 Being employed at Linus Tech Tips means there's a lot of cool stuff going on at work. We're constantly playing with the latest and greatest technology. But our staff has a ton of cool stuff going on at home too. Stuff that you guys don't normally get to see. With that in mind, today we're going to be taking a peek behind the curtain, and out the door, and down the road, for a look at the cool tech and hobbies that our staff spends their personal time on. We may learn a little something about them in the process. Just like I want you to learn something about our sponsor. iFixit. From laptops to smartwatches, iFixit has your next repair covered with their lineup of toolkits. Get 20% off iFixit toolkits and get free standard shipping on orders over $65. With code celebrate or watch the end of this video to learn more. The first bit of trash I would like to show off today is McDonald's story, heartwarming store manager training. A lot of people don't seem to realize there's actually multiple McDonald's games out there. There's McDonaldland for the NES, there's McDonaldland for the Game Boy, and I often get asked, is it any good? No. It's a collection of five mini games. One of them you fill up a cup full of soda. One of them you flip burgers. I don't know what the other three are because I don't speak Japanese and it's not a good game. Other features of the game include the ability to print off receipts using the Game Boy printer. Next thing I'd like to show off is just a real quick one, beat Takeshi, the hardest NES game ever made. It takes years to beat and you have to know every little thing happening in it. And if you die, you start at the beginning again. It's not a game I've even tried to beat or play if we're being perfectly honest. Not worth my time. Pokemon Stadium. You may think you have the first Pokemon Stadium at home. You don't. Do you prefer Charmander, Squirtle, or Bulbasaur? Psych, you can't play as any of them because there's only five Pokemon in the game. You like mini games? Tengen Tetris. Now what makes this version of Tetris interesting is that it was made by Nintendo. Previously, it was only made by Atari, e-Lorg, and Bulletsoft. Bulletsoft later went on to become the Tetris company. They made Tetris. When you press the down button, the piece spins. When you press the A button, it hard drops. You can't soft drop. You can't spin it the other way. These are the only two inputs. Well, you can do Psych, but you can't do Tetris. Well, you can do side to side. But by the time you realize that A and down do the things that they do, you turn the game off. If you want to play a Famicom game on a North American NES, you're going to need some sort of 60 to 72 pin converter so that now it will fit into a regular-sized NES. I like to use a cloned version of the NES, this Retron from Hyperkin. Is it good? No, but it's also not trying to turn everything into HDMI, and I really appreciate that. The thing that I like most about this version of Tetris, though, this comes from Nintendo's R&D 1 branch. That was headed up by Gunpei Yokoi. Gunpei Yokoi doesn't get nearly the credit he deserves. He invented the Game & Watch. He invented the Game Boy. He invented the Virtual Boy. We don't talk about that. That's why he left. After he left Nintendo, he went on to make the WonderSwan, a portable game console that ran off of one battery and nobody really cares about. Tragically, he passed away in 1997 after getting into a car accident. He got out to check on the car after the car accident and got into another car accident. The last thing I want to show are my sealed and unsealed copies of the 2019 movie Cats. I have seen this movie no less than 30 times, four times in theaters, and every time it's in theaters, I will see it again. What do you think this is? That's the question I asked when I first saw it. At the MCC sale, there was like a garage sale section of it where people were selling like old things. It looks like a piece of technology. Could it be a printer? What do you think it is? It's an IBM P70386, portable computer. There was another term for them I saw online. A very strange computer. At the MCC sale, the person who was manning the station said, give us an offer. My dad said, $2.50. That's how much we paid for it. It is a full functioning 386 computer with a plasma flat screen from 1989, if you can believe it. And I never used it. And I said, I'll bring it to work. Maybe they'll be interested. And it sat under my desk for the past year and a half. When I first brought it here in hopes that it would be very interesting to the people who work here, I tried to boot it up and there were some sad things we learned. First off, the disk drive, the floppy disk drive, never worked on this thing. It'd be really great if that was fixed because I could play old DOS games. But now I think the hard drive is broken. It did have Windows 3 installed on it. So let's take a look. Hey! See, I had to turn it off. Oh! Yes! The RAM's booting up. How much RAM do you think it has? 8K? 8 megabytes. 