239: Adult Nyquil

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by FreshBooks. To claim your 30-day free trial with no credit card required, go to freshbooks.com slash grumpy and enter Grumpy Old Geeks in the How Did You Hear About Us section. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Howdy-do-do-do, Brian. How are you, Jason? Apparently we both have stories to tell each other, as we were just mentioning before we started. I don't know if you saw my Instagram post yesterday. I blocked dogs. No, it wasn't dogs. It was a friend of mine who I don't think is very much of a friend gave me a really nice bottle of Avion tequila.

Okay. And I had some things to celebrate yesterday, and I had a little bit of Avion. But I was supposed to go out to dinner with a friend who flaked on me at the last minute. So you had more? I just was sipping tequila, talking on the phone with friends for about six hours, and then I noticed I can't feel my legs.

And then I looked and I'm like, oh, half the bottle's gone. And I haven't eaten anything. Oops. Yeah, yeah. I don't get hangovers anymore, except for today. Oh, my God. I stopped drinking hard liquor a while ago for this very reason, and now I remember why.

Yeah. At least it was a good tequila. Avion Gold is like 50 bucks a bottle. It's not bad tequila, but it's still tequila. Yes, you cannot drink hard alcohol as you would wine or beer. So if you plan on a six-hour marathon, catch-up-with-people session, I suggest staying away from the hard stuff.

Oh, I wasn't planning on it. It's one of those things that just happened. But I had something to celebrate. So I no longer work for The Art of Charm. Oh, whoa. New news. Big news. I work for The Jordan Harbinger Show. Ah, wow. A little split off there. Okay. Yeah, we've rebranded.

And if you're a fan of The Art of Charm and The Jordan Harbinger Show now, we'll be covering it in an upcoming episode of probably Fan Mail Friday. But yeah, it's big news, new show art. I got to play around in Photoshop this week working on the art. And as we were kind of joking before the show, nothing is where it used to be.

Something that I've done since 1992 is no longer where it was last week. And I'm like, ugh, come on. Every single time they push out an update, they move the five tools that I use all the time. I know. It's like, come on. Thanks, guys. Yeah. And I still haven't gotten the hang of Pixelmator.

So I just stick with Photoshop. I mean, come on. I've been using Photoshop since version two. It's like, it's kind of hard to change. It is. It is. It's, you know, brand loyalty. Yeah, really? I mean, God, I've stolen how many thousands of dollars worth of Photoshop? That's right. I only justify it by knowing that I have paid Adobe over a quarter of a million dollars in software licenses at my various jobs.

This is very true. I know it's not legal justification for it, but I can sleep at night. Right. So, Brian, what's your story? Oh, yes. Well, I was very excited to do this show. And as you may have noticed in our show notes, I kind of didn't get around to a lot of the links I put in there.

I'm taking the kid out a lot more. It's time. It's socialization. You know, he needs to do that. And there are two things I've noticed about kind of, you know, going to classes and being around a bunch of other kids. First off is the pure animal human nature. We need to be socialized.

As a kid, here's what happens. They see a toy that they like that some other kid has. They push the kid down. They take the toy. Now, then they immediately are no longer interested in the toy, unless some other kid wants the toy, in which case it is the most important toy in the universe.

That is just human nature. And we have to basically instruct our kids to not be that way and join society. And most of us do that. Most of us learn to get away from these behaviors. And those of us that don't, well, they become, you know, Silicon Valley CEOs or, say, president.

Or podcasters. Or podcasters, in Jason's case. So that's the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed is that kids are just disgusting petri dishes. And you are sick all the time. Like, my kid has basically had a cold for two months. And when your kid has a cold, you get a cold.

Thursday night is when I usually go back and review all the articles. I read the ones that you put in. I review the ones that I put in. We put in our little comments that we want to make about all the different stories. And, well, you know, I basically, after, you know, a couple glasses, probably too much of NyQuil.

Or, you know, by NyQuil, I mean wine. Yeah. I passed out. Adult NyQuil. Yes. I had some adult NyQuil and probably too much of it, just as you were. And I passed out. So we're going to wing it on some of these stories, basically, is what I'm saying. The great hangover episode of 2017.

Yeah, I wish I was hungover. Oh, well. The one thing I have to say is I never would have thought this would be a hangover cure, but ginger kombucha has actually made me feel a thousand percent better, which has gotten me to about 10 percent of human. Excellent. I basically sip on green tea kombucha all day long.

Ah, look at you fancy pants. I can't afford to do that. But, hey, every now and again, I'll go float the big bucks for some ginger kombucha. So let's get to some of the stories. I think we should start with the fact that we are actually on Spotify.

Yes, we discovered that right after I asked the question on recording last week. And not only were we on Spotify, we had been on Spotify for quite some time, according to some of our listeners. Well, yeah, that's the level of research you get here, grumpy old geeks. I'm like, yeah, I guess I should go check that.

And lo and behold, yes, there we were. Because, yeah, God forbid they notify you that you made it through. Yeah, that's somebody, I can't remember who, sorry about that, pointed out on Patreon that we had been on for two weeks or so. And I wrote back saying, would have been nice if they would have, like, notified us. Yeah. Hey, you're on our service now.

Unfortunately, we're not in any of the listings. So we should be under tech, but we're not. There's only, of course, there's, like, you know, five by five shows that have been dead for, like, five years that are on there. But we are not, we're not there. So you have to manually search.

But if you just go to GOG.show slash Spotify, it'll take you directly to the link. If you do that on your mobile phone or even on your computer, it will give you the link to open in Spotify. And then you can add us and subscribe and follow us there if you like. Make it easy for you. Big news, obviously.

The FCC has voted to roll back net neutrality three to two on party lines. Not good, obviously. We still have a shot here, but if there's one thing I know about Congress, one thing. Now, we may not be huge fans of government in general here, but one thing I know about Congress is that they take the will of the people seriously.

And we'll do what the vast majority of Americans are asking them to do, which is keep net neutrality and not give in to big corporations who want to get rid of it. That is, I am steadfast in my belief that that is what Congress does best. We're fucked. I think on the bright side, the state's attorneys general are lining up to sue the FCC.

So this is not over. It wouldn't even go into effect for two more weeks. But yes, we have to sue the FCC to make this. Yeah, a number of states are, it's going to end up going to the Supreme Court because it's going to become a state's rights issue. So this is never going to end. This is how this stuff gets passed, by the way, people, because they just erode you.

They just erode you and erode you. And it's just they keep bringing these things back that people don't want. And every single time, people drop out of the fight because they're tired. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. No, I mean, when we were starting to do the security segment on the show, we eventually got what I like to call breach fatigue because every week there was a new breach.

And then, so that's why we cover different stories now, not just breach of the week. But, yeah, it wears you down. And at least this time, people are like, yeah, you know, you just can't do that. You know, 83% or 87% of America does not want this, and this asshole did it anyway.

Yep. Never underestimate the power of greed. Yes. Well, let's talk about money again for a little bit. Patreon. We called it last week. Yes, they rolled it back because everybody on the platform had their panties in a bunch about this and said, what the hell are you guys thinking?

So they rolled it back. They're not going to do it. They're going to do what they should have done in the first place and talk to the creators to see what they want before handing us a shit platter sandwich and saying, here you go. Now, I have to say the one thing that they did do right was they sent emails to basically everybody that had unfollowed a patron or a creator on Patreon and said, hey, look, we're sorry if you stopped following them because we screwed up.

Feel free to come on back and we'll cover that in feedback loop later. Look, you got to applaud these companies when they realize they've made a misstep and they go back and fix it. Obviously, they should have talked to their people first.

Their people being us and everybody else that creates on Patreon. We are your customers. So that would have been nice. But hey, points for not doubling down, points for listening and points for rolling it back. Unfortunately, we'd already lost like 10% of our Patreons at that point. Yeah. Yeah.

And you know what? I can't blame you guys. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. I got a little follow up about the New York Times change that I made last week. I told you, you know, I got rid of my daily delivery and just went to Sunday in digital. And here's the thing that just really chaps my dazzle here.

I go to my mailbox three times a week. I get snail mail letters from the New York Times thanking me for subscribing. Yeah. And telling me all of the great stuff that they're doing. Do you know how much money that costs? A lot. To send letters to like all of these, you know, hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Guys, save the letters and just give me a decent rate. It makes, I mean, you're, you're marketing to somebody who is already paid you. Why? Why are you doing that? Are you just stupid? Inefficiency, Jason. Inefficiency. And it works.

Obviously, the stuff works. There is a return on investment. Otherwise, they wouldn't continue to do it. I'm sure some data wonk in a basement with his thumb up his ass came up with this grand idea. And his dad is probably in the direct mail business. So he gets a kickback from it. Yeah. Because I'm that jaded nowadays.

That's what the show does to you, Jason. It really does. Yeah. Yeah. And speaking of jaded, let me talk about Facebook a little bit. This is, we've been talking a lot about UI recently on the show and various screw ups. And remember, oh, Jason, remember the beautiful early days of the internet when we would design UI because we wanted users to be able to use our products.

Oh, yes. In the most efficient way that makes sense. Like we were just talking about with Adobe Photoshop. Yeah. And not move things around every single time. Facebook's UI. Now I, for our show notes, I do tend to save a lot of things in Facebook, things that friends have posted, things from various news organizations that I follow on Facebook.

And you can save links in Facebook, which is great. And then you go to your saved links and you find them. And as you browse through these links, because I like to delete them out after I put them in the show notes, there's an X that appears right next to the link. What would an X next to a link do, Jason, when we built UIs?

Well, in a safe world- It would delete it. It would delete it, yes. It would delete it. Now, Facebook doesn't want you to delete anything, so that X does not do that. What it does is it archives it. Because Facebook doesn't want to ever have you delete anything because they want everything attached to you so they can market to you and know you better and sell to you better all the time.

So instead of hitting the X, which is a fucking delete button, you have to select unsaved from a triple dot dropdown because, you know, fuck you. You aren't a user. You're the goddamn product. Yeah, see, that's why I don't save links in Facebook, because it does kind of profile you even more. I use Pinboard to save all my links for the show.

And I mean, I really do it for that reason. As we've discussed time and time again with Bittner in the security segment, I would love to really know what delete really means. Is it really, when I say I actually delete it from the dropdown, is it really deleting it or can I just not see it anymore and it's still attached to my profile?

That's what I think. Everything's still there somewhere in a cold storage vault. It's the price you pay for free software. Well, it's not going to be free too much longer, right? We're going to have to pay our Time Warner cable five bucks to be able to access Facebook pretty soon.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, speaking of Facebook, we had a story the other week about Sean Parker who said, yeah, yeah, we basically, you know, built Facebook on these psychological premises of, you know, dopamine rewards and things like that to keep people, you know, engaged.

So I saw an article on Next Web that's called Facebook digs a deeper hole in response to former exec. Yeah. Well, apparently another former exec came out and said the same damn thing. So, yeah, he was criticizing the site for using short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops and they're destroying, that Facebook is destroying how society works.

Okay. You know, straight from the horse's mouth. And then Facebook came out and said, yeah, we kind of know we did that. And we're trying to be more, you know, responsible now. Like, oh, guys, come on. Yeah. As of this morning, actually, I saw this right before we started to record.

They've put up their own blog entry about this over at Facebook. Hard questions. Is spending time on social media bad for us? Yes. I didn't get the, well, we know that. Yes. I didn't get the chance to read through the whole thing, but Fahad Manjou, who's a great tech writer, did read it. So I'm just going to read his tweet here really quick.

