In this Podcast, Jon Westfall and I discuss:
- Todd's visit to a Hawaii Symphony Orchestra rehearsal at the Waikiki Shell with a 360 degree video camera
- The Google Pixel Superfans program
- OpenAI SearchGPT
- Microsoft's irritating Link to Windows for Android
- What is the point of the Apple Maps on the web (beta)?
- Jon's Nike Run Club review
- The power of the reboot (and the anger some people demonstrate when you recommend doing it)
I'm Todd Ogassawara as usual of my good friend, a good Dr. John Westfall. What is today is a loaded question. I mean it's a construct. Yes, philosophical views podcast today. What is love? Indeed. What is existence? Before we begin I wanted to thank my cousin Kim Kyabu who twice let me go visit the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra at the Waikiki Shell right there behind me. For their practice sessions last week I went to visit them prior to their Star Wars performance last weekend and yesterday morning I really messed up my videos using my Insta360 X4 360 camera. And so I said ah can I come back and try again she was fine. And so I went yesterday and it was even more interesting because they were practicing for rehearsing I guess is the correct or rehearsing for a performance of Jurassic Park, the original first movie. And why it was so interesting they had this giant grid screen just so if you're looking at the Waikiki Shell which is behind me and can I point to it? Yeah I can point to it so whoa my finger is huge. Anyway so from the top of the shell the top of the arc there is a huge grid that is hung down right over the symphony orchestra and on it is projected the entire movie with dialogue and captions and the symphony plays the original soundtrack during the course of the entire movie. And again which is in Jurassic Park was a really fun movie and listen to a live symphony performing the music so the soundtrack so it was really really kind of fun to watch that practice session. I can't I can't publish a lot of it because I'd probably create a copyright violation. Probably. I think I can do a snippet that doesn't cause a creative copyright violation and I'll figure out how to do that later probably not included in this podcast so there's a separate one so if it gets struck down it doesn't strike down the podcast. Anyway it was really interesting to see the technology involved for that particular rehearsal with the movie playing by the way so even in bright daylight I could see it quite well from various distances and I'll publish a separate video vlog of vlog to discuss that. Anyway thanks to my cousin Kim for letting me bother the entire symphony twice. Hope I wasn't too annoying. Okay so a couple of things one which you are not eligible for by the way John and I learned this week that there is something called the Google Pixel super fans community kind of like kind of like the old Microsoft MVP community it's something that I like to join this as you know or maybe you know something I don't know I don't know of any way to apply to be an MVP. I don't think so I think you had to be nominated and you know you were evaluated and awarded because it was an award right and so yeah I don't think there was a way to get yourself in but I didn't think that tried you know but it wasn't easy. Yeah so and maybe there is maybe there isn't a way but we don't know what it is if there's a way to apply for it. There is however this thing called the Google Pixel super fans it's a Google you know a Google community that you can actually apply for and I'll put a link in the show notes for folks who might be interested in that. I applied for it and have not gotten any response back so I assume that I'm either rejected or they just take you know a long time to do this stuff maybe volunteers behind the scene or something. But anyway the reason I say you're not you're not eligible John is just kind of interesting so as you might expect if you work for Google you can't apply to be a Google super fan of Pixel super fan that sort of makes sense but it turns out if you work for government agency of any kind including universities public universities state universities as you do you also cannot be eligible for this so anyway I'm I'm hoping I'm because I'm kind of like to get some insider information I enjoyed the insider information we got as well not as Microsoft insiders which is their new program but as MVPs there's still a separate MVP because insider you can apply for I mean really not apply just be a tester but MVPs I think are still the super so anyway. The other thing speaking of applying is open AI announced something called search GPT which is their AI powered search engine not sure how it's different from everybody else but I applied to be under I'm not applied I put myself on a wait list as of today July 28th and if I got in response I don't think so I did this a few days ago nope so there's something search GPT I've seen some very dramatic headlines like this the end of searches here we just we've seen these things before we do have some weird search stuff because I was listening to a podcast I was talking about how Reddit apparently is only on Google search right now and Bing search and other search engines have delayed or no Reddit access anymore so there's an exclusivity and that that's sort of frustrating when you think about what search engines are supposed to be able to do so yeah I hope this is not a portense of what will come yeah it's really interesting you know I mean we've all had