8 megs? So apparently this is a pretty fast computer to be lugging around. Yeah, so I've got some error numbers coming up here. Not okay. IBM manual. It does need a little bit of tender loving care to get it back up to snuff. But this is a plasma screen. Oh yeah, this keyboard. It's not quite the SIMS keyboard. That's a reference to a Mac address video you should watch. But it is a really nice feeling keyboard. Lots of sounds from this computer. If the drive was working, I probably would have played around with it more. It's just kind of been a relic sitting in the corner. And now it's been a relic sitting under my desk. It doesn't have a battery or anything like that. You have to plug it in. So there's like these like doors to like really turn it, like seal it up when you're done with it. And you can like just walk around. You got a PS2 port for the mouse. There's a printer port and then I guess two parallel ports. Oh yeah, I guess there's a VGA out as well. So if you do want to plug in a color monitor, I don't know if it supports color though. But let's just pretend it does. And then there's actual slots. So you can put in a graphics card. Just kidding. Was PCI back then? Was that a thing back then? No, that was after. Somebody said, oh yeah, they're really hard to find because they didn't really sell very many of them. There's one on eBay for 750 US dollars. Yeah, it'd be great to kind of get it working and like actually fiddle around with it more. I remember opening up Windows and just being like, this is boring. I've restomodded an old Mac. That was fun. I wouldn't build a hack and touch in it. The cooling would be horrific. You'd need like very efficient chips. But it has the slots for like a graphics card, I guess. Oh, it's made in Japan. Who knew? The IBM PS2 P70 or Luggable computer. That's what they called it. Luggable. I brought Zunes. Not just one Zune, I brought two Zunes. This is a refurb. These things originally cost like $300. And giving them away refurb for 75 bucks was kind of like a kick in the pants for everyone who bought one of these for a price. Zune is Microsoft's answer to the iPod. At the time this Zune came out, so this is Zune 30. The biggest iPod, I'm pretty sure the biggest one you can get was 20K. This one had 30 gigs. You were getting a better value. I think they were both about $300 at the time. I didn't have an iPod. I was too poor. So when I got this, this was great because I could store all of the illegal MP3s I had. And the other nice thing was it played video. I never did that because why would you want to watch a video on this? Advertising stuff show people jogging with these things, which seems insane to me because it has a tiny little hard drive in it. And if you ran with it, you'd probably just destroy it. This is like a semi-official Zune leather case. The nicest premium Naga hide you could get. And it also has a very nice belt clip that I've never used with it. I usually just put it in there because the only thing that protects the screen is nothing. It came with a pair of earbuds, which are the worst knockoffs of the iPod headphones I've ever used. And if you bought the very expensive Zune that came with a very nice leather case, you got a pair of premium earbuds. I took it to Italy with me and that was in 2010. I had a cell phone after that and that was easier to find music content carrying two different devices. And then years later, I was working for Best Buy and someone threw this into the recycling and I grabbed it out. So this is 120 gigabytes. They're basically the same form factor. It's like a big chocolate bar. But the Zune 120 has a capacitive touch button that also rocks. But most of the stuff is gesture based on it. It doesn't work very well. The battery life on them, I don't think was as good as the iPod. I think I only ever get about eight to 10 hours out of this one before it needs to be recharged. And then this one is pretty much hopeless. What was sort of interesting for the time was that you could share songs between Zunes and you could listen to the song three times over three days. And then it disappeared off your Zune. It was kind of wild. It also has wireless syncing. You didn't have to plug this into the computer. You could just sync it wirelessly. It's just really slow because this is 802.11b. I still use the Zune software. It's the best way of downloading RSS feeds and it puts the album art on everything. And I don't even have to think about it. The Zune itself as a player kind of sucks. If you have MP3s tagged with the disc tag, so like whether it has disc one or disc two, the Zune doesn't recognize that. It'll play track one, disc one, then track one, disc two, unless you separate it like physically. What's neat about both of them though is that they have a built-in radio tuner. David had to go to the drive-in and he used that to watch the movie at the drive-in. That's probably the only time I've ever listened to radio on this. Oh, they're neat. Yeah, it's a neat oddity, right? Like so they were never commercially successful, right? Even when they came out, people said, why did Microsoft decide to enter this race now? Should you listen to music on a Zune in 2022? Only if you're a Lunatic. You could user upgrade the battery, you could user upgrade the hard drive. There's so many better ways to listen to music now. Today I brought a bunch of coffee stuff. I've worked in the food industry for some time. I've accumulated a couple of odds and ends that I wanted to show off and help potentially people that have never experienced coffee to experience a good coffee setup. I've got some coffee from a local roaster here in Vancouver, Agro Roasters. This is from the Yirgacheffe. Honestly, I don't even know if I'm pronouncing that right. Yirgacheffe. A region in Ethiopia known for producing very small beans. The coffee that comes from that region is very, very small. It has kind of a distinct roundness to it. When you roast it, it brings out a light acidity, some floral notes. We're going to be attempting to bring those tasting notes out with a V60 brewer today. I've also brought my Aeropress. It's a really wonderful way to brew coffee, but it is a little bit more intensive and it's not typically what I use in the mornings. So I've got two kettles here today. Both of them, you'll notice, are Gooseneck kettles. That just means that they have the long neck to them. They allow for water to be distributed very specifically within the points of the brew. So whether I'm using this brewer or this brewer, I can aim very specifically onto the bed