Know How... 95 (Transcript)

NetCasts you love, from people you trust. This isTwit!

Bandwidth for Know How is brought to you by cachefly.com

This episode of Know-How is brought to by Square Space, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free two week trial and 10% off go to squarespace.com and use the offer code know-how.

And by shutterstock.com. With over 35 million high quality stock photos, illustrations, vectors, video clips, Shutter Stock helps you take your creative projects to the next level. For 20% off your new account go to shutter stock.com and use the offer code know-how514.

On this episode of Know How, your questions, new stuff plus more on Maker Faire.

Father Robert Ballecer: Welcome to Know How, it is the Twit show where we bend, build, break and upgrade. I am Father Robert Ballecer.

Bryan Burnett: And I am Bryan Burnett.

Fr. Robert: For the next 30 minutes to an hour we are going to show you some of the things that we have been doing to geek out in the world, so that perhaps you can take it and enjoy your own geek projects. Now Brian we are going to get to a feedback episode. Remember what that is?

Bryan: That is where we go to our favorite cheap plus community and we locate your questions, see what you asked and here it is. This mess here on the desk gives all the questions that you guys have asked.

Fr. Robert: We made this mess for you. But before that, there has been something that has been bubbling around the inter-web for a while and it is a huge maker project. It is one of those things that is a little pie-in-the-sky but at the same time I wish this would happen. Do you know what that is?

Bryan: Solar panel roadways?

Fr. Robert: Or as they call it, solar freaking roadways.

Bryan: Electricity in your roads.

Fr. Robert: Now we know for a while that there has always been a push for solar panels. Right? we want to the solar panels everywhere. Now, this couple by the name of Scott N Jolie came up with this idea that one of the most open spaces we have is the roadways.

Bryan: Roadways, parking lots.

Fr. Robert: Any open paved expanse.

Bryan: Open areas that absorb sunlight basically.

Fr. Robert: It is interesting because he is a Masters in electrical engineering. His wife is a psychologist. They are really into green power, into renewable resources. They received a grant to build a solar parking lot based on these little interlocking solar doodads.

Bryan: Hexagonals?

Fr. Robert: Six sided panels. The cool thing is that you have the solar panels, and you cover it with a layer like an armor of tempered class. Super strong glass. We are talking about something that could withstand like 100 tons of crushed force. You can land a 747 on that.

Bryan: Which is what you need when you have something that is going to be exposed to all those cars, trucks, and things like that.

Fr. Robert: So what they did is they looked at, well we can’t just build a solar road. There has to be a reason why people would deploy this. So they look to making the module super super tough. The idea was to get rid of the asphalt that wears out in the pavement that cracks and give people something that both, offers durability and functionality.

Bryan: Will not only will it absorb the sign and give extra energy to the grid but they have LEDs integrated and they are open to having the roadways lit up at night? And also have pressure sensitivity so it can sense that something is on the roadway, like a child or a dog or something like that. So it is pretty cool. I will believe it when I see it because in the videos they always show the roadways perfectly lit up with the bicycle lane and everything like that. I does have a hard time believing it is going to be that well lit in real life.

Fr. Robert: People in the chat room admit that they are bright. We have virtual’s saying there are two problems, no snow removal and other people saying how slippery is this going to be?

Bryan: Yeah, the snow.

Fr. Robert: The snow. This is cool because these are multi-function modules. So the way they handle snow is…

Bryan: They can heat up and the snow melts away?

Fr. Robert: Right. So it uses the solar power, any of the modules can receive son and since they are interlinked they can be used to melt any ice or snow that is on top of the modules.

Bryan: The people in the East Coast would love that.

Fr. Robert: Absolutely. As for the durability, it is all about the texture that you make. What they have done is they have used a very strong tempered glass with sort of a ridged feel to it. Which, actually gives you a lot of grip.

Bryan: I am really optimistic about it but also it is like if these are going to be on a roadway they are going to be there a long time. Depending on where, it makes me a little nervous being a motorcycle rider. How is it going to handle where and how is the traction going to be. But, if it works as advertised it is definitely a direction we need to be going with our roads. Asphalt gets worn down fast. It is pretty wasteful and when they are shipping the asphalt to a certain direction if they don’t use it all they just dump it. It is pretty wasteful.

Fr. Robert: Now those modules are not just solar panels. They are multi-function units. Of course you could equip the ones in the East with little heating pad and you don’t have to get it really hot. Remember that. When you are talking about something in the long game, like a roadway you don’t need 100° you just need enough temperature to create a layer of melted water between it and the ice or snow.

Bryan: Which hopefully doesn’t refreeze and then become black ice.

Fr. Robert: If you can keep it just above freezing it shouldn’t become black ice. Now the other cool thing is it is going to have LEDs built-in, as well as communications protocol so that the modules can talk to one another. They have smart send them so you could, for example, dynamically create shapes. The examples that they gave is that you could make a playground or a parking lot and it can dynamically assigned stalls, depending on who needs what. Like for example let’s say a handicap space gets used up so it generates another way, and another one. Or it redraws the lines depending on what kind of traffic you have on a road. Or, for example it tells you if there is an animal because it is pressure sensitive. It can tell you if there is an upcoming dear and you would get a message in the roadway telling you to slow down.

