Citizens Of Tech

We’ve got the biggest supernova ever, your gadgets spying on you, accelerated bone repair molecules, plastic eating bacteria, the death of the shiny disc, and even a little history!

We discuss emulators, cassettes, long distance wireless charging, SpaceX, gene editing, Oculus Rift, and NOT flying over Antarctica.

Merry Christmas, Happy Festivus, etc. from the Citizens of Tech Podcast!

Citizens of Tech 022 - Sucralose Hyperloop Blenders

Missing Kickstarter money, sponge injections, astronomical uncertainty, and a writhing pile of snakes!

Citizens of Tech 021 - Winter Sponge Planets

Welcome to Citizens of Tech! At this merry time of year the temperatures begin plummeting here in the wondrously frigid north-east of the United States. Along with the dropping mercury our thoughts obviously wander to such festive topics as the chemical properties of water, flying personal robots, and hard drives with massive storage capacities; let alone “Today I Learned” and “Deathwatch”. Settle in, Citizens, as we prepare to talk about tech, science and other anecdotes, facts, and hypotheses! Santa may leave presents under the tree, but with even greater care *we* nestle nerdy news, research, and commentary directly into your auditory cortex.

Today, we’ve got a CoT holiday gift guide, the failing Mac app store, Thunderbird ain’t no phoenix, rockets land in real life like in cartoons, and a little bit of Today I Learned.

IntroIn 1992, Neal Stephenson described virtual reality to his Snowcrash readers thusly. Ethan reads a selection from Snowcrash.Eric continues: ...and we’ll discuss how virtual reality is shaping up in the real world, doubling your bandwidth with T-mobile, the FCC’s velvet glove, Tesla seatbelt recall, binary stars becoming one, oxygen batteries, all sorts of computer history, and more on today’s Citizens of Tech.On November 20th, 2015 we gathered in our virtual studio to record this epic bit of nerdery. We start the day with…Eric continues with the T-mobile story.PresentT-Mobile going for the jugular - CEO: “Both investors and customers are going to be real happy. This could be the biggest thing we’ve announced.”http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tmobile-binge-on-video-

IntroWelcome to the Citizens of Tech podcast, a show where we discuss all sorts of interesting technology without skipping the details. This isn’t really a news show. Sure, we talk about some newsy stuff, but we try to include more of the science and nerdy details that make the stories interesting. While we’re at it, we also have a bit of fun with features like Deathwatch, we look back to the past at old technology, and peer ahead to technology we think might be the future.We hope you’ll stick around as we discuss making your bricks the open source way, Googlemobiles, 4K streaming with Roku, a DOA phone, LP cover art, orbiting memory, carbon nanotube non-volatile RAM, and more.I am Ethan Banks. Follow me for mostly technology tweets @ecbanks. Eric Sutphen, my fellow Citizens co-host and producer joins me today. Today is November 9, 2015, and it is a beautiful day.And we jump into the news with a Kickstarter project.PresentThe Liberator Compressed Earth Brick Presshttps://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ajartech/the-liberator-compressed-earth-brick-pressAn open source compressed earth brick press. “AjarTech is kicking off its first big project, and we need your help. We want to bring Compressed Earth Brick Presses (CEBs) to the masses as they should be: Open source! The Liberator CEB allows you to take clay and dirt dug for foundation and compress it into bricks for a house, a factory, a wall...anything! It's an exciting project and we can't wait to bring you on board.”The money will turn CAD into a document anyone can use. “We need your support to take the existing CAD designs for The Liberator Compressed Earth Brick Press, or CEB, and make them into a single document that anyone can download, modify, and go to a hardware store and buy the parts for. We're working with [CAD firm], a local Chicago design group, to make sure that the designs are professional, functional,

Portable Workstationshttp://www.nextcomputing.com/products/portable-workstationsRemember lunchbox portables?Everything old is new again.Life, uh...finds a way - but how?http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/asexual-lizards/Lizards from the Aspidoscelis genus from Mexico and the U.S. Southwest manage to produce well-bred offspring without the aid of male fertilization.1960s - Scientists documented all-female whiptail lizard populationsThere are 70 known species of vertebrates that can breed this way.It has long been unclear how they avoid “shallow gene pool syndrome” and the diseases that affect other creatures that breed this way.They maintain “genetic richness” by starting the process with double the normal amount of chromosomes

PresentReal-Time Motion Capture Firm Faceshift May Have Been Acquired by Applehttp://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/04/faceshift-motion-capture-acquired/What does Faceshift do? Using depth cameras such as Intel RealSense, they can observe a user’s face and translate their facial expressions to an avatar.That sounds...silly. What’s it useful for? Gaming. Animation. Consumer apps like Skype.So, if Apple really did acquire FaceShift, what will the do with the technology? “As for what Apple could do with Faceshift's technology, there are a number of possibilities ranging from the fun such as real-time avatars for FaceTime video chats to the more serious including biometrics for unlocking devices or authorizing payments via facial recognition.”Comcast experiments with cell-phone-like data charges, and overage fees, for home Internet usershttp://www.geekwire.com/2015/comcast-brings-cell-phone-like-data-charges-to-home-internet-users/

