 If we name that one mp3 file, it does download. I have no idea what's happening. That's really weird. By the way, as soon as I started us streaming, yeah, I got my first little bit of bandwidth hiccup from you. Well, I think it came from your side, because it's not from my side. Now you're all pixely. Oh, am I? No. What's happening? It's moving out. It's moving out, though. But it happened as soon as I made us live, which is weird. I don't know why that would make a difference. All right. Is it good now? It's better, yeah. Yeah, it's moved out. It's like it had to make the transition somehow or something. Maybe it switches IP addresses. Makes you come from Belgium. That is weird. Yeah, let's acknowledge that you're on your mobile at the beginning. Yeah. Is the video as good as it usually is, or? Right now it's not. It's good. It's fine. It's acceptable. But it's not as good as it usually is. Damn it. So close. It was, in the pre-show, it was fine before I took the video live. It's weird. I think it's on your end. I think it's your fault. Sure, sure. That's very European of you. I almost said French, but then you're in Finland, so I had to go blanket. Let's finish for blanket. That's something. I don't know Finnish. Something, I don't know. I only know Swedish. You know, Sonya is a Swedish-speaking Finn. Oh, right, yeah. There's that whole thing. Well, let's get our show on the road, Roger. Goodbye. Disappear. Ready? I was born ready. That's been so long. There we go. Crap. Forgot to turn. Let me make sure that. All right, here we go. Now I will do it right. Tech news, a daily frontier. To explain advancing technologies and how they affect you, to seek out new gadgets, apps, and pics of the day, these are the continuing missions of the Daily Tech News Show. But Tom and the crew can't do it alone. To help keep DTNS on the cutting edge of news and lovable, goofy, curmudgeonly commentary, visit DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support to show your support. Now let's hear that other theme song. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016. I'm Tom, and I'm joining me on National Toast Day. Is Patrick Beja. How's it going, Patrick? You know what I did, what I had for dinner? Toast? Yes, absolutely. I know I know American. Does it automatically become French toast? Actually, it's in Finland, and it's a Danish dish called Toast Skagen, which is basically a shrimp on a toast with mayonnaise and dill and a bunch of stuff. It's delicious. Yeah, I want it. Can I have the recipe? Yes, of course, I will send it to you. I want to make that. By the way, if you follow me on Snapchat, I intend to do more cooking. I don't know why that would interest me. That's exciting. You know what else is true is Patrick has followed through on his promise to do today's show entirely on his mobile data in Finland. And so far, we've only had one very minor hiccup. And the hiccup was just a tiny slowdown of the connection. It wasn't even that it cut or anything like that. And the chat room, Big Jim in the chat room was saying that the video has even come back to the level before he started the show. So right when I went live with the video, his connection had to readjust or something, but now it's fine again. Knock on wood. Impressive Finnish mobile data. All right, well, we are going to talk a little bit about what happened in the virtual reality space at Mobile World Congress this week. Let's start off with the headlines. Got a lot of Apple news still in the news. Bill Gates, talking to the Financial Times, said that he did not think the FBI's request to Apple constituted a backdoor. He was saying that he thinks the courts need to decide this and we should have a debate. And then he said, quote, this is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information. They're not asking for a general thing. They're asking for a particular case. He compared it to requests for bank information or phone information. And then this morning in an interview with Bloomberg, Gates said he was disappointed that these comments were portrayed as siding with the FBI. He said the courts will decide Apple's case and he hopes for a discussion about the issue and he hopes that Congress will eventually decide where the line is. So he's really confused everyone. Recode published an article talking about the impossibility of kind of figuring out what he's saying. They embedded the Financial Times interview. The Financial Times has put the video out for people to watch. And Patrick, from my point of view, it looks like an engineer taking exception with someone calling something a backdoor that's not technically a backdoor and then getting muddled because he doesn't actually want to come out in full support of Tim Cook either and then having people interpret that as being against Apple. I think that Bill Gates just well-actuallyed the media world, that's what he did. He was like, well, actually, technically, it's not a backdoor. So ultimately, I think what he's saying is I really think that it's what everyone would like to see happen. Ultimately, people on both sides of the issue, which is a thoughtful, serious debate on a national level because these questions are too important and complicated to just actually just let one court decide for the entirety of the rest of the history of computers. It would have been an excellent opportunity for Bill Gates to start that debate with a salient and cogent point, though. Yeah, I guess so. I don't think any one person should start that debate that way. I think this is one case where there needs to be an actual gathering of a council of experts on both sides of, well, not both sides, every side of the issue that think long and hard on the consequences of whatever they will decide is right. Now, one thing that people are basing their decisions are is the narrowness of this case. It's for one phone or is it? Well, the Verge reports