MIX-12 === [00:00:00] James: Welcome back everyone to another Merge Conflict, your weekly developer podcast right here on your favorite podcast application or on YouTube, no matter where you're listening or watching, we got a whole bunch of developer goodness in the dry. Dry of summer and you know it's dry 'cause there's wildfires everywhere. Frank Kruger, woo. [00:00:20] Frank: Well, you know, I actually got to wake up to some nice fog in the morning. Liquid fog, not the, not the ashy kind of fog, uh, the liquid kind, the good kind. Uh, it was a little bit of a relief because you know what, I can handle nice weather for three or four days, but then it better better get a little cloudy just to make me [00:00:38] James: happy. There you go. That way you know you're in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah. I [00:00:42] Frank: don't want to [00:00:43] James: forget. There you go. Uh, well, if you're news to the podcast, I'm James Monon magnet with me as always, my partner in crime and our crime being recording a podcast. So I guess it's not really crime, it's free. Ms. Frank Krueger over there in an island. [00:00:59] Frank: Hi everyone. Let's, uh, yeah, let's try not to make this a crime. That sounds like a good goal. Let's go for [00:01:05] James: that. It is episode 370. If you're new to the podcast in the last 10 episodes, then you are in for a treat because every 10 episodes we like to just put a whole bunch of different topics together and do a little lightning topics. We try to cover six, maybe seven, maybe five, really quick under five minutes, some just one minute on this one. But we usually do six and five minutes. It's a half an hour, something like that. We got a bunch. Um, so let's get into it. You [00:01:29] Frank: ready? Frank? Ooh. I love it. I love it when we just get into it. Yes, let's go. What do you got, James? All [00:01:35] James: right. Well, we have a bunch of random topics, but you had an actual topic, which was. LK 99, which I believe is a Star Wars bounty Hunter. Is that correct? LK [00:01:49] Frank: 99. That'd be good to know. I that'd be s bad s e o for them if that's what they chose. The name of this awesome new material that maybe your may not be awesome. We don't know. We're waiting for science to happen, but we're all very excited about it. If you haven't heard about LK 99, it is a room temperature. Atmospheric, normal atmospheric pressure, uh, stable superconductor James. This will change everything if it's true. The problem is there was just a non reproducible room temperatures, uh, superconductor found in 2022. It was found to be non reproducible, so we're all a little bit hesitant about someone finding a new room. Temperature, atmospheric, stable, superconductor. But, um, so far some Chinese labs have been able to manufacture it. They haven't been able to fully test it, but it came out black and rocky, looking like it's supposed to come out black and rocky looking. I see the photos and what, uh, what, what, what's, what comes to your mind when you think superconductor and why is this so? [00:03:01] James: Well, I guess, well the thing is it's all kind of black and rocky, which to me doesn't signify what I normally am thinking about when I think of superconductors. 'cause I think of super computers like the super, what are those ones that like can split zeros and ones, um, quantum computing computers. Oh yeah. Um, I know that there was just a demos listening tech me and Ride Home where like there, there's someone that now they have a quantum computer, they can actually move and like shake and it still will do stuff, which is very impressive because the whole idea was that to be stable. So is this Super conductor, have to do with super quantum computers? [00:03:41] Frank: So, interestingly enough, the people who discovered this material were working on quantum computers. Oh. But I would say they are completely unrelated, aside from, uh, superconductors will be, uh, will improve everything including quantum computers. So they would be a, a very valuable part of a quantum computer. But there are, Pretty orthogonal to each other because superconductors can help us everywhere in the world. So a superconductor provides us zero resistivity in a wire. Normally when we create a metal wire, the longer we make it, the more resistance it has. What does resistance do? Well, it, it expels energy as heat, which is wasted, it's just released into the atmosphere and we lose a lot of energy just in transmitting power. We lose a