 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Tony Glass, Phillip Les and Daniel Dorado. Coming up on DTNS Trisha Hershberger is here to give us some ideas for gifts to give the video gamer in your life plus the social network for meeting friends for dinner and why countries want you to work from their beaches. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday November 14th 2022 in Los Angeles I'm Tom Merritt from lovely Cleveland Ohio I'm Richard Raffalino I'm the show's producer Roger Chang and joining us TV host and streamer Trisha Hershberger is back! Yay! Should I say that I'm from sunny Los Angeles as well? Oh certainly absolutely yeah yeah I'm so excited to be here thank you guys for having me back it's good to have you we're going to start with the quick hits Google moved its health connect app out of early access and into public beta on the play store now you may recall when this launched it only supported Fitbit, Google Fit and Samsung health it lets you kind of aggregate and sync between all of those services well it's added some more integration so now you can sync your health and fitness data from Peloton, Aura, Weight Watchers, MyFitnessPal, Flow, Lifesum, Total, Outdoor Active and Prove, Insight so a lot of big names outside of maybe some of the more platform focused ones getting in on health connect Reuters reports that meta told employees Friday that it would stop developing its portal smart displays and develop smartwatches the company already pivoted portal displays from consumer to enterprise devices and now it's going to stop selling them all together by the end of this year Bloomberg had reported that meta had already stopped work on its smart watch in May but now the program is officially stopped Alibaba did not share full sales results from its singles day shopping event for the first time saying grandiosly that gross merchandise value was in line with last year 2021 sales reached 540.3 billion yuan it's about 76.1 billion dollar so probably still generated a lot of gross merchandise value but they're not crowing about it yeah singles day so now what it used to be it's like half state fresh platformers Casey Newton's sources say that twitter eliminated about 80 percent of its 5500 contract employees over the weekend cuts were are expected to impact things like content moderation and core infrastructure services the buy now pay later fintech company clarna launched a price comparison tool in the us last month and it's now expanded that to markets in europe including places like the uk and the nordic countries users will be able to shop and pay in the clarna app which will also show historical pricing data and recommendations so it'll let you know hey maybe you should wait on buying that item or it's a good price right now this builds on clarna's acquisition of price runner which it closed on back in april i don't know i get a vibe about clarna i could be wrong it might be something to worthwhile they figured out the payments maybe e-commerce follows let's talk a little more about making close friends because uh once you're over the age of 12 i don't know when you're an adult it gets difficult uh despite technology finding more ways to connect people the situation hasn't improved in fact studies have found that it might have even gotten worse the survey center on american life founded 2021 that 12 percent of people in the us couldn't identify a person they would call a close friend that's up from only three percent of people surveyed saying that in 1990 yeah and since the start of the covid 19 pandemic we've seen some dating apps trying to move into finding platonic matches as well we've got bumble offering a bff feature so it's all the way back in 2016 but that saw a huge increase in time spent on it in 2021 and match group acquired the south korean social networking company hyperconnect that connects people for platonic chance but tech crunch just profiled an interesting new startup called 222 that says it wants to provide a way for more authentic connections yeah deuces wild 222 uh the service launched late last year coming out of a university funded project that was looking into predicting social compatibility in groups of strangers this this reminds me of all those mit robotics programs except it's about like connecting actual people this led the founders to create dinner parties inviting friends of friends but the guest lists were determined using psychological questionnaires fed into machine learning uh the founders essentially expanded that into a service where they have you fill out a questionnaire and the algorithm will then decide like oh you you should probably have dinner with these people and they've been partnering with venues in los angeles to host events yeah and to get your algorithmic invite right now sign ups are limited to those 18 to 27 at least at the moment rather than an app user use a type form workflow answering about 30 questions covering everything from favorite movies music serial preferences to more thorny things like political views and religious affiliation once you put in your info 222 notifies you of events you've been selected for it says that data is encrypted but it also uses input data as part of the university social science experiment does disclose that so i guess my question is trisha dinner parties as a service you interested um heck yeah i think that sounds awesome i uh i'm too old for their current age range but if they decide to open it up a little i would be very hyped like this reminds me so the questionnaire portion of it reminds me of e harmony i'm not sure how much online dating everyone that's here did but i did a lot of it uh back you know before i found my person um and e harmony makes you do all those answer all those questions so that the algorithm or the matchmakers or whatever powers that be the brain behind the service can match you up with people you might be compatible with and i always really liked online services that were more of like a group outing