Gadgetory

the iPhone won't plug-and-play we step inside one of the places you can actually touch Facebook and we find out if venom really is the dumbest movie of the year it's all coming up on the scene at UK podcast hello hi welcome to scene at UK podcast I'm rich Tran when I'm joined by Katie Colin how are you doing this week I'm doing very well we've had a little bit of a break but we filled it with lots of exciting things but first of all let's start it with some some interesting news in the world of fonts font you use everybody kind of news scientists have created a new font that's designed to forget your memory sorry to boost your memory so you don't forget things and it's a it's it's called sans forget occur see what they did there that's that's great I mean I imagine this would be great for like university students they were like cramming and yeah I can definitely see why this is a good thing but how does it actually work how does actually what well I'm glad you asked Katie because I'm about to tell you it is it so the design of it is that it's a sans serif typeface and it it's actually designed to be harder to read than most fonts most fonts are designed to be easy to read so you can glide over them and you can read quickly and easily this is designed to be harder to read because it slants left okay so it leans the other way to most fonts it's very fairly rare to be for that to be used in typography and it's full of holes so yeah there's like bits cut out with the different letters and so with its standing laughing with all these holes it's harder to read so you have to concentrate more right yeah I can definitely see how that would work so it's asking your brain to kind of go into overdrive a little bit - exactly to read through and therefore you're less likely it's less likely you just a slip out of your mind a second that you've read it exactly which is yeah which is something I think we're all familiar with it's called deeper cognitive processing apparently when you when you kind of ask your brain to work a little bit harder and that promotes retention of the stuff that you're reading interestingly this psychological learning principle is known as desirable difficulty okay which is also my attending so is this something that we're gonna be kind of like is it gonna be an option that we're gonna be seeing inward for example I would hope so yeah yeah I mean it's been well if I scientist I think we should use it everywhere yeah I think so I think everything should be harder to read Oh apparently you can download it too or is it as a Chrome browser extension or to use on PC or Mac there you go if you're perhaps studying you've got exams coming up or something like that then that might be something worth looking into why don't you test it out and let us know how you get on with it absolutely those Wikipedia articles won't let themselves get stuck in also coming up a problem that's been affecting a few people is the iPhone XS has a charging problem now it seems like there's always I don't understand how how there's a there's a problem with new phones in this day and age I mean come on surely they've drawn you've mastered it surely they've kind of figured out but apparently charging is a bit too difficult for the the iPhone XS so some users have noticed their phones won't charge if the screen is off when they plug in their lighting lightning cable right okay yeah I mean yeah it's nitch apparently this is going to be sold with a software update though so I got there the next software update iOS 12.1 and will it's currently in beta but it was going to arrive on iPhones and iPads later this autumn so if you are if you do have a new iPhone access and you're struggling with this and all you've experienced it then don't worry a fix is coming until then I think the the sort of temporary hack to fix this is just to make sure your screen is on when you plug your I your lightning cable in and not ideal but just something to be aware of for now I expect yeah at least it's not as bad as last year when the new iOS system came along and it wouldn't let you use the letter I which was which was a bit of a I mean it's not I use the letter I all that often now I mean that's all I ever I mean this I I do find generally that iOS updates are a lot more stable than they used to be and there used to be a sort of them I mean I used to wait a while at least to download the latest version of the Apple software to my phone and nowadays it tends to be a lot more stable so it's not gonna kind of like wipe your phone and lose everything that you have and you know oh good delete all your photos or anything like that so it's they they are generally a lot more stable but there are obviously these like little bugs that they find that they'll try and patch up in later versions as well fair enough absolutely fair enough also what's happening this week is the Paris Motor Show has been on so we've sent our road show and our intrepid Roadshow team out there to look at the latest cars and trucks and motorbikes and other road-going vehicles some of the cool things they've seen we're not gonna go too much into it but I'm quite like the look of the Peugeot II legend concept which is an electric car but it looks like a kind of like old muscle car it's so cool it's a kind of a nolle vintage look it's kind of it's kind of cool there's also a drivable lego Bugatti Sheeran yeah Bugatti Chiron made out of Lego but you can drive it which may be the coolest thing at the at the Paris Motor Show maybe they've been the Paris Motor Show as well it's obviously the European show it's for European cars if you're American then you might not get to see some of these cars so we actually have a special gallery which shows you all the cars that aren't coming to America and so I hope you enjoy that one and if you're European you can see all the cars that we get to keep for ourselves so it's something for everyone really yeah