Any way you can just paste it in the chat room or something? Yeah, sure. Or I can just email it to you. Yeah, just email it to me again. I don't know why I can't find it. Because Google ate it. They come from you? Oh, yeah, I found it. It came from you. Oh, OK. Yeah, Google failed. I typed daily tech news, and it didn't come up as a search result. Well, you know, they're not that good at search. Damn it. All right. More of an advertising company. I know, right? All right, I got it. Let me look at the headlines a little bit here. OK, yeah, no problem. We've got a couple of minutes. Oh, we're live. Yeah, this is the video's live pre-show. Behind the scenes. Yeah, I'm all for talking about the 5SEE, for sure. You know, phones are my thing, so I'm up for that. Let's see. You're right back. Patrick, getting close. Don't go far. Patrick. Oh, Patrick. We love you. I got to take the dive for a walk. We're going to run out of the store. We'll be right back. What did Patrick do? You're again? Dear Patrick. What? Where did Patrick go? Oh, he said he'd be right back. I don't know where he went. Oh, and Miriam, wscottis1 wants me to remind you we have a chat room at irc.chatrealm.net. I'll be right there. Hashtag or poundchat to join the. irc.what, is it? Chatrealm. Chatrealm. Is that? Oh, e at the end of realm. OK, and chatrealm.net.  You can get it in a browser, too. It's up to you. Is it? Yeah, if you do irc.chatrealm.net in the browser, it'll give you a browser-based client. I use irc.dtns.tv. That works, too. That redirects. And what's the channel, sorry? Chat. Oh, yeah, OK. Oh, that's nice. I'll just go in as tank girl if you want to op me or whatever you do there. Yeah, somebody op-er. Just coming in now. Coming in hot. I'm in. Woo-hoo, coming hot. Ooh, it's tank girl. Like, old 2000s. I don't know, it's fine. You just have the vowels, which is very, you know. Well, that's my handle, you know, everywhere. And it's from the mid-90s that I came up with that one. Because tank girl, the great comic. The same one I get sued, you know. Now that I'm a brand, they can't touch me. There's no vowels. There's no cause for confusion. No cause, screw you. They won't hold in court. No one is going to confuse my brand with yours. I know, right? Your brand clearly has vowels. Mine does not. I'm just looking at the headline still and let you know in a sec. OK. I haven't seen anything yet, Tom. On Yahoo. Yeah. There's a live blog from Fortune. Might be worth keeping an eye on. So exciting. They're also late. Will it not happen? Oh my gosh, Cara Swisher is so mean. Oh wait, what's she mean? On Twitter, she writes, just like Yahoo, to be late to its own party slash funeral slash strategic alternatives. Come on, it's Cara. That's where we live. Come on. It's funny meme. I know, right? Daily tech news. You said it's that Twitter handle. Yeah, it's Daily Tech News, because that's the character. Oh yeah, there it is. I see it. Daily Tech News. I've remedied this. You're following zero people. That's awesome. Really? That account follows zero people? I guess they use it in Tweet Deck all the time. I never thought about it. Yeah, that's right. You should probably follow somebody. Let me actually look at it again. I'm sure you tweeted about this, so I'm going to retweet you. Oh no, we probably haven't. Oh, really? Actually, I've been sitting here, I'm sitting on the thumbs. I tweeted about it from Ace Detective earlier, but. Oh, OK, cool. About to talk camera phones with Tank Girl and not Patrick. Not Patrick, such a good handle. Well, since you're ahead of me, I will retweet you then. OK, there we go. All right, I see that.  They have a new way to display the thread. It was very confusing at first, but actually is better. Twitter is a mess. Yeah, pissing me off because I'm a huge fan, but I'm just annoyed with it now. All right, you guys ready to go? I was born ready. I was born ready like that. That's how you do it. Thank you. When having tea with the queen, you must remember three important things. One, pinky up. Two, never wear a hat more audacious than hers. And three, make sure you wear your DTNS T-shirt to become queen appropriate. Go to DailyTechNewsShow.com forward slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 2nd, 2016 Groundhog Day. Apparently we get a quick spring, according to Punxsutani film. I'm Tom Merritt, joining me today. Mr. Patrick Beja as he does most Tuesdays, but this time, not from France. How is Finland, Patrick? Well, it is dark and cold. That's how it is. And it's lovely, though. I'm not. Yes, basically. And you've got only 500 megabits per second up with a gig down. It's not even symmetrical.  You know, I would really love to talk about this for the whole show. I'm sure we'll get a chance to do that. But I just want to know, has anyone ever experienced, and this is not a brag or a humble brag, I actually want to know, experienced a limit in the speed tests from speedtest.net, where they can't actually get high enough speeds. Patrick, it's a broke speed test because his speed is so fast. Miriam Zwar, our technology writer, is joining us to talk about camera phones today. Miriam, do you believe, Patrick, that he has broke speed tests? Yes, and thanks for having me on the show, by the way, Ed, Tom, I actually believe it because I have a place in Portland. I spend my time halfway in Portland, halfway in San Francisco. And I have gigabit ethernet, so gigabit fiber in Portland, and I can actually get one gigabit symmetric. And I tried it out, but I didn't keep it because it's just too much money. And now I'm down to 100, 100, and it's perfectly fine for myself. But I believe it. Like, I've seen the speed test kind of peg, so yeah. So there you go, maybe. Yeah, maybe. Miriam and Patrick are both being kind enough to speak English for this episode, even though they both could just speak France and leave me out of the entire conversation. So I appreciate that. Thanks. You're very welcome. I was gonna ask Patrick, actually, what are you doing in Finland? Did you just move there? Yes, I did, actually. My wife is from here. She's a Swedish speaking Finn, and we decided to spend some time in her home country. So I'm here, and the internet is fast, so I'm happy. What else do you need, really? Yeah, you know, a few years, but I've been to Finland a couple of times to visit Nokia back when I was at Engage and covering phones full time. Now I do consulting as well. But the thing that struck me the most around 2008 or so was that in an underground parking garage on the third level underground, I was still getting five bars of 3G. And that was my first experience.  I can only dream of this in the US. All right, I'm only mentioning this because you brought up the topic, but I get, so the gigabit down 500 megs up is about 30 euros or 40 euros, something like that. Unlimited, of course. And I get 4G LTE, 75 down 30 up, just about. Unlimited, no cap as well for 25, I think. And this is just, I'm as amazed as everyone by this. It's wonderful. Well, we probably will talk about what allows bandwidth to be higher in places than others on a future show. But as I mentioned, we got some camera phone tips coming, and we got headlines coming, so let's start those. Look, I'm not saying Mark Gurman of 9 to 5 Mac and John Piszowski of BuzzFeed are always right about Apple rumors, but when both of them agree, it really doesn't leave a whole lot of room for me to fit in a lot of doubt. And both of them say they have sources who say Apple plans to hold an event March 15th, in which it will announce a four-inch iPhone and a new iPad Air, along with new Apple Watch bands. And Gurman seems pretty confident that the phone will be end up to be called the iPhone 5 SE. Yeah, I first thought this is a weird name for an iPhone. That's too many letters. And then someone reminded me of the iPhone 3GS, which we were all fine with. So I swallowed back my Steve Jobs would never do this.  Mark Zuckerberg and Al Sonariam, what a good story on the 5 SE, I know for sure. What do you think of this? Look, both the rumors that are brewing in the tech media and the tech world out there, plus my own internal connections are pretty much in agreement with us. I think that we're gonna see an announcement March 15th for a new phone. And it wouldn't be surprised me, I think it's very smart strategy on Apple's part to have a smaller screen phone for those people who prefer that, but updated to kind of modern specs, like to be able to use Apple Pay and all that other stuff. And it's not probably not very expensive for them to do at this point. It doesn't mean it won't be cheap or anything. I don't think it will be. It's still driven by profit margins. So I think it's gonna happen and it's gonna be interesting. And I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. It'll be cheaper than an iPhone 6S Plus. And it'll also still only come with 16 megs and we'll be bitching about that. And then you'll pay $100 more. So basically whatever price they announce on the day, make sure it mentally to add 100 bucks to that. Well, yeah. And actually you probably should add 200 bucks because you look at the four inch and then you actually want the bigger phone and then you realize the bigger phone comes in 16 megs, 16 gigs only. So you have to get the 64. So those are fighting words because I think not everyone wants a big phone. Like I want a big phone. No, I agree. I agree. I agree. I think, look, actually it's interesting to me. I think you're right on the one thing is that everyone who has seen the, who is an iPhone 5 or 5S user or 5C and has seen the 6 or 6S, at first it's taken them back. And when they start using it for a while, they get used to it and it's not an issue, right?  I actually, what I'm hoping is, and I don't think we'll see this happening because economies of scale supply, Tim Cook's expertise here, what they're gonna do is retain the displayed head on the 5, but I would love to see the same exact form factor as the 5 with like a slightly larger display, 4.5 inch squeezed in that frame. That would make me happy because to me, it's not really the fact that the screen is too big. It's that the phone is too big for most people on the big ones. Very true. So Mark Zuckerberg, as I was saying, has announced on Facebook that WhatsApp now has a billion users, the most of any messaging app according to Fortune. The second most popular messaging app is Facebook Messenger with 800 million monthly users followed by 10 cents WeChat with 650 million users and 10 cents QQ with 639 million. That's impressive, a billion on WhatsApp. Yeah, and this used to be that WeChat was by far and away the most popular in the world. So WhatsApp has not only made up ground, it's doubled the amount of users since it was acquired by Facebook in 2014. Yeah, that billion club is a pretty small one and Facebook has what, two, three apps or services in it? It's pretty impressive. Microsoft has changed the Windows 10 upgrade and Windows update from optional to recommended. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley is talking about this over on ZDNet.com. It's got a good write up about it. This means Windows 10 will automatically begin the upgrade process and download for users with automatic updates turned on. Now, keep in mind, you'll still be prompted to approve the install, so it won't install itself without you interacting with it, but you should pay attention when you say yes, give me the security updates because one of those updates might be Windows 10 and if you don't want Windows 10, you'll not want to say okay. However, if you do install it, you have 31 days to roll back to your previous Windows version. Thanks to Greg N for posting this on the subreddit. Microsoft getting very pushy about moving people on the Windows 10. And that move was announced a few weeks or months back. Some people, I should say, were angry at it then. I'm sure they're going to be angry at it now, but I think at this point it's pretty clear that Windows 10 is going to happen for everyone in the long run, you know, you can't really escape it. I guess you have to put a lot more effort into it if you want to escape it. Yeah, I mean, if you're the kind of person that has recommended updates automatically installing, you're probably not someone who pays this close attention to all of this stuff anyway, which could be good or bad. It may be that you don't really care if it goes to Windows 10, or it may be that you'll be very surprised that you accidentally said okay and got a new operating system. Yeah, it might be people who aren't tech savvy enough to not have it, the recommended update automatically installs so they're safer and they might be very confused once they boot their computer and it's a different screen. So expect calls from your less tech savvy uncles and nieces or, you know, members of your family. Why is there a start button here? A new safe harbor agreement for data transfer between the United States and Europe has been agreed upon. European commissioner Vera Jurova and US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker finished the agreement late Monday night just in time for you to say that it wasn't finished and then they signed it. They were listening, I know. The new agreement will be overseen by an independent ombudsman and will have annual reviews. The commissioner said the agreement should take about three months to implement. And also, don't forget there's still a political end to this. The data regulatory agencies in Europe all have to sign off on it. There's lots of privacy organizations that may try to oppose it and it's questionable whether, you know, maybe the United States will oppose it in Congress or something so it's not all done yet but at least there is an agreement that they can try to go forward. I'm interested to see if it becomes a rocky process with people trying to scuttle it or if it just gets swept under the rug and becomes a fact. The thing is, I think both entities and actually all entities need it because they all wanna know what's, they all wanna spy on the information. So I suspect that it's gonna go through in the end. Maybe unfortunately, that's another debate for another time. Digital Trends has a story about an exoskeleton from suit X called the Phoenix meant to replace wheeled mobility devices like wheelchairs, for instance. At 27 pounds, it's about half as heavy as the most popular exoskeleton out there called the Rewalk. The battery on the Phoenix lasts for four hours of continuous walking or eight hours of intermittent use. It's modular so it can adapt to more needs. Like if you only need it for one leg, for instance, you can make that happen. That can be hard to do with things like the Rewalk. It can be fine-tuned to your particular way of walking using an Android app. Costs $40,000 which those of us who don't buy exoskeletons probably think that's very expensive but it's still about half of what other exoskeletons cost. Suit X is accepting pre-orders now and expects to ship the first unit in March. Thanks to Jay Nomadon for posting this one on the subreddit. I love that we're talking about exoskeletons in a competitive fashion with new prices and shipping dates. Like what a wonderful world we live in. And it's cheaper than a car, a new car. That's true. And you could probably walk down to the grocery store and back in this thing on eight hours of intermittent battery life. Yeah, it's still a little bit wonky. The exoskeleton doesn't simulate like actual walking speeds and it's not as nimble obviously as an actual skeleton but it's a great step forward, no pun intended. And I actually had an instance in my life where I couldn't walk and I actually had to learn to walk again and I was in the wheelchair for a while and it was in the process. Yeah, I had an accident when I was very young and it was a pretty bad road accident. And I didn't realize until I was in that situation how much we take for granted as people who can walk. Just the idea of walking down some stairs when you're not stable on your feet is terrifying but beyond that, when you can't walk, there are so many things that you don't think about and I'm sure anyone who is or who has been in a wheelchair is nodding their head right now. So the perspective that we could maybe someday have this kind of technology actually work sufficiently well that it's gonna replace the wheelchairs is incredibly exciting. Yeah, it's a cool advance. Nintendo announced quarterly earning, operating profits of 33.5 billion yen up 7% year over year and revenue of 224.5 billion yen down 17%. Nintendo sold, apparently Django approves. Nintendo sold, oh sorry, okay, one of your dogs. Nintendo sold 1.87 million Wii U systems in the quarter down 2% year over year and it sold 12.6 million Wii U systems since the launch of the system in 2012. But you can forget all of that because all anybody wants to talk about is the fact that the company's president, the Tatsumi Kimishima, said on The Young Young School that Nintendo is looking into VR. I guess this is big news because all they've ever said, all of any of them have ever said is we don't think VR's ready yet. So it's a shift in tone. But yeah, Miriam, that's a good point. They did VR. It's kind of fun, right? Yeah, the virtual boy, it was such a disaster. It wasn't really VR though, but I guess it wasn't really reality. It was something virtual for sure. They said it wasn't fun actually, which is a little bit more of a definite statement than it's not ready. But for me, the big news of that announcement was the fact that they sold about four million, over four million units of Splatoon, a game that has no easily recognizable Nintendo characters. There's no Zelda, no Link, no Mario, and it sold to one of every third installed console. And it's a new IP, which Nintendo hasn't done in a very long time. I guess they did, but not with that amount of success. So that, for me, as a gamer, was the most exciting part of this.  I think at the point where the president, for the first time, and the company says, looking into VR, we're not going to get it on the next console, right? I don't think so. I mean, there are rumblings that the NX might be some kind of an operating system that can serve different types of devices. So maybe, you know, Sony is putting their VR helmet as a headset, as an accessory to their machine. I don't think it's very likely. I mean, it honestly sounds like they would be coming in a little bit late on the VR wars, and it wouldn't be differentiating enough. It sounds to me like something he's saying half to half, not completely, but to appease the shareholders and saying, yes, we know we're looking into it. We'll see what happens. Baidu has published some data from usage of their DU battery saver and DU speed booster apps for Android. North and South Americans use more of their battery than those in Middle East and North Africa. Asian users tend to upgrade their phones the most frequently. North Americans took the longest. The report, however, did not cover Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Australia. A couple other tidbits from the study, 16 apps on average are running on any given Android phone, eight of which people are not usually aware of, they're just running in the background, and the most common problem with phones is overheating. Yeah, I can see that. You know, I saw something yesterday, I didn't get a chance to dig into it more, but somebody posted something that said that the Android, sorry, the Facebook app on Android uses 20% more battery life when installed, just installed. Maybe because people use it that much. No, no, no, it's just eiling in the background. Because Zuckerberg is gathering data on us, right? Like, that's what it is. No, there was an issue, I don't know if that's what it refers to, but there was an issue where the Facebook app was improperly doing some background caching, yeah, some caching or something, and they were trying to fix it. But I didn't get a chance to investigate, I thought it was interesting, though, because I wouldn't be surprised. I've noticed that some apps are not just Facebook, but some apps really drain the battery a lot faster. Yeah, well, and that's one of the reasons that multi-tasking was resisted by Apple for so long is because they were hoping to juice their battery life up by not allowing it, basically, and you still don't have true multi-tasking. Yeah, it vexes me. Yeah, me too. It's one of that in the file system of the two things keeping me back now, frankly. From being a full-time iPhone user, obviously have one, but. Yeah, I mean, again, you can get to the file system, but boy, do you have to do a lot, it's not easy. Yeah, you can't really. You can get to the iCloud file system, but yeah. And interestingly, on that issue, I think a lot of people don't ever realize that you can't get to the file system and we don't care. Well, they don't care, and it's fine. I think that's the whole point, right? This is a problem for some of us. It's really not a problem for most people, and I'm totally aware of that. I'm not even suggesting that it's needed for most people. But you know that Apple doesn't really care about the people who are not most people. And it is exactly why I don't use an iPhone as my main phone. It's why I have a choice, and it's totally okay. Tech in Asia passes along data from Canalis that Samsung has taken over as the top-selling smartphone maker in India, bumping MicroMax back to second. Lenovo rose to third in techs, Carbon and Lava also all saw declines. It's the invasion of the smartphone makers in India. All the local makers are starting to fall back in the face of Samsung and Lenovo. Miriam, do you know how good of news is this for Samsung? Everybody wants to take over the Indian market. Well, India is a huge deal, especially in the kind of mid-range low-end market.  