Pragmatic 103: Lockdown Computing

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Just visit engineered.network/pragmatic to learn how you can help this show to continue to be made. Thank you. I'm your host, John Chidji. And today I'm joined once again by Vic Hudson. How are you doing Vic? - I'm good, John. How are you, man? - I am doing very well, thank you. And I appreciate you making the time to catch up and talk about something that's been become, How do I put this? A problem that's been forced upon a lot of people, which is the whole lockdown, thanks to our friendly pandemic and how that's impacted our computing needs, I guess. I'm trying to figure out the right way of putting it, but that's a stab at it. That's a good stab. It's a good stab. It's a good stab, I approve. Okay, very good. I don't want to get to the- I don't want to get to the punch line of exactly what I've done, but I thought what I might start with is just talk a little bit about my role changes and my how, how I've changed in my job role over the years. And then a little bit about all the history of the different Max that I've had from the Hackintosh to present. All right. I'd love to. And when we get to that point, love to hear about your own from when your first Max through to where you're at today as well. If that's cool. Mine's a little less impressive of a history as yours, but I will share it. Yours is just consistent. And I clearly just have a problem, I think is a better way of putting it, but I appreciate it. You have a problem. I have a problem, yes. There are support groups for people like you? Is that what I'm hearing? I think I might need one. I'm just never happy with the Mac I've got. Oh, it's all right, man. This is a safe space. You can talk. It's just you and me? All right. Very good. Yep. Yep. Just us. Oh, man. So, the thing is, when I started out in engineering, it was all like, it was predominantly desk based, because I worked for, Yeah, I worked for Boeing for a while, I worked for Nortel for a while, it was all based in a desk. So, I had a desktop, pretty standard stuff, didn't really go anywhere, didn't really do anything. Well, didn't really do anything that came out wrong. What I meant was, yeah, I did stuff, but it was all desk based. And when I took on a job at MPA Engineering, the company started to give, you know, gave me a laptop and I was spending half of my time on site. And it was kind of at site one day. I was working on a machine, a brick making machine. And there was a developer who'd come up from Sydney to help with a different part of the machine. So I was doing the main conveyor system and some of the pneumatic stuff, but he came along to work on a different part of it. And he had this, so I was there with my crappy laptop provided by my company, which was some three-year-old beaten up. It was, I don't even remember, I think it was Pioneer Computers or something like that. It was an imported- It was a Chinese import and they used a desktop class Pentium 4 and shoved it into a laptop form factor and wondered why it got so goddamn hot. I bet you could cook eggs on that thing and it had a battery life of about 10 minutes. Yeah, not far wrong. It was- It had battery life issues, yes. And there was a slight bump in the bottom where the heat had warped the bottom of the case from getting so hot. Really? That bad? Yes. Yeah, that bad. It was bad. It was not a battery warp. It was a CPU heat induced war. It was not good. And so, yeah, you have to sit when it was on your lap as a laptop, you had to have your legs spread as far as you could without it falling through your legs. Otherwise, your legs would get burnt. I found a big pillow to sit it on or something. Nah, it would overheat quicker then, you need air flow underneath. Well, that's true. It was terrible. I was just thinking about protecting my goods. Well, that is a valid concern. So, suffice it to say, he had- I don't know how much the laptop that I had was worth. It was probably around about $1,500 or something like that Australian at the time. Yeah. And this other guy I rocked up with, I kid you not, I priced it. It was like a $4,000 laptop. So, it was more than double the price. And it was brand new. It was, well, I say brand new, it was like six weeks old. And I looked at him and I made comment of the fact and I said to him, like, why have you got- Like, what's a nice laptop like you doing in a place like this? Because, you know, we're surrounded- We're in a brickworks. I don't know if you've been to a brickworks before, but when they do slurry mixing, it's like you get this this powder in the air from all the clay dust and everything. And the whole place is just coated in it. You're coated in it and the sweat and everything. And this beautiful laptop getting rained on by this crud in the air. And it's just like, you know, why would you bring such a beautiful computer to a place like this. And he said to me, the computer that I have is the tool of my trade and I want to have the best tool I can for the trade. And so, and that sort of for me was a was an epiphany. Well, I mean, I guess an epiphany is one idea I would have, but he gave me that idea. So, maybe it wasn't an epiphany on my part, but I shamelessly stole his epiphany and claimed it as my own and said, you know what, I'm no longer going to put up with the crap that IT departments give me. And so, yeah, so it was more or less at that point that I started to buy my own laptop. So, the mid 2000s, so mid-naughts, this was. And so, I'd been running desktop PCs at home and it was at that point I decided to build myself a Hackintosh because I I was sick of Windows XP continually, and I hated Windows Vista with a passion. Cancel or allow. I mean, it was so bad. And so, I started by building myself a Hackintosh and I actually took that work laptop I mentioned, I actually turned it into a Hackintosh laptop. Much to my boss's horror, one day I came into work and I was having a problem with my laptop, and before I could stop him, he'd already jumped on the laptop trying to help. And he's like, what the hell have you done to this laptop? And I'm like, nothing at all. Yeah. Because- I'll bet the IT department was real fond of that. Well, see, the problem is that MPI Engineering was quite a small company. I mean, we had like 45 employees and there was no IT department. Oh, OK. Yeah, it was just like- So, you didn't have to worry about them. No, no, you just had to worry about the boss and he was scary enough, believe me. So anyway, we managed to get it fixed and so on and so forth, but he shook his head and walked off. I'm like, yeah, OK, just let the cool kids run their Hackintoshes on company supplied hardware. You don't need to worry about that anyway. So I built a Hackintosh then in 2000, this is 2007, I think it was. And that was around about the Tiger for Intel build that came out, which interestingly enough, Tiger for Intel never actually got released for a Mac, I believe, genuinely, it was there as a development thing. Yeah. So I don't think they ever sold it because by the time the Intel CPUs came out, that came out with Leopard. Right. Yeah. So anyway, so the Tiger for Intel build was what was the first one that people spun up in virtual machines and, and ran on on Hackintoshes and so on and so forth. So it was, there were lots of guides for the different Kext kernel extensions, you had out load to make it work on different bits of equipment. And I managed to get it working. It was like a 2.66 gigahertz Core 2. I think it was Core 2 Quad, I think, or Core 2 Duo. I can't remember. Anyway, 4 gig of RAM, 80 gig hard drive. Man, that was big back in the day. Yeah. And it actually became the kid's computer after I was done with it. And it sat in a corner unused for about a year or so till I sold it. So, I had it till about 2013. So, I had