10th Anniversary Show! Need I say too much more? Christian Johnson and Andrew Morris (Original hosts from episode #1) are back and we talk about Home Servers, Home Automation and chat up on topics we have covered over the last 10 years. All that and more!

Full show notes, transcriptions, audio and video at http://theAverageGuy.tv/hgg471

Join Jim Collison / @jcollison and Mike Wieger / @WiegerTech for show #471 of Home Gadget Geeks brought to you by the Average Guy Network.

WANT TO SUBSCRIBE? http://theAverageGuy.tv/subscribe

Join us for the show live each Thursday at 8pmC/9E/1UTC at http://theAverageGuy.tv/live

Podcast, Home Gadget Geeks, Christian Johnson, Andrew Morris, terabyte, drives, home servers, home tech podcast, social media, hardware, computers, servers

Find Us!

Join us in the Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/theaverageguy/

On Discord at https://theaverageguy.tv/discord

Save $40 on your first Box of HelloFresh

Jim Collison  [0:00] 
This is The Average Guy Network and you have found Home Gadget Geeks, show number 471 recorded on December 3 2020.

Mike Wieger  [0:22] 
Here on Home Gadget Geeks we cover all your favorite tech gadgets that find their way into your home product updates and conversation all for the average tech guy. I’m your host Jim Collison broadcasting live from theAverageGuy.TV Studios here in a very beautiful mic Bellevue Nebraska. I think we’ve had some string a nice weather. Hey, I mean, 40s and sunny. I’ll

take it in December, late November. It’s it’s been a nice little string. I’ll take it putting up Christmas lights. Not as bad when it’s this warm in December?

Jim Collison  [0:49] 
No, not that. Well, you know where the weather’s really good. Andrew Morris is down on the other side of the planet. It’s a spring for you guys. Right? Things are pretty good.

Andrew Morris  [0:58] 
Yeah, call it summer, we’ve already had 40 plus degree days. So what’s that? 100 hundred Fahrenheit. And so today’s a, you know, very nice 80, 80ish degrees.

Jim Collison  [1:11] 
Right? Things are going well. We’ll catch up with you here in a second. Christian’s out in Maryland, and Christian, how’s the weather in your neck of the woods?

Christian Johnson  [1:19] 
We’re chilly mid 30s. Taking out trash is getting a bit frosty, but nothing at the Buffalo blood isn’t used to. So

Jim Collison  [1:27] 
yeah, you’ll get soft.

Christian Johnson  [1:29] 
Eventually. You’ll know it’s already started. It’s pretty unfortunate, got to be honest.

Jim Collison  [1:34] 
Good to see both of you guys. Of course, we’re celebrating the 10th anniversary tonight of Home Gadget Geeks, it’ll be kind of a regular show, we’ll have a little bit in style Joe, kind of associated with it. We got some call and stuff. We’re going to do a beer pick here in just a second. But Andrew, Christian, good to have you back. I think about the I think about let me let me bring that up just for folks who were talking about it in pre show the very first post.

In fact, if you want to head out to the average guy, if you want to see this, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to find. But if you want to head out to https://theAverageGuy.tv and then it’s slash ht because we started with home tech. So this thing was called home tech for I don’t know, first hundred episodes, I think ht001 will get you there and a great opportunity to kind of see if you want to hear we play this in the pre show if you want to hear the intro back then. I flirted with the idea Mike of doing the old intro, but doing it in the new voice kind of thing. And then I thought and also flirted with the idea of having you do the intro, I think next week on our, you know, 10 year and one. I think you’re gonna have to do the intro.

Mike Wieger  [2:37] 
You could do it just from memory. I think it’s just ingrained in my head or No. Okay. But back then I still see that you had the average guy tag on there. So did you have more than one show? Or did you just know that you were going to start doing more than one show? So you made a network instead of just having one website?

Jim Collison  [2:54] 
Yeah, Andrew kind of went along on the ride with me in those days Christian I mean, Cyber Frontiers came out of this kind of this. Hey, Andrew was Spartan radio was was like to do the intro to Spartan radio.

Andrew Morris  [3:09] 
You found Spartan radio hosted by the man? Yeah. Yes.

Jim Collison  [3:19] 
The rad it was the RAD racing network. You found I

Andrew Morris  [3:25] 
need dodgy dodgy dodgy websites that are knocked out being that 20 minutes using some bit of crap way that I found on the internet.

Jim Collison  [3:34] 
Well, we got that roll in like we had fitness tech for a while. I think I did 30, 30 or 40 episodes of a fitness tech podcast we did. I did a financial tech podcast that I think I went a couple years on that three or four years maybe I got some folks to help me out on the financial tech and then what else?

I think that’s the

Mike Wieger  [3:54] 
you had a net worth from you. You knew you’re gonna do multiple shows.

Jim Collison  [3:57] 
Rich’s random podcast generator? Rich O’Neill.

Andrew Morris  [4:01] 
How many? How many rich do?

Jim Collison  [4:04] 
I’m gonna say 50. I think there abouts. Yeah, I think we’d get together on Saturdays on on and just do Hangouts. People could join it was to talk about anything that you wanted to.

And the idea of

Andrew Morris  [4:16] 
it was literally random, wasn’t it?

Jim Collison  [4:18] 
Yeah. Well, that’s that was the idea is that like, if the conversation was good, we just rip it into a podcast and publish it. And

most of them were.

Yeah, they were pretty good. And good. Yeah, we we kind of made that work. Lots of folks. Of course, if you’re new to this podcast, and you know, last couple years this all came out of Dave McCabe’s home server show so you know maybe I think I started they started that 08 I think and I joined him early. oh nine was Adler and Chris. And and then we I think I went a year and some change. And I wanted went rogue. Yeah, I did go home. I wanted to I wanted to do some different and so I approached Christian and you and Brian Burgess and that day In fact, Mike the intro that we have now the guitar riff is Brian Burgess he wrote that I mean like he he performed it first on the guitar and then he added drums and a bass to it and I’ve just never never not done that and Big thanks to Brian for doing that. doing that for us but um, back in those days I don’t know to be honest, I don’t know if if if of Home Gadget Geeks own tech before DICE has really changed that much in the 10 years we’ve been doing this we still get in here I mean, Mike you’ve been here five

Mike Wieger  [5:40] 
yeah five years now

Jim Collison  [5:41] 
five so the format’s changed a little bit we still guests that we have on we do miss Christians corner Christian that is one of those things I can we move Christians corner kind of Cyber Frontiers, right? came out the

Mike Wieger  [5:54] 
other day mass was this Christian’s new corner. Looks like

Christian Johnson  [6:01] 
I’m working on the styling. Don’t worry. I definitely have the most vanilla look of the advanced podcast walls that have formed over the years. But it is certainly a corner has three dimensions to it, as you can see, so I have a dimension in front of me you can’t see that makes it a box. So it’s definitely a corner. And I don’t know Christians corner wasn’t always 100% content, that outtake to Cyber Frontiers. I remember we did some college hunting, and some other off topic brands in that little segment. And I think people enjoyed it. So yeah,

Andrew Morris  [6:40] 
yeah. No, come up with some use to come up with some really good little quickie stuff that I’ve never heard of.

Christian Johnson  [6:46] 
Yeah, and General Cyber Frontiers, kind of a game a lot of quirky stuff put together. But yeah, there are just so many tools and little gadgets for for Windows at the time that I was fascinated with, and especially with the home server carry over stuff that we were doing. There was just always something to talk about.

Jim Collison  [7:06] 
John’s talking about the college show is the most impactful of my life. I think, Christian, I think he’s referring to the one I sat down and interviewed you right after you got accepted to the University of Maryland. Yep. And we kind of I quizzed you, I’ll be honest, I learned a ton about the process to from you, and all that you, my kids, were just starting to kind of get into that, the end of that space. That was a pretty impactful show.

Christian Johnson  [7:29] 
And it’s actually amazing how relevant it still is today. most universities are still using common app in the United States and the process. I mean, there’s some things that have changed with you know, a lot of schools not accepting standardized scores this year because of COVID or whatnot. But by and large, the fundamentals in that show largely didn’t change. So I feel like it has stood the test of time so far.

Mike Wieger  [7:53] 
Well, we got back really weird memories with common app when you send them like, painful night sending applications and it was awful.

Jim Collison  [8:01] 
Yeah, we do need to break into a beer. Real quick. Eric Janaki sent us Hop, hop cloud. Sorry, Christian. I didn’t get one of these to you, Andrew. There was no way I was gonna get one of these to you by Eric. So you guys are welcome to break out but hop cloud It’s uh, it’s called a hazy IPA. It goes with this voicemail so let me let’s let’s bring this in. And Dave left this voicemail. Maybe Chris now and you wanted to play it? Well. Okay, one second. You guys can still hear me right? Yeah, we can totally lock up all right, hold on. Let’s refresh the page. Mike while we’re doing that, yeah. What’s up? Well,

Mike Wieger  [8:43] 
let’s I cracked mine early. Sorry. I realized that pre show I thought we were doing so I cracked it. Yeah. What do you think? Very hoppy, which is something I really like. Really good. Where’s this one from again, trying to find San Diego. Canned brewed and canned in San Diego. If I got the 7%

Unknown Speaker  [9:05] 
Hey, Jim, Dave Canyon here, the guy who tortured you during podcast movement 2017 in Anaheim, California with his crappy Android phone. Hey, by the way, you know that according to Google, the 10 year of marriage is mark with tin or aluminum. Both materials represent the durability and flexibility needed to sustain a loving union. So this might be a good time to crack open a beer. A can of beer. Congratulations, Jim. All right,

Jim Collison  [9:33] 
Dave. Thanks for for sending that in. We got a few more that we’ll do

Andrew Morris  [9:37] 
a hit on that thing. To learn how to pour. I

Jim Collison  [9:43] 
dropped it before I

put set it up here and really, it’s gonna be it’s very possible. I did both on that one, like you said, very happy,

Mike Wieger  [9:55] 
very happy. I mean, the hot cloud is definitely an apt name for it. 7% alcohol Really good, but just extremely hoppy. Like, really all you taste when you drink it. So if you like that sugar I barely and I do. It reminds me there was a beer in Omaha called the hop louia and I loved it was like the beer I drank all through college my favorite when I went to a bar and this remind is like bringing back good memories of that hallelujah beer.

