631: Zamboni Sunsets

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From beauty and fashion to home, culinary and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Welcome back, Brian. It's good to be back. Packed up all the Christmas stuff here just the other day. It's all over. Thank God. It used to be a more relaxing time having a kid. It's just nonstop insanity.

And I never need to see another booze-filled chocolate again. We had our entire Christmas operation down in the box, off the house, by about 11 o'clock on the 1st. That was it.

Yeah, I have to do two. So I packed up my mom's before we left and then got back here and had all the stuff up still here. So packed all that up. So good times. Anyways, shall we get back to normalcy? Please, can we? All right. I have my favorite thing in the world. I have a class action lawsuit.

All right. All right. Again, let me reiterate. It's a new year, so let me reiterate our position on this again. It is our civic duty to engage in these because this is the only way that these big companies ever really get punished. And if you do not get your money, they get it back. So that's bullshit.

Or the lawyers take it. Or the lawyers take it. This one is for Verizon. I love the wording on this. If you have or had a Verizon post-paid wireless plan, meaning a normal one, not pre-paid. So you may be entitled to a payment from a class action settlement.

We have the link in our lawsuit. I have already filed for my pennies on the dollar. We have a link in our lawsuit. Okay. Yes. Take that. So I didn't know you were on Verizon. I'm sorry. I've been on Verizon, my God, almost 20 years now. They've always been the best for me.

Anytime I – now, admittedly, I have to call them to get a better rate. But anytime I do call them, they end up giving me a better plan. And back in the day when I was traveling a lot, they certainly had the most coverage across the states. So I'm sure that's changed by now. But back then, they were the best.

Yeah. That's the thing about all these plans. It all depends on where you live. Yeah. You know, that was the irony of AT&T and Apple getting together for the first iPhone. AT&T in San Francisco was the worst possible option. I remember I couldn't get AT&T in my house at the time.

Like it just – the signal would not go into my house. So, yeah. Yeah. Thus begat the Femtocell. Oh, God. I had one of those. They never fucking worked. We all did. No, they didn't. No, they didn't. Well, speaking of Apple, I too have a class action lawsuit. All right.

Yes, this was the Maldonado et al versus Apple Inc. This is the AppleCare protection plan, AppleCare Plus for iPhone, iPad. If you got one of their – basically a refurb, I think. We talked about this before the break because I said, hey, everybody, go sign up if you want your cash.

Well, I did. And I got paid, bitches. Woo! $26.18. All right. That almost pays for one month of AppleCare. It actually pays for less than – it pays for half of the Apple One subscription I have for one month.

So, yeah. But I'll take it. Yep. It's money. Yep. And I just saw this one come in last night because we've been on about EVs and how, yeah, we're going to be skipping them for now. Well, apparently Hertz is too. Yeah. They're going to be offloading about 20,000 of their EVs, mostly Teslas.

Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I actually – we use Hertz when we travel. We're signed up in their program and all that sort of thing. So, I did notice when we landed in LAX and went over to the Hertz thing and walked down the aisles because they let you pick your own car and all that sort of stuff.

There were a handful of EVs all sitting there. Everything else was gone, basically. So, nobody wants the EVs. Even in Los Angeles, which actually arguably has one of the better infrastructures. But the problem is the infrastructure is just not there. It's not. Unless you know you're staying at a hotel that's got an electric charger and you know it's going to be working and you know there aren't 15 other cars all lined up for the three that are there.

It doesn't make any sense to rent one of these. It barely makes sense to own one. Yeah. It would be nice. We'll get there eventually. But now? Not really. And you've got to also take into effect probably the main reason they're getting rid of a lot of Tesla models.

There's the Elon ick factor. It's really starting to take hold. Yeah. It kind of is. Especially, I don't know if you saw the article this week about how many drugs he does. Oh, God. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. Great. Hurts is saying it's because the repair costs are too high and the resale value sucks.

Yeah. Yeah. Both of those things are also true as well. So, yeah. I want to believe in EVs, Jason. It's just not there yet, which is, you know, I would like my next car to be one. Next car is definitely going to be a hybrid. Yeah. The thing – and think about this. When you're buying a used EV, you're basically buying a used battery.

You're buying an iPhone that barely charges. Exactly. You have no idea how well they took care of that battery. Did they charge it properly? Did they keep it at 80% instead of 100 all the time? Did they set it to the 80% of the settings? Yeah. Who knows what they did? Jeez. By the way, I mean, we'll get to this a little bit later.

I did get a new iPhone, but that 80% charging thing gives me constant anxiety. Like I never feel like my phone is fully charged. I mean, it's a new phone, so the battery lasts great even if I leave it at 80%, which I have been because I want a good battery. But constant anxiety, Jason.

Embrace the chaos, Brian. We'll talk about it in a minute. eBay is back in the news because they finally agreed to pay out a fine for that couple that they just terrorized back in 2019. An insane story that was. That was so insane. But, yeah, to follow up on that story, they got paid out – the couple got paid out $3 million.

Good. Which is pretty good. Yeah. And the executives who perpetrated the harassment campaign against these people – if you don't know what we're talking about, go check the link in the show notes and just read up on it. It's too – it's too nasty for us to recap right now. It's too early in the morning, so I don't really want to go through it.

But, yeah, the executives are in jail and these people got paid, so – Good. Win-win. In the news. I was kind of hoping 2024 would be the year without talking about Bitcoin, but that is not the case.

The SEC has approved Bitcoin ETFs for real this time. Now, we say for real this time because, guess what? The SEC got – Twitter account got hacked the day before announcing that they were going to approve it. Yeah, that was great. Because they hadn't yet. That was fantastic.

Yeah. So that was very funny. So, what this basically means is they've approved the applications of 11-spot Bitcoin ETFs in this highly anticipated decision. So, of course, the BitBros are like, this is great. Everybody loves Bitcoin. It's real.

Oh, it's awesome. So, there are some funds that will be listed on public stock exchanges that you can buy into in which they'll purchase some Bitcoins and have some of that as part of the portfolio. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. If you think everybody's excited about it and this is a resounding endorsement of Bitcoin, hang on a second.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler wasn't exactly effusive about the merits of Bitcoin and made a statement along with this. Bitcoin is primarily a speculative volatile asset that's also used for illicit activity, including ransomware, money laundering, sanctioned invasion, and terrorist financing. Yeah, but so is real money, to be honest.

That's true. While we approve the listing and trading of certain spot Bitcoin ETFs shares today, we did not approve or endorse Bitcoin. Investors should remain cautious about the myriad risks associated with Bitcoin and products whose values is tied to crypto. So, yeah.

It's a hug and a slap. Yeah. It's like saying, we don't approve of slavery, but here's some tobacco. Yes, exactly. And some chat GPT news, of course. Of course, a chat GPT maker, OpenAI, have launched their GPT store and a subscription tier for Teams.

So, the store is now out. It allows developers and users to share and profit from their custom versions of the viral chat bot. So, yeah, you can make your own stuff, but they are toolkeeping, just like Apple does, and they're taking a cut of revenue. Anybody can build and share GPTs. You don't need coding experience.

Great. But creators must make a builder profile that shares their real name or points users to a verified website, because those can't be faked. So, they have a revenue program for creators, but that's coming soon in quarter one. So, right now, you just kind of have to build on hope about what you're going to get paid.

And I wonder if it's retroactive. Yeah. I doubt it. I don't know. So, meanwhile, they've rolled out chat GPT team, which costs $25 to $30 monthly per user while offering data security and supporting longer queries. And they basically are stating, we will not use anything that a team profile types in to train our models.

Sure. Sure. Yeah. We'll see about that. We'll just train it on all the free apps that people are making. Speaking of chat GPT, CES is going on right now, and I've got some car news about this. Earlier this week, Volkswagen announced plans to augment its in-car voice assistant, Ida, with chat GPT.

