 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Eric Holm, Carmine Bailey and Vince Power. Coming up on DTNS, Rich Trafalino highlights some of the things he liked best at CES, is Sarah's prediction from just 10 days ago already come true for Mastodon, and why Gen Z is embracing digital cameras? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, January 9th, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Once again from Lovely Cleveland, I'm Rich Trafalino. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, Rich, how are your feet? They feel great. Ankle's a little worse for wear, I'm not gonna cry. How are your lungs? How are all the things? How are all the things? Knock on wood, so far, COVID free. Alright. Yeah, round of applause for Rich and Amos for braving the actual in-person part of CES coverage, and doing it with a plum, PLOMB. And a delicious fruit also. Yeah, and I'll send you some plums. Plums are also cool. Yeah, I'm sure they would be appreciated. Let's start with the quick hits. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, with the American Farm Bureau Federation agreeing that farmers have the right to repair their own equipment, and also have the right to go on an independent technician to go to one. The MOU will give users access to official diagnostics, manuals, tools, and training, also the right to disable electronic bikes, and won't stop people from legally obtaining repair resources. However, it also states that farmers can't compromise any safety measures or emissions control systems on equipment as a result of repairs. And that is John Deere's software and other intellectual property is protected from infringement. The agreement is in effect as of January 8th. Yeah, so they didn't have to pass a law in this case. They were able to come to an agreement. Very interesting. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple intends to announce its mixed reality headset this spring ahead of the Worldwide Developers Conference. So they usually do a spring announcement, usually some iPads, maybe the iPhone SE. Looks like we might get the mixed reality headset then. It would go on sale in the autumn, though. Some developers reported already having prototypes for testing, though Gurman said Apple, quote, roped in resources from other departments to work out several kinks in its hardware and software. Gurman also reported the upcoming Apple Silicon Mac Pro will offer upgradable slots for additional SSDs, GPUs, media, and networking. No firm release window other than by the end of 2023. Well, we mentioned last week that the information sources say Microsoft plans to incorporate chat GPT into Bing search results somehow. Now the information sources say Microsoft's incorporated a version of OpenAI's GPT model to improve outlook search results and inform autocomplete suggestions in Word. It plans further integrations into productivity apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook supposedly looking at whether it could do things like suggest replies to emails or recommending document changes to improve your writing. Microsoft holds an exclusive commercial license for the tech behind OpenAI's GPT 3. The Financial Times reports Apple listed several job openings in India, referring directly to opening flagship retail operations in the country. Several listings mentioned managing teams, quote, across Apple stores, end quote, indicating there's more than one location planned. Now several employees in Mumbai and New Delhi announced being hired for positions as yet to be announced stores on LinkedIn. Apple opened its online store in India, the first one in 2020. Beginning next month, Instagram will move the shopping tab out of the Instagram main page. The Reels tab will take its place. No word on how you'll get to the shopping page, but they aren't getting rid of it. They say they're going to keep it. In other monetization news, as part of its new partner program agreement, YouTube will roll out its new Shorts monetization module as of February 1. Creators with at least 1,000 subscribers and more than 10 million views on Shorts over a 90-day period can apply for its partner program. YouTube will take a 55% commission on ad revenue generated from Shorts. And that is the quick hits. For the last two months, when we talked about Mastodon, it's usually related to its impressive growth as of late in November. It peaked adding more than 130,000 new users daily, but that seems to be changing. The Guardian reports that Mastodon user data shows a decentralized downturn, shows the decentralized social platform had roughly 1.8 million active users in the first week of January down from the high of 2.5 million in early December. Yeah, so the platform seen significant growth since late October of 2022 when it had fewer than 500,000 active users. So not too surprising to see changes in Mastodon users closely following drama at Twitter, which kicked off with now CEO Elon Musk taking control of the company. The biggest uptick in users, though, this is for Mastodon, came between Twitter's initial run of layoffs and the initial suspension of Twitter blue. Yeah, in the Guardian article, social media strategist Meg Coffey speculated why, said everybody went and signed up on Mastodon and realized how hard it was, and then got back on Twitter and were like, oh, that's hard. Maybe we won't go there. It's like the people that said I'm moving to Canada when Donald Trump was elected. They never actually moved to Canada. Now that made me realize that a friend of mine recently moved to Canada. So I asked