Synth [00:00:08]:
It's the TEH podcast episode number 233 with Leo Notenboom of askleo.com and Gary Rosenzweig of macmost.com. This week, catching rockets out of the air, a WordPress feud, and the archive.org disaster.

Leo [00:00:26]:
It's another week. Hey, Gary.

Gary [00:00:28]:
Hey, Leo. How's it going?

Leo [00:00:30]:
It's going well. Yeah. It's been an exciting, you know, time for for technology. It's funny. I did not watch it live, but I did watch the video of the most recent SpaceX Super Heavy launch.

Gary [00:00:47]:
Sure. Yeah.

Leo [00:00:48]:
And what I find absolutely amazing is the the capture, the catch, if you will, of the booster coming back. That was just amazing. Yeah. Watching that, even even delayed, you know, sent a sent a chill up my spine. I thought that was pretty cool.

Gary [00:01:06]:
Yeah. So I I saw too. They so I guess the idea was before they were doing like, having it land and that was proving to be too hard, or is this just a different technique for a different rocket?

Leo [00:01:20]:
I think they just decided this technique for a different rocket, but I honestly I'm not sure. I could I could confirm that. I think up until now, they've just been, assuming that that booster when used would get, tossed into the ocean as is as is, you know, has been traditional for the last 50 years.

Gary [00:01:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I I wonder, like, what the details are engineering wise on the pressure put on by the chopsticks, you know, that caught it and, and what extra convincing they have to do or discounts you may get if you're actually riding one of those back up after it's been caught. It's like, you know, it's like buying a used car. You know?

Leo [00:01:56]:
Used. Yes.

Gary [00:01:57]:
You know, it's probably fine. Yeah. Climb over.

Leo [00:02:01]:
What I was looking at, I could not get a good sense from the the chopsticks or the arms that gathered it. But Mhmm. My sense is that they're probably not putting horizontal pressure on it. They're not squeezing the the rocket, but instead they are positioning themselves underneath what I would have just referred to as tabs that the rocket would then hang on or sit on. So

Gary [00:02:25]:
Yeah. I mean, that's probably probably it. You're probably right.

Leo [00:02:30]:
So It will be interesting to see, you know, when this particular booster gets used again, what happens to it?

Gary [00:02:37]:
Yeah. Indeed.

Leo [00:02:39]:
I was thinking about it as I was watching it. And, just, you know, from my perspective, from a software engineering perspective, I could just envision so many processors doing so much calculation in real time, you know, adjusting the rockets and adjusting this, that, and the other thing. It's it's almost overwhelming how much computation is going into simply getting that sucker to to line up in exactly the right place. When you think I mean, it's no small feat. Right? They had to get within a few inches of where they Oh, sure. And the, you know, the target was the planet. There's a lot of room for error. So

Gary [00:03:20]:
There's I'd like to think that the the rocket itself was doing all of that with, as you said, tons of processors and trying to figure it out. But meanwhile, the catching device is basically just a guy named Dave with his fist over a big red button that just it's like, is it there? Yes. Boom. And then it closes. You know? Because why not?

Leo [00:03:40]:
Sure. Why not, indeed? Hey. Don't screw it up.

Gary [00:03:44]:
Yeah. Press the button at the right time. I mean, because it probably is such a trigger, but I'm sure they do have, yeah, I'm sure there's it's automatic systems and all of that. It's it's interesting. It's also interesting to see it fire, you know, that just like with the ones that land. You know, they're they're firing just before they hit the ground to slow down. So that means that they're not using all the rocket fuel to actually boost whatever, you know, the cargo is up. Correct.

Gary [00:04:09]:
Yep. Some of it's being kept in reserve, and that's, that's that's kind of interesting from, like, you know, just thinking in terms of all those math problems you have to do when you're in math, you know you know, physics class trying to figure out, like, the weight of the fuel and its decreasing amount over time versus the amount of force being applied and all of that.

Leo [00:04:30]:
The reason I went to the old problems of, you know, if a rocket goes up at this speed for this long and then needs to turn around and come down at this speed in that long, and what how much how much has to be left before it falls to the ground out of fuel?

Gary [00:04:44]:
Yeah. Exactly. It's, yeah. Further complicated the whole equation. But, but that's where we're at. And, you know, it's good. We I mean, boy, a lot of rockets go up every year now. Yeah.

Gary [00:04:57]:
It's pretty incredible.

Leo [00:04:59]:
And indeed, the only the only thing that worries me now about the increasing pace at which we're throwing things into orbit

Gary [00:05:05]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:05:05]:
Is that there's a lot of things in orbit. And Sure. There's a there's a name for it. It doesn't come to the top tip of my tongue, but there's a name for it where, a chain reaction could happen where one thing in orbit crashes into another, and that that sends off all sorts of pieces then crash into others and into others and into others. So, hopefully

Gary [00:05:26]:
Yeah. It's, I mean, it's a lot. You know, it's three-dimensional space, so there's a lot of room for error.

Leo [00:05:31]:
Oh, absolutely.

Gary [00:05:32]:
Everything's in slight even things that are in the same orbit aren't, you know, may still be at quite a distance from each other

Leo [00:05:39]:
Yeah.

Gary [00:05:40]:
When they pass each other because it's you know, the same orbit might still be 100 or 1000 of feet or meters away when they pass. It's just kind of in the big scale of things, especially from the low Earth orbit or the extreme low Earth orbit of, like, the, you know, the Starlink type satellites Yeah. Compared to the extreme, orbits of the geosynchronous satellites

Leo [00:06:05]:
Right.

