24: The Best Productivity Podcast Ever!

Hey Brian. Hey Jason. We are back.

So, before we get going, I'd like to give a shout out to all of our new listeners. We have a ton of new listeners this week. And I just want to say hello everybody. Welcome. Hi. How's it going? I did something a little crafty last week. I have to admit it.

So, I don't know if you noticed what the title of last week's episode was. I did. I thought that was quite amusing. Yeah. Well, you know what? I'm going to coin a new term today. I'm going to call it brown hat SEO. Because my white hat turned brown when I shit myself when it actually worked.

If you do a search on Google for best tech podcast, we're in the first page results. I know. I thought that was quite hilarious. And, you know, there's a reason there's all those stupid little SEO experts out there, right? Yeah. I mean, this just seemed like a no-brainer. I couldn't come up with a title for the episode, so I was playing around and said, yeah, what the hell? See if it works.

You know what we should call this episode? What? The second best podcast ever. We'll just go down the list. That just means our show is just going to get worse over time. Well, yeah. Sorry, new people. That might be the way it goes. Man. So, I want to do a little follow-up from last week.

Okay. I think it was last week. I mentioned Human, one of the fitness apps that I got a beta for. And I said it was human.io. I was wrong. That's an old project that Josh Schechter did after he left Yahoo, and it got bought by Walmart, so it doesn't even exist anymore.

The actual URL was human.co. Right. Yeah, I took a look at that from when he put it in the notes. And, you know, we've been talking a lot about all these apps, and there's tons of them, obviously, and they all kind of vaguely do about the same thing. This one looks like the kind of idiot's version. Just make sure you get up and walk 30 minutes every day, and then it pats you on the back.

That's exactly it. And, I mean, none of these apps do what they're supposed to do, I think. No. Go buy some hardware, dedicated hardware, and, you know, some year down the line when the phones get better, then maybe it'll happen, or the iWatch will come out, and it'll have everything that you need in it.

Who knows? But for now, fuck the apps, skip them, move on. It seems to be. I mean, I'm still using the Moves app, but I'm not expecting it to be perfect. It's just fun for me to see how many steps approximately I'm taking, and it does the biking thing. You know, as far as you're a Fitbit guy, you know, I got one of those, oh, crap.

What, I always forget it. The watch thing. The basis? Basis. I got a basis for my brother-in-law, so when I was in Toronto, he was trying it out. You know, everybody has complaints about everything. None of these devices is perfect. He said it's a really, that the watch itself kind of lags on things.

It doesn't keep up with, like, your heart rate very well. And, you know, it is what it is. But, I mean, basically, who needs perfect tracking anyways? You just want to get a rough idea of what you're doing and make sure that you're staying active. Yeah. And if something is inaccurate, you want it to be consistently inaccurate. Exactly. I agree with that. And, actually, the app that I'm using, Moves, pushed out an update.

And this week, I've done, well, since I got back from Toronto, I've done my bike ride every single day. And it's a lot more accurate. Now, instead of being, like, 8 miles to 13 miles, 10.8, 10.9, 11.1. So, it's better. Dialing in. Yeah. Now, speaking of apps, last week, you were going to grab a copy of Plants vs. Zombie 2.

Yes. And I did. I grabbed that thanks to LAX's new free wireless, if you watch an ad, which Adblocker conveniently blocks for you. So, I downloaded it while I was sitting waiting for my flight. Now, to you new listeners, I am not a gamer. I have never been a gamer. The last time that I was intricately involved in any sort of game was Spy Hunter with the quarters at Disneyland when I was 11.

I just, I'm not into it. So, I downloaded it on Jason's recommendation, Plants vs. Zombies 2. And I immediately got hooked on it for about three days and then deleted it because I couldn't handle it sucking up my time anymore. That's the life cycle of a game on iOS.

Yeah. It was a lot of fun to play. I was definitely getting into it. I definitely see how these people make money because the upsells are ridiculous everywhere throughout the game. I was even tempted to just like, oh, screw this. I'll just spend two bucks to be able to get that cool flower that I haven't seen yet.

But eventually, I was just like, okay, this is now starting to get really boring. Yeah, I played it all the way through. No payments, no cheating, as I like to call it. I got to the end of the Egypt level until I realized that I would have to go back and replay a bunch of levels to get stars to be able to move forward.

And at that point, I was just like, nope, done. So, you didn't get to play the Pirates? Nope, never played the Pirates. Oh, the Pirates are fun. Oh, well. Okay, well. But, you know, games are fun. That's what they're good for. They're good for burning time. I definitely got that, and I find, you know, for the first time ever, I think I kind of felt the allure that all you crazy gamers feel about this sort of stuff.

I was well into it, particularly the entire flight, instead of, because it was the same damn movies I'd already seen. So, I played it almost the entire flight. Battery Drain, ridiculous on that game, though. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God, I just watched it. It's heavy on battery. Yeah. Yeah, but still, it's fun.

It's fun stuff. Yeah, and speaking of follow-ups and Battery Drain, and we'll get back to this a little bit later. Due to one of the comments of the week, I was using that USB power stick during my travels. Worked a charm. Fantastic. I love those damn things, so I hope you ordered yours. Oh, and just a little bit of follow-up on that.

I went back to the site with the link that we posted last time for the peoples, and at nomorerack.com. Yeah. They still have tons of them. So, basically, what they're using is, like, what do they call it in the pickup world? The false time constraint, or the, you know, or the, whatever, the hell is it?

It's like scarcity, basically. Yeah, it's false scarcity. False scarcity. That's what it is. Yeah, exactly. I mean, all the sites use it now. It's like, two more minutes, and then you're done. I mean, you know, that started with, like, Home Shopping Network and crap like that, so. Oh, yeah. Mr. Popeil, order in the next five minutes and get a second one free. Yeah. All those sites do it.

You know, if you're an idiot and you fall for them, I think I even said on the last podcast, it'll probably still be up there. And it is. So, everybody, so far, a weekend using it, traveling, worked great and saved my bacon a couple times. And I'm still waiting for mine.

It chipped, but it's not here yet. Yeah, yeah. It took a little while for mine to get to me, too. But, so far, loving it. We'll see what happens. And I have to go back on something I said last time, too, which was on my development cycle, when I got all those IE images for parallels for a modern .ie.

Yeah. And I said, oh, you still have to update them all? Well, you don't. Because you want the old version because it has the old browser that you're going to be testing against. When you update it, it updates everything to IE9, which completely defeats the point of it. So, I had to go back, re-download all the images, and keep them clean.

So, don't be an idiot like I am. And just because you're used to updating all your software, which most people aren't anyway, so I guess I'm an outlier on that one. No, I do it, too. Yeah. I always update. And actually, I read a really interesting article about why we're wasting so much time and bandwidth updating apps on our phones we never use.

But I'm addicted to seeing that. When I see that little update thing, I go in and I update the app, whether I've touched it in, like, a year or not. Yeah. This is a really weird thing with iOS 7, too, because it auto-updates. You never have to do that anymore. Oh, really? Except in iTunes, when you go into iTunes, the little thing pops up saying that there are apps that need to be updated.

So, hopefully, when they release the new iTunes, when iOS 7 comes out, they'll take that out. Yeah. Because it's really annoying, because it just, I mean, it's a nice little reminder to sync your phone, because then it'll just update it in iTunes. But the fact that I don't have to go in and update my apps manually anymore, I mean, it was great last, on iOS 6, when they said, oh, well, you don't need a password to update your apps anymore.

That was like, oh, no-brainer. Thank you, finally, after five generations of typing in my password every time. Yeah. To automatically update my phone. But it's really nice now. I just noticed new features pop up on apps. It's like, oh, that's new. When did that happen? That's pretty good. I mean, I suppose because Apple has such a strict QC policy on apps and even updates, you never have to worry about getting pushed a bad update or anything, which is, you know, as all of us Windows users know, you want to wait about a week and a half before you ever

install a Microsoft update, because chances are they fucked it up the first time, and it's going to kill your computer. So, I'm always leery of automatic updates, but hey, you know, it's Apple. They seem to know what they're doing with that stuff. Yeah, I've only gotten bitten once by doing the update too fast with Apple, and I used to run PGP, and, well, PGP kind of lagged, and I updated my OS, and PGP wasn't compatible with that OS, and basically bricked my whole machine.

It took me a day of, like, serious hacking and tinkering to finally be able to boot back in and downgrade. Oh, it was a mess. Yeah. So, but yeah, it's really nice to just have the auto update, so I recommend when, as soon as this comes out, hopefully next week, if you've got an iPhone that supports it, upgrade to it, because it's been, the new release of it has been stellar.

I love it. Yeah, I'm quite looking forward to getting the update, and I think it is going to be next week. I was hearing a lot of scuttlebutt about that, so. Well, the 10th is the announcement. Right. So, that's locked in stone, but I read that Apple has canceled vacations, I believe it's the 17th through the 23rd, for all the geniuses at the stores and all the support personnel.

