 finishes. Aaron and I were just breaking big news about a new product coming to CES. You'll have to check our audio feed in the Patreon if you missed it. Yeah, would you like to cut your own hair and all you would need is the device and the vacuum cleaner? What are you talking about? A flowbie. No, that's not what we are talking about. I know, I'm kidding. Maybe that's another function of the perhaps printing dog. Yeah, that's a printing dog flown by drone and cut your hair. Yeah. Is it raining? What are the strange sounds I'm hearing? Rain or dirt falling on your roof from the next door? No, it doesn't rain out here. That's that's what's odd. Someone's got a hose on the house. No, I actually think it's raining. You're in Dust Bowl 2017 coming up. Oh man, although it rained pretty good last weekend. So I guess we're going a little bit more. That works. Yeah, totally need it. Roger moved down here and suddenly it started raining regularly. Yeah, I brought the gloom. Someone else brought the much needed precipitation. That was the answer to all of California's problems with Roger. Roger Chang, rain dancer. Well, I just moved from one end of the state to the other. So I mean, all the rain. Tilted the rain down. All the water down here comes from up north anyway. So we had like a tornado watch on Saturday night that was pretty wild. Like I was I was driving to a friend's Christmas party and gosh, there was some touch and go moments there. Was that in Kentucky or in Tennessee? Kentucky. Yeah. So yeah, it's a little late in the year for tornado warning. Yeah, normally I'm trying to think of when we get them. I guess sometime around spring, at least that's that's how it's been in Nashville, but with all the fluctuations and weather like we had one day. I think I'm trying to think of what it was. I think it was like Saturday was in the 60s and then Sunday dipped down in the 20s again and so you get all kinds of, you know, tornadic activity. Wow, tornadic. That's what the local weather people say. I like that. Do the local people say I'm I'm I'm fixing to but they're going to do something. It depends on how folks see their trying to be, you know, some people lay it on a little bit thicker out there and they'll be, you know, like, tell you what, you know, this this weather is making me more nervous than a long tailed cat in a ruble of rapid chairs. Can't dance too wet to plow might as well. All right, let's get going. You guys ready? Yes. Here we go. Daily Tech News show is powered by its audience, not outside organizations. To find out more, head to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, December 21st, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt. Thanks for joining us. Scott Johnson alongside on a Wednesday. Scott, are you doing are you faring well? Yeah, I got Christmas coming up. We got five inches of snow today. I don't know what else you could ask for really. Five inches of snow. Wow, we don't we don't have that. It started to like lightly rain just now before the show. And I freaked out the difference between the places we live. I think your light rain transforms itself into thick, fluffy snow before. So thanks for that. Apparently ends up becoming tornadoes by the time it gets to our guest, Aaron Carson's area of the country. How are you doing, Aaron? I'm still alive. I haven't blown away yet. So I'm very glad to hear that. Aaron wrote a really good article a couple of weeks ago on CNET about her grandpa Ray and his technology use as he was in his 90s. And we're going to talk about that a little later on, as well as just the general idea of, hey, you know what? You don't have to stop using technology. And in fact, a lot of people as they age, don't stop using technology. So, Erin, thanks for really willing to come on and share more about that. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Let's get into our top stories. Nintendo announced 40 million people have downloaded Super Mario Run and its first four days available. Nintendo did not release how many people have paid to unlock the game. You get the first three levels for free and then you have to pay. Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing, Phil Schiller, said that Super Mario Run has broken a record for App Store downloads during those first days of availability. Nintendo updated the app also to allow players to use the Toad Rally Racing feature against friends without needing the in-game tickets that you earn. A lot of people, or at least Forbes, was complaining that you also have limits on how many times you can race a friend in a day. And they were wondering why that would be, Scott. I have a theory about all of that. And so two things I wanted to mention. One is it also appears to have made a lot of money with those $10 purchases, given the fact that it leaped to number one in top-grossing apps so quickly. I think that's a good indicator that a good percentage of those 40 million people shelled out the $10 to see their favorite plumber run to the right. At that being said, I think that this game, probably in its earliest incarnation or earliest development period, started out as a more traditional mobile free-to-play experience. There have even been quotes released from Nintendo executives at the time that made the announcement that we're going to be doing things on mobile and even suggested weird ideas like, what if you paid a dollar and Mario could jump a little higher? And at the time, people were kind of horrified by those comments. A lot has changed since then. That market is kind of, I don't know, evened out. And I think Nintendo saw themselves as perhaps not the best choice as a maker to go free to play with this. I think they thought they might get a lot more backlash with that kind of thing. But I think the game was developed originally or had at least started with a lot of that in mind. And so there's a lot of grinding in the game, a lot of things that happened in the game that typically you would look at and go, oh, I can either wait for this or I can pay to boost it. And there's no paying to boost it, which on the one hand, I really like. And on the other hand, it feels like maybe some of that stuff was baked in. So I think that's where a lot of the confusion slash frustration slash whatever is coming from overall, I think it's pretty fun. I have a good time with it. I mean, it's no it's no flagship Mario game, but it's no crappy runner either. I think it's pretty good. Aaron, where do you stand on this? Our foremost national issue. So for your own. Yeah, I'm one of the people who downloaded it. I think for, you know, I mean, for so many people, it's it's got this sort of the nostalgia tentacles just in you. You know, yeah, it's it's been fun. I mean, I've I didn't play a whole lot of video games as a kid. But for this, at least for me, I was sort of like fairly to quickly figure it out and jump in. And I don't know how long I'll keep playing it, but for now it's it's fun. It be it for about a week after it launched, it became my default game that I would go to when I had a little time to kill one of the problems with it. And I don't think this is a diss on the game is that it's less interruptible than other games. So I would get, you know, I'd be at the vet waiting to pick up a prescription for my dog and I'd be in a game and the prescription would come. And I'd be like, oh, I guess I'm just losing this level. You know, but it's easy to start over again. Sure. Then people have been frustrated about the online all the time thing. And they say that was for piracy reasons. But I'm still just semi convinced that this was originally going to be a microtransaction laden project as often as it definitely feels like it. Yeah, somebody walked in the room and said, we're Nintendo. We can't do that. And something changed. I think it may have hurt the game