317 I'm sure they'll climax

Paul 00:00

True, how the hell are you?

Drew 00:02

Paul, it's going. It's going. How are you? It's going. Is your window all fixed now?

Paul 00:10

Uh no, no, it is it is not all fixed. Uh, okay they are coming tomorrow to replace it or fix the window, so

Drew 00:22

Okay.

Paul 00:22

Yeah, yeah.

Drew 00:23

Okay. How's that been affecting your uh heating and cooling?

Paul 00:27

I'm sh I I uh I do not dwell on those statistics as much as you do, but I imagine it's yeah. I I imagine it's had at least had an impact. But yeah, yeah.

Drew 00:40

Okay.

Paul 00:42

It's been warm. It's been warm. Yes. Yes. It'd be nice to get two panes of class between me and the outside world instead of just one and some Some yeah. Some shards. Yeah.

Drew 00:55

Oh well, where do we want to start here?

Paul 01:00

I want to start at the top.

Drew 01:01

Okay.

Paul 01:02

We haven't recorded in a while. And uh You sent me a picture one day. Oh, right. Of of you Apparently was was at some sort of convenience store or gas station and you purchased yourself and sent me a picture of a dirty mountain dew.

Drew 01:24

That's correct, Paul, because uh a few episodes ago we talked about how that was your new obsession. Uh I love it. I had one for lunch today. Yep. Now, I am not responsible for the grocery shopping in the in the home.

Paul 01:36

Okay. Okay.

Drew 01:37

That responsibility lies with my better half. So she is the one that goes to the store. She is the one that goes to Target, to Kroger, what have you, to buy our food. And after we recorded, um I I made it a point to mention to her that if she sees them to buy it. Okay. I mentioned it once. And my wife is a busy person. She wasn't gonna go out of her way to find this soft drink. And I didn't pursue it. Okay. But every once in a while I would find myself at a gas station. I would find myself at a Target. Yeah. I would find myself at a place where they would sell soft drinks. I would walk around and I would look.

Paul 02:21

Okay.

Drew 02:22

And I was able to find twelve packs of it, or it's the six, you know, little bottles. The problem is I didn't want to buy that much.

Paul 02:32

You don't want to commit to that much soda. Yeah.

Drew 02:34

Well yeah for two reasons. One, I'm not a big soda drinker. Like the the only soda the only carbonated drinks that I drink if We have we're a big Xevia house. Okay. So we have Xevia soda that I'll allow myself to have once a week. I mean, I don't drink it all the time. I don't I'm not a big fizzy drink person. And when I'm traveling, when I need a quick boost of caffeine, I will do a red bull, I will do a monster, I will do I get it.

Paul 03:01

Yeah, energy drinks.

Drew 03:02

Uh-huh. I will do an energy drink. And and frankly, I used to do a lot more energy drinks, and I have cut that out.

Paul 03:09

I don't drink them anymore, period. Yeah.

Drew 03:12

I was a one-a-day energy drink haver. I don't do that anymore. Yeah. Okay. I will drink water. I will drink Other stuff. Okay. So one day we were out and about and we needed to stop. Forget where we were stopped. We stopped at a Walmart For reasons. Okay. And while we were getting the things that we needed to get to Walmart, I scoured the registers. I'm like, there has to be one of these sodas at a register.

Paul 03:40

Okay. Okay.

Drew 03:41

No dice.

Paul 03:42

No, no dice. Man.

Drew 03:44

And and I kind of forgot about it, to be honest with you. After searching for about a week or so, I just kind of forgot about it. I was like, you know what, whatever. But one day, my wife came home from the store and she goes, look what I found And she found me the dirty Mountain Dew. Now, when you originally described this soda to me. Yes. Remind me, how did you describe it to me?

Paul 04:09

I described it So it's like a cre it's like cream soda and Mountain Dew. I described it as very cream soda forward with some citrus notes. in addition to it, m instead of a Mountain Dew that if they added a little bit of cream soda. It tasted more cream soda y to me, but yeah.

Drew 04:30

I agree with that assessment. So what I did is I I poured a little bit in a cup and I tasted it. And my first reaction was it's not terrible. Okay. I'll take it, it's not terrible. Okay. Okay. I I actually like cream soda. I haven't had cream soda in a number of years, so that little bit of nostalgia hitting me felt good. Now there is something else in there. I don't think it's Mountain Dew. It's it's citrusy, but yeah, yeah. There's something something else in there. I don't know what it is. There's something else in there. Um I did finish the bottle over two days. Okay. Uh will I go out of my way to buy it? No, because number one, I'm not a soda drinker. And I don't think they make a diet version of it.

Paul 05:12

They they there is a zero sugar version.

Drew 05:14

Oh is there?

Paul 05:15

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Drew 05:16

Yeah If I so I have a road trip coming up and if I stop to get gas and I want a little treat, if they had the zero sugar version, would I get it? Maybe. Maybe maybe. I'll take a maybe. I'll take a maybe. I'm not a Coke Zero person. I'm not a uh diet coke person. I don't again not a s Drinker. No. But if I wanted something sweet I gotta say it wasn't it wasn't terrible. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'll take it. I'll take it.

Paul 05:46

They should use that as as their marketing slogan.

Drew 05:49

Yeah.

Paul 05:49

Wasn't terrible.

Drew 05:51

Wasn't terrible. I mean that's basically was at the top of my resume.

Paul 05:55

Should be the name of this podcast.

Drew 05:57

It wasn't terrible. It wasn't terrible.

Paul 06:00

Oh

Drew 06:01

Alright, so we've been playing a game.

