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The Week Ahead

Happy Independence Day to my friends in the USA!

Although it’s a day off for most the show must go on for me. So today I’ll be shooting a new version of the Wrapup that accomplishes the goal of reaching out to subscribers and sticks to being channel-oriented vs. a topic. Let me know what you think about that tonight! It’ll be posted around 6:45 p.m. eastern USA time.

I still plan to do my in-depth topic analysis videos but will do so as standalone videos. and only when there’s something to talk about.

Also be sure to check out my latest video on Amazon Luna that I posted Sunday morning. It was one of the more popular ones I did this week.

Stay tuned for tonight’s video to get a preview of what’s coming up this week!

Wrapup Feedback & Shorts Experiment

I want to thank everyone for their comments on the wrap-up ! I haven’t figured out exactly what I’m going to do with it just yet but we’ll get there soon. I do have a great topic for next week that I think will do well and after that we’ll figure out what to do next.

One idea I heard from those who liked the wrapup was to maybe have it live on its own channel. If I do that I think I’ll have it live on my Snippets channel where I used to post clips from the longer wrapups I used to do. Those clips still get decent traffic depending on the topic.

Another thing I’m experimenting with from a wrapup perspective is testing out using YouTube shorts to preview the week. I posted one as an experiment yesterday – they are super easy to put together.

Shorts are supposed to help drive subscribers but this one cost me 2 of them. So the juries out on this one :).

Tonight’s video will be my monthly sponsored Plex video! We’ll be taking a look at the official release version of Plex’s HTPC client. This supports HDR in a limited fashion along with lossless audio passthrough.

The Week Ahead

June was a blur! Here in the United States kids get the summer off from school before they start in the next grade level. I used to LOVE summer vacation as it gave me time to hang out with my friends, ride my bike, and of course play around with all of the cool 80’s and 90’s tech I grew up with. It was always a bit sad for us neighborhood kids when those summers came to an end.

My two girls, however, miss school and can’t wait to get back in August. I love that they love school more than I did!

This week will begin with a Weekly Wrapup as usual. But we’re going to talk about the Wrapup moving forward as I’ve done some analysis on its performance.

That will be followed by my monthly Plex sponsored video where we’ll explore the new HTPC client. After that I’ll have my review of the Beelink Mini S PC that I livestreamed the other day here. I also got in a new affordable HP Gaming Laptop and a smart smoke alarm with air quality sensors. We’ll probably have a few livestreams in the mix too.

Stay tuned and set your notifications!

Will Valve Deliver my Steam Deck in June? YES!

Last year I put in my $5 deposit for a Steam Deck. Valve was so overwhelmed that day that I couldn’t get my order to accept until late in the afternoon. That put me at the end of the order queue and I’ve been waiting ever since.

Valve has promised me Q2 availability which ends in 3 days. Will they make it? The answer is yes!

A few hours after I tweeted about this I got my confirmation!

Great Photo of the ISS HAM Station

There’s an amateur radio on the International Space Station. Usually it’s configured in repeater mode which is how I was able to contact a fellow HAM in upstate New York. I communicated through this ISS radio in repeater mode which received my signal and re-broadcast it out.

Sometimes the astronauts talk to people on the ground too. This weekend was the National Association for Amateur Radio‘s annual Field Day event where amateurs around the world make contacts out in the field using battery or emergency backup power. Astronaut Kjell Lindgren was participating in the event making contacts on the ground. You can see a list of stations he received on his notepad in the photo.

Crazy Atari 800 Add-On Device

I am a sucker for cool modern hardware for old retro hardware. YouTube channel The Retro Shack has this awesome and comprehensive review of an “everything” add-on device for the Atari 800 computers called the Fujinet.

What do I mean by everything? It’s pretty much the kitchen sink here with emulation for 8 floppy drives, a modem (connects via Telnet), a printer (writes out PDFs), realtime clock, a cassette deck for cassette based software, and a network adapter that connects via Wifi. Even crazier is that it allows for mounting disk images remotely over the Internet! It’s not all that expensive either at around $80 or so.

The Atari 800 has an innovative serial bus that in some ways works like USB where a whole chain of devices can be attached to a single cable with each uniquely addressable by the system. The creator of this hardware went on to work on the USB standard.

I have an Atari 800 in the basement here. My father-in-law purchased one back in the 80’s for use as a family PC but it hasn’t been booted up in decades. If you’re interested I might do a video or a stream where we power it up to see if there’s any life left in it!

The 800 is of course also faithfully recreated on the MiSTer.

AI Upscaled Wing Commander 3

Per WCNews.com a group called CD1188 Entertainment is working on upscaling the now super low resolution video from 1994’s Wing Commander 3. You can see it on their YouTube channel, it’s looking pretty good given the source footage they are working with!

Wing Commander is one of my favorite games of all time. Wing Commander 3 really pushed the envelope back in its day. It required a pretty fast 486 or Pentium, double speed or better CD-ROM, and a whopping 8 megabytes of RAM at a minimum.

The Wing Commander series was know for being a great space shooter but it also had equally good story elements. In the first two games they consisted of animated cut scenes with a few minutes of voice acting. For the third game Chris Roberts went all out with professional actors (including Mark Hamill, Malcom McDowell and John Rhys-Davies to name a few).

I talked about my love for Wing Commander in this video. You can see how the series progressed as technology improved over the course of its five mainline games and spin-offs.

RTL-SDR on the Secret of Skinwalker Ranch

The RTL-SDR makes an appearance on the History channel’s Secret of Skinwalker Ranch! They are really fun devices for exploring the radio spectrum through software defined radio (SDR for short). This link will take you to my series on the subject which was my “gateway drug” to amateur radio!

