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I don’t get how this is so hard for people! I don’t care if someone is left wing or right wing everyone wants to throw everything on school’s shoulders! It is so god damn annoying. “I only learned how to find the square root of x not how to balance a check book!” hur hur hur. Shut the fuck up. If you can’t tell this is going to be a super angry post.

For those that don’t get it. School is supposed to teach you academics. School should not teach you life skills. This is because school is an academic environment. You should learn life skills from your parents, family, or community out reach programs. “Well, I am not lucky to have both my parents!” Cool. Neither did I. You know what I did? I asked my uncle, aunt, grandma, occasionally my mom, and I even faked as being interested in Christianity to go to church outreach programs to learn skills. Just because you have half a deck doesn’t mean you can’t play.

My story? My dad went to prison when I was young and my mom was always working. When she wasn’t working she usually spent her time depressed watching TV and eating ice cream. Am I upset at her? Back then I was. As an adult I understand more of what she was going through and honestly have forgiven her.

So when I needed to learn to sew? I asked my grandmother. When I needed sex advice? I asked any family member to be honest but my uncle gave me a lot of advice. When I needed advice on growing up as a man? Uncle. To get my driving permit? Aunt helped me get it. Learning to repair and random stuff? Church outreach programs. I did not have the best of hands dealt to me, but I managed to learn stuff through other means because I didn’t have both of my parents.

Why shouldn’t the school teach this instead? Because it is fucking academics. You don’t go to your parents to learn algebra. You don’t go to your priest for that either. You go to them for life advice and skills. Many parents don’t want to teach this stuff and want the schools to do it. Kids since my age group have grown used to the school’s raising us that many people my age bitch about schools not teaching us to be adults. No shit. The school isn’t our parents.

A prime example is sex education. TEACH YOUR KIDS SEX EDUCATION! You have no idea who is teaching your kids sex education. Like South Park once famously said,”Your kids can be learning from someone who has never had sex, has a warped view on sex, or is a sick pervert.” All of which are very valid. For those that don’t know. In the US 1 out of 10 kids are molested by teachers. This is an actual study done by the US. If anything, having a pervert teach your child sex education is the easiest way to get away with it. They’re just “teaching”.

Don’t approve of school teaching a certain curriculum? Too bad. It is being taught. Do you want your kid to understand how to have safe sex? Then you have to teach them. STDs? Can’t rely on schools. Hell, my friend had a sex ed teacher who kept showing deformed dicks in class due to STDs that my friend was scared of sex for years. My sex ed teacher just said “wait ’till marriage”. What fucking knowledge is that? I was then tested over it.

School is also an awful way to learn life skills. Why? Because when you get too many people together it decreases the chances of questions being asked. Which is why ever since school’s have taken over sex education in the US sex knowledge is on a decline. If it is a one on one you feel safe asking questions. As more people show up you are afraid of sounding dumb. Which ends up with a class never asking questions even though no one knows. In my calculus class this was such a problem that I would ask questions I knew the answer to just so people would feel comfortable asking questions.

“Well I don’t have family.” Church? Community out reach programs? I know most community out reach programs are gone but it is important we petition to bring these back with funding. Community out reach programs help us a lot. Sure the person could be a pervert like a teacher but most community out reach programs are people in your immediate community. Where as a lot of teachers drive from all over to work. Church is the exact same but even more smaller of an community.

Why does everyone want school to teach anything anyways? Do you really want to get tested on how to balance a check book? Which is just basic addition and subtraction; for you people who keep bitching about math being worthless. School does not actually foster a good learning environment because we constantly have to succeed. There is no trial and error when it comes to tests and homework. You fail or pass based on your immediate knowledge. Save My Dears came with a lot of failures. Hell, I uploaded it without death scenes working correctly. Had that been graded by school I could’ve failed. Instead I was able to learn from messing up and then people reporting the death scenes didn’t work. Fixed it and learned from my mistake. Willingly asking to cripple our life learning skills like this is idiotic.

