In This Episode: Neal Stephenson’s latest. Downloading entire websites. Connectivity while travelling is getting easier. “Sign in With Apple”, and the pros and cons and privacy of letting a third party like Apple (or Google, or Facebook, or Microsoft) serve as a single authentication service.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:01:41 — 28.3MB)
This Week’s Hosts
- 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 discussed Neal Stephenson’s latest book, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, which lead do a discussion of how it does (or does not) relate to previous Stephenson books like Reamde and Cryptonomicon. Leo discovers he already owns Cryptonomicon even though he’s never read it, and now feels he must.
- Gary also watched Terry Gilliam’s latest movie, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
- Kevin learned how to download entire web sites using WGET (see the twitter thread). He’s also selling vintage tech stickers at vintagetechstickers.com. (Leo’s got one on his laptop already.
) - Leo talked about his cousin from The Netherland’s latest visit after her trip RV’ing through British Columbia, Yukon, and into Alaska. Of particular interest was the SIM card she purchased before arrival that “just worked” whenever Wi-Fi wasn’t otherwise available.
- That lead to a discussion of how we each connect while travelling. The consensus was that none of us has done the SIM card thing, as Wi-Fi is almost everywhere we go. Sometimes it’s just easier to pay the mobile provider to just have things work, also.
- Gary talked about Apple’s new privacy initiative with a Sign In With Apple button — CNBC — and how it really is better than the outwardly appearing similar offerings from Google, Facebook, and even Microsoft.
- Apple is also pushing two-factor authentication, which reminded Leo of an article published earlier: SIM swap horror story: I’ve lost decades of data and Google won’t lift a finger where an individual lost his mobile number due to SIM swapping, and then his Google account.
As always I enjoy your podcast. Today as I was motoring across Uzbeckistan I was surprised that Google FI was not mentioned in the discussion of International Internet connectivity. I’ve been using FI since the Pixel2 was released. It just works almost everywhere with no increase in data or text costs. We rarely actually make an actual intenational phone call as we use Whatsap which works better for us. And to sweeten the pot they provide data cards for free for other tablets and phones in the family. Everybody wins
Just back from vacation in Wyoming. Our week in Yellowstone was basically zero AT&T, no internet in hotels, no connectivity at all – in supposedly advanced USA! Our one Facebook was on top of a mountain with enough height to get signal and a three minute upload for one photo.
Do you have a link to the 6502 book? My grandparents Christmas gift back in 1977 was the 6502 hardware and programming manuals (which sadly I don’t have both, any more); I used to be able to read 6502 code straight from the hex dump.