Tech News Weekly Episode 238 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show. 

Jason Howell (00:00:00):
Coming up next on Tech News Weekly. It's me, Jason Howell. My co-host Mikah Sargent. And we start off talking with Dan Moore from six colors. He walks us through the big news from Apple's WWDC developer conference. Earlier this week, then we speak with Scharon Harding from ours Technica who talks through the EU new policy on requiring USBC for charging in smartphones. Very interesting stuff. Then Mikah shares his story of the week. Meta killed its wearable, but the technology from that wearable could signal kind of the direction for the future of augmented reality. And finally, I surprised Mikah with some choice images that I created with Dall-E Mini. You won't wanna miss it. That's up next on Tech News Weekly.

... (00:00:48):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Jason Howell (00:01:07):
This is Tech News Weekly episode 238 recorded Thursday, June 9th, 2022.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:13):
This episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by new Relic. That next 9:00 PM call is just waiting to happen. Get new Relic before it does, and you can get access to the whole new Relic platform and 100 gigabytes of data free per month. Forever. No credit card required. Sign up at new relic.com/tnw

Jason Howell (00:01:35):
And by net Foundry, reinvent the network and eliminate the wha by decoupling security from infrastructure to protect our applications and data with open source zero trust, grab your free swag and free tier. Now by going to net foundry.io/twit.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:52):
Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly. The show where every week we talk to and about the people making and beaking the tech news. I am one of your hosts, Mikah Sargent,

Jason Howell (00:02:01):
And I'm the other guy, Jason, how you say we talked to the people making a break in the tech news, but last week it was just you. So, right. Thank you. You're very well. I appreciate it.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:09):
You are here now. <Laugh> so that's right here right now. Right

Jason Howell (00:02:13):
Now. There's no other place I wanna be. You are here

Mikah Sargent (00:02:15):
To be here right now. Yes. All right. Let's get into, oh, look, my wires are all over the place behind my head. Let's fix that first <laugh> and then we can get to the news this week. So up first of course Apple has been holding and will continue to hold its worldwide developers conference. This is a week long conference that takes place mostly online. It is an event where Apple announces the next versions of its various operating systems and occasionally announces some hardware. Joining us today to talk about WWDC is one of the journalists who is there in person and is now back home safely. It's six colors own Dan Moren. Welcome back to the show, Dan.

Dan Moren (00:03:04):
Thanks for having me as always guys.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:05):
Yeah. Happy to have you here. So let's kick things off. Let's get the thing out of the way that people are always excited about. But the thing that I think comes secondary at WWDC, which is hardware. Yes, indeed. There was hardware announced to WWDC. What are we working with this year?

Dan Moren (00:03:22):
Well, we got two new laptops. I'm gonna put an asterisks next to new though, because we had a new MacBook air, which is based on the new M2 chip that Apple showed off at the event. And the new MacBook air has been redesigned. It's lost the classic wedge shape design. It's now just sort of thinner and flatter a little bit more like the MacBook pros introduced last year. It is using bringing back some other features. Magsafe, it's got itself a 10 ADP webcam, you know, a lot of stuff sort of been standardized around those MacBook pro models from last year. And then in addition to that, we've got a updated MacBook pro 13 inch also with an M2 processor. This is where the asterisks comes in. This model is it's based on the 13 inch MacBook pro that was originally rolled out with the M one a couple years ago, but it's not like the new redesigned ones it's using an older chassis. It still has that touch bar. It doesn't have a lot of the sort of more modern features in it that these other ones do. It seems to be predominantly there to hold down a price point. So it really seems like the air is kind of the big news here. Also new, it comes in four colors.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:26):
Can we call them colors? Yeah. Colors. Yeah. Silver space, gray

Dan Moren (00:04:30):
Starlight and midnight, which are two of Apple's newest colors, which are kind of slightly Goldy and slightly Blacky blue. I don't even know how to

Mikah Sargent (00:04:39):
Describe <laugh>. That's how they should name them. Actually. Do you want the slightly Goldy one or the slightly Blacky blue one lightly

Dan Moren (00:04:44):
Blacky blue one. That sounds good. That's catchy.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:47):
<Laugh> yeah. So new laptops and those are all powered by the new M2 chip. I think one of the big questions is how much more advanced is this chip over the first M one chip, the Apple's latest Silicon. Does it does it, does it blow things outta the water? Is it iterative improvement? What are we working with here? Well,

Dan Moren (00:05:10):
It's a little of both. They've kind of tried to split the difference here. There's a couple things happening. One they've obviously improve improved the speed of the cores built into it. And this is more of a mod, a modest speed boost over some of the previous, like going from Intel to Apple Silicon, which saw some really big performance improvements. This is a little bit more modest. It's a little bit like the year over year improvements in iPhone chips. A little bit closer to that. It does however, build in some new functionality in the borrowing stuff from the more powerful M one chips, which added like hardware accelerated video encoding and decoding. So you've got that. And then I believe it bumps it up to a higher GPU at some of the along some of the ways with a 10 core GPU. And the other big thing is that it removes the limitation that the M one had for 16 gigabytes of Ram. So it can now go up to 24 gigabytes of Ram. And I believe it has twice as fast memory bandwidth at a hundred gigabytes per second. So nice improvements across the board while still maintaining that good performance per wat that they're so interested in talking about sort of low power consumption, long battery life, but good performance to boot.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:17):
Nice. Okay. So, so some, as you said, I think that, that, that was what we ended up looking at. There was this sort of split the difference where I know some people going into it thought, oh, when Apple announces the M2, it's gonna be just a tiny bit of a bump. And some were wondering if it was gonna be blow away, but they, yeah, they did meet that sort of what is it, mama bear, I guess not quite baby bear, but mama bear right in the middle that, that works for some people and is enough to make that, that jump up. It was interesting that the smallest MacBook pro kept that old school design, but I think you're right there about the price point kind of being the big factor

Dan Moren (00:06:54):
And the, the same thing there with the M one MacBook error stuck around because it's holding down that $999 price point. So you can still get the like M one error that was introduced two years ago. And then the M2 error starts at, I believe, 10 99. So again, with Apple, they always like to sort of cover the whole lineup and have something at every different price point. And sometimes that means keeping around older models for a little bit longer.