her about Canada and Mastodon. Here's what she said. Yeah, so I did move to Canada in September, but I have not made a Mastodon account. I don't know if she found moving to Canada easier than signing up for Mastodon, but she definitely did one and not the other. Sarah, how does this make you feel about a prediction you made on our prediction show just 10 days ago? Yeah, exactly. So if you haven't listened, the prediction that I made, which was, I mean, it was a little vague, was I don't think Mastodon is going to stick as the Twitter alternative that everybody goes to, meaning the techies, celebrities, people who work in sports, all of those people. And I don't think that that is necessarily where we're at right now, but I do feel like Mastodon, even for me, is something, I check in daily. I'm kind of trying to figure out who to follow, what's going on there. It is great. It is not for the gen pop though. It just isn't. And if that doesn't change and the whole sort of like choose the server you want and figure out what's going on, like Twitter was always way easier than that, even though Twitter has a host of its own problems. So, yeah, I'll go ahead and call this like a 25% win on my, you know. A lot of your left. A lot of your left, yeah. A lot of your left. True story. But yeah, I do wonder, okay, if it's not Mastodon, what is it? Well, I think one thing that even if Mastodon itself becomes, you know, remains, I should say, maybe more of a niche social network. I do think there is some continuing weight with Activity Pub, right, kind of the protocol behind this. We're seeing Tumblr integrate that. We're seeing a couple other social platforms kind of either saying they're looking into it or announcing some integration. So even if, you know, this doesn't change the math too much and these numbers keep going down or they say stable or they grow much more slowly, unless there's more Twitter drama, which seems completely improbable. The, I could see this de-centralized or even just like this protocol centric kind of social networking trend continuing to grow. Admittedly, maybe it doesn't have that same catalyst to keep it, you know, that hockey stick curve going on for a long term. So that honestly is what I'm more excited about. Mastodon is cool. Like give me the protocols. Make it boring like email and let me have some fun with some clients. That's what's more exciting to me. Mastodon is already a fun thing now, thanks to the Influx. There was an Influx in 2016. There was an Influx in May. There were several Influxes over the autumn. I think what we're seeing is a lot of people just went to Mastodon out of principle, not because they preferred it. And now we're seeing what the level is of people who are, who actually prefer to be there and enjoy it. I like Mastodon for different reasons than I like Twitter. I never left Twitter, but I signed up for Mastodon and the Influx of people made me feel like, oh, this is a part of Twitter that hasn't been there in a long time. This is a very sincere conversation. This is more open source conversations. And I'm having some really fun conversations. So I think Mastodon is just going to end up being a different thing. I never really thought it would replace Twitter. And I think if you look at the graph in the Guardian, even coming down from a height, it's still a lot of people in there. What we're seeing is we had a holiday break, which means fewer people are going to go try something new. And we haven't had news coming out of Twitter, partly because of that holiday break, partly because of CES, which means you don't have things happening that cause a bunch of people to get incensed and decide to run over to Mastodon, which is one of the main reasons that was driving its growth. And honestly, I think there are a few Mastodon admins that are glad to not have to deal with tens of thousands of new users every single day. Yeah, absolutely. Well, a smartphone performance and design and screen tech become largely commodified. Camera systems remain a way for many brands to differentiate across a crowded landscape. On the one hand, it's easy to quantify this. Looking at things like megapixels, video resolution, frame rate, auto focus speed. But a lot of imagery also comes down to qualitative considerations. For example, Google and Apple throw around terms like HDR plus, deep fusion. But, you know, those are sometimes technology black boxes. Maybe you understand them. Maybe you don't. But they hope to output images that users like. However, we're starting to see that aesthetic employment of images doesn't necessarily scale with technology, at least with certain generations. Rich, tell us more. Yeah, there seems to be a bit of a move away from, I guess the sort of inexorable march of photographic progress from the Gen Z. They're embracing old school digital cameras. Isn't exactly a new trend. Johnny Yoko Yama noted this trend in Japan a year ago in a piece for casual photo files. Definitely going back to like kind of late 90s. We call them DigiCams. But now the New York Times is Kaley Huang looked into the trend in the US in a recent piece. And I want to give a big hat tip to Professor Art from the Philippines, bringing this article to my attention over the weekend. It notes that hashtag digital camera has 184 million views on TikTok. I mean, I love the fact that the digital camera is actually nostalgic, but it is at this point. So part of this is probably wrapped up in the larger trend of Y2K era nostalgia. We get it. Love it. But aside from completing that look, the digital cameras we're