509: Johnny Moronic

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, I was doing something this morning and I did something. Well, usually people do. Sometimes when you're doing something, it never comes to the did part. So, I've set us up a new way that people can donate to the show.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, Stripe has come out with a new easy way to make little payment pages. So, I mean, they've been easy before, but this made it super duper easy. I was about to say, it hasn't been terribly difficult for people to give us money so far. I mean, other than the motivational aspect of it.

Yeah, yeah, but also we do get complaints. I don't like PayPal. I don't like Patreon. Oh, everybody's taking too much. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, now we've made it super easy. You can come straight to the source. So, you can set up for one-time donations or recurring donations if you are so inclined. That'll be over at GOG.show slash donate.

And it goes straight through the credit card processor. No secondary middlemen taking that pound of flesh from us like we talked about on the last episode. The rise of the middleman. Okay. Well, I've heard many good things about Stripe. So, I'm looking forward to trying it firsthand.

I've used them for years. They are – I mean, you remember the old days with setting up payment processors, Brian? Oh, yes. Oh, my God. Yeah. No, this is – it's a brave new world. Yeah. I mean, back in the day, oh, my God. I mean, just the technical side of it, all the different plug-ins that you had to do and all the hooks and all that sort of stuff.

And then the other side of it where you basically had to put down your firstborn child to the bank to get them to let you take credit cards. And, oh, yes. What a nightmare. Oh, yeah. And just making sure that your server was compliant. Oh. Yep. That was fun. That was so much fun. I'm so glad those days are over.

You kids have it so easy these days. You fucking do. You really do. Anyways, a couple of people have sent this story to us and we talked about it when it first got announced and how ridiculous it was. But Amazon is rolling out their – I can't remember what they call it.

Sidewalk. Sidewalk. Amazon Sidewalk, which is the – we are going to go ahead and take that bandwidth that you pay for and give it to your neighbors for free. Ah, socialism. Yes. Socialism of a sort. And, you know, in and of itself, it's not, you know, a terribly horrible thing if you really wanted to do it.

There are some security issues, obviously, but, you know, a little bit of internet socialism, I suppose. The problem that I have with this, as is the problem that we have with almost all services, is that it is opt-out, not opt-in. Exactly. Yeah.

So that is coming in, I believe, nine days. So now is your chance. Just – this is your friendly reminder. Go into your settings. They've made it at least somewhat easy. I mean, as easy as anything can be with the Alexa app, which is a cluster F of epic proportions.

But open up your Alexa app, go to more and settings and then account settings and then select Amazon sidewalk and turn that bastard off. Now, you would think that there would be a very easy way to do this by saying, hey, lady in the tube, turn off sidewalk. But nope.

Well, that would make sense. Yeah. I mean, it is a voice-controlled device. You'd think that you could get to some of the settings using your voice. But no. Nope. Nope. Nope. So when this came in, I went and looked at my Ring app because I don't need to have the Alexa app on my phone because I just have the Ring cameras.

And there's nothing in there. And my hardware is really old, so I'm pretty sure I'm safe. But – and I still haven't gotten rid of it completely yet. But I did set a much more aggressive Eero time policy when the cameras are on and actually connected to the internet. Basically, if I'm gone or asleep, then they turn on.

Those are the two options. Right. Okay. Well, there's that. We just talked about an easy way for all of you to give us money. One of the ways that we weren't going to do it was using Apple's paid podcast subscription service. But we couldn't do that anyways because they've went, oh, not ready yet.

So not coming out this month. They've pushed that to at least June. Well, I guess it is June now. Today is June 1st. It is June 1st. Come on, Apple. Get on it. Or don't because nobody cares. They're like, oh, you know, hundreds of people have already signed up for this. I'm like out of the millions of podcasts out there, hundreds have rushed to the gate to give you their $20 and give you that 30%.

Well, to be fair, of the millions of podcasts on Apple services, 100 are active. That's true. That's true. And we are one of them. Maybe they do actually have a good hit rate then. There's an awful lot of three episodes of podcasts out there that stopped about six years ago. Oh, yeah, definitely.

And back in the news again, we talked about this last week, Twitter is back with verification for their accounts. Yeah. And what did we predict was going to happen, Jason? Exactly this. They have shut down after just one week because they got too many. Yep. I do believe we have a global AI shortage.

Oh, I mean sweatshops in the Philippines for people to actually go through and do this because everybody is vying for, you know, that AI time. You know how in the old days you'd have to, like, book time on the Unix machine? Now you have to book time with the AI sweatshops in the Philippines, and Facebook is taking up probably most of the time.

And so now Twitter tried to get in on it, and they realized, oh, man, we don't have enough Filipinos out there to do our verification. Guess we're going to have to slow down. I mean, okay. Again, like, going back to why we're not successful 101, Jason, when we would do these sorts – when we were about to roll out a feature that we knew would be labor-intensive, what do you do?

You staff up for it. What do you do these days? Fuck all. Exactly. You know? Oh, no, it's only the most requested feature on our service that we've had off for well over a year. And we've only wildly publicized it everywhere that it's coming back.

Yeah. Oh, okay. Of course this is going to happen. Of course. It's the first thing that came to my mind when they announced it. I'm like, it's going to last about three days. Well, they beat you by four. Well, that's true. Fucking Twitter. In the news.

Well, you know, we could do a whole NFT headline segment again, but why bother? I think we have reached peak NFT with this one. Ralph sent us this article. He says, hi, Grumps. This article describes what could be the ultimate NFT property encompassing this absurdity of the concept.

Can't wait to get started on creating my next invisible masterpiece. I can use the cash. And this is the world's first invisible sculpture. Sells for a whopping $18,000. And this is by an Italian artist, Salvatore Garou. Garou? Garou.

Garou. Who cares? Who cares? He didn't do anything and he sold it. Yeah. Now. So good on him. No. You should know that this invisible work of art represents a void, a technically empty space that is actually occupied by the energy of the sculpture. Now, here we go.

I want to point something out here. Here's one of his quotes. The successful outcome of the auction testifies to an irrefutable fact. The void is nothing but a space full of energy. And even if we empty it and nothing remains, according to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, that nothingness has a weight.

I looked up, Salvatore Garou. I know where that void is. It's in between the ears of the person that bought this. Physics is not listed on his fucking resume. And yeah, go look up Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and you will know that it has nothing to do with what you're saying.

Look, look, look, okay. So here's the thing. Now, I get it. I, I, I, you, you remember very well. I dated, I dated somebody for a very long time that was in the art world. And I had to go to many, many, many, many, many art shows with her.

I know. And all I would do was go around and read the blurbs about the pieces of art. And they were always bullshit just like this. Of course. Complete and utter bullshit. So I will give it to him. I do believe that this guy is a real artist trying to sell his bullshit.