Gary [00:06:06]:
That, you know, have to stay stationary. But it's it's an incredible distance, and there's all sorts of different types of orbits in between that. There's a lot of space out there, literally. So, yeah, hopefully, that that won't be an issue, anytime anytime. So we we have a lot of other issues to deal with, like, actually, you know, what what happens when the space station is decommissioned and things like that. I believe

Leo [00:06:32]:
they even have a plan for that one, though.

Gary [00:06:34]:
Yeah. I've heard that they they're planning what's gonna be a series of private, or sem or semi private, space stations that NASA will actually lease space on.

Leo [00:06:48]:
Oh, interesting.

Gary [00:06:49]:
Yeah. So, you know, we'll see if that, how that goes.

Leo [00:06:53]:
There was a news article about, a space station potentially going up next year, that is essentially a, a luxury hotel. And

Gary [00:07:07]:
Yep.

Leo [00:07:07]:
For the right price, which was not mentioned, and, of course, if you have to ask, it's, you know, I mean, it's like it looked gorgeous. I'm not sure that I'd sit on top of a rocket to get there, but, you know, that's that's another piece of of where things are headed.

Gary [00:07:25]:
So I I was interest just before we get off of the space thing. Yeah. I was interested to see, like, how many people are in space right now? And there's a website, who is in space.com. And there are, believe it or not, 14 people. And I think they're all on the the International Space Station right now.

Leo [00:07:44]:
Does that not include that's gotta be No.

Gary [00:07:46]:
That's 2 space stations. Yes. The Chinese one. 3 are onboard that, and the rest, 11, are onboard the ISS. Yeah. So interesting. So, yeah, we we can't forget about the Chinese space station. The, and it's we have to remember too when the ISS started, I mean, it grew quite a bit over time.

Leo [00:08:07]:
Mhmm.

Gary [00:08:08]:
So while the Chinese space station is, like, would assume is smaller now because it's newer, it will probably continue to grow. I mean, it's pretty credible. The 11 people onboard the ISS, because it seemed like so for so long in the early days of it, it was always, like, a crew of, like, 3 or 4 or something. Yeah. 2.

Leo [00:08:28]:
3. Yep.

Gary [00:08:30]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:08:30]:
Well, I meant to be fair, 2 of the ones that are up there right now are unplanned.

Gary [00:08:35]:
Yeah. They're not supposed to be. Yeah. They've overstayed their,

Leo [00:08:39]:
Yeah. They're out.

Gary [00:08:40]:
So Yeah. Yeah.

Leo [00:08:41]:
Anyway, so it's been an interesting week in technology. Otherwise, there's been a couple of interesting controversies and problems. The one that I want to to to bring up first, and this is one of those behind the scenes kind of things, I think, for a lot of people. But there is currently a bit of a feud going on between WordPress and WP Engine. WP Engine is essentially a hosting service where you can, you know, set up your website, and it's designed to give you, you know, well managed managed for you WordPress, installations, and that's how you would run your your website or your blog or whatever. Unfortunately, they've apparently gotten into a TIFF with the actual WordPress folks. And, the WordPress organization, mostly Matt Mullenweg, has essentially denied access to some of the technologies at wordpress.org that WP Engine might rely on. Now that doesn't prevent anything from working, but apparently, it does impact dramatically their ability to, update, you know, patch things and make updates as things move forward.

Gary [00:09:57]:
And,

Leo [00:09:57]:
of course, in fine, fine 21st century tradition, they're in the process of suing one another. So it's it's and, of course, on the wordpress.org site, really, there's to be clear, there's wordpress.comandwordpress.org.wordpress.com is a place where you can set up your own free blog, and it's actually also used for authentication in a few other places. Wordpress.org is a place where the open source WordPress software is available for anyone. For example, Ask Leo uses WordPress that I originally started with by downloading it from wordpress.org. It's unclear how this affects any of them other than, reputation, other than the fact that, you know, wordpress.org or WordPress, all of it seems to have gone a little bit, I don't know, odd political. It's not not political in the in the governmental sense, but political in the technological sense. And that's kind of concerning. The bottom line for me, is that while I'm certainly not panicking, because I don't really think that if there's going to be any major impact at all, it's gonna be quite some time off.

Leo [00:11:10]:
But it does kind of illustrate to me how fragile some things are. If I was hosting on WP Engine right now, I would be concerned because they now have to take some extra steps to basically deal with whatever it is they're no longer able to access from WordPress. And that's that's concerning. The fact that I'm on the other side self hosted doing my own stuff means I'm pretty isolated or insulated from all of that. But, for other folks, yikes. And there's also this this undercurrent of, you know, WP Engine exists. And as it turns out, WordPress owns a competitor to WP Engine. So how much of this is competitive? How much of this is anticompetitive? There's just a whole lot of complications going on here.

Leo [00:12:01]:
And it's honestly, it's kind of sad, because I've seen WordPress as being a wonderful example of how open source software, and the community make a huge difference. You know, some like, I think it's over a third of websites are running on WordPress. I think you've at least got one of yours doing it. Oh, well, yeah. MacMost is WordPress. Yes.

Gary [00:12:19]:
Yeah. And I've got, you know, all my

Leo [00:12:21]:
other sites I have. I can't even keep track. I've probably got about a dozen sites that are all running WordPress in various flavors. So it's it's pretty amazing what WordPress has done. And this is just kind of even the most successful, sites and services can run into problems that, that make you wonder.

Gary [00:12:43]:
Yeah. It it's very strange. I don't know much about WordPress, WP Engine at all, but I do know that, I've been concerned about WordPress for a long time in that not not WordPress itself, but the whole community of plugins and themes and and everything seems to just be just a deck you know, house of cards that could just fall in on itself because so many WordPress sites out there are so poorly put together, not because WordPress is. Like, the engine at the center is great. Mhmm. It's just that you start adding things onto it. It's meant to be extremely expandable, which is exactly what's happened. So there are dozens of major, systems that you could add to them.