it for a long time. Right. But it wasn't the first genuine Mac that I got, and certainly not the first Mac laptop that I got. Yeah. And it stayed a Hackintosh that whole time until 2013? Yeah, it did. Yeah. I just never upgraded it because upgrading, I think I actually know, I tell a lie. I was getting ready to ask, you know, did you have to fight with it to keep it that way with each update when it came, when the OS got upgraded? But you just- I actually, yeah, no, actually now I'm thinking about it. I think I did upgrade it to Snow Leopard at some point. And it was such a massive hassle that I never went beyond Snow Leopard. Yeah. It was so painful. And it was around about, I think it was around about that time that I decided to buy. So, I think I upgraded to from Tiger to Leopard. And then I got a secondhand eMac, the Education Mac. That was in 2008. And that was the 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4. It had a massive 1GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, and it was the 17-inch CRT. And that thing was so heavy. And I had that for a couple years and I ended up selling that in 2010. But that was because I'd made a choice at that point that I was done with my Hackintosh work laptop. My Hackintosh Hackintosh was already the kids computer. And so I decided to put my money instead into a MacBook Pro. So I got myself a 15 inch MacBook Pro. And that was a, you know, funnily enough, similar specs Core 2 Duo 2.66 gig, had two gig of RAM, 320 gig hard drive. It was the unibody, it was, I think it was the first unibody model. I think it was. - I was going to say that if that wasn't the first, it had to be pretty close 'cause that's, they didn't make them too much earlier than that. I don't think. - No, I don't think they did. And this was the one that still had the Express Card slot, you know, the Express Card 3/4 slot. Yeah, so yeah, I bought myself one of those dinky die 24 in one card readers, you know, with the two kinds of cards you actually used and the 22 kinds of cards you've never heard of that you'll never use. Yeah, 24 in one. You can read them if you ever need to. If you ever come across one of those other 22, it'll be there for you when you need it. That's right. Anyway, another sales point for that particular MacBook Pro, it had a removable battery. I remember the days. Like dog. I know, right, you can remove the battery. Anyway. User serviceable parts. User serviceable, I know, who would have thought that that was possible? Anyway, so I had that for a couple of years. I sold that in late 2011. And it was more or less then at this point that I had a decent laptop from work and I'm like, okay, fine, I'll use the work laptop. And then I bought- Instead, I replaced it with a- Well, it was early 2011, so they crossed over for a little while before I saw the laptop was a- my Mac Pro. I actually had the 2009 model quad core Nihalem Mac Pro. And it was the first Mac that I bought new, because that Mac Pro, MacBook Pro 15 inch was a secondhand, was a used one. Well, I think it was. Yeah, it was. But still, but the thing was that I didn't appreciate the time when I got the Mac Pro was there were a couple of problems with it. It was very big. And despite its nickname being a cheese grater, it really didn't grate cheese that well. No. Anyway. You tried this? No, I didn't. Far gone. But anyway, it was noticeably loud, you know, like- It was kind of pretty, though. Oh, yeah. It was a beautiful bit of technology. I loved it in most respects. And in retrospect, it wasn't loud, loud insofar as the problem was I had four hard drives mounted in it. And so, those four hard drives and the extra cooling because of all the extra heat that that generated, it got very hot. In fact, the whole room was probably somewhere between seven to ten degrees hotter when it was running versus when it was off. And in summer, you really felt it. Yeah. In winter, it was fine. It was kind of like having a space heater in the room. It was nice, but- Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. And that was in the time just before we got solar panels on the roof. So, we got solar panels. We got 5.8 kilowatts or something like that of solar power on our roof. And so, we noticed the power bill going up significantly because I left it on all the time. Yeah, for different reasons. Right. And I probably should have let it sleep, but I was serving media off of it. I was going to say, you didn't even let it go to sleep or anything? No, I had to keep, you know what I'm saying? But, hmm, in retrospect... As you do. Probably should have let it sleep, you probably know, but it doesn't matter. That's all right. So, I had it for two and a half years and they were, you know, two and a half blissful years and I loved it. But I mean, the thing was huge. It got hot, it was loud and it chewed through the power. So, eventually I lost that argument. And I also thought, if I'm going to put my money into a computer And I think this is the first one that I bought that was the first MacBook that I actually bought that was brand new. That was in mid 2012. I got a MacBook Air 13 inch and that was the i7, 2 gigahertz, 8 giga RAM, 256 gig SSD. And it was night and day because it was the first computer I'd used that had a boot volume that was an SSD. Yeah. And it was magic. So good. Yeah. And I love that machine. In fact, I loved it so much, that's the longest I've ever owned a laptop. I had it for three years and three months. So, it was just, yeah, anyway, dual core i7, beautiful machine, loved it. And that became my work machine. And what I would do and what I started doing at that point is that I had a docking station at home then. So, I had a couple of HD screens, like 1920 by 1080 screens, and I'd plug into those at home, I'd go to work and I had a single screen at work, I'd plug in the single screen at work. As time moved forward and I moved to my current employer, they had two screens set up. So, I said, "Bonus, I'll plug it into two screens." There we go. - There you go. - And it could run two HD screens and it was great. So, I could basically have my preferred computer at home and my preferred computer at work. Now, there's a brief period coming up there where I went for nine months with a Surface Pro, which we talked about in the previous episode. but I still had the Mac for like at this point in time for going between work and home. So it was kind of, it was the same machine, you just dock it in a different place. And that worked well because I was in the office five days a week. And when you'd come home, you just use it on the weekend and at night you'd plug it in for just software updates and what have you. - Right. - So a little bit fiddly with the corporate network 'cause corporate IT weren't necessarily the most happy with you plugging in your own device. That's gotten better with time, but anyway. All right, so now up to September 2015, at which point I then upgraded to a new MacBook Pro. And I had that for... Was this the first year they had the Retina display on the Mac? I think it was. So, this was the 15.4 inch, 512 gig. In fact, I didn't even write the specs on here because I only had it for 10 months. And the reason was that I was in a pretty touchy financial situation at that time. Yeah. And as much as it pained me to do it, I had to sell it because I needed the money. Yeah. Which looking back now seems like a lifetime ago, but you know, these things happen from time to time. So, I had to do it. It was a very sad day, but I did it. And I just subsisted on a work laptop until I, in September, 2018, that's when I bought my laptop that I'm using now, which is a MacBook Pro 13 inch with a touch bar. And I still have it today. It's two years and nine months, still not the record, but it's getting there. It is also a beautiful machine. That's the one, that's