405: A Graveyard of Good Ideas

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. Jason, I've decided to use this platform of ours for a cloud sourcing, however the hell you want to call it, ask about something here. I think that would be the lazy pod, like we used to have the lazy web.

Basically lazy, because I did Google this, and I figured the people that listen to this show might have some tips for me. My mom found an old microcraset, like the ones that you used to put in answering machines back in the day when we had such things.

And she was wondering, and thinking quite probably correctly, that my dad's voice might be on there. And that would be kind of cool. I would like to grab that and kind of digitize it. My mom wants to hear it. Unfortunately, obviously, I don't have a microcassette player anywhere. Right. So I Googled. And I don't really feel like spending $150 or going to eat.

They're not cheap because nobody really makes them anymore. Outdated technology, when you need to get a hold of it, can become pretty expensive. So I was just wondering if anybody out there knows of a quick and cheap and easy way to get a microcassette player for digitization.

Maybe libraries even rent them. I don't know. But maybe somebody out there does, because I'd rather not spend $300 for 10 minutes. Yeah, this is ridiculous. You're Googling it right now, right? No, I just went to Amazon. I just went to Amazon and typed in microcassette. Yeah, $249, $379?

Yeah. Oh, my God. So all of a sudden, it became, yeah, sure, Mom, I'll take care of that for you. It'd be pretty cool to hear my dad's voice and see what's on this tape to, what the F? I found a used one for $20.99. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I might end up doing that.

But again, you know, we've got a bunch of people that listen and a bunch of people that are older and a bunch of people that like crazy tech. So we'll see if anybody has any suggestions for me. Yeah, maybe somebody has one in a shoebox somewhere that they could loan you. Because I literally, I'm going to need it for like 15 minutes.

That's it, you know? Yeah, it's funny. I used to carry around a microcassette recorder back in when I was like 22. So that was quite some time ago. A friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, and I went to Scotland and we called it Starlog. And that was our audio blog back then.

And I still have, I digitized all of those. And they're pretty funny because we were really drunk and nearly got in some fistfights with some very angry Scotsmen. That's not surprising at all. Yeah, for some reason, they were offended when Bob asked them if there were any Scottish pirates.

So I don't know why. I used to have a little mini disc recorder that I used for field recordings back when I was kind of doing more avant-garde music-y sort of stuff. But that's long gone as well. Yeah. Yeah, sadly. The days of that are over. Now I have a Zoom F1 that I carry around and a telephone.

And there's a button on my telephone that does that as well. I was actually doing that over the break. I was doing walking and talking and using the Just Press Record app on my phone with my AirPods and just taking notes as I went. And it does automatic transcription and things like that. And I'm like, we're living in the future.

Right. It's pretty cool. So I'm diving into this Google Photos thing. Told you about it last show. I'm up to 2006. Okay. Well, I'm up to 2006 and every phone camera picture I've ever taken in my life are up there.

Which is pretty cool. And I'm finding all of this stuff that I completely forgot existed. I love seeing all the old 640 by 480 photos from the early camera phones. Oh, my God. Well, dude, I've got Casio watch cam pictures that are even smaller.

They're like, you know, I think it may be like 128 by 128, if that. Right. That thing was cool. That was very spy tech. But, man, the pictures were shit. I've got pictures of you and Wendy on there, actually. If you can actually tell that it's us. Yeah, kind of. Kind of.

She has red hair, so it's pretty easy to tell her. That's true. So I'm going through this stuff. And, you know, I'm thinking about my backup strategy and all this crap and thinking about how much stuff that I've kept over the years. Yes, for the Spartan guy that likes to talk about how he doesn't have much of anything.

Your digital archive is massive. Makes up for everything. And I can't remember if I talked about it on the show, but like six months ago, I finally, like, pulled the trigger. It might not even have been six months, but I pulled the trigger and deleted all of my old source code archives.

Oh, dude. I had those on CD-ROMs, and I just finally dumped them all in the trash. I had them on CD-ROMs. Then I ripped the CD-ROMs to images and put those on S3 for years and then kept them around and then, you know, thawed the images and pulled the files off. And it turns out those old CD-ROMs, there was a problem with the old Mac file system.

Because, I mean, I was making these CD-ROMs on System 8. Right. You know, System 8, System 9, whatever. And there was a problem with the way it cataloged everything. So, all the folders on there, I'd bring the folders over and, like, half the stuff would be gone. What I'd have to do is go in, in the command line, and do, like, a touch blank.txt.

And when I did that, it would rebuild the archive of all the actual files in the folder. And I'm like, you know what? I'm not going to do this. But I kept everything, just in case one day I found an easy way to make it happen. And I finally just said, you know what? I have a new theory here.

I was like, okay. I think that, as I've been growing up, I'm thinking, okay, one day I'm going to be famous and somebody's going to care about all this shit. Nope. And so I should have it for posterity. Turns out, never going to happen. I'm never going to be a famous photographer. Nobody's ever going to care about me after I'm dead.

And all this stuff is just junk. So, you know, gigabyte, hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of old movie websites went in the trash. Every freelance project I ever worked on went in the trash. Because it's like, well, who the hell needs a Perl script to turn a website red, you know, for a few minutes every hour?

That's, you know, the stuff I wrote for Star Trek. And I went and I looked at it again, and man, it was terrible code. Oh, my God, it was terrible. But, I mean, I was building my career off of Learn Perl in 31 Days, that book. Right. And I only made it to, like, day 28.

So I guess I should have finished it. Yeah. It's funny, because you're talking about, you know, going through these archives and things like that, and things that get screwed up. That totally reminded me of something. I think about a year ago, I had found an old drive, and I was going through it. And it had, you know, some client stuff and a bunch of videos that we had taken and things like that.

And the drive kind of crashed, and I rebuilt it. And when I went back to go look at some of the client videos that we had just to see if there was anything, like, really funny in there or whatever. When it rebuilt it, it took, I also had, like, my iTunes library, because I've had copies of my iTunes library everywhere.

The videos were just overlaid with just music pulled from the library through the drive screw-up. It was horrible. Oh, wow. Like, I lost all the videos. Like, it still said it was a video, and if I tried to play the video, just start playing a random song from my iTunes library instead of the video. So, yeah, even with all the, you know, extreme amounts of care that we had taken with trying to keep all of our old digital archives, one crash screws everything up.

Oh, it totally does. And, you know, it's, I, just thinking about when my grandma, my grandmother had dementia, and we had to go clear out her house. And we had boxes and boxes and boxes, all these old Iron City beer boxes, because my grandfather loved Iron City beer.

So, we always have, like, cases of Iron City around, and we use those boxes for storage in the house. And they were just family photos, like, piled seven feet high. Yeah. And when I talked to my dad, I'm like, what do you want to do with these things? This is the whole family history. He's like, throw them away. I'm like, what?

He's like, everybody that's in those photos or knows who is in those photos is dead. It doesn't matter. Nobody cares. And I'm like, it just, it kind of broke my heart. I'm like, you know, all of these lives are just gone now. There's a lot of truth to that. And it's sad, because I was thinking about going through, my mom has, you know, a tanker full of old photos and photo albums.

