mergeconflict260
James: [00:00:00] everyone to merge conflict, your number one source for stuff on the internet. I'm James Monson, Magna with my cohost every single week. The one, the only Frank Kruger with his amazing balance bot bringing a beer to him right now. 
Frank: [00:00:25] Ooh, thanks, James. Yeah, that is stuff on the internet. I posted a video of balanced spot.
I was very proud. Did you know that balance not now has a feature called balance and it's actually working. And I was so proud of it. I added to the stuff on the internet. I 
James: [00:00:42] first witnessed and be held balanced, bought before my very eyes. 18 years ago when I first met Frank balance, Bob was such a small young lad and, um, had a ways to go.
And now he's a grown up before our eyes and just wandering around town. 
Frank: [00:01:01] Yeah. Yeah. And falling over into bushes, uh, stumbling over every little rock. And generally me look like a fool, but no, it's, it's actually really fun because this is the mark three. This is the third hardware build that I've done. And it's finally been robust enough that it can take a full face plant on the concrete and get up and keep working.
So like that's one part I'm sure. Um, kind of pretty proud of, but the, the fact that it can actually stand up most of the time, I'm also really proud of, I actually had a breakthrough watching YouTube. Isn't that weird people. There are smart people on YouTube and I watched their videos and I was like, Ooh, I'm making a mistake.
And then I corrected my mistake and the robot worked. Imagine that. So you were 
James: [00:01:48] watching a video on like other balanced. 
Frank: [00:01:52] Yeah. Uh, my friend, hi, Greg was making fun of my bots because they don't balance, even though I was calling them balanced bots and he's like, look, even any random YouTuber can, uh, can get their bots to balance.
And I was looking through the video. I was like, huh, this person's actually being really thorough. Maybe I actually will watch this video. So I sat down and watched five videos from this person. I should probably get some links now that I'm talking about it this much. Uh, but good news was they had a few little tips, some things that I was ignoring that I shouldn't have been ignoring.
And once I fixed those bounds spot balanced. 
James: [00:02:35] Balanced bonds is balanced and you've got a 22,000 views of balanced bot wandering around town. It's it's quite impressive. Oh, Dodger rock. Nice. I know you're controlling this about balanced bought from something. 
Frank: [00:02:46] Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is manual controls. What I want to do is glue in iPhone.
And guide it with a vision system off of the camera. Yeah. But as of right now, I just made up Bluetooth remote control. You'd be so proud of me. I learned how to connect a Bluetooth controllers. So I gave it kind of like RC car controls forward, left. Right. So you can drive it around. 
James: [00:03:13] That was very cool.
I'm very, very impressed. Frank, our little, Ooh, it's so fun to watch. Like the last five seconds we're balanced about almost falls over. Um, that's really impressive. I remember early, early balanced bought days and it has come a long way and that's going to get us into our very first lightning topic today.
This is episode 260, which means that it's okay. A divisible of divisible dividing. Yeah. Invisible 
Frank: [00:03:40] divisor. It's oh God, she ruined it for me now. A remainder 
of 
James: [00:03:47] zero. 
Frank: [00:03:49] Yep. Let's go with that. 
James: [00:03:51] Um, every 10 episodes, we do lighting topics where we forget to ask you what we should talk about. So we tweet about it five seconds before we record.
And all of you, lovely, lovely listeners and patrons and people on our discord gave us some awesome topics. We try to spend five minutes each in and out of different topics, and I didn't even let Frank know what I picked. So I'm going to go ahead and. Just read all of them. Frank, you just sit back, you enjoy you enjoy.
Frank: [00:04:17] Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. I L I liked my intro. So you have all the practice with the good segues, but, you know, I have one or two good ones per a hundred episodes 
James: [00:04:26] that is accurate. All right. So let's get into it. Then IOT, Matt wants to know where do we get started? Is there a specific board that I should buy is like, how do I build my own balance bot?
Like what, what, what should I do? What, what do I go on the IOT world there? 
Frank: [00:04:40] Hmm, it's a tricky one because there are, um, um, divisions in the camps. Uh, we have the Amazon echo series of services. We have the Google services, we have the apple services. So it's kinda, what camp do you want to buy into? And unfortunately they're all pretty separate like that you're in the apple camp.
Is that right? Jane? 
