113: No Food, No Poop... No Level Up.

I love how you just ignore me. Well, I am. Because you're talking about Windows. You're going to do your thing. Is this something else that's built into Windows? Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo.

Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet. And who's to blame? So, we are back. Well, I mean, I'm back. And I guess technically you're now back too, Jason, because you've done the I hate Los Angeles. I'm leaving Los Angeles. I'm back in Los Angeles.

I hate Los Angeles. I'm leaving Los Angeles. I'm back in Los Angeles thing again. Well, I'm back in Los Angeles and I hate Los Angeles, but I'm back in Los Angeles. Does that work? That works. So, we're both back. Yes. Yes. I am here. You are there. Well, you're in that weird part of town that we call Satan Monaco, which nobody wants to go to.

I'm in that place called the Valley, which nobody wants to go to. For any reason. Yes. And I work in Hollywood, which is another place where nobody wants to go to. So, yes. This is Los Angeles where nobody wants to go, but everybody fucking lives here. Yes, we do.

And speaking of people that live here, you may have noticed a new theme song. A friend of the show, Andy Stochansky, an old friend of mine, singer, songwriter, old drummer for Andy DeFranco, now currently just doing the songwriting thing and rather successfully, was listening to our show last week.

And he's originally from Toronto, where I was. And he sent me an email while I was there in his hometown. He was listening to our show and was inspired to write us a new theme song. Yeah. I was amazed. You sent this over to me and I'm like, wow, that was pretty cool. It's very cool and very Silicon Valley-esque, but that's kind of the genre that we are in, is it not?

Yes, it does. It did remind me of Silicon Valley. It took me a while while I was listening to it to really kind of, you know, I'm like, oh, that's why this is familiar. I get it. No, but he did a really good job. And I have absolutely no issue replacing my semi-amateur-ish music songwriting abilities with someone of his stature's song that he wrote for us.

And he actually did write a full song. So, Andy, I know you're listening right now. Sorry we had to chop it up because the four minutes doesn't work for an intro for a podcast. So we had to do a little cutty-pasty. Yeah, we would like the people to keep listening to the actual show after the theme song starts. But maybe we can give away the show on our Patreon page, if Andy is cool with that, to our Patreon subscribers.

I believe Andy pretty much gave it to us with no restrictions whatsoever. So I will just double check with him. And if he doesn't mind, we will post the full song on our Patreon page for our Patreon subscribers. Excellent, excellent. So now, when we were putting this together, we were testing.

You were testing on your side, playing it for your friends. I was testing on my side, playing for my friends. And we pretty much hit the line at 50-50, down the middle, as far as just the way it works for the intro. Right.

I have opinions on that because I'm not big on doing the product testing. I don't give a fuck. I like it. Well, see, my problem, I love the song. But it was, you know, like, because we listened to Bob talk for so many, many times with the same intro.

And now he's got like that kind of like funky beat kind of thing going on. Yeah, I had to break up the vocals a little bit because they don't, you know, with a song that's got such a strong rhythm to it, the flowing Bob-ness had to be cut up a little bit. So, yeah, I'm starting, I have to get used to that.

It's going to take a bit. But. Well, we'll see. We could always have Bob come back up again and lure him with a bottle of whiskey and have him re-record. Well, you're paying for this time. I paid for last time. Oh, wait. All right. We have Patreon subscribers now. Yeah, yeah. I'd rather spend that money on booze for me.

Sorry, Bob. Yeah, sorry, Bob. B-Y-O-B-B. Bring your own Bob booze. And speaking of booze for me, because we are recording so late, I had some personal situations occurring today that involved me sitting around in places where I could not record a podcast. It's 6 p.m.

The workday has ended. And even though I was sitting around in a place where I couldn't really do a podcast, I could still answer friggin' email. So it was a hell of a workday, too. I have a nice Canadian rye that I picked up through Duty 3 that I'm sipping as we do this podcast. It's a drinking show.

I am actually having a little bit of Smirnoff and Club soda with a hint of lime. Ah, the alcoholic dieter's booze of choice. It is cheap and it is tasty. Yeah, but it won't be a drinking show like the old days. We're not going to get smashed, unfortunately.

Unfortunately. We'll save that until we can do the monkey rum in person. That's right. It is waiting and signed. Yes. And guess what I got? I got my drinking jacket from Zane Lamprey. Wow. That only took six months. I know. But you know what? Worth it. Okay. It is so comfortable and has many pockets for many things to do to get in much trouble.

Let's just say that. I can get in much trouble with this jacket. And I went out this week and got in much trouble and I didn't even need the jacket. Aren't you a bit old for getting in this kind of trouble? Yeah, yeah. But I spent three days in a car and I needed to get my party goblin on.

All right. Let's hear about your drive. Well, it was boring. It was extraordinarily boring. I did it in record time, though. Yeah, I tracked your progress while I was in Toronto and you were doing your updates on the book of the face about where you were at.

And I did not know there was a Las Vegas, New Mexico. Yeah, yeah. If you'd have seen Freedom Downtime, the Kevin Mitnick documentary from the 2600 folks, they stopped in Las Vegas, New Mexico. And that is the only reason I knew it existed. Well, one of the reasons the show works, Jason, is I don't watch that crap.

You do. That's right. So I knew where to stay. And it was it was very much like it was almost like a Sons of Anarchy reunion. There were cops on the street that were pulling people over every 30 seconds. OK, literally every 30 seconds, a cop would pull somebody over for something.

And there was a basketball tournament in town. So I got the third to last room in the entire city for the night, which was scary. And I stayed at a place that smelled horrible, looked horrible, was horrible.

But otherwise, it was a lovely town and just bikers everywhere. Like like seriously, biker gangs everywhere. But if you go into the suburbs, it was a pretty little town. But man, yeah, the part that I stayed in was I had the armpit of Las Vegas, New Mexico.

I had kind of figured it was all in our pit, but OK. No, there were parts that were nice. And Dr. Teeter, a friend of the show, said that he loves that town. And there's a lot of really good food there. Like, you know, authentic New Mexican food. I don't know what that means. I didn't have any because I wanted to get out of there as early as I could.

Because, yeah. Green chili sauce on a green chili next to a green chili with a green chili chaser. Most likely, most likely. And a side of meth. And then I just got in the car in the morning and I drove from Las Vegas, New Mexico to Los Angeles in one day, 880 miles.

Well, to welcome you on your 700th excursion into Los Angeles. Number nine. Number nine. Nine is a lot. Number nine. This is why we need to do edits and drops. Anyways, to celebrate the fact that you have returned to Los Angeles for the ninth time now, I have a little L.A. local news for you.

Oh, do we have good news? Is this like the art happenings, the fun stuff to do? Yeah, sure. Okay. If you want to go that way. Here we go. Here's story number one for you, Jason, on your return to Los Angeles. The LAPD killed more people in 2015 than any other U.S. police force.

Take that, Ferguson. All right. Hey, man, we do our best here, I guess. Yeah. There's number one to welcome you to Los Angeles. Number two. Los Angeles just experienced a weird and rare reverse spring. Is that like a reverse cowgirl, but with rain?

Much less fun, yes. Apparently, we've had crazy ass weird weather here where it's gotten incredibly cold when it should have been warming up and vice versa. So good times. Links in the show notes for both. I've never heard of the reverse spring and I've been living here my entire life, except for a brief excursion in London, which doesn't even have a spring.

So there you go. Okay. Well, it's better than nothing, I guess. You're in L.A. Well, nobody else was there to welcome me. So I'll take, you know, a bullet from the cops in shitty weather. That's what I get. That's what I get for coming back. I flew in a few days after you.

I'm sorry. I couldn't be here to welcome you with monkey. Yeah, that you would never welcome me anyway with because you never come out and see me. So whatever. Come to your barbecue next week and stop it. Okay, okay. A little pity party. Not a pity party. It's a barbecue.

God damn it. So a fan of the show, friend of the show, Unnamed Insider sent us a tweet that basically gave us the good URL for the YouTube version of title The End of Suffering. So we're going to put that in the show notes. It's a very funny video that was at the time only on the book of the face when we did our podcast last week, but well worth the view and very funny.

And actually, I spent a lot of time in Toronto with a bunch of music industry people and music industry lawyers and particularly a lot of people that worked on deals for title. And I shared this with all of them and they politely cannot be named at all for any reason whatsoever. Laugh like hysterically, even though they're supposed to be supporting title in public.

Anyways, maybe they're one of the unnamed insiders. Unnamed Insider is that sent us the video. They could very well be, except for the fact that they're music industry lawyers, which means they do not have time to put together such wonderful things. So between Jason traveling cross country for his ninth trip to Los Angeles, where he will probably

stay here for about a year before leaving again, and me being in Toronto and then having to hop a flight back and then dealing with some family issues and work issues, you'll maybe notice that all of our news basically stops as of Tuesday. We don't have anything more recent. Jason thinks this is a big deal, but I kind of assume that everybody that's listening to this podcast probably doesn't do what we do all day, which is obsessively read tech news.

So I think it's going to be okay. We'll see. I wasn't making a big deal out of it. I just wanted to point it out. You get a little cranky if we don't have updates. Well, I, you know, if I'm not reading 1500 articles a day, I feel like I'm letting somebody down. Yes. And you're insane.

So anyways, moving on. Apparently there was some big Google thing. Yeah. Google IO. Yeah. Okay. But since I don't give a fuck about Android or Google for that matter. Why the fuck did you put an article about Google in our show notes? Because it's news and other people do.

So they announced a bunch of stuff and there's an article on the slate that basically it's a nice little listicle running down the ton of cool stuff that they did ranked by coolness. So Jason, I'm assuming you probably looked into this a bit more than me. No, no. I read the article that you put in here, but everything began with the word Android.

So I kind of, I read the word Android and then I went to the next number, then the next number. I guess the VR stuff at number one is kind of cool. The DIY virtual reality platform. Yes, that is number one. So apparently it's going to be a do it yourself virtual reality kits that you will be able to put together yourself.

And, uh, you know, I, you know, my feeling about the VR thing and all of that stuff. And we know that the, uh, what the hell's the big one that's, that's, they've been talking about Oculus, which is, I think was priced out at over a thousand dollars or something like that. So, you know, good. This is very smart because nobody's going to fucking buy that stupid thing.

But here's the deal. The rig that they're showing to shoot your own VR is 16 GoPro cameras. I can't afford 16 GoPro cameras. I can't afford one GoPro camera. Well, then you also can't afford an Oculus Rift. So who cares? No virtual reality for us. Yeah. We're going to stick to reality. How's that?

It's funny that the one percenters are the only people that are going to get virtual reality and they can afford to actually have the reality. They can have the fun stuff and they want to go and they don't get the computer stuff. Anyways, number two, a smarter, creepier personal assistant. So this is, this is an extension of Google's, uh, backing away from do no evil, uh, in that their creepy personal assistant, the, their version of Siri and all of that sort of stuff is basically mass has massive privacy implications.

Google has massive privacy implications. This is just like a spin on it's like a smarter, creepier personal assistant is the name of this number. That is just Google. That is just Google. This is. Yeah. I mean, come on. Am I wrong? Am I wrong? No, you're not wrong at all.