Paul 06:03

We have been.

Drew 06:04

And I'm curious if anybody has watched our live streams.

Paul 06:07

I haven't even looked. I did replace the one live stream with. I did Uh you know, I'll I'll get into a little bit. Okay, so we've we've been playing Public Access. It's the game that we talked about like in episode 309. Finally getting to run it. Uh that is up on our YouTube channel. Uh the live stream for the second session is still up there. The first session I I did end up taking the livestream one down and replacing it with an edited video that I did with Riverside because we're using the same tool for that as well. the Riverside editing tool. I d uh dude, I I may or may not have sent a very, very frustrated feedback through it, just like, this doesn't work the way it's supposed to work, and I'm really mad. Uh and then they wanted more feedback and I just ignored them. So uh anywho.

Drew 07:01

Uh Wow, okay. Way to commit. Way to commit. It's

Paul 07:09

It's it's it's fine. It's fine, it's fine. I just trying to I was using some other AI features and it just did not work the way I wanted it to. The one thing I was trying to do was get Automute to work, but it it it's okay so okay, so random random tangent about the editor. The the editor in Riverside is unlike anything I have dealt with before. Because I have I have edited this podcast 316 episodes of them in a podcast editor. I'm used to looking at waveforms, having multiple tracks, doing cuts, moving things around. I've even edited a little bit of video, nothing huge, but I've used like, you know, some stuff. Riverside wants you to edit primarily by it generates a trans Of everything, and it wants you to do the edit by basically like if you don't want a fray or a section is you highlight the text and say delete and then it makes the cut automatically. And it does it that way. And it was just a weird situation where I was trying to have it like auto-mute. So someone wasn't talking, their their audio track was dubbed, like, you know, muted so you didn't hear background noise or stuff. But It turned some text, like some speech, muted, and I could not unmute it. Just uh actually I could unmute it I could not unmute it with my with my fingers. If I wanted to unmute it, I had to go to the AI chat and say Hey, find the text around this time that starts with this and ends with this and unmute it, then wait for the LLM to churn and do stuff. And it was not what should have been like you know, like a quick boom unmuted turned into me waiting five minutes for it to hopefully unmute what I wanted to. But anywho, uh If you like actual plays, uh we'll put a link in the show notes, you can go out and check things out. I'll pie edit the second session. Uh over this long weekend and and get that uploaded as well. Uh but really what I wanted to talk about, Drew, is I've ran quite a few games in my day. I enjoy running tabletop role-playing games, though I'm kind of still getting my sea legs under me for for this one, but this is the first I have played games when AI has been a thing. This is the first game that I've run where AI tools are actually really good and really helpful. And it's been a very interesting experience. So specifically for this game. So Public access at its heart is a game about solving mysteries. And how the game kind of presents that is like there's so obviously like there's a rule book with all the rules and then additionally there's a whole bunch of PDFs of just mysteries So it introduces like this is how you set it up, here's some clues you can give, here are places they may go, here's some dangers in the mystery, people, places, you know, things like that. Uh Scenes if you want to pull that kind of stuff in. And uh I'm a claude, I'm a Claude person. I'm sure all the other ones have exactly like this. But I basically have a little project set up in Clots when I'm using one of their projects with cowork. And I essentially pointed it at all of the PDFs for the roles and the the mysteries. And like, so one of the first things I did was just like, hey, give me a summary of all the mysteries so I don't have to read all 20 of them. And it did a really good job with that. Uh And then so basically I started using it to say like essentially I've been using it for session prep. So uh things really kind of think came together for the second session because I had a transcript of the first session generated from Riverside and I was able to feed that into it. So it was like, okay, like, uh You know, they like and basically just talking to it like I was a person. Like this is kind of some of the things I am thinking. Look at the transcript of the first session and make a list of things that like I should start like things that are loose ends or things that I want to maybe pull back in. It actually helped me pick the second mystery uh and the third uh based off of uh Just the session and what it understood about like the characters that were created and the backstories that are being developed. And man, I I have to say, Drew, I don't know if I could ever go back to analog session prep so to speak and and then and then the big thing is if we're doing it online is having the the full transcript of the session And being able to feed that into it and using that to like, okay, like help me, like, what are some things I should pull into this session? you know, helped worked on like there was a a handful of beats that I really wanted to hit and, you know, working on some of those. And I don't know, it's It's a good tool for tabletop roleplaying session prep. I mean I've been really impressed. I mean, I don't want to give a lot away because I don't want spoilers or anything to ruin anything for for you. Uh, but I've been really I've been having a really good time using it as, you know, a sounding board and r running ideas past it. And, you know, having it basically, you know, like it's good at summarizing and and finding patterns and things. And that's what I've been using it for. It's like, okay, like Given the character's backstory, what happened, and all the mysteries I have available, what would be a good mystery to pull in next, and then the one after that, and uh Yeah.

