64: Grumpy Old Geeks 3.0! Sorta...

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian and Jason. Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Let's get started. How about that smooth new intro?

Who was that hot chick? Ah, that would be Helen, I believe. At least that's her nom de plume. That's the nom de plume. Yeah, we got some new audio, which is kind of nice. We're going to start making some changes with the way that we do things around here. I have a little bit of a rant about this, actually.

Oh, dear. Oh, dear. But first, why don't we give a shout out to our wonderful job done by our previous audio guy, Mr. Bob Fogarty, who kicked ass. Yes, thank you very much, Robert. We appreciate your service very much. Yes. If you want to find more about Robert, you can go to his website where he puts his writing up at robertglenn, with one n, fogarty.com.

And you can also check him out over at lockernome.com, where he's one of the big editors, and he writes quite a bit over there, too. That's right. Go check him out. And thanks again for doing all that. We wanted to use him again, but due to various complications involving time and equipment and distance and all of that sort of thing, that didn't work out.

So we ended up just kind of finding a venue online. Now, I have a rant about this because that was not our first choice. You know, we're still in – nobody is really saying it anymore. For some reason, we've stopped talking about the fact that we're kind of still in a recession, and there's still not a lot of work out there, and there's still not a lot of money out there.

Unless you're one of these people that come up with these ridiculous concepts like yo and get a bunch of venture funding, and then you're sitting pretty for a long time, and you sell it off to Google or Facebook, and you make a couple gazillion dollars, and your stupid product eventually just goes away and disappears.

You're doing okay for money, but a lot of people aren't, and in particular here in L.A., where a lot of my friends are in the entertainment industry, I did reach out to some people who do things like voiceovers professionally for a living, and it's just we didn't have that much money to kick around, and they're professionals, and they're busy, and they're actually working.

But there are plenty of people here that are actors and specifically that even want to get into voiceover that I know tangentially, and I reached out to them, and I said, look, we've got a little bit of money. It's going to take you 10 minutes, a couple lines, come and do it, and none of them did, and it's just like I don't understand the complaining about not having work.

You have to say yes to things. Well, definitely. Yeah, and this wasn't even a freebie. We were going to pay these people, but it was always like, well, I don't have equipment. Well, I'm sitting here in Santa Monica, and I do. Come over for an hour. I'll give you a Coke, and we'll pay you, and just knock them out.

I've got all the equipment right here. I'm an engineer. You don't even have to worry about that part. Come on over anytime you want and do it. All you've got to do is sit down and speak, and we hand you cash, and you go home. Exactly. It's that easy. And this is something that you want to do for a living, but you can't be bothered to do a job that just fell into your lap.

It's a frustration for me that that's been around forever, but I think I'm seeing it way more and more. And it's one of the reasons that I've kept my company, Slender Fungus, is just two people because I've tried to find contractors or even employees when I had a ton of work that were reliable and were self-starters and were motivated and wanted to do things.

And it's so hard to find people. Oh, definitely. I burn through contractors like nobody's business. Nobody is detail-oriented, I find. No, nobody really is anymore.

And it really just – it's almost as if I felt like I would have had to take my entire rig with me, go to these people's houses, sit in the car outside waiting until I could see that they were actually home and not doing their yoga or sitting around at Earth Cafe, having an $18 latte while they're still complaining about not having any money or any work, ambush them, strap them down, make them do the work, and then force them to take a paycheck.

That's what it felt like. And you can't do that in this world. You've got to take the jobs. Every single person that writes me to my company and says I'm interested in having something, I follow up with them. There is not a single time I don't return an email or a phone call. You need to hustle.

Yeah, you've got to hustle. If somebody is offering to pay you for something, follow up. Definitely. So we ended up saving a few bucks by going online. We paid less. We outsourced to probably India with a really good English accent.

No, they're actually in London. I had to deal with the time difference. But they were a fantastic company. And I took the extra money and I got some acoustic foam for my little studio here. So this will be officially the last money that I put into this podcast. Yeah. Because work has completely dried up.

That was like half a month's rent that I blew on this. But it was worth it because I enjoy doing the show and I want it to be – I want it to sound good. So it was worth it for me to drop the coin as it were. But yeah. And I'm happy with our results. You didn't have to follow up with anybody.

I sent a couple emails and boom. Bob's your uncle. There you go. Just not your voiceover guy anymore. No. No. So they – very funny. Yeah. So I mean the moral of that story there is if you want work, get it. It's there. You just kind of get off your ass.

Yeah. I mean it's on a silver platter, seriously. And we would have given them much more money than we ended up spending. So all in all, hey, it worked out for us. But you know what? They're going to be down a couple of lattes at the end of the month. So there you go. That's right. There you go. So you're pissed off at the Gromit.

Yeah. Last week I endorsed them and now this week I have to revoke my endorsement. It's so annoying. I got my daily email from them and the product that they were pimping that day was called The Fly Baby. Oh, boy.

And here's what we have here. Anyone – this is from Jason from Fly Baby. Anyone who has traveled with a baby on an airplane knows how difficult it almost always can be. Most of us have even thought if only I had a place I could lay my child down, it would be so much easier.

Dear Jason, how about your goddamn car, you asshole? Put bringing your babies on a plane and coming up with these ridiculous products. Here's what this product is. It's basically a sling slash hammock for your infant. So you wrap the – you pull down your tray, your tray table, wrap some straps around it, put it back up, then put your baby in it and hang your baby from the person's seat in front of you.

I am just looking at the photo and I can see a lot of babies, bashed heads, and lawsuits. Oh, I hope so. So here's what I would never use – I do not have a child yet, full disclosure. I'm sure flying with children sucks. You don't have a choice, Jason.

You cannot ban them, although I've always said there should be baby and non-baby flights. I'd be okay with that. And there really technically are. If you fly in the morning, chances are you're going to have some babies. If you fly late at night, you're pretty much scot-free. This is the dumbest product I've ever seen.

So selling gear specifically designed to annoy a person on a flight so that another person can be more comfortable is utterly unacceptable. I'm grinding my teeth here. Like a baby on a plane isn't already like just a crime against humanity. Yeah, I know. They have to fly. Well, first off, I wouldn't even notice that this person had it on the back of my seat because I would not turn around and look.

I do move my seat around when I fly. I'm sorry. It's uncomfortable. So I go up. I go down. I move it. And every time I move this thing, it's going to piss off the parents and, like I said, potentially hit the baby's head. This is not wise.

But it's also going to be jerking your seat. But that's the problem I have with it. I mean it's bad enough when these little kids are kicking your seat. You can at least turn around and, like, glare at the parents or spill your coffee on the kid, which, you know, is an acceptable form of retribution, I believe. But this is a device that's going to specifically screw up your flight.

This is an extremely horrible idea. The best thing I have ever heard in my entire life about this, and I can't remember anymore if this is actually somebody I know that told me or this is just a story that went around the internet. But some parents were flying with their kid, and their kid they knew was going to act up a little bit, their baby.

And what they did is they came on board with goodie bags for, like, the 15 seats right around them, little chocolate bars, a little note saying, I'm very sorry. You know, we've been having issues with our baby recently. We understand that this is going to be horrible for you. We just tried to make your flight, your experience a little bit better.

We'll do the best we can. You know, some candies and all that sort of stuff. Now, that's the way you do it. Yeah, seriously, bribe them. Yeah, bribe the people around. Buy them drinks. Yeah, a couple little bottles of scotch in there. Yeah. So, yeah, this is a horrible idea. But are you throwing the baby out with the bathwater here?

Is all of the grommet bad, or just this particular one thing has annoyed you so much? To hell with them. To hell with them. If they're going to put this kind of crap out there, I don't want to have anything to do with them. All right. Fly baby, no. Die baby, yes. Oh, boy. That's all I got to say. Nice. So, last week, I was really pissed off at Dr. Oz.

And I'm happy to say I beat John Oliver to the punch, although he did put together a much better and very awesome 16-minute rant about it. So, we actually missed a week with John Oliver, who did not have a rant that went viral. He did again. And it's all about Dr. Oz and how much he sucks, and it's awesome.

It is so awesome. He did a way better job than we did. Of course he did. He has writers. Yeah, he's got a staff and a paycheck. We fired our writers. Yeah. So, I'm going to link to a pretty good piece in Salon about how he's basically taken over, what do they call him, the Sheriff of Cable News.

So, it's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, I'm really – I wasn't on board with the show at first, but I've come around to it, especially now that he's kind of centered on this, like, basically half of his show is a rant now. He builds the entire show around a 15-minute rant. So, it's pretty good.

