MacBreak Weekly 391 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It’s time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, Alex and Rene are here. We’re going to talk about the latest Mac news go to fail of course. And just as we go to press, an update from Apple. It’s all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

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Bandwidth for MacBreak Weekly is provided by Cachefly. At C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com. This is Macbreak Weekly, episode 391, Recorded February 25^th 2014

I'm sorry Kenny

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Leo: It’s time for MacBreak Weekly, the show that covers your Macintosh news and needs. Your deeply rooted Freudian needs. Starting with this man right here, Mr. Sigmund Freud himself, Andy Ihnatko. Hello Andrew.

Andy Ihnatko: Sometimes an OS update is just an OS update.

Leo: [laughing] Are you doing it now.

Andy: I just finished it right now.

Leo: Ah, good man.

Andy: After [inaudible] of course.

Leo: We’ll talk about that.

Andy: We’ll talk about that later. But yeah there was like a—that’s not a “oh I don’t know, let me just finish this project” or you know I'm getting a new computer in a couple of weeks. But you know that’s a—

Leo: No, little more important than that. Also here, Mr. Rene Ritchie from imore.com and Mobile Nations. Nice to see you.

Rene Ritchie: I was going to do the update Leo, but then I saw it required a restart so I became lazy.

Leo: I am going to take chances and surf the net without it but we’ll talk about that in a moment.

Andy: Last chance everybody, go see his tweets as he’s composing them.

Leo: As I'm writing them. Here’s my credit card number, where is yours? Also, Mr. Alex Lindsay, back from Washington, DC.

Alex Lindsay: Actually L.A.

Leo: The shot was actually better in Washington than it is here.

Alex:  I know it is. It’s an interim stage, interim yeah—

Leo: That green screen is so crappy behind you, oh wait it’s real.

[laughter]

Leo: And Alex has my Mac Pro. I finally remembered to bring it in just for you. Maybe you could figure out what Apple couldn’t. There’s something weird about it. Oh and I have to give you the administrator login.

Alex: Okay.

Leo: So let me do that. You could use a guest account but that wouldn’t give you the full flavor.

Alex: No, no…

Leo: …the Mac Pro experience. Alex are you testing it for Pixelcore, is that what you’re doing?

Alex: Yeah we want to see how some of the 3D applications run and how it renders. We’ve got some pretty heavy final cut 10 projects we want to throw on it and see how it resposds.

Leo: You have until the C comes out with the little big drive and then it’s all over, I want it back.

Alex: [laughs].

Leo: That may be years so you’re in luck.

Alex: Excellent, excellent.

Leo: So go to fail. I just went to gotofail.com and it say your browser is vulnerable, patch as soon as possible. It was kind of busy, which makes me think a lot of other people are going there in Safari after the update. There you’re safe. Who’s that, Chad? Are you in chrome?

Chad: Yup

Leo: Are you in chrome?

Chad: No, this is Safari.

Leo: You updated.

Chad: I hit escape, I updated right before the show started.

Leo: Oh man.

Chad: So yeah.

Leo: So this all happened since we’ve met last. It was kind of a dumb bug. I wonder even if it was a bug. It has a feeling of it being something that might’ve been done intentionally, if you look at the Apple source code, and for some reason the source code of this is published. We could do a little test of your programming skill. Let me see if I can find that source code and I can show it to you, and then you can look at that that source code and see what you think. Why was it open source code? That’s what I'm curious about. Here is the link from avanderson.com. Look carefully.

Alex: You don’t have to look too carefully.

Leo: Look carefully at this source code. Can you see the error. So it’s a typical “if then” kind of a thing, if there’s an error then go to fail. And this is the code that checks to see if a certificate’s authentic. Unfortunately, you see in that second if then statement, go to fail and then go to fail. This line, this line thirteen never gets executed because no matter what happens that second go to fail kicks in and you go to fail. What did the upshot of this, according to Adam Langley and everybody else is the certificate checking mechanism in SSl on Apple’s devices does not work.

Alex: And does it look like it’s been there for a while.

Andy: Since 10.7 was it?

Leo: Right.

Andy: It’s been around for a while but not forever but for a while.

Leo: Hmm, so it was fixed pretty quickly the next day on IOS 7.0.6. And I take it, having just arrived and it has been fixed now on OS 10.

Rene: Yes.

Alex: It has.

Andy: It just posted about an hour or two ago. But the weird thing is of course, as soon as I got alerted to it I downloaded it immediately. But if you go to the about box where, excuse me the system updates box where we get the system updates all the time. There’s always a dense bullet list of here’s why this had to be pushed out. And guess what, there are like fourteen different reasons including “Well in [?] there’s an autofill problem with Safari” and “Oh, you can also add a new feature on Facetime that allows text messaging” and nowhere on that list is “By the way, your entire computer is vulnerable to an attack and this is not something you should wait a day to install. You should install it absolutely right frickin now.” That is weird man.

Leo: Pretty stunning mistake. I’ve written a little code in my time. I guess it would be easy to do command v twice accidentally.

Alex: Yes.

Leo: If you were writing the code from scratch. This code’s been around for some time.

Rene: Or a bad merge or something.

Leo: Maybe a bad merge. Or if you were, you know, a guy you had a few minutes to get to that source code repository and modify a file. And you wanted to disable SSL checking, that’d be a pretty quick and easy way to do it, wouldn’t it? Pretty obvious too though, especially since it’s open source code.

Alex: It is although inside of an enormous code. You know, inside a big pile of code. It’s actually a—

Leo: I did go undiscovered for a long time.

Alex: Right, and it would be more innocuous. I personally think it’s probably a mistake. But if you’re a conspiracy theorist, this would be one of the more innocuous ways to do it. It would definitely look like an accident if someone found it rather than writing a bunch of complex code that did something. Rather than 26 lines of code that tie a bunch of stuff up that obviously look like something. This looks very much like a mistake.

Leo: There’s no evidence that it’s a conspiracy theory.

Alex: No, evidence. It’s probably not. 95% chance it’s not.

Leo: If you wanted to intercept secure SSL traffic, this allows a “man in the middle attack” where you could easily spoof a secure link and get anything that’s going. In fact there was a proof of concept code on OS 10 released earlier, I think it’s one of the reasons apple quickly put this out, released earlier that showed somebody capturing basically keystroke logging everything on an SSL. You can see everything in the clear because basically you’re the endpoint, then you pass it along to the real endpoint transparently. So, I don’t know. Andy, you’re the voice of reason. It’s not on purpose it?

Andy: No, I would be shocked if that happened. A, I don’t think Apple’s a company that would do that. I'm saying that I do believe that if Apple were forced to motivate to put in something like this that allowed back door access to secure transactions on IOS and Mac OS, I don’t think they would do it like a fake mistake inside the bug.

Leo: It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it.

Andy: A, I think that they would fight like hell to that they would never have to do it and find a way to subvert their legal requirement to do that so that there would be a way for sharp-minded people like, well not me but certainly Rene.

Leo: Such as releasing it to an open source code repository where others might see it’s an obvious mistake.

Andy: That’s Degrassi Knowles stuff. I just don’t buy it. Also, I think if this were a mistake that Apple, I would like to think that they would have enough wisdom to realize that once this secret is out they got to jump on it. They can’t just do what unfortunately is something they do a lot, which is to “This is bad news, let’s dump this out on a Friday afternoon when we don’t think many people are listening or when we’re certainly not going to get the mainstream news coverage that we might get otherwise.” I’m actually surprised that there has not been an open letter to Apple.com about this yet because this is such an important thing that you can’t undo this mistake, you can’t undo this vulnerability that they have introduced to tens of millions of devices. All you can do is demonstrate that when this thing is discovered that they get right on it and they tell people about this problem.

Leo: Yeah, and they did on IOS. And I'm a little disappointed at how long they took with OS 10, it’s clear that they wanted to wait until they released a bigger 10.9.2 update because there’s a lot of other stuff in here. It’s a 460 megabyte update.

Andy: Including a couple of other features right?

Leo: So golly Apple, this is pretty serious. I mean nobody here is going to deny the seriousness of this right?

Rene: No.

Andy: No.

Alex: No, it’s a big deal.

Leo: It seems to me that a zero day like this, you really ought to get right on it. Not wait till the rest of this stuff is ready.

Andy: Part of it is this philosophy that even if we spend 30 thousand dollars on a car, we are kind of okay with the idea that this is complex piece of machinery that a lot of people had to develop that took many, many years, and it’s possible that there’s going to be a problem with this that’s going to need to be corrected. It’s possible that that problem originated at the factory. It’s possible that that problem originated in the engineering table. We don’t want that to happen but we accept that this is part of engineering something that’s complicated. When you have a tech company that decides that we want to maintain this idea that our products are perfect and that they are sacrosanct. You need ever ever worry that a product that we have shipped has a problem with it. I don’t understand why there isn’t that level of trust with the consumer base. I don’t if people would actually go Ukranian  president on these people if this kind of a problem were addressed directly. I just don’t understand.

Leo: A lot of people are saying, and I think in the chat room are saying this “Boy we’d think this would be caught in testing”.

Alex: It seems like it would be important.

Leo: Is that really the problem, not that this problem but that it wasn’t caught sooner.

Rene: It’s not clear. As far as I understand from people who were talking about it, you would have to basically create a second stack that you then run tests against the two of them I think. Someone at Google said that they were going to do exactly that the next week. But it was one of those problems—

Leo: On Chrome.

Rene: Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of those things that once it happens, that the value of doing that is absolutely clear. But it’s probably not one of those things where you say “Oh there might be lot, like you know, maybe someone didn’t follow proper formatting and do the right curly bracket to prevent this kind of error from happening. We’ll build a second whole version to compare it against.” That’s one of those things that in hindsight, it’s much more obvious than it is in the beginning.

Leo: The proof of concept that captured basically all traffic from a New Zealand traffic consultant. I think it’s Bromium, I like the name of the company. Aldo Cortezy, actually it’s Null Cube. Null Cube discovered this one. And yeah, he had modified his Mit M proxy code to take advantage of the open hole in OS 10 Mavericks and was able to intercept all secure traffic on both IOS priority 7.0.6 and OS 10 Mavericks priority 10.9.2 which just came out. Usernames, passwords, even Apple updates. And that’s one of the issues, and maybe what slowed it down is that this could compromise the Apple update process itself. And some have said that means if somebody’s been compromised, the app update can’t be trusted. So what I just did, where I download the update and restart my computer, could be installing actually what looks like code form Apple. Certificate says it’s code from Apple, except it’s not. So how did Apple fix that part, I mean, seems like they maybe should’ve not used their standard update process.

Andy: I think the thing that makes us trust that this is the actual update is that if I wanted to trick everybody into downloading malicious update, I would say “Oh my god, there’s a huge security breach, download this right now.”

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: And that’s not what we’re saying.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: So thank you for a very badly worded note.

Leo: I'm not going to complain because they say they fixed the mail.

[laughter]

Leo: It’s none of a win for that one anyway.

Alex: In theory.

Leo: In theory. We’ll see. You know it’s so funny because some of my Macs, I get my Gmail and its updated and this Mac I haven’t had a Gmail update in weeks.

Rene: It’s fixter, it’s more fixed.

Leo: It’s more fixed. And Facetime audio.

Rene: Yes.