I think it'll be really interesting to see what happens with the Chinese manufacturers in India beyond Xiaomi, who has already got a pretty strong presence. Like Huawei is doing some pretty impressive stuff right now worldwide in terms of sales and rise as people becoming more aware, especially in here in the US. And so it'll be interesting to see if that falls through with India. But I mean, it's a huge market. I think every foreign manufacturer should want a piece of that pie, right? What's the other one, Vivo? Is that the other Chinese one that's moving in as well along with Xiaomi? Yes, there is Vivo, the Xiaomi, who else is? Meizhu, maybe. Meizhu has some presence there. One plus stride for a while, Oppo, of course. Right, right. But yeah, I mean, the thing about India is that for a long time, it was a Blackberry and Nokia stronghold, right? And so, because of obviously, for obvious reasons. But the thing I'm hearing from all of my friends who are in India, you know, phone bloggers and stuff, is that there's a high demand for, you know, in the same way as in China, people will want to pay the extra money to have, you know, a Samsung or an Apple phone, right? Like because of the brand Cache. Cache, yeah. Even though they can get a very wonderful product from other, from competitors, it becomes a status symbol at that point, you know? I actually, my aunt spends a lot of time in India, in the Himalayas, and she came back with a very cheap Samsung phone, around a little bit under 200 bucks off contract. And I was really surprised at the quality of the device. It could run most apps pretty well. It was a pretty fast phone. We're really a long shot from the phones, the cheap phones around those price ranges we had even a couple of years ago. It was pretty amazing. So I'm not sure, I mean, I'm surprised that it's Samsung though. Like I honestly like, you know, I'm surprised they bump MicroMax. I mean, MicroMax is pretty much a quintessential Indian brand, right? And it's just like, in Samsung, you know, their low to mid range phones are not, haven't been that great. But I think what's happening is the A series of phones, A5, A7, A9, we don't see these in the US very commonly, but they are basically the build quality and like they're 80% or 75% of the experience of buying a Galaxy S6 or a Note 5, but at half the price. But at half the price, yeah. And I think that's what's working. And if you look at OnePlus, it's the same thing, right? Making premium-ish phones that sell for half the price. And I don't know if you guys have talked about this since CES, but Huawei launched the Honor 5X in the US. It actually started shipping yesterday, which is the first officially sold in the US Huawei phone that's unlocked with a warranty and tech support and a 1,800 number. It'll be sold at like Best Buy and Amazon, et cetera, et cetera. And that phone is amazing for $200. It's probably the best $200 no-contract phone you can buy today in the US.  And so to me, it's like, okay, you know, if they can pull this off here in the US and, you know, of course they can do something similar. You know, Samsung will probably start doing something similar pretty soon as well, right? Yeah, for sure. The other part of Huawei's business is, of course, networking and Cuba's state telecom at Texas has announced it will allow residential broadband services in two areas in Havana. Up until now, only diplomats and foreign employees of corporations were allowed to have residential internet connections. Bars at restaurants will also be allowed to order service and Huawei is operating the fiber optic connections there. So a small, but I think important step towards connecting another country, one of the few countries left that doesn't have at least, you know, a decent presence in its large cities of a connection to the internet. Yeah. The fight, oh, sorry, Miriam. No, I just said, yeah. Okay, well, in that case, I'm sure you'll agree with this one as well. The Fine Brothers posted to Medium Monday night that they have rescinded all trademarks and applications for brands related to reaction videos. They also discontinued a plan program to license their reaction video format to other people.  They backed off. And we talked about it a lot on court killers if you want more detailed explanation of what happened here but essentially it was a very badly messaged attempt to do something and they've done the right thing and said, okay, fine, you know what? We've angered a lot of people. Let's just back off. And backing off the trademarks is something they wouldn't have had to do. Legally it may even be a bad move for them because somebody could now actually start a channel with the same name in another region and take them to court or something. So I think they've learned a lot, put it that way out of this whole experience. Finally, Yahoo announced today that it is exploring an aggressive strategic plan to simplify the company narrowing its focus on areas of strength to better fuel growth and drive revenue. That's different than pursuing strategic alternatives. It's an aggressive strategic plan. It's totally different. Wait for the next paragraph. Hold that thought. They planned to slash staff by about 15% close offices in Dubai, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Madrid and Milan and exit certain product lines. Kara Swisher said that Yahoo Chairman Maynard Webb said that in addition to trying to reverse spin its Alibaba holdings, Yahoo would also be taking meetings on qualified strategic proposals. Also quite different than pursuing strategic alternatives. Qualified strategic proposals. And revenue actually wasn't that bad. 1.27 billion up from 1.25 billion last year and beating expectations of 1.19 billion. I didn't get a chance to write it in because it's all coming in right now but I just wanted to say that when they were talking about products, they're going to continue to focus on search, mail and tumblr but they didn't mention Flickr, which concerns me and my terabyte of pictures on Flickr and some of the products that are going to go include Yahoo Games and Yahoo Smart TV. Oh, they had those? I know. Oh yeah. Thank you, Jenny. I appreciate that, Jenny. I made Jenny face her past life fears and keep an eye on the Yahoo earnings for us. So double appreciation for that. Thank you, Jenny. Yeah, it just amuses me. Yeah, it's a mess right now and it's only going to get messier as things go on. Let's hold that thought on Flickr. Let's talk about that a little later when we talk about Carrefour. Because we were talking about email earlier today and that's part of the reason I don't use it as much anymore is because I don't have that certainty that it's going to be cared for, the platform. Oh, that's it for our headlines. Thanks, folks, for submitting stories on our subreddit, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and that is a look at the headlines. All right, let's get into our discussion. This started because I was testing out a Nexus 5X. My wife works for YouTube, so she got the Google Christmas present, which was a free Nexus 5X and I thought, I'll live with it for a week. I'll try it out, put all my apps on there. It's a nice phone, I thought it worked well. It's not an expensive phone, so it feels a little more plasticky than maybe you'd be used to if you're used to a Samsung Galaxy or an iPhone. But the one thing I noticed early on was a lot of the pictures I was taking for either Instagram or Snapchat didn't look as good. And somebody said, well, you need to get Miriam to give you some tips on taking photos and I'm like, yeah, I think I probably do, although I'm not sure if that's the problem with the camera. Why do pictures look different on a phone that's not that differently specced from other phones? Is it software? Is it the way the hardware is put together? What makes one phone look different with pictures from another Miriam? So it is mostly the software. Actually, I have a 5X right here. It's interesting you mentioned 5X. 5X is odd because the sensor is mounted upside down. So some Android apps still don't know that and when you try to use them, show you an upside down picture. By the way, this is welcome to Android bleeding edge, right? This would never happen on an iPhone ever. But because they mount the sensor upside down and they just set a flag in the software to clip everything, some apps just don't know. But that's not the problem you're having. I think what we're seeing, especially on Android, it's really noticeable is if you don't have the software expertise, it doesn't really matter if you buy the best Sony sensor and the best lens stack from, you know, say Zeiss or another manufacturer, you're still not gonna get great camera performance.  They, you know, they have the chops, the specs are there, on paper it looks great, they're using the latest Sony sensor and then you take a photo and it's good, but it's not like, you know, iPhone or, you know, some of the other phones you should talk about good. And I'm using the iPhone because it's a good example of a reliably solid camera phone experience. It's not the best, it is 99% of the time best. And to me, that's good enough for most people, right? So the generic answer when people ask me, you know, I'm into phone photography, what camera phone should I buy or what phone should I buy? I always say, well, what is your purpose? Like, are you going to snap pictures of your running kids and family and memories? Or are you kind of like me, are you going to set up your shots and really think about your photography experience? And that really immediately dictates what I recommend. And then, you know, the general rule of thumb is that there are a few players that do software better than others. And so you can, you always count on Apple, you can always count on Samsung, LG. And I'm talking about the flagship level. Like if you go low end on LG, it gets bad very quickly, which is really strange because they make a lot of their own sensors. So they make their own software for these sensors. And then you have Nokia, well Nokia now Microsoft, another, you know, leader in terms of imaging technology. And then, strangely enough, it's strange that you had such an odd experience with the 5X that you're not happy with it because to me, the 5X and the 6P are not the best Android camera phone by far, but they are consistently good for a Nexus device which has never happened before. And they're fast, which has also never happened before. We've never had the combination of consistently good and consistently fast on a Nexus device. We had consistently fast on the Galaxy Nexus, but it was really poor. Then we had consistently good but not fast on say the Nexus 6 last year or the Nexus 5 before it. But then this year they've somehow managed to do both. And I'm pretty pleased I've got a 5X and a 6P and I really see no difference because again, same hardware, same software. And it's interesting, right? Because Huawei makes one and LG makes another one. And yet Huawei is usually not that great for camera photography. So the 6P is probably the best Huawei camera phone you can buy right now. But at the same time, LG makes way better camera phones in the G4 and the V10. So really it comes down to software.  