And he always has an epic ending, like Steve Buscemi tap dancing. What the hell? What the hell was that? Yeah. I love me some Steve Buscemi, but that was just random. That was totally random. Yeah. It's really good stuff. I'm really enjoying the show. I just actually – a follow-up kind of popped into my mind about what I was saying a little bit earlier about how you have to kind of grab the bull by the horns.

There's also going a little bit too far because I've had this happen to me just this week, actually, a couple times. As I just mentioned, I don't say no to work. If somebody writes me, if some baby band out there is like, I really want to kind of kick my stuff up to the next level, I'm really – we're going to try to do it.

And I'm super – first off, I'm really happy that there are people out there still trying to make music. I don't know if it's just because they're stupid or they're just passionate. You just call your clients stupid. No. I'm just – the dream of the rock musician, what got the Ramones in the basement practicing and all that sort of stuff, the money and the girls and the craziness, that's all gone.

So it takes a hopefully passion, if not most likely stupidity, to kind of slave away at it and still think that you're going to have a chance and it's going to be awesome. But good for the people that are doing it, that are kicking ass and just really going for it and writing and recording and happy to do music.

And even better, that you found my company and that you think that we do a very good job at what we do and you want us to work for you. That's great. That makes me happy. I'm happy for you guys. I love getting the emails and I'm always responding, always. And just so you know, when I get an email, I Google you.

I go look and see what you guys are up to, where you're at, what your music sounds like. So you don't have to send an MP3. And certainly by the time that we've gotten to the point that I've responded to you and we've maybe even had a phone conversation and we've maybe even set up kind of a basic budget and you've got your flow chart of what we'll do for you, stop sending me MP3s that are hot off the presses.

Send me a check, yes. But my job, I'm not a record label. My job is not to vet your music. I'm not your manager. We've established the parameters of what our relationship is, which is I'm going to help you out online and come up with a policy and plan for you.

Just stop. There's too eager. I don't want an email from you every day with your latest MP3. I will hear your music and I will listen to it and I'm certainly not going to listen to it until I'm getting paid, so send the check first. Honestly, it has no bearing whatsoever on the job that you will do for them.

The reality is I can do what I do if you were a shoe, much less a band. It doesn't matter. My job is to promote and sell things online. Now, yes, I can get passionate about it and I love it when I'm passionate about the bands or entities that I work for. That is a super huge bonus but it is not required.

Because you are basically just a whore. Exactly. Aren't we all? Hell yeah. Listen, the dude at Burger King is not in love with the Whopper but he's still going to make you a damn good Whopper. I don't think there is such a thing as a damn good Whopper. There may be a tolerable Whopper.

So, okay, speaking of work stuff, I've been struggling with input versus output. Right. Okay? Some mornings I get up, I pop on a podcast or start reading an article or a book if I'm in the mood. But that starts my day off on an input cycle.

It's really, really difficult I've found to transition from input to output. That's been my biggest problem lately because I'm doing a lot more research for this show and some other stuff that I've been doing. And I love doing research.

I love doing it. You know what I hate doing? PHP. You hate doing the things that we actually really do get paid for. Exactly. Yeah, me too. I've just found with age, I'm getting terrible at programming. So I'm trying to pivot, as the kids say today. But, man, I don't know how you – how do you do this day in, day out?

Like how do you go from – like how do you structure your day to get your maximum output? Because I'm just having a really hard time with it. You've been exploring this basically since we started this podcast. And I've basically kept my work routine exactly the same. And I don't know if it's optimal, but it certainly works for me.

I wake up in the morning. I make my coffee. I don't even look at work stuff first because I just – I used to do that. I used to leap out of bed and I'd grab my phone and just see what my emails were that had come in through the night. And I discovered that that just puts me in a horrible mood right away.

So I don't do that anymore. There is absolutely no work stuff. Coffee has started. Wander around the house a little bit, put on the Today Show so I can get upset at how stupid everybody is. Well, I won't be doing that. That's for sure. Whatever. I just – I used to watch that show because they had – what's her face?

Ann Curry. And I love Ann Curry. And I haven't gotten over her being fired away and replaced with idiots. But it doesn't matter. Nothing TV, pop culture. It's kind of how it infuses my brain and I kind of know what's going on in the rest of the world so I don't have to seek out that information or have it seep into me in other ways.

I just get it over with early. I have coffee. I watch the Today Show. I know what's going on in the world. Done. Okay. And that's 35, 40 minutes that I'm up and awake and I am not thinking or looking at work at all. And then I immediately go into an output cycle.

I sit down at my desk. I go over all the emails. I find the ones that actually involve things that I need to do, action items as it were, versus just respond to. You prioritize your action items. I find things that actually need to be dealt with immediately or require actual work.

And I also basically every day I have five or six things that I have to do every single day no matter what anyways for various clients. And so basically I'll sit down for two hours and take care of all that. I will do the daily tasks that need to be done and I will deal with the emails that came in or like two days or whatever.

It doesn't matter. I'll go through my email and take care of things that actually involve output. Okay. So you have like shorter throw projects, I think, don't you? Like mainly you're doing updates here, one-off stuff there. Do you have any like longer term projects that are like a month long or two months long that you have to work on?

I do. Because that's pretty much the bulk of my work is these longer throw projects. So it's like that. I know that I need to put in six hours of coding today. Right. Like how to structure that and still have time for input without it getting in the way. Unless I'm on a massive deadline, I will never dedicate that much time to something.

That's just too much for one day for me. So, I mean, I can do it. If I have a deadline, then the day becomes basically that. But then the deadline has to be immediate. But what I do is if I have the longer term projects, I know I've got two weeks, say. So I can build in three-hour chunks every day, which I usually do at the end of the day for the longer term projects.

That's like my three to six o'clock is I'll sit down and deal with something that's much, much bigger. And I cut myself off. I don't do what I used to do, which is what you and I both used to do, which is I'm going to stay up all night and get as much of this done as possible. No. So I do my two hours in the morning of work work, just dealing with daily smaller stuff.

Then I take a break. I go do a bike ride. Forty-five minutes. I come back. Okay, so basically you've got it down because you're structured. Yeah, I chunk everything into structures. I break it up with exercise, and then I'll also break it up with I'll take a 30-minute break to surf around the web, find some stuff for our show, read a couple articles.

And then I have a pretty hard out for work when I'm just like somewhere between six and seven. That's it for me. I am done. I am not going to work anymore. And that even includes, for the most part, stuff for our show. Like at that point, I am no longer in work mode.

And I'm going to watch some TV, or I'm going to read a book, or I'm going to listen to some music. I cut myself off and have the evening off. And I think that's super important for recharging and being ready the next day. So it's really just, for me, it's a very rigid schedule.

Okay. In which I switch things in between input and output, and I break it up with physical activity breaks. Yeah, I think I just need to get down to the structured thing. I'm so used to just waking up, farting around for a couple hours, and sitting down to code, and then, ooh, look, squirrel. Yeah. And it's also, I've got a pinball arcade in the basement, which also is a bit of a distraction.

You have a lot of distractions. It's hard when you work from home. And for me, it's just been, it's the only reason I've been able to keep this going for 15 years now is my structure. And it really hasn't changed much. Yeah, I think I also have a problem with Parkinson's law. You know, how the task will expand to fit the time allotted to it.

Yeah, that's dangerous, and that's why, I mean, it's really difficult, like you were saying, especially on a larger project. When I'm working on something bigger from that 3 to 6 o'clock chunk, and I'm hitting 6 o'clock, and I know it's just like, all right, if I just put in 45 more minutes, I can fit out this whole other block, and it'll be done, and I can cross it off the list, because the best thing in the world is crossing things off lists.

But I've just gotten really disciplined about it and said, no, I put in the three hours. I will pick this up again tomorrow at 3 p.m. Yeah, I think I'm going to have to bust out Fantastical and get back into it. Because for a long time, what I would do is, you know, do the trick where you write down everything that you need to get done the next day right before you go to bed.

Yeah. That really helped. I don't know why I stopped doing that. See, there you go. Yeah, I've got to get back into that. You just got to, I mean, I personally don't, I just have, I have my, what the hell, my moleskin, and I've got tasks written down daily that I know for the week that are coming up.

And on the side, I just list a bunch of the longer term projects or even personal projects that, you know, have to go get groceries. Don't forget to pick up dry cleaning, that sort of stuff. I don't schedule things out anymore, but that's because I've got 15 years built in of me scheduling it. So I look at the list.

I know what I can fit into the time chunks that I have set. And that's how I do it. Okay, cool. I think we've bored the listeners to death at this point. So let's get back to something fun. Yo. Let's talk about Yo again. The Verge put out an article that is called Yo is Going to Change the Way You Use Your Phone.