Bryan: So all this news comes in as Google is making their self-driving car. And I imagine they could make something that would talk to the car? And allow it to see things ahead. Because it is like a smart grid.

Fr. Robert: It is not just a grid. It is a street. So in order to deploy these things what they are suggesting is that you build a two channel system. You got the roadway, which is flat where you put the modules. Then on one side you have a trench where you can put the cable him and on the other side you would have a trench or any runoff would go to. So it gives you two benefits. Which is one, you get better control of runoff to make sure that it goes to a treatment plant or it is done towards supposed to get dumped and you also have a branch where you could put not just the wiring for the smart road, but also telephone lines or power lines.

Bryan: Google fibers!

 Fr. Robert: Google fibers! That would be kind of cool. Now the last bit is that they did an Indiegogo. They wanted $1 million, date got up to 1.5 million right now which is fantastic. Which, I would get excited about except for the fact that a lot of outlets are estimating that if we were going to deploy this over the United States we would need $56 trillion.

Bryan: Okay! That is a little bit bigger number.

Fr. Robert: We’re going to need a little bit bigger Indiegogo!

Bryan: But this is a step in the right direction. Right? We definitely need to take advantage of some of these areas that are direct sunlight all the time. If we could do that with the smart grid maybe it could be deployed in smaller numbers in cities and things like that and then expand from there.

Fr. Robert: Right. Look at the chat room. We have someone saying, how do they remove the panels to service pipes under the road? We’ve got someone saying well how much greenhouse gases are being produced in the creation of solar panels? It is a very toxic process. We’ve got someone else saying what about bad weather? If you put this in the Midwest are going to have tornadoes, in the East you are going to have hurricanes. Folks, that is what I love about this. That is why I can get excited. I know that this is a moonshot. This is a pie in the sky. But it is cool technology. And, none of the problems that people think of our unsurmountable. They are just technical.

Bryan: And that is part of the fun. Right? I see it lights up or it detects pressure on the roadway. I know Alex has hit a deer before so that could help him out. And on run ways?

Fr. Robert: I hope that they deploy one of these. So that we could at least play with it. It may be economically unfeasible but, wouldn’t it be awesome? Really?

Bryan: This is the direction we should be going. Right? Should we just continue using asphalt? Because it works? Even though it uses up oil and other things? But if we use solar panels we are putting back in the power that we get from the sun.

Fr. Robert: So to that couple we wish you nothing but luck. We hope that you can develop something that the rest of the world can adopt. But until then, you know what I thought? We should go from roadways to web ways.

Bryan: Web ways?

Fr. Robert: Web ways. You know the intranets? We are kind of using them right now.

Bryan: Something easy to use?

Fr. Robert: You know when you have a project, something like solar roadways, what they’ve been doing is that they have been doing some media online clips. They made a viral video, they made sure people knew about it, they ran an Indiegogo campaign but the key to that was creating a site that people could go to and say, no this is not a scam. You’ve seen that right? Where you get these websites that almost have the crazy eyes on them.

Bryan: With flashing lights and everything. Try now! Free energy!

Fr. Robert: They didn’t want that. They wanted something that was a bit more understandable. Something that had actual technical details. And that is what they created. Their site was okay but it wasn’t great. You know what would've made it better?

Bryan: A place that had templates already? Templates that look pretty good and you can start off from that?

Fr. Robert: Yeah, and you know where you can find them?

Bryan: Square Space?

Fr. Robert: That’s right. We welcome to the show’s supporters of the know it all, Square Space. Now if you have an idea, if you have a project, if you’ve got a concept that you want to sell people on how you sell that idea is as important as the idea itself. If you are brilliant, if you have something that is going to save the world that you don’t know how to make a site, you don’t know how to attract people and you don’t know how to keep people there to actually read everything about that idea, you might as well not have that idea at all. Which is why we are so happy to have Square Space because they help you get your idea and turn it into something beautiful. Now Square Space is all about giving you an all-in-one platform to make it fast and easy to create that professional site that you want. Now I’ve used Square Space to develop sites for institutions that are part of my church. A lot of places that don’t have tech savvy people, maybe you have creative people that you need someone to do the programming, someone to register the domain, someone to maintain the Web server. You don’t have to do any of that with Square Space. It is a great way to share your weekend project, or provide ability to jumpstart a site starter project with a professional looking site. The ability to quickly and easily take orders and sell creations. Now some of the things that they are doing that I really, really like is the first thing is they are always improving their platform. They are not just going to sit back and relax and say we were good in the past that are going to trust us and the future but now they are always giving you new features. They are always giving you new templates. They are always giving you new ways to get your message across. They are also really flexible. This is important for DIYers like myself, we want that set of tools to create our website without code. From design tools like layout engine in the logo Creator plus a platform for customization. Especially if you know just enough code to get under the hood. Which allows you to customize exactly the look and the feel of your site. They also have beautiful designs. 25 templates for you to start with. And recently they added a logo creator. That is the basic tool for individuals with small businesses with limited resources, in order to create a simple identity. A unique identity for themselves. Square Space is also easy to use. It has always got help available for you. They’ve got a large chat room that is open 24 hours a day seven days a week plus there is a completely redesigned customer help site for easier access to self-help articles and video workshops. Square Space also supports e-commerce. Now available for all subscription platforms. Including the ability to accept donations, which is great for nonprofits, cash wedding registries and school fund drives. Square Space also starts at eight dollars a month, which really isn’t a lot when you consider what it includes. A free domain name, your posting, and the service if you sign up for a year. Now Square Space is also mobile ready. This is one of the things I really like about them, which is if someone is looking at your page on a desktop or a laptop it is going to look differently than it does if they are looking on a mobile or a tablet. They automatically adjust. They dynamically change the code to make sure that it is going to suit the person who is watching. Now, even their coat is beautiful. This is important to me. Square Space looks beautiful on the outside but what is also amazing is that the code is beautiful on the inside. They take just as much pride in their back can’t is they do in their front end design. Now, here is what we want you to do. We want you to start a free two-week trial with no credit card required. Start building your website now. When you decide to sign up for Square Space make sure to use the offer code know how. To get 10% off and show your love for Know-How. We think Square Space for their support of Know-How. A better Web awaits, and it starts with your new Square Space website.

