NC_2024_08_08
Technology Geek Podcast covers African vacation, Brother printers, YouTube channels, cameras, Elgato gear, solar inverters, UPS systems, home batteries, & tech assistance evolution. Exciting insights shared on various tech topics.
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Today on the Technology Geek Podcast, my co-host Steve and I are excited to delve into various engaging topics. We kick things off by sharing our upcoming plans for a three-week African vacation, which means there won't be a live show until September 8th. To ensure continuity, I've prepared detailed guides for our guest hosts and shared all necessary materials with them in advance.
In the programming segment, we reflect on a recent episode where we explored JQ and had a fascinating interview with Matthias Wadman. We then shift gears to discuss our experiences with Brother laser printers and the transition from inkjet, providing valuable insights for our audience. Our special guest, Jill from the Northwoods, joins us to share her expertise on setting up a successful YouTube channel, rounding out our lineup with diverse perspectives on technology trends and experiences.
During the podcast, I share my journey of exploring camera options and eventually settling on Elgato cameras. Initially considering a Logitech camera, I upgraded to the Elgato FaceCam Mk. 2 for improved quality. However, I ultimately decided on the FaceCam Elgato Pro for its 4K capabilities and future-proof features. Moving on to lighting, I experimented with different Elgato options before finding the right fit, including a teleprompter setup that enhances my video creation process. I elaborate on using the Stream Deck Plus for efficient video and audio editing tasks, showcasing its versatility in controlling editing software seamlessly.
As the episode progresses, I discuss troubleshooting experiences with solar inverters and emphasize the significance of monitoring indicators like blinky lights on networking devices. I share insights into setting up video recording equipment and creating content, highlighting the importance of a well-functioning setup for a seamless production process. The episode concludes with a call for financial support and a troubleshooting story related to solar power systems, providing practical insights for our listeners.
In a subsequent segment, we engage in a detailed discussion on troubleshooting UPS systems in households, focusing on the concept of master or computer mode and its impact on device power during outages. We recount our experiences with UPS settings and how certain configurations led to disruptions in power supply. The conversation expands to cover topics such as whole-home battery setups, vehicle-to-grid technology, and efficient electricity management, offering a comprehensive view of home energy challenges. Despite the technical nature of the discussion, we inject humor and relatability into the conversation, making complex topics more accessible to our audience.
In wrapping up the episode, I reflect on troubleshooting experiences and the communication challenges inherent in tech support, drawing parallels to the evolution of technology assistance and the potential benefits of AI integration. I emphasize the importance of verifying assumptions in power supply troubleshooting and offer a glimpse into my upcoming articles, inviting listeners to connect with me across various online platforms for further discussions and insights.
In the programming segment, we reflect on a recent episode where we explored JQ and had a fascinating interview with Matthias Wadman. We then shift gears to discuss our experiences with Brother laser printers and the transition from inkjet, providing valuable insights for our audience. Our special guest, Jill from the Northwoods, joins us to share her expertise on setting up a successful YouTube channel, rounding out our lineup with diverse perspectives on technology trends and experiences.
During the podcast, I share my journey of exploring camera options and eventually settling on Elgato cameras. Initially considering a Logitech camera, I upgraded to the Elgato FaceCam Mk. 2 for improved quality. However, I ultimately decided on the FaceCam Elgato Pro for its 4K capabilities and future-proof features. Moving on to lighting, I experimented with different Elgato options before finding the right fit, including a teleprompter setup that enhances my video creation process. I elaborate on using the Stream Deck Plus for efficient video and audio editing tasks, showcasing its versatility in controlling editing software seamlessly.
As the episode progresses, I discuss troubleshooting experiences with solar inverters and emphasize the significance of monitoring indicators like blinky lights on networking devices. I share insights into setting up video recording equipment and creating content, highlighting the importance of a well-functioning setup for a seamless production process. The episode concludes with a call for financial support and a troubleshooting story related to solar power systems, providing practical insights for our listeners.
In a subsequent segment, we engage in a detailed discussion on troubleshooting UPS systems in households, focusing on the concept of master or computer mode and its impact on device power during outages. We recount our experiences with UPS settings and how certain configurations led to disruptions in power supply. The conversation expands to cover topics such as whole-home battery setups, vehicle-to-grid technology, and efficient electricity management, offering a comprehensive view of home energy challenges. Despite the technical nature of the discussion, we inject humor and relatability into the conversation, making complex topics more accessible to our audience.
In wrapping up the episode, I reflect on troubleshooting experiences and the communication challenges inherent in tech support, drawing parallels to the evolution of technology assistance and the potential benefits of AI integration. I emphasize the importance of verifying assumptions in power supply troubleshooting and offer a glimpse into my upcoming articles, inviting listeners to connect with me across various online platforms for further discussions and insights.
Brief Summary
Today on the Technology Geek Podcast, my co-host Steve and I cover various topics, from our upcoming African vacation to discussions on Brother laser printers and setting up a YouTube channel. I share my camera journey, experiences with Elgato gear, and troubleshooting solar inverters. We also delve into UPS systems, whole-home batteries, and the evolution of technology assistance. Stay tuned for more insightful discussions!
Tags
Technology Geek Podcast
co-host
African vacation
Brother laser printers
YouTube channel
camera journey
Elgato gear
solar inverters
UPS systems
whole-home batteries
technology assistance
Transcript
[0:00]
NC_2024_08_08
[0:00]Music.
[0:04]The Technology Geek Podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Thursday, August 8th, 2024, and this is show number 1005.
[0:14]This show is coming out early because Steve and I leave on Saturday for our three-week African vacation. We're going to South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. This means there is no live show until September 8th. I'm going to miss all of you terribly till then, and I'm missing you right now because because I'm sitting all alone in my studio, and nobody's talking to me, nobody's reminding me to save, nobody's telling me to put in chapter marks. It's a very lonely thing to do, but that's okay. I do want to pre-thank Alistair, Bart, and Jill for the hard work they have coming up. I've written elaborate guides for them using Folga that lets them walk through step-by-step instructions of setting up all the tools that make the show go. I even wrote a readme file to guide them through the guides. I shared passwords with them via 1Password. They've tested the instructions. They're even planning out their content for the most part. We've got three audio and text donations, four if you count the two-parter George from Tulsa sent over, so they even have a little bit of help with content as well. I'm sure the shows will be absolutely terrific, and I hope you give them lots of great feedback for stepping in to keep the NosillaCast streak alive so Steve and I can take a vacation. All right, let's get started with this show.
[1:24]
PBS Tidbit 8: Interview with jq Maintainer Mattias Wadman
[1:24]In Programming by Stealth, you normally hear structured lessons where Bart Bouchats is teaching the audience class, a new concept with me as the star pupil who sits in the front row asking lots of questions. On occasion, Bart and I come up with ideas for what we affectionately call tidbit episodes. This week, we published Tidbit 8.
[1:43]A month or so ago, Bart finished teaching his mini-series on a language called JQ, which, amongst other tricks, allows you to query JSON files and manipulate the data within them to extract the information you need. When we plugged one of the episodes on Mastodon, we were delighted when Matthias Wadman responded with excitement about our show. It turns out he's one of the open-source maintainers of the language JQ that Bart was teaching us. Bart was excited to meet Matthias virtually through Mastodon, and he asked him, would he like to come on the show? Turns out he said yes, and he came on the show to talk about the development of the project, how many people are involved, the genesis of the language, and much more. I wasn't actually there, but then I got to sit back and enjoy the conversation. You can find this episode of Programming by Stealth in your podcatcher of choice or by going to the post over at pbs.bartofisser.net, and that would be slash tidbit eight. Now, we're going to be on a hiatus until after I get back from Africa, so you've got a month or so before there's going to be another episode.
[2:46]
Choosing a Color Laser Printer – Brother MFC‑L3780CDW
[2:46]Back in 2015, Stephen Getz wrote a review for the show entitled, Have You Considered a Brother Laser Printer? He gave compelling reasons why a laser printer was superior to an inkjet printer, specifically for those who didn't need color. As a home user, I knew I needed color. Steve and I were firmly entrenched in the HP color inkjet world. And an elaborate inventory scheme to ensure I always had at least one black and one color ink cartridge in stock for both of our printers. Since we each had our own printer, that meant four cartridges in stock at all times. At around $65 for the black ink and $85 for the color, both in the XL size, that meant I was keeping over $300 worth of ink in stock at any given moment.
[3:30]Then one day a few years ago, Pat Dangler asked me if I wanted a black and white Brother Laser Printer for free. It seemed obvious to say yes to this generous offer. We could decommission one color printer, replace it with the Brother Laser Printer, and still have a color printer for when we needed it. Now, Pat explained that the cartridge in the printer was already saying it was almost out of ink. People always say that the cartridges cost a grip for laser printers, but that they lasted forever, so I was prepared for sticker shock.
[3:58]However, when I went to buy a spare cartridge, I found a set of two brother-compatible black cartridges were only $27 for the pair. I immediately bought that two-pack. I didn't put one of them in place right away because I wanted to see how long that one would last that was complaining it was almost out. Would you believe it was a full year before I had to replace that cartridge? Anyway, Steve and I both fell in love with that lovely brother laser printer. We realized that more than 90% of the time, we really only needed black and white. Even most color things for us, they're fine if you just print them in grayscale. The laser printer was wicked fast. It had such clear, crisp text. It was actually a joy to print. And this comes from the woman who penned the article, The Printer is a Lie, and the sequel, Printers are Jerks. I'm not joking about enjoying printing now. I still find it easier to check my taxes by printing out every form and cross-checking against the previous year and the records I've submitted to my accountant. When it came time to print, I didn't stress at all, because I knew it would actually print. I've never felt that fearless with an inkjet. I also didn't feel bad about wasting ink, because I knew it was super inexpensive. With the inkjet, I'd check the balance in our bank account before printing that many pages.
[5:15]Now, on a few rare occasions over the past year or so, I've wanted to print something in color. I remember I wanted to print a one-off photo to stick into a thank you note. So I sent the photo to the color inkjet that we keep in Steve's den. I know you'll be shocked to hear this, but it didn't work. Nothing at all came out. I messed around with it a bit, but after three tries, you know what? I just sent the photo file to my local drugstore, hopped in the car, and drove over to pick it up. I had no regrets. rats. In fact, I was rather proud of how calm and stressless this pass was versus fighting with the printer.
