Matt Geekab 1018 live from Las Vegas for Sunday, January 7th, 2024.
Music.
Greetings folks and welcome to the show.
Welcome to Matt Geekab. up normally we take your questions and your tips and
your cool stuff down and we share them all,
right now though we are here well
two of us pete and i are here in las vegas and
uh we're ces for
us has already started we've met with some companies we wanted to talk about
it so yes here live from las vegas i'm
dave hamilton and here in frigid las
vegas this pilot pete hey what's up
up with that we came all the way across the country to sunny warm
southwest desert and it's you know it's
like we never left new england but you know there we go yeah it's
crazy i don't yeah it's it's cold here it's like barely 50 degrees all i can
say is thank god that about four hours before we left i said hey s lady what's
the weather in vegas this week and she told me and i had to go back and unpack
all my polo shirts and get some long sleeves yeah for sure,
So, well, the good news is we did, we got up this morning, went over and saw
the folks at Uproar who brought in a bunch of clients to a hotel suite over
at the Palazzo. And we went over there and we met with a bunch of those folks.
And one of the ones that we met with was kind enough to give us a nice warm
wool winter hat. Yes, that's true.
Oh, you've got yours handy there. Yeah, it's true.
So there it is. So Yarbo, the people who make automated,
it's basically a robot with the ability to put attachments on it,
lawnmower, snowblower, it'll tow stuff,
you know, like a rake, leafblower, that kind of, so they've put some thought
and effort in it. It's really cool.
Yeah. The snowblower, of course,
it's snowing at our homes while we're recording this for all of you.
We aren't at our homes. Our homes.
Better halves our wives are out shoveling the driveway with all that you
done yet honey yeah yeah it was in fact i was able to show
the uh yarbo folks a live stream
of my ring camera that showed lisa with
our snowblower our you know drive it
yourself snowblower in the driveway while we were learning
about their automated uh robot snowblower this
thing it was uh let me pull up my notes here
and make sure i have it right but uh the the yarbo
snowblower it's like 6500 bucks for the
robot with the snowblower attachment and all the
smarts to it because that's the one with all the smarts yeah there's
there's one that's also just remote control correct so
right there's two versions the pricing it was
unclear on the on the less expensive version but
the uh the 6500 hundred bucks
gets you fully automated very similar to
what you would get with a robot vacuum
cleaner it does mapping and it will run without you.
Without any intervention and just kind
of do its thing there is a charge itself it'll yeah
go back and charge itself it there is a less expensive
version uh and i don't know how less expensive it
is we don't have that data in front of us here they weren't really
clear on it there either so they may not even
know but uh that one is
remote controllable so you can sit in the warmth of your house
and drive it around your driveway and it has cameras and gps
in it so it it like will figure everything
out but you still have to like control
it and tell it where to go so right i think most
people would want the one that does it itself Because the idea is it starts
going once you've got about an inch or two of snow on the ground and it goes
and does your driveway with your inch or two of snow and then it goes back and
it recharges itself and it can do a full recharge.
A full recharge for them is from 10 to 80
percent uh it can do about 6 000 square feet.
On its 80 percent charge which is fine and it
can fully recharge from 10 to 80 in uh in about an hour and a half yeah it's
about 90 minutes yeah maybe 90 minutes so that the cool part about that is that
you just you don't wait until the snow finishes you just let this thing keep
going Plow with the storm.
Plow with the storm. And I think the...
Lawnmower is built to function the same way
you just have it kind of that's my understanding it maintains daily right it
maintains it and because my hang-up with one of those has always been where
we are now we've got almost two acres of land a lot to mow and he's like and
he ran across the numbers he essentially said you can handle up to about nine
acres without a mower i I mean,
it's, so this is no, uh,
for, I don't put it like to put it like this.
It's no consumer grade piece of crap.
It is a robust pro.
I would call it a prosumer piece of equipment that, uh, uh, it,
it's going to do the work.
It's not, it's not limp. It's not, uh, built like cheap. No.
Oh no. This is. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really impressed to see that. And thank you for the
winter hats we will be using. Yeah, we'll use those this week. That's right.
Yeah, they knew their audience well, for sure.
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, all right.
What do we have next here? I've got to find our agenda.
Yeah, my computer is not happy. The first people we saw were Kenyon,
K-E-Y, I'm sorry, K-E-N-Y-O-N.