anyway so there's a little less pressure on it so you can just go out meet new people that you may or may not be compatible with but you know having a little extra um authority behind them thinking you'll be compatible with these people i think could be really beneficial however i was just talking about this uh on my twitch stream yesterday i think it was um where some people said that sounds like a nightmare for introverts but could be really great if you're extroverted and looking to meet new people um and with so much of us living our lives online i think getting getting afk every now and then to meet other people could be a great thing i don't know what do you guys think i i see people in our chat saying like batfink this is a horrible idea to which i say like well you don't have to do it isn't it's not like it's the law right this is for people who are like oh i would like to do that i just don't have anyone to go get dinner with uh so how do i find those people and and to be frank it feels like it's less risky than than dating because dating is is heavy right that's that's a lot of other things that it's meant to lead to uh whereas a dinner is just like oh you know maybe i'll make some friends and if not you know no big deal yeah and that was one of the things uh in the piece they kind of talked about like some of the health and safety aspects of this and they're like well everything's in a group setting so like you're always in a public place like all these are public venues that you're going to be meeting up in and you're not doing there's no like chat interface it's not one on one yeah yeah and it's not like you have to chat with these people or give them any of your details or anything like that so that that removes a lot of like the creep factor that you can get on dating sites i just think it's one thing that really stood out to me is just the fact that it eliminates so much of i like that tension of like especially like moving to a new city i know this is like one of their primary examples of just being able because you have events like this already where you're going like hey we're going to go to this tasting menu sit at the group table and you will usually strike up a conversation with the person next to you because you're just in proximity and and i think like being like okay you're you're still gonna have this experience you're invited to it you don't have to go to it the price is super low to accept it too and taking that away but still providing that same experience that you might otherwise enjoy i'm interested in this i don't know how they scale it though that's the one thing like i'm kind of scratching my head here on this yeah i'm not sure i'm with you on that i don't know how they would scale it to get it a little bit larger but i mean i always recommend to people and they're like how do i meet new people to go and find people you have things in common right with right like go to a local book club if you have a local gaming or hobby shop like go play games um you know if you're into mtg or dnd or whatever like go play games and find other people you have things in common with so it seems to me like this service is just taking the finding people you have stuff in common with part of it off your plate for you yeah so you're just going to the event that's why i think it sounds nice and nick with the c was saying how is this different from meetup.com and the difference is the algorithm right like it you don't have to pick pick a meetup you you just go to the thing and the algorithm will have found people that are fun to be together which that it's harder to do that it's it's easy to be like i'm looking for a date so i'm going to the bar where people look for dates if you say i'm going to the bar where people look for friends everybody's going to be like sure you are you're just looking for a date right like this this gives you a safe space to be like no no really this is just about friendship and what i would say about the whole introvert aspect to it is we say it's dinner parties as a service but each of these is catered like the events are catered to the audience that they are serving it's not like every single time you're going out to dinner right at the exact same restaurant regardless of whether it's a group of introverts or it's a group of extroverts or whatever they talked about having concerts having quieter experiences so i'm assuming if they already know that like hey we're going to have a bunch of people where social interaction perhaps is more more of a draining experience that requires energy to put yourself out there they're not going to put you in a situation where you're around 30 people and bring introverts together so that they don't feel pressured is could be a really good positive aspect of something like this also i would like to see this available for the 65 plus crowd i mean loneliness in in people as they get older is a huge problem and a health problem that that has been identified and so making a service like this it's available for all ages i think is really important well rest of world.org has a story up called Malaysia built a work from home paradise now it just needs people to turn up the idea is to attract digital nomads to fill the void left by disappearances of business travelers because of the pandemic business travel is its own fantastic little subculture and digital nomads i guess uh has another one let's let's tap into them so in september malaysia launched a visa scheme called DERan2 aimed at digital nomads who make 24 000 a year or more workers in it and other all digital work can stay for up to a year with the possibility of renewal and bringing in dependence the program promotes four destinations as places with good connectivity and hospitality yeah so they brought a bunch of journalists including rest of world's uh journalists to the kamar resort on langkawi island this is one of those four locations it has good internet lots of cafes and restaurants that take credit cards which is