Google wants you to put another screen inside your house Elon Musk has a very big rocket that could take you to Mars or to LA we all played cuphead and will tell you what we think all that and so much more coming up on tech news today this is Troy’s bandwidth for tech news today is provided by cash fly at CA CH e FL y com [Music] this is tech news today episode 1864 recorded Friday September 29th 2017 this episode of tech news today is brought to you by rocket mortgage by Quicken Loans home plays a big role in your life that’s why Quicken Loans created rocket mortgage it lets you apply simply and understand the entire mortgage process fully so you can be confident that you’re getting the right mortgage for you get started at rocket mortgage comm slash TNT welcome to tech news today this is the show where we tell you the tech news and we tell it to you with a smile we try we’re gonna tell you about this tech news I’m Jason Howard should we get to tellin ya let’s get to some challenge all right let’s do this security firm duo showed its research at the Eco party security conference that demonstrates how the firmware on a large number of Mac’s isn’t getting haven’t been getting any updates either due to a lack of updates being offered by Apple or due to a silent failing updating procedure happening in the background Apple’s efi which stands for extensible firmware interface runs prior to the operating system boot up process and when it’s outdated that leads the entire system vulnerable to years old efi attacks that have the ability to gain deeper control over the target machine than if it was just a you know something further up the chain running on the OS or something along those lines firmware it goes much deeper isn’t something that updates to this is not the type of thing that a user has to choose to do it should happen on its own so we’re always you know urging people to keep their systems updated you know update to the latest you know if the operating system has an update waiting for you don’t wait push that through now it’ll be as safe as possible problem is these updates aren’t necessarily user controllable they happen in the background and if they’re not happening that just leaves wide open holes potentially for a lot of bad stuff to happen on the machine yeah and the worst part about this is that they don’t know they think it says your system is up to date it’s super dangerous for organizations enterprise small businesses big businesses especially users with high security clearance or access to sensitive information this is really dangerous I mean with the Equifax hack we were talking about how if they’d only gotten their their updates like they knew that they weren’t you know they knew that they weren’t updated their windows was telling them Mac is not saying that they’re not updated this is this is a big problem it’s it to be fair the study says that it is also a problem for Windows that this just was a study they did on Macs only they’re not saying like that max aren’t also don’t have similar problems with EFI firmware windows computers are even more likely to be at risk and what it’s riskier because there are more of them in the enterprise right yeah and all sorts of different different ways that they go about kind of locking this this part of it of the firmware down the study itself they didn’t actually go in and analyze all those things but yeah they were kind of positing it’s probably a whole lot worse over there in the case of this particular study 73 thousand Apple machines were analyzed of those 4.2 percent of the Macs that were tested had the wrong efi version paired with the operating system version so in other words the software update happened but it failed to actually update the efi as it should have just some examples 2015 21 point 5 inch iMac models had failed a fee fi updates on 43 percent of the machines that they tested 25 to 30 percent of the 2016 MacBook Pros had failed EF eyes and basically there’s you know there is malware that can check to see if an EFI is outdated and if so you know they can gain full control and you would never know so it’s not a not good at all dual Labs does say and if you they have a github page they say that they’re near release of a tool that can check your efi to see kind of what the status is on your efi it’s called efi G or effigy and there’s a kind of a parking place on github for that so they say it’s coming soon to check back for that so that you can check the status of your efi sources tell TechCrunch that Google is working on a home assistant with a touchscreen like the Amazon show which would explain why they cut off access to YouTube this week through the echo show it’s code named at Manhattan and the rumor device will have a 7-inch screen that will let that will let you watch YouTube let you view your google photos interact with Google assistant and make video calls it will also function as your home Smart Hub Facebook is also reportedly working on something similar a smart screen for video calling called Aloha this Google device according to TechCrunch could launch this year I’m thinking like Google keep I love so many