I today, September 29th, 2024. This is 1 p.m. podcast 530. I'm Todd Agassore, my good friend, a good dog, Joe as well. - Yep, I am here. - And good. You know, I was gonna mention to you, John, I don't know if you had a chance, but to take a look. Last week, I exerted a small segment from our podcast and turned into a little video clip. And one of the things I did was, as I often do these days, I've been using Microsoft ClipChamp. It's hard to say that. I'm using Microsoft ClipChamp to edit our little video segments. And one of the things I learned just a few weeks ago, and I think it was a newish feature, is that it can now create captions in the SRT file format. And what is SRT? I don't even know, let me look at a file format. There we go. SRT stands for SubRip Subtitle. Just an obvious, obvious, for the second thing I'm from. But okay, I mean, the first T, SubRip Subtitle, which is a plain text file that generates subtitles based on our speech, our podcast. And so I created an SRT file for that. And I had tried captions previously, but I had hard-coded embedded them in English. And what I think it does is, if I hard-coded, you can't turn off the captions, which you could annoy. With the SRT file, people can choose whether or not captions are on or off, A. And B, they can choose what language to see the captions in. I think it does auto-transition. It being YouTube. So I uploaded to YouTube, and I think YouTube can auto-translate to whatever supported languages it has with SRT files. So I'm going to be trying to do that for our video segments, which I do semi-regory these days, just 'cause it's kind of interesting. And there's that. I did want to know that. I was mentioning it, John, before we started behind me. So I got this little calendar thing to do last year, 40 weeks ago, as John can see, it's reversed in line. But 40 weeks ago. And it's finally, as you tear away the little, trying to aim my finger and my camera at the same time, as you tear away the little calendar items week by week, it reveals the castle behind me. So another 12 weeks ago, we should see the whole castle. - It really takes a long time to see something. - Yeah. I think that makes me wonder, would you actually create something like that if you were designing it, would you create it to gradually reveal so that it kind of holds you as long as possible before you start noticing things? Or would you want to make it so that people get a little bit of a taste, you know? So maybe your castle, like one turret shows up early, and then, you know, it reveals. There's some psychology there, I'm sure, that you could dig into of, what's the more enjoyable experience for people? How fast do they get to start seeing something from the pull-off calendar? - Yeah. Personally, I would have liked to have seen something early, just to say, ah, you know, I've seen something's happening, versus, basically, all I saw in the beginning was, if you look at the little peaks of the turrets, so I saw little dark, gray dots appear, and that was pretty much it. It looked like some, perhaps something a dermatologist should see before somebody's game, but, but it's maybe not exactly what you're hoping for. - Yeah, but it's starting to look nice now. So in 12 weeks, I should have the complete thing visible, and I'll take another photo of it. So that's this morning at the start of week 40 of 2024. Okay, so iOS 18 came out a couple of weeks ago now, and it had, like, almost snowy eye features of the interest to anybody. - Yeah. - If you are on the public beta, however, the developer beta has had a lot of the AI features for a while now, for about a month, I think, maybe more. The public beta, however, which is less dangerous to install on a device, is now at 18.1 beta two. And so the only device, I've been testing it on a 10S, which is not capable of supporting AI features, 'cause it's only the 15 Pro and the 16 Pro's can. And I have, but I do have an iPad Pro with an M2 chip in it. I think that was released in 2022, something like that. And so I've got one of those, and it's not my main iPad, so I have sacrificed it to the beta deities, and it is running 18.1 beta two. And it quite honestly doesn't have some of the more interesting features yet, but I have, I'm gonna link to a nine to five Mac website, web article that talks about what Apple intelligence features are actually there. Yeah, I don't see, I'm looking at the list. I don't see anything in particular. There's some writing tools added to the Notes app toolbar, which I have not tried yet. It says RCS is supported by more carriers, but I'm an iPad, so I'm not on the carrier. Some shortcuts, and that's about it. So some of the fun emoji kind of, you know, generative AI stuff is not there yet, but I suspect we'll see something in beta, public beta three or four. So that's what I'm gonna do. I've even tried any of the betas, or even... - I've been mostly not doing the betas I used to, and actually up until this year, I used to do the, whatever I thought was going to be the release candidate. I used to do it very, you know, like the weekend before, kind of get a jump on everything. But this year, I really haven't, and I think it's because the iPad I would probably do it with is my iPad mini, and it wouldn't be able to get most of the features anyway. So yeah, I... - Yeah, so I think I'm holding off until I can actually play with more of this stuff. Although if the beta gets solid pretty quickly, my M4 iPad would be a great device to play with it on. So I might start doing it a little bit earlier than general release candidate. Maybe I'll get brave again. - Yeah, the public betas are pretty stable. I have not had any stability issues with public betas, so I'm pretty happy with that. I would, you know, I don't want to encourage anybody to do something that would damage their system, but... But for sure, the public betas have been pretty good. - Yeah. - Okay, I'm gonna take a snapshot of us when thinking about it. We both have very neutral faces, but that's okay. (both laughing) At least we don't have, you know, resting, you know, the bad word face. - Yes. (both laughing) - Oh, I do have a face that's gonna make me unhappy. - Okay. - You and I, well, I don't think you use Fitbit anymore. Do you still? - You know, I saw you put this in, and I put my comment in as the, it's sad. - Yeah. - I liked Fitbit, I