of the coffee where I want it to go. So this one is unpowered. This is one that just goes on the top of a stove and it's very, very affordable. Probably one of the first ones that I got is you can kind of tell by how grimy it is. I don't use this for coffee very much anymore. I mostly use it to water plants. But this one is electric. It goes on this nice base here and I can set it to a very specific temperature within one degree Celsius and it just sits there. I can let it boil for an hour if I want to. This is a hand grinder from Easypresso. This is a very, very good quality hand grinder and it's pretty expensive as far as they go. The reason for that is the build quality. When you look into coffee grinders, you can get them for 20, 30 bucks and they can go all the way up to thousands upon thousands of dollars. The reason that it is good quality is because of the tolerances involved in its machining. It's also a fully metal burr set. What happens when you grind coffee is it has a burr here that grinds against this burr, which is just a set of metal pieces that try to crush the coffee as it's being fed through by gravity or by the rotational movement of your hands. This is important because this shaft is very, very carefully machined. When you have a grinder that's potentially cheaper, it's going to have a lot more wobble and so the grounds are going to be different sizes. Coffee is just in general a chemical process. The closer that you can make a variable to a specific point, the more accuracy you can have with the end result because there's a lot of variables along the process that creates the outcome of coffee. The reason that I use a hand grinder, part of it is cost. This is just affordable for somebody who doesn't need to put out a lot of ground coffee like a coffee shop or somebody that's selling it. The other part of it is the ritual of it. I like the sound of it, I like the feel of it in my hands when I'm brewing coffee and I want to share that with you today. What we're going to do is take 30 grams of coffee and 500 grams of water, which is approximately a 20% brewer ratio. I've also got a coffee scale here. The reason that the coffee scale is important is because this has very, very specific accuracy. It's, I believe, good down to 0.1 grams, which is pretty tight for kitchen scales and it's also very fast. It's almost instant to come to the specific point of weight. That's important for when I'm actually brewing the coffee. I can see how much water that I put in at a specific point in time. It also has a timer. So when I start it, I know how long it's been brewing. That's not useful in the moment, but when I look back, I can see how I need to adjust my brew for the next one that I make. One thing that I like to do with this hand grinder is just use the basin as a catch bin to weigh out my coffee. Probably a bad habit because I'm collecting coffee grounds from previous grinds, but it's one that I've been doing for quite some time and I refuse to give it up. So now that I've got exactly 30 grams of coffee here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the back end of a spoon. I'm going to get it a little bit wet and I'm going to stir it through the coffee beans. The reason that I'm doing this is to reduce static. Some people will use an aerosol spritzer like a little spray bottle. That's kind of a newer way of doing it. This is how I started. So now I'm just going to grind. The next step is the brewer. This is a Hario V60. It's just a really common 60 degree brewer, which is why it's called the V60. Inside there, I'm going to be putting one of these filters, which I'll show in a moment. On the bottom, the carafe that I have is actually a hand blown piece of glass from Japan. This is a pitchy server. A lot of servers have trouble with drips afterwards, just like that cup did, but this pitchy server, when you pour it, there's no drips. So I have a couple of filters here today. The really distinguishing part about filters is just personal preference. The ones that I like to use are these ones that have no tab, as opposed to ones like these that do have a tab. Generally, they have less taste. I've noticed less of a paper taste in my coffee. And these ones brew pretty slow. What that means is it takes longer for the water to filter through, which means more extraction is happening in the chemical process and it just tastes different. And so I've adjusted my brew generally for these. These ones are just the same as the white version here, except they are unbleached. This is going to impart a more of a darker, more of a papery taste on the coffee, which some people like and some people don't. I don't typically use these with a V60. I use them with a different brewer called a Chemex. It allows for a little bit longer of a steep time. All of these variables make a difference. So I'm going to take my filter and I'm just going to fold over the edge here. What this does is it allows it to stand up a little bit better. The next step is rinse out the filter with just a little bit of boiling water. It just removes some of the particulates that would have been created in the manufacturing process. It removes some of the papery taste from the filter itself and generally it gets the brewer warm. Why that matters is you're using the energy to extract oils and lipids from the coffee. The colder this is, the more heat it's going to take while you're brewing. The more that you can do to warm the brewer up beforehand, the more consistent a brew you're going to get. So I'm going to take my coffee grounds and I'm just going to dump them in the top here. I have it spread in a nice flat pattern on the bed just by shaking it there and I'm going to put it on my scale and tear it out or zero out the scale so that it shows nothing there. Now what I