Tag Archives: headphones

PTJ 351: Going Places

After several weeks of unexpected hiatus, El Kaiser and JD return to catch up on the Justice League Snyder cut, NFTs, eco-friendly map directions, NASA’s Mars helicopter — and a whole bunch of Bluetooth headphones. Spin up Episode 351 right here!

PTJ 348: Beer Me, Rosie

As 2021 starts off feeling like the surprise end-credit sequence to 2020, El Kaiser and J.D. discuss Twitter’s big move, the power of social-media companies and a little trade Vegas-based expo called the Consumer Electronics Show that’s having its first-ever all-virtual edition. All this, plus thoughts on “Wonder Woman 1984” and Apple’s beefy new over-the-ear headphones, right here on PTJ 348!

PTJ 345: At Last

What day is it? Does it matter? Time may be a flat circle that got hit by the Covid Truck for many people, but things have happened this month: Apple finally rolls out its four iPhone 12 models, Facebook finally bans Holocaust-denial content and and a House committee finally produces its report on Big Tech and monopoly. El Kaiser and J.D. muse upon it all, along with with a new set of headphones that gets the Rosado Review. Hear it all on PTJ 345!

Six Russian GRU Officers Charged in Connection with Worldwide Deployment of Destructive Malware and Other Disruptive Actions in Cyberspace (United States Department of Justice)
The Citizen Browser Project—Auditing the Algorithms of Disinformation (The Markup)
Facebook says it rejected 2.2m ads for breaking political campaigning rules (The Guardian)
Twitter, Responsibility, and Accountability (Stratechery by Ben Thompson)
Apple Launches ‘Apple Music TV,’ a 24-Hour Music Video Livestream (Variety)
Apple introduces iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max with 5G (Apple Newsroom)
Apple announces iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini: A new era for iPhone with 5G (Apple Newsroom)
Apple introduces HomePod mini: A powerful smart speaker with amazing sound (Apple Newsroom)
Removing Holocaust Denial Content (About Facebook)
Why Facebook Can’t Fix Itself (The New Yorker)
The new Nest Thermostat: more energy savings for more people (Google Nest)
Amazon’s Latest Gimmicks Are Pushing the Limits of Privacy (WIRED)
Amazon launches an AR app that works with new QR codes on its boxes (TechCrunch)
The House Antitrust Report on Big Tech (The New York Times)
Google’s merger with ITA helped it grow into the giant that the Justice Department is scrutinizing (The Washington Post)
EU targets Big Tech with ‘hit list’ facing tougher rules (Financial Times)
Exclusive: TikTok rival Triller explores deal to go public – sources (Reuters)
Disney reorganizes to focus on streaming, direct to consumer (CNBC)
AKG K553 MKII Headphones

PTJ 295: Smokin’!

The year is winding down, but the movie selection at the local cineplex is heating up with several sizzling releases this month. Also in the hot seat: Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, who got to have his belated chat with Congressional members, and social-media companies who missed the massive amount of misinformation spread across their platforms in 2016 and beyond. And for those don’t want to burn a lot of cash on wireless headphones, El Kaiser has a a review for you.  Fire up Episode 295!

Links to Stories Discussed on This Week’s Show

The El Kaiser Hardware Review

PTJ 209: Fights and Flights

It’s been a loooong campaign and Election Day is just a few weeks away. If you want to beat the crowds, J.D. has a (Hopefully) Helpful Hint on how to see if your state allows early voting — and what you need to bring to the polls. Meanwhile El Kaiser has a few new headphones to inspect. In the week’s tech news Google checks facts and flights, Samsung is still scrambling to douse the Galaxy Note 7 fires, Facebook Messenger has some suggestions for your online discourse and there is a squadron of Taunting Drones buzzing drivers south of the border. Want to find out more? Just press Play.

Headphone Review Models

Status Audio CB-1 Closed Black Studio Monitors
• thinksound On2 Monitor Series

Links to This Week’s News Stories

PTJ 194 News: Hot Sales

Summer is a great time for yard sales and farm auctions, and The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Verizon will put up $3 billion dollars for Yahoo’s web assets in the second round of bidding this week.  As Ars Technica noted, if Verizon wins the auction, the company would rule 1990s Cyberspace as the owner of both Yahoo and AOL. A grunge-rock revival could be next!

Virtual assistants continue to pop up in all kinds of hardware and now Microsoft’s Cortana is coming to the company’s Xbox One game console this summer, along with many other new features. And while there’ll be more gaming announcements next week when the E3 show rolls into town,  Blizzard Entertainment is integrating Facebook logins and live video right into its new Overwatch multiplayer game and Battle.net online service.

Apple’s Word Wide Developers Conference kicks off next week. Expect a lot of software-based announcements and maybe a few hardware things. New iPhone hardware probably won’t show up to this party, but the Nikkei Asian Review site is reporting, based on conversations with suppliers and production facilities overseas, that Apple will probably start taking three years between major iPhone model changes. This slowdown is due to a slowing market and because the company is running out of whiz-bang features to unveil every year.

wwdc16

A wireless version of the popular Bose QuietComfort noise-canceling headphones have some industry watchers assuming the next iPhone is going to be the one where Apple gets rid of the standard 3.5mm headphone jack. The headphones have a list price of $350 and are supposed to get about 20 hours of listening time between charges.

