Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you? So? April first, April Fools Day fell on this past Saturday. So falling on a Saturday, I didn't see quite the same amount of shenanigan's within the tech sector that usually pop up that time of year. And of course, since the pandemic, things have been relatively calm as far as April Fools gags go. It seemed like it was in bad taste to do it when the pandemic first began back in twenty twenty, and generally speaking, I think companies have sort of cooled off a bit on going hard on April Fools. But I figured we could take a look at a few jests, japes and outright lies that various brands and cities and whatnot presented this year. But keep in mind, it was pretty quiet. I mean, I looked around a lot, and I saw some stuff that was probably not even worth talking about, like jokes that we're so lame that even I couldn't get behind them. That's saying something because I am like a dad joke connoisseur type person. But I think a lot of companies in general have decided to back off on foolishness for the time being, maybe due to the fact that, you know, economic uncertain DA has created a lot of anxiety in the public and we're also seeing companies holding wide layoffs in the tech sector. Doesn't quite come across as the perfect time to be josh and around, but we still saw some and you know, as a rule, tech journalists hate April Fools. Some of them look at it as its amateur hour, you know, when various PR departments and tech companies are doing their best to appear to be spontaneous and original and you know, wacky and buzzworthy, but frequently they fall well short of those goals and it becomes you know, what the kids like to call cringe. Other folks say, it's just irritating to have to cover news when the stories you're coming across are likely to be fake. You know, as much as we talk about fake news, journalists don't typically like covering a story that turns out not to be real because you put in real work when you're a journalist, right, real research, real effort. You're putting words to paper or words to a screen, as the case may be, and it is not much fun to go through all of that and then find out that the story you just filed turned out to be a joke and not an actual story, and then you have to go back and write a whole new take or just scrap it and get rid of the work you've just done. That is frustrating. It stinks, and I get it, and it can be hard. Like sometimes it's very clear that it's a joke and everyone's in on it, it's fine. You know. You could argue that it's a waste of time and that the company could be spending its time doing something else, but otherwise, no harm, no foul. In other cases, the quote unquote joke might be structured so poorly that it comes across as a legitimate, you know, pr announcement. And while you would think that people would be able to tell a joke from reality, the truth is companies do such crazy stuff occasionally that you can't be sure about that. So yeah, it's hard to craft a really good April Fools prank. Ideally, you want something fun and cheeky, but not too misleading. You know, you would like your audience to say, wait, is this real and then say no, it can't be. And you don't want to cause genuine confusion or upset folks ideally, and hitting that ideal is challenging personally. I actually like at least some April Fools gags. I've found some of them to be funny, not all of them, but some. Google has done a lot that I actually enjoyed where they had some April Fools gags that I thought were just fun or distracting. Google did one where you could find Pokemon on Google Maps. There was another one that turned Google Maps into Pacman, like you could play pac Man on the streets of downtown Atlanta, for example. Those I thought were really cool. I even liked stuff like Google Knows in osc where Google was claiming that you could use like an Android phone to identify Sense, kind of like how other other apps can identify a song by just listening in for a few seconds. This app would supposedly identify a smell that you encountered, or it could actually generate smells. So if you were doing a search on something, you could hit a little button and it would generate a smell from whatever that thing is, so search carefully. Obviously, that was a joke too, and I think most people got it. I just thought, Oh, it's just people being creative and being silly, and I think that sort of thing should be celebrated, not condemned. However, if I were covering the news and I was getting just total junk on April first, I guess I would find it a little frustrating as well. Anyway, let's start off with what was my favorite April Fool's joke this year. It's not that tech related. It does call out artificial intelligence, but that is literally just a gag. There's no actual AI involved at all. So NPR had a little radio piece that reported that archaeology students had uncovered an ancient Roman scroll that was filled with dad jokes or potter iokus, as the piece claims. And the piece claimed that during gladiatorial displays, a comedian would have to come out, you know, after one gladiator strikes down another, the comedian would be sent out to keep the crowd entertained, while custodians would come out and you know, dispose of the body or body parts or what have you and cart them out of the way for the next clash to begin. And I just love that image. I just this idea of like a toga clad character coming out right after Russell Crowe has struck down an enemy and thesays, how about that, folks give him a hand, but not the one on the ground. We gotta throw that one away. Say you ever noticed how galls walk like this while Romans walk like this? You know, I like, you'd really get behind that. I'm surprised if that's not in History the World Part two it should be. I wouldn't know. I haven't watched it yet. Anyway, there is one little bit of fake tech involved in this NPR joke, and the piece claims that the research students were somehow able to identify the author of the jokes as a Roman named Clownius Bozolius, so Bozo the Clown, and further that they were able to somehow create an AI recreation of this otherwise forgotten giant of history. Of course, it's all a gag. There is no AI generated comedian based off an ancient Roman, and the supposed AI generated Clownius is just as goofy or cringey as you would imagine him to be. He actually did sound a little bit modern day comedian Lewis Black. I don't know who they got to do the voice for Clounius Bozolius. It was not Ai though. Anyway, the NPR bit was obviously a joke, and it was very silly and harmless and had some truly truly atrocious puns in it, So I give it a thumbs up. You can actually find that audio online if you want to hear it. It's called archaeology Students found Dad Jokes from Ancient Rome, And yeah, I mean it's short, it's like six minutes. It's a cute, little fluffy joke piece, and there's nothing wrong with that. All right. Now, let's turn our attention to the tech world for real zs. So first up, it's Tender, the dating slash hook up app that I am really glad did not exist back when I was single. Now that's not me throwing shade at Tender. It's not throwing shade at the folks who use Tender. It's more that I think I would have been thoroughly unsuited or that app it would have I would have had the worst time in the world in an environment where Tinder was like a major way for people to meet one another and get to know each other. So I'm glad that my dating life predates Tender. But anyway, Tender had its own April Fools gag this year, and it had to do with photos. Photos that featured something that, as of April first, would be against Tender's policies. I am, of course talking about fish picks. Yeah, Tender announced it was actively flagging and deleting fish picks. Tender posted on Instagram that the app would be fish free within twenty four hours. No, obviously, this is both a joke and a sly reference to the fact that some prospective mates have used Tender to send pictures of you know, their nude forms or their downstairs business. You might say to people, which, y'all, if no one asked for that, then, for goodness sakes, just don't do it. It's terrible. Anyway, it was a goofy little joke that is delicately perched on top of an actual serious problem. In