68: Open Source Shenanigans with Sean Bonner

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. Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Jason. How are you? I'm peachy keen. Excellent. On this lovely Friday. It is Friday. Thank God. It's been a hell of a week. That it has. That it has. It's been up and down here.

Speaking of just silly stuff that we do because we're grumpy old geeks, as I was typing that, I saw a little notification come up on Facebook because I follow God. He said, thank you so much for everybody. I don't know why everybody thanks me on these days. I don't really do anything. Very funny.

Yeah, there's a really good Twitter account. I think it's Voice of God. He's pretty funny. Unfortunately, he outed himself as a writer, so now I know who it is, so it's not as funny. It was better when it was just an anonymous God account. That was good. I actually follow that account, and it was really good when Voice of God's Wife also joined Twitter.

I haven't seen that. That was very funny. Oh, I haven't seen that. Stop messing around with those two-legged people and get back to work. So we've got a little follow-up from the world of Facebook, which you always like to bring up. You know everybody is on it, Jason.

Yeah, well, increasingly less, increasingly less. I have not noticed that. I have. It's been very quiet. I only check it like maybe once a day or every other day. Right. But I'm getting to the point where I'm almost ready to leave. I've got most of my accounts migrated off of it.

I can. That I used the thing. Well, there's nothing there. It's not that. It's just boring now. Nobody's posting anything. But you found something on the Huffington Post, and damn you for linking to a Huffington Post article. I know. I really don't like to do it, and I tried to see if this article had appeared anywhere else.

And I'm sure there are breakdowns like this. But this is quite a good breakdown of the actual terms of service of Facebook that none of us have ever read. It specifically brings out a lot of really good points about how basically Facebook has the right to do whatever they want with us whenever they want.

And they can mess around with us in any way, shape, or form that they like. And basically, this is free, so screw you. And we're going to make money off you. Yep. And the one that was interesting is how they use other partners to match up your data to get more info on what you're doing.

Yeah. So it's a good read if you don't already know that they can take everything that you have and do what they want to with it anyway. Yeah. And it's not just what you do on Facebook. It's what you do basically anywhere that they're able to track, which is almost everything these days.

So anytime you are online and you are signed into your Facebook account, even if you're not signed in, if you sign in later and you still have all those active cookies and whatnot from everywhere else that you've been, Facebook grabs all that information, stores it somewhere. Yep. And now they're going to be using that data to sell you stuff because now they're including a buy button on some crap.

I am shocked it took them that long. Honestly, yeah. Seriously. It's kind of a no-brainer for them. It's definitely an easy way for them to make money. If nothing else, you know, associate links with – well, of course, they're not going to make a deal with Amazon because they see them as direct competitors. But, yeah.

So Facebook stores, not shocking at all. No, not at all. The only thing that's shocking is it took them so damn long. Yeah. Well, they messed around with that little gift thing for a while that never took off. Like you could – somebody's birthday would pop up and it would like send them a gift or whatever and that was just kind of stupid.

But this will be full-fledged. I'm not – I'm expecting it very soon. The issues, I suppose, would come in with advertising to outside retailers and things like that. So you would – as an outside retailer, you would get upset if you were running Facebook ads and paying for them and then found out that Facebook was selling a competing product directly.

Yeah, there's – I'm sure there's a lot of pitfalls that they're going to have to avoid. But that just means you're going to – besides giving them all of your info so far, then you're going to give them your credit card as well. So, yeah, pass on that one. Yeah, pass. So kind of related I guess because I think what we're starting to see is a recurring theme of not just Facebook burnout but kind of internet burnout in general and certainly tech burnout.

There was a really nice article in The Guardian, which is a good, fun little online paper to read by J.R. Hennessey, The Tech Utopia Nobody Wants, Why the World Nerds Are Creating Will Be Awful. And it's fun. It's nothing new in there.

I mean they're definitely just – they're talking about Google Glass and the incidents that have occurred there and Soylent, the high-nutrient sludge. And he's talking about this kind of strange world that a very small segment in society up in Silicon Valley, which is incredibly powerful, is certainly pushing to kind of achieve.

And I want no part of it as well. Well, honestly, this comes from like two tweets from somebody you've never heard of. It's like, oh, why don't we give people on welfare Soylent instead of food stamps? It's like – Some of the genius ideas that come out of Silicon Valley when these incredibly rich mid-20-year-olds have bright ideas.

Yeah, because they've never been out in the real world. Exactly. So yeah. No. It was interesting. But yeah. It felt more like link bait to me. Yeah. Because it was just a little thingy. Well, you got to – I mean, again, this is – for us who are embedded in this news all the time, this is no big deal.

But if you're, say, my parents or anybody that isn't on tech and online all day long, this is kind of a good wrap-up, as it were, of the situation at the moment. So OSX Yosemite has – the beta program is finally out. A lot of people on my Twitter feed were installing it yesterday, much to – I'm just waiting for the support questions to come in because I already told them.

I'm like, don't do it. Don't do it. If it's your main computer, don't do it. I'm still surprised you didn't leave it. If I had a spare computer, I would. And I did. I remember I did it on my iMac. And then the problem was, well, it ran like crap and half my stuff didn't work. So I uninstalled it, which was a major hassle.

Unfortunately, I had a carbon clone copy, whatever it was, CCC backup. But it was unfortunately from January because I forgot to run it right before I did the install like an idiot. Yeah. So my – I had like a six-month-old clone of my iMac, so I lost a bunch of stuff.

But that was back to elsewhere. Anyway, it's always – if it's your main computer, just don't do it, man. Don't do it. Yeah, I agree completely. I am looking forward to the final release, but I'm not going to mess around about this anymore. No. So we talk about the smart home a lot.

And this cool little company called LittleBits who make these little plug-and-play gadgets where you can kind of do home electronic-y stuff. They've got a new one out that's called the CloudBit. And you can use that now to kind of build your own home automation stuff, which is kind of cool.

Yeah. I mean, I hate the name. LittleBits? No, CloudBit. Just everything has to be cloud now, and it's so annoying. And typically, it's not really anything about a cloud. It's just something you use to control through Wi-Fi in your own home. But okay. Yeah, it could have been just the Wi-Fi bit.

Yeah. Wifi bit. Yeah. I wonder if Fitbit is on these guys for trademark infringement. But apparently, you'll be able to buy this stuff at Radio Shack pretty soon. And I'm just like, what? Radio Shacks? Yeah. No, it looks pretty neat. I mean, I am not this DIY.

Like, I don't want to build a box to put it into that makes it look cool and all that sort of – I am perfectly happy to wait until Apple or somebody else comes along and makes this all very simple and very nice looking for me already. But if you are a super handy Radio Shacky guy who likes to make your own circuit boards and stuff like that, sure.

Go for it. This seems pretty cool. If it's really good, they'll get bought out by somebody shortly. Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. But there are a lot of these new little hardware manufacturers coming out of the woodwork now because it's so easy to have these things – like your own circuit boards printed and all this stuff.

So I like how this is going. I'm going to try it over the winter because winter is coming, unfortunately. I hate to even say that. We're only halfway through summer here, people. Let's relax. Still. It is coming though. Yeah. When I see the fall lineup for TV starting to get promoted, I'm starting to get twitchy and nervous.

I'm like, no more snow. No more snow. I can't do this again. But I need to find some kind of hobby that doesn't revolve around broken bones this winter. So I'm thinking about getting into the hardware hacking side of things. Let me ask a quick question because I see this all over the internet and I've never really looked into it.

Is this what the Raspberry Pi basically is? Raspberry Pi was – I can't even remember now. It was a controller board but I think it was more of like a – actually, you know what? I'm not even going to say what it is because I can't remember. All right. I'm going to do some follow-up on this because it pops up all the time and I know it's definitely like – it's one of those things that super techie geeky guys get into.