And he did it. But the, just the NFT aspect is, oh God. See, the thing is, I didn't see NFT in the actual article, but yeah, I didn't see NFT anywhere in that article. I think he actually just sold the void. Same thing, right?

True, true. We'll get to that in a little bit. He did start off, Salvatore did start off his career as a drummer. That's right. In a band called Stormy Six. It all falls into place. Exactly. I thought you might like that. And I just love, for something so intangible and ephemeral, it does actually have a physical smell of bullshit.

So. Yes, yes it does. Go on, Salvatore. I saw this one over at the BBC. Buying a pink NFT cat was a crypto nightmare. And she goes through the entire process of trying to buy an NFT and how stupid it is and how much money you actually have to pay on top of it.

But this is the best part of it. This guy, David Garrard, he wrote a book called The 50-Foot Blockchain, or Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain, sorry. And I just love this. NFTs are a new form of magic beans that crypto fanatics can sell for money. But all you're buying is a receipt.

The market is completely fake. I love the fact that he nailed it with all you're buying is a receipt. That's it. That's all you're getting. And it's not even a good, useful one like the CVS ones. I know. You can actually use those as teepee. Yep. And Matthew sent us a link of finally putting machine learning to some good use.

This is from MIT. And, of course, it does talk about machine learning. But you had to have it. You got to know what's coming in the headline. Artificial intelligence systems could help counter the spread of disinformation. I know. I know. I'm still beating that drum.

I have to realize that journalists have just decided that machine learning and artificial intelligence are interchangeable, often in the same article. And that's just the way it is. But this is something they built at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. They call it the Rio Program.

And it automatically detects and analyzes social media accounts that spread disinformation across a network. All of them. All of them, yes. Well, the goal is to kind of narrow it down to find, you know, as we've known and has been widely reported, it's basically a handful of accounts that basically cause all these problems.

What they're trying to do is – bots, Russia, and grandma. What they're trying to do is go through and find and analyze quickly and be able to find these accounts so, you know, they can give this information to Twitter, which will then do nothing. There's nothing with it. No, but Twitter may start labeling your tweets based on how wrong you are, comes a new article from Gizmodo.

Right. So far, there are three levels of misinformation warning labels. Get the latest, stay informed, and misleading. So I don't know where they're going to get the cycles to do this on top of – unless they did hook into Rio. Who knows?

Well, you know, they pulled everybody off the verification program for this, obviously. Ah, yes. Soon there's not going to be anything left on social media. I'm not sure anybody actually works at Twitter anymore. I don't think anybody's there. I just think the thing is running by itself.

It's like God and the workbench. Jack walked away, and that's that. It's literally just a PR guy writing tweets and stories. That's it. Nothing has changed. We didn't even put in the fact that they have a new subscription thing coming up called Twitter Blue, which lets you undo a tweet and change the color of your page, which I thought you could already change the color of your page when you go down to profiles.

When do I get to add twinkly stars? I don't know. Oh, actually, I saw one of the funniest things I actually saw on Twitter was like some kid had posted – Yes, I know what you're going to say. Boy, I wish – if only you could put the song that you were currently listening to on your Twitter page so people would know about it, and somebody was like, wow, we've finally reached the generation that doesn't even remember MySpace.

Exactly. I thought that was great. Oh, I think it was great, and I felt so old. Ah, well. Way it goes, man. Anyways, another fun thing happened on Twitter. There is a company called Lemonade, which is a fast-growing machine-learning-powered insurance app.

And, you know, we can all sit and say, wow, what a horrible idea, but it is the way everything's going, sadly. Of course they're going to start to use AI, and they put out a demonstration of how their AI analyzes videos of customers when determining if their claims are fraudulent.

Needless to say, it did not go well. No shit. Really? Yes. So, all of a sudden, people that were using Lemonade to get basically cheaper insurance found out that Lemonade is collecting more than 16,000 data points about its users, 100 times more data than traditional insurance carriers.

And then, all of a sudden, they realized, do we want this to be happening? No. No. No, we do not. And do we want an AI to analyze our video saying, look at my car, it got hit? Oh, wait. Are there problems with AI? Like institutional racism? I think there might be, Jason.

There might be. There might be. Is this a good idea? I don't think so. But I do like it's called AI Jim. I know. And there's the whole story in there about how they're going to charge Jews more because they have more candles at Hanukkah, which represents a greater fire risk, so they have to be charged more money.

I mean, you can't make that shit up. Come on. No, you really can't make this shit up. It's pretty great. It's a great story and well worth a read, so check that out. Here's the fun part. Yeah, the funny part about this is, now, this is like a sausage maker tweeting pictures of the abattoir where they're killing the cows.

Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made. We know. We know how this is working. We just don't want to really know how it's working. Yeah, yeah. And I did an interview – well, I produced an interview with another – like a real insurance behind-the-scenes data guy, and they've been using voice analysis and voice stress analysis for a long time to figure out if you're lying or not.

So this is nothing new. They're just smart enough because they've been around the block a few times to never tell anybody, at least not the public. I mean, I suppose we should laud them for transparency, I guess. I don't know. I think they get a ding for dumb fuckery.

Yeah. Now, speaking of dings for dumb fuckery, WhatsApp has walked back their privacy policy. So we were talking about this. Now that Facebook owned it, everybody was worried what was going to happen, and one of the things that happened was, here's our new privacy policy, and if you don't accept it, we're going to basically start – first, we're going to lock down your account.

And if you still don't accept it after X amount of time, you're not going to be able to use your account at all, and then you're going to get kicked off the system, all because you don't want to click on something. That says – that you're not going to read anyways, that you've clicked on a thousand times on a thousand different websites, but whatever. Click this privacy policy or we kill this puppy.

Exactly. Now they went, oh, okay. Maybe we're not going to do that because people started to leave the app in droves. Well – So rather than have a ghost town, they went, oh, okay, never mind, never mind. And, of course, they said there's confusion and misinformation around the updated policy. No, there's fucking not.

No, there's fucking not at all. The only confusion and misinformation that was going on was in WhatsApp itself, not the rest of us. We all knew. That's why people left. Yeah, you're trying to hold them hostage, and they're like, well, no. See ya. Later. And another case of dumb fuckery being rolled back, Venmo is now letting users hide their friends list following the Joe Biden discovery.

Right. So somebody at Venmo finally went, huh, maybe financial stuff shouldn't be social. No. At least let's give people the option to start to hide things better. No, no, no. That's not the conclusion they came to. The conclusion was, oh, shit, we got caught, and now it's a big thing, and now we have to roll it back.

We have to give it to them. If this Biden thing had never come out, it never would have been an issue for them. They would have just kept on doing what they're doing. This is just they got their hand caught in the cookie jar in a very bad and public way. So they have to do this. By the way, all they added was a toggle buried in the privacy settings, buried under the settings that basically just sets friends list visibility to zero.

