TEH 050: Floppies in Space

In This Episode: TEH starts its second year! Landing on Mars. Son of Spectre. Hacking CPAP machines to better treat sleep apnea. Astronaut finds a cache of old floppy disks. Is Apple’s App Store an (illegal) monopoly?

This Week’s Hosts

  • Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True.
  • Leo Notenboom, “Chief Question Answerer” at tech education site Ask Leo!
  • Gary Rosenzweig host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media.
  • Kevin Savetz, web site publisher and Computer Historian at Atari Podcast.
  • Longer Bios on the Hosts page.

Show Notes

  • In the warmup, Randy took some time off for the Thanksgiving holiday, Kevin read 8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Story of Atari’s Missile Command, and Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, Leo has been sick (wait… humans can get viruses?! Who knew!?), and Gary was “All cloud, all the time.”
  • This is not just our 50th Episode, but (since we missed a couple here and there), it’s our One Year anniversary. Woo hoo!
  • Randy talked about today’s Mars landing, and some of the firsts for the mission. Here is the recording of the live stream from JPL. (The launch was a “first” too: the first interplanetary mission to launch from the west coast. That video is here.) We also mentioned the guide to the InSight mission from The Oatmeal, which NASA liked enough to promote.
  • Leo covered a fascinating technique for revealing the unintentional data leakage by things working normally in your browser (via The Register). Related in concept (only) to Spectre/Meltdown.
  • Kevin found a fascinating Twitter thread about sleep apnea machine hacking. There’s an article on the topic at Vice.
  • Randy talked about German astronaut Alexander Gerst, who “found” some old floppy disks on the Space Station and tweeted a photo, which was not only a blast from the past, but someone actually went through all the logs and figured out exactly when they got there, and how they were used. Also covered by C|Net.
  • And Gary says the U.S. Supreme Court may be looking at whether Apple’s iOS App Store is a monopoly (MacRumors.)
  • In the outtro, Gary is keeping careful watch on the new WordPress 5.0 (which has been delayed), Leo is working on getting healthy, Kevin is playing Zork III, and Randy is doing tech support for …his wife.

1 Comment on “TEH 050: Floppies in Space

  1. As the saying goes the devil is in the details so somebody would have had to think about labeling floppies before anything else could happen.

    Reply

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