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98: Accidental Comics Podcast 🤓

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:08   From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode number 98.

00:00:12   Today's show is brought to you by TextExpander from Smile

00:00:16   and PingDum. My name is Myke Hurley, I am joined by the incomparable Mr. Jason Snell.

00:00:21   Hi Myke, how's it going? Very good, how are you? Good,

00:00:25   Good. Warmed up, ready to go. Ready for 98. Getting close. Getting close to 100 now.

00:00:30   - Gone. - Gone. That's, yep. Mm-hmm.

00:00:36   - Following up from last week, you found out a reason why your phone was pausing in the shower.

00:00:41   - Yeah, it's... The answer is, apparently, to a certain degree, that if you turn off

00:00:50   the Ahoy telephone feature in the iOS 10 beta, it stops a lot of the extraneous audio pauses.

00:00:56   So something weird is going on there. I heard from like five people who said that this was

00:01:01   a solution. I turned off Ahoy telephone and it solved it. I also heard from a few people who are

00:01:08   like irate, like, "Oh, this is outrageous. That's a key feature that you have to disconnect in order

00:01:12   to get this other thing to work." And it's like, "Yeah, it's a beta. That's how it works."

00:01:17   It sucks to be a beta, but that's the way it goes. Pick your poison. Would you like

00:01:24   your audio to play continuously, or would you like a Hoy telephone to work? If you want

00:01:28   both, don't use the beta. But anyway, I also heard from somebody who's on like a 5S who

00:01:35   said that this trick didn't work for him, so it may only be on certain hardware that

00:01:40   this solves it, and there may be a different bug. There's bugs! It's beta. There's bugs.

00:01:44   But anyway, if you are feeling the pain of having your audio pause randomly all the time,

00:01:52   turn off Ahoy!

00:01:53   Telephone in the iOS 10 beta and see what happens.

00:01:56   Was it triggering Siri?

00:02:01   It's possible.

00:02:02   I don't know.

00:02:03   I wonder if there's something going on there where, yeah, something in the sound subsystem

00:02:08   is it's hearing something and it's pausing, but then it's not activating Siri.

00:02:14   it's it's maybe it gets to a point where it thinks it might activate and then it

00:02:18   decides it isn't but it's too late it's already paused the audio but who knows

00:02:21   there may be a very specific if you know the audio subsystem of iOS you know

00:02:27   exactly where this is I'm sure that they're aware of it that hopefully it

00:02:33   will be fixed in the next beta.

00:02:35   Was I talking last week on this show?

00:02:38   Yeah I was about not upgrading to the beta because of the Canary?

00:02:43   Yeah, yeah, that was this show.

00:02:46   So I have had a bunch of people write in to tell me that Canary have updated their application

00:02:50   and it is now fixed, so it doesn't crash anymore on the iOS 10 beta.

00:02:56   But I am, and I've had a few people, especially that dastardly David Sparks, send me messages

00:03:03   telling me, "Oh, it's fine, you should update, you should, come over, the water's fine."

00:03:09   I am holding off and I'm quite proud of myself so far.

00:03:12   I have no intention of installing the iOS 10 beta on my phone right now.

00:03:18   I'm going to wait until the next beta at least and see the next developer beta and see kind

00:03:22   of what the state of affairs is.

00:03:24   But I really don't want to screw anything up.

00:03:28   And it really is the canary which is making me think like this.

00:03:31   The point where my phone is controlling security in my home and also going forward my lights

00:03:38   and stuff like that, I'm less inclined to put beta software on it, which is probably

00:03:43   why they'll never do a public beta for software in the Apple car. At the point where these

00:03:49   things start to make real effect for security purposes and just for your general living

00:03:54   arrangements, I feel like it's less than likely that you should be putting beta software

00:03:58   on them, and that's kind of how I'm feeling right now.

00:04:02   I think that's valid. I validate your opinion. It's a personal choice for everyone. It

00:04:07   really is like, if you're in this business, then you have some professional choices to

00:04:12   make too. But it has to do, yeah, everybody's got a different little constellation of iOS

00:04:19   devices and apps they rely on and ways they use it in their lives, and you make your decisions

00:04:24   based on that. And I think that's the right thing to do.

00:04:27   >> So I have my iPad here, my iPad Air 2, and it lets me send stickers to people. Right

00:04:32   now I'm good with that. And I'll see where the next betas go before I make my decision.

00:04:36   As of right now, nothing. You remember Frank from last week who found pepperoni and pineapple

00:04:40   pizza in a bar?

00:04:42   How could I forget, Frank?

00:04:44   He wrote in to let us know a couple of things. He had actually tried it before, so he was

00:04:48   already a fan of the pepperoni pineapple. And also, as I guess we both expected, and

00:04:54   I really applaud Frank for owning up to this, he was inebriated enough to take the left

00:05:00   behind pizza, and he says he has no regrets.

00:05:02   No, he ate a slice of bar pizza.

00:05:06   - Yup.

00:05:07   - To you, sir, I congratulate you for having no regrets.

00:05:10   That's what I say. - We salute you, Frank.

00:05:12   - But be careful, everyone.

00:05:13   Don't eat random food that you find in bars.

00:05:16   The Upgrade podcast does not endorse random bar food.

00:05:20   - Well, in bars, you know, there is,

00:05:22   if it's like on the bar, like, I mean,

00:05:24   there are bowls of nuts and things

00:05:25   that people eat on the bar, and pretzels

00:05:27   and things like that. - I also don't endorse

00:05:28   eating those, though. (laughs)

00:05:30   - Oh, okay, all right.

00:05:31   I just, I feel like it's a little bit different

00:05:33   than if you walked, you were in a restaurant

00:05:34   and you found they hadn't cleared the table yet and somebody left and there was some pizza

00:05:38   on it and you just picked it up and ate it. I would be a little more, I don't know why,

00:05:43   but I feel like that would be more of a social transgression. Like some places...

00:05:46   I'm pretty sure that's what Frank did though. I think that that pizza was just left from

00:05:50   a previous patron.

00:05:51   Yeah. I guess I'm just saying some places actually do put out like plates of food and

00:05:54   things, but in this case, that was certainly something that somebody ordered and paid for

00:05:57   and ate most of and could just couldn't, even though they loved it, couldn't eat the last

00:06:03   part of it. And anyway, cheers Frank.

00:06:06   I would struggle though if I saw slices of pepperoni, pineapple pizza, I've got to say.

00:06:14   You remember many, many moons ago we spoke about the fact that with the lightning to

00:06:19   ethernet adapter you could plug it into an iOS device and you could have an ethernet

00:06:24   connection. It would connect to the internet in some kind of mystical, magical way.

00:06:28   So this was when Apple introduced the Lightning to USB 3 adapter, their new adapter. It's

00:06:37   the one that's got a Lightning port on the female Lightning port on the side of the female

00:06:44   USB port, and instead of it just being a pass-through of Lightning to USB, and that's so that you

00:06:50   can power it. And at the point that you can power it, you can do a lot of things with

00:06:54   USB devices that require power. And Phil Schiller stood on stage and said, "This will be great

00:06:58   for podcasters, and this will be great for connecting your iPad Pro to Ethernet in your

00:07:04   office, your secure Ethernet network. And that was funny because Ethernet has never

00:07:08   been a supported officially thing. There's no UI for it or anything. But it does turn

00:07:15   out that, yeah, if you attach a USB Ethernet adapter to that adapter and turn off all your

00:07:20   Wi-Fi and everything, it works. It works at least if you're on a DHCP network where it's

00:07:26   sort of the standard, like, it'll sign you an IP address, just like if you're on a Wi-Fi

00:07:31   hotspot, it's the same approach, basically, like, here's your IP address and go for it.

00:07:36   But it was all just sort of like, in fact, the rumor is that somebody who worked at Apple

00:07:42   said that, oh, it was ATP Tipster, I think, said that after Steve Jobs famously had that

00:07:49   failure at WWDC where he told everybody to turn off their Wi-Fi hotspots because the

00:07:54   demo was failing, they couldn't get out to the internet, that apparently like that day

00:07:58   engineering was told, "Put Ethernet support in iOS." That's an order. So maybe that's

00:08:05   where it came from. But there was no UI for it. It was all secret.

00:08:07   But now, when you plug it in, some random entry shows up in the settings app, which

00:08:13   is empty right now.

00:08:14   Yeah. Yeah. In iOS 10 Beta, if you plug in that Ethernet adapter, what you get is a new

00:08:21   setting like right under the wifi setting item in the settings app that is an ethernet

00:08:26   item and uh and then you tap on it and guess what you see nothing coming soon there's nothing

00:08:36   i can't actually decide whether that is a uh a mistake and it's just supposed to remain

00:08:41   invisible and that that's been there but they've been suppressing it like no no no don't even

00:08:45   show it it'll be there but nobody wants to see it don't even show it or if there's going

00:08:50   to be something there, which I think they should do because one of the problems with

00:08:53   the Ethernet support in iOS, especially when it's unofficial and not mentioned in a keynote

00:08:59   on stage by Phil Schiller, was the fact that not every Ethernet network has the generic

00:09:06   settings. Sometimes you have to put specific Ethernet settings in, which is why we have

00:09:12   a network control panel on the Mac that you can go in and you can set up your Ethernet

00:09:17   settings to be what they need to be. So it's an edge case, but I hope that they do it,

00:09:22   and I actually kind of hope that they do some other esoteric network stuff while they're

00:09:28   at it, like maybe even the sequence of what network interfaces to use, what order. With

00:09:34   the iPad Pro, the idea is this is a computer, you're going to do your work on it, you might

00:09:39   plug it in at your desk, well if you're going to do that, then maybe you should have those

00:09:43   features available. So maybe we'll see that.

00:09:45   And I wanted to do a little bit of follow up on Spotify.

