55: Premium Providers of Negative Value

Like a bug. Grumpy Old Geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong? Hello, Jason. Hello, Brian. It's another week. I've been told that I had to dial back my caffeine consumption after last week's show.

You were talking pretty quick. I was a little hyper, apparently. A little hyper. Well, you know, I got a new toy, my AeroPress, and it was just like, ooh, let's make some more coffee. It makes some more coffee. It makes some more coffee. It kind of, you know, snowballed into having a lot of coffee. Whoopsies.

So I'm going to try and slow down this week. All right. I've only had one single double espresso. Are you still enjoying your super hipster coffee tool? I am. I am. Very much so. All right. I might have to get one of these. I even took it. No, that's pretty cool. I took it and made some for my dad, too, and he liked it.

So, you know, the cleanup is super easy, too. If I were to take something like that to my dad and it wasn't Folgers, he would not be impressed. I think I think, you know, our people our parents age are the only people in the world that still drink Folgers, but they drink it and they're loyal. See, my dad knows quality.

So if I bring him something decent, he can tell the difference. But day to day. Yeah. He's a scoop of instant, like half a pound of sugar and some, you know, cow juice. They're good to go. So I wanted to do a little follow up on the iPhone battery issue that we talked about a couple weeks ago where our phones were just dying immediately.

Draining, draining, draining quickly. Yes. Yeah. And my information might be out of date now because there was a new update. The 7.1.1 update came out yesterday. I was about to say I downloaded that as well. They're making it really hard for us to actually test any hypotheses by keeping updating their software all the damn time. I know that. And don't forget, you have auto updates going on in the background now for all the apps.

I never turn that on. I leave that off, actually. Oh, man, that makes it exciting. You never know what you're going to get when you open an app. It's like, oh, look at that. Everything's not where it's fucking supposed to be. Oh, thank you. And your icon is now boring. So that's generally how you can tell if somebody's done a big update.

And we'll talk about another big update where one password updated in a little bit. But so I my big discovery was just I deleted the Facebook app. Yeah, that's known to be a massive drain. But because half of my job is updating social networks for people, I have to keep that app on.

I keep it on my iPad just because, you know, there it's that's fine because it's almost impossible to kill the battery life on an iPad for some reason. Those things are just unholy good. Yeah, they're fantastic, actually. They really need to figure out whatever mojo they're using on the iPads and put them in their damn phones.

Yeah. Well, I think it's the size of the battery that's two times the size of the phone. Yeah. So, yeah, I never had any problems on the on the iPad with it. But also turning off background refresh on just about everything, which is something I actually didn't even know was there.

So thank you for that. That pointer. Yeah, go into your settings and can't remember exactly what it's dialed down under. But there were so many apps that I never use that were constantly set up for background app refresh and I just turned them all off. And it does seem to be a little bit better. But again, thanks a lot, Apple, for the update, because we can't really give you any quantifiable data.

Yeah, really. And a lot of those updates, the background ones, we're using geolocation, too. So spinning up, you know, spinning up your radios every time. It's not good. Not good. But you're running like what are you running? What's that?

Argus. You're still running Argus and Argus still needs that on. I'm sure just to grab the data. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm relatively sure that Argus has been a big cause of battery drain. But like, you know, like we had talked about, it was actually when the previous software update, iOS update, came out.

That's when we really started to notice that just battery life was horrible. So Argus itself doesn't seem to be the massive issue. Dialing down the background app things has seemed to help a little bit. It's not quite so bad. I no longer feel like I have to run back to the house or carry a charger with me if I'm leaving for more than an hour.

But it's still not as good as it was a couple months ago. Definitely. Time to switch to Android. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Actually, speaking of Argus that you just mentioned, I haven't talked about that for quite a while. I'm still using it regularly and have for quite a while now.

They did something really cool and kind of surprising. I got an email from them, which I'm not on their mailing list. I asked to be removed because I just like using their product and I don't need the promotional crap. But I did get sent an email anyways, and this was a really nice touch. It was a postcard from Tucson, Arizona.

And since I've started using the app and tracked all my steps, that is the city I could have walked to from Los Angeles. I've racked up over 460 miles on Argus so far. You've walked 460 miles? Well, it counts the biking too, right? It counts the biking as well.

But distance traveled is 460 miles since I've started using the app. And that was a cool little thing to get. It was surprising because I don't really look at like totals or things like that. So hello from Tucson, Arizona. Yeah, because I know how long it takes to walk 460 miles. I'm like, we didn't review that app that long ago.

And I know you don't walk very much. No, I've actually, again, this is, we've talked about using these apps and getting the quantified data and how it changes your behavior. I have not had an under $10,000, 10,000 step day in quite a while. It does force me to walk a lot more. Where I've moved has actually helped as well because things before that I wanted to get to were a little bit too far to walk.

So I would bike to them. Now I actually go walk and do my errands instead and still just kind of take my bike rides for fun. But it does, having this app has made me very conscious of walking. It actually, to some degree, I think it almost might be a bad thing.

Obviously good for my health, but bad for my efficiency because I'll go out of my way to like walk something more times than I need to. Like I know the mail isn't there yet, but I'm going to walk down and check anyways just to get my steps up. So yeah, that was really cool of you guys.

Thanks, Argus. That's a nifty little idea that you guys had built into your little system there. Yeah, no, that's very cool. I just get badges from Fitbit daily or weekly roundups and stuff. Now, we talked about the middle class crap before because, you know, we're old and in the middle of it.

So there's now some empirical data from the New York Times that says we are definitely not the world's richest anymore and are falling behind. But, you know, okay, mea culpa. You're mea culpa and you're believing it. Yeah. The article basically goes on to discuss that the American middle class, which has long been the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction.

We are slowly sinking down from other countries as our middle class, which I've been screaming for years, has been shrinking as well. Canada, much better. Most nations in Europe, at least the, you know, the big ones, Germany, et cetera. Middle class, far better off.

Middle class, if you're middle class in America, you're hanging in there by your teeth. Yeah. No shit. Yeah. Luckily, I do have my escape plan of going to Canada. Lucky bastard. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, marry a Canadian. Nah.

So there's another thing that I've been talking about, and you and Teeter, when Dr. David Teeter was on with us about cutting the cord and getting rid of cable, I found a cool little article on Deal News, which I've never heard of, called Running With Scissors, Seven Myths About Cutting the Cable Cord.

If cord cutting is on the rise, why are there more cable subscribers than ever? And it just runs through a bunch of the different concepts that are floating out there, like myth number one, cable cutting is on the rise. They actually go through the numbers, and no, not true. All cord cutters are pirates.

Well, I don't know. I disagree with that one. Hell, I have a cord, and I'm still pirating things. Yeah, seriously. I don't think that has to do with anything. I mean. No, that has to do with convenience and stupid laws and how things are rolled out. Yeah, and people not putting stuff for sale immediately when they should be.

Well, and people just not getting global culture. I mean, I know that there's obviously a lot of legal involved and certainly money, but if it takes me 10 seconds to get the latest version of Downton Abbey that's aired in England and I have to wait a year to watch it here, sorry. Friends in Sweden are coming into play.

Yeah, seriously. Yeah. Anyways, it's just an interesting little article. A lot of it has to do with the sports and specials and things like that that make it difficult. But they do talk about how it's plausible to cut the cord. It's not so easy, especially once you've gotten used to watching things in a certain way.

You definitely have to change a lot of habits to be able to do it, but it is possible. And I think ultimately I'm just too lazy to do it. Well, here's the other thing. When I did it, it was for a couple of years. I still had an Xbox 360 so I could get some TV stuff through. And, you know, here's the deal, though.

You change your habits. As soon as you lose cable, you go outside more. You hang out with your friends more. You don't just sit there and watch whatever's piped into your living room. And that's what I did. I rode my bike a lot more. I went to the beach a lot, you know, because I was living in Long Beach. So I actually used that time to actually go out and do other stuff.

The downside is it did tend to be a little bit more expensive because when I did go out and hang out with friends, it was generally at a bar. Yeah, you end up buying more beer. You spend more on the pleasures of life than you do on the cable. But you know what? All in all, that was a fine tradeoff.

