0:00

My oven's working again, Brad. I know

0:02

it's been, okay. Well, it's

0:04

been kind of an embarrassing length of time. I, I, we

0:08

live in the Bay area as people may know. What

0:11

people may not know is that the cost of getting someone

0:13

out to look at a appliance repair

0:16

just to have them hit the door. It has never been

0:18

less than $300 for me in this house. Ouch. Yeah.

0:21

It explains some things. You know, I'm not, as a renter,

0:23

I'm not in a position to have to deal with such things, but that

0:26

that illuminates certain behaviors on

0:28

the part of my landlord, let's say. Yeah. Like

0:31

it's generally set up so that unless you

0:33

have a specific thing,

0:35

it's cheaper to just replace

0:37

the, the cost

0:39

of just biting the bullet and replacing the appliance

0:42

is such that you just, you just buy

0:44

a new one often. However, we

0:46

bought a new oven, a new combo range

0:49

stove a few years ago, about five years ago. And,

0:51

and when we bought it, we bought it at a

0:53

place that likes to push an extended warranty and, and

0:57

for big appliances that are going to last

0:59

five to 10 years, and we have more than five years,

1:01

I do tend to buy the extended

1:03

warranty. I'm not sure we talking, is it, is it a percentage

1:05

or is it a flat fee based on the

1:08

cards? So the, the range listed

1:11

at two grand. I knocked them down to 1600

1:13

bucks and we split the difference

1:16

on the extended warranty. If I remember right, you

1:18

know, I started this, I've never considered

1:20

whether you would be a haggler or not.

1:22

And I started to say, I hate it. You didn't, you

1:24

didn't strike me as a haggler, but then like, no, you would totally

1:27

haggle. I hate, I hate the haggle,

1:29

but you would still do it, right? I hate

1:31

it. Of course. Yeah. I mean, look, my

1:34

wife bought our, got our last car cause she

1:36

was like, I'm going to do this email thing. I'm

1:37

just going to grind them down. And she absolutely just

1:41

wore their asses out by emailing different

1:43

dealers and, and

1:45

saying, Hey, I have this and this and this.

1:47

What can you do with this deal? And then they would be

1:49

like, Oh God, you again. And eventually

1:51

one of them just gets so tired that they give you what you ask

1:54

for cause they just want to stop having you hassle them. Okay.

1:57

But yeah, that's the, that's the Nicole Clift

1:59

toast.

1:59

method is the first place I think

2:02

I saw that but anyway we

2:06

so so as soon as they hit me with the like

2:09

a Best Buy or whatever Costco you there's no

2:11

caggly at Costco right circuit City

2:13

I used to love going in because you could you could grind a circuit

2:15

City guy down into dust but

2:18

but Best Buy

2:20

is tricky because like they only get like

2:22

the people who are working there are generally pretty helpful these

2:25

days especially in the appliance section only

2:27

get paid on my understanding

2:29

is they only get paid on on plan sales

2:32

on extended warranty plan sales so they're strongly

2:34

motivated to move extended warranties and they'll take a

2:36

pretty big cut off of the top especially

2:38

if you go into the right time of year we needed another that was the right

2:40

time of year that was they were had a bunch of stuff

2:42

laying around couldn't get rid of it and

2:45

and so yeah we got that we got a decent deal on the on

2:48

the range we wanted the walk

2:50

we wanted like a high BTU walk burner that

2:52

is like you I don't know if you see

2:54

like you can get a twenty five thousand BTU

2:56

walk burner on just a normal ass range if

2:59

you live someplace that there's a large Asian community

3:01

and they call it a walk burner but it's just a really really

3:03

hot burner on a normal ass gas

3:05

stove I know I have no frame of reference for

3:07

BTU 25,000 sounds like a lot usually that usually they're like 18

3:12

cap so you can it

3:14

gets hot enough that you can do a an actual

3:16

round bottom walk on it without and

3:19

and the food works but it's also really nice for like

3:22

searing meat and using we put the the

3:24

the griddle and stuff like that on it as well just to

3:26

maybe add some context the people I know who are serious

3:29

walk cookers do all of their walks cooking outside

3:31

is how is how hot that gets

3:33

there is a reason the amount of smoke that the

3:36

serious walks cooking makes requires a real

3:38

real outdoor ventilating hood anyway

3:41

so last year right after the holidays are oven

3:44

the thermostat and it conked out and I knew exactly what the

3:46

problem was and I went through the whole extended warranty

3:48

rigmarole with Best Buy and

3:51

they often defer you to a outside

3:54

contractor and the outside contractor scheduled

3:56

a thing and then didn't show up on the day and then schedule

3:58

and I was like I don't have time with this right now. We were

4:00

gone for a little bit. So I

4:04

called back a couple of months ago. I was like, hey, we have a problem.

4:06

Blah, blah, blah. I can't come out there. And also, worth

4:09

mentioning, during the summer, it's a gas oven. I don't

4:11

know. I'm getting into too much detail here. During the summer,

4:14

it's a gas oven, so we often use the toaster oven

4:16

to do baking stuff in the summertime

4:18

and don't make the house a million degrees

4:20

with the gas oven. So it wasn't

4:23

urgent. But he came and fixed the oven

4:25

yesterday, and now our oven's working again. I made

4:27

biscuits this morning. I'm really happy. That's fantastic.

4:30

I haven't gotten past the part where you just casually

4:32

tossed off that he didn't show up the first time. So

4:36

what happens is Best Buy has a system where you schedule

4:38

an appointment, and they'll be

4:41

there on the Tuesday between 8 and 8, or

4:43

some ridiculous time frame. And then when they

4:46

do it with the Geek Squad, that's when they show up and they text

4:48

you, and the person is like, I'm going to be there at 9.45 AM

4:51

the night before. And you're like, that was incredibly

4:53

precise. When

4:55

the outside contractor does it, they

4:58

would call and be like, hey,

5:01

we are going to schedule you for this session, session, date,

5:03

which is not the date that you took time off working

5:05

and planned to be around, just some other

5:07

random day. And they didn't actually

5:09

notify me that they had changed the date. So when they showed up,

5:11

nobody was here. And when I

5:13

was there for the Best Buy Day, nobody

5:15

showed. So I was upset and called and complained.

5:18

They were like, well, what were we going to schedule? Anyway,

5:20

the option is the real Geek Squad guy, despite

5:23

the fact that I've made fun of the Geek Squad people for a pretty long

5:25

time, was freaking awesome. Really,

5:27

really good. Like legit, delightful

5:30

customer service. He came in the house, he

5:32

did all the stuff. No mess. Took

5:35

like 20 minutes. He made sure it worked.

5:37

He turned it off and on. He answered all the questions.

5:39

He was like, hey, this is a little weird too. If you want,

5:41

I can come back and fix this later. I was like, don't worry about it.

5:44

It's fine. And

5:46

it was like, you didn't have to sign

5:48

anything. It was really nice. Well, hey, you know what they

5:51

say? Don't look a Geek Squad in

5:53

the mouth. Welcome

6:25

to Brad Wilmaine Attack VOD, I'm Will. I'm Brad.

6:28

So, Brad, in honor of

6:30

the... I was kind of sad, I was hoping

6:32

you were going to ask me how I knew it was the thermostat

6:35

that wasn't working right in the oven. How

6:39

did you know it was the thermostat that wasn't

6:41

working right in the oven? I don't know how I feel about

6:43

this recent trend of carrying the cold oven into

6:45

the outside. Okay, sorry. No,

6:48

no, no, no, please go on. The podcast has to evolve,

6:50

Brad. I'm not saying it's bad, it's more

6:52

that I am self-imposing some rigid,

6:55

principled nonsense on myself. Well, but...

6:58

So this week's episode is about troubleshooting. Troubleshooting

7:01

theories specifically. Okay, topical, yes. And,

7:04

like, when the oven did this, I've

7:06

had ovens that had the same problem in the past where it

7:08

would... The gas would come on, the

7:10

fire would turn on for a moment, and then it would turn off,

7:12

and then it would turn on, and then it would turn

7:14

off, and eventually it would get up to like 250 or 300

7:17

degrees, but it would smell real gassy and a little

7:20

scary, and it wouldn't

7:22

really maintain a temperature the way you want

7:24

it. It took too long, and it was clearly not

7:26

working right. My

7:29

daughter described as making it sound like a whale, kind

7:31

of, because when it turned on and

7:34

off, it would

7:34

go,

7:36

just briefly. I don't think anything involving fire

7:38

should sound like a whale, personally. That's not

7:41

what you want. So what

7:44

that meant in my old manual analog

7:47

oven was that the thermistor,

7:50

that the fire hits, that tells the

7:53

mechanical part of the stove that gas is

7:55

on fire and not just pumping gas into your

7:57

house, making your home into a gigantic,

7:59

few... air bomb. It's

8:02

like that when that's cocked out then

8:05

that would happen on the old mechanical. On the new ones it's all

8:07

digital and there's a whole sensor and everything and it

8:09

happens with a robot. So

8:12

anyway, so the Geek Squad guy came out and he was like, oh yeah,

8:15

I know exactly what this is. Part will be here in a week,

8:17

I'll be back a week after that and we'll get it put in. And

8:19

it was done. But

8:21

the process of troubleshooting, it

8:23

turns out comes out a lot, comes up a lot

8:26

when you're people like us. Yes, it

8:28

sure does. We're

8:30

bug hunting at work this week, last

8:32

week, kind of constantly right now because we're coming up on

8:34

launch December 5th on Steam 1.0

8:38

leaving early access for the Anticruces, you should check

8:40

it out. You're welcome,

8:42

Chad. But

8:45

yeah, we're coming up on launch, so we're hunting

8:47

for bugs and troubleshooting

8:49

busted PC hardware, looking,

8:52

trying to figure out what's causing a bug, figuring

8:56

out why my home assistant isn't turning on at the right

8:58

time, figuring out all

9:00

of the weird electronic,

9:02

technological stuff that is in our homes that

9:05

works or does not work or works sporadically.

