 Coming up on DTNS, China's five-year plan to become self-sufficient in chip making, turntable.fm is back, and Razor is the latest into the audio eyeglasses game. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, March 5th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And coming back to us from St. Louis, Missouri, Patrick Norton, host of AVXL. Hi, Patrick. How are you, sir? I'm well. Thanks for joining us. I'm excited to be here, sir. We were just talking about all kinds of cool things around St. Louis and bagels and more. Get that wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. XDA developer sources say that Indian Telco Reliance Geo is developing a low-cost laptop with 4G connectivity called the GeoBook that will run an Android 4 called GeoOS. Current prototypes reportedly use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 665 chipset with X12 LTE modem, 1366 by 768 display, and 4 gigs of RAM with assembly reportedly set to begin in mid-May. Oh, I'm looking forward to them trying to break up Geo someday. Google will shorten the Chrome browser release schedule from six to four weeks, starting with Chrome 94 and Q3 of 2021. Google is also making an extended stable release option available to enterprise and embedded customers, but that gets updates every eight weeks. A bipartisan group of U.S. senators petitioned the Federal Communications Commission and other federal agencies to change the federal government's definition of what high-speed broadband is from 25 megabits per second up and three megabits per second down to 100 megabits per second symmetrical, so each way. The old definition was established back in 2015 and a change in definition would prohibit the FCC from identifying an area as being served with broadband unless it meets the new definition. Apple clarified that iOS 14.5 does not let users set a default music service, but that as a Siri intelligence-based feature, the virtual assistant will ask and learn over time what music services you prefer. Apple points out that Siri may ask again over time what music service to use, even if you've already told it, and that there's no iOS setting to set a default music service like there is for browser and email. Nubia announced the Red Magic 6 and 6 Pro in China, both with 6.8 inch and 2400 x 1080 AMOLED displays that can refresh up to 165 hertz and scale down to 30 hertz to save battery. The series also sports a single touch 500 hertz touch sampling rate, or 360 hertz for multi-touch, and includes a Snapdragon 888 chipset, starting at 8 gigs of RAM and 120 gigs of UFS 3.1 storage. The standard Red Magic 6 has a 5,050 milliamp battery with 66 watt charging. The Red Magic 6 Pro gets 120 watts charging, and Nubia notes that this can charge the Pro's battery from 0% to 50% in just five minutes. So if 120 hertz is buttery smooth, what is 165 hertz? That's like clarified butter. App researcher Jane Manchin-Wong has done it again. Jane Manchin-Wong is incredibly impressive at finding stuff, finds a lot of stuff in Twitter code, and recently discovered that Twitter's app appears to have the capability of showing you an Undo Send feature. The thinking is that this might be being tested by some people. This shows the standard your tweet was sent dialog box with an Undo button below it. The button itself can act like a progress bar to show how long you have left to undo the tweet. Undo Send was mentioned in a survey Twitter sent last July referring to potential features of a paid subscription. Everybody wants an edit button. Let's just get that out of the way. You can start complaining like, oh, they're going to give me Undo Send, but not edit. But setting that aside for the moment, who wants an Undo Send button? Anyone? Jane Manchin-Wong I don't know. When this rumor started going around some time ago, I was like, well, this must just be for DMs because if you send a tweet, you send a tweet. Someone takes a screenshot. It doesn't matter if you deleted or Undo Send kind of thing. But I guess it's that few seconds of despair where you realize, oh gosh, no, no one will see it if I just get rid of this really, really quickly. I've been there. I also use a third-party Twitter app, so I just always assume things like this won't apply to me. I think this is probably helpful. Everybody who cares about this probably would care a lot more about an edit tweet button, which you shouldn't expect is happening anytime soon. But yeah, it's better than nothing. Jim Collison My guess is this works like Gmail, where it doesn't actually post the tweet until the timer runs out. That way, when you press Undo, it never gets seen. Patrick Wong Sorry, I'm just envisioning Jack Dorsey sending Jay and Silent Bob to every single house that did manage to access it. Patrick Wong Oh, so Undo Send, coming your way soon. Jim Collison Yeah, well, in other news, Razer announced the Razer and Zoo on Zoo audio glasses available