Google Apps so I I think a screen a little Google screen like that would be great right now I connect my Google Calendar to my echo show and you know I say what’s on my calendar and it shows me a list of all the things all the activities that my kids are going to all the meetings that I have at work I love it it’s like the closest that I’ve gotten to this elusive you know screen in the kitchen that we’ve always talked about talked about that it would just be great better than a calendar better than a whiteboard just something a touchscreen I would show everything that everyone’s doing and if they cut that off if you cut find you don’t do it you don’t want to make Megan upset yeah but I mean you know I’ve heard you also talk about like yet another screen in the home I guess it’s probably Marco though that’s a little for that because I know my kids well enough to know that like you know like I’ve talked about the music phone that they have that’s all it does is it plays music and you know streams from google play music if that did anything else they’d be on it all the time but because I know it’s locked down to music I’m fine with them having it all the time and making sure that their screen time for other things is very limited and follows a schedule this is just one of those devices that would totally throw that out the window I’d spend all of my time you know trying to batten down the hatches on it you know then actually enjoying what it could offer well hopefully that people working on it would maybe also have the same problems I mean maybe there would be some some sort of family you know yeah family lock where you couldn’t did you ever figure out how to turn off YouTube like only get the music from YouTube and not the so that your kids weren’t yes I actually was able to do that on the devices that I set up with Google’s family link which when you do family link your you’re setting the device like you have to wipe out the device and start fresh and log into their account that’s setup through family links so it’s a parental control kind of system that’s baked into the u.s. a little bit deeper than some of the third-party solutions but when you do that you can determine whether you want YouTube to even exist on the device at all and that was kind of the thing that was missing so like on that music phone for example it’s in family link I’ve removed YouTube functionality so even if there is a music video that links into Google Play Music yeah it doesn’t show and so all they get is music so that was kind of a lifesaver there is that music phone or radio what do you mean it’s like a music funny you don’t use it as a phone it’s a music player all it is is a music player that you’re calling it a phone you know yeah well you know I’m used to that because that’s what they call it music kids will never make phone calls they’ll just by the time they they’ll leak I don’t even know what you mean talk to someone with my voice that doesn’t even make sense that’s true that’s probably very true I will be curious on this particular device I mean I guess it would be running Android right like that’s kind of Google’s operating system for all sorts of devices I’d be curious to see how Android how they would treat Android on a device like this because I don’t envision a device like this with like an Android homescreen on it you know I mean like that just doesn’t seem seems a little hacky I would want something that was designed around the interface to be elegant and everything but I imagine underneath it probably would be running Android well you know I had that front row camera it was a live streaming camera that you could wear around your neck in it we’re in Android and it had a beautiful interface it was it looked a little bit like a SmartWatch so you know you just slid over and the icons you could choose you know it’s a very limited amount of icons take a picture there was a watch on there and a compass and so I imagine something like that whatever it is it’ll probably gonna be customizable as Android phones are and pretty yeah well and if it’s running Android then technically it could run all sorts of Android apps and be a little bit more expanded in that regard because of that app compatibility so that could be a good thing as well kind of extending the functionality of it even further Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that it has signed a contract to bring the world’s largest lithium ion battery to South Australia with a hundred day deadline lest the battery be completely free if they don’t meet that deadline the area is prone to blackouts and gas shortages and musk believes he can wrap this up with a nice little bow quickly which would be great exposure for this type of energy storage for other parts of the world that fee that face similar restrictions similar issues it would provide power for more than 30,000 homes that’s the same number of homes that lost power during major blackouts that happened in the area last year and then in March you may remember earlier this year must said on Twitter that he could install 100 megawatt storage facility in the area in 100 days or it would