So, and the number three, which is the one I assumed you would be pretty happy about. And we've known this has been coming for a while. They're basically dismantling Google plus piece by piece, which is fine. Even though as we've also discussed, it's actually one of the best social networks that just doesn't have any fucking users. That's the sad part.

I've got the most users that follow me on Google plus and it's the prettiest. I think it is by far the case. It is the prettiest, uh, in a perfect world. We would all Google plus would be the Facebook, but I mean, it's, it's no LO, but what the, what the hell? Come on.

I mean, what is, what, what, what other social networks has eight bit graphics? I know. I mean, now you can store up to 16 megapixel photos and a 10 ADP video. Uh, yeah, they say it's not great news for flicker, but you know what? Flicker is not actually Marissa Meyer is not great news for flicker.

So I'm not going to worry about them. I forgot to mention what it actually is. We just talked about the dismantling Google plus, uh, Oh, a great photo app with unlimited free storage. They're spinning off Google photos, which is basically the photo portion. of Google plus, which is again, fantastic. I mean, everything they built on that social network is really good.

So, and it's completely free. So yeah, it's very, very bad news for flicker. So Marissa Myers takes another one, uh, in the can as it were. Oh, double entendre. So weirdly enough though, they list number four as better privacy for Android apps, even though number two basically says that it's a bad privacy killer.

So that's interesting. Well, I think they were talking about the now on tap, uh, like a service inside of there. So they're just talking about Android apps in general. You get more granular privacy controls, which they'll probably change every single time they do an update and not mentioned to you and blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

There's a lot of talk about this, but since I honestly, I know three people with an Android app and they are the most technologically unsavvy people I've ever met. I tried to have them show me how they use privacy on an Android app and they can't find their privacy settings. I'm not joking that I really did that and they cannot find them.

And they probably use one password. Like, yes, just the one. Well, just, we're going to start on that single password, single password. All right. And then number five just made me laugh because speaking of, uh, not being a technology person and this, whoever wrote this article is writing an article about technology.

Uh, number five is offline directions for Google maps, which is pretty cool actually. Um, but then they mentioned, uh, the paragraph about it, it goes, it appears you'll have to save a map of a given region to your Google account first to be able to use it offline. Well, no shit, I mean, come on.

Yes. You're not going to save the entire world of maps to be able to use where you're going, but the fact that saving it, have you ever tried to save a pin to your Google account? It's impossible. Uh, doing a lot of things with your Google account is impossible. Yeah, no doubt. I, this one actually has me kind of happy because there were places that I got stuck in the middle of the country with no signal.

Thank you, AT&T. Um, I actually had to pull out my iPad in a couple of spots to get signal from Verizon to be able to get a map. Well, I shit you not. Speaking of that very issue, number six, data saving feature for people with crappy internet. Awesome. Awesome.

Except I need a goddamn Android to do it and I don't have one. Yeah. Well, it's a, they are putting this feature apparently in Chrome and you do have Chrome on your iPhone. No, they says that works on a Mac book, not for Chrome on your, on your phone.

Yeah. Well, why don't they fix that then? Well, they're Google. Okay. No battery saving deep sleep mode for your phone. Again, never going to have an Android. Don't care. Uh, another platform for all your internet connected junk. I don't know what that is exactly. And I don't like anybody having access to all of my stuff, but okay.

Well, Brillo is Android software that will allow you to control stuff like your garage door, coffee maker, and thermostat from a single hub on your phone. This is their home kit. Oh, okay. That's okay. I didn't read the whole thing. My bad. See, you saw Android too. And then you just checked out and you call me the fucking Apple fan boy.

I would like to state for the record here. Come on. Uh, no, I am equally, uh, okay with windows. It's just, we both hate Android equally. Okay. Uh, another way to pay for things with your phone. So they're trying to do a basically Android pay, which is a lot like Apple pay, except nobody fucking takes it.

And, uh, much like Apple pay where nobody takes it. Oh, that's not. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Okay. Nowhere in Canada because they actually have things like called regulations for their banking. So they can't get away with it there yet because they have to go, you know, Apple's has to do the same thing that Uber and Airbnb don't have to do, which is play by the rules.

Uh, so there it's nowhere in Canada yet, but it's a fuck man. It's everywhere here in the U S but they've got chip and pin up in Canada. So, you know, they don't really need to have the quote unquote security of Apple pay with our crappy, just card and pin system. No, that's very, very true. So I've got a six plus now I can actually try and do Apple pay, but I, I went through the, the setup with Citibank and it was so terrible.

I had to call like three times and it still doesn't work and exit worked, but I'm, they canceled my Amex account, so I can't buy anything. So I now have an Apple pay account on my six plus that I can't pay with and three other ones that I can, but I can't.

I went through the process with a, with my chase credit card and it's actually set up and this, the problem is I am, I am 40 something years old. And for the last 20 something years, I have ingrained in my mind that when I pay for something, I pull out my wallet and pull out my credit card.

So even though I've set up Apple pay, as soon as I got my phone two weeks ago, I never remember that I have Apple pay. That, that also happens. Yes. Except when I've been to a couple of CVS is where my, my pocket got a little too close to the, the swiper and everything shut down.

Like they couldn't figure out why they couldn't type in anymore. It was because my phone actually triggered the Apple pay thing with a credit card that wasn't valid anymore. And it just went to shit. It was, it's a mess. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Bluetooth. Uh, yeah, just, it just happens.

It happens. So keep your junk away from the Apple pay. If you don't have the Apple pay. Okay. I will. What I do think is really cool though, is Google's new project solely. I think it's solely it's S O L I just your sensing tech that looks like magic. Oh boy.

Have you seen this thing? Uh, I, yeah, it's using like millimeter wave radar in proximity sensing. So you can wiggle your fingers and make things happen. It's like, it's literally like magic. Let me rephrase my, yes, I've seen this thing. I have seen animated GIFs of it.

I have not seen it in the wild actually work. If you say GIF one more time, we're, we're, we're stopping the show. We're never doing it again. I actually did that on purpose. Cause I, you little bastard. This is what happens when Brian has whiskey. Yeah. They're GIFs. They're not GIFs. Okay. Uh, yes, it looks very cool in the GIFs, but yes.

Okay. I guess we haven't had a real test yet. And, and much like Apple's watch, uh, I'd like to know if this works. If you actually happen to be tattooed in the regions. In the regions. I have many tattoos and who knows what I might be trying to run away. Wave at your phone.

What, and where are your tattoos? If you're worried about waving something at your phone with a tattoo, you frighten me now. I went to Canada and I got a full body tattoo of Brad Pitt. Okay. From five club. Not from like Benjamin buttons.

Thelma and Louise. Oh, he didn't have tattoos and Thelma and Louise. I'm guessing he was too young. He was like 12. He wasn't 12. I've never seen that movie. I don't know. Why do you name check a movie you haven't seen? Because it's like in street cred, you know, I knew that he was in the movie.

That doesn't mean I have to have seen the movie. Come on, man. I'm just busting out knowledge. How many, how many times have you gone to trivia and said something that you knew that was trivia that you've never done before? You know, that's what you do at trivia. I just threw out some trivia.

That's all. You're, you're busting out knowledge of things of which you have no knowledge. That's how we have a show. That's true. That's a good point. All right. So Microsoft accidentally kind of showed a new feature that they're going to be doing called Microsoft Wi-Fi, which will be their hassle-free internet solution for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Windows phone users, which basically is going to leapfrog over a bunch

of pay-for-play crappy things like Boeing or whatever those crappy ones that are that used to be at airports, which now generally offer free Wi-Fi anyways. So you can sign in through one thing and you'll be able to basically. You can leapfrog into all those when you're traveling. So it's not free.

You have to pay for it. They're going to ramp it up to 10 million hotspots. But the interesting thing that I got out of this article is they've already got 2 million hotspots that work with your Skype account. So if you have Skype money in your account, whatever they call it, Skype cash or whatever it is, I've got some of that.

So now I know that I can spend some of it there. So that's kind of cool. I did not know that. But yeah, they waived the wrong thing at the Google phone and pre-released their website. You know, I'm really happy about these things coming out. I don't mind them at all. I do wonder where the Google, you know, Google was talking big a couple of years ago about how they're going to bring, you know, free Wi-Fi to major cities all the time and expand everywhere.

And that's never happened. The one thing that we have Google Fiber rolling out in multiple cities, the, the, if you're talking about the Google Wi-Fi stuff, those were city ordinances that basically kept shutting them down that were run by the telcos. Right, right. You know, speaking of the telcos, I was about to kind of say, give a, give a high five to Time Warner Cable, which is something nobody ever does.

As I was walking around, I had to do a meeting this morning and I was somewhere where there wasn't wireless and I, I absolutely had to do a call right after the meeting. Um, so I needed to get, I had to do Skype or something like that for another meeting and I didn't have enough time to get home and I had no wireless to get on.

And, uh, bingo, uh, Time Warner Wi-Fi, it will, we talked about this cause it is kind of a secure security risk. You can basically open up a, if you're a Time Warner cable customer and you have a router, it can be basically used by other people in the area as a free Wi-Fi connection if you allow that option and people have not turned that off all over the city.

So randomly I've been able to basically connect to free Wi-Fi again all over the place. Thanks to Time Warner Cable. So thank you. Well, that's interesting. I mean, we originally talked about it as Comcast because Comcast was doing it first. I don't remember us talking about Time Warner, but now that I've got Time Warner, I'm going to have to keep an eye out for that.

Just keep an eye out. And actually the great thing about it is you sign in the one time and it remembers no matter what router it is or where you are. So if there's a Time Warner cable Wi-Fi connection in the area, it just connects you to it. Oh dear. I can see that as a problem.

Oh yeah. I just named, I just renamed my airport extremes Time Warner Wi-Fi. Oh yeah. Think about that aspect of it. Yep. I got to, I have, I now have an unpassword protected home router name, Time Warner Wi-Fi that anybody can connect to.

And I just get Wireshark open and thanks for your banking info. One would think they'd thought about that, but they probably haven't. Nope. We'll get to, we'll get to what you can use to protect yourself against that shortly. Okay. And since I was tooling around Canada, this, uh, this bit of news broke while I was there.

So I have to include it. A Canadian was ticketed for using an Apple watch while driving. Okay, fine. I don't have a problem with that. If we can't use, we can't use our watches. I mean, I don't know what the laws are in Canada because I only know the U S laws. You can't have a cell phone.

I'm assuming it's the same since he got the ticket. He got, yeah, he got busted for using a handheld device with a telephone function. That's, that's what he got busted for is 120 bucks. He should suck it up and use the, you know, we have controls on our steering wheels now. Why didn't he use that? Yeah. And it was the same deal with the glasses.

Somebody got a ticket for using that too. Yeah. You can't use this stuff when you're driving. Just drive people. How much do you want to bet that he was driving around with his arm out the window swiping? So he got pulled over. So he would be the first person to get the ticket. Well, maybe, I don't know.

