Jetpacks Are Overrated: a technology show

Seamus looks at the big news from the WWDC 2020 keynote, analysing his top new feature picks and exploring the potential of some new ideas.

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This is a great wireless headset for gaming and at a great price point for the quality on offer. But Seamus can't help wonder if every wireless solution is really solving the cable problem if it's introducing a separate charging problem along the way. And somehow he makes it about brushing his teeth too? Anyway, just listen, you'll get it by the end...

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There’s a lot more tech inside this unit than any Sonos speaker ever before, and it has upgraded styling in both black and white that fits with the modern era of their speaker range. Everything about it feels ready for the next era in living room entertainment and even without the Atmos experience the Arc delivers a lot more than the Playbar as a raw audio upgrade.

This is an entirely worthy successor for the Sonos Playbar, and it does raise the bar so that Sonos has a flagship home entertainment soundbar that is primed for the 4K era and beyond.

If you already own a Playbar, don’t go rushing out to upgrade until your TV will help you get everything out of its latest features. But if you already have an eARC TV it’s an exciting time to step up.

If you’ve never pursued audio excellence in your living room and you enjoy a lot of audio even when the TV is switched off, this is the new soundbar you’re looking for.

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Ellen Broadis a boardgame designer. But that’s not actually why I’m talking to her. The boardgames was something of a byproduct – her main focus is being a rather brilliant thinker on all things data and AI.

In her career, Broad has worked for governments and UN bodies to help plot the future of data, digital issues and AI ethics, and she has also worked for Australia’s digital transformation and innovation body, Data61.

She has worked as the head of policy for the Open Data Institute and today she is a Senior Fellow at ANU’s 3Ai Institute. You can also buy her book –Made By Humans: The AI Condition.

(This episode first ran on Uplink, but is now available here as Jetpacks takes priority in the Byteside podcast network.)

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This tri-band AC2200 mesh router is a perfectly workable unit with some nice features but in this review Seamus gets seriously annoyed with some very short power cables and points out why this is actually a critical flaw in a product that is all about positioning units just where you need them in the name of creating a great wifi experience.

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Passwords. People hate them. But people can't live without them anymore. And they usually have to be dragged kicking and screaming toward doing something better than reusing passwords on 50 different sites... but there is a better way these days.

Yubico and its Yubikey is one of those better ways, with a hardware dongle you can use to improve your authentication for many sites and in the process reduce how often passwords are required -- sometimes they aren't even required at all.

So, this week I'm talking to with Alex Wilson, he's the Director of Solutions Engineering for APAC and Japan at Yubico. We caught up on Password Day - one of those excellent made up holidays, but in this case it *is* a good excuse to highlight something that I know far too many people keep pretending is OK when it really, really isn't.

Be vigilant, update your f'ing passwords. And hopefully Alex Wilson can help encourage you toward a future where your whole experience with passwords gets much, much easier. The excuses are done with. Just get on with it.

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Today Seamus speaks with Distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell AO. She's a cultural anthropologist who spent two decades at Intel and is known as one of the most important thinkers on technology and culture. She returned to Australia in recent years to create an entirely new school of research at ANU, named 3Ai.

We explore the aims of the new school, why it matters, and what the big issues are for technology in society today. And like any conversation with Professor Bell we get anecdotes from the past to help us understand that where we're going next isn't all that new... if only we can learn from the history lessons that can help pave the way...

Find out more about 3Ai: https://3ainstitute.cecs.anu.edu.au/

[This episode originally aired on Byteside's Uplink podcast]

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I first got a taste of virtual reality back in 1992 when the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney had the Dactyl Nightmare VR game on show. I queued for about an hour, I played this blocky 3D game with terrible physics for 5 minutes and it was over.

We've all wanted good VR for a long time, and we've all wanted easy VR for a long time. Having both is hard, but each new product helps us get closer and closer to that dream.

HTC has been at the forefront of VR hardware since it launched the HTC Vive system back in 2016 in partnership with Valve. I've had my own setup since that year in my own home and I love it. I know we're not quite there with ease of setup, but the experience is great and I love sharing it with friends and family any chance I get.

Last week I got to catch up with Thomas Dexmier, the Country Manager for HTC for Australia and New Zealand, and talk about the state of their hardware right now and where it's heading next, as well as how they see software, hardware and network platforms working together to get us to that future where VR becomes an every day activity for more than just enthusiasts like me.

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TwelveSouth, famous for stylish iPhone and Mac accessories, has released a dongle that turns any audio input/output into a Bluetooth connection for any Bluetooth device or headset. Seamus walks through the options it makes possible and the features that make this clever device a winner.

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Seamus talks to Ed Pullen, Regional Marketing Director for Dataminr to discuss the company's real-time AI event and risk detection system. It's running everywhere from newsrooms to corporate security departments, helping companies find the information they didn't know they really need to know to stay ahead of the risk curve.

We talk examples of the kinds of events the system can detect, how it's finding this information from structured and unstructured data sources around the world, and what it says about how we search for and manage decision making in the digital world.

Dataminr sponsored this episode of Jetpacks Are Overrated. Having said that, I don't ever intend to say yes to a sponsorship if I didn't think the product was interesting and worth talking about. But a big thank you to Dataminr for supporting the show!

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