Jason Howell (00:07:17):
And that means people in my position that wanna upgrade, always continue waiting. Cuz there's always that the, the the right one is the next one whenever that's coming. Yeah, exactly. Always,

Mikah Sargent (00:07:28):
Always. There's always a new one coming. Yeah,

Jason Howell (00:07:30):
Because that 13 edge with the touch bar, I'm like, seriously, if you didn't have the touch bar, I'd be jumping on that right now. But damn

Mikah Sargent (00:07:36):
It. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> a common question. I see. And it's one that we actually have here in the chat today, and I've seen this at least four times and by four times, I mean not the same person saying it over and over again. <Laugh> but four different people is that new M2 MacBook air and the new 13 inch MacBook pro with the M2 have nearly the same specs because they all are based on that M2 chip. So why would one choose one over the other? Do you any tips on which one they should go for? <Laugh>

Dan Moren (00:08:08):
That's a good question. I mean, I think the advantage seems to be squarely in the MacBook air category here. It has a lot of benefits to it, including it's got mag safe. It's got a slightly larger screen at 13.6 inches. I think the other thing that sort of comes into play here is that MacBook pro the, basically the only thing it's got going for it is that it does have the pass, the active cooling system. So it's actually got fans, which if you are concerned about performance might give you a little bit of a boost in that department, but honestly, the, the competition in terms of the MacBook error, with the ability to have those extra features, it's got the better webcam, it's much lighter you know, with a bigger display. I think the MacBook air to me is, is squarely right there.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:53):
Yeah. Or rectangularly right there, at

Dan Moren (00:08:55):
Least <laugh> right. Rectangularly right there.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:58):
Walk a walk anyway, let's move on next. Let's talk about software. We've we've gotten through the hardware, but software is always the big thing at WWDC. We get an announcement of a whole bunch of new fun features. And of course we don't have time to get through all of them, but I was hoping you could take us through some of the ones that after having seen them announced on stage and then sort of seeing what people are talking about, what are some of the big buzzy features across the different operating systems? So maybe you can let us know, you know, this one's for iPad OS or it's for all of them kind of everything in between.

Dan Moren (00:09:29):
Sure. Yeah. I, I think the biggest thing in iOS that really they, they let off the show with it. And I think the reason is it is big and flashy is the ability to really customize and personalize your lock screen. And Apple's taken an approach of basically stealing its best ideas from the Apple watch in this regard, essentially turning your lock screen into kind of a watch face. So that means the ability to customize things like the font and color of the clock that's on there. But it also means adding complications or in this case, widgets, basically little glanceable pieces of information that we can be pulled in from apps so that you can look down and see what the weather forecast is or how close you are on your fitness rings or what your next calendar appointment is all on the lock screen without ever having to open your phone.

Dan Moren (00:10:12):
And that's sort of married to this idea of a more, a more complex wallpaper system where not only do you pick like a static wallpaper image, but you can actually choose from say a variety of different faces, some of which are provided by Apple. Like there's a weather face that animates and shows you what the current conditions are, but you can also set it to pull from your own photos either like automatically on a rotating basis or from a specific gallery of things or basically a whole bunch of different customization options. So I think that's something that people really been looking forward to on iOS because it really, you know, sort of provides a personalization that hasn't been there before on the iPad side and sort of connected to this is also on the Mac, but I think it's a much bigger deal on the iPad side.

Dan Moren (00:10:55):
It's this new feature called stage manager, which is bringing some of the best parts of the Mac multitasking system to the iPad. If you view mul use multitask in the iPad so far, oftentimes it's limited to that split view mode, right, where you've got two apps and they're side by side, and that's basically all you can do while stage manager opens up the ability to do things like overlapping windows pairing apps together. So you can have sort of a workspace where, you know, sometimes maybe you're watching something and want to take notes. So you need to like put that, that screen underneath and like bring out your notes app and, and or maybe you wanna refer to something that's in one window while you're typing in another window. And it, it allows it to be much more free form in that regard.

Dan Moren (00:11:32):
It's still got some restrictions on it in terms of how it works. It's not quite as wide open as the Mac is, but it is something that obviously a lot of iPad users have been frustrated with the lack of power when it comes to multitasking. So that's a big improvement on that side. On the Mac side you know, the Mac, I think is interesting, cuz it gets a lot of the features that are brought across the board. It doesn't get quite as many features that are just like straight up Mac features. But I think the one that people are gonna be talking about the most is this new feature called continuity camera, which is the ability to use your iPhone as a webcam. Obviously we all remember there was a big Fu fora a couple months ago with the new Apple studio display and people complaining about the webcam quality, well, Apple apparently, you know, had something up their sleeves here and they're like, well, Hey, what if we let you use those great cameras on the back of your iPhone as webcams and there have been third party apps, most notably camo, which already have done this in this case, Apple's sort of counting on the fact that it's, you know, sort of legendary ease of use.

Dan Moren (00:12:30):
You just sort of put your camera and put on like a little Mount and there will be some third party mounts available that clips onto the top of your screen. And it automatically figures out and offers itself up as a camera. You don't have to do anything. There's no like pairing process or apps to install anything like that. And you know, obviously the cameras on iPhones are really good. They spend a lot of time and money on that. So bringing that to the webcam side on the Mac, I think is potentially a really big win. Plus it gets you features like center stage portrait mode new studio lighting effect all that stuff I think will go a long way to assuaging people who felt perhaps a little burned by the studio display webcam <laugh>. And then on the watch, which is the other major thing they talked about, they got a bunch of different things.

Dan Moren (00:13:12):
I think one of the most interesting because obviously the watch is a big fitness and health device is this idea of new workout views that take a variety of different metrics and surface them for your workout. So for example if you want to look at like heart rate zones, this is a thing that people training I often do where it's like, I know I want to get my heart rate in between this zone, right? This range of heart rates, pizza per minute, you can sort of figure out where you want to be and then set alerts that let you know when you're in that heart rate zone or if you've dropped below that heart rate zone. And then there's also more customization for workout types like intervals and stuff like that. So if you want to train to a specific program it's a lot easier to sort of do that as well as collect a bunch of other stuff about running. That is way too complex for me, like gr ground contact per second or something like that. Or all this stuff than me is not a runner. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:02):
I

Dan Moren (00:14:02):
No has no need for, but it, it seems impressive. So I feel like maybe I need to start running now is the answer.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:08):
Yeah. I just like the way you're moving your hips is, is not great. Vertical oscillation. Yeah. Vertical who knew? I didn't know. I thought that was like an oscillating, your verticals all over the place.

Dan Moren (00:14:19):
What are you

Mikah Sargent (00:14:20):
Doing? Bridge engineers needed to know, not me. The, the last one I want to ask you about, because I think this is a, this impacts everybody mm-hmm <affirmative> is the, and you actually wrote a piece about it that was published yesterday. Pass keys. Tell us about Apple's vision for a passwordless future.

