Speaker 1: Get in tech with Technology with text Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff dot com. Hello, everyone, welcome to the podcast and
Speaker 1: you are listening to stuff you missed in history class,
Speaker 1: where you're two new hosts, Jonathan Strickland and Lauren. Today,
Speaker 1: we wanted to talk about the history of April Fools Day. Uh, actually,
Speaker 1: obviously this is an April Fools Tech Stuff episode. The
Speaker 1: last time we did one of these, it was it
Speaker 1: was me and my my former co host Chris, and
Speaker 1: we decided to say that tech Stuff had been canceled
Speaker 1: and replaced with reruns of stuff you should know. So
Speaker 1: I thought this time I would just say that we
Speaker 1: were now stuff you missed in history class. That, of
Speaker 1: course is not true. We wanted to update folks on
Speaker 1: other pranks and jokes that technology companies have done in
Speaker 1: the years since that tech Stuff episode, which that published
Speaker 1: in two thousand nine. We did not cover two thousand
Speaker 1: nine because us it published that day. Yeah, we record
Speaker 1: the episodes early, so there's no way of that we
Speaker 1: would have any way of knowing what was going to
Speaker 1: happen on the actual April first. Yeah, we also don't
Speaker 1: know what's going to happen this year. When when you're
Speaker 1: listening to this, we will also be finding out what's
Speaker 1: going on. So uh, but before we jump into two
Speaker 1: thousand nine and then work our way through, I thought
Speaker 1: I mentioned a few pranks we didn't talk about in
Speaker 1: that first episode, and one of them is, Uh, it's
Speaker 1: some of these are not April Fools pranks, by the way.
Speaker 1: They're just famous pranks that have happened within the world
Speaker 1: of technology. And one of them is is one that
Speaker 1: that definitely ruffled feathers. And uh, and Lauren, I know
Speaker 1: you know about this one too. It's what Gizmodo did
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight at c e S and
Speaker 1: they brought along these little controllers called TV be Gone. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So these are controllers that they only have one purpose,
Speaker 1: which is to turn off any television set that uses
Speaker 1: the infrared receivers to you know, you just press a
Speaker 1: button and it goes through all these different codes that
Speaker 1: are used for various television sets to turn them off.
Speaker 1: So some folks from Gizmoto were given some TV begne
Speaker 1: controllers and then they proceeded to wreak havoc or at
Speaker 1: least spread mischief around the and they even did it
Speaker 1: during some presentations Oh, that's not that's not necessarily kind. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So um yeah. In fact, they cut a lot of
Speaker 1: flak for that, and including for me. I mean, I
Speaker 1: you know there, I'm sure there are very talented people
Speaker 1: who write for Gizmoto or who work on other projects
Speaker 1: with Gizmoto, but that that got under my skin, you know,
Speaker 1: to the point where I was thinking, like, if I'm
Speaker 1: a guy whose job it is to to present to
Speaker 1: the press and two vendors how amazing a product is,
Speaker 1: and the product keeps not working throughout my presentation, that
Speaker 1: could mean actual loss in sales and bad press, and
Speaker 1: it just I mean to me that that's not the
Speaker 1: role of journalism. It's not to to be like, hell,
Speaker 1: look how clever and naughty we are, you know. And uh,
Speaker 1: the c E A that's the organization that puts on
Speaker 1: c e s agrees with me because they banned Gizmodo
Speaker 1: for that behavior. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's that kind of
Speaker 1: goes with I think that a lot of people in
Speaker 1: the press are kind of over this entire tech April
Speaker 1: fools on the web thing. That's a great thing to
Speaker 1: point out. Yeah, there to be fair, Like, I still
Speaker 1: find it amusing but it's not my job to follow
Speaker 1: every I don't report the tech news. We're not a
Speaker 1: news situation, so it doesn't it doesn't really matter if
Speaker 1: we have a day by day up to the date
Speaker 1: everything going on all the time, Whereas if if we
Speaker 1: were to cover the news, then you already know on
Speaker 1: April one that there's no way to have any sort
Speaker 1: of reliability. Yeah, all the news stuff you run into
Speaker 1: on April one, there's a very good chance that it's
Speaker 1: Shenanigan's right, right Canary. Yeah, although I do think most
Speaker 1: places are pretty good about having a little link at
Speaker 1: the bottom that says like, oh no, this is an
Speaker 1: April Fools joke, most but not all. Uh yeah, and
Speaker 1: a couple of other pranks. I wanted to mention, I'm
Speaker 1: sure that we mentioned this in an episode of Tech
Speaker 1: Stuff in the past, but I could not find it.
Speaker 1: If any of you guys remember right in because it
Speaker 1: is killing Jonathan, it's really it's there's that little vange.
Speaker 1: I am definitely guilty of manufacturing false memories, so so
Speaker 1: it's quite possible that I did invent these, but I could.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that I heard Chris talking about this, But again,
Speaker 1: these aren't April Fools jokes, but but cal Tech has
Speaker 1: a rich, rich history of pulling pranks. Some of them
Speaker 1: aren't hacking in the sense of hacking electronics, but are
Speaker 1: more like social hacking, life social horror, or just yeah,
Speaker 1: life hacking. A great example of the life hacking approach
Speaker 1: was in nineteen sixty one during the Rose Bowl game.