00:09:48   I was just thinking today whilst doing the washing up,

00:09:52   we haven't heard of anything about the Apple Spotify problem, right?

00:09:56   Like we spoke about it a few weeks ago that they were kind of loggerheads

00:10:00   and Apple was holding up an update and Spotify were claiming foul play.

00:10:04   And I thought I would go and check the app store.

00:10:07   And there hasn't been an update to the Spotify app since the end of May.

00:10:12   So it looks like that that update is still being held, but I haven't heard, I don't know

00:10:16   if you have any further updates to this specific situation.

00:10:22   It seems like it's not been resolved yet between Apple and Spotify.

00:10:25   It seems like it's still there.

00:10:26   There's been some back and forth in the press.

00:10:30   Apple has definitely said, you know, "Look, you're breaking the rules and we will expedite

00:10:35   your approval if you stop breaking the rules, but we're not going to let you break the rules."

00:10:41   And I think that's where it is right now.

00:10:43   But whilst doing some searches today to tell you if there have been any updates that I've

00:10:47   missed, I found some articles in the last couple of days that apparently Apple has made

00:10:52   some proposals to the Copyright Royalty Board about how streaming royalties should be paid.

00:10:58   So right now this board called the CRB, the Copyright Royalty Board, is working out a

00:11:03   new kind of framework model for how royalties should be paid for streaming.

00:11:09   And lots of companies have made proposals. Spotify has made a proposal, Pandora's made

00:11:14   a proposal, a bunch of others, like about what they believe the royalty should look

00:11:18   like. But Apple's proposed calculation of the statutory royalty rate would hurt services

00:11:24   that have free plans. And some are claiming that this type of thing is a shot at Spotify.

00:11:29   Yeah, well, I think, I think Apple is not interested in protecting the free streaming

00:11:36   business model, right? Just not. And I think there's a, I think if you're a company like

00:11:43   Apple and honestly, I think the music industry doesn't love it either. This idea that there's

00:11:48   this free tier and, uh, and they pay, right. But, uh, the more you charge, the harder it

00:11:56   is to get by on the free plan. And so yeah, I'm not surprised at all that Apple is trying

00:12:01   to make it harder for competitors who offer a free tier to keep offering it. But again,

00:12:10   I mean, Apple, of course, Apple should propose things in its self-interest. Now that doesn't

00:12:15   mean that Apple gets to choose.

00:12:16   Yeah, every company that's making a suggestion here, every company that is going to this

00:12:22   royalty board with their suggestions, their proposals, are doing the thing that makes

00:12:27   the most sense for them.

00:12:29   I'm sure that Spotify are coming to it and saying like, "Oh, this is our proposal and

00:12:34   that proposal is probably really good for people that are doing free tiers."

00:12:43   So I'm sure that their royalty things are, "Yeah, we'll pay royalties when people pay,

00:12:46   when they're free, I don't think we should have to pay."

00:12:51   And Apple's probably coming in and being like, "Everyone deserves to be paid, free or not.

00:12:55   Ha ha ha ha."

00:12:56   And this is just normal.

00:12:57   This is how business is done.

00:12:59   But this was the only thing that I found as an update to this situation.

00:13:03   And this could end up playing out quite interestingly.

00:13:06   If this royalty board does come out and say, "Everybody deserves to be paid, free or not,"

00:13:11   that is going to hurt companies like Spotify because where's the money going to come from?

00:13:16   So, that's something to keep an eye on.

00:13:18   - The money comes from a calculation about how many free you convert to paid and whether

00:13:23   it's worth it to do that, right?

00:13:24   But the more you are paying for the streams and the plays, the harder that calculation

00:13:32   is to maintain because your customer acquisition costs, as they would call it, rocket up.

00:13:38   And that's bad.

00:13:41   Whereas, you know, Apple, although Apple, you know, Apple has a free tier too, but the

00:13:46   way they structure it is you get a 90-day trial and then you have to pay or lose it.

00:13:54   And Spotify, you can stay on the free tier forever. And I think their goal is to convert

00:13:59   those people over time. My daughter loves Spotify, although she's been listening to

00:14:03   Apple Music more lately. I reminded her that we had Apple Music on family and that she

00:14:10   got all of that stuff and she's been doing that more. But she still likes Spotify and

00:14:15   I think Spotify's game plan there is that become, you know, make my daughter a loyal

00:14:21   Spotify user and that when she gets to college she'll probably have, I assume, a lot of Spotify

00:14:28   probably has this deal like the, all students at this college have access to a cheap or

00:14:33   free Spotify premium plan. They do a lot of that kind of college marketing where there's

00:14:38   a special deal and then you get out of college and you own that person, they will pay you

00:14:43   $10 a month for their entire life. I think that's basically their game plan, but you

00:14:49   look at the cost.

00:14:50   It's a great game plan. Make it indispensable.

00:14:53   Right, but if in eight or nine years of free listening or subsidized listening before you

00:15:00   get to the point where they start paying you, how long does it take to get your money back

00:15:05   and are you still in business at that point? So I think that's the calculation you have

00:15:08   to make. And any of those, it's always a gamble that you take. And that's the difference between

00:15:13   having a free tier that's available forever versus a with, you know, some revenue in it

00:15:19   or whether you just do what Apple does and say, "We're closing the gate after 90 days."

00:15:23   All right. So that's it for follow-up this week. Should we take a break?

00:15:26   Good idea.

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00:17:35   Yesterday was World Emoji Day, July the 17th.

00:17:40   Breaking news, breaking news, World Emoji Day yesterday.

00:17:43   So World Emoji Day, it was created by our friend, friend of the show, Jeremy Burge at

00:17:48   Emoji PD.

00:17:49   Yep. Of course it was. I was thinking to myself the other day, I was

00:17:54   like, why, why is July 17th world emoji day? I was thinking to myself, I was like, Oh,

00:17:58   I wonder. So I opened the emoji palette and I went to the calendar emoji and on iOS, the

00:18:05   calendar emoji is the 17th of July. You know, the little, uh, the little calendar that's

00:18:13   in the emoji. It's July 17th. That's the date on the emoji. So that's the date picked for

00:18:17   World Emoji Day. Interesting. Smart, right? I was like, "Why did he pick that random day?"

00:18:23   That's why, because the emoji is that date. Huh. That's weird. And why is it that date? Is that

00:18:31   because of iCal being introduced? Probably. A million years ago? It's an old Apple thing.

00:18:36   Didn't it always say July 17th, like the old iCal logo? It's the day that iCal for the Mac was

00:18:45   announced at Macworld Expo in 2002.

00:18:48   There you go. So I'm actually going to put a link to a Quora article.

00:18:52   And Twitter previously showed July 15th, which was Twitter's launch date,

00:18:57   but then changed it to March 21st. But that's why

00:19:00   that's why it's July 17th. There you go, perfect.

00:19:03   So there you go. And there you know why. So it was yesterday

00:19:07   and I was sent some some schwag

00:19:11   by Jeremy. He sent me a t-shirt. Did you see my picture of me with my

00:19:14   my t-shirt and I was looking at emojis that were made of me. Did you see that picture,

00:19:19   Jason?

00:19:20   I did see that picture.

00:19:21   I'm going to put that in the show notes in case people didn't see it. So I thought, in

00:19:25   the spirit of World Emoji Day, that today we could spend some time talking about emoji.

00:19:32   What do you think?

00:19:34   Let's do it. I'm always up to talk about emoji.

00:19:36   So how often do you actually use emoji? Like, what do you use it for and how frequently?

00:19:40   I use it all the time. I mean, this is the funny thing. People roll their eyes and like,

00:19:44   emoji is stupid. But it's like, you know, it's, we all communicate with text. I've

00:19:48   given this rant before, I think in person, if not on a podcast, we communicate on the

00:19:52   internet in text and text is really bad at expressing things that we express as human

00:19:58   beings in interpersonal conversations, one-on-one with people in groups. We have facial expressions

00:20:05   and hand gestures and body language in general and tone of voice. And on the internet, it's

00:20:12   text. It's just text on Twitter and slack wherever it's text text. You lose a lot. And

00:20:19   that's why people invented emoticons right where they're using punctuation to create

00:20:23   faces and stuff and and why we do markup or or markdown if you will the idea that you

00:20:31   can separate things with asterisks or something to show that there's you're supposed to emphasize

00:20:36   those or all caps or whatever. These are all ways to do that. An emoji is a great fit because

00:20:43   it gives you a lexicon that is much larger than you can get with something like--because

00:20:49   the emoticons got really complicated and I'd be like, "Oh, I don't even know how to make

00:20:52   that." When I first saw the flipping table guy, I was like, "I don't even know what that

00:20:58   is." Right? Because it was too--I love the flipping table guy, but the flipping table

00:21:03   guy was, I feel like, was the last gasp of the emoticon, where like, "We can use text

00:21:08   to make pictures!" It's like, yeah! It's getting really complicated. You're using, like, non-Roman

00:21:13   characters to make this thing that's kind of hard to read about what it is. And then

00:21:18   there's emoji, which are these cute little cartoon items, and you can string them together,

00:21:23   and you can tack them on the end of your phrases, and in Slack you can comment on somebody's

00:21:28   with a feeling. I think they're so powerful. And so I use them all the time. I use them

00:21:36   on Twitter. I use them in Slack. And it's for that reason that it gets across, or at

00:21:43   least it gives you the ability to attempt to get across a little bit more about feelings

00:21:50   that you wouldn't put in words because you probably wouldn't say, "I love that thing

00:21:56   you just wrote, right? We probably wouldn't say that, but you throw out a little heart,

00:22:01   and it means that, but you didn't have to say it.

00:22:04   Yeah, I love emoji. I mean, I was obviously an emoticon person. I used all the MSN emoticons,

00:22:13   which were kind of halfway between emoticons and emojis, right? They were little characters,

00:22:18   but they were kind of triggered by you typing in text. You know, you type in the cocoon

00:22:22   on a bracket and you'd get a little smiley face that would be rendered as a little yellow

00:22:27   smiley face.

