Adam Christianson joins the show to talk about the not death of Google Glass and why Apple staff are so fired up about the unauthorized Steve Jobs bio.
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Show Notes
Today’s guests: Adam Christianson from MacCast
Headlines:
Google Glass? Not so dead. The Verge passes along Google executive Chairman Eric Scmidt’s comments to the Wall Street Journal. Schmidt said “We ended the Explorer program and the press conflated this into us canceling the whole project, which isn’t true.” He said that’s why they gave it to Nest’s Tony FAdell so it could become user-friendly. He also said Glass is a long term project and that “[It’s] like saying the self-driving car is a disappointment because it’s not driving me around now.”
TechCrunch reports on the launch of a new standalone app from Instagram called Layout. It’s a collage app that lets you take up to 9 photos and arrange them and apply filters. It can do things like pick out just the photos with faces, take a series of photos and instantly make a collage from them, and general speeds up creation. Finished collages can be saved to the device, shared to Facebook and Instagram or sent through the OS’s sharing options to other apps. Layout from Instagram is free and available for iOS now and coming to Android within months.
TechCrunch reports Microsoft broadened its agreement with Samsung to preinstall software and announced 11 similar agreements with other manufacturers like Dell. The new Samsung agreement will see Office apps installed on Samsung Android tablets starting in the first half of 2015.
Re/Code reports that Cyanogen received $80 million in funding. Investors included: Twitter ventures, Qualcomm Inc, Telefonica Ventures and Rupert Murdoch. Cyanogen has a come a long way from its open source project roots to offering a commercial version for phone makers that includes services from partners. The company aims to become a fully competitive mobile OS.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told Time Magazine that the Wall Street Journal’s story reporting a Zelda show being developed for Netflix was “not based on correct information.” So you’re saying there’s a chance! Iwata said, “As of now, I have nothing new to share with you in regard to the use of our IPs for any TV shows or films.”
The Next Web noticed Microsoft released tools and sample code for developers who want to make universal apps for Windows 10. If you want to build an app that works across desktop, tablet and mobile devices with one codebase you need to download Visual Studio 2015 CTP6 and the SDK tools for Windows 10 through the Windows Insider Program at insider.windows.com.
News From You:
Starfuryzeta sent us the Engadget report that packing peanuts — you know the things in your hair, on the floor, and stuck to the cat — may be the key to a new generation of lithium-ion batteries. Purdue University researchers developed a process that heats the peanuts and turns them into carbon sheets or carbon nanoparticles that can be used as anodes where lithium ions are stored during charging. Early test samples last for 300 charging cycles without losing capacity. They need to get that number higher but unlike most battery advances this one is already practical, cheap and easy to implement.
Doorsrio sent us this The Next Web story about Boeing receiving a patent for a force field system. PatentYogi, a patent service company created a short video explaining the patent. The patent specifically covers a system to attenuate shockwave blast energy traveling through the air from affecting an object. Sensors detect the initial blast and direction and then use lasers to ionize the air between the object and the blast creating a plasma channel or a bubble of super heated air. This causes the blast waves to be redirected, reflected or absorb by the plasma channel.
Dmmacs passed along the news that a software update later this week will allow Fitbit wearers to use multiple devices on the same account. Good news for Fitbit who would like to sell more devices to the same consumers, and good news for users who want to swap between the fitness-centric Fitbit surge and the lightweight Fitbit Flex. The update will also add features for tracking bike rides.
Metalfreak submitted the Ars Technica article that shows multiple security warnings bore you. Researchers will present a paper to that effect next month at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI 2015 conference. MRI images show a “precipitous drop” in visual processing after even one repeated exposure to a standard security warning and a “large overall drop” after 13 of them. The researcher team—made up of six scientists from Brigham Young University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Google propose polymorphic warnings that change their colors, text, shapes, and other characteristics, to combat the habituation.
Discussion Section Links:
Pick of the day: michaelgeist.ca
From defrosting Ottawa, Canada…
I have a pick for fellow Canadians who maybe have heard many stories about the FCC’s Title II adventures but are looking for a more local perspective. Michael Geist, at michaelgeist.ca, is a Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa who writes regularly about the CRTC (the best equivalent to the FCC in Canada), privacy, media issues, digital rights and more. I have been a subscriber to his RSS feed for years and his articles are always insightful and timely. In my opinion, Michael Geist is the pre-eminent Canadian voice on technology and policy issues in the 21st century.
Jeremy Rand
Messages
In response to Friday’s show where HBO, Showtime, and others want to put servers into an ISP’s Data Center… As a person who has done such a task with third-party payment gateways on major card providers networks and third-party servicers on major banking networks, it is very cost-prohibited. To do this, you would have to set up a termination point for the main-feed to connect to a lease-line that terminates at the data center in question. The trunk of the lease-line at the data center will still need to be connected into a dedicated switch within the data center. The servers will have to connect up to the switch. This all will have to be done twice (primary/backup or hot/hot fail over or some type of forced fail over load-balancing). Say all this was accomplished then you have server support, patching, emergency access, upgrade cycles and more.
There is a lot more detail that I could bore you with, but you get the idea. Putting a server into another company’s data cent
er is glossed over as an easy-inexpensive task. If it was, then all the bank’s and financial institutions I’ve worked for must have been doing something wrong.
Akamai, F5, and the like, have a business-model that capitalizes on the connectivity complexities and costs. It will be cheaper, more efficient to use them than do it yourself. Most tier 3 and tier 4 data centers already have access to these services built in.
BTW, if they do want to do this, I’m always looking for work 
!
Love the show!
Joe formerly from lovely Cleveland.
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BOL REUNION!
Just announced: The Buzz Out Loud 10 Year reunion on March 29th at 12:30 pacific /3:30 p eastern and 7:30p GMT! It’s free! Tom, Molly, Veronica, Jason and many other special guests! Tickets for the event at the Hak 5 warehouse are available at http://bit.ly/BOLreunion but if you want to attend online you don’t need even need a ticket. The event will stream live on Alpha Geek Radio and on YouTube with more details forthcoming.
Buzztown’s Back!
PODCAST AWARDS
Also Podcast Awards! Remember yesterday, and the day before, when we told you how you could vote for your favorite podcast in the Podcast Awards? Well guess what, you can vote again today! For example, you could vote for DTNS in the technology category, but you can also support Night Attack in the “Mature” and “Video” categories. Also you can vote for The Instance, Film Sack and our good friends at The Morning Stream and Night Attack. I guess you could also vote for Serial. But only once. Vote once a day at http://www.podcastawards.com/ until March 24th.
Tuesday’s guest: Patrick Beja
In 1802 – Richard Trevithick and Andrew Viviane of Camborne Parish in the County of Cornwall, enrolled a patent for a steam engine that could power a full-sized road locomotive. He had previously demonstrated it by driving up a hill in a car he called the “Puffing Devil”.