196: Nordstradamus

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. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks episode 196. I am Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Guten tag here, Brian. Good morning, Jason. How are you? I'm doing okay, considering I almost burnt down my house last night. Then I brained myself on the stairs going to do laundry this morning and landed on my back and can barely sit here anymore. It's been a fun two days.

You are not the most graceful of men. I tell you, man, this getting old thing is just bizarre. Yeah. I was an athlete for so long and now I'm just a bumbling mess of hot goo. That's about it. That's a good title.

But I was making some enchiladas last night and I was roasting my tomatillos and didn't realize I put too much olive oil on them when I looked around and the house was filled with smoke and the dog started going batshit because she'd never heard a smoke alarm before. Oh, yeah, that can be frightening.

Yeah, yeah. She just kept jumping on me trying to lick my face to make sure everything was okay because I was so panicked. Which didn't really help the situation. I think you could offer that service to people. I think it would calm people down in these trying times. Here, have a puppy lick your face. Yeah, well, when they're 120 pounds and six feet tall, it's generally a little bit more scary than calming, I think.

Okay. I just wanted to throw out a reminder that we are now on the Podcast One Network. So we've killed our old app. So if you were using the Grumpy Old Geeks app to get your show, which means you're probably not hearing this anyway because we haven't updated it. And a friend of the show, Trent, who wrote it, pulled it from the store.

So if you want to use an app to listen to us, either Android or iOS, go to podcastone.com and you can get the app there and listen to us to your heart's content. Yep. It's a pretty decent app. You can go in there. You can favorite our show and it'll pop up and automatically download and all that sort of stuff.

Lots of settings. It's nice. And lots of other great shows on Podcast One to download. Like I might recommend The Art of Charm for a chance there. Yeah. No nepotism here. None whatsoever. Welcome to the Grumpy Old Geeks cabinet. Yeah. So I have I've been trying to wean myself off of the news as much as possible.

And I found it not possible. Well, I found a great website where I can go at the end of the day and just see what shenanigans went down that day. And I just love the name of it is what the fuck just happened today dot com. Yeah, I like this. I've actually bookmarked it.

It's it's a pretty useful. The tagline logging the daily shock and awe is pretty nice. Look, man, we I I knew we were in for some crazy times as soon as the election ended. I just Nordstrom Domus couldn't have predicted how crazy. See what I did there?

I see what you did there. I see what you did. I gave you a chuckle. So, yeah. Anyways, yeah, it's it's this is a great resource. I've got to say it beats staring at Twitter and just crying into your cereal. Yeah. And I had to kill so many news sources from my feed because I just got so tired of it.

So, you know, you just get beat down and beat down. So, you know, try to focus everything down to tech as much as possible, as much as you can nowadays because it's a cross permeation of everything that we love and hold dear. But it really is. This is this resource.

I just added to my RSS feed. So I just get a notice when I'm in my reader and I can just, you know, I have maximized my creativity. So I can only have to cry once a day now. Nice. A little follow up. Last week, I talked about how we're never going to get Deep Space Nine in HD.

And you had mentioned that that's your absolute favorite of the Star Trek. And I'd say it's really up there for me. But, you know, nothing could beat the original for Charm and Next Generation for basically saving the franchise. But Deep Space Nine was very good. I'll give you that. So if you would love the show, they're working on a big old documentary about it where they're going to get together these shows, writers, and workshop a planned eighth season and discuss what would have happened had they continued.

I saw this this morning. I was just like almost spit my tea out because I was like, no way. And went and looked at there because they're I think they're doing it on Indiegogo to fund it. And it's more than more than funded. So it's going to get made, which is great. And unfortunately, Avery Brooks is not on board yet.

So I'm sure they'll get them in. And once they get it going, I mean, they've got to. It's being directed by Adam Nimoy, Leonard Nimoy's son, who has also made the documentary for the love of Spock, which I tried to watch. Not good. I just it's so inside base.

It's I'm in that weird pocket where I know a hell of a lot because I'm a huge Star Trek fan, but I don't want to know as deeply as they go. Gotcha. So the basic level stuff I already know and I'm getting bored by because I know this already. And where they take it, I don't want to go. Gotcha. Yes, I've hit I've hit peak Nimoy.

So, yes, there's really not much else to dig into with that. So I'll probably skip it. I put it in my queue and then every time I went to go watch it, I'm like, nah, not really. It's the same thing with the Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself. I always wanted to watch it. But every time I have the time and I see it in my queue, I'm just like, I just it's going to bum the hell out of me.

You know, yeah, yeah, I agree. And speaking of bumming the hell out of me, I guess what I did this week. What did you do this week? We should get back to our tech roots here. All right. I started to learn how to build a Facebook bot. What? I had found myself with some free time, not covered with baby poop and sat down and went, you know what?

I should I should expand my skill base a little bit. Bots are all the rage with this artificial intelligence and whatnot. Let's see what's involved in building one. And I put together a very simple, basic one. I might build it out a little bit more and go through the process of getting it vetted and maybe have a grumpy old geek spot that does silly things like who's smarter, Jason or Brian?

And then we'll say neither of them or that sort of thing. So, OK, spoiler alert. I will let you know if the grumpy old geeks bot ever goes live and those of you who are super bored could play with it. But what I really learned building the bot is that very, very few people ever need to have a bot. Yeah, that's really what it comes down to.

I think it's the usage in terms of like building a store. If you're a retailer, I can kind of see that if you're if your customers are so lazy, they can't be bothered to go to the myriad of other ways that they can purchase your stuff. You can build a bot that can sell things to them. Yeah.

And it's funny this morning when I logged into Skype, there was a new Skype bot waiting for me. Yes. The hell's that all about? I don't know. Good morning, Jason DeFillippo. How can I help you? I'm sorry. I did not understand that. I'm sorry. I did not understand that. You're breaking up. Call me back. I actually did some software work this week myself, believe it or not.

What? I had to spin up a new server, lock it down, which, I mean, talk about bringing back some PTSD right there. Yeah. And it was a Node app, which made it even worse. It's the NPR audiogram app that they put out in source form on GitHub. And we're playing around with it for making little audiograms of snippets from the shows that I work on.

And it's a cool little app, and it just gives you a movie that you can share. And what it's doing, I mean, there's a lot of FFmpeg stuff in there. The interface is one of the worst things I've ever seen. To even change a background image, you have to go in and, like, make a new theme for it. And all of the stuff is in the back end.

This was definitely, the UI was definitely written by a coder. You can tell that. They did not have anybody put any UI on it. Yeah, all this stuff is kind of that. I mean, I did the same thing. I had to spin up a, you know, cloud application platform thing as well. I used Heroku, just for shits and giggles, if anybody is interested in that.

God, what a boring process. Boy, I don't want to get back into doing that as a living. Oh, no, man. Just, I fought tooth and nail to not have to do this thing. And I finally caved on it. And it took, you know, almost half a day to get this thing up and running and learn what the settings were and tweak it. But the fact that of, you know, using Node Package Manager again and all that other stuff, I was just like, oh.

Oh, yeah. I would so much rather talking to a microphone all day. As I was sitting there, like, command line interface, like, syncing GitHub with Heroku. And I'm like, why am I doing this? Yeah. What kind of self-loathing and hatred do you have for yourself today? Oh, let's jump on Heroku. Yeah.

Good times. Anyways, if anybody's out there, there's actually some interesting stuff. And we're going to get to one later in the show that I think I'm going to try. So we'll talk about that in a bit. Awesome. Well, then, let's get to the news. In the news.

Oh, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. What have you done now? Hold on a second. You have backed Twitter 100%. You have put your money where your mouth is with Twitter. Yes, I have. I have. And they never fail to disappoint, it seems.

Yes, they do. They've got three new updates this week around, basically, the problem of people being assholes on Twitter. Oh, so they got rid of the president? So they're going to do a better job of keeping banned users from rejoining the service via new accounts.

How they're going to do that? No idea, because it is so easy to make a Twitter account. It's ridiculous, especially if you use Gmail, because you can do the username plus unique identifier after that and use the same email account to have 100 Twitter accounts.

How did I know this? Because I do it all the time. So when they I'm going to play around with that and see if I can get past it. And I don't think I will have a very hard time. No. And even if they do, if they try to do IP blocking, you got your trusty VPN. That's right. Grumpy Old Geeks dot com slash VPN.

Sign up for private Internet access today. Next up, they've got safe search, which will, you know, turn off the inappropriate words, phrases or images from search results. OK. Yeah. OK. Because, you know, lots of kids use Twitter. Yeah. And they're going to start hiding inappropriate responses to tweets.

So they don't appear in conversations who determines what's inappropriate. Algorithmically machine learned machine learned will do that. Machine learned never really does well with things like irony and sarcasm. Yeah. Or fake spelling.

And because we know everybody on Twitter spells so good. Oh, I got a spelling story I haven't put in the news yet because it just broke. OK. Can't wait for that one. Yeah. Good times. Yeah. So we'll see how that goes. It's not going well, I can tell you already, because Twitter has missed Wall Street's earnings estimates and its ad business is slumping, according to this article on Recode.

I can tell you the ad business is slumping because, as documented on this show, I have repeatedly attempted to purchase ads. I cannot give them money if I tried. Yeah. Love it. The entire system is broken. I have never been able to place a Twitter ad. That is so funny. It's unbelievable.

So shares plummeted over 9% in pre-market trading earlier this week. The advertising revenue, which makes up the vast majority of its business, again, mind blown, don't know how, was actually down in quarter four from the year prior. The stock has hit 15.58, which I believe is lower than what you purchased that, Jason.

Yes, it is. Ah, that beer is coming my way. Come on, Twitter. Come back from the dead, please. I don't want to have to buy Brian beer. And this might be one of the reasons why Twitter is down. Hashtags and Super Bowl ads have slipped to 30% of all ads when it used to be up to 45%.

I used to always say that Twitter had the best PR company in the world because everybody uses hashtags, even though Twitter, not really, your money is better spent and your time is better spent on other social networks like Ello. But also on your own URL, I've always said this.

I've always said this. Don't put in, and this is my favorite one, my favorite one of all time. You see a TV ad or you see even better, a magazine ad where they have Twitter logos and Facebook logos and YouTube logos and no links. So you can't type a URL in. But now you know that if you really wanted to go try and find them on Twitter or Facebook, they're there somewhere, but you just can't get to them.

Those are my favorite people that do that are just like, oh, come on, people get a short URL and that's it. Then, you know, go to tide.com slash social to get all of our links. You know, easy enough. Anybody with a brain can figure that out, I guess, unless you're in marketing.

