46: A New Hope

I hear you're back from Canada.

I am back and I'm already in shorts and a t-shirt. I'm in shorts because I have to because I have a cast on. Well, yeah, you've got that going on. It's a little chilly here still. I think we're having a hurricane right now. We have sustained winds of 35 miles an hour with gusts up to 60.

So if it sounds like a freight train is coming through on this episode, I'm sorry, but I cannot filter out the winds of change that are blowing through. Well, it's a lovely 85 degrees here in Venice, California today. And after this, I plan on taking a bike ride. But first, I had to watch the USA-Canada game, which will exactly date when we're recording this.

Canada won. Fair enough. I had a lot of bets with all the Canucks that I just left, and I'm going to have to pay up. Hopefully, they'll forget because I'm not going back for a couple months. Okay. Did you bet an American or Canadian? Oh, it's probably – no, it was like dinners and beers, so they're going to get some Mulsons out of me, apparently.

Gotcha. Okay. Well, sorry about that. I haven't actually been watching the Olympics because I've been kind of popped up on pain meds because they actually did cut me apart this week. Yeah. Man, that sucks. Well, another reason that you probably haven't been watching the Olympics much here in the States is because NBC's coverage is a complete and utter piece of shit.

Having spent five days over in Canada watching on CBC, the Canadian broadcasting company, it was Olympics wall-to-wall, live all the time. Basically, just you put it on, and you were watching the Olympics here. It's almost impossible. And personal anecdote, last night, we missed the women's hockey final, which was also USA versus Canada.

I was on a flight back from Canada, on Air Canada at the time, and the pilots were nice enough to report the score as it was going along on the flight, which was kind of amusing. But when we got back, I wanted to watch it. NBC does have some sort of, you know, you can log on to NBCOlympics.com, and you're supposedly able to go ahead and view anything time-shifted.

You know, you can go back and watch the game. So I figured, okay, how hard could this possibly be? You know, I want to throw it up onto my TV through Apple TV so I can watch it on the big screen, pull out my iPad, log in. They force you to download an app, of course, instead of being able to just view it on the site if you're on an iPad or on an iPhone.

The app won't let you toss it anywhere. It's actually a flash stream through the app, which I don't even know how that works, or at least it's supported by Adobe. I don't quite get that. There was absolutely no way to toss it up onto the screen. So I'm like, okay, fuck this.

Actually, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There should have been, because in just your standard control panel that you do the swipe up for, you can just mirror your input of your iPad if you're on iOS 7. You should be able to just mirror your entire iPad straight to your TV. Damn it, I might have screwed that up there.

Yeah, because it's not app-specific. Yeah, it can be app-specific, but no, it is OS-dependent now. So you can basically stream your entire iPad to your TV. Right. Okay, well, I screwed up there. But one of the other frustrations is they don't just let you access the site.

You actually have to sign in through your cable provider. Right, yeah. And you have to have an account with your cable provider and all of that stuff just to be able to watch the Olympics. Way to go, NBC. I saw reports that viewership and ratings are way down for NBC this year for the Olympics, and it's no surprise.

I mean, everybody I know is complaining about the way that they've covered it and how crappy the coverage is and how you just have to jump through all these hurdles to be able to watch anything, which is just ridiculous. I mean, it's the Olympics, people. Come on. And this has been going on for years, though, now. I mean, their summer Olympic coverage was terrible.

Yeah. And, you know, I just – I wish we could even just turn off the commentary and watch just the – you know, just have the noise of the event. Because every time someone says amplitude when they're talking about snowboarding or skiing, and it's just – it's height. Come on, height. I want to go down there and I want to shove, like, their little styluses that they're using on their little pads to tell them what the tricks are right in their fucking ears until their brain explodes.

Exactly. NBC has been a fail at Olympics coverage since we basically hit the modern, you know, modern world. So let's figure it out for the next one or give it to someone else that can do this right. Or, you know, instead of just selling universal broadcast rights, why doesn't the Olympics themselves keep some sort of online pass where you sign into them and you pay them $30 for the entire Olympics?

Thank you. That's all. Yeah. End of rant. I don't even care about the Olympics that much, but it's, like, when it's on and people are getting excited, especially now, you know, when you've got your Twitter feed and your Facebook feed is filling up with, like, oh, my God, are you watching this event? You want to be able to pull it up and see it. Yeah, it's a fail on every level.

Yeah. So what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Move back to Canada and watch the CBC, which has consistently done amazing coverage. Or just skip the Olympics because it's sports and we don't really care anyway. That's true. So I did a new experiment this week since I've been kind of laid up.

I'm doing site reviews on our Grumpy Old Geeks website now. Yes. I put one up the other day, and I'm going to keep doing these when I find either a site that I really like or I really hate or somebody that needs help, as it were. If we want to take bets on how often they're going to be positive versus negative, I'm going to go ahead and go all in on more negative than positive.

Well, yeah, because they're more fun. I mean, and there are far fewer people that are knocking it out of the park than there are, you know, stinking up the joint, as I say. Very true. So we did our first one, and it worked out pretty well. The owner of the company said thanks. I know. I was a little surprised by that.

It was very nice. So if you're listening to this and you have a website that you would like critiqued by me, or maybe Brian will jump in every now and again. But I'm the one with the broken legs, so I've got the time to jump in on these. Just drop us an email at info at Grumpy Old Geeks with your URL, and we'll take a look at it.

And if it is rant-worthy, we'll give it a go. Definitely. Yeah, we'd love to – as soon as I find the time to do it, I will be doing it. Again, you know, Jason's laid up right now. I've been traveling internationally. I just got back, so as soon as I settle back in, I'll get back in the groove of things.

People do seem to be liking the Grump-worthy. We've gotten a couple comments on Twitter and a few other places, so we're going to keep up with that with both short articles and kind of more involved, longer dispatches from the Grumps, as it were. Yeah, I've got a couple in the queue that will be coming out today, so – now, I want to talk about the kind of crowdfunding area.

It's not even crowdfunding because I'll talk about this in a second, but what we – our experiment that we did with Tugboat Yards. Yes. So we decided to try out Tugboat Yards a few weeks ago just as a way for listeners of the show to give us kind of a helping hand to keep us funded to, you know, pay for some bandwidth, buy a few beers, even though we're not drinking on the show anymore.

And I like – I came across Tugboat Yards at the same time where I was considering writing a tool for us to just do that, you know, just to take donations without having to go through PayPal because PayPal is a nightmare, and a lot of people don't like PayPal. Yeah. So – and I found Tugboat Yards.

Now, the funny part is there's a new kid on the block now. It's called Patreon, which is a take on patron. Yes. And Patron. And that's the hard part of when I – every time I read it, I'm like, I want to call it Patron. I'm like, give me a shot. Give me a shot in the lime.

So Patreon, it's different than Tugboat Yards because where Tugboat Yards lets you do one-time payments or monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscriptions, Patreon is specifically based around donations on the time when you create content.

So every – like if you're a musician, every time you post a song, if you're a comic artist, then every time you post a new panel or new PDF or whatnot or a podcast or every time you post a new show, then you get a donation from your patrons. And they can limit it based on – oh, so it's like, okay, we got 500 people that are giving us $2 a month now for our shows.

Let's just put out a show a day and break the bank. You know, they thought about that and you can limit it. You can say, okay. You can cap it. Yeah. So you can theoretically pay less if only – if somebody only puts out – you know, if they're lazy and they only put out a few pieces a month or they can max out the bank if you want to say, oh, you know, cap them at $50 a month or $100 a month.

Right. So that's the difference between the two, which is – you know, I think it's a – it's interesting that there are two sites that are doing this now with two similar yet different models. Right. And, you know, from a technology perspective, these sites aren't very difficult, but I do think they have kind of an interesting place in this, like, you know, creator ecosystem.

