A Look at EaseUS EverySync, Listener Feedback and Mike has a Frankenbuild – HGG430

Jim has been using EaseUS EverySync for the last month and does a hands on review to start the show. We read some user feedback from Neal who talks about his camera set up and Bruce from the Discord group who left us some pictures of the lights on his deck. We wrap the show with Mike talking about his very messy Frankenbuild at home. I think you will enjoy the show.

Full show notes, transcriptions, audio and video at http://theAverageGuy.tv/hgg430

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Jim Collison  [0:00] 
This is the Average Guy Network and you have found Home Gadget Geeks, show number 430 recorded on January 16, 2020.

Jim Collison  [0:22] 
Here on Home Gadget Geeks we cover all the favorite tech gadgets that find their way into your home news reviews, product updates and conversation all for the average tech guy. I’m your host Jim Collison broadcasting live from a like single digit temperatures today like this was one of those days where if you don’t have the right gear, you’re screwed. Like you are cold and it was you’re outside for a few minutes and you’re pretty cold right now you’ve been inside because you haven’t been feeling well. But did you get Jeff to go out in the in the cold at all?

Mike Wieger  [0:51] 
Well just you know, taking the kids to and bringing them back from school. I park right in front of the door to their school and just getting Emmit out. then letting him wait and going your Harrison out my hands You know, you get that instant can burn

Jim Collison  [1:05] 
cold fast, like it’s cold fast enough. Nothing to mess around with. We have some snow just non stop. Oh, totally. Yeah, we have some we have some snow coming in tonight and it’s kind of created that weird confluence of activities in the city where they knew about it far enough and advanced people began to prepare for it. They’ve been spraying the roads already. And then like, we’re going to get two people to come to work tomorrow. I mean, I the whole city of Oman, if you can stay home, they’re just like, I stay home. It’s not it’s a Friday so it’s gonna be a three day weekend for most people anyways, the the working from home technology, you know, the idea of being able to be remote is for most people most so good. That even as an organization, Gallup, we sent out an email today and they, they encouraged it. They were like, Look, you’re more productive than spending two hours. Trying to drive to work is a tomorrow it’s the perfect storm or it’s supposed to be bad in the morning and then again, The afternoon. And so they’re like, Hey, don’t even come in. But the technology to do that is we can handle it now, right? Most we can have almost all the office there’s four or 500 of us there out. And everybody can do it. So it works a lot better. Can you you could, I’m assuming you can do that as well.

Mike Wieger  [2:16] 
Oh, hundred percent I haven’t. I have never relied on work from home as much they have this week. So I’m just at the tail end of having influence. So this whole week, I tried to go in on Tuesday, I really shouldn’t have they my boss sent me right back home. It’s like you’re gonna get us all sick. I worked and but there we have two deals closing this week, you know, like it, there was stuff that needed to get done. And I mean, it’s, I’m able to do everything here. And especially right now the way my office is set up. We are we’re building a new corporate headquarters because of our expansion. So we’re all we have like three like satellite offices right now until we can all consolidate into the new building. So you know it’s not like I’m really seeing a lot of people anyway, we’re usually doing a WebEx that’s when the buildings right because we’re all in different buildings. We’re usually on WebEx anyway. My boss is out of San Diego. So he’s used to it. I mean, I really could work at home

Jim Collison  [3:06] 
24 seven most of the time and

Mike Wieger  [3:08] 
yeah, I am a firm believer though that, you know being in an office does a lot for company culture that that face to face interaction is really good. I’ve heard a lot of people say why, you know, I’d rather just work from home 24 seven and I’m like, I would say about half right? I could I could do half time but there’s something about that face to face. That is that is still good, but your days like tomorrow. I was looking so this is how Omaha works though. We’re projected like two to four inches. We’ll get one maybe and they’ve already started canceling all the schools closed the cancellations already stolen before you even have a single file

Jim Collison  [3:44] 
Hasn’t even started snowing yet. Don’t you know Mike, Andrew in the chat room saying your little quiet I think the turn that processing and back on and let’s see let’s let’s

Mike Wieger  [3:53] 
give it a six I’m probably telling Yeah.

Jim Collison  [3:55] 
Yeah, we’ll see if that what that does. That helps

Mike Wieger  [3:59] 
you

Jim Collison  [4:00] 
It probably will. Yeah. Cuz it’ll adapt for us, which is probably a lesson if you’re going to use it. I should probably or vice versa. You know, we’re we’re not, we’re not same level. We’re on the same. We’re on the same audio level. Yeah. Well,

Mike Wieger  [4:12] 
yeah, let me know guys in the chat if I had helped.

Jim Collison  [4:15] 
Yeah, it’s gonna probably take a few minutes for it to settle down. But of course, I’ll say we produce the show and posted out at the average guy.tv World Class show notes out there. If you want to check those out. The average guy.tv synthesis for 30 it’s going to be forward slash HGG413. Don’t forget you can download and listen to us on the mobile app Home Gadget Geeks. com Android iPhone is out there as well. I want to thank our Patreon subscribers that’s not free to own that and so we appreciate the Patreon subscribers who helped me pay for that each and every month. Join the discord discord group, the applicate TV and by the way, some of the now that I’ve kind of gotten into the home automation space again, some of the chat on the discord group has been awesome.

Mike Wieger  [4:56] 
I totally agree. Yeah, yep. Did we do the forum Intro to the show

Jim Collison  [5:01] 
right now

Mike Wieger  [5:02] 
now I’m doing we do the whole you know the average guy do we like the actual yeah wow do this medicine is some strong Stuff They Don’t joke around with this influence on him I’ve been in my head the whole this whole week so that’s super funny this will be an interesting show it’s almost like can I have a single drink all day? Its water ice is where

Jim Collison  [5:23] 
the average guy TV slash discord the average guy.tv slash Facebook it gets you there as well. We want to highlight and Mike you you watch them live stream last night but Ryan Ryan Bob will be on here in a couple of weeks think computers.org slash ces 2020 if you haven’t checked out their coverage over there and you’re kind of a hardware nerd you kind of you’re kind of missing out to folks that you know you know Ryan really well he’s been on the show before we have Bob come with him on this next go around think computers.org slash ces 2020 and catch up on their kind of their CES coverage. We’re going to kind of get the best of it when they’re on here in a couple weeks. And we appreciate them sharing that with us. And Mike, you got a chance to listen to their livestream last night.

Mike Wieger  [6:05] 
Yeah, last night so last night was the live recording of their show. It would all say what I like about what they do is they really I mean, they talked about a few of like the kind of really cool booths right? Like they talked about like the robot ping pong for just a second. But what they focused on with the actual consumer average guy things are available to us, right? What’s the new line of of graphics cards, they talked about all of that sort of things that that really makes a difference for for me so it was actually not the usually CES covers to be totally honest. I usually avoid a lot of it because you know, it’s it’s all theoretical, it’s in the future. It’s not really happening. It’s these big ideas and which is really cool. But their show is really tailored to stuff that is really everything that if you listen to our show, you’re going to love what they talked about over there. And then of course they always what I My favorite part is then they jump on Twitch afterwards. And Ryan games I think in Bob was phone with him last night to the game. I did not know his co Host Bob used to be a competitive gamer. He used to compete with CES Counter Strike. And I think there was one their game he used to play as well. So cool background, and they’re just two really cool guys. So if you have not checked out their show, it’ll be fun having them on to in a few weeks. They can kind of give us the rundown on CES.

Jim Collison  [7:18] 
Yeah, what they’re what they do, and the podcast fits very well, with what we are doing. I think I think they get more detail. And they

Mike Wieger  [7:25] 
do. That’s what I like about them. I mean, the detail they go into on just a single case is awesome. Like, if you guys are looking for those kind of reviews on cases. I mean, the level of the photos they take the level of detail they go into they really think about to if I’m going to build in this case, I’m misusing cases as an example. They review everything. They do a good job there.

Jim Collison  [7:47] 
Yeah. So if you haven’t checked that out yet think What did I say? Think computers want to make sure I get that right think computers.org and you can check out their site as well as their CEO CES coverage as well. I mean, obviously I’m going to have some trouble speaking tonight as well. Paul brethren, I can’t be the beer. I just started drinking it. Paul Brethren, the big thanks to Paul Byrne who came on from his Tesla Mike I don’t know if he did you get a chance to I have not had a chance yet. You got to go see the video. Paul did the whole podcast from his Tesla. Was he

Mike Wieger  [8:16] 
using the record like well those cameras stuff?

Jim Collison  [8:18] 
Yeah, he didn’t know he had a laptop in there and yeah, no, well, he had a I don’t know what he was coming off of. I think it was a laptop. And he had a he had a webcam in there plus brought the microphone in and was did it from the Tesla It was pretty cool.

Mike Wieger  [8:33] 
Does stream yard have an app you could use from an iPhone or iPad or something like that?

