183: Throwing Pagers at Squirrels

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, episode 183. I'm Jason DeFillippo here with my co-host. I'm Brian Schulmeister. Still? Yeah, still. Okay. I thought I got rid of you, but I guess not. Well, you know, I can. Shit, I'm going to shut down my mic. See you later. Mic drop.

Out. Yep. Here comes up to speed again. Far less work. So on your recommendation, I got myself an Echo, an Amazon Echo. I decided to break out of the Mac only confines and didn't wait for the Google version of this, but got the, as you said, it's a year into their infrastructure.

So they've been building it and they've been around for a while. So I went and got the Amazon Echo and I love the damn thing. Isn't it cool? A week into it with a kid, it is absolutely fantastic. I can't even explain just even with a newborn how great this is. So, yeah, that's what I wanted to know because you texted me.

It's like, oh, man, this is great for having a kid. I'm like, okay, explain, please. I would like to know what is the upside of having it when you have a kid. I will dad-splain. Please, dad-splain. This is the new version of mansplaining. It's dad-splaining. Well, first off, for me, personally, it's already cooled.

Like, I was super into it, like, the first two days as a grumpy old geek. And then all of a sudden I was like, yeah, okay, whatever. Talking to a box that answers questions and most of the time gets it kind of right is already – that high is cool for me.

I like the fact that it can play some podcasts. But this thing, even a year in, I'm surprised at how little it can actually do. There are a lot of things that I want it to be able to do. And once it does, it will be fantastic for me. Having said that, for a two-month-old human being that does nothing except for eat and poop, this thing is fantastic.

Because I could basically say, Alexa, play white noise. Oh, my God. I don't have to, like, go fucking – like, if the white noise generator goes off or turns off or whatever. This thing will just do it. Alexa, play lullabies. It fucking plays lullabies. No way.

It's fantastic. I mean, it is absolutely great. And I did get an Internet of Things. And when you hear our security broadcast, you'll laugh at that. But I also know how to lock my shit down so we don't have to worry about this. So I have a light, basically a dimmable light in my child's nursery.

So I can turn it on and off with Alexa before I even go in the room. I can set it at different levels. If he's asleep in there and I know I want to wake him up, I can turn it up pretty high. But, you know, just kind of ramp it up. Or I can just turn it on really, really, really low if I just want to creep in and not wake him up.

There are so many different things that I'm actually using this for with my child. It's fantastic. The timer aspect of it for, you know, okay, guys who don't really, like, want to think about this stuff, plug your ears for a second. You time your breastfeeding and she can set a timer and she can pause it when he's off and then restart it when he's on so she knows exactly how long, etc.

There are a lot of uses that have been absolutely fantastic. So it's been great to be able to – because you lose hands when you have a baby. So to have something that is basically – you don't have to press anything. You can just talk to it. It's been great. It's like a really cheap nanny that doesn't do anything except Google for you.

It kind of is. And it's a weird thing because I've stayed away from voice control for so long even though I've had Siri technically available to me. I just have never used it. And this is actually stepping me into it. And the cool thing that I see is not so much for us because we're old but for my son, he will live in a world where he really just talks to a computer unless he has some actual work to do.

He's never going to be pushing buttons or doing any of that. He's just going to talk to a damn thing because this is getting close. Close the dad bay door, Hal. Well, speaking of that, the first thing I did was Google known Easter eggs and I found a huge list on Reddit, which if you've got an Amazon Echo, the link is in the show notes.

These are all the little in-jokes that people have built into this thing and they're all quite funny. I've been doing almost all of them. So did you get the big mama or the little mama? I got the big mama because I wanted the sound, right? Because I haven't bought into Sonos yet.

I haven't figured out what my Web 2.0 version of sound in my house is going to be since I've gotten – I took down my studio monitors and all that and I just kind of want to figure out some sort of wireless sound situation everywhere. So I got the big one, but I'm already like – I'm already sold on getting two dots, like one in the nursery and one in our bedroom and then keep the main one out in our main room.

And as long as they all sync up together, I'm – you know, I'm – damn you, Amazon. I've already spent a lot of money. Yeah, and here's the thing. So I got the dot. That's why I was rolling into this because I got the dot this week and I put it next to my bed. And I wanted to see what the speaker was like, like, you know, the built-in speaker quality.

How bad is it? It's not great, but it's not terrible. If I want to – like, when I get up in the morning and I just want to – depending on the time, I'll play a certain radio station and I'll just, like, roll over and it's like, Alexa, play WGN. And so if K-Rock's not up yet, because, you know, you guys don't start until 5 in the morning, and if it's before that, before 7 a.m., I'll play local talk radio.

And if it's after 7 a.m., I'll play K-Rock and listen to Kevin and Bean. And it's like, you know, it's radio quality. Yeah, I think I'm going to order one to put in the nursery. I'm going to tell you right now, I'm already regretting not buying the six-pack because I just – I don't have a big enough house.

I don't either, but I want to give these to – I want to, like, take two of them to my dad's house, you know? Oh, Christmas gifts. Yeah. All right. All right. I might give them one. Yeah, because I think if the little one's speaker isn't that bad, it would totally work in the nursery because that's – he's not – It would completely work in the nursery.

I guarantee you. Yeah. My son is not breaking down the classics yet or anything. He just needs some nursery rhymes. He's not deconstructing Chopin just yet. And the thing that I also saw with the dots, which is what they're called, is that they've got the audio out, so you can always attach them to other speakers.

Plus, there's Bluetooth. So, there's Bluetooth-enabled speakers that you can always put in as well. So, shit, man. I just got myself into an entire new infrastructure. So, Amazon, you sucked me in. Yep. That's the other thing. I've got a Bluetooth speaker that I can actually put, like, in a prime spot in the room that doesn't have to be – because it's wireless.

It's one of those iHome speakers. And I can just put it, like, in a prime spot in the room and then play whatever I want. Like, you know, I can play, you know, white noise or whatever when I go to bed and have it turn off and have it, like, in an audio-appropriate spot instead of where the echo has to be because it has to be plugged in, you know?

I've got to tell you, the game changer on this thing, as nice as it is to be able to control different powers and, you know, obviously any kind of music, you connect it to Spotify or whatever. Podcasts, you can play automatically through TuneIn, things like that. The game changer for this will be when they connect it to smart TVs.

The fact that I'm sitting there and using my voice to control almost everything in my house now but I can't control my TV is ridiculous. That needs to happen as soon as possible. Yeah, that's – I'm sure it'll get to that point, but you'll probably have to buy an Amazon TV for that to work.

Yeah, I mean, we'll see. I don't see why not. And, you know, the other thing that I think is lacking a little bit is the flash briefings and things like that. I love that. Not enough people are providing their content to the service yet. I was even thinking, as soon as I started the flash briefing thing, I was like, why aren't we doing one?

Slate does one that's basically once a week. It repeats every day. We should do a 90-second grumpy old geek thing on the Echo. Oh, maybe something like Up to Speed? Maybe something like that, except, you know, again, we have to get paid for it. Up to Speed was 15 minutes. The thing with the flash briefing is it's like 90 seconds, two minutes tops.

I think – I've heard the Twit ones, and they change up. Some of them are three minutes. But anyway, so the Notorious DSG on Twitter sent me a tweet. He says, I got the Echo Dot. Thanks to your recommendation. Thank you. And how come Siri and Google can't do this as well? Good Lord. It's – oh, it's a – I think it's a Texas Instruments OMAP and 256 mega RAM.

He was talking about the internal specs, but I'm glad the Notorious DSG picked one up on our recommendation. I'm happy with mine. I love it. I love it, too. And on that tweet, which came in in real time, Google's about to do it. Obviously, they're releasing their own thing.

I am beyond shocked that Apple has not put out a tiny product like this, except for the fact that, you know, they're snobby about shit, and somebody else came up with it first. So now they're going to – nope, we're not doing one. That's basically Apple's attitude. Yeah, that's probably – they're probably waiting to make it, you know, perfect.

Well, and, you know, they're pushing Siri to everything now, your laptops and everything. But, I mean, just build a little standalone hot-looking thing, Apple. Come on. Yep. Okay, so we got the Easter egg list, which is pretty funny. I was digging it. I mean, there are too many in here to mention, but I'm going to go through all of these this evening.

Oh, I mean, you obviously have to do the open the pod bay door, Alexa. That one's funny. So, yeah. There's so many. So many. Earl Grey hot, you know, of course. It's obvious a bunch of geeks built this shit. And my favorite is – Alexa, my name is Iniego Montoya. It's actually Indigo Montoya.

So, speaking of Reddit, though, we have our own Grumpy Old Geek subreddit. Woo-hoo! Yes, that is at reddit.com slash r slash GOG podcast. I'll have a link in the show notes. And what we're going to start doing there is posting links all week. And you guys can go and upvote if you're a Redditor.

And we're going to pick most of the stuff for the show for the next week from that list. So, if there's stuff in there that we've missed that you might find and want us to talk about on the show, please go add links, upvote things that you like, downvote things that you don't.