Right. And for a while I was thinking about, like, what do we call these types of things? Because it's not – it's not specifically crowdfunding. It's not a Kickstarter. Yeah. It kind of is, but it's a slightly different concept in that these people – people that are signing up for these sites to get donations.

They're already doing their product. They're not, here, give me money so I can make this. It's, I'm already making stuff. You may – you're probably already a fan. Now here's a way for you to actually give me some money so I can keep doing it. Yeah. And I kind of thought of it as like busking. You know, you're out on the street.

You're playing your music. You're doing your act. Here's your tip hat. People are throwing money in it. So I thought, yeah, buskware. But remember the old site Corrosion? Yeah. There's an article in Corrosion from the year 2000 where they actually already had – they had co-opted the term – I think maybe coined the term buskware.

And they have a very good definition. And it's similar but back then software – it's more around software. Like people who create – write software and goes out into the world. It's like – it's almost like a new definition of shareware and shareware versus freeware type of thing. It's one of those things where we might be able to like take it back since it's been so long now.

And nobody is really doing that kind of stuff anymore. That freeware, shareware, wares that you pass around on a floppy, you know? But the interesting thing about I think these services, they're all like middlemen, you know? Yeah. They basically take the money from, you know, the fan and take a cut, then give it to the artist.

Yeah, which is useful, definitely. It's very useful. And especially if they have tools that let the – like a community come around the artist, you know? So the fans can get inside info from the artist, you know, where they can have conversations.

Like you and I could do like a hangout with our fans once a month or something like that, you know, to give back and have like an inside newsletter type of thing. But the other side that I think these things really need to become is more of a discovery engine, kind of like we're – Well, see, that brings in the editorial aspect, which is always dicey.

And I personally feel is kind of lacking over the entire internet at the moment. There's no good editorials for anything. Well, hang on a second. How do you – because when you look at Kickstarter, Kickstarter is a great discovery engine for people who are looking to fund projects, you know? So if people are coming to these middleware sites that are, you know, kind of like Kickstarter, but the people who were looking for, say, podcasts about knitting, you know?

And, oh, okay, I can find other podcasts about knitting while I'm here. And then I can, you know, become a patron of multiple knitting podcasts to help the community grow. Do you think that actually happens, though? That personally to me – I mean, maybe you have stats to back this up or maybe I'm just being an idiot. But that to me sounds incredibly far-fetched.

I don't know of anyone that say – well, first off, I don't know of anyone that goes to Kickstarter just kind of with no ideas. It's like, I want to fund something. I'm going to look through the site and find something cool. I think almost everybody that gets to Kickstarter and funded something on Kickstarter found out about the projects from somewhere else and was linked to it.

I don't think that Kickstarter is a good discovery site for anything. I think it's a destination. Well, I totally disagree with you. I don't think that that happens. I also don't think that will happen on any kind of pay site like this. I don't think anybody shows up to a site with their credit card out going, what do I feel like funding today?

I just don't see that happening. Well, it's not so much that you're going to instantly fund anything on here. But if I'm in there – like somebody comes to Grumpy Old Geeks on the site and they say, oh, let's find out – let's find other technology podcasts while I'm here. Then they can go discover new technology podcasts.

It doesn't mean they're going to sign up and start giving them money right away. But they could discover new podcasts and from that point down the line, if they like the shows, then they can come back and then become a patron of the podcast. Well, I mean this is a bit like we were talking about last week, which is, again, going back to the editorial aspect.

And we talked about, gee, it would be really nice if there was some sort of – if we almost went back to the old school Yahoo model where there's categories and you can find things and you're not overwhelmed because you don't have the gazillions of things that are out there now. Well, yeah, it's a curated directory model from that. Exactly. And I think this – I think these sites have a – will have a place for it if they can get discovery right.

But they're not doing discovery right yet. Right. And the flip side is they don't have enough artists that are in the systems to become a discovery engine yet. There needs to be a tipping point when – That's the problem with all of these. There's no critical mass.

There's no one site that's kind of taken over and that's where everybody is, which is what Kickstarter did have going forward compared to the other crowdfunding sites that were out there at the time. Yeah, because there comes a point where the artists are the ones promoting the middleware site until the middleware site gets enough traffic on its own where then it becomes a promotion engine for the artists that are on their platform.

You see what I'm saying? Yeah. And none of them have gotten there yet. I think Patreon is getting closer because they have more artists on their site than Tugboat Yards does by an order of magnitude because Tugboat Yards is maybe newer. And they're doing – they're definitely curating the people that are on their site much more heavily.

Right. Because anybody can go sign up at Patreon, but you have to actually go and – there's a process for getting on Tugboat Yards. Right. What that process is, I don't know. I just – I knew the – one of the coders and the owner, so they kind of fast-tracked it.

So I don't know what the actual process is. Sounds very similar to getting the verified Twitter account. Yeah, pretty much. Nobody knows what the hell the process is, but if you know someone, you can get one. Yeah, you throw an email and maybe it comes back. So I'm just saying I'm glad these tools are out there, and I think we're going to see more of these because there really isn't a whole huge technology barrier to entry on these.

We could – honestly, you and I could sit down over a weekend and write one of these. Yeah. So we're going to see more of them. So I think what's really going to be the differentiator as we see these things coming along is the discoverability engine side where these sites can bring traffic – more traffic to the artists than the artists are bringing to the service themselves.

Yeah, I agree with you completely. I mean, I don't mind these services, and I think they're interesting. I think it ignores kind of the bigger picture, which is – I'd love to see some real statistics on how many people actually donate for content that is free versus the actual – how many people just consume it for free and don't give a shit.

And it's just kind of the overall bigger societal place that we're stuck in right now, which is we've raised an entire generation of people that don't pay for content. So we can provide all the tools that we want. We've had these sorts of things sitting on sites for years and virtual tip jars and things like that.

And the reality is there's a lot of content creators out there, some good, some bad, some mediocre. Everybody's scrambling to try to make a buck or at least make somewhat of a living doing what they love. Are there enough people out there that are actually going to take advantage of any service like this to throw some cash their way?

I don't know if that's going to happen. I'm looking at some of the people on there now, and they're making – Tom Maher's pulling $8,000 a month. Chris Barillo's pulling $3,000 a month. And, yeah, these are people that have established presences already. But I also think that if you go back and read that – was it a 1,000 true fan article that we talked about before?

I have to go find it again. I thought it was Derek Sievers that wrote that. Maybe it wasn't. I'll find it. But there's the – it's the 1,000 true fan number where if you have 1,000 true fans, you can actually make a living on it. You don't need everybody on the internet to give you a penny.

You find your fan base, and you focus on your fan base, and those are the people that you talk to. That's your audience. That's who you speak to. That's who you connect with. So when it comes to – because you're coming from the side of the multi-platinum albums where you need 220 million people to buy your record.

If you don't – if you need like 1,000 people giving you $5 a month, then that's a doable – that's doable compared to trying to go out and sell 100 million albums in a year. Because your costs are lower, and that's just the way the internet has spread out talent and given us a way to actually make a living doing this kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah. I see your point.

In the news, what's up? What's up? Yeah. That's pretty much the big news this week, and we would be remiss if we didn't talk about it for a little bit. The actual news is that Facebook has bought WhatsApp for $19 billion.

Bill, billion dollars. It's – that puts WhatsApp's valuation above, I believe – United Airlines. United Airlines. Quite a few companies that actually do real things and real products, not just send texts across phones.