So the URL is making a comeback. So maybe that's one of the other reasons Twitter stock has dropped a bit. Oh, good. Maybe we'll all get jobs building websites again. Oh, no. So one of my favorite things of all time is I love that sequence in Blade Runner where they take the photo and they do all the crazy, you know, enhanced resolution and look around corners and whatnot.

We're getting closer to that reality. New Google brain research is bringing zoom and enhance to reality. So if you've been pixelating your face on naughty photos out there, you're in trouble. Yeah, definitely. Because this stuff can basically unpixelate a face and figure out exactly who you are.

And you combine that with a little facial recognition pattern. Oh, boy. Mm hmm. Yeah. They figured out a while ago how to like if you use the swirly filter from Photoshop, they figured out how to unswirl it quite some time ago. So that one out the window. So you pedophiles out there start using something else.

Idiots. They call this pixel recursive super resolution. And we have a link to the actual white paper where they talk about this in the notes. It's heady stuff. I think I got I got about three sentences in and said, nah. Yeah. I looked at that one, too. And I went, OK, that's over my head.

Yeah. Yeah. So the Google Chromebook, did you ever get one of these? I remember you talking about you were maybe just going to drop like whatever it was because they're super crazy cheap. It was I got the Asus, the Asus Chromebook. Right. The 11 inch. It was two hundred and ten bucks, I think.

Right. Great little machine. Loved it. But turns out I don't need it. So I gave it to my dad for Christmas and he used it. Yeah. It's a great little machine. It's, you know, indestructible, super portable, has ports on it, unlike my iPad. So you can put in, you know, SD cards and stuff like that.

It was it was a nice little machine. I used it for what it was worth. The only thing that the one that I had that was really kind of a deal breaker was no backlit keyboard. So it made it really hard to see the keyboard when you're sitting there and on the couch at night, you know. So that was the only downside of it. But for what it is, I loved it.

I thought I thought it was great. Well, the U.S. school system agrees with you because it's doing extremely well there. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah, they're cheap. They're easy. Low income students can basically get these. They can be subsidized if need be. There's a couple different programs for that. So the Chromebooks are just killing it.

They're used in many, many, many school systems here in the U.S. And again, the cheap price, the fact that it's super simple, it does the basics. You can do your reporting. You can do Minecraft, which a lot of people are using this programming to teach programming these days. So just killing it in the school system.

So it's doing really, really well there. That's I thought that was fascinating. There's a whole report on Salon about how it's just taken over. Yeah. I remember when iPads were supposed to be the next big thing. But the problem is expensive. Yeah, they're too damn expensive and too fragile. That Chromebook I had, man, you could kill a man with it and still be fine.

It was built like a tank. But it was still comfortable to use. In today's school system, you need something that can stop a bullet. That's true. Or take out a bear. So you hear that, Tim Cook? Go build a Kevlar iPad that sells for $200. And then you can get back into the school system.

Yeah. Now, we've talked about smart TVs here a lot. Yep. Especially me. I don't like having a smart TV, especially one with a camera in it. You crazy people. Yeah. I don't understand buying one with a camera in it. I really don't. I mean, I guess the only use case I could think of is if parents.

So you could Skype with them with your kid. Yep. That's it. Families. Families doing built-in teleconferencing, which never caught on. Yep. Even FaceTime isn't a big thing. Like, nobody in my family wants to see each other. So I FaceTimed like three times in my life. I never use it.

Everybody's like, ah, turn the camera off. It's pretty big with my family, but kid, it happens. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody wants to see my dog. I agree. Bite me. Vizio settled a $2.2 million fine with the FTC this week, which seems like just a little slap on the wrist.

They do have to go back and delete all the data that they were slurping off of people's TVs and selling their viewing habits to advertisers. Go figure. So, you know, it's going to happen. And most smart TVs still snoop on you, but you have to go find a checkbox somewhere deep in the TOS.

The TOS of your POS. And uncheck it. Well, thank God there's this thing called Google. It actually makes it rather easy. If you've just purchased a new smart TV, or as soon as you do purchase a new smart TV, all you do is simply Google the model and say, how do I turn this crap off?

Yeah. Well, a little bit more involved than that, but that's the first thing that's the first thing I do when I got I've got my Samsung's. They actually the Samsung doesn't mess around with you too badly. They make it pretty easy. Yes, things are come turned on, but it's very easy to go turn off all the features that you do not want on. So, first thing you do, boot it up, turn that crap off.

Yep. I did that with a lot of the stuff on this TLC that I got. And having to reboot my TV, like do a hard reboot, unplug it, plug it back in, like once a week is so annoying. Oh, God. Wired has an article on how to stop your smart TV from spying on you.

And derp, tip number one, unplug it from the internet. It kind of defeats the purpose, but. Yeah, I mean, I guess for me, I've got an Apple TV and I've got a Google Chrome stick and all that sort of stuff. So I don't need my TV connected to the internet because I've got other things that are spying on me connected to the internet.

Exactly. Just trade one for another. Pretty much. I can. The only reason I really like the TLC is because it has the Yahoo or not Yahoo, Amazon Prime video built into it, which you can't get on your Apple TV. No, but you can on your iPad and then you just toss it to your Apple TV.

It's an extra step, which is stupid. Like if I can get it on my iPad, why is it not on my Apple TV? That's true. That's true. I didn't even ever try doing that. The whole. I do that all the time. That's how I've watched the whole wretched series of not of new top gear. Yeah, no doubt. Yeah, that finale. Woo. I haven't gotten that.

I kind of gave up. I gotta say. The finale is OK. It's not that bad. I got through it the other night. I endured it the other night. But yeah, I can't wait. Hopefully they're going to take a lot of the bitching that people have had about it and fix it. But yeah, well, let's get back to our own conversation street here.

Oh, conversation street. Yes. AR games like Pokemon Go now need a permit if you're going to play in Milwaukee. Apparently, a lot of Pokemon Go players trashed a park in Milwaukee that the taxpayers had to pay for. And so they got they got peeved and say, no, you have to come and have a permit to play your game here.

Wait. Good luck. Who needs the permit? The people that are playing or the game maker? The game maker. Yeah. How are you going to enforce that? Yeah. So, you know. OK. The Milwaukee County Parks Department tried and failed to hold Pokemon Go developer Niantic responsible for damages to a city park.

And yeah, good luck. Good luck. I mean, I understand the impulse and I somewhat I do agree with it. I think that it's an interesting legal area when you are mapping private enterprise over public land or private land owned by other people.

And there's there's definitely going to have to be some some rules and some laws and some legislation about this. But yeah, good luck. Good luck with that one. But I do want to say if you're ever in Milwaukee, go to the safe house, the best restaurant in the world. It's the spy themed restaurant where you have to know a password to get in.

I've heard about this place is so I've never been to Milwaukee. So and they've got magicians at night and they got bad dancing. It's fun. It is. It is seriously one of the best places to go. We every time I'm in Milwaukee, we go there a couple of times. Nice. We've talked a lot on the show about everybody doing their drone delivery, about how 7-Eleven did some testing and Amazon was trying to test things here and there.

And we're pretty close to having things delivered by drone. Well, not anymore. So, you know, all that new innovation and stuff under Trump, well, problems with that. Now, see, this is one of those seems like a good thing at the time, but isn't really a good thing. It's just everybody loved his, we have too many laws.

So if we want a new regulation, we have to delete two. Yeah. So the problem with drone delivery in the United States is that the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the FAA, there's a lot of regulations when you fly in the sky. Yeah.

We need to add new regulations to be able to do things like drone delivery and figure out how drones are going to play into things. However, we can't really delete any of the regulations in place right now because planes. Yeah. No. Yeah. You don't want to drain the swamp or you just might crash in it.

Yeah. So we are, drone delivery basically is on hold. There is not much chance to get regulation going in here. So it's going to be a while until they figure out what the hell to do with this mess. Yeah. I bet Amazon is happy they paid that extra money on their Super Bowl ad talking about how their drone delivery is coming.

It's not coming. Unless you live in England. Or like Domino's Pizza in Australia. Oh, that's true. Was that a drone or I remember the robot? Oh, that was... It was a pizza bot. They did a pizza bot in New Zealand. I think that was New Zealand.

But they also did a drone delivery with like a Slurpee, I believe. I think they were the first one to get the Slurpee delivery service up and running. I have to add pizza bot to my Google searches. Okay. Consumer Watchdog Group has told Uber self-driving trucks the auto that they purchased, take them off the damn road.

In addition to the Uber self-driving cars, in a letter to the California DMV, Consumer Watchdog Director John Simpson asked the agency to revoke the registrations of the self-driving trucks that auto is testing on highways. Basically smart, because if we're not even going to allow the cars, do we want 10,000 pound trucks barreling down the freeways, self-driven?

But Uber does say that they're only using them in lane-keeping assist mode and adaptive cruise control, so it's not fully autonomous testing. Uber has been so trustworthy, haven't they? Oh yeah, that's right. Well, Ford is keeping an eye on this space, and they actually just dropped a billion with a B, a billion dollars on Argo AI.

I saw that movie. Yeah, that was a good movie. That's one of the only things that Ben Affleck didn't bother me in. I liked it. He was no Batman in that, let's just say that. I'm Argo. Argo, yeah. This one is Argo Drive Yourself, apparently. So it's a five-year buyout for the billion dollars, but it's basically a brain trust slurping move to get all these smart kids from Carnegie Mellon into the Ford ecosystem.

And what they're going to end up doing is licensing the technology, because Ford has said that they won a self-driving fleet by 2021, and they have no idea how to do it. So they're going to go out and buy some people who just might. Okay. Nice. Yeah, we'll see how it goes. I love my Ford, so I'm not switching up, so hopefully they'll get it done soon.

Shopify and Breitbart. This has been an interesting story to watch. So Shopify, Canadian company. Yep. It's a service provider. They provide shopping carts. That's about it. That's all they do. Plugs in very well to WordPress. So, you know, in the dumbification of the online ecosystem, it's very popular.

It is popular because it's well done. It's, you know, I love Shopify. Shopify and what was the credit card one? Not Slice. Oh, I remember what you're talking about. Yeah, those guys are good. Square. No, no, not Square. The other one. There's another one in San Francisco that makes doing online payments really easy.

Something without the vowels. It has an S in it. That's all I remember. Anyway, these guys, since Shopify is powering Breitbart's store, people got upset. They said, delete Shopify. Shopify is like, look, we don't like them either, but they're not breaking the rules.

So what do you want us to do? You want us to, you know, throw people out every time you don't like them? And the interesting thing is the Wired article that I'm quoting in here is it's like, these days tech has to take a side. So we'll see where they come down on this.

