In this podcast I misspoke and introduced it as podcast 532. It is really podcast 531... Jon Westfall and I discuss:
- Trying out/reviewing the Comica EJoy Uni Pro Wireless & USB microphone
- Microsoft Copilot can now carry out persistent discussions. However, it does not have information about weather or news. Google Gemini, on the other hand, can answer questions related to weather and news.
- CNN.com trying a subscription plan again.
- iOS/iPadOS 18.1 with more Apple Intelligence features said to be set for release on October 28.
- After iPadOS 18.0.1., I can send/receive SMS/RCS text messages to Android phone users
- iPhone 15 & 16 Action Button super shortcuts in reddit.com/r/shortcuts
today is october six twenty twenty four this is multi podcast five hundred and thirty two i'm carugas award good dr. John last one yeah. I am here being as good as ever indeed and I have I have well I'm good but my my equipment has not been good this morning so the first thing that happened well there's so many things so many things so first thing is I'm trying to use this this new microphone which is it's supposed to be wireless but as you can see I've got a wire because I think the battery died looks very very spiffy but if it doesn't work in the way it's supposed to then I guess looks are not all they're cracked up to be yeah so it can work wired although I think it's power right now it also comes with a little dongle which I assume is you know like 2.4g or something which is what I was trying to do because I wanted to well not use wires so but I'll figure it worked the other days I'm not sure what's going on now but more importantly the spiffy USB hub USB C hub I've been playing with for a couple of days right here which is very nice by the way you know in addition to having all the hub features it also has a key charger hmm that's a mag say you know if it works a mag save or if you can see it's flat you can charge an AirPod or something so but and it's been working fine for about a week and this morning it decided that it could not do an HDMI out so I had to go unplug it and go find another hub so I could plug my display in to my laptop so I can have for folks who don't do podcasts all zero of you we have show notes on one screen and I have my laptop John may have a big screen but show notes on one screen and you kind of see each other and the other one yep but anyway so hub problem and then it turns out that this microphone has two USB options I'm not sure why you one is receive of course one is transmit wait and one is transmit so transmitting from here to there I don't know I gotta go look at it again let me look at it again microphone receive and transmit my why would the Microsoft phone receive I guess it's the audio but why would you receive microphone audio this way any who it's just there to annoy you and to make things not make any sense you know technology in general just doesn't always make sense one of my former students works for a technology company and first level support and the tales from that over the last two days just the last two days mind you today a person called asking about their extended service on their device and the four reps that I'm sorry I can't tell you that information but you can find it on your device if you go to settings and you look it's right there and the person said oh I don't have that device oh it was like so why are you what are you calling about if you are calling to know about your extended service on a device apparently you don't have and then yesterday it was a person calling because their computer which is five or six years old so it's an older computer it just hasn't been working right since the Ukraine war started and it just you know with the election coming up it's acting even worse so yeah I don't know how you you tell people that the geopolitical climate is probably not affecting their devices but you know technology just serves to annoy us all sometimes and sometimes you have some screwed loose it really annoys us in ways that we would have never thought yeah I think very interesting theories yeah what was the resolution for the person who was calling for a problem with the device that they did not have I don't think there was a resolution for that I think it was they kept pushing and I think they got escalated to tier two because the tier one agent couldn't give them any more information than they wanted for confidentiality and privacy reasons so oh I just I just wondered it was something like the person had given it a gift the person was complaining about it and it's trying to sort of you know third-party resolver but anyhow be that who knows be that is it so in any case I am trying to use this this microphone I will test it again during the week between our next podcast this and our next podcast to see why it wasn't working wirelessly but I kind of like it it's you know it's kind of a nice looking it's a nice looking microphone and it's got a volume control here for the microphone I'm gonna put it all the way up it's even got blinky lights blinky lights that does mean that it's better yeah length yeah and a spit shield as you can see although you know most low end microphones come with a spit shield these days which is real nice because it used to be they even the high end microphones didn't come with spit shields yeah did you know or pop shields I guess is what they're called okay but technical issues aside we are we are recording so yay okay one of our favorite topics of of late AI so Microsoft has some new