Jim Collison  [8:38] 
No, not yet. Right? Wonderful. We’re working on it working

Mike Wieger  [8:42] 
on it working on what a cool addition that would be right especially for those those type of interviews or for your you know, not very techie more because a lot of people now are mobile. They don’t have a

Jim Collison  [8:53] 
know a big rig though, and I wonder if I had him Come on. Come in on his phone browser with the microphone. phone from an iPhone or Android whatever. Those are pretty good they are and I’m know the sound is sounded good and it was fun to have them on. So Paul, thanks for your forgiveness, the time kind of caught us up not only does he have one Tesla, but bought a second. And, and so a lot of Tesla talk if you’re doing that kind of, you know, every time I talked to him and Dwayne, I think you know, because I’m buying a car this summer and it’s like maybe the Tesla’s it’s not I’m not ready for it yet. But I keep thinking maybe it is time. So Paul, thanks for coming on. Appreciate your commitment. If you haven’t listened if you’re new to if you’re new to Home Gadget Geeks here and you haven’t checked out Tinker, try write Tinker try.com talking about detailed like there’s nobody more detailed and thorough than Paul. And so his site What a great companion to what we do here. We’re kind of conversation and making stuff up. Paul is actually doing stuff and recording it and he’s got screenshots I mean, that guy is so meticulous So thorough you should you definitely should be reading what he does over there as well. So he did. He wrote better show notes on his site than I did on mine is my show. I mean, that’s that’s how that’s, that’s what a great job he does, as well. Mike, we’ve had a couple and I want to spend a little bit of time tonight. Ease us, I think is how they pronounced that. remember way back in the day, I put out a note, I think it was on I think I did it both on Facebook and on Discord. And it was like, man, it has been a long time since I’ve had to do this, but I need some sync software. And I who what what are people using to do that? And I got some fairly, some fairly standard responses back. I landed on and there were some there was a bunch of a bunch of suggestions in that in some of the the old time suggestions or the stuff we’ve been using, but I eventually landed and always think that was kind of the sync tool that works for me. They’re on version 19 of that. And that is a tool that has been around just for a very long time. In fact, it looks like it’s been around for a very long time. The the UI on it is still kind of Windows XP ish in a lot of ways. Now, the thing works great. I’m on an actually purchased the pro version, which I think was 20 or 30 bucks, so so not not terrible. And I was running, I run a lot of files in between the morrow data box and the Drobo for local backups. So it’s running off Morrow data, I’m bringing it over the Drobo is a second kind of form. And then of course, four more days going up to the cloud. So I wanted a sync between those two boxes. Anytime I put something on the morrow data box, it was going to sync over to the Drobo right Drobo had some software to do that. It was okay. Always sync is kind of what I landed on there and version 19 point 1.5 right now, works like it expects but the file on there, wait a minute moves over you get it. You get kind of UI on that thing, and it just does it, it just doesn’t job runs as a service and the background does what you would expect it to do. Right. So I was contacted by the by ethos, and they provided me a, they provided me a key for this. They’re like, hey, but what they were really looking for. And I think some of the feedback I got from the community on this was that most folks use it for the partitioning software that comes, thank you. Do you have you ever used any kind of software for partitioning or disk partitions or any of that kind of stuff I use? Usually diskpart

Mike Wieger  [12:39] 
just on the built in tool on Windows to kind of build those applications. Yeah, um, so what’s kind of the use case beyond what’s built into Windows? What do you need beyond that? Is there some sort of various hilty

Jim Collison  [12:53] 
I have never like I have never outside of Windows partition to drive ever but when I put that out there and when I said, Hey, has anybody ever used this before? They’re like, Oh yeah, I’ve used it for this partitioning and backup of that or whatever, right? And I’m kind of a blown away kind of guy start over, I just don’t do a lot of partitioning that way. But I do a lot of sinking. Right. And I saw that a sync product that was available in its it’s actually pretty good. Now they provided a key for me, it’s, it’s a $30 product, it’s a one time purchase lifetime, you know, $30 lifetime updates, basically. And it’s drop dead simple. It’s kind of one of the things that’s that I really liked about it in the end. It is it really lacks in UI, so there is none. You basically this is what you’re seeing is all there is to it. When we think about what it’s there. So I’ve got some, you know, some things set up right now. I have the camera running. So you see this folder here. If we come up here to package cam, there’s the files that are sinking in between it right now. The backups, I have our backups, we use a Cronus for Up here so the PC studio PC my PC rig and backed up, then I backup and I needed some other things to run on this thing so I’m just grabbing the backup files and sync them to the Drobo as well right? Right. those are those are sinking it’s got a basically down in the tool tray then you’ve got a this is the only UI you really have in this and you can kind of see what it’s doing right now it’s backing up the studio PC at 75% serious PCs backup is is getting ready or is running as well. And so it’s it’s drop dead simple Mikey you do targets if we if we say hey, I want to create a new sink in here. And you just choose the Select folder you want it to come from you choose where it wants to go, you have options to send it to the cloud, and FTP or do this across computers. You can select which version you want it to go in other words this way that way or sink right, right you want it depending on where you want it to go from to do it. And you click go and what is simple, like interface I know it’s us a journalism Have one but this is simple. Yeah makes total sense to me. Now my one question is if you let’s say I am backing up things from one NAS to another, is it having to pull that down to the computer and then send it back out? Nope. So just like a Cronus are always sync, it actually authenticate to that device. So it’ll say, hey, on the Drobo, not just does it connect to the Drobo. But it collects its username and password that way, it’s kind of it has everything it needs. It needs to do the credentials to get it right. Yeah. So So no, no, it’s going to move them straight across. I mean, of course, there’s going to be some processing that goes on locally because this is running that this is moving those across but it’s not like I’m copying it down to here and then copying a backup to there. It’s just being copied straight across on the network right across the network, right. The not many settings to actually have to worry about is either if I click on the settings, there’s a really simple this is really simple language, the default Do I want a data back? medically update? And do I want to start as a Windows service? I, this is one of those tools Mike again, 30 bucks. lifetime. This is one of those easy like, man, I even emailed the contact. They’re the one that reached out to me and was like, Is there some kind of UI that I’m missing? Like this? Like cuz I want to watch. I’m a guy who wants to watch things, right? Yeah, yeah, this is all you get. See this little spinning? That little spinner that you see right there on on the PC?

Mike Wieger  [16:31] 
What do you have the bottom corner, though?

Jim Collison  [16:33] 
Well, I mean, on this on this window we’re seeing here, this is all you get, oh, I could go down. This isn’t a history. So I go down a street and click on that. And that gives me some process updates of what’s going on.

Mike Wieger  [16:44] 
It’s funny that the that has more than the actual app.

Jim Collison  [16:48] 
Yeah. And so really, really, thanks for that notice witness. So yeah, look really, really simple. Interesting. Like almost too simple, I’ve been having it running for oh maybe a month now in fact they just reach out to me the other day that I kill you, you’re going to do anything with this you know, in exchange for the the license key I told my talk about on the show I kind of like it. I mean, it’s been it’s been a good live monitor to see what it’s doing behind the scenes is it sending any notes or anything I’m checking any of those kinds of things I check with the community and some of you are a little concerned they’re Chinese company and some are you a little concerned that of that in okay so you know, I’m not a recommendation or non recommendation, but a pretty drop dead easy tool love to interact with you if you tried this. Get some questions on it. I don’t I just don’t know how to make it. How to make it any any drop dead easier than that?

Mike Wieger  [17:49] 
Simple. So when you’re when you’re setting up a new, let’s say sink or backup, I’m guessing to the pop up with the schedule, or does it do an automatic detection of the changes

Jim Collison  [18:01] 
Know you so you can it’s it’s really, yeah sync this to that how often and boom, off it goes okay and it does its thing. I said all mine, I didn’t set them on a schedule, I set all mine to just keep them in sync to get that done. There’s a scheduling tool, you can set it you know, daily, weekly, monthly, at this time, if you want to do it that way or upon a change, right? Anytime there’s a new file, it’s been really, really handy. One of the things I do is set the camera. So I’ve site hound running on this computer. And I actually installed two drives that I’m running stable bit drive pool on and I put them together. And then so the copies those each every time site and see something by the way, they’re doing some really cool work, we could probably show talking about that they really are. So every time it creates a video file, it puts it on that drive. And then I’ve got I have the sync tool pointed to that and every time that shows up, it sends it over the Drobo. So it’s kind of just bam, send it over. Bam every time it updates it’s sending over. So that’s a good example of now I could best batch process those if I wanted to and just say hey, every night at midnight, update these files and get it done. So pretty simple. Ease us EA se us. The US is big on that one is in capital letters I think they say ease us is what that is. They’re like I like I mentioned their plans 30 bucks and you’re you’re in business. Again I’m it’s not a recommend non recommend it was just something that actually worked in an a sync tool setting. Something that was really really easy. Always sync has been a great tool for me and has worked equally as well and have way more options and always think I mean that’s a tool that kind of comes out of 25 years probably maybe 30 years of doing sync with them and as a super good tool. It’s just got a lot it has, has a big interface on it and a lot of and you know a lot of other options to do So, pretty cool. I want to thank them for providing that key for for for me to get that done. And if you’re needing an easy sync tool, that’s probably one to consider. All right. We got some user feedback as well. It’s been super cool to have a lot of conversation going on when our guests bailed tonight and said he couldn’t make it. It’s I always I always say to you, I’m always like, Hey, no guests and you’re like yes.