It seems to me like a pretty big deal that Facebook is admitting and citing academic research that, in some instances, spending time on social media is bad for you. So they're actively admitting it. Of course, they recommend as a solution spending more time on social media. So I look forward to reading this article and see how they word that, because that should be quite fascinating.

Yeah, it's funny. This is one of the ones where Betteridge's law fails us. I want to talk about cryptocurrency real quick as some follow-up, because we've talked about it here and there over the past couple of weeks. Yep. Well, I've jumped in. Okay. I bought some Litecoin. I didn't know.

I didn't buy Litecoin. I bought some Bitcoin and Ethereum just to dive in. So I, too, can play the douchebag game. I want to be that douchebag guy. Guess what? So did I. I bought all three. Oh, okay. Good for you. How much was Litecoin when you bought it?

Uh, I actually don't even have it yet, because for, because it's not, because it's not real financial markets, uh, I have to, I have to wait seven days for each to arrive. So I have not gotten any of them yet. Hmm. Okay. Good for me. And it is unclear as to what the price is.

Is the price what I paid for when I made the purchase? Oh, no, no, no. In the seven days. Oh, so, so it's when I get it in seven days. Awesome. That's fantastic. So with Bitcoin, that might be a letdown. With Litecoin, that might be a plus, because as I noticed, Litecoin spiked the other day and went way high from like, you know, 60 to 300.

And the creator of Litecoin says, guys, guys, don't buy it. Don't buy it. It's going to, it's going to normalize to 20 bucks. Don't do it. Trust me on this one. I'm like, okay, I'll take your advice. Right. Now, the funny thing is the money that I spent on buying these cryptocurrencies was, it was kind of found money because I haven't logged into my trading account in a very long time.

And I kind of, there's like tons of messages for me. And I'm like, what, what's all, what are all these messages? And they were all dividend notifications. Oh, nice. From my stock. So I took all the dividends that I didn't know I had and loop them back into crypto.

So I basically dropped a hundred bucks on the top two. So I got a Bitcoin and Ethereum and it's just, it's kind of fun to watch. It'll be our new thing to cover all next year instead of our stock trading game that we did. Apparently, I don't know how much feedback we got on that, but that one seems like it might have been a dog.

Maybe. Oh, well, it was fun for us. Yeah. So I'm using Coinbase for it and it's, it seems to work. I'm going to get a hardware wallet later and we'll have that, we'll have that review soon, but it's funny. The hardware wallets are expensive. The one that, the one that my friend, uh, Jordan Harbinger from the Jordan Harbinger show recommended is like 150 bucks, but you know, with the, it's money.

So you kind of want to put it somewhere secure. Anyway, um, I did find a funny article. We talked about how the IRS was going after Coinbase users and they wanted basically everybody's information. They settled a couple of weeks ago for only 14,355 users. Okay. Yeah. If you're trading over there, they will, they are watching the government be watching.

Yeah. It's, it's, uh, you know, you got to play by the rules people. So I, we talked about crypto kitties last week and I kind of glanced at it, but I couldn't because opera didn't work with it. So I begrudgingly fired up Chrome and went back to look at it. And so, yeah, I, I kind of understand it now.

It's really silly. You actually have to spend Ethereum to buy these kitties that you then merge and in some weird Island of Dr. Moreau game, you come up with these, you know, interesting new kitties. And, uh, there's a guy who's actually been playing the market over there and he's, uh, basically up like $42,000 worth.

Now, if he can cash that out, that would be interesting. Cause I don't know if anybody's going to buy $42,000 worth of crypto kitty, but yeah, it is a, it is a strange game. So I will not be playing crypto kitty because I'm not going to throw money into this thing, but it's interesting that, you know, this is the first game really built on the Ethereum blockchain and it is, it is so popular that it has slowed down the entire network by 11%.

Awesome. Yeah. This is so well thought out. I love it. Uh, the one funny thing I did see this week was, uh, total moon. Uh, it's a company that makes crypto sweaters for the ugly Christmas sweater season.

Oh, of course. They were kind of funny. They're cute. If anybody buys them, you're an idiot, but they're cute. They're cute to laugh. You put your finger at him and go, and okay. You spent money on that. How many Bitcoin did you, did you pay? Oh, I didn't even look to see if the site took Bitcoin because it'd be funny if they better, it would be so funny if they didn't.

I subscribe to the hustle newsletter, which is basically written by a bunch of millennials and it's kind of, some days it's really, really good. They, we get some stories out of there that are really good. And some days it's just like listening to reply all and it's like, oh, you didn't know that you didn't know when, where gifts came from.

Oh, okay. That's very cute. That's weird. That's a dorbs. But they did do a really funny video on Facebook called What the Hell is an Initial Coin Offering? And I got to say, it's pretty funny. So well done, Hustle, on your ICO video.

So that'll be linked in the show notes. You definitely should go watch it. It's only like a minute or two, but it's funny. All right. And finally, speaking of millennials, I talked briefly about Bird, the company that put a bunch of motorized scooters all around Santa Monica that you could rent and unlock with an app and ride, you know, the distance that you probably should have walked since we're all getting fatter and fatter all the time.

We already have the, you know, bikes here that you can do that with. So now it's motorized scooters. Unfortunately, typically, Santa Monica is now suing them and filed a criminal complaint because they are violating local laws by operating without a business license.

We forgot to get a business license. That's like just a couple hundred bucks, isn't it? Can't you just go down to City Hall and file for one? It's not like, you know, it's not like you're trying to get self-driving scooters approved by the state. Getting a business license is like step two on starting a business.

Okay, yeah. First, you come up with a name and then you go get a goddamn business license because that's what you do. But apparently not if you're one of these new, you know, Web 2.0 companies. To hell with that. To hell with legislation. To hell with the rules. To hell with the law. And by the way, they are like everybody is using these.

They're breaking the law. They're on sidewalks. You're not supposed to ride them on sidewalks. You're not supposed to take them out on the bike path. They're all over the bike path. Everybody is, of course, doing the wrong thing with them. And somebody is going to get killed because with all the Prius drivers going up and down Main Street here and you with your stupid bird riding in the bike lanes, you're going to die.

Good. So, anyways. Instant karma. Yeah. There you go. This is not how it's supposed to work, people. This is the new recurring theme on this show. In the news. We have talked in the past, Brian, about the Waymo versus Uber lawsuit.

Yes. How's that going? Well, it was put on hold for a while because it turns out looks like there is going to be a criminal investigation into Uber's actions. Gee, imagine that. They're being investigated for possible crimes under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

I do find it hard to believe that such an upstanding company would be accused of such things. I know. Oh, my goodness. Who'da thunk it? Who'da thunk it? Yes. We don't like laws, so we're going to skirt around them. Well, guess what? The pigeons may be coming home to roost, as they say.

There's a follow-up letter that is due out today. We're recording this on Friday, so it's sometime today there's going to be a follow-up that will probably be in the news by the time you listen to this. But keep an ear out for it, and we'll try and do some follow-up later. But, yeah, I thought that was pretty fascinating that, yeah, that there are other agencies that are unhappy with Uber and how they're handling themselves.

Gotcha. All right, got some Facebook news here, which I think is pretty interesting. Facebook is paying the WWE to stream some professional wrestling matches. Well, it's a fake news place meets fake sports. It's a match made in heaven. It really is.

So, apparently, these WWE wrestlers have massive Facebook followings in the millions. Okay. So, they're trying to capitalize on that, and they're going to run 12 straight weeks of matches that you can only watch on Facebook to, you know, I guess keep you on Facebook longer.

Go figure. I thought that was kind of interesting because WWE has their own channel. You know, you can buy the WWE channel, and it's pretty good. I like it. I'm sorry. I'm a wrestling fan. Talk about that later. I don't pay for it. My friends pay for it, and I go to their house to watch because watching wrestling alone can be kind of sad when you're eating your Stouffers and having your tequila, and you just kind of give up on life.

But, no, it's fun. So, this is kind of interesting. I'll check some of these matches out when they start showing up. Now, the next Facebook news I find really funny. Facebook adds a collection of 1,000 free songs to use in videos that you can make for Facebook and Instagram.

And so, I went and I looked it up, and I'm like, oh, okay. It looks like there's some, you know, decent artists on there. So, they're, you know, paying for some of the stuff. But, a lot of it's just unknown people. You know, they're song-alikes, as they used to call them. So, yes, these are, you know, pre-cleared of copyright.

You can use them to make your videos. Now, the catch is, which I think a lot of people are not going to read the fine print on, but I did. I went and I read the terms of use for these things. Yes, you can only make videos that you only can post to Facebook and Instagram.

You know, you know that there are going to be a ton of cease and desist coming down the line for people who post the videos on YouTube. You know it's going to happen. Yes. I just... And the other thing that's going to happen right now, the collection is only 1,000 free pre-cleared songs.

This is the deal that they're working out with major labels right now. All the major artists are going to come on board, and it won't be for free. You will be paying to use the songs. So, I think in the next year, we're going to see... Facebook has done a really good job of basically keeping everything free on Facebook.

And what we're going to see is these moves to, you know, now, if you want to do this and post this, you're going to have to pay 99 cents, that sort of stuff. We're going to start to see that roll out in Facebook over the next year or two, because they've reached about the level that they can reach with their advertising revenue.

So, they've got to start bringing in revenue streams from us. Yeah. Like, because they're not making enough money already. I know. Jeez. Yeah. Well, speaking of such things, Periscope is a Twitter product, I believe. Correct? Correctamundo. Yep. And apparently, not too many people are really using Periscope anymore, except for, you know...

Scott Adams. ...really creepy child molester kids. Yeah. And Scott Adams. That's about it. Yes. So, there's a big article out about how Periscope has a problem with minors. Users are swarming young girls and asking them to do inappropriate things, and because it is owned by Twitter, they cannot figure out how to stop that from happening.

Oh, these just write themselves. They really do. I mean, Twitter cannot figure out a fucking thing. They can't stop Nazis from tweeting, and we think they're going to be able to stop people from asking 14-year-old girls to lift their shirts. No, that's not going to happen, so, you know, yeah.

T-minus two weeks until we can sell our stock. I cannot wait. That first day of trading, 2018, I am selling that. I know. And you are definitely going to owe me a six-pack, because there is no way... Yeah, it looks that way. ...no way it's going to drop that much. That's fair enough.

I almost hesitated to put this story in the news, but because they are a company that has done this, has been one of our advertisers, and we thank them very much. But three big U.S. airlines will start banning smart luggage in January, because it's not a good idea to have a gigantic battery sitting in your suitcase.

Yeah, yeah. You're not supposed to have lithium-ion batteries in the cargo hold, because if they go poom, or poom, I think that's a hybrid of poof and boom, I guess. So if they go poom, your plane's going down. You're screwed. Because there's no way to put out the fire. I mean, granted, in the cabin, even, it's pretty hard, but if it's in the cabin, you know it's happening.

So you can get the plane down to 10,000 feet, open the back door, and throw the fucker out. But when it's in the hold, yeah, no, no, no, no, no. Now, I still think the one I have is a good product. I just recommend buying only in carry-on sizes. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, I use, so you're talking about Away Luggage, which has the built-in battery. I have a Giro, which has the cabling for the battery. I didn't buy it with the battery, but the battery is removable. So, like, if they do have to check my carry-on, I can just pop the battery out, and they can take it. Right.