But in this case, I'm on the side of Shopify. They're not an American company. They're just providing a service that anybody can use. And if you want, if you want politics to come into it, I mean, that's the thing. It's like they need to, they do have a lot of leeway in their TOS. So they could kick them out if they wanted to.

But I don't know if I want them to, it's a slippery slope. I don't know if I want them to take that step. There is an argument that this is freedom of speech, which we need to support whether we like it or not. It doesn't matter what side you're on. You know, Amazon is getting a lot of pressure right now as well because they're advertising on Breitbart.

And there's a lot of people that are very pissed off about at Amazon for that and petitioning them to stop, you know, spending money with Breitbart. I find Breitbart abhorrent. I think it's thinly veiled white supremacism, but it's also freedom of speech. Mm hmm.

Yeah. I mean, if you don't want advertising is a different story. So if you're giving them money to help, you know, get their agenda across, then there's a, you know, there is a moral stance for that because you are actually giving them, you're handing them money. Yes. But running a service that somebody uses, you know.

Yeah. Anybody can. That's that. That's the kind of the equivalent of us being pissed off if we found out Steve Bannon listened to our show. Yeah. I can't stop him from listening. He's he's he's consuming our product. Yeah. Maybe he's maybe he's learning something. Highly unlikely on both fronts there.

That's punch a Nazi dot com. So 19 year old Anas Modamini or Modamini, Modamini, Modamini, oh my God, I've got a I've got a Christopher. You've turned into me. I've turned into you now. Yeah. Or Pichoni. So Anas Modamini, Modamani, Modamani, that's it, Modamani.

I think I hit my head harder than I thought, is suing Facebook in Germany because a picture of him that he took with Angela Merkel is being used in being used in fake news and he's pissed off about it. He's like, hey, well, hey, it's copyright infringement.

So he's got all the rights there. Don't use my don't use my photo. But it's it's painting him into a corner as a basically a Syrian terrorist and he just wants to live a normal life. So why is he suing Facebook? Because Facebook is not policing the articles that people are using his photo on.

I don't know if that's Facebook's job. That's it. It comes back to safe harbor. It comes back to exactly what we were just talking about. Yeah. So you sue what you sue the fake news organization that is putting this out there. Yes. Do you sue Facebook? No.

Everything is confusing right now. Isn't it, though? Yes. And speaking of confusing, Sobo. Yes. Have you seen this robot that sews? No. It's pretty interesting that they finally figured out a way because because fabric is really hard to work with.

And humans are really good at working with fabric. Yes. Go figure. So this is a sewing machine. It's a robotic arm that works with an autonomous or not automated sewing machine. And it has made a T-shirt. They finally figured out how to work with fabric to make it robot friendly, which is basically they dump it in some plastic and make the fabric hard.

So it's a solid surface. Then it can be sewn. And then they like rinse it and get all the plastic out. And then boom, Bob's your T-shirt. So great. All the Make America Great Again stuff can now come from robots. Instead of China. Yeah. Yeah. No. And this comes to our next story, which is AI isn't the threat that Skynet is purportedly to be.

What it is, it's a threat to the middle class. So all of this stuff, this is another Wired article. They knocked it out of the park this week. You know, the one good thing, journalism has skyrocketed in quality in just the last three months. Journalism and comedy. I'm telling you.

I've got to say. Yeah. So this is a good article talking about the disruption of the middle class and what we've talked about a lot in the four, almost four years we've been doing this show. This has been a topic, I think, since probably episode one or two. I'm sure I was screaming about it in the first episode.

Yeah. So because we were drinking. Yes. People are finally catching up to us. So we need a new thing to rail about here because when you find yourself in the masses and go somewhere else. But check out the Sobo video because the music is awesome. It's got like a little ragtime thing going on, but it's a cool looking little toy.

We'll see. Oh, awesome. And this one I put in just for you, Brian, because New York City is finally issuing fines to illegal Airbnb managers. Good. You're catching up to Santa Monica. Yeah. There's only $17,000 in fines that have been thrown out there.

And it's only between two people, but they've hired lawyers and they are fighting the charges. But if they don't take their listings down, these $1,000 per instance violations can go up to $7,500 per violation. Now we're talking real money. Yep. Yep. So, yeah, I mean, I agree.

Again, my position on Airbnb is clear. If you're using it for its original intention, that's fine. If you're basically just opening up a fucking hotel without having to pay any of the taxes, screw you. Yeah, that's about it. Yep. Security.

Security. Back again this week for security. It's Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire. Hardy har har. Har har har. Oh, hello, gentlemen.

Welcome. Glad to be back. Not welcome back. I was going to say thank you for welcoming us to our own segment. Yeah, I'm used to. Sorry, I'm used to being the host of my own show. Somebody's getting a little too comfortable. Yeah, I know. Exactly. Don't get cocky, kid. Yeah, right. Exactly. Sorry.

Ding, take two. Clap. Thanks so much for having me on, guys. Know your role. Know your role. That's right. That's right. Next thing I know, I'll be cleaning up after Bam Bam. Tell us something scary. Well, okay.

We want to start with coming up this week as the show airs. It's the RSA Conference, which is the big cybersecurity conference of the year. It is the biggest event for those of us in the biz. It takes place in San Francisco.

Are you going? I will be there. Okay. Be careful of the man poo. Watch out for the man poo. I'm sorry. There's a story I'm missing out on here. Oh, well, I'll send you the heat poo map of San Francisco. Yes. Oh, all right.

It's a running theme on this show is the man poo of San Francisco. Is this the thing with homeless people and vagrants and that sort of thing? Yes. I understand. All right. If you step in poop on the sidewalk, it is not from a dog. Homeless people, vagrants, defunded startups, you know. Uber drivers on their break.

There'll be a lot of those at RSA. But no, it's the big security conference of the year. It's where everyone comes together and you check out the latest things. It is a big trade show. Lots of cool, loud, shiny blinking booths and things like that. Blinking boobs?

No, booths. Booths. Okay. In fact, the show actually has a rule against booth babes. Then why the hell would you want to go to that conference? Well, so I just thought maybe we'd talk about a couple of things that we're expecting to see this year at the show.

I think one of the things we're focusing on at the Cyber Wire is artificial intelligence. Thank you, Brian. Go ahead. Real artificial intelligence or machine learning? Well, we've got artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. Yeah, I think lots, there's going to be lots of that stuff this year.

Companies are really embracing it. And, you know, they come at it from a variety of directions. The idea is that only through artificial intelligence can we deal with the velocity at which these attacks are coming.

And it also helps with the shortage of people in higher level positions, then maybe that'll help close this gap we have in hiring people.

So, honestly, for traffic analysis, I think AI and deep learning and all that good stuff is the perfect application for it. Because, you know, somebody that just sits there and watches all the traffic and then graphs it and figures out what's anomalous, that is, you know, I've done that as a human and it is just one of the worst jobs in the business.

But having a machine do that and just kind of give you a little tick and say, hey, this doesn't look right based on historical traffic, that's fantastic. Yeah, and the machines can really make more connections across a broader spectrum of, you know, data flying in quickly that humans just aren't capable of doing.

So, we're expecting to see a lot of companies really, you know, pushing that this year as something that they're going to sell. You know, the other thing about artificial intelligence is that it is expensive, both computationally expensive and also, you know, dollars and cents expensive to do.

I'm sure there are going to be a lot of companies who, you know, this year are going to try to make it not expensive for you to be able to use artificial intelligence. And I guess expensive is always a relative term. But I was talking with someone earlier this week who was saying that, you know, so that's the reason why so far the bad guys, other than nation states, the bad guys aren't using artificial intelligence because it costs too much.

And there are so many other things that they can do that basically cost nothing. You know, things like ransomware, you know, even DDoS attacks with botnets and those sorts of things are comparatively inexpensive. So, they're hoping that artificial intelligence may be a way to get the advantage in this arms race because the defenders can spend money on artificial intelligence that the attackers aren't going to choose to spend money on because, you know, they don't really have to yet.

Right. Okay. Cool. So, yeah. So, that's – we're looking forward to it. We'll be traveling out to San Francisco over the weekend and we'll be there the early part of the week reporting on that. So, looking forward to it. I like San Francisco. I think it's a lovely city.

Not that I plan on really being able to see any of it because I'll be head down in the Muscote Center for several days. But hopefully we'll come back, you know, learning a lot and maybe even going to a fun party or two. I'll send you some restaurant recommendations.

That was always my neck of the woods. Yeah. All right. Terrific. Terrific. All right. Moving on. What do we got next? Well, we have these file-less attacks. I thought we'd talk about file-less attacks. Are you guys all familiar with file-less attacks?

I have no idea what you're talking about. No. We've talked about air gapping and things like that that have left that but never file-less. So, the idea with a file-less attack is that the malware, instead of getting on your system and dropping a file on your system in order to – and then executing that file, basically what it does is it just injects code directly into the RAM on your system and hangs out there for as long as it needs to until it's time to execute.

And because there are no files on your system, files are what most malware systems look for. So, there's no signature, you know. What's the injection vector to get something into RAM without having an actual file to run to put it there?

They are using – hold on. I was expecting you to ask me that question. So, I actually – Well, obviously you're unprepared then if you expected it and you don't have my answer ready. I know, I know, I know. For all the money we pay you to come on this show, you should be ready, goddammit.

Yeah. So, they're inject – I don't – oh, they're using Windows PowerShell to load the file right into memory. I remember that fondly from when I used to run Windows. I always use PowerShell. Yep. Yep. So, the problem with – there was actually an attack this week where there were a bunch of banks, I think 140 banks or so, that fell victim to a file-less attack where they were trying to get at ATMs this way.

And so, this is not a new attack. This is something that's been around for a while, has been known about, but it's becoming more popular because it's so hard to detect. And companies generally aren't scanning through the RAM in their endpoints, in their user systems.

It's just – it's not a common thing to do. Usually, when you're looking for bad things on someone's system, where do you start? You start with files. But, I mean, maybe I was just really lucky in the various programs that I used back in the day to do scans, but they always scanned RAM as well. When I would run – I guess I'm a smart user as opposed to somebody who would just kind of run a basic thing.

Yeah, and evidently, it's uncommon in your standard suite of tools to routinely scan RAM. And so, typically what happens is, instead, what you look for is exfiltration. You look for – once the system is in there and doing what it needs to do, it has to try to phone home or send that file somewhere.

So, you're scanning for that, for something that shouldn't be being sent out to be sent out. Gotcha. Yeah. So, you know, it's on the rise. Something to look out for. I'm sure we'll see more tools to help fight that. So, interesting stuff. Moving on, Jason, you had one about the White House.