The idea behind bringing chat GPT into a car is all about avoiding a dead end when you ask Ida something that it doesn't know because you're being stupid and asking your car questions that it can't answer. Because it's a fucking car. Because it's a car. It's not a fucking kit from Knight Rider. Drivers don't need to do anything different.

You just say, hello, Ida. And if it doesn't know the response about something that you should be asking your car about, it'll check with chat GPT. As the reviewer states here, and I put this in bold because I think it basically sums up all of this, I wasn't able to get a great sense yet of what things chat GPT is good for.

Yep. There you go. Yeah. So the demo had a car telling a story about dinosaurs, which is a theoretical way to entertain kids in the backseat and annoy the parents that are driving. It asked the car to tell it about the Sphere, the massive new concert entertainment venue in Los Angeles, and started responding with details about it opening soon, even though it's been open for a long time.

Because chat GPT isn't kept up to date. Yep. And correction, Las Vegas, not Los Angeles. Oh, sorry, Las Vegas. I guess I just want to be back in Los Angeles so much. So, yeah, they've got that. A bunch of other car manufacturers are also in the rush to bring AI to their vehicles because, I don't know.

Yeah. Why not? Amazon and BMW are replacing the driver's manual with AI, so there will be no more fucking manual. Oh, that makes me angry. That angers me greatly. That angers me greatly as well. I don't want to ask chat GPT how to turn off the bloody light.

Especially if you want to ask chat GPT how to connect to the network. How do I update my software? Oh, we can't because we're not connected to the fucking network. I love having that big-ass, giant, thick book in my glove compartment because every now and again when you're stuck somewhere, something's not working right.

That little book or big-ass book will save you. It will, although YouTube does the same these days. Not if you're stuck out in the middle of nowhere, buddy. That's why I use Verizon, Jason. It's got the most coverage across the United States. Cha-ching! I'll be on T-Mobile getting my satellite calls from Elon's space phones.

Yeah. Well, we had just talked a little bit about the holidays wrapping up, but one thing hasn't, Jason. Pink slip season has continued throughout the new year, has it not? Oh, boy. Here we go. Here we go. Let's just run through these because we've got a lot of them. Unity is going to lay off another 1,800 employees, which is about 25% of its workforce.

All right. Yes, Unity, if you don't know, is a competitor to Unreal Engine. It's basically a video game engine. And it is the weaker of the two, if you have to ask me. So that's probably why they're laying off a bunch of people. NASA has terminated about 100 contractors because the, I love this, the ambitious Mars Sample Return Program.

I keep reading that as ASMR. I just can't. I'm like, thank you, NASA, for defunding ASMR. We're going to Mars. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. So JPL is laying people off because they're not going to have enough money to keep that program going because we suck.

All right. Duolingo is cutting 10% of its contractor workforce because of AI. Yes. So apparently a lot of the work that people do over there at Duolingo is doing quick translations and checking them to make sure that they fit a certain certification standard.

Well, now ChatGPT can do 90% of that. Well, only the first part. It doesn't really do the checking. That's the problem. It doesn't do the checking. So they need people to still do the checking part, but they don't need as many is what they're saying. All right. Yep. Okay. Brian, take it away.

You got the next one. All right. I've got Amazon is laying off several hundred employees at Prime Video and MGM Studios, even though they're now charging us for Prime Video and throwing in ads. But I love this because we're going to keep hearing the same exact corporate speak. Amazon's entertainment chief, Mike Hopkins, wrote in an email to staff that has identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact.

So we don't know the exact amount yet, but several hundred employees are getting canned. And he also wrote that it's hard to say goodbye to talented Amazonians. Yeah. Fuck off. Amazon is also going to be laying off people over at Audible. They're going to be laying off 5% of the staff. And they sent out a memo, which can just be summed up by the response of this tweet, which just makes me so happy.

Alex writes, Dear staff, thank you for making so much money last year. Now we're firing a lot of you because our parent company thinks it will make it look better. Love, your boss. And the Amazon-owned Twitch is preparing to lay off 35% of its employees or a little over 500 people.

This was a blog post signed by CEO Dan Clancy. And here we go with the corporate speak because I love it so much. Over the last year, we've been working to build a more sustainable business so that Twitch will be here for the long run. And throughout the year, we have cut costs and made many decisions to be more efficient. Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it became clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business.

They fired over 400 people back in the last year. So now we're adding about another 500. So almost 1,000 people have lost their jobs at Twitch in the last couple months. They have failed to become profitable nine years after Amazon acquired it for nearly $1 billion.

So that could be part of the problem. Maybe it's just not a good business. Or maybe they just don't know what the hell to do with it. I think it's probably a great business, but... Obviously not. If they knew what to do with it. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, Pixar is going to be laying off about 20% of its staff or as high as 20%.

They're not saying exactly how much yet. But apparently they're going to be making less stuff, they say. That's what we're going to do. We're going to make less stuff, I think. Okay. But I think some of it came because of Disney Plus as well. So they were trying to do stuff with Disney Plus, and we know how that's going at Disney Plus.

Yes. Well, humane, you know, that AI pin that we talked about a couple weeks back that, you know, nobody really knows what it is, but it's going to be really expensive. And it's supposed to revolutionize our telecommunications and get us off our cell phones all the time.

They've just started shipping, but also laid off a bunch of staff, which does not give one hope for the AI pin because you're barely out of the gate and you're already firing people. Now, there's a little twist to this. We've got some of the corporate speak, part of a wider refresh of our organizational structure as our company evolves with purpose for this next phase of growth.

But then we also have the best phrase I've ever seen ever in the history of the universe about firing people. He also told The Verge that the cuts were not communicated as a layoff. Those sources told the outlet that they were both verbally and in writing. So you're fired, but I'm not communicating it to you that way, Jason.

Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Yes. Oh, great. Google is also laying off a couple hundred more employees because they're going to be, like, basically kneecapping Assistant. I think they're killing 17 features out of Google Assistant. So they're also, which is interesting, they're making cuts in the AR division as well.

We will talk about the Apple Guga coming up. But it seems like AR would be the place that they would be upping their staff. Maybe they're just recycling, cutting dead weight before they restaff. Who knows? But Fitbit also is getting kind of rolled into this new devices and services team.

So there's a whole bunch of reorganization going on over there. So Google is not immune from this as well. Obviously, they're not immune. I think they laid off 12,000 people last year or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. This is a drop in the bucket compared to last year. These are the ones they forgot.

Yeah. Oh, we forgot you. Get the fuck out of here. Look, stapler guy is still there. Didn't we fire him? No. Okay. Well, don't communicate it to him as a layoff. Yeah. And here's an article over from Vice, which I thought was defunct, which is a great title.

Thousands of software engineers say the job market is getting much worse. Brian, Brian, cast your mind back to the beginning of 2023. Do you remember the Great Resignation? Yes, I do. Yeah.

Everybody's like, I would like to work from home today because I want to. Give me more money so I can play with my cat. Well, now you can play with your cat all day long because, yeah, as we told you was going to happen on this show, you might want to hang on to that job a little bit longer because the free money is going away and it has.

And everybody, and this goes across the board from almost everybody I know, and I have friends who are accountants who are saying the same thing. Everybody's COVID money has run out and everybody's fucked. Yeah. Yeah. We warned you all. We said, keep those jobs, not go crazy about this.

And yeah, it's tough. I mean, people overhired and then they overfired, but then they realized that they didn't actually overfire because maybe we didn't need that many people anyways. So that's where we're at. Good luck, everybody. Happy New Year.

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Well, Slim Pickens on my flights. On my flight back, the video thing on my seat wasn't working. So they give you a discount code for your next flight, which as we've discovered, if you input the discount code, they actually up the price of your flight.

So you're screwed anyways, so none of it makes any sense, and they're all just bastards. But there wasn't much on the flight anyways that I hadn't seen, because I'd already taken the flight out to LA for the music festival like two months earlier, so not much was new. I watched a holiday rom-com about being true to yourself and trying not to ruin Christmas called The Happiest Season, starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis and Alison Brie and a bunch of other people.

