 Oh, hello, video. What are you doing there? I totally expected to see you there because you pressed the play button. Are we ready to go? Here we go. I'm going to start the audio recording now. So many things. I screwed up. Sorry, I thought you were starting AlphaGeek. No, I already did. Well, I've ruined everything. Goodbye everybody! All right, here we go. Australians, have you ever wondered what a nickel is? Apparently, it's five cents. So give it to Tom at patreon.com. This is The Daily Tech News for Friday, September 18, 2015. I'm Tom Merritt joining me today is Jenny Josephson, producer of The Daily Tech News Show and our co-contributor for the day. How's it going Jenny? Hi! Good to see you. The reason Jenny's joining us is that we also have staff writer from Tech Republic, Aaron Carson, who recently visited NASA headquarters to talk to them about virtual reality. How lucky are you, Aaron? Super lucky. Very cool gig is what I was thinking. Yeah, absolutely. No, I really enjoyed your articles about that. We're going to talk a little bit about what NASA's doing with virtual reality, how they've been doing it for what now, Aaron? Yeah, about 1992. And what that might mean for the virtual reality headsets, you might be sticking on your own face soon. Len Peralta is also here to illustrate the show. How's it going, Len? It's going really well. Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to hear about the future or the past of VR. Now, I know you can choose from anything we talk about on the show to illustrate when you do your live drawing. So I expect you'll probably choose Microsoft's new software-defined networking Linux distro. But you might think about Aaron's story. You know what? I actually made a really quick change in the drawing here after meeting Aaron, so we'll see what happens. Oh, interesting. No, I'm intrigued now. Stay tuned, folks. The answer may surprise you. Let's get into the headlines. Thanks to Teen Ninja 3000 on our subreddit, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com, for submitting our top story. 9 to 5 Google obtained exclusive internal documents describing a new version of Google's Chromecast and showing a circular rather than an oblong form factor and available in three colors, red, yellow, and black. The documents mention improvements like improved Wi-Fi, we're assuming 802.11ac, home screen content feeds, something called Fast Play to get your video playing faster, Chromecast Audio, which lets you plug your Chromecast into speakers using any kind of aux cable. 9 to 5 Google also expects Spotify to add Chromecast support, and all of this is likely to be part of Google's announcement, which is planned for September 29th. Well, I've always wanted an oblong dongle, so I'm already excited. So then you're sad because they're moving from oblong to circular. Oh, well, maybe what will make it up for me is that this Chromecast might actually work with my Wi-Fi, because I bought one. That would be an improvement. I was super excited, and all it did was ultimately hijack my entire Wi-Fi so that my laptop kept trying to connect to Chromecast, and then the dongle eventually got really hot, stopped working, so I put it away and bought a Roku. But I will be very excited to give this another try because it's such a great premise. Yeah, I like ours, but I do run into that issue where sometimes you press Cast, and it just takes forever, or it just doesn't work. So hopefully they've resolved some of those things. Onward to you, Jenny. Oh, right, I don't just get to sit here and passively listen to you read things. EFC88 sent us the Guardian report that Apple Senior Legal Counsel Mike Malatek met with officials from the California Department of Motor Vehicles about autonomous vehicle regulations. The one-hour meeting took place on August 17th between Apple and the DMV's Deputy Director Bernard Soriano, Chief of Strategic Planning, Stephanie Dardi, and Deputy Director and Chief Counsel Brian Soublay. So, what could they possibly be talking to the California DMV about? iPads. Any guesses? Right, they just want to bring some iPads to that department that happens to deal with self-driving cars. Erin, if you had to guess, knowing what we know which is virtually nothing, how likely do you think it is that Apple will do a self-driving car? Oh, man, I don't know. I mean, it seems like there's a few of these really... I don't want to say Pine Sky, that's too drastic, but these very large, very lofty kind of topics that are kind of floating out there for Apple and it's like self-driving cars and then whatever maybe someday they're doing with like an AR device or something. So, to me, it seems like that's what's floating out there. But the funny thing I was thinking about is I think that with autonomous cars, this is the most fascinating that regulation will ever get just because it's so interesting with the interplay of ethics and yeah, I mean, how are you really going to totally get a car to react to certain very odd situations that occur in traffic that can be just one-offs? Yeah, that's a really good point. This is the time when regulations really make a difference and are interesting versus some day when we're all in self-driving cars and we're just complaining about the regulations that slow them down on the way to our house or something. It's going to be all boring. I do think Apple is certainly investigating self-driving cars. They're obviously talking to California about this because they want to test something regarding self-driving cars and they want to make sure they're on the right side