James: [00:05:08] I'm in the no camp, man. What? I'm going to get 
Frank: [00:05:11] IOT? 
James: [00:05:13] No, no IOT. No, I'm against everything. I'm against all, all home automation. I'm against all IOT. We don't have anything listening now. You know, we have, um, we ha what do we have? I have a smart thermostat. Okay. And, 
Frank: [00:05:31] uh, I don't know if that qualifies and 
James: [00:05:34] I got the security camera.
And, uh, uh, that's it, you know, I used it, I did the Googles for the while. Uh, while I think that was actually asking about building an IOT device or Frank, but Frank went all in on home automation, but somewhere what we'll twist the question here, I went all in on the Googles for awhile, but then is Google.
So they got all my datas and you know, the Alexa, oops, the echos, they, um, they got that sidewalk mode on, you know, that's an app for everyone in the world to Sharon inner. 
Frank: [00:06:06] Not me. I hope. Okay, Tom, by default, learn how to they turn it 
James: [00:06:09] on for everybody. Can you believe that? 
Frank: [00:06:12] Uh, no. Thanks for telling me. I guess I have to go read some articles to find out exactly what that is.
I don't mind sharing James I'm liberal-minded it's caring. Yeah, it is. So in terms of building your own, I I've settled into the Amazon echo line of services, but mostly for, uh, the simplicity of building individual electronics. And there's a trick I use, I pretend to be a Phillips hue. All my electronics, all my electronics act like switches, but you can actually have Deming settings too.
So you can have zero to a hundred kind of levels. And so anything I want to automate, I do through those kinds of switches as the input, the convenience there is, it just integrates with all the apps and everything. Now, of course, that doesn't work. If you want to do temperature stuff and all that. But it works just right.
If you want to do a, um, voice control of things and B uh, automation, because you can just start sending web requests. These are just HDP requests that you're sending to the devices. So any little piece of hardware that you can run in HDP server on do a few, little bit of tricks with, um, broadcast DNS. Bon shore.
MDNS that kind of stuff. You have to be able to do those little tricks. So pretty sickly, any middle piece of hardware. I personally love using the SB 32, a little cheap chip. You can get on Amazon and make it, do all this stuff. 
James: [00:07:45] Yeah. That's a one that I think I used when I did my little IOT device and a little Bluetooth device for my cadence sensor, which is cool.
Um, I also think that the echo. Uh, Alexa SDK is really good for my understanding Damien, who is one of our patrons and creative voice in a can. I was just creating a new version of it that has the it's called presentation language. So it actually shows different UI based on different things, uh, which is pretty cool.
Uh, and, and he's, he's got a version out though. It's looking really good. So I think their SDK is quite excellent. I never used the Google. 
Frank: [00:08:20] Yeah, I haven't used the Google one either. I've used the Amazon one and I really liked it from C-sharp. I made, I think I open source it it's called an echo and it was just a neat way that you could do conversational stuff with the echo using a weight.
So instead of just having a bunch of, um, Commands that you can react to. You can actually script out conversations and do branching and that kind of stuff. I really liked the library. It was like a perfect fit for a wait. So I should release that library and talk about it more someday. 
James: [00:08:56] That sounds cool. I.
I have really avoided doing much IOT development because we don't have a lot of IOT devices. Like we just talked about, uh, any more, at least I do actually have Filipinos. So that is a lie. I do have three. I used to have a lot more. I got over them. I'm just, I don't just turn on my light. Just turn on the light bulb.
Just hit the switch. 
Frank: [00:09:18] That it's not the term. It's not the turning on, it's turning off. I really appreciate that. All my lights turn off at midnight. Um, and that when I'm leaving the house, I can just scream, turn everything off. Yeah. 
James: [00:09:30] Yeah. That is true. I, I enjoy that. I can turn on the main light, which is not on Hughes, but then we have two Hughes on both sides of the bed.
And that's pretty key because you want a bedside light to turn off without getting up. Um, I will say this before we go on to the next topic is I think I haven't gotten into too much because I'm not a big fan. See development and we know studio in general, not my favorite. I need to get back into meadow development because it's all, C-sharp all visual studio.
We both know, you know, Brian, so, um, we should really good. Yeah. Good people. Good people. 