that a filing by Apple in response to an Eastern district of New York court request shows, sorry, that request shows 12 Apple devices are subject to court orders by the FBI in five different court districts using the old Ritz Act as justification. The Department of Justice lists a 13th device that is in a subsequent letter. The 13th device is listed in a subsequent letter. The filings come from a New York drug case in which the defendant agreed to a plea bargain. Eight of the devices run iOS 7, three others have no secure enclave. Apple deferred compliance with requests to decrypt in most cases. And if compelled to cooperate in the San Bernardino case, I'm sorry, this is difficult for me to say, Apple could be compelled to comply in these other cases as well. So this is really what I think Apple and everyone is alluding to when they're saying that specific case in the San Bernardino case is not just about that one phone, it's about a lot more. Yeah, and one of these cases, the one in the Eastern District that caused all of these filings and letters is already somewhat settled. It's a question of whether the FBI can still execute the search warrant and whether that's relevant or not. That's at stake, which is why the court asked Apple to say, where else is the FBI asking you to do this under the All Ritz Act because we wanna see a pattern of behavior if you're resisting these requests for illumination of this case. And it's in five different districts. It's in Illinois, it's in Massachusetts, it's in New York, and of course it's in San Bernardino. So this now becomes a question that we knew would happen which is if they win one case, they can then apply it to other cases. It doesn't necessarily change the principle of it. Apple always said that, but it does show that there are in fact pending cases that Apple is resisting cooperating under the authority of that All Ritz Act in particular. Yeah, I'm not gonna go further into it because it's already been done many times over the past few days. Yeah, yeah, we've covered this. If you're wondering why we're not still talking about it, we had, I think, three pretty good discussions about it last week. Not that we're done talking about it when new things come up, but like Patrick's saying. There's not much new to this other than, well now we have definite other examples of cases that could be benefiting from the FBI winning that court order dispute. In a letter obtained by Search Engine Land and verified by TechCrunch, Google told partners in the US and the UK that it will shut down Google Compare as of March 23rd. That was a service initially known as Google Advise and launched in the UK back in 2012, launched in the US just last year. It let users comparison shop for financial products, things like credit cards, mortgages, insurance. Thanks to Kevin Kipper for submitting this on the subreddit. A lot of people looking this because it's only been around for a year in the US as a quick determination of failure by Google. Well, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's been running since 2012 in the UK as you mentioned. For me, myself, I prefer to look at it as Google having the intelligence of closing something down when they see it's not achieving what they wanted it to achieve. And that's a quality that I think some companies might benefit from having a little bit more of. Yeah, I think this gets a little confused because it's only been in the US for a year, but you're talking for three and a half years in the UK. That's quite a good run. And the UK is a financial capital of the world, so it's not like you don't get a good test case. And then once they took what they learned at the UK and expanded it in the US to see how it went there, what they learned was that they couldn't maximize enough revenue out of it, so they shut it down. And also, it's not like it's their core search product. I understand it's a comparison tool that could be useful to some people, but yeah, it's not gonna change the face of Google that they're losing that one tool. True. Bloomberg reports people familiar with the matter. Those people say Times Incorporated heard a presentation from Citigroup on a deal to merge with Yahoo's core business. Verizon and AT&T are also said to be interested in Yahoo. Yahoo reaches one billion people worldwide. Time announced earlier this month that it is buying ad tech company Viant, owner of MySpace. Yeah, and the MySpace thing got a lot of attention, but really they're buying Viant because of the ad tech. And they would be buying Yahoo, probably because of the ad tech and the data-driven technologies that Yahoo has. It sounds like kind of a match made in heaven to me. You know, Verizon buying Yahoo, and then combining it with AOL makes a little bit of sense, too, I'll give you that. AT&T is adding some content when they own direct TV, but not as much. Time, Sports Illustrated Magazine, all the magazines, you know, Time Magazine. Going into Yahoo's content portals to fill them up gives Yahoo something that it has been trying to create on its own with better branding, and then you get all of those ad technologies, which is what Time is trying to do at AOL did, which was create an ad tech company around good content. Yeah, and all of this would happen in the context of the reverse spin-off of them, basically diverting themselves from Alibaba to get the value from that investment. Yeah, and Bloomberg goes into some tax benefits that that gives Time, which allows them to bid on this with the big boys in ways that they might not otherwise. Therot.com reports on a leaked video discovered by Walking Cat on Twitter, showing the user interface for ActionGram, which is a holographic video app for the Microsoft HoloLens. There's the shoe dropping. In the video, you can see device stats at the top of the app window, things like Wi-Fi, connectivity, battery indicator, time, volume, and the basic menu