Then comes the funny part. People who say teachers make too much, when they don’t (and no they don’t get summer vacation pay unless they choose to take money from their regular paycheck to be held for summer pay), so they keep defunding teachers. Teachers are already overworked with many bringing work back home nightly and having to work a second job just to live. People want to keep throwing their parental jobs onto parents and cutting their pay. Schools are already over crowded and under funded. The last thing you need is someone stressed and tired teaching your kids life skills in that state. Many teachers can’t even teach academic skills in this state.

I don’t know how to end this! So, fuck it! Teach your kids life skills. If you can’t. Ask their friend’s parents you trust or their other family members. Ask your church leader or find a community out reach program. Fuck.

Recently I decided to get into speed running. I will start speed running Twisted Metal Small Brawl next week, actually. I am setting everything up as we go. What is speed running? It is where you compete to see who can complete a game the fastest within certain rule sets. However, getting set up for speed running has been annoying. With numerous tools and programs I’ve never used before. These tutorials were so awful I just took the time to learn how to use it all on my own because I was not about to waste a hour of my life of “uhms” and wasted explanations.Which is how this subject came to my mind.

Make better tutorials. Christ how is that hard? I want to go over types of tutorials too because it is very annoying how alike all of them are because people can’t make decent ones. Before I go over them I want to go over what I think the best tutorials have:

• Split into sections
• Keeps uhms and stutters to a minimum.
• Has a script
• Audio
• Properly mixed audio
• Cut the useless content
• Know what you are talking about

Split into sections: I know why people don’t do this, but screw you. Do it. It is very annoying to go through a 40 minute video for 2 minutes of content I need because people don’t even bother to do time codes. This is because people are trying to get YouTube watch time for higher ad rev. However, these videos I tend to ignore.

I once watched a tutorial over map making issues I was having when I made Killing Floor maps. I kept getting this one bug and people kept linking to this one video for the fix on it. Everyone linked to this video. The video was a hour long and the part I needed was under 5 minutes. The video was poorly edited with no time stamps or anything. So, after spending some time trying to scrub through I just gave up and watched it. 40 minutes into it what I needed finally showed up. Split your content up or at least provide time tables.

Keep “uhs” and “ums” to a minimum: Nothing is more annoying then when you watch a tutorial video, or any video, and it is full of uhs and ums. Unless it is supposed to be a live recording. It is clear these people had no plans to make a tutorial. They just opened up their screen recorder program and just went to town. I’m sure if you go through and edit out the uhs,ums, and pauses you could cut some of these videos from 25 minutes to 18.

I recently was linked a video for LiveSplit, from their official website, and it was the worst thing ever. The video was full of uhs and ums just wasting time. The fact this was the programs officially recommended tutorial is pretty sad. Later I will go over this video more.

Has a script: As with the above mentioned uhs and ums it often feels like people just create a tutorial with no script or outline. They just open the program and go. So, it is disorganized and disjointed. You can go from talking about how to set up keyboard short cuts to editing the theme then to how the short cuts actually work.

You need to keep things progressively linear. If I am teaching someone about programming. I don’t explain an int, for loop, switch statement, and then increamentation. No, you’d explain variables at once, basic math, increamentation, if statements, do while, for loops, and then switch statements. There is an order you should teach things to keep it simple. Like if you are learning the ABCs you don’t go A,B,Y,R,F,H,E,C,Z,X,L, and D in order of learning the ABCs. You learn them in order.

Audio: Speak in your videos. I know this isn’t common these days but back in the day people just used to do either text to speech or text on screen tutorials. Depending on the tutorials you are looking up these can still be common. Not only that if you are looking up something sometimes people will link to a video that is over 10 years old and has no voice. Just make a new god damn video and stop linking to tutorials that old.

Properly mixed audio: Look, audio is important. So is making sure it doesn’t sound like you have a upper respiratory infection when you are talking. It is also important to learn how to mask your microphone noise and to not add music that makes you hard to hear. That last one I never understood. I am here to learn from you and I can’t hear you.