Right next to the sidewalk app. You can turn it off. Yes, and, of course, it's not going to switch on automatically. You have to go in and turn it on to let people see that sort of stuff. Of course. So while everybody else has been zigging due to user outcry, Google, well, they decided to zag.

Google has decided to make it even harder to find Android privacy settings. This has come out because of the Arizona antitrust lawsuit over phone tracking, but Business Insider is reporting that freshly unredacted documents in the case suggests Google made Android privacy settings harder to find.

When they tested OS releases that surfaced privacy features, the company reportedly saw greater use of those features. Go figure. And decided that's a problem. And aimed to put them deeper into the menu system. They also successfully pressured phone brands like LG to bury location settings as they were popular, according to Arizona's attorneys.

Popular to who? So, yes, if you give people privacy settings that are easy to find, they will turn them on, and that is bad for these companies, so they're going to hide them again. Yep. Yep. The return of the dark design pattern. Great. It's been a while. I love this one.

Watch Elon Musk's Boring Company test its Tesla tunnel system in Las Vegas with members of the public. We are all beta testers now, Brian. Period. Well, if you're going to do it in any city in the world, get them good and drunk in Vegas. Exactly. Hey, the buffet is on the other side of the tunnel.

Just get in the car. What, went into the tunnel in Vegas? Stayed in the tunnel in Vegas. I was watching the video on this and a little cramped for my taste. Yeah, my claustrophobia kicked in, and then there was one video where they got up to 116 miles an hour in a Tesla in this tunnel with a real driver with about, I don't know, like maybe less than a foot to spare on either side before you hit the wall.

If that thing would have hit the wall, it would have flipped, it would have corkscrewed basically, and then probably exploded. Well, on the plus side, he's created the only place on the planet where I would actually trust autonomous driving. There's nothing to hit. There's no stop signs.

You just go straight. Here's the fucked up part. They weren't using autonomous driving during the test. They had real drivers. I'm with you. This is the one time I'm like, perfect, perfect fucking use case. This is what you want. It's got lines on the road.

There's no pedestrians. Now, if the guy in front of you was a dick and like opened the sunroof and held up a stop sign, that would have been awesome. Now, if only there was some sort of technology that's been in use for hundreds of years that goes into a tunnel that moves people.

I know. That wasn't a car that actually held a lot of people instead of, oh, say four. Hmm. What could that be? I don't know. Huh. We'll have to think about that. Maybe some of our users remember that technology from back in the day. I know not of which you speak.

I don't either. I can't imagine what we could possibly do with such technology. Hmm. Interesting. I'm sure somebody will figure it out someday. Speaking of Tesla and their leave from California to Texas because they don't want to pay taxes now that they've reaped the benefits of all of California's, you know, everything that he got here to get his company started, including all the engineers that came from California universities that we paid taxes for.

Fuck you, Elon. He took off and left for Texas because, you know, no taxes, but a bit of a snag. Bit of a snag. All right. Unfortunately, in Texas, there are some rules about how you can sell cars and where they come from. And apparently now he has to actually ship his cars out of Texas and then bring them back into Texas to be able to sell them to Texans.

Oh, come on. And of course he's saying, of course, Elon is basically saying, we sure would appreciate you changing that law for us. Of course, of course. I mean, my first reaction to this was, wait, there are rules in Texas? I thought.

It's just the one. The one. Yeah, the one he didn't actually check. It's like, oh. Oh, man, I moved here and I can't even sell my cars here. Whoops. Now, let's be honest. How many Texans actually want to buy a Tesla? Well, they get the mod that lets them put gas in it.

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Media Candy. Brian, when I went to San Diego, I watched a new movie on Netflix called Army of the Dead. Zombies.

You know, zombies. Haven't there been movies called Army of the Dead before? I feel like when I saw you post this in there, I was like, oh, you went back and rewatched some old series. You got Army of Darkness and you've got Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead. I think Army of the Dead is a new one by Zack Snyder, who likes to make really weird DC long cut movies.

2 p.m. Coffee, Crash of the Dead. Yeah. And he did one of the Of the Dead movies before. So, you know, we'd had a few cocktails at that point. We popped it on. And it's a zombie movie. It's a fucking zombie movie. I did love reading Sean Bonner's, like, just, like, 18-page diatribe against this movie.

And I just wanted to say, it's a fucking zombie movie. Who cares? You know what? He would have liked it if it would have came out as an NFT. Probably. Sorry, Sean. I can't help it. I know. Yeah. It was not a very good zombie movie.

I will give it that. Okay. Not a lot of character development. Not a lot of plot. Too many mulligans. Or, uh, MacGuffins. Not mulligans. MacGuffins. He needs to take a mulligan on this one and redo it. But there are usually a lot of character development with zombies. Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes you get some good ones.

Shaun of the Dead, for, you know, for example. Best zombie movie ever made, in my humble opinion. Yes, I agree. But, yeah, I mean, this is a three-star, just-get-fucked-up-and-watch-it-and-enjoy-the-ride type of movie. This is not something that you want to sit there and dissect like it's a fucking Oscar nominee.

Okay? Okay. I'm halfway through Crime of the Century. Wow. Yeah. There's some bad people out there. Everywhere. Newsflash. Yeah. Very angry at the end of this. Me and my roommate both were very, after the end of the first part, because it's like two hours per part.

It's long. It's another Alex Gibney documentary. So, you know. Yep. Take that. You know what you're getting into. Take that with what you will, because, you know, documentaries always have a point of view. But this one's pretty cut and dry, I gotta say. We know what the outcome is on some of this stuff.

But, man, the politicians that aided and abetted these guys should all be—actually, everybody in this documentary that was part of the opioid crisis should be taken out back, lined up against a wall, and shot. I mean, 100%. They should be capital punishment for these assholes, for the sheer magnitude of people they killed.

It's ridiculous. Okay. If you want to get really angry and learn a lot about how the pharma companies work, by all means, if you want a happy movie, I got nothing for you, because Army of the Dead wasn't a very happy movie either. All right.

Well, I saw something by accident. I was on the couch reading, and my wife, who was a huge Friends fan, watched the Friends reunion, which has been all over the news, because I don't know. People like it, apparently. People really like Friends. Yeah, they're old, made me feel old, and I watched more Friends than I've ever seen before in my life by just glancing up every now and then.

I've never seen a full episode of Friends, period. I think I've probably seen one full episode at one point 20 years ago. Yeah, I've never seen—I've never made it more than three minutes in. Between that and—and people are going to probably yell at me for this one, too—Seinfeld. I've never seen a full episode of Seinfeld. I never loved Seinfeld the way most people do.

