49: Painfully Unintuitive Fuster Cluck

Yes. Let's talk about these things. Before we talk about these things that we're going to talk about, when we talk about these things. Yeah.

Grumpy old geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong? So, Mr. Brian, I am in your neck of the woods today somewhat, and it's hot. Yes, it's nice and warm here. It's a bit of a heat wave in California, which has been a lot of fun when you're trying to move.

I can bet. So, you are now a homeowner, I hear. I am officially a homeowner, yes. Hopefully, I'll be actually in the place finally by early next week. Right now, it's still just a nightmare. It's a nightmare on so many different levels. I mean, the packing is no big deal, other than the fact that I've come across boxes of things that I moved over here two years ago when I first moved into this place and never opened.

I could really start a museum of Jurassic technology, the amount of cables and weirdness that I have shoved away in boxes, and I have absolutely no idea what to do with any of it. I do. I got an idea for you. This is what I did when I was getting rid of all my ancient tech, was take it to your local hackerspace, and the hardware hackers will tear it apart and make fun stuff out of it.

Oh, that's a really good call, especially since my business partner is very involved with hackerspace, so I will just have her come pick up a big box of shit. And it's the same hackerspace that I dropped all my stuff off at, too. Oh, there you go. Everything except for hard drives, obviously, because I don't really need anybody getting into that. Nope, not that stuff. I gave them my old creative MP3 player, the clamshell one that looked like a CD player. Remember that one?

Oh, I remember, yes. It had a whopping five gigabytes of space on it. So yeah, I mean, other than that, it's all been going relatively smoothly. A quick note just on the basic state of customer service in this world now. I am so fucking sick of three to four hour windows. If you can't narrow down showing up to within an hour, and I get an hour, I'll give you an hour because it's LA. There's traffic. You never know what's going to happen. But this three to four hour window thing is a fucking load of crap. I'm going to revolt against it. God damn it.

Well, do you remember when it used to be eight hours? So shut your shut your trap hole and quit your wine. And we're down from eight. So although I did find out a little secret, which I mean, I guess it's not really so much of a secret. We all kind of know. If you call back and complain or very nicely just say, is there any possibility they were able to winnow down some of my windows to like an hour or two, which is nice.

Oh, yeah. You know, squeaky wheel gets the grease squeaky wheel. Yep. As long as you're not talking to somebody in India. I had some Verizon misery while I was before I get to my Verizon misery and my train, my train is it is hilarious now that our podcast is so we have one like music mogul homeowner in Southern California.

It is palatial condo. And the other one is a rail riding homeless, like over the hill nerd. We are completely on opposite spectrums now. I literally everything I own fits in a suitcase and you now own a home.

Yes, I know. It's quite the we've taken divergent paths, Jason. Yes, we have. But that's what makes this so interesting. So the yeah, talking about riding the rails, I took the train trip out and our last show was posted from the middle of I think I was in New Mexico or something on Amtrak.

I don't know. So many of your photos, which were great, by the way, all looked exactly the same, except some of them were covered in snow and then some of them weren't. That's pretty much what America looks like. It's really flat. It's really big and it's really boring. So it was a it was an interesting trip. I I'll get to do it again soon because I'm going back to Chicago to get my leg fixed.

But I I couldn't leave my room because it was so rickety and rocky. Right. The cars are two stories and I was on the top and I couldn't leave my car. So it was kind of really lame. I didn't get to meet anybody, didn't get to talk to anybody. I had one guy that I met, this guy who was a who was my steward.

It was really cool, did a great job. He had to bring me my food, you know, and I tell you what, man, the food was amazing. Yeah. You posted a picture of that and I was I was heartily impressed. I mean, that was some some decent stuff. Way better than you get on a plane. Yeah. I had steak two nights in a row. It was cooked. I get medium rare, which, you know, sometimes even in a restaurant is hard to pull off.

Right. It was perfect every time. And they had Sierra Nevada. So I had some beer and steak and kick back with my iPad and watch some TV. Not a bad way to get across country. Yeah. I did have the sea legs for a couple of days, though, after even sleeping at night. I thought my whole bed was moving. I thought, oh, my God, is it an earthquake? Is it an earthquake?

But it's just just the standard sea legs. But yeah, I recommend it. It was it's it's really kind of fun. You know, you just basically kick back and you get to look out the window and not have to drive, which is the best part because I've driven that so many times. Yeah. So this was my my first chance to actually enjoy the trip across the country.

And it is a very beautiful country. It is. I've done the drive before. I've never done train. Like I said, on the last podcast, I'm quite jealous at some point. I do want to do the train, although I hear that the the ultimate cross-country train to take is from Vancouver to Toronto.

That's supposed to just be stunning. Oh, I bet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The one from you can do San Diego up to, you know, the northern tip up to up to Canada. And that's that's supposedly pretty nice, too. But I didn't have any Wi-Fi, so I had to battle with Verizon to get my LTE set up on my iPad.

And like four hours, four hours over two days of being on the phone with him. And oh, here's the other thing. There's almost no service when you're on the train going across the country. I found out. Yeah. Yeah. It was amazing. Once I started complaining on Twitter, my call got answered faster. I don't I don't know how that worked, but I don't know if there's some, you know, cross pollinization there.

But as soon as I started calling them the devil, my call got answered pretty quick and they got me sorted out. That is quite odd. You wouldn't think they'd be able to connect your Twitter account to your phone number. Don't know. But I tell you what, though, once I got it set up that man, it smokes. It is so fast.

This week was kind of interesting. There were a lot of ageism posts that we got got sent around. And since, you know, we talk about it quite a bit. I think people are starting to send the send us those as the go to old guys. Yeah, we are old. Yeah, there was quite a few. I mean, a friend of mine, Matt Quinn, forwarded us one on Twitter about I guess it was basically a conversation, a forum almost talking about what happens to older developers.

A guy was wondering, he's in his early 30s and he considers himself an older developer, which is like you're a fucking kid. Yeah, seriously. But he just started talking about, you know, he basically just asked the question that you and I asked probably many years ago. And we're still asking ourselves, it's like, what do you do?

I mean, when you get older, you don't, you know, the programming world changes. It's a young kid's game. You don't want to keep learning languages. You stick with what you know. And even with that, I mean, if you're a programmer, there's a pay ceiling. End of story. You're never going to be like, you know, $150,000 programmer.

Well, I guess you could be at some places, but not often. And, you know, you kind of have to go up the management chain if you want to keep making more money and you get your promotions and you get pushed out of programming. I just think that's the natural path. You become the dreaded producer. And then you become the dreaded manager.

Yep. Then the dreaded CEO. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, there's a lot of sturm and drang in this entire very, very long conversation. To me, it's just always been you're really not going to want to be a programmer, per se, when you're 40.

You're just not. You're not going to have the time for it. You're not going to be interested in it. The idea of staying up all night to code something, which used to be like, I would do that. And there'd be this massive sense of accomplishment. You wake up the next, you know, after three hours of sleep the next morning, you're like, I fucking built that last night.

That never happens to you anymore. You want to go to bed. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm starting to get back into it some more. I mean, I'm 42 now, and I'd have to program because it's all I know. But I still actually do enjoy when I get on a tear, I'll stay up, you know, and just bust my ass on it.

And I still get that same satisfaction sometimes. It's just a different kind of satisfaction because it's a different kind of, you know, procedure. Because back then, you're still learning and you're trying to figure stuff out, you know. It's like when you figure out how, you know, this function works or where this hidden method was, you know. That kind of stuff is, you know, it's an accomplishment in its own right because you learn something new.

Now it's like I know pretty much my language inside and out. Yeah, and you're just rebuilding the same stuff. That's a lot less exciting. Well, that's, but what I'm saying is when the stuff that I'm building now for me and some of the clients that I've got is actually not stuff that I've built before. So it's fun.

It's new. I know how to build it now is what I'm saying. You know, it's like before I didn't know how to build it, but now I know how to build it and I can build something bigger and better and cooler. Yeah. So, yeah, that was the long thread was on Hacker News, which, you know, sometimes it's hit or miss. There's a lot of stuff there.

But the other one was a really good one in the New York Times. It was called Silicon Valley's Youth Problem. No shit. Yeah, well, we've been talking about that for quite a while. It's, I mean, it's a really long one, but it was, it's written by a younger guy in his 30s, an engineer.

You know, Ivy League, snot-nosed little brat. Makes a lot of money. It takes on both sides of the argument very well, I think. And there's one quote in there from an older gentleman who's this kid's father, or this other kid that he knows his father. It says, if you are 50, no matter how good your coding skills, you probably do not want to be called a ninja and go on bar crawls every weekend with your colleagues, which is what exactly many of my friends want to do.