Leo: So it just bugs me a little bit. It feels like Apple should have last week, said “Okay we’ve got this one line fixed, we’re going to get this to you right away” and not do it with the standard update process because that’s been compromised but say “Everybody needs to go to this website and download this or use Chrome, you know don’t use Safari whatever you do” or I don’t know, what.

Andy: So it’s interesting because the decision tree is hard like you—

Rene: You have on line of code, but it’s never one line of code. There’s so many dependencies, I think this one line of code—

Leo: No, no, no. You could take that line 13, I don’t think that’s a problem.

Rene: It’s a battleship and they have to turn that. And that’s fair enough but then you make the decision whether you release just and update for the security exploit or you wait because 10.9.2 was eminent. It was ready to go. But then the second decision becomes, do you release it immediately or do you take the time to go through the usual process that vets and checks the update to make sure that there's no additional things being introduced into it that are bad. And that becomes a P.R. versus Tech decision because the faster you release it the better it is for your public relations but if there’s another error you'll look incredibly stupid.

Leo: That’s bad.

Rene: Or you wait a couple of days, you do the vetting process and then the tech people are happy but P.R. is getting hammered the entire time weekend so.

Leo: But Rene, I got to point out, they did do instantly on IOS.

Rene: IOS is a different beast.

Leo: Oh I know that but I mean same issues. You think easier to test it on IOS?

Rene: Well it’s a much more controlled, much more secure environment. I think it’s harder in some ways because they have far more bill targets than they do for Mac. But the ability to turn around IOS updates because there wasn’t one coming this was an update just specifically to fix that. It wasn’t like 7.1 was about to be released. 7.1 was supposed to be coming out the same week or a few days later then maybe they would’ve made the same decision there.

Leo: But isn’t 7.1 like doing a couple of weeks.

Rene: A couple of weeks is not acceptable. I mean a couple of days to fold it into your regular update, but a couple of weeks I think would be untenable.

Andy: Also to be fair, I think it sounds like all you got to do is delete that obviously redundant line and recompile it and redistribute it. But it probably had to go through a long process to figure out what else inside Mavericks was working only because this check was always failing. And so that’s probably the reason why they couldn’t just simply delete and go.

Leo: Good lord, if that’s the case, they are really in trouble. You know we’re relying on this bug to work.

Andy: What I mean is that if every person—

Leo: I know what you’re saying, this codependency, Rene said it too.

Alex: Sometimes pulling the spike out of the body is not the first thing that you want to do.

Rene: Yes.

Leo: There you go. That’s a good analogy.

Alex: It may be holding some key organs together.

Andy: Once again we learn that Alex Lindsay has a much broader world experience than anybody else at this table.

[laughter]

Leo: When you’ve been shot by a crossbow kids—

Andy: Keep a sheet of wax paper inside your wallet—

Alex: It wasn’t exactly a spike

Andy: Just in case you need to re-inflate a collapsed lung.

Leo: Get thee to a, I thee to a physic-er and have him remove it.

Alex: It turned out it was a branch. And let me tell you, I left it there for just a little bit of time.

Leo: Did you really? Did you get skewerd?

Alex: Yeah.

Leo: Geez, you’ve had some life. Holy cow.

Alex: Fell out of a tree.

Leo: You fell out of a tree the branch went [fart noise] through what?

Alex: Oh it just went through my leg. It was funny. It didn’t go very far but it was definitely something that I thought about because it was like near an artery and so I was—

Leo: If it was a femoral artery, it might be holding it together. Don’t want to miss that.

Alex: So I was trimming a tree and I grabbed on to a branch that turned out to be broken but of course I had a saw in one hand and a dead branch—

Leo: It’s a good thing the branch skewered you not the saw.

Alex: Well I threw the saw, fell through a branch and landed on a truck. Went through the wind shield. It was kind of cool.

Leo: [laughs] so I did do as you did, the update. Mine’s a going a little slower than yours is here. I've got to seven minutes for me.

Alex: Do you have a hard drive or SSD.

Leo: I thought this was an SSD.

Alex: Mine just spun right through it.

Leo: Yeah [makes noise].

Alex: Yeah but you're on Mavericks.

Leo: Yeah, what are you on.

Alex: Mine’s on 10.8.6.

Leo: Oh interesting. Well, all they fixed on yours was one line of code because your mail works.

Alex: Exactly, mine didn’t have the same.

Leo: Didn’t have, didn’t have to. I mean it’s that easy. How big was the download, did you notice? Because mine was 460 megabytes.

Alex: Mine was like 300 and something.

Leo: 460 megabytes.

Alex: Yeah mine was 300 and something.

Leo: That’s bigger than the entire Microsoft Office in 1997. You couldn’t get that on 28 floppys

Alex: Yes. No we haven’t—

Leo: And now for some reason my email address has been added to Leo’s Macbook now on the Facetime. So just this installing, this changed my Facetime.

Alex: Changed the state.

Rene: That is so annoying, I get that pop-up everytime on every device and I get 8 or 9 of them at a time. Its maddening.

Leo: Yeah this is from this computer. So there you go, that something that the update is fixing right now. Its Facetime.

Alex: It’s taking its time.

Leo: Now [Triggerspeed?] in the chat room is running server and his was 769 megabytes. Wow.

Alex: There was a lot more to fix there.

Leo: How many floppys is that? 1.44 megabyte per floppy.

Rene: How many boxes of floppys.

Leo: How many boxes of floppys. Things have changed considerably. Well now I just have to sit here because my computer’s going to take five more minutes to complete it.

Rene: Mine was—

Alex: You're just going to have to—

Rene: To download, eight minutes to stage and eight minutes to install.

Andy: Mine was about the same.

Alex: Oh, interesting. So after my update it said Apple store cannot verify a secure connection with the app store.

Leo: Oh nice.

Alex: Or the app store cannot.

Leo: So that’s why this was a potentially an issue on updates was the app store does in fact use a secure link, an SSL link. And if a man in the middle is possible on it, it’s conceivable that if you’ve been compromised, the NSA or whoever’s out there that in that van right there could—

Alex: The one that says NSA on the side.

Leo: The one that says NSA, yeah. Could actually say “Oh I see Leo’s trying to fix that, lets’s just inject some code into that stream.

Alex: Right.

Rene: Well it’s probably non-trivial to fake an entire app store or an entire update process.

Leo: Oh you don’t have to fake an entire app store. You just have to capture the stream. I mean it’s non-trivial, I agree. But you just capture the stream and jigger it a little bit.

Alex: Jiggle—

Leo: So since I don’t have a script to read, we’re just going to sit here for another four minutes and enjoy our… Thank you there's the script. Details, we already did all that. Go to fail, did all that. By the way, there is a Motorola event going on right now, Chad. So we should probably put it in the—

Chad: The first non-Google event!

Leo: Well it hasn’t cleared, has it?

Rene: It’s in transport.

Chad: It’s in transport.

Leo: Just like Nokia. Thank you Andy for joining us, by the way. Andy Ihnatko joined us on the Samsung unpacked event.

Andy: That was fun. I will say though that I really did block out two hours for that because I figured that “Oh man,  it’s going to be like eight announcements. Six of which we’re very, very sure of. But then we’re going to have to through little, little skits in between each and every one of them. There's probably going to be like a live hook up with Jimmy Fallon for promotional purposes.”

Leo: Oh, that would’ve been a good idea.

Rene: There was a very long symphony.

Leo: Yeah I would’ve preferred it if the Roots have played, whatever that was Spandau Ballet.

Andy: It was very pretty. It’s like I said yesterday, the only reason why we have to be like very, very mean spirited towards Samsung is that they made us hate really beautiful classic chamber music.

Leo: Yeah that’s kind of unfair.

Andy: It put it into context that said “Yeah, you know what, I'm a member of the press. I've got four and a half days in Barcelona, which I have to do nine days’ worth of work. I really don’t appreciate you keeping me here 20 minutes longer than I have to.” That’s saying [inaudible] time.

Rene: And playing bed time music.

Leo: And that’s right, playing sleepy music.

Rene: We all looked so tired.

Leo: We are going to take a break and come back because I do want to talk about that event. Not because it’s an Apple product, but Samsung really is aggressively iterating on their smart watch and the new gear fit actually looks pretty good. So good it’s like some of the mock-ups that people have imagined for the Iwatch. Hmmm, stay tuned that’s to come before—hey my machine’s all done. It was faster than it said.

Alex: And then mine required another update. So mine was very fast but there's another one right behind it.

Leo: Software update, updates are available.

Andy: They realized that—

Leo: Security update.

Andy: This computer has been in proximity of the White house, let’s install additional spyware [laughter].

Leo: Do they, when you go in the white house? Do you go in the white house ever?

Alex: We have.

Leo: You can’t bring probably your laptop or you phone.

Alex: Oh yeah.

Leo: You can?

Alex: Um-hmm.

Leo: What do they do? Do they look at it?

Alex: Dogs sniff it. It goes through like metal detectors and—

Leo: So they must have a very—there's no wifi in the white house.

Alex: There’s stuff there. I mean I don’t know how much I can get to but there's definitely lots of security.

Leo: Could you say when you get to the oval office, “Hey what’s the password for the wifi cause I—

Rene: To the president’s wifi.

Leo: “I want to check my mail”.

Alex: Not a lot of wireless anything works there. Even your phone, it just doesn’t, everything kind of is not useful.

Leo: Giant Faraday cage.

Alex: There's a lot of thick walls.

Andy: So it’s like being in upstate Vermont.

Alex: Yeah, exactly. It’s very much like being in downtown Los Angeles or Santa Monica. It’s pretty much the same.

Leo: In a building.

Alex: Yeah outside in the—

Leo: Did you see that there's a building in downtown L.A. that is interfering with Verizon’s towers because of their fluorescent light ballasts. It’s broadcasting at the same—

Alex: Must be really big ballasts.

Leo: Well they’re faulty ballasts. G.E. knows about this and the FCC said on a note in November saying “Could you fix that?” And Verizon’s been complaining, “None of our cell towers work in this downtown area because of this building. FCC says this interference building ignores it. Finally I think Verizon sued and said “You got to fix this.” And G.E. says “We know that, we have a replacement ballast”.

Alex: I just wonder if we have a lot of neon lights all over this city that’s why we don’t get any—

Leo: Oh, bingo.

Alex: I mean because it’s like—

Leo: Bingo.

Alex: Because San Francisco, L.A., and you know number one vendor—

Leo: I know this, it’s Petaluma that’s the problem.

Alex: Las Vegas.

Leo: Problem here. Because remember I was trying to set up this ham thing and they say “Oh there’s so much dBA noise at the frequency you want to use for HF radio.” And then we say “Oh, must be us”. And do Gordon came out with his little sniffer. It looks like he’s dousing. It’s a little wireless sniffer and he goes in, he’s pointing at stuff. He said “Well there’s those cameras put out a little bit”. Apparently out of the top of the camera, crap’s coming out. Of course the LED lights, we don’t have a lot of them but they’re very—

Rene: A friend of mine insists that his hue lights are disrupting his network.

Leo: No, LED’s notoriously bad, but then they went outside and drove around Petaluma and said “Oh it doesn’t even matter, you could fix this. Petaluma’s a mess.” It’s a couple of things, neon signs particularly but also lights, ballasts. And then the other thing is old transformers.