[5:47]Fast forward to about a month ago when Steve needed to print something in color. The inkjet failed for him too. He kept working on it and he finally did some searching online to try to figure out why the printer simply did nothing at all when he sent the print jobs to it. He discovered that our color inkjet printer from HP wasn't supported under Sonoma. Now, that's not such earth-shattering news, but I found it really interesting that we did not notice for seven months. This was literally only the second time in seven months that we had needed to print color. Now, as seldom as this requirement was, we still did need slash want to print in color from time to time. We'd been compromising and printing in grayscale where color would have been preferable, and so we decided to look at color laser printers. Now, our current free brother laser printer was the HL-L2360D, and it was pretty tiny as printers go. It's 14 by 14 inches square and only 7 inches tall. It didn't do any scanning or copying, which contributed to its diminutive size. I don't know why I use that word because I can't pronounce it. Anyway, it printed at 24 pages per minute. My goal was to get a color laser printer that printed at least this as fast and wasn't a giant monstrosity. I decided to stick with Brother, not just because Stephen had recommended it, but because everyone I know who has a laser printer recommends Brother. Wirecutter recommends Brother. I mean, it's basically the fan favorite.
[7:17]Now, as Steve and I started researching available options, we created a spreadsheet, of course we did, where we started recording models, numbers, and specs. We started with dimensions and pages per minute, but quickly expanded our criteria. One thing we didn't want to do was buy a printer model that had been introduced a long time ago, which would make it more likely to be abandoned sooner. It looked like there was a big model push in August of last year, because we found a handful of good candidates all introduced in August of 2023. 23.
[7:46]Before I start talking about models and the criteria we looked at, I want to explain some nomenclature from Brother. All of the models we considered have CDW at the end of the model number. That stands for Color Printing Duplex Wireless. Now, I'm not going to keep repeating CDW as I talk about the different printers because that would get really repetitive. Now, Brother laser models either start with HL or MFC. MFC means multifunction center. That means they're a fax printer, scanner, copier, all in one. HL doesn't appear to be an acronym that I can find, but it means a regular printer that doesn't fax, scan, or copy. I didn't catch this distinction right away, so I was leaning heavily towards the HL models because they were wee tiny like our beloved HL L2360D that Pat gave us. They were small because they didn't have all of the functionality we really needed. If we were going to replace our HP inkjet printer, that had a copier and scanner in it, and we really did still need that functionality.
[8:47]Now, a few of the models I briefly considered, like the HL-L3220 and the HL-3300, both only had monochrome LCDs of only one or two lines. They were on the less expensive side at $250 and $370, respectively. I know that sounds like a lot of money compared to an inkjet printer, but remember having to keep spares at $150 for a pair of color and black cartridges? All right. Now, there was another printer-only option that I favored, the L3280. It has a 2.7-inch color touchscreen, and it prints at 27 pages per minute, which is a smidge faster than the 24 pages per minute that our black-and-white laser could do. It was $300 and had both gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi. It was also just a bit bigger square than our black-and-white at 15.7 inches on a side, but it was even shorter at 10.8 inches high. I pushed on Steve hard to go for this one, but he was all reasonable and logical and stuff and pointed out that we do need to copy from time to time, and having a flatbed scanner does come in handy too. I do a lot of scanning with my iPhone directly to our sonology of receipts and such, and Steve has a swanky Epson photo scanner, but there are those times that you need a flatbed.
[10:03]That left us with just two options, and they were higher priced and huge. The L3720 at $400 and the L3780 at $500.
[10:14]Now, the $400 L3720 was slightly smaller than the L3780, but it only printed at 19 pages per minute, where our existing laser printer, remember, printed at 24 pages per minute. it. It was also Wi-Fi only, which isn't terrible, but it was going to be sitting right next to a gigabit switch into the router, so it seemed a shame to make that compromise. In the end, the $500 L3780 won our hearts. At 31 pages per minute, it's crazy fast. It's got gigabit ethernet and Wi-Fi and a three and a half inch color touchscreen. It's a beast though. It's 17 and a half inches by 16.1 inches square, and it's almost 16 inches tall. We have it sitting on a credenza that has a 27-inch Apple Cinema display, which is still kicking, and I gotta tell you, this printer is almost as tall as that display. At first, I thought it looked atrocious, but you know what? I've gotten used to the size. One of the reasons I was able to swallow the $500 price tag is that the MFC L3780 came with a full set of toner cartridges. I don't mean like those quarter orderful fake ones, they included the DR229CL cartridges that are listed to print up to 20,000 pages, and it only costs $163 to replace those. That's a lot of taxes we could print. You know what? We didn't even bother to buy spares because I'm not sure we're going to live long enough to print that many pages.
[11:39]Now toner cartridges like this for these kind of printers come in four separate units. You get a black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. I was intimidated at first when I opened the top of the printer. Each cartridge had a very obvious cap on each end warning me to remove each cartridge, take the caps off and put them back in. It took less than five minutes and only that long because I was being super cautious because I didn't want to wreck anything. Don't worry, I didn't bother to read the instructions or anything, but I did take my time. After plugging it into ethernet, running a firmware update, changing the default admin password, adding paper and then reloading the paper because we'd actually done it wrong, we were ready to print.
[12:18]Holy cannoli are the prints gorgeous from this printer. I mean, positively stunning. We thought our previous brother, Laser, had crisp text. It's nothing like this. We are astonished at the quality. Now, for grins and giggles, I tried putting a piece of glossy paper in it to print a photo, and that was a huge mistake. The toner just sort of smeared off the paper. Luckily, I didn't do any long-term damage to the printer, and at least it settled my curiosity. I'll still they'll be going to the local drugstore every eight months when I need to print a photo. Now, we love how fast it is after a warm-up time that's listed as 12 and a half seconds. It copies quickly, scans quickly, prints double-sided on command. You know what else it does? It prints every single time I ask it to. No belly aching, no jammed paper, no realignment of cartridge problems. It just works. It even works from our phones and our iPads too.
[13:15]Now, you know I like to do a deep dive on how things work, so I downloaded the PDF manual, and it's 680 pages long. I'm not even talking about it being eight languages. That's 680 pages in English, and that doesn't count the seven-page table of contents. Now, technically, it does talk about Windows, so I guess that's a little bit of a different language. Now, in scanning through the manual and connecting to the web interface to manage the printer, it's pretty obvious that but we've put a small business printer in our home. For example, there's an NFC card scanner on the front, so if you want to restrict access to only worthy employees, you can. Maybe I should make Steve use an NFC card to be allowed just to use my new Precious. If the 680-page PDF is overwhelming for you, there's an online user guide at support.brother.com. This makes it a lot less overwhelming. The design of the interface is circa 1982, 1982, including a link to the PDF that says you need Adobe Acrobat Reader. It's required to view this. It's functional as this interface is, but my daddy would have called it ugly as sin.
[14:22]The only thing not to like about the Brother line of laser printers is their hard sell for their Tonish subscription. Lindsay, the daughter, has an Inks subscription for her inkjet printer, but it's literally a dollar a month for 10 pages, so it's a terrific deal. She can add a dollar to it if she runs out, too. But for a colored laser printer, the cheapest plan I could get through Brother is $10 a month for 75 pages. I didn't mind them offering that deal to me, but it kept asking me when I opened the app on my phone, so it's a little bit much.
[14:53]Now, the bottom line is that we did spend a large sum on a new color laser printer, but to replace our current color inkjet to get a model that worked with Sonoma would have been $150 or so, and I would have had to have kept $150 in spare cartridges around, so I'm really not that much farther behind. Now, our housekeeper's husband is a geek, and he loves it when we give him tech, so imagine his delight when he got not only a perfectly functional color inkjet with $150 worth of spare cartridges, and we gave him our black and white brother laser printer with a whole spare toner cartridge. He was just like a kid in a candy shop. I was glad to give it to him, but I was also fascinated that none of my friends or family wanted the monochrome laser printer. They either already had one, or they didn't want monochrome because they were convinced they needed color. And one more thing, in the 680-page user manual of Doom, as Donald Burr would call it, it says that the MFC L3780CDW can print photos on glossy paper. So, I guess the printer is still a lie.
[15:56]
Jill from the Northwoods and Her Simple Elgato Video World
[15:56]Well, I've asked Jill from the Northwoods to join us here to talk about her video setup, because she's done some really interesting things in improving and setting up herself for success in making YouTube videos. Welcome to the show, Jill from the Northwoods, yet again. again. Oh, well, thank you for having me on. So Jill was going to do a review of these things. And I said, no, I want to do it in an interview because I'm going to have lots of questions. So rather than writing her 28 emails after a recording and going, well, what about this? How did that work? I didn't get this part. I'm going to interrupt her constantly. So that'll be fun for me at least.
[16:31]That would be fun for me, too. Oh, good. She's got a really funny look on her face. I wish we were recording video now, but we're not. All right. So what was the problem to be solved here, Jill? So the problem to be solved was I wanted to get into having a YouTube channel. And primarily, the reason is you kept reminding me, podcasting is a whole different beast. YouTube and video, that's a whole other thing. You know, they're two separate things. I told you to run away, don't ever do it, I think. Run away, don't ever do it. But one of the things that YouTube can do for you compared to a podcast is that you watch one video and it says, well, if you like this video, you might like Jill, too. So it's a way of getting discovered.
[17:08]And my YouTube channel is actually. Yeah. But my YouTube channel, I mean, it's not doing great, but it's doing considering I just started it doing OK. And the idea is that it's going to drive more traffic, I think, back to the podcast. It's free advertising. And I was hoping to also do like nature videos to show people how to observe nature eventually. So this is part of, let's make sure we have the setup. Jill has a full podcasting empire now with what she's referring to there as the Buzz Bossom and Squeak podcast, which is just a pure delight. As I told Jill yesterday, it's the best combination of science-y kind of stuff mixed with childlike wonder at the world. And those two things combined together, just, the show is a delight. I love every minute of it. But you've also got the Start with Small Steps podcast, Small Steps with God, and what's the name of the Bible podcast again? The Bible and Small Steps. The Bible and Small Steps. And aren't there five? I feel like I'm missing one. No, there are five episodes a week, but there are four podcasts. Four podcasts. Okay. So just, you know, a slacker, not doing that much.
[18:16]And what's the name of your YouTube channel? So the YouTube channel is Start With Small Steps right now. I'm going to unwrangle this so that Buzz Blossom and Squeak has its own channel. Right now, everything is just shoving into, I've kind of split my empire into two worlds. Everything, Buzz Blossom and Squeak and Start With Small Steps is going into Start With Small Steps. And then Small Steps With God and the Bible and Small Steps is all going over there at some point. I need to, yeah, figure out a strategy, which I haven't done yet. But the idea is to get, yeah, how can I make this easy to get a YouTube channel up and running with the least amount of hassle? I don't want to spend hours doing this. Okay. Okay. So that was the goal. So you needed to acquire, I mean, this wasn't just an excuse to buy a bunch of gear and just checking?
