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Show Notes
Today’s guests: Darren Kitchen and David Spark
Headlines:
Italian eyewear company Luxottica is working on a second version of Google Glass, according to The Wall Street Journal via Venturebeat. CEO Massimo VIan told his shareholders: “In Google, there are some second thoughts on how to interpret version 3 [of the eyewear]. What you saw was version 1. We’re now working on version 2, which is in preparation.” Luxottica owns 80% of the world’s major eyewear brands, including Ray-Ban and Oakley.
TechCrunch reports that iFixit is tearing apart the 38mm Apple Watch Sport and 42mm Apple Watch steel for your edification. Processor upgrades for the Apple Watch look unlikely. It took 20 steps to get to the Watch’s processor some of which involved ripping out soldering and the S1 chip itself was encased in a block of resin. The battery took 11 steps to remove. Apple has confirmed the Watch’s battery, which has a 3 year lifespan, will be replaceable.
Steam Workshop will now let modders sell mods according to PC Mag.com. Users can now buy game mods for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Creators set their own price and get 25% of sales. Mods include things like new textures, maps, character skins, soundscapes, and quests.
Engadget reports the Swiss Post will conduct a pilot program for drone package delivery this summer. The program will use quadcopters developed by Matternet which can carry anything up to 2.2 pounds for over 12 miles on a single charge. The test will deliver small things like medicine or documents. Matternet has used its quadcopters to deliver medicine in Haiti.
Honda has an idea for an alternative to Elon Musk’s hyper loop in a report from ZDNet. Friend of the show Jason Hiner wrote up an interview with Frank Paluch, who runs research and development for Honda Americas. Paluch spoke at 2015 SAE World Congress and suggested a dedicated lane on California’s 5 Freeway for highly automated, connected vehicles that would use swarm technology to travel at speeds up to 180mph. While the Hyperloop could travel LA to San farncisco in an hour the HOnda system would take 2. However you wouldn’t have to drive to the Hyperloop station, just take your car the whole way. Go check out Jason’s article for much more about the idea.
News From You:
HobbitfromPA noted the early rumors that Comcast was planning to drop its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable. This morning Ars Technica was among the outlets reporting a statement that in fact Comcast has moved on and will no longer pursue the merger. Fortune reported that the Wall Street Journal barely let the merger grow cold before it reported its sources say Charter is already “laying the groundwork” for a bid to acquire Time Warner Cable. It’s nice to be wanted eh TWC?
jmbburg26 noticed one of the reports of additions to Google Maps for Rawalpindi, Pakistan. One alteration showed the Android robot logo appearing to throw water on an Apple logo. Another alteration wrote a criticism of Google’s review policy in the greenery representing a park. Google’s Mara Harris told the Washington Post, “We’re sorry for this inappropriate user-created content.” Both alterations have been removed.
lagerdalek pointed out that Microsoft will bring solitaire back as a default game in Windows 10. No word on Minesweeper or Reversi.
IrishTechGuy posted the SiliconRepublic article that ISP Eircom has signed a contract with Huawei to construct Gigabyte fiber for 66 communities in Ireland by 2016 serving 1.6 million homes. Eircom hopes to start taking orders by the end of August.
KAPT_kipper posted the CBC story that researchers from Sweden, the US and Canada reported in the journal Current Biology that they have sequenced almost the complete library of DNA from a well-preserved wooly mammoth. Yes such information can inform scientists about mammoth evolution, how they differ from modern elephants and why they went extinct. But what about cloning Mammoths for eccentric millionaire’s Mammoth parks? Canadian researcher Hendrik Poinar said it is a “much more real possibility.”
Discussion Section Links:
Pick of the day:
WScottis1 in ChatrealmMessages:
Hey Tom, Jennie, Roger, Patrick, Justin, Darren, Scott, Veronica, and guest(s),
(I think I got everybody)
I wanted to let people know about two web tools that I came across the other day trying to make my website mobile with the Google Search Mobilegeddon. The first one I wanted to recommend is mobiletest.me. This is a website that allows you to test how your website looks like on multiple smartphones even if you don’t own them, it does it virtually on the website. It even allows you to “rotate” the phone.
The second one is detectmobilebrowsers.com which provides an easy way to check to see if a user is trying to load your website on a phone. It’s very easy to implement, you just have to upload the script to your website file manager, edit the file to change the default website to the URL of your mobile site, and then put one script line into your code of the original page. Love the show! Keep up the amazing work you’re doing!
Thanks!
Messages:
Rob wrote on the DTNS blog:
On the show, you talked about the poor cellular coverage in Montana. It’s really mind boggling how many areas in the good ol’ USA still have poor coverage, including where I live in Hanover, NH (only Verizon works and with mostly 1-2 bars.) We are just back from hiking for a week in the Czech Republic where we used a 3rd party foreign roaming SIM Card and had 5 bars of T-mobile coverage even on empty hiking trails between extremely small towns and if you play around with their coverage map, you’ll see that they have 21-150Mbps data speeds pretty much blanketing the whole country. How did America get left so far behind in the mobile revolution?
Brian writes:
“As an MVNO ting also provides service from both Sprint and T-Mobile (although they can’t explicitly state that T-Mobile is their GSM partner). The unique thing about Fi is the ability to seamlessly handoff between not only wifi and CDMA a la Republic Wireless but to also do it between CDMA and GSM networks. Kind of makes me wonder how it works with sim cards and phone numbers (probably something to do with Google Voice since they make a point in saying that you can use your number on your computer).”
Jeff writes:
Talking about Spotify and other services, one that I don’t hear a lot about, but I use almost exclusively is grooveshark.com. I believe it works in the sense that someone uploads their music and that becomes available to anyone to listen to it. So, I don’t think that grooveshark.com themselves are providing the music, but that doesn’t mean that the popular songs or others aren’t on there. The selection is pretty vast and there’s some neat features they are doing as well. One feature is that Individuals can create radio stations, basically becoming dj’s. There is a downside and that is the consistency of the music. It’s uploaded by individuals and there can be a lot of duplicates and some of those duplicates are of a lower quality.
Tad writes:
The issue with the major auto manufactures trying to apply the DMCA to their vehicles is getting seriously over-hyped. I saw an article with the headline, “GM, Ford, and Others want to make working on your car illegal”. The article went on to say that in effect you don’t own your car, you are just a user. This pure fear mongering. The DMCA applies to the code in the various control computers in the vehicle- nothing more. The physical parts of the car, including the control modules the code is in, are yours to do with as you please. Again, the DMCA applies to bits, not car parts.
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Monday’s guest: Rich Stroffolino