Drew 13:15

Now, here's a question for you. Mm-hmm. So, first of all, I think that's a great use case for AI. I really do. Mm-hmm. Uh as somebody who is also GM'd, I really like creative writing. I like thinking about things, and I think that if I can give something a prompt to expand upon my thoughts, I think that is a great way to use a tool. I have another friend who is also spinning up a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign. And they were walking me through sort of their workflow for getting ready for the sessions. Now here's what I want to know. You said you're using Claude for this. So you're using a closed uh open source proprietary model. I am. Walk me through your workflow. Do you upload PDFs of the rules and the mysteries or do you do a markdown file? Like how do you get it to do

Paul 14:10

So I'm using the co-work feature of Claude, which is essential essentially like you g basically you give it a working directory. And what I have done is I have all the, you know, I purchased the game through Drive-Thru RPG. It's a zip file with just a whole bunch of PDFs. And I had it you know basically pointed it at all of the PDFs and go. For what what I've been doing is I've I still to this day I use Bear as my note-taking app. Uh so obviously when I wanted to start doing prep and taking notes for running this, I went directly to Bear. Bear has a great MCP server integration, so I was able to go and say like You know, here's all the PDFs. Here's all of the notes that I've already taken, you know, basically pointing it up to Bear and saying, look at anything with this tag. And uh So, like one of the things I had it do was like, hey, take this and take this transcript, make a summary that I can use to recap the session at the beginning of the next session. and put it in bear with this note. And then I was like, okay, so like I think I'm gonna run this mystery. What do you think? And it would give me ideas and stuff. I'm like, okay, great, let's let's pull together some like some key like uh some key beats or some key like area like little bits of narrative or description or like sensory descriptions and it would also put that directly into bear. And then bears like a very like open, like loose tagging. So essentially what I do is I take all of my notes and all the ones I think I'm going to need for that session and I basically say, you know, tag them public access slash Session two, and then I can have them all together and just go through everything. Uh so really it's a combination. So Bear is also it's a markdown no editor, and LLMs love markdown. So it's really easy for me to basically say, hey, put the PDFs here, but put your notes and use all of my other notes for context as well.

Drew 16:19

And I think it's important to call out and keep me honest here is that when you create a new document in bare, it's actually creating the document in the folder, right?

Paul 16:28

Yeah.

Drew 16:29

Yeah. Yeah. It's not like you have like tabs or something and there's some database somewhere that has your markdown file.

Paul 16:35

It's actually working within the directory structure that you okay. Okay, so you basically PDFs and markdown files is all it is. Yeah. Okay.

Drew 16:48

So you just give it all that and you let it go.

Paul 16:49

Yeah, let it go. And It's a project in so I really haven't used projects much in Claude, but basically what it is is you can Essentially the the the project says you have access to these notes and bear in this directory, and then I can have separate conversations. And I think it can refer to conversations it has in the same project, so it has one big meta context. Uh but it's nice that if I'm long as I'm in that project, it knows I'm talking about public access, it knows that I'm running a game, it knows like who the characters are. And I don't have to I don't have to like recreate that context every single time.

Drew 17:28

It just goes. It knows. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Yeah. Now in terms of like token consumption. Well, I mean I'm just curious. I mean I mean obviously obviously when you're coding something, that's a lot of tokens, it's a lot of context. I'm just curious what the amount of prompts that you give this and what you feed it, like if you've paid attention to

Paul 17:50

I really haven't uh next time I will, I will pay attention and see if I can get an idea for how much. I imagine it's quite a bit because there are a lot of really text, you know, dense PDFs in there. And it's just cute because like some the There's two types of PDFs in there, depending on where they came from. There's a little supplement that also has some additional mysteries. So most of them it can read the text pretty well. Uh other ones and it basically every time it goes to read them it rips up a little Python script to OCR the Oh really? Oh yeah. It's cute. It's like, oh yeah, I need permission to run Python. It's like you go Uh but I've actually I've actually been taking the text of the PDFs and putting them into markdown in my notes so it's easier for me to refer to them in session. So that's kind of helped things as well. It's just like take the text and put it in here and uh Yeah, yeah. It's you know it It almost makes me that like this game we're obviously doing online so we can stream it and record it and stuff, but like if I was gonna run a game In person, I would probably get like some sort of like handheld recorder to record the audio so I could transcribe it and have that text in for the cause that actually was like I did use it for the first session, but the first session is very especially in public exits it's very scripted, right? It it wants you to do these certain things to introduce the game and how you introduce the characters and get things going. So there's there's like basically two-thirds of the session is very very rigid in structure But the second session, being able to pull in the text of the first one and saying, like, here's what I did, that's where really things started opening up for me. You know, like to being able to to have it just read that text and go, oh yeah, okay, I see this, and then in this mystery you can pull in this character and, you know Yeah.

Drew 19:56

It's it's it's it's good. So I want to shift the conversation a little bit and I do want to talk about the game.

Paul 20:04

Okay. Okay.

Drew 20:06

If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, Paul has played public access and he has played an entire campaign of public access.

Paul 20:13

Mm-hmm.

Drew 20:15

So he is now running this game for me and two other people that Paul knows. Yes. Now, uh Paul, first of all, kudos. I think you do a great job managing the game. Thank you. Um there's room for improvement. I have notes for myself, but you know. No. It's been a while. So one thing I've noticed about this game is there's dice and there's rules.

Paul 20:37

Mm-hmm.

Drew 20:38

But there's not as many rules as y as your typical tabletap Dungeons and Dragons as sort of the very, very, very rules-like game.

Paul 20:47

Very extremely rules-like. Yes. Yes.

Drew 20:51

The world and the world building and the nature of the mysteries is very cool. Yeah. Now, here's the thing. I don't feel that we as the players are playing it right.