be entirely free now he’s kind of following through on that and that cost by the way if it’s free that would be a cost to Tesla of roughly around 50 million dollars or so he set that on Twitter a little bit later after that yeah this they’re racing to beat the summer the Australian Center which starts in December so they really want to get that up and running I think I think he can do it yeah I think he can to this and Mars which we’ll talk about next but yes getting getting to it in time for the summer which is when all of that stuff happens you know the potential faults can happen I says 50 megawatts are already on this on site and in place so I think it’s very likely to happen if kind of half the job is already taken care of and they’ve only just now started the hundred date countdown deadline but that’s just because they’ve signed the contract so now he’s basically put his money on the line and said and I guess Tesla beat out 90 total bids for this energy storage so him saying that was obviously a part – a part of his way Tesla’s way of backing that up and saying hey we want to be the one to show the rest of the world how you can how you can better plan for this and you know use their batteries in the process and do some really cool things I guess in the island of why they’re also playing around with this 272 Tesla battery packs there that store energy for use at night time and I guess it’s cut down a lot of the cost that was associated with that prior we should probably go to Kauai to test it yet to do some real journalism all right let’s take the whole company everyone everyone to Kauai for this very important story also at the International Astronautical Congress this week musk announced his grand plans to get to Mars in giant reusable spaceships in the next five years in the same announcement he detailed city-to-city rocket travel on earth the rockets called bfr will hold a bigger payload than any other rocket before it must consists they’ll be capable of hoisting spaceships shaped spaceships into the air to transport you from LA to New York in 29 minutes or anywhere in the world in under an hour for the same price as an economy ticket on an airplane VFR just so you know does not stand for big friendly rocket that’s not what it stands for big brand later I’ll let you guess what it stands for also included in his master plan was a moon base and he showed off some prototypes of what that might look like he says these are aspirational claims so but he’s he’s done he has done as many amazing things as he’s made him met as many amazing things happen as things that he’s said he would do like that I think could equal parts like the reusable rockets the SpaceX reusable rockets are amazing no one can doubt that and you know he said a lot of other crazy stuff so you never know what he’s gonna do engineers have been pressure testing them in the ocean so I don’t know would you want to fly in one of these pressure tested BFRs yeah I’d be in a big rocket sure that sounds like a lot of fun I would absolutely do that if we were going to Mars let’s say let’s just you know take a trip to Mars the bfr lifts the spaceship it has 40 cabins inside to three people per cabin 100 people total per flight that bfr of you know big part of this is lowering the cost and that requires that that’s why they focused so heavily on returning that rocket to the launch pad reusable rockets in that regard the spaceship continues to orbit to refill the tanks methane-oxygen propellant and then it shoots off to Mars for a month-long journey with all those people occupying the spaceship and they’re saying that they can get this happening without passengers as early as 2022 and then a few years later send four BFRs to Mars with two carrying cargo two carrying people so 2024 that’s seven years away in in a mere seven years we might be witnessing people shooting off to Mars well beet master in our chat room wants you to go he says get your mass to Mars thank you very much I appreciate the Ahnold reference as for Earth travel new york to shanghai in 39 minutes basically he said musk said any two points on earth would be less than one hour apart that is awesome that is so cool if your brains didn’t turn to jelly it is definitely awesome let’s hope that your brains don’t turn to jelly that would be a horrible side-effect mm-hmm but after the breaks a maskavich is here to tell us why everyone is fascinated by a new character who has a cup for a head but first let’s take a minute to thank rocket mortgage the sponsor of this episode if you have bought a house any time in the recent past and if you’ve needed a mortgage because you don’t have all that money sitting around in your mattress then you know that the mortgage process was not keeping up with the times and if you are keeping a bunch of money in your mattress you are also not keeping up with the times but I’m not going to judge you I just want to tell you that the current mortgage process was dated and needed a client-focused technological revolution and that my friends is why Quicken Loans created or a rocket mortgage rocket mortgage gives you the confidence you need