 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you including Hector Bones, Tim Ashman and Johnny Hernandez. Coming up on DTNS, Nicole Lee has great ideas on easy smart home gifts to get people even if they aren't that tech savvy. Plus Sony makes motion capture cheap and easy and the end of the year music streaming recaps are here and we will admit what tops our list. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 29th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Web and I'm Sarah Lane. From San Francisco, I'm Nicole Lee. And I'm the show's producer Roger Jen. Oh, Nicole, thank you for bringing us like an accessible, not accessible so much as like wide ranging gift guide today. I can't wait to talk. Very wide range. Yeah. I wanted to be a thorough, you know, cover the gamut. It's perfect for those folks who like they went through all the Black Friday sales and they're like, I still have a couple of people on my list and I have no idea. Nicole's going to take care of that for you. So just hang in there. Let's start with the quick hits. Twitter updated the COVID-19 section of its transparency pages to say that, quote, effective November 23rd, 2022 Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy. End quote. Now, starting in 2020, Twitter began labeling posts with disputed information about COVID and removed posts that were demonstrably false. Twitter's community notes program, formerly called Birdwatch, will continue to add contextual notes to post about COVID. Yeah. So it's up to the audience now. India Central Bank announced it will extend the test of its central bank digital currency, the E-Rupi, one of those CBDCs we've been telling you about forever. It's going to extend that test to retail starting December 1st. Four local banks, the State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank and IDFC, are going to participate in this retail phase of the pilot in four cities, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar and New Delhi. More banks, cities and customers will be added as the test goes on. The central bank began evaluating the digital currency for the wholesale market last month. So this is the expansion into retail. The UK's proposed online safety bill will be amended to remove the obligation for social platforms to take down legal, but harmful content. The government states the change affects platforms like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok is preserving free speech and giving people greater control over what they see online. UK cultural secretary Michelle Donilon says the amendment ensures no tech firms or future government could use the laws as licensed to censor legitimate views. The bill is due to return to parliament on Monday, December 5th. Yeah, thanks. Take it forever to get through. We'll see. Wall Street Journal reports around 4,000 shipping containers containing solar panels have been detained coming into US ports and more are being held up on the other end in the exporting ports in places like Vietnam and Malaysia. The delay is caused by US customs agents enforcing a new law that requires that no solar panels contain parts made in China's Xinjiang region. Most panel makers are sourcing parts elsewhere, but they still have to show documentation to prove it. Wall Street Journal estimates around 23 gigawatts of solar projects have been delayed in the US so far this year. Yesterday we told you about Open AI's algorithm that could play Minecraft. Today we have news of Nvidia's Mindojo. That's the algorithm that won the company an Outstanding Data Set and Benchmark Paper Award at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. The user can write in natural language what it wants Mindojo to do, like build a portal and then enter it and Mindojo can execute it in a game. What kind of portal though? I mean, you gotta be specific, you know, another portal, something like that. All right, yeah. The AI's, they're just going to be playing all the games soon. All right, we will then become virtual avatars. We might, getting closer than ever. So Sony has launched a motion capture project called MoCopy, using six motion tracking sensors that you wear on your wrist, your ankles, your head, your waist, or your hip, basically tracking your body for videos or maybe to make a virtual avatar that moves a lot like you move. The sensors are small. They're smart watch size devices. They fit on a charging case the size of a large smartphone case. The sensors connect to a smartphone running an app from Sony, which then records movement data in BVH format and can be exported as a recorded MP4 video. So you can use the app's avatars or you can use your own VRM avatars if you so desire. You kind of have the choice there. The app can also transfer motion data to a PC in real time using Unity, Autodesk's motion builder. Some of you are very familiar with both. It might be kind of exciting there. An SDK will come out