399: Grouch, Out.

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I got a new puppy, Brian. You got a new puppy? Did you sleep much last night? No. I did not get a new kid, and I didn't either, because he has his first ear infection, so that's a good time. Oh, joy. Those are fun. I'm a little tired.

Yeah, me too. I'm slamming a warm Diet Dr. Pepper to get enough caffeine in me to get through this show. Well, that sounds healthy. You do what you got to do, man. It's for the art. It's for the people. Yeah, speaking of doing what you got to do, and it's for the art and for the people, a little follow-up here. We had Peloton Husband, who's been desperately clinging on to any shred of fame that he might have to continue to keep his career such as it is going.

But who was sadly lacking from... Let's all keep in mind, this has only been like two weeks. Yeah. Everything is so sped up these days. It's like, it's been two weeks total since this thing went viral, and Peloton Husband went crazy online, trying to, you know, climb up the ladder of fame.

Who was missing, though? Peloton Woman. But not anymore. Now we know who she is. Her name is Monica Ruiz, and Ryan Reynolds has grabbed onto her shining star of three seconds of internet fame to try to push his gin. She's got a new spot, which only makes sense if you've seen the Peloton ad.

It's kind of clever, so I got to give Ryan Reynolds that. It's funny. She's basically drinking gin, and it says exercise bike not included, and she seems a lot happier, but not as good-looking to me. She doesn't look like the same girl. Okay, maybe you need some gin. Get those rose-colored glasses on.

I thought it was funny. I chuckled. I lulled. Yes, it was funny. It was well done. Very clever and very of the moment, as it were. Yes, speaking of things that aren't funny, though, and of the moment, Away CEO Steph Corey is stepping down. So that was quick.

That was real quick. Yeah, well, you know, they got to keep that going. I'm assuming they're never going to advertise with us again, so F them. Yeah, I figured they were long gone. She says, I'm not proud of my behavior in those moments, and I'm sincerely sorry for what I said and how I said it. She tweeted, I was wrong, plain and simple. Yeah, well, all right.

Maybe take some business classes. She is. She actually has a coach. Okay, good. Well, she's doing the right thing. Too bad she had to step away. If you're going to fix it, stay. They're not a public company, are they? I don't believe so. So what's the problem here? Fix it.

Keep on going. It's a good piece of luggage. My wife loves the Away suitcase, I've got to say. She loves that thing. Well, that's why, you know, they were cracking the whip over there to make the good luggage, I guess. Now, speaking of something, though, that also is not very fun, actually, this is funny as hell.

Anti-vaxxers are asking people to stop calling them anti-vaxxers because it's highly offensive. Oh, God. This week, anti-vaxxer group Crazy Mothers, seriously, called Crazy Mothers, posted the request to their Twitter and Instagram pages, and it says, Dear Media, please retire the use of the term anti-vaxxer.

It's derogatory, inflammatory, and marginalizes both women and their experiences. It is dismissively simplistic, highly offensive, and largely false. We politely request that you refer to us as the vaccine risk aware. And, of course, the tweets blew up about this.

And my favorite one says, let's call y'all plague enthusiasts then. Listen, anti-vaxxers, if you need a safe space, you can have one as long as you give my kid, me, my wife, everybody I interact with, a safe space from you.

Like, a physical safe space. Go to a fucking island and die. Damn, somebody's touchy today. I'm sick of being sick. My kid's always sick. I don't need anti-vaxxers running around Santa Monica. Thank you very much. Well, the tit for tat slash drop and trow and whipping it out is continuing.

Right now, China has decided to ban all government departments from using U.S.-made technology. This is, of course, in response to the U.S. government's somewhat justified ban on Huawei stuff because, you know, spying. Well, this is going to be interesting because I'm pretty sure they use a lot more of our tech than we use of theirs.

This is true. This is true. So, but it will not be good for the financial bottom line for many, many companies, including Microsoft, Dell, HP, and Apple, all of which have massive investment and massive money coming from China. So, we shall see what happens now, but this will probably continue for quite some time.

Yeah, and this is just the government departments, not the general public at large. For now. Yes, for now. They can still go ahead and use Windows 10 if they wish. Yes, they can. They can. But that great firewall of China still runs on Cisco hardware as far as I know. Yes, it does.

It's going to be interesting to see what they do about that. I think they're picking and choosing which technologies they're not going to use anymore because, you know, we can't take that down. And I found a really interesting article over at The Atlantic, Meme Thievery Goes Corporate. Now, full disclosure here, I steal memes all the time for the Grumpy Old Geek social media posts.

So, I understand this, but we aren't making a ton of money or just doing that just to kind of make ourselves look cool. But this is the new strategy for marketing to young people. I guess the Gen Z, it's stealing their jokes. They focus on one particular company in this article, Drunk Elephant, which is a fancy skincare product company.

And their Instagram account says absolutely nothing about fancy skincare products. They do a lot of memes. A lot seem to be focused on carbohydrates. So, I'm guessing whoever's the social media person in charge over there must be on the keto diet. And, yeah, it's more and more all these companies are basically just taking memes that are out there and online and reposting them in order to kind of feel like they're your friends.

This is nothing new, though, by any stretch. No, it's totally nothing new. This has been going on forever. Pre-social media, this has been going on. You know, we take and appropriate what's going on in pop culture. Look no further than the follow-up segment in Ryan Reynolds. And I also saw this article over on Vox.

90% of growth in high-tech jobs has happened in just five metro areas. So, yes, the tech industry is very consolidated in a couple metro areas, including Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Jose, Seattle, and San Diego.

They have accounted in and of themselves for over 90% of all U.S. growth in innovation sector jobs. This is from the Brookings Institute. So, 343 metro areas lost a share of these jobs in that same period. The result, of course, is wealth, productivity, and scooters are becoming more concentrated in fewer, primarily coastal cities.

One-third of the nation's innovation jobs reside in just 16 counties. Half are concentrated in 41 counties, and these are all, obviously, high-paying jobs and contribute to overall faster wage growth in the areas they're located. But, yeah, we're seeing consolidation in just a couple cities.

