 We're live! How you doing, Brett? I'm doing, let's say that. Yeah, a little bit. What is laughing about the fingerprint you leave on the internet as your younger self? Yeah, it doesn't go away. I mean, technically, you can try to delete. We were just talking about Facebook, and I hear there's like so many hoops to jump through to actually delete your Facebook. Yes. Yeah, it doesn't come away easy. By the way, this is Vlog Thursday, 368. That was kind of what started this, is what I've been doing this for a while, and some of the things you do. There's a couple of companies that archive all that data. And I learned about this from a friend that works at a data center that he moved up a tier, and when he applied working there to the next tier, which was their GovCloud stuff, he had to go through security clearance. I've worked at this place for a while. I get to touch all the fancy stuff. I probably, I'll be fine. They pull up his MySpace. These guys came in and sat down with him, and they said, what did you mean by saying this? And he goes, ugh. It was like playing back some of the cringiest things. He goes, dude, he goes, I was in like 10th grade. He's like, I don't know why I posted that. If MySpace got dug up, I would crawl into a hole and never come out ever again. There's no way. I can't even think about that. That's terrible. Yeah. So there is places where you may apply, where that may, even if you've requested to be deleted, and MySpace is long gone. And I don't even think the web archive has all the MySpace stuff we set on there. Good. Good. Leave it dead and buried. Lots of people in the comments here greetings from all over the place. That's always the fun thing is finding out, well, I think it's a little late for my European crowd. Earlier, you get a heavier Europe crowd. So I think I should probably have a more U.S. crowd here doing it at 8 p.m. E.S.T. Yeah. What's over in Europe? It's like six hours ahead or so. So yeah, they're sleepy time. There's a few, you know, really late night people that might be over there, but for the most part, I'll get Netherlands, 2 a.m. and the Netherlands. So there you go. Night owl. Respect. So how is your move to Linux going? 30 day Linux challenge. Yep. It's officially started. So I'm only one day in about a little over 24 hours in and it's about what I expected so far. So I did this last year and I made a video about it, but I only did seven days. And the goal of that was basically survive a week of using Linux. But I'm going into it this time. I'm doing it for a month and it's more going to be like, not just try to survive it, but like actually learn along the way. Actually, like learn how to use Linux as like a power user from that standpoint. Because I can like, I mean, I have a, I'm just to do with a camera who films himself like setting up servers and stuff. I'm by no means like a Linux power user. So I'm going into this thinking I can come out the other end more knowledgeable on Linux in general. So I have my notes here from day one. I do want to mention real quick. I introduced you as Brett because that's what your name said. Ray Dahl. This is his channel because someone's like, Hey, he's a YouTuber. Just in case you aren't subscribed. I want to make sure it's clear. Go subscribe to Ray Dahl. Easy to find those. I didn't say that at the beginning. So yeah, that's me. That's where he's going to be documenting this for his second round of getting into Linux. Exactly. So my notes say the first one is scaling between external monitors is but cheeks. So I have a 4k monitor and a 1080p monitor. Ah, yes. You're right. If you want to do the scaling, yes. Yeah. You have to do either pick one because it's not like in Windows where you can pick based on the display if you want like 100 to 100% scaling. So you have a really annoying thing that I'm hoping Papa West. I know I've heard that something to really working on is be able to do that because yeah, setting setting the fractional scaling it screws things up. So one of the reasons this monitor here that I'm looking at isn't 4k, I was going to get one, but I realized fractional scaling didn't work and would break if I had a fractional scale on my other monitor that I don't want done that. Yeah. So I have a 4k monitor and a 1080p monitor. So I basically have to choose between the 1080p monitor looking okay and the 4k having everything small or the 4k looking normal and everything just blown to smithereens on the 1080p. So I've kind of got it in this like happy medium where it's normal on the 1080p, kind of small on the 4k, but I have like the icons and text increased so it kind of helps and it's doable. It's not bad. But I've heard, I've read some things that like on Wayland it's a little bit better, but I've also heard that Wayland is buggy as hell. Yes. So I've not been on that. Yeah. I think I said adjust your audio up just a little bit. I just saw that comment and I bumped it. So hopefully it's a little better. Yep. Yeah. Wayland's supposed to fix that. I'm hoping because I know the folks at PopOS and I'm excited about this or redoing I think is going to call it a cosmic desktop if I get the name right. They're going to just re-engineer a lot of things under the hood and just kind of give us a better desktop experience, which doesn't make me happy, especially some of these Windows news had me laughing. Like Microsoft is so desperate to get everyone to want Edge that they're automatically switching, even if you told them not to, switching your browser, extracting things out of your other browser. They just do things that are goofy. It's like, ugh. Yeah. I was using Edge for a little bit when they made the big switch to Chromium and like it was actually like good. It wasn't the old Internet Explorer days. I used it for a bit and it was fine. Now switch back to Google and Windows was like, we saw you do that. We don't really like what we're seeing here. Yeah, I've stuck with Google since then, but another thing I put as a positive, I like the software and update manager. I'm using Mint by the way. I should have said that first. Yeah, Mint's not a bad OS. Yeah, I used just regular Ubuntu last time and I was deciding between Pop OS and Mint this time around and I tried them both. I think from just a pure desktop perspective, Mint seemed to be a little better. I mean, I don't know. I had to go with one. So I kind of joke when people ask like, which distro did you pick? I just say the wrong one because it doesn't matter what I picked. It was going to be the wrong one based on the comments. Yeah, that is the fun of the Linux community. Yeah, exactly. So I'm just rolling with it. Yeah, Mint with Cinnamon is what I'm rocking. And yeah, software and update managers is clean. It's easy to use. I like that. It prompts you and you can just easily select what you want updated, what you don't. It's not like Windows updates where it's kind of like, here's a vague description of the update. Go. And by the way, you're the beta tester in Windows Update. Exactly. So yeah, I like that. Being able to manage which kernel you're on right there in the GUI is pretty nice. One thing I have is neutral. And this is probably just as much on Dell as it is on Mint. There's like three modes you can pick when you're rocking a laptop here. There's Intel using the integrated GPU. There's the Nvidia, which just straight uses the graphics card and on demand, which uses the integrated GPU. But when you launch apps, it's like, oh, is this a graphic intensive app? And it'll run that using the dedicated GPU. And it works okay. But the desktop, it feels like much more responsive on the dedicated GPU rather than when it's running on the integrated Intel GPU. And I don't know if that's like a Linux thing or a Mint thing or a Dell plus Linux thing, but I would run it on the Nvidia card the entire time, but the fans just ramp up like immediately. And I'm just such like a noise snob with my computers that I can't handle it. No, I hear you on that. It's definitely been a challenge for a while to get that right. And that was, if you see a lot of the Linux laptops, something offered by System76 or one of the other Linux dedicated companies producing the hardware, they have seemed to avoid those most of the time, because they know that like, yeah, sorry, we're not good at that yet in Linux world. So it definitely can cause an issue. Yeah, I will say I was surprised when I even saw that option down there. So I tried it out and that's what I'm rolling with right now. And it's, it's fine. The only thing I've really noticed is I can no longer set my 4k monitor to 144 Hertz and maxes out at 96 now, which I guess might be a limitation of the Intel GPU with the bandwidth I'm trying to push through it, but it doesn't sound like that much. One 4k monitor and one 1080p monitor. Well, I mean, if it worked in Windows, the hardware is capable of it. Right. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, 96 Hertz is perfectly fine. It runs, like I said, fine, but it was much more like, it was much more smooth when I had it running just on the dedicated Nvidia card. I had a nightmare of a time with OBS audio and DaVinci Resolve. That sucked. So I initially, like once I set up Linux, I was like, okay, I got to download my, you know, my apps that I need. OBS, DaVinci Resolve, Steam, Google Chrome, like the things I use on a day-to-day basis. So I opened OBS. The webcam wouldn't come up, but I've had that in Windows a lot, just OBS things. Yeah. So I kind of like turned it off, turned it back on, restarted OBS, and eventually the webcam came up. Then I tested recording and it worked fine. I could see my mic. I could see the audio growing up and down the waveform. I was like, yes. We have video. We have audio. I pressed record. It was recording. I'm like, okay, this is great. Then I played back my recording in VLC and there was no audio. And I'm like, what the hell is going on? I can see the waveform. I can see it's recording. What the hell? So I spent, I did some Googling, dig down in some forums from like 2017 and eventually just like restarted Pulse Audio and that did something. Like, I don't know. Cause then I had audio in my recordings and I was like, yes, we're good. Let's test DaVinci and I dragged one into DaVinci. No audio. No waveforms. No waveforms in DaVinci. I could hear the audio in the recording and when I bring the audio, the entire clip into DaVinci, not even a waveform in the audio. I was like, what the hell is going on? But apparently... There's a Kodak problem. Yeah. AAC? AAC? Is it natively supported in DaVinci Resolve? So I had to switch to whatever the backup one was in OBS and we are good, so... Yeah. The... The adventures of that. So that's one of the problems is they don't have... I forget what AAC Kodak, I think it is. Thanks to one there. And they want PCM because there's a licensing argument and they don't want to get into... There's a comment somewhere from one of the developers that DaVinci like, we're not dealing with legal arguments. Like, there's some controversy. Spending lawyers on it uses Kodak into story. Yeah. That's like the first... First thing I experienced with licensing Kodaks is when I used a... Or I still use a Ninja V on my camera for recording videos. And they're like... Oh, cool. If you want to record in... It's not ProRes Raw. It's some other Kodak. Maybe it's ProRes Raw. It's like $300. I'm like, wait, what? I can record in like ProRes, you know, high quality 422. And then if I want to record in something else, I have to pay $300. Yeah. Apparently that's like a licensing thing. I was like, oh, I didn't know... That was like a thing that got passed down to the consumer. I thought that was all on like the company. But I guess it's a business model. If they want to pass it down, they can do that. Yeah, that's... It is kind of a pain the way they do that. One thing's too, and I can send this to you, there's a script I have for when I pull audio... I use some of the B-roll off my phone, but maybe I want the audio off of it. What I can do is I can drop them all in there, and I have a script, and it rips through and reconverts them all. It pulls the audio out of the video, syncs it back to PCM, and it reassembles it automatically. It's a batch script. So you just run it in the folder where all the audio files are, and it just finds and fixes all of them for you. It's one of those little hacks I had to come up with to fix that. Yeah, that does sound useful. Let's see. I have a positive. Gestures work surprisingly well on the laptop, which I was kind of surprised about because coming from a MacBook, which is like the king of trackpads and like gesture controls, I was like, okay, this is going to be ass. A Dell laptop with a Linux operating system, but it's surprisingly good. The customization options you have natively in-mit for like two-finger swipe, up-down left-right, three-finger, four-finger, five-finger, if you want it to do it at the beginning and the swipe at the end, and all the different options you have. I was like, whoa, this is actually usable. This is great. So I was pleasantly surprised