sense but yeah look out for cnet.com slash Roadshow anyway and you've been you've been on the road I happy you've been out and about yep well I actually I flew to Ireland and back within in the space of a day and so not on the road so much is in the air but yeah this was a this was a trip that I did last week I think or maybe the week before now but I flew over to Dublin and I went to visit Facebook's new data center that they've just opened just outside Dublin in a town that I think he pronounced knee or Clooney okay sorry if I'm getting that wrong I'm sure I wish fans will tell us yep but basically I went to see this data center and that is I mean usually I won't lie data centers can be quite dull you know that it's just that there there's these kind of big warehouses almost that are full of servers and you know they don't even have many people in them because it doesn't take just a lot of flashing lights yeah but this one I found particularly interesting I mean partly because it's owned by Facebook so this is I was kind of wandering down these these rows of sort of flashing service tax and you know you they're all kind of labeled so you see you know you see what which bit of Facebook each service stack is relating to say what likes yeah a newsfeed and that kind of thing so so you have all of these you kind of have all of these these different bits of Facebook and it's the kind of its Facebook in its most sort of tangible form and the way that it works is you know if you click like on something on Facebook then the it will kind of Facebook will send all these signals to all these different data centers and the data centers will kind of scramble all the data together in the right order and deliver it back to you within the space of you know milliseconds down them down the fibre cable so so yeah it was it was amazing just to kind of be inside this data center and they've got all of this so Facebook's pledged as well to be to run on totally renewable energy by 2020 and I think originally when they signed up to this they said 2022 but they watch they're actually we're ahead of schedule so they've got all of these this this data center kind of runs totally on renewable energy mmm it's it's taking advantage of the fact that Ireland has is one of the best countries for wind power in the world to make sure that it's it kind of you know using all of that to to to power it and it's also got all of these it's got the special cooling system that sucks all the hot air up from the data centers and kind of sends cooler back down into them and it's about twice as efficient as normal okay and it's also really interesting just to kind of because you don't really get an opportunity to see you know these kind of facilities very often and to see how the kind of Silicon Valley Facebook culture sort of presents itself in this tiny town outside of Dublin in Ireland because you know I've been to some of the Facebook offices in London and they're kind of like you know that as you would imagine that it's like free lunches and like lots of like murals all over the wall lots of cool stuff going on very colourful like has a kind of like a fun atmosphere meeting rooms with silly name yeah so it's interesting to see there are about 300 people that work on this site and a lot of them actually I think are employed in security but they they have all of these kind of the whole of the the data centers surrounded by a lot of land and they've landscaped it so that it reflects the surrounding area and like the they've got kind of local like flora and fauna and as you go in the first thing that you see are all these these beehives so they're a it's it's not very obvious actually when you arrive that it it is a Facebook site and the first kind of branding that you see is as you go in as all these be housed with all of the Facebook letters along them and they're all painted Facebook blue okay and I was talking to some of the people that work there and apparently they have two beekeepers on staff all right but since since starting to work there it's kind of become a bit of an extracurricular activity for a lot of the employees and there are now over 20 people on the staff that help help maintain the beehives are all doing beekeeping at home and it really is and they make all this honey and they serve it in the canteen and that kind of thing so so yeah it was just really interesting to kind of see inside you know what makes Facebook kind of tick over on a day-to-day basis like a physical manifestation yeah what does it sound like so inside the server room it's kind of like there's a sort of constant hum of all of all the servers and yeah it's kind of it's quite dark in places and also I went up on the roof which was quite cool and I was like going up on there on the roof of building but yeah it was just it's just easy it's just interesting just to see the kind of the way in which it sort of sort of stands up and how Facebook has these sensors all around the world and how they all kind of all of our data is sort of its kind of passed up and stored in different places and every time we kind of use Facebook we're actually interacting with all these massive masses of machines and then all over the place so yeah it was just an interesting insight into it and there's an ask about that on the site there is your photo so you can actually see what it looks like itself so it looks like inside Facebook's brain yep and hearts and liver and spleen yeah and so yeah so that's how were so moving on and we have some more news about what from Facebook one of the world's biggest corporations to Disney another huge corporation yeah and we have some more news about what they're going to be doing with their new streaming service which is coming soon in the future I think yeah it is so they're there there's been some new news about one of the shows they're gonna be showing on their new video streaming service and it's called it's