Gary [00:13:32]:
And you could either use one of those, and they're huge, and they basically change WordPress drastically. Or you could just find tons of little ones, and I know people that have literally hundreds of these little plug ins. And it just everyone you add adds more points of failure. And it's it's yeah. I've seen other people's WordPress installs, and they're scary. And quite frankly, my WordPress install should be scary to other people because I not only have I have a very small number of plugins to do some specific things, and I have my own plugin that does everything else.

Leo [00:14:12]:
Right.

Gary [00:14:12]:
So instead of actually expanding it by grabbing other people's stuff

Leo [00:14:16]:
Mhmm.

Gary [00:14:16]:
I have used my own skills as a programmer to expand it, which to me makes everything seem really stable and rock solid. But somebody else looking at it would say, I have no idea what that part is because nobody nobody except me does. Right? Do you happen to

Leo [00:14:30]:
know offhand how many plug ins you actually do have installed? Because I'm looking at my number, and I feel really guilty about it. But before I share it, I wanna know what I'm up against.

Gary [00:14:38]:
I I yeah. I think I've got I'm gonna say, like, 6 or 7.

Leo [00:14:43]:
Man. I

Gary [00:14:44]:
mean, it it it's it's not that many, and let's see. The number of plug ins I've got is 123 well, actually okay. 12 345,678. But one of them is the classic editor,

Leo [00:15:02]:
which is Right.

Gary [00:15:03]:
Part of WordPress, really. It's not it doesn't really count. One of them is mine. Right. Right? And then the rest are that, out of those, 2 of those are kind of anti spam or anti you know? Mhmm.

Leo [00:15:19]:
Just Mhmm.

Gary [00:15:19]:
Stopping and, you know, get bad comments and, one's like limits login attempts. Right. And that's that's I've got a cache I've got everybody you know, a cache one and a, a one that that will, like, attempt to put a list of, like, related posts on the page.

Leo [00:15:38]:
Oh, right. That's it. Yep. I had one of those for a while. It really wasn't doing a good job for me. Yeah. I know. I have 45 plugins turned on right now.

Leo [00:15:47]:
Oh. And, one of them is mine. One of them is classic editor, like you said. But the one of the I think the big differences here is that, I'm using well, I have my own self hosted store. I'm using it for membership stuff. I'm using it for some communication stuff. I mean, I'm just doing a whole bunch of stuff with this site. And it's unfortunate because some of that stuff could be parceled out to other sites.

Leo [00:16:12]:
Right? Or a better, perhaps less fragile design would have me set up the, you know, like my membership site on a different server. But, the the the ease with which things can work kind of implies that they're working together, and they're all working together on a single WordPress install. But, yes, I've got the same you know, I've got the anti spam plug in. I've got SEO plug in. I've got, you know, a bunch of other things that, a security plug in, a couple of those. Yeah. It's the other thing, the store that I run, I use WooCommerce for that, which is the same model actually, kinda sort of as WordPress as in and in that there's a base Mhmm. WooCommerce Yeah.

Leo [00:17:03]:
Which is actually free. Mhmm. But if you actually want to do some of the other things that go beyond what that base offers, well, there's a plug in for that. So, you know, if I look at this, I've got WooCommerce, but then I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 additional plug ins that are all related to WooCommerce. Mhmm. Which is, pretty amazing. Anyway, so not only is it necessarily, you know, fragile on the inside. I mean, I I agree with your concerns, but, yikes.

Gary [00:17:40]:
Yeah. 45. Yeah. It's a lot. It seems to be, but then not a lot compared to some of the stuff I've seen. Right. So, you know, there's that. And seeing

Leo [00:17:51]:
makes me feel a little bit better about having all these plug ins is now understanding how plug ins work. Because, you know, like like you, I've got my own custom plugin that does a few things specifically for me. And, you know, understanding how it hooks in, understanding what does and what does not impact the system, is actually good knowledge to understand what you should and shouldn't do with plug ins in general.

Gary [00:18:19]:
Yep. Yeah. Indeed. And I a lot of people keep their customizations in their theme, and I I actually may have a few of those as well where it seemed appropriate to put them in the Right. In the theme rather than that. And I have my own custom theme as well, which, I I created from the the kind an old version of the WordPress default theme. Old because that's when I created it.

Leo [00:18:45]:
Right.

Gary [00:18:46]:
But, you know, it was it was new when I when I made it. So, yeah, I've got my own custom theme as well, which is another thing. You know, people have tons of themes installed, and themes aren't as simple as just a, like, you know, list of colors and font sizes. Right. There's functionality in the themes, and sometimes it can even be dangerous to have a a theme you're not using kind of sitting there. Right. So, yeah, I just have those. And speaking of fragile Yeah.

Gary [00:19:15]:
Brings us to our next story, which is just a really disturbing one. Everybody should be disturbed about this. So one of the biggest, if not the biggest website on the Internet, has been having trouble the last week or so. Archive.org, of course, is what I'm referring to. It is a big site. I'm surprised to hear so many people constantly say archive.org. You know the wayback machine Right. Which I I just it's like that's a small part of archive.org, but, you know, it's a part that a lot of people kinda remember and and check out and think is not

Leo [00:19:53]:
Probably the piece that most people use, to be honest.

Gary [00:19:56]:
Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. It's like not for me and not for like it's not and I do use it occasionally, but I use other parts of archive.org more. The but anyway, so sometimes in the press, it's reported as the Wayback Machine is down or the Wayback Machine's been hacked. Well, it's actually archive.org, you know, saying like the Wayback Machine is the what's going on here. That's like saying the, you know, the the new new book section of your library has been hacked. You know? It's like, well, actually, the whole library has been hacked, the whole thing.