But now that my grandparents are gone, I don't know who's in half of those photos. And my mom doesn't either. So, it's weird. Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, you know, you're really dead when there's nobody left to remember you. And it only takes a couple generations. Not even, man.

It's, yeah, just two. That's really it. So, I'm, you know, I'm putting all these photos up on Google thinking, okay, you know, they can just stay there. And, you know, I'm putting in my will when they're done, you know, here's a thousand bucks. You know, keep them up there for as long as they can stay.

And make them just completely, not royalty free, but what's the word I'm looking for? Not open source, but public domain. Right. Make them public domain. You know, if everybody does that, eventually, eventually facial recognition will get so good, we'll recognize all those old people we didn't know who was there through cross-referencing of other photos of other people.

Yeah, probably. And because what I'm thinking is, you know, like, just for historical purpose, I'm like, I was going through and I'm like, okay, somebody might want to see what it looked like in El Paso, New Mexico from the train in 19 or 2005. It's in El Paso in Texas.

Huh? Or, yeah, Texas. I was thinking of something else in New Mexico. I found all these pictures from the train. Remember when I would take the train across the country? Yeah. And I was always taking- Your multi-moves. Yeah. Well, that was just vacations. I never moved on the train. But I'd be, I was so fucking bored that all I did was sit there with my phone and take pictures out the window.

So I've got all of these, you know, geotag, time-stamped photos that are just going up in Google right now. And what made me think of this was, I don't know if you have the Google Photos app on your phone. I do not. There is this amazing feature called Google Lens.

And I was just trying to figure out how to do one thing. I wanted to tag something. I saw a button that I didn't know what it did, and I pressed it. And it was a picture that I took of the Shedd Aquarium. And, like, all these little dots popped up on the photo. And then in less than a second, it gave me the entire history of the Shedd Aquarium, the Wikipedia entry, the map, other people's photos of the Shedd Aquarium.

And I'm like, holy shit, let's try this with some other stuff. So I found a picture that I took of this obscure statue that was on display in the Field Museum in Chicago. Did the hit the little button, came up with a whole history of the sculptor, the actual piece, all this crap.

I'm like, okay, this is cool. I got to admit, this is really cool. Because I had none of those pictures geotagged. They were, some of them were film scans. And it still was able to pull it up and say, hey, oh, that's what you took a picture of. What I particularly love about this is six years of doing this podcast and railing at the evil megacorporation beast that's taking all of our data and forming this giant, massive archive conglomerate of everything that we've ever known ever.

And now Jason's just feeding the beast. You know why? Because we have done this show for almost seven years. And one thing that I have come to learn is no matter what I do, no matter how, even if I go to a cabin in the woods, they're still going to get the data. Resistance is futile.

Resistance is futile. Privacy is dead. Get over it. So I'm like, you know what? Maybe I will just try and figure out ways to use this to my advantage. The tech is really cool. Why not stop fighting it and try and actually get some use out of it instead of really just bitching about it all the time?

We're still going to bitch about it when they do something dumb, for sure. But I'm trying to figure out ways to make my life better with all this technology. All in all, you're just another brick in the wall, Jason. Pretty much. And at the end of the day, nobody gives a shit about me. You know, nobody gives a shit about you.

That is the one thing that we can hold on to for our privacy in the future is nobody cares. Exactly. You know, we're not criminals. I know the whole argument, if you're not doing anything wrong, who cares? But it's like, well, actually, I don't care because I'm not doing anything wrong.

Let's do something fun with this stuff. Let's figure it out. Because once you buy a cell phone, it's over. If you think you're going to be private by getting a burner phone, you are sorely mistaken. Because all you have to do is turn that burner phone on once next to your regular phone.

They've got a point of cross-reference. They can put you with that burner phone. They know exactly who you are. If you paid with a credit card for that burner phone, they know exactly who you are. If you pay a homeless person to go buy a burner phone with cash, they still know who you are. Because you are eventually going to screw up and open that phone next to your regular phone or from a location that you're normally at.

And they probably got you on a security cam giving the homeless man the cash and him handing the phone over to you. You're just not that smart. Yes. While you're standing outside the Safeway wiping man poo off your shoe and the homeless guy's inside picking up the phone. Yeah. There's no escape. So I'm like, okay, let's give in and let's have some fun with it.

And I am enjoying my Google Photos experience so far. I'm finding stuff that I completely forgot existed. And I'm also realizing how bad memory is and how useless memory is because I'm finding videos of things that I've done in here with friends that I've, you know, these are things that we've all talked about.

We've done together. We have videos of all of us remember everything completely differently. And then I pull up the video and send it around and they're like, I don't remember it being like that. And I'm like, neither do I. Getting old is weird, man. That's all I got to say.

All right. You had a lot of coffee this morning, didn't you? No, I've just been thinking about this a lot. I didn't sleep well last night and it's all I was just up all night. My mind racing. So I need to get it out before I forget it because I'm going to forget and then I'll never remember it again. Yeah. And then we'll go back and listen to this episode.

We'll both remember this conversation completely differently. Well, you will. I won't remember the conversation at all. In the news.

Facebook's back in the news again. No, they're not going to ban political ads. That's it. They're done. Is that news? Because that's what they've just kept saying for months now. So we know that. Yeah, I know. They had to go in front of politicians this week and they're just like, yeah, you know, we're going to give you a little bit more transparency in here and we're going to do a little of this.

We're going to do a little of that, which we know they're never going to do. So it's like they're just doubling down on being assholes. That's what it has come to this week. That's all the news that I've seen about Facebook for the most part, except when the next story I've got. It's just them being assholes and they're sticking to their guns on it.

Which you almost kind of got to respect a little bit, even though I completely and utterly disagree with it. But as we've talked about many times, it's how are they going to enforce it even if they tried to change it? That's the real problem. I think if it were if there were a simple solution, I think Facebook probably would step up and do the right thing right now just because they know that there's so much bad press.

The problem is there is no simple solution. The solution is hiring hundreds of thousands of people and basically, you know, spending all the monies that they make to try to police their own gargantuan system. And I don't think they want to do it because they don't want to because if you there's there's no upside to doing it because you will screw up.

And when you screw up, you're fucked. And also, they have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders and that and the shareholders just want the monies. If you look at the landscape, everybody is pulling political ads, right? If Facebook is the only place that you can go to put your political ads coaching.

So they are going to make bank on this while still screwing up democracy and the country. So, yay, Facebook. Way to keep going. I love this article that I have here in here from TechCrunch. At the very end, it says, it is, to quote Sacha Baron Cohen, bullshit. It is, but it's what we got.

And just another Facebook story real quick. Did you hear about the Teen Vogue incident this week? I did, but then I saw that you put it in the show notes so I didn't bother reading about it because I don't care about Facebook or Teen Vogue. Teen Vogue. Actually, we've covered Teen Vogue on the show before. They've got some great journalists over there now, believe it or not.

I mean, it was like four years ago, five years ago. We're just like, this story comes from, oh, wait, wait, wait. What? Teen Vogue? Teen Vogue. Yeah, it was a really good story. So, turns out that Facebook had an article published in Teen Vogue called, How Facebook is Helping Ensure the Integrity of the 2020 Election.

