60: It Could Be Sunshine

Think about it. Think about it. Think about it. Grumpy Old Geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong? Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. It dawned on me, Brian, because you are Brian. Yes, Jason. And I am Jason. We don't tell anybody who we are anymore, because we forget.

Okay. Well, I'm Brian. I'm Jason. There you go. There's our intro. This is how the pros do it, I guess. Yes. Well, we are professionals now. We've been doing this over a year. Well over a year. We're on episode 60, so for show notes for this show, go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 60, and you can get all of the links about all the crap we talk about all day long.

There you go. So I want to do a little follow-up on some things we talked about before. Okay. Start off with, remember Oyster, the subscription book app that we tried out? I do remember that. They're still around, I assume. They are kicking ass now. They just got Simon & Schuster on board, so that's the second big publisher they got.

They've got over half a million books now. That's actually rather impressive. In eight months. They went from 100,000 titles to 500,000 titles in eight months. So it looks like they're going to be here to stay for a while. Yeah. To be fair, the publishing industry is in a bit of turmoil, and publishers would be stupid not to latch onto any platform out there at this point.

Yeah, it just worries me that it's going to go the same way as the music subscription model, and nobody's going to make any money off of it. Yeah, that is a big worry. But people still buy books. You know, it's not like music, where it's just given away for free. True, true. But I mean, the whole point of Oyster is it's a subscription service, right?

You're not buying specific books, correct? Correct. Yeah. And I'm sure it tracks which books you read that month, because you can only have a few in your queue. Yeah. And I'm guessing what they're hoping for is that people that are avid readers and already buy books, it'll just be an extra income source, and people will still buy books.

But that needs to be flushed out over time. Who knows? It definitely does. It's a weird thing, because when you switch to, say, going from a physical book to an e-book, it's got the same issue that we have discovered in music. And I think that it's the feeling that you don't actually own it, and you forget about it, and it becomes second nature, and then you start – you just forget about ever actually buying anything anyways, because why would you?

I've already read it. It's gone. Done. Yeah, I have found with my Audible stuff, though, I tend to go back every now and again and pick something up, but if it's in the subscription thing, I don't know. The whole thing is just – it's a mess. All our paradigms are fucked. You think? Well, yeah, there's a really interesting story that came out this week about what happens when you basically sign up with these kind of massive controllers of content, such as Amazon.

A story came out that Amazon admits it's discouraging customers from buying a certain publisher's book, in this case, Hachette. It's Hachette? I thought it was Hatchet. Hatchet, Hachette, whatever. Doing a hatchet job is all I guess. It's a hatchet job, yeah. Yeah, so Amazon's basically screwing them because they're having a contract dispute with them at this point, and they're subtly increasing shipping times and not throwing things into their recommendations queue from this publisher because they're not happy with them.

Yeah, and it's their prerogative, unfortunately. And the letter that Amazon put out saying that, yeah, we're doing this, and all we're doing is we're just not buying as much stock as we would before. If you buy it, then we'll order it, and then we'll ship it to you, but in the meantime – It'll increase the time, yeah. Exactly. In the meantime, go check out Barnes & Noble if you can find one.

They say go to their competitor. Right. And who's that now, really? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, Barnes & Noble still exists online, sort of, but who the hell uses them? Yeah, I think they still have physical bookstores. I think they do. Well, I know they have one still here in Santa Monica at Third Street because that's where authors will come to do signings and talks and things like that, but they're few and far between these days.

Yeah, I've got one over at the Oak Brook Mall by me, too. But they're still around, so I can go buy my copy of David and Goliath if I want to because Malcolm Gladwell is one of the publishers that got caught up in this. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting that you're completely correct in saying that it is totally Amazon's prerogative to do so, but I thought Amazon were the good guys.

They used to be, but this is the first time they've done this, so. Right. You know, and hopefully it's to get us, the consumer, a better deal, but I don't know what the terms are, so I can't comment on it. Yeah, again, it's also – I'd be really interested in seeing what the terms and conditions and the deals are with Oyster as well.

I mean, I'm always interested in seeing what the – like, what's the author actually getting? How does this all work? What's going to the publisher? What's the cut? Transparency, man. Well, I can tell you from the time that I worked at Warner Brothers when – I can't remember. I think I've told this before on the show, but when I first walked in and I asked how much the musicians get from these, you know, music deals, these online digital music deals, the woman who ran the department looked me straight in the eye and goes, as little as possible.

Exactly. Yeah. So they're right there. You just take that as you will. Yeah, well, speaking of that, one of my favorite musicians of all time is basically trying to do a Kickstarter. He's not using Kickstarter. He's using PledgeMusic.com, which is a – I've never heard of that one.

It's a Kickstarter copy that's geared themselves directly for the music industry. That was their attempt. We've all – if you've been listening to this podcast, you know that I basically have torn – oh, God, I can't even – I've blocked her name from my mind. Help me, Jason.

Amanda Palmer. I've torn Amanda Palmer a new ass about 7,000 times for her Kickstarter. Not so much that she used Kickstarter for her album, but that she just declared that this is the future of music and then never went back to it because, you know, she made her money and fuck everyone else. He's got a really good article, a really good interview, which we'll have in our show notes.

Who are we talking about first? Daniel Ash. Sorry. I assume that everybody knows who one of my favorite musicians of all time is. It's Daniel Ash who was one of the founding members of Bauhaus, went on to start a band called Tones on Tail from which I took my company name, Slender Fungus, then went to go do Love and Rockets, kind of your seminal late 80s, early 90s alt rock band.

Some of the best songs I've ever heard. I think he's one of the most underrated songwriters actually of all time because his songs are just absolutely amazing. He's been kind of gone for a long time. You know, they realized that once they lost their record deals, they're old school musicians.

You know, they don't really – what do you mean? I'm going to record an album and you're not going to give me $200,000 and then give us tour support to go tour. We're going to make you a lot of money. You're not? All right, well, I'm not doing an album then. To hell with you, was basically what these guys did. Since then, they've done – you know, Bauhaus has come and done two reunion tours and a new album.

Love and Rockets did the festival circuits a couple times, but they've now called it quits. All three members have gone their own way. David Jay is doing his own stuff as well, and I'm not sure what Kevin Hastings is doing. But Daniel Ash kind of just disappeared. So what did he do in the band?

Was he a keyboardist, singer, guitarist? I don't know. Guitarist, singer. Okay. Yeah. Not singer for Bauhaus, but main singer for Love and Rockets. He and David Jay kind of split the duties, but also he was the main songwriter. Who was the guy from Bauhaus, the singer?

Peter Murphy. Peter Murphy. I think he's got a new album coming out soon. He has a new album coming out soon as well. I think it comes next week. It's called Lion and worth checking out because – Hey, look at me with the music knowledge. I know. It's pretty impressive. Dropping some beats. Some old school beats. So I really like this interview.

As you know, I'm not a big music guy, but I found the interview really fascinating because it kind of walks you through his logic on why he's doing this crowdfunding thing. And he's got a very logical and very many good points on why he's doing it.

So I – but when I was done with the interview, because I don't know who he is, but I was really interested, like, just hearing a musician's take on it who doesn't know technology. This guy has, like, a friend off in the corner who's telling him what to do. And, you know, he's – Full disclosure, one of the first artist websites I ever did was for Love and Rockets, and I met these guys back then.

And, yeah, his interest in technology starts and stops with music recording. That's it. Yeah, and he says many times, I'd rather just ride my motorcycle. Yeah. And it's fine. I think it might actually work because he's ignorant enough of the technology that he might just pull it off. So who knows?

I think he's ignorant enough of the technology that he might just pull it off. I mean, his entire point is the only way that I can make money from my music now is to tour. I'm old. I'm tired of touring. I just want to write music. So how do I do this? And it's a good idea for him. I would – you know, he's basically said that if this fails, he's not going to pick up his guitar ever again.

And he doesn't really have to. He lives a pretty low-key life. He's got enough money. It would be a shame to lose his songwriting talent from the world. So I am actually going to pledge on this. Cool. Well, good luck. I hope you get it. Yeah, me too. I'll be saving my money. I'll give my money to LeVar Burton in Reading Rainbow because he's got his Kickstarter.

It's kicking ass. I don't think he needs your money. He's doing quite well. Yeah, they've already beat $2 million. That's great. $2 million in two days. I actually went and checked it out after you posted this. I originally said, I don't read anything. I'm not going to check it out. But I'll give him money because it's LeVar Burton in Reading Rainbow, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. So I went and watched the video, and the video was pretty funny. He did a pretty good job on his Kickstarter video. Yeah, he did. I think. But the reaction video from when they hit a million dollars was very touching. No, he was all teary and crying, and I think it's a very good cause. You know, education, I'm in. And, you know, we support any of our Star Trek actors.