December 15th to let developers integrate MoCopy data to apps. Reservations will begin in Japan in mid-December for an on sale date in late January. MoCopy will sell for, and this is actually I think a very important part of this if you're excited about it, for 49,500 yen, which is approximately 360 US dollars. Yeah. So under 500 dollars, you can do MoCap for an indie film. Or if you're a VTuber, it's going to bring down the complexity of your system. I think this is probably a bigger deal than people are making it. It's a little bit of a beginning to look like CES kind of project, right? It's like, oh, it's only available in Japan. Oh, and it's not a PlayStation from Sony, so I can't hook it up to my games. But this is going to make motion capture accessible in a way that it hasn't been. And whenever we see things like audio recording, video recording, et cetera, graphics become more accessible, you start to see an explosion of new kinds of content. And I think the important thing that popped up to me as I was watching the video is that it also seems very user-friendly. It looks very attractive, easy enough to use. It looks like from the video. It's all kind of clearly laid out. This is for the head. This is for the ears. And this is for the arms and legs and so forth. And if it's easy to use and it's affordable, that's enough, I think. People are going to find all kinds of weird, unexpected things to do with this, right? Yeah. Yeah, my first reaction was like, okay, the avatar stuff I can get. Definitely get that. Like, ooh, metaverse tool. But then I was like, okay, but yeah, let's think about how this was, I don't know, how many years, it wasn't that many years ago, that people were like, this whole movie was shot on an iPhone, or a smartphone. I feel like this is, it's the next version of, hey, you can do this with pretty cheap software. If you compare this to going to some motion capture studio, not that long ago, like it's not going to be $360, guys. Yeah. And don't get me wrong. It's going to come out and people are immediately, as soon as they get over the excitement, critique how it's not as good as the professional things and start pushing for improvements to make it smoother. And those improvements are going to come. And eventually people are going to complain that I have to attach six things. I just want one thing. And then there's going to be a development. Like, that's just the way the stuff goes. But we're at a point where this is a thing you cannot do easily right now. And this implementation of the technology is probably going to democratize it a little. And I think that's significant. Yeah. And I will no longer be appearing on DTNS as me. I will be an avatar as soon as I go. This is not the weirdest idea. I know, right? I mean, at least just to give it a shot. I do it. Yeah, we might have to get one of these once they're out. What's their available? Well, if you're concerned about streaming music, a lot of people are like, ah, you know, I use streaming music. It's so convenient. But is it fair to the artists? Am I overpaying? Am I getting ripped off? We have some good news. The UK Competition and Markets Authority, the CMA, published its final report on its market study of music and streaming services. Now, the CMA's job is to find antitrust stuff. If they have a bias, it's towards finding something is wrong. And they didn't find anything wrong. The CMA found that music prices have fallen by 20% as a result of competition in the music market because you have multiple good services. While it did find that major artists got the most money, that seemed to be because of us. We're streaming 60% of our music from 0.4% of the top artists. The CMA found no evidence of excessive profits. Average royalty rates have actually risen for artists from 19.7% in 2012 to 23.3% in 2021 and for music writers from 8% in 2008 to 15% in 2021. So with that in mind, let's talk about the end of your music promotions coming from the three biggest streaming music providers. Yeah, so there's Apple, of course. Apple seems to be first out of the gates with Apple Music Replay. You can find it at replay.music.apple.com. You can sort of search for online or perhaps find it in your iOS app, although I couldn't. The company redesigned it this year to look a little better, gives you your top song, your top artist, top album, along with total minutes listened. If you're wondering how much you listen to music and some more kind of fun info, you got some chart views, you have some top playlists. You can also share your highlight reel and images with your stats, which is very much the point of all of this. It's an easy social media post type feature. YouTube also announced its 2022 recap feature. You get to that supposedly by searching 2022 recap either in YouTube Music or the main YouTube mobile app seems to be still rolling out. So you might have to wait for it to show up. It shows you your most