Youtube hearted comments of XSportSeeker (@XSpImmaLion).

  1. Good to hear you made a full recovery man! I've heard the news about this, but didn't know the full details... it's like yeesh, a crash on maiden voyage. Sounds like one of those cases where several people involved got too up on their noses about the thing being safe, broke all sorts of rules with a cost down or fast launch in mind, and made others pay the price for their mistakes. The issue being not so much that we didn't know better, but that we got too lax on well known safety practices... on the older historical videos we can understand the safety standards didn't exist yet, growing pains, lack of tech for support, etc. This one is more on the corruption side. It's pretty weird that not only it crashed on maiden voyage, the company ignored all sorts of safety measures, and even... it's like no one was monitoring the situation with a bit of anxiety? Perhaps it's the speed of society these days, but I'd kinda expect for a maiden voyage (well, not entirely, just a segment of the route I guess) to happen during day time with good visibility and emergency services at the ready for any eventuality... or that at the very least someone would've gone through the most dangerous portion of the new track with the pilot and engineer thoroughly. Anyways, good report as always!
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  2. Love the nuanced tone you used on this topic Greg... I often talk about this but in a way more sharp tone. xD Put simply, the stuff you usually see on international news coverage, specially for countries like Japan on a western publication, is often times sensationalized, exaggerated, or made to look weird/unique on purpose. There is a secondary intention there, and it's often not a great one. It changes at times, but sometimes it's demeaning (as in, our culture is superior to theirs), sometimes it's fetishization, sometimes it's targetting specific subcultures to make it look like it's a mainstream thing, sometimes it's for the clicks or for the views... And it's also often in a judgemental tone, not to provoke discussion or to make people think, but rather superficial and one sided. Which is quite unfortunate. I often say that if your own culture was seen through the lenses often applied by international news about Japan, or other foreign countries, it'd look as "weird" if not weirder. You don't even have to go that far I guess... tabloids will usually give a sense of how that goes. But still, tabloid news is not the same as international news because at least on tabloid news you have the full expectation that it's purposedly made that way for the clicks. International news often portray themselves as serious, composed, when they often actually are not. It gets to a point where a whole ton of these weird things that are often covered in international news are there mostly for tourists instead of japanese people. The weirdest thing most tourists will think about Japan when they visit there will probably be how not weird Japan actually is. It's a really good exercise to go through all these supposedly weird and unique things that are often talked about Japan, and see if there isn't something there in your own culture that looks or sounds extremely similar. Look hard enough, you'll often find that there actually is. I'll just talk about one thing that came up recently that is not an example of weird thing, but how international news tend to distort things, in this case by shallow coverage: the "Fukushima disaster". Fukushima is actually the 3rd biggest prefecture in Japan, the Daiichi power plant tsunami flooding and subsequent meltdown was bad, but the plant is located on the west coast of the prefecture, and the area that is still dealing with problems around ionizing radiation is a radius of a few miles around the plant, not much more than that. It was catastrophic, I'm not trying to diminish how severe the whole thing was, but it affected an area much smaller than most people imagine. The vast majority of the prefecture was not affected all that much, and it's a prefecture that almost reaches all the way to the east coast of Japan... it has lots of mountains, lots of onsens, lots of interesting stuff to see, different terrains, lots of cities and culture, lots of stuff that even most tourists don't see (because most tourists only go to Tokyo and Kyoto)... because it's a huge prefecture, not only a power plant. And yet, as it was labeled "Fukushima disaster", people specially from outside Japan thinks the entire prefecture is condemned or something, when not even the capital city of Fukushima which is located more towards the north of the prefecture didn't change much. :P I don't think many people realize this, but the capital of Fukushima, that has the same name, never saw anything related to ionizing radiation out of the Tohoku 2011 disaster. They had problems in infrastructure and public transportation because of the earthquake, but that's mostly it. So I think it's awesome that Greg often makes videos de-mystifing Japan... I think it's needed, because it's something you don't see a lot on traditional media.
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  3. Super interesting stuff Greg, please continue covering this sorts of topics because I think your channels is basically the only one putting the work and digging into these topics this well. Thanks!
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  4. Everyone should go get themselves some coffee
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  5. Reposted, rewatched, relaughed
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  6. Gotta be fair here, clarify further and reinforce what was said so that people don't get fooled by this. The Pinetab2, and V for that matter, should not be seen as tablets as we are used to knowing them... those are actually devboards in tablet format. Pinetab 2 has a Rockchip RK3566 SoC in it... it's a pretty ok and modern SoC, but in the devboard category. Meaning it competes with a Raspberry Pi, not an Android tablet. They are much more powerful than your basic RaspPi, but nowhere close to Snapdragon, Exynos or even Mediatek SoCs that modern Android tablets have. It has a quadcore CPU and is in the 22nm category. Should be fine for basic tasks, but you're not gaming in it... in fact, the company does not recommend this tablet to run Android, and it also does not have Widevine support. Just to be very clear that this is not a replacement for an Android tablet, but you can run Linux on it and you should expect a level of performance better than a Rapberry Pi. Pinetab V is even more meant for developers and tinkerers only, since it has a Risc-V processor. It's quite awesome for enthusiasts and developers that there's now a Risc-V devboard in tablet form to play with, but even if progress with the architecture has been phenomenal recently, it's just not ready for any type of everyday usage. OSs that support Risc-V are very much still in early experimental stages, lots of stuff that is still not working, lots of bugs, not super optimized yet, not a whole lot in terms of driver support, expect for most things you need do not work at all. With that in consideration, depending on use case it could still work great for you... just be aware of those points. I'm a bit tempted myself with the Pinetab 2, because I don't really use a tablet for much, and having Linux run on it is super interesting. If I had the money to spare I'd get one of those, and perhaps a Pixel 3a or Fairphone 4 to run Ubuntu touch.