weirdly, even though this is something I didn't want. So I wonder if they can redesign it as they go to be less like that. And I also think if they just made it available for $10 with a free trial, which you can do in the app store, I think it totally can. I mean, you that messaging is also weird because you download it for free. And then there's this thing at the bottom that says buy now and you hit that and it says past 10 bucks and you get a bunch of levels. And it's not very clear what that means that this is sort of like almost like a demo or a trial. So there's a lot of messaging problems there with it, but they can build it out. I think it's got a lot of charm. There's possibilities here. Whether they're going to do much more development, who knows. But I still say the big hit for them for Nintendo on mobile is going to end up being their Animal Crossing mobile game, which is in the works. Nobody knows anything about it, except I think the potential for a mobile, a more mobile kind of experience and retaining your Nintendo kind of experience should that should be the ticket, I think, at least I hope so. Twitter, CTO Adam Messenger told, or excuse me, in a VP of product, Josh McFarlane, they both announced a big announcement. They're leaving Twitter. They're leaving the company. This follows the departure of Twitter, COO Adam Bain. Last month, after the reshuffling, the heads of product design and engineering will reportedly report directly to CEO Jack Dorsey. VP of engineering, Edward Ho will move to VP of product and also report directly to the Dorsey. So big changes, big rumblings, big stuff going on over there at Twitter. Yeah, this is unsettling. When you see all of the other reports of Twitter growth stagnating and monetization stagnating and conflicts of direction, whether they should be acquired or not. So I can't tell if this is a ship with people leaving. I don't want to call anyone a rat, but, you know, the metaphor is out there, if you understand. Or whether it's Dorsey reshaking things up. Like he sort of won the fight against selling the company. And maybe he is now winning a fight of bringing in different people to run the departments. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's been interesting to watch all these shake ups at Twitter because there's also this conversation that goes along with it about, you know, what is Twitter? What will it be? What should it be? And so when you have the perception that the top levels are very unstable, it makes you wonder how quickly or if at all, Twitter will be able to define what exactly it is going forward, you know? Everyone agrees it needs that focus. And the question is, will it get that focus? And does Dorsey have enough time to impart that focus and not have to micromanage to do it, you know? You know, I wonder too, it's been a lot of talk lately how when you've got enough followers or you have enough of a following both on Twitter and outside of Twitter and you can go on there and say certain things. And again, I'm not trying to bring politics into this. But if I was able, if I had enough power on Twitter to say, boy, I think Nintendo really blew it with with this Super Mario run. And then their stock went down as a result of my tweet. That's a whole new wrinkle that I don't think people have been thinking about for maybe even since the inception of the service. No one ever thought that these short 140 character messages could carry enough impact to affect world markets or to affect the way something happens or the way people react to things and in major ways. And so I wonder if there isn't just an internal shakeup to try to understand and harness what their responsibility is. How much of they how much of it they should shoulder, how much of it they shouldn't, if any, like there's a lot of philosophical questions about what is Twitter in a sort of peak Twitter time where where it's it's a it's not only a known quantity, but it's in some cases the number one news source for for breaking news somewhere or another impact is out of proportion to its use. There you go. It's a great way to say that. And that's that to me is the most interesting part of this moving forward. I don't know what that really means for what they're doing right now, why these people would go or what Dorsey has in mind. But I think it's going to be interesting to see them try to answer and address those questions. Now, you may be forgiven for thinking that the patent wars are over that the Samsung Apple Supreme Court decision was sort of the last dying embers of that. But it is not Tuesday, Apple filed an antitrust lawsuit in California against Acacia Research and conversant intellectual property management, accusing them of colluding with Nokia to extract and extort exorbitant revenues unfairly and anti competitively about 12 or so cases are cited as examples. And they usually involve patents that Nokia transferred to these two companies. Apple and Nokia settled a cross licensing agreement in 2011. And patents not covered by that agreement were assumed by Apple to be covered by an industry interoperability standards agreement that you'll often hear called franned. It stands for fair, reasonable and non discriminatory. Apple thought we've settled with Nokia on on the arguable ones. The rest are things that you just need to run phones. And we've all agreed to license those at fair terms to each other. So they're saying Nokia is not doing that. They're transferring it to these other companies and then suing us. Wednesday, Nokia filed lawsuits in Germany and the US against Apple for violating a collective total of 32 technology patents relating to displays, user interfaces, software and tennis chipsets and video coding. Some of these are those patents from 2011 that they didn't reach an agreement on. So the patent wars just flared right back up again. Yeah. And not only that, I mean, technically, Microsoft is involved because Microsoft owns Nokia. I don't know if you Microsoft does not own Nokia. No, they owned they bought the Nokia handset business. This is what remains after the Nokia handset business. So this is Nokia Nokia. Well, I maintain my position of strange bedfellows, if you know what I'm saying, like it's just an odd mix of names and things and stuff happening. But I don't know, I just didn't expect a scab to get picked back between Apple and Nokia of all people. It would be, I don't know, like fresh, fresh lawsuits from Blackberry or somebody like that. I just Well, it's a fair clarification you're bringing up because I think a lot of people assume Oh, Nokia went to Microsoft and that's the end of that. Nokia, the Nokia that still exists is licensing its name to Foxconn to make handsets. It also is working on a lot of other products. Its main revenue does come from networking technology that it's that it held on to. But also it gets a lot of revenue from licensing patents. So this is part of their main revenue now. Aaron, you see this stuff all the time, right? Like you guys are constantly having to cover the legal ramblings of the tech world. Does this one surprise you or seem out of place? Well, I think that, you know, initially had a little bit of a surprise like, wait, are we getting back into this? Okay. I mean, it's always something I think that that's the big lesson I've kind of gleaned so far is that one thing and something else starts and, you know, it's it's back looking up legal definitions of things. Yeah, no, it's that's absolutely right. Uber, you know, Uber, they're adding a new feature. They already added it. In fact, it's to a new service today. Today is Wednesday, a location feature, let you request a location from your contacts and sets that as your ride's destination. Uber will then share your ETA with that person. The other feature provides custom snapchat filters, including your ETA and other options. Everybody getting in on that snapchat business. I kind of like the sound of this, I like to be able to think that if I need to meet a friend, if I'm going to LA and I need Tom know where I'm going to be and how soon I'm going to be there, that he can be literally involved in the information transaction of my said trip. And I think that's a pretty nice feature, although it does open up some questions I have about some privacy stuff. I'm sure a lot of this is opt outable or not even opt in able in the first you have to agree to share the location. So it sends a request to the person on the other end and says, Hey, Scott, Tom's out club and wants to find you, is that okay? And you say, Yeah, sure, come on by and then it shares. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it seems handy. I mean, I think that it is not often that I run into features that are added to the apps where you're like, I might actually use that and it would make my life easier. But it's, you know, it's it's a little like being able to share your location on iMessage, for example, which is handy. Yeah, or you can do it in ways. I use it in ways sometimes just so people know like how far away I am. So it's nice. And it's nice to be able to give that estimated time of arrival as well. I, my problem is, I don't know what those situations are where I'll need to find where a person is and I don't know it. Usually, like this evening, I'm probably going to grab an Uber or a lift to go meet my wife and a friend of ours for dinner. But I know where we're meeting. I don't need to find them. I'm going to the location. So I mean, I guess that's why I use the clubbing because that's the only thing I could think of is Oh, when you're out and about and someone says, Hey, come meet me at the DNA lounge man, rest in peace. The then you're well, but then you'd go to the lounge. So they're like, Hey, come meet me. I'll be around in one of these places, I guess, would be the way to do it. I don't know what's what's the use case for this? Well, I know it's there. What if what if all right, so let's say this is all done with location tracking. And we know that Tom is at this place we're eating for dinner. And we don't even need to know about the place for dinner because we're zeroing in on the address based on where your location is. But you could really play a nasty trick on me. You could get on a train and drive and all you think it's just good for avoiding being punked. I wonder if it has, you know, more potential in a walkable city, you know, you might not exactly be at, say, an apartment or a specific, you know, bar restaurant, because honestly, you know, I live in the middle of the country. And when I use Uber or share my location or any of that, it's when I'm in San Francisco. Yeah, my my example isn't perfect because they don't have Uber there. But when we were on vacation in Japan, we were traveling with a couple other people who weren't staying in exactly the same place as us. And they said, we're going out to this general neighborhood and get something to eat, come meet us. And if we could have said, hey, Uber, take me to where they are, it would have saved us some time, because instead we took a cab to the general area and then had to like text message with each other to try to figure out where they actually were. So all right, I got one now. Thank you for helping me wrap my head around that. US House Judiciary Committee's encryption working group has released its year end report in which it determines that encryption backdoors pose a threat to security. The report argues that a system that would allow police into encryption could also be exploited by criminals. The report also states, and here we're going to quote, Congress cannot stop bad actors at home or overseas from adopting encryption. Therefore, the committees should explore other strategies to address the needs of law enforcement. The working group spent six months meeting with experts from law enforcement and various technology companies to get feedback before making their report. I would also argue that Congress cannot stop good actors from implementing encryption as a technology that they need. Like that's one of the most frustrating things about the current conversation about encryption these days. It feels like it's seen as some nefarious, always bad thing. It's a bit like talking about BitTorrent as another example or something. Yeah, it would be like saying, oh, you lock your door. You must be a criminal. What are you trying to hide? Really funny. I don't know if that's just them trying to shape the conversation so that it's seen that way or maybe. I mean, look, it's politics, whatever. But I'm frustrated by that because encryption matters to me and is important to me in lots of ways and reasons. What also matters to me is law and order and helping things get resolved. And so I understand the desire to have law enforcement and be able to get what they need to get to get justice done. But I don't know that framing it this way is going to help anybody. I don't know. Well, I like the report saying, first of all, putting in a backdoor is not worth it, essentially is what this report says. Like the criminals can get into. So we don't recommend that. And if you were to put in weakened encryption, the bad guys would just go use stronger encryption. They don't have to play in your in your playhouse. They can it's math. People can figure out math. And so we need to find another solution to this. And that's where we should be going. We should not be trying to weaken encryption to make it easier for law enforcement. We should be working really hard on finding other ways to help law enforcement catch these guys. So if I'm a law enforcement person, I say to Aaron, I say, All right, hey, make sure to lock your doors. There's some some weird people out tonight. But then I say, Oh, we think there's a weird person in Aaron's house. We're going to go kick down the door. We told her to make sure to lock. Is that Aaron? Do you think that's a comparison? Because of this feels like to me. I mean, you know, in sort of a broad sense, what I was thinking about this and this is probably not going to quite answer your question. But, you know, it seemed especially around the time that there was so much conversation going on with regard to Apple and the FBI is that one of the points that a lot of folks are trying to make is that when you do something like weaken encryption or build in back doors, there are ramifications to that that are sort of far reaching and maybe even difficult to explain and and not necessarily like the best headline for saying like, Oh, we don't want to work with law enforcement and all that. So in one sense, I was kind of I know impressed that that I guess that that point got across. Yeah, good work. House Judiciary Committee Encryption Working Group, in my opinion. Let's see. Final story here. Disha Sling TV seems to have had accidentally posted details about an upcoming set top box called Air TV Player. Talked about this a bit on TMS this morning. I think this is fascinating. The box has a TV tuner so users can see the over the air channels alongside with streaming TV channels purchased through the Sling TV service. The box also comes with Netflix. A Google button on the remote control implies that the box also runs Android and probably does what do you call it streaming? I can't think of it now. Google cast streaming. It's interesting because basically here we have a service. This would be just not exactly fair comparison, but it's it'd be it'd be a little bit like if Hulu or Netflix came out and said, Hey, you're getting our service on your PlayStation or your Roku or whatever. Great. Good on you guys. Oh, and if you don't have one of those, but you also might want to tune into some local TV and need a tuner for that. We've