important when you're traveling uh visa and mastercard uh they've got service on the island from grab for ride hailing uh air asia flies there so it it shouldn't be too hard to get there and apparently they've gotten more than 2000 applications for these new malaysian visas as of early october lots of content creators lots of software engineers ux designers malaysia when they talk about it publicly is hoping to get people involved in ai and web three and sustainability uh but you know they're getting people well and the thing is malaysia isn't alone in creating special visas for digital nomads we've got countries like estonia and they appear to be the first country to do so way back in 2020 if you want to do something first digital i guess you start with estonia indonesia offers a six-month permit for remote workers and a second home visa for higher earners and then in september thailand began offering a digital nomad visa that offers 10-year residency and discounted tax rate for foreigners who make at least 40 000 a year so you know treasurer you attempted to pack up and you know moving to southeast asia on an island somewhere soon quite move i definitely i would look into vacationing there or maybe like an extended couple weeks day but it's hard that's hard for me to say because i would say about 60 of the work i do is probably digital nomad live content creator streamer although it would probably be hard to bring my two desktops over there i'd have to buy new when i got there but the other part of the work i do is you know on sound stages and stuff here in los angeles so i don't know that i could fully up and go but if you are in an industry where you work from your laptop and can move anywhere i see this actually with a lot of my younger cousins who are right in that 20 to 30 age range just out of college entrepreneurial spirits wanting to do this digital nomad life all living in different countries and doing it successfully so i kind of think it's awesome that melasia has opened up to this i think it's neat what do you guys think are you willing to move see the the tourist visa gets you 90 days right so you can kind of go on that as it is although technically you're not really supposed to work or you're supposed to tell them if you're going to work and all that sort of thing this is really like if you're willing to pack up that desktop and take it with you and and be there for months they're making it easy to me it's like i just have too many roots here to just go and do that on the other hand i have friends as well who do this in fact i talked to jen briny host of congressional dish who is a digital nomad she has gone to portugal and poland within like the last six months and spent extended amounts of time living and working in those regions uh she is now back in the us and she has a few reasons why she hasn't gotten to a lot of the places that we just mentioned starting with estonia fine print says that if you want the year-long visa you have to physically be in estonia if i think it was six months something like that so they're aiming to have people like come and stay and it's just so far north and i don't do winter that like six months in estonia i just like i can't the reason that we're focusing so intensely on europe right now is because we have the dog i know some other digital nomads and they love going to visit indonesia and malaysia and there's like a bunch of different places super friendly to digital nomads but they're not as friendly to little tiny eight pound dogs because you have to do quarantines and it's a whole process to bring a dog onto an island and our little pound puppy cannot handle being in a cage for more than 10 seconds without losing her mind yeah so i thought it was really interesting to hear those other considerations from somebody who is like yeah i i'm doing this but i i'm maybe not picking those places because they haven't done the things that i need them to do yet to make it easy yeah and the other thing is i mean obviously you know digital nomad you're probably not doing that like if you have young kids i have a young family so like you know a five and a four-year-old that can barely get to eat a hotdog i'm probably not like lining up i don't care how westernized the resort is over the you know in in thailand or something like yeah i'll get them before you have to be in school though if you're gonna be at all right and then let alone the like 24 hours it's all trout like everything about it is a disaster for young families but i will say i know a lot of people especially like the it consultant area that have done some form of digital nomad whether it's long term or it's like we did it for a year just to you know i was in between gigs i was just doing consulting so we bought an airstream and we just drove around and stuff like that but when you do that you can have a certain sense of stability so if you even if you have you know maybe an older child or you have pets and stuff like that that's easier to handle when you have like again when when you're still can be somewhat domestic you can go to familiar places if you need to if you know if emergencies crop up and stuff like that what i think this is interesting is when i'm looking at the terms of these it's like a year you know stony is like six months i i feel like a lot of that is to try trying to track maybe not the stony's case but like a lot of the snowbird audience where maybe i am someone that's driving around my airstream and i'm going through the you know uh just driving around and i'm going through route 66 or whatever and then oh the weather's getting cold you know what i can park that somewhere i can put in storage and i can take off and spend six months in thailand that doesn't sound like the uh the worst way to spend my digital no you can you can do the summer in estonia and the winter in thailand you know for malaysia i love that musical that's so good the old song summer in estonia winter in indonesia uh well folks uh i'm going to try to get jen