the 2.7 gig quad core Intel Core i7. And that's got the integrated graphics, Iris Plus, whatever it is, 655. Yeah. 16 gig of RAM, you know, 512 gigs solid state drive. And it can drive two 4K external displays, which I had one of at the time at home. And then last year upgraded to a second one. But the funny thing that I found and it says it can drive it like two screens, But can it actually do it all that well? Because what I found was there was some really... It's like it said it was driving 60 hertz, like it reported, yes, I'm driving 60 hertz, but the refresh rates just didn't look quite right. Yeah, it was sluggish, the scrolling wasn't very smooth, dragging screens around and minimising from the dock and expanding from the dock, it was all just not quite right. It was jittery, it was stuttery, it was not the best. So, you were working that poor thing to death. I was, because I mean, it was docked at home and then it was docked at work. And yeah, and I've been working on that for years, right. And when I was at work, the two HD screens, the 1920 by 1080s, they were fine. No lag, no nothing. In fact, one 4K screen at, you know, let me just see, was it 3840 by 2160? Ultra HD, whatever. One of them was fine, but two seemed like it might have been a bridge too far. And I think what the problem was upon reflection, or rather the problem is upon reflection, is that it's got integrated graphics, which means the graphics doesn't have its own independent memory. Yeah. It's fighting the core system for that 16 gig of RAM. And so, what I think was happening was when I had a lot of things open, it was forcing it to swap and the graphics may have got priority, possibly, but then that was sapping the rest of the performance of the computer, leading to the poor performance. Because you have to do a lot more swapping. Yeah. To preserve all that RAM for the graphics. Yeah, I think so. I'd say that maybe kicked out a lot of heat, too. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. My laptop was very hot and the fans would run quite loud regularly. It was not good. I mean, I was in a situation where I stopped using, I went through and I killed all these background applications. I love iStat menus and I had to stop using it 'cause it was chewing power. I ditched Dropbox for the same reason. I ditched a whole bunch of different applications that I've been running for years, simply because it was just causing the fans to spin up more or less constantly. And then at that point, I realized that it wasn't just those apps anymore, those background apps, whenever I'd run certain apps in the foreground, the fans would spin up, it would just get too bloody hot. Yeah. And so, things like Teams and Zoom and like any of these video conferencing apps. And that wasn't a problem until COVID and when the lockdowns happened. Yeah. And so, that's what the whole point of this episode that I wanted to talk about today was the whole how that shifted the thinking. So, because I was working in an office environment five days a week, well, actually prior to the... So, in prior to early 2019 and the lockdown started here in March, April of 2019, I think it was 2020, 2020, sorry, I'm lost a year there. - Yeah, 2020. - 2020. - Yeah. - I was working four days a week in the office and I had already negotiated, and it sounds ridiculous in retrospect, but I had negotiated to work from home one day a week to help with kids' sports and different things. - Great. - And that was working well, but I was still spending four days a week in the office. So having a laptop to go between both locations made perfect sense. And I was putting up with the displays, you know, and the performance and the fans spinning up and everything. But then when I started doing teams meetings and I was stuck at home all the time, The laptop was always plugged in. It was always driving those screens and the fans were always screaming five or six hours a day. Because I'm, you know, I was in a management role and I had lots of meetings that I was supposed to go to. Yeah. And it was killing. I could hear my MacBook Pro was screaming at me. It was screaming and it was sad and it was crying in the background. Well, and even if you can live with and overlook the noise, you're still, I mean, there's no way that's not shortening the life of that machine. Oh, totally. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so it just wasn't designed for what I was doing to it. Yeah. Because I mean, when I go into the office, I'd go into a meeting. Fine. My computer would sit there on the desk and snooze, you know. It's like- Never mind all the Apple ads and promotional stuff that say you can do that. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it's just yeah, because I'm using a laptop as a desktop. It's never going to be as good as a desktop as a desktop. Yeah. And so I was thinking about the situation and I'm like, I, until late this year, as in the end of 2021, I can't see, like COVID is not going anywhere in a hurry. It's being beaten down slowly in some parts of the world with vaccination rates and so on. Not wishing this to be an episode, we talk about that, but it's more the fact that lockdowns and working from home is not going to go away. And look, like for me in my professional career, I'm seeing that it's extremely likely that working from home two or three days a week will become the norm. And I can't see that going back to how it used to be. And therefore, I don't need that portability that I used to need. And so, having- Pouring my money into the best laptop I can have so it could be a desktop at home and a plug-in laptop at work, it's kind of not as useful anymore. Yeah. That's changed my thinking. So, as part of the lockdowns, the first thing I did was I bought the second 4K screen because I knew I'd be stuck at home. And then I got a sit-stand desk. So, I've got a- it's a manual one, it's cheap, but it does the job. So, I try and alternate between sitting and standing. And it helps, well, because, you know, it helps with the back and so on from time to time. It's actually quite refreshing, actually, to stand up at a standing desk. I used to laugh when I see people people at standing desks, but now I've got one and I've tried them on, like I totally get it. So, that's been great. And then I got thinking about, well, you know, I need to have like, so I've got a good ergonomic chair and I basically have fitted out my environment here at home to be as comfortable and as efficient as possible. And for me, what I need is I need screen real estate, maximum screen real estate, because I've got like a couple of Word documents up like specification standards, documents I'm reviewing. Now I've got email up on another one. I got messages, messages up on these other ones. I've got teams running. So I've got a lot of stuff to keep on the screens that I need to refer to constantly during the day. So screen real estate is a premium. And with my eyes getting older, I'm like, well, I need, I mean, OK, What- I should probably pause at this point and just quickly ask, what currently, what screen do you currently have on your- you've got an iMac at the moment, yes? Yeah. Just the, the 27 inch 5K iMac. It's a 2017 model. Yeah. So a 5K iMac in a 27 inch screen size is going to give you a very crisp, nice graphics. Like you're going to get beautiful texts. Like, do you have a- what sort of screen res do you run on it in high DPI mode? Whatever the native default is. OK. I've never changed it. OK. So let me take a look real quick. So the default is looks like 2560 by 1440. Excellent. So 2560 by 1440 is actually half of a 5K resolution, which means you're operating in high DPI mode, which is what I would expect. So in high DPI mode, all your fonts and icons are all rendered essentially at a quarter of their pixel size, or there's four pixels