Apple has just implemented a new security update that gives users more control. This has a lot of Facebook advertisers concerned. We discuss some of the ramifications.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-iphone-privacy-update-seen-hurting-facebook-revenue-q2-2021-04-26/

I mention J Thorn and the Author Success Mastermind – if you’re a writer, check it out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathlands

https://docsavage.org/1970/05/lester-dent/

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivebooks/dracula-the-evidence-hardcover-edition

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/geminiartifacts/first-editions-dracula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Haglund

We had some trouble getting the episode going this time. Lost a few minutes of conversation because it wasn’t recording. Did some reboots and everything came back. There you go, tech wizardry at its best.

Before the health tech, we discuss router extensions versus the newer mesh technology. While talking mesh, we discuss driverless cars and the tech with it. Even though there are cars already like this, we have a long way to go.

https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-wi-fi-mesh-network-systems

https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

This made me think of one of my favorite Rush songs – Red Barchetta.

Here is the True Metrix Bluetooth glucose meter:

TRUE METRIX

We finish with a discussion of Big Bang Theory and why some people like it and some don’t.

Here is Stephen’s list of favorite Big Bang Theory episodes:

S3E8 – The adhesive duck deficiency

S2E3 – The barbarian sublimation

S2E11 – The bath item gift hypothesis – this is maybe my all time favorite episode

S5E21 – the Hawking excitation – partly because Hawking loved doing this

S4E1 – The robotic manipulation

S4E2 – the cruciferous vegetable amplificaiton – you should watch this one because you’ve talked about this

S2E15 the maternal capacitance

S5E7 – the good guy flutuation – I think this may be my 2nd favorite episode

https://www.playhousesquare.org/events/detail/aint-too-proud-1

And they were called the Funk Brothers

Do you watch Big Bang Theory? Why or why not? Have a favorite episode?

If you’re dealing with diabetes, check out our conversation this week. Since both of us are dealing with it, understanding diabetes and how to control it can save you money and save your life.

Our other big topic is what we’re going to do now that things are opening up with the vaccination. Alan has it but Stephen hasn’t yet and we have plans of things to do.

Transcript:

Stephen 0:01

Do you like Dr. Pepper?

Alan 0:43I really do. Is there too much of it in evidence around the trash? Can that kind of thing? Is that the Yes,

Stephen 0:52cycle.

Alan 0:53It’s, in fact, Tuesday is our trash day. And so all of that goes out. But I do work myself through a two liter a day. You know, and so they kind of stack up,

Stephen 1:02you still have your teeth. That’s amazing.

Alan 1:05You know why? Because they use a straw. It’s kind of I don’t think it’s only a rationalization, I think it really is that I haven’t browned my teeth or made them fall out. Because of diet. Dr. Pepper, I know that there are better things for me that I could be drinking. And yet at least it’s sugar free. And at least it’s one of those things that out of all the things I’m going to have to eventually give up to be a perfect aesthetic diet guy, it’s going to be the last thing to go. Kelly and I laugh about this all the time, every day, if you like her particular coffee and my particular diet, Dr. Pepper, you get something that you really love every single day. And it’s not heroin, it’s

it could be worse.

Stephen 1:53Even though, okay, so we both have diabetic problems. And we really shouldn’t be drinking the sugary drinks, and they’re not good for anybody really, um, and the diet stuff, at least doesn’t spike your sugar, it does still have calories. So it still adds to your weight, which affects your diabetes. But also, I’ve seen several studies saying that the chemicals they use to sweeten those, they make it so it makes you want more and that makes you hungrier so you actually have to fight eating more and taking in more calories when you’re drinking the diet drinks. So

Alan 2:32I I’ve read studies but not all in that direction. You know, the the most suspicious studies say right, yes, whatever you have with aspartame and stuff like that. And, and I think my mistake obviously this, I am not a great example because I’ve been drinking diet soda since college. You know what I mean? So we’re talking like 40 years, and it hasn’t had a horse I’m heavier than I should be. But I’m not as if I had been drinking sugary soda all

Stephen 3:02the big calm beer belly that’s three times bigger than the rest of your body.

Alan 3:06Exactly that and back when I was drinking, like you know, a big gulp every night you know in college conveniently I was always up until one and two in the morning because I was computer science major was and you needed to have that extra burst of caffeine. At least he didn’t need it but I sure got used to it I needed to be whatever that little bit of acceptable drug that caffeine is it sure helped me in mental Christmas and I noticed that I had to do it kind of low dose This is such a weird, druggie conversation. I did try like no dose I tried it one time for finals. And it made me so jittery and wrong you know my mouth got all the over caffeine aspects were there that it was just I can’t do a burst like that. I need to just kind of have a saline drip or something like that.