 Fr. Robert: Brian, what do you say we get into some feedback?

Bryan: Yeah.

Fr. Robert: This is that time that we have dedicated to the know it all is. To the members of our community.

Bryan: The dedicated fans.

Fr. Robert: The dedicated fans who actually come to us with questions and projects. And we decided that we should answer a couple of these things.

Bryan: We want to let you know that we care. And we also brought in a special announcer for the event. He is coming in from sky desk, hovering 1000 feet over Twit is Gregory Burnett.

Fr. Robert: Gregory, I think it is actually a super, super advanced narrator of dreams.

Gregory Burnett: I come to you in your sleep.

Fr. Robert: Greg, what do we have for our first one?

Gregory: Our first one is Alex Martinez and he saw Padre’s use of LEDs to sound. But he wants to kick it up a notch. He wants to use multicolored lights, and control them to change color that react to music. He also wants to put a diffuser on LED lights and wants to know if there is a product that he can buy to do that.

Fr. Robert: Actually that is a really good question. And here’s the thing. You don’t have to change anything from what we showed you. You really don’t. Now remember this, the dancing LED strips. This is the first attempt. Red and blue for the left and right channels and it used a little tip 30 1C transistor to trigger. So whenever it detected voltage, which was the sound from that channel, it would allow through a 12 volt signal which would light these things up. And we had our dance party. Now here is the theme. You can actually buy the strips in tricolor. They have the RGB, the red green blue. And right now on Amazon I think $17 will give you a spool, which is like 17 feet and it is already in case and a polymer bubble. Which is nice and weatherproof. You may ask yourself what with that left channel, and we’ve got the right channel what about the third? You said you wanted RGB. It is very easy. You take a third tip 30 1C transistor, remember these are tiny. You type to the crossover. If you’ve got a stereo system in your car, you’ve got something that separates the hives from the lows so you just hired to one of those. For example I could do red on the left channel, blue on the right channel, and for the green I would tie it to the bass. So anytime there is a bass signal it will post a green.

Bryan: So in other words you have a lot of green in your car because you’re always pumping that bass.

Fr. Robert: Exactly. And the nice thing about the tricolor strips is that because they are all under the same protector/diffuser, it is not going to just be a pulse of read a post of green and impulsive blue is going to be all those colors. It looks really good. In fact you know what? You gave us a really good idea.

Bryan: You want to do that now?

Fr. Robert: I want to kick it up a notch. You know that I like blinking lights. And this is nothing. This entire project, if you just used 117 foot stream, if you use the power supply that’s already in your car the 12 V that runs through the low-voltage connector and if you bought yourself a couple of tip 30 1C transistors it would probably cost to a total of $30.

Bryan: Nice.

Fr. Robert: And then of course you need to install it properly.

Bryan: $30 is a very good little price to play for those sweet sweet colors it will be coming out.

Fr. Robert: I think we should do this to your motorcycle. Although you probably don’t have a great stereo system. I just realize that.

Bryan: Nope, not on my motorcycle. But we can still light it up for fun.

Fr. Robert: Wait, we could tie it into your rev on that are? What are they call that?

Bryan: Tachometer.

Fr. Robert: Tachometer. That’s right. We could tie it into your tachometer and have the colors change as it goes up. Would you let me do that to your bike?

Bryan: Probably not. But, Burke’s bike is around here somewhere. Hey Burke? Can we get that bike? He won’t notice.

Fr. Robert: You totally will notice.

Bryan: Nice. So that would be kicking it up a notch. So what is the next thing we’ve got in line Greg?

Gregory: Up next is Jason Miles and he refers to episode 87 how you guys cleaned up Adobe bloat on a PC. He wants to know how to do it on a Mac.

Fr. Robert: That is actually one of the tips that we have received. The most common thought. There were people who said I had no idea this was happening. Where did all my storage go? If you have a rotating drive you may not have noticed it because you've probably got a couple terabytes. But if you are running like 128 or a 240 GB SSD…

Bryan: Like on a Mac Book air?