the experience Alex I've had the experience of you know watching search bots endlessly hit my site either at work or in real life the index it it's like why my site doesn't change that much or you know just why period even if it does change a lot why do you need to hit it up you know four billion times in a couple of days and apparently I fix it which I think you're familiar with it's a really interesting site that tears apart hardware and then explains what they find and they the inner and so to speak of devices usually new ones they claim that the anthropic the company behind the Claude 3 AI service which is quite well regarded has been hitting them like I think they said literally millions of times a day almost de-dossing them and so they are and I guess it's ignoring some kind of you know robots that text I think I'm not sure what's out there now for AI searches but you remember the old robots that text tell well behaving search bots hey you know don't hit me so there's that happening too so we shall see oh yeah yeah everything is interesting these days when it comes to AI and who's trying to lock up access to things yeah indeed oh speaking of being irritated and I guess this is my week for being irritated so as you might remember John a couple of weeks ago our buddy swan showed us how he had his pixel cameras linked to his surface pro using a Microsoft application slash service called link for windows for android to use his pixel phone as a webcam and I think I don't particularly want to use my pixel phone as a webcam webcam you know to basically do what my surface camera is doing right now but I did want to use it to like show you stuff you know like an overhead cam when we're talking about new products and things and oh that would be cool so finally I saw an update for the underlying process it's not an app but it's an underlying component software component from Microsoft and I saw the update I said huh I'll try it again and so I tried it and I could now use my my pixel 7a as a webcam which is great so great John when we talk about stuff I can you know take my my pixel phone and point it you know at whatever it is that's sort of on my surface table and and talk about I show it to you but the app on the android side apparently reconnects every like 30 seconds or three two minutes or something frequent that every so often out here being connected to your you know your PC like I know you are you told me that 15 times in the last 20 minutes or whatever and so I looked at all the settings and I disabled some synchronization things and finally I disabled the whole thing because it was so darn annoying so Microsoft needs to learn how to write android apps better well if they can figure that out I mean the Microsoft would be you know for a company that has a lot of software that is used worldwide Microsoft doesn't always get it right when it comes to software on different platforms not even windows do they get it right half the time so maybe it's just you know they're large enough we notice all their imperfections but well and as you know as as former windows mobile fans we remember active stink and I believe in pronouncing it correctly as that was that was it was both a gift and a nightmare you know yeah mostly yeah I guess it was even you know you if it was working well active sync was great when it wasn't working well no amount of help I you know I just think about all the what was the name of the folder it used to create wasn't it my documents or it was like the name of your pocket pc plus my documents right right I probably had a thousand of those on my hard drive at random times because I would either have different ROMs I was using or different names for devices or different devices and then active sync we get screwed up and I have to break the connection reconnect and you'll create a new one and yeah I just if I search my NAS I will probably still find a ton of those old folders because they have one or two important things in them that I want to keep you know speaking of which I just fired up one drive uh on my web browser and I am looking for I still have I still have two folders I don't have the name folder you're talking about but I have three folders I have one folder called mobile uploads create date 2011 or last modified 2011 I have a folder called office live documents also last access to 2011 and I have a third folder in one drive called office mobile also create last you know actually this one was touched 2021 hmm I wonder why but in any case 2011 was I think when a lot of us gave up in office and well it became Windows phone in 2010 and a lot of and it was incompatible with all our Windows mobile software and we just said I have to use something else well some of us said I'll write a book about it first and then set the heck with it so that was that was my plan that's right that's right and our buddy Frank McPherson I think did three editions of his Windows mobile book I see books my my first edition never did enough to get me out of my advance so I I don't think there was ever any idea for a second edition or yeah yeah hopefully I think Frank did better in any case that so that was my that was my annoying week so far or the last week I should say and um oh oh so this is not so much annoying is unfathomable I well I just don't get it so I'm using yeah like kind of like why did you do you know who like who cares almost so apple has in beta called something called apple maps on the web and the url beta dot maps dot