Brands to avoid that are usually always underperform and always drive me nuts because you'd think they'd know better our Motorola. I just don't know how they do it. But even the best intentions, their camera phones just suck. And it's interesting because the benchmarks show otherwise. Like DXOMark, which by the way, please do not like, okay, let's rewind for a second. Let me tell you something simple. Do not use ratings and technical specs. It's the same thing as the technical specs on the car. You have to drive the car to really experience whether it's good fit for you. Can I live with this every day? Is there the space I need? Do I feel happy driving it? Blah, blah, blah. It's the same with a camera phone. Take a photo, see for yourself because ultimately the specs don't mean anything. More megapixels is usually actually a bad idea. Nobody, trust me, nobody needs more than eight megapixels. Period. The only reason we have more than eight megapixels today is because to do 4K video, we need a minimum of 12 megapixels. And so they've all gone to 13 or 16. But anything you see that's 20 or 41 is generally a waste of your time and energy. There are a few exceptions to that. Sony and Microsoft slash Nokia have used large sensor arrays like 20 megapixels and 41 in the case of Nokia in the past to create these, what they call, superfixed pixels in software. They basically do some software trickery, kind of like, it's very different from Lightro, but we've heard of all of Lightro that does software photography. They recreate depth from this unique sensor they have. So with a lot of compute power, you can do some pretty crazy stuff when you have a large number of pixels. But by general rule, if you have large pixels, you have smaller pixels and smaller pixels like cups like this instead of big buckets to gather light. And if each pixel is a bucket, you're gonna be able to gather more light more quickly. Think of it as the image coming into the sensor as buckets of rain. And if your buckets can fill up, if you can catch all that rain really quickly, then you're not gonna get as blurry of a picture because your camera is not moving in that time. And so the bigger the buckets, the better. So cups are not good, 21 megapixels versus a bucket, which is eight megapixels. Of course, the sensor, given the same size sensor. So stop me anytime if you have questions I can go on, but I can certainly give you some basic tips on how to take good photos. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think one of the things that is consistent in my comparison of the iPhone 6 camera and the 5X camera was that in low light situations, I was getting better Snapchat photos particularly on the iPhone than I was on the 5X, but it's also likely that user error is a factor here and that the iPhone was just a little more forgiving of my user error than the 5X was. So what are some tips to help me and anybody else like set yourself up for success to take the best photo, no matter what hardware you're using? I was gonna ask you about Snapchat specifically is did you use, you obviously use the Snapchat app to take the photos you didn't have photos in your gallery that you used? Okay, so the thing about Android you have to understand is the camera app does a lot of the image processing. The APIs don't really, until recently, didn't really give you the full control to the module. So apps like Facebook, whatever, they don't go deep into the camera APIs. They just use whatever's basically a little, basically it's a command that tells, that the programmer uses is take a photo now and give it to me and it doesn't really, they do any clever processing or anything like that. So my rule of, whereas Apple, you have to go through Apple's camera stack to get the photos so you get a more consistency again. With Android the best thing to do is always use the native camera app that came with the phone. Third party, there's a couple of third party apps that are really good and I'll get to that, but most of the time you better serve with whatever camera app came with the device that's branded by the company because it is bare down to the metal, it takes the best pictures usually.  Number one, it's kind of obvious. Wipe your camera lens because you probably have a fingerprint on it. Most of the people I see take shots and you see that haze in their shot? Like it looks like there's fog in the room. That's because they have a fingerprint on their lens. So use, you know. What do you wipe it with? That was gonna be my question. What's that? What do you wipe the camera lens with because is it on there? Anything that's a soft lint-free fabric, that's not synthetic, so a good one would be cotton if you have like this hoodie, the sleeve of this hoodie, or even a T-shirt under one of your layers under there, just pull out the shirt, just wipe the lens with it real quick. Avoid things that are rough and avoid things that are made of more plastic-key materials because it just won't work. Microfiber is awesome. If you keep a microfiber round for cleaning your glasses, you can use that. But it pays to just wipe that lens. Jeans are great, you know. The glass is on the- Cotton jeans, not those weird hair-shirt jeans that- Right, exactly. I mean, traditional denim is what I was thinking.  It's hard to scratch, so you can use jeans. Jeans are normally a little too rough for lenses, for like a real camera's lens. The biggest problem with real cameras is that the lenses are coated with these films and the films will scratch off if you use something rough. You don't have this problem on camera phones. So wipe your lens. Number two, get close to your subject. Like, I see so many people just stand far away from a picture and you look in the viewfinder and what they're really trying to pick a picture of is only taking a third of the screen or a quarter. Just walk up to your subject. Don't use the digital zoom if you can avoid it because most cameras have a digital zoom that reduces the quality of the photo. And I can explain that if you want to know why.  But generally, just get in the face of your subject. That's what camera photography is all about.  Yeah, don't do that. Then zoom, right? The next thing to do is frame your shot. Like, think of what you're trying to take a photo of. As you're bringing up the viewfinder, just look at it and go like, do I have everything lined up? Does it look right? And one simple rule for that is don't try to center anything. Just put everything at one third. It's called the rule of thirds. So one third from the top of the bottom, one third from the left or the right. And you'll see the pictures immediately look more natural, immediately look more professional and attract our eyes a lot more. Don't be afraid to do this. Put your phone like that. Put it like this. Portrait or landscape really make a difference on how the shot looks. If you're trying to take a photo of something that's tall, take a portrait. If you want to take a picture of something that's more of a landscape, that's the name, take landscape. So framing your shot matters and you can do that in a heartbeat by just raising your phone, look at the viewfinder, actually look at it. The last thing you want to take care of is, you know, focus and exposure. And to do that, if you see that the picture is looking too bright in one spot or that the subject is trying to take a photo is looking too bright, you can tap on the screen on that subject and usually most phones will adjust exposure for that subject and at the same time, focus on that subject. Unless you're very, very close, most phones will take a picture that's pretty much in focus from about two feet onward. And exposure is something that, in terms of how bright the photo is, is something you can play with by touching the screen again. If you see that there's a lot of backlight and you're trying to get a face of a subject for a person, use the HDR mode. That's a mode that you have on your camera. On some cameras, it's automatic, which is really awesome. But on cameras, it's not automatic. It's a quick setting away. It's usually one or two taps on the screen to get to HDR. Apple has an auto HDR mode. LG has an auto HDR mode. Samsung has an auto HDR mode. It's very smart. Use it, turn it on and it will actually automatically figure out whether it's using HDR. You're gonna say, what is HDR? It stands for High Dynamic Range. All it does is make the bright things in your photo less bright and the dark things in your photo more bright. So it equalizes the photo and looks better. And then here's another rule. Do not use your flash unless you absolutely have to. So leave it off by default.  So for example, the example of the person you're taking a photo of a friend, there's a lot of light behind them, turn on HDR and then also turn on the flash. Sometimes you can't do both, so pick one.  So these are some of the things you can do. And I would say the best thing you can do like everything else in life is practice and experiment. The more you take pictures in a thoughtful way by doing all these steps consciously as you go, the better you train yourself to take better pictures. And everybody will love you for it. Your friends will say, wow, that looked fantastic. How did you do that? And the secret sauce is that in the end of the day, you can pretty much use like $100 boost mobile, crappy Samsung phone and get fantastic photos if you just follow a few of these steps. So that's kind of a takeaway for me. I can't wait till my friends and family tell me I'm so amazing for taking those pictures. I'm gonna follow all those steps. I have one last quick question. I think we're running a little bit low on time. So looking towards the future, I'm hearing rumors about the iPhone 7 having two lenses and I know there are some phones that already use two lenses. What is that for? Is that useful or is it a marketing term or marketing gimmick? Well, it really depends how it's done. HTC did two lenses with the one M8 and one M9 and it really didn't, not the M9, sorry. Yeah, the M8, not the M9. The M8, and they use one for depth perception to give you like this kind of like focus, defocus effect, and that was really kind of useless. The ones that I've seen that really work well, if the two cameras have identical sensors in slightly different lenses, like Huawei has a phone called the Honor 6 Plus. It's not available in the US, but it had two lenses and instead of doing a 3D like two lenses could do, one lens is a very, you know, basically f-stop that's very wide and the other one is a more narrow field of view. So the end result is that they could vary the depth of field which means that you could defocus things after the fact and refocus on other parts of the photo after the fact. So kind of like lightro basically. Yeah, kind of a basic version of lightro and it was, the other thing is low light, it would combine both images to get to less noise, which was really clever. So it had many, many advantages and I could see if Apple were to adopt something like that with their in-house expertise and their iteration and their fine crafting of software that it could be a significant boon to the photo quality in low light. So low light is always the hardest. If you have, if you know low light situation, some, this is where phones fall apart and some companies make better phones and there are a number of tricks you can do to use to make better low light photos in terms of software, but there's no other major trick for you as a user than be steady as, as steady as possible. Try to avoid the flash and just, you know, hold the phone like this and with two hands brace yourself against something and be as steady as you can. Some phones like the iPhone 6S Plus and the 6 Plus since most of the new Android phones have something called optical image stabilization which helps a lot. That's a feature that you should always look for on a phone, it's always a good idea to have it. One of my gripes to the 5X and the 6P in the Nexus is that it doesn't have it. But the dual lens things helps with low light situations in the same way that the optical. Yeah, so the dual camera, the dual lens thing would do that but it still doesn't remove the shake.  