co-pilot plus AI PC features for Windows 11 update I have not tried it yet to figure what's going on but I did update co-pilot Microsoft co-pilot for Android and and iOS because it now will do continuous conversation it'll know what you're talking about so if you ask it about you know hey I want to go visit San Francisco and you say and then blah blah blah and you just keep talking you say hey what's the weather going to be like in September it knows that you were referring to San Francisco even though you're not seeing which location based on their conversation one of the things I did find though that that co-pilot the app does not know it's not no weather and it does not know about news and then you ask why it says I don't have real-time information it tells you I don't want you to know the news the news is depressing why are you looking for news Todd and so what I asked it by the way was can you summarize the most interesting news about personal technology in the past week and you know gave me an apology and so forth and so on well Lisa didn't just say I am the most interesting news in the last week you might think so on the other hand Google Gemini will answer those questions and do a pretty decent job so I had an interesting experience with you know technology somehow being self-aware enough earlier this week I was looking at my spam filter on one of my gmail accounts and I noticed that it had caught a class action lawsuit notification and that lawsuit notification happened to be against Google oh I thought that is really interesting that that would go straight to my spam if I was a 10 hack conspiracy you know theorist on this I find that very convenient that that's the one that went straight to spam and you know all the other ones would not so good job Google I found it anyway you didn't get it up this is a bit of a tangent but since you mentioned tin hats and conspiracy theorists so many many many many decades ago when I showed up to UC Santa Barbara the first day I went there I went to the tallest building on campus which is the library eight floors I think eight floors high and you know I go up there is a fresh-faced country boy Santa Barbara is not a big city but you know still so I go up to the top and I see four or five people this school hasn't started yet or classes hasn't started yet this is like before classes start I see four or five people all sitting in study carols on the top floor which you know he has windows all the way around you can see that you can see everything it's really beautiful but they hit their heads down and they're studying and I'm like wow but the other thing that made me say wow is all of them had pyramids on their heads these were just frames not full you know not with full solid side just frames of pyramids on their head and for those people old enough they remember they may remember the old pyramid power theory where I think you sit in a pyramid or you have a pyramid in your head and you're able to think better and you're smarter but anyway I saw that remember this is not just one person this is like a group of people at study carols in the library all the pyramids on their head and I thought to myself you know I'm really in Southern California I thought you were saying I have found my people you know I feel like I finally belong somewhere now okay and and more of a tangent but so I come down to elevator I go down to elevator and you know I I go out and the library is I don't know what looks like now this is decades of mm-hmm I come out of the library and I'm standing at the top of the steps which is you know about I don't know 15 20 feet above the ground level and I'm kind of staring out into the mall which is in a student center one side and so forth and so on and I'm just kind of enjoying the view it's a very nice view there's very few people because again classes have not yet started this was in August and I'm just kind of enjoying the view and kind of taking in you know trying to understand where I am this is before we had GPS and phones and stuff so I think I don't literally know where I was and as I look left to right I see two people I'm gonna assume they're guys I'm just gonna say guys generically I see two guys walking towards each other but not to each other just how and they pass each other and both of these guys were in full guerrilla suits and carrying books as you would you know as you might think well I mean gorillas didn't you know they used books at that time they didn't have laptop shed I mean every gorilla every gorilla I see today has a tablet because you know gorillas very technically savvy but yeah you do see interesting things on college campuses I mean of course the gorillas you could argue if it was about ten years later they would have been part of the infamous change blindness video errands and colleagues where you know they walk in the middle of a frame and no one notices them because people are too busy counting the basketball going back and forth that sort of thing so but oh they didn't greet each other or acknowledge each other they just walk past like any two strangers might in a large open area territoriality Todd they're not going to acknowledge each other they both believe that that's their area so acknowledging that it's a dominance thing at that point and so again having watched this in again country boy right unsophisticate a little country boy just sort of standing there in Southern California thinking yep I'm really Southern California I'm pretty darn sure of it now yeah okay um