Jim Collison  [10:18] 
Yeah, no, I like it. And are you happy fan or not?

Andrew Morris  [10:23] 
I don’t drink a lot of beer anymore. You sort of

Jim Collison  [10:27] 
brilliant card. Like is that even? Can you

tell you one thing? They don’t like boiled food? Like, can you? You can’t say those kinds of things.

Andrew Morris  [10:41] 
We can. Okay, I’m probably drinking more ciders these days? To be honest. You know, and, and hard cider. So you know, sorry. 70%. Yeah, type cider. There’s some really nice ones burden to put together in Tasmania that that feature feature quite frequently in the fridge.

Jim Collison  [11:03] 
Christian, what about you? You got it, you had a preference.

Christian Johnson  [11:07] 
I’m still mostly in the IPAs. And Maryland has a lot of good. local breweries for that jailbreak boo brewery is one of the better ones that has four flavors that you can get an A and A multipack. So

Jim Collison  [11:27] 
all right, good enough. Well, Eric, thanks for sending that beer to us. If you want to send us your local beer, you can do that. Don’t do it outside of the United States. Okay, let’s just be reasonable about this. Send me an email Jim@theAverageGuy.tv, and I will send you my address if you want to send them. Eric, thanks for sending those on. This is one of his favorites. And we appreciate that as well. I should mention just real quick, if you haven’t yet, and you want to start a website and we got the guy here, we’re going to talk a little bit about the infrastructure Maple Grove Partners can’t have Christian on not talk about this. But if you haven’t bought a domain yet, head out to hover do it. Now. Just do it right now.https://theAverageGuy.tv slash or even if you’re driving, start typing it in your car. The average time Just kidding. https://theAverageGuy.tv/hover, get $2 off your first domain. And then just some great domain hosting as well. And then while you’re at it, head over to Maple Grove. partners.com. Christian, do we have some space Maple Grove Partners? Would that be like would you take on somebody at this point,

Christian Johnson  [12:25] 
we have space, we’re building more space. We’re continuing to build out our second data site and we’re just gonna keep rocking and rolling with it.

Jim Collison  [12:34] 
So we’re having fun, pretty great, except when you have a website that has a weird funky WordPress thing going on? Which

Christian Johnson  [12:41] 
there’s that

Jim Collison  [12:42] 
which which the average guy TV seems to I think they have isolated it down to a plugin maybe?

Andrew Morris  [12:48] 
I don’t know. We’ll get it we’ll get a fan of with WordPress.

Unknown Speaker  [12:51] 
Yeah, yeah.

Jim Collison  [12:53] 
Now I know that’s shocking. avid WordPress problem so if you want plants they start they still 10 bucks if I can get in.

Mike Wieger  [13:02] 
Email hosting is fantastic too. So I still do my Ham Radio stuff to there. And I primarily use x I’ve been bad at writing posts. I’m primarily use it for all the email so I have my call sign as my domain and host my email over there works great. Have it on all my devices.

Jim Collison  [13:18] 
Good service. Yeah, super good. You can get it today. And you know, head out to Maple Grove partners.com and ways to sign up right there playing starts to lose 10 bucks. Maple Grove partners.com. Our discord group has been rocking lately. If you’re not out there right now, you probably should https://theAverageGuy.tv/discord, Bust Out has been particularly active in that group. And he left the message as well. Let’s see if we can hear from him.

Unknown Speaker  [13:44] 
Hey, Jim, this is must out. I want to thank you for not only entertaining us all these years, but also for building up a community. So nice to see how everyone has come together around what you build up. You find joy in your creation for many years to come.

Jim Collison  [13:59] 
So it’s nice to hear from folks, isn’t it? I mean, we we spend so much time talking to them online. So busted, bust out. Thanks for doing that. Christian, let’s talk about the data center there or your data center where we call Maple Grove Partners. Give us a quick rundown while we got you. What are you guys doing?

Christian Johnson  [14:19] 
Yeah. So we’re in the process right now of working on something that’s pretty unique for what you know, many would consider either some combination of shared hosting and virtual private hosting, we’re really looking to offer the hybrid experience of high end for high availability without going to a higher end package. So we’re right now building our architectures so that if the data site where your particular environment goes down, it’s gonna automatically be replicated and traffic shifted to a secondary site. So it’s all transparent to you as the as the user, but on the back end, we’re basically Making sure that your stuff stays up. And this like this works in both ways, right? So as we’re expanding capacity and getting more customers, we’re able to expand the sites where we want to host customers primary data, and then shift that and make sure it’s replicated to the secondary site so that at a moment’s notice, if there’s a disaster recovery situation, we can we automatically flip over. that’s taken a lot of evolution. I mean, when we started Maple Grove, it was really actually centered around this community, right, we wanted to offer a platform for podcasters. And that’s still one of our main use cases, although there are several others. But what started as buying a bunch of old servers off of ebay and getting the the internet connection in and kind of evolving that from a test lab, so to speak, that ran the average guy to an actual platform for customers, that’s highly available. That’s really where we’re going forward. We’re very much focused on knowing who’s on our platform, welcoming new people in our platform, we don’t like having kind of a one 800 stingy feel to it. So I personally interact with a lot of people that come on our platform. And we really just make sure that you have what you need to get your job done. Nothing more, nothing less. But the more that we do put in is around that security, high availability and reliability. And we continue to focus on that going forward both with new hardware that we’re landing as well as pretty much gigabit fiber going out to the world wide web. So if you if you think about what you would get on your typical shared hosting, no one’s going to give you kind of that unsaturated bandwidth. We do. We take care of blocking some of the bad things that might get to your site before your site’s firewall has to deal with it. And you know, we’re also kind of strategically located in place where the latencies for people who want to host the United States is pretty fantastic, right? 90% of the world’s internet traffic runs through the Maryland DC, Northern Virginia area, our latency to one of the nearest major telcos is about four milliseconds on our fiber lines. So it’s it’s not a bad network backbone, you’re getting for 10 bucks a month. And then on top of that, you know, we’re making sure that you know, whatever type of app it is, you want to host whether it’s something that would be on a LAMP stack, or otherwise, we’re going to make sure that you have the experience and the mechanisms, you need to run that. So

Jim Collison  [17:28] 
Christian when I was at your place, so I don’t know three or four weeks ago, I saw x 495. Sitting.

Christian Johnson  [17:37] 
Those are like the dead skeleton dead bodies that will just like, follow me around. They still multiply in size even though

Jim Collison  [17:45] 
Yeah, but you got you had one, you’ve got one in the basement.

Christian Johnson  [17:49] 
Yeah,

Jim Collison  [17:50] 
how are you?

How are you doing? So for your own home? You know, we’re all home server guys. Right? We came down to that. Andrew, I’m gonna ask you how you’re doing this as well. What are you doing for your own home storage at this point? Certainly. You got this infrastructure, it’s business related, but how are you doing your own home storage backup?

Christian Johnson  [18:06] 
Yeah, so it’s separate infrastructure, we maintain a lot of different sand devices. And whether it’s an i scuzzy, or even, in some cases, a Fibre Channel, I kind of have to two major sans that are, you know, we could lose multiple drives on them and not have an issue. And those are available over a VPN. So wherever I’m at whether it’s on my cell phone, I can recall data from my machines, or whether it’s, you know, from one side of VPN tunnel or another, it’s very much kind of a converged home network. And it’s, it’s getting cheaper to do actually, more at scale. I mean, you look at the cost of what it takes to throw in a bunch of 12 terabyte spinners, you literally don’t have to change the number of running computers or the amount of power you’re using to do it to have five or six times as much storage as what you did when we first started this podcast. So that aspect has been really incredible, I must say, with respect to the HP x 495. Our, our affectionate name for them has been toasters. And the reason for that is because they run as warm as a toaster does when you’re cooking your bagel in the morning, and it has also cooked a fair number of hard drives. So I have now on our six hard drive that we’ve lost that was in one of those devices. If you compare it to anything else that’s in a more enterprise chassis, you just can’t compare the hardware drive failure rates. Now, the drives that I had most toasters were Seagate drives probably weren’t the best drives in the world at the time. But that said, I have this fine place in my heart for what the concept was and what the possibilities were with that chassis but the case design in the airflow probably never really got ironed out to where it should have been

Jim Collison  [20:02] 
the the the audience, the old audience here that was been the beginning is just killing that they’re like God, they love those boxes those 495 were great, how much? How much storage? Do you think? Like, when you think about what you need to store for data, Christian, but what’s the requirement? Now? Do you think local,

Christian Johnson  [20:20] 
it’s stupid?

