 Coming up on DTNS, are you a PCDI wire? Trisha Hershberger's here with some cool RGB stuff to tell you about. Plus, Motorola wants you to wear the metaverse around your neck, and Sony tries to make earbuds you'll like putting in your ear. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 15th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. And joining us, TV host and streamer, Trisha Hershberger. Welcome back, Trisha. Hey, everyone. I'm so excited to be back. And thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. If you would like more of all of us chatting, Trisha and the rest of us, there's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet, which you can get at patreon.com slash dtns. Big, big thanks to our top patrons. Today, they include Brandon Brooks, Hector Bones, and Tim Ashman. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Got a couple of interesting Windows 11 updates. Rollin' out today, the Amazon App Store preview is available in the Microsoft Store with more than 1,000 apps and also games. Previously, you had to be an insider to try out and write apps on Windows. So open it up a bit. Windows 11 is also getting the redesigned media player, notepad apps, and new taskbar improvements. Ars Technica also noted that Microsoft said in its blog post about the updates, the new features will keep arriving on Windows 11 through a variety of update mechanisms. Microsoft is moving towards continuous updates rather than piling everything into the big service updates twice a year. Intel has agreed to acquire chip foundry tower semiconductor, which makes semiconductor components for automotive, medical, industrial, and consumer electronics companies, as well as aerospace and defense. The transaction was unanimously approved by both boards of directors and it's expected to close in approximately a year. India has banned another group of 53 apps with links to China, including 10 cents X River, Garena's Free Fire, net eases on Myoji Arena and Astrakraft. India has banned more than 300 apps from China since mid 2020, and many of the new rounds are rebuilds of previously banned apps. India says, uh-uh. On the other hand, Free Fire Illuminate had more than 40 million of its 75 million monthly active users in India, according to what app Annie told TechCrunch. So, huge markets. The game maker is owned by C, which is based in Singapore, but has significant backing from China's 10 cent. Yikes, is a riot next? I don't know. Apple received a 5 million euro fine from a Dutch regulator over dating apps being able to use payments outside Apple's app store. Now, you may think, Tom, I know you told us right here on DTNS that Apple had fixed this. Yes, they had, but the authority for consumers and markets in the Netherlands found that Apple's change, which does allow third-party payment systems through an in-app link to the developer's site to complete the purchase or a built-in third-party system, required the company to submit a separate binary if they wanted to do that. That would only be shown on the Dutch storefront, and of course, they would also have to report external sales back to Apple because Apple wants to take a 27% cut. The ACM found that the requirement to create a completely new binary was unreasonable in their opinion. So Apple will continue to be fined 5 million euros each week that it does not meet the regulator's standard, though the fines will cap out at 50 million euros. They've paid about 20 million euros in fines so far. Apple says it will comply and it will also appeal this order. It can also go five weeks. Not every company could. Epson has a new long-throw laser projector that delivers what it calls a zero-compromise 4K picture due to a three-LCD chip system with new pixel-shifting technology. It's called the Pro Cinema 4K Pro UHD LS12000. Just rolls right off the tongue. Comes with an HDMI 2.1 port. That supports 4K gaming at up to 120 frames per second, so some people are gonna be pretty excited about that. The laser light source can handle 2,700 lumens and lasts up to 20,000 hours with deeper blacks and a claimed contrast ratio of over 2,500,000 to one. Now, there's no Dolby Vision for those who are worried about Dolby Vision, but Epson is offering HDR10, HLG and HDR10 Plus with the latter supported on Hulu, Amazon Prime and YouTube, however, not Netflix. Yeah, still, that's a nice bright 4K projector there. Well done. All right, let's talk about OS Flex. That is not just a flex, although it is a bit of a flex for Google, now that I think about it. Google launched Chrome OS Flex in early access Tuesday. It's built off of Neverwares Cloud Ready. If you were familiar with that, it's very similar, not exactly the same, but very similar, Google acquired Neverware in 2020. Flex is meant for you to install Chrome OS on an Intel-based Mac or PC for free. You just install it. And if you use Cloud Relay now, you will eventually be transitioned to flex as soon as it's ready for stable release. There are some feature differences you