TechStuff Pulls Some Pranks: Part Two

and replaced with reruns of stuff you should know. So I thought this time I would just say that we were now stuff you missed in history class. That, of course is not true. We wanted to update folks on other pranks and jokes that technology companies have done in the years since that tech Stuff episode, which that published in two thousand nine. We did not cover two thousand

nine because us it published that day. Yeah, we record the episodes early, so there's no way of that we would have any way of knowing what was going to happen on the actual April first. Yeah, we also don't know what's going to happen this year. When when you're listening to this, we will also be finding out what's

going on. So uh, but before we jump into two thousand nine and then work our way through, I thought I mentioned a few pranks we didn't talk about in that first episode, and one of them is, Uh, it's some of these are not April Fools pranks, by the way. They're just famous pranks that have happened within the world of technology. And one of them is is one that that definitely ruffled feathers. And uh, and Lauren, I know

you know about this one too. It's what Gizmodo did in two thousand and eight at c e S and they brought along these little controllers called TV be Gone. Yeah. So these are controllers that they only have one purpose, which is to turn off any television set that uses the infrared receivers to you know, you just press a button and it goes through all these different codes that are used for various television sets to turn them off.

So some folks from Gizmoto were given some TV begne controllers and then they proceeded to wreak havoc or at least spread mischief around the and they even did it during some presentations Oh, that's not that's not necessarily kind. Yeah. So um yeah. In fact, they cut a lot of

flak for that, and including for me. I mean, I you know there, I'm sure there are very talented people who write for Gizmoto or who work on other projects with Gizmoto, but that that got under my skin, you know, to the point where I was thinking, like, if I'm a guy whose job it is to to present to the press and two vendors how amazing a product is, and the product keeps not working throughout my presentation, that could mean actual loss in sales and bad press, and

it just I mean to me that that's not the role of journalism. It's not to to be like, hell, look how clever and naughty we are, you know. And uh, the c E A that's the organization that puts on c e s agrees with me because they banned Gizmodo for that behavior. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's that kind of goes with I think that a lot of people in the press are kind of over this entire tech April fools on the web thing. That's a great thing to

point out. Yeah, there to be fair, Like, I still find it amusing but it's not my job to follow every I don't report the tech news. We're not a news situation, so it doesn't it doesn't really matter if we have a day by day up to the date everything going on all the time, Whereas if if we were to cover the news, then you already know on April one that there's no way to have any sort of reliability. Yeah, all the news stuff you run into on April one, there's a very good chance that it's

Shenanigan's right, right Canary. Yeah, although I do think most places are pretty good about having a little link at the bottom that says like, oh no, this is an April Fools joke, most but not all. Uh yeah, and a couple of other pranks. I wanted to mention, I'm sure that we mentioned this in an episode of Tech Stuff in the past, but I could not find it. If any of you guys remember right in because it is killing Jonathan, it's really it's there's that little vange.

I am definitely guilty of manufacturing false memories, so so it's quite possible that I did invent these, but I could. I'm sure that I heard Chris talking about this, But again, these aren't April Fools jokes, but but cal Tech has a rich, rich history of pulling pranks. Some of them aren't hacking in the sense of hacking electronics, but are more like social hacking, life social horror, or just yeah,

life hacking. A great example of the life hacking approach was in nineteen sixty one during the Rose Bowl game. So cal Tech, which was not in the Rose Bowl that year, UH, discovered that one of the plans UH during that that game was for the one cheerleading squad to yell out numbers and then the audience would hold up a card that related to whatever the number was, and some cal Tech students went in and fiddled with the system so that one there were fifteen different numbers

that they would go through throughout the game. So once they hit fourteen, when everyone held up the cards, that actually spelled out cal Tech. So they managed to crash

the Rose Bowl. Well, they did it again in nineteen four because that year they ended up rewiring the scoreboard so that although the actual game was U c L a versus the University of Illinois, the scoreboard said that it was cal Tech thirty eight M I T three UH, and then UH They've done a lot of pranks on m T, and m T has done some on cal Tech as well. It's like, if you get really smart kids all together in one room, they get a little

