Tag Archives: Indiana Jones

PTJ 370: SPACE WARS AND MOON BASES

Which is better — paying big bucks for the in-theater movie experience, or waiting a couple months and watching the flick at home? Are streaming services jacking their monthly prices too high for the average consumer? What’s with all this renewed global interest in the Moon and what’s going on with our Mars missions? And: are we ready to see holiday merch for sale while we’re in Back to School shopping mode? El Kaiser and J.D. discuss all of these pressing topics — and more — on Episode 370 of Pop Tech Jam!

PTJ 145: Just Give Chris Pratt the Fedora and Whip Already

Apple and Google had big splashy product announcements while we were away but don’t despair, J.D. fills us in on what the two tech behemoths are foisting on us and what the technorati have to say about it.

Also on the show our good friend and frighteningly talented reporter Laura M. Holson joins us to discuss the recent TEDWomen conference and, more importantly, her initial reactions to the latest CGI filled dino-romp “Jurassic World” starring the always entertaining Chris Pratt.

And speaking of Mr. Pratt.

If the producers of the rumored Indiana Jones reboot would just size the man up for a fedora and a whip, that would be great.

PTJ 133 News: Legacies

It’s been a rough few weeks for geek fandom and its iconic actors. Harrison Ford continues to recover from this private plane crash last Thursday, which came less than a week after the death of Leonard Nimoy on February 27th. We here at Pop Tech Jam wish Mr. Ford a hyperdrive-quick recovery and send our condolences to Mr. Nimoy’s family.

Since Mr. Nimoy’s passing, tributes continue to pop up around the cultural landscape, including a nod at the end of last week’s episode of The Big Bang Theory and multiple Spock statues showing up in-world around the Star Trek Online game. And in a thoughtful essay over on The Guardian’s website, Jason Wilson writes how Trekker culture now rules the world, as it introduced a productive creativity into fandom that long pre-dated Facebook, Twitter or even the commercial Internet itself. Live long and prosper, indeed.

Now, in hardware news, Samsung’s newly announced Galaxy S6 family of phones has retailers excited. A report in The Korea Times notes that Samsung received 20 million pre-orders for the new phones from wireless carriers and retail stores around the world.

androidGoogle is pushing out Android 5.1 starting this week. Also curious explorers over at the Android Police site who were peeking into the code for Google Drive 2.2 claim to have found lines written into the program that shift the old auto photo backup feature of Google+ to Google Drive.

Hillary Clinton held a press conference this week to deal with the controversy surrounding the revelation last week that she was using a private email account to conduct government business during her tenure as Secretary of State. The reason? She said she just wanted to stick with one email account and one device. (Yeah, this flap isn’t closing any time soon.)

Wikimedia is among those suing the National Security Agency for its mass surveillance programs that violate protections built into the United States Constitution. In a separate security note, The Intercept site says it has documents detailing how the Central Intelligence Agency spent years trying to break the encryption used on Apple’s iOS devices.

In NASA news, the Dawn spacecraft became the first piece of human-made hardware to achieve orbit around a dwarf planet last Friday when the sprightly little probe began to circle Ceres. Go, Dawn, go!

Meanwhile, over on Mars, scientists hope the arm on the Curiosity Rover can get back to work after its built-in drill began to suffer from an intermittent short-circuit problem a few weeks ago. Engineers have been running diagnostic tests while the rover has been parked. Even though Curiosity hasn’t been rolling around the red planet wince late February, it’s still been taking scientific observations from its position and monitoring the Martian weather.

opportunityNASA’s other active Mars rover, the 11-year-old Opportunity, is working its mission to study the Martian terrain and has rolled more than 26 miles on its most recent quest to study unfamiliar rocks. Despite its advanced age, Opportunity is still knocking around and recently got a new version of its software installed remotely from the rover team back on Earth. It’s also scheduled for a little memory reformat in the near future as a maintenance procedure. May all our space explorers — factual and fictional — live on in our hearts and minds.

Gone But Most Certainly Not Forgotten

I’ve never really gotten over the hurt. I’m stuck in that murky ground between steps three and four of the Five Stages of Loss and Grief. I’ve tried to move on but I’m starting to think nothing can ever take your place. Sure, some have tried to fill the huge void left after you were so cruelly put down but sadly, and despite potential, most have come up short. I miss you dearly Google Reader.

What?!?! I take my RSS subscription and news aggregation seriously. Doesn’t everybody?

When Google pulled the plug on its Reader service Feedly immediately stepped up its game by upgrading their servers and making the transition from the Big G simple and painless. The goal was for Feedly to position itself as the biggest and best news reader in all the land. They succeeded quite well and emerged as the defacto standard for RSS readers. It was a heady few months and I honestly felt I could finally find happiness. Then things got weird.

The decision makers at Feedly introduced a very expensive “pro” product that stripped functionality from the service and essentially made some aspects pay-for-play. Team Feedly followed that up with a very sudden transition from Google OAuth logins to Google+ only logins that prevented users without Google+ logons from using the service. They wisely reversed that decision but the pièce de résistance came next. Feedly began hijacking their users links.

Content that users were linking to and assumed would lead to the original source was now hosted on Feedly’s own servers. Uncool and heavy, to say the least. Not surprising they felt it was prudent to role this “feature” back as well. For me it was three strikes, take a seat for Feedly.

On this week’s 75th episode SPECTACULAR I run down my alternatives to Feedly now that they’ve so thoroughly nuked the fridge and successfully jumped the shark. The top contenders include work-in-progress efforts from AOL and Digg plus offerings from smaller companies like Inoreader and The Old Reader.

Take a listen and find out which RSS aggregator gets the nod from El Kaiser.