I know that we're coming at this late, but it was just one of those other avenues that we have to manage. But I'm doing everything on pinboard anyway. I'm like, well, I'm posting links to the internet. Might as well post them where everybody can see them. And then we can all talk about them and have a good time. So, yeah. Slash r slash GOG podcast.

I like the idea of becoming a Redditor. And there we are. So, let's get on it. Because right now there's one post and it was from 16 days ago. But we're going to start doing it. Damn it. That was me setting up the channel. All right. On to the news. In the news.

Breaking news. Vine is dead. Oh, that's the video service that was briefly popular about two years ago. It's still inexplicably around, but apparently not anymore. Well, it's owned by Twitter. So, you'd think that it would be, you know, still going. I guess they're going to... What's Twitter? Oh, it's that service that was really popular for a long time, but has a lot of problems and can't figure out how to make a dollar.

Yes. Well, yeah. Poor Vine stars. I know. Vine was... I mean, Vine was groundbreaking. I feel bad for them. They should probably have sold to somebody else instead of Twitter.

Well, who cares? They got out with their money. They don't care. That's true. They don't care. So, it's still up, right? Like, it's just been announced that support is going away. Eventually, it will be shut down. Yeah, you have six seconds to get all your Vine images out.

Oh, well done, Jason. So, this comes on the news. Twitter actually made more money than they thought. They were up 8% over last year to $616 million this quarter. Oh, does that mean they're going to hire a bunch of people?

No, they're going to fire 9% of their workforce. Oh. Yeah. I know you love Twitter, Jason, but come on. Even you've got to be admitting at this point, what the fuck is anybody going to do with this thing?

Oh, I always... Look, that's the reason I quit Twitter so many times. I'm like, what's the fucking point of this thing? And even Sean Bonner this week, the Twitter meister, posted his... I saw his stats of how often he tweets. He posted his 100,000th tweet and finally had this come to Jesus moment.

And he's like, well, this is fucking pointless. I'm going to go blog. I'm going to go focus on long-form blogging now instead of this crap. But to his credit, he's not writing on Medium. Which is where your first story is from. Yes, I know.

Well, you have to understand that the people who created Twitter also created Medium. So... So expect that to shut down hopefully soon. That's... And yes, people always say, why aren't you writing on Medium? Well, you don't build in somebody's backyard.

And we have more stories about that coming down the line. Yeah. And Twitter is in the news a lot today because obviously everybody's trying... Nobody wants to buy them to begin with. Grab them by the 140 characters. Everybody's trying to figure out what the hell they're going to do. They obviously don't know the cases of...

There's so many things wrong with Twitter to begin with. The abuse that happens on there, of course, is massive. They did announce that they were going to make... And I love this. Meaningful changes to its safety policy in order to clean up its toxic atmosphere and crack down on, quote, targeted behavior that harasses or threatens others to silence another person's voice.

Okay. Except they don't say how they're going to do it. Yeah, exactly. They don't say exactly when they're going to do it, except it won't be anytime soon, specifically not until after the election. And considering everything and all the hate that's going on right now is really election-based, that seems kind of useless.

So, Twitter is going to do something about something without explaining how, and they won't do it until after the point in time in humanity's history that we can actually use it. So, thanks a lot, Twitter. Yeah. Well, like you can engineer a solution like this in two weeks anyway.

Maybe they'll go down the route that YouTube is doing and get the armies of people to come in and do it for them because they can't figure out how to do it themselves. Crowdsourcing has fixed everything, hasn't it? Oh, yes. I wish we had real-time sound effects right now. And speaking of other useless shit that's not working out, the gig economy has grown big, fast, and that's a problem for workers.

So, says a nice article on Recode, which is worth a good read. Link in our show notes. I particularly like the quote from an anonymous former employee of housecleaning startup Homejoy. Oh, we have ripped them new home holes many times. Well, not only do we have to do it, apparently their own employees.

I love this quote. Children are running the company and they act like they are still in college. The poor cleaners are being treated like slaves. The children make fun of them behind their backs. This company is a tax evader and a moral concern to the working class. Basically, every single company that we talk about on our podcast is this.

And yeah, nobody seemed to care until now. Are people starting to care? This should have just been the bro economy, dude. It's the bro economy, man. Dude, look at those people cleaning my stuff. Dude, I totally ralphed in that garbage can last night and Consuela's got to come clean it up.

And I only totally tipped her like 2%. Basically, it's a pretty good article about this stuff. I've been railing against it. This is not the way to move forward, people. This is a step back in society. Next story on the same lines.

This comes from Digiday. Snapchat stops autoplay. Marketers grapple with declining view counts. Oh, yeah, autoplay. Hmm. Well, does autoplay count as a view? Yes. Does it ever count as a view? Always. Should it realistically count as a view?

Absolutely not. Have we said since day one, should that count as a view? Yes, we have. No, we've said that it should not count as a view. There we go. You're getting in way too many negative loupals here. I'm doing double negatives and reverse.

Yeah. So, shockingly, Snapchat stopped doing something that they should have done anyways. And all of a sudden, marketers are freaking out because people aren't watching their shit. Oh, poor babies. So, you put this article in and I read it.

And I don't do a lot on Snapchat because most of my clients aren't trying to get the sub-five-year-old and millennial people. We're trying to get slightly older people that still have jobs because most millennials don't. And I've been trying to deal with marketing on social media.

I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. You have no idea how bad it's gotten, Jason, since you've gotten out of this. You want to talk about why Twitter is going away? I have – okay. Over the last four months, I have attempted every week over four months to give Twitter money.

They will not take it. Why? I cannot place an ad. Their ad system for promoting posts on Twitter is so broken. It's impossible. I've shut down – it closes browser windows. It airs out nine times out of ten.

Even when I can actually get to the point where I have put in my credit card and I have a tweet and I'm choosing to promote it and I hit the button and it says it's been accepted, it gets no hits and I never get charged. Yeah. You cannot advertise anything on Twitter, even if you want to.

I know. I mean, I had a conversation one time with one of the heads of marketing over at Twitter and this woman was very blunt because she had many a scotch that night because we plied her with much scotch because we were trying to figure out how we could get some juice from Twitter.

You cannot. And she's like – it was a third-party system that they bought. It's terrible. They don't know how to fucking fix it. And it's like – and now they're laying off 9% of the employees. How much you want to bet that 9% is straight out of engineering? Well, and the other thing is there's no tech support to speak of anyways.

No. Yeah. So again, you're trying to give them money and there's nobody to talk to to give them money when their system to give them money is broken. And you know what's really fucked up this week? I got rejected for my verified checkmark this week. Oh, who cares? They said no.

No, but here's the thing. They're still like – I know that that system, they manually have tons of people sitting there manually going through trying to verify people to do that because I know the girl that ran that department too because she used to be an intern for us. And even she was like, I can't do anything.

I can't push you through. You got to go through the system and I can't give you any tips. But I'm going to tell you right now, good luck because it's a shit show. Twitter's useless. You can't do anything with it. And again, you want to know if a company is going to go out of business. If they have no ability to take your money, they're going to go out of business.

Yeah. Twitter cannot take your money. Well, that's why the Chicago Tribune didn't get my money because their form was broken and now I'm a subscriber, a happy subscriber of the New York Times. Anyway, these marketers need to shut the fuck up because when you build your business in someone's backyard, you cannot bitch when they come out in the middle of the night and turn on the sprinklers and piss all over you.

I'm just the middleman, Jason. I'm just trying to work these systems for somebody else. No, I wasn't. I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about the people who were complaining about the other thing. And let me quickly mention how bad the Instagram Facebook merger is going as well for this sort of thing. If you place an ad, you're now supposed to go through Facebook to place the ad, which will also be placed on Instagram, except for the fact that if anybody likes the status that you place through the boosting post on Facebook, it will not show up on Instagram.

It will only show up on Facebook. If you use the boost post on Instagram, it will only show up in a special boosted post version of your post, not your original post. So all the people that like that post aren't liking your original post. So the point of paying to get people to like your post is completely moot.

What the fuck are you people doing? I've worked in this business for 23 years and even I didn't understand a fucking thing you just said. Because none of it makes sense, Jason. All I'm saying is don't even bother paying these people right now because they cannot figure out their system. Anyways, moving on to something super expensive that we want to buy.

Yes. The big Microsoft event came out. It was two days ago. And there are eight big announcements. You can read about them on the verge. But I don't care about those. I care about two announcements. One, the one is the Surface Studio and the second is the Surface Dial.

These things are fucking sexy. I'm sorry. I'm not a I'm not a I'm not a Microsoft guy. Obviously, I railed on them for years. But when I watched the video for this Surface Studio, I wanted it now. Right. I fucking now I love the irony of after years of you trying to get me to go to Mac and I finally do it within a year.

Microsoft releases something that is just beyond cool. And now within a year, it's been like three months within three months. Now, this thing is hot as hell. And we were talking a little bit off air and rightly so. I was like, it's expensive, though. Then you're like, not compared to back stuff.