But the nice thing about it is, it's also a good way to say, oh, I'm sorry, you're going to have to find room up here, because I've got a battery in this, and you can't check it. Yeah. See if that works. Probably not. Okay, sir, please remove yourself from the plane, and catch the next flight three days from now. Yes.

We'll see how that goes, but yeah. And we had talked about delivery robots running all over San Francisco, bringing pizza, delivering E-24 stuff, because everybody's too goddamn lazy to even hop on their bird cycle and go out and get their own food. Apparently, people are turning against this idea.

San Francisco sours on rampant delivery robots. I love this quote. Not every innovation is great. That should have been the name of our show. That should have been the catchphrase for San Francisco. Pretty much. Yeah. So lawmakers are passing regulations to cut down on the amount of delivery robots because pedestrians have been tired of sharing sidewalks with aggressively entrepreneurial wet dreams.

Yeah. What's the number that you can get a license for, but there's only going to be nine of them on the street at any given time in San Francisco? Something like that, which is ridiculous. A planet full of startup founders have cried out in anguish because, oh, sorry, your cooler on wheels is not allowed to actually work here.

But speaking of robots on the streets of San Francisco, the SPCA hired one of those K5 robots from Nightscope to patrol the sidewalks and the internet shit the proverbial bed on this one, this was everywhere in my feeds, everywhere.

And I mean, I just was chuckling every time because everybody's like, oh, God, you horrible people. You can figure out how to, you know, take care of animals, but you're using these robots to get rid of the homeless. The whole point that everybody was saying was it was to get rid of the homeless.

Well, in part, that's true, because I don't know if you've been to San Francisco, Brian, the land of man, man, poo and dirty needles. Yes. The homeless problem there is ridiculously terrible. Yes, it is.

They bought this robot to try and help out because, you know, basically it's just a camera on wheels and it, you know, phones home because their employees were not safe. And, you know, it's the SPCA. If they can get something, a cheap solution to at least, you know, help with the problem of employee safety, they're going to do it because they want to spend the money on the animals.

I understand that. I'm all for that. This is one of the uses of the robot that I actually approve of. And the whole thing about, you know, oh, the poor homeless. Fuck the poor homeless. I'm sorry. I'm going to say it because the homeless in San Francisco are violent, drug addled assholes.

There is no other way to put it because they are so entitled. Yes, this is the entitled homeless. I'm saying it because San Francisco open has an open arm policy for the homeless. They're everywhere. They're rampant. And it is a problem. It is a massive problem in San Francisco.

And it's dangerous. So I am with the SPCA on this. Fine. Buy your robot. I'm cool with that. If it's going to keep your people safe while they're doing their job, like where they're coming home from doing their jobs of protecting the animals. Good for you. Everybody else suck a bag of dicks.

Well said. Thank you. Yes, I'll be I'll be sorry. Well, since the mayor of San Francisco died this week, I can go run for mayor of San Francisco. That should be fun. No, it won't because. If I never have to go back, it'll be too soon. OK, let's go to something fun here.

Apple has bought Shazam. Hey, like four million dollars. That was like one of the first apps I've ever installed and never used again. I've used it twice. And the problem is it's so buried on my phone that by the time I find it, the song's over.

Yeah, by the time you find it. And also, of course, now when you launch it, you get you get basically the equivalent of a pre-roll ad when you launch the app. So by the time I get past all of that, the song that I wanted to find out about is completely gone. Yes. I know like 150 episodes ago, we talked about how like when Siri was finally able to launch apps and we tried to figure out, you know, like, hey, Siri, Shazam and then hold it up.

And it worked back then. But now, yeah, there's just so much crap going on that it's really hard to use. So we'll see how this goes. But yeah, four hundred million dollars for Shazam. Then they just bought a depth sensing chip company for another three hundred and ninety million dollars. These guys are just, you know, spreading the love.

Apple's got money. Oh, yeah, they do have money. Lots and lots and lots of it. So this is one of the chips that go into the iPhone 10 or X, however you prefer to say it, that does kind of the depth sensing on your face to build that cool little map that they can put in the commercials to say, hey, look, we're good.

But they're doing they're building a new plant in Texas, which is pretty good. So we're looking for a couple hundred new jobs out of that. So, you know, that's pretty cool. I got to say, at least they're keeping it home, which is that's right. You know, finally, anyway, finally.

And now this last story I have in here is from Gizmodo. And I swear to God, a couple of years ago, we had the same story. And you know why I could swear a couple of years ago, we had the same story because they had this exact same story a couple of years ago. Man who threw away a fortune in Bitcoin now looking to dig up a landfill.

Now, this is from Gizmodo. And they literally went back to the well, pulled up the same damn story and republished it because it's relevant again. You know, I guess if if you can, why not? But I'm like, why are you telling me this?

We know this already. The guy threw away his Bitcoin. Tough shit. What are you going to do? What are you going to do, damn it? This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is sponsored by FreshBooks. Staying on top of your admin and paperwork while hustling to grow your freelance business is just plain hard sometimes.

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And seriously, if you run a business, you have to be running FreshBooks. It is ridiculously awesome. Well, we've been talking recently about the battles that seem to be taking place between Amazon and Apple and Google, the voice wars, as it were.

But there seems to be a bit of a thaw for the first time ever. Amazon is going to start selling Apple TV and Google Chromecasts. No way! So they're opening that up so you can get the next day delivery on this stuff, I suppose. It makes sense, obviously, for Amazon. Why not?

Because, theoretically, they're a store, and you sell what people want, and this is what people want. So, you know, there you go. They've never been really good at being platform agnostic, you know? No. Which kind of sucks. It's good that they're, you know, opening that up, which they should have done years ago, honestly. Yep.

And, yeah. And who knows who was holding back at various points, too. I know Apple wanted to basically keep everything to themselves for a long time anyways, as well. But it doesn't matter anymore. You can now get your Apple stuff on Amazon. All right. So I have a little Amazon follow-up, too, on the Echo.

Yes. And we talked about Spotify with them before and how we've had problems with them. But now they say Spotify and SiriusXM can use the multi-room streaming, which is good. So I tested it this week, and it works. It works great. Now, I was going back to your problem where it wasn't playing Casper Baby Pants or whatever it is.

Casper Baby Pants, that's right. Okay. And you're right. It totally wouldn't. I could not get it to play. If I'm using Spotify, if you have an Amazon music account, it plays fine, obviously, because it's Amazon's own product. It works great. But using Spotify was definitely a problem with a lot of stuff.

And I tried it with a bunch of my playlists because that was the hack. Supposedly, make a playlist, use the playlist. I was making playlists. And if I named it the artist name, nope, wouldn't work. Yep. Doesn't work. So I came up with, you know, so I just made up something. I'm like, okay, box something.

I used the prefix box. I don't know why I came up with it. It worked. It took about 10 minutes for it to propagate my playlists to the Echo. But I finally got it to work. But it was also an ordering issue. So I was having an issue getting it, like trying to figure out what the proper, you know, sorting order was to get it to work.

So it was like, you know, name of device, which I won't say. Spotify, play, playlist, name, then location. So it would be like Spotify, play, playlist, box baby pants, everywhere. And it worked. I could get that to work.

Except for the fact that at this point, it's now quicker for me to whip out my phone and just use the Spotify app. Right. But can you do that with locations? So if you have multiple Echoes around your house, will it work on the app? No. I didn't think it would. Yeah.

So if you have multiples, because I have I have two of them, one for upstairs, one for downstairs. And I like the everywhere because then I just in the morning when I roll out of bed, I say, you know, play WGN everywhere. So I roll out, take 15 minutes to get my sorry fat ass out of bed.

And then when I by the time I get downstairs, it's playing in the kitchen and I don't have to say three words again. Oh, my saved me saying three words again. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I still have the same issue. I can't. A handful of artists and of course, the ones that I play the most because of my kid just cannot be found via Spotify, via Alexa.

So I have made playlists. That workaround does seem to be working. But it's this is hardly hardly what they sold us on, is it? Or the future that we were expecting. And it just makes me think of the Star Trek 4 Scotty bit where he talks to the computer. So I've got that link in the show notes.

Oh, good. Yeah. I was going to say, you know, it might actually be worth it to drop the drop the coin on Amazon music. It's turned out to work extraordinarily well with the with the echoes. Yeah. I mean, it might just be that that's what I do. You know, price of admission sucks, but price of admission.

But I used to be able to write it off, but maybe not with this new tax code. Thanks, guys. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Thanks for reminding me. It's not like I felt like crap already. Thanks. Yeah, no problem, man. That's what I'm here for. Well, this should make you happy. I found an article that touts the Apple Watch and how it's becoming the ultimate fitness tracker.

They have a new trick now where they're going to start connecting to workout machines in the gym because everything has to be, you know, connectable these days, which is actually kind of smart. It's a capability they're calling Gym Kit. It syncs Apple Watches with smart gym equipment. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I actually quite like that.

So I don't know if I'm getting an Apple Watch anymore for Christmas, but if I don't, because there's some other things that have come up, I will probably get an Apple Watch at some point in the future. So this kind of stuff is really interesting. Of course, on the flip side of that, I also found an article.

We talked briefly about Strava, which is a social network that started for bikers. Now they're trying to expand to basically people that work out a lot or anybody that's active. And this is by Christina Bonington. And she used Strava and she's an avid cyclist.

And what she has started to realize is that she, you know, no longer has fun or enjoys her bike rides anymore because it's all about tracking. We've talked about this many times, you know, back, I think two or three years ago, we were on a kick where we were tracking everything in our life.

And then we realized how tedious that is and how it sucks the joy out of everything. Oh, it totally does. And the worst one is when my Fitbit battery would die halfway through a day. And I'm like, oh, my God, I wasted all that exercise. Damn it. I didn't get credit for it.

And I'm like, yeah, still exercise. So shut the fuck up. I'm like, still exercise. Yep. And speaking of Fitbit, there's a great article in Wired about how they're trying to pivot. They are no longer interested in being an activity tracker, especially with the Apple Watches of the world basically eating up their market share.

But what they are starting to do, and this makes total sense for them, is move to become a medical device company catering to hospitals, patients, and health insurers. Smart move, guys. Very smart. I might buy some of your stock. Well, you should because it's like pennies on the dollar now. It's super cheap. I know. That's actually a good idea.

I think it's a really good idea. So this is my recommendation for 2018 is to go pick up Fitbit because this is a really smart pivot. And this is going to be a big, big, big area. What's funny is friend of the show, Trent Hamilton, got me to buy Fitbit one day because he was Mr. Day Trader back then.

He's like, go buy Fitbit. And it's like, you know, the IM took about, you know, 20 minutes to get to me and I got it. And it was like, you know, 74 bucks. And the next day it dropped down to like 27. And I'm like, thanks, buddy. Appreciate that. Thanks. Preach. Preach.

So maybe I can get my money back on it this time. Do you remember the light camera? Vaguely. It kind of looks like a fly. The front of it. It is the ugliest camera ever created by the hand of man. It's got 16 lenses on the front of it, all pointed in arbitrary directions to make this hundred and like 60 megapixel image.

Well, it started to ship. And it's funny because all the preorders were were in and they gave everybody the option to say, hey, we can ship it to you now. And it's not that good. Or you can wait a little bit and get the good version in a year.