I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it. Yeah, so, you know, it seemed fine. My wife seemed happy with it. There's, you know, obviously—it's very rose-colored glasses look back. There's not going to be anything controversial. And if you were liked Friends, you'll probably like this.

Yeah, that's all I got. The other thing I picked— Damning with no praise. Damning with no praise, yes. The other thing that I picked up courtesy of my wife this week is she was in the back office area working, and I heard some semi-familiar strains. And I was like, huh, that sounds so familiar but different.

Apparently, Moby released a new album. It's called Reprise, and he has gone back and reworked many of his songs from over the years. Now, I am a big Moby fan, so I was like, oh, okay, well, I'll give this a listen. Why not? You know, Play was just a stunning album.

I know everybody's heard it so often, even if they don't like Moby, because it was in every commercial and every movie for about 10 years. But that does not take away from how brilliant that album actually was. I mean, it changed everything, and that's why it was everywhere for 10 years. So I went and listened to Moby Reprise, and if you wanted to take every single really good Moby song and rewrite it so it sounds like you're in a spa and about to fall asleep and get a nice massage, this is the album for you.

All right. Otherwise, go back and just listen to the original albums. Okay. Much better. And if you want Ambient Moby, may I recommend Moby's album called Ambient that came out in 1993, which basically lived in my clock radio CD player, because I'm old, back in college, and was my go-to just-play-it-all-night-long album, and it's wonderful.

Ambient says what it is on the tin. It does exactly what it said on the CD, whatever that is, kids. And speaking of stuff that we listen to, our Discord channel had a big link that everybody was getting into, and it's how well can you hear audio quality, and it's on NPR's website, and you can go give that a listen.

I tried it out, and I thought my ears would be dead at this point because old and because concerts and all that sort of stuff. And if I used my AirPods, I could not tell the difference, but when I put on my fancy Sennheiser headphones, I could hear the difference from four out of five. So not so bad.

Yeah, interesting. Okay. I haven't given it a shot yet because I haven't been in a place where I can listen without dogs barking or TVs blaring. So I definitely want to give it a shot because I know my ears have gotten better since I started podcasting, but, you know, way too many punk rock shows as a kid with no earplugs, and the fact that we're old now, so you lose all those high frequencies.

Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. I'll try it. Ups and doodads. Well, I'm trying to get everything settled here before I actually do my final move to Toronto, and one of the things that I'm doing is basically taking care of my mom and setting up all her technology.

So hopefully it'll stay together with duct tape and all that until I can visit for Christmases and all other types of things. And one of the things I needed to do was get her a new tablet because she had a very old Android tablet that she would use to read and whatever around the house. So I did some research, and I looked at, like, the big Samsung ones that are out, and they're as expensive, if not more expensive, than iPads at this point.

But one that isn't is the all-new Amazon Fire HD 10-inch tablet, 10.1-inch, 1080p, full HD, 32-gigabyte, latest model 2021 release, black without lock screen ads, because why would I force my mom to watch more ads? $184.66, including tax.

It's a solid piece. It does everything that my mom would need it to do. It's great, and it's like, you know, a quarter of the price of an iPad Air. Well, yeah, an iPad Air. If you just got the regular iPad 10.2-inch iPad Wi-Fi, 32-gigabyte space gray, that would be $364.26.

Okay, so it's half the price of that. Yeah, a little less than half. I know this because I've had my 9.7-inch iPad Pro around forever, and I remembered long ago that I'd offered it to a friend of the show, Fogarty, and I took it down to San Diego, and I gave it to him with all the cases, which cost 10 times as much as the iPad itself did, and the old Apple One Pencil.

Then when I came home, I realized, oh, shit, that's the iPad I use on my teleprompter when I want to read things on the screen. Whoops. Yeah, so I ordered an iPad 10.2-inch iPad Wi-Fi, 32-gig space gray for $364.26, including tax.

Should be here in about a week. Look, I would never use a Fire. I'm addicted to my iPad, but my mom is not in the Apple ecosystem at all, and it does everything that she wants to do easily because she reads on Kindle. She listens to audiobooks.

She'll be able to watch shows from Amazon. It is perfect for her. And if you're not in the Apple ecosystem, it is a solid, good tablet, and it's cheap. It's funny. I had a bunch of the Fire tablets. I had like a 7 and an 8, and I ended up giving them all away to people when they came over.

Like I gave one to my friend Jason Sanderson. He was flying back to Europe, and he's like, I got nothing to do for the whole flight. And I'm like, here, have a tablet. Take this. Have a tablet. The sad thing is I don't think he could get it all connected and download anything before it went. So he had a tablet that I think he could probably play Solitaire on for 10 hours or 12 hours.

But, yeah, I mean, they feel cheap most of the time. I mean, it's like the plasticky thing. It doesn't have the heft of an iPad, but they work. They actually do work. So for, you know, $184 for a 10-inch tablet, not bad. Yeah, not bad at all, man.

I recommend it. Also, something else is out and being reviewed now, the Apple TV 4K review 2021. This annoys me because I just bought an Apple TV 4K 2020, and it does not have the new remote. Why did you buy a new Apple TV?

Well, I didn't just buy it. I bought it a couple months ago for Toronto because we needed something over there. Okay, pro tip, man. Get a Roku and then just launch the Apple TV app. That's the best way to do it. I should have done that, but I didn't. Anyways, the review is basically like, this is great, and they finally fixed the remote.

And apparently I can just go get the new remote for $60 now. Thanks, Apple. Yeah, or you could just use the Apple remote app on your phone for free. Yes. Which is what I do because I still have an Apple TV. It's the one right before they came out with the 4K with the remote from hell.

Yeah. But now that I've got the Apple TV app on my Roku, it's literally collecting dust. It does nothing that the app doesn't do. So thank God for that. I got the Zoom PodTrack P8 podcast recorder. Woo!

You don't have enough things to record podcasts at the moment? Well, I'm doing that show on Adorama. Right. And in doing that, there's a bunch of stuff that I want to test. They're sending me a bunch of stuff, but this one I wanted to have for me because I want to test this. And I'm going to test it on this week's show. So if you go to twitch.tv slash Adorama XP on Wednesday at 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern, I'm going to do kind of a side-by-side of the PodTrack P8 and the RODECaster Pro.

Because there are definitely some differences there, but the PodTrack P8 is $499 and the RODECaster Pro is $599, which is – I mean, it's a small difference, but you get six inputs on the PodTrack P8. But here's the one thing that I totally forgot, which is why I didn't buy it in the first place.

It only records at 44, 116-bit. Okay. So you can't get any high-quality stuff. I also got the Bluetooth adapter for the Zoom, but I'll go into more detail on the show because there's a lot of other reasons. I wanted to get something like this. But, yeah, so far I got it last night.