Yeah, yeah. I tend to agree with that, except TV is starting to get so damn good. There's just so many good shows now. Yeah, there really are. It is the, you know. But you know what I have noticed? I mean, I have basically stopped going to movies completely. Because TV just tends to be so much better now.

I know. The only thing that I really want to see now is Captain America because they're doing that crossover with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which is actually getting pretty good. So I might have to go sneak out and catch that tomorrow. Cool. Yeah, I might have to see that as well. But then again, I've got a flight coming up pretty soon. So that's when I tend to get all my movies in.

Although Captain America on a three-inch by three-inch screen is probably not going to be all that stunning. Yeah, yeah, seriously. Get your butt to the theater for that one. All right. I do want to kind of circle back a little bit and talk real briefly about Fantastical and how I was using it for my morning rituals.

And it's been great. I'm still using it. You know, I get up. I have it wake me up at the same time every day. I've got like a standardized routine I've been going through. But things are changing up because I'm doing a bunch of crazy things in the next couple of weeks. I started a 10-day fast today.

So I will definitely be grumpy. Actually, but no, by the next show, I'll be over the hump. So fasting is – fasting the first three days are terrible. But after that, it's just fantastic. I love it. Right. But I used Fantastical to really kind of try different things out and make them habits.

And I found out that, yes, I love doing the 750 words thing, but I wasn't writing anything that was usable. So I pulled that out and I started just – I have time set aside to write every day now. And I'm writing like actual things that will become like blog posts and articles that I've been working on and the new show that I'm working on.

So it's like, you know, actual quality writing instead of just having to write 750 words before the next timer goes off on the, you know, the Fantastical to go like – I had watched a TED Talk on there with my breakfast and all this other stuff. Right, yeah.

Yeah, you kind of got to take the muse when it comes as it were, especially for anything creative. I mean it's an extremely useful and good habit to force yourself to sit down every day and do something. But trying to pinpoint the exact time I don't think works because you may not have anything to write about, but 35 minutes later, something will inspire you and then you're ready to go.

Yeah, exactly. And I mean I got – I did it for 36 days straight and I got over 30,000 words down. Out of those 30,000 words, there's probably 1,500 words that aren't just like mindless meandering and rambling and actually usable stuff. So like changing that – I mean it was a good experiment.

It got me in the habit of writing, which is good, but the timing was wrong and the reasoning was wrong. So I'm much – I'm glad that I did it and I'm glad that I'm using, you know, Fantastical to kind of get everything together. The fact that it syncs with all my standard built-in stuff is amazing.

I love it. Cool. Very cool. And a little pickup on Linode. It's amazing. I jumped it up. I'm paying $40 a month now for their VPS. It is super fast. Everything's SSD. My God, it's so fast. And since I'm paying that much money, I'm like, well, what the hell am I paying Squarespace to?

So as you predicted, I pulled my site back and unfortunately, I'll be running it on WordPress. But I can't justify $240 a year for a blog that I update once every, you know, two weeks. No, I agree completely. And, you know, you heard it here first.

I knew you'd be coming back. Yeah, yeah. You know, with everything – I mean you talk about cost-cutting in general. I mean you and I can't stand WordPress. We've gone on at great length about how much we hate WordPress and how horrible it actually really is.

But at the end of the day, I mean I find – I was going to try to avoid it with some clients. I don't think I'm going to be able to simply because they don't want to pay enough for anything custom or good. And the word – you know, for what they're going to pay me, WordPress works. And then they can either pay me to keep it up to date so they don't have problems or to hell with them.

Or they can pay you once they get hacked and they're like, where's all their content? And then you come back and charge them for that. Yeah, exactly, which then, you know, they're paying the same amount they would have paid if they would have just paid me up front for something custom. Yeah, and see, that's the whole hidden cost thing with it. Yeah, the hidden costs with WordPress are astronomical.

But for, you know, when you're arguing with a client and they're only giving you a set budget, what can you do? Exactly. I've got a – I'm going to post this coming week on the blog – on our blog, Grumpy Old Geeks. I've got a new set package that I do with any base WordPress install that, like, has – I've honed this over the past year to be, like, the most comprehensive as far as everything I need plus, you know, the security stuff that I use.

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's just a really good starting point. If you have to do a WordPress site, just start off with the set of – this set install, and it works pretty well. Excellent. Yeah, I noticed, especially – I mean, the one that everybody – if you're not running this, you're just an idiot – is limit login attempts.

Yeah, yeah. I noticed I forgot to put it on one of my sites, and there were 5,000 login attempts, like, within a 20-minute period. I'm like, why the hell is my server, like, going cattywampus? And that was why. And that also might have been a lot of the speed issue I was having with Media Temple.

Definitely could be, yeah. Yeah, if you're just getting hit like that. Anyway, look for that in the blog this coming week. I will, actually, because I could definitely use a refresher. Now, FCC is – this is – I don't know what the hell they're thinking over at the FCC, but their – They aren't.

The whole net neutrality thing is back up, and they're – the wording for this new bill that they've got going through is just so stupid. It makes me think that the people over there, they're just putting in, like, the most egregious things that you can think of because they've got other stuff that they want to slide under the table.

They're like, oh, well, let's make this thing so god-awful horrible. And you know, yes, we're going to steal all your internets, and we're going to sell them, you know, to the greediest people on the planet. And then that's just, you know, that's the MacGuffin. And over here, you've got what they're actually after. But I don't know. This whole net neutrality FCC thing that's coming out and it started yesterday, we're recording this on Thursday this week because Brian is super busy as usual.

More contractors, I'm sure, more furniture and things like that. No, no, this is all work stuff, not house stuff, unfortunately. Yeah, I mean, I'm shocked that a government bill would have a bunch of things attached to it that don't make any sense. Yeah, really. That never happens.

No, this is just, I, this is just getting so, well, like anything, any government bill, it's getting so convoluted. The wording is vague, inconsistent. I'm not even sure what the hell's going to be happening anymore, but smarter people than you and I have determined that this is definitely very, very bad.

Yeah, and there's an article that we'll link to in the show notes from GigaOM, and it's called, When it comes to net neutrality, either the FCC thinks we're idiots or it just doesn't care. And it's a really good, it's a really good write-up on it. I recommend checking it out. Yeah, it's a very good article, and I fall down on the they just don't care side of the argument.

Yeah. They got the money, they got the power, they don't give a shit. So, I do want to do one last bit of follow-up. We have an app. We do. Friend of the show, Trent Hamilton, made it for us, and it's cool if you, you know, know somebody who you want to introduce to our show, but they don't know what the hell a podcast is, you can just go get the app.

Search for Grumpy Old Geeks on the app store, on the, well, the iOS app store. Yes. And you can get a shiny new app that has all of our shows in it. And it's very pretty, and it's guaranteed not to drain your battery too bad. Yes, exactly. So, you can listen to any of the shows on demand.

You don't have to go download anything else. Just, you got the app, you're good to go. Yep. Check it out, everyone. Yeah, it makes it really easy to listen to us. And I think we're going to have an update coming soon that has some more fancy features in it. Because right now you can't, you can't do some of the scrubbing and I can't remember where the skips are in.

We've got some, we've got some new features coming on it. The player, the player will be polished up coming here pretty soon. So, but it's right now it works. You know, if you want to tell somebody about our show, please, pretty please, with sugar on top. Yes, please. This is an easy way to do it. And if you're on your phone, you can just go to grumpy old geeks.com and you'll get that swank, like swanky little banner.

Just click that and you can put it right on your phone, right from there. Comment of the week! And speaking of the iTunes store and our podcast, we have a brand spanking new five-star iTunes rating and comment. We love those.

This comes from Neil Sisson, 007. This has quickly become my favorite podcast. Both these guys bring a smart, informed, and witty outlook on this ever-changing frontier. Well, thank you, Neil Sisson, 007. We really appreciate that. Yes, thank you very much. This is a couple of weeks in a row now that we've had someone tell us that we're brand new, we're their brand new favorite podcast.

That feels good. It does. It does. And please, if you think about it, tell a friend, give us a rating in iTunes. Yes, please do. We're not asking for much. We'd love donations, which you can do at grumpy old geeks.com. But the best thing that you could possibly do for us is give us that five-star iTunes rating and a comment.

