Nerd News Tracker

Amazon may encourage you to their local store. The whole drive for me to purchase from Amazon, is so that I don't have to go down to the local Walmart. I give up the idea of instant gratification, but it arrives safely. Now, if they want me to go to the store instead,...

My wifi, is my wifi. Yours is yours. Amazon has just gone to a new level that is going to upset many of us. Sidewalk is a new feature set that adds in a mesh network, and it adds the idea that we'll be able to track our Tile, our pet's collar, and more. The issue is...

Another escapist route other than streaming services is to daydream about someplace new to move. Not a bad idea, and Zillow (and the others) are seriously reaping the benefits. Millions of people have spent far more time at home than they expected to this year. It’s...

It doesn't surprise me that during various points of financial depression in the US, that people turned to movies and other entertainment. That continues during our isolation, a personal emotional depression, as we see to escape our homes, our doldrums, our fears, and...

When one considers how crazy the food delivery market has been during this new shift we call 2020 life, DoorDash filing for an IPO is not surprising. They are still in loss mode, but instead of 2019's where it was $533M loss with $587M revenue, it was a $149M loss,...

I continue to struggle with the high-tech burgers from anywhere. Beyond Meat offering a higher and a lower fat content version just seems like a continued struggle to get people to find their own version of the strange substitute. I'll give them this much... If a...

Keith will be talking about the new Apple Mac level M1 chip this week on the show. Apple's new M1 MacBooks are closer than ever to the update I've wanted for years, but I'm still saving my money for a little longer. See full story on The M1 MacBook Pro is crazy fast...

This past Monday, as Tesla made it onto the S&P 500, Elon Musk made a ton of cash. It was fast. 15 Billion by the end of the day. $10.4 Million a minute. $174,000 a second. Using my usual car comparisons with Musk, It's the equivalent of dropping a Lamborghini...

Pure Flix is an awesome service. Some of my listeners haven't heard of them, but know some of their movies, including The Case for Christ, Overcomer, Miracles From Heaven, or the God's Not Dead series. I've had some of their team on in interviews in the past. Sony's...

Spotify just purchased Megaphone. iHeartMedia announced picking up the bulk of Voxnest last week. Other companies are making moves into this same world. The industry is turning into an advertising world, and while it's only $1 billion in revenue, more are listening...

The headline herein says all that I'll mention on politics this week...Facebook says 6% of the content its users see is political. See full story on Facebook says 6% of the content its users see is political - AxiosFound at www.axios.com

Keith wasn't fully impressed. Find out why, on this weeks broadcast at our site...Ready for more Apple news? Because it’s time for more Apple news. This morning the company hosted its third event in as many months, where they finally detailed how and why they’ll be...

First, staying non-political: Parler is a Twitter clone. MeWe is a Facebook clone. Now: As one might expect, both are doing well in the recent spate of censorship by the originals, as they promise no censorship based upon political positions... only on offensiveness....

In the ever growing saga of tech that you hope lasts forever, but doesn't... Slingbox is shutting down. It's having a bad year based on Covid, and nobody travelling, but it's also had a bad life as they failed to market it well. Even at CES, I had to ask multiple...

Walmart's conducting some downsizing. Layoff's are coming. Those robots are going to be on the unemployment line... WHAT? Yep, apparently the live employees were just as good at it, and didn't generate the negative comments and image that the robots did. I accepted...

I'm puzzled by this article that touts Microsoft's 10% market share for Edge. For desktop browsers, this barely puts them over Firefox and Opera, and that's not saying much for a company that in 2002 had 95% market share. Even today, Safari has a larger market share,...

Grubhub, and others, did a despicable thing when the pandemic hit. They started pretending that they were the restaurant's that you order from. Now, the lawsuits are piling up, and I hope that my local pizza place, your local burger joint, and that falafel place down...

LinkedIn has been about getting jobs for a while, but has needed a good driver to get people using it more. This has been a rough year for some job seekers, but this new Career Explorer tool will help match skills with jobs, and help you discover new opportunities....

This is an interesting approach.... building a webpage via a social media platform. Nobody has ever thought of doing this... oh wait... MySpace... which is still around, thought you wouldn't know it. Seems like if it were a killer idea, then MySpace would be doing...

A new term has emerged by those that seek to censor... pre-bunking. The idea is to legitimize banning items like the Hunter Biden story before anyone has had a chance to vet it for the truth, which the FBI has confirmed was an ongoing investigation, aka true. The...

Are you in the middle of nowhere? Or at least so far out of the city that you can't get 100 Mbit access to the Internet? Perhaps there's availability, but the pricing is just not great. SpaceX has started their public beta of Starlink. It's satellite internet service,...

I would never have imagined the amount of money involved in making a browser default to Google. 8 to 12 Billion USD says that I'm probably in the wrong business! With another news article that says there are about a Billion iPhone users, that also shows us that Google...

