97: Airgapping Our Grievances

I think between the two of us, we need camelbacks and catheters just to make it through a show. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the Internet and who's to blame.

Good morning, Brian. How are you today? I'm doing all right, Mr. Podcaster. Mr. Podcaster, yes. It was a crazy weekend last week. Yeah, I was sitting around with my buddy Jordan trying to help out him with some tech angles for his podcast for the Art of Charm and basically spent the entire weekend dicking around with wires, cables, software, trying to get everything set up so I could do a three-person Skype call in case his rig failed.

And it was interesting. It was definitely interesting. But I got to talk to some cool guys. I got to talk to Steve Rombaum. Right. We talked about him last week. Yeah, I love that guy, man. He's so awesome. That was that was definitely a fun interview. And this guy, Mark Goodman, who was on Tim Ferriss's show, he was writing a book called Future Crimes, which is, you know, right up our alley.

Of course, yes. So that was kind of fun. Awesome, man. Yeah. And I'm doing the Internet Outrage Machine again on Monday night. So that'll be out on Tuesday. We'll have some links in the show notes for those. You're like a regular guest on that one now. It'll be my third time. Third or fourth time. I can't remember now. Yeah. After last time, I didn't think they were going to bring me back. But it turns out they liked it. So I'm going back on.

That's great, man. So what you've been up to? Oh, you know, complaining, complaining, grumping, grumping, complaining. It's just been a very busy week. A lot of boring client stuff. So not much to tell. But I did find an article that I love and I had to post it immediately on Facebook. Apparently, you and I are going to live forever, Jason.

Why is that, Brian? There is a new study that has come out that says basically there are mental and physical benefits for airing your grievances or complaining. Well, I think I think we complain enough. I think that would that would definitely put us in the we're going to live forever camp. I did read this article. I thought it was a fascinating read. Yeah. And it's interesting, though. It's different types of complaining.

Yes. There are a couple of types of complaining that are kind of just self-serving and you don't get any benefit out of it. But so I recommend everybody go read this article and and learn how to complain properly. Yes, there is a strategic nature to complaining. Who knew? But yeah, I mean, it was a very good article and it was very interesting.

And I love the what do they call that? The help rejecting complainers, which is the bad way of complaining, which is basically just being a dick or a naysayer like those types of people. It's probably been a while for you, Jason, but I'm sure you remember sitting around a boardroom, having a meeting in a corporate environment.

And there's the guy that just goes, no, no, no, never going to work. That guy's a jerk. Oh, yeah. No, I know the type intimately. Yes. They're like, complain, complain. You give them some critical information that would help their situation and they just dismiss it out of hand because all they want to do is complain.

They don't want they're not complaining for a goal. You know, it's not to fix what's wrong. They're complaining because they it makes them feel better to complain. We complain. We we have goals when we complain. I have a great many goals and I voice them often.

So, yes, my complaints are generally either done for one of two purposes. One is humor and the other is because this is dumb and we need to fix this shit. Yeah. I mean, isn't that how we really kind of started the show out? We bitch about things and then we figure out how things could be fixed in the future. So I think I think we are definitely in theory, but I think we're definitely going to live forever.

Yes, I feel younger already. So a little bit of follow up, Sean Bonner pointed out that when we were talking about Adblock and Adblock Plus, we kind of screwed it up a little bit. Apparently we did. I mean, I could have actually just hit the little button on my browser and I could have told you that I'm actually been running Adblock Plus since day one.

And it's also there are two different companies. Yes, I always just kind of assumed one was the pay version and one wasn't. But then that wouldn't make any sense because I've never paid yet. I have the plus version. Here's a little complaint. All you people stop naming your companies the same damn thing. Yeah, there should be a lawsuit right now going on with this because that's that's kind of ridiculous.

Yeah. Well, actually, I was in relation to this for my corporate gig. I was looking at some of the companies that kind of pull in tweets and Instagrams and you can use them on like professional video screens for events and things like that. There's a company called TweetWall and then there's TweetWall Pro. Completely different companies.

That's that's that's why we have trademarks. Trademark your stuff, people, and then you can sue the other people and, you know, make some money that way. Yeah, it's better than being a patent troll. You can be a trademark troll. Exactly. It's much better. So, yeah. Thank you very much, Sean, for for enlightening us and pointing that out.

So get Adblock Plus, right? I'm I'm using Adblock. I've got I've got no problem with Adblock. So I'm sticking with that. Adblock Plus is the one that, you know, Google and Microsoft are paying to let their ads through. So I don't see how Adblock Plus would be any better.

So I don't know. You put an article in the show notes that says why I switched to Adblock Plus and you should too. I put it in there. I haven't read it yet. Oh, I didn't feel the need to read it because I was like, I'm on Adblock Plus. OK, well, never mind. Then we're going to continue to be uninformed. Well, I think I think this is a you know, your mileage may vary.

Try it yourself. See which one you like better. Yeah, I mean, I've honestly not had a problem with Adblock Plus. I don't see much at all. But as we discussed last week, I'm disturbed by the precedent of pay to play, just like I was on the Sunset Strip in the 80s. So what do what are you going to do? Here's the deal.

It makes it better no matter what. Whichever one you use, there's less ads. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. You need it. You need one of these. You need something on the Internet, because as Jason discovered when he did his insane 30 day trial without running anything, it's a wasteland out there without it.

Oh, it's it makes the Internet almost unusable. Yeah, I mean, it is. I mean, let's be honest, it's barely usable as it is these days. That's true. That's true. Ran across an article in the Huffington Post. I know you love it when I post Huffington Post links. Technology isn't boosting our productivity like it used to.

Well, it's because people are busy reading the goddamn Huffington Post all day. Judging from my experience walking around in offices recently, both my own and other people's. Yeah, that would seem to be true. Most people are browsing throughout the day. This was basically the argument behind this particular article is that, you know, we've kind of had the big leaps that have happened and everything that's occurring since the last 15 years or so have been monumental, tiny little itty bitty things that that get changed.

And so we haven't had any big leaps. So therefore, we're not creating any more productivity. My argument would be that this has all been a fucking mistake anyways, because all I know is anytime I walk into an actual retail store, everything takes 25 times longer than it used to when they just had a cash register.

Why so? Why so? Because nobody knows how to run the damn computers. I'm sorry. But like the guy at McDonald's and the chick at Target and all that with the touch screens that they have in front of them, they don't know how to use these damn things. And everything takes twice as long now. Well, and my favorite are the people who don't realize that you can pay before you're done checking out.

So when you're done, you just press a button. You know, these people look like they've never used money before. I think we've got to school everybody up. Jesus drives me nuts. I mean, there's also this, you know, obsession with productivity. Everybody's got to be productive, got to be productive.

But, you know, the pendulum can swing either way. And yes, we haven't had any major advancements. OK, we have computers now. Everybody should be using them. That was the big boost, you know, office productivity, less paper, all that crap. And since then, what have we gotten? We've gotten Facebook and Twitter, which basically negates all of the shit that we did to be more productive, you know?

So, yeah, it's the dicking around economy. Yeah, I particularly like this article just for the very last line, which is a venture capitalist. Peter Thiel has a succinct mashup of the two ideas. We wanted flying cars. Instead, we got 140 characters. Yeah, I've heard that one before. That's good.

That about sums up my thoughts on technology these days. Oh, well, you're not the only one, apparently, because another article you put in is, what was it? The Andrew Keene article. The great internet swindle. Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

Now, I know you hate this guy. Andrew Keene is a troll. He's one of those guys where he didn't get to play in the big kid's pond. He had a startup, lost all his money. Now he's just like, boo-hoo, the internet sucks. Nobody should use it. We're killing our minds. Everything is horrible.

Boo-hoo-hoo. So, basically, he could fit in as a third person on this podcast pretty easily. Yeah, except every now and again, we're, you know, we can be upbeat and come up with solutions to things. No, I agree. Now, I understand that you don't like Andrew Keene, as you've made very clear at our show notes as soon as I pop this in there.

But you have to admit, if you read the article, he is saying everything that we've been saying on this podcast. He is right on board with us. He is completely, he may be a dick, but this article is spot on, and I'm going to read his book. Okay, well, when you're done, let me know how it is.

Because he is on board with some of our ways of thinking, but not all of them. And what he, what he's talking about is this promised utopian internet that never existed. And, you know, he's like, oh, it was supposed to be the democratization of this and that and all this other crap.

And it's like, none of that shit that he's talking about ever existed. It was just writers saying that this is going to be the greatest thing ever. I don't necessarily agree with you at all about that. You and I were there in the trenches when it started. And I'll just, I'll use, I'm going to make up an example because I don't specifically remember, but I agree with his point.

The whole, the internet was fascinating. And when it first came out and you and I worked for a bunch of small companies and things like that, because the idea was that, uh, I can't remember the name of the stupid bookstore that was in a sleepless in Seattle or whatever the hell that movie was with Meg Ryan. But the idea was that a small mom and pop bookstore would be able to go online, get themselves up on the internets as it were, and, and be able to increase their business.

That was the promise of the internet. And it still is the promise kind of being sold, but we've all seen what the reality is. The reality is everything gets consolidated. Mom and pop go out of business and it's just Amazon. Well, I mean, there, there, there is, there's that, I mean, this is, we're figuring this shit out as we go.

But the fact that there was these quote unquote mythical promises never, it was just, okay. Replace the word promise with hope. And I'm on board. Okay. It was the, it was the hope of the internet that this is what was going to happen for all of us. I mean, you, you and I thought we were going to be fucking rich beyond belief because we knew how to do all this stuff.