may wanna look into, but mostly it's the same. While Chrome OS Flex is probably immediately appealing to those of us with an old laptop or desktop that we've been wondering what to do with, it's also meant to appeal to businesses and organizations like schools. Among the features of flex are network deployment, so you can push it out to a bunch of devices at once, the ability to set user policies and manage updates remotely, and IT controls that can do things like prevent data loss if a device is lost or stolen. So it's meant for enterprise management. That's why flex can be free. Enterprise clients pay for the management of Chrome OS. And the idea is keep them happy by extending the life of their own old gear and keeping them in the system. Still, if you wanna try it out on your own, you need to fill out a form and then you'll get an email which will include installation instructions, certified compatible device list, and of course the download of Chrome OS Flex itself. The way they suggest installing it is to create a bootable Chrome OS Flex USB drive. So just create a bootable USB drive, you'll put Chrome OS Flex on, plug that into your Mac or PC. You might have to go into your BIOS to install from USB and from there you can deploy it to other devices either by putting USB in other devices or doing the network deployment. Chrome OS Flex has the same code base as Chrome OS so it should feel and look the same, though it is an early release so they say expect bugs and not every feature works on every type of hardware. The features like Google Assistant need a certain level of hardware to be able to work. There are no plans to include Android app support at this time, a few other things that aren't included but mostly, Sarah, this is kind of a cool way to put a free OS on a machine and certainly a boon to organizations who have aging hardware that don't wanna spend money on upgrading. No kidding and I know Tricia, you have young kids so please weigh in on this but I don't but I have a couple old machines laying around and with so many families who have had to make use of the fact that we're all home and kids have to be in school and be interacting with other kids. I know some of my friends who also have young kids have said, if this just worked a little bit better we'd all be in good shape. We don't have a computer at the house that is even capable of the stuff that the school needs from us, et cetera. So yeah, it's not just about schools but I think this is, it gives new life to older hardware that isn't dead yet. Yeah, and with you, Sarah, I absolutely love the idea of being able to kind of recycle your old tech but in a more kind of reused type of way and it does when it comes to kids, Chromebooks are where it's at. I mean, for a lot of different reasons but when you have a really young tech user not having to worry about drivers, not having to worry about viruses installing themselves on the machine, not having to worry about kids downloading and playing games instead of doing their homework. Like there's a lot of benefits to having your Chromebook for a child. And now of course, like you were saying, Tom there's gonna be differences between Chrome OS Flex and getting an actual Chromebook right out of the box but as someone that has lots of gadgets lying around my house, I don't wanna have to buy brand new for my little guy if I can just put Chrome OS Flex on like an old gaming laptop and call it a day. That's awesome. Plus it opens your options as far as gifting old hardware. I like to get anything I can rather than just like take it to a recycle program. I'd rather like take my old consoles to the local hospital children's ward for example or completely factory reset an Android tablet and install like baby monitor type apps on it or make these things, I guess is upcycle the right term then maybe make these things reusable for someone else in your life that might have a different set of needs than you. I think it's awesome. And the fact that right now Chrome OS Flex is free two thumbs up for me. Yeah, it's a great reduction of e-waste to do this. I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft pushing something like this as well. They've got a lightweight version of Windows that they could do something similar with. So yeah, the more the better. Yeah, we'll see Apple doing exactly this, but who knows, you never know. Speaking of Chrome OS though, nine to five Google has a first look at an Android 13 developer preview build that will allow cross streaming from Google Pixel phones to browsers on Chromebooks. So even if you don't have Android support on your Chromebook, you could do this if you had a Pixel phone. Nine to five Google was even able to run the web app on Windows 11, not just on Chrome OS. So that's kind of cool. Let's talk about earbuds, shall we? You know, people like the earbuds that they like. Certain earbuds work for folks and other earbuds do not. I'm a fan of in-ear earbuds, but not everybody is. Sony created a new open style