got this box over here that'll do it. It helped me to sort of frame it that way because that does feel kind of what Sling is doing. I think it's really interesting. It seems to want to, I don't know, appeal to a group who are happy to get intended TV now and maybe expand their viewing options by subscribing. But if not, it's okay. There's a tuner and they can use it for whatever they want. Yeah, if you're if you're a Sling TV subscriber or would be Sling TV subscriber and your objection is, Yeah, but I can't get my local channels in that app. This solves that. Like here you go, get an antenna. They'll probably sell some bundles. And now you get your local it. It reminds me of back when Direct TV didn't have the right to deliver local channels and they would set you up with an antenna with your satellite dish. It's and dish used to do the same thing. So they're calling back to their roots saying, Well, why can't we set people up with an antenna and give them Sling TV all in a box? The one thing they'll definitely want is Netflix. I would assume this will probably open up to other apps like Hulu, etc. It'd be interesting to see if that happens. If it's an Android box, there's no reason it couldn't. I want to know what the price is. And when we say this is accidentally posted, it just showed up on Sling TV. That's not funny had been rumored had been reporting rumors about it for a long time. And the only link is to a support page, which doesn't seem like you would really want to launch the support page when the box isn't actually available yet. And there's no price or release date yet. So I'm guessing we'll probably hear more at CES. Yeah, you're going to probably see one of these, maybe both of you are there. Who knows? I'm curious, Aaron, do you do any of these cord cutting services? I don't have cable. So I've got rabbit ears. And I've got, you know, a Roku camera, which one. So yeah, I mean, I spent a lot of time switching input. So it would be nice if there was just like one interface that kind of neatly had everything there. But yeah, rabbit ears all the way. Yeah. Well, and Tableau and Simple TV have put out devices that basically let you roll your own version of this because they add Roku apps, right? So if I use Tableau, I hook it up to an antenna and then it streams my over the air reception to a Roku app and other apps on other devices as well. So this is just sling saying, hey, we've got it all built in. You want to live in the sling interface universe. We've got a product for you. Thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit, you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnushow.reddit.com. All right, let's get to Aaron's CNET article about Grandpa Ray and very sad that he passed away back in March, but he was 97 years old. And you tell a great story in this article about how he never stopped trying technology. He used email. He used Skype. I like that you say he used Facebook for a short time. I'm curious why that short time may have ended. But he got himself on LinkedIn. He's had a Google Plus page. It sounds like he was just always willing to try anything. Exactly. Exactly. And I was always kind of in this state of being impressed by him because there was always something new that he was just going to give a go. And he really bucked that stereotype that says older people either can't handle new technology or have no interest in it. And I think that he used technology in the way that I like to use technology, which is as a tool to make my life better. If I have a need, how can I use tech to sort of like meet that? And he was just a great example of that all the way up to the end. We were emailing just a week before he died. So it never stopped. That is so cool. So one of the things I've always admired about my mom is kind of a similar thing. It felt like all of her friends would see technology starting even when I was in high school and start saying, oh, I don't know about those computers. I don't know anything about that. And they would just sort of have this standard statement about why they were avoiding it. And as time went on, you would see her friends and her associates around her age and her generation say similar things. And it felt like the stereotype might have been true. I may have, I may be witnessing in real time how as people get older, they start to veer away from whatever the latest tech is, especially in our age where a lot of this stuff happened very quickly in the 90s and the early odds. And you're either sort of on board and with it or you weren't. But she through that whole thing kept going, no, no, no, I'm good. And she'd know what kind of computer she wanted. And she knew what she wanted to do with them. And she got into digital photography in a way that really surprised me. And to this day, as an avid Facebook user and uses her Android phone all the time and uses her iPad all the time. And she's not constantly calling me for, you know, fixes and problems. She remotely prints wirelessly in the house. So there's all that kind of stuff happening that normally I should be just dreading because I just don't know when's that next phone call coming from mom about why something doesn't work. And she's able to kind of troubleshoot and deal with this stuff on her own. And I don't know why that stereotype persists. I feel like maybe it's on us as we age and on them as they age to make that decision, whether they want to keep it hearing to it, or if they're going to see it as, oh, no, it's invading my life or oh, no, social networking is scary and I can't put myself out there or, or whatever, or that they're all susceptible to phishing schemes and being scammed all the time. I don't really understand where it comes from. There obviously must be a source for all that stereotyping. But it is, it was so fun to read this and say, Oh, I guess my mom's doing all right then. She's kind of breaking the mold. And here's somebody who's a lot older than her. And at 97, he meant to, that's a big deal. And my guess is it probably kept him from worrying about all the weird alien technologies that were out there like he did for what it was, instead of just a, you know, some sort of mysterious magic box in the corner of the room, he understood it was a tool and, and he knew what he wanted to use the tool for. For sure. Yeah. And the way, you know, the technology has this way of snowballing. And I think that for some folks you feel like if you miss this one level of it, then you can't jump to the next, you know, maybe if you don't have a smartphone, you're thinking, how am I going to get a tablet that just I'm just don't want anything to do with this, you know, but he was, he was so casual. I think that that that's one of the things that impressed me is that he was so casual about just picking things up and moving from one thing to the next that it never got out of hand. He never seemed overwhelmed and kind of like your mom and it was, it was funny. I really think that for the most part he was troubleshooting things on his own. I mean, it was super rare, maybe one or two times that he ever asked me if I knew how something worked or he would, you know, ask some other relative or something like that. But he just stayed on top of it in this very kind of casual, low key way. Yeah, yeah, I was thinking a lot about why we have the stereotype of the old person doesn't like technology, because there is something to it, right? We all know that person who's like, I'm too old for that sort of thing, right? I'm too old for for trying out those Snapchat. I mean, even people my own age say that about Snapchat sometimes. And I think one of the one of the things to keep in mind is I also know young people. I also knew people when I was in my 20s, who felt the same way. I'm not trying your websites that's done like that. That was in the 90s. I remember