288: Ten Times the Nerve

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by RxBar. For 25% off your first order, visit rxbar.com slash GOG and enter promo code GOG at checkout. 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 out here in wonderful Woodland Hills. You've always complained about how hot it is in your garage and I'm a little chilly actually. It's kind of nice today. Yes, it is. It's actually not bad. We have a new thing. We have a new thing for people to do. Found this out this week. If you have an iPhone, you can turn on Siri and say, hey Siri, subscribe to the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast.

And hopefully everybody that wasn't subscribed now will be. But yeah, you can actually subscribe to podcasts using Siri now. Isn't that kind of cool? That is kind of cool. Oh, the technology. Oh, the technology. Oh, the places you'll go. Like space? Like space. Yes, this week I got to see my first SpaceX launch. Oh my God. Was that the coolest thing ever?

You were very excited. I got a lot of messages. I actually, it happened exactly when I was putting my son down to bed. So I missed it. It did not have the big lingering light like we had last time, which I was able to see and take pictures of. So I missed this one completely. You were very excited. And I, I tried to figure out why I wasn't so excited about it. And I realized maybe I'm a bit jaded. I grew up here. So I was used to the space shuttle flying overhead as a kid all the time and hearing the sonic booms and it landing and all that sort of stuff. So, so I'm like a seasoned space veteran.

Oh, look at you seasoned spaceman. Yes. Well, I'm not, this is my first, well, I've seen missile launches from Vandenberg before when they would do missile launches. Yeah.

But this one, I, I just caught it. I set a timer 10 minutes before it was supposed to go off, sat down and I saw 10, nine, eight, and just hauled ass outside, killed all the lights. And was just, I had, I'd kind of figured out where Vandenberg was. So I kind of knew where to watch. So I saw this thing just shoot up over the hill and, you know, I grabbed my roommate, made her come out and watch it. And then when the, uh, the first stage separation happened, she's like, I don't think that's supposed to happen. I'm like, Oh, it's okay. Trust me.

But watching the, the first stage do attitude adjustments to like come back in and watching the little bursts from the rocket. Yeah. That was some cool shit. Yeah. I gotta say. And then running back in the house and watching it land. It was fun. It was just a ton of fun. I was giddy as a school girl and I had to call my dad and tell him to, cause he's a space nut.

Yeah. It's good stuff. I hope we have another one soon. A little bit of followup. I was getting really into actually using Apple news, the new news service that they launched with Mojave. And I really liked it except for the fact that there's no simple quick way to grab a news article URL for show notes, which makes it pretty much useless for me.

So I went in and saw that and I was like, Hmm, let me go check it out. And if you actually, if you do command option C, you can grab the link to the actual article. It's an Apple redirect for an Apple news thing, but that's the problem still though, but it still works. We like our real attribution and in our show notes. I don't want to fill our show notes with nothing but Apple short links.

Yes. It does do one little thing where you have to like take it into a browser and let it redirect and then catch the redirect and put the actual URL in. Yeah. Too much work. Too much work. I know in the news. I was bouncing around Ars Technica this week and I found this article that I was just kind of flabbergasted by Fitbit data used to charge 90 year old man in gruesome hacking murder case.

And it's not hacking like a computer hacking. No, this guy stabbed his stepdaughter to death. Okay. Yeah. 67 year old stepdaughter. Okay. Yeah. So I thought that was kind of interesting because they looked at her heart rate and when it spiked and when it stopped and then they timed it to when he was seen leaving the scene and things like that.

And basically said, ah, yeah, this doesn't kind of line up to your story there, buddy. So you're going to the Popo jail. Oh, okay. See, I thought just scanning at the headline, I thought the 90 year old was wearing the Fitbit and they were using it to track his locations and where he was at the time. Nope. Nope. Nope. They were tracking the heart rate of the woman that was killed so they could, you know, match up their timelines.

But the 90 year old guy is the one that killed the 67 year old and she's the one that had the Fitbit. So hello, Black Mirror. Interesting. California's at it again. We are now passing legislation on the Internet of Things. Good. Yeah. Sorta.

Sorta, kinda. It's about passwords and default passwords and hard-coded passwords. And California wants to regulate what these device manufacturers are bringing into the state. Okay. And saying that, look, if you're going to sell these things here, you have to be able to reset the passwords. You can't have dumb admin, admin passwords and stuff like that.

And the register over in the UK says, hey, that's a good thing. Kinda. Because what they don't address in this bill are software updates, which is one of the bigger problems. Because the software updates are what lets you fix security holes. Not just passwords.

Right. So it's a step, it's one step forward, two steps backwards almost. Well, is it though? I mean, you can't force people to do software updates. Well, I guess you can. Apple does. Microsoft does. Everybody does. Everybody does. Yeah. So that's an interesting thing because as an old school computer guy like you and I both are, I hate the idea of forcing updates.

I understand the security reasons for them. I'd like to be able to check and see what they are and pick and choose them. I wouldn't like it to be forced upon me. It's a better step than nothing. Yeah, but when it comes, we're not talking about your computer though. We're talking about devices who are like, you know, one-stop shop.

Yeah. Point the camera there, camera go. It's not like, oh, is word going to stop working on my security camera if I update, you know? Yeah, fair enough. But look, I think if nothing else, I like the idea of they're not being hardwired passwords, which a lot of these manufacturers were doing. Yeah, definitely.

So we got to do something. Something must be done, people. In other news, based on a breach that happened in March and they didn't tell us about until August and now they're not going to do anything really about it until next August, but Google has decided to shut down Google+.

It's about damn time. Yep. I wonder if they're going to make t-shirts like Ello did. Yeah. Evil. It's just going to say evil. Yeah, pretty much. So yeah, they found a bug in one of the people's API that allowed apps access to data from Google+, profiles. You know, a lot of us think that this probably didn't affect us, but we all signed up for a Google+, profile back when we thought it was going to be a thing.

I know I still had an account. I still do. I've got like, I've got a lot of followers on Google+, just nobody actually goes and checks in anymore. Yeah, at all. So this included data from fields such as names, email, occupation, gender, and age. So quite a lot. So, but they're like saying, it didn't include any information from your posts.

Well, who the fuck is posting? Well, that and the posts are public. Yes, and that's the information that we don't care if it gets out there. That's the stuff we want to get out there. Yes. Oh, Google. Somebody missed the mark on that one.

Yeah. So good times there. And then I found a really interesting article over on Slate talking about smart speaker usage. As we expected, there's been some studies now, but as you and I have always expected, a whopping 90% of responders report that streaming music is the main thing that they use.