watched or listened to artists, songs, videos and playlists, highlights, artists you may have discovered before they got big kind of make you feel like you're an insider and has a music personality feature, which tells you your music vibe. It can integrate with Google photos as well. So when you want to share your results, you can integrate your own photos into those shareable versions. If only somebody would tell me what my music vibe is, it would really help me out. Of course, the big one is Spotify's wrapped, which is still to come probably shortly after the first of December. It was just last year where I was like, what is wrapped today? What is everybody talking about? It's a big deal. In the meantime, developer Anshu and Sean Taboo created an app called InstaFest. If you authorize it to view your Spotify account, it'll take your listening data and create a kind of cool three-day Coachella-like festival poster with headliners based on your most played artists, which is very cute. I've seen it passed around quite a bit, maybe a little too much, Twitter and Instagram, but all that aside, time for everybody to spill. What are our top artists? Who's in our play fest? All right. You want me to go first? Yeah, go ahead. What would you like to know? You want top album, artist or song? Do you want to go like number three on one of those lists? What are you looking for? Well, Tom, what's your top album of the year? My top album is Anti-Fragile by Laceraphim. Okay. Okay. And you're using Apple Music. Yes, and I'm using, that's right. I'm using Apple Music Replay. And Nicole, you're also an Apple Music user as well. Yeah, you know, so a couple of things that I have to say, Spotify shows it all in the app, but Apple Music for some reason kicks you to this website. Even if you go through the app, it makes you go to the website. So, I mean, that's different. Also, I guess I don't listen to that much music. It's only like 3000 minutes versus all these other people that have like tens of thousands of minutes. But yeah, so the top song on my list is Taylor Swift, Midnights. I mean, yeah. Very of the moment. Yeah. Indeed. Current trend. Sarah, what about you? What's your top artist? Top artist is Kendrick Lamar. He had an album out this year. So, you know, that obviously helps, but like I would listen to him anyway. I'm trying to go back to something that shows me the minutes listening because, Nicole, I'm kind of with you because of podcasts. My music listening is sort of at an all-time low. And it's not because I don't like music, I really do. Mostly if I'm in my car, I'm like, oh, it's music time. Yes. In the car, in the car, which doesn't track. Exactly. Well, we're not using carplay, it would. Yeah, but otherwise, yeah, I feel like I'm like, wow, I would have been like way in like the 20,000 hours, you know, and like, yeah, I'm kind of listening to podcasts more. That would actually be a better metric for me. My minutes were like 13,000 or something. That's more than me. Yeah. Yeah, but I listen to a lot of podcasts as well. I think I would have listened to more. A lot of this is music that I play prior to it's a thing going live because I just put music on. You have to know. Just get you in the mood. Yeah. Just make sure people know that the Discord stream is working without me having to talk to them. This isn't really, you know, related to, you know, top artists of story or of songs and albums, per se. But a few years ago, I remember a friend saying, oh, Sarah, like, I can't even run to music anymore, you know, because he'd like to run jog. And I was like, I can't even imagine not running to music. I would just, you know, I wouldn't be able to like keep a pace. And now I can't listen to music while I'm running. Oh, you're there. Are you a podcast listener? Yeah, like, it's like, I need to like, I need to get into a story and then I have more fun. Welcome. Welcome. Now you understand. Yes, I do. I was not that friend. This way, she was not sub-tweeting me. No, no, I did. Certainly not. And, you know, I wouldn't be the only person to either. I'm the kind of person that will listen to the same podcast episode over and over and over again because I like it so much. Really? That's interesting. I don't know that I've ever done that. I am that person. That's kind of cool. But that sort of, you know, it's like that comfort movie that you watch every season. Same idea. So we highly encourage everyone to listen to this episode of Daily Deadly Go as many times as you want. And then tell us about it on social media. You can get in touch with the DTNS audience on Twitter at DTNS Show on TikTok at Daily Tech News Show and on Instagram at DTNSPIX. That's DTNSPIX. Well, Roger Chang has been doing yeoman's work putting together folks to tell us about gift guides this year. We've covered gift ideas for games with Trisha Hershberger, Home Theater with Patrick Norton, TVs with Robert Herron. But