We actually keep on topic and discuss (almost) everything we wanted to touch on. There’s a bit of tech talk at the beginning, but it just kinda happens, you know?

We do discuss Easter and traditions. We grew up different and have different things we each do for Easter. Maybe you’ll find a new tradition for you and your family. Egg rolling, hiding baskets, egg attack, and painting eggs are just some of these traditions. What traditions do you have?

https://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/2018/03/ukrainian_easter_eggstravaganz.html

Alan is doing a talk later this year at Baldwin Wallace and gets to take a class. He chose to take a humor class. Humor is big in our lives and we try to dissect and analyze it. I’m sure you can agree or disagree on some of what we say is funny or not.

https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Wildstorm_Universe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Destroyer_(novel_series)

Nameless: The Collection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_(The_Allman_Brothers_Band_album)

Transcript:

Alan 0:40tend to break out the shorts and the T shirts instead of the sweats and the etc, etc. And yes, so thanks again, Ted for being our guest. And it this is He always gets comments when I wear you know, I have certain lounge pants that people always talk about when I have like Dr. Seuss, or black panther or something like that. This is what like, what’s whose tap dance killer, it’s like it? Well, I have this friend that does this great comic. And so now,

Unknown Speaker 1:02if you go to my YouTube channel, you can see the interview.

Alan 1:07Exactly that if you want to go and get some, you know, get your geek on we are relentless in it is an actually, you know, that’s very fun. I for a long time I when I ran the smart life, you know, that was the very early social media site before Facebook was big. I actually had started something up that had lots of mental friends and so forth. And it was just that little fun tweak of when people say, Hey, you know what’s going on? What’s your website? And it’s like, well, I’ve actually built an entire universe of fun people and good content and you want I mean, if you stop by, it’ll get even better. And it just was nice to have that little leave behind. Right? You know what I mean? That he can come and join us. It’s fun.

Stephen 1:44That’s true geek cred that you’re always still one step up on the tech. I remember having a Palm Pilot. And when my kids were born showings or somebody going so you got a picture your kids? Well, let me show you and I pulled up the Palm Pilot guy. Really? You carry them on your phone? That’s so weird. Fast forward. 20 years later, everybody does it.

Alan 2:04Everyone, if anything, you can’t stop them from thrusting their phone right in your face and going oh, I don’t need to see your trash cans and how pretty I you know,

Stephen 2:13I like email, you know, because I got mine dark calm along with probably 10 other domain emails, right? And people are like, Oh, I never heard of that one. Well, no, that’s because it’s mine.

For whatever reason, we have a long discussion on fashion. Nerd fashion. Yeah, I don’t know why that became a complete discussion today.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80241581 The Irregulars

The big topic today is the changes once again happening in the comic world. This time, Marvel has signed a deal with Penguin Random House to distribute their books. Not sure if this is good news for comic book shops or collectors.

We talk about some of our favorite comic book stores:

http://www.kenmore-komics.com/

Adams Action Figures and Comics

We also love comixology and hoopla:

https://www.comixology.com/

https://www.hoopladigital.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pinette

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Schimmel

https://www.syfy.com/resident-alien

Transcript:

Alan 0:39It’s kind of funny, I don’t think I’m quite Seth Brundle. But it never matters to me what I wear, well, not never, most of the time is just flying pants and shirt that kind of match. They have a common color or whatever like that. But I’ve, I’ve worked on having both things in my closet not be special location, things are things I wear all the time. And so I select a pair of lounge pants and a shirt. And and I know I just like I said, I haven’t gotten to that point, if I have 10 white shirts and 10 black pants and you just choose the next one in a row. Right? Mind that.

Stephen 1:11Right? I always said when I was younger. As long as I have a pair of jeans, I don’t care what my shirt is because everything goes with a pair of jeans.

Alan 1:22You know what’s funny is all through college and African college. I wore jeans all the time. And then something just one day clicked over in me. And I said, you know, I’m going to try some Dockers because I don’t know, I don’t think I was going to like apply for a place that was of course the blue shirt and tan Dockers required uniform. But it’s at least I knew I’d be able to get other colors besides blue.

Stephen 1:43Right. And

Alan 1:44then also they wore very well. And I discovered that I liked him. So then I got you know, half my fault. The doctors didn’t fit me. And then I got half a dozen pairs of different colors. And I just kind of abandoned jeans. And especially when I started wanting to go on hikes. It was like well, I should have jeans on because they’re you know, invulnerable. You can get scraped on rocks and stuff. But then you read about cotton is rotten and should best be forgotten. And that, you know, jeans really are bad if you get wet because they will just suck the heat while they’re drying you where you’re drying them as a better way to put it. And so I don’t know now I have a couple pair, but I only kind of break them out when it’s I don’t even know it’s not like speci...