Speaker 1: So cal Tech, which was not in the Rose Bowl
Speaker 1: that year, UH, discovered that one of the plans UH
Speaker 1: during that that game was for the one cheerleading squad
Speaker 1: to yell out numbers and then the audience would hold
Speaker 1: up a card that related to whatever the number was,
Speaker 1: and some cal Tech students went in and fiddled with
Speaker 1: the system so that one there were fifteen different numbers
Speaker 1: that they would go through throughout the game. So once
Speaker 1: they hit fourteen, when everyone held up the cards, that
Speaker 1: actually spelled out cal Tech. So they managed to crash
Speaker 1: the Rose Bowl. Well, they did it again in nineteen
Speaker 1: four because that year they ended up rewiring the scoreboard
Speaker 1: so that although the actual game was U c L
Speaker 1: a versus the University of Illinois, the scoreboard said that
Speaker 1: it was cal Tech thirty eight M I T three UH,
Speaker 1: and then UH They've done a lot of pranks on
Speaker 1: m T, and m T has done some on cal
Speaker 1: Tech as well. It's like, if you get really smart
Speaker 1: kids all together in one room, they get a little
Speaker 1: bit bored. And yeah, apparently they once traveled from California
Speaker 1: all the way to Massachusetts. Uh, there's a sign at
Speaker 1: m I T that says the Institute of Technology, and
Speaker 1: they made the sign read that other Institute of Technology,
Speaker 1: and then they passed out free T shirts to the
Speaker 1: pre freshmen who were there to explore the grounds, and
Speaker 1: the T shirts on the front red m I T.
Speaker 1: On the back it said because not everyone can go
Speaker 1: to cal Tech. So yeah, anyway, the cal Tech has
Speaker 1: got a real long history of it. But let's move
Speaker 1: on to some actual pranks that were pulled in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine. Yeah, do you do you have one you
Speaker 1: want to start off with, which just kind of kind
Speaker 1: of alternate. Yeah, um, I was. I was really fond
Speaker 1: of of of YouTube flipping all of its videos upside down.
Speaker 1: And there's a little message that would play on the
Speaker 1: site that said that for for maximum like viewing optimacy. Right,
Speaker 1: that's not a word, that's not the word that they used,
Speaker 1: but it's similar to that. Yeah, where it was everything
Speaker 1: was upside down. That was a good one. Microsoft released
Speaker 1: a trailer for a game called Alpine Legend. Yeah. It
Speaker 1: ended up yeah, like like Guitar Legend, Yeah, but with
Speaker 1: an alpine horn. Yeah. The Alpine Horn looked like it
Speaker 1: was twelve ft long and had four buttons on it
Speaker 1: and you were supposed to it was a rhythm game,
Speaker 1: just like Guitar Hero or Rock Band or anything like that.
Speaker 1: And um. Yeah, and then they had a singing component,
Speaker 1: so you would have someone yotally next to you as
Speaker 1: you were playing them. I love this. I want one.
Speaker 1: It's kind of my think geek moment when I didn't
Speaker 1: I didn't even see that when it happened in two
Speaker 1: thousand night, or if I did, I have no memory
Speaker 1: of it. Uh, do you have another one you want
Speaker 1: to do? Um? Amazon announced that they were going to
Speaker 1: have some blimp based cloud computing systems yea, which is awesome.
Speaker 1: I still I still want that. I would take Yeah,
Speaker 1: they would pay for that service. They were they were
Speaker 1: going literal with cloud services. It was called the Floating
Speaker 1: Amazon Cloud Environment or FACE, and it supposedly had solar
Speaker 1: cells on the top of each blimp that would collect
Speaker 1: solar energy to provide the electricity needed for that that blimp.
Speaker 1: There was the Hotelicopter. Hotelicopter, Yes, I think that end
Speaker 1: gadget actually fell for. It was supposedly a Soviet m
Speaker 1: I l V twelve helicopter, helicopter, one of those kind
Speaker 1: of double decker looking things, enormous thing, and that I
Speaker 1: had been converted into a luxury hotel that had eighteen rooms.
Speaker 1: Each room had a coffee machine or WiFi WiFi, yeah,
Speaker 1: and they used the images they used were actually images
Speaker 1: taken from a chain of hotels called Yotel and uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was later discovered that Yotel was in
Speaker 1: on the joke, so it wasn't just that someone had
Speaker 1: stolen stole the pictures. Google that year, Oh gosh, Google
Speaker 1: always comes out with a ton of things. Uh, let's see,
Speaker 1: they had I think I think it was a kind
Speaker 1: of under an umbrella, that one that was their Caddie
Speaker 1: Katie k A d I E. Yeah, that was the
Speaker 1: kind of have auto heuristic distributed intelligence entity. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it was an artificially intelligent creation that Google then unleashed
Speaker 1: on the web, supposedly, and one of the first things
Speaker 1: that did was build its own website. And it built
Speaker 1: its own website by from Google explained that it was
Speaker 1: designed to pull design elements and design strategies from the
Speaker 1: web and pick the ones that are the most popular
Speaker 1: because those have to be the best ones, and build
Speaker 1: its own website. Did you actually see the website? It
Speaker 1: looked like something from It was like Geo cities. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was. There was an animated banner at the top,
Speaker 1: there were pandas all over the page. There was a
Speaker 1: there was a music playing in the background. I mean,
Speaker 1: like every bad design, there was an under construction gift.
Speaker 1: That's what was my favorite. Um. Yeah, there were every
Speaker 1: bad design you can remember in the in the nineties
Speaker 1: from web page design was and this artificially intelligent UH
Speaker 1: creation had supposedly created this picture. Uh. There also was
Speaker 1: an announcement to a three D upgrade to the Chrome
Speaker 1: browser because of all households have at least one pair
Speaker 1: of red blue three D glasses laying around right right.
Speaker 1: There was a Gmail autopilot which would answer your emails
Speaker 1: for Yeah. There was a Picasta feature that would let
Speaker 1: you put red eye into your photos. It would automatically
Speaker 1: add red eye into your photos and if and if
Speaker 1: the photo didn't have any eyes to add red too,
Speaker 1: it would it would destroy it. I didn't get to
Speaker 1: that part. That is awesome. Uh yeah, I mean in Australia,
Speaker 1: Google announced g Ball, a GPS enabled soccer ball. I'm
Speaker 1: assuming that they meant soccer since it's Australian rules football.