Not even, you know, all major cities anymore. It's just a few. And this has a downside, of course. There's the traffic, the aforementioned scooters, ballooning housing prices, wage growth so high that smaller firms can't compete. So, yeah, this is a definite problem that's unique to the technology age.

We did not see this before we saw a consolidation in places that, say, were, you know, resource-rich, etc. This is totally by choice, and it's totally destroying the cities that they move into, if you ask anybody that isn't in the tech industry. It's an interesting thing that's going on right now, and basically, of course, people are calling for regulation.

Maybe we move these things around a bit and help people out. I don't know how you do that, but we're going to try, maybe. Yeah, regulation on this one. Yeah, I don't know how that's going to work. It's just where the jobs are. That's where people go. So, it's just what happens. It's where the jobs are. I'm surprised Los Angeles and Chicago and New York aren't even in these.

I'm definitely surprised at L.A. Well, I guess L.A. is such a large area, and it's really only one part of L.A. that's seeing all this stuff. Well, two parts. A lot of people are, Apple's moved downtown and a couple other things, but Silicon Beach here has definitely experienced that. Maybe that's already done. Maybe that's why it's not in the list, because all the tech companies are already here.

There hasn't been, if anything, we've lost jobs here because, you know, stupid companies like Snapchat that can't keep their shit together. Yeah, I was going to say Snapchat probably helped out on that list, because how many engineers have they let go? In the past two years, like most of them? Many, many, yes.

They just kept the staff that is going to build the Glasses version 3. Yeah, I'm just surprised San Diego's on this list out of all the places. You don't really think the high tech is San Diego. I've heard that quite a few people have been moving there. Huh. Yeah, I've heard a lot of companies have actually moved down there. It is beautiful. Don't get me wrong. I do love me some San Diego.

Definitely. And the final article I saw is basically, shockingly, another massive misstep by Yahoo, or now I guess it's Verizon or Oath or whatever they're calling themselves these days. They have had forums, Yahoo groups and all that sort of stuff.

That stuff has been running for over 18 years, which is pretty crazy if you think about it. But a lot of people were still using them and still using them a lot. They're longstanding communities that have been sitting on Yahoo groups for a long time. I'm a little torn on this a bit because to one sense, I was like, did you not see which way the wind was blowing people?

You've had lots of time to get... Yahoo has been on a steady downcline for years and years and years. We knew it wasn't going to last, so you kind of knew maybe you should move, but they didn't. They've waited, and now Verizon has basically said, we are shutting these down on December 14th.

They told people this 60 days, which is not a lot of time, to be honest. The 60-day notice that it's going to be shut down. It will be shutting down this weekend, and people are freaking out. And what has made it worse is, of course, that Verizon has started to ban accounts that have been using automated tools to kind of grab everything and move it.

So people are saying, hey, hold on a second. This is a load of crap. The humane and good thing for Verizon to do would be to stop blocking us, give us six more months at least, and let us get our stuff and leave. That's all we've wanted to do. I would argue that the nice thing to do would have been for them to create their own export function.

Let the people have their content. You know, it's like Google Takeout. You go, you press a button, you wait a couple hours, and you get all your stuff. It's not that hard. Yes, it should not be that hard. And Verizon definitely has the money to step up and do it. So do the right thing, Verizon. Give these people a tool to get all their stuff.

Yeah, seriously. I mean, it can't be that hard. I mean, where are they going to go, though? What does PHP be? The importing to something else is probably going to be relatively difficult, but certainly they can provide a very basic Excel, CSV, CSV, CV.

My God, man. My God, it's been a long time since I've done this crap, but you know what I mean. Yeah, some kind of, probably some XML format or JSON or something like that. Yeah, it's very simple, and I'm sure that there are other tools for importing it back into other things.

I would recommend you not pick anything that might go away quickly as well. Yeah, yeah. Or just, you know, spin up a copy of PHP BB so you can get hacked in a week. God, I remember using that. Such a steamy pile of crap. Patch, patch, patch.

Hack, patch. Restore from backup. Patch, patch. Hacked. Restore from backup. That's how it goes. Yeah, did a lot of that. Ups and doodads. Nord VPN, which has been in the news recently on security because they have been, they got hacked a couple times.

Not very secure. Yeah, they had a little problem where one of its servers got breached and somebody may have walked off with the encryption keys, which, okay, that's a problem. And then a couple weeks later, there was a separate report that found that thousands of Nord VPN users had fallen victim to credential stuffing attacks that led to unauthorized access of their Nord VPN accounts.

Now, the credit stuffing attacks are basically, you know, when people use the same password over and over again. Yeah. So what Nord VPN decides to, let's create NordPass, a product that would have been useful before everybody got hacked.

You know what you don't want in your password manager? Encryption keys being stolen. So the funny part about this is just like they're jumping on the bandwagon now because we've got 1Password, which we've been using for years, Dashlane, LastPass, you know, but the big money came in with Dashlane.

And now that 1Password has gotten their big chunk of funding to keep going, these guys have jumped on the bandwagon as well. I see this is, you know, and you're just waiting for it to be built into the OS. This is like a feature, not a product anymore. Yeah, it's not very far off, especially for Apple.

I'm guessing the next major upgrade to the OS is going to involve a password manager. You've said that since 11, so not here yet. But we'll see. We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. Until then, I'm still on 1Password.

So I wore an Oura ring for a while, and it hurt my finger really badly. So I got rid of it. So I lost my sleep tracking. I gave it to my friend Dan Clark, and he was wearing it for a while. And he's like, you know, this thing really makes my finger hurt. So I stopped wearing it.

So since I now have the new Apple Watch, which is way more comfortable, I went back to trying out SleepWatch. Great app. Seriously great app. And if you do the subscription model to get all the extra stuff, it tells you a lot of really interesting features about your sleep.

I'm good on a lot of places, but I think it's my heart rate variability definitely needs some work. I'm at the low, low end of the spectrum on that. And, of course, they say that... You may not wake up. Indicates a healthy and vital body, and I certainly do not have a healthy and vital body.

Yeah, I think you're on the opposite end of that bell curve. Didn't need an app to tell me that one. $3 mirror does the job there. But, yeah, I'm really liking it nowadays. They've come a long way. I just can't wear a watch while I sleep.