And like 2000 people said, no, I want it now. I want it now. And then started bitching because it wasn't ready yet. Idiots. Oh, what did you expect? It said it on the tin. So the the founder, the CEO came out with a pretty interesting article just saying, like, look, guys, we're working on it.

It's software. It's hard. You know, we'll make it better. But we told you we told you it wasn't going to be ready yet. Is that right? I cannot wait to see one of these things in the wild so I can actually like, you know, see the images that come out of it because it's got promise if they can if they can figure it out.

And the interesting thing is their their play is to sell the technology to cell phone makers. Now, I'm sorry, but I already hate the little camera bump on my iPhone. I can't stand it. So if you want to put 16 of those on the back of my phone.

Oh, come on. Yeah. Battery life. Give me a break. I think that's that's a really silly type of plan that they've got going on. They just sell it. Sell it as a pocket camera. Come on, guys. Anyway, so I got some software. A software recommendation this week.

I have to read a lot of PDFs for my day job and I have to mark up the PDFs and then export the annotations to some other format so I can put them in the show notes for the shows that we're going to do. It's extraordinarily hard to find good software to do this. And I finally found my my perfect go to app.

It's called PDF Expert. I used to use PDF Pen Pro in the ugliest software I've ever seen in my life. And it barely worked. PDF Expert works great. It's not super cheap. The desktop version is about 60 bucks and the iOS version is like the pro versions like 10 bucks.

So but I use it on my iPad Pro and it works like a dream. I can use my pencil and just highlight phrases throughout the book. Yeah. And when I'm done with it, I can just hit export annotations and it just gives me an HTML file that I can load up in a browser, copy it, paste it into my notes. It's fantastic.

I really like I hate PDFs. But this actually didn't know they're not paying for this spot. I'm just going to tell you it makes working with PDFs actually not that bad. And that's the best you can say about PDFs. It's not that bad. I'm not going to say it's enjoyable.

I'm saying I can I can use it very well. And reading on it is pretty good, too. So because, you know, I get, you know, I read a 350 page PDF this week for work. And I also meant to mention to you, I enjoyed it much more than an audio book.

I have to say, I read this book in a night. I started on Monday at like seven at night, read till about three in the morning and then finished it at six in the morning. So I was working on three hours of sleep. But I really enjoyed reading as opposed to listening to the audio book because I paid attention to it.

And I'm like, you know, like I said, I'm marking things up. What's the interesting bits in the book? And I found it to be much more satisfying than if I would have had the audio book version, I think. So I think I'm going to move back into trying to read, like literally read more this year because I'm a terrible reader because I've got, you know, slight case of dyslexia.

So I have to read things a lot of times sometimes if I'm tired. Right. But I found that I got more out of it, which is kind of scary. Yeah. I tell you, it's true. Yeah. And oh, here's the other part about it. TV was off. No noise. It was quiet. I had the dog sleeping and snoring and farting next to me.

That was the only noise in the house. And it was so much more relaxing. And I didn't check Twitter. I didn't check Facebook. I wasn't doing other things like I do when I'm listening to audio books. It was a supremely satisfying experience. I mean, the fact that I'm rambling on about it this long, sorry about that.

But I just I was amazed at how much more I enjoyed the book that I was reading than if I would have listened to it on audio. You know, sometimes it takes you a couple of years to come around to me being right. But you eventually there's still some books that I just want to get through. So audio, I totally understand that it's a book I want to enjoy.

And this one was for work. But most of the books I read for work are not that enjoyable because I'm checking out for people who might come on our show and that will get eventually rejected because their book is terrible. But this was somebody who I, you know, wanted to come on the show and I read it and it was a fantastic book.

We'll we'll talk about that later after the show comes out. But yeah, it was fun. Anyway, PDF expert highly recommended. And I have a game that unfortunately I've been sucked into. I listened to the Dubai Friday podcast, even though I hate I hate listen to that show.

It's got Max Temkin from Cards Against Humanity and Alex Cox also from Cards and Merlin Mann. And one of their challenges that a couple of weeks ago was to play Clash Royale, which is an iOS game. And I did and I still am. OK, it's the good thing about it is you can do a battle in about three minutes.

So it's perfect for just like pop in, pop out. But yeah, if you're on Clash Royale, hit me up on email. Jason at Grumpy Old Geeks dot com. We can we can start a Grumpy Old Geeks clan, which is what I kind of that's the only reason I put this in here is I want to find other Grumpy Old Geeks listeners so we can start our own clan because I'm ready to go.

I mean, I am in a clan called Mundo Football. Oh, that's not for everybody in the clan speak Spanish. I do not. Nice. But yeah, anyway, and I did buy something last week for my new editing station. They're the Mackie CR series CR three.

The three inch creative reference multimedia monitors paren pair because I love Amazon titles. I got these things and it turns out Dave Bittner also has a set of these. Don't buy these things. I mean, Mackie always does good work. No, not on these. Oh, my God.

The base on them is so bad. And I found out that Dave has them because he's like, oh, yeah, tape up the big holes on the back. It cuts down on the base response. I'm like, that makes sense to be shoving like, you know, Kleenex in those things. They are so base heavy. So I'm probably going to return and I'm going to check out PreSonus came out with a new series, the Ares E 3.5, which are about the same form factor in the same price, a hundred bucks.

So I'm just going to say if anybody's looking at buying like, you know, decent reference monitors for audio work, do not buy these Mackies. They are just they reference like the Wumpa Wumpas next door who like to play with the bass all the way to 10. They're terrible. Okay.

Well, Jason, last week you went through your Amazon purchases for the year and put together a little bit of a gift guide. And this week I did the same. Unfortunately, what I discovered in this past year is I didn't buy a hell of a lot for me. So the real gift guide that I would be able to do would be for a one year old and nobody really wants that.

But I did find a few things that I've got throughout the year that I still think are fantastic and I use all the time. So here they are. The first up is a company called Zero Grid. And they do some really good stuff. The first thing is the travel wallet and family passport holder with RFID locking.

I don't know if you're paranoid. I guess you want that. We call it RFID. Yeah, it's a stylish. It's it's great. I've loaded it up and I've traveled with it now. Well, once and I'll be doing it again shortly. So it's I love it. It's absolutely fantastic. It's a great passport holder.

Keeps everything nice and tidy. You got a pen in there so you can fill out your forms because they never give you pens on the damn plane. Don't it's all set. It's really nice. So I can't recommend that enough. I also got how much is it electronics? Let's see right now. It is for $30 and it's prime with free returns and they'll get it to you by Christmas.

So go for it. Do that. Then I also got their same kind of thing, which is their electronics travel organizer, cord cable and accessories case black. I love their names. This is on sale right now for $15.96.

I cannot recommend this enough for grumpy old geeks. Now, if you are somebody that travels with 10 gazillion things, this is not going to be enough for you. But if you're just, you know, your phone, your iPad, all that sort of stuff, it's awesome. It is fantastic. And the price is right. So you can get this for Christmas as well.

So I recommend this highly. Go get it. You've got the cables. Now you've got somewhere to stick them. That looks better than my Amazon Basics one, for sure. Yeah, it's nice. And it's nice and cheap. So then I also have the car phone mount HCRT air vent magnetic universal car mount holder for cell phones with mini tablets with fast swift snap technology two pack.

Shakur. I've got these in both our cars. It's fantastic. They're great. They're cheap. They're simple. They do the job. They're $6.99 arrives before Christmas. Yeah, I need to pick these up. And I know you pimped them on the show before, and I'm like, I should get that. And I never did. But I really kind of could use that.

Well, do yourself a favor. Get yourself a stocking stuffer. They're totally cheap. The Zooms webcam cover, Swiss manufacturing, camera protection, iPhone and smartphone accessories. I'm OK. I'm going to stop doing this. No, it's more fun. Come on. It's very funny. Privacy three pack black metal 1090 in stock.

Expected to arrive after Christmas. So don't do this for a gift apparently anymore. But these are great. I've got them on all our laptops in the house. Yeah. Last time I checked these out, it was like three month shipping time. You know, again, like I said, though, I wouldn't do this as a Christmas order.

But when I ordered it, it told me it was going to take like three months, too. And again, I had a little NyQuil, so I said to hell with it. But I got it within a month. So it didn't take forever. I like the range here. Get it as soon as January 9th to the 30th. Yeah, I know. It's crazy. One thing I did get that's for a kid thing.

And I only bring this up because a friend of mine that a friend of the show said that he's having their their friend with a kid come stay with them. What do what the hell should I at the bare minimum do around my house? Get the Baby Mate 8-Piece Medical Grade Clear Baby Corner Guards Ball Shape Matte Finish Baby Proofing Corner Protector Childproof Corner Cover Corner Bumpers Baby Safety Corner Guards 11473.

Added to cart. Just did it. You know what? I don't have a baby, but I have a dog whose eyeballs are right at the height of my tables. And I was looking for something just like this. These are fantastic. Most of these things are so goddamn ugly. These are clear.

They kind of look a little spacey. You almost forget that they're there after a while and they come off really easy and don't leave stains on your furniture. Nice. So highly recommend these if you need any kind of bumper guards. I also got the PadKit, the most durable car seat headrest and airplane tray table mount holder on the market for Apple iPad, iPad 2, the new iPad 3, and iPad 4, 1, 2, 3, 4.

Who the hell does the naming on these things? I just like the 1, 2, 3, 4 at the end just to cover all the bases. Oh, it's the best. This is $14, $15. It arrives before Christmas. What you can do with this is stick your iPad in it and hang it on the back of your car seat so your kid can watch Elmo videos or whatever.

Works on planes, which is why we have it because the plane, the iPad, and Elmo is the lifesaver. It keeps him nice and quiet. So we will have not used this yet, but I will tell you what happens because we're going to fly with it and get it to go. That's what I was wondering. I'm like, do you have to ask the person in front of you to like, hey, can we...

You can... It's got multiple different attachments, so you don't have to necessarily flip it over the seat. You can attach it to the tray. Okay. So we're going to try that out, so hopefully we won't have to bother anybody. It should attach without having to do any of that. That's the first question I asked, too, and the wife was like, no, theoretically, we don't have to do that.

And if you do that and you have your kid and you need to load up from YouTube on your iPad, as I have to, I think I recommended this in the past. It's free. It's clipgrab.org. It's perfect. It does immediate, instant downloads from YouTube straight into formats that you can then import into your iPad.

So it's great. Awesome. Good list. And that's it. That's all I got.

Media candy. By now, you have all seen The Last Jedi, and I haven't. Oh, I haven't either. So I hope it's great. I'm actually... Actually, I need to talk to you, Jason. We'll talk off the air about next week, because I'm going to go next Friday to see it in the morning, because we have a nanny then, and the wife is off work, and we're going to go see it, because I cannot wait until after Christmas to see this damn thing.

Okay. By all accounts, it's amazing, though. So I'm very much looking forward to this. Every time it comes on the radio, I have learned to say, Amazon, stand in my kitchen device, volume one, and then wait three minutes and say, volume six. Oh, by the way, that is a, you know, we talked on the show about how to, like, mute an echo before, and, like, I always wanted to say, mute for 30 seconds, like, you know, please, mute for 30 seconds, because of those goddamn cars for kids commercials that are on every radio station.

I cannot stand that. Oh, and now it's the progressive second idiot dude who does, oh, some of the commercials on radio are just terrible. But anyway, the trick is, just say, volume one, you can't hear it in volume one, and then just wait a little bit and just say, volume five, and it'll come back up.