there. Night owl. That's me. Night owl? That's close enough. How are you liking your move to Ubiquiti Unify? I like it. April. Yeah, it works. It's great. I mean, the firewall rules are kind of janky, but I actually just today filmed a walkthrough of my Ubiquiti Unify network setup, and it's like, most of my videos are scripted, like I'll sit there and I'll type out like a nice script and be able to go through it and just say what I want to say, but this one, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna just do an intro, turn around and just walk through my network as if I was sitting there explaining it. And that's when you find out all your crutch words, like, um, and so, I'm like, oh my God, I had to edit out so many ums and so's and so likes. Yeah. It's one of those, how I got better at doing that was I don't really script things. I bullet point them. And once you've edited it, I have just about 1800 videos that made it to publishing, by the way. They've actually got way more videos than that. And once you edit all of your own content, you realize how poorly you speak or the fact that you use the same adjective repetitively. So first you've got to get rid of all the ahs and ums, all the disfluences, and then you have to work on like, oh, I say like a lot. And once you've edited out the hundredth time you said like, you learn, it's like this thing when I get in a mode now, when I start recording, I change up the adjectives, I speak very concisely. I'm like, cause future me knows, I have to edit this. Oh yeah. And I'm so, so aware that I have this problem when I don't script things and I've known this even before. I started scripting my videos that I ramble so much if I don't have a script. Like, I will... I am off topic all the time. Yeah. And I tried so hard in this one to be concise. And I like pulled the footage in and it was like 45 minutes. I'm like, what? What did I do? What the hell? I was trying to be concise. And I was like sitting here editing. I'm like, why am I going off so much on this one little thing? So, yeah, that's when I started scripting my videos. And that, that seems to work pretty well for me. Yeah. It's figuring out the right balance. I script, the intro is the one part I script frequently because I try to make an intro to make you want to watch the rest of the video. I give you enough details to tell you why you should watch this video and why you should continue and not click whatever's more interesting next to me. Yeah. So, I try to write that because if not, my intros would all be seven minutes long for a four minute video. That was so bad at that when I first started YouTube. I'd go back and watch some of my videos. I'm like, it's like a minute and a half in and I haven't even like talked about what the hell I'm doing. Like this is so bad. Yeah. So, I've switched to like in the first 10 seconds is like, okay, something interesting or like, this is what I'm going to be doing. And that seems to work pretty well. But it's funny you say like, when you were mentioning like your crutch words and you start to notice them. At my nine to five job, for like two years, I was part of Toastmasters, which, Oh, yeah. Yeah. For those that don't know, it's like a, an organization that helps you like practice public speaking. They're really helpful. Yeah. And one of the things they do is when you're doing, you're practicing your speeches, they will count, there'll be a designated person who counts your crutch words. And at the end of your speech, they'll tell you, yeah, 17 ums, 24 likes. I was like, Oh my gosh. So they'll like, call you out like on the spot of your crutch words. Do you know what I really want some day and maybe there's some script that can do this. See the way we edit, you know, we got a whole timeline of all the things. We have everything we chopped out. I want an invert button. So here's my published video, but here's the invert of that. Here's all the ums. It's like those, you ever seen those edits where it'll usually be, here's a speech of somebody, but it's only them taking breaths. And the whole thing's just like, like that's what it would be like. Like I'm so like, so like. One day, one day maybe I'll do that because DaVinci's got that new option to edit by the text that it creates. It'll do that. Maybe I'll say let's cut out anything. It's not an om or something. Yeah. See how many of you really have put it together. Make a short out of it. Yeah. Kind of back to the topic. With the gestures one, you're right. They're really good. So one of the reasons I went with Papa West and they, it's been a long time since I looked at it and they may have feature parody with the way Papa West does it. I just kind of got stuck on Papa West and ain't broke. Don't fix it. So I just stick with that. Despite how many people tell me I should try the latest to whatever. But one of the things they've done is document all the different gestures, shortcut keys. And of course they've also become muscle memory to me. All the gestures and shortcut keys where it's all right where I need it to be. So if you ask me how to do some things, I'd actually pause to think about it. But if you tell me to do them, my fingers are near keys, the thing happens. And that's one thing that makes me feel so clunky whenever I have to use Windows. I feel lost. I feel like this is such a clunky thing because someone commented, I did a demo and I was doing something in Windows and there's always those comments like, you could have done that with less clay. I'm like, look, this is how I get to that thing. Dude, that's me coding. Like, it's like, hey, don't you know there's like a keyboard shortcut for going back, erasing and going up one line? I'm like, yeah, but. But that's how I do it. Yeah. I've only looked briefly at this. Have you ever looked at the CASAOS? Because I know you have several of the Zimas. And you did a recent updated Zima video, which is great. Yeah. So I did mention that in my last video where I finally got around to trying out the Zima Blade. And I had a section in there where I mentioned trying out CASAOS because I come back to it every like six months because when I first saw it, I was like, man, this is, I like this. This is clean. It looks nice, but. It has such a nice look. It looks so good. Like their UI is so clean. It's nice. But when you like peek behind the curtains, behind all that like nice looking stuff, there's just so much stuff lacking. Like there's no user control. Like you can't add users. You can't modify. Like there's nothing there with that. And I believe you mentioned in your video, there's no raid support. There's no raid support at all. You can't modify a. There's certain containers. Like you can't modify before you create it. Like with their apps. Some of them you can. Some of them you can't until after they're created, which is kind of annoying. There's like all these little things that kind of add up to where I'm like, um, come back when it's like ready. And that's why I went off on it. Like, guys, you have all these pieces of hardware you're releasing, and now you're releasing another operating system, Zemo s that's still in beta. It's like, can you just give us one good operating system with one good piece of hardware? Like that's totally fleshed out. Yeah, I don't understand. They're so close. They are so close to like having some really impressive pieces of hardware and a really impressive little kind of Docker instance thing. So. Cause one of my takes when they look at it is making sure that if I can build something, Docker's an easy example of this. Can I build it? Can I rebuild it? Can I take another system and easily get this set back up? How do I do? I feel confident. I know where my data is. So if this thing went to put, I can easily grab my data, grab that Docker config and boom, have it set back up. That is just the way I think about it. It's like, this may fail one day. I've worked in tech for over 30 years. Everything fails. Eventually how quickly can I rebuild something that I rely on? And I didn't feel any confidence on a cost to asset. I was clear on where my data was. I clear, clearly had a backup process for it. Like to make sure I could validate the integrity and redo it even if it requires script. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Linux. Linux, what are you doing? This is the best thing ever. What is happening? This is the Linux experience. Oh, no. Okay, guys, there's an earthquake. It's actually not Linux. There's just a huge earthquake in Texas going on right now. This embodies exactly how his Linux transition is going. Okay. Hold on. What the hell is going on? All right. I'm going to unplug it and plug it back in. Okay, that's fine. Holy shit. I am greatly amused by this. Okay. Let's unplug you. Oh, God. It's making me dizzy. Look. Did you just touch it and stopped? Is it following me? Yeah. What camera is that? What is going on? What camera is that one? Okay. So, what camera do you have? The Insta360 something. Oh, no. Okay. Okay. I didn't know it worked with Linux at all. Well. Well. I'm just going to say, we'll give him a second while he fixes this. This is amazing. Okay. It's doing things. I am greatly amused by this. No. Wait. What is it doing now? It's booting up. This defines live streaming. So, for anyone's curious, it's maybe just joining us now. This is how Brett Radahl's transition to Linux is going. Okay. Yeah. One second. Let's say, oh wait. Start cam. Okay. It's not. What is this feature called? Oh, no. Now it's not even detecting my. Okay. Hold on. Let me see if it comes to BS. You're making a wonderful live stream here. I'm just saying this. Okay. Wait. It's doing something. This is the reason I haven't switched to Linux. Yeah. I see this. Oh, wait, wait, wait. I think I got it. Okay. Well, it didn't want to go back to its default position. And now. Oh, God. Now it lost connection again. So, guys. I am using Linux on my desktop. I don't have an Insta360, but I bought them for my staff. Several of my staff have these, but my staff doesn't all run Linux. Those that do run Linux do not have them because I recommended them against it. I was like, I don't know if this works in Linux. You're on your own. All right. He's bounced out for a minute while he sorts out his technical difficulties. I've seen a tail scale question. First, I'll answer this one because it's an easy one. No, I have not played with GNS3. So I have not been to CES, but we'll bring that. We'll come back to that question because my friend Brett here has been to CES. He's got a video on it. Someone asked about tail scale that may be too far up for me to scroll back, but I'm working on a new video for tail scale in PF Sense because tail scale has added more features. So absolutely, I will be doing an updated video on that. So that's definitely a topic that's going to be coming up with tail scale. The tail scale in PF Sense, there's a few things that I didn't know it could do, but through consulting and fun things that a few of my technicians done, they taught me things because I wasn't using it that way. So I want to bring... Well, I don't think I'll bring him on, but I will be sitting with one of my techs soon to cover exactly how we got a couple of interesting things to work so I can do an updated video on tail scale. I'm happy with tail scale, but I will also mention I'm doing a new video on NetBird as well. NetBird has got some new versions coming out and some updates, so I will be covering... I want to dive into that as a product because I think it's just... NetBird is great for any of you that don't know about NetBird or haven't heard of it. I did a video on it maybe one or two weeks ago, but if you type in NetBird, there's only one video on my channel for it. It is very similar to tail scale, but you can host the control plane. I just want to give them a shout out because I really like, you know, when I can just supporting this not sponsored by NetBird at all. I just like when companies can really do a good job with something open source and for people not sure what words I'm using. It's netbird.io. It's a pretty slick system. Opening up ports would be the solution. I do open up ports for tail scale. The reason why is because you can get the best connection and not relay it. Reverse proxy with Synology and PF Sense. I don't think I have any of my Synologies on there. I don't know how to fix this. My Synologies, when I use HAA proxy, they seem to time out all the time. They make me re-log in my credentials. Not really time out, but they expire my credentials way faster. And I've never really dug into why. And I'm not in my Synologies enough to care about the URL being... I don't log into it often enough that that's an issue. And they also have their own proxy tool inside of there. I think you can add yourself, Brett, when you're ready. Or... Test, test. Are you back? Yeah, you're back. As you can tell, my laptop webcam. Because by 360, just like shit, it's pants. So we're going to be running potato webcam for the foreseeable future. Let's just be honest. No one's here for our camera quality. Exactly. This