so co-pilot is more conversation about lacks what it calls real-time knowledge such as weather news and Jim and I can do all of that so it was very disappointing mm-hmm on the other hand when I asked it to summarize the mobile use podcast I thought they did a fine job so there you go I am also having problems getting co-pilot to recognize the microphone on certain devices and I can't quite figure out why but there you go there are some things that you will just never know yeah I just put this with the way it does yeah okay and as you know I accept them as a necessary evil well maybe not a necessary evil as an optional evil definitely an evil yeah evil for sure so CNN calm which has been a pretty you know okay politics aside whatever you believe it's been a pretty decent free news source or a number of years they are now going to and I think most of it is still going to be free but it's still now it's going to have something called a what is it called premium features CNN dot com subscription plans for premium features um and it's going to be like three ninety nine a month or twenty nine ninety nine a year I don't even know what it didn't fall but what do you think John I I'm not planning to pay thirty bucks a year or whatever yet no I would not as well and I also you know this made me think a little bit about what I would be willing to pay for I actually went through my subscriptions earlier this week as I do regularly just to sort of see what I'm paying for am I okay with that and it got me thinking what do I want you know news I have Apple News and then through some institutional affiliations I do have subscription access to New York Times and Wall Street Journal so I look at those when I feel like it but Apple News gives me pretty much everything I need but what service I guess would you be willing to pay for that you don't have access to now the additional service that you would actually go for they are like yeah bring that to me and I will buy it but I don't think I need more news I don't think I need more music I don't think I need more entertainment I don't think I need from these other services I don't need more apps that all have subscription plans Wow that's an interesting question so tell you mine the one that I came up with you know if you search for virtual assistant okay services you find one of two things either used to be that you were paying by the minute or by the hour for an actual human who could be your virtual assistant and was virtual assistant for all these other people probably those were fairly expensive because you're actually paying for a human's time now if you search you find a bunch of AI virtual assistants that purport to do everything you need them to do I want a hybrid I want AI to be the first realm of virtual assistants so its lower cost but then based on what I tell the system and what I expose the system for privacy reasons a human can actually then step in to do some work so maybe I have an AI go through and look at my email and flag things coming up and put together a weekly schedule for me in addition to my outlook calendar just going hey you got a newsletter that said this was going on maybe you're interested in that and maybe you've got this going on or I know that on the syllabi for your class this is happening this week do you need some help with this or that I could feed all of that in there and then say you know I do have an exam I'm giving in a class coming up and I know kind of what I want on the exam but I need some research done or I need some you know ideas for it I could literally then say hey send this to the actual human you know the human assistant and have them spend a half hour coming up with ideas or proofreading or whatever I might want you know them to do and then it could come back through and sort of this hybrid model would be potentially very useful because then I'm not giving a human complete and total access to all of my stuff I'm also not relying on an AI that doesn't quite know things to do everything for me so that's that would be what I would pay for you could exist it right right I would just like an assistant not if you talk talking about assistance of various kinds I would like an assistant to solve life's little annoyances like the other day I went to go visit a friend at his office and they've got this new fancy dancy parking system where there's no humans involved you drive in you press a button you get a paper ticket and unbeknownst to you what it's doing is it's snapping a picture of your license plate which would be associated which is associated with your ticket and if the if you're visiting and a business or you know someone who can validate that ticket they can take your license plate number and and validate it for you except the camera doesn't work that well I chopped off the first character of my license plate which is three three character three alphabet of characters and three digits and and you just have to hold that when you come back down and another camera snaps your picture and tries to match it up with your now validated ticket and this is validation takes place not when you're going out just you know like my friend was able to just go on and validate it well it didn't it didn't validate me properly because it I guess it now had saw six characters in the fives I said oh heck with his four dollars I'll just pay for it you know I go through all the hassle of calling my friend or whatever so somewhere an evil person goes ha ha another four dollars he probably paid four