They're smart speakers for, which is exactly what you and I do, followed up with weather forecasts and searching for factual information. However, the interesting thing about this is that the new, the thing that's gaining the most popular popularity in usage with these things now is basically just chatting with them, asking fun questions, and making your virtual friend.

Oh, my God. How lonely and sad are you? Yeah. I mean, I'm not even that bad. And as you guys know, I don't even have any friends. There's shit. Yeah. I don't even talk to my Alexa. Yeah. So this is what people are doing now, especially particularly with Alexa, because there are so many skills out there that kind of engage and enable conversational topics and, you know, playing Jeopardy and blah, blah, blah, learning fun facts.

And I can see this with my kid. He's gotten used to me talking to it. He wants to talk to it. He walks up to it and goes, echo music. And I can see him speaking to it in the next couple of years, just conversationally. And they're saying this is, you know, just a sign of how used to this we're getting, how commonplace having these kind of digital assistants in our lives is now.

No, I mean, I can see that. I can definitely see that. I wish I could have mine in the house so I could do it. Yeah. My wife still hates it. Well, now we have a new in-home device. This time it comes from Facebook. Yeah. Oh, Facebook, do you never learn?

Haven't they figured out we don't really trust them yet and we probably don't want Facebook cameras all throughout our house? Yeah, this is the new Facebook portal, which is, it's kind of like the Echo Show. It's a portal that takes your personal private information and delivers it directly to Facebook.

Yeah. And then on to Russia. Okay. Good morning, comrade. That's my new Facebook login. I'll talk to my portal and just say, good morning, comrade, and it will turn on. That'll be my trigger word. And one of them is like a little tinier device and one's a big device.

One's a 10.1 inch display and one's a 15.6 inch display. The bigger one just looks like somebody glued an iPad to a stick. But, and I thought maybe that's what it was. Like you could just bring your own iPad and click it to it. But no, it's their own actual proprietary device. And it spins so you can have portrait or landscape mode.

Why? I don't know. Oh, so you, when you're, when you're trying on your clothes for your girlfriend, you can see if your ass looks fat. Right. Well, that's the Amazon camera. We've already got one of those. We don't need one of these. Facebook. I have an Amazon show and yeah, this is basically a competitor to it, except, you know, I don't trust Facebook at all.

So I'm not going to get a Facebook version. Never. I did not see a single person who was talking about this article that said that this was a good idea and that they would buy the one because nobody trusts Facebook right now. Yeah. You'd think somebody on the product team would actually like pull the plug on this one for a while and let things settle down a little bit.

Hmm. Nah. Of course not. Why? Hey man, let's move fast and break things and we can do it while we watch you in your own home. Yeah. This is a little frightening. It does. On the plus side, it does allow Alexa to control it as well. So you can have Amazon's voice assistant. So Facebook has obviously been too far behind in the AI game to have their own version.

Well, as we know from the head of AI from Facebook, that AI doesn't exist. Yeah. As he told us with his own words. Yeah. So you can use Echo, but I would, you know, personally recommend just go get an Echo show to make these easy phone calls. They're phenomenal. Yeah. I thought about it. I actually did think about it, but you know, I'm going to call my dad and I bought him an iPhone seven plus.

I gave him my old iPhone seven so I can FaceTime if I need to. You can just do that. Yep. And that's why I have an iPad too. I don't need another device for this crap, but the, uh, the portal from Facebook comes in at one 99 for the 10.1 inch display and three 49 for the 15.6. And if you buy two, you get a hundred dollars off.

Pretty pricey still. Now, Brian, have you seen this new Verizon commercial with the firefighters and the first responders? No, but I do seem to remember there being a story that we talked about where Verizon totally screwed firefighters. Yes. They were throttling their data while they were actually fighting fires.

Great. And, and that was a whole big thing. So now in another, another case of somebody in PR not knowing what the fuck they're doing, let's make a commercial. Every call is different. So the only thing that we can do to make sure that we get there safely, and then we leave that scene safely and go home at night is train.

And we train all the time in the fire service. No matter how much we train, the last thing you want in disaster is to lose communications. Without communications, we have, people get hurt. When disaster strikes, that is when your communication service can really become your lifeline.

We are constantly innovating from a dedicated lane on our network, just for first responders to cell towers on wheels. We can even fly cells in drones. So communications stay up in times of crisis, their calls go through and they can get their job done.

We know what we're getting into when we sign on to take care of people and make sure everyone comes home safe. That's what my number one goal is. Except when they throttle the shit out of you when you're in the middle of a forest fire. Yeah, that is some damage control right there that costs them a lot of money. Yeah, we have, we have a dedicated lane that you can't drive on unless you want to pay $39.95 a month.

Now, the thing about this reminds me is like, don't we have radios for first responders and firefighters? Don't we have encrypted communications for these guys? Isn't that like part of the thing? No. Okay. Not anymore. Well, cops, cops got it. So why don't firefighters have that?

No, no, no. That's a good question. Yeah. So that's a... Well, thanks, Verizon. Thanks, Verizon. You're making me feel so much safer already. Now, we haven't talked about Bird for a blissful hot second, but we're back to it now. They have... This blows my mind.

They have a scooter delivery service. Oh, no. Oh, yes. So since it's now a little bit more difficult to find a scooter if you need one, you can request a scooter to be delivered to your home or business. The Bird Rep will drop the scooter off by 8 a.m. It will be reserved exclusively for you and can be used throughout the day.

This is designed to help the habit of using a bird scooter to commute every day, guaranteeing that one will be available to you. It does seem inefficient and somewhat backwards because someone is using a gas-burning car to drive an electric scooter to you, but isn't it convenient? So convenient.

Now, when you first put this in here, I thought this was going to be like, you know, like DoorDash, but on scooters. Like you could get your food, your burrito brought to you by some dude on a scoot-scoot. Nope, nope. They will bring the scooter to you, so then you can scoot-scoot. That's even dumber than the first idea I had. Yes, it is.

I love it, though. Well, they're pointing out on Twitter that this is going to serve as a clever hack for the company to operate in cities where it hasn't yet been approved because they can't dump them off anywhere. So you will now have a fleet of trucks driving around delivering birds because they can't just be left anywhere, although it doesn't say what happens when you get to work and then you have to leave your scooter there.

Do they have a concierge service that then comes and picks it up and then delivers it again to you when you need to leave work? I think what we're going to have is here a fleet of guys driving around following you on your bird, so when you're done, they can put it back in the truck. Are you done with your bird, sir? Here, let me take that from you. Yeah. Why don't you just, you know, get a ride in the truck?

Yeah, take a ride in the truck. Idiots. Oh, this next one. Hat tip to Jason Bryant from the Matt Talk Podcast Network. He sent this over to me on Twitter. You can now use SnapCrap to report piles of literal shit on SF streets. Hey, the task force came up with an app.