Yeah. And Brent Spiner makes a cameo in the Kickstarter video that's pretty damn funny. Yeah, that's good stuff. Check it out for that. Now, we've often talked about Facebook and how, you know, why isn't somebody making another one? Yeah. And, you know, we kind of just mentioned here and there how difficult it is to do things at that kind of scale.

Yeah. And somebody – was it Miller Matthews? Is he a friend of yours? Friend of mine, yeah. Okay. On Facebook. And friend of the show. He listens all the time. Hey, Miller. Excellent. Hey, Miller. He posted a link to our Facebook page called PennyStocks.LA, internet-inreal-time, whatever dashes. It'll be in the show notes.

It's another one of those cute, like, basically tickers that tell you how much data is being uploaded kind of things. Those have been around for 10 years, but this is a newer one. And looking at it, you can just get kind of the sense of the scope of how much shit these people are pushing, and it's mind-boggling.

It's stunning. I mean, you don't even need to leave this running very long. I mean, I just opened it, and there's already been 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube. My favorite part – I left it on for, like, three or four minutes. The one to watch that will make you kind of chuckle is Yelp.

Yelp is barely moving. It's like – I looked it on for, like, five minutes, and there were, like, 26 new reviews. Everything else is, like, 200 gazillion likes and pluses and all this other shit. Yeah, like, more – like, four lifetimes of video have been watched on YouTube, and it's – Yeah, this is a really – if you wonder about how much stuff is actually going on on the internet at any point in time, load up this link, walk away from your computer for five minutes, and come back.

Yeah. You'll be shocked. What really surprised me is the email. A lot of people have been running around screaming, email is dead. No way. Email is still, like, one of the – it's top dog. Email is always going to be top dog. Yeah. It's pretty damn impressive. Yeah, it's a great little – I like the design because they obviously went for the Windows 8 look as well.

Yeah, they did. For this particular layout, which is quite amusing. No, it's a fun little watch. These are – these always, you know, tickle me a bit because it's – Yeah. You know, it's extrapolated data, so it's not real – it's not actually real data. It's, you know, estimated data. Yeah. But even just estimated data, it's probably fairly – it's close enough that it makes you just go, wow, there's a lot of shit going on online.

So now just how to tap into it and make money off of it. Exactly. They don't – well, they show the Amazon cash, which is pretty cool. I like that too. You just see how much money is being spent in real – well, suppose in real time. Yeah, and AdSense money too. How many searches, how many ads.

Yeah. It's like, God, I'm just printing money. I'm just mesmerized right now watching the numbers go. So, I went to my favorite search engine, as per usual, just a few days ago, and something felt a little bit off.

Did you have to poo? No, no, no. Loaded up the Google homepage, and it looked a little bit different. Yeah, you're talking about the new logo change. Yes, and the fact that they actually just changed the kerning slightly. But apparently this pissed off a lot of people. I don't know.

I saw this before and after graphic, and it is like a one-pixel change, and I couldn't tell the difference. Never in a million years you could have shown me that page a thousand times, like A-B tested it to me backwards and forwards, and I never would have noticed it. Well, if you follow the link that I happen to have in the show notes from the Huffington Post, they have an animation.

So, you can see the G and the L shift slightly. Yep. Yep. Somebody's making way too much money over there. I know. There's too much time on their hands. Speaking of too much time on their hands, they unveiled their car, their new self-driving car.

Right. Oh my God, is that thing ugly. It's a... Some people say it's cute. It's cute. No, it's fugly. It's cute. I mean, I don't know. I'm sure that, you know, this is just a test model. There's no way that this is going to be the one that they actually go with, I'd hope. I don't know. It's very like when they unveiled the new Volkswagen bug.

Yeah. Yeah. This is like a cartoon version of it. And the face just looks like, meh. Just look at the front of the car. It looks like it's saying, meh. Yeah, it does. They should probably curve up that end so it's at least smiling. Exactly. Come on.

Be happy. Your car can drive itself. There's no brake pedals, no steering wheels. Just, I don't even think there's no shit handles in it. No, there doesn't appear to be anything. There's just, there's one button. That's it. And the other thing that it's missing is a roll cage because, damn it, if the car's going to be driving itself, I want a roll cage in there.

That's true. It doesn't look quite safe enough. Although this does, I mean, as soon as they came out with this story, just, what was it, three weeks ago on Silicon Valley when they had the guy get in the self-driving car and he couldn't ride anything and he ended up in a shipping container. Yeah. Yeah. I can see lots of that happening. You know, I was kind of against this at first.

I think we talked about it a couple of podcasts ago and you were just like, you know, once everybody has these, it's going to be the greatest thing ever. And I'm starting to come around to that. I would love to see the city of Los Angeles with no longer having any self-driven cars and everything is just kind of a goober, which is what I believe we came up with.

Yeah, goober. A goober car. Now, speaking of goober, Uber released some numbers this week saying that 20,000 jobs are created on their platform every month from the new Uber X drivers. Now, when these self-driving cars come around, they either better turn into mechanics or go find a new job.

Yeah, this is not a lot of job security here, people. And how much? Well, it's going to be a while until these things come around, but I don't think it's that long. I mean, within 10 years, I think these things are going to be everywhere. So, yeah, it sucks. I mean, we finally got a new job creation engine here.

And Google's just going to crap all over it. I find these numbers to be slightly unbelievable. There's no way that you're making 90 grand a year in New York City driving an Uber. No way. I mean, everybody would have to be driving one.

There would be no passengers at that point because everybody's driving their damn Uber X looking for passengers. Yeah, there's just no way. I call bullshit on these numbers. Hear that, Uber? Give us proof. Yeah, come on, Uber. We want proof. I want some fucking pay stubs from some of these drivers. Yeah, seriously.

W2s or 1040, whatever the fuck they are. Yeah. I don't know how taxes work. So you should probably figure that out at some point. Yeah. By the time I figure it out, I'll be dead. So screw it. Okay. Now, Facebook's doing some things this week that are, oh, let's just say shitty, like they do every week.

We should have our shitty Facebook section now, since we've got rid of Kickstarter in the balls. We'll have shit on your Facebook. Sorry about that. So now Facebook is going to start killing all of these automatic posts from things like Spotify and Foursquare, which I am 100% okay with.

But then, you know, where do they stop? Yeah, unless you pay them. And then where does it stop? Well, see, here's a big issue for me. There's no decent, I run a bunch of artist pages. There is no decent way to do tour dates unless, so you end up using basically bands in town and you put in your tour dates and it's a nice little publishing platform and it automatically publishes to your timelines.

If that goes away, there is absolutely no point in using Facebook as a band. No, none whatsoever. Yeah. Band or brand. Exactly. And, you know, people have been pulling away from that for a year now. I think it's going to continue. Unless you're a TV show or a movie, because now they're going to listen to what's going on in the background and see what you're listening to or watching.

This scares the crap out of me. I do not want. It's opt-in. It's opt-in. Yeah. For now. For now. Just like, you know, the news feed was opt-in originally. Except, you know, for the fact that we found out through the Snowden talk that basically people can listen to our phones and see through our cameras on our phones anytime they want to.

Yeah. So now they're doing voice recognition for television shows and movies and whatever else. Basically, your Facebook app will be listening and looking through your phone. So then how long does it take them to get everybody's voices into their database, like they have our faces, and they can say, oh, you're hanging out with Joe.

We can hear him in the background, you know? Yeah. It's just getting creepier and creepier and creepier. It's getting creepier and creepier, but the kids just don't seem to care. No. No, they don't. Actually, they probably think it's the coolest thing ever or have no opinion either way.

Yeah. If I can connect this to my Tinder profile, I can see if the chick is in the bar right now. I hear her. Oh, actually, that's a really good use. It's a fucking creepy use is what it is. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Okay. So moving on to a little tech stuff.

There's an article going around called Why Link Shorteners Harm Your Readers and Destroy the Web. This is a repeat of everything. This article just gets dragged up. It's a different article written by a different person, but the sentiment remains the same. And it's been making the round, so I just wanted to bring it up.

Link Shorteners suck. They're good for what you need to do to have a little tiny thing because of Twitter and you only get your 140 characters. And they've got their built-in one, which honestly for them is smart because it does some spam protection and malware checking and shit like that. But when you look at things like Bitly, and there was the original, I can't even remember the name of the original when it was so long ago.

Was it shortlink.us was mine. Okay. Yeah. These Link Shorteners have been around for over 10 years. We were writing them for, you know, we were writing them way back when. And the big issue now is you have these things stack.