Corey Louie, who was the chief information security officer of the White House, was abruptly removed from his post last Thursday. Well, that's interesting because we were supposed to get an executive order on the cyber. Yeah, the cyber. Last week, which just kind of went away.

Yeah. No, it's interesting. Yeah. So, they're draining the swamp, apparently, still. And Corey Louie was one of the people that got bumped. I didn't hear about it until this week, and it seems like nobody did. But, yeah, last Thursday was when it – Well, Jason, there was quite a lot of news.

There has been quite a lot of news, yes. Yeah. I mean, I've heard of a leaky administration before, but this is the fucking Titanic. It's like Niagara Falls. Yeah, I did catch wind of this earlier this week, but it's really – you know, he hasn't said anything so far.

He hasn't changed his LinkedIn profile, I think, is what everybody's saying. But everybody's saying. No, he's not. He's not. So, it's all still in that sort of scuttlebutt kind of phase.

Now, interesting part of this story, the story that you linked here on Talking Points Memo, they have a link there to the letter that several representatives sent to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, asking them to investigate President Trump's cybersecurity practices and vulnerabilities.

That letter is worth a read. They really lay it all out. And it's nothing that we haven't talked about before. Yeah, I was about to say, we've talked about the fact that we know that there are people using, you know, iPhones. We know that the people are using unsecured Androids.

We have photos of people using phones that they should not be using in the administration. So, there are some issues going on over there. Yep, yep, yep. They're using the RNC email server. Yep. Oh, but her emails. But her emails. But the emails.

Right. But emails. Fucking hypocrites. Anyways. So, they call out that. They call out the president's poor security on his Twitter account and, of course, the vulnerability of him. Just his Twitter account. Well, yeah, the vulnerability of him using his email.

Sean Spicer, obviously, always tweeting his passwords, which is always helpful. Thank you for that. Thank you for the cyber on that, Sean. That's well done. The thing that I thought of, you know, my take on this story of the cyber security guy being let go from the White House.

And who knows? You know, he may have quit. I was just thinking, like, can you imagine being that guy in this environment? Just what it must be like to the fight he must have been trying to fight. The good fight he must have been trying to fight. You know. I can totally imagine. Every Saturday, I have to go down to my parents and try to fix things and help them with things.

I really do understand what this guy must have been going through. We've spent almost four years trying to get people to install one password. I cannot even imagine how bad this guy's job is. Yeah. Just as a rational human being and, you know, who presumably sincerely has the country's best interest, the president's best interest, you know, knows this stuff.

I just can't imagine what he's up against. But and how are you going to hire the person to replace him? I don't know. I don't know. For the love of God, you can't use screw Obama as your password. I was I was thinking it was fuckberry123.

But, you know, maybe I should try that later. Mr. President, what is your password? Password. Password. Yes. No, no. My password is password. Wow. It's the best password. It's the best password. Nobody will ever nobody will ever crack my password because it is the best password because it is password.

We have breaking news. Dave Bittner does a good Trump. Who knew? Oh, thank you. Yeah. Well, if this whole, you know, Cyber Wire thing doesn't work out, maybe I'll we can get you out. We can get you down at the Chuckle Shack next week. Exactly. A stand up comic and doing impressions.

And it may have sounded a little something like this. All right. Let's move on. OK, let's talk about the Email Privacy Act. Yes, it has. This is this is the third run at the gate. The Red Rover, Red Rover, send your Email Privacy Act on over.

It is it is not made it so far, but it has just passed the House with a unanimous vote means absolutely nothing yet. But everybody's touting it as news. So I thought we should actually talk about it. It still has to get past the Senate. Yeah. So we thought this is.

Yeah. The government just has to go get a warrant and then they can look through your emails or they just ask Russia to get them. Oh, yes. Pootie. Pootie. Yeah. I actually talked about this last earlier this week, I think, with Marcus Roszak, who's one of our policy guys, we sort of dug into this.

And the background on it is that, you know, this law was passed back in 1986. And back then, most people, when it came to email, you downloaded the email onto your computer. Yes. Rather than having it stay up on the server. So versus LDAP.

Yes. So the notion was that if you had not downloaded that email in six months, the government made what they consider to be a safe assumption that that email had been abandoned. Oh. And so that is why they were able to dig into it.

And it's the same sort of thing why the police, for example, can go through your trash. Because you just presume that if you threw something away that it has been abandoned. And so you've given up the right of privacy of that thing. So that's where this law comes from, that they thought that if you left an email on a server for six months without downloading it, that you'd abandoned it.

You had no desire to protect it. And so it was fair game. And obviously, over the years, that has changed. Yes. LDAP exists. So, yeah. Well, yeah. Surprise, surprise. Legislation has not kept up with the rest of us. But I thought that was sort of a fascinating background that Marcus filled me in on.

That is really interesting because I never would have thought about that. Because, yeah, back in the day when they were doing that type of legislation, we did have to go download all our email and now we don't. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. So it's a good one.

And, you know, hey, it's good that it made it through. We'll see. Maybe this time's the charm. But it's about time. Do you guys remember Harold Thomas Martin? Poor Harold. Poor Harold. Was he the guy that you never saw on that show with Tim Allen?

Maybe the guy behind the fence? Yeah. The guy behind the fence? I don't know. I do remember, though, last year that we did do a shout out to the guy behind the fence because he did die. Yeah, he had passed away. Yeah. So this is not him. This is the guy who spent 20 years stealing highly sensitive government material and was a hoarder.

He was basically a techno hoarder. And they busted him and they finally indicted him. Yeah. Now, what's interesting about this is that what he's being charged with is taking the classified stuff, but he is not being charged with espionage because so far they have not found that he actually did anything with it, that he didn't, that he shared any of it or tried to sell any of it or anything like that.

It just seems like he maybe was one of those guys who just liked to have stuff. He liked to take his work home. That's it. He wanted to have all the wares. He did want to have all the wares. Yeah. Yeah. All your base are belong to me. Yeah.

All your secrets are belong to me. What an odd man. You know what? I can kind of sympathize with him. I've still got all my files from all the jobs I've ever had. That's it. I should go lock my door and start getting a magnet right now because they might be coming after me.

We'll get to that in one of the later stories. Yeah. No paramount. I literally deleted everything. I don't have all the Star Trek files. Never mind. Yeah. Nope. But I don't happen to have any of those files as some of my sounds on my iPhone because Jason sent them to me. Nope. Yeah. No. There would definitely not be an official Star Trek sound that actually heralds an advertisement on this show that we use.

Acknowledged. That would not be that. No. We don't have that. No. No. No. No. No. No. So poor Harold. We are audio engineers after all. We made those ourselves. Pew. Pew. Pew. See. Wow. It sounds just like the real thing. I mean, that's like real time Foley right there.

You know, that's how we do it.

So yeah, this guy, you know, I feel like if they would have kept this in-house, like if it wouldn't have gotten to the press, they would have kind of just shoved it under the side and let them go quietly. But they have to charge him because it got out. Yeah. And it has to be public.

And it has to be public and there's the internets and people are going to find this. Yeah. Like, honestly, if Joe came over for a coffee and he's like, hey, Harold, what's all those hard drives sitting there in your garage? That looks like proprietary information from the government. He'd be like, I like to collect stuff.

He'd be like, OK, let me call Bob the boss and get him down here and be like, Harold, what did you do? And Harold would be like, I like to collect stuff. And then they would just sweep it in a van, take it out, and Harold would just get, you know, his severance and walk away.

But it was public. They could have treated him like the stapler guy from Office Space. I don't, did you do my stapler? I don't want to go to the basement. Yeah, you just put him down in the basement and keep paying him and just take all the stuff back. Well, they didn't, they actually did not keep paying the stapler guy, which was the problem.

Oh, yeah, that's right. I just want my check. Yeah. So, you know, Harold, well, I mean. I feel bad for Harold. I'm sorry. Yeah, I think, look, let's, I mean, he did some bad things. He did some reckless things. No, he just did some stupid things.

He didn't do bad or reckless things. He just did some stupid things. I would definitely put this down as bad. I think we can agree that they're bad, reckless, and stupid. It's not mutually exclusive. But, you know, he's facing 20 criminal counts. Each of them can have up to 10 years in prison.

Harold's probably going to go away for a little while. I think it comes down to intent. I mean, that's what I really look at this as. We don't know what the intent was. Just because he hadn't theoretically done anything with it yet, he could be holding out for the high price. After 20 years, he can't sell it?

I can sell anything on eBay after a week, and this guy can't sell anything to the Russians after 20 years? Come on. He probably has the last store of the old five and three quarter drives that actually work in the world that we need for our nuclear program, and he's going to extort the U.S. government to sell them back to him.

I have all the gopher archives ever from the U.S. government. Come on. Anyway, let's talk about something really, really important. Brian, take us into Arby's. One of my favorite parts of the security segment back in the day was our hack of the week, and we haven't done one in a while, and I like this one because it's Arby's, and I miss horsey sauce.

Horsey sauce is actually not – it's kind of like does it have legs. You remember it being good, but when you go back and have it, it's not the same. Anyways, the malware on cash registers at Arby's fast food restaurants may have resulted – and every time they say may at this point, it's just because they haven't been able to prove it entirely yet, but you're pretty much sure, yes, it did result – in the breach of more than 355,000 credit and debit cards.

Now, I personally – I know where this is going. On the rare occasions when I actually go get fast food, I don't fucking use a credit card. This is what cash is for. Well, no, I thought you were going to go with the 355,000 people have eaten at Arby's. Well, there's that too.

They've been collecting this data as long as good old Hal was stealing stuff from the government there. It's the same guy. I drive by an Arby's – I drive by a defunct Arby's like every day, and I just kind of wish they were open because I would go get me a couple roast beefs with horsey sauce.

But no, but I wouldn't – I would pay cash. There are several functioning and successful Arby's within the circle of my travels. So are you a victim of the – we'll call this the great horsey breach of 2017.

I can't – no, I would say that I have probably not been to an Arby's in two years. We know this because you're still with us and your heart hasn't seized up. Right, exactly. But I think you're right. I think Arby's is one of those – it's one of those things that every now and then you get a hankering for Arby's.

And it's just – Arby's has curly fries, right? Yes, they do. Yes, they do. Yes, so there you go. That's all you need to know. There's your trip. That's why you go to Arby's. We were all making fun of Arby's, and right now all three of us would kill to have some right now. Yeah, I know. I still love me Arby's.

I love them. Do they deliver? Just don't use your credit card. Right, exactly. No, the problem with Arby's is that they had a scandal maybe, what, 10 years ago where they had somebody come in and say that the beef comes in in a gelatinous bag and then they reconstitute it into the beef then cut it.