I can't do it. I can't even wear rings. I take them off. Yeah, well, that was definitely the problem, wearing a ring while I slept. I'm like, okay, your sleep tracker wakes me up. Not really something I want in a sleep tracker. But this new watch is so comfortable, I don't even notice it's on. Eh, eh, eh.

I can't do it. But I don't need sleep tracking anyway, so I'm fine. I know when I'm awake because my kid is next to me yelling. There you go. Don't need that at all. So I've been trying to get into Final Cut Pro for a while. I've got all these videos, and I'm shooting more videos.

I've got these new cameras, all this other stuff. And so I just wanted to quickly, you know, catch up. So I signed up for Skillshare, who should advertise on our show, by the way. So I'm trying out video editing with Final Cut Pro 10 with Dr. Ali Abdaal.

Why is a doctor doing video editing? This feels like when you get in a cab and you find out that the guy was like a neurosurgeon in, you know, Bombay. I don't know. This kid's wicked smart, though. So I'm really enjoying the class. So if you're looking for some Final Cut from zero to something, this is a pretty good class.

I learned a lot. And it's helping me through, like, the pain points at the beginning because, you know, it's always like you get overload on these big interfaces. It's just like, show me the five things that I need to know that I'm going to use over and over again. That's 99% of almost any software, be it Photoshop, be it audio editing, be it video editing.

There's like five to ten things that you need to know and you can get by. And everything else is just annoying crap that they stuffed into the programs. Yeah, exactly. Like, when I'm teaching people how to use logic, I'm like, okay, this is all you need to do. And they're like, that's it? I'm like, yep, that's it.

That's 99% of what you will do day to day. Yep. There's going to be that 1% that's going to take you a weekend to try and figure out. But, you know, everybody's going to go through that. Yep. I always hated video editing. So Godspeed to you. Thanks. And this is actually not too bad. Like I said, this video really got me up to speed pretty quickly.

And he gives really great demos on how to do a bunch of different things. And it's really cool. So I'm actually looking forward to dicking around with it some more.

Media candy. So, Brian, have you finally gotten around to watching the Downton Abbey movie yet? I have not. Why? It is Christmas time. My child is going apeshit nuts. And by the time we get him to bed, we are too exhausted to do anything.

Okay. Okay. I have got it, courtesy of you. Thank you very much. So I've got, you know, a DVD. And now I've got a digital copy sitting on my computer. And at some point, I think we're just going to have to bite the bullet and just watch it in increments. Because we've been holding out for like a whole two-hour period of time that we could just sit and watch it.

And that's not going to happen. So we shall get around to it. You shall overcome. Okay. I did finally get through the Preacher series finale. All right. I binged the last, like, four episodes the other night because I forgot I had them. I'm like, whatever happened with Preacher?

Oh, yeah. They're on my NAS. I should go watch those. And fantastic. Fantastic way to end the series. The whole thing worked so well. Walked away with a big smile on my face. And, yeah, I mean, it was four seasons. And they really did a good job of keeping it all, like, cohesive all the way through.

So I'm glad they made it. And I'm glad they made it this well. Excellent. And that's it, right? It's done, done, done? It's done, done. That was a series finale. Yep. Okay. Excellent. I finally saw the premiere episode of Miss Maisel Season 3. It has dropped.

And I thoroughly enjoyed it. Speaking of just continuing to keep a smile on your face. That show's got it. Something about the writing. It's just great. Okay. I didn't know until last night. I was watching Mr. Robot and trying to get caught up on that. And I saw the... Because they keep running the trailers.

It's the same exact trailer they keep running. But at the very end, it always says coming soon. And now it said, now available. And I'm like, wait, wait, what? So, because I was, you know, I've been conditioned to see the same commercial. And I'm like, it's just going to say coming soon with no date. But when I saw that it was now playing, I ran to the notes.

And I saw you already had it here. Yep. It's good. I highly recommend it so far. I've only one episode in, but it is what it is, man. It's just a good show. And it doesn't seem to be getting any worse, which is a good thing. The writing is still there. And once the showrunners leave after, say, this season, I'm sure that'll happen.

Then I'll be worried. But right now, it's all very good. Hey, man. Take what you can get. Take what you can get. Speaking of finales, Silicon Valley's series finale has aired. It is done. It went out with a whimper, not so much a bang. But apparently, the last episode is quite good and shows just how much the perspective on technology has changed since the show started.

Obviously, when the show started, everybody was kind of up with tech and it's all good and very funny and interesting. And the season finale, I guess, I'm not going to give you a spoiler alert. I haven't watched it yet, but the reviews are all out there. It stays very true to our current feelings about tech. So I think I'm actually going to go watch this last episode just to see what happens.

I think I will as well, just to know how it finally wraps up. Because, yeah, I mean, I put a couple seasons into it. But, yeah, it got to the point where, like, I mean, even from the beginning for me, it was PTSD. And I just powered through it for the show. But, yeah, there came a point where I'm just like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It's too close. It's too close to home. Yeah. And I got a couple trailers that came out that I thought were pretty interesting. The first one being the Ghostbusters Afterlife trailer, which kind of dropped without. It was a bit of a surprise, I think. Everybody knew that it was coming, but all of a sudden it's just there.

I do like the title here. Who are you going to reboot? I don't know if it's this isn't necessarily a reboot like like the ladies one was, but it follows the rule of thumb. If you want something to be good and people to watch it, what do you do? You put Paul Rudd in it. Oh, God.

I like the trailer. The trailer looked all right. Yeah. I thought the trailer was good. I was hoping for some shots of the old cast. We did not get that. Obviously, they're going to hold that for later trailers to pique more interest. But it doesn't look bad to me at all. It feels very Stranger Things.

Yeah. It really felt like, you know, it kind of reminded me of an 80s movie. Just the lead up and the kids and everything. I'm like, okay, this is kind of like Ghostbusters meets Stand By Me almost. It's just the way it was filmed and stuff.

Definitely a very 80s feel. And of course, I've just clocked on to the reason that it felt like Stranger Things to me because it's the kid from Stranger Things. There you have it then. Well, Leslie Jones is not very happy about this one bit. Because she didn't get a sequel to their Ghostbusters that sucked?