You know, I post a Link Shorten URL to one service that goes through another service and another service. And this guy's got a list here. And just to get through the redirections for one link, it can be up to like three and a half seconds. Yeah. And you've got like all these DNS requests. You've got HTTP requests.

It just stacks up. And then if one of them goes away, the links break. You know, links should be timeless. They should always work. That's the whole point of them. And so, you know, anything that does Link Shortening does harm the web, but people are going to keep doing it.

You're, that's it, you know. So if it, don't send me this link anymore. You have, you have my opinion on it now. Yes, it sucks. Yes, it breaks the web. People are not going to stop. Okay. That's kind of how I feel about everything we talk about on this podcast. Yeah, that sucks. It's really fucking stupid.

Nobody's going to stop. Yeah. Unfortunately, there, therein lies the rub. Yeah. Speaking of things that suck. It's like, it's not just like the global warming of the internet. You know, everybody knows it's, everybody knows it's happening. Nobody wants to change. Well, on an extremely related subject about things that are stupid and just won't stop, Gwyneth Paltrow has decided to chime in about the internet.

Again? I don't think she's ever really done it before specifically. I mean, not this way. She, you know, she chimes in about a lot of stupid things and is the shocking thing to me is how she's so tone deaf to what people really live like or think.

But on the other hand, and in her defense, she has created an entire brand being this way and a very successful one. So as much as people want to bitch and moan about everything that she says, she's doing something right. I could not. I would like to have a conscious uncoupling from Gwyneth Paltrow myself.

And I would like to, I'd like to consciously uncouple her from the internet. Well, I agree with that. I don't really have the slightest idea why she was asked to come and speak at this internet conference. Because I don't, they could get her. I don't know.

I, when you sent me this link, I was just like, really, this is a thing. People are talking about this. And then I started to see the links come through on, on Facebook and somebody posted a really interesting one where Green Beret comes back after her about her, her war, war analogy.

And well, just to recap what it actually is. She was asked, she was asked to go speak at read slash codes code conference where she did a short little speech. I mean, she, she is, I suppose, qualified to go ahead and speak at an internet conference. I mean, she runs goop.com, which is a, an internet-based lifestyle site.

So fair enough. She has people that run it for her. Well, yeah, unfortunately not me. And she obviously has no branding experts because it's called fucking goop. Yeah, I know. The hell? That's what she, that's, that's what she put. No, wait, that was Cameron Diaz. Nevermind. I get them mixed up. They're idiot blonde chicks.

What are you going to do? Right. She did chime in about, about, you know, the commenting and flame wars. And the sort of stuff that basically the internet exists for and is built on. And to be fair, she has taken a lot of criticism and a lot of, of, of, of negative comments throughout her online career.

But then she, of course, went too far and, you know, kind of related it to be like, it's almost like how in war you go through this bloody dehumanizing thing. And, oh, wow. Yeah, that was, no. Yeah. Mean tweets are like getting your leg shot off. That's right. Exactly.

So, whatever. So, there you go. She did it again. Let's put her in the, in the, can we never talk about her again column. We will have a Gwyneth. We will consciously decouple from Gwyneth Paltrow on the Grumpy Old Geeks. Thank you. There was an article in Reuters that I found this week about the true cost of your commute.

Right. Is an interesting article, but the, the case study that they use is a woman who used to drive two and a half hours each way every day. Which is a ridiculous commute, unless you're in LA, because that's like three miles. Yeah. Seriously. That was, that was, that was mine from Long Beach to Marina del Rey.

Yeah. But, yeah, talk about, way to pick an outlier, you know? Oh, I know. This is not, you cannot use this as an example. I mean, this is, this is a manufactured story using a specific case that is not the norm to make a point. Yeah, definitely.

It was interesting how they like ran the numbers a little bit, but they don't even, they don't even really go into the true health costs of sitting for that long and anything else with it. It was, it was just kind of a half-assed attempt at journalism, I think. It was, you know, clickbait. I clicked it, so I was baited, I lost.

So, if you see this article come through, don't click on it, don't read it, it's crap. Yeah, but there was one interesting thing. There's a, some, a little bit down in the article, because I read it all as well. They talked about one personal finance blogger, a 39-year-old guy in Colorado named Pete, who remains anonymous for his family's privacy.

He boasts over 4 million unique hits for his popular website. Says that these numbers are kind of crap, but the fun thing is he goes by the name Mr. Money Mustache. I know. Maybe he runs a Lyft car in his, in his spare time. Ooh, Mr. Pink Money Mustache.

Ooh, fancy. Security! So, after all that depressing news, let's get to something fun. Mm-hmm. I like security. So, this just came out from the Naked Security blog. Google unenthusiastically launches right-to-be-forgotten request form.

Apparently, the EU has laid the hammer down, and they ruled earlier in the month on the, giving the people the right to be forgotten, which means that you can request that things be taken out of Google. And they've launched a form.

And the form, you know, you put in a bunch of stuff and give them your, a scan of your ID, and they say that, we'll get around to it sometime. Yeah. There's no- Pretty much. We don't have a timeline, but, you know, you can send us a form, send us a note. Yeah. Give us a post it.

You can say that, you know, I'd really like to have this link not be in Google. Yeah. Unfortunately, you have to be in the EU to make that happen. Yeah, well, the European Union is way ahead of us in terms of privacy legislation, but even theirs is kind of crap.

But they're much more supportive of it. They're much quicker to do it, and Google's not thrilled about it. And I guarantee you they'll never do that here because we don't have that kind of laws or restrictions here, but the European Union does. And a lot of things actually have to be different if you're operating in Europe than over here.

Privacy, especially things like mailing lists, because I run banned sites that are based in the UK, completely different way of approaching things. And take the privacy and removal requests very seriously and have to. Well, that's good. I wish we had that here.

I do, too. They have it in Canada as well. So just not here. Yeah, it's never going to happen here ever. Yeah. So I unfortunately have a Huffington Post link myself this week, which is scary that we both have HuffPo. Considering we have a segment called HuffPo.

No! Some Harvard and MIT kids have made, quote, I'm using my air quotes here, NSA-proof email. Sure, they did. So I signed up for the beta list. I haven't gotten access yet.

Right. And they say they'll eventually open source it, which they should be open sourcing it from the get-go. But I can see what they would want to keep a little bit, you know, behind the kimono, as the kids say. I think what they're doing is basically doing end-to-end encryption using JavaScript in your browser.

Okay. So it goes over the air both ways encrypted. Right. I think. I'm assuming that that's what they're going to be doing because that's about the only way that you can kind of even come close to that. Yeah. So, I don't know. Fingers crossed. Hopefully they crack the nut. They say that everything that will be stored on their actual servers will be encrypted.

They never see the decrypted data. So that's an interesting approach. The one thing that worried me a bit was the last paragraph, the first sentence. We're going to be following a model very similar to Dropbox. Oh, no, no. No, no, no. That's not for technology.

That's just a free account. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yes. The security model of Dropbox, that would be not that great as has been proved time and time again. So, okay. No, it's just the pricing model, freemium. Yeah, it's a freemium model. They could have just said freemium and gotten away with it instead of invoking the D word.

As I scroll through Hackboard, or Hackpad, which is now owned by the D word. Yes. Anyway, moving on. Moving on. Miss Teen USA. Oh, dear. A hacker for a year had access to her webcam and was taking nudies of her. Oops. And she is, you know, she's shocked and in tears.

Well, put a piece of tape over your damn webcam. Yeah. Yeah. I could have told you that. Oh, I did. I have for a year. Put a piece of tape over your webcam. I agree. And this was kind of a dumb story. But, you know, this is going to keep happening.

I actually have a slight issue, and this is just semantics. Is he really a hacker when all he did was install Creepware on her actual computer because he knew her? He didn't hack into her system. She probably handed him the laptop and said, can you fix my thingy?

And then he put some software on there that just allowed him to basically take over a computer anytime he wanted. So he got to spend a lot of time in his bedroom with a lot of lube. Yes. According to the law, yes, he is hacking. Right. In the black hat sense of the word. Gotcha.

Script kitty is probably more like it. But. Yeah. Yes. A true hacker, probably not. He probably downloaded something off of, you know, a hacker bulletin board, which is just, you know, a toolkit and ran it. Yeah. It's not hard to get somebody's webcam, especially if they're on a PC.

It's extremely easy, actually. Which we will discuss. So here's a big shocker this week is TrueCrypt. Everybody thought was, you know, bulletproof. And there was a Kickstarter to basically audit all the code.

And the audit was going well. You know, they were halfway through it. And they're like, yeah, everything looks good so far. And then, boom, out of the blue, we're shutting down. We're done. Right. It's insecure. Don't use it anymore. And it had something to do with the drop date of support for XP, which is at least that's what they're using.

