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Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. Welcome to the... OFNT Podcast, episode 255, which I'm calling Another Super Bowl Sunday. Yeah, it's that time of year again when American football fans gather around their television sets in order to consume large portions of unhealthy foods.
along with copious amounts of beer, as well as other alcohol-infused products, with the goal of working themselves into a stupor. When I was counted amongst this legion, I was so inebriated by halftime, I didn't even care who won the game. Unless it was my team, which is the New York Giants. And by the look of the current Giants team, it will be years until they make it back to the championship game again.
if at all so nowadays i usually catch the last part of the game well what do you say we get started then oh yeah Tech news. Most of the tech news is about the giant fruit company, which unfortunately continues its domination of the tech press. The first story comes from 9to5mac.com. These five Apple products could launch as soon as next month is the headline of the article. The iPhone SE 4 is expected to be the biggest announcement, which I've gone on about on this podcast.
This will be the largest upgrade to the SE series of phones since debuting in 2016. Expected upgrades are the new form factor will be based on the iPhone 14. It will be Apple's first product to use Apple's in-house modem. It will replace the lightning connector with USB-C. Have a 6.1-inch OLED screen. Face ID, which will use the newer notch design. A powerful A18 chip with 8GB of RAM. And a single 48MP camera around back. The SE4 will be capable of running Apple Intelligence.
And the price of the SE4 is expected to be about $499. The iPad 11, which is the cheapest iPad one can buy, gets a minor update to include an A17 chip. which will allow this iPad to run Apple Intelligence. This new iPad will also support the Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity standards and uses Apple's in-house modem also. The price for all this will be between $349 to $449.
An M4 chip-based MacBook Air is expected to release with no other upgrades. And the same goes for the new iPad Air. Just an upgraded M3 chip is expected. Hmm. An iPad Pro might be a better upgrade for me as I was hoping the iPad Air got some other upgrades. Finally, Apple is predicted to release a smart home display with a 7-inch screen, which according to the renders...
Looks like half of a full-sized HomePod with an iPad mini stuck onto it. We can also expect this smart home display to be expensive. All of these products are expected to be released in the spring, most via a press release. Except the smart home display, which will probably get an event of its own. Update. MacRumors.com is reporting that according to Apple leaker du jour, Bloomberg's very own Mark Gurman, the iPhone SE4...
will be released February 12th, which is this coming Wednesday. Yay! I'm still hoping for the SE4 screen to have the dynamic island instead of a notch. I guess we'll know what happens on Wednesday. Continuing with Aply news, the Apple-owned Beats, the earbud manufacturer known for their fondness for bass, is expected to be releasing an updated version of their PowerBeats Pro earbuds called...
PowerBeats Pro 2. They'll set you back $250 of your hard or otherwise earned dollars. PowerBeats Pro 2 will feature... Heart rate monitoring during workouts. Wow. Something we can expect the new AirPods Pro to have. The earbuds will also have improved sound quality, longer battery life, and improved cross-platform compatibility with the Android mobile operating system, including Find My Device. I have the original Powerbeats Pro, but...
I never got used to the over-the-ear method of securing the earbuds to my ears. As soon as the Beats Fit Pros were released, I switched to them and I still use them. You know, I prefer the sound of Beats over AirPods and Rock Beats earbuds when they were manufactured by Monster Cable. That was circa 2007, which I understand can be referred to as...
The day? Yes. Of course, back then, earbuds were wired, and I feel you lose some fidelity with Bluetooth. The only other wired earbuds that came close to matching Beats earbuds and sound were... A pair from Sennheiser, I don't recall which model, which I used until finally throwing in the towel and converting to Bluetooth with the original AirPods Pro. Since acquiring Beats, Apple has changed the sound of them a bit, and for the worse in my opinion.
Now if the Beats Fit Pro get a similar update, well, I'll be upgrading. The only other thing I miss about using the Beats Fit Pro rather than the AirPods Pro is the noise cancellation. which is much better on the AirPods Pro. The new PowerBeats Pro should be announced on February 11th. In other words, this coming Tuesday, in before the SE4. According to reports from many different tech news outlets, the Apple AR glasses project has been suspended, if not outright canceled. What? Oh no, why?