we're past Black Friday now and you may have a few people on your list that you're having a hard time figuring out. If they have a home, we may be able to help you. Nicole has been looking at options for people who might not even be that tech savvy, but would appreciate a few things to make their homes a little smarter. Nicole, how did you come about these picks? Yeah, so I wanted to make these picks based on a wide range of, I guess, people in your life. So I have a pick for the cook in your life. I have a pick for, for example, like, you know, I think everyone should have an air purifier these days because, you know, pollution and stuff like that. So I have a recommendation for like a smarter air purifier, for example. Okay. And I have a couple of other picks for just, I think, like you said, everyone has a home. Everyone has electricity. Well, most everyone has electricity and outlets and things like that. So these are just small little ideas that will just make things a little smarter, a little more streamlined in your home. Excellent. Well, what are we starting with? Yeah, so the first thing on my list here is a smart outlet. So the easiest way to smart up any home is to get one of these little smart outlets. And they're very inexpensive. I think you could get like $24 for fours and like that. So these little things, any appliance that you plug into it can instantly be like a smart appliance. You just, what all you have to do is just like connect the outlet to like your phone through an app. And then all of a sudden, like, if you can plug in like your coffee maker to the smart outlet, all of a sudden your coffee maker, which was a smart before, is like a smart coffee maker. Now you can program it to come on at a certain time in the morning, which is very cool. What I use it for, every Christmas, I plug my Christmas tree lights to a smart outlet. I do it with exactly this smart plug that you're showing here. I did it like this weekend. Yeah. Yeah. And it's super easy. So now that I can just like, you know, with an app or you can just like say, hey, Google or, you know, the Amazon option. And then because it'll turn off, turn on the Christmas lights, turn off Christmas lights. It's so easy. And you can even like come on like only certain times a day. Can we turn off certain times a day? So it's super easy. And I definitely recommend it. For anybody I feel like who, you know, I'm kind of in the Hube hub, you know, ecosystem. But it's like, if you don't have that built out, this works the same way in a pinch. Yeah. Yeah. Especially like you said, like if someone doesn't have any smart anything in their home, can't one of these things, it's like super, you know, low stakes. All right. What if they, what if you want to get them into the Hube family? You mentioned you speaking of the Philips Hue is the other thing if you want to spend a little bit more money, like build it to really build out a whole like smart lighting system. I love the Philips Hue system. This was my favorite, like smart light, smart light bulb systems. I especially recommend the Philips LED smart bulb star kit, because it has like the multicolor bulbs. And you can get they can get just the white color, which is fine. But I love the multicolor ones because you can set like, you know, millions of colors to a room so you can like warm moody lighting for like a cozy night in or like rainbows for parties or whatever you want. The companion, unless you create timers, so that, for example, or routines as well. So for example, you can set it so that the lights will gradually turn on in the morning to wake you up. Like a sunrise alarm, for example, I do, I do this every night. Cause I'm a huge person from 11 to 11 20. Yeah. The lights start going down. Like, if you're not already asleep, sir, you better get ready. And it's really helpful. It's, it's, it's a good way to like sort of love you to sleep or wake you up and depending on how you want to routine. And I was really like, like turning it on when I'm on vacation, when we were both on vacation, I'll turn it on. And I mean, I don't know if it really helps per se, but it sort of simulates. Oh, someone in the house or something. Like, I don't know. I don't even, you know, Warren's robbers or something like that. But maybe it does, right? So, um, and I think the, also the addition of the, of the hub, the hub itself, you could have like 50 lights can connect up to like a single hue hub. So you can really outfit your entire house with like, and, and yes, matter is going to make that hub less necessary in the future. But for the time being, it's going to make it easier. And that's one of the things we're talking about. Uh, what about the thing that actually just showed up at my sister's house? Uh, I hope she's not watching as present, uh, minutes ago, because I definitely bought this for her. I took it. Okay. Sorry. I'm looking at the list here. Uh, yeah. So yes, robot