Gary [00:20:30]:
So two things related happened. One is that denial of service attacks started on archive.org. So in other words, lots of computers, mostly like zombified computers with viruses on them, started hitting the server really hard, and that started first, but they were able to deal with it. And I'm surprised I would I thought that archive.org was the site that couldn't be attacked that way simply because they deal with such a massive amount of bandwidth that, I thought, well, anybody trying to attack it, it would be like a drop of, you know, a drop of water in the ocean kind of thing.

Leo [00:21:15]:
But I suspect that

Gary [00:21:16]:
out no.

Leo [00:21:16]:
That massive that massive bandwidth probably makes it more difficult for them to put in mitigation eventually.

Gary [00:21:23]:
Yeah. It's harder to to figure out, like, oh, you know, when they're but apparently, yes, you can overwhelm even them, and that's what happened. But they were able to kinda deal with it with some outages, and then they were hacked. And a database of passwords was stall stolen, and a message was put up on the site. So it was a real hack. It wasn't just like somebody got a hold of some data. They actually inserted some code into the site. They dealt with that or at least the immediate dealing with it.

Gary [00:21:54]:
There's gonna be a long term dealing with it as well. And then the denial of service tax just ramped up to the point that it knocked archive.org offline completely for several days. And at this point, all they've done, been able to do is get the Wayback Machine portion of archive.org back up as read only.

Leo [00:22:14]:
Right.

Gary [00:22:16]:
And that's been up for a day or 2 now, but the rest of archive.org, which contains, you know, like, archives of human knowledge, you know, from books to web to, like, you know, documents to audio, video. I mean, just tons of stuff. It's it's like the world's it's our modern day library of Alexandria. Right. That is still offline as I guess they are probably putting some things in place to shore it up, and hopefully it'll be back online soon. The weird thing about both of these attacks, assuming that they are related and the same people are, involved, everybody's asking, why? It is, like, the most unlikely target. I mean, I heard it described as it's like if a bunch of terrorists decided to bomb a library. Why? Why the library? Like, it it why why there? I mean, they're not government affiliated.

Gary [00:23:17]:
They're independent. They're nonprofit. They're they're anti censorship and that they just archive everything, so it's really hard to have any ideological problem with them. I mean, yes, it gets you attention, but still probably a lot of other targets would get you more attention if you if that's what you're after. There is a group that has claimed responsibility, although most of the articles I read say that it hasn't been proven yet that they're actually responsible. So people are worried that it's the somebody claiming responsibility that didn't actually do it. It's it's just a very puzzling thing. It's like, why go after them? They're like the nice people.

Leo [00:23:59]:
The only people that I know of that have an issue with archive.org are, the big publishing houses

Gary [00:24:06]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:24:07]:
Who are trying to get them to stop. They're basically fighting it out in court how archive.org can or cannot loan things out. To be clear, that would be, like, the least likely group of people to pull together some hackers to say go take them down.

Gary [00:24:22]:
Exactly. And at least at least probable in, like, all sorts of different ways.

Leo [00:24:26]:
Yes. Like,

Gary [00:24:27]:
they wouldn't wanna do it. They wouldn't wanna get caught. They would know how to do it. They wouldn't know how to talk. I mean, you know, it's like the whole thing. It's just a very puzzling thing, and and the fact that it's ongoing. I mean, we don't know for sure right now because, you know, way back machine is up, rest of it's down. For all we know, there is no attack going on now with just that they haven't put it back up yet because they're, you know, getting some things so it can't be attacked so easily.

Gary [00:24:52]:
But it did certainly go on for days. This wasn't like an attack that happened one evening, and then the attacker said, oopsie. Yeah. That was a dumb target. Let's, let's pick some sort of, you know, capitalist enterprise to to attack instead. This just kept going on and on and on. So, yeah, very very strange, disconcerting. Of course, I use archive.org for things, most notably to I I upload all my videos to it for perpetuity, you know, to be up there forever.

Gary [00:25:24]:
Right. And I also then use that archive as the podcast feed, which is a, like, less than, like, 1 half of 1 percent of all of my, you know, views come through the old video podcast method Mhmm. Which is how MacMost started in 2007. So for the few people that actually want to, you know, still view my videos that way for whatever reason, I have that feed point to archive.org's copies of each of these. And, and, of course, so my feed has basically been down or was down. I started putting those same files and an s 3 bucket.

Leo [00:26:04]:
Oh, right.

Gary [00:26:05]:
Temporarily, so, you know, somebody can get the latest video, but I can't continue that, because of the cost, to tell you the truth. I was

Leo [00:26:14]:
gonna say s 3, the you're paying both storage cost, which as it turns out is not as cost effective as things like even Dropbox. Yeah. And, but then you're also paying for bandwidth.

Gary [00:26:29]:
Yeah. Bandwidth. And it's very strange. They're not a great bargain on bandwidth that I thought they would be. Right. But the problem is that the one thing that Amazon does with s 3, that you can't find as easily as you think you should is they it's a it's a, you know, it's called a bucket because that's what it is. I could upload a file to it and then make that file available. Right.

Gary [00:26:54]:
Other services that kinda seem like they should compete with it don't. What they do is they are caching stuff. So the idea is I put the file up on my server.

Leo [00:27:05]:
Oh, right.

Gary [00:27:06]:
And then but I point to a URL at this content delivery network, which then grabs it from my server and redelivers it, which means you have to do all sorts of magic with DNS, and you've got to you've got to store all the files on your own as well, which is just a lot of maintenance when you have a podcast and you've got a new episode and then the old episode drops off the end. And it's like a whole thing. Whereas the s three bucket is just a upload, and here's the URL. Right. It's it's a pain. So I I hope I hope I don't have to continue to use that for very long. I'm tempted if I needed to find a long term solution. I I am thinking of just shutting down the podcast completely, because it's like, yeah, so few people use it.