used Fitbit. You and I both started off with Fitbit, the very first Fitbit trackers. And I used mine all the way up until about, on and off, up until maybe 2018 or so. And so, yeah, go ahead and talk about the demise of the Fitbit. - Yeah, so like you said, I've been using Fitbit since day one, 2010, I think. So that's 14 years ago, roughly. And I am currently using a Charge 5, which has been getting, which because of its backroom feature set is becoming less or less functional. It no longer does four counts or a whole bunch of stuff. The longer it's community challenges, but anyway. So they've been taking features, they've been Google since they bought Fitbit. I've been slowly degrading the enjoyment I've had with Fitbit over the years and useful man. And apparently this coming week, Fitbit.com is shutting down. Now this is not a shock. We've had several months notice. And in fact, a couple of months ago, I transferred all my history to the app, which to me sounds dangerous. Yeah, versus somewhere in the cloud, it's backed up by legit professionals and so forth. But Fitbit.com is going away. I mean, I assume Fitbit itself is going to go away soon and you just got to get a Google-ish, Google Wear kind of thing if you want it. But I think this will be my last Fitbit sadly. So for Fitbit.com, you can transfer your data over, is there a way to download your data? Or is it just hope that it transfers? Okay, so I think there's a two part answer. Part one is yes, if you have Fitbit Premium, I think if Fitbit Premium, you can download your data to some kind of a format that can be used by other applications like bringing it to a spreadsheet or something. I never subscribed to Premium. And so I transferred over to my Fitbit app. I did it for both, I think my Android and my iPhone. I forget. But it's not good whichever way it is I'm not happy. - Yeah, I did it. - Yeah. - It's not a question. - And because Fitbit, after they were bought by Google, they would've thought that their data export policy would've gone into Google Takeout like everything else, but it does not look like it does. 'Cause I'm out there now. I actually had logged into Fitbit, I guess a few months ago, because I was looking for data from 2013, which it still had in there. And I was able to get that data out. But now I'm just, I'm seeing if there's any way to get my data out and it doesn't look like it's easy if it's in there somewhere. - I'll poke around in it, but I am not confident that it's going to come out nicely. - Yeah, the whole, well, every time Google buys something, it's been kind of disappointing for the most part, including Google Boys and a lot of things that we have had a lot of usefulness and enjoyment from. A Google Voice is still around, it's just not the same. - I can't believe it's still around. It is one of those features that is a very useful product that I'm thankful is around, but I continue to be shocked that it is still around. - I hear you. - I hear you. - And I actively think about what would happen, 'cause I've had my cell phone number, my real cell phone number since 2002. I've had my Google Voice number since 2007, back when it was Grand Central, before Google even bought it. So it makes me sort of think to myself, geez, I used to think I was really connected to my real phone number, but I kind of feel connected to my Google Voice number now, too. I'd be a little sad if that went away, and I have used it on a number of things, doesn't start as much, so. - We do, yeah, same. - Yeah. - And it's still a good service, you know? I mean, a few things I think were taken away, but, and rightly so, they've been checking to say, hey, you're still using this number, and so I've been using it more often, and I've been getting a lot of spam text messages lately, so that's been fun. - Yeah, there was, I got about a dozen messages to other day and a half or so saying, hey, I'm interested in a party, and I'm like, yeah, I'm glad for you, you know. - I just thought you were holding a party you didn't want to tell anyone about, and I can totally understand that. - Yeah, so, but anyway, so farewell to Fitbit.com, it's not quite the sadness level of when my spot watch stopped working, but in a way it is, 'cause I've been using a Fitbit much longer than I use my Microsoft spot watch, you know, and got quite attached to it. - But I have just started the export process for my Fitbit data. - Oh, do you premium? - No, I'm just in the settings, I mean, a screen that looks like it hasn't been updated since 2014 or 2013, and I will put a link to it in our show notes so that if you want, you can see if you can find it, 'cause it is one of those things where you would like to have, but I'm kind of curious what I'm going to get, like what is the format that this is going to be in. So, we shall see. - Does it have a file, or you haven't started the process, so it hasn't exported yet, is that correct? - Yeah, yeah, it's currently working on it. It's at a whopping zero percent. - Okay. - So, let me hit, there's a little, okay, it's at eight percent now. So, probably by the end of the podcast, I'll have my data. - Okay. - But we will, we'll see. Like live demoing here that we're going over. - Oh, I'm trying to log in. Oh, maybe 'cause I converted, I can't export anymore. - Oh. - 'Cause I'm checking my password, I've done a revealed password. - Yeah, you fell for it. You went and did the conversion and... - Yeah. - Nope. - You know, this brings up a good segue though. You know, getting your data in a format, you can actually use is a lot harder than I think people think. - Yeah. - I have an app for iOS called auto-export or health export, I forget what the name of it is, but I've had it forever. And it will actually, this week I just, you had to do a regular last 30 days of activity export. - Right, right. - And I did not realize until after I had to do the export, that when it does an export by default, it spits out for, let's see, 30 days, all of the things I told it to spit out, it gave me 650 CSV files. - Wow. - Yeah. - 650? - 650 CSV's. It's got just like, there's a ton of data in there, including, for example, during the cooldown of my workout on August 28th, I have how much active energy I was spending per second, according to my Apple Watch. - Wow. - Yeah. It's sort of wild to see all this data. So I have no idea what you would