And please tell friends because for us to start getting any kind of sponsors, we need the numbers. So, remember back when we started this podcast and we wanted to talk about how to make money on the internet?

Absolutely. And we were kind of confounded because nobody really respects creativity anymore. And it just seems like everything out there that actually makes money is so god-awful stupid. Yes. Do tell. Yeah. Well, Airbnb's founders basically just closed a $450 million round and are now valued at $10 billion.

Billion. Why? Why? Airbnb is just a site that lets people put up their residences and rent them out. It's disrupting the, what, hotel industry? Craigslist? Craigslist. And basically, also, it's illegal in a lot of the cities that it exists in.

Yeah. I think they're glossed over that. Yeah. They're being sued. There's some antitrust stuff going on with them. But yet, they're still worth $10 billion. I don't understand, Jason. You know, there are lots of hotel chains out there that aren't even worth $10 billion.

No, and they actually provide a real legal service. Yeah. They're not just a fucking app. Seriously, this is just my, just stop. You're making my head hurt with this shit. I hate the internets. But you know what I hate even more? Really dumb people.

Oh. Well, fortunately, none of them listen to our show, so. No, of course not. None of you people need to worry about this. But the Associated Press just did another poll. Big Bang is still a big question for most Americans. They do not believe in it. Okay.

Even though we keep telling people. And there's an awful lot of science out there. And it's pretty much accepted by almost every major scientist, except for the one or two crackpots that always get brought up, trotted out every time anybody does a debate. Yeah. Well, when it comes to the science in Americans, we're really not the brightest bunch.

Seriously. Well, that history, geography, almost anything that you should probably know by the time you're out of fifth grade. We apparently fail at miserably. Yeah. So, yeah. This does not surprise me, but it saddens me.

In addition to most Americans not believing in the Big Bang, they also don't believe in global warming, even though Al Gore has been out there forever. And again, as per four, 99.999% of scientists now accept that this is actually happening and true. What they are, what most Americans do believe is only 4% doubt that smoke cause cancer.

So, apparently, there's 4% of Americans out there that think, no, it's not causing cancer. 6% question whether mental illness is a medical condition that affects the brain, as opposed to, I don't know, the spleen. What the fuck are these people thinking? 8% and 8% are skeptical there's a genetic code inside our cells because, obviously, they can't see it.

Yet, they believe in Jesus, who they also can't see. Interesting. No, no, no. No, no, no. I did see a really good video on YouTube a couple years ago about a guy who didn't believe electricity existed because he couldn't see it and went up and grabbed a power line. That was entertaining.

That is very awesome. So, if you're in a really good mood and kind of want to be depressed, go read this article. Well, speaking of climate change, Apple is on board with it, and they've got a new, basically a new ad campaign rolling out. Have you seen this yet?

I have, indeed. It's actually a pretty good ad. I don't mind it. I like it. I'm hoping that they're actually, that Apple as a company is taking steps within their own company, and I do believe that they are. I think they're relatively, for a massive company like that, they're relatively echo-conscious.

So, I'm hoping it's not just a snazzy ad campaign. Yeah. Did you see how much money they made last quarter? Oh, my God. Yes. I'm so happy to have their stock, and I am not selling it. Oh, you bastard. Yeah. Yeah. Apple is just going gangbusters, aren't they? But, again, very happy about this move.

I like seeing these major companies come out. You know, if tech companies can come out with stupid positions like shooting animals and all the other stuff that we've talked about in our Who's This Asshole segment, it's good to actually have them come out, to have a company come out on something that is good, good, and I totally believe in, and more people need to do it.

Yeah, speaking of the climate change thing, I was watching a show on Showtime called Years of Living Dangerously. I only saw the first one. I got the second one queued up. But celebrities going around to different parts of the world talking about climate change and what the causes are, and it's entertaining.

I got to say, I got to say, I like the first episode a lot. It had Don Cheadle, Harrison Ford was in it, flying planes and jets and looking like a twat, generally, with that earring. That earring's got to go. It just makes him look like an idiot. It better not be on Han Solo when they start shooting the next Star Wars.

That's all I got to say. Anyway, it's worth checking out if you have Showtime or know people in Sweden. I had not heard of the show at all, but since you put it in the show notes and I've looked at it, I'm definitely planning on watching it. It looks really good. Yeah, the second one's out.

It comes out on Sundays. Episode two, I think, has Schwarzenegger doing firefighting in California. California. So it looks decent. I mean, like I said, I like the first episode, so check it out. Yeah.

Now, somebody forwarded me a story about a band who stole a photographer's work and the band, when confronted with the fact that they had stolen something, came back with quite possibly the dumbest and worst reply in history.

Yeah, I mean, I have seen this. This is the rounds in my social networks as well because I know both a lot of photographers and a lot of musicians. Red jumpsuit apparatus, who I have never heard of. And I don't know. Apparently, that's the band, not the photographer.

Yeah, that is the band. That would be a good name for a photographer, though. I am going to shoot you a wedding. I am red jumpsuit apparatus. Yeah. So the photographer took a bunch of pictures of them. They just decided to start using them without paying, which frankly sounds very music industry. But then they responded saying that all digital art should be free, except for, of course, their music.

Yeah. There's so many contradictions in this story. I'll just put it in the show notes because I've been through this personally. And the same thing with being a photographer and having a musician steal my work and actually put it on a CD cover. And wondered why I sent my lawyers after him.

Yeah. He's dead now, so he got his comeuppance. The best part about this particular story, I just wanted to circle back on it because they didn't update. They went back and they updated their initial Facebook post that said, we believe all forms of art should be free, too. We believe most forms of digital art should be free.

Yeah. Idiots. Yeah. Oops. Yeah. So I also kind of keeping up with the whole thing that we've been talking about recently, about the middle class and me buying a house and all that sort of stuff. There was a wild motherfucker. Yes. I'm hanging out to the middle class as hard as I possibly can.

There was another article on the Washington Post in the opinions section by Catherine Rampell. Americans think owning a home is better for them than it is. I think it's very independent. Yeah. See, that's the thing. There's a lot of variables that go into if home ownership is right for you.

There's just a ton of factors. I've seen a couple articles, like, I mean, years ago where people had broken down the costs of home ownership, the ongoing costs, what you can get back out of your house. And for a lot of people, if rent is cheap in your neighborhood, it works out better to just rent. You're going to spend more money over the long haul, and it's just more hassle, more headaches.

And, you know, hell, even just fixing your damn house is a hassle and a headache. Like, and an expensive one, too. Yes, it is. So, I mean, you go replace a driveway or a roof, and there goes, you know, six months worth of rent for the most part. Yeah, this is – it's a complicated issue about home ownership, and me personally, I'm – obviously, I'm firmly on the side to put my shit in my car and drive around.

You, on the other hand, have gone the other route and now you're home. Yeah, I mean, I agree with – I was reading through a lot of the comments both on this particular article in the Washington Post and some of the other ones that we had discussed before on previous episodes. And I've gone back and looked at that just because I find it to be a really interesting subject as I'm a dual homeowner now.

Wait, you own two homes? Yeah, yes. We own a condo in Toronto and the condo in Santa Monica. So, we have – Oh, my God. What a – We're renting one out. So, we're lords of the land. You're slum lords. No, hardly.

It's a really nice place. Anyways, yeah. For me, it does – it makes more sense because in both areas, rent is astronomically high. If I were to keep renting here in Santa Monica, I'd be paying way more than my mortgage is right now. We're – the place in Toronto is being rented for more than the mortgage is.

And as far as mobility, I don't really want to throw my stuff in a car and drive around and go anywhere. In fact, I mean, of the three cities in the world that I would happily live in right now, LA, got a place here. Toronto, could rent this place out, move to the place in Toronto.

The only other city I'd really consider living in is London and nobody could fucking afford to live there. Yeah, forget about that one. So, for me, this makes more sense. But I totally get, you know, for you. But – and actually, I found an article on Salon after I'd read your comments. My generation living on the road.

Apparently, you're a millennial at heart. Yeah. Because a lot of the millennials are just saying to hell with it and basically living out of a bag. Yeah, well, I at least have friends with nice places that I usually stay at, you know. I'm not literally living out of the car.