9:08

It's all the same set

9:10

of, like there's almost like a flow chart.

9:13

Yes, figuring out why my PlayStation 5 is

9:15

crashing in rest mode every time I put it in rest

9:17

mode. Oh no. I mean that happened

9:19

like two years ago, I solved it. Yeah. I'm

9:21

not an example because I'm still not quite sure what

9:24

fixed it, but the point is, and I

9:27

don't like to harp on this too much because it's just my gut feeling

9:29

and I don't have real tangible evidence, although

9:31

I feel like we know enough people who work in hardware

9:34

and product design and so forth

9:36

that the sentiment is not uncommon, but especially

9:38

after the

9:39

last few years, it feels like everything

9:41

needs a little more troubleshooting right now.

9:43

The closer you live

9:45

to the edge, the harder that

9:47

life is sometimes, I would say. But

9:49

all you know, supply chain stuff has gotten disrupted

9:52

and who knows if design compromises

9:54

are happening lately or parts are having

9:56

to be substituted or there wasn't

9:58

as much Q&A on a thing. or X,

10:00

Y, and Z. Or that we're bidding hardware more

10:02

aggressively and as a result, like the margins

10:05

are a little bit narrower than they used to be. So

10:09

as I was doing, so we started talking about doing a

10:11

troubleshooting episode and like walking through the thought process

10:14

for troubleshooting, kind of a lot of

10:16

computer stuff, or you know, computer, everything's

10:18

computers now, but, and

10:22

I went and did some Googling and I remembered,

10:25

it prompted me, it was like, hey, this is all in the A+,

10:28

the Microsoft A+, cert test from like 30

10:30

years ago that I don't think they do anymore. But

10:33

it was like, hey, here's how you troubleshoot computer problems.

10:35

First, you have to blah, blah, blah. And

10:38

it was funny because that woke up some neurons that had been dormant

10:41

for 25 years at this point, probably.

10:43

Do you have a link to this? I think I need to see this. I

10:45

did not save a link to it, unfortunately. I'll dig it up

10:47

after the show. Okay. But

10:50

the idea is the same, like,

10:53

I think when we were talking about this

10:55

in the, in Discord chat, I kind of offhandedly

10:57

chucked five basic steps

11:00

into the chat and we've elaborated

11:02

on them a little bit in our notes, but

11:05

it's the same basic idea as the A+,

11:07

A+, or A+, thing,

11:11

and all the other troubleshooting methodologies. Did

11:15

they really call their certification A++? I

11:17

think they just called it A+, but I can't remember. It

11:20

sounds like washing machine repair or something.

11:23

They had multiple levels of certification. They had

11:26

a help desk certification, which is what the A plus

11:28

one was. They had a server

11:31

admin, like Windows NT, like

11:34

IIS server, and domain admin

11:36

ones. They had them for all sorts. Anyway,

11:39

you could spend a lot of money taking Microsoft classes

11:41

back in the day. Like that? Was

11:43

that to them? Were you paying

11:45

Microsoft directly or were they a third party, like licensed

11:48

third party instructors or do you

11:51

know? Boy, I have no idea. I

11:54

think that they, I think that

11:57

most of the money came from books and study things

11:59

you'd had to do. that you bought before

12:01

you took the test. I think you had to pay for the test though, but

12:04

I can't imagine the test was like, I

12:06

don't know. I think, I mean, there was definitely

12:08

a cost. They were gatekeeping it pretty hard. It was,

12:11

in retrospect, it's a little bit weird. You'd think anybody who

12:13

passes the test is gonna lift the tide

12:15

of the Microsoft, the

12:18

Microsoft ship, but

12:21

everybody did it. Cisco, Cisco, I mean,

12:23

and this is clear. This still exists, right?

12:25

Like Cisco and Oracle and all

12:27

of the big, giant technology

12:29

business companies still do this. Cisco's

12:32

always the one that I saw the most people

12:35

talking about certifications at. Well, and you actually,

12:38

unlike the help desk certification, which like,

12:40

woo, nothing personal

12:43

for people who got the A plus, but

12:47

to know how to set up a routing table for a 2000 person

12:50

company is some real wizard

12:53

shit. Yeah, yo, networking is hard.

12:55

Yeah. Networking continues

12:57

to confound me like nothing else in computing.

13:00

Yeah, my boss, who was the

13:03

network, he was the one who had the network

13:05

cert when I started at the biology

13:07

department, IT department, sat

13:11

down and drew on a giant dry erase

13:13

board how internet protocol

13:15

works. And it was like,

13:17

we went through two, it was like beautiful

13:19

mind stuff. Like we kept flipping the

13:22

boards over and anyway. I

13:25

think I finally got layer two and layer three straight

13:27

at least, I'll put it that way. But also, when

13:30

you get to a certain point, then the people

13:32

are like, yeah, all that layer stuff is kind of bullshit

13:34

because they've all blended together over the last four years

13:36

and it was all true in like the eighties, but not

13:38

at all now. Yeah, if you look at the descriptions

13:41

of each layer that were presumably written

13:43

in the eighties, it is very hard to intuitively. Yeah,

13:45

I mean, yes, you're exactly right. It's like where does

13:48

one end of the next begin? I don't know. What

13:50

is the application layer? It feels like that

13:52

could mean a lot of things. Everything on top

13:54

of TCP IP, but also TCP

13:56

IP as well. So anyway,

13:59

but we're gonna... about troubleshooting. So, like

14:02

the basic top level stuff is that

14:04

you start by being curious about the

14:06

problem, right? Then you isolate variables

14:08

and test theories to identify what the actual problem

14:11

is, to lock down on what you think could be,

14:13

what you think is actually the problem. You research, you

14:16

find out how to fix the problem,

14:18

you implement the fixes, you test it to see if

14:20

you actually did fix it, and then you repeat

14:23

if you didn't fix it. And

14:25

then there's a couple other things we've tacked on at the end that we'll talk about

14:27

as well, like, hey man, writing

14:29

stuff down, it turns out, is important.

14:32

That's the part I'm... It's the

14:34

part everybody's bad at, Brad. I'm just going to politely

14:36

excuse myself during that section. I'm

14:39

not sure I've ever written anything down in this context. Well,

14:41

but like, if you, for example,

14:44

I have this Plex server that's running on a little

14:46

tiny hundred dollar square computer

14:48

in the garage, and there's a

14:50

couple other processes running on it, and I documented

14:52

two of them, and I didn't document any of the rest. I

14:55

have no freaking clue even

14:57

how to update any of that stuff, because I don't remember what I did

14:59

to install it at this point, and whether it's like, is it

15:01

installed through the Python package

15:04

manager? Is it installed through the Debian

15:07

app get? How

15:11

did I put it on there? I don't know. It's probably a

15:13

Docker container that I download from some Docker

15:16

thing, and now, I think that just

15:18

automatically updates when I reboot the computer. I don't

15:20

know, maybe. Why not? Sure, whatever. I

15:22

mean, this is really just an excuse for laziness,

15:24

but I've kind of come to look at that process of retracing

15:26

your steps through stuff like that as its own form

15:29

of kind of meta-game. How

15:32

much can I not just recall, but also

15:34

like, intuit what my thought process would

15:36

have been 18 months ago, and like figure

15:38

that out again, and find the stuff? You

15:40

want to know what I do? I just keep pressing up in

15:43

the bash terminal on that machine until I get

15:45

to where... Can I blow your mind? Yeah.

15:48

Control R. Wait, what? Control R, and then start typing.

15:51

What does that do? It searches your history.

15:53

No, no, I need to see the steps. I was

15:56

engineering the steps that I got to get it finished.

15:58

Because while there's working, I never... touch it again. That's

16:00

my policy. There's a file where all that stuff lives.

16:04

Oh, that'd be a lot easier.

16:06

Probably. It's probably not a profile. Anyway. So,

16:09

um, okay. So starting out step one,

16:11

be curious. You got a problem. You don't know what's broken with your

16:13

computer, with your, with your home automation

16:16

stuff, with your media server, with your TV,

16:18

whatever it is. Think about what's

16:20

causing the problem.

16:23

Sounds so easy when you say it that way. Yeah. But,

16:26

but like, did you change something recently? Right?

16:28

Like, that's that's like

16:31

the other day I had audio crackling. Why

16:33

did I have audio crackling? I don't know. I

16:35

updated a bunch of drivers and

16:38

I did the firmware on my audio interface.

16:40

And then I was like, I'm updating firmware.

16:43

I should update my BIOS. So I updated my BIOS and that

16:45

reset all my settings. And then I went through and flipped the settings back

16:47

on that I thought I had on before. And I

16:49

turned on one that was like extreme power savings.

16:52

And it turns out that turns off USB about every 45

16:54

seconds. And that made everything hitch

16:56

in my mouse freeze. And it was bad news. Yeah.