And you're right. I've already been indoctrinated into how expensive Mac stuff is that I thought this was pricey. Anyways. Yeah, no, I'm running on a I'm running on a four year old MacBook Pro that cost me thirty seven hundred dollars. And this thing clocks in at two nine nine nine. And I'm just like, oh, I'll trade you.

You can have my MacBook Pro. It is beautiful. It is absolutely beautiful. What a stunning move from Microsoft. I expect their stock should rise. This this is a beautiful machine made for this age. The it's basically just a gigantic monitor, but yeah, four and a half.

It's huge. Yeah. And it's just great processing power. This is what you want sitting on a desk somewhere when you're tired of using your tablet, when you want to see something. This could replace a TV for most people. Hell yeah. Beautiful. And it's beautiful. The I'm sorry, but the nerd boner moment moment came when they put that dial on it and it popped up those menus.

I was just like, that is some minority report shit. You love that dial. But what you don't realize is a PC user. Those have been in our keyboards for ages. Not as sexy as that, I'll give you, which is a whole separate thing. But so many keyboards for PCs have had a little dial like that on on the keyboard that controlled things the same kind of way.

This is better. They've definitely improved on it, but it's not a massive step like you seem to think it is. No, I mean, I saw it in the first Surface tablet like a friend of mine at BLT when I worked there showed me a demo. He had a whole Surface setup and he showed me like the inline menus with the rotating, you know, content aware menus.

And I was just like, that's fucking hot. Problem is, you're still on my, you know, it's still Windows. You know, as I've said, it's the operating systems aren't that different. They really aren't anymore. Not really. I mean, there are a bunch of stuff there. I mean, the things that I use on my Mac right now are like just extremely Mac specific.

Like, yes, I'm using Logic Pro to do this show, but I could I could learn Pro Tools. I could learn Pro Tools, you know, and you'll hear later in our comments of the week section. Actually, somebody who's shitting on Logic and saying you should move. Well, so anyways, it is what it is.

They're not that different anymore. This this is a massive shot off the bow from Microsoft. This is a big move for them. This is what happens when you have time because everything else you've done in the last 10 years has failed miserably. I agree with you. I agree with you, Jason. I agree with you 100 percent.

They had like a stealth team working on something to like fucking blow the world away and they fucking did it. Yeah, they they did it. This is beautiful. And I want to go back to B.C. now. I know. And you look at the MacBooks that came out today like, you know, OK, the new MacBook Pros came out today. You have you get you get four ports.

And here's the here's the breaking news. Headphone port is still there. I know. That's the one thing that I couldn't believe that because I was cracking up. I got the new iPhone and I was like, I have to carry around two headphones. Surely the new MacBook will just have the thing.

Nope. Cracking up when I saw that. I'm just like, that's the Brian port. Yes. They did. Yes. Go down the B hole. That's the B hole. Look, I got to say, Microsoft has has leapt ahead of Apple as far as I'm concerned right now with their PC technology.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. That it's, you know, the stuff from the stuff from Apple today was evolutionary. This is revolutionary. I was looking for my marketing speak. Oh, that's good. Good job. Yeah, thank you. All right.

So let's be grumpy again instead. AT&T, Time Warner are merging. Well, wait, no, no, no. I want to talk about this PC comeback. Oh, OK. Yeah. Oh, sorry. I threw that in the in the show notes as well. No, there's apparently a renaissance on the desktop, which I am happy about because I live at the desktop.

Yeah, it's definitely happening. What's what's happened is people realize that if they want to be a content creator, the tablets and the phones aren't really going to cut it, regardless of what all you millennials think running around using your prebuilt in filters that everybody else has. That's the thing is to create actual compelling content.

You have to move beyond the filter set that's available to you on your tablets and on your phones. So people are going starting to go back to PCs. And it's also because the phones have gotten larger. The tablets are starting to get squeezed out a little bit as well. And you basically most people need to have two devices.

Well, actually, most people just need one. But people that actually create content on the Internet, you need two devices. So it's either going to be a super large tablet or it's going to be a PC or and you're going to have your phone. Or the tablet hybrid, which is what Microsoft just built, you know?

Yes. Well, this thing is I wouldn't even call this a tablet hybrid. Well, it's touchscreen. You can use a stylus and you can also just use the keyboard and the mouse. Yeah, but you can't walk around with it because the monitor is so huge. That's a tablet. A tablet is something you walk around.

But that's where the hybrid comes in. OK, it's a PC that you can you have a touchscreen on and it's fantastic. So finally, all of Microsoft's bullshit Windows 10 shit makes sense. It is all come together. It finally really has.

Yeah. And, you know, I've been going through this because I have my iPad Pro. I've got the nine with the smaller iPad Pro with the logic keyboard. I love it with the Apple Pencil, which I also love. I can do a ton of stuff on it, but it is an extension of my desktop.

It is not a replacement for my desktop. And all these people who are like, you can podcast from an iOS device. I'm like, fucking lick my balls. You cannot do it professionally. You know, imbecile. No, you can't do a lot of things professionally. And that's what people always say.

Oh, you can do this. You can do you can do everything on your phone or your tablet now. Yeah, you can. But it's half ass and it's shit. Yeah, it's shit. Trust me. You put me in front of a Mac with a mouse and a keyboard. I will blow your ass out of the water with your little tablet. No fucking question. I would so happily go back to one.

I would I would have this Microsoft Surface Studio and my iPhone and I'd be happy. Yeah, I'm pissed now that I'm on my MacBook. Well, if you just wait another year. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Here's here's the here's Brian's corollary to Jason's issue.

Whenever I buy a new MacBook, the new version comes out 31 days later. You buy a MacBook and we get this amazing device. So I'm going to have you buying MacBooks for the rest of your life so I can go out and buy a new Surface. Well, I think for the show, you should get the Microsoft Surface Studio and we should switch places.

And then maybe in three years we'll switch back. Yeah. Well, if the show could afford me going to buy a Microsoft Surface, I would. But I am poor and I will not be getting a Surface anytime soon. I can't even afford an iPhone 7. I went to go check it out and I'm like, oh, no, I got to stick with my broken six plus for another three months.

It happens. I just got to turn it off and on a lot. But hey, fuck it. I'll keep it. All right. So AT&T and Time Warner Cable are merging. Supposedly, this isn't a big deal because Time Warner Cable spun off its cable to Spectrum, which I apparently now have.

And I don't see any difference in. But this is just here. Speculum is your new cable. Speculum. Bend over. Here we come. Why am I even reading this? We all know why it's a bad idea. It's a fucking monopoly. It's bullshit. And net neutrality is going out the window.

And this is a really, really, really bad idea. There you go. Done. Moving. There's a great disturbance in the force. But unfortunately, it'll go. So. Yeah. So New York Times bought Wirecutter and Sweet Home. I don't even know what those were until I read this.

And then I was really upset and kind of jealous. I was like, what? I'm not jealous. Because Brian Lamb was going back to my old days as a blogging mogul before Ariana Fuckington. I ran Met Blogs. One of my first writers at San Francisco Met Blogs was Brian Lamb.

And he went from us to Wired to Engadget or Gizmodo or one of those two. They're interchangeable. I don't care. Whatever one. But then he started the Wirecutter on his own money. Never took advertising. Only built it on like Amazon ad revenue or, you know, click through revenue.

Right. And he lives in Hawaii and surfs every day. And sold it for $30 million. I'm like, brah. Go, dude. That was my Hawaiian thing. That was horrible.

I know. I know. Okay. This is why I don't work in radio. Shit. Except you do. I know. All right. This is why I don't make any money in radio. Well, he did a really good job. Yes. Awesome, man. That's fantastic.

No, I'm so happy for him. And also, here's the upside of it. Not a dick. Out of all the people I've met in blogging, this guy, not a dick. So, I wish him the best on his new fortune. Right.

Now, Facebook has realized that they are basically the future of journalism. So, they've decided to launch a series of online classes so that you people that write can actually learn how to write. Because you're horrible at it. Yeah. Yeah. You beat me to this one.

I actually started taking these classes and I'm just like, what? Seriously? I have to take this class to become an online journalist? Ugh. Yeah. It's bad. They're really... I mean, seriously.

My dog could finish these classes. They're that bad. This is rudimentary high school, at least from when we grew up. It's bad. It's really bad. I looked at them, too. So, I'm a proud graduate of FU. Yeah. Seriously. Uber purchased auto.

We talked about auto. I don't remember if we actually did the story where Uber purchased them, but I'm assuming we did. We did. We've done a couple stories about auto and you also beat me on this one. I had a great show title for this one because this just harkens back to my Smokey and the Bandit days.

Give me the show title. I can't remember it. Because as soon as you put it in here, I deleted my link and my link had the show title in it. I'm like, damn. If you happen to be a trucker, a long haul trucker that listens to this show, you might as well go to FU and start learning some journalism courses.