in square or round styles, depending on what looks best on yeah. They include 35% blue light filtering lenses with swappable polarized sunglass lenses, integrated 16mm speaker drivers, IPX4 water resistance, and 5-hour battery life. Not that much battery life, really. But hey, the audio is Bluetooth 5.1 with 16ms latency projected into your ears without blocking other sound. There's also an omnidirectional mic. And a touch panel on the side of the frames gives you playback control, accepting or rejecting phone calls, activating a smart assistant, and turning on aiming mode. You get a 15% discount on prescription lenses from Lensable. And Razer on Zoo glasses cost $200 for a case, and a charging cable, and both sets of lenses. Patrick Wong So this is earbuds built in to glasses. We've seen these from Amazon, we've seen these from Bose, a few other places out there. Razer now jumping into the game. It seems like manufacturers believe there's a market for these. Patrick Wong They're certainly trying to establish one. Bose thinks there's a market. A lot of people that are copying Bose with cut-rate products on Amazon think there's a market. Emily Wong Yeah, I mean, this is one of these things where, yeah, I'm sort of like, is this a product I want? No, not necessarily, but I also am a person who wears headphones. I also wear glasses. I sometimes, especially on the show for anybody watching the video version, it's like, I try to do the Bluetooth earbud type of solution, which has its own host of problems. But anything that can kind of combine stuff that I need going about my day, you know, where it's one product rather than multiple products, is not a bad thing. Patrick Wong I get the theory, but it's like mediocre audio reproduction combined with a substandard microphone and the inconvenience of annoying everyone around you with whatever you're listening to. Welcome to Bose's latest product. Patrick Wong So you can hear them if you're near somebody with Bose glasses on? Patrick Wong Not so much. Patrick Wong Because if these are bone conducting, you shouldn't. And if they had all-day battery life, and I wear my glasses all day, I could see you possibly saying, oh, since I wear the glasses this way, I won't have to keep putting earbuds in and taking them out. I don't know, the $200 is what I would pay to solve that very minor problem. Maybe it's about $200, I mean, compared to frames is not that bad, honestly. Patrick Wong No, I mean, there's, you know, the sound keeps fairly close to you, right? There's like a little, you know, there's a really thin, wafery speaker-y thing that's, you know, right around the temple. I just, I don't know. This is one of those things that I think is going to suck until it doesn't. Patrick Wong Yeah, maybe. Patrick Wong And whether or not it reaches that point, and it's also, yeah, I also should be honest and say that I'm, you know, pretty, I have fairly high standards for what I'm going to accept. I also, to be honest with you, find it really frustrating to be like, okay, I use this Bluetooth device here and this Bluetooth device here and that Bluetooth device there. And maybe I just don't spend enough time. I don't know, this might be something I'd absolutely adore if I was willing to spend $180 to $250. Patrick Wong If my insurance covers these frames. Patrick Wong Right, yeah. Patrick Wong I have just enough of a tin ear to not care about the audio quality quite as much. Give me more than five hours of battery life though. I'm with you, Sarah. You need all day. Patrick Wong Yeah, five hour battery life is a mess. I also laugh because I'm on boz.com and it's, and it's, most people say they feel like they've gone undercover when wearing Bo's frames. They're able to listen to music or a podcast without anyone noticing. And Razer's doing the same thing. Sarah Holt Imagine the, you know, the horror of someone knowing that I'm listening to a podcast. I mean, that kind of thing is, I don't know. I think we've gotten to a point where if someone's got headphones in, I don't know, maybe they have the sound cranked up really loud, but almost always it's not something where I'm like, I am now annoyed by the sound that's trickling out of whatever you're listening to. Patrick Wong Well, I've been working at home for a while. Sarah Holt Yeah, I think it happened. Patrick Wong Very true. Well, apologies to Allison Sheridan. A lot of music news this week. turntable.fm launched 10 years ago as a place to let people take turns choosing music and then it shut down in 2013, but it's back twice. Each of its founders starting a different version. So turntable.fm is back for Billy Chasen, one of the co-founders. That one is pretty much the same as it was before. Let's you create a virtual room, select music that's available on YouTube to play. There's soundcloud integration mentioned, but that's not working yet. turntable.org is from another