apple dot com and looking at my show notes beta dot maps at apple dot com and in one point yeah you would say oh that's that's pretty cool I mean you know it's nice to look at a browser without opening up a an i device ipad you know iPhone whatever but you open it up and it's like well what does it give me that I don't already have in google maps or big maps or you know whatever other maps you want to use on the web and I have did you did you look at it yet John it's not looked at it it looks like it's the basic idea is promoting that they have maps there you go maps aren't maps aren't horrible I could have mentioned there's you know even though apple maps has been around for a decade now yeah and it has it definitely had its problems at the beginning that everyone well knew and I wouldn't be surprised if apple still has problems with you know partners trying to get them to support apple maps because there are probably still people out there with long memories going oh well that's junk it doesn't it's not accurate it doesn't mean anything like this and this probably allows them to send a link and just say look our maps have everything you know google has so you should at least support them but that's all I can figure this is because if you're on an i device you're going to just use the maps app and if you're not on an i device I mean I don't know how often people use google maps in the browser without using it on a mobile device so I actually use it a lot but I'm retired and I have lots of you know more time on my hands than I used to but I will say this the thing about apple maps on the web beta is it does not even it does not log into anything you know does not authenticate with like your apple id or anything so it doesn't know anything about you which is good and bad right but the bad part is it doesn't know anything about you and which means it's there's no synchronization between what you do on your mobile device and what you do with this thing you can't personalize it and in fact it's and maybe by design its location is very imprecise like you know it sort of sees me in the middle of the pacific ocean and not much closer than I like how when I went there and I hit the guides button it had me somewhat near to where I am but about 40 miles away because that's pretty good why my IP is registered but I go to guides and it's giving me tablet hotels in Iceland right guide to the aisles off Sicily Denver and Chicago yeah like I don't know what makes you think I would be interested in any of these when I'm in the middle of nowhere Mississippi so they're not even utilizing data they have in a sense to it's almost like this just looks like it's a promotional thing they built so they could show partners hey we out maps yeah yeah they're great and for me it's worse by the way because you know I'm literally in the middle pacific ocean and so you know at worst show me something on a different Hawaiian island that'd be fine but it doesn't even have anything about Hawaiian in the guides my suspicion is we might see something when some of the AI tools might be announced for iOS 18 if they're announced for iOS 8 I don't think I see any of them in the public data by the way so I don't know how close Apple is to deploying their AI stuff what I was hoping that would be in here is you know let me log into my Apple ID for this you know maps on the web and then give me some AI tools to do interesting things like you know like the local guides and so forth but until then oh the other thing is oh and find my you know like you can't use find my my phone if you lose your phone so it might be if you don't have any other device it might be interesting to be able to do that on a desktop of some kind with just a browser the other thing is looking at the satellite imagery is it's pretty old and what I noted in our show notes is that Google Maps is relatively current from the satellite view Bing Maps Microsoft Bing Maps is out of date also there's a small building that's been was started being built 2020 21 so four years now four or five years now and it shows up on Google Maps but doesn't show up on Bing Maps or Apple Maps are using really out of date imagery so anywho all righty speaking of maps somewhat tangentially related you've got something yeah so recently I started playing around with a piece of software that this is the quintessential I don't know if you ever listen to Jim Gaffigan's stand up but he yes back in the early 2000s he had a joke about when you read a book seven years after it came out and you're like I want to talk about it now this is sort of that but it's interesting because it made me compare and contrast a few things I've been using the Nike Run Club app lately because in the past few years since I've gotten more into physical fitness and activity I used Apple's first party fitness app or activity app or whatever you want to call it primarily and lately I thought about getting into running but the problem is if you don't know anything about running you don't really know what to do with it as I figured out you know playing around with it you know my idea of running was go fast as you can for as long as you can that you know that was somewhat logical to me that somebody would never done anything with it and that's not the way you run but so I started playing around with Nike's Run Club app because they have guided runs in the app that you can use and it will you know talk in your ear as you're listening to music the musical go down slightly