154. Escape Dogs 2

Thinking of renting a car? Heard any of the Hertz horror stories on your social media travels? RJ has his as-usual useful advice for doing business with the megalodon of motor vehicles, as well as any of the lesser fry. It could keep you out of jail! The Dogs also discuss escape rooms, melting keyboards, preparing old laptops for sale, and saving money when repairing them. Also in this episode, RJ takes a deep breath and leaves Twitter now that Elon won’t let him use Tweetbot any more. And yes, Angry Birds still exists so we talk about that, too. It’s another seriously light hearted afternoon in the Shed! 

Just when they thought they could fetch the key

Links: Shed Dogs; the price of Costco hot dogs; Angry Birds Reloaded; Bamboozled Escape Games (the escape room Griffin played in Burnaby); soap box derby (with an oblique reference to crates); why RJ left Twitter.

Theme music by Voodoo Jazz!

Transcript. The transcript below is for search purposes.

[Music] Welcome back to the shed. RJ has been picking on me for the last half hour before we even started recording, so now I'm just in a fine fine state. But meantime we're going to start and we're going to have a bunch of fun! Who knows? Here we go! You know what I've been doing lately boys? I talked earlier about my whole jigsaw thing. So I finished that thousand piece Harry Potter and in fact I had the correct number of pieces and they all had an assigned location so good. That was good. So then, and RJ you know a bit about this peripherally, my daughter years ago had a MacBook and some time, I don't know, and probably around 2020 or so, she sort of let me know that it didn't work anymore. I don't know what's the keyboard screwed up. I don't know. It's like, you know, okay. And time went by. And so recently she was going through stuff to, you know, cull and she found this thing total. And I said, well, give it to me. I'll fool around with it and see if I can figure out why it doesn't work. So what fun. It just, I mean, it doesn't work. It's got stuff spilled on this keyboard and on the trackpad. Really heavily, heavily spilled, like not just a teaspoon. It looks like a whole glass of something went on to that and it went on there years and years ago. So it just doesn't work, but it does boot up. And so I took that whole entire thing apart, like all of the stuff out of the inside of it and cleaned it all as best I could. Took the keyboard out. Took the keyboard out into Rich's great amusement, applied boiling water to it because. Nice. Did you, did you YouTube all this first? No, I didn't. I was just mucking around and uh. Oh, I'm impressed. Just then I, oh, you mean how to do it? Yeah. Yeah. No, I did some YouTubeing on that. So I'm not, not a great deal because it's sort of, you just keep taking out little screws. There's just a million of them. You just keep taking them out and you try to put them someplace where you might remember where they came from, you know. But no, no YouTubeing on how to clean the No. liquid. No, I did not get a recommendation on that. So it was my own, like the keyboard, But everything inside of it was all sticky, everything. The drive was sticky, the board was sticky, the CD reader was sticky, the back of the... Everything was sticky because it had got shmuel on it. And I just thought, my real option here to clean this keyboard is to try to disassemble it, you know, pop all of these buttons off and use 80 billion Q-tips and carefully try to clean underneath all the way of those buttons. And I just thought, I've done that. So I took it in and I just hung it into a pot and poured boiling water all over it and you should have seen all the stuff that came out. It was like soup. It was just gross. But what I didn't do, which I in retrospect probably should have was take all the buttons off the top of all the keys, you know, all the buttons. So buttons, a lot of them deformed in the heat, which is pretty funny really. But don't you think the underlying like there's some flexible material underneath the buttons too? Right? Yeah. But it's harder plastic and it doesn't actually, doesn't appear to have been affected. It also doesn't appear to have been cleaned very well. Usually there's a membrane down there that's quite flexible, but I guess not. There's a metal frame under there. Oh no. But usually each key has underneath the key cap has underneath the scissor switch is, I think it's to keep any dust out maybe, but there's a flexible membrane. Well, I don't know. I mean, I successfully reassembled the entire thing, like, but I got it all back together again, and it booted up again. And it actually, the power button behaved way better. And the display seemed quite a bit crisper than it had been. But the keys were not improved at all. After all of that, they were not improved at all. And then I popped off all the buttons off all the keys to see if that was the problem. Nope, no improving. They didn't get any worse. Still the same five or six keys that were working still worked, but they didn't get any