00:22:28   That's when I started, basically it was on my radar, was that I was typing old school

00:22:33   emoticons and they were being turned into emoji, basically.

00:22:36   Yeah.

00:22:37   Or what looks a lot like emoji.

00:22:39   Yeah, exactly.

00:22:40   And I came to emoji on the iPhone when you had to do that weird hacky thing to try and

00:22:45   get a Japanese keyboard to install the emoji.

00:22:47   Do you remember that?

00:22:48   That was the way you originally had to get it.

00:22:51   So I've been using them for a long time and I use them constantly because they are such

00:22:56   a fantastic form of expression for me.

00:23:00   I think you're able to say so much.

00:23:03   So much of my conversation online is very short snippets of information, very short

00:23:08   snippets of text and quite frankly a lot of the time an emoji will do the job.

00:23:13   Like a little thumbs up emoji is perfect.

00:23:15   I send little heart emojis to people when they say nice things.

00:23:19   I send little mic face, nerd face emojis, my own little emoji that I have,

00:23:23   or that I have kind of commandeered because it looks just like me.

00:23:27   I love all of that stuff and I love doing it.

00:23:30   And I send messages, iMessage, I send emojis all day,

00:23:34   and Twitter, I send emoji all day.

00:23:36   Also, custom Slack emoji is amazing.

00:23:40   So this is where you kind of start branching out a little bit.

00:23:43   And the Slacks that I'm involved in, the custom emoji in Slack

00:23:47   really make it a lot of fun.

00:23:48   There's great ones in the incomparable slack and the relay slack and also in

00:23:52   The slack for my ring post. It's a ring post of the podcast. I'm doing an incomparable now about wrestling. We have a

00:23:59   Public slack and we're adding lots of really great emoji to that as well. And I think that's so much fun all of that stuff

00:24:07   and I know that the kind of the custom emoji stuff is kind of co-opting a little bit between

00:24:13   little just stickers and emoji and emoticons, but it all kind of rolls together into just a great way to

00:24:21   visually express yourself in very simple ways and a lot of the time add in the

00:24:27   Personality and character that would be in your voice if somebody could hear you. Yeah the

00:24:32   Slack's decision to not only embrace emoji with

00:24:39   Slack has done a lot to do emoji right. I wrote a piece on Macworld about this a while

00:24:43   ago. The fact that you can type a colon and then begin to type the name of an emoji and

00:24:48   it autofills it in, so great. Such a great feature. I use that all the time. And then

00:24:55   the ability to reply to comments, just like tag emoji on things people say is so great.

00:25:03   But the custom emoji thing, it's that, you know, so Jeremy, who we mentioned earlier,

00:25:08   is on the... He does Emojipedia and he's on the Unicode subcommittee for emoji. You know,

00:25:14   they're involved with deciding what the official emoji are. And that's why they're adding,

00:25:19   you know, a dozen a year or whatever at this point. They've added a bunch, but now they're

00:25:23   sort of like, kind of... It's like going into the Hall of Fame, of the Baseball Hall of

00:25:27   Fame or any Sports Hall of Fame. There's a process now. Are you emoji worthy? But it's

00:25:34   slow moving and they need to appeal to everyone. And one of the brilliant things that Slack

00:25:40   did is create this custom emoji feature. And it influences the tone and personality of

00:25:47   the Slack you're in, and it's great. In fact, I have to admit, I find myself missing some

00:25:54   of those custom emoji in the real world, or not the real world, but the outside of Slack

00:25:58   world because I have on more than one occasion on Twitter replied to somebody who was on

00:26:04   the incomparable Slack with colon Skeletor colon because I love the Skeletor emoji which

00:26:12   is like a picture of Skeletor or a hooded skeleton that I found on the internet and

00:26:16   made an emoji out of and then we made a t-shirt out of it eventually. I love it and it's just

00:26:22   it's not anything that's going to be a real emoji but it doesn't matter because it's fun

00:26:25   and it has some meaning. It has some specific meaning in the incomparable slack. So, you

00:26:30   know, it's great. All of it's great.

00:26:33   So, I was also wondering if you had any thoughts on emoji versus stickers?

00:26:41   Because this is an interesting thing, right? Because these days, there are lots of stickers

00:26:47   that are claiming to be emoji, you know, like the celebrity ones, for example, like Kim

00:26:54   Moji.

00:26:55   just using where was I what app was I using was a Twitter it might have been

00:27:00   on Twitter where where I I was trying to put in an emoji and instead I got a a

00:27:07   bunch of stickers that looked like emoji I was like no no no no no no no no no

00:27:11   that's not what I want

00:27:13   I don't know the stickers stickers feel like lock into me that's the problem I

00:27:17   have with them is emoji feels like this is a common picture language that we can

00:27:22   share across platforms and across services, and the stickers feel like lock-in, feel like,

00:27:28   "Oh, only on our special service do you get that." Then again, I just praised the custom

00:27:33   emoji in Slack, so maybe it's fine. But it's not in my lexicon, and I know people love

00:27:40   using stickers, so it's gonna take some getting used to. And I could see it being something

00:27:44   that people use. The problem with it is that you end up with that thing where you wanna

00:27:49   react with that. You've mapped an emotion to that sticker and then you're somewhere

00:27:53   else and you can't express it because it was a sticker on one service. And I don't like

00:27:58   that part of it.

00:28:00   The lines are starting to blur. Like you look at Twitter, they just turned their emoji set

00:28:05   into stickers. So the image that I put up and it's in the show notes of me celebrating

00:28:10   World Emoji Day is using their emoji sticker functionality. And so it's getting a bit weird

00:28:16   and it's still gonna start to get weirder, right, with iOS 10 messaging apps because

00:28:19   they're stickers but everyone's gonna call them emoji, right? They're gonna be

00:28:23   sold as emoji packs, not sticker packs, because that's the the naming, that's the

00:28:28   kind of the common name that we give to these things now. I'm not sure the

00:28:33   Unicode subcommittee on emoji will approve of that. Oh, I'm sure they won't,

00:28:37   but it's it's too late, right? The the horse is bolted. Emoji is just the name

00:28:44   for now a little picture which illustrates something, the same as Emoticon was the name

00:28:50   for so long. I think emoji is just that. What do you think about the idea of platform vendors

00:28:56   using emoji as an upgrade tool? I think Apple's starting to embrace that a little bit, right?

00:29:02   Yeah, certainly.

00:29:03   You kind of get your new emoji ready and it's a great way to get people to update.

00:29:07   New emoji and also Apple now is going to have a reason to update in iOS 10 with that emoji

00:29:12   auto suggest feature.

00:29:14   which is awesome.

00:29:15   - It is, I am still frustrated that Apple

00:29:18   isn't letting you search for a specific emoji.

00:29:22   Like if you want the German flag,

00:29:28   you can't like search for it.

00:29:30   You have to look through a list of flags

00:29:31   that are sorted in a very specific way

00:29:34   and hope that you can choose the flag of Germany

00:29:37   and not of Belgium.

00:29:38   And that's, it needs to be better.

00:29:41   like Slack. Like Slack, I can do colon flag dash D-E or G-B or whatever I want, and I

00:29:47   can get the flag that I want. And with the auto-suggest emoji thing, that's cool, but

00:29:53   I don't think the only way you should be able to get an emoji is by remembering or guessing

00:29:58   what word will trigger the auto-suggest of the emoji you want. But still, so I think

00:30:05   there's more work for Apple to do on that front, but that is in addition to supporting

00:30:08   a bunch of new emoji, which they will almost certainly do in iOS 10, and if not, it'll

00:30:13   be in, I think somewhere in there now, Jeremy Berg wrote a blog post about this on Emojipedia.

00:30:19   They will also have that auto fill thing, which is almost like, you know, encouragement

00:30:25   to use more emoji, but it also, I think, makes people who might not think in terms of emoji

00:30:31   do better with emoji. I think you can overdo it, like if anybody's seen Carrie Fisher's

00:30:35   Twitter feed. If you use emoji to communicate, you're just making a rebus. You're making

00:30:41   a puzzle for people. You're not helping your communication. You're hurting it. So I think

00:30:47   you can overdo it. And I think that Apple's sort of emoji replacement thing could lead

00:30:50   to that, where things seem kind of baffling and harder to understand. I always like to

00:30:55   use emoji as like seasoning in the message. Like, you know, here's a statement and now

00:31:00   I'm conveying a feeling, rather than it being like I'm literally going to replace every

00:31:05   other word with an emoji representation. I don't, I don't, I'm not a fan of that.

00:31:10   So you're saying about searching for emoji. I want to recommend a tool for me on iOS that

00:31:16   I use. I'm still using Gboard, the Google keyboard for iOS.