The History Channel show is about a ranch in Utah that is connected to the US government’s studies of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). Apparently the government spent quite a bit of money trying to make sense of it all. Visitors and residents of the ranch have experienced quite a bit there: UFOs, poltergeist activity, cattle mutilations, strange creatures, you name it.

A recent book entitled Skinwalkers at the Pentagon details some of the work of those government investigators.

Non-Spoiler Review of Kenobi Series

This 6ish hour series probably could have been done better as a two and a half hour feature film but it was great Star Wars nonetheless. Well worth a watch.

It was great to see Vader on screen again with 91 year old James Earl Jones voicing him. I really liked seeing this transitional Vader that still had movements and elements of the prequel films’ Anakin Skywalker. And of course Ewan McGregor was awesome – he really jumped right back into a role he hasn’t played in almost twenty years.

The series enhanced well established characters and their relationships (especially Vader/Anakin) without ret-conning anything. I’d love a season 2 with Ewan McGregor doing Jedi things without messing up the Skywalker timeline.

NATO Official Says Telegram is Insecure

According to the Washington Examiner, a NATO official has stated the obvious when it comes to Telegram’s security:

“Telegram is not really as it used to be,” Janis Sarts, the director of NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence in Riga, Latvia, told the Washington Examiner. “I do have reasons to believe that there is not full integrity. … Certainly, I would not see it as a secure platform.”

I covered this topic a few months ago when I did a deep dive into the popular messaging and social media platform. I suspect that it’s insecure by design – governments won’t need to ask for user data when they can very easily pluck it off the wire.

Contacted a Packet Radio BBS!

My amateur radio adventure continues. This evening I finally managed to get my gear connected to a packet radio BBS! These are simple bulletin board systems that have been around since the 80’s.

What’s cool about packet BBSes is that they do not require any type of communications infrastructure other than the radios on both ends.

The Week Ahead for June 20, 2022

Another week is upon us! Today will be the first real video I shoot at 4k so I’m eager to see how it all comes together and where things might fall apart. I got some great feedback from all of you on the visual quality and will be making some adjustments to cut down on the motion blur some of you noticed.

The big issue I see right now are file sizes. My raw 4k files are significantly larger so I may need to upgrade the SSD I use in the production machine for recording. The main clip from Saturday’s video is over 11.48 GB in size yet is only 2 minutes and 45 seconds in length!

I use Vmix’s lossless codec which offers the highest quality for the lowest amount of system resources. It’s pretty crazy how little CPU it uses during the production. At 1080p30 (what I used to record at ) it consumed about 55GB an hour. At 4k30 (my new format) it uses a whopping 175GB an hour!

On tonight’s Weekly Wrapup I’m going to talk about the recent government safety report on self driving cars. The media jumped to some conclusions without actually reading it so we’re going to look at what the report ACTUALLY says.

Later this week I’ll have a review of the new Synology RT6600ax router (affiliate link). This one is (hopefully) my last 1080p video. Following that we’ll have a review of a couple of new mini PCs (one of them fanless) and if I have time I’d like to do a new MoCA explainer based on some feedback I’ve been getting from folks as to how it works.

A little later in the week I’ll be attending a Pepcom event to get a preview from a few major brands on their new releases. If there’s enough to talk about from the show I’ll do a dispatch video too.

Stay Tuned!

Interesting Nugget from the NHTSA Report on Automated Driving

The National Highway Transportation Safety Agency (NHTSA) put out a much talked about study on crashes involving cars equipped with driver assist and self driving automation technologies. One of the reports shows that an Apple vehicle was involved with an accident over the time period the report looked at:

Apple has long been rumored to be developing a vehicle of its own. Surprising that nobody seems to be talking about this item in the NHTSA report.

Why Aren’t NFTs Being Used for Software Licenses?

I am surprised that the most obvious, legitimate and profitable use for NFTs is not currently being explored : transferrable and resellable media licenses with royalties.

One of the more interesting features of NFTs is the ability for the original artist to receive a share of future re-sells of the token.

This would be a real winner for indie game developers in particular who I think would like to offer gamers the flexibility of re-selling their licenses when they’re done with a game – something that none of the major platforms allow for now.

I covered this topic last year.

The Media’s Tesla Hit Job

I am annoyed by all of the negative headlines about Tesla’s autopilot crash numbers. This comes after a government report was issued about accidents involving vehicles that were driving autonomously before a crash. 

Tesla has the most number of autonomous vehicles on the road by far so of course they will have a higher number of reported incidents vs. other manufacturers. The data does not indicate who was at fault in those incidents, the attention level of the driver, etc.

Meanwhile Tesla’s data shows that vehicles running with their autonomous features are far less likely to crash vs. a human controlled vehicle. 

I’ll talk more about this on Monday’s wrapup. 

SpaceX Gets Approvals for Texas Space Port

SpaceX got the go-ahead from the FAA to operate its Texas “Starbase” facility for orbital flights following an environmental impact study. But they put a few conditions in place.

In addition to environmental safeguards the FAA is requiring SpaceX to write a “historical narrative” report on the Mexican War and Civil War events that took place on or around the property.

Like the Kennedy Space Center, which in addition to being a space port is also a national wildlife refuge, SpaceX will be required to coordinate with the US Fish and Wildlife Service on operating a similar refuge at Starbase. This includes opportunities for wildlife photography and monitoring critters via Starlink.

Read more at CNBC. Orbital flights are not that far away!