actually do with most of it, but you can get a lot of data. So that's why when I do get this download from Google, I'm going to be very curious to see what format it's in and how accessible. I know Aura Ring, when you download from them, they try to give you as much as possible in JSON format, so that you can actually slice and dice with JavaScript on it, but other groups, we'll just have to see what we get from the old Fitbit or Google. - So I just found out why I was slightly distracted while you were speaking so eloquently, is that the app allows you to do a Google takeout. - Okay. - And so I'm doing that now. And for whatever reason, because I felt like it, I decided instead of one download, I'm not sure how this is going to be different. I'm going to do six downloads every two months, and then I assume it ends. And it says export one of six will start on September 29th, which is today, and we'll see how that works. And trust me, we'll meet the link, yeah, yeah. So that's how it works if you've already transferred your data from Fitbit.com to your phone, yeah. So that's happening, we'll see how that works out. - Ah, yeah, usable data, what a concept, right? - Well, and then with health data, we've talked about this a little bit before. I have no idea what you're supposed to do with it. - Yeah. - And that's sort of the thing where I track a lot of stuff and I realize usually after a couple of months or years, depending on how long it takes me to realize these things, that there's something actionable in a lot of ways. I think Apple is trying what their state of mind logging and Aura is trying what they're tagging to try to give you some insight into, hey, on days that you slept really well, you also had this tag or you also had this mood or, but it's not exactly rocket science, the stuff that they're telling you. You know, on days that you slept well, you didn't have caffeine or alcohol right before bed. That's not a huge shock. You know, days that you're feeling really well rested and ready, you had eight to 10 hours of sleep the night before, that's not a real shock. So it's sort of like, I think I've talked about how I do my daily assessment of the day where I give a one to five score with four and five being above average, three being average, one and two being below average. This is probably going to shock no one. I pulled that into analysis software a few years ago, coded it for a few things like what day of the week it was. And here's a shocker. Saturdays tend to be my happiest days. I don't, I don't think anyone would have been surprised by that. And then followed by Sundays and Fridays and Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, not usually my happiest days. So again, I don't know what you're supposed to do with some of this data other than just go, yeah, that makes sense. I'm happy around the weekend. I have more free time. - Well, here's one that is tangentially related to what you're just saying. - You know, the genetics analysis site, 23andMe. - Yes. - Which was, I think founded or co-founded by like one of the Google co-founders, wife or ex-wife. And it is apparently in a lot of financial trouble. And all of the board of directors quit like within the last week or two. And there's some, there's some thinking. In fact, let me see, are they publicly traded? - Sure. - There's some thinking that they may go out of business. See, stock symbol. Yes, they are a 23andMe holding. And I'm looking at like one year chart. Well, it wasn't trouble for a long time. Let's go to five years. So five years ago, it was trading at about $10 per share. It is currently trading at 29 cents. Let me repeat that, 21 cents US dollars. - That's not great. - No, I'm not a financial wizard. But I will tell you that sounds bad. - Yes, yes. I, again, I like you. I am also not a financial wizard, but this also sounds bad to me. And more importantly, I think, and I should say I am a customer. I don't have anything I think I'm afraid of being revealed in my genetic data, except that I am even to my own, even to myself, I'm shocked how Japanese I have genetic data. (laughing) - I thought they'd be able to do it. - Have you seen their last name? And it comes easily, I mean. - I thought there'd be a leap in my diversity than 98% or whatever I am in. I'm like, come on, you know? But yeah, there's not a light diversity in my genetics in 40. But the question now is for a lot of people who may have some, well, they may have medical things that if insurance companies solve it, their insurance policies may change, you know, that sort of thing. What happens to the data if this company goes under? Now, again, it's shared for us. It's 29 cents a share right now. - Yeah, you bring it up. And I recently had someone I know, and I'll keep this, you know, not talking at your well, keep it vague, just something that's right. - A lot of that, yeah. - Who found out that they had a new sibling through 23andMe. - Ah, interesting. - And the way they found that out was that they were getting emails from 23andMe. They had done the service years ago, and they thought, well, they thought it was a marketing email. 'Cause apparently when your share price is 29 cents, you send out a lot of marketing emails trying to get people to buy more services from you. And they eventually realized that these marketing messages were very insistent or insistent. And so they would actually read one of the messages and realized it was another person on the platform trying to reach out to them. - Oh, oh, yeah. - And after a couple of days put two and two together, found out they had a sibling that they never knew existed. - Wow. - And so that's the sort of thing where 23andMe goes under, the ability for those connections, and this other person had been searching. They knew that they had a sibling out there. So they had been actively searching. The person I know did not know that they had a sibling out there. So we do wonder about the public good nature of these things where not just the scary, who's gonna get this data, but will we lose access to the ability to find people that we have right now through these services? - Yeah. And I know that's not always a welcome discovery for people, but I think, well, I don't know for sure, but I would find it very interesting if that were the case, and I would be glad to have made that discovery. But as