Fr. Robert: You start going, dude I had 100 gigs free where is everything? And the sad thing is that Adobe should have a button that says delete.

Bryan: Well, it is not that obvious. If you didn’t know about it, it just piles up. It is actually pretty simple, it is not that much different than on the PC. But if you go on my laptop I’ve got a little project in Premier open here. Premier is pretty identical on the Mac. the what you do, is you go to premiere Pro, at the top preferences and down under media there is a little option intermediate cache database and you can just hit clean and I will clear it out. If you find that there is still some residual data that needs to be deleted you can go manually and browse through it. So, it is pretty simple and pretty straightforward. One difference I learned though is, you know how you said you can make gifts on premiere? You cannot do that on the Mac.

Fr. Robert: Some of the functionality is slightly different. It is the same software it is just not the same software.

Bryan: Yeah, exactly. But if you have unnecessary Adobe bloat it is still relatively simple to get rid up on the Mac. It happens on the Mac too.

Fr. Robert: You just have to remember to do it. And let me be clear, this is not a bug of the software. It is a feature of premier. Because one of the things that takes the longest time is to import assets into any NLE. So what Adobe is trying to do is they are trying to say if you brought in this asset then you are going to use it again.

Bryan: So it is already preloaded. And it will load quicker. But one thing also to remember, is it if you are saving stuff like a remote hard drive, make sure it is plugged in when you do it.

Fr. Robert: This is from experience right?

Bryan: No!

Fr. Robert: How much extra time did this add to the project?

Bryan: I don’t even want to talk about it.

Fr. Robert: All right, let’s move away from a painful memory. Greg what have we got next?

Gregory: Well, Alex Salinsky just wants to get a hybrid hard drive for his laptop. But he wants to know the best way to configure it.

Fr. Robert: Here’s the thing. This is a hybrid hard drive. This is a Momentous XT. The idea is I’ve got 500 GB of rotating storage and I’ve got a 60 GB of SSD. But it does not look like a separate SSD. In fact, to the computer this is just a single 500 GB drive. What happens is the drive electronics themselves will look at the data stream and find what are the most useful items. And that goes to the SSD. So any time that someone asks for that data comes out of the SSD instead of a hard drive. The thing is, you don’t have to configure this. It is all automatic. but I know what he is talking about and I want to talk a little bit about that. He’s talking about the proper way to set up an SSD. We’ve got one of these SSD’s there are a few things, especially if you are using Windows that you want to change to make sure that it is going to operate properly. Especially if you’re using an older version of Windows, you need to make sure that trim is enabled. So what trim does is when you’ve got an SSD the limiting factor is how many times you write. Every time you write to a memory cell you are actually using up some of the write span. There are only a certain number of writes. You can read as many times as you want but writing uses space.

Bryan: It is a lot right?

Fr. Robert: It is a lot. Especially when you consider how many memory cells are in an SSD. The problem is, the old way of doing it was that the computer would just sort of pick the closest sector and write to that. It is not good for an SSD because what would happen is it will write the same sector over and over again. And it will wear it down. What trim does is that it spreads it out and makes sure that it is calling from random sectors instead of rewriting to the same cells over and over again. Theoretically it should extend the life of your SSD.

Bryan: That makes sense. Does defragging have any necessary place?

 Fr. Robert: Don’t ever defrag.

Bryan: Just a broad, don’t ever defrag?

Fr. Robert: If you have an SSD, do not defrag. You don’t have to. The reason why we defrag in a rotating drive is because you want those sectors to be concurrent. So that the needle doesn’t have to travel back-and-forth. There is no needle, there is no head. It is all solid state. There is no difference. It is not like you have memory on this side… it could read any sector as easily as any other site. So defragging, all it does is it uses up your rights. It actually uses up a lot. Because it is moving everything around. So how about this? If you want to kill an SSD, defray the heck out of it.

Bryan: Over and over and over.

Fr. Robert: If you've got something and it is in warranty, defrag it a lot and call up the warranty. There is also some using HHCI mode. Again this is one of the legacy things from rotating SATA. SATA was created with HHCI, a mode that would make sure that it was doing everything it needed to ensure that your data was safe. It would protect the rotating drive. But, you don’t have a rotating drive so use HHCI mode to turn off all the SATA functions that optimize the rotating drive. There is also a few other things. You want to enable the write cache in to the SSD. You want to turn off Windows base write cache buffering. Both of those features are designed to keep you from losing data in the event of a catastrophic loss of power. So, in other words like on a hard drive when you are writing data to the drive, you want to make sure that it finishes the write. So Windows pays extra special attention to make sure that everything was moved over. You only have to do that for an SSD because the transfer is so fast and so instantaneous. So you can turn that off, you take away a little bit of the security margin but you do take back a little of the speed. You also want to disable indexing, as I said you want to avoid defray in. You want to disable SuperFetch and you want to disable PreFetch. Those are all things that worked well for rotating drives, not necessarily for SSD’s. You get a performance benefit. You know what question I just realize that we should probably do an episode on optimizing SSD. That might be a good one. So, thanks. Good question.