Mike Wieger  [20:30] 
Yeah, these are my favorite. Well, I like I love when we have guests but I really enjoy you and I getting ahead just nerd out and talk about what you’ve been doing lately. It’s good to have a good mix of that. Have a show you and I and real quick I just have put in one quick tip. You mentioned site hound. Yeah, real quick one setting I noticed I don’t know when they added this. But it was a setting that was in the wrong setting for me for what I wanted. If you are running site hound, and if you’re running it on an SSD, so if your boot drive and I can guarantee most of you are there is a setting where it will buffer all of the new video and it gives you two options on the boot drive or in RAM and if you’re do if you have an SSD I would not have that buffer on your boot drive because it’s a lot of rights and read cycles just for no reason and that’s the default a default setting is on the boot drive so I would go into site out and if you’re running it you’re on SSD real quick and just change that to buffer in ram it doesn’t I thought I was also going to see all my ram just taken up by that buffering of the footage but no performance hit no nothing It didn’t take up any more RAM than it actually was a maybe just a little bit more so quick tip there go in and check that setting if you’re running it just so you can avoid the useless read writes on your SSD. Yeah.

Jim Collison  [21:44] 
And Kevin said it was hit he that was concerned about ease us in the China connection. So Kevin thanks for not you know what we should be concerned. Joe says a block going connections to China and peace Martin’s yeah yep. Should be I got an email. Oh, so Joe says and I want one of these, by the way, so Joe can get me in on this. I got the email invitation from sideout to try out the beta of the automatic license plate recognition. That would be super cool. I, they I got an email from him that said, Hey, we’re doing this. And I was like, Oh, I think I signed up for the demo, hoping maybe that they would just say, Oh, do you want to try it out? That would? Yeah,

Mike Wieger  [22:24] 
I’ve been a paid user. I’m involved in the forums. I got nothing at jack.

Mike Wieger  [22:29] 
I know, I shelled

Mike Wieger  [22:30] 
out because I mean, I thought I have like the whatever it is 250 $300 version for the Unlimited, like the pro because I have more than I think it was two cameras. I think so. too. Yeah. So I paid the full and now they have a new and the other thing is they have a new home license. I think. I think I saw that in their updates that they’re going to have a new home license. It’s cheaper for a certain amount of cameras and things can be right for like $60 instead of like 250 or, or free.

Jim Collison  [22:57] 
Yeah, and I think I just paid the 12 Dollar license update for the home one I think that that gets me current up until the middle of this year and then I imagine I’ll do whatever the new whatever the new one is. I’m trying to think through just that he accepted pretty nice considering hasn’t actually purchased yet, so don’t be. Don’t be too jealous, Mike. I’ve actually considered buying another one of those cameras that I have, you know, that we bought live here on the show. It’s now our package cam. And I like I want a second camera for sight out. So I’ve kind of been like that camera works. I know it works. I know it works. Well, I may pick up another one and put that put that somewhere in the you know, in a fallout of having our cars gone through. I’m not gonna lie. I’ve thought about the you know, the license plate recommended, you know, getting something where I can see because we get a lot of traffic on our road. It’s probably a super big invasion of privacy. But that’d be a perfect way of kind of track keeping track of who’s driving.

Mike Wieger  [23:58] 
Yeah, yeah, right. Well and who knows you will have a very high end camera to be able to pick up those license plates. I’ve been even surprised I have a 4k camera that’s in my driveway. And even if I pause that and I mean it is there with their driving any speed and they’re not right at you because a roads hard cuz you’re at an angle when they pull into my driveway it would be have no problem. But I would say today he’s not going to cut it probably for any form of recognition. I don’t know what they recommend, maybe they have a way of doing it. But I would probably say it it would need to be least afford to care which those have come down in price. You can get a POV one and just do a pod doctor to a plug if you still want to plug it in manually for you know 80 bucks, I’d say for a 4k 90 bucks right around there.

Jim Collison  [24:48] 
I’m not saying I could actually do it. I could have to be in an awkward spot and I have to push Wi Fi all the way out to the end of my driveway and I’d have to I mean, I wouldn’t do it from and first of all, I’m not going to do this. Okay, but let me just for a second. Let’s just say I was thinking about it, I’d have to get a camera out on the pole on the road to have it make any sense. You can’t do it from your driveway, right? Yeah, like you said, you could get people driving in but you couldn’t in it. That’s a kind of a creepy thing to do as a neighbor. So, you know, I went over, I went over next door to my neighbor, who were the cameras, we kind of bleed into his neighborhood and talk to him since the since the incident, and was like, Hey, I wanna I just want to let you know, you know, cars went through just me and he’s like him and trying to clean out my garage to get my car in the garage. I’d like to do that on a more regular basis. And I said, and then so I put up some cams, and I’m covering this much of your driveway. I just, I just want you to know, and he said, Oh, no, that’s cool. Like, I know, I appreciate that. Yeah. So it was a conversation knowing and then I said, Hey, I installed some security lights. They’re gonna come on when you come in your drive. I just I hope that’s okay. Yeah, it’s like, oh, that’s fine. No, that’s great. You know, they’re brighter and you know, some other things. So it was good to have that conversation. He’s going to be most affected out of anybody in the neighborhood. Except the maybe the guy across the street, he’s going to be most affected by the lights coming on and going off and the camera there. The other morning, I was out, getting in the car in and as I was walking out to my car, the neighbor girl turned around, she was walking to school and I noticed she was walking in the snow and she turned around and looked at me funny. That’s like, that’s kind of like, you know, it’s like, Hey, good morning, but you know, it was it was weird that she was one she was looking at me funny. Yeah, she was walking in the snow. So that night when I came home, I was checking I was going through just kind of checking the day’s stuff. And what I didn’t realize is right before I got out there the camera captured her slipping on the ice and falling

Jim Collison  [26:46] 
and she thought that you saw Are

Jim Collison  [26:48] 
you know, yeah, and I was coming out I didn’t notice and she the camera caught her falling. So she gets up you know, and kind of you know what you do you look around like Did anybody see me fall down? So she didn’t have to slip on the ice. She started walking in the snow. So she went in slip on the ice right away, right. So it all made sense. After I saw the camera. Yeah, she had the footage of that. And I thought that’s, that’s, that’s really really that’s really really cool that you could do that right now one of the things that I’m not liking is the battery life, especially in the winter, you know, the stick up cam, and the and the front door cam are both outside and they’re both battery. They’re both ring. And they’re both battery and I’m getting so far, maybe two or three weeks on those batteries. Okay, yeah. Now, a lot of traffic in and out. I’m checking them all the time. that’ll probably get better as we as we go along. But I’m gonna, I’m gonna go I’m looking around, I’m gonna buy an extra battery, right, both batteries, they take the same battery. So if I always have one extra charge, I could just swap them out. That’s just I think that’s probably the smart way to do it. They’re probably never going to go bad at the same time. So I can have one That’s always just kind of on the ready to swap around. But that is for me, that’s a little short. Like I’m going to again it’s one cycle so I don’t know if that’s true or not it’s been really cold and Valerie’s

Mike Wieger  [28:12] 
Yeah, you’re checking it a lot like you said as you start to get out of the the new phase you stop checking as much, I’m sure to last a lot more.

Jim Collison  [28:21] 
Well, but it’s going to kind of make me think like, okay, for these areas. Do I need dedicated power? Like is it smart or do I need to put a solar panel put solar power on them? It’s 50 bucks an extra batteries 30 all of a sudden solar kind of makes sense that I think I think that makes total sense, right?

Mike Wieger  [28:39] 
I’m 30 on a battery.

Jim Collison  [28:41] 
Now the the that camera sits south facing garage door like yeah, that should probably be solar. So that’s what said so I guess I’m saying this to say what that’s caused me to do my because now you start kind of thinking and if you if you’re in this boat where you You’re gonna start installing cameras I was kind of glad I just I had to be I bought a few but I kind of just deployed them all and then started checking the usage like okay, how does this work? How is it is this in the right spot do it Am I getting the right coverage? What am I getting? What’s up coming on for what’s it not coming on for? Right all those pieces you’re probably in a spot you’ve been doing this a lot longer than me you’re probably in a spot right now you’re really happy with you’ve got everything kind of positioned the way you want it right it’s you’re in the routine. Do you have any batteries outside that you’re having to change at all for anything there’s Everything I have is hardwired? Yeah.