dollars too you know yeah double they made a hundred percent profit but you know would have been nice to have like in the old days where you could either see our human person at a ticket booth at a parking booth or there was a called button to call says hey you know I've got this problem it's validated blah blah blah blah and there's a lot of little things like that like reaching even our our my my MD is part of a large system and in the old days you could call the MD's office and speak to an assistant or you know nurse or med tech or somebody in office and resolve something now you have to go through a call center which is sometimes overloaded and there's no way to reach them directly to like hey am I supposed to get you know am I supposed to fast for this whatever whatever whatever yeah you know you talk about parking and it reminds me of a story when I was in community college many years ago we had parking gates where you had to pay 50 cents to get out and one day I got the class and I realized that I did not have my wallet with me oh no and I thought well maybe I have 50 cents in the car in the ashtray like that and I didn't and so I someone had told me you know if you go up there and you hit the call button and you tell them look I don't have 50 cents yeah they'll let you out because what are they gonna do I mean you don't have 50 cents so you can't you know squeeze blood from a turnip so I I said I went up I drove up and I explained I said I'm very sorry I forgot my wallet at home today I didn't realize it's all I was at school I don't have 50 cents and the woman at the other end was very annoyed and literally asked me what I consider to be one of the dumbest questions anyone's ever asked me which was are you gonna forget your wallet tomorrow yeah and I said to her no ma'am it's been very inconvenient today that I forgot it so I'm not planning on forgetting it tomorrow and and she let me out because what else was she gonna do there was cars behind me but you know it just was one of those things so no I'm not planning on forgetting my wallet tomorrow because this has been a real annoyance today not to have my 50 cents no relation to the rapper by the way yeah yeah this predates him but yeah it's it's interesting to think about those new systems are supposed to be better and they're not that's why I said a hybrid model of a human and a computer might actually do what I wanted to do versus just one or the other yeah you know all of this automation it's all just money saving right it's no convenience there's no added convenience no matter what they tell you that's just all a lie you know what is interesting by the way speaking of services not doesn't answer your question but I just saw a news report on CNBC or something Amazon you know remove their automatic payment system from their Amazon go or Amazon fresh or whatever they're called their own stores their own brick and motor stores so you know you no longer just walk in and tap a card and walk out a few items so that's gone from their stores but they're selling that the other stores which I find really interesting so I'm I don't know if this is gonna annoy people or anything but it'll be I have not seen it anywhere here and I guess is because I don't really go to convenience stores anymore you know if I was still working I'd go downtown and pick up something drink or something at a you know at a convenience store but not something to do anymore all right so I guess we're both not gonna pay 30 bucks a year for I should not CNN tried this before it was called like CNN max or something and they tried to have a subscription before and they hired a bunch of news people as podcasters and that kind of blew up at them and you're crying yeah the only one that seems to be able to do it on a mass scale is Apple News and that's because most people get it through their you know a subscription probably I would assume there are very few people that are actually paying for Apple News as a separate a separate item I would agree I I have it only because I listened to you and I got the Apple one subscription and that is one of the four or five components of it and I really enjoyed I must note I'm not sure I'd pay separately for it and there are some things where you still have to pay separately to get the full access yeah yeah I'm sure like Wall Street Journal or something mm-hmm okay something I know we've been looking forward to is iOS 18.1 and Apple intelligence so Mark I think Mark Gurman Bloomberg News is saying this is going to happen just before Halloween October 28th mm-hmm and then yeah Gurman's also saying that November 1st will be the new Mac M4 Macs and the new iPad mini 7 so I'm really I'm really torn on all of this I do think I'll probably get a new M4 Mac because right now I have an Intel 2020 MacBook kind of like something newer because you know there's more more things I can't do on the Intel chip that are compiled for M4 M1 and above things like running your own large language models and things like that if you want to run llama or something like that locally you need an M4 or an M1 at least so I think I'll probably get that I've been looking at my iPad mini 6 and I use the thing every day in fact it's literally sitting right next to me right now and even though I love my M4 iPad Pro that I got earlier this summer I usually just use that for work the Mac mini is or the iPad mini is everything I do at home and recreationally so I don't know it's going to be real hard for me to decide if I want to upgrade or