The problem lies with the weight of the glasses and the need to have them connected to something like an iPhone, for example. Also, Apple's other products like the Apple Watch already perform a lot of the functions a pair of augmented reality spectacles would without having to put something on your face.
A future model of AirPods Pro are rumored to be coming with tiny cameras built into them, which would constantly scan your surroundings. These cameras would transmit the info they obtain to your iPhone and Apple Watch. Or will they? When I first heard the news of these camera-equipped AirPods Pro, I thought that Apple was just offloading the cameras that would otherwise be mounted on the AR glasses themselves onto the AirPods. That would help reduce the weight of them.
I feel that the screen technology just isn't there yet, and that's why Apple has halted development of augmented reality glasses for now. I guess I'm closer to seeing self-driving cars than I am to seeing augmented reality glasses within my lifetime. An article on AndroidPolice.com sees the author complaining about the number of advertisements he's been bombarded with while using the new Google TV streaming box.
The headline, which is, quote, Google TV is showing me ads for ads now, unquote, sums it all up. He points out that the home screen on the Google TV is half app launcher and half interactive billboard. On top of all this, he's noticed that Google just added a section which resides below the continue watching strip dedicated to YouTube's first party ad blitz channel.
which offers access to Super Bowl TV spots. What? Ad Blitz, which the author points out, has been around since 2007 and serves as a repository of Super Bowl ads. While he doesn't mind Ad Blitz itself, The amount of space the section takes up on the home screen does. The Google TV streamer isn't alone in the oversaturation of advertising with similar complaints about Roku and Amazon's Fire TV.
While the author is a huge Android fan, these constant ads has caused him to order a $129 Apple TV streaming box, which is just $30 more than Google's equivalent. The Apple TV box doesn't have ads on its home screen and has better specs than a rechargeable remote. My first streaming experience arrived as a Christmas gift from my son many years ago now in the form of a Roku streaming box.
Back then, there were no ads on Roku products. Since then, I've used two different Roku streaming boxes and a Fire TV box until settling on the second generation of the Apple TV. You know, the silver-colored one that in order to have more streaming apps on it, Apple had to update the entire operating system? I didn't mind this at the time. It was all magic to me.
I'm currently on the latest Apple TV 4K box and have no desire to switch. The biggest complaint I used to hear about Apple TV streaming boxes was how boring the home screen was. Well, I'll take boring any day over endless advertisements. What's your streaming box of choice? Sonos, the high-end audio company. Well, at least their prices are high-end.
Plans on launching an Apple TV-like streaming box. This according to MacRumors.com. Supposedly this streaming box will launch sometime later this year. The price is expected to be between $200 to $400. Well, I'd lean closer to the $400. And that's notably more expensive than Apple's own streaming box models. The box itself will be a nondescript color black.
The hardware is described as being slightly thicker than a deck of playing cards. It will offer content from Netflix, Macs, Disney+, and some others at launch, and supports Universal Search. The box will also feature Sonos voice control. The Sonos set-top box Why do they keep calling them that? You can't really place them on top of modern television sets these days. No. Will double as a HDMI hub and allow the users to connect gaming consoles, soundbars, and other devices to it.
As long as you're using an expensive Sonos-branded soundbar with it, you won't experience any audio sync delays. Okay, this Sonos streaming box falls into the category of a product no one but the staunchest Sonos users have asked for. The one and only Sonos product I own are a pair of IKEA badge Sonos bookshelf speakers, of which I had plans on eventually pairing with a Sonos Arc soundbar. I wasn't willing to pay $800 plus.
for the arc soundbar though i've auditioned the arc and while it does sound better than my recently purchased lg soundbar it doesn't sound 500 plus dollars better than it my lg soundbar also came with a subwoofer which would add another $400 to the total of a Sonos system. Well, good luck with that, bros. And finally, for the tech news section, the Pebble smartwatch returns.
The Pebble smartwatch was born of a Kickstarter way back in 2013 and was the first smartwatch I recall seeing and actually wanting. These watches were compatible with both iOS and Android. Had a week's battery life. and cost between $100 to $150. That is, until Fitbit acquired Pebble back in 2016, and then Google acquired Fitbit and shut down the Pebble. Well...