That's still the startup dream up in San Francisco where they come up with absolutely dipshit ideas. But that was the hope of the internet. The hope was the democratization of everything. The fact that the smaller guy would be able to finally play with the big boys. But the reality is the big boys beat the shit out of us and took everything over anyways.

Yeah. There's a big difference between hope and promise. And I'm, I'm on board with you with that, with that switch over, that changes the entire tone of everything that he says, but he's saying, I took him and made him better. Yeah, you did actually. Cause promise is, you know, diametrically opposed to hope, you know, wishing one hand shit in the other kind of thing, but I agree, but he makes a lot of, I mean, a lot of his points are very similar to my rants.

He goes down on Uber as I often do. He talks a lot about his hatred for social media as you often do. Uh, there's a lot, there's a lot of fuel in here that, uh, is, is pretty much straight out of the grumpy old geeks fire. So I'm looking forward to, uh, reading his entire thing as one piece and then I will get back to you about it.

Okay. Yeah. This is perfect because just as you wouldn't read Amanda fucking Palmer's book, I will not read Andrew fucking Keen's book. So you can come back and tell me what you thought of it. Fair enough. That's why there's two of us. And, uh, finally, because this is just my continued rants all the time. There's one more article that I wanted to pop in the show notes and if anybody is interested, please do read it.

It was pretty well done. Uh, this is by Michael Kazin. It's called the end of outrage. If inequality is such a growing concern, why are no Americans taking to the streets? Uh, he does conveniently forget the 99% movement that happened a couple of years ago. He mentions it briefly. That was an attempt at it.

I often wonder the same thing. This is the big issue, uh, where politicians that are trying to get elected in districts where it is an issue, or at least start finally starting to mention it in community quality. Uh, it's bubbling up through popular culture. It's finally starting to get a bit of a, uh, groundswell in terms of people being aware of the fact that this is really bad and it's getting worse and worse and worse, but there is no outrage.

Yeah. I was going to say that's what the article is about is the fact that there are no more protests. People aren't taking to the streets and he does kind of gloss over the 99 or the occupy movement. Yeah. The occupy movement. And the thing that really he doesn't take into account that much is everybody's just sitting at home sharing and liking they're not that, that, that is the new protest.

It's like, yes, they're tweeting about shit. They're not getting out of the house with a sign. I mean, some, some of them are, but not like they used to. Yeah. And that, you know, ties in directly with a lot of conversations I've been having recently because my, my kind of mostly full-time gig at the moment is a nonprofit situation.

It's a, it's a protest situation and there's a lot of arguments about how can we actually get people motivated and activated beyond just retweeting? Because that seems to be what the kids these days do. Um, you know, posting a link and, uh, sharing that with your followers and, and Snapchatting a photo of yourself, you know, saying, yay, climate change.

It doesn't really mean anything. Yeah. No, it doesn't. I mean, the last great protest I went to was in 2004, I think. And that was, you know, one of the war protests here in Chicago. And ever since then, almost nothing, nothing. Yeah. So, uh, we're, we've gotten pretty damn lazy.

I got to say, I know. Get out, get out in the streets, people. Act, use your rights, sir. Light fire to a Prius. No, don't actually do that because I don't want to get sued, but you get, you get the point. Grumpy old geeks does not endorse setting fires to Priuses only, only metaphorically. You're only allowed to torch automobiles if your sports team wins.

Yeah. Here's the, after our, our, uh, amazing rant on the Prius and answering the questions last week, we got absolutely zero questions in from the fans this week. So if you're out there and you have a question for us, we promise to try and be nicer next time. Not really.

No, we don't actually. Outrage. We want to live forever. Exactly. It's for my health yelling at you people. Now I'm going to yell at Obama. Damn it. Uh, after that Buzzfeed, uh, healthcare promo with the selfie stick that we talked about last week, it dawned on me that I actually did.

Have to go change my insurance. So I went to healthcare.gov. So it actually worked. Now, hold on a second. The healthcare.gov now. Didn't every state have to build their own using federal funds or is there just one national I'm, I'm not using healthcare, obviously the, the Obamacare because I'm already covered, but isn't it specific to states?

Uh, some states have their own marketplaces. Uh, I think it was Tennessee or one of those Southern states that had like the really good one that worked, uh, some states didn't, but I think you could still always use just the main healthcare.gov. I don't know exactly how it all worked either, but I'm going to tell you right now, this one was a piece of shit.

This was the government one. And I had to actually use a different email address than my main email address because my normal email address, it says was not valid. I'm like, it's an email address. It's simple. Why does this not work? So I had to change that up before I could get into the marketplace and I got through it and I got my insurance and I did all the, the hoo, ha, ha, made it in under the deadline and now I have to cancel my California.

But it was a, it was a terrible UX in, even though it's supposed to have been fixed since, you know, the big screw up, it did actually get me through the process and I did get insurance. So it worked, just not great. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of people don't have 15 email addresses like I do. They've got one, you know, and if it's, if it's farting on those, like a dot me address. And I think that was basically it. Cause it was a probably just, they probably put in some code about it's got to be more than two letters, which is ridiculous, but yeah, mine's the first letter on my name at jpd.me.

Very simple. So you want to get to press for a second, Jason? Oh, sure. I guarantee you the company that built that website made more money. And that one contract than you and I probably made combined. Oh, in our lifetimes. Yeah. Well, maybe they should hire us next time. So we at least know how to fucking do it.

Right. Oh, speaking of doing things wrong, my favorite WordPress. Oh boy. Yesterday got, uh, got a note that, oh, Hey man, our site's not working on mobile. And I go check it out and, um, figure out the fact that there is a, uh, a 1.7 meg HT access file where they were smart enough to look at the IP addresses that I normally use to log in, to check the site and do all my stuff.

And they, uh, they, they whitelisted me. So I would always see the normal site, but everybody else would get bounced to a Russian porn site. On mobile, on mobile only. Well done. Yeah. I thought it was clever, but fuck you guys, man. Talk about ruining my Thursday.

Uh, and, and, and security, like everyone was doing the updates, it wouldn't re-enable itself after the update. So it didn't see the modified system files, which I don't know if they got into the plugin and hack the plugin. So when it doesn't update, it didn't, you know, restart. I don't know, but I had to clean everything out and it's working again.

But man, what a pain. I'm sorry, man. That sucks. But, uh, I've got to give a tip of the tinfoil hat to those guys. That's quite clever. It was very clever. They probably used the security plugins to get the logs, to find out what my IP addresses were. Then I logged in to whitelist them.

Yes. And this is why we don't use WordPress people. Oh, this is why we do use WordPress, but get to bitch about it. So I feel, I feel five years younger already. In the news. Now, Brian, we've talked about news articles that end in a question.

Yes. And I found one this week and it was intriguing to me. So I decided, eh, why not give it a, give it a peek. I'll spend a minute and check it out. And it's called, could driverless cars own themselves? And this was on the BBC site. Yeah, that was what freaked me out about it and sucked me in because I even clicked through it and read it.

And I'd like to thank you, Jason, for wasting some of them. So much of my precious time, because this is one of the dumbest articles I've ever read. Yeah, the problem with this article is it's a thought experiment. It's just a full on thought piece. Well, no, that would require thought. I thought it actually was well thought out. I thought, you know, for a sci-fi novel plot, I mean, it's right up there with Daniel Suarez.

It's like a subplot of a good Daniel Suarez book. Yeah, it could be. The thing is, this is supposed to be news and this is supposed to be the BBC. So when I see a sentence in an article about, about driverless cars and it goes, to be clear, these robots on wheels would not be self-aware. Thanks a lot.

No shit. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. But it did make some interesting points about after a car like pays itself back to the person who paid for it, where then it could start making its own profit and then going in and having itself fixed and upgraded and A-B testing its software.

It was an interesting article for that where, like I said, it could be a good subplot for the future. But I mean, yeah, the technology is nowhere in sight. It's total blue sky and it had honestly no place on a news site. But for us, it's, you know, hey, it's great. It's good for me.

But I mean, the question that it brought up for me, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, is this article kind of assumes that in the future we will be purchasing and owning these driverless cars ourselves, I don't think that's the way it's going to go. And it doesn't seem to be going that way now anyways.

I think that we're going to basically, we've seen the entire next generation of these crazy kids that just Uber and Lyft and all that stuff. They have zero interest in owning a car. I mean, you and I remember when we were 15, we couldn't fucking wait to get a car. It was a big deal. Kids today don't give a crap.

And I don't think this is going to go this way. I don't think we're going to own our own self-driving cars. I think it's Google, frankly, or, you know, Super Uber or whatever they become in the next 10 years or by the time this comes around, I don't think we're going to own them. I think we're going to rent them. And that's that.

Well, yeah, it's the promise of Goober. Yeah, exactly. And I'm fine with that because I hate owning a car. I hate having to maintain it, pay insurance on it, you know? Yeah. Cars are a pain in the ass. When I moved to San Francisco, the best thing for me was selling my car. I didn't have a car for four years up there and it was glorious.

Right. So I'm looking forward to it, you know? When I was living in London, I really enjoyed not having a car as well. But that's because the, you know, the transport system was so damn good. But yeah, I don't think that it's going to go the direction that this author did. I think it's definitely going to be a case of the Goober. Yeah.

But it's a fun, I thought it was a fun read and a cute little thought experiment, but definitely not news, BBC. Yes. Not news. Let's see. We've been talking a lot about drones and there's a lot of drone news, correct? Correctamundo. All right. So basically a new set of rules are being floated by the FAA regarding drone use.