co-founder, Joseph Perla, who brought on board the founding designer of turntable.fm, Simon Oxley. And turntable.org is planning to launch in a beta in April as a mobile service with a subscription that would support MP3 uploads. So they're going to have to get some music industry cooperation on this. You have to get on a wait list for either of these. Though turntable.org ran a Kickstarter that raised more than $500,000, that offered early access and discounted subscriptions. So some people are already in line for that one. You were able to get into turntable.fm, right, Sarah? Sarah Holt Yeah, I was. I don't know. Someone gave me a code last night, and so I'm live. I had actually sort of forgotten what turntable.fm was besides being like, oh, is this mux tape? No, mux tape was way earlier. Okay, yes, I remember this service. And at the time, a lot of people were like, this is really going to change how we're all working together and how music is going to set the tone for the workspace. And that didn't totally happen. But I get why this is fun. And it's still fun in the exact same way. The problem that I have with the turntable.fm model is, sure, you're pulling stuff from YouTube. There's a ton of music on YouTube. It's where a lot of people get the majority of their music as it is now. But you also have kind of music videos that have, they've woven in some story lines. And so the music doesn't totally start right away or end right away. And if you're just listening in the background, that can be a little bit weird, but that would not be any different than using YouTube in general. I'd be really curious to see what kind of limitations I will have if I want to upload a bunch of music with turntable.org in the future. Let's say I own it. Okay, great. Am I going to be able to make that like yet 10 song playlist for Patrick that I know is just going to make his day? And what will the restrictions be? Because in the past, that was almost impossible to do. It just did not work. Patrick, what do you think? Okay, thank you. I'm still talking on the title sale. I think turntable.org is going to be the model to look at. Because the idea of collaborative play listing, right, where it's all live, that's got a lot of traction when DJ D nice out there and the versus battles and all of that. If they can get the music industry on board, which the music industry is a little more flexible than they were when turntable FM first launched, I could see that having a chance for sure. Hey, folks, do you want to join in the conversation in our discord? Do that. You can chat with a lot of other folks in the audience about all kinds of things. Just link to your Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. China's parliament is meeting to approve the Communist Party's five-year plan, which includes plans to become self-sufficient in technology. While China is the home to tech assembly, you may be like, don't they already make all the all the products? It imports $300 billion worth of chips annually. It does not produce its own chip making gear either like the machines you need to have to make a factory that makes the chips. So it would need to ramp up production of all of that. The US continues to target China with export controls on high-end semiconductors and high-end semiconductor manufacturing equipment. US blocks on sales to Chinese companies have been effective. In fact, Counterpoint estimates today that Oppo has now knocked Huawei out of the top spot for the best smelling, probably best smelling, but also best selling smartphone brand in China, followed by Vivo, Huawei's in third now, inside China because they can't get the chips to make their phones. Xiaomi was recently added to a defense department block list, not as wide of a block as Huawei's having, but it's the first step. And that was simply because its CEO was one of 100 business executives to receive an award in 2019 from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The US says that a department oversees the fusion of civil and military technology development. So these two countries are at odds. So the Chinese government wants to reduce or eliminate reliance on non-domestic suppliers like Intel or TSMC, which is gearing up for three nanometer processes in 2022. TSMC is right over there in Taiwan. The approach appears to involve making do in China with their current best 14 nanometer domestic semiconductors while investing in third generation chip making, which uses silicon carbide and gallium nitride. So don't try to go from 14 to 7 to 3, just jump right to the current cutting edge of chip making. China's Sanen Opto Electronics and China Electronics Technology Group are keeping pace with third generation companies like the US based Cree and Japan's Sumitomo Industries. China plans to invest $1.4 trillion through 2025 on semiconductors, AI, and wireless technology. Tsinghua plans to build half of the new fabs that are expected to come online in the world over the next two years. There's about 30 new fabs expected. Half of them are going to be built in China by Tsinghua. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun, a delegate to the National People's Congress, is pushing for R&D on sensors and factory robotics. Baidu CEO Robin Lee, a member of the political consultative conference, is pushing for legal at scale autonomous cars, making it legal for them to operate their autonomous cars at scale. But the biggest effort here is the chips. It's the idea that China says we want to not have to bring in chips from anywhere else. That way the US can't bully us and stop us from building stuff. Patrick, how possible do you think that is? China has done this before with the internet. They blocked off the rest of the world's internet, they developed Alibaba and Baidu and Tencent and a lot of viable companies within China. Can they do that with chips? It's going to be really interesting to see because in one case you're talking about a lot of intelligence and a staggering amount of money all focused on a particular problem to solve and amazing things happen. On the other hand, you have a ton of money and a ton of expertise in Intel and Intel's been having staggering issues catching up to contemporary technology. I think this is also tied into some larger issues with like Made in China 2025. It's kind of like, oh, Trump's out, Biden's in, and now we have a new plan to eliminate that because Made in China 2025, they stopped talking about it a couple years ago in part because they were, they is part of a larger political game they're playing. I think it's, you know, I get what they're going for. They certainly have, you know, engineering skills and money and they certainly have a reputation for industrial espionage so they could probably find a lot of what they need. I don't know it's going to be that easy to pull all this together. I'm very, very curious. The most efficient way to bake chips it has been shown is to distribute the manufacture of the parts and the assembly to the places that have the expertise and the most cost efficiency. It's one thing to say, hey, we've got hundreds of millions of people. We can build an internet business in here that's targeted to those people because we know that market. It's a different thing to make cost efficient effective chips in one country and try to try to keep all of the expertise and cost efficiencies to make that while also growing your economy because as your economy grows, it becomes more expensive to make stuff. Yeah. I mean, it's also, I mean, at some level, I think, you know, building a website and having a market for it is a false analogy to building some of the most sophisticated machines to make even more sophisticated machines in the history of humanity. So I'm curious. I'm really curious to see if they can pull it off. Yeah. I mean, granted, China can build, you know, three hospitals in a week to treat coronavirus. There's some impressive things they can do, but yeah, we'll have to see. Also, potentially impressive, a service called Sing, that Sing, which uses an exclamation or a bang in place of the I, has launched on iOS, letting users easily create NFTs with existing photos, recorded audio documents, or other data, non-fungible tokens. It's the hot new phrase. The service supports Wave, MP3, MIDI, PTX, PTF, and M4A music files, and images in JPEG, Bitmap, or TIFF formats. So when you sign up, the service automatically creates an Ethereum wallet. When you upload content, it becomes an ERC721 token in that wallet, and then you can share it with other users, seeing plans to eventually charge fees for additional storage and selling content, but there's no timeline on the sell-in option. So, Len, we asked you to try this, because I know you're using OpenSea to sell some of your art as non-fungible tokens. Sing isn't letting you sell things, so it's not exactly a comparison, but what did you think of the setup process and everything? It was pretty simple to do overall. Like I said, it seems to be set up for musicians and photographers. Not so much for artists. I didn't see anything. Even when I set up by account, it didn't give me a chance to say, hey, I'm an artist. It only said graphic designer. So I don't know if they're trying to limit it to musicians and photographers only. The setup was very simple, just like Instagram, and I uploaded a meme I created, just because I didn't have anything else, and it created the token very easily. If they can link that to selling, I think they may have something. It's just going to be another option for anybody interested in getting into the NFT market, I think. Yeah. This is them trying to get enough people on board to prove that their technology works and take it for a test drive, which I think is always smart, but it's not going to really be something that you can say whether