of the law. Whether that means they're still making a self-driving car or just making technology that would go into a self-driving car, I'm not convinced one way or the other, I'm not sure. Yeah. Apple Insider reports that iFixit's teardown of the new iPad Mini 4 reveals two gigabytes of RAM and a 5124 mAh single-cell battery smaller than the iPad Mini 3's 6471 mAh battery. Other findings include a fully laminated display, makes the display look better, a split Wi-Fi antenna array, so there's one next to the camera, and a repairability score of 2 out of 10. That's not very good if you don't know how the scale goes. 10 is the best. Yeah. That's the time to get a new iPad on your plan that you should always, always get from the Apple Store when you buy anything there because, ooh. Yeah. Just be real careful with that. Although frankly, I've never, I mean, knock on wood, but at this point it's what, I think my iPad's like seven years old, six years old. Is that possible? It's like five years old. And it's been fine. Yeah. So just now. So that's how I said that. Yeah. As a clumsier person, I have cracked the screen of every Apple device I've ever had, so that fixability, repairability thing is always important to me. All right. Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto posted to Facebook today that the Wii U game Star Fox Zero will be delayed until early 2016. Mr. Miyamoto said a 2015 release was technically possible, but the company wanted to, quote, polish the game a bit more so that players will be able to more smoothly grasp the new style of play. Classic Nintendo. We know this is really going to hurt our sales, but it's not right, and we're not going to put it out until we think it's right. Yeah. It's a good sign for this new structure. Now we're getting certain to get more announcements out about things now that they've got it all in place. Yeah. Although sad news that this was the big title for the holiday season, and everyone's criticism has been Nintendo. Doesn't have any big titles these days. So that's going to be a concern, but Miyamoto has always been this way, which is if we don't think it's right, then we're not going to put the game out. So not surprised to see him do that. And like you say, Jenny, kind of a first test of the new administration. The Verge notes that ad blocking apps took up three of the top five places on the Apple U.S. app chart as of Friday morning. Remember, this is a new feature of iOS 9. One of the apps piece from Marco Arment has been pulled out of the store. Arment wrote that he thinks ad blockers are still necessary, but he just doesn't feel good making one. He got in a little bit of a fight with John Gruber at Daring Fireball over this because of the way Arment made his app. He had no whitelist. He just said everything gets treated the same. He, meaning Marco Arment, still recommends ghostry for the desktop and either purify or crystal for iOS. Hot topic among people who run advertising-supported media is the ad blockers because it has an effect and they're worried that making it popular like this will make it have more of an effect. And obviously, it's a matter of how much you care, how much that more of an effect matters. If you're looking at your bottom line and even just a 1% increase in the usage knocks out a huge part of your budget, then this is a concern for you. Yeah, I think it sounds like it would be a good time for all of those concerned advertisers to get together and lock in a room and throw away the key people who have pop-up ads that tell me that a virus is on my computer and I should download their software. Yeah, that is a big part of this. And the part that right now is not getting the attention because people are talking about the ethics of running an ad blocker. They're trying to change the behavior and anybody who's been around the internet long enough knows when you try to change people's behavior on the internet, you will have less success. What will have more success is giving people less reason to want to use an ad blocker in the first place because the other thing about the internet is if you have to add something to your software to make something happen, people are less likely to do it. So the reason ad blockers are popular is you're pushing them to do it and they don't give them the reason to do it. Fewer people are going to go and add something to their software if they don't really need to. Paul Gannon 01 and Captain Kipper sent us the very welcome news that the BBC will launch a Netflix-style video subscription service for American audiences next year. Politico of all places reports that the new internet-based service will allow US audiences to access BBC programs that aren't already screened on TV channels or available on existing streaming services. Translation, no Dr. Who or Sherlock right away. But thousands of hours of programming that have never made it to the US should be enough to lure most anglophiles to check out the service. We turn now to DTNS resident anglophile Tom Merritt. Yeah, no, this is a good thing, although it's not really what I want. What I want is to get all the BBC shows, to get Dr. Who, to get Sherlock, to get, well, whatever Top Gear becomes. I guess Top Gear is not really going to be on Amazon now, but to get those BBC programs, and I think the thing that really sticks in my craw is that because BBC America is a joint venture between AMC and BBC, none of the BBC America shows. Anything like Orphan Black that shows on BBC America will be prevented from being in this service. So it's going to be interesting. There's