[19:03]It's hard to tell the difference between that and a real goal. All right. So the components of what you needed to get, which one do you want to start with? Let's start with the camera, because that's where I started in the whole purchasing of this. I had a Logitech camera that I bought during the pandemic for my endless Zoom meetings that I was going to have. And it was fine. It was nice. It was 1080p, but I started doing test videos with it. Can I make YouTube videos with this camera? The quality just wasn't really there. My room here is dark by choice. I don't like a lot of light. Although i do have hue lights in here it can be very bright if i want it to but i tend not to do that so i just didn't think it was great so i went on a search to can i find a better camera, and one that's going to be easy because one thing that people will do is they'll take their big dslr or mirrorless camera and they'll hook it up and they'll use that as their camera for YouTube. And they look fantastic. And they look fantastic. But I take my camera with me. I go places with it. And I just had this image of me constantly wrangling and unwrangling. And then how do you get the video off of it? And I thought, I just don't want to do that. I want this simple. How can I make this more simple?
[20:26]So I started looking at other cameras and looking at YouTube videos of people using other cameras, and really, Elgato looked fantastic. Now, wait, you first considered your bird has a camera, right?
[20:38]Or is that, oh, when you said your big birding camera, you meant like a DSLR. Oh, okay, that's what you meant. Yeah, that's right. I was picturing the camera you have watching your bird, and I thought, well, that's an interesting choice.
[20:49]I could do a ring camera, but, you know, that would be weird. So yeah and i know that some people do macbook you know camera and say it's good enough you know yeah they're wrong no it isn't it looks horrible right i'm sorry like i say yeah i started looking at videos of what people doing this what their setup is how do they do it and two cameras came up to me and because i love algado stuff i've i have a the stream decks i've loved everything thing that i ever bought from them they have two cameras and one of them i'll start with the cheaper one first is the mk.2 i think that's mark 2 probably mark 2 yeah probably and it's called the face cam and it's fine it goes up to 1080p if you use usb uh c it's uncompressed it looks good you know, or 3.0. I think it's a USB 3.0. It's uncompressed, right? Yeah, USB 3.0. Yeah, it's uncompressed. And it's good. It has a relatively good low light meter. And it's fine. And it does really good. But part of me got a little disappointed that I went and bought this Logitech camera. And then I was suddenly buying another camera. And I thought, I just want to be done buying cameras. So buying another 1080p camera wasn't solving the right problem. The right problem, right. So I thought, okay, let's take a look at the step up, which is the FaceCam Elgato Pro.
[22:18]That goes up to 4K. And in my mind, that's future-proof because if YouTube videos all go to 4K, it'll be fine and it'll last forever. Future-proof within a given definition of future. Red camera, 8K. Right, right. But I thought this was going to last me for a while. It looked beautiful when I saw people who were using it. It has some really nice pan, tilt, crop, zoom, which the other camera had too. But when you're having a higher resolution, you can do more with it. You have more bandwidth, I think, to do things with it. And I wasn't sure, am I going to sit at my desk? Am I going to sit on a couch? How am I going to do this? So what am I going to do? But this gave me a lot of flexibility. and.
[23:06]It has a really nice autofocus on it, so if I were doing some sort of product review and I held up the mouse, it would zoom in on the mouse. It was very nice. That is interesting to the audience. I'm looking at Jill while she's talking, and I saw once, I think it was when you got up to go mess with something, I saw the focus shift all of a sudden, and it was a little disconcerting. But on the Logitech, at least on the C920s, turning on the autofocus change was basically like showing you were a noob, because it would always do that. Like it would go, I'm focused on your nose, now your ears, now the back of your head. It would go back in and out all the time. It would kind of pulsate, and you always had to turn it off. But I have not seen that. You are in sharp, crisp focus, and your background's fairly close right behind you, and everything looks nice and crisp. And I'm not seeing that bouncing, but she just held up a mouse, and it immediately focused on it. It was very, very quick. Right.
[23:59]So in my mind, it is more expensive. The Mark II, the cheaper one, comes in at about $150. This one comes in at about $300. So it is twice the price. It is beefy. But like I said, I'm just getting sick of these piles of technology I have where I say, oh, I have this Logitech camera or I have this or I have that and it's in a big pile waiting to go to some recycling center. I wanted to just be done with this. You're done. Okay, okay. And then this was around the Black Friday Christmas sales, and I know that Elgato always has some really good sales, so I waited out. Okay, so you got a little better deal. All right, so I'm sold on your camera, but the possibly more important thing than a good camera is good lighting. Right. And so this room, like I said, is dark, even though I do have hue bulbs. And if you use hue bulbs, I learned from other YouTube channels, and you shine it on top of you, you get weird shadows, where it can kind of make your eyes look sunken because, you know, it can. It might not. And I thought, okay, I don't really have any good lighting in here. But here again, because it was around the sale time, I ended up getting a little tiny portable Elgato Key Light Mini. I think it was actually on your channel. Someone announced it was on sale and I picked it up because my dream is that I'm going to go out into nature and eventually film video.
[25:20]But it's little. So when I turned it on, it really didn't light up anything much. It's a good accent light. Yeah, so in your show notes, you've got, it's like six by four by three-quarters of an inch thick. So it's a little bitty thing.
[25:36]Portable LED panel. Now, is this RGB color or different shades of white? It will go all the way from a very warm yellow to a very bright white. So it has all the ranges. All the lights from Elgato will do that. But it's only 800 lumens, which, like I said, it's far enough away that it didn't really do much. Didn't do the job. You know, one thing people use lights like that for, in fact, I've got a small RGB light that's similar to this, not quite as fancy, but it is RGB, but is you put it behind you or to like light up the back of your head or the side of your head so you get a little bit more glow on your hair or whatever. It can help with that. Yeah. And I think that out of all of this, I wish I would have researched the lights more because first I bought a very small light. I'm not unhappy with it. Like I said, I think it'll be great for different use cases. But I went next and bought the Elgato ring light because it has threads for the camera right in the center of the ring. So I thought, oh, this is perfect. It has its own stand. I'll put the camera in it. but I suddenly realized now all the gorgeous YouTubers out there love having that little ring right inside their eyes. I hate that. And I wear glasses. It takes me out of the element immediately. When I see that ring all I'm thinking about is what the light looks like.
[27:02]And so I couldn't use it as it was intended because I hated the ring and it was just showing on my glasses and it looked strange. But I spent, like I said, it was a good amount of money. It was on sale. I like the light itself because it is, first of all, very bright. It's 2,500 lumens. So it's plenty of light. This is what I'm using right now. It is huge. It also doesn't flicker. And most of these lights adjust their color, sometimes even with just a physical filter over top of it. Like you're putting a beige color slide over the top of it. This is actually built into the light. It is actually displaying the warmer and the cooler lights. Okay. Through whatever technology. And I'm not seeing the ring except while she's talking to me, she's looking up at the light and then I see the ring on her glasses. Yeah. Okay. So what I learned on YouTube, too, is that if you put it way up there and then you look this direction, people won't see your ring on your glasses. I do have a question. Why am I not seeing the reflection of your computer display? Because you're looking at me, my glasses are filled with little white windows floating on a black background because that's what my display looks like. Are you in dark mode by any chance?
[28:13]I'm not really because I have my document right here all in white. Really? So if I look down, do I look down and see? No, I'm never seeing it. And my glasses are perfectly reflecting every single window. You barely see my eyes. So it's not a ring, but you still see that. Well, that's my problem, though. Yeah, I did get anti-reflective glasses when I bought them last time. So maybe that's why. Maybe I should turn on my Elgato Key Light Air that I have up above me. Now, did you consider that one? That's like a 7 by 7 inch flat panel. Well, like I said, I think in the end, I wish I would have done more research. That ring was an impulse buy. Because I thought, oh, it's great. It has the stand. It has the thing. I didn't research any lights. I should have. I didn't.
[28:58]Um, but I should have considered more lights. I don't like my key light air because I just don't put up home kit to turn it on. And it says, yeah, I'm on. Yep. No, you're not. You're off. It's very recalcitrant. It does not obey the rules. All right. Right, right. Yeah. So the reason I went for that was it was a more of a flat panel, but it's not super bright. So I think people tend to buy two of them and now you've got more garbage on your desk. So you're, I think your ring light is doing a really good job. I would not be disappointed. That yeah i'm 17 inches in diameter holy cow it is people stick their head through it yeah it is huge i like it though technically because i'm really sensitive to bright lights and i turn this to a certain color of beige and a certain level of brightness it doesn't bother me and i think that it ends up looking good yeah the amount of light i have so you don't look like you live in In the Midwest, you look like you have skin color tone and everything. Right, right.
[30:00]Hey, we have skin color in the Midwest. All right. Once in a while. Exactly. It is summer. No, I'm just teasing. I'm just kidding. Yeah. All right. So in the end, I'm happy enough with it. Yeah. No, I think your lighting is really good. And one of the things, I know I've repeated this on the show before, was I worked with a guy who did video for the company. And he explained to me, he sent me a video explaining to me why lighting was so important. Important and he basically just said you know if you take a photo in low light what happens the person blurs as they move well the same thing happens in low light in video and so he had he made a video where he had no lights on and he waved his hand in front of the screen and it was just this smear across the screen and then he flicked on a light and he did the same thing and it was a perfectly smooth beautiful video and i've never forgotten that because it was just such a a vivid explanation of why lighting is so important to video.
[30:54]Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I saw that with other people's YouTube channel. Like I watched a lot of how to set up your own YouTube channel kind of stuff. And as much as I don't like light that much, I thought, yeah, this is important enough. I was a photographer for enough years, as were you, to know that light's important. Right, right. Now, the last piece of equipment that you put in place, we discussed this before getting on the air is a fairly complicated, not complicated. It's a very interesting piece of equipment that I don't have any experience with. And so Jill's going to do a full detailed review of how it works, but tell us about your teleprompter.
[31:31]Right. So I started doing test videos where I was recording all these videos to see how I would do. And I noticed that, and you gave me some tips about like how you can put it right by the camera. So it looks like you're looking at the camera, but you're really looking at your notes, you know, try to get it as close as possible. And I started doing some videos. Dave Ginsberg has a YouTube podcast.
[31:53]And I noticed that I kept looking at my notes instead of the lovely people on this panel. I wanted to see their faces. I wanted to see them talking. And I thought, oh, I just look terrible because I'm just sitting here staring at my monitor instead of staring at these lovely people in the camera. And I thought, I need a teleprompter. And there are some iPad teleprompters out there that are actually pretty good, but they have subscriptions, which I historically am very anti-subscription. Description and it's it's that now your ipad's on a thing and now the simplicity is gone because now i'm in now i'm mounting my ipad to where the teleprompter is but it's still not behind my camera i'm like oh this is complicated so again i tried to look to see what other people were doing and some this is just when elgato's prompter came out which is their teleprompter product And this is really interesting. It's a nine-inch screen, but there's a nine-inch screen below it. The nine-inch screen that's flat is actually reflecting up into a mirror so that when I look at it, I see the right-side-up view of you. So I put you into this teleprompter right now because I'm not reading from a script.