bit bored. And yeah, apparently they once traveled from California all the way to Massachusetts. Uh, there's a sign at m I T that says the Institute of Technology, and they made the sign read that other Institute of Technology, and then they passed out free T shirts to the pre freshmen who were there to explore the grounds, and the T shirts on the front red m I T. On the back it said because not everyone can go to cal Tech. So yeah, anyway, the cal Tech has

got a real long history of it. But let's move on to some actual pranks that were pulled in two thousand nine. Yeah, do you do you have one you want to start off with, which just kind of kind of alternate. Yeah, um, I was. I was really fond of of of YouTube flipping all of its videos upside down. And there's a little message that would play on the site that said that for for maximum like viewing optimacy. Right, that's not a word, that's not the word that they used,

but it's similar to that. Yeah, where it was everything was upside down. That was a good one. Microsoft released a trailer for a game called Alpine Legend. Yeah. It ended up yeah, like like Guitar Legend, Yeah, but with an alpine horn. Yeah. The Alpine Horn looked like it was twelve ft long and had four buttons on it and you were supposed to it was a rhythm game, just like Guitar Hero or Rock Band or anything like that.

And um. Yeah, and then they had a singing component, so you would have someone yotally next to you as you were playing them. I love this. I want one. It's kind of my think geek moment when I didn't I didn't even see that when it happened in two thousand night, or if I did, I have no memory of it. Uh, do you have another one you want to do? Um? Amazon announced that they were going to have some blimp based cloud computing systems yea, which is awesome.

I still I still want that. I would take Yeah, they would pay for that service. They were they were going literal with cloud services. It was called the Floating Amazon Cloud Environment or FACE, and it supposedly had solar cells on the top of each blimp that would collect solar energy to provide the electricity needed for that that blimp. There was the Hotelicopter. Hotelicopter, Yes, I think that end

gadget actually fell for. It was supposedly a Soviet m I l V twelve helicopter, helicopter, one of those kind of double decker looking things, enormous thing, and that I had been converted into a luxury hotel that had eighteen rooms. Each room had a coffee machine or WiFi WiFi, yeah, and they used the images they used were actually images taken from a chain of hotels called Yotel and uh. In fact, it was later discovered that Yotel was in on the joke, so it wasn't just that someone had

stolen stole the pictures. Google that year, Oh gosh, Google always comes out with a ton of things. Uh, let's see, they had I think I think it was a kind of under an umbrella, that one that was their Caddie Katie k A d I E. Yeah, that was the kind of have auto heuristic distributed intelligence entity. Yeah, and it was an artificially intelligent creation that Google then unleashed on the web, supposedly, and one of the first things

that did was build its own website. And it built its own website by from Google explained that it was designed to pull design elements and design strategies from the web and pick the ones that are the most popular because those have to be the best ones, and build its own website. Did you actually see the website? It looked like something from It was like Geo cities. Yeah, there was. There was an animated banner at the top, there were pandas all over the page. There was a

there was a music playing in the background. I mean, like every bad design, there was an under construction gift. That's what was my favorite. Um. Yeah, there were every bad design you can remember in the in the nineties from web page design was and this artificially intelligent UH

creation had supposedly created this picture. Uh. There also was an announcement to a three D upgrade to the Chrome browser because of all households have at least one pair of red blue three D glasses laying around right right. There was a Gmail autopilot which would answer your emails for Yeah. There was a Picasta feature that would let you put red eye into your photos. It would automatically add red eye into your photos and if and if the photo didn't have any eyes to add red too,

it would it would destroy it. I didn't get to that part. That is awesome. Uh yeah, I mean in Australia, Google announced g Ball, a GPS enabled soccer ball. I'm assuming that they meant soccer since it's Australian rules football. Australian Okay, so not not soccer but Australian rules football. Yeah. It not only was a GPS enabled, but it could send messages to like, let's say that you are a

sports fan, but you can't watch the game. It would update you via text messages how the game was going based upon the position of the ball, Like I'm getting kicked around a lot. This is hurting my self esteem. Uh yeah, that was. There was some great stuff from Google that year. Yeah. Yeah. My My other favorite, being that I work in social media, is that Guardian reported it was going to shut down all of its web

and print services um and go Twitter only. Yeah. They said that that everything that has ever reported in the news can be summed up in a hundred forty characters or fewer. Expedia offered flights to Mars starting at and hotels. Dot Com offered deals on hotel rooms on the Moon.