should do is I should show you the app that I use at the same time. I'm from the labs. I am very statistically minded and so I track all of the data about my coffee. This app is pretty interesting. It's called Bean Conqueror. It's a free to use open source app developed by somebody who is dedicated to coffee for quite some time. I have been using it for I think at this point two years. What I'm going to do is I'm going to type in my brew settings here as well as the amount in grams of ground coffee that I'm going to be using here. I've already preset the beans that I'm using and I'm going to grab my kettle and start to brew. As I pour over the V60 I'm going to start the time and I'm looking on the scale here for about 70 to 80 grams of water at the bloom stage. Why this matters, you're releasing CO2 from the roasting process. You know when you have a fire and it crackles a little bit something is escaping. Same thing happens with coffee. We're going to leave that for about 45 seconds here. After most of the CO2 has escaped during the bloom we're going to pour some more water in there. You'll notice that I'm pouring quite high up. The higher you go the more agitation you can create in the bed of the coffee. The more agitation you have with the bed of coffee the more extraction you're getting from the grounds of the coffee and the more taste you get from the coffee itself. I'm going to let this first pour draw down and as it gets really close to the bed of coffee sitting at the bottom I'm going to start to pour over again. So this is called the Hario spiral but I'm spinning it in a spiral so as to aim for pretty even agitation across the entire bed of coffee. It's important to make sure that when you are pouring water into the coffee you're getting all of that hot water mixed in with the water that has already started to extract. This is what's known as a percolation brew. New water comes and filters through the bed of coffee. Something like an Aeropress is what's known as an immersion brew. A percolation brew has continuous extraction with new water whereas an immersion brew has continuous extraction with existing water and so you're going to have an extraction rate that levels off as time goes on. And there's no real reason to use one or another. I prefer to use the V60 because it allows me to benchmark coffee in a way that other brewers can't. If I get a good brew out of it I know that I've been very pinpoint in my accuracy. We're nearly done this brew. I have 500 grams of water there and it's just leveling out to be fairly flat on the top of the bed. The coffee is finished brewing and now we're going to taste it. I brought a number of coffee mugs here some of which are pretty important in general to coffee tasting. To somebody who is professionally tasting coffee a different shape coffee cup can actually impact the smell and taste of their coffee. We're just going to pour a little bit in here. Not a whole lot. When I'm brewing I'm brewing it at 100 degrees Celsius but I want it to come down to somewhere between 50 and 56 degrees Celsius before I drink it. You can't really taste very well when something is super hot so I'm just pouring a little bit of coffee into the cup and I'm swirling it around so that I can actually get a sense of how good or how bad that brew was. It smells a little bit woody like I've over extracted it. It's not terribly over extracted. Coffee tastes good. I like that temperature. My wife is always just scalding. I generally like milk or sugar in my coffee but this is good enough. You wouldn't want to put anything in it. Very smooth. One of the nice things about a light roast is that it allows for you to have all of the flavors of the coffee as opposed to having the roast be the flavor. If you didn't have a consistent coffee flavor would you over roast to kind of cover Starbucks? The coffee that I've got here is pretty acidic. It's generally on the lighter end of the roasting spectrum. The fats, the lipids, the proteins in the coffee are not going to be as cooked which means that you're going to taste them more. This coffee that I've chosen is also high in acidity because that's a flavor that I have a preference for. But coffee is wide and diverse and you might not like that. Some people like drinking battery acid. I'm closer to that. I've gone from a place of oh, Maxwell House or Folgers is perfectly fine and I don't really care what it tastes like to starting to work in the coffee industry and starting to come out with oh, I can kind of taste the differences between some of these things and then becoming way on the other side to being a complete gatekeeper. Oh, that coffee is disgusting. Why would I taste that? And then coming back kind of in the middle of being like oh, this is my ritual. This is the way that I enjoy it. This is how I would like to share it to the world. It's no more or less good with one type of brewer or one type of coffee than any other. It's just how you like it. Thanks to iFixit for sponsoring today's video. iFixit, well, they make compact toolkits with all the essential bits you need to fix your electronics. From mini kits with 16 bits to full repair toolkits to start your repair business, iFixit has you covered. Here's iFixit's over 70,000 repair manuals complete with photos and step-by-step instructions. You can work worry-free knowing that you've got quality parts backed by iFixit's lifetime warranty. Right now, save 20% off iFixit toolkits and get free standard shipping on orders over $65 with code celebrate. Get yours using the link in the video description. I just want to say thank you so much for watching and have a nice day. If you guys enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy part one of Show & Tell, which was like two years ago. Wow. Next Saturday has a modem. Flies.