[33:10]I see you in it, and now I can look at your face, and we can have this conversation. Okay, so this is where I get stuck. Now, I understand that it's got a mirror, so I'm going to describe it again because I need to keep going over this in my head. Imagine a six-inch display or so? so six, nine inch, nine inch display that's sitting at the top of her display, but it's horizontal. So it's, if you stood up and look down, you would see the display of whatever she chooses to put into that display. And that's connected to your computer through USB-C. And then coming diagonally up at 45 degrees is this mirror. And it's, and so it reflects onto to that mirror and then reflects back to her face and that way she can see me upright. But now putting me in there is actually just putting me in there. If that's all you did, this would be silly because you could have just put me on the screen. So how is this solving the, I want to look at my notes while I'm talking to her problem? It has a hole right behind the hole inside of the box. This is actually a two-way mirror. You know, think about the crime rooms where you can see in and they can't see out kind of thing. But the camera will fit and.
[34:28]Into the back of this screen. So actually right behind the monitor of the mirror, right back of the mirror is the camera itself. So when I look at you in this mirror, I'm actually looking straight at the camera. Okay. Okay. So, so for purely looking at me, uh, now you happen to have video of me right now onto the display, but you could put your notes onto that display. And when you're looking at your notes, you're staring straight into the lens of the camera. Right. So that's the other functionality. There's two modes it has to it. One of them, it will just act like a nine inch monitor. So 99% of the time when I'm not recording on YouTube or on some video stream, it is acting as a third monitor for me. Okay. And is it above your, is it above your screen? Yeah. So I just put it right above my monitor, my main monitor. Okay. All right. So I I have my notes right down below it. And then I have you looking at, you know, looking at you, so you and I can have a conversation. And you could switch the video of me with the notes if you're, well, when you're doing the YouTube channel and you want to be, referring to your notes as you're doing your extemporaneous video, you would be able to see the notes, but it looks like you're looking right at the audience.
[35:47]Right. And so the second mode is teleprompter mode with text. So now I can put in my text into this application it has, which is the same app as the camera app, and it will scroll either automatically for you at a certain speed, or I can control the scroll using like a stream deck so that I can go as fast or as slow as I want. You bought the fancier stream deck that has a dial on it? Has a dial on it. That's the new one. And oh, I didn't think of an excuse to need that dial yet. That's pretty cool. Yeah. And I'll talk about why I picked that one in particular. But now I can, I have content, right? I have five podcasts a week. I have a ton of content I'm writing. So then I thought, why not use all that great content that I'm creating for my podcast and make short YouTube videos with it? So I have transcripts already made.
[36:43]And so now i can just split them into two and have it on my teleprompter and read them in two short bits okay two short video clips the and the teleprompter by transcripts you actually mean summaries of the of the podcast episode, And maybe even just the, I have the pure transcripts of my podcast episode. But you don't reread to get it again, the whole thing into the, what are your YouTube shorts then? So what I'm going to do is I'm just going, I'm not going to reread them as is, but I'm going to use them as an outline for just me talking. What, so it'll sort of be a plug for what you, what you talk about if you were to catch the whole thing. Yep. This is BJ Fogg's books on tiny habits. So that's VJFog starts out, and I'll summarize what I'm saying in the transcript of my podcast into the video. But I have all this content. I can put it right there on the teleprompter and use it as a guideline for my video clips. Okay. Okay. That's really cool. Now, you said you were going to get into why you chose the particular stream deck you chose. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I'm getting ahead. I'm getting ahead. Okay.
[37:54]Well, go ahead and do the stream deck, and then let's come back to ARMS, because I think ARMS are interesting. interesting too. Okay. It sounds good. So that's where the next step came in is I'm really going to do video. Both video and audio are on a timeline. Either if you're using Hindenburg for audio or Final Cut Pro for video, it's a timeline. And so there's two different aspects I wanted to do with those buttons is first of all, I wanted to control this scrolling. So I can sit here very nonchalant and scroll the text of what I put into the teleprompter. Using the scroller on the Elgato Stream Deck Plus. Stream Deck Plus, right. But then when I'm not using it, I can use it to move along the timeline, either in audio or video, Hindenburg or Final Cut Pro, or Descript. I can use it to adjust volume. I can use it to adjust zoom. Hindenburg, we have a zoom so that we can say, Ooh, there's a little place where I hiccuped in there. Can I zoom in and cut out that hiccup?
[38:59]That'll zoom in for me. This sounds like a really stupid problem to be solved, but I have a lot of trouble zooming in and out on Hindenburg. It's the audio recording software that both Jill and I use. And the reason I have trouble with it is I do so much in ScreenFlow, and ScreenFlow, the keystroke is slightly different. Like one of them, it's just plus, and one of them's command plus. And if I do the wrong thing, it edits in a different way because the keystroke means something in the other app. And now I'm always paralyzed when I want to do it. So I say, okay, well, I'll just use my fingers to pinch and zoom on the trackpad, but it's super clumsy. Like sometimes I feel like I have to put two fingers on it from two separate hands to pull it apart. Like I can't just pinch and zoom with a finger, with two fingers on the same hand. So that actually might help me a lot too. It also has a very small touchscreen, which is just a band in it, which you can use to switch profiles just using your finger, but you can actually use the band as a stream deck button. Oh, geez. So you could actually scroll left and right using this. So I've told you that my winter goal is to learn how to use StreamJack and Kibo Maestro and bring this whole world together so it's perfectly set up. I haven't set it up perfectly, but it does a great job with those dials. I like the dials. Cool. Well, I look forward to learning that from you because my new plan is I just wait for Jill to learn stuff or I actually give her assignments, go learn this, and then tell me how to do it. And she's like, okay.
[40:23]Right. So the Stream Deck with its just customizable buttons, which is already part of Stream Deck, the profile, so I can have one for Final Cut Pro, one for Hindenburg, one for Descript, one for when I'm recording videos. I have everything just in that Stream Deck. And that is my recording Stream Deck. Yeah, I'm looking at my Stream Deck and I realize I used like five buttons and I bought the four times eight, 48, wait, four times eight? Is that 48?
[40:51]No, four times eight. 32 button Stream Deck and I've got four profiles set up and everything and I only use these four buttons across the top. I could have had the Stream Deck Mini for what I use it for. Right, well that just means you had to use it for more. Exactly. So that's the Elgato Stream Deck Plus, and that was another $200. But you had already gotten that before you went down this road, right? No, no, no. That was the final purchase.
[41:15]Because I said, there's something missing here. Like, I need to have this kind of control when I'm sitting here and recording videos so that I don't have to look at the screen and I can control. Okay. So that was the final purchase. That was the nail in the coffin to my budget. Yeah, you did well here. Now, let's talk about arms. So all these things need to be mounted somewhere. What did you get? Right. So Elgato also makes a fantastic series of arms. And one of them, I needed a very tall one for this key light. But it came with that. So it came with this gigantic desk mount, straight up mount. Not key light, the ring light you mean. Oh, I'm sorry, the ring light, yeah. Yeah, the ring light came up with a gigantic pole that now towers above everything. 29 inches high. Wow. Can go to 29 inches high, which is at its max right now, so you don't see the little rings. And then I bought the, let me get to my notes here. So then I got to the Elgato Flex Arm Large. That's the L. And what it is, is just a bunch of elbows that connect to each other. So I took the mini light and I just made a bunch of elbows so that it is actually swinged on the other side. It just highlights a little dark.
[42:33]Okay. Okay. So that's on the, she turns around to do the coordinate of transpiration. That's on the left side of your face. Right. Okay. So you are still using the little one. That's good. I'm still using the little one. And then I got the Elgato mini mount, which has a little floor stand or a desk stand. And it just goes straight up. And it has threads on the top. And I put the teleprompter on that, which rests right over the top of my monitor. Okay. Okay. So it's not actually clamped to your monitor or anything like that. Okay. That's neat. It is probably too heavy to do that. Oh, okay. Good to know. It's beefy. Okay. I didn't realize that. And then is the camera, the Elgato camera that you bought, is that actually mounted to the teleprompter? And so that is, yeah, it has a bracket. So the teleprompter comes with a series of brackets, whether you're using your regular DSLR camera or mirrorless camera, whether you're using your iPhone, or in this case, I just use the face cam because they made the whole system. And so it just slides right in. You screw the mounts in. And so now this is one piece together. Okay. The two USBs in it. So they clamp, it's together. Okay. Another reason why it's a little heavy is because it's got all those pieces together. Well, that's really cool.
[43:51]This is fantastic. So in the end, now, have you created a whole bunch of videos as a result of this, or is that the next step? I started creating, now I'm on six videos. So I just got put on a medication and I thought, well, let's just talk about my experience on this medication and just put it on my YouTube channel, just as a little experiment of me making videos. Let's just get started doing something. Right, right. Anything. You mean you started with small steps then? I did start with small steps, you're right. So I just made now six or seven videos in, and they're just about 15 minutes long. Just to get my feet wet in this, and it's been really good. It's been very fast. It has a little bit to do with the software, which we're not going to talk about in this, but this setup is everything I wanted it to be. Simple, easy to use, turn it on, record something, turn it off. And has other uses when you're not using it. So you didn't just throw money at it and have it be sitting idle most of the time. Right. This acts as a little tiny monitor for me, the teleprompter, when I'm not recording, which is most of the time. So I just put Telegram up there. So I can see when someone chats at me while I'm doing whatever I'm doing on my computer. Yeah. Yeah. It makes a perfect Telegram monitor.
[45:10]Well, this is fantastic. Fantastic. So the one thing I did ask Jill to do, and I mentioned it earlier, is I want her to do a full review of the teleprompter because she started showing me the software behind this. And it's got some real interesting flexibilities of how to deal with the camera. And the fact that the camera is also Elgato, I think helps with what she's able to do with it. And there were a lot of buttons and dials and it looked like a lot of fun. So she's going to do a separate review of that for us. But I really want to thank you for coming on to tell us about this stuff, because this is kind of cool having this overarching view with some of the detail, and then we'll get more detail later. So if people want to find your work, they would go to?
[45:45]A betterlifeinsmallsteps.com. That is all my podcasts, and there's a blog that my friend Em writes, and it's just a list of all the different podcasts I have. Great. I'm glad you've got it consolidated now. That's good. Yeah. All right, Jill from the Northwoods, thank you so much for coming. This was fantastic. I had a good Oh, I had a good time, too. It's a good way to throw some money at something, for sure. We all love that.