Speaker 1: Australian Okay, so not not soccer but Australian rules football. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It not only was a GPS enabled, but it could
Speaker 1: send messages to like, let's say that you are a
Speaker 1: sports fan, but you can't watch the game. It would
Speaker 1: update you via text messages how the game was going
Speaker 1: based upon the position of the ball, Like I'm getting
Speaker 1: kicked around a lot. This is hurting my self esteem.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, that was. There was some great stuff from
Speaker 1: Google that year. Yeah. Yeah. My My other favorite, being
Speaker 1: that I work in social media, is that Guardian reported
Speaker 1: it was going to shut down all of its web
Speaker 1: and print services um and go Twitter only. Yeah. They
Speaker 1: said that that everything that has ever reported in the
Speaker 1: news can be summed up in a hundred forty characters
Speaker 1: or fewer. Expedia offered flights to Mars starting at and hotels.
Speaker 1: Dot Com offered deals on hotel rooms on the Moon.
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers supposedly bought the Pirate Bay for thirteen billion
Speaker 1: dollars because they were involved in a lengthy lawsuit and
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers it didn't look like Warner Brothers would win,
Speaker 1: so the only way Warner Brothers could get around it
Speaker 1: would be by buying the Pirate Bay. Yeah, that obviously
Speaker 1: was not true. That was reported on torrent Freak. That
Speaker 1: was the source of that one. Yahoo announced that they
Speaker 1: had ideological Search, which would let you filter out any
Speaker 1: search results that that conflict with your own worldview. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of like Facebook, how you just start to
Speaker 1: unfriend people like I do not want any more posts
Speaker 1: about that. Actually, I'm kind of afraid that that's what
Speaker 1: Google is doing right now, like this very moment in
Speaker 1: the real world. Yeah, tech Crunch reported that their their
Speaker 1: technology blog, crunch Gear, had been purchased by General Mills,
Speaker 1: so that crunch Gear would be about crunchy cereals, which
Speaker 1: again I don't know I thought I would of I
Speaker 1: would read that Wired's geek Dad became jock Dad. Uh.
Speaker 1: Reddit became red dig and they totally redesigned themselves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they redesigned the page to make it look more like dig,
Speaker 1: which you know, redd it and dig. There's definitely a
Speaker 1: especially at the Zappos said that they were introducing bunk desks,
Speaker 1: so they would build platforms above a desk and put
Speaker 1: a second desk on there. The picture was great because
Speaker 1: it showed a guy sitting at his desk facing away
Speaker 1: from the camera and a platform built over his desk,
Speaker 1: and on top of the platform was a second desk
Speaker 1: with a young lady facing towards the camera working on
Speaker 1: at her desk, and they had to remove the ceiling
Speaker 1: tile over her head because otherwise her head would be
Speaker 1: pressed up against it, so that was kind of funny. Um.
Speaker 1: There was the service Chirper that was announced by box
Speaker 1: dot net because they said that Twitter is just characters.
Speaker 1: There's just just too long, so it reduces your tweets
Speaker 1: to fifty characters by dropping letters. Wow. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: pretty amazing. Uh yeah. Opera browser was introducing face based gestures,
Speaker 1: so to zoom out, you'd puff your cheeks out. To
Speaker 1: zoom in, you you suck your cheeks in. To reload
Speaker 1: the page, you twist your neck that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: There were some pretty good ones that year two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: I have to say was probably like the banner year
Speaker 1: for I think that was where the tech goofiness on
Speaker 1: April Fool's really peaked, and then people started to kind
Speaker 1: of back off after that. But this was like the
Speaker 1: the year where everyone was doing it. A National Geographic
Speaker 1: announced the publication of its newest title, National Geographic, The
Speaker 1: Best of the Breasts. The press release said, finally, a
Speaker 1: compendium of all our stellar breast photography has been called
Speaker 1: for our one twenty six year history. It's a celebration
Speaker 1: of the female body and its honest form that is
Speaker 1: completely amazing. It makes me so much more fond of
Speaker 1: National and I'm like, I didn't know that they had
Speaker 1: that sense of human and uh. In a little website,
Speaker 1: a blog for a webs sight, a little website called
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com had an article about rechargeable
Speaker 1: chewing gum written by a Jonathan Strickland. That was my
Speaker 1: contribution that year. I couldn't talk about it during the
Speaker 1: podcast that we recorded way back in two thousand nine
Speaker 1: because it had not yet published. UM. I was particularly
Speaker 1: proud of that when I had some people believing it,
Speaker 1: even though I thought it was the thing when you
Speaker 1: write these things, you'd think, there's no way anyone. We'll
Speaker 1: move on to twenty ten. So twenty ten, well, first
Speaker 1: of all, un let's say, Think, of course has a
Speaker 1: history of announcing ridiculous products on April Fool's Day and
Speaker 1: then another history of making them become real things. When
Speaker 1: people say, why doesn't that exist? I would buy that thing.
Speaker 1: Please let me give you my money. And my favorite
Speaker 1: from Think was the year that the Dharma alarm clock
Speaker 1: from from Lost came out. This is and if you
Speaker 1: guys have not watched Lost, then you're going to be
Speaker 1: completely bored for the next fifteen seconds. But but it
Speaker 1: had two alarm settings and one minute warning and an
Speaker 1: electromagnetic cataclysic mode um nice. It has a twenty three
Speaker 1: year warranty or until your house explodes, and polar bear
Speaker 1: not included. Does it does it flash sideways like like
Speaker 1: Lost did? It's it's got a got higher glyphs, but
Speaker 1: it had. They also introduced the ikade, which was the
Speaker 1: little arcade cabinet housing that you would put an iPad
Speaker 1: into and you could play arcade games on it, which
Speaker 1: and that became a real thing. We have here, we
Speaker 1: have one here in the office. I've played with it myself. UM,
Speaker 1: let's see YouTube announced text p, which was and there
Speaker 1: was a response to the fact that the online videos
Speaker 1: take up a lot of broadband. It takes up a
Speaker 1: lot of you know, it requires a long time to buffer,
Speaker 1: like especially back in you know, it wasn't quite as
Speaker 1: fast and mobile was definitely an issue there too. So
Speaker 1: text p was a service that would convert videos into
Speaker 1: streaming text instead of video actual video images, and that
Speaker 1: you could supposedly just watch a video and text form,
Speaker 1: which was nice, nice way to streamline that broadband problem. Uh.