representing what would be one pixel or something like that. I'm trying to remember how the math works out, but the point is that it's super crisp. It's really, really sharp. And when you look at a photo on there, it's pixel accurate. So, your wallpapers will be 5K. So, the bit mapping isn't scaled, but all the other stuff is. And if it's all vector based, which fonts would be for the most part of it, it's going to to be crisp as hell and look really, really nice. - Yeah, that's it. The day I brought this thing home, you know, I just, I plugged it in and booted it up and got it all set up and stuff. And it always just looked beautiful to me and I've never even changed it. - It's just, but it's just gorgeous. It's absolutely gorgeous. - The same thing with my MacBook Pro. It's just on whatever the default is too. And it looks great, fantastic. - Well, that's the thing is that once you get used to a high res screen, 4K or 5K, and you're doing the high DPI mode, I go to- When I go to work and I plug into the normal screens, the HD screens, they look fuzzy and blurry and they look like terrible, garbage. And it's like you can deal with it. But there was a time when I'm like, oh, that's fine. And now I've got these 4K screens. I'm like, wow, that is so nice. I can't really go back or rather I don't want to go back. Right. That's the key right there. That's exactly right. So, the whole discussion at this point has led me up to about six months ago And that's the point where I want to pause. I'd like to pause. And I'd just like to talk a little bit about, like, where you're up to. Like, so where would you like to start, like with your Mac history and how you use it? My less impressive Mac history. It's the more sane history, let's be clear. Sadly, while I can boast the claim to building many a PC's back in my day, I never built a Hackintosh. Kind of regret that sometimes. I think it would have been fun to play with. >> It's never too late. >> I don't know that I would have enjoyed the constant fight of trying to keep it running and finding the software updates and stuff like that. But I think just for the experience of building one and making it, and getting it to run that first time, I think that would be pretty cool. I was a Windows user. I don't know if I'd say I was a happy Windows user, but I was a content Windows user for most of my early adult life until sometime around 2000, shortly after the iPhone came out is when I first started giving Macs very serious consideration, 'cause I was really interested in making applications for the iPhone. And as you know, you have to have a Mac for that. So I started looking at them then. And in 2011, I finally got my first Mac. It was the 2011 MacBook Pro 15 inch, 2.2 gigahertz quad core Intel i7, four gigabytes of RAM. actually came with a 750 gigabyte platter drive in it. And I did eventually not too far into it, but I did eventually upgrade that with I put 16 gigs of RAM in it and one terabyte SSD. And I basically loved that machine. I packed it around for years and years and years and years and years. That thing was a workhorse. It was a beautiful machine. I know by today's, you know, industrial design standards that people think it's god-awfully huge and bulky and ugly, but I just I love that thing. You know, it's just the solid block of aluminum and it had these nice gracefully rounded off corners and edges and I just I really love that machine. I liked using it. It was the first computer I ever had that had a backlit keyboard. It's my first experience, you know, with Mac OS and getting into the Mac ecosystem and I just I really love that machine. And then I, there was some known GPU issues with those machines and I eventually fell victim to that and it died on me. I did have my best to date AppleCare experience ever because I was already like one year outside of my original AppleCare. Now because this was a known issue they agreed to replace the logic board for free which is good on them for that but they also while they had it in there the thing came back with a fresh battery and I had taken my one terabyte SSD out and put in the original spinning platter. I put it back in and I put my factory RAM back in because you know what they always say when every taking them into the genius bar to take all your customizations out. Yeah. Because well for starters they don't want to see that you've monkeyed with the machine and second of all so they can rule out the possibility that one of the things you monkeyed with is the problem. So I put all the original stuff back in but when it came back it came they gave me a fresh battery and they had put in a brand new one terabyte spinning platter hard drive and it only had I had 750 gigabytes when it went in. And they didn't charge me for any of that. So basically, it was like a new machine all over again. And then I brought it back home and I put my terabyte SSD back in it and I put my 16 gigabytes I ran back in it and I used it for a couple of more years. And then sadly, that same known GPU issue came back to haunt me again. And at that point, Apple declared it vintage. We discussed that on a previous episode sort back in the day. And they wouldn't service it directly. I'd have to take it to a third-party repair shop and it would be subject to parts availability. And they said, to be quite honest with you, I don't know if even they'll be able to get the parts that they need to fix this thing. So by then, that was in 2017. That MacBook Pro was six years old. I definitely got my money's worth out of it. And I saved up just a little bit and I bought this iMac because this is the 27 inch 2017 5k iMac still in use using it right now as I talk to you. It's a 4.2 gigahertz quad core intel core i7 with 8 gigabytes of ram in it. I need to upgrade that and I plan to upgrade that but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Not on this machine a terrible amount so most of the time that I don't feel that bottleneck too badly I do every now and then though but I really want to upgrade that to like 32 at least. I love this iMac it's quite honestly probably one of the best computers I've ever had. It was a tough decision to buy the iMac though, because that old MacBook Pro went everywhere with me. I love the portability of it. I know that there's a lot of compromises to come from a laptop being your main and only computer and stuff, but for me it was more important that I could just take it with me and work on my apps and stuff wherever I was. But the laptop offering in circa 2017 wasn't great. Butterfly keyboards, anybody? I hear you. We've talked about those. Everybody's talked about those. So I begrudgingly gave in and I bought this iMac and said that I would just sacrifice portability in order to have a working Mac and a good working Mac. And so I bought this iMac and I fell in love with it, too. I really love this machine. It's like it's probably one of the best computers I've ever had. But I did still kind of miss the portability. So when when they introduced that 16 inch MacBook Pro in 2019, Mm-hmm and it didn't have that butterfly keyboard anymore Yeah, so it was wasn't quite an insta purchase, but I did buy it very very soon after release I got the Acor Intel i9 option with a 2.3 gigahertz processor and 32 gigabytes of RAM I'm pretty sure I think I maxed it out I can't remember there may be a little bit of a spec bump above that but I think it's pretty close to maxed out. And this is a fantastic machine, and I love it as well. I use it all the time. A lot of times I'll use it at home, even instead of the iMac. And some people will be irritated when I say this. Sometimes it even sits on the desk right in front of my iMac. You know, just because whatever I'm working on happens to already be there. And I assume I don't need to tell you about the the cumbersome chores that sometimes