Warner Brothers supposedly bought the Pirate Bay for thirteen billion dollars because they were involved in a lengthy lawsuit and Warner Brothers it didn't look like Warner Brothers would win, so the only way Warner Brothers could get around it would be by buying the Pirate Bay. Yeah, that obviously was not true. That was reported on torrent Freak. That was the source of that one. Yahoo announced that they had ideological Search, which would let you filter out any

search results that that conflict with your own worldview. So it's kind of like Facebook, how you just start to unfriend people like I do not want any more posts about that. Actually, I'm kind of afraid that that's what Google is doing right now, like this very moment in the real world. Yeah, tech Crunch reported that their their technology blog, crunch Gear, had been purchased by General Mills, so that crunch Gear would be about crunchy cereals, which again I don't know I thought I would of I

would read that Wired's geek Dad became jock Dad. Uh. Reddit became red dig and they totally redesigned themselves. Yeah, they redesigned the page to make it look more like dig, which you know, redd it and dig. There's definitely a especially at the Zappos said that they were introducing bunk desks, so they would build platforms above a desk and put

a second desk on there. The picture was great because it showed a guy sitting at his desk facing away from the camera and a platform built over his desk, and on top of the platform was a second desk with a young lady facing towards the camera working on at her desk, and they had to remove the ceiling tile over her head because otherwise her head would be

pressed up against it, so that was kind of funny. Um. There was the service Chirper that was announced by box dot net because they said that Twitter is just characters. There's just just too long, so it reduces your tweets to fifty characters by dropping letters. Wow. Yeah, it was pretty amazing. Uh yeah. Opera browser was introducing face based gestures, so to zoom out, you'd puff your cheeks out. To

zoom in, you you suck your cheeks in. To reload the page, you twist your neck that kind of stuff. There were some pretty good ones that year two thousand nine, I have to say was probably like the banner year for I think that was where the tech goofiness on April Fool's really peaked, and then people started to kind of back off after that. But this was like the the year where everyone was doing it. A National Geographic announced the publication of its newest title, National Geographic, The

Best of the Breasts. The press release said, finally, a compendium of all our stellar breast photography has been called for our one twenty six year history. It's a celebration of the female body and its honest form that is completely amazing. It makes me so much more fond of National and I'm like, I didn't know that they had that sense of human and uh. In a little website, a blog for a webs sight, a little website called how stuff works dot com had an article about rechargeable

chewing gum written by a Jonathan Strickland. That was my contribution that year. I couldn't talk about it during the podcast that we recorded way back in two thousand nine because it had not yet published. UM. I was particularly proud of that when I had some people believing it, even though I thought it was the thing when you write these things, you'd think, there's no way anyone. We'll

move on to twenty ten. So twenty ten, well, first of all, un let's say, Think, of course has a history of announcing ridiculous products on April Fool's Day and then another history of making them become real things. When people say, why doesn't that exist? I would buy that thing. Please let me give you my money. And my favorite from Think was the year that the Dharma alarm clock from from Lost came out. This is and if you guys have not watched Lost, then you're going to be

completely bored for the next fifteen seconds. But but it had two alarm settings and one minute warning and an electromagnetic cataclysic mode um nice. It has a twenty three year warranty or until your house explodes, and polar bear not included. Does it does it flash sideways like like Lost did? It's it's got a got higher glyphs, but it had. They also introduced the ikade, which was the little arcade cabinet housing that you would put an iPad into and you could play arcade games on it, which

and that became a real thing. We have here, we have one here in the office. I've played with it myself. UM, let's see YouTube announced text p, which was and there was a response to the fact that the online videos take up a lot of broadband. It takes up a lot of you know, it requires a long time to buffer, like especially back in you know, it wasn't quite as

fast and mobile was definitely an issue there too. So text p was a service that would convert videos into streaming text instead of video actual video images, and that you could supposedly just watch a video and text form, which was nice, nice way to streamline that broadband problem. Uh. The The Independent newspaper from the UK reported a plan to build a had drunk glider in the circle line of London's metro right so the tube would become a

particle accelerator. I thought that was a great one. I love that Funny or Die turned into Bieber or Die. Supposedly Justin Bieber purchased Funny or Die and then it just became a website about Justin Bieber. All the videos were about Justin Bieber. That was a fantastic one. Uh. There were there was some great fake articles on Wikipedia. UM. I don't know how that's different from any other day, but one of those was a joke, just a joke.