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  7. Cris, you were too gentle with those drives... xD But nice test! These days, flash drives are more likely to get destroyed by themselves with poor quality chips and whatnot than physically... so I think it's best for people to chose one by reliability. Unfortunately, I never heard of tests made for reliability like Backblaze does for HDDs... if anyone knows, please share! Personally, I just go for well known brands. There must be some statistic out there on failure rates by brand. Overall, I also think ruggedness in flash drives are kind of a scam.... well, not completely, but bare with me. Tiny small drives don't have enough weight to damage themselves if they take a fall. Cris could've tossed those as high as he could and let them fall into concrete floor, I doubt it would've damaged them. Funny enough, the most likely one to be damaged would be the heaviest one. Water ingress might be a problem, but all those solutions could be easily reproduced with a rubber case or something like one of those plastic tubes used to protect matches in camping gear. I don't think there's anything special about them internally.... perhaps some conformal coating, which doesn't cost a whole lot. Potting the circuit of a drive like that would probably cause some thermal issues, so it's a no go. That Survivor Stealth in particular is kinda ridiculous... it's basically a pendrive inside an aluminium tube with rubber gaskets, right? I bet you could get a regular pendrive plus an aluminium tube with rubber gasket for less. :P Put some foam in there and that should be enough. I am curious though about pendrives with internal encryption, fingerprint readers, and other security systems that also kills the drive if someone tries to tamper with it. But those are waaaay more expensive. Perhaps I'm a bit biased... but from personal experience, I have never lost a single pen drive to damage or even corruption since the very first one I got that must've had less than 2Gb capacity. Heck, don't think I ever lost any of the SD cards or MMC cards I got that were under 1Gb too. I think I still have my first MMC/TC card (same format as SD, but older) that I got on my first MP3 player... an ancient Diammond/Rio Nike edition thing that came out way before iPods ever happened. Oh, I remember... it was a 32Mb card! xD Well, I do take good care of them, but accidents have happened. :P Speed is a whole other discussion though... if you want reliable speed, then you'll have to see reviews and really go into it. But personally, if it's not for mission critical usage, meaning I don't really need the pendrive or SD card to be that speedy, I just get cheaper slower ones... they are slower, but they get less hot because of that, so there are even less chances of chip failure. But of all the problems pendrives and SD cards face today, the biggest one remains on sales of those with fake capacity and modified firmware to display a size bigger than it actually is. I have fortunately only got one bogus microSD card so far, and Amazon refunded me. But that's only because I already knew about the problem and had the software to test it. Always test your new sd cards and pendrives people, with the h2testw software. You really don't wanna find out that your sd card is fake during a photoshoot or something...
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  8. Nice, stroll through memory lane, back at the time I used to build PCs myself... xD Nowadays, even with the ressurgence of PC builders, I just buy them ready to use. Here in Brazil there was a quirk back in the 90s and early 2000s for anyone who lived close to the Paraguayan border - it was waaaay cheaper to buy parts and build your own PC. That plus me being a tinkerer who broke lots of electronics as a teen and early adult, I'm familiar with a whole ton of stuff Cris is talking about. I started opening up desktop cases to see what's inside back at PC-XT times... but my first builds were probably back at 386 DXII desktops. I think that went on up 'till Pentium III, which I had a Slot 1 cartridge for. Perhaps a bit longer than that. From that time on things started getting super complicated on the ram memory side. There was a transitioning period that had lots of motherboards that were only compatible with certain RAM memory brands and speeds, things got a heck lot more confusing, and worst of all - poorly documented. So what you effectively had to do (which I did) was talk a lot with people working on stores to know what combination worked and what didn't. As they assembled multiple desktops a day, they knew what worked better and what didn't. They had lots of headaches with assembled desktops coming back from costumers because they weren't working properly. You gave a base configuration of what you wanted and they took care of matching brands and whatnot so that the build would work. Things I don't forget from that time... the moment RAM memory prices crashed down, which was almost unbelievable at the time, and the moment RAM memory speeds became a thing, which was the point assembling your own desktop became too complicated - like I said on previous paragraph. From that point on I never went back to building my own desktops. It doesn't make economical sense anymore these days here in Brazil... difference in price isn't that big anymore, parts are harder to find, and warranty plus paying in installments just makes buying a pre-assembled branded desktop the better choices nowadays. But the benefits lives on. My current desktop is over 5 yrs old now. I got a Dell. But I put an SSD in it right after buying it, most people didn't even know what it was. And I'll probably replace the aging graphics card and push it for some more years before retiring...
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  9. Great intro... this is something I always try to explain to people who keeps using racism, jingoism and general ignorance when they talk about "the jerbs they stolen" and whatnot whenever people start talking about industrial complexes operating in countries like China, India and other Asian nations. Plus when it comes about defining the industrial revolution era. The ugly truth about globalization and "modern" times is just what John talked about in the intro - the horrible work conditions in factory floors of the industrial revolution era never truly ended - it just got offshored, so that consumers get to enjoy a degree of separation from it. Plus cheap labor and zero regulations of course. It all got neatly packaged and sent to countries like China and India, and now that China is becoming a modern nation, it's being further offshored to countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, perhaps some African nations, a lot is going to Mexico, Brazil, and so on. So the reality is that whilst the industrial revolution era and it's complete lack of worker rights, child and slave labor, horribly dangerous factory conditions, industrial toxic pollution, and all sorts of bad things are rare in developed nations these days, it never truly ended, because it only got offshored to poorer nations. People should try keeping this in mind when they complain about product quality coming from these nations. Or when people complain about these countries "stealing tech" from the big brands who treated workers like cheap industrial revolution era labor. I often hear the response that, well, at least they have work, yadda yadda. I'll tell you - that's the exact type of mentality that justifies abuse in every level. I bring food to the table, so I can beat my wife all I want, because without me she would be miserable. I can give whatever education I want to my kids, including no education at all. If it wasn't for me opening a factory in this poor nation, they'd be all working in the fields and going hungry. Understand the problem with those? Privileged people don't get to set the rules and standards, that's what human rights are for. People don't need you throwing poisoned food on the table just because you are in the status quo, just because of your goddamned money or privilege - people need basic human rights and dignity. You don't get to play the white knight while trying to profit from human misery.