Last week, the Big G decided to release the Pebble OS codebase as an open-source project. The original inventor of the Pebble smartwatch, Eric Michikowski, announced on February 2nd that he was bringing the Pebble watch back. I never did get a chance to check out a Pebble watch, but if the price for this new version is low enough, I just might do so. From researching on the intertubes, I know many people still use their original Pebbles.
given another life by the Rebel OS Open Software project, and I'm sure many of these users will jump on the relaunch. The original Pebble didn't do as much as modern smartwatches do. But what it did do, it did extremely well. And that's something modern smartwatches can't claim. It's nice to see a trailblazing product get a second life. And I'm looking forward to seeing what's done with it.
Check I'm using. If you listened to last week's episode, then you know I spent a long, perhaps too long, of a time discussing various cleats for my Peloton cycling shoes. Well, I have an update. Okay. I promise I won't take up too much of your time on this subject. I now know why Peloton doesn't recommend using any other brand of cleats but their own supplied brand.
While the easy clip in and out more expensive cleats with that float feature are great, they're not so great when coming out of the saddle. For those unfamiliar with the term, that's when you pedal standing up while riding. During a ride last week, I attempted to do just that, but because of the free-ranging float feature, I almost accidentally unclipped my foot from one pedal. Oh no! Though if I had done so, it wouldn't have been catastrophic.
The feeling that it would be was still unsettling. So I wound up uninstalling those fancy float cleats and installing the officially recommended Peloton cleats. Now that's it. Bit harder to clip in and out now, but that's the price I'm willing to pay for a more secure ride. I've noticed something within the Peloton indoor cycling community which I've labeled leaderboard swindlers.
This is when you take a so-called easy class, let's say a low-impact recovery ride, but go all out in order to come in first on the leaderboard. Now, I do have a medium competitor's instinct within me. as evidenced by my experience I had while taking a plain Jane low-impact ride last week. Now my age and location are displayed on the leaderboard, and someone of a similar old fart age...
decided he was going to have a competition with yours truly. I noticed this because he kept past me in rank even when I bumped up my effort a little bit. Eventually, I bumped my effort up a lot and vanquished my new foe. causing him to give me a hi-fi at the end of the class. But this defeated the whole point of the ride, which was to take it easy during it.
In these low-impact recovery and even beginner rides, there'll be one or more riders that go all out in order to claim first place on that leaderboard. Now, in order to stifle my own competitive instinct... What little I have of it, I now dismiss the leaderboard on such rides. When feeling in the competitive mood, I shoot for the top 10 position or at least within the top 20% overall.
Another subject I went on about in the last episode was my newly purchased LG soundbar. While I was pretty impressed with it, I lamented that I couldn't access its advanced settings. At the time, I chalked this up to my old fart mind not comprehending the way to do so. At first, I thought I would need to connect the soundbar via an optical cable instead of the HDMI cable I was currently using. Wrong.
Upon conducting more research using this new thing the kids are calling the internet, I found out that while my soundbar will work just fine with my television, The advanced features are only compatible with newer models of the LG QNED televisions. I have a QNED 75 television, but the soundbar is only fully compatible with the newer QNED 80 and beyond. While disappointing, I'm not going to run out and
Buy another television just to unlock those advanced features. No. Now, if I could only figure out a way to add rear speakers without drawing the ire of the one whom must be obeyed, I'd be kind of happy. Speaking of which... Since using the soundbar, I've been noticing a lot of microphone plosives on YouTube videos, especially when the host is using the now-ambiquitous Sure SM7B. That mic has a reputation for that.
but i never really heard it as much as i do since getting the sound bar for my television now that i've heard it i'm glad i'm a rebel and never bought one besides the plosive problem with the sm My voice would probably come across too muddy on it. The SM7B is more suited for higher-pitched voices than mine. I don't recall if I ever talked about this previously. I don't believe I have.