That's what they're saying. Anyways, I think they found the bit of comments in code that said NSA hack here. Well, nobody knows who these guys are is the other thing. So who knows? Maybe the audit was getting a little too close to where the actual stuff was. But they released a new version that doesn't let you create anything but only mount the old encrypted volume so you can get your stuff off.

Right. And the weird part is they're saying just use the stuff that's built into Microsoft and OSX. And it's like the reason that you existed was because nobody trusts them. Yeah. Exactly. We all wanted to use a third party. There's some interesting stuff about the guy who basically wrote BitLocker, which is the Microsoft version.

And some people backing him up saying, you know, yeah, he's a solid guy. And NSA has had problems decrypting BitLocker stuff. But for the most part, you know, it's it's a shocker. Yeah, totally. I never use it, though.

So I was I was actually planning on trying it. But in the old days, I used to use like PGP, whole disk encrypt and all that stuff. And then PGP went tits up. They got passed around by so many companies. And the worst part about it was they were always like six months behind the OS X release schedule.

Right. So I would forget that I was running PGP and I would upgrade to the latest OS and break my machine for, you know, three days while I had to figure out a way to to bring it back from the dead because it basically locked it at the boot level and you couldn't get past it. Yeah. When you're on a deadline working at your startup for a pitch meeting, that's a really crappy way to start your day.

It really is. My own my own damn fault. So true crypt is dead. Don't know what what else is next for open source encryption, but we'll see. We'll keep an eye on it. Yeah, definitely. There's this. It's crazy that there really isn't a viable option out there.

Yeah, definitely. We'll see. It's it's an interesting problem. So now this one, I this is a story I ran across this morning. This guy, Micah Lee, is basically Green, Glenn Greenwald's go to security guy and is running the security for a first look.

Is that the name of the new I always forget the name of it? The you know, the new eBay. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. First. I think it's first look. Yeah. Sorry about that. It's been a it's been a long day. So this guy, this is the guy that they brought in to basically run the show over there.

And it's a really interesting story about this kid. I think he's young. He's 28. And what he's done, like how he hacked his way into flying to Brazil very quickly. But it's a fun read. It's unmashable, which I generally don't go for.

But this kid's like half activist, half, you know, computer security guy. It seems like a really cool dude and works out of his apartment in Oakland. It's just a fun read. It's a definitely a fun read. And he used to work for the EFF. So, you know, he's got he's got some he's got a good pedigree.

JP Barlow, John Perry Barlow, as it were, stands up for him, says he's a good dude. But from it's just an interesting article if you're into that kind of thing. So I recommend giving it a go through. Yeah, it was a good read. I enjoyed it, especially just like going through all the different steps that he's keeping.

And like I talk about using air gaps and storing things that way. And it's good stuff. The threat model is paranoid. Yeah, definitely. You know what? We haven't heard anything about that. That story we ran a long time ago about the guy who found the virus that could jump the air gap using the speakers and microphone. That's true.

I have to look look that up again and find out what's going on with that dude. Because that was a cool story. That was definitely like, you know, spy novel shit. Yeah, that was like super sci fi crazy. No, definitely. So the elephant in the room. Snowden. Snowden's big interview.

Snowden the interview. Yes. What did you think? I thought he came off really well for himself, actually. I was a bit worried that, you know, Snowden is kind of, while it's been mainstream news for sure, Snowden himself and like the ins and outs and all that is definitely not public, you know, general public interest because people are stupid.

And I was a little worried about his first kind of like mainstream media interview. Um, I thought he was great. I, I, you know, it really, I was on the fence about him for a long time. We've, we've talked about this numerous times. We've had teeter on and, and, you know, initially I was like, you know, he broke the law and a story.

He's a traitor. Um, he, this, the interview made me go, I like this guy. I like this guy a lot. And, uh, I'm glad he did what he did. Yeah. He, he, he came off as very eloquent, very well-spoken, um, had very good points. Yeah. You know, basically everything that was thrown at me through back.

I think a lot of it was, it was very softball, you know, it wasn't really anything, anything that hard coming at him. So any of the three major networks, nightly news guys are not going to exactly going to be hitting hardball. Actually, I'm surprised at that. I really am. Right. Because half the damn country thinks he should be, you know, taken out back and shot.

So the, the, mostly the uninformed to half, but it was interesting that they, they did give him that, that form. Cause obviously they think what he did was great because they've run, ran some of the news. So they've, they've, you know, had a very good upswing from the news. It's profited them probably fairly well.

So it was, I thought it was a really good interview. I think that, you know, he said some things that directly counteract kind of what the, the public perception is. He wants to come back here. He tried to come back here. He was not allowed to come back here. So now everybody calling for his head to come back here.

I understand why he would be a bit annoyed at that. It's like, I tried now. I don't want to. Let's go to a secret court and throw me in jail for the rest of my life. Nah, I think I'll stay here. I'll take a pass on that. Yeah. I love the fact that he doesn't have any information with him.

So there's no security risk for Russia. He does, he does nothing. He has nothing on him there. And, you know, I think it was the first time it's kind of basically just been publicly stated that, Hey, guess what? The government can turn on your microphone and camera on anything that you own anytime they want.

Yeah. He pulled out that burner that was the quote unquote burner. That was pretty funny. Yeah. Yeah. All in all, I thought it was a successful interview and he did change my mind a little bit, you know, because I have been on the fence with him here and there. Just, just looking at some of the leaks that came out and how they've, they've been used by the media.

And I have taken, you know, exception to some of the things and the uses of some of the things, but yeah. And I'm not surprised that he didn't have, that he has no documents on it. I'm sure he cleaned himself out completely before he left that hotel room to go to the airport. He couldn't, he could not travel with that stuff.

No. There's no way in hell. Exactly. I don't care if it was, you know, 16,000 bit encrypted. There's just no way because somebody would have gotten the password out of him, but if he doesn't have it, they can't get it out of him. So yeah, they're there. That's a good thing. Um, yeah. And I like the point where like, everybody thinks he's a Russian spy is like, well, talk to the state department.

They put me here, you know? He's like, I was going to Cuba. So, uh, interesting, interesting, interesting article or not article interview. And they keep posting it on Twitter, like the full interview with Ed Snowden. And it's like, no, it's not. They kept cutting him off. I want to see the full uncut interview.

You know, I really want to see the whole thing. I want to see all of his answers all the way through. Yeah. But I don't think we're ever going to see that. Probably not. Uh, I'm hoping that there will be more interviews and he'll, I mean, I know he kind of shied away for a while, but I don't think he has a choice anymore. He's got to, he's got to just sit there and, and tell his story to everyone that'll listen with as much detail as he can.

And, uh, coming up very soon, we've got the big, uh, Glenn Greenwald, uh, super piece on who they're spying on. So it'll be interesting when that list comes out. Yes, it will. Sure. Until then, we, we haven't had any real big break-ins this week. You know, all the majors, all the majors have kind of stepped up a bit, I guess.

I haven't gotten any, uh, I did get an eBay change my password scam email with somebody who tried to phish me to change my quote unquote eBay password. So, uh, deleted that one real quick. It's been a full week without any major company giving away your password or credit card information.

So sleep, sleep tight. No, no, no. Sleep. Be very afraid because next week then there'll be four. I know. So you know that, you know, we always talk about sleep and how to get better sleep and hacking sleep and all that, that good stuff.

Yeah. Uh, I found a great book this week called, uh, is it so boring you fall asleep? Well, I tell you what the reader is on audible. You have to double time that boy just to, just to kind of get him a little zippy. Uh, it's called night school, wake up to the power of sleep by Richard Wiseman.

Okay. Excellent book. This is the guy that wrote, uh, 59 seconds, which is a cool little book on like, you know, just little hacks that you can do to, you know, just neuro hacky type of things. It was a good book. I thought I reviewed it here before, but maybe not. Um, he's got a, a huge following on YouTube.

Uh, his channel is a quirkology, right? Quirky. Um, I have been, um, I've been tracking my sleep lately and I will get to how I'm tracking it in another segment. But since I've been reading this book, I have found several good little hacks to basically get a better night's sleep, fall asleep faster, dream better and sleep longer.

So all in all, it's a fantastic little book. It's not too long and it's just chock full of tips and tricks that are, that are, they're backed up by science. Okay. So if you, if you have any kind of problems, you know, sleeping or want to sleep better, want to sleep longer, which almost everybody I know in the, they're in the exact same boat, get this book.