We have a, you know, his name is Jeffrey Mason or something. Like that. We'll see if he does something to, Oh, come on. What's it, what's he going to get out of this? A job at Huffington post or Vox or Buzzfeed. That's a good point. Actually. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. So now speaking of the, the home wiring stuff and, and Apple's home kits, uh, the first round of products have actually been announced and we see photos of them.

And of course it's the, uh, what's the, it's the I home who've made all those clock radios that we all bought as soon as we had our iPods. Uh, I never bought one of those. I thought they were just too overpriced. They weren't priced, but they were cool as shit. So I had one. Okay. Okay. Are you getting one of these then? Well, the problem with it is the, those, uh, those little, uh, clock radios in the, at the time the design was basically on par with, with the iPods.

They look like them. They were sleek and they look great. Link in the show notes. Uh, you can take a look at the first round of stuff that they're launching. They are butt ass ugly and they have no design sense whatsoever. Where is the Apple sense of design that's supposed to go with these things? I'm looking at these and I feel like they forgot to put the stickers on them or anything.

They're fucking ugly. So no, I'm not getting any of these, uh, fail guys. Make them look good. Yeah. These things are terrible. They're, they're utterly terrible. But, but if these things work and if the security is there, which you and I have talked about many, many, many times, uh, you know, wireless thermostats, uh, lighting rigs and all of that, uh, nest may be a thing of the past because they are considerably cheap or at least the, uh, the planned pricing is a lot cheaper.

So the nest, so we'll see, but they are, they are ugly at nest is not nest is beautiful. So, and if you're going to roll out something that is based on Apple tech, come on, let's go people. Yeah. You'd think that the nest would be from Apple because that thing is actually really gorgeous. These are, but they're, they're just vanilla.

They look like PCs from the eighties. Yes, they do. They look like 10 PCs from the eighties, but, and as we talked about with security, it's only as secure as your home network. And if your home network is named time Warner cable, you might have a problem. That's right.

So, uh, Thunderbolt three is out from Intel. They've released the spec and it uses the same type of connector as USB-C, which came out in the new Mac books. So this is interesting. Well, at least thank you for using something that already exists.

So we don't have to have another set of cables. I hate to break it to you. iPhone seven going to have this cable. That's fine. Bet. We're going to have to go through this one more time until we can standardize again. And you know, it's, if it is that that's cool.

That's cool. I'm okay if, if we get, you know, if everything is up and we're all using that cable. Great. That's fine. I'm okay with that. And because I want the speed, I'm going to want Thunderbolt three. So let's go for it. Yeah. This, I mean, this thing supports 40 gigabits per second.

Oh, that's gorgeous. Double the speed of Thunderbolt two, which is what I'm using now for all of my, my gear here. Um, and you know, it's just, it's going to be, it's going to be awesome if we can get this going because you know, I've still got firewire two devices in firewire 800 devices.

I was, let's, let's get, let's get this thing kind of settled, please. And speaking of interesting, Facebook has opened their third artificial intelligence research hub in Paris. Okay.

Now I think this is interesting because what they're doing now is they're moving into the European market to get the smart Europeans into doing the same stuff that we're doing. doing here. They've only hired six people so far, but it's six smart Europeans. Oh, come on now.

That's, that's mean. Well, yeah, of course it is. Anyway, I have nothing against the Europeans. I think they're smarter than I am. They can hold themselves in a conversation more than I can, especially if you're Welch. Well, now to, I'm sorry. Welch. Well, to defend the Europeans, the reason they could only find six is because they actually care about privacy in Europe.

That's right. No, no Europeans. I know use Facebook. So they didn't know the job posting was up there. Yeah. But anyway, what they're doing is they're really trying to get into the machine learning and visual, basically visual machine learning. So they can tag you in a photo faster. It's already pretty damn fast.

It's terrifyingly fast. Actually, it's ridiculously fast and ridiculously good. I mean, I can't believe every time I post a photo, I'm like 16 in these photos and they already know it's me. I'm like, oh, either I'm aging well or you're really fucking smart. And keep in mind, dear listeners, that anything Facebook does, the government does 10 times better.

Well, actually, they don't even have to do it 10 times better because they can just get the data from Facebook. That's true. See previous episode where Dr. David Teeter talked about how you can quickly find out everything about anyone through Facebook. Security?

Ha! New hack of the week. Okay. The government's personnel office has been hacked by China for the second time in a year. All right. Since I still don't believe that North Korea hacked Sony, what makes me believe that China actually hacked the government's personnel office?

Yeah, we have some trust issues with this stuff, don't we? Yes, our government has not really, you know, given on the trust side. So this is what it is. All we know is they were actually hacked. All right, so 4 million workers that, 4 million government employees have had personal data compromised by an attack by someone, which would include personal information, but not highly classified, background checks, addresses, etc.

All right. But if you're a government spy agency looking for people to turn to get information from, that's the kind of information you want, so. Ooh, tin hat. Tin hat. Tin hat-y indeed. You know who is not going to have a tin hat or a tin pot to piss in for a very long time?

Who? Mr. Ross Ulbrecht, the creator of the Silk Road. Actually, a tin pot to piss in is the only thing he's going to have for a long time. Actually, this is, I think it's aluminum, but yes, he is going to prison forever. Ever. Yeah. I mean, what's your take on this?

Do you think he's the guy or do you think he's being set up? Okay, I absolutely think he's the guy. Yeah, me too. And I also absolutely think that the state overreacted, and the judge gave him way more than even the prosecutors were looking for.

Yes, he had to serve a minimum of 20 years for what he did, but life in prison without the possibility of parole for a non-violent crime, even if you take into effect the fact that he tried to hire somebody, even if that was true to kill somebody else, people like that still get off in, you know, 15 years.

Yeah, yeah. There was no murder. He did not kill anyone. Period. Okay. I mean, I'm mostly with you. I mean, that bit freaked me out a little bit, but if it was purely just the Silk Road thing, then this is the same thing as that asshole down in San Diego that had the revenge porn site, who, yes, deserved to be punished, and yes, deserved some time, but the punishment did not fit the crime and same case with this, except for maybe the whole trying to murder someone thing.

Yeah, the whole thing just reeks of wrong across the board. They're going to appeal. I don't know if it's going to work, but hopefully cooler heads will prevail and he'll just do his 20 years and get out. But yeah, he fucked up. He was an idiot. Well, yeah, and he deserves to be punished and he deserves some jail time.

But yes, I do agree with you. I think it's a bit extreme for the reality of what it is that he was doing. Speaking of which, Section 215, yeah, we didn't turn that around, did we? No, it expired. The Patriot Act is dead.

Okay. Long live the USA Freedom Act. So yes, the Patriot Act 215 basically expired. And then right after, they put into law, united in strengthening America by fulfilling rights and ending eavesdropping, dragnet collection, and online monitoring act.

Right. Okay. This is basically, you know, a lot of people were behind the Freedom Act because they thought it was better than the Patriot Act. But once the Patriot Act was shown in a lot of places to be illegal, like the EFF pulled their support for the Freedom Act because they're like, no, well, we're not going to support anything that lets you monitor us.

Yeah. But, you know, they still went through and did it. And there's a lot of discussion about it on the fact that, is it worse than the Patriot Act? Because there's a lot of vague language in it. Well, vague language is always the problem. And that does scare me a little bit. But one of them's dead. That's good.

Yeah. You know, you just move on to the next one. Nothing's really going to change. Yeah. And here's one that didn't really change. This one tickles me. How to hack a computer using just an image. Now, this comes from the Hacker News, who we have mocked incessantly on this show for having, well, not a very strong grasp of the English language or an editor.

But this is a story about a guy who has figured out how to use steganography, JavaScript, and the browser canvas to deliver malware payload. So what this guy has figured out how to do is basically, when you load an image, use the canvas to manipulate JavaScript to actually take over your computer and drop a text file on it.

Okay. So it's, you know, it's a proof of concept, but it is interesting and it's kind of scary. That's the whole problem. JavaScript is such a, JavaScript is just like Java in many ways, where we are just ass cheeks open to the wind.

Especially when you have something like Canvas, where you can just perform all these arbitrary actions on it. Yeah. Especially with images. Right. So it's a, it's an interesting hack. It's very dangerous. And I'm just kind of staying away from this one until I hear more data on it.

I'm going to, I'm going to read the white paper this week and watch the videos, which will be linked in the show notes, but it's kind of, kind of creepy. Yeah. Okay. Well, cat videos will actually fuck up your computer now. Wouldn't that be awesome? Boing boing would just be out of business like that.

Oh, yeah. Oh, well. So the FBI is behind a mysterious surveillance aircraft fleet over the United States. Yes. I've even heard about this one. And I got suckered in a little bit and I was reading a little bit about how maybe they're just pointing gigantic microphones down and eavesdropping on public conversations and recording all of them just to scoop up everything.

So I believe you subscribe to Sean Bonner's email list. Well, a friend of the show, Sean Bonner did kind of turn me onto that idea. And I'm not sure how credible that actually is. Well, I mean, I think that's exactly what they're doing, but I also don't think that it's illegal because I think that we could go hire an airplane and do it ourselves if we wanted to, because they're, they're recording people in public places.

Unless you go to the other side where they're flying planes over buildings and using electronic surveillance, like stingrays, like your stingray in the sky. But you know, there's a, there's a lot of things about this, but they've been doing this since the eighties. So you think Google and Apple are both flying planes over each other's, like all the, all the restaurants around their secure campuses?

I don't know about Apple, but I know Google has project loon. So we've got balloons in the sky. We've got the Facebook project with their, you know, high flying aircraft. They're going to be everywhere and they can, you can put any kind of microphone, any kind of sensor you want on these things and they can listen to whatever they want.

They just don't have to be wifi for the greater good. And little did they know, all they had to do was actually do the wifi thing, but just call a time Warner cable. Exactly. And speaking of Facebook, they did something interesting on the other side of the spectrum.

They're going to let you actually use your PGP keys to encrypt your email that comes back and forth from Facebook. So Facebook messenger? No, they're talking to mainly about any email communications that come back and forth. Messenger should already be secured theoretically.

But, um, they're going to be keys though. What? Not with personal PGP keys. No, but it should be going over TLS transport basically from Facebook servers to your phone and back and forth. Right, right. This is, you know, this is, this comes back to where, at what point in the chain does the NSA actually pop their head up and break the TLS keys?

But the NSA can is, is happy to read any notification emails I get sent from Facebook because I don't get any and if it is, it's just letting the NSA know that it's one of my friend's birthdays. Turning that damn notification off. Yes. And I found a really crappy restaurant in New Mexico, uh, in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

But this is, this is an interesting step just to, you know, have some layer of privacy in there that you control because you're using your private or your, your public PGP keys to do the encryption. PGP. I have to admit as one of those things that you'd probably yell at me for, uh, that would be like my one password.

I've never ever, I know I should have PGP. I just never do it. Well, the problem with PGP when you run a Mac, at least is the company that bought it, it has been traded so many times and I have been burned so many times by upgrading my OS and not realizing that PGP hasn't been updated and my, my, it bricks my computer.

