This Week in Tech episode 1 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, this is the slate Revenge of the Scr[CENSORED]s, April 17th, number one. Take one.
Okay let's see if we can get all three of you guys.

00:19 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Hello!

00:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's Kevin Rose.

00:27 - Robert Heron (Host)
Hello!

00:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's Robert Heron...

00:29 - Kevin Rose (Host)
What's up, Robert?

00:30 - Robert Heron (Host)
Hey guys.

00:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And there's Patrick. Can you hear me, Patrick?

00:32 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Yeah.

00:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So say hello to Kevin Rose and Robert Heron.

00:42 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Hi Kevin. Hi Robert.

00:34 - Robert Heron (Host)
Hey Patrick.

00:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, that's cool! How you doing. Patrick, you're exhausted, or did you get some sleep?

00:53 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Oh, I got lots of sleep. I got like 16 hours of sleep Friday night. I drove from here in San Francisco out to Denver, Colorado.

00:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Patrick, what did you do? You drove from where?

00:57 - Patrick Norton (Host)
I drove from here in San Francisco out to Denver, Colorado.

01:03 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Non-stop?

01:05 - Patrick Norton (Host)
No, I stopped in fabulous West Wendover, Nevada.

01:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And why did you do this?

01:13 - Patrick Norton (Host)
It was actually two things. I was meeting up with the fire guys to go see a premiere of Dust to Glory, which is an off-road movie by Dana Brown, the guy that did Step in the Liquid. Basically, he put 90 cameras down in the Baja 1000 a couple years ago and captured 250, 300 hours of video and turned it into a two, three-hour movie, which is pretty impressive. And it turns out it was a showing for Centrix Financial, who are some people we've supported in racing with Wide Open Baja at the Baja 1000 this year, and they actually flew out Dana Brown and his co-producer and some of the key people in the film to talk to everybody after showing the movie, which was kind of a trip.

02:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So anybody who's curious what Patrick Norton is doing these days? It's driving in the dust.

02:09 - Patrick Norton (Host)
No, mostly it's writing for Extreme Tech and ExtremeiPod.com.

02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute. There's something called Extreme iPod?

02:17 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Extreme iPod. ExtremeiPod.com? Well, I'll give you three guesses, Leo.

02:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But how extreme can you get with it? What's the most extreme you can do with an iPod?

02:29 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Well, gee, we actually are just starting up a contest getting people's pictures in of stuff they're doing with their iPod and wherever they're doing it, and I expect to be deeply offended and I'll let you know and forward anything interesting to you as soon as I am.

02:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that kind of extreme, that's very different, as long as we're catching up. What are you up to these days, Robert? Everybody knows Robert Heron as the crazy lab rat who specialized in video and would come on the show with his whacked out hair and tell us the latest thing in video. You're not on TV, though, these days, yeah.

03:05 - Robert Heron (Host)
No, not latest thing in video, or you're not on TV though these days. Yeah, no, not these days. I am working, though, for Extreme Tech and pcmag.com doing the same same kind of thing taking over their HDTV lab actually that's fun putting together a new facility and, at the moment, just grinding through some of the latest and greatest in HDTV so the only person who's gainfully employed in television here would be Kevin Rose.

03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, you are too, Leo. Oh, oh, that's right, that's right, but it's in Canada. That doesn't count. No, it counts. What's going on in G4? What is it in the show now? The Attack of the Revenge of the Show. What is it?

03:34 - Kevin Rose (Host)
No, they've changed the name. Obviously, The Screen Savers is no longer, but it's now called Attack of the Show.

03:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You sound so thrilled about this. Oh yeah, now I want to call this podcast the Revenge of the Scr[CENSORED]s. You think Charles Hirschhorn's going to sue me if I do that?

03:50 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Oh yeah, You're probably going to get a nice little cease and desist or something like that soon, I'm sure, Leo.

03:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll call it TRotS then. That way, nobody will know what it is. There you go. How about that? Excellent, I like that idea. So Kevin is also working on his own what's called the Vanity Project. It's his own offline TV show. Tell us about Systm.