going to be a lot of good-back titles and a lot of things like The Bake Off or maybe, I don't know, The Voice UK that will show up on here that will be interesting. Erin, are you into looking at British television as all of the sounds? I love British television, but yeah. So the thing that I was thinking is I'll be curious to see how that gets promoted. You know, I mean, you said kind of all the sexy titles that people are interested, so if it's Dr. Who or Sherlock or Orphan Black or whatever the case is, I really couldn't tell you the whole depth of what I know is broadcast there that's not available here. Tell the midwife? Yeah, I think you can get that on Roku. Yeah. So yeah, I feel like they would have like a large degree of faith in the kind of quality of programming of the BBC, but I feel like I would want, yeah, kind of better. I wonder if Planet Earth is available for them to add for their back catalog. That alone might be worth it right there. How about back episodes of Dr. Who so I can watch all of them. Those supposedly, the old episodes should supposedly be in there. So by the time you get through all of those, the new episodes will be out of their current licensing agreement. Well, and you can watch the new episodes on Netflix, just not the current season episodes. So yes, as I mentioned, Microsoft has made its own version of Linux. It should not have used the word distro on purpose because as Mary Jo fully points out on ZDNet, this is an OS for internal use only. The operating system is known as Azure Cloud Switch or ACS. It's the showcase for Microsoft's effort to separate switch software from switch hardware. Microsoft will contribute code from ACS to the open compute project. So if you work with software defined networking, this should be of interest. I'm going to tip off on this. A lot of headlines are like, cats and dogs sleeping together, Microsoft made Linux. Microsoft has been working with Linux. They've been part of the open compute project for quite a while. So this is really just them saying, hey, we're using Linux in this really specific networking oriented way. But the fact that it's actually a Linux operating system that's made by Microsoft is sort of significant, even if it isn't a distro. All right. Let's take a look at the report about the world's largest air purifier, which sits in a park in the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Thanks to a collaboration between Dutch designer Don Ruzengard, Delft Technology University researcher Bob Ursum, and European Nano Solutions, a green tech company based in the Netherlands. The smog-free tower, as it's called, is 23 feet tall and can purify 1 million cubic feet of air every hour. This is airborne smog particles so they don't end up in human lungs. Unlike other ionic air purifiers, this one doesn't produce ozone because the particles are positively charged. Officials in Beijing, Mexico City, and Mumbai have already expressed interest. Let's be clear. This is an art project. It's raising awareness about smog. So we could run a little wild with the idea of like these will be everywhere and rid us of smog. Ruzengard himself says he doesn't have a solution, but he's hoping to raise awareness for what is the solution to get rid of smog, which is reducing emissions. But also, he talks about there's a funny quote in this article in Wired about how he's like I'm tired of design being wasted on chairs. I want to do it on cool things like smog-eating towers, which, you know, I kind of I can kind of see his point. I kind of do love that intersection though of like design and having some kind of grad school. I covered sustainability for a little while and I remember there was this project that the city of Syracuse was doing with clean streets. And they went to some of sort of the parts of town that were kind of having the most trouble and installed these like bioretention areas that kind of extended out from the curb. And it had, you know, these really sort of far-reaching implications for their sort of water collection, you know, goals. And it beautified the streets and it was like this nice sort of, you know, secondary effect that it had on the community. So in general, I really love the idea. Yeah, I think the idea of using design to make something more acceptable and create a positive feeling around it is fascinating. You're right. That's a great way to turn something that otherwise would seem like bureaucratic nonsense to some people into something that's like, oh, it has lots of beneficial effects. It involves our eyes, dude. They can put this one right next to the theoretical machine that sucks carbon out of the air and turns it into carbon nanofibers. And they can all just install it in like every building in the world and then everything's gonna be okay. No, that's what we were trying to say is not going. Yeah. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has issued an order filing and settling charges at the same time against coin flip for selling options on Bitcoin without complying with the U.S. Commodity Exchange Act. It's not that they sold them. It's that they didn't follow regulatory principles. Commission further stated that it finds that Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are properly defined as commodities. If you didn't know the U.S. Internal Revenue Agency or Revenue Service as previously said, it considers virtual currencies to be property. They're going to be regulated pretty much as commodities now. At least here in the U.S. Hmm. So, yeah. That's gonna cause all kinds of tax headaches for people. Yeah. And that's why people are looking at the blockchain more and more in these start-ups rather than the actual currency because they're running into some headwinds on using it as a payment system. Because man, if I'm a merchant and people pay me in a currency and then I not only get taxed on my income but I get property tax because I own the currency, that's a problem. Just give me a dollar, Bill. Go to dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Help us figure out the stories that we're going to talk about each day on The Daily Tech News Show. We've got more than 5,000 people in there. We will put topics in there. Tyler's been great about putting discussion topics in there. Sometimes we'll put topics that we're going to talk about on the show in there. The stories and vote on them helps us put the show together every day. That's dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. And that is a look at the headlines. All right. NASA been working on virtual reality for around 20 years as we talked about. Erin, how did you get involved in going to NASA to talk to them about their VR? Yeah. I've seen it covered very much. Yeah, it's funny. It's one of the reasons I love Twitter. Basically, this is what happened. In May, I was at the Silicon Valley virtual reality conference in San Jose, California. I went to this short talk that the lead engineer, Evelyn Morales for the lab, gave. She just gave this really brief rundown of what they were doing. I was sitting there like, is everybody hearing this? It was a really short write-up on it. She tweeted at me. A couple days later, I was like, hey, thanks for the write-up. You should come see us sometime. You can't say that to a reporter. I will show up. Basically, I just talked to my editor. If they'll actually let me in, will you send me? He was all about it. After some coordination, I was at the Johnson Space Center in San Jose, California. It was amazing. This lab has been using different types, different models that they've been working on themselves. This is not off-the-shelf stuff. They haven't been going to other companies. They didn't get a virtual boy from Nintendo at some point. Since 1991, they've been trying out different displays. How do they feel now that lots of other people are doing that too? They're excited. They hit the market. They're keeping an eye on. It's not a super easy process for them to just say, hey, you know what? The Oculus CV1 is going to be out in January. We can just use that. Because everything is so homemade, integration is a huge issue. It requires a lot of care and a lot of testing. They're excited. They're in that exploratory phase. But also, like I said, whenever a new technology comes up, they have to be a little bit patient and make sure it's steady and stable and all that before they do anything. The thing that they told me that I really loved is they were saying, well, this is great that everybody's paying so much attention because that means that you have all this money and time and brain power getting funneled toward VR in a pretty small operation. They can't do some massive research project on how to deal with simulation sickness. They'll definitely benefit from this wave that's happening right now. Tell us a little bit more about what they're using it for. Training basically breaks up three ways. The first thing is EVA training, which is extra vehicular activities. Spacewalks, basically. With this training, for example, if there was a mission that required an astronaut to be attached, dangling off the end of the robotic arm and dealing with his partner who's flying him, they could run simulations and go through those types of tasks that they would be accomplishing in that mission. The other thing is mass handling and I think this is so fascinating, but basically the idea is that when they're out in space if an astronaut has to let's say move some piece of the International Space Station it could be something that's the size of a bus that weighs... Like one of the solar panels, those things are huge. Yeah, exactly. One of the solar arrays that can weigh thousands of pounds. The idea that you have is, yes, it's weightless because it's in space, but the thing is it still has mass and it still has a center of gravity, so you need to know how to negotiate this. I got to talk to Doug Wheelock who's one of the astronauts and he was saying that the rules of physics still apply. They're different but they still apply. So, you know, you could hold this thing up with one finger but if that thing starts moving in a direction and you try and hold on to it, it could rip your glove off. So, that's mass handling. And then the other thing is safer training which is an acronym that basically means this is how they prepare in case they were to become detached from the space station. And they have jet packs is basically kind of what it is, that have just enough juice to get them back in case that happened. And again, that's kind of another case of how orbital mechanics come into play because it's not just as easy as okay, let me grab this joystick and just get back to the space station. Not like George Clooney then. Exactly, right. That was one of the first things they were saying. It was like, okay, kind of like gravity but like, you know. So, here's my question which is, did you try it on and what was it like? I did. Which was very exciting because I think through this whole process, it was almost like a later revelation to me that I was probably going to get to do this. Which is cool. So basically the simulation I did was just, you