earbud that might appeal to you. They're called the link buds. They go for $180 and they fall somewhere between the company's premium 1000XM4s and the WFC 500 buds. So kind of in the middle there. They have a much easier brand name to remember as well. You can call them the WFL 900, that's the official name. We'll call them link buds for the purposes of this conversation. They come in either dark gray or white. They have a donut style hole that's cut right into the middle of the section. And that is a little bit interesting. It goes into your ear, but your ear has a, there's a pass through. There's an air pass through that is involved. Some folks say it actually makes wearing them more comfortable because not only are you not shoving something in your ear, but it's kind of connecting to the outer part of your ear. Again, it'll appeal to a lot of folks who don't like that in-ear earbud experience, kind of like earplugs. You either like them or you don't. Blocks out too much of the real world sound for a lot of folks, but they still fit snug. So much that Sony has you tap the skin in front of your ears while you're wearing them to pause music or skip tracks or adjust volume, all the things that you would do with your earbuds. So they're, you know, they're pretty sensitive. The Verge also notes that the style makes heavy bass less possible, because again, it's kind of not going into your ear. Waste quality is very good, but with just 5.5 hours of battery life on a single charge, a lot of folks will say, well, that's not sufficient enough for everyday use. Trisha, but where do you stand on earbuds? I mean, earbuds are such a personal experience and I was reading recently that the shape of everyone's ear is different. And so you're actually going to get different sound out of different buds based on your ear shape. And that's why you might have some people swear by a certain brand's buds and the next person sitting next to them could absolutely detest the sound quality coming out of those buds because it has so much to do with how sound reverberates in our actual ear canal, which is just fascinating. Some people are going to prefer an open ear design. Some people prefer the completely closed design, like you were saying, Sarah, and that's just for how the sound sounds to you, open versus closed. And then of course, there's also how it feels in your ear if it falls out, if you like kind of the hook design that goes over your ear or if you're fine with it just plugging right in there. And then some people go for like the jawbone conducting technology, but I really do believe it's a personal experience. I get to try out a lot of different buds in my time, kind of doing various tech correspondent type work. And the only buds that I personally don't care for are the ones that are so beefy that they fall out of my ear. I'm also a hobbit sized human, so it could just be me. But yeah, when they're too beefy, even though the sound quality is usually a little bit better if they fall out, it doesn't help me. Tom, how do you feel about buds? Yeah, I have luckily not run into problems with earbuds falling out, but I know so many people that do that I think this is one of the biggest advantages to the link buds is you gotta look at the picture to really understand it, but they go in your ear and then they have a little thing that kind of props out and props them up and it doesn't matter what shape your ear is in, they're gonna be in there. Now, not everybody's gonna like them because the sound is not gonna be the same, but since they're open air design anyway, it doesn't matter if there's a little propped up there, right, it's still gonna sound the same. The look actually reminds me of some ear plugs I use when I go to concerts, except for those, the circular hole is meant to pull them in and out of your ear rather than be in the ear like the Sony ones. I am looking for new earbuds because I've had AirPods Pro and something inside got a little bent and they buzz and I just don't feel like it's worth it to take them back and get them fixed. I probably should, but they're not in the warranty anymore because they're old and so I don't know if these are what I want because I do want some of that ability to be like, yeah, noise cancel, yeah, not and these kind of take that choice away, but I'm fascinated with that tapping on the skin to, you know, to control them. Not for any practical reason, just cause it looks cool. I'm like, oh, that's interesting and apparently it really works. Well, and they're sensitive enough that you can do that, which is pretty cool. I mean, I'm still a Jabra 65T user. I've loved them for, since I did a Live With It segment several years ago, there are updated models of the Jabras I just haven't gotten any and I don't mind that in ear experience. In fact, I'm kind of an earplug fan in general, but I know not everybody feels that way and it's cool that Sony is saying, all right, well, we're gonna give you some options. You definitely get passed through on