Yeah, I mean, that's a supremely valid point. I mean, at the end of the day, if you're going to be a hardcore programmer, you're going to be hanging out with a bunch of kids that are pretty young. And, I mean, it does come down to lifestyle choice. If you're 40, 50, and you want to be a Vagabond techno guy and, you know, ride Amtrak and code from your Verizon pad, that's one thing.

I'm, you know, that's not my life anymore. My life is I'd rather have my weekends to myself. I do not want to, I love going to a craft beer place and having a bunch of beers with some good friends and talking about stuff. But I do not want to be doing beer bongs at four in the morning anymore. So, I mean, it's just, it's, I, you know, I'm old.

End of story. I don't, I don't begrudge it. I don't actually miss my youth that much. I'm much happier with my lifestyle now than I was then. You know, and, and yeah, I, I just think that if you're going to stick with the programming thing and you're going to become a specialist, that is the kind of people you're going to be around.

And I think you're going to resent working with people that are half your age. I just don't think that it's a good combination. That's a good point. I never even thought about the resentment factor because these kids are coming into it and it's a totally different world for them. And, you know, they're, they're 20. When you and I were 20 and we started coding and there were older people around us, we're just like, yeah, whatever, grandpa.

And they were probably like 29. There's just a, there's an inherent lack of respect when you're that age. You just think that you're, you're the shit and nobody could possibly know how to do this better than you can. And when you're 40, 50 and you're dealing with that attitude, it's going to fucking great on you.

Yeah. I cringe when I think of some of the things I said to my management teams when I was starting out. Oh, me too. Yeah. That first company, when, when, when I started working with you at box top, I told, uh, one of our managers to blow me in the middle of the whole pit. And she was not happy about that.

You can't get away with that anymore. No, no, no. It's a, it's a different world now too. It's, um, so yeah, I just, uh, I don't know on that hacker news thread. One of the questions that the guy asked was, um, you know, should you become a specialist or become more of a generalist as you get older? I also think that you need to keep in mind, I would personally recommend the generalist route.

I'm also recommending, you know, you push up to management and not be a programmer anymore. The problem with becoming a specialist as you get older is eventually what we see is that those specialties die off and something else takes over. And all of a sudden you're left with a completely useless skillset and you're probably too old to want to completely learn something new or to be able to get a job anymore with something that you just learned at 45 versus a kid that's 22.

Yeah. You don't see many COBOL specialists running around. Exactly. That kind of stuff. You know, after Y2K, those guys were out of a job. So in keeping with the old man chillmeister theme that we've just been talking about, uh, I just started to get really creeped out this last two weeks with web, web tracking and advertising.

Um, again, as we've talked about, I'm moving. So there's a lot of like lounging about on the couch after being exhausted and then, you know, picking up the iPad and looking at West Elm or, or plumbers or various furniture stores. And like, all right, we're going to get a new couch, going to need a new dining room table, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you look at it and, you know, you bookmark a couple of things and then you kind of toss the iPad to the side, go to bed, wake up the next morning, hop onto my desktop, get ready to start a work day. And all of a sudden I get an email from, from West Elm in particular, uh, the very next morning with the table that I had looked at front and center within the email, which is pretty impressive.

Isn't it? Very impressive. Fucking creepy. I mean, it really did freak me out. I I've gotten used to kind of the sidebar on Facebook, you know, ads for anything that I had happened to be looking at anywhere else on the web, even if I cleared my cash or whatever, fine, whatever. I I've gotten used to that, but it's just, it's starting to reach an uncomfortable psychological level, how quickly and easily they're dialing in on everything.

And I think there's, there's going to be a balance. There's going to be a sway against this because it does feel icky. I saw that and I was just like, fuck West Elm. Yeah, it's, uh, it's been going on for so long that I don't even think about it. I expect it. If I, if I, you know, search for something on Amazon, then I know it's going to show up everywhere.

So, um, you can also, uh, one thing that I've used when I'm searching for something, uh, unsavory or for somebody else, uh, shift, shift command N opens a, uh, incognito browser window. So, yeah, yeah, uh, you know, I'm aware of all that sort of stuff, but it's, to a certain extent, especially when you're doing this sort of thing, you, you want to have this in your history so you can go back and go, Oh, what was that white coffee table that had the little pop-up opening thing?

That's true. Find it again. That's true. So you don't want to lose it. It's just, uh, my only point is just that they they're nailing this down to such an exact science that I think it's going to become uncomfortable to humans. Well, obviously it already is if it's, if it's, yeah, it did freak me out that next morning. It really did.

So I don't know. I think that, you know, maybe it's time to bring in some, uh, some psychology people into these advertising companies. I don't know. I don't, I mean, you're still going to buy it. So I'm probably still going to get it, but it, like I said, I just felt icky that next morning. When it's, when this stuff starts to turn into people not purchasing, then you'll see a backlash.

But if, if you're finding the things that you want to find and they're helping you find it, who's actually losing there? You know, that's a good point. I'd rather, I'd rather them send me the thing that I think I need, you know, and that I don't, can't find. Yeah. Then not the other way around.

There is a site called fixed tracking.com that has like tools that you can use. Um, I think DuckDuckGo is the browser you should, or the search engine that doesn't track you and all the other stuff. Like the, uh, Chrome add-ons and, um, Firefox add-ons that stop all the tracking stuff for people that are really creeped out by it.

But, uh, you know, I just, I, I ran that stuff for a while, but the real big upside of turning off all that tracking crap, everything loads so much faster. Cause you don't have so much cross-site JavaScript. You don't have all that script and all those things loading from here and there. And yeah, everything does go a lot faster, but you are missing out on some of the functionalities of the web in the first place.

Oh darn, I can't thumbs up something from Facebook on when I'm, when I'm looking at a cabbage on my, uh, home grocery site. Yeah. I, I can deal without that. Good point. So I, I've been trying to find a bar that uses that tray thing that, that you told us about last week with the disruptor of, you know, getting off your ass and getting a drink.

Yeah. The tray. I can't find anybody yet. Maybe that's because they're in stealth mode. Well, I, I have a bar that supposedly has it, but I can't find one either because the bartenders shut it off. Revolt. The people have risen. They are resisting to the disruptors. Uh, yeah. Uh, I went back in for my normal trivia and I thought I was going to be all cute because I had talked about it with the bartender last week and I was walking down the street and I brought up the app and I was going to order myself a beer and have it ready for pickup.

As I walked in, turned off. So I walked in and I like laughed at it and I, you know, held up the app to her and I showed her like, you know, cannot connect to this bar at this time, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, fuck you. Put that away. We had it on for like three days.

Tips went down like 40%. Yeah. Uh, the boss still wants it on, but, uh, every time that she's not around, we just kind of discreetly turn it off. Oh man, that's a, yeah, revolt because if they were smart, they would come up with a, a model that, you know, can still have the bartenders get their tips and make money because otherwise they're not going to, if they're going to have that much bad blood between the, the venue and the people that work there.

Yeah. It's just, it's going to be bad for the, like the internal dynamics of the bar itself, you know, and they're going to just be pissed off at management because they're not making the money that they should be making. So it's a dumb, dumb move. In theory, you can add tip through the app, but I mean, what we all discover is psychologically is once you remove that human connection, the, the desire to actually tip or leave a buck or two goes away.

So, yeah. And also, um, the, uh, the taxes that you have to deal with, you know, a lot of, a lot of people in service, they get cash tips. Yeah. They don't really report those because they're making so little money anyway. And once you start, you know, putting this stuff in a system that gets recorded, then they have to declare it. And yeah, I mean, that's the, the kind of unspoken illegal economics of being a server is you get tipped in cash and you don't claim it all because your fucking hourly rate is so low.

So if you go through it this way, and if you tip on credit cards and all that sort of stuff, then it has to be taxed. Yeah. That just makes me think of the, the scene, it wasn't reservoir dogs at the beginning when they talk about tipping as one of the greatest, greatest scenes in any movie. Yeah, that's a good one. Um, there was another thing we were talking about was the, um, uh, spritz spritz.

Yeah. Spritz. They, uh, some clever, uh, hacker dudes got together and basically stole it and recreated it and turned it into a little JavaScript bookmarklet called open spritz. It's kind of janky. It works some of the time. I think it uses a read later's, uh, functionality or not read, uh, read abilities, uh, libraries to pull the content out of the page, which, which I believe are based on Insta papers.

Like Marco Armitz original stuff. So that part seems to work. Okay. But I've gotten it to work. Like that's 75% of the time. Uh, I think they just added a pause button. There was no pause button when it started, which is a real pain in the ass. When you, when, like, you know, yeah, I want to stop.

I want to stop. Oh, dude. Especially if you're in like, you know, an article that's, you know, 4,000 words and you don't want to start back at the beginning. Right. So, but it worked. I mean, it seemed to work. Okay. I mean, as I mentioned, I tried it out briefly, but I am a really fast. Fast reader anyway.