come with a multi-computer lifestyle and shuffling your work back and forth between them. Yeah, true. And if you're just going to work on something for a few minutes, a lot of times it's just more convenient to just use the machine that's already on and just be done with it. And it's not like I don't like working on that laptop. I love that laptop, too. So I've got a couple of really good machines right now. And hopefully, they'll last me for a while. I do have a little bit of M1 FOMO, but I'd really like to have those. And the Apple Silicon looks really good. And the reviews on all that hardware sounds really sweet. And I don't know what I'm going to do when they come out with a 27-inch equivalent for the iMac that way, and it's the beastly power machine that it is. But honestly, I'm pretty sure these machines are going to be good for a long time. And I don't see Apple cutting off support too terribly soon for them. So I'm going to stick with these for a while. Yeah. So I want to talk a bit more about the whole Apple silicon thing. I will say that I'm fortunate in one respect insofar as that my wife got a new laptop and it was a few weeks before the M1 Macs were announced. Ouch. And I know, but the happy ending is- Did they let you return it? Well, we did have to return it because it wouldn't start. And so, when we took it in, they said, oh, wow, this thing's really dead. Unfortunately, we don't have any more of the Intel ones. Would you like an M1 version? And I'm like- Oh, sweet. Wow. Let me think. Yep, please. Any time. What colour? Don't care about the colour, just whatever you got. I want to strike while the iron's hot and just give me what you got now. Give me the M1. And so- Get out the door before they could change direction. Pretty much exactly that. And so, I got this home and I gave it to my wife and she opened it up and she's like, wow, this is so fast and it's so light and it's not burning my legs. And I'm like, yes, these are all true. Yeah. Oh, my God. I don't know if you're still listening to Bubble Sword or not, but Clay's got one of the Macbook Airs and he loves that thing, man. Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's converted him from being an iMac lover to a laptop lover. Yeah. Look, they're a fantastic machine. So, I have played with them and I've done tech support as you do on the M1 MacBook Air, and it's a very nice machine. And I like it, but there are other issues with it insofar as it's very limited, insofar as it can only drive one external display. And that is a deal breaker for me. And like you say, when they do, Apple, I mean, release the equivalent replacement for the 5K iMac in an M1 that presumably is going to have the ability to drive more than one external display, I hope, then that may be a cause for more consideration at that point. But for the moment, the answer is, well, no, you know, because the M1 doesn't drive the screen real estate, which is one of the reasons why I've made the decision that I have. So look, so thank you for that background on your stuff. You actually sound like you got some two very nice machines. So. I do. I love them both. I mean, that, that i9, that eight core i9 MacBook Pro, man, that, that thing smoking fast. On the downside, sometimes it's smoking hot and you could fry an egg on it. There is that. But it's, it's a really impressive machine. It's really nice. I'd like to take a minute to talk about the network and how you can help us out. The Engineered Network launched in 2015 and has several shows that take varying levels of time, effort and research to prepare for as well as to record, edit and release to you – our listeners. Over time, the ways people could support the network have evolved. Initially, through sponsorship advertising, which we're trying to move away from, we're now moving to a listener-supported approach and to that end, we've had a Patreon since 2015 and there are six support tiers, each with different benefits available to you. Public supporters are for those who want to contribute something as a thank you for what we do here. It's our most popular support category. Named supporters and above get their name added to the Engineered Network homepage as a thank you. Premium and above levels are where it gets interesting. As a premium supporter, you'll get access to higher quality encoded audio files for all of our shows, ad-free and released before the public versions go live. 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So if you're a fan of any of our shows and you want to help us out and ensure episodes are continued to be made, now there's lots of options that you can choose from. And no matter how much, what level or whatever way you like, know that it is all very much appreciated and it makes all the difference. Thank you. One of the things that I was reflecting on over the last few six months or so was back to my situation is that I've been using my MacBook Pro 13 inches as a desktop, laptop desktop and it was not really performing because let's be honest the whole thing was never designed for what I was doing to it. It's like yeah you can run two screens like that but you're probably not going to enjoy the experience as much. And so, fans spinning up all the time, running hot, probably killing the damn thing, already killing the battery, probably killing it with heat then. So, I decided I need to look at my options and what are my options? I want a desktop class Mac and I want one that is currently supported. And I was thinking, well, What does currently supported mean? So to me, currently supported means Apple's current release now, Mac OS Monterey, I think it is, has to be able to run on it. Otherwise, it's not a supported Mac. If it does, even if it, you know, it has to run it out of the box. I don't mean buying it and you can go in and buy replacement parts or it's under AppleCare. Supported means Apple still, you know, the software will still run on it. I have a quick question I like I maybe jumping ahead here I saw that you bought your second hand but correct me if I'm wrong here but Apple still sells this thing new don't they. No they don't. Oh they finally retired it when they launched the new one okay I wasn't sure but they sold it right up until then. Oh no there was a gap. Oh there was a gap okay. Yeah there was like a six month gap in there where they weren't selling any. So they were still selling new as recently as 2019. That's right so yeah they really haven't been they have to support that thing for a while they have to for people that know where we're going with this of already guessed that I've actually invested in a Mac Pro and no not a 2019 Mac Pro a 2013 Mac Pro. Get yourself a trash can. I got myself a trash can damn right the thing about this is that you can call me crazy if you want that's fine I'm used to being called worse things than that but, I've had this now for almost a week and this thing is really impressive. And so I'll explain myself a bit more just so you don't think I've gone completely crazy. The Mac Pro 2013 model can actually drive three 4K displays. - Right. - So I got myself as part of this, another 4K display. So now I've got three 4K displays. And yeah, to be clear, it's been a gradual progression. I've just, I bought a 4k screen roughly once a year for the last three years. So this is just, you know, a trend, mind you, I won't be buying one next year unless one of these breaks, because why would, I can't go to full screens. That's just getting crazy. I have a series of questions. Okay. Go for it. What kind of 4k screens are you using? Are they all matching or you get different ones? Are you using, what was that one that, that Apple was, was pimping for a long time that everybody hated? Oh, the LG Ultrafine. That's the one. Is that what you got or you got something different? No, no, I got something