Not all of them are fake, no, but you know, I'm saying this just after the news broke that that someone detected that BP had been fudge changing the environmental report about the the oil spill. So you know, they're always check your sources. Wikipedia right right. Wikipedia has its place. It's just you have to take it with a grain of salt, and you know how people sometimes mess with the system. Anyway, They purposefully had some some joke articles.

My favorite one was one that said a Japanese company had accidentally sent some of its customers back to That's that's a good one. That's good. Hulu created a fake option to watch videos in three D and that was one of the those things where you start watching it and it turns into the whole aliens have created Hulu and TV. It's part of that secret plan campaign that they were doing for so long. What's his name in

that other girl Baldwin? Yeah, Alizadu, I think was also in some of those one of the Baldwin's I think it was, yeah, Alec I believe. Um. Let's see what else. Let's see um read it. That year, that was the year that they temporarily granted all users at an accident. Wow, yes, for the whole day, which means, you know, you could you could edit headlines, you could ban users, You could infinitely vote up anything you wanted, so you could post your own link and then vote it up to the

very top of Reddit. Meanwhile everyone else is doing the same thing, right, So yeah, it was that was a I love I love the stuff that read it does. That one was terrific though, Um Google went nuts again. Yeah, yeah, that was okay, So that was That was the year. That was right after UM, Topeka, Kansas had named itself Google for a Day in a way too, and they were trying to to attract Google to build out that fiberhood in Topeka. Yeah yeah, and uh and so Google

renamed itself Topeka for the Day. Yeah. And then they also replaced search speeds with fake terms, so you know, like you it tells you how long it took you two took Google to perform your search. Then it was saying things like it's seven point to warp or twenty three point oh skidoo, which I thought was great. Um, Gmail had a vowel outage and so only consonants were showing up. Google UK had a translate for animals, so

you could hold up your phone your tone. You can make a little audio recording and it would tell you what your dog or cat or pig was saying. Pig pig Latin was going to be a new expansion coming out sade right. Uh, there we was. There was also if you typed in where am I into Google search field. Usually you get coordinates when you do that, but if you did it on that day, it would tell you things like Neptune or more door or entrance to Hogwarts if only. Uh yeah, there were some great ones there.

Um Kodak announced aeromatography. Aeromatography it's like smell a vision, but in picture form, so you captured the actual scent of the subject of your photograph. I would I would also, that's actually I wouldn't want that technology to be unleashed upon the world at all at all. I think PC World had had an article um users blame sudden acceleration for recent spade of injuries, and it was about how

how you know? Windows search queries could be completed a less than two minutes and it would just give people seizures. Nice thrill lists reported that there was a new startup called meeting Roulette, which was like chat Roulette except for business people. So if you wanted to practice your presentation, you would get on meeting Roulette and get connected with other random business people and then you would do your presentation.

So it's like chat Roulette, but with more power point slides and fewer more didy more, more pants and more pants, more pants, and more power point slides exactly. Uh you know, you know. Um. There was a flicker announced the flicker Pad, which was a pad of paper with photos attached to it. Group On had group poop on, which was all luxury items like crazy luxury atoms, like here's a collage made

out of dollar bills, it's two thousand dollars. Um. College Humor actually didn't go on the Internet for their joke. They went to real New York locations, New York City locations and put up posters saying coming soon in and out Burger So in and out Burgers a California fast food chain. And they were putting up these California fast food chain posters up on like vacant buildings a little bit boarded up. They put up the signs there. Yeah,

oh that could that could get you punched. I mean, I know it's in and out as a religion among some people. Yes, supposedly. The blogs of New York, the food blogs kind of picked up on the the joke immediately. That's good, that's good. Um yeah, So anyway, that's that's a good overview of some of the big ones from twenty tin. I mean, Toshiba also started getting in on the game. They introduced the Tube top Laptop computer, which was a laptop the head, an inflatable case including a

