Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 189 of the IA Cast. My name is Michael, and I'm who you have today. That's it. The there's nobody else with me so far today. If they show up, then that will be great. But we're going to run on the assertion that it will just be me today. So I haven't done this in a long, long time. I'm used to podcasting with a group of folks and you get used to that. So it is what it is. So we got some great news to talk about today. And I'm really excited about it because okay, I should say there's some news that I'm excited about and some news I'm not excited about. So let's just get started with the bad news, the news that I'm not really a big fan of. And if you're in chat on YouTube or if you're hearing this later, I'm curious your thoughts. And I keep meaning, and I always forget that. We want to start sending this to Iacast Radio, which is now a thing. Folks, we are updating Iacast radio again. There is a new Echo skill, so you could tell it to play Iacast Live. I couldn't change it to Radio, unfortunately, and the app is working. We had a problem in the app where you could not play podcast at one point that has been fixed. So all of those things are working now. The Iacast Radio, I've taken down all of the automations and things. So now when you log in, you'll just be given some random content that you can just listen to and just go with from there. So I do need to tweak it, kind of make some changes. But yeah, Iacast Radio is now back with new content, so I'm going to try to update it once a week and we'll go from there. I'd love to get some radio shows on there too. Just some tech talk radio that would be amazing. So if you're interested or you know somebody that's interested, let me know and we can make that happen. As for our news this week, we have well, I tried to make a good joke or good pun. It didn't happen.

Twitter.

Elon has changed Twitter to a new brand called X. It started about the time that we didn't know about it before the IA cast, and Elon said he's changing it to X. And it happened last week. And I mean, all this stuff really just happened in a week. I mean, it's crazy how fast this stuff develops now. You know, in the past years, during the Pandemic and other times, we'd have tech that would we hear about changes every few weeks. Things just did not happen as fast as they do now. We had the Beats Studio Pros last week, the week before, and we had all those things. So it's like every week there's new tech, new things coming out. It's just amazing to me. So it's like we're always getting something new. And Elon did that this week with Twitter turning into X, and I really have a lot of opinions about it. It seems like every weekend he's doing something new. In fact, I just saw a tweet that says something big is coming or something like that before I did the podcast. So who knows what that will be? Who knows if it's good or who knows if it's bad. So, if it is worth noting, we will report on it next. You know, enough with the preamble. Twitter is now X. That's just all it is. And it started with an update on the website from Twitter to X. He made a contest on Twitter and said, the first person that can give me a good X logo will be the logo and it will go on the website and be the main logo. Well, that happened and it's basically an offshoot of a Unicode character and it's now replacing the Twitter logo on the building. The iOS and Android apps have been updated to reflect this change. The app is now showing X. We've had the updates for iOS Android this week with these changes. So is this a good or a bad thing? I would say it's a bad thing because we've built a brand over the last ten or so years, right? Of X. I mean, not of X. What am I talking about? Of Twitter. And now it becoming x is just what do you call posts? And I think he wants to call them posts now, the fan community or not fans, but the community wants to call them Zeets X-E-E-T-S which I think is hilarious, but it's just a lot of he wants to change the brand. And you might be wondering why he's changing the name of Twitter. And that's because he wants the X app to be the everything app. So you'll be able to transfer money, you'll be able to talk to friends, message, all these things. And that's not what Twitter was designed to. I just I'm wondering why why now? Why did he make this know? Twitter has been around for a long time and he's owned it for about a year now, I guess. I don't know. I don't remember exactly the amount of time, but he's owned it and he can do what he wants with it. But one of my questions is why did he hire a CEO if he's just going to make rules anyway? I don't know. And then there was another tweet during the week that said that the dark mode version of Twitter would be the only way to use the app because it was better that way. So it looks like we will be losing dark mode support, I mean, light mode support in the Twitter X app. So those are things that you have to look forward to if you use Twitter again. There are other options out there now there is threads which I watched a video where somebody said that they felt like or they were using their phone and they got the logos confused because they're both the same color schemes now, black and white. So it's one of those things that you just don't know what to make of these things. But other platforms I'm still a huge Mastodon fan. You'll get my Mastodon stuff at the end of the episode. But I don't know, it's a shame. It's the end of a culture, it's the end of an identity. It's the end of a lot of things because he just didn't like it. And I think that's a big shame. So long live Twitter. It is now gone. Rest in peace. But I guess we've got to move on. And again, there's so many good social media networks out there. There's Mastodon, there's all these others. And Threads will eventually join the you know, just keep in mind, if you are a Mastodon user, your instance may or may not support threads. So a lot of people are saying they do not want anything related to Meta on their servers. And the one thing about that is that that's a server admin choice. And I kind of feel like as a server admin, if you have a lot of users, this even is some of the blindness community servers, you'd really need to take a toll of your users and say, what do the