63: Yo! Can I have a quarter?

All right. Good morning. Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Jason. How's that hot toddy treating you?

From last night, not so good. Not so good. Well, we're kind of almost back to a drinking show, at least one half of us, but mostly because you're sick. Yeah, I had a little too much hot toddy last night because I have a big giant mug and I was kind of, you know, you'd kind of pour to fit.

But it's like three times the size of a normal coffee cup. Oops. So besides being sick and hungover, this is going to be a great one. But I got my sexy voice on. Sure. We'll see what the ratings are on that one. So I have a mea culpa. I fucked up last week. Pretty big.

You? Never. No, never. Well, to be fair, the whole Tesla, Elon Musk story, all that kind of came out right before we went to record. And my brain is still and was then in World Cup fever mode. So I did not do my research and I talked – we were just kind of spitballing everything that was happening and I talked about how, well, okay, that's interesting.

I wonder how the employees feel and how you could only get away with this if you weren't a publicly traded company. They are a publicly traded company to begin with. Tesla is public. And stock – apparently, these shareholders are not bothered by this announcement because stock has actually taken a bit of a bump up since he announced doing this.

So I was definitely wrong about that and I'm quite happy to do the mea culpa because I like Elon Musk and I like what he's doing and I'm very, very hopeful that he will continue to be a vastly more influential figure on our near future than a lot of the other fuckwits we'll be talking about later in the show.

I am a huge fan. So having said all that, I did a bit more research. I was actually driving around this week and had NPR on. So it was amazing I didn't fall asleep and slam into things. But they did do – they had some people on and talking about it, some people that actually know some stuff about patents and the automobile industry in particular.

People that actually do their homework before they go on the radio to tell other people what they're talking about. So they did a few interviews and apparently the patents that he released aren't particularly useful. Most auto manufacturers have already bought a couple Teslas and tore them apart and completely reverse-engineered them and figured out ways to work around the patent issues.

And a friend of the show, Kevin, sent a link to me that's probably the best overview of the whole situation, which we will have in our show notes and not get into extensively here. But if you're interested at all in Musk and Tesla and what he did, it's a really good overview. The upshot is basically things are super unclear because patents are very bizarre to begin with, particularly within the auto industry.

But the main intention seems to be a statement that Tesla will not get into nasty legal battles with other electronic car manufacturers. So he's basically saying to the entire industry, go for it. We're not going to sue the shit out of you. Build it. Let's build up the industry. Let's expand the industry, which desperately needs to be expanded because mainly they need to expand the charging station industry and infrastructure because right now there are not a lot of charging stations about.

So there you go. I screwed that up. I didn't do my research. And let's clarify it. So, yeah. Okay. Well, thank you for your mea culpa, Brian. Anytime. I appreciate it. I didn't really care that much about this story. I thought it was cool, but I didn't. I'm not a Musk guy.

You are. Yeah, I am even, you know. Well, he caught me with that silly, like, little transporter thingy where you just sit in a little tube and it's like a gigantic roller coaster that will shoot you to San Francisco in two hours. I love that concept. It's great. Yeah, except a lot of people figured out that at that length, just the heat expansion and contraction alone would change the endpoints by, like, 30 or 40 feet.

We'll figure that stuff out. So we said that we would try Amazon Prime Music when it came out, and it came out. Yes, it did. But you had some problems signing up, but I just plopped in, put in my Amazon username and password, and I was good to go. I believe the issue for me was I had not signed up for the Amazon cloud through my account.

So not only did I have to sign into my account, then I had to go and hit off a couple, you know, I understand the terms of services, and I need to connect the streaming cloud thing to my Amazon account and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It ended up taking me, like, five minutes to get this thing up and running, which is a bit ridiculous.

Yeah, but you're getting it for free, so shut up. No, it's not free. You have to have a Prime membership. It wasn't there before when you paid for your membership, and now it's there. That means it's free. No, no, no, it does not, but we don't have to get into that semantic.

It is free. It's not great. There are entire – the largest label in the world is not a part of Amazon Prime Music, so you will not see anything from Universal Music Group available under Amazon Prime. There have not hammered out deals with everyone yet.

Yeah, there's huge swaths of my library that aren't there. So for me, it's – I don't need it. I tried it. I looked at it. I looked for a couple new albums. I think I looked for the new Deadmau5 that wasn't there. Yeah, I looked for a few things just to see if it was worth my time.

I'm going to keep it on my phone. Yeah, I'm going to hold on to it because it's free. But I don't think I'll ever actually launch it again. I mean, I've already got Spotify, which works quite well for me. The app is okay. I don't think it's – it's not great. It's not a great streaming app.

You're basically – I mean, the upshot here is they're trying to still sell you music the old-fashioned way because you'll search for it and everything in their library comes up and you have to see if it's actually Prime Music enabled or not. And if not, then it's a convenient buy button right there, so you buy it instead. It's confusing.

It's a horrible-looking app. Yeah. It is an unintuitive fuster-cluck. It is exactly that, which is a show title of ours from a previous show, but it seems to apply to a lot of things. It does. Yeah. You know, Amazon wins because I'm going to keep my Prime membership, but that's mostly because of the next day shipping on a lot of items.

But I don't think I'll ever use this again. Yeah, same here. Yeah. So you posted an article on our hackpad about does the World Cup have a lingua franca? And I've been wondering about this and apparently so had you. I had also been wondering about it.

It's surprising that I've never actually done any research into it before, but it's one of those things that you just wonder when you're watching a game and you're five beers in. And so, you know, you have this team from Uruguay playing a team from England and the referee is from Germany. I just kind of naturally assume that English would be the kind of standard language, but that is definitely not true.

There are a lot of players out there that do not speak any English and a lot of refs as well. So how do you curse out a referee from another country? Basically, it's a lot of hand motions. Yeah. It's like going to a foreign restaurant and trying to order off the menu and you're waving your hands and pointing. Yes. My favorite quote from the article is, any kind of fellatio comment is inevitably understood.

Yes. And there's a lot of that. I mean, basically, it just comes down to, hey, ref, you suck balls. So, yeah, it was funny. It was a good read. And it is something that, you know, like I said, I've wondered on many games when I see people, you know, getting into it and you can tell that they're speaking completely different languages.

So, good times. Yeah. Lots of waving and screaming. Yes. Lots of waving and screaming. I have a sad update for people who play Two Dots. They came out, well, it's an up and a down. They came out with 35 new levels, but they took out my hack. So, all my hard work and tips and tricks from the last episode are now moot.

So, if you don't want to – if you still want to keep the hack, don't update to the new version and just get to level 85 and then download it and go from there, which is what I would recommend. Yeah. Okay. Oh, also in the World Cup thing, Twitter added real-time World Cup scoreboard to the timeline.

Not on the phone app, but if you go to it via your desktop, there is real-time scores for all three games that are going on every day on the little left-hand side on Twitter, which I thought was convenient. It actually made me keep Twitter open for a little bit when I was working. That's why you were tweeting.

I'm like, what the fuck is trying to do in here? Yeah, that's pretty much the only reason I had it up, just because while I was working and unable to see my TV during the games, I had the real-time updates streaming in. So, that was nice. Very good. Yeah, I'm not watching real-time, unfortunately, because of the sickness, down with the sickness.

So, I read an amazing article in The New Yorker this week called The Disruption Machine, What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong by Jill Lepore. Lepore, who I've heard her name before. She's been writing in this field for quite a while. This is an extremely long read, but it's very good.

Very good. Yeah, it really kind of goes through the entire history of disruption within the computer industry. Yeah, and it starts with the book, The Innovator's Dilemma, which I've actually never read and probably won't after. I've read this article, so now I don't have to read the book.

Exactly. Yeah, it's a really great article. I mean, it definitely talks about how disruption has always kind of been there, but it's just never been so fast, so furious, and so disruptive. And that he used basically bad statistical analysis on the wrong types of industry to really put his numbers together, and how it's more of a label of past than it is of future.

