In This Episode: Traveling with cell phones. Can politicians (legally) block people from their social media feeds? Linux coming to Windows?! And fake meat: how good is it, really?
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, Gary has been Working on improvements to his YouTube presence, Kevin interviewed Steve Meretzky of Infocom, then attended Vintage Computer Festival East, and also saw Be More Chill. Leo was working on his new online course, “All About OneDrive” (following in Gary’s footsteps), and changing the WordPress theme on the askleo.com family of sites (following in Randy’s footsteps). And Randy talked about his recent travel to (Republic of) Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, which led to a discussion of the cell phone solution he used.
- Gary wondered if politicians should be allowed to block someone on their official social media sites, or is that a violation of free speech rights? A Colorado politician is being sued over it, not for money, but for a court ruling. Randy noted that last year, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s habit of blocking people on Twitter is a violation of First Amendment Rights — though that’s being appealed.
- Leo says Microsoft will ship a Linux kernel with Windows. The presumed goal is to more directly support Linux apps and development on Windows. The existing Linux subsystems available (Leo runs Debian) are in a sense emulations that run Linux command line — which is already pretty cool (at least to Leo).
- As a follow-on, Randy has learned that Microsoft is bringing back Windows 95’s popular Power Tools, which will be open source.
- As a non meat-eater, Gary is very interested in how several major meat alternatives like Impossible and Beyond are expanding — so much so that there are now shortages.
- And Gary talked about attending the WordPress Happiness Hour Meetups, where he helps people with their WordPress problems. The most common seems to be that their developer has disappeared, and they can’t do anything with their sites.
“…if politicians should be allowed to block someone on their official social media sites, or is that a violation of free speech rights?…”
Those complaining still have the opportunity for “free speech.” They can post opinions in their own public forum. If they can’t post on a politician’s social media site, they can use a phone or certainly write a letter — this affords them the opportunity to have their say. Nothing in our society indicates that we have the right to unfettered access via all avenues. Sounds like they’re ticked, not that they can’t have their say, but that they won’t get the publicity to everyone in the world.
Randy,
Thanks for the heads-up about the SIM for European travel. I am traveling to Puglia this summer and dreaded the prospect of obtaining and enabling a SIM at the airport in Brindisi.
I was definitely happy at figuring that out. Glad it helps!
You should not be surprised that Microsoft is releasing a version of Linux. Microsoft owned Xenix before DOS. Check out https://fossbytes.com/xenix-history-microsoft-unix-operating-system/ for one write-up of the history.
Microsoft licensed Xenix from SCO. It was the first system I logged into when I started there in 1983, and hosted my first email address as well. Xenix is, as I understand it, not related to Linux directly… I believe it was a variation of Unix itself.