Bryan: See, when we do these feedbacks and we answer the questions we come up with more ideas. So what is next Gregory?

Gregory: Is Dan Stephenson. He recently watched our episode about action cameras. He wants to know how Monoprice’s camera stacks up against GoPro?

Bryan: So, I actually don’t have any experience using the Mono price. You’ve use them before?

Fr. Robert: They are good.

Bryan: They seem…

Fr. Robert: They are good.

Bryan: They seem good for what they are. And, okay. I have a love-hate relationship with the Go Pro. Because they probably are in the top tier when it comes to action camera stuff. But they also have a great marketing team so they are pretty popular. So, I definitely want to try out the Monoprice cameras. So we got this other one, this is the Expo from Pile. It is like every other camera. They all want to copy GoPro.

Fr. Robert: It look so most exactly like the GoPro.

Bryan: It is hard to distinguish. Here is the go Pro, and here is the…

Fr. Robert: Even housing looks the same.

Bryan: The housing looks the same. So, I was looking up one of the mono price once, the sport Wi-Fi when? One of the CNET reviews. And it looks just like the go Pro two. The price isn’t that bad. I think we have a link for it. I'll show a picture of it. But, it seems comparable to the GoPro too. For about $50 less. And that is about what they all kind of come to.

Fr. Robert: Like for this one, it actually does include an LCD screen. Which is an option on the GoPro. You have to actually buy them. But here’s the thing. Like the Monoprice cameras. I played with them and they are actually really, really good. But, if you put it side-by-side with the GoPro, the GoPro still looks better. That is the killer. Some of these are less expensive but is it really so much less experience that it would justify getting a less capable camera? A camera with slightly lower quality, a camera that doesn’t have the best mounting options.

 Bryan: It is a compromise. So I definitely would be willing to try some of these out. then there is also the cheaper action camera that Mono price makes. This seems more comparable to one of the other cameras.

Fr. Robert: This has a use case. At that low price point. We're talking about something that is almost a third of what the cheapest GoPro is going to cost. You get a decent camera, you get upset if it gets destroyed?

Bryan: I'm not going to be too upset about it.

Fr. Robert: Exactly. Whereas, even the lowest price GoPro is still little bit of an investment. I just got this one because I’m going on vacation and I found a little extra money in my bedroom so I actually paid for a Hero 3+. Which is something I don’t think we’ve even reviewed yet. One of the things that I most like about this is that, especially since I go scuba diving, it is the pro-two. The automatic color and light balance. It is really, really good when you compare it against anything else.

Bryan: That is the thing, you can buy some of these other cheaper cameras and if you just want to do some recording for your commute and just make sure you have that than they are good for that. But if you want to make euro and videos and you want to do it in 1080 and you are used to doing color balance or matching with the DSR and stuff, the go pros are pretty good for that. I wouldn’t mind playing without 3+ that you have. Do you mind?

Fr. Robert: Know.

Bryan: Some of the other housings, life for this pile Expo will work with some of your…

Fr. Robert: All of them mount, they are all changing their products to use the go Pro mountings. So technically you can use the GoPro stuff. Except, and this is the weird thing about it, the case doesn’t quite fit in the foot it is a little bit too big to fit in the GoPro foot. Is this a lawsuit thing? Like, oh no it is totally different because we can’t fit in your boot.

Bryan: In the case on that one, you notice it doesn’t have the actual locking mechanism. So if you were to take it underwater it could brush up against it and pop off.

Fr. Robert: All the GoPro cases to release you have to do positive feedback. You have to push a little knob and then pull the tab. This, if you are underwater and you accidentally brushed against it they will totally just open the case. Which I think is bad.

Bryan: So in the end, I need to do some work testing, which I am more than happy to do. But it really depends on what you want to do. If you really want to do some serious video editing and make a video out of it then you need to go with a GoPro. And if you just want to record your commute and you don’t want to have to worry about losing your camera get a cheaper one.

Fr. Robert: The Monoprice one is not bad though. Let me stress the fact that I prefer the GoPro but if that is what is in your budget it is perfectly capable.

Bryan: Absolutely.

Fr. Robert: All right Greg. What have we got?

Gregory: Next up we’ve got Vulcan Puxely. He is in the market for a hub connector between his router in his modem. So he can track the traffic in his network. What is his best option?

Fr. Robert: Okay, I remember this one. He found on eBay at 10BaseT have period and he remembered when we did the project where we talked about how you could use a hub to tap your network. Right? Because it is different from a switch. Where a switch would, any time it receives a frame it is going to forwarded only out the port that the receiving computer exists on.

Bryan: And a hub just sends everything out to every port.

Fr. Robert: You also call it a repeater. which means, I could put the listening computer on one of these and it would hear everything.

Bryan: See you can figure out who is sucking up all your bandwidth.

Fr. Robert: Yes, exactly. The problem with this using a 10 base T have is 10 Mb per second may sound like a lot but it actually is not. One of the biggest reasons why we don’t use hubs anymore is they were incredibly inefficient.

Bryan: Because they are sending the signal out to all the different ports.