I don't think this is the task force. I think this is a private citizen that came up with this because I'm pretty sure that the city would not allow it to be called SnapCrap. But what you do is you can take a picture of some poo and then it'll send it to the San Francisco Public Works Department and with the GPS coordinates and they can come on and scoop it up on their birds.

I love this. I think this app should be worth way more than SnapChat is. Exactly. Yes, yes. You know what? Snap should actually buy these guys. They should. They should. Oh, I love it. I can just see a fleet of guys like flying around San Francisco on scooters like on their back instead of like a sword, like a broad sword.

They just have pooper scoopers. They can just come by and scoop it up as they go by like they're jousting the poo. God, I hope the app's icon is either a roll of toilet paper or just the poop emoji. It is pretty much just the poop emoji. It's the poop emoji. Okay, perfect. It's the poop emoji. I am poop. Oh, my God.

I love it. I love it. I love it. Yeah, it was done by one guy named Sean Miller. It's only got 3.1 stars. That's sad. That is sad. I love it. In the screenshot, it just says, I see poop.

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Media Candy Rowan Atkinson has announced that he's finished with Mr. Bean, to which I say, I mean, wasn't Mr. Bean done after the very first skit? Yeah, pretty much. Okay. Well, no more. I was never a Mr. Bean fan. Neither was I. I can't really say that I'm sad about that.

I suppose some people are. I watched a movie this week. Good for you. Cloud Atlas. Oh, my God. I still don't know if I liked it or not. I don't know if it was good or not. Okay. I watched it, though. All right.

That's all I got. Damning with no praise. It was engaging. It was. I was bored. I watched a little bit of it here and there, and I just couldn't. I couldn't follow it. I couldn't keep up. I just, I quit. Yeah, I think as good of an actor as Tom Hanks is, I think it would have benefited from him not being the main character.

Because I just, too many associations now with him. When he was running around as the futuristic guy, I was just like, oh, where's Wilson? And, you know, things of that nature. So it did seem really good. I then read up a little bit about it. I see what they were trying to do. It's just, I don't think they did it.

Okay. Fail. You know what? That reminds me. I saw another movie, like, a little while ago that they were coming out around the same time. I saw Jupiter Rising. Oh, I heard that was a steaming pile. Oh, my God. That is one of the worst sci-fi movies I've ever seen. That's like up there with Battlefield Earth.

Oh. The John Travolta Scientology one. Yep. Oh, that one was bad. Oh, well. And speaking of decent things, Star Trek Discovery season two will premiere January 17th. So get your Sweden ready. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not really jumping up and down about that one.

I'm excited to see where they go with it. And, you know, we've got some time until we get Picard back. This is true. This is true. Oh, I did see some news about that as well. I forgot to put that in the show notes because I just saw it this morning. The showrunners for the Picard show have confirmed that it is not a single season show. They're definitely planning for multiple season arcs.

Oh, sweet. So we're not going to get a one and done Picard. Yeah. I can't see Patrick Stewart coming out of, you know, Star Trek retirement to just have them say, ah, we'll see if it's any good and pick it up for another season. I'm sure he's just like, you know. Yeah. If I'm doing it, I'm doing it, people. Yeah, exactly. Make it so, bitches.

Sir Patrick Stewart. Did you see the sir part? Exactly. Yeah. Knighted motherfuckers. And some Zane Lamprey news. Mm-hmm. He's got a new show. Yes. Four Sheets. Because Three Sheets apparently was not enough anymore. He's got to up the sheet count. I think I probably would have gone with a completely different title because Four Sheets doesn't really make much sense.

No, it kind of doesn't. Yeah. But it's on a new network. Yes. Which I think is very strange. Great. Another monthly thing that I have to pay for. It's on the BrewDog network. Right. Say what? Yeah. Is there anything else on the BrewDog network?

Couldn't really find out. This might just be it. There's only, I think there's two episodes out now. Okay. Are there, is there one free to view or do we have to sign up for the network? I do believe you get a seven-day free trial and then it's $4.99 a month. And have you done this? No, I just found out about this and I haven't had any time.

All right. So for next week, I will definitely be checking out Four Sheets on the seven-day trial. I was just kind of hoping there'd be more episodes to binge through. Ready to go. Yeah. Well, maybe I'll wait. Yeah. I think I might just wait a little bit. I'll wait until they're all out then do a seven-day binge-a-thon. There we go. Sorry, Zane. I bought your rum.

Yeah, seriously. Oh man, that rum is good. I wish I could find it again. So I'm going to San Francisco in a couple of weeks. I'm going to go see Jawbreaker again. Okay. I love Jawbreaker. So I went on a Jawbreaker binge because I used to see him all the time in Chicago when I was a kid. There's a place in Elmhurst, Illinois.

It's called McGregor's. It was like the CBGBs of the suburbs of Chicago. Right. Everybody played through there. I mean, I think I've seen Green Day like 10 times there. I've seen so many bands there. It was ridiculous. And I found a really good quality video from August 23rd, 1992.

Okay. Yeah. If you're a Jawbreaker fan, go check it out. I'm actually not in this one like I was in that picture in the Green Day documentary. Right. I was under the camera guy. So I'm not in it. But friend of the show Bob is in it. He's actually singing in it. Nice. So at one point when they do Equalize, if you see a gentleman with very long flowing locks get up on stage, very animated and screaming into the microphone, that is Robert Fogarty who does our voiceovers.

It's pretty fun. And speaking of Robert, he sent me a new Spotify playlist he's been working on called Experiments in Terror, Halloween Music for 2018. And it's a curated spooky playlist, but they're all like kind of surf tunes. Yeah. I was listening to a little bit of it yesterday. It's pretty good.

Yeah. There's some really good stuff on there. I quite enjoyed it. And if you want to like have a little sphincter clenching moment, because I hate heights, I found this thing over National Geographic. It's called Free Solo 360. It's a new movie that's coming out by Jimmy Chin, who's, you know, an adventure photographer.

Basically, any great adventure photography you see, he does. He's the one that's always hanging off the side of the mountain. He's done a couple documentaries already. This is a 360 camera view of this guy climbing up and it's on YouTube. It's just a preview of it. It's like a 10 minute preview. Man, this kid's nuts.

He climbed El Capitan, like, you know, free climb. No ropes, no nothing. And I'm like, uh, no, crazy man. And finally, yesterday morning, I was sitting in bed. I just, I was so exhausted. I had, I was just beat from the weekend. I'm like, I don't want to get up. Let me go find a podcast to listen to because I try and find some new stuff every now and again.