So I don't need or want this app. Um, but the only thought I had about it is like, I don't, I don't, for, for most people, I don't think reading speed is really an issue. Who's really trying to jam that much, much stuff into a bit of time. Unless somebody really feels that they're incredibly slow reading. Um, than me actually.

Okay. Well, uh, my question is, I mean, how is this affecting comprehension? It's, it's different for different types of things I've noticed. Um, and news articles, it's really hard, uh, reading news articles with it. I can't do because if there are facts in it that I need to like, you know, kind of process.

Yeah. And especially if you're talking with like numbers, that's really hard and you can't like scrub back and stuff like that. It just, it makes it a little bit more difficult. Um, reading people's like blog posts or anything that's, you know, not so fact-based, but more like emotional-based seems to be fine.

I haven't had any problem with comprehension or retention on that. Okay. Um, that's good. Yeah. The real interesting thing that I've taken out of it is not so much even that you need a spritz or, uh, um, whatever the app that I talked about, uh, has is that, you know, that fast rapid thing. Yeah.

Is the, um, turning off sub vocalization in your brain when you're reading has, has helped me a ton. Right. That's, that's the, that's the biggest trick that I've taken away from all this stuff by, you know, they talk about the science of reading and all that, like, you know, speed reading and sub vocalization. Once I turned off sub vocalization and figured out the tricks to trick myself into not pronouncing all the words as I read them, um, my, my reading speed has just gone up, uh, organically.

Maybe that's why I've always been a fast reader. Cause I've never done that. That's probably it. Cause I mean, you're, you're insane how fast you read. Uh, I could never, never do that. Um, but I, I find that when I do read things, I mean, I have incredible retention and retention skills that I can pull this stuff back.

If I read a book, I can, you know, almost pull passages verbatim back. But when I do try and read faster sometimes with, with just tricks, like those like three points to cod tricks that you, they use. Yeah. Um, my, my retention definitely goes down and there's definitely, there's also a big difference between an, uh, listening to an audio book and reading a book.

I, I, you know, retention on an audio book is, you know, 10% of what it is. If you read it, I, yeah, which is why I've never really caught into audio books. Uh, I just go, I go back with fiction. I went to my whole rule now with audio books is fiction only. Right. You know, that's, that's a good rule. If it's, you know, any kind of fact-based book, a personal development book or any kind of crap like that.

Uh, I read the words, but, uh, you know, fiction is fun to listen to and you get the story, you know, you get the reader to, you know, do the characters. It's fun. All right. Gotcha. Although, you know, again, my thought, another thought on Spritz is nobody fucking reads on the internet anyways. So. Yeah.

Well, I, I, I've been trying to last week, we talked about how I'm getting so damn good at putting everything, you know, my, my capture is my capture systems are top notch. I am, I am the master of putting stuff in a bucket that I will never look at again.

Right. Um, I, this week I did a little trick. I'm not saving anything for reading later until after I've read it. Yeah. So like in the morning when I'm reading news, if I see a bunch of links that I want to go through, I will pick only a few of them, read them. And then if they're decent and we want to talk about them later, then I'll, I'll put them in a bin.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't get to read everything, but I read more than if I did, if I just captured everything and put it away. Yeah, I agree. That's what I've been doing as well. I don't just grab links anymore and save them. I actually at least read at least three fourths of the article to know, okay, this is definitely something I want to check out. Um, so speaking of one of those articles that I did find, cause I wanted to, uh, follow up again, cause we've talked about the music industry and shady accounting quite a lot.

Uh, let's talk about it again, because this has been doing the rounds. Um, it's an article on blabbermouth.net, which is kind of a music, music industry thing. Uh, this guy, Dave Lombardo says he made only $67,000 in 2011 while touring with Slayer. Now let's, let's see, where do we start here?

Um, what does, is he actually a, like a regular band member? I don't know. Let me, let me, uh, let me get into that first really quick. Let me drop a little industry lingo. He is a professional side guy. Now side guys are guys that are not in the band, but tour with the band.

Uh, for instance, you know, you've got, uh, say the police when, when they toured the three guys that are in the band sting, Andy Summers, Stuart Copeland. But, when they toured last time around, there was also an additional guitarist. There was, uh, backup singers, et cetera, et cetera. Those are all considered side guys.

Anybody that isn't in the band photo, but is, goes out on tour to help flesh out the sound to kind of recreate the sound of, of the actual recordings. Second guitarist, so the lead singer can get up there and like pull a girl up on stage in the middle of the big song and not have to play his guitar part as well. Oh, these are the guys that, uh, Amanda Palmer, I'm sorry, Amanda fucking Palmer, was trying to get to work for free.

Yes, Amanda Palmer tried to open source for free, the side guys, basically. Now the side guy industry, there's a lot of these guys out there and they move around from band to band all the time and, and they make good livings. Uh, they basically, you know, they hop on the bus, they sign up for the entire tour, as long as they don't fuck up and like puke on the lead singer.

You know, they're there for the duration of the tour, which could be one to two years or something like that. All their expenses are covered. It's part of the deal. They basically, you know, they're on the tour bus, they get per diems for food. The hotels are covered. You're usually not in the same nice hotel, like the main guys in the band.

You're in the motel six down the street, but whatever, uh, you know, your flights are covered again. You're in coach. You're not in first class. Basically they have next to no expenses. Plus they get paid, uh, you know, uh, basically a weekly, they usually get paid weekly stipends, which is decent money. So on the one hand, this article is kind of, he's bitching and it's coming sort of from the, uh, direction of Slayer is one of the biggest bands in the world.

This guy is in the band. He's not in the band. Um, and he only made $67,000 in 2011. So this has made the round with me and my friends and music industry people. And I've been listening to a lot of people talk about it. Uh, comments kind of range from supportive.

This happens all the time in so many ways. Oh my God, what the hell is wrong with the music industry? What the hell is wrong with, with the accounting? How can Slayer make all this money touring and only play their side guys this much money? Okay. Okay. How, how is, how has technology ruined this guy's life? What, what's his, what's his angle?

How has the internet, has the internet caused his problems or is this just some dude bitching because Slayer is not as popular as they used to be? Um, I don't, it's not technology that's ruined it. It's more, he's complaining about music industry finances, which I guess technology has ruined because bands don't make as much money as they used to.

Uh, but the other side of this guy is he's been fired from a couple of different bands for touring. So he doesn't seem like he's that great of a guy. Um, and second, the other thing is that, you know, I know a ton of musicians who just went, you made $70,000 in pure income with no living expenses for a year playing music and you're bitching.

Yeah. I'm on that side. I mean, damn, I'd love to do that. It's a, it's actually pretty, he made pretty decent money for no expenses whatsoever. Um, he just seems like a, it seems like a little bitterness, but a lot of these side guys, I mean, a lot of them are great. I mean, some of my really best friends are professional side guys.

That's all they do. They go out on tour with different bands. Um, this guy, but a lot of them are kind of disgruntled. Why aren't I up front? And they end up getting really angry and upset because their band didn't work out. Now I'm stuck playing, playing for these douchebags and why aren't they paying me more?

Um, I saw, okay, he's a whiner. I'm, I'm, I'm done with him. I still love Slayer. So I, I don't think I would go see them, but. The takeaway from that article, which we'll post in our show notes, um, is if you're interested at all in music finances and how I said, how Byzantine and crazy they are, they do get into it a little bit in detail in the article.

So it's kind of fun for that. But yeah, this guy's kind of a douche. Um, there was another thing. I forget how I came across this link. It's a wall street journal link, but it just, it's an infographic that just caught my eye. I couldn't care less about, you know, the percentages of what streaming services have, what percentage of the markets, because really honestly, who cares?

The one thing in this graphic is it's a graphic that shows the splits between, um, Pandora iTunes radio. And what was the third one? Spotify. Spotify. Okay. So Pandora has what? Like 50, 60% of the market.

iTunes radio has 17% of the market and Spotify only has 16% of the market. You got to say that iTunes radio kicking Spotify in the balls that fast is pretty goddamn impressive. iTunes radio has quietly become extremely popular.

Yeah. Nobody really talks about it. You know, everybody, uh, it's all beats music. It beats music in the industry right now, but iTunes radio is doing very, very well for itself. Pandora is still top dog. I will say that this is in the U S only Spotify is massively.

Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. And you're now, if you, if you bring in worldwide, Spotify is kicking all of their asses. Okay. Gotcha. That's okay. Now, now that makes more sense. Yeah. This is, this is, this is us only infographic. Um, and that's no surprise. Pandora has been top dog in the U S for ages.

But, uh, if you bring in worldwide demographics, uh, iTunes radio will be a distant third to Pandora and Spotify will be the leader. Yeah. Yeah. iTunes radio is fantastic though. I got to say, I really enjoy it. I mean, I've, I've put on just like, it'll create stations automatically for you based on your favorite band and you can't really lose.