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  10. Wow... after lying almost dormant for too long, it seems Risk-V is making leaps and bounds incredibly fast in recent years. Sounds great to me!
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  11. Agreed on the insurance answer, and the reason why Henry or anyone else shouldn't feel comfortable with it being decided based on all these private and personal markers is pretty logical if you understand the basis on how insurance SHOULD operate (it's not how they operate anymore, but it's how they should). Basically, it should be a shared piggy bank or rainy day fund. Lots of people put money on it, and insurance companies makes their profit and pay for operations out of it, but for the few people that something bad happens, the money is there to compensate for participating on the fund. Overtime, the entire concept got corrupted by greed, because that's what the whole data collection thing and treating people differently really is. They charge more for people who might make use of the fund, and charge less for people who likely won't, but this is really mostly for their profit. I wouldn't feel comfortable about sharing personal and private data with them because if it is about profit, eventually insurance companies will find a way to also monetize just that. In part, they already do. Insurance agency data is already used in some countries and some instances for credit scores, evaluation on other things, and who knows what else more. It's not supposed to be that way, you know? But we're far past the point of making a course correction I guess... The other argument that I'd put from what Nathan has said, there's a big issue there also related to profit and monitoring apps - you don't control the way the insurance company is calculating things, it doesn't sound very transparent at all, and so why would you trust a profit driven enterprise to honestly give you discounts for good behavior? It is quite possible that they manipulate things behind, gives discounts only for a tiny fraction of people so that they can say it works, and for the rest they'll give some lame excuse that the app or the algorithm is not working correctly for you, and just keep charging you up to the limit that they think they can scalp you. So, it's an issue of trust with what they do with your information. Then finally, I promise the last argument on this topic. It seems that if you agree with these sort of surveillance tactics, the only route for this in the future is that it'll become worse and worse over the years. They know where to and how you drive, they'll soon want to include more details. Who are you friends with? What sorts of stuff you do on your daily life? Do you have any potentially dangerous hobbies? Do you have strong political and ideological opinions that might put you on a risk list? See where I'm going with this? And insurance company can not only justify the collection of everything and anything you do in life on basis of calculation of your premiums, once they have all that they could just sell it to advertisers because that's exactly what advertisers also wanna know. Just stay away from it if possible.
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  12. This collab is producing some great stuff! xD Thanks for sharing Greg and John!
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  13. Thanks Greg, for yet another great video that compiles and brings nuance to a discussion I've been having for years with people curious about Japan! xD One more to use when trying to unravel the complexity of it. You generally have two camps of people on this. One side, people who have heard about the complexity of trash separation for recycling, plus perhaps a doc on that zero waste village that "recycles" "everything", and thinks Japan is a paradise of recycling or something, and the other camp who heard about double and triple packaging of Japanese products and/or how a ton of trash gets burnt and finds it all appalling... it is often hard to explain how none of it is black and white, and reality is more or less in between like in several other developed nations. But I think there are some models in Japan that are worth thinking about and adopting, sometimes I wonder why it still didn't happen. One is the standardization of product packaging, particularly for companies that already operate in Japan (which is basically most, as it has basically become a global oligopoly), they have no excuses on not knowing how to do it. My understanding is that while not perfect, particularly for PET bottles, Japan evolved recycling efforts a whole lot in the past couple of decades. And it's not only about recycling... in more general terms it's also about usability, education, awareness, culture and more stuff along those lines. Standardization and bottles that are clearly made with recycling in mind, with care put into how to clean and break them apart for recycling, by itself educates people towards better disposal practices... which doesn't happen in my country because bottles continue coming in all shapes, consistency and sizes, with paper and plastic labels completely glued to the bottles with zero consideration on how to take them off, an assortment of caps of all materials and qualities imaginable, no standardized shape, etc. You can see from the offset that it wasn't made with recycling in mind, and so people just don't give a damn. In fact, by comparison, the standard vending machine Japanese tea bottle is so well made (in comparison to local stuff) that I often see people using it as a reusable bottle... every now and then I get some in an import shop and it becomes a bottle to take on trips and whatnot. The bottles of stuff bought locally are so crappy that it often ends up in a state you can't really clean up and reuse. The whole idea that bottled beverage manufacturers needs to keep changing and messing with bottle designs as a marketing ploy has to die in the west. Well, what is left of it in Japan also has to go, because I know that despite heavy standardization, Japan also has a bit of that leftover. I also think that for quite a few places, there needs to be some consideration about controlled burning of trash with carbon capture methods and whatnot. While it might sound bad at first because of emissions, it's a whole lot worse if all this trash ends up in a landfill which contaminates the water table and rivers, and all of it ends up breaking down and becoming a source of greenhouse gases anyways, while also adding up to ecosystem damages and microplastics problem. For countries like Japan where there is a lack of natural resources for energy production, and a whole lot of emissions and costs involved in importing fossil fuel energy anyways, at least for me it seems more than logical to burn trash for fuel. It's not a perfect solution, and it might not sound great, but it sure sounds better than just exporting trash and importing even more fossil fuels to fill the gap... I do agree though that there should be better ways to handle some types of packaging... I do like the practice for cleanliness and food portioning reasons, plus the entire culture of gift giving, but I guess it's time to start applying more forcefully usage of alternative materials, or reusable stuff, rather than just keep using mounds of plastic that will end up being burned away. In any case, I'm not in any position to criticize or complain. My developing nation still didn't get even close to such considerations. Trash ends up everywhere here, even well educated people have no idea how little of our trash gets recycled, in general people also have no idea how to separate recyclable trash from the rest properly, we are nowhere close to having an uniform system for it, there is little respect for standards and labeling regarding materials and how to recycle them, and our landfills are all problematic in their own ways... I won't even start talking about industrial trash, commercial, and stuff like mining because it'd be an endless complaint stream. :P The only thing that saves us from going the complete opposite way when it comes to environmentalism and fighting climate change is that most of our power generation, thanks to the lucky geographical conditions we have, already leans heavily towards renewables. Lucky for us, because if it depended on government and people's will, we'd be contributing increasingly more and more to worsening Climate Change, and against the environment in general. But there is a lot more to be done, and it needs to start by taking away the idiot president in charge, replacing with someone that at least doesn't put industrial cattle farming and whatnot above environmental concerns. Realistically though, even if we elected the most radical environmentalist possible, there is only so much that could be done to solve all the environmental issues here... but I think a proper start would be regulating things properly and forcing huge industries to commit to better practices or start paying all the fines they should already be paying for environmental damages.