And I heard people talking about Dr. Death from Wondery. Okay. And it's about this Dallas surgeon who was basically a monster. The case was like concluded last year, but I'd never really heard it before. I knew many of the details of it. It's a six parter and they're doing a couple of bonus extras episodes now.

So I kind of binged through eight episodes of it. Uh, it was pretty, it was pretty decent NPR style, true crime shit. Serial-esque. Yeah, it's all, yeah, pretty much, you know, it's a serial alike, but it was decent. No, I think it's funny because you always say you don't really like Game of Thrones because it's sadness porn yet.

You seem to be attracted to these sadness porn podcasts. Well, no, I mean, this is the first one I've listened to in years. I'm kind of over that crap. And that's the other thing I'm like going through like, you know, the podcast list trying to find something new to listen to. And with the Apple iTunes charts, just such a firestorm right now of crap.

All these marketers are in there and you know, it's just terrible. So, but the, all the other ones that are out there just, you know, death and murder and crap. Right. So it's just like, eh, I'll try one of them and that way I get it out of my system for a while. Cause I'm not going to go listen to serial season three. No, thank you. No, me either.

I have not heard a single review. Nobody has said a thing about it. Nope. No buzz. No nothing. Nope. Yeah. So friend of the show, Carl Wallinger, who is basically World Party, the band should be working on new music, but instead has been screwing around with the video software for a while. So he posted a premiering tonight, today, whenever the fuck time it is where you are.

Here's a video update of Ship of Fools. Ship of Fools being one of his biggest songs. It's a cool new video that he did. He's not in it. It's all video montage work. So if you are a Trump snowflake, you will get triggered, but everybody else should enjoy this. Okay. It's quite good. I'm not sure if this guy's really a moron, other than, you know, it's not something you'd want to do if you wanted to keep your wife, or girlfriend in this case.

A guy put his girlfriend up for sale on eBay. He's a 34-year-old guy named Dale from the UK. He put her up, he put an advert up for Kelly, comparing her to an old car, warning potential buyers that she made a constant whining noise. And she has no serious damage, but you can see that she's been used.

Oh my God. He listed the body work as fairly tidy, but close-up shows signs of wear, adding that the rear end leaks a bit, but nothing that can't be plugged. Oh. Oh, man. The ad was meant as a small retaliation after Kelly hit him on the ass with a horsewhip at a bridal shop.

Initially, the ad received only a few bids from Dale's friends, but within 24 hours, it had been viewed more than 8,000 times, and more than 100 bids had racked up with the highest bid of 70,000 pounds. Oh my God. Unsurprisingly, the advert was taken down by eBay, although it seems that she had a sense of humor about it and was hoping that the number would go up quite a bit so she could leave.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Thanks, Dale. See ya. See ya. So, a little fun stuff on the internet. A friend of the show, Mike, sent me this, a motobag, world's first motorized rideable luggage, and I do believe, Jason, you're right. You put in the show notes that we've covered this before.

We had, but this is a new video. Oh, okay. I don't know if you've watched the video yet. No. Oh, boy. Here we go. Hi, my name's Kevin, and I'm the inventor of Motobag. My team and I put together this great new product that's going to change the way the world travels.

So, here's the scenario. You just ride it to the airport. You need to make your flight. Do you want to walk, or do you want to ride? And here we go. It looks so stupid. Oh my God. Today, we have the Motobag. It's three times faster than walking.

It's TSA and FAA compliant, so you can actually fly with it. It goes right in your overhead, 22 by 14 by 9. You've got 85% of the storage space you can have from a regular carry-on. It's able to charge your devices. All right, you can kill it.

That's enough of that. You don't need to see any more of that. No. It's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. You look like a moron, and it's done in such a horrible infomercial style. They've got the screen side by side, so you see this woman who's all put together riding this bag looking like a moron. But, on the other screen, it's so difficult to cook pasta.

It's so difficult to walk through an airport. This guy's sweating, pulling on his tie, taking off his jacket, because walking is hard. Oh man, he just looks so sad. I wish I had one of those. Probably the woman, not the bag. Probably. Wow, that's interesting.

Do we know how much these things are? Are they still in the Kickstarter phase? I think it's still in the financing phase. Yeah, go figure. You'll never see these. Oh yes, as you said, we have reached peak stupid. I tend to agree with you there. People just need to walk anymore. I don't get it.

Are we fat or not as a country? Because we keep getting fatter, yet we keep inventing devices to help us not walk. Yeah, I know. Let's talk about Banksy for a second here. Okay. So, did you see the big prank this week where he shredded one of his paintings after it was sold at auction?

I did. Now, I don't care about that. Me either. It's cute. It's a cute thing. It's fine. My problem here is Banksy is on Instagram. Now, the most elusive artist in the world who never wants to get caught is on Instagram. Isn't Instagram giving its geolocation data to Facebook now?

That's what I'm saying. Okay. And even in his Instagram profile, he's like, I'm not on Twitter. I'm not on Facebook. But I'm here. Yeah, not on Facebook, not on Twitter. And then he puts the URL for his website. And, you know, he's got video from the actual event where it's done.

How hard would it be to go pull the video from Sotheby's and figure out which one he is? People are already trying to do that. There are a few articles out there because, remember, everybody once thought it was the guy from Massive Attack because appearances of his artwork matched up with their touring schedules. Yeah. Apparently, he was actually at the auction as well.

But they also think it could be this other guy that I hadn't heard of. So they were two people, two prime candidates to be Banksy. Both were there and shot video. Oh, interesting. Okay. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Maybe Banksy is actually two people. Maybe Banksy is a collective. Yeah. Much like Massive Attack itself.

Or Nakamoto, whatever his name is, Bitcoin guy. Oh, Bitcoin guy. Satoshi Nakamoto. Yeah. I think the interesting thing about this is just I spent a lot of time in the art world because I've known a lot of artists and things of that nature. And I've always felt that the art world is complete and utter bullshit.

I think this proves it. Oh, yes, it does. I mean, a million dollar auction and then it just destroys itself. And now the art critics are saying it's worth even more now. Of course they are. Of course they are. Yeah. And how much says Sotheby's was in on it? Oh, it had to be. How would you not notice that there's a shredder in this frame?

Exactly. Like, why does this painting weigh 87 pounds? And need to be plugged in. Yeah. Yeah. It didn't need to be plugged in. No, it didn't. The battery was hooked up to this. Yeah, but how long, what if that battery went out by the time they sold it? Somebody had to be able to swap it out. Yeah, there's something fishy's going on here.

Or whoever was selling it knew all about it. Everybody knew. Yes. I think it was just a stunt. Yeah. Now, hero of the week. Yes. Chance the Rapper. Yes. He's a big fan of Chicago. Okay. And this week he's donating $1 million to Chicago Mental Health Services and another $100,000 each to 20 area schools.