little inner tube that's part of it. Um. So yeah, good year twenty tin. But already it was starting to slow down a bit. And before we get onto, we'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor. All right, let's get back to the joking. So we're at eleven. Hit me with something from Speaking of Tshiba, that was the year that they had the three D monocle bespectacle um one three D. So really you'd think you're using

both eyes. That's that's tricky to do too. I mean obviously, like those three D involves parallax, which requires two eyes to have two lenses, which is why people who have vision problems in in just one eye. But not the other. Often that you know the three D effect is completely lost on them. Um also means that you know they would prefer to have the polarized lenses because at least then they could watch whatever the movie was as supposed to red or blue, which means it would just be

red or blues. Um. Blizzard for World of Warcraft introduced a new companion, Crabby, who would give you helpful hints. Crabby was essentially Clippy for World of Warcraft. I see her trying to lead a raid. Would you like some help? Uh? Yeah, I'm not a World of Warcraft player, so that is hilarious to me. Let's say Hulu redesigned its site to look like it came out of the ninety nineties. Yeah yeah, Windows style. They had all the front page was all

like like x files and kinds. In the hall they had they had ads up for like Netscape and and someone just hit control all the lete to YouTube. They ended up introducing a a an option that would allow you to make your photos or your videos look like they came from the early nineteen hundreds, so they would all turn into silent movies with piano backed music and

have a cpo tone. Now their feature was not obviously actually activated, but they created They took some very notable types of videos and then redid them as like silent movie versions. That's that's another thing that I think that people would probably if that existed, we would be subjected to a lot more of that. Yeah, we'd have like at least two different versions of every video. Oh here's my favorite. One. Irish airline rhenn Air announced that it

would offer child free flights. I okay, I I'd pay. I would. I don't fly that often, but when I do, I I appreciate it when I don't have a crying baby within five rows and me it's a it's a perk. Absolutely. Hey, kids are great. They are they are, and it's not their fault, but they're upset and they don't understand why kids are great. Far away from me. I like other people's children. Just find there. I like them too. In theory to practice, No, no, kids are kids, kids really are.

Actually I do like kids. I just you know, I'm definitely one of those people who normally I can fall asleep on a flight, but when there's a crying baby, that's not not so much. Not really in the cards. Uh see Yelp announced puppy rentals rental you could you could find places to rent a puppy for a while. I if it weren't for the fact that I know that would be psychologically damaging for the puppies, I would say that's in a brilliant surface, But because I actually

care about the animals, it's not a good at all. No, not a good idea. Tech Crunch that year announced that Spotify was going to be coming to the US and in order to afford the tremendous licensing fees for P three's shutting down in Europe, which was hilarious. Of course, everyone had been asking for Spotify for ages here in America, and it had been available in Europe for a while, and everyone raved about it in Europe, and everyone in America is just like, when are we ever going to

get this? So that was kind of granted. Eventually Spotify would make its way to America by making a deal with Facebook. That would be the way that they got in on that. Um, let's see what else is My favorite of think geek that year was the play Mobile Apple Store play set, which which was you know, the little the little plastic people in their little plastic environment um to to introduce children to the magic of Apple and you could use your own real iPhone. Four is

the screen behind Steve Jobs and the keynote theater. Nice Nice. Reddit created a a new thing called Mold, right because because Reddit gold is their gift currency, it was kind of like, yeah, exactly, so if someone gave you mold. Each time you received mold, you'd see ten fewer comments and lose the ability to to type a certain letter.