not I'm already going to be spending a bunch of money on the M4 Mac but I do use the iPad mini 6 so unless there's going to have to be something really great about the mini 7 I think to push me to do both the Mac and the mini 7 so if I do that then basically all of my Apple devices are 14 months older or newer and I'm kind of spent a lot of money just refreshing a bunch of things right right right yeah I think for me the the iPad mini 7 or whatever they call it is going to be a yes only because like you I use my iPad mini 6 just a lot it is just super convenient you know it's just a great little device and I and and it was last it was not last but it was first released three years ago so you know it's kind of justifiable I think to replace a three-year-old device these days for me true and I'm okay with that I am more go ahead probably not gonna get refreshed anytime soon again it's not a yearly refresher it's like a three-year refresher so I guess by that rationale I think at any time in the next three years I'm gonna want an iPad mini then it doesn't really matter when I get it because it's gonna be the same price and it's gonna be the same mini for probably the next three years true true yeah no one the one event not one adventure one plus of moving got here from your Mac book to an M4 model is the Intel Macs don't run or can't run Apple intelligence features so that'll be up for you I think that'll be a big deal definitely that is definitely the reason why now I'm thinking about swapping it over yeah yeah so 18.1 18.0.1 by the way just came out and I'm gonna skip a little bit about well not I guess we already talked about it but one of the things I discovered after the iOS or actually iPad OS 18.0.1 not 18.1 18.0.1 is that I can now send text messages SMS or RCS to Android phone users from my iPad and you know just I think you've always been able to do that and I think I know why okay you have an RPE iPad right but even without even without LTE I've been able to yeah because I always had text messages on your iPhone you had to enable text messaging forwarding to the iPads I didn't do that go into messaging in fact you might I've actually noticed that more recent iOS devices don't require it which I'm not sure what that is you know Apple makes these changes to messaging and never bothers to tell you what they're doing with it but I've gone into messages on my iPhone and there's a little thing that's text message forwarding that's about three of the ways down and it says you know what devices do you want it to receive text messages from this iPhone and I have my iPad my MacBook Pro and my iPad Mini on there and with that I can send and receive SMS and RCS messages with that I got to go look at this because I have I have not set that obviously and it's never worked on my iPad my Wi-Fi only iPad until like 18.0.1 but I can do it now and also interesting is that it differentiates I guess maybe by carrier device probably carrier whether it's messaging plus SMS or messaging plus RCS mm-hmm and it's different night again I don't know if it's a carrier thing or what device that person is what Android device that person is using but that is a very welcome thing for me because you know a lot of people use androids mm-hmm and the green bubble people as we refer to them yeah well I have a green bubble person that texts me regularly and they had been on an older LG Android device and the pictures and video that they would send was just atrocious I couldn't tell what they were taking pictures yeah yeah as soon as they so they had them move to a Samsung Galaxy and then when RCS went live all of a sudden it was dramatic how different you know there cuz I think it was a combination of the camera was not set for low resolution and they were sending very nice videos and images so yeah yeah well RCS is a big player in that yeah yeah for getting inter inter device multimedia so anyway I'm very happy with the 18.0.1 I've been playing a little bit with the AI stuff and 18.1 beta public - but you know so far really a lot of the stuff that's amusing like some of the I think AI emoji stuff isn't there yet isn't yeah public beta - so I'll be curious when it launches if there's still going to be the waitlist you know right now when you're on beta you have to sign up for a waitlist for the Apple intelligence features and I've not heard anything about when it goes live if everyone will have access to it or if you don't have to get on the waitlist or not yeah real good point not all of your friends even if you get 18.1 and you're going in with it you might not have everyone else on your list able to access all the same features just yet yeah did I have to apply for Apple intelligence be it a separate I think I may have not did you mention it we'll have to wait and see okay so the last thing I think you you've found something as a new iPhone 16 pro owner I'm still a 15 pro so okay so this one is just kind of getting funnier and funnier so I use iOS shortcuts which is you know yeah I use them for a lot of automation and one of the things that the action button on both your Apple watch and your iPad iPhone can do is trigger shortcut Apple by themselves only allows you to do a handful of other other things like start a workout or go into you know silent mode or few other toggles but one of the things is use an action you know go to a shortcut and recently in the reddit r/shortcuts community people have been creating and sharing out these insanely complex shortcut button action button shortcuts