 Hello everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody. Just hanging out. I got to work on some top fives that I'm shooting later today with Roger. So I need to go over them, do some final tweaks. Figured I'd do that with y'all while you guys work. I'm Tom here from Daily Tech News Show here on the top five kitchen gadgets. Whether you enjoy cooking or not, we can all agree that anything that can take some of the work out of making, hey Zoe, anything that takes some of the work out of making a good tasting meal of beverage is a good thing to make your next dish delish. We came up with the top five kitchen gadgets that you need every cook's arsenal. Smart meat and smart oven thermometer. Bio-Cow, F-R-E-D, good to see y'all. Whether you're BBQing, baking, roasting or broiling the key to any good result is temperature control. Control that temp. A good smart meat or oven thermometer. Up to the second accurate information can let you know when to turn down the temp or roast. Coming in at number four, digital kitchen scale. Hey, sun bun. Digital kitchen scales are more precise than analog scales. And some models let you convert, measure everything in a single bowl. Just reset the scale to zero after you. Up to number three, immersion or handheld blender. Bloody Mary's pasta, sauce, the soup, smoothies and milkshakes. Handheld or immersion blenders are a great way to mix things without the need to use a bulky blender. You can even use them directly in bowls, pots and cups. Speeds up cleaning. So heading in at number two, instant multi pot, multi cooker. Instant pot is the brand name for range of cooking appliances. That is part pressure cooker, part slow cooker. Basically you could put one pot that includes roast, stew, soups, pasta, rice porridge and yogurt, plus it has a posse. Countertop smart ovens. They take up less space than a traditional oven and depending on what model you pick, you can bake roast, boil, toast, microwave, steam and air fry food. Some models automatically use the best method to cook a dish based on what you enter in its companion app. I am not one of the unlucky ones who lost their Google drive. Hope you aren't either. Cooking is getting easier thanks to these kitchen tech advancement. Think we missed them? Download. I'm Tom Emmer from Daily Tech's News Show. Ah, it's that lovely time of year when we all make predictions about what will happen next year. I feel good about these. Let's dive right into my top five tech predictions for 2024. Predictions for 2024. Number five, quantum computing starts being actually useful in some industries, drug discovery, genome sequencing, cryptography, meteorology, material science. It's been coming for decades, but lots of smart folks feel like the momentum is finally reaching usefulness. Ah, support RCS in USBC. Good one, Cliff Singer. Hey, Web of Magic. Coming in at number four, generative AI becomes boring. 2023 was the year of fear and awe of large language models. 24 would be the year of accepting their limitations, getting used to using them for the things they actually do well. Up to number three, cyber resilience because of the buzzword emphasizing not just security, but contingency plans. Every company professes to take cyber security seriously now, so the next step is to show you're prepared to weather future attacks. Sliding in at number two, the beginning of the end of passwords is past keys gain momentum. 2023 was about implementing past key in the infrastructure like browsers and operating systems. 2024 will be about big services supporting it, educating the public, making it common. At number one, mixed reality and augmented reality in the workplace. Apple will enter the augmented reality space, bringing with it all the attention, let's call that mixed. All the attention Apple brings to its product spaces and all the people who've been using it for Meta and others will finally have people listen to them about what it's good for. All right, there are my gambles. What about yours? Make your predictions in the comments. 2023 is almost over. Time to survey the year in tech news and name the biggest stories. I don't know why we like to look back on the year and name the biggest stories, but we do inevitably some big story breaks in January and forget all about them, but maybe that's why. Maybe we want one last chance to remember. Here are my top five biggest tech stories of 2023. Number five, Twitter becomes X. Love it or hate it, can't deny, people talk about it. I lost count of how many times people abandoned Twitter and or X only to see it continue to plot along. Can't imagine it'll be as big a story in 2024, right? Right. I mean, at number four, Microsoft acquiring Activision, Blizzard, the drama, the court cases, the revelations, the fact that the UK of all places was the deciding factor. And now Call of Duty and World of Warcraft are Microsoft properties. Maybe I'll take of all places. I don't mean it to sound disparaging. It only took years. Up to number three, the EU DSA and DMA acts. Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act are the EU's attempt, I guess those should be capitalized, to rein in big tech and rein in they are. Meta, Apple, Alphabet and Amazon have all contested various decisions that require them to modify their practices in order to assure it open playing field. This one will echo well into 2024. Sliding at number two, the Generative AI Wars, ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, Bard, Claude and more. When ChatGPT launched at the end of November 2022, I don't think anybody, including anybody at OpenAI expected to become the dominant story of 2023. Certainly they didn't expect it to cause panic at Google, but it did both those things. And it's changed the way people think about work already. At number one, Sam Altman getting fired, just skating in under the wire as OpenAI's board, deciding to try to get rid of Sam Altman, turns out the guy's pretty popular. And OpenAI's biggest partner, Microsoft, thinks he's great too, as well as indispensable. It was definitely the Game of Thrones moment of the year. Lots of other big stories. What do you think was the biggest? Let us know. Oh, with old