that floats in front of you in the video features Cortana and live tiles, very similar to the Windows 10 start menu. So it's kind of our first look at what the prototype interface for HoloLens is at the moment. They're obviously continuing to develop it, but it looks a little like Windows 10, not a big shocker, I guess. Yeah, it's not a shocker, but I have to say I was a little bit disappointed. It might be that it's a temporary thing to get them, you know, run. It feels very much like a placeholder, doesn't it? It feels, well, it's just a start menu, and you have to point instead of pointing with your mouse, you point with your finger, and then you do that air tap. It's different. Yeah, it's kind of disappointing that you have all of this fantasized imagery of the augmented reality enabled by the HoloLens, and then when you get right down to it, it seems that the menu is just a dumb menu that we've all learned. This is an instructional example of why companies keep things secret, because my guess is they're using that menu because it already works, and it's easy to port into HoloLens, but they don't want to show it off to a bunch of people because they want to eventually come up with something that's going to satisfy you more. And the instructional video is very much an instructional video, it's like. And you can do this and click here, and if you don't see the logo appear, then maybe try to turn around, turn your head around. Maybe it's got to be somewhere else, and it's very first gen. So yeah. Western Digital still plans to acquire Sandisk despite the removal of its investment from China's Unisplender Corporation. I love that name, Unisplender. All the Splendor in one. Yes, all of it. The US Foreign Investment Committee confirmed plans to investigate the deal in which Unisplender would have taken 15% of the merged company. Unisplender would have contributed 2.7 billion pounds to the 12.3 billion bid. Western Digital now plans to go in alone with a cash and stock deal valued at 11.2 billion pounds. Some of Western Digital's investors think it's too expensive, and they ought to just walk away from the deal, but I think Western Digital still feels like it's valuable. In fact, they were saying today that they think it's more valuable now than it was back in the autumn when they first proposed the deal, but it is an unfortunate intersection of world politics and investment that's undermining their plan. Telegram said Tuesday it has 100 million monthly active users now, generating 15 billion encrypted messages daily. Last time Telegram reported users, it was December 2014, so just a little over a year ago, and back then they only had 50 million active users, so in a year and a couple months, they've doubled their active users. So remind me, Telegram is that app that is actually encrypted in a way that cannot be cracked by basically anyone that is very- It's a very strong encryption at its end to end, so the company itself can't see what's going on on its network, correct? Right, and that anyone can easily download and use. Yeah, it's the one developed by the founders of Kontaktye from Russia, and it's also the one that has been controversial because of some of the users being considered criminals on the world stage, or terrorists, but Telegram has been suspending some accounts, and yet it is also, that's its only activity, is it could say, oh, you can tell me that's a criminal, we'll take it off our system, but they can't actually see what's going on. Right, and I think initially there were some public chat rooms being used on Telegram for illegal communications, and that's the ones, those are the ones they closed, but basically I was being an idiot and just trying to make the point that anyone can go to an actually encrypted and impossible to break app very easily, so. And if you said, and this is one of the things regarding the iPhone 5C that Apple is being asked to help crack the password with, is that there might be an instance of Telegram running on that phone, and if you can set it up either way, you can set up Telegram to not prompt you for the password every time you launch it and just rely on your phone's password to keep people out of it, or you can set it to prompt you for the password every time you launch it if the user of that iPhone 5C set it to not prompt you for the password every time, if they were to crack the password of the 5C, they'd be able to get into Telegram and look at the history of messages, at least that's one theory. However, the encrypted portions of Telegram, because you can choose to have an encrypted conversation or non-encrypted conversation, and the encrypted part, you usually can set it for the messages to auto-delete after 24 hours. So, yeah. Speaking of auto-delete after 24 hours. Snapchat just added the birthday party feature that gives you birthday-oriented filters you can use on your snaps. Amazing, I know Veronica is gonna be happy about this. A cake emoji will also appear next to your friends' names on their birthday. You can double-tap to send a picture to them with a birthday-themed filter yourself. Amazing, I admire Snapchat, because what they did yesterday that we talked about on the show, if you remember, was start selling you geofilters to say like, hey, having a wedding? You wanna have a wedding-themed filter? Give us five bucks, or maybe more, and you can do it. You can build whatever filter you want. Then the next day, they give you a free birthday filter to get you hooked on filters, right? So, either it's your birthday and you use the birthday filter, or it's other people's birthday, and you double-tap and use the birthday filter, and then you start seeing like, oh, I love these filters. I wanna have a filter, and then you spend money with them. On the subject of Snapchat, have you seen that article over the weekend where it was a journalist who was regaling us with the tales of how his younger