Right. Uh, GPG that I was using for mail for a long time, uh, didn't update when Yosemite came out. So I kind of stopped using it and I didn't talk to anybody that used GPG. It's more like, okay, here's more texts at the end of my email that you're going to hate and never going to use.

What could be more secure than not being able to talk to anyone? Uh, this is true. Um, I do that anyway. I, you know, yes, if you're going to do this stuff, I, it's all your secrets are safe with no one. That's, that's the other side. It's like, I got nobody to share a secret with that sucks.

I'm sorry, Jason. You can say it on this podcast. No one's listening. Uh, yeah. So we were talking about the Google stuff earlier and there's an article on. Slate in the future tense, uh, section, which is pretty good about, uh, all the tech stuff. So Google's latest enhancements come with enhanced privacy concerns. So all those things that we talked about that were super cool that they announced in the IO conference, which we actually don't care about because we hate Android.

They all come with a problem in that they now are doing more and more stuff that actually gets into your privacy and they don't care. That's all I got. That's the entire article. Okay. All of this new stuff that they're rolling out all comes with decreased privacy and a lot of concerns about exactly how your data is being used and what they're going to do with it.

Uh, you know, uh, so what do you care if somebody gets your angry bird high scores? Well, I guess it depends on what you're doing with your Android. Yeah. So if you want to be super safe, uh, don't use an Android or an iPhone or basically a phone or Twitter, email, Facebook, Twitter.

Nope. That's the point. That's the point. I don't know why we do the section anymore. Don't talk. It's fun. Okay. And here's a fun one. Russian billboard advertising contraband hides when it recognizes cops. This is from a naked security. I love this.

This is awesome. It's, it's a, apparently we're not allowed to import any food into Russia anymore. The EU and the U S are not allowed to import food. Poot is bad. What? We've established that Putin is bad. So I thought you said pooping is bad. I'm like, they don't want our food.

So they won't poop. Well, if you know food, no poop, no food, no poop. So, uh, we've said our show title, no food, no poop. When, uh, when these billboards see a cop coming, they changed to, uh, like a doll or something like buy our dolls.

But before that it was a big chunk of cheese. How exactly. Okay. I guess they're using, uh, they're using software that can actually recognize the uniform. Yes. They're doing symbol recognition on the uniforms, the badges, the stinking badges and whatever else they can figure out from a cop.

Maybe like the shield on the cop car. I don't know what Russian cop cars look like. I always just figured they were tanks and they would just come and shoot you. But the, that's what they're doing. And this article is interesting because it goes into the broader implications. It's like, and it's very smart. It's like, okay, well, what happens if you walk up to one of these billboards and you're wearing like, you know, the shirt from your favorite sports team, are they going to start giving you, you know, ads based on your sports team?

Are they going to do facial recognition on you with all this Facebook AI that's going on in Paris now? Who knows? Minority report. We already know what's going to happen. I, well, hopefully the self-driving cars from minority report, cause those were pretty cool. I just don't want those little spiders. Those, those things creep me the fuck out. Or I don't want anybody to dig out my eyeball.

Comment of the week. A big thank you to our newest Patreon subscriber, William De La Vega. If you have not subscribed to Grumpy Old Geeks at patreon.com slash GOG, please do. It is our go-to for supporting the show right now. And if you put in a bunch of money, you get a bunch of songs from Among Us and possibly our new theme song as well.

So check us out over there. Uh, we also got a comment sent through grumpy old geeks.com. And this is from at pan philius. Uh, he sent a question in guys. You mentioned a VPN service for 14 bucks a year. This last podcast, but I did not catch the name. Could you please let me know what you use?

I was recommended hide my ass.com, but I'm still looking. I had my spot.com by the way. Great domain name. Uh, thanks for any help you can provide. So Jason, this is, this is all you, uh, check out private internet access. Uh, that's the VPN I use. We're going to have a little bit more follow up on them shortly.

Uh, you can go to grumpy old geeks.com slash VPN and it'll take you there and it'll kick us back a buck or two, literally a buck or two, literally a buck or two. And as a personal note, I'm finally actually going to sign up because, uh, part of the problem with being in Toronto for 12 days and, uh, having my HBO account being in the U S is I'm two weeks behind on game of Thrones right now, which I wouldn't, which I wouldn't be if I would have been a private internet access subscriber.

Well, I'll talk about picking the wrong two weeks to get behind. Yeah. I, I know you have, you have no idea how fast I scroll past Facebook entries. And, uh, by the way, if you do want to connect to anybody's internet that does say time Warner cable, you can use your private internet access VPN to, to secure yourself.

And I did use it on my trip the entire time that I was coming out. Yeah. So I will be, uh, joining the, uh, wrong there and send myself a buck or two. So, uh, this next comment comes from Jeff Bisbee. Great show. I'm new here, but caught a few new shows and jumped back to number 50 to get into things.

That that's some dedication. Were we still drinking back then or were we done already? Sorry if we were drinking. Yeah, I think we stopped drinking around 24. Okay, good. Now we're at one 13 and back on the, back off the wagon. Anyway, um, I'll comment more as time goes on, but nice work guys.

I enjoy this a lot. I'll start donating. Once I figure that out, go to patrion.com slash gog and they'll, they'll hook you up. Yeah. You basically just hit like one or two buttons and put in your credit card. Pretty simple, man. I just got my private VPN tonight. Thanks to you. And one password is next.

Holy shit. Yeah. We got one. We got one. Jeff, if you actually do. Get one password. You need to write us back and send a screenshot. Please. I'm not going to believe it. If we even turned one person. By the way, why isn't one password fucking paying us money?

I do. They don't have an affiliate program. God damn it. And nobody, nobody has signed up to one password because of us. That's why they're not giving us any money. All right. Go to single password.com. Quick question.

What is the song at the end of episode 64? And we'll, we'll get to that answer in a second. I found you through the art of charm by tracking down the Jasons at the dual interview with Jordan with an internet security guy. The art of charm, by the way, is the company I work for during the day.

I'm a recent AOC alum. He went to our, our program. That's awesome. And glad to have found you. I'm from their first all older guys bootcamp in March, which sucks because that I wasn't there because I'm an older guy. But anyway, that's awesome that you found us through my day job.

More later. Thanks so much for the great info. This is the first podcast that I've ever read the show notes for. So Brian, a quick question. What is the song at the end of episode 64? The song at the end of episode 64 is one of the songs I'm most proud of having written with my band Among Us, which featured the bass player from the Goo Goo Dolls, Robbie Teikak.

Robbie and I just started writing a bunch of electronica music and, and we're using a lot of local talent from his hometown Buffalo, where he had a studio. The, one of the singers is Alex Kelly, who is extremely talented and stunningly gorgeous.

And I can't believe she isn't a massive success already, but she's in New York kind of doing her own thing right now. And it also featured the lady Tigra, who is in a band called the trim from a, it was a Miami based hip hop duo who did really, really well. And we kind of ran into her somewhere and she agreed to sing on this track with us.

And it was just this crazy, weird thing that happened where Alex and Tigra just really hit it off and, and wrote some amazing stuff to go with this kind of really funky song that Robbie and I wrote. So it's called green tea and it's on our EP, which is available on iTunes and there's a link in the show notes.

And I guess we're also on Spotify and title. Uh, and again, if you would like to, uh, if you would like to go onto the Patreon and give us a $10 donation, uh, we'll send you a bunch of, uh, uh, 10 among us tracks, which are all just instrumentals. But one of the instrumentals that is in there is the instrumental for that track.

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. That's the song that we use for the, uh, at the end of episode 64. I have no idea why we did that, but. I'm sure that there was something going on there. Yeah. That was back when you were editing. So who knows? Yeah. Who knows? I was, I was, I'm, I'm the crazy guy.

So please send us some more comments. Uh, you can email us at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com, or you can go to iTunes, leave us a review and to eat, to make it easier. You can just go to grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes, and it'll take you right where you need to go or check us out at patrion.com slash GOG.

Yeah. And thank you everyone. The depths of human interaction are as deep and vast as the universe. The art of charm podcast has spent the last eight plus years interviewing the top experts in the fields of applied psychology, social dynamics, business, dating, networking, and more through a mixture of observation, experimentation, and implementation.

They have been decoding the mysteries of charisma, authenticity, attraction, relationships, and the mindsets of high performers. They bring this knowledge to their award-winning podcast every week. Absolutely free. Check out the podcast at theartofcharm.com slash podcast for new shows, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or browse their vast library of over 400 episodes.

That's theartofcharm.com slash podcast, or search for the art of charm in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player. That again is theartofcharm.com slash podcast. At the library.

I had put down The Mechanical, the first book of The Alchemy Wars by Ian Tregellis, an author that we've talked about a few times on the show because I loved his first series when the Neil Stevenson dropped Seven Eves, which we've talked about last week, which was absolutely fabulous.

And so I went back to it after I'd finished The Seven Eves and finished up the book. So now I can actually talk about it. It's good. What is the book called again? The Mechanical. The first book in a new series called The Alchemy Wars.

Excellent. I believe I talked about it briefly. It's a reimagining of history if the Dutch may have discovered a way to animate robots and create artificial intelligence that was controlled, basically. Okay. Yeah. You didn't mention that part on the show before because I would have remembered that.

That's kind of an awesome premise. Yeah, it's an awesome premise. I mean, that seems to be his thing is because the first series that I read by him, which was absolutely amazing, was basically a reimagining of World War II in which the Nazis basically discovered superpowers by tinkering with people's brains and the British fought them with demons.

So there you go. So this is what he's very good at. And it's a very good book. It, you know, again, the problem was I broke it up in the middle by reading Neil Stevenson's Seven Eves, which is stunning. It's good. I can't wait to see where he goes with it.

It's a good introduction to what could be a very, very good series. So we'll see where he takes it. I do recommend it. But if you haven't read Seven Eves, go read that first. I don't know if it works for a recommendation. It was good. We'll see where it goes. But if you haven't read any Trigellas yet, do go back and read the first series, which I'm totally blanking on right now.

But I'll throw that back in the show notes. It'll be there as well. Okay. Yeah, I'm definitely going to check that out. On my trip, I actually finished the entire series Blueprint for Armageddon, which is Dan Carlin's six part hardcore history podcast. It goes on forever. But honestly, that last 880 miles went by in a flash because that's all I listened to that day.

And it was so amazing and so good. The time just disappeared. Honestly disappeared. I've got literally an hour left and I just haven't had the time to get to it because as soon as I got to LA, I had to deal with LA. But man, if you want to go back and learn everything that Dan wants you to know about World War One, you can't learn everything about World War One in, say, you know, 14 hours.

I'm just approximating. It's a very long show. But man, is it good. It is so good. You can't beat Dan Carlin's hardcore history. I mean, that's still one of my favorite podcasts that's ever been. And while you were talking about that, I was able to quickly look up what the first series that I really loved from Ian Tregelis was.

It's the Milkweed series. Three books called Necessary Evil, The Coldest War, and Bitter Seeds. And start there. I loved those three books. They were unbelievably good. So go back and read those. If you're into that, then go ahead and get the mechanical.