Alex: Oh right.

Leo: You’re doing it again, you rebooted again.

Alex: Second update.

Leo: Old transformers they’re broadcasting.

Alex: That would make a lot of sense of why Las Vegas is so bad. Because Las Vegas is like—

Leo: …ham in Vegas.

Alex: You don’t want to use a phone in Vegas.

Leo: Oh that’s a good point.

Alex: I mean Vegas is just horrible. You'd think that, meh.

Leo: Well fortunately someday everything’s going to be replaced by LEDs and it’s going to be worse. Our show today brought to you by Shutterstock.com. If you have a website that really looks ugly or maybe you're posting on the blog, and you’re not putting and image in there, you need Shutterstock.com.

Alex: Well I think that one of the things with any of these is that with—

Leo: These are beautiful, right? This is beautiful.

Alex: And you have to use—

Leo: Royalty free, don’t steal from Flickr or something.

Alex: You really expose yourself if you go and start grabbing stuff off of Google images or anything else and—

Leo: Look at these.

Alex: And I download—

Leo: The environmental movement. Wow.

Alex: And the other thing to kind of think about when you’re thinking about this is for your website but also if you're doing presentations, I use stock photography for presentations almost weekly because you know for an extra couple of dollars here and there, you can really pep up the quality of what you're doing and it really makes a huge difference. And those presentations often times lead to jobs and work and—

Leo: Chalk illustration of a vintage graphic element. The menu for meat. Steak, cow, pig, chicken.

Alex: You're like, “Who thought of that?”

Leo: I love that, this is classic. And then you can say find similar images. Now when you get this, and you’re going to get this if you start searching around. Please do. But do get a free account. You don’t need a give them a credit card or anything. I’ll sign into our account in a second. Because then you can say “Oh I really like these images, I want to save them” Maybe for your menu right. I want to save them, or maybe for your blog. And you can save it into a light box. It’s absolutely free, you can share it with other folks. By the way, Shutterstock also has very affordable image packages and even subscriptions. We have the twenty-five image a day subscription and right now I don’t know how much we use. At least we use it for our blog posts all the time. We use it right, for—

Chad: Oh yeah, anytime a project happens with Anthony. We’re talking about which Shutterstock image we need to use for—

Leo: Isn’t that nice.

Alex: And a lot of times when you're looking at magazine articles, all over the web. You see these great photos and you're like “How did they come up with that immediately”. Well they're downloading stock photography and putting it in. It’s how they're adding value.

Leo: Royalty free means you can use it as you wish in any form of medium. They have a beautiful Ipad app. Talking about inspiration, they have a beautiful Ipad app, which is always updating. Kind of really reminds me of a great photography app with featured light boxes. Here’s something called light box refresh looks. There's some just beautiful stuff here. It’s really inspiring, Shutterstock.com. So, do all the free stuff, make the light box for sure. That’s fabulous. But you also might want to subscribe, and if you do, I invite you to use our offer code MACBREAK214. Festive foods, ooh I like this. Mmm, that’s festive. Shutterstock, MACBREAK214 the offer code, and guess how much you're going to save, 25% off any package. 25% makes it really affordable. Shutterstock.com, you know they're really making the world a beautiful place too. I think that qualifies completely. Oh one other tip, a little pro tip, when you go to Shutterstock.com you end up on the photos, you know the royalty free stock images vectors and so forth. Click the footage tab up on the upper left because they have beautiful video too of all kinds. It’s really worth checking out. Tuning of the car, Shutterstock.com. Oooh pretty, see you could put that in your powerpoint, so everybody wakes up and pay attention.

Rene: I'm using it on Facebook, so my friends with Facebook paper think I'm better looking.

Leo: Haha, that’s a good idea. Hey good news, I ran the update what did I get, gotofail.com. And by the way the site is really slow but it is working. But it’s really sucky because a lot of people are saying “Hey did it work? Did the update fix it?” We’ve examined you OS browser version information and have determined an active vulnerability test was appropriate, fortunately your browser correctly aborted loading our test image upon seeing an invalid server key exchange message. So it’s not that hard to test. And there you go. It’s really good news. Please folks, take this really seriously. If you have not updated you IOS or OS 10 device, there are patches now for both and it’s well worth doing. Next step, see if I got any mail. That would be nice. It’s actually a nice excuse to say “Hey it’s not my fault, I can’t get mail. Didn’t mean to ignore you.” Steve Jobs is going to be on a postage stamp. Little passive aggressive remark about that from Steve Wozniak, did you see it?

Alex: No, I didn’t see it.

Leo: I don’t know if I should read it. Anyway—

Alex: See, the problem is when I look at the photo, if that’s the photo that they're going to use, I look at is and I can imagine Steve just going “Do you want to send that? Are you sure?”

Andy: Why are you still using paper bill?

Alex: Yeah, exactly.

Leo: I don’t know what image they're using. So, by the way, the stamps are determined by an advisory board and it says this in the rules, ordinary people.

Alex: Ordinary.

Leo: You're ordinary if you're on this board.

Alex:  Just walk down the street and be like “You’re looking pretty ordinary, would you like to be on an advisory board for us?”

Andy: Which means that you're probably not going to get people that the entire world hasn’t heard of. It’s interesting when you look at—I was a little bit too young for stamp collecting but I was definitely in the stamp collecting demographic. But when you look at a commemorative stamp from like the nineteen teens, 1920s, 1930s, it like people’s whose names would be carved in stone around the façade of a public library. You’ve never heard of them but you know that “Oh, he wrote this great novel that Harvard professors seem to really, really like”. So it’s kind of—

Rene: We just got Superman on our stamps.

[Laughter]

Andy: It’s great for the family that he gets honored. It’s just that you realize at this point he’s just going to sharing an accolade with plastic men.

Leo: Um-hmm.

Andy: Who also got a commemorative stamp.

Leo: Actually in all seriousness, American Treasure’s Hudson River School, black heritage, Shirley Chisholm, farmer’s markets, Harvey Milk, Hot Rods, Legends of Hollywood, Charlton Heston, Love Cut Paper Heart, Medal of Honor, Korean War, Pioneers of Graphic Design, Rudolph the red nose reindeer, Song birds, The Civil War 1864, Vintage circus posters. These are all approved. Wilt Chamberlain not yet approved. In design right now. They can’t fit all the women in the stamp. Oh that’s terrible. Winter flowers, War of 1812 the bombardment of Fort McHenry, and the Year of the horse. Steve Jobs is in here, the design is not approved so we don’t know where—

Alex: I’m saying if Rudolph the red nose reindeer gets one I think that—

Leo: Steve should get one.

Alex: Steve should get one.

Leo: Baskets, Christmas Carols, Christmas, Madonna and child, distinguished airman, five fishes. Johnny Carson’s getting one. James Brown’s getting one, good god. Elvis Presley, good god. And Steve Jobs. Now Gina Smith, who wrote Woz’s book or co-wrote Woz, did not write. Worked with Woz, she was not a ghost writer. Co-wrote Woz’s book iWoz. Emailed Woz with the news and his response “Too bad they forgot the engineer”. Oooh, that’s a little [makes noise].

Andy: I'm on the United Postal Service website right now. Don’t they have a rule where you can’t have a living person on a stamp?

Leo: Ah, interesting.

Andy: I'm literally scrolling through it right now.

Leo: I don’t know if that’s true or not. You know who would know, Becky, she’s a stamp collector out there. You might be right.

Rene: I remember Josh and Donna arguing about it on The West Wing but I do not remember the answer.

Leo: That’s where I get all my civics information, The West Wing.

Rene: They were the governor of Puerto Rico or something. They were arguing about it.

Leo: So Woz also added “I'm not sure Jobs would want a stamp of himself”. That may be true too. Certainly not one so poorly. Don’t forget the engineer, you know I kind of agree.

Andy: Here we go. It is a general policy that the United States postal stamps and stationery primarily will feature American or American related subjects. Honor men and women who have made extraordinary contributions to American society.

Leo: But it’s not unheard of because here is an article from 2011 “U.S. Stamps to feature a living person for the first time ever”. Don’t know who that living person is but…

Rene: Not Woz.

Leo: Not Woz but, we know now. You know what, Woz it going to get a stamp. And you know what will be really great is if he’s not dead before he gets it. That would be nice. Let’s just think about that. Citizen advisory, stamp advisory committee. Let’s just keep that in mind.

Rene: You know who you are.

Leo: You know who you are, you ordinary people you. Little bit of a dispute over Siri in China. Apparently, there’s a Chinese company that’s developed something like Siri. A Shanghai based company, and the Zhizhen network technology. Apple had asked the China state intellectual property office to invalidate their patent. Zhizhen has a patent. Apple was sued by—this is, it’s very complicated, sued by Zhizhen last year saying that Siri was copied from Zhizehn’s Xiao-I robot software patented 2004, ummm. So the Chinese government did award a patent Zhizhen, the Chinese company. The intermediate people’s court, Judge Wapner presiding, will hear this case because Apple’s now suing not Zhizhen but the Chinese intellectual property office. And the people’s court will hear the case on Thursday, so get ready for that. It should be a very exciting time for Wapner. Apple’s going to bring the iTunes festival to the United States for the first time. It’s always been in the U.K. coming to South By South West. Now I want to go to South By. It’s too late probably.

Alex: It’s just hard to find a hotel.

Leo: A few weeks from now.

Alex: It’s just hard to find a hotel.

Leo: You going?

Alex: I was going to be in Rwanda but now I may be somewhere else. But I—

Leo: Rene, Mobile Nations going to South By.

Rene: We always have this every year. We have a couple of people who might go and then depending on the other events turn out, like there’s an HTC event and there’s JVC.

Leo: The problem with South By is it’s great. It’s wonderful, it’s so much fun. Austin’s great music, parties are great. There’s no content, but it’s the best party you’ve ever been to, so it’s very hard for an editorial group like ours or yours to say “Oh yeah, we’re going to cover”. There’s no coverage, you go there to have a party. Unless somebody slips on a margarita on something.

Alex: I mean they have some pretty good panels but you can’t go in them and really cover them. It’s not like a—

Leo: No, in fact the speakers in South By this year are really good.

Rene: And you can get drunk in beta previews of upcoming software but you can’t report on those either.

Leo: Right, you going Andy?

Andy: No, I’ve never been to South By. It’s on that list that if I get invited to speak then I would go but it’s as you say, a great place to—I guess the best way to put it is that there is usually like a radius of travel where for me that would be a great 800 mile to a thousand mile thing to go to. But I'm way outside that radius of the difficulty and the expense of getting there versus what I would actually get out of it professionally would be really difficult. But it’s on that bucket list of “Oh, some time I should just like, as a vacation, go and do this thing”.

Leo: It’s really fun.

Alex: It is a good place to get a live view.

Andy: I’d really like to get there before it’s completely ruined because people I know who’ve been going there year after year after year were telling me about the sundancing effect of South By Southwest where it used to be really for people who are focused on this one area, believed in the thing. And now, that so much of it is deal making and I want this part of the marketing promotion for this project and I'm hoping to get angel funding for this project I'm doing. I can usually tell about the progress in something like that by amount of press releases and like inquiries I get before a show because now I'm getting like weeks before I start getting “Hey are you going to South By because I would love you to meet this guy or I can get you on to this panel on this thing” and it’s like “Okay, sorry I'm not going but definitely keep me in the loop”.