16:59

What you're describing is the hard version of this,

17:01

which is probably 90% of cases. It's not, it's

17:04

not something you did directly to the thing that's

17:06

affected to make it break. It's something tangential

17:08

or like barely related, you know?

17:11

Yeah. Like thinking, thinking through like second

17:13

and third order causes for a problem that

17:15

don't like very, uh,

17:17

obviously have anything to do with the problem. That's the

17:19

hard part. Well, but then, okay. So then we

17:21

also have to think about other changes, like environmental

17:24

changes, right? Is it, is it the time of year? Are you

17:26

having brownouts in your, in your house,

17:28

right? Is the power going off at a specific time every day?

17:30

Uh, is this summertime and your,

17:33

your, the ambient temperature in your rooms is 10 or 15

17:35

degrees warmer than it is the rest of the year. Um,

17:38

when I was at maximum PC, the doctor column, which

17:40

was where people could send in, Hey, I have a computer problem.

17:43

We would see so many,

17:45

we literally, there was a spike in,

17:48

Hey, my computer is black screen crashing,

17:50

rebooting. And they would always

17:53

spike in like July, August and September in

17:55

the Northern hemisphere when

17:57

it's the hottest and people's computer rooms went from

17:59

being seven. degrees to 85 degrees

18:02

and the efficiency of the power supplies went

18:04

down. So if their power supply, if the

18:06

amount of power their power supply was providing

18:09

to the computer was marginal, the

18:12

efficiency would go down, the amount of power that was coming out would

18:14

go down as a result. And

18:17

when they hit something that would pull a lot of draw, the

18:19

machine would just reboot because that's what power supply, that's

18:21

what computers do when they don't have enough power is they just hard reboot.

18:26

So think about like, you got to look at the whole thing. Did

18:29

you plug something new in? Did

18:32

you unplug something that you used to use? Did you

18:34

change the USB ports? This is my

18:36

favorite. I don't know if you had this. Yes.

18:39

What, the USB port thing? Yeah. Oh

18:41

God. Yes. All the time.

18:44

My USB ports, it's

18:47

like one of those, I mean, just to be clear, we

18:49

have weird situations. I think you have

18:51

a USB capture device. I

18:53

have like high powered USB audio

18:55

stuff plugged in. Like there's a lot of USB stuff plugged in

18:57

in our computers and some of it's weird. But

19:01

some port configurations work and it's like

19:03

one of those, Ralph and John and Jimmy all have

19:05

a wife and they, one wife doesn't like fruit

19:08

and one wife doesn't like turkey and one

19:10

wife eats only the bugs and

19:12

you have to figure out which plug,

19:15

does the camera go into a

19:17

USB 3.2 port or USB 3.0 port? Like

19:21

yeah, anyway. Yeah. I mean, I think we're

19:23

working more at the conceptual level on this episode, but we could sit here

19:25

for six hours going through hidden gotchas

19:27

in the modern computer, such as what you're describing

19:30

that all USB ports on a motherboard are not created

19:32

equal because they're going through different controllers,

19:34

right? Like some of them are going through like the chipset

19:37

made by Intel or AMD on your board.

19:40

But if you have a ton of USB ports, the

19:42

manufacturer of the board may have added a third

19:44

party controller to drive some more of those

19:46

ports and those third party controllers are

19:49

not always up to snuff for every use case. Well,

19:51

or just some ports maybe on different root hubs

19:53

and other ports. Like you said, you get

19:56

the specifics, but look at all of the things

19:58

that are different and... and think about what could

20:00

cause that. Another one, real quick

20:03

one I'll throw out is bandwidth

20:05

sharing or PCI Express lane sharing on

20:08

mobile these days. Oh, yeah. That's always fun. Between

20:11

less of SATA, it used to be a lot of SATA, but SATA

20:13

is kind of on its way out now. But SATA, NVMe,

20:16

M2, and PCI Express slots

20:19

all share bandwidth. So if you have

20:21

something in a thing in one of those interfaces,

20:24

plug in something else, and then the first

20:26

thing stops working, go check your motherboard manual, because

20:28

there's a good chance that you can't actually

20:30

use both of those at the same time.

20:33

Check your logs. Like, this is where

20:35

logs are incredibly useful, even on Windows. For

20:38

example, if you have a game that's crashing, you can always open

20:41

up the game directory, and there's almost always, especially

20:43

if it's an Unreal Engine game, there's almost always a log

20:45

file that just has a bunch of stuff in there, and

20:47

you just find out what the last thing is in the log,

20:50

and then start to use that as

20:52

your jumping off point in your

20:54

research phase. The value of logs cannot

20:56

be overstated, but it took me way too long. I

20:58

mean, it's kind of been concurrent

21:01

with my getting into Linux and open source and stuff like

21:03

that, and sort of staring at text more, and just getting

21:05

more comfortable with that stuff. But that's kind of when I started looking

21:07

at logs. And you'd be surprised how many different forms

21:09

of logs are available left and right. I

21:11

mean, not everybody streams, but OBS, for example,

21:14

right up under help. Yeah. Right under help,

21:17

as it has a log viewer, and you can pull that up. And I don't know

21:19

how many times I've not understood why

21:21

OBS was doing something weird or not working right, and

21:23

pulled that thing up, and was just like, oh, OK. Now I can see exactly

21:25

what it's doing under the hood when I click this button.

21:28

And that explains everything. Yeah. And

21:30

like Windows, so if you don't know, Windows

21:32

has logs. The event viewer shows Windows system

21:35

application and security logs. You can probably ignore

21:37

security logs for this purpose. But

21:39

the system log tells you when Windows

21:41

is having something weird happen. And you can filter

21:43

it by things that are super duper

21:46

bad, a little bit bad, not

21:48

very bad at all, or just like bog standard

21:50

happens like 50 million times a day. So

21:53

if you get to the point that you only see the red X's and

21:55

the exclamation points, there's usually There's

22:00

also information in there if Windows is doing something weird. Same

22:03

thing for the application log. If applications

22:05

crash in the standard way and report the crash to Windows,

22:08

then it'll have a lot

22:10

of information in there that's often useful

22:12

to you. Yeah, you can, for

22:15

reference, you can just open the start menu and type event

22:17

viewer to get to. Right click on

22:19

the start menu and go to event viewer too. Do they? Really?

22:22

Do they put that thing in there? I did not know that. Yeah,

22:24

that right click, it's funny, there was a tangent

22:27

here, but there was a talk in the Discord the other day about

22:29

where your start menu, start button is placed.

22:32

And I realized as a

22:34

result of that conversation that I right click

22:36

on the start menu infinitely more than

22:38

I, like I usually open the start

22:41

menu by pressing the keyboard button for it.

22:43

And I right click on the start menu to open the,

22:46

the, the like, it's like task manager

22:49

and power options and event viewer

22:52

and disk, computer management's in

22:54

there. You can open an admin terminal from there.

22:56

It's really good. I remember that.

22:58

That's a handy shortcut. Super useful shortcut. Anyway.

23:01

If you, if you have hard crashes in Windows, event viewer

23:03

is the first place I go after, after the hard crash

23:06

or shutdown to try to like,

23:08

cause you know, it logs everything by time. You can try

23:10

to retrace like what exactly was happening right before

23:12

the crash. Although unfortunately a lot

23:14

of crashes, if it's like a hard reboot

23:17

or something like that, you'll just get the very generic like

23:19

kernel error of like system shutdown

23:22

without the system powered off without

23:24

being shut down or something, you know, like it's not always that

23:26

one. That one's the one that it comes up when it, when

23:29

it's restarting. If you're getting blue

23:31

screens or something like that, you can install wind

23:33

dbg, which is I think short for debug.

23:35

It's a kernel debugger that takes those

23:38

mini dumps and crash dumps and tells you what was

23:40

happening at the time. And

23:42

those are a little bit hard to read if you're not pretty,

23:45

if you're not pretty competent with drivers and programming stuff,

23:47

but it'll at least tell you which driver is the problem.

23:49

Like if it's, if it's in an NV thing,

23:51

it's probably your Nvidia driver. You can,

23:53

you can look up the name of the dll that crashed

23:56

and cause the blue screen and it'll, it'll, it'll

23:58

let you know. It'll give you a jumping off. Anyway,

24:01

and write this stuff down. So figure

24:03

out, make your list of theories.

24:07

Often you'll find one. It's

24:11

fine to find one and then go down the steps. It's

24:13

also fine to think about it and come up with a couple of different

24:15

things it could be. Especially

24:17

when you're bug hunting for the game,

24:20

we make a concerted effort not to lock in on solutions

24:23

too quickly. So

24:25

if you often, you're doing

24:28

something and it's like, oh, there's a weird hitch when you do

24:30

this. And it's like, oh, it's probably audio because that's usually audio.

24:33

And then I spend all day trying

24:35

to figure out what the audio problem is and it turns out there's no

24:37

audio problem. It's something else happening in the game that causes

24:39

that hitch. Don't

24:42

say curious is the thing to remember

24:44

there. Yeah, I think that the last thing I'll say here, and I don't

24:46

know if this would work for everybody, but it certainly does for

24:49

me is by being curious

24:51

and thinking about the thing a lot. A

24:53

lot of the time solutions will drift into my

24:55

head out of nowhere hours or

24:58

a day or two after I've started trying to figure

25:00

something out, like literal kind of shower

25:02

thoughts method, I guess.