I mean, I

i’ve always almost full on my two terabyte hard drive locally. And so just for my personal needs, I probably need around 20 terabytes in a given notice. That doesn’t maybe necessarily include every single photo or video archive or other project I’m working on. But if I were to talk about, you know, the bare essentials, somewhere in that, that 20 terabyte range,

Jim Collison  [20:53] 
yeah, which doesn’t seem too ridiculous anymore. Andrew, when you think about what what are you doing for home storage these days? How are you? Um, so

Andrew Morris  [21:00] 
I’ve still got a home server. There’s still something to do, by the way, I’ve heard Yeah, look, my 2003 base time server still runs after a fashion if I turn it on, which I need to to get some stuff off. I’ve got a Synology ds 918 Plus, with three eight terabyte drives, Seagate ironwolf pros, they’re not the quietest driving in the world. But they seem to have a good mean time between failures. I’m using probably using that three terabytes at the moment, that’s, you know, downloaded movie and TV content, most of our photos go to the cloud. Now being Dropbox and Google

Jim Collison  [21:48] 
what what do you what OS Are you using on the server

Andrew Morris  [21:52] 
runs its own, so it’s running the Synology which is I think it’s a Linux Linux kernel of some some shape or form. And, you know, I got over I got over the whole fact of having to massage it and log into it and patch it and all that sort of stuff. Whereas this, this sends me an email if it’s got an update and I’ll log into it, I apply it you know, I’ve got four or five Docker containers running to grab TV shows that we watch and things like that automatically. So you know the kids the kids turn on the Kodi box and you know, the TV shows they watch a index up automatically and tell them that there’s a new episode to watch and they don’t watch it hot spare on those 322

Jim Collison  [22:35] 
data.

Andrew Morris  [22:37] 
So it runs their own file system bt something or other if RS I think it is. I haven’t got it set up for hot spare, but it gives you enough notice if you’re going to lose one. It is a smart off the drives. And I think a terabyte at he’s about 300 bucks at the moment. So I probably should buy one and throw it in it as a spare but just have it this long. Yeah, the longer the longer it runs the the better chance of it failing as well. So Mike, I

Jim Collison  [23:07] 
just reset up my my Unraid Box, I had taken it down for something and then I was super surprised how easy it was to take that flash drive, put it back in that computers fired up and it’s back.

Mike Wieger  [23:18] 
Basically you can you could move all those hard drives to new hardware as long as you have that USB stick and it’ll fire right back up like it was you have to remap some network. But uh, I love that. See, I’ve moved that around twice since I started using Unraid when certain parts failed, and then it works well.

Jim Collison  [23:34] 
I put some smaller drives in it needed to be I had to reformat some things I had to rebuild parody. So yep, that’s some work that I needed to do. And how are you? What are you using this week? Yeah,

Mike Wieger  [23:45] 
right. This literally this week? No, I’m still on Unraid as well. I don’t think I’ll ever leave Unraid just because it’s the perfect. You know, I’m not a huge, you know, I’m not a developer. I don’t know code. I don’t know all that stuff. So for me Unraid just dead simple. And the point and click the GUI does enough for me. And right now I have 20 terabytes in there, about half full, so 10 terabytes. My usage always just depends on if I’m in my swing of Am I making content or not? Am I making YouTube common if I’m doing videos, am I not but then on the on this computer here I have three terabytes, two of which are just devoted to games, because games take up a lot of space. But for me everything self hosted though, so far in run rate, I’m still running next cloud, which is our whole family. And then some also, some of my wife’s family are using our next cloud instance. And everyone’s photos backup their next cloud. So next cloud host all those photos. That’s how we do photo backup, in addition to our iPhones just backing up to iCloud. And so everything backs up to that that one Unraid Box and it tends to work out really well. And then we backup off site, the critical stuff but a lot of most of that 10 terabytes is Plex, right? It’s movies, TV, everything like that and a little bit of it is actually Send some of my security footage over there as well.

Jim Collison  [25:03] 
Well and into brings up good point, you know, we think about Mike and miss him in this area as we talk about Unraid Team. He was a big Unraid my coward is who we’re talking about big on Unraid Storage. We lost him early here, I think, April of this year, right in the middle of COVID. Yeah. And not not evil. I was I was hoping I knew, you know, we’ve had him on show a couple times and knew with the cancer that he had that it’s it was gonna be sooner than later. And I was really hoping to make the funeral down in Atlanta in the we’re in full lockdown. And so it’s probably April in those days, I couldn’t make it. Certainly, Mike a big, big fan of the show, and we missed that guy. dearly. Um, go ahead, Mike. Oh, one

Mike Wieger  [25:44] 
thing I was gonna mention real quick on Unraid. You know, we had john right from lime tech on a while ago. And he was talking about the beta of 6.9. Their latest beta was just like it took everyone by surprise. They included GPU use in Docker, remember how we had that conversation? There’s, there’s this whole second version of Unraid that people were running in which they didn’t really, they like they didn’t like, they just all sudden wrapped that right into the new release of the beta, which was extremely shocking, but really cool, because now you have full support, and you can be on the actual Unraid version. I’ve had to throw that out. I know a lot of people in our community, we’re waiting for that exact thing for Plex transcoding. If you’re running all that in Docker, now you can take use of your GPU if you have one in there.

Jim Collison  [26:25] 
I need to contact him and get back on the show. We do

Mike Wieger  [26:28] 
especially with that big announcement. I’m like, Hey, you were holding back he probably knew that that was coming. It was very hard for him to have that conversation knowing all that was coming down the pipe.

Jim Collison  [26:36] 
Andrew, you got some some guests there some live live studio audience for us.

Andrew Morris  [26:41] 
Yeah, the LA studio audience is showing absolutely no interest in what I’m doing at the moment.

Jim Collison  [26:47] 
They’re just they’re just napping. Want to play another another call? We got we got a bunch in this week. By the way. Appreciate you guys doing that. And I want to switch gears a little bit. So have a listen to this.

Mike Wieger  [27:13] 
We can’t hear it if you can, Jim.

Oh, really? No.

Andrew Morris  [27:16] 
Yeah. Oh, that’s that’s what I think that was why there was three blade three blade cooks.

Jim Collison  [27:22] 
Yeah. Unfortunate dead air. Yeah.

Mike Wieger  [27:26] 
To speak up sooner or later, if you’re waiting for it to load.

Jim Collison  [27:29] 
I thought I had shared that. That’s. That’s funny. I appreciate you jumping. Let me know. We’ll try to get this is Brian. Here we go. It takes a second for him to come in. So we’ll let him come in here.

Hi, this is Brian from Arizona. I just want to say I love the show. Listen to it for a while. And you guys always are providing great advice. great tips. Always love seeing new gadgets, and really given me confidence to help fill my smart home and get it going. So thanks. Keep up the great work.

Back in the day we did a home server show meet up in Kyle Wilcox was there we were talking about hard drives and storage space. And he wanted a Drobo that I think I had in my possession and i i’d love to drive in it in. It’s just a funny story. So listen to Kyle.

Unknown Speaker  [28:24] 
Hey, Jim, this is car Wilcox. Congratulations on 10 years. Thanks for all the podcasts and the community letting me come on your show all the meetups and that extra hard drive. I’ve had fun made friends and learned a lot. I just want to make sure to leave some Drobo dollar signs here. So yeah,

Jim Collison  [28:41] 
I kind of I kind of missed Andrew around for those days. I think Robo dollar signs in the in the chat area.

Andrew Morris  [28:47] 
I had left. Every time.

Jim Collison  [28:50] 
Every time. Tim Tim black was the the originator of that. I had left a one terabyte hard drive in that Drobo and it shipped out and I’ve ever Dave, you know day or Kyle took off. And it’s like, oh, in the day and one terabyte drive was like a pretty big drive in those days. Andrew, you said you got three eight terabyte drives. I don’t think we even think Christian if you were to think about the minimum size hard drive you’d buy right now. What do you think that would be?

Christian Johnson  [29:24] 
a spinner

Mike Wieger  [29:25] 
or let’s say spinner 12?

Christian Johnson  [29:29] 
bare minimum three. But, I mean, realistically, I haven’t bought any it makes me feel a

Mike Wieger  [29:36] 
little bit better because I literally just grabbed two four terabytes because I have not one to replace my parody drive in Unraid. So I just have a ton of four terabytes I have five I guess now because it’s 20 terabytes. Yeah, I have like six with the parody drive. And I just I haven’t want to upgrade the parodies. I just took two fours and they’re so cheap now. It’s like well, why not? And I’m not gonna I don’t need that bigger drive. But you’re right, the the eight is probably the sweet spot right now.

Christian Johnson  [30:00] 
It’s it’s the sweet spot 12 is starting to emerge there. 16 is higher end but within reach.

Jim Collison  [30:08] 
I, Andrew still saying he’s on one I’ve got in my Drobo. Now I still have a bunch of one and two terabyte drives in there. That you know, the Drobo is kind of the backup device here works just fine. I throw a bunch of those in there. They’re still out there. I think price wise. Here in the in the US I think on eBay, I can get the three and four terabytes for like 50 bucks. Mike, I think that’s

Mike Wieger  [30:28] 
I paid 90 for my 85 for my four terabyte.

Jim Collison  [30:33] 
Okay, but that was new. Brand new. Yeah. So eBay used you can, like 50 bucks.

Mike Wieger  [30:39] 
And I was disappointed. It’s actually one of the drives. It was my first drive to ever go bad and Unraid just went bad. And I thought it was because I have drives that Unraid Box. They’re old. And it was actually one of the Seagate NAS drives that I just put in last year.

So I’m gonna say that

Yeah, so I’m actually I just have it boxed up right now I’m doing the RMA process and sending it in but I couldn’t wait for the RMA. So I had to order new drives. And I didn’t learn my lesson because I actually went with Unraid they spend the disk down most of the time unless they’re being used. So I actually just went with a Seagate compute drive which is terrible idea. But um, so I think the Seagate NAS or even probably about $100 for four terabyte, and right around that same price for Western Digital read. Andrew, what about you? What do you think?