people want? What do you all want out there if threads can access the server? So I think those are all very big things to I mean, a lot of podcasts are making the joke they'll never talk about, but you know, it's still Twitter to a lot of people. It really is. And the interesting thing is, if you want Twitter, go on the Mac. The Twitter app for Mac so far has not been updated yet. So to me that is very interesting. So that is the latest on X and Twitter. I think we'll have other conversations about this as time goes on, because our regulars that are usually here, I would love to get their thoughts on this because you know my thoughts, right? But it's still a big deal and it's a big change because Twitter was the town square, right? You would go to get your weather, you go to get your news, you go to get those other things. And X is kind of pushing people away. I heard a statistic on a podcast that Twitter had 250,000,000 users and now it's down to about 175,000,000. So I think it's a shame that all these changes are happening and people are dropping off. But what can you do? What can you do? So on to some more interesting topics, and we've got two more today, and if you haven't heard last week's episode of the Iacast, I would check it out. We did some great discussion about routers. So that was really good we really enjoyed that discussion. And if you listen to Unmute Presents, they talked about a lot of different content. They talked about let's see the Friday fines. Michael talked about several topics, so check that out. I honestly cannot remember what they were off the top of my head, but they do some great shows. I think they did their security show this week. Unless the weeks are blurring together and they've done the shelf phone show. I was on the community call on Tuesday, and technically working was great. They talked about their experiences traveling yeah, I think so. And networking. It felt like a continuation, or I guess in that case they recorded a day before we did the router discussion. So it was just kind of a continuation of that. So check out all of the shows on Unmute Presents. They are fantastic. The next topic I really want to talk about is the Vision Pro. And as few people know, as you all know here, I am so excited about the Vision Pro that is going to be the best virtual or augmented reality headset because it's going to have accessibility in mind. Now, one thing that I did find out that I found very interesting is they are at least right now, saying that this thing is not invincible is the best way I could put it. If you run into something that glass will scratch or shatter is what I've been hearing online. So you really want to be careful with your Vision Pro, especially with the Dev kits. I think they're still working out some kinks to make it more usable. But they say if you run into something with that rounded glass front, it's not going to be good. So keep those things in. Uh, it's not gonna be that Amazon tablet where they show it, get ran over or fall off a vehicle. It's not going to be that. And it probably will not have the same quality of glass as your iPhone where you can have it fall and all those things. So I would keep those things in mind. If you plan to get one, you need to be careful with it. And if you do buy one, as a friend of the show likes to say, buy Apple Care because it's so important for a $3,500 piece of gear that you're walking around with, make sure that it's going to last, and Apple Care will do that. Apple Care will protect that device. So really recommend people do that. As for the updates that we know of now, it's very exciting. The Vision. OS and Vision pro Labs are now open. They're in several places around the world. I know two of them are London and Cupertino, and there's a few other places, but no, Austin, unfortunately, makes me sad. And they are reservation only. They started this week. The labs are closed for this time, but they're also doing the developer kits where you can loan out a developer kit. And the interesting thing is that the rules for these developer kits are quite strict. You cannot take them out of your location and nobody other than your authorized developers on your developer account can use the Vision Pro. So keep that in mind. They also, from what I've heard, need you to measure your head if you get approved for one. I do not know how much they will cost to loan them out, but I do know that they are going to be loaned out and they will have an air tag on them so that they can make sure that the device stays at the current address where you have sent them or where they ship them to. So those are some updates on the Vision Pro. So you might want to really, if you're planning on getting one of these, you really need to read the terms of service because they are important, especially this time. Most people don't read the terms of service. This time I highly recommend it. That's what we know currently on the Vision Pro. The last bit of news that we need to unpack today I got it. I got that one in there is the Samsung Unpacked July 2023 event. It feels like all of their events they call unpacked. Because I think there's like a January unpacked, there's a July and all these others, and this one is pretty exciting. There's four devices I want to talk about. Two of them really don't excite me because I've just never been a fan of folding phones, right? I've just never cared too much for the concept of a folding phone. Maybe I just haven't seen one. It's like, okay, if I see one, it'll be like, okay, I need to have this in my life, right? But I have never seen one. Maybe I just need to go to Best Buy and put my hands on, um, have to be like Angie on this one and just go and play with it for a bit. But I just haven't seen them. And the concept just it feels like it would be too breakable for just moving around the world or the environment. Now the flip sounds kind of interesting and I'm kind of curious how that will work, but the fold making it into a tablet, I just don't know with how we have to do zooming and speech and all those things. As a low vision two blind person, I don't know how that would go personally, but at the same time, people may love them. So they're just very expensive devices like the Pixel fold came out and all those things. As for these two