I said, no diversity. So I give it up an idea, diversity, any rate. Okay, now on to more interesting, well, maybe not more interesting, but happier thing. So, you know, I have not made much good use of Google Notebook LM, or Gen AI, or a large language model Notebook. But recently, they added a new feature, Google, added a new feature Notebook LM, which can take a YouTube video, or, you know, an arc-scar case for a podcast. Some of them, most of them are audio only. It can take the audio and create summaries and other kinds of data. I don't wanna call them a manipulation based on the transcript. I don't know what happens if you didn't do a transcript, but on our, as I said, on our recent one, I have an SRT file complete for it. So I had it go into it and sure enough, it did a pretty decent summary based on just what we're talking about in podcast 529, which I will post in our blog 'cause it's a paragraph, it's a lot of words, but it, you know, it got a couple of spelling issues, but that's probably mostly 'cause of my speech, but I thought it did pretty good. It spelled your name and my name right, which shocks me to know. (laughing) You know, it got like two Ls in your surname and got my name correctly with all the A's and everything. So I find this really interesting. You know, and I was, I was telling my daughter, you know, who's out of school now, you know, she's graduated a couple of times now, but I said, you know, for work, if you're trying to learn something and you know, a lot of stuff we learned through YouTube videos these days, you might just want to run it through notebook L.M. and have it summarize it for you. - Yeah. - And help bring up the high points and I think you can create table of contents and all kinds of stuff based on, you know, audio. So. - This reminds me of a service that I recently found that I recommended to some of my students because it looked useful. It's called explainpaper.com. - And it is a paper. It's basically, they call themselves the fastest way to read research papers. But you can upload a paper, highlight the text that you find confusing, like many things in academia are. And it will try to give you, you know, a large language model explanation of what that means. - That is fascinating. - And you can ask it questions and it will give you responses back and that sort of thing. So they have a free model that gives you, you know, kind of get started with it and everything. And then you can upgrade to get some reason to get blown and see your highlights and explanations kind of keep your things on track. - Right. - Yeah, there's a lot of data research tools out there now that are using AI and large language models for some interesting use. I have a document I put together for my students that has several of them. And explainpaper looked kind of interesting as one that would give you a little bit of help when you're trying to figure out what is this crazy wording is that these academics have. If you are not familiar with academia, we do not like to say things in the most direct, yeah, the most direct way we like to find ways to make things sound a little bit, I guess, more important than they actually are. My favorite one was a tweet this week by Robert. This was this week, yeah. Robert Pondisco and the question he's answering is why is academic writing so awful? - Yeah. - His responses, the opacity of academic prose arises from the epistemological imperative to operationalize disciplinary jargon, facilitating intra-specialized discourse while obfuscating heterogeneous interpretive accessibility and perpetuating a recursive dialectic of erudition and exclusion, which I am sad to say, I understand exactly what that means. So that probably means I've been in academia too long. - You know, in my misspent youth, when I actually did have a couple of published refereed articles, the writing style was just, it's like, ah. - Can't I write this an active voice? - No, it's just bad. I tell students that all the time where they go, well, this writing is really dense and some even think it's a sign of good writing. I said, no, it's just bad writing. And scientists are not great writers. They're adequate writers. They're good scientists, you know. - But yeah, I know. - But we don't get rewarded for, you know, using long unnecessary words and sentences. - Yes. - It makes it sound smarter. - Well, like I said, as soon as I read that tweet this week, I thought, I'm sad that I know exactly what this means. - Which is what he said, yes. - And I could put it in very much simpler wording. You know, it's basically, we try to sound smart and exclusive. That's really all it is, you know, but-- - I wonder if things like large language models, as it gets better, you know, I haven't really looked at a lot of its writing examples, but it's not bad looking at the summary of our, you know, podcasts from last week. I wonder if it will help teach people to write simpler and more clearly. - We could hope. I do think that will help in some places. If you actually use the editor tools, the way that they're supposed to be used, I think that will be the case. - Yeah, I remember Microsoft Word. You know, I haven't used much beyond a spell checker, but it had like a, not just a grammar checker, but a style checker years ago, and I haven't looked to see if it's still there. And it would grade your writing from, you know, K through post grad or something. And basically the larger the number, the less understandable your writing is. And it says, you know, you really want to keep it below a sixth grade reading level, if you want to be clearly and easily understood. If you're writing a 12th grade or college level, you're probably not doing such a good job. - That's what I thought my students, and we use tools like that, that do give those gradings and such, HemingwayApp.com is one that I like that's really something. - Fourth grade reading level, right? - Yeah, yeah, you want to have things that are easy to understand. Just because it sounds fancy doesn't mean it's good writing. - Absolutely. Oh, but that is that guy, if you can find the tweet or whatever and put a link in it, that's worth pursuing. (laughs) - Yeah, I did find it really interesting this week, but I had a lot of interesting things this week. That's why the bottom of the show notes are, you know, having a lot of interesting