Mike Wieger  [29:37] 
Luckily with being in a ranch and having access to my attic, I have direct access to my eaves. So I just ran Ethernet. I have one POV switch up in the attic that handles all the power and it’s good to go. So and then one so all the switches in the attic POV one line runs from that switch down to the basement to my main server rack and plugs it in and They worked pretty well yeah it took me a while and you know because site one thing I like about it and I think it has the same thing with ring is setting the zones because it took me a long time to figure out you know i the sidewalk and where people walk and there’s actually a part of my yard then the same the stall the neighbor kids when they come home from school they walk across a certain section yard and I every day I’m like I don’t even need to see really I really need to know if they get super close to the house so I started playing with the zones for for notification and yeah, I became pretty happy with with her but it does take a while and each camera I noticed was a little different on sensitivity rec same a mixture of cameras. So it takes a while to get your

Jim Collison  [30:40] 
kind of dialing in. Yeah, yeah. And for me deciding like what do I want on power? What do I want? Not on power? What am I What am I okay with I bought that z moto pivot, which is a 360 camera that’s going in the garage. I’m really not using the 360 capabilities that it has. It’s really a better indoor cam and it is outdoor. Now it’s not outdoor, but it’s in the garage. It’s okay. So but it’s Bluetooth, it’s a Bluetooth speaker that would make a perfect like you’re out in the garage working, you can just hook your phone up to it and play off that. So, you know, it’s those kind of things you start thinking through after you’ve had it for a while. We got a lot of really positive feedback on the show we did when I talked about all that setup with that a lot of you guys sent me emails saying Hey, thanks for going through that I appreciate it. I know it inspired some of you to start doing it or start doing it again. I’ve had several emails about the habitat that I set up in that as well and have really kind of enjoyed setting that up. In fact, after I set that up and figured out Oh, this is how it works. Now I’m like maybe I could buy more equipment to put on there right? You got to be careful what you when you start doing this but it has been interesting you know, I think the outdoor ones I would rather have power just to be honest, it’s the battery on those is pretty tough because you gotta go especially you know the doorbell. You know, if I That again I probably would buy the powered version of it now that wasn’t the one that was on sale the one and and in theory, I could put a solar up for the doorbell as well. I think I can turn those battery ones into solar. I think there’s a little conversion kit to get that done. So anyways,

Mike Wieger  [32:16] 
because Yeah, what did you do with your normal doorbell?

Jim Collison  [32:19] 
Just battery. What do you mean? Within so

Mike Wieger  [32:22] 
your your old hard wired doorbell to you. I

Jim Collison  [32:25] 
just took it I just took the thing off and shoved the wires in so I could get him again if I needed him. Yeah, yeah. And I took the I took the physical Bell, you know, not the physical body but the physical switch. And I put the backing on it and I put it on the ringer in the hallway so that I always knew where it was at. So if I move and I want to take it with me or whatever, I can take it down and and and put the put the original doorbell back on pretty, pretty simple. Yeah, to get that done. So yeah, so I’m Neil who sends me know All the time sent me after the after the show, he sent me an email and he said nice show today sorry to hear about your cars being violated Murphy’s Murphy and all that, which I thought yeah, for sure. Turns out I just got one of those cheap Chinese IP cams. So Kevin, listen carefully on this. I have multiple land segments as well as pf sense and cue radar. So as able to watch it pretty closely as it started up out of the gate, it tried to go to a bunch of IPS in China, which pf sense blocked. Eventually it made it to Alibaba cloud services sending some get server messages to Port 53 DNS which also triggered snort and pf sense as a result of watching it. I have made two changes in my pf sense router and a lot of folks use pf sense that listen to the show. So this this might help one force all DNS requests into pf sense on the IoT segment to add that camera to the list of things not allowed on the internet. So good, good some some good changes. They’re actually I had to block my z moto I talked to have to z moto devices that I’ve installed here with this actually had to block my z moto NVR from the internet to keep it from upgrading itself in a way that kept me from administering it with a web browser. So again, another good reason to be kind of monitoring these. And my camera setup the NVR is merely acting as a proprietary cheap POV switch as the cameras that came with a don’t use any of the standard or common POV schemes. All my cameras feed into the IoT land segment. That was another thing I heard a lot of Mike is people kind of creating kind of a whole separate segments, right? Yeah, to run these on both hard wire segment maybe through a pf sense or you’re doing that on that end, or you know, I have a bitdefender router, I could do that. And I could create different not only that I can have a five gig or a 2.4 and I could separate those and do Different things with the guests right? So there’s some things that you can do there as well says all my cameras feed into the IoT land segment and are recorded with the genius vision. Have you have you heard of that before? I haven’t been okay. I didn’t look it up for the show. I should. That machine is a dual. Dual Core, I think no dual homed, dual homes. So the port I opened for remote viewing goes to the private land segment. Right, that’s a little more than I that I can do from reading but that’s okay. If I, if I might, he says put in a plug for Q radar Community Edition, it takes in flow records and sis logs from pf sense. So I can also snoop on the mirror port in the switch, which gives us some visibility into the actual data. You can both trigger on suspicious activity as well as keep a record of flows and firewall rejections. The sledgehammer as they says a sledgehammer for sure. I also monitor my servers with it by collecting windows audit data which can expose things Like in memory attacks via PowerShell. Mike, you’ll have key radar figured out by the time we talk next. Yeah,

Mike Wieger  [36:06] 
right. I know now now I gotta switch from untangle to pf sense again. Thanks. There’s a weekend project.

Jim Collison  [36:12] 
Oh, pf sense also has Wireshark capability. One of the things I saw to the camera is it was sending out large UDP soap type camera announcement packets that were too large. So that were too large so got truncated by the switch. And to show you how over the top or relative it might be I also use open and Ms in a VM to monitor the network via ping to SM s and MP and alert me when part of it is broken. So Neil, thanks for

Mike Wieger  [36:46] 
Neil and it to hang out. All of that is like the stuff that I just get such a kick out of doing it. So yeah, Neil. All awesome suggestions. I totally agree. I run a VLAN For all of my cameras, and luckily you know, it makes it super easy when you run a VLAN because you can just tag your SSID with the same VLAN so I have also a wireless SSID for cameras or hardwired however they connect. And that whole subnet is not allowed on the internet except for the NVR box which is site Holland on a Windows box so the Windows machine can get to the internet. But those cameras individually cannot which is how I run it but all that extra stuff. I think I might have to have to switch to psls this weekend will

Jim Collison  [37:32] 
be both up and running.

Mike Wieger  [37:34] 
So that is not an extra box. I will and I shouldn’t all just probably buy an extra Dell box I would sort of run these things on terrible option because it’s so much power for a router but it’s still a lot of fun.

Jim Collison  [37:43] 
Couldn’t you put it on a Can’t you put it on a PI Raspberry Pi,

Mike Wieger  [37:47] 
no not beefy enough for all the DPI and things I want to do. Yeah, plus the the pie doesn’t have to

Jim Collison  [37:55] 
Ethernet ports. Can I think you do I have an extra computer around here. I can just give you

Mike Wieger  [38:01] 
Doesn’t it doesn’t run too bad. I think it’s probably about 30 watts, which is still a lot but for everything I run through it. Yeah, not too bad.

Jim Collison  [38:09] 
Neil, thanks for that feedback on that as well. We love that Kevin said in the chat room, sometimes devices are phoning home to get update code, which happens to come from China. I think he’s trying to be kind there to say, you know, hey, it’s not always they’re not always snooping. But, you know, it’s worth I think, in today’s environment, especially with relations between China and the United States being what they are. I think it’s okay to be that kind of paranoid. I i. I’m kind of wondering now. I think maybe I’ll take a look. This weekend, I’ll take a look at bitdefender I have the ability to shut off the internet to any device. And maybe it’s worth just taking those camera devices and shutting the internet off to see what they do. I’m not as worried about that. I don’t know if I have anything I’m not worried about although I should be like locking my cars. I should be worried about that. And so but it would be a good test to be like, hey, on a really because what I love about the bitdefender box is it’s just average guy security conscious. And it allows you to do some things, you can still have all the you can kind of still create all the subnets stuff that you could on pf sense. But you don’t have the complexity of the UI. And that’s one of those where the mobile app is actually a little bit better than the web browser version of it. It’s they’ve they’ve they’ve poured a lot into that. So

Mike Wieger  [39:30] 
yeah, the same sort of thing for untangle for me is it’s got the power of pf sense, maybe not the extreme power, but they’ve taken all of it and made it very user friendly to just go in and, and make all your tweaks right web filtering, built in IPS are just like apps almost in the untangle. It’s so simple to set it up. I got kind of addicted to the simple nature of it. Yeah, so same, same sort of thing with bitdefender, right, like a lot of the same functionality as pf sense, but just in kind of a more user friendly

Jim Collison  [39:58] 
way. Well that’s that’s really what it is you know and i and i listen I don’t I don’t have any advice in this area to give you guys around this just go with what you’re comfortable with and don’t let anybody listen. Do you want to set it up and have a really complex setup do it like that awesome if that helps you sleep at night, get it done like in go crazy with it because it’s cool. It’s super cool. at same time, if you can’t do that don’t and I think it’d be okay with it if you want to go with a standard setup with a ring and although they’ve had, they’ve had they’ve gotten hit on the chin a couple times here in the last couple weeks but if you want to go if you want to do a standard setup with reading or with dealing or with you know one of those kind of providers. I just encourage you to get in there and and give it a try. It has certainly been fun in I’m not quite out of the woods yet on this in the in the discord group in the Smart Home group which was it relative To me four weeks ago, Mike, but it has become very relevant. Now in the last and the last couple. I had sent out a note to everybody when we talked a bunch about switches couple weeks ago when we’re in here and I don’t have a neutral wire, and so silver 16. And our discord group said, Hey, check out Lutron they make smart switches that don’t require a neutral to work with Habitat. So that’s a good solution. I appreciate that. I’ll have to go give that a check. And then Bruce in the discord group put some really interesting pictures out there. I’m not going to I was going to show them but I didn’t get permission. So I’m actually not because it’s pictures of his house. But imagine a really beautiful deck that has lighting around it. Very, very well done, Bruce. Bruce said interesting conversation about deck lights. This is my work in progress. And if you want to see the pictures join us in the discord group. Again, I just didn’t ask permission to.

