114: Ghost in the Prius

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. Hello, Jason. Hello, Brian. How are you? Oh, I've been sitting here listening to your gardeners for the last half hour.

They're not my gardeners. They're the neighbor's gardeners. Because apparently everybody here in California has to have their gardeners come anytime somebody does a podcast. Do me a favor. Don't be that guy that comes back to California and then just shits on being in California. Oh, that's all I'm going to do. Forever. You're going to be a peach.

I'm going to try. I'm going to try. I just wanted to report that Andy's full theme song is now available for download to our Patreon subscribers on our Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG. So go ahead and log in. And if you've even given us so much as a paltry dollar per month, you get to download his track in full.

Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. It's a little hard to find, but it's the first entry up there right now. But by the time you hear this, it will be the second entry. Yes. Yes, it will. Because Patreon apparently just doesn't want you to have a regular title on normal posts and they just use the same really like shittily cropped image every time.

Can't quite understand their their methodology over there. It's not quite the best designed system in the world, at least in terms of getting content out there. But they are good at taking money and distributing it. So there you go. Yes. Yes. So in in true Californian fashion, I had I had a run in on the one on one the other day with a Prius driver who was playing with his Apple watch.

OK, I literally he was like he had his left hand on the wheel and he turned his hand and he was looking at it. And as I saw him, like, start touching it and I'm in like a little bit in his blind spot. But as soon as he starts looking at his watch, he just starts like not even gradually, but very quickly pulling into my lane because he's not paying attention to going straight.

He's looking at his watch and just literally driving to the left. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, most people aren't good at multitasking to begin with. And everybody just thinks, oh, you know, it's a watch. Yeah. Oh, you can keep your hands on the wheel and play with your watch. Or certainly I can text and drive.

Yeah. No shit. I used to be completely against the whole idea of these automated cars. But now I'm all for it because I realized that it'll get these idiots off the road. Well, not off the road, but off the steering wheel. Yeah, I am. I you know, we joked about the Prius thing many times and your your hatred of them in my and granted mine, too.

But now that I've been back here for a week and a half, it really is bad. There is. It's like really bad. It's a special breed of Los Angelino that gets a Prius. We call them unable to fucking drive. I literally went to Target literally and figure I could because I can't figuratively go to Target, I guess.

And in the parking lot between those pulling in the parking lot and parking, almost three cars hit me. And two of them were Priuses by women who just were looking the other way and blowing through stop signs. Yeah. It's just oh, man, it's pretty standard out here.

Yeah, yeah, it is. And, you know, you think it's hyperbole that how bad Brian says it is. And it's it's true. It is absolutely true. If you have a Prius and you live in California, you apparently just turn your brain off when you sit down to drive. Well, first off, it is kind of all over California in general.

But then as if there were a giant magnifying glass over the state pointed squarely at Los Angeles, it's intensifiedly worse in Los Angeles than it is in all of California. And then if you took a slightly smaller but still very large magnifying glass and put that just over Los Angeles and zeroed in on Santa Monica, this is the epicenter of shitty Prius driving in the entire world.

I don't know, man. Out here in the valley, it's pretty bad, too. Well, yeah, come down to Santa Monica next weekend. I will not do that because I will be in Chicago next weekend. Oh, they will be at Resistance Pro Wrestling. Go to resistancepro.com to get your tickets now. You're flying back to Chicago to go to a wrestling show.

I'm flying back to Chicago to DJ a wrestling show and then see my dad for Father's Day the next day and then I'm flying back. Okay, fair enough for the Father's Day thing. Yeah, it's Father's Day, man. I got to go see my pops. That's right. I guess I'll be down in Orange County. Moving on. Moving on. We got to get going here since we are literally two hours and 40 minutes late.

Running very late. In case you haven't heard us screaming about big data and how dangerous it can be and all of that sort of thing. Just a quick little read. It's an excerpt from a longer book. The link is in our show notes. On Salon, our massive new monopolies, Amazon, Google, and Facebook have the power to move entire economies.

Excerpt from the book called All You Can Pay, How Companies Use Our Data to Empty Our Wallets. And I would argue more than just empty our wallets, they're basically taking over the entire world. So good read and all the reasons why we are scared of these behemoths. Yeah, I'm tempted to pick up this book, but we could have written this book, so I'm not sure if I even need to bother with it.

That is very true. I think if we compiled our rants on big data through all the various podcasts that we've done, that would pretty much be this book. Well, hopefully we're credited in the back somewhere. I'm sure we're not. Speaking of not getting crediting, we did find I stumbled across yet another report that you know I love these things that actually show a little bit of the financials running around in the music world.

This is, again, a link in the show notes. Spotify released some of their finances. So here's how much Spotify pays the world's biggest music stars. And it actually is rather impressive. It's up from – now, see, this would be basically your 1%ers, global superstar, meaning a top 10 artist, meaning 1% of 1% of 1% of all the musicians in the world.

Pulling in $13.9 million this year, up from $7.7 million last year on purely Spotify. So obviously this doesn't include Taylor Swift, who pulled herself off. But, of course, you've got to remember that the numbers are deceiving. This is how much Spotify is paying out to said artist's name.

Chunk then goes to management. Chunk then goes huge, gigantic, ridiculous amount. Chunk goes to record label. A lot of this disappears up lawyers' asses and up their noses through cocaine and various other things. So the artists themselves do not receive that amount of money.

It's significantly less, but it is a big payout. But, again, it's the 1% of the 1%. And the people that are in the top 100, it drastically goes down to $3.3 million. And then there's basically every other artist known to man who is getting still nothing.

Yeah, that decimal point just keeps on moving to the left. Yeah, very quickly. And that is, you know, as unfair as the old system was, there was a better distribution in terms of, you know, basically if you got signed, you got signed. And you got a certain amount of support.

And you got tourist support. And you got living expenses. And you got many, many other things that basically made you to be able to exist as a musician. All of that stuff is kind of gone. And all you get are these payouts. And, yeah, they're basically solidifying just like most of our economy on the 1% that everybody else is fucked.

Yeah, yeah, that's about it. Yeah. So we have talked a lot about investing on the show. And over the last couple of weeks, I've run into some friends of the show and had some conversations with people that listen. And I've realized that I'm kind of an outlier in terms of that I've been investing for years.

In fact, even you, Jason, just recently did your first major investment into Apple. You're not an investor. So I did come across an article that I think would be interesting reading for people that are intrigued in the idea of actually trying to make a little bit of money. Because the stock market is one of the few ways that those of us in the middle class can kind of at least stay on par with the rising cost of living and maybe crawl our way into that 10% or something like that.

It's a really good article that kind of runs through on Business Insider how to get started with investing with relatively small amounts. If you've only got $100, do this. If you've got $1,000, do this. If you've got $10,000, do this. It's a good primer. I think, you know, just because I know that there are a lot of people out there that have not dipped their toe into this, and I think everybody should be doing so.

Yeah, I glanced at this this morning, and it actually is a really nice read. It gives you, like, concrete action steps to where to put it, who to get it through, and it was really good. Yeah, I mean, I've got to say that, you know, one of the reasons that it's a very good write-up anyways, but a lot of their suggestions are the things that I started with my investment, particularly the Vanguard Index Fund.

Which is their $1,000 recommendation. That's the first thing I ever really did as an investor, and the returns on it were great. And I still have it as a big part of my portfolio to this day. So I can basically say, you know, this is some really good information. Awesome.

Look at that. Dropping the knowledge. Yep. Speaking of knowledge, Tim Ferriss put out a quick five-minute video this week on how to triple your reading speed. This comes from an old blog post that he made a long time ago that I actually used to triple my reading speed. So now that there's a video out, instead of pointing people to an old blog post, you can just go check it out.

It's pretty good, I've got to say. And for me, it works. Yeah, I mean, we've randomly ended up talking an awful lot about speeding up reading speed on this show. Jason, by this point, you should basically be able to pick up a book and flip through it and be done with it because of all the different things that you've brought to the show about speeding up your reading.

For me, it's not an issue. I read pretty damn fast. I don't feel the need to read much faster. But I did give his old blog post a look-see. I didn't watch the video because I like to learn from reading. So I read his blog post. And these are things that I kind of basically have just been doing for whatever reason.

It's well thought out. These are definitely, like, I never think about these techniques. But as I was reading the article, I was going, oh, I do do that. And I kind of do that. And I do something very similar to that. So this is kind of how I read anyways. So if people are interested in kind of speeding up their technique a little bit without using silly little things on the Internet that flash letters at different colors and speed through things quickly, this is a good primer, I think, in basically keeping comprehension but getting your eyes going a hell of a lot faster.

Yeah, on the spritzlet thing, that's kind of interesting because I have been using that less and just reading more. Yeah, I mean, I think that those – who knows? I mean, everybody's brain is somewhat different. And it's hard for me to talk too much about this because this is just one of those areas in which I am either naturally gifted or somehow I trained myself when I was really young because I was a voracious reader from basically as soon as I could read.