So, expect it to drop probably the 17th. I'm guessing a week from the announcement. Probably, yeah. Sounds about right. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, that's why it's, it's been a good week so far. I'm digging it. Excellent. I'm looking forward to it. So, yeah.

Hello, all you new listeners, and this is the little segment where we talk about shit you haven't heard yet. Yeah. Go back and, go back and catch the reruns. Catch the, yeah, exactly. Command of the Week! A big, huge, gigantic shout-out to Melissa Wagoner, who went to our site and then told us that our donate button wasn't working, and then explained that it was probably because of IE, at which point I just scoffed and went, IE, who the hell uses IE?

But then she was actually right, and it wasn't working for anyone, so we got to fix that, and as soon as we did, she gave us a very generous donation to help keep our podcast flowing. So, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. That was very, very generous of you. We really appreciate it.

Yes, we really do. You paid for some hosting for a bit and some bandwidth, and we're quite happy about that. So, like I said, we've talked a lot about this. We're not really doing it to make money, although that would be nice. We do love covering our costs and very appreciate it. So, if you're enjoying us, feedback is great.

Cash is even better. And five stars on iTunes, somewhere in the middle. Yes, that too. So, we got another little bit of feedback from long-time listener, Mike Vinicor, a.k.a. MXV. He says that you owe the listeners an apology from last week's comment about Pigface, saying that Al Jorgensen was in the band.

I'll apologize to the one listener who knows what Pigface is, and that'd be you. But it's true, Al Jorgensen was never in the band. But to be fair, Pigface never would have existed without Al Jorgensen. The entire touring band he put together for the Ministry of Mine is a Terrible Thing to Taste tour basically formed Pigface after the tour ended.

So, he brought them all together. They started playing around during sound checks. They started writing a bunch of the songs during sound checks. Meh, meh, meh, whatever. So, take that, I guess. So, take that. I mean, technically, you're right. But, you know, I'm also not going to argue about a band from 20 years ago.

This isn't a Rivethead podcast. This is a tech podcast. So, close enough. Pigface, industrial supergroup. He was the one guy that wasn't actually in it at any point. He was Pigface adjacent. Exactly. We'll leave it at that. We'll call him Pigface founder. Okay. And, Mike, also wanted to ask that you said you were driving around going to meetings and using your little USB charger stick.

Well, why didn't you just plug it into the car? Because I go to cities that actually have public transport every now and then and don't drive in a car all the time. That's great in L.A. I don't really need one of these in L.A. But even then, I sometimes do because I'll go off on my bike with my backpack or I'll sit at a pub for a couple hours.

And I don't want to always have to bug the poor bartender to plug my phone in. When they do that, they put it behind the bar, too. So, I can't keep using it. Not everybody's in a car all the time. You must be from L.A. So, I think the real threat of the story is you need to buy a bar.

That's it. Well, that is the retirement plan. Yeah. I think that's every geek's retirement plan is just go buy a bar. Yeah. But my plan part of that is actually to get into all the drinking now. So, I'm sober by the time I own a bar. And that way, I won't drink my profits. Good call.

Think it ahead. I like it. I like it. I tell you. I've got a 20-year drunken plan. So, we got a little more feedback this week from – this was really nice. John Rojas from the Smart People Podcast, one of my definite weekly listens and huge fan of the show.

I'm going to paraphrase this a bit because he wrote quite a bit of stuff. He said, it's funny that I found your show because I'm attempting to start a career change. I've been doing management consulting for the federal government for the past eight-plus years. I've always had a love for technology and computers, hence wanting to create a podcast slash website, and have started learning as much as I can about programming.

That's where I hope you guys come in. Do you have any advice on where to start? I'm currently going through lessons on Code Academy, Rails for Zombies, and trying to build random mobile applications. Huh. Well, I mean, my bit of advice is come up with something that you actually really want to build because then you'll be interested in it, and then you can backtrack from there and figure out how to build it.

Do you want to build an app? Then learn that stuff. Do you want to do a website? Okay. What kind of website? What do you want to do? I'd always start with the concept, not the tech. Yeah, definitely start with the concept, but it also comes down to – I mean, I wrote a huge reply, which I will not do it on the show.

If it's for a career change, if you want to become a programmer as a career, there are so many different paths right now. Do you want to be specific in one area? Like we've talked about, you can either specialize or you can be a generalist.

Yeah. We're generalists. We do everything, the full stack development. Yeah. And I still prefer it, even though sometimes it can be harder to explain what you do to somebody. I do the internet. I prefer it too. And judging from his background, I mean, he said he's been doing management consulting.

I mean, basically, you can just be a generalist and get that plush job of being a consultant for someone. And then you don't even have to get your hands dirty with building things. You just find people that do. And you manage the whole project. I mean, that's a great way to go, especially given your background. Yeah. I mean, even as a consultant, it's good to know how everything works.

Learn some code. You know, learn soup to nuts stuff. I'm still not a, the Code Academy stuff, I'm kind of iffy on. I tell everybody, books. Yeah, I agree. Physical paper books are the way to go. Keep your browser open, go to Stack Exchange for questions.

But when you're learning a language, get a book, dog ear the hell out of it. Yep. And it makes finding stuff so much faster. I just think you learn it better that way too. There's something to be said for having to physically just go through those pages and rip through projects like that, as opposed to, you know, you got the code and everything in front of you in your browser.

Yeah, it just sticks with me better through books, and I think for most people. Yeah, and the other reason I don't like the classes is because you're going at somebody else's pace, and, you know, I don't really need to know a lot of things to get a certain task done. You know, theory is fine.

I've never gone that route. I've always had a book that I look up exactly what I need to know then. It just seems more efficient that way. And you learn the things that you need as you go instead of learning, quote-unquote, foundationals. Yep. That stuff will take you 10 minutes. You know, you learn the structure of the language, you learn some of the basics, and then you dive in.

And you'll learn it so much faster. Yeah, so I agree with Jason. I think one of the first decisions you're going to have to make is do you want to become a specialist? I mean, do you really want to be a programmer and then find a language that clicks with you and fucking become a super specialist in that? That's one way to go. The other way to go is to be a generalist like we are.

You probably won't end up getting your hands super dirty with code all the time. You might end up more in kind of a project manager or consultant position. But learn your stuff because I think what turned me into – I used to have the nickname Angry Man back in the companies that I worked for in my early 20s. It was because my project managers didn't understand a goddamn thing that we were doing, yet they were in charge of projects and were talking to clients.

So if you want to be in that position, learn your shit. It's helpful. It really is helpful. Yeah, there's nothing worse than that. The worst were the salespeople, but that's a different story. Yeah, they were even worse. So thanks for the comment, John, and thanks for the review. And everybody, go check out John's podcast at smartpeoplepodcast.com.

It's really good. They've got really good guests on. And up front, they say that this is a podcast that has smart people that it's just not necessarily them, which is very humble, I've got to say. Humble brag, but they are pretty smart guys. So check them out. Check them out. And thanks again to Melissa for the kind donation and MXV.

Meh, you know, we'll fight about stuff some other time. I'm going to go get some bands wrong later in this podcast so you can get mad at me. Sweet. Sweet. It's time. In the balls. So there's these two guys out of New York. They run a studio called Studio Neat.

They've done three successful Kickstarter campaigns so far. One for something that is a little toy for your iPhone called the Glyph, which is basically a tripod mount and a stand. Right. They did the Cosmonaut, which is a fat crayon-like iPad stylus.

Mm-hmm. And a sports bracket thing, whatever. Now they got a new one. Okay. It's an ice kit for making ice. Uh-huh. Now. Okay. Now to start off, it's like, okay, they're trying to make, you know, artisanal ice so you get the nice clear cube for your cocktails.

Uh-huh. With a bag, a stick, and a piece of metal. Uh-huh. Do they supply the water, too? No, no. Oh, no. I think you have to, I think you have to, sold separately. No, no water? Okay. No water. So. I'm just, I'm sorry.

I'm just looking at the prices. Are you fucking kidding me? So, here we go. 50 bucks or more, and you get the ice kit, which is basically. You get a bag and a stick. A box of bag and a stick walk into a bar. Holy, you know what, though?

I mean, Jesus Christ, they doubled their goal. I mean, what the fuck? What the fuck is wrong with you people? So, it started August 28th, and so it's been up for a little bit. They've got 1,503 people who are willing to buy a box, a bag, a stick, and a wedge to make ice, which obviously is, you know, beyond troublesome.

But you can make three kinds of ice. Oh, that's right, that's right. You can make a big cube, smaller cubes. Or crushed cubes. Tiny cubes. That's where the stick and the bag comes in? Yeah, okay. Okay. Yes, you put the nice ice in your drink, and then you take the crappy ice and stick it in a bag and whack it until you get some ice.