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  14. Thanks for the update Chris, always great to know that a free and open standard is progressing nicely! I also agree and think it's a very important development not only as a competing platform, but also as an alternative for proprietary architectures.... really not a fan of countries being able to leverage proprietary architectures as trade war fodder, no matter how justified it may be. It's not so much about China, Russia and other sanctioned nations, it's more about commodity weaponization. Computers, smartphones and whatnot are such a fundamental part of any modern society these days that I think we should have open platforms and standards that can be used regardless of politics, no country or economic block having power to control access to it.
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  15. AHA! Thanks for digging up the explanation for this board Chris, now it makes sense. When I first heard about this, I thought Intel was getting rid of old stock or something like that, it was just too cheap for components. But this makes much more sense. For those who don't know, this class of Atom Cherry Trail CPUs was in a whole ton of the tiny Windows sticks and boxes that were popping up in droves few years ago. Kangaroo PC, early GPD Win models, Intel Compute Stick, Gole PC, and a whole ton of other stuff. But they were all around the 200 bucks mark. The trend fizzled out when Intel decided to shut down development of the Atom line (which I still think is pretty unfortunate), but seems they kept up going with Core M3 and M5 lines. Those are even more expensive though, 500 bucks and up depending on what you want. I'd get one, but thing is, I already have both a Gole1 and a Kangaroo PC... that are juuust a bit above those specs already. X8500 instead of X8350. Not devboard, but for what I'd want to experiment with, better overall. I've been curious to see the difference between these and the M3 CPUs that replaced those though... particularly on the Intel Compute Stick. Too expensive for my pocket though. xD
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  16. Wow, kudos LattePanda! I know this is a more expensive board, but they are showing a very interesting path of evolution there... I'm hoping you'll be testing this one further Chris, too good a thing to stop here. xD Linux, some gaming, stuff like that. Also, thanks for bringing this up for us who don't follow this stuff closer. Very very interesting stuff going on in the are of sbcs.
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  17. Ooof, I'll file this in horror, because you can now imagine all the missing sources that are still out there, could still end up in industrial forging or recycling plants, coming then back to us... I kinda want a radiation detector now. :P
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  18. Great list Chris... most of which I already use, and that's why it's great. xD /jk Adding some others: 7zip - don't get the free trial forever Winzip, get 7zip. mplayer - if for some reason VLC is too heavy for you, or you get some weird codec problems in some ancient movie files, try this one. Media Player Classic (MPC-HC) - same as above Notepad++ - popular alternative to notepad more towards coding Keepass - password manager with local storage video production stuff - shotcut, audacity, OBS, GIMP, Camstudio... This one may sound a bit weird and you do have to take extremely good care for getting it from a reputable source, but afaik, it's kinda unique in what it does: h2testw1.4 - it's a small software designed to make a hard test on the size of USB pendrives and SD cards. Something that became necessary because the market is flooded with fake pendrives and SD cards that are actually small sized, hacked to display on Windows as large sized ones... like an 2Gb pendrive that shows up as a 128 or 256Gb one. The only way to really know is doing what this piece of software does - copying a bunch of filler files there until it reaches capacity. The hacked ones will reach it's true capacity and start deleting files... I've gotten fake stuff from Amazon and other websites, so people really have to be careful. It's the first thing I run on a newly purchased pendrive or sd card, and Amazon staff accepts this as proof that it's a fake product (at least on the only fake one I've got so far, they did). Oh, I also recommend checking all the other stuff made by the company that does Recuva - Piriform. It's all good. These are the ones I can remember right now...
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  19. Hmmm nice! Kudos to Pine and of course to Chris for bringing this to us... Is this the most powerful SBC you've ever had Chris? If I'm not mistaken, this represents a whole other step in evolution for single board computers/dev boards.... opens up a whole host of possibilities, at very reasonable price. If not for the raw power, at the very least for the PCIe x4 port... pretty awesome, didn't think they'd get there. Also at a pretty interesting price point. xD NAS, very competent emustation, HTPC, security cam hub, pretty competent secondary Linux box. Could be used to drive specialized applications depending on how the PCIe works... multiple USB Type-C interfaces, BD-R drives, some network stuff. Very exciting stuff!
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  20. Great explainer! I'm running something similar here, but I have two switches.... one by the side of the main router, and one under the TV. I've been considering going in the rabbit hole of managed switches with either pfsense or opensense though... I have a major issue at home here that the router provided by my ISP is an old piece of crap brand that I now know has a fixed and vulnerable admin password scheme, unpatchable. The ISP is refusing to replace my equipment and I doubt they'll have anything better there to replace anyways, so I'm offloading everything I can from it and putting hardware in front of it to stop any potential attacks. It's fiber, and I can't find any good fiber router to buy locally that has a reputation of being secure enough. Also considering to use my old Raspberry Pi to shove a PiHole in front of it too... xD Oh well, lots of side projects to go into.