The twist here, they're lesbians, but her parents don't know. You know what, Brian? This sounds like the cause of that Alaska Airlines door blowout. Somebody just tried to get the fuck out of the plane, because they had to watch this. I have to say, it wasn't horrible. It was very, you know, very, like, 80s version of a movie, except they updated it with lesbians, and the acting was fine, and it was clever, and there you go.

So I watched that. I also watched Barbie, which was actually fantastic. I do highly recommend it. It was very well done. I wasn't expecting much, and it over-delivered the nothing, so that's good. And then with the wife, once we got to my mom's house, we watched another Christmassy-type movie called Family Switch on Netflix.

A family descends into chaos days before Christmas when a rare cosmic event causes the parents to swap bodies with their teenage kids. Jennifer Garner. Oh, so it's still Freaky Friday. Yeah, Jennifer Garner, Ed Helms, Emma Myers, who's also from Wednesday. It was good. I mean, it does exactly what you would expect it to do.

It's funny enough. It was clever. It was fine. It was heartwarming. Christmas made my wife happy, and I drank wine. All right. God, this is going to be a big one. We watched a lot of stuff over the break. Yes, we did.

Yeah. I watched the miniseries Obliterated on Netflix, which is a very campy, emphasis on campy action series, which turned out to be really fun and really funny. If I thought it was going to be serious, we actually did think it was going to be serious going in, and we watched the first episode, and we're like, what the hell is this?

And then somebody's like, no, no, no, stick with it. So we did, and it was fun. Killed eight hours during the break. Perfectly fine. Trevor Noah, Where Was I, his new special, eh, not as good as his recent ones, I thought. I think he spent a little too much time in Germany on this one for me.

Dave Chappelle, The Dreamer, loved it. Don't care what anybody says. Fucking loved it. Still think he's funny. Ricky Gervais Armageddon, I have not gotten through it because I've fallen asleep three times halfway through. Okay. Yeah. Some people seem mad about it. Some people seem, I don't know.

He's pushing the woke button. He's doing all that sort of stuff. So, I mean, good for him. He's still funny. I've seen people post some jokes on Twitter complaining about, like, this is just wrong. And I was like, actually, that's a very funny joke. So, who knows? Yeah. If anybody gets mad at comedy, fuck them.

I don't care. It's comedy. The whole point of it is comedy. Yeah. So, if you get mad at this stuff, just save it for something else. Don't be mad. It's either funny or not funny. Get over it. Yeah. Seriously. The Killer, which was David Fincher's new movie on Netflix.

Okay. It was okay. It was slow, which I liked, but it was – no, I mean, it was good. It was a good, slow burn, basically assassin movie. So, and he doesn't blink the entire movie, which is very disconcerting. So, that was okay.

Okay. We watched Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1. Now, my roommate has never seen a Mission Impossible movie ever. And halfway through it, I'm like, you're bored, aren't you? And she's like, people actually watch this crap? And I'm a Mission Impossible – like, I'm attuned to it.

I understand it. It's probably like people who watch Fast and Furious movies. You know, it is what it is. I would not watch either of those franchises because I don't get it either. Mission Impossible 1, I still love. I worked on Mission Impossible 2, so I have an affinity because it was John Woo. Mission Impossible 7, on the other hand, did not need to exist.

And I really called bullshit on Rotten Tomatoes because they say the tomato meter is 96% and the audience score is 94%. I call 100% bullshit on that because that was the dumbest fucking movie I've seen in a very long time.

And the biggest stunt was basically the commercial, you know, for three weeks leading up to it and how they did it. So, it's like, okay, when's he going to ride his motorcycle off the cliff? We've only seen it 800 times. So, it takes you out of the movie. I was like, okay, there it is. And my roommate at least said, ooh, I wonder how they did that.

And I'm like, you missed the commercials, obviously, because he did it seven times in one day. He rode his bike off a cliff. Yeah. Done. We did watch High on the Hog, how African-American cuisine transformed America. Fascinating. Highly recommend it. Great history. Great food.

It's on Netflix. You could definitely do worse than check this one out. I think it's four episodes. Very well done. Great cooking show. Actually, more history than cooking. Very cool. Okay. Well, if you want to watch something that will make you not ever want to eat again, you can watch You Are What You Eat, a twin experiment over on Netflix.

Four-part series that basically, you know, they found identical twins. So the DNA bias would be gone and put one on a basically a very healthy omnivore diet and one on a very healthy vegan diet and then studied what happened to them.

Shockingly, you'll discover the vegetarian slash vegan diet is better for you. And then they delve into all the horrific practices in factory farming. So you'll never want to eat beef, chicken, or pig again. And, you know, I followed it up with a bacon sandwich because I got over it pretty quickly.

But it's pretty fascinating and pretty interesting and well worth a watch. And it definitely made me rethink my meat-eating practices. I've been pretty healthy with them anyways, but I'm definitely going to cut down a bit and make sure that I get my meat from butchers and where I know where the meat is coming from and not factory farmed chicken in particular.

You never want to eat that shit. Okay. Good to know. Yeah. As I nosh out my $5 Ralph's chicken that I got this morning. Yeah, don't do that. You're not going to. Or just don't watch this show ever. No, no. I'm still alive. You know, people eat worse shit and survive. The Traders UK Season 2 is back and it is going great.

Five episodes in so far. I think Episode 6 airs tonight. They push through these things fast. So if you're in the UK, you've probably seen half of it already. Now that, you know, I was so down on it at the beginning after watching the first U.S. season because it was such a gut twister.

Now everybody's in on it. So everybody knows it's a game. Right. So it's way more fun. It is way more fun. And Season 2 is fantastic. The Traders U.S. Season 2 starts today on Peacock. So we have Traders out the wall. Fire up the subscription machine. Dude.

Yeah, that's exactly why I kept Peacock for the next, you know, month. That's it. That's the downside. The U.S. version, they're going to launch three today and then one a week until it's done for 12 episodes. The U.K., 12 episodes in a week and a half. It's like, boom, here you go.

Take it. Love it. Gone. Fargo, Season 5. The penultimate episode was this week. The finale's next week. Holy shit, what a great series. Or this season is great. Jon Hamm is great. The girl that played Keighley from Ted Lasso's in it.

She's phenomenal. I mean, it's just a stellar cast as always. And this season has just been so much fun. Reacher Season 2, almost at the end of that one. Also awesome. Better than Season 1, I think, if you like that kind of thing. So much better than the Tom Cruise version.

I saw somebody on Twitter saying that the new Reacher ate the previous Reacher to get to its size. He did. He did. Easily. Yeah. Easily. And Monarch Legacy of Monsters finished last night. Meh. Oh, really? I watched the very first episode last night, and I actually loved it.

I thought it was great. The series as a whole is really good. Okay. The problem is it's – well, it's setting up Season 2. Right. Most of it is setting up Season 2. There's not a lot of monsters. There's a lot of backstory, and there's a lot of filler.

It's very – it's got a very lost feeling to me right now from Episode 1. There's this corporation. They're shadowy. What's going on? Blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of that, yeah. And there are bits that are great. I found myself – and some of the relationships I don't care about.

So I probably fast-forwarded 30% of the whole series. Okay. Honestly, because it's a lot of dialogue that I don't care about. I like dialogue. I do hope John Goodman comes back, though. It was great to see him at the very beginning. No spoilers. Okay. Yeah, don't spoil it. So enjoy it. I mean, it's not bad, but it's not super-duper action-packed.

There's not a lot of monsters in it, let's just say that. Okay. But the story's fine. Like I said, meh, not woo, not ur. So middle of the road. Okay. Stuff that's coming back. Halo is coming back for Season 2. And I love this.

Jason Weisberger over at Boing Boing wrote, I only got one or two episodes into Halo and forgot about Season 1. Well, me too, Jason. Could be the curse of the Halo Jasons. It was okay. I want to go back and watch it because there's not a lot else on right now. Right. But, I mean, it was decent, but I don't know.