I'm sorry, but no, it's not. This is an article that is justifying the existence of this idiotic app. And it's a stretch. You said it's a stretch. It's a complete and utter stretch. It has nothing to do with Yo. Maybe they could – best case scenario is they could package and resell their engine.

The only, only thing that I found even slightly plausible in that list of items that – or I thought would – oh, yeah, that's kind of cool – was the whole restaurant thing where you check in. And instead of handing you those stupid little things that they hand you that buzz in your pocket when your table is ready, every restaurant has its own app or they use an app like that.

So you just get a Yo, table is ready. But here's the thing. They're not even – yeah, you can subscribe. What they're proposing is you subscribe to your restaurant's Yo channel and they will just send you a Yo with no information. It's just Yo. Yeah. It's not like table is ready or it's going to be another 15 minutes or anything like that.

It's just – it's dumb. I'm sorry. It's just dumb. They're trying to make a product around notifications and every app already has notifications. This is just – it's another play and it is justifying their $1.2 million grab, which is – I mean it's really stupid.

Everybody's already – that I know has tried it, sent a couple of Yo's, deleted it, and have moved on. Yeah, I don't know anybody that's – that shark fin is just going faster and faster. This app is dead in the water before these people can even write articles trying to get us into it. I barely made it into the water.

It got a toe in and then got bitten right off by that shark. It was bad. It's a dumb app. It's a dumb article. Read it if you want to laugh. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Just to see how far they're trying to stretch credibility and credulity on something that is so inherently dumb.

Oh, man, I don't know what to do with these people. I really don't. I'm going to send them a no. Yo, no. Well, it took them eight hours to make it, so you can probably whip that out. That's true. Using the new Swift language or whatever the hell. So I want to put out a call for guests.

It's been a while. That's true. So we're looking to get some guests on the show and would love any listener recommendations or intros to cool people if you have somebody that you'd like to hear from. And they can come on and they can grump out. I personally like to get Kevin Mitnick on.

He follows me on Twitter, so I sent him a message, but nothing yet. Don't expect to hear anything from that avenue. So anybody who knows Kevin, do us a solid. Give us an intro. I'd love to have him on the show. He's got a new book coming out that talks about anonymity. I think it's called The Art of Invisibility.

It's coming out next year, and I'd love to chat with him about that because that's one of our topics that we are deep into quite a bit. And anybody else that you know, send them our way. We'd love to chat. Yeah, definitely. I think we should try to reach out to some of these authors that we've talked about that we've really liked because they're writing – especially the ones that are writing within the genres of the internet and technology and whatnot.

They're smaller guys. They're authors, and they want to get the word out. So let's give that a shot too. I'd love to talk to some of them. Oh, absolutely. So yeah, if you have any ideas, dear listeners, drop us an email at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com, and let's get the ball rolling.

Guess who's buying drop cam? Nest slash Google? Yep. Good guess. All right. Good guess. Makes sense. $555 million. Seems a bit high, but whatever.

Yeah, considering – I say that about everything though now. Yeah. It's all – what? I'm surprised it's not in the billions. Well, if yo is worth a million. That's true. Google just bought like a satellite network for only $500 million. The fact that you can buy a satellite network for $500 million and you spend $555 million on a little plastic camera that goes in your house.

Yeah. Something is skewed. But anyway, yeah. So now they'll be able to turn the temperature on and figure out where you're at in your home. And if you've got those little gadgets, they can tell when you come in and out of your home. Yeah. They just – that's it. They know everything. Yeah.

They do seem to. In related Nest news, they have announced a Nest developer program. Yeah. This is an interesting kind of shot across the bow to Apple because Apple just came out with their home kit. And this just says that Nest isn't going to play nice with them. They're going to develop their own set of protocols for in-home automation.

Right. Run by Google, of course. Run by Google. So this is their version. And we'll see how that comes. Well, it's exactly the same thing. It's a framework for home automation. They have a head start on Apple for sure. And Nest, for whatever reason, has developed a really good brand name.

And certainly their products look great, all of which we have not seen from Apple yet. I'm really personally happy that they're not doing anything open source and they're keeping it in-house and building their own. I'm totally fine with that because eventually all of us are going to be using some sort of in-house system.

It's going to happen. And I do not want it to be open source. I just don't. I know that there are tons of proponents of open source out there that think open source is the only way to go. It's the future. It is everything. It is the pinnacle of human engineering and how everything should be done.

No. Let me tell you why. There's this thing called WordPress that is open source. And any of us that use WordPress over the lamentations of ourselves with our clients know that because it's open source, there are thousands of people, millions of people, nay, hundreds of millions of people out there pouring over that code all the time.

And not all of them have your best intentions in mind. I do not want my house running on anything open source because that will be the day that somebody installs something as a backdoor and I come home and everybody's dead. Yeah, you don't need O-days on your heating and cooling, your HVAC system.

No, you do not. Yeah, and this comes into something that I've been dealing with, which is I've got a WordPress install, locked down tight as a drum. Yeah, and you're one of the best people in the world at this as far as I know. And you can't even lock this thing down. Every week, somebody's uploaded a backdoor.

Every week. I've poured through all of the plugins that we're using, which is very minimal, super minimal set. Cannot figure out how he's doing it. Right. Every week. And I'm sure it's automated. But I can't figure out exactly how he's getting in.

And this is just a straight-up lockdown system. Fortunately, if you have a WordPress install, make sure you do this. There's a way to run an HT access file in your uploads, your WP content slash uploads folder or anything under WP content, theoretically, in different stages.

But you can disallow PHP execution. As you should. Which means that if somebody does upload a script using the internal WordPress mechanisms and it gets slotted into the normal upload space, they can't call it. Right. So there are a couple plugins that I use for this.

I use an anti-malware scanner, which usually finds this every week. And I also use Securi, S-U-C-U-R-I, which will give you a one-click hardening setup. So they also have like a firewall that you can pay for and have them monitor everything.

I don't do that just because my clients don't want to pay for it. And I'm not going to pay for it. So every week they pay me to go in and delete the bad scripts, which I'll take. I'll take that. But yeah, I can't find this. I cannot find this problem. So this is like just one of those fun open source things.

This guy probably has a WordPress Oday and he's running it every week on God knows how many systems. I have found the same malware on four different systems that are completely separate. Different clients, nothing in common. So it's probably an automated attack and I'll put a link in the show notes to the two security things that I think everybody should use right out of the gate.

And you just have to and run it minimum once a week. I run it every two or three days just to make sure. But it keeps getting through. They can't do anything with it, but it gets through. I had the same issue a while back with one of my WordPress sites, which thankfully I'm not running anymore because it was also a target for whatever reason.

Sometimes different sites or personalities are. Oh, yeah. We won't mention the artist, but is that the one that you had me do the audit on? Yeah, yeah. Oh, that one was bad. And it would just – we would clear it out. You would lock everything down and within three to four months, boom, it was back. Yeah, and they rooted your box on that too.

That was a bad one. Yep, that was bad. Thank you, WordPress. Yeah, thanks, WordPress. Thanks, open source. And that's why I don't want my house running on open source. Now, here's another fun one this week. Google launches new domain registration service. So they're going to go up against GoDaddy. Right. I personally am sticking with my beloved hover.

But I think – I'm on the fence about this because I'm trying to pull more stuff away from Google, not give them more. But – and their carrot for this one is you get free WordPress apps. I mean not WordPress, Google apps. Google apps.

Like Gmail and all that good stuff. Which is kind of nice. I see this – there's not a lot of money in domain registration services. Almost none. There's next to none. The only reason GoDaddy makes money is they basically control the fucking business stem to stern.

And then they really only make money on their add-ons that they fucking put you through endlessly when you try to register a domain. This is just a straight-up Google Play to control you from start to finish. The only reason they're doing this is they want to grab you right away at domain registration and upsell you on everything else that they do.

Yep. Get you in young and control the entire pipeline. Exactly. So it makes total sense for Google. I get why they're doing it. Again, like we talked about a little bit last week, we're really down to Google, Facebook, Amazon just battling to get supremacy and control your experience start to finish.

Yeah. I'm really surprised it took them this long. I am too, actually. It's not a difficult thing to set up a domain registrar service. No, not at all. I mean, it's just off-the-shelf OEM, basically. You give somebody a bunch of money, and then you get a license to sell domains. Yeah. I mean, hell, you could have done it with 2COWS for ages.

That's most of their revenue, I believe. Because Hovers is owned by 2COWS. But 2COWS was one of the biggest registrars, and still are, because they have just a program where you go in, you give them some money, and then you can sell domains. And they've got an API for everything. When we did, what was it, Metblogs, I worked with them using their blogging platform called Blogware, which they have since killed.