devices, the Z Fold Five and the ZFlip Five, they apparently are very similar hardware, but they have newer specs, maybe some changes to the screens. Very little, though, has changed. It's an iterative year and less of a revolutionary new device build year. Apple does this all the time. So it's very I guess if you're going to get one of these devices, it's get it now if you don't have one or if you have several year old one. But what excites me is the other two devices they announced this time. So the last area I want to talk about here, which really has me excited, is the last two devices that they announced. And that's the galaxy watch. Six, I think it is. And the galaxy watch. Classic. And I don't know if both of them have this feature, but I heard that they went back to the bezel that can turn around it since it's a round watch. And it just makes me very excited because I've really liked that on the Galaxy Watches. I've never owned one, I don't plan to, but I just like that form factor, right, where you can turn the actual bezel of the watch to make things happen. I think that's really cool. I still like my Apple watches. I won't switch from my Apple Watches, I'm wearing it right now. But just that concept is really neat. I think it's really cool. So good on Samsung for kind of going back to that design technique, right? I think that's really a neat thing that they've done. And I don't know the pricing on all these, so you'll have to look that up. But I'll have articles to all these things in the show notes, but the last one really has me excited and that's changes to the Galaxy Tab S Series. So we got the S Nine this year, right? And with the S Nine, with the S Eight, certain models had an LCD screen, certain models had a mini Led screen. And now the latest model just have even on the eleven inch, the smallest one, they have OLED. And that's really exciting because that means that all of their devices are going to have great screens. It starts at 799 and they do have the s nine, s nine plus and s nine Ultra, like they always have. And they just go up in price to their 999 and 1199. If you're going to buy an Android tablet, a premiere Android tablet, these are the ones to go with. Folks. That Pixel Tablet is cool if you just want a very cheap tablet. But if you want an iPad quality thing for Android, get the Not Pixel Tab. Get the Samsung Galaxy Tab S series. They are fantastic devices. I have one an s eight. They even have a vibration motor in them. And they have a lot of other things that iPads do not have. The one thing they don't have is as good of speakers. So keep that in mind. But they are very good tablets. They have that vibrant Samsung screen that I really like as being low vision. So I'm still rocking my iPad M One and that one's getting in the years now. So it just depends on what you need, right? And the Samsung ones are thinner than the iPads and they come with the S Pen. So you're going to get all that stuff. And it's just very exciting that they're updating these. I don't know if they've updated the chip or things like that, but they are fantastic tablets. So I'd highly check those out. If you don't want an iOS tablet, it works with Talkback and all those things. And I just think that if you're going to get one of these, it's the way to go. So it's fantastic. Well, we're going to have a very quick wrap up. I think these were the biggest and most interesting tech things that have happened this week. But we'll be back next week for more and hopefully with more of our folks back. And we'll check out everything that we've missed this week and have a good long conversation about it. I can't believe we've been able to talk as long as we have about all of these things as one person. I can imagine if we had the whole group, though, this would have been a very long conversation, as it typically is. So I want to say that it's been great getting to share all these things with you guys. And we'll be back yet again next week with another episode. And as we typically do, let's see, what do I want to pick? So many great things. Oh, yes, I know what I'm going to pick. I started a new show and I'm really enjoying it. It's star Trek. Lower decks. And if you're a Star Trek fan, it's great. And there are voice actors from the TV show, so you actually get little bits and pieces of where people are after Know Next Generation and things like that. So you actually get to see Will Rikerd on the Titan. You get to see a brief minute of Tom Paris. You get to see all these people from older Star Trek and it's just fantastic. So check out lower decks. It's on Paramount Plus, and it is audio described as well. So it's really cool. As for where people can find me online, I'm Michael Doeies on most platforms. Mike DOE's at Techopolis social on Mastodon. I'm Mike Doeies on X. Yeah, that feels weird. I'm Michael Doeies on Facebook, and you can email me at [email protected]. And you could also send us feedback at [email protected]. Let me know what you thought of this episode. Did you enjoy it with one person, or would you just have rather me just wait till next week to talk about all this stuff? I really would love to know your thoughts. So we're also going to be working on a few other projects, so keep on the lookout for that. And I hope you guys are enjoying the chapters and all the updated things in the podcast. Let me know how you think that's going as well. The more feedback, the better. As long as it's not spam. Spam is bad. No spam. But again, thank you so much for being here. We will be back next week with a new episode and we really miss our usuals. Michael, Marty, Lynn, Angie, you guys are great. So we hope that you guys will be back with us next week. So thanks again for listening to this episode of The IA Cast and we'll see you next time. Bye everyone.

Thank you for tuning in to the IA Cast. We hope you enjoyed the show and found the conversation to be insightful and informative. If you have any feedback or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Please send us an email at [email protected]. You can also follow us on Twitter at cast network to stay informed about new episodes and other updates. Don't forget to check out more great podcasts on The Iacast Network iacast net. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.