Paul 21:04

You you you you were getting you you were fake note so you um You are. And it's it's happening organically, which I think is the That's what I wondered. Yes. So It's the public access is okay, so it's a game about mysteries, right? But none of the mysteries have solutions. That's the whole point of the point of the game is you basically just throw clues at the players and eventually they look at the clues and go Huh, I bet this is happening. Then you roll some dice and you're either right or you're wrong, right? There is no like and The game also has a lot of things where, like in a traditional like Dungeons and Dragons, there's a like most of the world building and this creating the setting is done by the dungeon master, the person running. This game specifically has many, many places where you invert that and the players have the narrative control. Like you enter a scene and you're asking for some details about the scene. one of the key mechanics of the game is finding these tapes that are essentially recordings of The central mystery is figuring out what happened to this public access television station that disappeared. And throughout the game, you find tapes of recordings of shows, and that is very much like There's like little snippets where I'll set up something, then I'll hand it over to a player, and they actually decide what is happening in the video And it is weird, and that that uncomfortableness is like we even though like I had read the rules and I had understood It is weird for a tabletop role-playing game to give this much you know, it's Like that much narrative control to the players, and it will become more comfortable. And then after you get a couple mysteries in your belt, like in the game I played We kind of like organically started building a mythology of what was happening and what was real and what was not. And like as we started pulling in things from dairy various mysteries together And like, and after like we had a little bit of momentum going, that kind of shaped how we saw all of the other mysteries in like the greater TV Odyssey as well. And I believe that will happen organically as the game goes on. Uh. So

Drew 23:50

Now adding adding to that outside of some of the material that you gave us, like choosing a latch key move and some of the other things that you gave us. I have not read the rules to this game. Yeah, there's n there's not a there's not a whole lot to them. Well, I'm just wondering, would it influence the way I play if I read the rules? Not in not not in a metagaming kind of way, but I don't I do not think so.

Paul 24:20

At the end of the day, there's There's only one mechanic, right? You roll 2d6, add a number to it. If it's seven or greater, you succeed in some way, shape, or form. If it's six or less, you fail. Uh You can read the rules, uh, but uh or honestly, there's there's a PDF of uh it's I can't remember what it's called, but there's a reference sheet out there that has explains the day move and the night move and the nostalgic like Like we that's one thing we haven't done yet is there's uh as your characters essentially you're there's this isn't there's like no armor class, there's no hit points, there's no There's no mechanics for fighting. You just die. You just die. Yes, yes, yes. That is that is an outcome. But there's mechanics for like basically turning back time and avoiding that. There's like there is a move called the nostalgic move, which is basically as you get conditions, which are like, you know, like they could be anything from, you know, uh, you're on the wrong side of the law to you're hurt or confused or have lot lost your confidence or or anything. The way you clear those is essentially is called the nostalgic move and you basically just roleplay and get nostalgic and talk about your childhood with other players And then you clear conditions. Right. So the game is really focused around uh Round that. And there's even like little like the more as I'm sitting on the other side of the table and running this game, there's just like all these like little things. that I've started to pick up about the game design and like I don't know if it it even things like When I when do like if I'm referring to if I'm asking you, Drew, of something, I am very deliberate of when I use your character's name or when I use your name. Because there are certain mechanics that are for the players, and there are mechanics that are for the characters. So like For example, if I'm handing things over for an Odyssey tape, I would say, Drew, this is yours, right? If you're in the this like in role-playing with another character, I would use your character's name. And It's I don't yeah, I don't want to get too spoiler spoiler spoilerly, but like it's F part of the game is for us. Right, the the the players, the c not our characters, the the the players. And the characters are a way to kind of explore that world. And uh hopefully everyone's having fun. People haven't complained or seem to be coming back and You know, at the end we kind of like do a little debrief and people are do seem to be finding parts of the game enjoyable. And it it I think it is a little uncomfortable at this point, but I think that is that is deliberate because the game is so unusual, so unlike a lot of other games. And you get a few more like another session under your belt, you solve a mystery, you see how things go. uh yeah it'll become a little bit more comfortable and hopefully hopefully then you know uh Yeah, yeah. And like it's a game that has a definite end. Like once you solve the mystery of TV Odyssey, that's it. Game over. Game over. Done. So and depending on how you guys play it, you guys can drag it out for as long as you want or Uh there's one key thing you have to get to before you can solve the mystery. It's kind of like the the unofficial climax of of the game, but uh once you get past that you can essentially wrap it up whenever you guys feel like it. So Yeah.

Drew 28:28

Yeah, it's that time of night. It's that time of night when he needs to let the world know that um mom mom's going to bed and nobody better mess with with him.

Paul 28:37

Ah got it. Yeah. Oh.

Drew 28:40

Okay, so I want to talk about what you bought. Okay. Uh I spent I spent a little bit of money this week.

Paul 28:47

Okay.

Drew 28:48

So n I'll just get right to it. I purchased a weather station. Mm-hmm. Okay. Now you're probably thinking to yourself, I I want you to close your eyes and I want you to imagine going online and buying a canonical weather station. What do you think that means? So

Paul 29:08

So it's basically it's a box full of sensors. You know, so a lot of them, if I I picture them, like obviously there's gonna be some sort of wind gauge or something that spins. There's gonna be some sort of place where it catches and measures the amount of of precipitation that has fall fallen. It probably also it also has other sec uh sensors in it for like temperature And barometer. So a lot of times you see these usually like mounted on a pole or attached or put on the roof of somebody's house or or things like that. Yeah.

Drew 29:43

Okay. Paul At first one thing you know about me, what do I like? That's right, integrated systems. Okay. And it also involves temperature, so that's it also involves understanding my local climate, hot climates in your area. I like the idea of open But integrated systems.

Paul 30:10

Okay. Yeah.

Drew 30:12

So here's what I bought. Okay. I bought a Tempest weather station That's a good n that's a good brand name for a weather station.

Paul 30:22

Tempest. Good brand name. Oh that looks that looks A little different than other ones I've seen in the past.