While 2016 is largely being forecast as a ho-hum year for smartphone innovation from several manufacturers, Bloomberg News is reporting that Samsung might be releasing phones with bendable screens next year. Will the Galaxy line become the Gumby line?

stitcherPodcasts make for fun listening no matter what kind of headphones you have, and now Stitcher Radio, one of the popular podcast apps, has just been snapped up by the old-school media company EW Scripps for $4.5 million dollars in cash. Stitcher, which streams more than 65,000 podcasts including this one, will operate under another Scripps acquisition, the podcast advertisement company Midroll Media.

This week, the United States Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Google to throw out that class-action lawsuit over where advertisements were placed through Google’s AdWords service. Last year’s ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco stands — and the class-action lawsuit can go forward.

In other legal news, tech companies and privacy groups are lining up against proposed legislation  that would let federal officials request even more types of user information in the National Security Letters they send to ISPs, banks, doctors and other recipients during investigations. The House version of the bill passed in April and the Senate version is due for a vote this week.

Microsoft Planner, its teamwork organizer app is headed to Office 365 subscribers over the next few weeks. True to its name, Planner is, uh, software for planning stuff.

twitterTwitter has redesigned its Android app to fall in line with Google’s material design standard. The update is rolling out now. Snapchat also got a fresh new look this week that, among other things, mixes Discover content with Live Stories.

They pumped it up last week and this week, astronauts opened up the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, otherwise known as the International Space Station’s add-on inflatable bouncy castle. An air sample was taken and sensor data downloaded as astronauts prepare to actually use the module.

And finally, although news of the breach just surfaced recently, LinkedIn got hacked in 2012 and millions of user names and passwords were swiped – including those of a one Mr. Mark Zuckerberg of a little company called Facebook whose password was reportedly dadada. A hacker group called Ourmine used the swiped credentials to compromise Mr. Zuckerberg’s accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn for a short time this weekend. It’s a reminder to the rest of us to change our passwords regularly or get a password manager program. Also, don’t recycle them across accounts and don’t use easily crackable codes like. . . dadada.

weak

PTJ 108 News: Arrivals and Departures

We’re rolling into September and new phones are everywhere.  Samsung released two new models in the Galaxy Note phablet line, the Galaxy Note 4 and the Galaxy Note Edge, the latter of which has a screen that curves around the side of the device. Then there’s Amazon! The company released its first Fire smartphone just a few months ago and this week, it dropped the price from about $200 to a mere 99 cents. Can we say…

FireSale

Also heating up: The Net Neutrality debate. Netflix joined Reddit, Kickstarter and tons of other websites in an online protest this Wednesday in which the participating sites displayed the “loading” graphic so common with slow connections, along with more information about the FCC’s proposal. California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler asking him to reclassify the broadband as a telecommunications service to protect consumers.

The FCC sure is getting a lot of mail these days. Discovery Communications is one of the latest companies to speak out against the intended union. In a letter to the agency, Catherine Carroll, a Discovery’s vice president, said the merger would create monopoly-like conditions and had several bullet points to back up the argument. (Meanwhile, the Ars Technica site has noticed that Comcast is using Javascript to inject self-promotional ads for its services into Web pages on devices that are connected to one of its many public WiFi hotspots.)

TwitterTwitter announced on the company blog this week that it was rolling out a Buy button on posts from certain retailers that lets users purchase products advertised in tweets. Will people buy as impulsively as they tweet?

If you’ve used you credit card at a Home Depot recently, keep an eye on your statements, as the big orange do-it-yourself supply store has been hit with a Target-like security breach. A new variant of the same malware used in the Target attack has been found on Home Depot’s point-of-sale terminals and the breach had been reportedly going on since last spring.

delveMicrosoft continues to develop its Office 365 tools for business users and is rolling out a new presentation and internal service app that looks an awful lot like Flipboard. The new tool is called Office Delve. And Google Play Movies & TV for iOS got an update this week so users can download videos and play them offline.

The run-up to the holiday season also means new videogames, like Destiny, which landed on Sony and Microsoft consoles this week. To help players really get into the science-fiction shooter, Sony has announced new gaming headsets coming this fall for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3. The models include the $99 PlayStation Gold Wireless Headset with 7.1 virtual surround sound and the $70 Silver Wired Headset, also with 7.1 surround.

tivo-megaAnd finally, TiVo, which announced a $50 over-the-air recorder a few weeks ago, is swinging to the other end of the price-tag spectrum with its new TiVo Mega recorder, which costs $5,000 — and comes with 24 terabytes of room. That’s  enough to record 26,000 hours of standard-def TV or 4,000 hours of HD video. The TiVo Mega also includes six TV tuners. The recorder isn’t due to arrive until 2015, so you have plenty of time to figure out how you can fill up that bad boy.