Most fancy cocktail bars often have a dedicated ice program. Were you aware of that? Yes. Okay. I am very much aware of that. Because clear, I like clear ice. It's, you know, it's a novelty. The ice that you get, this is, as Dr. Teeter put it, this is very much a Stonehenge, Spinal Tap type of thing.

It takes 24 hours. You get one block of ice that is two by two by four. Yes, but this ice goes up to 11. Two inches by two inches is the usable clear ice for your cocktail. So, this is for the very moderate drinker. If you're going to have a cocktail party.

I'm going to need about 18 of these. Yeah. I'm going to need 18 sticks, 18 bags. So, I mean, besides being utterly ridiculous that you're going to spend 50 bucks on a bag of stick in a box.

You can do this at home already with, like, three bucks worth of stuff. And you get more. More ice than you get with this thing. And, oh, it's called a Lewis bag. I don't know why. Apparently, Lewis was the first person to put ice in a bag and whack it with a stick.

So, I mean, these guys are making a cottage industry out of Kickstarter. They've done the Glyph and the Cosmonaut. I know a lot of people that got those. I mean, Jesus, the Glyph was, oh, God, the funding for that was, where was that?

It was huge. They got, like, over $100,000 for that thing. Right. And they were asking for, hold it, hold it. They were looking, yeah, it's 1,374% funded for that. Right. Okay. And I got one. Look. It didn't work for me because I got a case on my iPhone.

Oh, okay. So, it's useless if you like to have a case on your phone. The Cosmonaut, I like the way it felt, but the tip was too squishy. So, you had to press too hard to actually make it, you know, register as a touch on the screen.

And everybody I know that has it had the same problem with it, and it fell apart. The whole thing, it was, like, kind of cheaply put together. So, but at least, I mean, these guys, I do believe they put out a book, too, on how to, because everybody that has a successful Kickstarter has to put out an e-book, apparently.

That's one of the rules of Kickstarter in the print. But, yeah, I just thought this was kind of ridiculous, and a lot of my friends were funding it. Right. That's how I found out about it. They were on Kickstarter saying, hey, I'm going to get crazy ice now. I'm like, okay, good for you.

I mean, on the one hand, it's cool. It's great of them that they found this way to make this life for themselves. I mean, obviously, they've made nearly, you know, half a million dollars off their various projects so far. But this is just so stupid.

So, I'm putting a link in the show notes to an Instructables video on how to do this yourself with, like, literally three bucks worth of spray foam insulation, a pitcher, and a cup. That's all it takes.

And you can get much more ice than you can get out of the neat ice kit. Yeah. I mean, again, this goes back to a lot of the things that I was saying when we first started shooting on Kickstarter way back in, I believe, the first episode. You know, it's just, this is a free-for-all.

Free-for-all. I mean, buyer beware. Stupid people are going to order stuff. And, you know, it's, okay. They've fancied up an idea, and they've packaged it well, and they're charging way more money than you need to charge for anything, and dumb people are buying it. Caveat emperor. Emperor?

Emptor. Emptor. Sorry. It's okay. It's okay. I'm going to see what else you can get here, because they didn't do any, yeah, okay. So, they don't, you don't get a t-shirt. No t-shirts. You either get, you get the kit. Oh, my God. You get an extra mold.

$15 for shipping. International. International. Oh, jeez. Yeah, just international. God, I was like, you've got to be kidding me. That better come with ice for $15. If you spend $70, you get an extra mold. Yeah.

So, but at least they didn't do the, you know, the crazy incentivize thing. I give them props for that, so. But, yeah, if you want clear ice. Yeah. Yeah. If you want clear ice, go get some foam. You can get a stick outside from a tree and use an old pillowcase for your newest bag.

Yeah. All right. Another great Kickstarter. All right. Can't wait for the next ones. This is just awesome. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. I just load up the site and I'm going to be like, really, really, really, really. I just, I wanted to cover this one because all my friends are getting this. I'm like, are you fucking shitting me? I thought we were in an economic downturn.

How come people are spending $50 on a way to make ice? Yeah. When an ice tray costs, you can get three for a dollar at the 99 cent store. Yeah. Okay. I guess we have, you know, other problems to deal with here. Ice is way up on the list, apparently. Ice Ice Baby. Welcome to This Week in Shit We Put on Our Computers.

You like lists. I love lists. I have lists of lists. I keep a master list of my various lists. I like lists, too. But I don't like paper. I love paper. So, I have, go ahead, go ahead. I love lamp, too.

Sorry. I have spent an inordinate amount of money on software to keep lists, which is, you know, ridiculous. And I've gone back and forth with two different products that have made my life crazy miserable at some points and saved my bacon in others.

Right. First one, the first one is an old one that I found out when Merlin Mann was consulting with them. It's called OmniFocus. Yeah. You know, I've actually tried that one. Yeah. It's ridiculously expensive if you get the full stack. The, well, first, let me tell you what it is.

It's basically a GTD system, you know, a full stack GTD, getting things done, David Allen, the whole nine yard system. I basically use it to keep a list. That's it. I get it out of my head. I put it in the thing and then I come back and it tells me what I should be doing that day.

Yeah. Fantastic for that. The Mac version, they say it's $79.99 now. I could have sworn I paid a lot more than that, but it was a long time ago. I thought I did too, but. And if you want the iPhone version, that's another 20 bucks. Yeah.

And if you want to get the iPad version, that's 40 bucks. Yeah. So Omni is not real good about doing the Omni. I've spent more money on Omni apps on like five Omni apps, I think, than I have on all my apps combined. I bought Omni Graffle, which was a $90 iPad app.

I tell you what, though, we'll do this, we'll do Omni Graffle in another show. It was the best 90 bucks I spent. It's a fantastic app. So basically, I'm 140 bucks into Omni Focus at this point. Yeah. And it was driving me crazy. And this other app came out called Things, which is much more, it's got a much simpler design, much simpler in scope.

Yeah. And cheaper in price. So they're 50 bucks for the Mac, 10 bucks for the iPhone, and 20 bucks for the iPad. And it looks like they have a free trial, so I'm going to have to give this one shot. Because Omni Focus did get to be a bit too much for me. So I stopped using Things, even though I bought all three of them.

I just was pissed off at that point, because I had spent so much on the desktop version and the iPhone version. And when they came out with the iPad, it was another 20 bucks. I felt like I was getting ripped off. Right. And then I looked at it and I thought, well, you know, they did put a lot more work in the iPad version and it's not just a direct port.

They're actually, the apps on all of these are specifically tailored for the platform. So I can, they can kind of justify, you know, spending, costing more on each platform. Yeah. Not giving you a universal app. Right. So lately I've gone back to Omni Focus just because it does have a little bit more power.

Oh, excuse me. You can do really cool things with geolocation. So if you're like driving by the store, it will pop up your stuff that you need to get at the store and will remind you. Okay. You know, it does really neat things like that. That just seems like a bit too much for me, but cool. Okay. Well, I mean, if you're, if you live in a town where you're walking a lot, totally handy.

Totally handy. Like if you're like by the, by the drugstore and you need to go, you know, buy diapers or whatever the hell you buy at the drugstore, Ritalin, who knows? It'll just, you know, pop up a quick reminder. So that way it's just all out of your head, all your shopping's out of your head, whatever. If you really need Ritalin that bad, you're probably not going to remember.

And, but they all, and they all sync, they all sync between things, syncs and OmniFocus syncs. They all sync between all your devices, keeps them pretty up to date. Right. And, but yeah, I, I really like the way the OmniFocus iPad app works the best. The desktop is just way too convoluted.

I just use it because I'm at my desk and it just tells me what I need to type that day. But when I, when I'm done for the day and I'm sitting in the chair on the couch upstairs, and that's when I do all my input and I do all my input on the iPad and it's a really nice experience. It's beautifully designed, unlike the desktop version.

Right. And it's just, I don't know, it's, I'll probably change my mind in a month and go back to things. I tend to go back and forth. I get tired of looking at the same thing and go back to the other one. Right. And so I definitely, for the price point, things is better. And I mean, you're looking at, Jesus, 60 bucks for just a few features in OmniFocus.

I would, you know, my, my go-to is my, my recommendation would be if you're looking for like a simple GTD system to just get things out of your head, get you, give you reminders and you don't like paper because paper won't ping, paper won't ping you. No, paper will not ping you.

I've never, I have not made the transition. I spend 15 bucks a year on a Moleskine and I do everything in that and it works great for me. But, you know, the whole, I'm using my iPad a lot more. I'm using my iPhone a lot more. The syncing between them and having it digitally like that is starting to kind of, you know, the little thing in the back of my head is going, maybe you should try to switch.