looks more Linux, you know? Like this is more of a Linux. This looks more Linux for sure. Let me not kind of see if I can line people with this... Does it get old for repeatedly redoing videos like PF Sense, etc.? No, it doesn't. God, this looks like shit. Is there something on your webcam? Try wiping it off. Feels like it's blurry. That looks terrible, too. All right. You guys get the sun in the corner of my... Wow. So this is a review of the Dell XPS 9520 webcam. It looks like shit. It's pure potato. Yeah, absolute potato. So for anyone just tuning in and like, oh, this radar has shit quality. Look, I usually run on this camera behind me. That looks really good. If I'm in a pinch, I'll run on my Insta360. But that decided to stroke. So now... It did it in the best way. We're on a super backup. It really did. Go back and watch the VOD after this. Yeah, absolutely. And just laugh at the earthquake that hit my house, apparently. Have I done a recent video on PF Sense? My older ones are fine. They're still accurate. There's going to be some nuanced differences. But I've got a lot of them on there. I am going to do a new one. So I got it. That's my goals are going to be... Because my last PF Sense video, I think, is 2022. So it's been two years. There's been some changes. What about for you? I was going to say, someone asked before I exploded about CES. And I was like, man. I wanted to try to convince everyone to go next year because it was a blast. I didn't know as many... I wasn't sure because it's not exactly my niche because I'm more in the enterprise space. But yeah, I think I should go. My cousin now is going to... She's like, you should have went. And I was like, oh, you went? I didn't know she was going. And my cousin's a big YouTuber. She does family stuff. She's not in the tech world at all, which is why I was shocked she was going to CES. But she's actually fun to hang out with. She lives here in Michigan. So I get to see her from time to time. She lives about three or four hours north of me. But knowing that all of you guys are going, I had the FOMO because I was saying, I'm like, oh, you went? I think you and Gurling and... Did Kraft Computing go this year? No, he didn't go this year. No, he didn't go. Okay. For those of you who don't know, I've listed my friends in different channels I watch all on my website, including Radial. We have a not so secret discord group, but we all talk about things all the time. So if you ever wonder if we collaborate or just know about each other's videos, yes, we do. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. We're always in there hanging out. We're always in there hanging out and laughing about the silliness. It's one of those things. We laugh at your comments all the time, by the way. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just know that. If you post something cringy dumb, we're putting you on blast in our creator discord. It's how we cope with it, because when you're an individual creator, you may get offended by the comments, but you're like, when you share, you're like, oh, that person found your channel too and said the dumbest thing possible and insulted the way you looked. Yeah, they did it on my channel too. We know exactly who we're talking about here. Yes, we do. There's a specific person. They're not in here. Don't worry. We're not talking about any of you. I haven't seen this person, so don't worry. I haven't seen anyone in this chat that we've actually talked to. Guys, you're cool. Relax. But yeah, it's a coping mechanism. Don't worry. It is. Yeah, it's one of the things you kind of have to have a community around some of the things you do. So it's actually me and Jay started this. I don't remember a while ago now, and we started reaching out to all these other YouTubers, and we told them to reach out to other YouTubers. And I don't know who got in there from where, but we're all in the same like we make, we're all a bunch of nerds making tech videos. Yep. Yep. It's kind of fun. Oh, I learned something fun you got a kick out of. So I was, I went to this big, I'm actually thinking about buying an RV. I should travel. I've decided I'm old and getting older, so I should travel somewhere. And I'm like, why not travel in a camper? That sounds good. So I went to an RV show, but of course before then, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos, and I found this guy called the RV nerd. He's got like tons and tons of videos, and he's really good at it about telling you about RVs. I'm like, oh, this is cool. Well, he's there at the show, right? And end up talking to him. One of the funniest things he told me was they started a discord for other people who make RV videos. And he was the leader of it. And I'm like, I came up with this idea for technology. He goes, yeah, you got to find your niche. Just do it. We're just cracking up. Exactly. My wife's like, you talked to him for like an hour here. She went and looked at RVs. And me and him talked about YouTube for like an hour. Yeah. It was kind of fun. Go, speak of RVs. Go watch the CES video where I did the walkthrough of the RV. Yeah, you're a really fancy one. That thing was cool as shit. That was one of us walking through the CES floor. That was my first time. And next year, I'll be a little bit better. But I was kind of like, OK, anything cool? I see I'm just going to do a video on it. And we were kind of walking through. We were in the car and transportation, big areas. I was like, I don't know. We're just kind of walking through it. I'm not going to make a video on anything. And I turn and I see this lean RV. I'm like, holy shit, this thing's cool. And it's like a travel trailer. You tow it, but it's got electric motors in both the wheels. Yeah, it pushes it. I watched that. I was so moved. Yeah, so it pushes it. And it auto hitches to your tow hitch. I'm like, oh man, this thing is cool as shit. It's got like, I can't remember how many killers of battery pack and solar on the top. I'm like, man, this thing is tight. This might make me actually go touch grass out in nature. If I had one of these, but I have like two plans. Sometimes sometimes I want one because I want to disappear occasionally just into the woods, which I do that. I go ride my motorcycle. And that's how that's my offline thing and touch grass thing I do once in a while. But I actually thought, you know, it might be fun to go visit some of these other YouTubers. You're in Texas, right? Yep. Yeah. You're in Texas. And there's another group of YouTubers. I didn't realize how many of them live over by like craft computing in that corner of the world. Yeah, the Portland area. Portland, right? Yeah. There's a bunch of them. Yeah. I can go there and see everybody. Everyone's within an hour of each other. Yeah. I know Colton from Hardware Havens in Oklahoma. So he's probably like close to me. Yeah. But you know, anything outside of Texas. If you're going West Texas from Houston, it's like it could be a 10, 15 hour drive because, you know, Texas massive. So I don't know anybody that anybody else that's in Texas from like tech creators. Network Chucks in Texas. Maybe bigger ones in Austin. Who is? Network Chuck. Oh, is he like in Austin or Dallas? I think he's Austin. I would assume Austin. Austin. Now I'm trying to remember Austin or Dallas. It is one of those two. Wherever VidSummit, wherever the last VidSummit was, not VidCon, but the VidSummit they did. He lived in it. I'm pretty sure it was Dallas, right? You know, I think that was Dallas. I've only been to those two cities in Texas. I mean, there's only four real cities in Texas. So you got Dallas, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. Someone confirmed that he's in Dallas. So. There you go. Network Chuck Stalker. Got him. Yep. I'm going to get an exact address. Yeah, he was she, I ended up BS him a little bit on when I was in VidCon with him. So or VidSummit. VidSummit is what it's called. So it's the one for creators, not the one where the fans come in harass the creators. That's that's a VidCon. VidSummit's the creator one and VidCon is where all the kids come in harass the creators. How many, how many times in real life have you been approached like, Hey, I watch your YouTube videos. Some of the strangest stories I have about that. So let's start. If I, if I go to one of the IT technology events that I go to, like connect wise, lots of people recognize me. It's kind of as expected. I work in the IT MSP industry. I actually was been a public speaker even before I was doing YouTube. And so a lot of people know me there. So that's kind of an expected place. But the unexpected places I've been recognized. This is where it gets funny. I was down in New Orleans and we were, we're on Bourbon Street, we're on vacation. We're like, let's have some fun. Twice while I was down there, one, this super tall guy, he says, Hey, Tom Lawrence. And he was a big dude. And I was like, Hey, and he was from the Netherlands, huge fan, first time in America. And he says, there's nothing, he was doing this whole, I want to stop by all the party spots in America. And his first stop was Bourbon Street. And he, he didn't. Yeah, it was funny because he recognized me. So we talked to him for a minute. And what was also funny was he just didn't get the concept of how far away he goes, Oh, so you live here. I was like, no, I live in Detroit. Well, that's not far from here. I'm like, no, that's actually, that's quite a drive. And so we ended up talking about geographies. He didn't have a good grasp on it. It's his first time to America, which I don't know where anything is in Netherlands. Yeah. Well, I think that's like the meme is you go to Europe and if you're going to a country, you can kind of like see all the cities in the country in like a day or two, like you can drive to them. And so people come to the U.S. and are like, Oh, I'm going to see New York City. I'm going to see the Los Angeles. I'm just going to drive there. It's what, like two or three hours? No, absolutely not. Yeah. Locally, I've been recognized a couple of times. I made a few friends. One of them happens to live. I live in a city of Southgate. It's actually where my office is as well. It's a small city about 15 miles south of Detroit of all goofy things. I'm riding a electric scooter like some dork, because I'm a dork and I have electric scooter. I'm cruising down the street and someone tended windows in a Hellcat rolls or windows down. So I was, yo, Tom. And I was like, Hey, I have no idea who you are. And he's like, your video has helped me with my tech career. And me and him have now become good friends. He bought me a beer and we went over to a bar that was close to where he seen me riding on the road. And he bought me a beer and that's like two years ago we became friends. He can't talk completely about where he works, but I thought about having him come on anonymously because he doesn't just have a career in cybersecurity. He works in the Fortune 1000 space. So I don't want to narrow down where he works. He's responsible. He's the head of security for over 200,000 endpoints. He does the sock stuff. He does all kinds of fun cybersecurity things, but he started by watching my videos. And he went from a factory worker at an automotive factory to watching tech videos, then going and following a tech career, but I was kind of like a weird catalyst. He had no idea that I lived so close to him. So. Really? Yeah. Yeah, overall. Yeah, overall it's been kind of cool. Most of my interactions, I've not had any, I have not had a single bad interaction with people who have stopped by my office and said hi to me. So it's been, I've always thrilled and kind to anyone who says hi. Yeah. I've, I was like, when I had like, I think, I don't know, 10,000 subs, I was, me and my wife would joke. I was like, how many subs before I get, before the first time I get like, in public, someone's like, Hey, you have a YouTube channel. I know you. I can't remember how far it was, but like, I was selling my old circ on Facebook Marketplace or something, Craigslist. And I met up with the guy and, and I started talking to him when, when we met, he's like, you sound familiar. Do you, do you, like, do I know you from somewhere? I'm like, I have a YouTube channel. He's like, Oh, tell you, and he pulled out his phone. You see, like, right out and he said, like all my videos watch, like the last, like five of them. He's like, yeah, I know you. Like the other night is crazy. It's fun. Well, cool. This is the first time I've ever been recognized. And then at CES, some dude at their, I was at the real link booth and he's like, Hey, man, I love your YouTube chat. I was like, oh, thank you. That's awesome. At every, at all the booths at the real link booth, the home security. Booth, but cool. So full of times, but it's been, yeah, nothing weird or unpleasant at all. The, when I was at VidSummit, do you know who legal legal is? The channel does like the legal breakdown videos. He's pretty famous. He did a talk there. Great guy. He was super gracious and hung out afterwards. My wife is a huge fan of