You know, I just don't see that those little spritzlets and those little gimmicks and tricks that just run through things really quickly are really going to help you. I like Tim Ferriss' thoughts on this here. I mean, it's pretty much straightforward. Normal reading, it's just teaching your eyes a few tricks to move quickly and to not kind of – just keep going, basically.

I mean, if you want me to distill what his thoughts are in 10 seconds, it's don't ever stop. Go fast. Yeah, read fast, but also use your peripheral vision and don't sub-vocalize the words. Those are the two things. If you just take those two things away from it, because, I mean, to get through almost 3,000 articles a week to prep for this show, that's really where I just, you know, got my game on.

People really sub-vocalize their words? Oh, yeah. I did it. That's up until probably a year ago. I read to myself in my head. Really? Yeah. Wow. Again, like, who the hell knows? You're not in other people's brains, right? Exactly. That's why we tell people things, because we're not in their brains.

Okay. Oh, man. Okay. Let's get this show on the road. All right. In the news. For all of the times that you've called me an Apple fanboy, I would like to state for the record that I did not give a shit about the WWDC keynotes.

I have not watched them. I've gotten some of the news, but I really couldn't care less. About what they were announcing this time. So, in that spirit, Brian, what did they do this time? Well, yeah, much like Google had their big thing where they announced a bunch of crap last week and neither of us watched it.

Apple had theirs last week. So, make Google two weeks ago. Sorry for that. A little time slip up. Apple had their thing last week and neither of us watched it. So. Yeah, I mean, it's gotten to the point now where I just feel like I've watched enough of them where I could just kind of put my magic hat on and think of stuff and write it down and it would be close enough to what's going to come out of the keynote.

Well, no, I ran into an article, link in the show notes, that actually I think this may be why you don't care anymore and certainly why I'm not watching it anymore. So, the article postulates and the title is all the revolutionary new Apple products and who it copied them from and it basically runs through everything that they announced and where they originally came from because my theory now as to why you don't care and I don't really care.

Apple used to be the innovator and when they had these big announcements, they were showing us something brand fucking new that was changing the world or at least the geek world or at least made us super excited because this was something we had not seen or thought of before. Apple doesn't do that anymore.

What it does is Apple takes things that other people have developed or other people have brought into the mainstream or other people have conceived of and basically gets them right, makes them better and then mainstreams them to everybody else. Now, I take a little bit of umbrance with that because you say this is a new thing for them.

I would like to point to the mouse. Okay. I mean, we can go back to the very beginning of Apple. Everything that Apple is based on is taken from someone else. Well, yeah, on the grand scheme of things, there's nothing new under the sun, of course, Jason. But I think you get my point. There was a period of time in which when Apple had their conferences, it was exciting to everybody, to the entire geek world because we didn't know what was coming and it did seem to be completely new.

Beyond the caveat of, of course, air has existed forever and they're using air in their product. I mean, look at the iPod. The iPod, yes, game changer. But I'd already had three different MP3 players before the iPod came out. The music store was a game changer. That was a big one. The iTunes store.

The phone. Yes, we had cell phones. But yes, they did something new with that, with the, you know, just the touchscreen-ness of it and made it great. Same with iPad, et cetera, et cetera. There was a period of time in which Apple things were exciting. So can you just go with that premise instead of trying to say everything?

Because you agree with the general premise. Well, yes, I agree with it in the general premise. Apple used to make cooler stuff. Yes. So anyways, that's about it. And yeah, I did not watch any of the announcement. I know that we should be talking about Apple's new music product. But it's so murky right now.

I don't want to discuss it yet. We will be discussing this a lot because obviously half of our show is about music and technology. And this will be the big news of the year. But I don't know how it works yet. I want to see it first before I start to discuss it. And I don't want to join the noise that's out there just talking about it at the moment.

So we're going to hold off on that. And we also, a grumpy old geek's, you know, mantra is we just don't review shit until it's done. We don't speculate. We never speculate. We're not good at it. Nobody's good at it. And why add to the noise? You're right. Yeah. Why add to the noise? You know, they have their notes is basically taking on Evernote.

They're multitasking. Well, Jesus, PCs have had that forever. Apple Maps is actually finally good in theory. Who gives a shit about the watch? I don't know why they're still promoting that. Nobody seems to care unless they have a Prius. They are getting read of magazines, I guess, which is good because that was always a piece of shit.

That's something I've tried to develop for clients on for years and just haven't found a way to do it well. So maybe their new news app will be able to handle that and I can actually get some more development going and some clients in that area. That'd be nice. So we'll see what all this stuff looks like. The only thing, yeah, the only news thing that I'm happy about is newsstand is going away.

So that's one less crappy Apple icon that I have to shove in a folder somewhere that I never see on my iPhone. Yeah, but they immediately gave you the watch icon that you can't get rid of. Yeah. You trade one for another. It's the small victories, but you're going to get a news icon instead of newsstand. Oh, pro tip, pro tip.

I don't know if a lot of people know this. I think I learned this from Sean Bonner, his newsletter. But you can use emoji for folder names in your iOS device. So I do have a little Apple poop icon where I put all my Apple stuff.

That's very clever. I'm not going to actually have to do that. Yes, and where I keep my Bootify and Paziz icons, I have a little cloud emoji. So it's fun. You can just, because the words you never, who cares? Aren't you cute? I know. I know. But by the way, tomorrow you get to meet someone who has an Apple Watch.

We get to play with an Apple Watch in person. Uh-huh. So we'll actually be able to have a little review, a mini review. For people that don't know, Jason has invited me to a barbecue tomorrow. So I will be driving out to God knows where to hang out with him and some other folk.

By any chance, do you have a pool? We have a hot tub. Well, okay. That's where the watch is going. Okay, Doke. Well, I think Kyle's bigger than you. So I don't know. That might be a good fight to watch. Okay. We'll see how it goes. So, yes.

This is a funny article. Check it out. They basically do the parallels between what they steal. But I remember back in the heyday after, was it Macworld? And the people that worked at Apple would go to Macworld and they would see all the shareware developers. And then in about two iterations in like, you know, OS 8.

No, I'm sorry. System 8. System 7, System 8, System 9. Yeah. You would see the cool stuff from those shareware developers. So they've been putting the little guy out of business for years. But it's fun to watch. Yeah, and like we've said in tons of previous episodes, app developers beware.

As soon as your product gets good enough, Apple will just basically recreate it and offer it as part of their next OS. Yeah. And this is an interesting one. Amazon is making ambitious PC games with creators from Portal, World of Warcraft, more, blah, blah, blah.

This comes from Polygon. And I didn't know that Amazon was really just kind of like brain raping the gaming world, like the super elite of the gaming world. They've got a huge, you know, group of talent there now, and they're going to start making their own game systems.

This should in no way, shape or form be at all surprising. Oh, it's not surprising. I'm just surprised it took them this long. As we're seeing, I mean, all these media or all these tech companies are basically trying to become media companies now. Why wouldn't you go to the one media that actually makes the most money in the world?

Gaming is the biggest environment. The gaming is the biggest moneymaker. It makes more money than music, movies, TV, etc. Why the hell not? Well, I'm just like I said, I'm just surprised it took this long because. If you remember, they paid like a gazillion dollars for Twitch. Yeah. Like over a year ago.

And everybody's been wondering what? That's kind of weird. What's the gameplay or the end play here? And now we know. Now we know. Yeah. And, you know, this honestly may have been out for a while, but I generally tend to not follow gaming news. And it just kind of came across my desk this week. But, you know, the interesting thing about Twitch is I've listened to a couple podcasts where I finally started to kind of get the idea behind why it's so popular.

And I would say go back and check out last week's Tech Douchebags. Okay. Well, I was going to tell you what episode of Tech Douchebags to go to if you go to tdb.fm and then you could get the show notes. But for some reason, Jordan Cooper has decided to never do show notes for this because there's nothing there.

I think you probably have to go to the site on 5x5, but there's no link to it here. So, Jordan, if you're listening to this, what the hell is up with this website for Tech Douchebags? I don't know. Anyway, I'm not going to open iTunes right now.

So go check it out. It was a great episode. And it was like the Angry Dad Gamer episode. It's very good. But I learned a lot more about why the mindset behind Twitch actually kind of works. Yeah. I mean, I get it in theory. I don't get it in my brain because I'm not a gamer.

But I do get the theory behind Twitch and why people seem to be really into it. But in the same way, it's like I also understand why people seem to be really into heroin, but it means nothing to me. Okay. Pick your poison. Pick your poison. Yeah. They seem to be about equal.