So we'll see. Maybe I'll, I'll give things a shot. Yeah, and the other, I, I've gone back and forth with paper and all that stuff and I just kind of made a conscious decision to go paperless and try and get the habits down of keeping everything digitally and getting that habit, you know, putting everything in at night or when it, when a new task comes in, just put it in, put it in OmniFocus, get it out of the inbox, move on.

It's really helped, you know, just, it gives me more free time, but a little bit of extra work at night gives me way more free time during the day because I'm not thinking about it at all. No, I mean, just a productivity thing, whether it's paper or one of these apps, that's, I can't recommend that enough to everyone that you should just end of your day, sit down, do whatever you need to do in terms of lists, use an app, use a Moleskine, use whatever.

It clears your mind for the night. It gets you, you know, you rest a lot easier. You wake up and you know, you've got your list and you're ready to go. Yeah, and you, you, you're in the habit, you trust the list. The list is the de facto thing you go by. If you stop putting things in the list and don't check or whatever, if you lapse, then the whole system breaks apart.

But if you're focused and you do it, life is better. It really just is better. It really is. I mean, you know what you need to do when you need to do it by and you don't have that, that crazy feeling of like, oh fuck, I'm forgetting something. I'm forgetting something. I'm forgetting something. Cause you won't.

Cause it's in and you're done. Yep. Yeah. I haven't had that feeling in a while now and it's a great feeling. It is a wonderful feeling. So can't recommend it enough. Pick which way you want to go. I still stand by my Moleskine, but I am, I think I'm going to try to spend next month trying out things and actually using a digital task organizer.

So we'll see what happens. Yeah. Go for it. And for you, it's a write-off. So drop the, drop the, drop the 80 bucks and just bite the bullet and go. Um, the other thing that I want to talk about is something I use all the time and almost everybody I know uses it. So I just want to, you often tell me that not everybody knows the things I know.

So I, this is true. I gloss over a lot of things and think just every, I assume everybody that uses the same stuff I do. They do not. Um, Evernote, the Evernote suite. Are you an Evernote user? Uh, I have Evernote. I've played around with it a little bit, but I don't use it regularly.

Okay. I've been an Evernote premium subscriber for, I think since, since it came out, since they offered the premium package, like the day they offered the premium package, I signed up and I haven't looked back. It's 45, it's 45 bucks a year. Right. It's a note taking app. It's basically for taking notes.

Yes. The genius of it is you can take pictures of notes from your iPhone or you can take pictures of your iPad. It puts those notes in, then it OCRs the notes. Right. So you can search on, so if I'm, and I do it with my bills, all my tax crap, anything that comes in that way, I can just do a quick search, find the note done, you know, there, I mean, there are other options out there like the neat scanner, which will do that.

But I've got one of those that my mom gave me because she, she got it and she couldn't use it and I got it and I'm not using it. Um, but it also ties in with a really cool program called Skitch, which used to be like an independent Australian based company. It was for making screen, taking screen grabs and annotating them.

That's all it was. It was beautiful for it. Evernote bought them. Now it's tied in with, uh, Evernote. So whenever you take a Skitch screen grab, it just goes to a notebook in Evernote. So you have them all, they're all synced between all your devices because there's iPad and iPhone apps, which are gorgeous by the way. Yeah, they are really beautiful.

They didn't used to be, trust me, they used to be terrible. But the new iPad, uh, Evernote app is gorgeous. It works great. I do most of my work from there, but I keep everything in there from code snippets, which is really handy. So if I need to go find a function or something that I did before shell scripts, I keep in there.

I mean, literally almost everything I keep in Evernote. It's my go-to digital locker, uh, and they've got a whole bunch of other side apps that they came out with. One's called penultimate, which is an iPad app for sketching, right? So it's just for drawing and sketching and taking notes.

Um, hello, which is for taking pictures. It's like a contact list basically. So when you meet somebody, you take their picture and you put in their contact information. I don't know if it, I think it can do business card scanning too, but I played with it for a little bit, but it didn't really kind of hook me. Right.

The weird one is food. They've got Evernote food. So you take pictures of your food, kind of like food spotting or something like that. That's big in Japan. It is? No, I don't know. It's Asians taking pictures of food, you know, the memes. Well, so do San, San Franciscans take pictures of a lot of food too. I've noticed that all my San Fran friends always post pictures of their damn meals.

Yeah. The new one that I found was, uh, this little browser extension they have called clearly, which I love. Basically it just takes out the junk on your screen. It's like a reading view. Oh, cool. So you just hit the little, I use it in Chrome. So I've got a little widget at the top of my screen. I just click that all the crap's gone.

I can read it and I can save it to a notebook. Ah, okay. Which is really good for research. If you're doing research, it's really handy. The only thing that kind of screws up on the titles a little bit, but it's newish. So, um, love it though. Check it out. It will, all these links will be in the show notes.

Clearly is definitely a, it's free. You can just go grab it. If you have Evernote, then you can sync with it and do all the fun stuff with it. Um, and the last one is a really weird one. It's called peak. It's a, it's like a flashcard app. I don't get how, I don't get how this kind of ties in with it, but if you're trying to learn something, it's, it's, it's really built for an iPad with a smart cover.

Right. Okay. You know, so basically you, you, you, you lift it up a little bit. It shows you the question. Then you try and answer the question. You pull it up a little more. It gives you the answer. That's it. It's, and then you can get like different kind of flashcard packs from the site. But if you're trying to learn something that's like rote memorization, I guess it's pretty good, but they've got, yeah, they've got a bunch of funny actually.

I like that. Yeah. It's, it's kind of cool. I don't know how it fits in with the rest of their empire, but it's neat. You know, it's just neat. It's neat. Yeah. So, oh, I see. Take, you can take notes in Evernote and then turn them into flashcards.

Flashcards, right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that'd be great if you had to, you know, like a kid or something like that. That'd be awesome. Yeah. I mean, Evernote does voice memos too. They do damn near everything. If you just want a bucket to throw shit in, it's the best bucket.

Yeah. I mean, this looks really, I mean, it's a great suite of stuff. It's certainly, it's, it's extremely pretty. I mean, it's a beautiful looking set of applications. It's just, it's another one of those things. Those things where to really get the, to get the bang for your buck, you got to fucking use it. You got to turn this into your, your, your system for life.

And I have, I've been using it for almost four years now. Yeah. And there's so much stuff in there and like for the premium price, you get a gigabyte of new data per month. Right. That's a lot. That is a lot. Yeah. I've never, I've never gone past like 10% of that.

Seriously. And I take a lot of pictures. I don't do voice memos though. Right. So maybe that's why. Yeah. It could be. Yeah. Definitely check it out though. If you're, if you're, this is one of my seriously between OmniFocus or things, whichever I'm using that month.

Yeah. Evernote goes in there. One password goes in there. We talked about that on a previous show. Can't, can't live without that. These are like my go-tos every day. So yeah. And I got, I got one, two, two little quickies here. Okay. One is if you're a developer X scope, that's what I talked about before.

The one I couldn't remember for doing like onscreen measurements and stuff. I actually found this after you talked about it and I bought it and installed it and I've used it about 20 times already. It's awesome. Oh my God. It's so good. I love this thing. It's, it's amazing. If you, if you're a graphic designer or if you're doing any kind of development for the web, you need this.

Absolutely. It's 30 bucks worth every single penny. Yep. Um, and I actually, this is one of those apps I got, I think, um, Dan Berka, uh, he was a designer at dig and milk and then went to work for Google. So hopefully he's making all Google stuff pretty now.

He turned me onto it and it was, it's amazing. The, um, they have a, a sister iPad app too. It's like three bucks. Right. So you basically anything on your screen, you can just mirror straight on your iPad. That's fantastic. So if you're checking for sizes and want to see how, how it looks size wise, it doesn't do much rendering stuff.

If you want to do rendering stuff, go get Coda and diet Coda. Yeah. That's the perfect match for that. But for just previewing, it's three bucks. It's worth it. Yeah. Um, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it changes the way that you look at things and do things.

So it's, it's made drastic changes in my workflow. So it's great. And watch the videos. I, I bought this thing and I was using it for, I've been using it for a long time and I never really found the full power of everything it does until I went back and read the fucking manual.

Um, it's pretty, it's pretty deep. So, and my last one for the week, since you don't have anything, sorry, this is, this is called Twitter spirit tweets that expire. Yeah. I saw this and it seems a bit stupid. It is.

Okay. When Twitter first started, I think I, I think I mentioned this, this might've been on one of the shows that didn't air when we were still trying to figure it out. When Twitter first started, I wrote a giant email to Evan Williams saying, dude, can you put this feature in where my tweets go away after a set amount of time?

Because after a set amount of time, they lose context. Now they, now they have this conversations feature that just rolled out. Which kind of keeps things in context, which finally, you know, um, but I, I was always saying that over, you know, in two years when somebody goes back and looks at tweets from somebody, they're not going to have contacts about what they're talking about because they're not seeing what the other person's seeing and it doesn't make any sense.