It's a controller board that you can do anything with. Therefore, what the hell are people doing with it? Because usually anytime you can do anything with somebody, something, you never do anything with it. So we'll see. I've got to look into it because I know it's all over news feeds all the time and I've always been curious.

But then I was like, well, what am I going to do with this thing? Yeah. I mean I'm seeing an article now that compares it to Arduino and BeagleBone Black, which I don't even – I've never even heard of that one. So I'm guessing, yeah, it's a controller board of some type. Maybe we'll pick up – we'll both do a little geeky winter project.

Yeah. It's a microcontroller board. OK. So yeah, that's what it was. It was pretty cheap too. It was like $35. Yeah. I mean – That was the big thing about it. Lifehacker and Engadget are in love with this damn thing because it's just all over. But I just don't even know what you'd do with it. I guess we'll figure it out. Yeah, my friend Trent Hamilton got into hacking Arduino stuff not too long ago and I know a ton of people that are into it, like Tara and Sean.

Sean will be on shortly. They do stuff at their makerspaces in L.A. that revolve around Arduino. So it's just something that looks like it's fun actually. I might get into it. I need something to whittle away the hours that's not typing. Right.

You know, because winter is coming sadly. So, man, this week was just a hell week because I was working with one of my clients to integrate Recurly. Have you heard of those guys? I have not. It's basically a front end for doing subscription packages and billing.

It sits on top of your merchant account and you run your transactions through it. And then like every month they have – they've got an API which is utterly undocumented almost. Shocking. Yeah. It was terrible. They're trusted by thousands of companies, Jason.

I don't know what the hell is going on there. They just released their like 3.0 version of their JavaScript library. I don't know why because their 2.0 version looked pretty rad. Their 3.0 version does fuck all. It is terrible. The documentation is terrible. Their support took hours and hours between replies.

It's been over a week and a half trying to get a simple form to submit and start a subscription. It is one of the worst companies I've ever had to work with. And I've done tons of like e-commerce and merchant integrations. This is the worst one in the past 10 years.

Honestly, hands down. E-commerce and merchant integration is one of the nastiest things that you can ever possibly try to deal with. And I keep wishing that there would be a great solution out there. Even though their front page says an advanced recurring billing platform with no training necessary, I'm assuming this is not the one then.

Yeah. They're liars, liars, liars. I mean here's the funny part. This sits on top of Stripe right now. We're running the transactions through Stripe and unfortunately eventually we'll switch it to PayPal, Payflow Pro. But I mean Stripe does almost all this anyway. So this was an executive decision that I had to abide by.

But Stripe so far, every time I've had to do an integration with Stripe, it's been flawless and painless, which is unheard of. Yeah, pretty much. But man, Recurly is just a shit show. And I let them know. I told them flat out to support. And I'm like, look, you guys have to fix your documentation.

You cannot have an API with no documentation whatsoever. No, especially if it's not transactional. That's ridiculous. I mean I had literally had to go through like almost every line of their PHP API library just to figure out what needed to happen because they do have documentation for the API.

But there's no useful examples. It was just terrible. So avoid them like the plague until they fix their shit. Will do. So the other thing I've noticed is I talk about the private internet access proxy that I use. An interesting thing has come up that I've noticed.

Some sites will completely block me because people have used the proxy to basically troll them. Like the Hollywood Reporter. I cannot get to the Hollywood Reporter now. I have to turn it off and go through my regular channels just to get to the Hollywood Reporter because they completely banned the IP.

Yeah. And I think they banned the whole block because I went through I think like 10 of these different things. I even tried like connecting in Romania and it still booted me out. I mean that's the unfortunate aspect about using that kind of stuff and the internet in general.

I mean I remember one of my clients was having an issue with their servers because they were basically getting trolled and getting denial of service attacks. And they basically just said, fuck it. We're shutting off all of China to help them. It happens, man. Sometimes it's just easier to lose the customer than to deal with a headache.

Yeah, exactly. Good times on the net. Indeed.

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Thanks for having me. Last time you were here, you enlightened us about the bitcoins. I enlightened you to whatever I was trying to figure out about the bitcoins. Are you still a bitcoiner at all? I mean, I pay attention to it. I'm not actively mining or buying things all over the place just because it's still incredibly confusing to me.

And I think I don't have it figured out. And I think I have it figured out better than a lot of people. And it's still very, very tricky. But I'm paying attention and watching it. And there's just there's so many alts now. That's where it gets. It gets really tricky. So there's sort of the bitcoin monolith and then 50 million other crypto coins that are all sort of orbiting it that are more interesting or less interesting on a daily basis.

So it takes a lot of time. To me, the whole bitcoin thing seems to have just become almost a PR ploy for companies. It's a big deal to announce, hey, you can buy a Tesla with bitcoins now. I totally want to buy a Tesla with bitcoins. It would be cool. So you just got back from Hope, Hope X.

I did. How was it? Sort of. Sort of. So I was actually really disappointed. I've been to Hope a few different times. And it's always been fantastic. I've really enjoyed the conference and always really look forward to it. Just the community and the atmosphere and everything about it is really great.

And this year, you know, I was really, really excited because of the speakers that they had lined up and everything. And I went there, went there one day on Friday to register and sort of scope everything out. And it was really sparse.

The sort of table, the table floor was like only half full. There weren't really many booths around doing stuff. Tara and I tried to sit down for a lockpicking class. Tara wanted to get a little lockpicking intro. And she couldn't hear anything. And there was just tons of noise around and everything.

So we left on that. So that was kind of weak. And we didn't really see anybody. I saw Scott Beale, which was always wonderful, but didn't really get to see anybody else. And then said, okay, well, maybe this is just the first day. That's weird. We'll come back tomorrow first thing and then get our spots and see, you know, the sort of main event all day long.

And we got over there in pretty decent time. And the place was completely mobbed. Took forever to get up to the 18th floor. And by the time we got to the 18th floor, the entire elevator lobby was full. And they said, oh, no, the whole floor is full.

And the spillover rooms are full. And the credenza or, you know, all the other little areas that they had set up were all full. So your best option now to see any of the talks is to get a laptop and go find the live stream someplace. Oh, my God.

So you could have just stayed in L.A. Yeah, exactly. So I was like, really? I got plane tickets and a hotel and, you know, paid, you know, for tickets to the conference and everything and flew everybody out here to be told I could go watch it on my laptop on a live stream.

Yeah, that's a fail. Yeah, that was a huge bummer. And, you know, because because of the hackeriness of the conference and everything, it's not like you can just sort of go to the ticket counter and say, oh, I need my money back or, you know, like it's all it's all with anonymous hashes and everything else.

There's no way to there's no traceability on anything. So it was sort of like, OK, well, that was that. So it was a little bit of a bummer. That sucks. Yeah. The hope that I went to was pretty good. It was fun. I mean, I've been I've been to I think to two hopes previously, and they've both been fantastic.

I've had amazing times and they've just been wonderful across the board. And this was this was lame. And I talked to a couple other people on the Twitters afterwards who said that they got there even earlier than I did, went in, got a got a spot in the auditorium. They were all set. And then they kicked them out and cleared the auditorium right before the keynotes and said, no, everybody out.

And then everybody has to come back in afterwards. And then they couldn't get back in. So they were like, we got here several hours early to make sure that we got a spot and we couldn't get in. So, oh, man. So there was some there was some poor planning that that happened on this somehow. Yeah. Poor planning and overselling. Yeah.

And that's that's the other piece is this is the 10th year that they've done that conference at that hotel in that same venue. They know exactly how many people can be managed on everything, you know? Yeah. So, I mean, if you if you if the if all of the conference rooms, all of your spillover rooms and all of the like, extra areas where you set up for people to hang out are all completely full, you know, somebody somebody did bad math.

And you'd think for backers hackers, they would kind of know that part. Yeah. Somebody forgot to carry a one in there in their script. Yeah. After like, you know, paying attention to the 2600 crew for this long and actually knowing somebody that worked there. And, you know, I got to hang out with a manual and those guys went to dinner with them the last time I was there.