lot of energy and. All sorts of things. Wherever there's a resistance where we don't want it to be like, uh, in an electric motor, electric motors are made of wires wound up, and they're very good conductors. They're copper, but they are complete trash compared to what a superconductor could possibly be. So we lose, if you've ever used a motor, you'll know that it gets hot and that hot mm-hmm. Is wasted energy. Garbage. So it's bad, bad for the environment, bad for everything, bad for engineers, little hearts. And so if we could make wires out of superconductors, which we actually can do, uh, then you get this zero resistance and you're able to create magnetic fields much more efficiently. You can do even crazier things. James, you can trap a. Permanently inside of an object. So you like create a hunk of metal and you can put a current in it. That constantly flows even though you never touch it ever again. And that's actually how MRIs work. MRIs use superconductors. You trap a little bit of current in there and you create a ridiculous magnetic field and you scan people's brains. So we use superconductors all the time. They're incredibly useful. The problem with them is that they need to be cryogenically, frozen and pressurized. So no bueno, no good pressurized or depressurized, one or the other. Um, so the cool thing is if this material actually turns out to be good, we have a wonderful new material to start building things out of, to get great efficiencies [00:06:08] James: Now. If LK 99 is a success, can we then carbon freeze people at Con Solo in Star Wars with this new Suby Superconductor? Temperature, if we freeze it from room temperature, would it be able to keep my body frozen? Hmm. [00:06:31] Frank: Um, not sure anyone's looking for that application, so I'm gonna say no. James. No, it cannot. The, the joke is you would usually do the opposite. You would like freeze the, the material to turn it into a superconductor. So you would actually go the other you opposite process. I'm pretty sure we could. Maybe not carbon. Like, I don't know if you want to be in a block of carbon, it's not gonna be cold carbon can be solid at room temperature. Oh yeah. I guess that, yeah, I guess Han Solo was kind of room temperature, wasn't he? Yeah, but I, I would wanna be frozen in like oxygen 'cause that's hard and it'd be really difficult. So let's, let's go for that. Freeze franking oxygen. [00:07:10] James: Well, you know, here's an interest bar. Went crab recently, ever gone crabbing. No [00:07:15] Frank: crabs. We crab. We're gonna miss our five minute mark here, but tell me about your [00:07:19] James: crabs. Okay, so we went crabbing, uh, on the coast. And here's the cool thing about crabs is you can just put crabs, like they're very active 'cause they're crabs. But you can put crabs just like on ice. You put, you get, you get a little cooler, you put ice in it, right? Or ice pack. And then you put a little paper towel down on top of it, right? 'cause you're not putting the cramps on the ice, you're putting it on top of it. And then their bodies go into a dormant state. [00:07:43] Frank: Hmm. Right. Wild. Yeah, I guess they're like reptiles. Like we, we maintain our body heat. They don't one of those kinda animal [00:07:52] James: jigs, like when lizards fall outta the sky in Florida. 'cause it gets too cold. Yes. Do they fall outta the trees? Wow. Anyways. Alright. [00:07:59] Frank: I, I, I haven't had too many fall on me. Yep. [00:08:02] James: Not yet. All right, here we go. Uh, quick one here. Is there anything that Elon Musk can do to save x? [00:08:10] Frank: Save X. I don't xx. How's it doing? Doesn't need saving. I don't know, man. Why? Why do Twitters people rebrand things? You take 20 years to build a brand and then you just throw the brand out the window. Uh, so if you haven't caught the news, you probably have, because I think most of us are on Twitter still. Uh, I mean x still, you, you've learned that. We don't call it Twitter anymore. We call it x. I wanted Twitter bring this up. Man, I and X do com, I guess. x.com. Yeah. [00:08:41] James: Redirects 3 0 1 redirect. So I'm just saying, yeah, 3 0 1. [00:08:44] Frank: Alright. Is that move temporary or move permanent Move? Temporary. [00:08:48] James: Three oh one's permanent. 3 0 2 is temporary. 