 There we go. Now we're live. Faked me out. Say hello to all the people on the live stream. Everyone live stream or the on-demand stream. If you're watching this later, or the, I don't know, is that probably all there is? Yeah. Is there any other state? You're either watching it live or not live. Those are the two states where you're not watching it. In which case you can't hear us. Pretty binary. Well, we're excited. Stuart Sheffey is joining us today. Thank you. Stuart, again. Sure. Good to be here. And just a minute here, we'll rev up the show. YouTube is live. Chatroom is confirming it. Let's get going. Sweet. Yeah, here we go. Who's responsible for this? If you went to Daily Tech News Show dot com slash support and gave a nickel a day, then it must be you. Thank you. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, May 11th, 2016. I'm Tom Marin joining me as he does most Wednesdays. Mr. Scott Johnson of the Frog Pants Studios, host of the instance, host of the morning stream. How you doing, Scott? I'm good, man. It's going to be back. I love Wednesdays. I'm kind of having a nerd out moment about today and today's guest. I cannot wait to see. Very excited to welcome Stuart Sheffey, host of Computer Chronicles to the show. Stuart, thanks for taking some time and joining us. Pleasure. Good to be with you guys. It's great to have you. We're going to talk specifically about VR, but just sort of your perspective, having covered technology for decades now, how some of these ideas sort of come and go. And that makes it easy to see what we're really making progress on. Yeah, absolutely. Some some just go and some come again. Some come, some go, some just go. Well, let's let's get into the headlines before we get to that. Instagram has updated its app logo. The old brown Polaroid camera like design has been replaced. It's the biggest news of the day, people. And if you're used to seeing that and you turn on your phone and you see a flat, bright rainbow gradient color scheme, you you may also think it's pretty big news. It's a huge change. They've never changed their logo before. They also changed logos for Hyperlapse, Boomerang and Layout, three of their other apps to have similar treatments. Instagram's UI got less dramatic tweaks. They now have a white top bar. Selected icons are black instead of Facebook blue. And Scott, the internet went crazy. Yeah, people lost their minds. I saw it without hearing about the news. I updated the app and noticed the icon change. And a part of me kind of fell away. It was like a weird changing of I mean, it's a small thing. But as a guy who took a lot of typography classes and a lot of graphic design classes and studied logo design, when you see one change that you're so used to seeing to something this different, it was kind of took the wind out of me. But I'm fine with it. You'll get used to it. The new layout looks nice. I think it's a nice clean, crisp layout. We all get used to these things, but man, the internet lost its mind. I almost never lose move apps on my home screen of any of my devices. And then when they change the color of the logo, it can take me weeks to catch up and figure out which one it is. Like audible change the color to this this orange. And I still can't find it sometimes. Everybody's going flat. These kind of orangey pink kind of colors. Stuart, do you ever run into that problem? I hate it. You get used to looking at something and, you know, I got a million apps on my phone and my iPad, and you really you recognize them graphically more than anything else. Yeah, absolutely. They change the damn graphic. Where did that thing go? Yeah, I'm hunting around. And I haven't moved anything. It's crazy. Exactly. Well, and it also just heralds in a them moving away a little bit from the old antiquey looking sort of hipster. Looking on to something new. We'll see how things go. Microsoft is going to remove the Wi-Fi sense feature from Windows 10, which shared your Wi-Fi connection with contacts and automatically connected you to contacts, Wi-Fi in return. Maintenance costs and lack of usage were key to the decision feature will be removed in the anniversary update to do this summer. Something I never used once. Yeah, you and nobody else apparently. This is the one that people got really upset because they thought it was sharing passwords when it was really just authenticating and you had full control over who it shared with, et cetera. But apparently you didn't need to worry since nobody was using it anyway. Google has updated translate for Android with tap to translate. Anyone running Android 4.2 or later can now just copy text and you'll get a pop up icon. You can tap to do the translating. You don't have to paste it in. You don't have to go to another app. You can get a translation just like that. Google is also adding offline support to the iOS version of translate so you can download some languages to use later and word lens. Now supports Chinese for visual translation. So you can point it at signs and menus, things like that while you're traveling. These updates are rolling out over the next few days. It is really weird to hear you read an article like that having Stuart on the phone and my brain going to all and we don't have to jump on this next. I know we got a bunch of stuff coming up and we're going to talk about this very thing. But seeing these 1988 to 92 kind of era presentations of devices and translation and here's text to speech and those things that I used to see you demonstrate and now how flippantly we just refer to changes that are happening on our phones and devices. What a different world. Crazy to me. That only in 20 short years really we've seen pretty amazing changes. What's app launched a desktop app for Windows 8 or higher and OS 10, 10.9 or higher that supports notifications on the desktop, keyboard shortcuts and syncs with mobile devices. Log in with a QR code from your mobile WhatsApp and bam, you're in. Yeah, I mean there is a web version of this as well so it really isn't a huge change but it does mean that you can rely on WhatsApp for your messaging doesn't matter what computer you have. I guess unless you're using Linux but then you can use the web version. So there you go. I'm always convinced when a messaging service decides to do something on the desktop kind of go the other way away from mobile is always a good sign that they want to be here for the long term. They're very interested in capturing all of the market not just some of it. So to me this makes me far more interested in using WhatsApp than I did a day ago. And when I've been on Android having hangout integration has been essential to keeping up on messages and an I message with iOS is similar as well. So I think this is a good move. Nest announced OpenThread Wednesday an open source version of the thread low power mesh protocol that they use for home devices. OpenThread will also work on the same radio hardware as ZigBee devices. So there's an interoperability and that seems to be the goal. ARM, Atmel, Dialog, Qualcomm and TI are among the contributors to the project. So getting big hardware makers on board chip makers particularly. TechCrunch also reports that Chris Boros Nest head of the Thread Group left earlier this year to work at smart wireless