It's, they've got great selection. The service streams extremely well. Oh, it sounds fantastic. Yeah. It sounds great. I mean, I started listening to that more often than Spotify. Yeah. I, I think I'm thinking about killing my audio subscription because I almost never use it now. It's like when I'm in the mood for like a band, I just pop on iTunes radio and just type in the band name and I'll get one song from them first and then songs like it.

And then they'll just keep filtering stuff in and you can, you know, for some reason, when I pick my Depeche mode station, they keep playing the cult, which I don't quite get, but that is the, yeah, that's a weird combo, weird combo. I would go ahead. It's great. My guess would say, go ahead and get off RDO anytime anyways, because I think that they're going to be the first to be bought out.

I'm not, I wouldn't be surprised. The only place RDO is winning or big and popular is Canada. They're pretty big in San Francisco too. Cause it's pretty, it's got a good design. It is pretty, but they're definitely losing to Spotify. Okay. So speaking of things that I, I don't know how this happened.

I signed up for Squarespace again last night. You are so weird. I am. It's my personal site, man. And I've just, I've been, I can't bring myself to go back to WordPress because I hate it. So I hate this. I hate this. I'm going to go away from it. Okay. I like it again. Now you're going to be like, fuck this shit again.

Here's no, I'm forced to use Squarespace because I need to put my site back up. Cause I've got some things that I need to have a site up for the WordPress side of it. I am, I am actively turning down clients for WordPress now. And I, this, I'll talk about this in a later segment, but the Squarespace thing is just like, it's there.

It's going to cost me more money than running my own site. But, uh, I don't know. It's done, but my God, is that thing unintelligible and impossible to fucking use? It is, it is one of the most unintuitive systems I have ever used in my life, but they build themselves as the simple solution.

I don't know how the hell they can like legally call this, call it that. Well, you know why Jason, it's because you don't want a site that's just straight off. Like they're built in template. You want to be able to tweak things and you want to do things that, that other people wouldn't want to do. Oh, hell no, no, no, no. I just want to change a link color.

It's, it's, it's, that's, that's complicated, man. That's why they've got so many support guys. It's, man, it's, it just go get a free trial and play with it. Oh, I mean, we, I got pretty good at it when we were using it for the grumpy old geeks at site originally. Right. And we would have stayed with them because they were, they did have great service and the stuff that I needed to do was pretty basic, but trying to do some other customization stuff is just mind bogglingly hard.

I was going to throw my computer through the damn wall last night, just trying to literally like put in a photo gallery. It's like, what the hell? So I, I, I admit that, yes, I tend to go back and forth on things because there's not that many options, you know? And I know the grumpy old geeks.com probably be on Squarespace in about two months.

And then six months from now we'll switch it back to WordPress. Uh, no, I don't want to, it's too much money to be, that's the other thing about Squarespace is honestly, I think they charge too damn much. That's, that's my only thing. I, fortunately they, they, uh, advertise on every fucking podcast, no demand. So I can go, I can, you know, throw a rock and get a coupon, but, uh, it's still, it's, um, if I'm on, I'm on the monthly and with a coupon, it's costing me 18 bucks a month.

Well, yeah, that's not cheap. That's not cheap for, for a single serving site. So, I mean, granted it is unlimited with unlimited bandwidth and storage and all that crap. And I'm going to, I'm going to test the limits of that unlimited storage because that is going to be my new flicker. All my photos from flicker going over there, which is like 10,000.

So yeah, I would love to see how this works. I would love to see what would happen if I would take like one of my major artist sites and pop it on Squarespace and say, okay, about that unlimited, uh, we're going to announce a tour and tour dates in about five minutes. Let's see what happens. Well, they, um, uh, my buddy, Kevin Rose way back in the day when he was, you know, top dog with Dignation and Squarespace was, you know, saying how, how, you know, they were uncrackable and like, you know, wouldn't never go down.

Right. And he called on like a million damn people and did the guy said, you know, try and take us down. And he, and he couldn't. Okay. That's pretty impressive. It was pretty impressive. And I think Kevin had over a million followers at that point. So it was, it, it was fairly robust.

Um, but yeah, I mean, just the editing is just, Oh God. Yeah. Oh, they really need to work on that. So the, uh, guess what? It's happy birthday. World Wide Web. 25 years. Yesterday. 25 years. Oh, it's still a young'un.

Yeah. Well, cause yeah, we, we met it when it was five. No wonder it's so arrogant right now. It's 25. It can drink now. It can vote. It can go see like sex shows in Amsterdam. Which is most of the internet anyways. That's true. Yes. It was, it, it, it, it saw, it saw everything that was to be seen by the time it was one year old.

That is very true. Well, happy birthday internet. And, uh, apparently Google has decided to celebrate by coming back up to 1996 and finally getting rid of the underlined links. Uh, it looks better. I gotta say it does look a lot better. I mean, I've been, you know, that was one of the first things that we started doing as soon as, uh, I started my own company and, and Wendy, the main designer was like, we are not going to do underlined links anymore.

I'm like, good. Yeah. The one thing that drives me nuts is when there's, when you don't do underlined links, but it's still a link and you don't change the damn color or have, or have hover states. That's, that's just amateur hour. So, yeah. Well, hover states aren't really all that useful anymore either. Cause you got to figure people on an iPad, but they're still, they're still useful for a desktop, but yeah, you can on, on, uh, you know, portable devices.

Yeah. There is no rollovers, mouse overs, hovers. So you do have to at least change the color. Otherwise you don't be able to ever know it's there. Otherwise it's useless. Yeah. So happy birthday. And it's, you said happy birthday internet. Internet's far older. It's happy birthday web. Oh, that's true. Yes.

Happy birthday web. Gopher's got to be what? 30 now. At least. Comment of the week. Our comment of the week comes from Mike Tamal, who gives us a lot of good feedback and, and gave us some cash too. Thanks, man. Uh, great job on episode 47, gents.

I've got a question for you guys. Are there any plans to organize your book and app recommendations so that they aren't buried in the podcast notes? Maybe on a separate tab on the top. Mike. Um, in a related story, the grumpy old geeks are looking for unpaid and underappreciated interns. So if anybody out there would like to come in and do that for us for no money whatsoever and no thanks, feel free.

Yeah. We'd appreciate the help. Must know WordPress. Must know WordPress. Uh, it's a great idea. The fact of the matter is Jason and I both have full-time jobs and, um, uh, you know, we'd love to get to that eventually. It's just a matter of time. Yeah, it really is. It's one of those things where I, if, if I got off my ass on a weekend, we could probably get it done.

But by the time the weekend comes around and we're done, done with work and the show, the last thing I want to do is go into WordPress and do more, do more, do more work, go back through 48 episodes and read all of our show notes and organize them into different tabs in WordPress and create all that. I mean, yeah, that would be fantastic.

And I think that is, you know, that would be first on the list of things that we would do if we were actually getting paid for this. Yeah, honestly, it would be because we do need to kind of organize our stuff a little better, but thanks for the tip, Mike. That'll help, maybe help us get off our ass to actually do it at some point. Yeah, thank you.

And if you would like to send us a comment, please, please feel free. You can go to the website at grumpyoldgeeks.com and press the contact link and just drop us a note there or send us an email at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com. In the news.

So this story combines two of my least favorite things, a really ugly music player and Kickstarter. We just finished talking a little bit about the state of streaming media and how we all kind of know that streaming has won and it's basically just coming down to which service is going to win, most likely iTunes, radio, or Spotify, which is, you know, reasonable quality, sounds good, but not good enough for all those audio files out there that just won't stop.

Unfortunately, this time it's like 10 of those people left. Yeah, that's like 10 of them left tops. I mean, this is up there with the let's bring back vinyl until they realize that they can't fucking listen to a record at the gym. I'm a huge Neil Young fan. I love him to death.

I totally get where he's coming from. I understand home audio systems that are total audio file and encoding your stuff. It's super high, you know, resolutions. So you can listen to that at home and knock your socks off. What we don't need is a high fidelity portable player and Neil Young's high fidelity Pono music player is coming.

It is ugly. It is triangular. So I don't understand exactly how it's convenient. Yeah, it honestly looks like an ugly Toblerone. Yeah, it looks like an ugly Toblerone. It's being kickstarted, which means he's not even going to go ahead and put up the money to get this thing off the ground, most likely because I'd guess he thinks it's not going to work.

This thing is dead on arrival. I don't imagine anybody's going to use it. Its cost point is $399. Yeah. Yeah. It's not an iPhone. All it does is play high quality music. And again, it's you can't exactly get the service for free with it.

I don't know. I don't think that there is a service. So then what the hell? Oh, yeah, it is a service. There's got to be a service. OK, there are Pono music offering 192 kilohertz, 24 bit recordings. That's not even that high. Yeah. Anyways, so this is yeah, this is dead on arrival.