it's going to work or not until folks can start selling it, because that's what everybody wants to do with NFTs. They want to sell their stuff. Yeah, for sure. I think it'll be great. Like I said, for musicians, if you have a beginning of a song or something to put out there, I think it's going to be really, really great for them. We talked about Kings of Leon musical act yesterday, getting into the NFT game, getting really creative with what somebody as a fan can buy and feel ownership of. And so much of this is such a cool concept. Not every artist is going to feel like, oh, this is a great way for me to just make a lot of money. In fact, very few will as the market gets saturated. But I love how thinking outside the box, creative about, here's what I want to offer you as somebody who respects what I do for work, rather than just, oh, buy this piece of art and put it on your wall. Sure, that exists, but that is the only thing that has existed for a lot of people who are really creative. And I just love that that's the definition of what being an artist is and what you are willing to sell people that that support you means now. I think NFTs are about authorship, that if you're trying to make sense of it, think of it that way. You get to say, who created it and who now owns the first creation? That part was where people get hung up. They're like, yeah, but I can make infinite copies. But this is a ledger that says, this is the authorized copy from the person who made it. Len gets to say, Patrick Norton owns the authorized copy of, you know, my portrait of Patrick Norton or whatever it is. Yeah. It's subtle. It's really, really subtle. It is. Well, software engineer Philip Kaudel, founder of the not so big company, has built his own 5K monitor. It's the same one inside the iMac 5K. And guess what? He did it for 700 bucks. You might say, that's impossible. How is that possible? Well, Kaudel explained on Twitter, he bought an old, he bought an old iMac housing for 30 bucks. Then he bought the back panel off of eBay for about 500 bucks. So he's putting it all together at this point. And then bought a driver board from Ali Express, about 200 bucks. He needed two display ports to get to full 5K resolution, but he did. And given his line of work, because he's running a software company, Kaudel told motherboard, quote, anybody who's used Xcode will tell you with all the panes and previews and debuggers open, you have no space for anything else. So I wanted a way to have Xcode full screen and have the simulators running beside it. Patrick, is this your new project? It seems right up your alley. I was like, this is really exciting. And then I loaded up eBay and I found, I think, three used panels for sale that were a couple of them were under 500, one of them had scratches. One new panel for $900. Like, part of me thinks this is really amazing. And then part of me is like, oh, I don't want to buy the rest of the iMac. And two, man, you got to be careful because over time, if you leave a flat panel on for three years, 24 hours, it'll probably lose 50% of its brightness, right? So somebody's been running a screensaver on the 27 inch 5k monitor. And a lot of these are like ones listed as from late 2015. You know, you could buy a fairly trashed monitor. So I think this is, you know, this is, this is it most people are going to cheerfully buy a new monster that they don't have to hack into their system. I love it. It's really no, it's, it's cool as a project, right? Yeah, I don't think this is for everyone. Most people are going to find that their time is worth more than they would save. Because you have to spend a lot of time and you have to have the expertise to be able to put it together is it's not an easy thing. Cudell already had that expertise. So totally get why he did it. And I think it's impressive. It's certainly not, you know, you're not buying new parts. So you're going to be at the mercy of what parts you can find used, what their prices, if this became really popular, those prices would go up. But I don't think that diminishes the accomplishment here, which is like, oh yeah, this is, this is a cool DIY project. All right, let's check out the mail bag. This one comes from our very own Amos and luckily we have Patrick Norton on the show today because Patrick knows these sorts of answers. Amos' question is, is in my house are pre-installed speakers, left front center, right front on the wall, left rear, right rear in the ceiling. There are acoustic audio, 250 watt, eight ohm speakers all wired to a remote audio, visual alcove. Amos says I want to set up a 5.1 or even 7.2 system in the room. But I don't know the best AV receiver to buy. Can you suggest something that would be good for me? I don't currently run 4K video, but I'd like to start that option when I upgrade my TV or maybe even convert to a projector in the future. Also, for running video from the