But when I was still gainfully employed, and even recently while traveling back and forth during my relocation drama, I needed a method of carrying my computer and tech stuff around with me. I also needed to be able to transport these items safely and conveniently. especially to and from work so years ago i decided i wanted to do this by using what's called a messenger style bag you know the kind that has one central flap and various compartments inside
Usually this style of bag has an extra pouch on its outer side, actually the outer inside of the bag if that makes any sense to you. You carry this type of bag via a single shoulder strap, usually across your body. I had used backpack style bags for this purpose previously, but wasn't comfortable doing so. The bulk alone was a detriment for me. Well, one Christmas years ago now, my lovely wife asked me what I would like for a gift.
Of course, I told her I wanted a messenger-type bag. I had envisioned one made of heavy burlap. What I got... was an expensive Michael Kors branded Mr. Bag made of mostly PVC material with a bottom made out of leather. Not at all what I had envisioned. Though the bag could be considered androgynous, Michael Kors is mainly a women's brand. When finding out how much money my wife had spent buying this bag for me, let's just say that I wasn't pleased with the gift.
My son was also a recipient of the same bag that Christmas. After chaff-sozing my wife about the style and cost of the bag, I basically refused to use it for a month or so. My son has never used his. It wasn't that the bag was ugly, it was just too fancy for my taste, and that Michael Kors badge really irked me. Tired of lugging a backpack around, I decided to give the Michael Kors a try.
The interior spaces were roomy and well protected. I could easily fit my then 13-inch MacBook Pro, external hard drive, mouse, and many other items I liked to carry around in it. The bag was also very comfortable to carry. Fears that bag accompanied me every day to and from work, serving me admirably until the day I retired. Now, it did show some wear and tear, but nothing that obvious. When we decided to pull up stakes from New York, I packed my 15-inch MacBook Air.
11-inch iPad Pro with keyboard case, external hard drives, and even my Lewitt Connect 6 audio interface into it, along with assorted cables and even a USB hub. The Michael Kors messenger bag has served me well for almost ten years now, and I expect it to last the rest of my life and maybe even beyond. Even if it did somehow break, I'll just steal, I mean borrow, my sons.
Recently, I apologized to my wife for displaying the skepticism I had when she first gifted the bag to me. She was happy to hear this and... All it cost me was besides eating this humble pie was an expensive Italian ankle bracelet for this Valentine's Day. Well, at least for now. Entertainment News. Well, not much going on within the entertainment space. We did have the Grammys last week, complete with a red carpet featuring naked women, women wearing nothing but lingerie,
Men wearing women's clothing and men wearing weird hats which covered their faces. I'm into indie music mostly and none of the bands that produce this type of music will ever be honored by the Grammys. Like most entertainment award shows these days, I wonder if many people actually watch them. Anywho, I didn't watch it either. A music app that I've used, or at least have had for a long time, is Pandora.
which has been around for a long time. Instead of selecting what particular songs you want to hear, you pick the bands or genre of music you prefer, and Pandora will create a personalized radio station for you. I mainly listen to Pandora in the car because I can just set it and forget it, as the cool kids say. Yeah, I'm out of touch. I must say that Pandora's indie music channel is pretty darn good.
I use the basic free tier of Pandora, which does have ads, but one of the benefits of living in Nowheresville, Tennessee, is that not many companies want to bother advertising in my area. The ads I do get are infrequent and are usually ads from Pandora itself, ironically seeking advertisers for its service. Once in a blue moon, I get an ad from a restaurant chain called Bojangles, but that's it.
Well, Bojangles makes the best chicken sandwich, though. I prefer that sandwich over KFC and the vaunted Chick-fil-A products. Heck, my son likes the Bojangles chicken sandwich over Popeye's overrated, and that's my opinion sandwich. Okay, enough about chicken sandwiches. Anyway, I'm kind of sentimental towards Pandora, it being one of the first music streaming services I ever used. Oh, you can also listen to podcasts via Pandora.
The OFNT podcast is available on it. And that's a plug. This makes me wonder what my favorite music streaming service of all time, the now defunct Nokia music, would have evolved into if it had survived. Well, I guess we'll... Never know the answer to that question. I was one of the first kids on my block to cut the cable as far as television goes. First by using Dish Network satellite before switching to DirecTV satellite.
