Drew here, with this week’s episode of Technically Speaking.
We’ve got a new website, as of last week, which you can find at http://www.wespeaktech.org. The show will still be posted at whus.org each week, but you can find it on our site now as well.
After a fair amount of teasing, we had a quick discussion on Web 2.0 and car purchases. We started off discussing the flaws in the the Kelley Blue Book website (how painful we found it to navigate) and we moved from there into a discussion on how to write a decent Craigslist ad (include pictures and all of the information you can). One line of text in ALL CAPS doesn’t cut it. That may be fine of the classifieds, but you need something more for Craigslist if you want to make a good impression.
Our first formal conversation was on the recent Supreme Court ruling on Aereo, which decided that their business constituted copyright infringement. What does this mean, though? If I have a friend in Manhattan who lives at the top of the building and gets great TV reception, am I no longer allowed to pay them to set up my computer and antenna there to stream the data back to my house for my personal use? The Court’s ruling was narrow, so we’ll have to wait and see how far this goes. We were split over whether broadcast TV will or should go away in the next few years. It could be great for radio, right?
60-year old Jason Humphreys was upset about other drivers talking on the phone around him, so he started driving around with a cell phone jammer in the back of his SUV. The FCC found out, and he’s now on the hook for $48,000 for illegal operation of a signal-jamming device. Here’s a tip: While this was clever, don’t do this. You could actually cause people to lose their lives by blocking the signals of emergency responders, or by causing people to be more distracted as they check to see why their GPS isn’t working.
We talked once again about wearables, now that Android Wear has been anounced. Mike promised a full review of his Pebble for next week. I’m not sold on any of the new entries from Samsung, LG, and Motorola because there’s no way I’m going to charge my watch every day (the Pebble gets at least a few days).
After a short discussion on set-top boxes (Roku seems like the winner, at least for now, but the Chromecast is great), we rounded off the show with a discussion on the Supreme Court descision on cell phone searches. Namely, that authorities will now need a warrant in order to search your cell phone.
Technically Speaking is produced by Jason McMullan, Mike Fagan, and myself, Drew Gates. The show airs live on Mondays at 11am EST at 91.7fm (in the Storrs, CT area) and at whus.org (everywhere else). Get in touch with us at ask@wespeaktech.org or by leaving us a voicemail at (860) 880-0119. If we talk about your question, we’ll read/play it on air.
Download the show here or listen below.
See ya next week,
Drew Gates