Right. Which can cause confusion for maybe somebody who's looking at it with, you know, a potential to hire that person, you know, that hiring decisions could be going into it or God for, you know, loans, who knows, child custody, even when you take that stuff out of context, it can become dangerous.

It can become totally dangerous. So I just like this because basically you do a tweet, you do a hashtag with like the number and either, uh, minutes, days, days, yeah, whatever. But I mean, I checked it, I tested it this morning. It worked great. What happens if somebody retweets you or whatever?

Well, then it's still there. Okay. So yeah. Well, actually no, if they use the, the built-in retweet method, if they, if they copy it and type RT, but if they use built Twitter's built-in retweet system, I believe it just goes away because the, the, because the tag is in it as well. Yeah. The parent's gone.

The parent, the parent post. Okay. The, the retweet ID, that's geeky stuff, but I don't know. I just like it. I think it's fun. It's free. And I checked it out because I'm like, okay, this is an app that's going to get my Twitter credentials and can post and delete on my behalf. So I went and looked at the guy who wrote it.

He used to work at Twitter. So thumbs up. He's got my, he's got my stamp of approval. Yeah. Seems interesting. I just, uh, I don't get Twitter in general. So there you go. Why would I get this either? Well, you're not my fucking target audience. No, I know. I know. I'm just, whatever.

I'm just putting, I'm just putting in my two cents and I'll put in the hashtag two minute on that. It'll go away. There you go. No proof. Leave no footsteps. So Larry Page, uh, CEO of Google, uh, didn't interview with, uh, Stephen Levy or actually I guess it was, uh, I was an interview for a book, uh, called in the Plex, how Google thinks works and shapes our lives.

On a not even slightly related note, I watched that stupid movie, the internship on the plane about Google. Oh, I haven't. Oh, was it bad? Oh my God. Don't, don't, don't. It's, it's, they're playing themselves again and they try. To do feel good story at the end.

It's just, who was in that again? Uh, what's his face with the broken nose? One of the brothers and Vince Vaughn, Owen, Owen Wilson, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. Yeah. Oh, so it was like the wedding crashers at Google. It was the wedding crashers at Google with lots of product branding everywhere. Oh, so good times.

Uh, don't go see that. Anyways, he didn't interview and he talks about, you know, the basic Google vision is eventually to put an implant in your brain. Yeah. No. Yeah. I'm just going to say that right out. No, I do not want Google. Google's implant in my brain. I do not want Yahoo's implant in my brain.

I do not want any of these companies implants in my brain and definitely, definitely not Google. So this is just, you know, we all knew that's where they're going to head with it. Anyways, glasses is only the beginning, but at least they finally just came out and said it. Oh, come on, man. Imagine Keanu Reeves would just, he would be a gazillionaire.

I knew Kung Fu. Part of the, part of the article is like, imagine thinking of something that you don't know the answer for and having immediate knowledge of it. I'm like, uh, no, no, no. Let's, let's stay out of the brain, which will tie into one of the books I'm reading when we get to the, at the library section.

So yeah, I just thought it was really interesting that it's just in print now. Here you go. We're going to end up having the Google chip that we're going to put in your brain. I just, I, not in any, any reality would I let any company put anything in my body except a beer company.

That's it. Yeah. But that's just temporary. It flows through. You're just borrowing the beer. That's all. Yeah. It leaves a little behind in the gut area, but it pretty much doesn't stick around. Um, yeah, I'm not even sure I'm going to do Google glasses. I'm really not sold on this. And I think it's just a little bit too invasive in terms of, of basic life.

I like having something in my pocket that I put away. Um, you know, I can see, I've always, you know, dreamt of invasive computing with like wearables and things like that. Yeah. Um, and I think a cool heads up display with glass and actually better contact lenses.

I would like, I would like a HUD on my contacts. Um, forget the camera thing. I don't need that. Um, but just to be able to, you know, get augmented information. I'm, I'm cool with that. I just don't like that Google did it and they're ugly. Um, it just makes it kind of look like a twat. Um, I'd be down if Apple came up with some nice glasses, some Ray-Bans, for chance or something, something that's actual glasses and not this weird construct thing that just paints you as a douchebag.

Like when you walk into a room. Yeah. But we used to say the same thing about, uh, the Bluetooth ear sets and now they're so ubiquitous. It doesn't, we don't even think twice about it anymore. It'll be the same way with these sorts of things. Oh, I still think about it. Unless you're in a car, then get that damn thing off your head.

Right. Uh, especially if you're at the mall. I mean, there's crazy people at the mall. These housewives walking around talking to themselves. Who let the fucking dogs out? No. Keep your, carry your phone unless you're carrying your kids, I guess. But yeah, I don't know. Anyway. No to brain implants.

No to brain implants for, for many, many reasons, which we will discuss in, at the library and security. But this is just, uh, yeah, it's, it's just nice to see it actually in print. Yep. This is where we're heading for. We're going to get your brain. We're going to put our ads directly in there. And we'll look right now too. The one, one quick thing is that like pacemakers can be hacked.

You want something in your brain that can be hacked. I mean, it's bad enough that somebody can walk by you and turn your pacemaker off or sit in a car with a Pringles can and basically stop your heart. What, in your brain too? I mean, that's just, no, it's, it's, it's, it's an attack vector that I do not wish to expose.

Let's just say that. Agreed 100%. We are not there and there's no way in hell I'd sign up for this. But what I am signing up for is Amazon Matchbook because this is. Segway. Yes. Amazon Matchbook is the new thing that's coming out where basically any book you've ever bought on Amazon will be available through Kindle for $2.99, $1.99, $0.99 or free.

I love this. This is what iTunes Match should have been. I will use this. I've bought tons of books off Amazon for, God, 10 years now. So this is fantastic. The idea that I could actually just keep a copy forever in my Kindle app is great. And what I'm hoping for is to be able to buy a cheap paperback, get it for $0.99 or free, and still pay less than you would for the Kindle version.

Hopefully they're going to leave that loophole in and we'll be able to exploit it for a while. That will never happen because Amazon has one of the best bots in the world in terms of finding comparative pricing. This is why you will find things for $0.00 on Amazon if you search for it right because they have to outbid a special that's happening somewhere else.

They have the best bot in the world for this. Damn it. I guess since they are like, I guess they're the third biggest search engine in the world. So that makes sense that they would be that smart. Yeah, they're pretty damn good at that. You're never going to be able to out-trick Amazon itself.

But what you can do is you can start your own store and price everything at one cent. Then we can bring them down. That might work. Just keep one copy of every book that you want to buy and if somebody buys it, fine. No, what got me this week, it was crazy.

I was flipping through iTunes. I was looking for something and I went to the homepage of the iTunes store, which I never do. Yeah, who does? And I just go straight to apps or – no, I just go straight to apps. I don't buy anything else on iTunes. I don't buy movies or whatnot.

But I ended up on the homepage of iTunes and Prince's new single is there. And I'm looking and I'm like, what the hell happened to Prince? He looks like Dave Chappelle now. Yeah. It totally got me. He actually used a picture of Dave Chappelle for his single, which was amazing.

It's straight out of the skit. So he proved he was in on the joke and actually did it himself, which is pretty cool. Not a huge Prince song fan, so I don't really care for the new song. I knew about this right away because I actually work with the Rick James estate and because of my Google alerts, basically anything with Dave Chappelle, I'm Rick James bitch, shows up in my thing.

So the day this was out, I was like, oh, that's clever. That's funny. Good on you, Prince. You actually had a little bit of a sense of humor there. I mean, yeah, when I finally got it, because I was like, it was before my first cup of coffee and it was early and I was just like, I mean, I even tweeted something, which I immediately took down because I'm like, I'm looking like a fucking idiot.

And if I had to use the tweet spirit thing, then it could have been gone and I wouldn't have had to touch it. But true. Very true. It was, it was, it definitely got me. That was a funny one this week. It's hilarious. The picture's great. You know, he's got his little plate of pancakes. Very, very funny. But I mean, it also just goes to kind of show you about how the internet works now.

I mean, there was a big, there was a lot of news about it because, oh my God, it's very funny. He used Dave Chappelle and nobody's talked about it in like two weeks now. The song is just dead. Nobody cares. I did end up spending the rest of my coffee more coffee break going to YouTube and finding the Wayne Brady, Dave Chappelle, Dave Chappelle skit, which is the funniest one I think he ever did.

But I don't think I've seen that one. So put it in the show notes. Oh my God. Wayne Brady have to choke a bitch. Nice. Oh, yeah. If you haven't seen that. Okay. That's going in the show notes. For sure. Little library. Woo. I had talked about a book.

I think I talked about this called Nexus a while back by a guy, Ramiz Nam. And the book tying in with the Google Glasses idea. The first book, Nexus, was about basically instead of a chip being inserted into your brain, it was a drug that introduced basically software and operating systems to your brain to enhance things.