Cute the useless content: When looking up videos for LiveSplit many of them included how to download Livesplit, WinRar, how to extract files, how to move files to a new directory, how to create files, etc… This is a lot of extra steps I see often in tutorial videos.

I was looking up how to connect a Switch to a USB ethernet cable adapter because mine wasn’t working. Turns out mine was an unsupported chipset I had to find out through a lot of Googling. I wasn’t sure if I needed to do something special or what; so I tried a tutorial to at least see. The guy in the tutorial spends 5 minutes explaining how to plug in a USB cable, how to remove your Switch from the dock, how to plug your Switch into the dock, and how to plug in an ethernet cable. The tutorial was 6 minutes long.

Know what you are talking about: This is the biggest offense there is. It is very annoying to watch a tutorial video and they just say “Click this box for this option. I have no idea what it does but click it.” Explain the fucking option if you are going to recommend it or recommend against it. For the LiveSplit one it had the opposite effect and the option it told you not to check is the MOST IMPORTANT THING for speed running on PC.

I am fine if you make a tutorial video and you don’t know everything. However, at least be honest and don’t cover that part. I was watching a tutorial on digital audio workstations, or DAWs, the other day. The guy says “These options I have no idea what they are for. I do not touch them so I will not try to explain them or tell you to mimic my settings.” That I can respect. If the guy told us to load specific settings and drivers without explaining anything then it would’ve made me upset.

It’s like when people get random PC performance tips from random people and install all this shit that ruins their computer without understanding what it is doing. There was one person I knew who installed custom network drivers that were designed for a single network line system so they could play games better. What happened was only one connection could be active at a time. She’d connect to CS:GO and steam would die. She’d load steam and YouTube would die in the background. Etc. It made whatever she was using faster but it gave her internet tunnel vision, so to speak. She came to me for help and when I explained this she refused to listen. The guy who told her to install that driver basically then convinced her to make a bunch of fake networks to connect to and run things through. Which slowed her PC to a crawl performance wise and then her network too for it being split so much.

So now let’s go over types of tutorials:

• Videos by people who can’t teach
• Videos by people who have no clue
• Good videos by experts
• Bade videos by experts
• Long videos that say nothing

Videos by people who can’t teach: This is the LiveSplit video I will have a section on in a bit. The guy who made this video can’t teach. Every rule one has for being a teacher this guy broke. However, he at least knew what he was talking about for the most part. I feel like these people would make great tutorials if they didn’t just load up their screen recording tools and go. Spend time writing it and planning it.

Videos by people who have no clue: You run into these in the tech field a lot. Someone will just read a wiki how and make a video on it explaining nothing but step by step instructions they got somewhere else. They often get a lot of things wrong and cause a lot of harm. I ran into these a lot when trying to learn how the AndroidOS worked.

Good videos by experts: These are the best! These follow all the above guide lines I have, except for split/time stamps most of the time. These people take very confusing instructions and make them easy to understand. These people can make a video for beginners that experts can use at the same time to get that small bit of missing info. There was a great PS2 HDD mod video that turned this confusing mess of forum posts into a easy to follow video.

Bad videos by experts: These are still good, oddly enough. The only reason these are bad is because they gloss over a lot of stuff they have forgotten people might not know. While you can still get some great lesson from these videos they are not good for beginners. The people who need these tutorials the most.

Long videos that say nothing: That stupid Switch ethernet video. 6 minutes may not be long but it wasted 5 minutes on stuff it didn’t need to show. However, I have seen tutorials for modding consoles and software that are over 30 minutes long but honestly by the end of the video I felt like I learned nothing.

The live split video: This video is the main reason for this post so I feel it is important to single it out. This video is awful and the fact it is on the main website for their tutorial is bad. This video clearly had no script or outline, the guy did no editing, full of pauses, had useless content sections that were of sections being repeated, was over 20 minutes with no time stamps, and didn’t know what he was talking about randomly.