Yeah. Yeah. And she's just, you know, basically dissed and just going after them. And the problem I had with the all-female-led Ghostbusters wasn't the fact that it had an all-female cast. It's just that it wasn't very good. Yeah.

I 100% agree with you. I actually enjoyed the casting on that. I thought all the actresses were cast perfectly, and I thought they were good characters. It's just the story wasn't there. Yeah. It just wasn't good. It fell flat. It totally fell flat.

So, you know, I see why she would be upset getting, you know, pretty much dissed like this. But the problem was it just wasn't a good movie. Yeah. And I'm happy. Look, they've been talking about rebooting the original Ghostbusters with the original cast for years. We knew this was going to come eventually.

And thankfully that their movie wasn't bad enough to kill it. That's the way I feel about it. Yeah. I mean, and look, the Terminator series just restarted off after, you know, episode two and just got rid of everything that had happened in between.

They're just like, you know what? These didn't work. We're just going to go back and pretend the other ones didn't happen. Happens all the time. Nothing new about that. That's what, look, look at what Disney did to Star Wars. Basically, all of that stuff, not canon anymore. We're going to do what we want. And speaking of 80s nostalgia, wonderfulness, the Wonder Woman 1984 trailer dropped.

Now, Jason, you know, I am not big on the superhero movies. This looks awesome. It looks so good. It could just be the trailer because it's perfectly edited to a kick-ass remix of Blue Monday. Now, I thought Blue Monday by New Order is a song much like the B-52's Rock Lobster.

I could easily go to my grave never listening to again. There's something about this remix and the fact that they cut the trailer perfectly to it to make it feel like a music video. This thing was badass. I cannot wait to see this movie, and I can't wait to see how they explain that Captain Kirk is still there and the same age.

Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. Time Warp, who knows? Here's the thing, though. She looks amazing. That's really, I don't care what is going on. Yeah, she's gorgeous. Yeah, you know, this could honestly be a bread-making movie. And I would still watch her in it. I could get Wonder Woman and the Peloton Girl together.

Good times. Brian would be a very happy man. But let's hope that they learn from the last Wonder Woman movie and we don't have a half-hour fight scene at the end. Yeah, let's make it a half an hour shorter than the previous movie. That would be good. That would be great. At the library.

I finished Outland by Dennis E. Taylor. Of the Bobaverse? Yes, of the Bobaverse fame. I listened to the audiobook read by Ray Porter, who also reads all the Bobaverse books. It was really good. I was, you know, I read the reviews. The reviews weren't stellar.

But I went through it and I listened to it. I really thoroughly enjoyed it. So I'm guessing that, I mean, this has such an open end to it that there will definitely be more of these because you can't write just one. And yeah, thoroughly enjoyed it.

I don't know if it's in print, but if it is, pick it up for sure. Cool. And I also read a book called The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. Now, this was one of the ones that just happened to randomly get recommended to me on Audible.

And I'm like, yeah, you know what? Let's try somebody new. Had no idea about the book, the author, anything. Well, this was her debut novel. And let's see here. Winner of the 2017 pre-Julia Verlanger. Long listed for the 2016 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Nominated for the 2016 blah, blah, blah. Arthur C. Clarke. The list goes on and on and on. So if I'd have read that before, then I might have been expecting more. Yeah, I would have probably been expecting more if I read all of that. So I wasn't expecting anything. And it was a great little sci-fi book.

All right. It was really something that I just was not expecting. Didn't go, like, too far field trying to save the universe and crap like that. It's just, you know, this crew on this little ship that just got stuck in a weird situation. And it was just a great book.

And, of course, there are two more, which I didn't know of. So it's a three-part series. But the three-part series got the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Series. All right. Well. I will definitely keep going with these. Excellent. I'm going to have to check this one out, then. I think you'll like it.

I really do. And I saw this one on sale from Audible. This one clocks in at 51 hours and four minutes. This is The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. Dude wrote a lot. Dude wrote a lot. And I love this.

The first story in the anthology is a story about basically like these guys who invented teleportation and at the very end, I'm going to ruin it for you. It's a short story from 1950. So get over it.

But I loved it. Even back then, the main guy who invented the technology, he was like going on a family trip. And like somebody asked him, like, which port is he going to be leaving from? He's like, are you kidding me? I'm not using that. I invented the thing. I'm going to go get on a boat. I love it.

So I'm just going like just working through these because I can, you know, listen to one in 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and they're great. So, I mean, and for the one credit, 51 hours, this is going to be like, you know, lasting for quite some time. I have a huge ass hardcover that is basically probably the truncated version of this, and I've read through it many times over the years that I've had it.

So I'd love me some Arthur C. Clarke. Yeah, it's really, really good. It has legs. Yes, it does. I finally finished Leviathan Wakes, The Expanse Book One by James S. A. Corey. This thing took forever to read because it's like 600 pages, but well worth it.

I really enjoyed it, even though I knew everything that was going to happen because it's basically season one of The Expanse on Amazon now. It was awesome. Really enjoyable book to read, and I can't wait to read the rest of the series, but I will have to take a break from the universe and do something else, so I'll probably go read the Becky Chambers book you were talking about in between before I hit the next one.

Yeah, bounce back and forth between those, you know, because you've got, what, eight books total in the The Expanse series? Yeah, it's a big series, and I kind of don't want to get ahead of the show. I want to kind of do it backwards this time because it just gives you get so much more detail. It's amazing. Oh, that's cool. That's very cool.

And of course, by the time the next episode of this show comes out, The Expanse season four will have hit Amazon. Christ, so much to watch. I'm never going to get around to Downton Abbey. You've got to prioritize, man. Here's the funny part. I bet you still haven't fucking finished Star Trek Discovery. Of course I haven't, but that is on deck.

In fact, I'm going to push Downton Abbey and Discovery to my winter break when we take a week and a half off and I can actually catch up on things. Okay, you better hurry up because I'm guessing Discovery will be back soon. Oh, Christ. You know Picard's coming too. I'm drowning over here. Well, you have to get all this under your belt before Picard comes out.