So that's the problem with multi-lens cameras is that you can't do physical OS anymore. You have to rely on software. But software is getting faster and better. So Apple does this on the 6 and 6S Plus, sorry, 6S. They take about five shots in a row at like super fast speeds and take the best elements of all of them to get a steady shot in the low light. There's a number of things you can do. The Nexus uses large pixels which compensates for low light.  So picking the right device to start with really helps. But the reality is this, is that most people are not thoughtful and don't take the second or two to think about their shop before they take it. Now I understand if your kid is running in front of you, you need the best camera phone on the market and you just mash the button. And maybe hold it. So which phone is that? Which phone is that? Well, there's really two I recommend, maybe three I recommend right now for that. Any iPhone, 6 and up. And the Nexus, the current Nexus is not the old ones. And the Samsung, all the current Samsung's. In terms of raw speed, in terms of raw speed of taking photos in a row and hopefully getting that shot of your toddler running around, those are the three phones you wanna have. The three brands. But that's changing all the time. For example, LG is a close second to Samsung in speed but they're better in every other way. So to me, I would pick the LG because I don't have toddlers take photos off and I can frame my shots a little longer and I get a better picture. And so it's a tough call. But ultimately think of your photos just a little bit. Do us all that favor. And the final thing I would recommend is if you do video and it's not square video like you're doing Instagram or you're not doing like, you know, say on the new Facebook video, which is pretty damn awesome. Please, please, please, please, I beg you, put your phone in landscape mode. You know. The final plea for landscape. Unless you're forced to do otherwise.  And it is, I know your phone is, you're gonna hold your phone like this most of the time to watch stuff but honestly it costs you nothing to move your phone like that to watch your kid's video you just took. And it'll look better on a TV because you're probably gonna share that with your family. It'll look better in 10, 15, 20 years when we have VR and we can look at the stuff really wide angle. So please, I beg you all. No more, man. No more. We're gonna call those our pick of the day. The iPhone 6 and up the current Nexus is the Samsung's and landscape mode. For goodness sake, people. That's our pick of the day. Send your picks to us. Bad vertical video. A bad vertical video. And send us your new found landscape love and any of your picks to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks. Got one email before we get out of here. It was a jocoman on our blog said we had the story about how Google wants to possibly, there's a rumor that they might want more control over the Nexus phone hardware, not just the software and make a Google branded phone instead of a co-branded phone like they've been doing. Jocoman says if that's true, why'd they get rid of Motorola? They had a company that could have made the Nexus brand. Now I responded to Jocoman on the blog and said well that's a whole different business being the phone company versus doing kind of what Apple does which is we're gonna design it and tell you Foxconn how to build it. Motorola wasn't making a whole lot of money. I'm curious Miriam what you think of that. If Google wants to have a vertical integrated Nexus line would it have been better to keep Motorola or is it smarter for them to have shipped them off and be able to choose from a lot of different manufacturers? Well, you know, look, I'll just say this. Did it help Microsoft to buy Nokia in terms of phones? No. It doesn't seem to have. And I think that's why Google ultimately let Motorola go to Lenovo because I think they're gonna be better served in the long run to do one of two things. Continue the Nexus model the way they've been doing with some really dedicated hardcore awesome partners because look LG, it's our third LG Nexus, the 5X and it's a fantastic phone for the third time in a row. And the first Huawei, it's the best Huawei phone ever made on the entire history of the earth, right? So that shows you that the Nexus program is working but here's what I'm saying. The Pixel program, which is Google's own internal hardware which you know, after it gets sourced out to like something like Foxconn or somebody, that I could see in the same way as Microsoft making a Surface phone that would be a good move to me to take the potentially one of the next nexuses. So make a Pixel Nexus in-house. Basically custom built with nobody's brand on it but assembled from all the fine parts of various manufacturers. It could be eventually Samsung making it for them but we would never see the Samsung run and never find out who makes it. And as we don't know who makes the Pixel C and the Pixel today. And they're actually freer to do that not owning Motorola to be honest. Exactly, and I think that's what it is. And also look from a business point of view they were losing money and they didn't see the end of that. So, you know, whether Google is better off or not I don't know, whether Lenovo is better off with Motorola, I don't know. I love Motorola phones but the camera's always been let down for me so I've never been able to really endorse them and go guys, go get a Google, get a mobile phone, right? And what Google got out of Motorola was the patents. And so I think they feel like it was a success. That's gonna be it for this Daily Tech News Show. As usual, Patrick Beja, thank you so much. Welcome to Finland. I'm glad you didn't miss a beat. Moving pretty far away within a week. So keep checking out frenchspin.com for more of Patrick's great work. Any last thing to tell people about? No, not really, frenchspin.com is a place to go. Not Patrick on Twitter and Facebook to find about my daily musings in Finland. And Miriam Joer, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. It was fantastic to have you on the show. You were fantastic. Well, thanks. Let me again, anytime, I love to rant and rave and if you want to have a longer show you want me on we can do that for a while. And you know, I know you're a super busy man but I would love to invite you on my podcast one day if you want to just speak phones for an hour. Which is really what I do. I mean, I could tell you everything I know about phones in about 10 minutes but I'll stick around for the rest of it. You know, you use different phones and I'm sure you have opinions and that's really what matters. The same with you Patrick, you're welcome at some point. Shaping me if you ever want to. It's not like a major podcast but it's a lot of my old Engadget folks that are still following me because Engadget doesn't have a mobile podcast anymore and et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, it was the best place for people to find that. The best is to follow me on Twitter. My handle is Tankerl, TNKGRL. You can also find me on Google+, look for Miriam Joir, I spelt in the show notes. You can also find me on Facebook. I'm a little hard to find because it's friends only. But in general, tankerl.com, just like my Twitter handle.com is my website and you'll find all my podcasts there and sometimes I do review the phones and sometimes you'll find more articles on various blogs.   Yeah, excellent. TNKGRL, everywhere that fine content is served. Thanks to everybody who supports the show. If you get some value out of the show, we just ask that you give that value back in whatever amount you can afford and think we're worth. DailyTechNewShow.com slash support. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Give us a call, 51259 daily. It's<PHONE_NUMBER>. Catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern at alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv and visit our website at DailyTechNewShow.com. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club, I hope you have enjoyed this program. Woo, that was a super sized episode but it was really good stuff. Yeah, sorry, I tend to rant. You have to stop me. I'm sorry about that. I couldn't stop you, it was too good. I was learning stuff. Yeah, I mean look, it's hard to distill down but I've had to do it a few times and I tell people and it really is just, I should have said this but I know people are still listening. The basics of photography that they teach you in photography classes, you can use those and basically apply them to, have the right gear and that means cleaning your lens most of the time you already have a phone, you're not gonna buy another one unless you're shopping. Then the other stuff I said and the exposure of focus stuff, it gets a little hairy but generally the composition is hot in battle. Phones today are really good at adjusting focus and exposure properly, especially those phones we recommended. So if you just frame that shot immediately, it just gets more creative. And whether you choose a square format like Instagram, which I know now you can use more than square but I like to keep square going when I do Instagram, I just live, I work with the medium and it's fun, you know? Cool. What should we call this episode? We've got showbot.tv. You should note vertical video. Oh, band, or band vertical video, yeah. Or landscape mode, baby. That's actually really good. You know I used to have to write headlines for a long time. Yeah, yeah, I can tell. So it's like, you end up kind of... We have a, we get lazy here and we have a thing at showbot.tv where people could submit headline ideas throughout the show in the chat room. Band vertical video though, landscape mode, baby. Yeah. I don't know. I'm gonna submit that one. Landscape mode.  And then I'm gonna vote it. So, what do you think, Patrick? I don't know, I like all the ones that mentioned Finland and Patrick broke the internet or speedtest.net but that's really not relevant to the main topic. That is a vertical video. I don't, I, when I did the one gigabit test like for like the brief second they left it on because I actually requested the 100 megabit and when the tech came, I said, can you just show me what one megabit looks like?  