Mike Wieger  [41:55] 
I mean, discords public though.

Jim Collison  [41:57] 
No, I get you know, I know but I didn’t get permission. I didn’t So he said he, let’s see so interesting conversation about deck lights. This was my work in progress. I asked about waterproof switches at my local electrical store and they recommended a outdoor three way switch made by smart squares. And I looked up smart wires and they’ve said that they I think are primarily in the UK. I think they have some us products as well but do they do kind of lighting and security and I’d never heard of smart worse Have you heard of smart worse before I had not worth a look. They’ve got quite an inventory on their site. He found out after doing some research that they can control three channels. It’s a 433 megahertz and has an app so I have to so I have to set to come on. So I have it set sorry. So I have it set to come on at sunset and off at 11:30pm. It just works and I think that’s a great like application for that. The switch has got the you know you can go in and this is actually a great combination. With with Habitat to is you can get that in there and then through habitat you can set those sunrise sunsets and I even have a light so now our whole our front door light comes on at sunrise when it comes on a 50%. So it’s not blaring at that point and let’s face on all night and it it’s sunrise they say sunset before. So it’s sunset it comes on sunrise it goes off. We have a cat literal light that does the exact same thing I want that thing on during I don’t want to blaring during the day. There’s plenty of light down here for that. But we want to keep it on 24. Or you could turn it off at a certain time because they turn that on, turn it off. I also have a tat what I didn’t realize. And I went back and listen to the interview we did with them. They did not have that mobile app deployed yet when we interviewed them right April, right. Since it’s come out. It’s been kind of cool because that same debt dashboard functionality that came just to the browser is now functional on the app from anywhere. And so it’s super cool. You can kind of log in and see with your dashboard. Hey what’s on what’s off where things at and so anything that’s attached to that it’s a pretty way to it’s a pretty cool way to control it I’ve kind of a new appreciation for Habitat now and it will continue not everything works with it ring doesn’t have a there’s some folks writing some integrations This is another listen if you’re super techie and nerdy and you’re right code habitat is the is the world for you. Like you can hack and slash and slice and dice all you want on that thing. Is it easy? Not always, not always to set up? Yeah. So super cool. So Mike, after I bought that habitat hub, I was you know, you even said I think maybe in pre show, really, like, you looked at me like you really bought that like is 80 bucks, I think or whatever we paid for it like that. And it sat for a long time and I felt bad. I sat all summer. Like I didn’t do anything with it. I set it up one time and I was like, Ah, this is too hard. Well, you know, you know, I needed the right kind of motion. To kind of dig into and

Mike Wieger  [45:01] 
this is how you and I do a lot of things right we we we get it we kind of maybe it goes on the shelf and we always come back to this sort of stuff like I this is why I try super hard if I don’t have to to not sell off any my old gear because I always end up coming back to it right all the old Dell boxes I’ll find a use case forum anything. So I I figured you probably would come to a point where you would have a reason to look back now. Look now it’s now it’s running the show, right? Yeah,

Jim Collison  [45:30] 
yeah. Yeah, for sure. Is how’s my video to you? And how’s my day? You bet you you got a little behind in your you know,

Mike Wieger  [45:42] 
testing something I should have tested it because this is also my sight sound box. I was like, I wonder how bad it would affect it if I just because I had all the cameras off while I was doing the show. I was monitoring the did you turn it back on? I turned them on, like probably five six minutes ago to see Oh yeah, that’s say that about right what I

Mike Wieger  [46:03] 
want you to probably get a lot better here I just turn them off.

Jim Collison  [46:06] 
Yeah yeah and I actually this core i seven that when the studio I didn’t think about that I’ve been running site how on that all they’ve been running for a long time. So we would have known by now if it was going to be

Mike Wieger  [46:16] 
well and you’re only running two cameras of it right? I just one. Yeah. And I’m going to nine and two, four K’s and old ADP, so it doesn’t want to work. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of bandwidth and no fix it.

Jim Collison  [46:27] 
So talk. Yeah, so you’re right, just to wrap up that conversation. I hold on to this stuff way too long. But it’s super helpful when you have that moment of like, oh, wait a minute. I have an extra PC I could kind of run this thing on you know, as an example I was trying to run always sync on that. I bought a Adele little little micro Dell thing and it just never really ran. Always sinking never really ran very well on that thing. It just was always kind of locking up and it was losing to Eyes and some of those kinds of things. And so I blew that thing away and actually had no use for it. And when when, when the guys from the from ease us contacted me, I thought, oh, I’ll try it on that box and the software. So light, it actually just does what it’s supposed to do on that box. And it just, it has kind of become my sink box. Oh, by the way, one more thing I should update to a Cronus has updated their sync software with both Android and iPhone. And in a backup, I shouldn’t say sync. It’s actually a full backup. So if you’re currently running a Cronus on Windows, and you have iPhone, Android, make sure you check out and you want to back it up. Maybe you’re already backing up to iCloud or whatever. Maybe you’ve already figured that out. But a Cronus is doing that and doing it pretty well. And it’s a pretty easy setup. I think it’s been there for a while. But I kind of just discovered it through the app. You download the app, put it on your phone, you can back up your phone really easily to computer your computer now. Little code comes up you just take a picture it sinks the two together and man you are often on your way backs up all your contacts or your pictures all your all those things like that that you went back up another good way to do it if you’re on a Cronus Mike you you spend some time on discord this weekend because you got a little Franken bill going on tell it tell us a little bit about that.

Mike Wieger  [48:18] 
Well Jim I I never get I rarely get addicted to a video game or get the urge to want to play one but I started watching you know I’ve been sick so I had a lot of time to kind of just sit and watch stuff so I was watching Twitch. And this this game kept showing up like all the big streamers had switched all the sudden and we’re streaming this game called Escape from Tarkov. And the people who no Escape from Tarkov love it and the people you either love it or you’ve never heard of it. And so this game was like super intriguing to me. really intriguing. So like I really want to play this but it’s only a PC game not Xbox, and I’ve always ever been an Xbox gamer. I have never gained on a pewter, just because I’ve never had a gaming computer and I’ve always done console. So I started saying okay, how can I get this done so my first gaming my first ability to play this game came actually from my iMac and you guys got to remember this is a 2012 iMac, it’s only got like an i 530 something. It’s it’s got the built in GPU in this thing, this iMac is like a Nvidia 660. So I mean a super like potato of a graphics card just awful. But obviously need to run Windows. So first challenge was if you run boot camp on the Mac, which is the utility Mac has to be able to bare metal boot windows, it forces you to install that on an internal drive. So I had to use a separate Windows machine to actually create a external you know, on an SSD install Windows to an SSD, plug it in via USB three to this iMac and boot it. Quick tip here too is you can actually go into boot camp assistant is in Mac, and you can have it just download all the drivers you need and put it onto an external USB drive. And then you can install that later in your windows build. So I can do it all up front for you or you can just get the driver so it’s perfect because I installed on an external drive when I plugged it in the Mac, and it wasn’t I mean, the Ethernet port wasn’t working. Just all because all the drivers weren’t there. easily. I plugged in that USB drive, though, ran the drivers and then it was perfect. It worked great. And so I fired up Escape from Tarkov It was a 660 I had to turn it down to like, low low graphic this looked like I was like playing like Counter Strike from like, 1980 it was it was awful. And I was like, you know, this is just a sub optimal experience. So I mean, I really want to get some way to play this better. And but I mean, Hannah right now, there was no approaching her like I think I want to go buy a gaming PC. That is not something you even approach with or not a conversation I want to have. I think I even brought up the joke when I’m just Yeah, right. Okay. So, I needed to figure out a way to use the stuff I already had here. Plus, I figured I could probably get one graphics card and if I got it off eBay, I could probably you know, stuff’s coming down in price right now. So I was like okay, I have an optiplex over here turning site down and you know, it’s got it’s got its 1155 chipset or socket. So it’s got an i five in there right now. 2400 it’d be okay, but I can’t fit the windows optiplex is our first of all, there’s no extra things on the power supply right? Like what it came with is what you got. So am I a 400 watt it’s probably Oh, yikes. Yeah, there’s not even an extra you know, they don’t have like the PCI power port for those graphics cards. So it was going to be and the case was too small so it’s gonna be number one is gonna be a new case number to swap out the power supply which I had an extra one that was no big deal. So pulled it out. Now everyone in discord did warn me, Justin, everyone over there was like bad idea. These boards are proprietary. A lot of times the powers like an eight pin powers of that standard 24 pin. So I did some testing up front, the 29 was a full 24 pin. And there really wasn’t many, there were many issues with this, I got it pulled into the new case, only odd things were number one, the fan headers are not their proprietary, so I had to pull the fan out of that Dell optiplex box. And then the other one is just plugging the power so it runs at full tilt. So fan headers were unique. Unless I did something wrong, the headers for the power are proprietary as well. The power button in the Dell optiplex box has like this, probably a six prong little adapter you’re plugging in. So I’ve been trying to plug in the headers from the case for the power and those were plugging in. So I ripped out the power cord but in the process of ripping out the power button, it broke. So you guys I mean I posted pictures on the discord if you guys want a really good laugh, just go check this thing out. So scroop did you post those in your hardware, sorry, the hardware channel so you guys can go look. So I got it in there though. And I had a dangled a power cord out the front. So I popped out like one of the plastic little pieces. I mean, this is a cheap $20 case, it’s no big deal. So I got power out there. But after I got that done, this thing works great. So it was mainly a user I had on hand to get things done. So then I got a GTX 1060 and I gotta tell you with a 1060 and in this even with the i 520 400, it’s only got eight gigs of RAM. So I think I’m have to bump that up to 16 which is