It's stupid. Sorry, Neil Young, but this is a bad call. Audio files are never going to be mass market. You know, just keep it to the home system. Nobody cares. Everybody's listening on their iPhone. Give it up. We're done. Moving on. I did wake up to some interesting news this morning that's been going like wildfire for some strange reason.

I don't know why. Amazon jacked up the price of Prime, $20. I know. I saw that as well. Here's the deal, though. It's still a steal. It is still a steal, and their reasoning is sound. Gas prices, transportation, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. You know, I love Amazon Prime.

I really have to do a cost-benefit analysis to see if I order enough stuff for it to be worthwhile because I do have Netflix already, so I don't really use Amazon streaming all that often. Check it out, man. There's a lot of good stuff on there that's not on Netflix. Yeah. After the big purge of Netflix, like the New Year's morning purge, like when I broke my leg, I was stuck in bed, so I couldn't watch Downton Abbey.

I had to use Prime, which is actually why I bought a Prime account, which is how fucking lame is that? I really went out, and I got an Amazon Prime account so I could watch Downton Abbey because everybody told me, oh, it's so wonderful. Go watch it. So I did. And it was. But yeah, for me, the main thing about Amazon Prime has been the awesome, like if it's an Amazon Prime eligible, the free shipping and like the one-day show up, which has been ridiculous.

Yeah. But they got to fund those drones, so the price is going up. Well, I bought the, you know the Ollo Clip, the little wide-angle lens that you can put on your iPhone? I had one for my four, but I didn't have one for the five, and it was kind of janky. So I ended up buying one yesterday, and it's on its way here today, and I had to buy it from the store, and like their store, the Ollo Clip store, and I had to pay 20 bucks for shipping on it.

So, and I'm like, if I just got it at Prime, but they didn't, it was out of stock. So I know that pain when you need something and you do it. So five of those things a year, which I definitely buy at least that, makes it worthwhile, totally worthwhile. So I'm sticking with it.

I'd imagine I'll be keeping it as well, so. Poor Amazon, their stock went up. Excellent library! Woo! So on the train, I got to go back and read one of your recommendations, Dr. Sleep by Stephen King.

I got some angry texts from you saying there better not be a fucking spider in this. I know, I was like, there better not be any alien spiders, and there weren't, and it turned out to be an actually amazingly good book. I told you, man. That guy can write. I was, I was really amazed. He's a, he is, I mean, he's just, he's the master of the craft, right?

I mean, there's just no doubt about it. It's, he just still knocks them out of the park. I love how he kind of does these vague nods to connecting all the, all of his universes now. I've always enjoyed that. He really started, got that off and running with the Dark Towers series. Dr. Sleep was a great follow-up to, uh, to The Shining.

Yeah. And I never read The Shining, but now I want to, because it, it sounds like it is not like the movie at all. So it's a very deeper and different. Yeah. But yeah, I was, I was just, I was really impressed with the, the, the writing quality. I mean, it was, it was really good. So, I mean, I should have known, I mean, he's, he's been writing forever and I've read, I've read his book on writing, which is a must have for anybody that wants to write.

And even if you don't, it's still a great, great book because it talks about him getting hit by the car or the van and how he bought the van and burned it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's an interesting thing because Stephen King has been around for so long and, you know, sometimes you think, oh, the ideas are getting a little bit stale or whatever.

And then his son has started writing and is very successful in his own right. And I really enjoy all of Joe Hill's books. That's, that's the name he goes under, um, which are also great, you know, kind of horror ish fantasies, whatever books, uh, not quite as dark or as deep as, as a Stephen King's.

But, uh, the real takeaway from having read a really good Stephen King book again is this dude is a motherfucking class, a writer. Like nobody writes like him. His son doesn't write like him. You cannot beat the way he's just so concise and so descriptive and it seems effortless.

It's unbelievable. Yeah, that was, and this was, I got this on, um, audio book from audible and the guy who read it, he's a very famous actor, but he has a very distinctive voice. Unbelievably well-read. It was so good. I totally recommend the audio version of it because it's fiction and it's good.

And there were no space spiders, but speaking of space, um, Neil deGrasse Tyson's cosmos is now out, um, I I'm halfway through the first one, uh, but you can get it free on, uh, fox.com. If I hope, hopefully it's for international list or peoples that aren't, aren't Americans.

Um, and so far, cause it was, everybody was talking about it on the Twitters and everything so far. I'm not really that impressed. I gotta say, you know, I mean, I'm obviously a fan of him just because of what he does. I, anybody that's out there advocating for science and he's made some very controversial to the religious wingnut, uh, comments, uh, which, you know, are obviously spot on.

It's just, it's science people, whether you believe in it or not, it's science, it's fact, it's real move on. Uh, I've never read any of his books. I've never seen any of his TV shows or I don't really know how he is in terms of, uh, in person. I basically just see his quotes and his interviews and that's it.

Oh, I, I listened to his podcast. I've seen him. I'm, I like him. I like the guy. I think he's very fun. He's, you know, he, he's, he's a popcorn scientist who knows his stuff. Right. Um, but I, I just, I don't know. The, the pacing on this thing is really slow. Just the credits alone are like forever.

What they kind of remind me of, and there's a, there's a reason for this, um, is remember the, the credits for Voyager, Star Trek Voyager, how they were very slow and vaguely. Well, uh, the guy who is like executive producing and writing the show is Brandon Braga, who is the Star Trek guy.

He used to work at, you know, he used to work on next gen. Then I consider him the death of Star Trek, but yes. Yeah. And he ended up marrying six of nine and bastard. Yeah. Seriously. Um, I did, I did meet him one time at a, at a restaurant after we were, cause I was working on first contact and I, he co-wrote that and I met him one time.

I mean, he seemed to be okay, but he, I, that's right. I told the story about that. He, he, uh, had us change his bio on the Star Trek first contact website to say is single and lives in Los Angeles. Worked out for him. I guess it did. I guess, uh, that found out. So, but yeah, it's free.

Uh, we'll put a link in the show notes, grumpy old geeks.com slash 49. If you want to go get a watch on, I think it's, it'll be up there for about 50, 60 more days. Cool. Um, but yeah, I'm going to try and get through it. I like him. I listened to his podcast. Uh, we have a link to his podcast in the podcast. We like section on the website as well.

Uh, star talk radio. And this week actually Bill Nye, the science guy took over. So it's kind of funny. Oh, good. Yeah. And he is also very, uh, very, uh, anti-religion. So it's a fun one. Uh, but back onto science. Randall Monroe, Mr. XKCD.

Huge fan. Talked about it a couple of weeks ago about how I do not go to that site enough. Uh, yeah, I don't either. Because you know what? He's got an entire series that I've never seen before. And now he's making a book out of it. Okay. It's called, uh, what if is a, is a, uh, column that he does like a science column. It's serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions.

Nice. Uh, this is right up my alley. I was checking these out this morning and I was in tears laughing so damn hard. They are so good. And now, now, now I don't want to go read them because now I know the book's coming out. So cool. Oh yeah. I can't wait to get that actually. And this is a great way to actually support people who run websites that you like is when they actually put out a product, you go buy it.

Yeah. Buy the adams. So that's great. Um, I have been working my way through influx, which you recommended by Suarez, uh, uh, when I'm not too busy looking at couches and dining room tables on my iPad. It's fantastic. Um, it's a great book, but you're right.

It's completely different. It is not real world possibility, future fiction. This is way the hell out there, but it's such a good concept. Uh, if you're not reading Suarez yet, by all means, start. Yeah, absolutely. I'm about 75% of the way through, uh, 81% now. I love that you can tell that on the Kindle app.

It's fantastic. Uh, it even tells you how many, like how many more minutes you have left in the chapter to read and all that sort of stuff, which is pretty funny. Um, um, um, yeah. And I can't wait. I'm still not entirely sure where he's going with it, which I love because normally by now when I'm reading a book, I'll have gone, okay, this is what's going to happen. Looking forward to finishing it.

Yep. It's, it's, I'm telling you, it's a good one. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. So a couple of weeks ago, I talked about a status board from panic. One of the, uh, one of our app reviews and I was slightly critical. I'd have to say about it.

Uh, I think I just said, fuck it, skip it. Don't waste your money. Yeah. Slightly careful. Yeah. Yeah. It was my TLDR. Um, which is, which was sad for me because I love panic. I've, I've used panic software for years. I can't live without them. I have transmit and, um, Coda open right now.

And that's, as do I actually, they're, they're my go-tos. They, they could not get through the day without them. So, um, it was, uh, with a heavy heart that I, uh, gave them some shit. Uh, but, uh, Greg Maletic, one of the developers for, uh, for status board actually commented on our post and, uh, gave us some good, good, good insight onto it.

And, uh, yeah, I, I agree with everything he says. We'll put it in the, it, well, it's in the, the show notes for episode 47 and, uh, kind of basically tells me I'm an idiot with, uh, in no uncertain terms.