when it comes to buying a home or refinancing your existing home loan it’s simple allowing you to fully understand all the details and be confident you’re getting the right mortgage for you it’s convenient their trusted partners allow you to share your financial information with the Rockit mortgage at the touch of a button it’s powerful so whether you’re looking to buy your first home or your tenth home rocket mortgage is able to perform thousands of 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Nintendo classic which we will talk about in a bit I’m sure but there’s another equally gorgeous thing indeed cuphead is out finally it’s been teased and talked about for years but this platforming cartoony game exists and it is gorgeous anyone watching the video version of this will be lucky to see video footage of the game running but they’re not going to hear the audio with it and this is truly a 1930s cartoon in terms of sound and motion combining to incredible effect now as a video game it plays essentially like a platformer with Gunung so I like to think of Meg as sort of the perfect example of where you have to run around and there’s tough stuff happening and you have to shoot a little gun in order to win against incredibly tough enemies and really tricky platforming it’s all being done in this game in a style of I’d say a very early Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies kind of styled cartoon Bosko as one of the cartoons series that i think of a lot with us although this is color just gorgeous every single moment you play it looks wonderful which is good because it is also really hard this game could only take you about an hour and 30 minutes to beat if you are the greatest video game player ever however this is tough as nails perfect precise kind of gameplay stuff and as a result you’re going to replay each level if you want to truly beat the game on Normal difficulty you’re going to play each a level up to 80 times in order to beat at 88 0 that is the amount of tries that both myself and ARS Technica’s Kyle Orland went through to beat some of the game’s bosses the game is now unlike some other Megaman and Super Mario style games its focuses mostly on bosses and I think they do this because beautiful hand-drawn bosses look way cooler for the style of game that cuphead does then say just an average run around and jump on tiny little creatures the bosses have lots of little tiny henchmen and things that come flying at you in every direction it looks really cool but you have to essentially learn these patterns in a way that fuels I mean the whole thing feels like an 80s Nintendo instruction booklet when you look at these old instruction booklets and hope to the game would ever look like these little hand-drawn little details that were put in well that’s what happens here but the game is as hard as an 80s Nintendo game the kind where you would essentially get one game for 60 bucks and play it for the whole rest of the school year I it took me about an hour and a half to play through just the the beginning where it teaches you how to play it I tried it Alex downloaded it his Windows machine and the tutorial is what I believe you people you know what it’s funny and that is the thing as I tested this out with other friends and I found that was the same issue because there are people who are looking at this and going this is beautiful and the game has a quote unquote simple mode that you can trigger in order to have simpler bosses and simpler challenges but the tutorial even introduces stuff that is annoying and obnoxious there’s a parry system was what they call it where you have to double tap the jump button at the perfect moment in midair when a little tiny pink thing comes at you there’s the dash maneuver you have to use to sort of bounce around it’s just there’s a few too many buttons I feel like to make this as accessible as I think we all kind of hoped this would be this is not the ultimate beautiful cartoon game that anyone can jump into just because they think it looks good no this is a game that looks really good because you’re gonna be looking at it a lot if you actually invest in it it’s hard you’re going to be ooh listening to the songs and playing through the levels over and over and over and so the beauty and the presentation are there to help you suffer I played this for a little while as well and I had a great time playing through it and I loved the art style I’m very curious to know because I kept I’m kind of reading up a little bit on how this was put together and the art director Chad moldenhauer just basically said you know this didn’t get digital for a very like this didn’t enter the digital realm for a very long time it’s all hand-drawn which I imagine takes forever when you’re when you’re creating an entire games worth of art and it’s all hand-drawn to begin with have you seen any other games that kind of follow this path it seems so obvious now that this would have happened already and I can almost see like a he-man era you know that bad animation from the 80s a games falling into this category do you think this is like the birth of a new category