You see what I'm saying? So, it's interesting. I see what you're saying. No, this is definitely – if you've been listening to this podcast and you enjoy it, you're going to want to read this, but set aside a good two hours. It didn't take two hours. No, it's not that long. It literally did take about half an hour for me. I read slow.

Yeah. So, what are you going to do? What are you going to do?

In the news. The startup world was abuzz last night. It's been a big week for startups and for really crappy apps that you forced me to download and try. Yeah. Well, there are three of them this week, but two of them – well, one's a web app that will charge you $14.99 for $10.25.

That's called Washboard. And, yeah, I'm just – I'm beyond befuddled. Well, me too because, first off, they're kind of positioning themselves – I mean, obviously, it's kind of a bit of a joke tagline. But their tagline on the website, right under quarters for laundry delivered monthly, is wearing dirty underwear.

We provide two-day shipping on every shipment of quarters. If I am at the point where I'm wearing dirty underwear and I'm so desperate to get quarters that I'm going to a website to order them, I need them in two hours, not two days. And, honestly, unless your washing machine is in your building, there is no problem to be solved here.

Every laundromat that I've ever been to, especially in San Francisco, has a change machine. Yeah, I can't imagine – there is no such thing as an urban environment in which you are going somewhere that is a coin-op laundry that does not have change machines. I really hope we just got punked by a leftover April Fool's joke, honestly.

I just – I don't even understand this one. Yo! This is – I'm actually mad at you for making me install this. Now we can yo-yo, yo! I'm going, what's up? This is quite possibly the dumbest thing that I've ever seen.

The app is fucking horrible. They didn't even bother to make an icon. It's just a purple blotch. It's called yo. As far as I can tell, it doesn't do anything. Minimalism and simplicity, man. That's the future of communication. You don't get it.

And there's a million dollars invested in this? You got it, brother. That's the way it's all going to go down from now on. Yo is much more fun with friends invite. No, thank you. I sent you a yo. You sent me a yo. And that's all you can do?

That's it. You can yo – oh, no. If you double tap, you can get a yo-yo. It's an Easter egg. Oh, my God. I don't – this is the dumbest thing since we've started this podcast by far. Absolutely.

No, I mean, really. It does nothing. That's true. Well, he wrote it. It took him eight hours to write it. It shouldn't have even taken that. I guess they had to decide what fucking shade of purple to use as their icon. They probably had to download Xcode, which takes four and a half. That's true.

That was half the time involved. Now, yeah, it's – that was what was going around last night. And everybody is scratching their head. It's like, what the fuck? What the fuck? And you know people are justifying this. It's all these VCs and people who are hangers-on up there.

Well, have you seen our download numbers? Yeah. Oh, dude. Oh, jeez. I can't even – it's not the cold medicine that is making me speechless on this one. Just let me point out. No, it really isn't. I mean, it's – this is just – this is the Silicon Valley thing that just makes me want to fucking throw my computer in the ocean and go live in a cave somewhere.

It just – I can't believe this. This is – if they put this in the show, Silicon Valley, we all just would have laughed and said there's no way anything like that would happen. But here it is. Oh, shit. Maybe it's a stunt. It should be. It should be a stunt. This and Washboard should both be like lead-ups to season two of Silicon Valley.

Here's – it's – yeah. Well, I mean, look at Flappy Birds. That was the same thing. That was – Yeah, but at least that was a game. It had something. That's impressive, but it says, yo. Yeah. Yeah. At least that was a game. They need to gamify yo-ing. Now, if you give me the upsell, I can buy the in-app purchase of Mama, so I can say, yo, Mama.

God. Something. There's got to be something there. I don't know what it is. Now, the second stupidest app that we've ever seen launched this week too, Slingshot from Facebook. You know, yeah, it's stupid. There are serious issues with the UI and the functionality.

It's actually not a bad concept if they would have built it out better. It's Snapchat with a little bit more involvement. The main problem – I mean – Here's the UI issue that it has. I didn't know until I listened to the Product Hunt podcast last night that you can – like there's that reply icon, so you can just take a – set a reply to an image that somebody sent you instead of having to send back another one and getting in this circle jerk loop that just will never end.

But the problem is even if you do the reply, it disappears. It doesn't stay in your thing, so you can't have an ongoing conversation even if you do reply, which you should be able to have. That should just hang out there and you should be able to access that at any point in time once you start doing the replying. That should basically de facto switch you into kind of a text messaging mode as opposed to the automatic deletion slingy bullshit.

I think the whole point is that it's automatic deletion slingy bullshit. That's the point of the app. That is the point and that's my other major problem with it. Well, besides the fact that absolutely nobody else has it. You and I both installed it to play around with it and no one else has gotten this yet, at least not from my group of friends who are all – Well, all my friends have gotten it, tried it, and uninsult it.

I've already done it, yeah. I think the best quote about this is from John Gruber on Daring Fireball. He's like, if they give you phones in hell, this is the sort of app that's on them. Yeah. I mean the major issue for me with it is that Facebook is trying to force engagement instead of actually just kind of fostering it.

They should be fostering engagement by allowing you the kind of functionalities that we just talked about, replies, actual conversations that stay open. Here's the deal though. This is – they've got – this is like 15 people. It took them a couple of months. They've got a bunch of these groups going on doing these kinds of things to just throw shit against the wall and see if it sticks.

They're slinging things at the wall, yeah. They've got more money than – well, not Apple, but they've got a lot of money and they can afford to send people off and just do R&D and say, here, you got a really stupid idea like Slingshot? Go make it. Go make it and we'll see what happens, yeah. We already paid your million-dollar signing bonus and all that shit, so might as well get something out of you.

Go write something because obviously they're not working on the Facebook app. Obviously not, no. But I mean I guess there is a market for this out there because from what I hear, Snapchat is basically going downhill in terms of engagement and usage. So, you know, all right, sling shit at the wall.

Sling shit, yeah, that's it. Man, these cold messes must be kicking me in. See? I can't even put the words together. I miss sling shit. Jesus. So the Amazon Fire phone. We who? Do we give a shit?

Well, no. We definitely don't. It's a bit like Amazon hit it with the Kindle because it was first, so I get that. But the phone is way late into the game. It looks like an iPhone. It's cheap. I'll give them that. But it's got five cameras and it tracks your head movement.

It's got five cameras. It tracks your head movement. It's massively privacy invasive. We have a little article instead of going point by point about if you give a shit at all about your privacy, about why you never will want to have this phone because it basically just sends everything that you're doing at all times to Amazon, who is now, right now, probably one of the biggest aggregators of your personal shopping data known to man.

You know who I feel sorry for on this phone? Since you can navigate with flicks of your head, if you have Tourette's, you're going to get in just a loop that's going to make your head explode. Because you're going to get a head twitch and it's going to change the pace and you're like, shit. Then you twitch back the other way and it goes and you can't get it back.

And then you just get in this horrible cycle until your head explodes and you smash the phone on the floor. So if you have Tourette's, you might want to stay the hell away from this thing. And if the writers of Silicon Valley are listening, you can have that one for free. Go ahead and throw that into season two. That would be quite funny. It's a phone built to sell.

Everything goes to Amazon. Everything. It's built to just sell you shit. And fair enough if you're going to get the phone that cheap, I guess. And if you're dumb. And here's the other thing with it. If you're going in for the Amazon ecosystem, like if you have the Fire TV and you can do like the second screen IMDB thing, which is really cool.

I would love to have that on my damn iPhone. I would kill for that. Yeah. But you were not going to get it for a while. I think that this would be a nice probably rounding of the whole ecosystem if you went all in. If you have a Kindle Fire, then you have a Kindle Fire TV.

Then you have the phone. It's just like us Apple Spots. There's no difference. We've got iPhones. I've got an Apple TV. I've got an iMac. I've got some iShits. I don't know. I've got iEverything. No, I agree. I mean that's exactly what happened to me because I was always kind of Mr. I don't want Apple.

I don't want to be all Apple. I started with the iPhone and then I ended up getting the Apple TV and now I've got the iPads and it's beautiful and it works wonderfully all together in my home. And yeah, if you're all Amazon and you're going that direction, then this probably makes a lot of sense. Or if you're on a limited budget but you want to have some of the cool stuff.

