 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Hi-Tech Oki, Logan Larson, and Mike Akins. Coming up on DTS, James Thatcher joins us to explain about how those solar panel backups we talked about yesterday might affect other consumer electronics. Sarah sums up the reviews of the Kindle Scribe e-ink tablets and why we might not get a replacement for Twitter after all. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 30th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Rebed, I'm Sarah Lane. In a very cold Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger J. How cold? How cold? Well, this morning it was 13 degrees, currently like 21. So that's negative Celsius. Yes, that's Fahrenheit, so it's freezing conditions and it's gross. And this is what we signed up for. Well, then let's let's warm you up with the quick hits. Several Chinese cities, including Shanghai and Zhengzhou, announced plans to lift COVID-19 related lockdowns. As a result of unrest at Foxconn's Zhengzhou plant, spurred by the lockdown, Apple analyst Ming Qiqiu estimates the average capacity rather utilization at the plant was only 20% back in November. It's pretty low. Expected to improve to up to 40% in December, but obviously still pretty low. OnePlus announced it will bring longer operating system support to some of its Android devices starting in 2023. Some OnePlus devices, select OnePlus devices, will get four major platform updates. And since those platform updates come about once a year, you're going to get four years of feature support, as well as five years defined as five years of security updates. OnePlus did not yet say which models will fall under this new commitment. Corning says its new Gorilla Glass Victus 2 can survive a one meter drop onto concrete without any trade-offs in scratch resistance. Phone makers report that more than 30% of drops occur on concrete more than any other surface. Gorilla Glass Victus 2 will show up on flagship phones from what it says is very large OEMs in the next few months. Yes, Victus II, as I like to call him. Three Chinese astronauts arrived Wednesday aboard the Celestial Palace space station to become the first in-orbit crew rotation since the station began construction in April 2021. The previous crew had been aboard since June. Prior crews had had to leave the station and clear out before the new crew had arrived. So this in-orbit rotation tests the station's ability to support six crew members at once, at least temporarily. This was also the final mission in the construction of the station. Another non-cryptocurrency blockchain-based project is ending. IBM and Maersk will discontinue the Trade Lens Supply Chain platform in Q1. You might recall that Trade Lens was launched back in 2018, but the company said they couldn't really get the collaboration they needed to reach commercial success. Yeah, well, maybe someone... There's a lot of other projects like this. Maybe somebody else... Yeah, it could kind of be reimagined. Alright, let's talk about that Kindle scribe. Yeah, so the reviews are out for Amazon's Kindle scribe and as a user of its competitor, they're remarkable to one of the competitors, but a really close one. I was curious to see what the folks were saying. So we looked at four of the reviews out there to see the pros and cons. First, the basics about the scribe. It's a 10.2 inch Kindle tablet, largest of its kind. First new model since the Kindle Oasis was launched back in 2016. There have been some updates to existing models, but nothing fully new. This is a reimagined product. The company told TechCrunch it took as long as it did because it wanted to get some of the features right, like front lighting, the line-wide 300 ppi. The company sells two versions of the scribe. There's a basic pen version. They both have pens and a premium pen version with storage options that range from 16 gigs to 64 gigs. And it starts at $350. The priciest Kindle yet, but again, new category. The basic pen version can write on the screen. That's kind of it. Next, the premium pen has a cool shortcut button for quick actions like maybe you want to trigger the pen's highlighter mode, something like that. There's also a dedicated eraser on the opposite end of the pen. My remarkable two pen pro has the same thing. And it's pretty nice. So let's hear what else folks said, Scott. Well, let's talk about TechCrunch first. Their review notes that the scribe share some key elements with the Oasis in particular, like flush glass display, which is pretty nice. It has asymmetrical side bezels so that while holding the unit, it doesn't trigger the touch display. I think that's actually a really important feature. But the scribe doesn't have a physical page turn button or set of buttons on the surface, which in TechCrunch's case, they thought that was a missed opportunity. I think I agree. Though it does note the plus is that the scribe ships with the USB-A to USB-C cable. So you don't have to go fiddle around with dongles or figure out your own way to do it. It's not straight USB-C, which will come in handy. If you've got some cables lined around. Yeah, I mean, a lot of us who say USB-C all the way still have a lot of those USB-A. So