a free promo for their product i wasn't even reviewing it i was just integrating it into my home and showing cool things it can do right they they turned that into now this is gonna has to be a multi-part video because I didn't manage to successfully integrate the freaking product and now I have to find another solution. So they basically just turned an easy W into a giant L. So what do I do now?

Yeah, I don't know. There's still opportunity. I don't know what There's still opportunity. I don't know what you do, to be honest. There's still opportunity for Jazzco to fix their situation, though. Well, yeah, they can. Because it's probably ignorance. Like you said, ignorance or incompetence is probably ignorance. They're probably not listening to their dev team.

This is a big opportunity for hopefully their dev team to go like, hey, this thing that we've probably already talked to you about needs to happen and they could react and add a download section or just start allowing people to to get the files through support tickets or whatever else what are the odds if they're so willfully ignorant that they've maintained this policy up until now come on and and there's i mean i doubt it i i mean i even asked i asked explicitly so you make the switch yes we do so you write the firmware yes we do but you will not send it to me no we will not in such simple terms because i even thought as i was on the phone with them i was like okay well maybe this is one of those things where because it's it's like branded ge but jasco actually makes it maybe there's some

kind of weirdness where it's like it's someone else's ip and they they can't send it up but but the point is just however far this has to make it up the chain whoever's making this decision is so far out of date that it has to be willful like you can't possibly you can't possibly be working in the technology industry and and and manage to not understand why sending a firmware out to your end user is a good idea unless you just sit at your desk la la la la la la la la la every time an engineer comes in and tries to talk to you i don't know how else to put it yeah i mean it's a it's a horrible experience and we've seen a lot of home automation brands go down i think you mentioned that earlier in the show um it makes sense It's even at this point, I would say it's a relatively young space. Um,

for sure. You're absolutely right. Uh, so yeah, I mean, there's an absolute opportunity for jazz code to just fail as a company if they don't become more, uh, uh, I wouldn't even say that's user centric. I was going to say if, if they don't become more user centric, but I don't think that's even fair. It's like if they become less oppressive to their users. Because forcing people to have

stuff that's like a brand new product that's four years out of date is like not okay. And I don't know how else to say that. So they just need to figure it out and make sure that that's not allowed to be a thing that's it so what i could do luke is i could go out and i could buy a compatible hub

i could adopt all the switches with that hub well maybe because you don't know if that hub is going to have the latest firmware or not that's true. Okay, but I could try that. You could try it. Okay, fair. I could painstakingly adopt over 100 switches to my new hub. Beautiful. Update the firmware.

It is possible that I could have that Z-Wave hub act as like a daughter Z-Wave controller device for Home Assistant. We don't know that for sure. We haven't explored that. If that's not possible, then what I could do is I could, whatever the opposite of adopt is, I could disconnect the switches painstakingly from that hub, and then I could go around and adopt them all with their new flashed firmware back into Home Assistant. I could do that.

But unless we can use that new hub As a daughter hub Then anytime I needed to update the firmware again In the future, which as I think Appears to be being actively developed still I would probably have to jump through Those same hoops again Meaning that that is not an acceptable solution

So here's what I'm leaning to Here's what I'm leaning toward I wish to have motion sensing In my house particularly for hallways, stairwells, bathrooms, utility spaces. It's been really nice, actually. It's really cool. have to get a separate motion sensor and i'll have to get that embedded into the wall i have talked to my general contractor it looks like they can do it uh they can they can just cut a hole next to the switches and then just kind of work around the back to tap into the electrical wiring in the box uh hook up a five volt power supply there's one from aotech it's like a seven in one or something like that moisture humidity well those are the same thing, whatever. The point is it does temperature, like a whole bunch of stuff.

Put that next to all the light switches, serving essentially the same function, but at that point I wouldn't have to have these Jasko switches anymore, and the Jasko switches, even just using them as dumb switches is an inconvenience. There is a way, without doing it through software, which doesn't work, remember, because

the old buggy firmware, it doesn't work. There is a way to without doing it through software, which doesn't work, remember, because the old buggy firmware, it doesn't work. There is a way to turn off the motion sensor and just have them work as a dumb switch, but you have to pull off the plate, and there's a third button that you have to press and hold. They're not that good. They're not better than just a normal dumb switch, in my opinion.

No, they're not. I would prefer a normal dumb switch in my opinion they're not i would i would prefer a normal dumb switch if it was a dumb switch um yeah like it feels good but like we're being realistic with how good it can be while still packing all this other stuff in it yes so what i think will happen is i am going to try to find a sponsor maybe someone with you know an attitude chip on their shoulder someone a little snarky and i'm going to try and find a sponsor who's like yeah we want to be part of this and i think that through a combination you're making home automation switches now through a combination no no through a combination of sponsor dollars and just plain

eating it, I think what we'll do is we'll just rip every Jasko switch out of the wall. Rip it all out. Replace them with someone who has... We'll work through the community. I know Jake's already doing some research. Replace them with someone who has a way more consumer-friendly approach to firmware

and just, uh, just have it be, do a second, a followup video. That's just a big F you now, Jasco, Jasco can stop this,

but the only way to stop this is not to appease me. It's not about me at this point. The only way to stop this is to fix your policies, is to educate yourselves internally about what firmware updates are what the potential implications of sending out firmware updates are and learning that there's only one possible outcome to this lesson that you're learning and that is that you need to support your products through firmware updates that are readily available to your paying customers. Fair and, yes, Inovelli, that's the word I was looking for.