In a bit of news that I'm going to be, I guess, calling the John Oliver effect since people are starting to use that term because John Oliver is starting to have such a wide-reaching influence. John Oliver just recently did a story about the crappy state of paternity and, well, not paternity, maternity leave just in the U.S.

where women get basically absolutely nothing when they have a baby. And most other, I think it was us and Papua New Guinea are the two countries in the world that absolutely are the worst at this. And everybody else actually allows mom's time off to have a child and continue the human race, you know, which is kind of important.

Richard Branson, crazy-ass, stupid weirdo from Virgin who does crazy-ass, stupid, weird stuff, has done something pretty awesome. He's offering new dads up to 12 months paternity leave on full A. That's pretty kick-ass. That is pretty kick-ass.

Unfortunately, it's not for his big one, you know, his big companies. It's just for his little company right now, which only has like 140 employees. But it's a step in the right direction, I think. It's a step in the right direction, particularly since you and I are both in a country that does not even let the mom have any time off.

So basically, he's allowing the, under this new law, which, new law, hold on a second, why is it considered a law when it's just a company thing? This is a weirdly written article. It's a very weirdly written article. It's on the Telegraph, but I think it's in the UK, there's a new law that basically says that mothers and fathers may divide up to 50 weeks' parental leave between them, which makes sense.

And it's very similar to what a lot of other countries do. Yeah, it's shared parental leave. Yeah, so that's good. So yay, Richard Branson, step in the right direction. You know, again, there's been way too much focus on work and not enough focus on actually having a life and continuing the human race. So it's good to see this sort of thing happening.

Which is interesting, too. I think a lot of it comes back to, I mean, not just the government stuff, but in the US, we are so addicted to working. Yeah. And it's like, why do we want to give people time off? We want people to work more. It's, you know, the productivity clan and everybody going crazy.

And it's, I edited a podcast that's coming out next month for The Art of Charm. And we talked to a mother who literally, when she was done giving birth, was back on the phone making client calls until she had to put the phone down because the doctor had to come in and finish removing her placenta.

I mean, literally, it's like, okay, baby's done. I need to, I need to, you know, hustle. Yeah, study after study after study have repeatedly proven that there is a limit at which, once you pass it in terms of work time spent on work, et cetera, et cetera, productivity decreases.

So there's no point. It's not making us better people to be working as hard as we are. No, definitely not. So, and speaking of John Oliver, and I know, you know, hold on. Well, we'll get into the show notes and Jason had to rebut, of course, immediately. I was saying, to rip off John Oliver, how is LinkedIn still a thing?

And John Oliver didn't invent the, why is this still a thing? He's just repurposing it. He's amplifying it. Yes, he did not invent it, but so what? He's using it, and it is currently a thing on his show. Okay. But how is LinkedIn still a thing? Much less, how do they have offices in the Empire State Building?

33,000 square foot offices, too. And much less, how have they built a hidden speakeasy in it? And this is a kick-ass office. But how are they still a thing? I have no idea. I do not know a single person that uses LinkedIn for anything except social engineering hacks.

That's it. Everybody I know is on it, and I get weird requests now and then from people I don't know at all. But I've never used it for anything, and I've never had anything useful come of it. No, because there is nothing useful that comes out of it. I've gotten one job offer in the entire time.

And this was back when I worked at Technorati, and Yahoo was sending me job offers. That was 10 years ago. The only job offer I've ever gotten from LinkedIn is an unpaid job from them to write for them to provide content for them for free. Yeah, I don't know. The job offer I've gotten from LinkedIn.

Yeah, no idea why it is still a thing. But to everybody I know, it's not. Nobody uses it except literally my friend Jordan uses it to write talks on social engineering hacks. Yeah. Well, they're making enough money to have a gigantic office in the Empire State Building with kick-ass design that actually beats most of the Google offices I've seen.

Oh, man, yeah, I recommend everybody go look at this office because it is gorgeous. I mean, it makes me want to go work for LinkedIn. Hey, if you guys are hiring and you want to pay for my moving expenses to New York City, I'd be happy to come there and sit on that beautiful couch over in the corner and collect an outrageous pay sum for you for doing fuck all.

Yeah, seriously. Yeah, hire some of those people to write content for you instead of asking us to do it. And I'll be at the speakeasy all day. Do you remember the Amazon Echo? That creepy little device you put in the corner and it. The thing that you told me you were going to buy and I said you're crazy and you didn't ever actually buy it, did you?

No, because on the next episode I said, yeah, that thing's a little too creepy for me even. Okay. So now since it's owned by Amazon, they've finally paired it so it will read your Audible audiobooks to you. Oh, joy. I thought that was kind of neat. But the problem is I have a Sonus, which we'll talk about shortly, and it does.

I can't plug it into that. So if I if I stayed in one room, didn't move and wanted it to read to me, although you know what? If you've got a kid and you're a, you know, a latch, you've got a latchkey kid back at home and you want to read it to it at night, you get some Audible and then you hit play and then go out and party.

Yeah, that's great. I bet you got to you got to use it for something. Obviously, because if you if you watch the original video with the echo, those terrible parents who couldn't even figure out how many teaspoons were in a tablespoon. Jesus, that was great. That was so funny. I just actually realized something, Jason.

We've spent you've spent an awful lot of time on this podcast coming up and finding all these all these reading speed things, yet you listen to all your books. You don't even read them. I read I read physical books. I just have more time when I'm doing other things that I can multitask and listen to books like now that I'm in Los Angeles.

It's amazing how much more time I have to spend in my goddamn car, avoiding the Prius driving Apple watch wearing motherfuckers. It's an it's insane how much more time I spend in my car now, now that I'm here and L.A. Yeah. Yeah.

And what I would spend my time on back in Chicago would be going out for a walk while I'm in between things. I could listen to something while I'm walking. But now I just sit in my car and get angry and listen to stuff. But yeah, I like audio books, but I also read regular books. So because now I can read really fast.

Yeah, I know. I know. So I got another article going back to Apple. Apple is said to be building a high speed network for fast content delivery. Welcome to 2015, Apple. Everybody has beat you to the punch on that one. I'm reasonably sure they actually have one already.

Well, they're building like more of their own life. Spanning it because they're getting into streaming and they're hoping to take over the entire streaming market. So they're going to need it. But it's not like they don't have one already. This is this is one of those article headlines that just made me roll my eyes. Yeah. Apple's decided to actually use computing.

Well, yeah. They're making it bigger and better. Yes. Yes. But one thing I do like about this article, and I highly recommend you go check it out in the show notes, is on Bloomberg Business. There's a little blue line that starts to go across the top as you scroll down that lets you know how far into the article it is.

That's that's pretty nice right there. It's OK. I think I covered this around episode 40. It was I started to see that around because a lot of sites what they're doing now that drives me crazy. They show you on, you know, your progress as far as you scroll. And then when you get to the bottom, it lazy loads the next article.

Well, this one does that, too, which is annoying. I hate that. I really hate that. I want to pin down at the bottom and stop. I don't want the next one. And yeah, you did do this. I remember you did this a while back because it was an article that I had that you thought was boring. And then you pointed out the most interesting thing about the page was the way the yes far you had scrolled.

So I'm doing the same thing to you now. OK, OK. And we should just call that the death of the footer because footers become non-existent when you can just lazy load everything and have the unending page. And I do remember that because I was making fun of Twitter, because if you scroll really fast, you can get to the bottom of Twitter.

I think they changed it now. But back then you could get to the bottom of Twitter. You could see the footer with all the contact and, you know, all of the important stuff that you're trying to get to. And then as soon as you get to it, the next bunch of tweets loads and it goes away. Yeah. Those are called false page hits, people. They don't count. No, no, not for that.

It's that's just bad UX on the magazine pages. That's total false page hits. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, they're just they're bumping their numbers. Yep. But it's not like we're getting ads on those pages anyway, because we're all running ad block nowadays. Come on. Yeah. Again, you see all previous episodes and how we wonder how the Internet survives.

You know, it's funny, though. I actually turned it off for wired dot com because they have in place of ads when you when you load up wired. Now it's like, would you really pretty please? We'd really appreciate it. Kind of. You know, we're not going to kill this puppy or anything if you don't do it. But we were really upset.

Could you please turn off your ad block? Please, for the love of God, look at our ads. Yep. I remember revision three a long time ago wouldn't let you watch any videos if you still had ad block on. There are people that there are people that fight back. Yeah. Well, they got to make a living. Right. And cars are going to be fighting back soon because there's new technology coming out that won't let your car start if you've been drinking.

Well, this this exists. It requires a court mandate because you've already been busted for it once or twice now. And I've known a few people that have it. Well, yeah, that's a that that's actually they put a breathalyzer lock on your car. This is passive. So you don't have to, like, literally get down, blow into the tube and then wait for it to register.

Yeah, it's it's funny. Too little too late because basically we're not going to be able to drive our own cars by the time that this rolls out. That's what I'm saying. It's like, OK, self-driving cars are going to be here soon. But I see the the use for it because they're talking about teenage drivers and fleet vehicles as this being a use case.