04:13 - Kevin Rose (Host)
No E Systm no E, it's S-Y-S-T-M dot org and it's basically Systm is going to be kind of an old kickback to the old Screen Savers where I focus on one particular subject per episode. So it may be uh, I don't, I don't really want to give away our future episodes, but it may be something that has to do with, uh, you know, a hardware hack or some really cool open source, uh, you know, linux distribution that we really want to show off and how long will the episodes be?

04:41
I mean between 15 to 20 minutes per episode Cool.

04:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cool. Is it going to be you or Fu, or who's going to be involved in this?

04:49 - Kevin Rose (Host)
So far. There is a few people involved. There is Dan Hewitt, of course, is going to be kind of co-hosting it with me, cool. So this is kind of the successor to The Broken, or is it kind of different? Well, we still want to go do another episode of The Broken. That was a lot of fun, but this is kind of the grown-up Broken, a little bit more mainstream, more mainstream, you know no 40s or anything like that.

05:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're talking about the malt liquor that you began the first episode with and made it, which means that we could never play the full episode on The Screen Savers. That's right, we're going. We had to cut before they broke out the 40s.

05:27 - Kevin Rose (Host)
But yeah, pretty much it's going to be a lot of fun. Yeah, I remember a couple times where we were showing clips of The Broken animation Stop. There was no 40s in there. But yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun.

05:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I know a little company up in Toronto that would love to distribute a television version. If you, I, a little company up in Toronto that would love to distribute a television version, you don't have a problem with them buying it from you do you?

05:50 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Hey, that sounds good. We're pretty much open to anything. One of the main things, though, is that we want to keep it also online. We want to have that online component, because we know that, even with G4 or the old tech TV, you were only limited to the people that could actually watch, and they had the digital cable or the extended digital cable or whatever you needed.

06:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's nice not to have that seven-minute or whatever it is four-and-a-half-minute limit too.

06:13 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Yeah, exactly. I mean we can go really geeky and really take our time and not have to worry about breaking it up or dumbing it down any.

06:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Show of hands. Was anybody frustrated by the limitations of Tech TV?

06:31 - Robert Heron (Host)
I miss that environment. I do too it was great to be able to go in the lab and see you guys and talk about what you were up to after seeing first hand how TV is really just about numbers in Los Angeles, it makes me realize how special that whole environment was we had in San Francisco at that time yeah, we were ignorant yeah, but you know, I think toward the end we were actually getting it together in such a way.

06:57
It would have been nice if we could have extended it for another year, just to see what would have happened.

07:04 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Yeah, I agree. I mean, Robert, we worked together in LA here and it was just it's a completely different environment down here than it was in San Francisco, Like what. Just it's a completely different environment down here than it was in San Francisco, Like what? Well, it seems to me that our owners at the time when we were Tech TV just understood tech. You know, they understood that there was actually a market for it, that people really enjoyed getting geeky in certain areas, and it was the fact that we were constantly having to trim a lot of that out and it was just to the point to where you really weren't even getting enough information to make it worthwhile, if that makes sense.

07:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is there something? If you had a free reign right now on Attack of the Show, what's a topic you'd like to cover right now that you couldn't cover? Or is there one Well?

07:52 - Kevin Rose (Host)
What they really want me to focus on on Attack of the Show right now is kind of you know, some of the dark tip stuff that I've been doing in the past. But you know there's a lot of stuff that, even though we did it at Tech TV, that we can't do any longer Like a good example is. You remember, leo, when I built that shocking Xbox controller? Yeah, that was great. It was fun because you could play with your friends and you would actually feel the pain because of the shocking sensors in the handles.

08:17
But I wanted to even take that a little bit further and kind of do a nice little shocking chair where you could be sitting there and actually have more shock points. It was just a fun project that I wanted to do, but we got denied. We can't do that.

08:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know who invented the electric chair, don't you? No, I don't. Thomas Alva Edison, really, yeah, he supervised the first execution. His thought was this will be a more humane way of executing people. The only reason I know this is because our old buddy, Hank Kaiser, who now works up here doing shows for The History Channel, is producing a documentary about Thomas Edison and the electric chair and he actually sent me an email saying did you know that you look like the later in life, the older Thomas Edison, and would you which I was very flattered by and would you like to play him on the History Channel special about Thomas Edison and the electric chair? I said you bet. Unfortunately the schedule didn't work out. I was in Toronto when they had to tape, so I think I actually ended up watching that episode.