Because you're now out of a job. You're fucked. Yeah, you're fucked. It's over. Any trucking service, blah, blah, blah, you're done. So, auto, the self-driving truck startup that was acquired by Uber for $700 million, has completed the world's first completely autonomous commercial freight delivery.

Over 120 miles from a way station in Fort Collins, Colorado to Colorado Springs, there was a professional driver in the truck the entire time who had never had to intervene. And the truck was able to drive itself from exit to exit. The software is programmed to hand off control to the human driver when the truck needs to exit the freeway.

But basically, you're done. You've been outsourced. The saddest thing in the world is the fact that actually this entire run was to deliver the world's worst beer. Forty-five hundred thousand. No, forty-five hundred. Forty-five hundred thousand.

Apparently, they delivered it to your house. Forty-five hundred Budweiser's. Forty-five thousand Budweiser's. Whatever. Yes. It's a lot of Budweiser's. So, at least it wasn't, you know, because the original Smokey and the Bandit, they were doing Coors Light from Texarkana.

But the snowman is dead in many, in more ways than one. And the thing about, the thing that really pissed me off about the video is the guy was in the back, like in the sleeping quarters, reading a magazine. Now, for safety's sake, you'd think that he would be maybe by the wheel in case something went wrong.

Well, I'm sure they'll bet there's some beepings if something bad's about to happen. What if he's rubbing one out and then he's got to pull up his drawers and try and get to the front, you know, because that's all they do in that little sleeping cabin. That's not a sleeping cabin. That's a spanking cabin. Which somewhat brings me to the next story.

Not really the spanking cabin, but this is a thought piece on what will happen with these self-driving cars and trucking and things like that. And the future, because how they're going to be built and how they're going to work and how humans will interact with them, especially in dense city centers.

This is by Philip E. Ross, and it's on IEEE Spectrum. We call it IEEE.org. Yeah. So he's talking about how game theory would predict how this is all going to work. And basically, from the point of view of a passenger in an automated car, it'd be like driving down the street filled with unaccompanied five-year-old children.

Basically, people are self-centered. They aren't going to follow rules. They're just going to step out. With the knowledge that the car will stop for you no matter what, you'll just do what you want to do. And it's going to destroy the entire concept of how, you know, this is supposedly these self-driving cars will be faster.

Everything is going to be smooth traffic, easy commutes, and no sudden stops. Well, no, not with asshole humans leaping out in front of the cars every two seconds. Okay. Now, I would like to flash back to three years ago on Grumpy Old Geeks, where we were talking about the rise of the self-driving car.

And I laid out several plans on how people could troll self-driving cars. You could also just carry a stop sign with you. And when people are coming by, you raise the stop sign. And they, you know, they're forced to stop.

So if you want to think about the Uber protests in France, they had to get in traffic to make them stop or bring their tractors in when they were protesting Disney or shit like that. No, you just got to get a bunch of people walking around with stop on their backpack and the game's over.

See, the thing, yeah, I'm going to modify my original statement because my thing about this has always been we can't have a mixed system. It has to be all autonomous cars and trucks and whatever with no human drivers. You can never mix the two. I'm now revising that to say it has to be in a sealed, self-contained environment in which no human being can ever actually be in at all whatsoever because humans are assholes.

Here's the deal. Yes. No pedestrians. No pedestrians. That's it. It can't work in a pedestrian environment. It has to basically. Oh, wait. We already have these. It has to be like a subway. Well, death to the sidewalk. No, it's just death to the sidewalk. That's it.

No, just make the entire top level pedestrian and then have subways. Somehow we solved this already. We just don't implement it. Interesting. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. Okay. We're going to. It's going to be a fun time. I'm glad that I don't have to leave the house much. And then I can get my Amazon deliveries to come to me as long as they still have people driving.

You're going to become Chet from weird science. I do. What do you mean become? Have you seen me lately? No. Apple is also in the news because they're delaying the AirPod rollout, which pissed me off. I found out about this because I went to the store to go buy them.

And no. That was dumb. Yeah, well, I went online to the store. I didn't actually leave my house to go buy them. What do you think I am, a cretin? But yes, I found out that they are being delayed. Apparently, there are a few bugs that they want to quash before they come out.

Is the video on the link in the show notes that you provided the actual container for these things? I did not. Well, I linked to a TechCrunch article. I did not look at the. Well, they have a thing that looks like it's. Yes, that's it. That's it. That's the self-charging Tic Tac. Actually, it looks more like dental floss.

It's dental floss. It's dental floss. Yeah, it's a dental floss container. It's very much dental floss. Yeah, but there's a battery in there so you can, like, when you're out and you're running out of juice, you can plug them back in and they'll charge real quick. Okay, fine. Whatever. I'm not interested. But that is definitely the dental floss carrier.

Okay. Well, Apple, instead of spending their time to make sure that those are ready, has apparently been working on doing a TV guide for the future. Future. I actually really like this concept. I'm interested in seeing it. It supposedly is launching tomorrow. We'll see.

The idea is that Apple wants to make it easier to find and watch video content without requiring users to sift through a bunch of apps. Instead, there will be a guide that aggregates and shows content that's available. And I theoretically, hopefully there will be filters like show me everything versus show me the apps that I've paid up for probably won't be there because it should be.

That would actually be useful. I would like to have something like this because we've lost that ability. And this is what drives people to go to Sweden. Yeah, that's true. I saw it go through and I was like half watching the live stream today. So I didn't get all the technical details.

But what it seems like, though, is that you have to have registered for that service through the Apple TV, which doesn't work for me and Hulu because I got that separately through Roku. So I need to figure out how that's going to work so I can get my Hulu, you know, listings coming through that.

But I don't know. I don't know how this is going to work. This is one of those things. Nobody knows how it's going to work. And one of the other supposed features of this is that it'll be a sign on feature. And again, you would have to do it through Apple TV. But even if this exists, this will save my life because I'm so every time I try to log into an app that I'm using, I have to go then sign into my cable provider.

Supposedly, Apple TV is going to have a single version of this. Oh, that would be good. Once. Yeah. You don't have to do it every single time for every single app because that's so goddamn annoying. No, that is terribly annoying. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, I got that TCL TV, that 4K Roku TV.

Piece of shit. It crashes. I have to hard reboot my TV like a couple times a day if I'm watching actual apps on the TV. Yeah. Well, no, but here's the thing. I just go back to my Apple TV. There's no.

The only thing that I, the only thing that I'm watching on my actual TV that needs to go through the interface at this point is my digital antenna that I bought. Remember, I talked about that a while ago. Yep. So I can watch the Cubs win the World Series. Wow.

1-1. Yeah, but it was a good, it was a good second one. I was, I'm cheered for the Cubs. You got me. So you're racing against the clock to wrap up three projects, prepping for a meeting later in the afternoon, all while trying to tackle a mountain of paperwork.

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Security? Ha! All right. We're back again this week with friend of the show, Dave Bittner, host of the Cyber Wire podcast. How's it going, Dave? Oh, it's going good. It's been a busy week. I've got a few things to cover, though, this week. So you want to jump right into it?

Let's jump right into it. All right. So the big story that we continue to watch is what's being referred to as the botnet that broke the internet. This, of course, was the big Mirai botnet that took down large portions of North America last week.

Is this the one that did it by taking over our porn fridges? I can neither confirm nor deny that. But it was the Mirai botnet is what it's called. And there's been some developing information during this week.

We've discovered that it was not as large as many people thought it was. Turns out it was about 100,000 devices, which is still, you know, no small potatoes. Nothing to sneeze at. No, no. And it used heavy use of what are called, sort of called amplification techniques.

And there's a company called. It went to 11. Yeah. Isn't this actually bad news? The fact that it involved even less devices than assumed and still took down so much shit? Yes, this is absolutely bad news. Okay. To clarify. Just checking. News is bad.

It is not good news that it used less devices. There's a company called Carrero that's a research, cybersecurity research company. And they observed exploitation of something called LDAP, which stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. It is a protocol that is supposed to be used sort of like inside enterprise systems.

It's really not supposed to be out there on the internet. I was going to say, if you ever worked in a cubicle, you know what LDAP is. But I'm surprised that they could get to it. Well, that's the thing. It's really a matter of scale. The Shodan search engine shows over 140,000 systems responding to requests over port 389, which is what uses LDAP.

And over 60,000 of them were in the U.S. So it's basically people, you know, not doing things correctly, allowing that to be accessible. Hold on a second. Hold on. Hold on. Shocking. Have you ever configured an LDAP server?

Nobody does it correctly. You spit and duct tape that thing until it actually delivers what you need it to do. And then you run away and never breathe on it again because it might break. I just can't believe that a corporate environment might not hook things up correctly. I know. I know.

So where the rubber meets the road on this one is that evidently when you're exploiting one of these LDAP servers, you get an amplification factor of about 50 times what you're sending out. Right. That's not good. So bouncing off of one of these. No. So that's where the leverage comes from.