Dan Moren (00:14:41):
Yeah. This is exciting stuff. They talked about this a bit at last year's WWDC, and I thought this was something, oh, coming years down the road. But this year they're really making a hard push on this idea of let's replace the password PAKEs are an industry standard. That is basically being developed by a consortium that includes among its board members, not only Apple, but other big players like Microsoft and Google and Amazon. So there really is some serious weight behind this and making it like a universal thing. The idea of Pasky is like, people have trouble with passwords, right? We all have a problem. You gotta make unique passwords. You gotta make strong passwords and it's hard to remember them. So you need a password manager and all of this has gotten very complex and we still have tons of security breaches, even though we've added things like multifactor authentication.

Dan Moren (00:15:21):
Well, PAs keys is a way to sort of get around all of that. Essentially it uses public key cryptography, which is this very powerful form of cryptography that underlies pretty much all of the encryption we use on the web. Like if you ever go to a website to do shopping and you see that little padlock, you know, that that technology that is securing your connection is based on public private key encryption. And so essentially you can go to a site, you can generate a pass key. All of this stuff is managed by the key chain on all your Apple devices. It's all synced between your devices, but it doesn't require you to remember anything, cuz it's generating like a very complex encryption key that is stored securely on your device. And the nature of how this encryption system works is that that key never has to leave your device.

Dan Moren (00:16:01):
Basically you'll try to log in someplace. And Apple has demonstrated that you can do this basically with one tap and like essentially that server or app will send a request to your phone and be like, Hey, I've got this really complex math problem that can only be solved if you have the right private key. And then your, you know, your, your computer does the little math problem and sends back the answer and it's like, great, it's you and, and you don't have to do anything. You don't have to remember anything. You don't have to write anything down. All of this is managed. You can don't need multifactor authentication. It's very difficult to fish or there's no passwords to be leaked from the server side, basically. So it's way more secure than passwords. Frankly, personally, I cannot wait until places start adopting this because I am so tired of managing all my passwords and getting all those notifications about, oh, we had another security breach. You gotta change your password again. So if you're sick of it, there's hope coming.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:51):
And I saw someone say that many people's passwords, if not most people's password is actually the forgot my password link on any website. Because every time they forget their password, they just

Dan Moren (00:17:03):
Go process. It's basically like a, like a one time password, essentially what you've done for yourself.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:07):
Yes, exactly. So this I'm very excited about. I, now I will point out, I've asked a couple of folks and I've been looking at the different the, the videos and things like that. I'm trying to get some information, hopefully at some point on the portability of past keys, because mm-hmm <affirmative>, there could come a time where you wanna switch your from iPhone to Android. I, I won't say God forbid, cuz Jason is here and he likes Android <laugh> and Hey,

Dan Moren (00:17:37):
You

Mikah Sargent (00:17:37):
Never know what if you need to have to keep that phone around to be able to do the, the pass key on, on her Android device.

Dan Moren (00:17:44):
I would assume. And I, I don't know the full details, but sort of based on what I've read between the lines, because this is a standard and because Apple demonstrated a way to log in on non Apple devices using a QR code, which is part of this whole standard you know, you essentially use your phone and you can log in on a separate device. I think the answer is then you're going to regenerate your Pasky like, like making a new password on your new device. Once you've been able to log in there, you should be able to create a new Pasky and have it associated with that new device. Ah, now it does raise questions. I, I don't know what happens. There's a great story. Somebody sent me that I wanted to write up about if you lose everything, right, your phone gets destroyed and like you don't have access to your other devices. I don't know what you do in that situation. I don't wanna let know what, like an emergency recovery situation looks like

Mikah Sargent (00:18:27):
For actually, if you have given up on a password entirely, you know, if you don't have that as a backup, then the only way to get in is with that pass key and your phone got eaten by a ground squirrel mutated in factory nearby as it happens as yeah. As often happens real risk. Yeah. People

Dan Moren (00:18:45):
Aren't talk enough about that. They

Mikah Sargent (00:18:46):
Don't talk about mutated ground scores. I don't know they've ever talked about it, but they should be, they should be. And we are. That's why we're, here's why we're here. Yes. now we are here now. Anyway, Dan, it always comes full circle. Thank you for joining us today. To talk about WWDC of course, lots, lots, lots that got announced. We'll be keeping our eyes on that. Folks can head to six colors.com to check out all the great work that you're doing there and stay up to date. But if they wanna follow you online or, you know, find your work, where should they go to do so?

Dan Moren (00:19:17):
Ah, yes. Well, you can find me on Twitter at DMoren. And my website is @dmoren.com where they'll find links to all the places I write and podcasts, including the great clockwise podcast that I do with Mikahevery week is a great as well as my my science fiction novels, which are prominently displayed behind me on a, on a shelf. So you can find links to those where you can buy those over at dmoren.com.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:38):
Excellent. Thank you Dan. We appreciate it. Take you Dan.

Dan Moren (00:19:40):
Thanks guys. Take it easy.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:42):
All right. Up next it's time for one USB connector to rule them all or so says the EU anyway, before we get to that though, let us take a break. So I can tell you about new Relic who are bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. If you are a software engineer you've been there, it's 9:00 PM. You just put on your slippers, you pulled out the bubble pipe, you've got the nice camomile tea. You're sipping it. You're unwinding. And then suddenly that is your phone buzzing in your pocket because something at work is broken and your mind's already racing, trying to figure out what it could possibly be. Is it the back end? Is it the front end? Is it global? Is it the server? Is it the network? The cloud provider, slow run queries. Did you introduce a bug in your last deploy?

Mikah Sargent (00:20:36):
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Mikah Sargent (00:21:31):
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Jason Howell (00:23:32):
Oh, well, you know, I gotta say I've been living in the USBC future for quite some time now and apparently a whole lot more people are about to experience this in a couple of years. If the EU well, seems like the EU is gonna have its way, the EU is making a lot of news lately as it's making moves to regulate various aspects of how the tech companies, the big tech companies are doing business. The latest move is in agreement to require the use of USBC charging in a wide swath of electronics and joining us right here right now to talk about the details of this agreement is Scharon Harding from Ars Technica. Welcome to the show, Scharon.