of games in terms of art style if it makes money yeah but it’s really hard to do a hand-drawn everything because again they aren’t doing sort of the cheating that you might expect from something like he-man he-man went a pretty cheap route and also used you know terrible overseas labor don’t ever read up on that if you ever want to feel good about yourself it there’s a lot of work that goes into making a videogame look like an inch action manual in your mind from the 80s so if this one indeed makes money sure I think we’ve seen in the retro phase of gaming kind of the opposite where people have said now we’re gonna go with pixelation and sort of simpler stuff to get games done more quickly this one took three or four years and is it’s only 20 bucks I mean gee I almost think that they should just charge you to watch it on YouTube like you should just be able to pay five bucks and watch someone else play it just to enjoy it as a short film because again not only is there beautiful stuff and music tied in there’s also a lot of cute story and elements like that worth it there’s lots of little jokes that are scattered around the entire time every time you die in a boss you get a different one liner making fun of how you lost because there’s so many different ways in which you could lose in these boss battles that they keep track of it they’ve really built the whole thing for you to get into it and be immersed if I was 8 years old 12 or even 15 years old this would be my game of the year hands down as a grown-up I don’t have as much patience for this but I will say it’s fair in its brutal difficulty if that sounds anywhere near interesting to you grab it otherwise head to YouTube I really like the music as well I think you can buy the soundtrack oh I can buy it for 10 bucks I can’t remember I I don’t have a link handy but I do imagine if you just type cuphead one word and then soundtrack it should be the first thing that pops up so definitely if you like that 30s big-band jazz style it’s really really great soundtrack yeah I’m just warning you it’s not like watching cartoons in the 30s like we all did in the 1930s it’s a little harder than that yes yes also there’s I wasn’t alive in the 1930s Sam you might have had you know someone who talked to you about it yes okay let’s let’s get to your rant your weekly rant you wanted to talk about loot boxes what are loot boxes why do you think they’ve reached a new low I love that you say my weekly rant like I’ve got the sweet soapbox although it’s true also we’re not talking about you know a loot like that a little instrument we’re talking L OoT loot boxes oh yeah that’d be great in fact if someone makes loot box or loot crate with the musical thing and maybe like it comes with a little plastic recorder I would buy it no questions but loot boxes or loot crate’s and video games have become a lot more prominent in recent years they’ve been around for some time some people tie them to MMO games from the late Ott’s and early teens other people mentioned Team Fortress 2 but the idea is that we’re combining real money virtual items and random chance so you go into a game and it says oh here’s a free random item and you tap it and a little flashy animation plays and out pops a new costume for your favorite character or a graffiti spray that you can tag on the wall of an arena that you’re fighting and so on and so forth and then it says oh if you want more of this kind of stuff you can either play a lot of the game to earn them slowly or you can pay us cash to get these virtual items a lot more quickly now paying for virtual items has been around a lot but it’s this extra randomization that really adds this slot machine sort of crap to a video game into the feeling of a video game now Forza Motorsport 7 just has just come out in a quote-unquote deluxe version meaning you can pay more now to play it immediately or you can wait another like four days to pay less money for the normal version that’s another thing that annoys me where they’re charging you more to play early but in addition to this $60 or more retail price you can also now get into a driving games loot boxes these are called prize crates inside of Forza Motorsport 7 here’s the problem and apologize for some of the wonk as I explain this the way that these crates work is that most of them give you things that are really stupid now some of them are costumes but these costumes are for your race car driver and I don’t know if you’ve ever been in one of these sim cars in a video game or real-life but they have very tinted windows you’re looking at the really sexy car so you’re not looking at the person inside of it dressed like a clown or a cheerleader so it’s sort of a weird thing that they’re attaching a random giveaway to that you could maybe have your little racecar driver look like a clown if you know you get the right little random loop etc that’s one annoying thing but the more annoying thing is that every single one of these prized crates randomly comes with what they call mods and the short version of this is that these mods exist to make you more virtual coins you can spend virtual coins to