This is how you do it when you get rich. That's very nice. Yeah. Everybody in Chicago loves that guy. You know what I don't like about Chance the Rapper? What? He does that entire Microsoft commercial about Microsoft AI and tells us that AI is here. I didn't realize that was him. That's him. Oh, well.

You win some, you lose some. That's right. Feedback loop. We have some new Patreon subscribers. Chris, Holly, Michael, and Brent. Thank you so much. And we had some comments over on Patreon as well from some of our supporters. Sharif writes us, I love your now twice a week format.

You guys have one of the best produced on par with and definitely more entertaining than the NPR and Gimlet podcasts. Booyah! Suck it, Reply All. I still can't get enough. I've gone back and listened to the last few podcasts a second time because I couldn't wait for the next one. You guys rock. Well, thank you very much, Sharif.

Thank you. Peter writes in, calling all geeks, young and old welcome, but pleasant, distempered need not apply, looking for grumpy responses only. Ha, but really, in my new job, I've been tasked with working on coding RPG4 for an IBM AS400 system that handles report generation.

Do you use punch cards for that? No, you don't actually. I'll tell you a little bit about that in a second. Seeing as the system was about 10 years old by the time I graced the earth with my presence, I have no experience working with it. Since the architecture is completely different from x86, I can't even set up a VMware box to connect to.

Moreover, it seems that pub400.com is no longer offering free account registration, and the only accounts allowed are existing users. I was hoping someone could suggest a good way for me to learn developing for the IBM AS400 without risking me accidentally-ing the whole GD mainframe.

Any advice would be wonderful. Thanks, all. Well, turns out my mom used to program for the AS400. We had one in our house. You know what she had for that? Lots and lots of manuals. Yeah. She RTFM'd, and that was pretty much it. So maybe you can find some AS400 manuals at a garage sale in 1986.

If you can create a time machine, you can go back. I didn't even know the AS400 was still around. I know she was working on those. She made a lot of money for Y2K. Right. When everybody was redoing all their systems. But I have not heard of an AS400 in 15 years at least.

Yep. It's a bit old. Sorry, Peter. I have no idea. If anybody out there does know, get in touch. Mm-hmm. We'll pass it along to Peter. And Jim also writes us, Hey, guys, I just got a nice email from haveipenpiond.com, which says, Why, yes, you have. This included the link to a Wired story on LinkedIn Salesforce data.

No big deal. Just another example of some company I've never heard of gathering a bunch of info about me so they can sell it to other companies I've never heard of, but they don't have the basic competency to password protect a public-facing database. On the plus side, Apollo stressed that the exposed data did not include sensitive information such as password, social security numbers, or financial data.

I say we can have absolute faith in that, right? Loving the show in the new format. Keep up the great work. Yeah, I got that email about 10 seconds before he sent this in, and we'll talk about this with Dave Bittner on Friday. But yeah, it's a pretty big breach. But what they do is they scrape public records and everything else.

It's just they send out robots and scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape. Yep. And over on PayPal, we got some recurring payments from Breed and William. Thank you. Thank you very much. And Mary wrote us and saying, Thanks for the shout-out. Here is $10 for October. You will see the November donation on Patreon. Okay, so no one stars for Marie's book.

No one stars, okay. For Marie's friend's book. Yes, go check that out then. Over on Twitter, Chris writes in, How can I convince my wife that online data security is important? Her argument is, I don't have anything important online. I've tried to explain how it all works, but I'm hitting a brick wall. Let me ask two rhetorical questions really quickly.

First, would you like to keep your wife, your wife? And secondly, have you read the news recently and seen anything about hashtag me too and mansplaining being on the... You may not want to be doing that right now. Yeah, yeah. Or you can just have her listen to our show. Yeah.

Because, you know, we've been trying to explain this to people for almost six years now. And it's hard. It takes some time. You have to be patient. Yes, yes. And start a podcast. Yeah. Well, don't do that. Don't do that. Paul writes in, More to show that deleted doesn't actually mean deleted.

In Gadget's report that Microsoft promises to recover all files deleted by the Windows 10 bug. Say what? So there was a Windows 10 bug that apparently started to eat private data. Things in like your documents and photos photo. And if you've got any problems with that and that's happened to you, you can reach out to a local Microsoft representative who will undelete them all automagically.

Wow. Hold my beer, Microsoft says. I've got your files right here in my back pocket. Yep. Here they are. We didn't really delete them. Yeah. Now, you know, there are undelete utilities because when something is deleted on your computer, they just set the flag to delete and it just stays there until something usually overwrites it.

Yeah. You know, I mean, we've had that since the 90s. The old Norton programs that would go in and try and file save it. This is basically all that's happening. They do say in the report that they say, don't do anything else. Immediately reach out so we can undelete your stuff because if you start doing a bunch of stuff, you're screwed.

Rob Hatfield writes in, another successful AI deployment. This is an image over on Twitter. It says, Microsoft is using AI to make Windows 10 updates smoother. By deleting all your stuff. Yeah. If, paren, user is doing stuff and user has unsaved work, update. And Wesley sent us a tweet, welcome to hell, please select a beverage.

We're going to talk about this later because somebody else just wrote in about this. This is new AI beer, Jason. Oh. Yes, we will get to that in a few seconds. Okay. We have to? Yes. Really? Yes. And Mike Me writes in, the secret to DuckDuckGo is to use the bang shortcut. Then you can escape to Google as needed but still use DDG for day-to-day stuff, e.g.

Bang G esoteric search. My fave is at Wikipedia, e.g. Bang W6502 or Bang Reddit SpaceX if feeling lucky. Okay, that seems like a lot of extra steps. I just remember back in the day when I was like, I considered myself a Google expert because I knew how to use all the special commands.

You don't ever have to do any of this anymore with Google. Google just gets it right. Yeah, for the most part. For the most part. And they just steal everything. And Fernando writes us saying, could it be that at Nouriel listens to you guys? I don't know who Nouriel is, but he links to a tweet.

Yes, blockchain is the most overhyped technology ever. No better or safer than a glorified Excel spreadsheet. Thief! Thief. Joke stealer. Title stealer, even. Yeah, seriously, man. Come on, dude. Write Film Sleep Repeat writes in, great take from GOG Podcast on the stupidity that is Brexit.

We will all be vegan, as in eating from hedgerows once the supplies dry up. Also, great call on The Good Place. One of the few shows in years I had to binge. Yep. And Seth Podchain Lessons also wrote in about that. Just listen to the latest episode and you need to watch The Good Place. It's not a typical sitcom.