You know, 100,000 devices. It has the power of, I guess, what, 5 million by using some of these LDAP devices. So, you know, the problem is we are coming up on a big holiday in terms of online internet shopping as we head towards Thanksgiving.

Everybody's going to get stuff that's going to break the internet. Well, okay. That's one angle to come at it from. The angle that I was coming at it from is that imagine what it could, the effect it could have on the economy if, for example, most of Black Friday, people were not able to actually do their shopping.

The lines of Best Buy would be even worse. All you got to do is take down Amazon.com and I guarantee you will have a massive hit. I mean, it'll be really, really bad. Well, guess who ran the DNS that Dine used? It came out of the eastern, what was it, the eastern seaboard version of S3, right?

Yep. Or AWS. Wasn't that where this was, like, really localized? It was taken down Dine, and Dine was basically based out of that East Coast data center for AWS. Ah, okay. I was not familiar with that. Well, that'll do it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fortunately, Amazon doesn't use that location for their own DNS. Yes. They don't use their own stuff there. Right. They just give that to other people. They are not eating their own dog food. I was going to say, yes, dog fooding is not high on Jeff Bezos's menu.

So you can see, you know, there is a real world sort of potential problem that's right around the corner. And, you know, people are wondering how much of these attacks have been sort of shots across the bow. Are they tests? And what's yet to come? What people are pretty certain about is that there's more to come.

Now, has it been determined who did it yet? Because I heard it was script kitties. Basically, just this was people playing around with the open source version that got leaked. I thought it was bitch-tick bobbed. The most recent one, so far, the current consensus, so if you could even call it consensus, is that it was script kitties.

And mostly what that means is it was not a nation state. So people, you know, fooling around, basically for about $7,500, you can get your own Mirai botnet for hire with many, many thousands of devices. So, you know, that's not big money when it comes to these sorts of things.

So that's the kind of thing where someone could, who wanted to make a point, could put down their money and, you know, give most of North America a bad day. So we're saying Trump might be doing this on the third? Moving on to Flash, our second story is— Actually, let's quickly mention that we do have in our show notes an IoT scanner, which checks for vulnerabilities in your connected devices.

So if you have these things and you're concerned about this, please do go hit that link in our show notes. Yeah, yeah. And we should say one of the major manufacturers, it's a Chinese company whose name I am not good at pronouncing, but they've actually done a recall of some of their devices. Not that it's going to do a whole lot of good at this point.

Is that the same company that's suing Krebs? I, yes, I believe, yes, I believe it is. I believe they have their dander up. We said on our show, you know, we made the point that they should calm down.

We're not blaming them. You know, they're not the—well, they may be—they may have a part in this. They're not, you know, they were not malicious. They didn't set out to do this. Yeah, they just had a—they had a pool of gasoline in their backyard, but they're not the ones that brought the match to the party. Right, exactly, exactly.

So we actually spoke to a security expert today on our show who was talking about how this botnet is very simple, but actually kind of brilliant in the way that it executes, where once it gets a hold of a device, the first thing it does is it starts looking for more devices.

And so you get this sort of exponential growth of it gathering potential devices until you hit go, and then kaboom. Anyway, moving on to our next story, Graham Clewley, who, of course, is a well-known security person and a well-known security website, has the article, Patch Flash Now, or Kick It to the Curb.

Was this from 1999? It could be. Yeah, exactly. A recurring theme. I thought Steve Jobs got rid of Flash. He sure did his darndest to do that, and I would say, you know, probably more than anyone has contributed to Flash falling by the wayside, which I think many of us would consider to not be a bad thing.

So there was an advisory, an immediate patch now. There is an exploit of Flash that is being observed out in the wild, which means people are actually using it for bad things. So if you are someone who still has your Flash player installed for Windows, update it now.

Do not delay. They're targeting attacks against Windows version 7, 8.1, and 10, and they've got updates for the Mac, for Linux, and for Chrome, and for Windows as well. So don't delay. Go in and do that. According to Adobe, this is a serious one.

Of course, the other option is... Get rid of Flash. Now, I feel bad for Flash, and I know this isn't a popular sentiment, but I just... A few words in defense of Flash. In its time, it was great for what it did. So is the plague.

Get fucking rid of it now. Yeah. Bubonic plague was great in its time for population control, but that doesn't mean we still want it around. This is true. This is true. Now, I do see our next story could equally have come from basically 1970. So this is an interesting...

This is a flashback show. It is. Except not. When this thing hits 88 miles an hour, you're going to see some serious shit. So this is a story about pager security. Now, for those youngins in our audience who may not be familiar with what a pager is, let's go back in time to, oh, I don't know, the early 1990s, and what a pager is.

How you got your drugs. What's that? Yeah. How you got your drugs. Yeah. That's how you got your drugs, yes. But let's take an alternative timeline and say that you're just getting out of college and you're working in television production, and so people need to get a hold of you to give you jobs so you can afford to pay your rent and you don't have to move back in with your parents.

You would have this small device about the size of a box of matches that you would wear on your belt. Tic-Tacs. Tic-Tacs. Oh, yes. About the size of a pack of Tic-Tacs. Yeah. The Trump communication device. Some Tic-Tacs. So, anyway, you'd have this device on your belt, and there would be a phone number assigned to this device.

Someone would call that phone number. They'd hear a beeping sound, and then they would punch their phone number into the telephone. Your pager would then get notified, and all it would display usually was the phone number that called you. At that point, you would rush to find a pay phone, because at this point in time, people were not carrying around cellular phones the way they do today.

In fact, cell phones would not fit in your pocket. They were large, bulky, and very expensive. Briefcase-sized. Yeah, so you would find a pay phone, and then you would call this person back, and you would say, they would answer the phone, and you would say, hello, someone paged me from this number. And they would say, oh, yes, I called you.

So, that's your little history lesson on how pagers work. Very simple technology, but at the time, it was like living in the future. To be fair, the few female listeners to the show watch Grey's Anatomy, and I think they still use them on there. That's true. Yeah, that's a good point. That is another place where pagers are still used, is in hospitals.

But it turns out pagers are still very popular when it comes to people who are handling our critical infrastructure, our electrical grid, our nuclear power plants. Oh, great. Oh, nice. Things like that. And pagers are not encrypted in any way.

The traffic going to pagers is unencrypted, because way back when these protocols were invented, nobody really thought such a thing would be necessary, because who would be listening in on your pagers? And besides, the data stream was probably coming by at an impossibly fast rate. Four baud.

Right, exactly. So, it turns out it's really easy to listen in on these paging streams, and researchers also found that it's pretty easy to inject something into a pager stream, so you can actually send something to someone's pager, make it look like it came from, you know, a real sender.

So, you can make them call like a 900-porn number? You could do that. You could do that. Absolutely. Do those still exist? I have no idea. Hey, if pagers still exist, nothing would surprise me at this point. Well, I think we have a story for next week's show, continuing with the retro theme.

Yes. Exactly. So, you know, imagine that what people are concerned about is this is a way that people could collect business intelligence that they could use to then, you know, use social engineering to break into someone's, get past someone's security.

So, for example, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, I could call the front desk receptionist at the time that I now know this is down and say, hey, this is, you know, Bob from Bob's HVAC system.

And I need you to, you know, give me the I need you to unlock the front door so I can come in and and take care of the HVAC. So, you know, you know, that sort of intelligence that you could get from monitoring a system like that. So Bob's your hacker. Bob's your hacker. Bob's your hacker.

So, you know, one of those things that's still hanging around. I don't think there's actually been any examples of this happening, but I just thought it was a fun, fun story to kind of close things out today that some of these things linger around and they can become, you know, potentially serious threats.

That's awesome. I think I still have my pager sitting in a box somewhere. I'm going to see if I can find that. Yeah, I do. I still have an old Motorola pager sitting in a drawer. I don't know why I can't seem to part with it, but there it is. Yeah. Friend of the show MXV and I went together to buy our first pagers.

And unfortunately, in a in an incident, mine got lost in the woods when I tried to throw it at a squirrel. But he still has his and we found it not that long ago. And it's fun. It's fun to look at those old things. And that squirrel is still getting his messages on that pager. I know. Sentences you would never expect to hear in a technology podcast.

I threw my pager at a squirrel. But now we have a show title. Show title. All right, guys. All right, Dave. Thanks again. This was awesome. And we'll talk to you next week. Sounds good. At the library.

I finally finished Death's End. Remembrance of Earth's Past. Finally, finally, finally. Well, to be fair, it's like 10,000 pages long. It is very long. So, verdict. Did not like it at all. I like the first two books a lot.

This book sucked. Ah, fuck yeah. You thought the same thing. You could have saved me basically a week of slogging through like 800 more pages of what the fuck is going on. Who the hell are these people? Why does this matter?

What happened to all these people that I actually cared about? Oh, we're just never going to mention them again. And we're going to finish 7,000 years in some fucking QBert-y future. Welcome to my life. Yes, I had to go through it too. So, you had to suffer. And the only reason I had to- You're an asshole.