get the mods which then get you more virtual coins which you then spend on more mods to spend on virtual coins and on and on and on I was at dinner the other night and I liken this to going to a restaurant eating and then going to the bathroom and then eating that and then going to the bathroom and then eating that and then go into the bathroom not appetizing at all whatsoever it’s essentially turning your car game into a bean-counting game and I go into much greater detail about this at ARS technica but the short of it is that this to me is the exact end point I think of random crap that you buy for a video game virtual items that don’t exist that you’re actually just buying away to buy more stuff you are paying to earn it is garbage and if any of that made sense or even if it didn’t I hope that you take away this sense that video game companies now think it’s a good idea to not only charge you to just get into a video game you know you’re 60 70 $80 but then they want to tease you with this slot machine sort of mechanic whether or not you actually pay money in order to make it go faster it is still messing with your brain and it’s still coming in products that are rated for less than mature I mean this is an EVE e 10 I think that’s 10 and up age for this game for Forza and the the research is incredibly clear that when you put and normalize gambling systems for children it affects them with compulsive gambling behaviors and other bad habits I think it sucks I think it’s irresponsible and I think video game publishers need to hear not only from random people on the internet but from purveyors people who like play them for a living and think that they have important thoughts maybe me maybe other people but I really think anyone who has any power to talk to a video game company and say no enough is enough should take this example of paying to earn and saying stop it let us buy a video game and let that be done with it or if you want to do these random virtual item purchases do is the only way to pay make that be the concession of going all right it’s kind of free but here’s the catch fine let me pay with my wallet choose with my wallet don’t give me this bait-and-switch I hear your frustration I mean and and what stocks sounds like my therapist now tell me how you’re feeling what really sucks about this sort of thing is like I feel this way also with a lot of in-app in-game purchases on mobile right is that they kind of they know they understand the science behind you know the desire to to participate in these sorts of of gambling like contests and so they keep doing it and I mean they’re gonna keep doing it because they make a lot of money and that’s the unfortunate thing is like even if and it’s not it’s not like it’s not important to complain and everything but people are still gonna buy it because it’s so hard not to for a lot of people you know to to resist that temptation to buy into it that’s just a shame that we’re here because I remember when games did not have these kinds of mechanics that just it feels so manipulative well we all remember the era in which games were hard in order to get your money you know pac-man and Donkey Kong were hard because that’s how you spent more money yes that was a given you know paying 25 cents a pop get it that’s how it was built and mobile games that start out totally free and prey on this sort of thing and charge you accordingly okay you started for free you jumped in you bought in but I think it this is beginning to poison games that should be fun for the fun I I mentioned in my article some gun games where you run around and compete and shoot at other dudes online and they want to bait you with these loot boxes that randomly pop up with flashy slot machine like animations and want to hook you in and that becomes the reason to play this is why the game matters is effectively what they’re saying that when you finish a match it’s telling you how close you are to that next loot box oh it might take you a while to get that next flashy animation pay up to get there faster and I just say no let me give me a game that’s fun and let me pay for a game that’s fun and let that be the end of it and I just I just think it’s poisoning reputations and it’s poisoning our feeling about games and it’s we’re people out and that’s what’s gonna you’re gonna lose actual fans and gamers they want these monthly recurring players to show up and hang out and play games maybe making a game fun will get them to come back as opposed to this addictive crap because eventually the addictive preying on our psychology kind of stuff does run out of steam and then people will find other hobbies to spend their stuff on yeah right because if you’re paying to play a game you’re not playing the game right and so it’s like what you’re saying is the game is not fun enough on its own now conversely you could just go to the store if you can find one and just get one of these super Nintendo classic editions which doesn’t have any internet connectivity and just gives you 21 games for 80 dollars that’s such a value and it comes in this tiny little thing I mean look at the controller for