Each season is only 13 episodes and there are so many twists and turns. Okay. I went to Sweden. It's on the hard drive. I will watch it soon. I think I just got to dump it to the Synology and then I will start watching The Good Place when I'm in a good place. Also from Seth, I'm working on literal time shifting using AI, ML, and blockchain.

Now fun to me at my new startup called Time. Expect an announcement on that soon. Well, we should have it already if you're time shifting. Yeah, I know. So go back in time. Do it on episode one. Yeah, seriously. We should go back and re-listen to episode one. Maybe it's there. Maybe it's there. It's like the end of Bill and Ted.

And Christopher and I am Mr. Dom both sent us stuff about Amazon and the $15 minimum wage. I am Mr. Dom writes in, oh sure, Bezos is a saint. Ooh, $15 an hour minimum wage. Hang on a second. Maybe not so much with a link to a Chicago Tribune article about Amazon eliminating monthly bonuses and stock awards for warehouse workers and other hourly employees to pay for the increase in wages.

There's always another shoe. There is always another shoe. However, they are claiming even after the eliminations of bonuses and stock awards, hourly operations and customer service workers will see their total compensation increase. In addition, because it's not a longer an incentive-based system, compensation will be more immediate and predictable.

So that actually doesn't sound too horrible. It does sound like they're killing one program, replacing it with just the money increase. But overall, they're going to get more money. So yeah, I mean, you got to give to take, take to give. Yep, yep, yep.

So Derek writes in and sends us a tweet. And it's an ad for earn money by maintaining electric scooters from Bird. So mechanics.bird.co. So you can now run around. Well, you fix them in the van when you go to drop them off when people want them.

So you have a little, you know, toolkit in the back and then you can, you know, put them back together after somebody has set them on fire or jumped up, dumped them in a river, you know, those kinds of things. So you can join the mechanic team and earn five to $15 for each bird you repair. You can repair as many birds as you want, particularly if you break them yourself.

I was going to say, I think we have a, we have an unlimited money supply here. I know. Yeah, I'll get a hammer and you get a wrench. And I'll get the wrench. And then I'll just follow you around. There we go. Easy breezy, beautiful cover girl. I love that. And Mitch wrote in, that's it.

Going on full Facebook delete. Log in. Purge. Destroy. Mission impossible. 10-4. Good for you. Good for you. And Rocky writes in, I'm sure you're going to talk about this on the next show. So my solution would be a phone app that can log you out of all your accounts with one button. This is a story about New Zealand.

It's become the first country to find passengers who refuse to hand over their phone passwords at the border. Whoa. Now, it's not everyone. They have to have a reason to ask for this search on you. But yeah, they will find you a ton of money.

You'll be charged quite a bit and face having your device confiscated as well as prosecution. If you do not give them their passwords, they're saying you will not, they will not access the cloud. It's a file-by-file search on your phone itself. So we will examine your phone while it's in flight mode.

And you, again, have to have a reasonable cause to suspect. But this will stop the Grumpy Old Geeks Tour to New Zealand. No, it won't. I'm just going to leave my phone at home. Bug it. I'll bring some film to take my pictures. But I really want to go to New Zealand so bad. Me too. Over on GOG.show, Tammy writes in, Every goddamn episode I've been meaning to email y'all and say hi.

Love the podcast so much. You guys saved me the hassle of attempting to keep up to date on everything that's wrong on the internet all on my own. So thanks for that. I've been in this industry almost as long as you two. Hence, I'm a proud Grumpy Old Geek. Or even better, the elusive Grumpy Old Girl Geek. And every time I hear y'all go through your resumes on the air, I'm like, yep, been there, done that.

The only difference is you guys escaped and I'm still up to my neck in the web dev world. Whee! Oh, the reason I finally emailed now. Thought I'd check out Notehost Jason was talking about. We'll probably give them a few bucks to check them out. As I'm also curious about the pricing and like supporting my Canadian brethren. I did notice they have an affiliate program as well, though.

So to help alleviate my guilt for not making my way to Patreon for GOG quite yet, Jason, send me your affiliate link and you can have 20% of my $1.20 a month. Cheers. And I love the 2x a week thing as well. Tammy. Well, thanks. I'll dig it up. I didn't even know. David wrote in, just listening to you talking about social media portability.

How about WordPress type things with RSS? Make a blog more suited to short updates and photos like we share on Facebook. Have a public page for your public posts and a private page you log into. Follow people by subscribing to their RSS and their posts will appear on your private page. There could be private RSS feeds for friends only or group only posts.

The biggest thing in it would be to have a universal distributed directory for authentication so that granting access to a private RSS to friends is easy. Build it to handle the Facebook dump so you can import your existing Facebook. We should be able to do this. How hard could it be? Do you want to actually do something for a change? This is actually a very old idea.

Very old idea. Is that kind of how it should have been built to begin with? Well, I mean, that's one of the things about RSS. We've tried this. Yeah. And it just doesn't work because it takes a little bit too much technical competency to pull something off like this. Yeah. And then you just run into roadblocks with it. But we've actually, I mean, you know, the micro formats guys tried a lot of stuff with this like Tontech and those guys.

And I mean, we brainstormed this to death over cases and cases of beer. And maybe that's why we never got anywhere. But yeah, it's a tougher problem to solve than you think. Because once you go down the rabbit hole on it, it's like, oh, yeah, what about this?

What about that? There's just edge cases that come up. And it's just, it's a harder thing than you think. But Tim Berners-Lee's on it, so we don't have to do anything anymore. That's true. That's true. And he also sent in a link from rockpapershotgun.com. Another case of a Kickstarter biting off more than they can chew. First, I've heard of this one. Actually looks pretty cool.

And hopefully it might be a case a bit like Blender where it could be picked up by an open source community. Now, this is something called, it's a sandbox space sim limit theory that has been canceled six years after a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. So let's Kickstarter it again. Because main developer Josh Parnell is simply exhausted from working on it for so long.

One quick question about this article. How, he never released it. It never came out. How is it a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter? Well, he got paid $187,865. Well, yep. And I guess that's six years of his life and it's never coming out.

He is going to release all the source code, but he says he's done. Wow. I guess you can do that when you take almost $200,000 and just say, here, finish it for me. I'm pooped. I'm done. Pooped. Gabe writes in, hi, fellow grumps. If it wasn't blatant enough that 23andMe's real business model was selling your genomic and personal data, this company laid out in their SEC filing the going rate for different types of genomic data it plans to collect and monetize from its users.

Wow. And so here, according to the SEC filing, $0.14 for 20 days of Fitbit data, $3.50 for a genome-wide microarray, $3.50 for a whole microbiome, and $21 for a whole genome. So now we know what the cost of human DNA is. Human DNA.