fact, reportedly, guys at one point were so eager to send unsolicited nude photos to Tender matches the Tender actually saw a decline in women users because, honestly, I mean, who wants that kind of thing, So yeah, fun to joke about it again. If someone asks and you are amenable to sending it, that's one thing, But unsolicited sending of nude photos is just that's a bad idea. All around the city of Miami, or more specifically, Mayor Francis Suarez, joke that Twitter would be relocating its headquarters to Miami, Florida. I'm not really sure what prompted the joke. This seemed like one of those jokes that just was kind of random, and maybe there's some local news and local politics type stuff going on that I'm just not familiar with because I don't live in Miami. But yeah, that was a joke that happened this past weekend, and no, Twitter is not relocating to Miami. Tesla, another Elon Musk related company, was tweeting out a video that was supposed to show the Cybertruck, the long delayed cyber truck product from Tesla, and show its crash test results. Only if you play the video, the cybertruck never actually gets to the point where it hits the crash barrier. The video is edited in such a way that has lots of cuts and loops, and it'll go into slow motion and reaction shots and use other tricks to feel like it's leading up to the collision that you are going to see this cybertruck collide with a barrier wall, but the collision never actually happens. It's kind of like saying, if you were to start walking towards your front door, but with every step you are going at half the distance you did with the step before, you would never actually reach your door, because you'd always just be approaching it, but you would never actually reach it. That's kind of what this video feels like. And I don't know, I just found it frustrating. It's kind of like those videos where people do things wrong on purpose to just get to have a reaction. It felt like that, and maybe that was That's probably the point. But I also noticed that because Tesla posted this on Twitter, they had a gold checked verification mark on their account, and I am curious if Tesla had to pay the same fee that Musk is demanding other businesses cough up if they want to stay verified. I suspect Tesla is an exception to that rule. Okay, we've got some more tech based jokes. We'll put those in air quotes. But first, let's take a quick break. We're back. So there were a couple of jokes that I saw in the tech space that I actually thought were kind of cute and clever. Our roast Benelux, and I have no idea if I'm saying that company's name correctly. Anyway, this company posted a joke for serious PC desktop owners, like you know, your power gamers who buy those high end desktop gaming rigs, who also happen to have one or more housecats. Because we know kitty cats like to perch on elevated surfaces, particularly if that surface is a warm one. So you think, oh, if you have a desktop, like it's a wide desktop computer and it's getting nice and toasty, then obviously a cat's gonna want to perch on top of it. But that's a problem, right because, like you've got a device that doesn't really react well if dust and fur and that sort of stuff gets into it. Plus, if you got a cat laying across the top of your desktop computer, it might be on top of some vents which will have a serious impact on airflow. So this company introduced the cat Master. It's meant to fit on top of a desktop tower. PC, and it's essentially a cat hammock, and it gives the cat the ability to lounge in a hammock perched above the computer itself, still enjoying the warmth being given off by the gaming rig. Plus the cat master itself has integrated r GB LEDs. This is obviously just a joke, but I do know a few gamers who are also cat owners, and I suspect they would really PLoP down some cash for a cat bed with RGB lighting, particularly if they could synchronize the lighting of the cat bed with their PCs fan lights and internal lights so that you know, if it's going from red to green to blue, then so would the cat bed. So maybe one day this will actually become a thing, because that's actually a long tradition in tech. April fools gags as well. Sometimes a company will float an idea as a joke, but they're also keeping an eye out to see if there's enough interest to actually make the thing and go from joke to real product. See also the ton Ton sleeping bag that Think Geek teased many many years ago and then turned into a real product. Also rip Think Geek, I still miss you. Speaking of computer accessories, I got a couple more jokes that are in that line. So Razor a company that's known for creating various tech equipment, including stuff like like gaming laptops, gaming desktops, keyboards, mice, that sort of stuff. They announced their own April Fools product this past April Fools. It is the Razor Razor, a computer gaming mouse that doubles as an electric razor. Now. Razor published a video showing this supposed new product in use as a scruffy nerve herder of a gamer use the mouse to trim and shape facial hair, including some truly outrageous eyebrows. The company said that beta testers were wanted and included a sign up form which I think actually puts you in the running for like a little sweepstakes giveaway of Razor products. But Razor said the shaving mouse works at three hundred sixty fps. FPS in this case refers to follicles per second, And yeah, very silly joke. Obviously a gag. This is the kind where I feel like the joke is obvious from the get go, and it's still pretty entertaining, particularly when you know that Razor is a company that has made all sorts of gear ranging from pretty cool stuff to why would I ever need that kind of stuff? And I think this one was just outside of being credible based on the kinds of products we've seen from Razor. This includes stuff like vaporware products that were shown off at CES but they never actually made it into production. I've had that happened a few times, where I saw a really cool Razor concept that never became reality. Then there was a new product from be Quiet, which is a company known for producing computer gear that is no big surprise here, meant to minimize superfluous noise. You'll often hear gamers talk about how they'll build this crazy computer rig and in an effort to keep it operating at the right temperature, they'll have these fans that are going on full blast and they create a lot of noise. So it ends up being kind of a downside to those sorts of rigs. Be Quiet makes cases and fans and that kind of stuff meant to create the minimum amount of noise while still being effective. Well, the company claimed to be launching a bladeless computer fan, and in the video these fans look like just a little white square frame made out of plastic and there's a round opening where a fan would normally go. You know, it's essentially the housing for a fan, but there's nothing in the middle. It's just a hole, right, there's no fan sitting there, And I said, well, this is the bladeless fan that'll move air through your computer case. Be Quiet also said that these fanless fans would use a purpose built artificial inteligence to control airflow, which would be super interesting if that were true. The name of the AI was Fanos, of course, which makes it sort of a gladdose kind of reference from the Portal Games. And while the thought of an AI directed ventilation system is really neat, I mean, imagine you've got a computer system that could actually identify hot spots in the case and then direct airflow to try and pull some of that heat away and do that dynamically, so instead of just having an overall cooling system, you would have a reactive one that would be able to optimize performance. That would be really awesome if it were true. The video is actually a very fun one to watch. You can check it out. The spokesperson demonstrates the fan at one point holding it in front of his face, and it subsequently is powerful enough to blow his hat off. Sure, the top of his hat is suspiciously out of frame, so you can't see that. Something is probably attached to it to pull the hat off at on Q. But if you can't trust a video, whom can you trust. And of course the circumference of the fanless fan is a ring of RGB lights, because let's not be silly about these things. You