Over Engineered

00:06.71
Chris Morrell
All right, welcome back to Over Engineered, the podcast where we ask the question, what's the absolute best way to do things we already have a perfectly acceptable solution for? Today, I'm here with Ben Holman, who has been running a pair amid scheme for the folks on the internet who've been following along.

00:22.46
Ben Holmen
That's right.

00:26.05
Chris Morrell
And Ben and I are going to be talking about pairing for a little while. But before we do, Ben, do you want to introduce yourself and say hi?

00:32.86
Ben Holmen
Yeah, I'm happy to be here, Chris. I am a developer in the Laravel community. I've been running an engineering team for a company and am now transitioning to an IC role, probably about the time this episode comes out. So I'm up in there coding and having fun in the community.

00:53.27
Chris Morrell
how did the whole, so basically, I don't remember exactly when this happened, but, months, months ago now, right?

00:58.92
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

01:02.04
Chris Morrell
Uh, uh, the, the, the pair, the pairing started and I don't know where, how it started, but I remember just seeing on Twitter.

01:04.53
Ben Holmen
Right.

01:08.65
Chris Morrell
Uh, people suddenly talking about, man, I had this great pairing session with Ben. Oh, everyone should pair with Ben. And I was just like, what is, what is going on? Like, who's this Ben guy?

01:19.56
Chris Morrell
What's w why is everyone paired with him all of a sudden?

01:20.34
Ben Holmen
Right.

01:22.40
Chris Morrell
And how do I get in?

01:23.98
Ben Holmen
Right. Well, it worked, I guess. I mean, that's the best case scenario. Thanks for that, Chris. Well, so I've been exploring ways to participate in the community more over the last year or so. So I've done a couple of things, but I was looking for ways to connect with people. And this just happened serendipitously. So I like to pair.

01:48.35
Ben Holmen
I love to pair. I pair on my team every single week. I pair with every developer on the team. And I've done that for years. So it's an old habit for me and I see a lot of value in it.

02:00.79
Ben Holmen
And then Joe Tanenbaum of Terminal fame and former guest on this pod, he and I were friendly on Twitter, but didn't like know each other.

02:10.48
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

02:11.24
Ben Holmen
We weren't, we were friendly, not friends. You know how it is.

02:14.85
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

02:15.11
Ben Holmen
And I saw in passing, he mentioned that he'd never had a chance to pair before. He wanted to do it sometime. So I just took a chance and said, hey, I pair all the time. I'd be happy to pair with you. Never paired with a stranger before.

02:26.56
Ben Holmen
Let's give it a try. And Joe being a great guy was down. He is ready to give it a shot.

02:29.66
Chris Morrell
yeah Oh, I love it.

02:31.74
Ben Holmen
So we can thank Joe, who, by the way, named the scheme, the pyramid scheme. The man has a penchant for naming.

02:38.54
Chris Morrell
That's fantastic.

02:38.91
Ben Holmen
So we just got together and became friends. like That wasn't intended to say, let's start something in the community. That was just two guys saying, hey, let's get together and get to know each other a little bit. And we paired on some terminal stuff, some ANSI code like for colors and formatting in terminal, which is dear to both of us, and had a great time, and then became friends.

02:56.26
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

02:59.65
Ben Holmen
like Excuse me, true friends after that, which has been a big blessing to both of us since then. And a few months after that, we were just having a conversation. I can't remember what, but kind of around getting out in the community a bit more.

03:15.82
Chris Morrell
yeah

03:16.33
Ben Holmen
and he's, one of us suggested, why don't you just put it out there and see what happens? I can't remember. This is in February or so. And so I did, I, I used Joe's endorsement of yes, Ben's not a crazy person on the internet.

03:30.87
Ben Holmen
Uh, you'll enjoy this. and just put a tweet out and for some reason it really resonated with people the idea of pairing with someone and in that tweet I just had a calendar link and I put up a quick blog post to explain like why I think pairing is a good move and why pairing with strangers might be a thing and I i cast it as an experiment just like I'm taking a chance see how this works And I immediately got 15 or so appointments on my calendar.

04:00.80
Ben Holmen
So that booked me up for several months of pairing.

04:01.69
Chris Morrell
That's awesome.

04:03.12
Ben Holmen
Yeah, I was really blessed by the response to it. and it, the experiment part just totally worked. Like it turns out that you can pair with strangers on the internet. So these are literally people, some of whom I've never heard of. It's people all around the world. Some people I'm familiar with. but you just show up on a zoom call, spend like five, 10 minutes getting to know the person and then hop into whatever you're working on that day.

04:31.33
Chris Morrell
Mm hmm.

04:31.38
Ben Holmen
And it totally worked. So I don't know where where you jumped in, but it must've been a few pairing sessions in where, again, we're promoting like, hey, I just paired with this person.

04:42.35
Ben Holmen
You should give it a try as well. And and the idea was not that Ben Holman pairs with the internet, but that people in general pair with each other.

04:51.49
Chris Morrell
Sure. Yeah, this this kind of reminds me that i when we were talking about the show and what we were going to be talking about, I kind of pitched that maybe we step back a little bit further from from the pairing conversation and more to just like fulfillment as a concept, like developer fulfillment, which I think this plays into.

05:12.93
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

05:16.15
Chris Morrell
And I think there are a couple other things that you and I have both been doing that I think are interesting to talk about there. But it really feels like this conversation is so perfect for this moment in time when I think a lot of folks who you know folks who got a good sense of community. I think the Laravel community in particular is is really solid on Twitter right now.

05:41.69
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

05:42.57
Chris Morrell
and a lot of folks really get value from that. And, you know, I know for myself, I think I've talked about this here, but, uh, so I won't go into too much, but just like, I think particularly over the, like the quarantining portion of the pandemic, having that community to, to lean on was really, really helpful for me. And I think because I lacked interaction with my like traditional friend group,

06:10.74
Chris Morrell
You know, it may, it gave me a little bit of a shelf to reach out to people and, and turn those connections into something a little bit more solid than just like, Hey, we at mention each other occasionally on the internet, you know? and I see a lot of folks, uh, I see a lot of folks doing various versions of that right now in this moment when.

06:32.72
Chris Morrell
it kind of, there's a bit of an unknown about how long the the the Twitter community may last.

06:37.99
Ben Holmen
That really drives up the urgency of like solidifying those connections, right? And taking it to another level.

06:43.94
Chris Morrell
It really does.

06:46.41
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

06:47.84
Chris Morrell
and, and so I know for myself, you know, I am not typically this type of person, but I definitely just DM people and was like, Hey, do you want to just get on zoom and chat?

07:00.37
Chris Morrell
Just, just because, you know, and this feels very much like a, maybe a little bit more structured.

07:00.40
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

07:06.78
Chris Morrell
version of the same thing. It's like, let's turn these connections that we have informally into something, something a little more. And just like getting to know other developers, getting to make new friends, new relationships is like really valuable.

07:23.47
Ben Holmen
Right.

07:24.94
Chris Morrell
And I can see how I love to pair as well. We do, I think at internet, should we do it? very frequently sometimes and fairly infrequently other times depending on sort of what's going on.

07:38.19
Chris Morrell
I think if we have a set of very well-defined problems that everyone's kind of on board with the solution already, there's less pairing.

07:42.49
Ben Holmen
Right.

07:46.71
Chris Morrell
And when we have fuzzier problems that are useful to have multiple sets of eyes on, we do more pairing. But I think it's a very, very useful tool and, you know, especially when so many people are remote, being in on a call with someone else, talking about what you're doing is also just really nice.

08:10.94
Ben Holmen
Right. I found it's a great way to hype people up, like building those connections. For me, the the pairing is an excuse to get to know people and to build connections.

08:21.63
Chris Morrell
Right. Right.