It's pretty stunning, and what I've actually enjoyed the most about this is kind of what I would call civilians, people that aren't in the tech industry, people not like you and I, Jason, who follow this stuff and pay attention, people who just basically are really happy to pull an iPhone out of the box correctly.

Not like that Olympics guy. Really happy to pull their iPhone out of the box, and they hear about, oh, do you have this WhatsApp app? And no, well, why don't you grab it so we can text each other, blah, blah, blah. People who don't – the civilians are actually freaking out about this. I've seen it on Twitter and Facebook, and kind of – this is one of those watershed moments, I think, where even GenPop, the general population, is turning around and going, are you fucking kidding me?

What? So I kind of think that almost we need to – we need to talk about this a little bit even though it's been done to death everywhere, but I think we need to separate the money from what it actually is and why Facebook might have wanted it for our discussion.

What say you, Jason? I mean I think it's interesting that they – from some of the numbers I read, Facebook basically valued every WhatsApp customer at about $45. Right, and it worked out to $345 million per WhatsApp employee. Yeah, and these numbers kind of vary based on these – either if you're going with the $16 billion or the $19 billion.

Really? What's $3 billion amongst friends? Yeah. It's actually three Instagrams. Oh, yeah. There you go. So there's just a general – let's talk WhatsApp first. For people who don't know, WhatsApp is basically a text messaging replacement service that you can put on your phone, and it's on all the major – it's on Android, it's on iPhone, it's on even BlackBerry.

Apparently, you pay $1 a year for the service. I must have gotten in so early with WhatsApp because I've just had it forever. I've never paid a dollar, so I don't know how that works. You're probably grandfathered in. Yeah, I must be grandfathered in or something. I originally got it back when I had just switched to an iPhone from BlackBerry, and a bunch of people were still on BlackBerrys.

And it was a lot because BlackBerry users were used to BBM, and there were charges on text messaging, especially internationally. So that's why I got it. It was completely free. You're basically just using your data plan to send small, tiny, little amounts of text back and forth, and it replaced text messaging.

That's all it is. Okay, I mean, I apparently have downloaded it before because after this I went and grabbed it again just to see what the hubbub was about. I've never really used it, so I don't understand what the fuss is about.

I guess if you need to do IM stuff over the phone, it's a way to do it. It's fantastically ugly, but it's just basically text messaging. You can send photos, whatever. Whatever you can do with your iMessage or just standard text messaging on your phone, WhatsApp can replace that for you.

That's it. Yeah, Viber is the one that was the voice one, right? Yeah, Viber is a voice, kind of a Skype competitor. So WhatsApp is really just texting. And the reason it's popular overseas, basically anywhere not in the U.S., is because if you're not in the U.S., especially if you're in Canada, which is, again, why I got it for all the people that were on BlackBerrys in Canada, Canada has one of the worst subscription costs for wireless service in the world.

It's expensive. And WhatsApp was a way to get around the text messaging costs and all that sort of thing, especially internationally. Same thing, which apparently WhatsApp is very big over in Hong Kong and places like that, where you don't have your wonderful unlimited or super huge data caps on your wireless plans.

So it got a lot of traction and popularity because basically you were skirting text messaging charges. So unless you, I mean, if you didn't have an unlimited SMS plan, which most people don't, you get like 100 or 200 a month for, you know, 20 bucks. So it's the way to get around it. So, okay, I get that part.

That's what it is. Now, why would Facebook want that? Well, here's the deal. I mean, Facebook has Facebook messaging, but not that many people use it. No, it's not as popular. And they launched their own app and that didn't go very well. Very few people installed it or downloaded it. Because you also look at Instagram, like Facebook does way more traffic on photos than Instagram does.

What they're kind of doing from my perspective is they're kind of future-proofing themselves. So they're going to have these functionalities and they're letting them work, you know, as independent companies, even though they're owned by Facebook. Yeah. So for now, always remember that's for now.

Yeah, the for now, because this is the interesting thing. Again, WhatsApp is basically free. They charge a dollar a year per person if you aren't grandfathered in like we were. And they promise no ads. There are no ads on it and they promise to keep it that way for now.

Well, look at this. This is – that's $450 million a year in revenue, okay? That's not bad. It's not – I mean it's not worth $19 billion when you look at, you know, revenue twice, whatever the numbers are.

Whatever that, yeah. Whatever – to give you a value based on a company, this is just ridiculously out of the park. It's ludicrous. Anybody that's watched Shark Tank even once will know that this is a bad deal. Yeah, this is an insane deal. So it comes down to the theories that I've seen is that Facebook has decided it's valuable because Facebook is actually starting to realize that there are huge markets that they haven't penetrated.

And basically everybody in the markets that they're doing really well in is fully saturated. So the theory is we're going to get WhatsApp customers in other countries that aren't into Facebook. True. Into Facebook. So – but is that worth $19 billion?

We all know that it's not and it's ludicrous and I don't know what else to say about it. I mean this has really stunned the entire tech community. We're all just sitting here going, what? Well, here's the deal. They've got – they've got fuck you money right now. Facebook has a ridiculous amount of money.

What they're – the way I see it is what they're doing is – when I said before they're trying to future-proof Facebook, they're going to be buying up these companies hand over fist. They're going to be portfolio companies for Facebook. So when Facebook eventually goes the way of MySpace, which it most certainly will, they'll still have all these other companies.

They'll still have their text messaging app. They'll still have their little photo app. They'll still have – yes, exactly. They will have other means of revenue that just aren't Facebook. So I think they're broadening their portfolio. Yeah, okay. I can see that. The thing is that Facebook has such – again, this is when you go between us who are in the industry versus the random person.

Facebook has such ill will now that – I mean I immediately saw a bunch of tweets saying, just deleted my WhatsApp app. Yeah. And this is not a hard app to build. Again, like we just said earlier about the other ones, if you and I sat down for like three or four days, we could build a text messaging app. So buying this just means that now there's a market.

Somebody else is going to come along and just make another one. Again, the trick is getting critical mass. How do you get the word out there? There's a lot more than spending a weekend to build WhatsApp. There is a lot when it comes to scale for 450 million real-time users.

This is true. But I'm just saying – It's a lot of work. The tech itself isn't the problem, and Facebook has the ability to do the scalability. Yeah. I mean Jabber has been around for years. You could just do a Jabber clone and then figure out how to scale it. But at 450 million scale, it is a – there are massive problems with doing that.

But they really – what Facebook also did buy for $19 billion was 450 million phone numbers. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot that they're getting out of this. But it is what it is. I mean it's – I think people are just so angry with seeing all this money being thrown around and everybody is broke.

Like I fell on some ice and now I'm bankrupt. And now I see these people making hundreds of millions of dollars per engineer. It's like that's just – the money just doesn't make sense. Yeah, the disparity. It makes sense, yeah. And the frustration with Silicon Valley and these companies are – again, going back to what we were just talking about in our intro segment.

You have these artists and people just hoping and begging that somebody is going to give them $10, $15 per song or a month or whatever so they can do what they do. And the economy is still in the crapper. And I know people that are still unemployed. I know tons of people that are still looking for work.

Even if they find work, they're not getting paid as well as they used to get paid, and then you see staggering $19 billion purchases. It's just – it's starting to really, really anger people. Yeah, and here's the deal. But it was never their money. It's never going to be their money.

It's – you're looking through the glass wall at these guys playing with monopoly money, and it's unfortunately real. It's none of our business, really, because it was never ours to begin with, you know? Unless you're a shareholder in Facebook, then it actually was yours to begin with.

I don't know how it stocked it after the announcement. I'm not sure either. I've actually – I mean, my personal investing strategy is I just refuse. I have not gotten involved with any of these just software-based or service-based companies. I just don't see them playing out well in the long term.