There was just something about it that just didn't hook me. So I'll see if it keeps going. They got to Season 2, so it must not be too, too bad. All right. Slow Horses, Season 5, has been renewed and will be coming soon, or after Season 4. Probably not any time too soon. No, no, probably another couple years now.

But I tell you what, the last season was phenomenal. Loved it. And finally, finally, they have started production on the last season of Stranger Things. I haven't watched the previous one yet, and I don't know if I'm going to. I think I might be tapped out on Stranger Things.

It was good. Okay. You have to budget for it because each episode is a movie. Right. It's an hour and a half per episode, so it is movie-like. Yeah, I don't have that kind of time. I started, once I realized that, then I just, I budgeted 45 minutes a shot. Right. And then got through it in two nights, which actually worked out because it makes it last longer, because it was good.

Okay. I actually quite enjoyed it. I thought it was a decent season. All right. I guess I'll do it then. We have Netflix's Three Body Problem has finally gotten a full-size trailer. I watched it. I don't know if you did, Jason. Damn, it actually looks good. Oh, good. Good.

Yeah. No, I didn't, I was, I didn't want to be disappointed again because I'm just been, the Chinese version with the, the, what was it? Who did that one? Who's, it's not Huawei, but who's the big, whoever the big retailer is over there, their Amazon that made it.

It was just incomprehensible. Yeah. No, this, this is very Hollywood and it looks, it looks good. We'll see if they pulled it off. Did they foundation it? Hard to tell from the trailer. Okay. Okay. Odyssey has filed for bankruptcy.

Okay. I didn't even know they were still around. Well, you know, they're huge. I mean, they own most of the radio stations. If you listen to it, well, you're in Canada. That's right. Yeah. I don't really listen to any radio station. You listen here. It's like, you know, Hey, you want some more podcasts? Go to Odyssey. We've got gazillions of them because we shit them out by the ton every day.

Well, it turns out radio advertising is in a steep decline as well as thank you. Thank you, Odyssey. People like you. Podcast advertising is too. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a big restructuring, but I think they're still going to be around. And a friend of the show, Fogarty, shot me this and I could not believe it.

We're talking about Tom Lehrer or something, and I think he went to go look it up. I did not know this, but back in 2007, Tom Lehrer gave all of his music to the public domain. That's cool. Yeah. There's a site called Songs and Lyrics by Tom Lehrer that has everything up there.

And there's a very long, beautiful note from Tom. And at the very end, he's like, don't send me any money, which is great. He said, so help yourselves and don't send me any money. Huge fan. Like, I've always loved him. Definitely, like, introduced to him by Dr. Domeno, like many of us probably were. Yeah, really great stuff.

It's one of the few pieces of vinyl I kept, as I've got one of his. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And for people who don't know who we're talking about, I put a link in the show notes. It's called Tom Lehrer at 90, A Life of Scientific Satire. Well worth the read. Go listen to everything he's ever done multiple times on repeat, because once you get hooked, you're hooked.

I mean, he was just one of the greats. One of the greats. Definitely. Tops and doodads. So over the break, I ended up having to build a new website for this guy we're managing, Dashaun Wesley, the King of Vogue. Okay. And I decided on Squarespace.

Okay. Because, you know, it's basically, we always call it an unintuitive fuster cluck. But it's the unintuitive fuster cluck I was familiar with. So I signed up, got a new thing, and I found out they've got a whole new layout engine and a whole new design system.

Okay. It's not half bad. All right. Anything's better than WordPress. Oh, Jesus. No, no, never again. Never. Well, I mean, for a blog, it's fantastic. Okay, great. Make a blog. It's a little overcomplicated for a blog, actually. But if I had to do a blog again, I'd probably use Ghost.

But, yeah, for just building a generic website that just does some stuff, Squarespace has everything now. It's just like, boom, done. In and out. I think, and here's the trick. When you sign up and you go through a couple times, wait a couple days, you don't have to go track down a podcast to find a coupon code for them.

They will just send you a 20% off coupon saying, I see that you're using our site. Would you really like to buy a year? Would you like to continue? Yes. And also, Squarespace, feel free to advertise with us. We're free. Yeah, yeah. We've changed our tune. We will not call you an unintuitive fuster cluck anymore.

There you go. I do want to drop another mention of Set App. Man, this year, I was looking at how many apps I use and how much money I save versus having to buy them individually, one at a time. It's insane.

It is insane. There's so much good stuff on there, especially now that they've got Spark. Craft alone saved me $40 a year. iStat menus, bartender, clean my Mac 10, all of those. You get it for $9.99 a month.

There's a link in the show notes. Go check it out. Seriously, it is one of my favorite things that I've got. And I've got it on four machines. And it just all syncs. And you get iPad or iOS apps, too. So, all in all, Set App. Go get it.

Links in the show notes. Everybody's been talking about the iPhone that fell from the Alaska Airlines flight. I saw a couple different takes on it. And they're like, all the experts are like, well, it landed in dirt. Of course, it's going to be fine. It's a phone. It's not a person.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, it doesn't matter how high it falls from. Once it hits terminal velocity, it could fall from a 10-story building or, you know, three miles up. It's going to be falling at the same speed. And if it lands in a pile of dirt, probably going to be fine. If it would have hit the road, it would have been obliterated. But it landed in some grassy dirt.

So, yeah, not a big surprise there, folks. Okay. Speaking of iPhones, I did upgrade my phone per your recommendation. I got the iPhone 15 Plus over the break. Faster and lighter than my old smaller phone. Okay. Not surprising that it's faster.

Surprising that it's lighter. It's taken me a while to get used to the size. It's so funny because we used to all have big phones and wanted smaller phones. And then we got super small phones. And now we all want bigger phones again. Probably because we're getting older and blind. It's great for that. I've got to say, I don't have to whip out my reading glasses to do work on my phone anymore, which is a plus.

So, hence the plus. Yes. So, yeah. So far, I really like the phone. It's great. So, I'm glad I finally made the upgrade. What were you coming from? A 12. Oh, like a 12 regular? Okay. A 12 regular to 15 Plus. Yeah, I got a 13 Pro. And I'm so sloth to give it up because I own it outright.

And it's got a terabyte of space on it. See, I was able to use my Verizon upgrade to basically get this for 200 bucks. Oh, that's not bad then. That's not bad at all. Not complaining at all. Yeah, I could trade this in, but I spent so much on that damn terabyte that I kind of want to hang on to it and drive it into the ground.

Yeah. I mean, if it's not slowing down for you, if it's still charging, it's not like a Tesla battery that you got secondhand. Oh, yeah. Why bother? You know, stick with it. No, it's, yeah. It charges fine because I do the 80% thing. Yep. The problem is what you alluded to. I can't see the damn thing.

I really can't see the damn thing. Yeah, we're just getting old. So, it's astonishing how much I actually wear my just reading glasses because I'm always reading. So, I basically wear glasses now, which is depressing. But along with the phone, I also wanted to get a new charger.

So, I splashed out some bucks for this one. The MagSafe charger stand, Anker 3-in-1 Cube with MagSafe, 15-watt max fast charging stand, foldable wireless charger for iPhone 15, 14, 13 series, Apple Watch, S1 through 8 Ultra, AirPods, 30-watt USB-C charger included off Amazon.

This is the best standing, most compact charger I've ever had. It weighs a ton. And I couldn't figure out why it weighs a ton until I put my 15-plus magnet on it and tried to pull it off. And even with the weight that it could actually be a little heavier because it still moves around just a little bit when I pull off the phone.

Yeah, MagSafe is, those magnets actually stick. Yeah, it's no joke. So, you need a heavy charger and this one is, it is pricey, but it looks nice and it holds everything beautifully and charges much faster than my previous stand did. And yeah, I'm very happy with it.

Yeah, I've got an old stand that did all three and it does it overnight. So, I don't really care about the speed. It looks nice. The thing I found is though, I just almost, I never use it anymore because my watch, I charge every other day for, well, I take a shower.