25:05

Yeah. I don't know who knows what the

25:07

cognitive root

25:09

of that is. Maybe it's just obsessing over something

25:12

too much and thinking about it too much. But it's like, again,

25:15

it's some of the second and third order things, you know? I

25:18

feel like I've exhausted every possible

25:20

cause of this. I'm just tearing my hair out, screw

25:23

this, and then three hours later something

25:25

just pops in there. Your brain

25:27

makes the connections for you that

25:29

your conscious brain is not able to do. I

25:33

often find going on a walk, same effect. I

25:36

can't spend that much time in the shower because my skin gets dry.

25:39

Sure. Maybe that's another bullet

25:41

point to add is sort of take a break,

25:43

walk away from it. It would do something

25:45

less frustrating for a while. I wrote

25:47

down at the bottom, like

25:50

to talk about at the end, but I'm going to put it here too, like 3

25:53

a.m. is a bad time to be fixing problems.

25:56

Like I have a personal personality flaw that... means

26:00

that I get really anxious when stuff is broken

26:02

and I don't let things being broken and I

26:05

just keep working at them until I

26:07

get them fixed, which often just makes

26:09

it worse. Yeah. I, I've, this is a

26:11

weird, this is a weird tangent, but I've been dealing with the stuff

26:14

a lot lately. So it's top of mind. I think there's

26:16

like, there's nothing better for my waistline

26:18

than computer problems because

26:20

I'm so goddamn single mindedly

26:22

focused on trying to fix it

26:24

at all costs that I like, we'll go all day without eating.

26:27

If I'm sitting there tinkering with parts and pulling things apart

26:30

and testing and yeah. Well, but, but

26:32

yeah. And, and to the larger point,

26:34

you're not going to be as sharp as you can be

26:36

if you've been working on it for six hours and you're

26:39

like, it's just getting worse and worse. You

26:41

need to take, take, take that break. Okay. So, so

26:43

there's curious, we're curious. We've, we've figured

26:46

out, we have some ideas of what the problem is now

26:48

it's time to isolate variables and start testing

26:50

stuff. Right. Uh, so you can actually

26:52

identify what the problem is. So revert

26:54

those changes. If you know about recent changes,

26:56

revert them, um, pull

26:59

your unnecessary, anything that is, that

27:01

could be contributing, but isn't, isn't directly

27:03

related. So if you have, if you're, if you

27:06

think you're having memory causing crashes in your computer,

27:08

pull a stick of memory and try both sticks

27:10

individually and see if the crashes happen with one

27:13

stick or another more than more than the others,

27:15

right? If you're, if your home assistant

27:18

stuff isn't working right and you just updated

27:20

the home assistant roll back to the last update,

27:22

that's kind of, sometimes it's a little more complicated than

27:24

you maybe want it to be, but, um, go

27:26

back and read the patch notes and see if there was something, some

27:28

step you were supposed to do as a result. Like often,

27:31

homocystin is much better at this now,

27:33

but in the early days, they would put in the patch

27:35

notes, yo, before you do this run this script or something.

27:38

And then if you didn't run the script, it would,

27:40

it would try to run it after the first

27:42

boot. But sometimes that would fail. And there

27:45

was a reason they wanted to run it before.

27:48

Go back and look at all of the things you did

27:51

without reading the notes and, and, and,

27:53

and, you know, roll them back. Um, like

27:56

if you're dealing with bios problems, if you're dealing with system stability

27:59

problems, you're in the bios. Reset everything

28:01

to the defaults and don't do it with

28:03

the button in the BIOS. Like hit

28:05

the clear CMOS jumper on

28:07

the motherboard and pull

28:09

the battery if you have to. I've actually

28:12

even had problems on

28:14

an old ASUS board where pulling the CPU and

28:16

putting the CPU back in actually

28:19

caused it to trigger the first

28:21

run stuff again and that fixed the problem

28:23

I was having. So

28:26

like pull everything out and

28:28

plug it, sometimes pulling everything out and plugging it back in,

28:31

powering it all the way off, turning the power supply

28:33

off, completely discharging it will

28:36

fix the problem. Yeah, not

28:38

just isolating variables but in a lot of cases eliminating

28:40

as many variables as you can quickly by

28:43

doing things exactly like you're talking about, like defaults are

28:45

great for that. Just like

28:48

hey, let's try to set everything back to baseline except for

28:50

the thing that you think is wrong. A-B

28:52

testing is huge for me. I mean maybe this goes without saying

28:55

but this is very much how I try to isolate stuff

28:57

is siloing every variable

28:59

off in my head and then just very systematically

29:02

going and running through tests

29:04

that will prove whether one of those things is,

29:06

you know, any given

29:08

one at a time is good or not. Like especially

29:11

if it's like CPU memory. I mean this gets tough

29:13

if you don't have spare parts around to test with in a

29:15

lot of cases. It's very hard to know

29:18

if your CPU is at fault if you

29:20

don't have another CPU to test with for example but to

29:22

whatever extent you can swap things in and out, test

29:25

one thing at a time and say

29:27

like okay, now I know this memory is good because

29:29

I got it to boot in my old machine or whatever. I

29:32

think that's a big part of it, right,

29:36

is knowing we

29:39

don't all have a computer lab, right? So

29:41

we don't all have extra memory and extra CPUs and extra motherboards

29:43

and all that stuff. And when

29:46

I was at MaxPC especially or even tested

29:48

and we had a bunch of computer hardware around it makes

29:51

this troubleshooting process a lot easier because yeah you just

29:53

go grab an extra couple of sticks of RAM and jam them

29:55

in and if it works then it's probably the RAM. But

30:01

you can do a lot of the stuff like you can, if you

30:03

think, if you have Ram, and it's most

30:05

of the Ram that people are going to have in like a gaming machine now

30:07

is going to be overclocked beyond what

30:10

the standard is for, for whatever type of Ram

30:12

you have. So you can always clock the Ram at the jet X

30:14

speed, the default speed, and just

30:16

set everything to auto and see what happens. Right.

30:19

I really wish that motherboards had like a fail

30:21

safe option. It was,

30:24

Hey, this should run. Right.

30:26

Like you plug it in. It turns off all

30:28

the automatic overclocking, all of the bullshit

30:30

that the motherboard vendors do to get a 3% increase

30:33

so they can tell a few more motherboards. And

30:35

it's just like, yeah, if you, if the

30:37

hardware is good, this will work. Oh, I

30:40

hate that ever all the defaults out of the box are

30:42

the most extreme version of everything. It's the

30:44

period. But,

30:47

but, um, and then, yeah, for other stuff,

30:49

for things like, like, like your home automation

30:51

or your living room stuff, like think

30:53

about, this is where you've

30:56

thought about all the steps from, you

30:58

know, a console to the, to the,

31:00

to the TV. And it's a little simpler these days,

31:02

but it's kind of not because you have, you have

31:04

receivers with the EARC and you have

31:07

HDMI cables that come in 55 million

31:10

different flavors. And like, you

31:12

have to think about what each of those cables is and,

31:14

and whether the one that's in the wall that goes

31:16

from the, from the, you know, where your rack is

31:18

to the, to the, to the back of the TV

31:21

is actually the right cable. Um,

31:24

and, and try replacing, you know, try

31:26

swaps, try swapping all your, you know, try

31:28

swapping cables, but do it one at a time, swap

31:30

one cable at a time. Cause then, you know, that one's the one

31:32

that fixes the problem. Yeah. I feel like

31:34

some, some devices are starting to have more kind of

31:37

friendly diagnostic stuff included. Like

31:39

the X, the Xbox series consoles are

31:41

fantastic for that. And they've just got, they've

31:43

just got that giant screen full of like, it's like a

31:45

list of every like resolution and refresh rate

31:47

and HDR type and a little check mark

31:49

or a big red X that tells you

31:52

whether your current setup can do each one or not. Yeah.

31:55

But, but it's like, um, it's funny cause

31:57

there's some problems that I live with, but there's, there's

31:59

one. I haven't

32:02

actually taken the time to figure out what causes it, but I think it's

32:05

when devices plugged into my

32:07

TV turn on the TV and the receiver,

32:10

the arc stuff doesn't always

32:12

work so I don't always get audio return channel. And

32:15

I have to turn the receiver on and off to fix it every

32:18

time I turn on the switch because of where the switch is plugged

32:20

in. I

32:22

could probably fix that. I could make it so it doesn't happen.

32:25

But also, I don't care. It's probably

32:27

fine. It's a minor annoyance. I'm up anyway

32:30

to get the switch controller. So I

32:32

just know if I want to play Mario, I have

32:34

to turn it on and turn

32:36

it off again, the classic fix everything.

32:39

Should we talk about

32:41

research? Yes. I feel like

32:43

that's maybe the topic given

32:46

the state of the internet these days and how

32:48

many AI-generated

32:50

garbage articles you're likely to run into if you go

32:52

looking for solutions to problems these days. It's

32:55

really hard. When

32:58

I was at test at Adam used to joke that you just put message

33:00

board at the end of the thing you were looking

33:03

for. That's a good tip. Or forum.

33:05

Right. And it would take you to

33:07

a website message board where somebody had

33:10

the same problem and fixed it. But that doesn't

33:12

work very well anymore. The

33:17

first thing I usually do is look for somebody who's had the same problem

33:19

and that means figuring

33:21

out which are the affected pieces of hardware,

33:23

which sometimes is hard now because it

33:25

may be that your motherboard

33:28

and, for example, my water

33:31

cooler, my specific motherboard, my specific

33:33

water all-in-one water cooler was

33:36

having voltage sags. And

33:38

that was causing the little

33:40

controller inside the water all-in-one water

33:42

cooler to crash. And that was causing

33:45

a bunch of downstream problems. And

33:47

the only way to solve that, the only way to know that

33:49

was to search for my motherboard,

33:52

my all-in-one water cooler, and USB.