revelations. - Yeah, okay, the next one is not techy, but you put it in there, or is it techy? And I just don't know about it. - It's National Coffee Day. I think coffee is tech adjacent for many people. People get into coffee when they're trying to get computers to work, get out and build an eye to try to wake up after a long gaming session the next morning at work. So a lot of companies do run sales for National Coffee Day. So I bought way too much coffee this morning 'cause things run sale. But that is the nice thing of, you know, the whole being coffee, it will last a while. It doesn't go bad really if you keep it sealed. So it does, but it doesn't beat out go through drinking it. - I am not a heavy coffee drinker, although I happen to have a mix of coffee and chocolate in here right now. But in my youth, again, in my misspent youth, I had a job that had a nine, five, four schedule. It's meant you work nine days every two weeks. You work five days one week, four days the next, and your schedule has jumbled up so that essentially you work nine hours, nine work hours or count it for most days. So you're really there 10 or 11. And then every other Friday was off. This was for an an evil location. And so I started work essentially at six o'clock in the morning. And so I would get there about five, 15, slightly, I was young, so I wasn't really groggy, but you know, I could use a little pick me up and I started drinking coffee during that job, like lots of coffee. I was like breakfasters, I could meet with clients and coworkers and stuff in the morning before we got really got started. But anyway, after I changed jobs, that lasted for a little while and I changed jobs, and I quit drinking coffee 'cause it's not something to really enjoy all that much. Although lately, you had sweeteners like chocolate. Well, back then it was coffee, sugar, and cream. That's, you know, we didn't have fancy coffees back then. It was in a Navy cafeteria too. So it wasn't like a Starbucks in there back then. These days you probably do. But anyway, so I quit. And I forgot that coffee, caffeine is a drug. (both laughing) I forgot it's really has pharmaceutical properties. And when I quit, I was shaking for about a week and a half and my fingers like, hmm, do I have a motor and you're a motor problem here? - Every so often, I decide to take a caffeine break just to see what will happen 'cause I'm drinking caffeine, caffeinated beverage of my whole life, pretty much. It's rare for me. And what I have found is that if I go, I think the longest I've gone is 96 hours or something like that to see what would happen. - Yeah. - 'Cause, you know, physiological withdrawal is within, you know, hours to seven days or so. - Yeah. - And all I get is usually a very slight headache. - Anache? - Yeah. - But even that, if I wasn't, I'm often wondered if it's psychosomatic thinking I should be getting a headache 'cause after about two days, three days, and is anything gonna happen? And that's when I get that. But I do think it's useful every so often to just see how your body has accommodated for these things. But even if you do five cups a day, we just thought I was doing that then. - Yeah. That is a lot. - For a while, you know, and say, what is wrong? Why is he doing this? (laughing) - Well, I've become really bad at, I buy more expensive coffee. - Yeah. - And that means I don't put any sweeteners or anything in it 'cause it tastes pretty good on its own. And I do like flavored coffee beans. I don't like the flavor additives that a lot of people hate because they're the ones that are mixed into ground coffee. But if you actually get a roaster that will use flavored oils and things like that on the beans, those are really good, in my opinion. And, but the problem is that it can be a very expensive habit. So today, finding some places that we're doing buy two bags, get a third free and stuff like that, that's been useful for me to stock up. - All right, National Coffee Day. - Yep. - September 29th. - Speaking of deals, I have a couple of things that are a little out of order here. - Okay, let's go. - Groupon is still a thing. I had, you know, I haven't used Groupon in years. - I haven't used Groupon. - Some, today a friend and my wife and I decided to go to a local museum and I was thinking, you know, museum's a little expensive. I wonder if they're on Groupon and they were, and they were half priced. - Wow. - So, yeah, I bought it on Groupon. So, it's just one of those things. Now, I then looked up Groupon travel on something where I was thinking about, and they were about $50 more expensive than the rates at the hotel I was looking at directly. So, I'm not saying they're gonna be great deals and everything, but they still exist. So, if you're doing something like me where you're like, "Ah, hell, that was a little pricey "for a local this or a local that double truck." 'Cause you might be surprised there might still be things on Groupon that, you know, you could use. - Well, I remember when that was a heavy topic around a water cooler, you know? - Oh, yeah. - And then, of course, I'm retired now, so there's no water cooler, but even before I retired the last years, maybe the last five, six, seven years, I don't remember hearing anybody talk about Groupon. - Yeah, I think it was one of those services that a lot of people think went out of business. - I did. - So, like, 23 and me is about to. - Yeah. - And hadn't thought about it. I certainly hadn't until today when it came up with a search result. - Well, I'm looking for, I'm looking at it right now. Apparently, it knows your location based on your IP address. So, it's telling me that I can get a glass bottom boat tour. I can get six hair removal sessions for a discount. Oh, there's even a discount for Sam's Club membership for those who don't already have one. So, good tip, Groupon's, well, and I'm not gonna agree with this. It still exists and it still has some, maybe some interesting stuff. I mean, I don't see anything I want right in the moment, but one can never tell them not to finish scrolling. - And I do know that people have gotten burned, not literally, but figured it out from the bottom of the nest. So, be careful with it, but, you know, it might be some of those things you could just forget about. - Yeah, you're just working so, right? - Yeah, yeah. Speaking of things that I've