Fr. Robert: Low latency but incredibly inefficient. So that 10 Mb, once you take away the overhead and once you take away the collisions you are at least losing 50% period most of the time you are losing like 75%. So that 10 base T is really 3 MB. And remember that is 3 in both directions. So it is not 3 in each direction. So unless you got the crappy as DSL 1.5 MB down at 384. You are going to strain it. So what you want to do and this is what I actually told him in the Google plus community is you want a 10 100 hub. Because it is still going to be inefficient but you have a lot more head room. So if you’ve is 70% of a 10 100 have you won’t notice it as much. You still have 30 Mb to play with. And unless you’ve got a super-fast connection to the outside world, if you are just like cable modem with 20 Mb per second down and 5 Mb per second up it will be enough to capture all the traffic without worrying about throttling.

Bryan: Okay. That makes sense. Are those much more expensive?

Fr. Robert: They are a little more expensive but you can still find them on eBay. I search every once in a while because they don’t make hubs anymore they only make switches. So they are kind of a hot commodity. I have been able to find them from time to time, like a five port 10 100 have for $20. Which is still a lot less than a dedicated. The taps I use, those enterprise class tabs our about $1-$10,000 per port.

Bryan: That is a little expensive for just wanting to tap your network. Cool.

Fr. Robert: Now when we come back I thought it would be time to show the folks a bit more about maker fair. Maker fair 2014 was awesome.

Bryan: That octopus picture has been going around the Studio all week.

Fr. Robert: Will it was an octopus with flames! Huh?

Bryan: It doesn’t get much better than that.

Fr. Robert: And my sunburn is actually even started to abate.

Bryan: You are kind of starting to blend a little bit.

Fr. Robert: I don’t look like a black hole anymore.

Bryan: I don’t feel the heat radiating off of you like I did last week.

Fr. Robert: But, before we do that and now would be a good time to thank our second sponsor of know-how. Shutter stock. If you have watched wit at all you know what shutter stock is. Shutter stock is the place online to get all the assets that you need for your creative project. If you need pictures, or you need video, you need something that gives your project a little extra kick. Well that is what shutter stock is going to give you. Shutter stock is the place to find over 35 million high quality stock photos, illustrations, vectors and video clips. At shutter stock you will find the perfect image or video for your next creative project. Whether it is for your website, publication, an advertisement, a video or any other type of project you can choose from over 35 million high quality stock photos, illustrations, vectors and video clips. And many contributors to shutter stock offer professional photographers and artists, so you know that content is going to be high quality. Etc. stock reviews each image individually for content and quality before adding it to their library. And they have over 20,000 images every day. So every time you visit you’ll find something new. Shutter stock has flexible pricing, which is what we want. You can choose individual images, packs, or a monthly subscription for the best deal. You can download 25 images a day with the standard subscription, and you can download any image, in any size, and pay only once. Shutter stock gives you the images you need to bring your creative projects to the next level and they make it easy. They have sophisticated search tools that let you search and drill down by subject, color, file type, gender, emotion and more. For example, Alex if you could search for it else. What do you get if you just type in elf? Okay, how about this? Type in angry elf.

Bryan: That seems very specific.

Fr. Robert: How about this? Type in purple, angry elf.

Bryan: So you can drill down by color and emotion?

Fr. Robert: And so there is no purple but we do have an angry elf. This is the thing that we love about shutter stock. They give you the ability to find exactly what you are looking for so that you are not constantly scrolling through every single image and video clip that they have to find exactly what you want. They also have shareable light boxes which allow you to save images to a light box gallery that you can access any time and share with other team members. They have an award-winning iPad Which lets you search on the go and use it to display images during presentations. Now, shutter stock is a global marketplace. They have multilingual customer support in more than a dozen international countries, a full-time customer support throughout the week. Now, you can try shutter stock today. By signing up for a free account, we would like you to try it. Just jump in there and see if maybe these videos, these pictures, these vectors might help you with whatever you are creating. There is no credit card needed you just start an account and begin using shutter stock to help imagine what your next project could be like. Save your favorite images to a light box to view later. Once you decide to purchase, use offer code know-how 514 and your account will receive 20% off any package. shutterstock.com and for 20% off new accounts use the offer code knowhow/514. And we thank shutter stock for their support of know-how.

Bryan: It is fun to search through those. Like Alex just did. It is fun. How did they come up with those pictures?

Fr. Robert: it is funny because sometimes I actually try to stump it.

Bryan: And then something crazy pops up. And you put it up on your squarespace site.

Fr. Robert: Speaking of something crazy that you can put up on your squarespace site, let’s take a look at Maker Faire.

Fr. Robert: I’m Father Robert Ballecer, the Digital Jesuit for Twit TV, here at Maker Faire 2014. JDo you remember when you receive a brand new toy and even though the toy was fascinating the think that most drew your attention was the giant cardboard box it came in? Well we are here at Giant Cardboard Robot and they are trying to remind you of the passion you had for this most flexible of maker materials. Now it may seem a little silly to make things like giant robot arms out of cardboard but you’ve got to remember when we are talking about the Maker generation we are talking about introducing kids to designing and to building something from their imagination at a young age. And what better material than cardboard.