yeah, that is kind of a plus. ZD Nets review was interesting because it described an almost identical experience to how I first felt when I reviewed the Remarkable 2. In fact, that was a live with it segment from last year. Certainly a scribe competitor, but it's not, you know, the Amazon ecosystem, which is, I think, a minus for Remarkable folks unless they just don't care about anything Amazon or Kindle. You can create notebooks and organize notes of a variety of ways with the scribe. You can take documents from your computer or a phone or a tablet to the scribe. If you're on your computer, you can use Amazon's updated send to Kindle website where you can drag and drop documents, upload them to your scribe. So, you know, it's kind of like a cloud situation. You can also send documents to the scribe from your phone or tablet using the share button and select the Kindle app as the destination if you so desire. ZDNet said this doesn't always work perfectly, but they expect some of those things to be ironed out in the future. ZDNet also noted that images and word documents are pretty much restricted to adding things like sticky notes in the scribe, but writing and highlighting in a PDF document was pretty open. Well, that's interesting. And Gadget says of the scribe, here's some of the pros. These are things they like. That's a perfect time for my screen to go black, and now it's coming back up. There we go. That's a good one. That's a good one. That's an important one. This is the reason I want this device, is that number one thing right there. They also, and there goes my screen again. This is really unfortunate. There we go. Premium, thin, and light design. Again, another nice thing. You want a nice ergonomic, non-heavy sort of device. They also said it had a very roomy canvas for reading and writing. And as far as cons go, they said no handwriting to text conversion. So a little bit of a bummer there and not water resistant. So don't spill anything or take it in the rain. Yeah. The not handwriting to text conversion thing is kind of a bummer because it works really well and they're remarkable. Works really well. In fact, you really have to have bad handwriting to fool it. So that's something to think about. Moving on to the Verge's notes. The Verge noted that scribes great, had great battery life for an e-reader, especially of this size. What they didn't love though was the recommendations that Amazon offered. Signing out for subscriptions to Kindle Unlimited and Audible kind of felt egregious given the scribe's premium price. Again, 350 bucks. You don't really want to see upsell stuff from Amazon. The Verge also preferred the scribe's reading experience over the remarkable too. This one's interesting, especially the annotation ability where with the scribe, you can create little notes, let's say as you read a book. Maybe there are certain passages you really want to remember later. And then it automatically collects all of those annotations in one place. Remarkable too is a little bit clunkier when it comes to that. Although, you know, they're pros and cons to both. The Verge says for most people, the scribe is a solid choice. If you're looking for a simple note taking device or just a big e-reader, maybe you're not even going to do any annotation, but you just like the screen size. Doesn't really blow away its competition though. And those would be namely the remarkable too. The Onyx Books Note Air 2 is another. Yeah. Okay. So big advantages. The screen probably stays on. Doesn't it only scot like his screen did just now? Yeah. But also, Sarah, as an owner of the remarkable too, having gone over all of these reviews, does the Kindle scribe tempt you? Well, I have to say, you know, off the out of the gate, I have a Kindle Oasis. So I'm not in the market for another Kindle anyway, but let's just say I didn't have an Oasis. I just had the remarkable too, which there are many ways you can sync variety of books and certainly a variety of documents and you can do a lot of content creation on the remarkable to itself. I don't see a reason to buy the scribe. I see it as not exactly Apple's to Apple's competitor, but pretty darn close and in the same price range. These are pricey things. I don't know who would want the scribe just for the bigger screen, because you kind of have other options at that point. Yeah. I know you don't draw or like sketch a lot, but do you think the remarkable too is a better sketch device, just if you had to guess? I do. And the reason is that the pen has more just sort of fun flair to it. Not only does it, you know, because I've got the fancier pen that has the eraser on the back, but I can do like calligraphy pen or ballpoint pen or pencil or I don't know, you just have more of that kind of artsy stuff that maybe you wouldn't take advantage of if you're just writing some notes down, but they are some nice extras. I was going to say, it sounds to me like the upshot of the reviews that you looked at are, this is a great reading device, as most Amazon Kindles are, but if you're trying to get the stuff that the remarkable is the note taking, it's not quite there, at least not yet. Yeah, and I think, you know, I suffer from this too where I go, ooh, features, more features is better, but you kind of have to be honest with yourself. Do you carry around a notebook in a pen often? Do you write down stuff? Do you kind of sort of sketch out things, whether it be words or images or whatever, and is that helpful to you? If so, this might be your next device, but if you don't do that, then it might be something that you're paying for for kind of no reason. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, thanks for paging through all that stuff. Y'all, that was helpful. Well, you're very welcome. What's your, what's your... Tuesday, we mentioned that around 23 gigawatts worth of solar projects hadn't been delayed in the United States so far this year, because solar panels are being held up in ports as U.S. customs agents enforce new rules that require manufacturers to prove their products were not made by labor in China's Xinjiang region. That law is affecting more than just solar panels, though. James Thatcher from thetradenerd.com, aka Big Jim, kindly agreed to give us his insights on how this might affect consumer electronics and more. Jim, thanks for doing this, man. Well, thanks for having me, Tom. Yeah, it's, this is, this is actually not a new regulation per se. This was actually passed last year. The enforcement action had started back in June. So it's not brand brand new, but it takes time for customs to build the cases that they need to be able to start these stop and seizure applications. Yeah, so I'm guessing, tell me if I'm wrong here, but something is coming from China and the customs agents have discretion about whether to, you know, look at the paperwork more closely or less closely to make sure that it didn't come from this region. Is that why we're seeing solar panels make the news first, just because there's more of those coming from China? Or why is that? Well, it's a specific region within China, the Xinjiang region within China. And I apologize to all of our Chinese Mandarin-speaking people. I never say Xinjiang right. I understand that that that's the region that's being targeted. But anything coming from China, they're making prove that none of it was made in that region. So the company that I specifically work for constantly we get requests, was this made in this area of China and we have to either declare or not declare that it was. I will say for my sake, my company doesn't make anything in that region. We don't buy anything in that region to my knowledge or manufacture anything in that region to my knowledge. But we do have to sign off on these items because, you know, we have to prove it. Now, when you export something to the United States, there's various different reporting requirements that you have to do to customs. And I'm not going to go through the plethora of customs requirements. But yes, customs is aware of who the shipper is, who the manufacturer is at the time of sailing. I guess the big question is, how does a company not get caught in the delay? Is there a way to speed the process along? Well, the first thing is... How does Apple avoid that, right? Well, for the first, well, for the most part, I can't speak to Apple supply chain directly because I'm not in Apple supply chain. But I would assume that Apple actually does make sure that none of their components are coming from this area. They take it back at the purchasing phase. A lot of this comes back at the purchasing phase where you look at and say, where am I going to source these goods? Where am I going to source these materials from? And building within that, you're going to say, I'm not going to source from this specific geographic area that we know is going to have a problem. The other thing that a lot of purchasing people do, and I know our company does, we will send out quality inspection people to not only validate is the product that's being made at this factory the right product and does it look good. We'll also validate things like, what are the worker conditions? What's going on in this facility? Could we see any red flags there? Is there anything specific in this facility that we think would either cause us a problem with governmental authorities or, in a lot of cases, public relations issues? Nobody has to be fired that they're doing that. Sorry, it sounds like even if you do that, you still might get delayed because you have to prove it. You have to show the documents. Right, you do have to show the documents. Now, one thing I will say is when customs does take these actions for the most part, the first step is they will put the goods on hold. Okay, so you will know at the time of customs entry, which you can do up to five days before the vessel actually physically arrives. You can make your customs entry to customs, your declaration. If customs puts it on hold, you will know right away. In which case you usually get a message within the system and I don't, again, don't want to get into the specifics of how that works, but you'll get a message in the system of if they're looking for something specific or if they were looking for some specific documentation, they'll request it. And if you provide it within a timely manner, usually within 48 to 72 