still have to have it light up, because that's like part of the big deal with these gaming rigs. When I was last thinking about building a gaming rig for myself, I was the crazy person looking at just regular fans. I didn't care about the RGB stuff because in my mind, the cool thing is what is going on on the screen, not the lights emanating from my computer case. Now, blameless fans really are a thing. I'm sure most of you have seen them. You've probably seen Dyson's example. That's sort of the flagship of that particular type of product. Dyson, as far as I know, was the company that really made that design popular since and I've seen other companies kind of jump on that bandwagon. But I thought maybe I'd take a quick moment to explain how bladeless fans actually work. Because the way they work means it would be impossible for the computer fan version to work. So, first off, a bladeless fan isn't really bladeless. It actually does have blades mounted on a rotor. It's just these blades aren't visible because they are inside the pedestal for the fan. Like if you look at these bladeless fans, you'll see that they are standing fans and they have a pedestal underneath them. You would not really be able to design an effective computer fan that was bladeless because you would have nowhere to house the actual blade components. Right, the frame is too thin to have an effective way of pulling air through. So in a bladeless fan, the pedestal houses this blade device, this rotor of blades, and it has vents inside the pedestal so that an electric motor starts to rotate the rotor with the blades on it, the blades start to pull air into the pedestal that then gets pushed out the front of the face of the fan. Now, if that were all it were, then you would just have like a light fan blowing you. But because of physics and fluid dynamics, there's a little bit more going on. That the bladeless fans able to take advantage of. There's inducement. This is when air behind the fan starts to get pulled along with the air that's being pushed forward through the front of the fan. So if you think of the fan as just a circle with no blades in it, the motor inside the pedestal is turning a bladed fan inside the pedestal that's pushing air through the front of that circle. The air that's actually behind the circle gets pulled along with it. That's inducement, and then the air that's around the edge of the fan also gets pulled along, but that's called entrainment. These are two similar concepts and fluid dynamics, they're just slightly slightly different. So through inducement and entrainment, you get a lot more air, or at least a little more air push towards you than you would if it were just from the little bladed fans inside the pestle by itself. So Dyson calls that air multiplication that you're getting way more air than you would just through the blades because of the physics involved. Anyway, for these bladeless fans to work, you still need somewhere to house the electric motor and the bladed rotor to get things going in the first place. And without that, there's just no mechanism that would force air through the hole either in or out of this computer case. And since be quiet claimed there bladeless fans have no moving parts at all, there's really just no way it would be possible to do. But it was still a fun little goofy video. I imagine if you did have bladeless fans attached to your computer, you would have a dickens of a time keeping debris out of your computer, particularly if you installed one of those cat hammocks that were sitting on top of it. You would just be sucking that stuff into the computer case because there'd be like no mesh or anything blocking it. So while it was a neat concept and and a fun little joke, once you start applying critical thinking to it, you realize, oh, yeah, no, there are a lot of problems with that particular design. Though the AI component is really interesting. If there were a way to do such a thing where you could have more directed air so it's not just just a standard airflow through the computer, then that would be really cool. Obviously, there are water cooling systems that use more specific targeting for cooling for stuf of like you know, really high powered CPUs or GPUs. But it would be neat if you could do that. It's just we're not not at that point. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we'll wrap up some of the jokes that the tech sector, you know, try to pull on us this past weekend. I think some of my favorite April Fools gags come from companies that are otherwise known for creating stuff that's undeniably useful, but not exactly fun or whimsical. Maybe it's utilitarian. I think that's the case with Obsidian. Obsidian the software company. So this is a company that makes productivity tools that help you do things like create links between ideas, similar to the way how web pages use links to connect different documents to one another. So it's a neat way to go about working with concepts, it's not. It's more lateral thinking rather than linear thinking, and for some people that approach is incredibly useful, especially for specific types of projects. So it's a really neat approach to productivity. Anyway, Obsidian announced an AI assistant that It was calling Jemmy Gemmy on April Fools and said, quote, not sure if an AI assistant is going to be helpful in your workflow, don't worry. We've eliminated the guesswork for you because Jimmy is one going to be unhelpful end quote. So I would say this is the folks at Obsidian poking fun at the current AI craze that we're seeing other companies go through right now, companies like Microsoft and Google that are rushing to incorporate AI into their productivity products, even while concerned folks like critics are saying, maybe we shouldn't be going so hard and fast on AI, because we've already seen instances where AI creates incorrect responses and is unreliable for accuracy and reliability, and that should give us cause for concern that if we start to lean too heavily on these tools, that we could end up having lots of problems or at least really shoddy work. In other words, you might be making more work for yourself by trying to voice some of that labor onto AI. At this stage, Obsidian was kind of making fun of these other companies and saying, yeah, you know We've put this in just so that we could have it in there, and we're telling you right off the bat it is not going to help you. It will make things harder. And really, Jimmy's design just made me think of Clippy Microsoft Clippy. If you don't remember or know what Clippy was, It's a little paper clip character that would pop up in Microsoft software like like word and it would say things like I see are trying to draft a resume? Can I help? And people started to despise Clippy, even though like the thought behind Clippy was good. It was, you know, this tool that could detect if you were trying to make something that could be potentially standardized, but people found it very intrusive, so obsidian kind of pointing out, like people hate this stuff, stop putting it into your productivity products, especially when it's not a mature science. That really resonated with me. Moving onto video games, which are you know, supposed to be fun all by themselves, those can get more fun on special days like April Fools if things are handled correctly. I think for me, the one that surprised me the most was that Sega dropped a big bombshell with the murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, So yeah, kind of out of nowhere, Sega released a point and click adventure slash visual novel style game for PCs and Matt computers in which players try to take on the challenge of solving Sonic the Hedgehog's murder on the Mirage Express. Now, I've not played this game. It is a real thing. It does exist, you can get it. But yeah, this really surprised me because you don't often see companies take such big risks with a really iconic brand mascot character, you know, unless it's mister Peanut, which was kind of the long game play that started off in a big game football game. Back in the day. IGN released a video reporting to be from Nintendo. It was not from Nintendo. It was taking video clips from actual Nintendo Direct videos, but it was made by IGN. But the video was supposed