forgotten about, or here's a weird issue that I may have solved. I am cautiously optimistic. I've solved a networking issue that I have been plagued with for years. - Uh-oh. - So, when I started buying internet of things, smart home automation stuff years ago, one of my first purchases was a set of smart plugs from iHome, the iHome SP5 smart plugs. And I bought them, and I still use them regularly. And I realized that every so often I was getting weird issues on my network, where certain devices just weren't responding. And I'd have to go around and unplug the device and re-plug it in with very annoying. And recently, last weekend, I thought, well, you know, my network had been stable, and then it got flaky, and that was, well, what did I change? I realized that some of those smart plugs that I don't always use, I'll leave them unplug, but I'm not using them. I had a few of them that I had plugged in recently. I thought I wonder, since they're about five to 10 years old now, if maybe they're having issues. And iHome shut down their servers years ago. So these things only work on HomeKit. They don't go through a central server anymore. So I unplugged one of them. And my network stability has markedly been improved. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than it was. So I, you know, if you're having issues, especially with IOT stuff and, you know, HomeKit devices and all that, check your older devices or just check your devices and maybe try one by one pulling stuff off your network and see if you have something that is misbehaving and causing annoyances across the board. But I think what's happening is these switches, some of them are just starting to fail. And they're failing by just letting the router with traffic and then the router can't figure out what to do and it just causes a massive problem, so. - You know, it's funny because, not well, there's two things, I guess two topics that come to mind. One is generally orphan digital products, hardware products of which there are many in place, including a NAS and old NAS device I had that was really cool until, you know, but it needed cloud service. And so when the company shut down, my NAS stopped working. - Yeah. - And the other thing is that, you know, what happens when, you know, your hardware is like, again, you know, this one was orphaned, but because the company went on what happens when your, your heart, like my Fitbit company, Google is going to be around for a while, probably longer than me. And I don't expect them to disappear, but they just sort of abandoned and discard services from their products, most of the ones they bought. You know, and it's like, hey, this is still a decent device. It's not even that old, I think it's two years old. So, ah, sad, very sad. - So another interesting thing and a mini review, you ever wonder if expensive toothbrushes are really useful at all? - I needed to replace my toothbrush. And because I had some extra money and I thought, I gotta see if this is anyway decent. I bought the top of the line, Phillips Sonicare toothbrush, the Prestige 990. - Wow. - Yes, it is expensive. That is slightly less than $400. - Wow. - Yes. - Now, I guess I did. I did this because I was curious. - Okay. - Is it actually good? Like, is it better? Is it the best tooth brushing experience I've ever had in my life? - Right, right, right. - I've not had a lot of tooth brushing experiences other than, you know, the regular brackets I've had, you know, and then a toothbrush reviewer. I will say, it's a pretty awesome toothbrush. But what is interesting about it is that you, it connects to a smartphone because of course it does. Everything today has to connect to a smartphone. - Right. - And it will show you where you are brushing your teeth on a little map of your mouth. - Wow. - While you are brushing your teeth. And it will guide you through not just the, you know, every quadrant here, do 20 seconds here, do 20 seconds there. It will literally like walk you around your mouth and then tell you where you should have spent more time or if you've got everything evenly, you can put it in different modes. So I have it on a white plus mode where at the end of two minutes, then goes back to my front teeth in the top and bottom and does an extra 20 seconds on those. And what this is really doing, I don't think is, you know, helping in terms of it's doing something cool through the app. It's definitely not AI powered. Thankfully Phillips has not gone down that road to try to say that's an AI toothbrush or something. It keeps me from getting bored in the two minutes of brushing my teeth, which doesn't sound like much, but, you know, I was talking to someone recently and they're like, yeah, my toothbrush does that. And I will get distracted and I'll forget where I'm at in my mouth and did I do this quadrant or did I not? 'Cause my mind will go, it's like, yeah, but when you're staring at your bone and you're watching yourself go around your mouth in terms of where you're at, you don't get distracted. So it might not be that great of a toothbrush from a technological standpoint. It might be very good for me, keeps your attention on the task that you're trying to do standpoint. But yeah, it's a nudge. Yeah, it's a nudge. It's a nudge in the right direction to actually do a good job. So I don't know, my plan is to have this toothbrush for a very long time since I spent a lot of money on it. And it does come with, I mean, it's got wireless charging. It comes with a little dock for you to charge it every week or so. It comes with a case that will charge it wallets in its case. So if you are a traveler and you're going somewhere, you can take a travel case with it. And so, but the brush heads are a bit expensive 'cause they're prestige brush heads. So they're like, they're like $10, $15 a brush head. But you only have to replace them every 180 brushes. And yes, it keeps track of how many brush cycles you've had with it. Every six, roughly every six months, roughly. If you're brushing once a day, but of course they say it's a brush twice a day, which I don't know if anyone actually does. - I do. - Okay. Well, then you would not get six months out of it. - Well, I also have, you know, my former dentist was also my cousin who retired recently. You know, when your cousin is your dentist, you tend to get a lot more, they tend to be a lot more judgy than the judgemental about you with their other patients. And it says, Todd, you really got to work on, no, no, no. (laughing) - See, this is why I'm glad that most of my relatives didn't go into professions that, you know, are the affluent professions that I might need to use, because if I had a dentist cousin, I probably would feel compelled to go there. But yeah, you get very judged, I would assume. - Yeah, yeah, but he was a good dentist. I mean, he's still alive, he's just no longer practicing. - He was a good dentist. And you know, I think he did a good job of keeping my teeth and gums, you know, relatively good, given my own, you know, poor habits at the time. My habits got much better because of him, I think. 