Jim Collison  [53:27] 
not bad. You probably could have gotten away with eight.

Mike Wieger  [53:29] 
Yeah, probably could have. And that’s what I’m running right now. So we’ll see I think, but I think I’m going to get some more RAM for it. Um, I was able to run this Escape from Tarkov game on high settings, and was flawless. So before I was on low settings, and I was getting about 16 to 24 frames per second when I was using my iMac, and now I’m getting about provisioning 75 and 90 depends depending I have overclocked it a little bit. All the 1060 but it’s a Frankenstein machine, but you know what, to be honest, and no one’s seeing this thing, right like no one’s down to my basement. No Here, I just need the ability to play and it plays great. So probably some things I’ll look for in the future I’ll probably end up swapping out the motherboard. This was just because I had it on hand. I didn’t notice for 1155 socket, motherboard, there are some pretty cheap options on eBay. And this board for example, doesn’t have USB three only has three SATA ports on board. So I think I could easily spend 3540 bucks on a US motherboard off eBay and probably have a little bit better experience Plus, I wouldn’t have to use the power button and the fan would actually plug in the motherboard and and there would probably be some some better options there. But so got that up and running. And it’s it’s working out really, really well. So now obviously Ryan was playing Apex last night so I got Apex downloaded so I’m like okay, well now that I the world’s my oyster now now I’m a PC Gamer Jim. Now this is like a whole new world to me when I have the ability to run PC games I’ve never been able to run this. I’ve always either been a Mac guy, or had a Frankenstein of a like an iMac right? We shouldn’t run it.

Jim Collison  [55:07] 
Would you pay for that? Six gig 1061 40? Oh, no. Yeah, so pretty good.

Mike Wieger  [55:14] 
Yeah. And you know what I’m always swapping. So I sold the I sold the USG 400 grabbed out 440 us gateway, since I’ve kind of got rid of unify just on the USG side. Right? And I swapped that out. And, you know, so it’s Yeah. So be careful that when you’re looking at graphics cards, just because like that same price, that were easily three gig models that were being listed there. And if you don’t catch it, you could have gotten the three gig model and really, for gaming, I think especially in 2018, the 60 gig is kind of what you need if you’re going to use it for gaming.

Jim Collison  [55:46] 
But they were all pretty much right around that same

Jim Collison  [55:49] 
same guys five for the three gig versions from two years ago when we were doing all that. That mining Yeah, and I just I you know, I’ve kept them and they make great cards to put in for the kind of stuff I don’t game I don’t PC game, I don’t game at all. But so there they make great graphics cards, if you’re going to and I so I’m the opposite I’d rather have a million monitors that I can do computing on and I don’t game on any of them, right? But I want video here I mean I like dedicated like a site hound has its own dedicated monitor down here. And so having a couple of those cards with with the ability to run out just about any port I want to and including the the onboard graphics on this card. I could run in theory I could probably run eight monitors maybe more off this, the 210 60s that are in here plus the the onboard for eight 910 yeah 10 I could probably run 10 years early. 60s have got four

Mike Wieger  [56:51] 
four plus DDI i don’t i don’t know if you can use all at the same time.

Jim Collison  [56:55] 
It’s true. I don’t know that I’d have to

Mike Wieger  [56:59] 
support one another My

Jim Collison  [57:00] 
you can run a bunch off that thing and and super cool to have so I’ve thought about getting rid of them I don’t really use them I mean I use them on this PC the one of the other miners they just sit in there and I’m like, I’ll use them for like what we’ve been talking about, I might get in a pinch and I’m going to need a video card to run some things offline and rip it out of there and and use it for that. So I bought a bunch of SSDs when we were doing all that burning and they were sitting around for a little while and me and they have come in handy when I set up the when I took the NVIDIA Shield out for Sarah out there. Well now she has an SSD for some of the recording that’s going on out there and it works just great.

Mike Wieger  [57:36] 
And just to have extra OS is around that are fully installed. So for example, if I had an extra SSD run I haven’t deployed all right now, I would have pf sense fully installed on one SSD and I could just swap in and out the SSD on that Dell box and run pf sense, swap it out, be running, untangle and just have that kind of go back and forth.

Jim Collison  [57:54] 
You know, I got a 60 gig SSD I could just give you like it’s just sitting here. I’m never gonna use it so I have to bring it back. Maybe logo package. Little care. We still gotta get together. There’s I see you

Mike Wieger  [58:05] 
You did come come by but that doesn’t help when you do a day when you man it was supposed to be last Friday we were supposed to get together and that whether that was that was probably the worst weather I’ve ever driven into my entire life driving from Kansas aid Omaha. It was ice and snow and then back to ice and we all it took me what that drive from my high school where it’s at in cancer usually takes two hours and 45 minutes and it took me five hours to get home that day. Yeah, it was Yeah,

Jim Collison  [58:33] 
we I was ugly for everybody. Hey, in learning this though, you told me that so the MSI Afterburner tool. Oh, this is a good Yeah, tip. Yeah, talk about that.

Mike Wieger  [58:44] 
So a while back and this came from Ryan

Jim Collison  [58:46] 
from the show last night, or did they tell about this? No. I discovered on my own.

Mike Wieger  [58:51] 
So because of fancy Google searches. overclocking graphics cards is something that most people are have at least heard of. But what the developers with the producers of these cards realized is that it was really something that kind of the, the nerdy guys were trying to do. The average guys were kind of breaking their card sometimes by trying to do it themselves. But they knew their cards have the capability of overclocking, so about two or three years ago whenever they came out with the 20 series cards whenever those came out, they added in essentially their own overclocking tool produced by Nvidia and MSI. So if you use MSI Afterburner, there is a built in blessed by the company’s OC scanner. So overclock scanner tool built in and it’ll essentially do the hard work for you it goes through and it kind of bumps up the core clock bumps up the core clock, and it keeps going through until it fails and then kind of comes back and it sets its own curve for your overclocking. Super simple. It runs the test in about 15 minutes and then it sets the curve for you. Now it’s I people have the reviews I’ve seen. They’re saying it’s a little on the conservative side. But a lot of them are saying it’s pretty much dead on they said they’ve run with the overclock that it said they’ve tried to bump it up and it starts to get glitchy on them. So they think they say it’s pretty flawless. It doesn’t it never leads to unstable cards. Sometimes they say you can maybe squeak out a little bit more performance. The only thing really that after that is it does not adjust memory clock speed. So you do have to do that on your own. But memory clock speeds a lot easier. It’s it’s really just one dial compared to everything else. So it’s a really cool tool. So now it used to be two years ago just for the 20 series cards in the 2018 2017. But they have since expanded it to the 10 series cards as well. So with my 1060 if you open up MSI Afterburner, you click on the OC button, and a new click, I think it’s there scan and there’s test you click Scan, first scan runs the 25 minute thing, then you test it and just make sure that it is It works. Save it as a profile and you’re good to go. So really cool. They do all the hard work for you way of overclocking, and I was always one that I did not want to mess with it, because I would always break it. And I did. I didn’t know enough about it. So I it scared me. But people say, you know, you can really get a lot more performance out of these cards. I overclocking, which is something I never tried to do. This was back when I was mining, right? That was the only time I had experience with these cards. And I tried it at first and I kept having issues. So I ended up just reverting back to the standard. But if I had known about this tool back then actually I don’t know if it works on AMD cards. That’s a good question. I don’t think it does. I think this is just for an invite. I don’t know.