know, I put on the headset and the gloves so I can, you know, do this whole bit and see astronaut hands and it's kind of like being picked up by the scruff of your neck really and they just flew me around the International Space Station. And so, you know, I can kind of look down and okay, there's the earth and over my shoulder I can look far back and there's the moon and they had just updated one of the headsets a couple days before so it was like, you know, 1920 by 1080p so it was so sharp, you know, each eye. What are the graphics like? Like what does it actually look like through that thing? Does it look like the best video game ever or does it look like when you're looking at the blue marble? It's, you know, the way that I put it so, and I put this in the story I mean, it's not like 100% photo-real but it's so close that you can really just suspend you know, believe for a second and they actually have this poster that's like outside of the lab that's like very large and it's sort of this, you know, this image of the earth and part of the space station and so the public affairs officer I was with was telling me that it took him a really long time to realize that that wasn't a photo and I just had this moment where I was looking at it and I just, I got really close up to it and I was like, oh my god that's not a photo you know, so it's sharp, it's really sharp. Now what, you wrote an article about the takeaways from this which I thought was great and one of the takeaways I found fascinating at one point they had to choose in the early days between latency and detail because they just didn't have the technology to handle both yet you know, this back in the earlier days of it and so they asked the astronauts which they wanted and I thought it was very interesting what the astronauts wanted and your takeaway of why it was good for them to do that, to ask the astronauts. Sure, yeah so that, yeah, I mean that's that relationship between the lab and the astronauts it's just been incredibly important over the years and so, yeah, they were having to pick between, you know better latency or better graphics and, you know, you would think that maybe latency would be the priority but in talking to the astronauts who really are their customers they said they'd rather have the details that that was more helpful in preparing and that in space, you know they're so slow and so deliberate about the way that they move that even if, you know, it takes a fraction of a second for the scene to update as they turn their heads, they're going to be turning their heads so slowly that it really didn't matter like that much to them and so there have been some instances like that that have really let the lab sort of side step some of these signature problems that the broader virtual reality industry has had over the years and in that particular case what was cool is that they just got to keep going and looking at sort of other innovation and, you know, what other ways that they can improve themselves and it just kind of gave them a little bit of more room that the technology could, you know, catch up to where it is today and that was not something that just had to like completely, you know, sideline them and so early on, you know in 1992 or something. So here's the thing which is obviously they're excited about everybody else getting into the VR space to help them solve all these problems but did you find in your course of your reporting that the VR business was coming to them for their wealth of 20 years of experience because it seems like this sort of undiscovered pocket of information? Well, I think it's one of those things that's sort of like leaking out more and more and I know that they do in certain respects and at certain times kind of play the role of consultants a little bit, you know and I think that what also happens is because they're getting more out into the world and people are becoming more aware of them I would think that those people are going to start turning their attention more and trying to pull from that you know 20 year kind of depth of knowledge, you know so for example they were telling me about you know the company 6th Sense which is sort of, you know, VR, 3D graphics entertainment and they have like a wireless tracking system that's electromagnetic based and the lab also has a similar tracking system but it's not wireless and so I think about you know the communication that might happen between the two or really any other company that's out there and you just kind of get the sense like I'm sure that everyone's kind of benefit from that kind of dialogue well you wrote an excellent article and anybody who's interested in what we've talked about already should definitely go read it at techrepublic.com we'll have a link in the show notes as well there's lots of photos and everything well done how exciting really cool. Great it was something that we just kind of couldn't wait to finally get up on the site you know. Yeah I can tell why it's a really interesting story. Our pick of the day comes from Tom the energy IT consultant after settling on the fast and sparse but still customizable Zubuntu he quickly found matches for all his regular software, went to the ArchWiki as well as alternative2.net and Tom says I've been enjoying the unique features like enhanced privacy, vast customizability as well as comprehensive software updates hence I would wholeheartedly recommend Linux to all listeners out there he's a Zubuntu ex-Zubuntu enthusiast so there's his pick, send your picks to us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and