I feel this video could be drastically improved. I watched the video for two bits, how to set up LiveSplit and use it into OBS to make sure a internet connection wasn’t needed because people kept saying I had to connect to an online database. The internet part wasn’t included and setting up was pretty awful. Most of the video was how to make it look pretty. Where he even stopped midway through going over setting it up on how to make it look pretty then went back to going over how to set it up. Then went over the same thing he just did later in another how to make it look pretty section.

He also told people to not check global hot keys because it was useless despite not knowing what it is. Global Hotkeys just means you don’t have to have LiveSplit active to use it’s hotkeys. Say you are speed running a PC game and you need to stop your timer or mark a section. Without global hot keys you will need to minimize and have LiveSplit be your active program to stop the timer. This is a very important thing and he told you to not turn it on. It took me 20 seconds of testing to figure this out. He said he’s never used and had no idea so to not turn it on.

How to make the video better? I think splitting the video into a function video and then a make over video would’ve been better. This way if you are like me and want to focus on getting it running first before making it look pretty you can.

Then you would write a outline and basic script to keep you in check and cut down on wasted time/sections for each video. Fun fact, preparing with a basic outline and studying it helps cut down on stutters, uhs, ums, and pauses. Those happen because you are stuck thinking and are uncertain of where to go. If you keep an outline handy you can always reference it.

It was very clear he was just recording with no idea of what to talk about or discuss. In fact, when he was going over how to create splits and all that jazz he stopped confused and then after a bit decided on Wind Waker to be the example. He should’ve had from the start “When I get to this section on creating a game and custom splits the game should be titled xxxx and there should be y splits, each of which titled a,b,c,d….. Even him wasting that small bit of time trying to come up with a game and then splits is still wasted time. Even if it only amounts to say a minute that is still 1 minute out of 20 minutes. That’s 5% of the video wasted. Add in the pauses and uhs you can probably cut down 2 minutes. Which makes it 20% saved with a script. Possibly more with the wasted extra content.

I also think learning how to actually use all the sections of the program before telling people what not to use and to use is important. This is also something an outline is good for. When I am teaching something and there is something I don’t know I include in my outline to study it then create an outline of that sections. It is more work but you will be a much better teacher for it.

His audio was perfectly fine and I think it was well mixed.

This has always been a thing that bothers me. A lot of people get away with this truly awful tutorials simply because no one knows any better. I am tempted to start making some to cut down on unneeded content. Not sure. Yes, I am aware this is long with a lot of repeated things said but it was still a oddly organized rant.

Every time I buy computer parts, or any parts, people always look at me weird for caring so much about “things that don’t matter”. Well, let me tell you size definitely matters. What brought this about? Getting the wrong length CAT-5E cables recently. “Why did you get CAT-5E when..” Shut it. That’s why I ordered a specific size.

Nerd word stuff out of the way:
CAT-5E – This is an ethernet cable. The thing needed to connect a device to your router and your router to your modem. CAT cables come in different types. From 5E and on they are all backwards compatible. What this means is a CAT 6 cable will work with a 5E device and a 5E will work with a 7 device.
What’s the difference? Maximum speeds and lower resistances mostly. A CAT5E cable, which is perfect for what I need, is slower then a 6 or 7. If you can do 1Gbps then get a 7, just make sure you get the right size!

Alright, with the nerd stuff out of the way lets go over my issue first. So, I ordered 3 CAT5E cables recently. They were supposed to be 1M, or 3 FT, long and instead I got 3M, or 9 FT, long cables. Great a free upgrade right? Why is he complaining about this? Well, wrong. Size matters a lot. Despite common belief a longer cable is not always better. You lose efficiency when you travel distances due to resistance and generate heat. Which the heat leads to more loss of efficiency. How? Here we go!

First have we all ever used something that as it got older it got hotter and preformed worse? The answer is yes. The reason many laptops start to fail, tablets, phones, smart watch, etc is because they “get old and overheat”. Well, this isn’t entirely true. What is happening is the cooling solution is getting old and failing. There is also the possibility that dust and such as gotten in and made things worse. So, you may wonder why does my phone getting hot make it slower and run apps worse? This is because when components get hotter they can’t generate as much energy. So, by getting hotter they lose efficiency.