Speaker 1: The The Independent newspaper from the UK reported a plan
Speaker 1: to build a had drunk glider in the circle line
Speaker 1: of London's metro right so the tube would become a
Speaker 1: particle accelerator. I thought that was a great one. I
Speaker 1: love that Funny or Die turned into Bieber or Die.
Speaker 1: Supposedly Justin Bieber purchased Funny or Die and then it
Speaker 1: just became a website about Justin Bieber. All the videos
Speaker 1: were about Justin Bieber. That was a fantastic one. Uh.
Speaker 1: There were there was some great fake articles on Wikipedia. UM.
Speaker 1: I don't know how that's different from any other day,
Speaker 1: but one of those was a joke, just a joke.
Speaker 1: Not all of them are fake, no, but you know,
Speaker 1: I'm saying this just after the news broke that that
Speaker 1: someone detected that BP had been fudge changing the environmental
Speaker 1: report about the the oil spill. So you know, they're
Speaker 1: always check your sources. Wikipedia right right. Wikipedia has its place.
Speaker 1: It's just you have to take it with a grain
Speaker 1: of salt, and you know how people sometimes mess with
Speaker 1: the system. Anyway, They purposefully had some some joke articles.
Speaker 1: My favorite one was one that said a Japanese company
Speaker 1: had accidentally sent some of its customers back to That's
Speaker 1: that's a good one. That's good. Hulu created a fake
Speaker 1: option to watch videos in three D and that was
Speaker 1: one of the those things where you start watching it
Speaker 1: and it turns into the whole aliens have created Hulu
Speaker 1: and TV. It's part of that secret plan campaign that
Speaker 1: they were doing for so long. What's his name in
Speaker 1: that other girl Baldwin? Yeah, Alizadu, I think was also
Speaker 1: in some of those one of the Baldwin's I think
Speaker 1: it was, yeah, Alec I believe. Um. Let's see what else.
Speaker 1: Let's see um read it. That year, that was the
Speaker 1: year that they temporarily granted all users at an accident. Wow, yes,
Speaker 1: for the whole day, which means, you know, you could
Speaker 1: you could edit headlines, you could ban users, You could
Speaker 1: infinitely vote up anything you wanted, so you could post
Speaker 1: your own link and then vote it up to the
Speaker 1: very top of Reddit. Meanwhile everyone else is doing the
Speaker 1: same thing, right, So yeah, it was that was a
Speaker 1: I love I love the stuff that read it does.
Speaker 1: That one was terrific though, Um Google went nuts again. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was okay, So that was That was the year.
Speaker 1: That was right after UM, Topeka, Kansas had named itself
Speaker 1: Google for a Day in a way too, and they
Speaker 1: were trying to to attract Google to build out that
Speaker 1: fiberhood in Topeka. Yeah yeah, and uh and so Google
Speaker 1: renamed itself Topeka for the Day. Yeah. And then they
Speaker 1: also replaced search speeds with fake terms, so you know,
Speaker 1: like you it tells you how long it took you
Speaker 1: two took Google to perform your search. Then it was
Speaker 1: saying things like it's seven point to warp or twenty
Speaker 1: three point oh skidoo, which I thought was great. Um,
Speaker 1: Gmail had a vowel outage and so only consonants were
Speaker 1: showing up. Google UK had a translate for animals, so
Speaker 1: you could hold up your phone your tone. You can
Speaker 1: make a little audio recording and it would tell you
Speaker 1: what your dog or cat or pig was saying. Pig
Speaker 1: pig Latin was going to be a new expansion coming
Speaker 1: out sade right. Uh, there we was. There was also
Speaker 1: if you typed in where am I into Google search field.
Speaker 1: Usually you get coordinates when you do that, but if
Speaker 1: you did it on that day, it would tell you
Speaker 1: things like Neptune or more door or entrance to Hogwarts
Speaker 1: if only. Uh yeah, there were some great ones there.
Speaker 1: Um Kodak announced aeromatography. Aeromatography it's like smell a vision,
Speaker 1: but in picture form, so you captured the actual scent
Speaker 1: of the subject of your photograph. I would I would also,
Speaker 1: that's actually I wouldn't want that technology to be unleashed
Speaker 1: upon the world at all at all. I think PC
Speaker 1: World had had an article um users blame sudden acceleration
Speaker 1: for recent spade of injuries, and it was about how
Speaker 1: how you know? Windows search queries could be completed a
Speaker 1: less than two minutes and it would just give people seizures.
Speaker 1: Nice thrill lists reported that there was a new startup
Speaker 1: called meeting Roulette, which was like chat Roulette except for
Speaker 1: business people. So if you wanted to practice your presentation,
Speaker 1: you would get on meeting Roulette and get connected with
Speaker 1: other random business people and then you would do your presentation.
Speaker 1: So it's like chat Roulette, but with more power point
Speaker 1: slides and fewer more didy more, more pants and more pants,
Speaker 1: more pants, and more power point slides exactly. Uh you know,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. There was a flicker announced the flicker Pad,
Speaker 1: which was a pad of paper with photos attached to it.
Speaker 1: Group On had group poop on, which was all luxury
Speaker 1: items like crazy luxury atoms, like here's a collage made
Speaker 1: out of dollar bills, it's two thousand dollars. Um. College
Speaker 1: Humor actually didn't go on the Internet for their joke.
Speaker 1: They went to real New York locations, New York City
Speaker 1: locations and put up posters saying coming soon in and
Speaker 1: out Burger So in and out Burgers a California fast
Speaker 1: food chain. And they were putting up these California fast
Speaker 1: food chain posters up on like vacant buildings a little
Speaker 1: bit boarded up. They put up the signs there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh that could that could get you punched. I mean,
Speaker 1: I know it's in and out as a religion among
Speaker 1: some people. Yes, supposedly. The blogs of New York, the
Speaker 1: food blogs kind of picked up on the the joke immediately.