Scharon Harding (00:24:11):
Thank you. I'm so glad to be

Jason Howell (00:24:13):
Here. I'm glad to have you here. Thank you for hopping on to talk about this. So this story definitely caught my attention. I'm an Android user been you know, in, I would say in the, in the Android world, USBC has been a port technology for charging for data transfer for quite a while it took a couple of years for all of the Android devices to kind of move over. And now it's to the point to where, if you get a USB, you know, an earlier form of USB port, it's, it just feels archaic. And like, what the heck are you doing? Apple of course, different company. They have different standards there. So we're gonna talk about all that and how this USBC requirement in the UUA in the EU actually impacts all of that. But first, tell us a little bit about this agreement specifically what it calls for exactly and kind of how wide that net goes.

Scharon Harding (00:25:02):
Okay. Yeah. So what's been announced this week is a provisional agreement between the European union's parliament and council outlining what this USBC mandate, so to speak will look like. So what they decided is across the number of consumer tech categories. So we're talking smartphone, digital cameras, tablets handheld video game consoles, e-readers earbuds, headphones, headsets. Any of those products that have wired charging will have to offer USBC charging by the fall of 20, 24 is what they're looking at. So the parliament and council still have to formally sign off on all this, but once the law takes effect, laptops will have 40 months to comply as well. So also in this agreement is what they're calling a harmonized charging speed for devices in those categories, that claim to have fast charging and also in the agreement, the E decided that vendors will have to provide information on charging characteristics, life charging speed. And when shoppers buy one of these products in those categories, they should have the option to buy it with or without a charger.

Jason Howell (00:26:11):
Okay, well then that's, that's a lot more than just the USBC requirement specifically. So I'm happy you kind of split that out as well. That's important. What what was the driving force like? Is the EU talking specifically about the why here are they, you know, I mean, obviously they mentioned they mentioned, you know, e-waste as one example and, and, and all that, but do they spell that out exactly like what the driving force is for this?

Scharon Harding (00:26:40):
Yeah, so e-waste is a big one according to the EU, they believe that chargers account for about 11,000 tons of EWAS per year. Mm. So that is definitely a, a big driver. The other driver behind it is the idea of giving consumers more choice and more information. So this has actually been a long time coming. Parliament has been pushing this for 10 years and in September you might have heard the European commission also made news as it announced its plans to enact legislation around this. So we've had some time to kind of wrap our heads around this. But it also, in terms of the why and the idea of, you know, giving consumers more information and power the EU believes that shoppers will save up to 250 million euros a year on unnecessary charger purchases. And then, you know, by giving consumers information on things like charging speed you know, they believe it'll make it a little bit easier for consumers to make the right purchasing decisions. So they don't have to, you know, end up buying a new one down the line and throwing that one out. Anyway,

Jason Howell (00:27:44):
Yeah, I know. Well, I mean, you know, here at twit in particular, like we are, are practically swimming in technology. And so I'm sure we all have, like, I have a drawer in, in my office just around the corner and the middle drawer of this filing cabinet is filled. Like, you can hardly even close the drawer cuz I've got so many chargers and cables and that's what we're talking about as far as E EWAS is concerned, but not everybody has that. Like I realize that we kind of live in a, in a, you know, we work here at a company where our business is technology, not everybody's gonna have that technology. Like did they make any, any sort of comments or claims around what companies I don't know might might do in that regard? Like I'm, I'm assuming a lot of companies are gonna be cutting down on the chargers that they include in packaging, but those chargers are still necessary. Did they address that at all?

Scharon Harding (00:28:39):
I mean that is a, a concern, especially, you know, I'm sure we'll get into this as we talk about Apple. Yeah. And all the lightning chargers that are already out in consumers homes and in stores and in the tech ecosystem. So I think that is a big point that companies and people that aren't so excited about this are bringing up, but I think the, the EU stand their government stance is that, you know, this is what will ultimately be right for the consumer and it'll help them also make better decisions. So like you and me have all these cables, their ideas that, you know, someone who's not as tech savvy can just buy the right charge or buy the right cable and they won't have a problem. Cause that's part of the reasons why some people end up with all these different cables, they think it'll work or it'll have the right charging speed and they find out it doesn't, that one goes in the drawer, they buy a new one. So, right. That's kind of the idea here

Jason Howell (00:29:28):
And you never quite throw it away because you never know you might get that device somewhere down the line and that's the exact cable that you need. Meanwhile, I haven't even touched anything in that drawer for years. So as I said at the top Android devices in particular been using USBC widely for a number of years now, Apple, as you mentioned, seems to be the company, at least as far as smartphones are concerned that, that is likely to be impacted the most here. Has there been any sort of response from Apple in reaction to this cuz I mean, that, that seems to be the headline and a lot of the, the pieces that were written about this is uhoh, Apple's gonna have to make some big changes in the next couple of years.

Scharon Harding (00:30:08):
Yeah. So Apple hasn't responded to this week's news yet, but it has commented in the past. Like I said, this has been a few years coming mm-hmm <affirmative> so, you know, Apple uses it lightning chargers as you guys know for iPhones and the base model iPad. And so it stands for years now, it's been that such a mandate as the EU creating well stifle innovation. They've also pointed to, as I kind of just mentioned in an increasing e-waste of lightning chargers cables, adapters, those accessories all start becoming useless and that it could also confuse customers. So they say, I mean, I think, you know, <laugh>, it might actually make things simpler down the line and a customer can learn USBC versus lightning, but that is something that Apple has said. So in 2021, actually Apple said there are over a billion active iPhones in the world. So that gives you an idea of the scope of the ecosystem of charging parts that we're looking at here that could potentially become useless. That said the EU has responded to those concerns, at least partially they have noted that Apple could technically keep its lightning or any other proprietary charging port or connector. It wants, it would just also have to offer us VC

Jason Howell (00:31:21):
<Laugh>. And if we know Apple, we know they hate buttons, they hate ports. They're not gonna add two ports on their iPhone or I don't know, what do you think they're not doing that they would rather go completely pointless and yeah, yeah, completely right. Just go fully wireless charging and that sort of stuff, which I guess would be one way to get around this, but that, that might carry its own other consequences as a result. One big question that I have about this is just about the technology itself, right? Like you mentioned, just a few minutes ago, they've been working on this for 10 years. If you go back in time, 10 years ago and envision a world where they actually created this rule, this law, whatever it's gonna be 10 years ago, what was the port that they would've like mandated then?

Jason Howell (00:32:07):
And here we are 10 years later and we probably now through now eyes looking at that would go, oh my goodness, I'm so happy. We aren't locked into that port. Like USBC is five years old already, by the time this is in place, it's gonna be seven years old. So it's gonna be a seven year old kind of technology, port technology. And there will be a time somewhere down the line when that is outdated or that there, or there is a good reason for that to be, to be replaced. Is there any kind of thought or, or long term view as far as that's concerned? You know, as far as this just kind of burning out at some point and it ma doing more harm than good, I guess, is where I'm going.