08:23.83
Ben Holmen
But the the result is what you're describing. It's making a connection where you could have a Zoom call with someone and just hang out.

08:30.11
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah.

08:31.87
Ben Holmen
I know Andrew Schmellian, I think that's how you say his name, genius in the community.

08:36.39
Chris Morrell
Okay.

08:37.60
Ben Holmen
He's the guy who built the the GitHub issue receipt printer, if that comes to mind, and a general kind of mad scientist guy.

08:41.89
Chris Morrell
Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I know him around the internet. Yeah.

08:45.59
Ben Holmen
Yeah. he I paired with him and he was carrying on this idea of a pyramid scheme, but it turns out five or six of his calls were all just like, let's get together and talk about ideas, not writing a single line of code.

08:59.63
Chris Morrell
Mm hmm

09:01.22
Ben Holmen
And so that's what we did together. We did some high level planning of something I was kicking around, but even just having that kind of that level of conversation was really rewarding for me to have with Andrew.

09:14.22
Ben Holmen
And he was finding it very rewarding to not code at all, but to just make those connections that you're describing. So having that hook to get started with that that conversation and excuse to get together seems useful.

09:26.66
Chris Morrell
yeah

09:27.60
Ben Holmen
What are some of your hooks?

09:27.76
Chris Morrell
yeah

09:29.22
Ben Holmen
Like if you're gonna DM someone, what do you say beyond let's get together on Zoom and hang out?

09:35.63
Chris Morrell
Uh, I mean, I'm going to be honest. I basically, well, no, I take that back in the beginning. That is exactly what it was. I mean, I think the the first person that I ever did that well with was.

09:53.02
Chris Morrell
This is a, maybe it's not the first, but this is a while ago when Aaron Francis was still working on his, uh, like, uh, rule builder, uh, thing.

10:02.34
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

10:05.51
Chris Morrell
and internationally we have like a sort of sophisticated rule builder implementation. And I was just like. Hey, I love this problem space I've been working in it a lot.

10:16.90
Chris Morrell
Like, do you just want to get on the call and just like nerd out on this thing, you know?

10:20.89
Ben Holmen
Yeah. So you had some connection or expertise you can offer.

10:25.21
Ben Holmen
There's a little hook there.

10:25.47
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah. There was a little bit of a like, I know that we are both thinking about this problem. Like, do you just want to talk about it?

10:31.82
Ben Holmen
Mm-hmm.

10:32.99
Chris Morrell
I mean, I think more the more obvious answer to your question is the pot. This podcast is basically that.

10:39.81
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

10:40.02
Chris Morrell
I mean, this podcast

10:40.77
Ben Holmen
You certainly have a platform which isn't in, like you can make an introduction, I would think, to many people.

10:47.29
Chris Morrell
Right. It's, it's easier to say, Hey, do you want to come talk on my podcast?

10:51.92
Ben Holmen
Mm-hmm.

10:52.22
Chris Morrell
Then, Hey, do you want to spend 90 minutes just like nerding out on things? You know, like, uh, and essentially they're the same thing.

10:58.06
Ben Holmen
Right, right.

10:59.83
Chris Morrell
Like it's just that we have the fancy mics out, you know, but.

11:00.65
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

11:04.55
Ben Holmen
and an audience in mind.

11:06.31
Chris Morrell
And an audio, well, I don't know. I'm going to be honest, like. The podcast certainly has a small audience. It is not very big. I think that 90, like one and a half to two and a half hours of like highly technical conversation is not necessarily everyone's favorite way to pass time.

11:15.38
Ben Holmen
and

11:26.68
Ben Holmen
That's not going to rock it up to the top of the iTunes chart. Is that what you're saying?

11:32.93
Chris Morrell
But I just, I honestly find that incredibly freeing because it's just like,

11:36.35
Ben Holmen
Right.

11:38.55
Chris Morrell
That's not the point. you know it's It's fun to have an audience and like I'm not gonna lie that like there's a fun little ego boost when you talk to someone who's like, oh yeah, I listen to the podcast. It's like, hey, that's cool. like This is beat. But yeah, for the most part, the podcast kind of started out as, like I've always wanted to really set aside some time to talk about this like thing that's been just like annoying me.

12:08.01
Chris Morrell
And I never do, so like what if we what if we like do it as a podcast? But I kind of ran out of those topics pretty quickly. it's like most things that that like Most programming problems that bug me, I end up finding a solution that I'm happy with.

12:23.71
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

12:24.71
Chris Morrell
So there were really a...

12:24.45
Ben Holmen
and It's hard to talk about that solution for an hour and a half consistently.

12:27.14
Chris Morrell
Right, there were only a handful.

12:29.12
Ben Holmen
Maybe five to 10 minutes.

12:32.51
Chris Morrell
So then it kind of quickly shifted into like first like who are the people that I have have something of a relationship with who I would love to like spend more time talking with and now it's kind of branched out to even further just like who's out there who wants to like nerd out about something like I'm I'm game you know and yeah it's it's exactly the same thing though it's really just like an excuse to chat get to know someone

12:44.86
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

12:59.27
Chris Morrell
I like to, I like to really get deep in the weeds on technical things. So I like that the sort of framework for the show is like, that's at least the premise, even if it doesn't always go that way. I think that's fun. But yeah, nowadays it's more just like, all right, now I get to spend an hour with Ben, you know, he's committed to it.

13:24.57
Ben Holmen
He's locked in. Yeah. I think it's one problem I've been trying to solve in the pairing scheme specifically is people who have never paired before or they want to start pairing at their company.

13:33.74
Chris Morrell
Mm hmm.

13:41.35
Ben Holmen
And I'm happy to be the first person that they pair with. Like I love breaking that ice for them.

13:46.83
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

13:47.11
Ben Holmen
But I think the same could apply to just cold D, I mean people and saying, hey, do you want to hang out? So I'd love to brainstorm with you, like, how do you how do you go from zero to one in putting yourself out there, in making those connections?

13:58.94
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

14:03.60
Chris Morrell
I think, and I mean, I, I am going to, I'm going to sort of like hedge this a little bit with a little bit of like the future of Twitter is unknown and maybe this is not as true as it had been a year ago.

14:25.28
Chris Morrell
but I think it does help to put yourself out on whatever public space you're in. And like, you know, I've been saying Twitter, that's, that's the place that I have been traditionally, I am very, uh, heavily trying to shift that to mass dot and it's been,

14:40.77
Ben Holmen
Chris, I've been waiting for the Mastodon promo to hit. We're nine minutes in. We got it.

14:48.40
Chris Morrell
Uh, yeah, well, I have to bring, I have to bring up mess.

14:49.95
Ben Holmen
But yeah, the concept of, the the concept of wherever you are, putting some work out publicly is a positive thing.

14:55.100
Chris Morrell
Where, I think the problem is it's where the other people are, uh, is where you want to put things out publicly. Because, if you're trying to make connections with people.

15:10.95
Chris Morrell
uh, showing them that you are like, maybe someone who's interesting to connect with is a useful piece of that, you know?

15:17.33
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

15:20.81
Chris Morrell
So I think, I probably wouldn't have cold DMed Aaron if like he and I hadn't been like interacting publicly on Twitter for a while.

15:30.76
Chris Morrell
Right.

15:30.85
Ben Holmen
Right.

15:32.39
Chris Morrell
now. Uh, now I have put myself out there enough that like, I can, I can kind of like reach a little bit further out to like connections of connections, friends of friends, like people who listen to the podcast that I don't know particularly well. Like I, I think I have a little more flexibility now, but I think in the beginning.

15:55.96
Chris Morrell
That would be where I would start is like, try to be authentically yourself, but public about it, you know, and, and talk about what you are interested in, not what you think other people want to hear from you, right?

16:13.38
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

16:14.38
Chris Morrell
Because the worst thing that you could get into is you've got 60 minutes booked with someone and now you feel like you have to continue to like project whatever sort of like facade you were projecting publicly, right?