They've been quite involved in the Home Assistant community and would very likely be on board. Yes, Inovelli has actually reached out to us already. In fact, they were the number two choice. And the only reason we went with the GE JASCO ones was for the motion sensor, because I didn't want to put those additional freaking holes in my wall for separate motion sensors, which now ultimately it looks like I'm going to have to do anyway. Inovelli actually reached out to us and said,

hey, we know you're looking for smart switches. We'd be potentially willing to work with you on firmware updates and build new features for you if you require them. So basically I made a mistake. Jake pushed hard for you if you require them. So basically, I made a mistake. Jake pushed hard for the Inivelli switch. That's the other end of the spectrum. That's fantastic. And I really wanted the motion sensor,

but there's also stuff on the Jasko switches that I don't even know if the new firmware is going to fix because I can't get it and I can't try it. For example, we want to operate it without a fade on and fade off. There is a parameter that we did get working for adjusting the speed of the fade on and fade off. But in some rooms, like, for example, in my son's room, he wants to use a smart bulb. He wants to use, like, one of those ye lights so that he can have, like, RGB lights in his room.

And I was like, oh, yeah, that's cool. But smart bulbs don't always play well with smart switches. yeah that's that's cool but smart bulbs don't always play well with smart switches and one of the reasons is that smart switches tend to um do have like fade on fade off or dimming functionalities that are not that don't work well with a smart bulb now that doesn't mean i want to put a dumb switch in there because if i wanted to do something like turn off all the lights in the house i'd like to have the switch be controlled without having the Yeelight app on my phone tied into homelessness. I'd like to have a minimal number of apps and tie-ins required to have basic functionality. So what I wanted was the ability to set the Switch to have an instant on, instant off mode that you can activate. I don't know if the JazzCo one has that, but in a Veli,

if they don't, well, I'd be able to say, hey, here's what I want. Here's why I want it. Here's why it'd be beneficial to your entire community, not just to me. And they expressed interest in working with us on that. So I think that's the update. Guys, you're still going to want to watch the video just because it is such an emotional roller coaster. we were really pressed for time that day we were trying to get the smart lighting video done and the hvac update one done and then um this just completely threw a wrench in what was supposed to be a simple shoot where we adopted some switches showed some cool automations and called it a freaking day and just one of those situations where having labs like running and having the labs website

would be pretty cool because i'm sitting here thinking like i i want to make sure because this this is a terrible thing for someone to run into, especially if they don't have a platform, right? Yeah, for sure. And I don't want people to run into it. But if you title the YouTube video, like, you will have firmware problems if you buy Jazz Co. switches. That's just not really going to go very well.

So just because it's just very boring of a of a title so i want to make sure that it would get traction with people that might be like hmm should i buy this switch and i would hope that this this content would come up but having the labs website you could absolutely do something like that um i'm excited man i'm excited yeah yeah oh why don't we do a couple of merch messages we've actually got some deals on ltt store for this week uh we are launching a new oh oh dang it oh i don't have it on me we're launching a new headphone t-shirt uh okay what is the oh crap what is the best way for me to do this oh okay the first thing i'm gonna do is share you Inovelli's firmware download page, which includes beta firmwares and change logs and all the things that you should have on a firmware download

page. So that's pretty cool. And then the next thing we're going to do is head over to LTTstore.com, where we have the new headphone shirt. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, a new design from the one and only Laloid Pan. Looking pretty sharp. Kind of audio-inspired. In other news, we've got a couple of promos this week.

We need to generate... I mean, look, I'm all about being honest with you guys, okay? We need to generate some cash flow to pay for our final payments for screwdrivers and backpacks. I have stubbornly refused to take pre-orders on them, so I can't take your money in that way. So we're running some promos. We're doing a free shipping promo, but because of some limitations in Shopify's systems, the free shipping promo is honor system in a sense if you kind of get what i mean discount code honor the american way or honor with a u the british canadian way will get you free shipping on orders of 89.99 or more it is intended for use with the Team Red and Couch Ripper pillows.

Please don't use it for anything else. That's right. Free shipping on your entire order. Okay. If you buy all products, here we go. The Couch Ripper or team red pillows in I believe it's the largest sizes So team red 50 by 50 centimeter this guy right here or the couch ripper Which is this guy right here in the I believe it's yeah 65 by 50 size So the the big guy right here So both of them are over that threshold and you will have free shipping for your entire order on lttstore.com. Don't use it for anything else. The code probably ends at midnight Pacific tonight,

unless Nick thinks that it's gotten out of control and shuts it off early. Okay, bye. That is the end of my notes about it. And with that, we have some merch messages. Oh, yeah, sure. That makes sense. From Tim.

Linus, did your trip to the Intel Dev Center give you any ideas for testing methods or methodologies for the lab? Oh, my God. I mean, there's so much stuff there that's just beyond what we could afford to buy, even if we wanted to. I mean, it's not like we're going to...

Man, did you watch... Even Linus's blank check isn't that blank my dude yeah my my blank check it just it's not long enough you know it's a blank short check short check okay yeah and cash is a little tight right now over the next sort of 12 to 24 months, my belief is that through Screwdriver, Backpack, some of the other launches we have coming, LTT Store is really intended to fund a lot of the lab equipment we're gonna need.

And then my goal, just to give you guys some idea of how I expect the business model to work, is I don't really expect to make back the equipment, if that makes sense. What I need lab to be is self-sufficient on like a month-to-month basis. So through the site, through any channels, any additional YouTube channels that we spin up

around lab content or anything like that, I need it to be break-even, to cover its own payroll and its own monthly mortgage or rent right but the equipment the goal is that we make enough on ltt store that we can that we can afford those big outlays right and get labs to the point where it's set up enough that it can that it can coast that's the goal um lttstore.com you know it's been great it's been one of the biggest success stories for us ever but we're not going to be able to afford a lotta luke did you watch those videos uh i i watched some of them a lotta to me is a russian car so there's a cooler LADA okay so I believe it's the LADA is the one that allows Intel to fire a

laser add a silicon dye and actually change the properties so that they can test what redesigning the um what redesigning the chip and remanufacturing it would do. It's utterly incredible. I didn't even think technology like that existed, but it does. And Intel has it in their testing facility. Like I'll never have anything like that. I mean, even the way that they have heated and chilled water plumbed throughout the building and then running to all the test benches.