And I will read this little block of text here so we can have a base for our discussion. Okay. These still have to go through approval before their law, but the good news is that it opens up more uses for journalists and small businesses like photographers and videographers. You'll have to get vetted by the TSA and take some tests, but that's better than what it is now where they require you to have a pilot's license.

It does require you to be in sight of the drone at all times, through which means it's a no go for deliveries, at least in the U S I'm pretty sure. Oh, this is your tech. Sorry. I'm pretty sure other countries will welcome the drone overlords with open arms, just like that Google test in the Outback that delivered dog treats. I totally thought this was a news piece you were having me read.

I didn't realize it was your, it was your thought piece. Gotcha. I got you on that one. I just totally like endorsed your position, which I never do blindly. See, I gotta, you gotta be tricky to get you on board. You're a little tricky. So you get me before I have too much coffee.

That's how, that's how we do it nowadays. All right. So full disclosure, I have next to no interest in drones or the drone story, though I do realize it's a big deal for technology and the internet of things as we move forward. So I am following it for that point, but I, you will never see me out in the park flying a drone around.

I just like it because now if I wanted to, or once these go into effect, if they go through effect, it's going to take a year, at least for all this stuff to go in right now, it still sucks. If you have a drone, like, you know, for real estate stuff, I could be out there doing a couple of jobs a day as a photographer doing real estate stuff and, you know, make a good, good living at that, especially with the drone, because, you know, house flyovers are gold.

People love that. And when you're selling a house, it's, it's, you know, almost necessary nowadays because people are out there doing it illegally. And I'd like to be able to do it legally and charge for it and make some money. But yeah, I think it's, I think it's a good step forward.

I think other countries are going to eat our, eat our lunch on it though. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's a bit of, I'm, I'm happy that they're not requiring a pilot's license because that's absolutely ridiculous. I do like the idea of there being basically a flying version of the DMV where you have to get a license.

That makes total sense to me. Um, I don't see why that would even be an issue. That's just a no brainer. Uh, and people who are really into this, uh, I don't know if you still listen to the still untitled, the Adam Savage project regularly, Jason, but every week, every week. Yeah. The February 10th episode was basically entirely about drones.

Uh, it goes into the tech as well as, as, as Adam's thoughts on what the rules should be on all the stuff. So, uh, it's going to take a long time for this all to get sorted out. I, you know, I think Amazon's eventually going to have no problem getting their drone delivery system working, but it's going to take time. I mean, Hey, uh, hats off to Amazon for actually going along with the regulation instead of just Ubering through and doing it anyways.

They're not, they're not as dumb as, uh, as what's his name from Uber with Travis. So they've got, they've got shareholders and a vested interest, you know, they're, they're, they're a public company. Yeah. They have to abide by the rules and provide shareholder value. Exactly.

Uh, this one, speaking of Australian dog treats, uh, this was quite a treat. An Australian researcher has worked out how to store 1000 terabytes on a CD. And, and the, I think the title of this is wrong because he figured out how to do it on a DVD, not a CD. Yeah.

I was about to say, there's no way that would be on a CD, but a DVD, yes. Uh, just in time for all the computers not to have drives in them anymore. Yeah. We'll get to that in a minute. Oh, we get to that in a minute, but man, if you can put 50,000 movies on one DVD, you don't need your friends in Sweden anymore.

No, you do not. Um, and you know, this is, this is one of those things that dovetails nicely with my, my other pet complaint, which is, you know, we're not going to have free bandwidth anymore. Uh, but if we could fit all this stuff on a disc and there you go. Viva la sneaker net. Bob's your uncle. And, and on the, uh, the science beat, I got a couple of these, these are just fun.

The, um, scientists develop a prototype contact lens that allows wearers to zoom in and out. That is bad-ass. It is so bad-ass. I mean, you have to have special glasses with it and you know, it's like double wink to zoom, whatever. Is that not cool? I want these so bad because I'm going blind.

I need, I need something. So, you know, I finally started to feel my own age with my eyesight. I've, I've always had just, you know, above average, ridiculously great eyesight, but, uh, because of the monitors and my age now at the end of the end of the day, when I'm laying in bed, trying to read off my iPad mini, I can feel it.

I, my eyes are not working as well as they used to. So hurry up with this stuff, people. Yeah. Wait till you get to the point where you have to like, you know, keep putting things farther and farther away. And when you get to the, you know, your meat limitation of how far your arms go, then that's when you, it's time for reading glasses, which I've discovered.

Well, I'm just hoping that this stuff speeds up as much as it seems like it's going to. So I can avoid the whole LASIK surgery and just get some cool contact lenses. Yeah, definitely. Although, yeah, the LASIK thing, I'm just, I can't do it. My eyes are shaped wrong. I would, I would love to, man. Right. I've had glasses since I was four and I would love to be able to see.

Um, but speaking of seeing. Yes. In the future, when, when we are, when we are split between the Eloy and the Morlocks, just like in the, you know, the time machine. Perhaps in the year 2000. Could be, could be. Uh, somebody's put out this artificial skylight.

These guys, Koalux. Yeah. And it is so cool. It's been, it's been making the rounds this week, but it looks pretty damn neat. It is pretty bad-ass. Uh, initially I was like, wow, this is the coolest thing ever until I realized that you still have to basically construct this into your ceiling. So it's, it's not quite, I'm waiting for the, basically the, the pixelated paint that we can just paint on a spot on our roof that will do this without actually having to create, you know, this, this beveled entrance area and all this other sort of stuff.

But it's pretty bad-ass. Yeah. I mean, what they did was they basically compressed the atmosphere down. So you get actual, you know, the blue sky effect from this skylight with just a compressed atmosphere into a, like a gel that they've made. And it looks like the sun. It really does look like the sun.

And if you can get, if you get, I don't know what, uh, like the properties of the light that's coming through there, but man, if they can figure out a way to get vitamin D and then when they put us in the basements to code for the rest of our lives, because we're going to live forever now because we just like to bitch about stuff, you know, then we can at least be happy until we, you know, we can be happy little drones.

Yes. But then again, then we'll die because then we won't be able to bitch about anything. But true. True. It was a catch 22. Now there was the last article for the news, which isn't really news again. We're doing kind of news light this week because, because the next segment is going to be doom and gloom.

Um, there was an interesting article in Wired this week called your dick pics are about to be all over the internet. I've been saying this since episode one. My only problem with this article is they're called dickies. God damn it. We coined, we coined it here on grumpy old geeks. They're called dickies.

They are called dickies. Uh, yeah, you know, it's not going to, uh, every frigging kid with a cell phone has a picture of their junk. It's, and as we see from everything getting hacked, it's all going to end up out there. A lot of it already is. And, you know, we just need the stigma to go away about it.

Oops. Oh, well, big deal. Yeah. Okay. Well, you got a picture. Want to see it from the, want to see it in person? Come on. It was, it was, if you read the comments, it'll, it'll make your head bleed, but it's a, it's a fun little article. I thought. Yeah. You know, it wraps up what's happening and yeah, I did read through some of the comments and that's, you know, as we all know, just don't read comments.

No, you don't read comments on the internet and you know, no pants Friday, bring it on. Yeah. Casual Friday is going to take on a new meaning. Security. Normally when we roll into this segment, uh, I try to warn everyone that Jason's going to get all worked up and I kind of roll my eyes and I hope you all collectively do too.

Uh, but this time, uh, all right, Jason's going to get really worked up and he's got a goddamn point. Oh, I, here's the thing. I'm not going to get worked up. All I'm going to, I'm going to start off with just saying, I told you so. I told you so. Oh, so will I, because I, I've always said there, there ain't shit we can do about this.

But what we've learned this week is the extent to which we have been so screwed the whole time and haven't even known it. But first we're going to have a little follow-up. We talked about Google's project zero where they, where they take O-day exploits, sit on them for 90 days, let the companies know, and they have 90 days to do it to fix a patch.

And this came out when they released the source for a Microsoft, uh, you know, exploit a couple of days before they were going to launch. Well, they obviously listened to our show because we're like, that's not long enough. You need some, you need some grace periods in there. And that's exactly what they've done. Yep. Added a 14 day grace period.

Yes. If you can prove that, you know, you're almost there and just say, Hey guys, we're almost done. Just chill, chill. You know, we've got a, we've got a patch release cycle. If it doesn't fall within your, you know, release rate frame or whatever, you know, if it doesn't fall within your release window, we'll give you a break now, which is good.

And they took out, you know, national holidays and things like that. Hey, that's actually a big deal because another, you know, we always fight about this, about how we shouldn't have to be working 24 seven all the fricking time. So thank you for putting in weekends and holidays. Yeah. It's mighty, mighty nice of you, Google.

Mighty nice of you. Um, yeah, this is really, this is funny. This is, I mean, I still like the idea of project zero, but as we discussed, it's really not fair and they have to give a little leeway. If the company, if you know, the company's working on it and working on it really hard and they're almost there and they can prove that to you, or at least tell you don't really sit into the wild when they've almost got it fixed.

Yeah. Come on guys. Give us a break. Exactly. Uh, the other funny thing about this is a little bit more follow-up. Uh, who do you think has the most problems? Uh, well, Adobe flash. Well, I mean, that's the, that's the thing. It's, there's your, there's a, there's a, it's a, it's a, it's a close race between internet explorer and flash.

Very close race. Yes. And hopefully we can abolish both of them. Well, and Java. Don't forget Java. Uh, I've had that uninstalled for years. I had to put it back on the other day cause I had to run audacity for something. It's like all Java. It's like, yeah, it immediately took it off my system. Yeah.

So we have, we have so many things to pick from this week. We're just going to start off with the big one that came out yesterday. The great SIM heist. All your cell phone are belong to us. Yeah. These guys, you're going to hear about this in the news everywhere. So hopefully we're getting on it fast enough.