I know. I know. Moron of the week. I was searching high and low for a tech moron of the week and there are obviously plenty to choose from, but then I saw this story and I just have to go with it because it's kind of tech as well. An Alaskan dentist is being prosecuted, get this, for riding a hoverboard during a tooth extraction.

How? In July 2016, an Alaskan dentist named Seth Lockhart extracted his patient's tooth while standing on a hoverboard. After the procedure, he pulled off his gloves, glided down the hall, and threw his hands in the air in a show of very misguided triumph. If that's not bad enough, he of course took a video of it, which he then texted to friends and family, joking in at least one conversation that it was a new standard of care.

Oh my God. Yes. The patient, of course, had no idea, Veronica Wilhelm. She was sedated for the entire extraction. However, the state of Alaska did discover the video and is going to charge him with many, many things, basically unlawful dental acts, claiming that riding a hoverboard during a procedure violates the minimum professional standards of dentistry, to which I have to agree.

Yeah, I was wondering what they were going to charge him with, but yeah, that seems like kind of a, it's like when a cop wants to get you for anything, they just cite you for improper lane usage while you're driving. Yes. If you think you have some sympathy for the guy and just kind of wish he'd get a slap on the wrist, these aren't the only bad things he's done.

He's also facing more than 40 other charges. According to CNN, these include billing Medicaid for more than $25,000 in unnecessary or not properly justified procedures, engaging in a scheme to defraud Alaska Medicare of $10,000 and diverting more than $25,000 in funds from Alaska dental arts.

So not a good dude. Not a good dude. And I bet, I bet this is one of those catch me if you can type of things like a Frank Abagnale where this guy actually isn't a dentist. He's just playing one on TV. At least the hoverboard's battery didn't explode during the procedure. That would have been great.

Feedback loop. Got a funny story real quick before we jump into feedback here from Clash Royale. I was in the chat and Jay the Destroyer writes, 75 shows dropping to my feed all at once. So much grump. And then, of course, Boston Strong writes back, JTD, configure podcast app or you're going to bankrupt the boys.

So I write back, of course, JTD, we only told you 10 times to fucking turn that shit off. That shit is going to put us out of business. And McSachewan writes in, we thought that your Christmas gift to us was the entire back catalog and our gift to you could be bankruptcy. Sad but true.

Yeah, yeah. We keep going back and forth. It's pretty good. We did some math and it turned out that would be bad. But RJG18 writes in, was feeling guilty that JTD's reckless downloading is going to force Jason to sell his car or take up Uber driving or have to eat his dogs slash cameras.

I'm not going to eat my cameras and hopefully not the dogs. So I've signed up to the maximum Patreon tier. Spend it wisely and or recklessly. So, yes, even even everybody can't can't remember. Set your downloads to a maximum of three or five.

It helps us out greatly. Yes, it does. And over at Patreon, we have some new subscribers. Divorced Pop, Taylor, Travis, Damien, Richard, Nick, Syntaxes, Bonuto followers, Orion Ludbia, who also says, just want to say thank you for your continued tech news and grumpiness.

My favorite part of the show is when Brian says, does it though? Does it really? Much love from Orion Ludw, there you go. He actually did a pronunciation guide. Thank you, Orion Ludw. And if you get that Star Trek reference, I'll be super impressed.

I didn't. So, sorry. Me either. P.S. I love the ads. Fuck the haters. Excellent. And we got a message from Derek C. who says, hey, Grumps, question for you guys. Since you're in the Mac ecosystem, my brother's looking for a new MacBook for music production, editing, etc. Any recommendations, his current MacBook Pro 2014-ish has finally croaked.

I can tell you, do not get a MacBook Air, because it doesn't do that stuff. No, MacBook Airs are way too underpowered. The new 16-inch MacBook is the way to go. I've got a few friends that have already gotten them and really love them and are doing audio and music on them and have no problem.

So definitely check that out. All right. And over at PayPal, we have got donations from, deep breath, Simon, Michael, Judge, Ben, Stephen, Doug, John, David, Elizabeth, Andrew, Jody, Breed, Daniel, William, Mark, Christopher, Adam, Michael, Ralph, and Joseph, who says, hey, Jason, what the fuckity fuck happened to Seth's voice mic in episode 397 at 1658?

I went in and listened to it at 1658. I couldn't hear a damn thing. So I'm guessing maybe the download got corrupted. So I couldn't find a break. If anybody else heard this as well, let me know. But I went back to the master and I couldn't find anything. Did you hear anything, Brian? I did not. I went and checked and it sounded okay to me.

Okay. I'm guessing possible corrupted download on that one. There you go. Don't re-download it again because it costs us money. Yeah. Deal with it. Over at Twitter, Stuart writes in, so it's okay to call someone to pedo on Twitter. And he sends us the link. Elon Musk wins defamation case over pedo guy.

And it's done. It's over. I can give you a long list of things that's totally okay to do on Twitter because they don't police things. Very well. Just about everything. Just about everything. And Craig writes in, Jason, I enjoyed GOG three night. GOG. Why did I just say GOG, Jason? You said GOG.

I'm a GOG. I'm a guest. I'm a GOG. GOG 397 with you. And Seth, I too had a Pentax K1000 when I was in high school in the 90s. That thing was heavy. I didn't even think it was that heavy. Maybe you need to lift some weights. But it was a damn fine camera. Damn fine.

Speaking from sleep tracking guy, lift some weights. True that. Over at GOG.show, Ryan writes in, hey, Grumps, just a quick note. If you ever find yourself in need of furniture, Facebook Marketplace is actually a wonderful resource. I found it far better than Craigslist in both search and in not having a ton of replicates or spam.

If you're not interested in buying secondhand stuff, then feel free to delete. This is the only thing I ever log into FB4, and it's still very rare. Well, we'll talk about this in a second. Also, if you're looking for a good sci-fi series, check out Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space. It's not laden with tropes, and the author uses his physics background to layer in a somewhat believable future.

Thanks again for all the work. Yeah, I have used Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist a lot extensively recently because I am getting rid of baby items as my child is now three years old, including selling some of the old strollers that we had for him that he no longer needs.