Thank God. It was terrible. But I learned all of their back-end systems then, just because I was integrating at an early stage with them. And, yeah, basically, you can be a registrar right now. So it's surprising that Google has taken this long. Yeah.

Yeah, it is. And since it is Google week. Apparently, yes. Oh, and Google I.O. was this week, their big developer conference. And talk about an interminable, interminable keynote. It was like three hours.

Really? I only watched the nine-minute video that you sent me, and I thought that was way too long. That was interminable, too, yeah. Apparently, they don't believe developers have to pee. Maybe these guys didn't, because they just had such enjoyment of all this stuff that I found so boring.

Oh, God, yeah. I mean, look, I'm super happy that there's an Android out there, that Google is doing the phone, that it's not just the iPhone out there. Because, as we all know, Microsoft, once there is a dominant system out there, there's not much call for innovation anymore.

So we need some battles going on to keep people on their toes. So I'm happy that there are people out there that are really happy with their open-source phone. Yeah. I'm not one of them. I'm not going to be using one anytime soon. I think they're fine. They're pretty. They do the same sort of stuff.

It's not, you know, it's tomato, tomato, whatever. Well, there's just so much damn malware on the Google Play Store. It's ridiculous. Yeah. And even, this is one that came up this week that I heard. The way that they were doing the custom keyboards, you know, like Apple has just announced custom keyboards in iOS 8.

Yeah. The old way in Android, and I don't know if they're fixing this or not, but it was just kind of a key logger. You know, just basically read all the keys and send them off to the server. Yeah. Specifically, it was just a giant security hole, and hopefully they fixed that.

But, you know, that just kind of plays into how, like, Swiss cheesy it is just as a platform. Yeah. And we talked a long time ago about this as well, which is we don't really see under the hood that much anymore unless we want to pour through the open-source code.

It's not like they tell you that when you use those custom keyboards, all your information is being shipped off somewhere else. You don't think that. Well, you and I would naturally assume, well, of course they wouldn't do anything that stupid. But they do. They do. So the next version of Android is Android L, which will be available in the fall.

And they obviously didn't take a hint from the Super Bowl people who dropped the L because, you know, eh, loser. Yeah, Android L sounds pretty stupid. The presentation, like I said, I'm happy that they're there. I'm happy that they're standing up and basically going toe-to-toe with Apple on almost every feature or concept that they're rolling out.

But I just don't find it elegant. And I just – the entire time I was watching that nine-minute thing, I just – I felt like I was watching an episode of Silicon Valley and it was Hoolie giving their presentation. Yeah. These guys made horrible jokes. They take themselves so ridiculously seriously.

Cheering over the most lame implementations. I just – I was laughing. I was like, I can't believe this really exists. I know. It bordered on parody for sure. It really did. And Sundar Pichai, if that's how you pronounce his name, I could barely understand him.

Like there were times when I was just like, can we have subtitles, please? I just could not understand him. He got a lot of pop when he mentioned India though. So there was a lot of Indian developers in the audience for sure. Shocking. I mean – So they've got Android Auto coming out, which if you want to get your car hacked faster, go for that.

Yeah, you don't – you really don't want your Google car running that. Now, they've got Google Fit. They've got a couple ugly watches that are out. They've spent a lot of time talking about how you can just swipe. Everything was swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. And then you swipe, and then you swipe, and then you swipe. And then Andy uses his phone and he swipes and it goes to his car and then that gets swiped.

I know, man. It was like – yeah, it's almost like trying to – like an old unlock code for Mortal Kombat to get all the fatalities. It's like up, up, down, left, right, right, up, A, B, A, B, circle. You know? Yeah. Just watching him like swipe through it was like – I was getting dizzy. You're going to get carpal tunnel in your wrist from all the swiping.

No. So I'm not into it. And they have their new Materials API, which is their whole new design aesthetic, which is – it looks like a kid's book. These things are getting so like blocky colored and simplified that it's just – there's no soul in it at all.

I mean they took the Windows 8 design, which admittedly I thought was horrible. But they've made it even worse. It's – it's just ugly. It's – I don't know how you can have something at google.com slash design and not have a designer look at it and go, this looks like shit.

Well, they did. They have designers there. And one of my favorite designers on the planet works there now, Daniel Berka. And I don't – he's probably rolling over going, what the hell are we doing? You know, his designs always had soul. They were usable, beautiful.

Yeah. I mean just say, if you're listening right now, bring up google.com slash design and just feel the life force drain out of you. Yeah. There's nothing there. Hey, but it will have 3D because pixels have height now. Oh, joy. Yeah. Oh, great. That's going to be some more coding crap we'll have to learn.

No, it's Java, man. I'm not getting anywhere near that. And the funny thing is somebody posted a picture a long time ago – not a long time ago – when Windows 8 came out. And they put the Metro interface side-by-side with AOL or – it's AOL or Prodigy circa like 1992 and it looked identical.

It's just like we have come full circle from shitty to shitty. Another fun thing Google did this week – so let's rag on them a little more. They dropped the profile photos and Google Plus counts from any of the authorship blocks in search results.

They made a big stink about how this was the new thing like way back and we're going to have – it will like up your authority and it will have a picture so people will click on it more. And apparently they backtracked and said, you know, that's not working for us. Let's just pull it. I'm happy with that. I mean I just – anything that lets them finally admit that Google Plus isn't working and maybe let that go die a slow death would be awesome with me.

Oh, they're definitely pulling away from Google Plus. They're going – they're changing that up massively. What they're going to do with it, who knows. I still like it. I go on there every other day and kind of browse around. I still post stuff there. I get – I have almost 11,000 followers and I maybe get a click or two out of it. So I'll take a click or two.

It's a click or two I didn't have before. Fair enough. Fair enough. And originally that was the upside was you posted to Google Plus and that would up your authority with your search results. And apparently it's not working so well because nobody is using Google Plus. Yep. That is gone. So good.

Good, Google. That's smart. Get rid of it. Now, sadly, another thing that's gone, Technorati, my alma mater, quietly killed its once authoritative blog ranking system back in May. Sad. This makes me very, very sad. I kind of knew it was gone.

Nobody looked at it in ages. But I put so much work – all of us did. We busted our asses on that thing. That was my first startup, my first real like in the trenches. I worked 40 days with no day off. We did all sorts of fun stuff there. But it's gone now.

Goodbye. All good things go away, Jason. All good things go away. I know. This was from the next web. And I do have – I'm very happy that they did mention that the blog claiming service was one of the things that died. And I wrote that back in the day. That was mine. That was my piece. Nice.

One of my many pieces. But that's – I wrote the original blog claiming service. I'm sure it was rewritten seven or eight times after I left. But that was my one claim to fame. Well, there's only so much room on the internet, Jason. And yo pushed you out. Fuck him. And speaking of getting pushed out, L.A. got pushed out of the bid for the George Lucas Museum.

We won. Chicago. It's because they wanted an authentic Hoth environment. Exactly. It hit my notes. I wrote down, we got the droids you're looking for, bitches. Yeah, yeah. I – you know, it's – it's Los Angeles.

We can't keep work here because we can't beat the tax breaks that other places are giving them and because we're stupid as a city. So I'm not surprised. I didn't know where they were going to put it here anyways. And I originally thought it would be San Fran, not L.A. So – because he's out there.

Well, yeah, because Lucas – but guess where? He's also got a home here in Chicago. Ah, there you go. Yeah. So we went through nepotism and, you know, pandering to the local politicians, I'm sure. Yes, I'm sure there was a lot of that. There was a lot of Mos Eisley Cantina behavior going on.

Hey, but you guys got a Lamborghini for a police car. And this is why we can't have nice things in L.A. Well, fortunately, you didn't have to pay for it. It was donated. But you have a Lamborghini Gallardo, which will not be on the road but just tooled around to charity events for some reason.

Okay. How that's going to get people to give you more money for charity, I don't know. But I – you know, I – melt it down and use it to fill in some of the fucking potholes in this city, you assholes. I will have to say you could actually use Lamborghini on staff over there because if you are driving home like at 2 or 3 in the morning on any of the L.A. freeways, there's always somebody probably going about 140.

That's true. Drunk off their gourd, the scariest thing to do is be sober on New Year's Eve and drive on the freeways in Los Angeles. It is the dance of the macabre out there. It's like how many of these people are going to die before they get home? You know, it's just – it's one of those things where we're in L.A. and we're not used to going more than 10 miles an hour ever.

So once we can, we just go batshit crazy. Yeah, it's insane. So maybe they should get this Lamborghini on the road instead of out pimping for cash. Hey, let's stay on the Google train for a while.