IntroOnce upon a time, there was a princess, only she didn’t know it. Her stepmother was mean, and her ugly stepsisters were condescending and cruel. One day, the princess shoved her foot into a glass slipper. It was really uncomfortable. She wiggled her toes, hoping for a better fit. The slipper shattered, a shard severing a plantar artery. She swooned from the sight of her own blood, pooling below her. The swoon turned into a faint. The faint a brief coma, which just as quickly turned into death. The poor princess bled out completely, the catastrophic blood loss too much for her tiny body to overcome. She died. Why? Why, oh, why??? Because she was not a Citizen of Tech! If she were, she’d have immediately recognized the foolishness of glass footwear, and made a wiser choice.To assist you with your technical wisdom…is me! (Ethan Banks) and reading the fate of the poor princess is Eric Sutphen your hosts for this rocket ride of insanity. Follow us @citizensoftech. On today’s program...A cloudy phone, Netflix on the nightshift, Hulu sorta ad free, an insane laptop, the humble dishwasher, the Tesla Model 3, and more!PresentEx-Android and HTC employees launch Robin, a “cloud-first” smartphonehttp://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/09/ex-android-and-htc-employees-launch-robin-a-cloud-first-smartphone/A matter of storage32GB local + 100GB cloudIt’s a nice phone. Really.

After a month, Citizens of Tech is back! To get back into the groove, we decided to stack up a whole bunch of interesting news stories. Our focus is on the present. Next week, we will head back into our standard format - we promise! We are...of course...Eric Sutphen & Ethan Banks.PresentEurope’s Extremely Large Telescope to be… extremely large! (ERIC)http://gizmodo.com/look-how-extremely-large-europes-extremely-large-telesc-1703844268 Intel targets gamers with sixth-gen 'Skylake' CPU launch (Ethan)http://www.engadget.com/2015/08/05/intel-skylake-desktop-enthusiast-cpus/Intel Core M being tested in phones (Eric)http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/02/intel-s-core-m-processors-are-being-tested-in-phones/I’m now an Estonian e-resident, but I still don’t know what to do with it

We start with a discussion of jail time. Jail. Time. And…147 MPH. Yeah. Eric tells the story. And then we hop into our show. Present Doomception: How modders got Doom to run inside of Doom http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/doomception-how-modders-got-doom-to-run-inside-of-doom/ Doom was open sourced in the 90’s. Folks have gone nuts porting it to all sorts of things.Now, you can run Doom inside of Doom. “OK, if we’re being technically accurate, this is actually Doom running inside GZDoom, a heavily modified Doom source port that was first released in 2005 to bring a slew of modern gaming features to the 1993 original. The author also warns that the in-game versions of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D available in the mod are only “semi-complete.” Still, the sheer amount of near-pointless effort and dedication needed to get GZDoom to run what is essentially a version of itself within itself is impressive (and kind of frightening).Action code script makes this possible. ”ACS was designed to allow modders to create more interactive environments through simple bytecodes that did things like open doors, play sounds, or move items and characters around in response to player actions. The basic bytecode-based language in that game was later extended in the ZDoom source port to allow for high-level programming features like named scripts, functions, arrays, and entire libraries. Those additions made their way into the later GZDoom as well.”We tear apart a $340 audiophile Ethernet cable and look inside http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/ars-prepares-to-put-audiophile-ethernet-cables-to-the-test-in-las-vegas/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/gallery-we-tear-apart-a-340-audiophile-ethernet-cable-and-look-inside/ Audiophile people are special kind of crazy. Some are willing to spend exorbitant amounts of money to get tiny improvements that most of us (maybe none of us) could actually hear.Cables are a prime example of this madness. Maybe fancy cables made a difference in the analog world. But in a digital one? The ones and zeros make it, or they don’t.Ethernet cables are already manufactured and can be tested to be within a specific performance rating. For a twisted pair Ethernet cable to perform at a particular “category” level, specific pairs must be twisted a specific number of times per foot. Beyond that, the 4 twisted pairs must be then twisted around each other in certain category definitions, all to avoid crosstalk, electromagnetic interference, and errors. The shorter the cable, the less likely these issues are to be present. Even with errors, Ethernet can detect them, discarding the errant frame, and probably get a retransmission assuming an acknowledged data protocol like TCP is running over the Ethernet cable.So. What’s in a $340 “audiophile” Ethernet cable?“The cable itself is of reasonably high quality, with braided and foil shielding around the entire cable coupled with foil shielding around the individual twisted pair bundles.”“The plugs are hig