Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from June 27th, 2023. I'm Stephen Jolly. Great to have you with us wherever you're listening, perhaps through Virgin Australia radio associated Stations of Australia or maybe the Community Radio Network, there's also the podcast. If you haven't caught up with that yet, all you need to do is search for the two words. Talking tech and DNA can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced.
Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech Podcast. Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast. With me someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. David, perhaps we might start by talking about something that's been around for a long time, but maybe some people haven't even heard of it yet. The Apple Card.
No. And this is one of these things that starts off in the US and doesn't go anywhere. So the Apple Card is, in effect, a credit card that's issued by Apple. And besides being a general credit card, which has got all the benefits of a general credit card, you can also save money. Of course, when you buy Apple stuff, you get points which you can cash back and get more benefits and so on. So it came out in the US in 2019 and of course being from Apple, everybody loved it because it was a titanium
physical credit card, which looked really, really cool. So the geek factor was very high. And of course everybody wants to know right around the world, well, when are we getting it? And part of the problem is the regulations for financial institutions in the US are different to the rest of the world. And what Apple's finding is that it's not as easy to get this credit card out to the rest of the world. So even simple things like the way they display the information on the card
in some countries is not enough. You're supposed to have, you know, the name of the name of the user or the actual number of the credit card and sorts of other things as well. So I think they're currently having chats with India to see if they can get it in there. But I don't know if it's really going to end up going anywhere. I mean, four years
later to me is a fairly long time. And I mean, fingers crossed we might get it one day, but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets replaced by something else because for years in India, industry is getting a little bit too long.
Let's not worry about it. Coming soon, I think, is what you're saying, correct? Yeah. A couple of iPhone hygiene matters now. Perhaps the best way to describe them. Firstly, the latest iPhone, the iPhone 14 range. They are waterproof, aren't they?
Yeah. So what they say in the documentation, I'm probably not going to quote this exactly correctly, but if your phone gets dropped into I think it's up to a meter of water for 30 minutes, it should be perfectly fine. And what the article I'm referring to suggests that if you do drop it in water, you can get this eject water function via Siri shortcuts, which is in the article that you can download and install on your iPhone.
And what it does, it plays a series of tones which generates a lot of air movement to get the water off the speaker in the iPhone. Now, of course, us Apple Watch users have already got this function. It's called the eject water function, which is exactly the same thing. So this is a way of doing it in your iPhone because you might have noticed if your Apple Watch gets wet, it's not going to damage it. But you'll notice the actual speaker sounds really, really tinny until it
dries out. And this is the same thing for the iPhone. You could leave your iPhone to dry out. Or by running this eject water shortcut, you just decrease the time that you have to wait for the speaker to completely dry out.
Okay. Also, there's been talk lately I actually do do it quite regularly that you should turn the iPhone off and it's recommended maybe once a day for five minutes to clean itself up a bit.
Yep. So this is all about the cyber security threat that keeps getting worse and worse in the world these days. And one of the suggestions is that when you when your phone gets exposed to malware and viruses and back end attacks and all that sort of stuff, that if you completely shut down. Now, this article says iPhone, but I think it goes for any smartphone, including Android and
then you restart. There's probably some code that's running in memory that has got into your smartphone in a particular way. And of course, when you restart your phone, one hopes that. Some of the things that it's got past have been reset back to their default settings, if you like, and that malware virus, whatever else it might be, then has to actually try and get a new way of getting into your system on your iPhone or your Android phone. So it's from one point of view, it does make sense.
I actually do it as a matter of course, anyway, because some things on my phone get a bit slow sometimes and if I restart, it seems to actually pick up again and start functioning as well.
I do the same with my Apple Watch and I do notice a difference in its performance when you have switched it off for a little while, maybe not five minutes, but restart it. It just seems snappier and response to the gestures better and all that sort of things. Well, exactly. Yeah. The Mac is still pretty important to Apple, even though there are lots of other devices like the iPhone. Tell us about all that.
So people just think, you know, because the iPhone is sort of the what's it called, the umbrella of the whole Apple ecosystem? Well, it might be to a certain extent, but the thing that makes the iPhone, the Apple Watch, the Apple TV, the HomePod and everything else work is the Mac. Because the thing that makes all that happen is coding for all those things. And it's called Xcode. So when people want to write software for all the
Apple stuff, it's done on the Mac. So it will not be replaced by the iPad because you can write Swift, what's called Swift Playground apps, but they don't have all the extra libraries and so on that Xcode has on the Mac and even the new, you know, the goggles coming out, you know, next year, the vision goggles, that's also not going to make any difference either because all the coding for Vision iOS is again going to be
done on the Mac. So whilst people may not use the Macs in general too much, certainly for coding in the huge Apple environment is always done on the Mac.
So we're going to be around for a while here to stay. Yep. Text based games. They've been around for 50 years.