00:31:20   Yeah. Um, I've been using it for like two months now as my only keyboard. I'm very happy

00:31:25   with it actually. Uh, I find the autocomplete works better for me. Um, it does a better

00:31:30   job of splitting up words when I accidentally hit N instead of space, which is one of my

00:31:35   my biggest frustrations in life. Google keyboard does a better job of that. It also seems to

00:31:40   be doing a better job of remembering words that I frequently say in people's names and

00:31:45   stuff. And I assume that it's pulling some of that information from my Google account

00:31:49   somewhere maybe, I don't know. Or it's just doing a better job of just remembering. I'm

00:31:53   very happy with the keyboard. I like that I can do the one hand swipe typing, which

00:31:59   I do quite a lot with my big phone. So I'm happy about that. I like that all that's built

00:32:03   in but what it has a couple of great emoji features so you can it does the

00:32:08   replacements so as you're typing if you type the word like I don't know like sad

00:32:12   or something it will in the little suggestions bar it has the emoji there

00:32:17   so you can hit it and something then what you end up doing is you learn the

00:32:21   words right so I know some of the words that will trigger those emojis so I just

00:32:26   type those words in and it'll trigger them but also you when you hit the emoji

00:32:30   bar. It's a swipeable thing like Apple's but it also has a search box so you can search

00:32:36   and it does a couple of different ways of searching this. I actually tested this with

00:32:40   Jeremy. Jeremy should probably be on this episode but we met for coffee recently and

00:32:46   I was showing him Gboard and I was doing some searches and he was asking me to search for

00:32:50   specific words to see if it was pulling from the actual Unicode like standardised wording

00:32:58   and naming for an emoji which it was but then Google are obviously putting their own words

00:33:02   on those emojis as well so they can be searched for. So for example if you type the word butt

00:33:10   a peach comes up. Oh my. Now Google's doing that all by themselves. I love that. I think

00:33:17   that's fantastic. I'm happy that they do that. But there you go that happens. The peach pops

00:33:23   up. I was very pleased to find that out. That made me smile a lot. There's some

00:33:28   some good stuff. Jason jumped in there for the title suggestion in the chatroom, making

00:33:36   everybody upset.

00:33:37   Well, I was able to do that because I downloaded Rocket for OS X, which I didn't even know

00:33:41   existed in Joe Steele, just linked to in the chatroom, which is an app that lets you have

00:33:45   the colon shortcuts anywhere on the Mac instead of just in Slack, and that's a dangerous,

00:33:50   dangerous thing.

00:33:51   So that's another tool that I was going to suggest. I don't have this one installed.

00:33:56   I don't really understand how this works and I'm not sure if it's like looking at keystrokes.

00:34:01   I don't really know how it's doing this.

00:34:03   So I haven't looked into it enough to download it yet, but I've seen a lot of people talk

00:34:08   about this and it looks pretty cool.

00:34:10   Another one I just saw today, Emojipedia for OS X, is like an add-on for the dictionary.

00:34:17   So you can select an emoji and do the dictionary definition and it will give you the name of

00:34:24   the emoji, tell you what the emoji is, and sometimes that is needed.

00:34:28   Ah, interesting.

00:34:30   So there's a few things in there.

00:34:32   The emoji dictionary, there's a Medium blog post that I'll put in that explains how it

00:34:35   works and then tells you how you can go and get it from GitHub.

00:34:38   So there are a few emoji tools for you if you're looking for some tools for emoji.

00:34:42   And I also want to give a bit of breaking news.

00:34:45   That's productivity right there, folks.

00:34:47   Productivity tools.

00:34:48   Exactly.

00:34:49   As part of World Emoji Day, there was an award for the best new emoji of 2016, and the eye

00:34:53   eye roll emoji has won that one. So what do you think of that, Jason, the eye roll emoji?

00:34:59   Do you think that it's the best new emoji? It's beaten out the upside down smiley face,

00:35:03   for example?

00:35:04   Well, the upside down smiley face is pretty good.

00:35:07   I thought that would have won, to be honest, because that is a...

00:35:09   Oh, that's because we know Joe Steele. Joe Steele's favorite emoji is the upside down

00:35:13   smiley face. But the eye rolling is a-- I use that-- I have to admit, I have to restrain

00:35:19   myself sometimes from replying to tweets with just the eye roll emoji. Because that's mean,

00:35:26   but also true.

00:35:27   So I'll finish this off with asking you, Jason, what is or what are your favorite emoji?

00:35:33   Oh, um... blue heart.

00:35:36   Blue heart?

00:35:37   As I've established elsewhere, I felt like the red heart was a little too forward.

00:35:41   Yeah, I agree. I used to use the pink heart with the sparklies for the same reason. Go

00:35:46   as far as you can in that you know you got to co-opt a heart of your own. Yeah exactly right.

00:35:53   The I don't know Skeletor emoji on slack is pretty great yeah but nobody else gets to

00:36:01   gets to use that. I like the rainbow sometimes for like happiness like I think that's a fun one.

00:36:12   I like the, you know, I like the winky guy and the smiley guy, the faces.

00:36:17   Thumbs up is a good, quick thumbs up thing.

00:36:22   That was the first emoji autocorrect I created.

00:36:25   Just I typed thumbs up and a thumb appears. It's great.

00:36:28   Nice.

00:36:28   I think those are mine. What are yours?

00:36:30   Mine, I have two key favorites.

00:36:32   I like the heart inside of the box.

00:36:34   In Slack, it's called heart decorations.

00:36:36   There's a pink box of a heart inside of it.

00:36:38   Just because it doesn't look like any of the other hearts.

00:36:40   and a lot of people don't even really know about this one. I don't ever see anybody use

00:36:44   it, so I use it. And also the nerd face because it looks just like me.

00:36:49   That's you. Yeah.

00:36:50   It looks just like me and it makes me very happy.

00:36:54   So that's emoji, everyone.

00:36:56   Yeah.

00:36:57   Another piece of breaking news for the show. We're all about breaking news today.

00:37:00   Oh good.

00:37:01   This is not emoji related.

00:37:02   Oh.

00:37:03   iOS 10 Beta 3 just came out.

00:37:05   Hey, look at that. Well, we'll be able to see if there are any Ethernet settings then.

00:37:09   I want to thank Smile for also sponsoring this week's episode and let me talk to you

00:37:13   about TextExpander today.

00:37:15   And it's funny actually to mention TextExpander because we were just talking about emoji and

00:37:21   I have set up a couple of TextExpander shortcuts for emoji.

00:37:24   NNE will bring up the nerd emoji for me and HHE will bring up the heart emoji.

00:37:30   So they're there if I want them so I can have my favorite emoji right at hand with TextExpander

00:37:36   because with TextExpander you never have to type that same email address, chunk of code,

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00:37:54   thing. Another one that I have used in the past week, Jason, if I type in Pokemon, it

00:37:58   puts the little accented E in for me as well. This is the beauty of a life with TextExpander.

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00:38:18   You can have a big couple of paragraph emails that you send to people more than once and

00:38:22   all you need to do is change a name, maybe one date or something in their email.

00:38:26   You can fill out all the big text in there, just specify those two areas and you can very

00:38:30   easily change those two little pieces of information.

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00:38:38   And now you can share groups of snippets with others, expand your common knowledge

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00:39:15   Thank you so much to TextExpander from Smile for their support of this show and Relay FM.

00:39:22   So Mr. Jason Snell, this has been in our top-up list for a long time and Comic-Con is just

00:39:28   around the corner, right?

00:39:30   This is Comic-Con week, in fact, so it's perfect.

00:39:32   It's perfectly timed, even though it was unintentional, because it's also, you know, it's, uh, there's

00:39:38   a lot of stuff happening in the background, but it's a little bit slower in terms of news

00:39:41   and things like that, which we usually like to talk about.

00:39:45   And yeah, it's Comic-Con time, so why not?

00:39:47   Let's talk about comics.

00:39:49   So I have been in and out of comics over the years, and I'm feeling like a draw's in.

00:39:57   I have these lovely devices that will very nicely let me read my comics.

00:40:02   Right, I'm going to assume.

00:40:03   I'll ask you which devices you use in a little bit.

00:40:06   And there are a couple that I'm interested in and I want to get your opinions on them.

00:40:09   I always love Spider-Man and I would maybe like to read a couple of Spider-Man comics

00:40:13   again.

00:40:14   And also I'm interested in the upcoming Iron Man reboot which features a female 15 year

00:40:21   old black teenager instead of Tony Stark as Iron Man.

00:40:25   What is going on here?

00:40:26   know, by the way? What is this change all about?

00:40:29   Well, so Marvel has been experimenting in the last few years with this, the idea of

00:40:36   taking their hero—I mean, this has happened for a while, but they're doing it with some

00:40:41   new characters now, where what if we took new characters and put them in the hero name,

00:40:49   basically, an outfit in power? So the idea there is—they did this a while ago with

00:40:54   Tony Stark actually where he was drunk. And so, Rhodey, his buddy, became Iron Man. And

00:41:01   so, but they've done that lately. There's a, they introduced Miles Morales as the new

00:41:09   Spider-Man. They had a mysterious woman who has now been revealed. But anyway, as she

00:41:15   picks up the hammer of Thor and becomes Thor. And they have done the Falcon became Captain

00:41:21   America. And I think, you know, some of this is, you'll find one of the things they're

00:41:26   doing and they're doing this very specifically is taking a lot of the characters that have

00:41:31   only been inhabited or largely been inhabited by white men and putting people who are different

00:41:38   races and putting women in some of those slots. And I think, you know, it's comics and it's

00:41:44   intellectual property with a market value. So the characters you know are always gonna

00:41:50   to come back in some form because there's too much money for them not to, but I feel

00:41:56   like they want to use the comics to play with alternate versions or additional versions

00:42:02   of those characters to tell other stories. How many, you know, how many stories? There

00:42:06   are new stories to tell with every character, but there are probably more new stories to

00:42:10   tell if you can say, "Well, what if there was this variation? What if a 15-year-old

00:42:16   black teenager became Iron Man because she's an MIT genius like Tony Stark and she's his

00:42:22   biggest fan and then she invents her own armor and, you know, what would the dynamic would

00:42:27   -- what would that be like? In fact, it's a lot like the dynamic that they have with

00:42:32   Spider-Man now where due to many comic book continuity shenanigans, Miles Morales and

00:42:39   Peter Parker are now in the same universe, which they weren't before. But it's led to

00:42:44   this interesting case where there are two Spider-Men and the older Spider-Man, Peter

00:42:48   Parker has to, you know, who for so much history has always been the kid of superheroes. He's

00:42:55   now like a mentor to an actual like 17, 16-year-old kid. And that's a fun new set of stories to

00:43:03   tell. So Marvel's just doing a lot of experimentation where they're bringing in new characters and

00:43:09   putting them in some of their old, you know, old clothing, old intellectual property, and

00:43:16   trying to tell some new stories. And the new Iron Man story, I believe, is by Brian Michael

00:43:21   Bendis, who also was the guy who created Miles Morales, who is the new additional Spider-Man

00:43:27   now, the ultimate Spider-Man, as they called him. Does that make sense?