Okay, why not? It's their week. So Nest has apparently backtracked a little bit on what they said originally, saying that they weren't going to share any information with Google since they're a separate company. Well, it turns out they're going to. And one of the main guys, one of the co-founders of Nest basically says, yeah, we're not telling them anything they don't already know.

So that's their justification for it. There I go. And they know it already. Fuck it. Yeah, unfortunately, that's kind of where we're at. It bothers the hell out of me, but there's no turning back. Well, it's very simple.

Don't buy anything from Nest. Don't buy anything from Dropcam. Don't buy a car that has Android Auto. Right now, none of them do, so you're set there. None of them have anything from Apple either, so it's all just smoke and mirrors and vaporware. Yes. But we did have some good news this week from the Supreme Court.

You can't have your cell phone searched if you're busted without a warrant. That's good. I like that. I'm down with that. Well, yeah, finally. Yeah, the quote from – this is the best quote. The Justice Department in its Supreme Court brief said, cell phones are not materially different from wallets, purses, and address books.

Chief Justice Roberts disagreed. That is like saying a ride on horseback is not materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon. Well, technically, they're still both forms of transportation. Yeah, but they're a little different. Right. Yeah, yeah. I agree.

Yeah, I'm really happy about this. I mean, I don't think – I mean, I think you should need a warrant anyways for any of those items, much less a cell phone. So, yeah, it's good. I don't want my cell phone just grabbed for no reason if I get pulled over for fucking running a red light or something or anything.

It doesn't matter. I totally agree with this. So, thank you, Supreme Court, for finally doing something right. We'll see how long that lasts. Yeah, and they acknowledge that it's going to make it harder for law enforcement, and they're like, tough shit. Get used to it. Yeah, yeah. It's your job. They've had an easy enough run with their stingrays and all the other crap that they do to us.

So, this at least gives us a little bit of protection. So, speaking of that protection being taken away, Chicago streetlights are now collecting data not only on weather but on how many people walk by, and they are monitoring cell phone signals to track where people are walking, which also, by the ruling, should be illegal.

Well, it's all anonymized, and it's coming from Argon Labs. We all know that when it's – let's take a page from Snapchat here. When they say anonymized – I don't know. I have faith in Argon Labs to at least be smart enough to do the right thing. Of course, in the future, it could be turned on its head and used for law enforcement or who the hell knows.

But they're saying that it's anonymized. All they're doing is tracking unique device identifiers, which – okay, I've got a laptop, I've got an iPad, and I've got a cell phone. So, am I now three people walking by? Or do they average that based on people who don't have devices? But it's mainly for, like, you know, learning traffic patterns, like, you know, human traffic patterns.

Yeah. Which, you know, they're doing it mainly on Michigan Avenue, which is good because Michigan Avenue can be just a shit show half the time with too many people. The lights aren't programmed properly. You know, we'll see what it's for. We'll see. We'll see. But couldn't they accomplish the same – okay. Specifically, there's an article discussing this on The Verge, which is a link that you threw in there, where basically the city of London attempted to do the exact same thing.

Now, if you've been to London any time in the last 15 years, it's basically – you don't notice it because you just get used to it, but you're basically in a police state. There is never not cameras on you. You are being tracked everywhere you go through London. Everybody knows what's going on, and they even said you can't do this there.

Oh, okay. They said that's a little bit too far. Now, I agree with – I love the fact that they're going to make all the data public. I don't mind this as long as I am 100% ironclad guaranteed that it's completely anonymized, but I don't think that they can do that, and I don't think it will be, and I think there's always ways to triangulate data and that sort of thing.

And secondly, couldn't the same amount of information be gotten just by installing cameras, by CCTV, and using some set of software programs that is literally just tabulating bodies that pass by in time periods? Yeah, probably with facial recognition and – We don't even need facial recognition.

No, no, no. Just the fact that it can recognize that it's a face. Right. Not whose face, but I'm saying that, okay, here is a face. Right. So Facebook will start checking me in automatically every time I walk past a certain establishment. Oh, well, you know that's coming. I know. That's what worries me. It's always the slippery slope on these things.

It's a cool concept, though. Yeah. Here's the thing. Remember, when they're talking about anonymized data, remember the big AOL kerfuffle a couple years ago when they released millions of search records? Yeah. There's been a bunch of anonymized dumps of millions of search records, and within minutes, people had reverse engineered who these people were because people like to search for themselves.

Yes. It's not that hard. Yeah. Anonymized sometimes just isn't. So here's a big one. 2600, the hacker magazine. Yeah. I remember that. They're getting shafted by their distributor big time.

All right. Source Interlink was their distributor, right? Mm-hmm. Source Interlink had two divisions, one that sold magazines and one that made magazines. Well, they decided to declare bankruptcy on half of the company. Okay. And not pay the people who they owed money to and keep the other one going and just put a new name on it and go with business as usual.

Wow. They got some good corporate lawyers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you might not want to do that to a hacker magazine because they have raised the ire of the internet. And the new brand is 10, the Entertainment Network, I believe. The Enthusiast.

The Enthusiast Network. Sorry. The Enthusiast Network. And, man, just – if you go through Twitter and read some of the replies, it is hysterical. So I don't know how it's going to play out, especially with Hope coming next week or in like two weeks.

Mm-hmm. The big – you know, Hope 10, the big hacker convention. So – which I wish I could go to. The last time I went to Hope, it was a blast. I got to see Jello Biafra, basically goat-see the entire audience, which was – left a scar, I got to say. Left a mental scar. I'm sure it did. Yeah. Fortunately, I had my camera down at that point and I didn't get it on film.

Oh, thank God. That's not going to be one of your photos of the day. No, definitely. I will not have Jello Biafra's taint on our website at any time whatsoever. But, yeah, it will be interesting to see because they're owed like $100,000. And for a small publisher – That's a lot. Well, and it's two issues that they're owed on, which is they only publish quarterly.

So that's half a year's revenue. Yeah. So they're going to fight tooth and nail. But to their credit, they're like, we're going to pay our bills. Even if it takes us 10 years, we're not going to well-shun our responsibility to the people who are our contractors, which is – it's a good way to go.

Yeah, God bless ethical hackers. Yeah, no, these guys have been in business for a long time. I remember. I'm surprised – well, actually, the only reason I know they're still around is you and the various things that you've discussed about them. But good on them, man. I read them religiously when I was a kid. Yeah, I – not so much anymore do I read them.

I don't anymore, but – Yeah, I've got a couple issues lying around and after being in the business, like some of the stuff that they have in the magazine isn't – it's kind of common knowledge at this point. So I haven't seen anything that's really groundbreaking. But the fact that they keep doing it, I mean that just could be because I've been doing this for so damn long.

And for the new kids, it might be great. Yeah, it might be. I mean that's just the nature of the world now though. I mean with this intertube stuff, there isn't really hidden knowledge anymore. It's all out there. Yeah, they should just go digital. Straight up digital. Yeah, it's actually kind of ironic that they still do print.

Oh, and they're like the number one magazine on Amazon Kindle, which is where I got my copies. So they are doing digital, but they should just kill the trees. Kill killing the trees. Yes, kill the print version. Move on. And get better PHP editors in there because, man, some of the PHP code they post is just god-awful.

Oh, man. Register global is always off, people. Always. So we talked a long time ago about this guy who was getting hacked incessantly. And he couldn't figure out how. And then he figured – he theorized that these computers were jumping the air gap because with no network connections by using ultrasound and the speakers talking to each other.

Google must have read the same articles because because they're going to be doing that with Chromecast. I don't like this. It's creepy. It's – this is – I've enjoyed the Chromecast. Now, I have Apple TV, and I use that more often because it's just – it might – as we've talked about, I've kind of went Apple with my home infrastructure, and everything talks to each other, and it's great.

I have a Chromecast. I got one for Christmas, and I like it. It's fun. It's super easy to use for some stuff. It was great. I love the fact that it's only connected through my Wi-Fi network. I do not want it doing ultrasonic audio cues through my house. Hey, but it still requires a pin, they say.

Uh-huh. No. There's going to be problems with this. Somebody's going to figure out how to make it go the other way or something. Something's going to happen with it. I don't know what. I don't know what, but it's just one of those gaps that – This is something that is frightening to me.

I don't like it, and we will discuss more about why I may not like it as soon as we get to the At the Library section because I started reading one of the books that you just recommended. Okay. So, yeah. This is one of those things where I don't know exactly what's wrong with it, but I have a gut feeling that something is ridiculously wrong with it, and it's going to be a problem.

That's exactly where I'm at, too. I can't tell you why this is a bad idea, but I just know it's a bad idea. At the Library. So, I listed off a bunch of books last week that I was going to get to. Yeah, not so much.