[46:11]
Support the Show
[46:12]You know who's really swell? George from Tulsa. I mentioned earlier that he sent in a two-part recording for one of the folks to play on the show while I'm gone, and he almost always does that whenever I put out the call. He's also someone who's listened to the show for ages and ages, and that means a lot to me too. But he also contributes financially. His method of choice is to go to potfee.com slash PayPal and drop in a random dollar amount that seems right for him at the time, and then he usually adds a goofy little comment to make me giggle. If you'd like to be swell like George, please consider going to PayPal and dropping a little money my way to support the podcast. You can put in a comment to make me giggle too if you want.
[46:52]
CCATP #798 Adam Engst on Troubleshooting
[46:52]What's that time of the week again? It's time for Chit Chat Across the Pond. This is episode number 798 for August 6, 2024, and I'm your host, Alison Sheridan. This week, our guest is again the venerable Adam Angst of Tidbits. Welcome back to the show, Adam.
[47:06]Venerable? Have I gotten that old that quickly? I feel like I should have like the Fu Manchu beard. I thought about looking it up. The problem with writing and talking to Adam is he's so precise that I've got to really pay attention to my word choices here. You need to be the real-time thesaurus. Right, right, exactly. Well, Adam wrote an article recently about his solar inverters that ended up being almost more a story about troubleshooting. And that inspired me last week to tell you my story of troubleshooting our home network problems. And we kind of thought it'd be fun to go through Adam's story and pick out ideas for troubleshooting and kind of maybe talk about where our own weaknesses are, where our blind spots are. Does that sound like a good way to start?
[47:48]Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. So talk about the basic structure of what happened. Yeah. So the basic structure is global warming sucks. Paradox um that uh that that yes this is real and so i grew up in this area um making hay on a farm so i'm pretty aware of weather and the weather has just gotten insane i'm sorry upstate new york okay so we we are in a world you know part of the world where i won't say nothing bad happens but we don't get tornadoes hurricanes earthquakes forest fires like those aren't our problems uh so so you You know, like this has been one of those kind of situations where in the past five, 10 years, thunderstorms have become insane.
[48:36]And so when, you know, 10, nine years ago, we put in solar power, we thought, well, you know, we lose power, but not that often and never for that long. So we're not going to mess around with one of those whole house battery systems. This was also nine years ago when they were more expensive and less common. that's common. But we'll, we'll put in some some power plugs on our on our solar inverters. And maybe we could plug something into them, you know, when when power was out for the grid. And so fast forward to the present, and we have lost power six times this year, four times in two weeks. Oh, wow. So I feel like I'm in the third world somewhere where we have to have your garage-sized generator for everything because it's just like, oh, yes, we're on brownouts every day. So it was just kind of crazy. But you think of the solar panels as providing power. You don't think of them as having problems related to power outages, right? You know, like, they make it. They don't need it. But it turns out the solar panels don't just, like, blow electricity at your house. There's components involved. I was shocked at how many components are involved. Oh, yeah. They're connected. There's no question.
[49:55]But there's one part of it that actually is a little bit more subtle than others, which which is they communicate with a web portal. And that's how you discover how much power you've made. If there's any problems with them, they report it on the portal. They also send the email every day, which I kind of like getting because I can see, oh, good solar day. Oh, good solar day. Oh, that was a terrible solar day. So in any event, after an earlier power outage this year, the monitoring didn't come back online. line. So they were producing power. I could go outside and see the little graphs and they were making power, no question, but it wasn't getting to the portal. And because of, I mean, like this is the portal is basically a way of keeping score, right? Like this is you, you want your points. Oh, totally. My, my friends and I have all put in solar and we're always comparing our graphs and stuff going, ah, you only got to use so many kilowatts.
[50:56]Precisely so so in any event um you know i'm i'm a little put out by this and i reach out to the company that put them in a company called halco and and they say oh you know well it's like oh we can send someone out i'm like you know like i could probably is there something i can just reset you know like i'm i'm sufficiently technical i can reset things they're like oh well if in that case we won't bother to you know send a tech if you just do this you know flip flip flip there's three inverters, flip those switches, flip three circuit breakers here, wait five minutes, reverse the process. Hang on. Okay, no problem. For everyone else, what is an inverter? What does it do? Ah, so the inverter, this is where I get a little on the iffy side. Inverter takes DC from the panels and converts it into AC for the house and the grid. Is that correct? Well, we can say for sure it's an ADD or DDA converter, whether either of us know which A is to D. That's why I always ask Steve because I've got a pocket electrical engineer here, so I just ask him. Yeah so basically they're the they're the the devices that the panels connect into that then do all the work of something or other and then feeding it into the house make it electricity, precisely okay people did ask me to uh to uh to uh you know explain what i had at some point more and i'm like you really don't want me to do that i have a i have a general view of this but i'm really a computer guy, not a solar guy.
[52:25]Steve and I spent weeks trying to diagram our system so that we could explain it to people. And it, and that was with, you know, I'm an engineer, I got a master's degree, but it's a mechanical engineering. So I'm impaired in some way in this category. But what we found was the more we worked on the diagram, the more we understood how it worked because we clearly did not understand how it worked. I mean, I knew I didn't understand at the beginning, Steve thought he understood.
[52:48]And now I couldn't explain it to you without that diagram in front of me so so in any event you've got all the all the power stuff but then you've got these ethernet cables that come out of the the inverters and connect one inverter to the next and then they go into the house and they plug into an ethernet switch wait magic after that ethernet ethernet because they gotta talk they've got to talk to the portal they communicate with the portal okay ours has a cellular modem on it oh you're all fancy like no we have ethernet you know the pink the kind of the beptal bismol pink cables okay okay good good to know what color well they're not blue which is the other question with you know your ethernet cables are the blue cables right um so okay um so yeah so so so so after this previous power outage i had to reset the system did did all these little basically flipping of switches right you know it's just a reset and did that. It came back online. Life was good. So it happens again in the first of my four power outages, uh, uh, this, this, this past two weeks. Um, and, um, and so I go do the thing, you know, the next morning, I don't think about it the next morning I go back. I really, I get the email. I realized that, Oh, it's not working. I go back. I flipped the switches, but the power goes out again that day. Oh, so it fixes it again. Now a second time.
[54:13]But I don't know if it fixed it. I don't know if it fixed it. I was I was busy. I was like, I was doing stuff. So I reset it. I assumed it worked. I figured I'll get the email tomorrow. I didn't actually like log in immediately to see if the portal was working. Okay. All right. So so so it failed, you know, some power goes out the next day. And I get the you know, the email saying zero kilowatt hours, you know, produced. Okay, fine. It didn't work. So I reset it again. And same thing happens, right? Like I'm waiting for the email the next day. And that was I was at like a weekend that was super busy. And so it took the third power outage where I'm like, you know, like, oh, right. I'm still not getting the email from this thing. And the power again, power goes out. So by the time I've reset it, it's gone out again. Like, what do I got to do here?
[54:58]And so it wasn't until then where I'm like, you know, this is really not working. You know, this is not just like a reset thing. I mean, I've done the reset correctly. I feel like you're a mouse in an experiment. man somebody's just pressing the button to see if you'll do it again we gave him cheese the first time let's see how many times we can get him to do it i'm just i'm just pushing the button man waiting to get my cheese so that was terrible so so eventually i reach out to the the company it's like like i've reset this i've i've done my thing it's not working could you send a tech out out. Luckily the tech can come out in a couple of days. He does. And this is, this is where I started to get embarrassing. This is likely, oh, and so, so he goes out and he looks at it and he, he, he bonks on them the way you, the way it turns out you get these, these inverters to show you trouble, you know, like status information is you bonk on them. Are you serious? Yes. Like there's a display that's blank until you, until you whack it, It's not blank, but it cycles through different things.
[56:07]Did you get this from like pubs and burgers? And hair care products? SMA Energy, I think they're German. So, you know, very, very precise. But in any event, yeah, it's the strangest interface ever. So, you know, he shows me that. I'm like, oh, good to know. And he shows me that, you know, they have IP numbers and everything. So, like, from their perspective, they're doing the right thing. And they're not 169s or anything? They're a reasonable? Well, yeah, we didn't look at them closely enough. I think that actually, I think they were 169s now that I'm thinking back to it. To anybody who else is listening, 169 means, yeah, you don't really have a connection.
[56:46]I'm just going to show you a number. It's a self-assigned. Yeah. Yeah, it's a self-assigned IP number, and it usually means that there's no connection at all. Um so so so we go in he says okay well from from the outside perspective it all looks good let's go inside and look at your thing and so we go in and i don't know do you have like the little rat's nest of where stuff all connects up and like it's device and device and all these little cables and power cables and everything well we've got a a box on the outside of our house where the ont is our which is our optical network terminal from our fiber optic company and a lot of stuff goes in there but it's not like where the router is where the router is yeah i've got as many cables as i can possibly cram behind that cabinet precisely that's what i got so that's where i am so you know so i've got these you know four or five little devices they're all they've got ethernet into various things it's the ero base station and a couple of you know an ethernet switch and a couple of little monitoring um internet of things monitoring laundering tools. And so, uh, so we, you know, I say, Hey, you know, here's the pink cable. It goes in right here and you can see it's plugged in. And as I'm looking at it, I'm going, and why are there no blinky lights? I mean, everyone knows internet network, networking stuff works on blinky lights, right? Right. I wonder if you could take a light and blink it at it and it would work. It's that kind of thing, right? So what device didn't have blinky lights?
[58:16]The ethernet switch oh and so this was the problem there were like five devices back there four or five devices and some of them had blinky lights and so like i just was kind of and this is like this is kind of a dark corner of our laundry room like it's not a just it's where the it's where stuff comes in in a certain way or used to come in actually in a certain way so it's kind of where everything lives and uh and so the um what happened was that i had just looked in the dark corner seen some blinky lights and assumed all the blinky lights were on and it wasn't until this guy is standing next to me and i'm just like here's the cable plugs into why is this not getting any blinky lights and so and so we but you know really others are and so he's like he's like oh well maybe it got fried and i'm like nah it's plugged into a ups like the whole switch you mean yeah yeah he said oh that happens you know i've seen that happen i mean it's like oh and i was like yeah but it was plugged into a ups as i point down to the ups right underneath it which is clearly working because it has a light on it and you know the other things are turned on.
[59:22]So um so then we were like this is this one's working and there was one other of the little devices up there that wasn't working and we we start moving plugs around and you know and at At some point, I pull the UPS out of its dark corner, and it has a master enable button on it and a light next to it, which is not the power button, sort of next to the power button. It's like a reset?