00:43:31   - Yeah, kind of. I mean, I like that... - I mean, it's comics. It doesn't make sense,

00:43:35   but still. - Yeah, it can only make as much sense as the

00:43:37   comic can make which isn't always a lot of sense. I mean I get why Marvel does this you

00:43:41   know putting new characters into the old suits is a really kind of good way to get a bit

00:43:49   of marketing push behind you but what I do like is they could put anyone into these but

00:43:53   they choose to put different people right they choose to put women and people of different

00:43:58   races and people of different backgrounds into these suits when really they could just

00:44:02   put another white guy in and it would still push sales right or it still push PR.

00:44:07   Maybe. Because they've changed it. I mean you change up the character and it's like

00:44:10   "ooh they've changed the character" or "whenever they kill a character." I'm saying

00:44:14   it's like I like that they do push the envelope a little bit and trying to make

00:44:19   change to these things you know. Also I think I and this is an interesting trend

00:44:25   I think comics has realized now that there is a there is a market of women

00:44:32   read comics, that there have always been women who read comics, but I think there are more

00:44:37   now and they're more visible and that there's some realization that I think the comics publishers,

00:44:45   part of what they're doing is saying, "We want to reach a new generation of people and

00:44:49   the new generation of readers, not the one that's people my age and just getting older

00:44:55   every year," right? Because that's what happens and if your audience gets older every year,

00:44:59   a sign that you're not picking up new younger readers or viewers or whatever. I think they

00:45:06   say that that audience is more diverse and wants to see the reality of the world reflected

00:45:12   in what the comic stories are being told. And so you're seeing a lot more of that. And

00:45:17   is that because Marvel Comics is making a political statement? I think I would go with

00:45:23   the fact that it's also about money and about serving new audiences who want to see these

00:45:30   characters reflect the world a little bit more than they do now. And they're creating

00:45:34   new intellectual property. The fact is people are agitating and have been agitating for

00:45:37   like a Spider-Man movie with Miles Morales in it. And I think in the long run that that

00:45:41   is what's going to happen. The comics publishers are owned by, the two mainstream comics publishers

00:45:49   are owned by movie studios, essentially. And so, a lot of--they want the comics publishers

00:45:54   to make money, but really what they want is the comics publishers to incubate new characters

00:45:59   and stories that they can then use in movies. And so I think part of what's going on with

00:46:06   Marvel is that they're kind of investing for the next wave of Marvel movies five years

00:46:10   from now, ten years from now, and be able to use these characters in situations that

00:46:14   have become more familiar. Because they're dealing with the legacy of so many classic

00:46:19   comic book superheroes are just white guys and occasionally women. The Falcon famously

00:46:27   was added as the first black superhero in the 70s. And the Black Panther, and there's

00:46:31   a movie coming out with Black Panther who appeared in the Civil War movie. It's a business

00:46:39   and I think they're trying to create some new raw material that they can use on screen

00:46:45   as well. I think that's happening too.

00:46:49   So what apps should I be using if I want to read comics on my devices?

00:47:02   Well I think Comixology is still the best app for reading comics. Period. It's a very

00:47:08   good app. Unfortunately, on iOS, it's a lot less good than it used to be and a lot less

00:47:13   good than it is on Android because they had to pull out the in-app purchase. They didn't

00:47:20   have to. They pulled out the in-app purchase because Comixology was bought by Amazon, and

00:47:24   Amazon's policy is they're not sharing 30% of their sales with Apple. So like with Kindle

00:47:30   Books, you have to buy Comixology in a web browser. You have to buy your comics in a

00:47:34   web browser and then they appear in your in your app. Although I would say if you are

00:47:40   only using Marvel only reading Marvel or DC Comics the Marvel app the regular Marvel comics

00:47:48   app and the regular DC Comics app are Comixology. It's called the white label which basically

00:47:54   means it's the comic Comixology app relabeled to look like a Marvel and DC app but they

00:47:59   behave the same way and they actually use the same backend and since those are from

00:48:06   publishers you can still buy in those because the publisher is happy to give 30% to Apple

00:48:11   or at least finds that acceptable because the publishers always have a middleman between

00:48:15   them and the customer. They don't sell direct really, but it didn't work for Comixology

00:48:20   because they're a reseller so they're already the middleman and then Apple also wants to

00:48:24   be the middleman and that becomes a problem. Middleman also, a good superhero name. So

00:48:31   if you only read Marvel or DC you can just use the Marvel or DC app and buy your comics

00:48:35   that way and you're basically getting the Comixology reader and in fact your purchases

00:48:38   will show up in Comixology too. So that's a tip if you want to buy comics from Marvel

00:48:45   or DC you can use the white label version of Comixology that they use to sell comics.

00:48:50   peculiar. Yeah, it is interesting. And then I also use the Marvel Unlimited app, which

00:48:56   is great. It's a great service. It's a good value. The app is still not great, but is

00:49:06   getting better all the time, I guess I would say. And the service, because there you pay

00:49:11   a monthly or annual fee, pay the annual fee. It's like $60, $70, and you will read $60

00:49:19   worth of comics in a couple of days using Marvel Unlimited. It's a pretty great deal.

00:49:25   So how does the service work? So when you subscribe, you basically, it's like Netflix,

00:49:30   but only for Marvel Comics. They have a huge library of old Marvel Comics going up to about

00:49:36   six months ago. They trail it by about six months because they want the people who want

00:49:40   to buy today's comics to pay them $3 or $4 for a comic. But after about six months, they

00:49:47   show up on Marvel Unlimited and there's a huge back catalog. And so the story I always

00:49:52   tell is that I was on a trip, a business trip, and I read like a run of like 30 issues of

00:49:59   Daredevil by Mark Waid or 25 issues on my trip there and back. And then I did the calculation

00:50:06   of how much it would have cost for me to buy all those issues. And it was like the cost

00:50:10   of a Marvel Unlimited subscription for just those comics. Because comics aren't cheap.

00:50:15   when they're older and discounted, they're not cheap. So Marvel Unlimited, if you want

00:50:19   to read Marvel Comics, is a good deal. Unfortunately, Comixology Unlimited, which they also have,

00:50:24   is not a good deal, I have to say. It's kind of a sampler service. They put the first few

00:50:31   issues of some comics, independent comics, not Marvel and DC Comics, on there. But the

00:50:37   goal seems to very much be like, they want you to pay for the service, but really what

00:50:42   they're trying to get you to do is get into the comics with the first few issues and then

00:50:46   buy a lot more comics. So it's not bad if you want to explore comics you wouldn't otherwise

00:50:52   want to read. And it's not that expensive, I think it's like five or six bucks a month,

00:50:56   but it's not, you can't like go through a whole run of a comic book series. It doesn't

00:51:00   work like that. They won't give you issues one through twenty-five. They'll give you

00:51:04   issues one through four and then they want you to buy the rest. So it's a less good deal.

00:51:08   And DC has nothing. DC doesn't have an all-you-can-eat comic app at all, which is frustrating because

00:51:14   I find myself curious. I was always a Marvel guy, but I find myself curious about some

00:51:18   DC comics, and you know, but I'm not going to go buy $40 worth of something and hope

00:51:25   that it's good. There's, you know, I liked the ability with Marvel Unlimited to try something

00:51:31   out and read a few issues and abandon it or just kind of go through and read them all.

00:51:36   How many comics can you kind of download to the device with Marvel Unlimited?

00:51:41   Oh.

00:51:42   The website, oh, the website says 12.

00:51:45   12 I think is, I think is the number, yeah.

00:51:48   But do they do just single issues or can you get like whole trade collections in Marvel

00:51:52   Unlimited?

00:51:53   I think they're all single issues on Marvel Unlimited.

00:51:54   I think that's how it's structured.

00:51:55   See, that's a shame.

00:51:56   Yeah.

00:51:57   I don't know why you can't just download any amount you want, like you're paying for it.

00:52:01   Well, it's a good question.

00:52:03   I think there's a piracy fear there or a, "I'm going to download a thousand issues and

00:52:08   then cancel my subscription, and now I've got them all locally." I agree. I think it's

00:52:12   a little unreasonable. It's a little bit like, you know, Amazon lets you download movies

00:52:17   and TV from the Amazon video app, and it's fine. And you can download many episodes and

00:52:22   fill up your device. So I think it probably should be more. And they only have themselves

00:52:26   to blame. They can't say, "Oh, don't blame us. We're just the service. It's the publisher

00:52:29   who demands on this. They're the publisher. It's direct from them. They should probably

00:52:32   do more than 12.

00:52:33   Because I just feel like, you know, you'd go on a long plane journey and you'd have

00:52:37   12 issues and then you finish it and you want the 13th and there's nothing you can do.

00:52:40   You take longer flights than I do. But yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true. I wish there were

00:52:46   more, but it is, you can, you can stash away a dozen issues to read on a plane and that's

00:52:52   nice.