So you just turn on a tap and then you have a controller there that gives you the exact temperature of water you want to test. Like that's, it's not the kind of thing that is likely for us to be able to do. But we are- Pretty sweet though.

It's pretty sweet. But I guess there was some inspiration. Like I thought it was really cool the way they had their test benches in drawers. Like I could see us maybe implementing something like that. It'd be the Ikea version of it but but a lot of a lot of their uh a lot of their test benches looked like uh and so i i'm pretty sure i watched the whole thing i'm just not remembering names and stuff

um a lot of their test benches looked like just like open bench table style configurations and and a lot of their their like racks and stuff just looked like extrusion i think we could get that type of stuff but some of the some of the machines and things that they had like you were saying that like oh we can just set the temperature of the water to be whatever we want and stuff like that um without having the the loops getting all screwed up and yada yadaada, yada. Like that's, that's some pretty advanced stuff. But yeah, I think, I think the benches and having them slide out and stuff, there's, there's easy ways to do that. We could do that for sure.

From Eric, UEF, Cybrand, Aon or Seraphim? I started out in UEF and so I just never really learned the other races. Good question. Because of that, I do the same thing. Right, because I taught him how to play. From Anon, I want to get your opinion on password managers. Love the idea behind them, but it's hard to trust one company with all my passwords. Yeah, I don't know.

Luke, you want to speak to that? Don't trust them good call good call try to it it almost feels like a necessity in the modern age because you're if you if you do like anything you're gonna have way too many passwords um single sign-on is becoming more popular that is an interesting thing but that also has a very similar problem where one thing is going to control access to many other things. I think there's going to be some major disruption

to passwords and logins in the next five to 10 years. I think there's going to be some extremely major disruption to that whole field. But there is a range of security options that you can choose. There are some like self-hosted password managers that you can have. So that's a much higher level of security

that you can have if that's something that you're looking for. There is also some expertise, some maintenance and some management that come along with doing that. So you have to be willing to actually do that. It's like that it's like it's one of those things where i feel like there's there's a group of people that will jump straight

to well you should self-host it without really considering that for a lot of people even the act of setting up a password manager is a lot to expect yeah yeah for sure yeah. So that's not an option for everyone. And then if you do decide to use one, just make sure. If you follow some news setup of some type, add to your feed the keyword of the name of that company so that you can keep on top of it and hope that it's open source so that the security of it is constantly being evaluated um and to be clear make sure that 2fa is on everything is not a magic silver bullet no no no it just means that it's constantly being evaluated by a multitude of sources unless it's a very small open source project and nobody happens to be looking at it

absolutely true it could be completely abandoned where and it could be a a situation where a zero day lasts forever because no one ever actually notices that it's there um so yeah it's uh i don't know the whole world of of that type of stuff is a little sketch right now unless you want to self-host but but that's also complicated. And if you self-host a password manager and you're not managing the backups for it properly, you're going to have a bad day. You're going to have a really, really bad day.

But yeah, also, I have heard this before. I never realized that it was a thing, but some people think like oh i have a password manager and all my passwords have like 100 characters in them i don't need 2fa that's just stupid and like i don't have anything else to say about that that's just unintelligent i just okay it is a thing that has been said no um you don't even know them but okay i just i don't yeah um you need 2fa 2fa is like hugely powerful right now yeah 3fa if you can um and ideally you want to pick good factors sms is not a very good factor for you sms is a trash factor yeah there's almost

nothing left on sms for me and that is on purpose because phone numbers are so trivial to find they and and taking them over and hijacking them is so trivially easy through social engineering and no amount of better encryption is going to save you from social engineering there's nothing that you can do because the social engineering to get your phone number has nothing to do with you um it has to do with the the phone company um i had something to say and i don't remember darn it it was probably really good though oh yeah uh if if you have a company or an organization that only does SMS to FAA, um, reach out to reach out to them in some way.

Uh, if, if, if you have to use them, reach out to them in some way, like the Canadian government, um, and ask them to support things other than just SMS.

Oh, that's insane. Did I ever tell you about my stupid conversation with Equifax support? No. Oh, my God. Oh, man. So, okay, it might not have been Equifax. It might have been the other one.

But for some reason, I had to have credit monitoring through one of those services. Yeah. I literally got a newsletter from them talking about the importance of 2FA for protecting your own security. And this is literally, like it was Equifax or the other one. What's the other stupid one?

Equifax is the main one that I know of. There's two big ones. There's Equifax and then there's the other big one. And I literally got a newsletter from them talking about the importance of 2FA. TransUnion, that's the other big one. And I literally got a newsletter from them talking about the importance of two-factor, TransUnion, that's the other one. So I don't remember which one of them it was.

But I'm on the phone with them going, hey, you guys have all my financial credit information in here and you don't even support two-factor. You literally sent me a newsletter saying how important it is and you literally don't even support it. Unbelievable what can be done. They're like, basically, entry tier customers.

Yeah. So, guys, if you work for, if you, yeah, anyway, if you work for a company that doesn't do 2FA properly, please, please advocate. Advocate because it's so, so, so important. And if it's any kind of financial or otherwise personal, potentially compromising information, you absolutely have to have it be required. And even then, you still have to be careful because you could be holistically compromised and they could still get into your systems or whatever else. You still have to be careful. Nothing is a fully encompassing solution, but 2FA is a super big deal.