So, I don't need it for that. I need to actually use the charger charger for it. AirPods, I plug in while I'm at work and my phone, I plug in while I'm at work. So, I'm like, I don't, like, I'm all wired charging now. Yes, see, I basically charge everything at night like you do, but I leave it, like, nothing goes to the bedroom with me.

So, it all just goes on the stand downstairs when I go up to bed. So, it's great. Yeah. I wish I could keep mine out of my room, but I can't. I can't. I literally sleep with my phone on my pillow because I listen to audio books all night. Oh, here's something that came up over the break. I was getting headaches every morning.

This goes back, way back to the early days of Grumpy Old Geeks. I was getting headaches by four o'clock every morning and I was just like, why am I getting headaches every morning? And I realized, I'm like, hey, wait a minute. I remember our old shows. I've got a phone stuck next to my head for like seven hours.

Maybe the radiation is probably melting my brain. So, now I just turn it on airplane mode and actually turn off all the radios. No Bluetooth, no Wi-Fi, just so I can listen to my books and have it there. And the headaches went away. All right. Surprise. Surprise. I don't have a microwave stuck to my brain.

Anyway, I found this one. Actually, my roommate found this and sent it to me. You know, we've got the white noise generators and all that crap that you can buy off the app store. Well, there's actually some built-in options right on the iPhone that's built into iOS. So, it's not a bunch of them, but in a pinch, it's nice to have that if you, you know, just need to turn something on.

It's, yeah, it's in the, or not the accessories, the accessibility settings. There's some decent ones in there. They don't sound as good as a dedicated unit, but it does the job. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and it's free. It's free. It's built in. So, link is in the show notes on how to turn that stuff on.

All right. I see you're about to talk about Instagram ads in a second. And this relates because pre-Christmas, while I was at my mom's house and I was doing a lot of walks because I didn't have my full exercise bike, my weight set and all that stuff that I do my workouts here for.

So, it was a lot of walking. I got served an ad for an app called Fantasy Hike, which, and I bought it because it's fun. And I was getting a little bit bored with just the Steps app or Apple Fitness. This takes you on a walk from, well, it's not Lord of the Rings IP, but they make up shit that sounds almost exactly like Lord of the Rings.

Yeah. So, you walk from Hobbiton to Mount Fire or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it's fun. Like, I'm actually enjoying, like, just checking it out and getting the different achievements and seeing where it tells you where you're at and all that sort of stuff.

And it's, it just, it adds a little bit to making me want to walk more and making it a little bit more exciting. Now, since I bought that, I've been served ads a gazillion times for another app called The Conqueror. And apparently, they did go out and get IP rights, which is smart. And they've got all kinds of different things.

They've got Lord of the Rings. They've got different cities and all that sort of stuff. So, once I've completed my walk to Mount Fire, I will give The Conqueror a spin, too. I just find it fun to have something that's a little bit more enjoyable than just a step count. It's kind of nice.

Yeah, yeah. When you put this in here, I checked it out and I liked it. I downloaded it. But now that I know The Conqueror is out there. Yeah, go straight to The Conqueror, I think. Yeah, I'll skip to the end. I'll go for that one. It is cute because you open it up and it's got some very Hobbit Town-looking graphics.

And I'm like, hmm, didn't want to pay for the copyright, eh? Nope. Because after that, I was using it and I was thinking, my God, there's a market here. Why don't people chase after copyright for this sort of stuff and just do completely different things? And then, boom, I started getting served the IG ads for The Conqueror. There we go.

So now into your IG ads. So before Christmas, I was getting a gazillion. I'm sure you get these two, Brian. The old man chair workout ads. You can get a six-pack on a chair. My entire Instagram feed post-Christmas has been nothing but old man yoga, workouts, and intermittent fasting apps.

That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of those. So I just marked – I kept marking all of those as I already bought this. So they finally got the – they got the gist of it. So what they've decided to change up with now is all of the ads that I get now are for face yoga.

What the fuck is face yoga? Face yoga is basically going – Oh, for fuck's sake. Yeah. And rubbing your face in a particular way to improve your jawline. Give you a chiseled jaw. So, yeah.

And the thing is, I love this. This is the same thing. This goes with the chair yoga or the chair workout, the face yoga, any new app, fitness plans. And I can't believe people fall for this bullshit. As soon as you go to the website and it says, how old are you?

And it starts off with a fucking questionnaire. And then it goes, calculating whatever it is. And it sits there and has a little percentage dial that takes time and goes through it. I'm like, do people fall for this bullshit? Of course they do. This is – yeah, this is all pre-planned, pre-scripted shit.

They're just selling you a bucket of videos that have been pre-produced that have nothing to do with your particular lifestyle. It's the same shit. I get this – there's an Instagram ad that I get all the time right now. How much walking do you have to do to lose 45 pounds? I was like, I've got to walk to Mount Fire more than 17 times.

Trust me. You're trying to sell me on this bullshit that I'm going to lose it in three months? Fuck you. Yeah, you've got to walk to Mount Fire and wait for the entire – wait to get to the end credit scene, which is another four hours. Unbelievable. Oh, man. Yeah. I did fall for one though.

I got – I don't know how I – well, I know exactly how I got on this one. I don't know if you've seen these fireman tools. No. You have a very special set of skills that come in your ads. Yeah. These are all lockpicking – these are basically lockpicking devices that firemen use to breach buildings as they come in.

They're sold as quote-unquote fireman tools. This is just B&E shit. Right. It's all it is. It's breaking and entering shit. So I had $26 from Apple's burning a hole in my pocket. So I used my payout for my class action lawsuit and I bought a couple of fireman tools on Instagram.

So I'll be reviewing those next week. I think they get here today. So over the break, I had a celebration of one year of sobriety. And to celebrate, me and a couple sober friends went to Sandbox VR here in Woodland Hills, California.

It's like, you know, it's upgraded laser tag. Right. I was looking at the site and I was like, that's exactly what I was thinking. Yeah. But you're not shooting against each other. You're shooting against the VR. So you put on the dots on your wrists and your ankles. You put the headset on. But you also put on a vibro vest that tracks you and you can talk to each other.

You have microphones and everything. And they give you guns and swords and things like that. It was so much fucking fun, Brian. I see that they've paid for IP as well. Yeah. Yeah. There's a Star Trek Discovery one there, which we all agreed looked boring as hell. And too woke.

Yeah. So we didn't want the game to become emotional on us and start crying when we shot it. So we went for zombies and dragons, played Deadwood Valley, and we played Seekers of the Shard. Nice. Deadwood Valley. I tell you what, the adrenaline rush you get from actually shooting zombies that are chasing you and flying at you.

Oh, my God. It's scary. It is. Yeah. This looks amazing. Like, my son has just recently gotten into laser tag because he's at that age now where he goes to birthday parties where they're at fun centers where they have that sort of stuff. And he loves it. And next time we – when we come back for the summer break, I want to take him to this.

I think he would love this. Sadly, I think this one is 18 and over only. Oh, damn. Damn. Yeah. But check on it. I'm sure there might be some that are younger. But ours – it might have just been because ours were zombies. Right. And orcs and stuff like that. But, man, dude, even if you ditch the kid and come hang out with us, you, me, and Blondelle will go and we'll just kill some stuff.

It is so much fun. All right. Looks cool. So we did two – yeah, we did the zombies and then we did one with dragons after that and dragons and orcs and stuff like that. Deadwood Valley was fun because you don't have to look up a whole lot. Only – there is a couple scenes where zombie vultures are trying to attack you from the sky.

So you do have to look up, which is difficult because you kind of – it is disorienting looking up in VR. And Seekers of the Shard, we definitely had to look up a lot. And I ended up just getting my ass handed to me because there was a couple scenes where we were going down a raft on a river and we go over a waterfall.

And I actually had to grab the ground, like kneel down and grab the ground because I was going to lose it. Anyway, I can't recommend it enough. So much fun. Send me a coupon, Sandbox VR, for that plug, please. Speaking of VR though, well, we move more AR.

