Bad Voltage

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you the wonderful world of Bad Voltage, in which it’s all about the money, it’s never about the privacy, and we disagree about:

00:05:03 The Endless Computer bills itself as “a computer for emerging markets”; a unit with a priority on design, created to plug into an existing TV and pre-packaged with content so it doesn’t need an internet connection. We discuss whether it lives up to its lofty goals.

00:21:26 At roughly the same time, Dustin Kirkland wrote an extremely angry “open letter” to Google about his horrible Nest smoke alarms, and meanwhile our own Jeremy found himself very happy with his Nests. We asked Dustin for a comment, and Jeremy reviews the Nest 2 and why he’s considerably happier

00:37:52 Hack Voltage: Stuart has been playing with drawing app Gliffy

00:39:15 Microsoft: friend or foe of the open source community? Every time they seem good they turn around and do something terrible to us, but then the open source community have finally moved beyond the “Micro$oft” years and we want to embrace them as being on-side. Are they OK now? Are they as bad as they ever were?

We’re doing a live show, and you can be in the audience! See details of Bad Voltage Live, in Fulda, Germany on September 30th 2015, at badvoltage.org/live!

Discuss this show in the community!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge return from the brief summer hiatus to bring you Bad Voltage, in which what we want is not what Google want, we might be more outside the mainstream than was previously thought, and:

00:04:25 Politics and outliers: the UK and the US are both seeing challenges to politics from people outside the establishment — Donald Trump for president of the USA, and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK challenging for leader of the Labour party. Are people sick of politics? And will this sort of outsider challenge shake up the grey consensus currently running the world?

00:24:33 Stuart reviews the Meizu MX-4 Ubuntu edition, the latest smartphone running Ubuntu, and talk about this new handset and the Ubuntu phone software

00:42:51 Lots has gone on over in Google world recently: the creation of the new Alphabet holding company, the release of the OnHub router, and a change in focus for Google Plus not least among them. What’s going on with G+, and what does Alphabet mean for all of us?

We’re doing a live show, and you can be in the audience! See details of Bad Voltage Live, in Fulda, Germany on September 30th 2015, at badvoltage.org/live!

Discuss this show in the community!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which they battle through an army of gremlins and fail while it sounds like Jono has smoked ten packs of cigarettes:

00:04:00 Reddit has been facing problems recently both in terms of management and views on freedom of speech. We delve into what is going on and what the future of Reddit might look like

00:33:31 Bad Voltage Best Bits: a blast from the past where we blasted the Mars One project into space with a rocket made of cynicism and sarcasm

00:43:07 Bad Voltage Best Bits: reminisce as we listen back to the quite righteous poetry competition in which the presenters demonstrate their literary aptitude (or not)

Also, we’re going to take questions. Send us a question you want to ask the team to [email protected]; it might be about something we’ve discussed on this show, or about anything else you want, and we’ll choose the best question and answer it in each show!

See details of Bad Voltage Live, in Fulda, Germany on September 30th 2015, at badvoltage.org/live, and go get your tickets to see the show!

Discuss this show in the community!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which a thing is hotter than the sun, the chap who now runs Microsoft is cruelly misnamed for comedy purposes, and:

00:01:27 After Linus Torvalds asks kernel devs to take a break so he can too and articles start popping up about what Linux looks like after Linus, we ask: what would happen? Does this look like the changes that happen at tech companies such as Microsoft and Apple? Would we users be affected at all?

00:21:28 Jono reviews the NXR Stainless Steel 7-Burner 80,000-BTU Propane Gas Grill

00:37:20 Google. Everybody uses at least some of their services, and some of us use an awful lot of them. Bryan has been exploring what it takes to leave Google entirely, how to do the move, and what to use instead: how easy has it been so far? Why do this? And where does one go?

Also, we’re going to take questions. Send us a question you want to ask the team to [email protected]; it might be about something we’ve discussed on this show, or about anything else you want, and we’ll choose the best question and answer it in each show!

See details of Bad Voltage Live, in Fulda, Germany on September 30th 2015, at badvoltage.org/live, and go get your tickets to see the show!

Discuss this show in the community!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we argue about whether to wear socks, loads of festivals are interested in our technology, and:

00:02:00 The Register recently revealed that the Download music festival will have automatic facial recognition cameras. In Bad Voltage Fixes The Fucking World we discuss the problem of mass surveillance and how to fix it

00:26:41 Jeremy reviews the HTC One M9 mobile phone, HTC’s new flagship device

00:42:55 Apple announce that they’re open sourcing Swift, their OS X and iOS app programming language, and that it will also be available on Linux. We discuss whether this is a useful thing, and what it means for large companies’ stance on open source

01:11:08 In the previous show we discussed Sourceforge, their current path, and what they could do to make themselves a great service again; we speak to Ross Turk, the engineering and community manager for Sourceforge during the good years from 2000-2009, about how they reached their current position and the pressures that may have led to it

Also, we’re going to take questions. Send us a question you want to ask the team to [email protected]; it might be about something we’ve discussed on this show, or about anything else you want, and we’ll choose the best question and answer it in each show!

See details of Bad Voltage Live, in Fulda, Germany on September 30th 2015, at badvoltage.org/live, and go get your tickets to see the show!