And they do indoor and outdoor grills. Yep. And those were pretty impressive.
They're DC powered, 48 volts for the indoor grill.
Was it also, no, it was 240 volts out for the outdoor grill.
The big, looks like a great big Weber grill. But it's all DC powered. All DC powered.
You can plug it into your AC current and they had an inverter to step it up to 240 DC.
But this grill is so well thought out.
It was really amazing. one of the most impressive things to me was one of the
last things I saw was that even at the height of grilling with this thing on
and grilling steaks or chicken or what-have-you you can touch the top of the grill.
Yeah. They've got a Venturi system in there that keeps the airflow,
that keeps the top of that grill from getting too hot and causing injury,
for lack of a better word.
But the thought that they put into the grill shape and the grate,
and I said, no, this is great.
And pun not intended, but it came out with a good one.
Pun acknowledged. Yeah, yeah. And he talked about how it caramelizes the food.
It isn't the flame and the charcoal, but it's the food being caramelized as
the juices come off the meat and explode in the superheat.
And it's fully even heat because of the way the heating element is.
So all of the things that we're talking about here, we have seen some of them
we are going to do bespoke YouTube videos for. I think this is one we might,
even though it's not like it doesn't link with your iPhone yet.
You know, my guess is that's coming in a future version. Like it seemed like
this would be a good thing to maybe link with your phone.
But this one, it's worth seeing based on like the way that they kind of engineered
this so that the element, the heating element is right there under your food,
but it never touches your food and it remains completely isolated from it.
So it'll stay clean and, you know, all of that stuff. Yeah, it'll never have food hit it.
Yeah. Yeah, it's in a channel, and they've put a lot of thought and effort into this.
The price point on that, it was rather high, as I recall. It was around $5,000. Yeah.
So it isn't ready for most people's backyard yet.
Right, right. But that's how this stuff goes, right?
I mean, the first plasma TV that was 48 inches was a $16,000 TV.
Now you can't even get plasma because they're, you know.
Correct. Yeah, you know, that's ancient technology now, Pete.
That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
We went and saw this company called Vasco that creates a translator.
It's translator earbuds, right? They have taken it to another level.
And there is the earbuds that you put in.
You can put one in your ear and one in someone else's ear. And in fact,
you can have up to 10 of them going simultaneously, translating an entire conversation
audibly and on your phone in 10 different languages simultaneously.
People talk, everyone hears it in their chosen preferred language in their ears,
and the conversation just sort of happens.
It's, you know, we can do this with one person with our phones right now,
which is amazing that we can even do that now with, you know,
with the devices that we generally have in our pockets.
This, the folks at Vasco take it to a whole other level.
It's really, it's spectacular how well this works.
And they had another device there. Was that called the four Dave?
It almost looked like a thin touchscreen cell phone. But all it did was it has,
when you buy that, you get the data plan with it.
You don't have to be connected to data anywhere in the world. Right.
In order for this, in order for the earbuds to work your phone or they needs
to connect to, they need to be connected to something that's also connected to data. Right.
And the, that can be your phone or you can get this upgrade.
The earbuds are about 350 bucks and then it's another 200 for their base unit,
if you will, the version four, the V4, whatever they kept calling it.
But that then comes with its own data plan that they say is lifetime data for that unit.
So you don't have to worry about data in another country just to have your ability to translate.
Correct. Yeah. So that was really cool. Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. They say the V4. Or I'm looking on their website right now.
That is $331 if you buy it standalone. Okay.
And then I think they said it was going to be $549 as like a package.
I think with the earbuds. With the earbuds, that's right. Yeah.
But that was amazing to watch it translate. The gent who demonstrated it to us was speaking Polish.
It translated to English for Dave in his ear and to Spanish on his phone simultaneously.
Right. it was incredible to watch
it just work as quickly as it did yeah and and whichever one of
us spoke in whatever language we spoke it just
picked it up and and went with it right and in fact uh
i threw some pidgin japanese at it to for yeah that's right and it picked it
right up and went okay this is what you said yeah wow that is what i intended
to say so yeah and all this stuff like i said we will do videos on some of these
things that you'll see on our mackey cap video like our youtube channel we'll
put a link to that in the show notes but it's.
YouTube.com slash at MacGeekGab. But we'll also put links to all these things
in the show notes as you expect. I guess I should say one thing.