16:14.43
Ben Holmen
Yep.

16:27.64
Ben Holmen
Right. That persona. Yeah.

16:30.40
Chris Morrell
Like, If the point of the whole thing is actual like personal fulfillment, right? And like connection, then it's got to start with that authenticity, right? but that's where I would start. And it sounds like that's kind of what you you did as well.

16:47.30
Ben Holmen
I found, I would just recommend putting the work out there, not to get a bunch of likes on it or to build a bunch of followers or whatever, but to be like an endorsement of you as an interesting person to talk to.

17:04.88
Ben Holmen
If that makes sense.

17:05.24
Chris Morrell
Mm hmm.

17:06.12
Ben Holmen
So to use Twitter as an example, make sure your pin tweet is like something interesting that you've been working on recently. or something that you've built. And it doesn't have to be like built ship to market huge success, it can be like, Oh, I'm tinkering on this package. Or this is this thing I'm thinking about. It's pretty low stakes. But putting out something so that if you DM someone,

17:31.36
Ben Holmen
They look at your profile and say, Oh, okay, this is kind of interesting. I haven't thought about that, or I want to learn more about this. That's a hook in itself. And it's, it's promoting you as someone who's interesting to spend some time with.

17:46.67
Chris Morrell
Yeah, yeah, I think that rings true. i now that Now that I got started, i will I'm going to circle back to Mastodon just for an instant, because i do think I do think there's something interesting there which is

17:56.18
Ben Holmen
Yeah. Yeah. Here we go.

18:03.00
Chris Morrell
you can, there are platforms, whether it's Mastodon or Blue Sky or Threads, one of these one of these sort of upstart platforms where you can more quickly be a bigger fish in a smaller pond.

18:16.82
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

18:17.69
Chris Morrell
And I think there is, for someone who's trying to get out there and you know sort of establish themselves in a community, it's a you know it's it's sort of a double-edged sword because it is gonna be a smaller group of folks that you're kind of engaging with. But my experience right now at least is that the engagement is way, way higher. You know you just like you put something out there,

18:43.60
Chris Morrell
And people respond, people favorite, it people react in some way, much, much more than on Twitter right now.

18:54.19
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

18:54.42
Chris Morrell
So I do think that there's like an opportunity for someone who really wants to like, make a concerted effort to kind of get out there and start to make those connections. Like if you become like one of the Laravel people on Macedon, like that's, there's a, there's a big empty hole there right now that you can start to fill.

19:12.81
Ben Holmen
Right.

19:15.62
Chris Morrell
and there is, yeah.

19:15.38
Ben Holmen
And there's an appetite for that space right now, like this is an opportunity time.

19:20.58
Chris Morrell
Yeah, for sure. And so then you know if if that's something that you're into, if you like the idea of like you know an open protocol, open standard public space, you can start to connect with other people who kind of share that value.

19:37.48
Chris Morrell
you know It's not going to be the same community that exists on Twitter right now, but there is a community there.

19:40.28
Ben Holmen
hmm.

19:42.39
Chris Morrell
And I think while you're going to be, you know, you're going to be kind of connected with different people. I think there's a big opportunity to kind of get a jumpstart in this moment in time.

19:55.11
Chris Morrell
and probably for the next year or two, I don't know. Like it's, it's not like it's the next week or two. I think that's going to be true for a while.

20:00.46
Ben Holmen
Right.

20:01.98
Chris Morrell
Like that's how new platforms are. it doesn't feel like it's going away. So.

20:08.59
Ben Holmen
I'm really interested in this moment in history on the internet. It feels like a throwback to like 2005 or so where there's just a lot of upheaval in social networks happening right now.

20:18.16
Chris Morrell
Okay.

20:22.66
Ben Holmen
And I'm really curious if we're going to coalesce on like one Twitter replacement or if we're going to see greater fragmentation into like splitting up that pie five ways.

20:31.08
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

20:35.72
Ben Holmen
And that's not clear to me yet. I don't know if we're going to get a big winner out of it or if we're going to drive the internet into more corners, if that makes sense.

20:40.18
Chris Morrell
Mm

20:44.60
Ben Holmen
I'm not mad about ending up in either of those locations, but it's a very interesting place to be at, at the moment.

20:45.14
Chris Morrell
-hmm.

20:52.77
Chris Morrell
Yeah, it is. I think that there is some value in having sort of a central place that everyone kind of knows to go to, especially in like in moments of import.

21:06.20
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

21:06.62
Chris Morrell
you know like i I definitely know that there were you know just big moments in time when being on the place where everyone else was, was how I kept on top of what was happening or found out about what was happening.

21:17.79
Ben Holmen
All right.

21:23.69
Chris Morrell
I think we would lose a little bit of that.

21:23.96
Ben Holmen
Whether that's a healthy thing or not, I definitely relate like trying to get quick updates in the moment feels, it feels really interesting.

21:25.94
Chris Morrell
I guess that's true. I guess that's true.

21:31.48
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

21:33.80
Ben Holmen
Like it definitely checks a lot of mental boxes, whether that's great for humanity or not.

21:36.96
Chris Morrell
Sure.

21:38.35
Ben Holmen
I don't know.

21:39.83
Chris Morrell
I do think that activity pub is an interesting solution to this problem in a way. I don't know if it's actually going to happen or not, but the fact that threads is, you know, a pretty big, place that people are moving to and is already.

00:17.55
Ben Holmen
Mhm.

00:20.14
Chris Morrell
Federated through an activity pub to a degree. I think is really. leaves me feeling optimistic about that as a potential sort of like, it is both fragmented, but there is a way for these silos to kind of connect to each other.

00:37.08
Chris Morrell
so that, yeah, you have a little bit of the best of both worlds. I mean, I think you also get some, there are downsides to that whole approach too. but people can kind of go off into their little corners of the internet, but not be totally isolated.

00:54.01
Chris Morrell
and I dunno, I'm hopeful about that. I, I'm not, I wouldn't make a bet yet.

00:57.75
Ben Holmen
Yeah, I wouldn't be betting on anything right now.

01:00.85
Chris Morrell
but I am, you know, I'm optimistic. So, uh, all right. I'm not going to turn this into the mastodon podcast. So we'll, we'll step back. I think, I think another thing that has just been on my mind lately, and it seems like this is, this is something that resonates with you is just like the the pairing and connecting.

01:31.90
Chris Morrell
All of this is like a means to an end, right? It's like a way to be connected to people and like sort of feel fulfilled as as individuals.

01:37.44
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

01:43.41
Chris Morrell
And I think another piece of that for me certainly is finding ways to like do do stuff in the real world.

01:54.40
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

01:56.68
Chris Morrell
I think particularly as a developer, and even i think even as a web developer, like I even find that sometimes I will experiment with like building desktop applications or mobile applications.

02:09.03
Ben Holmen
Right. Why does that feel more real than a web app?

02:11.29
Chris Morrell
It, but it does, right?

02:11.59
Ben Holmen
I don't know, but it does.

02:13.28
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

02:13.49
Ben Holmen
Yeah. Yeah.

02:13.83
Chris Morrell
Like even that is like a step towards a like, look, I can click on this icon in my doc and an app pops up.

02:15.93
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

02:20.04
Chris Morrell
Look at how cool that, you know.

02:20.24
Ben Holmen
yeah

02:22.91
Chris Morrell
but even more than that, yeah. Like building things in physical space, I think can be really satisfying as someone who, as someone who builds things, but it's all sort of like just this flat virtual facade of something.

02:38.48
Ben Holmen
Right.

02:38.60
Chris Morrell
Right.

02:39.39
Ben Holmen
Oh yeah, it's totally different.

02:40.55
Ben Holmen
Building a physical object that you can hold in your hands and give to someone or show to someone is totally different even than publishing a project where people can interact with it online.