But, yeah, it's an interesting article. I read about half of it before I kind of drifted off into something else. But – Yeah. Yeah, you know, there's a lot – since we have all of the technology to do what you want to do from wherever, I think there's going to be a lot more people that basically do what I do.

I think so, too. The only thing that really worries me – and maybe this is just me being raised solidly middle class and having those, you know, kind of like 70s and 80s values imparted into me where, you know, eventually you own a home. And I even felt like I was very late to get to that stage because I was in my late 30s before I took that step.

What happened – I get the whole let's not own anything, let's rent, let's be vagabonds. I just worry about what happens when you basically retire and you don't have an income coming in anymore. And how do you – if you bought a place, you don't have rent. You still have property tax, you still have maintenance, you still have utilities, the whole nine yards.

Yeah. There's still costs. But yeah, when you talk about, you know, perpetual work, you work till you're dead. Yeah. It's about – unless you are – you can still be a vagabond and save a bunch of money. You know, you don't have to – you can – I'm personally not one of them because I'm an idiot.

But yeah, there are people out there that are independently wealthy and have nice places and still move around and, you know, the whole thing. Yeah. Whatever. Whatever. Well, I'm not buying a house. You are – the one thing that I did want to bring up about that article is they don't go over land ownership because that's the weird part.

That's the one thing I don't understand why people buy condos. Maybe sometime over a beer you can enlighten me on it because you don't – you own like airspace. Yeah. You know, you don't really own a whole lot and especially in California, if you have an earthquake and, you know, the building is damaged to the point where it gets knocked down, you kind of lose everything.

That was the understanding I had. So it's a crapshoot, especially in earthquake country, to own a condo. Yeah, I suppose. But I just – I don't worry too much about that. Okay. I try not to think about it too much. You're money.

And speaking of getting old, this is a really cool article that I think Tim Ferriss posted this morning. The blood of the world's oldest woman hints at limits of life. Mm-hmm. They talk about her – basically her stem cells and how she kind of just ran out of them. She had like two left.

Right. By the time she died. What's interesting about it though is they have some pretty good theories about being able to – when you're young, like take your stem cells, freeze them, and then when you get old, stick them back in you. Yeah. And like kind of reboot and reset the clock a bit.

I mean you're still going to die, but it's like – it gives you a little bit more youth because your DNA hasn't like – the telomeres haven't – Telomeres, yeah. Haven't degraded as much and you haven't had as many genetic mutations from splitting. It's interesting.

Unfortunately for us grumpy old geeks, it's a little day late and a dollar short. Yeah, yeah. We're not going to quite make it there. I think our best bet is still to be able to download into a computer at some point. I love this stuff. I was – back when I was in college, I did work-study programs and I kind of – I worked for a doctor that was in the gerontology department who was big into aging and aging studies and all of this stuff.

So I find this endlessly fascinating and a really cool article. Very cool. If you're one of those people that doesn't believe in the Big Bang, you've never heard of this site. It's called newscientist.com. And another one I found this morning – I forget who sent me this one, but this was an interesting take on how Valve, their game manufacturer, right?

Okay. See, I didn't know that. Yeah, Valve makes video games. And there's a game called Dota 2. Okay. To cut down on trolling in the game and complain – because they have to deal with a lot of complaints, you know, user-to-user complaints. Apparently, after the match, like it's like some kind of battle match, whatever, they give you some questions.

And it used to be like, you know, how was the match, whatever, and you could just rate it. And they started asking more questions like about cooperation, in-game cooperation, and how the person themselves actually cooperated. And what it's doing is it's creating a little cognitive dissonance in the players because they know that they were just bastards during the match, but they give themselves a nice rating.

Right. And it's – for some reason, it's cutting down on trolling, which is – it's interesting by using just simple forms and questions that they can, you know, shape the – actually just manipulate the hell out of the trolls and the players to make them be nicer. Okay. Well, I mean, I think that's really interesting.

I'd love to see this basically applied to Twitter or, you know, at least message boards or something like that or certainly comment forums, things like that on articles. I would love to see some sort of system that is proven to work implemented just to see what happens.

Will people be nicer? I doubt it. Yeah. I don't know if that's going to work because it's not really a collaborative type of thing. That's true. And when it comes to comments on websites, just disable comments. No good comes of having comments on your website. But how are we going to be sticky?

Oh, in our vertical. Excellent, library. I've been waiting patiently for some of the books by some of my favorite authors to come out, and I was very desperate to read something in between.

I am working on the assholes, a theory, but it's a bit dry and I like to break it up with fiction. So I forgot about this author, Matt Ruff, who I read one of his books called A Fool on the Hill a long time ago, and I really enjoyed it. And he was just one of those guys that fell by the wayside in my brain for whatever reason, and I never went and got another one of his books.

But I found one called Bad Monkeys and tore through it. It's a pretty quick read, really enjoyable, kind of spy, semi-sci-fi, mindfuckery. Is this real? Is this not real? What's going on? I loved the entire buildup and everything.

The end was a little, eh. I wouldn't say that you see it coming because you see something coming that you know is going to mindfuck you, and then he does a triple mindfuck. Ooh, the dreaded triple mindfuck. The dreaded triple mindfuck, yes. But I do recommend it. It was a fun little read, and he is a really good author.

I'm going to have to, at some point, go back and work through the rest of his books. Cool. And maybe check that out. I'm going to be running out of – actually, no. What am I saying? I've got a stack of 100 books to get through. I'm starting – they're starting to pile up for me as well. Let me just say that Matt Ruff appears as suggestions if you're reading any of the other stuff that I like to read.

Your Tom Robbins, your Christopher Moores, who we're just about to talk about, and all of that. So he's in that vein. Yeah, and you still need to read the Vorkosigan series, which I keep telling. I do, and here is a thing about computers and apps. If you consistently always read through the Kindle app, those books happen to be in the Apple e-books or – what the hell do they call it?

Library. iBooks. Sorry. It's in – I have all those in the iBooks app, and I never think to open it. I completely forgot that I was halfway through the first one, so I will get back to it. Thanks for the reminder. No problem. I do that all the time, too. I'm like, I know I had this somewhere. Now, where is it? It's like, oh, there is an iBooks app.

Yes, I keep forgetting about it as well. Sorry, Apple. And guess what I bought on Kindle? That would be The Serpent of Venice, Chris Moore's new book. But the thing I did this time was – because I've been dying to try out the Whisper Sync. I wanted to do it with the Daniel Suarez book we talked about, but it didn't offer it. This one, I bought the book on Kindle because I saw you posted you got yours in the mail, the cool signed version.

I'm like, oh, fuck it. I'll go get it. And I clicked on it, which is what I always do. I end up buying it on Kindle, and then I get lazy, and then I go to Audible, and then I buy it on Audible, and then I bought two copies of a book. But, hey, I'm supporting authors.

Fuck it. And I love Chris Moore. So this time, I was trying my best not to buy it, but I went to Audible. I had three credits, so it's like, okay, they're throwing away now. And I looked at Serpent of Venice, and sure enough, Whisper Sync enabled, and I'm like, buy on the spot. Right. Downside, I didn't even think about this.

You've got to use the goddamn Audible app on your iPhone. It has gotten a lot better. I mean, before, it was just, it was unusable. It would not work. But now, it's got good downloading in the app. The app looks decent. The controls are way better.

It has not crashed yet, surprisingly. So I'm like, four chapters in, it's funny as hell. I'm about that far as well, and it's really enjoyable so far. Oh, my God, I so miss this character. Oh, my favorite. I know. Fool was just amazing. Yeah.

So I'm so happy that that character's back. But man, yeah, so what I'm going to try, like, later on when I have, oh, shit, I'm not having lunch anymore. Well, I guess when I sit around and not have lunch, I can read a little bit on my iPad. While you breathe your lunch. Yes.

Next week, I'll have an update on how Whisper Sync worked, and if it was everything that I thought it would be. Yes, I'm very interested in that, because I have not used it yet. And hopefully by next week, I will have finished The Serpent Events, and I can give it a bit of a review, but I can already tell it's going to be a stellar, glowing one. Oh, yeah. So far, I mean, I'm, like, laughing my ass off already.