Oh, and one more thing…

applelivestream

Apple had an event this week. Among the announcements:

Not announced? The quiet death of the iPod Classic, the last click-wheel, hard-drive based iPod and the most direct descendant of the simple white block that put Apple back on the map as an innovative  technology company. Be thou at peace, iPod Classic.

original

 

PTJ 105: A Cat, a Dog, And a Groot

El Kaiser takes a listen to the INEARPEACE earbuds from Om Audio and likes what he hears while J.D. tells us where and how to find quality documentaries online.

In the news, Amazon continues its war with book publisher Hachette and now finds itself battling Disney; Microsoft has Xbox announcements; Apple appears to have ramped up production of the new iPad; the U.S. government creates new agencies to handle its tech woes; Akamai releases its latest State of the Internet report; we have robot news and yes, it does rattle the Kaiser; and a security researcher weaponizes his pets.

PTJ 103 News: Shoot the Messenger

Facebook’s move to shove users onto its separate Messenger app is reportedly coming soon — if it’s not here already by the time you read this. Millions of people are already using it, and Facebook says the Messenger app is a faster and more efficient for sharing text and multimedia messages. The company has plans to monetize Messenger with a payment system as well. The Messenger app’s Terms of Service is causing some concern with the privacy-minded, though, and some users are complaining about the forced march.

Splitting up app services seems to be a popular move. Foursquare recently divided its eponymous mobile software for checking into places and reviewing them into two apps They are Foursquare and the new Swarm app, available for Android and iOS. Swarm is now the app required for all the check-in-with-your-pals activity, while Foursquare has been transformed into a user-reviews database. The split has gotten media criticism and a fair amount of backlash from users who are checking out of Swarm, but the company did just release another update earlier this week. (Yelp, the service Foursquare seems to competing with most, updated its own mobile app this week and now allows users to add short video clips to their reviews.)

fakefoxAnd about apps… there are new reports of a security problem with the way apps are identified by Google’s Android operating system. The research team at Bluebox Security says the new “Fake ID” vulnerability that it has just discovered allows malicious applications to essentially copy the identity certificates and credentials of trusted apps and get into places where malware is normally not allowed. The research team said this security hole has been around since Android version 2.1 in January 2010 and devices that haven’t been updated with last April’s patch for Google bug 13678484 are vulnerable.  Bluebox waited 90 days to publicize its findings so Google had time to get out the April patch.

Apple has just purchased BookLamp, a book-recommendation service in what’s said to be a shot across Amazon’s e-book bow. Also in Apple’s shopping cart: Swell, the podcasting app described by some as “Pandora for talk radio.” The Re/code site reports that Apple is scooping up Swell for about $30 million and could put Apple’s own poorly reviewed Podcasts app out of its misery or boost iTunes Radio. (Apple has now  quietly confirmed the dealthe Swell website has been shut down now and the app has been removed from the App Store.)

This summer marks 15 years since the Napster peer-to-peer file-sharing service stormed onto the scene and made MP3-swapping all the rage. At its peak, Napster claimed 80 million users before its original incarnation was shut down by court order for copyright violations in 2001. After several years of being bought and sold, the remains of the company eventually merged with the Rhapsody streaming service and this week announced it had just hit the two-million subscriber mark. On the way back up at last!

Beats Electronics, another of Apple’s more recent acquisitions,  is getting sued by Bose Electronics. Bose, which makes a line of high-end and very popular noise-cancelling headphones says Beats infringed on five of its patents. Sounds like QuietComfort is getting ready to rumble…

Microsoft is also finding itself in a spot of legal bother this week, as the Chinese government is investigating the company for violations of its antitrust laws. Chinese officials have also investigated Qualcomm for alleged anti-trust violations in recent times.

Legal troubles overseas haven’t dampened Microsoft’s sense of fun when it comes to giving Apple a virtual wedgie on TV. The mighty Redmond giant is running a new television commercial for Windows Phone that shows off its Cortana virtual assistant being much more talented and helpful than Apple’s Siri software. The general theme of the ad is similar to last year’s Microsoft spots that touted its Surface tablets over Apple’s iPad.

raspberryMicrosoft is also cooking up its own recipe for Raspberry Pi. But while the bare-bones Pi computer (shown here) costs a mere $40, Microsoft’s own version of the naked circuit board computer is called Sharknado 3, er,  The Shark’s Cove and runs about $300. The Shark’s Cove is intended to be a serious dev board for programmers and less of a hobbyist gadget like the Pi. The Microsoft Shark board does come with a copy of Windows 8.1 and the oomph to actually run it.

A lower-cost cable plan that brings broadband, basic channels and HBO for about $49-a-month is said to be in the works. The budget package had a trial run with Comcast last year. Game of Thrones for fewer bones, perhaps?

marscakeAnd finally, up on Mars. We’d like to congratulate NASA’s Opportunity Rover for setting an off-world driving record. The rolling robot has been cruising around the Red Planet since 2004 and in that decade, racked up just over 25 miles on its little odometer.  And a big “Happy Birthday” this week to NASA itself. The agency came into existence on July 29, 1958, after Congress and President Eisenhower made it so with the creatively named National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958. The mission? “To provide for research into problems of flight within and outside the earth’s atmosphere, and for other purposes.”  It’s not quite as poetic as, To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before,” but hey, you have to start somewhere.