Those guys generally don't have a clue on what they're doing. They really don't. It's it's quite interesting. Yeah. For somebody that's been around this long, you'd think by now they would have just paid enough attention to get their shit together. Yeah. Or brought in somebody else, you know, realized, you know, there's a self-awareness level where you can say, like, you know, I don't have my shit together and I'm really not the kind of person who's going to get my shit together.

But I'm going to hire this person over here and they really have their shit together. Yeah. You know, we did that with Locker Gnome. Locker Gnome, like Chris Pirillo used to do everything himself. And then it got to the point where he's like, I can't do this. Let's hire. Let's hire an event manager. And that's what he did. And the events go off without a hitch.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, I was really looking forward to it and I was really disappointed. Too bad. Yeah. But from the from from what I saw of it online, it seemed like it was a great talk. I saw a little bit of it. It was it was interesting. I'm going to go back and watch it later.

But yeah, some of the streams I tried to access didn't have any audio. So like Bernie S gave a talk at the beginning and there was just no audio. So I'm like, OK, well, this is exciting. Yeah. Your lip reading skills are not up to par for that. Not really. Bernie S kind of he mumbles.

So what have you been up to? I hear you've got some cool stuff in the in the works. Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing that sort of occupied or occupying all of my time and not my time, but sort of like my mental head at the moment is is this art opening that that we're having on on Saturday.

And so, you know, in addition to my main gig, Safecast and all of that other stuff, the last two years, I've been working on this weird project with with some friends with I think you might know some of these people. Andrew Klein from from the hardcore band Strife, who I worked with for I've known for a long time, but I worked with when I was at Victory and everything.

DJ Muggs, who is most famous for for Cypress Hill, but he's, you know, been been very active in sort of music and producing and has done tons of different records and worked with lots of different people. And this vocalist named Brevi that we've been working with. So about two years ago, we started talking just kind of in a conversation that, you know, sort of multiplied over a few days just about about sort of music discovery and how not necessarily good or bad.

But there used to be a time where, you know, finding new music was really, really exciting because you sort of had to hunt for it. You know, you were going to the record store, digging through records, you're reading liner notes to see if, you know, a band that you liked was talking about another band and who is this band. And, you know, you relied on a handful of of not tastemakers, but people who you knew had really, you know, good sort of sources to find new cool stuff.

And it was really cool to be able to find something and tell your friends like, oh, I got this new thing you got to check out. You know, there was this level of excitement, which, again, for better or for worse, doesn't exist anymore now, because anything I tell you about right this second, you can go listen to, you know, in five seconds on 50 different services. So, you know, that it just kind of changed.

And so we're just kind of talking about that and thinking about how a lot of that is because there's just a clear roadmap that everybody goes down and everybody goes A, B, C, D, you know, and just follows the same thing over and over and over again and turn it around. And so we started talking about, well, how would if if you were going to not do that, you know, like let's say you had a music project and you didn't want to do any of the those things and sort of you're just jumping into the world now, like what what could you do?

And so we just started talking about a lot of different things that might do that and decided to sort of run with some of it. So we started this this project called Cross My Heart Hope to Die, and it's equal parts music and physical art. So we we've been creating physical art and putting them sort of in street installations and a couple a couple one off pieces for group gallery shows here and there around and sending some stuff around as well as creating music.

And some of some of those things are actually jammed together because we've been making music boxes that you can plug a headphone jack a headphone into into a headphones jack in on the box and hear a song and placing them on the street just around the world. So for the past two years in Tokyo and New York and Vienna and London and Los Angeles, of course, we've been just putting these boxes up on telephone poles and just all around the city and they don't have any information on them.

So it's not like here's this marketing thing for this EP, like it's literally just a box with some electronics inside and you can hear a song and that's it. And it's been really cool because we've actually seen, you know, we sort of put them up and stake them out and see how people interact with them. But we have people we've seen people listening to it and pulling out their phones and Googling lyrics to try to find out what it is.

We've seen people listen to it and then leave and come back 30 minutes later with 10 of their friends or something who all get to hear. And so it's actually been really cool to see people interact with these weird objects. And so we put out we put out an EP last year. We have a new EP getting ready to come out. But that's that's heavy on the music piece of it.

The art piece of it is is making its really big debut on Saturday. So we have an exhibition called Vita y Morte at Shepard Fairey's Subliminal Projects Gallery right here in Los Angeles over in Echo Park near Dodger Stadium. That's full of a whole bunch of imagery and sculpture.

We've been sort of following or following up on that sort of visual conversation of like what's the context of this music and why is it music? Why is it art? What's the difference between these two? And so we have photos that we printed on the wall, but the photos were manipulated in audio editors.

So we pulled the raw data from photos and dumped them into, you know, like Audacity and then tweaked them as if they were a song, add some reverb, add some echo effects, and then dumped them back into a photo editor, which creates these really fantastic glitches all through the photos. So we printed those out really big.

We've made a bunch more music boxes. We made some 3D sculptures. We made an installation where we cut all of the cathode ray tubes in a bunch of old TVs, and so instead of having video signals going to them, we ran speakers into them.

So they basically turned all these old TVs into oscilloscopes so you can sort of watch a song. I'm surprised you didn't electrocute yourself. That's some dangerous work with CRTs. Yes, yes, it is. So that was part of my discussion of it ahead of time is like, if I die for this project.

Then it will actually be worth money because you can't be making any more. The value will go up. So, yeah, so we just finished the installation and all that stuff yesterday, and then on Saturday as well will be the first live performance of the band as a group. So we're going to show off all the art and then get up on stage and play some of the songs, and we'll see how it goes.

So that's been really a huge focus for the last month is getting all that together, but it's kind of the culmination of things that we've been working on for the last two years. So that's been really exciting. Very cool. Yeah, very cool. And then, of course, SafeCast, as I mentioned, SafeCast is going full bore.

We just hit our 20 million data point milestone about two weeks ago. So we have more open radiation data available than every other organization combined that's publishing any of that stuff.

Very cool. Very cool. That's awesome. Yeah, I saw Joey's TED Talk. We actually talked about that last week. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was cool. He got a bunch of bits and pieces into that. It's been really exciting. So we're starting to look at how to do other environmental things with this stuff, too, now because we built sort of a hardware platform and a software platform, and it's working very well.

And it sort of makes you think about the stuff in your environment that you can't see. But obviously, it's around because you have all this data for it. So what other things are around in the environment that you can't see that do we have bad data for? So we're looking at building some air quality sensors and maybe some better tracking of sort of weather and climate, any sort of stuff that you can find out what's going on actually at your house rather than just sort of a general thing for your entire city.

So we'll see how that goes. But I think we might have some new interesting data along those lines in the pretty near future. That's cool. Yeah, the rumor is that they're going to be putting a barometer in the new iPhone, so maybe you can piggyback off that. Yeah, jump off of that. Yeah, I mean I think that as more and more people get really interested in this stuff, these sensors are going to start being much more ubiquitous all over the place.

And one of the big issues that I've seen over the last three years really is just that the sensors that are available all over the place for really cheap are crap, right? They just collect absolute crap data that are sort of for entertainment purposes only.

And that's really halted any sort of large-scale rollout supported by any sort of like scientific or institution or anything because the data is useless. And so anything that comes back interesting, somebody is going to have to go back and remeasure with real stuff.

But as more people have been looking into it and working with it, like, you know, we're using really high-end stuff for Safecast. But we're using more of it – we've purchased more of these sensors in the last three years than, you know, they had in the last 20 years, right? So as more people are doing these things and getting into it, the costs start to come down and there's more development on it and everything.

So I think that there's going to be more sensors available for different things that are higher quality at lower price points, which will allow things like, you know, nice sensors to end up in phones and stuff as opposed to just, you know, something cheapy.