Frank: [00:10:08] Yeah. The fun thing about the meadow is it has an SB 32 chip on it. So you can do all this stuff from it. I haven't personally myself, but it's technically possible. I just haven't done it myself. I like 
James: [00:10:19] that. All right, here we go.
Now this is going to be a throwback because I actually remixed the question here that Samir asked us in our discord, but only because I think that my, my insertion of one word, I think changes the game here. So this is from Simeon. What was your first? I inserted that word million dollar idea. 
Frank: [00:10:42] Uh, shall I go first?
James: [00:10:44] I can go first. If you do need it. 
Frank: [00:10:47] No, I, I have an answer. Uh, my first million dollar idea, I've talked about it before. Imagine this James live bus tracking in Seattle. So like, you know, like bus take twisty and turny things. I, I lived in a little bit of a dense city part, so you can never see the bus coming.
You know, some places you can see the bus coming from way up the road, but I can never see it coming. So I wanted a map to tell me when the bus was coming and I thought. Easily. I mean the first week I would probably make a million dollars. I would just have to figure out what to do with the other tens and hundreds of million dollars I would make after that, you know?
Well, I 
James: [00:11:22] mean, one bus away 
Frank: [00:11:23] does that, Frank. This was before one bus away to my credit and a one bus away did not have a fantastically rendered 3d map that had anime animated buses on it. A vector map, just like apple maps is today, but it took them years to get there. I had it early on. That's your one 
James: [00:11:42] bus away is cool.
Cause when it, when we first moved to Seattle, it was pretty new. They've expanded into other cities too. Um, good idea. It's the problem is it's not. It's real-time but not a hundred percent real time. I don't know exactly how it works. And if it is GPS tracking or not every single bus or routes, I think it's like, check-in points like when it passes it or something, right.
I'm not positive. 
Frank: [00:12:07] It's actually really funny. It's all mileage based and guesswork. So the buses are broadcasting how far they've traveled and depending on, um, a few other things. Keep it's the information that decides what route they're run and therefore where they are on a map. It's funny because there are actually really many levels to it.
I'm sorry, I'm going deep into bus stuff. Um, the server presents different API APIs, but you can dig in deeper and deeper and get to more and more raw data. So what I was doing was collecting records over a long time. Time, so that I could map out probabilistic events of the bus being traveling, but the updates were only about every eight minutes.
So the trick was to do good interpolation for that eight minutes that the data wasn't updated. That's 
James: [00:12:51] cool. That's cool. Yeah. I didn't realize that that was that's. That's how it worked. I was guessed, but now I know someone that knows. 
Frank: [00:12:57] Yeah, I'm sure. Uh, GPS is a common, uh, and this I've worked on this app.
Uh Hm. Jeepers. Ooh, 10 years ago. So maybe they actually do have proper GPS these days. 
James: [00:13:09] It'd be cool if they did, but I do. I do like the mileage thing that makes a lot of sense. So 
Frank: [00:13:14] based on the route good hack. Yeah. Cause then they have very simple radios on them that are just broadcasting their mileage.
James: [00:13:20] Yeah. All right. Here's my first million dollar idea now. I, I never went through with it because I don't know how to build websites and that's problem. Number one. But I'm a big fan of the Amazon affiliate program. So the Amazon affiliate program, it's, it's how any deal website you've ever gone to, or anytime anyone's tweeted in Amazon, I guess how they make money.
So how it works is, uh, anyone can sign up for it. And, and if you find a product you want to promote it, maybe tweet it, maybe write an article on, or maybe you tried write a video on it. You put a link to that Amazon product. And if somebody buys. If someone clicks on that link and then buy any product, you get a cut of their total sales.
So when I wrote that bike article, my bicycle article, I have a script on my website that takes all Amazon links and then converts them into my own and all this other stuff. But like that article netted a lot, quite a lot of money. Cause it got picked up on hacker news. And then if people didn't buy the bike, let's say they bought a TV.
I still get. So Amazon affiliate links, affiliate links in general, buy on Amazon. There's, there's all sorts of networks and all this stuff. That's how the internet works. Basically, a bunch of people are taking tiny cuts from every single time you click on anything. You'll see it in, in the URLs. You'll see it, the little rough things.