you can find my picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks. Few emails before we get out of here rich from lovely Cleveland talking about all the recent news about luxury automakers Porsche for instance getting into electric cars and he said there was a much more blasé announcement in the field that will probably have more of an impact on people's lives. Nissan just announced an updated 2016 leaf that has finally exceeded the 100 mile on a charge threshold which says I think the 100 mile mark is a considerable psychological barrier for a lot of people and it makes the leaf feel much less like a novelty while it's starting price is not exactly entry level $30,000 government tax incentives put the lease price at a more affordable level so does that encourage any of you to go for a leaf? I am trying to take my 2002 Jeep Grand Cherokee to the absolute limit of its driving so that the next car I get is either all electric or at very least a hybrid and I feel like announcements like this make it so much closer if my car engine will keep turning over. Daniel in it finally rained a little bit San Diego congratulations on the rain Daniel we got some too says there is one thing that voice input has consistently done better for me and that is calendar events it's so much easier to say add a meeting with my bosses on Friday at three for two hours than it is to fuss with dials and dates to input times lots of people writing in we got Kimberly writing in about how she and her daughter have dyslexia and so using voice input is been a lifesaver for them and one of her sons uses it to look up stats for baseball players that he doesn't know how to spell their name but he does how to say the name so yes lots of people are finding good uses for voice input I'm curious Aaron do you use your voice assistant on your phone much? I actually don't yeah I've always I hate to say this almost kind of like I love pen and paper and then just yeah kind of type away I just don't want to say stuff out loud I'm probably just overly sensitive about it. Jenny do you use the voice assistant much? So not on the phone but I am rapidly falling in love with Amazon Echo's Alexa as if she is my adopted daughter because there's something about just being in the other room and going hey Alexa and then that immediate last mile problem has been solved because the moment I think it I can just say it out loud without having to go find my phone. Although I ran into a problem with the Amazon Echo when I wanted to add a grocery item to the shopping list early in the morning while people were asleep. Yes that does happen you just have to not care about other people and also you really can you can lower her volume but it would be nice you're right it would be nice to have a silent mode for Alexa so that she just kind of like blinks that pretty color at you and like received information instead of if you could say you I have it if you could say Alexa keep this quiet yeah and the following and she says okay it's added yeah but they turn over I'm sorry they turn over those updates so fast that you get the sense they're really invested in this and they're really invested in little details like that that's what I kind of like about it and Ryan has a quick tip for people like me who don't like talking out loud in public to their virtual assistant he says for a person values personal privacy as I too am not fond of speaking to my phone out loud I find whispering into the mic is just as effective and avoids the unnecessary drawing of attention to yourself so there you go you even if they can't whisper back to you you can still whisper to them and Siri doesn't talk back as much as the Amazon Echo does and I apologize to everyone's Amazon Echo that just got set off because we said the name hopefully they'll fix that too thank you thank you Aaron Carson for joining us it was a pleasure yeah thank you so much for having me lots of fun go find Aaron's work at Tech Republic she covers more than just VR helmets at NASA there's lots of good stuff there so this just went up yesterday I think is that right yesterday morning so techrepublic.com where could people find you otherwise I'm on Twitter at Aaron Carson and that's sort of a I'm on there all the time so hit me up Jenny Josephson of course is our producer on the show so her work is evident every day on daily tech news show but you can also go subscribe to tellitanyway at tellitanyway.com and you just had Scott Johnson on your show it was one of my favorite episodes ever it was Scott telling surprise a doctor story and a really wonderful story from my friend Greta about the really hilarious things that happened to her when she had cancer which is an unlikely sentence if I've ever heard one but that's Greta and at all interested in the Emmys I had an amazing story about meeting a TV legend who gave us enduring life lessons at the Emmys 10 years ago so go check it out tellitanyway.com and Len Peralta has been drawing that's amazing Len I changed it a little bit it was just supposed to be like a little dude but I had never met Erin before I thought it would be kind of funny since she said she wore it to kind of draw Erin actually wearing it I know this is not exactly how it went but you know the one thing it was the one thing about it that I thought is like they've been working on it for 20 years and that's a quite a long time in my years and it reminded me of what things what were happening in 1991 so you can see here it says it's nailed to virtual reality it actually feels like I'm watching Clarissa explains it