Gary [00:27:53]:
And, possibly, also, I I discovered because the, the feed wasn't working, like, the the files couldn't be accessed, that I could simply just continue with the RSS feed because I think a reason people didn't complain is that the actual, entry for each episode was, like, here's the description. Oh, if you wanna view this on the web, click here. And I think people were just doing that, and I thought, well, wait a minute. Maybe I don't even need to have the file in the RSS feed. I could just have the RSS feed with a either a missing file or to, like, a dummy file.

Leo [00:28:28]:
Right.

Gary [00:28:28]:
And then just continue to put it there. Apple hasn't Apple and Itunes and and the podcast app haven't paid any attention to my podcast feed even back in 2007. Why would they start now? Right. So yeah. I I don't know. It's a it's one of those it's a weird thing. But I would like you know, I have this backlog now of videos I haven't been able to upload to archive.org. I wanna make sure that I have a complete archive there, so I, you know, have to get back to that.

Gary [00:28:56]:
But still, just a weird a weird thing to have happen of all the places to have this

Leo [00:29:03]:
Yep. Happen. And I it's it's funny because I feel badly for a whole bunch of different people, not just the people down at archive.org, but, like Kaye, for example Yeah. Who's doing a bunch of, Internet archive related stuff. I and I can only assume that he's just blocked from doing anything unless, and I haven't asked him, but I unless he's actually involved in the mitigation. But, yeah, it's it's crazy.

Gary [00:29:28]:
Yeah. It it's interesting. What I hope the only thing I could hope is that this is raising awareness of archive.org and that when they get back up, their, contributions will increase for the rest of the year.

Leo [00:29:42]:
Okay. Nice.

Gary [00:29:43]:
As, you know, more people maybe miss them and say, yeah. You know? And I really should probably you know? I did actually even see somebody post, on social media network. Does anybody know how I can contribute to archive.org right now Yes. Because their site's down, so I can't get to the contribution thing. But I have a feeling that they really need, you know, a boost right now.

Leo [00:30:06]:
What's interesting, though, is that the answer to that, of course, is now on archive.org. Right? The temporary the the the temporary page they've got Yeah. Very last line there says Oh, yeah.

Gary [00:30:19]:
There it is.

Leo [00:30:19]:
They can support, and it's a link to PayPal. So yeah. Sure. Do it.

Gary [00:30:24]:
I I also found that interesting. As soon as they went offline, officially offline, then they replaced the main page with the, you know, error message service availability thing. And the first thing I saw is that the message looked really old. Like, they had actually activated that page for a long time.

Leo [00:30:42]:
Oh, right.

Gary [00:30:42]:
And it said, check check at twitter slash x for the latest information, and I was so, like, disappointed. I was like, oh, come on. That's the only place I go. I have to go over to that site. And, apparently, I wasn't the only one that complained because I checked, like, an hour later, and then it said Twitter slash x or Blue Sky or Mastodon. Right. So I was like, alright. That's better.

Gary [00:31:05]:
Give us choices.

Leo [00:31:06]:
Yeah. So I've been I've been looking at Mastodon. It's been kind of interesting to see the see things progress.

Gary [00:31:11]:
Indeed. Alrighty. Mhmm. Hey. So I was, of course, we can't go through an episode without talking about AI. So I did something interesting with AI with, 11 Labs, which we use for this very podcast for various things. Like a lot of these AI tools now, they're getting multifaceted. Right? There's all sorts of cool things that you could do on, like, the page.

Gary [00:31:36]:
Like, it's like you can do this, this, this. And 11 Labs, of course, specializes in audio and voice and all. And one of the things you can do is you could give it a video, and it will produce alternative soundtracks where it translates the spoken word to another language, and it will do it using a similar sounding voice to the original. So to test that out, I actually did that with one of my videos, and I said, give me a Spanish soundtrack. And it sounds like me speaking Spanish. My my Spanish teacher from middle school will be so proud. The Is

Leo [00:32:18]:
Spanish any good, though? There's a real question.

Gary [00:32:20]:
Well, that's the thing. Now okay. I haven't tested it yet. I do plan on uploading this version to my patrons because there must be some Spanish speakers there, so I can get some feedback. And it it's interesting. It's it seems like there are limitations. Like, one of the things it does is it really tries to match up the the pacing of the audio, through it. So it's not changing anything in the video.

Gary [00:32:41]:
Your lips don't change or whatever. It's not doing anything special like that. But it's trying to keep the same pace, but it has a tolerance I found because I can look through the whole video and I can see it broken into segments, approximately sentences maybe, and most of them are the same size. And then every once in a while, there's one that's, like, 25% less. Never, like, 5% less. Never just a little bit like the Spanish finishes a little bit earlier than the English. But it's always either they match or they're off by, like, 25%. So I'm thinking that it's like a tolerance thing where it's like if they can make it match, they will.

Gary [00:33:22]:
And if not, it just they don't try. So sometimes you're talking and, you see my lips continue to move after the Spanish is finished saying Right. You know, whatever it is I'm saying. And, you know, it's a couple seconds of me doing it. And and other times, it's fine. And then I tried, just a heck of it. I tried adding another soundtrack to it, and I added Hindi as well. And, Hindi is not a language I hear spoken very often, unlike Spanish, in the United States, which you hear all the time.

