### Issue 1664 - Thursday 4th August, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- Pearson reckons it can use NFTs to make money off 2nd hand eBooks
- Google rebrands Duo to Meet, but keeps the old Meet app around as Meet Original
- People are paying good money to appear as guests on popular podcasts
- This $30 USB LTE modem & wi-fi router is very easy to run Linux on
- Cheap EPOS GPS 670 Bluetooth gaming headset, Samsung Galaxy A32 smartphone, 15% off sitewide at Swamp Industries

## The News

### Pearson reckons it can use NFTs to make money off 2nd hand eBooks

One of the world's largest publishers, Pearson, is hopping on the NFT bandwagon. While giving an update on the company's financials, CEO Andy Bird said "in the analogue world, a Pearson textbook was resold up to seven times, and we would only participate in the first sale" and that "technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life". I figure this means they'd allow you to sell your DRM'd eBooks to others so they get a cut. Bird must have a buzzword KPI as he also mentioned there's a "whole team" at Pearson working on "the implications of the metaverse and what that could mean for us".

### Google rebrands Duo to Meet, but keeps the old Meet app around as Meet Original

Google's Duo app is now called Meet. The existing Meet app will be renamed to Meet Original and discontinued eventually. What's the difference between Meet and Meet Original? The new Meet app will "let you conduct both group and one-on-one calls as well as hold meetings", so I assume Meet Original will only let you join meetings instead of starting them. Google has fucked up their messaging/chat apps for years, but to their credit they seem to be going all in on Meet now. Hangouts is dead, Google Talk died a while ago and now Duo has been rebranded as Meet. Oh by the way, Microsoft's Teams finally gets Apple Silicon support in the production version.

### People are paying good money to appear as guests on popular podcasts

According to Bloomberg, there is a growing trend of people paying to be interviewed on large influential podcasts. Essentially "pay for play" podcasting with no disclosure like there (usually) is with advertisements. It apparently works, as one "business coach" that spent US$35,000 on two podcast appearances made $150,000 in revenue selling online courses after appearing on those shows. There's even a marketplace called Guestio "devoted entirely to brokering paid guest appearances". When asked about disclosing these types of deals Guestio says they "should do a better job of having a script". Yeah, no shit.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### This $30 USB LTE modem & wi-fi router is very easy to run Linux on

A bunch of nerds are excited about flashing a cheap and common 4G LTE USB Wi-Fi modem into a full blown Linux computer. From Hackaday - "For a bit over the price of a Zero 2W, you get a computer with a similar CPU (4-core 1GHz A53-based Qualcomm MSM8916), same amount of RAM, 4GB storage, WiFi – and an LTE modem". Sounds cool right? I don't know what you'd use it for exactly, but I'm sure there's some great use cases for this. The instructions to flash this unit with Debian Linux are not difficult at all (I've had a harder time rooting Android phones) and I think this eBay listing is the same one as used in the English tutorial for flashing. Can someone with more disposable income than me take the $22 punt and see if it's flashable? Cheers.

## Bargains

- EPOS GSP 670 Bluetooth gaming headset - $179.10 from Computer Alliance
- Samsung Galaxy A32 128GB storage/6GB RAM smartphone - $217 from Officeworks
- 15% off sitewide at Swamp Industries (musician/audio gear, cables, accessories, etc)

## The End

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