02:51.77
Ben Holmen
It's it's just a, it feels like the next level, but it's certainly a different level and the satisfaction you get from it is different.

02:51.88
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

03:02.21
Chris Morrell
Yes.

03:02.99
Ben Holmen
What kind of things are you building?

03:03.06
Chris Morrell
So, okay. Well, I have been, I've been taking a sewing class and I made pants.

03:10.86
Ben Holmen
Oh, that's right. You made pants, right?

03:13.88
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

03:14.04
Ben Holmen
Yes.

03:14.58
Chris Morrell
I.

03:14.60
Ben Holmen
All right. Let's hear about the pants.

03:16.39
Chris Morrell
Uh, that, this is my latest thing. yeah, I've just, I, okay. I, I am relatively. a relatively, yeah yeah I guess, crafty person.

03:30.39
Chris Morrell
I don't know. i went i I went to school at a school that was very arts focused. I just am fairly comfortable with arts. And my my mom and my grandparents were both in the textile world.

03:43.76
Chris Morrell
So I kind of grew up around this stuff a little bit.

03:45.37
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

03:46.31
Chris Morrell
But I've always kind of just confidently said to my wife, like someday I'm going to make myself a pair of pants that I really like. And she just kind of rolls her eyes at me being like, dude, you couldn't make a pair of pants if your life like counted on, you know.

03:56.26
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

04:01.78
Chris Morrell
And so recently for I guess for Father's Day, she got me this for four week pants making workshop.

04:10.72
Ben Holmen
Yeah. Pants, is specifically pants making.

04:14.08
Ben Holmen
She was helping you realize the very specific dream that you've been talking about.

04:14.72
Chris Morrell
Specifically pants making. Yep. Yep. Uh-huh.

04:19.04
Ben Holmen
Okay.

04:19.26
Chris Morrell
Exactly.

04:20.30
Ben Holmen
I can think of a few projects like this that I've been talking to my wife about for a decade.

04:25.80
Ben Holmen
Maybe i' I'm going to get off this session and just mention, Hey, so I know this guy, his wife got him a four week workshop to make pants.

04:34.66
Chris Morrell
You could just send her the this episode.

04:35.34
Ben Holmen
All right. Perfect.

04:37.44
Chris Morrell
Like, listen to this great episode that I was on. Yeah.

04:40.19
Ben Holmen
I think sewing is amazing because it's relatively low in tooling.

04:44.12
Ben Holmen
Like you can get a used sewing machine on Facebook. I'm assuming not that much money.

04:47.88
Chris Morrell
Oh yeah, for basically zero dollars.

04:48.98
Ben Holmen
And then you're talking about like seam rippers, like scissors, measuring tape, some pins. Like this is a really low barrier to entry. Doesn't take up a lot of space.

05:00.28
Ben Holmen
It's pretty neat.

05:00.62
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

05:01.58
Ben Holmen
It doesn't mess up an environment.

05:03.96
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

05:04.38
Ben Holmen
And the materials are pretty inexpensive. And so learning is pretty cheap. Like if you screw up a yard of fabric, that's not that expensive. I think sewing as a intro to making skill is really high up the list.

05:22.54
Chris Morrell
Yeah, like all things, all of those things can very easily become not true.

05:28.00
Ben Holmen
Okay. All right.

05:30.04
Chris Morrell
I mean, well, yeah, like as soon as you have a sewing machine, you're like, Oh man, I really need a serger because I need to be able to finish these, these edges in a different way that this other machine.

05:30.25
Ben Holmen
Like expense.

05:37.10
Ben Holmen
Uh-huh.

05:40.63
Ben Holmen
Like every hobby, you're immediately like, what's the $3,000 version of what I have right now?

05:42.74
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

05:47.40
Chris Morrell
Well, no, it's even worse because you need to have both. You need to have the one sewing machine and then the other sewing machine. You need you need two sewing machines, it turns out.

05:53.62
Ben Holmen
Okay. What's a Serger? Can you explain that?

05:55.86
Chris Morrell
A serger is, it's it's a machine that basically, some people call it interlock machine. It it it cuts the edge and finishes the edge at the same time.

06:07.97
Ben Holmen
does it like roll it over and do the ham and no.

06:09.93
Chris Morrell
No, no, no, it doesn't do the head.

06:10.94
Ben Holmen
Okay.

06:11.45
Chris Morrell
No, no, no. But like if you if you after after the call, look at the inside of your T shirt, you'll see like the edge will have sort of like zigzag stitches over that that wrap over the edge.

06:16.46
Ben Holmen
Yeah. yeah Yep. I'm looking at it right now.

06:24.43
Chris Morrell
That's done on a serger. And it's just like when you're dealing with like stretch cottons, like something that you would use for a T shirt, you essentially need need that or else the seams are just not going to last.

06:30.28
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

06:34.93
Ben Holmen
yeah

06:36.76
Chris Morrell
But also just

06:37.09
Ben Holmen
Do you need it on pants though? That's the question.

06:39.27
Chris Morrell
You don't, you can finish, you can finish without a serger. It's just a lot more work because you have to like trim all your edges and then like sort of stitch them in a specific way. And it's, it's not as good.

06:49.52
Chris Morrell
It's like, I can do, I can finish an edge. I can, I can finish a hem in like eight seconds on a serger or I can spend 10 minutes doing it manually, you know?

06:58.86
Ben Holmen
Right. So I'm looking at my pants now and it seems like the serger on the finished side has two parallel stitches.

07:02.02
Chris Morrell
Okay.

07:08.64
Ben Holmen
And then on the unfinished side, there's a pattern of the thread going back and forth. And so it feels like the surgery gives you those two parallel stitches, which would be tough to do on a regular sewing machine without some variation, some wave, some, like an uneven.

07:24.14
Ben Holmen
Chris is looking at his pants now. I hope every listener is like looking over their clothing right now.

07:25.78
Chris Morrell
I'm looking at my pants. too

07:31.06
Chris Morrell
i I don't think that the two parallel stitches are necessarily, I'm i i am not an expert in this stuff, right?

07:36.75
Ben Holmen
Okay.

07:37.07
Chris Morrell
But that a lot of times those two parallel stitches will just be someone being really good at sewing.

07:46.14
Ben Holmen
Okay, much better than us.

07:49.57
Ben Holmen
One thing I will say about sewing it that another box that checks is awareness of your environment.

07:54.95
Ben Holmen
Because as soon as you try to sew your pants, you're going to look at every single pair of pants for the rest of your life.

07:59.94
Chris Morrell
Oh my God.

08:01.81
Ben Holmen
You're going to appreciate the craft that went into even the cheapest pair of pants.

08:05.02
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah. And I literally, I'm just like walking around being like, yeah, I think I could make that. I joke though, because I, I feel like,

08:20.98
Chris Morrell
I came away from this class totally vindicated. I was like, I could have totally made pants on my own without without any help.

08:27.04
Ben Holmen
Without. But you didn't, Chris.

08:29.54
Chris Morrell
It turns out it's not that hard.

08:30.95
Ben Holmen
You didn't for a decade.

08:31.15
Chris Morrell
You just literally just cut them out and then you sew them together. like Just follow the follow the instructions. It's like cooking. It's like people say they can't cook.

08:39.80
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

08:40.98
Chris Morrell
Literally just do every step that it says and on the the recipe and it'll turn out good enough if not great, right?

08:42.09
Ben Holmen
Just do it.

08:49.64
Ben Holmen
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

08:52.38
Chris Morrell
But yeah, that's that's my that's been my my little thing right now and it's it is it's really fun. It's just like I have a pair of pants that I can wear. I'm now like teaching myself how to make like more complicated pockets because I don't really like the pockets on on the pair of pants that I made.