the Super Nintendo classic I know I’m just changing the topic here but this controller is the same size as the system and as hard to like see it in a photo but I finally when I got him this controller the system ratio is insane I don’t know if you guys have any thoughts on this if you’ve already gotten to check one out yourselves but I finally I went and picked one up because I’m not as cool as Ars Technica skyla Orland I didn’t get one early but I haven’t even plugged it in yet I just got back from Best Buy where I pre-ordered mine somehow and it’s a really solid construction and it plugs in really easy although it’s really funny it actually has the same chipset as the NES classic pretty much identical someone took the Super Nintendo one apart and all they’ve done is just change out the little shell around it so if you get one of these you essentially kind of get the same thing just with different games in the chip but you know hey this is not bad you know it may not there may not be enough of these to go around they may be selling out left and right but you know hopefully they’re actually making good on their promise of making enough of these so you don’t have to go to an eBay scalper and hang out with your precious Super Nintendo classic Edition comes with two controllers by the way I swear I’m not a shill for Nintendo I just think it’s a nice segue to have something that doesn’t connect to the internet and just says here’s games here’s fun go do it and did you have to wait in line for it I know I pre-ordered a while back I I got in for like a perfect 12 minute window in which I could get on to Best Buy and preorder one I only pre-ordered one I’m not scalping that’s not my I’m not gonna pay for my kids college tuition that way stem thing No a different system entirely and pay for that tuition with have you haven’t even had a chance to play around with Star Fox – right like that’s another thing that I’m really curious about that is and we’ve Kyle Orland at ARS technica his review of that will go up at some point and based on I played the old beta that kind of it was a prototype ROM that came out back in the day and it’s not that much different than this one this is a curious game consider it more of an historical artifact as opposed to a truly great game because all of the good ideas from Star Fox 2 were essentially put into later games like starfox 64 and starfox command Star Fox 2 was absolutely an experiment in trying ok let’s make it fully 3d as opposed to the original game which will true it was much more on Rails it guided you toward the action and this one is much more it feels a lot more like a PC game or it sort of throws you out to the wolves and says you have a bunch of random stuff to take care of you have to manage a base and keep it alive and kind of play the game over and over and try to get your score up its ambitious its wonky and the framerate is terrible at certain points because it is essentially designed to they did not soup it up to like work better with modern hardware it plays just like it would have if it had come out on the Super Nintendo but if you do have an opportunity to play it in one way or another you know whether you have to you know go steal a bunch from a truck or something you know give it a shot but it’s not good I would not say that you need to go and spend $300 to get a Super NES just to try starfox – it’s definitely more of a curio than a must-play but I mean goodness there’s so many other good games on it you just flash Yoshi’s Island on the screen and I’m already like haha I can’t wait to go sit and play that we don’t recommend that you steal any off of a truck just just to be clear on that thank you so much for joining us as always Sam as the culture editor at ARS technica and at Sam read on Twitter now go play your your snez okay hold on let’s get one more creepy shot at me okay oh it’s so creepy also work as a razor well we’ll find out next week all right thank you Sam have a great all right Brian writes in feedback time in regards to the iPhone radio uh he says says the solution might be to have the phones start a countdown whenever there’s an emergency alert and then if the cell towers go offline the radio would then activate then when the cell towers come back on the radio would deactivate as cell service is now back online this is in regards of course to the iphone FM radio capability that as it pi of the FCC seems to think that there is in the iPhone but there is not yeah that was uh I was I spent a lot of time yesterday evening being really annoyed by that that first of all that we even chose to report it it was a waste of time like they do it was exactly as you said they have radios in them there’s no switch you can flip it’s not like Apple like was just not doing it doesn’t work like the the antenna doesn’t work I go we got lots of email about that I got email about and we’re showing on the screen the John Gruber’s piece on during fireball about how why how and why it doesn’t they can’t just flip a switch and everyone would be saved and how Apple does do things to try to to help people so yeah that was that was frustrating and and