Drew 30:30

Describe it. Describe it for the audience. There'll be a link in the show notes, obviously. It almost looks like a futuristic light ball.

Paul 30:41

That's fair. Yeah, it it's it's we're we're we're all so it's kind of like K conical a little bit. It's thinner at the bottom and wider at the top. It definitely comes in multiple. So what is the There's a big piece which I guess has a majority of the sensors. Is that little piece? Is that like the precipitation gauge?

Drew 31:05

So here so here's what it is.

Paul 31:07

Okay.

Drew 31:08

So that white bulbousy piece is the whole package. Okay. Okay. What is difficult. Yeah. So if you if you click through Yeah the pictures. Like the fourth picture, it tells you what the different components are. Yeah. Yeah. So the actual sensor device is the bigger piece of the puzzle. That little base is just for attaching to different things. Yeah, okay So you've been to my home and I don't know if you've noticed, but out on my deck There are some I think they're technically aluminum poles. They're kind of attached to some of the post on my deck. And previously I had some string lights on there. There was an incident with the string lights. They're not there anymore. So what I did is I I they had like they're essentially aluminum pipes, if we're being honest. And they had like an end cap on the top. I couldn't get the end cap off, so I had to get an angle grinder and cut it off. But that flat base and pole attachment is basically like a locking mechanism where like the two pieces come apart. You put that Like you slide the collar down the pole, then you put this on the top, and then you like twist it, and it like kind of cinches down onto the pole. And then the actual sensor device sort of locks into that. Now, the interesting thing is the Wi-Fi hub.

Paul 32:28

Yes.

Drew 32:29

Obviously, this thing needs to be out in the open because what you can't really see on any of these pictures are three quarters of the device are covered in solar panels. And if you look at the picture there, you'll see that on the device there's like what appears to be a canonical compass rose north indicator. Yeah. So the idea is you need to point that to the north and then you have sun because if you're in the southern hemisphere that should Point north if you're in the southern if you're in the southern hemisphere, it should point to the south. That way, like solar panel gets right, yeah. Raises in the east, sets in the west, it's getting sun throughout the day to charge its solar battery. Okay. So the Wi-Fi base hub is interesting because the weather station actually communicates over RF. Okay. So it actually has pretty good range. So if I wanted to put this like way out in my yard where I have no Wi-Fi signal, this is just this is its own radio transmitter. And that's the thing that you actually put on the network is that little Wi Fi home.

Paul 33:37

And that's inside, right. Yeah.

Drew 33:38

That's inside somewhere. And I I I tried putting it upstairs. I actually ended up putting it in my living room just because of the way like My house has different outlets and I wanted it to have good line of sight to the to the vice. So like it's it's just in my living room. Now, why did I buy this particular model? The reason I bought this model is it directly integrates into my smart Sprinkler system.

Paul 34:05

Okay. Okay.

Drew 34:07

When you buy this device, and part of the reason I bought it was and let's not beat around the bush, it's $350, which is kind of expensive. But I got it on sale and they also gave me the code that gave me the integration for my irrigation system. Because normally you have to buy that separate. So the order of operations was get this here, get it installed, get it set up, and then link it to my irrigation controller. Now, my smart irrigation controller does pull local weather data. But this knows exactly how much rain fell in my yard. This knows exactly how much sun is hitting my yard. This knows what the forecast is gonna be for my yard. Right, right.

Paul 34:56

Okay, okay.

Drew 34:57

So it it has all of that information. So now it's actually pulling data from this. Device. And there's another really cool thing about this. Yes, there's an app. Of course there's an app. Of course there's an app. Yeah. And I will tell you that it immediately has replaced a default weather app on my phone. Okay. Immediately. Okay. Because one, it's so much more responsive and fast than the weather app. One thing I've noticed about the Apple Weather app is that if you want to look at the radar, you might as well open it and wait about 30 seconds. Yeah, it takes for it to render to load. This is Lickety Split. Okay. Like it's it is a phenomenal is a phenomenal weather app I think it does a really good job. And oh, the other cool thing that this thing does is that has a lightning sensor. So the other day The other day we didn't have storms here, but there were storms north of us. And I was getting notifications on my phone that lightning was detected up to 27 miles away. Because it's able to detect the flashes. And I do think there's a little bit of crowdsourcing because after you set up your weather station, and I there's no easy for me way easy way for me to show you this. But if you log in either into the website or you log into the app, you can see other p other tempest stations around you. And I think they're all feeding the same, kind of like the ADSB receiver for flight aware, where it's all feeding a common

Paul 36:23

thing. Yeah.

Drew 36:25

The other thing that it does, it has a fully open API. So remember how you talk about your terminal screen? Yeah. This integrates directly with that. There's already an integration for that. So if you wanted to show the tempest weather data on your terminal thing, you could do that. Nice. They also make custom light boards for it. If you sign into the Tempest web app, you can basically put the it in into full screen mode in the browser where it basically just shows you current conditions, weather radar, the whole thing. On your screen. If you wanted to build your own app, you could. You can go get an OAuth token or a personal access token And you're actually pulling your sensor to get the a to get the data. So it's it's it's a it's a it's a neat little thing to And obviously that's how all these integrations with what my Spark Sprinkler system work and these other third-party ecosystem things that they provide. That's that's how that's all working. So it's it's just a really kind of cool device the way that it works. Cool I'm really enjoying it. I mean, once I actually got it up and mounted, now I will say there's one thing I don't like about it. If you click on the fourth picture. Okay. On that website, you will see that it is a picture of the uh Tempest sensor with the base attached, and then you get an alternate angle of the Wi-Fi box. Uh-huh. What do you see on there? Well, there's three lights on the second. And those motherfuckers are bright. Are they? They are bright. Is there an Ethernet port on that second one? There is not. Boo, boo. But Paul, those LEDs are so bright. Are they? I had to put tape over it. Because where I had it, uh every place I had it, if I had it facing the wall, it basically lights the whole wall up green. It is so bright. Somebody guess that's like power signal. Power signal and communication to I I am able to receive data from the thing. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is it is unnecessarily bright. And I haven't found a way to turn those off. I'm sure maybe there's a way. Well you did. It's called tape. Yeah, I I put I put a piece of masking tape over it. And even then, like it like lights up the tape. Like it's crazy bright. It's uh unnaturally bright.