him. So she's just like, Oh, we got to meet him. Devin's so nice. I'm like, whatever. I know you just want to shake his hand. But what's funny is, when we got up to him, I actually, I complimented him. I said, you know, you do such a good job. I'm not, I like watching his videos about threading the needle of lame in terms of understanding law, blah, blah, blah. They just, you don't want to say hi and thank him and stuff like that. Well, he said he liked ubiquity a lot and gesture towards, you know, he goes, you can make a good career out of it, out of it. And talking about this, because maybe I'm building a new house and I have to watch some ubiquity videos. And he went and shook my hand. I was like, my wife was not having it. She's like, no way. I'm like, lawyers say things on purpose. He didn't call me up on my name, but he said, when he said ubiquity videos, that didn't come out of a lawyer's mouth randomly. I was like, I was like, Devon watches my channel and she's just like, you're not that famous. Your head's too big. Yeah, he knows me. Yeah. That was my one time I knew a celebrity cared about what I do. Yeah. Another YouTube slide. Someone in chat asked, I asked Radow, how many random tech YouTubers he ran into randomly at CES? He said at least one. Can we get the final count? So I met Jeff Geerling, which was awesome. Got to meet him in person the first time. We had dinner. It was nice. Got to talk about YouTube and things outside of YouTube. It was nice. Ones that I saw, like, but didn't actually talk to. I saw a potato jet. So anybody out there who's big in the cameras. Yeah. His is great. Yeah. I love potato jet because it's funny because I didn't even see him. I was because me and my wife were there. She was my camera woman. And she was we were walking. We were like leaving some booth and I was like checking the map or something. And she's like, that that's that's your camera. I'm like, what? She's like your camera guy from YouTube. That's him. I'm like, what are you talking about? She's like potato. So I turned around and I see him walking with his wife and his crew. I was like, oh, cool. The first like big YouTuber I've seen. And then I saw a bit with walking through the Venetian. He was on the I didn't say anything. But I saw him and I think it was the only like YouTubers that I know of that I saw. Yeah. But yeah, I didn't like big YouTubers or anything. There's, as you know, they're all there, but I think some of them probably get some special access backstage with the. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. There's a lot of that. I mean, there comes to be a challenge. I mean, if you're, I really appreciate the high quality, high production value that you get out of someone like MKBHD. You know, I don't watch all of his videos because not all of them are interesting to me, but when he does a video and it's not a topic I want, I top notch production quality, but I gotta imagine there's just a ton of people that kind of, you know, because he's up there to upper echelon or even being Linus at a tech event. Everyone probably just mobs him. Oh, it's funny. We were like putting the escalator up to some, something doesn't matter. And the people on farms were like, Hey, man, I saw, I saw Linus walking. My God, you saw Linus? And they were like geeking out about seeing Linus at CES. I was like, I didn't get to see Linus. What the hell, man? Yeah. And it's funny because I would watch his videos from CES. And it was funny because like some of the booths he was in, like ASUS or MSI or whatever. They're like, when I went in there, just like packed with people making videos is in it. The doors are closed and it's just him like looking at the stuff. I'm like, ah, okay. You got the, the special come in and we'll close the doors and no one else can, can be in treatment. Yeah. Yeah. The nice thing about all the people I've interacted with in the YouTube, in the YouTube space, especially the tech space, none of them are putting on an act at all. Jeff Kearling says, I've went to dinner with him as well. He's as nice in person as he seems in his videos. He's just Jeff and yeah, we're all just kind of nerves on that. Even the one thing I'll say for Network Chuck, like there's some people, they give it a take you either love or don't love the fact that he's got this really hyper 10 camera switches level of presentation. He brings a lot of enthusiasm to it, but if you watch his live streams, that is the real Network Chuck. So to speak, he's calmer. He's, you know, he's still enthusiastic about what he does and everything else. He was, he's really nice when you've talked to him in person. He's not as caffeinated. His videos, he has that really hyped up way. He presents things with a lot of excitement to two different cameras. And he just kind of spins around. That's why it has like over a million subs. Like it's people like that. I mean, it's polarizing. I guess like people hate it or they really like it. So, right. It is what it is. It takes all, it takes an ecosystem of people to get people in tech. Not everybody learns the same way. The number of people, my favorite YouTube comment, and I've had this happen a lot. Tom, all you do is read manuals and regurgitate information. I could have read myself. I was like, yes, I'm making a career out of it. Some people don't like it. Yeah. Why are you here then? Yeah. Why are you here then? You could have read the manual. You think I wasn't going to read the manual? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's just, that's how it goes. This is a good question. Hi, Tom Brett, really old Windows VM running some legacy line of business software that can't be migrated. But I'd like it to get off-site. Is there a VPS? So let me import an image from Prosmox. I don't think so. Trying to get something into, yeah, if you want to like post it somewhere in some virtual private cloud server, there's not usually going to be a one-to-one, like, hey, extract this as an OVA file over to here. Some of them may support it. We deal with, and I just did the whole data center tour, stick something in a colo, stick a Prosmox in a colo and set it up yourself and put it there. One of the things that not everybody realizes, and I pointed this out when I did my data center video as well, they have quarter racks. So if you don't need a full rack, you can get these small mini racks so you can put a few things in the cloud because they live better there but running on your own hardware. Yeah, I don't, I mean, for running like some old Windows VM somewhere, there's not any, other than using some backup utility, not any easy way to get it over there. I was gonna say, is that like a benefit of running like more established, like VMWare or something? Yeah. And when you run your, you create like a disk to put your VM on, it's like a specific type, like a VHI or a VHD or whatever the shit, kind of a proprietary, I don't know, proprietary is the right word, but there's specific type of... Right. This file system or whatever you want to, where you can just migrate it super easy to other things. I don't think Proxmox has anything like that, right? No. No, you could, the other option, I've told people to use things like Zilla or your favorite cloning software, Acronis because it's Windows. And then you can usually upload a custom boot image and then just transfer that file up there, restore it to the VPS server and there it can live some crutch, cranky old OS. So I, there's so many, we work with manufacturing on the business side of the house. So we have things, I still have one client, kind of client, they're not actively managed, but they do have an OS2 system. It still works. We, and my five, I think a couple of years ago, there was a really old, like, I don't know, it was like VB6 application that, it was doing something that has been running for, forever. And they were like, okay, we need to upgrade the server that it's on. They're like, well, we don't know where the server is. So they spent like probably two weeks trying to find where this application was running on what server. It turns out it was one of our coworkers desk, like under his desk, it was just like a random PC just chilling there. And it's been there for years and it took this team, they like assembled like a, an admin to find this server. And he was like, oh yeah, that's, that's right here. They were like, what the hell? I mean, you can't do that anymore. So as of now, I don't think there's, but I could be wrong. The, the, this, this feeds part of the, I'm going to say that, we'll just say that time works in the automotive space a lot. Well, I don't want to get in trouble for talking about things that I may not be able to talk about about some of our clients. But this is one of those things where you wouldn't believe the scale of operation that a database, someone put a laptop in a closet and it ran a database synchronization tool to take what products were made for the day at a company that was, we'll see, publicly traded and synchronized that with the purchase order system that then got all the deliveries managed to all the other tier one suppliers. And when we were sorting it out, they were arguing because we thought it should be something more robust than a laptop that the previous who came up with the idea of how to get these databases to sync with EDI was like, hey, we just do it in here. All the inventory gets downloaded and to this laptop and then synchronized. It was running Windows 7. Oh, by the way, long after Windows 7 expired. Yeah. This isn't like an old story. Life spanned. Yeah. This isn't even an old story. And we're just like, they were arguing with us about the cost of like fixing all this and migrating because no one knows how it was set up. So we're going to have to try to figure out how to reverse engineered. I'm like, well, it works. That was their answer. I'm like, yeah, but it stopped working for a little while, which caused a panic. And when we fixed a minor problem, we were shocked to find that this is how it's being done. But also, it shouldn't be done this way. Yeah. Yeah. That's, there's, I'm sure there's so many night stories because I work in IT for a pretty large company. So our IT department is massive and I'm sure there's so many stories that I don't know about servers and things going on that I have yet to experience, but luckily I've only seen one like nightmare instance of some legacy software that has almost caused some serious issues. I was, I was there. We got hit with a crypto worm. It must have been four years ago at this point. And I remember our, our on-site IT guy came in and he's like, everyone turn off your computers, go home. Like what's going on? So I just turn them off, turn off everything turned off. And so everyone like kind of turned off and then it came out like what happened. And it was big. It was a big catalyst to approach to security. Let's say that. So just say our security is our security team has pulled quadrupled in size since then. So the, I did, I, you know, I can talk kind of vaguely about this. I was called, I'm not a normal, normally I don't do incident response. That's going to be covered by the insurance company, but I knew the IT people, personal friends that work for a relatively local municipality. They've known me for a while. We've just, you know, go out and have a drink while it's a BS about things. So when they had an incident, they called me and weren't exactly sure what the next step was. And I'm like, well, first, tell everyone to shut up because you're a city, you got breached and you're ransomware. So first, don't say anything. I don't know what the right thing to say is, but nothing sings better. Call your lawyers, call your incident, call your thing. But, you know, what my favorite part of the story is, though, is I help them kind of triage it and just calm people down, including like the mayor who's like, how does this happen? And, you know, things like that. But the funny part was, the reason they didn't get to the really goody-goody stuff was because it was all running Novell still, which also shocked me. They had an entire operating Novell. This was like only two years ago that this happened. And I was like, that's amazing that this works. And also they didn't know how to encrypt it. So it all was saved. It was just like. Yeah. Which happened again recently was in the news. Some bank in China got hit with ransomware. And the reason they said they were recovered is because they were unable to infect their Novell network that they still run. And I was like, Novell, run your bank. Yeah. Yeah. If you're running something obscure that no one knows how it works and how to get in and maybe that's like a meme about driving a manual in America. No one can steal it. Yeah. No one can steal it because no one knows how to drive it. I do. I do miss that about, like my test is fun, but I had a stick shift before I had the test. I love a stick shift. I like manual transmission cars. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't do a manual car because I've never driven one. So your car is safe around me. Casey, when you're running, I have some Traverse City whiskey. What do you have today? Just some, just some casual buffalo trace. Oh, buffalo trace is still good though. I like it. Yeah. It's probably one of my favorite sub like $30, $35 bottles. Yeah. I'll be honest. I'm kind of over bourbon at this point. I went through a huge bourbon phase like a few years ago and I got to the point now to where I'm like, man, there's no point of buying anything over like $35, $40. It all is like burnt oak. Some are slightly sweeter. So now I'm just like, man, I'll go with like a Elijah Craig, a buffalo trace, like something easy, something sugar. Yeah. I mostly do that. Traverse City is in Michigan, so I'm drinking one of my local Michigan ones. It's an Apple one, so it's not bad, but I've had a lot of different ones. And now I do like a Scotch occasionally, like a little bit of it because I like the PD ones is that I guess is what they refer to them as, but you're right. There's a diminishing return for that expensive bottle. And one of my clients, so my wife for my birthday, weird coincidence that happened, her friend got a job somewhere and was celebrating that her friend who worked with her became her friend who doesn't work with her, but they went to a bar to celebrate her new job and her boss showed up. I didn't know. I don't know. I didn't go to this party, but her friend turns out, ended up working for one of my big clients. And when the boss showed up, my wife started talking and he recognized her for one reason or another and said, oh, yeah, your husband does all the IT for my company. And she goes, oh, yeah. And they start talking about whiskey and she says, I really want to, it's too much money, but I want to give him something nice. I want to give him some grandpappies, but it's like $2,000 a bottle. I don't spend that kind of money on my husband. So he says, I'll have one dropped off at your house tomorrow. And so I didn't even know this. The guy has cases of it. Now I've been, I've been to the guy's house. He's got a six car garage full of exotic cars. Cases of grandpappy, completely not surprising. But the fact that he just dropped one off at my house the next day, my wife went and got it and then she gave it to me and she's like, I got this for you. I was like, I think there's a story behind this. But then we shared the grandpappies. Yeah. We shared the grandpappies. Is it 12? Yeah, these are 12. 12 year? Yeah. It was good. But there's, I thought it was really good, but I, it wasn't so good that I feel compelled to spend too grand on whiskey. I'm like, no, I can't do this again. Like, yeah. We actually held on to it. Yeah. We held on to it when I got it on my birthday and we celebrated when we merged the companies together because all the people, we're all co-owners of the new company. And so we all celebrated with grandpappies after the merger. So that, that was where that bottle went. I figured we had it. I wanted to just not taste it, but I wanted to use it for some reason. So. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of like a, I feel the same way with like wines. It's like you, you get a nice one. Not that it's so good that it's worth the money, but it's kind of like good thing to use to celebrate or like mark a special occasion. It's just fun. Like it's more of an entertainment thing. Like, I don't know how to describe it, but I totally understand it. Yeah. It's like the novelty of being able to pour a bunch of it for all the people. And we had, we had everyone, I was at my house when we cracked open the bottle. We just had like kind of a big gathering. Um, co-ball is definitely not dead. I love that Veronica talks about this man. She's a, she's a co-ball programmer. Veronica explains if you haven't followed her channel, but man, she definitely, um, I've talked to her personally a couple of times and yeah, all of her co-ball stories are always wild. Just all the different things, everything else. It's pretty neat. I've heard of people using co-ball. I've never seen in person anyone using co-ball. So. Oh, I haven't had to witness co-ball, but back to like working in the automotive space. Um, it's one of the things automotive companies have been around a long time. And especially if you're dealing with the, you know, Ford GM and Chrysler. Well, whatever they're called now, Chrysler has a new name. I, he called him Chrysler. His name from the company that bought him. Um, some investment company, but the, you run into all kinds of this old things running these manufacturing companies. That's just so common. So I run into a Jason stuff. Actually not co-ball. It's usually AS 400. Um, kind of stuff that I run into. Uh, except for the OS two guy. Yeah. I don't know that we have any crazy super legacy stuff hanging around anymore. Our company, but since I've been there, we've gone through so many like modernization efforts and, you know, those big corporate downstream. We're updating the company. We're updating how we do. We're in the middle of one now where like half of our shits in the cloud, half of it's locally stored on our servers. We're running like five different types of cases. So when customers come to me and they're like, Hey, can I get this data? I'm like, God damn it. I don't, I got to find out which database we have it in, which location. Do I even have access? So I'm like, guys, I don't care if we move to the cloud. If we throw everything in AWS or Azure or whatever, just pick one. Like I'm so tired of trying to manage and wrap my head around all these different modernization efforts you guys are going through. And it's just annoying. Yeah. When you get it spread across like, Hey, let's come up with this bespoke solution. And this one and this one, like someone has to manage all these. Where are, where are all these things? Yeah, that's part of being a massive company where you have one group that comes up with a good idea and you have a bunch of groups that come up with different managers and directors like, yeah, let's roll with it. Let's roll with it. And then by the time it rolls up, you have five different things that are doing the same thing. So yeah, it's, it's something say that. Yeah. This is something I'm looking at. We want to deploy it ourselves. We're slowly, we're six months past the merger and we got a lot of things done. But what's not done is some of the lab stuff. We want to set up net box to auto document all of our labs. So now that we have two locations, we have our Southgate office and our Toledo office. We're building new labs and they're not well documented. So our, our employees kind of have free reign to do what they want in the labs, which also means there's a lot of random in our labs. So net box, I don't know if you've ever used it, but it's kind of cool because it can auto document as you create things. You can tie it into some of your infrastructure tools, including like XCP and G, I think you just plug in for Proxmox as well. As you spin up VMs, it can document where those VMs are, what they are, and kind of, yeah, it's really, it's really slick how that works I know we actually have, this is, we literally have a net box server and I don't know where it's at anymore. It's in, it's in the infrastructure somewhere. It's under someone's desk dude, running, running on top. It's under, you know, I wonder if I have a picture of what we, we find one of my Toledo pictures of our Toledo office. It's, the Toledo office is, is the newest office, but also the building took a long time to update. I don't have a picture of the basement. I'll find one. The, it's a hodgepodge. There's, there's some things going on there. And, yeah, it's, yeah, we have such a wide, I feel like we had such a wide variety of like, storage and, and server rooms at our, we have our main data centers that are pretty hardcore, but then at the building I worked at, we had like, this just random, I feel like it was almost like an ad hoc server room for our, like a local IT guy who I'm pretty sure dabbled in some type of uppers before coming into work every day. Cause he was way too, way too excited for like, 6 a.m. every morning. And it was funny cause like, one of the first times I met him, they're like, oh, so and so it's coming down to help you use your new laptop. And everyone started kind of like giggling and laughing and I'm like, what's, what's going on here? And the guy comes like rushing in, he's like, hey man, yeah, yeah, we're going to get your laptop set up, man, we're going to do it real quick. And what's your name, man? I'm just like, oh my God, you're the IT guy. He's like, yeah, come, come follow me. He's like running like three stairs at a time up. I'm like, dude, we got an elevator. Can we, like this is six floors up. What do we do in here? And we go into like his office like a hodgepodge of server racks and shit laying around. I'm like, this is not what I expected. So there's probably random shit running and still he's, he's retired since, but I'm sure there's stuff in his room. I was reasonably organized with some of my lab stuff. And I didn't have too many legacies, too many legacies I'm supporting. So my company started in 2003. So I had 20 years of things that I dragged along. And then with CNWR, they've been in business since 1992. So over like 30 years that they've been around. And so we merged two together and also all the clients we support and everything else. I've, I've made a project called where are the bodies buried? And so we had to find and update all the bodies that were buried. But I also started discovering all the CNWR bodies that were buried, which was not bad or anything like that. But also we had two or three colos of stuff, of things. And then we, then we have another special client that we support their essentially data center on it. So you know, and manage everything with chef and puppet. So we have an entire Linux that handles that. Yeah. If you haven't heard those words in a while. So there's so much of that that we've been slowly, we just shut down. I seen them decommission one of the, one of our colos just finally got decommissioned. We just need to consolidate it. We were just in too many places. So yeah, it's, it's not a fun project. Unfortunately, I was trying to get permission to film in there in one of the colos we were in, cause we know the people, but didn't, didn't work out. I was shocked. I don't know if you see my data center video, but I was able to do all kinds of deep dive filming inside that data center, along with a full narrative of, I got a tour by the guy who manages deft. So he gave me a walk through tour and unleashed like, I know just a wealth of knowledge that also it was following around and go, wow, a lot. Everyone loves the video. It's got a lot of years, but it's just me going, wow. Yeah, this is crazy. That's big. I must have been a year ago at this point where Linus did the Intel, Intel factory tour over in Asia. I can't remember where he was, but did a factory tour of like Intel and like, I feel like 90% of the video was blurred out. Like anywhere he was, just like blurred out air. I'm just like, yeah, that I would be too nervous to even like bring a camera in somewhere like that. I would just be like, no, I'm going to show something that I shouldn't and it's not going to be a good time. Yeah, we, with the people over at deft, I did make an agreement that they could audit the video before I released it. And I had no problem with that. There was no money exchange hands. It wasn't like a sponsored video. They just wanted to make sure their legal department could pass it, which the, the thing that got cut out was the funniest thing because the guy was off by a minor digit. He says, can you edit that out? Cause I said a digit wrong. And I was like, how did you, you rattled off all this like a script. Like, and he was off. Yeah, the guy was really, really into every, he knew like, it was amazing. He could quote the wattage or any obscure detail of any device we touched. There's actually more video that I just didn't feel like fit in. The video was already 30 minutes long. And I was like, I don't know. I mean, I love data center videos, but I don't want to make it too long. You know, trying to figure out what to cut. I have one more clip that I am going to put back in for how they do data destruction, which is really cool with the giant degausser that scared me. I think I jumped in. There's a bunch of camera like, it's like the guy goes, and goes, I think it's like, but definitely fun. So yeah, I saw your and your short and your 45 drives, your HL 15. Yeah, I feel like you're like the, you're like the last creator who hasn't put out a video with it yet. Like we're just waiting for the Tom Lawrence HL 15 video. Yeah, I figured I'd make, I figured, all right, everyone's going to run and get their stuff, which is fine. I'm using it and it's it's backing up all over data. It's a third copy of all of our data and it's going to become a primary copy soon. So I figured, hey, I'll do a long-term review. So I've now, I think I was the first or second to get it. And then I immediately put it in production. So now that it's been running for several months, moving data, running our VMs and everything else, I'm going to do a video that's a little bit more like review issue. Hey, this is what it looks like. There's dust on it now. It's been running that long. Yeah. Yeah. I think that'll be a good breath of fresh air because yeah, like you said, people get it. And it's like, I feel like that's kind of the thing in YouTube, right? I, I often get de-incentivized to create content about like newer stuff because I often feel like, well, someone a video, like if it's new, someone's going to make a video about it. So it's like, I don't know that I have anything additional to add. Like, I know it's a joke but someone like PayScore on my discord like, hey, you're going to review the the Apple vision, what the hell is it called? The Apple Oh, the Yeah. The Vision Pro or whatever the shit it is. Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, I kind of want to try one, but no, I mean, there's nothing I can add that Marcus Brownlee hasn't already talked about. I will, I will watch, I've seen it, I haven't watched it yet, but I put into the watch later queue. I will watch his video on it. But I also think about it from a more practical standpoint. I can't think of any reason I want to strap something fucking heavy to my face. That's like, that's what I like. That was, that's what I like. What does that make me better? Not comfortable. I mean, I mean, my friend were texting about it and we were both kind of on the same page like, yeah, I want to try this, but I can't imagine like, I get the novelty and like the cool thing people are like, oh, like, you can sit at your desk and have like, you know, three months or like a giant month, like this and that and I'm like, yeah, but I would use that for probably like 30 minutes to an hour and be like, okay, this is novelty is kind of worn off back to my normal working setup and they're like, oh, but you can like sit on the couch and watch like a big screen TV thing or like a movie. I'm like, yeah, but I don't know. Like the novelty is, I, I'm often, I am self aware enough to realize that I'm a terrible impulse buyer. So if I see something, I'm like, I'm going to buy it and like the little devil on my shoulder pops up. That's like, you don't really need this. I'm like, I know, we know this, we've been doing this our whole lives and I'll still buy it. This is one that's just like completely like, yeah, even, even I'm like, I don't think I can dish out $3,500 for, for this. That does feel just excessive for it. Like I thought the, 2023 is a year. I finally admitted defeat and bought classes because I didn't want anything on my face. And I just go, even if it's electronic, I don't want it on my face. I'm not bothered by any look I have with glasses. I was just like, I don't want to have to be dependent on something on my face. Just annoying. And I'm like, Oh, you know, and I did get the, Oculus from Facebook, which was a novel for a little bit. I found one space game that was just super cool and I played it for a while, but I got bored with it and then stopped playing it. Um, yeah, I don't tell you I had the HTC Vive for a while. And yeah, same thing with you. I tried a bunch of games. They were cool, but yeah, the knowledge, but one that was extremely fun. And the kind of the only thing I miss about VR was keep, keep talking or load. What's, yeah, keep talking or explode. Yeah. That game is so fun in VR. Yeah. I've never played that in VR. It is. It's not pretty fun. Yeah. Because you, when you're diffusing the bomb, it's so much more immersive. When you can like grab it and like flip the briefcase up and down, you're actually pressing the buttons. That game was a blast in, in VR. And someone said, VR is good for racing. I actually have a buddy who's really into sim racing. And he just upgraded to an Oculus three and he's pumped about it. So he loves his VR for racing and like plane simulation and plane fighting and shit. I tried it once and it made me nauseous. Like I was like, I can't, I immediately got sick. And I don't get motion sick, which was surprising, but I tried this racing game and I was like, yeah, I can't do this. Something about it makes my tummy hurt. But I think it's, it's weird that I saw someone tweet. I mean, Twitter has just been nonstop like vision for stuff and it's so polarizing. Like anytime Apple releases something, it's either the greatest thing ever or absolute dog shit. And I'm like, you guys are in between, right? You know, like you can acknowledge that it's kind of cool, but also overpriced and maybe not the best thing ever. Like there's kind of an in between, right? Yeah, you know, one of the things I'll admit is I've been a Linux person. I switched to Linux on the desktop around 2008. So long before it was easy to do. And but I gotta admit, I fully admit my crutch was virtual box, running Windows in a virtual machine. So I've always, when I've had to do Windows things, I had a Windows system to do it. But coming back all the way to the Apple stuff, I was always really avoided the Apple ecosystem being that I was a Linux fan boy, open source fan boy. My open source world of Linux, I started working in Linux and my first job where I had to do it was 1998. So I was in the early days. I was a mail server admin in Linux back in 98. But swinging back over to the Mac topic, I for the last year, we had we had a bunch of clients that had Macs and some of our tooling had to be tested, not just on Mac, which we've been using for a while, but also on the M one series. So we had to pick one up or we picked up a client. We're very, we prototype things very well before you deployment clients or like, all right, let's try all the tools on the M one Mac. Once you got all the tools done, the MacBook Air was just sitting there doing nothing, which bothered me greatly because I just bought it and it's like, it's not doing anything. So I'm like, yeah, we're done with the project. I'll just take it home. I'll poke at it for a minute. I hate how much I like it. I am angry at myself for how much I like that MacBook Air. It is my favorite laptop I've ever owned now. And I hate saying that. You're not wrong. They've gone from... It's such a good laptop. Their laptops are not touchable right now. When they made, when they were still putting Intel chips in laptops, they were in like the overpriced tier, like that was the meme. You can buy an Apple MacBook Pro with this on it for $2,000 or you can buy the Windows version with the same specs for like $1,200. It was a big meme and then they came out with their M1 series, their in-house ARM chips. And oh my God, like I was skeptical. I was like, Apple's like first generation, like making their own chips, ARM based, like this is going to be a painful experience. And then I got an M1 MacBook Air and I was like, what? This is the greatest laptop ever. Like it's so powerful. It's so capable. It's it. And the battery life is insane. I'm like, oh God. Yeah, it's just wild. I sit on my couch with it for hours. Like people ask how I reply to emails as much as I do. So people who do engage me on emails or my forum posts, I have thousands and thousands of forum posts, not just my forums, I participate in other forums. I sit on time. I say honestly, it's me on my couch, on my MacBook Air and when it's nice out because right now it's really shitty here in the Detroit area. It's just cold out. But I sit outside. I sit on a kitchen table or I have like an outside picnic area. And yeah, I just sit there and hammer out emails. The keyboard's amazing. The battery life. I'm not plugged in. And then even in the evening, I'll build a little fire pit. I got a Xebo with a fire pit and I'm sitting on my MacBook Air just cranking. I'm like, this thing is so light, so easy to use. And I'm like, I charge it like every other day or every couple of days. Yeah. It is, they're playing a different game. Like there's not there as much as I couldn't spend. And the price is reasonable on it. You can get these MacBook Airs for sub $1,000 depending on your feature set you need. And I can't tell you a $2,000 price tag of a laptop that would beat it. I couldn't even tell you it's been $3,000 of a laptop that would beat it in that relationship. So it drives me nuts. Yeah. I ran an M1 MacBook Air for a while until I wanted something to edit on, like away from my main desktop. And it wasn't that the M1 couldn't handle editing. Like it really could. I just want a bigger screen. So now I'm rocking the 16 inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro. And that thing, like I, I challenge you to name like an AMD or Intel chip. That's three, two generations back. That is still in terms of productivity. Yeah. It's crazy. But so like, I'd say Apple's by far makes the best laptops right now. Their iPad untouchable in the tablet world. The iPhone, which I run, I will admit is there's nothing special about an iPhone anymore. Like it's pretty, pretty mid. They've kind of like almost killed off. They have their Mac pros that I don't think there's anything special there. But they're little like Mac minis. I think I've around the idea of getting one because to try. What is it? A sigh? What is the M1 arm base? A Sony, the Linux version for it. I think that's coming along well, but it's not. I don't think it's quite there yet. One thing I'll say is like a J from LearnLinux TV. He edits on, I think he's got the newest M3. Whatever. He edits on that and I've been over his house. Jay lives really close to me. He's about a half hour away. It is so buttery smooth when he edits on there. DaVinci Resolve runs so well on a Mac. Yeah, especially if you're on ProRes because those M2 and M3 chips have the super fancy like built in ProRes encoders and decoders. Like man, if you're shooting anything in ProRes, you're going to, I run on an Intel 13900K and 4090 system, which is like pretty much top tier like Windows consumer system you're going to be running. And yeah, like I shoot ProRes 422 and it just rips through that. But if I import something that's like, you know, H264, H265, it's not really edit friendly and anybody in the chat is probably like what the hell are you talking about? But if you, if you edit videos, then you know, but it can't struggle with that. But I've heard the M3 can just tear through like H264 and H265 too. So I'm on the fence about snagging like a M2 Ultra like Mac Studio, but I don't know. I want to try one so bad. I've had them in my cart like three or four different times. Yeah, I'm still not the biggest fan of the Mac ecosystem, but I also look at it more like it's a fancy, the MacBook Air Genie is like a fancy Chromebook because I'm popping open my browser. I'm replying to everybody, but oddly some of the, some of the native tools I use because I load homebrew on it, some of the open source tools like I use LogSeq. I love LogSeq works wonderful on there. That's what I started using for all my note taking and journaling. It is kind of cool that they have Mac support under. As a matter of fact, when I was trying several different markdown tools for editing stuff, it's like no problem. And as far as the command prompt goes, I have a jump box I use anyways. That's Linux. So I open up the terminal on my Mac. I SSH to my jump box. I Tmux attached to my session. Everything's there where I left it. I may as well be running Linux and so it doesn't really matter at that point. So it really hasn't been much of a pain. And then of course the native apps like I have Slack on there because I use that for work and some of those tools are all going to be working fine on Mac. It just makes it easy. Yeah. Like I said, I hate how much I like it because I have to, I still customized it a bit. I put some stickers on it. Like I made it look not like an Apple anymore. My wife made fun of me for it. She goes, I thought you hooted Apple. I can't actually show it now because my webcam is I was going to show off the stickers on my Dell because I'm like joking in my videos that yeah, this Dell used to run Windows, but now you can see since I saw it, that means it's a Linux machine because I've decked it out with stickers all over the front, but obviously I can't show that because because you got your potato webcam. You got these nuts. But yeah, I often joke that I like accidentally found myself in the Apple ecosystem because I have an iPad. I have a MacBook. I have an Apple watch. I have an iPhone, but I never had Apple stuff. And the first thing I got was like an iPhone. I was like, oh, this is cool. You know, it's an iPhone. I was in high school and that's what I've had since. But then I was like, oh, the cool thing to do, like when you get in the college, you get a MacBook, right? College kids have MacBooks. Yeah. So I got a MacBook. I had that for like a year or two and I went back to Windows. I was like, I don't really use this. And then I wanted to start just practicing with developing iOS apps and using Swift like natively to develop. So I was like, I'll just go back to Mac and I bought a MacBook to use that. And then I was like, oh, the