bryne back on the show uh roger's going to talk to her and and get some of her tips and tricks for being a digital nomad because when you're a digital nomad you don't have the home base anymore you what you are on the road like that continuously so uh look for that in the coming weeks and if you have a thought about anything we talk about on the show uh here is our email address send it to us feedback at daily tech news show dot com as we move closer to the start of the holiday shopping season it just kind of fades in over time uh you might be wanting to know what to get for the gamer on your list or or maybe what to ask for if you are a gamer because it could be tricky i there are games of course but you may get those for yourself or so many of them are digital maybe you're like i don't want to buy them a disc they don't use that anymore you don't want to get them the wrong game uh trisha you not only play scores of games for your twitch stream but you also have lots of hands on time with a lot of gaming hardware besides games what are some good gamer gift ideas oh i'm so glad you asked i mean this is exactly what you were saying of do i get them the right game do they already have this game what if they don't like this genre of game so my probably top level that i always suggest for people because it's under that fifty dollar price point where it's a sweet spot for gaming stuff is game pass if you are buying for someone who is a pc or xbox gamer game pass and game pass for pc and game pass ultimate which is the hybrid of the two so you get to play games on uh cloud games xbox games or pc games game pass ultimate you can get a three month game pass ultimate for about 45 dollars it comes on a little card so you actually have something to put in the stocking if you're looking for a stocking stuffer um but it's so nice because then you're giving three months of a full library of games that the person you're gifting it to can choose between so you don't have to worry about what they already have in their collection you don't have to worry about the types of genres they play it's awesome it's like getting a gift card for them but without them having to go do the gift card part right it's actually appreciated yeah you don't have to do the gift card part and it's like a gift card for it's essentially like a three month library card for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different games that they can just at their will for that next three months do as they please so that's a fantastic kind of good for everybody who's a pc or xbox gamer um also if you're looking for some hardware and you're shopping for someone that is a mobile gamer the backbone or the razor kishi or both devices that do this so it's a device that stretches so that you get almost joy con like sides to your mobile device so you can play your mobile games you can play your cloud based games that you're streaming or whatnot with a full handheld set and it thereby turns your phone into a switch like device so for mobile gamers that's absolutely awesome they'll feature things like charge pass through and they make them for both ios and android so just make sure if you're shopping those you know what the gift recipient uses as their preferred mobile operating system that's a good one to think of um and then if you're thinking of controllers again you know whether you're a pc gamer an xbox controller gamer or a playstation gamer i have something for everybody i always like to recommend because it's tried and true and everybody loves it but for the pc gamer in your life the logitech g502 i have the light speed wireless that's what i use on my streaming pc and it's really nice um but it's a wireless controller that's very very well rated logitech is like the go to for a competitive gameplay on pc as well as the g502 i don't i mean tom i don't know if you've reviewed this over yours but the g502 has been like the trusted five out of five star review gaming mouse i feel like for the past decade it's like the c920 of gaming mice right that is an excellent way never goes out of style 100 yes and i like the wireless it's really fast no latency and it you know cleans up my desk space plus if you forget to charge it you need to charge it it plugs in during uh right in the top and then you can just use it as a wired mouse while it's charging so it's not like you oh i forgot to charge it now i'm done um for the xbox gamers out there the elite series 2 is an amazing controller um and for the playstation gamers out there the new dual sensors for the ps5 come in a variety of different colors and they're so pretty uh and so fun and if you have not used a dual sense controller yet the i it's very hard for me to describe how different the haptics are on a dual sense and how it feels in the hand um it's you know it's one of those things that you kind of have to feel it to believe it if you will but it is leaps and bounds different than any other haptics in controllers i felt so those are all great um i'm trying i'm trying to move a little quick because i know that we only have so much time and there's so much good stuff yeah but there's so much good stuff if you're into headsets my best gift under a hundred dollar headset is usually uh really anything from the hyper x cloud gaming headset line these are so good that's the cloud two uh that we're taking a look at there but these are almost always priced under a hundred dollars even more so if you can find them on sale and they're lightweight they're comfortable they have excellent sound quality and they're very reliable so i always recommend those if you're looking for more of a luxury headset and you have a digital nomad that games maybe that you're shopping for the alienware 920 h headset that i'm wearing right now actually um is a tri mode connectivity headset so it connects over wireless it connects over bluetooth and it can wired connect either via usbc or 3.5 millimeter so your connectivity options are not only very varied but for example i