to be promoting the Super Mario Brothers movie, and this fake video supposedly revealed that Nintendo Switch owners would be able to choose to play classic Mario Universe games and swap out the original soundtrack with voices from the film's cast. You could actually go into options and change this, so that would mean you would suddenly have you Chris Pratt voicing Mario in Super Mario Brothers, a game that didn't actually have Mario say anything. It's from the old nes Days. But my favorite bit of the gag like, as the video goes on, the various characters they're referencing are pulling from other sources that the actors who voice those characters in the movie, other projects that they've been in. So as you go on and on, you're like, wait a minute, I recognize that line. That line came from something else. My favorite of those moments was a bit about Toad featuring new voice lines from Keegan Michael Key. I'm not going to spoil it because honestly, this IGN video is really worth watching. It is amusing, and of course the video plays into the reaction that the Internet had to the announcement that Chris Pratt was going to voice Mario, a decision that I think a lot of people were not exactly thrilled about. Blizzard through in some jokes for Overwatch two this year, I feel like I should almost do a full episode about Overwatch because that's a game. You know, Overwatch and Overwatch two have really had their ups and downs, like it's tightly tied with Blizzard and the public perception of Blizzard, both in front of and behind the scenes. There are there's a lot of controversy in the background of that game, so it was interesting to me that they were kind of incorporating some April Fools gags into Overwatch too. But among those gags were some new voice lines for when characters engage their special ability. So in Overwatch, it's a team based shooter game, and each character in the game has their own special ability. You work out to the point where your character builds up their meter, and then you can unleash this ability at a strategic moment. Some of the new voice lines are kind of cute. A lot of them I think have references to stuff in the game that I'm not familiar with because I bounced off Overwatch a few years back before they had added more and more characters, So there's some references where I'm like, I bet that's funny if I'd been playing the game the whole time, but I don't really get the joke right now. Blizzard also published patch notes that included the phrase do not publish the idea, being like, it's patch notes, but you're not supposed to make them public. Those notes had more jokes in them, like yeah, there was a description about changes to character abilities and stuff. One of the notes said that doom Fist, when using his ability, can quote open a glass jar and a single attempt end quote. Truly a mighty character. Also, apparently they were given googly eyes on April first, something the Blizzard has actually done before with Overwatch. Again, I didn't play it, so I didn't see these things, but I'm like, oh, well, that's cute. I mean, if you were a regular player and you've logged in to see that, that would be fun. Sticking with games among Us, developer inner Sloth brought back an old gag to among Us and then added to it. So, if you're not familiar with among Us, it is a group video game. It's a social discovery game. And when you're playing, you're playing with a group of other people, and most of the players are innocent crew members on a space shop and they're supposed to do their tasks and that's it. But at least one of them, or more than one if the group is large enough, is a trader, and the trader is out to kill everyone else and avoid suspicion as best as they can, so the innocence they have to finish their tasks, and if they complete all of them before the killers can outnumber the innocence, then the innocence win, because otherwise, if the killers out number them, then the killers can just vote off all the innocence until it's just the killers that are left. Alternatively, the innocence can also vote to eject the killer into space if they figure out who the killer is. Otherwise they might eject someone who's innocent. Well, anyway, that's all to say that this year, among Us got back into Horse mode, in which all the little cartoon characters are vaguely horse shaped. They are very weird to look at. But the company had done horse mode before. What they had not done was introduced a brand new mode called horse Wrangling Mode. So in this mode, most of the players appear as horses, and one or more of them is a horse wrangler, and it's the wrangler's job to track down and capture all the horses. So it becomes kind of a hide and seek game rather than social discovery. So just different gameplay approach for that particular mode, and it's just cute. It's a cute little addition to the game. Then there was Rainbow six Siege, which pits teams of players against each other in tactical shooter based confrontations. They introduced a new mode called Rainbow is Magic, which is I guess a thinly veiled reference to my Little Pony Friendship is Magic. If you were to engage in this mode, everything gets a lot more colorful, very vibrant colors, which is not sought what you typically see in Rainbow six Siege. And there's a teddy bear based crisis inventually, instead of a bomb, the team has a teddy bear that they have to protect or the other team has to seek out and destroy the enemy's teddy bear. It's just as ridiculous as it sounds. The video is cute. Again, I'm not a Rainbow six player either, so I don't know how well the game play holds up for this particular mode, but I mean it's something different. I'm very curious which ones of these actually resonated with players. There's sometimes where game companies will come up with these special modes for a limited time and they go off like gangbusters, like it's just it's it's a breath of fresh air. It's silly and fun and people really enjoy engaging with it. And in other cases it's like, oh, I see what you tried to do. Like I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. So I don't know how these stack up. None of the games I play seem to incorporate any April Fools jokes in them, but I don't play that many games these days. I just don't have the time typically, and the game that I'm playing right now obsessively is Dredge, and that one probably doesn't need to have any April Fools jokes in it. It's already kind of absurd. It's a fishing game that has some lovecrafty and horror elements to it. I recommend it. It's kind of a fun game. All right. That's all I've got for April Fools for this year. I'm sure. Like I said, there were other gags that I saw and came across, but most of them weren't very inspiring. It hasn't been the same since before the pandemic. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, because as I said in the beginning, sometimes companies go overboard and the quote unquote jokes they push out are both not funny and not effective, and they just end up being frustrating. So fewer does not necessarily mean worse, and more does not necessarily mean better. Companies can come up with really creative ways of kind of being silly and lighthearted, but there's an art to it. So I've done episodes in the past about some of the greatest April Fools gags in tech, and you know, maybe I'll point back to one of those in a future episode, But like I said, there haven't been that many in the past few years, so it's hard to kind of update that list. If I were to do it again, it would probably just be repeating a lot of stuff I've already said. But I hope all of you are well. I hope none of you were fooled this weekend, or if you were, that it was a joyous and fun loving and kind hearted approach to being fooled, as opposed to mean spirited and nasty, because gosh, who needs that. And if you would like to get in touch with me about something I should talk about in a future Tech Stuff episode, please do so on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW or you can download the iHeartRadio app. It's free to download. It's free to use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff by putting it into the little search field. It'll pull up the tech Stuff page. 