Cool. Brian and I were actually talking about this in the intro. We were talking about Raspberry Pis and Arduinos and trying to get into the hardware hacking side of things as winter is coming and I need a hobby. Yeah, sure. What do you guys build your platform on? Do you use any of those off-the-shelf, like microcontrollers?

Oh, yeah, all that stuff, all that stuff. So, I mean, actually, for both of these projects. So with Safecast, we're using Arduinos and everything. All of our BGygies are based off of Arduinos across the board. We actually use an Arduino board called the Arduino FiO, or FiO, F-I-O, just because it has a couple things built into it that work really nice for our system.

And it has a little XB port on top of it so we can plug a Wi-Fi board or a Bluetooth board or, you know, any little extra addition on it fairly easily using the XB setup. And then for Across My Heart, Hope to Die, we're actually using Arduinos in the music boxes and in some of the installations for some of the sensors that we have on stuff.

So, yeah, I use a lot of Arduinos around the way. What I've found hanging out around Crash Base, and I did a residency with Tara at SparkFun last year as well, is that the Raspberry Pi is great, but it's very, very, very specifically for video stuff.

So if you're doing a project that has a need or a piece of it that is HD video or something, then the Raspberry Pi is fantastic. But if there's not a video piece of the project, then there's probably a different option. So whether it's Arduino or the BeagleBones or any of those other things, there's probably something else that works a little bit better for it, though the Raspberry Pi gets a ton of press.

That's exactly what I was saying earlier. It's like all you see all over the Internet is all about the Raspberry Pi, and I was like, I still don't understand what you do with it. Yeah. I've got like five or six of them here in boxes that you can have one and do nothing with them as well if you want. They make a nice doorstop.

Yeah. I mean, it's a cool thing, you know, and it's a great idea, right? And the sort of, you know, $25 for a computer or whatever is a fantastic selling point and a great way to get people interested in them. And then when they were unavailable, that was even more interesting. So anytime they were available, I grabbed one, and I just have never had a project for them.

But sooner or later, somebody will do something interesting with them. So how did you get into, like, working with Arduinos and hardware stuff? Because when you and I used to hang out, you were never really a hardware hacking kind of guy. Yeah. So, you know, and I don't know that I necessarily am really a hardware hacking guy more than I ever was now either.

You know, I mean, going back to, you know, college sort of stealing cable from the neighbors or something, right? That was the extent of, you know, my stuff. I would get in and, you know, try to figure out how to add extra speakers to my stereo or, you know, like, if I can cut a cord and attach another cord to it, I got it, you know?

And if I need to solder it, that's no problem. But to getting into the really, really, really complex pieces of it, a lot of that, I just rely on people around me and find cool people. So, you know, with Crash Base, which is a hackerspace that I helped start here in Los Angeles, there's an absolutely fantastic brain trust of really amazing people.

So I can go to that group and sort of say, hey, I have this idea. I kind of want these couple pieces to go in. And then there's, you know, several people who are like, oh, awesome, here's this piece that I already have that's ready to go. Or, you know, here's five minutes of, like, brain dump on something. And then I can, if somebody shows me something, I can run with it.

And there's also kind of something really satisfying about doing stuff with your hands, right? So somebody does one, and I can see how it works, and then I can do ten more of them. And I'm like, oh, wow, I actually built this stuff, you know? And so hanging out in the garage with soldering irons and fans and laser cutters and stuff all around.

I totally understand that. I mean, that's something that I think Jason and I have been talking about quite a bit recently, especially on our podcast here, that, you know, we've been doing virtual stuff, just code that doesn't have any physical existence. For so long now that it is really refreshing to actually build something real.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because, you know, I mean, all you guys get this, you know, like you spend hours and hours and hours, weeks and months on a project, right? It goes live as things, and then maybe six months later, it's gone, right? Or a year later. I mean, how much stuff did we all pour blood, sweat, and tears into over the past 15 years that there's not a single trace of its existence anyplace?

Yeah, even Internet Archive doesn't have a lot of the stuff that I built way back. And the time that I was so proud of, and still am, but it's just gone, you know? And it's not that it was great work. It's just, you know, I mean, that's what that format sort of, you know, that's a risk you take with something like that.

So, you know, designing and working with designers and actually, like, you know, burning yourself on a soldering iron and putting this stuff together, and then at the end, like having a table full of these things that all work and do stuff that sort of go out into the world and do things that, you know, continue to send data around or sort of entertain people.

That's been – it's been really fulfilling and really exciting to see it play out. We've got – I was going to say after about 15 years of doing motion picture marketing, and we'd spend a year on a website. It would be up for three months, and then it's gone. Right. So the idea of getting into, like, the hardware stuff that we'll live on – I've got a – I was so surprised the other day I found a mini DVD from Mission Impossible 2 that we made, which is, like, the only physical artifact of pretty much anything I've done in that realm.

So this is really fascinating stuff, and I really want to try and get into it. And it's pretty fun. It's a pretty low bar to get in and start messing around. So you can – you know, there's lots of kits that you can get. I mean, that's one of the things with SafeCast that really sort of helped us in the past year to get things ramped up is we got our main workhorse device, the BeGuyGuy Nano, into kit format.

So you can buy the kit for – I think it's about $450 in parts, which is – it's about a $3,000 device. So getting it for $450 in parts is really great. The sensor alone is – it's like $150. So you can get this, and there's nothing trickier than through-hole soldering.

So it's very simple. You can build the thing in maybe three hours, four hours, and then you have a working SafeCast device that collects data, logs it to GPS, and sends it to our server. And so we're getting all this data from all over the world that we never would have really had physical access to before from people who are, you know, jumping in and building this thing, and then they get to be a part of this bigger project.

So there's a lot of kits like that at lower price points as well that you can jump in and, you know, build something and then see, oh, wow, that was much easier than I thought. What's the next step up, right? Right. Yeah, it's interesting that you were saying that most of the sensors out there are crap though.

Yeah. Oh, tons of them. I mean, you know, one of the most sort of famous crap ones that got a ton of attention was the air quality egg. You know, it was a big Kickstarter thing. There was a ton of people, and they made tons of them, and lots of people backed it and everything.

And most of the ones that people got, they brought home, turned on once, and then stuck in the closet or something. Or, you know, they're collecting data from, you know, in their living room where they're smoking, you know, or something, which is not useful information if you're trying to get environmental data for, you know, a city or something like that.

And so, yeah, there's, you know, if you're trying to get the lowest possible price point on a sensor, which is what those guys were trying to do because they wanted to make as many of them as they possibly could, you're never going to beat, you know, like bottom dollar China production on anything.

And so, then you just end up buying bottom dollar China production on stuff, and, you know, those, they don't work, you know. If you have 10 of them next to each other, I mean, so with our sort of steps into looking at air quality, we went around to, like, the EPA and the AQMD and a bunch of these environmental organizations and said, you know, we're, this is what we've done with radiation.

We're looking to do something similar with air quality. Can you point us in the right direction of hardware to look at? What kind of sensor should we be using? What sort of, you know, devices might we look at to collect, you know, useful data? And got a bunch of recommendations from these organizations, and then, you know, being nerds, we decided to test those rather than just sort of take their word for it.

And, you know, we bought five of them and set them next to each other, and then they all gave a different reading. And then we introduced a controlled contaminant, and they all gave a different reading. And we're like, wow, that is not going to be useful. Quality control in China. Yeah, exactly.

So sort of back to the drawing board on some of that, but that's the thing is just that because there's not really a huge market for it, the driving goal in the production is make something cheap so that people will buy it rather than make something reliable, which is going to be more expensive.

And it's so bleeding edge. I mean, this is almost one of these examples, not to get incredibly political, but this is when governments are helpful. Because they can actually have the money to, like, say, you know, create these themselves and have the quality control and have really good versions. So it would be amazing if, like, a city like Los Angeles got behind something like this and said, well, we're going to build a bunch of these things.