Speaker 1: That's good, that's good. Um yeah, So anyway, that's that's
Speaker 1: a good overview of some of the big ones from
Speaker 1: twenty tin. I mean, Toshiba also started getting in on
Speaker 1: the game. They introduced the Tube top Laptop computer, which
Speaker 1: was a laptop the head, an inflatable case including a
Speaker 1: little inner tube that's part of it. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: good year twenty tin. But already it was starting to
Speaker 1: slow down a bit. And before we get onto, we'd
Speaker 1: like to take a moment to thank our sponsor. All right,
Speaker 1: let's get back to the joking. So we're at eleven.
Speaker 1: Hit me with something from Speaking of Tshiba, that was
Speaker 1: the year that they had the three D monocle bespectacle
Speaker 1: um one three D. So really you'd think you're using
Speaker 1: both eyes. That's that's tricky to do too. I mean obviously,
Speaker 1: like those three D involves parallax, which requires two eyes
Speaker 1: to have two lenses, which is why people who have
Speaker 1: vision problems in in just one eye. But not the other.
Speaker 1: Often that you know the three D effect is completely
Speaker 1: lost on them. Um also means that you know they
Speaker 1: would prefer to have the polarized lenses because at least
Speaker 1: then they could watch whatever the movie was as supposed
Speaker 1: to red or blue, which means it would just be
Speaker 1: red or blues. Um. Blizzard for World of Warcraft introduced
Speaker 1: a new companion, Crabby, who would give you helpful hints.
Speaker 1: Crabby was essentially Clippy for World of Warcraft. I see
Speaker 1: her trying to lead a raid. Would you like some help? Uh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not a World of Warcraft player, so that is
Speaker 1: hilarious to me. Let's say Hulu redesigned its site to
Speaker 1: look like it came out of the ninety nineties. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: Windows style. They had all the front page was all
Speaker 1: like like x files and kinds. In the hall they
Speaker 1: had they had ads up for like Netscape and and
Speaker 1: someone just hit control all the lete to YouTube. They
Speaker 1: ended up introducing a a an option that would allow
Speaker 1: you to make your photos or your videos look like
Speaker 1: they came from the early nineteen hundreds, so they would
Speaker 1: all turn into silent movies with piano backed music and
Speaker 1: have a cpo tone. Now their feature was not obviously
Speaker 1: actually activated, but they created They took some very notable
Speaker 1: types of videos and then redid them as like silent
Speaker 1: movie versions. That's that's another thing that I think that
Speaker 1: people would probably if that existed, we would be subjected
Speaker 1: to a lot more of that. Yeah, we'd have like
Speaker 1: at least two different versions of every video. Oh here's
Speaker 1: my favorite. One. Irish airline rhenn Air announced that it
Speaker 1: would offer child free flights. I okay, I I'd pay.
Speaker 1: I would. I don't fly that often, but when I do,
Speaker 1: I I appreciate it when I don't have a crying
Speaker 1: baby within five rows and me it's a it's a perk. Absolutely. Hey,
Speaker 1: kids are great. They are they are, and it's not
Speaker 1: their fault, but they're upset and they don't understand why
Speaker 1: kids are great. Far away from me. I like other
Speaker 1: people's children. Just find there. I like them too. In
Speaker 1: theory to practice, No, no, kids are kids, kids really are.
Speaker 1: Actually I do like kids. I just you know, I'm
Speaker 1: definitely one of those people who normally I can fall
Speaker 1: asleep on a flight, but when there's a crying baby,
Speaker 1: that's not not so much. Not really in the cards.
Speaker 1: Uh see Yelp announced puppy rentals rental you could you
Speaker 1: could find places to rent a puppy for a while.
Speaker 1: I if it weren't for the fact that I know
Speaker 1: that would be psychologically damaging for the puppies, I would
Speaker 1: say that's in a brilliant surface, But because I actually
Speaker 1: care about the animals, it's not a good at all. No,
Speaker 1: not a good idea. Tech Crunch that year announced that
Speaker 1: Spotify was going to be coming to the US and
Speaker 1: in order to afford the tremendous licensing fees for P
Speaker 1: three's shutting down in Europe, which was hilarious. Of course,
Speaker 1: everyone had been asking for Spotify for ages here in America,
Speaker 1: and it had been available in Europe for a while,
Speaker 1: and everyone raved about it in Europe, and everyone in
Speaker 1: America is just like, when are we ever going to
Speaker 1: get this? So that was kind of granted. Eventually Spotify
Speaker 1: would make its way to America by making a deal
Speaker 1: with Facebook. That would be the way that they got
Speaker 1: in on that. Um, let's see what else is My
Speaker 1: favorite of think geek that year was the play Mobile
Speaker 1: Apple Store play set, which which was you know, the
Speaker 1: little the little plastic people in their little plastic environment
Speaker 1: um to to introduce children to the magic of Apple
Speaker 1: and you could use your own real iPhone. Four is
Speaker 1: the screen behind Steve Jobs and the keynote theater. Nice Nice.
Speaker 1: Reddit created a a new thing called Mold, right because
Speaker 1: because Reddit gold is their gift currency, it was kind
Speaker 1: of like, yeah, exactly, so if someone gave you mold.
Speaker 1: Each time you received mold, you'd see ten fewer comments
Speaker 1: and lose the ability to to type a certain letter.
Speaker 1: And I think the first one was E, and then
Speaker 1: it would it would get down to I think only
Speaker 1: MP and H. Yeah, you would eventually get to the
Speaker 1: point where the MPH would be the only letters you
Speaker 1: would be able to type with the comment section yeah, which, hey,
Speaker 1: you know that's an interesting feature. Um. There was a
Speaker 1: a announced of an announcement of a group on Clone
Speaker 1: called Deals for Hipsters, which was just deals for Hipsters
Speaker 1: that said that if you were not satisfied, they would
Speaker 1: think about sending you a card that said I'm sorry
Speaker 1: that you didn't. You didn't didn't appreciate that you didn't
Speaker 1: appreciate this. I was about I was about to make
Speaker 1: a very unkind comment about Atlanta. Um deal group that
Speaker 1: has a mustache in their logo, and then I decided
Speaker 1: that instead, I'll just make a snarky allusion to it.