Star Wars show and it's gonna be called the Mandalorian and this is the show that's going to be like produced and created by Jon Favreau the guy behind Iron Man and swingers and loads of other stuff and and the the Jungle Book remake so this for for Disney so this is going to be a new show too much about it we haven't seen any pictures yet but all you know is gonna be about someone who's in some way related to Boba Fett the famous bounty hunter from the original movies the Mandalorian II so Boba Fett was a Mandalorian he was from the Mandalore yes hello he was a Mandalorian bounty hunter and this show is going to be about a Mandalorian presumably a bounty hunter they've been described as a lone gunfighter on the frontier of space and it's set between the original movies and the start of the new movie so it's set between that return of the Jedi and the force awakens okay so it's kind of a chapter of Star Wars that hasn't quite been explored a particular yeah thoroughly so yeah so there's quite a few shows coming about Star Wars there's you know we've got the spin-offs like solo and that kind of rogue one or that kind of thing but we're also going to get Star Wars resistance which is about poe dameron and his mates now we've got this show the Mandalorian the Clone Wars is coming back there's there's quite this other Star Wars do you think it's getting to the point where we're getting a bit oversaturated do you think they're kind of milking the universe maybe a bit too much losing the you know that kind of like real thread of sort of excitement and they're kind of cannon almost of Star Wars and sort of splitting it up a bit too much in two different directions yeah I mean this is the thing way so our colleague Clare Riley has written a piece that stirs basically talking about that very thing she talks about how when she was a kid she probably would have loved to have seen all this stuff but Star Wars was like a special thing and every years it can you know a new Star Wars movie came along it was a big deal so I maybe maybe that's - I think maybe we were a bit jaded I was thinking about this the other day when I went to see I went to the premiere of the new Doctor Who series and it occurred to me that you know 10 15 year 2015 21 let's be honest 20 25 years ago I would have been like absolutely over the moon to have the amount of Doctor Who stuff that's out there the books and the you know the spin-off shows that they're on on the moment but stuff like Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures in class all that kind of thing when I was a kid I would have just like lapped that all up and now as an adult even though I love Doctor Who I love watching it still I never bothered to really get into those shows particularly and I just you know I guess I've just grown up so I think maybe it's easy for us to say oh there's too much Star Wars but for kids it's probably you know kids who love Star Wars it's probably a great time to be alive what a time to be alive and young to be a Star Wars fan to be a Star Wars fan exactly I do sometimes feel like there's so much stuff like the kind of the binge-watching boxset revolution and the Golden Age of TV has turned slightly into it for me it feels like homework you know kind of you meet up with your friends and you're like checking off the list like have you watched Ozark yet have you watched reticle so yeah now I'm really behind that Ozark I haven't even haven't even thought about Westworld season two you know there's so much stuff that feels like feels like homework yeah and actually I think as a kind of the thing that actually that makes me do is to go back and re-watch a lot of stuff that I find really kind of comforting and you know it's it's kind of it puts me off a little bit like it feels like it once you start investing in a new series like this is gonna take up a bunch of my time and you know I don't know if it's going to be worth it and you know I I'm really picky about new things that I'm prepared to kind of get into and it is making me go back and just rewatch a load of old stuff that I have seen before and perhaps that's you know perhaps I should step outside my comfort zone a little bit but I do feel like I watch you know at least one new thing every month that's good I think the important thing is probably to try something new without feeling beholdin to finish them yeah yeah I sometimes get put off actually starting something just because I feel like I don't want to complete it or never and also if something gets to like season two or season three and you haven't started it already you just feel like oh I'm so behind I'm never gonna catch up now I feel a bit like that with Game of Thrones I know it's a so I'm not really that off on Game of Thrones but I think maybe but I might like marathon it before the last season starts yeah but there's been some good stuff that's been on for example on Netflix recently maniac I thought was great and final space it's fantastic on Netflix now isn't really really good it looks kind of like future armor and it looks like a kind of wacky silly sci-fi spoof cartoon and it sort of is but it also turns into this kind of proper space opera it's kind of like guardians the galaxy eventually it's funny but it's actually also really kind of surprisingly affecting and and exciting so final space and also I've noticed that maniacs being kind of advertised to me quite a lot so I think I might give that a go as well because yeah the algorithm is suggestive algorithm decrees yeah maniac that it might be for me although it also said insatiable might be for me and it definitely wasn't safe so just just one fer that one last question on this and what else do we know about Disney's streaming service and who it's gonna kind of be targeted at because you know I'm already signed up to a bunch of different streaming services and taking on a new one now at this stage with yeah that's the things