sister was using Snapchat? No, I don't think I saw that. Okay, I think it was a Buzzfeed article. Yeah, there it is. I'll link it in the chat room. Maybe we can come to... I'll put it in the show notes, too, Patrick. Yeah, put it in the show notes. It is kind of an entirely different world how the actual teens actually use Snapchat. It's a very interesting read. I reckon... Do you have an example? Basically, she answers snaps with her own snaps. She can do that a few dozen times a minute without really reading the snap that she's answering. She's 13-year-old. Got it. It's a very... It's a kind of parallel processing where we should be able to harness for data centers. Hopefully, yes. One day. But it's the first time I actually felt like I was out of touch with the way the young people use stuff. Do you use Snapchat? A little bit, but certainly not like this. I see. Well, let's get into something we all can understand, battery life. Oppo showed off SuperVook at the Mobile World Congress. The battery-charging technology can take a phone from zero to 100% in 15 minutes. In fact, the author of the CNET article said they saw a phone go from 5% to 100% in just a few minutes. Oppo also showed off SmartSensor, which builds image stabilization into the camera's sensor. Instead of having it handled in the lens, both features are expected in Oppo's upcoming phone, which they did not announce yet. Yeah. Maybe those features could be sold to other manufacturers so that they can be in full-time activity mode. That's why patents exist, Patrick. That's my point. Maybe they should start doing stuff with patents. Maybe they will. Samsung 837, is that the actual name of the store? 837 is the name of the store, yeah. Well, so that funnily named store is opening Tuesday at Washington and East 13th in New York with art exhibits, cooking classes, musical performances, and of course, electronics demonstrations. It will have a 75-seat theater and space for tech support and workshops. It won't sell things, though. If you want to buy a Samsung product while at the store, they will help you order it online, although you can buy food and drinks there. So yeah, there's a Samsung store that doesn't sell Samsung stuff, but does sell coffee. And art exhibits, maybe, cooking classes? I guess they have, you know, home appliances that could be used in those classes, musical performances. Totally, it's to show off their white goods, yeah. No, that's it. But I'm very, I mean, maybe it's some kind of branding effort on Samsung's part, but I'm confused a little bit. Between this and the BuzzFeed article about Snapchat, I don't know what word I'm living in anymore. I don't know if it will be as successful as they hope. I think the jury's out on that, but this is definitely an attempt to say, hey, people just buy online, let's make the ultimate showroom and give them reasons to come, like food and classes and music performances so that they will be exposed to our stuff and want to buy it, whether they buy it whether they're in the store or they go home and buy it, we don't care, but let's associate our brand with fun. So they're essentially building a really fancy cafe that shows off their products and hopefully gets people inspired to buy them. That, what I like about this idea is it acknowledges the reality of consumer behavior and tries to lean into it. Now, you can argue it maybe leans into it too far by not stocking anything, but I think it was Big Jim who said they want to avoid the New York City sales tax, which maybe that alone makes it worthwhile, I don't know. But yeah, this is an interesting doubling down on people buy on their phones, they buy on their computers, and they just want showrooms to look at stuff, so let's give them the ultimate showroom. It's, you know, when you put it like this, I kind of understand it a little bit better and I think it does kind of make sense. Certainly, I've gone and hung out in geek places, you know, Apple stores, Microsoft stores, those kinds of places, without really having any intention of buying anything, just to go and look at stuff and touch some of the computers and hang out, really. So why not? Cooking classes, maybe? Hey, you could learn some knife skills, thanks to Samsung. And then when their internet of things, iNife comes out or whatever they call it. The Galaxy knife. Oh, Galaxy knife, that sounds ominous. Well, thank you folks for letting us know what you want us to talk about. It really does help us put the show together every day, so get in there and vote at our subreddit, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com, and that is a look at the headlines. All right, big week for VR, as we've mentioned. The HTC Vive going on pre-order February 29th for $799, but that does give you the controller bundled in. Valve just released today a Steam VR performance test tool which runs a benchmark for VR content at 90 frames per second, and then returns a fidelity rating. So it doesn't just give you a list of specs, it tries to actually test out your rig. Of course, we mentioned on Sunday the LG 360 Cam, which does 2K video. There's the Samsung Gear 360 Cam, which does 3,840 by 1920 video, roughly 4K. LG 360's VR headset, which is cardboard compatible, but doesn't put the phone in. It actually has its own lenses and connects to the G5 phone over USB-C. There's the Sony Xperia iWareable 360 camera. Don't know how good that's gonna work. Tim Beharen for PCMag had a big write-up about the Sony PlayStation VR today and was very positive with his test of that. And then there was a little bit of trouble with some Oculus pre-orders being canceled. Now Oculus said that most of those were because of order problems, probably people in countries where they don't chip trying to do a pre-order, but they said if you think it was canceled an error to contact them. But here's the big one that caught my eye today, Patrick, and you as a a aficionado