Speaker 1: That's a wise decision, and I'll tell you why later. So,
Speaker 1: so let's a group on itself said that it purchased
Speaker 1: April Fool's Day. That was right, and so that no
Speaker 1: one else could do anything on April fools Day because
Speaker 1: that would violate the terms of service. Uh, it's a
Speaker 1: funnier die ended up. You know. They had they had
Speaker 1: become Biber centric the year before, they decided to do
Speaker 1: something totally different in uh in in this year they
Speaker 1: decided instead of for they'd become a Rebecca Black site.
Speaker 1: It was like between the music with Rebecca Black things
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, it was interesting. Whereas Wolf from Alpha
Speaker 1: became Biber Beta Beta. Yeah, the little Wolf from Alpha
Speaker 1: logo became like a little cartoon picture of Biber's face.
Speaker 1: Google that year they had they had a job listing
Speaker 1: for the Google auto completer. Right. This is so so
Speaker 1: when you're typing in like if you're on Chrome and
Speaker 1: you're typing in a search query in the in the
Speaker 1: search bar, the awesome bar, whatever, the omnibar. I can't
Speaker 1: even remember what it's called in Chrome anymore. Um. But
Speaker 1: then when you start typing it in, it auto starts
Speaker 1: to auto complete, right Like if you're typing on a phrase,
Speaker 1: it tries to help you out by sending you responses
Speaker 1: that it thinks you're gonna go for. And so the
Speaker 1: auto complete, according to this was the person who actually
Speaker 1: types up, you know, anticipates what that search is going
Speaker 1: to be, quickly types it in before you yeah, minimum
Speaker 1: typing speed of words per minute, yeah, you know, and
Speaker 1: go through a few keyboards a year. That way. Certificate
Speaker 1: and psychic reading strongly preferred, right, Yeah, it was very cute.
Speaker 1: Gmail had Gmail Motion, which was a gesture based interface
Speaker 1: to navigate around Gmail. The pdf of all the gestures
Speaker 1: is still available online. All yeah, they're they're they're pretty good. Um. Also,
Speaker 1: it announced that it was going to as of like
Speaker 1: three days in the future, switch everything to comic Sands
Speaker 1: all the text across all of Google. You know, comic
Speaker 1: Sands definitely has like people just despise that with a
Speaker 1: passion that that that in Papyrus are really there's the
Speaker 1: ones that people really hate. Huh. Kodak created the option
Speaker 1: to remove x is from your photos, like ex girlfriend's
Speaker 1: ex boyfriends from your photos with an app called Relationshift.
Speaker 1: That's good. Yeah, that's cute. I know a lot of
Speaker 1: people who would love that. They definitely have a lot
Speaker 1: more photos posted on Facebook right now had they had
Speaker 1: that option. LinkedIn began to suggest that you might want
Speaker 1: to connect professionally with people who are either dead or fictional,
Speaker 1: like John Watson or Albert Einstein. So yeah, that that
Speaker 1: can really help you get your career ahead. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: some great stuff that year. Now, I guess we'll go
Speaker 1: ahead and move into last year, two thousand and twelve,
Speaker 1: and again we don't have anything for two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: so we'll talk a little bit about these. Um. I
Speaker 1: like that Airbnb announced that they had a deal where
Speaker 1: you could stay aboard the International Space Station for four thousand,
Speaker 1: one twelve dollars per night. So if you look at
Speaker 1: that amount of money for thousand, one hundred twelve four
Speaker 1: April one first twelve, two twelve, Yeah, that's how they
Speaker 1: came up with that that price. Cute. Um. The Register
Speaker 1: claimed that Apple had patented the rectangle that specifically, the
Speaker 1: patent was about a quadrilateral having all four interioral angles
Speaker 1: of ninety degrees opposite sides that are parallel and congruent
Speaker 1: diagonals that bisect each other. So that is that is amazing. Um,
Speaker 1: that's pretty funny. Uh. My favorite from thinking last year
Speaker 1: was I think that was the year of the Admiral
Speaker 1: Akbar singing wallfish. Yes, they had those singing bass it
Speaker 1: was Admiral Akbar. Yeah, yeah, he could play the cantina
Speaker 1: song and I'd say, it's it's a trap. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: here's a sad thing. I would still buy that. That's
Speaker 1: that's a little bit terrible, but it's it's I'm ashamed
Speaker 1: to admit it, and yet it's still true. I cannot
Speaker 1: deny that I would I would actually buy that. Would
Speaker 1: it would end up sitting in a closet something. My
Speaker 1: wife would never allow me to put that up anywhere,
Speaker 1: not even in the dog's room. She'd be like, are
Speaker 1: you kidding, and like the dog's deaf, he can't hear anything,
Speaker 1: and she's no, seriously, there's gonna be some deep psychological
Speaker 1: damage you will do to that dog if we leave
Speaker 1: this here. So I think it is not to be
Speaker 1: I think there would be. Uh. They also that year
Speaker 1: had had minecraft marshmallow creeps instead of instead of peeps
Speaker 1: and uh and and my my personal favorite, as much
Speaker 1: love as I have for animal acbar, they had the
Speaker 1: Artenic based sea monkeys straight from Mono Lake. They are
Speaker 1: one percent pure science and one percent fund which means
Speaker 1: two awesome for you. Right. So, so that that relates
Speaker 1: back to the science story from that year about the
Speaker 1: life forms found to live on Arsenic, which was a
Speaker 1: huge scientific breakthrough at the time and was it was
Speaker 1: actually a story that end a lot of misrepresentation in
Speaker 1: the science media. But anyway, Yeah, so that was definitely
Speaker 1: a reference to that gentle polke there. Ad block said
Speaker 1: that it would expand beyond blocking ads to blocking pictures
Speaker 1: of cats. Oh didn't they had ad block had I
Speaker 1: feel like in the previous year they had had um
Speaker 1: instead of the normal ad block logo, they would have
Speaker 1: an ad like a block thing with a cat on it.