Heinous fuckery. Heinous fuckery. Fuckery most foul. Yes. I also stumbled across another article on Slate. They just do damn good journalism. What can I say? This is called, What Will Become of the Library? How it Will Evolve as the World Goes Digital.

As we all know, especially our scrumpy old geeks, everything is basically going digital now and having these huge storehouse spaces for a physical product, be it bookstores, which are already basically non-existent. Good luck with that, Barnes & Noble. And the library, these spaces are basically going to go away, especially as the next generation is kind of being raised to not even know that they existed or go to them.

So this particular author, Michael Agrista, you know, you can never do pronunciation right when you're just reading people's names, talks a little bit about it. It's a really interesting article. He brings up the concept of creating third spaces, which are basically just public spaces that are designed really well.

And you can go and basically do whatever you want there. Take your laptop and work. Meet with people. Sit around and read. Just open spaces that, you know, as all these empty spaces are starting to show up everywhere, brick and mortar stores closing down because they just can't make a business anymore.

The library, all of these spaces. I think the government should be buying these up and creating some of these. It's a great idea. Yeah, I'll take a look at it. I'm not really into the government spending any money on that kind of thing, but it's better than guns. I'd rather have a public space that the government subsidized than another fucking Starbucks.

Oh, that's true. That's true. I don't go to Starbucks. Yeah, so and speaking of Slate, which I do tend to read regularly, and I'm very happy with them because they do actually have really good journalism. They are attempting to go back to a pay model again, sort of. They used to have...

Silly people. They were a pay model a long time ago where basically like half of their articles were free and the other half you had to pay for. I paid like five bucks a month, I think, or something like that. And that was back when, you know, we weren't all expecting everything to be free. So I was quite happy to pay it.

I don't know if I'm going to bother this time around because they don't really seem to offer too damn much for their money other than you're giving them more money than they're already making off the ads on every single page that I read. Yeah, they're not going to remove the ads if you pay, I take it? I'd assume not, no. Yeah. You get behind-the-scenes info about Slate, regular updates, discounts on Slate merchandise, and more.

Well, I don't know. What's more, yeah. I don't know. So good luck for you. I don't really want a Slate mug. Yeah, 0.00001% sign up on that. Yeah. Super happy about the site, though. Keep it up. And I hope, you know, just like every other model in the world, we're hoping something will work for paid content.

But I don't think this is going to be it. And dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee. Breaking news. Nice sound effect. Thank you. Just put up on Eric Idle from Monty Python's Twitter. The sad news of this is, as expected, Monty Python is not going to tour their reunion show.

They're basically just doing it in London. But they will be playing it in movie theaters worldwide. Are they going to do a live simulcast, or is this going to be taped to live? This is so breaking news that I have not read anything beyond the headline. Okay. Okay.

International distribution rights to broadcast Monty Python's final live show at London's O2 Arena on July 20th to movie theaters around the world. So I will be in a movie theater on July 20th. Same here, for sure. And they have announced that this is their final live show. They will not be doing any more. Doesn't surprise me.

No, no. Of course not. I mean, why would they? They're Monty fucking Python. Yeah, and they're not spring chickens, you know? No, no, no. Some of them are pushing late 70s now, aren't they? Oh, at least, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So just even looking at the picture on the Variety site, they're a bunch of old dudes.

They're a bunch of old men. But I cannot wait for this. I'm very happy. I mean, obviously, they'll release DVDs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it would be nice to... I'm hoping here, especially in LA, that they'll actually do it at the Hollywood Bowl. Although, with the timing with London, it's going to be in the middle of the day.

Well, it says Landmark Theater, so you're going to have to go to a Landmark Theater. Okay. All right. There I shall be going. Yeah. So, Monty Python... Oh, wait, no, it wasn't... I'm sorry, it wasn't Landmark. It was Picturehouse Entertainment. I don't know why I came up with that.

I'm just... See, this is what happens when you people tell me I can't have any caffeine. Then I, you know, my brain shuts down. Just saying. Just saying. Welcome to This Week in Shit We Put on Our Computers. So, I've been having some issues with my DNS, with my home internet cable provider.

And it dawned on me I'd forgotten to switch it to OpenDNS, which is a free service that does, you know, just massive amounts of DNS traffic, and it's free. And you can set it up at your router level at home, and I'd forgotten about it. I did that, man, my speed just went through the roof again.

Highly recommend, highly recommend everybody use OpenDNS. Wow, I've never really thought about it, or had a particular issue to look into a change. In fact, I wasn't even aware that you could do that. Oh, yeah, yeah. Log into the, log into your router admin, and you can set the DNS at the, you know, at the router, so it's overridden by everything downstream, and you can set it on your downstream computers.

But, yeah, I've been using them for years, because they are fast. They're super fast. You will notice when, if you 404 something, you'll get, like, a search screen from them. Right. You know, instead of just a regular 404 page sometimes. And they've also got a really nice cache check, so you can see if you're, like, switching domains from one IP to another, and you've, like, done DNS changes.

Yeah. You know, for developers and people like that. The cache check is great. I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes, because they've moved it. It used to be on the homepage, and now you have to search for it. But I used to work with these guys when they first started, when I was at Minor Ventures with JPEG Magazine. We were floor mates, and these guys are super cool.

They're solid. Highly recommend it. So if you're, like, it's just one of those things where I've always done it. I've always put it on just because I've been working with them for so long. Yeah. If I have to go back to the, you know, the Comcast or the Verizon built-in DNS stuff, I can always feel it.

I can always tell the lag. Really? I'm going to have to check this out and make the switch, then see if it speeds things up. Well, especially, yeah, you're on Roadrunner, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You got to do it. Okay. Next thing I got, I went and I dropped a few bucks and got a new game for my iPad.

I think it's a universal game, so it works on the iPad and the iPhone. And I think it's featured right now, too. It's called Hitman Go. Okay. It's a turn-by-turn-based game, like a board game, where you try and move your little hitman to the target and killing people along the way.

Right. It's really funky and fun. It's in 3D. It looks interesting, but yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of levels. Five bucks. That's pretty pricey, man. It is, but there's a lot of levels, and it's fun.

I enjoy it. Okay. I was going to talk about this thing called Emmett, but I'm going to pass on it because it's way too nerdy for almost anybody, even including myself. I'll leave the link in the show note. It's called Emmett. It's a toolkit for web developers. It lets you do really cool things like just write a little bit of CSS descriptor, and then it'll auto-expand it to the HTML, like reverse.

Yeah, which is pretty cool. I was playing around with it a little bit. If you're a super dorky dev guy like us, you're going to like this. Yeah, my only problem with it is trying to remember everything that it does, so that's why I didn't go too far into it. And we talked about the auto-updates before, and finally, 1Password45 is out for iOS, and it's got all the iOS 7 trimmings.

Yes, and it's very nice, and we've been espousing this program for ages on this podcast. You will not find a nicer password manager, and you will not have a more secure password system. It took me ages to switch over to it. Once I did, the first week is a bit weird when you're having to basically reset everything, and it's kind of a pain in the ass every time you log into a site.

After that, it becomes second nature, and it's fantastic. Yeah, and if you do the whole suite, you get it on your laptop, your desktop, and your phone or iPads or whatever. I just have it on everything. I have it on everything as well. It all syncs. It's fantastic. I cannot... You just have to do it nowadays.

And I mean, you can get LastPass, which I think is free, but it's just so damn ugly. 1Password is beautiful, and it does everything it's supposed to. It's very elegant once you get used to it. Yeah, it's unbelievably good, even though it does sync through Dropbox. You can sync with iCloud, too. Yeah, that's true.

But I am also syncing over PCs and Macs, so... Ah, well, yeah, you're screwed. Yeah, Dropbox works for me for there. Well, here's a free game I got for you. Remember I talked about the game Threes a couple weeks ago? Yeah. Like a slidey board game number matching dealio? Yeah. There's another one out there that my brother turned me on to called 2048, which is very similar in concept, but just the physics of the gameplay are a little bit different.