my bacon. Do I have kitchen tech tech stories? Predictions. Only tech support tips. Didn't have that one. No, I was missing one, cause I should have five. I know, Cliff Singer. I, it, holiday is a chance to get together with your family, eat, share gifts, catch up on gossip and tech support their PCs, laptops and smartphones. It's easy to do when you're physically there, but what do you do for the rest of the year when you're away? We made a list of the top five tips to help you tech support family. It's easier. Number five, a password manager. Common tech support problem as a family member having trouble logging into a website. Forgot their password login or left the caps lock key on. Whatever the issue, a password manager goes a long way to, they store passwords in an encrypted container ensuring safety while offering convenience. You can even share passwords just in case. Coming in for a delegating email. Delegating email means a family member is allowed you to access, you access, but you don't have their account. Delegating email means you can read, send and delete email messages, but you can't make changes to their accounts like the password. This is useful if you have a family member that might need more help with their emails. Up to number three, external hard drive. And hey, Clinton, what's up? Large external hard drive in connection with their PC or Mac's automated backup function will come in handy in the event of OS corruption or data loss, shared cloud storage, securely storing share files, FaceTime or Google Meet. Sometimes there's a tech problem with no phone call or chat messages can add a good face-to-face. So you can see what you're dealing with when you can't drive or fly to a family member's house. A video call can be the next best thing. They can show you what the problem is and you can help them sort it out. We're on a desktop. InkText for family members is huge, is a lot. But these tools can help you make that task easier and less stressful. And if you have a family tech support suggestion, need either. Share your family tech support suggestions. Four down, four to go. How's that mastodon feed looking? Let's take a trip back in time to the 90s. 1990s were full of software for me. I had to choose carefully though because things weren't free back then. There was shareware, but no open source. So our producer Joe suggested I count down some of my essential pieces of software that helped me make the most of my IBM PS2 3286 and Packard Bell DX. Here are my top five software for the 1990s. Number five, Word Perfect by Corel. I was very obstinately in my 20s so I plopped down the money to buy Word Perfect. And I tried to use it too, mostly I did. Though I still did use my Word 5.0 for DOS sometimes. Coming in at number four, Netscape Communicator. Well, Netscape Navigator first of course, but as soon as Communicator came out, it was my stalwart. I had built-in page editor so I could open any web page into the editor and see how the HTML saved the page with edits of my own. Even make. It taught me HTML. And I used its email client too. I even used its successor CMunkey before finally switching to that new fangled other air Firefox. Let's make that successor. Up to number three, Adobe Page Mill. Well, Netscape Composer and Communicator was good. I got to where I wanted something a little more WYSIWYG. So I headed down to Computer City and picked up a copy of Adobe Page Mill. I think he used it well into the 2000s. Not the 200s. Sliding in at number two, Quicken. From 1997 until well now, I have used Quicken to organize my finances. It's a much different program these days, but I really haven't found an equivalent I like. Plus it keeps my data local. And number one, AIM ICQ. Uh-oh, uh-oh. To be honest, I was only ICQ for most of the 1990s, but I did jump on the AIM train when AOL integrated it into Netscape. And it was the way to keep in touch, even if I derided them both as unnecessary compared to email. That was a punk. There was also real player WinApp, WizFTP, Udora, Encarta, auto-exec bat, sound blaster. What 1990s software would you add to the list? Let us know. Want more great tech news? Go find it. A Daily Tech News Show. Ah yeah, PaintShop Pro. I almost put that one on the list too. Failure, tech failure. You fail, fail, fail. No one likes to dwell on failure. What am I talking about? Everyone likes to dwell on failure as long as it's somebody else's. And nobody more than the tech community. So I asked the internet. Internet, one of the biggest tech failures of 2023. Here's what I found. Number five, Cruise. They started out the year so well. They were providing driverless taxi service. The dream was real, but then this happened. And this, and especially this. And that caused California to pull their license to operate without a safety driver, which in turn caused Cruise to pull toll fleet. Bad year. Coming in at number four, OpenAI fires Sam Altman. Someone thought it was a good idea to fire the world's hottest CEO who was almost universally loved by his employees and not tell your majority investor until minutes before the announcement. That ended up causing almost the whole company to threaten to quit and go work for Microsoft, which had said it would gladly hire them. Fire fail. Up to number three, hiring Sam. No, I'm just kidding. Silicon Valley Bank. This one doesn't feel bad as bad now as it did then, but when Silicon Valley Bank went under on March 12th, it threatened the entire tech startup landscape and brought up awful comparisons to the 1930s. It's now a division of first citizens, but not before suffering a bank run and insolvency. Sliding in at number two, Twitter. Depending on your perspective, there are all kinds of ways to see this as a failure. The majority opinion on X and threads was that it was a failure of operations by its opinion of the people who talked, who posted to me on X and threads was that it was a failure of operations by its new owner. Some noted, however, that Twitter failed and now under its new name X can succeed. Others noted the failure of people to call it Twitter or even for all of X to have changed all references to Twitter. See, plenty of failure to go