and it's getting to the point where it's like one button to rule them all you know there's people that have figured out because you can do so much with shortcuts in terms of checking different things you can do if then till the cows come home and so for example things like yeah here's one that when you're in your work focus hence you're probably at your office it does this when you hit the action button but here's another one where when you're in the home focus it does something different and when you're on your home Wi-Fi and the home focus it does something even still different and you just see these conditional branchings of eight million operations to to do one button for us some of which are just simple menus you know open up a menu and choose one of whatever you want from that menu but I've just been really enamored and finding it kind of funny the way that some of these are getting literally out of hand in some cases one yesterday was action button shortcut has gotten out of hand and it is these just I mean the screenshot of it I will send you I'll put it in our notes and you'll just look at it and it's too small obviously to read but it is getting crazy out there but if you have never used shortcuts and you're not quite sure what you want to do with shortcuts yeah you can go over there and you can learn a lot you can also learn about different IDEs that are available to create these shortcuts more efficiently than dragging and dropping so you can use a product called jelly cuts which lets you code in text instead of having to drag and drop everything so yeah if you've never used shortcuts and you have that action button and you wish it could do more than just one thing well it surely can't so you know I use shortcuts you know for people that are curious I use it for things like tracking little counters like I wear contacts most days but on certain days I don't so I have a little shortcut that just auto increments a counter and every time I put in my contacts I hit that it it puts a number another number on it when it hits 30 I realize oh it's time to change my contacts because I've hit 30 wears on them so there's a lot of things you can do with shortcuts if you've never played with them but like I said it can do a lot of different triggers and a lot of different if/then so if you want something to happen every time you hit your home Wi-Fi or you want something to happen every time you go into your work focus or your sleep focus I have a shortcut that every morning goes to my journal and puts a note in about what was the current weather forecast for the day and what time did I wake up and yeah just kind of fun stuff like that to start off my day you can do a lot someday there's going to be a little RFID wire around the edge of the of your of your of your contact lens which was not going to be visible but you can you know it will it will like every day your app will ping the RFID and say hey how many days have I pinged you it's 30 well somewhere over here I do have a whole collection of NFC tags that I bought a few months ago that got 50 of them for I think ten dollars and I still try to figure out exactly what I want to use them for but that's also another fun thing to play around with because you can use NFC tags to trigger a shortcut so you could have it when you tap you know anywhere you put an NFC tag no to turn on the lights turn off the lights control home kit whatever you want it to do actually what I should do is I should I should have it set to you know I'm doing I'm still in having retired in 2022 I'm still in Swedish death cleaning mode and a lot of times I'll pick up something and I don't throw it away or give it away or whatever at that point and what I should do is put a little tag in there and says hey revisit this object in six months and you know then I can if I forget where I put it I can go find it or if I pass by it is his hey it's been six months since you know you put the tag in your library make a decision now I have a funny story for you so speaking of shortcuts that are that are have long if then's on the other hand at you as a our programming language wizard may not be old enough to remember a programming language called a programming language apl and apl you probably don't you've never heard of it I've seen I've heard of apl but I never knew what it stood for oh yeah yeah a very practical people I love a good acronym you know so apl I guess still is a mathematical programming life and before our way before our before s which as you know for whatever reason preceded are even though that makes no sense at all before us which came from AT&T Bell Labs there was a there's this thing called apl and you need their special keyboard because the keyboard needed to have these mathematical symbols on them to program and it was such a concise mathematical programming language and a lot of us used to write our statistical routines in it instead of using SAS or whatever because it was just back there this is back in the days of card punches and things and this you could do it on the interactive terminal which was mind-blowing back in these days you could write for example a linear regression routine and apl in one line mm-hmm you know it had it it had built-in matrix operations so you know a times B is not a you know one numeral times another numeral is one matrix times another matrix which made like so much easier yep and anyway yes so we still have like you know the kind of the geeky people of which I guess I am the geeky people we used