And I think the first one was E, and then it would it would get down to I think only MP and H. Yeah, you would eventually get to the point where the MPH would be the only letters you would be able to type with the comment section yeah, which, hey,

you know that's an interesting feature. Um. There was a a announced of an announcement of a group on Clone called Deals for Hipsters, which was just deals for Hipsters that said that if you were not satisfied, they would think about sending you a card that said I'm sorry that you didn't. You didn't didn't appreciate that you didn't appreciate this. I was about I was about to make

a very unkind comment about Atlanta. Um deal group that has a mustache in their logo, and then I decided that instead, I'll just make a snarky allusion to it. That's a wise decision, and I'll tell you why later. So, so let's a group on itself said that it purchased April Fool's Day. That was right, and so that no one else could do anything on April fools Day because that would violate the terms of service. Uh, it's a

funnier die ended up. You know. They had they had become Biber centric the year before, they decided to do something totally different in uh in in this year they decided instead of for they'd become a Rebecca Black site. It was like between the music with Rebecca Black things like that. Yeah, it was interesting. Whereas Wolf from Alpha became Biber Beta Beta. Yeah, the little Wolf from Alpha logo became like a little cartoon picture of Biber's face.

Google that year they had they had a job listing for the Google auto completer. Right. This is so so when you're typing in like if you're on Chrome and you're typing in a search query in the in the search bar, the awesome bar, whatever, the omnibar. I can't even remember what it's called in Chrome anymore. Um. But then when you start typing it in, it auto starts to auto complete, right Like if you're typing on a phrase, it tries to help you out by sending you responses

that it thinks you're gonna go for. And so the auto complete, according to this was the person who actually types up, you know, anticipates what that search is going to be, quickly types it in before you yeah, minimum typing speed of words per minute, yeah, you know, and go through a few keyboards a year. That way. Certificate and psychic reading strongly preferred, right, Yeah, it was very cute. Gmail had Gmail Motion, which was a gesture based interface

to navigate around Gmail. The pdf of all the gestures is still available online. All yeah, they're they're they're pretty good. Um. Also, it announced that it was going to as of like three days in the future, switch everything to comic Sands all the text across all of Google. You know, comic Sands definitely has like people just despise that with a passion that that that in Papyrus are really there's the

ones that people really hate. Huh. Kodak created the option to remove x is from your photos, like ex girlfriend's ex boyfriends from your photos with an app called Relationshift. That's good. Yeah, that's cute. I know a lot of people who would love that. They definitely have a lot more photos posted on Facebook right now had they had that option. LinkedIn began to suggest that you might want to connect professionally with people who are either dead or fictional,

like John Watson or Albert Einstein. So yeah, that that can really help you get your career ahead. Yeah, there's some great stuff that year. Now, I guess we'll go ahead and move into last year, two thousand and twelve, and again we don't have anything for two thousand thirteen, so we'll talk a little bit about these. Um. I like that Airbnb announced that they had a deal where you could stay aboard the International Space Station for four thousand,

one twelve dollars per night. So if you look at that amount of money for thousand, one hundred twelve four April one first twelve, two twelve, Yeah, that's how they came up with that that price. Cute. Um. The Register claimed that Apple had patented the rectangle that specifically, the patent was about a quadrilateral having all four interioral angles of ninety degrees opposite sides that are parallel and congruent diagonals that bisect each other. So that is that is amazing. Um,

that's pretty funny. Uh. My favorite from thinking last year was I think that was the year of the Admiral Akbar singing wallfish. Yes, they had those singing bass it was Admiral Akbar. Yeah, yeah, he could play the cantina song and I'd say, it's it's a trap. Yeah, yeah, here's a sad thing. I would still buy that. That's that's a little bit terrible, but it's it's I'm ashamed to admit it, and yet it's still true. I cannot deny that I would I would actually buy that. Would

it would end up sitting in a closet something. My wife would never allow me to put that up anywhere, not even in the dog's room. She'd be like, are you kidding, and like the dog's deaf, he can't hear anything, and she's no, seriously, there's gonna be some deep psychological damage you will do to that dog if we leave this here. So I think it is not to be