And he said, yeah. And it was their own speed test. Like they have their own setup. And I didn't get a chance to try with speed with Ukla or whatever. But when they scaled me down to 100, I'm getting about 97 down and about, you know, 75, 80 up now. They, the Ukla, you can see it pegs and then it kind of rescales itself. That's what I noticed. So it's, I think it's able to rescale up to probably a gigabit but you probably destroy that where you are. No, it's, yeah. Just landscape mode baby, I voted for it as well. It's destroying the other titles. Oh yeah, it's just blazing to the top. But yeah, no, actually you might mind the upload top set about 500, but if you saw 900 or something, it depends. I don't know if it's the servers or I don't know. I'm sure some people will write in saying, Patrick, we hate you, which I understand, but you already got a couple of them on Twitter. It's funny you mentioned that because, you know, here in the US, I'm just, it's so like, I live in San Francisco right in the city and you'd think in the tech mecca that I am at, I could get fiber or something from someone. No, I cannot get anything good. I can get shitty Comcast, right? Which there's no way I would ever give my money to. And then best they can get me is Doxus 3, like 100 megabits max, max, max down and maybe 20 megabits up, which look is great but I don't want to give them my money. And then that's the only choice I have that is really high speed. Then there is a company that I'm with actually and I called Astound, which is now owned by Wave Broadband but it used to be an independent ISP that was awesome and every time they get bought, it gets worse. And they're cable Doxus 3 and I get about 20, 30 megabits down and maybe five megabits up with them which isn't fine but not great. And then there is a microwave solution you can get. I don't own the building, but if I can get permission from my landlord to put a little microwave antenna on the roof, I could get much better performance, but my landlord will never let me do that. He is an old, cranky guy who barely wants to ever come to my house. So permission for that's not gonna happen. And so then DSL, and DSL as we know is abysmal. And so what else do I have left? It's insane. And then in Portland, Oregon, I'm out in the city still, but in more residential part and it's pretty much, I have two choices. I have Comcast again and I have this fiber thing. And Comcast is not fiber there, it's coax. And when I found out I inquired about ADSL and the guy goes, oh, we replaced all the copper in the neighborhood with fiber. That's why we're offering you fiber. And I was like, oh my God, I gotta do that. And so we did and it was amazing. That is fantastic. Jenny knows this very well because in her office, she can feel the fiber going underneath her over to the CBS studios. Blazing. But you can't get. I can't get underneath my office. But I don't do it. Yeah, nobody will sell it to her. Yeah. Oh, wow. Or they will, I'm sorry, $1,000 a month. Yeah. What? Yeah. Okay, that actually makes me angry. So you want to hear the irony. I pay, so my $100 in Portland is a $49 each month right now, which is pretty damn great. That's amazing. How much? What? $49. $49, $100 fiber. If I wanted one gigabit, it would be like $129 a month or something. And I think this is a limited offer, it's probably for the first year. And then it goes up to like $79 a month or something for what I'm paying now. And probably like $200 a month for the gigabit. But the NSF here, I'm paying $79 for 20 down, of 25 down, five up. It's freaking bad. It's like, I'm better off almost getting LT. If there weren't any data caps on LT, I'd get LT. Because I can get like 50 down on T-Mobile right now in my house, if I want. Through the- Yeah, they have data capped plans and no data cap plans. And no data cap are like five bucks more expensive.  And apparently a lot of people are angry about it because they were so used to the no data caps that when they added the data caps and bumped the price of the no data cap ones, they, people got angry. The double X price increase. Yeah. It's a really interesting topic actually without diving into US crappy internet service hate, which I have a lot of a huge amount of. But it's a really interesting discussion. That's what we were sort of mentioning by email with Tom. It's kind of, I got here and I got this huge connection and I was like, how, at which point is it overkill? Like, I'm never gonna use a gig down. Like it's an actual gig down in 500 up. Until you start streaming those 4K videos. Oh, 4K. True. What? 30 megs. Five at a time. Yeah. Right. Well, that's- No, that's- It's 30 megs. I could do, what, 10, like 30 of them at a time? See, that's why I picked the 100 megabyte package. Because I'm like, at this point, I can afford to pay for the 1 gig of it, but it's bragging rights. That's all I'm paying for. I'm not paying for any improvement in my performance. It's so fast already. I pay for 300 because I want no possibility that anything is going to be a problem on my end. And I have lots of cases of updating throughout the day, automatically putting software patches on the Xbox or the PlayStation, this and that. So I don't want that to ever get in the way of anything else. So it's a ridiculous amount of overhead, but I don't- I could get 500 from Fios, but I haven't run into a point yet where I need it. But Tom, it's your business. Like if I was- Exactly, right.  You know, like there's no doubt about it. And for me as well, that's the reason. It's absolutely because it's my business. It's not because I wanted the gig. Is that because Patrick just wanted to lord it over all the rest of us? No, well, actually, the real reason is that it's- No, no, the real reason is that it's 40 euros, I think. Something like that.    You have a one gigabit connection and you start buying hard drives. A digital hard drive. You start downloading websites. Yeah. You're gonna grab all Wikipedia today. I'm gonna grab all of Google. Oh, that's gonna take a few years. That's what happened to Brewster Kale. They became the Internet Archive. Oh, right. Yeah. But you know, I'm thinking who usually buys these kinds of, like if you run a company, like a huge company, not a huge, but you know, if you have a few hundred people, probably you could get by on a gigabyte connection, probably, because not everyone is gonna be- I mean, I can think of a couple of use case scenarios, especially if you do distributed computing, where you need to do remote access. I mean, we used to have editors remote access into the edit machines at work and they would just edit from home. Yeah. They would able to sync audio. I mean, it wasn't, you wouldn't wanna finish the project that way, but you could definitely A-roll and do a lot of work without having to physically be in the office. Actually, that sort of bumps into our potentially potential future discussion where these are the kinds of uses where we're not really thinking about them now, but maybe if we had all that speed available, we would just find other uses and then it would come. Oh yeah, I think we'll have that bandwidth. We'll fit it out. There's no doubt. VR and stuff, when we start streaming 360 degree HD, you know, resolution VR, it'll happen. But I mean, we're not ready to look like half of, like, well, I'm at the bleeding edge right now in Portland with 100, 100. And here in SF, I'm kind of barely skating across here. It's just, we're not so not ready in the US at least, you know? You're lucky to have Fios where you are, Tom. Oh yeah, it was one of the things that made this, where we decided to live is that it was a Fios area. That was also near Eileen's workplace. Like those were, that was the Venn diagram we were looking at. For sure, yeah. Well, you know. I'm wondering if she can't take a job anywhere that doesn't have Fios service. You know, that's... Oh, sorry.  Oh yeah. In the office. I would VPN into work if I was abroad and access my email and stuff that way, going through there just in case. Cause I was super paranoid. Doing banging or anything like that. Yeah, it's paranoid too. She's approving. Yeah. All right, well that is it. I'm gonna wrap it up here. Thanks again, everybody for watching and listening and thank you again, Miriam. Thanks for having me, Tom. Anytime. I really appreciate it. I'm gonna go guys.


And then we'll let you guys do official introductions of the long event here and all that good stuff. And I really appreciate their willingness to do this for us today because we really need an opportunity to understand that different departments function a little bit differently and what can we learn from each other and how can we get some tips from that. The neat thing is that these guys all work in areas where they serve a unit. Okay, and I'll tell you about this in a second. I work in an area where there is no one doing what they do. Okay? You too? Okay, so we're all after you guys. But the least we could do is hear how they structure these things and how they function. And maybe we pick up a few tips from it and maybe it does encourage us to get one of them in our offices. So with that, I'll let you do an official introduction of yourself and share your tips with us. Stand because I'm short. I'm Myrna Freed. I'm from the Carrington Research Extension Center and I've been at Carrington since 1999. I'm Jan Ulrich. I work in the Department of Plant Pathology and also with the School of Natural Resource Sciences. And I have worked with research for 10 years. I'm Julie Nash and I'm an animal sciences. I've been at NDSU since 2001. And for most of that time I've been with animal sciences. Part of that time I left and worked with the FORA program. So I got to see it on the other side of actually working with a grant that was funded and administering that. So I've seen it from a couple of different views now. Take it away guys. Who ever wants to go first? Well I can start out with, as far as, I worked in SPA previously. So now for me coming to the departmental level, it is really an eye opener. You know it is because you, I thought when I first moved it would be a real smooth transition. But it's amazing to me the things that are, the things that I never thought of by myself working in SPA. I guess just things I never encountered. But to begin with I guess like everybody says, time is huge. We need to start everything in a very timely, timely fashion. Unfortunate I have phenomenal faculty I work with. They have been excellent to get me their proposals or at least part of their proposals in advance so that I can get the PTF started. I can get their budgets reviewed.   For me to get that part in advance and I really, really have always pushed for the seven days. You know it depends on the type of grant we're looking at. We're looking at agrants.gov. I had a faculty that seriously started his grant three months in advance. And he needed the three months. I mean that was his whole technical writing, everything. But it really takes the pressure off of everybody. You know because we had the time to pass it on to you know beyond our departmental signatures. We send it over to ag budget and it gets reviewed there and then we send it on to SPA. It gets reviewed there. And they need time to submit that proposal and not one minute before it's due. So you know the seven to ten days is definitely a necessity. I would say for me to review and prepare a budget justification isn't going to take me three days. But if you run into questions or if we send it on over to ag or to SPA, questions can come back again. You know so time to me is huge. So that's what I'll start with and let somebody else talk a little bit here. Well I think from my perspective too, I know all your kids don't have someone like us in your department. So I've always seen my role as trying to be a tool for the faculty member to be able to work more on the science part of their grant. So I can take away and help with the other parts making sure that they're including everything in the grant that they need. I'm looking at guidelines and policies and that. I know a lot of what we're talking about today is budgets and how to get it through the process. But it's only one little aspect of the whole grant proposal. So I know for you guys there's so many more pieces. And some of those forms can be very labor intensive, especially grants.gov because