Hey, I'm sorry. Gunslinger. Book one. Fuck you. Pay back. But I told you that one sucked and you had to just slog through it to get through it. Only after I tried to slog through it. That was after months of the Gunslinger saying, this is awesome. This is awesome.

No, no. That's a lie. No, it's not. I'll go back to the archives and find that. Fine. You go ahead. I will stand by the fact that I said that the Gunslinger series is fantastic, but the first book sucks. I have said that from day one to every single person I've told to go read those books.

Except me. That's bullshit. No, that's bullshit. You'll go back through the tapes and you'll find out. Except that you won't anymore. Hell no, I'm not going to go back through the tapes. And anyways, the point would be that you have to slog through something shit to get through something that is amazing and ends on such a high note.

This is the end and it sucked and I could have stopped after the second book. Here's the thing though. You like the ending of Seven Eves and I didn't. So I thought maybe we could get a different timeline on this where you would convince me that the ending of this was actually good. So I was hopeful that maybe that you saw something in it that I didn't.

Nope. This sucked. Okay. Don't read the third book. The first two are genius. The third book is not. Maybe the first like one third of the third book is okay. No, no, no. It's not worth picking up because like I said, the ending of the second book, you could have been done.

You did not need to keep going. Yeah, you don't need to go anywhere. It's just meanders and there's no point and you don't feel good. You don't feel bad. You feel nothing. Yeah, that's pretty much it. It's just like, oh, really? Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Well, that's how the universe ends. You know what? It ended almost as pathetically as the last Hunger Games movie. That's about how pathetic it was. Yeah. I mean, it's like you carry, you're carrying this, this delicious, like delicious cake across, across a room and then you just kind of stumble a bit and you drop it and it flops on the floor and you're like, oh.

Yeah, but it's not even like the cake was delicious and you lost something. It was like the cake was made of dog shit and then you look, you like, you got it all the way to the end. You dropped it and you're like sad and then you look at it and you're like, oh, well, this was shit anyway. Fuck. The cake in this analogy would have been the first two books, which are good.

Oh, okay. That's okay. Didn't know where you were going with it. Oh, man. All right. So, so you read a book by a fucking total psycho. Ah, Scott Adams. How to fail at almost everything and still win big. Kind of the story of my life. Who would have thought that the guy that created Dilbert is such an egomaniac raging asshole?

Well, the book was good. I liked the book. I had a really good time with the book. Read his book. I'm trying to stay away from that for very various reasons, which you know about. But yeah, I kind of had to unfollow him on Twitter.

So I have plausible deniability about what's coming in the future. But yeah, with the whole thing about him signing up to kill Trump, if he wins that really kind of that after supporting Trump for ever. And yeah, it's just as Dave Bittner, friend of the show would say, this is a sticky wicket.

It's not a sticky wicket. He's a fucking psycho, crazy asshole, and it's tainted everything that he's ever done. I can never look at Dilbert again. Oh, kind of like Orson Scott Card. Man, except Ender's game is still so good. Well, so is that other one. Empire. Empire was good.

But the one with the dead kids and the magic underwear? Yeah, he can go fuck himself on that one. Well, he is Mormon. Yeah. A lot of magic underwear floating around in that society. Hence the go fuck yourself part. Yeah. Anyway, did you see the post about the kid that needed a permission slip to read Fahrenheit 451?

I did not because you put that in recently. Okay. So this is a really funny one that came from the Daily Dot, but it was passed around Twitter and in the link verse, as it were. So Daily Show head writer Daniel Radosh.

They still have a writer because that show's gotten horrible. I liked it. I watched a couple episodes recently. I quite liked it. But his so his son got it got this permission slip. And so he wrote a beautiful rebuttal to the not a rebuttal reply to the teacher.

I'm not going to read the whole thing because it's actually long and we're running long. But yes, I'll paraphrase. I love this letter. What a wonderful way to introduce students to the theme of Fahrenheit Fahrenheit Fahrenheit Fahrenheit or 50 Fahrenheit club. That would be a good one.

Oh, boy. Yeah. Fahrenheit 451. That books are so dangerous that the institutions of society, schools and parents might be willing to team up against children to prevent them from reading one. So and it goes on from there. I thought it was a great little. I'm really getting an insight into my future as a dad.

Oh, you're fucked. Yeah, you're fucked.

Software, apps and gadgets. I got a couple old school app recommendations. OK. Alto's Adventure. One of my favorite go to just fun, like you can play for like two minutes, three minutes or 10 minutes or in my case, sometimes four hours games.

Alto's Adventure is awesome. It's just like, you know, two buttons. You're you're you're a monk snowboarding down a mountain trying to avoid llamas and sheep herders and doing lots of backflips and jumps and grinds and stuff. It's so much fun.

I love it. And the music is great. The graphics are great. It's cheap. Highly recommended, especially if you have a high definition iPad and they have the new Zen mode where you can actually not fall and play forever. It's like the, you know, the endless version.

So, oh, that's nice. Yes. Now, the other game is a zombie gun ship. I swear I've talked about it on the show, but I couldn't find any links. In the previous versions. But zombie gun ship has been around for almost four years. And you're basically flying an AC-130 gun ship and you're shooting zombies while hapless, stupid humans run between them trying to get to a bunker.

Oh, it's like self-driving cars then. Pretty much. Yes. It's it is so much fun. I have spent so much time playing this game. I love it to death because it's not your normal like zombie shoot them up. It's like infrared cameras from a gun ship. You get to change weapons and upgrade your weapons.

And I love this game. And I've been talking to the guys who built it on Twitter and they've got a new version coming out, which looks great. But either way, even with the new version coming out, go check out the old version, because I swear to God, I have spent so much time playing this game on the crapper that my legs have gone numb many times over.

So I highly recommend zombie gun ship. Okay. Too much to TMI. Yeah, that was the absolutely most unappetizing description of anything ever. Well, I'm talking about killing zombies. I can't talk about dropping a deuce while I'm killing zombies. Jesus. Fuck. I know.

Tough crowd. I know. Seriously. There is now a new way to take drones out since we're in the gadget section and drones are gadgets. Normally, I'd put this under security, but it's just it's more fun now to keep drones and gadgets together. These guys have figured out how to hack the DSMX protocol, which is what most remote controlled toys run on.

I want this so bad living where I live. I know you do. I know you do. It's probably a felony to do what they're doing because you are taking over aircraft. But to be fair, most of the aircraft that I'm going to take over are committing felonies doing what they're doing.

Well, then you get double felonies. And then so if they're squared, then you get felony cubed or gleaming the cube. Don't even fucking mention that movie to me right now. Okay. The week I had, don't mention that movie to me. Anyway, yes.

But you can steal a drone without requiring a shotgun or an eagle. Okay. It's called Icarus. It's not for sale yet, but the link will be in the show notes to Ars Technica, who covered the whole story that came out from a security conference in Japan this week.

Highly recommended reading. And thank you, hat tip, to John Chevron, aka Monkey13, for sending this one along. Thanks, Monkey13. Thank you. So the steadfast seat of power for all of the original .com boom, the original Aeron chair, has now been redesigned.

There's a new one. There is. And let's see if any of this makes any sense. The new Aeron retains the distinctive silhouette of the iconic chair, but every component of the design has been updated to raise the bar for performance seating. These updates include the Posture Fit SL, which allows it to move the body in such a natural way that people can shift from forward to reclining postures intuitively, a fit that supports the sacral region.

Sacral? Sacral. So if it supports my sac, that is a region. That's for sure. To nurture the natural S-shape of the spine. Rotate the pelvis forward and activate healthful posture, all while sitting upright. And the EZ. 8Z. 8Z. 8Z pellicle, which offers unprecedented comfort through eight varied zones of tension in the seat and back.

What this sounds like to me is that they basically become Web 2.0 with their bullshit speak. Well, I went and did some research on this and the pellicle is an often talked about people in Aeron message boards. So this is actually speak to the people who still give a shit about the Aerons and are Aeron enthusiasts.

So to a lot of people, this made sense and there are probably some chair boners going on out there right now. Good old chair boner. Well, I still like my Herman Miller Mira, which is the one that I'm sitting on right now. It is my favorite chair ever. I will not be getting a new Aeron link in the show notes for the Mira.

It's good times. Are you on the straight mirror or the Mira 2? I am on the straight mirror. OK, because the one that you got me to buy was a Mira 2. And it was it was fucking glorious. That was the single best chair I've ever had.

And I had to sell it because I couldn't bring it with me to Chicago. And I'm still sad every day sitting in my ninety nine dollar Office Depot chair. When I get up, my hip flexors are in fucking agony. And I hate this thing more than life itself. So I might just have to sell a kidney so I can go get this new Aeron because it does look beautiful.

Yeah. OK, I'm going to stick with my mirror. I love it. Anyways, you have complained multiple times about me never, ever getting you a maple cookies from Canada. Well, no, you do get me the maple cookies. I complain about you eating them before you mail them to me. That's true.