I still prefer Craigslist, believe it or not. I did sell one thing on FB Marketplace just yesterday, as a matter of fact. Here's my experience using FB Marketplace. For every 20 people writing you, is it still available?

Only one will actually respond to you when you say yes. And if you happen to be selling baby items, if you get the husband, forget it. He will show up and not buy it. You need the wife to come. The wife will actually make the real decision. So there you go. It's interesting. I've actually bought furniture on Facebook Marketplace.

I got a couch when I was in Chicago. This is right when Marketplace first came out, and I got a $3,000 couch for $250. And I loved that couch. It lasted for quite some time, through two puppies. So very good deal on there. It worked pretty well. There you go. Sherman writes us, What's up, geeks?

Not sure if you've seen this already, but I found an article that neatly combines your disdain for both unprofitable tech companies and e-scooters in one place. Absolutely ridiculous. Stay grumpy. P.S. Brian's outro regarding the ad complainer is currently my favorite outro ever. Pure gold. And so he sends us a link from The Verge.

Unicorn, the e-scooter startup from co-creator of Tile, shuts down with no money for refunds. Believe it or not, this is not a Kickstarter program, but it might as well have been. So they are shutting down operations after blowing all its cash on Facebook and Google ads, but only receiving 350 orders for its glossy white e-scooters.

As it claims, in an email to customers, all 350 of them, the company says it lacks the resources to deliver any of its $699 two-wheelers and won't be issuing refunds as we are completely out of funding. In a remorseful email, Unicorn CEO Nick Evans says the company has totally failed as a business.

You think? And has also spread the cost of its failure to you, the early customers that believed in us. So might as well have been a Kickstarter. I do like there's one particular line in this article that said something. I'm going to have to paraphrase it because for whatever reason, I didn't put it in the notes. But it was basically saying, I guess this shows that you can't actually have a sustainable company buying cheap shit from China and painting it.

Nice. Very nice. Like real unicorns, their business model didn't exist. Nope. Kirk writes in, stay grumpy. Why are e-bikes legal for Amazon but not immigrant delivery cyclists? So this is a link from the Gothamist. So this is New York City. And apparently the city's Department of Transportation announced that Amazon, UPS, and DHL would start using electric cargo bikes to reduce congestion on city streets.

But these are apparently illegal for other people. They're street legal thanks to a technicality carved out for e-bikes powered by the rider's feet. Revel has placed more than 1,000 electric mopeds on the streets of Brooklyn without legal problems. On the other hand, e-bikes that are powered by a throttle or button on the handlebars that are favored by the city's tens of thousands of immigrant delivery workers remain illegal.

Those delivery workers are still subject to $500 fines and seizure of their bicycles. There is no data to suggest that throttle e-bikes are more dangerous than pedal-assisted e-bikes or that e-bikes in general are more dangerous than regular bicycles. So to answer the question as to why are e-bikes legal for Amazon but not immigrant delivery cyclists, the answer would be money.

I'm sure that they've paid them off. Yeah. Yeah. And technically, these are two different types of bikes. But yeah, I get the difference. And there's no data, but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that these e-bikes are actually more dangerous because people in cars don't expect a bicycle to start screaming out of an intersection at 20 miles an hour.

Yes. And it's screwing things up and people are getting hit more often with them. Yes. And David sends us this. I'm not sure if you saw the story. An exit scheme on the ClearNet. And this is from ZDNet. 20 VPS providers to shut down on Monday, giving customers two days to save their data. Wow.

That makes Yahoo actually look quite good, giving people 60 days to get off their forums. At least 20 web hosting providers have hastily notified customers today, Saturday, December 7th, that they plan to shut down on Monday, giving their clients two days to download data from their accounts before servers are shut down and wiped clean.

By the way, two days, definitely doable. So stop complaining, people. You use a cheap service. What do you expect? John writes in Brave Browser. I heard about it from you guys, so I installed it on my iPhone XR. Seems to be working fine. I thought it odd that I had the choice of making Google my default search engine as I was wanting to use Brave for more privacy and security.

But you now say that it's no good because it doesn't sync with something or another. It seems to be working okay for me. So what exactly is it that's not good about it? I'm not what you call a power user, so maybe I'm just not understanding it. Well, the sync that I was complaining about was from Mac to Mac. I didn't install it on my phone because all of the browsers that are on your iPhone that run under iOS basically are Safari in the background with just, you know, a few clever features on top.

But the rendering engine is still Safari, so they can't really do a whole lot. So it's best just to use Safari on the phone from what I've been able to tell. But, yeah, my problem with Brave actually comes up in another message that we have from Yuri, long-time listener and security advocate here.

You guys are awesome. Keep up the great work. I took your advice and installed the Brave browser on my 2016 MacBook Pro to give it a shot, and I do like it. But notice that it kicks on the laptop fan on starting the browser. Upon further investigation, it seems like it's using the GPU for something. It's a similar experience when launching a game when the discrete video card turns on and heats up instead of the onboard video.

This does not happen launching Chrome, Opera, or Firefox. Not sure if it's just me. I understand all Mac browsers use Safari under the hood, but is Brave using GPU to improve performance? Hmm. I'm going to tell you two things here. Under the hood, this is Chrome 77, and it's not Safari under the hood.

That's only on iOS. The thing about this is – and here's what I – I knew that there was something in the back of my head, and I can't prove it. I can't figure it out yet. But inside of Brave, there is a crypto option. And I believe that they are using our GPUs to do a little mining in the background.

For their in-house crypto tokens. That's what I think. I could be wrong. If they were doing that, that would be entirely against their modus operandi, their mission statement, the whole point of the Brave browser. Would a company do such a thing?

Well, maybe. I don't know. I said I don't have any proof. But it's also – it's their internal coin that works on their advertising network. It's kind of like Flatter. So if you sign up for it, but you have to go to another service to sign up for the crypto because of regulations, they can't have it under the same company.

There's a lot of stuff there. But, yeah, the biggest issue I found with Brave was when I cranked that thing on, my CPU pegs to 100% often. And I'm on a 5K iMac with, you know, 64 gig of RAM and the best processors you can get on it. So if I'm pegging that much, something's going – either it's a really bad programming error or they're using that GPU for something else.