I think this is kind of like the Dell of the day. You know, like you used to go buy – or maybe they were HPs or eMachines even. It's like the eMachines because you buy that cheap-ass computer and it would come with so much shitware on it that you couldn't do anything besides reboot and shop. So it's kind of the same thing.

But it does run Android so almost all the standard Android apps that run on the Fire will run on the Fire phone without a few tweaks. And they've got APIs for the face thingy and the 3D and all that crap. If nothing else, thank God for that, that they went the Android route instead of trying to develop their own thing.

And then all of a sudden all of us developers have to figure out a completely new way to build apps. Android, it's all built on Java and I will never, ever touch Java. It is not worth my sanity or my happiness to deal with Java. No, Java is a frigging nightmare. Yeah. So I think the Firefly thing is cute.

If it works as fast as it looks like it does, I just – I made a snarky comment about I hope it gets canceled like the original Firefly. But honestly, I've got nothing against this thing. I haven't seen it. I'm just not going to buy it because I'm invested. Read the VentureBeat article that I have – that will be on our show notes on grumpyoldgeeks.com if you think.

Oh, I did this. Yeah. Because the Firefly is – yeah, it's definitely cute, cool, and convenient. But my God. Tracking everything. Yeah. You're just being tracked cradle to grave, everything that you do when you use that. Yeah. If you're worried about your Xbox Kinect being on and listening to you in the background, you would basically – your head is going to explode if you try to buy one of these or just look at what it does.

So they're going to keep all this stuff. That's just the way it is. Enough until we actually see one in the wild and actually give it a shot. Yeah. I agree. YouTube. What the fuck are they doing now?

Well, this is not exactly a surprising move because YouTube is – regardless of what any subscription streaming music service will tell you or even iTunes or anyone else, YouTube is de facto the big gorilla in the music industry.

It is where everybody goes to listen to music. There is far more music listened to on YouTube than probably every other service combined. End of story. Because it's all there. Everybody's put everything there. Because it's all there and it's completely free. And, you know – who is the musician? Oh, Neil Young.

Sorry, Neil Young. I do really like your music. But nobody gives a shit about quality. People would rather listen on YouTube to a scratchy old horrible audio thing taken from VH1 Classic off of VHS than your Pono. End of story. Done.

Oh, yeah, that thing. Oh, yeah. I was wondering where you're going the Neil Young route. Oh, yeah, the high definition. The high def big cubicle. No, he's going to sell 15 of those and they're going to be the reviewers. Oh, well, it's already gone. It's completely dropped off the ecosphere. Like nobody is talking about it. So it's done.

But because YouTube is that, they have obviously went, well, we should launch a music subscription service since everybody is coming here to listen to music anyways. And that's what they're going to do. It doesn't make sense for YouTube to do it because they're just going to have to go through the same route and then they have to deal with all the piracy, take it all down. Well, granted, all that stuff's in place already because they're selling ads against it.

All of that is already in place. It is going to cause a nightmare because none of that stuff is 100%. It's going to pull down things that shouldn't be pulled down. It's going to cause massive issues within my personal industry because all artists that I work with, we host all of our videos either on YouTube or Vivo for official sites and things like that.

So now we go, well, what happens with that? Are they going to get pulled down because you'll have to pay to be able to see them now? What are we going to do for our – well, what we've been talking about since day one, which is we host everything internally. We put up our own videos, which will then become a nightmare with streaming and all that sort of stuff. And costs. And costs, exactly.

So I've already kind of like – I've sent this out to many of my clients as like, this is coming, people. We're going to have to figure out how we're going to deal with it. What about Vimeo? Vimeo? Vimeo is possible. I mean a lot of the stuff that – a lot of the labels have moved all their stuff over to Vimeo already.

But who knows? Because a lot of the time it's like Vimeo is hosted but you use a YouTube link to get to it. So what's that going to mean? And it's so strange. You don't have to use a YouTube link to get to a Vimeo video. You don't have to, but they have crossover deals. Oh, I didn't know that.

I use it for all of my clients who don't want the grid coming up at the end of their video. They want to have their own end plate and control the experience. So Vimeo Pro works great for all of my guys. Yeah, that's probably going to be where we go for the time.

And it's pretty cheap too. It's cheap. Yeah. The other major issue with this is that YouTube is definitely starting to squeeze out indie labels. They're only going after the majors right now and they're basically just saying, we're going to have deals in place with the majors when we launch. And if you're an indie label, that stuff's still copyrighted.

It's going to get locked out. Oh, man. They should just leave it alone then. If they're not going to have it as part of the subscription program, just leave it there and run ads against it. That makes no sense. That's exactly what they should do. And hopefully there's a lot of outcry in the indie music scene about this. And hopefully they'll come to their senses a bit about that.

We'll see. We'll see. We shall see. You sent me this. Oh, who are these guys? Sound Exchange. Sound Exchange. There's a report from these guys. They look like they're like a third party music sales. Yeah. No, they're not music sales. They just do tracking. So they do tracking on plays and all that sort of stuff.

So they put out their digital radio report focusing exclusively on digital radio. But I'm not even entirely sure what digital radio means anymore because that can be – it's definitely Pandora. It's a lot of – it's all the radio stations that have gone online, iHeartRadio and all that sort of stuff.

But it could also technically be iTunes because iTunes has their radio. It could also be Spotify. Yeah, anything that's non-interactive. But here's the thing. Pandora is interactive. You can skip track. iTunes Music is interactive. They're all interactive to a certain extent. So question number one is we need a much clearer definition of what exactly digital radio is.

And, well, you know, they made a nice, pretty, little, flashy, interactive, fun, funky presentation of statistics of digital radio as of this year. Much ballyhoo because the revenue streams and payments being paid out to artists are way up over previous years.

However, they do not mention how they are still way, way, way, way down. Way lower. Way down over pre-disruption levels in the industry. So the takeaway from this is this has gotten a lot of people who don't seem to remember what things used to be like very happy because things seem to be on an upswing in terms of revenue and payments.

But, nah. It's still, yeah, they're not going to come anywhere close ever again to the money they were making when they put it on coasters and sent it out and bought it at the store, you know? Exactly. So to get off the music thing, Dr. Oz. This has made me so happy.

So I didn't, I don't follow Dr. Oz because I just assumed if he's a doctor on TV, he's going to be a charlatan and then a quack. Yeah. Because I look at Dr. Phil and that's exactly what he is. So I figured, you know, why get into Dr. Oz? But you posted an article from Salon.

Go figure. Sorry. It's okay. It was a good article. Good article. Senator Claire McCaskill took his ass to town in front of a subcommittee on consumer protection and product safety and insurance and some other stuff. I love this. She took his ass to task.

They basically put him up and said, you are the face on TV. You are the one making the most money. You are the one that has most increased his personal Q value. Remember when we used to talk about Q values of people? Yeah. And they fucking slapped him hard and he deserves it and good.

And I'm thrilled about this because he's been out there, you know, it's not like he's a bad person. Yes, he is. Well, when he started, you know, and he's part of the Oprah cabal and I've always said you can't trust anybody that's on Oprah. And that's where Dr. Phil started as well.

Exactly. If you've got a doctor in your name and you're on Oprah, you should run screaming from any advice they give. When he started up on the show, he gave great advice. My dad even got suckered in all the time because he's like, have you been taking your green tea pills? Dr. Oz says you need to take your green tea pills. Well, that was all fine and dandy except for the fact that he started endorsing weight loss programs.

And they're only hitting him for one in particular. He's endorsed a number, including some crazy ass ones involving like basically injecting estrogen extracts from pregnant women into yourself. And that causes, you know, extreme weight loss in certain cases.

This guy is – We've got to worry about your Decepticons neighbors, by the way. I keep forgetting that we're recording early on Fridays and this is when they come. So sorry about that. I will close all the windows next time. But, yeah, he got slapped down and he got slapped down hard and he deserves it. Good.