'Cause he was more than a nudge, he was like a push. - Yeah. (laughing) - I was gonna say, he's talking about IOT, you know, things that affect you physically. I have a mini-stepper that I've requested for review. And it's, it'll come in someday, I don't know when. These things, you know, come when they want. But it has, apparently it has like automatic tracking and it's got a little, it's really tiny, by the way. It's not like a treadmill or anything. It's just a little thing that you can, you know, hide under your desk when you're not using it. Maybe I could use it while I'm on. Anyway, it's got like a resistance band, it's got steps that you can, and I was thinking about using it on rainy days when I can't, I started to walk in again because my MD, thankfully not related to me, that basically he said in a very nice professional and friendly way, "Hey, you're old and fat." You know? (laughing) So you should maybe do these things. So I am doing these things. But on rainy days, it's a little bit more difficult to get motivated and get wet and everything. So I've got these little, little mini-stepper coming in. It's got all kinds of little displays and things. I think it can transfer data. Yeah, records, your exercise, time steps, calories, distance at all times, I don't know if it can export, but at least it tracks it, you know, on device. So I'm looking forward to getting that in eventually. Okay, so I've got something before we get on to our final topic. I just added, it's called a mnemonic, not like the MN, but it's spelled the M, E, M, O. Anyway, as some of our friends know, John, as he often does, got me on a whole thermal printer kit. And so I've bought two, I think, and I've gotten a bunch of review. And this cube thing, it looks like a board, white board cube, is a really interesting printer because it, it looks like I remember how to open it because I've got it open. So if you pull it out, unlike other printers, it's got a, it's got like a, a roll, a physical roll. This happens to be posted notes. And so it's got a physical roll. And you just have Bluetooth or you can do wired and all that. The interesting thing is it's, so I've got, it came with sticky notes for this particular one, comes out on the top here. And it does an automatic cut. So it's a roll of sticky notes, but for whatever you print, you can print a long sticky note or short stick it. It'll automatically cut it as it comes out. You don't have to like manually, the other ones I have yet sort of manually care or cut. This one does the cut itself, which is kind of interesting. And so I've been reviewing it. It can also get a regular thermal sticky label kind of things versus post-it notes, but this one has post-it notes in it 'cause I don't have anything in print post-it notes. And it's supposed to be an AI component that I haven't tried yet. That's supposed to let you do, you know, sort of text to, the descriptive text to image, if you want to have a particular image or something generate down here. So I'm going to test that sometimes soon. I've already done a test print, so I know it works fine. The one thing I want to mention is, you know, a lot of these things that we get these days, they don't tell you the basics sometimes. Like when you plug this in, you see a power light on and I think it's green if it's charged. So I just thought, oh, it's fine. It's got a USB port right there. Is that a USB? Yes, USB port. And that's got a wrist, but what I didn't notice 'cause because they'll gun at these designers, I bet you can't see it on the screen. Yeah, a little tiny button, the same color as the case. I didn't even notice it was there. You got to turn it on, just to light on. You know, some things you plug it in, it's on, right? This you got to actually turn it on, but that's not anywhere in instructions. It doesn't point out where the power button is, that it needs to be simple things with big cloud lights here. But I'm looking forward to testing this mnemonic thermal print as well as the little star step thing. I hope it can export data. I think that'll be kind of cool. I think it doesn't, it doesn't, it's fine. Just something for any days. Okay, you've got something that sounds kind of both happy and sad coming. Well, so this is a follow up. This was kind of our last discussion topic. And we'll see how much we have to discuss about it, maybe not much. Notifications. I think I mentioned how I reset up devices typically and I try to avoid reinstalling a ton of things. And so my iPhone, after two weeks now, actually has pretty useful notifications because there's not a million of them. Previously, I had the notification summaries turned on. I had the daily, like the twice a day, I just feature turned on where it would give me all this. And I just never felt probably for the last year, year and a half that my notifications were in any way useful because there were just too many of them. Even if I pulled down the notification center and tried to go through them, it just got to be the point where, oh, there's 700 things here and I cannot, I just delete them all, who cares? I am one of those people that, when a thing wants to send me notifications, generally it's the thing I need notifications from. If I'm ordering food through an app and I need to know when the food's ready or something like that, my wife is very cutthroat about notifications. She hardly ever allows apps to send notifications. - Really? Interesting. - Yeah, and so I guess now that I've had this experience where being very mean about what I install and thus not having a lot of notifications and actually seeing notifications to be useful, I'm kind of curious, do you think notifications are useful, not useful? Do you, are you selective with them? 