Andrew Morris  [31:24] 
Um, I look I’m running on holes. Like I said before, they’re a little bit noisy, I’m running the V and W, V and o two twos, which are the earlier models, the vn w four, which is a CMR drive, they’re meant to be a lot quieter. So you know, as a firewall, replace them with those, the beauty of the Synology. So I can take it from eight terabyte drives to 12 or whatever the weight or size is, and it just takes care of it for me. And that’s all every build on its own. That’s right.

Mike Wieger  [31:56] 
Yeah, that and Unraid all those where you can just kind of mix and match and it’s amazing how much how many use cases you can find for old hard drives. Oh yeah, minor all right here you can see them all stacked up. And I’m always pulling one of those off to like transfer some data right just it’s something there if you do it all the network available or something I’m going to take one down Actually, my brother in law and I are building our mother in law, a new computer for Christmas. I’m gonna take one down loaded up with all our old files, we can bring it back up here and and move everything over for it’s always a use case for a terabyte and some of these are even like 300 400 gigs spinners

Andrew Morris  [32:28] 
I should just throw out Yeah, my my home servers. So I think it’s got three to 50 gig spinners in it. And one on work one. One of them doesn’t one of them is dodgy. So when I started. I’ve got to sit there with the drive and go like that to keep it running.

Jim Collison  [32:44] 
Tap it, drop it remember all the tricks. They buy a stick in the freezer for a couple hours and drop a freezer in the freezer all these tricks to unstick a spinner. In those days. My Mike my Unraid you know when I reconfigured it because I needed I wanted some drive space. So I took it away from the Unraid Box. 800 gig. That’s that’s his. That’s his big, it’s made up on four laptop drives. So like it’s a suit, but you know what it works? It works. It works really, really well. Yeah.

Mike Wieger  [33:14] 
And do you have an SSD in there for cash?

Jim Collison  [33:16] 
I don’t know. I don’t even have Oh, it’s slow. But it is and I’m not gonna do a lot on it. I just was thinking if we’re gonna have john back on the program, I can’t do that and not have an Unraid Box running.

Mike Wieger  [33:27] 
Right? Oh, see, you have like any Docker is running on it.

Jim Collison  [33:31] 
Right now.

Andrew Morris  [33:31] 
So yeah, okay.

Mike Wieger  [33:32] 
Once you experience that you’ll, you’ll fully go Unraid you’ll be like, Okay, I’m putting some big drives in here. It’s perfect for guys like you and me. Well, go ahead. Let’s

Andrew Morris  [33:42] 
talk what’s on ride cost these days? Is it subscription model or is a one off cost?

Mike Wieger  [33:47] 
a one off cost, which is the best part about it? And they said they’re not going to change that. I think it was $60

Andrew Morris  [33:52] 
that’s what Google said about Google Photos.

Mike Wieger  [33:55] 
Yeah, but these guys I don’t know. I for some reason I trust them. They see pricing What are they currently 60 $60 for basic, which is up to six drives 12 drives at $9 unlimited drives 129 so even if you get a max current 29 bucks for life

Andrew Morris  [34:14] 
saifee average Ponta Fannie Mae, Fannie Mae basic anyway. For Who’s your your average punter, your average average guy? Okay.

Mike Wieger  [34:24] 
Yeah, you’re right.

Unknown Speaker  [34:25] 
Yeah, I was gonna say it’s at 100

Mike Wieger  [34:28] 
we’re like like a football punter

Jim Collison  [34:32] 
understand what you say? Most of the time I just shake my head. Okay, that’s

Andrew Morris  [34:37] 
not Yeah.

Mike Wieger  [34:38] 
Yeah. 59 bucks for that. It’s not bad.

Jim Collison  [34:41] 
Yeah, ready says he still has some extra dress. In service in I might have I might have a maxtor sitting in a stack somewhere waiting to be

Andrew Morris  [34:50] 
i get i get bought by someone or they just not see a bottom. Okay, I think Cyborg everyone. In Western Digital.

Jim Collison  [34:58] 
There’s only two left right. I think Those are the two. I think those are the two that are left. Hey, let’s, let’s go one more. Let’s go on with you.

Andrew Morris  [35:06] 
If you if you’re going to buy flash,

Jim Collison  [35:08] 
what would you buy? That’s a good I was gonna I was gonna get to that after the voicemail. So hold back for one second. Let me play. Let me play another voicemail. This is Jim Schumacher.

Unknown Speaker  [35:20] 
Hey, Jim, I first remember hearing you on the home server show. And then then meeting you at the 2012 meetup. Those meetups were all great good times at the Irish pub, fish and chips.

Unknown Speaker  [35:30] 
Good stuff.

Unknown Speaker  [35:31] 
I started listening to your podcast as soon as I learned about them, and I kept with it. We had a series of excellent co hosts and guests. I had to get my dose of tech somewhere. It’s been really neat to meet some of your family along the way. Congratulations on 10 years. And here’s a toast to 10 more. You toast? There’s a toast to 10 more. Why don’t you guys Oh, there we go.

Jim Collison  [35:53] 
Good job. Good job. Christian SSD. Let’s start with you on this as we think about sweet spot, and I’m assuming we’re going to or NVMe. Now, right, we’re SSD in that traditional sense as we’re moving into those. So Christian, what do you think?

Christian Johnson  [36:11] 
Yeah, two terabyte for the solids, both in the classic form and in the NVMe form, it is a little bit harder to find PCIe for nvm ease and the two terabyte form for example, the high end NVMe from Samsung, they 60 there is a one terabyte Max is where you can find mostly, if you look at the gigabit aorus series, you can get up to two terabytes which the bus speeds are about 5500 megabytes per second on reads and close to five on writes. So pretty impressive chip. If you’re going to buy new and you’re you’re building it into a new computer, I’d make sure you buy something that’s PCI for at this point. So okay,

Jim Collison  [37:07] 
Andrew, your thoughts?

Andrew Morris  [37:10] 
The laptop I’m using at the moment? boots off a Western Digital black? I think it is. And then the data is on a Samsung one terabyte. So, five 512 for the system. terabyte for data. It’s not new work machine. I own the data data drive they own the system drove

Jim Collison  [37:35] 
What do you think the sweet spot is? Right now?

Andrew Morris  [37:38] 
price? What price was that? Here? It’s a terabyte. Okay. And I’ll come in me. Look, I think I’d probably go crucial Samsung for the most part.

Jim Collison  [37:51] 
Yeah, I think that’s kind of the default. Western Digital is making a big play in that space. They they’re their brand is solid there. But yeah, there’s a lot of Samsung donut.

Andrew Morris  [38:02] 
Yeah, and crucial symptom of much better long time be much better meantime between fire quote, you know, 1.1 point 8 million hours versus 1.5. Which is significant if you’re using it for you know, home automation. So my, my Knox got a crucial in it purely for that reason. Because if it comes through, if it comes through the form, you know, that’s another one, right? 200,000 hours.

Jim Collison  [38:27] 
Andrew, you know, with the exception of price for you guys, and it’s a little cheaper here in the US than it is Australia. But in Christian you say two terabytes. Do you think we’re to the spot, honestly, for most people to is enough in you know, yeah, we used to do an SSD and then a spinner. Now, with most things being in the cloud, I Christian is a two and that’s it. That’s all that’s all you really need. I mean, are we kind of to that point for most people?

Christian Johnson  [38:55] 
Depends how good your backups are.

Andrew Morris  [38:57] 
Yeah. Depends how good you are still as a true i i

Christian Johnson  [39:07] 
the modern day equivalent is you have your boot drive on an NVMe and your data drives as SSDs and if you look at a lot of the case designs that you’ve seen in the last year, they’re optimized for you know, hiding your your two and a half inch SSD cards on the back of the motherboard case and then having your m twos presented on the front with a heatsink or cover of some kind so the cases are building that way. If you look at the amount of space they save for spinners in a mid range a TX maybe you get three slots for them. I doubt anyone’s actually using them, especially if they’re going with that SSD layout. never hurts to have some extra SSDs around especially if you have if you want to make backups to different types of risk as Andrew points out different types of things that Restore differently. Rather than just having multiple backups that get restored by the same program, like maybe you backup your system one way with, let’s just say, server essentials, and then you do another backup with just classic Windows systems and edge. And then maybe your third backup is to cloud if that’s if that’s for you. So

Mike Wieger  [40:21] 
yeah, I mean, my setup is a little bit different. I think you’re totally right on, on how most people do it, because that’s pretty much how I do it. So I run my boot off an NVMe 500 gigs and then I have my SSD on the back back of the motherboard. And that’s where I store the games that I play. And then but then I still do have a two terabyte spinner in here as well and that is for all of like YouTube video content Rafa, just want to I want to have locally on this machine, but I want to throw it somewhere, it doesn’t need to be fast at all. And I just had an extra two terabyte later on Honestly, it could be an SSD, but I don’t experience any. So it’s kind of like the cold storage. For me, it’s games I haven’t played anymore. But if a buddy says, hey, man want to go back to that old school game used to play, it’s probably still on the hard drive, somewhere here doesn’t need to take up SSD space. I think that’s, that’s pretty true. It’s so funny on backup, I backup my server, religiously. I don’t care, this machine can catch fire tomorrow. And I could rebuild it in like an hour without a backup. I don’t back anything here up. Everything here is like pulled from the server. Usually, I think that’s why and it might I might have to redownload some games. But besides that I’ve just I have lost and it’s probably bad of me to say that. But all my work my main machine down here, not my work machine, I have not found the need. And I have just wiped and redone it a few times when I’ve run into something. And it’s like it’s so painless. Now with everything being cloud, whatever cloud is to you cloud as your own server cloud is off Prem, whatever it is, it’s pretty easy to rebuild a computer these days, probably not for you, Kristen, you have a lot of mission critical stuff on your main machine. But I think for a lot of like I consider myself a very average guy user for this machine. Even I think for a lot of people, but then again, I say that but all my stuff is stored on an in house server, people are probably storing a lot of that stuff on their main machine. And not on a server in their house. So I’m probably in a weird spot with being average guy slash not average guy.