Oh, no, the horror stories are showing up in the chat. Sophie Mac and Cheese says, T-Mobile apparently recently killed off email 2FA, forcing you to use SMS. Like, why? Why? I mean, okay, i can tell you why because sending emails costs t-mobile money whereas to have whereas uh text probably don't that's probably why they run their own thing i was gonna say usually text is more expensive than email but yeah they run their

own thing that's funny uh glad to hear it infinity puddle okay their school district is turning off sms and moving to uh required to fa love to see it awesome good very cool good happy to hear it all right money hit us with a couple more and then we'll move on to another good job too to those it teams because i know um and they probably don't hear it very often because government and, and, uh, essentially government it teams often have to move very slowly. There's a lot of steps and hoops and stuff that they have to jump through. So if you're able to push stuff like that through to educate. Yes.

So if you're able to push something like that through, that's a big win. Good job. Yeah. Props. You're doing, you're doing the Lord's work because no one else is going to thank you for it. You're going to get a ton of angry emails. do you mean i have to do this my password is and i can always remember it and i just type it in so fast so

keep doing what you're doing it's really important all right oh okay we got someone asking why is sms 2fa so bad because sms 2, if someone hijacks your SIM, like if they call your carrier and pretend to be you and get a new SIM issued in your name, it will have your number. So if they have compromised your passwords in some other way, they can quickly go log into things, two-factor authenticate,

change out all the phone numbers associated with your two-factor and lock you out of your accounts. And it is a real nightmare. If you don't happen to be like a public figure, like I am getting my accounts back is relatively straightforward. I call my YouTube rep and I'm like, yo, I need my account back now. It's frozen. It's done. It's out. I'm authenticated. They know who I am, but i went through this back before that was not the case i lost my youtube account and getting it back took a month it's it's a really awful stressful experience and for a lot of people like and there's so much uncertainty

will i ever get it back what else have they compromised while they've had access to my email what what credentials are they changing email is basically the key to your life right it's rough sorry luke i didn't mean to cut you off there's a bit of a lag on he's not actually here i don't know if you know it's it's it's always it's way harder to do wanshow remotely it's just it is i remember after the like the the first era of isolation wanshows when we first did wan show back in office again it was like whoa this is so much easier um but even the small amount of delay you don't notice it very much when you're like gaming and stuff but when you're trying to host a show it's it's pretty noticeable um what was i gonna say though i don't really remember but

yeah anyways it's it's just it happens more often than you'd think. Social engineering is a very... In some ways, it's super difficult to be extremely good at it. But then also, anyone can try it. And if you fail, it's like, whatever. Because you just hang up. By the way, can I just say, I can totally see the same thing that I went through when I had COVID and I hosted the show.

Your brain's just a little stupid today you're umming way more than usual and you're just like dude i've felt it all week yeah that's the like one thing that i've experienced i yeah i've been i've been talking to my like family and stuff about it um and there's a there's a couple specific things because my stuff and that's all whatever but um this more than any other sickness that i've had i just yeah i just feel a little lagged you're like you're kind of an idiot today it's great and i mean that no i mean that in a good way i mean normally you're sharp and so when you're not i notice that's great yeah slow mode slow mode loop chat uh why don't we do our sponsors real quick here actually before we do before we do some more merch messages oh i just ripped that tab out of my browser perfect that's what i needed to do the show is brought to you

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We did a few merch messages, yeah. We can... Wow, that's a really long topic. God, you're so slow. Kotaku gassed on Game Pass. Xbox put them on blast. Can the subscription model really last? This is a super long topic.

What I saw was that Kotaku mentioned on, I think it was Twitter that they were like burnt out on game pass or something. And then, and then Xbox just like flamed them saying something along the lines of like, tell me you only ever play AAA games without telling me you only ever play AAA games.

And I think that's the whole story. And then the notes are like an entire page long. But it says, can the subscription model really last? I think yes. Honestly, everyone that I've talked to about the Xbox Game Pass for a long time has been very happy with it. And I think we're in one of those situations

where everyone's going to be really happy with it because companies can be very aggressive on pricing and availability. Yeah. And then once everyone switches over to not buying games and just being on subscription models, then we're going to have too many subscription models and they're going to cost too much.

Um, the same thing that's happened with video streaming services right now. I think we're going to go through the same thing. It's basically freaking cable. It's cable now. Yeah. And there's all these people putting their pirate hats back on.

And I think we're going to go down the same path. But right now, in this exact moment, things like I would probably say, especially Game Pass, in my opinion, I think Game Pass is probably the best one. But it's an extremely strong value. Yeah, Game Pass is insane.

The value proposition on it is nuts. The value proposition of Netflix was nuts when it was $7 too. How long did that last? A fair amount of time, but yeah, it's completely gone. I strongly believe we're going to be going down the same path. But yeah, Kotaku's point was just stupid.

Honestly, Xbox was probably right. They probably just play like new AAA titles and there aren't a ton hitting right now because it's not the time of year that they usually hit really hard. If I can give a shout out for something actually super cool that I'm personally very interested in that I think is launching today is a mod for Elden Ring co-op, which makes me like way more interested in playing it oh i'm down to play i haven't tried it yet you down yeah i mean neither so sure yeah

all right i mean right now i'm probably just gonna die constantly because brain like brain leg but you know um but the uh it's output lag the screen updates and it's like hold on a second i died um but yeah it looks amazing you can you can look it up it's made by a a well-known modder it adds a lot of the things to to multiplayer elden ring that a lot of players would want i understand that a lot of like hardcore hardcore souls players can be like that's not the way the game is meant to be played i don't care i like co-op games um yeah co-ops fun you can you can both mount at the same time if one of you like dies during a boss fight it switches to a spectator mode so you can watch your buddy play oh that's