Maker Faire Announcer: There is a couple of problems with just getting the card to where we can start to fiddle with it. Because when it is in a container and we backed it up and pulled the emergency brake. But now the emergency brake was underneath this pig which was no longer a pig. It was more like a pig shaped mound of hairy, boney plague. That smelled worse than anything you’ve ever smelled in your life. And I know that there are people you’ve smelled if you have ever smelled a truly dead and rotten thing. You never forget it and you can smell the tiniest hint of it on the wind and think, “Something died over there”. So Jamie had to get in the car and sit on the pig but rather in the pig. And sort of reach through it to release the emergency brake. Now, he had a gas mask but it didn’t have air being pumped into it which was a problem because there was no air in the Corvette and it’s all ammonia. So he started choking and had to open all the windows, I’ve never seen Jamie so unhappy and I’ve seen Jamie unhappy. I also tried to eat ribs that day for lunch, which might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

Fr. Robert: If you’ve done any sort of electronic design you know what a pain in the butt it is to make your own PCB. It normally involves some drilling, a copper peg board, a lot of chemicals and a lot of time. Well what if I told you that you could get your own quick throttle time simply by drawing it? I’m here at the AgIc booth with Yamisu who is going to explain to us what their technology can do. What is all this?

Yamisu: This is conductor server ink with which you can just draw with it.

Fr. Robert: The nice thing about this is that it is really for fast prototyping. So if you’ve got an idea you want to get it on paper, you can actually draw out the circuits ro make sure that it is going to work. It is essentially the same as printing a circuit board only you are looking at a turn-around time of seconds rather than hours or days. Now tell me, it’s not just this right? Because no one drew this, what is this that you are holding?

Yamisu: This is conductive ink targeted printer in which you can just print with our special conductor ink.

Fr. Robert: If I were to ask you who are you pitching this for? Who do you want to buy this product? Who do you think should buy this product? Who would you tell the audience is the target for silver conducted ink?

Yamisu: Anyone who wants to enter the Maker Space, I would say. Because you know now you can make plastic very easy. Electric circuits is still a very difficult part but with a printer it can print an electronic circuit bar immediately in 2 or 3 minutes.

Fr. Robert: Here is the big question: price and availability. Where do they go to find out more about AgIc?

Yamisu: Alright. So we just finished our Kick Starter project so our ready to use printer is going to be available for $600 which is quite cheap. And the pen is available for $15 and that includes some paper.

Fr. Robert: Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you for this. Because this is going to inspire a new generation of Makers. I’m Father Robert Ballecer. Go draw yourself a circuit.

Fr. Robert: I got so much rhythm, Brian, I got so much rhythm.

Bryan: Yeah, you got something.

Fr. Robert: Now we are actually going to be, I’m going to tease you here, we are going to be showing you the traditional way to make a PCB using a copper clad board, a little transparency, a light source, a little developer and some nasty stuff that dissolves copper.

Bryan: So you are recommending gloves and safety glasses? Unless we have Greg or Jeff here?

Fr. Robert: Oh, Jeff. Actually we are going to be showing you how you use an Intern to develop stuff without any safety equipment whatsoever.

Bryan: And a closed, confined area with very little ventilation.

Fr. Robert: In fact I like to pipe all the exhaust into that room. I think it makes it develop better. We are mean to Jeff but you know what, so??

Bryan: Who’s going to stop us?

Fr. Robert: Greg what do we have next?

Gregory: So, our last feedback question comes from Chris Hightower. His phone motherboard and it has suffered some corrosion from possible water damage. Is it even worth the effort to fix?

Bryan: Possible water damage? Which makes me think he brought it into the shower or something?

Fr. Robert: Or a toilet drop. If he is talking about corrosion then it means it probably had a little bit of moisture and he kept using it, something happened and then he realized there is corrosion on this mother board. This is actually a very common problem, especially on the older systems.

Bryan: But is it an easy problem to fix?

Fr. Robert: On a phone, no. He asked if this would change the IMEI number and yes it will. When you change the unique motherboard you are going to change the unique identifier of the phone. So if you are tied to that IMEI then don’t swap out the motherboard. Now, I’d like to expand this a little bit because this is a common question, this is something that we get from people which is, I’ve got old electronics that have been damaged, how do I fix it? Now this is actually a board that we had down in the basement for a while. I think this might have actually driven one of the Skype sources way back when. This is an old VIA motherboard. Very low power. This had some water damage and a lot of corrosion. You can’t see any. It looks pretty clean. The way that we did this is that is a few things you can try. First of all with a phone you could try the bag of rice trick.

Bryan: That is supposed to absorb the moisture that is on the phone.

Fr. Robert: Right. So you take your phone, put it in a bag of rice, preferable put the bag of rice in the over for a while. At about 200 degrees and then put your phone in it. It should suck out some of the water. I’m not a big fan of that just because desican is cheap. You know, those little balls that come in….

Bryan: Oh like when you buy a new pair of shoes or something like that?

Fr. Robert: Now here is the cool thing. That desican is reusable. I always save those packages because what you can do is cut them open and you put them on a tray and you put them in the oven and you bake them. It removes all the water, it is like brand new. Dump your phone or motherboard or electronics into that it is absolutely will suck the water out of the air. Much, much better than rice.