around. Here you go, Fretty. At number one, NFTs. Maybe it's too harsh to call them a failure. Some people are still collecting them, but they failed to achieve the glorious heights people predicted for them. And folks are now just bored of board apes and such. Look for them to make a comeback under another name someday, maybe. There were so many inventive dominations that didn't make this list. Many think of AI as a failure, which I found odd, given just how many people are using chatGPT. Among other ideas were the MGM hack, Russia's crash in the moon, cryptocurrency itself, we work so many more. What's your top tech failure of the year? Let us know. Good job. Good guess. It's a pretty obvious guess, but still a good guess. Cause it should. Smartphones are great. They're an indispensable part of modern life and they have almost everything you need pre-installed right out of the box. But to improve the security functionality and usability of your phone, you'll wanna make sure you have additional apps installed from get go. Here are the top five smartphone apps you need. A web browser. The default browser pre-installed in your phone is great. Why should you use an alternative browser? One word, privacy. If you don't want anyone tracking your web surfing activity, consider a third-party browser. Alternatives like DuckDuckGo, which has nifty one-touch clear all tabs in data mode, or Brave with its ad blocking engine. What's the Firefox one called? I'm gonna add that. Payments app. If you wanna use your phone to pay for things, you need to have the right payments app installed. If you don't use Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Samsung Pay, you'll need to make sure you have Venmo, Paypal, Zell, or whatever service you use before. Up to number three, VPN app. Data privacy also means using a data network you trust. If you're roaming or using public Wi-Fi and want some extra security, get a trusted VPN service and download their app. Sliding number two, password manager. Two-factor authentication is crucial. An authenticator app gives you a limited time code that you enter into your login. That code typically expires 90 seconds after it's issued. Smartphones are only as good as the apps you have installed on them, and remember to keep them updated. Is there an app you think should be included? What's your must-have app? Let us know. Let us know. You know, some of the ones that say they require a certain one, don't. I have discovered this. Now, some do. That's not always true, but that's a good point. You wanna be the most secure. Don't use an app. Just turn the phone off. Want to build a PC? You need these tools. Building your own PC is a rewarding experience, but you need to make sure you have the right tools. So, Roger put together a list of must-have tools, built many a PC in his time. Let's count them down. Bye, BioCal. Yeah, and you can't take the battery out of a bunch of new news. Number five, telescopic magnetic pickup tool. Because so much of a PC is put together with tiny steel screws, you know. Sliding in at number four, screw tray. Did I mention that PCs are held together with tiny little screws? When you're installing or replacing a component, you're going to have a lot of screws lying around. Screw tray doesn't have to be a purpose-built tool. Any small dish or container will work to keep those little pieces from getting lost. Coming in at number three, anti-static mat and wristband. Static electricity is the bane of people's hair and the health of your PC. Large enough charge can damage the sensitive electronics on motherboards, hard drives, and expansion cards. An anti-static mat and wristband will help discharge any static charge. Up to number two, flashlight. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. The inside of a PC case is often dark and it can be, flashlight helps illuminate. Shut some light on the problem. Instead of getting a goose necklight or a head flashlight as they'll free up your hands to hold and position tools. Number one, multi-bit screwdriver. A multi-bit screwdriver is just like a regular... I want to be successful, you need the right tools. Do you think we missed a must-have tool? Thanks y'all, that was nice having you along for that. I usually am talking to myself while I do this bit. Bit, get it, bit. And you got a little preview. I just need to upload these to my finished top five edits and uploaded to the prompter. To the prompter. The essential app is the flashlight app. What else is up? We got Patrick Norton coming on the show today. He's gonna tell us about tech for long drives in case you're doing a drive for the holidays. That's mostly like mapping resources, weather stuff. Makes sense. Helps you with the tech you need for any long winter drives you have coming up. Plus, new chips from Amazon? Why you won't? And why your hand will be your employee badge soon. Well, either my chat crashed or you all went silent. I feel like I wasn't getting all of the chat messages too because I saw people saying things to each other that I was not seeing in the... Oh, Clinton's still there. Okay, just drinking coffee. So it's still okay. Good, all right. Coffee sounds good. I've had two mugs already. That's probably enough. Oh, okay. Did y'all get the substack? I don't know if you subscribed to the substack. It's me going on about how the internet doesn't harm your mental health. Maybe you don't wanna hear it. Oh, cool. Why the magic? Let me know what you think. Zoe brings bacon. But really, really what she brings most often is coffee. Bacon is just the highest value item. Not the most frequent item. Oh, good. Thanks. Well, I should probably take out the trash. That's literally what I'm gonna go do right now. Cause it's trash day, yay. Most volume. There you go. That's a good way of putting it. Thanks, y'all. Good hanging out with you. Tour of my hat collection is a great idea, Zoe. I do have to take out the trash though and then get ready for the show. But remember that next time I'm like looking around for something to do, bring that up. Cause yeah, oh boy. I don't know if we can do it all in one go either. Yeah, son bun. You too. All right. Talk to you guys in a bit.