Yeah. I don't know if he's going to change anything. We'll see. Hopefully more people will read this article and learn about his crappy ways. But, you know, now that he's got the podium, he's got to make a buck. So that's what he's doing. He's not going to have this little empire forever. Hey, and he did a mea culpa, which is good.

But it did take him being dragged in front of a congressional Senate hearing to do it, which is bad. I still don't think he gets it, though. I don't think he wants to get it. I think he sees the paycheck at the end of the tunnel. Yeah. Well, the one upshot that I hope that everybody takes away from this is that somebody has got to take a track record look at Oprah and stop just believing everything that she ever says and puts on her damn show because it's a not good track record.

Well, here's the problem. Nobody that listens to our show watches Oprah. So, I mean, the woman has a monthly magazine where it's her on the cover. Hey, she's a megalomaniac. You can't get, you know. I wonder who's on the cover this month. Oprah. Oh, imagine that. Oh, it's thin Oprah. Oh, interesting.

Photoshopped Oprah. Okay, next week will be Jelly Belly Oprah and Teletubby Oprah. Mm-hmm. Oh, I should make an animated GIF and put it on Twitter because you can do that now. Great. Oh, joy. Yeah. What a – that was the only, like, you know, safe, sane place.

People went to Google Plus if they wanted or Tumblr. Yeah. If they wanted their animated GIFs and now they're – Well, all it does is make me think this is the first step to MySpace, Bill, where it's going to be all shooting stars and little twinkly hearts everywhere. Well, it's been that already, especially if you follow Cheney Jardin's thread. There's usually kittens and unicorns and farting rainbows.

But – and now they're just going to move. But there is a play button, so they don't play automatically. So there is that. Yeah, but that's where Facebook started too and now videos play automatically. So it's just a matter of time. It's called – this is a pure example of, like, gently raising the heat on the frog in the water.

Yeah, that's – they figured out the frog thing was bullshit. That's true, but it's still a good, you know, example. Yes. Okay. I'll grab that. Crank up the heat. Woo-hoo. Security. Ha! We got a lot in security this week.

We do. I'm excited. It's been a while. You know what we don't have, though? We don't have any, like, crazy big box retailer or anything like that being hacked into this week, which I'm a little disappointed by. I was hoping to make that a regular weekly segment. Come on, hackers. Get to it. I'm sure there has been.

We just haven't been notified yet. That's true. I think we're still waiting on the fallout from the – what was the Chinese place? P.F. Chang's. P.F. Chang hack. We're still waiting on the – Yeah, they actually haven't released numbers on that yet. Still waiting on that one. So, now, yeah, Torrent Freak, who, like, a good torrent news site and all sorts of other torrenty goodness.

Right. They put out a great article every year on your VPN stuff. Mm-hmm. Like, which VPN should you use? And they list a ton of them this year. Yeah. And the one that's on the top is private internet access, and that's the one that I actually use. Right.

So far, it's been amazing. I've got it on all – I got it on my Air, my iMac, my iPad, and my phone. Works like a charm. Forty bucks for a whole year. You can't go wrong with that. This is still something that I have not done, which I keep meaning to do, so I've got to get on that. Especially if you take your laptop, like, outside of your home at any given time, it just makes no sense to not do it.

Yeah. So, I dig these guys. We'll put a link in the show notes to them. And so far, my speed has gotten faster, which is beyond mind-boggling. I don't know how the hell they do that. But I went from 110 megabits per second on my home connection, and it peaked around 270 megabits per second.

There might just be some – it might just be so fast that it's getting confused at this point. I don't know, but either that or Comcast has been extraordinarily generous with the bandwidth now. I still think you're some amazing test case over there. They're just going to see if people just slurp it up if they keep giving it more. I have been doing time trial tests over the day, and it does get quite a bit slower during the day.

And by slower, I mean it's around 60 to 70 megabits per second. Right. And AT&T – hey, we do have some data breach going on here. AT&T. That's right. I forgot about that. So they're going to be giving some credit monitoring to people who were affected by the breach.

And this was kind of a contained breach. So it was like for people who were trying to unlock their iPhone 5s. Right. I believe. Yeah. So it's a more contained breach. But still, hey, it's AT&T. But you get some free credit monitoring out of it. Yay. How many different versions of credit monitoring do you need after Target and everybody else gets hacked?

You're going to have more credit monitoring than you know what to do with. Right. Yeah. I mean who doesn't already have like free offers of credit monitoring and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everybody's got that. FreeCreditReport.com. That's right. I miss that band. I miss that band. And the U.S. Marshals kind of screwed up this week trying to sell off all their Bitcoin.

They're like 30,000 Bitcoin that they're trying to unload. Do you see this? I did see this. I almost wanted to buy them just for fun. Well, the fact that they put – I mean in this day and age and you're selling cryptocurrency and you can't tell the difference between a CC field and a BCC field?

Yeah. Yeah. Come on. Seriously. Yeah. I don't think I'll be joining that auction because they probably can't figure – they'll probably just put it on eBay and not figure out the rest of it. Probably. At least they didn't tweet it. Yeah. Now, you posted something about Mr. Scoble, Mr. Robert Scoble, the cheerleader of Silicon Valley.

I'm not a fan at all. So I particularly like this article because it's a nice little boing boing takedown of Scoble who has come out saying that privacy advocates have way overstepped their brown – they're boundaries and has useful advice for victims of violent stalkers and is jealous of your threesomes, which is a great headline.

It's a very funny article where they basically rip him a new asshole for just kind of being an idiot and saying that every – stop worrying about government surveillance and things like that. It's not that big of a deal. Well, it is and you're a jerk. Well, here's – I have to preface this here.

I know Robert. I met him the first time I was in California staying at Chris Perillo's house and he was an advocate then for the HP tablet that ran Windows. So maybe that will be our picture of the day. I've got a picture of him holding that tablet, which was pretty funny.

Nice. I've got no problem with him as a person and personally hanging out with him. I think he's OK. The shit that he says on the internet is just whack-a-doodle. He's insane. He does – I mean it's – his job is to be an evangelist. He works for Rackspace, you know. Yeah. The people that gave us the – The Daily Rack.

The Daily Rack newsletter, yes. So I don't know what the hell is going on there. Yeah. I don't really get what he's – through the Boing Boing article, which will be on the show notes on grumpyoldgeeks.com, they pull in a bunch of – Slash 63. Slash 63. They pull in a bunch of his quotes.

I haven't read this particular blog that they're taking down directly. I'm sure there's a link in there by Boing Boing. But I'm also reasonably sure that – look, let's – this whole internet age security thing is intensely complicated. It requires high-level knowledge of which even – I definitely don't have.

And Jason is way above me in terms of security and things like that. But even you don't know half the stuff that this crap is running on and the possibilities out there. And Scoble basically just takes the general, uneducated, non-technical public and what they say as his defense for – He's like, just crack me a beer and keep doing your threesomes.

I'm out. Yeah, pretty much. His violent stalkers are after you. So just set your privacy settings in Facebook and they'll go away. It's like – this comes back to just the bubble mentality where the rest of the world doesn't exist. Where people with guns do and they want to kill you sometimes and turning off your Facebook privacy is not going to stop them from kicking in your window and shooting you in the face.

Outside of the fact that every time that Facebook updates their internal engines for this sort of stuff, everything gets reset. They reset it back. So now a case could be made that stay off fucking Facebook if you've got a violent stalker. Well, yeah, that's probably a good idea. If you have a violent stalker, people, the grumpy old geeks hardly suggest that you get off social media for a while.

Yes, and go to the gun range. Well, one of us. One of us. That would be one side. Did you see Bessie in my picture of my desk last week? Yes, that – yeah, so did some of my friends and they said he keeps a gun at his desk. I was cleaning it so it was out of the thing.

I can't keep it in the case for too long or it dries out. So that weekend I was out oiling it. So it's usually in a case, locked, ready to go. Robert Scoble doesn't care what you oil up. No, he's jealous of what I'm oiling up. But I just wanted to say like Rob Bishiza is the guy that wrote the Boing Boing article and I love that kid.