You will get something out of it. I guarantee. I might have to pick it up. I mean, I just, I don't have sleep issues, but it's always interesting to read. I mean, I love the science on this. It's, it's just one of those things that we spend, you know, half our lives doing it and we don't really understand it. And I love that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Well, a third, but yeah. I mean, it goes, it goes from the, the history of like the EEG, like, you know, the history of sleep science, because before they couldn't even figure out when you were sleeping and what, you know, what your brain was doing. So it goes from the very beginning. Right. And there's a great story.

And this is why I love, I love anecdotes like this. These guys were trying to build this, uh, basically a scientific instrument. And the scientific instrument had a 40 foot tube in it and it kept getting blocked because there were spider webs that would, there were spiders that would make spider webs in there and then the tube wouldn't work.

And their fix to clean out the tube, they put a cat at one end and a bowl of food at the other and made the cat run through and clean out the spider webs. Genius. That is smart. That is genius. Yes. So for fun stuff like that and, and a lot of good science, check out the book, Night School.

Wake up to the power of sleep. All right. I will. Uh, I read a book, but, uh, this book is basically completely out of left field, particularly for our grumpy old geeks podcast. But, uh, I needed a break from, from the science fiction and the straight up science and all the nonfiction stuff I've been reading.

Um, and for the last three weeks or so, I've had trouble sleeping because my wife has been reading this book and cackling, uh, well into the night. Uh, it's called listen to the squawking chicken. What, what mother knows best. What's a daughter to do a memoir sort of, uh, this is by Elaine Liu, who's more commonly known as a lady gossip.

Laney gossip.com is her site. Uh, it's a massively popular kind of pop culture gossip, whatever site. Um, a bit of, you know, uh, Perez Hilton, except not as rude. And from a woman's perspective, uh, she happens to be Canadian Chinese, uh, first generation, much like my wife.

Um, so having read this book now, uh, it was very funny, uh, extremely enjoyable and a good break away from what I normally would be reading. Um, I understand a lot more about my wife and Chinese culture and how, how they, uh, how they raise, uh, their, their offspring, um, and, and why they're all really good and, you know, driven people.

Okay. So I do not have a Chinese Canadian wife or Chinese anything except some takeout once a week. Um, it, will I find this book interesting or funny? I think you, it's so, she's a very good writer. Um, a lot of these stories are eminently relatable to just, you know, to life in general, to, to, you know, why we do the things that we do and why we're driven to do what we do, how our parents affect us.

Um, yeah, I, I think you would enjoy it. I give it a shot, read a couple of chapters. Uh, there, there's so much hilarity in it in terms of like, just how abusive things can seem, even though they aren't like, I'm hurting you to make you better. You look like dried monkey flakes, all that sort of dried monkey flakes.

Yes. Dried monkey flakes. That's, that's what she looks like every time she goes on TV, according to her mom. Uh, it's fair. It was very funny. Uh, very enjoyable. Cool. I'll check it out. And I will use, uh, one of the things I keep forgetting to mention to people, and it still boggles my mind that people don't really know this is almost any book that's on Amazon.

Yeah. You can get the first chapter for free. Yeah. Because you just use the Kindle app, or even if you don't have an app, if you have a computer, you can download the Kindle reading app on your computer and just hit, send me a, send me the first chapter and they'll send it to you and you can read it and get a, get a feel for the book and, you know, make a decision from that.

I've been using that on, on everything now. Saved me a lot of money. Yeah. Saved me a lot of money. This is a prime, perfect example for that for you then. Get that first chapter. And if you're not laughing, pass it. And if you laugh, get it. I thought it was hilarious. Cool. Just hit send sample now.

Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. So Lifehacker had a list of five apps to make your iPhone and Mac work together even better. As I'm still a year later working on my eventual complete transition to Mac, I thought this would be an interesting thing for me to take a look at.

You got my hopes up. When you send me Mac software, I'm like, did he, did he change? Did he come around to the side of good and right? But apparently not. Well, I'm 95% there. I've got, you know, I've got the iPhone. I've got my laptop, which I do a lot of stuff on. But still, I just have, I have a PC as my main desktop where I kind of just knock out stuff.

But I'm trying to transition more and more every single day, which is kind of why I, I, you know, basically saved this article to look at and talk to you about. Then I realized that you've probably reviewed almost everything on here already. The only one that I've reviewed on, on here on the show is the one called knock, where you basically knock on your phone to unlock your Mac.

I remember you saying it did not work well at the time. It was sporadic as hell. It locked up my, locked up my Mac, barely worked. And I was worried I was just basically going to beat the crap out of my phone because you had to give it a pretty damn good knock. So, and it uses Bluetooth low energy, which I have like the first iMac that supports it because my iMac is ancient.

And it just really, it really didn't work very well. It's easier to type a password than it is to go through all the hoops to, to install this silly little thing. The rest of them I have not tried. Yeah, knock is the one that I would probably not even bother with a notifier, which sends notifications from your iPhone to your Mac is kind of almost a no brainer.

That's a great idea because I love, uh, you know, the iPad and the iPhone do that automatically anyways, which is great. And it's completely useful. So when I'm sitting here and I'm working on my, on my laptop, I would love to have the text messages and WhatsApp messages pop up on my laptop. So I'm not grabbing my phone every 10 minutes.

Well, for text messages and stuff, uh, I use the messages app that's built into OS 10 works great. Okay. So I, I, if you don't have that running already and have it hooked up to your iCloud account, get that done. It's much easier. And people are like, how the hell are you texting me so fast? It's like, ah, so it's a, yeah, just stick with the messages app and give it a shot.

The one that I want to try is called dialogue where you can answer your phone calls on your Mac. Right. I don't know how that works. Oh wait, that's why I wasn't going to try it. It doesn't work with Mavericks, which is old now. It's almost a year old and all my computers run it. So I guess I'll have to skip that one.

So you're out on that one. Yeah. The other one was, uh, the other two that they listed was type to phone, which shares your max keyboard with your iPhone again, which would be pretty damn convenient for sending out and responding to things, uh, text messages and whatnot. And, uh, command C shares clipboard data between devices instantly, which is pretty awesome because I got sick of emailing myself stuff.

That one is really good. Also, although I've got my, I pretty much have my workflow down with, uh, URLs to pinboard. And then I have, I have those everywhere. Yeah. Um, opening things in Safari. And then I just, I, I generally don't use Safari on my Mac is my like main go-to browser.

I use Chrome. Right. But with the, if you do the window sharing on Safari, you can basically see all of the, uh, tabs that are open on all of your other devices, which is handy as hell, you know, it is very handy. Chrome does that, but I don't use Chrome, the Chrome browser on my iPhone.

I use it on my iPad. That's great. But yeah. So I'll give some of these a shot. Now, you know, I've got a love and hate relationship with the game dots. Oh yes. Here we go again. Yep. Well now, now we have two dots. Oh, did we, did we lose you for two weeks?

No, no. It's a, I just got it yesterday. So you lost me for about an hour. And it's, it's, it's basically candy crush saga with the dots model. It's, you know, a windy road of different levels. You can buy crap to get through the levels faster, buy lives.

It's got the five life, then 20 minute per life recycle thing, just like candy crush. Yeah. Um, I think I'm on level 26 and there's like 400 and some odd levels, but I, I'll keep it around. I will not pay for it. Okay. I made that, I, I said that when I started out with candy crush and it cost me probably 50 bucks at the end of the day.

And then I just, I couldn't take it anymore. So I deleted it just because of the time suck. Right. So this one, I have notifications off for it. I will try it twice a day and I will play my five lives and that will be it. I'm, I'm putting my foot down with it. I'm, it's not, I'm not going to waste my time with it.

Look at that discipline. I don't believe it. Well, Hey, talking about discipline, I got rid of Facebook and Twitter on my phone, which the peace of mind that came with that, with knowing that it wasn't there and like having to go through the hassle to install it, reauth and all that crap, just not having it there and knowing that it's not there to just keep looking at like the, you know, the fucking dog trying to get a pellet.

Yeah. So much peaceful, so much more peaceful, so much more calm. And I've been moving away from Facebook. Like I'll, I'll check it once every two days now. So. Right. But I, I do enjoy Twitter much more because of it. Anyway, the other thing I waste time with obviously are the podcasts. There's a new podcast app out.

I'm not going to say podcatcher because that's the stupidest term. It's called Castro. I ran across these guys because I was having problems with a client feed and they were cool enough to email, email the client. And then I got in the middle of it and fixed the feed and they gave me a free version of it to check out.

But he didn't know that. I was the same guy on Twitter asking people, Hey, what's your favorite one? You know, is it, you know, downcast, instacast or Castro or whatnot? And he, he DM'd me and said, Hey, check it out. Here's a free, here's a free copy of it. So cool guy, you know, uh, there's, it's like a two person team.