vacuums. Um, will they be as efficient as like an actual vacuum? Probably not, but they do help out for like the occasional mid sort of like in between cleaning sessions kind of a kind of a test. So my favorite robot vacuum is the iRobot Roomba 694. And I like it because it's kind of fairly affordable for a robot vacuum and it works great. Like it really does suck up everything. And it's, um, the app is really good. The, it's really easy to use even, even if you don't really aren't super tech savvy, the app is really easy to use. You can program it to like certain parts of your house. Um, it's connected to the Wi-Fi network. You think we can create a cleaning schedule for such a day. So for example, like in the morning when you're when no one's in or at night. And, um, also the better life on this, uh, thing is actually pretty decent about 45 minutes to I think 90 minutes, depending on how hard you, you, it works it. So, um, yeah, I definitely recommend it. I don't have this latest Roomba version, but the Roomba has changed my life. Truly. You know, and it's exactly like you described, Nicole, it's, it doesn't replace a real deep clean. Yeah. But for kind of like every day, especially if people have kids or pets or I don't know, you just have a dusty house or something. Boy, does it make a difference because otherwise you, you know, you'd feel like you'd need to be vacuuming every day. And you spend less time cleaning. I, I, I really do. You were like more time. It's like automated robots and warehouses. You spend more time doing the things that you were supposed to do in the first place. Now I, I have a Kowe air purifier, which I know Nicole, you at least used to have, but you're, you're recommending a smarter one than that. So I have both. I have the Kowe and also that doesn't call the Mila air purifier. This is like deluxe luxury air purifier, which, you know, depending on how you want to spend your money, but I really like it. And I think if you, if you have something like this, like really nerdy and into like statistics and like factual data about the air content in their house, like they will love this. It gives you all this data of like how much like particulate matter is in your air and like carbon and it's all these sensors too. It will tell you like what the level of carbon monoxide is in your home, which is very important by the way, the VOC level in your volatile organic compounds, the VOC level in your home, how humid your home is was also very important actually for like mold and mildew reasons. And I love this Mila air purifier because you have the option of picking out from several filter options. So the basic one is like the basic breather filters. These are the filters you sort of buy with the air purifier. There are other filters, for example, like there are filters for pet livers. So if you have a cat or a dog, you can get like special filters that will really filter out like stink and like odor, which is definitely a problem if you have pets. There's also a specific filter if you're, if you have someone in your home was really allergic, like very high allergic levels, for example. So they have filters like very strong filters for those specific use cases. I also really like to have tons and tons of customization options. So there's something called a housekeeping mode that will just turn on like 100% full blast. And it'd be very noisy. But that's assuming that no one's home. There's also a sleep mode, which will turn the lights that turn the speeds off super low. It will still continue running, but it's like sort of like, okay, everyone's sleeping. I'm going to be not as powerful at this time of night. Yes. There's even a white noise option that will just like turn on at a certain level, that it will turn out the white noise to help you sleep. Some people do white noise generators. So yeah, two birds with one stone. Oh, I mean, I'm a white noise fan. But on an airplane, 100%. So I'm really into this air purifier. It is a little more and more expensive, but if you someone in your life who likes data and like tech and all this like information, I do like it a lot. All right. How much are we talking about? It's like 270. 270. All right. All right. So less than a Mocopi. Yes. Yeah. All right. We're going to talk more about this in good day internet, but just tell us the one for the cook real quickly. Oh, yeah. Sorry. This is the ANOVA Precision Cooker Nano. This is the Suvi Cooker everyone recommends. And I do think it's if you want perfectly medium rare steak, you want perfectly done burgers and chicken breasts and eggs. You can make yogurt in it even. You use an app. You stick the Suvi Cooker in some water and you'll cook that food to perfection. Fantastic. Thank you, Nicole, for these. And of course, we'll have links to all of them in the show notes at DailyTechNewShow.com. Would you like to tell us about the advances in urinals, Sarah? Tom, I, you know, it's