Slightly easier than Threes, I've noticed. But it's free. It's ad-supported. You can pay to turn the ads off, but I'm throwing it in there. I have spent way too much time with this over the last week since I've had it. It's fun. It's really fun. And, well, excuse me. Like I said, a little easier than Threes.

Cool. I might actually play that one a little bit because I did like Threes. I played around with that for about 20 minutes, which is really long for me on a game. Okay. Well, when you get 2048, I think my high score is about 16,600. Yeah, probably not going to get there.

Yeah, not going to happen. Last week, I talked a little bit about my problems with my cell phone network in my house, which is also my office. So, obviously, that's not good. I did go ahead and try out the network extender. I'm on Verizon. It's a Verizon-specific device, which is unfortunate.

But what are you going to do? Yeah, they're all specific. Mine was AT&T-specific. Yeah. FemtoCell. Yes, the FemtoCell. It works a treat, I have to say. It takes a little while to boot up. We plug it all in. It takes about an hour. But now, every time I pick up the phone to make a call, I get this weird little beepy sound that lets me know that I'm going over the extended network.

And I have had crystal clear, well, as crystal clear as cell phone calls ever are, calls. And I'm getting everything. Like when I've set up my buzzer in front to come to my cell phone, all those are coming through. I'm not getting dropped calls or missed calls anymore. So this shit actually works.

It's ugly. And you do have to run a wire, basically, with a little GPS device that has to go sit in a window. So I've got to figure out how I'm going to deal with that, which is basically going to be running a wire. Thankfully, they give you a very long one. So I'm going to be running along baseboards and things like that to get it over there.

So that bit's ugly. But it is working flawlessly, I've got to say. They're not cheap. There's no extra, there's no monthly rates, which I'm very surprised by Verizon for not trying to get us on that. So it works. So if you're having cell phone problems in your house and you absolutely 100% need to get that solved, so far, so good.

Yeah, and you're having completely opposite experience that I had. I had the AT&T one. It was fucking terrible. So caveat emptor. And how much was the Femto cell? I think it was like $270 or something like that. Yeah, that's about right. Mine was like $299 when I got it.

I've seen the AT&T ones on eBay for like $199 used. But I tell you what, do not buy a used one because those things are tied to your account and getting it switched to a different account is a nightmare. I tried to give mine away and we spent so much time going back and forth with AT&T.

He ended up just giving it back to me wherein I promptly threw it in the garbage. Yeah. Because I just couldn't get it transferred over. Yeah. Fun times. So I actually tried out an app as well. Well, I actually haven't tried it. Gasp! But I haven't tried the service itself, but I did download it.

Grubhub. It's kind of like an 824 app that's getting a lot of press and coverage right now and advertising on every other podcast in the world except ours. Thanks a lot, guys. Well, you just gave them a free ad. Well, they're probably not going to be too happy with me. Oh, okay.

The concept of Grubhub, obviously, is disrupting home food delivery by having you not talk to a person, I guess. You type in your area or does it automatically find where you are? And it basically just lists all the restaurants in the area that deliver, some of them free, some of them with delivery charges.

All the menus are in there. You can set everything that you want and basically just have it sent to you without ever talking to a person. And as far as I can tell, that's about all it really does. There are ratings within it, but not a lot of them because people aren't really using it to do.

They don't have all the user-generated content yet, so I wouldn't use this app to ever find a new place. I'd definitely Yelp at first, so I'm already using a second app to use my first app. And on a test search for local pizza delivery, it lists a lot of places that I know don't serve pizza.

So I'm not – you know, the entire point of an app like this is to get fast, accurate information, and it failed. Okay. Well, there you go. That is a non-glowing review. Yeah. But feel free to advertise with us anyways, Grubhub.

You know, throw us some cash. Yeah, definitely. I'll check it out when I'm done with my 10-day fast. Thank you for bringing up a fucking food app. It's the day that I don't eat anything. Pizza. I've done – well, hey, man, I'm in Chicago. You just throw a rock and you get some of the best pizza that you do not get in L.A.

That is very true. So I've used Eat24. I actually used Eat24 when I was in L.A. I tried to use it when I came back to the Midwest, and it was not quite the same, not as many restaurants. So, you know, I'll try the app when I go back to food again.

But I think it's worthwhile to just have a folder of these things around, you know, when you're just not feeling well or toot poop to even move and you just want something quick and easy. Yeah. You know? You got to – let's use technology for things like pizza. No, that's exactly true. I mean I do have a folder on my iPhone called food, and I've got Yelp, and I've got that, and I've got the Chipotle app, and I've got all those things in there.

So, again, it becomes one of those Apple iBooks things where I forget that they're there. But it's good to have them in there when you do remember them. Yeah, and to get around that – to go back to that iBooks thing, I actually have a folder called read where I just have the Kindle app, the iBooks app, and Instapaper.

So I can just open that up and read her, my newsreader. So it's like, you know, you're on the crapper. You need something to read. You press the read button, and then you can choose based on how long you're going to be there what you would like to listen to or read that time. Yeah. You know, you have to plan this stuff out.

Yeah, caddy, caddy, caddy, caddy. Tim Ferriss came out with a podcast this week and promptly went from zero to hero because he went to number one in podcasts overnight. Dick. That Tim Ferriss, you know, I'm on the fence with him a lot of the times.

He was on our podcast, and he was totally awesome. I do love every bit of product that he does. I find it entertaining. I'm not sure if everything he does works or is good, but it's always entertaining. So congratulations, Tim. Yeah, I listened to it, and I actually left a very critical review on iTunes of his show.

And the first episode that he did with Kevin Rose, kind of a snore. But it's a bunch of rich guys talking about investing in Silicon Valley. So right there, I'm already like, you lost me already. Yeah, I think he loses. The second episode, though, was with Josh Waitzkin, the guy.

He's not a kid anymore. But the Searching for Bobby Fischer movie was based on him, and he's got a great book that I read before called The Art of Learning. That was a fantastic interview. It was much shorter than the first one, so it came in at like 105 or something like that. Right. Awesome podcast.

If he does everything like that one, he's going to knock it out of the park, and it was really fun. Okay, cool. All right. I totally recommend it. Excellent. So the next one I got is – it's a podcast I talked about before, still untitled, The Adam Savage Project.

Yeah. So yeah, I covered it before, but I'm talking about a specific episode here, which is the latest one where he talks about his diet and fitness and how he lost like 30-some-odd pounds. Like if you see him on the show now – That dude has slimmed down a lot. He slimmed down, and I swear his hair has gotten fuller too.

They even mentioned that on the show. It looks like he's gotten skinny. He looks great, and he's got more hair. And he talks about all his secrets. And one of the things that he said was key was quitting drinking. And the interesting part was he said – and this is something that completely relates to me and probably you too.

He's like, it was when I realized that I was drinking as stress management that it was easy for me to give up because he was just doing it for stress management and not for anything else. And if you cast it in that light, it's like, yeah, it's kind of – I get – or not nervous, but get some anxiety, have a beer.

No, I totally do that as well. I mean by the end of the day, I'm usually so stressed out and dead, and my reaction is, well, let's open up a bottle of wine. So I've been aware of that, and again, being aware of it is kind of the key, and I've been much better about that.

I don't automatically like at 6 o'clock when I decide no more phone calls, run to the liquor cabinet anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I gave it a listen too. I'm a huge Adam Savage fan. I find him to be engaging, and basically anything that he does, I will watch.

I love the Mythbusters. I love everything that he's done himself. I haven't listened to much of the podcast. I listened to this show, and then I immediately subscribed, and I started to download them all. But I do have – I listened to a little bit of some of the others' podcasts, like I just dipped in and listened to five minutes of this one, ten minutes of that one.

The only problem I have with the podcast is now that everybody is an uber geek, being an uber geek alone doesn't do much for me, and the show is them being uber geeks. I'm not too crazy about the other guys. I think they're fine, but they're kind of like mini savages, and I think it would be a more interesting podcast if you had people that weren't quite so similar in terms of opinions and tastes and everything.

I mean, they don't disagree at all. You and I are always at each other's throats, and how interesting would this be if we just said, yeah, man, you're right. Right, Jason? Man, you're right. See? That wasn't very interesting. No, not at all. And yeah, these guys – well, they all work together at Tested.com, so they're all doing the same thing, and they're like media dudes.