better. They just, right. So it was all really fun though. I enjoyed myself quite a bit. Also, yeah, you were talking about possibly buying a replacement keyboard, but certainly on Marketplace or Craigslist, there will be those machines for parts. Yeah. So you just look for the same model and it might be $25 for parts kind of thing. And they'll say the screen doesn't work. Yeah. Or, you know, keyboard's fine. And that's what you're looking for. So hopefully you can find something like that as well. I should do that. I should do that. Get your 40 screws and. But you know, the beauty of doing this to a non-functioning 14, 15 year old machine is if you really screw it up a while, no big, but it's very fun to get it all back together and then have it come back to life again. Cause there's a lot of parts in there. When we were saying you could have Sue's MacBook Pro from 2009. Um, cause we just don't use it anymore. So I decided to prepare that machine for you or if not you then we'll give it away or even sell it for a hundred or 200 bucks. So I tried to, you know, you have to create an installer disc is the way these old Macs work, you know, an external drive. It's kind of cool. You can take any of your current external drives and create a new partition on it. That's only, I don't know, 16 gigabytes is all you need. So I did that, but I couldn't install onto the installer drive. You have to install to the installer drive and then you use your installer drive to install to the Mac. That's the, I couldn't do that on a modern Mac because the modern operating systems, the install to the installer step doesn't work unless it's on an old operating system. So I got Sue's 2011 Mac, which is, which is using high Sierra. It's an older OS 10. older version OS 10 and that one was able to create the installer. Right. So why you were doing that? So now I'm doing this and it's one in the morning, right? And I'm like, great. Next step now is to install. Right. And I've already emptied the drive on the Mac book. That's fine, but I'll just go ahead and re-empty it as part of the process. It only takes what three minutes? Yeah. Two minutes to do an erase step. So I do the array step and I start the install. This is on the Mac, right? So I got the external drive. I've erased the Mac's internal drive. Yeah. Start the install about five minutes into it. And I realize, oh wait, I did, I did it on the wrong Mac. I did it on the 2011 one. Like Sue's special zoom machine from stairs. You erased. Yeah, I erased it completely. We don't back it up because it's not a primary Mac. It's just for, it does sync to the other Macs. So, so anyway, it's not the end of the world. It's just work for me because the next sink is going to take a hundred years too. Well, yeah, but I gotta do all the installs, right? I have to install high Sierra and then I have to, which I've done. And then I have to install any specialty apps like zoom and stuff like that for Sue. I have to turn on one drive and do the full one drive sync. And then I turn on iCloud and she syncs desktop and documents. So it all sinks and it all work. I don't need anyway, but it's like, Oh, I don't know. It's about 10, 15 hours of labor to get that whole thing going. So then, so then I plugged the drive into the 2009 MacBook Pro and that install, it gets almost to the end and then it just restarts. And it's fresh. It does, it starts all over. It never actually doesn't get to the end. It's downloading stuff to get ready for it. And then it just crashes every time. So now, yeah. So now I got to do the instructions to do the previous operating system, get that one installed and then run the updater. Yeah. Just like that's brutal. Or I could just give that away to someone. Say you got to install the operating system on it. It's probably more reasonable to do. Well, if you're giving it away anytime in the next little while, tell me, but if you're selling it. Yeah. No, it's not worth buying unless you actually wanted, like for someone who couldn't afford any more than a hundred bucks for a computer. Yeah. You can go and get yourself a working computer or working Mac usually because they last longer in my opinion. You probably get one that's better than one I got. I mean, I have a 1999 Mac set up right now to play old games on and it's working fine. There's nothing wrong with it. Yeah. Well, in fact, my laptop is a 2015 Mac book, I believe. It's great. Works fine. Yeah. 2015 ones are pretty good. Well, the other day I was walking buddy and I found a headlamp. Oh, yeah. And it looked like a GoPro to me because it looked like there was a lens on the front. And I thought, oh, this is kind of cool. I don't know if I tried it right there, but I brought it back home and I tried it and the light comes on. So I googled it just trying to see if it was kind of a GoPro or if I had some sort of camera option. And since then, you wouldn't believe what my ads are. Oh, yes. Just on the side, and it's all this camping stuff. Yeah. One of them is a they're really pushing this, what seems to be a mosquito