Apple Vision Pro is coming. Everybody is talking about it. Pre-orders are starting very soon. Sadly, this is the one time that I desperately want to get one. I want to start building for it. I just can't. I can't afford it. It's fucking expensive.

It is. It's really fucking expensive. I'm not going to leap in on this. I'm definitely going to wait because I'm going to be more of a consumer. I'm not interested in developing. If I had the money, I would invest in you, Jason, because I think you would actually make some pretty cool stuff for this. So maybe you should take out a small business loan.

That's what got me in trouble in the first place. I know. I know. So, yeah, I definitely think I will be picking up one of these when we're looking at version 2, version 3, and there's a lot of content for it. They're expensive. But, man, I think this might be the game changer finally.

Yeah. See, that's why I want to get one to actually start building content for it. So, yeah, if anybody wants to bankroll me, shoot me an email. I'll give you 20% of everything I make for the next 10 years because it's going to be – I think it's going to be awesome. There's only going to be – they're saying on launch there's only going to be 60,000 to 80,000 units available, and they're expecting them to sell out, which doesn't surprise me.

It sounds like that's a lot. That's not a lot. It's not a lot, especially for Apple fanatics who've got the money. Yeah. And corporations that can afford to shell out for 10 or 20 of these for their people to start building. You know, game companies are going to be sucking these things up. Movie companies are going to be sucking them up.

Yeah. You know, any big content creation house is going to be sucking these things up. Yeah, agreed. Well, speaking of cool but incredibly expensive, I've only tangentially been following CES 2024 because I don't really care that much. It's usually smart toilets.

But I saw this, and I thought this was really cool. Samsung has debuted the world's first transparent micro LED screen. It is fucking awesome. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It is so cool. A complete transparent micro LED TV.

You can see through it, and then you can set different settings. I mean, it is unbelievable. I would kill to have one of these, but it currently costs $150,000. No, you can almost buy one of the Apple Vision Pros for that. Yeah. So it is really cool. It is one of the few things that kind of blew my mind when I was looking through all the different stuff that's come out at CES.

So very cool. I recommend checking it out. Okay. Now, just to clarify here, that $150,000 is for a 110-inch model. Well, if you're going to go in, Jason, you go all in. That's true. You cover your wall with one of these fucking things. Well, I got a 75-inch TV, and I know how big, 110.

I need a bigger house. Yeah, for sure. One thing that came out of CES that I saw that just, I think people were trying to make fun of, but I think is actually genius. It's called the mouth pad. No, I don't have a lisp. It's called the mouth pad. It turns your tongue into a mouse for basically – they say it's for your phone, but since it's Bluetooth, you can actually use it on basically any Bluetooth-enabled device that will handle it.

How fast are the virtual reality porn people trying to figure out the interface for this? Oh, Jesus Christ. Like they've done it already, haven't they? They must have. Must have. Up, down, up, down, ABC, ABC. I'm missing a tooth, so I'm wondering if I could get an extra battery put in my tooth to make it last longer because it only lasts for five hours.

Let's just get the whole thing built in. And while we were gone, Google disabled cookies for 30 million Chrome users as a test. Yeah. On its way to the many billion, the three billion people that have Chrome installed. Can you believe three fucking billion people have Chrome installed? No. Jesus. I mean, to be fair, I have Chrome installed because sometimes I'll fire it up for some site that doesn't work on anything else, but – I'm actually – I'm doing this call on Chrome because I found Chrome works better with the recording software we use, Riverside, than Brave.

See? Okay, now we understand. I use Chrome for this. Yeah. But the interesting thing is this company, Reportive, which is an ad tech firm, they said that users are bringing in 30% less revenue with NoCookies, the cookie-less system.

And they're saying it's a win because they were expecting 50%. Okay. Yeah. All right. I'm sure they'll get back to whatever they do because, you know, the quote-unquote privacy sandbox that Google is working on will have some loophole that will be able to track us, I'm sure. People are clever.

Yes. Don't forget. And I found this final article, using the 2003 Nikon Super CoolScan 5000ED to digitize film in 2023. I've got one of these. Mint in the box. I've had it for 20 years. I think I – we were probably working together when I bought this damn thing.

I think it was crazy. I've put maybe 1,000 scans through it. I have been waiting for it to unload it because I figured this thing is going to be a collector's item. Sadly, they're going for about 500 bucks. Bummer. But – At 20 years old, 500 bucks isn't bad for any piece of kit.

Well, I was hoping it was going to be like 5,000. You know, it's either going to be lower or like super duper. And here's the take on this. And this is really cool. Are these old scanners still worth the price they are being asked of, $500 plus at 20 years old? I would have to say, yes, they certainly are. If you're looking for a way to get consistent results with relatively little testing and next to no pre-scan setup, the Nikon Super CoolScan 5000ED is a great choice for scanning 35-millimeter film.

I – like I said, I have one of these. If anybody that's listening is interested, 500 bucks plus shipping, it's yours. Otherwise, in two weeks, I would throw it on eBay. But I'm going to offer it to the Grumpy Old Geeks family first because it is in beautiful shape.

I mean, all the original stuff is with it. Like I said, I put about 1,000 scans through it. That's it. And it is a great scanner. Fantastic.

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

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave with podcast superhost Dave Bittner.

Dave is the host of the CyberWire podcast for all your cybersecurity news. The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan discussing how humans are mean. The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy. And the host of Control Loop because industrial machines have feelings too. Welcome back, Dave. We missed you.

Well, Happy New Year, gents. It's nice to be back. It's good to have a break, but I'm looking forward to catching up with you all. Everybody doing okay? Very well. I thought I'd just go ahead and start with this because when we talked security, I think shaving. And because we've talked shaving so much, I have an update because I went all in with Jason's shaving plan over the holidays.

I ordered myself the shaving oil. I got the nice shaving cream. I've got the bowl with the stand that holds the brush and the bowl and the razor blade. And I went all in and I've done it all. And I've got to report that it is the finest shave I've ever had in my life. Now, with the caveat of it does take quite a bit longer and I have to wonder, is it the incrementally better shave really worth the extra time?

That I'm not entirely sold on, but it is a great shave and you do feel good. And there's something to the process. It's one of the reasons I like smoking because I like packing the pack of cigarettes and then getting the one out and the match and the strike and the whole, you know, the rich.

I would be a fucking heroin user in five seconds because I love rituals like that. Tying off of the arm. Yes, yes. The whole thing. It's not so much the drug. It's the thing. It's the things. Yep.

So eloquently put in train spotting. Yeah. So there you go. Yeah, I'm enjoying it. I thoroughly, I don't know if it's going to be an everyday thing for me. Like if I have the time, like maybe, you know, two to three times a week, I'm going to go all in. The rest of the time, I'll just do the old school.

But yeah, it's pretty awesome. The pre-shave oil gets you 80% there. So just do that. And that's my quickie. I'll use that when I don't want to do the whole brush and bowl thing. Yeah. But just do the pre-shave oil. And then it's like I said, 80%. Yeah. And you still feel great and you smell good.

Yeah. And I definitely like, I'm not too far off from having to teach my kid how to shave. That's a few years in the future. He's like six. What the hell? Dude. They're a very hairy family. It depends on whose genetics he gets. If he gets my wife's side of the family, I'll never have to teach him.

If he gets mine. I remember 12, 13 is about when I needed to. So yeah. But I will teach using the full-on method. And then you can go from there. So yeah. Similarly, I have adopted a couple times a week premium shaving schedule.

Premium shaving. I like the way. Yeah. That's a good phrase. I did the premium wash today. Yes, exactly. Special undercarriage spray. But then. I martinize my face. That's right. That's right.

But then in between, I will either hit it with an electric razor real quick. If I just feel like a quick, you know, in between kind of thing. That's usually, like that usually buys me a couple of days in between the really good one. Right. But like Jason says, even using the shaving oil before the electric shave makes a big difference.