router company Eero. So some people are suspecting that may be part of the change in direction. They've got new people in charge. Well, another chunk of the Google world Google Cardboard is now for sale in the Google Store in France, UK, Canada and Germany. The price will run 20 euros or 20 Canadian dollars, about 15 pounds. If you buy a pair, it's 30 euros, 25 Canadian dollars or 25 pounds shipping is free. Google Cardboard went on sale in the US back in February and continues to gain steam. And we're not far away from Google I.O. Where Pete Rojas today said there will be a VR device from Google at Google I.O. And he's just talking about what he has heard but he's pretty sure about it. So it's interesting that they've opened up Google Cardboard in these stores because it makes me think, well, that's where they're gonna be selling the new VR gear as well. Yep. Disney announced Tuesday, it's shutting down its Disney Infinity line of games and collectible toys and ending its self-published console game business. Two last play sets will be released in the next two months and then that's it. Disney will write down a $147 million charge in connection with closing the business. Scott and I talked about this on the morning stream today as well. Disney just moving on from video game making. I mean, this hits a little close to home. Actually no people who were in the 300 or so jobs that were affected, it's a local company here in Salt Lake City and highly thought of here. My daughters both work for a division up at the University of Utah that is all about game development and they're very tied to them and they see these people come and go and so there's a real kind of personal edge to this news today. But also it just marks a sea change for Disney getting out of trying to be a game developer which they've dabbled in for quite a long time. And officially pushing that work off onto others and I have to think that part of this is a drop in how things were going with the toys to life genre that Disney Infinity was in but also getting out of the publishing console business in general means they've got big properties like Marvel and Star Wars in addition to the Disney lineup that make it harder and harder for them to be the place to manufacture all that and to publish all that and develop all that. So off sourcing it makes a lot of financial and business sense I think but a real stinker for the locals here. That's our videos. No doubt. Starting June 13th, let's see, starting June 13th you'll no longer gonna, let's see, sorry. Google. Google will no longer allow me to read this. Allow ads for payday loans and other similar financial services that includes loans with payback terms of 60 days or less or an annual percentage rate of more than 36%. Google previously only allowed such ads if the words payday loan were entered in search. When I first saw this, my immediate thought was well if they decide to move against payday loans does that put them on the hook for removing other kinds of controversial ads that they've resisted saying we're not here to pick winners and losers but apparently there have been investigations from I don't know if it's the FTC but certain attorneys general wondering if these loans were actually these kind of loan ads were purporting fraud, perpetrating fraud and whether Google should be on the hook for it. So I think just getting out of it altogether lets them say, you know what, this is a controversial area and we're just not gonna get sucked into it. Sure. It probably wasn't all that big and lucrative to begin with. Yeah, as you said, they were limiting where those search ads could show up anyway. Hyperloop technologies, first of all, if you didn't hear, changed its name to Hyperloop One which is easier to keep track of now. Remember there was Hyperloop transport technologies and Hyperloop technologies. Now we've got Hyperloop One and HTT. Hyperloop One showed off a test of its linear electric motor on a test track in the desert north of Las Vegas. A 10 foot sled was propelled along a test track into a pile of sand at a force of 2.5 Gs and Gadget says CTO Brogan Bam Brogan hopes to have a quarter mile track with tubes by the end of the year and that's one of the keys to this. They did an open air test but if they get it in the tubes you'd get rid of the wind resistance, get a few other advantages and the top speed they estimate they could hit is 700 miles per hour. A lot of confusion about how fast this actually went. A lot of outlets were reporting 60 miles an hour and then Hyperloop was saying no, it was faster than that but it's the first legitimate test of the machinery anyway even if it is just the motor. Stuart, just from a perspective of somebody who's seen most of the innovations that you covered were always about either desktop or corporate or on that level of things, are you surprised to see transportation as such a strong tech sector now? It seems like everything we talk about lately is about self-driving cars or Hyperloop or something akin to changing the way that we commute and move around. Not really, I mean there's been tech in cars for a long time now, right? It's just sort of, so I think transportation has been an issue if you compare today's car to a car 10 years ago. I mean today's cars are riding computer compared to an old car that you actually open up and do something to. So I'm not surprised at all, I think it's been a slow progression now. Self-driving cars, I mean that's another issue, Hyperloop. These are big future issues, so it's different from the gadgets that are in your car right now. But I'm not surprised, I think it's been a slow path but it's been a steady path for a while. Well, I'll say it again, I'll buy anything from a CTO named Brogan Bam Brogan. GitHub has changed and somewhat simplified its pricing structure, if you're all sitting around waiting for that. Starting now, accounts for personal users cost $7 per month and accounts for organizations cost $9 per month, so $2 more or $25 per month for the first five users. You no longer have to pay more for more private repositories. Good news for GitHub users. Yeah, and this may not be readily apparent to people who don't use GitHub and don't publish code but one of the things you wanna do is object orient your code even more than ever and make modules that you can use. And because you had to pay per repository before, a lot of people were saying, well, I can't afford to do that so I'm just gonna put all the code into one repository and now they don't have to think about it. They just pay for their user, their month and they can put as many repositories up as they feel like. So it's a big change that people who use GitHub were asking for and it's GitHub responding to user requests. Good thing. That tip to Big Jim for sending this one in our Slack. DHL parcel copter has been going since 2014 and it just finished a three month test of its third generation. You see a lot of people doing their first tests of delivering by quadcopter. It turns out DHL has been working on this for a while. Customers in a mountainous region of Bavaria loaded 130 parcels in a test skyport. The region included valley community right in Winkle and the 1200 meter tall Winkle-Mulsum Plateau. Apologies for my German pronunciation. It covered