We're going to make sure they work, and we're going to put them all around the city. But it almost takes that level, you know. There's a couple of initiatives with that right now. In Chicago and in New York, there's both sort of small-scale rollouts of sensors that are being put around that pay attention to a handful of different things, some of it's air, some of it's wind.

I think Chicago is doing, like, a noise pollution one, so they're seeing, like, what sort of, like, the decibel of background noise is at any given time during the day and how that changes. So there's a lot of different things that these people are starting to look at and roll out.

And I think that, you know, over the next few years, that's just going to be amplified all over the place. I mean, it sounds like a massive area that is just we're going to see so much more of this. So it's really cool that you're right there. Yeah, it's been really interesting. I mean, you know, it sort of happened by accident, but I've been very happy to be involved with it and really excited that we've been able to do cool and useful things with the project.

Very cool, man. Well, thanks for stopping by. And I definitely want people, because this is going to come out on Friday, so the day before your show. So if you're listening to this on Friday or Saturday morning and you're in the Los Angeles area, definitely pop out and see Sean's show. Definitely. And I will be there as well, so come say hi to me.

Absolutely. Cool, cool. Yeah, doors open at 8 p.m., and we're set to go play live around 8.45. It's just a short set. We're just going to play a couple songs, but the gallery will be open until 11 as well, so swing by at any point during the night. And here's a fun bit. If you get there early and you're a Dr. Horrible fan, right across the street and down the block is the laundromat from Dr. Horrible.

Yes, a short walk. A very short walk. The first time I went there, we went and saw your buddy Glenn's photo exhibit. Oh, right. Yeah, absolutely. And we trolled the laundromat. You can go bring your Dr. Horrible costume, and you can reenact out scenes right there while you're waiting.

Or your Captain Hammer shirt. Yes. All right. Cool, man. Well, the links for everything Sean will be in the show notes at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 68. And thanks for stopping by, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. Hello, podcast fans.

Adam Carolla here. I'm leading the fight against patent trolls who are threatening this medium. It's not about me. It's about the podcast you're listening to right now. If I go down, this show could be next. Visit fundanything.com forward slash patent troll for more information on how you can keep podcasting alive.

Thank you and mahalo.

So, in the continuing theme of maybe everybody is burned out on all this stuff, TechCrunch came out with a little report about how today's app businesses are just not sustainable. According to a new report that came out a couple days ago, almost half of iOS developers and even more of Android developers, they have it at 64%, are operating below the app poverty line of $500 per app per month.

This is hardly surprising, right, Jason? No, it's totally hardly surprising. I mean, it's a big marketplace and getting discovered in the marketplace is hard enough. And then being discovered with a good app is even harder, you know? Look at websites.

Most websites fail. Most small businesses fail. Now we're seeing most apps fail. Yeah, not surprising. Everybody leapt in. There's too many developers. There's too many bad ideas. There's too many apps that nobody needs or wants. And there's too many bad developers. Yes, and so many of those apps are so crap, which is why our segment was originally going to be called Your App is Crap.

Yeah. So, yeah. So if you're trying to get out there and become an app developer, have a backup plan. Well, or go work for a shop that makes apps for people with money like all of us did. And we went and worked for agencies that built websites. And, you know, that's how we got paid.

Exactly. And, you know, put your skills up on Elance like everybody else and make less than you would if you had a crappy app. But speaking of good apps, Flurry got bought for $300 million by Yahoo, believe it or not.

Flurry does – they do mobile analytics. Are we fans? So speaking of the app stuff, yes, absolutely. Flurry is fantastic. You – on most of the apps that I've been blessed with being a part of, we use Flurry for all sorts of analytics for different events.

So basically you tie an event to a Flurry event and you can see pretty much exactly what people are doing with your app. So for Yahoo, it's – for 300 – I'm surprised it was $300 million. I thought it would be a little bit more because they've actually got a business, I believe. Well, we know how that works, Jason. The less actual business or real things that you do, the more money you get.

Right, yes. The more vapor, the bigger the buyout. Yes. Snapchat was worth, what, roughly 10 times as much as Flurry? But it does next to nothing. So, yeah. It does dickies. Yes, it does dickies. Whee! Yeah.

So Airbnb is in some trouble. Again, shocking. Yeah. And not for their logo this time? Not for the logo this time. Unfortunately, there are these things called laws that most of these companies that are attempting to disrupt things don't really think about.

So this is really unfortunate, actually. A San Francisco resident basically purchased a condo in Palm Springs because they can't afford the San Francisco market. And helping to pay the mortgage, she decided to rent it out on Airbnb. Unfortunately, under the tenants' rights laws in California, the person that rented it is not leaving.

Oops. Oopsies. Yeah. They need an injector seat to get people out, apparently. Yeah, there are some crazy squatter laws here in California that I'm incredibly not very aware of because I'm actually a nice person that would never do that to anyone. But, you know, I could have basically just stayed in my old place and not left and just not paid rent for an awful long time.

It can take up to three to six months to evict tenants who aren't paying rent. And now Airbnb is involved with these things because you use their service, you go through them, there you go. Yeah, it usually takes about six months, I remember, in Los Angeles before the sheriffs show up and basically throw all your stuff on the sidewalk.

Yeah. But that's six months free rent, and if you're a really horrible person, you can get away with it. Yeah, pretty much. So be careful when you do your Airbnb stuff. It's just more and more of these stories are going to start to come out. You can only skirt these kind of issues for so long, and then you've got to deal with it.

I mean, Uber is going to have its own things that they're dealing with in various different transportation laws in different cities and different countries. You've got to play with the laws, people. Mm-hmm. I'm saying. Yeah. But now let's talk about some good disruption. There is such a thing?

There is such a thing, because this is an old-school business realizing that they can break a monopoly. I love this. This is a story from Chattanooga, Tennessee. You don't really think of Chattanooga as being on the bleeding edge of technology, but apparently their public utilities there are, because they realize that they've upgraded their grid recently, and they realize that, hey, we can easily provide our customers with Internet connections as well, so they don't have to use Comcast.

Yeah, they've got lines going into every home. They've got lines going into every home that can just as easily carry bits and bytes as they can electricity and whatever else. So they're now offering it as a viable alternative to using Comcast there. That's excellent. And I want to see this everywhere. Yeah.

And now that this is a good test case, and if it works out, then hopefully every electricity provider – I mean, then you're still dealing with the utilities, but hey, it's competition. It's competition. And right now they're offering it for less than Comcast is in the area, and apparently the connections are even better.

Excellent. That is good stuff. We like that. Yeah, if I got a better connection than I have with my Comcast now, I'd be down. But my Comcast connection is so off the hook. It's ridiculous. Yeah. Well – They keep updating – upgrading me. This is what I said before. This is like the drug dealer thing.

They keep giving it to us faster and faster for cheaper and cheaper, and then one day they'll be like, And let's just revise this a bit where every bit is going to cost you a dollar. Once you get hooked, then you're screwed. Exactly. That is the way it happens, but not if there's competition. If they have somebody else that's competing against them that's saying, well, we're going to keep offering it at the same price, Bob's your uncle.

Yep. That's a good thing. Yes, it is. Go, Tennessee. Woo-hoo. There's been a lot in the news recently. I just found one because this particular article went semi-viral, and it's just so ridiculous. It's funny.

A pregnant woman who – a 27-year-old pregnant woman was arrested because she posted a selfie on Facebook wearing a stolen dress. The selfie said how much she loved her dress. They matched it – the store matched it to footage of her basically walking out of the store with it without paying, and then the police came to her house and arrested her.

Again, you know, come on, people. I just filed this one under instant karma. Instant karma. I mean I'm glad. This is a good thing if you think for a second that law enforcement isn't checking out social media. You're a moron. And, you know, just – Well, this wasn't law enforcement.

