Bad Voltage

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia, present Bad Voltage, in which there are packs of hacks, backs are waxed, Aq has snacks, and:

[00:03:25] The first “hack” — suggestions and tips for little bits of software that we use and are amazed that others don’t — from Jeremy, which is a clipboard manager. Jeremy uses Diodon, but there are loads of others!

[00:06:24] In the news this week: the US Congress voted to allow US internet service providers to sell the browsing habits of their customers to advertisers, we solicit your opinions on which VPNs are good (tell us on the forum), Amazon’s physical staffless shop beta is a disaster, AT&T join the Linux Foundation, the Linux Action Show close their doors, and Google publish a site listing all their open source software

[00:23:50] Stuart’s “hack”: KDE Connect, which connects your Android phone and any Linux desktop (KDE or not) to show notifications, send files, control music, and generally tie them together

[00:26:15] Jono reviews the Garmin Vivosmart HR+ activity band, and whether it’s better than the rivals and whether you should get it if you wear an activity band like everyone does these days

[00:40:35] Jono’s “hack”: how does he edit the Bad Voltage show to get the audio production that he requires, and how do we record so that other people can use the same techniques for recording a remote podcast if they want to

The competition to win a Dell Sputnik laptop will close before the next show! So if you’re in the US and you haven’t already entered, go to badvoltage.org/fruit and get your fruit-based entries in!

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, and special guest presenter Jeff Atwood present Bad Voltage, in which we all had baby hacker names, burner phones are probably not required, and:

[00:04:00] In the news this week: the 2038 problem, advertisers start boycotting YouTube over ads on hate speech videos, Apple and augmented reality, and speaking passwords out loud with your lips used for authentication

[00:21:23] Open Source Project Communication: historically open source projects used mailing lists and IRC. These days people use Slack and forums. What’s the future of communication for these kinds of projects, particularly given the balance of openness vs convenience?

[00:46:00] Ads vs Recommendations: Google Home devices start doing ads for films, and everyone’s pretty upset. But these aren’t ads! They’re recommendations. According to Google at least. Is this a legit argument? Where is the blurry line between an advert and a helpful suggestion?

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The Bad Voltage live stage show, from SCaLE 15x in Pasadena, March 2017!

An epic time was had. Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge, live on stage, in which there was some downright unfair quizzing of Jono, a one-sh*t trumpet, the brightest suit that’s ever been seen, a machine to count eggs, Perl abuse, a hollow burrito, pies, more pies, hammer pants, the Phantom Zone, no air horns, the products of the Chevy company, and a reappearance of Bryan! As well as:

[00:07:00] The news! Featuring the Amazon S3 outage, Snapchat being worth $33 billion, System76 bringing manufacturing in-house, and how swimming pools have dustbins full of urine in

[00:11:30] Cloudflare had a pretty serious security flaw identified by the Project Zero team at Google, where sensitive data from all sorts of Cloudflare sites was leaked — passwords, auth tokens, and the like. What’s the deal with this sort of issue? It’s surprising how much of the internet turned out to be behind Cloudflare, and this sort of centralisation is a problem… but equally, there’s a reason we go to experts in the field and outsource services to them! So, what’s the best approach here?

[00:20:00] Quizmaster extraordinaire Jeremy plays Much Taboo About Nothing, in which team opensource Jono and Rikki team up to battle heroic ginger team Stuart and Hannah in a game of wit, erudition, vocabulary, guesswork, and trying to not be too nasty about Ruby people. Partially successfully, depending on your attitude on rule-bending and wide appreciation of cultures…

[00:33:20] Why are all our amazing technological advances being used to make stupid pointless gadgets that nobody should buy? Paper towel dispensers that magically detect your hand movement and then still dispense a bit of brown paper to dry your hands on; amazing iPad-based payment systems which still require you to sign your name with your finger; endless pointless stupid Internet of Things devices. Stuart rants, and Jono and Jeremy respond with various degrees of defence or agreement as to where we’re going and what to do about incredible technology put to wasteful ends

[00:43:00] Ig-NOT — it’s like the Ignite talk series, but… not. The presenters each do a talk, on an unknown subject chosen by the audience, using unseen images suggested by the community and the other presenters. And… well, see how they get on. Featuring some properly unkind choices, a brief and magnanimous appearance by Bryan, and a very weird old guy with an axe…

Many thanks to the extra participants in the show: Chris Smith for warming up, the ever-wonderful and ever-supportive Ilan Rabinovitch, and show guests and guessers Rikki Endsley and Hannah Anderson!

We are hugely grateful to the companies who helped make this show happen: Linode for getting us there, SCaLE for inviting us again, Dell and Endless for providing prizes, and Ticketmaster for putting on the show and venue and tacos and many many beers and the band afterwards!

And… if you want to enter the competition announced in the outro and win that sweet Dell XPS laptop… you want badvoltage.org/fruit…

Watch the show here:

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which pies are not permitted to be stored in the checked baggage. In this show:

[00:01:50] In the news: the city of Munich are preparing a switch back from Linux to Windows, Chrome are preventing users from disabling their DRM and PDF plugins, UPS are working on a “rolling warehouse” by launching delivery drones from their brown vans, and Bad Voltage burger correspondent Jono announces the release of a new “bigger Big Mac” from McDonald’s

[00:14:22] Disassembled: Gitlab. At the end of January Gitlab had a fairly major outage and lost data, and dealt with it in an unusually transparent way; a live video stream and live documentation of the fix investigation and progress, and afterwards a detailed technical post-mortem of what went wrong and why. We dig into the incident and the response.