Here's the thing, man. Holiday. Going in the morning on Amazon. Would you like it today? Sure. How much extra? Nothing. Free. Okay. I'll take it. And that is why Amazon is taking over the world. Yes, that's why Amazon is in the middle of so many antitrust lawsuits right now, too.

Hey, what are you going to do? Have you ever heard of an app called Drafts? No. I've heard about it for years from the Markdown community because they love it. They love it. And I'm like, okay, I had it forever. And then I'm like, okay, just over the weekend, I'm like, let me give this a shot again.

I opened it up, looked at some tutorials. It ended up buying the Pro Edition for like $25 a year because it syncs with all your devices then and all that stuff. It does one thing. It actually does a ton of things, but it does one thing really, really well.

What's that? I press the button and it gives me a new text document with focus, like set to start typing. That's it. One button, one click. Shouldn't every editor do that? No. On the iPhone, you've got to like start a new note.

Like if you use the Notes app, you've got to do all this stuff. You press the button, boom, start typing or press the microphone and dictate into it. And it saves it, puts it out everywhere, and you can hit it up later. That alone, because I'm always coming up with ideas. I'm like, ah, I don't want to get the notes and do all that.

This one, I literally just press one button, go, done. And then you can do all sorts of stuff with it. It's all scriptable and stuff like that. So it's really cool for just capturing. You know, it's a starting point for text documents. So I really am digging it so far.

I don't think you would really have that much of a use for it. No, I don't think so. I'm perfectly happy with notes. Yeah. Yeah. I just, when I'm out on the road and walking or doing something and something comes to me and I just want to get it then because I'm old and have had too much booze over my life and I know that it's going to be gone if I don't get it in 30 seconds or less.

It's perfect for that. And I tried a new, one of them new food delivery there services. And this has an app, so I figured it'd be fine here in apps and doodads. It's called Cook Unity, a Chef Collective. All right. Socialist. Looks healthy.

I ordered six meals to try it out. Got a, you know, $25 discount or something for the first round. And we had our first meals yesterday. I had some fettuccine with shiitake mushrooms and a nice sausage, asparagus.

Are these prepared in heat or are these? Prepared in heat. Prepared in heat. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. So I figured they're going to be a little more and that's fine. I was looking for prepare in heat. I've got enough stuff that I cook all the time. I wanted something for lunch every day that I can just pop in and go that was tasty and delicious and healthy.

Well, let's talk about healthy. In my household, we don't use salt, period. Me too. So imagine my surprise when I actually dive into the nutrition facts on these. Salt, salt, salt, salt, salt.

Oh. Well, that's how you make these things tasty, Jason. The breakfast burrito, well, the carbs too. The breakfast burrito, vegetarian breakfast burrito, 98 grams of carbs. Just that right there should make you go, I think I'll pass on that one.

Take a shot at how much sodium is in the vegetarian breakfast burrito. Half. Well, give me a milligram count. I don't know, man. 4,000. Holy crap. Over 4,000 milligrams of salt.

Everything else is about 1,800 to 1,200. I bring up those numbers because there's a funny thing you can do when you're setting up your account. You can have different warnings on different types of meals, and it will warn you when something is out of bounds, if it has nuts or if it has milk or things like that.

And there's a sodium warning if anything has over 120 milligrams of salt. There are no recipes that you can buy from CookUnity that have less than 120 milligrams of salt. That's a shit ton of salt. That is like my household is the same as yours.

We never add salt to things we usually use way less salt than recipes call for. It's just we don't do it. The other thing health-wise is I'm just scanning through these. These are not low-calorie. These are pretty high-calorie meals. Yeah, they're not low-calorie. They're certainly not low-carb.

Everything's close to 100 grams of carbs, and we're just like, holy shit. So yeah, that was a failed experiment. So if you want to – I mean, the food was good. The one that Shea had was really good. It was some Japanese noodle type of thing.

She did have to actually pour out half of the sauce and dilute it so it was edible because it was so salty. When you don't eat salt, you know what it's like. When you don't eat salt, just a little bit is just like, whoa, Jiminy. It hits you like a ton of bricks. Yeah, and mine did not taste salty at all, but I checked, and it had 800 milligrams of salt.

I'm like, no, thank you. Okay. Well, I'll be passing on Cook Unity then. Yeah, yeah. So you will not be – if for some strange reason you hear an ad in one of our auto-generated ads, let me know so I can make sure that we get rid of them because, man, yeah, cannot recommend them with a good conscience.

And finally, I just saw this, and it just – it couldn't go any other way. If you heard that Japan was going to send some sort of robot to the moon, of course it's going to be a transforming robot, right? I was thinking an AIBO. I was thinking, shoot an AIBO to the moon.

Well, it's pretty close. So they are sending a ball-shaped transforming robot to study the lunar soil. Pretty cool, but of course it had to be a transformer. Of course. I can't wait to see it. I can't wait to see it. This thing looks so cool. I hope it works. Please don't fail.

At the library. Well, I finished the Murderbot Diaries book five about a week or so ago. I talked about it last week, and I figured might as well just roll into book six. Now, book five was the very long one. Book six is very short, so this one's called Fugitive Telemetry, and I read it in like probably two days because it's pretty quick.

I seem to remember enjoying it, but I swear to God not a single detail is stuck in my mind. Okay. That's not a good thing. No, it's not a great thing. I remember book five a lot better than I remember book six, and I just finished book six. That was the problem I was having with book three because I kept trying to read it, and I couldn't – I'm like – I read this like three times already, and I can't remember any of this.

But, oh, well, hit or miss. Hit or miss on the Murderbots, but I still like them. I still like them. It's a good series. Yeah. I've been reading Code Girls, the untold story of the American women codebreakers of World War II by Lisa Mundy. Okay. Great book. Holy shit, what a great book.

I had no – I mean I knew that women were pretty integral in the codebreaking efforts for World War II, but I had no idea how integral they were. They basically saved our bacon. I mean they're – and they're really good at it. Really good. And why is this not a movie yet? You know it's got to be coming.

You know it's got to be coming. Yeah, it's got to be. And I will very much enjoy watching it. Yeah. It's a long book, but, man, it's really good. It is really – if you're into that kind of thing, which I certainly am, it's – I mean I can't recommend it enough. Cool. Moron of the Week.

Elon is back as Moron of the Week. I know we had a – we had him on hiatus for a while. I mean he's no Kanye, but he's getting to Kanye status. Well, I was going to put the whole Texas story in Moron of the Week, but I figured, you know. Yeah. I didn't see that you had put this in. We could have had a doubleheader.

We could have had a doubleheader. Neuralink Brainship will end language in five to ten years, Elon Musk says, and will help self-driving cars. How long, Elon? Let's all agree that Elon sucks at predictions. Somebody has got to, like, once he's toked up, get the microphones away from this dude.