And, uh, I have to agree with them. So the, uh, the thing that I, the problem that I had with the portrait versus landscape mode, um, it was, it was user error on my side. I was, I had something set up where it wasn't like flipping right. And it was like overlapping. So that was actually, I went back and fixed it.

It was my fault. You don't have to buy the thing to get it to stream to your TV works great. Um, and I've been using it every day. Now I wake up in the morning and I open up my status board so I can see my downloads and my emails and how many followers I've lost on Twitter because I actually speak. Um, usually about three a day, by the way.

Okay. Um, so yeah, it's like, I still don't know if it's worth the 10 bucks for what it does. Um, I think it'd be, I think their perfect price point would be four 99, but I understand why they priced it higher because it is a, a limited audience of people that are going to want this type of thing.

Yeah. I was about to say, I, I don't want it. Um, I mean, it sounds nice. Well, I mean, you have you, with all your different artists, I figured you'd want like, you know, stats at a glance for your, your guys and stuff like that. But since you're actually not selling product or anything like that, I can kind of see that.

Yeah. You know, you don't have support emails and it's nice to get at a glance, like how many support emails are in the queue, how many products you've sold, what your, you know, what all your rates are. But that is fun. I can definitely see the usefulness for that. Yes, I, I use it every morning to see how many people did not listen to our show. So, uh, and I, for that, I use, uh, something that Marco Arment came up with.

He wrote like a little custom connector for Libsyn, the guys that we use. And I had to do a little mod on that to make it work. So, um, I might actually release that knock on wood. Oh, very nice. Um, his works kind of, but I, I wanted a little bit, uh, better, uh, integration on our side.

So there's that. Cool. And also since, uh, since we've last spoke 7.1 iOS in the wild. Yes, it is. Thoughts. Um, easy install. Didn't fuck up. That's always nice. Uh, reasonably quick.

Also nice. Uh, I love the font change. I love it. It's actually so much more legible. That was so much better. It's so much better. Um, it just, it looks nicer. It seems to run a little bit faster and keep in mind that I'm just on a five, not a five S. Um, but I do have my continuous complaint, which I have about basically like even Facebook.

When you install the app, it changes settings. Why the fuck does it turn on Bluetooth every single time you do an update? If Bluetooth is set to off and you do an update, why does it switch it back on? I don't know. I always have Bluetooth on, so I, I don't, I, I never have it on because it drains battery like no tomorrow.

And I have, unless I'm in my car, which is the only Bluetooth connected device that I have. Uh, I just leave it off all the time. So, uh, it's just one of those little annoyances as, as the update came back up, I noticed on both my iPad and my phone, Bluetooth is on. I see.

I haven't synced my Fitbit all day long, even though it should be GIMP bit because I'm on my crutches, but, um, I, that's, so I just leave it on for that because I charge it. I charge it so often, but sorry. Sorry to hear about your blue woes. No, it's, it's no big deal. It's just one of those little code things that, uh, you know, that I could put on a tinfoil hat and be like you with their, with their zero exploit.

But, uh, you know, it's just some little switch somewhere that just says, make sure that Bluetooth is on when you do an update or something. Who the hell knows? Somebody fix that. Yeah. Cause we know everybody at Apple listens to our show. Um, I, I, yeah, so far no crashes, zero crashes. This thing crashed on me three times a day.

It was just like, you know, like clockwork, but so far so good. They still haven't fixed the shift key issue so far. They're so, so, so much that they have a, uh, there's a website now called is my shift key on or not.com because people still can't figure it out. Yeah. They did. They kind of fixed caps lock.

I give them that. Yes, they did. They fixed that. And everything else. Yeah. The speed is way better. There's like a fraction of a second cut off of all the damn animations. Um, there's it's, I recommend going into the accessibility settings and just dick around with it for a while. Cause you can, you can kind of customize it a little more to your, your liking.

Yeah. They moved the, um, the, the wallpaper motion thing to the actual background settings too. So you can change that there because before it used to be under, um, uh, reduced motion, which would kind of kill it. Um, and I like it. I like having it on actually.

I do too. I love it. So I think it's nifty, especially with on the, on the 4S that I had, it was a little slow, but when I went to the 5S, it, there was no, no hiccup or anything. I keep it on, on the, my iPad air too. Works great. So, yeah. And it works great on the iPad too.

I'm so far, uh, everything points to finally, you know, this is what seven ocean should, should have been. Yeah. They're definitely getting there. They're dialing it all in just in time to, uh, probably change everything again. No, no, no. This is, this is what we're stuck with for the next, you know, eight years or whatever. Um, and another app that I talked about my new mail app, uh, Unibox.

Which I'm still loving. I've been having some search issues, but I got a fix for that. There's a little thing that you can do if you Google enough to fix the search. But the main problem was the one I talked about was that damn UX issue where they put the subject bar over the two bar.

To this day, I still get bit like four times with just muscle memory. I'm like, I'm going to send an email. I open up an email and I'm typing the name, you know? Yeah. And honestly, who's going to come up with a subject for an email first? That's the last thing you ever come up with. Yeah. You pick who you're sending it to and then you type your damn subject.

Yeah. Or subject after the email, you know? Cause it's like, you could write the email, you know what you want to say, but you don't know how to subject it, you know, whatever. Uh, so I just wrote them and, uh, they said, we'll consider moving the two field to the top. Thank you for your feedback. Well, we'll see. We'll see. Hopefully they do. It would be nice. Yeah, it would be.

Um, we talked on the security stuff before about, uh, personal VPNs. Yeah. And I found one today that I cannot believe I've never heard of before because it's just so damn funny. It's called tunnel bear. Let's you tunnel to anywhere in the country or any, anywhere in the world. Like say I want to watch BBC, I can tunnel to the UK and pretend I'm coming from there.

Um, it works on iPad, iPhone, Mac, PC, cheap as can be. You get like for, for free, you get a 500 mega month of, of traffic. And if you, and, and if you tweet, there's a little thing in the app, if you tweet, you know, just promoting them, they'll give you an extra gigabyte and you can do that every month.

They let you do that every month. So it's basically one and a half gig free of, uh, traffic, which ain't bad. No, that's not bad at all. I mean, I've been looking for something like that, uh, just to be able to watch things that are on the BBC that I can't get here. Uh, BBC news videos, everything like that TV shows.

So it's fantastic. Not that I advocate piracy. I would pay for it. I would subscribe to things. I would be, I would watch these, I would pay gladly to watch these things if I had a choice, but I don't. So. Yeah. And on the piracy side, they don't do torrents. You cannot do torrents with them because they said, uh, in their FQ that, uh, they were companies that were coming to them saying, we need your user data.

Right. And because of the torrent traffic going through and they said, you know what, instead of tracking users, uh, activity and having to hand it over, we're going to keep our service clean. We're never going to track users activity, but you just can't torrent. Yeah. Which makes sense. I like it. I'm fine with that. It's fine.

But I mean, there, there are many other VPNs out there who, uh, allow torrents. And from, from what I can tell by what these guys have done, the torrenting company, the VPNs that allow torrent probably are giving your data to the MPAA or the government. So probably besides our friends in Sweden don't make it hard to find anything.

No, speaking of our friends in Sweden, the torrenting, have you seen popcorn time? I have not. Jesus. There's it's a, it's, they've got a funky URL. Um, but it's, it's, it's this new app called popcorn time that puts the most beautiful interface on stealing movies I have ever seen.

And it's all torrent based, but it, it hides everything and it just streams the movie. So you, you look at the, it looks like the coming attractions on iTunes. You find the movie you want, you press go and it just streams it. It doesn't save it. As far as I can tell, I only played with it for like a few minutes, but it was, this is like torrenting for that.

Your grandma can do this. This is, this is, this is, you know, theft on a scale for every member of the family from little Joey to grandma Jones, you know, it's amazing. It looks cool as hell. I mean, I can't, I I've been reading a lot of news about how everything's just getting so much easier in the torrent world.

And, and here you go. Just, you can't use it on, on your Berry, uh, your tunnel Berry, whatever they call tunnel bear, tunnel bear. Um, but yeah, man, Ooh, it's, it's amazing. What, you know, what evil hackers can do when they have time on their hands, because nobody's making money off of this one.

This is just obviously for the pure love of it. Yeah, exactly. It's pretty impressive. Well done. Yeah. Cause I don't even know who, what trackers they have. Maybe this is, Oh, you know what? It looks so good. I bet the MPAA actually made this and what they're going to do is every time somebody goes there and watches a movie, it's, it's coming from their trackers there and you know, their torrent, uh, seeds.

Yeah. And they're just capturing your IP address and you'll, you know, anybody that uses it will just get a bill at the end of the month. Yeah, probably. That actually wouldn't be bad, bad idea for them. They should, uh, they should run with that. Right. Yeah. Cool. So remember like two weeks ago when all the entire internet could do was talk about WhatsApp.