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Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you? So? April first, April Fools Day fell on this past Saturday. So falling on a Saturday, I didn't see quite the same amount of shenanigan's within the tech sector that usually pop up that time of year. And of course, since the pandemic, things have been relatively calm as far as April Fools gags go. It seemed like it was in bad taste to do it when the pandemic first began back in twenty twenty, and generally speaking, I think companies have sort of cooled off a bit on going hard on April Fools. But I figured we could take a look at a few jests, japes and outright lies that various brands and cities and whatnot presented this year. But keep in mind, it was pretty quiet. I mean, I looked around a lot, and I saw some stuff that was probably not even worth talking about, like jokes that we're so lame that even I couldn't get behind them. That's saying something because I am like a dad joke connoisseur type person. But I think a lot of companies in general have decided to back off on foolishness for the time being, maybe due to the fact that, you know, economic uncertain DA has created a lot of anxiety in the public and we're also seeing companies holding wide layoffs in the tech sector. Doesn't quite come across as the perfect time to be josh and around, but we still saw some and you know, as a rule, tech journalists hate April Fools. Some of them look at it as its amateur hour, you know, when various PR departments and tech companies are doing their best to appear to be spontaneous and original and you know, wacky and buzzworthy, but frequently they fall well short of those goals and it becomes you know, what the kids like to call cringe. Other folks say, it's just irritating to have to cover news when the stories you're coming across are likely to be fake. You know, as much as we talk about fake news, journalists don't typically like covering a story that turns out not to be real because you put in real work when you're a journalist, right, real research, real effort. You're putting words to paper or words to a screen, as the case may be, and it is not much fun to go through all of that and then find out that the story you just filed turned out to be a joke and not an actual story, and then you have to go back and write a whole new take or just scrap it and get rid of the work you've just done. That is frustrating. It stinks, and I get it, and it can be hard. Like sometimes it's very clear that it's a joke and everyone's in on it, it's fine. You know. You could argue that it's a waste of time and that the company could be spending its time doing something else, but otherwise, no harm, no foul. In other cases, the quote unquote joke might be structured so poorly that it comes across as a legitimate, you know, pr announcement. And while you would think that people would be able to tell a joke from reality, the truth is companies do such crazy stuff occasionally that you can't be sure about that. So yeah, it's hard to craft a really good April Fools prank. Ideally, you want something fun and cheeky, but not too misleading. You know, you would like your audience to say, wait, is this real and then say no, it can't be. And you don't want to cause genuine confusion or upset folks ideally, and hitting that ideal is challenging personally. I actually like at least some April Fools gags. I've found some of them to be funny, not all of them, but some. Google has done a lot that I actually enjoyed where they had some April Fools gags that I thought were just fun or distracting. Google did one where you could find Pokemon on Google Maps. There was another one that turned Google Maps into Pacman, like you could play pac Man on the streets of downtown Atlanta, for example. Those I thought were really cool. I even liked stuff like Google Knows in osc where Google was claiming that you could use like an Android phone to identify Sense, kind of like how other other apps can identify a song by just listening in for a few seconds. This app would supposedly identify a smell that you encountered, or it could actually generate smells. So if you were doing a search on something, you could hit a little button and it would generate a smell from whatever that thing is, so search carefully. Obviously, that was a joke too, and I think most people got it. I just thought, Oh, it's just people being creative and being silly, and I think that sort of thing should be celebrated, not condemned. However, if I were covering the news and I was getting just total junk on April first, I guess I would find it a little frustrating as well. Anyway, let's start off with what was my favorite April Fool's joke this year. It's not that tech related. It does call out artificial intelligence, but that is literally just a gag. There's no actual AI involved at all. So NPR had a little radio piece that reported that archaeology students had uncovered an ancient Roman scroll that was filled with dad jokes or potter iokus, as the piece claims. And the piece claimed that during gladiatorial displays, a comedian would have to come out, you know, after one gladiator strikes down another, the comedian would be sent out to keep the crowd entertained, while custodians would come out and you know, dispose of the body or body parts or what have you and cart them out of the way for the next clash to begin. And I just love that image. I just this idea of like a toga clad character coming out right after Russell Crowe has struck down an enemy and thesays, how about that, folks give him a hand, but not the one on the ground. We gotta throw that one away. Say you ever noticed how galls walk like this while Romans walk like this? You know, I like, you'd really get behind that. I'm surprised if that's not in History the World Part two it should be. I wouldn't know. I haven't watched it yet. Anyway, there is one little bit of fake tech involved in this NPR joke, and the piece claims that the research students were somehow able to identify the author of the jokes as a Roman named Clownius Bozolius, so Bozo the Clown, and further that they were able to somehow create an AI recreation of this otherwise forgotten giant of history. Of course, it's all a gag. There is no AI generated comedian based off an ancient Roman, and the supposed AI generated Clownius is just as goofy or cringey as you would imagine him to be. He actually did sound a little bit modern day comedian Lewis Black. I don't know who they got to do the voice for Clounius Bozolius. It was not Ai though. Anyway, the NPR bit was obviously a joke, and it was very silly and harmless and had some truly truly atrocious puns in it, So I give it a thumbs up. You can actually find that audio online if you want to hear it. It's called archaeology Students found Dad Jokes from Ancient Rome, And yeah, I mean it's short, it's like six minutes. It's a cute, little fluffy joke piece, and there's nothing wrong with that. All right. Now, let's turn our attention to the tech world for real zs. So first up, it's Tender, the dating slash hook up app that I am really glad did not exist back when I was single. Now that's not me throwing shade at Tender. It's not throwing shade at the folks who use Tender. It's more that I think I would have been thoroughly unsuited or that app it would have I would have had the worst time in the world in an environment where Tinder was like a major way for people to meet one another and get to know each other. So I'm glad that my dating life predates Tender. But anyway, Tender had its own April Fools gag this year, and it had to do with photos. Photos that featured something that, as of April first, would be against Tender's policies. I am, of course talking about fish picks. Yeah, Tender announced it was actively flagging and deleting fish picks. Tender posted on Instagram that the app would be fish free within twenty four hours. No, obviously, this is both a joke and a sly reference to the fact that some prospective mates have used Tender to send pictures of you know, their nude forms or their downstairs business. You might say to people, which, y'all, if no one asked for that, then, for goodness sakes, just don't do it. It's terrible. Anyway, it was a goofy little joke that is delicately perched on top of an actual serious problem. In