Discuss this show in the community!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke (he returns!), and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which all books are signed from now on, we reveal that we are coming to Europe in September and you can come to the live show, and:

00:01:39 In the last show, Bad Voltage fixed Mozilla, or at least proposed what we think they might want to do to fix themselves. We asked Mozilla PR for comment or a statement, and they declined. This leads into a discussion about Mozilla’s internal culture, and how their relationships with the community have changed

00:18:14 Stuart reviews Seveneves, the new book by Neal Stephenson

00:29:28 Bad Voltage Fixes the F$*%ing World: we pick a technology or company or thing that we think isn’t doing what it should be, and discuss what it should be doing instead. We look at a company who have been in the news recently, but maybe wish they weren’t: Sourceforge

00:51:30 Does social media advertising work? We tried a challenge: we’d each spend fifty dollars on advertising Bad Voltage on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and the like, and see how we got on and whether it’s worth the money. Is it? Maybe you can do better?

Also, we’re going to take questions. Send us a question you want to ask the team to [email protected]; it might be about something we’ve discussed on this show, or about anything else you want, and we’ll choose the best question and answer it in each show!

See details of Bad Voltage Live, in Fulda, Germany on September 30th 2015, at badvoltage.org/live, and get your tickets to see the show!

Discuss this show in the community!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which Bryan is sadly unavoidably absent, we discuss relationships between the Ubuntu and Kubuntu community councils, we ask you to tell us which bits you like, there are once again accusations that eating yoghurt is a bad personality trait, and:

00:01:57 Bad Voltage Fixes the F$*%ing World: we pick a technology or company or thing that we think isn’t doing what it should be, and discuss what it should be doing instead. In this first iteration, we talk about Mozilla

00:28:40 Meditation is reputedly a good way to relieve stress and stay centred, and we look at HeadSpace.com who offer a purchasable digital set of meditation tapes and guidebooks, as well as some brief diversions into the nature of relaxation and the voice of Jeff Bridges

00:44:45 Rick Spencer, Canonical’s VP of Ubuntu engineering and services, talks about Canonical’s focus, the recent announcements around phones and “internet of things” devices, and how community feelings about Ubuntu’s direction dovetail with Canonical’s goals

01:06:12 We’ve talked about 3d printers in the past, in the context of you owning one, but there are online services which allow you to upload a 3d design and then will print it in a variety of materials and send it back to you in the post. Could this be the way that 3d printing really reaches the mainstream?

Discuss this show in the community!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which the word “keynote” is officially declared to be meaningless, and:

00:01:49 Tesla have released a new product, the Powerwall, a “home battery that charges using electricity generated from solar panels, or when utility rates are low, and powers your home in the evening”. Elon Musk is happy to solve the world’s energy problem by selling six billion of them to everyone; but is the Powerwall actually a useful thing? Can we all go solar now?

00:18:37 LibreOffice have announced that they’re working on an online version of their office suite, and have in the past announced that they’re building a mobile version as well. But are LibreOffice falling behind on all their promises? Can we expect this to work?

00:33:33 Amber Graner from the Open Compute Project talks to us about what OCP is all about, whether you need to use its stuff in your new datacentre, and how to fit twenty-one inches of rack in nineteen inches of space

00:47:47 Jono reviews Zeetings, an online service which promises to add interactivity and audience participation to your presentations. We talk about whether the thing itself is useful, the art of public speaking, and their properly annoying introductory video

Discuss this show in the community!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which hell may be slightly chillier than previously. Featuring the uses for abundant graphical power, the nature of what “cross-platform” really means, and:

00:02:15 Google announce Google Fi, a new MVNO-style mobile network joining together wifi, Sprint, and T-Mobile for US customers and allowing international roaming and a pay-what-you-need rate for data. Is this actually a good idea? What about how it only works on the Nexus 6?

00:18:00 We speak to Mashable senior tech correspondent and podcaster Christina “@film_girl” Warren about the Microsoft Build conference announcement that the Visual Studio Code editor is newly available for Linux as well as other platforms, and MS’s apparent increasing friendliness to open source. Is it real? Is it good?

00:37:16 Bryan reviews the NVIDIA Jetson TK-1 development kit, a Raspberry-Pi-style small board but with 192 GPU cores

00:51:12 A blog comment from Glyph suggesting that “Linux is not, practically speaking, more tweakable” than alternative desktop OSes starts a discussion about whether that’s the truth and why Linux desktop automation tools aren’t (or are) as good as AppleScript and Windows COM automation

Discuss this show in the community!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which things are longer than normal. Featuring doughnuts with the jam not in them, many many percentages, and:

The new release of elementary OS Freya makes us think about their funding model and their design-led approach, and whether it’s all a good idea (2.02)

Stuart reviews an attempt to put together a music player for his parents with OpenElec and the Raspberry Pi 2 (26.40)

Bryan has objections, sometimes, to vaccines. We unjustifiably accuse him of being a lunatic anti-vaxxer and he explains his viewpoint, after which we get into a discussion of scientific data and public health policy, and generally Have The Vaccine Debate (41.10)

Discuss this show in the community!