cool it scales you can play with you can play with up to four people at a time and it scales the difficulty of the game based on the amount of people that are in the lobby wow that sounds like an amazing mod like it's extremely well done it's like literally everything i would have wanted from elden ring multiplayer is theoretically going to be in the game it's going to be launching on nexus mods um i don't um that sounds like like first party tier feature set like what i mean i guess we'll have to try it and see if it's any good but yeah like it's supposed to release today so i mean i haven't played it yet but it's supposed to be yeah absolutely like fantastic wow um hey there's a good comment in twitch chat for a change doomwalker42 says imagine gatekeeping how an rpg should be played that's ironic

yeah yeah yeah what you said yeah no i will role play however i wish that's the whole point um it looks like it's yeah so i'm pretty sure it launched today it already has 21 000 downloads um like it it yeah people are people are on this it's called seamless co-op for uh for elvin ring so yeah maybe check it out i'm definitely going to check it out um but but yeah i know there's there's not a ton going on right now for for new large triple a titles which is probably why you're bored of game pass if all you play is new large but here's an alternate perspective. Mike Rose of indie developer NoMoreRobots claimed that Game Pass

is guaranteeing success for dozens of devs every single month by paying them their entire dev costs and then some on day one. He went on to explain that normally you launch a game, it costs X to make, and you hope that your game plus marketing was good enough to make X back so you can start making a

profit. If you're on Game Pass at launch, it's likely you've just instantly made X on launch day. That's incredible. I mean, that's what we wanted for this model, was to have more predictability to your income as a game developer, because we've seen that feast and famine just chew

up and spit out studio after studio after studio. And and some of them folded some of them got acquired but the story is ultimately the same that as they scaled up the ambition of their projects they reached a point where they just yeah where the risk was just too high and they couldn't keep going so yeah yeah game pass very cool yes i i don't have like a huge amount else to say about this topic i just i saw that tweet too and i kind of laughed at it as well because it's like there's just so many games on game pass that there's just like no way that unless unless you have that like fatigue that people get with things like steam or if they own

like 500 games they're like I have nothing to play. There's at least 50 games that you know they'd be excited to play, but they don't want to scroll through the entire list and look into each one and actually remember why they bought whatever they bought and why they wanted to play it. Or maybe they got it in a pack of 10 things from Humble Bundle 10 years ago and they don't know that it's actually good or whatever else. But there are so many things in xbox game pass then that unless literally all you do 16 hours a day is try to play through every single game in your game pass library and even then i don't know

i feel like you wouldn't have made it all the way through like there's an insane amount of content if you're not finding anything to play in game Pass, you might not be broadening your horizons enough. Try something new. You might like it. You might hate it. But hey, you didn't pay anything for it. It's Game Pass. That's the beauty of it. To be clear, I'm saying I'm supporting Game Pass.

I love the idea. I actually don't have a subscription to Game Pass. You actually what? I don't have a subscription to Game Pass. I don't have a subscription. Me neither. Yeah, but it's really great. I mean, I like to buy games on sale and then play them at my leisure. I like to own my library of

content, but I consider that a luxury. It's an utterly unnecessary luxury. I have friends that have game pass and i have recommended game pass to some of those friends and i have recommended game pass publicly before um the reason why i don't have it is because i will recommend it because it's just a very good deal and if you're trying to be economic about things and all that type of stuff, which a lot of people should, then it probably makes a lot of sense to,

to go with it. Um, the reason why I don't is because I'm trying to lean more on my, my stuff, which is where I buy like as many physical copies of games basically as, as possible. As long as it's not like, you know,

you know, when they switched pc games to like you go buy it in the store and you get a box and inside there's a sticker that's the code yep that's stupid i don't care about that i'm not buying those um but like for switch i buy as many physical games as possible for pc i buy as many like buy it one time own it forever games as possible um but that's that's a personal thing so that's up to other people decide how they want to deal with that we should probably jump into a couple more topics because i realized i have a badminton night thing uh that i forgot about yvonne showed up kind of hovering around the wan show set and i think that's what she's trying to remind me of uh von is that is that the thing she's going to get me of. Vaughn, is that the thing?

She's going to get my children. Wait, does that mean I don't have a car? You got me. Uh-oh, that could be a problem. Okay, AMD Ryzen 7000 launching this fall. It could be really fast, up to 5.5 gigahertz with architectural improvements.

They're expecting a 15% single thread increase in Cinebench. Given the clock speed, the IPC gains look pretty small, but it'll be built on 5 nanometer TSMC, more level 2 cache with some AI shiz that has no actual details. All desktop processors will come with an iGPU. Alex Clark puts, I personally love this because it makes troubleshooting so much easier. It is actually a really valid point.

That's, I, the only reason I think I, that one's not a big deal for me. What I love about it is just that AMD's onboard GPUs are freaking awesome. So having a value option is something I wish we'd had two years ago, but hey, I'll take it now. DDR5, no support for DDR4,

it looks like. PCIe 5 with four more lanes than what we have on Intel's latest platform, support for up to 170 watt processors. And in their keynote, AMD showed a 16 core processor completing a Blender render in 31% less time. This is sort of a strange way to put it because it means that the CPU is 45% faster, notes Alex. It's entirely possible that AMD is being very conservative with their claims. All right, let's go ahead and talk about iFixit

starting to sell Steam Deck parts. Yeah, this is super cool. Here, they created... I'm just going to share my screen real quick here because... Who did this for me? Anthony Young. What a guy.

Anthony created a nice little list of all the parts you can buy and how much they cost. Now, this looks like the pro move, all right? You buy the cheap one, upgrade the storage DIY, grab the 512 gig screen with the anti-glare etched glass, and boom, there you go.