Speaker 1: Very well might in the previous year. So that's that's cute.
Speaker 1: They went from from all cats to know cats. I
Speaker 1: liked what Hulu did and that they you know, the
Speaker 1: Hulu voice guy like this episode is brought to you
Speaker 1: by blah blah blah that guy. So they had they
Speaker 1: had it as if they had accidentally inserted out takes
Speaker 1: from his recording sessions into the things like red leather,
Speaker 1: yellow leather, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Alright,
Speaker 1: are we rolling like that? Or this episode of Hulu
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Hey, are we ready to
Speaker 1: go yet? Or what you know? That kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: and it was. It was actually inserted into their other
Speaker 1: one otherwise normal videos. Um so, I thought that was
Speaker 1: really amusing. Beats Audio announced that they were releasing Beats
Speaker 1: by Boyle as in Susan Boyle as in I Dreamed
Speaker 1: a Dream So Dr Dre and Susan Boyle finally waiting
Speaker 1: for that album that that connection that will rule the
Speaker 1: music world? Um tashiba again. They announced that they were
Speaker 1: releasing tablets of interesting shapes, including an oval, a rhombus
Speaker 1: and the Heart heartsheet tablet by a heart shaped tablet.
Speaker 1: That's so sweet. I have no doubt that you would.
Speaker 1: It would probably end up right next to my Admiral
Speaker 1: act bar singing bass a. Blizzard announced that they were
Speaker 1: going to start doing more more children's content, educational games,
Speaker 1: y A novels, you know, things like a like all
Speaker 1: functional Zerg typing game right where the zer would rush
Speaker 1: you if you don't type the word out properly. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: reader Ravager, which would you know? Devour Tome after Tome
Speaker 1: of Ancient Lord, teaching kids a valuable lesson that reading
Speaker 1: isn't just fun, it's downright delicious. Nice YouTube announced that
Speaker 1: they would offer the entire database of videos on DVD
Speaker 1: because there's nothing like web content on DVD, right, So
Speaker 1: if you wanted it, you could order it. It would
Speaker 1: require one seven five delivery trucks to carry all the
Speaker 1: DVDs to your house, but you could get them. Of
Speaker 1: course you couldn't really those the joke um stuffed on
Speaker 1: TV had a couple of different different jokes one of
Speaker 1: the one one of them said that Apple was introducing
Speaker 1: a forty two inch iPad, which would have been enormous,
Speaker 1: And the other was that Apple and BlackBerry were collaborating
Speaker 1: to build a new smartphone called the Crumble, and it
Speaker 1: looked like it looked like a BlackBerry smartphone with an
Speaker 1: Apple on screen interface. Yeah. Google of course went nuts
Speaker 1: in Yeah they had that. They had that great um
Speaker 1: eight bit map, Yeah, the Nintendo in nes it was
Speaker 1: Google Maps for the Nintendo in e s and it
Speaker 1: was it turned Google Maps into an eight bit version
Speaker 1: and it worked everywhere. Yeah, I mean, I mean they
Speaker 1: built it. Yeah, they created that thing. This wasn't entirely
Speaker 1: a joke. There was a really long time where you
Speaker 1: could actually switch it to that mode. I wonder if
Speaker 1: you still can. I haven't. I didn't try, but there's
Speaker 1: a little there's a little um uh linker icon do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was something where you could switch it over, and
Speaker 1: it was it was just hilarious, like everything it looked
Speaker 1: like everything was Legend of Zelda and and so you
Speaker 1: could look at your own neighborhood as if it were
Speaker 1: part of Legend of Zelda, which I thought was fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Google Racing was announced, which was going to be
Speaker 1: autonomous nascars, right, so, because the big story about the
Speaker 1: Google autonomous car was still in the news at that point. Uh,
Speaker 1: I mean they've been They've been in the news for
Speaker 1: a while at that point. But yeah, I was kind
Speaker 1: of funny to have the idea of these these driverless
Speaker 1: cars competing against each other in a in a race.
Speaker 1: Chrome got multitask support, which allowed multiple cursors to be
Speaker 1: on the screen at the same time. Anyone who has
Speaker 1: used any of the collaborative tools that Google made, like
Speaker 1: Google Wave things like that. It allows multiple people to
Speaker 1: edit the same document at the same time and you
Speaker 1: actually see the edits in real time. So if you've
Speaker 1: ever had that experience where multiple people were working on
Speaker 1: the same thing all at once, mostly to mess with
Speaker 1: each other, it's it's funny and irritating. Now, now I
Speaker 1: mentioned that where everyone's got control of a different cursor
Speaker 1: on your screen, that would be a night pretty great.
Speaker 1: That two thousand was also the year of street Row,
Speaker 1: which would would the kangaroo with a with a camera
Speaker 1: on it, which would allow them to cover those tricky
Speaker 1: parts of the Australian outback that are otherwise unreachable by
Speaker 1: They also had Google Fiber bars. They were bars of
Speaker 1: fiber stuff that you would eat like actual snack bars.
Speaker 1: Optical fiber. No, no, it's supposed to be like fiber fiber,
Speaker 1: get your fiber, but that it was. It was based
Speaker 1: on an algorithm that would uh analyze what your body
Speaker 1: needed and provide you exactly the nutrition that you that
Speaker 1: you required at that time. Yeah, let's see. Sony unveiled
Speaker 1: a point seven to five inch Vio Ultra Book Q
Speaker 1: series with eight gigabytes of RAM ten ADP resolution and
Speaker 1: come on tin ADP resolution when it's point seven five inches,
Speaker 1: that's easy. It's still like three pixels. And then the
Speaker 1: a m D radio on h D sixty six fifty
Speaker 1: graphics card, which that was the picture was like a
Speaker 1: person holding this tiny little thing in the palm of
Speaker 1: their hand. It could fit in your pocket because it's
Speaker 1: three quarters of an inch. Reddit that year had the
Speaker 1: introduced the Reddit timeline because that was when Facebook was
Speaker 1: switching over to timeline and everyone was was freaking the
Speaker 1: heck out, as people do about Facebook changes, which which
Speaker 1: extended from from all the way to the beginning of
Speaker 1: time until the heat death of the universe, right, so
Speaker 1: you could look at the headlines of any given time
Speaker 1: from like pre history to the future exactly. It was fantastic.