on Japan, I think we'll have a good perspective on this. The Japanese division of IBM is sponsoring a VR adaptation of Resi Kawahara's book, Sword Art Online, called Sword Art Online, The Beginning. The book is set in 2022 and focuses on various virtual reality MMOs. So they're making a virtual reality MMO of a classic book about virtual reality MMOs. It uses cognitive computing from Watson to help create the world. It uses the software cloud service to deliver the world and they're partnering with Namco Bondi on the gameplay. They'll start with 208 testers in Tokyo next month. You'll be appearing as a 3D scanned avatar where you are the controller and they're gonna be cross-platform. They're supporting the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. So you would think that I would have a strong opinion. Well, actually I do kind of have a semi-strong opinion on this. I have no idea what they're doing. It seems like, I don't know what Watson is for in this project. I mean, Watson has very, not specific, but it has a certain type of thing it can do. I don't know how it will factor in to an MMO. But even beyond that, it's kind of funny, not even interesting, but funny that they're making a VR MMO about a series where the main topic is VR MMOs and immediately you're gonna have the images of the biggest fantasies about VR. I would guess the people who first imagine what a VR world would be, I think that's what they're gonna think about. It is people living as avatars of themselves into a virtual world where they can do things that they couldn't do in the real world in the same way that people did in something like Second Life. Well, it's kind of a genius way to approach an MMO. First of all, I think the reason you need Watson is doing a virtual reality MMO has got to be a Herculean computing task. So you need some powerful computing engine behind it. And I guess that's why they need Watson, but I'm also vague on exactly what they get from that. It does make a certain sort of sense. But isn't it genius to say, look, the problem with a virtual reality MMO is everybody's gonna say, well, why is this compelling? What's the storyline? Why am I in virtual reality? And I, hey, wait a minute, I can see the strings, so to speak, because it's virtual reality. So you just make it based on a story that is about virtual reality MMOs. So all the strings are already grandfathered in by the storyline. And you're like, well, of course, it looks like you're in a virtual reality MMO because the story's about virtual reality MMO. You know, I'm not convinced. I think this is the first, the most obvious use of the technology. And very often, when you see those new kinds of technologies being developed, the first users, the most obvious ones are sort of transcriptions of the real world. And usually they don't work as well and they don't work period because you need to have a type of, use a type of software that takes advantage of the specific, the specific, well, the specificities of that platform. And I don't think this is it. This is what we always try to do, recreating something that we have in reality in a digital space. And it's kind of like making, when you first had the web, people came up with geo cities. They were thinking, oh, we're gonna recreate virtual cities around web pages and it's gonna be like the real world but on the internet. Well, it didn't quite work because that's not what the platform was best at doing. And I think this is the same example, a kind of similar example of this. It's interesting that they're doing it and it's certainly gonna help everyone figure out what virtual reality is best for but I don't think that best use is going to be that. I think it is. We were talking last year a lot about, well, what are you gonna be able to do when these headsets come out? So it's interesting to see IBM getting into a big project. Whether your concerns prove to be true or not, there'll be something to do. There'll be something to try, it sounds like. And there'll be more than just this, obviously. It got me thinking though, okay, if I'm the controller and this doesn't apply to Sword Art Online, it applies to all of these things. I am now gonna have so many options for doing some kind of virtual reality and if I'm participating in a movie by walking around or I'm doing one of these MMOs, I have to move. So suddenly, I mean, first of all, accessibility wise, if your mobility impaired, it becomes difficult to participate fully in these. But what if you just hold and slow, like me? Like it's already bad enough on a little controller how far my lag time is because of my 40 year old plus brain. Imagine if I actually have to move in real time. That's gonna introduce a whole different set of symptoms here. I was thinking about it when I was reading Tim Behren's PC Mag article because he talked about like actually ducking down behind stuff and holding up a gun in a game and how it worked perfectly because it was doing exactly what he thought it should do and I was like, first of all, I thought, oh, that's great. Like I suck at trying to map my brain to the controls and I'm always really slow in these shooter games. Maybe it'll be better and then I realize, no, I'm gonna still be slow because I'm creaky. Well, this is, you're describing exactly the reason why this I don't think is going to work depending on how it's implemented but certainly making you have real life movement and interaction in order to translate that movement and interaction into the game is not gonna work. I'm gonna break it and help play a game or something. Well, exactly, and that, first of all, it was possible in some arcade games and in some actual games a while ago and you could play it for five minutes but after that, you get tired from moving around and it's exactly why motion gaming didn't take beyond the first couple of years, like the week's phenomenon societal fun thing to