[59:51]Yeah, it's just a preset. So master enable, it turns out. As soon as I see this, I'm like, oh, crap. I know what's gone wrong. so this is i've never really paid much attention to this but all ups's or most ups's consumer level ups's anyway have this concept of a master or computer mode where you plug your computer into one outlet and when that one gets turned off because the computer shuts down it turns off power to other outlets so you think of you've got it you've got like i don't know an inkjet printer or something attached you do not ever want to have the inkjet printer powered on unless the computer is powered on there's no reason for that to ever be true um same thing with maybe like an external hard drive that has an external power supply you know things that like they make no sense to ever receive power unless the computer is running okay so and so.
[1:00:50]Okay, so I've literally never heard of this. And I just did some UPS work yesterday with a new UPS. Did you look? You have a cyber power UPS, I believe. Yes. Yeah. Okay, so if you look at the back of your UPS, does it have, does it say something like, you know, computer here or controlled by computer with outlets like that? I've got to go back and look at it again. again and then i can't guarantee that it's universal this was an apc ups but i've seen it on others okay um i just i just thought like you've got the side that's that's search protection only and the other side is search protection post battery and so i put stuff like my ero and my ring uh alarm system and my sonology on the battery side yep precisely and but there's But there's another chunk, another variable, which is which ones are controlled by the master outlet or can be. I mean, I guarantee this is all.
[1:01:50]OK, so so the problem was soon as I realized I realized what the problem was, which was when the power goes out, this UPS starts screeching. Oh, man, are they freaking annoying? And so, like, I know the power's out. Shut up. And it's in a dark room, a dark corner of a room, which does not have any lights on because there's no power. And so I went into the room, presumably in the first power outage, and I kind of reached around in there and I pushed a button. And it wasn't apparently the right button. It wasn't the power button that shuts off the power and thus the screech. And it was the master enable switch.
[1:02:38]And I probably figured, and I probably said, oh, that didn't do it and pushed another button, you know, and it turned off. I didn't even think twice about it. I know I didn't think twice about it. So when the power comes back and I turn everything back on, the Eero, which is the router, so it's sort of the main device, and I had that plugged into the, you know, the master outlet, the computer outlet, it doesn't draw enough power to turn on the other ones. What? what oh yeah but had had it been plugged in this way all along yep oh but it hadn't been in this master enable mode okay so master doesn't have to be it exist doesn't have to be on right doesn't have to exist because because in just a situation just like this you don't want it to exist right you want every outlet to be active because duh that's the whole point of active outlets, So by enabling it, I had basically said, you know, look for enough of a draw on this outlet that these other ones should be turned on. You know, the Eero, I forget what it takes. It's like, you know, three to five watts, something like that. It's tiddly. And so it's not enough for the master enable mode to turn on the other outlets, which these two things happen to be plugged into, even though several others were plugged into other outlets.
[1:04:03]And so it was, it was absolutely a case of, is it plugged in?
[1:04:09]The answer is, well, yes, but yes, but so, so, Somehow, but there was an original problem. I mean, you made it worse in fixing it until it's broken.
[1:04:27]But what caused it to be down in the first place? Well, so the problem was, no, I actually caused the problem by pressing the switch. It was just, I thought I was turning off the UPS. Instead, I was enabling master mode. And, you know, it was a mistake that took like two seconds, right? And then I like, oh, wrong button. Pushed another button and that turned off the ups so that's why i didn't realize and the reason, because i did this when the power went out it was never going to communicate communications were never going to recover because that ethernet switch that the inverters plugged into wasn't powered okay okay so the the when you press the wrong button was the first time the power went out, right right okay not the fourth i thought it was the fourth time okay not the you know not the second third or fourth times you know like who knows i mean you know by that time i'd realized where the power button was right you know like i've been turning the damn thing off all week right right uh and so and and so there were other there were other hints really right if you think about it this because the switch is used was used for other things it was used for um you have these these little things called wireless sensor tags, which do temperature monitoring and live in my fridge, freezer and chest garage, a chest freezer outside. They weren't reporting, but they don't, they only report narrow conditions. So who, I wouldn't go for a month without.
[1:05:56]There's no, I'm working right. They only report if the temperature gets too high on these cold, you know, these cold devices. Then there was a device that connects to our thermostat so that I can, you know, control the thermostat remotely from my iPhone. But, you know, whatever we, it's, it's on a, it's on a schedule. I almost never bother to use that unless we're traveling for some reason. And I, and even then I don't really use it because we have geothermal. So it's not, you don't, you don't adjust your thermostat much. Okay. And then the Eero actually connects to another Eero on the other side of the house via Ethernet for backhaul. Right. So it's a mesh network with a wired backhaul.
[1:06:34]And Tanya and I had actually had a discussion at some point in the middle of all this going like, boy, connectivity seems a little weak. Why is the connectivity a little weak? I don't know. I mean, I actually rebooted the Eero in my office. Didn't make any difference. I don't know. I'm not sure what's going on. um but basically our her computer only uses wi-fi mine can use ethernet or wi-fi and i just didn't i didn't notice like it doesn't tell you which network adapter is active so i hadn't looked to see and so all of these little things had sort of gone wrong but none of them were the kind of thing you'd notice all i noticed was the inverters okay okay so if you're if your When the Eero wasn't drawing enough power to keep the other outlets on, it was still drawing power? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, the Eero was powered from the UPS. Oh, yeah. That master computer outlet gets power regardless. It just shuts off the other ones when it doesn't have enough.
[1:07:36]Okay, so you've got two Ethernet cables on that, one coming from your ISP, and the other one is from the switch? Or do you have a connected to the switch? Okay. So, yep, precisely. The Eero gets connected to the cable modem, and the other one goes to the switch. And that one going to the switch wasn't working either. Okay, so the other Eeros were only using Wi-Fi backhaul. They didn't have wired Ethernet anymore. Precisely. Precisely. But that's just sort of, that one's so subjective, right? Seems cruddy, right? It's kind of dodgy. Precisely. You know, yeah, you know, and like, it worked fine for internet most of the time, but, you know, like, you just, you never quite know. You know, the network's being a little flaky and, you know, and cable modems, my experience with cable modems is the speeds vary widely. Right, right, right. You know, Bob down the street is streaming Roblox right now, you know.
[1:08:33]Yeah, precisely. light. So, so, so it was, it was, it was, it was, you know, one of those situations where I was like, I cannot believe that I completely missed, is it plugged in? Because I should have seen that it didn't have blinky lights to begin with. It was more that I wasn't looking closely enough to see the right devices had the blinky lights. Well, I don't know about your switch, but I eventually looked at my switch because I was, you know, by this time I was checking to see if, you know, flushing the toilet was affecting the network. Uh, but I looked at the switch and I went, oh my gosh, there's no blinky lights. And I went, oh wait, the blinky lights are on the back. So my blinky lights are not on the front because all the wires go out the back to be in that giant mess in the back. So I have to like put my hand back there to see if any light is reflecting off of it in order to tell us something happening back there. And likewise, that means the switch is being on the back of the UPS. Why wouldn't the power switch be on the front of the UPS?
[1:09:27]Uh the the switch that i touched was on the front of the eps so um but it was a dark room so oh okay this is this master thing this what do you call this master thing right master power and master enable that is on the front okay yeah yeah yeah and so like again i don't know why they bother to put it on the front it's not something you're going to press regularly right you know like you know put it put it on the back where it doesn't get accidentally touched but uh my ethernet my My, my ethernet switch like yours does most of the lights on the, I think it has a, I think it has one light on the front, but it has most of its light on the back for each for each pour. But, um, because I don't actually mind, mind sitting on a shelf and you're, um, I want the cables coming into it where I can see them. It's actually, it's back is facing out. Okay. So I should get all of all the blinky lights there. Yeah. That was the, that was the mistake.
[1:10:22]If there had been no lights back there, I would have figured it out right away. Yeah. But the fact that several of the devices, the ones that weren't plugged into these two controlled outlets, did have lights, you know, I just sort of, like, clearly there's power over there. Oh, I'm missing a subtlety. So, you're saying the switch had power? No. Some of the other devices in that plugged into the UPS had power. So, it was like two out of five were dark. Okay. Okay. And so the others being light, you know, again, I was like, just didn't, I just assumed it turns out that a lot of troubleshooting mistakes come when you, you just assume something is true without actually verifying. And as soon as I verified, you know, with this guy standing there, standing there next to me that, oh, wow, there's no blinky lights on my switch and this other device. Oh, they're not getting power.
[1:11:21]So I wouldn't have even known that that master power thing existed. Like I said, I mean, I'm going to look. But now you do. Well, I'm going to look and see if I have one. But I mean, I looked at all the buttons yesterday and I don't remember seeing anything called that. So I'm going to have to go take a look.
[1:11:36]So other UPSs I've seen, I don't know if they have a button exactly. This is the only time I've ever seen it have a button. um so i don't i don't know how it is nor if it's normally more of a a built-in feature or if there's some other way of enabling it um that they that they provide so i have not done a comprehensive survey of ups's to uh to to see how how it varies from ups to ups and we have another thing that we've been assuming that we are starting to think maybe we need to maybe do a little bit more verification on but our um uh one of the questions we have is why did the power go out on the ups when it when it lost power because we have a whole home battery, that should never have lost you shouldn't you should never be right there's no losing power there so what we don't know is is it's because the um ups was failing or and it somehow caused some weird side effect that it shut itself down as a result or is that outlet maybe not actually on the on the battery because we weren't able to put all of our circuits onto the battery we believe that it is but what if we're wrong so that ups becomes a lot more important.
[1:12:56]It is true. I have my circuit breaker box is absolutely jammed full. I mean, to the point where I forget what we had to have an electrician put in, you know, more circuit breakers for something. He had to actually remove several and replace them with half size ones. So that's which they have now. And then we also have this device called an e-gauge, which it sits and looks, It ties into, in theory, each one of the circuits in the box and tells us how much power that circuit is using. Oh, that's cool. It's really cool.
[1:13:35]And so, again, the inside of our box is truly scary looking. You know, I mean, the gray outside is fine. You open the door, it's not terrible. But you take the front off, you're like, well, do not touch. Now, I highly recommend doing your circuit upgrades with solar in this particular order. First, pay a crap ton of money to have a whole new larger box put in so that you can accommodate the solar panels. Then six months later, change your mind and decide to add whole home batteries where they have to take everything out of that giant box and put most of it into another box. So now Now we have this huge, Steve would say words with volts and switches and numbers and stuff on it, this giant box. And now there's hardly anything in it. There's like four switches in there and everything's in another box. So we tried to pay for everything. Oh, and we have this thing called a dog house on the side of our house. And that's where it sticks out. It's a box with a door on it. That's where all the circuitry is. And we actually had to pay to have a new door put on it because they had to expand it because you couldn't get in and out of that giant box. Well, now you don't need to get in the jam box because all the stuff's on the other side of the wall anyway.