Scharon Harding (00:32:49):
So the good news is that the EU says it's open to evolving and adapting the policy as technology develops. So should the EU find a technology that it, it believes is better for the consumer and that's the key like the government has to

Jason Howell (00:33:03):
Agree upon, right. They're deciding. Yep.

Scharon Harding (00:33:05):
Right? Yeah. So if, if they find a technology like that, that they think will serve consumers better than S V C, they say they're open to changing the policy and doing that. They even say, you know, that they encourage tech vendors to come speak with them and work with them. They've noted that they have tech engineers on the commission. So they say that they're open to, you know, changing it, they, their goal is not so to make it so that USSC is the ultimate last ever wire charging option.

Jason Howell (00:33:32):
The one portrait rule them all as mic seven <laugh>

Scharon Harding (00:33:35):
Right. But I could see why, you know, people or companies might actually become less interested in developing new wire charging techniques. You know, you think about, you know, how many resources will companies be wanting to invest in R and D for a future that might end up being used across products and won't be a differentiator. Yeah. And when, you know, when S V C becomes very prominent in their related accessories in everywhere in everyone's home. So there is something to consider, like wondering if it will stifle innovation, like inadvertently, because people get so complacent and it will become a differentiator per se. But the EU says, you know, we're, we're open to evolving with the times.

Jason Howell (00:34:15):
Yeah. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see how that plays out. And again, we've got a couple of years leading up to that, so a lot to develop there. And then I, I think my final question has to do with this is, you know, this is a requirement in the EU, but there's, there's no way that Apple just taking Apple as an example, is gonna create two different versions of the iPhone, right. Like one with the USBC port and then one with the lightning port. I mean, I don't know, is, is it possible that this regulation in the EU impacts worldwide? I mean, I think, I think undeniably it's, that's probably what's going to happen, but what do you think?

Scharon Harding (00:34:50):
Yeah. I mean, you know, you bring up wireless charging. So I would say, like, let's not forget that, you know, it's not quite at the point, I think, where we'll wanna convert completely to that due to how challenging it is to make that efficient in terms of transferring power and data. But there that is something still open for vendors to work with and play with in terms of innovation. And so in terms of the spreading globally, you know, or, you know, I could speak to the us or I am, of course you know, I took the E the EU like 10 years to get to where, where it is now. And as of right now, I'm not seeing that level, that level of lobbying and organization in the us mm-hmm <affirmative>. And of course, you know, big tech and the idea of free enterprise has an extreme amount of value in this country.

Scharon Harding (00:35:36):
But there is a big organized push for right now in the us that I think is worth comparing against is the right to repair. Cause we have seen gains there. New York state is on its way to having the first law requiring right to repair for digital electronics. So that does show us that it's possible to pass laws in the us around, you know, this kind of topic around consumer electronics, but it's, it would be incredibly challenging. It would require a lot of work in organization, and it's gonna see a lot of resistance from big companies with a lot of money and a lot of influence just like the right to repair has seen. But you know, I still think the policy could still have influence in the us. Of course. You just might see companies seeking things into their own hands. Like last year, France passed law, requiring tech vendors to provide repairability ratings and vendors like Samsung and even Apple just started sharing their repair manuals, including outside of France.

Scharon Harding (00:36:29):
So that's, that's a possibility that companies just might start, you know, taking their own steps toward it, without the law getting involved. And there's also the possibility of, you know, standardization, like we've seen with other technologies H D M I display for and such where we see big tech companies coming together and developing their own agreement without getting the government or legal mandates involved. And I think, you know, it's also worth noting that this law going in the EU get, get going, sorry, this law going in the EU does have a lot of Americans and consumers talking. So yeah, if opinions and desires start to shift, that could be a driver for product change as well.

Jason Howell (00:37:07):
No question. I mean, I think, you know, everybody who has these devices has felt the, the tug that that happens when you've got a device, but you don't have an easy to find charger somewhere or whatever. Just the fact that there are so many different standards in charging and in other facets of technology. So we've all felt what it feels like to have that, that device and the wrong thing. And so that's a pain that everybody recognizes so we can all appreciate that there's some movement there. I certainly do well. Scharon Harding really appreciate you hopping on to talk with us about this. Scharon of course writes for ours, technica.com. If people wanna follow you online, where can they find you?

Scharon Harding (00:37:47):
Oh, believe it or not. I don't use any social media. So the best place to go is our technica.com and check out my articles there.

Jason Howell (00:37:55):
I'm I'm jealous. <Laugh> that sounds delightful.

Scharon Harding (00:37:58):
<Laugh> yes. It's a simple life. Yes.

Jason Howell (00:38:02):
Right. And actually it's pretty easy. Just stop using social media if you wanna go there. It's not that easy. I can tell you that firsthand. Scharon, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time. We'll talk to you soon. Good.

Scharon Harding (00:38:12):
Thank you guys.

Jason Howell (00:38:13):
All right. Take care. All right. Up next, we're gonna get to our stories of the week, but first we wanna take a moment. Thank the sponsor. This episode Tech News Weekly is brought to you by net Foundry. Networking has traditionally been handled by dedicated teams and personnel. You could say net network security has been deemed too important to leave in the hands of developers. One of our sponsors that's net Foundry believes differently. Secure connectivity is too important to be taken away from developers. It's actually forced dependency and stifled innovation and business velocity or unnecessarily trades off security. For those benefits, therefore net Foundry created and maintains open ZT providing an open source free and easy way for the world to embed zero trust, networking into anything. It provides everything you need to spin up a truly private zero trust overlay network in minutes across anything directly in your app, on any device or in any cloud.

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Mikah Sargent (00:41:41):
Week time. Yes. So Apple may be known for its well it's different devices, of course, but in particular, when it comes to wearable devices, the Apple watch kind of reigns Supreme in the category of general wearables. It not so much for the very specific situations like folks who are after who are runners. Those typically are the garment watches that people will go after mm-hmm <affirmative>. But it's not the only company that is working on wrist wearables. And there's just a, a story published on Bloomberg about one device that meta, which was formally known as Facebook was working on. And this device was an Apple watch rival that had two cameras. So the Apple watch has precisely zero cameras. <Laugh> yeah. This device had two cameras. There was a camera on the front that was located below the display. And then one on the back that would sit against your wrist now. Oh, okay. Bloomberg says that that second camera was so was made so that users could remove the watch face from its strap. So I guess like the watch puck itself could come detached from the strap. So it kind of like clicked into place it come detached, and then you could take pH take photos with it, so you could lift it up and take photos with it.