like coach will come in your ear and tell you things and then it'll go back to your music and does it help you pace I mean does it tell you like okay slow down catch your breath you know whatever yeah it does that and it tells you you know you can pick different kinds of runs you can do recovery runs you can do speed runs you can do long runs you can do training programs for different lengths of races and those sorts of things so it's been really interesting to do that and it's also interesting to me because Nike is not the only one in this space obviously Adidas has their own run club app strava is well known as an app for this map my run all these other ones my fitness pal that whole group is now owned by a shoe company but what I find interesting is that Nike and Apple have a history you know people forgot Nike launched the Nike plus iPod sports kit back in 2006 that's right 18 years ago and that was basically a sensor that you put on your shoe and it was a pedometer that report back to your iPod touch or your iPod and so there I would not call them first party they're not Apple but I wouldn't say they're just a third party app because they've got some pretty deep integration so second party if that's a thing we'll say that yeah good partner close partner and but even though they are close partners they can't access some of the same data that Apple reserves for itself so ironically it will it can record workouts to the Apple fitness app like usual but some of the advanced tracking that Apple allows with its own first party app the run club app cannot get and this has caused actually some people to say well just run both at the same time which seems kind of annoying I've not tried that yet but it's just kind of a weird thing because it's not a direct competitor to Apple fitness plus but it's also not given full access even though they're the preferred partner by Apple and I could see if they were both doing exactly the same thing but as I said Apple fitness plus does have guided runs and walks but they're much more motivational and conversational so if you've not used those it'll be the walks the time to walk are usually with celebrities so you're walking with someone talking in your ear and at some points you know they talk about something and you feel a little tap on your wrist and you look down there's a picture that they're talking about like you know this was when I filmed this movie or whatever and there's two or three of those that will pop up during the walk and the time to run the series that came out about a year later is with their coaches but their coaches are mostly talking conversationally about we're in this city and I love this city for this reason and the management we're right now running along this or here and there whatever so they're not very educational whereas the Nike guided runs tend to be much more on the educational side of okay this is what's important to start out your run this is the systems check I want you doing right now here's the effort level that I'm asking you to put in you know make sure you're listening for these signs that your body is either going too fast or going too slow or whatever it might be and so it's kind of curious to me that they wouldn't have given them more access because it's a qualitatively different product fitness plus also has much more of a jump right in attitude which is really good for accessibility if you want people to feel like hey I could try a hit workout or I could try this or that but if you want to learn you're not going to learn from Nike fitness plus you know there's no hit there are a few getting started guides but if you say well let me jump into this hit workout and at the beginning I'll get a lot of time to practice these moves before we do them in real time you get maybe 10 seconds to learn the moves you know you get to watch it once or twice in slow and then it's okay we're jumping right into it wow and and you're watching it during your recovery time from the previous set so you're not really having the the ability to pay as much close attention as you might want so two different products if you've never tried something outside of apple fitness there are products out there like Nike that are doing things more educationally more teaching than apple does back when I used to not run so much but walk a lot I used to use something called run keeper mostly to keep a GPS track trail of you know where I went because often I was not going on a fixed path like I'd be well like a good example was I landed at Heathrow and my daughter was scheduled to meet me like hours later so I spent you know like five or six hours just wandering around London not really know where I was generally except in a you know very generic sense like I am now you know near the palace or I'm walking longer serpentine but I didn't know where it was and so later on I could go back into its man oh that's where I was that was sort of interesting but that's the kind of extent of my knowledge I never tried like a guided health thing which I probably should since I've been picking up weight lately it is an interesting you know thing to play around with and of course Nike's monetization strategy is interesting the app is free the club is free there's no premium features that you go with because their whole goal is consider buying our shoes and clothes hmm you know and they'll run deals for run club people to get a discount code or something like that but they don't have a premium tier which as today