They're not really in it for the conflict or interesting conversations that much. I do like – I like Adam's particular slant on the show just because he is Adam, and I love everything he says just because I tend to agree with it. There are some that I've had to get rid of their love fest for 2001, and that – I just hate that fucking movie.

I love it too. I'm with him on that one. So you'll like a lot of that stuff. Their Kubrick suck fests are right up your alley. But his old stories about when he worked at ILM and all that other stuff, and just some of the general stories are really good. It's a popcorn podcast.

It's a half an hour, nothing too deep. But when he gets into his personal stuff, read the one about him being deaf too. That's a crazy one. Read it? I mean listen to it. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely will. I mean like I said, I subscribe, so I'll be dipping in and out every now and then, especially now that the entire Corolla network is shut down while he's shooting his movie.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Excuse me. I had to go get a Mountain Dew because, you know, as you can tell, I'm probably picking up a little bit here. You are. You're talking a little faster. I'll try and slow down. Slow down. So the next thing I got, which is not so much ear candy but eye candy.

This comes from – I've got to give Dr. Teeter the hat tip on this one. It is bucking dog. Speaking of dogs, it's food in China. We're doing a lot of food now that you're fasting. I know. It's crazy.

Are you really going to watch all these while you're fasting? So, yeah, I'm definitely going to watch this whole thing because when I do a fast, it's not like – I mean, yeah, like I said, the first three days are really tough. But after that, I don't really find myself missing food that much. But this is a series called A Bite of China.

It is a – it's a documentary that's a little bit older, but it's all on YouTube. I think there's eight – seven or eight episodes in beautiful HD and with subtitles because it is all in Mandarin. But it is unbelievably gorgeous. Just – I zipped around to a couple different parts just watching them cook and the care that they, you know, give to the ingredients and everything.

It just – I'm going to put the link in the show notes. It's a playlist that has them all in order because it is in Chinese. So I'm trying to figure out the numbers. There are no titles. Well, there are titles, but they're in Chinese. So unless you speak Chinese, then you're, you know, you're one up. But it's gorgeous. It is so gorgeous.

I can't wait to watch it. I looked at it as well. It looks beautiful and that's lined up in my – I'll be checking out with a Chromecast. Ooh. I'm going to toss it to my TV with Chromecast. I put it on my Apple TV and just log in and press the button. And lastly, I did an interview with the Tech Douchebags podcast last week.

If that isn't fucking appropriate, I don't know what is. We talked about that show and then I was invited to go on it. So that episode comes out on Monday. So there will be a link in the show notes to check that out or go pre-subscribe so you can get it fresh when I come on.

I do not plan on listening to this show, so I'm going to leave it to other people to tell me how terrible I was. I just – I don't know. I think I may have been a little bit more douchebaggy than I usually am. So who knows? Oh, great. I can't wait. Hey, man. That's what I do. I am the ambassador. I make friends.

Making friends and influencing people. That's me. As only Jason can. All 390 – 390 – 380 – 370 friends. Ooh, fancy. So we have an ongoing interest in the internet of things and the physical and the bots and the, you know, the dronies and the bronies and the cronies and the dickies and the wikies.

I ran across another article, again on Slate, because they do good journalism that just caught my fancy because I've been thinking about getting a Roomba or something like that for a long time just because I think they're neat and I've always had wood floors and there's a lot of long hair all over the place all the time.

And just, you know, was interested in it. And this guy did a review, Seth Stevenson. He does a lot of tech writing for them over there. He got one of these bots that cleans windows that you just basically attach to the outside and it goes along and cleans a window for you, which is obviously very good if, like, say you're in a high rise and you'd like to actually see outside without getting out there yourself and cleaning it all up.

I did a review on it and basically the takeaway is if we're all sitting around worried about the robots taking over the planet, we can kind of relax for a bit. They don't really work all that great. Yeah. I watched the video of this, too, and it was – it's interesting when it – when they show it from the other – the opposite side of the window where you can see the underpinnings of the mechanism.

Yeah. It really reminded me of the face-sucking alien from Alien. Yeah. That's what I thought, too. That's what I thought. It was cool for that. Yeah, but the thing was loud and just the same with the Roomba. Roombas are loud. See, that – I did not know and that's a problem for me. I actually – after you made that note, I went and looked at it and found, like, some videos on YouTube of the Roomba and the noise would bug the hell out of me.

It's way too loud. Yeah. My roommate here has one and when he runs it, it's just like you can't do anything else because it's just – it's so damn loud and they don't work very well. I had the first version. I ended up giving it away when I left San Francisco because it just – the damn thing didn't work for me.

And the one here even, you know, it'll go in there for, like, 40 minutes just doing the kitchen, banging into shit and moving around. And then when it's done, you still got to sweep up. It's, like, not that good. Yeah, kind of useless. I think the only real use for them is all those great videos of, like, home pets riding them.

Yeah, basically cats in shark suits chasing raccoons or parrots or whatever the hell they do on a Roomba. That's what they're good for. Yes, but those videos now exist, so stop it, people. Yeah, there was a – oh, who was it? I forget the guy's name. Phil something. He works for Adafruit now or dating the Adafruit girl.

He said he was – made one that had, like, a solar – he had a Roomba with a solar panel on it with a plant in the middle. And then it knew which way the sun was going, so it would keep the plant in the sunlight in the middle of the room. That was a cool use for it, you know. So as the sun was moving, it would just move the plant to stay in the sun.

That was neat. Perfect. Anyway, I got one that just came out today, literally this morning. Well, the funny part was it came out last night because Leica, the camera manufacturer, screwed up and they put the website for their new T-System camera live.

And everybody found it, so all the pictures were out this morning. Gorgeous camera. It's a little point-and-shoot. It's a mirrorless. So it's, like, their foray into mirrorless. And it's got this, like, aluminum body, like, milled aluminum body, much like, you know, the iPhones and all that stuff.

Which also take pictures. And are much cheaper. Yeah, I mean, this has a 16.5-megapixel sensor in it. The body is $2,267 approximately because the original price is in pounds. But the lenses are all in the $2,000 range. It's, yeah, ridiculously expensive.

Looks gorgeous. Link to the site with the video. Really cool to check out. And they have the world's most boring advertisement there, which is literally 45 minutes of a dude sanding the body. Because after they're milled, they spent 45 minutes per camera hand sanding them.

All right. You can watch the beginning and the end. It's pretty funny. And they have, like, the chairman of Leica up there talking about it. So you get to see it in person and use it. It's got a touchscreen on the back, Wi-Fi built in, so you don't even have to plug it in. 16 gig of memory on the camera plus an SD slot.

It's neat. It's expensive as hell. But, you know. Yeah. If somebody wanted to give me one, I would take it. Please donate it at grumpyoldgeeks.com. Although he's not allowed, Jason's not allowed to use that money to buy the camera. Aww. So sticking with cameras, there's another one out.

Do you remember the Litro? It was a little box camera, and it did light field photography. I do remember that when it came out, yeah. Yeah. I saw a bunch of pictures with it, played around with it. It was just a toy, basically. You know, it was an expensive little toy. Well, those guys have finally made a real camera with, like, real lenses on it.

And it's real, not cheap. It's like $1,600. Looks cool. My old friend Nicole Lee did a write-up for it over at Engadget that we'll link in the show notes. And it looks cool as hell. The light field stuff is super neat. And if you don't know what that is, it's like when you take a picture, you can actually change some perspective.

But you can also change the focus and depth of field to generate an image. It's just, like, nuts cool. Excellent. Yeah. Hopefully Canon and Nikon and all these other people will get their hands on it. But as far as I know, they're not licensing the technology yet.

But when this is, like, you know, in your camera in 20 years or in your phone in 20 years, it's going to be super nice. No more out-of-focus pictures. All right. I bow to your photography knowledge. I know nothing about this stuff. The web's not dead. Speaking of photography, and I can't believe I'm going to read this title, these 50 photos from the past are shocking and hilarious.

I can't believe how things have changed. So it's a listicle, and it's one using the titling method that makes me want to fucking kill the entire interweb. But this one has, like, history and shit and photography. And, you know, that's all stuff that we're kind of interested in. And I actually really did enjoy looking through all the photos.