[1:14:51]Well it's actually good to know that there's this doghouse concept because i said i don't know if they'll be able to ever do anything else with our with our electricity again i just can't imagine there's room yeah and um we have uh we have a nissan leaf one of our cars is electric um but we've only we only have it just plugs into 110 we don't have a charger uh you know a level two charger for it. And so what all this has gotten me thinking about is, well, you know, Sure, those whole house batteries are kind of cool, but wouldn't it be even cooler if you had the whole house battery with wheels where you could go and recharge it somewhere else?
[1:15:26]And so the vehicle-to-grid stuff. And so it's not quite there yet, but once you've got a bidirectional charger, you should be able to just be charging your car. And then when the power goes out, it just reverses and starts feeding the house from your 70 kilowatt hour battery in the car. Right. That's what's really ironic to us is we paid $10,000 a piece for, I think they're 12 and a half or 13 kilowatt hour batteries when we have two 75 kilowatt hour batteries sitting in the garage. You know and uh one of the interesting surprises to us and this was part of us drawing the diagram that we figured out was um when we when we figured out the circuitry of what goes on the whole home battery we had to eliminate certain things and basically things that have high power draw like like the oven is really bad and charging the cars so we wouldn't be able to charge the cars from these little wimpy batteries and uh and that was fine we understood okay we won't use the oven we don't bake or cook anything in it anyway. I think we heat plates with it. And obviously the cars, that's fine. We got a heat pump system that's a variable speed, so it doesn't have this high kick of whatever those are, volts or watts or whatever. So current, maybe current. Amps, that's probably it.
[1:16:45]Steve's going to kill me when he hears this, but it doesn't have this high draw up front. It comes up slowly. So we could actually have our air conditioning on the battery, which is cool if necessary. What we didn't realize was that if the grid is up and we're generating solar energy from the panels and we're putting it into the grid, the battery, or into the battery, I should say, the battery can power those things. It's only when the grid is down that the battery can't supply power to the oven and to the cars.
[1:17:18]So we can charge our cars from the sun without sending it out to the grid and taking it back it can go into the batteries and it can come straight from the solar we can actually, do it because it can draw enough i guess the current level thing works fine as long as there is a grid to fall back on yeah it's pretty clear this is this is an extremely complicated thing and And I suspect, you know, that basically when we want to go to a level two charger for some sort of new electric car to replace the Leaf, which is a 2015 model, same as our solar panels, my guesses are going to say, oh, you don't have enough power. Yeah. It's almost certain there's going to be something which is not going to work in a big way. 100%. I'm just setting the expectations there for myself. Yeah. Um, so, you know, so it's not going to be the, like the $300 electrician, it's going to be the $5,000 electrician visit. So, you know, I got to cover myself.
[1:18:20]The, uh, the funny thing about the whole home batteries is they don't actually, they don't actually save you money. At least where I live, the way our power works, we get paid for every, or every kilowatt we put into the system, kilowatt, kilowatt hour, I don't know, every unit of electricity we shove into the grid and we bring back, it's kilowatt to kilowatt. I mean, it's the same unit. So if we generate one unit during the day and we take that same unit back at night, it's zero-sum game. If we generate too much electricity, then we only get paid pennies on the dollar for it. But for the rest of the time, it isn't. So the battery doesn't actually save us any money the way the solar panels do. So there is no ROI. But if you live somewhere where the the power actually goes out a lot, then there's ROI from a personal level, right?
[1:19:09]Right, right, precisely. Yeah, I mean, some people can do, you know, sort of time arbitration, you know, where if you can charge your batteries on cheap power and then use them on expensive power and things like that. But when you're making most of your power via solar, that doesn't usually help in a big way. Yeah, we actually, the cost is double. We have a special plan for people who have solar panels, and the cost is double from four to nine for what it is the rest of the day. So we go off battery between four and nine, and we just don't run the dishwasher, don't charge the cars, that's it. And so that does save money. We are also part of a system in California, and I know other places are doing it too, where during high energy needs, like if it gets real hot in L.A., they will pay us to get power from our battery. So we make like $2, what are the units?
[1:20:04]Kilowatt hour. Kilowatt hour per fortnight, as I like to call it. I don't even try anymore. For long per quadrant. Exactly, exactly. Exactly. So we get paid two bucks where our power is normally like 26 cents for that same unit of energy. So we actually, we've made like $60 so far this year. So $20,000 in batteries. We're burning that. We're making it. So back to the troubleshooting though.
[1:20:33]You tried to blame yourself and say it was embarrassing. I mean, it was embarrassing that it wasn't the solar people's fault. But from the big picture, I feel like there's a little too much to know. I mean, you and I are reasonably clever people, reasonably well-educated in this nerd stuff, right? We're pretty good at it. Um, I don't know if you do the power, the power unit things. I don't do the power unit stuff well either. Yeah. Units are tough. They shouldn't have put the word hour in something that does isn't time-based. That's why I can't ever do it. Right. Um, but, but as much as we We know, and Steve and I are, you know, controlled experiments, man. We change one thing at a time. I document, he doesn't document, but I document. We change this, this happened. We change this, this happened. And it still took us four months, six months to figure out what was wrong with our network, that it was a dodgy power supply. Yeah, no, it's really true. And, you know, I...
[1:21:31]It hits me a little bit more with some of the computer you know the mac and iphone stuff where you know like my parents or my in-laws will will have some problem and i'm just like i i know the answer to this because of who i am and i can solve it in 30 seconds because of that and you would stand no chance just not like you know you would you would never solve this problem yeah you know You know, it's not possible. And it's funny because it goes back to the, you know, I got started doing this stuff in the mid-80s, working with computers and started Tidbits in the early 90s, 1990. 90 and we always sort of believed that like we're evangelizing technology and you know that that if we worked at telling people how to use it we'd all get better at it and technology would get easier and it would be become really it'd be widespread never like the world would be good um i mean we were young and naive um but but i kind of believed that for for for a long time and at some point i I actually did an article on tidbits about this. This is quite some while, while Google did these videos in time square. I can't remember the details of something like what's a browser or something like that. And, and they were just asking like, you know, it's like person on the street interviews.
[1:22:54]And, and it was absolutely eyeopening the level to which your random person in time square couldn't even begin to answer this question.
[1:23:07]Right and this was a while ago but but still the internet and the web had been around long enough that it was not it should not have been surprising they were all using one put it that way right right um and and it was that i remember i have to look up this article now because i remember i was like i realized that no there's always going to be geeks you know that there are gonna you know that that there really are people who are good at tech and people who aren't and yes Yes, everyone who isn't good at it is still going to be using it. But they're the people who only learn how to do something when their friend shows it to them.
[1:23:42]And I think there's a second quadrant. It's not just left half, right half, get it, don't get it. It's want to get it and don't want to get it.
[1:23:54]So it's a four square, right? Because there's people who don't want to get it and aren't good at it. There's people who don't want to get it, but they could. They just don't want it. yeah that to them this is just a tool they don't want to know how the hammer was built they just want to know i'm going to go hit some nails this is going to work that's all they care about and in fact i think when people like us talk too much to them they want less and less to know about it you know like i'm never putting an iot device in my house ever in the ever because of what the story you just told me of how long it took you to fix it and you know what you're doing and i don't care yeah right and it's funny you can't always identify them either so for instance i have an aunt who's you know she's she must be 70 i think just about and um and you know but she is you know and she she she talks a good game of like oh helpless little me i don't know what to buy can you help me get this or help me set this up or whatever and every time i do i'm like you're you're actually really good at this. You know what you're doing. You're just playing the kind of like, you know, not really, not that I'm a dumb blonde kind of thing, but like she's playing the, I need help card. Now, does she know she's playing it or is she playing it for a reason that she thinks she's not good at it?
[1:25:14]Don't know. But it really is a situation where I suspect there's a little bit of she knows she's playing it because she's she was a, you know, a very high level professional before she retired. You know, so it may be a little bit of an act of being a woman in a high, high level position of sometimes this was a useful game to play. The reason I ask is because I have known people where, as I'm watching what they're doing, I realize they do know a lot. And I'll never forget my sister-in-law. I said, man, you know what, Linda, you're a geek. And she went, am I? And it was wonderful because she actually, I think she thought that she kind of knew what she was doing. And then she was really emboldened that I would give her such a compliment. And that's when I realized that is a compliment in our world. um but i mean i remember one of my favorite people of all time is a guy named harry he was um 93 when he passed away and i think i met him when he was in his mid to late 80s and uh i remember he was we were hanging out watching a soccer game and one of my kids and he said uh hey so allison can you explain what this whole thing is about screen resolution.
[1:26:28]I did not expect that to come from him you know and but he was genuinely curious and wanted to understand. And this was somebody who maybe wasn't terrific at technology. He was actually, what was the TV box you could get that like you hooked a box to a TV and you got internet on it? Like home TV or something like that. You remember what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wanted to say TiVo, but that's not quite right. Yeah. I know what you're talking about. It was web TV. Web TV. Yeah. You had a web TV box. Neuron fire. Neuron fire. Web TV. Yeah. Impressive. Yeah. So, but the, yeah, it's really true. And, and so, so yeah, so, and so it was, It was a little bit sobering to come to this realization that there's always going to be a role for people who are good at it and find it interesting and enjoyable to solve the puzzle. Like, I don't need to do Sudoku or Wordle or whatever. I got networks.
[1:27:30]Yeah, so I do like thinking about the troubleshooting and the steps that we go through. And I think of all of the things that I do troubleshooting on, the networking stuff, like you said, when Tanya's like, hey, the network seems slow. And you're like, yeah, you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure that out. Or you can go, huh, maybe it'll go away. I'm just going to wait. And sometimes it does. So, yeah. And we just had another one, actually, just yesterday, in fact. Um people were visiting and um tanya's computer tristan was using tanya's uh studio display so with his computer so he'd unplugged it from her mac mini and she'd turned off her ups and things had gotten unplugged she'd want the lights on when people were sleeping in the room etc etc so did to kind of reconnect all the cables and i think tristan had reconnected some of them after he was done but and so basically everything was turning on but there was no no no video signal.