3 0 2 is temporary. Okay. Permanent. I didn't look, I didn't see what the, I didn't see what the, the routes j ss o file was, but I'm assuming it's a 3 0 1. [00:09:01] Frank: So it seems that, uh, Elon wants to compete with the Facebook metas and the Googles of the world, so it's just gonna become a general purpose internet company now. I don't like the name. I don't like change. Um, so far I haven't seen anyone rage quitting over it, like the last time something changed on x slash twitter.com. So, so far it looks like most of the communities have been preserved. Everyone who is gonna hop over onto Tutor World has tooted over there. Yeah, it's, I guess it hasn't made a difference, but. Boy, is every journalist gonna have to write a write a correction to every article, or the link's gonna work forever. The links better work forever. So why even bother rebrand? James, you're the pm Why? Why rebrand? [00:09:51] James: Well, he's going for, he wants a, he wants a, um, Like a WeChat, uh, which is like a all-in-one super app basically. That was like, his goal has always been his goal. I don't know if that's what it is, but it's the, the thing, the thing still works and still Twitter, it's still the same, I think it is. Some analytics and things were pretty much the same. So it's, you know, like you said, like I do think people, some people have jumped. I don't think threads is the new thing yet. It's missing a lot of features and just different type of thing. Um, but. This is where I'm at right now until I just delete it or something like that. But it's fine, you know, UN until it's not fine, it's fine until it's not fine. And right now it's still fine. It's, to me, you know, that's, it's just silly, but it's a little ridiculous. But what are you gonna do? It's not [00:10:38] Frank: what I would do. You don't think it. I think we've all just been through so much in the last few years that this is just more of like roll your eyes than even get upset about it. I saw a lot of jokes going around, but I couldn't even get into the jokes because I'm just rolling my eyes so far. Back in my head, I couldn't even read the jokes, so it's just, it, it reminds me mostly of when Dropbox. Sent out all those pastel icons and they're like, look, we're a pastel company now. And they semi clash. Isn't that modern and cool? And you're like, no, they're ugly. And then they're like, oh, sorry. Uh, it feels like that. So I'll be curious to see like, um, I'll be curious to see how journalists reference it and, um, Uh, articles, are they gonna just start calling it X or is it Twitter? People started calling stupid Facebook meta way faster than I ever thought. I still call it Facebook. I can't believe people were able to mentally shift and start calling it meta. [00:11:35] James: But not always. I watch a lot of C N B C, too much C N B C for my goodwill and even the, you know, people that are buying meta, the company still call it Facebook, right. Facebook's just a product of it, which makes a lot of sense, you know? I understand that. I understand that because Facebook is the product. They have multiple products. Meta is the company, this was the Zain problem. Zain was the company with a product named Zain, which is also great until you have more than one product that does more than that, which is no problem at all, but it can be. Alright, here we go. Next question. Talking about Zain, talking about the Mac, because you're on a Mac and you're using X Twitter. Twitter X, uh, we had a comment on YouTube from Kiley. Uh, it, and I'm just gonna summarize this is a Mac Catalyst, Mac Catalyst app. Really a Mac app, isn't it? Just iOS app running on a Mac. And isn't that cheating? I need to develop a real Mac app. We have a Mac Mac expert, Frank Kruger, uh, I, I ship Mac app as well, but the, the, is it really a Mac app or is it just the child's version? Ouch. [00:12:48] Frank: Ouch. It hurts. Um, I suppose I ask myself this question often also, but I I've never been happy with my own response because in the end, what is a Mac app? If you're talking about what is rendering the buttons in the text boxes, and does it behave with the keyboard and does it do let, let's, let's start there. So, levels of macab, does the text box and buttons work correctly? Yes, those are all correct. And in fact, um, there's multiple scaling modes. You can put it in like by default it kind of is a bit of a scaled iOS app. But if you put a little bit of flag in when you're compiling, then it actually, um, doesn't do the scaling trick anymore. Buttons by default. Font size labels have the correct font size instead of being scaled versions of iOS. So it's funny, even within the S D K itself, you, you have a little bit of control of