In This Episode: Paul Allen, Do Millennials donate blood? PHP 5.x going away, yet millions of sites still use it. Cheap backup drives, and Winamp is coming back!
Podcast: Download (Duration: 56:57 — 26.1MB)
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.
- Longer Bios on the Hosts page.
Show Notes
- In the warmup, Randy says he’s working on a new B-to-B site (to be announced), Gary is working on a new site too (to be announced), and Leo is trying to catch up after travel last week, where we all met to work in person. (And you can join us next time, if you listen up!)
- Leo started up with today’s news that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen died. (Seattle Times has detailed reporting).
- Leo also talked about the struggle to get millennials to give blood; the Pacific Northwest’s blood bank is having success with (naturally!) an app (GeekWire). The app is out for both iOS and Android.
- Randy says yeah, it’s somewhat of a FUD headline, but with the end of life for PHP 5.x, web site creators that rely on it (including WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal) really need to migrate to later versions, says ZDnet.
- Leo is enthusiastic that name-brand 1TB of portable SSD is now at the $200 price point. Story: PCWorld. (Buy one: Amazon). That then led to a discussion: is SSD overkill for backups? Well yeah: Randy got this 2TB WD drive for his wife’s backups for just $65(!). But get what what you’ll use! Both options have other sizes available.
- Gary brought up the upcoming Facebook hardware, the Alexa-enabled Portal for $350 (via Wired). It reminded Randy of Lenovo’s similar Google Home video unit, the Smart Display for $250. But none of the guys were too keen on putting cameras in their houses — especially Facebook’s. And yes, Facebook did try a phone some years back, and it flopped.
- Last, Randy says that the popular player Winamp is coming back after 5 years of no updates, both as a mobile app and the desktop player, says TechCrunch. And that led to a wide-ranging discussion about streaming vs local MP3s, and the way music consumption has changed since Winamp went away in 2013 — but even then, Winamp (whose slogan is “Whip the llama’s ass.”) could handle a lot of streaming services.