Well, he's not a kid but he's younger. He's responsible for like some of the – well, he's responsible for all the tech and shit at Boing Boing. When they first went over to responsive design and stuff, I pinged Shani. I'm like, who the fuck does this? He's like, oh, Rob. He's the genius. And he's in Pittsburgh and I'm bummed I never got to meet him when I was out there.

Yeah, that guy is just awesome. I give him all the credit in the world just for the technical stuff and being a spot-on writer. He's curmudgeonly and pulls no punches. So you go, Rob, about Rob. Now, I was watching the news this week and it was like a local news piece.

But this is apparently something that's coming to America. You can put in the Neil Diamond drop if you want. We can't put in copyrighted music anymore, remember? Oh, that's right. We can hum it. We can fart it out with our armpits. So it was a news piece on something that they've been using in England for like 12 or 13 years called Smartwater CSI.

And it's like micro dots that you paint on with a nail polish brush to your goodies. And when they get pilfered, they can scan them with the light and all that stuff. And they've got aerosol versions. So if somebody breaks into your car, they get a blast in the face and all this stuff. Right. If anybody knows more about this stuff, I'm doing my research on it this week.

Something does not seem legit here because it was a local news piece and it was local law enforcement selling this stuff to like elderly homes, which right there just like – I'm like, what? Yeah. Why is law enforcement now selling something? Why are they selling stuff to old folks' homes, which is, you know, that's just – that reeks of crossing the streams right there.

So if anybody knows about this, any of our England listeners knows anything about this, I'm going to do some more research on it and try and see what I can find out about it. But it's coming to the states now. And if you see any of the local news places running pieces on it because I'm betting their PR machine is on this and sending out camera crews because there were two different camera crews from two different locations.

With two different cops in like little podunk villages around Chicago. So something's not legit here. Right. Well, it does seem that there's an ABC World News piece about them with Diane Sawyer that maybe we should both watch to see if we can get some more insight into this.

Yeah, I'll give that a watch too. But I'm just – I'm wondering if anybody on the ground in England knows about this stuff or like gets – how they get marketed over there and what the costs are and that kind of stuff. So I'm going to do some more research on it. But I just – I threw it in the show notes because it just intrigued me for the security stuff.

It's very interesting. Now, we talked about ProtonMail before, the end-to-end JavaScripted email like NSA sniffer proof shit. It's on Indiegogo. Yep. It's our friends from Sweden. Or Switzerland actually in this case. Well, they passed their goal.

So their goal was $100,000. They now have $119,000. Here's the kick in the nuts. I signed up for my account like a while ago. I have not yet gotten my account. But what I did get was a nice email asking them – or asking me to give them money.

More money. Yes. And it was at $60,000 when I got this email. And I'm like, now you realize you haven't given me anything yet. Which, you know, even a demo. Such is the way of crowdfunding. Yes. I'd like a little something-something to see what my money is going to get.

Because I think now about – what was the social network that was going to take down all social networks? A distributed social network? Oh. I keep wanting to say Exodus, but it was – Gosh, I can't remember the name of it. It was so gone. The guy killed himself. Oh, my God.

I can't believe I'm spacing on this. Oh, man. It's cold. Cold meds. Cold meds. But I look at that, and I'm like, software projects, you know what? I want to see a demo. Yeah. I'm like a VC when it comes to this shit. I want a demo. I want a working demo. Not a video.

Yeah. Not a video demo. I want a plug-in. I want to try it. I want to make sure it works and that you're not full of shit. So that was – I was like, what the fuck, dudes? Chill. Crowdfunding. Well, they are now crowdfunded, so maybe they'll hear this and get mad at me and never give me my free account.

Or maybe they've hacked me already. Or maybe you'll just get a really shitty, cheaply made t-shirt. That's for you, Zane.

I've been – I've read quite a bit of mid-level to basically kind of crappy sci-fi over the past couple months. So it was really nice to have the third of the Long Earth series by the collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter was released this week.

And I basically – I had already pre-purchased it on Amazon Prime so I could listen to a crappy soundtrack involving barely any musicians that I actually like with Amazon Prime as well. So it was delivered to me on my Kindle on a day of release.

And I've gotten about halfway through it in the past three or four days. It is so far absolutely wonderful. This is a great series. If you haven't read any of them yet, go back and read them. I cannot recommend it enough. It's almost unbelievable that this is Terry Pratchett that's involved because, as we've talked about many times in the show, we all love Terry Pratchett and Discworld.

There's none of that. There's no humor. This is straight up speculative sci-fi, really well thought out, amazingly great ideas, not bothering with stupid love stories. It's fantastic. First off, I'd like to say the day of release sounds like National Masturbation Day, but I'm glad that you – it came on that day.

It did come on that day. There you go. As expected. So I love the other two books. I thought the second one dragged for a while, so I'm looking forward to this one. I unfortunately burned my last credit on something that I can't even remember now from Audible. So I'll get it on Audible since I got the other two. You know me.

I don't – my eyes are not for reading anymore. They are for watching Orange is the New Black Season 2, which I did. We got through it. I liked it. I liked it a lot. I got done. I got two episodes left. I've been vastly underwhelmed by Season 2.

I'd even say I'm not going to do any spoilers. But quick thought on this. We had almost kind of figured out how to deal with spoilers until you people decided to release entire seasons on one day, and now we're all confused about how to deal with this again. It is kind of a pain.

It's a pain in the ass. Thanks a lot, guys, because we had almost sorted out. The proper amount of time to wait after A Game of Thrones before anybody is allowed to discuss it, and now it's all out the window again because you put out everything at once, and Jason burned through it in the first two days. I'm still on – I still have two episodes left.

I know people that haven't even started it yet. The first episode was brutal, and I almost stopped watching after that. I'm kind of back into the stories now. I'm just – I'm not as into it as I was with Season 1. I love Season 1, Season 2.

If it's on, I'll watch it. If it's not, I'm not missing it. Well, the ending wraps everything up nicely, I think. I think the ending is great. It's an hour and a half long episode, so you get lots of closure. It's great in my book. All right. All right. Well, I will have an opinion probably next week because with only two episodes left and nothing else to watch since every show has ended.

Oh, wait. World Cup. Never mind. Who knows? Oh. No, dude. True Blood starts back this week. I stopped watching True Blood last season, and I'm not going back. I don't care. Even people like – I'm getting social pressure to, don't you want to finish it since it's the last season? No.

No. It got so fucking stupid last season. I'm done. I don't care. Everybody's got a superpower. I don't give a flying fuck. I am so done with that show. They destroyed it. They ruined it. I was so uninterested, and I don't care if it's the last season.

I'm not watching. Unfortunately, I am forced to watch it because my roommate and we have people come over, and they watch it. So I'll unfortunately power through it, but no. I'd much rather be sitting around watching my Blu-rays of Deadwood instead.

I really – I mean, True Blood, I was so into it. I loved the first couple seasons, and then I started kind of going, meh. Well, at least they've still got some really hot girls. They get topless every now and then. Oh, God. This is really getting dumb. And finally last season, I was just like, that's it. I'm done. That's sad if Breasticles won't keep you watching.

So you'd rather just go to RedTube or play with your wife. So for next week, I've got a couple of things that I'm in the middle of and one that I haven't started yet. I'm going to do It's Complicated, The Social Lives of Network Teens by Dana Boyd. Heard much about that. It's a very interesting topic.

So I'm glad that one of us is going to read it, and if you think it's good, I will get into it. Yeah, I've also got Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson and Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie on the queue. So hopefully I'll get through those this week and we can have something to talk about next week.

Well, hopefully – I don't know where the week went. Well, hopefully you won't be sick and have the hot toddy haze. Yeah. No. I'm done with the hot toddies. That was just last night and I'm done. So I remember them being much better, but you know why they were better before? It's because I used to have other people make them for me and bring them to me.

So when I make them myself, I actually – I'm like, okay, some honey, lemon, whiskey, whiskey, whiskey, whiskey, whiskey, whiskey, hot water. Yeah, that was pretty much it. I'm like, oh, that seems strong. Well – Yeah, don't give the ingredients to the guy that's already been on cold meds to actually make something precise.