people my own age, you know, when I was in my 20s saying that. So it's a matter of percentage, I think when you're when you're young, especially when you're in your teens, you're still learning everything. And so picking up something that's new like Snapchat is no different than picking up how to drive or how to act like an adult. Like you're you're learning things all the time. And so young people get sort of you get the reputation of like, oh, well, they're young, they're willing to try things because you're always learning when you get into your middle ages, you don't stop learning, but you're settling in. You're like, these are the things I know how to use they work for me. I will fine tune them. And I think that it kind of explains the stereotype of well, old people like boring things like Microsoft Office in LinkedIn, right is like, we're not trying to get and learn new things all the time. We're trying to fine tune the things that work for us. And then as you get older, you get set in your ways. And the difference is some people's personality types are willing to just try stuff like your grandpa Ray, like, let's see how this works. Let me let me try different things. And some people through their entire lives, just really want to settle on a couple of things that work for them. When they're young, they'll learn those things because they don't have they haven't settled on anything yet. Yeah, my favorite my favorite quote in here, Aaron is one that you had, it's bolded to it says Ray had an important quality that eludes even my generation sometimes, which goes with what Tom was saying, it is a willingness to poke around and try tech without the fear of breaking it. And I would add to that the fear of it breaking you or it ruining something. And that just seems like a trait that we all could use. I my kids could use it. I certainly could use it in some cases. I there's just a real lesson in that bold text. Yeah, I mean, it was it's such an important attitude to have, I think, because you know, my experience with me, even my parents, you know, is there's just this queasiness sometimes about like, I don't totally understand it, which is perfectly, you know, reasonable. And I just I just don't want to mess it up. And I think that, you know, one of the messages that should be reinforced more is that it's really hard to mess up some of this stuff. You know, there's very little that like if I just hand you my iPhone, you'd really have to be pressing some stuff. And I don't even want to get it to just like, you know, yeah, not work anymore. Yeah. So but but in the world of news, we constantly get the message of, Oh, there's hackers that are going to get you and there's exploding phones that are going to burn you. And I think we fall a little bit for the for the local news effect of, hey, those things do happen, but they don't happen in the large percentage that you think might happen. And so that shouldn't scare you off. For sure. And you know, at the opposite end of the spectrum, I remember a few years ago, some friends of my parents were over at the house, you know, on Christmas and they had a toddler. And I think I had like a Kindle fire out. And she was playing with it. And you've just never seen for someone who had never laid hands on a tablet, the way that she used it and just poked around and swiped and pinched. And it was so natural. Yeah. And you could tell that she just had no concern that, Oh, maybe something's going to go wrong. If I tap this and I, you know, and so push this, this device beyond the edge of use, you've just embraced it because she didn't know an alternative. You know, she didn't know that she could push it away. So yeah. I think children and Scott, I know you can you can swear to this. Children don't come in with preconceptions of, Oh, it should work this way. And I think that's one of the traps we fall in as we get older is I know how things should work. And if it doesn't work exactly the way and I think this is a large part of the people's problemless Snapchat is, Hey, this doesn't work exactly the way I expect. And I'm frustrated and I'm done with it. Yeah, no, for sure. Like I watch my kids do very similar things, even my son who's 16 now, will get a new app or the school put in some program where he's got to follow some new app and do something with his phone remotely for his for a school work or something. And you can see them go, Oh, this isn't like the other one. This is a new website. This isn't what I'm used to. And you go, No, no, no, this is we don't want to get in this trap. Like here is a chance. I mean, there's there it is possible to actually, you know, objectively worse than what it was before. I'm not saying that. And there are certainly ways of of sort of sussing through that. But to just see it on the surface and go, Oh, this is all different. I don't want to touch it is is a bad thing to sort of get into. And so we try around here to get them to understand that, you know, delving in is okay. For the most part, they're way ahead of that. And, you know, touch screens, a future without touch screen seems insane to them. I watch them use notebooks and desktop computers that don't have touch screens and they're constantly touching them. I catch myself doing that sometimes. So you, you know, you have to embrace these changes, these trends. It's great to be a great typist, but keep in mind that one day maybe asked to do it with your mind and you got to be okay with it and you got to at least try it out and give it your best. And I don't know, I feel like it's a lesson for way more than technology. But for today, this works for this is a great lesson for technology. Maybe there's other ways to implement it. Yeah. And you know, I mean along those lines, you know, some well, one of those incredible experiences that I had with Ray is that he was a musician and then he was a music teacher middle school music teacher before he was retired. And and in 2012, my grandma Hazel died and shortly thereafter, he kind of figured out on his own how to record himself playing his keyboard and you know, take that sort of monstrous file and send it to me via I think it was like you send it. And I just and again, it was like one of those moments that he he just knew what he wanted to do and he figured out how tech could help him do that. And it completely cracked me up because I'm from Nashville. I went to college here. A lot of my friends are in bands and they're songwriters. And so when I was younger, I would get files the same way these kind of rough bounces of like, hey, I just wrote the song. Like what do you think about these lyrics or this or that? And again, I just love that idea that he he wasn't thinking to himself that it was sort of an intimidating process. Like, how am I going to get this from from me and Carl Spad, California to my granddaughter in Nashville, Tennessee, he just did it. He was just open, you know, that's so cool. And people that chat room are talking about how as you get older, your brain gets less plastic, it's less adaptable. But one of the ways to stave that off is is to keep keep using it, you know, and keep trying it. And it sounds like that that works for him. Yep. I like I like the 97 years old. He was sharp to learn his fresh mixes. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, thank you, Aaron, for for talking to us a little more about that. Of course, you can go to CNET dot com and find that article. We'll have a link in the show notes as well and raise a glass to grandpa Ray this year. Yeah, it's a great article. Maybe one of my favorites of the year. I don't know. I was feeling a little down on 2016. This really cheered me up. So I guess we owe you that thanks as well. It was pretty great. I'm so happy to hear that. Let's finish up with a couple of emails. Our pick of the day comes from Michael O'Neill, who noticed that last month Scott was mentioning wanting an affordable solution for cloud backup. And he says for strictly backup purposes, you can't beat Amazon Glacier. I've been using that service for three years now as part of my backup plan rates run at a penny a gigabyte. So it's really hard to beat while restoring data has a rate as well. I rarely have to restore as this is just a piece of my total backup strategy. That said, it's nice knowing I have an off site cloud based backup. You'll need a client to use Glacier. I use cloud berry backup. There are some free clients out there, I believe, but if you want some bells and whistles like TNO encryption, trust no one encryption, cloud berry is a steal for around 30 bucks for a single license. You also get an SLA with Glacier unlike any consumer cloud storage providers. Well, that's awesome. So they don't even have to me kind of had me sold it. It's just a backup. Like in other words, I'm really not looking for a new service that wants to give me a billion bells and whistles on how I share out my stuff. I can do that with Dropbox. I can do that with other services. I can even do that with more automated backup. Sometimes I just want a place to put stuff, chuck it in a folder and have it be searchable and kept their safe and restore it when I need it. This seems like maybe what I'm looking for. Send your pics to us folks feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com and you can find more pics at DailyTechNewShow.com slash pics. And then also got an email here from Dave Southern in Madison, Wisconsin, who said one thing that tends to get lost in the no new Max story. We've been talking a lot about the delay with releasing Max and then there hasn't been iMacs and Mac Pros. He says don't forget there was trouble that Intel had with the Skylake platform. There were shortages and issues early on, which caused quite a few manufacturers problems, including Microsoft with their Surface Book machine. To me, it seems Apple made a conscious decision to skip this generation and the hand waving we see them do is mostly to obfuscate that. If I were to surmise why I think Apple is taking so long on Mac refreshes, it would be because the newest Intel processor doesn't bring enough change to the game and they're exploring a Mac OS port to an arm based OS a la iOS. Coincidentally, Microsoft also seems to be taking this approach as of last week's announcement per Paul Therot and Mary Joe Foley on last week's Windows Weekly. To the programmer in me, it makes sense from a code standpoint to as it would allow Apple to deprecate Mac OS X 86 and adopt iOS and extend it to the desktop, e.g. mouse capabilities, monitor capabilities, file system, et cetera. While this port would be non trivial, it excites me that there's a chance Microsoft and Apple could both be running arm because as a gamer, it could finally bring decent games to the Mac. I love it. That's his ultimate not as ultimate goal, but I like that he I like that he ended on that. I'm kind of all for this. Like I I'm I was as concerned like here, I'm a guy who's got one of these cylinder Mac pros. I got it in 2013 late 2013. I love it. It's been great. It's powerful, wonderful. I don't know when they're ever going to update it or refresh it. Maybe they never will. Maybe only 10 of us bought these. I don't know, but I really, really like it. I really like iOS and the reasons I like iOS are different though. I can't run full versions of Photoshop and Illustrator and the whole Adobe suite that I need over there. So what I what I like the idea of is if they can figure out a way to get their desktop notebook and otherwise, you know, sort of all in one platform to be if they wanted to be iOS, great, but give me some robust third party application support for it. And I'm all in. I don't know how confident I am in that, but I need to be able to do that. Once that happens, I'm run, you know, high capacity, low power consumption, arm chips, less fans, less bulk, more thin, like these are all things I think people want. So I'm not that worked up about it. Also, I remember all my Microsoft friends were upset that there was no big refresh to the regular Surface Pro. And there were very few explanations as to why that probably explains this as well. Like there were a lot of manufacturers expect or affected by that whole Intel thing. So my overall intake on this is everyone just relax. This isn't Apple. Apple needs their ecosystem and their ecosystem includes Max. They're not dropping them. The lack of refreshes and the space between them, I think, is just a little bit of padding, and they'll be back to it and we'll be happy with what we get. I hope that's an optimistic view. I don't think it explains all of the delay, but it certainly is another element of it for sure. All right. Well, that wraps it up for us. Thank you again, Aaron Carson, when you're not writing heartwarming stories about Grandpa Ray. What are you covering over there at CNET? I cover startups. I cover diversity in tech. And I also cover this kind of weird, nebulous category of all tech that's cool, weird or fun. Ah, so the emerging stuff. That's awesome. Basically, yeah. I like that. You're going to have a bonanza. That's sort of thing at CES. Absolutely. Well, check it out. CNET.com. Look for Aaron's work there. And Scott Johnson, anything to tell folks about before we head out of here? Oh, not really. With Christmas here, it's like everything sort of slows down a little bit. So it's not a ton of happening, but I got a lot of big stuff happening in 2017 to keep up on what everything is going on with me. Check me out on Twitter at Scott Johnson. And of course, frogpants.com for everything. Oh, I will say this, way more streaming on Twitch. Twitch opened up their stuff and said, yo, everybody who wants to do normal stuff that isn't video games, come on back because now we'll let you. So that's been huge for me. And already we're like doubling and in some cases tripling show attendance, doing stuff live over there. So go subscribe slash follow the channel so you can be notified when it goes live. I'm gaming, I'm creating art there and podcasts. Of course, that's over at twitch.tv slash frogpants. Big thanks to everybody who supports this show, whether it's buying mugs and hoodies and t-shirts over at Daily Techno show dot com slash store, whether it's supporting us at Patreon dot com slash D T N S or however it is you support the show. Big thanks to Ken Pochletar, Brian Oldfield and Logan Garrett, who all just today become brand new patrons. All of our existing patrons give them a big welcome. If you want to know all the ways to support the show, head to Daily Techno show dot com slash support. Our email address is feedback at Daily Techno show dot com. We're live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern at alpha gig radio dot com and Diamond Club dot TV. Our website is Daily Techno show dot com. Two more live shows before we get to our holiday specials next week. So stick around for those. We'll be back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants dot com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Good show. Thank you guys. I'm going to turn on the light really quick. Oh, yeah. Sun's going down there. Oh, yeah, it's true. They're ahead of us a few hours there. Couple hours. Last time a fun conversation. Yeah, last time she was on with us, it was we were talking big time VR was like right around the time VR was hitting the market. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, gosh, that Aaron was right. VR was a big thing. Everyone's got your information there. Yeah. Show titles. Oh, yeah. What are we going to call this thing? This just in encryption backdoors. We can privacy. Also, water is wet. Fire is hot. It's long but admirable. Thank you TVZ. Nokia tells Apple suit yourself. Nice. Follows up with teaching old mom new bits. You can teach an old dog new tech. You can. All right. I like it. Super Mario paywall. Super Mario run for the money. Nokia Nokia doesn't want to be a friend. Congress shows backdoors the door, although that's technically not correct. Back in my day, grandpa had tech and liked it. That's, you know, everyone based that off that Dana Carvey skid on SNL. And we liked it because that's the way we did it. Our condoms were made out of what did they say made out of like, like wool and it's super scratch and we liked it. Twitter CTO flies the coop that was put in twice. The second one being Steph Koo said coop. Adjack runs this coop co-op co-op co-op. Maybe it is a coo. Tech never dies. Tech early, like I think they're trying to say elderly, but they had a tech elderly, tech elderly. Technically young and heart. I like that one. Grandpa Ray makes Scott's day. I like that. It's pretty good rhyming. Technology goes on for ages. Everyone doing low location motion. Sling dish. Sling dish, just simple as that. Oh, the coo one was a typo. I see. But it could work anyway. You could teach an old dog new tech is and this just isn't Christian backdoors. We can privacy also waters wet is a tie for seven. Arenda, any of these catch your ear? I thought the suit yourself was funny and also the technically young and heart. Technically young and heart. I like that one too. That's not my favorite. My dad, my dad gravitates to any new technology. That allows him to make money. Motivation is all you need. It really is, though. I mean, it's like he I'm still trying to explain to him how how to get to his email. But he'll figure out a new credit card payment system like within a week. All right. He just takes the proper motivation. Yeah, whatever you're, yeah, whatever tickles it, you're like, all right, sweet. He's basically the everybody keeps talking about all emails dead. Only old people use email. He's just showing how young he is like, I don't want to use email. I don't use that. Yeah, email more and more starting to feel weird to me. I love email. You're just getting to something else soon keeps and keeps a record. The reason why I don't delete emails. So I have a record of everything. Oh, crap. So if anyone were to ever come to me and say, oh, I never touch it like, oh, wait a minute. Careful when you write to Roger. No, I'm the same way. I save all my email, at least on my personal email account, because there's people. I mean, I've had, you know, situations where I think of somebody I interviewed five years ago and I'm like, that that person would be good and I can find them. Yeah. Well, it's it's great because I did this with my work email. We were using Zimbro, which is all web based, but has an IMAP functionality. So I just used Thunderbird and I just save a copy of everything. So if at any one time, if anyone were to smack talk me or accuse me of something, it's like, oh, wait a minute, I actually keep I kept the backlog of all six years worth of emails since I've been there. Ha, ha, ha. Yeah. The only time I wish I didn't keep all my email as I got, I had to testify at a lawsuit thing that I really didn't want to do. And it wasn't me. I wasn't like implicated or anything, but I had a bunch of email transactions that led up to whatever evidence there was. And I hated that experience. It was the worst. And it made me wish I didn't have any of those emails. But other than that, your guys are right. You didn't want to purge yourself, huh? Yeah, I didn't. I mean, I would have much rather said, I don't remember because I didn't. I just had wrecked. I had emails. Oh, yeah, I guess those two did talk or I guess we did have that meeting. Yeah, it was. I mean, the one thing it taught me is never write angry emails. It's like right up there with don't write drunk emails. You write it. You delete it. You get it out of your system. All right. All right. What I do is I type it into a text or a notepad document and then like, maybe, maybe not. But it's like, you don't want to you don't email emotionally in the same way you don't drive emotionally, unless you're fascinating. My psychologist sister says what you do is you write it, save it as a draft, get up the next day. You give it like 12 hours and look at it again. And she says nine times out of 10, you're either going to change it or you're not going to send it at all. Probably. That's a good method. It's also a good policy with Twitter, not to tweet angrily. There might be an extension people could use that would just delay their tweets and then make them look at them again later. They would sort of combine his sister's approach as a safety. I think call it a think twice. Yeah, extension, the think twice. Maybe that's something Twitter could put into place instead of a ban, like a half measure. If you like if you start to fall afoul of people rather than just censoring you say, OK, well, you're on you're on delay now. You can still post. Yeah, but it's it's going to you have to wait and re approve later. Yeah, it's not bad. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, some people it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't matter. There are times they could have done that or should have done that. You know, I always have the opposite regret. I've always wondered like, man, if I just took a swing at that time, I think it would work out better. Wish I would have punched that guy. I get a lot of those moments, but now I'm at the stage where all I hear is my wife's voice on the back of my head. Telling you that. That's not a good idea. Dental plan. Lisa needs braces. Dental plan. That's all you get. Yeah. It's like, I'll fight. That's hilarious. Whatever works, Roger. Yeah, whatever. Well, you know, it's one reason I used to I was like on a video gaming binge, like I would just play every night was just like I was just really angry. The only way to really kind of kind of let all that frustration without going down to the gym was to shoot things virtually healthier way to get it out of your system. Yeah, I played I played Left for Dead with you once. I know I love. I've played that game. You know, it was really great. We should have played with Veronica because they used to play with Veronica all the time. You get think that's the one at a time or the two times we played was with her. I think. Because, you know, that's the thing. It's one of the few online first person shooter games you can play that's actually cooperative and not like not in the tactic. I mean, it is a tactical sense, but like you need to ensure everyone else makes it because it actually improves everyone's chances. Yeah, I could use. I agree with you. So I was thinking, Aaron, you were you were on the VR beat before you went to CNET and it sounds like you're basically on the next VR beat. Like what is what is the next thing? I don't know. It's so so this this topic area is sort of funny because it's it's almost one of those things that you don't know it until you see it. Sure. Like I did this story about this. It was like a it's like a company in L.A. that was working on virtual reality eating experiences and so, you know, you'd have something akin to like a Google cardboard and they would design some really far out, you know, environment and they had an aromatic diffuser that would make it smell like whatever the food was and they'd have 3D printed like algae, you know, food things. And and and of course, the question is with that is like, why would you not just want to this is that kind of stuff. And you know, I remember I think for them it started out trying to replicate food and then they decided they wanted to try and make food that no one's experienced. So it's a lot of those almost kind of like one off things really. This is just odd or, you know, a robot that plays beer pong