00:52:53   So for someone like me then, who's maybe thinking about getting back in and I, whenever I have

00:52:58   read comics I like to just go through one series or something you would maybe suggest Marvel Unlimited

00:53:05   as a good option for me. Yeah if you're trying to get back into comics and you like Marvel

00:53:11   Comics, Marvel Unlimited is a great deal because I can tell you and I will in a little bit give you

00:53:16   reading suggestions and instead of saying well I mean we just did this we just did a comic book

00:53:21   club episode of The Incomparable that'll come out in the next few weeks and I bought three trade

00:53:27   paperback editions of that comic. It's "Astro City" by Kurt Busiek. And each one of them

00:53:34   is like 13 bucks. So, you know, $39 later, I bought three trades. And they're good. They're

00:53:40   really good. I'm going to buy more. It's going to be real expensive. But, because there are

00:53:45   like 13 of them. But here's the thing. If you get Marvel Unlimited, which you could

00:53:50   even try monthly, or like I said, I think the year, the annual deal is a great deal

00:53:54   for 69 bucks or whatever it is. I can tell you, "read this and this and this and this

00:54:00   and this," and you already paid your entry fee and you just read them and there's no

00:54:06   extra charge. And if you don't like one, you don't feel bad that you spent money on it

00:54:09   because you didn't. You just, you know, you're in the door at that point. And there's something

00:54:13   really freeing about that. And the way comic book storytelling really happens oftentimes

00:54:17   is it's runs over many issues or even across different books and you read one and then

00:54:22   want to read the next and then you want to read the next. And Marvel Unlimited is really

00:54:25   great at that because you're not making a financial transaction every time you want

00:54:28   to read the next one. You just read the next one.

00:54:31   So what's ComiXology Unlimited, though? ComiXology Unlimited is, like I said earlier,

00:54:38   it's like Marvel Unlimited in the sense that you pay a subscription fee and you have access

00:54:41   to a certain number. They have a library of comics. You can save them on your device to

00:54:48   read later. You don't have to be online to read them. And it's with independent publishers

00:54:52   instead of Marvel or DC. It's the smaller comic book publishers. But the difference

00:55:00   is most of what's in their library seems to be first trades or the equivalent first five

00:55:07   issues, six issues, four issues of a lot of different comics. And then also it seems like

00:55:12   month by month they go, things disappear and then other things reappear, which is not really

00:55:18   what happens in Marvel Unlimited, they just keep adding stuff every month. So, every week,

00:55:23   in fact. So, ComiXology Unlimited is a little different in that it's not for... it's for

00:55:29   discovery. When I interviewed David Steinberger, who's the CEO of ComiXology and is the head

00:55:32   of comics for Amazon, and that's how he described it to me was, it's a discovery service. And

00:55:39   I can see how they got the independent publishers on board with this service is they're probably

00:55:43   not making any money on it, but what they're doing is essentially giving away free just

00:55:49   to the people who pay for the service, but once you're in the door, free samples of their

00:55:55   comics, the first few issues. But the ultimate goal of that service seems to be to get you

00:55:59   to buy more comics. Like, buy more comics directly. Like, you want the rest of this

00:56:04   story after the first four issues? You know, the second trade is never available, or the

00:56:10   third trade is never available on Comixology Unlimited because the goal of the product

00:56:15   is to get you to buy those.

00:56:16   It's a taste.

00:56:18   Marvel Unlimited, I mean, I guess part of the goal is to get you so into a storyline

00:56:23   that you can't wait for six months for it to show up on Unlimited and you'll go and

00:56:27   buy it, but it's really to make money from people out of their immense back catalogue

00:56:34   that is not really being monetized properly, I think they would say. And, you know, now

00:56:39   getting $70 a year from me to read old comics that I wasn't going to buy. So that's a—or

00:56:45   probably wasn't going to buy. I'm sure they're trading some trade paperback sales, but a

00:56:50   lot of their stuff—a lot of those old comics are just out of print and, you know, the money

00:56:55   is in hand for me for my subscription.

00:56:58   All right, so give me some—give me some suggestions. What should I check out? What

00:57:04   should people be checking out?

00:57:08   Let's see. So, if you do Marvel Unlimited, I recommend—I've got some standard recommendations,

00:57:15   which is Hawkeye by Matt Fraction. The new Ms. Marvel. Have you read that? By Willow

00:57:22   Wilson? It's very good. Ms. Marvel was a character invented in the '70s, hence the Ms. that was

00:57:32   supposed to be like super cutting edge in 1975, named Carol Danvers who got promoted

00:57:37   to be Captain Marvel now. And Captain Marvel is actually a good comic too. But then they

00:57:42   made a new Ms. Marvel who is a girl who lives in New Jersey named Kamala Khan and uh...

00:57:48   Oh yeah, I've heard about this. And uh, those are fun. Those are a lot of fun.

00:57:53   Immortal Iron Fist is another one that I really like.

00:57:57   That's done by the same guy who did Hawkeye, right?

00:57:58   Who did Hawkeye, yeah. Yeah, it's the same creative team, more or less, that did Hawkeye.

00:58:03   It's very good. It's very good. I'm currently on Marvel Unlimited reading a miniseries that's

00:58:10   only about half on Marvel Unlimited now, but it's coming out called Worst X-Man Ever.

00:58:14   Okay, this sounds great. Like, whatever it is, it sounds great.

00:58:17   It is hilarious. It is a story about a guy who turns out to be a mutant and has to go

00:58:23   live with the X-Men, but his X-Men power is terrible and he basically can't use it, but

00:58:28   he has to live with the X-Men and it's funny and it's actually written by the singer in

00:58:33   a band I like but he also is a comic book writer now. It's kind of funny how that happened.

00:58:38   His name is Max Bemis from the band Say Anything but he is a comic book nerd supreme. I am

00:58:45   reading The Vision which is a weird weird comic about the red skinned android, synthesoid

00:58:54   whatever he is who you may remember from the Avengers and Civil War. And then this, he's

00:59:00   got a family and he's living in the suburbs and it's so strange. It's a very strange comic

00:59:04   but it's very, very smart.

00:59:06   - That sounds weird.

00:59:07   - Vision, yeah, it is. And if you're a Star Wars fan, Myke, are you a Star Wars fan? A

00:59:12   little bit?

00:59:13   - You know I'm a Star Wars fan.

00:59:14   - The new Star Wars comic is on there on Marvel Unlimited because Marvel publishes it and

00:59:21   of course that's all owned by Disney. The new Star Wars comic is pretty good and there's

00:59:25   a Darth Vader comic that's also quite good actually and is set after the first Star Wars

00:59:32   movie where Vader is kind of in the doghouse because he let the Death Star get destroyed

00:59:38   and what he does and like the missions that he's on. It's pretty clever. I like that one

00:59:43   a lot too. They've gotten those are it used to be that all the tie-in comics were written

00:59:47   by people who were, you know, they were doing it because it was work and they were getting

00:59:51   paid, but it was workman-like at best and they left their best work often for the stuff

00:59:58   that they were creating themselves. These Marvel comics about Star Wars are written

01:00:04   by great comics writers who love Star Wars and Marvel and Disney and Lucas, you know,

01:00:13   Whoever is paying them is paying them well to write really good comics about this world

01:00:17   that they love.

01:00:18   And so they're cut above most tie-in kind of comics.

01:00:22   So that's what I'm writing on Unlimited.

01:00:24   And then the other stuff that I'm reading that is largely through Comixology that I

01:00:28   recommend to you and to other people.

01:00:31   Like I said, Astro City, which came out in the '90s and is really great.

01:00:35   It's amazing if you're a long-time comic reader, especially.

01:00:40   It's great.

01:00:41   series about a city full of superheroes and the people who live there. It's pretty great.

01:00:47   I'm reading The Fuse, which is a sci-fi procedural, crime procedural, which is by

01:00:54   Antoni Johnston, who appears on The Incomparable Network in several places. Very good. That's a

01:01:02   really good sci-fi. It's like space. It's crime procedural in space. It's like homicide life on

01:01:07   on the street in a space station, it's pretty great. I'm reading Morning Glories, which

01:01:13   has just had its 50th issue came out. It is a mind-blowing, complicated, if you liked

01:01:20   Lost but thought that the mysteries on Lost were not weird and complicated enough, Morning

01:01:28   Glories. I recommend it for that because that's what it is. I am reading Amazing Spider-Man

01:01:34   because I love Spider-Man and the current run of Amazing Spider-Man is pretty good.

01:01:39   And if you go on Marvel Unlimited you can read the old, it's Matt Fraction has been

01:01:43   writing that for a few years now and it's all pretty good. I'm also reading Spider-Man

01:01:48   without the adjective and that's the Miles Morales book. It's the follow-on, it's the

01:01:52   successor to Ultimate Spider-Man which is my favorite comic of the last decade probably

01:01:58   by Brian Michael Bendis. I'm reading Invincible which is by Robert Kirkman, the guy who did

01:02:03   the Walking Dead, but this is his superhero comic. It's from Image.

01:02:05   It's one of my very favorite comics. I've read a ton of Invincible. It is surprisingly

01:02:11   brutal which you would expect if you'd read The Walking Dead, but it is so good. So good.

01:02:18   Yeah, Invincible is great. And I'm up, I've, yeah, that one I've been reading, Lisa Schmeiser

01:02:23   turned me on to that one. It's really good. It's a, and because it's an independent comic,

01:02:27   it's set in its own little universe, so there's all sorts of superheroes that you've never

01:02:30   heard of before who are the friends of invincible and and it's a dramatic

01:02:34   things can happen because they don't have to tie it in with 80 other comic

01:02:38   books and dramatic things do happen in invincible I'm reading Buffy the vampire

01:02:43   Slayer season 10 that they followed on from the show which is my favorite TV

01:02:49   show of all time with now what is it three seasons of what happened next to

01:02:55   those characters supervised by Joss Whedon the creator of the show and he

01:03:00   wrote the first season and a half or something like that and so it's fun to

01:03:06   revisit those characters in something that feels like it's semi-official.

01:03:11   The Wicked and the Divine is a great comic that is about gods being reincarnated

01:03:17   as rock stars basically. It's good. It's weird but it's good. And Saga which

01:03:25   which everybody recommends, but is truly a weird, great comic. So, that's it. That's

01:03:32   what I'm reading, more or less.

01:03:34   If you had wondered why the show notes were so huge this week, that is why.