And if I do tweet them, they usually do hashtag ref because then, you know, that's the legal, you have to do that. Anyways. My idea was this. Was big movie deals.com. I own the domain name and I've owned. For 20 years, Frank, um, 
Frank: [00:14:58] this is a great idea, so good that you've never worked on it, but keep going. 
James: [00:15:02] Well idea because I'm a big fan of a website called cheap as gamer.com.
They have great podcast, um, and they are a forum where people can. Video game deals and have discussions around it and all this up black Friday, I was off. So I wanted to do something very similar, but for movies cause I'm, I used to be a big SINTEF Santa file, like a movie movie person. And so I wanted to have a website that only did movie deals and that was it.
And people would discuss movies and post things. It's not like that. And I would get affiliate revenue share from that. I thought big movie deals. What a great domain name. That would be my million dollar. 
Frank: [00:15:42] Okay. Uh, you're you're going to have to sell a lot of deals. W w uh, uh, I'm. I'm sorry. I can't help, but to interrogate people's ideas, who's going to do all the sales for you.
Where are you getting these big deals from James? No, they're all 
James: [00:15:54] a F you didn't even listen to me, Frank. They're all I 
Frank: [00:15:57] listened to the affiliates, but they're not all deals. 
James: [00:16:01] Um, so here's how it would work. People would go find when a movie was on sale on target.com or best buy or Amazon, they would share that I would promote that on the front page, they would, people would click on it.
I would get the affiliate money from that sale. 
Frank: [00:16:15] Ah, your users did the work. Got it. Absolutely. 
James: [00:16:18] I mean, I would, you know, I would try and it runs itself is Brunswick. Exactly. 
Frank: [00:16:22] Yeah. Okay. I feel like you could do this in place or pretty nicely. Yeah, well, let's, uh, let's all get James to do this with 
James: [00:16:32] some, um, uh, build a quad copter thing.
Frank: [00:16:38] Yeah. Actually pretty similar. Um, it wasn't deals though. It was just, um, shopping and assembling a quad copter, and then it would try to give you performance characteristics. I still like the idea. It's just hard to keep up with the cattle. 
James: [00:16:53] There you go, all right, here we go from Christopher. Now this, this question is generics.
I'll let you interpret it. However you want light or dark theme or neither 
Frank: [00:17:06] dark theme. Um, and I, I think, I didn't understand. You're open to interpretation, but you gave me a little clue earlier. You're distinguishing between the operating system and the IDE and things like that. Yeah. Um, no, cause just consistency, because once you have something dark, all the white windows are so bright and so painful.
You adjust to the dark. And so for no other reason than to save my poor little eyeballs, consistency, consistency, consistency. And I wasn't a dark person before I happily we used bright Mac. I always loved bright Mac. It's very cute. But I don't know, dark modes pretty. I get to see 8 million different shades of black.
Somehow. I never knew there were so many grays in the world, but every app uses a different set of grays. That's always interesting to see and, uh, I just dig it. Maybe I'll grow out of it, but for now I dig it. 
James: [00:18:04] All right. So I'm all over the place, to be honest with you. So my phone, my phone, it is in the daytime nighttime settings.
Frank: [00:18:16] Crazy. That's like chaotic that's anarchist lifestyle right there. A friend of the show, Joseph, I believe also lives that crazy lifestyle. I don't know how you do it. 
James: [00:18:27] Just open up a message. It is in a light right now. Hmm. 
Frank: [00:18:31] Insane. I would hate it. 
James: [00:18:34] Yeah. Now I, I do this and so every single app I open it it's there.
So I use system default based on time of day. That's what I use all my time. Are there now I do get very upset when an app doesn't theme, Redfin guilty, not having a lighter dark theme. Listen. 2022. We need to have, we need to have light and darkness for every website too, because there's nothing worse than lying in bed, opening up a news articles in your face.
Right. 
Frank: [00:19:04] Okay. So you agree with me on that point? Yeah, I will say just for usability, please put a dark theme on your website. Yeah, I will 
James: [00:19:11] say. Websites apps, everything. I am guilty though, of not doing it for island tracker. Cause I was lazy. But now that I have everything down to a science, that's the way to go now for my IDE.
Um, mostly people have yelled at me about my streaming. I usually use default blue, which is not light it's blue theme in visual studio. That's actually my favorite theme, but I've been using dark theme mostly because when I'm streaming, people are sitting close to their monitors. However, when I'm presenting at a conference.