Gary [00:33:52]:
And it was it was fascinating to hear Hindi, to hear something I don't really you know, it's very different for me to hear that, but I could hear my voice speaking it. So that was really interesting. And I'm tempted to I'll probably, I wanna let my patrons see this, but it's actually really easy to take these and export them as audio, and then YouTube has a way for you to just insert, an alternative soundtracks Oh, interesting. For a YouTube video. So I plan on going back to that video and probably throwing these 2 in there. And, that leads to kind of the speculation of thinking that, well, you know, how long before YouTube actually does this automatically? Right? That would be really interesting. Oh, I also liked that 11 Labs, it recognizes when there's things that are not spoken word. So when it gets to my little theme music at the beginning Right.

Gary [00:34:41]:
That plays normal.

Leo [00:34:43]:
Okay.

Gary [00:34:44]:
And at the end too. So it's act and then other little sounds that were in the video, little beeps and stuff, they play fine as well. So it's doing more than just grabbing the words, generating a new soundtrack, and then laying it in. It is actually working very closely with the audio track to do that. Interesting. It got me thinking too about, like, for a while, you've kind of had this translator ability on, the iPhone, you know, where there's a translate app. And you can use it for text and all, but you can also use it. You could speak into it or if somebody speak into it, and it will show you the text on the screen or speak it to you.

Gary [00:35:24]:
And you can even set it into a mode where you put the phone down between you, and you can go back and forth. And it acts like a translator in a sci fi movie. And this isn't new. Right? This has been around for a few years. So it's it's really cool. And I've seen a few videos, like travel type videos, where as a matter of course, the person is talking to somebody and they've got their iPhone out. Right. And they're just using this to ask for, you know, when does the ferry leave or, you know, how much does it cost to do this or whatever.

Gary [00:35:57]:
And and it's and they're not even commenting on that they're, you know, oh, look at this cool thing I'm doing. No. It's just like, oh, and then we are on our way to here and we needed to find directions. And then they show that's how they did it. It's fascinating. We definitely have been getting closer to having, you know, kind of universal translators like they have in sci fi. Hopefully fast

Leo [00:36:22]:
when you don't when you don't understand the other language

Gary [00:36:25]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:36:26]:
Hopefully, it's not doing the, my hovercraft is full of deals.

Gary [00:36:30]:
Yeah. The money part, I think. Yeah. I mean, there's that. I mean, I guess yeah. You just had you have to go and, you know, use I, you know, I found as I've traveled the world, I was very, when I was younger because I've always had difficulty learning other languages, I think due to my hearing. Mhmm. I don't have a very good ear for distinguishing different sounds.

Gary [00:36:54]:
Mhmm. And I think that's held me back in learning new languages because I'm not hearing things outside of English sounds very well. You know, and, that may be very timid about what it about traveling to countries early on that where it it wasn't very common to find somebody who speaks English. But since I, you know, stopped worrying about that and have been doing odd traveling, I'm amazed by how rarely you need to actually use language a lot at the time. You know, how you could travel all around, say, Tokyo Right. Go to a restaurant, visit a museum, go shopping, and then realize you never really had a language barrier at all because so much is conveyed with, just gestures or just actions.

Leo [00:37:38]:
Mhmm.

Gary [00:37:38]:
You know, you don't you walk up to pay for something. You don't have to say anything. Here's the thing I wanna buy. You do it. You you give me your credit card. That's like no language is needed. Right? Same thing with ordering food in a restaurant.

Leo [00:37:52]:
Nice to say thank you. But yes.

Gary [00:37:54]:
Yeah. Well yeah. But it's like it's not like you you know, it's like, oh, I tried to buy something, and I just I didn't know the language. I couldn't, you know, convey to the person who's there to take my money for the products I bring up to the counter. Couldn't understand what I wanted. Of course, they could understand what I wanted. It's the same thing everybody else wants that comes up to them to pay for their stuff. Well, you know and so it's very and also, you know, and, like, public transportation, all that, it's very symbol based, very map based.

Gary [00:38:23]:
That kind of thing, gestures, pointing. So even you said it'd be nice to say thank you. But you know what? Smiling

Leo [00:38:30]:
Of course.

Gary [00:38:31]:
You know, waving. There's a lot of gestures that you could use without words to signify basically thank you or please or, you know, just, you know, general goodwill. But adding a level like this where you can actually maybe have a conversation with somebody and ask them a question that's not normal. It's it's really it's interesting, and, it's it's kind of been a quiet piece of technology that hasn't been talked about much, and AI, of course, helps with it.

Leo [00:39:02]:
Well, that and I suspect that, even though it's been around for a while, it probably wasn't as good 2 or 3 years ago as it probably is.

Gary [00:39:14]:
Oh, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's one

Leo [00:39:17]:
of those things that's just been quietly improving to the point where all of a sudden people like you and I would recognize that, oh, hey, this just became a viable option. Yeah. What's funny? Because in Europe, we've talked about this before too. You know, the the symbology makes a lot of sense. Right? There's a lot of image based communication, but, it's still the case that, especially in the urban areas, English just works. It's it's on one hand, it's sad. Right? But on the other hand, it does make things much more convenient. And I've I've mentioned this before too that, you know, when my relatives who are Dutch go to a foreign country like say Denmark or Finland or something like that, just north.

Leo [00:40:04]:
The Finnish don't know Dutch, the Dutch don't know Finnish, so they speak in English.

Gary [00:40:08]:
Yes.

Leo [00:40:09]:
Which which I find very, very interesting and and somewhat, just funny.

Gary [00:40:15]:
Yep. I've observed that too in some, you know, definitely in Scandinavia. Yeah. It's very common. So, yeah, we it's, you know, one of the things that technology is making the world better, helping us understand, help us travel, but we it's it's been happening so smoothly over the last so many years Right. That it hasn't gotten the headlines that other things have gotten.