09:14
Wouldn't that be fun to be Thomas Edison.

09:17 - Robert Heron (Host)
There actually wasn't a word for electrocution back in the day, so Edison immediately came out with the word being Westinghoused.

09:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was this because he hated Westinghouse?

09:28 - Robert Heron (Host)
Oh, Westinghouse and Tesla basically perfected the AC system that we use today.

09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And his DC system was harmless.

09:37 - Robert Heron (Host)
His DC system was harmless, but it was limited in range. You would literally have to have a power plant every half a mile to a mile.

09:43 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Yeah, 12 or 15 yards.

09:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've been Westinghoused. That's hysterical.

09:50 - Robert Heron (Host)
Of course George didn't appreciate that and made sure that didn't come to be a common term.

09:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, as it turns out, unless you think having flames spurt from your ears is humane, it's not the most humane way to execute people.

10:08 - Patrick Norton (Host)
I mean, none of us have been executed in a hands-on testing environment, with some repeated attempts for comparison, I mean, who knows what the most humane version is?

10:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not too late, Patrick. I mean, our lives aren't over yet. We may have a chance Someday. We may have a chance. I don't know exactly what this show, this Revenge of the Screensavers, is going to be. I mean, it's fun just to sit around and talk, and I'd love to invite more people. Right now we're using Skype to do it, which seems to work fine. I mean, we've got four people and the quality is good.

10:42 - Robert Heron (Host)
I realize where all the background noise you're hearing on my end is coming from. I have this noisy box sitting right next to the mic.

10:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I hear that one. I should have just put it on my notebook. How many fans are in your computer? I?

10:54 - Robert Heron (Host)
think just two, two, but they're pretty loud. Actually, the loudest fan you're probably hearing is the one on the motherboard itself.

11:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You might be getting some from me. I'm not recording my audio, though the audio that comes. You may be hearing something different from me. You are hearing something different from me than you'll hear on the broadcast, because I record. Nobody cares about this, but I'll just tell you, I record directly from a real radio mic so that I sound good while you guys sound like you're, you know, like you're wondering.

11:20 - Patrick Norton (Host)
The rest of us are going to be wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Next up on this podcast.

11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, there's, certain privileges accrue to the person who owns the mixer. That's all I'm saying. You know that from your days in rock and roll, you know you can get the power of the board. So any news stories, anything in the current events that are of interest to anybody, anybody want to uh, want to mention anything. That's bugging you these days, patrick. What's bugging you?

11:50 - Patrick Norton (Host)
these days. Actually, you know what's been bugging me these days, what so I'm finally going to switch cell phone carriers, yeah yeah. It's something I've been putting off for three four, maybe eight years now.

12:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've been Sprint as long as I've known you.

12:05 - Patrick Norton (Host)
I've been Sprint since I basically bought a cell phone because there are no working pay phones in San Francisco. That's right.

12:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When we were in Paris, they saddled me with a pager. When we were in Paris, I showed my son what's that. When we were in Paris, I showed my son the they had a pay phone. I said look, Henry, remember this day. You won't see many more of these. You're right. Who needs them?

12:27 - Patrick Norton (Host)
now you need to turn the level down just a smidge.

12:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Am I too hot for you? You know what I was doing. I was talking into the microphone. Let me sit back.

12:35 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Well, no, what happened is it was like. So I was in Paris with my son and I went, hey.

12:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, the technology. Is this better, fabulous? Okay, I was just saying that. I showed him a payphone. I said boy, look at this, this is history, you. But look at this, this is history. You ain't going to see many more of these. They still have them in Europe. So have you decided who you're?

12:58 - Patrick Norton (Host)
going to go with. I think I'm actually going to end up going with Verizon.

13:02 - Kevin Rose (Host)
People seem to agree that's the best carrier. Verizon is by far the best carrier, no doubt.