I think I also got an email about how it doesn’t run down the battery there were several people who emailed me saying they use the radio chip in their Android phone and they can use it all day and it doesn’t run down the battery versus like streaming music which would definitely oh yeah data data heavy versus something that’s a little bit lighter I mean anytime you do something extra it’s going to run down the battery more than if it wasn’t on there but yeah so well there you go I guess as it’s just gonna have to wait right and chanteys fan of the day is Mostafa on twitter who sent us this picture from inside a Tesla Model S saying this is how I watch TNT while super charging and with a laptop lucky you super charging and all the screens in in your in your Tesla that’s that’s pretty impressive looking gotta say show us how you watch or listen to TNT record a video or take a picture of yourself or your setup post around Instagram Google+ Twitter Facebook use the hashtag oh I watch and we’re gonna fight it take a break a breath because that sounded really difficult but you did it in a former life I was a Commodore 64 hacker which is to say that when I think of my childhood it’s filled with run/stop buttons and peak commands so when I saw that the c64 was getting its own mini version you better believe it caught my attention now it’s still early but here’s what we know it’s called the c64 mini nowhere in any of the advertising for this or any of the site does it ever say the word Commodore so even though it might be licensed it’s not fully licensed as far as I can tell 64 games pre-installed 70 bucks and as you can see the form factor is basically the old Commodore 64 with a joystick paired to it the 64 is maybe half the size of the standard 64 so it fits you know slightly larger than the palm of your hands the bummer is that it doesn’t look like the keys on the on the c64 are actually functional which just kind of boggles my mind because if you if you’re gonna put out a a Redux of the Commerce before you need the keys they’re like you could do a lot of this in emulation and I have before but it’s just not the same because the layout of the keyboard the combination of keys there’s some keys that exist on the Commodore 64 keyboard that don’t exist on your standard like PC USB keyboard which by the way you can plug into here to program a basic and all that kind of stuff what keys that are missing well it has a run stop button that’s useful for certain things the function keys on the side control they’re just routed differently also like the symbols that are above the numbers are different on the Commodore 64 than they are on a standard keyboard that we use today so when you want to do something like load a game the command is is load star comma a comma 1 and when you need to do the star it would normally be shift 2 but instead you have to find you know on a keyboard that we all use is shift 8 but that doesn’t tie up and so when you do emulation ends up kind of throwing things off a little bit and takes a little while for your brain to kind of remember how it how it used to be versus how it is now okay dirty stuff you know that all of these retro devices won’t actually bring your child back you still have your mortgage ya still have your dog that might be pooping in places you don’t want you have to clean it up you still have to show up at work every day so you know that right it doesn’t you don’t actually get transported back nobody sixty-four days but it’s fun to go back I mean it’s fun to relive parts of your childhood and I have I have a very big obviously a very big affinity for the Commodore 64 I have no faith that this is actually going to be very good but they do have if you if you like dive into the the stuff that they have listed on the site they do say this is the first in a range of c64 reboots as they call it they say a fully a full sized fully working version is coming in 2018 as well and I would say that’s the one to get if you can get like a redo of the Commodore 64 that’s like made for modern TVs has the HDMI out I can load up the Commodore 64 game images that I have onto it there’s a lot to ask but if I could do that I would probably pick one up I’m not sure that this one’s worth it the games list just isn’t that good but I appreciate their effort and who knows maybe I would get it because they’re making a really good giant keychain or something okay TMT records live every Monday through Friday 4:00 p.m. Pacific 7 p.m. Eastern 2300 UTC at 20:00 V slash live be part of the show by emailing us TNT at 20:00 V leave us a short voicemail to 6o TNT show and find us on twitter at tech news today TV and subscribe to our show go to twitter TV slash tnt subscribe to all of our shows go to Twiggy find the shows that you love and subscribe to them and if you want to tweet at me whatever you want I’m here for you at Megan Maroney we are for you to CC me please I’m at Jason Howell thanks to Kevin our TV and editor thanks to Mario for helping out the studio thanks to everybody who’s watching us right now and thanks to you for talking tech we’ll see y’all next week hi everyone [Music] you