This was the store actively tracking her down. Even better. So this is vigilante social media as it were, and then they sent it to the law enforcement. The law enforcement was like, oh, yeah. Look, she did steal it. Okay. We'll go bust her. We'll get her. Grumpy old geek pro tip.

If you steal something, do not post photos of you on social media with said stolen items. Now, didn't Lindsay Lohan do this too? Pretty much, and it's happening a lot. I mean this is just happening more and more. Like I said, I mean I've heard about it like just kind of in the background with news stories. You know, it's the tagline that every news reporter says now is, you know, authorities are looking at social media attempting to find some information about the case because criminals are just stupid.

Well, and from the old engineering axiom, you can't engineer around stupid. No, you cannot. And in good use of social media, at least as far as I'm concerned, Israeli women are showing support for the IDF by showing their boobs. Nobody knows why this is caught on, but apparently all over Facebook and Instagram, Israeli women are putting iHeart the IDF on various body parts and posting it.

Interesting. This is a throwback to the old boobithon that we used to run for breast cancer. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's – as a guy, it's enjoyable. It certainly catches the attention. And, hey, why not? I'm just, you know, as long as it doesn't expand to guys.

Nobody wants to see that. Yeah, that was a problem with the boobithon because guys would post their boobies, which was unsavory. Yeah, the bad boobies. What are you going to do? Hey, man. Boobs. And no banana dictators. Security.

Ha! We all know about cookies, right? They're delicious. They are delicious. Oh, and if you listen to the You Are Not So Smart podcast, he has a great cookie segment. But this is different. Cookies are for tracking and other things for saving state in your browser and blah, blah, blah.

We all know about cookies. Now, a new service has come up with a new way to track online identity and devices that is just genius. It uses the new Canvas, it uses the new Canvas, CSS, basically, feature to profile you.

And I've heard about this from other, like, malware people. They profile the fonts on your system, clock speed, and all of these different metrics to fingerprint you. Yeah. Well, it's not surprising. Any computer, especially, has been running for a long time, and you've tweaked it and done whatever.

You've got your own basic fingerprint, basically. Yeah, everything's custom, because you're going to have different fonts than somebody else. There are certain metrics that you can glean the identity of a machine from. And what these guys have done is basically inserted a small CSS canvas tag, probably through JavaScript, that, you know, then can get the data from your machine and then track you from site to site like you used to do with cookies.

And it's a way to get around the cookie tracking. Yeah. And basically, I mean, if you – it basically means even if you go to that browse privately option that almost all the browsers have now, it won't matter. Yeah, the do not track stuff. Yeah, all of that will go away. This is just cool.

I like it, you know. I'm a fan of people doing cool things with technology. Because I never had a problem with cookies. I don't think most people should have a problem with cookies. It is de facto standard that they're there. We need them. We can't get around them. So for now, until they come up with a new way to do it, people are going to – because, you know, we've got the cookie mania with people like, oh, I don't want cookies.

Well, you're an idiot. But this is just a cool hack. I think it's just a cool hack. And like I said, malware designers have been using this for years in their botnets. And it's just – it's a new implementation of that. So just get used to the fact that if you're online, you're going to get tracked somehow.

There's – they're always going to find a way to fingerprint your machine so they know who you are bouncing from site to site. So in other news, Mr. Snowden has been in the news a bit because of his Guardian interview, which was a really good interview.

It's not very long, but it's worth a watch. It's definitely worth a watch. And in that interview, he talks about Dropbox specifically as a – as an NSA target. And now with Condi Rice on the board, you're just – get used to the fact that if you put it on Dropbox, anybody in the government can look at it with very little effort, I'm sure.

And he recommended SpiderOak, which I'd never heard of. Neither had I. So I looked into it and I signed up for an account. And yeah, it's pretty much the same. But it's got – they've got no introspection on what you post because everything is end-to-end encrypted, right?

Yeah. So they can't peek at it. Problem is now, a lot of people saw that Snowden interview. And SpiderOak is having a little bit of an issue right now. So they've got the highest rate of signups in their history. So their server load is off the charts and their customer service is way behind.

So give it a bit before you give them a shot. That's all I'm saying. There's also something out there called LiveDrive that a few of my friends were saying that they use. I'm not – who knows what their security is exactly because I haven't taken a look at it or vetted it. But it definitely doesn't have Condi Rice on the board. No, and what was – what's his name?

Kim.com has got one too. I wouldn't use anything that he makes personally, but that's just a preference. That's like not buying Nike because I don't agree with some of their policies. Yeah, yeah. I mean that's a moral thing for you. I just – I don't use it because he's such a target. I mean after the Mega Upload stuff, he's such a target that he's got such a – he's got a bullseye on anything that he does.

So they could just sweep in again like they did with Mega Upload, confiscate the servers and wipe them. Everything is gone. Yep. Yep. This morning I found a really cool article on QZ.com called This is How You Invent a Person Online. I loved this article.

It was really fun. It was a really fun article. And he used the dark web to get like fake IDs and social security numbers and all this shit. It was really cool and cash for Bitcoin and he did a stealth buy of a Chromebook. Very fun. I thought it could go farther, but he kind of gave up near the end of the article.

It seems like he started the process and then just kind of said, OK, I'm done. Whatever. He might have gotten a little freaked out too. You can never really tell about that. But it was a great article and if anything, this guy should turn around and just write a sci-fi book about this because this is 90% of stories anyways. So he's got a great book in here as well as being a cool article.

Yeah. I think maybe he was just running up against a deadline and just had to put his article into the editor. So that's about it for this week in security. No major data breaches that I've found. Me either. Or at least none that have been published. I'm sure there were some. We'll find out later. But yeah, it was a pretty nice, quiet week in security.

We've been reading a lot of Daniel H. Wilson the last couple of weeks. We did Robogenesis and the follow-up. And you weren't too huge of a fan, but I still like them both.

I went back and found one of his earlier books called Amped, which is – he comes from kind of a neuro-robotic background, which makes sense because this whole book is kind of the first part of the inserting technology into humans.

It was a decent book. Again, I really like his concepts. But back at that point, this is pre-Robogenesis. It wasn't greatly written. He's definitely gotten much better. I wouldn't actually recommend this book. I would recommend a book with the same subject and same title, which I think I covered a long time ago on this podcast, but I just want to pimp it again.

Also called Amped. This one's by Douglas E. Richards. It's actually the follow-up. The first one is called Wired by Douglas E. Richards. Both of them really talk about basically putting tech into our bodies and into our brains. Wired and Amped by Douglas E. Richards were fantastic.

I really love both those books, and I can't recommend them enough. They were written really well. They were super near-future, plausible. They also had a bit of a kind of rock and roll edge to it because the first people that hopped on to this technology were a bunch of crypto-anarchist ravers that threw big parties.

So good stuff. And they did Mondo 2000 back in the day. Yes. I miss that magazine. I heard they might be bringing it back. I love that magazine as well. That was a fantastic magazine. It would be nice to have it come back. And I finished a completely new book this week.

I don't know why I keep reading these because they're just getting horrible. Earth Awakens, the First Formic War by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnson. Orson Scott Card doesn't even bother to try to write these alone anymore. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.

The movie was crap. The book is simply one of the best books that's ever been written, and I will never say anything bad about it. If you have not read Ender's Game, you need to do so. It is amazing. It is perfect. That entire first series that he wrote about Ender, all four of those books, because he went back and did a fourth one.

There used to only be three, were all really good in completely different ways. Fantastic sci-fi. Very well written. He has since done basically a cottage career on shitting out books about this universe that suck. This is one of them. That's the end of my review. I read the whole damn thing because I'm hooked.

I think it's kind of like the people that are still watching True Blood that know it's really shitty, but they want to see it through to the end. He keeps writing books about this universe. I keep reading them. I keep being really angry by the time I finish them. These should have been made into movies because they're kind of straightforward action-adventure.