09:09.66
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

09:10.75
Chris Morrell
And so I have like a bunch of pieces of fabric with just a square of fabric with a pocket in it.

09:17.61
Ben Holmen
Yeah, just testing things out.

09:18.34
Chris Morrell
of Yeah, of varying degrees of quality or, or you know, different styles.

09:20.21
Ben Holmen
Yeah. yeah So are you going to make a second pair of pants? Is that in the future now? Or like once you did this, you're done.

09:27.01
Chris Morrell
that Yes. No, no, no, the first pair of pants I made in muslin, they're just sort of a test test run.

09:36.49
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

09:37.74
Chris Morrell
and I've, I now have like adjusted the pattern in a bunch of different ways to account for like changes that like, uh, you know, changing the shape of the legs, giving like a little bit more space in the ankle, a little less space, like stuff like that.

09:52.15
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

09:53.18
Chris Morrell
and now I've cut out like the proper fabric, uh, for the, for the sort of quote real pair we'll see.

09:59.06
Ben Holmen
Right. So you made pants, but you haven't made the pants yet.

10:00.00
Chris Morrell
They could, I haven't made the pants yet now. I'm still still hunting those.

10:04.24
Ben Holmen
Okay. Yeah.

10:07.41
Chris Morrell
But what made me think of it, what made me think of this was you sent me this incredible thousand pixel display that you were building, which is like the intersection of two things that I love.

10:17.20
Ben Holmen
Yes, sir.

10:23.57
Chris Morrell
It is this whole just building interesting things in the physical world, combined with what i I feel like I keep on coming back to on this podcast, this idea that

10:29.02
Ben Holmen
Mhm.

10:38.30
Chris Morrell
This is that we are we are creating art, right?

10:39.22
Ben Holmen
Mhm.

10:42.15
Chris Morrell
We are we are creative professionals. And a lot of times art is best when it's for the sake of itself, not to some productive end, I guess, not always.

10:58.55
Ben Holmen
Right.

11:00.04
Chris Morrell
And it just feels like, I only looked very briefly at at the post that you sent over. But it just felt like it was like the perfect, the perfect intersection of those two things.

11:06.66
Ben Holmen
I'll fill you in.

11:10.43
Chris Morrell
So I want to, I want to hear more.

11:12.13
Ben Holmen
Yeah, so I am also fascinated by the intersection of art and technology, which I don't think is unique to me, but the idea of building art in a way, being creative within a framework. So for example, I had an art minor in college for a while. And my big thing was photography. I did a number of photography classes and independent study.

11:37.12
Ben Holmen
And for me, that really fit my brain well, because it's very systematic. like they're very It's very technical to do well.

11:44.58
Chris Morrell
Sure.

11:45.27
Ben Holmen
You have to have a lot of technical knowledge, but that doesn't solve anything.

11:50.36
Chris Morrell
That's.

11:51.14
Ben Holmen
like You can be very technical and take extremely poor photos. so or make yeah And so you're operating inside this technical system, but you have to be creative with how you use that.

11:55.28
Chris Morrell
That's just the floor, right? Yeah.

12:03.15
Ben Holmen
And that' I think that's present in the code we write to varying degrees. so Even if you're not attempting to make art with it, you are certainly being creative with it.

12:11.61
Chris Morrell
Yep.

12:13.44
Ben Holmen
And this project, you mentioned it's 1000 pixel display. I was inspired by a couple of things. The first is somebody took an E-ink display, like from a Kindle, and then they hacked it to play a movie extremely slowly.

12:29.02
Ben Holmen
So they would take each frame from a movie and display it for several minutes, I wanna say.

12:29.52
Chris Morrell
Okay.

12:34.83
Ben Holmen
So you could watch a movie over the course of days. And that idea of this laborious slow display forcing you to interact with a movie, another form of art, in a totally different context was really satisfying to me.

12:52.34
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

12:53.37
Ben Holmen
So I didn't do that, but I was inspired by it. And then there's this other artist, I can't remember his name off the top of my head, But he makes mirrors out of unusual materials. So he makes mirrors out of fabric. He makes mirrors out of wooden blocks that angle toward or away from a light source. So they turn light or dark. And this is when the Microsoft Xbox Connect was like a brand new thing using that. I don't even know what kind if it's some kind of infrared or something.

13:24.02
Ben Holmen
But basically it was the the introduction of gestures and recognizing a person in front of something.

13:24.27
Chris Morrell
Hmm.

13:28.06
Chris Morrell
Right.

13:29.45
Ben Holmen
He was parsing that and then using a mechanical physical display to create an image of what was in front of it out of really unusual materials.

13:29.57
Chris Morrell
Okay.

13:38.82
Chris Morrell
Oh, that's so cool.

13:40.61
Ben Holmen
Yeah, he and he's taken that a bunch of directions.

13:40.83
Chris Morrell
Oh.

13:43.16
Ben Holmen
It's been an overall theme for his work. So that was very fascinating to me. And then I don't know what sparked it, but I had the idea that I could create giant pixels that would be like manipulated very laboriously and like very obviously. So we look at our, our computer displays and it's like, I don't know, millions of pixels and they all get updated 60 times a second or whatever.

14:10.58
Ben Holmen
And the magic is gone, right? But if you saw someone like painting that display very slowly, it would be interesting and novel. And so the idea is to not manipulate pixels in parallel, where you would change every single pixel at the same time, but in series where you change one pixel at a time, a thousand pixels, and the whole display is limited to one refresh.

14:20.25
Chris Morrell
Sure.

14:36.00
Ben Holmen
And where I've landed on it is about three seconds to change each pixel.

14:41.25
Chris Morrell
Okay.

14:42.61
Ben Holmen
There are a thousand pixels, which is 40 by 25.

14:46.14
Chris Morrell
Okay.

14:46.22
Ben Holmen
My prototype is about four feet wide right now, but the final product would be about six feet wide by about four feet tall.

14:49.35
Chris Morrell
Okay.

14:55.69
Ben Holmen
And I have some friends who own a coffee shop in my town. My ultimate goal, and to be clear, this is an unfinished passion project that I pick up, work on a few days, and then set it aside for like four months.

15:07.77
Ben Holmen
So the progress is not great.

15:07.91
Chris Morrell
Sure.

15:10.16
Ben Holmen
But the the eventual goal is to have this in a physical space, have some kind of ambient display updating it, but also allow people to control it through a web app.

15:14.20
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

15:20.44
Ben Holmen
So now we get into a lot of coding. The physical I'll start with the physical display. So I've set it up as basically a CNC plotter.

15:31.00
Ben Holmen
If you've seen someone like with a pen that is drawing on a piece of paper in two dimensions, that would be a plotter.

15:37.07
Chris Morrell
Okay.

15:38.98
Ben Holmen
And so you have servos, which are just motors that you can control very precisely. One controlling an x axis, one controlling a y axis, and then some kind of third control mechanism to like, push the pen into the paper, and then pull the pen away from the paper.

15:55.12
Ben Holmen
That's the most basic form of a plotter.

15:55.70
Chris Morrell
Sure.

15:57.41
Ben Holmen
This is also used in like cutting vinyl stickers. Instead of a pen, they'll have a knife that cuts a very specific path for like billboard size vinyl all the way down to your little cricket that you can set on your desk. That's a plotter. So I adapted some a plotter controller. So I have an left and right up and down axis and then I use that third control to actuate I got to back up to actuate the thing that changes the pixel, right?

16:26.86
Chris Morrell
Okay.

16:26.97
Ben Holmen
so You have to write some G code, which is a language that's used in CNC to say, go to this coordinate and then run the motor to activate this pixel.

16:33.65
Chris Morrell
Mm hmm.

16:39.13
Ben Holmen
And then I'm going to tell you the next one, but don't worry about it right now. Like your job is to go to this location and do something over and over and over. So I had to figure out G code. I wrote a Python script to hit a a API endpoint to say, what pixel do I need to do next?