Yes. Okay. Interesting. To be fair, the arrangement sounds consensual, much like the college kids filling in surveys for a cup of Joe. While I might not be up for handing over my microbiome, i.e. poop DNA, for a few bucks, it sure beats some of the blockchain buzzwardery competition mentioned in the article, which will compensate you for your genomic data with their own custom crypto with the oh-so-witty name, DNA.

God help us. Love the twice-weekly format. Keep up the great work, Gabe. Thanks, Gabe. Thank you. Geraldo writes this. Hello, guys. I'm a listener from Brazil, and hearing the show makes my hour-and-a-half commute to work almost enjoyable. You guys rock. Here are two questions I would, if possible, like to have discussed on the show with Mr. Bittner. Well, we're going to take it without Mr. Bittner, because he's not here today.

One, I fully agree that using a password manager is a must, but I've always wondered if the service providers, the company providing the management service, such as 1Password, was hacked. That would be a disaster, as the hackers would have access to all passwords. I guess it's one of those situations where this is the best option we have, because nobody can actually have strong passwords on everything without storing it somewhere, right?

Well, 1Password doesn't have my passwords. They have my passwords, because I'm using the 1Password cloud service. No, they have yours, not mine. Right, but they don't have the keys. Yes. I am the one that came up with my very long passphrase to log into 1Password, and all of my passwords are encrypted using my key.

They do not have that key, and there are multiple parts to it, and they're using very strong encryption. Yeah. So I am personally comfortable with leaving all of my stuff on the 1Password site and using the cloud version, because it actually is easier than using the shitty Dropbox sync that I've been using forever.

And the price with upgrading, I did the math on it in a previous show, where it comes out to be just about as much as I was going to be paying anyway for upgrading every year. So I bit the bullet and went with the 1Password cloud package, and I feel comfortable that they are going to take care of my stuff. Yep. Because they have one job.

They really do have one job. Well, how many times in the security segment have we gone, you've got one job. Shit. Yeah. Yeah, but it's pretty... They don't have the keys to the kingdom. This stuff isn't stored in plain text or anything like that, so it is relatively safe. We shouldn't have to worry too much about that. And 1Password is closed source, unlike LastPass, which did have some problems.

Yeah. And the second question, how does a brute force attack work when most of the site services block your access after a few attempts? Ha ha ha! Therein lies the rub! Mm-hmm. A lot of programmers forget about that part. Yes. They completely forget about it. They let you do as many attempts as you want on that password form.

Yes. So that's how you get a brute force attack going. Now, if they actually... And the other method is multiple points of attack, which is why we talk a lot about the Internet of Things and security there. Right, right. You can do a distributed botnet that will do, like, you know, nine attempts. If it's a 10-attempt website, you can do nine attempts on one machine, nine attempts on another.

Spin up a VPN. You can automatically spin up an Amazon VPN, change your IP address a lot. There are ways around it. But for the most part, programmers just forget about that thing. Yeah. A lot of lazy programmers out there. And he finishes with, by the way, Jason, I wanted to ask you this for ages. Really? Die With Your Boots On is the best Iron Maiden song?

Dude. I was one of my first Iron Maiden songs I ever heard, and I still love it to this day. The best way to have gone after him, Geraldo, would have been to drop your favorite song there. Seriously. I mean, my second favorite is Ace's High. Okay. So, go there. Jerry writes in, AI and blockchain for your beer, not the onion.

It is truly time for the next meteor. Yes, it is. So, this is GetIntelligentX.ai. It's beer that learns. Beer recipes that adapt to you using AI delivered to your door. Jason, I think we need to try this. I think we definitely need to try this.

So, it's a big... Okay. We've been using IntelligentX from a brewery in London. Things are changing. We've been working crazy hard to get the beer right where you want it in your home. I hope we can get this here, because the idea is you get four different types of beers, then you get an app so you can train their AI, then they're going to modify the recipes on the beers for your next delivery.

Okay. I like it hoppier. I don't see the AI that would be involved there. I know. Yeah. Seriously. You know what you can do? You can go to BevMo and you say, hey, I kind of like a hoppier beer. Yes. And then the very smart person who likes beer will take you over to the 4,000 beers that they have there and say, try that one.

Try that one. Now, I think they're missing out on a real market opportunity here. They shouldn't be doing the AI beer. They should be doing the DNA beer. You send in your DNA, we will match your beer to your DNA type, and then sell all the information off. Exactly. Yes. And your beer will be delivered on a bird. There you go.

Brian writes in about the Shiru Cafe near Providence. Shaking my head. If you watch a Netflix series called Maniac, Jonah Hill and Emma Stone live in some type of advanced 80s universe where you can purchase items with the use of an ad buddy in lieu of cash. When done, your ad buddy, a physical living person, follows you around for the rest of the day barraging you with ads.

Who to thunk it more than one individual has come up with this insane idea. Time to win the lottery and buy another planet to move to. Amazing work. Continue being grumpy. You know, I've heard this is a good show. Me too. I have not watched it yet. No, it's in my queue. But I know I was talking to Dr. Teeter the other night and he was watching it and he said it was good.

So I'll have to check it out. And he's like, Jonah Hill got skinny. Yes, he did. I've seen the billboards. Insec writes in, I saw an ad for this and I'm kind of interested in hearing your thoughts about it. I'm eager to call bullshit on this. Actually, something relevant or just expensive speakers with app bundled in. Also, greetings from a GOG addict in Finland.

And this is ChooseMuse.com. Yes. Muse is a brain sensing headband that will elevate your meditation experience. It gently guides your meditation through changing sounds of weather based on the real time state of your brain. This allows you to obtain a deeper sense of focus and motivates you to build a highly rewarding practice.

Meditation has been scientifically shown to reduce symptoms, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, it's an expensive headset that's supposed to help you with your meditation. Yeah, it's kind of like one of those feedback devices that you could use to get at Spencer's Gifts for like 10 bucks. Yeah. And I always thought the real point of meditation was to have nothing, to think of nothing.

Now, this is just forcing you to continue to think of something and you're feedbacking with it. So you're engaging your brain, not letting it loose. That's just my thought. Yeah, you're supposed to just, you know, pay attention to your breath. That's what you do. Brian writes in, I was listening to podcast number 286 and someone asked about two-factor authentication tokens and a really good one is VIP Access by Symantec.

I have to use it for work and it could not be any easier to use. All right, there we go. Rick writes in, Brian, off your recommendation, we went to see Gary Newman last night and everything was great. New tunes are good and sound was good. The band was tight. Am I to assume that the music tracks are all giveaways now off the website and he makes the five bucks off massive touring?