do. And so I really, and maybe that's not what they're gonna be doing, right? It's, there are already developers figuring out the best way to move in a virtual space. One thing that one developer found out was that a sort of teleport was working a lot better because beyond, if you would be walking your character, you know, if you move a stick forward, then you're walking, in real life, you're not moving around so it can induce... And Oculus works with the Xbox controller, the Vive's gonna have controllers, so you don't have to do all of the moving, I get it. No, yeah, of course. And so one of the way to move, I was saying, it's you teleport, so you have a little ready cue and you place it where you wanna go, you press a button and then you're there. That is one of the, and this is kind of what I'm trying to get at. It's not gonna turn out to become a perfect reflection of the real world. There are gonna be things like that where in order for it to work, it's going to have to be teleporting to move or these kinds of things. But yeah, it's definitely interesting that they're doing this. If I can go on for just a second, well, half a minute longer, for me, the thing that was really interesting was the reliance on smartphones for VR techniques. And it might be that those manufacturers are trying to get something cool and new and fun to get interest in their core business of smartphones. But the LG device specifically that you can plug into a smartphone was really intriguing to me because not only is it a device that you can use with any smartphone that is compatible. Well, and the only one that's compatible is the G5. Well, yeah, but they said theoretically they could make it more compatible, but yeah. They said it would work with any Snapdragon 820 device. So in the future, there might be more. But it's also very lightweight headset and the smartphones are powerful enough that they can power VR experiences. And we knew that with the Gear VR and things like that already. But here, it's actually, it's not even using the display. You're plugging in just to use the GPU and CPU of your smartphone. It's kind of mind-blowing. And honestly, we're not that far away from being able to do that wirelessly where the video lag would be okay. The problem with VR is you need to cut that lag down so much that that's gonna be several years before we can get the latency to be small enough to make that possible. But eventually, the idea that the device in your pocket just connects to the headset, you pop the headset on and you can watch movies, you can play VR. I think what Google did with Cardboard is more valuable than some people give it credit for because that's what gave LG the freedom to do this. They're using the Cardboard VR app. They're just changing the Cardboard form factor by leaving the processor in the phone but giving you a little better lens. Yeah, and you know, that could become a much easier. You were mentioning the Vive going on sale soon. As everyone knows, it's 800 bucks. I don't know how expensive that LG VR headset is going to be, but yeah, it might not be the best, technically the best experience you can imagine, but in the same way that Sony might have a leg up on the VR market, sometimes you just need to be good enough and to have a more approachable device and that might be interesting in LG's case. Yeah, I mean, even at $199, it's gonna look cheap compared to the Oculus and the Vive. Let's get to our pick of the day. Dwayne in Germany was listening to the show with Scott and Molly last week and said he chuckled a little when they were talking about multiple sign-ins for the Instagram official app because he's a Windows phone user and he's been dabbling with Android the last six months and still prefers Six Tag over Instagram on Android. Six Tag is his pick for Windows phone fans out there. It's amazing, he says. It has multiple accounts. It's had it long before the official app did on any platform and always pushes the boundaries thanks to Rudy Hyun, the developer. He just made it a universal app on Windows 10, making it shine so much more. So Six Tag is his pick if you wanna take a look for it. Even though Instagram now has multiple accounts, you could have been using Six Tag for now. Now you tell us Dwayne, but there you go. I think that's a cool pick and it does seem to get some decent reviews on the Microsoft App Store, four and a half stars. So there you go, check it out. Six Tag. Number six, TAG. Send your picks to us folks. Feedback to dailytechnewshow.com. You can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks. Our message of the day is from Bill in Huntsville. I mentioned him yesterday because we talked about the fact that Google is going to bring Google fiber to Huntsville, Alabama because the municipal fiber being built by the city is available for anybody and Google won't get exclusive views at it, but they said, hey, we're gonna run. We're gonna be the first client to run on that municipal fiber. So Bill did a little poking around in his local papers in the Huntsville media and said, the city will own and install the backbone. When that is complete, the city will then lease space to Google and Google will connect to individual addresses. They said the price for gigabit service in other cities is $7 a month, so they're using that as a benchmark, although they haven't officially announced the price yet. He said, if HDTV and internet is provided, the cost is usually $130 a month. Thank you Bill for the on the scene reporting. That's awesome. And I think it's cool that we actually have a unbundled system to look at. Chattanooga has the single payer system, right? The city runs the fiber and sells it to the end users and Huntsville is going to have the unbundled system where the city built the infrastructure and then they let people provide service over it as much as they want. Maybe true in Chattanooga they do that as well, but this