And we'll see where that goes because there's only one out now. So we'll see what the second one's like. Good premise. I want to see where he takes it. No, that sounds good because I do like I like the premise that you were talking about with his first books. And now I can read those three books and give him time to write more on this new series.

So when he's done with this series, I can go read the whole thing or hear my review on it and let you know if you should read it or not. So that's true. That's true. I do really like him as an author. It's always exciting to find a completely new author that you didn't know about. So I'm into him right now.

And, you know, it's good to find new authors because some of your favorite authors may not be around forever in somewhat sad, but kind of exciting news because at least we get one more. We've done our we've done our eulogies for a. Yeah, for Terry Pratchett numerous times.

But today it was announced the final Terry Pratchett book, the final Discworld novel. Number 41, The Shepherd's Crown will be coming out 827 in the UK and September 1st here in the USA. That news was announced today and I'm very excited about it, obviously, and also very sad.

So it will be a bittersweet read. It's going to be extremely bittersweet because this is, you know, it's not the book that I wanted. Yeah, I'm looking at the synopsis for it and it is definitely not the last book that I wanted. This is kind of a crossover between his young adult series in Discworld.

Yeah. Yeah. This is the Teen Witch Tiffany. It's not a wrap up that we would have wished for. And again, I will plead to the estate. Don't try it. No, no. Don't have someone else do it. Let it go with this. No, no. I'm just going to tell you right now, The Salmon of Doubt from Douglas Adams was one of the most heartbreaking books I've ever read because I still want to know what happened to the goddamn cat.

The cat forever in my brain will be half a cat and I will never know what happened to the other half because you published the book, Douglas Adams is dead, and now I will never know. Yeah. I don't even keep The Salmon of Doubt in my book collection because I just keep it as the holy trinity.

So, well, quintology, whatever it is. Anyways. Yeah. So it's coming. It's not what we at all would have hoped for. Who knows? Maybe it's not as bad as I'm thinking it might be because he is doing the crossover with the children's books.

I'm hoping it's not. But again, just please, whoever is running his estate, let it go. Don't have someone write a wrap up. Let's. Yeah. So let's talk about more exciting things and more upbeat things. Okay. I read Dead Wake, The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Eric Larson.

That sounds uplifting. It was very uplifting. Eric Larson also wrote The Devil in the White City, which is the story of a serial killer in the World's Fair in Chicago at the turn of the century. Amazing book. So was Dead Wake. Dead Wake really kind of chronicled the both sides of the Lusitania.

Disaster. But also the political history behind what was going on in World War I, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, and just the whole bit about the war. And what was really fun is I finished this book. Then I read another book I'll talk about next. And then I listened to Dan Carlin's Blueprint for Armageddon, which was about World War I.

And he covered a lot of the stuff that was in Dead Wake. And it matched perfectly. Right. Which is rare. When you're talking about history interpretations, it's really rare to have that kind of melding where different historians kind of come at you with an agreed-upon history.

So that was really cool. But Dead Wake just really kind of goes from the – it starts before the Lusitania sinks and it goes to, like, maybe a little bit after. But, man, is it good. It's really, really good. And here's the crazy part. I gave this book to my dad in audiobook format.

Right. And at the beginning of a chapter, they will give you a date about, you know, where you are and what ship you're on. If you're on the U-boat that's going to sink the Lusitania – yeah, spoiler alert, the Lusitania sinks by U-boat. I think the – you know, we don't have to – I don't think we have to do a spoiler alert.

Too soon. Too soon. And – or if the date you're on the Lusitania. My dad was listening to this in his car going to work every day in real time. He was literally – he wrote me an email saying, I was listening to the book this morning and today is the 100th anniversary of the day of the sinking of the Lusitania and that was the day I was listening to the audiobook.

Talk about really kind of weird timing. I thought that was kind of cool. That is pretty cool. So the second book I read was Shift by Hugh Howey. Yeah, see, this is what really upsets me about how Hugh Howey's books are kind of put out there in the world because it's actually an omnibus edition, which means it's actually three books.

It's not one book. It gets really confusing. If you try to, like, figure out what books he's actually read, it's all over the place. That was a difficult part of it. And that's why I started it and stopped it about seven times before I finally got to it. And I'm like, I have Nebraska, I have Colorado, and I have New Mexico in front of me.

What's going to get me through those? And I looked in my Audible collection and Shift was the only one that hit the time mark. So I said, screw it. Went back to the beginning, started again. And I actually, when I was in my car with nothing else to distract me, I really enjoyed it.

I actually really enjoyed this book. I liked this book a little bit more than I liked Wool. See, I'm, I read both. I liked Wool better. I enjoyed Shift and all three books in which they are. And I also enjoyed Dust and I also enjoyed Wool.

Wool was actually my favorite because there was still the mystery. Shift explains what happened. Yes. Shift is actually the backstory and brings you up to speed to what, like, you know, kind of brings you up to the timeline and Wool from the other characters' perspectives. Yeah, see, I like it when you don't know what the hell's going on.

You're just stuck in it. And this just went back and filled in the backstory. And for me, that was, I'm not a big fan of the prequels. See, but the thing is, what I liked about it was I liked the backstory. I liked why they did what they did. Yeah. And, you know, I really enjoyed the, because there is definitely, when you deal with a prequel, there is the, you know, there's the very real option of alienating half your audience because they're not going to like what the backstory was.

And I actually liked this. He did not alienate me. I will say that. I really did enjoy Shift. It's just, I liked Wool better. Have you read Dust yet? No, it's on my list. It's coming up. Next time I leave Los Angeles to say fuck you to all you guys and go back wherever I come from, I will read Dust.

Okay. Six months, you'll read Dust. That one actually did disappoint me. Oh, that's too bad. See what you think about it. Yeah. But I agree with you. I enjoyed Shift. But I still think that Wool as a three, you know, a standing thing by itself was by far the best.

See, the thing with Shift also, it had the same problem as Seven Eves for me, was that I had two sets of characters that I was trying to connect with. And I'm not a huge fan of those kind of books where you have, you know, time shifting and separate groups of characters that you need to kind of learn and get in touch with.

I like a linear story where you go from beginning to end with a character's timeline and arc. And I would say the entire listening community to Grumpy Old Geeks to bookmark this particular moment when he, when Jason just said that, because all he does is defend Neil Stevenson's Krypton Omicron series, which has 7,000 characters that you have to keep track of over 7,000 time periods.

Oh, that's, it's terribly annoying. It's terribly, no, I love the book, but it's terribly annoying. I've read it so many times that I only think in the timeline of that character now because I've had to read it so many times, but I hated that book the first time I read it because I couldn't keep anybody straight. That doesn't mean I don't love the book.

It just took me, it just took a lot of work for me to love it. It's like, you know what, I'm just stopping right there. I'm saying that you hate that theory and then that's all those books were and it was horrible and I couldn't deal with it. So anyways, yeah, I agree with you. It was good.

I mean, I really want to see what he writes next. In fact, I actually haven't been following him. So I'm hoping something is coming soon because after dust, I don't know if he's written anything else. So I'll have to find out because I'm in the middle of a couple other books right now, which we'll be talking about next week because I'm almost done. Excellent.

Excellent. Yeah, I need to. You know what? I'm going to get some Ian Tregellis because I am. Well, I have no time, but I have nothing in my queue right now. So I need to put something in for when I get a little bit of time. Software, apps and gadgets.

One of the things I did while traveling was I decided I would finally actually take one for the team on this podcast. And I'm well known for not being a gamer and not downloading apps. So I was like, well, what's the biggest game app out there right now?

Candy Crush? No. Well, I mean, yeah. Candy Crush Soda Saga, which is what I'm on, but actually a real game. Something that, oh, that was a bit of strategy, not just like that stupid shit. So the big one is the one that can actually afford some audaciously beautiful blonde girl with just say it, boobs, boobs, they can afford boobs in their ads to be in all the ads that appear everywhere on TV everywhere, everywhere.

So the Kate Upton won a game or so the ad came up and I was like, all right, fuck it. I'm in. I'll give this a shot because when you're traveling, as you know, you end up with a lot of time that you can't do anything with. So what better than trying out a game? Well, you could read the Vorkosigan series, which I've given you, but I guess we'll go with Game of War.

Awesome. I do have to get that. You know what the real problem with it is? You just don't like it, do you? No, no, no. That's not the problem. You gave them all to me from our friends in Sweden and they were there in Apple eBooks format or iBooks or whatever the hell that's called.

And I only ever load up the Amazon app. I never think to load up the iBooks app. And that's where they all are. If they were in the Kindle app, I would probably actually have read them all there now. Expect a gift certificate coming in the next 24 hours for you to buy every single Vorkosigan book in Kindle.

I will send that to you. That will be my gift to you. I swear to the God that I don't believe in because I'm an atheist that I'm halfway through that first book, which is at least 1,200 pages. So I've read at least 600 pages of this, this coming from the guy who has read like 18 books of Dune since then.

So, okay. Yeah, better. Anyways, let's get back. Game of War and boobs. Bring it on. Game of War, Fire Age. I downloaded it. I installed it. I tried to play it. I'm actually still playing it crazily enough. But what shocked me about this and and I know because you put it in the show notes is that we've discussed this before, which I probably totally blanked out on because I don't care about games in a previous episode.

In fact, way back in apparently episode 68. Yes, this is actually the second mention of Sean Bonner this episode because that was open source shenanigans with Sean Bonner was episode 68 where I talked about in depth about this game. But let's not talk about that. I want to hear your take on the game. I am shocked and amazed at how good these companies have got at forcing you and compelling you to engage so you open up your wallet because you can not do anything in these games unless

you buy shit. How much did you spend? I have spent nothing and I refuse to. And that's my point. I am shocked I'm still playing. That's amazing that you're still playing. I've been going for four days now without spending a dollar. And, you know, you start up in a group of people that are around you and you join an alliance and they are on like level 17.

And I'm still like on level four and I'm not dead yet just because nobody has chosen to invade me. Oh, yeah. You cannot do shit in these games unless you spend money. You cannot. OK, now let's talk a little bit about the economics here. They bombard you with ads and the prices get cheaper and cheaper.

The fact that when you don't buy. Right. Yes. Yes. Everything gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper as I continue to not buy. So I get like my my one gold coin upgrades if I just refuse to keep upgrading. Mm hmm. For all the buildings and everything. But it doesn't matter because everybody else that is playing this game, you can see it around you.

You OK, first off the game again, just in case you didn't know, it's the kind of games I like. It's basically the high tech version of risk. It's real time strategy. Yeah, it's real time strategy game. You build things up and you know, you you you attack other people and all that sort of thing.

And you can create the funny part is everybody that's listening to the show knows exactly what the game is, except I know. So you're explaining it to everybody who knows. I know. OK, whatever. Anyways, it's but it is so the psychology behind how they work.

Everything is ridiculous. And again, like I said, like there are two types of people that are in this game. There are the people that have just completely given up. So there's like level ones are all around me that just, you know, they logged in. They tried it and said, I'm not spending any money. I'm out. They didn't quit it.