So if you have a kid and you just said it's like no booze in the car. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And in the way that I was I'm like, OK, well, what if like they're like 10 people in the car and they're all like shit faced and your car won't start? You try. You're the designated driver. But it looks like the way that they're going to do airflow management to make sure only the driver is is the one that's blowing in the hole, which is I don't know how the hell they're going to do that in that confined of a space.

Yeah, I mean, I don't quite get that. You know, stick to the straw. But still, it's a fun it's a fun watch. It's got a little video on how it's supposed to work. I think the most interesting thing is how they're using infrared light to actually do the alcohol detection and the fingerprint technology. So just from a technology side, it's cool.

But from a practical side, my Google self-driving Uber will be here shortly. I don't need this. I mean, I wonder from the technical side, is this if the police are going to start incorporating this for their for their street alcohol tests? They already have that. I think there was an.

No, there was an article that we had a long time ago where they would they basically built that technology into what looks like a clipboard and they would have you roll down your window and they'd stand there with a clipboard stuck in your window. And it would read the ambient alcohol in the air in the car and tell and just give them a green or a red.

If somebody in that car has actually just been drinking, period. Sneaky. Sneaky motherfuckers. Security. We have a hack of the week, Brian.

Woohoo. Kaspersky Labs, the lovely ex-KGB folks in Russia who work on cybersecurity for the rest of the world. They've been hacked. Yep. And it's interesting because this is like the the watchers getting watched by the ones who they watch.

It looks like the guys behind the Stuxnet and Dooku attacks actually got into their systems. Yeah. It's pretty cool. I think it's and they were using like Dooku to electric boogaloo. It's a 19 megabyte toolkit that they put in there and they said it's almost perfect.

Hint being almost. So it's a really neat. This is a Wired article and it still says right here, please do us a solid and disable ad blocker. Thanks for supporting Wired. Yeah, I just saw that too. Which is interesting because I did disable it.

So maybe my ad blocker is even better at blocking ads than I am because I just it's like, cool. OK, keep going, guys. But yeah, this is a nice long article in Wired about like the what happened during the attack. And it said like not too many machines were compromised, but the way they were compromised is pretty goddamn good.

It's ingenious. I was scanning through it and this is it's started to get into way over my own head territory. But it seems pretty, pretty intense. But what I loved was a lot of them, a lot of the stuff, the exploit code that they had, they, you know, purposefully kept in in RAM just in memory on the compromised machines.

So when the machine was rebooted, they lost contact with it, but they were smart enough to say, oh, well, let's just have the main server run the main exploit. So, oh, Joe rebooted his machine. Well, let's just reown that machine and have it phone home again. It's like, God, these guys are good.

Very smart. I know. This is why I just like I just want to make podcasts now. I'm done with the IT thing. I literally I just like I do not want to have a server again because it's like I'm just going to wake up, stay awake at night knowing that anybody can get into it. Yeah, well, the more the longer you and I have been doing this podcast, the more I've realized that the idea of any kind of Internet security is a joke.

Yeah, sure. You can harden things against idiots and DOS and things like that. But if somebody wants to hack you, you're getting hacked. I know. I think the biggest the best thing that I have going for me right now is Cloudflare. I love Cloudflare to death because they've got DDoS protection. They've got hack protection.

They've got everything in there. It is worth every penny I pay Cloudflare to be able to sleep at night. So this this next one's a little interesting. It's this comes from The Verge. Feds can charge you with obstruction of justice for clearing your browser history. Now, they're using a weird law.

It's called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that was kind of put in place to comply with the Enron scandal, basically. Right. And they're using this weird section in Section 802. And you can get basically arrested for destroying, mutilating, concealing, falsifying records, documents or tangible objects with intent to impede or stall a federal investigation.

So they have now they have now used this to basically indict somebody for clearing their browser history. Which is just fucking nuts. So if I run my browser in incognito mode, I'm breaking the law at all times.

No, if you started with it. But if you've already if you already have search records in there, it's it's. So this is basically saying if we've indicted you, don't touch your computer. Pretty much. Pretty much. All right. I mean, I sort of get that.

But it is does seem somewhat insane that that they can say that, yeah, you're breaking the law if you basically touch two buttons on your browser. I know. It's it's kind of clickbaity. But still, it's I thought it was there's a guy who got busted for it. So it actually happens. Yeah, it's not clickbaity to that dude.

No, no, no. Don't drop the soap, my brother. Don't drop the soap. This is one from TechCrunch. Menlo Security emerges from stealth with twenty five million dollars and a plan to defeat malware. Now, normally I wouldn't do somebody got funded kind of articles. But the interesting thing about how they're going to their plan to get rid of malware is fascinating.

Every time you click on a link or open an email, they sandbox it and basically display it and run it in a VM, which is protected from the rest of your system. And I'm guessing they'll probably just VNC it to you because they're just going to give you the display output.

So it looks like you're doing the thing, but you're not doing the thing. You're actually seeing what the thing is doing in a virtual machine. So it's like you're looking at the matrix. Right. Which is my point for this article, that they use the absolute worst bit of imagery I've ever seen in terms of matrix looking slash hacker in the background.

Piece of crap. Horrible Photoshop graphic. The best part about that graphic. Yes, it is terrible. They had the wherewithal to flip the codes so it looks like the guy is looking at everything like the right way around. But the word password is flipped so we can read it.

Yes, this is a piece of shit crap. It is. It is a fucking terrible graphic, but it's funny. I think the graphic is funny, but the technology that these guys are trying to start using or building is pretty cool. It is cool. It's I mean, use cases are kind of odd.

What are they going to build this into every browser? It's got to take so much time. It's got to go into it's got I mean, it's got to be its own standalone standalone thing that they can sell to enterprise because this is for enterprise. This is perfect because everybody in the enterprise is a fucking idiot and clicks on every link you send them.

So, you know, true that's the that's your target audience because people are the problem. The problem generally isn't the technology when you're trying to break into someplace. It's the the people people you're your peoples. Your peoples are your problems. You're better off shutting down your phone lines than you are shutting down your Internet lines.

True that. True that. Comment of the week. Many thanks to new Patreon subscribers, Simon Carter and Patrick P. Thank you. Yes, thank you very much.

Patrick also sent in a comment through our email conduit. At podcast at grumpy old geeks dot com, which you can send to if you'd like to ask us a question, because this is going to be the question and answer episode. Apparently, we have a lot. So Patrick writes.

Finally sent you guys some cash on Patreon. Oh, yeah. Sorry for being a douche and not kicking in some monetary love sooner. As I've been listening to the show since the beginning and loving it. You're forgiven. It's second to Radio Lab for me in always listened to podcasts. Really appreciate and enjoy the work you've both put into the show.

Great stuff. And too tired for anything witty. But I'd like to second Jason's recommendation for Kung Fury and Death Note. Kung Fury is strange as fuck, but kind of fucking brilliant, which it is. Absolutely. Death Note is pretty solid. Takes a while to get through, though, but it's well done and somewhat intelligent.

That said, Brian, I'd highly I'd highly recommend watching Ghost in the Shell. Amazing anime film that got me into the genre from the 90s. But it's intelligent and plays with some really interesting AGI concepts. And the sound design and score are solid. And if you like that, maybe try Akira, which is a classic of sorts.

And then go for Death Note if you have the anime stamina. Cheers, Patrick. Oh, oh, P.S. Add Cowboy Bebop to your anime lists. I think that was technically my entry to anime. Really fun show. Yes, Cowboy Bebop was awesome. Oh, well, thanks a lot, Patrick. I actually know Patrick IRL, as it were.

So I didn't even know you listened. So thank you very much, man. Yeah, cool. Ghost in the Shell. I built the Ghost in the Shell website back in the day when the movie came out in the 90s. And I watched it back then and I thought it was reasonably interesting. Also, just as a related note, since you mentioned Akira, Daredevil season number two showrunner is scripting a live action Akira remake.

So we'll be getting that in the future. I don't know how you feel about that. People who are super into anime hate the live action versions of things in general. So there you go. I just never was able to get into anime. It's not through lack of trying. I've watched Akira. I've watched Ghost in the Shell. You know, I really enjoyed what the hell was that that kid's thing in Robotech.

I liked Robotech, but that's about where I dropped off. OK, I have actually one more recommendation for anime. This probably isn't for you, but for the listening audience, Lane, L-A-I-N. It was really good. It was really crazy and creepy.

And, you know, this little girl who becomes part of a computer and it's, you know, Matrix-y before the Matrix and all that stuff. But it was really it was that was a really fun one. I own that one on DVD still. Cool. Well, thanks again. Thanks a lot, Patrick. Thank you very much. And also thank you to Mr. Simon Carter.