Jason Howell (00:43:14):
Okay. All right.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:16):
But the more, yeah, so exactly. It's like, wait, huh. Because all I can think about is how our skin has oils. Yeah. And

Jason Howell (00:43:25):
They would've, it's smearing up the

Mikah Sargent (00:43:26):
Camera. Yeah. I've heard that lens and oil. I don't know what they were thinking. Maybe there was something there, or maybe not, because now they're not doing this. Right. So they've, they've hold the development of this device. But one of the other things, and one of the more important things is that they were hoping to use this device for what's called electromyography. So for folks who aren't in the know, which is probably quite a few people, electromyography is looking at the electrical signals from nerves. So our nerves obviously are just a S it's like we have wires inside of us. And these wires communicate the, the central nervous system sort of can send out messages throughout our whole body. And, and that's how I'm able to do this weird thing I'm doing with my hands and arms in front of a camera.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:11):
And the idea is that if a device can read the signals that your brain is sending to the different parts of your body, and in particular, your wrists are connected to your hands, the wrist bones connected to anyway then you would be able to take that information and apply it to virtual space. Yes, because meta, the metaverse company of course is concerned, is not concerned about, but is interested in the ability to interact in virtual environments in ways that are less limiting Facebook, which is now meta is big on the way that they've got. So they've got the Oculus quest too. And one of the things that they love to tout is its ability to just use your hands as controllers, the little cameras that are all around the device itself are all looking and they can, in some cases I find it's not very good, but it's okay.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:12):
Recognize your hands and then recognize the movement of your fingers. And the idea is that, or the thought is that obviously the more friction you add, the less likely it is that a person is going to want to do any given task care. So strapping on an Oculus quest headset, and then figuring out how to put on those controllers and hold them just right, and make sure that the wrist straps are on and that you then have to learn these controls, all of that adds friction to the experience. So if instead, all you had to do was wear a watch that you already had, or maybe in the future, when you buy an Oculus quest two, it comes with two wristbands. So much easier to just slide some wristbands on, put the headset on. And the wristbands along with the cameras are both working together to figure out what your fingers are actually doing.

Mikah Sargent (00:46:03):
And suddenly you have a lot more information about the interactions that you're doing. That's fascinating. Right? So it's a pretty cool idea. And what's fascinating too, is that the Apple watch has some accessibility features where I don't think that, and don't quote me on this because there are, there are a few ways that, that exactly how this could work. I don't think that they're using electromyography, meaning I don't believe that they're reading the electrical signals in your wrist, but instead, what I believe is happening is they've got these four sensors on the back of the Apple watch, and they've got all of these lights. And when they shine that light into your skin, they use those sensors to measure your blood or your, your pulse, which they can do by seeing how the red kind of grows and, and shrinks. But then also your blood oxygen level by how red your blood is.

Mikah Sargent (00:46:56):
And a few other things that they're able to determine using those sensors, but while they're lighting up your skin, they can look at the tendons that run through your wrist down your hand, yeah. Down your arm. And so there are actually accessibility features for the Apple watch where making a fist or doing a pinch will actually control things on your Apple watches device on the Apple watch device. So that is kind of another way of thinking about it. You could then put on a wristband that is just lighting up inside of your wrist and looking at how you're moving your tendons. That's another kind of technology that could take that could be used. So all of these companies are, seem to be working on ways to make it seamless for people to use augmented reality glasses or VR headsets or mixed reality devices. But it appears that the company is not interested in taking this project, which was internally reportedly called project Milan.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:55):
However, the company is working on some other devices. So even though they've halted work on this wearable Bloomberg says they're still working on multiple other wrist worn devices. And so they are while this one's no longer on track for production, which was targeted for release in spring of 2023 they will probably go to work on the other, the other wrist worn devices that the company is working on. And you can kind of get some insight on where maybe the company is going based on what, what we know about this one, according to Bloomberg, again it said that the watch included a notification center, a lock screen. It didn't have a built in app store, but you would manage apps and features from your Facebook account. And then you, of course, could post details of your fitness activities and achievements directly on Facebook or Instagram, like Instagram stories.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:50):
And apparently also had Spotify built into it as well. So interesting. What the company is working on, even if the device doesn't end up launching, because we do know that the company is working on some other ones that we could see it said that the removable watch face had a gold colored casing. It had two buttons on the side, including a long pill shaped one and a small circular control, which is a lot like any other smartwatch out there mm-hmm wifi GPS, and even a cellular connectivity with an EIM, which is a lot like again, other wearables, 18 hours of battery life, et cetera. So com it would've been a competing smartwatch from meta. But I think that the more important overall story here is that this wrist worn electromyography device definitely seems to be something that Facebook is, is, or meta is sticking with in terms of paying attention to that technology.

Jason Howell (00:49:53):
Here's what this makes me wonder. We also know that Apple is working on its own AR and VR stuff. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and the Apple watches a very popular, very ubiquitous wearable out in the marketplace. Like if Facebook is here, I have to imagine Apple's there too. Yeah. Yeah. And Apple's thinking about like, how can we take the other devices that you already have and empower those to make this experience better? And if they do it well, they do it in a way where, because you're right. The friction is, is kind of the killer. Yeah. In, in all of this, I feel like, but Apple has the ecosystem and the, you know, the, the real, the people who love their Apple devices have it. All right. Yeah. And so if Apple does it, well, it's like ambient computing. Yes. It's like, it just kind of adds to the experience and improves, improves what you see when you do put on the ski goggles or whatever they're gonna look

Mikah Sargent (00:50:50):
Like. Yeah. And I was just thinking too, I dunno how I didn't think about this. Your Apple watch can measure. Yeah. ECG, right? That is an electrical signal. Yeah. You touch the side and that forms the circuit so that the, the part that's touching your wrist is the one side of the circuit. And then your finger touching the other side is the other side. So it already can measure electrical impulses from the heart. So then why couldn't it also use those same contacts that you have against your flesh to measure the nerve electrical signals? So who knows? They may already have some implementation of the Apple watch that is reading the nerve communication going on in your

Jason Howell (00:51:28):
Wrist. They might just need to make the case for by the way, if you have one Apple watch, you have half, as many as you need. <Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (00:51:36):
You need,

Jason Howell (00:51:36):
We've created a new watch for your ankles. Oh

Mikah Sargent (00:51:39):
My gosh. The ankle watch

Jason Howell (00:51:40):
The ankle watch

Mikah Sargent (00:51:42):
Or the, the eye ankle. I don't know.