Paul 38:48

Oh man.

Drew 38:49

So yeah, big fan, big fan. If you're if if you enjoy this kind of thing, I think that this is probably one of the nicer ones you can buy. Of course there are cheaper ones on Amazon or whatever. They come with their own little display that you can like put on your window or put on your countertop. But again, if you are in, say, the uh Lady in the Tube ecosystem or the Google Home ecosystem where you have those displays across your house. You can put the app on there and get current conditions and everything. Like it's fully integrated across every app ecosystem you can think of, every smart home device you can think of. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. So I'm really enjoying it. Uh, the other thing that I I spent some time doing this week is I I do have to complain a little bit about Sigsaur the fi the firearm manufacturer.

Paul 39:36

What'd they do?

Drew 39:37

Uh they caught they caused me to waste a thousand dollars. Well, waste waste is a strong word.

Paul 39:42

Okay

Drew 39:44

Okay, I need to tell I need I need to explain something. Okay. Again, this is highly niche. I'm not gonna get us in trouble. I'm not gonna show anything on YouTube. But I do need to complain. So Uh I recently r you know submitted all my paperwork to the ATF to turn my current Sig sp Sig Sour Spear LT, which I have shown on this on this podcast, into a short-barreled rifle. It took about two months. It was a really, really long wait. But part of the reason that I wanted to do that is I wanted to buy another rifle rifle upper for it to turn it into a 9-inch 300 blackout. system. I'm putting a link in the show notes to what is very close to what I bought, except I mine is uh tan, I guess flat dark earth. But That is the thing that I bought, and that is a full upper assembly. So the idea is when I want to do this caliber change, I just Pop out two pins on my existing rifle, lift that piece off, put this piece in, push in two pins, and you're ready to go. I don't have to mess with a barrel swap. I don't have to change hand guards. I don't have to change I don't have to change bolt faces. I don't have to do anything Pretty awesome. A little more more more costly to do it this way, but it's a complete system. Now you know me, I also like to shoot suppressed. And I own I actually do I own many suppressors, I actually own a SIG sour suppressor. So when I was kind of thinking about this and justifying it to my you know, my sickness about how I spend money on these things. I was like, I'm already in the Sig Sour ecosystem. Here's the thing about Sig. Sig is a company that loves to come up with standards that only apply to SigSour. For example, yeah. For example, if you buy a sig sour pistol, one of the things that's very popular these days is people are putting small little red dot sites on pistols. So rather than using traditional iron sights, they're able to look through the optic on the pistol. It aids in target acquisition. It's just easier to see. It lights up, so different areas of brightness and all that other stuff, easier to see in the dark, etc. Every other pistol manufacturer has this figured out. They either offer, like if I go to the if I go to the gun store and I'm looking at not even necessarily higher-end pistols. My dog is mad. I if you're not even looking at like necessarily higher-end pistols, if the slide of the pistol is already p pre-drilled for the attachment points for an for an optic They're usually in a standard footprint. And it's like one of two different standards. SIG looked at that and said, nah, I'm we're gonna do our own thing. Which is great because guess what? SIG uses the whole hog. They make every single part of a gun that you can think of, including accessories, suppressors, sights, optics. gas systems, whatever. If you're in the SIG ecosystem, you're fine. It's almost like Apple in that way, that as long as you're in the Apple ecosystem, you're fine. You want to step outside of that and use it with other stuff. Good fucking luck.

Paul 43:08

Right.

Drew 43:08

Okay. Alright. So I I own this is my second SIG rifle that I've owned. And I have a SIG suppressor. Now I want to call your attention to one very particular important detail on that thing that I showed you.

Paul 43:27

Okay.

Drew 43:28

And that's the muzzle device. And I'm gonna give you a closer-up picture, a close-up picture of it here in a second link.

Paul 43:35

Okay.

Drew 43:37

This is known as a flash hider or muzzle device. Now, again In the SIG ecosystem, this thing serves two purposes. This threads onto your barrel, and when you're shooting, that little three-prong arrangement is known as a flash hider. The geometric shape of that with the escaping hot gases causes dissipation, basically makes it so that if you were shooting, your muzzle doesn't give off a flash or give away your position. Okay? Okay. But you'll notice at the base of that thing, there's threads. There is. Okay. Yes. The idea is that with certain suppressors like the one that I own This is th this is SIG's proprietary system. It's known as clutch lock. So when you look at the suppressor I'm showing you in the next link, the idea is you You screw it onto those threads and and you can kind of see if you look close in some of these pictures. It's kind of hard to tell from the one I gave you, but there's basically a locking collar. So you screw it on, you lock it, interdupt. So shooting suppressed, shooting unsuppressed, very easy to take it. It's easy to take it on and off.

Paul 44:47

Yeah.