in 2024 I'd like anything that doesn't have a premium tier because it's just getting really really frustrating to have all these somewhat useful services but you got to pay for it on a subscription and so if you haven't tried it out you might look into it and if you're not if you do anything and all you use is Apple's first party fitness app you might consider sacrificing some of the metrics that you would get in the fitness app for other things that the fitness app is not currently providing so with the it's running you might look at run club because it has the guided runs if it's walking or any other activity there might be an app out there that does it a little better but sacrifices some of that acts up I think I will um yesterday I didn't I didn't walk a whole heck of a lot last day let me look at my I'm still even fit it until it dies um but yesterday let's see yesterday I did 9,147 steps which is kind of a lot for me um and that's you know like I think like four miles or something and that's only because you know as I said I visited my cousin over at the Waikiki shell to go attempt to do some 360 videos for fun no commercial stuff and then there was also a ukulele festival ukulele festival right next door um which my cousin alerted me to and so I walked over there and I wandered around and um I found out to my chagrin how much it's going to cost me to repair a very old ukulele but I should do it I should do it it's considered a vintage because I'm so darn old now I got it when it was new oh yeah story of our life you survive long enough in your vintage yes it's very sad uh but true and of course you know if you don't survive long enough that's also very sad so yes um you know it's better to be vintage than not that's my that's my current philosophy um so I I am looking in fact one of the reasons I think I told you I got the 360 camera after being uh enthused by what Sven was doing with his he got a DJI osmo I think camera um is I thought oh this will make me walk more and it kind of has but not to the extent I should and so it's something I'm glad you brought this up I'm really looking forward to to doing some of this okay and you've got I guess we have nothing annoying too well tech observations you know you've had mentioned to me before we start recording that one of your devices spontaneously rebooted and yes as tech people we are aware that this happens yes kernel panics spontaneous reboots and rebooting has come up recently a lot in text conversation with a friend of mine because this friend works first-level tech support for a large company and a well-known company that I'll remain nameless with and I'm out of this but she was signing the number of people who call in for assistance with their device who you know the first troubleshooting step is let's try a reboot and they get angry that that's even suggested they haven't tried one and it hasn't worked I could see them maybe getting angry about that but they right truly think and I think there is a public perception out there that rebooting is just something that tech people ask you to do as a hazing thing where it doesn't actually do anything but we decide statistically to make you do it right and I know and you know that there is a healing power of a reboot you know rebooting will clear a lot of issues with memory you know reloading the software from a starting point a common starting point and it's just funny to me thinking about the way that you put it before the caucus civilians sort of think about technology where they go well you know this person is obviously punking me by asking me to do a reboot when you and I I think the first thing that we do when a device is acting up is let's try rebooting it and see if it works and you know 99 percent of the time it does you know either fix the problem or it gets the problem to a state where we're better able to diagnose what the problem was so even if it didn't fix it it at least got us closer to the solution so if you're a tech person listening to this tell your civilian friends that we're not punking them when we ask them to try a reboot it does actually do things and while you're at it also mentioned to them that it is not particularly useful when you call first level tech support to scream at them yeah we're asking simple questions because the friend of mine was revealing and she texts me you know a few times a week with whatever the current annoyance was and the amount of times that she reports getting screamed at because she asked for the name of the caller so that she can create a case or she asks for the device you know literally what are you calling about and gets screamed at to you know stop asking stupid questions or gets insulted until you don't know what you're doing which is ironic coming from someone who's calling tech support to basically say you don't know what you're doing you know it's not like you're in a position of authority if you're calling tech support either but yeah the the rudeness that she reports is just kind of eye-opening because I think you and I even though we spend years in tech we know users get angry and we know that they get frustrated we know that when they're wrong sometimes they respond with anger and frustration rather than admitting they were wrong right but to think about just you know some of the complaints I mean she's been told that her name is wrong because she'll introduce herself and they'll tell you that it's not your name you're really you know like I don't even know where