all while the Color Me Bad Cats are in space so they kind of there's a couple things that they still needed to work on other than nailing the actual VR thing so there you go it's today's little drawing called NASA Explains It All now did you put on a blue spacesuit along with it or is that what you look like when you look down at yourself oh I wish they had had manned blue spacesuits but yeah I mean it kind of covers you know so much of your face that you can't quite look down but if you look over because there's the capability to have like two people under the headsets at once you can see like an astronaut floating beside you oh that's pretty cool pretty magical well folks if you want to take a look at this yourself go to LenPeraltaStore.com and you can see the digital version of it and you can even buy a print like he's still working on it right now yes I am actually I just do the little NASA logo on there there's a little NASA logo on the VR thing yeah awesome so thank you Len no problem thank you for having me LenPeraltaStore.com thanks to everybody who supports our show DailyTechNewShow.com we could not do it without you if you're one of the 5% or so people who actually give us a little bit of your money in exchange for the value you get from the show we cannot thank you enough we appreciate it to the ends of the earth you've changed our ability to understand what we could possibly do and so we thank you so so much DailyTechNewShow.com if you would like to be one of those people our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com you can give us call 51259 Daily that's 593-2459 listen to the show live Monday through Friday at 4.30pm Eastern at AlphaGeekRadio.com and visit our website DailyTechNewShow.com talk to you then that was a great show that was awesome I love having new people on this show and you were terrific Erin thank you I'm glad I was looking at all the stories earlier and just like oh so hopefully that was no no that was perfect we wanted you to come on and talk about your story everything else was gravy so you were awesome cool yeah thanks so much for having me it was a lot of fun now what we do afterwards is we just sit around and chat while I edit the show but you don't have to stick around for that we know you're busy so if you need to take off go ahead okay cool yeah I might just split in just a second I wanted to read through so I was watching the chat through oh yeah go say hi to the chat realm the folks over there are awesome yeah and they submit amazing titles of our shows it's showbot.tv leading the pack right now is Houston we have awesome which is pretty great and then to virtually go where no one has gone before I like it that is true yeah and then let's see oh one if by broadband two if by stream now Dark Redeemer on Fuego yeah so Erin if you had a preference would you say Houston we have awesome or to virtually go where no one has gone before oh that's hard I kind of like the virtually one I think yeah alright I was kind of leaning that way too so let's do that we have a title Houston that's pretty cool I like show me the commodity show me the commodity it just loses something then also beatmaster the desolation of smog you know for a hobbit fan that's pretty good that's pretty awesome desolation of smog not smog and of course I've always wanted an oblong dongle I can't tell the difference between an oblong and a circular when it's at that distance it's just it's round the thing that I was thinking of so I've got one of the pretty simple Roku's and the thing that I like about it is like most of the time I'm just not aware that it's there you know because it just blends in just works my other side of it all sound like half blind glasses so it's great magic stuff just like you know appears on my TV I had to set up the Google Chromecast no jokes six times every time I tried to use it and it just wasn't quite there in terms of the interface and I was bummed because the premise is terrific so hopefully this will knock it out I didn't have any problems setting the Chromecast up it sound like you were having some confusion and issues around because you have to connect what's that to me it was who was in my house the Chromecast when you set it up it temporarily creates its own wifi you use wifi to configure right to configure and then the configuration was staying forever and then my laptop would try to log on to that as a wireless network the configuration part never went away it would just stay there well your laptop you just needed to tell so the Chromecast was never connecting with your wifi network it would and then it would set itself up in that long arduous back and forth process but then the configuration network always stayed and so my laptop would try to log in and then after a certain point the Chromecast would no longer be logged in it was sort of like this infinite loop of not working and me having to think about it it sounded like you needed to tell your laptop to forget that network because maybe it was confusing the Chromecast but the Chromecast should no better so that's interesting it's from Google like we'll see but yeah I think I'm super excited and if everybody wanted to know what was the thing that got me to come out from behind the logo it was VR in space that's the standard that's awesome I was thinking how can you go wrong it's a great combo yeah no kidding a headline built for clicks but then it also delivers on substance that's the best part about it I'm glad about that but yeah it's been exciting because it's just one of those stories I genuinely want to get