Yeah, so I didn't get – I didn't buy Facebook stock. I'm not going to – I don't have Twitter stock. I'm not going to get any of those. I just don't buy it. I'm not buying it. Okay. Well, let's just keep on a roll here with Facebook because since it was – it was Valentine's Day recently. It was.

And it's interesting how Facebook – you know, we know they collect everything, right? Yeah. Everything you do. Yes. The fact that they – I mean, I'm sure they have mouse tracking where they can do heat maps of your mouse and all that. The fact that they don't have eyeball tracking yet is just – that's just a hurdle.

I'm sure that they would love it if they could have eyeball tracking. But one of the things that is interesting is their data science division, which is like Facebook's big data department. They decided to do something for Valentine's Day, which I think is very funny because they probably are the ones that don't have dates.

This is actually awesome because this is – first off, it's kind of really creepy. And secondly, it's actually one of the first bits of data that they've released that kind of shows you just how much they're tracking everything.

Okay, well, let me finish explaining what they're actually doing here is on – for Valentine's Day, they put out some stories about relationships and love and how your posts change over time with love and with breakups and flings and, you know, how Facebook sees your activity through the rose-colored glasses of amour.

So they did a six-piece series. Basically, it starts off with love and religion, the age of love, flings or lifetimes, looking for love, the formation of love, and when love goes awry.

That kind of rounds out the whole series. But yes, it's all around what they know based on what you do and your – a simple thing as your relationship change status. Right. And it's all kind of fun and interesting until you realize that they actually can pinpoint this down exactly to you.

Yep. And your relationship to someone else, and then it gets creepy. Yeah, because it's like, okay, they can tell when two people – like it was 100 days before they actually hook up. They start to reshare each other's posts and comment more on each other's posts, and that velocity picks up until they start going out.

And then it drops off. Yeah, presumably because they're hanging out together instead. You're not courting. They're basically tracking online courtship. Yeah, and the whole – it basically, you know, cradle-to-grave relationship tracking here is what it is. And it's kind of – it's interesting, but it is kind of creepy.

It's extremely creepy that – yeah, and again, like I said earlier, it's just – it's really frightening to actually see this kind of data being released because now you're starting to understand. It puts a very specific face and a very specific set of data in front of you that goes, oh, yeah, this is what they're paying for.

This is why Facebook is free, and this is why we should be really concerned about everything. Right. You know, I kind of made an analogy to this. Like you think of the battery farms from The Matrix where the machines just wanted your life essence and your electricity and your juice.

Yeah. Facebook has made click farms that put things in front of you to make you click, and that's what it is. So the more that they know about you, it's not for them to build a better website to entertain you more or do whatever – whatever most websites want you to do is have a good time, you know, enjoy yourself, whatever.

No, this is to maximize the profitability for their investors. Exactly. So if they know that you've been hanging out with some chick online and they can see that art coming, then you best bet you're going to start getting flowers and – or flower ads and, you know, restaurant reservation ads and that kind of thing coming down the line.

Exactly. That's exactly where I was going to go with this. They're tracking it. They're 90 days in. They know you're about to hook up with this chick. Boom. All of your ads are going to be flowers, restaurants, candies, chocolates, lingerie, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's stunning. It's actually – it's just frightening.

It really is. Well, I mean we've already talked about this from another big company, which was Target, when the people start to get, you know, Pampers coupons before they even know they're pregnant. Yeah. Well, we noticed you haven't bought condoms in nine months. Ooh. So here's a Russian bride catalog.

Yeah. It's a – you know, free is not free, people. And this is starting to show you why. Well, I mean, yeah, it's just big data. But the fact that they're doing – that they can take it down to this level is just – I think it's an easier way for people to maybe grasp that it's not really about buying habits so much that they can track anything and everything that you do.

Right. So just take that and do what you want to with it. So let's keep with Facebook and their big data and talk about something else that happened, or at least stories have started to come out about it. They've tweaked their unknown algorithm regarding linking insights and what shows up in your news feed.

And they're basically trying to do something that I'm actually on the fence about because I do want to see more editorial sort of things happening. But the problem is, do we trust Facebook to be the editor? They're working on tweaking the algorithm to reward what they call quality sites as opposed to, you know, just whatever else is out there.

So you're going to see more links from sites appearing in your news feed that friends have shared from things that they deem worthy as opposed to, say, upworthy, which they may not like anymore. Well, yeah, this comes back to what we talked about, I think, about two or three weeks ago with the meme factories, with the December rollout and the meme factories being basically kicked out of the index for the most part.

Like, you know, 80% of the traffic is getting booted out. And it still comes back to Facebook being the arbiter of what we get to see. And if you look at the videos we posted last week, you know, there is a goal for what they want.

That's your money, you know, to pay – you to pay them to get your stuff in front of people. That's it, you know? They have become the internet for a lot of people. They are the walled garden and now brands who have made – who made them what they were, you know, who put their logo in their advertisement, say, go to Facebook, check out our page.

The brands who built those little bastards up from nothing are now getting crapped upon and, you know, now they have to pay where they – like Facebook now has the power and they flip the script on them. Yeah, and if you guys don't think it's a big deal, I mean, this is – this algorithm is literally making or breaking entire companies.

We're talking millions of dollars of revenue sways either way depending on whether Facebook has decided they like you or don't like you. Yeah, and it's going to continue. So that's – I mean that's why we've been saying stay – if you're a brand, stay off of Facebook and even with people and friends, you know, it's – it makes no sense to post an update that you actually want your friends to see.

You just email them now, you know, or tweet because on Twitter everybody gets to see it but nobody is on Twitter anymore. I mean worse, you just go to Google Plus and fart – what is it? Fart into the wind. Exactly, like trying to paint a fart. So let's – since we're on a roll with social networking now, I'm kind of burned out on the whole Facebook thing but this still kind of relates.

There was a really great study that came out this week telling us something that isn't all that surprising. Internet trolls really are horrible people. I really – I honestly did not need a study to tell me this but I'm glad that we now have academic research to back it up.

Well, actually I am glad about that for various reasons because this has been an ongoing battle that I've had with my own company because in addition to kind of doing design and website stuff, obviously part of the deal nowadays is you run brands' social networking. And social networking means comments and comments means trolling and there's always been a battle that I've been fighting just saying, you know, ignore them, never ever respond versus, oh, we can't possibly have somebody saying anything bad about us.

We need to deal with this. This study basically gives me the ammunition to say, no, we do not because they will never stop because comment trolls are, according to this study, narcissists, psychopaths and they are sadistic and you trying – you beating the fire just makes them burn brighter.

End of story. You have to just ignore them. Yeah. Don't feed the trolls has been around for 10, 15 years now. I mean it's – ever since blog commenting came into vogue, you know, it's a thing. Don't feed the trolls and it's your brand. It's your message.

Don't feel that you need to keep those comments up there just because, you know, you want to have an honest and transparent conversation. Fuck transparency. Get it off of there. That's your brand message. Yeah, it's your brand message. If people are crapping on your brand message, ban them. Kick them.

Boot them. Ban them because basically the study is saying that they will not stop. Nothing you can do will appease them. They are only doing this because they are narcissistic psychopaths. This is what they get off on. They don't care about you. They don't care about your brand. They don't care about the specific thing they're complaining about.

They're complaining to complain. They are being frustrating to be frustrating. They enjoy the fact that they know they're driving you crazy. End of story. Yep. So don't feed the trolls. Don't feed the trolls. And my buddy Jordan Harbinger, who was on our show not too long ago, giving me some life advice from the Art of Charm podcast, he actually did a really cool interview with an actual narcissistic psychopath.