real world audio because it's a donut, right? We're not actually plugging your ear up, but you do miss out perhaps on certain audio quality. It depends on what you're listening to. Yeah. You know, for a podcast, I would never care. From music I would. And I'm just gonna bring up quickly before we move on to the next topic of conversation because Tom, you shouted out the AirPods, but I'm like, for my Android friends out there, I have both the Samsung Buds 2 currently that I'm testing as well as the Pixel Buds and I gotta say Pixel Buds, for me, for my ear type, there we go, are totally where it's at. I like these, they're my faves. Well, if you're in the market for earbuds and battery life is of utmost importance, you're wearing them all day, you're talking on the phone, you're doing all the things, all the things that you might wanna do, Audio Technica has a new pair of wireless earbuds that might appeal to you. Again, great, great name, A-T-H-C-K-S-50-T-Ws, and they go for $200, that's at the high end of earbuds, but they give up to 20 hours of audio playback, this is according to the company, and 15 hours when using the Buds Active Noise cancellation feature, which that brings it down for all companies, but 15 hours is still pretty solid. Audio Technica also says that battery life can reach up to 50 hours, when you're using the earbuds with your charging case, all the charging cases will give more life, but 50 hours is pretty good, pretty impressive. By comparison, if you look at the Beats Fit Pro, offers six hours of continuous playback with noise cancellation, Samsung's Galaxy Buds Pro, and Sony's, that's the top of the line, WF-1000XM4 earphones that I mentioned earlier, both offer five hours of playback, so it's coming down, coming down a bit, and Apple's AirPods Pro only offer 4.5 hours with noise canceling enabled. Those are, that's pretty good battery life then on those. Yes, I haven't tested it personally, but boy, that would be great. All right, let's talk augmented reality. Augmented reality glasses need chips and modems, and a power source somewhere, and if you put that in the headset, it gets bulky. So designers often use a phone, which may not be really designed for it, or some pocket or clip on your belt. Motorola and Verizon want you to wear it around your neck, like you're at a conference, or if you raised Catholic like I was, a scapular. Motorola and Verizon announced a 5G neckband on Tuesday. Brian Meekam of Verizon told Engadget, we're making 5G wearable. Product photos show the neckband hangs like a lanyard with a cable connecting a small pendant that hangs down in front, and then there's a module on the back. The front pendant weighs 100 grams. That's where the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, the 5,000 milliamp hour battery, the SIM card slot, the gyroscope, the accelerometer, GPS and barometer are all, most of it's in the front. The back module is 75 grams. That just has stereo speakers in it. The magnetically attached cable contains the coaxes and signal lines to connect it all. The whole neckband is covered in 5G antennas, so it's supposed to get great reception. It's meant to work with a lot of different kinds of glasses. The photo shows it with the ThinkReality A3 headset. That thing needs a laptop usually to power it, so that's interesting. The Verge writes that it's compatible with Qualcomm's VR platform, Microsoft's remote network driver interface, and that it also has USB-C and DP 1.4 ports. Motorola and Verizon seem to think this is an enterprise product, not a personal consumer item. They talked about it being used by sports teams or schools or virtual reality theaters. We have a lot of people coming in to use VR. No price are available yet, but they are in a lot of talks, they say. You know, at first, when I read the story, I was like, I thought of it as like a choker necklace. Rather than, this is not gonna work, especially if somebody likes turtlenecks. No, no, no. It really is just more like a necklace rather than a neckband. So call it what you want. But yeah, listen, if you're not wearing a full-on thing on your face or going the eyeglass route, this makes the most sense of getting a sense of what your body is doing and what it can pick up as you navigate the world. Yeah, I think they're definitely spot-on with the enterprise approach here because my first thought is, okay, great, we're gonna wear all the bulky stuff around us like we're going to a convention and it's a lanyard or a badge. And then I was like, so the glasses are gonna be really sleek, right? And obviously there's going to be different glasses. They can come out with them for this, but at least for the pictures that went with this story, they're still bulky glasses. So I thought, you know, okay, I feel like with the consumer market, the big deal with AR, if you're going to go the AR glasses route is making it fashionable, like making it something people actually want to wear as well as functional. But I don't know that we're quite, they're