The guy that I'm talking to is Irish. So I can't pronounce his name because it's like half Gaelic, but it's very, very pretty. It's not really meant for power users. As far as I can tell the, the tools aren't there.

Like they are in downcast for me, downcast is like, you know, just the, the power users podcast player. I, I can do so much more in there. The, the UI and caster, like I said, it's very pretty. Unfortunately, they do the round icon thing, which drives me nuts and it's inconsistent, which is even more interesting.

Like I put in the grumpy old geeks podcast and I put in, does it have legs? Now the grumpy old geeks podcast, they crop and the, the, does it have legs podcast? They have the whole icon in the circle. So that doesn't make much sense to me. I don't know if they've got somebody there by hand sitting there cropping these things, which would be such a waste of time, especially when they should be square.

So that was annoying. The other annoying part is the interface. When you go into a show, the background for the page of the show that you're on is basically a giant blurred version of the color palette of the icon of the show. So when you, whenever you go into a different show, like I go into a Drew and Adam's podcast, Dr.

Drew and Adam Carolla's podcast, it's this God awful turquoise screen. So if I'm at, you know, it, at night, if I'm getting ready to just play a podcast to go to bed too, and I get this giant glaring blue light in my face, I don't want that. I would like, you know, a nice dark palette.

So it is a very big inconsistency across different podcasts. And just the way that you tell if it's actually downloaded onto your phone or if it's waiting to stream or whatnot, you can't tell at a glance. You have to go and click each show. And that part's kind of a mess. But for the delay podcaster, I think, I think it's probably just fine.

It works better than the iTunes one by a long shot. Right. Yeah, it's got a really nice interface for speed control and skip control. The forward and back buttons are programmable for how long you want the skip to be, which is great because most of them are either like 30 or two, like the, the downcast one has a great skip forward for two minutes one, because obviously listen to five by five and this goddamn Squarespace commercials.

So they know what they're doing there, but it's, it's, it's a nice, a really nice podcast app. As far as look and feel goes, it's the prettiest one on the market hands down and it works great. It's fast. So if you know somebody that's just wants to, wants to get into podcasting and just listen, it's like, you know, a couple bucks, but as far as I can, it's well worth it.

It's a, it's a great little app. I'm not going to use it day to day. I've used it for a week now and I like it, but I just need, I need downcast for the stuff that I do, especially because I could, I have to be able to import files directly from the computer to play them. So there's, there's more power tools on downcast. So if you're a podcaster, definitely downcast is the way to go.

If you're Joe Schmo on the street who just wants to have a really nice experience listening to podcasts, Castro is the way. All right. Now let me, as an audio nerd, let me ask you a question. Um, high fidelity podcast is in the name. Is that just a naming thing? Because I'm assuming that there isn't any higher fidelity or audio processing that they're doing to make it sound better.

I have no idea because I'm deaf as a post. Okay. I have, my ears are so shot. I couldn't, I could not tell you. So, uh, I think I still have an extra code that he sent me. I'll send it to you and you can try it out and tell me if the audio quality is better or not. I have a feeling it's just a naming thing, but I'll give it a go.

Yeah. Cool. Candy, candy, candy, candy. You sent me a link to a frontline, a generation, like a video that they put up there, um, saying had I seen this yet? And of course I, I had not because I am lazy, but, uh, I did watch it.

I watched the whole thing. It's, it's 53 minutes long. Um, and, uh, it was really well produced and I came away feeling horrible. Very horrible. Did you feel very old? I felt very old. I felt very sad.

Um, and it's, it's interesting. I ran across this because I was doing some more research on Douglas Rushkoff because I was going to pick up his new book that we talked about on the last show and I really like him. So I was curious about his take on this thing and I'd never heard of this one. So it was, it was interesting to see what, what frontline's take on it was.

Yeah. The, it's, it's, you need, if you are in this industry at all, you should probably watch this, especially if you're older. Uh, they basically take a look at, uh, how the young generation is coming up with all these things basically built in and never understanding a world without it about how much of their self-worth is based on how many likes they got on their, on their comments and how much, uh, you know, how many people are following them on Twitter and, oh, it's just, and then

when they get into the entertainment stuff and these kids that are, you know, making money on YouTube and just doing God knows what. And, and the fact that these new, these new kids that are coming up instead of, you know, have, you know, instead of, instead of, I can tell you're having some problems with this.

I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around it. It's, it's such a foreign world. Yeah. It's really hard to reconcile what is important to kids nowadays versus what was important to us. Yeah. I mean, you have, you have like, you have kids coming up that are, that are trying to basically be musicians and they're, they're stunt casting YouTube stars in their videos to merge fan bases.

Well, people in podcasting do that too. Well, that's, that's what the podcasting world is. We've talked about that at great length about how like, you know, basically everybody just goes from podcast to podcast and this giant podcasting circle jerk, but yeah. Which for some reason we haven't got on to the extent that we probably should.

Actually, I know maybe we should be trying this, you know, so. Yeah. Give me a reach around whoever's out there. I was on the tech douchebag podcast. So that was our first foray into, uh, the, the jerking of the circle. But I, I was fascinated by this piece and yeah, if you, if you deal with young people and are curious about their interaction with the internet for, as far as, you know, trying to, if you see them wanting to make videos, taking selfies, all this crap, this will give you a, a better

look into their psyche as to what's happening now. I don't know if this was a very broad enough sample audience to really get, you know, that big of a thing out of it, but it was fascinating. It just to watch these kids sit around the table, you know, like talking about their profile pictures and all this shit.

And I'm just like, Oh my God, how vapid is, is this? Um, yeah. Generation vapid was more in line with what I thought of it, but it was interesting to watch some of the social media marketing companies in the big one that they showed. I think they just got bought by Disney. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So that was actually the bit that made me the most sad because you would have these kids that kind of, uh, as much as I feel it's wrong to be raised that way and, and to, to put so much emphasis on, on these social networks as, as a kid, um, you'd see some of these kids that just, they, they, they took it, they understood it.

They learned the game and they won. I mean, they kicked ass at it. And then you have the older guys like us in the, even our companies just swooping in to figure out how we're going to make money off these kids. Make money off the kid. Well, actually we're middlemen. We make money off the brands. Yeah, exactly.

We make money off the brands by, uh, manipulating the kids and they are getting smarter and it is getting harder to do that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. The, the hunger game stuff was very interesting on how they, they played that out to get some kind of insight into that campaign was definitely very interesting because they, you know, with the timed releases that over the broad spectrum of platforms and I've worked at, you know, a couple of agencies now that tried to do that and did it very poorly.

Right. Some of them did like, they got lucky sometimes. And I think what we're seeing with the, uh, the examples on the show are, is of an agency that got lucky. That's really hard to reproduce every time it really is. So I think we saw, I think they gave us a good example of what it looks like when it works well.

Most of the time it really doesn't work that well. Most of the time it fails horribly. Yeah. Yeah. And you just spent, you know, 50 to a hundred, 500 grand on, you know, a couple thousand, uh, people clicking like, and then going about their day. Yeah. So, okay, next.

I can't, I can't think about it anymore. My brain's going to explode. Well, uh, the next thing I did was actually, I went back to an old podcast I used to listen to ages ago. And again, it seems to be, uh, this is my week of kind of getting away from tech and science and all of that. Uh, I just went, uh, it's called the pretty good podcast.

Uh, it's just a general entertainment, personality driven podcast, uh, no tech bent at all whatsoever. It's just what they did around LA this weekend. And is it pretty good? Yeah, it's pretty good. I wouldn't say, I wouldn't say it's damn good. I think they named it accurately.

Um, it's, it's great for me because the two hosts, Gina grad and, uh, Randy Wang used to work at the old KLSX talks talk radio station here in LA where Adam Carolla was on, where frosty Heidi and Frank were on. Um, I used to listen to that station religiously.

So you get a little bit of a, you know, a backroom baseball talk going on about the, the old days like that. And all those, all those personalities that were running around. And I just miss that damn station so much. So, so I, I have this thing where, when I read, I generally start at the bottom and work my way up.

Oh, you want me to, all I, the first thing I started off with was fantastically large breasts. So, so this would be not Randy that you're talking about. Well, Randy probably as well. Although I, I hear he's lost a lot of weight. He used to be quite a big boy. Um, yeah, so the, the two, I haven't listened to a long time to, to this podcast.

So it was kind of nice to come back to it, but it was a little shocking to find out that that co the first cohost, Randy Wang, uh, who was straight, apparently went gay for a long time, but now has a girlfriend again. So that was, that was fun to dip in on. And, uh, Gina grad is, is really funny.