What's app. I haven't heard anything about it recently. Pretty much over. Just kind of, yeah, came and went as a story. Uh, the people that were super pissed off about it left the service and everybody else is just keeping on. Yeah. The world has not changed. Yeah. The world has not changed at all, but you and I did try out two different, uh, messaging apps that, that other people had touted as a, as a replacement.

Um, we tried telegram, which is telegram is the more secure version of WhatsApp that everybody transferred to when WhatsApp went down right after being bought by Facebook for $19 billion. Yeah. And telegram looks and works exactly like WhatsApp.

No, like, like criminally. Exactly. Criminally. So like they basically just renamed it. Yeah. I mean, I don't see any difference whatsoever. Um, yeah, it's supposedly more secure and supposedly they're not going to sell out. And, uh, but I mean, again, it doesn't matter if your user, base hasn't left.

If all your friends are still on WhatsApp, you are too. Uh, and you have to get them to switch over to telegram. It's nice. It's again, it's exactly the same. So if Facebook really bothers you go get telegram. Yep. And, uh, I think telegram is the one that's, uh, funded by some mysterious German backer.

Um, I don't know. We always know how well that goes. So, uh, the other one we tried was cyber dust. Yeah. One of those disappearing, you know, read it. It's, it's, it's kind of like a Snapchat replacement. Um, I only found it because Mark Cuban, I guess, is an investor in it. I, it might've been on shark tank or something.

I haven't seen that episode, but he, he was pimping it on Twitter. So I tried it because it's got such a stupid name. Yeah, it does. And, uh, within five seconds, I had taken a screenshot of our conversation, sent it back to you. Yes. And I, I screenshotted your screenshot. Yeah. So, uh, there you go.

That doesn't work. Well, I mean, it works to the point where it's supposed to, it's pointless. That and Snapchat, the pointless. So you cannot send something to somebody that they cannot keep on a computer. Period. It does not work. It does not work.

Once it is created, it cannot be uncreated. There you go. Security. Edward Snowden appeared at South by Southwest. Well, he didn't appear. He Skyped in or whatever and did a big interview.

Um, you know, I just, uh, I, I don't, I didn't watch the entire thing. I read a lot of the commentary after, uh, I like how he's positioning himself as kind of like a figurehead basically for, I don't have all the answers. I don't have all the solutions, but here's what's going wrong. Here's some possible ways that we can start to fix things.

Uh, the most, my favorite takeaway from the entire thing was that he dropped a, an epic Harry Potter reference, uh, referring to basically, uh, what was the exact quote? Let me make sure I get that right. The defense against the dark arts of the digital realm, which, which, you know, got a huge fucking response from all the dorks over at South by Southwest.

Nerds. Um, I don't really have a lot more to add about Snowden than the stuff that we've already talked about. Uh, he hasn't really added much more to the conversation yet. There's still leaking more stuff. Uh, he's basically just saying, you know, uh, let's get some oversight and let's get encryption involved.

Yeah. At this point, his job I think is done. Um, now that Greenwald has all the docs and keeps coming out with more and more stuff like the giant plan for the NSA to infect millions of computers with malware in an automated, like cyber brain, uh, system that they have.

They're like, Oh, well, you know, if we have to, if we have to infect everybody by hand, it's just going to take so long. Can we like, uh, I don't know, make a program to just infect everybody by the, without us and like, okay, yeah, let's do that. Yeah. Um, so I think, uh, like Glenn Greenwald is, is, is running with the torch at this point.

Um, I hope he stays in the limelight just because we don't want to forget what he's done, but I think, um, I think his part in the story is, is basically almost over except for being, you know, the guy on the stamp in, in 30 years when he talked about, you know, how he's changed things.

Yeah, I agree. He's, he's the figurehead now, which is great. And he seems to be very good at it. His speech went over very well. People enjoyed it. He's, he's, you know, he's good on, he's good on TV. That's good. I didn't get to see it. I think he used, they used a Google hangout actually. Oh, okay. Yeah. It went in, apparently it was fairly janky and crashed a lot, but he is coming from some bunker in Russia or a holiday in the Russian infrastructure, as we all noticed, isn't all that great.

Um, so I was going through this morning and I read a pretty good, uh, breakdown of the, the giant target hack, which is really crazy because, um, they had everything in place to prevent the attack. They even had, they even had software in place that told them when the hack happened, that, that, that malware was installed on their systems twice.

And they, they basically ignored it. Yeah. So this is, you know, humans are the problem. Well, look, I mean, we, we bring this up all the time. Uh, we invented the entire segment. Who's this asshole for this kind of stuff? Uh, you know, it comes down to like the, the, the head of the coding commission in Britain, uh, you know, has never coded in her life.

Uh, the internization of, of things that we've talked about, who was in charge? Did they have any idea of what was going on? Did they get these reports and just go, well, this, this could wait. Yeah. I mean, they, they, they had, they had everybody in place except for when the, you know, the notes went up to the, you know, their security commission, but it has like 300 people from the outside.

It looks like everything should have worked. But the, the last mile there where they needed to go and uninstall the malware that was installed and they had the, um, it, that just didn't get done. They also have systems with this system that they're using that, you know, detects malware, which is a really cool system.

I gotta say, um, it, I mean, it was fucking invented by the CIA and all the governments use it now. It's, it's, it's worth reading up. I'll put a link in the show notes. Um, there's an option for it to turn, to delete the malware. It's like, Hey, we detected some malware. We can, you know, we can tell you about it and you can go delete it or we could just delete it ourselves.

Yeah. They had that turned off. So if they had just turned that on, well, it would have done its, you know, done its job. I think they were wary because it was a new system and they were just still trying to get the, you know, the, the hang of it and see if it worked. But, uh, yeah, I mean, it's just, they, they paid for everything.

They had all the people, they had all this stuff. They just didn't, they just didn't listen. You know, it was just, it's, it's kind of sad. It really is. Yeah. Oh man. So yeah, there was a big WordPress hack this week that turned it into a DDoS. We'll put links to that in the show notes because I, I, I don't want to raise my blood pressure by talking about WordPress anymore than I have to.

And, and this is just going to keep going on and on and on. It's what happens when you have the most popular and open source system out there. WordPress is a target. It's always going to be used. Uh, we've probably, I think we've done WordPress attacks about 18 times on the show so far. Yeah, definitely. But here's the upside.

My clients now are hiring me to wean them off of WordPress. I'm going to, I've got a big job right now. It's going to take like a month or so or two months. And it is turning a site that they, you know, built in WordPress with, you know, 40, 50 plugins in it to get it to do what it needs to do.

And I'm writing it from the ground up in scratch with custom code. Nice. So it's, you know, it will do what it needs to do without having to worry about every time somebody updates a plugin, if the whole site breaks, which is what's been happening for them. Um, cause that's, cause that's the thing, you know, that's the, that's the, that's the upgrade cycle that you get in with the problem with WordPress.

WordPress keeps updating. Plugins keep updating. If you don't keep updating everything and you stay behind, then you get hacked. So where you've got, you've got a gun. Pointed at your head on both sides. So, yeah. Sorry about that. The hell with, I got a little ranty. I think we're going to have to retire WordPress like we retired Kickstarter, which just means that they keep coming back up anyways.

Okay. Deal. I ran across a really interesting article on lifehacker.com. Uh, it's called, I'm a telemarketer. Here's how to get rid of me. This is another in these continued line of series that we're seeing all over the web about people that used to work somewhere, then got pissed off and quit.

And now are going to spill all the industry secrets. In this case, I'm fine with it because telemarketers suck. Uh, it's a really interesting article. I suggest you go read it. Uh, if only for the fact that you'd be surprised that you'd think telemarketers are these low rent operations run out of basements. Well, they are, but they're also incredibly sophisticated.

They are as good as tracking as the NSA is. Um, and they are keeping records on absolutely everything, every single call, everything that you say. And a lot of the tips that, that we always thought that, uh, were the good ways to get rid of telemarketers and get them to leave you alone are, are wrong.

So, oh, well, that's, that's interesting. Yeah. So they, there's a, just, you know, it's a kind of a glorified listicle to a certain extent in that they just kind of list off all the things that they do to track you. And then they, he gives, he gives a bunch of tips that are really good about how to make call and stop and things not to do.

Okay. I haven't read it yet, but, uh, did they bring up the do not call list and does it work? The do not call list, uh, works if the telemarketers are ethical. Okay. So it's like a robots.txt file. Yeah. And the surfer, the snarfer can, can ignore it if it wants to. They can.

And there are ways around it in terms of switching call centers. And, you know, this call center is registered and got this list when, and versus that one. And if you're the Uber company, that's just hiring these like third parties, you're distancing yourself. So there's all this weirdness about it. It's, it's quite complicated. Okay.