That's definitely not a good idea. Plus it's also a scientifically proven fact that everything tastes better if somebody else makes it. Yes, yes, and freeze at the best price. Welcome to This Week in Shit We Put on Our Computers. This week I was listening to a podcast.

Go figure. I was listening to Quit and on the 5x5 Network with Dan Benjamin. Yes. I was on that show because I made a call and Dan doesn't care for me very much, but that's neither here nor there. His guest runs a site called The Sweet Setup, which is like they go through and they do best of breed apps and things like that.

And I thought it was really cool, really well done. It is not technically shit you put on your computer, but it tells you about shit you put on your computer. Yeah. And I found some really interesting stuff on there that I'm going to try out and report back on. Unfortunately, one of them is an RSS reader.

Right. But I've already got an RSS reader and that's Reader 2. Whee! They finally released the Mac version for Reader 2, which syncs with the iOS version. The problem with the whole Reader debacle is this kid who wrote it didn't really plan in advance for when Google Reader was going away.

Yeah. And just took his apps away, even though they've been paid for and it was a mess, a total mess. But I picked up Reader 2 for iOS and I just barely used it. But now with it on the Mac, it's on all my devices. So now, and now that we're doing a lot more stuff on the show, it gives me a lot of time to sort through and find really cool stuff.

So I really, I like the layout. I like the interface. There's really, I have no complaints about it. I mean, and this, I'm like a hardcore Net Newswire guy. So this is like going from a, you know, a Beetle to a Ferrari as far as just UI and UX go because Net Newswire was such a dog. But it worked, you know?

I might have to try this finally. I would. I'll send you my feed list. Maybe I'll post my OPML in the show notes. Now, this is something that you sent, which we, we. This is called Swarm from Foursquare that we talked about a while ago.

But they pimped it. I sat through a fucking 10-minute video with Dens. Fuck, whatever. And it finally came out. So you put it this week. So take it away, Brian. Tell me why I should give a rat's ass about this app. You shouldn't.

Well, this is going to be a short segment. Okay, we're done. No, I'm just kidding. I actually only got it because we do this podcast. And I figured I'll take one for the team. So basically, does anybody even actually use Foursquare anymore? Not really.

Hardly anybody's on. It's kind of an abandoned social network for the most part. Swarm is their attempt to try to get people back. And it's – I'm confused by their approach because they're – From the video, it says it's not like they're trying to get people back. It's saying that they're having a shit ton of check-ins, but they're separating the company.

So they have like the Yelp-like division, and then they have the check-in division, like the social division. Yes, this is where – That's the difference. This is where it's getting very confusing because this is what they're saying, but it's not what I'm seeing. Well, I am seeing it a little bit. Yeah, it seems to me that this isn't – Well, first off, it's an attempt to get in the news, let's be honest, because Foursquare has gone by the wayside as far as social networks go.

Pretty close to tits up. Pretty close to tits up. So this is, hey, we've got a brand new thing, and it's super cool, but we aren't quite sure if we should pivot the whole way because we don't really have a business plan. So we're going to say that we have two different apps that do two completely different things, and God, I hope people are going to buy this shit.

Do you think people are going to buy this? Should I be putting out my resume? I'm not sure yet. What do you think? So that's where I think that this is at. It's crashy. It's buggy. Basically, if you use the old Foursquare, you got – every time that you tried to check in everywhere, you got an annoying pop-up saying, hey, check out our new app called Swarm that you had to click away from to be able to just use the old app.

So finally, I just gave in and said, well, fuck it. It's for the podcast. Okay, download. Once you download it, it now uses the Swarm engine, even if you were in Foursquare, to do a check-in most of the time, but not all the time. So that's confusing. And you basically say yes to looking at the new features in Foursquare, which gets rid of your list of your actual friends to see where they've checked in and basically just gives you a list of – a Yelp-style list of businesses that are around you.

So Foursquare now is no longer about your friends. It's about local businesses. Swarm is for your friends. But the separation between the apps is incredibly unclear so far. I don't know why you would want to try to have two.

They're obviously pushing ads from the businesses into Swarm as well because they want to make money there, yet they've gotten rid of the friend functionality for the most part in the old Foursquare app, and now that is just basically an ad. Okay, I get it. I get it.

Okay, you can stop. You see where I'm going with this? Yeah, please. You can stop now. I checked out like three minutes ago. It's all a big mess, and there's no point in getting it. Here's the deal. I think we need a new voiceover for pivot fail. Pivot fail. This is a pivot fail. Good job. The one thing that they did that I thought would be kind of interesting if anybody were actually on Foursquare, like if all your friends were on it, the Swarm thing has something that lets you plan events within it, which is kind of cool.

If it works, it crashes on me every two seconds. I have been unable to actually – I tried to make a plan, and it crashed on me. I have been unable to do so as of yet, and it really doesn't matter anyways because I have four friends, including you, that are on this thing. Okay, and here's another bug point.

I signed it. I had 61 messages. When I signed in. Okay? Out of that, I could get to like maybe number 10 or 12 of accepting friendships. Yeah. And then it just crashed, dumped the data, and now I can't get to anything. It's a mess. Forget it. Yeah. Stay away from Swarm. Yeah, they are a total pivot fail.

Like many of the bees of the United States and the world, they are dying. So, Swarm away. Yeah, caddy, caddy, caddy, caddy. I was a guest on this podcast called Tech Douchebags. I think it was episode four, and they're up to episode 12 now, I believe, or something like that, some ridiculous amount, which is a good sign because they've survived my appearance, which most people don't, including us most of the time.

But it's a solid show, man. It's a really solid show. Jordan Cooper, who runs it, is finally getting his legs under him, so much that he got picked up by the 5x5 network, you rat fucking bastard. Congratulations. Yeah, he's making his way.

And then he was on the Systematic podcast this week, too, which I'll put a link in, which was pretty good. He's an old punk rock guy like myself, so can't go wrong there. But, yeah, I just want to say congrats, and check out the show, man. It really has gotten good. I mean, I seriously mean that. Go check it out. To you, Brian. To you, Brian.

I will. I will. I will. Okay. The next one I got this week was The Feed, and this is what took up most of my week. Now, this is The Feed by Libsyn, which is our podcast host. This is completely inside baseball for podcasters and wannabe podcasters.

So if you don't want to be a podcaster or don't really care how the sausage is made, skip it. Okay. I think this is where my week went, because there were 28 hours of previous episodes that I've been trying to power through, and that's like three books on Audible. And I'm still not even done yet.

It's quite a lot, yeah. But it's a really good show about podcasting, and they're very serious about saying, you are probably not going to make any money doing this. So I've got to say good on them for being honest. For being honest, yeah, and not trying to sell something that says, we'll teach you how to do this so you can make money.

And I got hooked up with this because I'm moving one of my clients, who is like a top 50 podcaster with millions of downloads, like ridiculous amounts over to Libsyn, and I met this guy, Rob Walsh, who is their head of podcaster interaction or whatever.

Excuse me. And he's like a guest on the feed. And then I found out, oh, he's got his own podcast called Today in iOS. And he's got like 400 or 500 episodes of this thing. He's been doing it for a long time. It's actually really good too, which I would hope because he works at Libsyn and talks about podcasting all day.

So if you're into iOS stuff, this is actually a really good one that I'd never heard of, which is crazy that there's like, you can just run across these podcasts that have been going for hundreds and hundreds of episodes. And out of the blue, like boom, you know, alpaca out of nowhere. Well, that's because there's so damn many podcasts.

So it's not terribly surprising. I kind of leave the podcast stuff up to you. I just had a bit of an interesting music thing that came up this week. As most people know, Casey Kasem passed away. So shout out to Casey because even though I hated his damn show and top 40 and all that, apparently the dude was a super nice guy.

Hey man, keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. Damn right. By all accounts, super, super nice guy. You know, obviously a legend, no matter what I thought of his person, it was stupid show and top 40 music. But way back in 1991, when I was, when I was a young goth, anarcho punk kid, a band called negative land had a single out for about 17 hours.