Maybe flip your standard screen on eBay for someone who broke theirs. That's looking like a pretty good value, huh? Changing out the screen is a bit of an ordeal, though. But it can be done. It should be noted if you were hoping to get a Steam Deck sooner by buying all the parts and putting it together yourself i would say that the cost probably doesn't make a ton of sense it's 400 that's for the 512 gig display but that doesn't include everything like not the ssd or a bunch of

the buttons and the heat sink and stuff so there's parts that um are not currently being sold just yet ifixit says that new parts will come parts will come online in the next few weeks, responding to out-of-stock parts by citing very high demand for their initial shipment of components. It could be a good or a bad thing, depending on your point of view, right, Anthony? That's a very good point. iFixit's main issue with the Steam Deck is the inaccessibility of the battery. That's something we talked about when we did a teardown of it.

It's glued in place and buried under flex cables. Another complaint was that the thumbsticks, capacitive touch wires, and the unit's USB-C board are soldered in place rather than modular. Those are relatively small, though. Notes I fix it compared to other consoles, and the Deck is leagues ahead of the competition when it comes to transparency and repairable design choices. So, I mean, it's sort of old news at this point, but good guy, Valve. Thank you very much for that. Are there any other headline topics we promised to talk about and haven't yet? I don't think so.

Oh, Twitter fined $150 million for misusing 2FA data. Twitter misused 2FA data of its users, misrepresented its security and privacy practices, profited off of users' data, misused phone numbers and other personal info to target advertisers, and Twitter used users' 2FA phone numbers and email addresses to allow advertisers

to deliver specific advertising to them. They violated an FTC order from 2011 that prohibits social media companies from deceptively using personal information. Twitter allowed users to use other multi-factor authentication methods such as mobile authentication apps or security keys that do not require users to provide their telephone numbers. They must notify users that it misused phone numbers and email it, oh, as part of the suit, I guess. They must notify users that it misused phone numbers and email it. Oh, as part of the suit, I guess. They must notify users that it misused phone numbers and email addresses collected for account security

to also target ads to them and provide information about Twitter's privacy and security controls. Here's what needs to happen. Sorry. Okay, go ahead. No, go for it. It's fine. Here's what needs to happen. Okay. there needs to be a centralized fund that these companies pay these fines into and the money needs to go to the end users if you're going to use my data i want to get freaking paid for it like what what benefit is it to me that they then get a slap on the wrist that gets paid to like the same entity that wastes all my money so it can waste their money too like i i don't i don't understand i'm the one who was harmed right am i not so why are they paying

a fine to the government so what i'd like to see the government do is instead of just taking this money padding their pockets is i would like them to create a system by which these fines, and I want fines to be recurring every time. I think it's like whatever organization in the States, I think it's the IRS, goes after tax stuff. Sorry, I'm not 100% on top of American things. It's the IRS in the US. Yeah, where they fund themselves by catching people

that are doing tax fraud things. Right. I suspect this is a similar situation. I'm assuming the fine goes to the organization that caught them doing this. Well, I don't know. All right, whatever.

Basically, I'm telling you guys how I think it should work. I think the users whose rights were violated should get paid. I think it should be way worse. People are saying it's called a class action. Yes, you could do that, but it's a ton of work to organize. It should just happen automatically.

Laws should matter, and companies should be fined, and people should just automatically receive the money. What year is it? If all our personal information is going to be out there anyway, it might as well be used for our benefit for a change. Give me my money. That's my hot take for the day.

That's very wishful thinking, Linus, says Twitch chat. Yes, it is. I know. I know. I just think, like, at $150 million for all the users that Twitter has, you're going to get, like, five cents. But maybe both. Maybe the fine has to entirely cover the government's costs.

And also you have to like pay whatever amount that you gained from users to the users. That'd be cool. I don't know. I think that's it for headline topics. Child Dude No says, in the past few videos featuring the Corsair 4000, you keep unscrewing the entire front part, yet you can just rip off

the front panel and you can just pull off the mesh. It's been making me mad as someone who owns the 4000D. I'll have to have a look at that. I've got a fan art to show. Firmware by Jazzco. I don't think it's the greatest fan art, but an attempt

was made. so that's nice thank you for that i don't i don't mean to be overly critical it's uh it's good it's good it's good that you tried that was good uh we've got a few curated merch messages here uh just a reminder guys whether you want to send a merch message or not we have free shipping on orders over 89.99 we intended it to be for cpu ripper uh or excuse me what do we call it cpu rip like couch ripper thank you we intend for it to be for the large size couch ripper or the large size team red pillow but there's no actual way for us to limit it because of shop's stupid limitations. So it's just on any order over $89.99. It should run until midnight tonight, or Luke might pull the plug

if it gets too bad. But just telling you guys, let's go through a few and then I'm going to have to I'm going to have to run. I have like seven minutes. From Ryan, I've sort of become the unofficial tech advisor for my workplace. I love helping but it can be tedious at times. Any advice on how to politely educate on smaller issues without seeming like I'm trying to avoid helping? Documents, knowledge bases. Yeah. Boom. Link them to, link them to a video.

Make it, make it, you know, just say, hey, I'd love to help you with that, but that's a little more involved than, like, basically, you have to help them understand that they have to be willing to help themselves. And if they're not willing to put the basic work into reading an FAQ or watching a video that helps give them a primer so that you're at least speaking the same language when you're trying to help them, then you just got to say like, Hey, you know, I really need you to, you know, you, you, you, there's gotta be like a push and a pull here. You know, like know, I really need you to, you know, there's got to be like a push and a pull here. You know, like I can't just be pushing all the information to you. You got to be willing to educate yourself. You know, one of the things that was a big change for me is I used to try to

respond to every email to our public email asking for tech support. This was back like, you know, eight and a half years ago, right? When it wasn't such an incredible volume. And I reached the point where I just couldn't do it. Every evening from the moment I got off work, which was late, to the moment I slept, which was even later, I would just sit and reply to tweets and I would reply to emails just like helping people with tech problems. I'm like, look, at a certain point, I made myself a template email and it basically was just like, look, I can't do this anymore. I'm sorry.