I don't believe it. Yeah, well, the problem was it was debunked. The entire thing was debunked. Doesn't matter. Once the alt beef is out there, you're fucked. That's it. But yeah, they were a target of being poked fun at on the Daily Show for a while.

If you were regular watchers. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, Jon Stewart used to like to tag them just for fun. I still love Arby's. I'm not going to front. I dig them, so I just know when you go, use cash. We used to have Roy Rogers restaurants around here.

I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. Not a West Coast thing. It's a Midwest East Coast thing. Yes, I remember Roy Rogers well. Yeah, yeah. There was a thing where when I was a child, all of the Jack in the Boxes became Roy Rogers.

And I guess you still have Jack in the Box out on the West Coast. We do not have Jack in the Box out here. And the Roy Rogers are few and far between. Roy Rogers was, and Arby's are kind of cousins, I'd say. I mean, Roy Rogers had roast beef.

Yeah, maybe. Roy Rogers had roast beef and, you know, the horse Rogers sauce and the barbecue sauce. And yeah, I miss Roy Rogers. It's good stuff. Anyway. Okay. You go rub one out to Roy.

We'll talk to you in a week. You know what? I met Roy Rogers once. When I was a kid, I was actually in a Roy Rogers television commercial. What? Yep. This better be on YouTube. It's not. I need proof. In fact, I don't have a copy of it. I've never seen a copy of it. Actually, I have some still photos that my mom took on the shoot day.

Of course, my mother was just so excited because she got to meet Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, who were actually there on the shoot. No fucking way. Yeah. They were very old. You know, this was back in the 70s. They were very old. And so, yeah, I got to do a TV commercial with Roy Rogers.

It was in a Roy Rogers restaurant, and I was part of a little happy little family eating there, and Roy tipped his hat, and it was a TV commercial from the 70s. But I've never been able to find it, and believe me, I have looked. Wow.

Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire, childhood commercial star. Send us those pictures. We'll put them in the show notes next week. What a strange turn the security segment took this week. Yep. This is very weird. You never know. See, I'm mysterious.

You never know. You got to listen to the end, people. You always got to listen to the end. Well, you know what? Maybe now the listeners can find it because, you know, there's more of them than there are of us, so. Not many. Yeah. Roy Rogers TV commercial for someone who looks like a younger, cuter version of me.

All right. Get on it, guys. All right. We'll talk to you next week, Dave. Bye-bye. At the library. So I've been stuck in these Harry Bosch books.

I ended up reading two more of them. I got The Last Coyote and Trunk Music. And Trunk Music, turns out, was the book that season two was mostly based on from the Amazon show. So that was kind of a waste of a book. It was fun to read and see where they got their source material from because, you know, the TV show is a lot different than the books.

They kind of mish-mashed it together and all that stuff. But the one thing I wanted to bring up about these is that in the first couple books, it's around the time of the Rodney King race riots and all that stuff. Oh, yeah. Good times here in Los Angeles. Pre-internet, pre-cell phone for a lot of these stories.

So it's fun to watch, you know, just or to read about what these cops are doing in, you know, in a day and age where they don't have a cell phone on them all the time. Right. And Trunk Music was the first one where he actually got a cell phone and he carried it in his briefcase.

So nice. But they're fun. It's fun to get out of sci-fi and tech every now and again. But I'm going to I'm I got to follow our rule from here on out. I got to take a break from the series because they do start to run together. Yeah. Yeah. I also re-read, re-wed, re-read Whiplash, How to Survive Our Online Faster, Our Faster Future by Joey Ito and Jeff Howe because I interviewed Joey Ito along with Jordan Harbinger for The Art of Charm on Friday.

And we had a fantastic 90 minute talk, which will come out in a couple of parts in a couple of weeks. But man, I love Joey. He's so damn smart. Oh, he's a smart guy. How's the book? Oh, the book's fantastic. I already covered it on the show a couple of times. And it's worth a reread, too. It's so dense.

It is definitely worth a reread. So excellent. Yeah. He goes over just nine principles of how they teach stuff at the Media Lab and just how to, you know, kind of future proof yourself for the future. So I highly recommend it. That'll probably be my next read. I'm still working through the Nightmare Stacks by Charlie Strauss, the most up to date of the laundry files that's out until the new one drops shortly.

I'm having a rough time with this one. It's not the best. It's not the best. Well, yeah, they changed the protagonist again. I miss Bob. And then, you know, they switched to Bob's wife slash whatever for the previous novel to this one. And this one, they've switched to one of the vampires that they discovered in the last book that was mostly about Bob.

So I'm having a hard time getting invested. I want Bob back. Damn it. Bob's back in the next book. So, OK, thank God. Charlie has listened, hopefully. And I will work my way through this one because, I mean, it's still clever. It's still funny. It's it's a it's a fun world to live in. But, yeah, I got to get through this one.

Take a break. Do some nonfiction. I'll do the Joey Eatup thing. Yeah, and this summer, I just went back through my Audible account and checked out all of the Discworld books that I had owned and which ones I didn't own. And this summer, I'm going to start at the beginning and just go through them all.

I know we have the we have the series ban in place, but I don't think that really counts for something you've already heard or read. I don't think so either. I like when I ran through all of Dune. Yeah. Yeah. So I think I'm going to go through all 40 of the Discworld books this summer. You're allowed to revisit old friends.

I am because, yeah, we'll talk about Terry in a minute. Apps and doodads. I have some follow up on the Blue Moo Universal Control. Yes. I don't use it anymore. OK.

I went out and bought a nine dollar replacement for my TCL remote, which they're finally selling on Amazon now, which solved the problems that I was having with it. So the Blue Moo is just too clunky. The interface is not good on the app. So the nice thing about it is I'm not getting rid of it because I can't.

I threw the through the box away. So hopefully over time that the software will get better and easier to use and maybe they'll hire a designer. That would be nice. It is. It is. Yeah. There's a lot of things out there that are that are kind of decent technologically. But boy, they forget about the design aspect, don't they?

Yeah. This thing is janktastic. Yep. Big time. So now that you have a MacBook Pro, Brian, this next one, this next one is up your alley. You're going to want to you're actually going to want to use this. It's called fruit juice. Yep. And it calculates the optimal minimum time you should be running on battery power each day based on the way you actually use your laptop.

It will even notify you when you've reached your daily target. Now, I've got a couple MacBook Pros here and I'm using this to kind of reclaim the the max juice on it is let's see here. The machine I'm on right now has 82 percent of original capacity, 314 out of 1000 charge cycles.

And so what it does is every day it's like today I need to use it for two hours and 12 minutes on battery time. And I've been testing with my other one, which I when I just bought it a couple of weeks ago was running around the mid 80 percent of capacity and now it's up to 96. So this thing actually does work.

I'm getting more battery time out of it by not just leaving it plugged in all the time or it's reporting to you that it is. Well, that's it's an easy task because you use it on battery. And if the battery lasts longer, Bob's your uncle, you know, right? Yeah. So there it's a couple of bucks.

I mean, it's like 10 bucks or something. But if it's going to, you know, I my laptops last for three to four years easy. So I want to keep them keep them in good health. And it's it's it's a worthwhile thing. Definitely. Yeah, it's $9.99. I'll definitely pick it up. It seems relatively simple.

And, you know, I'm guilty of just basically leaving it plugged in all day long, which you're not supposed to do. So, yeah, it's it really does kind of it'll save you some money in the long run and just extend the life because these things aren't cheap at all. No, no. And I'm not getting the new one because they're terrible. That's why I bought the I bought the second one.

So, well, see, the problem now is I hate the direction that they're going with all the new laptops. So I may never want to buy a laptop again. I need to keep this thing running for 30 years. Exactly. So hopefully soon we'll get some new iMacs. I would trade this for an iMac since I'm not a road warrior anymore.

I can sit at home with a big ass iMac and some external monitors and be, you know, happy as a clam. Right. But then I'll just go get another Chromebook if I want to leave the house. Or use my iPad Pro, which usually sits around collecting dust nowadays. Right. It's sad.

It's sad what's happened to the iPads. They were fun for a while. I still use mine all the time. You do? That's cool. I used to use it for Kindle, but I have a Kindle. So I use my Kindle. The paper whites are really nice. Anyway, next app is called Rescue Time, which is an oldie but a goodie.

I started using this to use their focus mode. So I've been training it for the past week to know what, you know, what the good websites are, what the bad websites are, when to quit Slack and things like that. So it's like when I need to edit for three hours and I don't want to have the option of opening up email or Slack or anything like that.

I turn my phone goes into airplane mode. I turn on focus time and it just quiets everything down, you know. Granted, that used to be called self-restraint, but I have none. Yeah, I was about to say. I have none. So I need algorithmic ways for me to actually get things done.

So I'm giving it a shot. I'm on the 14-day trial right now for the Pro. And if it works, I'll stick with the Pro because I have it on both my machines and it works really well. But it's a janky interface. They haven't updated this thing in years. It is really, really janky.

But if it gets the job done. It looks really super old school, I got to say. Yeah, the charts are nice. The charts that you get are nice. So I can see where I'm spending most of my time, which is surprisingly, or actually unsurprisingly, 80% of the time I'm in Logic. That's it. But since I stopped, I don't check Facebook as much anymore and Twitter because I don't like sadness.

Yeah. Okay. I had a run-in with Pro Tools this week. We talked about me getting Pro Tools before. I got Pro Tools for this project that I'm working on for Forbes and turns out I don't need it. So the day I buy it and then I get my iLock key, which cost me another 50 bucks, all this stuff.

They're like, oh, you can just give us finalized files. They sound good. We don't need Pro Tools versions of it. I'm like, oh. So there's 100 bucks down the drain. And Pro Tools took me almost a day to get them to unlock it with this stupid iLock thing.

It is such a terrible system. And I never will ever give Avid another penny of my money. Seriously. Look, it's hard to argue with. I got super upset when they went subscription model. I, you know, Pro Tools back in the day was genius and it was the best thing out there.

It's what every album was recorded on. It's what it was professional audio. That's it was the gold standard. It's not anymore. So. And here's the other thing. If you dig deep enough, you don't have to use the subscription model. They will sell you perpetual licenses for different versions. Nice.

Yeah. But it's 600 bucks. And I'm like, that's 600 bucks for the basic version. It's like 1500 bucks for the HD version. I'm like, uh, Logic cost me 200 bucks. I got it forever. Thank you very much. Moving right along. What I did end up dropping about 1500 bucks on this week, though, is iZotope RX 5 Advanced.