Drew 44:47

Correct. Right. You don't have to you don't have to fuck around with it. And the fact that it threads onto that muzzle device and it has a locking collar also makes it lock up to this lock up to the muzzle device better and you're not going to have what's called walk-off. Because again, centrifugal force being a thing If the thing threads direct if the suppressor threads directly to your barrel, as things spin in the barrel and move down, it has a tendency to knock things loose just from the force. And as it gets looser, it can get out of alignment. And now your thousand dollar suppressor is like also going downrange. Okay? I've seen it happen. Hasn't happened to me yet. It probably will one day, but it hasn't happened to me yet. Okay. Okay. Anyway, back to the story. So as I was like thinking about, okay, I'm going to buy this 300 blackout upper I want to get a really good suppressor specifically for this caliber. Okay. This is this is a goofy caliber. I'm not going to go into 300 blackout and why it's goofy and all that other stuff. I have a problem. I have a sickness. Get over it. I did my research and it turns out SIG actually makes a pretty good suppressor for this. And I thought, oh that's perfect. They're a really well-view well-reviewed suppressor for this caliber. I have a SIG upper. It's probably gonna work exactly like my other set I couldn't use this suppressor because it's not big enough. Like this is a smaller caliber suppressor. Because like, you know, if I were to like put this on the gun and shoot through it, again the hole's not big enough. That's a problem. I need a different suppressor for this. SIG makes this, it's great. So I order it. I wait four days for it to clear the process. I go and get it. And immediately when I get it, there's a problem.

Paul 46:35

Uh oh.

Drew 46:36

So this is the suppressor I bought. This is also known as a SIG hexium suppressor. This is their new line of suppressors.

Paul 46:43

Okay.

Drew 46:44

What do you notice about that?

Paul 46:47

I like the hexagon pattern on the side.

Drew 46:49

So click that's kind of cool. Yeah, it's interesting, right? Yeah. So there are there are different models of this. So those pictures at the bottom of the screen. Click on the second click on the the next to the last one, the hexium seven point six two.

Paul 47:02

Seven point seven point. Okay, I I got it there. Okay.

Drew 47:06

Yep.

Paul 47:06

I see the threads.

Drew 47:08

Yeah. That is not the same system.

Paul 47:11

Uh-oh.

Drew 47:13

It is. This is known as what is this is what is known as a hub system. So it doesn't it's not it doesn't work with the clutch s at all.

Paul 47:24

Nope. Nope.

Drew 47:26

So So here's the irony of this. This hub system is the closest thing there is to an industry-wide standard, which SIG never does. Okay. So basically they went to this hub lock system because like that threaded piece you can kind of see that it looks like it what's hard to tell from that is that hub system actually unscrews from the base of the suppressor.

Paul 47:50

Okay.

Drew 47:52

And that actually screws directly onto the barrel. Which which is not what I wanted. Not what you want. Not what I wanted. I wanted it to be clutch locked. When everything I read led me to believe that it was going to be the standard that SIG came up with, all of a sudden they just decide to say, Oh, we'll make this thing that works with third-party hub systems. So, long story short, fuck you, Sig Sauer. Okay. Fuck you for making me think that this was gonna work, and then require me to then turn around and do a bunch of extra work to get it to work with my rifle

Paul 48:27

Okay, did you all right I was gonna say did you return it or did you figure out what you needed to do to get it?

Drew 48:31

I can't return a suppress I you can't return a suppressor. Just the same way you can't really return a gun. Like at that point you're in it to win it. You have to make it work. Even if it costs you a couple hundred even if it costs you a couple extra hundred dollars or time or whatever to make it work, like you have to you you just have to see it through to the end at that point. And Again, SIG is notorious for completely overdoing it when it comes to torque specs or thread locker or anything because like now to get this to work I have to get the muzzle device off of that thing which is no easy task It either requires extreme heat or extreme wetness. One of the two. So there there's this material. But there's this, there's this uh stuff called rock set. And you're familiar with like a thread locker, right? Yeah. What thread locker is, like Loctite. Mm-hmm. So Loctite is good. But it breaks down with heat. So if something is loctited, usually what you do is you like fire up a blowtorch or some other heat source and you heat it up to sort of loosen that bond and then you can torque it off. ROCSET's the opposite. Rockset is actually water soluble. It's impervious to heat. So in order to get something that is rock set off, what you basically do is soak it in water. Okay. Or put it in boiling water. And it's not instant. So really what I had to do is I had to get a bucket and I had to basically set the the muzzle of my gun in a bucket of water overnight. And it just it star that moisture starts to permeate all the tiniest little crevices to the point where once it gets wet it starts to break down. Then you can torque it off.

Paul 50:22

Okay, okay. Yeah.

Drew 50:23

So it's like the opposite. So I when I'm when I'm doing things with muzzle devices or suppressors or things like that, I always use Roxet because Shit gets hot. Yeah.

Paul 50:34

I was gonna say heat. Yeah, firearms make heat. Yeah. Yeah.

Drew 50:37

So I use I use Rock Set to do that. So anyway, uh yeah, so fuck Sig Sour. Um they continue to confound me. I'm only I'm only in the SIG ecosystem so far. I'm done with it after this. Okay. I'm basically done with it at that point. Okay. All right. Uh, to wrap things up for tonight, I want to talk about some gaming news.

Paul 51:01

Okay.

Drew 51:03

Uh, are you familiar with the game Dark Castle?

Paul 51:06

Only vaguely, I did not play the these were primar they were Matt games, weren't they?

Drew 51:14

These were these were like sixty-eight K and a hundred and twenty-eight K Mat game. These were like MAC classic games.

