Star Wars news! Star Trek apologetics! Peak smartphone! The science of game theory! You’ll find all of that discussed in this week’s episode of our technology podcast. Plus, we ponder what would happen if Elon Musk took over a city’s transportation department.
One Day Builds
Adam embarks on one of his most ambitious builds yet: fulfil…
Show And Tell
Adam recently completed a build of the royal St. Edwards cro…
Making
Viewers often ask to see Adam working in real-time, so this …
One Day Builds
Adam and Norm assemble a beautifully machined replica prop k…
One Day Builds
One of the ways Adam has been getting through lockdown has b…
Making
Adam unboxes and performs a quick test of this novel new hel…
Making
When Adam visited Weta Workshop early last year, he stopped …
One Day Builds
Adam tackles a shop shelf build that he's been putting off f…
Show And Tell
Time for a model kit build! This steampunk-inspired mechanic…
One Day Builds
Adam reveals his surprise Christmas present for his wife--a …
I have long thought the best kind of VR experience would be an accompanied journey in a submarine, a guided tour of real deep sea life, in real time, and not CG or artificial. A new “episode” of those every six months would be a big seller, I think, especially as it’s a sit-down, 360°, literally immersive experience.
And I’m sure there are similar concepts to that you could experience, like journeys in a jet plane or space shuttle, or even a safari through Africa or a boat trip on the Amazon river.
Okay – inspired by Norm’s complaining about Woody Harrelson in the Han Solo movie, this is to the tune of the Cheers TV show theme song:
Making your way through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops.
And Disney wants the Star Wars stories to be winners, not big flops
But I can hear the fans complain . . .
Hey man now don’t you know-
We don’t want to see your face.
You don’t belong in outer space.
Star Wars is meant for rising stars
Not actors well known for tending bars
So you gotta go ’cause everyone knows your face.
Also – can we get a musical cue for Jeremy’s weekly Star Trek Log. “Jeremy and his son have set out on a 7 season mission . . . “
Did you make that up, becasue that’s pretty brilliant?
Wow. I saw the knockoff fidget cube at a store by the cash register, and I just assumed they were the Kickstarter product. It was IDENTICAL. I did notice no mention of Kickstarter on the box, but I brushed that off because I thought they had moved on to being a full fledged product.
Dude, totally want to hear your thoughts in TIOAT sharing the love of Star Trek with your son. And cue the music bumper!
The last CO2 laser i used was a 600w behemoth – was about the biggest in the world at the time – 1980’s. A proper scary piece of kit. Especially if you ‘lost’ the (IR hence invisible) beam on the bed…. nobody move, the first thing you would know about walking through the beam would be when your leg fell off!
I would love a weekly update on your TNG watching.
This is for all three of you and you can take it as you want but I just want to put my two cents in when it comes to wings. I work in a restaurant/brewery in Portland, OR. We sell multi-hundred pounds of wings a week. We dry rub our and par bake them in the oven till they are 90% done. Then after cooling we fly fry them the rest of the way and then sauce them. This way you get a layer of flavor baked on and then a layer of flavor sauced over. Then if you choose to dip you ad another layer of flavor. My two cents, but we can sell 200 pounds of wings in a 1-3 day period.
I remember the first time I played the F.E.A.R. series. There where a couple of times I couldn’t bring myself to move my character forward for like 30 minutes because I knew what was coming. That was on a 2D screen. I can’t imagine experiencing something like that in VR.
Is it possible that we become jaded about future technology as the internet has made it easier for us to see when it is fraudulent? https://youtu.be/RNFesa01llk
The hyperloop doesn’t look like it will ever come to fruition based on our current understanding of the laws of physics
Regarding futurists and telling us what the future will be like, isn’t that what Black Mirror is all about? Just finished the first episode of the Netflix original season 3 – definitely no drop in quality. Am I wrong in thinking, though, that this was the first episode of Black Mirror to actually have a somewhat hopeful ending?
There is a green/future city being built in Abu Dhabi called Masdar City. I lot of this architectural based systems that help reduce the temperature of the shared space around buildings and to reduce the cooling of buildings. One interesting thing that they are doing there is a Personal Transit system. you a personal computer controlled car and then push a button for where you want to go and it takes you there.