13:07 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Well, the other thing is their coverage, especially compared. I mean, the one thing I like about Verizon more than anything else is their coverage map is actually readable. Singular's has gotten pretty good too. You laugh right. But if you look at Sprint's coverage map, it's the funniest thing you've ever seen. It's basically three shades of greenish blue and if you're not looking at it on the right particular page off of the Sprint thing, it's about 300 pixels across. So you're looking at a map of the entire United States and there's a green blob pretty much between Toledo, Ohio, and Chicago and there's like a green stripe from Boston down to DC.

13:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It works, it just works.

13:44 - Patrick Norton (Host)
A couple green blobs, like Florida's a green blob, dallas is a dark green blob, and then you get into California and you can see the I-5 corridor and then you can see I-15 up to Vegas and then you get the rest of Nevada and Northern California are two subtle shades of green and you can never tell what's actually covered and what actually isn't covered. Yeah who?

14:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
supports the Sidekick 2? I have a Sidekick 2 with T-Mobile and I love my Sidekick 2. I don't like the Sidekick. It's such a locked-down environment. You can't just put any arbitrary software on there. It has to be stuff T-Mobile sold. You can't put any ringtones on there, but what T-Mobile sells you. On the other hand, I've got an SSH application that allows me to log into my server and I can run any command line. Unix application, yeah.

14:32 - Kevin Rose (Host)
But Leo, how fast is that really? It's not too bad. I've tried it on the old. I tried SSH, but it seemed to be extremely slow with T-Mobile. Well, you have to be patient.

14:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know where Verizon has a real advantage and it's not in San Francisco, but it is in LA. They have an incredible high-speed. You know that EDVO network is incredible. Have you tried that down there, kevin?

14:55 - Kevin Rose (Host)
No, I haven't tried that. I actually am having some cell phone problems as well. I have the Trio 650 from Sprint right now, yeah, and I just hate it. I hate that phone. Pat, do not buy that phone. I know you were thinking about it, Kevin.

15:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you returned your Trio 600. You didn't like that one either. Why did you go with a 650?

15:12 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Well, I just thought the resolution of the screen is just so much better, and then it has a better camera. I thought it would fix a lot of the issues that I had with it before, but I just don't really like it. It's too bulky, I don't know. It feels like carrying around a brick with you. Yeah.

15:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the same thing with a sidekick too. It's a little clunky. On the other hand, it's got a real keyboard. I mean I can use AIM. I always have AIM running. I mean that's pretty cool. The sad thing is it's designed for people your age, and so they have all these hip ringtones, a lot of rap and stuff. Nothing for you know. Where's the Joni Mitchell? There's no Joni Mitchell ringtone. Nothing for people my age. I want some Jameson. Hey, leo, you like rap, I do.

15:55 - Patrick Norton (Host)
I like rap. You know you could create a Joni Mitchell ringtone.

15:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No you can't. No, that's. The point is that they have locked the sidekick down so tight that you are not only well, look at what happened to Paris Hilton. They have all your data, so if somebody hacks their servers, you're dead meat. So I make sure I don't take any dirty pictures.

16:16 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Or, if I do, I erase them right away, that's good to know.

16:19 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Yeah, thanks for sharing that.

16:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I appreciate that. So the thing to look at, Patrick, is this high-speed connection, and now Verizon has this thing called VCAST, which is real yeah.

16:30 - Patrick Norton (Host)
What? There's not much. I mean, the VCAST is a great idea, but we're about six months or a year before it starts getting really interesting. I mean because we've been kind of tracking the 3G stuff that's been coming out on Extreme Tech and the emergency excuse me, not emergency emerging technology sections, yeah, and it's like the stuff that Verizon's offering, the high-speed stuff, is spectacular, but right now they're in, I think, 30 markets.

16:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you have to be in a market where they have it. That's the problem.

17:00 - Patrick Norton (Host)
So if you travel in like 30 major cities, none of which is San Francisco, you're in great shape, right, especially if you stay in the downtown area.

17:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what I was asking, Kevin, because it does support LA. You know, it's weird towns too, I think, like Syracuse.