how Mackey to get, you can control the ness level. Now I will say one, one side of a Mac Haos app that I don't like, which does make it feel a little less native. And by the way, AppKit's wonderful. I, that's what we mean by a Mac app. But AppKit is not all of Mac. Hmm. So one thing I miss when writing Mac Catalyst apps is all the libraries have to be recompiled for Mac Catalyst. And so there are Mac libraries that are missing from Mac Catalyst, and I always find that annoying. So I would say at the UI level, it's a Mac app. No, it's not using app kit, but Mac is rendering it. It's, it's obeying the event. Uh, the, the responder chain in the same way a Mac app would accept that it's written, used in a different ui, a different user interface library. Uh, this is very different from saying getting win forms to run on a Mac, where the event system is very different from how the Mac Mac event system works. At least it's using that thing. So I'd say the only non-native part feeling to me is. Mostly not being able to use Mac apps and not being able to embed app kit stuff into it, so you can't become like an NSS menu item and things like that. So yes, it's a Mac app. No, it's not perfect. [00:15:04] James: Yeah. You know, I think, yeah, there's, there's definitely different, uh, trade-offs that you, you have in any type of, In this instance, cross-platform technology. And, uh, but you know, for me it really depends on the type of app that you're building. You know, we still get that this question all the time, even on this podcast of what should I use to build an app? Do I use WinForm? Do I do w pf, do I do the new stuff? Do I do Mac? Do I do Mac Catalyst? Do I do MAUI? Do I do have a laundry? I, there's so many. What are you building? In general. So like, do you need those libraries? Do you need things that are only in app, like, you know, X, Y, Z, then yeah, you can go down that route, right? That's up to, up to you at that point. So things to always consider and think about. [00:15:46] Frank: Yeah, and there's not a great answer. You it. I like what you said. It's really about your app. Um, if your app does Mackey things, you probably wanna write an app. App. If your app is just supposed to look good and run good on a Mac, Mac catalyst is fine. [00:16:02] James: Yeah. And you know, a lot of Apple apps are Mac Catalyst apps. So, so many of 'em [00:16:07] Frank: at this point. Yeah. [00:16:08] James: Yeah. A lot of them. More, more and more. Every time I open I'm like, yeah, you, you know, I, I, not that I like, oh, I know what it is, but it's like, I know that this app wouldn't exist if it wasn't Mac Catalyst app. Yeah. But also, like a lot of the apps make a lot of sense if you met Catalyst apps because, and the reason, you know, it's 'cause it looks so familiar if I'm on iPhone. In fact, there's almost a benefit there in a weird way that it's like, it feels familiar because I'm. Going between my Mac and my iOS device quite often. So it should feel relatively similar. [00:16:37] Frank: Don't, don't be an iPad hater. I, I gotta break it to you. The, the iOS app store. You make more money on that than you make on the Mac Store. So you write a Mac Haos app, you're an iPad app. Sell it on the iOS store too. 'cause there's a lot of iPad users out there. [00:16:53] James: There you go. Talking about Don and MAUI and building Mac applications. We got a question here from another YouTube listener that says, do we recommend third party controls when we're building MAUI applications? Even hybrid applications like mud blazer or something out or something else? And that's a great question because this week is sponsored by our good friends over at Syn Fusion. I swear I didn't, I didn't just find that question. It just happened to be in there. It's a good question. Do we recommend it? We endorse it. Stamp and improve it. Because we use all sorts of amazing libraries from the community or from our sponsor Sync Fusion. I use Syn Fusion on my applications that I build and ship because I don't wanna build every single user control that I need. Do I need charts and graphs and P D F pickers and photo editors and all this other stuff? I could build it. I could build it. I could find a library maybe, or I could. I don't, I don't want to, right? I just like gimme everything. Gimme everything in the box. And that's what Sync Fusion does. No matter what you're building. Are you building a Blazer app? A MAUI app? A Blazer hybrid app from down in MAUI with Blazer. Are you building as pco? Are