fact, reportedly, guys at one point were so eager to send unsolicited nude photos to Tender matches the Tender actually saw a decline in women users because, honestly, I mean, who wants that kind of thing, So yeah, fun to joke about it again. If someone asks and you are amenable to sending it, that's one thing, But unsolicited sending of nude photos is just that's a bad idea. All around the city of Miami, or more specifically, Mayor Francis Suarez, joke that Twitter would be relocating its headquarters to Miami, Florida. I'm not really sure what prompted the joke. This seemed like one of those jokes that just was kind of random, and maybe there's some local news and local politics type stuff going on that I'm just not familiar with because I don't live in Miami. But yeah, that was a joke that happened this past weekend, and no, Twitter is not relocating to Miami. Tesla, another Elon Musk related company, was tweeting out a video that was supposed to show the Cybertruck, the long delayed cyber truck product from Tesla, and show its crash test results. Only if you play the video, the cybertruck never actually gets to the point where it hits the crash barrier. The video is edited in such a way that has lots of cuts and loops, and it'll go into slow motion and reaction shots and use other tricks to feel like it's leading up to the collision that you are going to see this cybertruck collide with a barrier wall, but the collision never actually happens. It's kind of like saying, if you were to start walking towards your front door, but with every step you are going at half the distance you did with the step before, you would never actually reach your door, because you'd always just be approaching it, but you would never actually reach it. That's kind of what this video feels like. And I don't know, I just found it frustrating. It's kind of like those videos where people do things wrong on purpose to just get to have a reaction. It felt like that, and maybe that was That's probably the point. But I also noticed that because Tesla posted this on Twitter, they had a gold checked verification mark on their account, and I am curious if Tesla had to pay the same fee that Musk is demanding other businesses cough up if they want to stay verified. I suspect Tesla is an exception to that rule. Okay, we've got some more tech based jokes. We'll put those in air quotes. But first, let's take a quick break. We're back. So there were a couple of jokes that I saw in the tech space that I actually thought were kind of cute and clever. Our roast Benelux, and I have no idea if I'm saying that company's name correctly. Anyway, this company posted a joke for serious PC desktop owners, like you know, your power gamers who buy those high end desktop gaming rigs, who also happen to have one or more housecats. Because we know kitty cats like to perch on elevated surfaces, particularly if that surface is a warm one. So you think, oh, if you have a desktop, like it's a wide desktop computer and it's getting nice and toasty, then obviously a cat's gonna want to perch on top of it. But that's a problem, right because, like you've got a device that doesn't really react well if dust and fur and that sort of stuff gets into it. Plus, if you got a cat laying across the top of your desktop computer, it might be on top of some vents which will have a serious impact on airflow. So this company introduced the cat Master. It's meant to fit on top of a desktop tower. PC, and it's essentially a cat hammock, and it gives the cat the ability to lounge in a hammock perched above the computer itself, still enjoying the warmth being given off by the gaming rig. Plus the cat master itself has integrated r GB LEDs. This is obviously just a joke, but I do know a few gamers who are also cat owners, and I suspect they would really PLoP down some cash for a cat bed with RGB lighting, particularly if they could synchronize the lighting of the cat bed with their PCs fan lights and internal lights so that you know, if it's going from red to green to blue, then so would the cat bed. So maybe one day this will actually become a thing, because that's actually a long tradition in tech. April fools gags as well. Sometimes a company will float an idea as a joke, but they're also keeping an eye out to see if there's enough interest to actually make the thing and go from joke to real product. See also the ton Ton sleeping bag that Think Geek teased many many years ago and then turned into a real product. Also rip Think Geek, I still miss you. Speaking of computer accessories, I got a couple more jokes that are in that line. So Razor a company that's known for creating various tech equipment, including stuff like like gaming laptops, gaming desktops, keyboards, mice, that sort of stuff. They announced their own April Fools product this past April Fools. It is the Razor Razor, a computer gaming mouse that doubles as an electric razor. Now. Razor published a video showing this supposed new product in use as a scruffy nerve herder of a gamer use the mouse to trim and shape facial hair, including some truly outrageous eyebrows. The company said that beta testers were wanted and included a sign up form which I think actually puts you in the running for like a little sweepstakes giveaway of Razor products. But Razor said the shaving mouse works at three hundred sixty fps. FPS in this case refers to follicles per second, And yeah, very silly joke. Obviously a gag. This is the kind where I feel like the joke is obvious from the get go, and it's still pretty entertaining, particularly when you know that Razor is a company that has made all sorts of gear ranging from pretty cool stuff to why would I ever need that kind of stuff? And I think this one was just outside of being credible based on the kinds of products we've seen from Razor. This includes stuff like vaporware products that were shown off at CES but they never actually made it into production. I've had that happened a few times, where I saw a really cool Razor concept that never became reality. Then there was a new product from be Quiet, which is a company known for producing computer gear that is no big surprise here, meant to minimize superfluous noise. You'll often hear gamers talk about how they'll build this crazy computer rig and in an effort to keep it operating at the right temperature, they'll have these fans that are going on full blast and they create a lot of noise. So it ends up being kind of a downside to those sorts of rigs. Be Quiet makes cases and fans and that kind of stuff meant to create the minimum amount of noise while still being effective. Well, the company claimed to be launching a bladeless computer fan, and in the video these fans look like just a little white square frame made out of plastic and there's a round opening where a fan would normally go. You know, it's essentially the housing for a fan, but there's nothing in the middle. It's just a hole, right, there's no fan sitting there, And I said, well, this is the bladeless fan that'll move air through your computer case. Be Quiet also said that these fanless fans would use a purpose built artificial inteligence to control airflow, which would be super interesting if that were true. The name of the AI was Fanos, of course, which makes it sort of a gladdose kind of reference from the Portal Games. And while the thought of an AI directed ventilation system is really neat, I mean, imagine you've got a computer system that could actually identify hot spots in the case and then direct airflow to try and pull some of that heat away and do that dynamically, so instead of just having an overall cooling system, you would have a reactive one that would be able to optimize performance. That would be really awesome if it were true. The video is actually a very fun one to watch. You can check it out. The spokesperson demonstrates the fan at one point holding it in front of his face, and it subsequently is powerful enough to blow his hat off. Sure, the top of his hat is suspiciously out of frame, so you can't see that. Something is probably attached to it to pull the hat off at on Q. But if you can't trust a video, whom can you trust. And of course the circumference of the fanless fan is a ring of RGB lights, because let's not be silly about these things. You