And it immediately got pulled by lawyers, both from Casey Kasem and from you too, because the song was called you too. And it involved the infamous Casey Kasem rant that was caught on tape. It's all over the internet now, but back in the day there was no internet.

So this kind of stuff didn't leak. But the band negative land who did crazy weird, you know, they would never made a living or been signed to a label these days. But back then you could get away with being bizarre and interesting. And they were, they had a friend who probably was the engineer for Casey Kasem and handed them this tape of Casey Kasem, just completely losing it.

And he also, you know, he goes off on YouTube and the rants about how they're not even American. Who cares? Why do I have to know these names like Bono and the edge? They don't matter. We're never going to hear from these people again. And negative land basically did a cover of a U2 song.

I believe it was where the streets have no name. I can't quite remember. cut and spliced with a bunch of these bits of the rant and put it out as a, as a release and was immediately sued. The thing has been pulled, disappeared completely from existence until the internet resurrected it.

You can find it all over YouTube. We'll have it in our show notes. So you can listen to the original single in all its glory. They still cannot release it. They will never be able to release it, but in honor of Casey Kasem's passing, they have put up the original multi-tracks and are asking fans to basically reinterpret it and post their own versions.

So pretty cool little move there. Love negative land. Love that this happened. Fun little part of music culture back before you could just steal people's stuff like everybody does now. Well, technically they were kind of stealing people's stuff, but you know, I think you missed the point on that one, but I remember when this came out and those, that Casey Kasem tape was making the rounds quite some time, especially with the, I was in the Dr.

Demento crowd. Oh yeah. So we would all trade tapes and have like all sorts of stuff. And I remember getting that tape with just the raw, the raw cut on it and it was genius. So this was a, this was a great thing. So I'm glad they did that. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Pretty cool stuff. And you know, it's, it's worth a listen. It's historical. Yeah, definitely.

Goodbye, Casey. Later. I found a cool little music tool this week that I passed along to you called sequence.org. Yeah. You kind of fart around, play with some, you know, it's a flash thing and you make music and beats and you spin them off and make loops and all kinds of thing.

And we're like, we were just talking about offline. It's, it's one of those tools that you, you fart around for a lunch break and then you never use it again, but it was fun. It's a fun, it's a fun and cool little thing. And it's, it's pretty. That's why it's in the fancy section. Yeah, it's fun. You don't need to know anything about music. It's basically just click here and there and it creates little kind of weird things.

And they're trying to do something biological with this little sluggy thing that floats around and sets off different sequences that you can put together. It's definitely fun. If you have, if you like, if you listen to any of our previous podcasts and you checked out any of those Brian Eno apps, it's very similar to that.

It's, it's just a fun little thing to play around with and you'll probably never go back to it, but give it a shot once. It'll, it'll blow 10 minutes and you'll be, you know, impressed with yourself. Now, the next thing I got is for chicks or dudes who like bling. It's called, it's called Ringly. It's a little Bluetooth gadget that you keep on your finger like a ring, which it is.

It's basically a ring. Yeah. And it vibrates to let you know when you have mail or a phone call or a Facebook notification or, you know, some crap like that. Yeah. It's got four, four vibration patterns. So that's not a lot. No. Okay. Here's what we got here. Four vibration patterns, correct?

Mm-hmm. On their app home screen, they have phone call, text message, email, application, Twitter, and Facebook. And if you notice the Twitter and Facebook are off because you can only have four things at one time. Yeah. And, and you know what their app looks like? No.

Yo. No, it does. It looks just like yo. It's, it's very, yeah, colorful. Um, and has the same kind of all the way across bars that, yeah, it's, okay. I mean, yeah, it's very Windows eight looking. Yeah. I mean, I could see, I could see, I could see women digging this.

Like, you know, you, you, you, you finish work for the day, you're going out on, on a date or something like that, and you want to leave your phone in your purse, but you want to, you know, get notified because you're a high powered CEO or something, I guess. I don't know. No, I understand this, but where, where's the stuff? I mean, it's 145 bucks a piece, but where's the stuff for the dudes?

I want a big, like giant motorhead ring that I can, I'm surprised that they, yeah. Why aren't there skull rings and stuff like that? Totally. Seriously. I mean, I would actually use something like this if it, if it was like well done and look pretty. And I, I don't mind wearing rings.

I'll wear a ring. You don't want it to look pretty. You want it all gothed out and, you know, spikies or whatever. I mean, it's a, it's a cool idea, I think. Yeah. And I think it's going to go some places if they can figure it out, but you need more, you need more than four patterns though. I want at least like 10. Yeah.

The fact that you can create a vibration pattern on your phone now, and keep it in your pocket. So, you know, like who's texting you. Remember like how you can do that crazy cool vibration pattern thing. Well, right there, uh, that kind of defeats the purpose for it, but I can still see why people would like it. But that's, that's men versus women.

Most women are in dresses. They don't have the pockets. They don't. Vibration patterns are in dudes pockets and well, and that's not go there. Um, yeah. Anyway, I like it. I just wish there were some, some dudes stuff. I agree. I think this is a market that they could easily expand.

So good on you. You figured out something that isn't stupid. Here's the thing though. Uh, they're predicting now that the I watch will be out in October. That's killing the industry. Yes. That's killing the whole thing. And because I don't know, I'm, I'm dying to see what this thing looks like. And if I can put a, remember the old stoners in the, in the nineties or seventies or whatever, they had the big leather gauntlets with a watch on it.

And I want that with my eye watch on it. I want to look like a, like I'm going with a, you know, going to an Iron Maiden show with a jean jacket, leather gauntlet, and an eye watch on it. That's what I'm going for. All right. Maybe they'll sell. That would be fancy. Sell a Hesher wig to go with it.

Exactly. So I got my, um, Tim Ferriss quarterly box this, this week. And I'm a, I subscribed to it because he does send really cool stuff. Yeah. And this week I got the Marpok dome DS dual speed sound conditioner, which is basically an ugly little box that sounds like a fan.

So it, it creates like brown noise, white noise type of thing, depending on how you twist it to let the airflow go through it. I used to go ahead. A couple of questions. Sure. Um, first off, why not just use a fan? This is exactly the, this is exactly what I was getting to. I always have a fan in my room.

Always. But being sick, I could not use my fan because, uh, the airflow kills my sinuses. Right. So this does the same job without killing your sinuses. Right. Okay. That's the real trick. And it gets really cold here in the winter.

I don't want a fan in my room in the winter. Gotcha. Okay. The noise was great. It's loud enough where it just drowns out everything else. If you have street noise, like I do, if you have neighbors or guests or, you know, roommates drowns them out. I didn't hear a thing. I slept like a baby with this thing.

I am, I am hooked. I'm so glad. Gotcha. second point in this cultural renaissance of design and, and Apple leading the way with things. There is absolutely no excuse for putting out a product that is this ugly. They really could use a designer.

This is the one that, the only one that looks slightly. Okay. Is the black one, which reminds me, okay. The black one reminds me, this is where we get super geeky because it's what we do. The black one reminds me of the little robot in star Wars. The first one that's just cruising along in the death star. And then, and then the white one, the white one is the bomb that they found on the control bridge on Battlestar Galactica.

Oh yeah. I have the beige one, which comes out of a seventies asylum. Yeah. That one is the most ugly. That's when I first brought that up. I was like, this comes from 1970. Yep. I have the beige one. It looks like office furniture or it's, it's terribly ugly, but I put it in the back and it works.

It is stunningly ugly. And it's got the stupidest name on the planet. Marpock dome, D O H M. Yeah. Dome. It looks like a dome, but they could have done so much more with this. Get this thing to frog design and have them fix it. Yeah. But if you look at the Amazon page, they've got like four or 5,000 reviews on it, like in the four and five star range.

So I don't think there's any real reason for them to go through and redesign it at this point. Gotcha. So I'm just, I love this thing. It's like 50 bucks. So between that and all the other crap, in the, the Ferris box, that's the great thing about those boxes.