Jim Collison  [1:01:40] 
Yeah, I’ll have to dig into it. It’s Yeah, I put the link in the chat all included in the show notes as well. Yep. Basically MSI comm slash page slash afterburner. If you want to get there and get that done, I’m gonna download it and give it a try. I have a suit cards, all four of mine or a suit in a suit has a tool that you could do now that They don’t, it’s not it’s only for, you gotta kind of do it yourself. It monitors it’s got a really nice dashboard. But you’re on your own, like you You can set they have two settings that come with the software which is like overclocking and something different than overclocking, I forget what those two are. And then you can set your own and your own profiles really cool. If you know what you’re doing. I would I had looked at afterburner at the time it didn’t work really well for what I needed it for, but I’m gonna give it a new look. Not that I’m gonna do anything with it. I just think it’s kind of cool to go through and see what see what else it will do from it. Yeah, I’ve actually not I’ve turned off all the overclocking on these cards. Now I don’t really need it for what I’m doing here and it just burns more power. Fans run a little bit higher. I don’t need all that noise. So I’ve kind of turned off in the software. I’ve kind of turned all that off.

Mike Wieger  [1:02:49] 
Yeah, speaking of power. One thing to notice when you open it, you would be led to believe you don’t need to make any changes at first, but you need to make sure adjust your power setting to like all the way over to the right. Because it’ll it’ll work within the parameters, you get it for the top. So there’s three sliders up top, there’s voltage, there’s power, and there’s 10. Those three sliders you need to set because it will only work in the parameters you give it. So if you say don’t go past 100 power, it won’t, which isn’t really going to do you any good. So, pump the power up, I left the voltage at zero, I don’t like messing with voltage on these cards. I think that leads to problems. So I left a voltage at zero but I bumped up the power like 116%, which was the max and and let it go. And it did give me a little bit more boost. And then I bumped up the memory clock speed by about 500. And it’s,

Jim Collison  [1:03:36] 
it’s working well the community around video cards, from what I remember when we were doing the mining with them is very strong. And so if you if you like you can find at YouTube videos on your car, whatever you have, and what people have done with them. So and you know, there’s a variety it’s not always perfect science, but you can kind of get a consensus on those cards in during the mining days you know everybody kind of had a mining video How to tweak it how to set it how to do that i’m sure on the gaming side there’s even more and PC gaming is kind of enjoying a nice little revival so to speak there’s a lot of PC gaming going on including you now Mike and so if you’re into that the graphics market listen if you walked away from the graphics market two years ago because prices went nuts right? That was our fault well not you and me because we didn’t pay those ridiculous prices but

Mike Wieger  [1:04:31] 
they benefited I sold during that you kind of did we bought cheap I would have sold Yeah,

Jim Collison  [1:04:36] 
you probably were and you’re always the problem I’ll be honest, so. And in a lot of people I heard from a lot of listeners in those days Who said I quit on video cards like this is ridiculous. And then both Nvidia and AMD their next gen cards they came out at like the price the market had been at at its most Expensive peak and try to justify it with a whole bunch of stuff and I think it’s pulled back some but what I heard from a lot of listeners was like I’ve done I quit I’m not even gonna I don’t even think about this. I’m not saying the prices have come all the way back but it’s probably now it’s probably a good time to look again and especially in the US market for a while two years ago if you’d have bought in the US market you would have been buying minors and then okay kind of questionable if you want to buy you know a card that has been ground to the you know, just driven to the ground for the last year I think Bitcoin but I think a lot of those cards have been flushed out or they just they’re not you know, they’re just they have been mining and so long like up mining has really been out of fashion now for 18 months. 24 months something like

Mike Wieger  [1:05:50] 
I’d say it’s relatively safe right now. Great, great in the in the aftermarket. That’s right got mine off eBay. Gemma Is this the way he package it reminded me of totally you when you were talking Talking about selling your hard drives how you kept the boxes and everything. This thing came in the original I mean even the original What do you call that like the anti static bag in the box the the the manuals everything sealed the boxes in great condition. I mean they could have fooled me this was a brand new card. I mean even the plugs for the put back in for each individual graphics card. He looked like a brand new Jeep

Jim Collison  [1:06:26] 
maybe it was me know the 1060 you would asked I probably given you one all that was three gig and you really do want six Yeah, you

Mike Wieger  [1:06:35] 
do for gaming. Now

Jim Collison  [1:06:37] 
for now you do so no super cool. Mike. I was gonna reach behind me right here. You have to watch the video stack right here as well. All of these are the stack boxes, right? Xbox. Here’s the video cards are down here, right? Hard Drive. Xbox Xbox. Right above it, though, is my old windows seven launch kit from the launch party whenever that was 10 years ago. I guess there’s one We launch windows seven. And of course, that is gone. We talked about that a couple weeks ago, but it hadn’t yet been here. And now it’s here. And so if you you’re running Windows seven, on the 14th major patch came out thanks to the NSA and their help with Microsoft on identifying a pretty severe vulnerability in in the code. Although it sounded like it pertained more to Windows 10 than it did windows seven from from what I’ve read on those things. But now’s the time. If you’re if you got windows seven, eight, although I think you could kind of hold on to that for a while and I think you’re going to be okay. My Media centers fine. We’re starting to switch over and getting feedback from Sarah She’s full time and videos, she’ll now and like, give me the feedback. I want to hear about it. Things are locking up and this isn’t recording, right. So we’ve got some things to kind of work out in that environment.

Mike Wieger  [1:07:52] 
That’s the one thing one final thing we should mention is Ed sent me over an NVIDIA Shield. And man I’ve been loving that thing. Oh, good. Yeah, so so we’ve been testing it for about the last week or so i think is about how long we add it. And so getting Hannah’s by any Oh, this is the one it has the remote and it has the controller both. And so we got it also have we’re using in the bedroom because that’s actually where we watched the most TV because our boys room is right on the living room, and they go to bed pretty early. So usually if we’re going to watch a movie, we’ll go to our room and watch it.

Jim Collison  [1:08:23] 
Yeah, I can see what I can see why you like

Mike Wieger  [1:08:25] 
that shield.

Jim Collison  [1:08:26] 
Yeah, it’s Eddie Navarro, by the way said that already thing. Yeah. And that for sending that he offered that to Mike and we appreciate that. Yeah, no, it’s a slick little box. It’s great.

Mike Wieger  [1:08:37] 
And the power behind it is impressive. And what I like about it, is that the Roku is also a great device, we were using a Roku and on that TV, the Nvidia seems to play any video format from Plex direct play without transcoding whereas I noticed the Roku is having to have the box transcode and a I just like to avoid transcoding just because it takes up CPU power on my server. So That Nvidia Shield I have never once noticed it transcode anything I feel like it can play pretty much any video file so that alone has been awesome. I even played some games on it. I was playing a bike game I was sitting in bed one night and handed falling asleep. It’s got the headphone port on the controller, which was super cool. I was like okay, what what are the free games on here? And

Jim Collison  [1:09:20] 
it’s actually a good remote. It’s Yeah.

Mike Wieger  [1:09:23] 
Well, it took me a while I did not notice that there was a volume slider that that thing in the middle is actually a touch sensitive thing. I kept accidentally doing it. How is the volume turning? Oh, it’s the

Jim Collison  [1:09:35] 
spider man. Yeah, it took me a while to figure Yeah, yeah, it’s a slider. So it took

Mike Wieger  [1:09:40] 
Yeah, but so thanks said that. We loving that box. It’s been a lot of fun to test that out.

Jim Collison  [1:09:45] 
Yeah. And it makes a great Plex server to do some tests and kind of needs a little storage like you gotta have your storage thing kind of figured I can do Plex on it. You got to have your storage. I tell you what, if you if you’ve been away from Plex for a while, and you have Like the new version of Plex server in the dashboard associated with it, like you say, you can see every single connection that’s coming into Plex how much bandwidth is taking up, but it’s running on some, you can see how the the memory and CPU are being affected. So if you’re running it on a PC, you can see the CPU and memory utilization. And then it will tell you like you were saying, Mike, it’ll tell you what kind of trends what kind of transcoding Is that right? Yeah. What kind of transcoding for that didn’t sound you ever say a word and you’re like, it’s that doesn’t sound right. right word. Yeah. That was right there in that moment. It will tell you what kind of transcoding it’s doing. And you so that was so helpful when I was trying to troubleshoot the problems like with the Xbox and, and, you know, figure out like, Why won’t this not play for more than 15 minutes on the Xbox? Well, that’s kind of the Plex software on the Xbox is terrible. Like it’s unusable at this point, which is Yeah, it’s just unusable, which is unfortunate. Hopefully, it’ll get updated and maybe Plex. I’ll get to that and updated. I don’t know but We’ve after that, I mean, it’s out in the living room. I stream all my TV from it here. I was at the airport waiting for my son. I was watching the football game at the airport on LTE on my phone from here. So let’s do the transcoding pretty well done. Very, very well. Yeah. Okay, very well. Well, it’s, it’s all it’s made for, like, yeah, that’s the only thing it does. It doesn’t have anything else on it. It is a transcoding machine. That’s really what it does. It’s really was meant to play video and so it’s got all the hardware you need in there to get that done and pretty good little tool. So the saga continues. I think we’ll wait. I know it’s still a couple more weeks till I pull that box down till she’s totally comfortable and then I’ll pull that box back and redeploy it in some form or fashion or maybe I’ll give it to you as a as a pf sense box. But what will bring that thing back in and then the Xbox is going to go back out there as the as a blu ray player. blu ray you know DVD whatever so we still have a pretty big DVD collection. We just haven’t ripped lost those files I don’t really care anymore I’m telling now we watch so little movies we can just put the DVD and when we want that you know we want to watch a movie it’s that’s that’s kind of what makes the most sense. So super cool Mike anything else on that build

Mike Wieger  [1:12:22] 
a note I mean to be determined literally the graphics card came today so all of what I told you was done in probably an hour and a half before the show even started so stability not tested yet, but I’m in the gaming world.