I think there would be. Uh. They also that year had had minecraft marshmallow creeps instead of instead of peeps and uh and and my my personal favorite, as much love as I have for animal acbar, they had the Artenic based sea monkeys straight from Mono Lake. They are one percent pure science and one percent fund which means

two awesome for you. Right. So, so that that relates back to the science story from that year about the life forms found to live on Arsenic, which was a huge scientific breakthrough at the time and was it was actually a story that end a lot of misrepresentation in the science media. But anyway, Yeah, so that was definitely a reference to that gentle polke there. Ad block said that it would expand beyond blocking ads to blocking pictures

of cats. Oh didn't they had ad block had I feel like in the previous year they had had um instead of the normal ad block logo, they would have an ad like a block thing with a cat on it. Very well might in the previous year. So that's that's cute. They went from from all cats to know cats. I liked what Hulu did and that they you know, the Hulu voice guy like this episode is brought to you

by blah blah blah that guy. So they had they had it as if they had accidentally inserted out takes from his recording sessions into the things like red leather, yellow leather, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Alright, are we rolling like that? Or this episode of Hulu is brought to you by Hey, are we ready to go yet? Or what you know? That kind of stuff, and it was. It was actually inserted into their other one otherwise normal videos. Um so, I thought that was

really amusing. Beats Audio announced that they were releasing Beats by Boyle as in Susan Boyle as in I Dreamed a Dream So Dr Dre and Susan Boyle finally waiting for that album that that connection that will rule the music world? Um tashiba again. They announced that they were releasing tablets of interesting shapes, including an oval, a rhombus and the Heart heartsheet tablet by a heart shaped tablet. That's so sweet. I have no doubt that you would.

It would probably end up right next to my Admiral act bar singing bass a. Blizzard announced that they were going to start doing more more children's content, educational games, y A novels, you know, things like a like all functional Zerg typing game right where the zer would rush you if you don't type the word out properly. Yeah. Yeah, reader Ravager, which would you know? Devour Tome after Tome of Ancient Lord, teaching kids a valuable lesson that reading

isn't just fun, it's downright delicious. Nice YouTube announced that they would offer the entire database of videos on DVD because there's nothing like web content on DVD, right, So if you wanted it, you could order it. It would require one seven five delivery trucks to carry all the

DVDs to your house, but you could get them. Of course you couldn't really those the joke um stuffed on TV had a couple of different different jokes one of the one one of them said that Apple was introducing a forty two inch iPad, which would have been enormous, And the other was that Apple and BlackBerry were collaborating to build a new smartphone called the Crumble, and it looked like it looked like a BlackBerry smartphone with an Apple on screen interface. Yeah. Google of course went nuts

in Yeah they had that. They had that great um eight bit map, Yeah, the Nintendo in nes it was Google Maps for the Nintendo in e s and it was it turned Google Maps into an eight bit version and it worked everywhere. Yeah, I mean, I mean they built it. Yeah, they created that thing. This wasn't entirely a joke. There was a really long time where you could actually switch it to that mode. I wonder if you still can. I haven't. I didn't try, but there's

a little there's a little um uh linker icon do. Yeah, there was something where you could switch it over, and it was it was just hilarious, like everything it looked like everything was Legend of Zelda and and so you could look at your own neighborhood as if it were part of Legend of Zelda, which I thought was fantastic. Yeah, the Google Racing was announced, which was going to be autonomous nascars, right, so, because the big story about the

Google autonomous car was still in the news at that point. Uh, I mean they've been They've been in the news for a while at that point. But yeah, I was kind of funny to have the idea of these these driverless cars competing against each other in a in a race. Chrome got multitask support, which allowed multiple cursors to be on the screen at the same time. Anyone who has used any of the collaborative tools that Google made, like

Google Wave things like that. It allows multiple people to edit the same document at the same time and you actually see the edits in real time. So if you've ever had that experience where multiple people were working on the same thing all at once, mostly to mess with each other, it's it's funny and irritating. Now, now I mentioned that where everyone's got control of a different cursor on your screen, that would be a night pretty great.

That two thousand was also the year of street Row, which would would the kangaroo with a with a camera on it, which would allow them to cover those tricky parts of the Australian outback that are otherwise unreachable by They also had Google Fiber bars. They were bars of fiber stuff that you would eat like actual snack bars. Optical fiber. No, no, it's supposed to be like fiber fiber,

get your fiber, but that it was. It was based on an algorithm that would uh analyze what your body needed and provide you exactly the nutrition that you that you required at that time. Yeah, let's see. Sony unveiled a point seven to five inch Vio Ultra Book Q series with eight gigabytes of RAM ten ADP resolution and come on tin ADP resolution when it's point seven five inches,

that's easy. It's still like three pixels. And then the a m D radio on h D sixty six fifty graphics card, which that was the picture was like a person holding this tiny little thing in the palm of their hand. It could fit in your pocket because it's

three quarters of an inch. Reddit that year had the introduced the Reddit timeline because that was when Facebook was switching over to timeline and everyone was was freaking the heck out, as people do about Facebook changes, which which extended from from all the way to the beginning of time until the heat death of the universe, right, so you could look at the headlines of any given time from like pre history to the future exactly. It was fantastic.