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  21. The land of convenience... xD those are awesome, I'd love to have a service like that here. We do have frozen meals here, but it's like half a dozen types at most, they are super expensive (sometimes more than just paying for restaurant delivery), and they generally don't taste great nor are very healthy... If you count lasagnas as a meal, several of them still have trans fat added. The stuff you find on supermarkets are generally bad... it'll do to fill you up, but there always seem to be something wrong with it. The rice comes out kinda raw, the pasta ends up mushy, meat has the consistency of rubber... You know when food is poorly frozen or it taste like it has been unfrozen and frozen back again? That. You can never trust supermarkets, restaurants, and delivery services to preserve the thing as they should. I have seen a few app based delivery restaurants offering frozen meals made by them, not industrialized, but they are really hit or miss... the better ones are labeled as "healthy food", and accordingly comes with the healthy food tax - by which I mean, they are too expensive for what they are, and portions are small. And I've never seen anything offering this much variety... the restaurants that offer frozen meals made by themselves at most will have some 4 or 5 choices based on the standard everyday brazilian meal. Rice beans and a few other stuff, beef stroganoff, feijoada, and then all sorts of pasta... the most common here are spaghetti, gnocci and lasagna. It's really made for those in a hurry, not for those looking to enjoy a meal. Though I think if I lived there, I'd just do a quick run to a kombini everytime. xD I mean, with frozen food you don't even have to leave home, but really, the only reason why I consider frozen food here is because there is nothing like kombinis around where I live, restaurants are expensive as heck, and everytime you go out you gotta have safety in mind because depending on time of day, you always have a chance to get mugged or something. :P So I have tried a whole ton of frozen, dried, and generally long preserved food... it's mostly been kinda like cup noodles - not the kind you see in Japan, the kind you see internationally... pretty basic and bad. But opposite to cup noodles, if it's a regular meal, it tends to be super expensive too...
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  22. Very interesting! Would you consider that for your editing station Chris? I see some worries about stability with it being a hobby distro and all, but it seems all tools should work there fine...
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  23. Rough, but at least it's getting there, and there is a viable path... This is still at a stage that I'd worry about things breaking up on every update in every single component of this math, but at least there is a kinda official route. Needs a bit more cleaning up though... particularly now that they already have a route for long term support. Thanks Chris, great video as always! If I decide to separate a computer for production alone, this is the tutorial I'll be watching to make the thing work. xD
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  24. I learned everything I know about japanese mushrooms from the first episode of Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai... xD /jk
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  25. Super interesting! Also, the fact that you went offline for this Cris, matters a lot... I'd be pretty interested to play with this tech around a bit if it's not creeply connected to something else. Thanks for sharing!
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  26. Yes, very much interested! Thanks for sharing Chris! Question - is this somewhat similar to what Android has been doing these days? AB Partitioning to have one fixed immutable backup, and then use the other for updates and such, switching back and forth after things got stable? Anyways, I always thought that the idea of separating apps from data was good way to go for. The second step on this would be making the app partition fixed and immutable, storing all configurations and customizations on the data partition, so it can be easily swapped back and forth. Of course, the broad concept is easy to explain, but implementing this properly is much much harder... glad to see people are finding ways to do it.
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  27. The culprit is TV and movies, as always... :P
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  28. Heh, since like early last week I have been watching a ton of videos on the Atem, particularly the mini Pro ISO version. Not that I can afford it right now, but it's amazing what it can do for the price. Recording 5 different video streams and audio channels separatedly and organizing everything automatically on DaVinci's timeline? What a workflow dream! xD
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  29. Yeesh... I get what Microsoft is going for. It's not really about a Windows PC on the cloud, it's about the support, security, backup, maintenance and whatnot for a ton of people all at once. The temptation there is for people with new businesses or businesses needing modernization to simplify the entire process. But even still, those prices for that crap performance might be too much even for most businesses. The other problem I'm seeing right from start is how you could get a cloud gaming PC for less, if I remember correctly. Not sure if currently available services would be able to handle a ton of new users all at once, but still. Also not sure how many of the services are still around, the entire business model always sounded infeasible to me. Particularly for gaming, which needs constant upgrading to run the latest and greatest. What was the name? Shadow something? But I imagine there must be other cloud PC services that are less targeted to gaming and more to regular usage... hard to imagine they'd charge ridiculous prices like those. Anyways, thanks for the look into it Cris!
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  30. ROFL, sometimes I'm a bit surprised on things Henry doesn't know... Yes, The Lonely Island, how can you not know? 🤣 Then again, Henry is younger than me too, so... has this become a Boomer thing? Oh no! But Lonely Island is like above average when it comes to stuff that exploded in popularity... Like a Boss, I'm on a Boat, Jizz in my Pants... safe to say it achieved meme status for quite a long time. I'm not even from the US.
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  31. Thanks for this years' content Chris! Agreed with predictions, and subscribed to the new channel! :D
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  32. Heh... this has a more "Dr Sbaitso by Creative Labs please enter your name" vibe to it. xD
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  33. Fully agreed with the closing comments! Thanks for sharing the strategies and thoughts!
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  34. The argument "if it only saves one life" is even worse because, sure, you saved one life from dying by Covid on an extremely optimistic point of view, but lockdowns the way the CCP is implementing is making people sick, if not outright killing for other reasons... such as the fire. But even more, on letting people waste by being essentially locked into solitary confinement. Perhaps even worse than solitary confinement as some are being left to fend off for themselves without any help. Even disconsidering the horrible effects on economy, on people's social lives and livelihoods, it's already a net negative. Setting aside totalitarianism, let's pretend for a moment here that this was a democratic country enforcing rules according to science. It'd be wrong already. Strict lockdowns to the point of total isolation should never be employed past a few days at most, even if everyone had the conditions to maintain themselves (which they don't)... because those also have deleterious effects on health, both mental and physical. If the CCP wants to keep being overly precautious about the pandemic, and I personally cannot disagree with that, but it had to be a managed strategy, not radicalism. Either that or state presence had to be much more forwards providing people support all the time, pretty much impossible in a country with almost a fifth of the world's population. Keep the advisory to use masks and take extra care with hygiene, advance vaccination campaigns, but don't just pass chains on doors and tell people they cannot leave their homes for any reason. Which it seems is exactly the way they are going now given recent announcements and rare admissions of fault... but it didn't need to get to this point. But of course, this is all happening exactly because it's a totalitarian regime. In a way, like Louis said, what happened is a good thing because it put in display how far the government is willing to go for some stupid attempt on political gains in the international scene. The CCP and Pooh went this far into the misguided if not outright blind and stupid zero Covid policy because they wanted to become some weird shinning example on how to combat a pandemic in the world stage. It also have showed plenty how no one at a position of power there understands the hardships citizens have been going through. And for lots of Chinese citizens, this isn't only about Covid too. It's the combination of several moves by the CCP in recent years topped with Pooh staying on power. Particularly for younger Chinese, with an understanding of how things work in other countries, and what is happening these days, everything from Hong Kong, Taiwan, policies stamping down on gaming and gamers, moves that the CCP took against tech and gaming related private businesses, among several other actions shows a blatant disconnect between the government and themselves. The hopeful part of this is that if the government there is smart enough, this will be the opportunity to tone down things and stop with all the totalitarian moves. Thing is, China might have a totalitarian communist government, but in actuality, it has throngs of citizens in the middle class that are very capitalist, have a very modern democratic mentality, and just tolerates the situation with the government because it hasn't pushed them over the line just yet. Still, the fact that China has so much of the world's population is both strength and weakness for it's government. Protests are a seed for changes that needed happening there. I bet the CCP right now is shitting their pants on this becoming a situation similar to Iran... different motivations, different situations, but prolonged protests and anti-government sentiment is exactly what they don't want.