Jim Collison  [1:12:35] 
Well your audio and video especially your video so much better tonight like anyway, that little blade we were running around, running side down but yeah, no super great tonight. So whatever you’re doing, let’s keep

Mike Wieger  [1:12:48] 
let’s get doing these Logitech do like a Windows machine more than a Mac. I’ve noticed that so the C 920 ages runs I think a lot better.

Jim Collison  [1:12:58] 
Yeah. super clear. Your You’re you’ve been super clear tonight. Well, with that or mine everyone we’ve got tons of conversation going on. And if you’re if you’re not a part of either our Facebook group or a discord group you might want to jump in I’m I’m kind of enjoying our discord group right now, it was a slow start. But lately the conversation has been really good. I mean, I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been helpful. People have been posting pictures, there’s just been some great stuff going on. I’ve always contended that, you know, between us and reset with the old home server, show community, surface geeks, all that stuff that we’ve done four years now it’s almost 10 years now. We have the best community in the world. So I appreciate you guys out there in those the average guy.tv slash discord, the average guy.tv slash Facebook. If you want to do that, for those of you who support us on Patreon, thank you for your support in 2019. And I appreciate those who continue to support 2020 it allowed me to do some upgrades and do some of the camera stuff that we’re doing here. So I could come on here and talk about It. Appreciate you guys supporting us that way. We do have a $5 plan out there. If you want to jump in and join us on Patreon, the average guy.tv slash Patreon gets that done. It doesn’t mean Mike and I meet together any more often than we do, but it does mean and we appreciate the support for the show that it does bring. We got to we got to replan another Friday. Oh, you know what? I’m a meeting February 3, the first February or the first Friday in February? I’m meeting Edward winegar. Down in Havana. Maybe that’d be a good time to

Mike Wieger  [1:14:31] 
and one of our people reached out I’m totally gonna blank on the name so I apologize. I said I was up in San Diego. He said that’s his neck of the woods. He’s like you have time to grab a beer I set up I yeah. I do have time to grab beers. Good make time for that. So uh, yeah, listener out there.

Jim Collison  [1:14:48] 
Well, and if you’re ever in Omaha, I mean, Ryan reached out to us kershner right reached out to us and he was like him, you know, my and we got together to pizza. For pizza. We’d love to see if you’re coming through. Stopping through driving through This isn’t really the time that you drive through Nebraska. But as we think about summer, we’d love to see you, you know, it’s email me, Jim, at the average guy TV, if you think you’re going to be somewhere close, we would love to see you if you’re listening on YouTube, and not many do my YouTube numbers aren’t that great. But if you’re listening on YouTube, just hit subscribe down there for me. If you’re listening on the live, you can do it that way. get notified whenever we release something new. And we’d love to have you do that. One of the things I’m learning to super important is comments on you on YouTube. So if you got something to say, this is always I’m always torn because I really want you to put it into this core group, to be honest, the conversations just way better out there. But if you want to make a comment about something, leave it on YouTube it will I go out there and approve those about once a week. But you can do that out there on YouTube as well. And that actually does help on YouTube get us ranked a little bit higher and not that that matters, but I just have to say it because that’s what I do. Don’t forget that the average guy TV both platform and media hosting powered by Maple Grove partners Secure reliable high speed hosting Mike’s on it. I’m on it. High Speed hosting for people that you know and you trust course that’s Christian and so we appreciate his sponsorship of the show Maple Grove partners com. Plans start as little as $10 Don’t forget you can get the app Home Gadget Geeks com. Mike came home last night Sarah was not a good mood 10 started dinner yet was six o’clock but there was a box of hellofresh ready for me and I rocked I made the best sauce last night I am not gonna lie. I had it was so good. I thought I need to start videoing like I need to do a video blog. Become a food blogger. Yeah, just just cooking these hellofresh meals like and I listen I have I’ll do the pitch. I get free boxes all the time. I don’t make anything off. I just want you to try them. So contact me Jim at the average guy.tv if you want to try it but i i made we did grilled. We did pan kind of pan fried chicken with the mushrooms sauce like a brown mushroom sauce and mashed potatoes and corn, enough carrots. Everybody loves that. It’s not the weird stuff that you’re thinking. That’s like your average everyday Midwestern or whatever. Meal super easy. I did it. I like I did it. This is a hard thing to believe, right as you’re cooking these things like, Oh, dang, I’m actually I’m actually pretty good. No hellofresh has actually put these things together. The beauty of this is if you like the recipe, they tell you everything you need to do if you’re just gonna want to buy it on your own. Just make it again, right off the recipe card. It’s super, we’ve done that a couple times for big family meals, where we’ve been like, Oh, that was so good. Let’s just make it in bulk and will double or triple the recipe on there and and do it and so it’s been a really good experience. Are you guys still

Mike Wieger  [1:17:44] 
still doing it? Yeah, we did it for one week at the middle of December and we’ve been off since then. Just because of the holidays. Holidays. Second. Next week is probably the next week. It’s coming.

Jim Collison  [1:17:56] 
Yeah, I just I love the flexibility in the plane to that’s our

Mike Wieger  [1:17:59] 
There’s one thing we were like and there’s no guilt trip is my favorite part now like I get skip out a whole month and they don’t even say anything about it.

Jim Collison  [1:18:06] 
Yeah, in fact, because of the snow on Friday, the FedEx guy couldn’t get here on Saturday and so it backed him up so we didn’t get the box until Monday. We’re both at work Sam he’s gone now. So I was eyeballing the package cam. The brand new package cam off of sight hound off the app off my phone. Boom Dude, I’m a I’m a whole new person. You’re looking at me like you got it working. No kidding. Yep, got it working off my phone. Site hound. Watching the box about every hour so I just kind of dial in it is you know is it still sit on the porch is it on the porch Is it still sit on the porch? So it’s kind of fun to have that and then I could when Sarah got home she got home early and of course the the driveway cam went off when she came in the garage cam notified me when she got into the garage. The front door Cam Newton Find me which picked up the box. Like I you can. Yeah, I can time I go, she’s home. She’s in the garage. Oh, she’s picking up the box and then I went to the site down and sure enough it was gone and I could even go back and play the video or watch her go out and pick it up. Like, I know that’s kind of weird, but I’m liking it. I yeah, it’s kind of fun to kind of watch what’s going on. So if you if you want to join us on the Pampered Chef just let me know Jim at the average guy.tv love to have you in there. wintertime is the time to do it, too. Just to be honest, it sucks cooking. In the winner. It’s just cold everything you’re inside. Came grill. Pampered Chef so Pampered Chef hellofresh is the way to do pampered chefs the way to do it too. They have some great tools as well. We are live every Thursday. Oh, let me ask this question in the chat room really quick. And if you made it this far in the podcast, you are most engaged listeners. So maybe I kind of glad I waited till the very end. Because this is a tough decision. We are Thinking I am thinking of moving the podcast from Thursday to Wednesday. Right? So just one day, but not Thursday’s now. I have podcasts of live every Thursday for nine and a half years. Like, like I know that’s hard. And I know that’s everybody’s patterns are put in place. But I was telling Mike like every business thing, every business event, I’ve got a thing this week on Thursday, or next week on Thursday, and it would just be better I think for me to get get it moved to Wednesday instead of Thursday. So chat room if you’re listening live. Love to just get a little bit of feedback, good or bad for you. So just get a little bit of feedback. If you’re a regular listener and you made it this far. Thanks for doing that. What do you think give me some feedback. Jim, at the average guy TV love to know if Wednesdays you don’t really care because you’re listening to this. Two weeks later, whatever. You don’t really care. I know you get that. But chat room. I’d love to hear from you now and it just could be it would be better for me almost never have anything Wednesday nights anymore but when Thursday’s are always try place now for whatever reason I have a chamber and then a couple weeks on a Thursday, it just seems like everybody wants to book things on Thursday. So let me know Jim theAverageGuy.tv. But for now we’re live every Thursday, from nine Eastern after the average guy that tv live will do a little bit of post show. Thanks for coming out tonight. Those of you in the chat room will stay around to get some feedback on that live show wednesday thursday thing but with that, we’ll say goodbye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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