You need to go post on the forum or something like that. You got to crowdsource. You got to crowdsource this information. It's just not, it's not tenable for me anymore. And I would suggest something along those lines, like point them to a good resource, point them to r slash build a PC, point them to linus tech tips.com. And if they, and if they exhaust those resources you've provided and they do not find a solution then okay you know fine fair enough maybe you can make some time to help them out but they got to do they got to put

the work in first you know what i mean okay i'm ordering my uber now so bell do you mind locking up tonight of Of course. Okay, thank you so much. And then I'm just going to sprint out of here when the car comes. What's next? Oh, sorry, Luke. I can finish up Merch Messages with Bell.

Okay, cool. Well, as soon as it comes, I'll go. It says it's going to be about eight minutes. From Odin's Raven, desk pads are awesome, but my beautiful wife wants one in white. Nick and I talked about this today. Today. My concern, and this is me being a total dinosaur executive,

is that if we make a white product, y'all are going to get coffee stains on them. You're going to post pictures of your amazing setup with my white mouse pad in it and it's going to look ugly and it's going to be bad bad promotion for our in my opinion quality beautiful product and i had this argument with nick and sarah back when we did the gpu wasteland one and they got me to agree to do a light colored mouse pad as a limited edition. Before we even received the finished units,

I had gotten Sarah and Nick to do a complete 180 on it because Sarah had spilled coffee on hers twice and it looked like ass. So that's where I'm at on it. Nick brought it up to me again today and I said, yeah, I'll consider it. But I just don't think people should buy it. That's the ultimate problem is I don't want to make products that you're going to, I know you're going to eat your Cheetos. You're going to drink your Mountain Dew. Okay. I know it because I'm you. I'm there. All right. You're going to ruin it. And it's, and then you're going to want a new one and it's just more microplastics and more garbage

in an already full of plastic and garbage world. I would rather that we make something that you're going to use for 10 years than something that you're going to use for 10 months. That's my stance on it, and that's why we haven't done it. Stop being a control freak, twitch chat there's also a lot of people saying just pre-coffee stain the mat but like rings of coffee mug on the mat could work

uh i know it's gonna be a lot of them but we should go through any that are specifically addressed at at linus because he's gonna head out oh. It's not going to get here for 15 minutes. I'm going to be so late. Okay. I'll be fine. Everything will be fine. From Jackson. Yes, Jackson. Hi.

Whatever happened to the gold Xbox controller and the diamond play button PC? Our potential buyer for the gold Xbox controller, well, got sort of screwed over by COVID. They wanted to come pick it up in person. I can understand that. I'd probably want to do the same thing. So we haven't sold it yet, which means it's still somewhere. Um, to be clear, when I say somewhere, I know where it is, but not telling you exactly where it is, cause it's like kind of valuable and

stuff. So it's still somewhere. Um, and wants to buy it, I'm open to it. You know, you can get in touch. It's not going to be cheap. I consider it worth more than just the gold. And I want to finally make some money on that project. So there you go. I'm being upfront with y'all. As for the Diamond Play Button PC, it's still 100% works.

It's actually in my office on my test bench right now. It's amazing. It's so quiet. And on my test bench right now. It's amazing. It's so quiet. And because of Thunderbolt, you can even put like a rip in GPU and it's freaking awesome. From many people, any updates on the screwdriver or backpack? Still aiming for the summer or any changes in that? Backpack has gone to fabric cutting, which means that it is one step away from mass production. All the testing with uh i think we

use chima it's the company that we use for our testing all testing passed with flying colors with respect to durability and uh water resistance so it it meets our goals internally actually for durability it blew our goals out of the water it's a freaking durable bag and so that is going into mass production should be this summer but you never know the worldwide it's a freaking durable bag and so that is going into mass production should be this summer but you never know the worldwide shipping is a mess that could be locked i don't know you got what what's the new what's the new disease monkey monkey monkey you got monkey pox right like i don't know man so it'll be when it is and as for screwdriver we should have the final fix to the ratchet next week. We're pretty darn sure that it involved a new mold. So we weren't able, we weren't able to fix it by changing the zinc

housing. We had to fix it by changing the mold for this little rocker inside it. And with that new mold, we should be able to enter mass production for those as well. We've got a lot of parts already shot, so people might not realize this, but it actually qualifies to be labeled made in Canada. All the plastics were designed and shot here in Vancouver. The actual engineering was done here in Vancouver, Richmond and Langley, I think, like all by companies within this region.

The patents are owned by Megapro, who's a local company. They're in Port Kells. They're our neighbors. The only thing that's being done overseas is the zinc housing for the Ratchet. And then I believe we're doing the shafts themselves. Are the bits done overseas? Okay, I can't remember. I think the bits might be in Taiwan. And then I think the shaft and the zinc housing for the ratchet are done in China. But yeah, it actually, because of the way the costing works out, oh, and the final assembly is all done here. It actually qualifies as a made in Canada driver, which is pretty cool. What was I going to say? Where was I going? Right. So a lot of it's actually done. Like a lot of handles are shot already and sitting waiting for assembly. So as soon as the time comes,

we're going to be ready to rock boys, but it going to take some time i think the capacity of the of the ratchet factory is like 30 000 units a month or something like that so we're gonna once once we have that locked in we're gonna go we're gonna be ready all right from christopher christopher sorry how do you feel about the firewall, Firewalla firewall boxes? I just got the Firewalla gold. Amazed at how Apple-like they've made the firewall slash router without Wi-Fi.

It's the first user-friendly networking monitoring equipment. I have never heard of it. I'm sorry. Luke, have you ever heard of Firewalla? You're muted, dog. Mute king strikes again. Dude, I did so good until the end.