Speaker 1: Virgin announced Virgin Volcanic, which was a vehicle that would
Speaker 1: allow you to visit the center of the Earth. Oh right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: It looked like a cork screw, like a like a
Speaker 1: really like super high tech cork screw thing. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: Seth Green was going to be on that. They all
Speaker 1: had announced that they would start to accept a new currency.
Speaker 1: The currency would be tied to the British pound, but
Speaker 1: it was a currency specific to Virgin Mobile, So anyone
Speaker 1: who has been to a theme park that has theme
Speaker 1: park specific money essentially the same idea. Of course, the
Speaker 1: the unit of currency for Virgin was called the Branson
Speaker 1: of course. Yeah, I mean I wonder, how could it
Speaker 1: not be? Yeah, yeah, my favorite isn't you know, terribly
Speaker 1: tech related except for it happened on Facebook George t
Speaker 1: k announced that there was going to be a new
Speaker 1: Star Trek film coming out that that he was going
Speaker 1: to play the captain in and And. I wanted this
Speaker 1: movie so badly. I was so excited about it for
Speaker 1: like two and a half minutes until I realized it
Speaker 1: was able, until you realize what day it was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, in the past, I've actually got people a
Speaker 1: few times with some great Yeah, Like I posted one
Speaker 1: year that I was developing a story and I had
Speaker 1: pitched it and that it was had actually been accepted
Speaker 1: and I was going to fly out to Hollywood to
Speaker 1: to have a discussion about making a movie about a
Speaker 1: pair of scientists who are both studying the human genome
Speaker 1: and had identified the genes that guide aging, and they
Speaker 1: wanted to try and find a way where they could
Speaker 1: stop aging, so that, you know, the cellular death is
Speaker 1: no longer a problem. You could you could theoretically live
Speaker 1: forever as long as nothing terrible happened to you, like
Speaker 1: you know, you don't you could. You would still die
Speaker 1: if you got hit by a bus, but otherwise you
Speaker 1: would live in definitely right, And that they because of
Speaker 1: funding issues or whatever, the whole system is shut down.
Speaker 1: And so they both independently of each other. And there's
Speaker 1: a man and a woman and they both love each other,
Speaker 1: but they have not expressed their love to one another.
Speaker 1: They independently do tests on themselves, but for one of
Speaker 1: them it speeds up the aging process and for the
Speaker 1: other it reverses the aging process. And so they begin
Speaker 1: to age apart from one another as the love story
Speaker 1: unfall olds. And the question is when is the love story?
Speaker 1: Is the love story going to actually be a thing,
Speaker 1: or is it going to have to stop? So that
Speaker 1: was my that was my pitch I was trying to
Speaker 1: think of. I was literally sitting there thinking like one
Speaker 1: of the most stupid story I can think of, and
Speaker 1: I typed that up here's the thing. That joke came
Speaker 1: back to bite me because everyone said, no, you have
Speaker 1: to write this now. I'm like, but that's a dumb story.
Speaker 1: I want to see that story. So well yeah, but then,
Speaker 1: you know, that was before the Benjamin Button film had
Speaker 1: come out, so that one, I said, you know, Benjamin
Speaker 1: Button essentially tells that story in a way. It's not
Speaker 1: you know, not it's not a literal translation of that,
Speaker 1: but it's very similar. So when that came out, I
Speaker 1: was like, nope, nope, someone else has already done it,
Speaker 1: and they did it probably better than I would have anyway.
Speaker 1: So but I've I've done similar jokes like that a
Speaker 1: couple of times, and usually I get people believing me
Speaker 1: for about half an hour and then some one we'll
Speaker 1: figure it out. And as soon as someone figures it out,
Speaker 1: they post and then everyone goes right, and I'm like, thanks,
Speaker 1: you know, you could you could just sit there and
Speaker 1: send me a message and say good good April Fool's joke.
Speaker 1: But no, you have to ruin it for everybody, or
Speaker 1: I have to delete your comment. I'm not above such things.
Speaker 1: Well anyway, So it's it's interesting. I'm curious to see
Speaker 1: what happens this year. Like I said, by the time
Speaker 1: this podcast goes live, you guys have probably seen quite
Speaker 1: a few examples of the ridiculous stuff that happens, Uh
Speaker 1: and I do. My heart goes out to all of
Speaker 1: my tech journalist peers who are exhausted by April Fool's
Speaker 1: Day and find no joy in it whatsoever and only
Speaker 1: see it as an irritable event that happens on a
Speaker 1: yearly basis and they cannot wait for April second. Just
Speaker 1: just think about think about that that street Roo and
Speaker 1: um and UH and George and I didn't mention it,
Speaker 1: but one year Codex said that they had print They
Speaker 1: had created a three D printer that would allow you
Speaker 1: to print live kittens. It was like kitten printer. Just
Speaker 1: think think of the kitten printer, the kitten printer. That
Speaker 1: that should just make you feel better, all right. So,
Speaker 1: if you guys have any favorite jokes, maybe there's something
Speaker 1: that we did not cover, but it's something you're familiar
Speaker 1: with them, you think we should should have talked about it.
Speaker 1: Why don't you us knows send us an email or
Speaker 1: ad justus as tech stuff at Discovery dot com. We'll
Speaker 1: drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. We'd love
Speaker 1: to hear from you. We always are happy to accept
Speaker 1: any suggestions for future episodes. You can find us on
Speaker 1: Facebook and Twitter with the handle text stuff H s
Speaker 1: W and Lauren and I will talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Does it have staff works dot com