And Mr. Simon. And we also had a comment from one of our Patreon subscribers on our Patreon page. Jerry wrote, great episode again. This may seem out of left field, but I know we are supposed to hate Kickstarter, but I can't. Well, Jerry, first off, just because we hate something doesn't mean make it a requirement for you to hate something.

So Kickstarter has been a very great boon to board games and miniature games. As a board game geek, there have been many there have been some very awesome games come out of it. Yet the trend is apparent as you guys subscribe. Instead of using it to jumpstart a business, it's used to jumpstart products. But I can't help myself.

The games are awesome. A new golden age of board games. So while I feel that the game side of Kickstarter is somewhat healthy, there is a dark side. The FTC is getting involved in a failed Kickstarter project, and he provides a link, which is in our show notes. Just to clarify, Jerry, I really don't have an issue with Kickstarter.

I've never had an issue with Kickstarter. If you are an amateur or if you are doing a hobby or if you are an individual trying to get something off the ground, if you are Milton Bradley putting your fucking bullshit games up on Kickstarter, that's when I have the problem. OK, now now that we've clarified that and I actually funded a Kickstarter campaign this week.

Our buddy Rowan from Budaphy, I actually backed his Cards for Mindfulness campaign, which got funded. So I will be getting my mindfulness card sometime in September or October or November or probably December. No, no offense, Rowan, but we know how these things work.

Yeah, you know, and I have a friend who's done Kickstarter and it's that stuff happens. You don't really know what you're getting involved with. You haven't run through the product cycle before. You're not a professional. You don't have a huge team of people. There are delays. It happens. Yes, you're generally good at other things, not, you know.

Not running the business. Well, no, no, no. Not fulfillment in production on some things. Anyway, our next comment comes from my buddy, John Chevron, who we talked about in the last episode. And he writes, I just need to tell Brian that, yes, there are people out there other than Jason that have heard Steve Albini's bands.

Now, Big Black is hands down one of my all time favorite bands. I do also listen to Shellac, but preferred Rape Man. Thanks for the shout out on the last episode, John. Well, of course, there are other people that have heard Albini's bands. Well, according to you, there was nobody, but, you know.

Well, again, that's nitpicking. I said that Steve Albini is not part of popular culture. He has not made a dent in the larger scheme of things. And 99% of the people that you walk up to on the street will not have heard of Steve Albini. He is an individual, small affair.

That's all I'm saying. Plus, I mean, I expect that the people that are listening to this podcast would probably have heard of Steve Albini. Let's be honest. If you're a grumpy slash old slash geek, we were a bit of a self-selecting sample. None of us were coding listening to the Backstreet Boys. We were coding listening to industrial, listening to punk rock, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, I don't know what kids today are coding listening. Well, yeah, I don't know what the programmers are into, you know. The programmers are probably rocking the Rihanna and all that sort of and the Wheezy and all that crap. But as a self-selecting sample, I don't know a single programmer near my age that listened to anything that wasn't alternative music.

Wait, there's actually a band called Wheezy. I don't know. I think of Wheezy. I think of George Jefferson's wife. Yes. Well, you are out of touch, my friend. I apparently am. But thanks, John. Yeah, I get the point. And I actually prefer shellac. That's probably my favorite of Albini's stuff.

So there you go. Our next comment came from Mark. Comment, I think the conversation about Game of War was great. However, there are games that don't rape you for cash. There's a lot of rape in this episode. That don't rape you for cash out there that is fair. For example, Clash of Clans. Also a very popular game is one where you don't need to pay money, though you do need to devote time to get there.

I have, for example, never spent a dollar on that game, but I have played it off and on for about almost three years, and thus I have maxed out almost everything. Another game that I tried that is also relatively fair in this respect is Summoner Wars. This game and Clash also give you ways, though again time-consuming, to earn cash currency equivalents and rewards you for playing, which really helps those of us free-to-play players.

But did you guys consider something? Sure, Game of War and Clash of Clans are great games, and their devs deserve to be paid, but has anyone thought about this? Any good PC or console game requires away more time from devs, artists, story guys, economists, for those games with auction houses, etc. And they are a one-time fee of $60 on lunch day.

A lot of these app games will run you $200 right away. Is that really fair? I think this is a big problem. I don't mind in-game purchases, but why the fuck do these purchases cost so damn much? $100 in a game like Game of War will get you through, what, a week or two to play the way you would like? This is getting crazy, and parents just have two deeps of wallets these days.

Well, Mark, actually, that is something that as we wrapped our episode last week and I went into the weekend, I was thinking about how I sounded when I was talking about Game of War and how I refused to pay for it. I do realize that even the developers of Game of War deserve to be paid for their product.

I am a staunch believer in that as a content creator myself, and I did have issues thinking about that. And yes, I should be paying something for Game of War. I shouldn't just be saying here that I don't want to pay anything. And Jason did bring that up last week as well. And I am on board with the idea of paying a one-time fee for a game in much the same way that us old people used to pay for our music or anything else.

And I think that is right and fair. And obviously, that was kind of my whole point about the Game of War thing last week, is that the psychology behind these in-app purchases has gotten ridiculous and people just pay a ton of money. And I don't think that the parents have too deep of wallets these days.

I think there are arguments and lots of groundings and lots of problems happening all over the country when these kids are just charging shit up on the in-app purchases. So, you know, he's talking about the $60 one-time fee on launch day. Now, I think that is absolutely fair.

If you're talking about a game that is on a DVD that has no external content and no server-based gameplay, it is a standalone product that you buy that you play. Nowadays, games aren't like that. You have server fees. You have ongoing maintenance.

You have, you know, IT staffs to handle all this stuff. And the only way that they can keep that game going are through in-app purchases, because that $60 isn't going to go all the way there to pay them back. So there's a give and take here. Now, when they do get, quote-unquote, rapey about it and just use psychology to drain your wallet, that's when it does get a little much.

But, you know, there are ongoing costs with this if you're going to keep playing that, you know, I'm fine with a monthly fee. Like, I paid my monthly fee for Warcraft. I paid my one-time fee to get the bulk of the game, and then I paid a monthly on it, like a small stipend, to keep the servers spinning. I'm cool with that.

I think you and I, and probably Mark as well, would probably be okay with that. But what people have discovered, and what these game companies have discovered, is that psychologically, requiring a mandatory monthly subscription fee does not work as well, because that turns a lot of people off.

And they know damn well, if they just let them keep playing, they're going to start buying things to stay in the game. Yeah, and it also comes down to the type of game, too. Like, if you're looking at, you know, Candy Crush, which is a Twitch game that doesn't have storyline and long-term play and collaborative play, they're just trying to rape your wallet.

Now you've got rape in my head, so. I know, it's all about the rape. Well, fortunately, it's monetary rape. Anyway, moving on. Sorry about that. Thanks, Mark, for the comment, and I think we're all on pretty much the same page where this whole thing kind of sucks.

Yeah, it's kind of all ridiculous, but again, it seems to be working very, very well for the game developers. And yeah, they do have costs, and they do need to make money. So, yep, it's just kind of fucked up. Yeah. So, we have four new five-star ratings on iTunes. And I want to thank everybody.

Well, we've got a lot more five-star ratings, but we have four comments. Comments. We want more comments. We've got a lot five-star ratings, but we have four comments tied to said ratings. Yes, please leave a comment if you can. We really appreciate it. And if you do have a question in the comment, I'm not going to say the Quement thing because Nerdist beat that into the ground, and I hate that little song.

But that's for the Nerdist fans out there. Let's get started here. Wraith Zero, he writes, I have a Greg that's been telling me I need to listen to the show for years now, but I finally got a job where I travel a lot. GOG has been a wonderful reason to look forward to the drive and a great way to keep in touch with what's going on in the tech world.

I'd been meaning to wait until I had a question for the show, but it was answered before I finished writing this. Awesome. We're good. Yeah, we are good. Is there any form of communication the GOG crew prefers should that situation spring up in the future? P.S. For the record, I am neither grumpy nor old.

Well, if you are a friend of the Greg that I'm thinking of, you definitely are not old, but grumpy is a state of mind. We want everybody to be grumpy. But our preferred form of communication is become a Patreon subscriber and send us a message in Patreon.

Other than that, yeah. You can send us an email at podcast at grumpy old geeks dot com or go to grumpy old geeks dot com and hit contact. And there is a form that you can fill out that will come to both of us. Yeah, I think probably the only one that doesn't work so well would be posting on our Facebook just because Facebook has really not built that out to be very, very straightforward or easy for us to find.

You can also tweet us. We do check that relatively regularly. Yeah. Anyway, you want to get a hold of us. We don't care. We're not exclusive. So just to holler at my brother and he'll text me. I don't care. Whatever. There you go. That's the best that that way it goes direct to Jason and I'm not even involved.

And then I can just put it in and make fun of Brian later. OK, perfect. We got another one from Colorado, right? Good and grump. I have really enjoyed this podcast. These guys come prepared with come prepared with lots of different things to talk about in a variety of different categories.