Apple watch is kind of cool. So I bought one of those. And then like I was doing, I had some minuscule reason to get an iPad. And all of a sudden I looked down and I'm like, wait, I'm in the Apple ecosystem. Like they've got me. They've successfully blurred me in and built the walls around me. But I still don't use like someone just talked about like iCloud stinks on Windows. I don't. I hate iCloud. How supposedly user friendly it is and awesome to sync between all your Mac stuff. I still don't use it. I think it's ass. Like the innocent. It's just annoying. So I still don't use iCloud. But yeah, I've stumbled into the Apple ecosystem. I'm kind of just sitting in it. Like I don't, I have no reason that here I am. Yeah, it just kind of, and if you like being in the creator space, like once you realize how smooth some of the editing stuff works, and you're like, oh crap, this is, this rivals my expensive machine I built for editing that I probably spent more money on. Yeah. And that was one of the reasons not all, because I switched from, I used to be a Premiere Pro Adobe for editing and it runs on Mac and but Adobe doesn't run on Linux. And when I did my Linux challenge last year, that was one of the big things was like, I don't have an editing software. I was like, oh, DaVinci supposedly runs on Linux, but I don't really know how to use it. So yeah. And I eventually just bit the bullet to resolve. Yeah. Resolve. I really am happy I moved to resolve. Where do you back up your photos? Me and Jay just did on the Learn Linux, I'm sorry, not Learn Linux, the homelab show podcast. We just talked about backups. Backblaze is my preferred one. Do you have a preferred one, Brett? So I have such a stupid, it's so weird because I'm actually, I just wrote the script for some of what I'm about to discuss, but I have two separate like photo solution for like my photography. Like when I do, I guess my camera's not next to me right now. But when I shoot like actual photography stuff, I load everything into Lightroom. That's one Adobe product I can't live without. Lightroom is solid for photo stuff. Lightroom is so good. Like Lightroom and Photoshop are amazing. Premiere is ass. But I load everything in Lightroom and I have that locally stored. That is stored on my TrueNAS server, which gets backed up to my Synology server, which then gets backed up remotely to another Synology server. But my phone photos get synced up with the Next Cloud. So Next, all photos load in with Next Cloud and those are stored same way, kind of on the TrueNAS system backed up to Synology and then backed up again. So Lightroom and Next Cloud I guess are my answer. Yeah, I recommend Backblaze to people. My actual solution that Tom is using is the fact that Tom has buildings that are 45 miles apart. So I store, we have storage servers in each of them. So I just back up to my, and I'm at another location. My studio is actually at my house and then I can back up things to my local office and then I can replicate them again to my other office that's another hour away. Exactly. But if you don't have three offices, Backblaze is cheaper than having three offices. They're the only one that does a static price for a single system. I know they do it on Windows and Mac because they can get away not having to back up a Linux server that's housing a petabyte of data. They'll just ignore what mounted drives and stuff. So I think for cheap, if you're just looking to back up like your personal machines, I know it's super cheap there. I don't know what their pricing is for like terabyte per terabyte, but... If you use TrueNAS with a B2 server or Backblaze, it's cheap too. So they're probably sold in one of the more cost-effective places that's natively integrated with your TrueNAS or I believe if you use HyperBackup, there's a Backblaze option inside of Synology too. I think there is. But if you use Synology, their C2 service is really reasonably priced too. We've recommended that to a lot of clients. I had a free trial for it and I messed with it. It was super, obviously. Like everything in Synology is pretty seamless. I will give them a ding on... I feel like they have so many apps that do the same thing that it can get overwhelming. The Venn diagram of calling things active backup but having different functions but overlapping... Active backup for client, active backup for business, HyperBackup, R-Sync, all these different ways of backing up your stuff and restoring it. It's just like pick one, just kind of roll with it. Yeah, make one called SuperBackup that just does all of it in one... Yeah, SuperMegaHyperBackup. SuperMegaHyperBackup. We're helping them with their product names. Yeah. I love my Synology systems and it reminds me of the annoying situation that I'm sure you found yourself in a lot as a content creator where you use something and you genuinely like it and they want to sponsor you. So you create sponsored content and people are like, you're just saying that because they... I'm like, no, I've used this. I actually like it, which is why I part them... It's so hard. It's so hard to thread that needle and this is... It's a big YouTuber challenge. So much that goes into the production of what we do. I'm lucky enough that I sponsor myself because YouTube... Unabashedly and unapologetically said, hey, hire us for a project. That is how I kind of look at the sponsorship. My channel is kind of self-sponsorship. But the reality is there's good amount of hiring that comes in, but sometimes I need some extra revenue because especially since I split things, there's still the revenue that has to support Tom Lawrence, the YouTube creator. And yeah, so I do do some sponsored content. I've always been clear about it. I only take a few of them, but it is a pain, especially because I've not taken sponsorship from... at all from NetGate, despite the number of... The number of times I'm called a paid shill for NetGate because I use a lot of PF since I'm like, no, I commercially use this product. I've never had any money exchange hands. Same thing with 45 Drives. The exclusive is they've sent me... I like that Homelad 15 and some other servers, but my company spent $700,000 just last year with 45 Drives. That's money towards them. That's sponsorship. We spent with them. With so many 45 Drives servers, we bought... This is the opposite. Yeah, it's the opposite of sponsorship. I did a video and I talked about another petabyte of storage that we put in for a client with 45 Drives. Someone was like, oh, more sponsored shill content. I'm like, this isn't sponsored. I spent $6,000 on that server, just that one. Yeah. Yeah. It's frustrating. It is. I know 45 Drives would probably sponsor me if I wanted to say... I know it's kind of a circle. We're a reseller, but my videos bring in more. Sometimes it brings them directly clients that don't necessarily go through me, but I'm like, yeah, it's worth it. We get... I'm working on to figure out... I think I got permission now. They're a studio, their primary client is someone you might have heard of called Netflix. And we built all the storage backend for them. We designed their architecture for their networking, their servers, and it's all 45 Drives. All these people that do these editing for the things you see on Netflix, they do the color grading and stuff like that. So it's kind of a cool... The owner, I might be able to get him in on the video, because he found me from my YouTube channel, full disclosure. We helped re-engineer things. That's crazy. Yeah, it's actually... It's so cool working with the scale they operate with editors. And I've learned a lot about the backend editing industry of movies inadvertently, just by talking to them. It's been really fascinating. They have a lot of interesting procedures they have around video. If you work for Sony Entertainment, Warner Brothers, whatever big blockbuster movie company, they have extremely strict policies around which editor edited which frames and when. They have check-in processes, because if any a frame of the next superhero movie gets leaked somewhere, they know what editor was working at at what time. And that is all very, very tracked in a very interesting way. The entertainment industry reserves to write to audit all these independent editors at any time. They can surprise audit them, and they want background checks on people. It's really a strange world of things they want. They've got strict door access for things to get into editing rooms. Data doesn't leave this place. It's really strict and locked down. It's very secure. I was impressed with the levels. Yeah. It's like Irman's made when I got an internship and I had to go work at a new facility and I've never seen anything in real life security wise like that. Like holy crap. Just a step foot in I had to go through this background check and I had to do a behavioral test. It was like a 250 question multiple choice behavioral test. I'm convinced it was like if you can get through this without going insane because you're doing a question. Yeah. And some of the questions were like have you ever thought about killings? I'm like Okay. Who's going to answer yes on this? Is that just an immediate red flag? Like, well that was easy. You're not coming to this nuclear facility. Like what? So I can imagine that level of just security going on, especially because you know obviously nuclear is different. It's not just about money and it's about safety and government stuff but when you're talking about millions and millions of dollars that are on the line I'm sure there's they're not skimping when it comes to making sure none of that stuff gets leaked. Which? No. They're very strict on that. But it's fun. It's amazing how much this stuff runs all on 45 drive servers. No. That's and they're not like a sure big company, right? No. But I mean I can't tell. I mean I know they're not massive but they have some giants it seems like. Yeah. There's a write up in Forbes on them. I get mentioned in the write up in Forbes. My first Forbes mention. Yeah I thought it was kind of cool. I'm like oh look I told my wife I'm in Forbes she's like shut up. My wife is not having any of it but I would say that all the time if I was in a Forbes article I would wear that on my name tag. Yeah the article is about 45 drives and about some of that and they talk about the companies they work with and which are some of the companies you work with because of the 45 drives relationship we have but it's they're really kind of punching above their weight if you look at the fact that they don't have they're not the scale and scope of some of the massive companies but they're in these niche places and you know us working in automotive space I got to film a little bit of us racking drives at a place I just had to block out all the client names but it's in the automotive space I'm in the Detroit area and we just installed two petabytes of 45 drive servers at an automotive company and that is how that works that's you know it's wild but there's not anything for the budget they have which is still huge budget it's just best bang for the buck to do some of the data analytics they have for doing design and engineering. Yeah so what I guess on the 45 drive side so the big thing that I've seen not just on my video but on every single person who's released an HL15 video is I could build this for half the price what is your immediate thoughts and response to that because I've gotten that so many times. Yeah my immediate reaction is I mean I can stick a pile of hard drives I can build some type of random backplane and kind of cobble together with duct tape some type of solution but it doesn't have that fit and finish that my clients appreciate when they look at and it's funny because when I have this video I mean I pull this picture up real quick it's just kind of a fun picture you know because you can see what I'm doing in the picture um let's see here it's a recent one I'll pull it up because it kind of gets some context of what we're doing inside of this mini data center at a local place and we're racking up some drives but you can really see the fit and finish here of what we're doing uh there so this picture makes it easy to see this is um one of my staff so she was excited because she um she's works in our tech sector but doesn't necessarily get to put hands on hardware so I was like hey Erica just just go ahead and load these up she's like how do they load up I'm like it's really simple you just load the drives in straight so she's just loading them in but one of the things I'm doing here is holding covers over the fact that we have see the other 45 drivers here there is also this machine here that's a um super micro I did a video on this machine it's a $150,000 server with one and a half terabytes of RAM but these 45 drivers this is a rack and there's a rack behind your um that's getting more of them the thing I'm holding over is we've branded and logo these with all the company logos on them so the company comes in and sees all these servers racked two petabytes of storage is what they have now a little over two petabytes and