It was a 2,000-word Q&A session with five women working at Facebook and how they're protecting us from election interference. Well, and, of course, Sheryl Sandberg says, it's a great piece. Well, it turns out it wasn't really a piece of journalism.

It was sponsored content. A.K.A. An ad. SponCon. It was SponCon. And it wasn't labeled as such. And then everything kind of went to shit. And nobody really had an answer for a while. And then it finally all came out.

And they're like, yes, we paid for it. Shit. Yeah. Well, there goes Teen Vogue's Shining Star. Yeah. And it's funny. Somebody asked the Teen Vogue's Twitter account, like, what is this? And somebody at the magazine responded, literally, IDK. Great.

Awesome. Well, I've got some fun news from the world of the internet as well. Seems the pink slips moved and shifted one month this year. Not everybody got fired in December. But a lot of people are getting fired now in January. Including almost everyone at College Humor.

Yeah, layoffs have come for another online comedy outlet. Yeah, you know, they're there. They've managed to survive on the internet despite challenges for almost 20 years. But they are no longer. Multiple sources have confirmed that College Humor was hit with a big round of layoffs today. About 100 employees in New York and Los Angeles have lost their jobs.

Which is around 5 to 10 people will remain at the company as it restructures. Meaning eventually goes away and dies. Here's 100 new podcasters that just flooded the market. Great. That is probably true. Can you believe College Humor is 20 years old? No.

God, I feel old. That means the people that started College Humor when they were in college at the time are now getting ready to- Retire. Reap their retirement benefits. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's what this was. They didn't want to have to, you know, pay the pension out. Get out.

Maybe. Get out. Well, and another round of layoffs have occurred over at Lime, one of the scooter companies. So, in an ongoing quest to become profitable. Lime says it will exit 12 markets across the globe.

In the U.S., this includes Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Antonio, as well as a bunch of international locations that they are pulling out of because, you know. Sadly, not Los Angeles. People. No, sadly, not Los Angeles. According to Axios, Lime is also laying off about 100 employees, which amounts to approximately 14% of their workforce.

So, this is all tweaks and restructurings to help their bottom line, and so they can become sustainable. This year, we are confident that in 2020, Lime will be the first next-generation mobility company to be profitable, Lime President Joe Kraus said. So, yeah.

If you can't make money, cut expenses. I don't think that that's going to help them much. Well, Twitter did it, and it made them look good on paper. Yeah. Well, there's looking good on paper, and there's actually being good. Yeah. There are different things. There's always that. Yeah. And speaking of that, Uber is making changes in California to brace for the new gig worker law that has passed.

The company sent out an email to over 150,000 drivers and millions of passengers. Did you get this email, Jason? I did not. Oh, I did. You may not be registered as Californian in their books then, perhaps. So, things that are changing. No more upfront pricing for trips other than Uber Pool.

Uber will now show passengers in California a range of prices, just what we wanted. The final price will be calculated at the end of the trip, so you no longer have any idea how much this is going to cost you. Passengers will be able to add drivers to a favorites list, and the company will eliminate some Uber rewards benefits like price protection on a route and flexible cancellations.

Drivers will reportedly see more info, including trip time, distance, destination, and estimated fare. And they'll be able to reject ride requests without penalties now. Theoretically, giving drivers more control and being more transparent about fares may better prepare Uber for the repercussions of AB5.

But critics are noting that the changes could also cause drivers to reject shorter trips or refuse trips to certain neighborhoods, potentially leading to discrimination against lower income areas. Awesome. The law of unintended consequences. Exactly. And that would totally screw me, because the only times I ever really ever used Uber was when I was at a bar and too drunk to even walk home, and it was a five-minute walk, and I would take Uber.

And they would definitely reject me for those rides now. So that was good stuff. And Grubhub is having some problem as well. It could be up for sale, according to the Wall Street Journal. Whether or not that sale actually happens, this is highlighting that Grubhub and its competitors are, unsurprisingly, struggling to compete over who brings you food from restaurants.

Because this is such a low-margin business, where they make money from charging customers delivery and other service fees and from revenue shares with restaurants. And to sign up some of these bigger restaurant chains, such as McDonald's, food delivery services have had to lower their commissions, making those margins even smaller.

So good times. And of course, they're playing the game. There can be only one, and they're all lowering their fees for customers by trying to lock people in. But what they're discovering, and I love the way that Grubhub's CEO decided to basically point out this truth, we believe online diners are becoming more promiscuous.

Okay. Meaning there's no loyalty to any of these. Why should there be? Because it's what they always do. They get you in with low prices, and all of a sudden, the price gets jacked up. So then you move over to a different company that's offering lower prices. Duh. Yeah. Your own business model is biting you in your ass.

Well, I mean, I go with the one that actually goes to the restaurants that I eat at. Right. But now they're basically, you know, it's, I don't know about you, but anytime I actually go out to eat in a restaurant, I see like five iPads for every delivery service. Oh, yeah. Exactly. They're all on every one of them now. No.

And so I've talked about DoorDash on the show before and how I had such a miserable experience. My food came upside down and cold. Yes. Well, my roommate and I were both injured about two weeks ago, and we couldn't actually leave and go get groceries and stuff. I'm like, okay, let's get some paquito mas.

I'm hungry for Mexican. It's like, dude, love paquito mas. Just you wait. So I'm like, okay, let's just, let's just bite the bullet. Let's see who delivers for paquito mas. I'm like, ah, shit, it's DoorDash. But I signed up, placed my order, came back, got it within, you know, 20 minutes, because it's less than a mile away from here, which is fantastic.

So the food got here, wasn't upside down, totally hot, order was perfect, tipped the guy on the app, everybody was nice, the guy was cool, got my food, fantastic dinner, and I'm like, ah, shit, maybe they fixed it, but let's try it again. And so I ordered a Philly cheesesteak from a place like down the road, and I'm watching the driver come, driver turns off, basically probably goes home, takes a dump, and then

about, you know, 30 minutes after they left the Philly cheesesteak place, I get my food, it's cold, it's rubbery, I'm like, ah, this is the DoorDash I remember. And so, you know, one star's all around for that one. Then, you know, I'm like, okay, paquito mas worked.

Let's stick with paquito mas. We've eaten at paquito mas five times in the past two weeks. You know what, though? I would be terrified to order from a service again once I'd given it a one-star rating. I think that just means that the next time you get your paquito mas, it's going to be butt floss first. No, but I didn't give paquito mas a one-star, I gave the Philly cheesesteak place a one-star.

I mean the DoorDash delivery type people. Oh, well, the DoorDash deliverer was, you know, just a stupid little fat girl from college who was just like, literally had food on her shirt and didn't care about what she was doing. All of the other delivery drivers I had were very professional, very nice, and whatever.

I think this was a shitty driver. So, but then I ordered, and here's the test, the big test of DoorDash. I ordered sushi. We ordered sushi for a cookie. You're a brave man. Well, here's the other thing.

We don't order outside of a two-mile circle. So, it's perfect. Came perfect. I even put in the notes, you must have at least six cups of wasabi with this order. This is extremely important. And the guy shows up. He's like, hey, man, I got your wasabi.