Jim Collison  [42:15] 
JOHN says he built an Unraid Box, intending to transfer everything over the sense fryer, which he did, but we got around to decommission Windows Server 2011 you know, nine years, Chris, I’m, yeah, kill it. Sounds familiar story. Christian. You know, we used to think like the OS, the life of an iOS was just a couple years, three, four years. That seems to be getting stretched out a little bit like, I don’t know, I could be wrong, but it just kind of seems like I hear a lot of guys running older versions of things. I know. We got to worry about patches and stuff. Andrew, this is a little bit of your space tank. But but it’s no right on but it just seems like Oh,

Andrew Morris  [43:01] 
look at windows look at windows seven. Yeah. You know, half the teams in the world are still running their bloody operating system, right? Yeah.

Mike Wieger  [43:10] 
Even hardware though, replace it throw, throw an SSD and something that had a spinner. And those machines this iMac behind me is a 2000. When did I graduate undergrad? Um, 12,012 machine works great use all the time. It’s actually run sighthound I can I can. So he’s a daily driver. All I had to do is put an SSD in there, the hardware is lasting forever. My Unraid server is nice. 737 70 right. I mean, it runs great. And then old motherboard. And I think the hardware is even lasting.

Christian Johnson  [43:43] 
I even cars are lasting longer. Right. I mean, the reality is that the the way we designed and whether it’s designing and building transistors and and hardware on a circuit board, or whether it’s the architecture and design of operating systems that are just able to be more resilient and self healing, particularly in software, certainly in hardware. I mean, one of the biggest Stark changes at the 10 year mark for me is look at what a BIOS was 10 years ago to what it is today. Like, are you kidding me 10 years ago, you know, the types of viruses I would look at online were half a megabyte. If you flash it wrong, you were done. Go buy a new motherboard or you had all the equipment you needed. If you were lucky to either pull the BIOS chip out of the motherboard flash back to something that worked and put it back in if you hadn’t damaged the hardware. Or you were looking at soldering pins and the whole nine yards right today, go pick up a new motherboard. Some of these firmware images are two gigabytes, just for the BIOS and there’s two BIOS chips. And if you want to revert back to the previous version, you hit a button on the back of your motherboard and it takes you back and it automatically flashes back over. And good luck reading some of the source code in those because it’s it’s basically an operating system unto itself that boots right from the time you hit the power button so even at the at the firmware level before you even talk about the operating system, it is a vastly different place in software and underlying hardware functions are just far more mature

Jim Collison  [45:26] 
Christian BIOS bots still around. I did you said that I forgot we even mentioned BIOS are

Christian Johnson  [45:32] 
still still live to tell the tale. I admit, it’s been some time since i’ve i’ve, you know, been active in the community. But it’s still still out there still chugging along. And it’s amazing the types of old hardware that people are trying to keep running and keep alive. So that definitely serves a valuable purpose.

Jim Collison  [45:56] 
I hear Andrew, you said you didn’t even want to go into this. So ask your personal opinion on this. And I know you know, for a guy who supports you do this day in and day out, and you’re supporting me. So of course, it’s not great that that folks are running older hardware, but we’re just really thinking about the consumer, our space running server software, that seems like we can get away with a lot less, it’s still do what we’re doing. Yeah.

Andrew Morris  [46:23] 
Look some of the vulnerabilities in particularly in server 2008. So if you’re running Windows Home server 2011, for example, you really need to have a good hard look at yourself, and what are you prepared to lose? It’s not some, it’s not so much the risk of having it sitting behind a firewall, you know, if you got a decent firewall, and you never expose it to the internet, you know, who cares? But, you know, if you’ve got stuff on there, you don’t want to lose. There’s some pretty horrible people out there on the internet. And if you’ve got personal data stored on it, you know, nothing’s unable to be cracked, no matter how well you encrypt it. Yeah. They encrypt encryption software’s they because they can break it. That’s my that’s my, that’s my slant on it.

Jim Collison  [47:08] 
I think it’s, I think it’s a good I think it’s a good warning. You know, I think that’s like, it’s probably time to upgrade. Jim Shoemaker says, Yeah, use BIOS mod on my n 40. L. Thanks, again, Christian. For that, um, and it just seemed like we talked a lot about that. And then we, yeah,

Andrew Morris  [47:25] 
that was a hot topic. Few

Christian Johnson  [47:27] 
months wasn’t it? Was I mean, I remember when we did all the BIOS updates to get the quad core CPUs running on the HP 485 and 495. And yeah, all those all those little toasters I have running around our quad core Xeon, which, you know, in comparison to the Celeron D chip that shipped with it, which was single core and couldn’t transcode a video if you paid money to night and day difference for the cost of a BIOS update and a $60 CPU chip.

Andrew Morris  [48:02] 
I have your skills to be able to make that sort of stuff work.

Jim Collison  [48:06] 
Yeah, Christian never surprised me about your Christian is that there was just there was nothing that was ever too hard. Like, yeah, this is really difficult and everybody’s planting and Christians like, but I couldn’t figure it out.

Christian Johnson  [48:19] 
I’m just a butterfly for chasing problems. I find that as elegant as a game of chess, you know, just infinite outcomes.

Mike Wieger  [48:27] 
run towards Jain danger, right. Yeah, superhero.

Unknown Speaker  [48:31] 
Yeah, I,

Jim Collison  [48:31] 
I want to play one more, one more voicemail. Then I’m gonna ask you three the question, what do you think has changed the most in 10 years? So as we think about all those technologies that we were talking about back in 2010, up to today, 2020, which has changed the most. So let me play this voicemail. Nathaniel sent this to us. And then I’ll ask the question. Here we go.

Unknown Speaker  [48:57] 
Hello, Jim and Mike in the Home Gadget Geeks family. This is Nathaniel Lindley in Minnesota. I want to thank you for recording and sharing stories with all of us. I appreciate the variety of voices and perspectives over the years. Cheers to you to learning to listening. And congratulations on 10 years of the Home Gadget Geeks podcast.

Jim Collison  [49:18] 
Everybody who did that sent in a voice of mail via our pod page that’s available in I had Home Gadget geeks.com working. Then I sent out a tweet to like Hey, leave with a message. I don’t know what we did. We took it down. So it didn’t work for a while. You go to pod page.com slash Home Gadget Geeks I think you need to put dashes in there. Home Gadget Geeks, you can leave us a voicemail. This is actually something Mike and I would love to have you guys do on a fairly regular basis questions for things you want to ask. It’s 30 seconds so it doesn’t take a long time. You can just drop in there and leave us a voicemail and we appreciate that as well is I go back to the post Let me bring up that original post really quick. And let’s just look at it as you guys are kind of thinking. So I think I did this post the Andrew i don’t i think this is before I roped you into making yet. But this week we spend most of the show focusing on Microsoft Windows Live Essentials. 2011 Brian most recent post on the line mom still uses that. really well. You know what I still use the video. The finance,

Andrew Morris  [50:28] 
that’s what she that’s what she uses. She uses someone else

Jim Collison  [50:33] 
to still use life rather to

Andrew Morris  [50:35] 
just it just works.

Jim Collison  [50:36] 
Yeah, no, it’s still continues. Now you can’t find it anywhere on the web. Like it’s not it’s not there anymore. I still have it. But it because I use it so much. But we talked about Windows Live Essentials, how to set up how to set it up. Getting started with it. We talked about Skype, remember those days blogger and WordPress Dropbox?

Andrew Morris  [50:55] 
Agent? Well,

Unknown Speaker  [50:57] 
yeah. Yeah,

Jim Collison  [50:59] 
I’m Christian, let’s start with you, as you think, about 10 years ago. And then you think about today, what do you think? What do you think’s changed the most and in to find that however you want, I was gonna say better or worse. But what do you think’s had the most change what’s got the most Delta in their

Christian Johnson  [51:22] 
consumerism, particularly in the enthusiast space, right? Like the things that excite us are very different. And actually, if you think about, even the rebranding of the show, from home tech to home gadget, right, it was the introduction of the era of gadgets that suddenly lit consumers up into a different way of experiencing computers, right. And now, yeah, I remember in the early days, a home tech where we’d have these royal crusades about whether or not anyone would buy a phablet for a phone. And now, everyone, everyone has one, right. And it’s a computing device. And there’s plenty people who would be just as happy to have a phone and not a computer, because to them, it’s the same thing. So really, I think that presentation of computing and the technology industry, and I loosely call it ubiquitous computing, right, regardless of the platform, or the gadget, or the thing, the major difference from 10 years ago till now is that it’s very cheap and effective and accessible, to have any type of consumer product have an IP address and Network Connectivity, some kind or fashion and a compute mechanism. And 10 years ago, we just weren’t at a point where things were reliable enough at that price point to make it worthwhile. infrastructure was still, you know, budding it by comparison to what it is today. I mean, there’s so much more internet infrastructure that powers what we can do today that we don’t even think about it. And so the next gadget, or the next app, or the next whatever, can pop up in weeks in comparison to the years that would have taken if you had started in 2010, or something like that. So

Mike Wieger  [53:10] 
yeah, that follows. I was gonna say accessibility, right? Like, can you think of everything that has changed? Well, personally, for me, I was all Mac and then I came on this show. And now I have like an old Mac and an iPhone. That’s the only Mac products I have my house and I was supposed to be the Mac guy coming into this. So personally, it’s been operating systems of choice for me is now Windows and Linux, but accessibility for everyone. I mean, if you think about back then like the dream was to you know, someone mentioned Chad’s streaming, right? access to live streams, access to video. Yeah, it was all there. But just like how much better it’s gotten access to think about you walk around with access to your entire photo library in your pocket. content, every single foot Yeah, you’re kind of all your personal photos, which is searchable by AI. And I can say show me a picture of my dog and it shows me all the way back to the beginning of time, all my photos, video games, you can now with all the stadia an Xbox, you can stream from your console to your phone, anywhere in the world. I can play my video games from my console, like that type of accessibility is is crazy. And I think even 10 years ago, which isn’t that long ago 10 years ago, I think I was a freshman or sophomore in college. And I mean, that was right as I was starting to create my YouTube account so I can remember the things that excited me like Dropbox was like big for me back then. I think my first video on YouTube was like Dropbox tutorial and how people didn’t get like your files could sync all totally different devices and how would that work? Things like that for the for the average person, right? The tech people knew all about that. But for the average people that just that that was still new to them. So accessibility is probably my biggest focus in the last 10 years.