net that you put over your tent. It's a whole tent. But every day since then, they're on my huff post feed or something. Yeah. The ad thing is rich men's while ago is just pernicious, you know, just, they're all interconnected. Yeah. Yeah. Respond to something in a text and next thing your Facebook feed is oh, we thought you might be interested This just coincidentally yeah really coincidence. I think not I almost thought of actually writing out little cue cards and with a product and just holding it up and showing it to you And you know like showing us and we just get the thought and then he was down the rabbit And then and then just see if anything pops up. Oh, right know, they've managed to push past the what have you searched for? What are you thinking? Yeah, there's, there's iOS 16, you know, you can just clip digits right out of a photo and use them. So why would they not be able to clip phrases out? Just use this iOS to clip phrases out of signs that people are holding. Like put one on there. Just, just have a sign that says, MEC freeze dried meal. Something like that on a sign. Something just anything, in fact, better yet anything that you don't normally do at all. So put it on a sign and do what with that sign? Just publish a picture with that sign on Facebook and don't say anything about it in text. Oh, and just see what comes back. Yeah. And then see if you start getting ads for whatever the sign referred to. Oh, I'm betting you are. Yeah. So it's image recognition software at work as well as text recognition. Yeah. I was searching for Christmas lights through a company I bought from in the past called Christmas Designers. And I've been having Christmas designers ads for like weeks now. And I can't help but think that that's got to really add to the price of the product. All those advertising dollars. You think? You know, not my particular product, but in general. Like if a company's advertising budget is 20% of their other costs, then there's this huge uplift that you have to pay, right? because they can't be profitable without raising their prices. But aren't internet ads rather inexpensive because they... Yeah, that's kind of where I was going. I was thinking historically they had an advertising budget and it reached a population of a certain size, right? Direct mail, whatever it was. For the same amount of money, you can just reach millions of people now. You don't have to increase your advertising budget, you just increase your venue, don't you? Yeah, I guess for a company of good size. And especially if it's only triggered by people actually searching their website, so it's only going to hit those people that actually search the website, then maybe it's not all that expensive. Yeah. It's way more like ... It's a bidding system. It's all automated, right? There's no humans involved. Like when you go and say, "I want to place ads anytime the following keywords show up and someone has searched the site." You know, there's a number of parameters, right? And then like if you just decide to buy some keywords, you're going anytime that Christmas lights show up, I want a 20% probability of having an ad placed. See it's fairly wild like that. You can have parameters, right? Then what it'll do is it'll detect and you say, and I'm willing to pay this much per impression, which is per click. And then you lose it and you simply don't get the ad. They don't, you know, so there's a bidding war going on all the time and every, you know, bids open and maybe 20 or 48 hours later they close and whoever got the best offered the best price wins. Geez. It's a pretty... Well, I'm getting ads for theater shows, which is really surprising because theater, actually I think it's the arts club, so they actually do have a budget. But it's like literally on HuffPost and on the side along with this woolly underwear and the mosquito net. I'm getting these. That sounds pretty uncomfortable. Woolly underwear. Oh, they're down to 14 bucks. They were 40 bucks. I'm going to pick up some. Yeah. Don't say that out loud. Send them to Ogre. They'll double down. Send them to Ogre. But I'm really surprised because this one show, it's not like it's the sound of music or whatever is the big show, it's this unknown smaller arts club show and there's ads. I'm thinking, oh, that can't cost very much. No, and I'm kind of thinking young people today know how to use social media. And so they know how to do stuff on the cheap, real cheap, like at home even, to get brand recognition building. I mean, people do it on their own in TikTok. They build their own brands in their own homes. Hey, speaking of brands, you guys like my t-shirt? Keep Hot Dog, keep hot dogs. And then what? $1.50. Oh, right. Is that Costco? Yeah, except for it's not. It's Costco colors. It's just keep hot dogs $1.50. I mean, is that what they are? Yeah. That's the whole thing with Costco is they have never increased their prices on their hot dog. Yeah. It's the best year. Yeah, it's the best deal in town buck fifty for a dog and a drink and they do it on It's a