And yeah, it's just decadent. I mean, like you said, just having the smoothness of a really well-done shave. I don't know if I've aged into that appreciation or what, but I do appreciate it.

Yeah, it's very nice. So thank you, Jason. And I believe that should be it for talking shaving. All right. So we get a little bit of tech then. Because we have a great track record when it comes to not talking about things anymore. Yeah. So Dave, did Santa bring you your Apple Ultra 2?

Apple Watch Ultra 2? He did. He did indeed. Okay. Have you climbed a mountain with it yet? I have not climbed a mountain. Have you dove to the bottom of the ocean with it yet? I have not yet gone scuba diving. Okay. I have, however, worn it in my hot tub. So it has been submerged.

This is news. You have a hot tub. I do have a hot tub, yes. I'm driving down this weekend. I have one too. You're the one in Canada. You're the one that should have one. I know. That's right. That's right. No, late last year, I got a hot tub. And let me tell you, it's decadent. But speaking of decadence, this Apple Watch, Jason, you are 100% right.

I absolutely love it. And here's why. So I had the previous Apple Watch, and I had a regular one, just sort of the, I guess, the base model, not the really cheap one, but just the standard model.

And I had the smaller one, a regular black strap. And the two things that I noticed immediately about this that are very pleasurable to me are, number one, it is a premium device. It is a premium object. Mm-hmm.

And so it's nice in the same way that the original iPods were nice. There's just something about the design, the construction, just the way it's put together, the precision with which it's put together is, I find, very pleasing.

But then also just the big screen. I mean, to me, this is a better realization of the, what we were promised as kids growing up, you know, the futuristic screen on your wrist, the two-way wrist radio from Dick Tracy.

It just, I don't know, the scale of it, I like a lot more. Obviously, I can see things better because, you know, these eyes aren't getting any younger. But it's not really any heavier or bulkier or anything like that. So- I swear, it's heavy.

On the scale, it's heavier, but I swear I can't feel it when I wear it. Yeah. The thing I've noticed is that it has more inertial heft. So if I twist my wrist back and forth, I can feel its resistance more than I did with the other one.

But just in terms of weight and bulkiness on my wrist and that sort of thing, there's no noticeable difference for me. Yeah, you should take it out before you rub one out. It might slip off, so. But then I never hit my fitness goals. Well, no, that's when you charge.

You got to take a break and charge. Yeah, but I keep it on my left wrist, so. So, no Thursdays. Gotcha. Yeah, that's right. No Thursdays, right? A little strange. So, yeah, I am still in love with it.

The sleep tracking I have been doing since our last encounter together. I've been doing it every night. So I charge it. Oh, here's a pro tip for anybody with an Apple Watch. Turn it to low power mode. No matter what the charge is, before you start charging it, it will charge much faster. And once it hits 80% or whatever, it will turn itself back to normal mode.

So it's a much faster way to do it. So I charge mine when I'm in the shower. So I just put it on low power mode, stick it on, go. It's like the airplane mode trick for the old iPhones. Yeah. You can also turn this to airplane mode. I haven't even tried to turn it to airplane mode to see if that goes even faster. It might. Yeah, it might. That is a great tip.

And also at night, since I've had it on for sleep tracking, theater mode is a godsend. Because even though it's got the red light on it, like it turns red at night in the dark, which is super cool. Also, I have my phone go to red with that triple tap click, which is really cool. So I got both red devices.

I feel very Russian spy. But yeah, the theater mode is awesome for that. Sleep has gotten better. So thanks to the watch, because I can track it every night now. I've cut back on caffeine. I don't eat after 4 p.m.

And I'm starting to get actual normal sleep. Hang on a second. You're attributing your better sleep to the watch, even though you just dropped in the night way cut back on caffeine. Well, no, no, no. I used the watch to track it, because I wouldn't know. I wouldn't have started the caffeine and the diet changes without the watch and the tracking.

If only there weren't some large body of knowledge about how caffeine actually impedes our sleep. Well, I knew that, Brian. But I'm using this as a baseline to test it. That's all. It's science, Brian. It's science. You missed the point. I understand what you're saying.

But the point is, if I wouldn't have tried it, then I wouldn't have gone back to. I thought I was going to be sleeping okay. And then I saw how horrible it was. Now I'm getting better. Now back up just a second here. How do you get the red screen thing on the iPhone? I'm not familiar with that. Oh, there's a – you go to accessibility.

I think it's displays, then color shift. And then you can set it for a tone. You can basically set it for a hue. So it basically goes – I'll put a link in the show notes. And then you set the accessibility trigger to triple tap on – I set it for the side button.

And you can also triple tap on the back glass, which actually happens, unfortunately, more often than you think. So I use the side button and triple tap it. Right. Okay. And then it just goes – it goes to, like, full-on red mode. It's great. Because it's the same way that you used to set it to black and white. But now they have the color mode where you can just set it for a tint.

And the whole interface will tint to red. Now, what have you set your extra button on your iWatch to do? Workout mode. Okay. That would be great if I worked out. I take a walk every day. So it just goes to – it goes there so I can set it to my outdoor walk.

Right. Okay. Right now I have it set on stopwatch. But I'm intrigued with the notion that I can set it to flashlight. I love this discussion because the entire reason I got an Apple Watch is for workouts. That's the only reason I have an Apple Watch. Yeah.

As I've said here before, my main reason was on the off chance that I would find myself in the midst of a heart attack. Yeah. That if nothing else, it will call people and let them know where to pick up the body. Yeah. You are courteous that way. I know. Yes. Well, you know. I love the – yeah.

And also the blood oximeter is nice. To have that's in there. And, you know, mine has a cell phone on it. So if I do want to go for a walk and leave my phone at home, I do have that option too. If we do start to fall over dead in the middle of the woods, help me.

Right. I think all in all, it is a fine, fine watch. I'm glad you like it. I do. Yeah. I really do. I like it way more than I anticipated that I would. So thank you for the tip. Sure thing. So I'm two for two. There you go. Yeah.

How about them apples? Brian, get a hot tub and you can draw a club. We can all sit together with our hot tubs and our watches and shave at the same time. Yes. We're going to do our new podcast. Yeah. Shaving and sitting in a hot tub. Pod. Right.

We'll call it Grumpy Old Geek Soup. You. Yeah. Nobody needed that visual. No. No. Make sure you take your watches off. I saw this one come through. I can't even remember when I saw it.

But I just had to put this in here because it is right up our alley. Hackers can infect network-connected wrenches to install ransomware. Yes. Now. One does have to ask, why would one need a network-connected wrench? Scientific purposes, Brian.

Yes. So the name, of course, is the only reason because I'm 12. It's called the Handheld Nutrunner. Yes. The Handheld from Bosch Rexroth. Right. I'm just imagining the requisition order that somebody said, you know, boss, we got to care ourselves.

We need a boss of Nutrunners. We need a gross of handheld Nutrunners. What? So I am quickly reading this. I'm sorry to derail you and go off on a tangent here, Jason. But I am reading why they have network-connected things. It actually connects and it's precise torque levels that are critical for safety and reliability.

So everything is exactly as tight as they need to be. Boeing needs these motherfucking things. Right. Right. No shit. Maybe they got hacked. Yeah. I'll bet you Handheld Nutrunner is a lot less funny in the original German. It's just longer.

Yeah. So, yeah. Lots of vulnerabilities in it. They say they're working on it. But still, come on. It's a strange, strange world we live in when your Nutrunner can get ransomware. Yeah. The other funny one I saw was from Boing Boing. Wave of the hand defeats $700,000 subway gates.

So this is a test that they're running. And they bought these $700,000 gates meant to stop people from ditching a $2 fare. There's a video on the site that shows exactly how they are foiled, which is not really rocket surgery.

It does not require any fancy gizmos or gugas. Nope. Just need a hand. Just need a hand. Yep. And you are straight through. So I'm guessing that they're probably going to reevaluate these units. But if you're in New York and you see one of these, go watch the video so you know how to get your free fare.