Leo: It’s good not to go because then you won’t miss it when you don’t get to go. You won’t have the fomo, because I have fomo. Especially now that I know the iTunes festival for the first time ever is going to be there. March 11^th to the 15^th, it’s at the Moody Theatre, I don’t know that theatre in Austin. But listen to who’s going to be there, Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, Pitbull and Zed. I have no idea who any of those are except for Coldplay. I've heard of Pitbull, it’s a person right?

Chad: You haven’t heard of Imagine Dragons and—

Leo: And Zed?

Chad: Well Zed, I’m not familiar with but I knew all of them but Zed.

Leo: A good cultural Litmus test, how many of those four do you recognize? And I bet you, I could name your age within five years of your actual age by the number you recognize.

Alex: That would be a good little—

Leo: Test.

Alex: Test.

[Crosstalk]

Leo: Yeah you know that would be a fun app. Guess your age and weight app.

[Laughter]

Andy: Just like that quiz—

Alex: You’re 42 year old and 220 lbs.

Leo: I'm going to write that.

Alex: Yeah exactly.

Leo: And it doesn’t have to be accurate. And at the end it goes “Is this a profit deal?” Sorry Andy go ahead.

Andy: Oh I was saying just like that web app recently, it said “You want to have a carbonated beverage that is flavored and sweetened. What do you call that, is it a soda, is it a pop, is it a Coke” and then after answering 20 questions “You come from not only Massachusetts, but here is the region of Boston you come from if this is all the language that you have.”

Leo: That was in New York Times I think, it was really fun based on language study—

Andy: And I'm sure you can do the same thing with like cultural - like music references like that you know.

Alex: We were talking about Kenny Rogers of all things the other night and one of the guys that works for me was like “Yeah I wasn’t born”. And I was just like [bows head].

Leo: I’ve heard of the fried chicken, you mean the fried chicken guy?

Alex: No I was talking about—

Leo: Same guy, he has a fried chicken franchise. See that’s another test—

Alex: Kenny Rogers has a fried chicken—

Leo: I'm telling you, I can guess your age and weight. I'm telling you, if you’ve heard of Kenny Rogers fried chicken and you’ve heard of Kenny Rogers the gambler, you're 48 years old and 300 pound.                Thank you very much. Good night. I'm telling you, it’s a great app.

Alex: When are we going to get Kenny Rogers back on it. Remember he was on a screensavers—

Leo: I'm mocked, that’s my example of when the screensavers jumped the shark. Is when our Hollywood based producer who came in, first thing he says is “Well my buddy tells me we should have more cleavage but I'm going to go smart” uh-oh. And then he starts booking celebrities and I'm sitting there asking Kenny Rogers what’s on his iPod thinking “ How do I get out of this job now”.

Alex: I remember, didn’t he call in for Photoshop tips? I think I gave Kenny Rogers a Photoshop tip on one of them.

Leo: Did you?

Alex: Yeah I'm one of the call for helps.

Leo: Really?

Alex: Yeah he was on it.

Leo: Ha, Kenny Rogers.

Alex: He had some question and we were like talking—

Leo: “You know I've been altering picture of me and my ex and I want to know”—

Rene: Know when to save them.

Alex: That was the most surreal by the way. That was like—

Leo: Really, Kenny Rogers Photoshop tips?

Alex: Yeah, no, no—it was, no he,--

Leo: That actually is a good idea.

Alex: No, no he had asked for us. No I gave the Photoshop tips.

Leo: Kenny Rogers?

Alex: Yeah it was on the show you were hosting.

Leo: Kenny Rogers asked you for a Photoshop tip?

Alex: No, he asked you for a Photoshop tip and I got pulled in.

Leo: And then I said well I don’t know Kenny. I was supposed to ask you but your eyes popped, but let’s get Alex Lindsay over here.

Alex: Because I was told before the show I was like “That’s not really going to be Kenny Rogers is it”. You know, and they were like “Yeah, yeah, yeah it’s going to be Kenny Rogers”.

Leo: Somebody in the chat room said “I just logged in, is this show over or—

Alex: Were talking about Kenny Rogers.

Leo: No, we just got distracted. The iTunes festival.

Chad: Do you want to know who Zed is?

Alex: I think they should put Kenny Rogers in now, just play some

Leo: Yeah who’s Zed? Let’s play some Zed music.

Chad: Zed does this. [plays Zed music] You haven’t heard this song?

Leo: Pretty generic.

Chad: This is top 40.

Leo: Pretty generic.

Chad: Clarity.

Leo: Okay, so that’s Zed.

Chad: And now we’ll definitely get pulled off by Youtube.

Leo: Yeah.

Alex: Is that like from the White Chicks soundtrack?       

Chad: Possibly.

Leo: So anyway, that’s not all. It’s a five day festival. So the iTunes festival is fun. So the way they do it is they - and the only problem is because it’s been in the U.K., it’s always been in the middle of the day for us in the states right?

Alex: Right.

Leo: It’s like 1 pm, the acts go on stage so this will—

Alex: Now it’s going to be in the middle of the night in the U.K.

Leo: And sorry U.K., at least for those five days. But usually it’s one act a day so. One, two, three, four, there’s going to be one more act I guess. More artists will be announced at a later date. All five nights will be free as a live or on demand stream on the iTunes store. Best way to watch it is the Apple TV. It’s great, you know it’s like you're at the concert, it’s really fun. So I don’t think they're getting rid of the London venue. This is just in addition, or maybe not.

Rene: The London one just finished in September so it’s kind of off cycle—

Leo: Oh this is a new one. Oh you're right. They say more than 400 artists have performed in front of more than 430,000 fans and live, and tens of millions online at the iTunes festival London over the years. That is really, really cool I hope they do that at South By. Now I have a real reason to go back and do it. Jim Dowrenpool is a rock and roll fan. Apparently he goes to the London festival. Just look for a guy with a big beard in Austin a couple of weeks. We’ll—

Alex: And that won’t be Kenny Rogers.

Leo: Uh-huh.

Alex: And that won’t be Kenny Rogers with the big beard.

Leo: It won’t be Kenny Rogers.

Alex: December 26^th 2003.

Leo: Do we have video?

Chad: Uhh.

Alex: It’s according to Alex Howard.

Leo: Can we get video of Kenny - all right, I – we got to, that Mac Pro could go to – no I’d better not do that.

[laughter]

Rene: Don’t do it.

Leo: I can’t do that. Here we go, Kenny Rogers call into a call for help-a-thon, JC Calhoun. Turn up the audio.

Chad: Sorry about that.

Leo: Great way to get the information sent directly to your mailbox—

Leo: So this was the help-a-thon?

Leo: 50,000 other members—

Alex: Something tells me that was on the 25^th.

Leo: That’s all right. This is just the usual promo at the beginning. We’ll cut out of that in a second.

Leo: The newsletters you want to get. Robot Wars, Damage Report, Tech TV Tips—

Leo: I had to do that every day for six years.

Leo: Subscribe to them all but most of all—

Leo: Nobody ever subscribed to my newsletter.

Leo: All right, here we go. Let’s see if we can get another call on, we’ve only got 39. I’d like to make it lucky 40. Who do we have, lucky 40.

Female Host: Lucky indeed, we are lucky to have this next question asked. It’s not by the phone but it’s actually pre-recorded. Let’s see if you can guess who it is, number 40.

Leo: All right, that would be fun, okay.

Kenny Rogers: Hey Leo, I have a question for you. I have a—

Leo: Oh my god!

Kenny: 14 megapixel Kodak camera, which does not give you the option of shooting in black and white. It does give you the option of desaturating when you're in the dialog box—

Leo: I take it all back.

Alex: See I told you.

Kenny: I that the most effective way to do it or should you bring it into Photoshop and deal with changing it right then right there?

Leo: Holy moly.

Kenny: My question. Pretty well dressed for a question.              

Leo: Hahahaha, the best dressed question we’ve ever had. Kenny Rogers of course, hey that’s great. Thank you for asking the question Kenny. I wish we could get you in here and ask it in person. Kenny is a big photographer you know. That’s a lot of—

Female Host: Fourteen megapixels?!

Leo: That’s a pretty fancy camera.

Female Host: Fourteen megapixels?!

Leo: Probably more than most people need.

Female: That’s a lot of megapixels.

Leo: Well he asked—

Leo:  I just want to point out, this is probably 2003 okay.

Leo: That should know about and that is you don’t want to modify the picture in the camera. Ideally, take the best possible picture you can.

Leo: I do.

Leo: All the information—

Leo: You could get it. Two for two for guessing things that are correct about our co-host.

Andy: The fish shirt.

Leo: I would totally win the newlywed thing if this were that thing. I have that exact shirt. I don’t have the watch anymore. But the shirts are mine.

Leo: You’ve showed up. Great to see you finally, huh.

Leo: And look at this—

Leo: Three hours of—

Andy: Some guy.

Alex: My hair was so much darker.

Andy: This is like that episode of that sitcom where they go back in time to when the characters first met and everybody had like different hair and—

Leo: I know, your hair is so black.

Alex: To do a lot of the things—

Andy: And they say things that are deeply ironic to the people who know the characters in the present state.

Alex: Pretty much the same haircut I have now except it’s just a lot darker. And I'm a lot thinner, and there’s that.

Leo: We have and old version of Photoshop I hope you won’t turn up your nose at this but this is Photoshop six. Two versions old. And I'm going to load an image and you can just show us what you would do. We have a lot of images on here, I don’t even know what these are.

Andy: What is the purpose of that plant on the table.

Leo: It’s a décor and it’s plastic so we didn’t have to worry about it.

Andy: But was there a meeting about whether there should be a plant or not?

Leo: Ummm, probably.

Alex: This must’ve been really early on.

Rene: It looks like it’s covering up a hole.

Leo: Yeah, that’s a Christmas plant. Oh it’s Kevin Rose in the back talking to Morgan. Oh no that’s Sarah. Ooh wait a minute, I think there was a little something something going on there.

Leo: Wait a minute that’s a song.

Leo: Ooooh, Sarah and Kevin.

Alex: …is you can—

Andy: Awesome Wesley Crusher sweater.

Alex: …which to—

Leo: Do it in a camera  and saturate it.

Alex: Well no not in the camera, but what you can actually do here is if you go up to image.

Leo: Image.

Leo: Whatever happened to Sarah Lane? She was great.

[laughter]

Leo: I wonder where she’s at right now.

Alex: … if you pull the saturation down there.

Leo: She’s right across the—

Leo: Desaturate the color.

Leo: That’s the way.

Alex: This is one way to do it. Now what you're going to get is a—

Leo: A black and white image.

Alex: A black and white image.

Leo: Kenny doesn’t want that, he wants something a little better.

Leo: …a better tunnel range than that. But you can see, you can even go through.

Alex: You can, yeah, if you wanted something to look more—

Leo: Wow I can’t believe you remember that. I can’t believe I don’t.

Alex: That’s because it was like Kenny Rogers. I was a huge fan of Kenny Rogers when I was a kid.

Leo: I was a big fan of Kenny Rogers.

Alex: Do you know where Kenny Rogers is big, is what I came up in our conversation.

Leo: Is it in Rwanda?

Alex: Rwanda, they tell me he could fill a stadium.