And I'm like, okay, you win, DoorDash. You win. And, you know, it's usually three bucks a delivery for these things. And to go to your point about how they're lowering the prices and to keep you using the service, DoorDash has a system where you can just pay $9.99 a month, and all the delivery fees go away.

Yeah. And also, I discovered that if you are a Chase credit card holder, you can get that waived for free. Oh, nice. And apparently, you can get between three months or a year of no DoorDash fees, depending on what type of card you have. So, you might want to Google that if you have a Chase card out there.

Oh, yeah. I don't. So, I just pay the 10 bucks. And so, after three deliveries, it's like, you know, okay, I'm just paying for the food and a tip. I'm like, okay, I'm down with that. I'm totally down with that. Yes, I'm sure it will help their bottom line. Yeah. Yeah. Because I'm like, okay, I have to order at least four times to get my $10 worth, which means I'm going to use it more often, which means I'm going to be eating in more often.

But, tell you what, man, Paquito Mas. Oh, Jesus. They closed the only one around me. I think the only way I could get it now is DoorDash, and it would show up 30 minutes later. So, I don't even want to think about it. No, yeah. Remember, we had the taco. We talked about this with food delivery. There's the Taco Bell problem. You can't get Taco Bell from a delivery service.

It's just not going to work. But, you know, a nice Mexican restaurant, it still works pretty well. So, you're moving to Toronto. I am. All right. Well, Sidewalk Labs is launching a recycling pilot with a company of theirs called AMP Robotics.

Yes. So, the Toronto municipal government is targeting a 70% reduction in the amount of recyclables and organics that are going into landfills or waste disposal by 2026. So, in six years, they want to have a 70% reduction in this. Yes. Fairly Herculean task, you might say.

Not really. I know where you're going with this. Okay. Well, they're going to be going after apartment buildings because apparently in apartment buildings, everybody just shoves it all together and nobody cares. There's no accountability for your recyclables in an apartment building. And the downtown Toronto core is 98% condos and apartments and co-ops.

There's not a lot of single-family residences in downtown core. So, this actually might make a big difference. Okay. Now, here's what gets me about this. They're going to be tracking you. That I'm not thrilled by. They are going to be publicly, or not publicly, but they will be shaming you if you are not putting your thing in the right bin.

And do you really want the garbage companies sitting there and saying, like, looking through your garbage, figuring out what you've done and what you haven't done? I do believe that they're going to attempt to basically do it to the actual full apartment units. If you hit over a certain amount, then they will tell the apartment owners, and that will be passed down through HOAs and things of that nature, that we aren't doing a good enough job here, people.

So, it's not going to be individual. However, having said that, we know that, you know, there is no such thing as anonymization of data. So, they would be able to dial down, I'm sure, if they chose to, and they may do that in the future, which is kind of frightening. You know, but, hey, trash is trash.

Once you throw it in your bin, it's public domain, isn't it? That's true, I guess. It certainly isn't Santa Monica, because as soon as I throw something in my trash, somebody else has come along and taken it. Sidewalk is also aware of the privacy concerns that could arise from having the trash monitored by its portfolio company.

So, in concert with the city, the company created, remember, the company created a responsible data use assessment process and is assuring residents that any data collected will be de-identified and aggregated, only focusing on the types of waste that's being thrown out.

Right. Can you de-anonymize your egg carton? I don't know. Yeah. How are you going to de-anonymize all the Amazon boxes that have my name and address printed on it? Exactly. The non-personal aggregate data about the waste recorded by the Materials Recovery Facility and AMP will be shared with Sidewalk Labs, residents in the buildings and building owners, the company said.

Once the pilot is complete, Sidewalk Labs will share a report to the public using the same aggregate and non-identifying data. Right. Well, overall, I think it's a great idea. Obviously, there are privacy concerns, but as you always point out, Jason, there's no more privacy. Get over it. That's true.

That is true. And it won't really matter to me. I am not going to be getting a condo. We will be getting a single home house. It's only fancy pants. Well, you know, I'm old. I deserve it. I do too, but I can't afford it. And in more Uber news, Uber is adding LA to flying taxi test cities.

Demo flights are slated for this year, 2020. Yes. Specifically, it's signed an agreement to work with a federal government agency over the development of unmanned traffic management at low altitude, which makes a change from being investigated by federal agencies. Oh, no, it doesn't, because both are happening at the same time, Mr. Author guy.

They're still being investigated. They just made a deal with NASA. So NASA is already working with several other companies to develop traffic management for low altitude vehicles, including for drones. The goal is to have a flying taxi service up and running in Los Angeles before the 2028 Olympics.

And they've also released a concept video showing an Uber user getting an elevator to a skyport and then taking a flying taxi across the city. Now, Jason, what did we talk about last episode? Something about a list of things that are always going to be 10 years away? Yep. This is on it. This is always going to be 10 years away.

There's no way this is happening anytime soon. I don't trust anybody, especially in the city of Los Angeles, having come back in and seeing their Uber and taxi system that they're using now at LAX, which is a goddamn fucking nightmare. There's no way any of this is going to happen anytime soon.

And even the author knows this because, as the author points out, near the end of the article, this is basically just another Uber PR stunt trying to get people to look at something cool instead of thinking about all the crappy scandals they're involved in. That's true. That's true.

And you know what? You know, what we have a lot of in Los Angeles are guns. So it doesn't take that many beers to go outside and shoot down a taxi. Yeah, well, I mean, not even shooting down. We've got a lot of laser pointers and we are having problems with those with airlines at the moment.

You think that's not going to be a problem with these? Or just fly your drone in front of a taxi, you know, kamikaze a taxi. There's just so many ways to take an aircraft down. It's ridiculous. Yes. And my last article that I had for news here was over at the Wall Street Journal. I want to put a button on this one and I want to come back and revisit this in our last episode of the year.

This is Tech Will Change Your Life in 2020. Let's see. What do we got here? Let's see. We got 5G. That's going to change our life. Hearables are going to change our life. iPhone excitement returns because the next iPhone is supposed to be really, really cool. Nice day for a wireless wedding.

I'm not entirely sure. Oh, this is mergers for wireless companies. Now that's going to change our life. Yeah, but they don't point out if it's for the better or not because I don't necessarily think that's going to be better. All the different streaming things that are coming this year. Unicorns on the endangered list, meaning all these crappy companies that are finally, you know, good on paper isn't good enough anymore for a lot of these companies.

People looking into Amazon and all its shady businesses. China rising. Gig workers uniting. The election. So we shall see. I want to save this in a little file somewhere and come December. Let's see how all these things actually did.

All right. Set a reminder.

Security? Ha! We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Shit! By Dave Dirty Joke Bittner. Dave Dirty Joke Bittner. Dave the Joke Command Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyberware podcast and many a filthy joke that we can't air.

Dave is also co-host of the social engineering podcast Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan as well as the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen where they discuss law and policy as well as surveillance and privacy. Absolutely nothing we discussed before we hit record. No. And she said, I was talking to the duck.

Oh, hi guys. Hello. Welcome back. Brian, welcome back. Before we get started, what did you think of Star Wars? I listened to your discussion about it. I like the fact that you came prepared with bullet points. Thank you very much. Yes. I do agree with most of your points.