So only the nerds know about it now, but yeah, they, uh, the NSA and the G, uh, GCHQ have been slurping up all of the encryption keys for just about every SIM card they can get their hands on and they've done it in extraordinarily illegal ways.

They, they have gone after employees of companies in other countries. Yeah. You know, this, and these weren't just like, oh, we're just going to passively listen. No, they broke into their computers. They hacked their email, their Facebook passwords. They, they built profiles on these guys and figured out how to get the, basically the data dumps in transit, unencrypted or with low encryption so they could decrypt it.

Cause whenever a SIM card is made, there's a set of keys, you know, encryption keys. So when you talk to your provider, it knows it's you, it knows it's you and your connection is secure. Yes. So basically this has given our government the key to basically know exactly where we are, what we're doing and absolutely everything that we do on our phone.

Well, and it's not just, you know, well, yes, it's our country that's done it, but they can do it for everybody whose SIM cards were made by the companies that they've hacked, which is almost every telecom in the world, because these guys do it. They make SIM cards for about 450 telecoms.

Yep. And it's insane. It is utterly insane because what they can do once they have those, they can avoid getting warrants because they've already got the, they can decrypt it. They don't need to go get a warrant to, to, you know, capture and decrypt, uh, before post encryption and just, they can just do whatever the fuck they want.

It's ridiculous. This is going to be the biggest news story probably this year. I, I, it really is not only because of what they can do with this information, but because of the way that they got this information, which is, as you said, extraordinarily illegal. And the thing about this is this is another, you know, Snowden leak.

And I think we keep saying, oh, it's gotta be, they gotta be running out of stuff. They gotta be running out of stuff. It just gets bigger and bigger. It gets worse every time. This is unbelievable. And it's just, I mean, I don't even know where to start. I mean, we're having so many problems with our tech industry being eroded from the lack of trust because of all the shit that these guys are doing.

And now they're, you know, breaking into other companies and other countries to do it and just getting caught red handed. There's no getting past this. They did it. They're just, they're screwing us every which way from Sunday. I mean, I, yes, it's to protect us, but you know, this is where the, the case comes in against Snowden.

Uh, there's, there may be, there may be some things that need to need to stay secret, buddy. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah. Uh, I don't know. I mean, this is, it's such a major story that it's ridiculous and it's going to be interesting to see how the, how the media covers it to begin with. Uh, I can't wait to see what the nightly news is going to have to say about it.

Probably nothing. Um, it's not good. No. And this, yeah, this is only part one. We'll get to part two in a little bit. We're going to lighten it up a little. We're going to do is a little lighter, a few lighter stories and then we'll get to the other one. The funny thing is I saw this story and I thought this was a big deal, but compared to what we just discussed, who even gives a shit?

Uh, if you've got an Android phone, there's a particularly devious new bit of malware that's making the rounds that basically hijacks the shutting down process. So what do you think you've shut down your phone? It gives you the animation. It goes black, but the phone actually stays on and the malware can use your phone to send messages to third parties, record calls, take photos all while it appears your phone is off.

Now I like this one because I thought it was clever. It is clever. It's very clever. And wait till it gets to iOS, you know? Yes. If it's not already, who knows at this point, it could already be there. I particularly enjoy the fact that, uh, Android is, is recommending that users take out the battery of their phone when they want to shut it off.

When you're done talking to your person that you're chatting with, get a hammer, take it out back, put it on a cinder block and smash it to pieces just to make sure it's off. And this is the way the technology is starting to go. Everybody's just going to have like a $2 burner phone.

Cause you make one call and then you throw it away and destroy the damn phone. Yeah. You know, that guy that does the, will it blend, uh, commercials, everybody's just going to have one of those and you make a phone call and you drop it in the blender and move on. Now in other fun news, Lenovo, who I didn't, I didn't even know was still a thing.

I thought they were, I haven't bought a Lenovo in God knows how long, but man, did they screw up this week? Well, they've been screwing up since January about there or November, whenever a couple of months here, they were putting this thing called super fish. Yes.

Which is a great name. Yes, it is. Because it's added, it's adware ad injection. Yes. Because when you buy a laptop, you want it to come pre-installed with ads. Exactly. They're like, Oh, we're doing it to help the user experience a bullshit. You are you greedy motherfucking bastards.

What you're doing is you're trying to monetize a piece of hardware I bought from you by putting crap on it. And I thought we stopped doing that in like the mid nineties, but apparently not. And these guys put this, uh, I'm just going to call it malware because it's exactly what it is. Screw the ad injection. It's malware because what they did was they put in a fake root certificate authority, which means that they can hijack any secure communications that are coming through your laptop.

Basically meaning if you connect to your bank, they can, they can see it all. Yeah. They, they, they built in a man in the middle attack with the hardware that they sold you. Yeah. I mean, how, how just stupid is that? It's not just, I mean, it should be illegal.

It should be illegal. And you know, hopefully it is illegal and somebody is going to get them for it because when it, when this first came out, they tried to play it down. They're like, Oh, we're sorry. We're sorry. And now that the blowback's coming and everybody's posting screenshots of you. It's like, okay, I'm connected to bank of America and the certificate authority is superfish.

They've backpedaled quite a bit. They put out a new statement this morning and they're apologizing with uninstallers, how to get it off of your system. They're like, we promise we'll never do it again. But the fact that they did this in the first place is just crap-tacular. Yes, it is. And I find it hard to believe that only one company has done this.

Oh yeah. Remember e-machines? Yep. I used to get those things all the time because they were like 20 bucks and then you wipe them, put FreeBSD on them, take them down to your ISP. Remember when we had local ISPs, we could just go to Fry's, buy a computer, put Linux or FreeBSD on it, take it to our ISP and have our web servers there that ran all our mail.

Nothing went through Gmail or Google and all of this crap. I miss those days at this point. The good old days. And even now it's like, I can't, I don't know an ISP where I could go buy a box and take it down there. Like all of the major ISPs, you have to get like a cage or a full rack.

You can't just get a corner like you used to. You can't get, you know. No, you can't just plug in. Yeah. You can't just show up and say, oh, can I have for you? Okay, no. No, you have to have a rack or a room or, you know, and it's going to be $30,000 a month. This would have been the biggest story of, you know, the month.

Except there are bigger ones. This is, there was a bank heist where these guys stole almost a billion dollars. And it has been shoved under the rug and nobody cares. Almost a billion dollars. Kaspersky is saying that these guys, you know, realistically could have taken off with $900 million.

They're saying they definitely got $300 million. Wow. But it could be as much as $900 million, you know, pushing the big B. And these guys were in there for years and they targeted, you know, a couple hundred banks and just were very methodical, very like Ocean's Eleven-y on how they got their target, got their info.

They watched everybody's, you know, these bank branches. They learned everything about them and just did it really well and did it very smartly. Yeah. And walked off with the money. And I'm sure, you know, at some point somebody's going to talk and they're going to get busted because it was a pretty big operation.

Yeah. But yeah. In what kind of week is this that the theft of almost a billion dollars is like a second or third tier headline? It's not been a great week. Oh, let's get to the big one. Okay.

The equation group. Yep. Now, Kaspersky put out a report on these guys, which is like the NSA's SEAL Team 6. Yeah. Now, the guys who made Stuxnet came to these guys to get code, you know?

And so these are like the super top-notch, top-tier guys. Some of the exploits that came out this week have actually been known for almost a year, but now we kind of see what the damage is from these exploits.

And the biggest exploit is that these guys have figured out how to basically overwrite the firmware on a hard drive. Which is insane. It is insane. And here's the trick with this is there's no way that you can, with public documents, figure out how to do that, which means they probably hacked into all of the hardware manufacturers, got the source code for the firmware, and reverse engineered it, and figured out how to put payloads in the firmware and reflash them.

This is, this, right here, I don't know if anybody kind of gets the scope of what's wrong with this. You cannot get rid of this unless you wipe your machine and reflash the firmware from, you know, from a copy of it from the vendor.

Otherwise, you have to destroy it. That's the only, only way to get it off of there is to see if it will blend. Yes. I should get stuck in those guys before this episode comes out. But yeah, this is like massive, massive problems here, because we were talking about the trust eroding from U.S. manufacturers.

And some of these aren't even U.S. manufacturers, by the way. It's a global problem with how many hard drive manufacturers these guys have broken into. I think there's eight of the major ones. You know, you got your Seagate, your Western Digitals. And right there, that's, you know, how much, how many percent of the market are Seagate and Western Digitals?

It's probably like 75 percent of market share right there anyways. And in all of the other stuff, I mean, that's just the tip of the iceberg from what these guys can do. These guys are, I mean, they're like still team six plus plus. I'm serious. No, I read the article in our show notes, especially when it gets down to Fanny, which is a wonderful name, which is basically how they're going to work air gaps.

Oh, yeah. Unbelievable. Like there's nothing they can't touch. No, you are so screwed. And the fact now that it's like, how do you destroy the global trust in everything technological that we've been building up for 30 years? Well, you do this shit and get caught at it.

Yeah. So hopefully now, though, this will be I don't I don't even know if you can call it a wake up call because people have been trying. But now that they know the scope of what cheap security will do, that, you know, people will just start to beef it up. That's that's the only way that this is going to get fixed is if companies take the lead and say, screw you to any spy agency, get their their staff to be more well-trained.

Because all of these problems come from people. Most of the stuff comes from phishing attacks, social engineering attacks. And it's not the technology. It's the people that are the problem. Yeah. A lot more training for staff on. No, do not open the email from somebody you don't know.