01:03:38   This is why.

01:03:39   Because I have got links for all of them, as I've been collecting whilst you've been

01:03:44   talking.

01:03:45   That's good.

01:03:46   So they were all in our show notes, which will be in your podcast app of choice, which

01:03:49   may have crashed, or...

01:03:51   Possibly.

01:03:52   at relay.fm/upgrade/98.

01:03:55   They will all be there.

01:03:56   Jason, there are some excellent picks and suggestions

01:03:59   in there which I'm gonna have to check out, I think.

01:04:02   I'm gonna have to look at a bunch of these.

01:04:03   'Cause I'm very interested, very interested.

01:04:07   So I'm gonna do that.

01:04:08   - I was reading them all on,

01:04:09   so I was reading Astro City yesterday

01:04:12   and I will say one of the other reasons

01:04:14   in addition to the fact that I really like

01:04:16   the software keyboard and I like the size of the screen,

01:04:19   one of the reasons that I really love

01:04:20   the 12.9 inch iPad Pro is that comics look so good on it. They look so good. It is just

01:04:27   full-sized. It's beautiful. They look beautiful on that giant iPad screen. They look good

01:04:34   on the – I mean, I used to read comics on the iPad mini, and I sort of have to zoom

01:04:38   in a little and pan around. And on the regular 9.7 iPad, they look good, but on that 12.9,

01:04:43   They look amazingly good.

01:04:45   So that's I recommend the 12.9 iPad Pro for if you've got one, it's a pretty great comic

01:04:52   experience.

01:04:53   I gotta say.

01:04:54   Yes, I've just been looking for like little pieces of entertainment to break up my day.

01:04:58   Yeah.

01:04:59   You know, and I've been watching more YouTube videos and stuff for that reason.

01:05:04   But this could be a really interesting and fun alternative.

01:05:07   Yeah, 20 a 22 page comic is a pretty good.

01:05:11   I do that sometimes clockwise we do on Wednesdays and that's the day that the new comics come

01:05:15   out and there's usually a comic that I buy on Wednesday and often that's what I do is

01:05:19   I will I will record and edit clockwise and post it and then I will I'll read a comic

01:05:25   and maybe make some lunch and then I go about the rest of my day and it's a nice little

01:05:29   mental break in there.

01:05:30   Hey that's a good way to do it to start your day.

01:05:33   So aside from all this comic talk I think it's time for some Ask Upgrade.

01:05:38   All right let's do it.

01:05:40   Luke asked, "How does Myke decide between saying Apple, Amazon, Google companies?"

01:05:47   So let's say Apple is an Apple are.

01:05:51   This is your mid-Atlantic language processing center now.

01:05:55   You're part British, part American wording.

01:06:00   So the way that we're taught this and the way that it's done in English English is that

01:06:07   a company or an entity like that is a sum of its parts, not one single thing. So to

01:06:13   my mind, the way that I think is correct in my head is saying that Apple have or they

01:06:23   because it's a company of people and those people did that thing, right? That's how it

01:06:30   is in my head.

01:06:31   It's a plural mass counting object and it's the same reason that Brits will say the army are attacking

01:06:41   Yeah

01:06:43   Which because army is a plural mass count object. It means a collection of many things

01:06:49   There's not an army. It's the army and the army is a plural. Mm-hmm, but as of many things these days

01:06:58   Americans, bloody Americans.

01:07:00   - It's moving all over the map for me right now,

01:07:03   and whilst it makes the most sense to me

01:07:05   to say it in the plural,

01:07:06   I am finding myself saying it in the singular.

01:07:09   And I have to know, I noticed this a couple of weeks ago.

01:07:12   You said Apple R.

01:07:14   - Yeah.

01:07:15   - I noticed this, so I'm doing this to you.

01:07:18   - No, well, so this is actually a long-standing problem

01:07:21   in covering companies like this,

01:07:23   because I think, I do think this is moving.

01:07:28   I think companies being referred to as "they" rather than "it" is something that's

01:07:33   happening in American English. At least I see it in technology because we always struggled

01:07:39   with that. Like on the Macworld copy desk, this was certainly always the case. It's

01:07:42   like, "Apple isn't it. Apple is not a they." And so what you'd say is, you know, you'd

01:07:49   say the people at Apple, the executives at Apple, if you could do that, the programmers

01:07:57   at Apple, the developers at Apple, then you get to use "they," but if you just like Apple,

01:08:03   you know, when it introduced the iPad is what you have to say, because that's the rule.

01:08:09   Now I kind of am lax on that these days because I feel like there's the colloquialism.

01:08:16   I think that's ugly.

01:08:18   I kind of agree. It's more accurate, but I don't think it's how people talk. I think,

01:08:24   know, "Oh, did Apple come out with something new? I love it when they do that," right?

01:08:29   People say that, right?

01:08:30   I love it when it does that.

01:08:31   I love it when it does that, right? The robot that is Apple disgorges a block. It's like,

01:08:37   "Yay, it did it! It came out with a new thing. Hooray! All hail the robot!" No, it's a "they"

01:08:44   because it is. So I think people do think of these companies as "they"s more than "its."

01:08:50   So I think usage is tracking the other way there, but the proper usage would be that

01:08:54   Apple is a singular in American English. But I do feel like there's... It's always telling

01:09:02   when people's instincts for conversation and how people refer to things casually are pulling

01:09:07   away from the standard, because that probably means the standard won't last because nobody

01:09:13   talks like that. And at some point, that'll be the end of whatever that thing is. So I

01:09:17   do think that's happening. But we still say the army is attacking, not the army are attacking.

01:09:23   Matthew asked, "How long do you think Tim Cook will remain the CEO of Apple? Ten years

01:09:28   from now would take him to around the age of 65. Is it more likely that he would hold

01:09:33   a high profile job like this past retirement age, so past those 10 years, or because of

01:09:39   the high profile nature of the job, would it be more likely that he would retire early?"

01:09:45   question, I don't really have an answer for it, right? My thinking is, and it's such like

01:09:50   a pish-posh answer, is for as long as it's right for him to be there, that could be a

01:09:59   year or it could be 20 years, right? Like, we have no idea. For as long as Apple is doing

01:10:04   well and as long as the board and everybody that works at Apple are happy that he is there,

01:10:10   then have him be there. Like there shouldn't necessarily be an age limit that times him

01:10:15   out of being the CEO.

01:10:16   Right. Well, there's also lots of succession planning stuff, which is like the here's

01:10:27   at some point is there somebody who he feels is as he's getting up on there that there's

01:10:32   very clearly somebody who's he's training to be the CEO. That was the case with Steve

01:10:37   Jobs is, although they never talked about it until, literally until Steve Jobs needed

01:10:41   to be replaced on an interim basis and then replaced when he resigned as CEO, they didn't

01:10:48   talk about it, but Tim Cook was the succession plan, right? And I'm sure they have a succession

01:10:51   plan if something happened to Tim Cook today. I'm sure they've got something in place about

01:10:57   what would happen next, but over time, as Tim Cook starts to think about how long do

01:11:03   I want to do this?" He seems like a very driven guy and I think he's driven by not only by

01:11:08   the success of Apple and by his own personal drive to be a success but also by the thoughts

01:11:15   that they're sort of the stewards of Steve Jobs' legacy. I think that he's going to be

01:11:19   there a while unless, like with Steve Jobs, unless something happens and he's not able

01:11:24   to do the job anymore. But a time will come when he will probably, ideally I think he

01:11:32   would step into a role in 10 or 15 years where he's the chairman of the board or something

01:11:37   like that, right? And there's a new CEO and that he's still around for a while on the

01:11:42   board. I think that is a way that a lot of businesses handle transitions like that. But

01:11:48   I don't know. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. I think there would have

01:11:52   to be some, you know, Apple calamity, which given Apple's current position seems unlikely

01:11:59   something like that to happen. So I think at this point my gut feeling is that he's

01:12:02   going to be here for quite a while.

01:12:04   I mean I assume that considering the history of the company now that there are always succession

01:12:12   plans in place.

01:12:13   I'm sure there are but there's the in an emergency succession plan versus the plan

01:12:20   for the future. The timed succession plan kind of thing and those change over time and

01:12:25   all of that. But I think Apple also, I would say, is not a company, unless you're a dummy

01:12:31   who writes for Business Insider or something like that, Apple is not a company that even

01:12:36   as a shareholder you look at and say, "Oh, what they really could use is somebody from

01:12:39   the outside to reform what they're doing." Like, the whole story of Apple, right down

01:12:45   to the training at Apple University, right, is doing it the Apple way and that nobody

01:12:50   does it like Apple. And as a result, I would also say, you're never going to replace the

01:12:57   CEO of Apple with somebody from the outside. It's never, never, never going to happen.

01:13:03   It would take…

01:13:04   Again.

01:13:05   It would take a calamity. Well, yeah, not… Well, look how great it worked with… Well,

01:13:13   Gil Amelio was from the inside. No, Gil Amelio was not. Michael Spindler was from the inside.

01:13:16   Emilio was not from the inside, and of course John Sculley was not from the inside. But

01:13:20   I, you know, since Jobs has returned, I mean, the whole success that they've had since

01:13:25   Jobs returned is all about Apple recognizing that it does things its own way, and everybody

01:13:31   tries to emulate Apple. I think it's unlikely that somebody, maybe it could be somebody

01:13:35   who was like great at Apple and then went and did their own thing and was great with

01:13:39   that, and then could be brought back. That could be a scenario, but I don't see it. I

01:13:43   feel like Apple, this is not a job where there's any sanity for like, "Oh, what if Tim Cook,

01:13:50   you know, what if the shareholders get angry at Apple's sales being flat and they replace

01:13:54   Tim Cook?" It's like, "I don't know. I don't know if there is somebody to replace him."

