Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest presenter Alan Pope present Bad Voltage, in which there is temporarily less Jeremy, everyone should have a figurine on their desk which watches over them (tell us on the forum what yours is!), and:

[00:03:05] Debian are discussing packages in their distro which have problematic names. The main one is weboob, “Web Outside Of Browsers” and there are others. Issues were recently raised in Ubuntu and Plasma, among other places. Do people care, are these names actually a problem? Should these packages be removed or renamed?

[00:13:00] NVIDIA launch RTX real-time raytracing graphics cards

[00:27:45] If you own a car and can access it from your phone, that doesn’t get revoked when you sell the car, and you can continue to access it afterwards. Do people use this stuff? Is this worrying, or just caveat emptor? And does this apply to other consumer electronics as well — Teslas, Alexas, connected houses, orthopaedic pillows…?

[00:40:44] The National Library of Scotland produce a “side-by-side” map viewer of the UK, which shows a modern map and old maps from the early 1900s together, so moving one moves the other. Everyone in the UK immediately looks up where they live and their home town, and it’s fascinating. Nice one, NLS. Also mentioned, pretty minimalist US city map posters

[00:47:10] The Google Pixel 3 is coming, and we know this because there have been a million leaks. A suspiciously high number of leaks, actually… we’re starting to think that these aren’t leaks at all but a carefully managed PR campaign

[00:56:55] Twitter remove their facebook app; every cross-posted tweet gets deleted. Er, hooray? Although good luck getting that to happen for your Facebook app…

[00:59:30] According to a Microsoft-commissioned survey, 50% of parents in the U.S. with children aged 18 and under believed coding and computer programming to be the most beneficial subject to their child’s future employability… but interestingly major tech company CEOs tend to limit their children’s use of tech and want them to read books. Which may or may not be the same issue at all…

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×38-rambling-uncle-at-christmas/11799