[1:28:31]And, and, uh, and I was like, it's all connected. I can see, you know, like the, there's the Thunderbolt cable going from the back to the display to the Mac mini. Well, you got a little bit of light when you turned on the power to the studio display. It says dots in the middle. And so it clearly was getting power. And it wasn't until I looked at it more closely that I realized the studio display has one Thunderbolt display and three USB-C ports, which are identical except for this tiny little lightning icon over the one, which you can barely see because it's on the back. Yeah and tristan tristan had inadvertently probably just not really thinking about it but they plugged in the thunderbolt cable to one of the usbc ports and then it wasn't you know it doesn't carry video to the studio display so a very easy fix but it took us a good five to eight minutes or so before we'd like worked out all the things going on and she knew this had worked you know two days before so like it's not like something could have broken right yeah um but But again, you know, not an easy thing. And I could really see that throwing someone. I used to, we had an elderly neighbor who I was helping before she moved to an assisted living place. And she often wanted me to come over and just like hook and hook cables.
[1:29:49]Because, and it wasn't like she didn't try, but she didn't have enough of an underpinning to know of like what's input and what's output, that kind of thing. She just like plug things when they seem to fit. it. And, uh, just because it, just because you can plug it in, doesn't mean it's going to work. And it was something along those lines. One of my favorite times with Steve's mother was, um, uh, Steve's mother is actually really good at tech stuff and she'll try. And Steve's dad is the other way around. He takes a lot of handholding and it's, I called dibs on helping mom, Steve helps his dad. And we had ordered a new airport extreme for them. This is many years ago and their old one was failing and she got it and she said, okay, when can you guys come down and put it, plug in? And I said, you're going to do it. And she's like, what? Okay. So I had her tell me like, okay, what color is that cable? Is it the pink or is it the blue? Is it the yellow? I want you to pay attention, write this down. Where's this one plugged in? And she was probably in her, I don't know, early to mid seventies and she's crawling around under the desk and she plugged it in. And then she, I had her walk into the room where her husband was with her laptop in her hand, showing that it was on the internet because she had it on wifi for the first time. And it was like this big glorious moment. So that's somebody who doesn't know a lot, but is willing to try and is pretty good about, you know, describing to you what's going on so that you can help them. That's the other thing that some people aren't good at telling you what's wrong.
[1:31:19]It doesn't like me. It said something. It said something. Well, what?
[1:31:25]I mean, one of the things, and people suck at this, but I love trying to get people to take screenshots. Yeah. You know, like, you don't have to remember. You don't have to write it down. You can just take a screenshot. Then show me the screenshot, and I will undoubtedly know what you're talking about. Yeah. But if you just, you know, my father is that way. He has terminology issues. issues um so like he can describe what he's seeing but not in terms that you will be able to figure out um because they're just different from what you're expecting and so so you know like there's a lot of the kind of translation of the oh you mean the dialogue not the window the menu bar you know that steve's dad goes the other way he types into an email every single thing he saw on screen i mean no matter what it was it could be his bank statement was up and he's going going to tell you how much money he has but whatever it is he's going to type everything so you have too much information um all right so there is something i'm going to be curious about though one of the new apple intelligence features coming in ios 18 and i am mac os 14 15.
[1:32:30]Uh actually i don't know if it's going to be in mac os interesting question theory is in theory going to know about apple how to do stuff tech stuff i assume that apple's basically training it on the entire apple knowledge base so you can you can ask siri for instance and i'm like how do i hide photos you know hide images in my photos app and it will tell you about the hidden album.
[1:33:00]Yeah, which is not something you're going to figure out any other way, right? You know, like, you know, that's, that's not something necessarily, right, non-obvious stuff. And so I will be curious to see, and this is probably going to be one of those features that doesn't ship till 2025 or whatever, because I think the fully capable new series is on the far end of the Apple intelligence stuff. I will be curious if that actually helps with support loads for people who, you know, people People can be trained to ask Siri. And if the AI is good enough to do their terms. Natural language, not necessarily knowing the real terminology. Yeah. I know what I'm going to do it for. I'm going to do it for system settings.
[1:33:44]You know, where did you bury it today, Apple? What did you call it? Now, they have to keep using all of the terminology they ever used. One of the things I was complaining about recently was in Apple Contacts, I was talking about, I was going to explain to somebody how to make groups. And I was like, I couldn't find the groups menu. And I realized, because they changed it to call it lists. Okay, I'm all right. I'll go into lists. And then I go into some other menu, and it's called groups again. Okay, you have to keep all the words you ever called this in the system. You got to keep calling things bonjour, okay?
[1:34:19]Yes. Well, again, in theory, if it's trained on the whole knowledge base, you know, and then tweaked such that it prefers newer things, for instance, it should be able to do that kind of stuff. So if it knows about archived report, like words like system preferences, but it'll drive you towards, uh, and it should know what OS you're running. So if you're still on Mojave.
[1:34:46]Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But no, it won't, it won't have Apple intelligence. Nevermind. They can start forward a little bit. That's right. It won't know. It won't know that only, only knows Sequoia, but you could ask it in, in, in Mac OS, you know, Mac OS 10 point, which one was my hobby? 15. I can't remember. I can't remember anymore. Um, too many far back. I'd only go to big, sir. Um, but yeah, so, you know, in Mac OS 11, big, sir, what is the case? You know, in theory, it should be able to do that. Yeah, that would be, that would be interesting. to see if it can do any better. I don't know if it'll ever tell us that you pushed the wrong button on your UPS or the power supply cable is failing on your Eero that you're not even looking at. Oh, that was the other thing I wanted to say when you were talking about screenshots. I first had my house sitter and his dad come over and take a look at the network to figure out what the heck was going on. And they took a picture of everything in my electronics cabinet area, but it was a still photo and I didn't notice there was no light on the Eero. So all that had to happen was unplugging the Eero from the UPS and plugging into the wall and the network came back up. A lot of other stuff was still messed up that we had to fix. But at least there would have been a network pipe into the house that I could have gotten to. But because he took a still photo, and I think the lights happened to have come on on the Synology. So I was like, well, the Synology's up. What could be wrong? So here's a question. If you have the whole house battery, which presumably switches very quickly, why do you use UPS at all?
[1:36:15]I don't know. and in this case it hurt us right i mean big surge protector power strip i don't know and i yeah it's supposed to but again there should be no too but again if you're on a battery there should be no surges it would be it would it definitely gives you a big power strip yeah you could get a 15 power strip yeah yeah i i think it's just sort of well because, it's what you do, you know? We did have a big surge in the, I don't know if, I think I've talked to you about the story before about how we suddenly had 200 volts on one side of the house and 40 volts on the other side. That seems wrong. Yeah, it didn't work out very well. But every single device that was plugged into one of those little $8 surge protectors that we got from Costco, Every single one of those devices survived the power problem. Every single big device that wasn't plugged in one of those failed. So we lost our oven. We lost our garage door opener. That's a little hot tip. Put your garage door opener on a surge protector. Just screw it into the ceiling. Just plug it into that because we lost a garage door opener because of that.
[1:37:28]Yeah. And that was before you put in the whole house battery? Correct. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I do what I don't know. What would have happened in that though? Cause we didn't lose power. We might still have gotten 200 on one side and 40 on the other.
[1:37:42]My suspicion is, is again, I don't know how the batteries are exactly connected, but I mean, sort of the way my understanding of UPS is and there's different varieties of them. And I would have to go back to the research to that, but at least some of them you're always actually running from battery oh and the battery is always being recharged and that's how they get around the surges because the battery is never going to feed you more um i think that's a little more expensive ones yeah and that's that's the question is is because you have what tesla power walls yeah yeah um so yeah that's the question is the tesla power walls um basically are you always running from battery and and then charging them on the back end and if that's true then yes it would protect you from the surge and in theory there should be no there'd be never be a drop when you lose power yeah yeah but if it's the other way around if if there has to be a switch because that's some of the ups is switch very fast right so that when they lose power they notice and in milliseconds switch over to the battery So I do hear a click. And so in theory, that's enough. I've got a UPS under my desk on the Mac setup I've got in my office here. And when we have a power glitch, I hear it click.
[1:38:59]So apparently the external battery isn't picking it up as quickly as the UPS is.
[1:39:05]That would be, it's possible. It's just, it's either not installed that way or not designed that way. I just don't know whether how the battery, whole battery runs. And it's possible that, I remember a couple of years ago, we had some of the, one of the health guys here when we were fixing something and he was like, oh, did you, do you thought about putting in like a whole house surge protector? And I was like, well, no, because I have UPSs on everything more or less. And I had, so before I'd heard your story, so I'd never really, never really imagined the concept of 200 volts, you know, going through everything. But, but so yeah, so that was, that was the first thing that got me thinking about like, Like, well, how does the power come in in different ways, and what would that do? So, yeah, so again, not really knowing much about power. I think there are different ways that it can be set up, but they probably are more or less expensive, too. Yeah, yeah. Well, this has been fun talking about this. Now, this started out as a troubleshooting story, and your basic message was don't assume.
[1:40:09]Yeah. And is it plugged in? But your stuff was plugged in. It was plugged in. It wasn't turned on.
[1:40:18]It's the subtle, is it plugged in? Well, yes, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So verify that assumption that plugged in means plugged in. I was just hearing, oh, I think it's Adam Christensen was talking on the Mac cast about how he's got a dodgy outlet where his Eero is plugged in. And it's so dodgy that if his robo-vacuum bumps it, it knocks it out. And so he'll just lose internet because the vacuum has been going around. And, you know, so I think there's a root cause you could work on there. You know, maybe an electrician ought to be coming out and fixing that. Yeah, that feels a little tricky if the Roomba can take it down. And then is it doing it on purpose? Just saying. There you go. All right. Well, that's a perfect place to close this out on a line like that, Adam. If people want to find you online, they go to tidbits.com, correct? That is indeed correct. And all sorts of stuff there. I'm working on some new articles right now about the new network utility. Oh, that sounds fun. Just a tease. There you go. All right. Well, we'll talk to you again on the other side of Africa. Oh, well, have a great time. And let me know if you see any penguins. There are penguins there. You just have to go looking for them. In Cape Town, we're supposed to get to see them. We saw them in Ecuador and, of course, in Antarctica. So that'd be our third penguin. Adam's pointing at the penguin in his room.
[1:41:46]All right. Thanks. And we'll talk to you again in September. All right. Enjoy. joy. Well, that's going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at allisonatpodfeed.com anytime you like? If you have a question or a suggestion, just send it on over. I don't know how many emails I'm going to answer while I'm on vacation, but don't be surprised if I do. Remember, everything good starts with podfeed.com. You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeed.com slash Mastodon. If you want to listen to the podcast on YouTube, you can go to podfeed.com slash YouTube. If you want to join in the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeet.com slash slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely Nocilla castaways. We just had somebody new join just because they were going through their Programming by Stealth class and they wanted to ask a question. So you can join it for that reason too. You can support the show at podfeet.com slash Patreon or with a one-time donation like George from Tulsa at podfeet.com slash PayPal. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, you're going to have to wait until September 8th to join the friendly and enthusiastic Nocilla castaways.
[1:42:48]Music.