Or even if somebody does send you an email that, you know, never, ever, ever click on a link in an email. Period. I know it's difficult for some people, but that's the only way stuff like this is going to stop happening. Or say you get a promotional USB stick in the in the mail or something.

Don't put it in your computer. Put it in the blender. Exactly. Put it in the blender. We should market a Grumpy Old Geeks blender. We should. Yeah. Now to the lighter side. If there is such a thing. You mean the article called the Death Star of Malware Galaxy? No, no, no.

That's that's still the equation group. That's what we're just talking about. No, I'm talking about the automatic license plate readers we've talked about, where the cop cars have cameras on their bumpers and even some buses. Like in San Francisco, the license plate readers on the buses would give tickets to the cars that were parked in the no parking lanes.

Yeah. Things like that. Well, guess what they're doing that they said that they were never going to do? Taking photos of us. Exactly. Now, what better way if you're trying to build a facial recognition database and figure out who the person is that you're putting into that database? Well, get a picture of them in their car, which you already license plate, which is connected to a government database, which has your address, your social security number, your name.

Bingo. And they said they weren't doing it. They promised they weren't doing it, but they were doing it. Shocking. So shocking. Now, there's a nice little article on the Vox, which I generally don't read, but it's called the Department of Homeland Security is a total disaster.

It's time to abolish it. And it seems like a lot of people agree. And I'm kind of with them because their their entire purpose, like we talked about on the last show, it was to be a coordination effort to get all of the security agencies to talk to each other and share information. Well, now that we've got another agency coming out to do just that, which was these guys jobs, then why do we need them anymore?

I agree. Disband them because they'd cause nothing but problems. And it talks about how different branches were cannibalized to build this DHS monstrosity. And it's just it's resulted in a duplication of effort across the board and people still aren't talking to each other.

So what's the point? Yeah, it did. All they did was recreate the other agencies within themselves instead of coordinate. It was never meant to be that. And it became that. And it's a monster and it needs to be killed. OK, now, Microsoft. Yes. How's your Windows 10 going? The three times I've used it, it's been fine.

OK, so you haven't done any of the biometric password stuff in there yet. I don't think that that's in the release that's currently out in the wild. OK, because they're going to start building in biometric passwords into Windows 10. OK, dumb, dumb, stupid.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's we know we know from like five year old episodes of Mythbusters that can be faked. And, you know, we're meatbags. You just go in, you shoot somebody in the head, take out their eyeball. I've seen demolition, man. Yeah. You know, what I want to see is more duress passwords.

I like that idea. This was something I was working. I mean, it's not it's not my idea. I was using it, though, on when I was building Death Vault. So if somebody, you know, kidnapped you and they wanted to get into your documents that you were storing in Death Vault, which was the secure location. Is this one of the lighter stories? Maybe not.

But, you know, if you have a password that can say that I am under duress and get you into someplace while sending a signal to somebody else saying, I need help. I am at this IP address, which is at this location. And send a, you know, use that cool JavaScript browser fingerprinting to get as much information.

Talk to the ad companies. Get your location because they're going to know it and then send it back to law enforcement where they can come rescue you. See, I think the problem here is with the marketing, Jason, because we've already, you know, you threw out the term Death Vault and we're saying duress password. We need to we need to catch on to this whole Fifty Shades of Grey thing and call this the safe word.

The safe word. Yes. That's how you market it. You win. You win on that one. Strawberries. Blueberry pie. Anyway. Yeah. So I think. Yeah. Biometric passwords is stupid. We already know that's stupid. Have you seen the Intel commercials they're running now where they're, you know, you'll be able to use your face as your password.

And I was like, I can hold a photo up to the camera. Well, this is the dumbest thing ever. If they have two cameras, you can figure out if it's a flat surface or not. Yeah, but it's not two cameras. They're showing this on a standard laptop. Oh, yeah. Well, then screw it. Get a picture. Exactly. That's the they're running that as a commercial as security.

Are you kidding me? And I'm sorry. Go watch sneakers. They beat it in sneakers with a microcassette recorder and a Chinese dinner. Come on. We can do better than that. OK, now let's get into the fun stuff. War balls. They're making these kind of inner tube with an engine and cameras that can, you know, autonomously go from your ship to a beach and go up on the beach and they're calling them war balls.

War balls is a great name. I mean, this is basically straight out of the Star Wars one, right? The little rolling robots that showed up and start beating the crap out of the Jedis. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, I like that. I like these guys. They're they're they're cute. But you strap a, you know, a battlefield nuke on it and it's not cute anymore.

No, no. Balls. So I'm done. I'm done for the day. That's that's enough doom and gloom. OK, go out and just, you know, just I don't I don't even know. I don't know what you can do. Just you have to assume now that everything that you do is exposed.

Your phone your phone is exposed. We all kind of knew that one, but not to the extent of how easy it was. It's all pretty bad. It's this is this is a pretty depressing segment, Jason. Thanks. Well, here's the here's the upside. If you do still need to make, you know, secure phone calls, there are security apps out there that will let you do secure point to point connections because it's software based and not go.

It's just a data connection that's encrypted in the app, decrypted on the other side. And you can still make, quote unquote, phone calls using your smartphones to another person with a smartphone using those apps. I'll dig up a few of them and put them in the show notes. And nobody is ever going to do that. I've got a bunch of friends that already do.

So don't don't even go there. OK. Sleep tight. At the library. I finished the follow up to Brilliance, which I read, which I talked about last week by Marcus Sake.

I still don't know if that's how you pronounce his name. As I mentioned last time, I enjoyed the first one, but it did have a little bit of that. It's the super hot older dude who meets up with the younger chick and has to have a romance while we try to have some sci-fi stuff around it. Sequels a bit better.

I really did enjoy this one. I understand why this one was nominated, which is how I found out about this series in the first place. Really, really good. I really like the concept. And this one went a bit more into the whole technology side of things and the sci-fi aspect of these people born with these gifts and and how that would play out in society.

I'm highly recommending this series now and I can't wait for the third one. OK, cool. I'll have to check it out. Yeah. So work your way through the first one and the second one's a lot better. Oh, OK. So I'm really enjoying this guy's writing. The only problem is like his previous books before this series weren't sci-fi.

They were kind of just more your your crime sort of novels. And I don't like those. So as much as I like this author, I don't think I can go back and read any more of his stuff. But maybe I'll give it a shot. Who knows? I could use a change of pace, a little less sci-fi. So how many books are in the series? There's well, right now there's just the two, but it's but it's left open ended.

So, you know, there's going to be a third one. OK, I'll tell you. I'll tell you what you tell me when it's over and then I'll go back and read them later. Oh, I see what you're doing there. So I finished Born Standing Up, a comics life by Steve Martin. Excellent little book. It's very short and it's an interesting biography or autobiography, I should say.

Right. It just runs through his early life up until kind of when he kind of quit the business and quit stand up altogether. Yeah, I got it on Audible. He read it. It was like I said, it was a good little read. My favorite line from the the book, though, was thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent, which means he wasn't very talented, but he just stuck at it for years and years and years.

I've always been a huge fan of Steve Martin. His comedy is is one of those weird things where he's not really that funny, but he's he kind of deconstructs what comedy is. And that was his genius. Absolutely adore the man. So I'm I actually do want to read this.

So, yeah, I highly recommend it. I was kind of sad because he didn't talk about King Tut at all in the book. Really? Didn't even mention it. There's like there's one mention of it, like after the fact, after he'd been doing like all these stadium tours and, you know, he talked more about the arrow through the head than he did King Tut.

King Tut's how I found him, you know? Yeah. Well, that's I think we grew up with that. I mean, most of us as kids, which reminds me, did you watch the Saturday Night Live 40th anniversary thing? Because I heard that he did it on that. Oh, I'm I'm still I'm about 40 minutes in. It's like three and a half hours. Yeah, that's why I haven't watched it.

But I'm doing it in chunks. And so far, it's solid. I'm loving it. I just got to Celebrity Jeopardy and I was cracking up. I watched that skit online. It was absolutely fantastic. The Jeopardy skits were always my favorite when they did them. Yeah, no, it's really good so far. I've got no complaints about it, so I can't wait to finish it for sure.

Excellent. And I am going to be reading the Steve Martin book. That is the change of pace I might need. Software, apps and gadgets. We're coming up on the one year anniversary of me purchasing my place here in lovely Santa Monica, California, and we've discussed a lot about my trips to Home Depot.

And all the various upgrades and crap I've been doing around my house, which I took a break from for a long time, but now I'm trying to get back into it. And I ran across something called Switchmate. What is Switchmate, Brian? Switchmate is a ridiculous little device that you'd snap on top of your lights, your on-off light switches, and it stays there with magnets.

And then you can basically use the Internet of Things to control your lights from anywhere using an app. So what it is, it's a box with a magnet that sticks to your wall that has a battery in it, a Wi-Fi, basically a Wi-Fi chip, and probably a 10-cent motor that you can get from Radio Shack that goes up or down to flip the Switch for you.

Yes. How much does this cost? We don't know yet. I will give them points for not Kickstartering it, but they are doing one of the things that drives me absolutely insane, which is they go out and get all their PR and press and have a site all ready to go before you can actually get the damn things or even know how much they cost. The Tim Ferrissification of product selling.

Yes, which I despise beyond belief. You do not sell something until you have something. Well, they're not actually selling it. You know, that's true. What they're doing is they're determining if there is a target market that is large enough to sustain their company. Yes, which I don't think that they will have. Yeah, it's a clever idea.

I would never personally do it because we've talked a great deal about the security implications of having a wireless home. I do not need an app to control my lights. If they price it fairly, it's a pretty neat idea because it requires absolutely no wiring whatsoever.