hours it's released. And, you know, if you do the timing right, you never even see a delay. Most consumers don't know when things are even on delay with U.S. Customs because we're trying to get that information back and forth before everybody gets to kill. So what causes the solar panels to get delayed? My guess is they can't prove that these weren't made in this region. Customs has done their investigation. They haven't done as much legwork on the other end. Well, that's part of it. But the other side of it is, customs in this situation from my reading of it and various AP sources, I don't have any insight of customs specific to this. It looks like customs has made a pretty rock solid case that no, these were actually made in this area and these were actually used with forced labor. There was parts that came from Xinjiang. Yeah. Yeah. And the specifically Uighur labor that is really being pushed with regard to that. And so I think in that regard, if customs is building that much of a case and that big of a case, that's definitely an issue. We're seeing this ramp up of forced labor from customs across the board. It usually, well, I shouldn't say usually, it wasn't in the past as huge of an issue, but now it's becoming a stronger and stronger issue. So it sounds to me that if I'm a consumer and I'm shopping for holiday gifts, not that that's the most important part of this thing, but it's what's going to hit most of the listeners in their homes. If it's a big brand that I'm familiar with, probably going to be fine. Yes. It's those smaller deals, those Amazon things where you're like, never heard of the smart plug maker before. That stuff might be more affected. Is that fair? From a consumer standpoint, yes. The other side of it is also commercial standpoint where you might have components that are brought in from those areas and kitted or produced further in the United States, Mexico and Canada. And those areas also have this anti-weager area act in the allocation, not necessarily from US customs, obviously, but from Canadian customs and Mexican customs. They're both looking for those areas as well. So it could cause products to not necessarily hit the shelves as fast as we think they would. Yeah. Good to know. Well, Jim, thank you so much for helping us understand this a little more. If people want to follow you, see what else you're up to out there. Where should they go? Best place to go is our DTNS Discord. I'm in there all the time talking to everybody. Come on in. It's a grand old scheme. I will tell you, I'm on Twitter at jthatcher79 or the trade nerd, but you're best likely to hit me at the Discord. Fantastic. Thanks again, Jim. You want to hear us talk about on a future show. One way is to let us know in our subreddit. You can do it on Discord too, but our subreddit's a cool place. Submit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. A significant number of people are still looking for Twitter... Twitter. Might as well call it that at this point. Twitter alternatives. We don't need to go into the house on the wise because if you're looking to leave Twitter, you've got a good reason or your own reason anyway. It just happens to be what's happening right now. Mastodon user count at bitcoinhackers.org estimates more than 50,000 people per day have been signing up for a Mastodon server. There are almost 8 million accounts on Mastodon now. Huge uptick in a short amount of time. Another place people are flocking to is Hive Social. That is an app that you can use on Android and iOS. Hive was launched back in October 2019 by Riluka Pop, who taught herself Swift that summer before heading into her first term in college. It started with some personal loans by Riluka and then a designer who's considered sort of a co-founder was brought on. A developer was the third employee brought on in May 2021 and they didn't receive angel investment until October 2021. And right now, Hive Social has three employees. They are thinking of bringing on a fourth to help achieve the scale. Three, three employees. Twitter still has thousands even after its cutbacks. Hive also just passed 1.5 million users. Yeah, Wired's Megan Farakmanesh wrote up a story on Hive and how it's handling this sudden influx. When you have that few employees, you think how could you possibly scale, right? So many companies need thousands of employees to do this. Riluka told Wired she is making it a happier place for people, a safe place for users to express how they feel, a safe place for them to post content. Hive has some unique features along those lines like being able to add a song to your user page, change your profile colors. There's some customization there. It also lets you choose who can comment on your post, hide specific words, hide types of content you don't want to see, you don't want to engage with. An algorithm filters out certain content before it makes it to the Discover page as well and the team is looking into third-party help to do that even better. So think about all this stuff we're talking about. There's a lot of talk about alternate platforms. None of those alternate platforms have reached Twitter's scale of hundreds of millions of monthly active users, maybe