16:56.25
Ben Holmen
And what am I doing with it? And then that spits out gcode, which it pushes into the CNC controller. So those were new things for me. And then there is all the physical stuff like controlling servos and finding servo controllers and timing belts and aluminum extrusion to build the frame and 3D printing the little bits that hold things together to hold the limit switches on to be the actuator for the pixel.

17:06.10
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

17:27.62
Ben Holmen
to hold the motor that spins the pixel. So all of these different disciplines are coming together. And I haven't even talked about the web app yet, which is the most familiar part of the project for me.

17:38.03
Chris Morrell
Sure.

17:38.20
Ben Holmen
Like, build a web app, okay, I can do that.

17:39.23
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

17:40.66
Ben Holmen
Build an API, okay, no problem. Uh, so I got to dabble in all these different areas and on the prototype, I have a raspberry PI that is, running the Python, which is communicating to a separate CNC controller.

17:56.36
Ben Holmen
And then I have a dedicated power supply on the board. I had to figure out power supply for this thing. And I now have like 40 pixels by four rows.

18:08.28
Ben Holmen
I want to say I'm at about 160 pixels in my prototype right now.

18:08.60
Chris Morrell
Okay. Okay.

18:13.08
Ben Holmen
But man, so we're nerdy now over engineering. So the amount of rabbit holes I've gone down on this thing is crazy.

18:23.26
Chris Morrell
I love it.

18:24.12
Ben Holmen
The first thing is the pixels, right? So this is a hobby project. I don't intend to sell this ever. I just want to make a couple of them and have fun with people.

18:34.52
Ben Holmen
Like I've envisioned putting this in my zoom background and letting people tinker with it.

18:35.07
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

18:38.50
Ben Holmen
Well, well, I'm on the call basically. I just want to, I just want to scratch my outage and share it with people basically, but a thousand pixels, right? What do you make the pixels out of?

18:50.24
Ben Holmen
It has to work. It has to not be super heavy and it has to not be super expensive. So I've explored like foam balls, which turns out they melt if you spray paint them and they're pretty inconsistent in size.

19:02.77
Chris Morrell
Hmm.

19:03.98
Ben Holmen
Ping pong balls, which are cheap, but you have to pass some kind of wire through them to mount them. And as soon as you poke a hole in a ping pong ball, it's like opening a can of pop.

19:14.52
Ben Holmen
It doesn't have any strength left in it.

19:15.79
Chris Morrell
Oh, interesting.

19:17.39
Ben Holmen
It needs the pressure inside. So if you poke holes in it, then it flexes. And then the spray paint that either makes it black or white cracks off and is lost.

19:30.16
Ben Holmen
I bought tennis balls, not tennis balls, uh, like bouncing balls, like one inch diameter. I bought wooden balls, which are inconsistent in size and way too heavy when you have a thousand of them.

19:43.61
Chris Morrell
Did you try discs?

19:43.68
Ben Holmen
My current. Okay. Tell me, I, I would like to crowdsource great ideas for this. Cause I don't feel like I've cracked it yet. What kind of disc?

19:51.61
Chris Morrell
I mean, like, why not just a disc? Uh, you could either 3d print it or like, cut it out of.

19:58.36
Ben Holmen
Hmm.

20:00.71
Chris Morrell
you know, balsa wood or, uh, or something like that. And just paint the one side, uh, put a small hole through the center.

20:08.63
Ben Holmen
like a flat disk.

20:10.21
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Like a flat disc, just a circular disc.

20:11.06
Ben Holmen
So not a sphere.

20:14.16
Chris Morrell
One side's black, one side's white.

20:16.87
Chris Morrell
That's the first thing that my comes to my mind.

20:18.59
Ben Holmen
Yeah, I like that because it's lightweight.

20:21.62
Chris Morrell
Jeep.

20:22.76
Ben Holmen
I did 3D print spheres, but I don't know if you've ever 3D printed like a dome shape. It looks great at the edges, but when you get to the top, the way the build lines work, it gets very obviously 3D printed.

20:38.19
Chris Morrell
Mm hmm.

20:39.10
Ben Holmen
and But I'm interested in the flap thing.

20:41.10
Chris Morrell
Yeah, like I'm thinking of.

20:42.30
Ben Holmen
I'm trying to think of how I'd act to actuate it. Cause I've been thinking about like, My prototype literally has a a rubber Lego wheel attached to a motor.

20:52.43
Chris Morrell
Okay.

20:52.68
Ben Holmen
And so it pushes itself into the sphere of the pixel, turns it a predetermined amount, and then pulls away from the pixel.

20:57.94
Chris Morrell
Mm hmm.

21:02.02
Ben Holmen
But so I'd have to figure out a new actuator on the flap.

21:06.45
Chris Morrell
Well, I'm just thinking, imagine, okay, here's what I'm actually thinking. You know, I'm trying to think of where you see these anymore, but like there'd be sometimes like an event or a bar or something that gives out like those little wooden tokens.

21:23.84
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

21:24.86
Chris Morrell
Like I'm picturing basically one of those.

21:25.82
Ben Holmen
Yep.

21:27.78
Chris Morrell
You you drill, excuse me, a very, you know, very small hole through the center of it.

21:32.49
Ben Holmen
ye Yep.

21:35.22
Chris Morrell
Right. You put your little Lego gear on a, you know, on a wire at the top of that hole.

21:36.00
Ben Holmen
Hmm.

21:42.94
Chris Morrell
Right. One side's painted black, one side's painted white, and you just, uh, rotate that little gear, uh, 180 degrees to switch from one, one pixel to the other.

21:54.06
Ben Holmen
Right.

21:57.10
Ben Holmen
I like how gears are really interesting idea. Cause you could get the a thousand of them for not too much.

22:03.54
Chris Morrell
Right.

22:05.11
Ben Holmen
Huh. I like that. That's some good food for thought, Chris.

22:07.54
Chris Morrell
We, all right.

22:08.58
Ben Holmen
We may have solved something here.

22:10.29
Chris Morrell
You know, the goal of over-engineered is to have some sort of outcome at the end. I've kind of lost track of that, but I'm, I really appreciate.

22:16.78
Ben Holmen
If it's worked, what your hit rate is.

22:19.13
Chris Morrell
Yeah. I appreciate us getting back to our, to the roots, solving problems here.

22:23.45
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

22:26.01
Ben Holmen
Right now I'm using nerf balls. Do you know the nerf guns that shoot like a sphere?

22:29.96
Chris Morrell
Okay.

22:32.44
Chris Morrell
yeah Yeah. Yeah.

22:33.36
Ben Holmen
And I think they're about like 787 inch, they're a little bit smaller than an inch in diameter, which makes a smaller display.

22:33.47
Chris Morrell
I've seen them.

22:43.79
Ben Holmen
I like the idea of the the disc because it's light.

22:44.31
Chris Morrell
Sure.

22:48.13
Chris Morrell
I like the wooden disc too, because there's, there's something nice about wood, right?

22:52.65
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

22:53.100
Chris Morrell
You know, you could sand them down and you could even stain, like just do a really dark stain on one side.

22:57.06
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

22:58.24
Chris Morrell
And so the, the dark pixel would be should, would still show some wood grain, which I think could be like just a really nice, uh, visual element to it.

23:06.58
Ben Holmen
yeah

23:10.16
Ben Holmen
Yeah, one of the challenges I've run into is a tiny amount of variation in the size of an individual pixel. If you string those up either vertically or horizontally on a wire or a rod or something to support them, just like half a millimeter of variation in each one times 40 pixels in the horizontal or 25 in the vertical, you're off by a significant amount.

23:25.70
Chris Morrell
Mhm.

23:35.99
Chris Morrell
Right.