We have another live episode for you. This one was recorded for the Dayton Mensa RG – Lost Cities. The theme of the weekend was Lost Cities.

Alan and Stephen have both been on trips that many geeks would love. We discuss some of the places we’ve been which give us a glimpse into the past.

There is some discussion of fantasy trips and trips we could take via technology. Alternative Reality and Virtual Reality have given us new avenues to explore the past.

And there are some ‘lost’ places that more people should visit and we have a great chat about those also.

Come listen to the live podcast as we explore!

Transcript:

Alan 0:38So it’s because we’re now actually looked into artificial time, we want to do so thanks, everyone for coming. And what we’re, you know, what relentless geekery is about we had a little bit of an introduction is, you know, to talk about these things, both current because that’s often of interest to people, but also we have been reading and seeing and doing and playing for a long time. And so we tried to share those things. In particular, for this session, with lost cities being the theme for the RG, we wanted to spend some time on that Stephen and I have both traveled physically and in our minds any number of different places. And so we’re gonna try to use that as to what are some of our cool experiences have been, but as you might imagine, it’s not only have we really traveled there, it was kind of like geek travel, you know. So, Steven, you have an opening, you know, you can’t wait to talk about what this topic strikes?

Stephen 1:29Well, when I talk about things, places we’ve been to, and the geek things, reasons why or places that we still want to, but we’ve investigated,

Alan 1:39I would say both. And also, as quick, you know, I know that this is we’re doing it live, and we’re recording it and so forth. And but if there’s anybody that really has a wonderful conference, to be sure to make that they’d like to chime in with, please raise your hand, please do you have a dog, please make sure that they’re currently not going to be taking us to doggie Ville. So here, I don’t know.

Stephen 2:05Let’s start off, what’s the most geeky trip you’ve taken to some exotic place, maybe not even a city but some exotic place.

Alan 2:15So it’s kind of a very good geeky place for instances. So here’s a quick frame. I’m Colleen and I have been seeing state capitals all of our married life. We went to Bar Harbor for bah, bah, bah, have a honeymoon and underway. So

Stephen 2:31did I my first time Montpelier,

Alan 2:32which is the smallest of the state capitals. And I kind of knew that for reading one of those like, you know, trivia books. Well, we loved it. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there. But you it’s it’s only like 4000 people, but the Capitol itself is a perfect dome, and a perfect like big sidewalk with stairs leading up to it and perfect gardens. And it just was beautiful. And we kind of said, you know, this is where every state kind of like shows off, what’s the best foot forward, right? See all the state capitals. And from that throwaway comment, like two days into our married life three days in,

Stephen 3:04we’ve now seen 14 out of 50, you proposed again, right?

Alan 3:09And the reason that’s cool, I guess, is because it has proven to be that that state capitals are beautiful.

Like any good geek conversation, we start off discussing a bit about house repairs and that leads into our discussion on electricity. Particularly with figuring out how much power you need to run certain items and how you really need to know about this for some Raspberry pi projects.

What we really intended to discuss was Zach Snyder’s Justice League. This is a completely different movie than the theatrical release. While there are still things we think should have been done different, overall we discuss why we liked this version.

Alan has had a rough time with his investments lately. That’s not to say that he’s losing money, but there are reasons he has less than he used to.

This ties into a talk on AI and GPT2. AI generated text is not a sci-fi future, it is here and you can even install it on your computer.

We also are starting somethin new and featuring music and books we are currently listening to and reading. Here is this weeks:

Frost*

https://frost.life/

John Cougar Mellencamp

http://www.mellencamp.com/

Dean Koontz – Jane Hawk

https://www.deankoontz.com/book-series/jane-hawk

Jeff Strand – Stranger Things Have Happened

https://shop.scholastic.com/teachers-ecommerce/teacher/books/stranger-things-have-happened-9781338226836.html

We’ve had issues with Alan’s sound and we are continuing to try and figure out the issue. We both have been in tech support and understand the issues and we want to do what we can to make it sound good.

Open source is a big topic since both of us work with these types of products every day.

Talking about products leads us to discussing marketing and the ways that marketing controls people. Apple has some of the best commercials and we understand why.

After marketing, we delve into Bill Gates and philanthropy. It fits because we wouldn’t be doing tech support without what Bill helped create. Though now, he is the biggest philanthropist in the world.

We cover many topics today that revolve around lifestyle. There is discussion about virtual reality compared to real reality. We talk about comedy. And we talk about our love for Bill Watterson and his Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.