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  35. Flashbacks to diskpark, to park your hdd headers safely! xD great video, I'm always forgetting how to do this.
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  36. Folding phones are kind of an extreme version of phablets... and I imagine this is why the smartphone industry is putting money into it. This will sound weird, but out of all the stupid fad crap we've been having in smartphones since the tech plateau'd, this is one that I'm actually kind on the fence about. Not for myself, but for chances of mainstream success in general. Probably will sound ridiculous for most people, but that's a personal hunch. And just to put in context, I thought AR was stupid, using hand gestures and stuff like sonar was stupid, the whole bezel less thing, the whole notch, punch hole, and then under glass front facing camera to be a completely useless discussion, headphone jack yadda yadda, AI assistants, multiple cameras for 3D mapping, modular phones, and the list goes on and on and on. Under glass fingerprint scanner, wireless charging to a point... all of those and more I consider pretty useless fads. Advanced haptic engine feedback, 4K high refresh rate screens... oh lord, there are so many. Some of which I was wrong, but still. On the other hand, I also always thought that some edge features that some phones have would become increasingly more important, and they never did. Desktop mode, wireless mirroring, USB-C accessories, good quality front facing speakers, high quality microphones, better physical controls... gaming is one thing that I thought would change and then revolutionize smartphones at some point. I still think it could, but this is largely a problem with major smartphone companies not knowing how to handle this. I mean, it could be argued that the Nintendo Switch is just basically a tablet with gamepads and Nintendo OS/software after all. Back to the point though, think about how hated the phablet concept was when it first came out. They were overly expensive, everyone talked how ridiculous it was to use one for calls, how they were not "pocketable", how ridiculous they looked, etc. Which honestly, all mostly remain true. Remember back when Samsung Galaxy Note came out and bloggers, tech press and whatnot got puzzled on how successful the product line was. So, what about it? What I theorize here is that screen size is a factor that is more important than most people realize. Not for you, for me, or for the average gadget enthusiast... for mainstream. For your mom, for kids, for your average joe. And of course, not for everyone, but for a significant part of the market. Perhaps even the majority of the mainstream market. If prices on folding phones comes down, I think that there are good chances of lots of people foregoing the inherent disadvantages of folding phones - fragility, weight, crease, how clumsy they are to handle, etc - all for having a bigger screen on hands. You know how Nathan said about a bracelet phone that combined two things in one? Smartwatch and phone? I think that was a Samsung future tech showcase, concept phone of sorts btw. Folding phones are kinda similar to that, but for people who are always carrying a phone plus a tablet. More importantly though, it's just a question of usability, which will make it or break it for folding phones. Both the OS and apps absolutely needs to make the most use out of folding phones in order for the whole thing to really sell, or else the idea just won't work. Since both Apple and Google already failed several times on this aspect of the thing, with desktop mode, with gaming, and a few other things, that's the real obstacle folding phones have to overcome. The way I think about it is this - how many people you already see all around you using their phones in a way that it'd be much better for their own experiences to have the option of a larger screen on hand? Like, people watching videos and even movies on smartphone screens, doing videoconference calls, spending tons of time gaming on them, reading comics, even books, plus a whole ton of other stuff you'd say - heck, get a tablet, laptop or something for that! I mean, I agree with the sentiment, but at the same time, there are all these things people are already using a smartphone for in which a bigger screen would be obviously better. And since they are not willing to get another device, or even skip to use another device, you just give the bigger screen option. Like, it's ridiculous, but I've seen tons of scenarios were people had a laptop, had a tablet, had a frigging desktop connected to a 32+inch screen, but they were still using the smartphone... because they just didn't want to jump to another device. And to be fair, perhaps the folding phone format itself might not be it. Again, it depends on OS and app implementation, and perhaps there are better designs coming around the corner that will supplant folding phones before it has a chance of really going mass production. Rollable phones, scroll like phones, who knows? But I think the core idea of the folding phone is already here to stay. Having a smartphone that somehow can change into a form that gives you extra screen real estate. Henry might hate it, and I kinda understand where he's coming from since I also went after small screen smartphones for quite a while before phablets started becoming popular... I even have a tiny backup phone to use depending on scenario here. But for things like these, you gotta think about mainstream uses, not our personal needs.
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  37. Interesting stuff! Someone finally made a bridge between those... xD
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  38. What do you mean you don't know how to use it? Just press the button and out comes coffee! :P
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  39. Great summary of all the different 3D printing methods! Clear and conscise! Thanks Chris!
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  40. That's insane.... I guess nothing like the threat of sanctions on proprietary tech to jumpstart open source architecture/instruction set that had been kinda stagnant for a decade... xD Nevermind wondering whether this will work or not, seems the question now is how Risc V architecture will affect apps and the general upgrade path. We're already at minimum viable computer already, kinda.... I have no illusions Risc V will get to some high end point, but it really doesn't need to. If it can work for small servers and average everyday computing, I imagine it'll have more than reached it's goals and purposes. Thanks for sharing Cris!