you come from where someone says I'm so and so you go that's not your name okay if you're omniscient calling tech support as well as not knowing what you're doing so you can't refer your own device but you know for certain that the representative is lying to you when they say their name strange strange tales from darkness so what does this do work and be nice remote remote sensing is that what the alleged project was back in the 50s or 60s yes yes there are people that can remote sense and they can be at her workplace with her and see that she you know is not that's not her name that it's definitely something else well you know the other question that goes prior to did you reboot or can you try rebooting is is it plugged in yeah I don't know many times and this is happening to me too you know it's like I've knocked a cord loose or and I'm not enjoying even a power cord like it like this morning actually you and I had a problem with my audio and the solution was to unplug it from my my USB-C dock and to go find in a USB-C to USB-A adapter to plug it directly into my service by the way my practically brand new service Pro 11 is the device that John is alluding to that spontaneously rebooted I went to go fill my cup before the podcast I came back and I pressed the keyboard nothing happened and I saw it rebooting so I'm not sure what happened there I updated this other day so it wasn't an update you point out a good thing that this does affect these things affect tech people as well as non-tech and I always talk about young tech support people especially desktop support physical IT guys and girls that come to your you know desk I always say that they haven't been burned enough times because they've had enough times where it looks like the user is the problem yeah and we all know that 99% of the time the user is the problem yes but that 1% of the time that it's on your end that it is your misconfiguration or your server or your network or whatever it is yeah that 1% of the time will teach you to never assume that it's the user and never take the cocky attitude with the user and never just dismiss the user as crazy because yes 99% of the time they might be the problem they might be crazy they might be delusional but you only have to have that 1% happen every so often and you went the wrong way with it you you know you dismissed it to only have it bite you a few times where you realize that you need to have a little bit of humility as a tech support person until you are absolutely sure that it was the user's fault and then you can you know say whatever you like about them but don't assume until you know for sure absolutely and and you know like you said a lot of times it's uh the end user who doesn't who did something inadvertent like unplug the pc you know back before pc's or back before people start using laptops more or let their battery run down and they're at 0% battery which is why they can't boot yeah yeah or you know just any number of things but there are those times I remember sitting on a on a what is a tier three call with a very large unnamed company because their cloud service just was bonky and it was them it was not us yeah yeah yeah my one of my favorite I it sounds horrible but I always love the that moment when it's like oh that is a problem yeah when they have that realization and all of a sudden the attitude shifts and it goes from you must obviously be too stupid to use our product to oh our product is not working right and you brought it to our attention and we were too stupid to know that it wasn't working right uh yeah it's sort of humorous but if you know anyone that's first level tech support tell them that you appreciate their service and they're taking bullets for the rest of us because it's a rough world out there and I have to tell you you know um I have played tech support either officially or unofficially in my latter years mostly unofficially and you know trying to explain things to friends and family like you know it was it's a kind of simple problem and you have to do like kind of a simple behavioral change on your part to make it work but uh having also been uh the uh a group under under my uh my management that handled tier one tech support well tier one through tier three I give those folks a lot of credit because it's it's not always pleasant if often it's not pleasant and uh and you know the those the good ones especially the ones who are patient and despite your own failings managed to help the person uh you know they're they're wonderful people so but I do like to see them get out of there fairly quickly before they go insane yeah that's very true all righty so um we shall talk sometime in the future I know you're pretty busy I think school's starting all kinds of stuff so yeah I'll be uh gone for a couple weeks and then I'll be back so we'll we'll catch up and I'll have uh hopefully some stories to share from my travels all righty and I hope your students appreciate you your incoming students appreciate you and I don't know if you have returning students if you have like a level you teach so uh I hope they have a good time in their the coming semester I know if your weather settles down or it has settled down already you're not in a heat dome area are you right now no we were actually in kind of a rainy gloomy state for the last uh week and now we're today's the first day we've had some sunlight in a while so okay good we're back to normal Mississippi weather all righty and we will talk to you next