eight kilometers of flight back and forth. Cargo was typically sporting goods, you know, skiing type stuff or medicines. The 30 minute trip by car took eight minutes by UAV. So they definitely were able to get stuff out there faster onto the plateau. Oh, it's huge. I cannot wait until I'm getting stuff by quadcopter. Whoever's bringing it to me, I'm all up for this. I think it's no. Stuart, have you, when did you first become aware of this sort of drone quadcopter phenomena? How long has that been going on? For me a couple of years ago, I guess. Not surprising, I'm surprised it took so long for this whole drone quadcopter thing to get going. As you say, it's really, it's better model airplane, right? Yeah, it's just a natural evolution. To get it from a cool hobby toy to something practical is a big leap. I mean, doing this in Bavarian, some mountainous region where there's no human being as a test is pretty easy. Bringing a package to my house is not so easy. But it's coming. There's no question about it. I'm just waiting for all the crashes. That's what I'm waiting for. Yeah, I hope not. UPS crashes into Amazon, you know. The shipping wars now take on a whole different aspect. I hadn't really thought about that. Some YouTube users are getting a messaging function in their mobile versions of YouTube. That's good news. The new feature allows text, photos, and links. Those who have the messenger can get into others or get it to others by inviting them to conversations. So some YouTube innovations happening on mobile. I like that. Yeah, a little direct message to message, trying to encourage people to share. One of the things you can do is share a video from YouTube and watch it together and comment on it while you're watching it. So that's kind of cool. Interesting little thing. Hey, thanks to all who submitted things we used in our subreddit. You guys are the best. DailyTechnewshow.Reddit.com is the place to go. If you wanna be like, I don't know, Teglas1976, another Jay Martin, Captain Kipper, Mr. Anthropology, TM204. Those are just a few of the people that submitted stuff that we use right here on the show. Helps us put the lineup together. So get in there and if nothing else, vote on some of the submissions people have made. DailyTechnewshow.Reddit.com. That is a look at the headlines. So all of this started when Alison Sheridan sent me a link to the Computer Chronicles Circa 1992 virtual reality episode, Stuart, and pointed out just how much hasn't changed. In fact, some of the headsets that you show in that episode back then look very similar to an HTC Vive or an Oculus Rift. And obviously the graphics have improved over time. You got a lot more gloves, a lot more, a lot less motion recognition. But tell us a little bit about the, your perspective on this episode from 1992 and how virtual reality is now finally hitting the shelves. Well, people thought we were kind of nuts covering something called virtual reality, which no one had really ever heard of back in 1992. But I love the stuff that nobody understood yet and myself in particular. So we put together the show, as I said, most people didn't even, didn't even have the term VR at that time. And there were a couple of really interesting things that are out that actually, some are out today. So I pulled out the lineup from that show. So we had Jim Kramer from Virtual Technologies on the show. We had Chris Alice from Autodesk. We showed off the gesture glove, the cyber glove. The amazing thing is, these were running on a 386 PC. So imagine that. And today we need this monster machine to support Oculus Rift, et cetera. It was interesting to see too, this ridiculously slow frame rate that the 386s were performing at. And it was, I have to think, when I originally saw this, because I'd seen it way back then. Memories of it. And I had to have been really impressed. I just know I must have been. But I look at it now and look what they're manipulating in 3D space in VR today on Oculus Rift 5. It is shocking. And people bitch about the update rate today, right? Oh yeah. I mean, that's a great door effect. So slow and so chunky. It's the thing. To get it out into the hands of people, they've had to try to nail a certain frame rate. It has to be matched up with where our eyes work. And there's much more care in all of those ways. And I looked at that stuff and I thought, oh man, we'd all be throwing up in five minutes if I was wearing that thing. As we are now. Something's happened. Have you taken a roller coaster ride on the Rift? Yeah, I have. Not fun. I mean fun, but yeah. Right, but where's the bag? Right. I think that is one of the interesting things about that I think this shows off the progress of technology. And if you haven't checked it out folks, archive.org slash computer chronicles or we'll have a link in our show notes as well. Take a look at it because you will have those moments where you're like, oh, look at the clothes, look at the hairstyles, look at that chunky graphics. But then you'll see some things and you'll say, that's really not that different. The problems that they're talking about, the things they're trying to solve. Yeah, I mean, one of the areas that's very similar to that though, this finally changed a bit. We used to do a lot of shows on speech recognition and artificial speech, synthetic speech. That stuff never worked, never got better for 20 years until a couple of years ago where it's real, Syria, et cetera. And I think the funniest thing to me was that one of those headsets that they were showing, I don't know if it was the Crystal River one, just looked like exactly the same form factor. And you reference it as having TV monitors in there instead of LCD screens, but otherwise, we really haven't changed that, we haven't solved that yet. Well, that's a big problem to solve, isn't it? I mean, it's pretty basic, put something on your head and look at two screens. Yeah, and try not to make people throw up. I mean, at some point, the hope and the dream of this generation, this cutting edge of the headsets that are shipping now, the idea is that we are finally to a space of fidelity, performance, and comfort that we can deal with having this sort of thicker, heavier thing on our heads. And then we're gonna immediately, if things go well, we're gonna immediately start to see these things shrink, manufacturing processes improving, and you're gonna have far less hardware on your head in theory and time. Like we do with phones or any other technology, it tends to get smaller, thinner, and better. Do you think we'll take that path here? Do you think we're always gonna be wearing big, weird, black looking things on our heads? No, holograms is the answer. Mm, all right. We're gonna have these little guys walking around as holograms. We won't wear the headset. Yeah, just project it. You know, Discovery and HBO are actually developing hologram-based dramas now. And something that is just projected, so you see it, you don't have to wear anything, yeah. It's, I think, they're working with a company called Otoi, I believe it is, whose CEO says, who needs screens? Well, this is, it's kind of what Magic Leaps after, as well. Yes, exactly. Still wearing something, but you're wearing something light that you don't have to cover your face