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“It’s for people who just had babies.”
Welcome! It’s episode 92 of YetAnotherTechShow. Thanks for coming out. This is your weekly technology podcast where four lovers of tech sit and discuss the latest interesting and entertaining tech stories. As usual the panel includes producer Mat Lee, Larry Press, Mike Rothman and myself. I’m Ant Pruitt. So click that “play” button at the top of the page and follow along with this week’s show notes. Here we go…
The OpenSSL bug, Heartbleed has been patched by most of the internet, but there has now been a reported loss of data. The Canada Revenue Agency has been attacked. The culprits have been arrested, but this case makes us wonder how fast were the criminals. The bug was well-known and had IT professionals working around the clock correcting the issue. Seems unlikely that the the breach could have happened. Perfect timing, I guess.
Google opened up the Glass offering to the public on tax day (April 15th), but it’s only in the US. We discuss if the $1500 price tag is now worth the investment. Project Glass has been intriguing to some, but not most. The buzz of it has died out as we wonder what exactly can this thing be used for. Our biggest conclusion was capturing pictures. Did any of you jump on the chance to buy Glass? Personally, I’m waiting out for version 3.0. What use cases do you see fitting for Google Glass?
In more Google news, the terms of service (TOS) in Gmail has been updated to a small degree. In actuality, it’s more of the same just more of a honest admission of your messages are scanned. A developer will tell you it’s more based on an algorithmic scanning, which is true, and not some person reading line for like every love letter you write. The TOS basically says it’s a better way to produce targeted ads. Personally I’m happy with the TOS. Google’s search history has been beneficial in my day-to-day life.
Be careful with what you search for on Amazon. Recently Amazon has been linked to unintentionally creating a shopping list for drug dealers. Depends on what you search for, Amazon will subsequently show you items that are related or applicable to your search. It’s useful in many ways, but this is just a tiny blow to the ego of Amazon.
Next, Mat was all excited about a “new” keyboard offered from Microsoft. This design is similar to previous laptops released by other OEMS offering a trackpad on the side. Granted this could be a larger trackpad, but at anyrate this is not “new.” It can be used to control most any device with the RF capability. Mike and I are going to go dust off our old keyboards in honor of this one. I miss the keyboards of yore that had real keys and tactile feedback.
Google released a new camera app to give you somewhat of a pure Android phone. The app looks nice and Googly. Mat has had mixed results with the new app. My HTC One Max hasn’t seen much benefit from it, but it’s still a nice UX.
Larry wanted to chat about his new Chromebook. The Acer 720. He discussed the performance of the machine touting 4GB of RAM that runs faster than his current laptop. I was also given a Chromebook. I have the Acer 710 from my good friend Mike Claypool. Thank you, bro! We discuss the use of a Chromebook that meets most of the needs of every average user. It’s cloud based and safe from viruses for the most part.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
The IBM System 360 celebrated it’s 50th birthday. Mat and I deferred to our “old guys” of YATS to discuss this thing. Kidding. It’s really a cool piece of computing history from IBM back in the 1960s.
Lastly, Larry shares the British Pathe’ YouTube channel with us. The service focuses on historical news feeds. Think of seeing the news announcement regarding the Wright brothers first flight on an aircraft. Pretty cool stuff.
Thanks for checking out this week’s show. Be sure to take a second and leave a comment below as well as click the share buttons to post onto your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ feeds. Watch the show rerun below and click the “like” button. Thanks for the support and see ya on episode 93!
Check out the hangout video below. If you want to watch us live, check out YATS tv Wednesday nights.