I made it a point to see how long I could go without spending a dime. And I'm still there. But like you're on you're on day four. It took me it took me till week three until I started to spend money. And then the first time I spent money, my first purchase in this game was fifty dollars.

Now, here's the OK, that's fifty dollars. I felt so much shame when I when I pressed that OK to buy button that you have no idea. I will. I promise you, Jason, I will not spend a dime, but we're going to continue to do updates on this show to see how long I last, because here's what I did.

And this is where it gets a little crazy. You join an alliance, right? And they start sending messages. And normally, especially when I'm a gaming guy, I don't I don't engage. I don't talk to anyone. I don't want to stir to me. But I finally said, fuck it.

And I sent a message out to my entire alliance. And I said, I am doing an experiment. I refuse to spend any money. They surrounded me. They're all spending money like no tomorrow. They're all like a fucking level 15 or something like that. I'm still like at three. They surrounded me to protect me.

No way. I may be in this game for fucking months, but so here's the thing, though. I was a level 58 by the time I was done. If if you get one person, you can work for a week to build up everything.

You have you have busted your ass on this. And if a level 64 comes along while you're sleeping and you forgot to save up enough coin to say, oh, put me in protection mode so I can sleep and you don't have another six bucks to spend to go in protection mode.

You wake up in the morning and everything that you've worked for a week on is gone and you have to wait another week before you're even back to strength. And in between then, all of their friends from their guilds come and just rape you and destroy you. The point is, it doesn't matter what level you're at.

If somebody wants to kill you, they will kill you and not no amount of money will save you unless you spend crazy amounts of money. You could spend a car and still get raped on that game. It's it's amazing the psychology behind how they just they they extract money from just your soul.

Again, this is what I found fascinating about these these games that are out there now. And and I really I'm terrified for the future and the kids that are out there now because they've gotten so good at making sure that these things are so gamed that you will if you are at all invested, you're opening up your wallet and you're dropping coin like no tomorrow.

And yeah, the funny thing is, we know we know that what they're doing and we still fall for it. You cannot play these games unless you spend money. No, you can't. There's there's no way to do it. You will get destroyed immediately. And again, it's it's I feel really bad for this alliance that I joined because I was honest with them, but they seem to be into it and they are protecting me for the time being.

We'll see how long that lasts. But they're they're like, cool, man. Let's let's see what happens. So they're all surrounding me and protecting me and just letting me grow at my own pace with not spending a dime. We'll see how long I'm here. So yeah, until until they get they get raped and then there's nobody left to protect you.

We'll see because I had I had a really cool guild of 25 guys and I'm pretty sure they were all like 13, but they were, you know, on my level and everybody protected each other except for a couple of times when the entire guild got raped and everybody bailed.

They're just like, we can't do it anymore. We're out of money. Our allowances run out. My mom won't pay me to vacuum the carpet this week. So what am I going to do? The sad thing about it is if there were a game like this that actually really didn't involve money and everybody was on a level playing field and we were all just doing it.

I'd be totally into it. I would I would be I would play it every fucking day. Well, it's really addictive. I do enjoy the whole concept of it. It's just I refuse to give them a fuck. Well, civilization was the first one of Starcraft.

That's why I always played Starcraft because it was the same thing, but much shorter. You can play a game of Starcraft online or free. You just buy the game and then you play and then, you know, you're done. It's that's why I love Starcraft so much. Right. Um, and if you like games like this, you'd probably be actually really into Starcraft.

OK. Yeah, except I paid for Starcraft and all of the security things that Blizzard have going on now. I can't get back into my Starcraft account because I came from an IP address. They didn't understand. And they're like, OK, well, we we canceled your account. You have to call these people.

You have to do all this. Oh, you have to get your two off token on your phone and you have to do. I mean, honestly, so many hoops to jump through just to get back into my account. I'm just like, you know what? I'm going to go watch The Real Housewives of Who the Fuck Ever. That's it. Yeah, well, I don't I don't fall that low, but yeah.

Well, I'm proud of you. I'm proud of you for giving it a shot. Honestly, I am. You know, the whole first day when you're just kind of on this thing where you're figuring out how it all works. It was super cool and super exciting. And then, you know, by day two, I was like, ah, this entire thing that this isn't a game for me to play.

This is a game for the creators to figure out how to get money out of my wallet. And they're very, very good at it now. Here's the interesting thing that you didn't bring up, which is what really got me into this game and really kept me going with this game. The the complexity of what they're doing in that game, the computational skill that they had to create that game is off the chart.

I'm playing this game on my iPad with a hundred other or thousand other people in real time on literally even when I put it up on my phone. I'd play on my phone on the crapper and I'm like, I am playing a real time strategy game on a little brick in my hands.

They they know so much about how to make these games performant, look good and still be enjoyable when they're not raping you for cash. It's you know, people forget the fact that, you know, this has never existed before.

Oh, if only we were to put this amount of effort into doing something actually that was, I don't know, useful for society. Well, it's useful for the people that work there because they're making bank. Hopefully they will become, you know, the Bill Gatesians of the the next century and and cure disease.

But anyway, but again, this is this is prime example number one of why I've stayed away from gaming, because as I was playing this, I was starting to realize they just want to take my money. But then I saw an ad for the Star Wars version and I was like, oh, oh, seriously.

But I know it's going to be the same thing. So shit, I'm going to have to try that one. Yeah, well, I'm done with this one as soon as I finally get killed off. Updates next week. OK, so so and and on that note, I am actually on the same path as you right now. OK, because I played Candy Crush.

I spent a lot of money on Candy Crush. You're a fucking idiot. I know I am because I called it research, but it was just me being weak willed. So now I'm playing Candy Crush Soda Saga. Hold on. The next one. Just just as a clarification here.

It wasn't Patreon funded research, was it? No, this was before we had Patreon. This is when I was living in Pennsylvania in my mom's basement. I'm helping her move. OK, no, no Patreon money has ever gone for my gaming habit. All right. Candy Crush Soda Saga.

I am on your quest. I have not spent a penny. I am on level 256 and I are actually 261 as of this morning's poop. And my friend who works, she used to work at Sony, whatever. She's she's like 15 levels ahead of me.

Nobody else has made it this far. The only other people on my timeline when I look at my Facebook friends, Chris Messina, the guy that invented the hashtag. He's he's playing with me. And I think Kent Nichols, the Ask a Ninja guy and then her. I mean, my goal is to pass her and get to the end.

There are 350 levels. I'm at 261. I have not spent a dime. And here's the trick they, you know, basically it's like kind of reverse Tetris and shit drops and all that stuff. If you stop playing in and delete it from all your devices in a rage like I do probably twice a week or how you leave L.A.

Yeah. When you bring it back on, they let you through that level that you were stuck on. They like their their their sorting algorithm just happens to let you through that level. That is so smart. It's amazing. I'm like, these guys can figure out how to do array shuffling to the point where it is a science, you know, because I'm looking at this thing.

I'm like, OK, these are arrays of arrays. We've got three dimensional arrays of pieces on a board. I'm going to get nerdy for a second. Oh, God, because look, I mean, have you built one of these? Have you ever tried to build these games? No, because I hate them anyways. Why would I build one? Because clients pay you for it.

We did that at Paramount. We built these games. Yeah, people paid us to build them. And learning the math and how it works with array shuffling and things like that. The fact that they can do smart array filtering is just amazing. But that's why I'm old and getting out of the programming business.

But damn. So, yeah, I'm 261 levels in. Not a penny on Candy Crush. I think I think that alone should get me a medal. All right. I'll give you one. OK. So let's get back to real stuff. Private Internet access, what we talked about previously in the comment section.

They've just finally released their iOS app. Because I will actually really do. I am going to get it now because anytime I travel, I'm pissed off. I can't keep up with shows. So, yeah. I mean, before you could kind of manually go in and set your your VPN settings. But now they have an app and then you can pick whatever region you want.

And they've got the most regions out of any VPN service that I've ever used. And that's why we actually promote them. Because you can be damn near anywhere in the world from their drop down. I mean, and it's amazing. I love those guys. Everything works.

And the iOS app is free. And if you want to go watch HBO, no matter where the hell you are in the world, you can probably do it with this. So definitely check out the app. There'll be a link in the show notes. Right. Cool. My next app is called Mac Bartender.

Right. I got super excited thinking this had something to do with booze. No, no. Yeah, that disappointed me then. I know you're back on the booze for this show. But Mac Bartender is it's a menu bar manager because I've got, you know, 45 things in my menu bar.

And this actually lets you say what shows, what doesn't show. And it's a really nice manager. And if you it gives you a month for free to try it out. Oh, so they do that whole thing that Windows has built in. Except the problem is you're stuck using Windows then. This is 15 bucks and it does a really nice job of letting you sort, shuffle or hide different menu bar items.

The apps themselves should let you do this. But sometimes you get shitty apps like my universal audio app that I use to record this show. They won't let me hide it. Flux, I can't, you know, but, but it also just puts it in a, in a sub menu. So if you don't want to hide it, you can, you can have a disclosure menu.

Yeah. And in Windows, they do let you do that. Interesting. You're still stuck with fucking Windows. I will. It's worth 15 bucks for me. How much does Windows cost? How much does Windows cost? It's going to be free on the next one. On the next one.

How much does Windows cost till now? I have no idea. When was the last time you had to pay for fucking Mac OS? Rest my case. Okay. Anyway, moving on. This comes on the computers you buy. Tab suspender for Chrome. It's an extension. Windows 7 is the most stable OS that's ever been built by humankind.

Oh, Jesus Christ. Please. Have some more of that whiskey. Okay. You drink that Apple Kool-Aid. Okay. This is, I'm talking about Chrome. Okay. This is Chrome. This is a Chrome extension. I know. Okay. I'm very actually.

This works on your Windows PC. I'm being nice to you and giving you something that will save you memory because. This works on my Windows PC and it's actually just kicking in right now because the sun is setting by the time that we're doing this show. Flux, which I can actually control on my window integer.

Yeah, so can I. Flux kicked in for me the same time it kicked in for you. What's your point on Flux? I don't need to have Mac Bartender to have it in my menu bar. No, it was in my menu bar. I don't want it in my menu bar. That's the point. I can remove it without a $15.

But I can put it in a submenu so I can save the real estate. Okay. Tab suspender. I sense some editing going. Tab suspender. Basically, if you have a tab open, you can set a timeout on it where it will suspend the tab.

If you have a bunch of Google windows open, like if you're using Google apps, those things over time will just suck RAM out of you like a fucking succubus. And you can set, I have a five minute timeout on my tabs now and it will just freeze the tab. You can go in and manually restart it or have it start up again, but it will free up all the RAM that that tab is using while you're not using it.

It is, it's been a lifesaver for a bunch of guys I know. And Jordan from the Art of Charm actually sent this to me today because he was, his computer was crashing all the time because he's got eight, you know, Google doc windows open at any given time and it just sucks up the RAM. I just added it actually, because this is fantastic.