Leo [00:40:42]:
Yeah. And, honestly, the headlines that it deserves because this is one of those things where it actually is practical use.

Gary [00:40:47]:
Yeah. Definitely.

Leo [00:40:49]:
So Yeah. I want a complaint.

Gary [00:40:52]:
Okay.

Leo [00:40:55]:
One of the things that well, let's let's let me back up. Facebook is a great target for complaints because they do lots of things badly. Right?

Gary [00:41:05]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:41:05]:
I mean, they've enabled a global community. I I certainly you know, there's a lot of stuff that wouldn't exist, I suspect, without Facebook. But Facebook seems to be, of late, shooting itself in the foot repeatedly, and I'm not sure that they care. I have had posts removed with, you know, the the warning that says, hey. This is spam, yada yada. Of course, it's not. And, of course, these are posts that have been up there for, like, 3 months or so. They're just now getting around to deciding that it's spam.

Leo [00:41:41]:
Of course, I contest or ask for a a reevaluation, and I never hear anything. I got one this morning where I got notified that Facebook had taken down 20 of my posts. They were posted this summer, but I have no way of knowing which posts they were.

Gary [00:42:02]:
Oh, wow.

Leo [00:42:03]:
Just because it doesn't handle a long list like that very well. You might ask for show me more information, and it just shows you the same partial list. You know, the same thing as we removed this post 20 times. So, yes, that's my grump. Facebook is removing posts. Now the one of the reasons that I mentioned it here and one of the things I'm going to go on a little bit of a jihad on Facebook and other socials is that there's nothing we can do. Complaining doesn't help. You know, asking for for review doesn't seem to help.

Leo [00:42:38]:
We are at their mercy. So if you don't want to miss posts from Ask Leo, from MacMost, from, you know, not all news is bad, what are my other ones, 7 takeaways, all those things, sign up for the newsletter. The newsletter is under our control with the exception of spam filters, which ultimately are still under our control in the sense that we can we can actually do things to understand what's going on. It's it's the most reliable way to stay in contact with whatever service or site you're interested in following. So, anyway, that's my little my little grump turned, you know, active active I don't know which you wanna call it, but, yeah. Sign up for the email lists. Get Facebook out of the way. If this continues to happen with Facebook, I'm not sure, if I'm going to keep trying to invest over there just because, it's so frustrating to do all that and then have it removed.

Gary [00:43:37]:
Yeah. I've, I've stopped posting regularly to Facebook for MacMost a long time ago. But, you know, and I wonder too if some of this, it doesn't excuse it, but some of it is maybe spam has gotten a lot worse because I noticed about a month or so ago that, I did a periodic check into my junk filter for email. And I'm using Google. I'm using, like, a Google Workspace, you know, email address for my primary thing, and they charge for it now. So if I had to start over again, I probably would use, like, ProtonMail or something like that. But since I'm already there at Google, I'll just keep going. But I usually look in junk to see some good examples of spam and scams that I could use in my videos.

Gary [00:44:27]:
Right? And I've been doing I did a really good video on scams recently, and I'm planning to do more. So I was looking in it to see, okay. Oh, let me go and see if I can get some good juicy, lottery scam examples in here because I was doing some research on that. And I found a lot more false positives in there than I was prepared to see because usually I rarely see a false positive in there. And to the point where I don't even go. It's like, ah, there's the occasional email that falls in there. If it was important, the person would contact me another way. But I saw a lot of, number 1, regular, messages to me from people, some stuff that was like server related stuff where it was like the server telling me things, and it wasn't important, but it should not have been marked as spam.

Gary [00:45:15]:
It should have just gone in my inbox, and I should have just archived it, you know.

Leo [00:45:18]:
Server ones have an explanation for it, but go ahead.

Gary [00:45:21]:
Well, but they were not it wasn't a very consistent thing. Like, things like a like, I'd get a couple comment, notifications. I was like, well, I'm getting all the rest of the comment notifications. These went to spam, though. And then, just a few other just odd just weird things. So I basically went in fortunately with Google, you can set lots of filtering rules. Yes. And all of these, basically, I was able to go and create filtering rules I just didn't need before, like Right.

Gary [00:45:51]:
Stuff that, you know, WordPress comment notifications just didn't go to spam. So I didn't never had to do it, but it was easy to go and set it up so that if certain criteria were met, always go to the inbox and never send to spam. So I set up a bunch of rules and and that worked and all. But it was just weird because it's like, well, they must there there must be a little bit of a, few battles in the war going on for them to have up the stakes a bit, and my stuff got caught up in it.

Leo [00:46:16]:
Right. Alright. So this week in cool stuff, I'm going to do something really odd. My cool thing is going to be technology related. For the most part, we've been avoiding technology in this section, but it dawned on me this morning that I've been relying on a little piece of technology for, gosh, a couple years now that has really, really been serving me well, and it's a TP Link Wi Fi extender. And the reason I bring it up is because, as you know, I was I was out of town this weekend. And when we do that, we go out in our travel trailer, be it at a park or at, in this case, a relative's. You know? Yes.

Leo [00:46:54]:
There's Wi Fi in the area, but, it's often very, very weak. And I've even had this where I've left one specifically with a relative in their home, because they too were having trouble accessing the Wi Fi that was available to them. And it's awesome. I I was expecting there to be more issues. I even had a Zoom call yesterday or the day before using I mean, went over the Wi Fi extender. I was concerned that it would add more latency to the connection, but it's as if it weren't there at all. So I just wanted to throw that out there for folks that are having Wi Fi issues, especially when it's related to signal strength. TP Link Wi Fi extender.