you building a Flutter app? A UWP application? You still got ZA Forms apps. Whatcha building? They got you covered. They got thousands of beautiful controls across all these different platforms and they have great P D F processors, Excel word processors, all these amazing things. Check out our good friends over at Sync fusion@syncfusion.com slash merge conflict. Check 'em out today and get a free trial over there. And they got a bunch of great licenses for community license, A bunch of other stuff. Give 'em a look. I use 'em personally. I've been using Sync for over 20 years. Since my very first job outta college at Cannon, been around just saying, tried, trusted, trusted, and true. Syn fusion Sync fusion.com/thanks for. Alright, next question. Um, what is this cryptic message on Frank's piano? Now here's the funny part is you all see very crystal clear image quality 'cause we're recording on Zencaster and I see. The star link quality from from Frank's feet, which is sometimes good, sometimes not good. And y'all though, Mario, uh, right now you look. No, you look good. You look good. A little pixelated. You kind of look like, you know, when Netflix is sort of buffering in, it starts at that four 80 p That's what you're at right now. You're at a very low, there's lots of, there's lots of, um, blips and bloops around you. Like a halo of, of squares. Oh God. Um, it's great. But you know, I frank's in there somewhere. But y'all get the, the real feed because it records the local in the browser. Now there's a lot of things behind you. There's like a, a charting graph. Maybe it's seismic activity of some sort up top. [00:19:28] Frank: No, no, no. But I, I like your guesses, so please continue. Uh, maybe it is [00:19:33] James: that one. [00:19:34] Frank: What's that? This is perhaps my favorite poster around the entire planet, so I can't help but to explain it very quickly. The vertical axis is time. The horizontal axis is location on earth, and it's a chart of civilizations, so it goes back to 3,500 BC all the way up to the modern day, and you can see the expanse of civilizations and the time periods that they were most prominent. Let's go with it's, it's my very cool favorite poster on the whole planet. [00:20:03] James: I like that. Okay. That's very different than what I thought it was gonna be. That, but that does make a lot of sense. Um, but I can also, there's like little things on it so that maybe there's like starships or something like that. Okay. Now there is a sheet of music open. I'm assuming it's Beethoven's 45th, uh [00:20:21] Frank: oh. Uh, not Beethoven. Um, I'm, I'm totally blanking. Uh, prelude and e minor, everyone. Um, Chopin, maybe chop pen. I, I feel stupid. I'm Prelude and e minor. Every piano player knows what I'm talking about. [00:20:37] James: Now we have a, um, we also on this desk I'm describing 'cause people are listening to the audio podcast. This is good [00:20:43] Frank: radio, right? We're doing [00:20:44] James: well. Yeah. Yeah. There's a piano, an old timey piano that was. Purchase with the house, obviously just sitting there for decades and Frank has decorated it. So he is got this behind him. And there's a sheet of music. There is a, um, doctor who telephone booth, I think it's called a, a te uh, um, a Tut to Right. PO Police, [00:21:05] Frank: boxer Police [00:21:06] James: Box. Oh, it's not it. Oh, okay. It's a, it's a London Police box, or No, it is Dr. [00:21:13] Frank: It's definitely Dr. Who. Yes. You, you got that right. And I dont, honestly, it's s Adventure. No, no. I don't have that much class. [00:21:21] James: Okay. Or Dr. Who over here. I've never watched Dr. Who never got into Dr. Who. Oh man. Okay. So that's my mistake. Y'all can make fun of me on X. So this is a police box? Yeah, that's, it Has a name, isn't it? Like, um. The Tardis. Telluride. TTUs. Tardis, thank you, Telluride. [00:21:42] Frank: And it was stands for some time and relative dimension in space. Yeah. [00:21:46] James: And then in between TTUs and the sheet of music is a sheet of paper that to me looks like pixels and I cannot read it. So that I assume Yeah. Is what our friend is asking about Frank. I'm very, to say something [00:21:59] Frank: bad, I guess I'm still in college 'cause I guess I still have just nice little phrases that I like around the house. It's a line from the book, the Little Prince, you know The little prince? Mm yeah. And the print, little Prince had a little rose and one day he came upon a planet that had a bunch of roses