So I can see, say, renters. This could be big with renters, especially, you know, the Google lights that I'll live in this area and are renting because you don't have to muster about with the wiring or anything like that or even something for my parents. Design wise, it's pretty cool looking. It's definitely, you know, we've gone through the app or the Apple design school on this one.

It looks very, you know, it'll pair up nicely with your iPhone 6 in terms of style. My concern with that, though, is anything for a house that's so stylized is going to look dated in 10 years. The other problem I have, obviously, is that it doesn't connect into your wiring, so there's no power.

So you have batteries, which means you have to go around and change the batteries every, I believe they said 8 to 12 months on every single one of these units. So not for me. OK, you know what this is? This is the Clapper 2.0. This is it. Yeah, because the Clapper was just a little box with a little sound trigger that you plugged in between your your light and, you know, the wall.

This is the Clapper, the Internet version of the Clapper. The batteries doesn't concern me because I can, you know, I use rechargeables on everything. So my battery costs have dropped significantly now that the new versions of rechargeable batteries are so good. If you don't if you don't use those and you got to.

But here you go. Your batteries go out at midnight when it's dark in your entire house. Here's the thing, though. If it's smart enough, I'm going to I'm playing devil's advocate here because I would I would never buy one of these things. You were you were gushing over them, so I'm just going to, you know, I didn't say I was gushing over them.

I would never buy one either, but I can see this for the rental market. Like if I were still a kid and renting and I was all into tech, I would totally get these. Now, my Fitbit tells me what the battery charge is. So I'm assuming that this device can probably tell you how much juice is left in your batteries and give you what help give you, you know, some text alerts at like three in the morning saying, hey, wake up, put some batteries in me, Joofus.

But anyway, I thought it was ugly. I didn't I didn't care for the look and feel of it. I know you liked it, but I didn't I didn't care for it. I thought it was too bulky and blocky and just kind of meh. And, you know, they're like, oh, and it's it's touch sensitive. I'm like, so is my switch. I can walk over and flip the switch.

Well, I mean, that's the one thing I'm looking at kind of wired solutions for this. There aren't a lot of great ones out there that look really good yet. So I'm hoping that maybe some, you know, people coming out with these sort of things will up the game on the on the wired solutions. Here's the thing that when I'm when I'm looking at a device for home automation, if there is a third party service that needs to talk to my network to get to my device, it's a nonstarter.

It will not happen. I will not let that happen because that's that's the point of failure right there. That's where somebody can come and get through my network, through their device, even through their back end to get to my device. So, no, ain't going to happen, because even if even if that device is firewalled from the rest of the network, you can still get it's still got a Wi-Fi chip in it.

So you hack the Wi-Fi chip, bounce back to it. All sorts of stuff. Deep breath, Jason. We're not in the security segment anymore. Deep breath. OK, OK. OK. And, you know, I'm on board with you on that. But most people don't give a shit. OK, well, I'm trying to make them give a shit. The whole point of this show is to make somebody give a shit besides myself and you sitting in a darkened room with because we can't afford our light, our sunny skylight yet.

That is pretty funny. Follow up on the Pono player. We've already I mean, I think that the Grumpy Old Geeks nailed us months ago. And then last week we talked about how basically there was an article that just destroyed the Pono player as a player. There's a second article out, which I think is interesting.

The David Pogue article last week basically said that no one cares about high quality audio, which we all agree with. And we tested title the high quality streaming service as well and could, you know, nobody cares. This article specifically points out that you can't even tell the difference anyway, listening to the player.

So I like this article because this guy actually got it, did A-B testing, sat there, played through everything. And you cannot tell the difference at all. Yeah. And the one thing I was hoping they were going to do because they were trying to get all sciencey with it. Nobody's showing you waveforms. I'm like, OK, why don't you just plug your plug your iPhone into your computer, capture a waveform, then plug the Pono into your computer.

Capture a waveform and look at them and see if they are actually different at all. I'm sure they are slightly, but it's just not enough to make a difference. And speaking of not making a difference, Sony is now trying to sell you a quote unquote premium sound card, which is not which is it's a memory card.

That's it. It's just a memory card. Well, keep in mind that they introduced a twelve hundred dollar Walkman at the Consumer Electronics Show. Does it walk for you? Does it carry you from point A to point B and whistle you a fucking song? Because that's the only thing twelve hundred dollars is going to do for me for a Walkman. I'm sorry.

He's going to walk me from point A to point B. Yeah, this is I don't know what Sony is doing right now. Sony is having a lot of issues there. There's already talk that they're liquidating their TV division. They have this crazy ass Walkman. They have this one hundred and fifty five dollar card that does fuck all from what I can tell.

It's a it says premium sound on it. That's it. Yeah, it's stupid. So I'm saying if you if you take your take your Pono player, plug in one of these Sony's Sony cards and then take a monster cable and shove it up your ass, you've got like a full feedback loop of audiophile douchebaggery.

Says the guy that spends all his time at at the damn it Guitar Center. I've been to Guitar Center once and I bought that. I bought the cheapest, crappiest cables they had. And they work beautifully. Always do that. That's been proven a gazillion times. Everybody out there. Monster cables are worth absolutely nothing.

Absolutely. I mean, I've got nice microphone cables for the the XLR mics because those can actually make a little bit of difference. Yeah, but I mean, it's mostly the shielding on those. Yeah, yeah. But patch cables and stuff like that, they're fine. They don't do anything. They're great. So something that was great.

And I love this because I took your entire Lumosity experience and distilled it down into three months instead of a full year and came to the exact same conclusion. I got I was using Peak, the brain training app. My subscription is expiring next week, so I canceled it, deleted the app.

I'm like, yeah, it was fun. I got really good at playing those games. I was in the 98th percentile of all the peak users, which means nothing because they're just telling me. Although my friend sent me his and he's like ridiculously smarter than I am. And he was I mean, my little square was like tiny compared to his, you know, map of how smart he is.

I'm like, damn you. But yeah, it was it was fun. It was a fun experiment. I did not feel smarter. And I actually was changing the time of day when I would play the games until like I had it set for 10 a.m. And I'd get up and I'm like, OK, yeah, coffee, tea hasn't kicked in yet.

I'm not not at my peak. So I'd move it around till I'm like, OK, now I feel like I can play the games and score properly. So I was gaming the game to get a better score. And all in all, yeah, I just learned to play the games better. That's all. I think there's a value to these gamings that to Lumosity, to Peak, to all of this stuff in the same way that there's a value in reading or there's a value in watching Jeopardy or there's a value in doing crossword puzzles.

But I don't think that they do what they claim they can do. That's it. There is no neuroscience behind this. There is no this will make you smarter. It's you just you're you're working your brain out. That's it. Yeah, it's just a workout. That's it. And is it like are you actually working out or are you just, you know, doing jumping jacks and thinking that your legs are going to get whatever?

It doesn't matter. You're just farting around, Jason. Yes. And speaking of farting around, we're going to tee that right up for you. I appreciate that. See, you're getting better at this. I don't know. I don't know what these people on iTunes are saying. You're getting really good at this. Fartners, the social network for your ass.

I honestly thought it was a spoof, but it's a thing. It really is a thing where you can fart into your phone and then which means if I know that you have that app, I'm never going to borrow your phone. Yeah, well, come on. If you were a 12 year old boy and you had a cell phone, you would get this app.

Yeah, probably. There you go. You got to check out the commercial there. They're doing an Indiegogo campaign to get enough money to build an iPhone versions because it's Android only right now. And I still stand by the fact that Apple is never going to let a social network for your ass through the app store process.

This will not make it through the approval process. But the commercial, the commercial is pretty funny. So another thing that I found this week, which I just couldn't believe when I saw it, it's so simple. It is called fuck off as a service. Yeah. It's at foaas.com.

Links will be in the show notes. And it's an API that lets you put in parameters to a restful URL string. And then it comes back with a message that builds a nice fuck off message to the parameters in the string. Yes. I think it's funny as hell.

And you can send a link to somebody with their key in it. They need to marry this with a URL shortener so the people can't see the whole thing in the URL. If they marry this with a URL service, like a URL shortener service, it'd be perfect.

You can just send a fuck off link to anybody you like. It's quite enjoyable. It is. And just to close out, retweets. Retweets from people that I follow sometimes just get obnoxious. I've talked about this on the show before, and I just want to say it one more time.

When you're on Twitter, on the web version, there's a little, if you go to somebody's profile, there's a little sprocket for settings. You can just click that and turn off all the retweets from that person. You'll never see them again. But Jason, that's how we do social activism now. We retweet. I'm sorry, buddy.

But yeah, your retweets are turned off. Media Candy A couple weeks ago, we talked about the Amazon pilot season, and I talked about The Man in the High Castle and Cocked.

I liked them both quite a bit. Sadly, Cocked was not picked up. So no Jason Lee for me. But The Man in the High Castle was the most watched pilot of theirs of all time. And I think the Ridley Scott connection probably really helped there. You think?

But it went to show. So I think it's going to take a year for them to make it. But who cares? We're going to find out what happens to the Nazis. And I don't have to wait our wonder because I haven't watched it yet. So I'll watch it when it comes out. No, you won't, because you won't watch it until it gets to season two. That's no, I will not watch it until it gets to season three, Jason.

This is my very strict and I'm sticking with it. I call it my winter is coming rule because I started it with Game of Thrones. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We'll enlighten us, Brian, please. My rule is very simple. I have not watched Better Call Saul yet.