17:13 - Patrick Norton (Host)
I mean, they're slowly rolling it out, I think they're actually going to try to get it out to at least 100 markets by the end of 2005.

17:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I haven't seen it. That's why I was wondering. But I've heard good things about it. If you're in the right market, you know and I guess that's the key so you're going to go with plain old Verizon, then You're not going to worry about the data.

17:33 - Patrick Norton (Host)
I'm going to go with plain old Verizon, yeah.

17:37 - Robert Heron (Host)
What do you use, Robert? I'm a Nextel person personally.

17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nextel.

17:41 - Robert Heron (Host)
I have to have Direct Connect, but they were just purchased by Sprint, yeah that's right, you know.

17:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think I pardon me, but isn't? Isn't this walkie talkie thing stupid?

17:51 - Robert Heron (Host)
It has some stupid functionality to it in terms of the fact that everybody can hear what you're saying. That and everyone has that same double chirp. Yeah, it's so annoying. There's no way to change that. And there's no way to like lower the chirp without lowering the person's volume at the same time.

18:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't you think, though, that it Is there anything? I mean? Look, it's bad enough that.

18:12 - Robert Heron (Host)
And being rude with a cell phone period is just wrong. There are plenty of alternatives out there, there's enough. Especially that boom microphone is awesome where you can just whisper into it.

18:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, you like that.

18:21 - Robert Heron (Host)
The boom? Yeah, arguably it's just a lucky design by a very clever engineer. It has analog voice cancellation built into it and you literally can whisper into it and the person next to you is totally not interrupted at all.

18:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's depressing. They gave me one when they first came out and I accidentally stepped on it.

18:39 - Robert Heron (Host)
They were fragile.

18:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I never got to try it.

18:43 - Robert Heron (Host)
They were fragile and expensive, and broken, in my case dead in the water now. But I I swear by direct connect just for the ease of just seeing if someone's there. It just makes it. It makes it for me and my community of friends who use it.

18:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's it's the simplest thing for me now I just, I just pray that the FCC and the FAA don't approve cell phone use on airplanes, not because of the technology issue or the wireless issue. Just who wants to sit in an airplane full of loud mouth boring people for six hours?

19:15 - Patrick Norton (Host)
You better get used to it, because it's coming with a vengeance.

19:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a nightmare. That's where I plug my edemotics in and I turn the Metallica on to the full volume and I just pray the plane doesn't go down, because I won't know.

19:28 - Robert Heron (Host)
Is that the in-ear headphones? Yeah, the ones that make you gag. Oh, I love those.

19:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But at least I don't hear the cell phone. I'm gagging, but I don't hear the cell phone conversations. Has anybody used these Bose, noise-canceling ones? I don't think they're very good, I don't like them.

19:46 - Patrick Norton (Host)
No, the audio's kind of eh. I good, I don't like them. No, the audio is kind of eh, and I'll be honest with you I always feel like my head's going to explode when I have any of the noise canceling headphones on.

19:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like you're in cotton or something. Huh, yeah, it's weird.

19:56 - Robert Heron (Host)
It adds like a pressure yeah, almost to your hearing. The Bose are the best at noise canceling, but Sony is probably your best value oh really, honestly for any kind of repetitive noise, especially in offices with air conditioning. It's amazing If you can tolerate that, that pressure, that synthetic pressure you kind of feel more than hear.

20:19 - Kevin Rose (Host)
They're great. I've used the Bose at work and they drowned out pretty much everything else. I like them. They're decent.

20:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we will all be wearing them on airplanes so that some nitwit can talk for five hours on his cell phone. God, there's nothing worse. I was after we got back from France. I'm on the bus, you know. I took the Airporter and I'm on the bus back and some guy just couldn't be an hour on a bus without calling every one of his friends to announce that he was back. He literally made 20 phone calls and I'm just dying. Thank God for the edemotics.

20:50 - Patrick Norton (Host)
I don't mind the phone calls so much as I mind the really loud phone calls. Well, everybody seems to feel like they have to talk loud on a cell phone. Why is that? It was like when my dad would wear headsets when he was listening to a CD player. He's like son, can you get me a Diet Coke? What it's like, dad, you're the one with the headphones okay, it's like Dad, you're the one with the headphones.

21:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I hear you just fine.

21:11 - Robert Heron (Host)
Hey guys, I think personal illicit cell phone jammers are going to be the new rage.

21:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's like that TV be gone, isn't that awesome?

21:19 - Robert Heron (Host)
Oh, it just puts out every off code for every display out there.

21:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You just walk around, turn it off. My son wants one of those. I said, Henry, you don't go in enough bars yet. When you're 21, I'll get you a TV. You've got to have a real need for it. What's your favorite gadget right now? Kevin Rose, what are you doing?

21:39 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Oh man, I haven't got to see gadgets in a long time.

21:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really.

21:43 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Why not? Well, I mean, we don't have as many on the show as we used to. I did see a really nice three CCD little miniature handheld camcorder the other day.

21:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've got. Because of the system, you're becoming an expert on camcorders.

21:56 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Yeah, we well, we happened to get a. We purchased a really nice one.

22:00 - Patrick Norton (Host)
I was talking about? Was I? Were we talking about having headphones?

22:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on. Is Patrick having a side conversation? I think so. I think he is. My wife just came down the stairs with a Diet Coke. Let's listen in while Patrick and Sarah have a little marital discussion. Wait, where's the mute button? Can she hear what we're talking about?

22:22 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Well, she could hear me when I was yelling about. You know how I was talking about dad having the headphones on, I'd be like son get me a. Coke. She came down here with this really cross. Look on her face.

22:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But she brought you a Coke. No, she thought you were actually asking for one. I love it. Well, sarah's been an important part of all of our podcasts to date all one of them so I'm glad she made an appearance a little cameo on this one as well. How's Married Life?

22:49 - Patrick Norton (Host)
treating you, patrick, it's good.

22:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you married a great woman. You really did. I like to think so yeah, you did well for yourself. So, Kevin, you were saying there's a 3CCD camcorder. Is it the Panasonic you like, or what is it? Which one do you?

23:02 - Kevin Rose (Host)
like the one that we use is the Panasonic. It's the 100A the. The Panasonic, it's the 100A, the 24P one yeah, the 24P cam, and it's just a great camera all around. It's got the XLR inputs on the side so you can just go straight in from your wireless mics. It's really nice. But that is not really your typical consumer device. You know, what I've been looking at lately that's really kind of got me excited is the fact that I'm seeing more and more LCD monitors just fall in price. Yeah, I just bought a really nice dell 19 inch lcd. I got it for, uh, like three, a little over 300 bucks I saw that deal on dig.

23:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh what, the widescreen dell was so cheap. Was that the one you got?

23:43 - Kevin Rose (Host)
no, I got the. This was um. I have a an apple display as my main display. Really. But this is just kind of a 19-inch Dell standard DVI for like $312 shipped to your door, which is just amazing considering you get DVI and it's a really nice 19-inch Dell that's cool, and that's 1280 by 1024?. Yeah, exactly that's nice.

24:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it secret that you do Digg, or is that known?

24:09 - Kevin Rose (Host)
No, it's pretty much known. I didn't really go out shouting it right off the bat because I really didn't want to. I'm a fan.

24:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I appreciate it. Digg for those who don't know is one better than Slashdot because, instead of some random taco editing it, the humans who use it, who read it, choose what stories float to the top, and as more and more people have joined Digg, it's become really better. I use it as part of my news beat check because I get the most interesting stuff that doesn't show up anywhere else on there.

24:42 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Yeah, a lot of it's kind of offbeat stuff, but it's cool like that and there's some articles I find that I haven't seen anywhere else Digg.com.

24:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's your plans with that? I mean, are you going to grow it? What are you?

24:58 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Well, I've just been working on it just pretty much non-stop since, uh, really, november. Oh, uh, all my free, you know, nights and weekends. I've pretty much been working on it, cool. And uh, yeah, we're, we're in the process of redesigning uh little portions of it to make it a little easier to use. Um, I'm adding a bunch of new features, uh, friends. So you, there'll be a friends list to where you can have, uh, keep track of all your friends that are on dig, and it'll create, um dynamic rss feeds for your friends. Oh, that's neat, so that, like, you can have a, an rss feed that you subscribe to. That is just what your friends are digging throughout the day. That'll automatically update that's the future isn't it.

25:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the future. I've always thought we should have something where you could know where your friends are listening to, doing reading at all times, and then you could just follow along, Exactly.

25:43 - Kevin Rose (Host)
And the nice thing about Digg is it's not something that tracks you obviously to all the sites that you go to, but you just let your friends know what you're into. So there's that privacy there that is still intact.

25:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Speaking of websites, you know where I'm going with this, don't you, patrick Norton? Ah, yes, Patrick, St Patrick's Day, you put up a site at like five minutes to midnight, yes. And then what? It's? A month later have you posted another posting yet. Oh Skype conveniently, has stopped working. All of a sudden, Skype stopped working magically.

26:24 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Say again Patrick, no, it actually you know, you know he's doing that on purpose.

26:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What honey? We're losing the signal. That is very convenient. It's breaking up. That is very convenient, breaking up.

26:40 - Patrick Norton (Host)
I'm going to try to update it probably twice a week. This week, the first week, it was just kind of a shock because in the first couple days about 40,000 people showed up. See, see, see, we've been telling you this it was one of those moments like wow, this is neat, this is terrifying. This little weasel is calling me a poser.

27:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there you go, That'll get Patrick started. Slamdanceindustry. It's actually tightpadpatricknortoncom right now, or rather vice versa patricknortontightpadcom right yeah.

27:21 - Patrick Norton (Host)
So I actually need to. Basically, starting this week, I'm going to start updating a couple times a week.

27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what URL domain I just got, which I love, is leo.am, through the Armenian registry. Excellent. In fact, I was thinking we could make that be the official URL of this podcast, leo.am. That's not fair. Well, we'll have to come up maybe with trots.am. Leo.am may be better than trots.

27:50 - Patrick Norton (Host)
TRotS is not maybe the best image, the 24-hour podcast about sitting down on the toilet because things have gone wrong.

27:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Trots.am Tune in whenever you need to. One last question before we head for the hills. I presume is everybody up for doing this again next week.

28:08 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Yeah, definitely.

28:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, and down the road, I'd like to do video, figure out how we can kind of convert this to a television show. I've got the equipment.

28:18 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Huh.

28:20 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Go ahead. Patrick Kevin said he's got the equipment. I was saying we need to figure out how to up the audio quality on the Skype feed.

28:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kevin's always said he's got the equipment. I'm still waiting to find out. Video, oh video, oh okay.

28:32 - Robert Heron (Host)
I'll definitely swap this mic out for a better mic for next week.

28:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It sounds better than you think, patrick, wait till you hear the podcast. It actually isn't bad.

28:40 - Patrick Norton (Host)
It might just be the horrible equipment I'm using on my end, then it could be.

28:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It could be. Another thing that we could do, I guess, is we could all just set up video cameras, point it at ourselves while we do it, and then this would mean that the podcast would take a lot longer to get out, but we could all tape ourselves, then mail me the tapes and we could edit it together and make a TV show out of it.

29:01 - Kevin Rose (Host)
I've got the Mac Mini so we can do the new Tiger.

29:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I'd like to try when Tiger comes out on the 29th. It has video conferencing. What is it? Three or four-way, I can't remember. I think three people at a time, but four people can use it. Do you want it now, leo? We can test it out. I don't have it now. Oh, I got it. Am I allowed to say that? Yeah, you're allowed to say that. I don't know if you have a legitimate copy or not. Nobody else does.

29:26 - Robert Heron (Host)
You're a developer student.

29:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Theoretically, I'm working on a Tiger book, but I'm writing it the way I write all my books, which is completely hands-off. So the guy who actually is writing the book, Todd Stouffer, has the copy. I didn't want to sign the NDA because if I found out anything, I didn't want to not be able to talk about it. You know the easiest.

