Jesse Mulligan: It's time for Tech Tuesday, Daniel Watson is our guest from Vertech IT Services. Hey Daniel.
Daniel Watson: Hello.
Jesse Mulligan: Well, you've been doing some glamorous and possibly less glamorous traveling. We will get to the glamorous stuff in a moment, but actually you've been camping with the cubs too over the weekend. That sounds like fun.
Daniel Watson: Yeah. Yeah. I was out there stirring up the stars on Saturday night and I completely missed the whole thing with the ...
Jesse Mulligan: Aurora. You're not the only one.
Daniel Watson: I was looking up at the sky, but I was in the bush in a space where we'd cleared out just enough trees to put down a couple of bivvy's in a fireplace. So I had a very much a keyhole view of the sky and deep in the valley I didn't see anything about it. And then it was like, well, no surprise, there's a few events affecting power and GPS that happened in the world for the rest of people who are dependent upon technology. And I wish I had seen it, but it was also, I think it's a kind of look forward as to how many of us are in our day-to-day lives without realising it are using satellite services. So the Tesla owners who are finding that the autopilot was thinking that it was on a motorway rather than a road. So the speed limit changed abruptly and vice versa. And phantom braking, the car's breaking because you're going too fast forward, it thinks is a 50 kilometer speed limit road. Right?
Jesse Mulligan: Yeah. That's potentially pretty dangerous.
Daniel Watson: Yeah. We are not at full general artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles yet we are very much in the world of it is machine learning assisted in some machine intelligence, which is going on, but it's not the same as having a little human under the bonnet, don't make that decision.
Jesse Mulligan: And no matter how good our tech gets, we will still be vulnerable to celestial solar activity.
Daniel Watson: Yeah, indeed. And there's more satellites going up. I mean I'm on starlink at home, quite a few people in the area because it's the best option out there. If satellites are under stress, then they can be knocked out with the appropriate solar weather and that's always been a risk just from debris that's up there as well. In this event. It didn't sound like it actually affected too many people with regards to internet connectivity, but definitely with regards to GPS systems, and that includes in the states real-time, kinematic systems, RTK systems used by John Deere and other tractor brands. So those massive farms where you've got the combine harvesters rolling across these endless miles of fields that they're guided by GPS. It's not necessarily just a person in there driving it about the place. They make sure that they're covering every square centimeter of the ground.
Jesse Mulligan: Oh, look, Dan, out of control, full size, combine harvester. What's the worst that could happen?
Daniel Watson: I know they're massive. I'm so impressed whenever I see those machines, it's like this is industrialised farming is what enables us to feed the world at 7 billion people and we're only going to have greater alliance as we go into the future. The days of systems of farming is well behind us.
Jesse Mulligan: Well, I'm keen to hear about your travels though, and you've come across a nice little way of synchronising your viewing when you're on the plane.
Daniel Watson: Oh yeah. So the wife and I took a weekend on either side of a business trip. We went over to Perth, got to check out the quokkas on Rottenness Island. Extremely cute.
Jesse Mulligan: How cool. Yeah, great.
Daniel Watson: Very much so. But I was stuck in this like, hey, we are off this little bit of a holiday just in two of us and straight away we're watching two different movies doing two different things. I like that shared experience of like, hey, this is a cool movie that watched together and you can talk about it afterwards, but literally we started this holiday being in own little worlds listening on frankly those the not super awesome headsets and we all have got our favorite headsets that we love to use. There is a neat little tool out there that I'm going to go buy unless somebody wants to see me on these Avantree Relays.
Jesse Mulligan: This is public radio mate. We won't be soliciting free tech gear and Tech Tuesday.
Daniel Watson: Alright, okay. Well won't basically, because you've got that three and a half mill audio jack, that pretty much is the standard thing everywhere and most of us are using Bluetooth, so you can plug this in and then it provides a Bluetooth capability that you can hook into your normal EarPods or a headset that you'd be using and that way, and it's also, you can have two of them connected to it, so you can plug it into one screen. You both watch one screen, you both get the audio through for it and they're only like 60 bucks. I'm like going, oh, got to get me one of them.
Jesse Mulligan: What are they called Dan?
Daniel Watson: They last for about 16 hours. They're called.... A-V-A-N-T-R-E-E.
Jesse Mulligan: Right. So you can both listen to the sounds at the same time. That's genius. And I guess that's right.
Daniel Watson: It charges via USB so you can plug it into, you go in those mega long haul flights, but certainly enough to get out to the islands where most people will probably take for the holidays over school, break holidays and winter. And that could be good for just shutting up a of kids,
Jesse Mulligan: Otherwise you're syncing it up and you're just watching both at the same time. But then that wouldn't be the same audio quality as this would be using your own devices with this one too, right?
Daniel Watson: No, you can use it with, yeah, you could use it from a single device, any device that's got a three and a half mil jack. So sometimes I go to the gym or I go to a gym in a hotel when I'm traveling for business and they've got YouTube or a TV on the treadmill or the steer master thing. It's like, oh well nothing else to do around here whilst I knock out half an hour of exercise. You could plug this device in and use your own headset as well and be able to do that. Otherwise you'd just be kind of having to listen to your own thoughts. . Sometimes it can be dark and scary.
Jesse Mulligan: Fantastic. Well we've got you on travel. Dan, any other advice for when you hit the grounds to make sure that you don't run into trouble?
Daniel Watson: Well, okay, so I'm not a big fan of joining any free wifi access point that you have there in hotels and at airports. Are you not? There is methods, no. You can be subject to a man in the middle, a type of attack where people can quite easily set up fake wireless access points and then use that to siphon off data. I mean it's not paranoid if they are actually after you. It is a possibility it does happen and it's just one way of being able to see if you can siphon off people's passwords on mass with very low risk. So if you can hotspot off your mobile phones, I mean two degrees and what have Vodafone, sorry, One NZ, Spark...They've all got pretty good data plans. If one person in the family has an unlimited the data plan and you can roam with that at low cost, then I'll do that. It's safer and you know you are secured because you are applying the hotspot encryption password. Did you want to hear another little trick that?
Jesse Mulligan: Give us a good one?
Daniel Watson: This is for long flights. This is a travel hack. I did this when I was flying economy a lot and when you get stuck after a meal and it's like everybody wants to use the dunny at the same time, just how things go, so one, let's keep this one quiet if too many people do it, it won't work...
Jesse Mulligan: Okay.
Daniel Watson: Okay. So what you can do is when you're putting, ordering your tickets, you can say under dietary requirements that low sodium, your low sodium diet. So what happens is that everybody with the special meals get their meals first and if you scoff it first, you can get off to the dunny first before everybody else has even had theirs delivered. What the best thing about it is in that little package with the knife and fork, what else comes in there?
Jesse Mulligan: Salt....
Daniel Watson: Haha.
Jesse Mulligan: It's very funny.
Daniel Watson: You're not really missing out anything. Anyway.
Jesse Mulligan: Love it Dan. Thanks so much. Have a great couple of weeks. Nice to chat to you Dan Watson Vertech IT Services with a variety of hacks for when you're traveling internationally.