as far out there as possible it's been nice to be like please read well they sound like a cool team like I want to work there oh my god so yeah Evelyn Morales who's the lead engineer she's incredible she's just like one of such a cool lady and she actually yesterday found out that she made a scene at Espanol's like list of the 20 most influential Latinos for 2015 so it was like you know so yeah I was kidding it was like a heck of a day for Evelyn Morales and CBS but yeah so that was kind of a happy thing but I got to spend time with her and just a great person to talk to I love your description of how she tunes in to all the EVAs because she's like super nervous about it these are my babies that's awesome they realize that every single astronaut comes to the lab and so they kind of know them and they spend I can't remember if this made it in the story or not but it's like you ask any of these astronauts so how much time do you think you know you've spent in the lab and they're like oh my god I don't even know a lot of time that's how many a lot so it's cool because it's like they want to making friends and all that sort of thing so it's so close to home for them it's such a cool story it is and just on the journalism front it's really hard to take those stories that are like a huge amount of science and also a really cool bunch of people in a room working together and I thought you did such a great job of doing like really great long form journalism that's hard to do so I was really impressed as a former sort of current I was super impressed thanks I appreciate that like a lot of time trying to figure out because yeah that's the funny thing is you have kind of multiple timelines going you could discuss the history of the lab on hardware alone you could discuss it on software alone and just the people and there's kind of compelling parts to all of that but then it's like how do you actually weave that together yeah I get it to congeal but yeah I'm glad that all it came off alright because I definitely spent a lot of time trying to figure out what's the magic mix here you know well it's a testament to you that you made it look easy I don't sit there thinking like oh wow it must have been hard to go through this I just read a story and enjoyed it oh I'm very very happy to hear that thanks yeah but it was fun it was a pretty condensed process like the last long form I did sort of about VR in a broader sense and it was like why will this work this time supposedly and I think I took maybe about two and a half months you know how to do it and and in that time I think had about like 10 hours of interview and you know and that you know when you do it like that you kind of have some of these natural stopping points you have like okay here's my first round of interviews and then I'm going to pause and see what I have and the way this one it was like an entire reporting process for the most part it was like four days and just you know sort of after that just a lot of you know organization compressed timeline do you do a lot of reporting on VR like would you be considered like a VR beat reporter I would yeah oh that's so interesting to know Erin Karsten for no reason whatsoever you know I have just found that I am so fascinated with VR and I kind of picked up this beat basically about January or so of this year and it kind of grew off of this thing because one of my other beats is social media and how like you know businesses use it and that sort of thing and I had talked to someone GE yeah it was GE who they had done this sort of like branded VR experience and I was like oh that's interesting you know and just kind of like getting more into it it just yeah I kind of got to the point like around first of the year I was talking to Jason and he was like I think we really need to actually focus to some degree on this so yeah it's been really great I've gotten to do one other long form and then kind of this stuff you know comes up I mean like I got to go out to F8 oh wow in March and you know and that was great because like the day 2 keynote was about VR and you know kind of their plans for it and all that so so yeah so I try and you know as best I can because we are more features based sort of like do like the you know second day like deeper dive on if there's something that's breaking you know are you going to Oculus connect I'm actually not I'm going to be in San Francisco next week oh cool so yeah I can't complain but yeah I'm curious that if there's anything kind of interesting that will pop up GPEG in our chat room wants to know do you cover AR so augmented reality at all yeah not as much but it's something that I kind of want to maybe do a little bit more of you know because what it seems to me like I mean when people talk about sort of you know what if any of this winds up being sort of an everyday use I think AR is really kind of it yeah you know where that's going but I do if you know stuff comes up with like HoloLens that kind of falls to me so I'm kind of VR yeah they're straddling the continuum there HoloLens which is really interesting to see what they're going to end up doing I'm so sad that that one that was on the rocket that it exploded I know isn't that crazy but you know I just saw something maybe like a day or two ago that they're going to send another one that pretty soon I think before the end of the year so I think that would be good but it was like what timing but yeah awesome well I'm out of the post so we're done I gotta go pick up my son bye man awesome art good work as always thank you take care bye everybody