If you notice your phone start to get warmer you can reapply thermal paste you will find your battery and phone will actually live longer. It’ll keep the phone from getting warmer which will allow the internals to operate at peak efficiency. This is what many of my friends do to their laptops. They don’t replace laptops often and instead replace the thermal paste and cooling systems to keep their laptop cooler and lasting longer. I replace the cooling solutions in my desktop every 18 months to make sure my desktop can live as long as it needs to. Helps a lot with performance and keeps costs of upgrade down.

Why does this happen? Well, you have to understand a bit about physics for this. Now, it has been a while since I have taken a physics class so my info may not be 100% accurate but the theory is there and proven.

Before I explain it I want to go into how I first discovered this. Back in college I had to take an introduction to engineering; which was just a civil engineering class. They made us go to events and write about them. I was tired of going to civil engineering events so I wanted to go a computer science or computer engineering event. When I mentioned that I was actually quizzed. After taking this short quiz I was told that I could go to these events. This confused me because all the civil engineering events were shit like a pizza party while learning history of buildings or plans for a park. Almost no teachers were there.

My first computer engineering event was issues of multi core devices. The second I walked in I saw 0 students there. In fact, it was just teachers. I saw my own computer science teachers and they looked at me weird. They even asked why I was here. I saw the computer security teacher who knew me from my robot competition days and even the dean of our department. I very awkwardly find a seat and sit down. 5 minutes before the event and even more teachers pile in. I’m the only student.

I listen to this lecture which opened my eyes on the fact I didn’t understand processors at all. That there’s way more then just L cache and GHz. I’m writing notes and trying to pay attention. Then the speaker, a woman from China, starts to talk about the physics and heat transfer and loss of efficiency. Between never taking a physics class before, her accent, and this high level presentation I was lost from this point on. I understood a little bit after that like making sure you have a single core to rely on because of issues I couldn’t understand and heat=bad not due to death of parts but loss of efficiency.

Now, let’s go over resistance. The longer something has to travel the more resistance it will get. The more resistance it gets the more heat it generates and the less efficient it will be. So what does this mean? Friction! So no matter what everything has friction. When you turn on your laptop or lights despite how instant that may seem there is a resistance slowing it down causing a loss of efficiency.

How does this work? Despite being wrapped up in nice tubes and all this stuff to make sure there’s minimal resistance there will always be some form. Let’s say for my CAT5E cable for every instance a bit of data is transferred it faces a .0000001% loss due to resistance. Notice how I said instance it is transferred. This is because for every picosecond it could move 5000000 instances. If it did then that means every picosecond I lose 5% efficiency due to resistance. Thank god this isn’t the case because that’s awful resistance. Lets say every 1CM moved I lose .05% of data. So if a cable is 1 M I lose 5% of data. Which means my 3M cable makes me lose 15%.

Again these are theoretical numbers but the point still stands. Because my data has to move further along it is facing more resistance causing in more data loss. Now CAT6 and 7 cables are much better with lower resistance then CAT5E. However, at 1M the data loss would be so minimal I wouldn’t care. To be honest even at 3M it is pretty minimal. Resistance is still pretty low on 5E cables. So why do this? Because it has always bothered me how no one seems to notice or care about this. Sure going from 1M to 3M isn’t a big difference. However, say the seller sent me a 10M cable, which has happened before. I would be out 10x the data due to resistance. At which I would’ve gone with a CAT6 cable. Sure the cable would’ve costed more but the data loss would not be as much compared to a 5E over that distance.

Another fun thing about cable length that matters is how much heat they make. If anyone has a really long, I mean REALLY long, extension cable without a thick wire I am sure you’ve burnt it out or know someone who has. Why does this happen? Well, as resistance builds up that loss of energy it has to go somewhere. Energy can’t just disappear. It turns into heat. Which the heat then causes extra loss of energy as the wiring becomes less efficient because it is getting hotter and hotter. So now at 1CM what would’ve been .05% could be .08% due to heat which could raise to .1% and so on until the cable burns out. Which is what happens to those extension cables. The energy keeps storing up building up until it has built too much and just fries itself.