Leo: Wow.

Alex: And then we talk to someone in Kenya and they're like “Oh Kenny Rogers is huge in Kenya”. And then we told a guy in Uganda that Kenny Rogers is much bigger in Rwanda than Uganda then he said “That is a lie”.

[laughter]

Alex: He goes “Kenny Rogers is huge in Uganda”. It turns out in East Africa, Kenny Rogers like - if Kenny Rogers was listening, we really want to pay you to come to Africa. We’re  going to fill stadiums and have—

Leo: I apologize Kenny profusely for all this time I've been using this as an example of where - like there's Tech TV jump to sharp. Actually, that’s a good example of a celebrity asking a great question. So I apologize Kenny. And if you want to come on this show and tell us what’s on your iPod, you just let me know. There’d be more cleavage I promise. That was Kevin Rose back there talking to Sarah Lane and both of them have gone on to great fame and fortune. And you're still going on.

[laughter]

Leo: Here we are.  I'm sorry Kenny.

Alex: You're a king maker—

Leo: Look at you.

Alex: You're so thin.

Leo: Are you eighteen?

Alex: What was I, 33?

Alex: You can see what happens, if you look at that picture and then look at me now. And you can see what happens when you start your own company.

Leo: Yeah, your hair goes gray just like a president. Yup.

Alex: Yeah, exactly there you have it.

Leo: Wow. Our show today brought to you by Audible.com. Did you hear triangulation yesterday, man do we have a good time. Daniel Suarez came in for our second interview with him. His new book just came out February 20^th on Audible.com, it’s called Influx. And I think you can argue it’s his best book yet. I had said that to his face. But what was really fun, is he brought along Jeff Gurner who the guy who’s read all of his books on Audible.com. Jeff is such a good reader. And we asked Jeff to read a segment from – were you here Chad in the studio when that happened? It was—

Chad: It’s so funny, I tuned it to it live and just went “What is going on”.

Leo: It just blew me away because here he is, you know we’re interviewing him and Jeff’s the nice guy. And then we say well read your passage and he goes into it. It’s like watching a great actor just suddenly begin a performance. We were all going crazy, it was amazing. Anyway—

Chad: It was a even a little more shocking, because I was expecting to see breaking news on the Samsung stuff.

Leo: That was over.

Chad: It was over at that point.

Leo: Yeah, and we are going to check in with the Motorola thing right after we talk about Audible.com. But in any event, what it brought home to me is what great performances we get to listen to every time we listen to an audiobook on Audible.com. Really talented actors bringing a book to life. And in the case of Influx, 13 hours and 45 minutes that you will – what do you call – it’s not a page turner. It’s a page turner if it’s a book. There's got to be a name for it when you’re listening to an audibook. It’s a block burner, it’s one where you drive around the block a couple of extra times because you don’t want to get out of the car because you are riveted to the story. It’s about a shady government organization, which keep technological advances from being released to the public because they think the public’s not ready. It’s been going on since World War 2. And it is really phenomenal. Influx, I highly recommend it. And this could be yours, free. Free when you go to Audible.com/macbreak. Audible’s offering a free audiobook because they know sometimes people “I don’t know, do I want to listen. I've never listened to a book before. What’s it like compared to reading the book?”. I tell you, when you have people like Jeff Gurner reading them to you it’s so great. And I asked Daniel, I said “Do you have a preference over one or the other?” he said no. Because I said “People don’t like it when I say the word read” and you know, he said “You should just say receive”. You're receiving the book from the author. Haaa, I'm receiving the book, because it’s every word the author wrote but it comes alive in your brain. Does something really amazing with it, especially when it’s a great performance like that where it’s a movie that you see in your head.

Alex: It’s ruined me.

Leo: It had ruined me forever.

Alex: I open up Flipboard and I'm like “Why doesn’t this just read the article”.

Leo: Read it to me please.

Alex: Like “I don’t want to read this anymore, my eyes hurt”

Leo: Uh love it, Audible.com. So what you're going to get, you're going to signing up for the gold account at Audible.com/macbreak. First month is free, that means your first credit, which is good enough to get Influx, most books are creadit, is free. You'll also get the daily digest of the New York times or the Dow Jones – I'm sorry the Wall Street Joural free. So check Audible.com, find a book. I think Influx would be a great start. And even if you’ve not read his other books, Demon and Freedom TN and there's one more. I want to try to remember the most recent one. Kill Decision, if you haven’t read his other books, pick any one of them but I think Influx is a good one to start with. Audible.com/macbreak,  we thank them so much for their support of MacBreak Weekly. And thank Daniel Suarez for another amazing book and Jeff Gurner for an amazing – is a performance. I want to say performance. And if you didn’t see that triangulation, go ahead, check it out before you get your audible credit because I think you'll agree this is definitely the book to get. Audible.com/macbreak.

Andy: Can I put in a plug for triangulation. There are a lot of people who only listen to one Twit podcast for the thing that they got started on MacBreak or another show, and they stay within that interest. If you’ve ever wondered what is the second podcast you should start subscribing to, I was oblivious to it until about a year ago and then I started subscribing to it and then now it is in that hollowed tier of “I don’t care if I don’t know who this guest is, I know it’s going to be a good interview”.

Leo: Thank you so much, I am very honored.

Andy: Your interview with Tim on Tim’s Vermeer, it was as good if not better than the movie itself. And that was a great movie.

Leo: Yeah, Tim Jenison. Have you seen Tim’s Vermeer now?

Andy: I just saw it this weekend.

Leo: Because it’s now starting to get into the theatres. What do you think?

Andy: Really, really good. I’ll say my one negative thing about it which is that I don’t know why Penn had to be on camera, I don’t know why the narration had it be there because Tim is just a fascinating guy that you just want him to talk to you personally for the entire two hours of it. And when they skip and you want to know about – wait a minute, back up. So your family had a broken player piano, you’ve fixed the player piano and then taught yourself how to play rock and roll by matching the key presses to a Fats Waller piano roll. You sir are a steliad missile man and I want to – we’ll get to the painting but I want to know about you.

Leo: Tim Jenison is the guy who started NewTek, he created the TriCaster which we use. He’s brilliant inventor, and at one point - just, you know, he was looking at a Vermeer, the very famous music lesson. In fact I’ll show you the original, which you can’t see because it’s in Buckingham Palace, unless you're a friend of a Queen. But he looked at it and he realized that optically it was perfect. And he though “There's no way Vermeer painted this freehand.” And so he reverse engineered a device that he believes, and of course there's no proof because Vermeer was keeping it quiet, Vermeer must’ve used an optical device that he then used to paint an exact copy of the music lesson. He actually build a studio, got models to pose. And apparently, this movie is all about this process, apparently his copy is virtually perfect. Took him four years. And I think many art critics – this was something the painter David Hockney actually supposed for some time. And I think it kind of confirms it. Many art critics are kind of appalled by the idea that the great master Vermeer might’ve used optical engineering.

Alex: Yeah there's definitely been theories that a lot of artists actually use that. And I know a lot of folks that do paint like movie posters like that and that’s kind of a very well known technique, or something like it to paint things very quicly.

Leo: And Teller of Penn and Teller directed it. And did Penn Gillette narrate it? Is that—

Andy: He sort of hosted and is narrating it. If you're familiar with the show time series that they did, Penn and Teller’s Bull [claps] Hit. It takes the form of that where Penn really introduces it and there are times when something needs to explain “So Penn goes on to explain that when you put a lens in the middle of a floor and darken the other side of it.” And I love Penn Gillette, I love Penn and teller, it’s just that I think they missed out on an opportunity for intimacy between the viewer and Tim. I didn’t think it was bad at all, it just that I was hoping for – at the end I was just thirsty for more of Tim talking about himself and his worldview. What really got to me - I'm sorry, this is turning into Tim’s Vermeer weekly but what really got to me is that as you say, wasn’t just that – “Okay I'm going to build a scene and then we’re going to try to paint it using this technique”, it was no, he had to do and entire duplicate of the entire scene with the lighting matched exactly, the props exactly. And so he’s building the furniture, he’s grinding the lenses that he needs for this. And the one question that I wish the movie had asked was that this guy has got money. He doesn’t have to grind his own pigmus to make a historically accurate painting. He doesn’t have to make these lenses himself, he can simply contract a lens maker to say “Please make me a lens to be correct to how it would’ve been made and at the time this made”. And I'm sure that that lens maker would be thrilled with that challenge. Why did he feel like he had to do that himself, he had to do that himself? That’s why it’s such a fascinating movie.

Leo: And yes, I agree that Tim is such fascinating fellow. We really was lucky to have him for an hour on triangulation. So you can go back and listen to that triangulation. And I guess Tim’s Vermeer is making its way around the country.

Andy: I saw it the second day, it was maybe the fourth or fifth showing in the Boston area and absolutely packed house. So word’s getting out.

Leo: So Samsung, their event yesterday. Samsung unpacked five, they showed a watch, a beautiful - they showed two – actually three new Samsung gear watches. And the third was the one that really – you know if you’ve seen the original Galaxy gear the new Galaxy Neo and the Galaxy 2 – or I'm sorry, the Gear Neo and the Gear 2 will probably look very familiar to you. They have added the ability to store music on it and it has a headphone jack and so forth. But the one that I found the most interesting was the fit, and you see that in the right, in the picture we’re showing. It’s curved, it looks a lot like the mock ups of what an iWatch might look like. And it is the fitness bracelet but it has the time, date, heart rate monitor. I thought—

Alex: I think for a lot of people that’s—

Leo: …pretty good looking.

Alex: That’s what they need.

Leo: I didn’t like the gear. A lot of people didn’t like the gear. It’s just too clunky. But the gear fit is not so clunky. You made the point Andy that because of the curvature you’d have to have a fairly beefy wrist for it not to feel weird.

Andy: Both of those are really men oriented watches. In the video they had a woman wearing the gear as a fitness watch. And it just – it really did look big and clunky and thick. So it’s a problem that—

Leo: How does Apple solve that problem? I mean that’s going to be a problem for Apple too right?

Andy: I mean I don’t know. I still say I still think that there is going to be more of a band than anything else, as I said yesterday I think that Apple to produce, to produce an Apple branded wearable product that cannot really be used by women to them would be absolutely intolerable and unacceptable. So I even think that is an even bigger consideration for the design of this wearable that Apple is doing as anything else.

Leo: It’s really clear that Samsung and everybody else, wants to get ahead of the iWatch. Samsung, because, they have been, accused of copying Apple. If it looks the same then it’s not going to be Samsung copying Apple.

Alex: I think the issue that people get into, trying to get ahead of Apple-I have seen a lot of this go back and forth, is that it also gives a lot time for Apple to look at what people are doing, and that makes is even more you know more dangerous and what happens they think they have something and then Apple releases something and they realize that they were like six miles off, and now you know they have not got anything to show for it.

Leo: The new gear watch measures the heart rate; it has a little sensor in the back, kind of looks like a camera in the back, which measures the heart rate without a band around your chest or anything like that. That’s pretty sweet, although not the first of those. That’s something Apple probably wouldn’t want to do.

Alex: I think that it still looks a bit funky.