tumblers closest. Twitter is considered small for a social network. Up until the sale recently, everyone talked about, oh, Twitter, is it even big enough to survive? Now, one big gating factor for new social networks to compete with the Facebooks and Instagrams and TikToks of the world has been that it's hard to get users to try it because your friends aren't there. Unless your friends there, you're not going to go there and if you don't go there, then your other friends aren't going to go there and it's a vicious circle. The drama around Twitter has changed those conditions giving these alternative platforms an opportunity because, well, a lot of times your friends are going there. In fact, I asked people on Hive why they ended up there and one person said, my friend told me to follow them here so I went there. Another gating factor is how good those platforms are. It's not just about design and features, it's about performance and, of course, the ever-controversial topic of community moderation. How well do they do that? And those things get harder the more popular a platform gets. So keep these things in mind. If Twitter is expected to fall apart because it only has a few thousand employees, people have said the sky is falling because they laid off so many people and they may be right, how can Hive make it with four? Even if they expand to four. Even if they expand, they can't expand to thousand overnight. If Twitter was considered too small to make it with only 300 million monthly active users, it is 8 million even close to enough for Mastodon to have critical mass. Mastodon doesn't have the profit motive, Twitter has, but you still need enough people on there to make it interesting and make it be worthwhile to be cited and all of those things. I wonder, Scott, if what we're, when we're talking about a replacement for Twitter, if that's the wrong way to talk about this. Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot. A replacement for Twitter, I mean, everybody's, you know, on different ends of the drama around Twitter. And so your opinions are pushed a little bit by emotion or by, you know, whatever reaction you might have to what's going on, be it good or bad or, you know, nothing in the middle. I'm not sure what everybody's looking for is actually a replacement for Twitter. I think what they're looking for is a place where they can feel the fun and excitement again. And I'm not even sure that that, the feeling of that lacking right now has that much to do with the current goings on to Twitter. I think it has to do with, it's been a long time. And Twitter was already kind of a toxic place and wasn't as fun as it was in those early days when we were telling each other what we had for lunch. And it's become much more than that. And I'm not saying that there's not a place for that. Something like that should exist, but me as a user, I love the idea of hive social having three people. It being a passion project, people from an interesting point in their life coming up with a piece of software that everybody glommed on to for what reasons. Hard to say, but it's a little more artsy over there. It's got a little Instagram hooks to it. Some of it does. When you post photos, it takes care to like say, how do you want to crop this? How do you want to do this? What do you want to do here? I think that maybe we're just all hungry for that feeling again of those early days of Twitter or the early days of Facebook or whatever you're thinking of. I think there's a desire for that because what Twitter is today is fine, but it's not what it used to be. And so I think there's a lot of people that are going, well, this is it. This is the reason why I finally have motivation to get off here and go somewhere else for a while. Most people I know are doing all of it together at once. That's what I'm doing. I'm still on Twitter and if Twitter goes away, I'll be there till the ship goes down, but I'll have all these other places all ready to go and I'm always got my ear to the ground if something news comes. And so I have a feeling you see a lot of that. I feel like the way that you describe Twitter and in the early days when it was kind of a nerdy place where people did say like, what are you doing right now? And then you would say, this is what I'm doing right now. That is sort of how we're describing some of these Twitter alternatives. When Twitter first launched, well, they had more than three employees, but they didn't have, it wasn't the same company. It felt like kind of a sort of niche place that some people went to, but lots of people were going to lots of other places. You had your Facebooks, you had your blogs. I think that there's a lot of folks saying, it's going to get so complicated, everything's going to be fragmented. I'm going to have to follow Tom Merritt talking about this or that over here. Scott Johnson talking about this or that over on some other social network. How do I keep them all straight? But that's kind of how it used to be. Yeah, if anything, there seems like there's a swing back to forum culture in a weird way with Discord. Discord really is just kind of a fancy bit of forming. Things like Substack, it's personal