yet. So for enterprise purposes, I think AR is the bee's knees, you know, for helping to train surgeons or people operating having machinery or I've seen AR teach people how to do public speaking. Like all of this is awesome, but in those use cases, people won't mind wearing a big badge modem around their neck. So that's awesome. Yeah, I had the exact same reaction with especially when I read about the speaker on the back, I'm like, why would you want that? Nobody wants that. But then the amusement park was the one that got me. Like, oh, you're going on a virtual roller coaster. They have those already. I can see them handing these to everybody, putting them over everybody's head as they start the ride. Then the speaker in the back. Obviously now I can make, it makes sense. Okay, or if it's virtual laser tag or whatever you're doing. So yeah, if you're looking at this saying, I never want to wear one of those. You won't have to if you don't want to. I don't think it's for you to just walk around your neighborhood with. We'll see. Folks, we love to hear from you. We ask if you got a couple of minutes and only a couple of minutes to fill out our latest survey. Let us know what you think of the show. It helps us make it better. So tell us what you think is working or not working about DTNS. Head over to dailytechnewshow.com slash survey. Really, we'll only take you a few minutes, just a few questions. Dailytechnewshow.com slash survey. Well, Trisha, you are fresh off of hosting Corsairs announcements this morning, including a new case, among other things. We were kind of excited when we read PCMag described the Corsair 5000T RGB Mid Tower PC case as smooth with easy cable management. Music to our ears. So what else can you tell us about the announcement? Yes, it was so fun getting to kind of unveil that this morning to the world. So the 5000T is a Mid Tower case and it is a very premium like top of the line case. It came out from Corsair and it basically has a lot of components that some PC build enthusiasts might purchase separately to put in their case, but already put in your case in a way that A makes the build a lot easier and B is styled to look pristine together. So it's a Mid Tower case with 208 individually addressable LEDs. Three included LL120 RGB fans. It includes the Commander Core XT already. It fits multiple 360 millimeter radios as well as it has these really nice cable management options in the back. So you're getting a lot of things that one would expect out of a more premium and high end case. But yeah, it ships with, like I said, three of the LL120 RGB fans already built in and there's these really cool lighting accents that they accent like the curves and the architecture of the case itself. And it just looks really sleek. It comes in black and white as of right now. And of course it's Corsair so everything can be controlled via IQ software. So there's certain things you can do with that specific combination. Like for example, you could set your entire PC to glow a certain color if certain components are getting too hot. So you could see in a moment's notice if there's an issue rather than having like a temp control window or something like that up in the side, which could obviously be very useful for people who love overclocking or if you're streaming and just need to catch something out of the corner of your eye, if it's positioned where my PC is, et cetera. That's really cool. So I mean, you could go out certainly and buy all of the RGB fans, the lighting strips and put everything in there individually yourself or if you want kind of that more premium experience where it's all orchestrated for you, the 5000T is really built from the ground up specifically for that. And I know not everyone is a huge RGB fan. I like RGB, but for me, when it comes to DIY PC builds, I'm happy to see all the RGB, not because I think RGB should be for everyone, but because I love the idea of customization in the PC build world. So if you wanna turn off half those RGB zones, you totally can or if you wanna build a super sleek white and purple build or something like that, you can set them all to that or if you're like me and you like the unicorn vomit RGB everywhere in your life, then you can also do that. But making it your own is one of the things that's so special to me about DIY PC building because you're really custom crafting it for your needs. So in my opinion, the more options, the merrier, which speaking of that, the other thing we revealed in the Corsair live stream this morning was all about RGB, the LC 100, which are these lighting panels that a lot of people in stream chat were asking if they were nano leafs, but they're actually significantly smaller. They're these tiny little triangular LEDs that magnet into the case. So I'll use my PC as an example, kind of off to the side. If you don't have a liquid cooling reservoir, if you're not doing that, you have kind of this empty artists canvas, if you will, with which you can light things up and