Hey, World Cup time, man. Shit happens. Yeah, I haven't even been watching World Cup that much. Just, you know, that whole balance thing we talked about at the beginning. Right. Skewed somewhat more on the output instead of input. So, this week I've got Robopocalypse, which is a couple years old, but it's by Daniel Wilson.

Phenomenal book. It's kind of like in the World War Z vein where it's, you know, different points of view of the robot apocalypse. Right. And it just follows – it's all written by one soldier who you get to know, like, as the book progresses, you get to know him better.

Mm-hmm. But all in all, man, this book just had me from the get-go. It is a plausible take on a robot apocalypse. I picked it up two nights ago because I had finished up The Long Mars, which I'll talk about a little bit later. And as I talked about with my schedule, I do need my reading time at night.

It's how I relax. I picked it up. I started reading it. I stayed up until 1 a.m. that night, which was a bad idea because I had a 9 a.m. World Cup game to wake up for. Oh, the important things in life. The important things in life. And then I did the same thing again last night, which is, again, a bad idea because I have a 9 a.m. podcast this morning.

I'm not able to stop reading it. I'm really enjoying it. You're right. It feels like World War Z, which is another book that I really enjoyed. This one is also fantastically plausible. And if you do remember, Air Gap. That is how the main guy escapes at the very beginning of the book, the main robot.

The intelligence, basically. The main intelligence gets out through the stupid scientist, brought his laptop and had him in a protected environment, but forgot about the high-frequency audio signals that he was able to send out. Actually, no, no, no. He used the IR port. The IR port on the laptop. That's right. Yes. Yeah.

So total Air Gap. It was great. Yeah, I'm really enjoying it. Can't wait to see that it ends. And you just informed me during the break that there is a sequel, so I'm very excited about that as well. Yes, the sequel is called Robogenesis. It just came out not too long ago, and that's how I found out about the original book. Cory Doctorow had posted about it on Boing Boing and had raved about it, so it is definitely – Is it a sequel or a prequel?

Because Robogenesis sounds like it could be a prequel. I do believe it is a sequel. Okay. It's after Robopocalypse takes place. Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, I can't recommend this enough. I mean this is – if you're into this sort of stuff that we're into, you're going to like this one a lot. And it's very well written for an author I'd never heard of.

That's fantastic. No, it's extremely well written. It almost reminded me of Suarez's first two books. Yeah. Just the quality of writing. Yeah, I agree. So my second book is kind of a self-helpy book. Oh, boy. Yeah, I know. I know. Did you ever read Steven Pressfield's The War of Art?

I did not. That is an amazing book, but it's a little frou-frou-woo-woo for me. Yeah, that's the problem. So you can lose about half that book. But this one is called Improv Wisdom, Don't Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madsen. Fantastic book.

I'm loving every second of it. I'm about 70 percent into it now. I love this concept because that's how I treat this podcast. Yeah, I noticed. I've noticed. But it basically walks you through 10 improv principles that you can use in everyday life.

Oh, that's good. I mean, that's cool. I like that sort of stuff. Yeah. I mean, I took an improv class way back in the day when I was in college, and I had a blast there, and I used a lot of those principles to this day. Yes, and. Yes, and. So check it out. I mean, it's a short read. It's like 160 pages.

Oh, that's cool. You'll breeze through it. Yeah, and it's just chock full of good stuff. I'm really loving it. I did the same thing. I think I stayed up until 2.30 in the morning the first night I got it reading it. I will actually check that one out then because I'm due for some nonfiction, too. Not necessarily self-help, but whatever.

I'll give this one a shot. I finally finished The Long Mars. I really – I could not put it down. I've screwed up my entire last two weeks in between being up at 9 in the morning for games and staying up until 1 or 2 in the morning reading. I really, really enjoyed it. The book itself maybe wasn't probably the strongest in the three, but the story is so damn good.

And as an ongoing saga, I just – I need to know what's going to go on. I need to know what's going on in this world. I felt that the ending was very abrupt and definitely open-ended, so hopefully slash obviously there's another one coming.

There's a lot of ideas that they haven't touched on. There's a few major plot twists that they brought up in this one that I don't feel that they resolved. My only fear is that this is a co-write between Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett, and as we know, Terry Pratchett is suffering from Alzheimer's and will not be writing too much longer.

Discworld is one of both of our favorite series of all time. We probably read the last Discworld that we're going to get. I don't know if he's going to be able to do another one of these, but as I said when I talked about it a little bit last week as I was just getting into the book, I don't feel that much Pratchett in it, and I kind of have a feeling that should Pratchett not be able to continue.

Stephen Baxter can probably keep the series going by himself, which would make me happy because I've really enjoyed this series. If they keep building this out and they do – or he does, say, nine, ten of them and it becomes an epic series like Foundation or Dune, this could become that.

Cool. I really, really like the first two, so I'm looking forward to having some time to dig into this one for sure. Yeah, and it's really kind of fun for me because I feel that this does have the potential because it's happening now. You know what I mean? Like as a kid, I discovered Dune, but that had already been written.

I discovered Foundation. That had already been written. There were no new ones coming. They basically existed already as a complete gigantic work of fiction, and it's kind of nice to be kind of in on the ground floor on something that could easily become that, which is fun for me. Absolutely. Yeah.

No, I'm loving it as it comes out, so I will keep adding these to the queue. Highly recommend it. I didn't really have any new software this week. What? I know. No new apps, no nothing.

I was a bad boy. I was still trying to muddle my way through two dots since they killed my hack. Rat bastards. So I did find out something new, though, with the iOS 8 beta. So beta 2 came out. I did not install it. I'm not going to install it until it's like beta 4 because I do need my phone to work.

And what I heard on the grapevine, though, is that in iOS 8 now, the Apple podcast app is a required app. You can't delete it, and it comes built in. All right. For podcasters like us, that's fantastic. That is good news.

So even though it is one of the most terrible apps I've ever used in my life, I ran it for two weeks just to get the hang of it so I know where everything's at and I can tell people how to use it. But my God, is it terrible. See, I don't have an issue with it.

But then again, I don't listen to 10 gazillion podcasts, and I could see if you have a ton of things in there. It would be a really crappy app. But for me, especially because on my phone, I basically only listen to podcasts when I'm out on the bike riding. So I only have like four podcasts that I keep on my phone.

The rest are all on my desktop computer. So for me, the app is fantastic. It's super easy to use. It does exactly what I need it to do and nothing else, which iTunes has never been able to do. It's fine. I went back to Downcast.

That's my – if you're a power user, I listen to – I think I have 48 podcasts in my list. Yeah, there you go. It sorts the way it should sort. When there's new episodes, it sorts – you can set some sorting parameters. But on the built-in podcast app, man, I'd be scrolling, looking for stuff.

There was no rhyme or reason to how it was ordered. It's a mess, total mess. So I dumped it. I spent three bucks on Downcast. Best three bucks of my life. Love it. And even with the new ones that are coming out for normal podcast subscribers, there's probably a couple of them now that are okay to use.

But I would just say stick with Downcast. It's not the prettiest, but it is the most functional by far. Yeah, fair enough. I'm excited about this built-in, though, for us, at least, for our dear listeners because it will all be so much easier for us and for them when this comes out, maybe.

I have unsurprisingly not found any new apps except for signing up for Yo! so I can get a Yo! every time there's a goal in the World Cup. I'm just kidding. I didn't do that. I did finally, though – well, actually, we talked about iPhone cases a while back, and I'd totally forgotten that I had ordered one, and this would be the place to talk about it.

I ordered the Lunatic SMK5 seismic touch suspension frame for iPhone 5. That's a mouthful. It is a mouthful, but the price was right because a lot of the suggestions that you were giving me and a lot of the best-reviewed cases out there are like $100.

And I'm like, I'm not spending $100 on a case. It's only – what is it on Amazon right now? It's $33.39. Its list price is $35. It looks pretty groovy, I have to say. I do like the aesthetics of it because it's got this kind of honeycomb around the outside look, which feels sufficiently industrial and funky looking.

It's bigger than I thought it would be, a little heavier than I thought it would be, so it's a bit bulky. But I guess the point is that this is a touch suspension frame, so you can basically throw your phone on the ground and it will survive. So I guess you get bulk with that.

It's too big for me, but the funny thing is I went without a case for like six months, and I never dropped my phone, didn't do anything, not a scratch, not anything. I've had this for three weeks, and I probably dropped my phone on a daily basis. That's what happens. You forget – that part of your brain says, oh, I don't have to worry about it anymore, so you get sloppy.

Yeah, it does the job. It looks kind of pretty, but even after three weeks, I'm starting – like some of the plastic is starting to – or the rubber, I guess, is starting to kind of peel off on the side a little bit. That's not good. No, but it's $30, so I guess I got what I'm going to get out of it, and I'll probably use it for another six months, and then I'll try something else again.