talking about provide unique looks that stand out on social media, usually coming cheap or free from a family junk drawer. Hey grandpa, got a digital camera? Odds is he does. And then they have the benefit of being completely offline. Ah, interesting. So is anybody going to dust off their cool pics and start snapping besides you Rich? Because I know you will. Yeah, I'm a camera dork. You'd give me any old camera. I'll take some pictures with it for sure. I do think this is really interesting that we've seen a lot of this, you know, a lot of advances when it comes to night mode, when it comes to optimizing for low light performance with phones. And I feel like a lot of that has led to a very, I guess, typical smartphone look. That is, it's remarkable that a small-sensored camera can create images that look good on your phone or on social media and stuff like that. But it's almost homogenous at this point. Like none of those cameras anymore barely use flash or by turns that off automatically. And it's interesting that all the flaws, in the film community we would call this character of digital cameras where it's washed out colors, real grainy, like all of this stuff that we've been trying to avoid with phones for the longest time is now the way to stand out in social media when it comes to this kind of stuff. It is super fascinating to me to see this playing out. It reminds me of when I was a kid, brownie cameras became kind of a thing for a while. And they only took black and white photos. And so, yes, you could do a lot more with the current photograph, film, color, et cetera of the day. DSLRs pull out more control, but people just liked to try out the forgotten things that were cool about the old tech. And I feel like that's what's going on now, similar to people rediscovering cassettes and getting into cassettes and what's interesting about a cassette and what's cool about them and what's advantageous. So, Rich, if somebody is looking into getting into a DigiCam, do you have any tips? Yeah, definitely. So the first thing, like first and foremost, I know someone in the article quoted, someone that says, just find the oldest camera you can. Maybe don't do that because I would look for stuff with USB ports and SD cards, right? Because if you look at older Sony and Fuji cameras, you're going to be dealing with like weird memory sticks or XZ cards. And then some really old stuff, you're going to be looking at compact flash, even if you get a Sony Mavica, you could have a floppy disk. So like just reading that media is going to be kind of a hassle. You could certainly do it. Just get adapters, but make it easier on yourself. Just get something with USB. Don't get like a weird proprietary pin cable. Try and find mini USB. Some of those are out there. But SD cards make that ton, ton easier. Certainly the way to go. Another thing to look for, this is, we're going to get geeky. You be talking to me about cameras, we're going to get geeky here for a second. Most cameras today come with what's called a CMOS sensor. Look for an older camera with a CCD sensor. This gives a very distinct look. Some people have been shooting with these, like refuse to give up old cameras, old like as particularly where do these, you don't have to have like a prices to get these, but these will give you our much worse live view rendition on your digital camera, which may not seem like that's great, but it'll give you very, much more gradated fall off from like highlights to shadow in a way that can almost kind of take on a film look. And some people say the color is better. I think some of that is just people want to see better color. So there's that. If you're looking for just a good all around pic, you say, I don't care about any of this. Just give me the camera to get, look for any Canon power shot in their G series, G1 through like the G12 should be able to find these for really well, really nice lenses on there. They open up to F2 and it'll still give you like, it'll still look very vintage. Don't worry. It's not going to look too good. Don't worry. But those are super nice. They have flippies, all of them have flippy screens. So those are super cool. There's also, if you want to go off the wall here, maybe stand out even among your digital camera friends, cohort, if you will, a couple of weird ones to take a look at. 3D cameras were like a thing when 3D TVs were a thing. 3D cameras were a thing. Panasonic has weird bifocal cameras that you can find out there. I don't know what the software support is though. So maybe look out for that. Look for anything from Sigma that has a foveon sensor. These render colors really wild. They're ultra slow. They're ultra inconvenient. It has all of the charm and character you could possibly want from a camera and weird cameras with projectors. These were a thing for like two months in 2012. Samsung made, everyone made one with a little tiny projector in it. So when you're gathering in meat space with all of your friends, you can project all of your character-laden photos. They're amazing. I thought of it as like going to like a pork store in meat space. Yeah. When you meet the butcher shop, yes, in your meat space. 