Sam Vaknin, I think he's Polish or – what was he? It's kind of an Eastern European – Eastern European guy. Jewish sort of mix, yeah. But this guy's written many books on psychopaths, but he is one. And it's a fantastic podcast because one of the interesting things that I took out of the podcast – I think it's less than an hour long, well worth it.

There will be a link in the show notes to it. The person he describes as the most perfect narcissistic psychopath is Adam Carolla. It's hilarious. It is a really good and interesting podcast to listen to.

We've always been aware that these sorts of people are out there. I don't think we ever understand how prevalent they are without getting too into it. I mean there's a good and a bad side to it, and I think he brought up the point a couple times throughout the podcast that a lot of these personality traits actually make you successful in life.

Yes. And a lot of the very successful people, and certainly in my experience particularly within the music industry, they are narcissists without a doubt. You cannot want to and sacrifice your entire life and gamble to be on stage in front of 100,000 people.

It's not for the money. It's because they're narcissists and they need it. Yeah. And they work tirelessly to get to that point. So there are some positive aspects to it. But it was a really interesting podcast. It's so strange to realize – and I think it's always a shock to people when – we're all vaguely narcissistic ourselves anyways in that we all assume that everybody else feels and thinks the same way that we do.

And when you're confronted just smack in the face that, no, there are people that approach the world entirely differently than you do. It's always a shock. Yep. So. I'm glad that you can now go back to your clients with proof in hand that you're allowed to delete and handle trolls accordingly with an iron fist.

Yes. I'm going to get all narcissistic on their brand's behalf. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. So we talked last week about the IQ apps and the brain apps and the exercising and all that good stuff.

Yeah, Lumosity and all that sort of crap. Yes, the failure and death of Lumosity after a year. So I did some research and the only thing I found that actually looked decent was an app called Fitbrains. This is one of the exercise apps, not one of the mental testing, what's your IQ apps.

But it looked interesting. It's got a nice design. It's got like a decent set of games to play. And it's multi-platform. You can play it on the browser, on iPad, iPhone. If it's on Android, I don't know. I don't care.

But it may be. Yeah. It looked all right. I took a look through the site itself. I didn't actually download the app yet because I still have, I think, three more weeks on Lumosity, at which point I will be searching for something desperately. So I'll probably try to do it this week. It's owned by the Rosetta Stone, which I like.

The website turned me off a little bit because I'm always leery of any website that uses stock photography. Well, Rosetta Stone is, you know, its entire product is stock photography. That is very true. I don't believe in Rosetta Stone's learning philosophy with languages.

So I saw that after I bought a year's worth of Fitbrains. Oh, boy. Because the way it works is the app is free and you get a couple trial games. Right. But for the full boat, you have to subscribe. And you can either pay $25 for a lifetime, you know, access to it.

Right. Or buy, like, in three-month chunks. I bought a year. It cost me $10. I bought a year because… Much cheaper than Lumosity. Yeah. That was the other side. I didn't want to drop $25 because I figure in a year I'm probably going to be bored of it. I should have just done the three-month, but, you know, they do that movie soda pricing scheme where it's like, you know, $8.99 for a 12-ounce and it's $9.99 for a 128-ounce.

So you just get the – you go for the $9.99. I have a theory about these sorts of sites and, you know, I'll pontificate for a second. I just don't think that there's any point in ever buying anything more than, say, three months on any of these because once they've actually built out the infrastructure and they're getting subscribers, they don't have a lot of reason for them to keep developing new games, change up their systems, et cetera.

And your brain adapts after a couple months quickly. I found that with Lumosity. I'm sure I'll find the same thing with Fitbrains. It's like I think almost the best case scenario is buy in for as little as you can and switch from company to company to company to keep yourself off track, basically.

Yeah, that's a – yeah, it's an interesting way to think about it. And yeah, I didn't – like I said, I went for the year because I think three months – actually, I'll probably be bored with it in three days as well as the way these things tend to – as they say, shark fin. The games are fun.

There's enough games though where it keeps me interested. Right. And some of the games are actually pretty hard. But they do have multiple levels. You start basic, then get to intermediate, and then on to advanced. And here's the downside. I'm in advanced on almost everything already after two days of playing all the games, which does not bode that well for my $9.99 longevity purchase there.

Yeah, Lumosity was probably a bit better than that. I mean, it took me at least five to six months to get to the top levels on everything where I've been sitting for the last five months. So if you got up that quick on this app, that doesn't bode well. I'll probably go ahead and do the trial anyways just because I'm not aware of any other ones yet.

So we'll keep doing research on this because I found doing Lumosity in the mornings very useful and beneficial to me. I don't think it could ever be quantified. I mean, how can you tell how much better your brain is working on a week-by-week or even year-by-year basis?

But it certainly feels good, if nothing else. It feels like I'm doing something. Yeah, there's actually too many variables to really get a good – you'd have to lock somebody, honestly, away. Well, you'd need like an FIMR kind of device in your room and strap yourself in every time you play to see how you're really doing.

Yeah, it'd be FMRI, by the way. Sorry, I screwed it up. That's okay. Just think functional MRI, which is what's happening. Yeah, I didn't do my Lumosity this morning. This is why my vocabulary is not working. So one of the things that I've been trying to do with the Grumpy Old Geek site, as we're talking about adding content on there, when we do some of these reviews, I wanted to have like a website component to them.

But it's really hard to get video off of an iDevice, an iOS device. Yes, it is. You know, most people have another iOS phone that they're pointing at their iPhone that they're playing the game at. Seriously, if you go look at YouTube and try and look at like iPhone demos, they're incredibly hard to watch.

Either they're, if they get lucky, they can put them, they can like get cracked versions of the software and put it on the iOS simulator and run it that way. But finally, I found a piece of software called Reflector, which what it does is it turns your computer, your Mac into a, an AirPlay reception point.

And I love this. It is so cool. It is. I, it was like 20 bucks worth every penny. And when you couple this with another app, I've, uh, pontificated about in the past called ScreenFlow Pro. I'm done. I can now do all sorts of fun, um, tutorials and walkthroughs from the phone.

So this is, and this is going to get me off my ass to do our, uh, reviews on the site with, uh, our iDevices. So now we'll have companion pieces. So there will be a Fitbrains, uh, blog post, uh, this week. And I think I'm going to go back and do one for threes as well, because I don't think people understand how cool threes is until you see it in action.

Right. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, I, I actually got the reflector app, um, cause I do, I've felt the need to do that before and it actually works for, you know, demonstrations and things like that as, as you know, I, we do a lot of sites that have to work on iPads. So this is a great little app. It's, it's really super easy to use.

It tosses, tosses your iPad screen to anything. It's fantastic. Well, yeah, it throws it to your Mac basically, um, it without requiring, uh, uh, uh, Apple TV. Yeah. Instead of, you know, because normally you'd have to, if you're going to a meeting, you'd have to slog your Apple TV with you, plug it in, get it on the wifi, get it all, you know, together or create an ad hoc network that it's all joined with.

There are ways to do it without the in-house wifi, but, uh, we won't go that far, but this just makes it super simple. I mean, it's so, so, and you can have multiple devices at the same time. So you can have, uh, an iPhone and an iPad on your screen. So if you're trying to like debug and send stuff to, um, I'm actually going to use it today to, uh, uh, iOS developer that I'm doing a project with, I can do my debugging, uh, cap it, make a movie, annotate it and send them the quick time movie and boom, he's done, you know?

And so that's the other thing that we've talked about screen flow pro before with is for when you're debugging something, it's so much easier to just video it and like leave comments in real time and point to something and say, this is broken instead of trying to describe to them. When I click on this button, I do this and all that.