Rene Ritchie: Its’ one of things where you Apple is not like an Internet commenter that it’s going to yell first. They are really, really patient, and I think that Eric Midgekovsky the guy who does Pebble he said a very interesting thing. He said,” He believes the current generation of smart watches are roughly equivalent to the palm, five PDA and not even thePDA smart phone And Apple doesn’t enter typically those kind of markets. They wait until they’re trio pros and Blackberrys 9000s. Devices that significantly belong so they can see what the problems people are experiencing and whether they could figure out whether Apple had any good solutions to those problems, and the smart watches don’t feel like they’re there yet. I think that Apple is really; really happy to let Samsung make these products and Pebble make these products and everyone else make these products, because it helps them distil the idea that what they want from an iWatch---better. So I’m really happy----I’m always happy with Samsung because they are like the crazy uncle that throws everything against the wall. And we need companies to do that because there will be 20 useless features and 2 that are really cool, and a company that is really focused and can drill down on those focus features faster. I think that we get the future faster because companies like Samsung are so unabashed about presenting every option under the sun.

Andy: But they are doing--- kind of doing that’s I think kind of unfortunate because----

This isn’t just an Android ----its worse than an Android only device. It only works with Samsung/Galaxy phones, so you really have to buy it with the whole eco system in order for this even to be useable, and the features that you……..

Rene: At least these ones work with at all or at least twenty Galaxy devices. The original one worked with two of them.

Leo: But, still not with iPhones.

Andy: Not only no iPhones, but…..

Leo: No Moto Xs either.

Andy: No, you really have to have your won device----you already have to be part of the Samsung family, which I think is a kind of missed opportunity, because Good Heavens! like if you want to convert like an iPhone user into an Android user, or a Moto X user into a Samsung Galaxy User----- Samsung user. A Samsung user will have their first experience here is a wearable that Apple computer does not make, and see how well this Samsung device works for you, see how attached you get to this thing. And this does not mean that you will still crush up you iPhone today, but it means that a year from now, a year and half from now, two years from that when it’s time to buy a new phone, maybe this maker that you always thought they make tacky plastic phones that were kind of ridiculous and they have horrible craft-ware on their screens, maybe it is because you have been relying on this fitness thing every single day for the past year and half, so maybe you will start looking at this Samsung in a new light. And not to make it as an ambassador for other brands, its kind of a missed opportunity, just because if you look back at the different benefits Apple got from the iPod. One of them was that it was the first Apple product even if you’re a Windows user. You don’t have to go all in with a Mackintosh in order to get into the iPod, it will work with Windows and that starts to make you think that gee----- maybe this company just doesn’t make little stylish toys, but they make absolutely cool things to solve problems for me.

Leo: I should point out that Motorola which is having---------just had its press conference, saying: “We’re doing a smart watch too this year and Moto X new one will come out this summer.” Google and LG are a pretty hot rumor, I guess it’s probably true, are expected to announce a watch next month, Google Smart Watch built by LG, but ofcourse the PEBBLE still very most popular, maybe because at least it is cross-platform.

Rene: Motorola did a smart watch right called “The Active”….. and Sony have done one for a while too.

Leo: So it’s not a new category, I think I mean, let me give them credit he said,’ it’s a misnomer to use the word iWatch. What we’re really-------Code Wrangler Apple’s not doing a watch, so the word to track is wearable.

Rene: They called it an iPhone but its not a phone, it’s just a word that people are familiar with.

Leo: A watch is something you wear on your wrist, and it tells you what time it is. This presumably would at least do that.

Rene:  It’s a word that people are familiar with.

Andy: This is the on hand wrist PC which is kind of like a Palm Pilot, a wearable computer from something like…………..

Rene: It’s huge!

Andy: That’s how thick it is and it takes like a stack of coin batteries, in order to make it work, and also because the screen technology. I was wearing this every single day like Wass style. In order to get the time you had to tickle this joy stick, in order to light it up, which means that if I am running through an airport, with like………..my hands are full, and I literally have to bring my wrist to my head and go like that and see what time it is going to be.

Leo: But I think that Code Wrangler is right, Apple is looking well beyond is that a watch or a wrist -watch computer. In more than wearable its health focused, although Samsung is focused on health.

Andy: Yes, but I think that they are putting so money into, but it is costing so much. How much does it cost to do Colorola display, a curved color display? I think that Apple is going to figure out that this has to be a two or three very, very important featured device. Though they are Apple they can’t charge 500 dollars for it. And so that’s why I think they are going to go for a fitness band sort of thing, but a super, super great little spanner or put more sensors on it.

Leo: We will find out I presume sometime this year.

Alex: And the other question with the whole thing with the Samsung release this year, it’s the beginning of a fork where Samsung really start to take-over its own OS; you know they have still have their own watches.

Leo: They are still using Android, but not on the watches.

Rene: But not on the watches.

Leo: And unlike Nokia, (laughing too much) for its phone and not Windows phone, but Nokia X which is based on an Android, here is Samsung’s ad, taking on remember the pencil ad, the iPad is the thickness of a pencil they said it does all these things and then they remove the pencil and they turn on the iPad. Here is their response from Samsung: Wow, four times MVP, back to back championships, laying down monster dumps night like this one after night……………

Leo: On the left an iPhone 5 on the right a Nokia 3, foot 7 inches (more ad)

foot inches of HD ooh yah or 4 point something……………it’s terrible, and that’s terrible and here is the pencil one, and they are going right at Apple.

Andy: Hey they are not showing you hey look you can scuba dive with this underwater.

Leo: This is not Brian Cranston I am sorry to say. The Pencil ad (its an extremely simple tool, but also extremely pointy, its been used to make plenty of points and to cheat at golf. Students have used it to play ceiling darts; it’s wait a second – what’s behind this pencil………….hiding behind the iPad.

 Ah the even thinner Galaxy 2.1

More footage from the ad: interesting not only are you thinner, your HD screen is a killer for more world- beat down action. Would you look at that a Galaxy tab button that even does multi-tasking, two things on the screen at once versus up to one thing on the screen at once…………..(too much talking over)

Andy: This is the price of Apple’s success, congratulations Apple you are now in the John Hodgeman in a commercial.

Leo: That is what happens when you are making a lot of money, also as long as we are talking Samsung I am sorry that I have to bring up that hated word again the finger-print reader, they copied it but they did it all wrong. It’s really. I think that when you look at the Samsung finger print reader and what Apple did, it’s exactly the difference in a nutshell the Samsung Galaxy finger print reader is exactly like every finger print reader. Just swipe a finger across it, and you have to do it at exactly the right speed and right angle, the Vorge reported it is pretty much impossible to do it one handed. You have got to hold the phone in and do that………..it is just not practical.

Rene: I said it’s simply the two things, they made a gold version and they made a finger print reader and they made the exact opposite choices involved that Apple did, which I thought was fascinating. It’s the wrong shade of gold and it’s the wrong technology for a fingerprint reader.

Leo: The gold actually perforated backing made it look like a perforated band-aid.

Rene: My Twitter screen was filled with that picture yesterday.

Leo: It’s a band-aid-----look at the picture, once you see the band-aid you can never see it again………

Rene: To me the most interesting thing to me is that how Samsung has arrived where Apple was, with people saying that Apple is not innovating with all the iPhone 4S and 5S jokes, and I remember that last year I was at the event with Andy at The Musical in Time Square, and people kept calling the Samsung Galaxy S4 the S3S and this year they are calling the Galaxy S5 the S5S and that’s what happens when you have an incredibly successful, incredibly popular, high revenue generating product is that you get rid of increased….. (laughing)

Leo: Once you see this.

Leo: It’s a band-aid.

Rene: Their design sensibilities are not at all in line with mine.

Leo: No but its glam, don’t forget……………it’s glam.

Andy: But, let’s point out that if you don’t like that, you can pop it off and put another one, and whilst you have that cover off why don’t you swop that battery for another and get another day’s worth of battery life and also pop in an SD card for 128 gigabytes of storage.

Rene: This would make my mom cry.

Leo: Let’s make fun of it.

Andy: It is also acknowledged that back has some cool things.

Leo: Yep, yes Burstliegh acquired by Apple, the company that did test flights. If you have ever Beta tested an app on an iPhone test flight are often the way companies do it. I am not sure if Apple wants to put them out of business. They don’t want people doing Beta testing, or they really want to incorporate this it into the IOS APP store, I’m not sure.

Rene: They also have a second product that does, ad aggregations, you can have ads across a variety of networks, so there is two good bits for them.

Leo: That is probably more useful to Apple.

Rene: There is I forget what it is called now, it’s the Hockey App which is another very popular app, and infact more popular Beta testing technology now because they do a couple of things that Test Flight does I think in two parts that is more attractive for Apple.

Leo: But. Is Hockey owned by Test Flight, and, by Burstliegh?

Rene: No it’s an independent company.

Leo: That is good news, because, if Test Flight does get closed down by Apple, there is still something else out there. Hockey, it’s a word you like to say a lot.

Rene: Hockeyapp.com

Leo: Canadians like saying Hockey.

Rene: It’s a German company and so at least………….

Leo: It’s like the gold medal- hockey saying that too.

Rene: The test flight thing is interesting because Apple still hasn’t done since the launch of the Apps store you have had 100 slots for the per U do ids for the Beta testers, unless you go and get an enterprise account which comes with its own draw-backs and advantages they still have a limited of promo codes. There is a lot of pain if you are a developer, and apps like Test Flight and Hockey solve a lot of those things. And people have said that Apple could just build a test flight, but there is no reason to do it. But Apple tends to buy companies or hire the people who for the kind of things they tend to do and not entirely ripping them off.

Leo: Good, good I like it. We have heard a lot about manipulations of the charts on the App store, and here is a story from Tech Crunch, how one scammer manipulated the Apple Top Charts to earn tens of thousands of dollars a day using a ten dollar Game Salad Template to make a very simple game. It’s the red bouncing ball spikes. Apparently, if you get a game sellers licence, this is just kind of included.

Rene: It’s a template. He did not modify it at all. No, no.

Leo: Did he modify the template at all?

Rene: No I believe he did not modify it all.

Leo: Did he modify the template, or not at all. He did not even modify it at all. It is number 73 on the free charts in the Apps Store. He did the flappy bird parakeet flying sirus, which is Miley Cyrus’ head and waking bird. I thought I would buy it and wrecking balls and she go to fly. He apparently…………..what did he do to become at one point at number two (talking over each other)

Alex: I think that was someone else. I think they might have taken advantage of that and had fun with it. I think that the second one was the Mateen Pagan or I think Pecan. That is the one that a lot of people think of as just a scammer that took advantage of this.

Looks like what he did is literally bought a lot of his own soft-ware to move it up the charts, kind of give it a little bit of a boost.

Leo: That is probably a smart move, spent ten thousand dollars moving your App up the charts and let the.  Apparently Google Play is doing the same thing on Google Play. You manipulate  gross sales figures by buying your own stuff, getting you app ranked higher apparently then people notice it.

Alex: I guess technically that cost you thirty percent, so you just lose your thirty percent I guess. It’s an inefficient thing but if you get enough additional sales because of its position.

Leo: Tech Crunch say to perform a scam a developer would have to have many iTunes accounts, and you have to push the games gross sales to twenty thousand dollars. And that would get you up on the charts. Apple apparently didn’t take any action to remove him from the charts directly they just stopped him.

Alex: You see it’s like one of those things like……………….