They were glaringly obvious. I mean, glaring plot holes. So many questions. Nothing as big as, oh, we can just hit hyperspace with our vehicle and blow things up. But lots of little ones that added up to that. But then as I left the theater, slightly, you know, I'm feeling it's not the Star Wars movie I wanted, but it's the Star Wars movie we have.

I reminded myself these movies are for kids, not middle-aged adults who have been slavering over these things and reading books that are no longer canon for 30 plus years and have opinions and thoughts about the actual mechanics and how the force actually works.

So these are kids' movies, and as such, it was a fitting and welcome wrap-up to the entire series. All right. Fair enough. When I remind myself of that, when I think about it as a rational adult, I'm still quite angry. Okay. I don't have any anger, so... I'm not angry.

It was fine. It was totally fine. There, you know, a lot was left hanging. But, of course, things... That's the way of things now. You know, you can point at any series and say the same thing at this point. You know, Avengers did not answer every question. Star Wars did not answer every question.

It is what it is. Yep. Yep. All right. After a week to chew on this, I have come back with my verdict, and it is just utter crap. It is just a crap movie. Sorry, guys. It's a crap movie. Jason is unable to tap into his childhood delight. That is my theory here. Yes. Yeah.

The weight of the world has crushed his spirit. Yes. But I also didn't hate the Battlestar Galactica finale as much as you did. The tagline of the show was, they have a plan. What do we find out in the last episode? There's no fucking plan. Well, so...

Gee, guys, I haven't watched it yet, and I guess I don't have to now. Well, you can watch everything up to the final episode. It is a wonderful series. In fact, I would consider it to be one of the best sci-fi series of all time until the final episode. Okay. But they did cover it in one of the extra movies later.

They had to quickly put together another mini-series because everybody was so pissed off. Well, here's the thing. They said, we had a plan. Then it didn't work. So we didn't have a plan after that. That's the whole wrap-up of Battlestar Galactica.

If there was ever a definition of retcon, it was that mini-series. Oh, okay. Anyways, let's move on to technology and security. A little bit. Well, I do have one thing. Have you guys seen the Mandalorian Spaghetti Western trailer that I put in the notes yet? Yes.

I liked it. I want them to go back and redo the entire series as this. Yeah. I mean, is it that far off? I guess they could just replace the music and put that filter on it. Yeah, that would just about do it because stylistically they're pretty much on track there.

Yeah. Well, we know that from that crappy movie that we just watched that they have space horses. So I guess they can have space coyotes howling in the background too. Why are you surprised there are space horses, Jason? There are millions of planets in this galaxy. Space horses. Come on. I'm just saying. Lots of planets.

Mm-hmm. You got no problem with Little Green Man, but you're pissed off about space horses? But you're going to go attack a spaceship and you bring your horse with you? Come on. Who takes a horse to a space battle? Well, like I said, there's lots of plotholes. You fight the war with the army you got.

All right. So we remember back in 2017 what happened with Strava and it published a bunch of maps and it's anonymized data sourcing and all that, which of course enabled people to find secret military bases because military people were using it. Oopsies. That happened.

It's kind of happening again. The U.S. has banned Strava since that happened. You're not allowed to use it on military bases. They are now banning TikTok. And we're not entirely sure why. This could just be a we don't want this to happen to us again preventative act because we don't know exactly what's going on with TikTok.

We do know location data is often posted and the same thing can sort of be done. There is worry that, of course, even though TikTok and its parent company ByteDance says that, oh, no, no, no, none of our servers are in China and we do not give our data to China. There is some evidence, according to the U.S. government, that, yes, the app is sending data back to China.

So good move, bad move. How the hell is the government going to stay on top of this sort of thing as apps come out? Do they have to hire millennials and Gen Z people just to tell them what's cool and hip these days and look into it and ban things as we move along? Or should we just have a blanket thing saying you're in the damn military, you're on the base, turn your damn phone off?

Yeah. I saw a thing with this recent deployment to Iran that a bunch of folks were sent on, thanks to everything that's going on over there, that they had to leave their phones home. Yeah. They were not allowed to take them with them. I can't go in to see a concert now without putting my phone in a bag that's kept, you know, securely behind.

And why not? Why shouldn't the military have to do the same thing? It's amazing to me that they give them the amount of freedom that they do with the mobile devices. And I guess part of it is it's a big morale thing where it's a way for people to feel connected to home. So that's a good thing.

So you've got to balance that against the risk of everything we know that these devices can do and do do. So, yeah. Well, I mean, if they're using the base Wi-Fi, which I'm guessing they're having to because they're probably not getting, you know, a RAN TNT over there.

So they can just put IP blocks on the services that they don't want the soldiers to have access to. It's like, okay, what are the servers that TikTok uses? Okay, let's just put a block list in for those. So they can't even get to it if they wanted to. I'm sure that works in controlled environments, like when they're overseas on these bases.

But part of the concern is here at home. Well, and I mean, imagine I'm just, you know, talking out of my butt here, which is what I do best. But if somebody drives by a base with a Stingray device and starts imitating a cell phone tower and everybody's phones start reaching out to it and thinking that they're going to, you know, get cell service.

There's those kinds of concerns. Bluetooth, you know, all that stuff. Yeah, well, hopefully that stuff's encrypted. Fingers crossed. Somehow. Good stuff. I'm thinking no. As we've learned on this show, after seven years, yes.

Yes. Where things should be generally is where they're not. If you're going to err on one side or the other. Go with stupidity. So, yeah, that's happening. Also, news came out this week that Amazon has now fired, well, I guess Ring, but is there any difference between the companies anymore?

None. So they fired employees for improperly accessing Ring's user video data, according to a letter the company wrote to senators and obtained by Motherboard. So, yes, people with God access used it to do ungodly sorts of things. Are you saying that young programmers are inquisitive and would like to stretch their mind and knowledge and see what other people are doing?

Yes, I suppose. I'm a little actually surprised at what they're saying the count is, which is over the last four years, Ring has only received four complaints or inquiries regarding a team member's access to Ring video data, which I just assume that there's an awful lot of this is unreported and hasn't been figured out.

So one per year. The crappy programmers are the ones that got caught. Yeah. That's how it is. The guys who wrote the system know how to erase their tracks. Yes. Well, and would there be any practical way for them to have the videos be, you know, encrypted when they're at rest and, you know, limit the access that way?

That would probably be a good idea. I mean, they may very well be doing that. I doubt it, but I doubt they are because, you know, but they might. Yeah. Right now they're saying, of course, they've taken steps to limit data access to a smaller number of people. It says right now that only three employees can currently access stored customer videos.

I do wonder why any employee can access it at any time. Shouldn't there be a reason to do so? Right. Customer service. Well, yeah, if, if, yes, if I request it, then, you know, can't we have like a old style nuclear bunker key situation here where like three people have to switch their keys at once and now you can get in there and look at my private data?

Not a bad idea. Well, grumpy old geeks is a graveyard of good ideas. Ooh, show title. Yeah. A graveyard of good ideas. Yeah. I was thinking three employees are, have access to this and one of them is a custodian.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, we, we know that, you know, restricting access to these things is a good idea, but nobody tends to do it and, you know, you have to have, I think you have to have manager approval to look up somebody's data. It's like, Hey, you know, check out on aisle three.