Light theme because of the contrast when people are far away, it's easier to read the, um, um, dark tacks on the light background with bigger fonts. So if you're presenting at a conference, always blue theme, it doesn't have to be light theme. Light theme is like yelling at you in your face. Um, and, and very bright whites, but the blue theme is blue.
It's. I mean, it is a white, you know, editor, but, um, it's that. Um, my Mac is also always on dark or dark mode right now. And windows is also in dark mode, but I'll tell you what, I can't tell half the difference, because like you said, every website, no website has a dark mode to it. So it's, it's might as well be.
And notepad doesn't have a dark theme to it. So, you know, whenever that comes, then we're full on things. 
Frank: [00:20:35] Well, at least get hub finally. Got it. You know, it's okay. 
James: [00:20:39] Good hub for me. Always light theme. I never go dark name on it. 
Frank: [00:20:43] Uh, yeah. I, I don't love their dark theme. I think there's some mistakes with it, but I think they will improve it over time.
So I'm not too worried about that. I 
James: [00:20:51] do it always light theme weirdo. Yeah, I know. 
Frank: [00:20:56] What is wrong with you, James? I get, I get having a difference for a distinction. Like I could see like all the media apps or communication apps being light mode. I could see an argument for doing that. Did you see the new setting in oh, S 10, 11, 12, Monterey.
What are we up to 12? Uh, every app can now choose an accent color just like on iOS. So. You. Uh, so now it's a little bit more multicolor in the apple world. It used to be so simple. There were no options. Just one option. What color do you want your buttons? But now you, the operating systems getting a bit color.
Cool. 
James: [00:21:34] That's awesome. That's how Andrew has been forever, which is great. It's all coming to weird on 
Frank: [00:21:38] a desktop though. Um, I think UWP apps like windows store apps had a theme. I'd forget how much the operating system reflected it though. Outside of the Chrome. 
James: [00:21:49] Yes. True. That's true. Um, all right, next question, uh, that we have here is back to Samir.
What are you most excited for in the second half of 2021? 
Frank: [00:22:06] I am most excited to see absolutely zero third wave of COVID and the world will move on and life will get back to normal. Um, wow. Yep. Well that, so that's my life one, uh, technology wise. I don't think too much is happening. So good stability times.
I want to see the  processor come out at some point, but honestly, I don't have high hopes that it's going to happen in the second half of 2021. I think it would have happened now. I don't know who can guess timelines. But aside from that world, peace, you know, that kind of stuff. 
James: [00:22:48] That's good. I like that little world peace, uh, Olympics.
We got Olympics coming up. We'll be, I'll be fascinated to see how that happens. I'm a little out of 
Frank: [00:22:55] touch. Where, where, where are we doing the Olympics in 
James: [00:22:59] Japan still. 
Frank: [00:23:00] Okay. I'm that outta touch that I didn't know. Yeah. Well that sounds fun. I can't believe they're actually doing them because again, third wave, but, okay, great.
James: [00:23:11] They were doing, they were supposed to be last. 
Frank: [00:23:14] Sure. And then they weren't multiples of four triathlete beer, right? Yeah. That's how the Olympics work. 
James: [00:23:22] I always say I am. I am like you. I am optimistic. We had, I think 65% here in the states and yet somehow 35% of people don't want to get a vaccine in which most of the world can't get.
It's very disheartening, but on a positive note, uh, I am. Starting to feel a little bit better about my newsletter, a little bit about recent travel I had to do, which got me on many, many flights. And thanks to the mass mandate. I felt really good about it. Not great about it, but I felt okay about it. I mean, I was fine wearing the masks.
I did it the entire time, but I'm feeling a little bit better about being out, eating outdoors, not indoors. I'm still not there yet. I'm feeling okay. Feeling a little bit better. So I'm thinking this fall, I look forward to the second half I'm I think the more. Vaccines. And if we don't have a third 18th wave or whatever it is then, or that I would like to, I would like to really look for here.
What I'm really looking forward to is if things are better than theirs.net comp in November, which is the launch of doc six, which is, would be very exciting for the second half of 2021. I'm so down in value, I'm very excited about that. And maybe we could be in person and we can. You know, socially distance, some of the, the, the dinette comp, which has been virtual for the last oh, 
Frank: [00:24:43] yes.