like to keep the wireless dongle at home on my battle station so when i'm here gaming it connects very easily to my pc but i'll connect to my laptop via bluetooth or i can easily plug into my switch via wired so it works in a variety of situations without me having to do a lot to switch in between the two which is awesome and then another one that's kind of as as universal or even more so than game pass ultimate is more storage every gamer out there needs more storage all the time especially if you're trying to create gaming clips or content from your games more storage is absolutely key so whether it's an sd card or a micro sd card for something like the nintendo switch whether it's a little portable ssd that you can plug into your playstation or xbox or whether it's m.2 that you can install internal on your next gen consoles or in your pc these are so important to have uh the one caveat i will get if you are gifting this to someone thinking oh man my uh my you know cousin has a ps5 and i want to get the more storage for their ps5 for the next gen consoles xbox series x and ps5 if you get them an external ssd chances are real good that they'll be able to save their games and run their previous gen games off of the external ssd but they'll need to transfer that game file back onto the console's internal storage to run the game off of it so that's that's a reason that you might want to consider an m.2 that can be installed internally if you're shopping next gen consoles only but really more storage is a gift that everyone can appreciate because it's the worst when you get a new game and you have to uninstall a favorite that you hadn't finished yet yeah yeah it's the worst the worst it's the worst so is there anything i miss that's on your list gentlemen that you're like this is what i need for my gamer heart this holiday season the one so the one thing i would say just real quick is we've seen a lot of like cloud streaming stuff announced i know logitech announced their own is that no go or is that i need to know the audience for you do something like that if your audience or the person you're buying for has fast reliable internet service then cloud gaming could be an excellent choice for them but is heavily relying on your internet and i would think you'd still need to know what games work for them to oh i mean the library of games you can use yeah between g force now and xbox game pass cloud gaming it there's so many games now that i really feel like you'll find a genre for everyone but it doesn't work awesome in every area if you're in an area and you have that high speed reliable internet then it's really cool and that's where the backbone and the razor key she come in for your phone and if you love that and want to upgrade that then go for that logitech g cloud yeah i like that i love game pass ultimate is like an easy gift if anybody's in xbox and pc and i love the stealth of being able to ask your your ps5 or ps uh yeah your ps5 gift recipient uh what's your favorite color i have no clue i have no clue what you're getting sneaky sneaky all right well may 16th 2020 was still for many of us the height of covid 19 related lockdown so probably not a lot of fond memories when we're looking back you know at our uh google photos and that kind of stuff but it turned out to be a pretty fun day for the us space force it launched its unmanned x37 b space plane on that date and over the weekend 908 days later it landed successfully at nasa's kennedy space center making it the longest and its sixth overall mission the x37 b first started flying in 2010 we don't know much about its overall purpose since then what we do know about this current mission is that deployed the falcon sat eight satellite it also carried equipment to test converting solar energy to microwaves transmit back to the ground which sounds awesome and experiments to test space exposure on seeds for future interplanetary missions yes space seeds the space plane last landed in 2019 after a 780 day mission a mere 780 days i mean i know this isn't the first uh and and it's not even the first time they've gone more than a year but just the idea that they're they're sending these these solar planes for years without anyone on board and they just fly around the earth you know that's it's pretty impressive when you think about it yeah just someone's this is cool just someone's job for like two years was like is the space plane still up all right yeah we're good all right it's like that yeah pat and kelly just sitting there trading off shifts yeah space plan still up yep all right your turn watch the next 12 hours same to you uh yeah that's amazing uh you know who else is amazing trisha hershberger thank you so much that was incredible what a great rundown of info for folks thank you for doing that oh man thank you for having me i you know i'm very passionate about gaming hardware so i can talk about that all day anytime where should folks go if they want more trisha in their life which they should oh man well if folks want to follow me on all the socials it's at that girl trish with no i in the girl so just that g r l trish um except for on twitch and youtube where it's trisha hershberger and uh on twitch i do an indie game showcase every tuesday and i'm pretty much streaming four to five days a week every week so come on by and say hi fantastic thank you trisha trish and thanks to chris taylor who is one of our top lifetime supporters for dtns thanks for all your viewers of support chris truly appreciate it thank you chris all right and patreons remember stick around for the extended show good day internet it's getting started in just like a couple of seconds you don't have to stick around that long you can catch the show live monday through friday at four p.m eastern 2100 utc find out more daily tech news show dot com slash live we'll be back tomorrow talking about media tech's latest chip announcements with shannon morse see you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this program