Well, I'll check it out because, uh, I hate when those, those guys talk to me. So it's tips from a real person that's worked in the industry about the best way to handle it. Sweet. There you go. No, seriously. Are you shitting me? I have been bitching and whining about supposed viral videos for ages this week.

Probably I've never smiled so big and never enjoyed myself quite as much as this entire week. When the strangers kissing each other stuff blew up virally on everybody's fucking feeds and everybody's like, Oh my God, this is the best thing ever. Uh, especially girls, girls went apeshit for this fucking commercial.

So apparently the heartstrings, if you're single, just walk up to girls in the middle of nowhere and say, will you make out with me? Because apparently they love this shit or do they? Because all of a sudden people started to notice that everybody, nobody looked like normal people. These were gorgeous, stunning looking people.

These are not just random strangers. Oh, wait, hold on. It's an ad for a clothing company too. And then the mea culpas and then the people posting about their disappointment. I just started laughing and laughing this week. So yes, it was not some beautiful, I kudos to the company and the way that they put this out there to make it seem as if it was not a commercial.

And it was just this beautiful virally shot, uh, video by some artist, which it was, except it's also a commercial and it used paid models and paid actors. Okay. So the thing that I don't know why people are pissed off about it because it, they are people that technically haven't met and they get together in a room, they take pictures, they video them and they smooch.

Isn't that the whole point of it? I guess. So, uh, it's toying, it's toying with your perception of reality. Okay. So the, the fucking everything on the television does. I know. Um, so yeah. So instead of walking out on the street and saying, Hey, would you mind coming inside and kissing somebody you've never met before?

They say, okay, we're going to hire you to kiss somebody you haven't met before. So instead of, uh, freeware, it's, uh, shareware or whatever. Okay. It was paperware. Okay. Yeah. Come inside and smoke an e-cigarette with somebody you've never met before.

Okay. I just enjoyed it because there were all these people that got upset about it because as if we haven't been marketed to or bullshit to before. I can't trust any of them anymore after, you know, was Jimmy Kimmel and all his crap, um, you know, with the twerking and then the wolf in the hallway and all that crap. I am just so over the viral up rocks and, and, you know, all those different sites, uh, they just drive me insane.

And, uh, you know, so now we're surprised that advertising is co-opting the same way, same method of selling to us. There you go. Yeah. I mean, it works. There's no denying that that stuff works because they're all these sites up worthy, et cetera, are all built on, on the way that they phrase and present things, which isn't quite the truth.

And speaking of up worthy and all those, you know, content mills, um, we talked about the, the Facebook changes that they made. I mean, granted, I've been staying off of Facebook a lot more just because I've got, you know, work to do. Um, but I have noticed when I go on there, their changes have made a difference on how many people are actually, you know, passing those videos along.

I haven't seen an up worthy video in weeks. No, until this particular one with the strangers kissing, I mean, I had been blessfully free of just getting completely bombarded on my feed with the same video. This is the first one that's broken through and done it in a while. Closing shout outs.

As much as I hate crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Um, I'm going to, I'm going to explore this site a little bit. That was brought to my attention by a friend of the show. Fergal crowd brewed the craft beer financing marketplace, financing and fundraising options for the craft beer industry and its affiliates.

If I'm going to chime in money on anything, it's for beer. What do they need to get money for? Isn't like brewing fairly cheap? You can do it in your bathtub type of thing. One would think, I think that these are people that are trying to actually go beyond from the, the home brew to the kind of mid-level, uh, brewing things.

The site is actually relatively confusing. I can't quite get what's going on. Uh, you do seem to be able to buy in almost as like a stock exchange program to certain local breweries, uh, or breweries, basically anywhere you can search by area. So I'm going to take a deeper look at this just because it might be interesting.

Um, I want to see if I can find somebody or somebody around here that's local and kind of see what's involved or what happens if I give them some money. Do I get free beer? Do I, you know, can I come over and hang out and like, you know, sip straight from the tap? Let's see what's going on here. I don't know. You know, it's just like, I figure, you know, everything in the world is obviously getting, uh, getting crowdfunded these days.

And it's, uh, you know, I like beer. Well, there you go. Nothing wrong with that. Uh, the one crowdfunding thing I think I'm going to end up, uh, pitching in on is Adam Carolla's patent troll, uh, crowdfunding, uh, thing that he's got going on. He's using fund anything to, uh, help fight the, the patent troll.

That's trying to take down podcasting basically with a really ridiculous patent. This is really important to, uh, to basically anybody that listens to podcasts. And if you're listening to us, you like podcasts. Um, you know, this one company bought out a patent, which I believe is just for the, I'm not going to get the phrasing exactly right, but the ordered list of articles of audio content.

Uh, in time deferred, I think. And time deferred. It's about time deferment. It's really fucking stupid. It's fucking stupid, but they're going after Carolla because he's the big dog, uh, for I believe $3 million is what they asked him to settle for. Uh, if, if they win, he comes after those, the patent trolls will come after every podcast, not us.

Cause we don't make any money, uh, but everybody else. And it'll basically change the entire game. Uh, so this is pretty important. He's getting together a group of, uh, basically all the big podcasters out there. Um, we're in everybody else. Um, and they're raising money to, uh, to fight these guys off and say, you know, screw you.

Yep. And, and invalidate the patent. Yeah, exactly. That's the big point is to just invalidate the damn thing. And it's ridiculous. The only people that win here, the goddamn lawyers. As per usual. Yeah. And if you want to Adam Carolla on his podcast recently, um, one of the episodes that they just put up was a, his keynote presentation over at South by Southwest, uh, where he talks quite a lot about it.

And he talks about fund anything, uh, with the founder of Bill Zanker about crowdfunding, which that part turned me off quite a bit because obviously he's going to promote it. And Bill Zanker kind of sounded like a bit of a jerk. Um, but he does talk a little bit about the patent troll stuff, which is really interesting. So I think it's worth a listen.

Yeah. Yeah. You can fast forward most of it. As soon as he finishes talking about the patent trolls, you can turn it off. Yeah. Because the crowdfunding stuff sucked. Yeah, pretty much it did. Um, and, uh, fortunately for, uh, validation for us, because we, we, uh, we are ahead of our time sometimes, uh, Ogilvy Mather, the, you know, brand people have put out a report basically saying that, uh, organic reach for content published on Facebook for brands is reaching zero penetration.

Yeah. Which means that anything that you post on Facebook, you have to pay to get in front of people. Yeah. So when that happens, why would you put anything on Facebook when you can put it on your own website and organically get people through search engines or pay search engine advertising like you, you know, like you can also do and, and, and, and cut Facebook out of the equation whatsoever.

Why would you not, why would, I don't see how Facebook cannot see that this is the end game. You know, Facebook is completely shooting themselves in the foot here. The only thing is, is nobody's paying attention. Brands are paying attention. They're finally starting to, because all these reports are finally coming out and people like you and I are screaming about how useless this is.

And we're the people that, that brands are paying us to put them up there. And, you know, I, I don't readily turn away money, but I'm also not going to spend your money in a useless sense. And I'm telling you, do not bother with Facebook be there, but do not focus on it. Yeah, not at all. Just have, you know, put your sign up and go away.

Do not turn it into a home. Do not, you know, do not spend any money on games or crap like that because you're not going to get the return on like you used to. And since we're on the front lines of that, cause the people, we're the in-between point when, when a brand needs to get on Facebook, they come to people like us. And then we are the ones that say, you know, okay, we can do this, we can do that, but you shouldn't do this.

So I'm hoping more devs and, uh, you know, service people like us in, in, in that business, try and point brands to going back to the way things were on the web, where everything worked. I mean, I, I'm not trying to sound curmudgeonly and old fashioned, but it, you know, it's, it's the best for the brand to have their own space.

Yeah, that's not, I mean, that's just the reality of it. You know, we tinkered around with all these free services and, and you know, that we didn't have to hire anyone for, and you could let interns run your Twitter and Facebook. You don't own your stuff. You can't control your content. You can't control the way it's displayed. And basically they're just fucking with you about how you reach people.

So have your own thing. Yep, absolutely. And hire us to do it. I am Jason. Amen. I am Jason at grumpy old geeks.com. If you'd like me to build something custom and fresh for you, Brian's going to be busy with contractors and his fancy new, uh, pad, but only for another week or two at one, but hope, and I'm still working in the meantime, but after that, feel free to hire me as well.

All right, man. I got to run. Yeah. Go, go deal with your house. Hopefully sometime I can see you before I have to leave, but, uh, hopefully. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm hoping to be done in the next week or so, but I will be in touch and we got another show to do next week too. So I talk to you later. Keep up with the grumpy old geeks on the web at grumpy old geeks.com on Facebook and facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks or email them at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com.

Have a good week. Okay. Last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida. This January, bare knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural bruise cruise sales from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian jewel.

Three straight days with pool deck, bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean, massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and nonstop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then, explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.