blogging, but in a slightly different way, different delivery methods, but at the same time, it's not that different. So there is like, I feel like the whole car is like turning back to the early hours and say, you know, some of that was all right. We have better tech now. We have better distribution now. We can do cooler things now. But the core was all right. So let's go back to that core. Yeah. Nice plug for your show core. No, I'm kidding. I think we're onto something here. I think this is a natural cycle. And it's tempting when you're in the middle of a natural cycle to attribute it to a thing that's happening. In this case, Elon Musk buying Twitter. But when you back out, something like that may have been bound to happen anyway. And if you look at it from the, you know, the 30,000 foot view, this may just be how this particular swing back to different stuff works, right? We are going back into a cycle that has people trying out a lot of different things and freaking Yahoo still around, right? So Twitter's probably not going to die. It's probably not going to go anywhere. But this is in the, you know, zooming back into the close perspective, causing a lot of people to try stuff. They wouldn't have tried otherwise for whatever the reason they're trying it. That's going to bring other people like me and Scott, who are like, well, we're still on Twitter, but let's try the mastodon. Let's try hive. Let's try posts. You know, let's, let's try all this stuff. I was having a conversation with Molly Wood who was like, I'm so frustrated. I'm starting a sub stack. And I was like, well, that's not really an alternative for Twitter. But she's like, yeah, but a lot of the things I want to say there, I can say better on sub stack, which is true because it's a different format, right? So it kind of gives you that kick in the butt to be like, you know what? I am going to try that thing that before it was like, well, but everybody's here. So it's kind of scary to try a new thing. It's kind of forcing us out of our comfort zones. And I think we end up with multiple new things. Not all of them are going to stick around, but some of them are going to get momentum and some of them aren't way too early to tell which ones are which, but it doesn't have to be a replacement for Twitter. Yeah. And there's a bunch of people who always myself included complain about walled gardens. And why do you want to have all your stuff in one place? I mean, this is the internet. We're just branching back out to like, oh yeah, right. We don't have to be in one place all the time. Let's go to all the places. Yeah. Many places. I mean, I've got the time. Sure. All the time. What are you too busy? You know, let's try them all. Exactly. You want to keep track of one feed? Keep track of 500. Okay. Way more fun. No. All right. Let's take a quick look at the mail bag before we get out of here. Yeah. So yesterday we were talking about Apple and YouTube and Spotify's year end wrap ups of all of our listening habits. And Justin, the techie teacher in Texas writes, pocket cast did one too. And you, you were show was at the top of mine. Thank you for another great year. Yeah. Justin added a screenshot and I mean, not that he was lying or anything, but it was nice to see DTNS top podcast. Listen to him. I bet it's not my own personal pocket cast top podcast that I've never listened back to our own show, but I'm waiting on mine. I'm waiting on my pocket cast top podcast to find out what they are. That's really cool. And thank you for letting us know. Justin, appreciate that. Indeed. Thanks to everybody who writes in feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Keep those emails coming. We love to read them. I love it over a T first thing in the morning. Thanks to also Scott Johnson for being with us. Whether or not you drink tea or not, Scott has all the things for you. You're a busy man, Scott. What's been going on? There is a lot going on. Instead of giving you ready anything specific, I'd just say go check the buffet out. If you go to frogpants.com and click on the podcast link or any of the art links or a million other links on the page, you will find something that you'll like. And I would recommend it. So if you're interested in a whole litany of ideas and cool stuff and all the social accounts I'm now signed up for, you can find them at frogpants.com right now. I love content buffet. Yep. But without the salmonella. Yeah. And no sneeze guards or any of that. You'll be fine. Yeah, you don't need it. Special thanks to Clayton Brookert, who is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Occasionally, we'd like to just call out one of you for being such a great supporter of us. And Clayton, today's your day. Thank you for all the years of support. Pile on in, everybody. Be like Clayton, patreon.com. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. What will we talk about? No, no yet. It hasn't started yet. Starts right after DTNS though, which is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and you can join us live. If you so desire, we'd love to have you. We'll be back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young joining us. Talk to you then.