Yeah, I gave away my Glyph case to my roommate, which was a fantastic case, but I bought that OlloClip case with the sliding top mount for the camera, so you can put their lenses on it, and it acts as a shutter button. Yeah. Love it so far, and I barely use the lens thing anymore, but as a case, it still works.

I like it. It hasn't scratched up. It sits nice. I'm sticking with it. Cool. Yeah. Well, I like mine. It's called Lunatic. There will be links in the show notes. Media Candy. Listicle of the Week.

Oh, shoot me now. I stumbled across this one. It's actually been out for a little while, but I just thought it was kind of funny. The 15 most hated bands of the last 30 years. Link is in the show notes. I'm proud to say I've only worked with one of them, but they took it up the ass pretty hard in this listicle.

So who would this be? Well, I've worked with the Goo Goo Dolls in the past, and they're still quite good friends of mine, but they get name-checked multiple times on this list. Yeah, it's a very funny list, and actually, most of these bands I almost entirely agree with, because I can't stand a lot of them.

But, hey, it's music, and they made a lot more money than any of us. That's true. That's true. So they can laugh their way all to the bank while they just get shit on relentlessly in this article. Very funny, though. I loved it, and I like having Nickelback first. Definitely.

Never a fan. No, never a fan. So I want to do a little follow-up on the Wil Wheaton project that we talked about before it came out. You're not a fan, I see. I watched two episodes, but I'll let you talk about it first. I love it.

I am excited now when it shows up on the DVR. Some of the jokes are kind of corny. Some? Most of the jokes are kind of corny. Some of the bits, though, are hilarious, like the stoned Neil deGrasse Tyson. That was funny. That was funny.

They had Hodor on. There was a ton of stuff on there. I find it's a nice little popcorn show. I really like it. I can definitely see that. I enjoy the fact that there is something. First off, I like the fact that Wil Wheaton has something because I think he's a great guy.

He's really funny. He has definitely carried the torch for geekdom being a good thing. He's a super cool guy. He's always like, every time he goes to a Comic-Con, he is all about women's rights. It's all about do what makes you feel good and to hell with everyone else and be into what you're into and to hell with everyone else.

I love that. He's a great guy. I highly recommend reading his blog. I always like what he writes about. Do I sense a butt coming? There is a butt coming. The show is not for me. Let's just put it that way. I think on the one hand, I'm burnt out on the format of the whole daily soup.

Talk soup? Talk soup, whatever. That entire format of guy standing in front of a TV screen and having a bunch of mediocre jokes that they have to shit out all the time, I'm done with it. It doesn't interest me anymore, so that's bad enough for me.

Plus, I also figured you're on Siffy and you're doing a show that is entirely about geek culture. Why didn't you try to change and push the format and make it more interactive slash online slash anything except for you standing in front of a TV screen in a suit making awkward jokes?

That's all. Kind of like how At Midnight's doing it, you mean? Yeah, yeah. At Midnight is actually a great show. I need to start setting that up to be recorded because that is a new media show. And I was just a little disappointed to see that this was kind of just your standard talking head show.

The other thing that just killed it for me is – and I called it a laugh track and you immediately told me that it's not a laugh track. It's filmed in front of a live audience. No, it's not a laugh track, but there's also a thing called sound mixing. The laughs are way too loud. You can focus on one or two people on both episodes I listened to where there was just one guy that was always like mediocre joke.

And I was just – I can't watch. I cannot watch it. Crank it way the hell down. It's way too up in the mix. It sounds like a laugh track. It sounds like I'm being told you should be laughing at this because it's funny and I'm just sitting there going, no, that wasn't that funny. Okay, fair enough.

Point's enough for doing it. I probably will not watch it again if anything gets viral and pops up out there about did you see this clip on the – which, by the way, there was one. The Brady Bunch Game of Thrones thing was awesome. That was pretty good. That was fucking funny.

So I really enjoyed that. So I will watch – like I watch a lot of shows. I will watch the clips that the public deems good enough to watch. I will not watch the show. But definitely I'm happy that something out there like this exists. Okay, you will wait for the nerd worthy. Speaking of nerds, Nerdist Podcast, episode 538 with Greg Berent.

It's a couple weeks old but for some reason when I put Downcast back on, it synced a bunch of old podcasts that I stopped listening to and Nerdist was one of them. I haven't listened to Nerdist in ages which is – again, it's one of those weird things about there's just too much out there. I love that podcast. I just never get around to listening to it.

I flipped through the episode list to see who was on and it's like Morgan Freeman, Tom Cruise, Anthony Bourdain and – Yeah, he's getting total A-list celebrities now. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean it was fantastic. I went and listened to the Tom Cruise one this morning. It was awesome. I loved it. It's just – yeah, sometimes you get these runs of mediocre people that you never heard of that are just C-grade writers on shows and stuff.

But Greg Berent, I knew from ages ago from Andy Preboy's White Trash Wins Lotto. And it was great to see him on the show and I'm like, oh, cool. Greg's on. So I got it and I listened to it and it was a fantastic episode. Highly recommended. Cool.

I'll have to give it a listen. I do miss the White Trash Wins Lotto. That was some good stuff. Yeah. We'll be putting that video in the show notes. It was – he plays the DJ at the beginning. Okay. I picked up something this week for my podcast, the iHome Bluetooth Rechargeable Mini Speaker Cube in an effort to keep my phone from being under my pillow all night and waking up in the morning and trying to find where it is and it's inevitably stuck to a butt cheek or something.

It was like $25. I picked it up at Target. Amazing sound. Amazing. For this little tiny cube, rechargeable batteries. Really? I played it for my roommate and he's like, holy shit, that much is coming out of that? And iHome has a pretty good history of making good accessories.

I have been a fan of iHome since they started. They're a great company. I've had two or three of their travel things over the years and I've always had one of the iPhone plug-in alarm clocks, always. They're great stuff. Yeah. I was originally looking because I've got an old iPhone 4 with the old 30-pin connector and I'm like, oh, cool.

I can get something old that's cheap now. Yeah. Surprisingly, no. They're all still expensive. What they're saying now is, oh, just get the little adapter, lightning adapter. Yeah. So they're still selling for over $100 for a lot of them. So I'm just like, ah, screw it. I'll get this cheap thing, which really is going to work out because my dad has an old car with just a CD player and no inputs.

And I've been trying to figure out – I've been burning audio discs for him forever of like cool audio stuff that I find. Now I'm just going to get him one of these and Velcro it to the dashboard. And he's already got an iPhone 5C, so now he can just Bluetooth to it and no more CDs.

I'm so excited. Total ghetto tech. Yep. But Bluetooth ghetto tech. I don't know. I like it. And just check it out. If you're looking for one of those little portable speakers, this thing is fantastic. Like I said, sound quality is excellent.

I just throw it on the other side of my mattress when I go to bed at night and put a timer on and boom. Very cool. I'm going to have to check it out. So in the media side of things now, North Korea calls new Seth Rogen film, The Interview, an act of war.

What the hell? An act of war with who? Us. Hollywood. Look. North Korea versus Hollywood now. Most of us don't like Seth Rogen. Get in a war with him. Yeah. Honestly, you can have him. I don't want anything to do with him.

He was funny when he first started and now it's just the same fucking stoner jokes over and over again. Yep. No, thank you. I saw the clip. It was reasonably kind of sort of funny but not really. And there you go. I was going to try and get my buddy Jordan Harbinger on here who goes to North Korea. And when I sent it to him, he's like, ooh, that's bad.

And then he was like – and by bad, I mean Seth Rogen. Yeah. Yeah. Well, whatever. Non-story. Whatever. I was going to say, speaking of non-stories, this just came out today and I just had to put it in because it was so ridiculous. Binge-watching TV may be linked to premature death and in parentheses, study.

This is going to be a case of using statistics to prove anything you want, right? No. This is what we call clickbait. Oh, OK. Because if there is a question in the title or like, does binge-watching TV link to premature death? You won't believe the answer.

This one says binge-watching TV may be linked. And at the last part of the article, it says, though the study did not find a link between the time people spent performing other sedentary activities and the risk of premature death, the particular mechanism behind the relationship between TV watching and a person's risk of premature death was not determined.

It's like, OK, you just made me read a goddamn article to tell me that your article means nothing. Absolutely nothing. What do you tell me every time I bring up one of these stories and have a rant? Don't click on it. Yeah. I mean, the Hollywood Reporter is now stumbling down to these depths.