with. I think we're gonna be wearing these headsets for a long time, though. Oh yeah, but AR does seem to have a place in all this. What really impressed me about the old video was this. You started it with somebody using a, I think his name was Jim Kramer. Right. Yeah, wearing a glove, a haptic glove, or not really haptic glove. The public had gesture control, and he could find language. That's still impressive. That's very impressive. Yeah, like there's nothing about that that I look at other than Tom reminded me of Vitex. You know, a lot of this we're doing without gloves. You can do a lot of this just with camera recognition. But still, watching him do that, I thought, oh man, that was innovative then. That's innovative now. Perhaps that was brilliant at the time. I mean, you think really what a value that is to people who only know sign language, and you make your signs, and it talks to the other person. Yeah. And that was brilliant. The lens technology we're talking about from Google Translate is right up that alley of being able to improve that kind of communication. The biggest difference is, yeah, there's better motion recognition, so maybe we don't need the glove. And the computer, instead of a 386, it fits in your pocket. Yeah. It's pretty impressive. So easy to see that and go, oh, look at the hairstyles. Look at that, look at all these things that are funny from 20 years ago. But it was pretty cool. It's so cool. And when he was doing letters for you, that was what I thought. Well, I guess that's kind of cool. And then you said, can you do words? And he does words and they start being spoken aloud. Right. Take that, echo in Siri. I'm really impressed. Well, and that's one of the things about older technology that I've noticed. And Stuart, I'm curious what your perspective on this is, too. Latency never seems to improve because as soon as we reduce, as soon as we get a faster chip, we start pouring more things into it. In fact, Ken from Chicago in our chat room says, you know, the resolution really isn't important for VR. It's the latency because that's what's gonna cause the issues. And yet we always wanna make the graphics bigger and improve things and rightly so. But that causes the computer to work slower because it's handling more data. That the latency on that glove translation that Scott's talking about was snappy. It was pretty fast. Yeah, it's kind of like building another lane on a freeway. It lasts about two days, right? Yeah, before we fill it up with cars. Yeah. Shane in our chat room wonders, do you think that VR took so long just because of the technology that was needed to do it right? Or do you think it was shown off too early that people gave up on it? No, I think up to this point, it is because the technology is really challenging. From here on in, it might be a different issue. Here, just use your acceptance is there really enough value there to spend all the money that these things are gonna cost. I think it, to me, has been technology up now. As you say, it's been hard to get these things really, still hard to get these things to work really well. People still complain about the experience of having the goggles on. But I think the bar is gonna change a little bit in terms of really what are the applications? What good is this? Why is it worth spending my money other than playing a cool game? Do you think it took this long for us to get to a place where the fidelity is strong enough to create realistic experiences or even the ones that are more stylized or creating out of this world experiences that are pretty genuinely kind of brain altering in some ways. They give you a lot of presence which is everybody is shooting for. I think that we didn't, it took that long. Took 20, 25 years from even that point till now to get there just because of the slow pace of whatever technology. Or do people leave this alone for too long? Do we have too many people who were disappointed in the end results of all that work for VR and then we just kind of let it lie for a couple of decades until somebody got a couple of wild hairs and went for it again? You know, I think reality is very complicated. You know, so when you get to virtual reality, you've got a hell of a bar to pass. I mean, life itself is pretty rich. And if you're gonna simulate all the experiences of walking down the street as a human being and put them inside of virtual experience, that is damn difficult. I mean, not only the latency issues, I mean, we've solved so many of those problems, but I think the problem up until now has been tech. I think the problem from here on in will be apps and acceptability and price. Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny to me, not funny really, but it's interesting to me that a lot of the debate about what VR is good for really was solved. I mean, you were talking about store shelf arrangement, virtual architecture, CAD and VR. We know what to use this stuff for. And granted, once we have really good working prototypes, we'll find new uses, but it's not through lack of one. I don't think it ever has been all about gaming. Absolutely, but I think to Scott's question before, one of the reasons this has moved slowly because there's not a lot of money at stake. Where are the business apps? Games is really cool, but where people are gonna make a lot of money is when this is used in education, in medicine, in the military, in the science, and so on and so forth. Then it's a big business, then more money will go into the research and the development. Yeah, I mean, the gaming industry is now a multi-billion dollar industry, but you're right, this is the easy angle in. This is the open window to get in quick, give an experience that blows people's minds, create excitement, create that feeling of presence, and then give us the experiences of walking through an ancient Egyptian tomb. Right, right. I totally agree with that. Before we wrap up on this, another thing I wanna point out is that you were able to get, every Computer Chronicles episode on archive.org now? Virtually all are up there, yeah. Yeah, one or two that slip through the cracks working on those right now. And is that, and the ones that slip through the cracks that you're just trying to find the source material? We have the source material that we took us a while to figure out that some of them weren't there, actually. Oh, gotcha. Interesting story as to how that all started, if you wanna hear it. Yeah, absolutely, I'm very curious. I was doing another show at the time called Net Café, which is all about internet stuff, not different from Computer Chronicles. And one of the guests I interviewed on the show was Bruce Tricale of the Internet Archive. And at the time, we'd been doing the show for 15 years or something, Chronicles for 15 years or so. And after I finished the on-camera interview, I sat down with Bruce and I said, you know, I've got an interesting problem, maybe you have an idea, because you're into this archiving stuff. I've got hundreds, 500 shows, basically the virtual history of the personal computing revolution, sitting on shelves inaccessible to people. And this is a crime, what can we do about it? He said, we're the Internet Archive, we'll do the video archive now. And he offered, right on the spot, to