3D pork chop pictures available now. Thanks to Rich. You can project. Hey, if you've got thoughts on this or you're trying this out, let us know. We'd love to hear about your experiences in our email box feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Well, as I mentioned, Rich and our producer Amos are back from CES. We heard Rich from the show floor last week, but now you've got a few days under your belt to get some sleep, put up your feet, and reflect back on the show. Rich, what was the biggest surprise that you saw at CES? I would say the whole category of short throw projectors. I know these aren't new, but seeing these, like these are not things that you generally see, or at least I don't see in my local Target, my local Best Spiders. There's not a big projector section, let alone these laser short throw projectors. I know we're going to have Robert Herron on tomorrow, so I'm not going to get, I'm going to let him be the TV expert. But what was startling to me seeing these was, I was walking past the, me and Amos were walking past and were like, oh, that's a projector. I thought that was just a regular TV. They look phenomenal. We spent some time in high-senses booth. They were showing off the L9H Tri-Chroma Laser TV and also the L5H4K Smart Laser TV. These are designed to go on special screens, but unlike a TV, you wouldn't have to wire anything. What really got me thinking about that is, one of the big announcements from CES was LG with that completely wireless signature series TV that they're putting out there. That just has like a little base station. I could see the argument of saying, if you're going to have that little base station, it might as well be a projector. It needs to be 11 inches from the wall. That's how far your sound bar is from the wall or your entertainment center goes out from your wall. Anyway, these can kind of fit in a whole lot of spaces. You can go up to like 150 inches in some cases and just, I was just kind of blown away by the quality of those in general. That's really set out to me. Well, so Rich, you've been talking about kind of the throwback nature of camera stuff and how much you like that. CES isn't a huge camera show at this point, but there's always something that comes out. So did you see anything this year that caught your eye? Yeah. As a camera geek, Panasonic announced right as the show, right as like landed in Vegas. They announced the Lumix S5-2. This is their mirrorless camera. And this is a huge deal for Panasonic because this may seem like a very minor thing, but it is a huge thing for cameras. They originally were using a contrast-attacked autofocus system for years. This is like the original AF tech. They've iterated on it. They put algorithms out, but when you're doing video, it results in like a weird pulsing in the background over time. It's not great for tracking and it can be kind of distracting, not a look that a lot of people want. They finally, with this generation, they've been avoiding it for years. Like literally this has been like the number one thing if you look at reviews of any Panasonic camera. The autofocus is kind of hit or miss. They've switched to this hybrid phase-detect autofocus system that Sony, Canon, Nikon are all using. Really awesome. And so by all accounts, the reviews of that are awesome. It's in a spelt body. They haven't changed lens amounts or anything. So this to me is a huge upgrade for them and really kind of changes the game, especially at the price point. This is kind of in your enthusiast prosumer space, like $2,000 camera. It doesn't seem like it's inexpensive, but when you're talking Canon or Sony, those can go up to $3,000 to $5,000, depending on the model. And it also comes with active cooling, which I think is going to be a bigger trend. It's a big deal for video. So if you're doing 4K, 6K, 8K video on some of these cameras, they overheat. Canon has had particularly issues. Sony too has had issues with this. And this literally has a fan in it while still being completely weather sealed. So I think two major trends that we're seeing embodied in what is an affordable-ish prosumer camera. Super excited about that. All right. What about something you thought you'd see more of and then were surprised that you didn't see a lot of? Yeah, e-bikes. I was like waiting to go e-bike crazy, saw a ton of battery tech. Like the lunchbox style or like boombox looking battery that you take camping, that every vendor has like a campsite set up with their weird little boombox battery pack. Those are all over the place. Battery tech is all over the place. We saw some e-bikes. There was a company called Cake that came out with one. There was a lot of scooters. Bugatti had a scooter. Bugatti scooter. Hey, that was cool. But I was expecting to kind of be wild. We didn't see like rad power. We didn't see any of the big names. They're like Bosch at their booth. They're one of the biggest motor makers of e-bikes. Didn't even have a spot in their booth in all of CES. That I saw. Maybe it was in a back room somewhere in the Venetian or something like that in one of their booths. So that was, you know, I was surprised not to see that. All right. And then what about in the e-ink category? Because I know you're a fan. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. So I got my hands on that Lenovo smart paper tablet. And I got to say, I was pretty impressed with the pen functionality. I was like, I'm pretty familiar with ink. I've had ink smartwatches. I've had ink kindles before. Not exactly. I wasn't expecting it to be like really great pen support and the pressure sensitivity seemed dead on. The response rate was like, it felt very natural to write on. They kind of nailed. I feel like the feel of it. I've not used the remarkable too. So I do not have that as a basis for comparison. I am limited in that respect, but it definitely was impressive and made me, like it was like making the case for me. Not that I need it for e-ink because I loves me some e-ink. Well, speaking of e-ink at CES, the sole reader showed off a new wearable device. That's an e-reader you wear on your face. Now as of now, it's Goggle's form factor is reserved mostly for virtual reality. Augmented reality or wearable devices that support both were familiar with those. But again, with e-ink, it weighs less than 100 grams. The goggles are immersive VR goggles, meaning that you can see the world around you when you're wearing them, which I guess is the point if you're going to read a book or whatever, but feature a pair of electronic paper screens. Page turning for reading works through a wireless handheld remote and battery life is promised to be close to 30 hours. The sole reader is expected to sell for around $350 sometime this year. We don't know exactly when. 30 hours. Yeah. Well, this seemed like it was just a like CES gadget. I was like, oh, cool e-ink goggles. Why not? That's sure. That seems wild. Then they said the designed use case was laying down. And I was like, oh yeah, it's like a pain in the butt if you want to lay down and hold your neck weird. Kind of. Yeah. So I think I was like, oh yeah, if I just wanted to lay down. Now would I immediately fall asleep if I am in any way warm and I'm presumably on a bed or a couch? Yeah. Because I barely can stay awake to read a book now because, you know, I mean. And this is sort of, this is something that I've even been a VR enthusiast. It's like, do I really want to watch a movie in VR? I don't know. But the idea of watching, reading a book, you know, as you said, like you're rich, like I'm comfy, I'm ready. You know, I got my, you know, I think that this is actually a really good use case for this. There's a whole debate about how to hold the book when you lay on your side. You know, do you hold it up? Totally. Do you hold it to the side? People, it's like a cilantro thing. Which is why I don't have face time with anybody. It's like, I don't want to hold my phone up. This solves the whole thing. It's a little expensive to solve that problem at $350. True, true, true. But for an E-ing stand, no price is too much. This might be. It's actually too much. This will put that for that to the test. It just keeps the conversation alive, right? Yeah. I think this is, this is one of those things where it's easy to mock it. It probably won't end up catching on. But I like that somebody's trying this, you know? You can get it down to a kindle price. Right? Get it down to a kindle-ish price. Like even the high-end ones. Maybe we're talking. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. And I keep forgetting to play this. This one comes from Tucker. This is awesome, Tucker. Says, Tucker, back in the day, I did tech support for a sat phone company that supplied a wide variety of rental phones. Not only did I deal with Iridium and Globostar phones, but also in Merced ones. The adoption of Iridium and Globostar by Qualcomm and Apple makes sense from a coverage standpoint, but raised some questions about where the technology is going to go. There tends to be two really big differences between Globostar and Iridium. One is that Globostar seems to have handled one satellite transferring a call to another better than Iridium. The other is that all Globostar phones have a number that is a Texas area code. So if you call somebody in a Globostar phone, it's like calling someone with a Texas phone number. Iridium, on the other hand, has its own country code, meaning you can be subjected to foreign country calling charges. So many of your service provider even recognizes the country code and allows you to call them. Tucker says, I'm reasonably certain that most people are hoping that these additions to smartphones means that in a few years we won't have to worry about things like cell coverage because we'll just always have satellite to fall back on. But unless Iridium has some software or hardware upgrades they're planning on rolling out soon, they've got a ways to go before they can match what Globostar can do. I was so happy to see this email because it reminded me when I was doing search and rescue training I wore a Globostar hat that I'd been given for free. I had no skin in the game and one of my training captains just could not stop talking about how much they hated Globostar and Globostar had undermined them and their satellites were no good and this and that and brought up the Texas phone number thing as a disadvantage. Basically, he had the opposite view from Tucker here and I was glad to see that the fight between Globostar and Iridium fans goes on today and if you're familiar with the Android versus iOS or Windows versus Mac fights just know that that happens in satellites too. You've got your Globostar stands and your Iridium stand. Where there are two, there are camps. Yeah, absolutely. And Tucker, thank you for sharing your fandom with us. Appreciate it and good info on top of it. Indeed. Thanks to our brand new bosses, Daniel, Jeff and William, all who just started backing us on Patreon. So thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Jeff and thank you, William. Hey, one for every day over the weekend. I like that. Thank you guys. Indeed, indeed. It's like a trick of new consumers. Yeah. We love all our patrons and just a reminder, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. Rich has one more CES item to talk about on here but just to remind you, you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back tomorrow talking about TV trends from CES with Patrick Norton and Robert Herron. Talk to you then.