and then all of a sudden he is like, oh, my rose isn't so special anymore. And then the fox said to the little kid, uh, it's the time that we put into the rose that makes the rose valuable. And so it's just that saying, but in French, it's the time we put into the row that makes the row. So, yeah, valuable, treasured, whatever you want to say. My Just a reminder that the effort is important too. [00:22:41] James: I like that. Very nice. In French, [00:22:43] Frank: just so I have to [00:22:44] James: stare at it a little. Well, Ronald say we, uh, yes. My four years of French, I probably have no idea what it means, so. [00:22:51] Frank: Perfect. You could read it. It's simple. It's a children's book. So I, I I like to read it in French only because it's simple. The parts are small. [00:22:58] James: Nice. I like that. All right, what are we Okay, all decoded. Great. Excellent. All decoded. Boom. Uh, next up. Uh, a little update here. Uh, this is a nice topic, so. Do you know those people that, um, walk while they work because they have a treadmill under their desk? [00:23:19] Frank: Oh, boy. I haven't seen 'em in a long time, but yeah. Yeah. Um, it's, it's healthy, I suppose. Do, do people keep it up for years? [00:23:29] James: It's a thing I've people could do. Yes. So, uh, Heather wanted one and she wanted to give it a try, so we went on the Craigslist. We're not gonna buy a new one. We went on the Craigslist. Found one, which means never, never [00:23:43] Frank: ever buy a new treadmill. People buy 'em and sell 'em a month later. [00:23:47] James: You don't even need to buy a new Peloton. You can just buy and use one. They're like 400 bucks now. Just get whatever. Yeah, just, you don't need to buy new fitness at scrimmage. Just buy it used. Um, So we went on the Craigslist and there was a a person selling it. And you, 'cause you know if it's an under the desk treadmill, they either got another job where they have to go under the work or Uhhuh. They're like, I bought this 'cause I told 'em I'm gonna walk during work. And then definitely did not. I'm pretty sure it was that I [00:24:14] Frank: gave it a gift becomes a closed rack. How long until it becomes a closed rack. [00:24:17] James: Correct. How long? That is a great question. So right now at least where we are at is Heather, try to give it a go. But the main problem is it really didn't fit under her desk. Her desk has like a bar on the bottom. It's a sit stand desk. Yeah. It just didn't go under enough. And her desk isn't wide enough where it allowed her to have her. She would have to be permanent placement, you know what I mean? [00:24:43] Frank: Let me ask real quick, 'cause I'm a big dummy. Um, uh, the handlebars are a big safety thing on a treadmill. Do you keep the handlebars when you turn it into a desk or do you put your desk over the [00:24:53] James: handlebars? Great question. So the cool thing with these desks is that the handlebar can come up or it can go down and they give you a remote so you can mm-hmm. Control it with the remote directly with it. Um, so when I, I have it right now, it's now under my desk and the handlebar is down, so, and the handlebar is my desk. Okay. Funny, right? Yep. Kind of makes sense. Yep. So that's kind of cool. So anyways, I am two days in and I've walked one hour a day. Excellent. So far the biggest problem I have is that while my desk is large, I. You know, my monitor doesn't swivel left and right, so I have to move the entire thing, like the base of it. I have to like physically alter and like put the stuff over there. Definitely when I'm in meetings, I am not on it because that's impossible. Mm-hmm. But if I have like an hour's worth of time, I do it. I make so many typos when I'm typing and doing this, so it's, it's very fascinating. But if I have a long, you need co, I need copilot. But if you have like a long meeting, let's say, um, uh, like an all hands or a A M A or something like This's gonna be great for you. So anyways, 150 bucks. Pretty good deal. It's working good so far. A hundred s treadmill can't go wrong. Let me ask, [00:26:10] Frank: so what do you do for a chair when you wanna sit down then? [00:26:15] James: Well, my desk is so large. That I, I'm sitting in my chair and on the right hand side of me is the treadmill. [00:26:24] Frank: Roger. Roger. Very good. So get a nice long desk. Um, another [00:26:28] James: biggest desk I have, it's like five for five feet or something like that. It's huge. [00:26:34] Frank: And then swiveling the