Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:00:31 — 27.8MB)
“Some people just can’t handle freedom.”
Ant Pruitt here, and welcome to episode 8 of YATS: Yet Another Tech Show. This is your weekly rundown of technology news, rumors, and sometimes rants. Big things were going on in the world of tech and our YATS crew gets around the mic to share thoughts and opinions. We were joined by guest host Jeremy Lesniak of Vermont Computing and aNewDomain. We appreciate our “viewers” as well as our listeners as we are now running our Google Hangouts live on air. Thanks for joining our chat room too. You can always watch our live recording via yetanothertechshow.com/live.
Mat found an article on arstechnica about the interesting world of Steganography. “Well how is that interesting,” you may ask? This read discusses how a suspected al-Qaeda member was found with an SD card that had encrypted data on it. That’s expected, right? Well there was more to it. This SD card contained a pornographic video called “KickAss”, but it wasn’t a typical video. The video contained plain sight steganography in the bits of data. This encryption concealed secret information for al-Qaeda.
Our Mike Rothman had his new Android HTC One-X delivered to him. (Yay!) As you know from previous episodes, Mike was looking to leave the iOS ecosystem and join Android. The vast choices in Android devices (some may call it fragmentation) had Mike doing a lot of research in deciding what would fit him best. His 24 hour judgment of his new phone is high praise. We’ll continue to be in touch with Mike about his new phone and get him geared up with all the best apps for it.
Mike discussed and debated PC World’s 12 Best Free Entertainment Services and Apps of 2012. It was a list of a few obscure apps, but they aren’t half bad. Services such as Crackle.com offers online tv content. Specifically, older content for nostalgic entertainment. Remember JJ Evans and “Good Times” from the 70’s and 80’s?
Google had their self-driving car approved and licensed in the state of Nevada. There are more lenient laws and regulations to allow this for the Mountain View, CA company. One requirement states that two people have to be in the car at the time and a special red license plate is to be mounted on the car. What are the ramifications of this endeavor? Are people even using the parallel park feature found in some cars today?
Get yourself a $35 computer! Well maybe you can’t. The Raspberry Pi Linux computer is a small PC that’s about the size of a credit card. Unfortunately, this PC is now out of stock. The specs include: It has a 700MHz ARM CPU core, 256MB of RAM and a Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU with OpenGL ES 2.0 that supports 1080p at 30FPS as well as H.264 and MPEG-4 high-profile decoding for smooth Blu-ray playback. Connectivity includes two USB ports, Ethernet, HDMI, RCA video, an SD card slot, a 3.5mm audio jack and two rows of 13 General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pins for further expansion. This device could potentially get the consumers back into learning the fundamentals of a computer for further innovation. It could take us back to the days of homebrew computing where hackers and hobbyists dabbled with circuit boards and processors for early computing.
Larry discusses how Stanford is a education model runs without the limits of walls. Stanford’s classroom environment expands from tech companies and venture capitalists firms as well. It’s a very collaborative environment. This model may not work as well as an online education environment because Stanford as a unit is so heavily vested in its students’ endeavors outside of college. The online community may create a disconnect between the students and family of Stanford. Larry’s post discusses more.
Thanks for listening and watching our show. Remember we are now doing live video feeds of our recording each Wednesday at 11pm eastern and 8pm pacific. Just browse to YATS tv at yetanothertechshow.com/live. We have the video there and a live chat to join in on the discussions. We’d love to hangout with ya!
Also, thank you for continuing to spread the word through your social media and checking us out on our Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter pages. Send us an email with comments at thecrew@YetAnotherTechShow.com. Check out all of our writing on aNewDomain.net and GroovyPost.com. Thanks, #YATSsquadron!