I need to, I need to refund somebody's lettuce requires somebody to walk over with a key. If you have to look at somebody's data from their home and inside their house, you should actually have to have somebody come over and say, okay, I approve this process. Look at it from this angle too, which I just occurred to me because I've been dealing with some customer service things on, on various fronts.

Look at it from, if you're a customer trying to get access to your own data with companies, they put you through so many hoops. What's your phone number? We need to send you a text. You can send a code back. What's your social security number? What's your mother's maiden name? There are so many steps to be able to access our own information with companies, but internally within a company, it seems to be a fucking free for all.

Well, we trust the people who work for us. That's why we have insider threats. Right. Yeah. It would be nice if I get a text message saying, Joe from Ring would like to access your personal data. Would you like to approve this? Enter code, blah, blah, blah. Let's give Joe this code.

It's like a, you know. Let's go ahead and make a headstone for that idea. Yeah. Two-factor auth where the client is actually looped in or the customer's looped in. Yeah. But I could imagine that. I mean, that would work great for an actual customer service engagement where I'm on the line with them and they say, okay, I'm shooting you an approval notice.

If for me to be able to look at the files we're talking about here, you need to give me the okay. And that would be a great interaction with any cut, any company. Yes, it would. Yeah. Another, another one of my million dollar ideas. It will never come to fruition.

Well, the problem is it'll, they'll say the companies will say it'll cost a million dollars to implement. Therefore, we can't do that. Right. It'll slow things down. Customers will resist. Yeah. Yeah. So my next story here is it's, it's not really security on the front end, but we'll talk about it here.

Delta is going to pilot program a new display in the Detroit airport called Parallel Reality. Detroit's nice. That's what it is. Yeah. You actually want to stay here instead of leave. Yeah. So this new technology allows multiple people to look at the same display and see different things, which is cool.

It is very minority report. As we were discussing earlier in the show about memory, we do that already. Well, but even, how about the three of us having watched Star Wars? Yes, we all saw a different reality. So the thing about this is, is it has to, you have, you sign in at the gate, you give them, you know, you got your boarding pass, swipe your boarding pass.

And from there on in, it gives you a customized view at any of these displays telling you when your flight is leaving. You don't have to see all the other flights. You just look at it and it's like, oh, your flight's on time. Your flight's delayed. Oh, bonus. You've been upgraded or you've been downgraded, which is what they don't want to say in the press release, but it can do, you know, multiple people.

The thing about it is. How are they identifying you? Exactly. I'm guessing you scan your boarding pass and you scan your face because that's about the only way that these things are going to be able to look at you and figure out where you're at and use the angle of the TV to see where you're at and show you your specific information because it's got to use some kind of like solarization technique to be able to have like multiple displays at the same time showing different info to different people at different angles.

I've got to say there's going to be so many false positives on this. It's ridiculous. I travel. I used to travel an awful lot. I still travel fairly extensively. I'm part of the, what's that program that you, Christ. TSA PreCheck. PreCheck and also the International, Nexus, Nexus International.

So they have retina scans of me and when I cross the border, I go up to a machine and it does scans my eyeballs and says, okay, that's you and you get a little pass so you can walk through really quickly. That thing is so finicky. People spend five, 10 minutes, you know, move forward, move back, move your eyes over here, move your eyes over there.

I can't imagine that the technology has increased so much that it's going to be amazingly accurate easily. Well, they're saying, you know, this has new processor architectures, new computer vision algorithms and new applied manufacturing processes. So it has to be facial recognition.

Now, what happens if there's a short person in front of you that's going on the flight, you're standing directly behind them, but you're taller. So you have two faces in the same, you know, actual line of sight of the device. How is it going to do that? From what we know and from 70s technology shows, it starts to smoke and rock back and forth a little bit and then it explodes.

Yes, as it cries out in pain, the blue screen of death comes up. And when I was reading this, I was thinking, who asked for this? Why not just give me this information on my phone? Yeah. Most airlines, you can sign up for that and you get that.

There's also fucking screens everywhere in the airport. But they want to make it personalized, Brian, because Delta cares about you. Delta could actually suck it and spend the money on making bigger seats for all of us and a little bit more fucking leg room. Yeah, I know.

I know. But I don't know. When was the last time anybody here flew Delta? The 70s is the last time. Every time I hear it, I always think about the George Carlin joke. TWA stands for travel with Arabs and Delta stands for don't even let them aboard. Okay.

Don't remember that one, but I miss George Carlin. Not as PC as, well, it was never PC, but, you know, it was Carlin. Yeah. But here's the other thing that I love. The name of the company that built the display is called Misapplied Sciences. Sounds about right. Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Exactly. So this is just another way for them to scan your face and try and do something that's probably not going to work. This is another one of those 10 years out things. Yeah, this is always going to be 10 years away. But it is very minority report. I got to give them that. Because, you know, once you can see your flight details, you know, you're going to have a customized ad right under that for whatever restaurant that you like the best.

That's it. It's not just going to be flight details. It's going to be upsells. Now, you know, I see that there is a tall person standing behind you. Would you like to opt for the larger, you know, premium economy experience so you will not be, he won't bother you the whole flight or whatever. Right.

Right. It's interesting technology. I'm curious how the actual technology works. I've seen, I remember a few years ago at, when I used to go to the NAB convention, which is the broadcaster show, they had some folks had some 3D televisions that didn't require glasses, you know, and it was some kind of, I believe that it's called lenticular, you know, the thing like the, I remember I used to have books that had that like thick sort

of rippily plastic on it and you see things in 3D. Yeah. Yeah. That's lenticular. So, um, yeah, I figured it had to be something similar to that. Yeah. Right. Some sort of dynamic lenticular process. And now we have them all in our homes. Oh, wait, no. Right.

Exactly. My friend had a 3D TV in his basement and we went down and he had rumble seats and, you know, we had put on the glasses and we watched a Jurassic Park in it. And I got to say, it was really cool for like the first 15 minutes. And then I think as a group, we all got a headache at the same time.

Huh? Yeah. Those things, man, they're, they're, they're headache boxes. Oh, those 3D TVs. Well, and I never opt to see the 3D version of a movie in a theater anymore. Oh, me either. Oh, hell no. Never. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Last one I saw, I think was Avatar and we saw it in IMAX and we were in the front row, bottom left.

3D doesn't work when you're that close. I got to tell you, it, it, we all walked out of there needing some, uh, Excedrin. I think I saw one of the Hobbit movies a little bit more recently than, than Avatar in 3D. And I just remember, I don't really need to see the spear come at me every single time. It's not adding to my experience of the movie at all.

Yeah. And the first 3D movie I saw was Jaws 3D. Oh. Classic. Classic. Yeah, it was a classic. It was terrible. Another headache box. But I think we all had headaches from Avatar just because of the plot. But the first 3D movie I ever saw was Creature from the Black Lagoon. Oh.

I didn't know they made that in 3D. That was a 3D movie. Yeah. Wow. And I saw Captain EO all the time because I was Disneyland local. Yeah. Did you get, what did you think about my comment about the Emperor's support mechanism being right out of Captain EO? I think you've actually ruined the movie for me and I will not be able to watch it again without thinking about that.