And then it went off on all the problems that that would cause about the same thing with the Google chip in your brain about how it can be hacked and that people can take over and how, well, something else we'll get into in security about how they built a backdoor into it that only the guys that built it knew about.

So, the sequel came out, Crux, earlier this week. So, I picked it up immediately because, you know, it wasn't the best first book in the world. But a really interesting idea. It's pretty well written. About halfway through the follow-up now, still really enjoying it. So, if you want some good, cheap, fun sci-fi that kind of basically deals with a lot of stuff that is in our not-too-distant future, good stuff to read.

It's really interesting. The one complaint I have, and I don't know if he actually even put out a print version. I just know the Kindle edition. Did anybody proofread this or take a look at the layout? Chapters aren't clearly defined. Spacing is off. They did a really, really shoddy job laying this thing out.

Well, one thing I learned actually today listening to a podcast was you can send them just a Word doc. You can send to Amazon a Word doc and they will format it for you. So, maybe that's at play. This is obviously the way they went. Yeah. Because it looks like shit. And it's actually just detracting me from the book because paragraphs are running into each other and you're switching characters' viewpoints, but it's reading as if it's the same paragraph and it takes you a couple seconds and you're like, wait, what's going on now?

So, fix the layout on that, you guys, because this guy's got some good ideas and I've liked both the books so far. Did you leave a review telling them how bad their layout was? No, because I'm so lazy about that sort of stuff. I've really got to start doing that. I have to get engaged with the internet instead of just view it from afar.

Be the net. Be the net that you want to see in yourself or whatever the hell that line is. All right, Keanu. Okay. So, my book this week, The Shadow Factory, the ultra-secret NSA from 9-11 to the eavesdropping on America by James Bamford.

We're about to get dark, aren't we? So, this book came out in July 2009 and it basically covers everything that happened. I mean, and it goes into detail, like serious detail about the whole story of the warrantless wiretapping that happened with the secret rooms at AT&T and the other places.

I mean, everything. And it goes, it's got a level of detail that I just didn't know we even had available. And I mean, it's a four-year-old book, which is crazy. Yeah. And it, I don't know. I mean, it left me with basically this feeling that we need to reign these guys in ASAP.

Just, I mean, the computing power that these guys are using. They kept SGI in business. Yeah. You know, was it SGI or Cray? I think it was Cray, SGI. There was a basically, the supercomputer industry in America was going under.

So, the NSA and the Department of Defense basically underwrote them because they needed their supercomputers. Yep, pretty much. Yeah. It's insane. And the reason that they're building that giant place in Utah is because they used too much power. They basically used half of the power that would run Annapolis to run just the computing center.

It's crazy how much resources are going into this thing. And we'll get into the rest of the other resources in a bit. But it's just, this is an amazing book about everything that happened. And if you're in the least bit interested or following what's going on now with the NSA and the Snowden stuff, you got to read this book.

It just is a great primer on how things can get eroded by politicians who are basically trying to skirt the laws. And, you know, always thought Dick Cheney was an evil dick. This pretty much confirms that. The one thing that I was really surprised by was John Ashcroft, the guy who did the Let Eagles Soar song that was buried on The Daily Show quite a bit.

He turned out to be a pretty good guy. Really? I got to say. He actually tried to not let things get too crazy? Yeah. When he was in for surgery and he handed off the attorney general position, he backed up the new attorney general and they shut down the wiretap.

I mean, they fought it. So I got to say that that was a really big surprise. And the other surprise was there are a lot of good people in government who think that this is crap. Yeah. You know? And that's good that not everybody is evil.

I mean, the NSA has 35,000 employees that work on this stuff right now. So apparently some of them are not so nice. But it was a really refreshing take to hear that there were definitely, like, the puppeteers and the people who just did it. Yeah.

It was refreshing to just know that there are people in the government that are trying to watch our backs. And in the telcos. The whistleblowers in the telcos who basically backtrace. Like the guy who blew the lid on the AT&T thing. Yeah. You know, he's like, there's only one thing that these guys can be doing.

And they basically have boxes in between all the trunk lines, everything. They listen to everything. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Of course they do. I mean. But it's also, well, and it's also some of the other interesting parts are the hardware that they're using is basically, the Israelis make most of it.

And very shady Israelis made a lot of it. Right. So we're using hardware that's made by people in another government who are not really good players. It's complicated. It's convoluted. It is a great read, though. It was one of those ones where I just could not put it down.

Backdoors within backdoors within backdoors built into backdoors with another backdoor. There weren't so many backdoors. These were basically front doors. Okay. They ran the pipe right in the front door. The interesting thing is that this was four years ago. So imagine how things have moved on.

And to your point, and I think Shane Nickerson's point, too, about how they handle so much data. Yeah. They totally talk about it in the book. I'm sure. I mean, they're just throwing manpower. Well, not manpower. They're throwing computer power at it. That'll do it.

That'll take care of the problem. And, you know, just the placement of the nodes so they're closer, like the wires are closer. It's crazy talk. It is a completely different world. I'm definitely going to have to read this, especially after we go through our next little segment that will make everything so dark.

Yes, I do recommend it. I listen to this on Audible. I recommend the Audible version. It was really good. Good reader. I listen to it on 2X because I'm that kind of guy. Yes, you are. And it went well. It was well-paced. Good reader. Great book. Totally recommend it. I'll be reading it next week.

Security. Ha! So, Jason is definitely the way more technical of the two of us. We both are kind of generalists, but Jason really knows his shit in terms of back end, you know, all the security sort of stuff. I just sit on the outskirts, and, you know, I kind of bitch and moan all the time about how there's no point in security because everybody's going to get at us anyways, and the government knows everything that we do.

And if a butterfly farts in Sweden, there's a recording of it. And I've kind of always felt that way, and Jason has tried to tell me otherwise, but I think he's coming around to my way of thinking these days. So, when I saw this headline on Salon, I instantly had to put it in the show notes because I figured Jason would have something to say about it.

No password is safe from new breed of cracking software. The free password cracking and recovery tool runs at 8 million guesses per second. Take it away, Jason. Tell me why I shouldn't be worried about this. I didn't say that. You shouldn't be worried about it.

Damn it. They're basically talking about OCL Hashcat Plus, which we've actually talked about on a long-ago episode when we were doing our security episode, which was kind of a train wreck. It was the first one where I actually wrote down what we were going to talk about and decided never to do that again.

Yeah, it's basically brute force password cracking that is very intelligent. You can actually, if it's trying to crack a website, when you sign up for a website, it'll say, okay, your password has to be between 16 characters.

It has to have an uppercase and then an at sign or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, so those are just regular expression rules. So, you can put those into this and then just let it go. And one of the things that I, it kind of works if you, you know, get the hash table from, like, or the encrypted passwords from them instead of sitting there trying to just break into the system because then you'll be discovered, like, by hitting the system over and over again.

Yeah, you can prime the pump. Yeah, I mean, you need to get the encrypted passwords, really, for this thing to kind of work well. But one of the things I did want to throw a quick caveat out to, to any of our developer friends who are listening, if you're building a user system that requires a login, make sure you put limits on the amount of times people can try before they get kicked out.

Yep. Most people don't do that. They just say, oh, well, they just forget about it and wake up in the middle of the night with their pager going off. Well, pagers. Wow. Oh, I got dated right there. Then they got in their DeLorean and came to the future to fix it.

But wondering why your server's down because somebody's hitting your site, like, a thousand times a second trying to brute force somebody's password. Just put in lockouts for that kind of stuff. It's easy enough to code in. Yeah, very, very easy. And one of the things that I used to think was amazing was there was an XKCD comic that a lot of people adopted,

which was basically instead of taking gibberish words and putting, substituting letters for numbers and a couple punctuation symbols, whatever, use a very long string. Like, their example is correct horse battery staple.

Yep. You can remember it because you can do a visual mnemonic on it. And it's much harder because it's much longer. Well, those are dictionary words. Yeah. Well, they got dictionary attacks just like that. So instead of doing single letters, they can do words the same way. And eight million guesses a second.

Yeah. Ain't going to take that long. No, it's not going to take that long. So, yeah, really kind of, yeah, they're, uh, on the comic, it says, uh, 550 years at 1000 guesses per second. Well, do the math on 8 million guesses per second. And that 550 years comes down really, really fast, you know?

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it, this comes down to security on the websites that keep your passwords, but you should still, I, all my passwords are minimum 16 characters, random generated through one password. They're, they're never the same on any site. Yeah. You know, and I still, I still have to publish the, my, uh, email obfuscation, uh, document that we talked about way back when.

I thought about that this morning. I need to put that up this week. You should get that up. Because, yeah, well, I owe, I owe our listeners about four or five different blog posts. Even going back to the, uh, the wet stuff, the never wet. Right. I actually, I actually did our video tests and I never posted them. So, oh, my bad guys, I'll get it up.