pay to digitize all these videos we had, took two years to do it, put them up online. Now we had to take a big swallow tube because we were being asked to give away all our intellectual property, we had spent millions of dollars developing. And this really wasn't a sharing economy at this time. So we had to make a big decision to put that all online for free and downloadable, not just viewable. So that's where it came out, it took two years to get it all up there and it's been fantastic. We have over the years, I guess shows have been an archive for 10, 15 years now. I mean, in total, we have far more viewers on the archive shows than we ever had on television. And we used to have television million viewers a week, well, two million around the world. Sure. And it amazes me, you know what the most popular show, by the way, on the internet is? Yeah, which one? Commodore 64. The most downloaded show. A lot of people had a lot of nostalgia tied up in the Commodore 64, yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. Apple is up there too. That's great because that is what archive.org is meant for. We put the show on archive.org, even though we don't necessarily need to, we serve it from elsewhere, just so it's there. I mean, that is the purpose of that. How did you get yourself over that hump of saying, well, you know, I might want to sell these on DVDs or re-syndicate them and still be able to allow archive to do that? Well, it was really Rick Prelinger and the Prelinger Archives. Rick was the first one to actually jump in the pool and say, okay, I'll put a lot of my stuff up for free. And he convinced me that it actually was a good business decision. That it is? Good business decision for spreading the word that things exist or what? It became just great PR and promotion and free advertising. Gotcha. People would find the stuff on the archive and say, oh, I want to use that in a documentary. Whoops, I guess we've got to call the guy who owns it and gets the rights to do that. Because our stuff, both Rick's and mine are only for non-commercial, non-mashed up use. So it was just ended up being a great promotional tool and people basically know about our show who didn't ever watch it on TV through the archive collection. I must say the risk we took was bigger than we thought because they've all been pirated. Oh yeah, of course. The collection on YouTube is bigger than the official collection and it's impossible to keep up with it. Am I feeling knowing that it's all there? It's weirdly cathartic. It's like this. Absolutely. I mean, in one way, obviously you guys are going to be selling a bunch of new 386s because of exposure. Right. What you are doing is creating, I don't know, there's a historic value to this that has an educational value that has a lot of other value outside of just quick monetary value and I'm really grateful you guys made that choice. It's a treasure for me to go check that stuff. For example, CNN is doing a show either tomorrow night or a week from tomorrow night on Tech in the 80s and we provided a lot of footage to them for that show which they couldn't get anywhere else. Yeah. So it is a great resource in them. I wasn't thrilled at the time but I'm thrilled now that we did it. Well yeah, that's the thing. It's counterintuitive sometimes. This stuff works now in an infinitely copyable universe. So the rules are constantly changing and anybody who tells you they know how it all works is selling you something. I just have to take a deep breath and accept it and say it's a good thing to do. We'll see what happens. Yeah, yeah. All right, well let's get to our pick of the day real quick. Rami from Bethlehem suggests the Jied remix OS, jied.com slash remix OS founded by three ex-Google engineers to bring new great features to Android. Rami says remix OS makes Android look like a desktop OS. Start button, taskbar system tray, resizable movable windows notifications. Currently the OS only supports a few Android devices, Nexus 9, Nexus 10, a couple others. And also a version for PCs. Luckily Rami says I have a Nexus 10 which I was thinking of replacing but since I installed this ROM, I'm using it more and more and while the OS is still in beta, it works fine. Has some bugs here and there but it's very stable and extremely fast and because he's using the Nexus 10 it comes with the Google Play Store but without all the extra Google apps. I think that has to do with the device. They say that the Play Store will be available depending on the device. So if it's a Nexus device, I think you get to use the Play Store which is interesting. Anyway, it's an interesting way to maybe save an old tablet, jied.com, J-I-D-E.com slash remix OS. So cool, I wanna put it on a PC, like an old box. Yeah, right, another way to revive an old PC. Just Linux, just a different kind of Linux, Android. Send your picks to us folks, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks, a few emails here. Roderick said I listened to the show about the new Amazon service. Actually Amazon purchased the company CreateSpace a few years back. CreateSpace allows you to send a copy of a DVD that you offer for sale. Then they'll print the DVDs on demand when a customer purchases them and send you a share at the end of the month. So it works like the Kindle. This allowed anyone to get into the DVD publishing game. Amazon purchased CreateSpace which then got all the titles listed on Amazon for free. They are not designed for the YouTube cat video crowd but content creators like myself and they've always required things like your tax information, et cetera. So he says, he saw this Amazon video direct announcement and he said, oh, well they're just doing the same thing CreateSpace has been doing for DVDs except you don't have to have a DVD. You're not printing a DVD. So whereas CreateSpace makes print books, they're making Kindle versions and now people can publish this stuff up there. He said before CreateSpace there was no easy way to get my titles on fly fishing and scuba diving the Florida Keys published but because of CreateSpace and Amazon, I'm a worldwide publisher and I've sold DVDs and video streaming around the world. Now he's got another outlet there. If you would have been the, what was the monthly CD tape service that we used to Columbia house? So Columbia house, same kind of thinking and said, all right, well people are moving to digital or whatever the transitions are. This is just Amazon being really smart about what the existing stuff they have does and where it needs to head in the future and not getting behind. So I'm with him that this is a lot like that and I think Amazon's smart to do it. Nathaniel in Leafy Southwest Washington has a question particularly for you Scott, although I'm curious if Stuart has thoughts on this as well. Nathaniel says I'm a one and a half years into a three year residential electrical apprenticeship as someone who helps people with electrical issues that range from chipped GFCIs to why does my house smell like burning? I have a lot of opportunity to offer additional services. Dish Network's diversification of technician services fits the theme of this discussion well. So here's my question. What skills and systems should I add to my arsenal as an electrician? Simple networking, nest