not every day I would say, indeed I do, but today is that day. Scientists at the University of Waterloo have taken on a very important research project. And I'm not, I'm not even being cheeky here. It's designing the optimal splash-free urinal. They call the not a loom. Waterloo's Xiaopan told new scientists, I think most of us have been a little inattentive at our post. Look down to find we were wearing speckled pants. Nobody likes having pee everywhere, so why not just create a urinal where splatter is extremely unlikely. And quote, to that I say, okay, the team presented this important research, which indeed is, because who wants to have pee on their shoes during last week's American Physical Society meeting on fluid dynamics in Indianapolis, Indiana. Pants design encourages the optimal angle to avoid splashback. Something he discovered with computer modeling, but also happens to match something you might be familiar with, that's that 30 degree angle that male dogs often achieve when they lift their legs to do their business. Pan and his team experimented, but died fluids, sprayed on jets, varying speeds, several distinct urinal designs made of dense, epoxy covered foam to achieve their findings. The curved Nautila shell structure of the Nautilu cut splashback almost to zero. Now, if you're saying, all right, well, what do they know? Pan is a former graduate student of Tad Truscott, a mechanical engineer who founded the Splash Lab at Utah State University. It was formerly at Brigham Young, that's where it is now. But back in 2018, the Splash Lab designed the orchid, an attachment designed to, I'm sorry, I just didn't want to get through this without laughing, designed to reduce spillage and sample collecting cups, which could lead to devices that would let perhaps people of all genders pee while standing up. Well, if you can't pee while standing up already, why are you dancing around it? Well, you know, just try it. If you can't pee while standing up already, then this would let you do that. I mean, I'm probably capable of it. I just have never tried. This would make it easier, I think. Yeah. So yeah, this is all good technology for all of us. Honestly, I mean, I know it's like, ha ha, we're talking about pee, but this is like really cool. It's like just the fact that there was an American physical society meeting on fluid dynamics recently, as of last week, where people talk about things like this, I think is really cool. It's important that someone is talking about it. That's what I like. That's what I say. And thank you, scientists at what I will now call the Lou, the University of Waterloo. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. All right, let's check out the bell bag. Let's do it. Bill wrote in, we had a conversation about Vinfast, a new EV company, Newish coming out of Vietnam and making some inroads in the US. Bill writes in the most interesting thing about Vinmas to me, besides the fact that they are already shipping, is the fact that they got the design firm Peninfarina on board. That's a big deal. It explains why they're quite attractive. He means, you know, to look at them. Can't wait to see the interiors. Peninfarina designed so many really amazing cars, says Bill Ferrari Testerosa, 550 Maranello, Alpha Spider, Vellace. It's a long and distinguished list of beautiful cars. I can't wait to see what they do next. Yeah, Bill, no, that makes sense. When you put it that way, like, oh, a Ferrari Testerosa was designed by the same people who designed the Vinfast electric vehicle. No wonder it looks pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Well, thanks everybody who writes in feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send that email. And also thanks to you and Nicole Lee, great gift guide and just great to see you in general. Let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Yeah. So with various, so you can go on twitter.com slash Nicole. You can see all my information there. I also have a link tree, the link tree slash Nicole nerd. You can see all my different links there. I do have a blog that I'm working on that will be coming soon. And I'll link them all in that little page. You'll see it when it's ready to go. Very cool. Well, we're glad to have you. We also have a brand new boss to think that boss's name is Robert. Robert just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Robert. Robert is part of the wave. I call it a boss wave because it's a wave of bosses that have been joining our Patreon at patreon.com slash DTNS. Well done, Robert. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We talk about all the things. A lot of it is DTNS and a lot of it is just food. You can catch the show live though Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. Thanks to everybody who joins us live. Always good to have you. We'll be back again doing all with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com.