different. So, OK. All right. So, first of all, let's be clear. These are not the same screens because they were bought three years apart. And so the original screen that I've got is it's an AOC U2879VF model, which won't mean anything to anybody. But the biggest drawback of the original screen doesn't have a VESA mount. which kind of sucks. Yeah. So it's on a stand, which is annoying. Apart from that, given its age, because when I bought it, it was, you know, the monitor technology itself was from about 2015. So it was already like three year old tech when I bought it. Yeah. And they struggled to find it at the back. Apparently it was covered in a layer of dust. It had been sitting there for a very long time. Yeah. So anyway, I liberated it from the shop and I gave it a new home and it likes it here, as far as I can tell. ALC makes good screens. Yeah. I had a regular HD monitor I used to hook up to that old MacBook Pro. That was ALC. And it was a good monitor. I've still got it. It's boxed up. I think it's in my attic. I don't know if that's doing it any favors, but probably not. I didn't want to just throw it out. But when I got this iMac, I didn't see a point in hooking a 1080p monitor up to it to sit alongside this beautiful screen. So I just boxed it up. Well, that's certainly one approach. I mean, since I've got 4K screens on my desk, all of the other ones have been relegated to the kids. So my HD screens, like I've got about two of my sons have got a screen and I've got a spare screen under my desk here. Just sitting there not doing anything. Must be 10 years old, probably older actually. But anyway, the next screen I've got is a Samsung, I don't know, 27.5. So it's almost the same dimensions, but I got it for somewhat of a bargain at the time. It was brand new, but they were having a sale for some reason. So I grabbed one of those. That was the one from previous year. And then the one I've got most recently is another AOC, but this one is the much newer model. And it is so vivid and bright, like the colors and the definition are so much nicer. And it's also got a much thinner bezel than all the others. So they are three 4K screens, two are AOC, one is Samsung, and they look completely different. So, and none of them, none of them were recommended by Apple, but they work. So, shrug. Hey, that's all that matters. Right. Last question about your screens and then we can move on. All right. Do you like sitting in front of all these three screens and pretend you're like Michael Keaton in Batman? I was thinking more about Tank from The Matrix, but never mind. That's good, too. As funny, I had someone on Twitter ask if I needed to apply sunscreen or sun lotion before I sat in front of the computer. Which is a valid concern. So, thanks, Karen. Quite right. And no, I do not do that, but still, I probably should. If I start developing a nuclear tan, you know what happened. OK. Wow. So, I know, right, from all that radiation. I shouldn't joke, but never mind. Okay, so the Mac Pro 2013 can drive two of the... So this is officially, they can drive two 4K screens at 60 Hertz and the third is limited in the operating system to 30 Hertz. But if you don't mind that, and when I hooked everything up, that's what I've got initially, that amount of high DPI, super crisp 4K screen real estate is just intoxicating. Having all that space is magic. But the other reasons that I got the Mac Pro wasn't just a screen real estate. It's so quiet. Yeah. It is unbelievably quiet. I mean, the fan is running at 790 rpm, as I'm looking at it right now. And basically at idle during the day, it was measuring about 36 dBA. That is quiet. It was very quiet. And at full blast, it got up to 58 dBA. Still pretty quiet. here. Yeah, but that's still pretty quiet. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like that's full blast. And it's just I just can't believe it. It's so quiet. I haven't measured it, but I think when this iMac spins up or even my MacBook Pro for that matter, I think when either one of those spin up, they're louder than that. Yeah. So my MacBook Air, I was going to, MacBook Pro, I was going to measure it before the episode and I just I ran out of time. But that thing, I guarantee you, gets more than 58 dBA, a hell of a lot more. When those fans are cranking, you can hear them in the next room. It's a high pitched whine and it's horrible. And so because it gets picked up on the microphone and people on the teams mini can hear it, it's just nasty. This thing here, you don't even know it's there. Yeah. And I haven't actually had like any application yet that's caused it to increase its speed. Like for me to go full blast using the- There's a utility called Max Fan Control. And so I put that at full blast just to test that because I couldn't put under load to make it go any faster. - Yeah. - So if I didn't force it to go faster, it wouldn't. I mean, these Xeons run at like 56 degrees Celsius, which is like chilled, super chilled. I can't believe it. Anyway, so that thing's crazy. So, so quiet. Anyway, so I've put under all sorts of loads. I've put Teams calls, I even ran Unigine, Valley, and what's the other one? It doesn't matter anyway. you know, those 3D rendering, you know, test things. And honestly, it just didn't break a sweat. So anyway, the thing is that if you look at that and you pick one of these up secondhand, so, I mean, honestly, it was the most cost-effective way for me to drive that many pixels with a machine and that's currently supporting the Apple ecosystem. - Right. - So, I mean, I absolutely acknowledge that I could have built another Hackintosh, But as we just said, that's a lot of mucking around. I've been there, I've done that. It wasn't fun. Yes, you can do it, but good God, say goodbye to your weekend, several weekends in a row and several nights during the week. Never update it because it'll just break. Other option, could have built my own computer and run Windows, but Windows. Yeah, who wants to do that? I didn't want to do that. So, then I thought, well, you know, the iMac Pros, you know, I could get an iMac Pro. But even secondhand, those things cost a fortune. So, like the iMac Pro, when it was for sale here in Australian dollars was like $7,300, which is ridiculous. And secondhand now, you won't get them for less than five grand. And I don't have five grand, you know. And then I thought, OK, let's keep sliding down. What else could do it? And it's like, well, actually, the thing that surprised me was that you could actually get a 27 inch iMac. If it has the Radeon Pro 5300, then you can drive two 4K displays. Obviously, it also comes with its own 5K display. Fair enough, the models are different sizes, but that's the screen real estate. But that's still going to cost me $2,700. So that's still too rich for my blood, right? And if I was absolutely insane, I would buy a 2019 Mac Pro for $10,000 with a 580X graphics card, it can easily drive three 4K displays and the rest. But that's a ridiculous amount of money for a computer. I don't know how you could justify it. They look nice. That's it. Yeah. Anyway. And so, then I thought, okay, here are the counter arguments. And you might be thinking, well John, you know, a current 27-inch iMac 5K, maybe twice the price but you'll get three years of AppleCare support, but that's another one and a half grand I don't have in my pocket. And then we just talked about Apple M1 or M2 or whatever the hell we're going to call it, Silicon Macs with multi-display support just around the corner, and you know what, that's probably true. But I know Apple and I know the way they think and I know the way they price their products and they will make the multi UHD monitor support only for the highest end models. And they are still going to cost the earth. They will cost at least as much as the iMac 5K, if not more. I