still have to have it light up, because that's like part of the big deal with these gaming rigs. When I was last thinking about building a gaming rig for myself, I was the crazy person looking at just regular fans. I didn't care about the RGB stuff because in my mind, the cool thing is what is going on on the screen, not the lights emanating from my computer case. Now, blameless fans really are a thing. I'm sure most of you have seen them. You've probably seen Dyson's example. That's sort of the flagship of that particular type of product. Dyson, as far as I know, was the company that really made that design popular since and I've seen other companies kind of jump on that bandwagon. But I thought maybe I'd take a quick moment to explain how bladeless fans actually work. Because the way they work means it would be impossible for the computer fan version to work. So, first off, a bladeless fan isn't really bladeless. It actually does have blades mounted on a rotor. It's just these blades aren't visible because they are inside the pedestal for the fan. Like if you look at these bladeless fans, you'll see that they are standing fans and they have a pedestal underneath them. You would not really be able to design an effective computer fan that was bladeless because you would have nowhere to house the actual blade components. Right, the frame is too thin to have an effective way of pulling air through. So in a bladeless fan, the pedestal houses this blade device, this rotor of blades, and it has vents inside the pedestal so that an electric motor starts to rotate the rotor with the blades on it, the blades start to pull air into the pedestal that then gets pushed out the front of the face of the fan. Now, if that were all it were, then you would just have like a light fan blowing you. But because of physics and fluid dynamics, there's a little bit more going on. That the bladeless fans able to take advantage of. There's inducement. This is when air behind the fan starts to get pulled along with the air that's being pushed forward through the front of the fan. So if you think of the fan as just a circle with no blades in it, the motor inside the pedestal is turning a bladed fan inside the pedestal that's pushing air through the front of that circle. The air that's actually behind the circle gets pulled along with it. That's inducement, and then the air that's around the edge of the fan also gets pulled along, but that's called entrainment. These are two similar concepts and fluid dynamics, they're just slightly slightly different. So through inducement and entrainment, you get a lot more air, or at least a little more air push towards you than you would if it were just from the little bladed fans inside the pestle by itself. So Dyson calls that air multiplication that you're getting way more air than you would just through the blades because of the physics involved. Anyway, for these bladeless fans to work, you still need somewhere to house the electric motor and the bladed rotor to get things going in the first place. And without that, there's just no mechanism that would force air through the hole either in or out of this computer case. And since be quiet claimed there bladeless fans have no moving parts at all, there's really just no way it would be possible to do. But it was still a fun little goofy video. I imagine if you did have bladeless fans attached to your computer, you would have a dickens of a time keeping debris out of your computer, particularly if you installed one of those cat hammocks that were sitting on top of it. You would just be sucking that stuff into the computer case because there'd be like no mesh or anything blocking it. So while it was a neat concept and and a fun little joke, once you start applying critical thinking to it, you realize, oh, yeah, no, there are a lot of problems with that particular design. Though the AI component is really interesting. If there were a way to do such a thing where you could have more directed air so it's not just just a standard airflow through the computer, then that would be really cool. Obviously, there are water cooling systems that use more specific targeting for cooling for stuf of like you know, really high powered CPUs or GPUs. But it would be neat if you could do that. It's just we're not not at that point. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we'll wrap up some of the jokes that the tech sector, you know, try to pull on us this past weekend. I think some of my favorite April Fools gags come from companies that are otherwise known for creating stuff that's undeniably useful, but not exactly fun or whimsical. Maybe it's utilitarian. I think that's the case with Obsidian. Obsidian the software company. So this is a company that makes productivity tools that help you do things like create links between ideas, similar to the way how web pages use links to connect different documents to one another. So it's a neat way to go about working with concepts, it's not. It's more lateral thinking rather than linear thinking, and for some people that approach is incredibly useful, especially for specific types of projects. So it's a really neat approach to productivity. Anyway, Obsidian announced an AI assistant that It was calling Jemmy Gemmy on April Fools and said, quote, not sure if an AI assistant is going to be helpful in your workflow, don't worry. We've eliminated the guesswork for you because Jimmy is one going to be unhelpful end quote. So I would say this is the folks at Obsidian poking fun at the current AI craze that we're seeing other companies go through right now, companies like Microsoft and Google that are rushing to incorporate AI into their productivity products, even while concerned folks like critics are saying, maybe we shouldn't be going so hard and fast on AI, because we've already seen instances where AI creates incorrect responses and is unreliable for accuracy and reliability, and that should give us cause for concern that if we start to lean too heavily on these tools, that we could end up having lots of problems or at least really shoddy work. In other words, you might be making more work for yourself by trying to voice some of that labor onto AI. At this stage, Obsidian was kind of making fun of these other companies and saying, yeah, you know We've put this in just so that we could have it in there, and we're telling you right off the bat it is not going to help you. It will make things harder. And really, Jimmy's design just made me think of Clippy Microsoft Clippy. If you don't remember or know what Clippy was, It's a little paper clip character that would pop up in Microsoft software like like word and it would say things like I see are trying to draft a resume? Can I help? And people started to despise Clippy, even though like the thought behind Clippy was good. It was, you know, this tool that could detect if you were trying to make something that could be potentially standardized, but people found it very intrusive, so obsidian kind of pointing out, like people hate this stuff, stop putting it into your productivity products, especially when it's not a mature science. That really resonated with me. Moving onto video games, which are you know, supposed to be fun all by themselves, those can get more fun on special days like April Fools if things are handled correctly. I think for me, the one that surprised me the most was that Sega dropped a big bombshell with the murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, So yeah, kind of out of nowhere, Sega released a point and click adventure slash visual novel style game for PCs and Matt computers in which players try to take on the challenge of solving Sonic the Hedgehog's murder on the Mirage Express. Now, I've not played this game. It is a real thing. It does exist, you can get it. But yeah, this really surprised me because you don't often see companies take such big risks with a really iconic brand mascot character, you know, unless it's mister Peanut, which was kind of the long game play that started off in a big game football game. Back in the day. IGN released a video reporting to be from Nintendo. It was not from Nintendo. It was taking video clips from actual Nintendo Direct videos, but it was made by IGN. But the video was supposed