I mean, thank you. Thank you for that. Because for some reason, like Maui is half released in my head. So like, yes, Maui, but that is. In the mobile space, the thing I'm looking forward to most, because it's been a little bit gray and fuzzy, but I think it will be getting a 1.0 or something last time I think I heard, so we'll be getting a good release and we can start really converting all our apps over to it and re standardizing all that.
And that does sound terrible, but I'm actually looking forward to it because new technology, all that stuff. 
James: [00:25:19] I'm excited. I'm excited about it. I don't think the transition will be that drastic, but I'll find out relatively soon, I've been playing around with every preview. I'm going to do a video by the time this is out.
It should be up on preview five a and there's a lot coming in preview six, but also visual studio. 2022 will be out this fall, which also be very exciting pairing nicely with, and Maui also improvements there on both windows and the Mac 64 bit support on windows, which was very exciting too. Um, yeah, I, I.
I it's, it's hard to say, I guess I'm looking forward to maybe seeing you again, maybe see my family again, uh, and having those interactions be a little bit more comfortable. 
Frank: [00:26:04] Yeah. I don't know about that comfortable part. It's going to take a while 
James: [00:26:08] I said a little bit more Frank now fully. I said a 
Frank: [00:26:10] little bit more.
I did an outdoor seating restaurant for the first time and. 80% comfortable, 75% comfortable. So it wasn't too bad. Uh, it's good to hear about the flying. I have to do some flying this summer, so, uh, that'll be the big one for me. We'll see if I can just, yeah, pretend, pretend I'm not around diseased bags. 
James: [00:26:34] Uh, I was, I did fly in and out of SeaTac and Seattle.
So busy so many people. Oh yeah. It's just so many people, so many PFS as, so I had to go, Ooh, side tangent. I, I was there for a while cause I had a layover and uh, um, I. My gate that I needed to go to there. It was like a bunch of gates at the end of a thing. And it was so many people it's like every, like all the planes were departing at the same time.
And I was like, I got two hours I'm out of here. I'm going to the end gates, the north satellite. They recently redid stunning because there's no international flights. So nobody's there. It's great. And that's what you can do. 
Frank: [00:27:16] That is really funny. I have spent ridiculous amount of times and those north satellite gates.
I had one of those like sleeping in the airport, adventurous there twice where I've just had to kill like 10 hours at the north Seattle gates and they get quiet and they get quite fine. You're absolutely right. Nothing wrong. I am a 
James: [00:27:36] fan. All right, schnapps, over here on our discord. Now Franklin not know about this cause Frank isn't on the internet, I guess.
Um, we are recording this on the 22nd and on the 24th of June one day before my birthday and Microsoft decided to, um, do a windows developer event or a windows event. Now it is just a windows event. However, there's been a bunch of leaks online. So we know from the leak I, I work at this company and this podcast will come up after a second.
I edit this stuff, but anyways, they're saying it's a windows 11 event. Hence look at the website, the windows, the form, and 11, that makes a lot of sense. And is starting at 11:00 AM Eastern. That makes a lot of sense too. 
Frank: [00:28:21] Yeah, that's very clever. Yeah. Well, I did, I did happen to catch, I did not know about the windows event, but I did happen to see the windows 11 leak and I was.
Snarky enough to post a snarky tweet about it, because there, there are a few things that look like they have a dock now, and I wanted to make fun of Microsoft for having a doc just like apple, but we'll see, because you know, what's a leak. How old is the bill? They're definitely not showing it off. The way it's meant to be shown off by someone who knows where all the new features are and everything and how they go together.
So I'm definitely going to tune into this one. Thank goodness. I'm really bad at times zones 11:00 AM Eastern is 8:00 AM for me. Yeah. Yeah. Great. 8:00 AM event. I can do it. It'll be worth it for windows. 
James: [00:29:15] Yes, I am excited about it. I will be up and running. It's on my calendar and yeah. You know, I think, um, like if you have ever read the verge article, they talk about how windows 10 X, what is no longer shipping, right?
Because that was going to be for dual screen devices, but the windows division pivoted due to COVID, which makes a lot of sense. There's been tons of work going into windows, all new icons updates to settings that fee every time I'm getting updated feels fresh. There's this new thing in the most recent update that on the bottom, right.