It's funny stuff. It's funny to see that there was a version of planking called horsemanning done in the 1920s. You got to see the photo to believe it. So these kind of memes and stupid-ass shit have been going on forever. It's a lot of good stuff. I mean, the shot of, like, Hitler rehearsing his speeches from 1925, unbelievable.

A lot of really good ones. It's definitely worth the, you know, five minutes it's going to take you to scroll through all 50 of these photos and take a look. And the main thing is that basically the very first photo on this thing, also we posted this on GrumpyOldGeeks.com last night. So you could have gotten a sneak preview, or if you followed us on Twitter or on Facebook, we posted it there as well.

The oldest known selfie taken in 1839 by Robert Cornelius. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, that's about it. So fun photos. Second listicle. Hang on, hang on. Some of these are amazing. The isolator, I think, is fantastic.

It's just a helmet with an oxygen tank so you can turn off everybody. It's like the world's ugliest set of noise-canceling headphones. Yeah. Well, there was one, the one-wheeled motorcycle. Did you see that one? Yeah, it got up at 93 miles an hour. That looks totally space age. Like, if somebody shot down the street in that now, I'd be like, that's from the future.

Yeah, I've seen those, and I've seen people crash on those, and it's no good. I'm sure that's not good at all. Yeah, there's a lot of great photos in here. It's totally worth checking out. Yeah, there's one here, though. Yeah, the, oh, Margaret Lang, or I don't know. There's some in here that aren't as cool as the other ones, but yeah, man, these are cool.

I like the, oh, Jesus, the cop with the jail on his motorcycle. That's kind of neat. I could use that sometimes. But yeah, check these out for sure. These are really fun. Yeah, the winner of the 1950 Miss Atomic Bomb pageants, where the crown has an atomic bomb cloud going off of it.

I mean, this is just great stuff. So yeah, and it's got Paul McCartney doing a selfie, too, back in the 50s. So selfie selfies. Lots going on there. Second listicle. No dickies. No dickies. Second listicle that was sent to me this week, which I thought was quite funny, because I was doing an abnormally large amount of bitching about corporate life and jobs and work on Facebook this week.

11 brutally honest job titles. Now, this is some e-cards who always do really good work with their little cards. They're very, very funny, and they're always being passed around. But I see that they're now getting in the business of listicles, because they work, apparently. Anyways, so if you take a quick look, number one is probably my favorite, because as we've talked about, the internization of social media strategies.

Social media strategist, person with the Twitter password. See, I personally like head of IT, the director of turning things off and back on. I think that really is. Yeah. Yeah. Then my life has been the last one. The project manager, executive in charge of circling back about that.

Yep. No, these are good. These are definitely good. It's good stuff. So good for you, some e-cards. Maybe you can drum up some business by buzzfeeding yourself. No, seriously? Are you shitting me? And in today's Are You Shitting Me? This one kind of bummed me out a little bit and definitely made me feel extremely old.

The show The Wonder Years aired from 1988 to 1993. I watched it. You, Jason? I watched it, too. Oh, yeah. It was a great show. Great show. And Winnie was my probably early crush. And boy, boy, take a look at her now. Google her, man. Not good? No, very good.

Oh, good. Unbelievably good. Oh, I'm glad she aged well. She is stunning. Anyways, okay. So it aired from 1988 to 1993 and it covered the years 1968 to 1973. Today, in 2014, if one were to make a similar show, it would cover the years 1994 to 1999.

God, I'm old. Oh, that sucks. The 90s don't really feel all that long ago. Well, actually, 94 is when I got in this business. So, yeah, it does actually feel like a long time ago. Wow. Yeah. So there you go.

Thanks for that. Thanks for that. Pick me up, asshole. That was a little depressing of, uh, are you shitting me for the week? But, uh, it is, time is funny. No, it's, it's not funny at all. It's the right bitch. But speaking of funny. Oh, man. We have, I got a huff. No for you.

I almost fell out of my fucking chair when I saw this. This was actually, I didn't stumble across it. There was some honest outrage or not so much outrage, but a couple of people posted on Twitter with, I can't believe that this is a journalistic site. Well, it's not. It's not, but we have a link in our show notes.

I'm just going to read the headline. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the real headline for the article. Proof that once you go black, you never go back. It's an article about interracial celebrity couples. Oh my, oh my, oh my. God damn it.

Oh, Jessica Dickerson, you little minx you. I, uh, when you sent me this, I was just like, oh Christ, what's this? So then I went and, uh, I went and looked up the author and pretty much everything she does is black, this black, that. So she is into the black side of things.

So she is pro black. 11 Afros that make it impossible not to love black hair. That's, that's another one of her titles. I need to get in touch with this woman because I own a strong black woman.com. It is for sale. So I need to get, get in touch with her and sell it to her. Yeah. You work on that.

Here's, here's another one of her. I just, I just brought up her little profile thing and here's another one of her awesome titles. Serena Williams opens up about embracing her large boobs and butt. Photos. Thanks HuffPo. Woohoo. Closing shout outs.

Uh, I've moved. And, uh, really? I didn't know this. I've talked about it a little bit. Uh, and I've noticed that I've been carrying some stuff around for near on 20 years. Every single time I move. We call that a spare tire at our age. Well, I've been, yeah, I've been care. Well, this is additional.

These are additional things made out of vinyl and rubber. Uh, I'm basically selling off my entire vinyl collection because I haven't had a record player for 20 years, but I've had all these, uh, all these discs that I've been taking around with me. Uh, so I wanted to pimp that because if there's anybody out there that's totally into vinyl and I'm, I won't debate with you and I won't laugh at you if you get a Pono and whatever, if you're into vinyl, that's cool.

I mean, it's a beautiful format. It's just not one that I listened to. Um, and I'm not planning on getting a, an expensive record player and I'm basically never going to use this stuff and it's just been, it's time to let it go. And, uh, so I've put up all my vinyl, which is all in mint or near mint quality. So if you're into eighties music, uh, especially eighties remixes, there's probably a lot of gems in there, the Smiths, the cure, love and rockets, all that sort of stuff at discogs.com, which I had not heard of.

Um, it's a great site for, for people to, uh, buy and trade kind of rare, rare music because they do more than just vinyl, but it's primarily vinyl. Uh, my friend, Mike Malin and previous guest of the show is the one that tipped me off to this because he's moving as well. He's moving to Nashville. So he's getting rid of some of his vinyl and, uh, pointed it out to me.

So my collection is up there. Uh, we have the link in the show notes. Um, if you love vinyl and you love the kind of music that I do, you will be very, very happy. That's interesting. Yeah. I know about that site because I live in one of the largest, uh, collections of punk rock in the country. Yeah. I was, I was actually going to give him a, give, give him a shout out about that, but, uh, and let him know that he can take a look, but I'm sure he's not interested in anything that I've got.

I think you might be. Or he probably has it all. Yeah. Yeah. The cure stuff. I think he probably has every single one of them. So, but we'll check it out for sure. Yeah. We, uh, we had, there's eight, no, close to 9,000 records in the living room downstairs. So I've heard, I've heard of discogs.com before.

Somehow. I mean, I never even knew I had quite so many. Once I was done entering them, it's like, I have almost a hundred pieces of vinyl that I've just been carrying with me in, in great condition for 20 plus years. So time to let it go. Yeah. Yeah. That shit's heavy. Yeah. That shit is heavy. And, uh, keeping with music, I'm also just made some travel plans.

I will be going to Toronto for Canadian music week. Uh, and, uh, I believe I'm going not next week, but the week after. So I'll be recording live from, uh, CMW and, uh, it's a big Canadian music industry conference. Gonna head back and hopefully drum up some new business, do some schmoozing and rack up some hours in the foggy too.

All right. Excellent. I got nothing this week, but, uh, definitely go check out. Check out, uh, my appearance on tech douchebags on Monday. If you feel, feel so inclined and, uh, check out our app and give us a, give us a quick rating. If you have a few minutes, uh, we really appreciate it.

It really, uh, does help us out. And, uh, yeah, that's what I got this week. So have a good one. Have a good week, everybody. 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.

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