systems, Spanish, all seem like good ideas. What else would you guys like to see offered? If you could hire an electrician to work on your smart home stuff, what kind of stuff would you want them to know? Well, here's somebody working the way I just talked about Amazon. Somebody thinking ahead at how his job, his line of work changes and evolves and I think him knowing more about how routers work and how different ISPs and their kinds of, the kind of bandwidth the cable provides as opposed to something over satellite or something over DSL or SDL or DSAL, AL, whatever. All those things, those are all so different and yet I don't know any electricians who know any of that stuff. If they did, there'd be a lot less return appointments, there'd be a lot less confusion about what's wired to what, knowing how your cat five is routed through the house as opposed to what is that blue wire. Like that seems really smart to me but I can't think of anything. I mean, what he's listed here are kind of the main things. Stewart, can you add anything to his list that might help him? No, I totally agree except it's a pretty steep learning curve. There's a lot to learn that most electricians don't have any clue about. So I think it's a great idea. His ideas are good ones too. Certainly NEST knowledge and so on and so forth but there's a lot to learn there. I mean, he's not gonna be an electrician anymore once he learns all this stuff. Yeah, it's definitely broadening the skill set quite a bit. I would say just brushing up on protocol compatibilities would be less of a steep curve and be extremely helpful if people are asking which stuff they should get and you're saying, well, I'm an electrician, I'm not gonna, as long as you plug it in, I know it's gonna work but I do know that ZigBee now works with open thread and I do know that this, that could be extremely helpful for people I think. Very good. Yeah, I mean, as home automation becomes more and more commonplace and less and less this cool thing that your buddy does, there's lots of advantages to understanding that and staying with it as it evolves because we are at the very burning edge of that stuff right now. Yeah, this is sort of like helping you put your PC together 20 years ago, just helping you put your home wireless stuff together. Your home's become a PC. Kind of like you were saying with the car too. Right. Finally, we had Severin's email yesterday pleading with people to say, hey, are there any Blackberry users left out there? We did get a handful of emails from people saying, yes, I still use a Blackberry. You're not alone, Severin. But Rusty in Virginia particularly wrote and said, the United States established and has steadfastly maintained a national park dedicated to that endangered species. It's located in Washington, DC and covers the 100 square miles around the mall where federal government employees roam about in their natural habitat. And of course he's pointing out that, yeah, government, government users all, you still use it on the Blackberry. They'll see them all over the place. Good point. Amazing, amazing. Can't remember the last time. Government behind the times as usual. Right. I really couldn't tell you the last time I saw somebody with one in their hand. It's been so long and I guess I'm not around a lot of government employees, but it was there, I suppose. Yeah, I like the idea that it'd be a preserve for Blackberry users in the mall in Washington. Well, Stuart Schiffay, what a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Pleasure to be with you guys and your audience. You should follow Stuart on Twitter. He's still keeping you up to date on what's going on in the world of technology. It's Schiffay, C-H-E-I-F-E-T. Also as a website, schiffay.com. Anything else that you'd like to tell people about in particular? No, between the website and Twitter is where I'm most active right now. I don't do a lot of Facebook stuff, but the Twitter account, I put a lot of fun stuff on there, so I'd recommend that one. You know what? From somebody who's covered tech for this long, Twitter must be like the greatest thing ever because now you don't have to stop after a 30-minute take or whatever. You can just talk, right? It's amazing. Yeah, I actually love Twitter. I don't have everything on Twitter, but the tool is fantastic. Yeah, yeah. And go check out Computer Chronicles on archive.org as well. Scott Johnson, anything to tell people about before we let you out of here? Oh, well, I'm done talking about free comic book day prints because they shipped. Thank you everybody for signing up for those. We had more than ever. We had every country in the world. We only had one continent not represented. That was Antarctica. Those penguins are always messing with us. So that went really well. So thank you all for that. But there is a new website up for people who want to reserve tickets for the Warcraft movie showing next month, 11th of June. You can go to frogpants.com slash Warcraft. Tom Merritt will be there. I'll be there. Brian Ibb, it'll be there. His lovely wife Tina, a bunch of other friends and people that make podcasts, and then all of you. So tickets are limited, obviously. It's one movie theater that we're doing this in. So if you go there right now, you can grab ahold of that. That's over there at frogpants.com slash Warcraft. And for everything else, follow me on Twitter at Scott Johnson. Thanks everybody who supports the show. We are only supported by you. So if you've got a dollar a month that you're given to us or more, we definitely appreciate it. And if you haven't supported us yet, there's lots of ways to do it. DailyTechnewshow.com slash support. We're just a few dollars away from being able to get Peter Wells to do a show from Australia every week. He's been doing one every other week so you can hear what you might be getting. It's great international perspective. So get us over the hump, folks. DailyTechnewshow.com slash support. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechnewshow.com. You can give us a call 51259 daily. That's 5932459. Catch the show live Monday through Friday, 430 p.m. Eastern at alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv. And our website's DailyTechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club, hope you have enjoyed this brover. Great show, thank you guys. Very good, thank you. Stuart, that was fantastic. Thanks again. Yeah, well, we didn't have a lot of time, but it was fun. Well, it was a great time. And if you ever want to come back, I'd love to have you back. Sure, be happy to. Yeah, I feel like I'm around computer royalty today. I'm a little bit, I was geeking out. And usually after the show, while I publish the audio version, we just sit around and talk. So you're welcome to stay if you need to get going, though. Probably need to get going, actually. Yeah, no worries. OK, thank you very much. Sure, thank you guys. Nice to meet you. All right, nice to meet you too, Stuart. Bye bye. I was working for a computer company in 92. I was always watching this stuff. And like all the talk of like SCSI cables. Yeah, when we were watching that virtual reality episode, I was I was noticing the Windows 3.1, I think, was still on the the top 10 on the on the top 10 software. That was