But I'm right, right? I mean, it's- Oh yeah, you're 100% right. Yes. Yes. Now I'm going to expect Palpatine to break out into song. Right. We are here to save the world. And Rey's going to moonwalk. We are here to save the world. Yeah. Kids, if you haven't seen Captain EO, don't.

Aw, I like Captain EO. I think it's one of those things where we were of the right age to appreciate it. It's of its time. Yes. Yes. It's of its time. Anyway. All right. Something else that was of its time and will soon be going away in Illinois are red light cameras.

Okay. We've talked at length about red light cameras. Have you covered any of this on the show, Dave? With the Safe Speed investigation with corruption going on? No, I have not. No. Oh, well, there's apparently an ongoing federal corruption investigation about Safe Speed, the company that puts out these red light cameras.

But the Comptroller, was it the Comptroller? Yeah, the Comptroller in Illinois, Susanna Mendoza, they have given her the task for the past several years of getting people to pay their red light tickets by taking it out of their tax returns.

Oh, that makes her popular. Yeah. Yeah. So no more. No more. She's not going to do it. She says, the Comptroller's office isn't going to be in the business of helping a program that's broken and morally corrupt. They should revisit their programs entirely. I don't think it's good public policy, and I think it's time it ends.

All right. She must be running for president. The problem here isn't actually with the technology in and of itself. It's with the horrible company that is implementing the technology. Well, no. The technology has been shown to cause more accidents in most environments because people react differently when they see a camera.

They slam on the brakes when they're coming to a stoplight if it turns yellow, causing tons of rear enders. That is a proven fact. You can look that one up. It causes accidents, which is not something you want from a company called Safe Speed. But the whole thing is just fundamentally flawed, false positives, and it's just a mess, and they need to go away.

I think I have a solution for all of this, Jason, for everything that we tend to talk about in this segment. We just need to get rid of all cameras. All cameras. Get rid of all cameras. All of them. Or everybody has a self-driving car, or a flying taxi, or a bird. That's an interesting thing to think about.

What would a world without cameras be like? What would be different? That would be, hmm, I'm going to be thinking about that. No more Snapchat filters. Weaponized pencils and paper. Right. All of the courtroom artists are suddenly in high demand. Rule the world. Yeah.

If you can't draw, you're an outcast. Fake sketch. Fake sketch. Right. Right. Deep draw. I am not a fan of red light cameras. As I've said, I think, here many times, I think it's wrong to have a crime be a different crime, depending on whether a human being witnesses it or a machine witnesses it.

It's either a moving violation or it's not. And so I have a problem with automated law enforcement. I find it just creepy. Yeah. I'm not a fan. So you don't go back and watch RoboCop every year. Oh, I love RoboCop. That's different. Oh, because there was an actual brain inside.

Yeah. Please put down your weapon. You have five seconds to comply. Yeah. All right. That's all I got this week. All right. That was more movies than security. Excellent. Yeah. We're heading in the right direction, gentlemen. Oh, man. I should have put in my Airwolf versus Blue Thunder link in this segment.

Yeah. I was reading about that. Maybe we'll touch on that next week. All right. If you want to hear my thoughts on Blue Thunder, go to DoesItHaveLegs.com and you can hear all about it. I thought I'd run quickly through some of the presents I got for Christmas, which fall under cool apps and doodads.

And these are the things that so far I actually kind of like. First up, and I looked them all up on Amazon. I'm not sure where the people that got them for me got them from, but they're all on Amazon, as is everything. The Trivando Money Clip Wallet Rio Men's Wallet Slim Front Pocket RFID Blocking Card Holder Minimless Mini Bi-Fold Gift Box.

I could care less about the RFID blocking bit, but this is comfy and it's a nice front I always like my wallet in my front pocket. It's a great front pocket wallet and it's kind of snazzy looking. I hate the comparison photo on Amazon because they're showing it next to a big fat wallet. I'm like, you didn't take everything that was in that wallet and put it in that other wallet.

Well, no. The one thing that I do have two wallets now. I have my slim wallet that I take out for just the normal stuff and then I've got my I need absolutely everything with me wallet, in which case I have to move stuff back over. Oh my God. But it's fine.

I mean, 99% of the time, the Money Clip Wallet, the slimline one is all I need. It's, you know, if I'm going to go travel or do something big, then I'll take the full wallet. It's so funny. I still have a biker chain wallet without the chain that I got as a gift from the staff at JPEG magazine. When I got, I got drunk at snakes on a plane and somebody rolled me and stole my wallet and they bought me another one as a, as a consolation prize for not getting killed or stabbed.

And I still have that. And I still have that and it works fine. The next thing up is the Swatom 8-in-1 Mini Gadgets Repair Tools Pen Style Precision Screwdriver Set Kit Home Improvement Red. I got red because red's my son's favorite color. I've got tools all over the place, but they're usually put away in a closet.

And, you know, especially now having a kid because every, every battery compartment and every kid's toy requires a tiny little screwdriver to get it open because God forbid a kid open it up and eat a battery. I've basically needed screwdrivers a lot. I just keep this in a little pen cup that I've got.

And anytime I need a screwdriver, it's right there. Super convenient. In fact, it's been so convenient and I've liked it so much. I bought another one to have at my mom's house because of all my kid's toys there. Okay. And last up, which I have not used yet, is the Wallet Ninja 18-in-1 credit card size multi-tool number one best selling in the world, black.

This would have been so convenient and awesome for me about 20 years ago because bottle opener. Yeah. You know, I had one that's like shaped like a monkey. I carried it around in my wallet forever. And then I realized it's just adding too much weight to my wallet and I never, ever used it. Yeah. They're heavy and I don't ever use it.

And instead of putting it in my wallet, what I've done is I've thrown it in my backpack because there's a better chance of me recognizing that I've got it and need it with my backpack than it ever will with my wallet. Yeah. I tell you what, this reminded me of something. that I carry with me all the time that has saved my bacon a ton.

And it's the Swiss Tech Utility Key 6-in-1. It's a little $2 key that looks like a key, clips on your key chain. It's always there. It does have a bottle opener on it and just a basic screwdriver and some other doodads and googahs. But you can get it through TSA too.

So it's always with you. It's pretty good. Yeah. But for two bucks, well worth it. Utility keys are awesome. Now I found a new app that I am thoroughly in love with. It's called Front and Center and it's by John Syracuse of Accidental Tech Podcast fame and other podcasts out there.

It's three bucks in the app store. And what it does is it fixes a problem with Mac OS X, which has driven me crazy. Well, an app has like, say, five windows open. You go to another app. Those get put in the background.

Are you moving around apps and everything? And then you click on the app and you want all of the windows to come forward. But it only brings forward the window that you click on, not everything else. This fixes that. So what you're saying is this can be baked into the next version of OS. Well, it used to be.

This is that's why it's called classic mode. Right. Because it actually goes back to the way things used to be. And I wish they would just bake it in. It would have saved me three bucks. But I got it this morning. And it's like because my big problem is I do my email in Spark and, you know, my Spark inbox is big and it's easy to click on.

But I have a separate window open for the email that I'm actually composing. Then I have to click on Spark. That one comes up. Then I have to go to window and find the window and have that come to the front. So it's a pain in the ass every time I'm just writing an email and I need to go, like, do a quick research thing and come back.