or that kind of things we all need. I could see I could see a few ways you could go with the food thing. As soon as you said like eating food that doesn't exist, everybody wants to try like the food from TV shows or or science fiction novels. And that could be a way like, oh, here's here's Klingon Gach. You can you can actually eat it. We've created a virtual experience for that. Because otherwise, yeah, I don't want to eat a virtual bull ramen. I want to eat an actual bull. Yeah. Yeah, I think that they were, you know, they were talking about and this was just sort of spit balling. But if there was a way to, you know, for example, make meals more enjoyable for you know, folks in the military or like you're eating an MRE, but you could make it feel like you're in a restaurant with them. Yeah, or even like if it's a holy grail going to Mars or something, like, could you, you know, kind of create better taste experiences? Yeah. For a lot of your enjoyment of food is not just smell, but also the environment that you're in. Yeah. So even if you had beef Wellington, but you were stuck in like us in a public bathroom, it wouldn't be as enjoyable as if you were in a five star hotel lobby. So wise words, yeah. But what's funny, too, is like they were telling me a little bit about some of the things that they were trying to create that didn't exist at all. And so, you know, for example, you know, they're telling me about a flavor that's a mix of maybe passion fruit and this thing and that thing. And you consume it in this, you know, backdrop that's outer space, aim, punk, Lisa Frank explosion, you know, these kinds of things. All right. Cool, man. Yeah, so it's kind of it was interesting. I feel like that's just the hallmark of any new thing like this. And the NBR is no different, but it's like, I don't know. I feel like Microsoft Bob was the operating system version of this is like, what if it was a little dude and he did all this stuff for you and it's there's just this insatiable human desire to immediately try these things, which I think is probably good. But most of it just ends up being so dumb in the end. Yeah, I mean, I think that like some of this stuff could, you know, work is like an art exhibit or, you know, some things that kind of experiential, like, hey, do you want to go to this, this, you know, place and try not everything has to be a widespread consumer device, right? Yeah, yeah. To give you a custom 3D printed an acid or dough. Here's your thumbs to go with it. You never know where the innovation kind of come from. Sometimes the innovation comes from some weird experiment. So oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I'm happy to let them try. Yeah, all they need to do is come up with the tasteless food cube, but then have like a helmet that literally alters your perception by by influencing your brainstem. So you think it tastes like something even though it doesn't. So it would be like a nutritious bland soy cube of food, but you could program your helmet to make it all. This is like a pizza or this like lasagna or something or sushi or whatever you want it to be. Yeah, that would be the ultimate. Some trippy stuff. So yeah, so it ends up being, you know, sort of odd level things like that. But yeah, it's it's fun. Or somehow I've fallen into writing about like online dating things, which is something that I never had any never did. Yeah, but there is I was a covered tech crunch disrupt in September and saw that there was like a dating app for airplanes. So you could actually date while you were like in the air. So I wrote like a thing on that. There was this sort of ridiculous, you know, piece because my parents actually met on an airplane. You know, really? And there's years ago and so I was like, well, you can, you know, they have this kind of lovely little story about how they know my dad cut in front of my mom and blah, blah, blah. And there was a taxi strike. And so he ended up giving my mom and my grandmother like a ride and blah, blah, blah, blah, or you could just kind of dispense with a class and the like romance of it all and just like log in on your phone and see who's on your plane. Who's on the plane? Yeah, you need an app to manage the the matchmaking, but also the seat swapping, you know, exactly a different fair class than you. How that's never worked. That's like super complicated. You know, or and I think I put that in the story that I was like, there's parts of this. How do you negotiate? Do you chat with someone up to the point where you're like, so I'm in 6E and I've got an extra drink coupon. Do you want to come over? Like, how does this work? Yeah, excuse me. Do you mind switching? I'm about to date someone on the supply. Exactly. Exactly. This could be the one. Move on, baby. Yeah, there's always something kind of interesting and strange out there to to mess around with. No, the reason not to sit in the center seat, you won't be able to swap if someone tries to date you on the plane. I would just love it if at some point because I travel quite a bit like someone did come up to me was like, would you switch seats with me because the person next to you? I want to I want to get to know a little bit more. You could be the person who made it made the connection happen. There you go. There you go. I can just sit there and be like, no, keep looking. This guy is sure about this guy. Not for you. Yeah, this guy won't put his seat and table in their upright position. This is a man spreader. You know, why paying attention during the safety demonstration? I don't think he's reliable. It's interesting because if you take into account like things that happen on flights as your qualifications, there's a lot of different stuff having it on planes that don't happen in your everyday life. Yeah, this guy got motion sick and barfed in a bag. Well, did you hear about Richard Marks? Oh, yeah, I saw the some photos of it. I wish they'd got the singer, the singer Richard Marks was on a flight with his wife, Daisy Fuentes, formerly of MTV, from Hanoi to Seoul, Korea. And some guy got drunk and disorderly and was pushing around flight attendants. And he was one of the people who got up and helped restrain him. Oh, my God. That was like punching and swinging like a knife, but like objects of people. And Richard Marks already happily married, of course. But, you know, that could be a way to beat someone. You know, I started restraining this man who was drunk and disorderly. They should not serve alcohol on flights. You'll get an argument on that one. Yeah, you probably will. That's fine. That's fine. Even from flight attendants who are like, yeah, there are people who get get drunk and disorderly, but it's more often that they just fall asleep and stop bothering people. That's a good point. I didn't know Daisy is married, Richard Marks. So that was the big take. I did not know. Yeah, I thought she married someone else. Well, according to my wife. So, you know, I don't I don't know where she got her information, but they've been married a year, I think. OK, well, let me let me look. He's the hold on to the night sky, right? That's the song. Is the helmet right there waiting for you right there waiting for you. That's right. Yeah, that's his monster hit. I see. Oh, my gosh. High school, personal life. There's a she was married to Timothy Adams. Oh, you know, one to ninety five and then Louis Miguel. The day always they dated, though, they didn't get married on the and then she went home to date Matt Goss. They were engaged, but did not marry. And at the end of just 2015, they got she got hitched to Richard Marks. OK, so he was Roger Tang. She was he was right there waiting for her. And with that, we conclude our broadcast day. Excellent. Goodbye, Rusty and Misty. Thanks all for watching. Thanks again, Aaron. Thanks for having me. Bye, everybody.