This is MacGeekGab 1018 for Sunday, January 7th.
MacGeekGab 1017 says that it's for Monday, January 8th.
It will already have been released. It was for Monday, January 8th.
And then we decided to do this episode. So we pushed out 1017 a little early.
So it's fine. It's fine. while we
were waiting to talk to the folks from vasco we decided to
waste some time we decided to waste some time that the the
folks at uproar were like oh go check out this oh clean uh company
yeah o-c-l-e-a-n.com so we
did okay right we'll kill some time they make
a smart toothbrush okay fine smart toothbrush
i've had we've talked about them on the show like it's interesting
but the ones i've used have all been bluetooth and you
know just like a bluetooth scale you know
know you have to have your phone open in order to sync with the thing
and like it's always a little bit of just a
an ordeal if you will well the new oakley
toothbrush is wi-fi so it's constantly syncing your data even better than that
though it gives you all the feedback while you're brushing which is pushing
too hard you're going too fast yeah yep but then when you're finished it shows
It shows you both on your phone and on the toothbrush.
And this will definitely do a video for us. You can really kind of dig in and see.
But it shows you a diagram of your mouth and where you did good and where you
didn't do so good. Right.
Yeah, and it uses basically bone conduction technology to talk to you. Yeah.
Why are you brushing too hard? No one else hears what it's saying, but you do.
Yeah, exactly. And it's $130.
Right, and it's got a brushless maglev motor inside it.
And the battery life, they have a couple different ones.
One is 30 days battery life, which is great in and of itself.
And then they have another one that is not quite as advanced as the Wi-Fi one.
It has 180-day battery life on it. I was like, oh, my gosh.
You know, I don't take my electric toothbrush on the road because I don't want
to pack the charger to go around with me as well.
And one that's going to last six months between charges?
Yeah. Okay. I'm good with that. It's pretty cool.
I was really astounded to see, yeah. Yeah. Same.
Yeah. It's pretty cool. So yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll dig more into that.
But yeah, 130 bucks and it links with Apple health.
So you, you know, it's like, they've already done that work for us, which is great.
We love that. So I ask again, who needs a smart toothbrush? Yeah. Yeah.
That's awesome. Yep. Yep.
Of course, none of this would be possible without our CES 2024 coverage sponsors, uh,
uh the the we've got three companies on board this
year and i'm trying to bring up the graphic for it which is
why i'm there you go oh you got it
you do it that's fine i was trying to do it and then i took it off it's great
and i know this shows audio for the most part but um yeah it's uh carbon copy
cloner mac updater and collide are our ces 2024 coverage sponsors and our sincere
thanks to them all of you for helping us making this happen yeah bringing this stuff to you yeah Yeah.
It's truly amazing. There's links in the show notes for it, but just go tell them, thank you.
That's really the thing I would love to just like, of course,
if they, if the product that they make is something that fits for you,
even better, even better, but go check out their site, tell them, thank you.
And tell friends about them. Uh, if it's, you know, if one of these things isn't
for you, tell somebody about this about it, but there's links in the show notes for, for each of them.
And, uh, yeah, our, our sincere thanks carbon copy cloner.com slash
M mgg collide.com slash
mgg that's collide with a k and core code.io
slash mgg for uh for mac
updater so two more things pete one
of them is a company we saw last year e-site yeah you
uh that was cool yeah you want to tell them about it
well yeah so there's uh now don't get
old it's bad for you remember i can't remember the gent's name who was standing there
do you remember his name now I
don't know which one you're talking about the tall gentleman who was legally
blind yes so anyway he I remember talking to him last year and I was so touched
he saw his children's legally blind saw his children's face really for the first
time through this technology.
And they've made some huge improvements on it. It's much lighter now.
I think it's at 160 grams.
I was able to put one of these on, and I don't have the best vision in the world, hence I wear glasses.
I could not see a sign with a naked eye that was a better part of two miles
away from where we were in the hotel.
Put this thing on, and I was able to zoom right in and read the sign on the side of the building.
And that doesn't seem like much. This is a gent who's legally blind who can
now read to his children, who can read the sign on a building across the street.
He showed he was able to go to a baseball game and actually watch the baseball
game. Watch the ball game.
And the video stabilization that's on this now, he said, has made it so much nicer.
There's less feeling of jitter, which I assume would bring some level of nausea on.