Yeah. This was a publication put out and it was looking at the development of text based games. Now to remind people that are not used to this because it's a bit of, you know, old fashioned type stuff. These are the games where you see things like, say, go north, go west. You know, one of the most famous games called Zork was one of the opening paragraphs was you're standing in front of a little White House. You have a forest to the south, the doors in front of you.
You're standing in front of a mailbox. What do you do now? So it's all written by typing in keyboard commands. And they were just saying that from what they could do, from a very little sort of programming point of view in the 70s as it went through in the 80s 90s 2000 and so on, they got really clever with
the way they can manipulate the code. And they even said the development of the stories, the hierarchy of things you could do in the game in some ways outdid console and other games because they were just much more clever at creating stories about creating characters and other stuff as well. So I just thought it was a fascinating thing. I don't know how accessible the book is from an epub point of view, but I just thought, you know, the fact that text adventure games have been around for
50 years, it was just a really interesting thing. I'm trying to get a hold of the book, so next time hopefully we come on here, I'll have a chance to hear a bit of a read the book.
You've been telling me of an article that says that smart homes are only as good as the brand behind them. Is smart home technology coming to a bit of a crisis?
Well, I think it is in some ways because there's supposed to be well, there is this new standard called matter which allows smart home devices to talk to each other across platforms. And it's getting to a point now where it's still not really working Now. Smart Homes stuff has been around for a while. I'm getting to the point now where I think I'm just going to use the app that comes with my device and I'm just
going to use it that way. I don't really care if it's not going to work across all the different platforms. I'm just going to get or stick with one brand name. So let's say I stick with Amazon or I stick of Google or I stick with Apple because struggling to still find something that works across absolutely everything in some ways is just getting harder and harder. So I think it's almost got to the stage now where I really think stick to one brand and then and go for that.
Don't try and sort of be a holistic, smart home because I honestly don't think we're going to get there until, you know, a few more years in the future.
There's another Beatle song that's been released that's more than. 40 years after the passing of John Lennon and many years after the passing of George Harrison, it's said that it's using AI. Paul McCartney says it's not artificial. I wonder where all this discussions going about artificial intelligence. Is it being used a bit loosely?
Well, I would think so in this case, because what they've done with this song off a tape in the late 60s is that they took his voice and, you know, cleaned it up besides all the background sound and the noise of the tape and everything else. And they've obviously generated new music track with putting his voice singing that on top of that track. Now, to me, that stuff that's been around for donkey's ages being able to do that.
So I don't know whether that's artificial intelligence because it's artificial in the sense that, you know, this has come from a tape, but audio studio is in general, they do that all the time. I mean, they take somebody's singing, they alter it, and they do all sorts of wonderful things with it. So I just think this word artificial intelligence sometimes gets a bit waved around a few times just to I don't know, it's almost like we're going to incriminate you by saying it's AI and it's not.
It's just a process that's been done before. And I just think it's a bit of a what do they call it, clickbait? Sometimes.
What's NASA doing with voice communication up there in space?
Yeah. So this is so this is not now this is looking towards the future. And when I may have been by the future, I mean for the next five years or so. So what they're wanting is space ships or space stations to talk to their human people, for want of a better word, the human partners, so that when you rather than saying, you know, do this and do that to, you know, a Google type or an Amazon type device, which is not a conversational system, what
they're talking about is having a large language model. And yes, I'm talking about things like chat GPT to have a conversation between both the human and the AI. So what I mean by that is, let's say one of the astronauts wants to go for an Ava, so they want to go for a walk outside the space station or
the ship. They could say to the AI, you know, Charlie, for example, can you run through the process of getting ready for an Eva and now the ship or the space station could come back and say, okay, here are the following steps. Now it could get I don't know how many steps are involved in an Eva, but let's say in step 20, they I could say, Well, hang on a minute, James, you forgot the check. The pressure
in your oxygen supply. Can you please do that? And once you've done that, let me know and then we'll go on to the next step. So it's going from that large, you know, let's go for an Eva outside the ship or the space station to very specific conversational points during that whole thing. So I just think it's a really great way because that system can actually access lots and lots of data points, lots of information, and maybe even bring things up that the human being themselves
hasn't actually thought about. So, you know, I nobody's scared about, you know, the old thing of 2001 Space Odyssey with Hal 9000. Hopefully it won't get that bad. But I just think relying on this huge knowledge base to prompt you in cases where you might have not forgotten something, but not taking note of something properly is really quite amazing and would be quite safe and secure for people to interact with.
Just before we go, a reminder of where people can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the programme.
So you can check out my blog site, which is David would be.podbean.com.
David would be dot podbean podbean.com. To write to the program.
You can write to me at Vision Australia where I work. David Dot Woodbridge It sounds at Vision australia.org.
David Dot Woodbridge at Vision Australia. Org This has been talking tech with me has been Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.