23:36.06
Ben Holmen
So aligning each pixel in a predictable grid You're close, but it's not precise. So I've got to figure that out.

23:43.53
Chris Morrell
Right. Yeah, you could, you'd have to make some sort of like, what have you made? Some sort of little jig that you could drop the token into, and then it would give you space to like, maybe cut a slot that the, uh, that the gear would fit into, you know, I don't know.

23:56.82
Ben Holmen
Yeah. How do you adjust it? Right. Yeah. yeah

24:05.02
Chris Morrell
It's tricky. It's, it's, it's definitely, I get it.

24:08.86
Ben Holmen
I love working within constraints though and a thousand of something without it being hundreds of dollars or way too heavy or whatever.

24:12.16
Chris Morrell
yeah

24:18.23
Ben Holmen
a thousand really doesn't seem like 40 by 25 doesn't seem like that much, but you multiply it by a thousand.

24:18.46
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

24:26.27
Ben Holmen
It's a lot for a while. I was thinking about, uh, using led strips, like addressable led strips to illuminate a ping pong ball, which was less satisfying to me.

24:27.43
Chris Morrell
yeah Yeah.

24:36.43
Ben Holmen
Cause it didn't seem laborious. It didn't seem like it was working hard.

24:38.85
Chris Morrell
Right. Right.

24:40.78
Ben Holmen
But just as an interesting side note, a thousand addressable LEDs, even at low power, like LEDs sip electricity, but a thousand of them do not.

24:53.34
Ben Holmen
And so that was enough to really push the limits of like, how many watts is this display going to use? I think it was going to use something like 30 watts maybe, or maybe it was 300.

24:58.87
Chris Morrell
That's interesting. Yeah.

25:06.21
Ben Holmen
And so then you have, like I want to say 40 meters of led strip and you'd have to have multiple power supplies and you get like yellowing if you try to by the end of like 10 meters of led strip there's enough voltage drop across that that the color of the leds changes so again a thousand or something it feels like that's like a lot but not a lot but it's certainly enough to cause problems that you then have to figure out

25:28.60
Chris Morrell
That's interesting.

25:37.08
Chris Morrell
Okay, wait. Here's another like thinking outside of the box idea.

25:41.73
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

25:43.66
Chris Morrell
What if you had a thousand individual LEDs, you know, just like the the two prongs, right?

25:53.56
Ben Holmen
Yep, yep.

25:55.72
Chris Morrell
One is soldered in, and the other has some sort of actuated switch.

25:58.41
Ben Holmen
Yep.

26:05.12
Chris Morrell
And so to turn on the l LED, d you're actually like flipping a switch.

26:06.99
Ben Holmen
The actuator is physically switching on. I love this idea. So how much does a thousand like really satisfying, like clicky, like space shuttle toggle switches cost?

26:18.61
Chris Morrell
this

26:21.13
Chris Morrell
The switches are probably the expensive piece of it.

26:23.85
Ben Holmen
Oh, a hundred percent.

26:24.57
Chris Morrell
The LEDs would be cheap. you could You could...

26:27.84
Ben Holmen
Let's say they're 50 cents each. That is a $500 display.

26:32.15
Chris Morrell
Yeah, yeah. God, it is wild. the The cost just... The cost really does add up quickly, no matter how you look at it.

26:44.19
Ben Holmen
Even ping pong balls, it's like $90 of ping pong balls. Ping pong balls, little plastic spheres.

26:48.58
Chris Morrell
Right. Right. Right.

26:53.54
Ben Holmen
Huh. I love that idea though.

26:55.47
Chris Morrell
Right.

26:56.99
Ben Holmen
That makes an LED actually feel satisfying, like the machine is working.

27:01.34
Chris Morrell
right

27:02.93
Ben Holmen
So one of them one of the ambient modes that I've created is a clock.

27:03.12
Chris Morrell
I mean, especially if you heard the click.

27:07.66
Ben Holmen
So it would just display the minutes, like 1254.

27:08.12
Chris Morrell
Okay.

27:11.26
Ben Holmen
it can barely update in one minute. So the clock is struggling to keep up. the Picture if you go from like 1259 to one o'clock.

27:21.58
Chris Morrell
Uh-huh.

27:21.60
Ben Holmen
How many pixels do you think you need to change if your letters are like four by eight? It turns out to be, it takes several minutes to make it from 12.59 to one o'clock.

27:27.06
Chris Morrell
A lot.

27:33.62
Ben Holmen
And it's still catching up when it switches to 1.01.

27:34.19
Chris Morrell
That's so funny.

27:36.98
Ben Holmen
And so then like all those changes, some of them were in vain and it has to keep up.

27:40.91
Chris Morrell
Right.

27:42.08
Ben Holmen
This reminds me, there's a, I don't know if you've seen this art installation, someone bought a very expensive like factory robot that I don't know how many axes they have, but basically like something that you would build a car with in a Ford factory.

27:56.89
Chris Morrell
Oh yeah, yeah.

27:57.59
Ben Holmen
And the thing is leaking hydraulic fluid and the machines.

27:59.70
Chris Morrell
Yes. Oh my God. What an incredible installation.

28:03.05
Ben Holmen
So it is basically squeegeeing the floor of its own hydraulic fluid and barely keeping up.

28:03.48
Chris Morrell
you Yeah, go ahead. Yep. Yep.

28:08.38
Ben Holmen
Like that's the kind of vibe I'm going with.

28:09.28
Chris Morrell
It's.

28:09.86
Ben Holmen
Like this is a machine who is struggling to display.

28:10.70
Chris Morrell
Yeah. I think it died. I think it finally died.

28:14.09
Ben Holmen
It did.

28:14.75
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

28:15.61
Ben Holmen
Okay. Was that for real that it was leaking its own hydraulic fluid?

28:16.32
Chris Morrell
It took years. It was, yeah, that the so for for everyone who's listening, it's one of those like very high tech robotic arms that you see on like a factory floor mounted in like a white box, basically.

28:33.21
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm.

28:34.02
Chris Morrell
And they they constructed it in a way that the the hydraulic fluid that controls the arm is seeping out very slowly. And the arm has basically like like a bowl scraper, like a so silicone squeegee or whatever. And the whole installation is just this robotic arm constantly drawing the fluid back into this like reservoir at the bottom that would then like you know somehow get back into the robot. so like

29:07.04
Chris Morrell
the the hydraulic as as and This took years, I believe. I took it i think it took like five years or something. for it to die but over time like the robot would like miss a drop here or there and slowly over time it like actually lost the fluid that was necessary to control the arm anymore it's it's uh it's an incredible piece of art yeah yeah i i totally get where you're coming from that's exactly yeah it's it's perfect oh

29:41.46
Ben Holmen
So a ton of switches, I have to find, I have to see if that's feasible. but I did look into like LED matrices. So like this is a older school approach.

29:50.34
Chris Morrell
Mhmm.

29:53.20
Ben Holmen
You can hook all the cathodes or a number of cathodes together, a number of anodes, and then something to do with intersecting, basically two axes.

30:04.16
Ben Holmen
You can address individual LEDs like in an analog way.

30:06.70
Chris Morrell
Mhmm.

30:09.34
Ben Holmen
When we talk about addressable LEDs, there's like a shared bus and they have, they're all connected to like three wires. Uh, this is not that this is like, I am going to actually produce a voltage at this particular electrical connection.

30:23.16
Chris Morrell
Right. You've got like one, one wire that runs to all of them and then a thousand wires that run to the other. Essentially.

30:32.21
Ben Holmen
Yeah, it's better than a thousand though. It's less than that because there's like some analog math happening basically.

30:39.08
Chris Morrell
Oh, interesting. Okay.

30:40.77
Ben Holmen
Yeah, I don't remember how it works.

30:41.84
Chris Morrell
That's cool.

30:43.03
Ben Holmen
I did some research on it, but again, getting a thousand of them to work is not easy, like a hundred or 200.