I have this problem all the time and it's actually even worse. I don't know if you've run into this problem a lot, but for whatever reason, a bunch of sites that I have to go to still tend to use some fucking crazy ass flash shit. And, uh, the flash plugin will crash constantly if you just leave it open.

Oh yeah. Yeah. I have a tab open that has something that's running flash that I don't want to look at. And I want to get to later the browser will crash all the time. So this is, I, yeah, I just installed it. We'll see how this works. Yeah. So far I've, I've been using it all day today and I've been checking my, uh, CPU level with, uh, what am I using for this?

Oh, I, I stat menus, I stat menus and the CPU level has just dropped. And the memory level has dropped like substantially after I installed this. Cool. Well, much appreciated. I just installed it. Cool. Uh, my last one, this is a gadget.

This is a gadget that I have known about this for a very long time. I think, I think as old crew have known about this since the dawn of the internet. Um, and since I'm a huge fan of the morning dump with Jordan Cooper and we have sponsored their theme song, I thought, uh, I, I wanted to keep this one for us.

I was going to send it to him for his fecal beat news. Uh, but since this is old, I thought that I would throw this in here for you kids who have never heard about this. And as I was traveling across the country, I'm thinking a couple of times when I'm stuck on a road with no facilities for about 150 miles, I could have used this.

This is called uncle boogers bumper dumper. What it is, is a, it's a device that hooks onto your trailer hitch for your car, which holds what is basically a five gallon bucket, a lid and a roll of toilet paper.

It is patented US patent number 612-5480. And it is called the world famous bumper dumper, by the way, but is the ultimate, ultimate portable toilet for the outdoorsman. They would like to remind you that the bumper dumper registered trademark is not just an accessory.

It's a necessity. It is a necessity. And there were many times on this trip where I thought, man, I wish me, I wish I had me an uncle booger bumper dumper. And that's why it's in this show today. Because if you're traveling, you kind of want to have this in your trunk as a backup. Yeah, I suppose you do.

I, this is absolutely ridiculous, but anyways, it's very funny. It's been around for a long time. I had no idea it was called uncle boogers because it actually, uh, I became aware of it because of a radio show back in the old day here in LA called the frosty, Heidi and Frank show, which popularized the bumper dumper.

And, uh, that's how I learned about it. It's absolutely fantastic. And in fact, I'm actually going to make a pledge right now, uh, because they have t-shirts. Yes. Yes, they do. For any listener, the, the, any listener within the next two weeks of hearing this episode that goes to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash GOG, and gives us a donation of $20.

We will send you a bumper dumper t-shirt. Well, we will hang on 20, 20 bucks on Patreon is 240 bucks a year. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, if they just want the shirt, they can go buy it themselves, but if they want to support our show, we're going to give them a shirt.

Awesome. Okay. And by the way, uh, their, their store page, uh, says now available because they've available. They could not spell it right. And they've forgotten L. Okay. Well, uncle booger needs, uh, I'm sorry. Uncle booger needs an editor.

That, that might be the better show title. The title of their t-shirt page is UBTNC. I was going to label this section ass blast from the past, but, uh, yeah. Yeah. There you go, go, go sign up for us at a Patreon. We will send you an uncle booger, uh, t-shirt.

Give us a $20 donation. We give you a uncle booger's bumper dumper t-shirt. If you sign up for 50 bucks and stay more than three months, we will actually send you a bumper dumper. Yeah, we will. And to be fair, uh, full disclosure, given the titling and spelling on the order page, this only applies if we can actually order one.

I'm not so sure we can actually get an order through.

Media candy. Steve Albini has put out an article this week. It's, uh, well, it's not actually an article, but it was a piece in Billboard about a speech he gave at a conference. Not a conference, but a, uh, what do you call those things where you sit in the desert and do ecstasy and listen to music?

A festival, a festival. Coachella. Yeah. Yes. It's called Steve Albini. Copyright has expired. Okay. Uh, he was playing with his band shellac, uh, way out in the middle of nowhere. I think it was Portugal or some crazy place like that. But, um, he has the, basically got on his soapbox and said that he thinks copyright is over.

That intellectual property rules are not going to apply in the future. That things have changed just as a society on how people are living with, you know, like, you know, people are doing selfies at shows and you just have to get over it.

There's no smoking at shows anymore. And like just a lot of broad statements. And there are a lot of them that I really agree with. There are a few that I disagree with, but I am really curious, Brian, what your take on this piece is.

Because as we've talked about with the music industry, how difficult it is now to, to make a living. And Steve Albini is out there saying that, well, the, the fundamental protections that artists have in copyright is, is basically dead because nobody respects it anymore.

What do you think? Well, I mean, I, I sadly agree with the statement. I, I don't think you throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think there's an incredible amount of importance with the idea of copyright and into intellectual copyright. I mean, it's ridiculous to say that it has no place anymore.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Steve Albini. He is a genius in many, many ways. He's a very amazing engineer and engineer is one of those terms in the music industry that's really misunderstood a lot of time because people think it's, it's, you know, it's dialing in certain things.

It's on some gigantic mixing board. A lot of being an engineer or producer, because those terms can be kind of used interchangeably a lot of the times is just the, it's how to get a performance out of a band. And there's no denying that he's done great work with that. And he's somebody who, I mean, his best known work is his work with Nirvana and he was producing them and engineering them.

And it was very interesting. And way back in 1993, he was espousing these, these ideas. And he's always said, I don't do contracts. I don't do this. I don't do that. Again, my respect for him is in, is in the fact that he's an outlier. He is one of these people that kind of gets away with it, but the vast majority of people don't.

And I think his ideas can be misguided. I think they're work for him. They don't necessarily work for other people. Uh, I would love to know if anyone listening to this podcast right now has ever heard a single song by his band shellac. I have, I know, I know you have very into the scene.

The only time you ever hear about Steve Albini is when he makes these crazy statements that get picked up by shitty music journalists because we need content. Or what about when Courtney Love steals his statements verbatim and then republishes it as her own?

Well, who gives a fuck about Courtney Love's music anymore? Well, no, no, no. Steve Albini doesn't believe in copyright, so he should be okay with Courtney Love taking his statement and putting it. back out as hers. Oh, but he's not because he can't think about that, doesn't he? Yeah, so it's all bullshit.

I mean, you can say this and yeah, I like the conversation. I like the fact that he's out there stirring the shit up. Do I agree with half of what he's saying? No. Is it working for him? Yes, because he's getting published sort of because. Yeah, and he makes his money, honestly, being a quote unquote engineer and and turning bands into better bands and making records for them.

I, you know, and I'm on your side with this one by saying that this is this is an overly broad statement with no solution. You know, it's like, OK, I can say I mean, we say it all the time. Shit's broken. How do we fix it? And that's the thing. He says this is all broken, but he does not provide any framework for something to replace it because there has to be some sense of ownership.

We cannot just as a society, because unfortunately, we all have to make a living. We can't just say, well, everything is everything. And just because everybody is pirating stuff, I guess we just have to accept it. No, no, no. Yeah. And everything he's saying is is fucked up.

No, that's this. I don't think everything he's saying is fucked up. I think I think he has very good points on many things, but he doesn't give an option on how to fix it. And he's just saying we will eventually fix it. But right now things are fucked and everybody should just be. But basically what he's invoking is the Bill and Ted maxim of be excellent to each other.

But, you know, pay me. I'll do my work and you don't steal my shit. That's kind of what he's bringing out in this. Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, well, what he's really doing is our podcast. This shit is fucked up and broken. What about it? I don't know. Well, hey, man, at least sometimes we give a give options.

Actually, that's true. We've spawned a couple gazillion easily three billion dollar valuation ideas. It's just we're too lazy to go out and get the three billion dollar valuations. Oh, my God. If I could have just saved the money that I spent on domains for the ideas we had in the first 20 episodes of this show.

We'd probably be profitable. Yeah, cut that bit out so they don't go back and listen to the first 20 episodes. Yeah, please don't. Just drunkenly stumbling through those ideas. Now, speaking of people who have made money off of ideas, Kung Fury. Now, this came to me through through our friend John Chevron from Chicago.

Really good buddy of mine. He's an InfoSec musician, an amazing musician and a really cool guy. And he sent me this video for Kung Fury. I had never heard of it and it was apparently a Kickstarter and they got like six hundred thousand dollars.

Jesus, no, it was it was ridiculous. It was like six hundred thousand dollars from seventeen thousand seven hundred backers. OK, I'm going to make this silly movie that I think is kind of reminiscent of Buckaroo Banzai slash what's the one in San Francisco?

Shit, I covered it on doesn't have legs. Big trouble in little China. Big trouble is this big trouble in little China meets Buckaroo Banzai meets Tron. OK. And their company is called Laser Unicorns. Nice. I'd never heard of this. I looked at it last night.

It's a half an hour video that they made. It's got 12 million views. So I'm sure a good portion of our audience has already heard it or seen it. And it was amazing. It was utterly fucking amazing. This is where Kickstarter comes in and actually makes something good in the universe.

Granted, the seventeen thousand seven hundred people, all they got was a half an hour video and maybe a T-shirt six months late. But either way, man, this thing was a fun watch. This was such a fun watch. And it's got David Hasselhoff in it. See, you just put the link in the show notes and I was not intrigued.

But now I am. This thing was I had no idea what it was until last night when I'm falling asleep and I hit play. And, you know, like the first three minutes, I was just like, OK, this looks silly. And then the production value just kind of kicked in. I'm like, holy Christ, they spent a lot of money on this.

And then I'm watching it even more. And the story was hilarious. The characters were spot on. The acting was great. But here's the thing. The kung fu was off the fucking chart. This was like watching like a live action Mortal Kombat meets Nazis from the moon meets video games.

Go crazy with Tron and they're dinosaurs. There's a character called Triceracop. They had a cop that was a Triceratops. Come on, you got to watch it. All right. Maybe. First, I'm going to have to go back and rewatch Buckaroo Banzai because I loved that movie when I was a kid.

OK, well, now that I'm out here, I'm going to drag you into a doesn't have legs and we're going to do Buckaroo Banzai because I remember hating that movie. I loved it. Yeah. Well, I also hated Big Trouble in Little China. But then when we did the episode, I loved it. So anyway, OK, so there is a guy.

There's a character in Kung Fury called Hacker Man and there's another video called Hacker Man's Hacking Tutorials. How to hack time. OK, you got to watch these in succession. They're going to be in the show notes. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. There's also a link to the Kickstarter page so you can get the backstory on it.

But damn, I got to say this made my night last night. I like I took three minutes. But as soon as I hit that three minute mark, I had a smile on my face for the next twenty seven minutes. It was so much fun. I mean, and by the way, Hitler's in it.

Come on. Of course. So my final my final one for this week on media candy era. Yes, media candy. I'd scroll. I scrolled too fast. I'm we're we're doing this late. Death Note.

Mm hmm. I've have I mentioned Death Note on the show before? I don't think we've actually even gone into Japanimation at all. I think they call it anime. I think Japanimation is like, you know, the culturally insensitive version. Oh, is that what the octopuses?