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  41. Amazing how far they came with it, and thanks Chris for the tutorial and sharing... I used Kdenlive several years ago, very much liked their simple and intuitive approach that got the standard workflow for most video editing software. It was great to see something that works somewhat close to Premiere and Final Cut which were the editing suites I was used to, but on open source software. Seems that they only improved on the whole thing and worked out the kinks and bugs. Not currently using editing software much these days, but I'll certainly keep Kdenlive installed for any odd job that comes out. At least for me personally it was a bit more intuitive to transition from Premiere to Kdenlive instead of daVinci Resolve, even though now I know the basics of both.
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  42. This, yes, too much this.
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  43. Hey Chris, congrats on the JapanTimes interview for you and Sharla... since you didn't advertise it, I'm putting it out here for your channel followers. xD https://www.japantimes.co.jp/podcast/episode-28-chris-broad-sharla-living-youtube-life-japan/
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  44. Done and done! Thanks for all the videos Chris, and I hope for a great future on this channel! Success!
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  45. So... I'm brazilian, my native language is portuguese, but when I'm on foreign countries I'll usually ask people if they understand english... because it's just that much more likely that they'll have studied english at some point instead of portuguese or even spanish. xD I dunno how it goes for most other countries, but at least in Brazil the vast majority of people who went through high school will at least have been taught some english clases. Far from enough to be fluent, but perhaps enough to understand the basics. First time I went to Japan 12 years ago I simply didn't know enough japanese to speak anything. So "english, ok?" everywhere. My relatives had to do all the talking because some of them knew at least a bit of japanese. Lots of people understood english to some degree... speaking it well was a bit more difficult. xD This time (I just returned from Japan last weekend) I could at least go "eigo daijobu desu ka?" xD Not much of an improvement, but at least I tried speaking and understanding a bit more. Oh well. It's even worse because I am japanese descendant so there's an even bigger expectation that I should know the language (you look japanese but you don't speak japanese, what the heck?), but I'm actually 3rd generation brazilian. So I never learned it as a kid, my parents had very little japanese (pre-WWII japanese to make things worse) at home when they were kids, so almost nothing. I do have the intention of one day staying in Japan for longer though, so I have to find a way to learn it better somehow. I'm on a very basic level right now... lose words I can catch at times, but building sentences becomes a problem. And I can't read anything - katakana, hiragana, kanji... I've tried multiple times since I was a kid learning it, but it just never worked. I need something to force me to practice. That's basically the way I practiced (and still practice) english - music, games, books, and eventually the Internets. And I do have japanese magazines, some manga, among other stuff to force it, but you know... as you get older, things gets more complicated. :P
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  46. On the ergonomics and keyboard thing.. I don't have problems personally, but here's advice I heard through the years. If you have a related inflamation or general discomfort with using mouse and keyboard, the first thing you should do is not hunt for new stuff to solve the problem, but rather look at your own habits around what you already use. You should take breaks, you should see if you are putting too much tension in muscles and nerves while you are using those, and you should have a stretching routine once or twice a day. There's a standard chart for sitting position at the office in front of a computer to be observed, you can probably find it by looking for ergonomics with an image search. But a basic description goes like this: the center of the monitor should be at eye level, you should be sitting somewhere where you can touch the ground flat feet without effort, in a relaxed position. Your back should be straight, not huntched, relaxed but not too much. You should be typing and using the mouse with your arms in a 90 degree flex, not tensioned. They will be more or less at elbow high. The recommendations are not absolutely strict, but to be followed as best you can, or rather you have to create an environment that enables you to do all of those naturally without thinking much about it. This is specially important if you have herniated disc, which I also have. Herniated discs require a certain set of stretches and exercise that you should always keep up with. Once that is done, then you'll probably identify problems in the stuff you are using... For the most part, changing keyboards and mouse do not change a whole lot unless you have muscle and nerve inflamation problems... repetitive strain injury. I started feeling a bit of that in the past, but it was on the wrist and the cup of the left hand palm. But fixing those were more of a matter of fixing habits rather than buying new stuff. I just had really bad posture in front of the PC, I didn't stretch hands much, and I kept in front of the screen for hours and hours without pause. Since I did play a whole lot of FPS games in the past, I did invest in a better mouse though... but it was only because I played those too much, to the point a regular mouse got uncomfortable. For me, bigger was just better because I could rest my entire hand on top of the mouse - I got myself a Microsoft Sidewinder older model wired mouse which is still with me, but which I haven't been using much because I haven't been playing FPS games a whole lot anymore. But truly, I'm currently using mostly a wireless keyboard and mouse cheap combo that has nothing ergonomic about it which came with my now 6yr old Dell XPS desktop. The mouse is way smaller than my Microsoft Sidewinder, (not as thin as the Apple mouse though) and the keyboard is just standard size a bit thicker than the Apple keyboard, but still pretty thin, with chiclete style keys. It's just that I don't game much with it, and I don't type anything much other than extremely long comments on YouTube videos of channels I just started watching *wink wink*. :P This is annedoctal of course, but from personal experience, I have to say not to worry too much about keyboard and mouse. I guess Apple is kinda notoriously non ergonomical, perhaps at least a better mouse would be nice. But way more important is all the rest of the setup that most people ignore - chair, table, taking breaks often, stretching, constantly monitoring posture, and stuff like that. I often hear about people who have went through 20 different keyboards and mouse combinations, feeling they just can't get it right, when in fact their pain had nothing to do with those.