So public transportation. I saw a bit of, I guess what I'll call thought technology a few months ago about this very thing. And the person was making the point that we shouldn't think of how much money we lose on public transportation.

We should think about how much money public transportation costs. And their point was, when you charge a fare, you think about how much you lose relative to the fares. But we don't think, we don't say, for example, oh, we're really losing money on our roads. You know, we just, roads cost money.

And so we pay for them and we all use the roads. And so this person was advocating, if we had that approach to public transportation, maybe we would have more public transportation. Yeah. I mean, look, I lived in Los Angeles all my life.

No public transportation. I now live in Toronto, which has a pretty good, robust public transportation system. I hardly ever drive any. It's great. I love it. Yeah. What do you use? We have subway stations here. TTC that basically gets me everywhere I want to go. Now, it doesn't go through the whole city.

So I don't like getting on buses. That part kind of sucks. But if I can get anywhere just directly from the subway, I will. A hundred percent. It's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. They need to, LA is getting a lot better. Yeah, it is. It actually really is.

There was a time when I would take the busway from Woodland Hills to North Hollywood and then take the subway from North Hollywood to Hollywood to when I was working at the CNN building. And the bus was definitely the weak link, especially in the summer. It was really not fun. It was very odoriferous.

But it's getting better. They're definitely putting in more lines. The problem with the subway in Los Angeles is there's a free stabbing every day. So there's that. You might want to wear some Kevlar if you're... Well, and Los Angeles is so vast. The subway barely goes anywhere.

Like, you would need to live near a station and only have to go to places that are by another station. Forget going to Santa Monica. Forget going to Pasadena. Like, it's just... LA is huge. So... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But they're working at it. Yeah. I took the DC Metro in for a while when I was working down there.

And eventually, I switched back to using my car, mostly because I never felt like I could relax on the subway. Like, I always had to have my guard up just because of there was always something weird going on.

And so, which is... Which I did not expect because prior to that, my only experience with the DC Metro had been as a tourist on weekends. And it's a very different experience and a very different clientele than if you're using it during commute times.

And when people are coming back and forth from school and just using it to get around their day-to-day lives. Right. And so, that kind of surprised me because I was like, oh, I'll use the Metro. This will be great. Metro is great. It's clean. It's... Well, not always. Yeah.

Because that was my experience. I've only been on it as a tourist on the weekends when I was in DC. And it was lovely. I had a great time. The stations were really cool looking and the trains were nice. They are. Yeah. Right. See, I've only got experience with a couple different cities. Like, I've ridden New York cities.

That can be a bit sketchy. Paris was fine, but not great. I lived in London and used the underground there to commute. I always thought they did a pretty good job. I mean, it could be cleaner, but it's a big city. What do you expect? But I always felt fairly safe on it. Maybe not in a train coming from a soccer match that just ended.

That can be a bit rough. But other than that, it was fine. And here in Toronto, where in general, I mean, certainly there have been incidents. And if you read the papers here, you'd think that people were dying every day on the subway. But they're not. And it's pretty damn safe. But that's, I mean, that's Canada compared to the U.S. anyways.

Right. All relative. Yeah. I have to say that, you know, out of all the places, the only place that I ever lived where I did not have a car for multiple years was San Francisco, which has the best public transportation system, as far as I'm concerned, out of any major. The Rice and Rooney system. Any major. That's right. Yeah.

Don't take those unless you're a tourist or don't want to get to your destination on time. I did that once. When I went for the first Webby Awards, we did that to get across town. And it took all day. Oh, God. So San Francisco used the bus system? No, Metro. Yeah, the Muni.

The Muni system. You got Muni for in town. And if you're leaving town, if you're going to the Bay or going to the South Bay or like Oakland or whatever, you got BART for that. So to get out of town, you get on BART for in town. You have Muni and the trains there basically run everywhere because I lived out in the the inner sunset, which was, you know, kind of the burbs for San Francisco.

And I would go downtown to Soma to go to work. And it was great because I lived right by Giant Stadium. I mean, it worked right by Giant Stadium. So the only problem there was drunk baseball fans a couple of times a week. But for the most part, I never really felt scared on Muni.

Mainly because it was just drunk naked people going to the Castro. I will also point out, though, that we are saying that as three white males. My wife has a very different opinion of feeling safe on metros and subways. Yeah, that's true. And yeah, I'm six feet tall and I was like 230 pounds and worked out when I was riding Muni.

So I was probably the one that they were afraid of. That people were worried about. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, there's that. Going back to Canadians, though, I saw this and I just had to throw it in here because, you know, Brian, you're an honorary Canadian for at least a little bit longer.

Canadian police say porch pirates have a right to privacy. Oh, Canada. They're so polite. So if somebody steals your package off your porch and you have video of them, you can't post it to social media without possibly being put up for a civil suit from the criminal.

Right. Which is just... Brian, get back here. Well, no. Not until the election's over. Oh, hedging your bets. I see. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, Canada does tend to err too far on one side.

This is... I mean... Okay, don't post it on social media anyways. Why would you do that? Send it to the police. Send it to the Mounties. They'll send somebody over with a beaver and a pitchfork and they'll go find them. So I agree that you shouldn't be posting it on social media.

But yeah, this is a bit ridiculous that you would then get in trouble for this because somebody stole stuff from your house. So yeah, that's Canada. I did see one of the things I forgot to put this in media candy. I watched... There was a movie about a Canadian guy who was a bank robber.

Very clever bank robber. He robbed like 20 or 30 banks out there and he finally got caught. And, you know, he gave all the money back and said, sorry. And they only gave him a couple of years in prison and he walked away free. I was about to say, nicest bank robber ever, right?

He was saying that Canada, as long as it's a non-violent crime, you can basically get away with just about anything and they'll let you go. Yeah. They're very lenient on non-violent offenders up there. You have to be sorry.

I thought that was very interesting. You have to make amends, but yeah. Yep. And I'm like, okay, this guy robbed all the banks and had accomplices, which also got a cut, but he still had enough money to pay back the banks, which makes me think that he was doing a little bit more robbery than they caught him for.

Or invested it well. You never know. Yeah. I was going to say, does like a community service involve driving the Zamboni, but then I thought Well, but then I thought driving the Zamboni is probably like one of the highest honors that It's a highly sought after job.

Right. There are only a few that can do it. There are a few that are called to service, but they are proud. Yes. Many apply. Few are called. Yes. Goddamn, all my Canadian friends are going to fucking hate me after this episode.

They're going to kick you out. They're going to kick me out unless I say I'm sorry. What were you guys talking about? Oh, God. All right, guys. Well, shave well, and until next. Shave well, soak well, tell the time well. Yes, and ride that Zamboni off into the sunset.

Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got David, Michael, and the very mysterious S. Welcome, everybody. Yes. Over at PayPal, we've got Charlie, Simon, Howie, Jonathan, Judge, Nikolai, Thomas, Shari, Miles, Ralph, Nicola, and Levy, or Levi.

I'll go with Levi on that one. Yes. And over at the tip jar, we've got Nick, Josh, Daryl, Adam, Christopher, Sarah, Matthew, Jeff, Joseph, and Michael with the big 200 smackeroonies. Thank you so much to everybody. We also got a new five-star review from As Grumpy As It Gets in Israel, of all places.

Fantastic. This is The Way, over 40, and you are not yet subscribed to Grumpy Old Geeks. You're a D exclamation part K. I'm assuming that's Dick. Go subscribe. Thank you. Yes. Thank you very much. And condolences to friend of the show, Brian Blondell, who had a very big loss this week.

Yep. Thinking about you, buddy. Yep. And I am glad to be back. I don't know about you, Brian. I am perfectly happy to be here, sweating my ass off in this booth and sitting around with nothing else to do. It is nice to be bullshitting again, but I'm not going to lie. I did not miss reading about Elon Musk for two weeks.

Oh, no, no, no. Did not. That was the only high point of the week, but now that we're back, it's great. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at gog.show slash 631.

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