loss leader. It costs them more than a buck fifty to provide a dog But yeah, and there's a lot of there's an automatic limiter too because there's a lineup Yeah, there's a lot of people waiting around for the food. So lots of people. I bet those are quality hot dogs Oh, they're delicious. They're actually not bad They are not are they boiled or I don't think yeah, they boil them. I think pretty sure I don't know they're heating up somehow, whatever. If you can accept what they're made of, you don't worry about how they're prepared at all. Sorry, RJ, I cut you off. No, no, no, that's good. Lay it on us. Yeah, so in our trip to Europe and some other trips, I've tended to lean towards hurts. Probably shouldn't be. Make a corp and all that. Yeah, exactly. But it's just so tiresome doing price shopping for car rentals. really a lot of work, right? They just the way they make it is you don't really understand the full pricing until you get through a large part of the process. And it's just work, work, work and comparability of cars because they say ours is like Pujo something and then some other company will say theirs is like something else. The use of the term compact, subcompact, it varies across. It's just a nightmare. To me, this sounds highly analogous to shopping for a phone plan. Yeah, a lot of work. Yeah. So anyway, so we've just been using Hertz and then, you know, we return the cars and this is a PSA here. And I think most people do this anyway, right? You return the car, you take a lot of photos. Yeah, you walk around the whole car, maybe turn the movie thing on and just walk around the whole car or just take a lot of photos, open all the doors, take photos in inside the car, but also get far back from the car and take a photo of where it's at in the parking lot with enough markings that you can't miss it. And then we just do that. And also photos beforehand as well. But anyway, it turns out that Hertz has been really screwed over some customers because of their own bungling. So customers dropped their car off, didn't take those context photos, and Hertz says we couldn't find that we didn't find the car. Yeah. Because of some manual process with, you know, maybe they sent it off to the cleaners and the cleaners still have it on their lot or who knows what, right? And so they're charged with a stolen car and people have ended up in jail because law enforcement just goes along with mega corporate. And it's a big deal. There's a whole article on it. I'll put a link in the show notes. People have ended up in jail or, you know, what's great here is the advice on how to avoid that situation. That I have not heard. Like what you just said about taking pictures. I don't think I've ever heard that before, but I think I have seen some of those stories about people who swear They returned the car and they dropped the keys off where there's been and next thing You know someone's knocking on their door at five in the morning. Yeah, some sheriff. Yeah paid by the arrest. Yeah It's a it's a brutal world especially down in the States, but I'm sure it happens up here, too Yeah, I could see a lot of room for that kind of mistake with vans as well because a lot of the rental vans now you pick them up at different places. Yeah. And although I think in the case of U-Haul, I think there's one giant place you return them to down on Marine Drive. But you probably have the option to return them to whatever local little corner store pickup place. That is interesting though, that whole business of taking all the pictures and it never would have occurred me to do the same thing with the U-Haul. Yeah, you kind of want to take photos beforehand when you're picking up the vehicle and then afterwards and then the whole thing about where it's parked. I think we rented a 5 ton perhaps moving from East 27th to Sophia and 5 ton on Kingsway and everything went fine and I go back into the lot and I clipped the fence the roll over you know the fence that rolls in to shut everything down and I kind of blew up like I don't know how I clipped it. Oh, sorry about that. Oh, never mind. Just never mind. Just go. Go. Go. Go. He said. Well, that's good. Because yeah, a lot of those trucks are trucks, right? Like they're going to have little dings and stuff here and there. Well, I didn't do anything to the truck. It was just like I kind of blew up the fence. This automated rollout fence thing. And the other thing is that I had forgotten that my credit card has rental insurance and Having a road star on your ICBC coverage doesn't help you in Europe. So yeah, so I had to I forgot about that. So I paid for insurance and boy is insurance expensive if you don't have it covered And then the second time I rented I remembered and so it's just free if you got road star No, certain credit cards have oh, right Yeah, I have rental car insurance and it's decent coverage. I read the entire policy. Do you have BCAA? Yes. And RoadStar? There's RoadStar and there's RoadSomething else and the RoadSomething else is comparable to the BCAA coverage, right? Isn't