There's no great thought process behind it. There's no big ideas. There's no nothing. It's just they attack, we fight them. Yeah, I can't read Orson Scott Card at all. Besides, he's just a moron. He is a moron and there's all that. Yeah, and I read one of his books about the dead kids under the thing, whatever.

It was a terrible book. The only other good book that he's written, I think it was called Empire. Was that the one? You turned me on to it. That was a great book. Yeah, that one was actually – that was a standalone that was really good as well. So his older stuff before he went super crazy and decided to hate anybody that isn't white and whatever were all pretty good, especially Ender's Game.

Again, Ender's Game is so good, I have put myself through about seven really shitty books just because I love that one book so much. Okay, well, time to just back off and not give this guy any more money. Yeah, I think so. I think it's time to give it up. Because if you keep buying them, he'll keep writing them. So stop. Yeah. Yeah.

And I did find – Vote with your credit card. Vote with your credit card. I agree. I did find an interesting article on Salon related to Robogenesis, The Future of Warfare and Why We Should All Be Very Afraid. It's a fun little read about armies of robots, which is exactly what the book was about and how we're kind of getting there very quickly.

Oh, they're coming. They're actually – they're already here. Samsung makes them. And yeah, there are places where you don't want to go because you will just be shot by a robot. Yeah. Not – yeah. I'm just going to leave it at that. Yeah, let's leave it there. I did finish Robogenesis and it was meh.

I went back on your recommendation and finished it and I just – it just did not hold my attention. I was kind of done with it. So the first book I thought was great. The second book did not do anything for me. Okay. I still liked it and I'm interested to see where he goes with it.

So we shall see. So I've got a couple of books this week that I got through that every now and again I like to go read books that are on the other side of the coin. Like I read hacker books and every now and again I'll go back and read books by people who work in the government and do fun stuff.

So I have kind of a balanced view on what these guys do and I read two fascinating books this week. One is called Operation Shakespeare, the true story of an elite international sting, which is – these guys from Homeland Security, kind of a mishmash of agencies because they all got kind of bundled together.

And it is a great story about basically tracking illegal arms sales from US companies to Iran and other places. But it focuses on this one sting operation where they got this guy who was one of many importers of illegal technology that we're not allowed to export.

But US companies want the money so they find ways around it and sell to hostile governments. Fascinating book. I loved it. The second one is The Art of Intelligence, Lessons from a Life in the CIA's Clandestine Service by Hank Crumpton.

This book is cool. This is a really cool book. This guy is no joke. Seriously. And it details his career like through the beginning of – actually, it starts before 9-11 when he was in clandestine services and like his start in coming up through the ranks and going through – after post-9-11 through Afghanistan.

And you get to hear some of the cool stories about the guys that were on the front lines like the CIA infiltration teams and what like actually happened over there. And this is the kind of book that gives me faith in some of our government services because these are the guys who like really care and are really doing their jobs.

Not the nerd in the NSA basement looking at your dickies and all that stuff. These guys are like no joke. They're putting their life on the line. There's lots of people and friends that he lost in the war. Fascinating book. I cannot recommend it. Both of these, I can't recommend enough.

Very cool. Yeah. I think I might have to check out the Hank Crumpton one just because I like his name. Yeah. Yeah. He's a cool dude. You can check out some of his stuff on YouTube because he was on 60 Minutes when the book came out and he did a couple interviews. And he took them over to Afghanistan on another show.

He's a cool guy. Check out the stuff on YouTube with him from 60 Minutes. It's fun. And I think I will. So I found an article on Vulture.com which caught my eye for a couple of reasons. First off, it's the title. This is the best 5,453 word interview.

That's a lot of words. It is. Bronson Pinchot. Pinochet? Pinchot? Pinchot. I don't even remember how to pronounce his name, but he was Balki. I didn't even know he was still around. And apparently he is like one of the premier audiobook reader guys that's out there.

And I know you're a huge audiobook fan, so I threw that interview in the show notes and wondered what you thought about it. Well, you obviously forgot that I had talked about this on a previous show because I pimped Iceman, the true story of a cold-blooded killer, when I read that before. And he was the reader on it.

And I looked at it and I'm like, it's Bronson Pinchot? And I went back and checked it, and it was him. And I was like, wow, he's good. He's really, really good. And then I went and read the interview that you posted, and the interview was really good. I thought the interview was cool as well. It was really interesting to get so deep into something, that particular job, basically.

Yeah, and just the care that he takes with the craft. You know, he's a master craftsman when it comes to reading these audiobooks and just his thought process and just his articulation on how he gets into the book and the character and just the reverence that he gives the books.

Even if it's a terrible book, he's got ways that he's figured out to make the book sound better, you know? So, yeah, his books are – I've only read the one or listened to the one, and it was a really good job. And the book was pretty good too. But his job in the book was fascinating.

I can't recommend him enough. So if you're an Audible fan, check out some of his reads for sure.

I'm a Git guy. Yes, you are. I used to be CVS, then I was Subversion, and now I'm Git. And if you don't know what those acronyms or those three-letter things mean, this probably – You're lucky. You can fast-forward real quick. Yeah, it's all version control for software and other things.

My favorite Git tool for the Mac has just gotten a big refresh, and it's Tower 2. And they've added a ton of stuff in there, and it's a really nice update. I paid for it and have been using it and love it. So if you have to use Git, Tower 2 is my go-to, hands down.

And I've been using the original version of Tower for one particular project, and it is great. And I guess I should do the update. Yeah, I recommend it. They've got some cool features in there that you'll like for sure. We'll put a video of the updates in the show notes as well.

But definitely check it out. If you have to use Git, use this for sure. Oops. Sorry. So I got an update. I talked about Game of War last week. Yes. My new iOS iPad obsession. Well, it's got kind of a nasty cliff.

When you get to around level 11 or 12, it starts to take up a lot more time unless you're willing to spend a lot of bucks. And by a lot of bucks, I mean like you can drop 100 bucks and not blink an eye at it. And the stuff that you get is really not that great.

So I spend time. I just like check it every now and again, let my builds go, see if anybody attacked me. But there's some really interesting things with this game that I'm liking a lot. I've actually made some new friends on there. We've got a new alliance. So if you do play Game of War, check out Five Kings.

That's us. You can come join us. It's fun. I love the game. Okay. So it does take a lot of time. But, you know, there's just some interesting things I found out about this game where these big alliances will create little splinter alliances for newbies that come in.

Don't tell them anything. And those guys are basically there. They're like if vampires had a daycare. So they raise these little guys up. And then when there's a – basically they have events in the game where you get points and extra stuff for killing a lot of other people.

They basically just go raid them and wipe them off the map. And then – so it's just these weird little quirks about the game. There are some gameplay issues with it that just drive me nuts because like any high-level city can kill a very tiny level city. There's no like boundaries between who can attack who.

But otherwise, I'm still hooked on it. I can't give it up for some reason. I just love it. I know you're never going to play it and most people won't. Never going to happen. Anyway, it's – you know, it kills some time. No, it's good. It's good that we have one gamer on this podcast.

So this just came out too. The cast of Firefly is reuniting for an online game. That does not make me happy. Why not? I want another movie. I don't want a game because I'm never going to play the game. Yeah, I know. But you can get the voices or whatever. I'm probably not going to play the game either.

I just saw the headline and I didn't have any time to really dig into it. But it's something. I mean, hey, man, if it picks up, maybe they'll – the problem is Universal still has rights to those movies. They have to do two more movies before the TV rights will be released back to Joss Whedon.

And he's busy making a gazillion dollars on the Avengers and stuff. So it's pretty low on his priority. Let's be honest. It's just never going to happen. Not in our lifetime, unfortunately.

During the World Cup, I talked about Slate's blog, The Spot, which was all about soccer and had some great reads about everything that was going on in what is probably going to be the final entry on that blog, at least for quite some time. How to follow soccer now that the World Cup is over.

If you got the bug at all, read this article. It talks about all the different international leagues that are out there, the different international plays that are coming up and conferences and whatnot and attempts to get you interested in MLS, which really – I just can't do it.