Links and discussion on the latest Silicon Valley idiocy, the stupidity of security, books, music, podcasts, movies. This covers a lot more than just general geekery. As an old geek who is probably one generation before them, it is still good to hear that the same stupidity I was dealing with 30 years ago hasn't ended. Oh, thank you very much, Colorado, right?

Yes, as I am fond of saying, this has all happened before and it will all happen again. So it's the same stupidity lives on. It means it's never going to end. At least we'll still have fodder for our podcast, I guess. Well, just remember, in 100 years, there'll be all new people on the planet.

They'll be doing all the same stuff we've done. Oh, great. OK, Forever Learner writes, unbelievably refreshing and honest. Finally, a tech podcast full of the best kind of humor and honesty about relevant news. I'm not sure how I hadn't stumbled upon this podcast sooner, but I'm glad I now have grumpy old geeks in my life.

I feel thoroughly informed, educated and entertained. Well, Forever Learner, you haven't stumbled upon it because people who listen to the show haven't told you about it. So you can break the chain. Tell all your friends about it and then they will feel better about it now that you've told them.

And it will come back on you and you will get that glow of knowing that you have spread the grump throughout the universe. Yes, please do. Tell a friend and don't let don't let people stumble upon it like you had to. Damn it. Our next comment comes from CD Man.

Comment. Dudes, are you handwriting those RSS feeds or what? The latest entry contains a link. Notice the missing S. Also, what's up with not having comments on the website? Jason. OK, so yes, actually, for the show links, I did drop a link to drop an S in the grumpy old geeks dot com link.

We handwrite those. I do that by hand every week. The show notes go into WordPress. Everything else goes into Libsyn. But I have to manually do that because there's no tie in between the two. I did screw up. Thank you very much for letting me know. And we fixed it.

Yeah. He tweeted that pretty damn fast. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this came through. But he also tweeted us. OK, cool, cool. But yes, anytime you see a screw up like that, you can tweet me Jason dot com or Jason at grumpy old geeks dot com. Last week, we were just slammed because it took it.

We were so late with the show. I was working till like after midnight to get it edited and in because we had some cocktails before. It took a little longer. Whiskey and the vodka. Yeah. And so sometimes, you know, booze happens. But Jason, I also have this question because I log into grumpy old geeks dot com and check our feedback and comments all the time.

And I've just realized that we haven't had a comment in a long time. What's up with not having comments on the website? I turned them off because we were getting just spammed. Yeah, that's the spam comments were just off the off the charts. So I turned it off. And also, there was a time with we covered this about 10 shows ago.

There was a an exploit in the core of WordPress that somebody could leave a comment and have a malicious payload in it. So we turned off comments. Actually, I turned off comments then and I never turned them back on because I was enjoying the silence. And, you know, we have other avenues to talk to us.

But yeah, the last time we turned comments off was because of the breach in the core of WordPress that lets somebody do a buffer overflow on the length of the comment and execute malicious JavaScript. So that's why they we turned them off.

But once we turned them off, it's like nobody comments on on blogs or, you know, so bygone era. It's like, why don't you send us a Marconi gram? So that's why. Yeah, it's good reason. There are plenty of other ways to get in touch with us. And it's not worth the security risk and all the problems that come with it and all the advertisements for shoes and all the people telling us how our site is so awesome.

And we could get much better SEO if we click on this link. Yes, exactly. Jay Lester writes, you guys underestimate your powers of persuasion. I have, in fact, started. What? Oh, no, we do not. I have, in fact, started using and have even paid for one password.

And no, not the quote one single password, but the actual goddamn piece of software. I like his vim and vigor. Yes. And a good part of this purchase was your incessant shaming week after week. Rock on, Jay. Awesome. And I don't believe I see a screenshot.

We have two because Chen, you know, fan of the show, sent us a screenshot on Facebook that she has paid for one password. Nice. So we're up to two. We're up to two. We're up to two. All right. Okay. So last of the bunch, my cousin, Dwight Kidder, he works for a bunch of different things.

He's a professional QA guy. But, oh, what's that? What the fuck's that college you went to? MIT? No, no. It's one of those, you know, froofy ones. I think Cornell. I think he went to Cornell. But he's an engineer. But he works for a quiz bowl company that writes questions for quiz bowl.

So if he comes to town and we hang out, do not engage him in quiz bowl questions because he will mop the floor with you. He is definitely the smartest person in the family that I know besides his dad. We'll bring him to my pub trivia night.

And he, yes. You want him as a sub on your team for sure. So there's been a human versus computer quiz bowl match. Basically, they trained an AI to play a quiz bowl toss-up match. And I'm not going to ruin the outcome, but there are two videos in the show notes for this that he sent in.

One is how they built the AI. And the second one is the match itself. So check those out. It's actually pretty damn entertaining. Cool. You can write us at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com or you can go to patreon.com slash GOG. Drop us a little coin and then you can talk to us there.

Or you can go to grumpyoldgeeks.com and use the contact form to send us a message. Software, apps, and gadgets. So guess what I got? What'd you get? I got a Sonos.

Really? I've been curious about those for a while. So they've got a deal on their website. It's going to end soon, but you can get two of their quote-unquote Play One boxes for $50 off. And I got two of those and then I just got a straight up another one of them. The Play Ones are standalone just speakers.

They've got other stuff. Because in the old days, you had to buy different components to make the system work right. But nowadays, you can just get these standalone speakers and it's much easier. They're amazing. They are utterly amazing. Well, I guess I'll hear them tomorrow.

Oh, you'll definitely hear them tomorrow because the nice thing about it is you can just unplug one, take it out by the hot tub, plug it back in, and then it rejoins the network. So as long as you have Wi-Fi range, they just move around the house. Now, the Sonos software is janky as hell, but it goes into all of the different systems.

So I use Spotify and make, you know, playlists. And I just, I have a playlist of like 200 songs that I just keep on loop and shuffle. So in the morning, I just go in and turn the volume up and I've got music playing. And then at night, I just turn it off. It's great. Does it connect to iTunes?

It will connect to your local media library. It will not connect to like if you have like an iTunes match account or something like that, but it connects to just damn near everything. There's like, you know, a hundred services that it connects to. I know we only talk about Spotify on the show, but there's a, there's a lot more music out there than you'd imagine.

In theory. But man, I, I, the sound quality is amazing. This thing fills the room. So we've got, we've got them spread around the house. So the entire house has music and you can group them and you can ungroup them. So like in my office, I'll be listening to, you know, my heavy metal punk rock crap.

And out in the other room, we got Vanessa Dow playing, you know, just to have ambiance. But for the price, it's, they, they've come down a lot. In the old days, they were like, you know, a couple grand to get your house wired, but at 200 bucks a shot for the individual speakers, it's, it's, it's still expensive, but it's affordable.

Right. So now I don't have to buy a stereo. If I go anywhere, I just pick it up and take it with me. Yeah, that's very cool. I mean, I've been intrigued for a long, long time. So I'm looking forward to seeing yours tomorrow and seeing how it goes. And I've, I've always wanted to kind of get the Sonos set up, rock it in my place. For your place, you can get away with the same setup I have.

And it would be actually almost overkill, but I think you'll like them. Yeah. I mean, I think I will too. So I have some, uh, some, some spending to do. Let me tell you the place I'm not spending money. I'm still not spending any money on game of war. So I want to do a little followup. I'm still alive. After you just said that you wanted to give them money.

Now you're standing by, I'm never spending money. Uh, well, if I actually really wanted to play the game, I would definitely spend money. The thing is, I'm already bored with it. It didn't, as predicted, uh, as fun as it was for like the first week, I'm over it. And right now I almost just wish someone would come along and kill me, but nobody has yet.

It's been kind of sad. I've been using the strategy thing. That's been keeping me alive. Basically my entire Alliance got wiped out. I teleported the hell out of there. And I've just been kind of going around and just trying to slowly build my stuff up and doing treasure hunts instead of actually getting involved in the war part, which would probably make the game more interesting.

So you bailed on your mates when they needed you most. Well, I couldn't help them anyways because they all spent money and they were like 11 levels, 12s. And I was like a level two. What am I going to do? You went down to your level three last week. Whatever I was. Brian was level potato.

Yeah, I was level potato. Exactly. And that's basically been continuing. And now it's gotten to the point where it's even more boring because as you do slowly crawl your way up, all of a sudden everything takes five times as long like to do, to build another building or to get to another level of research.

Now it's, it's like 12 hours in real time for me to be able to get to it. So therefore you pay to get these things done faster. That would be the psychology behind their entire business model. Yes. Yes. Welcome to game of war. I've, I'm still alive, but I'm incredibly bored and I don't see this lasting too much longer.

I've even given up on, I might just like do a suicide run where I just started attacking people and it's just so I die. Well, I'm going to tell you what I did when, uh, when I quit, I gave everything I had. I basically destroyed all my buildings and cashed them in for materials and money. And I distributed distributed and distributed everything throughout my guild for being awesome guildmates.