there an ICBC coverage where they'll actually tow you away if they need to or no? RoadStar, yeah. Okay. Yeah, so they're similar products, right? Yeah. I've been playing Angry Birds. Angry Birds? What is this the 90s? What is the matter with you? Exactly. Well, I'm on, you know, like I got the mega Apple subscription, Apple One premium. Okay. You know, the family gets all this iCloud storage and we, there's things we truly do need like Apple music. We use that a lot. the iCloud photo library. We use that a lot and you need enough storage space for that. You know, and then there's some peripheral things that you might get use out of and, and Apple Arcade's one of them. And Apple Arcade includes a whole bunch of free games. So, you know, Griffin comes over, plays some games on it. And yeah, so Angry Birds Reloaded is free on Apple Arcade. To, you know, my job with Angry Birds is to get three stars on every level without using their bonus birds, their big extra powerful birds. It's been a long, long time since I played Angry Birds and I can't quite remember all the ins and outs of the game console. Well, I'll remind you, when you first started playing Angry Birds, which is similar to when I did, there were just the birds, right? And they would introduce a new kind of bird every 10th level. Yeah. And so you'd get to be expert on all these birds, right? So that's that. And you paid for the game. You paid $3.99 or something like that. And you owned the game. Then they realized that there's not a lot of money in that. And they started doing the whole in-app purchases thing. And you could buy new capabilities, right? And so around that time, I think the levels got quite a bit more difficult. And so you could, you know, you could spend these in-app stars to, to get stuff. But you could also pay actual money to get more stars. And so I refuse to actually ever, ever, ever buy additional capabilities in a game. Same principle. Same. I just absolutely will not. Yeah. So they, they will give you those extra capabilities without any money and I still won't use them on principle. I just don't want to get in the habit of wanting those extra things. And the next thing you know, maybe I'm going to buy one once or something. So anyway, I always just go for three stars, which is your highest rating, using the basic birds. And so I got to a level and I did it like 100 times and could not get three stars. And then so I googled it and there's always a YouTube of someone showing how they solved it. Yeah. And so I go, well, that's kind of like how I was trying to solve it, you know, So I carefully made sure my birds hit precisely where this player's birds hit. And in this particular level, there's three giant scarecrow. And those scarecrow are fairly big. So you got to hit blocks at the bottom of the scarecrow. The scarecrow will topple. That's what the video showed of this person showing how they solved it. Well, I would hit those exact same points and the scarecrow would not topple. So I became convinced that there was something wrong with the game. So I wrote an email to Rovio, company out of Finland, I believe, those angry birds. And I recorded a video of myself playing so you can play on the Mac, right, on this version. So now I'm recording the video of myself playing and you can narrate and the Mac just automatically records your voice, right? say, you see how I hit the bottom of the snowman here and it doesn't topple, right? And then I'd shoot again and I'd miss my shot. Yeah. It's like, okay, let's start again. So I, I record it like three times, right? And then on the fourth time, it was perfect, right? So I demonstrated that it's not behaving the way it's supposed to behave. And then I went back and listened to it before I sent it to them. Uh-huh. And, uh, see a couple of the snow, snowmen are made with black blocks. So I'm going, you see how I hit this black guy here? You know, and he doesn't fall over. And I really want to get the black guy down, right? It's just like all George Floyd-y. And so I had to record it again. And I was saying, you see how I hit the left-hand snow person? person. Anyway, I thought that was kind of funny that I, I almost sent that to him and it would have just sounded so bad. So anyway, I finally sent it to them. I finally sent it to them with the video. And I got a reply the next day saying, yeah, thanks for all the nice detail. We'll get that fixed in February. So it was the other guy did it. Yeah, but that's just an earlier version, right? You know, it goes, right? They I noticed, I noticed they patch it like monthly. Oh, some patch they disabled that you know what when we were back in the day when we were paying for it, it just worked. And now I think that they kind of rush it into production. You know, they've kind of let themselves go. Yeah, I mean, the C team is the guys that probably do the Angry Birds patch. It's not the team anymore. No, the team's doing the special power birds. And they're going to make sure that those are not even on angry birds. They're out there doing