Jim Collison  [54:51] 
Yeah, no, that’s a good point, Mike. I think that’s what I hadn’t thought of in that.

Unknown Speaker  [54:56] 
Andrew, what

Jim Collison  [54:57] 
about you? What do you think?

Andrew Morris  [54:59] 
Um, Also look at our growth with those guys, I would, I would have added internet of things as well, you know, every everyone automation is becoming so accessible, you know, you buy a $30 Smart switch from the hardware store, plug it in, point a Raspberry Pi at at for another 3040 bucks, and you can turn your lights off and on, you can put your blinds up and down depending on you know, where the sun is in its azimuth across the sky during the day, what your temperatures are doing in your room, you know, again, you get the sky’s the limit to what you can do, you know, basically, or simply what we’re doing here is, you know, we control temperature based on whether we’re home or heading towards home or white or away from home. And, you know, just some automated lights and stuff like that. But some of the stuff people are doing with, you know, very cost affordable home automation is amazing. And then it ties into everything, you know, you can tie it into your phone, you can tie it into, you know, a tablet, you know, double sided taped onto a wall or voice control, you know, look at look at a lexer and, and the Google Home ecosystem. You know, whoever thought that you’d be turning on your TV and changing channels or talking to a gadget, or your remote control for that matter. Yeah, then you LG TV turn on TV channels given.

Jim Collison  [56:33] 
I don’t know if we saw that comment as we were talking about some of these early things. I don’t know if we saw you remember, we used to rip really hard on The Voice assistance.

Andrew Morris  [56:43] 
Like oh, yeah. Can you remember how bad Cortana was?

Mike Wieger  [56:50] 
How bad and still is? Right?

Andrew Morris  [56:54] 
Yeah, I’m serious. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say and all you Apple fanboys have got Siri.

Mike Wieger  [57:06] 
Go Yeah, that’s why I mean, it’s gotten better. But it’s still it’s definitely, I’m so used to living in the Amazon ecosystem. And I mean, everything in our house is a lady enabled. And we use a lady for everything the kids come to, I hear them in the mornings, because when Hannah leaves, the kids come to the base. Next, they get a little play time before I’m kind of wanting them to get ready. And they come down. Hey, lady, turn on the basement lights and my kids four. And like that just makes sense. And then the little one, the three year old was like you got it. You made it work. You got it. Like they’re all really happy when it works. Because he can he can enunciate well enough now that she understands him. Yeah, you’re right, the Internet of Things has been a massive change. There are still family like my mom is someone who will not allow those devices in her home.

Andrew Morris  [57:51] 
Because they’re listening on that. I

Mike Wieger  [57:54] 
mean, yeah, that and just like, My home is my spot. Like she doesn’t she doesn’t she doesn’t want security cameras, because you know, especially the cloud ones. I mean, she’s just not about this is my safe place. And you bring those in, and yeah, they’re listening or more data you can give to people so and she she’s not even a 10 hat person at all. She just like, ya know, I’ve lived without it my whole life. I’m good. Like, I don’t like how do you live without it? It’s everything in our house. There’s not a thing that isn’t connected to that device.

Andrew Morris  [58:21] 
Yeah, well, both my kids have got, you know, look, the little Lenovo, Google Assistant enable alarm clock, you know, first thing they do in the morning, you hear him? You know, Google, what’s the weather today, you know, Google Play some song that I’ve got no interest in hearing? And, you know, as long as it stays in their bedroom? I don’t care. So yeah, you know, that’s second nature to them.

Mike Wieger  [58:42] 
It is Yeah. Which is, which is interesting. watching them grow up. And in that time is

Jim Collison  [58:47] 
better. You know, it’s creepy. So if you use a like, if you lose, use the a lady, sorry, the a lady go into the app for her. And then there’s an area I think you go into settings and then voice training. And you can it will play back some of the audio that you’ve recorded in there to say who is this because it’s trying to learn you and the other members of the family is trying to learn who those people are. And then listen to the way you do these commands. It’s super funny because sometimes in the morning, I’ll whisper to the to it. You know, and it’ll tell me in a whisper it’ll tell me back but it records that right. And, man, you start listening those things and we sound awful in like, we must be asking this thing. You know, Sarah must be half asleep. She was like, what’s the weather today?

Andrew Morris  [59:42] 
So if you go into the bedroom, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. RFA, seven in the bedroom. Yeah, that’s

Jim Collison  [59:47] 
probably good call. But

Mike Wieger  [59:49] 
my bathroom and my bedroom. I have

Unknown Speaker  [59:52] 
no place in the bedroom. Yeah.

Jim Collison  [59:57] 
You know, I was trying to go I was thinking along these lines. What was different 10 years ago and and the average cable TV looked totally different 10 years ago Christian, remember the graphic you gave me? Was this blue? I will never forget it was this blue picture of a building with

Christian Johnson  [1:00:11] 
pretty awful, pretty awful.

Jim Collison  [1:00:13] 
I didn’t we just throw it up there was fine. Second went to the Wayback Machine and it says the Wayback Machine says, Sorry, this URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine. Is that possible? Could I have been blacklisted from the Wayback Machine?

Unknown Speaker  [1:00:30] 
I have to dig into this kind of thing.

Christian Johnson  [1:00:34] 
I may have done some something with way back from like a Ah, yeah,

Jim Collison  [1:00:40] 
right.

Christian Johnson  [1:00:40] 
I’m trying to remember what I did. I think I did a list a whole bunch of stuff back then

Mike Wieger  [1:00:45] 
saving you from yourself, Jim. Yeah. Well,

Jim Collison  [1:00:49] 
I have a revised version of it on Maple Grove Partners. So I can go back to those. I just, it was fun to see the old styling is a part of it. I think my my thing and 10 years is we think about it. And maybe it’s not the biggest change overall. But just in the way we do blogging and podcasting, like it has, I think about what’s available to us today. The ability to connect the four of us together, Mike and I are close, but Christian, you’re across the country. Andrew, you’re on the other side of the world. And in the ease at which it we’re able to do it that in the cost in which we’re able to. I mean, I’ve been doing it for free on stream yard for I don’t know, since stream yard started, was doing it free on Google Hangouts before that. I just bought the $10 plan for stream yard because he got me some more hours and I want to do some more live streaming of the smoker, you know, the grill. And so it’s like, you know, is limited by 20 on the free plan. For 10 bucks, they offered a plan for Black Friday. I think back to the days of we cobble together Ustream or we cobbled together Hangouts and Skype and some other plugins to make it all work. Yeah. Christian. I’ve got I’ve got Christian and me and Gary talking on Skype in I think via Ustream in those days. Christian I think that was that’s just a couple years in.

Andrew Morris  [1:02:10] 
That’s when Gary was making sure you an hour Okay, for Christian

Jim Collison  [1:02:12] 
I was, I think it was a big interview is, like, really hanging out he was it was sick that it was great having Gary on the show, and I know you’re listening, so I appreciate Kenny. He’s only

Andrew Morris  [1:02:29] 
he’s only human. Of course, he’s listening.

Jim Collison  [1:02:31] 
He’s listening. He never he doesn’t jump in the chat room. But I know he’s listening. So Gary is on the show. So fish, but then even think about you know, blocking on completely different from the traditional blog, then onto medium. You know, I have four or five, six years ago. And then today, blogging, really it’s Facebook and Instagram are the blogging platforms, I think of what people are using today to do that, especially Instagram, how many of you are who’s not on? Or I should say who is on Instagram? Or why I’m on Instagram.

Andrew Morris  [1:03:07] 
Okay, I don’t actively put content on it I’m a consumer but

Mike Wieger  [1:03:10] 
what it’s made for me especially as a guy I think blogs before had more of a lean towards women for for blogging. And there are a bunch of guy blogs out there too. But I think for me Instagram is like a really good I first of all, I love consuming video and photo content, but like feed people stories, like I follow a bunch of hunting channels and tactical channels. I really like ham radio channels, technology channels. And it’s almost like you get vlogs and like little mini forums and my wife I don’t think she’s ever read a blog in her life maybe when we were having kids and she was first trying to read some some mommy blogs, but she follows a ton of Instagram influencers wherever you want to call them. And they’re smaller people, even local people to hear and you know, all the fashion stuff and and that’s how she consumes all of her quote unquote, like blog style content is through Instagram stories. That’s it

Jim Collison  [1:04:02] 
well, and I’m finding the youtubers are on Instagram first. So they do their live stuff is kind of on Instagram and then they’re recording whatever they’re doing. They’re polished stuff is on YouTube, right behind the scenes is Yeah,

Andrew Morris  [1:04:17] 
Yeah, I think so. And Snapchat, I didn’t I don’t know if it’s

Mike Wieger  [1:04:21] 
dead, but I that’s my main source of communication. Actually.