Yeah. He was hanging out with Rogan again. Of course. Of course. Nothing good hangs out. It comes from that, you know. But he's saying, yeah, we're on track. I'm like, you have a monkey playing Pong. That's what you've got. And you think that we are going to transcend human language in five to ten years.

By the way, if this chip actually does end language, it won't be in the way you think, Elon. It'll be more like, you know, just sitting and fucking drooling in chairs. Exactly. Yeah. It isn't going to be because we've transcended language and are using our brains to solve the world's problems without language.

It's because all we're doing is feeding ourselves little chips that taste good and have too much salt. No, the first actual use case is can we order Amazon – can we navigate Amazon.com with our mind? Because then we never have to leave the house. We just think it and it shows up. It's like magic.

I have telepathy. Ooh. And I love it. Somebody on Twitter called him Johnny Moronic. That's good. Gold Star, give that guy a verification checkmark. I know. Oh, wait. That department's gone. It's closed.

Security? Ha! I need another countdown song to hum before the – Four, three, two, one. Earth below us. On the next episode of Grumpy Eagle, geeks, your top ten countdown songs.

I have to dig up three, two, one, contact then. Contact, it's the feeling, it's the answer. All I've got is endless Sesame Street counting songs because of my kid. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

That was the Pointer Sisters. Yeah, yeah. I mean there's amazing YouTube compilations that have been put together of different Sesame Street clips for different purposes. It's one of the few times I've enjoyed YouTube as a parent. Anyways, where were we?

Dave Bittner is back. Dave is the host of the Cyberware podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan. Co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy. And finally, he's the co-host of Recorded Future, where he takes you inside the world of cyber threat intelligence.

I often wonder what Jason gets up to in between the morning time segment where we record most of the show and then the afternoon segment when Dave comes in. And today I feel it was booger sugar. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.

He's dipping into the dog's meds today. Yeah, I think so. I tell you, man, I've been watching that Oxy documentary. It just kind of got me inspired. What can I say? Yeah. For people who are wondering what we were chatting about at the beginning, we have a countdown on our recording software.

And it has a mind of its own. And it starts at six. At six. Randomly. Uh-huh. Yeah. I don't know why. I have no idea why. Because five just wasn't enough, Jason. This one goes to six. They must have done A-B testing.

Yeah. Maybe that's, yeah. I don't, yeah. It makes no sense. No, it doesn't. They're foreigners. Maybe that's their nod to Spinal Tap. I don't know. But speaking of watching things, I have been keeping up with Star Wars The Bad Batch. It's fine.

It definitely feels, I'm not, I'll finish out the season. I don't know if I'm going to go much further than that, to be honest. It's, you know, the kid is cute and all of that. And callbacks, you know, you get the rancor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Is it better than Lower Decks? Anything's better than Lower Decks. That's what I wanted to know. Okay. Let's be honest. It's better. But what I stumbled across and started to watch that is, I believe you mentioned that you have been watching it with your kid, Dave. Star Wars Rebels is actually legit good.

Yeah. Yeah. I haven't watched Rebels in a while. We took a little side trip to watch the last season of Clone Wars before jumping back to Bad Batch. So thanks for the rancor spoiler there, Brian.

Appreciate it. No problem. I expect you to be up on these things, Dave. I know. No, no. I don't begrudge you at all. That is a safe assumption to make, actually, most of the time. Listen, it's not – there isn't much plot for anything to be particularly pivotal to with the Bad Batch, so I don't think I've really spoiled too much for you.

No. And one of the – I was talking with Young Jack about this, and we agree that one of the weaknesses in Bad Batch and also Clone Wars is that they're written kind of like illustrated radio, you know?

Yeah. Like, I'm going to walk over here and open this door and, you know, like – They're priming it to be a podcast. That's what it's going to be. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And Rebels does not feel that way so much. And Rebels also has a – like, I would not show this to my kid yet.

He is far too young. While it is still cartoony and there are some elements that are definitely in there for kids, that Inquisitor is effing dark. Just straight up. Yeah. Yeah. And Darth Vader is not nice. No.

No. And we were talking about the body count in Clone Wars as well. Yeah. You know, just like people get a lightsaber through the middle from behind over and over again and are beheaded or – although another thing we were talking about is how sometimes there's no pressure or tension because of where these things fit within the movies.

You know, like, well, he's going to live because he's got to show up for the next movie. Yeah. You know, so – I mean, I guess that's the plus with Rebels is that none of those characters ever – well, I guess you can see the ship in one of the newest movies and people freak out about that.

But, you know, yeah, you don't know. I think that was the great part about Rebel 1. It's just like – Rogue One. Huh? Rogue One. Rogue One. Yeah, you got me on the Rebel rant. Rogue One. I like that because I'm like, who the hell are these people?

Are they going to make it? Are they going to be side characters in the future? Oh, maybe not. Spoiler alert. Maybe not. In case you haven't seen it yet, they don't. Yeah. Well, and evidently Chopper, the droid, is in Rogue One also. He's – there's a little – there's a shot of him somewhere at the middle of the base.

Excellent. Yeah, but I burned through the whole first season of Rebels and actually legit enjoyed it much more than almost any other Star Wars property except for the Mandalorian that has come out recently. Yeah, it is good. I agree. And I'll – maybe I'll go revisit that one after because we're most of the way through, like I said, the final season of Clone Wars.

Then we're going to pick up with Bad Batch again and maybe we'll go back and go through Rebel. Although, by that time – well, when's – We should have a lot more new stuff. Yeah, I don't know. Not until next year, I think, for Mando. We're going to get the Book of Boba Fett, I think, Christmas-y.

Right, that's what I'm thinking of. Yes, yes. So, you know, that's something to look forward to, hopefully. Yeah, hopefully. It's intriguing anyway. So, we'll see. Question, Clone Wars, worth going back and watching the whole thing or no? Not really. Okay, perfect. Saved me some time.

Yeah. Savedyouabinge.com. Worth going to watch the last season of because I tried to start it. I probably got one season in and just kind of gave up. I heard it got better when it got re-picked up. Mm-hmm. Okay. It's not bad.

It's just – it's a fun show to watch. No, no. Let me put it to you this way. If I were watching it on my own, I would not make it through. Right. But because I'm watching it with my son, we're enjoying it together and it gives us things to talk about and that makes it worthwhile.

Yeah. That makes perfect sense. I think Bam Bam is going to really add to the conversation about the universe. Well, you know. Maybe you should watch Cruella with Bam Bam. Yeah. You got a little bonding movie there. Yeah. Well, Dino's the barker, so he may be the one to really jump in.

But Bam Bam does watch the TV. Whenever we're sitting in the bed, Dino will sleep. Define watch. Staring at the TV intently and barking at different passages. Her favorite is Shark Tank. When the Shark Tank theme comes on, she will get her spot and stare at the TV the entire time we watch Shark Tank.