That's a Huffington Post gambit. I can't – the Hollywood Reporter gets enough money. They don't need to do that. It is one of the most expensive magazines to subscribe to in Los Angeles. It's a total industry mag, and they know it, and they sell it, and everybody that has zillions of dollars in this town gets it, and they don't need the money.

So why clickbait, you jerks? I know. I used to get it every day, and it was a fun read, but with crap like that – An exact, immediate turnaround. I'm going to talk about a link that you'll tell me I never should have clicked on in the first place as well.

You read my mind. In the – yesterday morning was a big morning for me. Germany played the U.S. These are my two countries, and I love Germany, and World Cup's been going crazy, and Germany passed through to the next round, and the U.S. also made it much thanks to Portugal winning their games.

So I was on a World Cup high when I came home. I was like, this is unbelievable. I can't believe this is all happening. This is so exciting. And I come home, and I'm about to start doing some work. And trending topic, Ann Coulter. Well, problem right there. Right there, you should have stopped. We all know that anything that comes out of Ann Coulter's mouth is a complete load of shit that is basically – she probably doesn't even believe.

She's just made a nice career out of telling stupid people stupid things. Any growing interest in soccer is a sign of nation's moral decay. And then I went on to read the article, mistake number two. There's a second mistake. Got super pissed off and got really annoyed, and I just want to say that first off, you are scum of the earth, and not just for this story.

There's been far worse ones. This one just happens to pick on soccer. Secondly, every single person in this country came from a soccer-playing nation, unless you happen to be one of the people that we killed or displaced. You too, Ann Coulter. Your prodigy or your ancestry were soccer players.

Shut up. She is a professional troll. Yes. That's all she is. So if you see her name, please don't put it in the show notes anymore. The one thing that I did enjoy about this is even people, even Americans who don't like soccer and like to scream loudly once every four years when some of us who do really start to enjoy it about how much soccer sucks, we're like, screw you, Ann.

Yeah. So that was nice. I've got to say on the World Cup thing, I don't know why this came to me the other day when I was watching commercials. And so there's that song, Ole, Ole, Ole, Ole, right? Yeah. Why doesn't Yoplait have a commercial?

Come on. Yoplait. Yoplait. I'm just saying for the yogurt fans who like football. We can try to sell that. Feel free to edit that part out. No way. That stays in. This morning I just saw another thing that definitely deserves to go into this category.

I don't have an issue with anything that anybody decides to do for a living. And if you want to make your living telling other people how to live their lives because you found some magical elixir that makes your personal approach to life the best one and can save other people and you are convincing enough to get people to pay you money, to listen to you talk about your bullshit, good on you.

That's fine. No problem with that. I do have a problem if you're hypocritical about it and that's not the way you actually live your life. Christian motivational speaker. Take that one from the top. Christian motivational speaker who says, dateable girls know how to shut up, arrested for public intoxication.

Apparently he couldn't make it to one of his speaking engagements because he was in jail, because he was way drunk in public. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with being drunk in public, but if Justin Lookadoo, and that is his name, and you should see the photo of him, link in the show notes, this guy scares the crap out of me.

He kind of looks like a drunk homeless version of the prodigy fire starter guy. Yeah, it kind of does. Yeah. So this guy is a motivational speaker who makes a living telling teenagers how they should be living their lives, was arrested for public intoxication and vomiting. Good on you.

Sweet. I'm not even going to follow up with that one. It says everything there is covered. That's all you need. And Dr. Oz, you can get one more honorable mention in this category, too. Are you kidding me?

It's inevitable that something that is crowdfunded ends up in the Are You Shitting Me category, and I found a doozy of one yesterday. The O-Phone. Harvard scientists are creating the first scent-based mobile messaging platform. So you can send farts, smells.

What the fuck? Yeah. Remember back in the early days of the internet where I think it was Sound Blaster. Yes. It came out with a scent card that you could put in your PC. And nobody cared. Nobody cared. There's two things I don't want my computer to do. Make noise when I tell it not to.

Or smell. And smell like anything other than a computer. Yes. And especially on a phone. What? Huh? Yes. There's a lot of lovely photos of people sitting in front of a large contraption, by the way, which does not look like you could – you'd have to lug this thing.

It looks like about the size of a briefcase. So it's not exactly like it's – you can attach this to your phone and walk around. But I guess that's why they're asking for $150,000 to maybe make it smaller. Thank God they've so far only raised $20,000. I don't think this one's going to make its goal.

I hope it doesn't. But there is flexible funding options. Oh, great. Yeah, I'll pass on this one. Yeah, I'm going to send them a stink. Keep your stink to yourself. And – yes. And finally, I just did have one little item that I liked.

I was actually watching Top Gear the other day, one of the old ones, where they constructed a road that would play the Top Gear theme song when you drove over it because music is all harmonic frequencies. So if you drive over things at certain speeds and you spread out bumps over time, it will make melody.

I did not know that Japan has a network of rogues that play music as you drive over them. It's quite cool actually. So there's a link in our show notes. Unfortunately, all the music is J-pop and it doesn't sound very good. Well, if you like J-pop, you're in business. I like in the article how it says if you go too slow, then it just kind of makes you nauseous.

So that would really kind of suck in traffic. Everybody's just barfing in their cars. There was one time when I was in Silver Lake looking over the 101 freeway and we were having an X-Files party at my friend's house in a barbecue and I just had this conspiracy theory.

I'm like, oh my god, what if we could put subliminal messages in the roadway and have it work like these guys driving on the things? I just – I don't know why I thought of that when you brought this up. But that was my X-Files days I guess when I wanted to believe.

Go back to Kansas. Go back to Kansas. Okay. I don't know why I brought that up, but it was fun. Closing shout-outs. I'm going to give my shout-out this week to Carl Wallinger, also known as World Party, who I'm off to go see play tonight at the Troubadour in Los Angeles.

He is sincerely the most talented musician I've ever met in my entire life. He's got some really catchy, great songs and he's also got a new album out. So go get it. Go listen to some World Party on the Tube of the U or the Spotify or whatever you use.

Love Carl. Can't wait to hang out with him tonight. So World Party. Shout-out of the week. Wasn't he supposed to be on our show? He would like to be on our show. It's a question of catching him when he isn't in an altered state, which has proven to be difficult. When has that ever stopped us before?

Well, there's a slightly different version of altered state that Carl prefers and then he usually ends up talking about Star Trek for three hours, which actually would work for our show. I think it might. I want to throw a shout-out to Shane Nickerson, a previous guest on the show. The Hollywood reporter who we mentioned before has a link that Rob Dyrdek has inked a multi-year deal with MTV and they're bringing back Fantasy Factory.

Nice. Yeah. Congratulations. Yeah, Shane's an executive producer on that show, so I'm glad to have Fantasy Factory back. I really actually enjoy that show and they've got some kind of new snack show coming out too, but it also means that ridiculousness will be out there for a little longer.

As far as those show a YouTube, funny video, get a laugh type of thing, I like this show. All right. It's fun. I TiVo it and when I need some popcorn, I pop it on and I get a couple good laughs and see some videos that I haven't actually seen before. So good on you, Shane.

Keep going. Congrats, man. So I do want to say my tea of the day came from Tim Ferriss' Quarterly Box, which I talked about on the last episode. This is from Breakaway Matcha and it's a cold brew green matcha. So good. It is so good. Highly recommended if you like the teas.

I will have to try that out. I am drinking my standard ginger pooh-er. Puh. Puh. So this is actually the start of my booze sabbatical for the summer. You are a brave man doing it. I know you're not a huge World Cup fan, but we're entering into the round of 16, then the quarters, and then the semis, and then the final.

And I can't even possibly imagine that until after the final. I watch World Cup Home Alone, so it's probably a good thing that I'm not sitting here going, oh, man, I got a drink for this. Man, you're in Chicago. You should go out to the park that is just crazy for the U.S. games.

I'd totally be there. Have we met? I'm this guy that doesn't like people. I don't like being outdoors because there are bugs, and I don't like to sweat. So all three of those combined in one festive event just shoved like some needles in my eyes.

That's it. All right. Well, good luck on the booze sabbatical. Thank you. I will toast one. I will pour one out for my absent homie during the final. No, I think it's a good thing. I've noticed as I get older that booze affects my speech, not like slurring, you know, to the point where I know a word, I visualize a word in my head, but it doesn't come out of my mouth.

And that's like after just like half a sip of wine. Jason, I hate to break it to you, but that happened to you back then too. You just drink so much that you don't remember. Oh, okay. That could be it. That could be it. Okay. Well, that's it for this week.

That's it for this week. Righteous in the voice, you're the boss, make me scream aloud. Got to make a choice. Keep up with us at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks, on Twitter, we're at twitter.com slash gogpodcast, or simply email us at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 64. Yo. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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