There's like 200 bucks worth of crap that comes every month. It's just random. And so most of it you use, but it's always more than you actually paid. Cause the box is a hundred bucks a month. Right. Just saying. Yeah. And I have exhumed my Phillips go light blue. Okay. I finally read the manual and talk to some other people and figured out how you're supposed to use it.

Okay. You use it first thing in the morning to, to basically break down the melatonin in your system to wake up and, and, you know, start the day. Right. Right. Been working like a charm now that I know how to use it. Okay. I wake up, I wake up faster and I find that I don't feel like the cravings to run downstairs and get my coffee immediately.

And I can get work done. Like if I wake up early, I pop it on and I, you know, just kind of start my day off. I can be reading a book with it in bed next to me or at the thing, but just immediately use it for 15 to 30 minutes as ambient blue light. I, I find that I wake faster and I, I sleep better at night now that I've got the fan thing.

It's like, I'm like Darth fucking Vader here with all this shit. I know it's working though. That's the crazy part. It's actually working. I'm having great sleep now and I get so much more done during the day. It's all right. You know, I know it's silly. It's really silly. This could be, you know, just confirmation bias.

I don't fucking care. It's working. I've got to, I got to wait on the science for a blue light. I'm, I mean, I'd love it to be true, but they're just, they're a bit pricey for me to leap in until I've got some hard science about this. Right. But you're still using flux on your computer, right?

I am using flux on the computer, but that's my works. Well, flux works for eye strain. I, it does not work for, let's see what the blue light is claiming to do. Increasing energy levels, fighting winter blues, increasing alertness, waking up, feeling refreshed and helping me fall asleep more easily. It helps with eye strain.

Well, it doesn't help with eye strain. It helps with, with your circadian rhythms. That's the point. Yeah. that, that description that you just read was really poorly done. No, the more blue light you see, the more you think that it's morning because when you walk outside, you see blue light and skies and that's part of your circadian rhythm.

And you're not supposed to see that spectrum of light in the evening. So if you pull it back and, you know, take it out of the giant screen you're looking at, you will, you'll start to, you know, build melatonin for the sleep that's coming in the evening better. Right. That's the point. Okay. I tell you what, tonight, while you're sitting there, turn flux off.

Okay. Just turn it off. Well, I'm not going to be in front of my computer tonight. God damn it. You have a life, you fucking asshole. Sorry. A few weeks back, we had posted in webs not dead, a real time chart that showed internet traffic in real time.

And as we discovered, as we looked into it a bit more simulated, but kind of based on overall statistics that we've seen over time and people's reports and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So not really real time, but more a demonstration of what's going on.

So these have been around for a decade and they used to be done in flash. Now we can do them in JavaScript. And they're popping up all over the place because they're quite popular right now. And they all look like windows eight, a new one real retail in real time popped up. You know, it's, it's just something to look at. That's kind of interesting.

You know, it's all the stories about how printed books are dead through this chart, printed books outselling eBooks handily still people eat a lot of fucking burgers and fries in this country. Oh, now I'm hungry. Oh yeah, it is about that time, isn't it?

And the most frightening statistic to me is that people are still eating hot dogs from 7-Eleven. Oh my God, that's nasty. It doesn't, that is just disgusting. These people should be dying. Well, the only people I know that eat hot dogs from 7-Eleven are the homeless people on Sunset Boulevard.

Cause I used to walk, I used to work at BLT in the CNN building and I'd walk down on my way to Chick-fil-A usually to get some diet Mountain Dew, which means I'm going to die like pretty soon. Anyway, the only people that were eating hot dogs from McDonald's are the guys that were sitting outside that would get changed, the gutter punks and homeless guys who would walk in, you'd give them, you'd give them a dollar and they would walk in and they'd get a two for hot dog and walk back out, sit there and eat them.

This is like, oh, so they needed to, they need to connect this in real time to hospital entrances and check-ins. Exactly. Or just, you know, dead bums. Ooh. No, seriously?

Are you shitting me? This week's Are You Shitting Me? Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas. We got a little link there that has the science and I'm just saying this might explain the Yo app. Or the homeless hot dog eating phenomenon.

Or that. You know what this fact is? It's bananas. Oh, really? I had to go there. Daycool's kicking in, man. I'm sorry. All right. We got to wrap this up because you've been drinking. No, I had one sip at the beginning. That was it.

No, I'm tired. I'm beat. I need a hot dog. So, now why did you pick this? Out of all the stuff that you've covered in this segment, we've had iPhones and, iPhones and pyramids. We've had, you know, crazy stuff, but did bananas.

Well, I just wanted something. I was so annoyed with the stupidity of the apps that we talked about this week. I, I was, I was kind of done. Let's be honest. Okay. Next. Closing shout out.

And, uh, just a second shout out to Casey Kasem because he did pass this week. And, uh, as I was talking about earlier with the negative land thing, there's also a really good talk from Mark Hosler who was in negative land, the band a bit later on about the whole experience that happened with the suing and the sampling and the early days of all that stuff.

And it's about five, six minutes long. Um, he gets into it a little bit with someone in the audience who is a very upset about, uh, copyright infringements and things like that. It's, it's an interesting take from somebody who, you know, basically negative land claimed to be artists that are pushing the edge and what happens when you do so.

And I think everybody comes out looking pretty good in that one. And it's really interesting. So give it a listen. I definitely will. I have, I'm sorry, I'm dying here still. Uh, I've, I've tried this new fermented turmeric tea this week. Yes.

So far so good. It's actually been, it's, well, it's really hard to get. It comes from Japan and it takes about three weeks to get it. So if you ever want to try it, I recommend ordering two boxes first. Cause it's like one a day. So you're going to have to order it a month in advance, no matter what. And then whatever, um, for digestion and just, I don't know what the hell it's doing to me, but I feel better during the day after I've had it.

It could be again, all in my head. Yeah. But, well, I've been drinking the for, I'm not, I haven't had turmeric, but I've been drinking a lot of the fermented puer teas and I definitely, it, it has a noticeable effect. And this stuff surprisingly is very tasty.

I mean, it's like I said, it's expensive. It's about a buck a tea bag, but it's expensive. It's a, I'm digging it. I'm really digging it. I swap between that. Well, I have that first thing in the morning and then I'll have like a black green or puerh in the afternoon. But my, it, unfortunately my coffee, uh, habit has gone by the wayside.

I've got all that gear now and I just went back to teas because they're just tastier. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I'm a huge fan of tea. I basically just have some coffee in the morning and, uh, I drink tea the rest of the day now and I don't touch coffee again until the next morning. So good stuff. You got to get on this. Uh, one last shout out breaking news.

But by the time you listen to this, it'll be actually all over the news because, uh, another massive upset in the world cup, Costa Rica just knocked off Italy. Damn. So is Italy out of it now? No, no, Italy is still doing fine, but it is put the nail in the coffin of England in that group.

England will be going home and Italy and Costa Rica will be passing through. Oh, poor England, poor England. But, uh, they were supposed to be like the good guys in this. Well, it's been, it's time that we finally admit that England is no longer a world cup soccer power. They just aren't.

Stop holding onto that dream. Well, since I wasn't holding onto it, it's pretty easy to let go of. Yeah. So well done Costa Rica. I mean, talk about a shocker. So far in the, in the tournament that they're doing so well. So, uh, and knocking off Italy is no mean feat. All right. Well, that's it for soccer talk this week with Brian and Jason.

I will talk to you next week. I will talk to you next week, sir. And hopefully this is the last of the grumpy old geeks generation two podcast. Next week, we're going to have all new intros and goodies and interstitials and zibbity zabbity doos and music and stuff.

I think it's going to be a quite fun. All right. Well, hopefully that'll happen by next week. Uh, first I knew about that timeline, so we'll see how that works into my world cup schedule. Well, there may be a good chance, apparently then that I'm editing the show next week. So we'll see how this goes.

Yes, we will see how it goes, but, uh, all right. I'm looking forward to that. We're going to make some changes around here. Uh, should be interesting. All right. Talk to you later, man. Talk to you later, man. Bye. Keep up with the grumpy old geeks on the web at grumpy old geeks.com on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks, or email them at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com.

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