[00:30:15] The elementary team are crowdfunding a sprint to work on their app distribution story. But what’s the deal with the story they’re planning? We’ve got some thoughts saying that they’re doing it right… and some maybe that don’t.

[00:54:40] Some updates on Bad Voltage Live, _next week_ (!!!) at SCaLE in Pasadena, California on 3rd March at 8pm. Buy your SCaLE tickets, come for the show, stay for the open bar and the taco trucks and the Spazmatics. And the show.

We’ve also got a few questions for the audience — things we’d like to know. Come to our forums and help us discuss methods for the US border patrol and guest presenters!

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, with special guest presenter Christina Warren, speaker, tech journalist from Gizmodo, and podcaster at Rocket. In this show:

[00:03:12] In the news this week: Vizio get fined $2.2m for secretly collecting everything you watch on their TVs and lying about it, police use someone’s pacemaker data to help prove that they committed arson, Uber hire a NASA person and start talking about flying taxis, and Streetmap lose their appeal after suing Google for unfairly pushing their own map product

[00:17:00] In honour of our special guest being @film_girl on Twitter, we’ve put together a list of “the good, the bad, and the ugly” in film: films that are really great, secretly great, and idiosyncratically terrible

[00:39:30] Jeremy reviews the Pico Brew, a device for brewing your own beer easily without having to buy all the glassware and a forty foot mash tun

[00:56:35] Is there actually a space for a successful “third player” in mobile phones? Microsoft, Ubuntu, Sailfish, Palm, RIM, all have foundered in pursuit of this market. And if there’s no space for it in phones, who will shift the market to some new _type_ of product, and what will that product be?

Also, Bad Voltage are returning to SCALE in Pasadena in March for a live show! With free food and an open bar, and the 80s nerd rocker band the Spazmatics, the show’s gonna be great. Buy your SCaLE tickets now!

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, your fortnightly recommended dose of vitamins and minerals. Featuring a still virulently ill Jono, the uttering of the phrase “FreeBSD” in these hallowed halls, and:

[00:02:26] In the news this week, the Guardian wrongly declare WhatsApp to have a “back door” and get huge pushback from security experts demanding a retraction, Google is big enough to develop a trusted hardware solution for internal use only and isn’t going to sell it, possibly heralding a new era of hardware that nobody will be able to buy, and Facebook are doing something with VR thus confirming one of Jono’s predictions and he almost dies of smugness

[00:13:00] We review the ACPAD, which calls itself “the electronic orchestra for your guitar” after its successful Kickstarter; what’s it all about?

[00:27:30] Is ChromeOS “desktop Linux”? We asked this question in the last show, and it’s a bigger one than we might think. If it is, do Chromebook successes count as “the year of the Linux desktop”? If it isn’t, is it a threat? A rival or a friend? Should we buy a Chromebook?

[00:50:07] People are using the GPL less and permissive licenses more; this isn’t just a feeling, it’s confirmed by research. Why is this? Is it a problem? And do we think that anyone should care?

Also, Bad Voltage are returning to SCALE in Pasadena in March for a live show! Keep your ears open for more details, and buy your SCALE tickets now!

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia return with the first episode of season 2 of Bad Voltage! Featuring a vitriolic Stuart, a victorious Jeremy, a virulently ill Jono, and:

[00:04:00] We bring our predictions for what’s going to happen in the tech world in 2017. Broken up into three parts, first comes Stuart’s attempt to be Nostradamus with regard to the web, Apple, Oracle, and Amazon

[00:14:30] In the news this week, a girl uses her sleeping mother’s fingerprint to buy Pokemon stuff, a newscaster says Alexa command words on air and orders a zillion doll houses, Samsung unveil 8K TVs and Panasonic unveil a baby voice recognition engine at CES, and the new Bad Voltage Roku channel courtesy of Martin Wimpress

[00:22:30] Jono predicts 2017, focusing on Google+, electric cars, phones, and VR

[00:33:00] Jono reviews the Cadillac XT5 Premium Luxury, including whether the technology inside it is actually good, what the deal is with Caddys these days, Android Auto and entertainment systems in a modern car, and whether Bacon knows anything about cars

[00:50:00] Jeremy gives his predictions for 2017, looking at Canonical, mobile apps, and Linux market share

Also, Bad Voltage are returning to SCALE in Pasadena in March for a live show! Keep your ears open for more details, and buy your SCALE tickets now!

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The last show of 2016!

[00:03:14] A year ago, the four members of Bad Voltage looked forward in time and predicted what would happen in 2016. And now, we look back and say: how did we do? Our roles as Nostradamuses (Nostradami?) come under analysis, and we look at each of our predictions, what it would have meant were they true (spoiler alert: some were! but… some were not), and who is the worst most terrible futurologist.

[00:38:35] Also! An announcement. Things are changing, and this is where we tell you that. Listen to find out our news, and what this means for the show. Bad Voltage continues, in season 2, in 2017…

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It’s the holiday season! An excuse to buy interesting tech for people. But… what to get? Well, we’re here for you. Stuart Langridge, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke and Jono Bacon each give suggestions of some cool things that you might want to look at getting… or asking for, in these next couple of weeks of shopping days. And just maybe some things that you should actively avoid…

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In this episode, we devote the whole show to a different format: a wide-ranging discussion on Linux adoption and market share, following the news that it’s been trending up and over 2% consistently for a while now. Taking in the current state of hardware, Steam gaming, new devices from everyone else, and whether mobile is eating desktop or not, Stuart Langridge, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke and Jono Bacon dive deep into where Linux is going and whether we want it to get there at all.

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