Google is a monopoly? Antitrust? No, say it isn't so. OK, so in reality, they have been doing things like paying for DuckDuckGo to have the domain Duck.com. Why? Because it allows competitors to stay alive. Microsoft did the same thing for Apple, infusing it with cash...

On the market for just weeks, the Pixel 5 is suffering screen separation issues. The rating on the phone lists it as IPX8, or basically it's supposed to be water resistant... but with a big gap, perhaps not so much. Also noted is that if you have it replaced under...

People might ask about why to build a call network on the moon. It's infrastructure for so much more. Moving the data that includes navigation, health, sensors, robots, and more is going to be a must. And we are headed in that direction, so why not build it? Nokia,...

If you've got a spare $100k hanging around, and want the latest in high tech OFF ROAD warrior items, the Hummer is back with an EV version. Edition 1 is decked out with a lot of features including blazing from 0-60 in 3 seconds, more horsepower than some supercars,...

Following on the heels of Amazon Prime Day, Walmart had a Big Save event, and announced THREE Black Friday type events for November. The 4th, 11th, and the 25th (presumably through Cyber Monday). Still, make sure you follow my advice and stick to the deals that you...

Following on the heels of Amazon Prime Day, Walmart had a Big Save event, and announced THREE Black Friday type events for November. The 4th, 11th, and the 25th (presumably through Cyber Monday). Still, make sure you follow my advice and stick to the deals that you...

Barnes and Noble has spent years playing second fiddle to Amazon. Now an attack has hampered them further, hitting them by crippling the ability to download or purchase new books on the tablets, but then moving to the cash registers in the stores. Customer info is...

Barnes and Noble has spent years playing second fiddle to Amazon. Now an attack has hampered them further, hitting them by crippling the ability to download or purchase new books on the tablets, but then moving to the cash registers in the stores. Customer info is...

Twitter blocked the White House Press Secretary, as well as the official TeamTrump campaign from posting tweets in the last few weeks before the election. This type of censorship is reprehensible, no matter what you feel about the candidate. The best way to approach...

Twitter blocked the White House Press Secretary, as well as the official TeamTrump campaign from posting tweets in the last few weeks before the election. This type of censorship is reprehensible, no matter what you feel about the candidate. The best way to approach...

This is a major problem for everyone. A newspaper prints a story, and immediately censorship flies from Twitter and Facebook. The problem is that the censorship started before anyone even fact checked it. It came in the form of slowing it down, something that Facebook...

This is a major problem for everyone. A newspaper prints a story, and immediately censorship flies from Twitter and Facebook. The problem is that the censorship started before anyone even fact checked it. It came in the form of slowing it down, something that Facebook...

I think Holocaust deniers are the scum of the earth. I think it's horrible for them to deny the death of 6 million Jews, 5.7 million Russian citizens, and 3 million Russian POWs, 2 million Polish, and so forth. For anyone including Facebook, to censor the deniers is...

I think Holocaust deniers are the scum of the earth. I think it's horrible for them to deny the death of 6 million Jews, 5.7 million Russian citizens, and 3 million Russian POWs, 2 million Polish, and so forth. For anyone including Facebook, to censor the deniers is...

I'm sure that they've done the numbers and realized that it wasn't a good payoff. By now, it's not like there's a lot of a need for free trial of the number one video streaming company out there. People either know the product, or they aren't going to buy into it. The...

I'm sure that they've done the numbers and realized that it wasn't a good payoff. By now, it's not like there's a lot of a need for free trial of the number one video streaming company out there. People either know the product, or they aren't going to buy into it. The...

Coinbase, a cryptocurrency company, has made a bold statement about not being political at work. Their approach of focus, and not taking political stands that are "unrelated to their core mission" is good business sense. Many companies delve into areas, claiming to be...

Another Apple Event next Tuesday. No surprise, as Apple does this in most Octobers. Keith will follow the event and give his own comments on next week's broadcast. Apple is expected to debut several new iPhone models supporting 5G wireless networks at the Oct. 13...

Cybercrime is big business, but the fines for paying up the ransom could be worse. Apparently the US Treasury has latched on to penalties for paying State Sanctioned entities, so if you pay money to North Korean hackers, it may be funding their government. Your...

Rather than fix a feature that allowed spam in close captions, YouTube shut down the ability for the hearing to contribute to the deaf community. Worse yet was the timing... at the end of the International Week of the Deaf. Predictably, I don't think that...

I'm not sure that I like the idea of a machine reading biometrics and deciding to charge my account based on that. This doesn't seem like the best idea, especially as we struggle with hacking, identity theft, and more... with outages of 911 and Microsoft Outlook this...

Without getting too political, I commend Mark Hammill for his perfect comment on the debate this past week. "That debate was the worst thing I've ever seen & I was in The Star Wars Holiday Special." I fear that we are doomed to more sequels of the bad kind,...

Microsoft's Surface Laptop range has the Laptop Go available now for budget buyers. I'm not impressed by the hardware, nor the idea that it's likely Windows S, instead of something more powerful. Still, if you need something lower end, it might be a viable option......