I can click on and it gives me weather data, stock data, get like top stories and traffic data and I can customize it. And it's kind of like a home page for me, kind of, which is nice. So I'm hoping more customization. Like I kind of want my operating system to be a little bit more personalized towards my life.
Where like widgets could do that a little bit more, you know, didn't we have widgets and like Vista and previous versions of Macko ass. Like I kind of want, I think widgets are back. I think we're just our back, Frank. 
Frank: [00:30:15] Yeah. Be curious to see if they actually come up with a widget model, like, you know, like, can I buy an app in the store that does it because I've done taskbar programming on windows before.
It's not hard, actually. You just. Register a function, create a menu, somehow register it with the operating system. Um, but it'll be interesting to see if that becomes a more important user interface, idiom, that kind of thing, how you're supposed to actually use. But, uh, I'm, I'm always curious about windows updates because they have that trick, um, They definitely have a style in mind, but at the same time it's customizable.
I'm sure. James, if you tried hard enough, you could probably get an active ex desktop running a web page with embedded Java controls on it. You know, I they're so good about backwards compatibility. I'm pretty sure you could get that in your desktop. So the real question is what technology would we use for these kinds of widgets and things like that?
Hopefully you really think this will be a developer event and not just a. Check check out our new cool operating system event. 
James: [00:31:23] Yeah, I don't know. Well, actually what I'm seeing right now, spoiler alert is that, oh, there is a another event. Uh, 3:00 PM Eastern, which is the developer event. Okay, cool. That's actually cool.
Wow. Okay. I didn't know this. Perfect. 
Frank: [00:31:38] They're giving us a recess. Oh no. Now we can't record the show right after the one. Now we have to wait till the next one. Yeah. So 
James: [00:31:46] we'll we'll do we, we, I don't know. I'm excited. I mean, I, you know, Inside inside the Microsoft, but I don't work in these divisions. So I honestly don't know.
And I don't, I don't dog food because I'm a bad dog food or I don't dog for any of our things. So actually, I don't know. I don't know. Um, Very 
Frank: [00:32:05] much count yourself. Lucky. I used to work. Uh, I used to work on windows, so would dog food, all the operating systems and James, there were months where the operating system was just upside down when you installed it for another reason.
And it was just upside down. So you'd get, you'd get some really funny builds. Sometimes it's fun to dog food. They have like those to previews and all of that. But as far as I know, this has not hit any of those inserted previews. This is just been. Internal internal. Yeah. And so maybe there'll be a preview available after the event.
We'll see. 
James: [00:32:39] That'd be cool. What I'm really hoping for is if this version of windows is even thinner than windows 10. And what I mean by that is, you know, on my surface go my little device, I recently updated to the most recent version of windows and it seems to be getting faster with optimizations. So I'm hoping that this is even thinner.
Co thinner OSTP client that will run faster on my poor little surface go that I did take on this fight. It held up pretty well. I, I, you know, I do like that machine a lot, and I know that there are a lot of people that. How's this in tech meme ride home. And he was complaining that he bought a windows machine and like this and the track pad, the O S and the thing, and the thing is like, well, you know, what did you buy?
You know? And, and did it have a bunch of, did you buy one that had a bunch of junk on it? And of course is what track by, you know, there's only certain devices, but there's a lot of people that buy, like Chromebook ask devices that are running windows that are running Celeron processors. How do you make those run?
Amazing. And I don't, I don't know if that's a. If that's going to be used some parties in this event or not, but I would love that. So thin down. 
Frank: [00:33:51] Yeah, that's always been a tricky part with windows, too. Pre-installed apps and all of that. I actually find it very rewarding to get like a computer from the store that has all that junk installed and to slowly methodically go through and uninstall it all and get the operating system back to like a very clean state I used to.
Uh, w whenever I'd buy a new computer, wipe it out and start from scratch that way. But I learned to go in the other direction. It's actually a little bit better because you never know what some of these random, uh, crazy drivers are. Like, you can never get those touch pads to work as good ever again. If you don't use the drivers that come with the computer, that kind of stuff.
I actually enjoy that part. I know it's not for everyone, but there they're always working on improving it, but it's a fine, fine balancing act. They're doing there with all their parts. 
James: [00:34:41] That's very true. It is impressive. When you think about it at the end of the day, it's a very wide. Gambit 
Frank: [00:34:48] people installed windows on everything.