No, that's actually true. Yeah. That's a good, that's a good hack. All right. Life hacks for the win. Last week on the show, I talked about Stay Tuned with Preet, the new podcast that I'm really liking from friend of the show, Dr. David Teeter and his lovely lady, Chien. Well, apparently I said something wrong on the last show.

I said he was the district attorney that was fired by Orange 45, and he was not. He was a U.S. attorney, and I have been corrected because Chien said that I was wrong, and so I apologize, Chien. It is a fantastic podcast. If you haven't listened to it yet, definitely go get Stay Tuned with Preet, P-R-E-E-T.

Yes, I listened to it. It is amazing. Really, really enjoyable. Yeah. It's good. So I've got a Battlestar Galactica update. I am. Do they have a plan this time around? You know, here's the interesting thing. I'm trying to pick it apart as I'm watching it in the run-up to what I know is the train wreck of the finale of the series.

And so far, I don't really have any complaints, and everything seems to be on point. And I was so happy because in Season 3, the press was gone almost for the entirety of it. But I forgot that there's a trial with Baltar at the end of Season 3. Yes, yes.

That is a terrible lull in the show. The problem I'm having with it is this show is not an upper. This is not like watching Deep Space Nine or Next Gen again. No, it's dark sci-fi. Oh, my God. I've been having the worst nightmares and dreams because you've got to think about it.

The sidelines are like space zombies. You know, they just keep coming. They keep coming. They keep coming. And, you know, the best example of the whole space zombie thing is the first episode of the first season where they have like 23 hours to get out of the way because they keep showing up. They keep showing up.

But, I mean, it's an amazing series. If you have not watched Battlestar Galactica, definitely go get the whole thing and just sit down with a bucket of popcorn and, you know, an adult diaper and just keep going. But I've had to slow down because I was doing four episodes a day for a while and now I'm just like, I can maybe do one a day and then I have to watch something funny after because I was it's really it was really giving me nightmares.

Terrible. Right. But it's so good. The price we pay for dystopia. That's right. Speaking of dystopia, Mr. Robot is done for the season. Finally, I watched it. Did I miss out on anything? Dear God, no. You didn't. I didn't think so. I'm so glad I quit that show.

I'm so glad I quit that. Yeah, it was. I mean, it was a slog to get through and I'm just like, yeah, next season, I am not even going to bother. I'm done. I cannot even go back to it. It's just it's really hard to watch. It's like I know a lot of people like that show and I'm like, why?

I just can't. I can't understand it. I'm like, you know what's going to happen? Ninety nine point nine percent of the time because we've all seen it before. You know, it's like, you know what? Fight Club is better. It's way better. So just go rewatch Fight Club. Exactly. You're good. I have a crown update.

The crown season two has dropped. I've gotten about halfway through. I was a little bit worried because I loved the first season, but it was all about John Lithgow playing Winston Churchill. And he did not come back for this one because it's a little bit further in time. I do miss him, but it's still a really good show.

I can not recommend this. It's fantastic. It's the acting is on point. It is occasionally funny. And there's some really deep, dark stuff that I did not know about about the royal family. So very well done. Still enjoying the hell out of this. So they're hitting it out of the park.

Well, the deep, dark stuff about the royal family. I mean, is it true or is it just fiction? It's true. Oh, really? So the crown is a historical retelling. It's not just they take. Obviously, obviously, they take some liberties and whatnot. But all the main plot points are, yeah, historically true.

Oh, wow. Okay. I didn't know that because I've been inundated on Instagram with crown ads every three photos. I would say give in, Jason. Go ahead and watch the show. It's really well done. Maybe I'll use that to offset my BSG. That might be good. But what I can't wait for is March 8th.

Oh, God. It seems so far away. I know it's going to be here in like three days. But Jessica Jones, season two trailers dropped, and we have a release date of March 8th. And oh, my God. Barracuda. Yeah, that was a great trailer. I cannot wait. I just I love her.

I love her so much. And, you know, I was really surprised that I got into it. But Jessica Jones, by far my favorite Marvel show. Yeah. Love it. So good. So and I got to say, yeah, the last time I was talking about her, like when I was reviewing her novel and you're like, she does so much stuff.

Did you know that she also runs a production company that is making more TV shows? The reason she's so skinny is because she's like going 24 seven and doesn't have time for a sandwich. That's right. Somebody send her a burger. God. And I found this one in Rain News, which is a radio news blog that I follow.

This is a rumor coming out of a Norwegian newspaper claiming that title will go broke in six months. Yeah. I'm like six months. I'm surprised they're still here. Yeah, me too. You know, it's it's a weird market niche that they've set themselves up for and they're getting basically continued influx as a cash to keep going.

But they've lost. They just don't know it yet. Speaking of zombies. I mean, this is zombie streaming service walking. Yeah. I mean, what was their claim to fame? That just it's it's artist driven. So there's oh, yeah, they they theoretically they they are the one percent of artists in the world invested in it themselves.

So this is the great redistribution of wealth, I think. Yeah. Except it didn't happen as far as I know. And I think most of the artists have divested themselves of it and sold their shares. So, of course, because the rich have to stay rich. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, so I can't.

I mean, we we've made fun of them for so long and now it's just like I didn't even know they were still in business. I have given so few shits about them in the last year. Yeah, I mean, everything that they tried to do to pivot didn't work or to get people to come over to them. They you know, you're done, guys.

Yeah. Go ahead. Pack it up. Go home. So cards against humanity. I'm still getting my, you know, seven days of Christmas letters in the mail, which are just fantastic every time I get them. One of them, though, was they started a podcast for a year. It's it's been funded for an entire year and it's called the good news podcast.

It's all just it's all just good news. It's like six minutes a day or four to six minutes a day. And it's just good news. Well, I could use that. Exactly. That's why I put it in here, because, you know, we've got Black Mirror coming. I'm stuck in BSG. I'm like, I could really use something that's a pick me up every day.

So definitely check out the good news podcast. And if you're a wrestling fan, I have a friend of mine. His name is Sugar Dunkerton. He goes by Shug D. He's a indie wrestler out of Georgia. But I've met him here at Resistance Pro, which is now just called The Resistance. Right. He started a podcast called Funny Cash Shows.

I don't quite get the name. And but here's the deal. It's a great show. If you're if you're into wrestling and indie wrestling and just like to hear stories about what it's like to go behind the scenes, he's got a great personality. He is one of the most upbeat people I know and just a good soul.

One of the I mean, just one of the good guys. So if you're into it, go check out his show. The link will be in the show notes. OK. And the exact opposite. Somebody that is not a very upbeat person and isn't necessarily a great soul. But I still listen to his show all the time. Adam Carolla, I have a question for you, Jason, because they've just recently made a switch instead of the one download two hour show.

It's now coming in part ones and part twos. Why the change? And let me guess bigger download count. It is absolutely not about a bigger download count. And I'm not giving away any trade secrets here because there was a time when Penn Sunday School came out on Sundays.

Now, Penn Sunday School comes out on Sundays and Wednesdays. OK. So Penn, in his great wisdom, told us why. Norm from Podcast One said, we have a lot of people who want to buy ads on your show.

You only have one show a week. Why can't we make two shows a week? So they made two shows a week. So they have more ad inventory. So now we have two shows a day coming from Adam Carolla, even though it's just one show. You're getting part one and part two the same day? Yes.

Same day, same time. But they get released at the exact same time. And because of the way that podcasts, you know, the Apple podcast player. Could come out of order? They come out of order because they put them in in order. So they come in out of order. So when I download both and I just start to play one, it starts playing part two.

OK. I'm going to make some emails after this and just tell my guys over there to maybe stagger those a little bit. Yeah. You want to stagger that a bit. Yeah. I don't know. Just like half an hour or at least put them in the reverse order so it's easier. Whatever. Yeah. No. OK. Well, that's an easy way to fix that.

But yeah. Yeah. It's basically generally about inventory. Although this one might be a download play because that doubles your downloads for an episode. Interesting. That's what I was thinking. You might be right on that. Good problem to have. So considering our show is relatively long, if only we had the ad inventory. If we had people buying ads, then hey, we'd break it up too.

Anyway. OK. Thanks for that info. I'll look into that because that's kind of fascinating. No problem. It was quite an interesting change. 2018 is going to be a good year for me because it is the Cure's 40th anniversary and they are ramping up to do. I know. 40 years. Right. Crazy.

So they are ramping up to do an awful lot of stuff. There's going to be a documentary done by Tim Pope, who does all of their best music videos. So that's going to be super exciting. It's going to be like a full length film. That'll be interesting. Fantastic. Yeah. And yeah. And they've announced a big London show.

So I'm hoping for a couple other stateside shows to be announced as well. The London show I would kill to go to. I mean, this is some of my all time favorite bands. Not only is, you know, the Cure is obviously headlining. Ride, who I've been in love with for the past year and telling you guys all about, will be playing it.

Gold Frap, one of my favorite bands, playing it. Slow Dive, playing it. Interpol's playing it. The editors are playing it. It is going to be a hell of a concert at Hyde Park, and I'm trying to figure out a way to get my ass there. Oh man, that would be fantastic. It's funny. It's like, every time I hear Gold Frap, I think about that movie, Hard Candy.

And the great line is like, I fucking hate Gold Frap. I love Gold Frap. And I got to see Interpol play at the House of Blues for the Napster re-release party. And they were like, you know, 300 people there. And they were amazing live. And ever since then, I just love their music.

Yeah, I'm a big fan. And a little link in the show notes, Hey You, which isn't technically a Christmas song by The Cure, but it is Christmassy and always reminds me of Christmas. So go give it a listen. Okay. Will do. Security?

Ha! All right, we're having our last security ha for the year with our good friend, Papa B, Dave Bittner. Star Wars, talking about Star Wars. Wish we could bar wars.

No spoilers. I haven't seen it yet. I don't know if I ever will. Yeah. I saw Star Wars last night. Listen to those dulcet tones. And now he's going to spoil and ruin the movie for us. Oh, no, I'm not going to spoil anything for you. I'm just going to gloat that I've seen it already.

And Brian has not. Have you seen it, Jason? No, I haven't. Well, then I'm gloating over both of you because... Yeah. Gloat all you want. This is one of those things where I just don't care anymore. I'm going to go see it eventually. Jason is one of these really weird people that doesn't get excited about Star Wars.

I don't know what's wrong with him. I think there's something to that. I mean, there's so many movies to get excited over, but this just isn't one of them. I'm like, okay, I'm going to go watch a movie that everybody's hyped up about. It's going to be great in the theater, and then I'm going to watch it again on TV, and it's going to be terrible. It's about the experience in the theater, I know.

Well, and we don't have to wait 10 years in between Star Wars movies anymore, or 20, or whatever. It's pretty much... There's going to be a new one every year, probably for the rest of time now that Disney has them. Well, but I mean, they're alternating between the... Oh, Han Solo is the next one. Yeah, we got Han Solo coming this summer, and we had Rogue One, so I think they're aiming for a Star Wars movie every year, and I'm okay with that.

I am okay with that. I am 100% on board. Yeah, exactly. So anyway... Well, Dave and I will always be happy around Christmas time. Jason will be bomb and boogie. We'll be playing with our lightsabers. That's right.

Yeah. I'm still stinging from Atomic Blonde this year. The one movie I was looking forward to that was just utter crap. Oh. That's what I am. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, before we get into the news of this week, I have a little bit of follow-up. You remember probably a few months ago, we were talking about how I got some new smoke detectors for the house.