30:44.05
Chris Morrell
Oh, oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah.

30:48.66
Chris Morrell
Right. Yeah.

30:50.67
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

30:51.83
Chris Morrell
I mean, I remember in and college I built a binary calculator, you know, on like a breadboard with with individual like logic gates and wires.

31:04.32
Ben Holmen
Yep. Yeah.

31:06.70
Chris Morrell
I think it could

31:06.71
Ben Holmen
It's very similar to that. I think.

31:08.76
Chris Morrell
It could add up to four and it took me like a month.

31:16.41
Ben Holmen
We truly do stand on the shoulders of giants, right?

31:17.44
Chris Morrell
so

31:21.55
Ben Holmen
Like how many of those machines are inside the computers that we're using every day?

31:21.59
Chris Morrell
And I'm not kidding.

31:26.45
Ben Holmen
Like what billions, trillions, whatever it is.

31:26.49
Chris Morrell
Right. Right. A billion.

31:29.24
Ben Holmen
How many?

31:29.63
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

31:30.19
Ben Holmen
Yeah, it's insane.

31:30.24
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah.

31:31.43
Ben Holmen
and Yeah.

31:31.76
Chris Morrell
it's so funny it really did I mean I and it really did I think you could only add it could add one or two plus one or two I think that that is the entire the entire they the entire calculator and it really did I

31:33.94
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

31:41.49
Ben Holmen
yeah

31:48.68
Chris Morrell
You know I had it. It was it's so funny. I did. I had a thought earlier that just popped back into my head which is for your clock.

31:59.43
Chris Morrell
You know what you should do for every given frame.

31:59.56
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

32:04.91
Chris Morrell
Also, render the that the frame that follows. So you have 101, render 102, and prioritize any common pixels between this the future and the current frame so that at least your you know you're not

32:09.94
Ben Holmen
Mm hmm. Right.

32:24.18
Ben Holmen
Did you tell the robot the optimal squeegee pattern as well, Chris? Or did you just let the robot figure out how to die?

32:32.44
Ben Holmen
That was a thought though, like how do you pick the next pixel to go to, right? Do you go to the farthest one, the slowest?

32:36.04
Chris Morrell
Right.

32:37.76
Ben Holmen
Do you go to the next one? Do you pick a random one? Yeah.

32:40.87
Chris Morrell
Right. Yeah.

32:41.83
Ben Holmen
Yeah, that would absolutely work. That is a optimal solution to it, whether optimal is best or not.

32:45.95
Chris Morrell
I mean, I know. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

32:48.40
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

32:50.12
Chris Morrell
Oh, well.

32:51.39
Ben Holmen
Yeah. So next steps in that one are figure out the pixels. Uh, I'm going to look up that, that switching I've gone through a bunch of, we don't have time to get into the the web app at this point, but I've gone through a number of different stacks on that just for the fun of trying like, Hey, I've never written a node app.

33:12.18
Ben Holmen
Let's give that a shot.

33:12.76
Chris Morrell
Sure.

33:13.84
Ben Holmen
What's that like?

33:14.24
Chris Morrell
Sure.

33:15.50
Ben Holmen
I've never, so it's gone through a few iterations there, but this, this.

33:15.96
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

33:19.95
Chris Morrell
I would love to experiment with like the, the sort of like physical physical interacting with physical devices in languages that I'm familiar with, you know, just like, how do I, how do I write to some physical object with PHP?

33:28.72
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

33:36.49
Chris Morrell
I I've never done it. And I'm very curious about that.

33:40.54
Ben Holmen
I have never done it either. It's I've done it. I mean, like are doing those with, what is it called processing? Is there a flavor of C I think. and then Python now.

33:50.22
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

33:53.35
Ben Holmen
So on, on most like hobbyist devices, there are GPIO pins. I don't know what that means. General purpose input output, maybe.

34:03.33
Chris Morrell
I assume so, yeah.

34:04.84
Ben Holmen
and I know you can interact with them with those two languages. I've never tried PHP. I have no idea.

34:09.97
Chris Morrell
It'd be fun just to see.

34:10.15
Ben Holmen
You probably just call a subsystem that is using C I'm going to guess.

34:14.21
Chris Morrell
Well... I'm pretty sure that there are ways to like write to like a serial, like you if you had a serial port somehow, right?

34:25.14
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

34:26.29
Chris Morrell
I think there's a way, there are ways in PHP to still just like write to the individual pins of a serial port.

34:33.08
Ben Holmen
If I had to guess, there is a thin wrapper for a common C function that made it into the PHP core in about 2004.

34:38.68
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm. Probably. Yep. That sounds right.

34:47.58
Chris Morrell
well, unfortunately this, I never do this, but we just kind of had a scheduling mishap and I have a hard stop pretty soon. So I, I want to make sure that we have two or three minutes to, to, uh, to close out.

35:00.16
Chris Morrell
Is there anything, is there anything that you came in being like, I want to, I i want to talk about this, uh, that we didn't get to or anything that like, you know, is, is burning, is burning that you want to take a minute.

35:10.39
Ben Holmen
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I just want to leave with an encouragement for someone who's listening who needs to get from zero to one on pairing or connecting and you're not sure how to do it. I just want to encourage you that it's not as big of a deal as you think. Like you're going to finish that first pairing session that you reach out on and it's going to be easier than you thought it was. It's going to have gone better than you thought.

35:38.66
Ben Holmen
So don't psych yourself out of it, I guess is what I'm trying to say. like Make those connections. You've got this. Everyone has something to offer even if you feel like you don't have a lot to offer, you're not unique enough or special enough. Just do it.

35:56.12
Chris Morrell
I agree. I would also say like, sometimes people are not going to be up for it. And that's also like, it's just part of the, part of the game.

36:03.10
Ben Holmen
Yep, it's fine.

36:05.01
Chris Morrell
That's fine. Uh, and like, there are lots of other people who are, I, I'm curious about, I actually, I have, I, I'm thinking about doing some of your pyramids.

36:18.47
Ben Holmen
Yes, please do.

36:18.54
Chris Morrell
I'm also thinking about. I've been tinkering with the idea of just inviting people to come on this this show with like a specific technical problem that they're trying to solve and just spend a half an hour trying to solve it like through audio only, right? So that that may be on the agenda, but yeah.

36:45.65
Chris Morrell
There are lots of people who are interested. all Everyone out there is looking for connection, right? we're And we're all a little bit too afraid to like be the one to reach out first.

36:52.65
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

36:54.84
Chris Morrell
So in my experience, same as you, like everyone's everyone wants it, yeah.

36:57.29
Ben Holmen
Yeah, that's the truth.

37:03.83
Chris Morrell
All right, well, that was kind of a plug, but do you have anything of yours that you would like to plug or anything?

37:11.18
Ben Holmen
I just want to get any and all feedback on my kilopixel display.

37:11.44
Chris Morrell
How do people find you on the internet?

37:15.39
Ben Holmen
That's all I want out of this. Pair with somebody and tell me your great idea for a 20 cent pixel.

37:25.26
Chris Morrell
Where's the best place to find you on the internet?

37:27.99
Ben Holmen
You can find me at benholman.com and then take that to your social network of choice. They're all there.

37:34.01
Chris Morrell
Awesome. All right, Ben, this has been really fun.

37:37.11
Ben Holmen
It was a pleasure, Chris.

37:37.55
Chris Morrell
Thank you for hanging in and we'll have to, we'll have to do, we'll do a second one where we're not constrained to just a reasonable amount of time, but we can take an unreasonable amount of time.

37:46.72
Ben Holmen
We'll get really indulgent next time.

37:48.74
Chris Morrell
Sounds good.

37:49.04
Ben Holmen
This wasn't nearly enough.

37:51.41
Chris Morrell
Take it easy.