And this is where the argument started, because Jason posted the link in show notes about Better Call Saul, which I'm assuming you enjoy. It's an excellent little show. It's not as good as Breaking Bad, but it's in its infancy. And so far, it's very good.

And your point is that you're not going to watch anything until the studio has actually accepted it into the fold and is going to keep making more so you're not disappointed. Is that correct? Yes, I do not like to get into shows that I really enjoy that get canceled before they can wrap up a story or anything like that.

I've been burned on that too many times. So I've adopted my official winter is coming policy regarding TV shows. And my point is that no show will make it to two seasons if everybody adopts your dumbass policy, because then there's no numbers. There's no advertising. There's no reason to make a season two if nobody's watching season one or season three, if nobody's watching season one and two.

Well, tough shit. And here's my here's my here's my logical my logical point to this is your argument breaks down when you look at something like Deadwood. Deadwood made it to season three and it didn't make it to season four. So it's always going to be outliers, Jason.

Oh, come give me a break. Look, it's a very simple reason why I wait for this. It's you're afraid of you're afraid of disappointment. I'm also kind of fucking busy. So I got to pick and choose my TV shows. Simple. I don't like watching a ton of TV. I will watch the really, really good things.

Season one. I'm never going to watch a show in season one. It's just not going to happen because I have no guarantee that it's going to be around. Season two now is a ploy already for for all the networks because they'll announce before season one even aired, like with Better Call Saul, that it's been picked up for season two.

That's just another way to get the PR cycle going and get people to watch because they're like, oh, my gosh. Well, if they think it's so good, they've already picked it up for season two without airing season one, it's got to be good. So we'll watch it. So I call bullshit on that. So I wait until season three. When it gets picked up for a third season, that means that people are enjoying it.

People are watching it and it's good. And then I will go back and I will binge watch seasons one and two and catch up for season three. Winter is coming. I still don't. I still don't get your Game of Thrones parallel here. I don't. I don't. I started that with Game of Thrones. I didn't watch the first two seasons when it came around to season three.

I binge watched and caught up. And this has been serving me well for many shows. I did the same thing with Breaking Bad. I did it with a bunch of shows. And I have every reason to think that Better Call Saul is going to be really good. But I will wait and see because I don't want to get all wrapped up into it and then find out that it ends up getting canceled. OK, well, then you dodged a bullet with Constantine because it looks like that got canceled.

See, but it was still a good show. But here's the thing, though. I enjoyed the season that I watched. So it was still a good show. Now, what's the hell is this next show you got in here fresh off the boat? It's a new comedy on ABC, and it's actually extremely funny. And I'm breaking my rule on it by watching it.

But I don't feel so bad with it because it's a it's a situational comedy. It doesn't there's no plot or storylines that carry through. It doesn't matter. They could cancel it tomorrow. They're standalone little. It's a bit like the Big Bang Theory. Who cares? Do you need to watch them in order? No. You, sir, are a douchebag.

When it suits your purpose, you can come up with a way to make it work. But no, there was no way I was not going to be able to watch the show because my wife is from Chinese, is Chinese heritage. So and this is the first Asian American show that's been on TV since what's the standup comedian since Margaret Cho's show was on.

So and this one is specific to Chinese culture. And there was just no way it wasn't going to be watched in my household. And it's very fucking funny. See, I mean, it's a hypocrite, hypocrite. You're going to watch this crap, but you're not going to watch Better Call Saul, which is a it's Bob Odenkirk.

How can he not be funny? I will most likely be watching Better Call Saul in two years. I just I don't know. I have no idea how to handle you. I mean, you don't like the fifth element, which right there just negates all of your opinions whatsoever. So I don't know.

I don't know how we can keep doing this show. I don't know if the fifth element is just like Battlestar Galactica. It was absolutely awesome until the very end, at which point I wanted to crap all over the TV. So not right. So not right. So not right. OK, moving on. What else we got moving on? Dennis Miller and Adam Carolla have teamed up together to do a podcast called the P.O.

cast. A very clever har har har. Oh, before you keep going. That is the dumbest name you could possibly pick. If you ever want to get Googled, you cannot find it in Google because Google removes the apostrophe. So you are just searching for podcast. Yes, it is not a Googleable name, but the podcast itself isn't bad.

I've always been a big fan of Dennis Miller. Yes, I know he went like uber conservative, which he actually kind of did, but kind of didn't. If you listen to him, it's not as bad as it sounds. But his stand up was great. I loved him. I think he was the best weekend update guy on Saturday Night Live ever. And they do a podcast where they basically get on for 45 minutes a week and complain about things.

So they're obviously going to live forever, as we discussed earlier. It's not bad. OK, I mean, I agree with you on Dennis Miller on Saturday Night Live. He was definitely the best anchor, hands down. Otherwise, I can't stand him. I never thought he was funny. I just never thought he was funny. Yeah, this isn't a comedy podcast, really.

What I like about it is I've come around to having the same problem with Adam Carolla that that you have had for a long time, which is on his own podcast. He's just annoying and he's just angry all the time. And it's fun to have him paired with somebody who is actually really, really smart because he can't stomp all over Dennis Miller like the way he does with, say, Dr. Drew or anybody that's on his own podcast.

He actually is forced to listen to somebody else and shut up every now and then. So that's great. They're having problems with their timing because they're new to this and they're both, you know, they're both the big gorillas and you've got two lead guitarists, you know, Carolla's other big saying going at once.

So it's it's a bit shaky, but it sounds like it's going to go somewhere interesting. And again, Dennis Miller is very intelligent. So when Carolla just kind of does his gut, I'm pissed off thing, Miller will step in and give actual reasons and maybe even refute some of his things, which is nice to hear.

It's something nice to listen to. I would love to see somebody from the complete opposite spectrum be paired with one of these guys, preferably Dennis Miller, because he's a smarter one. Somebody like a Louis Black, who's also extremely pissed off, but extremely liberal. That would be a great podcast. That would be a fantastic podcast.

I would love to see Dennis Miller and Louis Black. Yeah. Carolla, that's you nailed it on the head. You know, you put Carolla with somebody that's intelligent and he can't keep up. Yeah. You know, and that's also who's the other guy that I don't like that's on HBO that you like? Bill Maher.

Bill Maher. Yeah. Bill Maher. His guests are a thousand times smarter than he is, but he just interrupts them and says his shtick. You know, that's why I can't watch his show. I'm glad that, you know, he's got that Carolla has somebody to kind of, you know, knock him down. But like I said, I don't I'm sick of Carolla.

I don't care for Dennis Miller. I think he is smart. But and I also think the problem that you're talking about with the timing is that they're not in the same room. Yeah. Yeah. And you can't get those visual cues. You and I have kind of worked this out over two years. We started off in the same room.

So we kind of learned the style. And now, you know, we don't talk over each other as much and, you know, respectful of the other person's opinions and then let them finish and then chime in. I don't think I don't think either of those guys are respectful of each other's opinions no matter what. So they're just going to stomp all over each other.

Well, there's definitely I mean, Carolla is definitely not Carolla just wants to shout and yell all the time and it gets really pissed off when he gets interrupted. Miller, he's been doing his own show without a host forever. So he's got to build up that timing. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that was one of the problems when I did my two podcasts last weekend was I was dealing with somebody who was a single host with a guest for, you know, a couple of years and then I come in and then it's like hard to get in there and get the timing right.

You know, when people get used to doing something their own way, it's really hard to kind of adjust on the fly like that. So I don't know. I'm not going to listen to the show. If you like it, rock on, you know, I'm sure some of our other listeners will like it that like Adam Carolla, but it's just not my cup of tea. I listened to half of one episode and I totally you hit it like right on the head with them talking over each other.

And yeah, it was it was interesting, but not not my thing. We'll see if they're still around in a couple of months. And at that point, I think they'll either have it nailed down or they'll just say we can't work with each other. It's going to go one way or the other. I finally got to see the Kraftwerk pop art documentary that you talked about a couple of weeks ago that the BBC did.

They took it down or it was behind the BBC's kind of geolocation wall for a while. And I was too lazy to figure out a way to go around it and see it. But it is reappeared on the tube of the U. We have the link in the show notes. I would get on that quick because who knows how long it'll stay up there. It's really good.

But that one you really have to do. You have to be a fan of Kraftwerk to really like it, though. There's no doubt about it. But while I was Googling around to try to find it, I found a longer, much more in-depth exploration of the entire electronic scene also on YouTube, Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution.

That was fascinating. I highly recommend people watch that if they are at all into dance and electronic music. Yeah, cool. Thanks for the YouTube link. I still want to watch the Kraftwerk thing. I've just been busy all week. I like them, but I wasn't a huge fan. The other one sounds better to me with the Kraftwerk and Electronic Revolution.

That actually sounds more interesting than just a show about Kraftwerk. So, yeah, I would go ahead and skip the pop art thing then. That's really if you're a fan of Kraftwerk, you're going to really enjoy it. But if you want to kind of more in-depth exploration of the entire scene, go watch the other one. Just skip the pop art one. OK, cool.

Thanks. Thanks for the tip on that one. No problem. Now, I listen to I mean, you know, my podcast listening habits are pretty epic, but I have been paring them down because I just don't have time and I'm trying to be more, quote unquote, productive and stay off Facebook and all this other stuff.

But I found a show called Inquisitive a couple of months ago. And it's this guy, Mike Hurley. He's been around for a while and he's working for this new company called Relay FM, which I think is his. He started anyway. Does he really spell his name, Mike, with a Y? He's British. It's apparently a Britishism.

He lives in London, does his stuff there. A lot of the shows on that network are very Apple specific, you know, and I honestly, I have killed almost every single podcast that talks about Apple. I am sick to fucking death of white dudes in a closet talking about Apple.