Yeah. Yeah. That's basically the octopuses in your ladies. But no, Death Note is a great series. There's only a few episodes like thirty seven, I think. Yeah, thirty seven. It's basically a story about a guy who finds a notebook that a angel of death drops where you can write anybody's name in it and kill them.

OK, the fact that they get thirty seven episodes out of it. Amazing. But the animated version is just the start. There are three full length action movies made out of it, like live action movies that they did so well and were so true to the original anime version that I have to recommend the entire spectrum of Death Note.

So if you get into it, you will love it. I guarantee it. All right. I'm just saying like I've never watched any anime because I got so pissed off about not being able to understand what the fuck was going on in Robotech.

Well, who fucking likes Robotech? And Robotech was awesome when I was a kid. I still can't figure it out. I've tried to read that Wikipedia page like 20 times. I don't know whatever happened. Oh, no, this dude, this will change your mind. You have to get into that. You have to check it out. OK.

When you're done with, you know, the Vorkosigan series. Moron of the week. Oh, Moron of the week, which is quickly becoming my absolute favorite segment. Let's get into this quickly. I think we should actually put this at the top of the show. I'm starting to think so, too, because there's just so many good things that have been coming out recently.

So let's start with Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post, also known as Sideboob.com. And yeah, so she had an interview from the fabulous future America and the world in 2040.

So she was talking about the future and things that are going wrong right now, which are going to lead to horrible things in the future. The quote being fetishizing social has become a major distraction, also known as your entire fucking site. This is funny that you linked to a Salon.com article about Arianna Huffington, who runs Huffington Post.

I'm sorry. This is snake eating itself. We're going to put it up on the Huffington Post because she's basically saying her site is shit and part of the problem. Yes. Yes. I love your note. Hello, pot, meat kettle. Yes. And for Hello, pot, two, meat kettle, two, number two on Recode.net, the Snapchat CEO, even Spiegel, the tech bubble is real.

And yes, it will burst, says the guy with the bullshit $15 billion valuation. Yeah. He's you know, he's like shoving money into duffel bags right now and getting and getting them as far out of the country as possible. Yeah. So he is calling the entire bubble completely real and that's going to burst when he is one of the biggest companies causing that stupid bubble.

So there you go. There's two. Okay. Number three, a superior court judge Jane Galena Mecca from New Jersey orders that the Bergen Dispatch, which is the local paper, take down a news article about a child custody case.

Yeah. Then everybody said, yeah, no, it's called the First Amendment. Free speech. And she she backpedaled. That's that's pretty much it. They're like, oh, here's the statement. While the Bergen Dispatch reviews its options, we have confirmed that Bergen County does currently remain part of the state of New Jersey and that currently New Jersey is still part of the union of states that is governed by the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

As such, Bergen County citizens continue to enjoy the right of freedom of speech and the right to a free press. Boom. Gotcha. There's a lot of education that is usually involved with becoming a judge. You'd think. Anyways, yeah, good times.

I thought we talked a bit about FIFA last week. And if you pay attention to this at all, it's just gotten more moron-y than ever possible. Sepp Blatter, who is the most horrible person in FIFA and the head who won his election, has since stepped down after his election.

Bye bye. So he's a fucking moron. And even better than that, one of the arrested FIFA officials who is saying. He tried to post a video. He decided to publish the video to defend himself and thank his supporters, in which he actually quoted an Onion article.

This was the greatest thing on the internet this week. I'm sorry. This was the single greatest thing on the internet this week. It really was. This fucking idiot who has basically destroyed the sport that I love for so many years, went on and recorded his own video in which he named this Onion article, which is linked in our show notes.

Basically, the Onion article title is FIFA frantically announces 2015 Summer World Cup in the United States because everything's gone so fucking wrong. He said, look, we're trying to fix things. He's like holding up a printout of the article. It's like single, single handedly won the internet for the week by being so fucking dumb.

It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. So yeah, Moron of the Week is quickly becoming my favorite segment. We had a trifecta last week and the hits keep coming. Ooh, fancy! Fancy! Ooh, fancy!

This one pisses me off because it's a Kickstarter. I'm not so happy about that, but I do love the concept. Doppler Labs is a company that is basically doing a Kickstarter for something called, what are they called exactly? Here. They're called Here. Well, I'm sure they can't trademark that.

Hear active listening. Change the way you hear the world. This is actually really interesting. Use two wireless head buds and a smartphone app to control what you hear and how you hear it. It's not just volume. It's also frequencies and things like that. And you can really kind of dial in an optimal listening experience in any situation that you're in.

And obviously it comes with a bunch of presets, airplanes, office, city, live music. So you can crank things up and down. So basically, in theory, and I would love this company to send us a pair so I can test them out. I could basically pop these things in and they would replace the $200 molds earplugs that I have for concerts that drop the decibels down but still let me to hear every nuance of music.

The $250 noise cancelling headphones that I would use on an airplane and the earbuds that I use for regular walking around in listening to music but still wanting to be sure that a Prius isn't going to hit me when I'm walking. Head, head buds. I would, if these things work as advertised, I'm all over this.

Okay, so here's the deal with these guys. The Kickstarter was for $250,000. They're at $332,000 now. So they've been funded. They've got 25 days to go. So you can actually sign up for them and you'll get them in two years when they finally make them. In two years. The interesting thing about it is if these things actually work, which looking at just the form factor, I can't see how they can put this much technology in it, but I am old and I don't understand technology anymore.

If these worked and you could turn down the real world and turn up like augmented reality, like you've got something on your phone, if you're doing like a story, like I'm doing an augmented reality story and like, or if I'm a spy and like I can have control talk to me and turn down the ambient volume and then send me messages, that would be really cool.

That's what they're claiming that these things can theoretically do. You can turn down ambient volume, but turn up like internal volume and do all sorts of stuff. They're hideous and no spy would ever wear them, but they look like they might have something if the technology works like it's advertised.

If this works, it will be a massive game changer. I'm not entirely buying it and I'm also not exactly emboldened by the fact that all their promotional videos involve them being at Coachella, hanging out. Okay, hang on. Here's one.

In the preset modes, we've created specialized algorithms that target and turn down specific frequencies while allowing you to remain aware of other sounds in your environment. One of the frequencies that they have a preset for is baby crying. No, I mean, I did audio engineering in college.

I'm well versed in a lot of this stuff and I've talked to some of my engineer friends and I've had them take a look at this and they say, well, everything they're saying sounds probable, but none of us believe that this can actually be done with one device in a way that actually works well.

Works well. Yes, that's the thing works well. A little bit of an adjustment, but you are not going to see what they're actually claiming that they can do. That's not going to work great. But who knows? I mean, and it's not two years. Well, I mean, who knows? It's Kickstarter. It's always bullshit. They're saying August 2015, but I seriously doubt that would happen.

I am actually intrigued enough that, let's see, if I can pledge $5 or more, do I get it? Oh, here's the thing. Six hour battery life, multiple silicone tips, blah. The case that they come in is a charging case and holds two full charges. So you can get 12 hours out of them by putting them back in the case.

I wonder if it's some kind of inductive charging, which is interesting, which I think that would be the better tech for, if I was going to run this, I would like do inductive charging for Bluetooth headsets. Yeah, that's actually more interesting. We'll see. I mean, if the buy-in price is low enough, I might take one for the team on this because I'm so intrigued by the concept.

But we'll see. I really don't think they can do it. Okay, here's what we got. It's $200 for a set. Ah, shit, that's too much for me to buy in on something I don't believe is going to work. Well, you know, I think that we can, I think our Patreon backers just funded us for $220.

So if you would like, I would, I would take one for the team and buy these to, oh, no, I'm not. The estimated delivery December 15th or 2015. No. Yeah. Yeah. Let's hold off on this one. And yeah, let's see. I mean, I'm going to keep an eye on it because I'm really intrigued in this technology for, for numerous reasons.

I mean, obviously just being into audio and all that sort of stuff, if they can do what they're claiming to do, it's going to be a massive game changer. We'll see. Oh, you said game changer. It's a big deal. It really is. I mean, if they can do, if, if look, the concept is solid, the concept is solid.

And if they can, if I, even if they're not the guys, somebody will do it. We have an entire generation of kids that are basically almost deaf now because all they've done is crank up their iPhones at top volume and had earbuds in their ears their entire lives. This could actually make a serious difference in terms of their ability to listen.

If this could do what it says it can do. If they've got the tech. Yes. It all comes down to if they've got the tech. And you know, if, if I had never bought a pair of noise canceling headphones, I wouldn't believe it, but I have a pair of bows and I put them on and I turn on the power and it gets quieter.

I did not understand how that was possible until I got the bows, but now I understand that. So if they can take that concept and literally turn down the volume on the real world, I think they, they, they've got something. Sample in, sample out, cancel out waveform.

It works. Closing shout outs. So if you want to feel like a really grumpy old geek, think about Ferris Bueller. Now the movie came out 29 years ago in 1986, but some crazy people with way too much time on their hands who are also geeks figured out.

And, uh, by watching the exact game that they went to at Chicago's Wrigley field, it was the Cubs versus the Braves. That was June 5th, 1985, which is exactly 30 years ago today when they shot that scene. That's awesome. That is awesome.

And I did see this movie in the theater with my dad. The, the year later when it did come out. So shout out to Ferris Bueller and the entire crew and, uh, Wrigley stadium. And 30 years ago today, they were shooting that scene. Yes.

And technically it's Wrigley field, but, uh, the, the, the whole thing about Ferris Bueller, I still have an Abe Froman sausage King of Chicago t-shirt that I wear regularly and get name called every time I wear it out. It was an absolutely genius movie. I don't know if you've seen it recently.

And I think this should be something that we should do as a, as a, does it have legs now that you're in LA? Cause I would actually watch this again and, and figure out if I still like it. I think I would. I, you know, this is the thing about does it have legs? You never know until you do it. You never know. So I also want to give a shout out to my cohost, Jason, who was very accommodating today, who not only was okay with us recording super late.

In fact, it's almost 9 PM and we're still recording because he was also okay with me taking these drastically long breaks so I could take care of my wife who had some procedure today. So I've been taking breaks to go make soup and toast and other things that are very boring.

So she would feel fine. So thank you very much, Jason, because you're very accommodating. Dude, of course I am. You're my cohost. What the fuck? What'd you think I wouldn't be? Except when it's Christmas and I want to do a show. You always get crazy. We're late. Very late today. In fact, given the amount of editing that you probably have to put in, this may not even come out until tomorrow.

It will come out, well, tomorrow, actually it's tomorrow in some places where it normally comes out early. But anyway, no, it's no big deal, man. Here's the deal. Family's family. You got to do what you got to do. All right. So thank you. So an apologies to everybody for the late show, but there you go. Thanks for listening.

I am Jason DeFillippo and you can find more about me at jpd.me. And I'm Brian Schulmester and you can follow me on Twitter at at Slender Fungus. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan supported show. Check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG. We really appreciate your support.

If you don't want to or can't donate, but still want to support the show, please go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and a five star review or tell a friend. Music for the show is provided by Andy Stachansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy.

Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com geeks.com slash 113. Bueller, DeFillippo, Schulmeister, Bueller. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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