Leo: Oh then he tried to sell it for a quarter of a million, look at this.

Alex: I am doing great.

Leo: I can’t blame him when you see What’s App going for 16 billion dollars, can’t blame you.

Alex: Yes

Rene: There was another interesting one where people would take an app that wasn’t performing well, and just put whatever hot app title in it. So would be in like Floppy Ninja Clumsy Driver and then it would become Angry Clash of Clan Driver. They would keep changing the title because the search is so broken of shuttling those results regardless of their quality. And it shows people will exploit the app story is not sophisticated enough to take the stuff out. So people exploit and gain whatever system is in place.

Leo: By the way Apple had an article linked in Tech Crunch too imore.com I have heard of them explaining how to get a refund if you did buy one of these crappy apps. You can get a refund from Apple.

Andy: That is why I recommend that people, there is actually an RSS feed for people for every new app released on IOS that has been released on the app store. And when you scroll down, you see that, I see the word “bird or devil”or “amazing bird or devil bird” now there are four apps that seem to be copies of the same apps.

Leo: Notice how Apple no longer touts how many apps there are in the Apps store.

Alex: Exactly, there is a lot of them, more than you need.

Andy: This is why anybody should stop that figure, the reason why you should stick with IOS because the App Library is ten times greater than it is on any other competing platform. But yessssss after you get to the top three hundred, four hundred apps; the quality tends to tail off rather preciptatously does it not.

Leo: Walt Disney Movie is launching a new App called “Disney Movies Anywhere”. The App is free for IOS and you can use it to buy Disney movies, at least twenty bucks each, 420 film to choose from, and the movies will fortunately be viewable not only within the Apps, but also within he iTunes Library. So this is an interesting model. I don’t know of anybody else who had done this,” Disney Movies Anywhere” selling direct presumably Apple getting it’s thirty percent, but ofcourse.

Rene: Twenty Bucks.

Leo: Twenty bucks and there is plenty of money to go around. And I am sure that it is highly copy protected. If you buy a movie in a Disney account, that movie will show up in a linked iTunes account only. So you have got to make sure that you are all linked up right there if you are going to use that.

Rene: The Disney boutique in the iTune Store there have the Apple and Samsung boutique are the best buy.

Leo: Yes, exactly like that.

Andy: it is just too bad that it is so hard to buy a DVD and convert it into a completely non………….oooooooh wait a minute its trivially easy.

Leo: And often less than twenty bucks. It’s, easy for you, not easy, for a lot of people, I mean lets face it.

Andy: It is now down to one app to download and just four days ago I turned up to do the exact same thing that I have done so many times where there is a movie on cable that I really like and its on cable and you get to see it again. OK. And you at this point you know OK I want to buy it and I go to an online store and I can either buy it digitally for nine dollars or ten dollars or I can buy it on DVD for five dollars and eighty cents, at which point you say,” Why would I buy it……..

Alex: It’s more for convenience.

Leo: And that is why this app exists, because the easier she makes it the more likely you will do it that way. Isn’t that right?

Alex: That’s right, those people that have their DVD collections from Netflix right, building a library as it comes in.

Andy: There is the other aspect that, I got no kids myself, but my understanding is people will buy or a neighborhood will buy one copy of a Disney DVD, and because you have these libraries and you just lend them out to your friends, because if you have to buy one of every Disney movie that comes out there to keep your kids entertained, that’s like how much money is that. So I………friends of mine in this neighborhood and some relatives of mine are in that beat I was surprised that they wanted a recommendation on a mobile DVD player and I asked them why and I have an iPad I like my iPad but the kids play DVDS and that is way, way cheaper than buying content that I can really even transport from place to place.

Leo: We bought Bambi on DVD and then I transferred to a VHS because Abbey when she was three wanted to watch it over and over again. I transferred it to VHS is because so I could put the DVD somewhere safe because (a) I knew she would scratch it and (b) so I can cut out the part where Bambi mom is killed and I cut that out, and Abbey never saw that on the VHS tape.

(laughing in the studio)

Rene: Nice

Leo: And proving that I am a good father. Forget all that other stuff I did there. Our show today is brought to you by Gazelle.com and then we are going to get your picks of the week, gentlemen. Line them up. Gazelle is a great place to go if you have a lot of stuff, everybody has that junk drawer right, the gadget drawer, and the gadget closet the gadget second bedroom filled with stuff. You thinking about getting a new iPad or a new iPhone, well take the old iPhone and iPad and sell it. Bring it to Gazelle, you can lock in your price today, it’s good for thirty days and then send it to Gazelle when you get the new phone and you have transferred everything off and then you can relax, you know you don’t have to have the hustle. Gazelle makes selling gadgets very fast, very easy (spells Gazelle.com) You find your item tell Gazelle the condition and they do by the way buy broken and iPhones and iPads, you can get a risk free offer for your gadgets. Free shipping too! You got up to thirty days to do it, that’s locked in day 29 you say OK I am going to do it you push the button, they send you a box, pre-paid mailer and everything, and then the turnaround is quick there. Their experts will look at it and they will give you more if it is in a better condition than you thought, they will wipe your data if you forget it and you get paid fast by check, Paypal or an Amazon Gift Card, if you buy a lot of stuff, I would say that is a better deal. Here is a pro tip because you get an additional five percent on if you buy a gift card. (Spells out Gazelle.com) risk free, offers good for thirty days, they will wipe your data. They have paid more than hundred million dollars to over seven hundred thousand customers and you should be one of them. (spells out the name again Gazelle.com sell your gadgets the fast and easy way.) Time for our picks of the week, let us start with Rene Ritchie this week.

Rene: So. I was going to do two picks but I ran out of time. I figured that I would pick something that is more……….it is not available now but the demonstration of it was so impressive that I wanted to give it some attention and that is the Wolfram Language, it’s by the same people who did mathematics and Wolfram from Alpha. And it’s basically a language that runs from wolf to beo and shows what you can do with and the first three-quarters of the video are ohhh you can do that in mathematics and that is not so impressive, but when you get to the last quarter of the video and they show you how you can do it all of it as a language, how you can tie into mobile devices and web interfaces and how conceivably a child can use the symbolic nature of the language as one of their first explorations of programming. It starts to become hugely exciting and it is that symbolic nature of the language where you can just pull out the data and turn it into graphs, take that graph and put that graph into something else.

Leo: Sorry.

Rene: I mean. If you could show that video it could be awesome, especially if you started 75% through a really amazing thing to look at.

Leo: Stephen Wolfram, another guy that we have had from triangulation, so amazing. So this language is really kind of an abstract that they have been using for years in mathematics, right?

Rene: Yes and he said he spent thirty years in making it higher, it’s incredibly large and the scope and the breadth of it is fantastic. But what they want to do is make it consistent that once you did all these things that it would be vaguely similar even if you are using radically different parts of it.

Leo: It’s mostly going to be used for somebody that is used to manipulating numbers right as a scientist or a statistician.

Rene: I would love to see. What was interesting too was that the natural language………….

Leo: Look at that that is a raspberry pie; it runs on a raspberry pie?

Rene: It does and on a bunch of mobile devices and as you can imagine that they have a natural text language as a front point to this now. But, if you can imagine like Google now or Sirri interfacing with it. The kinds and facing quality queries that you will able to put in. Really useable and really important results, falls back and I think is going to be phenomenal.

Leo: It’s also kind of got the machine learning stuff that they kind of use to teach the machine, which means that you could really make it small, it just kind of intriguing. Wow it works on all those devices. That is amazing there is one function that I cannot wait to play with, called “Predict”.

Rene: Predict, wouldn’t that be great. If you watch them typing in the queries it is just fantastic how they can type in a small thing and take that and make that a big thing, take that and make it an image, take that and make it a 3D model, take that and make the 3D part of the next query.

Leo: What is this going to cost………is this going to cost a thousand bucks or more. How does this work?

Rene: He doesn’t address that, he does talk how there will be web interfaces for it and I am sure that they are going to make partnerships for it where they have Wolf from Alpha for it. But you know I remember using it for a logo for turtle graphics as a kid for an entry point into programming and this is so much more exciting.

Leo: Wow this would be worth learning wouldn’t it.

Rene: It just excites me about the future of computing.

Alex: It is just interesting that certain people have an entirely different reality. Like they have a got a special relationship to something like Tessler and electricity, you know he had, he understood something about it. I think when you look at a lot of what’s Stephen Wolfram and he is understanding the math and how it applies to everything is I think just different from everyone else, and you know much more powerful, and you know almost organic I guess I would say. Yes I would say that if you haven’t read or I can’t say I read it page to page I definitely spent time.

Leo: You have read his book?

Alex: I did not read the whole book; I definitely read sections of it.

Leo: Holy Cow! I am impressed.

Alex: It is a new kind of science and it really is a very very interesting book as far as thinking about the way math relates to science and reality now and how far

Leo: He is easily the most intimidating person I have ever interviewed, not because he is totally nice and normal, but you know you are talking to Stephen Wolfram….. you know he must be thinking that this guy is an idiot. The only other guy that I was equally…………and he did think I was an idiot was Murray Galman the Noble Prize Winning Physicist who discovered the Quark. He really did think I was an idiot, I interviewed him too and he was right. So……..

Alex: At some point did he go Leo?

Leo: Tell me what is going on---- why am I talking to this guy, he is such an idiot.

Andy: Dr Gillman, are you having any problem with your Kodak camera that I can find that I can possibly solve for you.

Leo: Exactly. I have got Alex Lindsay, here; he has read your book.

Andy: I am exactly like that. I am getting ready for the Congress of World Affairs at the University of Colorado………I have fixed the laptops of some of the greatest minds of my generation mine and any other generation because it will be a panel where OK this guy piloted a lunar lander on Apollo 9 and this person solved a problem that saved eight million lives and this person was the first person to point out the problems of the Gulf War and Andy here says that he converts Macintoshes into aquariums.

Leo: It has put it into perspective your chosen profession.

Andy: I take a certain amount of pride in what I do. I hope to help people with things that I write and I say I am quite aware that probably that nobody is alive today because of something that I wrote or said.

Leo: You are breaking up. I don’t know if you want to call him back or plug it in. Whilst you are doing this let us get Alex Lindsay’s pick of the week. By here this this is from Mark S Brownley he posted this new image of the Galaxy S5 prototype before………………

(A lot of laughing in the studio)

Alex: You know it would have been a lot easier if he had got the big bandages and with the big bandages one would be enough, just cut a hole out of it. (A lot of talking over each other)

Leo: What have you got for us?

Alex: I have been we have been planning to do a bunch of shorts in the summer and so I started to get back into screen writing, and a friend of mine actually wrote a screen writing application that I am quite happy so I have been

Leo: They can be very expensive if you buy Final Draft or…….?

Alex: And they are all really good and also the font wrap is intimidating, there is a lot to it, and there is a lot going on and I wanted something simpler that I could work through and so I got this application “Slug Line”. Slug Line is I think about 49 dollars or 50 dollars or whatever and it is a really great simple application that you can get started and it will help you build. It will help you buildYou know you may think that you want to use pages or something like that to do it. But there is a lot of tools within it and you know simple tools, and you know it is not as intimidating as a lot of the other places you know to write you know to start and kind of work through some scripts, because you can outline things you can comment things out so they won’t print things out when you do not want use them, if you want to come back to them later, but it helps you format them and you really and the formatting process really just also helps you think about the script. And if you are thinking about it there is a demo download and if you are thinking about this and you see if the field is right for you, you can download it from sluglineco. This, was designed by a friend of mine, Tim Ashwoods, who I used to work with at IOM, and, so anyway, so I really enjoy it. It took me a little while, Stew sent it to me about a year, because I was not writing scripts, and now that I have got into it………ohhhhhhhhhh I will give it a shot. It’s Great.