01:13:58   And there certainly is not a scenario I see where they're going to bring in just some

01:14:01   other tech industry CEO and pop them in and say, "You fix Apple." I just don't even see

01:14:07   that as a reasonable possibility, certainly anytime soon. It would take a calamity for

01:14:12   that to happen.

01:14:14   Reid asked, "I'd like to buy a 13-inch iPad Pro for university, but should I wait

01:14:18   for a possible iPad Pro 2 this fall?" I don't think there's going to be another iPad

01:14:23   Pro of any size until March of next year, but if you can wait until the September event

01:14:28   has passed, then you should. Just in case.

01:14:31   Well yeah, if you can hold out, but if you're going off to university, probably going off

01:14:36   sooner than that.

01:14:37   Yeah, so if for any reason you can, like maybe you have a laptop and you're going to use

01:14:42   a laptop for a bit and you're good to wait until September then do that but I

01:14:46   don't think you're gonna have a problem from that I don't think we're gonna see

01:14:50   one in September but if you can wait you should but I think it's gonna be March.

01:14:53   That's my gut feeling too is that they'll get they'll get them on synced

01:14:57   up and they'll probably get them synced up in the in the spring on the year

01:15:02   anniversary of the 9.7. Clive asked do you think that the new iPhone will have

01:15:07   a true tone display like the 9.7 inch iPad Pro. I really do think so. I think that this

01:15:13   is like the new retina.

01:15:15   Yeah, why not? I think they will put this across the line eventually. You're adding

01:15:21   a sensor and you're adding some color management. A lot of it's happening in software other

01:15:26   than that sensor. So yeah, I think it'll go everywhere over time. I would be surprised

01:15:35   if the new iPhone didn't have it. It's possible if they're gonna really differentiate the

01:15:39   plus model from the regular model that it could only be in the plus model but I would

01:15:44   put money probably on it being on both models, yeah.

01:15:50   E: And Brent asked, "How does Myke say…" Jason, can you say this so as not to spoil

01:15:56   it?

01:15:57   JE It's my former employer in fact at one point,

01:16:00   ZDNet from Ziff Davis originally, ZDNet. How do you say ZDNet?

01:16:04   Well, because obviously I say the letter Z, right? I don't say Z.

01:16:08   Yes, you do.

01:16:09   But I would still say ZDNet because that's the name of the company.

01:16:12   Okay, so you would say ZDNet.

01:16:14   Yeah, because they're not called ZDNet.

01:16:18   It's true, they're not. That's a terrible name. ZDNet. ZDNet.

01:16:22   I mean, let's be honest, ZDNet is not that much better.

01:16:26   So the story is that it was Ziff Davis Publishing and they published PC Magazine and Mac User

01:16:31   magazine and PC computing and Computer Shopper, all these magazines from the 80s and the 90s

01:16:37   that people may remember if you're old like me. And it was an enthusiast publishing company

01:16:45   originally and they had like a flying magazine and a photography magazine and other magazines

01:16:52   like that. And by the time I got there in the 90s, you know, Bill Ziff owned it. Davis

01:16:57   was long since gone and Ziff Davis Publishing was it. But Bill Ziff wanted to retire and

01:17:04   his sons wanted to be venture capitalists. They did not want to be in the publishing

01:17:09   business at the time as an employee of Ziff Davis I was like, "Oh man!" And today I

01:17:14   look back and I'm like, "Smart gentlemen, get out of the media business, sell that thing

01:17:19   off, take the money, invest in other things. Good job, boys!" So when they left, they

01:17:26   started Ziff Brothers Investments, I think, or Ziff Investments, and one of the conditions

01:17:33   of the sale of Ziff Davis Publishing was the ceasing—because people shortened it to Ziff.

01:17:42   Everybody would just call it Ziff. I work at Ziff. And the Ziff family didn't want

01:17:45   that. The Ziff family wanted their name back. The Ziff Brothers wanted it on their investment

01:17:50   firm. And so one of the conditions of selling it was to change it to not have Ziff Davis

01:17:57   in the name. So they became ZD Publishing and ZDNet, which they had already done. They

01:18:02   had already changed that to ZDNet from ZiffNet, which is actually what it had been before.

01:18:09   And that's why that name exists. And it's a terrible name, but it was meant as a bridge

01:18:13   to, um, you know, to exist from Ziff Davis publishing.

01:18:18   Why any vestige of that remains almost 20 years later or more than 20 years

01:18:24   later is beyond me, because I think it is also a terrible name.

01:18:27   There's a little history, a little old history.

01:18:31   Pull up a chair.

01:18:32   Everybody let me let old uncle Jason tell you about publishing in the nineties when

01:18:37   magazines were printed on dead trees.

01:18:40   Good times.

01:18:41   Jason.

01:18:42   Tom would like to know, are you going to Comic Con?

01:18:46   So this is Tom Zoller who does the Fantastic Love and Capes web comic and I saw him on

01:18:51   a panel a few years ago at Comic Con.

01:18:54   But I'm here, Myke, I'm sitting in my chair and it's Comic Con week.

01:18:58   I'm not going to Comic Con.

01:18:59   Comic Con is huge.

01:19:01   I love San Diego but I don't love San Diego during Comic Con week.

01:19:08   is not so bad, Friday is kind of bad, and the weekend is kind of just complete disaster.

01:19:13   So I may gin up the courage to go back to Comic-Con at some point in the next few years,

01:19:20   although it's harder now for me to get a press pass, I think, than when I was the editor-in-chief

01:19:25   of Macworld. That was a lot easier. And quite frankly, I went because I thought the tech

01:19:29   angle of comics on the iPad, which we talked about earlier today, was a really interesting

01:19:34   story right after the iPad came out. Now it's just kind of part of the conversation. It's

01:19:38   like not, there are not so many story angles for me for that anymore. So maybe someday,

01:19:45   but not this year. Last year, we inaugurated the official Snell vacation strategy of, for

01:19:54   years I would walk around Comic-Con and think, "Boy, I love San Diego. This place would

01:19:58   be really nice if all these people weren't here for Comic-Con." And so last year, Lauren

01:20:02   and I went for a couple of nights to San Diego. We stayed in the hotel right next to the convention

01:20:06   Center and we were there the week before Comic Con, the weekend before Comic Con. This year

01:20:11   we're going, and we're staying in the Gaslamp District right next to the Convention Center,

01:20:16   and we're going the week after Comic Con.

01:20:19   Why does it have to be around Comic Con?

01:20:22   Well, because it's the summer and we're taking the kids down to visit with her parents and

01:20:26   the kids stay there for another week and a half or so. So the timing tends to be just

01:20:31   during the summer, and for a few years it was timed so that I could go to Comic Con.

01:20:35   it's time so that we can go not to Comic-Con. So it's the kind of "un-Comic-Con"

01:20:40   experience. So Tom, if you're hanging around for an extra week after Comic-Con

01:20:44   in San Diego, I will be there, but otherwise I will not be there. And our

01:20:49   last question this week, you mentioned this a bunch, what is the weather station

01:20:53   that you use in your backyard? This come from Josh. I've heard this from a lot of

01:20:57   people. I'm using a station that I installed when my son was born and he is

01:21:02   now 11 so it's the Davis Vantage Pro Davis still makes a Vantage Pro 2 it's

01:21:09   really expensive it lasts I can say that that after almost 12 years in my backyard

01:21:16   it still functions and in fact I've even upgraded a couple of things on it so

01:21:21   it's it functions better now in some ways I had to replace the little backup

01:21:27   battery a couple of times but it's still working there are lots of other options

01:21:32   One of these days I will try to do a survey of weather stations, but like Netatmo makes

01:21:38   one that's a lot less expensive, and you can tie them all into weather underground, and

01:21:44   so there are a lot of other options out there. Davis is not particularly MAC friendly, I'm

01:21:49   using a piece of MAC software called WeatherCat that is compatible with a lot of different

01:21:54   weather stations that are out there, because it turns out a lot of these weather stations

01:21:56   are not Mac friendly. And WeatherCat isn't fantastic, but it's fine, it's good, it lets

01:22:01   me build my custom webpage of my weather station and also upload my data to Weather Underground

01:22:08   where I can see it in apps and stuff. But even something like the Netatmo stuff, which

01:22:12   I think starts at like $150 or something, is going to be good. And then you can add

01:22:19   sensors and stuff to it, whereas the thing that I've got probably costs like $800 or

01:22:25   Alright, so I think that about wraps it up for this week.

01:22:29   It's 68 degrees Fahrenheit right now, Myke. Just a little

01:22:33   weather information for you, a little weather update. Good to know. We're in the high 80s today.

01:22:37   It's 20C. It's 20C. So yeah, cool. We have a cooling trend.

01:22:41   We're in a heating trend. It's not pleasant here right now.

01:22:45   Yeah, it shouldn't be warmer in London than it is anywhere in the United States ever.

01:22:49   It's 27 degrees Celsius right now. Well, at least one of us

01:22:53   us is having a summer. And it's going up to 32 degrees Celsius tomorrow. So old Myke will

01:23:02   be seeing things when he's recording. Goodbye. With all the windows and doors closed. Turning

01:23:08   into a big blob of a man. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade.

01:23:13   If you want to find our show notes this week head on over to relay.fm/upgrade/98. Thanks

01:23:18   again to our sponsors as well, the great folk over at Pingdom and Smile for helping support

01:23:23   this episode. If you would like to find Jason online, head on over to SixColors.com and

01:23:28   he is @JSnell on Twitter, JSNEELL. I am @IMyke, I M Y K E. This show is part of Relay FM.

01:23:36   If you enjoy this show and enjoy podcasts, we have many more that you may enjoy. Go to

01:23:40   relay.fm and you can find some for yourself. Today, thank you so much for listening. We'll

01:23:45   be back next time with episode number 99. Until then, say goodbye, Jason.

01:23:48   Goodbye, everybody.

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