As prices kept climbing, I switched to DirecTV Stream, which gave me everything I had with DirecTV for half of the price. I tried out Google TV and was quite happy with it until regional sports networks were pulled from the service. forced me back to DirecTV Stream, now called AT&T Stream or something like that. Like DirecTV before it, prices became out of hand, but besides Fubo...
AT&T was the only streaming service where I could watch my beloved New York Yankees. My move from New York mostly solved that issue thanks to the Major League Baseball app, so I dropped AT&T and switched to the Sling streaming service. Now the problem with Sling TV is that most of the channels on the service are available on other platforms free of charge. So basically I'm paying for a service that bundles all of these freely available channels all into one place.
Sling doesn't have local channels nor any regional sports channels. Today is Super Bowl Sunday here in the United States, and if I wanted to watch the game, there would be no way to do so on Sling TV. Well, at least in my area. However, an app called Tubi is streaming the game. I've been using Tubi since before it was purchased by the Fox Media Empire, and I must say, since they bought Tubi, they've improved it.
This has me re-evaluating whether to keep Sling TV around. I hardly use the service and neither does my lovely wife. I'll keep Sling TV around for baseball season and then when that's over, I'll make a final decision on it. Here's a rundown of the shows I'm currently watching these days. The Recruit and the Night Agent on Netflix, Severance on Apple TV+, which gets stranger and stranger as the series goes on,
and Dexter New Blood on Paramount+. New seasons of other shows are starting later this month, and that'll get me through my winter television watching. In regards to movies, nothing in theaters or otherwise has caught my interest. Podcast news. It's been really quiet within the world of podcasting incorporated lately. The top shows list hasn't really changed and they're the ones making most of the money. I guess those...
OG podcasters who predicted back when this all started, circa 2020 or thereabouts, that independent podcasters would eventually be squeezed out have been proven to be correct. Oh well. What can you do?
First it was the celebrities, then it was the fired conservative journalists, and now it's fired liberal journalists joining the podcasting space. For years, these newsreaders who practice agenda-driven content journalism looked down on their conservative brethren, who had turned to podcasting after being purged from their respective mainstream media outlets, even when these podcasts started drawing larger audience numbers than the network news shows and by a large margin.
And why wouldn't they? They were still earning millions upon millions of dollars yearly for merely propagating the DNC's talking points 24-7. Well, those days are over, as the whole mainstream news media seems to be imploding. Trusted media is at an all-time low and will probably go even lower. At any moment, a law or executive order could be enacted that would ban pharmaceutical advertising on these networks, which would sound the death knell for the so-called news outlets.
Sure, most will survive as tax write-offs, but gone are the days of Ivy League J-School graduates fetching multi-million dollar contracts paid for by multi-million dollar big pharma ads. Any of these news entities are on life support, with current information coming out from the Trump administration that the New York Times, Politico, and even the BBC, amongst others, are receiving money from the U.S. government.
using USAID, the king of the non-governmental organizations . These injections of cash help prop up these news outlets, especially in the case of Politico. Not only was the government censoring its citizens, but they were also dictating what news items citizens got to hear, using NGOs like USAID and many others. Of course, many, including myself, suspected this was going on.
I've discussed the NGO game on this podcast numerous times before. Well, perhaps journalism in this country cannot return to how it started. Working class stiffs out to ensure that the government behaved. and had its citizens in its best interests. These newly fired propagandists that have or are planning on joining the podcast ecosystem will have to get used to something they never had to deal with before, and that would be accountability.
The music is playing as this episode enters its final phase. Hey, I'm a little early tonight. I can catch some of that Super Bowl. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I enjoyed making it for you. If you like what you heard, you can make a donation using the link in the show notes. Any and all donations will be appreciated. You can always reach me at OFNTpodcasts at gmail.com if you're so inclined.
I'd enjoy hearing from you. Drop me a line, why don't you? Remember, don't listen to what they say. Watch what they do. Hey, if you keep hanging out here, you'll miss the end of the Super Bowl. So get off my lawn. Stay skeptical. I'm out. See ya.