Yeah. But that's all been worked out. The battery life on it is amazing.
Easing uh it has the ability it has a camera tilt on it that you can set so
that you can watch tv on it you can read without having to hold your head down
you can you can have the book down the camera will point down you can keep your
head pointed up and still read just you know watch tv.
And they they really look there's still a
virtual headset but they look a lot more like a pair
of big sunglasses now than they did yeah even a
year ago but it was so touching to see this guy
who uses this and he's now a coach when you buy these you
get up to five hours of coaching they said and he's a
coach for people who buy this technology and it's
it's life-changing i know it yeah it's amazing
i i'm yeah it's uh it i love when tech can do things like that so yep very cool
the last thing we did was go check out a company called brandenburg labs they
have been working on spatial Spatial audio, right?
Just like, you know, Apple has their version of spatial audio.
Everybody has their version of spatial audio. Which is amazing.
It is amazing. Even Apple's, you know, with the AirPods. Correct.
Brandenburg Labs...
Started really digging into this what's happening with our ears
what are we hearing how are we doing this and
they created a demo that isn't just a demo
it's being used by people by like engineers
mixing engineers and studios especially folks
that are building like at most mixes but what
they had us do is they had a set of
speakers and the best demo that they did was just with stereo speakers but
i mean you could do it with you know 15 speakers if
you wanted they had stereo speakers in the room and they
had us kind of walk around and listen to some audio samples
music and things like that and then they had.
Us put headphones on now the headphones had motion trackers on them so
that it would know where we were in the room which direction you
were facing whether you were high whether you were low yeah exactly and
yeah 3d motion trackers for these these headphones
and it was just in a you know a hotel suite or whatever i put
the headphones phones on and they said you
know just keep doing the same thing keep walking around and it's like okay this is
great like i'm getting a lot of bleed through from the speakers in the
room though and i took my headphones off and
realized they had muted the speakers in the room mind-blowing
yeah it was amazing i did the same thing i had it
on and the first thing i did was pull it off going wait a minute yeah yeah
yeah they got mad at me they're like no no don't take them off i'm like
no no i like needed to so that i knew
what was going on and i've had a similar experience
with Apple's spatial audio when I
first used it on an airplane with my iPad I was
convinced that my iPad was uh I
think somebody's getting a call you know it's me it's you all right uh I was
convinced that my iPad was you know loud in the airplane right it was not you
know but this takes it to a whole other level it lets it do it with uh you know
it's in real time and there it's not not something you or I could get right now,
but it's just, it's great to see that.
The technology of this spatial audio thing is moving more and more down the
road it's really it's it blew me away it is yeah yeah you shouldn't be able
to do that with a pair of headphones or even a pair of airpods for that matter
you should not be able to exactly pretend that,
it was wild i'm telling you we were standing there in
the room and it would go left high and you
could hear sound coming from above you to your left
yeah and if you turned around and it would would say left high you would
actually hear it coming from the right side above yeah yeah
yeah right because right because you had turned around and it
was you know yeah left was now right yeah it's really
something else really something else so yeah that's what we got for today in
fact we gotta we gotta go because we have to go to our next uh we do our next
appointment here to get out of here there's no way this show is going to get
published before uh before we before we go to to that next event.
But it's fine. I'll publish it later tonight.
We'll get it out. Yep. Get it out. So thank you, everybody, for joining us. This is cool.
Thanks for hanging out. Yeah. I've got to find my mixer volume here so I can
start everything. Like, you know, I don't...
I really should travel with a portable control surface for this,
because then I could, like, fade in the music, see? Like that. Well, there's that.
You know, got to bring the band in. And for the folks at Brandenburg Labs,
I think when we were walking out, They said to us.
I don't think that's what they said. Oh, okay. But if we were,
if we went back to the Vasco translator folks, they might be able to tell us
what that actually meant in German.
That's don't get caught.
Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks to our sponsors.
Of course, for the CES stuff here, carbon copy, happycloner.com slash mgg,
corecode.io slash mgg, and collide.com slash mgg.
Thanks for hanging out, and we'll be back. We'll do more of these episodes this
week, and keep an eye on our YouTube channel so that you can learn all that
stuff too. Pete, what was that that they said again?
How did that go? I think it was...
Don't get caught.
May not. I'm back.
Thanks for watching!