extra terrestrial warrior three or something like that. So it's Griffin's birthday the other day and him and three friends went in some escape rooms. You ever heard of those mobile? No, they're kind of like puzzle rooms. You know, you go, they're real rooms. You know, you go into the scene them on K dramas. Oh, really? Really? Yeah. Yeah. And any number of horror flicks to no doubt. And what were they in Vancouver somewhere? This one's in Burnaby, okay. Old Orchard Mall, which is what Willingdon and Kingsway. Yeah, go on. And yeah, he said it was great. He said they have, I think four different escape rooms. And I think they update them from time to time so that people who like these things can keep coming back. Right. And there's clues how to open something to get out of open this. Exactly. Yeah, it sounds like fun. It's called an escape room, but there were actually three rooms. Hmm. So they would start, solve that puzzle, which would net them a key to then they could unlock the door and go to the next right. Sounds really cool. And what did the subventure cost? I didn't ask him. It was for his birthday. So he had it paid for. So, but I'm going to guess. I have no idea. 20 bucks a person, maybe 30, 20. I'd pay 20 or 25 bucks a person for a, maybe, maybe not that much. Cause the only, the maximum play time is 50 minutes. Yeah. I can see 20, 30 bucks. Yeah. Or maybe, maybe a bit more. Yeah. I don't know. If you're the kind of person that likes to rent go-karts, probably going to love escape rooms. Same sort of, I have a go-kart for X minutes for X dollars. Yeah. That's pretty expensive though, isn't it? I have no idea. I'm not a go-kart guy. Did you ever do go-karts as kids? When I was really young, Krummer and I did them at Penticton, believe it or not. Yeah, you can only imagine back in the 60s and 70s just how unsafe those companies were. No helmets, no regulators, probably real differences in the power of motors. They probably had seat belts, I imagine. Yeah. That's funny. We used to do the derbies. You know, the Cub Scout ones were, there was no engine, but you'd go up on a big hill. Oh yeah. And you'd make it, or in my case, my dad would make it, and I'd pretend to help. What were they called in the States? Because we called them crates. Oh yeah, you guys called them crates. Yeah. Right. Right. Remember that there's a difference to what the Americans called them. They call them soapboxes. I soapbox soapbox derby Yeah, that's what it's called. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, it crates a lot and and I don't recall any seat belts There were no seat belts and you'd sit on those things and we were yeah, we were going down steep hills And it was all good fun. Yeah. Yeah But one thing I did notice in the photo at the very end of the race like eight people lined up including me me and I never won those things. All getting awards. And I thought all those, you know, those people that are constantly complaining about kids back in the old days, we didn't have participant or participation awards. Well, guess what? We got participation awards. And I'll bet you they got them back in the 1200s as well. People, they got rose colored glasses for looking at the past. Well, it's like, it almost feels like you got to get your daily dose of judginess in no matter how. Yes. And that's how you do it. Right. In my days, we didn't have chat GPT. Yeah. I, oh, I told you I lost Twitter. He lost Twitter. So I can't focus here. I don't know what lost Twitter even means. Does it mean? I use tweetbot, which I've recommended in the past. Tweetbot doesn't have any ads and you see just the posts from people that you follow and you see them in strictly time sequence, it's beautiful. It removes all the bad parts of Twitter. Elon Musk just shut down all of these third party clients so they no longer can access the API got shut down. So I'm no longer using Twitter. And I think they probably just lost five or 10% of their user base right there. Because, you know, when you're already thinking about leaving Twitter and your favorite clients gone and you would actually have to look at ads and look at tweets pushed to you by the algorithm? Like I just can't understand how you'd ever do that or why you would ever do that. Even Facebook, I sort by date. I beat it down to the ground. I wrestle it until it's actually displaying by date. And then I can just quickly skip the ads on Facebook. Because the Elon way of thinking and all these tech bros way of thinking is move fast and break things. Yeah, that's the actual motto move fast and break things, which it turns out doesn't work well when you're talking democracy. We've finished. We discovered, among many other things, some things to do to protect yourself when you rent a car from Hertz in particular. Anyway, we've got a goal. Because we have active, vibrant, busy, engaging lives waiting for us outside the shed, as well as the active, vibrant, engaging life you've shared with us here in your club. So here we go. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)