Oh, yes. That are smart smoke detectors. So this week, I'm sitting at my desk here at the Cyber Wire, minding my own business, and I glance over at my phone, and an alert pops up that says, upstairs smoke detector detects smoke. Now... Okay. Now, what's...

Drink your clench, run out of the park. Yeah. Now, well, it's an interesting little case study. What do you think your first reaction would be if this was the alert you got? Check my Chinese webcams. That's right. That's good. Brian, what would you do? I'd be up the stairs because I don't entirely trust technology.

I would be assuming, if I did not smell anything whatsoever, that it's a false alarm. Yeah. But if you're not home, that's the point. Oh, I'm not home. I'm 10 minutes from home. I'm heading home. Yeah. And so my wife, who's about five minutes from home, she had keys in hand and is on her way home.

I think it's interesting that neither of us' first reaction was to call 911 or call the fire department. Oh, I suppose there's that. Yes. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. But so first thing I did was I looked on the Find My Friends app on the phone to see where everybody was, to see if there's anybody home.

And turns out my oldest son, who no longer lives at home, was at home. He was home for some holiday stuff. Cooking meth in his old bedroom. Well, that was a possibility. Yeah. Oh, it's a possibility that your son's cooking meth. Why are you not telling us that?

I don't know. I mean, probably not meth. But so let's say there's a possibility that there could have been smoke in the house that was the response that was caused by my oldest son. So we'll just leave it at that. And did this happen at 420 in the afternoon? Because there's another alternate explanation. Exactly.

You're getting my drift here. So first thing I did was call him. And it turns out that he had been taking a long, hot shower in the upstairs, you know, hall bathroom. And when he opened the door, he was not running the fan in the bathroom.

And when he opened the door, all the steam came out and tripped the smoke alarm. Because I guess smoke alarms these days just have a part of the system they have is an optical sensor. And so the optical sensor got fogged up and it triggered a smoke alarm, which, of course, freaked him out because he's, you know, on his way from the bathroom to his bedroom.

And the smoke alarm goes off. So, you know, two minutes later, I got a notice from the smoke alarm. Smoke cleared. So that was nice. It gave me a little, gave me a little follow up. And all's well that ends well, but it was an interesting little test. The funny part about this is if there was a camera in the smoke alarm, you could have just logged into the camera to watch it and seen your son frantically, while probably dripping wet and naked, wafting his towel on the smoke alarm.

Yes, exactly. And then just put that as your credit, as your Christmas card next year. Yes, exactly. Merry Christmas from the bitters. Right. Yeah. And that is pretty much what I had in mind. That was the image I had in mind. But I went to establish that everything was fine. So at any rate, the smoke alarms work and all's well that ends well.

But it's an interesting moment when you get that sort of alert on your phone. And, you know, what would you do next? Now I know. I'll check to see where everybody is. And maybe next time I should, I don't know, call the fire department. Yes. I think you did the right thing. Yeah. Yeah. Because that would have been expensive.

For sure. Yeah. I don't know. Well, it's true. I mean, I guess if they because of that, I guess fire departments, you know, they'd come and they just they just break in. They don't they don't they don't fool around. Exactly. Yeah. They just knock the door in. So even if there's nothing there. Yeah. They come in hoses a blast in.

So we had a yeah, we had a chimney fire at the place I used to live out in the valley in L.A. And when when they showed up, they basically were just like, yeah, like I'm running around the house getting the pets out the back. And because the fireplace caught fire, which is, you know, it is a thing.

And all the neighbors like we're sitting there watching TV. We start to hear this whistle. And then like she's looking out the window and it's like, why are all the neighbors coming over here? Yeah. It's like a zombie apocalypse with all the neighbors running towards our house. It's like, holy shit. And it turns out, yes, the chimney was on fire and when the fire department got there, they were just like out of the way and just, you know, basically pushed us out of the way through the ladders up, got to the top of the chimney, threw off everything, basically

breaking down the house and, you know, went up into the attic. One of the guys stepped through the ceiling because he wasn't watching where he was going. He's like, oh, sorry about that. OK, thanks for that. Three hundred bucks. Yeah. And but fortunately, we did have a fire, so we didn't get dinged for the no actual fire charge because it's like, you know, a couple hundred bucks.

If you call them and it's a false alarm, you have to pay for that call. Ah, interesting. All right. Well, like I say, all's well that ends well. And I hope, you know, nothing, nothing bad happened. So but a little follow up there. So let's dig into some of this week's security stories.

The big. Well, actually, I've got a I've got a I've got a quick bit of follow up before we begin. Yeah, go ahead. So we talked we talked last week about Apple and their, you know, lackadaisical approach nowadays to software. Yes. And it turns out Wired wrote an article this week that backed us up and it's called making sense of Apple's recent security stumbles.

But they came to the same conclusion that basically I think a lot of us have. It's just like slow your roll, guys. Yeah. Step back. Get it done. Because they even pointed out Snow Leopard as one of the most stable releases in OS X history because they did just that. And High Sierra is the opposite, even though it's supposed to be one of the point releases where they fix everything.

So they're just like, guys, we need you to take a look at what you're doing and fix it because this is getting out of hand. Yeah. And it seems to me like what would be the downside for Apple? I guess from the marketing point of view, having an annual release, you know, with your developers conference and all that sort of thing generates a certain amount of excitement and everyone likes all the new stuff.

But even if you took a year off to kind of get your house in order, would Apple really suffer from that? I don't think so. No, because they're not selling the operating system. Exactly. It makes sense. And you can't even point to saying that, oh, Mac sales might go down because Mac sales are such a small portion of Apple's actual revenue now.

You know, it makes no sense that they wouldn't take the time off and actually get everything back to where it needs to be. It's true. Although I do make the point when, because a lot of people point that out, that what a small percentage, uh, Apple's Mac sales are, but the flip side of that is that there, every other computer manufacturer in the world would love to have Apple's Mac sales business.

That's true. Yeah. It's a small part of Apple's business, but it's still a massive, if you spun that off as a company, it would be massive. Yeah. They do well with, uh, selling the CPUs at a premium. Yeah. The iPhone is basically, you know, just kind of dwarfed it, but it's still like huge, huge multi-billion dollar business.

But anyway, I'm glad that Wired has come to, uh, to agree with us. I think that's a pretty common thought that's making its way around. So we'll see what Apple does. It's interesting times for them. Uh, looking at some other stuff this week, uh, the big story in the cybersecurity world was, uh, there's a new bit of malware that targets industrial safety systems.

Um, you know, looking back historically, you all remember Stuxnet, which was the, uh, the piece of malware that destroyed the uranium enrichment centrifuges. That's the one that, uh, you know, legend has it that we were responsible for that probably along with the Israelis.

Um, and then, uh, after that came, um, crash override. That was the one that took down the Ukrainian power grid. And now we have a third one. Um, this is called, it depends on who you ask there. Of course, these things all get different names, but, uh, Triton is one of the names of it.

And, uh, I believe, um, I believe, um, Dragos is calling it Triton, but Triton, Triton, we'll go with Triton. That seems to be the one that's sticking. Uh, the folks at FireEye have released a report about this and it's, uh, they discovered it in some facilities in the Middle East.

There are some companies who are saying it's Saudi Arabia, but it's still a little fuzzy as to the details of where it is. But what's particularly interesting about this is that these industrial control systems, uh, are designed so that when they fail, they go into fail safe mode, which means when stuff stops working, it automatically switches to the mode that is the safest.

And usually that means shutting things down. So, uh, in fact, that's how this was discovered is that, um, a, uh, system shut itself down unexpectedly, automatically. And in figuring out why that happened, that's how, uh, FireEye and some of the other researchers discovered that this Triton malware was in the system.

So what's disturbing about this is that it includes functionality that can disable those fail safes. Ooh, that's not good. Right. Can disable the fail safes and also can disable the signaling and the alerting to the people who are controlling these systems that there's anything wrong.

So you could be sitting there at your control system and looking at, you know, all, everything looks like it's running the way it should be. And unbeknownst to you, there could be systems that are failing and, uh, you know, bad things going down. And, uh, as Raleigh from Dragos, who, um, you know, we've, uh, had some excerpts from him on this show.

Uh, he's one of our regulars over on the cyber wire, really one of the top guys when it comes to this sort of stuff. Um, he was saying that, you know, things could go bad, uh, in a hurry with this sort of thing. This, this is the sort of thing where you could have loss of life. That's kind of, that's, that's terrifying. That's, that's terrifying.

Yeah. So, so far, uh, you know, we've just got this one case in the Middle East, um, attribution is weak on this. They say the Iranians would be the usual suspects, but nobody's, uh, a hundred percent sure. When is anybody a hundred percent sure? Yeah. Well, you know, there are varying degrees of certainty.

Um, you see, there's, I mean, a lot of, we've talked about it on the show that attribution is one of those things that's really difficult and most of the time doesn't really matter. Let's fix the problem, you know? Yeah, so, uh, no signs of this being anywhere else, but, uh, this isolated incident in the Middle East.

And they think that they're probably just sort of testing things out and feeling around and figuring out what they can and can't do. But, you know, it's a sign of things to come. It's a sign that, uh, these capabilities are out there and nation states are interested in them and everybody's testing out each other's systems to see what they could or could not do in a case where they had to or wanted to cause, uh, cause a little bit of chaos.

Yeah. God. Computers. What are we going to do? Computers. What are we going to do with them? Yeah. Throw them in the lake. Yeah. That's it. I mean, yeah. Grumpy Old Geeks next year is going to be a letter writing campaign. Right. So we need, we need you all to send us your address and we'll just put out a lot of stains.

It'll just be a big chain letter. Yeah. We'll just. Yeah. That's it. Right. Don't break the chain or you'll, your, uh, your industrial control system will fail. Right. So anyway, I mean, you know, this isn't the sort of thing that's going to affect any of us in our daily lives today, but it's just sort of a sign of things to come and where, where things are, where things are headed and the kinds of things that these folks are worried about.

Uh, this is the world we're in these days. Yeah. Yes, it is. Uh, the past couple of weeks, Dave, you and I have been talking about cell phone tracking. Um, in particular, this started over Thanksgiving, so we'll just carry it on to Christmas. Uh, right now the Supreme Court is mulling over the case of Carpenter versus the United States, which we are hoping to get a good result on in terms of consequences for police who track suspects without a warrant via their cell phones.

Uh, but none of that may matter anymore. Uh, four engineers at the Princeton, at Princeton University have revealed a brand new method for identifying the location of a cell phone user, um, using only data that can be legally collected by an app developer without the consent of a cell phone's owner. Researchers have been able to produce a privacy attack that can accurately pinpoint a user's location and trajectory without accessing the device's GPS system at all.

So I love this. Uh, what they're stating here, all you need is your phone's internal compass, uh, an air pressure reading, a few free to download maps and a weather report, and they can find you. Yeah. Oh, that's genius. It really is genius, isn't it? Right? That's what I love about it.

It is. Just, and you, as you read through this article, and I recommend people do, you just go, oh, God, this is so clever. And it totally makes sense. Yes. It's a process of elimination. Yes, it does. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. Okay, that makes me happy.

That makes me happy. I love clever hacks like this. Yeah, it's super clever. You could be happy for the hack and still be disturbed by the actual reality of it. Well, I don't care. I mean, they know where I'm at anyway, but I just think this is fun. This is a fun hack.