Then I got to find the windows, blah, blah, blah. Three bucks. Easy beasy. You just click on it. All the windows come back forward. So good. Cool. I might have to get that. And since we're on little utility things, I want to talk about Tyke again real quick. My friend Andre Torres wrote this ages ago and it is a simple free little app that sits up in your menu bar and all it is is just basically a paste board for plain text.

You take any, like, formatted text, you paste it in there, it converts it to plain text. You can copy it back out, work on it for a second, and boom, put it back where you need it to go. It's just so handy. I use it, you know, 20 times a day. Downloading it right now. Oh, Tyke is awesome.

I need this. Especially with us and doing show notes and things like that. It will be your best friend. And it's free. So thank you, Andre. And the final thing, since you had all of your little things, I'm like, let me talk about this one one last time. Kershaw Leak Pocket Knife 3-Inch Serrated Folding Blade 1660ST.

When you absolutely positively have to shiv someone overnight. I've been carrying this knife for over 10 years and they are fantastic. They're like 45 bucks. It is the best pocket carry. It's assisted open. So make sure that they're legal in your state. They are legal here in California, but it's basically a switchblade.

It is nothing short of a switchblade. But when you need to open, I mean, yeah, it's granted mine has never tasted the sweet flesh of a human, but Amazon boxes. That's a creepy way to say that. Amazon boxes have no chance against it. But definitely get the serrated one.

It comes in really handy. Brick-a-brick. So I've got a three-year-old. I go to a lot of places that have things for three-year-olds to do. Yes. And one of them is, and I do remember ball pits very fondly.

So I've spent a lot of time around ball pits. I loved a good ball pit. Nothing wrong with a ball pit. It's just a big empty hole with a bunch of plastic spheres dumped inside. But it is so much fun to play in them. And I totally remember that. And my kid goes crazy. He loves it. So I found this story that I came across about who invented the ball pit, because somebody had to.

It's been around for about 50 years now. They're all over the place. McDonald's, amusement parks, whatever. All of the world's ball pits can be traced back to one man, its inventor, an English man named Eric McMillan. And basically, he did a lot of this stuff. This was kind of his job.

He came from a rough upbringing, but he became the leading designer of children's play centers. So he's designed all these sorts of things for kids, and the ball pit in particular, which has this crazy origin story. He and his team came up with the idea for the ball pit in San Diego more than 40 years ago by looking at a container of pickled onions in the kitchen.

Huh. They looked at the onions, and he said, wow, how about if you could crawl through those? And then instead of actually putting a bunch of pickled onions in a pit, they used plastic balls. It might be more sanitary to actually have pickled onions. That's actually probably true. That is the downside of the ball pit, as you see all the kids climb out of it with snot dripping out of their nose and connecting to the balls.

Now we know why you're so sick, because you're always bouncing around in the ball pit at McDonald's. Yeah, it doesn't help, but I didn't want to raise the boy in the bubble. It's so funny. I was raised in the bubble, and I've never been in a ball pit. Dude, you're missing out. Seems like not. No, no, really, you are.

I mean, I've actually been in a ball pit as an adult, and it was pretty amazing. This was quite a long time ago when a friend of mine was throwing a bunch of raves, and he did it. He managed to convince a kid's play center to let him throw a rave in it. It was unbelievable. I'm sure we trashed the place, but it was a lot of fun. I bet, man.

Yeah. No, my mom would never let me go in them, so I just always assumed that there was something wrong, and I just never partook of the balls. Well, Jason, you should do yourself a favor and find one. You'll enjoy it. It'll put a smile on your face and whooping cough in your throat. Speaking of smiles, turns out forcing a smile at work leads to drinking at home.

Explains a lot. Yep, yep. So it turns out if you have a crappy job and you're forced to smile a lot at work, you're going to drink when you go home. That's pretty much it. A team of researchers from Penn State and the University of Buffalo have deduced that from talking to 1,600 workers all across the U.S., like, you know, people in customer service and things like that, who have to smile to make their job go by faster and make sure people aren't upset.

Turns out that there is a direct correlation with how much they have to smile at work falsely and how much they drink when they go home. Perfect. Perfect. Oh, man. And I have to put this in here. I meant to put it in last year, but we just ran out of time.

Calling Bullshit. I ran across this on Twitter. A friend of mine, I think Jessica Stover, linked to them. And I'm like, I was intrigued. I'm like, ooh, we like bullshit here on the show. So I checked it out. And it's actually a college course called Calling Bullshit by Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West.

Should be required. It should be absolutely required. They have their videos up from the course from 2017. And I spent like, you know, like a half an hour as soon as I saw them and went into it. And they just called bullshit on bullshit.

It's fantastic. And they even called bullshit on themselves. You know, they did some graphs on their website traffic. And they're like, let me explain to you why this graph is bullshit. And I was immediately reminded of when CBS All Access launched.

And we called them on their bullshit because their press release the day after they launched said, we had a record number of subscribers on our launch day. Before you had zero. You went from zero to even one is a record day.

It's like, oh, man. So definitely check this out. It's at callingbullshit.org. Link will be in the show notes. And their Twitter account will be also linked in the show notes. And they're very funny. I went back and forth with them on Twitter for a little bit. And they're very funny guys.

Oh, yeah. Even their disclaimer is hilarious. It's good stuff. Yeah, because I mentioned, I'm like, if you have nothing to do on New Year's Eve and instead of going out and failing to trying to get laid, you should just sit home and watch these videos. And then our friend Eric Hundley says, well, why can't you just sit home and get drunk and watch them?

And then they responded. Well, it's in the disclaimer not to be used with alcoholic beverages. Boom. Done. So they're sharp dudes. And I highly recommend the videos. So good. And the last thing I have is a video that will be linked in the show notes. It's a fun watch.

It's called Celebrities Failed Auditions. Auditions versus actual scenes. So you can see how the movie came out and the people that actually auditioned for it that didn't get the part. And Kurt Russell as Han Solo would have been weird, I've got to say. No. Not down with it.

Nope. So I think this is a good lesson on casting. But it's a fun video. Closing shout outs. Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of Prozac Nation, is dead at the stunningly young age of 52.

She is a metatastic breast cancer. So, you know, that's going to happen. I don't know if you ever read Prozac Nation. I did. I loved it. I actually read a lot of her books. I know she pissed off a lot of people. A lot of people say she actually wasn't a very good writer.

But whatever. She was one of the first people that came out there and just kind of spewed it out all on paper. Total confessional writing. Highly influential now. That's basically all we see anymore, really. I loved her. I thought she was great. And I was sad to hear that she passed away. And I have a number of friends that have passed away from metastatic breast cancer.

So please check out metaviver.org and donate if you can. Help find a cure. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillipo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to GOG.show slash donate. Toss us a few bucks a month and we'll love you forever. Your support keeps us going and we really appreciate it.

Also, if you're listening to us on the Overcast player, please click those little stars. We're moving back up the ranks now that we're back on the air. So thank you very much. We've got to take down Ferris. We've got to take down ATP. We know we're never going to take down Rogan. But damn it, we want to try. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 405.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead.

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.