It's just, it makes you like so much on which button, which buttons you click on? No, that's the wrong button, man. Go back. Okay. What page are you on now? Yeah. That whole thing. But here's the other, here's the other genius part of it is you don't, even if you're not a developer, which most of the people I know are not developers, it's worth having this kind of app, the screen flow app, the screen recording app, uh, for families.

When I'm, when I'm trying to tell my mother how to do something, even though she's got a PC, like I'll whip up, um, parallels. I'll open up a PC and parallels with the free VM that you can get off the IE testing site, by the way, that's, that's the hack to get around actually having to buy windows.

I'll open that up and I will go and do whatever I have to do. Screen cap it on the Mac side of the screen flow pro, bust out a, um, a video, make a private video, send it to YouTube. So she doesn't have to go figure out what codec to get, what, what to download, make a private video on YouTube and boom, I just taught her how to do something.

It, it'll save you so much time just to have that kind of a trick in your bag. There you go. That's, that's what I got for, uh, apps this week. Hopefully, um, uh, yeah, I'll get some of these things up and next week, next week we're going to be flooded. I'm sorry, with, uh, uh, cool iPhone videos on, on the grumpy old geek site.

All part of the fun of you being laid up for a while. Uh, I actually didn't have time to do any apps while I was traveling around a bit other than the crappy NBC Olympics app, which I already talked about. Uh, but I did see a really interesting article. I've been kind of following the whole wearables thing quite a lot. Um, I don't really get wearables, uh, the Fitbit.

I totally kind of understand, but I unfortunately lost in a bar at some point and I still haven't gotten around to replacing because I'm lazy. Um, but you know, the whole Google Glass thing, the smartwatches, which are all coming or already out and not that great. I personally don't want one at all, but until I saw the, the concept art for the Apple iWatch, which should be coming pretty soon, it is fantastic looking.

Now, whether it's actually going to be that or not, who knows, but if, if, if that's what it's going to look like, I want one. Uh, but the main point of the article, which is in our show notes, and you can, you can see what these things, the concept art looks like, and it's gorgeous, uh, is that Apple's already won this because it's not really about the watch.

It's about the software and what it connects to. And Apple's already got the infrastructure. Apple's got the store. Apple's got the phone. The watch is only as useful as, as what it can do and what it can connect to. And you can't beat what Apple's already got going. Yeah.

Cause when it comes to these wearables, the computing power that can go into a wearable is so limited and it's always going to be limited. You can do some fun stuff with it, but I mean, honestly, what you really want is, you know, minimum, uh, computing power on the device, uh, really solid Bluetooth connection to the supercomputer that you've already got in your pocket.

Exactly. Uh, it's a good article that kind of tears down basically anybody else's chances to, to kind of blow away the market when they come out. Yeah. I hope that, I hope they knock this one out of the park because I would, I would, this is not just being an Apple fan boy. I'm a watch nerd and to have a, have like, you know, I'll keep my super nice, like fancy gentleman's watch on my left hand, but I will, I would totally put some technology on my right hand, you know?

Right. And the only thing that bums me about these things is they're very skinny. Like we, you have to see the picture of them to kind of, to kind of understand it. They almost look like a Nike fuel band. They do look very similar, but here's the deal. This is a concept. This is an artist's rendering of a concept that was in a patent from 2000, literally a year old patent.

Yeah. Literally a year old today. It's funny. It's February 21st, 2013. Right. And we record this on the 21st, 2014. I always, I always wanted like a big, like, you know, kind of gladiator type of arm, arm thing.

Like a gauntlet arm. I don't know what you call them. You want some spikes coming off of it. I want something cool, like big and leathery with, you know, with, I don't know, um, like the metal heads used to wear back in the seventies, something like that. Yeah. Some studs on the side.

Well, I mean, that'll be the whole secondary market, right? Like your iPhone case, you'll have your iWatch cases that you slap these things into. I know. I just, I think once you get, once you get into flexible displays, then we can have a lot more fun with a full on arm, arm sized. That's true. Like the whole, like a, like predator style thing where you hold up your arm and you got your whole arm covered.

That's going to change football too, man. All those players are going to be out there wearing this stuff. No, it's, it's pretty cool looking. Um, you know, I, I'm starting to come around to the idea of potentially having one of these if it's going to be that cool. So Apple, come on, blow, blow our minds one more time. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it.

Security. I talked about that show almost human a while back and it's, I still love the show. I think it's great. They had a, the latest episode is called disrupt our favorite word. Disrupt, disrupt, disrupt.

Uh, this episode kind of deals with smart homes though. And this is the latest episode. It deals with smart homes and the fallout of what happens when your security system fucks up and kills an intruder, which happens to just be a teenage boy who is just cutting through your backyard.

Right. Um, so which, which, you know, we'll probably see in the news in a few years, something like this probably will happen. I don't know about killed, but well, I think that might be out in the desert areas. Um, it won't be in the suburbs for sure. Right. Um, and a spoiler alert here.

Somebody hacks the house, uh, and it, they, they make the house kill the owners in protest, in protest for the, the kid who was killed a year ago. You know, it was on the one year anniversary. So the, the title disrupt comes from the fact that they wanted a hacker group to claim responsibility, but they didn't want to use anonymous.

So they, they created a hacker group called disrupt and they say, whose members are all anonymous. Yes. Yes. Very clever. Not really. Yeah. Um, but here's the, I mean, the, the, it was written by a woman named Sarah Goldfinger who, who writes for CSI Hawaii five Oh, and for some strange reason, grim.

Um, and she was writing on this show as well. Uh, I think it's interesting that they have taken up the smart home, you know, the smart home technology and made it part of an episode of, you know, kind of a future show. So it, it, to me, that looks like they're paying attention and it's a sign of a good show that they, I mean, they had to have thought about this months ago when they're, when they're breaking the show for the season.

Yeah. And I mean, obviously this had to be written like a year ago. Um, so I'm glad that there's, I don't know. Even if it wasn't her particularly who came up with the concept of doing the smart home, if it was the show runner or whatnot. Cause you know, people get assignments on shows to write different things.

Um, either way, I think it, that's what I like about almost human is the fact that they're thinking about things like this and the societal repercussions of what can go wrong. You know? Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what sci-fi is for that the best sci-fi always does this sort of stuff. I mean, you know, you take this, this, this, uh, fear of technology, go back to Stephen King's Christine.

I mean, that's, that's the whole point. So it's, it's good. I mean, I'm glad that they did a good episode. I'm definitely, I have avoided this show, but I'll go back and check out this episode just to see what they do with it. And the interesting thing is the kid who was killed, the teenagers that was killed, they named him Aaron, uh, as an homage to Aaron Swartz.

And the, this show, uh, should have, I've, here's the problem that with this show, they're airing there. This is actually kind of a problem that goes back to Fox. It runs on Fox. They're running this show out of order and they're going to be changed. They're running it out of order and they're going to be changing the time that it's run and they haven't re-upped for another season, which guess what makes me think of Firefly.

You know, this is like Firefly 2. It's like these networks go out of their way to kill these shows. It's unbelievable. When, when I found out about this, um, somebody on, uh, I think Facebook said Fox runs on nerd tears, which is, which kind of sums it up.

Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. So it was a nice homage to Aaron Swartz. Cause I think maybe this show would, it should have aired closer to the time, his anniversary of his death or suicide. That was kind of a bummer, but it was nice cause they did, they, the way they did it in the show was kind of an homage to, to Aaron.

You just have to see it to kind of understand it. But yeah, if you can go, go check it out on your, uh, on demand. I will definitely go check it out. Although I'm not sure it's going to change my mind about wanting to get Nest installed in my house. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no. If anything else, no, it will not.

It will not give you any, uh, any faith whatsoever in, uh, home computables. Right. Uh, also this week, I don't know if you got this email. I'm sure millions of people did. Uh, Kickstarter was hacked. Oh, I got the email.