monitor. Couldn't you put an arm up on the wall? I'm not sure if you're facing a wall, but monitors on arms are very cool and you should get into that. [00:26:45] James: So I had that with my dual monitors and then I upgraded to this ultra super wide, and it's. Very heavy and I'd have to get a really crazy arm to do it. But yes, ideally it would swivel and most monitors also have like expensive ones, have the swivel left and right. Even in the built stand, that's what doesn't for a reason. And I don't know why. Um, I'm assuming because of the weight of the device and the length of it left and right, but that is on me. And I would say even this, I'm still not even sure I really like an ultra wide monitor, but it happens to be here and I do face a window, so in front of me is a window directly in front of me. So it's not gonna work to, okay. Yeah, it's very heavy. But the ultra wide monitor, like I love it, but then also hate it at the same time. You [00:27:27] Frank: know? That's funny. I saw someone on Twitter basically posting the same thing. They spent all this money on like the widest of wide monitors possible, and I think they used it for an entire day and they're like, Nope. Shipping it back. Yeah, it's, it's funny, it's, they're, I feel like I could use a little wider, but I know what you mean. I don't need a lot wider, I need medium wide. So maybe we'll start making some medium wide [00:27:47] James: monitors. Yeah, and Heather has a, a smaller, wide screen one, but then. I don't know. It just makes sharing your desktop and meetings hard 'cause of resolution. Oh, changing stuff. [00:28:01] Frank: That's a funny one. I never even thought of that. You got this weird letter boxed display come for [00:28:06] James: everyone. Yeah. So you gotta actually, then you gotta put this monitor in 1920 by 10 80. Then you have like all this black space on the left and right and it's like, ugh. It's kinda like terrible. What do I do? Have you tried any? [00:28:17] Frank: Now that you have a treadmill though, have you tried doing any of the Peloton things like walking around in a forest with your ultra [00:28:22] James: wide monitor? I walk around inside of Outlook and that's a forest of emails, so it's great forest [00:28:29] Frank: of email. Well there's, there's the Vision OSS app I need to write. Your emails are a forest walk through the dark, scary forest [00:28:38] James: You pluck, you pluck the emails from the [00:28:41] Frank: trees. Oh, that's a rotten tree of spam. [00:28:44] James: Okay, I like that. All right, there's that. Okay, here we go. Final question of the pod. Written by users. When will this podcast end? Never, [00:28:58] Frank: never. James. When one of us meets our saddo, my slash retires to Costa Rica. I don't know. I I, I think, I feel like you're gonna be the first one to go off grid. Like, I'm going Where'd James go? And James will just be gone. So I think the podcast will end when James disappears off grid. Um, maybe there's some other criteria we could come up with though. [00:29:21] James: Yeah, we started this podcast many, many years ago. We're 370 podcasts in, that's a lot of podcasts. I don't expect anyone to listen to all of them, but if you did, you're amazing. Um, and if you're a Patreon subscriber, that means you've listened to even more because we have a bonus. Patreon. That's right. Video and audio every, nearly every single week. And this week we talk about dehumidifier. So if that is your fancy then boom, excitement. We started this podcast for many reasons. Frank and I have been friends for a long time, predating, you know, my Zarin days and. We lived very close to each other, but we never really hung out. And we did hang out when we started a user group together and we said, this is great, but this is like once a month. We should try to either one hang out more, but we live in Seattle, so that's not gonna happen. Or b, give an activity where we're forced to talk every single week. And that became this podcast and, and many of the other podcasts that I've done throughout the years have. Been to catch up with friends. So we literally do use this podcast, talk about stuff like we talk about stuff ahead of time, sometimes more, sometimes less. We have life stuff that's going on. It's good. And this has been the longest lasting of all my podcasts that I've ever done, and it's because there's a lot of exciting stuff in the world of tech that we're both interested in is mobile developers, but also Frank and I, I think we just have