alcove, would HDMI, DisplayPort or Wireless be the best performance per dollar option? First thought, working backwards, HDMI is probably going to be the only option you really need to care about, especially if you're running a Roku box or an Apple TV or a Blu-ray player. For all intents and purposes, everything runs off of HDMI in the home. I wouldn't point out to everybody out there, one of the great bargains in audio is the fact that older AV receivers and when I say older, I mean anything that's basic 5.1 are incredible bargains on Craigslist. If you have some speakers and you want to power them, just go buy an AV VR off Craigslist. Because if you don't care about running 4K or you don't need some of the newer audio technology, usually some of them are great and they're also incredibly cheap. If you don't need overhead Atmos speakers, you don't have to spend a ton of money. A really good one out there is Denon's entry-level AV receiver right now, the AVR S540BT 5.2 channel. It'll do 4K and it costs all of $300 and they're available everywhere on Amazon on Best Buy. Local stores are really easy to find. You can step up from that, but that will do everything you need for those speakers. I also would like you to make sure the speakers aren't too old and that they're wired properly because there's nothing worse than lighting a speaker on fire by accident because it's trash. If you can pull the covers off the speakers when you first start running them to make sure the surrounds aren't trash, that little bit of rubber or foam that goes around the speaker, it can be a good thing. Because sometimes those in-wall speakers are super, super old and some of them age less better than others. Age less well better than others. There was a sentence in there somewhere. All of those and more. Well it's always great when we have guests like Patrick to be able to explain things like this and we want to encourage you to ask more questions if you have them. Maybe you have an answer to a question that's been asked on a previous show and we can address it in a future show. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels. Today they include Brandon Brooks, Tim Deputy and Lynelle Lane. Let's check in with Len Peralta who has been illustrating today's show. Len, what do you got for us? So we talked a little bit about NFTs there near the end of the show and for the first time for this show, since I've been working here for seven years, I've done something very, very different. I've created three separate images for each one of these platforms. So this is the one you can get in my online store. It's kind of NFT sort of digitally related. It's called I'm an Artist Now. You can get this one but it's also totally different than the one you get on my Patreon which is this one which is called Orange. It's also called I'm an Artist Now and but Patreon users get this one. Oh, and he's got three glasses in that one. It's not only just orange. Yeah, you got to check these out. They're pretty cool. The final one I'm not showing here on the show. It's over at openc.io. Just search Len P. It's an NFT. It's one of one. It's purple. I think it's purple or green. I can't remember. Orange. No, pink. Check it out. Go to OpenSea, search my name and you can find that. It's one of one. You can actually buy that. It's an NFT and it's pretty cool, guys. Check it out. So there you go. Beautiful stuff, Len, as always. Also, thanks to Patrick Norton for being with us today, Patrick. You give people advice about all sorts of AV things and beyond every day. Where can people find more of your work? Robert here and just posted a fresh episode of AVXCEL for our patrons at patreon.com.avxcel and you get links and all the older episodes. Please head over to avxcel.com. Would you like a DTS hat, hoodie, mask, or mouse pad? We have all of that and a lot more at the Daily Tech News Show store. Dress yourself in our logos and spread the word dailytechnewshow.com slash store. Folks, we are live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live teleference and we'll be back on Monday. Talk to you then. This week's episode of Daily Tech News Show was created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chang, producer and writer Rich Strfellino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coontz, associate producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer Jen Cutter, our mods, Beatmaster, W Scottish One, Zoey Brings Bacon, BioCow, Captain Kipper and Jack Shid, modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Looters, a cast ad support from Tim Ruggieri, patreon support from Stefan Brown. Contributors for this week's show include Chris Ashley, Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Patrick Norton. Guests on this week's show included Nicole Lee, live art performed by Len Peralta and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Hope you have enjoyed this brover.