33:55

And then I found a Tom's hardware post

33:57

from like six months, a year in the past,

33:59

that Oh yeah, I have this motherboard and

34:02

every time I do something on this USB bus

34:04

with it, it bombs out and I don't understand

34:06

what's happening. And the solution it turns out

34:09

is to get a USB hub that lives inside

34:11

your case and uses the motherboard

34:13

header type USB plugs. And

34:16

you just put that in and plug it into

34:18

SATA power and it works. Interesting.

34:22

How did I figure that out? Did that work? There

34:24

was literally a Reddit post that said, Hey, I got this

34:26

USB hub and that fixed the problem. Are

34:29

those types of hubs made for those USB

34:31

motherboard headers? Yes. And

34:34

is that something I should look into? Because like the

34:36

USB headers on motherboards can be pretty problematic.

34:39

And if there's something that makes those more reliable,

34:41

I would like to know. So I will say,

34:43

unless you have a problem, this is a situation

34:45

where adding more variables is not going to make things

34:48

better. Right. Fine.

34:51

I didn't like, I never

34:53

in a million years would I have thought that this is what the problem

34:55

was. And I found a Reddit post from somebody with the

34:57

exact same thing and it was like, Oh, okay, here you go.

35:01

I think dropping voltage is probably

35:03

the biggest issue I have had. And again, we have extreme

35:05

USB use cases here with

35:08

all of those types of recording and microphone video

35:11

stuff that we're doing. But devices

35:13

hooked to those motherboard headers, seemingly

35:16

not getting enough power generally seems like the biggest problem

35:18

there. So if there's some way to add power in

35:21

line. So that's it. That's you add that

35:23

hub and you plug it into a SATA power connector from the power

35:25

supply. That seems pretty desirable. But

35:28

then you look for people with similar problems, right? So

35:31

then, so first you start with, at least I start

35:33

with really specific, the

35:35

specific hardware affected. And

35:38

then I, and I usually, I usually crunch the dates

35:41

on those searches to from

35:43

the time that hardware was released. Because otherwise Google

35:45

will be like, Oh, I can't find anything like this. Let me find

35:47

something with the same number in it from like 15

35:49

years ago. And that's useless. Yeah.

35:52

I look for similar problems after that. Right.

35:55

So you look for motherboard or

35:58

whatever version CPU you have. or whatever

36:01

brand switch if you're looking at like Z-Wave

36:04

or Matter problems, your Zigbee problems with home

36:06

automation stuff. And then Home

36:10

Assistant or whatever your software is that you're using

36:12

to run the thing you're trying

36:16

to do. Yeah. Whenever

36:18

I'm looking for stuff like this, I always try to be conscious of

36:20

the line between like trying

36:23

to think how it like, where's the line

36:26

that constitutes a legitimate problem?

36:28

You know, like where is how like this

36:30

is getting into some like anecdotes are not data kind of territory

36:33

of like, how many different people do I need to see with

36:35

the exact same set of symptoms I've got before

36:37

there's like maybe a larger issue here. You know

36:39

what I mean? Because no electronics, no

36:42

technology on the planet has a 0% failure rate.

36:44

Like everything that you

36:46

possibly buy might fail individually.

36:48

You know what I mean? Like manufacturing defect or whatever.

36:51

But what I'm talking about is not individual manufacturing

36:53

defect or something, but is systemic or like

36:56

design flaw. Design problems

36:58

like, hey, we've really some other board that's torturing

37:00

your CPU. Yeah. So that's exactly

37:02

the issue with this motherboard that I am I'm

37:05

divesting myself of is I saw enough

37:08

people. First of all, the set of symptoms is weirdly

37:11

specific enough that it raises an eyebrow.

37:13

And then when I went to the gigabyte sub

37:16

reddits and saw numerous other people with

37:18

the same model having the same weird set of circumstances,

37:20

like that's when you start to suspect like,

37:22

okay, maybe there's an actual

37:24

design flaw here, even if it's only 0.2%

37:27

of

37:27

owners of this board

37:30

that are encountering it. If there are that many people that

37:32

there are like lengthy enough discussions about.

37:35

Again, again, what is a very specific

37:38

problem? Then you start to wonder like, okay,

37:40

at least you know you're not alone. And it's not

37:42

just your specific board that

37:44

is bad. So the thing I'll tell you is

37:47

you never can tell

37:49

if it's a real problem, like

37:51

a real systemic problem, or

37:54

just a small number of people who got duds,

37:58

unless it gets to the stage that like my Microsoft

38:00

is spending a billion dollars replacing

38:03

Xbox 360s. Yes. Yes. The 360 red

38:05

ring is the classic counter example here of

38:07

like, clearly this was deeply flawed, right?

38:10

But like they're not, the companies are never

38:12

going to come out and be like, Oh man, we really messed this

38:14

entire thing up. Everybody should replace these. Unless

38:17

they, unless it's like, Hey, your Chevy

38:19

bolt is catching fire in your garage and burning your

38:21

house down or you

38:25

know, the red ring or caps

38:28

exploding on and forced. Motherboards

38:30

or what, what, you know, whatever the classic examples are. Um, so,

38:33

so I, my

38:36

general advice is that you worry

38:38

about that stuff before you buy something. And then

38:40

you don't sweat it afterwards because

38:43

you'll make yourself crazy. Like you could make yourself like

38:45

you can go on the subreddit for any given manufacturer

38:49

and find a problem with the thing

38:51

that you have that 50 people report.

38:53

And if they sold 20 million of them, 50 people

38:55

having a problem that are vocal about it, it doesn't matter.

38:58

Right. Yes. And well, first of all, one of those 50

39:00

people, that's what I was going to say. First of all, I'm

39:02

only going out and looking for this stuff because I too

39:04

am having the problem. Well, yeah, of course. And,

39:07

and like, if you're having the problem, it's a completely different thing.

39:09

And, and at that point you've like

39:11

you, you start reaching out to their customer

39:14

service teams and are like, Hey man, you got

39:16

to fix this. You've, you've sold me something bad. Yeah.

39:18

Just a, just a little sidebar here. Just cause I've

39:20

talked about it enough. I'll just briefly lay out the

39:23

problem I'm having with this board. And again, there's a bunch of

39:25

other people are having is that the, the networking,

39:27

the storage, the, um, like

39:30

wifi and Bluetooth, like all of these parts of the

39:32

motherboard will just randomly fail and turn

39:35

off and turn back on or just stop working entirely.

39:38

Some of both it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

39:43

it's non-specific enough that I can't describe an exact scenario,

39:46

how it plays out every time. But like, it

39:48

would always be something like all the networking died

39:51

or like all my peripheral, all my like connected

39:53

USB devices died or both at the same time. Um,

39:56

I had it, I had to corrupt my, my, my D

39:58

drive, the SSD. connected to the

40:00

chipset at one point to the point that I had to format them and

40:02

like That was that was where I'd spent

40:05

a lot of time in a bit viewer recently is where I had I

40:07

had a bad crash And when I came back from it like I saw

40:10

Dozens and dozens of right errors

40:12

to the drives and Bluetooth errors and all

40:14

kinds of stuff And it's the same stuff that other people are

40:16

having but the thing I was gonna say where you

40:18

mentioned Engaging the support for the company

40:21

that I was absolutely is normally the right advice But

40:23

the thing I found looking around was other people had already

40:25

done that and gotten Replacement boards back

40:28

that ended up developing the same problems again. Oh, well

40:32

In my case I I suspect it's some kind of

40:34

specific configuration. It's like oh if you're

40:36

using You're using all the m.2

40:38

on the board or something like, you know what? I mean, it's like some some

40:40

extreme configuration that 99.5

40:42

percent of people are never gonna do because

40:44

yeah most people buy a motherboard and plug in a CPU

40:47

and RAM and a graphics card and and maybe

40:50

One or maybe two in the ame drives

40:52

these days and that's it right But yeah, if

40:54

you're populating a lot more of what the board has

40:56

available for expansion You're probably

40:59

more prone to running into stuff like that the closer

41:01

you live to the edge The more likely you are to

41:03

catch on fire Brad Same

41:05

time you could argue they shouldn't put all that stuff on

41:07

the board well agreed

41:11

But I mean, okay So you're at the spot the

41:13

thing that you're describing is where you test with

41:15

other hardware if you have access to it right like

41:18

either you you find some places you can buy

41:20

some stuff that doesn't have a An

41:22

expensive restocking fee or you

41:24

look at the restocking fee is the cost of

41:27

running the test right? like if you're

41:29

buying if you're buying an extra ram kit and they have

41:31

a 10% restocking fee then you're paying 15 bucks

41:33

to to get to

41:35

find out if your ram is good, which is Not

41:38

ideal but better than better than

41:41

not knowing and constantly having problems And

41:45

then and then theoretically at the end of the go go

41:47

ahead guy Can I throw one more thing in here real quick? No,

41:49

just just in the context of looking at discussion

41:52

of people having issues Please

41:54

resist. Please do me a personal favor

41:56

and resist if you come upon

41:59

one of these discussions and you're not having

42:01

the problem, please resist being the person who

42:03

just goes on there and probably is like, I don't know, we're gonna find for

42:05

me. Like that adds that

42:07

there's always somebody who shows up saying

42:09

like, I don't know what your, what I know what your problem is. Like this

42:11

is fine. You know, it's like, yeah, that's the

42:13

nature of problems. Issues like

42:15

this is it's only going to affect a small number of people. That

42:18

doesn't mean it's like an invalid thing

42:20

or it's their fault that is broken or whatever.