to be promoting the Super Mario Brothers movie, and this fake video supposedly revealed that Nintendo Switch owners would be able to choose to play classic Mario Universe games and swap out the original soundtrack with voices from the film's cast. You could actually go into options and change this, so that would mean you would suddenly have you Chris Pratt voicing Mario in Super Mario Brothers, a game that didn't actually have Mario say anything. It's from the old nes Days. But my favorite bit of the gag like, as the video goes on, the various characters they're referencing are pulling from other sources that the actors who voice those characters in the movie, other projects that they've been in. So as you go on and on, you're like, wait a minute, I recognize that line. That line came from something else. My favorite of those moments was a bit about Toad featuring new voice lines from Keegan Michael Key. I'm not going to spoil it because honestly, this IGN video is really worth watching. It is amusing, and of course the video plays into the reaction that the Internet had to the announcement that Chris Pratt was going to voice Mario, a decision that I think a lot of people were not exactly thrilled about. Blizzard through in some jokes for Overwatch two this year, I feel like I should almost do a full episode about Overwatch because that's a game. You know, Overwatch and Overwatch two have really had their ups and downs, like it's tightly tied with Blizzard and the public perception of Blizzard, both in front of and behind the scenes. There are there's a lot of controversy in the background of that game, so it was interesting to me that they were kind of incorporating some April Fools gags into Overwatch too. But among those gags were some new voice lines for when characters engage their special ability. So in Overwatch, it's a team based shooter game, and each character in the game has their own special ability. You work out to the point where your character builds up their meter, and then you can unleash this ability at a strategic moment. Some of the new voice lines are kind of cute. A lot of them I think have references to stuff in the game that I'm not familiar with because I bounced off Overwatch a few years back before they had added more and more characters, So there's some references where I'm like, I bet that's funny if I'd been playing the game the whole time, but I don't really get the joke right now. Blizzard also published patch notes that included the phrase do not publish the idea, being like, it's patch notes, but you're not supposed to make them public. Those notes had more jokes in them, like yeah, there was a description about changes to character abilities and stuff. One of the notes said that doom Fist, when using his ability, can quote open a glass jar and a single attempt end quote. Truly a mighty character. Also, apparently they were given googly eyes on April first, something the Blizzard has actually done before with Overwatch. Again, I didn't play it, so I didn't see these things, but I'm like, oh, well, that's cute. I mean, if you were a regular player and you've logged in to see that, that would be fun. Sticking with games among Us, developer inner Sloth brought back an old gag to among Us and then added to it. So, if you're not familiar with among Us, it is a group video game. It's a social discovery game. And when you're playing, you're playing with a group of other people, and most of the players are innocent crew members on a space shop and they're supposed to do their tasks and that's it. But at least one of them, or more than one if the group is large enough, is a trader, and the trader is out to kill everyone else and avoid suspicion as best as they can, so the innocence they have to finish their tasks, and if they complete all of them before the killers can outnumber the innocence, then the innocence win, because otherwise, if the killers out number them, then the killers can just vote off all the innocence until it's just the killers that are left. Alternatively, the innocence can also vote to eject the killer into space if they figure out who the killer is. Otherwise they might eject someone who's innocent. Well, anyway, that's all to say that this year, among Us got back into Horse mode, in which all the little cartoon characters are vaguely horse shaped. They are very weird to look at. But the company had done horse mode before. What they had not done was introduced a brand new mode called horse Wrangling Mode. So in this mode, most of the players appear as horses, and one or more of them is a horse wrangler, and it's the wrangler's job to track down and capture all the horses. So it becomes kind of a hide and seek game rather than social discovery. So just different gameplay approach for that particular mode, and it's just cute. It's a cute little addition to the game. Then there was Rainbow six Siege, which pits teams of players against each other in tactical shooter based confrontations. They introduced a new mode called Rainbow is Magic, which is I guess a thinly veiled reference to my Little Pony Friendship is Magic. If you were to engage in this mode, everything gets a lot more colorful, very vibrant colors, which is not sought what you typically see in Rainbow six Siege. And there's a teddy bear based crisis inventually, instead of a bomb, the team has a teddy bear that they have to protect or the other team has to seek out and destroy the enemy's teddy bear. It's just as ridiculous as it sounds. The video is cute. Again, I'm not a Rainbow six player either, so I don't know how well the game play holds up for this particular mode, but I mean it's something different. I'm very curious which ones of these actually resonated with players. There's sometimes where game companies will come up with these special modes for a limited time and they go off like gangbusters, like it's just it's it's a breath of fresh air. It's silly and fun and people really enjoy engaging with it. And in other cases it's like, oh, I see what you tried to do. Like I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. So I don't know how these stack up. None of the games I play seem to incorporate any April Fools jokes in them, but I don't play that many games these days. I just don't have the time typically, and the game that I'm playing right now obsessively is Dredge, and that one probably doesn't need to have any April Fools jokes in it. It's already kind of absurd. It's a fishing game that has some lovecrafty and horror elements to it. I recommend it. It's kind of a fun game. All right. That's all I've got for April Fools for this year. I'm sure. Like I said, there were other gags that I saw and came across, but most of them weren't very inspiring. It hasn't been the same since before the pandemic. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, because as I said in the beginning, sometimes companies go overboard and the quote unquote jokes they push out are both not funny and not effective, and they just end up being frustrating. So fewer does not necessarily mean worse, and more does not necessarily mean better. Companies can come up with really creative ways of kind of being silly and lighthearted, but there's an art to it. So I've done episodes in the past about some of the greatest April Fools gags in tech, and you know, maybe I'll point back to one of those in a future episode, But like I said, there haven't been that many in the past few years, so it's hard to kind of update that list. If I were to do it again, it would probably just be repeating a lot of stuff I've already said. But I hope all of you are well. I hope none of you were fooled this weekend, or if you were, that it was a joyous and fun loving and kind hearted approach to being fooled, as opposed to mean spirited and nasty, because gosh, who needs that. And if you would like to get in touch with me about something I should talk about in a future Tech Stuff episode, please do so on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW or you can download the iHeartRadio app. It's free to download. It's free to use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff by putting it into the little search field. It'll pull up the tech Stuff page. 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