is being built that way from the get go. What I've learned in Finland is that actually, how is the connection? Is it still good? Yeah, yeah, it's still good. Okay, so there you go. Amazing connectivity Finland. What I have learned is that for sure, there are going to be different ways of wiring different communities in different cities. And certainly a municipal effort should be possible, no matter what the situation is. There are cases where this is your only decent option in order to get a good internet connection. So I really wish that this kind of, I hope that these examples show the way for other instances of that happening in the US. It's a very efficient way of actually deploying fast internet. And I think you make a great point, which is not every community is the same. So what's good for Huntsville might not be good for your community, but it might. So you should be able to avail yourselves of the best solution for your community, whatever that is. Yeah. Thank you, Patrick Beja. As always, Frenchspin.com. If you want more, Patrick, there's lots more good quality podcasts coming at you in both English and French. Yeah, and on Frenchspin.com, it's the English versions. And we just recorded a couple of days ago, an episode of Pixels, which is the show we do about video games. We cover the video game news, kind of in the same way that we do about tech news here, but it's much easier to consume because it's only once every two weeks and you get everything you need. So go to Frenchspin.com and listen to Pixels. And yeah, that would be excellent for you video game enthusiasts. We are going to get our second edition of day six DTNS with Peter Wells, this coming Sunday slash Monday, depending on whether you're in Australia or not. And we're going to get at least two a month now, thanks to you guys, but we want to get to that milestone. We're getting close. So if you can all help us out, I think it's like 600 of you, gave us a dollar a month, that's all. If you get a dollar worth out of the show and you're not giving us a dollar, think about going to patreon.com slash DTNS, helping us get to that next milestone goal. Or if you're like, you know what, Patreon doesn't work for me, dailytechnewshow.com slash support has all kinds of ways to support the show. But we succeed based on how well you think we're doing. So let us know, patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can give us a call 51259 daily, that's 5932459, catch the show live Monday through Friday, 430 p.m. Eastern at alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv. And visit our website, dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Simon Club helps you have enjoyed this program. I had a frog pants in my throat. That didn't go so badly with the cell phone connection. No, actually I forgot all about it. It seemed to go great. Yeah. You and your bits, all those bits in Finland, trying to corner the bit market. Ooh, Martha Stewart has a toast scoggin recipe. I think that's the one I'm going to send you. Oh, yes, send that to me. That sounds delicious. I actually have some shrimp in the freezer I could use. Ooh, do you have dill? No, I can get dill pretty easily, though. Dills or dill? Just dill. Dill, oh yeah, no, dills are much easier. Dills, I'd have to go to Texas. Yeah, that would be more difficult. Oh, you don't have to use Grimfresh. That is for, no. Dill, OK, dill springs, garnish. Lemon juice, OK, coarse salt, yes. White pepper, absolutely. Small shrimp, unsalted butter. OK, I can see that. Bread, whitefish caviar. Yeah, OK, that's. Whitefish caviar, hold on. It's just fish eggs, just it's not. That might be the harder one for me. Well, Whole Foods will have it, I guess. How much is that going to be? That's really what it gives me pause. Recipe in the chat room, and just forget about the Grimfresh. Dave, do you do milk? No, no, nothing. Just don't do it, Derek. Don't do it, just add more mayonnaise in order to clog your arteries. OK, done. I mean, yes, maybe if Martha wants to use Grimfresh, fine. But it's going to be nicer with just. And also, a little tip from my wife, cut some of the shrimp a little bit more finely, and some of them a little bit less finely. Oh, OK, good. Because it's nicer. All right, sorry. Show title. I wonder if I can get the caviar at Ikea, like the fish eggs? Well, it's just fish eggs. I'm sure you can get, can't you? I can get a row over at the Japanese market, but I don't know if that's even though. Yeah, that's why it works. OK, yeah. What are we going to call this show, Jenny? I know. Hi, Jenny. Hi. Hey. Well, Big Jim has a lot of suggestions. But the top vote getter right now is go through the gates to get to the back door. It's a little long. I like it though. I like the gates. The gates in the back door philosophy. I mean, I think of lots of titles. But there's also 3D or not 3D. Nice. All rits lead to Apple, also from Big Jim. The gate is not a back door? Unisplender to rule are your splendors, what? Unisplender for all. How about VR-Hitbraking with Old Man Merit? What? Oh. VR-Hitbraking. Oh, I didn't mention that. I didn't mention that incredible device that I don't even know how to describe it. It's a thing you run on when you have a VR helmet on. Yeah, it's like a treadmill, but omnidirectional treadmill. It has beads, and you can run on any direction. It's great if you want to play a VR thing where you're running around, and you're just in place. Is that just a giant ball? No, it's like a really like a treadmill, except it's not like a carpet that's moving around. It's just a series of little beads that move, you know, it's Jesus omnidirectional treadmill. OK, I'm going to call it, will VR break your hip? OK, I forgot to talk about this. I'm disappointed. I fall in, and VR can't get up. Yeah, that little cage thing. I remember I've forgotten all about that. It could seem like they showed that at CES two years ago, and