These are, uh, have you ever used iZotope RX? Uh, yes. Yes, I have. It's amazing. I mean, it is unbelievably amazing, especially the advanced version. It is like Photoshop for sound now with this new version. You can take a paintbrush and go in and paint on the histograms and the waveforms and just get rid of little fudges and things like that.

But yeah, I love this thing. It has saved me so much time. iZotope is a quality company that makes a lot of really good stuff. Their soft synths are fantastic. I've never had a problem with any other stuff. Yeah, I am. I'm just blown away and I watch some of the videos.

I really have to like sit down and take some classes on this because it is so deep. And one of my favorite ones is like the background match. So if you're, if you're like doing a movie and you have a scene or you're doing ADR or stuff like that, you can like sample a background from one audio file and it will just seamlessly replace another file's background noise with the other ones that they match.

Yeah. So, you know, part of it was recorded in like a crowded subway station. Yeah. Or like at the beach or something like that. You can just do some, some overdub and then use this and recreate the audio soundtrack of it. So yeah, I think, I think it's called ambience match. It is so cool and well worth the money because I didn't have to pay for it.

So I like that part. Thank God. It's always a plus. It's a work expense. So, uh, the company picked that one up. Thank God. Yeah, that's nice. Uh, I've started using Apple's notes shared. This is a genius life hack. I don't know why this took me so long to do, but now I just, the wife and I have a shared note that we just type in groceries on.

You know why you didn't do it before? Because it's new. Is it? The shared, the shared stuff notes has been ramping it up. I killed my Evernote professional, uh, license and went straight and just using Apple notes now. Yeah. There's a lot of reasons to kill Evernote, but I can't even tell you how awesome shared notes is.

It is fantastic. It is so convenient if you're working on, uh, if you're doing any kind of thing with somebody else, uh, we can both just pull up the thing anytime we want, edit it, whatever, whoever ends up going to the store is, is got the full list. It is fantastic. It is such an easy life hack and free.

I mean, not free. You have to have an iPhone or whatever, but yeah, yeah. If you both have iPhones because it works on the iPhone, but it also syncs to the Mac and the thing about it, you know, the shared notes aspect of it, Evernote tried to, you know, smack that on later on down the line. And it is one of the worst shared implementations ever because whoever's in the note first locks the note.

You cannot have, uh, you know, two people editing the same note at the same time, which is one of the reasons we dumped it. Cause we used to use our show notes in there and it's like, Oh, and then if you're like halfway scrolled down and somebody edits something at the top, the whole thing just scrolls back up to the top. Yeah.

And if you're doing live reads for commercials and stuff, it's like, ah, I'm in the middle of a blue apron ad read. And then boom, there goes the note. Yep. And the, what Apple has done is what they always do really well. Well, it's the, it's the reason that Apple stock is insane and why we all love Apple. Keep it simple, stupid.

And this is great artists steal. They steal. Yes. And this is a super simple implementation. It doesn't bother with anything like letting you know who edited what it's just a shared file. Yep. That's it. It's fantastic. No, it's, it is, it is a really good app. I am so glad that they've, they've put the time and effort into updating that because that's, well, a, it saves me 50 bucks a year, which I, which I really like since I already paid for the damn thing.

Give me, give me at least a notepad, but it's, it works. It just works. Yeah. It just works. It's fantastic. So if you're, I didn't realize it was brand new. I just never thought to even try to use it before. So if you're a notes guy and you need something to share, give it a go.

It is, it's super simple, super easy, and it just makes sense. Yep. So it's fantastic. Now, Jason, I have some Valentine's day news for you. Oh, okay. This guy might've beaten you to the punch, but it's a wide, wide world out there. So you could always make your own version of this. This is a, it's an app he's created called Shinder.

It's like Tinder, except he's locked it down. So he can, he's the only guy on it. I love it. Yep. So this is a, his name is shed some move. He's a entrepreneur slash author slash product designer slash motivational speaker slash what we call in Los Angeles, a mattress.

A mattress. What, why is he a mattress? Uh, a bartender act, a model actress, bartender. Oh, we used to call those triple threats. Yeah. So this guy does a little bit of everything. He wrote a book called what every man thinks about apart from sex, which is 200 blank pages.

I like his style. I like his style. Another called 50 shades. But he, this guy, you know, the jokes that we all think of in our head, he takes it one step, he takes it one step further. He actually implements. Yes. Uh, he, I put out a book called 50 shades of gray, which also contains 200 blank pages, except they go from light to dark gray as the book goes on.

Uh, so he does a lot of this sort of stuff. So he wrote an app called Schinder, uh, tagline quality, not quantity. And, uh, it's very real. You can download it right now. Uh, he's had more than a hundred matches so far. Nice. He's as he says, he's a big fish in his own pond.

You go girl. Uh, I should have thought of that because otherwise it's going to be a six pack and porn hub for me on Valentine's day. But, uh, you know, par for the course. You can always write gender. Dinder would probably be mine.

Media candy. Once again, music, how beautiful, wonderful music is worth next to nothing. And it's just a loss later. Okay. What happened? Spotify free me premium, freemium. They don't do a freemium. Uh, Spotify premium is now included with the new digital New York times subscriptions.

So if you get a digital New York times subscription, as of right now, you will get a ad free Spotify. $120 value for the year. Now I got to go find out if I have to cancel my New York times subscription and resubscribe to get my free Spotify. Because I, I, I read the article and I have the answer for you.

What is the answer? It does not apply to those already subscribing to the New York times. I will shall be unsubscribing as soon as we're done with this show. Yeah. So as per usual, with these bullshit deals that everybody makes, uh, if you're already paying for Spotify premium, sorry, the deal doesn't work the other way around.

You do not get the New York times. And if you've already subscribed to the New York times, you do not get the free Spotify. Wow. That's dumb. Isn't it though? Yeah. Cause I pay for the actual physical newspaper and two digital subscriptions, one of which you are a recipient of, um, and this is BS.

It is, but this is like everything else. It's a, you know, it's like my, I just have my dad yelling in my mind right now. I've been a Comcast subscriber forever. How come I don't get these promotional deals? I've been a Netflix subscriber forever. Why are the new people getting the DVDs before me?

Yep, exactly. Because life sucks. Yep. And, uh, well, life did suck for Prince and he's, he's now not with us anymore, but he's showing up on Spotify and other services starting today. Yeah, of course. I mean, you know, there, there, there was a lot, there's a lot of money being left on the table and Prince basically said, I don't want to be on this stuff, but he's not there anymore.

So now he is. And in, in his dying, not leaving a will and not protecting his assets, his estate owes around a hundred million dollars in back taxes. So yeah, uh, yeah, good for them. Uh, poor fuckers.

So anyway, they, uh, they lost Prince and the estate at the same time. So look, I'm happy about this because I, I enjoy some Prince every now and then. And the fact that it's actually available, but we got everything just needs to be on Spotify at this point. We, uh, a cry uncle and put your crap up there.

Yeah, seriously. Uh, so yeah, I went and installed Spotify this morning and went to go check it and sadly not there yet. So they didn't say when on Sunday, but. Ah, okay. Well, at some point. At some point in the Sunday future. Uh, so hopefully by the time you're listening to this, you will have your Prince and you can party like it's 1999.

Excellent. Uh, and you remember the podcast, what I kind of jokingly called our Canadian sister broadcast, uh, geeks and beats that was, uh, going for quite some time. Then they finally called it quits cause they couldn't make any money. Yep. Uh, well, the music aspect of that Alan Cross is, uh, he's a big Canadian guys, Canadian radio.

Um, and he's has these great radio shows called the ongoing history of new music where he does deep dives into series, uh, different bands, different genres, different things that, uh, you know, the grunge era, all that sort of stuff. And it's only been available on Canadian radio.

Uh, he's finally taking it to a podcast. It's come out now. He's launching it, unfortunately with blink one 82. Um, I saw the title of this, of the rise and fallen rise of blink one 82. And I'm like, I'm not going to listen to that. I've listened to it because it's interesting just hearing the story behind the bands, even if you don't really like the bands.

And I've, I've missed him anyways, cause I haven't been able to listen to him cause I'm not in Canada land anymore yet. Um, yet give it time. People give it time. Uh, but the problem with the podcast is the licensing. Uh, it's the same reason that we no longer use music that we liked as bumpers for our podcast.

You can't do that. You have to pay for the rights to use music on a podcast. So his shows, which are like, you know, four to five hours long on the radio because he can play music, become 30 minute podcasts where there's, he has to cut out the music. So it's a bit of a drag.

Now what he's doing on the blink on the blink one 82. And though that's a feature, not a bug. Good point. So for some of these, it's actually a good thing. Uh, including the blink one 82 one. Uh, but what he is doing to make up for that is, uh, on his show notes, he's basically linking to Spotify playlists that have all the tracks that he's had to cut out of the show for the podcast.

Um, if you are a deep, deep music guy, you're going to like his shows. Um, I, you know, blink one 82, maybe not your cup of tea. So wait until he puts out some other ones, but take a gander at the, and subscribe to his podcast. I think it's going to be worth it. Well, I like the fact that it's like the story of the band.

So that might actually be worth listening to if I don't have to listen to the music. Cause then you're still just, then you're just getting a good story, you know? Yeah. I mean, like I said, I, I actually rather enjoyed the blink one 82 one. I now know way more than I ever needed or wanted to know about blink one 82, but it was still interesting in the telling and he's just a good storyteller.

You're going to enjoy listening to him. He's got a voice made for radio. Oh, that's good. That's good. I can't wait for that Nickelback episode. No. Yeah. Um, I watched Terry Pratchett back in black, the documentary that we've been talking about. It was, uh, came, it aired on BBC two this, this last weekend.

Um, how many tissues did you need? Uh, I, there were, it got a little dusty in the room a few times. Okay. I figured it would. It got a little dusty in the room. I'm not going to lie. It was very well done. Um, the actor that they chose to play him, um, spot on the, uh, again, he, he mostly wrote this himself before he passed.

Oh, I didn't know that. Oh yeah. He was working on basically his own life story. So the jokes, many, many of the jokes are obviously his, um, the, it was Neil Gaiman. You will die. You, you will tear up when Neil Gaiman tears up. Oh yeah. So, uh, it is, I don't know when and if it's going to be airing in the States.

I Googled, I looked for it. I've got mine via Sweden. Um, it's, if you just got to watch it, it's great. Yeah. So before you watch this, go to grumpy old geeks.com slash VPN and get on private internet access and head to Sweden safely.

You, well, you don't even need to go to Sweden actually, if you get your VPN because, uh, the BBC is iPlayer, the, uh, whatever they call it. Is it the iBBC? I can't remember. It's iPlayer. Yeah. You set your VPN to stun or London and you could, you could watch it direct from their site. Good point. Good point.