This is also why if you use an energy usage tool and you compare an extension cable usage to just plugging it into a wall the extension cable uses more electricity. This is because the resistance leads to loss of efficiency which requires more electricity to pull through. If your phone needs 5 watts to charge and the extension cable is heating up well your phone is still sucking out 5 watts. Which then leads to the extension cable pulling more electricity from the wall. However, before you go dumping cables let it be known unless you’re pulling massive amounts this is pretty minimal. Sure your phone needs 5watts but really after a few hours the extension cable is maybe pulling like 5.3 watts for your phone. The people I’ve seen who have blown these cables were using them for mini fridges and such. Which pull a lot of energy.

So, what type of cable should I get for an extension cable? Well, the thicker the cable is the better it will be at moving the heat across to prevent it from heating up so much leading to less loss of efficiency. My dad used to work in construction. He had this massive extension cable with the thickest wire I ever saw. We used it for our window AC unit. The old one we used before actually burnt up. This thick monster he brought from work? Didn’t give a fuck. It took all the heat and resistance and didn’t even care one bit. Not only getting a thicker cable but learn what type of energy you will be using. If you need electricity get cables and extensions that are amazing at transferring it. Pay extra for a higher quality wiring with less resistance. Just learn what is being used for the transfer and what materials cause the less resistance.

What if I can’t? Well, hub up is my opinion. So I used to have a really long HDMI cable that used to get insanely hot. I ditched it and bought a splitter and combined two cables half the size of the long one. The new cables were no where near as hot. The splitter absorbed the heat. I went from no gaming past 1 hour to all night sessions. Just think of data like bridge routers. If you are having shit wifi connection buy a extra router or two and use them as bridges. This way you lose minimal data via wifi. You can do this same with cables when they need to extend long distances if you can’t get the higher quality cables to make sure they don’t burn out.

Here’s the kicker. This entire post is about cables. However, microchips, resistors, CPU, GPU internals, and so much more all follow these same principles. Once things get hot they lose efficiency. Once things get too small they lose it too, but we are getting better tech here. Remember the Wii U? Remember how Nintendo said they were selling the console at a loss when the PS4 and XB1 were way stronger and needed to only sell 2 games to be a profit. Then the Wii U needed to sell 2 games and a pro controller? Why did that happen? Well, to keep the Wii U cool because of its small form factor it needed custom parts. This made it much more expensive. To where if you made the Wii U the size of the XB1 it honestly would’ve been super cheap to produce.

The issue with smaller parts isn’t that they can’t produce results. It’s that they can’t produce results for long. I am sure you can make a 5CM CPU that can do 6 GHz. However, it’ll generate so much heat it’ll just die. The issue with the Wii U was they needed small parts for its small form factor. They also needed to make sure these parts didn’t overheat which costed a lot into R&D. Then they needed to get a proper cooling solution and one strong enough to handle this. Which the Wii U had a tiny fan to boot.

If you haven’t noticed this is the inverse issues cables have. Cables create more heat the longer they go while CPUs, RAM, etc generate more heat the smaller they are. This is because you are jamming more components inside a smaller area that all generate a lot of heat. Which is why you have noticed Apple starting to increase the size of their phones. They need to keep heat from building up as their phones get more powerful. For components it is less resistance and more so putting so much next to each other. Like if you open up a CPU and see its innards you will see tons of tiny components jammed next to each other. These things also need to breathe. They make a lot of heat. Which is where external cooling solutions come in.

However, hardware is an entirely different discussion one I don’t understand nearly as well as cables. It’s very complex and for hardware I just say make sure you reapply your thermal paste every 18 months.

Before I go! So, heat = loss of efficiency then cold = more? Wrong. If things get too cold you also lose it too. If you were to take a CPU and managed to keep it at 0 C for too long, without worry of condensation, you will harm the CPU. Cables and components all need to be at the right temperature.

-Waiting to get made fun of Joshua