it's not real user friendly some days. Especially if you have a lot of people on your grant. There's a lot of different things that need to be changed. And so even one little minute change which might not seem much to someone else. It's just tiny change. It's like yes but now I have to change it in five different places. And unfortunately you guys all have to do that. I've taken that away from some of the faculty members so they don't have to worry about that. But I think one thing that's good about the discussion is to throw it out there that there are many things that affect the whole grant process. And even though I might be in your department doesn't mean I'm not open to you calling and asking for have you ever done one of these? How do I do this? This isn't working in the form. I definitely am never going to say I can't help you or not in my department. I won't put your grant proposal together for you. But I definitely am open to helping anyone that has questions about new proposals they're doing and things like that too. The budgets are just one part of that. The thing about the budget is it's very fluid depending on what after it goes through the review process at the external agency. They may come back and say we're only going to fund part of it or it's only going to be this much this year and it changes every year. And so I know we focus a lot on that. And it does have to mesh with what your research is. And in support and we definitely want to make sure you have enough money in your budget to do what you want to do. And that's kind of what I see my role when I'm reviewing someone's grant is to make sure they're asking for everything they might need. I agree with Julie that we spend a lot of time on the budgets but that's because that's what Spa wants to look at. And they rely on you to do the science correctly because that's what you are your scientist. So they rely on you to do that correctly and that's why we're to help with the budgets and that's what they really care about. So I know in my department people get irritated probably with me because I'm like well I don't care about the rest just bring me the budget so that I can help you start. And it's not that I don't care about the other stuff but that's what sponsored programs is going to look at. And it's not always a matter of what's going to happen after you're awarded it as well. And I know in some instances we've had problems with well I don't like the way that looks or that doesn't sound like how I'd like it to sound. And part of that could be because if you are awarded the grant and you want to pay for something that doesn't maybe look appropriate you could get yourself in trouble later on. So while it might not be disallowed in the grant that doesn't mean it's allowed either. And so you have to watch those kinds of things. You know what I think was in your Marie said that read the instructions and that's what I would encourage everybody to do first is read the instructions all the way through. Because there and so much of it is probably Greek to you because it is to me sometimes too. You know they talk about indirect costs and you can only use 10% indirect costs and and but every agency and every grant is different. And so you have to read all the way through and sometimes I mean I know the RFPs are 40 pages long but you have to read all the way through to find that. Yeah NDSU wants me to use a match percent of 46% but the sponsor is only going to allow me to use 20% and that might be on page 36. So it's just important to read everything ahead of time and and try and have and that's why the time issue is a big thing too. Sometimes it takes a long time to read through that. So if we have people bringing us something that is due in three days and the RFP is 40 pages long. I mean we feel that that's our responsibility to read through that and know what your requirements are too. And that takes time and and then from my perspective I call on because half the time I don't understand. I know it says 10% but how does that work? Is it 10% of total direct costs or is it 10% of modified total direct costs? You know all those things are different but that's why you have to read and ask questions. We did want to open it up so that if anybody had any specific questions or some experiences recently that you wanted to process we'd have that opportunity. So I'm just going to pause a minute and see if anyone's got a question or example they'd like to bring up. So do you have researchers who, they're out in the field and they decide that maybe the budgets that they put together, if they've received the grant they've now discovered they need to purchase some material that are different than what was written up in the budget transmittal form. So if we need to do budget revisions, do you help with some of those things? Or is that something that you have the BI do? If you need to do paperwork to do budget revisions, do you help with some of that stuff? Torban? Yes. In our department, in my departments I would help. If there's rebudgeting I would help at least start the process. And then contact sponsored programs and Marie would be the one then to review the original budget to what we're changing it to. So yes, the initial process would start at the departmental level and then be processed on to sponsored programs. But some of it doesn't need to go through. Some of it's allowable under different grads. It depends on what grant you have because some movement within your budget is allowable depending on the type of funding it is. And so I work with my account techs a lot or we call grants and contracts or whatever just to make sure that if they are going to do something or need something different, whether it is necessary to get approvals and then if we do need those approvals, yeah, then we work through the process. So you help with PIs with that process? If they want, yeah. Some are, you know, more comfortable doing it themselves. Some would like some assistance and that's fine, you know, it's whatever their comfort level is. I feel like we might be a little out of touch with what you all do because, I mean, in my office I do maybe two or three extension type grants and the rest are researched. And so maybe we're looking at different animals too. And I know that the one extension grant I do for Mary's program, it's a bugger, it's a bear. And so if that's what you're all facing every time, I can see how you get frustrated because it's taken me years and only can attest to this to feel like I have a handle on it and it doesn't take long to not have a handle on it pretty quickly. I mean, honestly. And so most of your stuff is probably in the same vein as that. You know, hers is a North Dakota Department of Health program, but it's federal money. And so if you're getting federal money, there's lots of problems. I think the extension too, there's different, probably different needs than what the research meaning. Like for example, there's a survey. Sometimes there are, like on the budget, there could be something that there's going to be a gift card given to the participants of this survey. Or, you know, there's a lot of different items like that to help fill in. I don't know, I can't think of other. But I always think of that as a gift card or you can't say anything. Sometimes, like even if they're using someone's facilities for doing site demonstrations and that, it's a different process or a different way of thinking about how you budget for it. Did somebody mention a gift card? What? Gift card. Did you need one? I would never, ever let my people put that in a grant. Ever. Because I wouldn't do it. But it is a lot. Yeah, see, and that's why I say, you know, maybe I'm just not attached with what you're doing. I mean, I would be like, no one can do that. It does depend upon the grant. Yes. Perfect. I guess I really appreciate the fact that you acknowledged with this group that there are a lot of differences. And everybody in here would have a different story. And there are just so many unique differences. And what that should say to all of us is that patience is a virtue. We just really need a lot of patience sometimes when we're trying to work through these things. It takes extra energy. And I have listened to people say to me, I don't know why I bother doing this. I'm so sick and tired of this. It's too hard, all those sorts of things. Well, part of the reason we're here today is to try to begin to share more information that will help this process be less stressful for us. And yeah, we'd all like one of you guys in our offices. We probably aren't going to get that tomorrow. But we do know that there are people out here who have worked on these things. And we can ask for opinions and ask for alternative ideas. That's why I wanted you to see their faces, meet them, visit with them afterwards. I at one time said to them, you know, that if there's a process or any tips that they use that I might be able to implement without carrying someone just in my unit. Maybe I can gather some of that information. That's what I'm here listening for today. I don't have the funds to hire someone like this, but I do have the capacity to try to figure out a couple tips, a couple things that might be able to save us a few headaches. So that's our purpose. The one thing to add to that that I would like to acknowledge is what you all are doing through those grant proposals, whether it's research or extension, is so core to what we do at NDSU. And so I always think of it as a team effort. Whenever one of my faculty gets a grant, I think I celebrate as much as they do. Because I mean this is really core to the bringing new knowledge and new services and new skills, whether it's on campus or off campus. And I'm here to help them make that a reality and continue to grow as a university. So I'm always thinking about the bigger picture of where it brings us. And that's why I say reaching out, other departments, anywhere, any way that I can help someone else to kind of find their way through that process or hook them up with other faculty members that may have the expertise that they need. Anything like that that just kind of starts the conversation because I think we have to keep in mind that we are a team in a different way. And that I'm really here to support all of you. So that's how I always look at it. That's our main, for any of us, that's our main purpose here is to give support, try and help. I guess I, as I work with the forums, the comments relating to most of them being related to research, I guess kind of get home. It seems like all the forums, all the categories, everything in generic are read before research. And trying to find categories that would be more appropriate for the kinds of extension education that I'm trying to support with the grant is always challenging. So if there's any ideas as to what would be more appropriate, and then it talks about publishing journal articles. It doesn't talk about printing extension publications or those kind of things. And any assistance that we can have in figuring out what would be the purpose behind it would be helpful to see? I'll quickly address what I think as far as that goes. Part of it is looking at the categories of expenses after, how you spend it afterwards, is going to determine what category you should put it in to begin