Andrew Morris  [1:04:25] 
They all have no I have never looked at a Snapchat or tik tok. Really,

Mike Wieger  [1:04:30] 
I think it’s all depends on where your friends are at. So for me that took off.

Unknown Speaker  [1:04:36] 
Well, older than you know, you’re

Mike Wieger  [1:04:39] 
in college that Snapchat got its rise and meal, my friends just got on it and we’ve never left it. So even even my mother in law, my parents aren’t on any social media. So it’s texting or calling them or FaceTime or Lyft calling on 35 years ago. Okay, well, yeah, I think so. There’s definitely still a community around. I think it just You had to have used that as a primary communication at some point. And it just happened to be ours and we’ve stayed on it.

Unknown Speaker  [1:05:05] 
Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  [1:05:07] 
But

Mike Wieger  [1:05:08] 
that only I don’t think I’ve texted my friends in a very long time. Yeah, my close my four I call my four like main friends and call it my ornaments I had all through college. There. We all just use Snapchat for some reason.

Andrew Morris  [1:05:18] 
I don’t know, if they say oh, my friends. We’re all WhatsApp.

Jim Collison  [1:05:22] 
Okay, well, and what’s happened in Asia in particular is very, very strong in Europe. And I’ve never even used WhatsApp. nobody uses that space.

Andrew Morris  [1:05:32] 
But then what WhatsApp is fully encrypted, they guarantee that no one’s going to be able to get your content right on.

Mike Wieger  [1:05:37] 
I Well, my buddy uses it with his like his large extended family, because they’re all in different platforms. All of my friends have iPhones. So we could still use iMessage. But health his family, they use WhatsApp, because some of them don’t have Facebook. But they’re all willing to the ones that don’t have Facebook are willing to get WhatsApp because of the cryptid. They trust it more than they would trust, like a Facebook. And that’s why they use WhatsApp. I think it’s just all the different circles have different needs of running.

Andrew Morris  [1:06:02] 
Trust, it’s ironic that trust and more than Facebook given her wines.

Jim Collison  [1:06:06] 
Yeah. Christian would that

Christian Johnson  [1:06:11] 
I don’t know, the whole social sphere is continuing to I think bifurcate and not not really get any clear. You know, I think when Facebook first came out, it was seen as revolutionary. Now, I think it’s it’s pretty much an afterthought, in many of the younger age groups, and a lot of the older demographics are now starting to discover it like it’s brand new. It’s very confusing. There’s a lot of migratory patterns and people picking up and dumping platforms, I think you’ve seen a lot of change in how platforms try to position themselves regulate themselves, make everybody happy and make no one happy as a result. I’m not yet totally convinced that social media is somewhat of a failed experiment, you know, in some ways, you know, I again, I define social media very narrowly, I define it as that, that profile, that thing, you’re maintaining that communication mechanism, like, to me social media is a distinct category from like, a chat application or a video call, right? And so I think, you know, snapchats such a perfect example, right? Because rather than maintaining this, you know, long thought out profile where you can scroll back into a timeline to the beginning, and everything is there’s a for life. Well, Snapchat is I take a picture, I send it to people, whoever wants to save it, they save it. Three years from now, no one’s gonna remember, no one’s gonna care, whatever, right? And a lot of the things that have become more popular in the last two to three years are these temporary ephemeral things like Tick Tock videos or whatever, right? So Instagram Stories even

Mike Wieger  [1:08:01] 
right, there. Were hours you have 24 hours to watch it after that. It’s gone.

Christian Johnson  [1:08:04] 
Yep. And so I’m convinced that part of the reason why social media is is innovating so quickly or so rapidly is because it’s still trying to figure out what the heck it is. And so I it’s to me, it started something there have been good out shoots of it, but the main product of social media is like,

Unknown Speaker  [1:08:26] 
Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Mike Wieger  [1:08:27] 
Well, for me, it kind of clicks of what people loved about it before is it connected you with people you might not always talk to? Right? At least it was for me, right? Social media was, Hey, I never talked to my kids, my buddy sweet car, who grew up here in Omaha, and we grew up all his kids. And then we moved, I moved away and I never talked to him again. And when Facebook came out, we connected on there. I was like, oh, cool, I could see him. And now that’s just kind of a norm right? Everyone is connected but you don’t need the all the extra things that came along with sr, all history. What’s their current job title? It’s all that stuff. Doesn’t matter more. Right? Maybe it’s just more of just an instinct connectivity.

Andrew Morris  [1:09:04] 
style damn on it. So I need to print my facebook profile. And

Christian Johnson  [1:09:08] 
yeah, it’s funny though, because at least for me, maybe I’m weird. I am weird, but I would much rather go talk and meet people in enthusiastic form and a topic or I’m researching or subject matter, right. Like if you think about one of the most successful social media experiments personally for me has been watching the average guy migrate to discord, because I can follow the conversations I can get content. It’s so much easier to digest than anything that social media and I think part of it is because it is a weird instant message version of what form what what form boards were, you know, before, before people flocked to free social media, it was webmasters hosting message boards where people would come in and post or oh my gosh, mailing list servers, right like if you want to go watch period Entertainment. Just subscribe to the public Linux Linux mail list and watch Linus Torvalds tear someone a new one. I mean, and he’s tearing, you know, really senior engineers at these top companies and it’s free entertainment. But

Unknown Speaker  [1:10:15] 
yeah, you could

Christian Johnson  [1:10:16] 
go you could go sign up and reply. Well, yeah and so it’s like he That to me is much more of the the old school social media that still has a very strong undercurrent and how people connect online today. So that’s a great point. I

Mike Wieger  [1:10:33] 
love the discord movement whenever that is keep that going because I that’s my May I love living in Discord. When it’s my social time, right? I have it up on my computer. I’m down here I have a bunch of different servers of servers I’m a part of, and it’s it’s great. I love it. You can stay just as injected as you want to be right, you can dip in dip out and always have be able to go back and kind of see what the conversation was. I love it.

Jim Collison  [1:10:57] 
Andrew, what is AI? What is AI ca

Andrew Morris  [1:11:02] 
isca was a online bulletin board system run by the unions in the States. Let me quickly google it because it’s still the universities escaping me

Jim Collison  [1:11:16] 
while you’re looking that up if you want to join us University of Utah,

Andrew Morris  [1:11:20] 
University of Iowa.

Jim Collison  [1:11:22] 
Yeah, just down the street from me if you want to join our discord group https://theAverageGuy.tv/Discord. Okay, keep going.

Andrew Morris  [1:11:29] 
Yeah, and this this, this thing was run off of a bulletin board system called Citadel, and it was rooms and rooms and rooms and rooms and yet a thousands of people are going at any given time from all over the world. This is really nice, mind you, by the late 80s, early 90s all University cuties that it was hip. And I, I met people all over the world. I traveled to stay with people and meet people that I met on it. What year? I started using it 99 I think?

Jim Collison  [1:12:05] 
Yeah, no, yeah. Cool. Super cool. Well, it’s certainly socials come a long way. In the 10 years, we’ve been doing this. You know, I, we I don’t think I mean, Facebook was super young. In 2010. I was gonna go back and look through, even if it was, I might have wrote I might or may not I, I’ll you know, say I did or I didn’t kind of based on who’s asking. But I wrote an article that Facebook is dead in 2012.

Andrew Morris  [1:12:39] 
It might be rotting.

Jim Collison  [1:12:41] 
after Christmas, and I had I had five or six really good points of why this was just a flash in the pan and now it’s gone. Well, okay, I was wrong.

Andrew Morris  [1:12:51] 
So I didn’t even have a time movie at that stage.

Jim Collison  [1:12:54] 
No, I didn’t have anything. Nobody even knew who Mark Zuckerberg was right. We were just, we were just kinda okay. I want to wrap this with one quick segment on on something I found interesting. So Michael, run this by you. And this is for the real time discussion things that are going on actively in Jim’s world. So Mike, you and I bought these D link cameras. A couple years ago, maybe what’s the resolution on these things do you remember

Mike Wieger  [1:13:20] 
at 727

Jim Collison  [1:13:22] 
not bad Wi Fi enabled now. Put them on they have an app, you can get them connected I had one at the front door. So until we got one of those package boxes that that Paul Burton talked me into. This has sat at the front door monitoring when people drop off boxes, we have a ring cam out there as well. So it’s kind of double duty. Then I bought another one and put it in the back window and it watched the whole backyard. So that was kind of these two cameras going on. And they we we brought it in through sight hound and they pretty well for a while and then I started having internet problems here at the house and the bitdefender box was struggling with some things and then I noticed this last weekend the ring cameras were starting to struggle with some things so I called ring in you’d think okay, Amazon owns ring now and you think Oh okay, maybe that the service is you know, maybe I’m gonna get lost in the shuffle somewhere because it’s so big. No, I called I called them I started with chat then I called got this nice gal who was super nice to me and like some really great customer service I struggled with some of the things she said because they weren’t true but in the midst of it got this really good customer service person is helping me and and I’m watching Mike I’m watching sighthound on my computer while we’re trying to troubleshoot these ring. They got really flaky on me they were dropping out they weren’t recorded the the ring cams. They were recording but it was all black. They were kind of dropping their signal back and forth.