to have little fun there was no awards and but just sort of personal competitions like can you write this in not just one line but in the minimum number of characters possible there's no comments yeah but anyway apl I had to buy a special ROM for my IBM PC because my being PC could not show those characters on a screen without this extra character generator ROM but anyway I have digressed one one of the things that we mentioned I think last week that I wanted to bring up again because I've still haven't tried it is Google's notebook LM ability ability to take text and have it create like a good person podcast discussion that sounds reasonably human in the sense that these these AI podcast entities say things like um and have inflection and all of that I have not tried it but my my old friend and and one-time guest the podcast guest dr. Kim Bridges poured in some old papers and things into it and it's it's pretty interesting what it can do I listen to it and it was it was very interesting to listen to these like papers reimagined by notebook LM as a discussion between two entities have you tried it yet John I I have not but I think thinking about it in that way I do have a bunch of texts here and there that I could try to try throwing into it so I might play with that this week or next as I am sometime we're right in that sweet spot of our semester before advising starts and where after you know I just have some midterm stuff going on and we do have a fall break Monday and Tuesday where I don't I'm not in the classroom so never know it might be added to my to-do list yeah um let me see let me just let me go to his list just to give you an idea flavor of some of the some of the things he's he's poured into it oh here's one that would interest John one is using an LLM to create our code okay um and that's that and then he took some classic papers including George Miller's the magic number seven plus or minus two I'm sure you're very familiar with yep and also if you're familiar with Jared Diamond the ethnobiologist dilemma this is pretty and I guess from my perspective it's not that old but for your perspective 1989 so it's got some it's got some really he did some really interesting stuff with it and I that the thing that I came away with is I'm not sure I would really read the ethnobiologist's dilemma I probably would but because it's a conversation now based on that paper it is much more accessible to a layperson like myself yeah I should know Kim is a retired professor of botany so this is very much in this wheelhouse but uh I thought it very accessible because I listen to it saying is this listenable to a you know lay a layperson and be somebody's kind of critical of AI voices and I thought it was pretty good on both counts so any rate that is that and we are at the end of a podcast unless you have anything else John I don't think I am not except I'm going to figure out why this microphone well why everything why my doc isn't working and and all kinds of other stuff my doc I did have to change out the doc which because I really like this doc it's a really nice little doc I think you know with the with the the Qi charger and everything on it super okay I've got a bunch of toys that I'm playing with that that we'll talk about and some future I got another body cam this one has a display which is really nice and a much much better clip which is easier to clip on so I tested that yesterday took a walk and took some videos and photos and I've got a vertical mouse and testing and of course this microphone and I should have some other stuff coming into oh I should know one more thing I have been complaining about my Microsoft Surface Pro 11 keyboard right this is the not the Bluetooth the real expensive one that's Swen God this is the magnetically attached keyboard that came bundled with my Surface Pro 11 it's the lower end but I thought it was fine you know laptops are not figured in I use laptops for literally decades I hate that keyboard if the the key travel is just too short for me it feels like I'm tapping on solid wood table in my opinion instead of typing it on a keyboard 90% at a time it's not recognized by the Surface Pro remember this is built by Microsoft for the Surface Pro anyway it's just a miserable experience all the way around and I think I think oh and it comes with a slim pen so yeah I think the keyboard itself is about a hundred and fifty two hundred dollars and it's but bundled with the slim pen I think it's I think it's about two fifty and I say I think because mine came bundled the keyboard the slim pen and the Surface Pro 11 came you know for one bundled price which is why I got it like that but anyway I hate it and so I just got in for review a third party it's called Omotan oh M-O-T-O-N keyboard Bluetooth keyboard for the Surface Pro 11 and I love it it clicks in magnetically like the other one but it doesn't need that magnetic that physical connectivity between the connectors it just happens to be you know what you use because it's also the key the screen cover it has a slot for the flex pen but it doesn't recharge it which is fine I don't really use a flex panel that much it turns out and I have a third-party Bluetooth stylus for the Surface Pro there works great and more importantly I can type on it comfortably and it's $40 or somewhere there in under 50 so you know a fraction of the cost of Microsoft and it my opinion just works better so I'm really happy with it and with that happy note I will say goodbye I will talk to you next time
