In This Episode: A week with Apple Card. Discontinued vodka. 78 RPM vinyl, and the potential for laser record players. Bill Nye sells out while Mac Book sells Surface. Server security: everything connected to the Internet is under constant attack (even you)!
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
- Gary spent a week with his new Apple Card, although he just got the physical card today. This lead to a bit of a discussion of the progression of payment technology from contact-less Apple and Google Pay, to the need (or lack there of) for signatures at point of sale.
- Randy spend some time lamenting that his favorite coffee-flavored vodka, Sobieski, has been discontinued. (Leo’s shares the sentiment … it was good, emphasis on was.)
- In a riff off of this week’s episode number, Leo points out that a) shouldn’t 78RPM be higher fidelity than 33⅓? (OK, ok, there are reasons.) And why do we need physical needles any more anyway? Couldn’t a laser do the job? (And Leo remembers a video of Chris Pirillo on Call for Help from some years ago.)
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Bill Nye the Shill Guy (Photo: Microsoft) Bill Nye (the “Science Guy”) did an ad for Google’s Chromebooks dissing Windows. Did he sell out? Probably. Was it in poor taste? Perhaps, but not necessarily as bad as Microsoft finding an individual whose real name is Mac Book, and orchestrating an ad where “Mac Book recommends Microsoft Surface”. With luck both ads will be gone soon. In addition, a recent ZDNet author talks to a Best Buy salesman for the Chromebook versus Windows word on the street. (Spoiler: Windows wins in the real world.)
- We ended on a discussion of server security, and the fact that anything and everything connected to the internet is under constant attack. Be it a server, a computer, a router … all are being constantly, and continually probed for vulnerabilities. In particularly we all agreed that every WordPress site must include some kind of security plug-in to further harden the site. (Leo and Randy use iThemes Security.) Randy’s recent comment on Twitter called out Digital Ocean, but there are many other problem hosts.
A laser phonograph pickup was one of the ideas I had as an engineering student in the mid ’70s that I saw become a product back then. No input on my part for the people creating it and, obviously, no benefit to me other than to verify that my idea was not overly weird.
The other was a digital watch (would have been LED in that era) with analog hands.
Gary – according to Popular Science article, the Apple Card physical card has a magnetic stripe as you suspected.