Mike Wieger  [1:14:56] 
And just to clarify you’re not you don’t bring ring into sight down because they can’t do Not yours. Okay, got it. Yeah,

Jim Collison  [1:15:02] 
so there’s actually a Windows app for ring that I use. So it’s on there. And then I was, I was watching sighthound. And I had this thought about an hour into the call with ring. It’s like, one of those dealing cameras are causing problems because she was, she was trying to tell me how, you know, when you’re in the ring app, they give you some, it’s an rssi. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with that. It’s kind of a Wi Fi signal strength. And she was saying like, oh, there could be other devices that are affecting it. And so the score isn’t an absolute score, but it just kind of tells you how much interference there is. And we look for a score of about 5014 great, sort of Wi Fi interference. I don’t know what made me think of it but I thought I wonder if these things are causing any any interference on my Wi Fi right? So I said to her Give me a second I’m gonna go unplug my my dealing devices stayed on the line with me it was great unplugged them almost immediately. Everything on the ring network started working, like stuff I’d had problems with. Before keeping the chime You know, I’ve a ring chime as well, that the doorbell for it.

Unknown Speaker  [1:16:13] 
Uh,

Jim Collison  [1:16:15] 
working perfectly. Like now my ring is almost in real time. Like, I can almost go to it and watch in real time. What’s going on? I think I got some troubleshooting to do, Mike. But yeah,

Mike Wieger  [1:16:26] 
cuz you can turn the Wi Fi on those on. Like it broadcasts its own Wi Fi network. Yeah. And you can turn that off. Um,

Jim Collison  [1:16:33] 
check into that.

Mike Wieger  [1:16:34] 
Yeah. And I bet that was maybe on the same channel as whatever your Wi Fi is in your home. Could have been causing some interference there if the if the Wi Fi was putting out so because I haven’t had that issue. Okay, then again, I only have one and it’s actually outside on my back patio so far away from everything. Maybe it’s not. But then again, who knows? Maybe I’m plugging holes and everything. It’s faster.

Jim Collison  [1:16:54] 
It was incredible. So one of those one of those local events right that Well, okay, maybe I don’t need these now. So I’m on eBay for five bucks. Or maybe someone in the Home Gadget Geeks network here would like me to send them to them. I’ve got to send me an email Jim@theAverageGuy.tv. I think I’m going to go 100% ring just to be honest. On this I’m going to install a stick up or something in my backyard. And and just let that thing and maybe even a solar thing on you know, let it do its thing. But yeah, Mike, it was just crazy as soon as I unplugged him, like instant change in the network. Mm hmm. So, so pretty cool. So if you want to try out a couple These are 720 they’re used all I’ll send them to you send me an email Jim@theAverageGuy.tv and in love to maybe ship them off your way. Andrew Christian, thanks for thanks for jumping in tonight. Good to have you guys back on this thing and, and relive some memories right? I mean, yes, you

Andrew Morris  [1:18:00] 
get me back more often. I’ll have a beer next time. Okay, done Boss. Boss. I’m just to keep Mike happy.

Jim Collison  [1:18:05] 
Yeah, ya know, right on.

Unknown Speaker  [1:18:06] 
Well,

Jim Collison  [1:18:07] 
Andrew, let’s I mean, I didn’t ditch you on purpose you know, and I got it I had kids you had to be clear he had children that that’s the they ruin children ruined Christian. Listen carefully. Listen carefully Christian children ruin everything

Andrew Morris  [1:18:27] 
together. You’ll not just just your life

Unknown Speaker  [1:18:33] 
thing here but

Andrew Morris  [1:18:36] 
if you ever want shortly after marriage, your children will run you off.

Mike Wieger  [1:18:40] 
Yeah. Andrea, we’re talking about this in the free show. Jim. I think you’re up getting a drink and I was like, you know, because he was saying was like well you know, when were you on as a kid and I had kids I’m like yeah, I know. I said as soon as my kids are getting into sports and stuff I just know Thursday nights are gonna insulate me like it’s already getting tough because they don’t go to bed as early as they used to. So I hear them upstairs and like you know, it’s like

Jim Collison  [1:19:01] 
well, Andrew, maybe this is your entrance back in he has to

Unknown Speaker  [1:19:05] 
rotate out right.

Andrew Morris  [1:19:08] 
And you haven’t even asked me about the solar panels on my roof yet. I

Jim Collison  [1:19:10] 
don’t know why but no, no, I’ll tell you what, we’ll do a whole show on that I’ll be in

Andrew Morris  [1:19:17] 
that knowing no I could put up for now put up with me driveling on about that for now. Oh,

Jim Collison  [1:19:23] 
maybe we just do a partial. We kind of do a partial stone. Christian certainly I mean your life has changed pretty rapidly I graduated from school got married. We followed you a little bit Cyber Frontiers so not quite as shocking but a lot of your a lot of things have changed for you as well.

Christian Johnson  [1:19:40] 
It’s definitely it’s a little bit of a time machine warp and going back and watching chess from 10 years ago as a as a stark reminder that

Jim Collison  [1:19:51] 
Andrew events as he loved to hear a show about your your solar panel got

Andrew Morris  [1:19:55] 
past its

Jim Collison  [1:19:58] 
we talked about that idea. Love solar I, America itself. You’re so well. Okay, we’ll get you back in Oh, and maybe we’ll come up with we’ll kind of mix and match and have Yeah,

Andrew Morris  [1:20:09] 
well this is information and I can show people how ignorant I am about my own home automation system.

Jim Collison  [1:20:16] 
Yeah, well, hey, there’s a lot to do in keep a Christian you’re in this mode right now brand new place, figuring out all the tech right that you

Christian Johnson  [1:20:25] 
went, Oh my gosh, yeah. That’s a it’s a constant struggle. That on top of that, I this current machine I’m on is also exceeded its 10 year anniversary. It’s this OS is an upgraded version of Windows 10 from an original image of windows seven that I built in Oh, nine. And so it’s fundamentally been the same hardware now for 10 years or so. So I’m building my next decade decade where the machine to carry into battle and even that just finding parts has been brutal. Yeah,

Jim Collison  [1:21:05] 
well, now’s not a good time to buy GPU.

Christian Johnson  [1:21:08] 
I’m sorry, I did it today. So great. Great time.

Jim Collison  [1:21:14] 
What one you found one?

Christian Johnson  [1:21:16] 
I it’s a long story. I got a last minute pre ordered to be taken. So

Jim Collison  [1:21:24] 
yeah, everything’s everything is nuts right now. But to my point, Christian, like, the studio PC here is not that old. I think I built this thing. I mean, is old. I think I built this thing in 2014. And, you know, six years later, and the other day, I was like, maybe I’ll upgrade it. And then I started looking at things and I’m like, maybe I won’t, you know, hey, it still works. It’s still fast. It still does a lot of great stuff. You know, I put 16 gigabytes of RAM in it when I built it. by today’s standards. It’s okay still, like, you know, you can still kind of get away with it. I can max it out, by the way, but you, you know, you start thinking okay, well, if it’s made maybe this is okay, for what did we call that the flame thrower? Something was that is that the West

Unknown Speaker  [1:22:08] 
soccer about? Yep. And that’s the one I’m still running back into.

Jim Collison  [1:22:11] 
It’s so crazy. 10 years ago. Yeah. Yeah, no run on. Well, okay, a couple reminders on our way out. One is, don’t forget, if you want to join us on Patreon and many of you maybe haven’t decided to do that we got a $5 plan. In 2021 we got some Patreon kind of only stuff we did two meetups here at the end of this year. I’ll be scheduling one for January kind of get access to the full version of this on Patreon if you want to do it and it’s just a nice thing to do. head out to https://theAverageGuy.tv/Patreon if you want to support us we mentioned the discord group https://theAverageGuy.tv/discord if you want to join us there contact the show send me an email Jim@theAverageGuy.tv if you got content ideas or once solar back on the show with Andrew Morris we’re bringing solar back we’re gonna make solar sexy again, Andrew never stopped. Just a reminder, the average guy TV platform both web and media is hosting hosted by Maple Grove partners.com get secure reliable high speed hosting from people that you know you trust that yeah, if you’re watching the video, that guy right down there, we know the guy. We know that guy here at Home Gadget Geeks. If you want to start a if, if you want to start a site or you got some kind of special need just let Christian know he can do just about anything. So head out to Maple Grove partners.com and and get something started today while you’re at it, sign up for a new domain on hover https://theAverageGuy.tv/hover, get $2 off your first domain support the show while you’re doing it. And again, it’s just a nice thing to do. And we appreciate it when you do that as well. https://theAverageGuy.tv/hover we are live for the next 10 years. Well, Mike not Mike Wieger cuz he just said he’s leaving but

Unknown Speaker  [1:23:54] 
we got kids

Jim Collison  [1:23:57] 
never want like it’s inevitable.

Unknown Speaker  [1:23:59] 
Not yet.

Jim Collison  [1:24:00] 
Not yet. I’m gonna hold off as long as possible. Andrew get your co hosting responsibilities.

Unknown Speaker  [1:24:04] 
Get my hat back on.

Jim Collison  [1:24:05] 
Get ready. We are live every Thursday 8pm Central nine Eastern out here at https://theAverageGuy.tv/live. Thanks for coming out for the special tanoshi party. I hope you found it helpful, useful in a little bit of reminiscing and a little bit of congratulatory backslapping, and a little bit of some new stuff as well. Always good to have everybody back. Thanks to everybody who joined us in the chatroom. didn’t get a chance to do it. Come on, join us live. With that, we’ll say goodbye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Find Us!

Join us in the Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/theaverageguy/

On Discord at https://theaverageguy.tv/discord

Get the Home Gadget Geeks subscribe links at http://homegadgetgeeks.com

http://theaverageguy.tv is powered by Maplegrove Partners web hosting. Get secure, reliable, high-speed hosting from people you know and trust.  For more information visit http://maplegrovepartners.com