Like I was debating, I was debating, put this on a VM or something. Then you mentioned the go. I'm like, yeah, my surface go would love it. I, now I'm really hoping there's going to be a preview, but if not, if they're doing an announcement like August used to be the classic windows release time, but we'll see, there must be a preview coming out before the end of the year.
James: [00:35:13] I'd hope so. All right. Last question. This is from James Monson Magno in the chat. Uh, he asks, if you could go back in time, Frank Krueger and change one thing in your development of balance bot that you know now that you wish you knew earlier, what was.
Frank: [00:35:32] Sensors are very noisy and you can filter, filter, filter, and you think you're filtering, but you're not filtering. And you got to just filter more because it turns out all sensors are terrible in particular, James excelerometer. They are the absolute worst gyros. I love you. Gyros accelerometers. You are the worst.
So I wish I did not have the false belief that accelerometers were at all a viable sensor. 
James: [00:36:02] That is, uh, that, that I, I can contest that, uh, that sensors are very noisy. Um, GPS, very noisy. Uh, For most things, sometimes the operating system can, can, can, can factor out different things, but GPS can also be very noisy and bop around.
Um, we were building a driving app, the many, many, many, many builds ago or big nights ago, and it's called my driving cause he just put my in front of everything and it's great. Yeah. Uh, and this was cool because this application hour with like James and Pierce Bogan on this and a bunch of other people, it was cool.
It was, you could put in an OBD sensor. That was the thing that reads the sensor data from your car and, uh, over wifi or Bluetooth, it would stream the data to your phone. And that would give you information on how fast you're accelerating or braking. You could tie that into the GPS and we would track your drive and feed that into IOT hub that would process your data to see what heartbreaking or heart-stopping kind of like those, uh, insurance app do.
And that all that data, all the, all the things that are coming back are so noisy with all sorts of stuff. You really got to filter stuff out. I mean, even for my little cycling app, you know, this little tiny accelerometer or gyro or whatever's in there, the cadence sensor, right. The, the, the data can be noisy and you got to filter out the highs and the lows and, and, uh, try to do some, some guesstimating in there, you know, is, has it been really high for, for 10 times?
Is that too much? Is it three times too much? Like, oh, what if it's a zero? Did they stop or did you just get a bad. 
Frank: [00:37:44] Yeah. And it's hard because I try not to have too many magic numbers in my code. Like when you look at control code for robots and things like that, there's random numbers everywhere. 0.01 0.02 0.125, you know, just random numbers.
What do they mean? I don't know when I put these numbers, I feel a little bit that way with my filter. So I don't absolutely love it. I think that the fact that the robot is bouncing as a small stroke of miracle. Not a hundred percent because of my skill. There was a lot of luck involved there that I happened upon some numbers that were controllable.
But the neat thing is now that I have some controllable numbers, I can start looking at the graphs and playing with the filter values to, um, really refine it down to what I want. The problem I had before was all of my logs were of the robot falling off. Hmm. So it takes at 1.5 seconds to fall over. So all my logs were 1.5 seconds long, and there was just not much you could learn from those logs.
Now that I have the robot actually functioning, I can take a more critical look at why it's functioning. Now. I have a pro case. I never had a pro case before, and I can do a better job. 
James: [00:38:58] Nice. That's awesome. See the more, you know, 
Frank: [00:39:03] Yeah. Um, it turns out, even though you think, you know, something, you really got to build it to find out if you do, and don't forget the little details, everyone linearize your inputs.
That was the other big mistake I made. Make sure you linearize your inputs. Yeah. 
James: [00:39:22] Uh, all right, well, we may or may not do a windows 11 recap affiliate. We should probably do that at some point. It'll do a special episode or just tack it onto the end of this. You'll find out pretty soon, but that's gonna do it for this week's podcast.
I wanna thank everyone for tuning in. Don't forget that we have all the things over at merge conflict, FM, our Twitter accounts, our Patriot page, and of course, every single podcast. So you can share that with your friends and tell them to subscribe. We'd appreciate that. Oh, and you can leave a review too, you know?
That's going to do for this reason we're traveling. So until next time, I'm James Watson Magno and 
Frank: [00:39:52] I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks. 
James: [00:39:55] Peace.