I can go on for HOURS on this topic. We used to par-bake with a little dusting of baking soda to up the pH. This would render some fat to pump up crispiness and browning. Then finish fry in peanut oil to really crisp them up and add that fried flavor. That baking soda trick made a nice difference.
We are trying the sous vide for that same par bake idea, but at a very controlled temp. I think we’ll lose out the render of some fat.
You know that New York City had dug holes for transportation back in 1904, right?
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Two seconds after Jeremy tells us how he feels dirty that a game it trying to extract money from the users and Norm talks about tagging somebody as a “freeloader”, we move right into the segment about how Premium Tested Members can get content that is unavailable to the rest of us.
My irony meter tilted.
No, No… First soak them overnight in a good hefeweizen beer. Then drain them and pat dry. Season with a dry rub and then drizzle with olive oil and mix them up to get a good coating on everything. Then grill them – I like to put some wood chips in a smoker basket for a little added flavor. The grilling gets them nice a crispy but not greasy like frying can. Then sauce them. Then eat!
Grilling? Never. Fat has to cook fat 🙂
and Los Angeles already has a subway. Wired covered the other problems with virtually every argument for this project. Elon has either lost his mind, or he is secretly preparing to build underground cities on Mars.
are there any guesses whether win 10 cloud is the first step in ms moving uwp-only? i feel that was a topic/motive ever since win 10 released, but was always met with vocal push-back.
re ai’s unexpected strengths for work/uni, i dabbled a bit in a tool called word2vec recently, and had a similar reaction. w2v takes a very simple input – you feed it a big text corpus, from which it extracts each word in sequence, plus a window of x words around it. it trains a simple neural network to match words to their context, and finally outputs the result values of the neural network nodes per word. these number sequences can be cast as vector representations for each word. despite being derived from such banal input data, they map similarities and relationships in word meaning well enough to enable vector arithmetic with words. the common example is that the difference between king and queen is about the same as that between man and woman, or uncle and aunt. therefore, king minus man plus woman equals queen. i feel that’s similarly a too good result given the input, as an AI beating humans at poker despite not having access to the whole interpersonal game of reading people.
Love the podcasts. Long time watcher. Just a thought…any chance the table you sit at can be turned slightly towards the camera at Kishore’s end so we don’t see a complete profile of Norm? Im guessing there’s not much room for movement but even 5 to 10 degrees would help. oh, and Norm can come up alittle in volume. He dosnt have quite the projection of Jeremy and Kishore…just sayin. Also, like to see you guys have a little look at and hear your thoughts on this little puppy…http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a25000/leaded-video-handle-robot/
A little scary.
As regards to the TNG diaries “though a child’s eyes”, oh please do. it brings back fond memories of original Star Trek…well, at my age anyway lol.
How about Tele-presence robots at sites around the world that you can rent by the 1/2 hour. Oops, just got a visual of thousands of Tele-presence robots “flash marching” on Senate or House for a bill – can’t have that.
Another good idea is sports events or concerts, to have a live VR in-the-stands experience.
Being a Tested Member is like being a Patreon supporter. It’s not about the extra content, that’s just the bonus you get from your endorsement of the site. I prefer it to the ad model, anyway.
Always want to hear more about Star Trek
Quake, Overwatch, etc. still don’t guarantee an even playing field. How far are you from the servers? How good is your internet connection? How responsive is your mouse/keyboard/computer? All these things can influence your game.
As for Magic, you could play with house rules and even out the playing field with the same decks. I agree it can be daunting playing against someone with seemingly endless amounts of cards to chose from and there are many places that do sealed tournaments where you build a deck based on cards you get from boosters at the tournament. But more cards doesn’t equal being a better player. You have to know how to use your cards and how best to counter what your opponent does or, more importantly, will do. For me, a very large part of the fun is creatively coming up with ways of thwarting what my many opponents may do without knowing all the details. In many cases it is the strategizing that can lead to victory and using the exact same deck ruins that. Though limiting your playing to certain sets can help alleviate the problem of newer players and old and still retain that creativity.