And by the way, the never wet stuff is pretty cool. It did actually work on a piece of wood. Really? But on the wood stuff, it was pretty damn cool. That's cool. Unfortunately, I don't usually wear wood outfits. Uh, you didn't get a woody? Oh. I tried.

Fuck, I need a drum kit here. Oh. Um. So. Yes. So, yeah, passwords. Now, yeah, well, this just kind of dovetails into the rest. Now, let's move. Now we can move on as to why passwords don't matter at fucking all. Yeah, well, the big news, obviously, yesterday, and by the time you listen to this on Monday, everybody on the fucking planet is going to know about it.

But it is the fact that the, uh, NSA and the GCHQ Britain spy arm basically has the keys to the castle. Yep. It's baked into everything that we use. Encryption for SSL, SSH, VPN, they got backdoors into it all, or they, they have the keys.

It's, nothing is safe. So, if you want to. There is no way to keep anything safe at all, ever. Done. Well, write it on a piece of paper and give it to a courier who takes, oh, wait, no, the couriers, that's kind of like Bin Laden. No, the couriers, you definitely can't put it through the mail because they take photos of everything.

No. Well, I was thinking of the courier that got Bin Laden, but. Oh, that's true, yeah. That's how they tracked him. So, yeah, it's, uh, this is bad stuff. It's very bad stuff. And there are a lot of articles coming out yesterday and today about this. And, uh, I don't know, man.

I don't know. It's, it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, you know, the government needs to, no, they don't. Nevermind. What am I saying? They don't need to go this fucking far. They do not need to know what I'm buying from Netflix, you know? No, they don't need to. And then, you know, it was always the theory that like, there'd be just be so much data that things would just get lost and, and whatever.

But the thing is, um, they're storing everything. They're keeping everything. They're using supercomputers to search through things. It's all about putting together probable cause. They can do that based on anything that you do. Uh, if somebody wants to get you and they're in the government and they have access to this, they can, and they can make it up and it doesn't matter.

It's, it's, I don't know. It's on, on the one hand, I've always kind of had that kind of Corolla attitude, which used to drive you crazy about it, which is, oh, fuck it. I'm not doing anything wrong. Who cares? But, I get it. Yeah. It's, it's one of those things now where it's like, we need to stop these guys.

You know, we need to, we are a country of laws, so we need to actually step up and put the kibosh on this shit because it's, it's getting out of hand. It's honestly getting out of hand. It makes us look like just giant dicks to the rest of the world, which we already did already.

And this is just making it worse, you know? Yeah. It's, oh God. Um, who wrote this one? Oh, Bruce Schneier, who was one of the leading journalists on, on security. He's an author. He's a blogger. He wrote, he wrote a couple of great pieces that are all going to be in the show notes.

That would be grumpy old geeks.com slash 24. If you want to get all the show notes. Uh, he just wrote the U S government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back. And it's a, it's a wonderful piece on, uh, basically engineers need to step up and fix it.

He also wrote, he also wrote a great piece on, um, a guide to staying secure from the NSA. So all the tools that he's using to basically make it harder. He's like from reading, he got to read some of the Snowden docs and he said, look, if they want to get into your computer, they're getting in your computer.

That's it. You've got no, no defenses. So he went out and bought a computer that has never been connected to the internet and transfer stuff via flash drive back and forth. But he lists a bunch of tools that are actually pretty good tools, um, to use. Don't use any, uh, private company encryption like PGP, you know, anything that's closed source, everything needs to be open sourced.

And he even talks about different types of out like cryptographic algorithms that you can use that are better than others because the NSA is pushing for one type of algorithm, which they've obviously already figured out the cracks on. Um, it's, there's just so much stuff coming out.

It's crazy. It's crazy making. And the one thing that I got to say is I have flipped my opinion of Snowden 180 degrees. I think he's a great fucking guy. Yeah. I think what he, I think now that I see the scope of what they've done.

Yeah. I mean, I think I, I'm glad he did what he did. Remember when we were talking about Laneier's book and about how there was this alternate idea to the internet that would have ownership and, and dual connections back and forth. And then we both said, yeah, but it's never going to fucking happen because you can't rebuild the internet. Now we have a reason to rebuild the internet.

Yeah, definitely. I think, um, well, they're meeting on, uh, God, Tim Berners, Lee, and a bunch of the guys are meeting on the future of the internet. And they're talking about baking a lot of security and encryption into the underlying standards.

Yeah. So hopefully the NSA isn't going to be invited to that meeting. Yeah. And it can be, it can, it can remain an open discussion. That would be nice. Yeah. So hopefully we can come out of this. Yeah. I mean, okay. Bad guys will be able to chat. You know what?

I want to be able to chat too and do whatever the fuck I want and not have anybody listening to it because that's, it's just, I know it's a privilege, not a right. Like when you get your driver's license and that could be the same way with the internet, but it's still, it's, this is a complicated, complicated topic.

And I just think what they're doing is gone way beyond what should be done, especially like having strong arming companies to put in back doors to encryption. Yeah. Encryption algorithms is inherently dangerous for everybody because whoever knows about that, they get fired, they quit.

They still know that. Yeah. You can't, you don't unknow your back doors and, and all that sort of stuff. But, and, and it just, it is, it's a fundamental breakdown of what security is supposed to be. That's not security. If there's a hole in it, it's not secure. That means it's not secure.

I mean, it's, it's, it's fucking common sense. So yeah, it's, uh, it's not good stuff. So I'm going to put in all these links in the show notes. And if you have a Mac, there's a really cool article from Macworld that I found today called, uh, how the NSA snoop proofs its Macs. Yeah.

Basically what they do to, to keep their Mac safe. And it's an older one for Snow Leopard, but, uh, Macworld fortunately has gone through and updated it for Mountain Lion. So I don't know if it'll work with Mavericks, which is coming out in October, the new, uh, uh, Mac operating system.

But there's, uh, stuff you can do now. And I'm going to go through there and get my, my laptop definitely up to speed and, and my desktop. And for people who don't want to read the article, the one cool takeaway that I got from this when I was reading it this morning was never, uh, check email or surf the web as the admin account on your computer.

Yeah. Which is just, it's so, such a simple idea that I never thought of. It's like, Oh, duh. Because if you're, if your machine gets owned, they only have the privileges of that user. Right. So they can't like take over the whole machine. I mean, it's like a subset of the machine.

So you have a separate admin account that runs your machine for upgrades and all that stuff. And then you have just your user user, which you do for all your daily stuff. It was a cool little tip. Yeah. Simple enough to think about. Um, I, I read a bit through the Mac thing and it was just like, wow, if you did all this stuff, I mean, just everything that you try to do.

On your day to day basis becomes so much harder. I don't know if it does that. I don't. I'm, you know, we're lazy. So that's the thing. I'm not lazy. What the hell are you talking about? You're not lazy. You will probably do all this stuff. I will probably not. I've done a lot. Actually, I had, had, had done a lot of it before I read the article.

It's the stuff I normally do. And I run a pro, I run a program on my Mac called little snitch, which basically alerts me whenever any program tries to access the network period. Yeah. So I run that as well. And I keep my eye on that. So thus far, I've been okay. Anyways.

Uh, so there's this other, now there's this other crazy article. It's, uh, called, do you know where you'll be 285 days from now at 2 PM? I love this. And this is, this is what, like, I think we got into this a bit when, when we were talking to Dr. Dr. Teeter, um, big data, big data is scary.

And this is why big data is super scary. We're human beings. We are creatures of habit. And, uh, you get enough data together from enough people and you put together some data points and you have a big enough sample. You can pretty much predict what people are going to be doing. Yeah.

Yeah. I just, I find this crazy that, that Microsoft is doing this. This is a, oh, formerly, um, but these are researchers who just doing it shits and giggles. Yeah. You know, I'm sure it's for money in the longterm, but it's like, guys, go outside, get a life.

Quit trying to figure out where I'm going to be. Go be somewhere. Leave me alone. There's, there's money in this, Jason. There's big money in this. Yep. It's, uh, yeah, just these predictive algorithms are, are kind of crazy creepy. Foursquare tells me I'm going to check in somewhere in 25 minutes.

Oh, I better get a move on. You know? Yeah. I mean, it starts to, it, I don't want to be like too philosophical about it, but I mean, this starts to get into the whole question of free will. You know, it's pretty amazing. I mean, I, I've, if I would have been stoned when I would have read this article, I'd probably still be sitting here going, dude.

Yeah. It's a, it's a great article. It's a really interesting read. Uh, it ties really into the security stuff and just concerns about privacy. And, and we are just rapidly heading into a world where not only will they know what we have done, what we are doing, but they're starting to figure out what we will be doing.