a lot of like GPUs don't have built-in lighting. So you could make your GPU look really shiny. And of course, all of that's controlled through IQ as well. So it's- So you're talking about inside the case, you just magnet this thing up to the side of the wall. That's cool. Yeah, and it bends at each LED. So you can have it like crawling up your PSU shroud or, you know, and you can put it in all different configurations. Like we kind of did like a very silly design challenge. I made a kind of big try force out of mine with different colors. Someone else made a dinosaur. Someone else made like a little cat. So it's again, it's all about customizing your build and really making it your own. And that was something that I don't think anyone's really seen before. Like we've seen not only beyond your wall in your battle station room, but never something that's actually meant to go inside your PC. So that was kind of cool. Those were some of the highlights for me of the event. I don't know if either of you got a chance to check it out. Yeah, I actually, it's been a while since I built a PC myself. And part of that is because I can still feel the scrapes and cuts of trying to shove all the cables in there. So the cable management on this looks really good. The PC Gamer article about this convinced me that this is probably one of the better cable management systems out there. So if you're into cable management, you might want to take a look at it. Yeah, it's super nice. Sarah, I don't know how into the DIY PC build world you currently are, or if you still mess. Oh, I mean, listen, it's been a while as well for me, but I am into lighting. Lighting is my jam. In fact, I forgot to turn on my light behind me on the show today, so whatever. But yeah, I think this looks really slick. All right, well, Trish, thanks. Appreciate you giving us the scoop on that. They're pretty. I like those lights. Pretty. Yeah, it's so pretty. Really fun. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it, Tom. Reed Fishler sent us this story from IT News in Australia. Australia's NBN operates satellite internet called Skymesh through its SkyMuster satellite network. And on December 21st last year, 40% of Australia's NBN SkyMuster users were knocked offline for about seven hours. And in fact, some of them didn't get back online for two weeks. Now, you may say, OK, Tom, you talk all the time about how you don't talk about outages. Why are you talking about this one? Well, it's because NBN announced Tuesday it believes the outage was caused by a micrometeorite hitting one of its satellites. The satellite's optical recognition tech saw meteorite activity, and the satellite is no longer pointed where it used to be. So that seems to indicate it got hit by something and knocked it out of alignment. And then there was a configuration error in some of the customer's reception boxes that caused it not to be able to mitigate. That's why some people were only down for seven hours while other people out for two weeks. There was another error involved there. But if you had meteorite on your bingo card of possible ISP outages, well, mark it, because we had a meteor-caused outage, which I thought was very interesting. Man, satellites have had quite a week, really. And train the atmosphere bad for many satellites. Meteorites also bad. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Also, if you have anything that you'd like us to talk about on our future show, any feedback you have on a previous show, please do send it our way. Your emails make us smarter. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also want to extend a special thanks to Kepper67, who's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support. Kepper67. Woo-woo. Oh, yes, thank you, Kepper. Oh, that's great when you clap. Just kidding, Kepper. Kepper, we're giving you two rounds. The audience just gasps. Especially because Kepper's good with us from the very beginning, too, so good to appreciate it. Absolutely. Also, thanks to you, Tricia Hershberger, for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with all that you do. No, thank you guys so much for having me. It's always such a joy to come and chat tech with y'all. If you want to follow me on the socials, I am that girl, Trish, with no I in the girl. So it's just that GRL, Trish. And then on Twitch and YouTube, it's just slash Trisha Hershberger, just in the name. That's it. I'll be streaming on Twitch a little later today, doing an indie game showcase for those of you who enjoy indie games. And yeah, my MO is generally gaming-related, PC gaming related tech and passionate about games development. So if you like that stuff, come find me online. Well, you are a hard-working woman. And we really appreciate it. And so yes, if you're not following Trish on all the socials, do so now. Do it now. We're also live on this show Monday through Friday at 4 30 PM Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with one Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.