I watched the Galaxy play against Manchester United and lose 7-0 because they were pathetic. So, yeah, that was pretty bad. The one good game that will be coming up that if you were all into soccer, I think you should watch. I think it's in late August.

It's the MLS All-Stars will be playing against Bayern Munich, which is basically the backbone of the entire German national team. So that should be a fun game to watch, and I will be watching that one as well. Okay, cool. No more soccer. We're done for four years. We're done for four years. We talked a little bit about Led Zeppelin and how neither of us were into it a while back.

You sent me a lovely Spotify link to an album called Mothership Remastered, which I did listen to, and I've got two thoughts on it. First, it's nice to hear some straight-up rock and roll, which basically doesn't exist anymore, and I've been in kind of electronica land for years. So hearing just like balls-of-the-wall rock was pretty nice.

And thought number two, they wouldn't be signed in a million years if they started now. Okay, now, rock still exists. There are tons of great rock bands out there. You just have had your head up your EDM ass for so long, you haven't poked around to find anything. I mean, hell, the Foo Fighters, Jack White.

Foo Fighters. Jesus Christ. I like them. I don't mind them. Queens of the Stone Age. Who else? Even Muse is kind of pretty rocky. This is pretty electronic-y, too. Well, so was Led Zeppelin. Listen to the keyboards in there. And they would totally get signed.

I'm sorry. No, they wouldn't. They would. No, they wouldn't. Jack White's out there making music, and his stuff sounds almost identical. So, no. They would get signed. All right. Totally. I'll agree to disagree. And this popped up on Boing Boing. Do you remember Schwa?

Not really, no. It was the funky little alien stuff, and I got really into it at the time, so much so to the point. You know when you start having stuff, and then people just keep giving it to you, and then everybody thinks it's your thing, so it just builds and builds and builds, and you kind of liked it, but you never liked it that much, but that's all people ever get you anymore?

Yeah. That happened to me with Schwa. Like, I was into it, and then all of a sudden, that's all I got as presents from people, and I was soon inundated and buried in Schwa stuff, so I eventually had to get rid of it all. But it's 20 years old. It's been two decades since this stuff, and if you've never knew what it was, it's – this guy, William Barker, basically did this as kind of like a protest-y surveillance state art thing, and it was really cool and really interesting,

and it's great to hear that he's still out there and that Schwa's still getting some attention. Good stuff. Yeah, it wasn't my thing. So I want to do a quick Orphan Black follow-up. I can't remember if I mentioned it before, but I got into this a couple weeks ago, and I watched like an episode and a half, and it didn't really – it was interesting, but it didn't really hook me, and then Jordan Cooper got into it, and he's like, no, dude, you've got to keep watching it.

So I got five minutes past where I was, and then everything picked up, and I couldn't stop watching it for three days. I watched 20 episodes in three days. It was really good. It was fantastic. The actress who plays the main character – well, plays many main characters – is phenomenal.

The only downside was the story got a little bit hokey near the end of season two, but I loved it, man. It was a good ride, definitely. And I really like that at the end of every episode, the beginning of the next episode picks up exactly where the last one left off.

I love when they do that, a la 24, you know? Right. It's definitely a good series to catch if you like sci-fi. Moron of the Week. Our Moron of the Week is Blake Lively. If you haven't had the pleasure of going and looking at her new lifestyle site, a la Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, except for younger girls, I suppose, and a slightly lower price point, go to preserve.us, which is already an annoying name.

That sounds very, like, Jesus freaky. Yeah. It does a little bit, but it's not Jesus freaky as far as I can tell. But go ahead and go to the site, and I promise you, you'll want to vomit in about three to four minutes. This is horrible. This is a horrible, horrible, horrible concept. This is a horrible, I basically just said, let's shut the entire internet down to stop these things from happening.

And I agree with it. It's kind of like the epic hack of the internet. Exactly. This is just bad and horrible. And I, Blake Lively, I can't stand you right now. I don't even know who you are anyways. You were on some TV show I never gave a shit about. That's what I'm like, who the hell is this chick?

And I thought, when I see Blake Lively, I thought it was like a basketball player. I think that's Blake Griffin. Yeah. Let's get on the, let's, let's talk to his team about doing a lifestyle site. The web's not dead.

Ran across a link. Pirates of the Caribbean 5 gets summer 2017 release date. This just shocked me a little bit because I didn't even know there was a two, three, and four. This, this, this is based on a ride at Disneyland. How could you not know that there was a two, three, and a four? I mean, honestly, how can you not know?

Well, I mean, I believe I was peripherally aware, but I never saw them. Nobody's talked to me about them. Nobody said, hey, man, did you go see Pirates of the Caribbean 4? It was awesome. That just didn't happen in my life. That's because it was not awesome. The only good thing about one of the sequels is Chow Yun-fat played a bad guy.

Okay. Anyway, the reason that I ended up sticking that in here is because of the second article, which is the main point of the web's not dead. But I love the fact that things from my youth way back in like 84, like old VHS movies that were shot, end up on the internet.

This is High Schoolers Ponder the Meaning of Fashion in 1984. I was 11 at that point in time, but I was big on late 80s fashion. Pirates of the Caribbean reminded me of that because I hung out at Disneyland, where there was just a ride that somehow has now become five movies.

This is a funny-ass video about just kids in the 80s talking about fashion and displaying some epic 1980s fashion. I just loved every second of this, and I love the fact that this stuff pops up all the time. So, yay, Webb. Yeah, the video was very funny.

And it kind of gave me hives because they were talking about how the jocks would make fun of them and throw things at them. And I'm like, well, that was my high school existence. I know. Yeah, because I was 13 when this came out. So I was just getting into skateboarding and definitely not what you would call a fashion maven.

I was wearing parachute pants and an Aussie t-shirt, and it was a mess. I was all over the place. So, yes, people often made fun of me. And watching this, it was kind of like a really nasty flashback. I enjoyed it.

I enjoyed the hell out of this video. So if you're approximately our age and enjoyed that kind of high school experience as well, you will enjoy this video. Good stuff. Absolutely.

Are you kidding me? The dot over an eye is called a tittle. I can't believe you didn't know this. I'm sure it caused me to laugh back in the aforementioned 80s many times. But somehow it's left my mind for the past 20 years, and it just makes me laugh every time I say it.

Tittle. Tittle. Tittle. Yo. Closing shout-outs. Shout-out to Sean Bonner for coming on the show, and check out his show tomorrow night. That is Saturday the 26th. I am hoping to be there as well.

So say hi to me if you see me. On the music tip, I'm going to pimp my vinyl collection again. It's been selling well, and I have a lot of great vinyl. I'd like to see to go to a good home because I just will never play it. I've accepted the fact that as much as I loved all this vinyl and collected it for years, it is just taking up space for me.

So check me out on Discogs.com slash Slender Fungus. I'm all up there, and there's a lot of good stuff left. But it's going quick, thankfully. Well, that would be Discogs.com slash Seller slash Slender Fungus if you really want people to actually show up. Sorry. Okay.

I just want to do – since we're on the music thing, I want to give a shout-out to Weird Al. He finally got his number one album. I know. Number one album, which is amazing. So good on you, Al. He's probably sold like 50 copies because that's all it takes to get to number one anymore. I was about to say, yeah, number one doesn't mean quite as much as it used to.

But even his streaming stats are extremely high. So good on you, Al. It's about time. Yeah, definitely.

Music for this show is provided by Among Us, who is helmed by our good friend Brian. Yo. Who's also – yes, yo-ing. And we are hosted at Libsyn. If you want to, use the coupon code GOG while signing up and receive up to two free months.

Good deal. 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 to tell us anything we were wrong about or just to say hi.

Show notes for this episode can be found at GrumpyOldGeeks.com slash 68. See you next week. Tiddle. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida. We're driving to Florida. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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