Jason Howell (00:51:44):
Actually, you gotta love it.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:45):
I am wearing two Apple watches today. That's because

Jason Howell (00:51:47):
You are, you're the user, I'm the guy. No surprise, but you're the guy.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:50):
This one is running. The beta OS and this one is not, this one is the watch that I actually use, but this one has the, the secret software on it to, to see how it's working. So, yeah. Yeah, I guess, yeah,

Jason Howell (00:52:01):
Here we go. We identify all eating glasses, all you need yeah. Are snow goggles or whatever they're gonna end up looking like, but yeah. That's interesting. That's really cool.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:10):
Yeah. All right. Tell us about your story of the

Jason Howell (00:52:12):
Week. All right. I like to think that my story of the week is interesting and really cool as well. We talked, I'm excited on this, on this show in the past many times, different ti different moments different times throughout, you know, the last couple of years about AI and AI's impact on art. And then of course, we've got Dolly that you, I believe had as your story of the week. Not too long ago, I, or it was an interview. I can't remember what it was

Mikah Sargent (00:52:35):
Interview exactly.

Jason Howell (00:52:35):
It was an interview. That's right. With some of the people who created the tool. Well, apparently there has been bubbling around a Dolly mini of many version of Dolly that was created back in July of last year by a gentleman named Boris DAMA, he produced and coded, coded this over the course of a single month. It was part of a competition that was held by Google and also the AI community hugging face. <Laugh> nice name. And, and it's out there. This is, this is an example of that AI image technology that everybody wants to get their hands on, but can't use, yeah. This is an example that you can use.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:17):
How do they, so is this actually Dolly?

Jason Howell (00:53:20):
I don't, I don't, I don't think that this is exactly Dolly. Okay. I think this is a system like a, like a, maybe it's a strip down version. I'm not quite sure exactly the the correlation between the full Dolly system and Dolly mini, but, and, and yeah, I saw your message in slack. John, it's really overwhelmed basically, this, this was created and I think it's been out there since middle of last year, but it's suddenly been discovered by, you know, everyone. And so it's getting really impacted. So if you actually go to the website, you're gonna have a hard time loading it. And actually it's, it's more impacted than it has been when I use it. When you're pulling it up on the screen here. And you it's just saying, please wait. It's not even giving you the interface, but anyways, do a search for Dolly mini.

Jason Howell (00:54:07):
It's on hugging face.co and you'll find the tool I was using it this morning at like six in the morning. And I was having no problem. So probably time a day, you know, how many people are using it and everything. But you know, the creators admits Boris admits it, quote kind of works <laugh> but the thing about these things is that the more you use them, the better they get, right? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> it's getting slammed. People are using this like crazy right now. And the more it gets used, the smarter it gets, the better it's gonna continue improving and everything. There are certain things that work better on it than others cartoons characters like that, that have more simple characteristics, definitely work well easier to decipher and replicate landscapes achieve better results because it's harder for the human eye to really pick out like, oh, that tree doesn't look perfect.

Jason Howell (00:54:59):
Or trees just kind of look imperfect, you know, as, as a whole. Yeah. And so it's harder to, to see that people like pulling in people Kermit me frog. Yes. Lots of memes out there right now about Kermit the frog. Right. but people you'll, you'll start to see a real breakdown. And you're like, well, I guess that kind of looks like Tom cruise <laugh>, but his face is all smear and everything. So it's not perfect, but you can play around with it. There's tons of different sites that are kind of featuring these. And if you're on social media, you'll see a lot of people posting the grid. It's like nine or 12 images. I went on a tear this morning and created a carousel of images to surprise you with Micah. I'm so excited. And so basically my, my and you could start to see it up here on the screen.

Jason Howell (00:55:43):
They were all Chihuahua images, but in the in the style of different artists. So who is that? That's Banksy. That's Banksy. Okay. Your eyesight is better than mine. This is Kevin. Is it Harding or herring? Keith. Oh, Keith. Okay. My eyesight is really bad. Apparently. I can't see that, that far away Chihuahua in the style of Keith Haring. There we go. You can read these better than I can. This is Goya. Yes. Yes. So this is Chihuahua, the style of God. Oh my God. Those ones are kind of terrifying. Those I know <laugh> I love it. They're they're the one in the top, right? <Laugh> go Chihuahua in the style of

Mikah Sargent (00:56:23):
Jo Johanas ver,

Jason Howell (00:56:25):
Ver, there you go. In the Frita collo.

Mikah Sargent (00:56:30):
Oh,

Jason Howell (00:56:30):
Those are pretty cute. I really

Mikah Sargent (00:56:32):
Like's. So for

Jason Howell (00:56:34):
<Laugh> Baquet. There you go. Whoa.

Mikah Sargent (00:56:38):
I love that one on the bottom, right? It's oh, it feels super. Yeah. what is the, it feels like it's cage

Jason Howell (00:56:46):
Almost go back to the basket. Oh yeah. You're back on. Oh yeah, totally. And then if you were on the interface, like if you actually loaded this up, you could click any one of these and it would full, full screen. Do you,

Mikah Sargent (00:56:56):
Can you rate them, can you say like, this one is a good one. This one's bad.

Jason Howell (00:56:59):
Oh, that's a good question. I didn't look.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:00):
That would be some sort of

Jason Howell (00:57:02):
Yeah. Thing for

Mikah Sargent (00:57:03):
The, for the brain to use. Yeah.

Jason Howell (00:57:05):
Yeah. And say this. So anyways, Rembrandt, you know, I did Andy Warhol and I just had a whole lot of fun. The, the one that didn't really work and I, oh, Picasso's good too. There's lots of real, I mean,

Mikah Sargent (00:57:16):
The Rembrandt one cracks me up.

Jason Howell (00:57:19):
<Laugh> that?

Mikah Sargent (00:57:20):
One's hilarious.

Jason Howell (00:57:21):
Oh, but it's so great. Like how cool that you can just type out a, a sentence and say, I want all this ridiculous stuff in a single image and you end up getting these selections.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:32):
I'm gonna save all of these.

Jason Howell (00:57:32):
They're not perfect, but they are pretty impressive. Yeah. And again, this technology, this type of technology, like we're early on this mm-hmm <affirmative> like, imagine how amazing this is gonna be in five years.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:45):
I wanna see Dolly do these now. 