just can't see them doing it cheaper. And then I thought, you know, Intel Macs, you know, they're about to die. They're going to melt and burn in a big blob and become the neglected stepson. to be the golden head child of the Apple family until Intel dragged their heels and Apple overtook them. Yeah. And that's, and it's true. Intel Macs are going to be on the way out, but you know what you can do on an Intel machine, you can run Linux, Windows or anything else on this thing probably for a decade to come. No problem at all. And the funny thing is that if you look at what's happened with the 20, like the original Mac Pro like the 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012 models. So the cheese grater, those you can still hack them to run a current version of the operating system. And I, yeah, provide the hardware hasn't died. I guarantee you someone will be hacking kernel extensions and firmware to make the trash can Mac Pro work, even if Apple stops supporting the operating system. So I think the far more likely possibility- So you might make a hackintosh out of a Mac. Well, people are already doing that with the 2010. I know. Yeah, but seriously, you know what I mean? Yeah, I know. I know. I know you're joking, but I mean, seriously, I think it's far more likely possibility that Apple will drop support for Intel Macs completely before it becomes unhackable. You know what I mean? Yeah. So anyway, the last but John comment is why the hell would you buy a Mac that had so many reliability problems? And why didn't people like them in the first place? Because you can't upgrade them. And it's like, OK, let's talk about the upgrading thing. Yeah. You actually can upgrade these things in the only respects that I care about. Keep in mind, screen real estate was what I care about. I'm not going to upgrade the graphics card in these things. When I had my original Mac Pro in 2009, the Hala model, I never upgraded the graphics card. I could have, but I didn't. Yeah. It's just too expensive. And then the kinds of cards you could put in there and ran on Mac OS, there weren't very many options and they're all really expensive. And so, I didn't do it. So, the things I care about are memory. I can put 128 gig of RAM in this if I wanted. 64 gig actually probably smarter because you can put a 64 gig, it runs at a higher clock speed. So, you get better performance. Yeah. But, and I can't see myself needing more than 64 gig of RAM, but that's cheap. I was going to say, that'll probably meet all your needs. Oh, hell yeah, easily. And that stuff is cheap these days. Memory is cheap. And so then you could say, well, the SSD, you can't upgrade the SSD. It's an Apple custom SSD. Like it's it's it's like an M.2, but it's not or it's an NVMe. Sorry, but it's not. And it's like, yeah. Yeah. But you can get adapters for 15 bucks that will convert any NVMe via an M2 adapter to work in this thing. And the same adapter actually works on many models of the MacBook Pros because they had the same the same setup. Yeah. Before they started soldering them onto the motherboards. Yeah. And so, you can pick up a 2 terabyte NVMe drive and a $15 adapter for this thing for like 320 bucks Australian. 2 terabytes, it's got 256 gig in it. Now I can go to 2 terabytes without that massive amount of money. So, those are the sorts of upgrades I'm talking about. And that's today. I mean, you'll be able to put 4 terabyte NVMe's in them for a reasonable amount of money in another, you know, 3, 4 years time probably. Yeah. So, you know, and everything else that I've got, I've already got connected via Thunderbolt or DisplayPort out the back. So to me, it meets the whole reliability, expandability thing. So then there's the reliability question. So I did a lot of research on this, I spent six months digging into this. And I've got the... That's a long time. I'd like to take my time and think about it. But anyway, so I just can't help it. Anyway, it's fine. Well, it's probably fine. D300 model, entry level, first one, so that that's the AMD Fire Pro D300, 2GB RAM. Now you could get the D500, D700 models and they stopped selling the D300s in 2015. If you look at the reliability issues that they had, they started having them with the D500 and the D700 models. And I started digging into why they did and it's because of this, they had like Craig Federici admitted it in an interview, he said that they designed themselves into a thermal corner. He meant the GPUs, not the CPUs, the GPUs. So you've got two identical GPUs churning out a lot of heat. This thing simply can't keep them cool enough. It's that simple. But the D300, it was fine. There were no significant issues with the D300 graphics cards. - Not pushing as hard, yeah. - The people that were complaining, oh, my Mac Pro's having all these reliability problems. They were the people that were the high-end users that one of the most powerful graphics cards you could get, not the entry-level thing. If you're gonna spend $4,000 on one of these things brand new, now you're gonna spend another one or 2000 and get the D500 or the D700 model. You know, so, okay, that's what I'm gonna do. So yeah, you're gonna be a bit pissed when that thing dies. But for me, all I need to do is drive my pixels. I'm not working with Final Cut. I'm not, well, not regularly doing compiling with Xcode. So it made no difference to me what graphics cards I had. The CPU, well, I said, crying with X code, that's more of a CPU thing, sorry, but you know, I'm not doing work in the final cut. Not really. - Yeah. - So I didn't care. I didn't need it. And so there aren't any reliability issues, no significant ones with the D300 models that I could find. So to me, that was a non-issue. For me, I wanted the entry-level model. I can upgrade it later in the ways that mattered. And I don't want the more powerful graphics cards 'cause they're the ones that cause problems. - Yeah. - All right. So far so good? All right. So there's one last thing I want to address. - Okay. - I'm gonna have to think about wrapping it up, but is 30 Hertz on that third display. - Yeah. - So I, this is bizarre thing that Apple did in 2015, because everyone said, oh, your most expensive top of the line Mac Pro doesn't even support 5K displays. And because at the time, because it uses Thunderbolt 2 and Thunderbolt 2 has only got 20 gigabytes per second on its per channel on its bus. So the problem was, yeah, 'cause unlike Thunderbolt 3 where you can gang their channels together and get 40, but the problem was that over DisplayPort, it only had enough to drive 4K pixels at 60 Hertz at full color depth, right? So that was a limitation. And there were some displays that were built that had dual display port inputs. So the only way you could get 5K to work was to plug in a two display port to two display port cables into a- - Two cables, yeah. - Two physically independent cables, one from the left port, one from the right port into the same monitor. And the monitor would stitch the two together. And it's an absolutely insane old school solution to the problem, which is my bus don't have enough width, yo. It's like, come on, but that's what they did. And in 2015, they updated the firmware. So, you could plug in all six of those Thunderbolt ports in the back, Thunderbolt 2 display port, you know, same thing, into three 5K displays and it would work. So, that got me thinking about it and we're thinking about, okay, well, If they, if it's just a firmware limitation and I don't know, 5k screens, why am I stuck at 30 Hertz for that third screen? Why? Right. So it was said in the Apple documentation that you had to use the HDMI port to get that third screen. And the HDMI port was a 1.4, HDMI 1.4. So it wasn't HDMI 2, which means it wouldn't support 60 Hertz. A lot of people say, okay, that's them's the rules, can't help you. And I'm