Because, yeah. It's very clever. I love it. Yeah. So, I mean, to clarify, you're just sort of, you're correlating the direction that you're moving, the barometric pressure of where you are, the speed at which you're moving, which allows them to determine if you're in a car or a plane or a train or something like that.

And then they just correlate that with what they know about the terrain. And there's only so many places where you could turn left and then turn right and at this speed. And they just, what did they say? Like, it was a dozen turns. They could figure out where somebody was in Philadelphia or something like that. Really?

Yeah. Something like that. Pretty cool. I really dig this. Yeah. It's pretty badass. I got a little giddy when I saw them. Good for them. Clever humans. It is a little frightening. Now, here in Los Angeles, Starbucks basically serves as everybody's free office.

Anybody that's working on any kind of screenplay. You got to have your screenplay out. Yep. Got to have your screenplay out. Everybody goes to the Starbucks, gets on their free Wi-Fi, and basically works and destroys any possibility of anybody who's just getting a cup of coffee having a place to sit down because you can't.

In Argentina, this might be a little bit more involved, an Argentinian Starbucks was discovered to be hacking customers' computers when they logged into the free Wi-Fi in order to mine for cryptocurrency. Because, of course. Of course. Yeah.

So this guy found out about it, tweeted him, said, Did you know that your in-store Wi-Fi provider in Buenos Aires forces a 10-second delay when you first connect to the Wi-Fi so it can mine Bitcoin using a customer's laptop? Feels a little off-brand. Yeah.

Oh, man. And this so... Have a Mocha Crypto on us. Yeah. This was the third-party provider, not Starbucks, who's responsible for... I mean, ultimately, it's Starbucks' responsibility, but... Ultimately, yes. Yeah, quite clever. We've talked about this before, Jason, because there was the Pirate Bay, which recently tested the use of the same technology as basically, instead of running ads, we're just going to let you use our site and we're going to mine some cryptocurrency while you do it.

Yeah, they were mining Monero for that, and that's a common JavaScript library that people are using, for sure. Yep. So I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of this. I think you're right, and I'm of two minds of it. On the one hand, if I give you... It seems like a reasonable deal to make if you say to me, hey, in exchange for this thing I'm giving you for free, can I use some of your processor cycles?

And, you know, we were all in on this when we were trying to detect aliens. I had sold SETI. I remember that. Yeah, absolutely. SETI at home. I suspect SETI's probably still running. I don't know. I haven't done it in a while, but... Well, they haven't found anyone yet, so I guess so. Well, we've got to check out an asteroid that's flying through.

Yeah, we've got to check out that cigar asteroid that's coming, yes. On the other hand, allowing someone to run code on your machine remotely is probably just not a very good idea. I mean, if it's sandbox JavaScript, I'm okay with it, as long as I have the option to say, you know what I want?

I want a slider that says you can have this percent of process, and like, okay, so this page has 27 ads on it, so I'm going to, you know, it can do the little slider and the number of ads decreases as I go. That might be a way to do it, but...

Or, you know, just any consent or knowledge, because that's not what was occurring here. Excellent point, Brian. Yeah, any consent at all would just be a breath of fresh air, wouldn't it? Yes, it would. But that's not the internet we've made for ourselves, is it? The Pirate Bay stepped on their own dick with this, because they had a flaw in their JavaScript that didn't use 10% of the customer's processor, they used 100%, and that's how they got found out.

Because, you know, programming, hard. Zeros, hard. Yeah, and every time you hit their website, your fans all spin up to maximum speed. Exactly. That should only happen on Pornhub, dammit. That's right. That's right.

Well, finally this week, another one of those sort of funny stories. You know, you figure you're going to get mugged, you're going to get robbed, somebody's going to say, your money or your life. In this case, this is your Ethereum password or your life. A man had his friend kidnapped to steal $1.8 million worth of Ethereum.

This is another one of those crooks are stupid kinds of things. A guy had a buddy over to his house and told him he was going to have a car service, drive him back to his house. Turns out the car service wasn't a car service. It was a bad dude with a gun who demanded the 24-word secret passphrase.

So I have to tip my hat to him for having a secure passphrase, 24 words. That's, you know, he wasn't fooling around. But, you know, I guess you can spit that out pretty quickly when you're at the other, the unfriendly end of a piece of a firearm. And so later on, there was some video surveillance where they found this guy in the person's apartment, the person who got his stuff stolen, stealing his digital wallet.

Again, this is another one of those shape of things to come kind of thing. And the article makes some good points, which is that if you're investing in cryptocurrency, even though this is the shiny new thing and it's fun to talk about and it's kind of cool and sexy and all that sort of thing, keep it to yourself.

Don't, there's no reason to share. Or, you know, don't talk about it on your podcast. Oh, dear. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Oops. Oopsies. Yeah. Jason, we might need to do some editing.

I think we might need to edit that intro a little bit. Oh, dear. So with that, gentlemen, I wish, I bid you adieu. Have a good week. You as well. And by the way, I sold all my cryptocurrency that I mentioned at the very beginning of the show. Yes, that is gone. Yes.

If you log into my Chinese security cameras, you can see me selling my crypto right now. It's all gone. And Dave, your mention of your money or your life reminded me of a great movie that I saw a long time ago called Plunkett and McLean. This has Johnny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, and Alan Cummings in it.

And it was from 1999. Great underrepresented movie that I think everybody should check out over the holiday season. So if you're into highway robbery, much like cryptocurrency, it's a fantastic movie to check out.

I'm just going to throw that out there because you got me. You got me thinking about that. And I love that movie. It's a it's a it's a gem. All right. Well, very good. All right. I'm going to go go gloat some more about Star Wars. So. Yeah, I knew that was coming. Yeah, yeah. May the force be with you. We'll talk about it soon.

All right. Bye bye. So I found this over at the Quartz and I'm always confused by their domain. It's QZ dot com. And I always think of New Zealand for some reason when I see that. Me too.

And the article is AI isn't just taking away our privacy. It's destroying our free will. And it's funny because this points out something that I've been just trying to wrap my head around and kind of get a like a concrete label around what this is. And I'm just calling it the end of serendipity, because in the old days, we would just bounce around and find stuff and serendipitously find things.

And now everything is so controlled the, you know, by the eyes, as they say, just to shove the shit that they think that you're going to like down your throat. And I just, you know, I'm kind of over this crap.

Crap, I really am. It's just like, I think everything I'm going to do from now on is going to be in private mode with just, you know, fake accounts. I want to be able to look around the Internet like I used to be able to and see things that I disagree with, because maybe I'll change my mind sometimes.

Who knows? Yeah, I mean, this reminds me, I read through this article, and I thought it was a really good read. And it reminded me a little bit about what I was talking about last week about my own iTunes library versus going to Spotify or Tidal or any streaming service where you're getting these AI-generated whatever bullshit playlists and selections thrown at you, as opposed to me viewing my own personal curated iTunes library.

And how our choices are intensely personal things, and they're being taken away from us, either via these algorithms or removing the methodologies that we are used to and the narrowing processes that we've already engaged in. Instead, we're being told we should trust these things that know us better than us.

No, they don't, and they're not that good, and I don't know if they're ever going to be that good. And it's frustrating. And anybody over the age of, say, 30, at this point, you've already curated your own personal libraries of whatever it is, books, music, TV, etc., and we're losing those libraries all the time and being told that we don't need that anymore because everything is on tap, and we'll tell you and we'll show you what we want you to see.

No, I don't fucking want that. I want what I want to see, and I want it to be my choice. Damn it. And rant. Everything kind of went to hell with Amazon's, you might also like, algorithm. Yeah. Well, we were told that this was going to change everything, and they were going to get so fine-tuned that they would be perfect, and we'd be so happy with the choices that come to us, but that doesn't seem to be the reality.

Look at the millions of dollars Netflix has spent on their recommendation algorithms and all the contests that they had because they think that a 0.1% increase in the algorithm's efficiency will generate more dollars. And it's like, guys, come on.

What you should do is not have to give us a secret library that we have to go Google for and find all the links to to be able to go dive deep into your catalog. It's like, give us better discovery tools, not just shoving it down our face. Yeah, I agree.

Well, we may not need to worry about it too much longer. There's apparently a cigar-shaped asteroid watching us. Okay. Maybe. In theory. In theory. So starting at 3 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, researchers with the Breakthrough Listen initiative began pointing a powerful radio telescope toward a mysterious object visiting the solar system, hopeful that they could detect signs that that interstellar interloper is actually of alien origin.

The object in question is, I cannot pronounce this, Umamama, an asteroid from another star system currently zipping past Jupiter at about 196,000 miles per hour, too fast to be trapped by the sun's gravitational pull. It was first discovered in mid-October by astronomers at the PanStars Project at the University of Hawaii.

It is 800 meters long, 80 meters wide, cigar-shaped, and technically speaking, weird as hell. And that's precisely why some scientists think it's not a natural object. Now, I've known about this for a while. This has been in the news, in the science geeky news for a while, because this is the first object in our solar system that comes from outside the solar system that is not just a general asteroid.

And it's not going to get, you know, gravitationally locked by the sun's gravitational pull because it's going too fast. And, yes, and it's just basically a rock is what everybody's said up until you put this in here. And I'm like, what? Huh? Because, yeah, it's, I mean, it's on its way out at this point.

But this is, this is interesting that people are thinking that it's, of course, it will, alien means it's not from our solar system or our, obviously it's from, it's alien origin. So, but yes, is it an intelligent rock? Is it got, you know, does it have a tape recorder on it?

Probably not. That's what people are wondering. Probably not. But I do enjoy the story. So it's worth the read and it's nice to think about, but I'm sure it's nothing. Okay. Speaking of more sci-fi things, there's a great article over on futurism. It's not even an article. It's just a little video about Ford employees who are using exoskeletons to kind of make their jobs easier.

And I'm looking at these things. I watched the video and they're really cool because these people have to hold their arms over their head, like for a very long time during the day to rivet in shit on your car. And these are just, they just kind of hold them up and like support their spine. And I thought they were really cool.

I really enjoyed the short video and I'm like, man, I could really use that sometimes. My back hurts at the end of the day. But I have taken your video clip and I have replaced it with the Aliens power loader clip because I like that better. It's true. Yes. They're both in the show notes.

And I did a link in a previous show to a hater for, I can't even remember which catalog it was, but I like this one even better. This is the 2017 Haters Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog. It is a fun, fantastic read. I will just read their little quote about the Williams-Sonoma wine aerator, no decanting required.

Okay, but if no decanting is required, why is there a decanter on sale for $62.99 right above it? What kind of hustle are you guys pulling? Keep in mind that they sold an aerator with a decanter last year, so now I'm completely spun around. Do I aerate? Do I decant? Do I aerate and decant?

Or do I hold my glass of wine up to the light and swirl it majestically and cry out to the table, the tannins, I have given the tannins life and you shall kneel before me in their glory. I'm just looking for some guidance. And it goes on and on to that realm, and it's quite funny. Oh, that is funny. I do like, I have a wine aerator and decanter set myself, and it does work.

So do I. You can take a bottle of three-buck chuck and turn it into a bottle of six-buck chuck. That's right. Oh, man. So this morning I found an article over at the Huffington Post, which was very interesting. It's called Poor Millennials. It is a very long read, but it kind of breaks down why millennials are so screwed.