42:23

There's a human instinct

42:26

to weigh in on things

42:29

when people just shouldn't. Yeah. Like,

42:32

yeah. If it's not impacted, you just

42:34

don't say anything. I don't know how

42:36

many different like Reddit threads and I don't

42:38

spend time on Reddit as a rule. I mostly

42:41

Google stuff up. So

42:43

I'm mostly going there looking for solutions to things,

42:45

but like, it feels like

42:47

in your hundred percent success

42:50

rate of finding right in the middle

42:52

of one of these conversations, a big digression where somebody

42:54

just crashes in there like calling

42:56

everybody stupid for not getting it to work right.

42:59

And then just it turns into a big argument. It's just, it just

43:01

wastes so much time.

43:02

Yeah. The other

43:04

thing is, and this is come back to this is like, if you

43:06

find a thread where somebody posted

43:09

a solution that actually solves your problem, make

43:13

a note and come back to it and say, Hey,

43:15

this actually works. And interesting points

43:18

is, well, I think we'll get to that as we talk about,

43:20

I think we'll talk about, you know, writing down solutions and stuff

43:22

like that. But like, yes,

43:25

sort of incidental to that is,

43:27

I guess the turmoil

43:30

that's happening on a lot of different social platforms

43:32

right now, like Reddit had its share of issues with people deactivating

43:34

or deleting accounts and like turning

43:37

off whole subreddit since some cases, subreddit

43:39

and moderator drama and all that stuff like Twitter, God

43:41

knows more than its share of issues.

43:44

But like a lot of old content is disappearing.

43:46

Like a lot of a lot of old discussion is turning

43:48

into Swiss cheese where there are all these holes and threads

43:51

that you'll pull up that I don't know how many times

43:53

I've come upon what looked like it would have been exactly

43:55

the solution for my problem. But

43:57

the person had deleted their accounts so I couldn't read the post

43:59

anymore. and it wasn't in the Wayback

44:02

machine or whatever. This is why I love the open source

44:04

people is because they just

44:06

post stuff on their personal blogs and it's like hey,

44:08

here's how I got blah, blah, blah running on Docker.

44:11

Yeah, thank God, this is great. Thank you. I

44:13

do have a folder full of PDFs. I

44:15

have printed two PDFs, several, quite

44:18

a few web pages that are like, ah, if

44:20

this goes away in the future and I can't find it again, I'm gonna be

44:22

in trouble. I should save this

44:24

somehow. It's interesting you do PDFs. I often

44:26

will save a document that's like the links to

44:29

the how-tos that I follow. That's what I used

44:31

to do until a couple of them vanished and

44:34

like a year later when I needed it again, it wasn't

44:36

there anymore and I was like, okay, I need, I've

44:39

got all this storage in this box here. I should

44:41

just put all these solutions on there. I

44:44

have to, I have to salute whoever, I

44:47

don't know what the hierarchy of ownership

44:49

is between like Stack Exchange and the

44:52

various whatever.

44:54

Don't say good things about Stack Exchange. That'll like,

44:56

ah, what if, too, I mean there are a lot of solutions on

44:58

there. The thing I was gonna say though is

45:00

whoever set that thing up, licenses

45:02

all, like they decided early

45:04

on to license all the content, all the user content

45:07

under I think it's Creative Commons. I

45:09

did that without telling the users that they were

45:11

changing the license, I believe. No, they're

45:13

not. There was scene drama there. Well, I

45:15

mean, but the upside of that though is that if a corporation,

45:17

if some shitty corporation comes in and acquires

45:20

that body of information because

45:23

of the way it's licensed, you can just

45:25

copy all that information and take it and post it somewhere else.

45:27

Like nobody can, nobody, no big

45:29

corporate owner can come in and close all that information

45:32

off and start charging for it or something. I

45:35

should say I blocked Stack Exchange from

45:37

Google for a long time when they had

45:39

that as an option. Anyway,

45:44

Stack Exchange is like, well,

45:47

we could probably do an episode about Stack Exchange. I have complicated

45:50

feelings about Stack Exchange. Okay, so we've

45:52

been curious. We figured out what the problem is. We've isolated

45:54

variables to test the theories and identify the problem.

45:56

We've done some research. We figured out potential solutions.

46:00

Now we implement those solutions. So

46:02

this by this point you should have you should have found something

46:05

you can try You should try it. Good

46:07

luck Do one thing at a time.

46:10

This is the place that people mess up people like okay

46:12

I found 12 different things that'll fix this problem I'm

46:14

gonna bang them all out and then usually you

46:16

break it worse and you don't know which of the 12 things

46:18

you did to Break the problem to make the problem worse. Yes,

46:21

you have to resist that urge and that's where the a B testing

46:23

I mentioned earlier comes in just that's

46:25

just changing one thing between two possibilities

46:28

and testing with everything else the same Do

46:30

one change at a time see if you have initial

46:33

success if you do then push on Into

46:35

the next step where we're actually gonna do some real testing But

46:39

but also be prepared like if you went

46:42

through and reset all of your BIOS settings Make

46:44

one change at a time reboot it see

46:47

what see if it works when you reboot

46:49

it takes a long time Yes, this takes forever.

46:51

Yes, it is mind-numbing Yeah But

46:54

but if you're if you're like if you're having driver problems

46:56

and you restore a bunch of drivers Do

46:59

those one at a time and when it says hey you have to reboot

47:01

after this one I know that you don't really really

47:03

really have to reboot for most driver installs,

47:05

but also reboot after each one, please Just

47:08

just play safe like even what you

47:11

think even I mean I'm old-fashioned like I even reboot

47:13

after the ones I don't tell you to reboot

47:15

anymore. Oh

47:16

I don't reboot for weeks on end Brad.

47:18

Do you wait really? Yeah, I Just

47:21

go to sleep. I feel like I'm the last person

47:23

who shuts their computer all the way down every night So

47:26

I mine goes to sleep. I've

47:28

had trouble. I've had sleep problems since the Windows

47:32

update earlier this year That's a big part

47:34

of it is that I do not know how many people and

47:36

you've got an Intel machine I see a lot AMD users talking

47:38

about sleep issues But like it seems like sleep

47:41

has just never been all the way reliable The

47:43

more complicated the stuff in your computer the

47:45

less reliable sleep is if you have a laptop

47:48

it turns out it's pretty good Yeah, if you have

47:50

a computer and there's like some weird capture

47:52

card in there from a company that doesn't really care about sleep

47:54

states It's not gonna work great. Yeah, who knows?

47:56

Yeah, I mean to be clear my MacBook is on 24 7 3 6 65 when

48:00

you can turn those off anymore. Yeah, you can you can

48:03

shut them actually It's a whole that's

48:05

a whole topic. They boot as soon as you open

48:07

them Yeah, so you can shut them down

48:09

and close them Okay, you

48:11

open the lid it will come right back on and there's no there used

48:13

to be a way to disable that and there is Not anymore. Yeah,

48:16

they absolutely want Macbooks to be on all

48:18

the time I tried to turn Gina's off when we were

48:20

going on a trip because it was gonna be in a bag for a while

48:23

and she Was worried it was gonna get hot and I can do

48:25

that Could every time but then I

48:27

so what happened was I opened it. I was like damn it's on

48:29

again. Yes. Yes Yeah, this is

48:31

stupid. That's the annoying part. Anyway, the

48:33

other thing was sleep. I mean we'll get back to topic

48:35

here But I just I just rarely

48:38

have anything running that

48:40

I can't afford to lose or

48:42

that I You know, like it doesn't

48:44

take that long to just open stuff again when

48:46

I start the machine back up. So for

48:48

a while My machine took a while

48:51

to boot. It's not as bad these days But

48:53

I do I do like not having to

48:55

turn everything on like Honestly

48:58

once I figured out the magic set of USB ports

49:00

to use on my computer to make everything work without me to

49:02

unplug and Replug stuff sleep became less

49:04

much less important to me. Sure. Yeah,

49:07

anyway Okay, so

49:09

you fixed it you think you got a fix test

49:11

test is the last part because it's not it's not a fix

49:14

until you're Absolutely sure and you've actually

49:16

done some some whether it's memory

49:18

problems Run memtest and you boot off the

49:20

USB drive and you do the hard one that takes makes

49:23

out all the fans in your computer spin There's

49:26

a program piece of software that Gordon

49:28

and Adam over at PC world introduced me to called

49:30

OCCT Which is I think called

49:32

over clock. It's overclocking. I Don't

49:36

know what it stands for it, but I think it's one of those ones that

49:38

used to stand for something and doesn't anymore but

49:41

it's a it's a

49:43

Let's see. It has that it has a timer on

49:45

it when you launch it that Then

49:48

if you don't pay for it, it gets longer the more you

49:50

don't use it But it's a good way to stress

49:52

test a machine you can you can hit

49:54

all the CPUs even on a massive core

49:56

machine You

49:58

can you can memory memory testing.