new streaming services are kind of a kind of the big big thing at the moment that everyone's trying to do Apple's trying to do it the main thing that we kind of know is that Disney is taking all its stuff it's kind of taking its ball and going home it's taking all its toys off of Netflix and other places and it's just gonna be available on the Disney streaming service the exact details of how it's going to work for us over here aren't clear yeah I'm not sure if it's just gonna be a u.s. thing okay and you know there's also DC of just a lot or is about to launch their new streaming service which is gonna have brand-new live-action shows like Titans which is where it's about like the the sidekicks of the superheroes like Robin swearing and beating people up is quite gritty and violent it almost feels like these are a bit more niche though because you know the where is it anyone could probably sign up to Netflix or Amazon Prime and prime video and find something on there for them and you know there be stuff for a whole family you know if you're not into Disney off you're not into DC then it sounds like these services are not gonna be for you yeah well that's the thing Disney DC is definitely something that's going to be fairly niche I mean you know there's a huge number of people who love DC yes it's still gonna be it's still gonna be pretty much all superheroes Disney at least I mean the thing about Disney is it has it has Marvel it has Star Wars it has you know the Disney Princess type movies so that's a fairly broad range of stuff but it does it is reaching the point where you're gonna have to decide like when Apple launches their streaming service you're gonna have to think can I spend ten dollars on Amazon ten dollars on Netflix ten dollars on exactly yeah so that Hulu and so on and so on I mean there's also already there's a bunch of other even more niche ones there's the shadow which does just as horror movies there's a movie and BFI player which are like cinephile streaming services that do kind of arthouse and indian and classic movies so there's all these different streaming services and I think what we're probably going to see is we've reached the point now where everybody's trying to get in the game and then in a few years time it'll shake out and it'll kind of consolidate back down and we'll probably just end up with Netflix and Anderson like we have now yeah good luck waffle yeah so good luck you know enjoy it have a good time won't last Apple and everybody I guess Apple have got some some really big names lined up for their service we don't know what they're gonna be yet we know for example they can have that show by Damien Chazelle who is the guy who directed lala land and he's just directed first man which comes out next week which is very very good we talked about first man just for a second that's coming out on the 11th of October and it is excellent it starts Ryan Gosling it has Neil Armstrong who you may remember was the first man to walk on the moon and it also stars Claire Foy from the crown as his wife directed by Damien Chazelle and it's absolutely brilliant it's really really good it's it's what they've done is something really clever where they they they don't kind of show you these kind of like wide epic shots of the spaceships taking off they it you might have got from like Apollo 13 and that kind of thing what they do is they put you right in the cockpit and the capsule with Neil Armstrong so a lot of the time all you're really seeing is is like Ryan Gosling's eyes which is more than enough obviously in his helmet and you're seeing that I bet the result exactly the dials and the switches and the readouts that he's looking at and you're seeing these little tiny windows as like the earth falls away it's incredibly cost refer back and it's so immersive and it sounds counterintuitive that it's a very small kind of intimate sort of view of this guy's experience but it was so immersive that when I saw it on the IMAX screen the massive I met screen it really kind of brought me into it so you know I think it's what kind it's what the big screen is made for I think and then it's it also sort of shows the lives at home of the astronauts which is a little bit of a kind of like standard by a you know biopic thing where you've got a brilliant man being all driven and obsessed and his wife is like but what about the kids and you know she's like no Neil you listen to me all the time that kind of thing there's lots of slamming doors and that kind of stuff which is a little bit of a thankless task for Claire Foy but I actually also I did get to meet Ryan Gosling and clarified a little bit chat to them about the movie so let's have a little clip of that now like what I wanted to try to do with this movie was try to take you know a contemporary viewer and put them try to really rewind in a true time-travel kind of way to the early 60s where we're walking on the moon was as insane a proposition as you know today maybe it's Mars or you know what have you but kind of as insane a proposition as you can get and felt as unwieldy and enterprise and just to see step by step in a real time immediate kind of way not with an historical vantage point but hopefully in a present tense kind of way how one goes about turning improbable fantasies into realities and again the costs that we often forget human spaceflight anyway had sort of become at least where I grew up taken for granted you know it wasn't something that really was being discussed you know the moon man was the MTV logo and that's why I think when I when Damien and I met about this and I read Neal's story I just was like so he's just such an inspired idea on his end to want to sort of dive deeper into that and to revisit it and to show that it wasn't this this predestined success an incredible thing that Damien did was he gave us room to not have to feel pressured or that we have to get it right and it's but for