No, I haven't. It's quite a mouthful, though. Yeah, it's a cool name. All right. From John, what's a good 4-8 bay NAS brand? You want the NAS build that we did recently in a John Spoh case

with your own computer in it because it'll be way better. Just run TrueNAS and it'll be awesome. That's what you want. Yes. Ask a DIY person, get a DIY solution.

From Carter, having recently wrote a research paper on passing right to repair legislation, I was wondering if you think there's any situation where right to repair should not include third parties due to quality or if first parties are responsible

for the quality issue. I'm not sure if I fully understand your question. I was wondering if you think there's any situation where right to repair should not include third parties due to quality.

Oh, I see. Or if first parties are responsible for a quality issue so no the first party just simply shouldn't be liable for anything that goes wrong with your self-repair i mean i think that much has been clear for many many years i mean that's that's the reason why ford is not responsible if your local mechanic shop puts bad brakes on your car. They're responsible. Yeah. Like this is already the craziest thing about the whole right to repair argument is that we already had it.

It's already completely solved decades ago. We just need to look to the automotive industry where, yes, they are required to produce service manuals and they are required to support devices with replacement parts for some certain amount of time or facilitate the existence of these replacement parts like this is already a solved problem so everybody shut up and do the solution we already have sorry okay not no i'm calm i'm calm not panicked at all about being late for this thing that i'm a guest at well to make you feel better we have another question from guther what's a product you wish you had reviewed when it was relevant

oh wow vita maybe that would have been pretty cool that's such a cool product and I just like I never shared any thoughts on it yeah I don't know I've just I've had kind of retro consoles on the mind so I uh what about you Luke what's something that would have been pretty cool i don't know i'm thinking wrt54gl the legendary oh yeah honestly that would have been sick yeah what a legendary product remember when linksys was cool yeah for us normal folk what is that uh it's a router it was like the go-to router where the l at the end meant that it was linux compatible and you could run third-party firmwares which at the time was like a big deal and not that common that enabled all kinds of cool functionality like you could build a mesh network way back in

like freaking the mid 2000s with these things way before like you know the kits you can buy today with like your home mesh setup or whatever like way back then like ncix's freaking wi-fi ran on wrt54 gls that were like zip tied into the rafters in the warehouse like that stuff was so op so sweet there's this sweet spot with technology um where like honestly for me i don't want it to be too good because there's this sweet spot when it's still kind of jank but you have an enthusiast core behind it that's really motivated and they make some some stuff for it that's like really cool and it still exposes a lot of it's a lot of the ways that it works and you can tinker with it you can do things and it's awesome but it's it's

performance enough that like when you get it in place and it's done it's actually like a really good experience that's the sweet spot dude when stuff is in that situation it's great and you know that it's over when it's not really that fun to play with anymore because you can just set it and forget it and it's going to be fine anyways and that happens with like almost everything eventually it gets too good and then it's just like ah but that's the fun of being on the cutting edge right it hurts a little bit it's fun yeah yeah exactly like that that was an extremely fun era of like home networking oh for sure yeah relating to our game pass conversation reed asked where do you see gaming pricing going in the

future when cloud streaming becomes a norm? Do you think we'll just pay for a subscription? Will we buy games or rent games? I don't see the model changing much for the foreseeable future. Game pricing has been so stable for so long that I think it's pretty clear that if there was any way for the industry

to push pricing up, they probably would have done it. There's whole deeply analytical articles and videos about why games still cost $60. So I think you should maybe just explore that rabbit hole. But I think that cloud streaming is ultimately not going to change that model because for the people that want to own a copy of the game,

as much as you can own a digital license in the game app store of your choice or whatever, I don't see why they would discount it any more than they already do. And I don't see how they would get away with increasing the price if they haven't already. So that's kind of my take on that. From Joshua. Love the content. What's your take on the new major browser exploits going around first chrome now firefox i've been really busy um every day at work i do script reviews and meetings and shoot videos and then i go home and i work on setting up my house

so i actually didn't hear about it sorry yeah i've been like sick and haven't really heard about this but yeah yep fair enough okay from michael i just got a new job as a civil engineer in a large company how do i convince them that if you pay me over six figures providing monitors larger than 24 inches is probably worth the investment. There is nobody at our company still stuck on 24-inch monitors. That's stupid. The amount that it costs for a 27, or better yet, an ultrawide, particularly if you are working them spreadsheets, it's like the calculation for when the productivity is worth it

is on the order of like weeks, not months, like the break-even point. Like that's, you can send them this, Michael. It is so much faster and so much more efficient to get your work done when you have that extra screen real estate. And for how little, like a 27 or 32 inch monitor costs these days especially if you're a

large company doing civil engineering um it's trivial it's trivial and and a second monitor uh yes said monitors so i'm assuming that he has two but i'm just making sure there is there is productivity increases beyond two monitors they get pretty small but they are depends but if you have like getting to that second one or if you have like internal chat or tickets or something like that that kind of always need to be up it is i need a third monitor that's just the way it is you you got your two for what i'm doing what i'm referencing and what i kind of need to be aware of yeah it depends there's industries where you need like six to nine at, at like a minimum. So it depends what you're working on, but like for any random person,

almost no matter what you're doing, getting a second monitor is an immediate, massive improvement to productivity. Okay. I must go. You got to go. I think that's the end of the merch messages anyway, though.

Oh, nice. Awesome. Okay. Well, Hey, that was the end of the merch messages anyway, though. Oh, nice. Awesome. Okay. Well, hey, that was a fun show. Thanks, guys, for tuning in. We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye. Bye.

Did you mock me, sir? Yes, I did. Okay, Bell, I need to run to the sidewalk. Okay, are you going to... All right, here, I'll turn off the thing.