Then I laughed and laughed and laughed. I don't know why you laughed. They got your info too. Oh, I know. I know. But actually they got a credit card that's already been canceled. So no big deal. That was the same one that I used for Target. Hey, convenient. Well, they, uh, they said no credit card data was accessed.

Just, just, you know, all your personal information, like your address and email and, uh, home address, phone numbers, uh, and your passwords and your encrypted passwords. So as soon as I, as soon as I, uh, got this, um, well, here's the funny thing as a precaution, we strongly recommend that you change the password of your Kickstarter account and other accounts where you use this password.

Yes. First up Kickstarter, you're doing it wrong. You should force everybody to change their password. Regardless, you should reset everybody from the get go after a hack like this. Yeah. When you log in, you should be forced to change your password immediately. It's not that hard of a thing to implement. Nope. Uh, Zappos did it back when they got hacked.

Adobe did it. Everybody, this is like, this should be standard protocol now that you have to change your password there. Period. So they screwed up on that one. Um, when I saw it, the first thing I noticed it was that you're encrypted passwords. So I'm like, okay. And, uh, there was an email address at the end of the email if you wanted to ask questions.

So I asked him a question. Um, I wrote, uh, I just got the notice about the security breach. Can you please tell me what the specific encryption scheme, uh, what is the specific encryption scheme you use to protect our passwords? Right. And so, uh, this woman from, uh, this one, Catherine from Kickstarter tech support wrote back almost immediately.

And she said, hi, Jason, thanks for writing. Older Kickstarter passwords were encrypted and salted using SHA-1. Uh, more recent passwords are encrypted using bcrypt. Both. So, you know, I don't know why they didn't go back and I guess you can't go back and re-encrypt until somebody does a password change.

Because you can't get the original password out of a salted SHA-1 hash. Um, but both of those are fine. So, you know, I'm happy with that. They were fine on their tech and, and this actually just points out the fact that basically no matter what you do, uh, keep this in mind, uh, got secret or get secret or whatever your app was that claimed, yes, whatever, uh, that, you know, it doesn't matter what you do.

Chances are you're still going to get hacked at some point. You can, you can follow best practice standards. You can do a lot of things. If a hacker wants to hack you, you're getting hacked. Yeah, it's, it's so tough to not be a target anymore. I mean, you can, you can mitigate the, the possibility as much as you want, but every now and again, somebody leaves a hole and it could be, it could be as much as a disgruntled employee on the inside, which makes it a lot easier.

But anyway, I, I was happy with Kickstarter's, uh, response, except for the fact that they didn't change everybody's password. I think that they're, um, using SHA-1 with salt is fine. Um, I'm sure that, uh, some people would complain about it. Here's the deal. It wasn't MD5.

Okay. It wasn't an MD5 hash, which is what a lot of people still use for, for password hashes for, for the uninitiated is a very easy way for people to, uh, get your password and break. Yeah. So, uh, did you get the, the other email this week I got, uh, which I think was last night from Dropbox.

I got that as well. It's been a, it's been a busy week for these sorts of emails. Yeah. So Dropbox, uh, who I am a huge fan of and I pay them every month for big buckets of data that I can use, um, they sent out a, uh, government data requests principles, uh, email as part, as part of a, a terms of service update.

Yeah. Um, so do you want to take this one? Um, you, you're probably a bit angrier at it than I am. Actually, I'm not angry at all. Why would I be angry at this? That's true. So let me explain what it is then if you, maybe you don't understand it if you're angry because it's, it's nothing to be angry about, uh, what they're doing is they're trying to be more transparent and, and letting their users know when, uh, requests for information come in from the government and how many, you know, cause that's been, that's been a problem.

And that's what a lot of the tech, uh, big tech companies are trying to get together to force the government to allow them to say how often that these requests for information are coming in because they haven't been able to talk about it. And the government has been releasing the kind of loosening the reins a bit on what they can talk about.

Um, they're also trying to fight blanket requests for, I love that one. Yeah. So they'll resist a request directed to large groups of people, um, or the seek information unrelated to a specific investigation. So they have to, you know, it has to be, there has to be some specificity involved with the request.

Um, and just protecting their users and providing trusted services. And, and just getting behind you, getting behind their users to, um, you know, stop kind of this government overreach. So that's what they're talking about. And the provide trusted services one, which, which states specifically, governments should never install backdoors into online services or compromise infrastructure to obtain user data.

We'll continue to work to protect our systems and to change laws to make it clear that this type of activity is illegal. Uh, I love that except for the fact that we already know the government has done all this. So not with Dropbox. I mean, you can't, you can't make a blanket statement that they're going to try and do it for everybody, for them as Dropbox, as a company, making sure that the government isn't coming to them and saying, can you just give us a backdoor so we can, don't have to bother you with all this legal, legal, legal, why get the lawyers involved here?

Yeah. Yeah. This just makes it easier. Come on. So they're good on Dropbox. I'm happy about all this. I thought you might find something upsetting about this. I guess I was wrong. No, absolutely not. I think it's, I think it's a great policy. So it's a plus, uh, plus one for Kickstarter and, uh, Dropbox this week for sure.

Hey Kickstarter, we're nice to you for once. On the silly side of things, which is what I like about the internet when I'm not actually working on it, uh, I stumbled across, uh, God, that's yeah, it's a listicle, whatever.

Uh, but it's a really good one. And it's the world's 19 most imaginative insults. I mean, I remember being a kid and the fun thing was coming up with crazy insults or learning a bad word in a foreign language. This tickles that same funny bone, uh, just kind of goes through various, uh, language and cultures and comes up with, uh, what I'm assuming are, are real insults.

Uh, it's a funny little list in the show notes. Uh, some of my favorites, uh, in Chinese, uh, I'm not even going to attempt to say it in the appropriate language, but it translates to your mother is a big turtle. Then this is an insult and it's apparently quite a serious one. Uh, in Russian, you, sir, are ass dandruff.

Ass dandruff is a good one. Uh, that one's great. Uh, the German one was really disappointing because there's so many, uh, being of German descent myself and, and being somewhat aware of the culture through my parents and the language. Uh, really there's, there's a lot of stuff, but, uh, one who parks in the shade is, is the one that they came up with for German.

I'm, I'm a little disappointed. Yeah. That didn't make a whole lot of sense. I like Bulgaria's, uh, you are as ugly as salad. Well, the, I think the one that takes the cake is Turkish though. May the bow of a violin enter your anus. I don't know.

This is just very specific. Well, the Romanian one is pretty good too. I can blow farts in your spoon when you, when the soup is too hot for you. Yeah. So there, I mean, it's a fun little read. I mean, it really made me chuckle. Um, this is again, the web is not dead.

This is what it's for people. In Per, this is where I, I actually mentioned this one before. Uh, the Persian insult is try to paint my fart. I don't, I don't understand. Yeah. And you had a bit of a silly one too. I, uh, I forget where I ran across this one.

It might've been, uh, my friend Alana's, uh, email newsletter that we talked about before the TV one. Uh, uh, but it is the Benedict Cumberbatch name generator. It is fantastic. Yeah. It's just a, it's a little Tumblr site. I think it's a little JavaScript app, but you, you just go and you hit click a name and I just got a blubber whale cockle teat, uh, Brandenburg waffle smack.

If I wish I had some place to use this cause I would actually make this my name. I just got barbiturate Snickers bar. Nice. Billiard ball collywog. Liver's wart cockatoo. Yeah. I mean, this is Burger King scratch and sniff. Yes.