And at the end, I'm like, I'm halfway through it because it's a very long article. But the thing about it that I really like is there's some serious web design that went into this article. It is so good. You scroll and there's animations, and it's designed and built like the way we used to do it.

Yes. It's quite a nice page. I was really glad that somebody put the time and effort into it. And the interesting thing about it, this has to be one of their big deal articles. I looked at my ad blocker, because sometimes when I go to these sites, I look at my ad blocker to see if I've broken 100 yet on the ads that are...

So it's usually around 50 per page that I go to. Zero. They didn't put a single ad in this thing. Oh, very nice. It was really cool. But yeah, I mean, God, it is such a good read. This is, I mean, good reporting from the Huffington Post. Wow. I know. Good reporting and good design.

It's amazing. And no ads. But it's incredibly depressing. This is a lot of stuff that we've been talking about for quite some while. So if you're a millennial, you can at least enjoy it while you read it, and then you can cry after. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's just, it really, yeah, I've got a lot of thoughts about this one. I might say, I might put them together and save them for another episode, because there's a lot to think about in here, about how we've kind of just screwed everything up, especially with the gig economy.

My God. Yeah. I got an ad in my email this week from Amazon AWS, and it's for Amazon Recognition, which is a deep learning-based image and video analysis tool that you can throw your images at, and they will do facial recognition from a pool that you set, or it can check celebrities for you, too, if you are looking for a celebrity in your images.

Right. Apparently, though, it doesn't come with spell check, because they spelled recognition very poorly. It's R-E-K-O-G-nition. Um, come on, guys. You're Amazon. It is somewhat unclear as to why you would do that.

This makes no sense for me, from an Amazon, I just, I am befuddled. I am thoroughly befuddled by this naming change. Yeah, because Amazon just generally doesn't do this sort of lame-ass Web 2.0 word stuff.

Yeah, granted, to give them a little bit of credit, they kept all the vowels, so, which is new, but yeah, why? This makes no sense. If somebody who's listening to this show can tell me why they named their product this, please enlighten me, because I have no idea.

And, yes, so, yes, moron over at Amazon naming and branding, you are the moron of the week. Second moron of the week, and this is shooting fish in a barrel, Twitter. Twitter now admits that their product is way too hard to use, with a couple new ads that came out.

Did you get a chance to watch these ads? I did. They're very funny, and they're very true. Very funny. I gotta say, Romesh Ranganathanon, however you say that, is the comedian that is in the ads, and he is hilarious. I gotta give him that, at least. But, yeah, I see that they're trying to take the piss out of themselves, but why don't you just fix your product instead of making ads?

Or fix the product. That is an option. That really is an option. Fix the product. Fix the UI. If people come to your product and they don't know what to click on or press, tell them. Yes.

Don't Snapchat this shit. Come on. You guys have enough money where you can figure it out. And I know a lot of my friends who are top tier UI and UX designers have gone through the halls of Twitter and have come out the other side shaking their head going, I couldn't get a goddamn thing done in there.

And it's like, so fire your executive management who won't let people do their jobs. Feedback loop. We've got some Patreon followers this week. Lawrence D, Michael H, Josh J, and Elaine. Yep.

And Elaine wrote, hey, gents, forgive typos and punctuation. Just want to get this question out before bed. A few weeks ago, you mentioned an air humidifier. Can you please remind me of the make, model, brand, et cetera? Appreciative of your attention and help. Normally, I would say go to GOG.show, click the little search box and find it your damn self.

But you're a Patreon subscriber. So for that, you get special attention. It is the Honeywell HCM 350W germ-free cool mist humidifier, comma, white. The funny thing about this is a friend of mine who does not listen to the show, so I can say this with great certainty that she will not hear this before.

She gets it for Christmas because I ordered her one to help with the air quality in Los Angeles because with all the fires, a humidifier is good for taking that ash out of the air. It is. So I ordered her one and I got a notification this morning that the package had been delivered.

So I texted her. I'm like, hey, your Christmas present is on your porch. Lo and behold, I walk out to go get my mail. What is there on my porch? But a giant box from Amazon that says gift enclosed. Oopsies. Somebody picked the wrong dropdown when ordering a gift.

So now I have two Honeywell HCM 350W germ-free cool mist humidifier, comma, whites. Nice. Yeah. Talk about feeling like a dumbass. Oh, well, it happens. Lauren's also wrote us over at Patreon. Hi, I'm quitting Patreon due to the policy change.

I'll bundle every few months to your PayPal instead. Stay real. Stay grumpy. Hey, Lauren's. Thanks for that. Appreciate it. Any way it comes. Patreon did fix that issue. And Russ C. writes in. Hey, guys, thanks for the explanation about the Patreon issue. I received an email from them acknowledging their bonehead move and their intent to reverse it.

Based on this, I have reinstated my pledge and upped it to help you cover the fees. Thanks again for the information regarding tech and security. No, Russ, thank you. Yes, thank you. And we got some people over at PayPal. Some of them, I think, were fleeing Patreon. Others are just new, which is nice. Bernard M.

Beer and cookie money for the boys and the babies. You guys make my week. Is that sad or what? Just kidding. Stay grumpy. Oh, my 2007 Prius runs great. Just don't run over me. That's all I ask. Don't run over Brian, please. And Al L. writes in. Thanks, guys. Can't get enough. Enough with the politics.

Having said that, fuck Trump. There. Let's move on. All right. Agreed. Brian B. says annual subscription. F Patreon. All right. Thank you, Brian B. Christian Z. writes in. Sorry, I canceled my Patreon, but I'll replace it with a yearly donation. Not sure how much you have to pay PayPal, but I hope less money is lost during my transmission this way.

Actually, if you're giving a yearly donation, yes, it is much less. So thank you very much. Thank you. Over at Facebook, Richard left us a comment. FAO Brian. We also couldn't find the music following an Amazon Echo change. We use the Echo every night at bedtime with our young child, similar age to yours.

Thankfully, my wife, Rachel Hughes, saved the day. Alexa, play dot, dot, dot from my library. Phew. I must have previously added it to my library. Now bedtimes are back to normal. I tried that. Did not work for me. So I'm still stuck with the playlist solution. I wonder on his library if he's using the Amazon Music library.

Could be. Yeah, because I'm still doing Spotify. He also says, FAO Jason, I also have a four-legged daughter, so double trouble. Keep up the good work. I love the podcast. Hashtag amazing GOG. Amazing GOG. It doesn't roll off the tongue, but thank you very much. It does not.

And I've renamed Twitter. We have some comments over at Twitter. I've renamed it Twatterwaffler, because that seemed funny to me last night right before I passed out. Ah, yes. Adult NyQuil does that to you. Yes, it does. 6502 Chip writes in, regarding the traffic apps, we still have data issues on the island.

And this is Gabriel Pagan over in Puerto Rico, by the way. Workers from the USA get hopelessly lost all the time trying to get to affected areas. People have lost sense of direction and the skill of using maps. Yes, they have. Yes, they have. And friend of the show, Dog Burps, over on Twitter, which is Kyle, enjoyed the show this week.

Made my morning commute a breeze. I recently finished a German time travel series called Dark. Of course it is. It's German. It's not going to be sunny side up. On Netflix that you guys might enjoy. If you can get through the shit English dub or read subs, it's worth the twisty, dramatic storytelling. I look forward to that. I'll check that out.

Added to my queue and I will do subs. I much prefer subs. Me too. I like the nuance of the original acting. Yes, yes. And I, you know, speak a little German, so it's all good. And Song of the Ass writes in, hey guys, will you be talking about HP's latest quote unquote accidental keylogger news?

We are right now for a short bit because I was going to go. I have a new HP laptop that is an old HP laptop that I got on Woot. I'm pretty sure it's going to have that problem, so next time or maybe not, who knows. Yeah, it seems to have been fixed by HP, so we're probably going to skip it.

Yeah, there we go. And Brian Doherty sent us a retweet from Botnik Studios saying, I think you guys might like this. The Botnik Studios, we use predictive keyboards trained on all seven books to ghostwrite the spellbinding new Harry Potter chapter. Did you read this, Jason?

I didn't, but you know what I saw? I saw a lot of quotes coming through Twitter this week that was basically based on this, and people were quoting it, and they were very funny. So I'm definitely going to go back and check out the article. Very cool. We got some five-star ratings over on iTunes this week, quite a few of them.

So thank you very much, everybody. The first is from Rachel. A great combination of tech information and humor. Find out how tech companies are screwing us this week and how to protect yourself from rogue smart toasters and other perils of the internet. Now, this is a U.S. review, but she did spell humor in the British fashion.

Well, you know, we do like immigrants over here. Well, at least some of us do. Well, some of us do. Yes. I being one of them. So anyway, this next one comes from Helios247. Gold Star, you guys are great. Format is fantastic, and your reviews are concise and knowledgeable. I can't recommend this podcast enough.

If you are interested in keeping up with the Joneses of the tech world, this is the place to be. So thank you very much. Thank you. And our next one comes from Norway. X Mr. X. Great podcast. I'm new to this podcast, but I love it. The good thing now is I have 200 more episodes to listen to while I'm out playing in the snow here in Norway.

Keep up the good work, guys. Quick question. What are some movies that you would recommend watching? Harvard, Tony, The Last Jedi, I'm guessing, is going to be very good. I'm not really a movie guy. Jason is. He even has his own podcast that he occasionally does about them. Yes, I recommend go to DoesItHaveLegs.com and check out 40 of our favorite movies that are some of our favorites.

I recommend checking out The 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas, directed by John McTiernan. It's from 1999, but it is a fantastic movie. It's a retelling of Beowulf. Well, and for Christmas, Die Hard. Also Die Hard. It's the ultimate Christmas movie. That's true. Yeah, go back and watch Die Hard.

Yes. And our final five-star rating for the week, and we only got five-star ratings. It's not like we're cherry-picking, is from SelfDestruct264. Funny, current, effed up. Super entertaining. Wish there were fewer F-bombs so I could listen while my children were around. Hey, you put an F-bomb in your review. Yeah.

What the hell? There you go. 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 if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star in a snarky review. And as always, please tell your friends.

Closing shout-outs! I just want to throw a quick mention that next week we're going to have a shorter episode because we have things to do. It's Christmas, mofos. That's right. But yeah. Thanks, everybody, though, for sticking with us this long. We love you.

We do. I have a couple shout-outs this week. Came across my social feeds, which I don't have to pay more money for yet. Meet the elderly woman who will not stop being goth no matter what anyone says. Shout-out to... Her name is Jillian Venters, otherwise known as the Lady of the Manners.

She runs a website dedicated to goth culture and considers herself goth as well. Two big thumbs up. You live your life. You do you. And I used to be goth. I love this stuff. That's fantastic. And the photos on her site and in this article are just unbelievably great.

It just gave me a big old chuckle, which guys aren't supposed to do. And in light of news, and even though the song isn't specifically about what the FCC just did to net neutrality, shout-out to Eric Idle and his song, Fuck the FCC. Go listen to it. Listen to it proud.

And my final shout-out, because I have spent a little bit more time on Twitter recently because there's so much to be outraged about. I want to give a shout-out to the British singer-songwriter Lily Allen. I love watching her on Twitter, more so than her music now, to be honest. She's a goddamn legend, shutting down trolls on Twitter.

Absolutely fantastic. So fun to watch. Until next time, I'm Brian Schallmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. They fixed it. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever.

If you'd like to give a one-time donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 239. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy, and we'll see you briefly next week.

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