Leo [00:47:39]:
My theory is that because it is designed to be an extender, it has a better antenna specifically for receiving than is, you know, crammed into my laptop. So, yeah, it's actually been working really well, and I just wanted to recommend that to folks. The links will be in the show notes.

Gary [00:48:01]:
I am really excited about my ain't a cool this week.

Leo [00:48:06]:
Okay.

Gary [00:48:06]:
It's one of the my favorite books of recent years. I devoured it this week. Have you ever heard of, you probably have heard of books somebody describes it as, hey. This book is really Douglas Adams like.

Leo [00:48:20]:
Right.

Gary [00:48:21]:
And then you read the book, and you're like, okay. So Douglas Adams like means it's sci fi and there are a couple jokes, you know, which is not this that's not it. You know? And it is. Every time that there's a little bit of humor in a sci fi book, somebody says this is like Douglas Adams, and no, it always fails. So when I saw that for this book, the only thing that actually got me to read it is it's from an author I know that is top notch. This is a book by Adrian Tchaikovsky who's written some fantastic deep and very serious sci fi. So when I heard he wrote a book that was extremely Douglas Adams like, I thought that's interesting. He writes really serious stuff, like deep stuff.

Gary [00:49:02]:
And I started listening to this, and, boy, finally, a book that is very Douglas Adams like. It's to to be a Douglas Adams like book, it's not just has to be sci fi and funny, but the humor has to be really rooted in technology and bureaucracy, right, which is a theme throughout Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's really a series about bureaucracy. Right? And it's gotta be constant. Hitchhikers doesn't let up. It doesn't give you a funny chapter at the beginning of the book. And then now let's get serious and save the world. It keeps going, and it's just as ridiculous at the end as it is at the beginning.

Gary [00:49:41]:
This book is just like that. It's sci fi. It's funny. The humor is about technology and bureaucracy, and it keeps it up. The entire book does not let, you know, let down on the humor at all. It's a book called Service Model. It's fantastic. It's actually kind of a dystopian novel, where the main character is a robot, a valet robot.

Gary [00:50:09]:
And the very the premises at the very beginning of the book, just to give you a sample, the very beginning of the book, he he kills his master, slits his throat, and, and doesn't know why he did it. And when the police bot comes around, to investigate the crime, he confesses, which the police bot says, you know, confessions can be fake you know, faked or, you know, coerced. He's like, oh, but I'm telling you I did it. And he says, well, I'm going to investigate and find out who really did it. And then determines he's not guilty because he has no motive, because he can't explain why he killed his master. So without a motive, there can't be a murder according to my programming. And he gets to go free. And the whole book is just this ridiculousness of this robot that is built to be a valet, going out into this world, which turns out not to exist anymore outside of this the, like, the last little mansion that he was working in, and going through encountering ridiculous people, ridiculous robots, you know, bureaucracy just gone completely awry, spiraling out of control.

Gary [00:51:23]:
It's bizarre, and every line is just dripping with just humor, and, it's just delicious. The whole thing is just delicious. And I just I it's like I could not stop reading it, but at the same time, I hated the fact that I was getting through it so fast because then the book would be over. So, anyway, it's great book. Huge recommendation.

Leo [00:51:46]:
Darn you for adding something else to my reading list. By the way, I did want to comment on the fact that I have been reading, last week's recommendation.

Gary [00:51:57]:
Yes.

Leo [00:51:57]:
I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom.

Gary [00:52:00]:
I saw that in your newsletter. Yeah.

Leo [00:52:02]:
And yes. And I'm about 3 quarters of the way through it and concur with your recommendation. It's a it's a really interesting, fascinating story, and I'm looking forward to, to seeing how it all resolves. Cool. Self promotion. So the article that I am going to self promote is, is passkey 2 factor authentication? We've talked about passkeys occasionally here and the fact that you and I basically have a really hard job ahead of us to try and explain what it is and get people to adopt it and so forth. But, one of the common confusions is is it 2 factor authentication? Does it relate to 2 factor authentication? And, of course, the the traditional answer is, well, it depends. There are it's it's not, but occasionally, sometimes it kind of sort of is.

Leo [00:52:51]:
Anyway, askleo.com/17464 is passkey 2 factor authentication. We'll attempt to make the mud a little less muddy.

Gary [00:53:02]:
Cool. I'll, point to a video, things you could do with an Apple trackpad that you can't do with a mouse. One of the best things Apple makes is their trackpads. They're built into all the MacBooks, but you can also buy a stand alone one for, desktop machines. Mhmm. It's a really great device, and, the comments for this video actually, prove me kinda right that people that like that use the trackpad really do love it, and people that don't use it just haven't tried it. Like, a lot of people just go and say, I think I I like a mouse. I'll go with the mouse, and they just don't give the trackpad a chance.

Gary [00:53:38]:
Right. It's, so, anyway, I point out some actual, like, specific things you can do with it, functions that it does that, mouse doesn't do.

Leo [00:53:48]:
Cool. Yeah. My current frustration with my my laptop is that, it's not a Mac, obviously, but its, its trackpad is super, super sensitive. And I don't seem to have a way to dial that down so it's very easy for me to accidentally, quote, unquote, click on things I didn't mean to click on. Alrighty. Cool. Well, here we are. That ought to wrap it up again for another week.

Leo [00:54:15]:
As always, thank you for listening, and we will see you real soon. Take care. Bye bye. Bye.

Synth [00:54:21]:
The show notes for this week are at tehpodcast.com/teh233. If you have a comment or question for us, be sure to leave it on the show notes page. The TEH podcast is hosted by Leo Notenboom of askleo.com and Gary Rosenzweig of macmost.com and edited by Connie Delaney. I'm your synthetic announcer, Adam, from 11labs.com. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you here real soon.