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  47. Ooof, yeah.. the Thanko stuff. Interesting ideas, sometimes looks good on paper and to show off, but often with product killing bad designs, bad materials or simply impractical. Lots of stuff that seems to never have been tested on a day to day usage basis, as they'll break fast, or not work as intended, or have several very annoying problems. Well, every country has one of those, when it's not an entire segment of the market. xD So... as a single guy myself, I am interested in a few of the ideas there, but I'm not really interested in buying single purpose stuff for it as I don't have the space. I'm always looking out for multi purpose everyday usage stuff though. xD Rice I mostly cook a ton and freeze most of it. A cooking and warming bento box is great for some situations, but at least for me it seems like the Thanko version is lacking some features and implementations. Better design to handle things and not burn yourself, a battery, and both materials and cutlery that will work better with it. Could do without a battery for people warming things in a hotel room or work environment without a kitchen, but it needs refinement to handle hot plates and whatnot. The electric oven... well, those are pretty cheap from any brand, and I'd personally go for one that fits just a bit more stuff in it. I was actually considering to get one, but then I bought an air fryer, and now I'm thinking of some way to adapt a stand or something into it to do the job. It should've come with a stand or something, plus the egg container, but unfortunately it's just a strainer-like thing. I'll find some way to do it. For nabe, I've been thinking of getting one of those induction cooktops with a single "burner" for camping... I already have a full size induction cooktop plus pots and pans, so I don't see the point of getting an entire new thing for it. Perhaps find a way of insulating the pots to avoid burns. It just seems to give you more flexibility on size. That way it can be used either for lots of people or just myself. I already have a set of pots and pans that use a detachable handle on it, I only wish it also had vertical one like that, would be very practical. They are very convenient for direct storage... xD Though for instant noodles, I don't even bother anymore... it's hot water from the electric kettle directly into a regular bowl with the noodles and ingredients all into it. xD Grilling stuff... I have an unwieldly round and big electric grill here. Next time, I'll see if I find a smaller rectangular one, perhaps a bit bigger than the one Greg is showing there. Back when I bought it they were all big and round in the local shops, horrible for storage. It's bad because I have to store it out of reach, and so I end up not using much because of that. Kinda like my mixer set... occupies so much space that it ended up stored over the fridge in cupboards that I need a stool to get to, so I almost never bother. Reachability is king when it comes to daily usage, so these days I kinda adopted the idea that if it's something I'm likely to store away, I gotta rethink the whole thing before considering a purchase. I didn't have an oven, thought of buying an electric oven, thought about those smaller toaster ovens, then finally got to the conclusion that the best thing I could go for the stuff I wanted an over for was an air fryer... and it's been working well for me personally. I've also been thinking of getting rid of my rice cooker and keep only the electric pressure cooker, and I usually don't use both at the same time. They are basically the exact same thing, it's just that the pressure cooker is a rice cooker with an airtight lid and a timer on it. Gotta figure out the proper timing though, I have to say the rice cooker single button automatic turn off thing is pretty practical. xD
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  48. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
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  49. Could you do it slower.... and with more intensity? xD
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  50. Nice video! I'll just put some corrections and information here... not to be contrarian, a troll or anything, but I think it adds to what was said. Oh, let me present myself first... I'm japanese descendant but actually brazilian, writting english on a foreign in Japan video? xD I've been to Japan twice, don't know the language a whole lot, wish I knew more. :P So... big cities like Tokyo, Kyoto and others might give an impression that lots of foreigners live in Japan, because relatively speaking in these big cities there are a reasonable ammount of them. I think tourists might give that impression, because tourism to Japan is big and exploding in recent years. I really mean exploding, if I'm not mistaken, Japan is the country where tourism has been expanding the most worldwide in recent years. But actually, foreigners living in Japan is still not a big number. Ok, relative to what? To give a better idea. Well, in comparison to almost all developed nations worldwide, Japan still has a very small immigrant population both in absolute numbers and percentage relative to the japanese population. This comes both from the language and culture barrier, the geographical barrier, and then immigration policies barrier. Put this in numbers to give a better idea. According to the most recent surveys, which is statistics from some 5 years ago, the immigrant population in Japan composes some 1.75% of the population. Tokyo has a higher number, but it's not by a whole lot, at 2.9%. The population of Japan is a little over 98% ethnic japanese. So it's something like 2.something million in Japan as a whole, less than half a million in Tokyo alone, given that Tokyo is the densest urban center in the world (Tokyo has almost 14 million people). These are very approximate numbers because they were taken from years old statistics, but still (you can find it all on Wikipedia). How does it compare to other developed countries? Most are close to or on the double digits. So, several countries in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, etc... they all have 10 to 20% of the population as immigrants/foreigners. Developing and poor countries are kind of a mix because you usually have negative numbers... more people going to other countries than getting in, becomes kinda complicated to do the math. About why and how japanese people get surprised... it might not only be about a foreigner speaking japanese. If you guys watch other channels with foreigners living in Japan you will probably already know this. But here are some other things that may... surprise, cause a different reaction, for japanese people - speaking loudly, the entire vlogging thing, weird intonation/pronunciation/accents, non-verbal language. And really, if you think carefully about it, that would probably be the case in your own country too. There usually is a collection of local habits, cultural behaviour and whatnot that, when not detected, would cause a reaction too. xD Obviously, for a country that has such a homogenous ethnicity, looks can surprise too. But I think other factors play a bigger part than people might think. Anyways, fully agreed with the rest. People who intend to visit Japan someday, I highly recommend taking time both to visit the big cities, the big tourist attractions, but also see if you can find sometime to visit smaller towns, more rural Japan. I'm gonna cheat and say I love both. In fact, I kinda dream of living there someday, and my neighborhood of choice (ideally of course) would be somewhere between 1 to 2 hours away from Tokyo... surprisingly, that's far enough to be away from all the noise, rush and fast living of Tokyo, because the city is very packed. On my first trip there I stayed half way to Saitama, and the second trip I stayed in Chiba, close to Narita station. Personally, I have to say that while I enjoyed Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and big cities a lot, it's were we stayed most of the time, the places I really felt a connection with the culture were outside the urban centers... empty streets, well maintained (but not like, super well renovated and whatnot) old buildings, places not as well prepared to receive tourists. That side of Japan is slowly going away unfortunately... partially because of the increase in tourism, opening to more immigrants, part because of aging population, and how parts of older traditional culture are being lost with the aging population. Japan still does a remarkable job to keep traditional culture alive intermixed with modern culture, but it's hard to keep it going given the situation. Anways, wrote too much already... thanks for sharing!
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