Again, you'll, you'll spend a about, I'd say 30 seconds clicking through here, getting a good laugh. And again, exactly what the internet's for. I know this would be good. If you're like running a D and D campaign and you just needed something. Oh, it'd be amazing. Beelzebub kankersore. There's tons. I just got Beelzebub scratch and sniff.

Yeah. I'm sure I, I, I, you know, normally I would just view source and see what they all are, but I'm going to, I, I like this one so much. I'm not even going to do it. Don't ruin the magic. Exactly. Keep it, keep it fresh.

Candy, candy, candy, candy. I found a new podcast this week because I was going through, for some reason, I don't know how I found this, the top podcast lists of all of the countries in the world that iTunes has a store in.

And for some reason, this was on the top of almost everyone that wasn't, wasn't American in the U S and it's called hello internet. It is a podcast done by, uh, CGP gray, who is a huge YouTuber and, uh, Brady Haran or Haran, who I don't actually know.

I've never heard of before. Yeah. I've, uh, I'd brought up CPG gray's a YouTube site before because, uh, I fell in love with those. That was a previous, uh, web is not dead segment where he just does these wonderful, uh, amusing, funny and informative educational videos. Yes.

And it, and now I kind of know why there was at the top of the top of the charts. His YouTube channel has 1.1 million subscribers. So yeah, you, you start a podcast with, uh, that much a woofy in the bank. You're going to probably knock it out of the park.

They've only got three or four episodes up now. Um, and it's fun. I actually quite enjoy it. It's his first episode is being wrong on the internet. Um, and, and, and it's cool because they did three episodes or two episodes before actually sending them out to the public.

So they were doing follow-up with no feedback. They were following up on their own follow-up for themselves, which is, which is kind of novel and funny. So I don't know. I recommend checking it out. It is at hello internet.fm. Oh, yes. And this, I'm definitely going to be listening because I'm, I'm quite the fan and I'd love to learn more about, about the guy himself and, uh, everything that's kind of going on there.

So I have a ear candy as well, which isn't really, um, anything about a podcast or anything, but it is a music award show. And, uh, that is ear candy. Um, because I've been bitching so much about, uh, say NBC and how they've done the Olympics. I went off on a rant about the Grammys being done on delay here, uh, on the West coast, even though it's done here.

So, uh, in this connected day and age in this world that we live in now, it's absolutely in a world where everything is connected 24 seven and you're expecting and counting on tweets because you know, it, remember it was the hashtag Grammys. How do you not show it live everywhere at the same time?

You cannot have hashtag Grammys. If we're watching it three hours later on the West coast, it's fucking stupid. So the Brit awards, England, yay. Not only were some of the best music comes from, it's a really fun award show. Anyways, I've tried to watch it every year, uh, before the only option was, you know, they would show it on BBC America, like two or three days later this year.

Thank God. They put it live on YouTube worldwide open as it was being done the exact way that every live event needs to be done these days. If you're not stupid. So congratulations, Brit awards. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see it because I was not, uh, I was not available to sit around at the time.

So I'm still going to end up watching it on delay, but whatever you guys did it right. And next year I'm definitely going to carve out the time to sit there and watch it live. That's very cool. Yeah. And we have the technology, we have the technology, so why not do it? Yeah. Again, like I said, you can't do hashtag Grammys when the entire country is seeing it at different times.

You can do hashtag Brit awards now. Yeah. It should actually be for the Grammys should be hashtag spoiler alert because somebody's going to be ruining it for you if you're on, if you're getting it later. Exactly. So good job guys. And it's probably well worth the watch. I mean, it's always been very funny and a great award show and very different from the Grammys because it's mostly British talent and a lot of it's actually about music.

And it's funny, the, uh, I'm looking at some of the pictures, apparently MasterCard sponsored it because on all sides of the podium that they're getting their award at is a giant MasterCard logo. Hey, at least they're not like, you know, hiding the sponsors. Yeah. Oh, it's even in the logo Brit awards to 2014 with a MasterCard logo in it on the website.

Um, I think, I wonder if the people at Brita, uh, get upset by this because when you say Brit awards, I, I, I originally hear Brita, like a water, Brita water filter. I will have to get, uh, Dr. Teeter on the phone. Then you can talk about Soma. Okay.

Okay. Closing shout outs. So I want to give a shout out to, uh, Sheila. A good friend of mine who had her 40th birthday in Toronto and a big part of the reason that I flew out there this past weekend, uh, it was a really fun party. Uh, she's a great person and it had the convenience of, uh, having mutual friends and friends of the show, Ted and Matt, who I got to hang out with.

And we talked a little grumpy old geeks and some tech. So that was a good time and, uh, made going to the horribly cold weather bearable. Cool. I hope you told Ted and Matt to, uh, give us a five star rating on iTunes. Uh, if they, uh, like to like the show and want more people to listen, I believe they have.

Excellent. And, uh, that goes for the rest of the listeners, by the way, uh, if you would, wouldn't mind, we'd appreciate it a whole bunch for a, for a little star action. Um, and I do want to say that I'm sorry, my voice is a little, uh, raspy this week. You're sexy, man. Oh God. And you know it.

I'm like Carly Simon. They're a raspy voice. Um, probably think this podcast is about you. That was episode 22 or something like that. Um, yeah, it turns out when they put you under for surgery, they intubate you. They do. Which I think they intubated me with a, uh, like a steel pipe wrapped in sandpaper that they, uh, had to forcibly shove down my throat because I am just like raw is can be, it's been almost a week now, five days and man, that's rough.

So I haven't been eating much. Um, I've been off the food as, as you would say, um, yogurt and ice cream, man. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and lots of tea. I had to, I had to hit up a whole foods a bunch to go get some, some good matcha. Cause that's the only place I can find some matcha.

Yeah. Well, I also want to give a shout out to whole foods. Uh, even though, uh, you know, I live right across the street from one, uh, I been calling it whole paycheck for years because it's so damn expensive. Uh, but the really interesting article came out that I read through this week and yeah, whole foods drives me insane.

The people that hang out there drive me even more insane, but there's no denying that we're literally killing ourselves with processed shitty food. And this article on slate, which we'll have in our show notes, lists through basically the difference between the, uh, things that whole foods refuses to carry, uh, uh, different ingredients, whatnot.

And if you could actually shop with that list at Walmart and turns out you really can't. Walmart basically carries everything that whole foods refuses to carry. Uh, it's a little frightening and it's all really, really bad for you. I mean, some of it's kind of pseudoscience, but the general list is pretty damn good.

And yeah, uh, good on you whole foods for sticking to some standards and, and actually getting some real good food out there. Yeah. I wish I could really afford to shop there on a regular basis. Uh, me too. It's getting harder and harder, but, uh, you know, cause our economy is just so wonderful right now.

But what I try to do is, is kind of like stick to certain things. You know, I want to get some, I want to get real organic vegetables and I want to get my meat at whole foods and, and other things I'll just suck it up and go to Ralph's for. But, uh, the list is really good. The article is fascinating. Um, it's, it's a really disturbing look at, at what we're actually feeding ourselves as a country.

Yeah. I think it's worth checking this article out for one, one specific aspect. They made a really cool slider where you could, where you could pick on a, uh, a food type like breads, cheese, meats, and you could look at a, a, uh, a picture of a shelf at Walmart.

And as you slide across it, uh, things that you can still buy at whole foods will be visible. And there's some where it's literally nothing like the, I think the whole bread aisle is gone. Um, cheese. It was at this point where Comcast decided that we jabbered on long enough.

So in closing, the consensus is to shop at Whole Foods, you need to rob a Walmart. Thank you for listening to our show. If you enjoyed it, please tell a friend. And until next week, grump on. Keep up with the grumpy old geeks on the web at grumpy old geeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks, or email them at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com.

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