awesome. Windows 3.1 was like number six or seven. DOS was second. I forgot what was first. Yeah, I hung around a bunch that bit, too. That was pretty great. All this old stuff like EMM 386 and like that's the top four, fourth most popular piece of software. That's crazy. I don't even think they track that now. They have to, right? There's probably some tracking. Or is there it's all digital now and people with downloads and app stores. It doesn't it's such a different world. Yeah, I mean, the tracking stuff on the internet was supposed to be easy, right? Yeah. What do we got for titles, Roger? Oh, really? I can't hear you. I'm kind of done. I'm kind of done with this, not being able to hear Roger at the end of the shows thing. Is that a new, is that a thing that this has been doing? Yeah, last three shows. What a bunch of Hoochie. He mutes himself and then when he comes back, it just won't let us hear him anymore. It's like Hangouts have been funky generally. I still don't know why. All right, how's that? Can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear you now. Why does it do that? I don't know. Why? It's annoying. So he didn't hear me that time. I was like, dude, it was great to have you. Now I feel like a heel, because he didn't hear me. No, you shouldn't feel like a heel. I don't think it's stuck out. Like a heel. All right, Disney to Infinity and Gone, the cardboard chronicles, daily tech news chronicles, cardboard now in EU before they can only use plastic, hyper looping across the universe, DHL equals drone hyper logistics. Everyone's got a hyper loop, Google gives paid a loan, adds the pink slip, the mother of all computer chronicles, it's a latency stupid, the Cron father, that's pretty funny. I actually like that one. But I don't know if people would get it, so. Let's see, WhatsApp, Windows and Mac, drone it up. VR so old, VR colon, the 80 strike back. You know, it's weird watching, because I remember my community college, they brought one of those VR units in for people to play around with to the student center in the middle of the campus. And they had the giant flying petrodons and stuff. I was like, oh, this is cool, I guess. I like the Cron father, actually. Yeah, the Cron father. If I'm voting, it's Cron father, I like that. I've everything I heard. Skazy key, I still have a Skazy card, I have a Fiber Skazy card, I also have a... I got a few parallel ports and some weird old IO stuff, but not much else, no. I have one because I had an old dot matrix printer I used occasionally to print checks. Oh my gosh. To print money? No, remember you had to buy your special checks not publisher but paper maker. And they would just give you a giant box. This is for my dad and then you have to roll it in and type in all the payees. This is back when Quicking just came out, typing all the payees and the account and they would print them all out. Like oh, I feel really like corporates. That little So bad. I'm printin' money. I don't know what's freakier, that that seems like yesterday or that it seems like forever ago because it feels like both to me. It does. So somewhere around right after high school time literally got elastic for me and I can remember being in all those situations from that point forward. When you're a kid it's harder to remember so it seems, it feels longer ago but it's different than like oh I remember the time I got drunk and my friend was yelling at the hooker outside his window and my other friend up chucked in the bed and we had to dump the sheets into the toilet for some reason. It was really bizarre. That's a good story man. But you know like all those things you, I can even feel, I even remember the hangover ahead like I remember it, I can feel it. You know? That's awesome. Because I don't drink enough that I can actually still remember a lot of things. Maybe. Oh, SCSI. I don't remember anything so that bears it out. Scott has perfect memory. Oh, I don't know about that. Everything except that one sip on vacation. Oh yeah. What's, what do they call that where someone has total perfect recall? Like picture perfect. Total recall. Total recall. Oh, photographic memory. Sam's, it's a condition. Oh shoot, I was just hearing this story, oh this American life had a thing about it. And it's rough. Like they have this production lady in Hollywood that's awesome at her job because she remembers what people's hair looked like when they shot six months ago. Yes. And so she's perfect because she gets to make up people to nail it for the next season of the show or the next time they shoot the movie or reshoots or whatever. So she's super good but then the downside is she can't forget anything. Like every single moment of every single day is not only recallable but all of the emotions with that. Wow. Cancer. It's like every day she's mourning. She just really did something to happen when she was five. Yeah. Sounded rough, man. I mean she said she didn't want to change it. She was cool that it, you know. Well, she's never known it any other way, right? So she's sure she's learned to live with it. Yeah. That's about it. Identic? Is that Tim Vick suggests? Identic memory? Sam. Shane says Sam's club? I don't think that's it. They do develop photos. The same disease is what happens. We use it too much time. The only cure is go to Costco. Yeah. Do you have both in Utah? Yeah, we do. We only have a Costco thing but there's Sam's and Costco everywhere. Hyperthymesia? Right. Hyperthymesia. I'm sure. Individuals with hypermethesia. I'll have two. Almost every day of their lives in near perfect detail. Really? There are things I would love to forget. Hyperthymesia? Yeah. It's from ancient Greek, hyper meaning excessive and themesis, meaning remembering. Okay. Makes sense. Neurologist Elizabeth Parker, Larry Cahill and James Magal are people identified to defining characteristics of the condition. One, spending an excessive amount of time thinking about one's past and displaying an extraordinary ability to recall specific events from one's past. Oh, so that exaggerates the bad things in your past happening because you keep thinking. They keep coming back up into your head. You just got to make a lot of great things happen moving forward. Yeah. Never let any bad happen. Of good times. Literally just go through an entire season of good times. We've prescribed you all seasons of good times. You must watch them all. Temporary layoffs. Easy credit ripoffs. Roger wins. That was really funny. The doctor is in. I watched that show. Reliagously, for some reason. I did too. I loved it. I loved it, you know what else I was really into is Sanford and Son. I liked the one episode when they had Pat Meridon. You remember that one? Yeah, I do. Yeah, he started up on a lot of shows of that era, it seems like. It was right after Happy Days, right? Yeah. And so they booted him out for the other Al in Happy Days. But they wanted to run a Japanese restaurant with Sir Red Fox, Sanford and him come up with this detail or plan to like, oh, we'll run a Japanese restaurant at the house of the junkyard. Great. It's so stupid. I wish that was streaming someplace. I never can find that show. Oh, and they would write down the orders on baseballs and he would pitch it into the kitchen, he would catch it and he would read