Virgin announced Virgin Volcanic, which was a vehicle that would allow you to visit the center of the Earth. Oh right, yeah, yeah. It looked like a cork screw, like a like a really like super high tech cork screw thing. Yeah yeah. Seth Green was going to be on that. They all had announced that they would start to accept a new currency. The currency would be tied to the British pound, but it was a currency specific to Virgin Mobile, So anyone who has been to a theme park that has theme

park specific money essentially the same idea. Of course, the the unit of currency for Virgin was called the Branson of course. Yeah, I mean I wonder, how could it not be? Yeah, yeah, my favorite isn't you know, terribly tech related except for it happened on Facebook George t k announced that there was going to be a new Star Trek film coming out that that he was going to play the captain in and And. I wanted this

movie so badly. I was so excited about it for like two and a half minutes until I realized it

was able, until you realize what day it was. Yeah, you know, in the past, I've actually got people a few times with some great Yeah, Like I posted one year that I was developing a story and I had pitched it and that it was had actually been accepted and I was going to fly out to Hollywood to to have a discussion about making a movie about a pair of scientists who are both studying the human genome and had identified the genes that guide aging, and they

wanted to try and find a way where they could stop aging, so that, you know, the cellular death is no longer a problem. You could you could theoretically live forever as long as nothing terrible happened to you, like you know, you don't you could. You would still die if you got hit by a bus, but otherwise you would live in definitely right, And that they because of funding issues or whatever, the whole system is shut down.

And so they both independently of each other. And there's a man and a woman and they both love each other, but they have not expressed their love to one another. They independently do tests on themselves, but for one of them it speeds up the aging process and for the other it reverses the aging process. And so they begin to age apart from one another as the love story unfall olds. And the question is when is the love story? Is the love story going to actually be a thing,

or is it going to have to stop? So that was my that was my pitch I was trying to think of. I was literally sitting there thinking like one of the most stupid story I can think of, and I typed that up here's the thing. That joke came back to bite me because everyone said, no, you have to write this now. I'm like, but that's a dumb story. I want to see that story. So well yeah, but then, you know, that was before the Benjamin Button film had come out, so that one, I said, you know, Benjamin

Button essentially tells that story in a way. It's not you know, not it's not a literal translation of that, but it's very similar. So when that came out, I was like, nope, nope, someone else has already done it, and they did it probably better than I would have anyway. So but I've I've done similar jokes like that a couple of times, and usually I get people believing me for about half an hour and then some one we'll

figure it out. And as soon as someone figures it out, they post and then everyone goes right, and I'm like, thanks, you know, you could you could just sit there and send me a message and say good good April Fool's joke. But no, you have to ruin it for everybody, or I have to delete your comment. I'm not above such things. Well anyway, So it's it's interesting. I'm curious to see

what happens this year. Like I said, by the time this podcast goes live, you guys have probably seen quite a few examples of the ridiculous stuff that happens, Uh and I do. My heart goes out to all of my tech journalist peers who are exhausted by April Fool's Day and find no joy in it whatsoever and only see it as an irritable event that happens on a

yearly basis and they cannot wait for April second. Just just think about think about that that street Roo and um and UH and George and I didn't mention it, but one year Codex said that they had print They had created a three D printer that would allow you to print live kittens. It was like kitten printer. Just think think of the kitten printer, the kitten printer. That

that should just make you feel better, all right. So, if you guys have any favorite jokes, maybe there's something that we did not cover, but it's something you're familiar with them, you think we should should have talked about it. Why don't you us knows send us an email or ad justus as tech stuff at Discovery dot com. We'll drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. We'd love to hear from you. We always are happy to accept

any suggestions for future episodes. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter with the handle text stuff H s W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it have staff works dot com