Bryan: I’ver heard if you have a very high alcohol percentage, dip it in that. The alcohol absorbs the water and then evaporate.

Fr. Robert: Good point. Isopropyl alcohol is excellent for this and it is cheap right? You can get a bottle, 16 ounces for $2. All you have to do is find yourself a little tub or tray. Put it in there and just drown it. It sounds counter intuitive because the alcohol will actually evaporate. But the nice thing is that displaces water so especial on these fiber boards the water will be drawn out by that alcohol. Leave it there for a while and when you take it out go ahead and let it dry out and all the alcohol will go away. Which is nice. Now that doesn’t fix the corrosion problem. That is just going to fix if it got wet. For the corrosion this is what I would suggest. People have said they use a toothbrush with baking soda. That is ridiculous. Please don’t do that. What you want is to you Isopropyl alcohol and a soldering brush and just go over the pathways that are corroded. Especially the connectors until you see a shine. What you don’t want to do is you don’t want to accidentally rip away one of those traces. If you rip a trace, it is game over. You won’t be able to fix it. That is one of the best ways I’ve found to fix corrosion. Actually I’ve just realized this is probably a good Know How show.

Bryan: Another one? Now we just have to find a corroded piece of hardware? Burke???? I hope we are making a list of these things.

Fr. Robert: So if you’ve got yourself some corroded gear, gear that got wet those are some quick tips to get out of a bind.

Bryan: And getting it wet necessarily won’t… only if it is on right?

Fr. Robert: If you get something wet, turn it off.

Bryan: Yeah.

Fr. Robert: I’ve seen people that fall into a pool and then they pull out their phone and say, “Look it is still working” and I’m like Dude!

Bryan: Pull the battery if you can. Or turn it off. Uh-Oh. It is Burke. We were just talking about you.

Fr. Robert: Thank you Burke. Burke is giving us a can of Deoxy. Oh yeah, this improves metal to metal connectors. This actually does work pretty well. This would work if you used the wire brush technique and spray this on the area of corrosion and you can use it to brush away the corroded area.

Bryan: Thanks Burke.

Fr. Robert: Now Burke you are going home tonight right?

Burke: I’d like to point out it makes a great topping on your Tuscan Souffle.

Fr. Robert: That is good stuff.

Bryan: Flavor.

Fr. Robert: Now folks I”m sorry but we used up all our time.

Bryan: How did we do that?

Fr. Robert: We are really bad at time management.

Bryan: Alex, you need to be on top of this a little bit better.

Alex: I’m sorry I slacked off a bit there.

Fr. Robert: We also want to thank Greg. Thank you so very much for being our Google Plus voice. You represent the community. Now we realize that we threw a lot of stuff at you and we are not just going to walk away. We actually give you really good show notes. Where do they find our show notes?

Bryan: At twit.tv/kh and not just show notes there but all our past episode, links to any of the products that we have shown. And yeah, of cousre the show notes because on these feedback episode we’ve gone over a lot and sometimes it is hard to keep track.

Fr. Robert: We’ll have it all on there. You can also email us at knowhow@twit.tv. None of us will respond but it’ll make you feel better. Instead if you actually want to communicate with us you jump into our GPlus community. It is 6500 people strong, it is filled with some of the coolest engineers, some really bright people and some people have great questions.

Bryan: Like that one from Ben. I wanted to answer that and by the time I looked at it there were already six responses. Okay, I guess they took care of it.

Fr. Robert: They are good people. So jump into there to gplus.to/twitkh. Join us, be part of the Know It Alls.

Bryan: We might feature your feedback or your project.

Fr. Robert: Also, you can find us on Twitter. If you’re not into the GPlus group go ahead and jump over to twitter.com/padreSJ. I’m @PadreSJ. Follow me and you can suggest topics for future episodes of Know How as well as find out what I do between shows.

Bryan: Which is kind of cool and scary. Honestly. It is the best way to get ahold of us too. Padre can’t stop checking Twitter. But I’m @cranky_hippo and our TD is @anelf3.

Fr. Robert: He is the one that actually keeps us on time. I’m glad we have him.

Alex: Except for today.

Bryan: Oh. Yeah. Well we were going to give him more props, but he’s cutting us off. So.

Fr. Robert: Also I wanted to mention that this maybe the last feedback heavy episode of awhile. We actually listen to you and several of you have said, Feedback is cool but I don’t like so many of them strung together. So what we are going to start doing is we are going to cherry pick some of the best feedback segments from the GooglePlus community and just put them at the end of regular episodes. So if you want to get your project featured, if you have a question that you think would be good, make sure to jump into the GPlus community and make sure to suggest it. Who knows? You might end up on an episode of Know How.

Bryan: We might just butcher your name.

Fr. Robert: Until next time, that is Greg.

Bryan: Or Greg will butcher your name. Because they don’t let me say the names anymore.

Fr. Robert: Until next time, I’m Father Robert Ballecer….

Bryan: I’m Brian Burnett.

Fr. Robert: And now that you know…

Bryan: Go do it!