Paul 51:19

Yeah.

Drew 51:20

So I grew up in a household. I don't think so.

Paul 51:28

Okay, okay.

Drew 51:29

I don't maybe. I I didn't really dig into the history of the developers. I mean, the publisher was electronic arts. Okay. Um on certain systems, but I grew up in a household without a PC. We were we were an Apple family because my parents were educators. So I grew up on Apple IICs, Apple IIGS, Mac Classics, Mac LC3s. Heck yeah. One of the first games I like One of the first games I ever played on a Mac was Dark Castle. And and to be frank, this was Dark Souls before Dark Souls. These games are exceptionally difficult, okay? Okay. These games taught me how to do keyboard and mouse movement in video games. Okay, the whole idea behind Dark Castle, it is a platformer. What you have to do is you have to defeat the the the black knight or the dark knight. I think it's the black knight. And in order to do so, you need to power up your character by finding fireballs. So in the game your character throws rocks, but you can upgrade to throw fireballs. You can also find a magic shield, which makes you impervious to certain types of damage. I have beaten Dark Castle. I have beaten it as God intended on the classic Mac. It is a very charming game. It's funny. Uh but it is brutally hard because the way that your character jumps has certain frames, he goes so far. If you fall too far, your character gets dizzy and then you'll get bitten by a rat and then you'll die. The the the way the game works is you move your character with the keyboard, but in order to attack You aim with the mouse to throw a rock to hit something. And you can find flails, you can find other stuff. I remember beating the game as a kid and it was like the m one of the most joyous things I remember. This plus classic After Dark. on on the Mac are just like core memories. I remember sitting in my hot, unair conditioned room in the summer playing these games. I love it. Then there was a sequel. It was called uh Ret was it was it Return to Dark Castle or was it Beyond Dark Castle? It was beyond Beyond Dark Castle.

Paul 53:41

Yeah, I'm looking at the Wikipedia page. There was both. Beyond was the s the Direct Z.

Drew 53:45

Beyond is the sequel, and then a different developer, a different developer did return.

Paul 53:50

Yes, Z Sculpt.

Drew 53:52

So Beyond Dark Castle was the sequel. And it added way more content and it actually turned parts of it into a platformer where you find like a little helicopter backpack and you kind of fly around. Very, very cute, very, very fun, but again, very difficult. I have never beaten beyond Dark Castle. I've only beaten the original Dark Castle Why am I bringing this up? Well, I'm bringing this up because Steam, uh, a company has re-released these games on Steam. And they have contr they have controller support, which is to me is cheating. Okay. But if you if you really want to experience a piece of nostalgic Mac gaming Because Paul, I'm not gonna lie, I have emulated Max on my computer specifically to play these. Yeah. That's how that's how much I love these fucking games. They're they're funny, they're whimsical, the graphics are actually pretty good for their time. Uh there were obviously like hand-drawn things One guy did all the sound effects so like every time there's like a uh or like a like it's one guy like with a with with a with a microphone in his bedroom somewhere who did all this stuff. And it's just And it's probably the audience probably just compressed the absolute crap It's not bad. I mean, I always felt like playing computer games as a kid until sound cards became a thing. Oh yeah. Macs always had better integrated sound in their game. They just did. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it's it's it's a fun game. It's a fun game. You should you should definitely check it out. Uh they're actually kinda they're actually kinda pricey on Steam. Um you can emulate them if you know how to if you if you go down that rabbit hole you can emulate them.

Paul 55:30

I I'm I'm no stranger to emulation, Drew, so

Drew 55:34

Yeah. And then tangentially, um when I was reading the Wikipedia page article this for this to prepare for the uh to prepare for the podcast, and I'll I'll drop a link to the to the to the um the Wikipedia page for this game series in in the show notes. Um there was a company who ported these games to other platforms. Okay. One of the companies that ported it to other platforms is this company called 360 Pacific. And 360 Pacific actually made one of my other core memory Mac games, and that was Armor Alley.

Paul 56:12

Armor I'm not from Armor I don't know, I'm not familiar with that one.

Drew 56:18

It was released for DOS and macOS. The mac OS version was the superior version just because of the resolution on the max and the sound on the max. Basically what it is is did you ever play the game Choplifter?

Paul 56:32

I I did play a lot of Choplifter on a Commodore 64 baby.

Drew 56:36

So this is this is a more advanced version of Choplifter. The idea is it's you ver it's green versus gray, and you control a helicopter. The object of the game is you need to escort a van from your side of the map to the other side of the map The per the player on the other side, whether it's a CPU or another player, because it supported modem support back in the day, is trying to do the same thing. And what you do is as you kill other enemy units or kill other helicopters or capture buildings and bunkers on the map, and it's just a 2D map. You earn basically credits, which you then spend to buy tanks, infantry, paratroopers, which you can then pick up in your helicopter and drop behind enemy lines to capture bunkers. It's a very very fun game and then as you play it introduces new concepts new units the the AI gets way harder as you play Um your helicopter is equipped with is equipped with bombs, machine guns, and guided missiles. Very, very fun game. So it's just interesting that there's a there's a connection between Dark Castle and Armorality. Cool. So go check that out if you're interested. Uh very, very fun games. Just a little piece of gaming history that I'm I'm very, very nostalgic for. Excellent.

Paul 58:00

Is that a show? It's a show Yeah, uh doing the best dot doing their best. com. I plubbed that one right up. Doing the best. com. You can find all the show notes, all the episodes.

Drew 58:12

And hey, thanks for listening.