Technically, I buy them for you and I just eat them and don't send them to you. Now you don't need me anymore, Jason. Well, theoretically, because this is Web 2.0. So you never know what you're going to fucking get. There's a company called XPAC. And this is actually genius. I'm surprised. I'm pissed I didn't come up with this.

It's at XPAC.co. It's a monthly box because everything and Web 2.0 is based on monthly, not just buying what you want. You have to sign up and get a fucking subscription. And you don't know what's actually going to come in the box until you get it, because every single time it's going to be based on what they can get the most cheap from every single place.

Still genius concept. So if you're an expat, they have a bunch of different countries right now. They will ship you every month a box full of goodies from your home country. Right now they have Canada, Germany, the UK, France, Puerto Rico and Colombia.

The can the Philippines Philippines. Oh, yeah, there's more. Sorry. That was just the home page right now, because, again, Web 2.0 scrolling parallax site version 1.0 that everybody uses only allows for six different boxes on the home page.

That's right, because they bought the cheap theme. They bought the cheap theme. So there you go. So everything about this is so Web 2.0. It's ridiculous. However, my wife just lost her mind when she saw this envisioning ketchup chips every single month and I had to explain to her, you don't know what you're going to get.

See, yeah, I'm looking at the Canada lineup right now. You got maple cookies. You got shreddies, which I never had. You get the milk in the bag. You have to use with those, right? Because they have the milk in the bag in Canada, right? Yeah. OK, so you get shreddies in the bag and you get the milk in the bag.

And but next to it, yes, the ketchup lays, which are fucking glorious. I will all in all, this looks like a really nice package. But since you don't know what you're getting, I cannot subscribe. And now that I'm in Illinois and Chicago specifically, I can hop like over to Midway, get a plane to Toronto, go shopping and be back in like three hours.

That's true. And you get what you actually really wanted and maybe much better. They have things like, you know, in a bag poutine, which is not going to match the real thing at a bar with beer. So no, definitely not. No, I mean, my problem with all this stuff is you don't know what you're getting.

I'm not going to pay for something not knowing what's coming. I'm just not going to. I guess you take an Uber, you pay for a car and you don't know who's going to drive. That's the reason I bitch about Uber all the time as well.

Media candy. Black Mirror is out. Woohoo. I've really got to get on watching this, but it's hard to do. It's so bleak and I have a son and I'm supposed to be feeling happy. So here's the funny part. The first episode, I was originally on the, oh my God, this is so depressing.

We've talked about this on the show and it actually mirrored something that we'll talk about when we get to comment of the week. But at the end, I was like jubilant. I'm like, yeah, fuck the man. But the second one, yeah, pretty depressing.

I'm pretty much more about the happy myself nowadays. So watching it was, that's why I've only watched two. And you know, me and binging, you know. I know. I've only watched two episodes so far. Okay. So I liked the two that I saw. I know that I did. I looked at some lists and some of the ones that are coming up are on like, you know, the top, the top five lists out there.

So, but the ones that I saw, I didn't think were bad at all. And they're definitely in the Black Mirror realm. It is just the same. It is more Black Mirror. Yeah. I think I'm going to add this to my late night viewing once everybody's in bed. We'll see about that.

I tell you what, you know what? Like, like I said, I previously pimped Goliath. I would rather have a second season of Goliath, I think, than a third season of Black Mirror, which is really scary because I was looking forward to this. But now that I've got it, I'm like, it just makes me feel like black inside.

It's like, it's like goth television. Well, that sounds perfect for me. A friend of the show, Mike, actually talked to me about Goliath as well. Apparently it's all shot around the corner from me in a place called Shé Jé. I told you. I ignore you when you talk about shows.

No, when I talk about things, you don't listen. Yeah. Speaking of which, Sherlock season four, the premiere date has been revealed. I'm very excited about this. January 1st. Woohoo! We'll be called The Six Thatchers, and it's January 1st. Yes, I'm very excited. I have been keeping up with Westworld.

I still love the show. Well, hang on, hang on. Did you watch the trailer for Sherlock? No, I haven't watched it. Oh, I thought you were going to talk about the trailer. The trailer looks incredible. See, I just want to wait and watch the show. I do, too, but I don't need a trailer.

I'm already sold on Sherlock. I love it. I know, but it looks really fucking good. Right. I mean, I guess it's really good. Yeah. I guess it's one of those things where I haven't waited that long for it. It hasn't been canceled. So I'm amazed you're still watching it. So that's for me. For me, Sherlock just ended about three weeks ago because that's when I finished all the episodes.

So, yeah, for me, it's been years. Yeah, exactly. So I get you wanting to watch the trailer. For me, I was just like, yeah, OK, great. Next season. Awesome. So I've been watching Westworld. It's been absolutely fantastic. I'm really, really into it. And I was starting to get this vague kind of feeling like I've been here before.

I felt these things before. And then somebody over at Vulture.com by Lindsay Romain put her finger on the pulse of what I was feeling. Eight Ways Westworld is the new Lost. OK, I have to read this because I'm having I'm having very difficult, a very difficult time with Lost right now.

I mean, not Lost, Westworld, West Lost. I really wish they would get to a story at some point because I'm not feeling it. I don't see how you don't see multiple stories there, but I do. But I don't see a thread that's actually a through line.

I don't see a through line yet. I can't. Eight Ways Westworld is the new Lost. Yeah. Yeah. Read this article. I think you'll resonate with you. But it doesn't make it bad, per se. As long as there's not a panda they don't explain. No, no. So far, everything's been explained.

I just it's moving so fucking slow. It definitely did slow down this last two episodes. But I get what they're trying to do and what. Anyways, we'll talk about it more. I don't want to go into deep that we're not a Westworld podcast, so we'll talk about more later. No.

Apparently, the Rocky Horror Picture Show revamp sucked. Shocking. Shocking. Yeah. No. I'm sorry. I hate to break it to everybody out there. The Rocky Horror Picture Show sucked. Unless you're 16 and you're drunk and you're throwing toast and rice at your friends that are scantily clad, it sucks.

It's a terrible movie. The only thing good that came out of that is Tim Curry. And now he's like, you know, a vegetable. So it just reminds me that Tim Curry is a vegetable and makes me very fucking sad. So I'd like to distance myself from that last statement because it makes me sad.

It makes me sad, too. Are you watching Dirk Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency? I have not made my trip to Sweden yet. Okay. Yeah, I haven't either. I think I'm going to throw you under the bus on this one and let you watch it, although the reviews are very good on it.

Okay, so here's the problem with this. I am the world's biggest Dirk Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency fan, so I am going to be the most critical motherfucker when it comes to this show. I listened to the Nerdist episode with the stars talking about it, and apparently the director and writer, the guy who put this together, is on my level of Dirk Gently fan and has adapted it for television in a way that I should be happy.

So I'm going to at least let two episodes come out before I watch it. So by the time we do next episode, two episodes will be out, and I will have watched it. Look at Jason starting to adopt my rules slowly but surely. Well, no, it'll still be on the air, Miss Cancelaholic.

A little bit different there. The thing about this is I remember when they did Dirk Gently before, and I watched that, and it was just a travesty. It is an absolute travesty. And I'm still, like I said, I'm still traumatized by, you know, the salmon of doubt and the last Dirk Gently story because I still don't know why there was only half a cat.

And if you're a fan of Dirk Gently, you will know what I mean. So I'll have my review next week. We have half a cat and four times a show, so let's move on quickly here. Moby has put out a new song, Moby and the Void Pacific Choir. I've just released the new music video to the song, Are You Lost in the World Like Me?, which has a thoughtful take on people's relationship to technology.

It's an animated video from this guy, Steve Cutts, who I was not aware of, but he's a London-based artist. And it's all about how we're basically losing our entire worlds and lives to our phones and how modern culture sucks. So there's that video, good time.

Is he writing an episode of Black Mirror for next season? It might as well have been, but it's quite a good song. So good on you, Moby, you came back. Also, just to point out at Pitchfork.com, they have listed the 50 best shoegaze albums of all time. This is one of my favorite musical scenes.

And since music is free now and you can just stream the hell out of it, here's 50 albums to go listen to. I ran through the entire list. I like every single album. I'd even say, where the hell is Swallow, because that was a great band, Blow and Blow Black, the remix version of the album, should be on there somewhere because that album is absolutely fantastic.

And finally, we have a video in the show notes from Dave Bittner, who sent this along as well, and it fits in media candy. It's a great listen. Yes, it is Sultans of Swing by a bunch of guys playing guitar. All right, moving on. Moron of the Week!

I was torn on putting this in Moron of the Week. It was originally going to be in Webs Not Dead or something like that. And then I realized all he's really doing is recreating somebody else's work, and that's stupid. So this guy, his name is, what is his name here?

His name is David McGowan, and he has a Tumblr, MSP Blade Runner, where he is recreating Blade Runner in Microsoft Paint. Basically, really bad sketches, scene by scene, for no particular reason I can figure out whatsoever. See, if this was in the Webs Not Dead, I would have vetoed it, because this is definitely Moron of the Week.