So don't just throw everything away. Be nice to your guild and they'll, they'll appreciate the boost. Yeah. But mine are all dead. They're still, there's, they're still there. They're just rebuilding. And that's when they would really appreciate it because they need stone. They need lumber. They need whatever the hell you had to mine for.

But you're in, you're in that grind phase. You know, it's like every game has the grind phase where you just got to grind through to get to the next level. The problem with game of war is there's really no payoff. Like in world of Warcraft, you grind, then you get to the next level and then you get cool new monsters in game of war. You just get new assholes that come beat you up.

That's all you get. Or grinding. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yes. That's I'm kind of done. I'm not dead, but I'm kind of done. And the site, again, the psychology as, as we've discussed a number of times, stunningly good. I mean, this thing is just geared to get you to pay. And there were a few times I was like, oh, fuck it.

Well, you know, there's this thing for five bucks that'll make my I'll be able to get to the next level. And I was just like, no, not going to do it. Not going to do it. I think I think I think to to get your karma up, I think you just need to get get a five dollar upgrade just so the guys made a little bit of cash for all the time you spent, you know, banging on their servers and and then move on.

I suppose that would be fair. It's like a tip. You give them a tip. Over a week now and enjoyed it enough. So I'll tip them on my way out. All right. Tip your waiter. Now, speaking of apps that I bought at your recommendation, I did buy Dark Sky, the app that you reviewed a few times on the show, actually, most recently, about two, two, three weeks ago.

It was pretty great little app. The design is really cool. It's like hyper local weather. Nice little design tells you when it's going to rain, gives you breakdown of the day when it's going to rain during the next 24 hours, rough temperature charts and base temperature charts for the next seven days.

When I was in Toronto, it was awesome. I mean, it would say, you know, precipitation, light precipitation starting in five minutes and five minutes later, boom, it happened. And until you want to do an end, all of that. It's less useful here in Los Angeles, obviously, because it doesn't rain much. But particularly, I don't think it works here very well.

I was standing out. It's been raining on and off on the coast here all week. And I was standing outside looking at the app, which said there would be no precipitation for the next 10 hours. And the nearest precipitation was 20 miles to the northeast, except for the precipitation that was actually falling on me as I was looking at the app.

See, the interesting thing about yours, your case is you probably have rain coming in from the ocean. So you you're the leading indicator of where the rain's coming from, because I was using this in Hollywood, and it gave me literally like in the minute notifications when it rained on me. So where you're at, you're like kind of the bellwether.

So maybe it's not going to work in Satan Monica. But in Hollywood, it worked great for me last week. Right. Well, it's not working for me in Santa Monica at all. So I'd like a refund, Mr. Dark Sky. Well, I'll make you a fucking hamburger tomorrow. Shut up.

OK, I want sausages, too. We got Italian sausages, too. Perfect. Can't wait. In actual real world product news, I believe I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the Herman Miller annual sale was on and I ordered myself a mirror to chair. It arrived a couple of days ago.

I love this damn thing. Really? 100 percent more comfortable than the air on chair was. It's like sitting on a cloud. It's super adjustable and I can roll around and it's super quiet. You can't even hear me because you used to always yell if I moved around too much. I've been doing it the whole episode and you are none the wiser.

Yeah, I didn't even notice it. You're not squeaking anymore. You don't have the butt squeak. Nope. None of that. This chair is awesome. I can't recommend it enough. It was definitely time for me to get the upgrade from the old standard air on and cannot recommend the mirror to enough. This is an awesome chair. Awesome. That is that is pretty cool.

I'm glad that it worked out for you, even though it's a little pricey. But yeah, looks good. It's a little pricey, but it's it's you know, there are things that there are a couple of things in life you should not cheap out on. You should not cheap out on your bed because you spend an awful lot of time on it. Chair, same ass thing. Even, you know, I know you want to do the standing desk and I should be doing that as well.

But you're still going to spend an awful lot of your time in your chair. Don't cheap out on that. And don't cheap out on toilet paper. Oh, good one. TP. Yes. And more TP for my bunghole. Never, never go to the 99 cent store for your TP. Well, some of our TP comes from the 99 cent store, but go to the night.

Go to the house. I brought the good stuff for you. So it's all good. In California tip, though, sadly, this didn't work in the rest of the country. So if you're in Los Angeles and you don't know this trick, 99 cent store for vegetables. Greatest, greatest place to go.

I cannot endorse that message. OK, well, anyway, for me, it works great. I've got the greatest 99 cent store because they get it. They get the you know, if it's expiring that day, they can't sell it at the grocery store. They get it there. It's still fresh. You come home, you cook it and you save like dollars and dollars every time.

Gotcha. So I will be bringing monkey rub, my own toilet paper and not eating any vegetables. Excellent. That's the kind of barbecue I like to have. So my recommendation this week is Turbo Boost Switcher for OS X. This is if you have this is going to like four people who are listening are going to get this.

But what it does is it lets you turn off Turbo Boost if you have a MacBook Pro that has the Turbo Boost feature and it will save you like over an hour or so on battery. And yeah, I've been testing it this week because I've got I've got, you know, a year old MacBook Pro 15 inch and I love it.

This is my I love this computer. Granted, it's not as portable as the air, but the problem is the battery life on it does kind of suck. And I'm doing a lot of audio processing. So if I can just wait a few extra seconds, the the the tradeoff in time spent rendering something versus time in battery actually works out in my favor.

So I've got this. I turn it off for different things and it's open source. You can just get it for free and it works. I got this from Marco dot org, Marco Arment, the guy who wrote Overcast and Instapaper and all that stuff. So there'll be a link to the software and his write up where he actually does math and gives much more shits than I do about how it works.

But yeah, it's a great little little freebie app. Nice. So you need to go get a MacBook Pro so you can use this software. And this is free, so I don't have to give you a refund if you don't like it. But I'm not going to give you a refund for the MacBook Pro. You should still probably toss him a couple of bucks.

Media candy. The Martian trailer came out this week. Oh my God. Yeah, well. Well, OK, let me just say for the record here, I thought it was fantastic.

It allayed all of my fears and it looks like it is going to be about as true to the books as you can get. I'm sure they're going to leave a lot out, but I have to. Yeah, for the most part, it looked really authentic to the book. It looks great.

I love 99% of the casting. The trailer was fantastic. We both love the book, obviously. So I don't see a way that this can be bad, even though it does have not. I don't know what I hate Matt Damon.

What's wrong with you? I don't know. I just don't like Matt Damon. I'm going to attribute that to Skype messing up and not you like doing some kind of retard voice. That's dude. That's that's like South Park stuff. I don't watch South Park. Sorry.

Oh, see. OK, yeah, I'm totally lost on that one. You would get the whole me saying Matt Damon that way. He appeared as I think it was actually in the puppet movie. Yeah, it was the puppet movie. Matt Damon showed up and he's a retarded puppet. What's the puppet movie? America. Fuck yeah.

America. Team America. Oh, Team America. I still haven't seen Team America, dude. It's not my fault you don't stay up with massive popular culture items that are really funny. I know we talked about this. I just haven't had time to go back and watch that. I watch new stuff. And you would get the Matt Damon thing. OK, so did you see the XKCD comic about the Martian?

No, I didn't. OK, scroll down on the show notes and you'll see it. But it's very nice. It's it's a very funny XKCD comic. Like an even Adam Savage posted, he's like XKCD has once again gone into my brain and basically pulled out exactly what I thought was perfect about the Martian.

And I'm going to I'm not going to ruin the comic, but it'll be in the show notes. Check it out. It's quite clever. And I mean, yes, the trailer for the Martian actually looks fantastic, even though it does have Matt Damon in it, although I can't help but see Matt Damon in Interstellar now.

That's that's that's the other problem is like he's played two astronauts in a row in relatively similar movies. Well, not similar in any way, shape or form, because Interstellar is actually a piece of shit. And oh, God, it was such a piece of shit. Yeah, I still I'm still mad at that movie. I want my money.

I want my time back. Yeah, I don't I don't even care about my money. They can keep the damn money because, you know, obviously, what's his face? The star, Mr. Beef, it's what's for dinner guy. What the hell's his name? Ask your winner plays the same fucking character in every goddamn movie he's in because he can't act for shit.

I thought he was good in True Detective. You know what? He was really good and he was really good in those car commercials. Oh, Jesus. Those are so terrible character that he plays and everything else. Plus, he's doing car commercials after he just won a fucking Oscar. How much money do you need, asshole? All the monies.

I just got to have all the monies. Not only did I get an Oscar, not only do I get 20 gazillion dollars for every fucking piece of shit film I'm in. Then I'm going to immediately do these stupid fucking pseudo intellectual car commercials. Fucking doosh. Okay. So we are talking about Matthew McConaughey. That's his name.