it's all branded with their name the fit and finish these go in really nice they love the fact that these are so like if they had a problem they can just see all the drives pull the lids see the serial numbers it slides in and out it's so much nicer than even the Dell equipment that's adjacent to it matter of fact one more piece of equipment that's in there I'm sure I remember the name of this uh piece of equipment this white server is an um there's another company that makes them there's these white servers that are filled with nvidia cards that's what this one has in it as well but they like the stuff that we brought them better and I thought that was just kind of cool the but my back to my response it's the fit and finish the quality of it the thought process they went into creating the back planes the when you have 60 drives 60 drives when you start them up if you turn on all 60 drives at once that's going to fry your power supply drives have a peak wattage start time but a low wattage very low wattage substantially lower run time they're using like four or five watts when they're running um so the staggering that they have built into all those little controllers that kind of stagger the drive start up all that little thought process that went into here even if it's only a 15 drive system substantially improves the usability and feeling you get when using one of these so um I think Wendell said it best because I watched his video on the hl 15 and he just said this is a case that's going to out survive the drives and the motherboard a few times before you're over it you know what I mean so you're going to have it for years to come and it's that's how I look at it I think they are they're filling a good niche for homelab users which homelab is a weird term because there's the budget hey I'm not into the tech industry I don't make a lot of money there's my friend working in a large cyber security company who makes well about 200k a year and he just says Tom tell me the best thing to buy and I'm like I need a storage server I'm like oh buy an hl 15 he goes to grand cool buy he just doesn't he's like I make a lot of money I'm going to buy the fanciest thing and you know build this homelab like that that is a pretty big niche of people who want a really high quality product they're not going to be tinkering with so um that's kind of my response is it is the premium product for those that want it if you want the cheapest thing you can do I mean hell um I kind of glance over because I'm too lazy to drag it over here I have this 3d printed hard drive holder it is how I've demoed true nasty times because I 3d printed the the jankiest ugliest true nasty server ever running on a zema with a bunch of 3d printed wires everywhere will that work yes could I eventually tie 15 drives together yes will it be ugly yes yeah and that's it reminds me well touch on what you said like the hl 15 was designed with like homelabbers in mind show my videos like it's such a tough market to break into because so much of the homelab community is built upon like finding gills and like using old enterprise stuff and like that's kind of the thing in homelabbing so to break into it with like this new expensive premiere like premium product that like kind of goes against the homelab idea homelab yeah homelabbing idea so I think that was a big hurdle to jump over because homelab is like this race to the bottom how can I make the cheapest thing possible how can I make the sub $100 but scores top of the line on everything else and comes up with more rand than you'll ever need and comes with like redundant MVMEs but meets the $99 price point that's every homelabber wants I'm like cool story bro but there's a point of unrealistic expectations and there's and like there's there's a market for everybody like in the same way that BMW releases a car that's $100,000 they're not going to sell it as they sell as like a Toyota Camry like that's not they're different markets and I think 45 Drives is very aware that they're releasing a premium product that's not going to compete with a $150 rose will case you can buy on new egg like it's different now this is a fun history I don't know if you're aware of the relationship between 45 Drives proto case and back plays um yeah so and I think cool I love that Jeff Gehrling just popped in so Jeff Gehrling might know some of this history as well so and someone else kind of knows the history here 45 Drives parent company is proto case I believe whose supplies are back plays so the story came out of if you dig in through the history and maybe this is a fun topic I should talk with the 45 Drives people and some of the other people involved with this back plays was a one of those hey I got this idea let's see if we can use consumer hard drives in this high density case that we can build and start a storage company hence back plays was born you know all those we wrote it on a napkin it came true and the napkin idea was let's top load everything they were years ahead of their time doing this cool top load no type of tray and proto case is a proto type manufacturing they made all the cases and back plays famously being very transparent their drive reports but they also talked a lot about how they built their infrastructure people like oh I want one of the they call them storage pods everyone's like I want a storage pod and so they're like okay and 45 Drives then said we can build storage pod so it's kind of like an arm of it um where they started selling to the public matter of fact there is the stornado there's a stornator there's the uh beer keg one that I have bugged them several times they actually produced one that's a cooler it's it's in a case but in Iraq it's a rack amount of cooler for beers um they call it like the beer nator look it up I need I need to see this I've told them it's like you need to really produce this I bring that up anytime if I have any conversation with people what we should do next I'm like I reference screenshot it's a rack amount it's one of their cases with beer in it and and it cool like it's a an actual no it's just cooler it doesn't plug in but they got the face looks like holy shit it looks like it's like bad but think about how cool that is to have in there like you got a rack of all these 45 Drivers to the bosses like hey thumbs up that looks wonderful you slide one out and it's full of your chilled beers I mean come on I think we can improve on this I thought this was like a full plugged in like refrigerator I was like okay I could be that I think this is what they should build they built it as a joke I would buy one I would buy one they built it as a joke um I would buy one 100% yeah that sounds awesome yeah but it's one of those things it's so cool they have this kind of cool history of everything that was that was related to back plays and proto case and by the way proto case um is a big company that makes all kinds of one-off prototypes they're actually known in some of the automotive space and somewhere else because they make these one off um specialized things they have really advanced uh equipment for building your ideas and so it's just kind of a whole there's a whole relationship between all these companies that kind of brought that to uh where it is today yeah I had no idea that there was this crazy relation or that a beer cooler oh I gotta find it I bugged them about that one small because they just hollowed out a case and built a cooler into it but they were showing off all their regular servers but then one of them is not a server they pull out and there's beers in it I'm like yeah like this is cool oh yeah that that's like the level of like uh putting a tarp in the back of your truck and filling it up with water and making it a a hot tub type thing like yeah that's kind of the level that I want my server I got I want to I want a beer cooler I want something something like that in my in my server rack it's missing something well it's probably a a beer this is old but someone built this and they were a genius for building it this is a Cisco beer cooler oh wait that's the you know me here we go this was famous on reddit let me find the right image what that's so cool that is epic I wish I had any a fraction of that like creativity and know how to do anything I might build this I mean I say that's just like a wait does this actually have a little rg45 stuff on the front yeah it's all they cut the back of the server off and just glued it all to the front of the fridge okay so it looks like it's I would go as far lights well they did they actually the lights light up here so I see lights on so it's blinky I want to make one that's fully blinky so no one knows that it's not real and then they just glued it to the fridge yeah I mean I guess I do I do I have the motivation to do it no but I will admit that it's very cool yeah and I would be very jealous of it but man yeah that's I have zero like like inspiration or like any type of artistic or manufacturing type ability like it's I wish I could get in 3d printing and like laser cutting and stuff and it's hilarious because we have a 3d printer and a laser cutter but my wife is the artistic one so she made like these 120 millimeter fan grills like she designed them and laser cut them with a radar logo on them I was like wow I could never do that but this is cool as shit so so all as I can find I will dig it up sometime and I'll bring it up again um there is an old post on hacker news 2014 that's funny this 45 drives you can order the beer nadir you're gonna have to do yours copy or nadir dot php let's see hold on we're going to the way back I was gonna say no way that's that URL still exists yeah I'm gonna find the way back one machine here if I can spell properly geek house store nadir and beer nadir that's what Jeff says let's see if they have a page on it well they did in 2014 so you can pull one up here where's the snapshot of it I mean there's something they should bring back I love bringing this up to them they always get a chuckle out whenever I talk to the media people there because they're like hey Tom I've actually helped them with their youtube channel and things like that they're not so serious yeah like a Jeff's message said just search for geek beat for beer nadir oh shit and that cola that is so slick like you would order this right oh 100 oh hell yeah that is I would 100% get that I'm thinking this could be a more I'm thinking this could be more popular than hl15 amongst the I was like I can just picture like you have people over and like hey come check out the server room like all these random servers you're like hey check out what's in this one just pull that shit back loaded with beer loaded I mean this is just awesome yeah this is just genius 100% have to sell that and they don't even have to do any like crazy engineering it's like one of their already we wouldn't have to send them to us we would we would be lining up to buy these I guarantee you a lot more people than they think would buy those now they're doubling your shoulders like why haven't you bought one already yeah no I'd be like dude I'm way ahead of you already bought one you don't even have to show up it's being delivered tomorrow that is crazy I never knew like that ever existed which man now there's something else I want that he's not wrong about this well I'm going to wind this down here because one I am now drinking it needs to leave and so I've ran out of this and now it wants to come out so I was going to say yep I'm I'm all out so that means it's time to get but yeah man yeah what a I never thought I was going to come into the stream learning about a beerinator exist and that I can't have it so and in a while Jeff Keeling would appear at the end of this we experienced that and we experienced an earthquake here in Texas specifically yep that was like if you want to know how I'm going to find that clip and pull it out and we'll post it as a short so how how's right now it's going this that is couldn't have been like okay not was not planned and there's no way I could even plan that because I wouldn't know how to make my webcam just start no but Linux knows how and that's what's important I didn't even do anything that was the funniest part like I was just sitting here I wasn't like messing with another Apple and I wasn't like trying to run OBS and something else at the same time it just took over the stream over man it was like entertainment I should have made you full screen when you're doing that I was like it was like hey man you want to see a party trick cool check this out you're talking about how my Linux trip is going let's go for it so I will grab the clip out later but I'll leave everyone with that I'm going to wind this down I gotta go pee and I'm out of whiskey those two things that converge and we've talked for two hours so thanks for joining see everyone next time and check out subscribe to Raydoll's channel if you're not subscribed already if you aren't why not follow his Linux journey and whatever epic thing happens with his camera next thanks so far so good we'll end with that yeah see y'all