29:48 - Kevin Rose (Host)
I've got to tell you real quick one of the easiest ways to get access to all these types of stuff is you can sign up for the developers network for 99 bucks, oh, and they send you all the latest builds and you can log in and download what it's built.

30:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah completely legitimately and legally. Well, we're all gonna. We're all gonna. Actually, 99 bucks is cheaper than 129 bucks. Do you get a final version as well?

30:07 - Kevin Rose (Host)
uh, I'm not sure if you. Well, yeah, they, they send you the final once it's out. Well, that's a good deal. Do you have to believe that's the student pricing, though I think it's. It's normally like $199. Kevin's a student still. That's right.

30:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where are you studying, kevin? Hey, I didn't say I paid $99, brother, it's a good deal, it's just a good deal. Well, April 29th, let's see if we can do that. Patrick, do you have a Mac yet, or are you still all Windows?

30:31 - Patrick Norton (Host)
Still all Windows. Sometime in the next couple months I'm probably going to buy a Mac. Unfortunately, the content management system I'm doing most of the professional work I'm doing right now is not particularly Mac-friendly.

30:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How about you, Robert? Do you have access to a Mac?

30:48 - Robert Heron (Host)
I do not actually All Windows. I've just got a new ThinkPad, though, for work.

30:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it'll just have to be just me and Kevin. See you guys? No, we'll figure out something. I'm going home, we'll figure out some way to do it. I mean, frankly, I don't think video adds anything at this point, but if down the road we wanted to kind of recreate this, I guess we could do a really poor man's version of it. Maybe it's not worth it. I'll have to say one thing, patrick the audio quality of this is a lot better than the 21st Amendment, really, but we're not as happy.

31:28
That was a fun place to do this it was. If you want, we can get back together at the 21st Amendment. The problem is everybody's in a different city so it would be a little more tricky to do it, but next time everybody's in town, we should all get together and do that. Guys, this has been a lot of fun. Our first Revenge of the oh, I can't say the name, can I? That's right, The Revenge of Charles Hirshhorn. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you've enjoyed it. You're fired. Leo Kevin Rose has nothing to do with this, he's just you know here. Thank you, yeah, it was all my idea. Can I call him Chuck? It was all my idea. Chuck, do you think he'll Honestly, do you think he'll ever hear this?

32:07 - Kevin Rose (Host)
There's probably about a 75% chance. Yeah, probably.

32:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this is the portion of the show where we give Kevin Rose a chance to disclaim everything you've just heard. That's right. I had nothing to do with this. No, we have nothing. You know, I'll be honest. I have nothing against G4 or Charles, and I'm happily and gainfully employed. I know Robert's miserable with his life, but the rest is it was perfect.

32:36 - Robert Heron (Host)
I got a free ride to LA and then I got a great five-month vacation. There you go, and now I'm back up in the Bay Area.

32:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, what's wrong with that?

32:44 - Robert Heron (Host)
I love Southern California.

32:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know we all get mail from viewers saying God, I miss it, and so forth, but I don't think those of us who are involved in it have the same feelings that the viewers do. I mean, we didn't watch the show, we just made it, so you know, and we're all still doing our own thing in some way or the other. I don't think tech TV is ever going to come back. I think that's long gone. But who knows, you know, I think with system and this and Patrick's slam dance industries, who knows, you know? I think there's a possibility that. And don't forget, call for Help 2.0. Call for Help 2.0. Oh yeah, I keep forgetting that, don't I? Let's hope my Canadian masters don't hear this. No, I love doing it.

33:26
And, in fact, guess what? Kevin Rose is going to be on the show. He's going to come up in May to be on the show. Patrick and Robert, you, you have a standing invitation to come to Toronto anytime you feel like it's beautiful this time of year. Oh, that's a good excuse. The snow is almost completely melted. Hey guys, thanks a lot. Thank you, leo.

33:46 - Kevin Rose (Host)
Thanks for having us Leo.

33:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's it for the first edition of the Revenge of the Screen[CENSORED]. We'll be back next week, lawyers permitting. Hope you'll tune in then. Thanks to Wayne and Wax at wayneandwax.com for our theme have a great week. We'll see you later.

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