So yeah, then you don't do, you don't even have to really break the law. No breaking the law, breaking the law. Well, I found on bbc.co.uk, uh, Neil Gaiman's tribute to Terry Pratchett, the full 10 minute video. We read some of this on the show before, but finally getting to see the video of it was very touching.

And yes, the room did get a little dusty. I will, I will admit. There are clips from this in, in the documentary, but this is not the Neil Gaiman scene that you will lose it. Okay. There, there is a very poignant bit. Okay. Yeah. It's, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to be weeping like a little girl, Jason.

Okay. That's fine with me. I'm, I'm, I'm not too proud to cry. I say it. Now here's one that I did kind of want to cry when I saw the trailer for it's called iBoy on Netflix. I watched the trailer for this. It is horrible. Here's the funny thing. I watched the movie. It wasn't, it actually wasn't bad.

It's silly, but I mean, the whole premise is a kid gets shot in the face while he's talking on his cell phone and then gets superpowers and can control stuff. The, whoever wrote this obviously has no idea how technology. He works. Right. But, and the, uh, the credits are a straight rip off of fight club.

I mean, direct rip off of fight club, but once you get like 15 minutes into it and he just goes, ah, fuck it. I'm going to, I'm just going to watch it. It was entertaining. I actually stuck through the whole thing and enjoyed it. I, I, okay. I don't believe you. Seriously.

If there's nothing else on, it wasn't bad. It was fun. All right. Well, it's got Macy Williams, Aria Stark from a game of Thrones. She's great in it. She's absolutely great in it. Okay. Nobody else. I know, but it's, you know, it's a cool little British movie. I liked it. I need more stuff like this, but better written preferably with somebody who has some idea of how technology works.

But when you, when you give up the conceit that this is not how tech works and you just go, okay, he's like, you know, he's an iron man with a brain who can control technology. It's like, okay. All right. Many silly bits of it, but it's, I, I didn't hate it. I think I gave it a, I gave it a three star.

I didn't hate it. I didn't hate it. Yeah. Well, I tell you what, the genius trailer sets it up to be one of the worst things you've ever seen. So when you actually do watch it, it's not how trailers are supposed to work, by the way. No, that's theoretically not supposed to be the other way. Trailers are always better than the actual product.

This is completely trailers are supposed to trailers are supposed to polish the turd. Yeah, no, no. This just gave you another turd. All right. Well, the problem with it, with your whole review there, as you just said, is if you've got nothing else to watch, there are so many things to watch out there. One of them I'm surprised by, you know, the wife has gone back to work.

So office chatter and water cooler chatters is back in play for her. And because of people at her office, she's started to watch Black-ish, which means I've started to watch Black-ish. This is awesome. It is so well written. Laurence Fishburne's in it.

I mean, it's great. I can't. This is the best written, at least, you know, major network sitcom out there right now. I highly recommend it. It is very funny. It is very topical, especially since, you know, the reality is comedies start to die after five or six seasons. And the stuff that I've been watching, Big Bang Theory, just kill it already.

It's not funny. It's not interesting. There aren't even jokes anymore. It's the last season. So, yeah, you don't have to worry about that. Modern Family is going the same way. It used to be a genius TV show. Now it's what misunderstanding is going to cause hilarity this week. That's all it is anymore.

Black-ish is not at that phase yet. It is fucking funny, man. Okay. So I highly recommend that if you're going to go the major network route. That is a great show. Is it on Hulu or anyplace else? Do you know? I don't know who ABC has their deal with.

I mean, obviously, your cable providers, there's the on-demand that you can always do. I don't have a cable provider. All right. There's always Sweden. And, you know, I'm sure it's got to be on Hulu because ABC's got that. Yep. Black-ish online stream on Hulu.

Okay, cool. I'll give it a shot. I like having comedies at night. I love it. That's why I've been watching ALF and WKRP at night because I want something to just be light at the end of the day. Anything is better than watching Black Mirror right before you go to bed. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, speaking of that, I actually did something on Netflix the other day that I thought was kind of fun.

And you may want to do this too now. Netflix has so many of the old shows from the 80s. I got, well, there's a little whiskey involved, but I watched the season finale. The season finale of Cheers, MASH, and what was the other one that I watched?

Frasier. I just watched the finale episodes of like four shows from the 80s that I don't remember how they ended anymore. And it was genius. See, I saw you post this on Facebook and I was going to say, do they have MASH? Because MASH is the one I remember watching it live when I was a kid. And I want to talk about the 80s in a second.

But yeah, MASH was a thing. And I'm just like, man, I haven't seen that in forever. And when you brought that up, I'm like, oh, I bet MASH would be a good one to watch. Does it have legs? It does. Okay, cool. It does. Awesome. I got into Billions when it first came out because Brian Koppelman's a fucking genius.

And season two starts, technically, it starts next Sunday on the 19th. But somebody in Sweden got their hands on the first episode of season two. So I watched it this week. Oh my God. I'm so glad this show's back. It is so well done. Did you watch the first season?

I did not. What was this about again? Billions. It's got Damien Lewis, Paul Giamatti. It's about a hedge fund guy and a guy and the attorney general team that's going after him. Gotcha. It's, dude, it's so good.

You'd love it. It's evil. It's awesome. Who doesn't love evil? Yeah. And I did watch Legion this week. My friend Demon turned me on to it. He's like, because I wasn't, I didn't even know what it was. And it's apparently the son of Charles Xavier from the X-Men.

Okay. And it starts out, he's like in a mental hospital because they think he's schizophrenic. And it just goes from there. It is so well done. I'm going to, I'm going to watch the, the premiere episode again before next week. Highly recommended. It is, it's, it's, it's a mind fuck for parts of it for sure.

Because you don't know what's real and what's not. Who? That's cool. Aubrey Plaza. I think she's hilarious and underrated. Very funny actress. Yeah. Everybody in this is great. I definitely check it out. I know you're not a big superhero guy, but this isn't, this is really kind of different. But that's the kind of superhero stuff I like.

I'd let's, you know, I'm a daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage kind of superhero guy. So like this, I think you'll really like this. Okay. And I do want to recommend, I've always talked about the, you are not so smart podcast. They've got a three part series out or he's got a three part series out now on the backfire effect.

Yeah. And this is must listen material for everybody who listens to this show. This is why I was talking about how Trump's an idiot won't make a difference. Exactly. But part three has some really interesting stuff. So I'm going to listen to it again and take some notes and see if we can actually work on it.

Yeah. And a related article I found in Wired was, want to make a lie seem true? Say it again and again and again. Yep. And a little bit of follow up on the 80s. I watched the first episode on your recommendation. Loved it. Loved it. Yeah. It's really good. I mean, it's a very well produced series.

And, you know, obviously with our age, the 80s is the exact one that we're going to, we're going to be apeshit about. So, yeah, it's very, there are a lot more parts than I thought there were going to be, but. I think it's a 10 parter, right? And each one is kind of a specific topic. You know, one's about music, one's about TV, one's about the whole AIDS thing, et cetera, et cetera.

So I'll get through. Spoiler alert. The AIDS one is very depressing. Oh, go figure. Hmm. Didn't see that coming. But to lighten the mood, a friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, who does our VO stuff, sent me a wonderful video this morning of a guy playing The Devil Went Down to Georgia in his laundry room with his white trash washing machine as the drum machine.

Nice. It's really good. It's very fun. It's only like two minutes long, but I put that in there to lighten the load. Nice. Moron of the week. Our moron emeritus is back. Oh, no. I know we said we'd never put Kanye back in here, but how can I help it?

According to TMZ or, you know, just your eyes, Kanye West has scrubbed his Twitter account of all things Trump. He used to be a huge Trump supporter, but now he doesn't like him anymore. So he's changed his mind and he's done what morons do when they think that people don't really understand how the Internet works.

And he went to pretend I'm going to pretend I never was into him. There we go. Done. It's all deleted. Prove it. Yeah. Yeah. This is good old Kanye. Back in the saddle. Back in the saddle again. When you say somebody's gone from Moron of the Week, it's like me saying I'm never moving back to Los Angeles or never using my Apple Watch.

Yeah. I will be in town in May 7th, so put on your calendar and come out and have a beer with me. Or us. Why don't we do a little Grumpy Old Geeks thing again? We'll talk about it off the air. Okay. All right. My Moron of the Week is a lovely gentleman, Ross Compton, who burnt down his house and called 911 and told them what was going on.

But in the middle of it, he said he packed his suitcases, got everything out of the house while he was, you know, supposedly while the house was on fire. Well, the roof was on fire. The local law enforcement actually got a subpoena for his pacemaker data because he had a heart condition.

And they had a cardiologist come in and say, hey, they asked the cardiologist, does this look like this data is, does this match with what he would be going through while his house was on fire? And the guy's like, oh, no, not at all. There's no way he could have done all that stuff.

And so he got busted for for arson and fraud, arson and insurance fraud. Because it came down to they found multiple lighting points of the fire. So they had that, you know, they had something to go on and they just needed some, you know, data to incriminate him on.

And yeah, his pacemaker turned him in. OK, I think I think I can beat that. OK, what you got? I've got a boyfriend who was caught cheating on his girlfriend by his girlfriend through a Burger King Instagram post. You win. You win the Internet today.

First off, why would anybody follow a Burger King Instagram? Secondly, why would you and your sweetie both be so into Burger King that you're both following Burger King's Instagram? Thirdly, you're so into Burger King that you're not only following the Burger King Instagram account, but you're then reading through all the comments.

So, yeah, this guy, Jordan, was out with his with with another lady. And, you know, being classy, he was taking her to the Burger King drive through. Hopefully he got her a whaler. Found the time while waiting at the Burger King drive through to comment on a Burger King Instagram photo about how long the drive through is taking when he's with this other girl.

Then the girlfriend saw this and starts in the comments saying, what the fuck are you doing? Why aren't you? Why are you with that chick? So this is all taking place and unfolding in the comments on a Burger King Instagram photo. It's genius. I love it. This is the best. This is the best thing ever. It is pretty damn good.

But what was Jordan thinking? You don't tag the person you're cheating with. That's just not classy. Yeah. Oh, man. So on so many levels, this just works. It's beautiful. Yeah, I love it. So my follow up to that, it's not as good. But a French man wants $48 million from Uber for breaking up his marriage.

OK, he was using his wife's iPhone to call Ubers for him, but then deleting the app. He'd like install the app, call the Uber, then delete the app. But there was a bug in the notification settings where she would still get the notifications of his cars coming up and, you know, dropping them off, picking them up, all that stuff.