As for the game adding barriers to prevent you from playing, that’s not entirely correct. Sure, you won’t be able to improve your deck until the timer resets and able to get another card, but that doesn’t prevent you from playing the game. Ultimately, what is the purpose of playing the game? To improve your deck with more cards or to actually play your deck against opponents? Enjoy the game for what it is and play to have fun. Otherwise, dig out your credit card and “win”.
Dissenting opinion – the 10 minutes of Star Trek fanwank that started the podcast today was almost unbearable. I wouldn’t mind a little bit of talk about Jeremy & son watching it, but please don’t let it turn into a total nerdfest.
In my opinion they will move in that direction, but can never go one hundred percent Nintendo.
The problem with “Walled Garden Stores” for modern open source, freeware, and small authors is that entering a Store requires purchasing a code signing certificate. This costs hundreds of dollars a year and it also requires giving out a bunch of personal information to the signing organization.
That may seem like a small portion of software that people use – but it’s an extremely vital part, and it represents the core philosophy personal computing. It has a tradition going back to the 70s, when some young fellow named Bill Gates published MicroSoft BASIC for this thing called an Altair.
Please fix your levels! Ever since you moved the volume on your podcast has been about significantly lower than previously, and much lower than other podcasts or recordings. I get blasted every time I’ve been listening and then either forget, or accidentally switch sources. Your mic levels have been inconsistent between the three, as well.
Sorry to just log a complaint, but I love Tested and Tested media.
i think i agree with your judgement. that they want to go there seems pretty obvious, but they also can’t really go all the way without severely hurting the usefulness of their product, for all the reasons you mentioned. (and also breaking compatibility with old software way worse than ever before)
i wonder what data they will be able to gather from their UWP-only edition, and what degree of walled-garden-ness they will decide to go, though.
ok here’s an idea. The Republicans are going to destroy net neutrality… so the various ISPs are going to start to provide certain benefits to various content creators and more importantly content distributors.
So imagine Microsoft does a deal with Com cast, so Com cast gives favor to Micro soft related traffic. So if you download a new game, and there is a terabyte of game data, it will be delivered at a hundred Mbps if you are going through Microsoft Store, or Xbox store, but it will be delivered at five Mbps if you are going through Steam.
Or… maybe Com cast can offer customers a special ‘Microsoft Bundle’ where you get “Microsoft Express pass” so that all your Microsoft devices get five hundred Mbps.
Now say Microsoft Store starts selling movies. You can get 4k HDR movies at full speed if you have the Microsoft Express pass, but if you are trying to watch Net flix on a chromebook you are ***** out of luck.
*shudder* this is the stuff of dystopian scifi ~5–10 years ago, and the uncomfortably-plausible kind of near-scifi of ~2 years ago.
and here’s where i’m relieved to neither be living in the US nor be using windows.
Regarding the uniform change in Star Trek: Next Generation… The U.S. Army changed uniforms a few times when I was in. Also, the multi-cam uniform and boots I wore in Afghanistan were different from the Army Combat Uniform I wore in garrison. I don’t think Star Trek needs to explain uniform changes, even if it happens within the same show.
Let’s not get too carried away. Hypothetical shady business deals between giant corporations is not nearly as Orwellian as the U.S. government actually working with leading tech companies to spy on U.S. citizens (something that’s been going on LONG before the current administration got into office). And that includes Apple as well as Windows (NSA Prism program). And it’s not like Apple, Google, Facebook, and the like aren’t cozy in bed with the Chinese government and their very stringent censorship criteria.
Let’s not pretend that any corporations are actually good guys. I wouldn’t trust Tim Cook/Bezos/Gates/Zuckerburg or any of them to watch my gold fish for 5 minutes.
And while I wouldn’t necessarily say the USA is the best place in the whole world to live, I can easily think of a hundred other places I’d rather not live. Easily. It would take me less than a minute to name them.
don’t worry, i wasn’t taking it as the de facto incoming state of fact. merely being dismayed at how playusible it sounds.
as for there being places one would rather not live: that’s not a particularly high bar. 😉 but for me, the US as a place to live isn’t even up to discussion. given a hypothetical job offer that would require me to relocate, the US being the US instantly voids that as a possibility as much as if it was russia. (that’s not a trump thing. it wasn’t before and only made the ever-so-slightest steps towards fulfilling minimum requirements under obama)