I just don't care. I don't care. That's you, man. It used to be. I'm just I'm like, OK, you know what? It's going to come out. I'm going to buy it, whatever. I don't care about speculation. I don't care about what the market's doing. Well, I do care about what the market's doing because I got the stock, but different story.

Anyway, he took his normal show, which was an interview show, kind of, and turned it into an NPR style look into the beginnings of the app ecosystem and how it all started from the introduction of the iPhone. And it's going to be like a six or seven part series.

And he did it, you know, NPR style. So there's breaks with boring music and then there's the kind of voiceover. And then you can tell that they're in a cafe somewhere while the people are talking because you hear like silverware clanking and stuff like that. Exactly. I love that shit.

He totally, you know, just he stole the playbook. He had he had the Edward Snowden of NPR give him all the playbook on how to do this. For the second segment, make sure you're in a cafe. For the third segment, make sure you can hear a car going by in the background. Yeah. And then we have a little bit of music and then a little exposition.

Then we go back to a different interview. He interviewed a bunch of really cool guys that are in that. There's a little brat pack of Apple nerds like Marco Arment and just the standard crew that does all of these podcasts that everybody wants to, you know, love.

But I'm just tired of. Anyway, this was an actually entertaining episode. It's a inquisitive number 27 called Behind the App. Good name. I like it. It was a great little show. I can't wait to listen to the rest of them and then unsubscribe from the podcast if he goes back to the old format.

If he sticks with the format, I'll stay with it. It was good. It was it was really good. And as much as I rail on the NPR format, I liked it. Look, there's a reason it works. Yeah, there is. Honestly. Yeah. It's good storytelling. And I like to make fun of it, but it works. It does. And in speaking of good storytelling, 99 percent invisible, which I pushed back on for a long time because I thought it was going to be another one of those NPR style shows.

And it is it comes out of Radiotopia. The one this week is episode 153 game over. And it's a it's you know, they're short. They're like 17 minutes, 17, 18, 19 minutes in that in that range. This is about the death of Sims online and about the culture around the people that made up that community and and literally documenting the the ending of the game when it's turned off.

And even now I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it. It was such a good episode that me and my friend Veronica Belmont were tweeting back and forth about how awesome it was. And then the guy who does it, Roman Mars, nice guy, you know, tweeted to us, too. It was fun. And honestly, that was the best podcast I've listened to this month.

Besides, besides ours, of course. So it goes without saying. Yeah. If even if you're not into video games, it's a great listen. But it's it tugs at the heartstrings on, you know, these people that get invested in a game and then it goes away invariably unless it's Warcraft, which will never die.

But yeah, even even listening to this, I was thinking about all my friends that I made in Warcraft back in the day in my old guilds and the we know guild, you know, we had tons of friends there and I'm still friends with them in real life and I've still never met them. You know, I'll I'll actually get on the phone with people that I met in Warcraft and we'll have, you know, long conversations.

So it's a real thing and it was a really good episode. All right. I mean, I've never done that, so I know nothing about it, but I can get it. I mean, I understand how that could suck because you you invest all this time and you make all these connections and then all of a sudden somebody pulls the plug on it.

Winter's coming rule, people. Douchebag. And the thing about well, I mean, that was online for a while, but the thing is, it's like when you're talking about these relationships, you're actually going through real life strife together. Like if you go on a raid and you're killing dragons and things like that and people die and it's it's intense.

So you build up these intense kind of emotional connections to the people that you're going through this through, even though it's completely unreal. It's not real at all, you know? Yeah. And so you do get these crazy emotional bonds. That's why I really, really dug this episode. I still haven't gotten over Ella.

Hello. Oh, fancy. Fancy. Oh, fancy. I have spent the better part of my life searching for the perfect wallet as a kid. That's kind of sad.

Hey, it's something that what do you mean? Sad. This is talk about one of the items that you always have with you. This is like a bed. You spend your money on the bed because you spend so many hours with it. You carry them every day, all the time. No, no, no. It's always with you. I was not talking about the, I was just sad that you haven't found one yet.

So I'm happy now. Have you found the perfect wallet? I think I might have. Ran across this link, this place called Distill Union, which is a Southern Carolina startup that has made a wallet called the Wally Bifold. It is the slimmest wallet I have ever seen.

It actually takes a new approach to how to store the cards and things that you need and take up as little space as possible, which is exactly what I want. I want an almost non-existent wallet that I can barely feel in my pocket and leaves no discernible mark, especially now that we have to carry so many other things with us all the time, like our big ass phones that keep getting bigger.

Okay, that's cool. I'm, I'm, I'm glad, glad you tried it or you will try it, right? It's not out yet. It is. No, you can order it now. It is out. I have not placed the order yet, but I've had put it in my wishlist. The problem is I just recently bought a wallet and I feel like I shouldn't get a new one until this one starts to crap out on me.

Oh no, no, no, that's just get rid of it. Get the new one. Pull the trigger. Well, yeah. I mean, if you're, you're putting your faith in this wallet will be the one. And if you don't have faith that it really, truly, honestly is going to be the one, then you're just wasting time. It's like, it's like a bad girlfriend. You know, you've got the hot model over here waiting to go out on a date and you're going out with, you know, the, the, the passable girlfriend, but hoping that she's going to turn around now dump her and just go, go with a hot one.

Jason just cut the best joke I've ever made in my life. Well, you're trying to get me shivved here. Okay. All right. It might've gotten you in trouble, but it was fucking funny. It was fucking funny. I'm sorry. All right. Now stop laughing and do your bit. No, I, I found my perfect wallet. Like when I was in my teens, it's just a leather three pocket biker wallet.

It was back in the day. It was a chain wallet. I started wearing it when I went to Europe and I didn't want to get pickpocketed. I am now, you know, in my forties, I took the chain off because thank God, once you hit your forties, if you have a chain wallet, it's just kind of sad, you know, just nobody's going to steal my stuff period.

But it's chain wallets. Okay. The funniest thing that ever happened regarding a chain wallet in my life is I was at a Dodgers game with a friend who we, I've always made fun of his chain wallet because he's had it forever. And he got caught up in the chair and basically tried to get up and ripped his, it dropped his beer.

Everything fell down. He fell back into the thing and we've never forgotten about it. Chain wallets are for douches. Well, they're fine when you're young and, or if you're in a biker gang, if you're in Sons of Anarchy, fine, whatever, who cares? It's a fashion statement. But for me in my forties and I have had that exact same thing happen to me.

Here's the difference though. When it happened to me, I was at the Pantages theater watching Wicked. So it, and I'm like, why do I have a chain wallet? I've been a Broadway musical. What kind of moron? Wow. You made it even less cool. Oh no, it was so uncool. I'm just like, no, this is, this is not working for me.

I'm just not that guy anymore. I don't need a chain. I'm not going to use it in a fist fight. I'm not going to wrap it around my hand to beat up some assailant. No, it's time, time to cut the chain loose. But anyway, the, the, the wallet itself, it's, it's very long.

So things don't stack, you know, highly. That's, that's the difference in the, you know, where the leather design from the old days comes into play. Whereas the new design that you're looking at is, is, is clever. And let me know how it works. And I want to know if there are magnets in it, because in the video, it looks like it snaps closed with like, I mean, you know, some neodymium magnets.

Right. Yeah, it does look like it does. So, um, I'm, I'll place the order today. So hopefully we'll be talking about it next week. And I apologize for cutting your joke, but you're going to get me killed. Come on, dude. That was good though. Closing shout outs.

Gong He Fat Choi. It is the lunar new year. And I celebrated it last night by eating a shit ton of very delicious food. So I just want to wish a happy new year to the people that, uh, that celebrate it since it's not just Asians anymore. And it is the, it's the year of the sheep, right?

It is the year of the sheep and or goat, depending on translations and very specific, uh, areas in the world. Um, for instance, uh, there, speaking of NPR, there was a great NPR piece where they went around and like, they talked about how in Vietnam, it's definitely just, it's a ram because they don't have it and it went really in depth into it.

So there's a lot of, uh, it's something in the sheep, ram slash goat area. It is sheep slash ram slash goat related. Okay. That's good to know. I like that. Okay. Yeah. You put a very disturbing clip that we're going to have in the show notes.

Uh, I, I, I had to put a palate cleanser in there. So, uh, anyway, I, I've got no shout outs this week. Uh, thanks for stopping by. That's all I got to say. And go buy your tinfoil because you're going to need your tinfoil hats and your grumpy old geek splendor.

Absolutely. And if you get a chance, tell a friend about the show or leave us a comment on iTunes or send us some money. Even if you feel like it, that'd be nice. That would be. It's been a long time since anybody did that. That's been a little bit. Maybe we should get that Patreon page up and running. Patreon.

I know a lot of people that are killing their Patreon pages because it's embarrassing when they're making $4 a month. Yeah. That's the problem, right? Yeah. You got to get over that, that hurdle. Yeah. I don't think we will. I don't think we will either. All right, man. I'll talk to you next week. Talk to you next week.

Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan supported show. If you'd like to help keep the lights on, you can donate at grumpy old geeks.com. $10 or more. We'll get you a copy of our official soundtrack provided by the band. Among Us, who you can find on iTunes and Spotify. On social media, you can find us at facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks or twitter.com slash GOG podcast.

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Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpy old geeks.com slash 97. I'm fucking cutting that. I'm fucking cutting that. I am not putting that in the fucking show. How could I resist, man?

Ah, yes. Cutting my best jokes. You better fucking put that in as a drop.

This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean.

The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and nonstop action. The lineup reveals coming soon.

Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place.

Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead. With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.