with. Because, you know, you say publication costs. Well, publication costs have a certain account code when you pay a publication bill. There's a code in counting where publication cost is six, two, three, something, something, something. But printing is five, four, two, oh, one, five. Well, those are different budget categories. So those can help you determine which category to put that in when you're writing the grant. And that's why I say sometimes, you know, okay, gift cards may be allowable in some instances, but it depends on what category that's coming out of once it's actually paid. Would you agree with that? But I think the point of, you know, like what he's saying, so, okay, that's a printing cost and not a publication cost. Well, the form we wrote doesn't have a printing cost line. So where am I supposed to put that on the form? That's the point you're bringing up. If you're going to reproduce publications to hand out, is that a publication cost or is that a printing cost? Is a printing cost where do I put it? And how do I know as it has? And again, I'm not supportive of them. We don't have grant people in our department to lean on. So I speed that on the dohona. Say where do I speed this? She'll tell you where. But there are differences, but I, as the PI for this, don't understand that background. Unless you've done this a couple of times and flipped over before and say, oh, you can't do it that way, you know, you don't know. And even if you've done it a few times, there's still plenty of changes. Well, we're going to talk about it. I have an upgrade here. I forget. So how, well, let's just ask where you guys would like printing costs to fall instead of publication costs. Is that other expenses or is it publications? And then once it gets to grants and contracts, they're going to have to separate it out. What I look at is a little more general because it's all in the operating category. I look at salaries, operating, equipment. So if you've got it on this budget that you're going to send to me, if you've got it within that operating category, I guess I don't care if it's printing or publications. It's operating. Now, I think maybe you go more into the budget forms. A bit more. There again, it depends on the budget form that you're using as well. If you're using the NDSU budget forms compared to the grants.gov, the budget forms. And there isn't always just one correct answer. There may be, and when it comes to classifying expenditures, there's degrees of correctness. For instance, there are publication costs on the grants.gov budget form. That's meant for recovery journals or some other printed material that's meant to publish the results of what you've done. Now, that can be an extension bulletin. But if you're printing material to use for educational purposes for your workshop, it really doesn't belong there. If it gets in there, there again, I don't, that's not a huge issue to me if you put all your printing under publication. Technically it's not 100% correct, but that's kind of, that's getting down into the mini-grids stuff and everything else is correct. That's what we're really concerned about. That's how I do it. I have a question for Julian. I've worked with Julian on grants and desks, and that's really valuable. I'm just wondering if you could describe sort of your system if you have one. Because when we're writing at grant, there are things coming from 40 different directions that all have to feed into this final project. You have some sort of flowchart or excel sheet, it's all in your family. That's pretty much in my hat. Yeah, I think because every circumstance is different. So depending on whether we're doing USDA grants, we have 18, 20 grants coming to me at one time. Or if I'm working on a foundation grant where it's less intensive. Because some of them, the PI is going to be more involved in filling out different things because sometimes they can only access a form or only one person can work on a form at a time. Grants that go by more involved with.  It's not what you are focused on when you're starting to do a grant. You're thinking about, okay, objectives, then what do I want to do and the science behind it or the reasoning, you know, and all that kind of stuff. And so to really work to make sure that we're also doing that budget on the front end of it. Because although that might not be their priority for me to get it out on time. Because I can't control, you know, that it's something we have to, you know, work through the process. I push them as hard as we can to get it done as soon as possible. And so that's kind of number one on my priority list. But that also includes them that they have to have some bit of a summary and, you know, talk through budget justifications, things like that. The other things that I worked through, and depending again, of course, the USDA grant is going to be more labor intensive. Getting all the necessary who's going to be on the grant and then figuring out what kinds of forms. So if I have these five people, what their roles and responsibilities are, because depending on that, I may need curriculum, I may need current and pending. I may need their conflict of interest. You know, and it depends on what their role is. So, you know, we have a lot of discussions about how involved they're going to be. What are they going to be doing? Well, then I would put them as a collaborator because then you only need these forms from them. You know, a lot of that is a continuous discussion throughout the process of getting the grant prepared. And then I'm constantly reading the guidelines while they're doing it too. And I'll find, oh, did you see this new thing about broader impacts? Or did you see this new thing about you have to have a statement about this? So we're constantly tweaking throughout the thing. And then I also have a list of what forms I'll need. Again, depending on how complicated the grant process may be. One grant may be one just for grant.gov. You know, a lot. And so, yeah. I was looking for this. I'm pretty sure it's not going to help me if I ever let us know. I was wondering. No, none of us have. Yeah, I think a big experience.  You know, what do you need help with? Have you, did you remember to get that letter from so-and-so? You know, and so a lot of it is a conversation. And that could be a very huge kind of piece of the part. Is getting letters from, if it be subs or, you know, just letters of references. Or those are the things that a person really needs to get done in advance. Because that can really, I mean, it has many times held up grants for getting submitted. So, especially when we are working with other states or, you know, just because their state says, well, they don't need to do that, doesn't necessarily mean that it's not required. I've had a few PIs submit something out my knowledge. And then later on you have to go back and fix all that. Because NDSU still has to approve of your work with that institution or whatever you're doing.  They have to know that. And, you know, I've worked with a lot of different states. Well, we don't need a letter, but we do. We need a letter that says that you are going to work with us. That you're agreeing to this. That your university is agreeing that you can work on this. And all of that up front is a huge, huge help. Because it just, it does, it takes time. Because if their sponsor programs requires three days and their egg budget office requires three days, you know, that's six days before you're going to move it somewhere. So, just got to climb ahead. I just want to make one other comment to kind of summarize this part up a little bit. And that is that when we first talked about this and we spent some time on the phone, the four of us visiting, I used the phrase that appears to me, what my experience here is, is that we have organized chaos. And I don't think you can totally change that because things change a lot. You know, you've got all these people, whether it's at the department level, whether I don't have department level help, whether I'm going through SPA and I'm going through egg budget, and then never mind later grants and contracts, which we aren't going to talk about today. But all of that is, everybody's got systems. And it can feel very chaotic and that's usually when I get to hear about people being so frustrated and so upset about something. And it is. It just is because there are lots of layers. I think it's helpful for you to see and hear this. And by seeing and hearing this, you have a different perspective than sitting back when we're all in our own little tunnel vision world and I'm busy and we forget that everybody else has their organized chaos to deal with too. So I hope that if anything you've picked up a few tips and you will have some patience with all the different entities that have to weigh in here to make a successful grant. And we talked about how it would be really helpful after this is over too for us to kind of come together. And maybe there is a fix for that form, Ken. I don't know. Maybe there are some small things that will come of this visit today.  I know even when we were talking, I was sharing an example about a multi-state grant and Murnen had an excellent point. She said, well, if you could show me that, I'd understand it better. This is a while ago and we fixed it and I don't think I can find you the original problem anymore. So it's too late. I just knew it was a problem. Okay. So at the point next time you have an issue. Okay. This is what I'm talking about. This is what doesn't seem right to me. Can we fix this? Please then speak up and we'll see what we can do. And we'll try to keep a conversation going and see what we can do. Okay. So I thank you three very much for being brave enough to just put yourself out here and offer to everybody that you take a phone call. That's big too. One call. Per person. Per year. So you have to throw like that too. Thank you very much.


Protesters the rhetoric used during the election cycle held rallies across the world in support of the Women's March on Washington While many of the rallies were held in major cities nearly 500 marchers walked through Bemidji Armelle Meyer has more from this weekend's events The event drew a much larger turnout than expected This is amazing Pam Lem organized event because she wanted those who are unable to travel to DC or other major cities like Minneapolis to be able to participate. We're so remote from the other areas and I feel like We need to band together band together against messages of intolerance Martin Graefa says he was happy to see that the crowd included some men. I think it's important as a country to Express our respect and our solidarity for women Ellie Carger says she was encouraged by her mom to come out in March Sue Alice says she is marching for this younger generation. They deserve to have respect They should be strong But what started as a march for women's rights soon turned into much more than that for some This was a time to speak up for others all people of this country should feel that they have just as much right To their life as anyone else in Bemidji. I'm Mal Meyer Lakeland news According to the Women's March officials over half a million people attended the March in Washington, DC If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland public television