She loves the music and then she will just intently stare at the TV while we're watching. She's like, oh, that's a bad deal. Don't – no, Mr. Wonderful's not. No, no. Don't go for a royalty deal. Royalty deals are stupid. Don't do it. I can just see it in her eyes. She knows. We had a dog.

Pup Treat's all in on this one. Yeah. The first dog we had after we got married, sort of our practice dog, we're going to get a dog and see how that goes and then we'll consider having children. If the dog survives, we can have a kid. Exactly. And that was how we did it.

And so we had this great dog. Her name was Emmy and she was a soft-coated Wheaton Terrier, which is a little Irish herding dog. They're sweet dogs, very smart. And she loved to watch the Westminster Dog Show. She would – she'd get up in front of the TV.

She'd put her paws up on the little stand that the TV was on and she'd just sit there and watch all the dogs go by. Nice. It was her favorite show. So every year when Westminster came on, she – I'm not going to say she's got popcorn, but it was pretty funny to watch a dog intently interested in this dog show.

Bam Bam, whenever there's a dog on TV, tries to eat the television. Fortunately, it's above the fireplace, but that's also scary because she could break her legs trying to jump at it. But yeah, no. She would – the Westminster Dog Show is like snacks. She's like, that's snack size.

At least I want to eat it. So we have a few stories here because it was a slow week. It was kind of a slow week. I'll just throw these out real quick. Why not? I mean, we got another 10 minutes to fill. What do you want?

Sure. The FBI is going to start sharing compromised passwords with have I been pwned, which I think is a good thing. Why not? Yeah, I think it is a good thing. From my point of view, this also speaks to what we've been seeing, which is a real concerted effort from both the FBI and from NSA to do a lot more public outreach.

They've been really deliberate about this and they're coming to us and asking to do appearances and interviews and that's the kind of thing that you never used to get from – especially from NSA. They never – they never – I particularly enjoyed the outreach I got from the NSA this week when they emailed me and said, you really shouldn't have anything with that many carbs as I was sitting down with my loaf of bread.

Thanks, guys. Yeah. But they're being much more collaborative with both media organizations and folks in private industry and I think this really points to that. I think it also points to the – to have I been pwned being the pinnacle of this sort of thing online that they recognize this is the alpha database for this sort of thing.

So why not be part of the thing that is the best? And it is that. Excellent. I, for one, endorse this. Yeah. No. Good for Troy Hunt. You know? He's really built something there, which is fantastic. Yeah. He is. He is.

And he's such a nice guy too. He's like – Troy's got it all. He's like – That sounds like one of those guys you look at – Wow. No, I mean you – Man crush. He's got – oh, totally. I mean he's a handsome guy. He's got a great looking wife.

He lives in a beautiful house in Australia. I wish I was him. He's just – that Troy Hunt is just dreamy, let me tell you. Because it started – your thing started out and I'm like, he was a nice boy and then he shot the president is how it kind of started in my head.

I'm just like, oh, no. No, no. I didn't know there was such a crush going on there. No, no. And the times that I've spoken to him, I've interviewed him a couple times and he's just delightful. You were all a flutter. I was. I was a little nervous. You know? I got to talk to Troy Hunt. He's not – I mean, you know, not only is he well-spoken and he's got that charming Australian accent, but he's easy on the eyes too.

I got to tell you the whole time we've been talking about this guy because I'm aware of the name, but I've never actually seen a photo of him. All I can see in my mind's eye is the Simpsons Troy McClure. He's not that, but he is a remarkably handsome man and I can't remember if he has kids or not.

But if he does, I'll bet they're damn good looking too. I bet they're damn good looking too. They are perfect kids. Yeah, he's got two perfect kids, perfect wife. They do their homework. They eat their broccoli. It is one – it's just bliss. I tell you, bliss. Yeah. I hate him already.

Oh, to be a fly in the hunt household. No, Troy's a good guy. So, anyway. Good for him. Good for him. Good for Troy. Troy, you be you. Love you, man. Okay. Well, this other one was just for shits and giggles.

U.S. soldiers accidentally leak nuclear secrets via study apps. So, apparently there are sites where you can go make your own quiz cards and they stay online and they were found by Bellingcat. What is the code to launch this nuke?

One, two, three, four, five, six. They could have listened to our show and we knew that. But, yeah, this is basically them saying – they're learning all the jargon that goes along with their job protecting the nuclear weapons across Europe. Oops. Oops.

Yeah, and there was some location information as well, like which vaults actually have the weapons in them or not. Which are hot, which are cold. Yeah, the whole nine yards. Yeah. Oops. That's just great. Yeah. Quizlet, check, prep, and cram are the ones that they used.

They didn't use fucked? Okay. Don't. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I put in here, just to sort of revisit this thing that we cannot get enough of, which is this whole thing with online privacy and how they're aggregating and combining our information.

It's an interesting Twitter thread from a gentleman named Robert Reeve, who evidently works in the ad tech business. I would like to point out that the first thing on his Twitter bio is that he is a dungeon master. Yes. Yes. Dress cleaner.

Yes. I think that's the – I think it's the Dungeons and Dragons kind of dungeon master, which is – Well, I'd assume, but – Yeah. You know. Yeah. I just – I read it as Robert Greve, like he's grieving for the future.

Ah. Ah. Okay. Okay. Again, Robert, you be you. So, he writes, I'm back from a week at my mom's house, and now I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand, the brand I've been putting in my mouth for a week. We never talked about this brand or Googled it or anything like that.

And he says, as a privacy tech worker, let me explain why this is happening. Let me explain, Lucy. Yeah. And what I like about this and how this sort of relates to us is he says, first of all, your social media apps are not listening to you. Thank you. This is a conspiracy theory. It's been debunked over and over again.

And then he goes on to explain that they don't need to listen to you and just sort of unpacks as to how they connect the dots between you and the people you've been around. And this is all stuff we've covered before, how they even – they'll use location. And in this case, he was at his mom's house for a week or so, and so they used the GPS to say, oh, you're near this person.

Well, when this person goes shopping, they use their discount card. And because they use their discount card at the grocery store, we know the brand of toothpaste that they buy. So we're going to combine that person's data with your data, and we're going to start showing you ads for the same sort of toothpaste that we know goes into this house.

And it's all very creepy. Yes. But it's not listening to us. No. Not listening to us. No, it doesn't need to. Let's make that clear. Again, we don't need to. No. They can get everything they need by you just giving it up in exchange for a discount. And as much as I applaud Apple's attempt to stop things like Facebook from tracking us everywhere and opting out instead of having to opt in or vice versa, whichever – I'm very tired at the moment.

Facebook also does not need that data. There are ways to get it. Right. Yes. By signing up by Facebook. That's all you got to do. That's it. Yeah. Pretty much. Fun times. So I have a link to the Twitter thread and also a thread reader unroll of it if you want to check out the details of how he gets into all the tech there.