then they just never went back to it. It was a Kickstarter project, actually. But of course, it's not going to go anywhere. No one wants to run for half an hour if you're playing a game for half an hour. Exactly. Can you imagine doing Vanilla WoW that way? It was Vanilla WoW. It would be like training for a marathon. Yeah, it's the original World of Warcraft before any of the expansions. Basically ran constantly. Well, you know, you'll be rewarded. Don't you, after running so long, don't you get a mount automatically or no? It's not the way it works, Roger. Come ask. That's why I put phrases as a question. That is an answer, didn't I? It's not. It's not. There's more to it than that. You have to level. And in Vanilla WoW, the level was much higher than it is now for your mount. So can't you just get an Apple Box and use it as a step? Right. Now you're not making any sense, Roger. Are you trying to make a mount, Pun? I see you're trying to make a pun. I already made a pun with Marco Rubio on Twitter. Oh yeah? What did you say? I said if Marco Rubio doesn't get the RNC nominee vote, will he be open to opening a restaurant called Rubio Super Tuesday? Rubio's Chris Steakhouse. Well, it's like Ruby Tuesdays, or Ruby's Tuesday. Scott Johnson's wife said that Rubio and Cruz would make a great Miami Vice cast. That actually sounds like a DJ set. Rubio and Cruz in the morning. A smartphone guided toothbrush. Do we really need that? What do you buy guided? Does it tell you where to brush? Yes. You missed a spot. It's a video. I have to watch John Falcone tell me about it, which is fine, but I can't really do that and edit at the same time. So everybody just go follow John Falcone on Twitter and then watch that video if you want to find out. All right, I'm going to re-plug my ethernet. You're going to try to hand over the other direction now? That was impressive how it handled that. That must be a Chrome or an OS thing, I guess. Just an OS. Probably an OS. Yeah, that was elegant. It feels elegant, but the underpinnings are quite ugly. All right, so disconnecting from the iPhone now. Did we lose him? Did we lose him? There we go. There we go. It's working. And this time, well, no, actually, last time it was the same. I was about to say, this time there was no pixelation, but that wasn't when you switched your connection. That was when we went live. My phone, however, is getting extremely hot. All that insight into that small space. You know what, it is pixelated now. I don't know what's going to be. Oh, OK. Your password. Oh, maybe it's all of that weird P2P they're doing for Chrome or Hangouts now. Yeah, I don't know if that affects Hangouts on Air or not. I was curious about that. Has to, or, well, it doesn't have to. Hangouts on Air operates in a little different manner than the conference call part. Hello, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. You guys can't hear that. I need to make it so that you hear the sounds that are happening on my machine, my streaming machine, because AlphaGeek radio hears them. So that means you can go and play Overwatch now. Wait, is that not what you're going to do? I played Overwatch this weekend. What did you think? And I had sound driver issues on my desktop. So I liked it, but I think I'm going to have to play it on my Surface Pro or my Surface Book with a mouse, which is almost as powerful as my desktop, frankly. But I have a new desktop coming to replay for VR headset testing. And then that comes. I'll be using that. Nice. Are you getting a VR headset? I am. I don't know if I'm going to order the Vive. I probably should if I'm going to test. But I have a pre-ordered the Rift. I should probably do the Vive, too, for genius sake. You were saying? Me? Yeah. You said, uh? I think I wanted to answer Big Jim, but I did that in the chat. I see. I do that, too. We start to say it out loud, and then realize he can't really hear me in real time. Maybe I'll just type it. Ruby is super Tuesday. I'm going to go and do things. It's half past midnight here, can you imagine? I'm sorry, it's away. That's fine. It's looking, I'm 94.5% sure I'm going to be in Japan in April and May. So then it will be, I don't know exactly how the time different works out, but I think I'm going to wake up fairly early for the show. But I don't know that I'm going to be able to participate well in the discussion topic selection. Just before a couple of months, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, so we'll figure it out. Maybe we'll get in the habit of picking the topic the night before when you're actually awake. Right. Unless there's something that breaks, and in that case, that's sure. Yeah, yeah, that's all right. Well, we still have time, anyway. Cool, man. Fun, I can't explain it. You wonderful people have an amazing time. You too. Bye, chat room, bye, everyone. Bon voyage. What? No, I'm not going anywhere. Have a good voyage to bed and a ship of dreams. Excelsior. Excelsior indeed. Bye. At least I didn't say ship of fools. D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d. We're on our third let's talk about Star Wars, right? Yes, I believe so. This was one today will be our third. Yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I'm going to go get all my toys. I stayed home to get the toys off the top shelf. Nice. What toys? Star Wars toys. Star Wars toys. Oh, nice. I've always wanted a Star Wars-themed easy bake oven. Like as a toy. I always thought that was kind of, but not, it wouldn't be an easy bake oven, but it would be like, you know, whatever the replicator version of Star Wars food thing. Because you never see a stove or, you know, kind of thing. OK, I'm going to go and play with toys. Hold on a second. Oh, yeah. Star Wars mold maker, easy bake oven, ultimate oven. There's a mold maker for the easy bake oven. That is Star Wars. Just so you know. All right. Thanks, everybody, for watching. Goodbye.