That's his name. Okay. Just making sure. Bongo, dude. Yes. I liked him in True Detective. I thought he was good. I thought he was okay in Dallas Buyers Club. I thought he earned it, earned the Oscar in that one. But I didn't see any of this. Well, there's your problem. Well, Team America.

Okay, so I see that you've posted some other news in the media. I think that you and I will both be watching. We got our first official look at Mulder and Scully in the X-Files revival thanks to a tweet of a shot from behind the head of the director, them sitting in a car looking at the cameras.

Okay, so this looks like somebody photoshopped a shot from Californication into a shot of what's-her-name doing the thing in the Netflix one that we watched, The Fall. So we've got Californication meets The Fall in the back of an Uber.

That's what we've got. That is very true. But exciting. Nevertheless, they are actually shooting. So this should be, again, I think when we talked about it the first time around, I have been burned by the X-Files many, many times. Oh, haven't we all?

Haven't we all? Some trepidation, but also some excitement. So, because, you know, I still have a crush on Scully. Of course you do. Don't we all? That's why I watched The Fall. The Fall was great. Yeah, I got to get on that. Oh, you still haven't seen it? Oh. Oh.

I'll watch, you know what, just tell me when you're done with that and then I'll go watch Team America. We need some tit for tat here. Okay, fair. Although I think both of us will probably be stuck watching Orange is the New Black, which came out today, so. Yeah, yeah, I got to get, I still haven't even finished the last season of House of Cards.

I'm so far behind on these things. Oh, man. Yeah, I think we're going to start off by watching the last two episodes of Orange is the New Black to get caught up because it's been a year and you forget. Yeah. So, although I still remember the end of last season with Don't Fear the Reaper. Yeah. Okay, so my new dude crush here.

My new jam. My new jam. Baby metal. It's this Japanese girl band. Well, kind of girl band. There are three girls up front. And I'm going to give you a warning right now. Before you watch the video that's in the show notes, the lead singer is 17 years old.

The two backup singers are 15 years old. Don't drop your pants. So, yes, constrain yourself when you watch this. This is just fun. This is pure fun. I could have swore it was you over a year ago that told me about baby metal, but obviously it wasn't because we talked about this before the show.

Also, I was going to ask if you were hungover because generally when you start to post a lot of things late at night, as you did last night, it means you're drinking some whiskey and you posted quite a few baby metals and then moved on to a bunch of other things last night. But yeah, I've known about these guys for over a year and I swear it was you, but obviously no.

They were actually playing in L.A. and somebody was trying to get me to go see them because they should have gone. You should have gone. I did become a fan back then. This is Spice Girls meets anime meets Ozzy Osbourne meets Marilyn Manson. It's so awesome.

So what happened was I was out at Chispaca, this this really nice restaurant on Melrose with the Art of Charm guys and John and John Zubak, one of our coaches, started talking about this band. And he went to that show that you're talking about. He'd never heard of him. And somebody took him to the show and he was just like floored by them.

And I'm like, OK, whatever. So the reason I was posting about this stuff last night is he sent me a bunch of Facebook messages and I was just like, oh, my God, I got to post, got to post, got to post. And then I went down the rabbit hole with other music stuff and I needed a throwback Thursday thing. So I posted pictures of me and Andy Preboy and Rita Albert in my, you know, my apartment in Los Feliz back in 97, I think, whatever.

But you can see my Instagram at Instagram dot com slash JPD or on my Facebook account. But yeah. Oh, by the way, Chispaca. Unbelievable food. OK, we had we shared one hundred and fifty dollars steak. It was ridiculous. But I just I love baby metal.

I think this band is so good. Just a hat tip to Johnny for sending me this. Johnny's got a band. It's called Blackpool Republic. They play around L.A. quite a bit. And you'll be seeing some photos from their upcoming shows because I'm going to go shoot them. But check them out. They're they're pretty awesome. There will be many links in the show notes for them.

But baby metal. Come the fuck on, man. It's good stuff. I spent a lot of time on the show bagging on the economy. Two point O companies that don't like to play by the rules, Uber, Airbnbs and whatnot.

So I just wanted to bring it back old school, kick it old school style and bring it back to an old school asshole company. The Dish Network, the Dish Network, a link in the show notes. It gets a little too complicated for me to get into. But basically, they the corporate giant cheated taxpayers out of three billion dollars in a recent auction for publicly owned airwaves.

They executed a deceptive scheme to receive a huge discount. And so fuck you, Dish Network. To quote you from earlier in the show, I can't believe Dish Network is still a thing. Yeah, I know that too. But they're not only are they a thing, they're a we save three billion dollars thing.

So you know who they are? They're Enron 2.0. Yeah, they seem to be. Yeah, there's a it's all fudgy finances and shell companies. And oh, my God. But it's a you know, it's all on record. We know what they did. And it's kind of bullshit.

So this has been going around for a couple of weeks. It's actually been in our holding pattern, but it's a link to a video and an article about what Shakespeare plays originally sounded like.

I loved this video. It was really cool. And it explains why half the time some of Shakespeare doesn't work in modern language. And you're like, what the hell is going on with this? It's like in the old school English, it actually rhymed right. It sounded better. And it's just neat.

And this was originally posted on Kotki. But I got the link in the note from Mental Floss because they did a much better write up of it. Did you get a chance to check this out, Brian? Yeah, you've had it literally in the show notes for probably a month now. And I finally listened to it last night, or watched it, also listened to it.

And I really, really enjoyed this. I thought this was absolutely fantastic. Not only just the Shakespeare aspect, but I just love the history part of it and how language changes. I'm big on language and very intrigued by changes over time. And this was fantastic. It was really enjoyable.

Although I do have to say that in general, as we get older, it's just more Scottish. Don't predict. I mean, it does sound very Scottish until they go even further back in time. And then it just sounds like a completely different language. It's good stuff. It is very good stuff. And it was posted in September 2013.

So it is not a new article, but it is still a very cool article. Yeah, and they do it all at the Globe Theater, which is really interesting and really, really cool looking. And I'd love to see these. It's a son and father team that run you through all this and really interesting people.

I'd like to see more about this, actually. Well, then head over to the Globe next time you're in ye olde London town. I will be going this year again, so I will have to do that. Closing shout out! Our closing shout out this week goes to Sir Christopher Lee, who was an amazing person, an amazing actor, and just a general badass all around.

I'm going to put a link in the show notes that has probably come through your social media feed. But if it hasn't, you should definitely just go look at it. We were going to read it, but we're kind of long on time and very late. So go check it out. It's awesome. You will be missed, Sir Christopher Lee. I sadly didn't know that he was even sick, but it's not unexpected.

Although I think Abe Vigoda is still kicking. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of people still kicking. That's shocking. But yeah, it was sad to lose him, but not unexpected. He had been around for quite a long time. Do check it out. The graphic in the show notes. It's amazing to realize exactly how many things he was in and how many very memorable characters he played.

Oh, there was another thing that it was an anecdote that I heard because he was a Nazi hunter in World War II. But Peter Jackson, like, you know, there's a point where Saurman gets stabbed in the back. And he's like, Peter Jackson's like, I want you to imagine what it sounds like for a man to get stabbed in the back and use that sound.

And he's like, oh, I don't have to imagine that. So that's how badass he is. He's like, OK, good. It's pretty badass. So, yeah, it's sad to see him go. But again, not unexpected. But there you go. Also, big shout out to something that FIFA, with all its problems, has managed to thus far not fuck up.

The Women's World Cup is going on right now in the host nation, Canada. USA is doing very, very well. In fact, they're playing later today. And it's actually been quite fun to watch. I will say that I think it was a mistake to open up the game to another eight countries. I believe there's 24 countries now total competing.

The reality is that there's really, and this is a sad reality, it should be fixed. There's really only a handful of professional countries supporting women's soccer at a professional level, anything beyond college. So some of these teams are just vastly, let's face it, they're just vastly horrible compared to some of the other countries that are out there.

So there's a massive disparity, the likes of which you don't see on the men's side. But it's great. I'm glad there's more support for it. There's a lot of people watching and I urge everybody, if they care about the game, to watch it. It's actually been quite entertaining so far. Okay, cool. Well, thanks for listening.

I'm Jason DeFilippo and you can find out more about me at jpd.me. And I'm Brian Schilmeister and you can follow me on Twitter at at Slender Fungus because that bothers Jason. Yes, the double at does bother me. You're an at-at, so that means you're from the dark side.

I had my favorite toys when I was a kid. I love that damn thing. Okay, until next time. Until next time. 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 five stars or tell a friend about the show.

Music for the show is provided by Andy Stachansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash House of Andy and check him out on SoundCloud at soundcloud.com slash House dash of dash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 114.

It is obvious that this contest cannot be decided by our knowledge of the Force, but by our skills with a lightsaber.

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