A, using MS Paint to recreate somebody else's artwork. Yeah, all you're really redoing... This is my problem with internet culture in general right now, is all we're doing is redoing other people's shit. Do your own shit. All your shit is belong to us. Exactly.

Apparently, maybe, theoretically, scientists have found a way to turn carbon dioxide into fuel, into ethanol, specifically, which can be used as fuel, by accident, apparently.

If this is true, this is like world-transforming, serious, amazing, crazy stuff. The fact that they haven't been killed yet is amazing, if this is actually true. I'm serious. They have tinfoil hats on Jason. Absolutely. Dr. Adam Rondion, from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, led a study.

They found out, somewhat by accident, that some material that they discovered basically was a catalyst that was turning carbon dioxide into a fuel, which will change the entire effing world, if this is actually true. So, hopefully, we'll see. Comment of the week.

Comment of the week. First comment of the week comes from Patreon, from I like big books and I can't not lie. Well, it's just I like big books, but hey geeks, love the show. Started listening last year. I'm a tech specialist up in Stephen King's neck of the woods.

Surprisingly, we do have a few tech hubs here, surrounded by lots and lots and lots of pretty trees and good beer. Good on you, man. I usually listen to On My Commute Monday morning, so I'm good and grumpy going into the work week. Anyways, I understand the frustration with iTunes. I'd love to leave you guys a five-star review, but in a moment of fury, I totally deleted my iTunes account and can't be bothered to make a new one.

In my house, we use Plex Media Server instead. We have a reasonably sized media collection, and it works great for us. Can't say how well it would work on a massive collection like Jason's, but it's worth checking out if you haven't already. Keep up the great work. Brian, congratulations on your wee one. I'm sorry you are getting a little, or I'm sorry you're getting little to no sleep, but I do appreciate the extra grumpiness you've been bringing to the show lately.

Well, thank you. I like big books. Yeah, it's good times. And by the way, my media collection is very wee, like Brian's wee one, because I delete everything after I watch it. Yeah, and I have the big media collection. I'm the one that can't sign into iTunes with all that stuff because of the sheer large amount of songs that I have.

I'm way too lazy to do my own media server. I want to stay within somebody's architecture. I just wish Apple would let me. Brian lives in the clouds. I'm trying to. Our next comment comes from GrumpyOldGeeks.com from Swell Schultz, which is one of my favorite names of all time.

He just said, editor of Tape Op Magazine is saying goodbye to Apple OS for good. Give me a hammer, part two. And it is the editor of the online magazine talking about why he hates updates and how they ruin software, particularly in the audio engineering world.

Then he gets into how much logic sucks and how Apple keeps screwing with people that do any sort of audio engineering whatsoever. So, Jason, you actually should probably read this. I'll read it, yeah. He says, go to PC. So you should get one of the new PCs and do all your audio engineering from there now. Yeah, then I'd have to learn something new, which I don't like learning.

And again, it's just funny because I'm the exact opposite of this guy as well. I've been doing audio stuff my entire life. I've done editing. I've done engineering. I've put out my own album all on Windows while everybody else in the world was using Mac. And now everybody that's using Mac is trying to switch over to Windows because they hate Mac.

And I just switched to Mac. See, I still love my Mac and I'm not going to change. All you have to do is wait three months. That's it. You wait three months. And honestly, no matter what, you should always wait three months after a Mac update. It doesn't matter if you're a fucking audio engineer.

There are bugs. If you rely on your computer for what you do for a living, don't be on the bleeding edge. This is just common sense. Says the guy who has auto updates on his phone. Yeah, my phone doesn't pay my bills. My Mac pays my bills.

Okay. That's all I'm saying. Moving on. This comes from NoNicnameRequired, who you might recognize from last week. Well, this is a recommendation from NoNicnameRequired, who you might recognize from last week. We have a five-star rating from him this time.

Such a refreshing tech podcast. Well, thank you, NoNicnameRequired, for updating your review. We appreciate it. And see Black Mirror, Season 3, Episode 1, for why we thought this was hilarious. But honestly, we do love the new review. We're not going to read it here because it is very long and it is very gushing.

And we really, really appreciate it. Yes, we do appreciate that. Thank you so much. And I had a very, very long laugh when I saw it. I did, too. We also got a five-star review, first time around, from N-T-Y-T-I. N-T-Y-T-I.

N-T-Y-T-I. Love the show. Found the show through a mention on the AOC podcast. That would be Jason's day job. That'd be the art of charm, yes. I find myself coming back every week to hear what has happened in the tech world and have some laughs. The show notes with all the articles are great. There are always interesting articles to find.

Thanks, guys. Well, thank you. Love it there. Don't know what's up with the mayo on the fries. But love it there. Closing shout outs. The iPod is 15 years old. 15 years old.

This is ridiculous. I had one. I had version one. I wish I still had it. It holds more music than my goddamn phone now does. Here's the problem with it. Well, it held five gig. I bought one, too. I bought one on Michigan Avenue in Chicago when I was sneaking around from work using my AOL Instant Messenger BlackBerry to skirt having to actually sit in my office.

And I took it to my dad and his thing. And I'm like, look at this. This holds music. And he's just like, kids. But I loved my iPod 1. I love the mechanical wheel. I miss you, iPod 1. And if you still have one and it works, good on you because those things blew up.

Battery expanded and hard drives dies. Yeah, blew it up not in the way the Samsung Galaxies did. No, no, no. Big thanks to Tony Hawk, by the way. I actually talked to him and interviewed him this week for my day job. That episode will be coming out at some point. And I will definitely talk about it when it comes out.

It was a long road for that one. Hometown boy for me. Yeah. Well, he's a little bit south of you. He's a little bit south. A little. He's south of the nuclear tits, as the descendants would say. Yes. But I will give your copies a shout out.

Oh, thank you very much. They're doing their, well, we're 50-50 right now. But last night. I'm a National League boy, so I'm always going to root for the National League. And maybe not if the Blue Jays would have been in there. But, you know, I'm married into Toronto. But, yeah, I mean, come on.

This is historic if they win. It is historic. And you know what? I'm not generally one of these guys. But I'm looking at the Cleveland Indians logo. And I'm like, that's fucking racist. It is a little racist. It's really bad.

They could do an update. You know, there's this whole thing about the Washington Redskins as well. And somebody had done, like, an indigenous update of the logo that makes it not offensive. And it's fucking way better. Just adopt it. And you're done, people.

Yeah. This is like a bucktooth Indian from a Bugs Bunny commercial is their logo. And I'm looking at it. I'm just like, man, that, that, that. Look, plus we, plus we all know the bottom line is money. You change the logo. You have to sell all new gear to everyone. This is a win-win for you people.

You're not racist anymore. And you make a shit ton of money. Exactly. So what's holding you up there, Cleveland? Idiots. Anyway, my last one, this is, since we're recording this on a Thursday, I'm going to have my throwback Thursday in here. I'm going to put in a video of how the Animal Chin Ramp was built.

If you're a skater from the old days, Animal Chin turns 30 this week. On Friday when this comes out, there will be video of the original Bones Brigade skating the Animal Chin Ramp that has been rebuilt. I'm going to try and link that in the show notes after it comes out.

But after talking to Tony Hawk this week, I could not not put this in the show. I'm not entirely sure what a single word was that has been said in the last two minutes. So, perfect. So you got me on your social media shit. I got you on my skateboarding shit. Anyway, thanks for listening.

I'm Jason DeFillippo. And you can check me out at jpd.me where you can find all the links to all my social media and contact info if you want to hire me for your podcast editing and producing needs. And I'm Brian Shulman, certainly you can follow me on that dead social network called Twitter at Slender Fungus. I don't know why anymore, but hey, I'll try to post more until it goes away like vinyl.

Oh, I'm also at about.me slash jpd.me. Maybe you should check that one out, Brian. Oh, what else are you on? Oh, I got an email from a hello. Hello. What's the one that I've mortally offended on Twitter? I can't even remember that you're on as well. I have no idea.

There's so many of them. Imsi. Imsi. I got my Imsi shirt. Yeah. That's going the way of the Zane Lamprey shirt and it's going to become a cleaning rag. Visit patreon.com slash GOG and sign up to help support the show.

Even as little as a buck a month helps keep the bandwidth, baby formula, and puppy chow flowing. If you're cheap or broke but still want to support the show, please go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a glowing review and five stars. At the very least, please share the show with your friends. Grumpyoldgeeks.com is where you can listen to shows, leave feedback, ask us questions that we can read on the air, or find links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like.

We're also on Twitter, the Dead Social Network, at GOG Podcast, and on Instagram, at Grumpy Old Geeks. Intro music for the show is provided by the band Among Us. You can find them on iTunes, Spotify, and Apple Music, or get 10 exclusive tracks when you sponsor us on Patreon. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Sochansky.

You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash House of Andy, and he's also on SoundCloud at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash Andy, where you can listen to this song in its entirety. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 183. Even as little as a buck a month helps keep the baby whip.

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