me I just personally felt really grateful because I got to test out an American accent for two weeks without anyone going I'm not sure about that vowel sound which was amazing and we all got to kind of you know live with each other and and get to know one another and and mess up and do it wrong and try things out which is very very rare so yes that's first man and the funny thing about the first man is that after it had finished I felt like I just wanted to just sit quietly just I didn't want to go out into the world of like people and traffic and email and all that kinda stuff I just wanted to sit in the darkened theater and just like sit with it and I'm just sort of it was yeah it was it was a restraint I can't leave any movie where I felt like that for such a long time so I'm yeah so first man he's absolutely stunning that's out on the 11th or 12th October so that's out fairly soon and but if you want to go to the pictures now then what you can go and see is what might be from a very smart movie first man to a very dumb movie which is venom and you know I actually thought it was really fun so in a terrible way yeah but I I think that it's been that year hasn't it I mean of I was kind of wanting a bit of stupidity and just and saying it it doesn't have to be good in the classical sense be to really enjoy it yeah so so venom for those who aren't aware venom is a villain from the spider-man comic books and so he's appearing in his own movie he's this kind of a alien hybrid guy who sort of he's like this kind of super-powered alien black-clad kind of weirdo who likes biting people's heads off and he kind of bonds with Tom Hardy who's this sort of hapless reporter dies he does he has here does have eyes he kind of like he sort of he sort of takes over Tom Hardy's body in he has like big Fang teeth and he has hair sort of eyes and he's this big kind of like huge black creature and so the sort of the thrust of the story is about Tom Hardy is is trying not to let this this creature take over him and and it's that sort of side of it is really really fun because Tom Hardy is like really kind of like he's very Tom Hardy's doing a bit of a funny voice and he's really like kind of twitchy and sweaty and committed to it and he's playing this guy who just doesn't know what's happening to him while this monster is trying to take over his body and so there's almost like a kind of David Cronenberg body horror element to it and to the action scenes and stuff and that bit of it is really really fun the trouble is it's all that's a sort of pushed aside too often for this sort of fairly generic superhero story where there's like a villain and there's a there's a love interest and that sort of bit boring what you really kind of want to see is is Tom Hardy just trying to stop himself from eating people that's something that Tom Hardy struggles with in real life I think it probably is he really kind of brought a lot of himself to this role well it's kind of funny about it is that he's sort of doing he said he drew influence from Woody Allen and Conor McGregor so kind of Woody Allen's that sort of like a neurotic kind of twitchy kind of normal guy and then Conor McGregor is this like pumped up sort of almost bad guy figure and what's great is that when Tom Hardy is like fighting for control of his own body he's kind of like mumbling to himself all time is Woody Allen this way he's like what happened to my leg my leg was broken oh my god I just hit that guy don't need someone and it's just it's just really it's just really funny those bits are really fun there's there's when you and also the venom being has a bit more of a personality than I expected and when that comes out it's quite funny like there's a whole sort of subplot about Tom Hardy trying to get his girlfriend back and Venom this kind of alien being that likes eating people starts giving him advice which is on his shoulder it really is I wanted a lot more of that and unfortunately Michelle Williams and R is armed who are both great and I'm sure they probably got paid a lot of money I hope so they kind of their stories are quite dull and they kind of love this story down and resume it also plays the exact same Silicon Valley tech but genius bad guy that he played in the Jason Bourne movies so I mean it wasn't much of a stretch for him I guess you know maybe they thought no one remembers Jason Bourne because it wasn't very good then with the most recent one with venom it's kind of fun it's a it's it's kind of silly it's there's a lot of stuff that doesn't work it's all over the place but it's it's kind of fun I quite liked it so there you go it's a it's a big dumb supervillain movie that reminds you of big dumb supervillain movies from like 10 15 years ago honestly if you remember if you look back fondly on Ghost Rider and spawn and the Hulk movies that Marvel tries to forget about then then yeah you probably love venom yeah sounds great it's great so yeah let's know it is actually out now and so I think it's out now yeah but time you hear this it will have been out for a couple of days so yeah maybe you've seen it maybe you haven't oh no tell us what you think of our venom let us know you can get in touch by you can email seen at UK podcast at CBS I calm or we're on Twitter and Instagram Facebook all over the place we're on start we on snapchat they don't still use snapchat okay but not to the same extent not the same extent okay you can Instagram story us or something I don't know that's what the kids do these days you can find us I'm on Twitter at rich night well and Katie what's your I am at Katie Collins nice nice and simple great and if you want to leave a review for us on iTunes or leave some comments on YouTube then we'd be very grateful as long as they are nice because we are very thin-skinned and we're feeling very delicate Yemen so yeah be nice I think that's it we'll see you hopefully very soon I don't buy anyway sorry