She has her own podcast as well. I'm a little surprised that she is not more famous, uh, than she actually is because she is one of those people that just, uh, a very large personality to match her very large breasts. Excellent. Too bad, too bad, too bad. Too bad her breasts don't work that well on radio. No, radio is definitely not the right format unless, you know, we have access to her iPhone the entire time she's recording.

All right. Who's this asshole? I had a really, really cranky day one day. You really went. Hey, it doesn't always happen, but, uh, I was having, I was having a pretty bad day where I was just kind of annoyed at everything.

And this is, uh, right place, right time. All of a sudden I saw two or three links to this upworthy.com piece. There's your first problem. Yeah. There's the problem. Number one. Uh, I thought Facebook was getting better at, at deleting these out, but you know, this is one of those, like, the title is before we use certain words, we should all look at these pictures.

They might make us think twice. Okay, fine. It's a feel good piece. It's about, let's not judge a book by a cover or something like that, whatever, uh, pour myself a glass of wine and click. And then I just got super fucking pissed off. So the images, uh, first you get a warning saying these images may be too graphic for some people.

Yes. Because we have to make everything sound like it's much more than it actually is. And it's basically a bunch of kids with bruises on them with words written in them. That's it. That's it. It's, it's faked. It's not real. It's all makeup and it's done to make a feel good point and has no fucking substance whatsoever.

Yeah, pretty much. It's a, it started out at hurt words.com. Yeah. Which I just want to, I just want to destroy those people. Do you want to hurt it, Brian? Yeah. I want to hurt the hurt words. You want to hurt it with a tire iron, then not with your words. I understand that, you know, this is a real issue and these are things that we should be talking about.

And these are things that are important, but whatever happened to sticks and stones will break my bones. You beat me to it. You totally beat me to it. That's it. Grow up people. And even if you don't want to grow up is, is faking imagery to make it graphic and offensive when it's not real accomplishing anything.

Now, maybe. Other than it got, you know, you know, some makeup artists made a fucking couple bucks that week. I was thinking maybe they should put Gwyneth Paltrow in there. Yeah. For some reason, this reminds me of that really terrible series that that one photographer did where she took the lollipops out of kids mouths and made them cry and then took the pictures of them.

For some reason, it reminds me of that in the same offensive nature. When I look at these, I'm just like, I'm offended by this. It's just faked up shit made, you know, done purposely to push some buttons and your time could have been better spent actually giving us some real facts and statistics about actual stuff that has caused problems.

Real bullying, real world examples, not made up bullshit. And speaking of made up bullshit, while I was on that page, I saw some, another up where they saw a thing that popped up and I clicked on it because I was cranky. Tired of people mispronouncing your name? A poetry champion named Chikondria is too.

Now, I don't know the proper pronunciation, but I'm just saying, if you're going to go with the name Chikondria, you expect, you should probably expect people to not to fucking get it right because it's not a fucking name. Well, you say you don't know the pronunciation. Did you not watch the video for two minutes where she tells you how to pronounce her name?

No, I refuse to watch it. You bastard, you made me watch it. You dick. It's a poem where I'm already offended by the poem, but it's actually a very good poem. And she talks about the reasoning behind why some people have names like this.

And she calls them ghetto names and why people say don't write your name down on a job application or things like that. It was actually a very good video and she was very eloquent. And, you know, you put this under the asshole section, but I thought she came across pretty well. I was, I was quite impressed with her.

I didn't put this under the asshole section because of her. I put it under the asshole section because of Upworthy. Oh, well, there you go. Okay. No, I'm sure she's fine. And I'm sure she's a great poet. And again, it just comes down to, uh. Don't you know it. Don't you know it. So before I was talking about my sleep tracking.

Now, I, I'm a fan of Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose. They're, you know, old, old acquaintances. And I watched their new, uh, episode of the random show, number 24. Right. And Kevin was talking about how he got this new misfit shine and how it was working really well with him and his wife, Daria, to, to track their sleep.

And it gave them really good numbers about deep sleep and time of sleep. Now, it's not scientific because it's just using an accelerometer, right? Right. But as far as deep sleep goes, you don't move. You're paralyzed. I found that out in the book. So you, it can get a fairly decent idea of how long you're asleep and your, your actual time in deep sleep.

So I said, what the hell? I'll get it. You know, let's try it out. It's another quantified self tax write-off. Right. Um, which I hope I can figure out how to write it off. That's that whole tax thing. I know. Um, a hundred bucks got it from Amazon. They're supposed to have it at Best Buy, but they were sold out.

So I just Amazoned it. Uh, it's a nice little wrist-based thing. And I've always talked about wrist-based step trackers being crap. So I didn't get it for the steps. It can't do stairs. It's just got a three-way gyroscope sensor in it. That's it. I mean, that's all it's got. Bare bones, very small, fits on the wrist.

Really nice. I, it doesn't bother me at all. It is not ugly. No, it's not. It looks like a watch with no face, but you can't. Tap it and have it, have the time come up. But I turned that off because I have, you know, a phone and a Fitbit and a watch. So I tried it out for the past two nights. Works like a charm.

It's great. It tracked my sleep, gave me time of sleep numbers. It gave me step numbers and it gave me deep sleep numbers. Now I checked the step numbers against my Fitbit because I had them on almost exactly the same amount of time. Yeah. And they are surprisingly close.

If anything, the, um, the shine is under-reporting, not over-reporting like the Nike fuel band did. Right. So as far as steps go, I was really impressed with the, the step counting on it, but the sleep thing was, was even better because it's got an auto sleep tracker. It's in beta and they're still working out, you know, the algorithms for it.

Cause it's a fairly new product. Um, and yeah, I just went to bed and once it, once you lay down and stop moving, it basically turns on the, turns into sleep mode and tracks you. And I get up in the morning and I sink it and it gives me a graph and shows me what's what for a hundred bucks. I'm pretty impressed with it because I can't wear the Fitbit to sleep because it does sleep tracking too, but you have to wear this cuff and all this other stuff.

It's uncomfortable. It's really uncomfortable. This I have on, I don't even think about it. So, so far so good. And it's not rechargeable. You just put a watch battery in and it lasts three to four months. Oh, that's fantastic. And I, I, I'm just scanning through their site right now and it says that it supports cycling and I am looking for my Argus replacement.

Here's what you have to do with the cycling though. You have to triple tap it to go into cycling mode. So it knows that you're going to cycle. I think I can handle that. Yeah. Well, hey man, some people can't, but when you get on the bike, you just triple tap it. And I've got it set up for that too, because I'm going to go for a bike ride this afternoon. So excellent. I'm going to let you know how the biking thing works.

Yeah. Let me know next week how this is going. And if you still like it, I'll order it. Okay, we'll do. And, uh, I'll throw up some of the graphs on, uh, the blog post for the, with the show notes so you can see what the sleep tracking looks like. I'm, I'm, I'm really liking it. It's got a really nice interface. It's, there is no like desktop component like there is with the Fitbit.

It's all, uh, on your iPhone. Cool. Very cool. I have been like expanding my morning news, uh, email list. Yes, I know.

You've given me a couple and now I have a bunch every morning. Yeah. Yeah. I need to mute these like Monday through, or actually Saturday through Wednesday, because if I read these things all week long and I, when we're just talking about the show. Yeah. I, our show would be four hours long.

I find so much cool stuff in these things. Yes, you'd need to mute it then. Yeah. Yeah. My, uh, my new favorite one though is media redefined. It's a website, but it's also a newsletter. And every day there are just great stories, just fantastic stories.

And now here's where I'm going to draw a blank because I can't remember the guy's name that does it and I don't want to open my mail app, but there's going to be a link in the show notes to it, to the, uh, website. Oh, Jason Hirshhorn. That's what I knew. I knew the name from something there. I'm not that, not that flaky.

Yet, but, um, yeah, it's, it's a wonderful, wonderful, uh, newsletter. And, you know, he was one of the former co-presidents of my space. So he's been in the business for quite some time. So he knows he has a good picker. Let's just say that. Yeah. Have you been, have you subscribed to this one yet?

I have, I have indeed. And there was a bunch of stories in here that I actually wanted to kind of slam into our show today, but I held back because we already had a lot of stuff. That's the problem. Like over a week, we might just have to start doing the show twice a week. Yeah. We'll see about that. You lazy bastard. It's not, it's time, man.

I don't have time. So check this one out. If you want like really good, uh, daily stories about what's going on in tech and just other stuff, there's, there's some just generally cool stories in there. Like there was one about, uh, world war one pictures from the trenches that was in there the other day. That was really good.