like, "Oh, okay, but I've got a Thunderbolt dock. I've got the CalDigit TS3 Plus, which is a fantastic dock. That's what I was using for my MacBook Pro." Well, I'm still using it now, but I'm connecting it to the Mac Pro through a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter. So what that means is that I should be able to drive that screen at full 60 Hertz resolution, because it's Thunderbolt through to the dock, after which it is not HDMI anymore. It's now DisplayPort, which will handle 60 Hertz. So that should work in theory. And so I set about testing it and turns out that it does work. So that means that it's not because of the HDMI port. If I can connect that into one of the display port outputs or Thunderbolt port outputs, I should be able to get 60 Hertz on all of them, but it wouldn't let me. No matter what I did, no matter what combination I tried, whatever buses I tried, the third display that you connected defaulted to 30 hertz, no matter what you did, the operating system would not let you. But that's when I had the epiphany that that's an operating system limitation. Yeah. It's not a real bandwidth bus with data rate problem. It's just the OS. And so, I remember there's this application I used years ago, I can't even remember why I used it, called SwitchResX. And you install this thing and you set all the displays to 60 hertz 4K res, and they now work at 60 Hz, 4K, full res, you reboot it, it works fine every time. It's beautiful. Nice. And every- Yeah, and there's no- I can't see any evidence of any intermittent lag, under load or anything. It just works perfectly. So, I couldn't believe it. But yeah, so there you go. I got my wish after all that. There you go. That's pretty cool. Yeah, very cool. The only other point I want to make is I thought, yeah, wouldn't it be great if there were 5K screens? Uh oh. This is a very, this is a very short story. So I dug into this too. Did you know that there were only ever three monitors in the world ever manufactured with the configuration necessary to be driven by a Mac Pro 2013? None of them have been made for at least the last three years. You cannot buy them new. - I'm assuming at least one of them was that LG Ultrafine. - Yes, that's right, you're correct. So basically it is impossible now for anyone to buy a brand new 5K screen connected to a Mac Pro 2013. It's not possible. There are no adapter cables. There are no, it's just not possible. You can't do it. The only way you'll do it is to buy one secondhand. And of course that's if you can find them because the cheapest, well, okay. I think that they had models ranging from about 1000 to 2000 dollars each monitor. Have you set some shopping alerts to watch for these things? No, because I still have some grip on sanity. Okay. And my sanity says no, no, no. 3, 4K screens is pretty good. That's a lot of screen real estate. Yeah, I'm okay with that. It's fine. Okay. So, so there you go. I'm now rocking a Mac Pro on the desk and it is absolutely gorgeous. And it just- The funny thing is all the benchmarks would tell you, you would think just looking at it, the benchmarks would tell you this thing should not be as fast as my MacBook Pro, but it feels like it's faster. Yeah. And the reason I think is comes down to the fact that I want to drive pixels. If I didn't want to drive pixels, it would not be- There'd be no contest. If I'm doing like handbrake encoding, which I hardly do anymore. Yeah. And you did a time trial between the two, you would find that the MacBook Pro would finish it quicker. Or if you were compiling Swift. Yes, or if you're compiling Swift, it would probably do it quicker. Yeah. Not by much, maybe 10% quicker, but it would be quicker. Yeah. The SSD on this thing, seriously, the SSD is like my MacBook Pro is something like two and a half times faster than the Mac Pro. And yet I don't notice the difference. So, it's kind of funny how that's worked out for me. And so, it's a very specific use case. Don't get me wrong. I absolutely understand that this is fine for John's use case. Right. But the thing that surprised me, seriously surprised me, was just how good this Mac Pro 2013 really is. And for all the shit that people heap on it, so much of that is not justifiable. And you can pick one up secondhand, I mean, and it's a D300, it's not going to have reliability issues. I don't know why people aren't raving about these things. Well, it becomes trendy to hate on things. Sure. Anyway, so there you go. I have I joined the dark side of crazy people with Mac Pro 2013 trash cans. There you go. Oh dear. Enjoying your new old tech. I am. I am. And that honestly, that's all that matters. That machine meets your needs. You see yourself using it for a long time. That's all that really cares. You brought it in under budget. So. I did. Yeah, I did. That's all that matters. Yeah. Haters be damned. I am excited to see what Apple come release with the M1 stuff, to be honest. Yeah. Well, the M2 stuff, M3 stuff. The M2 is... I mean, the M1 is really fantastic. They under-promised and over-delivered a whole lot, and there's no shame in that machine at all, but I'm really eager to see. If they did that good with the M1, I think the M2 and the M3 are going to be phenomenal machines. to see what they do. Oh, totally. And, I mean, as much as I am excited for that, I'm still going to hang on to my laptop for a little bit longer because I still do go in the office very occasionally. And I imagine I will be going in one or two days a week, semi-regularly over the next few months while things return to some almost semblance of normality. But the temptation to upgrade it, because it'll be getting to three years old at that point. The temptation to upgrade it to an M1 is a real temptation. But whether I would get a MacBook Pro again or not, I don't know. I probably wouldn't. So maybe it's a moot point. But so far as desktops go, this thing, I can foresee it fulfilling my needs for a very long time. So I guess we'll see how this turns out. My favourite computer is the one I just bought. Maybe that's a thing. We'll see. All good? All good, man. All right. Well, if you want to talk more about this, you can reach me on the Fediverse at [email protected], on Twitter @johnchigi or one word or the network @engineered_net. If you're enjoying Pragmatic and want to support the show, you can by becoming a premium supporter. We're edging closer to our monthly goal to go advertising free across the network, but we can only do that with your help. You can find details at engineered.network/pragmatic about how you can help this show to continue to be made. A big thank you to all of our supporters, a special thank you to our silver producers Mitch Bilger, John Whitlow, Kevin Koch, Oliver Steele, Leslie Law Chan, Hafthor, Shane O'Neill and Bill and an extra special thank you to both of our gold producers Stephen Bridle and our producer known only as R. If you'd like to get in touch with Vic, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you mate? I'm usually all over the internet so I try and steal the handle @viccudison1 wherever I can, that's where I'm at on Twitter. You can also find my other stuff over at the Bubble Sword Empire. That's bubblesword.show. We've got a Slack set up there too, where people can contact me and reach me that way too. Excellent. Cool. Thank you very much for that. And so, yeah, once again, a special thank you to all of our supporters and a big thank you to everyone for listening, as always. And thanks. Thanks again, Vic, for coming back on the show. It's been a while. It's been good to have you back. Thank you for having me back. It has been a while and it has been fun. I appreciate you making the time. Thanks, mate. [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING] [Music] (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [music]