interesting lives when we're just good friends. We like to talk to each other. And that's fun. You know, I mean, and as you can see though, we, it's not like we're dedicated our time and our lives to like, yeah, I edit it and I do it on YouTube, blah blah. But there's a lot of people that are doing whole plans around and this and put so much a lot of, I only got so much time and effort, right? The most important part is me talking and chatting with Frank and learning new stuff. Like I do this podcast half the night to learn new stuff from Frank. And I think maybe, you know, Frank on occasion learned stuff from me on occasion. Brands, [00:31:13] Frank: mostly brands. Brands. You teach me brands, [00:31:16] James: marketing tips and tricks, things like that. Um, but you know, I think you're, I think you're right. Like for me it's been fascinating because the things that we kind of talk about now are a little bit different. Only because like my job has dramatically changed since I. Three years ago when I became a manager two years ago when I, yeah, two years ago. Yeah, two, three years ago when I became a manager, even though I'm still in the space, I do a lot of different things now, which means we can talk about different things, but it doesn't mean I'm always doing the same stuff that Frank's doing, which is kind of good to some SPAC aspect. So will it ever end? I don't know. I don't, I, when I retire, maybe. You retire first. [00:31:51] Frank: I think we've done well, keeping it low key because a lot of podcasts, uh, do have a lot of guests and that's a lot of scheduling and it's a lot of arrangement. It's a lot of effort. It's enough effort to just talk to each other once a week, you know, just arranging that kind of thing. Uh, but I think we've done a good job in keeping it low key enough that we can keep on doing this for quite a while because. We're both tech nerds. We're always gonna wanna talk about tech nerd stuff, and we enjoy the community and everyone chitchatting with us in the comments and then on the tweeters and all that stuff on the tutors. And so I think we will just, we'll, we're gonna keep this puppy going for a while and then, uh, we'll see. We'll see. Yeah, I talked to us in 20 years. No, [00:32:32] James: no, it's, it's definitely hard. You know, we look at, at. At the, the metrics. So behind the, the scenes, you know, we were talking about the metrics of how the podcast does, what our numbers look like, and you know, I think definitely like the average show in the beginning of time, like when we were at like peak. Podcast downloads. Mm-hmm. You know, we're getting five, sometimes 5 50, 500 downloads per episode in the first month. Mm-hmm. 90 days or so. Um, and you know, I think with Covid that went down, you know, as listeners go down, there's, there's other things, you know, you're gonna lose. Listeners go up, listeners. And even when I listen to podcasts, I ebb and flow and sometimes you auto download stuff for a while and you don't. And if you're a new listener, that means it's also kind of scary. Like three 70 episodes are. Tune into this episode. I start at one. What do I do? So the, the, the overarching like .NET podcast downloads. That are like the top 20, top 30, or like 10 to 12,000 downloads, which is pretty great. Like these are good numbers for a podcast. Mm-hmm. So thank you all for listening. Thank you. All right. Now, right now we're at about like 3,500, so we've definitely gone down quite a bit. Mm-hmm. You know, 25, 30%. Tell your friends about the podcast. You want us to keep going, but we have been posting on YouTube and we get a thousand to 3000 views there. Now are those people listening to the whole thing? I dunno, are you listening to this whole thing? How many people are listening right now? One, I don't know. But that has this thinking because law. Yeah. As long as people are listening and enjoying and writing into the show, we love feedback. Mm-hmm. If you're on YouTube, you can leave it a comment, you can go to Merge Conflict fm, you can hit us up on X or Twitter or anywhere we're at. We like that stuff. So I think as long as we enjoy doing it and as long as people are listening, then we'll keep doing it. Sounds like a deal, [00:34:22] Frank: man. I'm in. [00:34:24] James: Alright. Well I think it's gonna do for this week's merge conflict, so until next week when we make our epic return, I. I'm James Magno. [00:34:33] Frank: And I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for watching and listening. Peace.