But regular listeners of this show will find it's sort of a rehash of many of the things that we talk about, but it's all nice to have it all in one place. And if any of your friends come to you and say, I think my phone's listening to me, you can send them the link to this. I just slap them now.

Let them read it. I was going to say, just give them a slap. It's a Batman Robin slap right there. Right. Exactly. I said, good day, sir. Yeah. And finally, we had someone write in to us. Neil writes in, says, hi, geeks and Dave, listening to you in show 508, talking about the evils of Amazon Ring cameras.

Like anyone who's interested in privacy, I like to keep things in-house, but I do have a camera looking at my front door and driveway. It's all simply on a Raspberry Pi and a couple of cheap USB webcams. It is seriously easy to do using Motion iOS. The videos and our stills are stored on the SD card.

I personally store them for a few days and delete them, but you can easily move them to some clown storage of your choice if you want. And everything is configurable. And he provides some links to that. Note that it is possible to install the Motion iPart without its own OS on an existing Pi or other single board computer.

Keep up the good work there, fellas, and stop promoting Chrome, Blue Yeti, and Amazon Ring cameras like you obviously do all the time. Stay grumpy. Yeah. I mean, I looked at this. It looks all fairly simple. It's not out-of-the-box simple, which is the problem, right? People tend to be lazy. Well, the other problem is all somebody has to do is walk up and rip the camera off the house, and you lost all your footage.

So that's the downside of storing it on the SD card. If it's not somewhere else... Well, they don't even need to rip off the camera. They can just pop out the SD card. They can just pop out the SD card. It's easier to rip the camera off than it is to find the damn slot and pop out the card, in my experience.

Yeah. Is there nothing a Raspberry Pi can't do these days? I mean, it's the tricorder of computers. Yes. I hear Twitter has installed artificial intelligence on it and is now running the verification program. A little call back to some earlier rants in the show, Dave.

Sorry. I'll take your word for it. No. I just... I want to play with it, but then I'm like, no, I don't. So, what, Raspberry Pi? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I even ordered a kid at one point. It is in a box somewhere, collecting dust.

Yeah. I gave mine away to a friend of the show, Monkey 13, when I moved from Chicago the last time. I had it there forever. Another thing I've learned this episode is if you just want to stop by Jason's house at some point, he will give you all the technology he's ordered and not done anything with. Actually.

So far, I've learned he's handed out Amazon firepads. He's handed out cameras. He's handed out raspberry pies. Just go buy... Fries may be gone, but Jason's is still here. I had lunch with some friends this weekend and I gave him a sure SM7 being a cloud lifter.

What? Yeah. Oh, man. I got extras. I got extras. I got to come have lunch with you. And you need to have a yard sale, my friend. That's what you need to do. You need to have Jason's yard sale and ham fest. See, I would rather give it to friends than get...

I tried to sell some of my stuff at a yard sale and they come up and they offer you 10 bucks. And I'm like, I just paid $300 for that. So it's just offensive. I would rather give it away than take $10 for something. And that is why you are not a good businessman. That's why I'm poor. Exactly.

No, I get that impulse, though. I mean, because then you feel good about it and you've helped someone out and they're happy and you're happy. And you can't put a price on that. The only rule is no tech support. If you've got a problem, Google that shit. Google that shit. There's the rub. Yeah.

By me giving you this technology does not indenture me to you in any way, shape, or form. Here is the binding contract for your free item. You will never call me. Okay. That's fair. That's fair. All right. All right. That's all we got this week, right?

Yep. Off to go watch more Star Wars. There you go. See you next time. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Peter, Derek, Kelly, and Jake from State Farm. Jake, I hope you're on the AI. I didn't know you listened to the show.

I really hope you're on that AI thing. Good stuff. And over at PayPal, we have Simon, Matt, Charles, Thomas, John, Matthew, Charlie, Nicola, Michael, Stephen, Jonathan, Judge, Nicolai, and Eric, who says, get some gumbo, Brian. Jason, you are cool, too.

There was a discussion on Discord about New Orleans food that I was involved with there and got us a donation, apparently. Thank you. Okay. I like gumbo, too. Okay. I really like gumbo. You weren't involved in the discussion on Discord. You were in San Diego or something. No gumbo for you. No gumbo for Jason.

Jerry writes in. Hello, Jason and Brian. I finally donated something to the cause. Thanks for your consistency of great content and humor. I kind of stopped listening for a while but came back. You blokes are by far the best for keeping up to date with internety stuff. I'll donate again soon. Okay. Don't hassle me. Jeez.

And an emoji. Yep. And Bonnie writes in. I'm a long, long-time fan and sent you Patreon money, but I thought you'd send you a very few bucks. COVID-19 has been tough. I look forward to you guys each, and you make me smile or laugh each week. I might be one of the oldest geeks you have, not in years, but started very young.

My family worked on ENIAC, learned base 8 in grade school, punch cards, et cetera. I've begun to hate updates lately, yet another expert-friendly feature I don't want. Seeking a decent email program, not Snoopy Gmail, any that run on iPads, et cetera, would deeply appreciate Facebook as evil.

Privacy checklist should have one box get lost. Stay grumpy. All right. There you go. I just used the built-in Mac mail. It runs across everything in my ecosystem, and, you know, Tim Cook is all about the privacy, right? I like Spark. Yeah. Link for that will be in the show notes, but I like Spark.

It syncs with everything and has a lot of fancy features that I really, really enjoy. And Wendy Lee writes in. Hi, guys. Instead of giving ultra-rich Apple any more of my money to hear your pod, I'd rather give it to you. I really appreciate your content and love sticking it to Apple. Thank you for all your hard work for all us grumps.

You're the pod that gets me places. Woo-hoo! Thank you, Wendy Lee. Thank you. And over at iTunes, we have a five-star rating from Mac Dave. Great show. Been listening for a while and look forward to hearing their opinions on things happening in the tech world. I don't always agree, but it is an interesting take. Hey, we don't always agree with each other.

No shit. That's the world. Yep. I got a big shout-out to my brother, Greg. He finally accepted the position of medical physics resident at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Way to go, little bro, and way to make big bro look like a total schlub. Thanks. Preech.

Keep up the good work. Yeah. Congratulations. My brother, the physicist. And here I am in a garage telling fart jokes and making fun of Elon Musk. I make fun of people that are more successful than me. That's my job. Great. We like to punch up.

Yes, we do. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed the show, please consider visiting GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies.

It's easy and absolutely free. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 509. From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode as well as links to our swag and Discord channel if you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans. You can also head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars. And if you want to watch or listen to us on YouTube, you can now go to GOG.show slash YouTube. Stay grumpy.

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