So basically, she found out it wasn't a cheating scenario, but he was just lying to her about working late and then Ubering off around Paris at night. So, or wherever the hell he was, uh, Cotesia. Ah, very fancy. Well, you know, there are these things called cabs and you use cash.

And, or just get your own damn phone and don't use your wife's phone to get an Uber. Well, there's that too. If you can afford to get an Uber all these times when he did it, he can afford to get another phone is what I'm saying. And don't tag your sweetikins at Burger King. Brick-a-brick.

And easily the best thing I've found all week. Um, there is a link in the show notes from, uh, the secret taxonomy behind Ikea's product names. Now, you might have thought these were just random. I love finding out this kind of stuff that it's not. Uh, bookcases are all named after either professional occupations or boys' names.

All outdoor furniture is named after Scandinavian islands. All rugs are named after cities and towns in either Denmark or Sweden. And all bedsheets, comforters, or pillowcases are named after flowers and plants. This is the best thing ever. I love this. It's great. I was looking, I was looking through this earlier and I'm just like, oh, wow, I had no idea.

Where's the fluken fluken from? Exactly. This is fantastic. It's just, there's a whole list of what everything is, is done and named from. So there's a whole taxonomy. Somebody has to sit there and actually come up with this stuff. This is fantastic. What a job. What a world we live in, Jason. What a world. What a world.

Uh, bringing us back to the world we live in, uh, German honest news site, their postillion, their postalon has made a fake, a faux, sorry, faux Ikea ad, which offers President Trump an affordable border wall or beauty wall. This is genius.

This is genius. I love this. It's, you got it. This is a, one of those visual ones you have to go to the show notes and check out, but, uh, I go to gog.show slash 196 and there'll be a link, but it is funny as hell. Yeah. I saw that you put that in there. So I've also added my own version of this because, uh, one of my favorite memes going around is the, the faux Ikea instructions.

So I've also thrown in the clever illustrations of horror film bad guys as Ikea instruction manual pictographs. Nice. It's a, it's worth a, worth a look and it's quite the chuckle. Okay. I'll definitely check that one out after the show, uh, in interesting, uh, gut news.

Let's get back to some gut news. We haven't had gut news in a while. I don't know if it's a fact, but I feel it in my gut, Jason. So therefore it's true. There you go. Ingestible electronics, those little things that you swallow and they take the readings from the inside of your body. Uh, it's, it's kind of, it's an, it's, it's a super, it's extreme wearable.

That's what that is. It's an extreme wearable. Uh, they've had power problems because when you swallow these things, you're basically eating a battery and, uh, then it goes into your stomach acid and there could be problems there. Batteries and acids, usually not a good combination. Yeah.

Because then you get the battery acid from the acid on the battery. You know, it's a, it's a vicious cycle. Well, they, new researchers have figured out how to actually use your gut juice to power these sensors. They've got it, uh, working for 6.1 days in live pigs.

That's with full wifi and, uh, temperature sensing and all the good stuff. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. I'm not going to try that anytime soon. Well, you know, in, in our near future, when you need to swallow a pill and regrow your liver, you just might need it.

That's true. Uh, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has made more than 375,000 public domain images available with a CC zero license. That's awesome. This is so cool. You can go search the entire collection and what CC zero is, is basically an easy way for them to put things in the public domain because actually putting works in the public domain is apparently a pain in the ass.

Yeah. So there's a lot of legal fees involved. And usually when you're putting something in the public domain, you're not going to be making any monies. Therefore it doesn't make sense to go through the entire expense and process of doing it. Exactly. That's where creative commons comes in and they created a special license called the no rights reserved license or CC zero information for that will be in the show notes.

But so will a link to the Mets, uh, giant archive of images that you can go take and play with and do good stuff with. It's so cool. Very cool. Feedback loop. We have a new Patreon supporter. Woo hoo. Welcome to the team.

Christian Zangle. Thank you so much. Thank you. So if everybody else would join in, we wouldn't have to go back to work tomorrow. But yeah, yeah, that might, uh, come on, hurry up people. I don't want to have to, I don't want to build any more bots, although I will probably build this bot just for fun.

Uh, this is from our Twitter account, uh, at GOG podcast mechanical lurk sent us, uh, sounds like something you guys might need. It's a bot that watches Donald Trump's tweets for mentions of a company and automatically executes trades based on the tweet and on their stock. So, uh, basically if he, you know, if you would have had this running when he decided to use the goddamn official president of the United States Twitter account to attack an

American company for not carrying his daughter's Chinese made clothing, um, it would have automatically basically invested in Nordstrom for you. And Nordstrom did indeed get the Trump bump. Um, he did, he crapped on them and, uh, their stock price rose. So, okay.

So this is called Trump to cash and I'm on GitHub right now looking at the graphic that they have, which is beautiful, basically angry tweets coming out of Trump's mouth, going through a money machine and money comes out the other side. Then you have a little rat running away with the dollar, which could be you.

You could be that rat. Yes, indeed you can be. So I will probably be installing this and trying it out thus far. It says it does better than average. Um, and I do think that we are starting to see, uh, as people keep pointing out, uh, you got to pick a side these days. I think, uh, more often than not, if he craps on a company, it's going to actually increase in value or at least get a short term bump from it now.

So I'm, I'm up for giving this a go. I'm not going to throw a lot of money into it. I might set up an account that's like only got like a thousand dollars, but, uh, that's a lot of money. What are you kidding me? Some of us are poor. It's just part of my investment portfolio here. Okay. Well, I think maybe we should take last month's, uh, Patreon, uh, earnings and make a GOG fund and run that through that.

Yeah. All right. So who's going to put it like the five hours it's going to take to install this damn, uh, stamp app. Obviously you, cause you're the, you're the bot man. All right. I'll give it a go. Some of us still have to do the day job thing. Sorry. Okay. I love this thing.

Trump to cash. Uh, next one comes from Jason Schroeder. Hey guys, I've been listening to your podcast weekly for about a year now, and I think it's fair to call myself a fan. Well, we'll call you a fan too. I like the banter between the two of you and the well-balanced mix of tech news and comedy punditry. Thanks for the consistently great listens.

Well, thanks for consistently listening. Anyways, sorry to dampen my fan letter by tacking on a not so sneaky press release, but I'm trying to get the word out about my new iOS and Android app called I know words. I have the best words. Now, see, hold on a second. We, we gave him the plug for free at a Patreon level for a $5 donation is what gets you the plug.

Hey, so you owe us five bucks, Jason. Get on it. I downloaded this app. It's pretty fun. It's basically magnetic poetry with, uh, with, you know, with choice, you know, bigly words. Yes. The best words really. Yeah. He pulls actual, uh, Trump tweets in to give you the, give you the vocabulary, which is pretty fun.

Yeah. It is pretty clever. I liked it. So well done, Jason. Well done, Jason. And get on, get on over to Patreon. Come on, brother. Help us out. Yes. Yep. Throw, throw, throw a grumpy old geek a bone. Uh, and then Christian Zengel also wrote in on our website, in addition to, you know, doing the Patreon thing.

Um, he says, I recently bought a car and I thought I'd get it with CarPlay, the iPhone integration. Uh, boy, was I in for a surprise. I'm actually, I'm surprised right now. I didn't know that that was out in the wild yet. So that's a couple months, at least. I, I was not aware of that. I'm going to be Googling that. I want to see what it looks like. Um, if this were a study on how not to integrate a phone with a car, I'd give it a gazillion points.

You could be on the show, buddy. Uh, the only positive thing I could say about it is that they made it really hard to open CarPlay by accident or even intentionally. It's the most useless crap I've seen since the big bang. Not only is the interface brain dead, it's also buggy as hell with Siri on top.

A potent combination for a road trip. I'm back to using Bluetooth. Well, that's, that's good to hear. I guess I, it's sad because I, I, you know, once again, we have high hopes for Apple doing things that are intuitive and great, like the sharing and notes, but apparently they can't get this right.

So that's too bad. But I'm, like I said, I'm on Ford. Uh, I use sync, which is built by Microsoft amazingly enough. And I'm going to have a Amazon echo integration into my car soon. So I'm fine with CarPlay sucking. And I've got the whole BM, I've got the BMW interface, which is fine. It's fantastic.

It works well with the iPhone. So I'm good. Fancy pants. What's my damn it. I wish I had German for fancy pants on the top of my tongue. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And you guys have been a little lazy with the iTunes comments. What's going on there? Give us some love. Go to GOG.show slash iTunes. It'll take you right there. Leave us a five star and some nice words. We really appreciate it. Seriously. It's been a while. Where's the love? Exactly. Closing shout outs.

I'd like to wish a happy birthday to probably my favorite living comedian, Eddie Izzard. Or Izzard, if you're American. Eddie Izzard. He's currently out. Got caught in blizzard. Oh, boy. He's currently out on a tour, Force Majeure. Go see him if you get the chance.

By all means, if you've not seen his stand-up, you can't beat it. He's hilarious. He's smart. And it's good stuff. He's also extremely family friendly, which is one of those things that you never would think with a transvestite British comedian. His stand-up is extremely smart, but also family friendly.

He does not swear very much in his stand-up at all. Because I watched it with my dad and my little brother when my brother was little. And we were looking for good comedy that we could watch and still get a lot out of it. And was safe for my brother, who's now 25. So that's how long I've been listening to Eddie.

But man, I love him. Other than potentially having to explain why the nice man is wearing makeup, yeah, pretty family friendly, I'd say. Absolutely. I love Eddie. So happy birthday, Eddie. Happy birthday, Eddie. And we do have some sad news. Richard Hatch, the original Captain Apollo, who obviously came back and the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, passed away this last week.

This was a kick in the gut. I had no idea he was sick. I hadn't heard anything about him at all. It just, this one really did kind of come out of nowhere. All of a sudden, it was just like, oh, oh, well, that sucks. Yeah. And he died of pancreatic cancer, which also this week we lost Hans Rosling to pancreatic cancer.

Now, you probably don't know that name unless you're a nerd who watches a bunch of TED Talks. But Hans made some of these, the best TED Talks. This guy made graphs and Excel fun. He was a statistician and just some of his stuff is amazing. We've got links to a couple of the big ones in the show.

And I was really bummed about this one because he is such a, his stats are like a great force for good in the world. And it's sad that he's gone, but he leaves behind a pretty good legacy. All right. Well, I'm sorry to hear that as well. I have not watched these TED Talks, but I'm definitely interesting.

And, and, and what he's talking about. So yeah, you'll love them. You'll love them. They're right. They're right up your nerd alley. Trust me. Would you like to say goodbye now? Oh, sorry. My bad. Until next time. I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillipo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like. If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show slash support, where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and help keep us on the air. To learn more about all the people who make the show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 196.

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