'Cause I think I'm gonna get much more selective than I was in the past about if something can notify me or not. - Well, it's funny you see that 'cause I've been, I've left it all these years on whatever default is for Android or iOS or iPadOS. And I'm looking at my notifications right now and I was wondering what, do you have like scheduled some return on, minus on? - I did. I did it for a while now, I don't have it anymore. - Oh, okay, so what is it that you're doing that's different from me? - I have fewer apps because I rebuilt my whole life. - Oh, got it, got it. Literally installed a quarter of the apps I had. Okay, one of the things that you can do is, in fact, I'm gonna turn it right now to see bundle non-urgent notifications, I'm gonna try that. I'm gonna try to, oh, and it gives me a list of things that can notify me, hmm, Derek? Well, maybe I won't turn this on, I mean, we better read this 'cause there's some things I want to know about. But to answer your question, I'm fine with the bazillion notifications because, and maybe it's 'cause I'm retired now and it's sort of exciting to be notified of anything. (laughing) When I was working, I was constantly bombarded by email and voicemails and things like that. And so they were just an irritant in general, that compounded personal and work. And now that I don't have the bazillion work messages I used to get, it doesn't bother me. And I suspect it's an age slash whether or not you're working thing. I mean, when I first became an adult and I got mail, that was cool. Because I can understand that, you know, you just, no one wants you and then all of a sudden you're starting to get stuck and it's interesting. Yeah, yeah, even that Google Voice spam messages I got was I'm using-- Oh yeah, I told you that you were having a party, that you knew we were having. Yeah, people from two different state zip codes, by the way. So. From different sides of the country. Yeah, it wasn't even in the same, yeah. No, wasn't even in the same region. Well, it's a great party. It would have been nice if you'd been there. I guess so. So to me, my notifications are not yet out of control. I will say that I, you know, I saw I have, you know, I've put up security cams and things and they send me a, one day, one early morning, I got a trigger on one of my cameras, which, you know, it's like two o'clock in the morning or three o'clock. And so I paid attention. I've heard a ping and what is that? It's a weird time to get a cam notification. So I looked and I saw this odd ghostly figure on the, you know, the little 22nd video. How the heck is that thing? And so I went outside and what it turned out to be-- and I have one cam on the ground for our pet. So I can check on our pet outside. And a small toad had placed itself in front of the security cam and, you know, because of night vision and all of that, you know, it was not doing color. And I think it was raining. So this ghostly image appeared in my cam and sent a trigger at like, you know, three o'clock in the morning or whatever it was. So that was sort of an interesting notification. I wish I had real AI thing that, you know, this is a threat. You should really pay them or it's just ignore it. I thought the payoff there would be greater if it was actually a ghost or something like that. You went out and that was just what it was. You got a ghost image. And like, it was a tiny ghost. Yeah, very small ghost. Tiny ghost. I should mention, you know, one other thing before I let you go is speaking of things to review. You know, I've had a, I've had a love-hate relationship with my HP printers over the years. Very speaking, I've really liked my HP printers. They're pretty reliable. They last a long time. On the other hand, their ink costs probably more than some rare blood types, you know. And, you know, it's very, and again, they've gotten really fussy about third-party inks. I think I told you about a year ago, when they, you know, when I stopped accepting firmware upgrades, I could continue using my third-party ink with my printer. I think I told you of some other friends. I'm never going to get another HP printer again. Well, I have one coming in for review. I didn't pay for it, so I have a review unit coming in. And it tells you straight up, hey, this, it comes with a three-month ink subscription. But I read a little bit about it. And apparently, when you set it up, you can decline that ink subscription. So I need to, I need to learn what this whole subscription thing really looks like. And so I'm going to find out. Hopefully, I'll be here in a little while. We'll be able to take a look at this whole ink subscription thing, and whether or not this is a printer that I'll eventually, you know, stop using, because I'm not going to subscribe ink, or I'll pay the gigantic amounts of money that they want for cartridges and continue using it. I should note, I have a HP printer right now that as I said, I stopped accepting firmware upgrades from years ago, so I could continue using third-party ink. And it's perfectly fine. You know, the automatic sheet feeder for scanning doesn't work as well as it used to. Actually, it doesn't work at all anymore. So this one, you got to manually flip pages if you're scanning, which is fine, which is what I do now. Anyway, ink subscriptions, it's like that logic to take mouse subscription you're talking about, and then decided, no, this is a really bad idea. - Yeah. - We'll see. Okay, John, well, I'm glad we're able to chat today. We're at a little bit different time than usual, but I worked out to everybody, I think. - Mm-hmm. - Well, we'll use podcast 530. We got to get swan and Don on to talk about their, their, what you wanna call it, Pixel 15 Pro. - Mm-hmm, okay. - But I'm gonna wait until after Android OS 15 is actually available. You know, they ship brand new phones with an, basically an old OS, so. - Well, I mean Apple did the same thing since 18.1 is really more interesting than 18.0, so. - Very true. - Yep. - Yeah, yeah, well, you know, the software guys have a big job and, you know, as always, I think software has always been behind the hardware curve. - Yeah, I agree. - Anyway, okay, gonna stop recording. Thank you, John. Good Dr. Westfall and I are signing off.