Jason Howell (00:57:50):
You know, oh yeah. Like the real, yes. Like the full blown Dolly. I mean, yeah, man, I can't wait till we get access to that. If

Mikah Sargent (00:57:56):
It happens. Yeah. I signed up for access. But I don't know what their rules are. Yeah. So I don't know cuz that's the thing. I don't know if this person who made this got access to the Dolly tool set or whatever, if they posted it online in this way, I don't think that's allowed. So I don't know what they're doing here. If they just had a, a similar model or what, anyway,

Jason Howell (00:58:18):
I have to imagine it's allowed cuz it was part of a, a contest that Google held. Oh. In, in collaboration with whatever that site was I'm looking through my notes. Hugging

Mikah Sargent (00:58:31):
Face or

Jason Howell (00:58:31):
Yeah. Hugging face. Yeah. So it was a, it was like an official legitimate thing. So I don't, so I don't understand the relationship between full scale Dolly and this, but nonetheless, if you have a creative combination of things that you wanna see how a computer does on it, go for it. I did try plugging in like my Sargent in space and you know, a few others, I, I put Leo somewhere, but it doesn't like it has to be trained on images. Right. Yeah. And while you and Leo are very well known in tech circles, I don't know if the creator of this tool,

Mikah Sargent (00:59:06):
No reason. Why should

Jason Howell (00:59:07):
Have you into the yes, exactly. But I tried, I was like, oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:59:12):
If it could pull from like an image search and pull that into its own, you know, machine learning model and then take, or if you that photo or

Jason Howell (00:59:20):
If you could upload, if you could upload and say, these are a hundred images of me. Yeah. Or I happen to have a hundred images of me <laugh> so anyways, I thought that was really cool. No, no doubt. If you're on online on social media, you know, you're gonna be seeing a lot of these in Instagram and Twitter to find some

Mikah Sargent (00:59:39):
Seeing for a while peak hours,

Jason Howell (00:59:40):
But yeah. Try it out yourself and see what you come up with. And maybe your experience will be better than John's right now. He's still waiting. And even when you get through, you'll put through a search query and you hit go and like nine times outta 10, it'll pop back in error message that says we're too overloaded, you know? And you just

Mikah Sargent (00:59:58):
Kind of keep going, set an alarm for 3:00 AM.

Jason Howell (01:00:00):
<Laugh> play around with Dolly mini, lot of fun and just really compelling to this technology kind of improving and, and democratizing and everything. So there you go. All right. All right. Oh oh, wait a minute. Where, where are you? A new demo will be better. Oh, maybe they're changing. It is now available. Okay. Yeah. So click that. Oh, there you go. Okay. So now you have your field. So what is what is the query that you wanna do? Oh, I have no.

Mikah Sargent (01:00:33):
Oh, oh, do you, you like bagels bagels

Jason Howell (01:00:38):
Bagels and space. Sure. I Don know. And it does take, see, so you get that error error message. And I was just like, hit enter. I thought I'm ready to go bagels. And even once you put it through, it takes like a couple of minutes. So it'd be hard to get a follow up on this, but I would just keep on going. I had like three or four different windows open

Mikah Sargent (01:00:56):
And just hop it's like stuff. When you try to order a pixel phone. Yeah,

Jason Howell (01:01:00):
Yeah. Or buy tickets on Ticketmaster. Yeah. Yeah. Actually they, they don't allow you to do that anymore, but anyways, try it out for yourself and yeah. Share, share what you come up with in the discord or IRC. Yeah. Let us see it. See it there. All right. We've reached the end of this episode. Tech News Weekly always enjoy doing this with you. Every Thursday. All you gotta do is go to TWI, do TV slash TNW and get subscribed, subscribed to the podcast. That way you'll get it automatically in audio and video formats. Also YouTube, if that's your preference, but TWI TV slash TNW is the place.

Mikah Sargent (01:01:34):
And if you'd like to get all of our shows ad free, while we've got a way for you to do that, you can check out club TWI, twi.tv/club TWI for seven bucks a month. You get quite a bit of stuff. First, as I just mentioned, you get every single TWI show with no ads, because instead you are supporting the show directly. You get access to the twit plus bonus feed that has extra content. You won't find anywhere else behind the scenes, outtakes and special stuff from us as well as access to the members. Only discord server. That is the place where you can go and chat with your fellow club, twit members. It's just like a bunch of different chat rooms, all grouped into one app. It's a lot of fun. Seven bucks a month, twi.tv/club TWI to check that out. Also, if you use Apple podcasts and would like to support the show, well, we've gotta wait for that for you to do that as well.

Mikah Sargent (01:02:22):
You just go into Apple podcast, you type in Tech News Weekly, and you find the audio version of the show. You'll see a button there that says subscribe for 2 99. When you tap on that button and subscribe, you'll get an ad free version of the audio feed. So that's a great way to help out as well. If you would like to follow me on social media, I am at Mikah Sargent, or you can head to Chi wawa.coffee. That's C H I Hua hua.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Check me out on Saturdays with Leo Laport, where we host the tech guy radio show. It's a show heard round of the world and answer your questions about tech and on Tuesdays with rose Mary orchard for iOS today, where we talk all things, iOS, tvOS watchOS homepas cetera, etcetera cetera. Jason, how, what about you?

Jason Howell (01:03:09):
Well, pretty easy at Jason. How on Twitter? That's that's one of the few social media networks. I, I update on a regular basis. So at Jason, how find me on Twitter. You can also find me on all about Android, Twitter, TV slash AA, every Tuesday talk and Android. And we talked about the USBC story and a number of other stories from the last week. So check it out there. Big, thanks to John here in the studio for chipping in today and doing all the things you do. But thanks also to Burke for testing our interviews before the show to make sure that they're good and ready for the live show and thanks to you at home or wherever you happen to be watching and listening. We couldn't do without you either. We'll see you all next time on Tech News Weekly. Bye everybody. Goodbye.

Mikah Sargent (01:03:55):
Bye.

Ant Pruitt (01:03:57):
Did you spend a lot of money on your brand new smartphone? And then you look at the pictures on Facebook and Instagram and you're like, what in the world happened to that photo? Yes, you have. I know it happens to all of us. Well, you need to check out my show hands on photography, where I'm going to walk you through simple tips and tricks that are gonna help make you get the most out of your smartphone camera or your DSLR or mirrorless, whatever you have. And those shots are gonna look so much better. I promise you, so make sure you're tuning into twit TV slash hop for hands on photography to find out more.