Leo: This is kind of cool too; because it is a text only format when you save it as, you are not saving it some format that you can never read it again.

Alex: This is………..it is not the only place it lives, you can send it out and work somewhere else, you can bring it back in……………………

Leo: You could even save it onto Google Drive and use Google word processor to edit it, instead of using…….. (talking over each other)

Alex: Yes and use word processing.

Leo: Use it to edit using the Fountain markup language. So that’s cool.

Alex; Check it out.

Leo:  and it’s and 50 bucks Sluglineco if you want to see more and its on the Mac Apps Store. Have we got Andy’s audio fixed?

,

Andy: In Winter in the woods alone and the three psychos I suddenly go…………….

Leo: It’s suddenly fixed, its beautiful.

Andy: Thank-you very much. Mr. Frost has to take some credit for it.

Leo: Go Ahead Andy.

Andy: My pick of the week is the one use only tools that you only really value. I am shopping for a new camera right now, and number one I don’t want to be one of those people who goes into the camera store and say,” Hi I intend to buy a new camera at a discount on Amazon, but can I use your store to get a sense for what the camera actually looks like. I have no intention of actually buying from you.” And not only that but there are so many cameras out there that you can never, not even one store will have the one that you are looking for anyway. So, but one of the big ideas that you are trying to process says,” What is this camera going to be like in my hands, what’s the size yet.” So here is a simple tool called Camerasize.com which all it does is has two pop ups and let us say if I am thinking about getting like an IKON D7100. Just type in the IKON D7100, you click and there is an icon, but I want to know how big or small that would be compared to this other camera, thinking about the Olympus, where is it, yes the OMDE1and so will actually put two images, oop sorry……………..

Leo: That is the camera I would get if I were you.

Andy: Hang on

Leo: I love my camera OMDEM5, I wish I had the one…………

Andy: Here it is, the magic is about to happen, there we go and so those two cameras are here side by side, at the same scale, not only that but you can also, the 7100 is huge compared to the Olympus but how thick are these two cameras, and so you could just ask for some different elevations of different views of it and that will give……….it is so valuable. You can buy a camera from anywhere, but it is so hard to get a sense of what it is like. I would also recommend that you go onto You Tube and just look for review videos of the cameras that you are looking at. Not for the content so much, so much as a video of somebody holding this camera as they talk to you about,” the effect of megapixels with the DSLR Sensor Ready”, well you just turn off the sound and look at how this person is handling it, and how it is. This tool I actually about a half a dozen to a dozen different cameras on the side by side, including like my original. The camera that I have now is a Panasonic Lumix GX 1. It should be here somewhere.

Leo: That is a Micro Force 2 right?

Andy: Yes, yes I like the Micro Force 2 lenses. I have a lot of those lenses, I would be willing to change lenses for the right camera so but so given that I am always, that’s the camera that I carry around day to day right now. That gives me a sense of OK, it is certainly bigger but it not like it’s not overwhelmingly bigger so it is such a simple tool I will not probably use it again for another two or three years, for when it comes time to buy another decent camera, but if you are going through that sort of process, and you are being careful enough with your money that you are trying to get as much viable information as possible, well Camerasize.com is really, really a lot of help.

Leo: Very cool, well let us know what you choose too.

Andy: I actually, I did not want to say it actually arrived this morning the one that I bought and I am probably going to make it the Pick of the Week, but I want to use for a week before I do that.

Leo: OK, I cannot wait.

Andy: I have got to say that I already like I have probably taken a hundred photos inside my living room already. And I know that I made exactly the right choice.

Leo: Once the snow thaws expect more outdoor pictures from him. Andy this has just come in from Dan Goodman who is very good and writes for ART TECHNICA

Thanks for the chat room for pointing this out, new IOS flaw makes device, makes IOS devices new, new flaw makes devices susceptible to key logging and concept app has been posted on the Apps Store. It affects iPhones running IOS7 for O4 O5 5 and the new 6 as well as those running a 6.1.X Fire Eyes Security Firm they have published this blog post last night, I did not see it. But thanks to Dan for highlighting it, and I don’t know more about this, but……….

Rene: I, looked at it all morning, it is still one of those non-trivial things where you basically have to get an app built and put it in the App Store and you get someone to fix somebody to click in it so they install the app and then start monitoring user’s background processing which IOS 6 and previously times out and an IOS 7 still wakes up and goes to sleep. So it is a bug that needs to be fixed absolutely but it is no reason to go panicking and running down the street.

Leo: More serious than the jaw broken iPhones of course because they don’t have the protection of the App Store, but it seems like that Apple would be fairly………fairly easy for Apple to keep those…………

Rene: It was shown at first for the Android Jaw Broken IOS, and now they have the proof of concept that they been to the App Store too.

Leo: My pick of the week is something actually I keep trying to fix this MAC PRO by reinstalling OS10 and I find there are certain things I install on them day in day out and on OS 10 it should be part of a set. I have used in the past on Windows something called Ninite, which is really sweet. What you do is you go through and do check marks next to all the apps you want and it builds a little app that you will run automatically down and install all the apps so it is kind of like a pre-built build but it downloads lawyers versions etc. Well there is one now for Mackintosh, it is called “GET MAC APPS” a little different and probably worth explaining the difference and it says at getmacapps.com free so if you always install Chrome and FireFox and you always install Dropbox and Google Drive as I do. It is for the most part open-source and there is some commercial soft-ware like Evernote and Skitch ,Calibre I know Andy likes that and Thunderbird if you don’t want use Apple Mail and Skype and you are doing a little ripping you are going to want a Handbrake ofcourse and you could put the Gimp on there. For file transfer they do Ivo Panics, as well as Cyber Duck Filezilla, Transmit. Some developmental stuff called CODA which I always put on all my systems, and Text Wrangler too I have BE EDIT license but Text Wrangler is good But here is what happens, instead of creating an application for you, you have created a command line that you run in terminal. Now I would recommend, because you could cut and paste this at the terminal, but I think that it is not a bad idea to look at the terminal code it generates just to validate this doing something you expect. So here it is it makes a very big bash script that uses Curl and mounts the thing and installs the application, runs the application and then removes the DMG file which is nice, cleans up after itself.

So I have looked at the code its reliable that is the code it is generating, that is what happens when you paste it in. This seems like a very useful little tool to have lying around, install all the basic MAC apps that you always want. It’s certainly going to save me a lot of time. So that is my pick of the week and it’s free to getmacapps.com. First once you have your script you can modify it, it is easy once you see what is going on to make your own script. Well I think that does it for this show I want to thank Rene Ritchie for braving the weather and coming to the microphone in his living room or wherever you are.

Rene: I am in my Park House Studio………

Alex: it looks great, it’s definitely shaping up.

Leo: Good I like it.

Rene: I just got my lights in to……. I got five colored lights I have to install them now.

Leo: Which ones did you get?

Rene: I will hold one up, I have got one right here I forget the manufacturer but it is this bad boy here.

Leo: Oh I like this boys built in flags and everything in there

Rene: Its got one white on black…………

Leo: What do you call those………barn doors?

Andy: And it is LED.

Leo: And this is not for MACBREAK but for all the other broadcasts you do?

Rene: It’s for MACBREAK Leo, you have really big standards, and it has got to look nice like Andy’s.

Leo: We benefit. It’s nice to have you imore.com. As always Alex Lindsay it is great to have you and enjoy my MAC PRO.

Alex: I am going to.

Leo: Remember that you have it until the C comes out with the little……….

Alex: I am going to be talking to those guys at C and be relaxed.

Rene: I could send this app to you and not Leo.

Leo: You know it still say available on QO 120/14.We have got a little more time, and it does not say how much it is for how much this terabyte dual SS is going to cost.

Alex: It is going to be awesome.

Leo: It is going to be over a thousand bucks, don’t you think? It is got to be right. Also check the USB port, I am convinced there is something wrong.

Alex: We will test it, we will put some drives on it.

Leo: Anything else you want to plus whilst you are here?

Alex: You know that we are almost ready to let people join the training program so, stay tuned for that the next either the next MACBREAK or the next MACBREAK after we will open up the barn doors. We are just finishing up the sign up process, so it’s a kind of training program that is to take part in what we are doing in Rwanda, and how it is coming along with us. So stay tuned on pixelcorps.com or you can follow me on Gplus or Twitter and it is one of the best places to find me.

Leo: Have you done any iWorld this year?

Alex: No.

Leo: Boy we have done a lot in the past in the training and so forth. You have done enough I am not asking you to do more.

Alex: No absolutely not. You know it is so hard for me to do many of these anymore because of my current travel schedule. So I have been kind of right now stated to be out of the country. So I speak at NAB, I am talking at NAB about live streaming for three hours I think on the Saturday, and then on Sunday I am talking about Virtual Sets, and I have been allowed to talk a lot about Hangouts. I say that because we were under a contract usually with Google not to deal with a lot of the details, so I am going to be spilling the beans, maybe on how we do a lot of the stuff on the show on the software that we have developed internally for hangouts. (Talking over each other)

Leo: I haven’t been able to go into our basements for over four months, so finally –iWorld and Mac World is coming at the end of March---- March 27^th to 29^th, and then immediately following it we are fit to test. I don’t know what our coverage of NBA is going to be………(talking over each other).

Alex: I will be there for a week, and I have got some clients there and as I said I will speaking……..I only speak on the weekend before MAC so I can cover NBA. I will definitely be there with my glass, wandering around talking about stuff.

Leo: It is a fun show for the kind of stuff you do and all for what we do to.

Alex: It is an expensive show for me usually.

Leo: I can’t wait for the Black Magic Show.

Alex: Yes they have the big black booth when you walk in. When Leo used to have the booth, when you had the studio over there I would walk over and say,’ We have to shoot over here…………. You cannot believe what I just saw. (A lot of talking over)

Leo: Yes it is only a thousand dollars.

Andy: I guess that MACBREAK viewers can look forward to about five weeks’ worth of eight thousand dollars picks of the week from you right after NBA week.

Alex; I will try and take it easy on everybody, but I am excited there is going to be some shopping for satellite dishes.

Leo: Oh my God, it just gets bigger and bigger.

Alex: I have got one but that is not big enough.

Leo: I was wondering what that was on the roof, only ten meters. Mr Andy Ihantko is at the Chicago Sun Times joins us every week and does his own Andy Ihantko Almanac at the Five by Five Network at the fivebyfive.tv.

Andy: I am coming up to episode one hundred.

Leo: Oh! Congratulations. So come on what is the camera?

Andy: I don’t want to say, if I say which one it is then it means that it is like a review and an endorsement.

Leo: We don’t want to do that?

Andy: It is a camera that I have only had for a couple of hours.

Leo: I am so jealous and I really mean jealous and I think that you made the right choice. Okay Thank-you Andy and we will see you next week and maybe we will have that as the pick of the week!