In This Episode: GPS’s “Y2K” was about as eventful as Y2K (but with one interesting failure). 2001 (the movie), U2s (the plane), and tech in sports.
This Week’s Hosts
Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True.Leo Notenboom, “Chief Question Answerer” at tech education site Ask Leo!Gary Rosenzweig host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media.Kevin Savetz, web site publisher and Computer Historian at Atari Podcast.Longer Bios on the Hosts page.Show Notes
In the warmup, Randy noted we had a great Meetup in Denver, and will be doing another in Boise in early October. Anyone have a good venue to suggest? Kevin saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm at the Hollywood Theater in Portland, OR, which of course led to a discussion of the movie and what it meant, video formats, and other favorite movies. (Leo has three copies of 2001, including one he can’t watch yet! And Gary got a Zoom H4N digital recorder not so much because he needed a recorder, but because its microphones are so good.Kevin is curious about Focusmate, a productivity tool he read about in MEL Magazine. It’s an interesting way to get focus….Randy was intrigued by archaeologists’ “new” tool: recently declassified U-2 spy plane photos, which are super-high resolution, especially when compared to older spy satellite imagery (Science Mag). Which led to a side discussion about the Internet Archive.Kevin followed up on the outcome of the GPS time rollover that occurred Saturday (Bloomberg and The Next Web. It was surprising what high-tech device did fail, but for the most part it was about as ho-hum as Y2K. Don’t ask how Randy knew about LORAN (LOng RAnge Navigation, aka Loran-A), a World War II radio-based navigation system which was replaced by Loran-C in the late 1950s, but the hint is, he’s a major radio geek. (Loran-B, by the way, was a technological failure.)Gary asked: Should baseball have a tech-assisted strike zone? Which led to a brief discussion of the NBA Replay Center for basketball.Leo says you’ll be seeing less of the Safely Remove Hardware prompts in Windows 10 — but if the option is there, it’s probably best to use it.
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