Something's definitely up. I mean, I'm on a MacBook Air, and the first few days it seemed okay. So I was like, ooh, Brave. And then when I tried to do anything real with the Brave browser, it just – it was useless. We had a hell of a time recording an episode trying to use it. It did not work well at all. Yeah.

And tracking down the issue was, you know, interesting. And fortunately, I found out about it because I was on my Air when it was happening too. And I'm like, what the hell? So I cranked open iStat menus and just left the CPU monitor running. And it's like, Brave, peg, peg, peg. So we have both completely uninstalled Brave, and we're back to opera.

So let China see what they want to see. Yeah, it just works. James writes us, hey, team. I just wanted to thank Jason for a great interview with Seth Miranda. As someone who has no photography skills, it was a great insight into the world of photography. I found his comments around what models he uses, why he uses them, and the type of equipment used to make shots look good to be highly informative.

Jason, you may find this interview with the astrophotographer Dustin Gibson to be one of interest to you, and he gives us a link. I chanced upon this episode after years and definitely learned a lot. P.S. Gave Dave a pat on the back for his nice interview with Christopher Lockett on his show. We did. Yep, we did.

Jody writes in, just listened to episode 397 with special guest Jeff Miranda. Well, actually, Seth, but Jeff is good enough. That could be an autocorrect. Who I thought was sufficiently grumpy. Bravo. Great discussion and nice change of pace. Incidentally, my first SLR was a Pentax K100 too.

It was my big Christmas present in 1978. I was 15. I love the simplicity of that camera and thinking about it now brings back some great memories. Thanks for the distraction and stay grumpy. It was a great camera, Jody. Sean writes in, hey, Brian, you will finally get to use CarPlay in your BMW without having to pay for it.

Grump on. And this is a link from Yahoo News. Somebody better get in and save all those news stories really quick because that's probably going away too. BMW finally makes Apple CarPlay free. So it has been made free in the UK and has been confirmed that it will be free in the US as well.

I am actually going to test drive some new BMWs today, so I will be looking for CarPlay as one of my options. Mr. Fancy Pants. Ew. Mike writes in, Jason, thanks for sharing your conversation with Seth this week. Most of it wasn't my cup of tea, but it's the thought that counts.

So I wanted to say thanks. Please continue to do these kinds of things in the future. Nothing wrong with breaking up the routine a little. Keep up the great work. Well, hopefully next time it'll be Brian interviewing somebody so I can go on vacation. Damn. I was about to say, I'm happy to take a vacation anytime anybody wants me to.

Matt B writes in, Yoda, baby Yoda, either way, don't feed him. And a link from News Thump, the Mandalorian bitterly regrets feeding baby Yoda after midnight. Yes, there's been lots of gremlin slash baby Yoda memes going on the internets at the moment. I think we even posted one of them.

Just for fun. Because we like to steal memes from people. That's right. We're a big corporation. Christopher writes in, if I'm cheating on you guys listening to 13 minutes to the moon, how do I play podcasts back in order of oldest to newest on iPhone iOS 13?

It's unfathomable to me. I'm guessing you're doing this in the podcast player app, which I don't use. Brian, do you know how to do that? Because I never, I don't touch it anymore. I don't believe you actually can. It's newest to oldest. That's the way it runs. There's no reverse way to do it.

So you just have to go in and select them one by one. Sorry. You can't create a playlist and sort the playlist by oldest to newest? Nope. Oh, that's kind of lame. Gets the job done. I listen to podcasts. There you go. All right. Herb writes in regarding Google search becoming a dead zone.

The worst part is getting to the bottom of an ad driven search response page only to see more results and not the old and not the old time next with the choice of skipping into deep page returns, 10 or 50 pages deep. No, that's gone. Now you can serve up one page of pablum at a time.

Is it? It's not for me. I'm still getting my, my list of different things. Hmm. Interesting. I have, I have full on regular pagination on Google. Me too. Got my pagination. I don't know what's going on with you. Sorry to hear it.

That would be very frustrating to me as well, but, uh, it's still there for me. Yeah. Yeah. I've got no lazy load or anything like that. This is just, uh, yeah, straight up one through 10. Old school. Interesting. Uh, Graziella writes, Hey grumpies, just thought it was worth mentioning this article to you guys.

And maybe you have a comment on it. Stay grumpy. And, uh, this is over at Apple news, grumpy cat, little bub and the death of the good internet era. Uh, I don't know if you read this article, Jason, but it basically makes the argument that the internet has finally gone bad because we've lost a bunch of, uh, internet meme animals.

Uh, I think our comment about this is the internet went to shit about 10 years ago with Facebook and social media. So all of this has happened before it will all happen again. Yeah. And, and for the record, I say it's the day that AOL got on. So long before that. And she writes in PS, a question for Brian in this era of dying cable and dozens of streaming services.

What's the best content for babies and where to find it? I'm a new mom, six month old baby. My husband and I are Brazilian in our mid 30, 40s, raising a child in the U S uh, congratulations on the kid. And, uh, thank you for listening. What we did in our early days was basically YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, uh, things like Casper baby pants, uh, Sesame street selections.

Most of them of course pirated, but whatever, uh, blippy gecko's garage, et cetera. We made a ton of our own playlists and quickly wised up to paying for YouTube to get rid of the ads, which I've discussed on the show are often wildly inappropriate for babies and toddlers, things like slasher movies and all of that sort of stuff.

So yeah, YouTube is your primary resource. It is great. And if you pay, you don't get the ads. You can also do downloads. Um, so you can make playlists that will work on airplanes, which is very good if you're going to be flying back to Brazil to see your family. Um, and after that, uh, you know, Disney, PBS kids, Nick jr, et cetera, those are all pretty good, but, uh, you know, you got, you got some time until we're there.

So for right now, it's all about the tube of the, you crimes rights. And I missed the long Amazon product listings. You used to read. I found this the other day gifts for mom dash mama shark needs a drink slash funny mom, birthday gifts dash Christmas gifts for mom dash mom gifts for daughter, son dash mommy shark, comma, new mom, comma, pregnant mom, comma, wife gifts, dash cool life, wine, Tumblr mug.