Yeah. Yeah. And here's the title of the paper is far out predicting long-term human mobility, but far out, dude. Yeah. Oh my God. The equations on this thing are insane. So definitely check out the article. And if you just want to make your brain hurt, look at the paper that's linked there.

Yeah, it's pretty intense. I wish I'd have studied more in math class. I know what we're discovering is it's all math. Everything is math. Math? Breaking bad. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's just one of those things where it's, I don't know, man.

Just come on guys. Stop it. All right. I'm just getting way too bummed out now. Let's take a break and come back with something that isn't about how our lives are destroyed. Okay. Candy, candy, candy, candy. So one of my favorite bands out of Chicago, like one of the old punk bands was Screeching Weasel, like one of my all-time favorite bands.

The guitarist for that band was John Jughead. John Jughead, when Screeching Weasel broke up, started a band called Even in Blackouts, which is basically an acoustic pop-punk band. They're amazing. They broke up, I think, 2009.

We went to their house and they did these parties, like these going out of business parties, basically. They recorded them and did a little record of it. But the point of this is, go check it out because you can get their first album for free. Now. He released, he just gave away the album on their blog spot account.

He's just like, here's the album. Take it. And I love them. They are fun. The first album has a bunch of cool punk rock covers on it. It's just, it's a great little listen. Like I said, it's acoustic. I can't remember the girl's name, who's the singer. John and her are like kind of lead singers.

They both sing. But she's got an amazing voice. It's just fun, fun, fun. Go listen to that while you're thinking about the NSA. It's all about being able to perform when there's no power because power went out and they're like, oh, even in blackouts, we can play. That's awesome.

I'll have to check it out. Yeah. Get it now before the internet turns off. Yeah. And just go ahead and write the NSA and say you're downloading it. Just, you know, tip them off a little bit. Help them out. They already know. They don't have to go through a database and look for it. They already know that you're going to download it.

That's it. No, I'm going to have to check this out. I mean, you've talked a lot about your Chicago scene that you came up in and there's a lot of good stuff in there. So I'm definitely going to give this a listen. Yeah, I'm going to dig it out. I took a video at the last show and edited it and I think it's on YouTube somewhere. So if I can find it, I lose things on the internet all the time.

I'll post it in the show notes. Well, that would break my data cap. It was their last. They did three last shows and I was at the first one. And they even yell at Bob, our lovely voiceover specialist, because he was talking too much. Fantastic.

Yeah. So I'll put that in. It's fun. And our buddy, or my buddy, Jason Shoup from San Francisco gave me the heads up on this. So thank you, Mr. Shoup. Very nice. I actually don't have anything new just due to travel and work stuff.

I haven't listened to anything that I've really enjoyed. You know, I did the Ruby thing the other week. But since I had to wake up at 7 in the morning to launch something for Coldplay today, Coldplay has a new single. It's about as far from punk as you can get, Coldplay in general. And you say what you will about Coldplay and God fucking knows I used to a lot.

They used to be my whipping boy band, but I've been working with them for a few years now. I've got to say, I've liked their last two albums quite a bit, Viva La Vida and Milo Zylotto. So both of those were really good. They put out a new song today called Atlas. It's the first single from the upcoming Hunger Games sequel, Catching Fire soundtrack.

I didn't think Hunger Games would be. That's the porn version. Hunger Games? Somebody's probably made that. I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Anyways, it's a nice little track. There's a cute little lyric video up on the site right now. And, you know, go give it a listen. Why not? If you always thought Coldplay was a piece of shit, go give it a chance.

Yeah, pretty much they were my whipping boy, too. And then when you started working with them, I listened to them. It's not generally my cup of tea, but it's not bad. I can keep them on the background. I quite like the last two albums. And if you've never seen them live, what a hell of a show. You've got to give them that, if nothing else. My God, they do a great concert.

Yeah, I've never been to a show, but I saw your iBook that you did for them with all the footage in it. They put on a damn big show. Yeah, they do. It's a big, fuck-off, crazy show, and it's pretty damn good. So go check them out live. Well, they're not touring anytime soon. You'll be the first to know, well, after me, because I have to put the dates in a database.

The life we live. Yeah. All right. So, yeah, hopefully I'll have something. There's a couple bands that I know of that have some stuff coming out, but I can't say anything about it yet. So maybe next week I'll have a little something for this segment. They go out! So just to kind of wrap up the NSA stuff, the reason I mentioned the tools and all that stuff was, even though that they can basically read anything they want, that doesn't mean you need to make it easy for them.

So that's seriously it. If you really care about it, you're not going to win, but you can make it harder for them. Slow them down. But the point is that Frank Church, who was a senator back in 1975, said this, the capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such as the capability to monitor everything, telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter.

There would be no place to hide. This was in 1975. Look what they can do now. So I will probably keep up on this because I am very focused on this topic right now because it just creeps me out.

It's not what we should be doing, honestly. And, you know, as grumpy old geeks, we've been with this technology since we were kids. And I posted something on my Facebook a couple of nights ago just about how sad it makes me to see the way things are playing out and all this technology that has changed our lives in amazing ways is just being used in such horrible ways by our governments, by big corporations.

It's sad. Yeah, it is. You know, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. So let's, like I said, I don't want to get too big of a downer on it, but it does, it definitely bums me out that this is going on. And hopefully with all the attention that's coming to bear on it, things will change.

And that is what's changed my mind about Snowden as well. I mean, I still don't necessarily agree with everything, but seeing how much stuff is going on and the fact that there's so much attention being paid to it right now, that is worth everything that he did. Because at least people know now, people are researching it, people are looking into it.

So, you know, do what, if you want to, do what Jason does and make things hard. You can do my altruistic route that won't work at all and write your congressman and tell them that the intertubes are broken and get your ear off my end of the intertube.

And yeah, I don't know. I don't know what we're going to do, but we're going to keep talking about it. That's for sure. Yeah. So I got a couple of things I want to throw out real quick. Yep. One of the great places I get some of my links from is my old buddy, Om Malik. He founded GigaOM, a big news organization up in San Francisco now.

He's doing fantastic. I am so proud of him. He's a great guy. I met him way back. And he's got a blog at om.co. Om, just not O-H-M. Om.co. And he just does a post every now and again called What I'm Reading Today.

That's it. And he posts some of the best links that you're going to find anywhere to read. Period. Great stuff. And I recommend just getting whatever newsreader still works. Newsreader still works. Yes. And throwing them in your RSS feed because he posts some good, good stuff.

So check him out. Will do. One of the other things, as a domainer, a guy who owns lots and lots of domains. Yes. My go-to registrar for, God, over 10 years now has been Dotster. And I'm still there.

They were great in the beginning. And I think everybody's just gone now. So I've been moving everything to Hover, which is basically a branch of Two Cows. It's actually started by the guy, Ross Rader, who bought my company, Blog Rolling, from me. So I haven't talked to him in years.

So this is not any kind of nepotism or whatever. They just run a damn good service. So I'm moving everything over to them. And we're not getting any kind of advertising money or anything from there. It's just a good service that I am loving to death.

Actually, a free valet service. So you can just write them an email and say, here's the login account for my registrar. Can you go get all my domains and move them to you? And they will do it for you for free. Oh, there. Done. Okay. And built-in domain privacy.

Like at Dotser, it costs you $3 a year. Any registrar now, they get you on all the upsells because the margins are so small. Yeah. It's free at Hover. You get free domain privacy. Excellent. It's great. I will have to make that switch. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I've used Dotser for years.

Love them too. The process of doing anything with them now is a nightmare. The upsells are all over the place. It's just frustrating these days. Yeah. And I mean, I found them, this is the weird story about Dotser and how I found them. They're Canadian, right? They're right on the border of Canada.

So they toggle. They toggle. The first day that you could get, basically when they opened up registrars from anybody except Network Solutions. Remember when you could only buy domains through Network Solutions?

Yeah. Way back in the early days. Oh, yes. This was the first day that you could get other registrars to buy domains, which means you could get domains with the seven dirty words. So you could get domains with fuck in them. And I registered three domains with Dotser and I've been with them ever since.

I still have one left. I have one left. I sold the other two for a gargantuan amount of money and I have one left. I have fucko.com. Oh, yes. I will keep that forever. I think I still have an email address you set up for me with that. No, it got dumped. I moved a couple times.

But if you want it back, I can set you up. No, it's okay. I'm good. I had a lot of friends who wanted fucko.com email addresses. It was very strange. I should have turned it into a service. I tried to register it with Google Apps, but they wouldn't let me because it had a naughty word in it.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, again, why I can't have a Google chip in my brain. I like my naughty words. Yeah, seriously. That's right. You can't search for porn on Google Apps, can you? Uh, no. I think they're trying to block all that, which is, you know, whatever. We don't need overseers, people.

We can take care of ourselves. The net was great when it was free. Keep it that way. And that's a good note to go out on. Later. Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks, or email them at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

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