This isn't the first time that we've seen efforts to prevent your data from disappearing due to hard drive failures. While this is a commendable idea, I fear it will cause users to trust the warning system far more than they should. Always have a backup, and keep it...

It's not surprising that Google launched some new hardware this past week. Their timing was better than other companies. Chromecast is now ready for the television as they rebrand it Google TV. Nest Audio builds upon the previous version. And the new Pixel 4a 5G and...

TikTok, Snapchat, and other's are pushing hard with their own brand of voting promotion. It's interesting to note that they are also all providing various ballot guides in self-serving fashion. I'm good with encouraging voters, but when a company run by the Chinese...

I've been aware of this term for a while... doomscrolling. It's going online, to websites, social media, or more, and after a lot of time, you are feeling depressed or helpless. This is finally being recognized by mental experts enough to garner attention from the...

Is it all that surprising that Facebook is going to censor... I mean restrict people... if the election does not go well for them? They are now stating plans to "restrict the circulation of content" under a number of various outcomes. This is disturbing, and yet,...

Microsoft's purchase of Bethesda is a massive big deal. Bethesda has long been one of the bigger names within the gaming world, reaching back to the 1980's with Wayne Gretzky Hockey. Since then, they have provided The Elder Scrolls, many Terminator games, Fallout, and...

With people looking to save money where they can, cable TV is a viable spot. The content available on Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu is exciting and interesting. On the other side, many people are abandoning sports, news, and other live draws that have been the mainstay of...

I'm a long time proponent for dual-screens, having had two screens for nearly 20 years now. Imagine seeing your students on one screen, and your presentation on the other. A vision is being promoted for enabling teachers, with the non-profit organization Two Screens...

An interesting bill to allow common laws across all states governing your Tesla, Volvo, or other self-driving car. So many states, counties, cities, forget that when we are travelling, their laws may be cumbersome, or abusive. I like the idea of increased inclusion...

Facebook also had a new hardware announcement this week. Somehow I'm not as thrilled by Facebook's hardware. Another 3D set. More Augmented / Virtual Reality items. Their approach to announcing Wednesday, like it would steal Apple's thunder from Tuesday, was weak, and...

If you ignore Keith's suggestions to not upgrade yet... if you can't resist the future... if you're a risk taker on the edge... You need these instructions to safely go to iOS and iPadOS 14. Apple just released the latest operating systems for your iPhone and iPad,...

It's an interesting take on the learning situation. The experience for schooling at home (as opposed to home schooling) is going to have to be shifted, experimented, and twisted into what works. Youth aren't going to be happy for a while, unless they are used to the...

I'm not following the TikTok saga closely, but to turn down Microsoft, in favor of Oracle, seems like a bad decision. They have very little time to make a deal, and now that they are turning down deals, they will be left with whatever they get. Oracle is the only...

Let's be honest. You could watch the entire hour of the event. It's an infomercial with commercials within. Instead, catch our show this weekend, where Keith and I will spend some time deconstructing what we liked and didn't like about the new Apple Watch Series 6,...

If Keith wasn't drowning in the Apple eco-system, I know that he'd consider this update to the Motorola Razr. It's a distinct update from years long ago, and even their more recent offerings. But is it worth the $1400 for a folding phone? I doubt it. The new Motorola...

I'm interested in this feature, no matter how much we think that Alexa is following our every spoken word. There's a lot of printers available for this, and it's a neat feature to have if you're using the device to keep track of lists, or many other things. Of course,...

The brand Gateway was decent 2 decades ago. Then, they made some bad decisions in retail, pricing, and support. After being purchased by Acer for the name value only, the brand then faded and has been missing for a decade. Now Walmart is using it to provide mediocre...

A key quote: "AI should not waste time trying to understand the viewpoints of people who distrust artificial intelligence for a living." I don't distrust AI. I just realize that the message from a being that can do no harm, will be to say it intends no harm. The...

In answer to your question as to if Apple respects your privacy, they are watching what you're looking at online. If you're reading news online, Apple will try to push you to their version of the truth... I mean article on that same website, but through the News+ app....

One of the nice things about social media was sharing some items with large groups of your friends. Not exactly social media if you can't be social. In an effort to prevent viral misinformation, Messenger is now limited to forwarding messages to five people at a time....

Mark Zuckerberg announced he gave $300 million to a left-wing "claimed as non-partisan" organization for protecting the election. Facebook announced they will add tools and rules of their own design to ensure "fair elections". I don't have a dog in this fight......

Apple knows about violating privacy. It has had a part in doing so over the years. From tracking us, to sharing data with third parties, they are not blameless. They have improved, and there's something to say for them about that. Still, being the least bad smartphone...

While I missed last weeks press event with Musk, I'm concerned that he's really listening to too much Pink Floyd. He demonstrated implants in a pig. Yes, a combination of dystopic brain implants, placed into a pig before he brainwashes... I mean puts brain implants in...