That is an actual product listing. You know, what's really funny. I actually have this. I got this for my wife and my kid is taking it over and he likes filling up his little water and drinking from it. So it's kind of clever and cute. You know, what's funny. I got one of these for my roommate too. Did you? That's particularly funny as you have no child, but, uh, excellent.

You know why I got it? Because it comes with a sippy cup lid and we have dogs that like to knock the wine glasses over. Ah, there you go. Yes. It's a, it's a great product actually. Uh, my family really enjoys it. My wife and kid both really like this cup. So, uh, great.

That's awesome. That is too funny. Yeah. Justin writes in, Hey, fellow geeks, a couple episodes back, Brian was talking about smart switches or plugs, not report, not reporting their current status to the apps controlling them. I normally wouldn't bother writing in as the rest of the community usually chimes in and I don't have to, but in this case, another episode has gone by with more complaints about the smart devices and no listener responses.

So I thought I would share my experience. I use TP link CASA smart plugs and switches in my home and their real time status is reflected in the management app. Additionally, I can monitor and interact with these devices via my Google home account that is tied into CASA. Perhaps these products would be worth a look for you. Speaking of Google home, I find the voice recognition and the AI and the Google assistant to be quite good.

For example, when I ask what time a store closes, it comes back with the closing time for the store located closest to me. Grump on. I will take a look at that, but I think that ship has sailed and I think the wife will just get pissed off if I do anything new. So there you go. Yeah. Maybe I just need to fill up her baby shark glass with more wine and install it all.

Maybe switch to scotch. I don't think my wife has ever had scotch. It might kill her. That would not be good. Not good. I kind of like having her around. So we had so many emails this week that we have to cut it there because time and life are getting it here.

It's great though. I mean, it's awesome how much response we're getting and how much interaction we're getting. So keep it up, everybody. It's fantastic. We really, really appreciate getting all your messages. It's why we do it. And over at iTunes, we got a couple five stars here. Best Gen X pod on the net.

This is probably the best podcast for Gen Xers, if not everyone. Without a doubt, we all have lost our starry-eyed view of the internet. If you're a Gen Xer, you embrace the internet, but being a product of a divorced home, you know that all things come to an end. Oh, how true you are, my man. Well, we've all seen how the internet has ended our hope of a connected, better world.

These guys will tell you how it happened in excruciating detail. It's the one place that calls out grifter tech gurus, gullible Facebook boomers, and despicable tech companies that have turned out to be just another type of robber baron. Keep listening, get off Facebook, and listen to the grumps. Well, thank you.

Thank you very much. And that was from Hefastio. Hefastio. Hefastio. Now, we got a two-star rating here from Railer 2000 in Australia, who says, laughing at rape jokes. I'm not the wokest guy on the planet, but the two of you laughing at a rape joke in relation to Uber recording rides was pretty disappointing and immature.

Lift your game, guys. Don't you have a daughter, Jason? Now, I have a few thoughts here. Continue, Brian. Not to go off on a total rant here, but obviously, Railer 2000 is fairly new to the show, because if you've been listening, you know Jason does not have a daughter. The two people that have children on this show are myself and Dave.

We're both married, and we both have ... I have a boy, and Dave has two boys. So, no daughters at all. But let's get into this a little bit further, shall we? Perhaps, Jason, you and I have been ... This is our fault, I think. We've been derelict in our duty.

For some period of time, we used to start our shows with, basically, disclaimers. This is not a safe space. This is an adult podcast. We make jokes. We use foul language. And we haven't done that for a while, so perhaps Railer 2000 was not expecting it.

Perhaps he thought, we were a safe space. We're not. At all. This is a podcast for an adult, and for adults who understand humor, and jokes, and potty language, and shit jokes, and horrible stuff that we say all the time.

Now, in specifics, this was not a rape joke. Well, it kind of was. It was a joke. Well, it kind of was. It was a joke about Uber's response to their rape problem. We were making ... I was making a joke about Uber and their response to the problem that they are having with rape.

So, how about you direct your disappointment at Uber instead of us for pointing it out? Just a thought. Okay. You done? All right. Yeah, I'm done. That's enough. All right. OC Grumpy writes in, the only podcast I listen to religiously.

And you know what? There's a couple more of these. They're funny. We're going to leave it at that, because I think Brian pretty much said everything we need to say. But thank you, everybody else, for the bevy of five-star reviews and very funny ones, especially people from the UK and Poland, and, of course, the one from Australia.

But appreciate it. Keep it up, guys. And yeah, and always remember, it's not rape if it's not on the tape. I think it's still a good joke, and it's about Uber. I think it still has legs. I think it's still funny, and it's still about Uber.

It's not about rape. Rape is incidental. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG.show slash contact 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!

You know, I did the homework on this, and I actually really went in and figured out how to pronounce his last name, but because I'm exhausted and didn't get any sleep last night, it has escaped me. Rene Auberjonois? Auberjonois? It has passed away, sadly. He played Odo, of course, in Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

He has been in everything. I mean, literally everything. Murder, She Wrote, The Jeffersons, The Outer Limits, L.A. Law, Stargate, SG-1, Frazier. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. He played the original Father Mulcahy in the movie MASH. He was in absolutely everything, and I saw him in an airport about a year and a half ago, and it was quite a treat for me, so sad to see we've lost him.

I used to see him on set in Odo makeup quite often when I worked at Paramount, and years and years later, and this is a call back to last episode, he was a fan of JPEG Magazine, and I actually got to talk to him a few times on the phone, which was pretty cool because he had trouble with his subscription, and I got to play customer support and get Odo his magazines.

So he's a very nice, very nice man. He will be missed. He will be missed. And somebody else that will be missed, Carol Spinney passed away. You may not recognize the name, but he played from the very beginning Sesame Street's Big Bird, and more importantly, even though the Big Bird is getting all the press to us, he played our spiritual Muppet, Oscar the Grouch.

He has passed away, sadly. Very, very sad. Very sad. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. If you don't like Patreon but still want to support the show, you can give a one-time or recurring donation by just going to GOG.show and clicking the big-ass PayPal button that Jason put up there.

Your support really keeps us going, and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are GOG.show slash 399. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. It was a joke about Uber. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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