50:00

You can do, I think it is a GPU test if I

50:02

remember right. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think we mentioned

50:05

that when we talked about new machines set up a few

50:07

months ago. Yeah, it's quite good and it's relatively

50:09

easy to use and you can just hit the button, hit

50:11

the stability test button for whichever part you care

50:14

about. And it does a reasonably good job. Um,

50:17

uh, you know, uh, if it's, if

50:20

it's other stuff, just use

50:22

it, see how it works, pay attention to whether it's

50:24

working or it's failing. Keep an eye on the logs during

50:26

this period. If it's, if it's like an open source

50:28

thing, um, I

50:31

generally try to keep some spare parts around. Like

50:34

I like to not have, I like to have

50:36

memory spare memory, at least just stick

50:38

for everybody. I have all the computers in the house that are

50:41

like ones I use all the time, just cause downtime is

50:43

bad. Like memory standards, thankfully, or

50:45

like the cycle for a given memory

50:47

standard is long enough that you're likely to have probably

50:50

at least two, two kits in that time.

50:52

It's not three. Yeah. It's just like, it's

50:54

just what it's during the initial transition. It's

50:56

the hard time. But it is not like, for example, if

50:58

you're on a succession of Intel machines, like everyone's

51:01

got a different socket. I mean, that's changed at least

51:03

temporarily for right now, but like, you know, you

51:05

were not able to test CPU's between different

51:08

generations of boards there. So like that's, that's

51:10

very troublesome, but memory, memory

51:12

generally is going to be compatible back and forth for

51:14

a few years. Yeah. And, and stuff

51:16

like, you know, you

51:19

boot off a SATA drive, see if you can boot off a SATA drive

51:21

if you're, and the end of you are causing problems, whatever. Um,

51:25

Brad, you put a good thing on the list here that I hadn't thought about,

51:27

but just like having a nice toolkit is incredibly

51:29

helpful so much. I went so long without,

51:32

uh, my aunt gave me a little

51:34

Radio Shack computer repair kit when I was 15 for Christmas.

51:37

Yeah. But I still have and use cause it's still

51:40

useful, but it's very basic. Like

51:42

does it have like a CMOS pullers and stuff? Uh, it

51:44

does have a chip puller actually. It's got, Oh,

51:46

it's, Oh, it's right here.

51:50

I was just saying when you were 15, that would have been like

51:52

early nineties. So it's like AC stuff,

51:54

right? Like 94, 95, six

51:57

probably is about when I got it. Like it's

51:59

got. a couple of little like I got this I guess

52:02

this is like a chip pullers a CMOS puller yeah

52:05

yes this is pretty pretty old-school sorry

52:07

it's plastic though you have a like hex head

52:09

drivers yes

52:11

a couple of them actually these are here is that a

52:13

screw grabber it is it's it

52:15

looks it looks horrifying I don't know if you can

52:18

see those it's the one that has a little little

52:20

three pieces of wire that spread out and you can grab

52:22

a yeah fall into the cracks it's on it's on a spring

52:24

it's got like a plunger and in a spring in it and

52:26

these horrifying looking metal claws

52:29

come out of it God radio shackies I have one of

52:31

those it's like three feet long radio shack used to be so

52:33

good radio shackles pretty awesome

52:35

for stuff like this for if you need to go pick up some capacitors

52:38

and a little toolkit with a CMOS puller

52:40

in it I have a little wobbly spring with a magnet

52:43

on the end that I can jam down into places that are tight

52:45

to pull like a screw that I dropped down

52:47

in there yeah anyway I brought

52:49

this up because this is all I used for a long time

52:51

because granted Scott good screwdrivers in it and that's kind

52:53

of all I needed but like there's a lot of modern

52:56

equivalence stuff like this out there I mean we talked about some

52:58

of the stuff before but the like the

53:00

I fix it style like you

53:02

know 875 different screw

53:05

screwed what's on the

53:07

security bits security bits so they have

53:09

like the two with you can open an elevator

53:11

you can open a Nintendo switch you can open a

53:15

pretty much anything try they've the the pental

53:17

lobe that's on the iPhones all that stuff

53:20

like getting one of those has been life-changing for me because

53:22

you don't need it that often but when you need it you're so

53:25

glad you have it yeah it is absolutely worth whatever

53:27

you paid for it's nice for putting a screw into your

53:29

glasses too yeah yeah totally stuff like

53:31

that or like you know you're like they're just enough torque

53:33

screws and stuff like that out there that having having

53:36

interchangeable stuff is super nice yep

53:38

but the headlamp is my favorite thing have

53:41

the headlamps another thing that like those

53:43

those two things the screwdriver said in the headlamp were

53:45

just both like why did I wait so long

53:47

I love that you live in the headlamp life now I have

53:50

a real happy what we have zero

53:52

to three and like less than a year I didn't pay for any

53:55

of them they all like probably appeared

53:58

one of them was on Amazon freebie because I bought

53:59

It's something that I bought a,

54:02

I still like to say multimeter even though most people like multimeter

54:04

here in the States I think, but I bought a multimeter

54:07

and it came with a headlamp. I've

54:10

gotten a couple other, they've all been freebies

54:12

off of different promotional

54:15

things, but they're also like their sheep. You can get

54:17

a little $10

54:19

triple A battery driven one if you

54:21

want, but you can also get nicer ones. I will

54:23

tell you, I pretty regularly when people,

54:26

when I find out somebody doesn't have one, I usually buy

54:29

a $20 black diamond one at REI and they're

54:31

fabulous. It's so nice when you're bending

54:33

over your computer trying to see in weird little places

54:35

to like, especially if like, you know, you're trying to like snake

54:38

your hands under the graphics card to plug some motherboard

54:40

headers in or a fan header or something like that. And

54:42

you can't quite make things out. It's

54:45

I spent, I spent so long like grabbing

54:47

a lamp and putting it on the floor and trying to angle

54:50

it. Yeah, it sucks. That's awful.

54:52

Terrible. What if, what if you just have light every direction

54:54

you're looking? Let me tell you Cooler Master, I think used

54:57

to do a case that plugged into

54:59

the USB header inside and it

55:01

had like a light that had

55:03

a switch that you could flip on and off while

55:05

you were working in there that just flood lit the entire

55:08

inside of the case. It was good. Wow.

55:10

Yeah, that's pretty good. Like it was on three sides of

55:13

the case. It was awesome. Yes. I

55:15

have to, I have to, I have to say real fast. I've clowned myself with

55:19

when I, when I built this machine, I put

55:21

it up with the classic the Noctua NHD 15, the

55:24

King in there. And

55:27

they make an all black one now because most people like to have like

55:29

nice sleek black parts in their thing. But

55:31

the classic is a like chromed metal

55:33

with the brown, the beige fans,

55:35

you know?

55:37

And I went, I went ha ha, I'm going to

55:39

get the beige ones because people are going to be like, you're

55:41

dumb for getting beige. That

55:43

thing is so reflective with a headlamp

55:46

on the chrome side of this,

55:48

of this cooler is so reflective with

55:50

the headlamp on. I have to be very careful getting blasted

55:53

right now. I have to be careful with,

55:55

with how I look inside the case. Um,

55:58

I bought, I bought a. Electric

56:01

blower. Yeah, so I've had air blower.

56:04

I've had one of those for years and it is a godsend

56:06

Here's battery powered or no mines. Mine's wall

56:08

powered mine plugs into the wall. Yeah mine I think

56:11

the X power that's all over Amazon. I don't

56:13

know. I use mine to do everything It cleans

56:15

like the filters on the the the

56:18

guy when it when the air filters get put

56:20

up at the end of the fire season That

56:22

thing comes out and I blast them clean.

56:25

I Literally by all the filters

56:27

in the PC everything gets blasted with that

56:29

thing. It's fat fabulous Yeah, I've

56:31

never run into this because I'm just obsessive about blowing

56:33

dust out every so often, but I've certainly Heard

56:36

from people who have had weird computer issues

56:38

that they realized they hadn't opened the machine in

56:41

three years And like a fan

56:43

was no longer turning because of dust accumulation

56:45

So okay So here is the one thing

56:47

to know about using canned air or

56:49

blower on fans Is that you

56:51

want to not let the fans been while you're

56:54

doing that because they can Because

56:56

a motor and a generator are the same thing just

56:58

whether the whether electricity is going in or

57:00

coming out and you can Back flush

57:02

you can back charge the motherboard If

57:06

you let the fans been oh, I didn't know about that I

57:08

I have always heard just like the the machinery

57:10

them It would bear in bearings and stuff inside the fan also

57:12

might not be able to withstand the

57:14

speed It would blow out if you if

57:17

you yeah, maybe but the real problem

57:19

is that they'll generate electricity and pump it back Yeah,

57:21

yeah into the into the board replacing

57:23

a fan is not the end of the world But if it can also damage

57:25

the actual machine that's bad Yeah You

57:28

can just put like I often just jam a pencil

57:30

in between the blade one of the struts and it'll keep it from

57:32

Moving while you're putting it clean out Also, my

57:35

blower was like 50 bucks And if you look at the cost of

57:37

canned air like it's the same like

57:39

a like a three-pack of canned air is pushing

57:42

Maybe not 50 but it's like, you know, you don't you don't have

57:44

to go through too many cans of air before you have It's

57:46

paid for itself

57:49

So anyway And

57:52

then you have a soldering iron here I

57:54

need a soldering iron to fix a PC part. I've worn

57:56

a soldering iron maybe

57:58

Yeah

57:59

You know, I've used it to fix wiring before.