Anyway, good, good find the website. There's just, it's just a grid of shit. It looks, it looks like Pinterest for news and I just can't take that, that, that type of interface just makes my skin crawl. So I'll pass on the website and it's taken the place of the dig newsletter for me, which is fine.

You know, I can cut one out to add a new one. Yeah. Now we talked about fucked company last week and how I miss them. Mm-hmm. Well, there's a, another website called product hunt, which I think, I think we could, it's like a kind of a board for up and coming products that people can vote on and talk about type of thing.

Mm-hmm. I think if you go to this website every day, you can just call it the preemptive fucked company because every company on here is going to be fucked within a couple months because it's got some of the worst ideas I've ever seen. Uh, yeah, it's got some bad ones. For example, the one I found today was drum pants.

Right. Have you seen drum pants before? No. Drum pants are basically sensors that you put into your pants so you can slap your legs and tap your toes and play the drums. Well, you keep forgetting I live in Venice Beach and there's a drum circle. This would actually quite possibly do very well here.

Ooh, God. That's another reason not to live in Venice Beach. Yes. I just, I, you know, I used to hang out with a lot of bands, which I'm sure you have, and you've been in, you've been in bands, so. Yes, I have. I was always the photographer for the band because I've got no musical talent. The most annoying person in the band is always the drummer because everywhere you go, they're rat-tat-tatting on the table, they're ratting on the back seat of the car, wherever you go, they're rat-tat-tatting away.

Now, if a drummer had this and you took him to Denny's, he would never get out of there because he'd be stabbed in the heart within 10 seconds. It's just, I think it's a bad idea. Shout out to Mike Malinan, previous guest and drummer. Sorry, Mike. Yeah, some of these are ridiculous.

Yeah, he goes running to get his drumming out of him. Like a ship and dip, discover your next favorite dips. It's Birchbox for condiments. Oh, God, I almost squirted my tea on that one. But, I mean, you know, we can laugh at a lot of these, but you click on the links and they've obviously got some funding.

No, they're not going to last, but these are some professional sites. You know, somebody thought these were good ideas. So, yeah, I'm sure most of them came out of Y Combinator. But, yeah, and I don't know, the Product Hunt guys have a podcast, which I cannot bring myself to listen to because I can't, I can't.

If you've listened to it, feel free to drop us a note or leave us a comment and let us know if it's any good. So, I'm not going to, I'm going to step back from that one. But I do believe that this would be the preemptive fucked company of our time. I tend to agree with you. Just as I scan down, I'm going, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum.

So, if you had your drum pants, you could like have a soundtrack. Oh, there you go. Dum, dum, dum. Okay, so, last one I got was something I found this week called GoWatchIt.com. Have you seen this site before? I have not. You put in a movie and it, or a TV show or whatever, and it tells you on which service you can find it.

Oh, that's actually rather convenient. I'm telling you, because I was looking for some obscure movie and I was trying to find out where it was, you know, if I could find it on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon or where I could get it, iTunes. It'll give you the rundown of where it's at, if it's streamable, or if you can buy it or rent it and what the costs are.

Fantastic. So, you can, you know, it, you know, it's, I can find out, oh, I can stream it here on a Roku for $2.99 or I can rent it on Amazon for $1.99. It's cool. It's really cool. It's actually, this is a useful website that people will actually use. So that is extremely useful because it's all over the map these days.

And yeah, I didn't know you could buy movies at YouTube now. I had no idea. So now I know. So yes, you can go rent and buy movies on YouTube of all fucking places. It does kind of make sense. Even though I've been staying away from science and stuff like that, this week's Are You Shitting Me?

Pluto has never made a full orbit around the sun from the time it was discovered to when it was declassified as a planet. Poor Pluto. Not one orbit. It's way out there, man. It's got a long way to go. The universe is goddamn big. We got some science to back that up in case you don't believe us. In our show notes, grumpyoldgeeks.com.

And I ran across another link. I just, I read this and I'm like, are you shitting me? And based on the URL it's coming from, which is xposethereal.com. I'm calling bullshit on this anyways. There's a link that says the FBI has released documents proving that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun fled to Argentina in a submarine that they did not actually die in that bunker.

Contrails, contrails, tinfoil hat, tinfoil hat. It's very tinfoil hat-y, but, you know, I love that shit sometimes. That makes for a good novel, but I don't believe this is real. I'm pretty sure they did DNA tests. Well, no, they didn't do DNA testing. What the fuck am I saying? They couldn't do DNA testing on the body.

But anyways, you know. I wrote too many tinfoil hat ones. Yes, okay, I'll give it a read just because I bet it's funny. Give it a read and then go ahead and click on the actual news headlines. for the site, which is called Exposing the Realities, but they just went for Expose the Real for their thing. Scientists use sound waves to levitate and manipulate matter.

A smarty-pants scientist makes an easy analogy about our planet, and now I'm scared. Discovery of huge underground pyramid in Alaska. Uh-huh. All right. Somebody watches too much X-Files for their expose. Closing shout-outs!

A friend of the show, Hannah, sent me a link, so shout-out to Hannah and to ramen in general. I've been on a ramen kick recently. Not the stuff that you had in college, the dried-out, crappy noodles, but real. I was going to say, man, is business that bad? No. You had to go back to ramen?

No, this is the real shit that isn't so cheap. There's a lot of really, really great Japanese places right here on the west side in L.A. And I've just been, I've gone to about four or five of them in the last month, and I'm in love with ramen at the moment. And rather conveniently, next week is ramen week.

Starting today. Actually, it starts today. That's correct. So for the next week, it's ramen week in L.A. You can go to la-la-la-usa or la-la-la-usa.com slash ramen week 2014 to get a downloadable list of all the places that you can go to with wonderful, like, half-off coupons for delicious, delicious ramen.

Oh, man, I don't think they're going to have anything like that out here, but I do love me some ramen. And if you ever make it up to San Francisco, there's Ibisu. It's a sushi place, but across the street is their noodle place. Oh, my God, it's so good. I mean, I've had the udon there, and it was delicious.

But, man, hangover, ramen is the way to go. Love some ramen. Yeah. Salty, brothy goodness. And speaking of it, it must be a thing going on now because my friend Shlomo, who used to own House of Shields up in San Francisco, has started Ramen Tuesday.

So I think he's just getting started on it. But I know he's got a Facebook page and a website, and he's going to be doing more ramen-themed things on, apparently, Tuesdays. Apparently so. It's nice little photos of some good stuff. Although, to nitpick, one of the photos is Gyoza.

That is not ramen. Oh, dear. Here we go. Throw down. Throw down on the ramen. Nudophyte. Nudophyte. So, well, on Monday, you can get feasted up for your Ramen Tuesday by watching the WWDC keynote. Is it that time already? It is.

I'm excited. I'm excited. I don't know why I'm excited because I can't fully buy anything. And as far as we know, nothing really particularly groundbreaking will be coming or announced. Oh, well, I've been... You never know. You never know. You don't listen to the same podcast that I do. So there's some rumblings on the grapevine.

Man, I'm not going to speculate, but I'm hoping that there's going to be some good stuff. There will be at least iOS 8 and whatever town that they want to name the new OS 1010 after. So somebody put out Sausalito as an idea, but I'm thinking, yeah, what do we do?

Watts. 1010 Watts. Okay. Yeah, well, I'll be watching as well. So it should be interesting. If nothing else, I just want to see how much they're going to talk about Beats and if my stock is going to go up. Oh, you own Beats stock?

Oh, no, you own Apple stock. I own Apple stock. Yeah, everybody seems to be glossing over the fact that Dr. Dre likes to Beats on women sometimes too. So what are you going to do? Now he's a billionaire, so he can sweep it under the rug. Exactly. Yeah, I don't know, man. Those things suck.

They're terrible headphones. They're absolutely horrible headphones. I've talked about that about 2,000 times on this podcast. Yeah, yeah. And I was actually going to go buy some of the Sennheisers that you were pimping, but I ended up buying my sleep tracker instead. So I just have to wait for Beats to get better, I guess.

So good luck with that. No, thanks. That's what we got for this week. Yep, that's the week. Next week will probably be heavy on Apple, I'm guessing. Oh, yeah. We'll see. We'll see if it's anything good. Yeah. So if you haven't yet and would like to, please drop by grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and pretty please give us a review in iTunes.

It helps us get a little bit more, what do you say, exposure so other people who like this kind of thing can find us. Yes, we would like that very much. It helps. We love doing this damn thing. We're going to keep doing it. But if we got some more listeners, we could actually make a little money.

I don't know, something. Not keep going into debt. I'll always say that. We won't be making any money. We'll keep going into debt. So we appreciate it if you can do that. So we'll see you next week. See you next week. Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks, or email them at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

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