it. I remember that. See, look, you know what's up. What's up, what's happening? You know what good TV is. Roger's keeping his head above water. I think I liked that show because unlike the pretty bunch, like bad things happen to the family and the whole family, well, no. But I mean- No, no, I know what you, it just was a funny way of phrasing it. I like it, because bad things happen to the family. Well, you know what? No one lives in a perfect life. You're not saying you like that bad things happen to the family, which is what it sounded like. No, no, no, no, but things happen. Situations happen to the family in totality. It just wasn't like, oh, Bobby. It wasn't a fairyland of all this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not everything worked out. No, not everything worked out. And it felt good to not be the only one where things did work out. Actually, the best line I had, because my dad was a stickler about buying anything, it's like, what do you need it for? It's like, when can we get a color TV? He's like, what do you need it for? And I remember watching Good Times, there's an episode where the youngest son was asking Ma, he's turned to the channel, he's like, Ma, when can we get a color TV? She says, why? You know the sky is blue, the grass is green. What do you need a color TV for? That's awesome. They're just, there's so many great lines there. Damn, damn. Good. Let's tell you what, with all the hangout weirdness, I'm starting to really seriously consider an alternative. But when you use Skype, Scott, you just don't switch. You just put all everybody on screen. So actually I am, so that's funny you should ask. When I started, no, but now I switch. But I'm doing a lot of manual stuff because there is no like voice detection, switchy business happening now. That's the big advantage to hang out for me is that I don't have to spend any time thinking about switching and I don't have to have Roger do it or somebody else do it. So I get that I could get lots of software that would allow for switching, but for our show, having an automatic switcher that just goes to the person who's talking is brilliant. It really is that simple thing is everything for this format. So I totally with you, man, totally agree. And if there's nothing else out there that doesn't that I know of, that I know of, somebody told me there were some, so I use OBS for the actual stream out part. And I was told that there's a plugin underway or plugin in the works that we'll do just exactly what you're saying. But I don't know what the status of that is or anything. I know I'll jump all over when it happens, but I'm totally with you, man. Like it's, that's the one feature. Well, it's the one feature. They almost kept making me go back to the Hangouts. Well, and I can never get over the audio. I know some people are like, yeah, like you, like you were saying the audio isn't good enough. I think it's fine for what we do. So I'm willing to live with that, but if I get the impression that Google is really just not interested in Hangouts on air anymore. They don't, they like Hangouts for text messaging. They like Hangouts for video chats and for business conferences, but Hangouts on air is not getting any love. And these little bugs here and there kind of make me think that they're gonna wind it down. Well, you know, Google rarely winds anything down as much as we talk about Google news. Usually they just let it sit moribund for decades. Yeah. And when they do finally, I mean, well, I don't know. I guess I did with the news reader, but I don't know. But yeah, I mean, I, I want something that's gonna be reliable. So. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I don't know what I expect out of it, except that when they came out with their game streaming service and improved some of their go live right now stuff, I thought that meant, oh, okay, this is some fresh attention has been brought to this. But really all they did was make it a lot easier for people to use third-party applications and stream it to the service. No, and that, again, makes me think that they're like, yeah, nobody really uses Hangouts on Air. Yeah, I mean, they have numbers, maybe they don't. I don't know. That's incredibly frustrating though, because that's a single feature thing that would be so nice anywhere else. Yeah, and that's the thing. I'm not tied. I'd be perfectly happy streaming through other places like Meta CDN if we had the thing that did the switching for me. Yeah, so Skype for a hot minute a couple of years ago did this very thing with the app by itself and you could capture it like a window capture, but it would, when I would talk, my video image would come up and I, and you would see me talking and then when you would talk, it would swap us out. So basically exactly what you're talking about Skype. So the trick was back then, I was using Xplit or something, but I would use that to just capture that window and it was switching the faces automatically because Skype was sensing it. Right. They just, that feature just disappeared. Well, and they still do it for the caller. Right, oh, right, right, right. Right? So when I'm on Skype for current geek, my little window switches based on who's talking, it just never shows me. So it's worthless. Like I couldn't screen capture that and stream, but they obviously have a technology that does it. Right. Yeah. It's all, I wonder. Well, if anyone at Google, I did have a talk with a guy at Google Hangouts once. If anybody, maybe I'll hit him up again. He's probably not there. He probably left. I don't know. But if anybody at Google can say what's the future here, you know. Well, you knew someone who worked at Google. I know she'd start that. Oh yeah. So far away from that. You'd think, right? You'd think someone who worked as a production manager of YouTube Space LA would be closer to this, but it really isn't. I think I may have convinced her to do a YouTube show with me though. Oh, really? Maybe. Oh. Maybe. Maybe. All right. Maybe's better than no. Maybe. Right? Yeah. And maybe I'm just missing something. So, I don't know. We'll keep looking. Thanks everybody for watching. Yeah. Great show today. Man, how's it? Yeah. And thanks again to Stuart Chaffet for jumping in and joining us. That was fantastic. Yeah, it was the bomb. Yeah. And also, I'm glad that everything worked because I would have been super sad to miss this one. I was so like, oh. When you were like, I've tried every browser. I was like, oh my God, what do we do? Two computers, two ISPs. I tried two ISPs. We don't even still know what fixed it, to be honest. I don't know. All I knew is I accepted it in the hangout part because I never logged into that. So when I logged into that and I got it through Inbox, I went, all right, well, I'll just accept it here. See if it's any different. And I didn't expect anything to happen. It worked. It's so weird. I do remember I was getting that authentication error. Yeah. It was just kicking me back out. Something like something. I tried the DNS account. I tried my Boop account. Oh, did you try blowing out the cache? Did you try blowing on your computer? I didn't do that. I didn't blow on it. I didn't physically blow on anything. All right. Next time. Thanks, everybody. Thank you for watching.