58:02

I've used it to fix toys and wiring and stuff like

58:04

that. I've used it to fix big

58:07

electronic stuff. I

58:09

had a little component at MOSFET

58:11

fall off of an Intel board once, and

58:14

the board worked fine other than the fact that

58:16

the network, it was part of the networking, it was right

58:19

next to the Ethernet port, and it stopped the networking

58:21

from ever working again. And it was so

58:23

small, and SMT soldered, like pad

58:26

soldered, I couldn't get it soldered back on. My

58:29

soldering iron wasn't as good back then, so I made sure more modern,

58:32

better soldering iron would work better.

58:34

Yeah, the MOSFET on the little fan controller

58:37

on my old fractal case, I guess it's

58:39

not bad, but maybe the connection is bad, because

58:41

if I kind of wiggle it back and forth with my

58:43

finger, the fan will come on and then go off. So

58:46

I guess that means the connection is bad. It

58:49

just needs to be resoldered. It would mean the MOSFET's

58:51

bad too. I

58:53

don't think there's a whole lot of MOSFETs that can go bad though. I

58:55

don't know. So

58:58

if your tests fail, you do it again, if

59:00

it doesn't, then you put the closer thing up and you call

59:02

it a day. Nice job. It's the doing-again

59:04

part that really gets me. I actually

59:07

don't mind troubleshooting. It's kind of a fun puzzle

59:09

to solve, except when it starts

59:11

dragging into its, say, fifth or sixth

59:13

iteration, and you especially,

59:15

not speaking from a recent

59:18

experience here, especially if it's something that requires

59:20

a bajillion tedious steps every time

59:22

you test something. It's like

59:24

something that takes 20 or 30 minutes of tedium

59:28

to build back up and take apart and build back

59:30

up over and over, and then actually testing the thing

59:32

to see if it works takes about five seconds of hitting a switch.

59:35

But you have to do that a dozen times. I

59:38

had a problem once when I was at Max

59:40

PC that required I reinstall Windows every

59:42

single time to see to happen. No.

59:46

And just, it was

59:48

a lot. Yeah. Like,

59:52

once you find the fixed label, label everything,

59:54

like, every time I have

59:57

to unplug and replug all the USB stuff, I curse

59:59

myself. because I still haven't labeled which USB ports

1:00:01

are the right ones for my stuff. Write

1:00:05

down what you did. If you don't write it down, it didn't

1:00:07

happen. A doctor friend of mine always used to

1:00:09

say that. I'd

1:00:12

really, for real, like once you're

1:00:14

tired, stop, go do something else, go to

1:00:16

bed, wake up in the morning, work on it more,

1:00:19

and do go back and revisit your old, the post

1:00:21

stuff. That's, you know, that's a big one actually

1:00:24

because I've been troubleshooting some stuff recently

1:00:26

and now that you mention it, I don't know how many times

1:00:29

I've come upon people describing my problem

1:00:31

and then never actually coming back around to say if the

1:00:33

thing, the advice they got worked or not. Yeah. And

1:00:36

of course, the other side of this is if you post a question

1:00:38

someplace, go back and post

1:00:40

what you did to fix the problem. Yeah. Right?

1:00:44

Like, like, yeah. Cause somebody else will find that post at some

1:00:46

point in the future and be like, Oh man, I

1:00:48

guess this is, I'm just going to have to buy a new one. This is

1:00:50

terrible. So yeah, it's always better

1:00:52

to fix the thing, buy the new one if you can.

1:00:54

So, if you can. So that's the troubleshooting

1:00:57

theory, um, episode, I guess. I'd

1:00:59

love to hear what people think and what they do differently

1:01:02

from us. Yes. We thrive on

1:01:04

user tips and tricks, especially on our

1:01:06

discord or email. Yeah. Please,

1:01:09

please let us know if there's anything we haven't mentioned here

1:01:11

that we could benefit from as well as our audience.

1:01:13

Yeah. There'll be a feedback thread in the discord if you're

1:01:15

a Patreon member or you can send it

1:01:18

to tech pod at content.town. If

1:01:20

you just want to use an electronic mail or

1:01:22

email. Um, but, oh yeah.

1:01:25

That's what that means. Have you heard about those? They're

1:01:29

going to change the world. Yeah. It's a

1:01:31

whole new thing. Um, but this is the part of the show where we thank

1:01:33

our patrons, the people who make the show possible.

1:01:35

This is a hundred percent listener supported show. So

1:01:38

without you all, we wouldn't be here. Thank you so

1:01:40

much patrons. Yeah.

1:01:42

Thank you. And a very special thank

1:01:45

you to our executive producer, to your patrons

1:01:47

who I have not opened up on

1:01:49

my, uh, on my list yet. So

1:01:51

bad at filling. I don't know if I

1:01:54

can, um, I got you. Okay.

1:01:57

Thank you. Thank

1:02:00

you to all of our executive producer chair

1:02:02

patrons, including Nick Johnson, Paddle Creek

1:02:04

Games, makers of Fractured Veil, Andrew Slosky,

1:02:07

Jordan Lippett, Dollar Sign, JustWedge,

1:02:09

Joel Krauska, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James

1:02:12

Kamek, and Pantheon, makers

1:02:14

of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.

1:02:16

Thank you.

1:02:17

Thank you all so much. Thank you. If

1:02:19

you want to find out how to support the show, which is an important

1:02:21

part of this segment that I've forgotten up until now, you

1:02:24

can go to patreon.com slash techbot.

1:02:27

That's patreon.com slash techbot or patreon.com

1:02:30

slash techbot. Or I think you can go to techbot.content.town

1:02:32

slash patreon. All of those will go to the same

1:02:34

place. I don't know about that last one. I'm

1:02:37

suddenly questioning myself. But and

1:02:39

you can, for five bucks, you support the show. You

1:02:42

get access to the fabulous techbot discord, which

1:02:44

is full of lovely people. Somebody joined,

1:02:46

a new person joined. I won't out them. But a new

1:02:48

person joined the Patreon this week

1:02:51

and they were like, I'd heard how nice a place this was.

1:02:55

And then they joined into the Patreon and immediately

1:02:57

got a bunch of pictures of nonsense in the general

1:03:00

feed. They were like, oh, I'm good. This

1:03:03

is where I want to be. This morning

1:03:05

I opened it up and it was just pictures of raccoons.

1:03:08

Millions and millions, maybe not millions, but a whole buttload

1:03:10

of pictures of raccoons doing very cute things

1:03:13

and not being monsters. So that

1:03:15

was nice. Raccoons have their downsides,

1:03:17

but I think they're a delightful

1:03:19

animal. I mean, they may be

1:03:21

festering with all sorts of horrible diseases. My

1:03:25

daughter found a YouTuber who has

1:03:27

some house raccoons that like,

1:03:30

they're like. Raised

1:03:32

by humans, so they they understand human

1:03:34

ways and they they post

1:03:36

cute videos with them like swimming in their pool

1:03:39

and which sounds revolting, but

1:03:41

whatever, I'm not going to judge. They

1:03:43

did a mean thing to the raccoons, which I'm usually

1:03:45

against cruelty to animals, but raccoons don't

1:03:48

be mean to raccoons. They gave them cotton

1:03:50

candy bread. Wait, does that mean? Well,

1:03:52

so raccoons like to wash their food, right? Oh,

1:03:55

so they handed him cotton candy. Oh, I

1:03:57

didn't know that they ate the cotton candy. This

1:03:59

is. really good. They put a bowl of water out.

1:04:02

Oh no. They wash the food and

1:04:04

the, cause the cotton candy immediately just dissolves

1:04:06

when they put in the water. They're like, wait, what happened? Where's the good

1:04:08

stuff? That's terrible. That's kind of funny, but that's

1:04:10

terrible. It's kind of funny. Um, I didn't know raccoons wash

1:04:13

their food. You said they were, so they were unclean.

1:04:15

That sounds pretty hygienic to me. Well,

1:04:17

okay. They wash their food because I think they have taste

1:04:19

buds in their paws. So when they get

1:04:22

it wet, they can taste it and see, see

1:04:24

if the garbage is sufficiently ripe

1:04:26

to eat without killing them. Interesting.

1:04:28

Okay. Um, the, uh,

1:04:31

the problem with raccoons, if you ever find a raccoon,

1:04:33

latrine, which is where a large number of red ones

1:04:35

have gone to the bathroom, uh, hire

1:04:38

a professional to clean it. Cause it has parasites

1:04:40

that will get in your brain and kill you. Oh no.

1:04:42

Yeah. If you breathe the

1:04:44

dust, is the contagion

1:04:47

vector. It's not just cast with spreadable

1:04:50

brain parasites anymore. Uh, yeah.

1:04:53

Raccoon latrines. Uh,

1:04:56

you got to wear respirators and stuff. Um,

1:04:59

and if you, if you do something stupid, Oh

1:05:02

yeah. If you cannot use heat such as flame

1:05:04

or boiling water, hot

1:05:06

soapy water, a damp not wet sponge

1:05:09

to wipe up residual fecal material,

1:05:11

um, flush dirty rinse

1:05:14

water down the toilet. Thank you.

1:05:16

County Washington. I might keep my distance

1:05:18

next time I see a raccoon. Look there.

1:05:22

Trash panels indeed. Yeah.

1:05:24

We love, I do love a trash panda, but

1:05:27

that'll do it for us this week. Uh, have a good week. Everybody

1:05:29

will see all next time.