Oh, he makes the money, not five bucks. Oh, the big bucks off massive touring. Sorry, not five bucks. Lights were a bit annoying, flashing all the time. Go see them in L.A. I plan to. And yes, like most musicians now, music is a cost giveaway, basically. All the money's from touring and merch. And I don't believe Gary Newman's ever made the massive money, to be honest.

Yeah. I mean, I'm sure he's still doing okay on that cars money. No, he's doing fine with that, but he's never been a crazy, massive rock star. David writes in, came across this. What are your thoughts, guys? And this is a tweet from, oh, crazy man, John McAfee.

He writes, the presidential alerts. They are capable of accessing the E911 chip in your phones, giving them full access to your location, microphone, camera, and every function of your phone. This is not a rant. This is from me, still one of the leading cybersecurity experts. Wake up, people. Yeah, my thoughts on that.

McAfee is full of shit. And basically everybody else has come out that are actual real cybersecurity people and said, no, that's not how it works. Yeah, it's a text. Yeah. You got a text. Yeah. So Jim wrote us, I enjoy the show and learn something every time I hear an episode. Thanks for plugging RBG in episode 286.

While I have no financial interest in the movie, I worked on it, recording location sound over about 16 months. It was a great doc to be part of, especially because having women as the entire Above the Line and creative team made the experience fun. The focus was on making an excellent film, not on egos. I do another film with Betsy and Julie in a heartbeat.

After 35 years making docs, I'm not very sentimental about shows I've done, but bought a copy of RBG for my library. The film is still in a limited theatrical run, six months after it opened in May, and has done around $14 million at the box office. Both are exceptional for a documentary film. How can you see RBG at home?

Not Netflix. He has a direct link to magpictures.com. So I guess you can see it there. Thanks again for GOG, Jim. P.S. The person who wrote you referencing Reagan National is either young or not from here, D.C. Locals call it national. At least those of us who lived through the Reagan years in D.C.

Nice. I actually did watch the movie this week. Yeah. Yeah, I rented it on Amazon. Okay. Very simple. It was five bucks. Very good movie. Yes, it was excellent. Yeah, me and my roommate watched it, and we both really enjoyed it. Well done. Elaine writes in, Hi, guys. Someone has come up with a new font that helps you remember things.

Sans Forgetica. Sans Forgetica. And basically, it screws it up so your brain has to work harder to basically read things. Oh, my God. That's so annoying. Oh, no. Thank you. Also looks like a font for a really shitty sci-fi film. Yeah. This is like something we do in the 90s, like from T26 or something.

Oh, wow. Yeah. No, I'm going to pass on that. Yeah. I know. That's going to give me a headache. Austin writes in, hey, guys. I'm a newer listener recommended by one of my graduate school professors and love the podcast. I heard Jason talking about his migraine problems. I've also had them from time to time and wanted to throw out another potential solution.

Instead of Botox, you might want to try a trip to the dentist. I've got several dentists in my family who've told me about some procedures they use involving the alignment of a patient's jaw specifically to treat migraines. Might be worth doing some research into. I cannot wait to come over here and see Jason's jaw wired shut for a couple of weeks.

Yeah. Bite me. No, I'm not going to the dentist for that. Look, I have to have teeth falling out of my head to go to the dentist. I hate the dentist more than anything. I have a weird nerve disorder where I have 10 times the nerves that most people have in their mouth. So and I'm basically immune to Novocaine now because I've had so much of it.

You've certainly got 10 times the nerve of most people. Yes, I do. That's right. So they have to put me out just for basic stuff. So I'm going to pass on that. Yeah. Gianni writes in, great show, guys. I've been a fan for over a year now. I specifically love how you bash on AI because I was also let down when I learned that it was mostly glorified if statements.

Glorified if statements, indeed. I'd like for you guys to test something out. About two years ago, I couldn't find a truly free audiobook player on the App Store, so I started one and made it open source. Later down the road, a designer joined the project and we completely revamped the app. It'd be great if we could have your feedback. And there's a link to the App Store we'll put in the show notes and the GitHub repo.

So this is pretty cool. It's Tortuga Power book player. Yes. So we'll definitely check that out as long as it works. Oh, yeah. Xcode. Okay. Works on a Mac. I'm happy. There you go. Roy writes in, greetings again from New Zealand. That's the second New Zealander that wrote us this week.

Yeah. You know what? They're trying to get us down there so they can look in our phones. Yeah. They want to get to our phones. Yeah. Love the new format. Twice a week. Excellent. Unfortunately, of late, I have not been able to get my fix of grumpiness regarding scooters from your show. Hey, we did one earlier. So I had to look elsewhere. And this is a news clip from a New Zealand website, stuff.co.nz.

And he warns us, don't look hard at the site because there's a lot of shitty news in there. So we are getting Lime scooters in two of New Zealand cities, Auckland and Christchurch. You'll be able to ride them on the footpath without a helmet because it's a, let's see. What is he saying? New Zealand, it is legal requirement to wear helmets on bicycles and motorbikes.

Okay. So they're allowing them not to wear them. And they can travel up to 27 kilometers per hour or about 16 miles per hour on either the road or footpath, but are banned from the massive cycle lane infrastructure that New Zealand has just spent millions of dollars on developing. I look forward to hearing your, as always, super intelligent discussion on my train ride into work.

Keep up the excellent grumpiness. You make my daily commute fantastic. Well, thank you, Roy. Well, that's interesting that they're not going to let them on the bike path, but they're going to put them next to the pedestrians and the cars. Yeah. With no helmets. With no helmets. Yeah. What could possibly go wrong? All right. Over on iTunes, whole par three writes in five stars.

Love the show. I just started listening to the show last week about five episodes in and love what you guys do. I related it to my husband that it reminds me of the tech TV show screensavers. I love that show. If they were allowed to drink and cuss on the show, that's pretty much what we do here. Yeah. I do agree. Our technology is advanced beyond security law or even basic common sense.

This is the star of how the robots will take over. You guys do amazing stuff. Keep it up. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. And D Croft, too, gave us a five star rating. He says, fun. Listen or she hosts tilting at windmills. Very entertaining. Keep on. We shall. Yes. 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 and snarky review. Closing shout outs. I'd like to give a shout out to our Clash Royale clan.

Still? Yeah. We're still cooking. All right. It's still full up, but I think we're going to do a purge soon because there's a lot of people who have kind of fallen off. And I'm going to say it, but nobody's going to remember it. If you would like to join our Clash Royale clan, it is gog.show. One more time, gog.show.

God damn it. I'm going to be doing that on Twitter all week now. I know you are. Great. Well, I want to congratulate the Dodgers who won their series last night and are moving on to the Milwaukee Brewers. Oh, nice. Congratulations. Thank you. And until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schilmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Support the show and keep us on the air. Go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to gog.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 288.

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