Show notes
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>> Hey, all. Marty here. Today,
we're coming at you with our Friday finds.
With me, I've got Michael.
Say hello, Michael.
>> Hello, Michael.
>> Lynn, say hello, Lynn.
>> Hello, everybody.
>> Lynn, why don't you kick us off with our first story?
>> Sure. Well, I'll just quickly introduce myself.
I'm Lynn Schneider, and you may know me as
Kane Prince around the Internet.
And I am a right now sort of an intern, I guess you could say.
I'm interested in branching out
and becoming a content producer.
And I decided to ask the best teachers that I could find.
We'll do our best to learn to use something.
And so I'm really excited.
I love technology.
You guys probably know me.
I do the ACB crafters on Fridays.
I'm involved in lots of different,
I'm totally blind from birth from anaphylmia.
I was born with that eyes. Yeah.
I'm really excited to be here
and to share some news stories with everyone.
My first news story of the week has to do with
the freestyle libre readers
that many people use for diabetic control,
blood sugar control monitoring.
Why don't you tell everyone who may not know what a freestyle librarian is exactly just so they understand what it is?
So these readers actually help people
Monitor their blood sugars
without having to stick themselves with needles all the time and
Many people are doing this that they will sync up with your phone
so that you can have access to your readings and
It will tell you if you need insulin or
Actually, I think that they they even you can even get insulin
Injectables that they will actually do the injection for you
So you don't have to poke yourself with a needle.
So the new technology, the old technology actually,
what people used to have to do if they didn't have these,
you know, digital phone apps was they would have to take
either a little needle, poke themselves,
and then they'd have to use a little strip,
put that in another machine,
they would have to get a little drip of the blood
and then suck that into the little strip
which goes in the machine and tells you
what your glucose level or what your sugar level is,
which is glucose at that exact moment.
And it would reach you on the screen,
whatever the number is.
And some of them are accessible and some of them are not.
And the ones that are accessible will speak
the what's on the screen, your glucose number
or sugar number at that moment out loud to you.
Now the new technology, which what Lynn is talking about is you get this little tiny
sticker which you stick on and it goes under your skin just enough so that it can check
your blood and you don't change it.
It sits there constantly.
And then what happens is you have an app on your phone, which you open up and then when
you hit the app, it automatically draws your blood sugar for you and then gives you the
reading on your phone on the app and then it will keep track of all that information
so that the next time you go to the doctor they can see what your trends are and you
can also obviously look and see what your trends are and see if your blood sugars are
high low and different whatever the case may be.
So with all of that being said so Lynn now what is the problem that they're running into
these machines?
Well, basically what's happening is that the lithium ion batteries in the readers, some
users are reporting that they're swelling and that they're overheating and sparking.
Wow, really?
Okay.
In rare cases, they're even catching fire.
So in response, the manufacturer has, which is the freestyle libre, the manufacturer has
is advise people to do a few things.
Basically, they want you to use the adapter that it comes with.
Because what's happening,
they say is that people are not using
the adapters with the right power wattage.
>> So this is specifically the power adapter, is that correct?
>> Right.
>> So people are using
different power adapters that didn't come with the machine
and that's causing the machine to do wacky things, correct?
Right, right, that's right.
And so they're fixed to this is use the power adapter
we send you in the box and don't use any other one.
Right, and they do have some,
there's like four, they say there's like
tons of these devices out there.
You can still use them, but there is a recall.
So you should just be aware that there is a recall out there
and you just want to contact the manufacturer.
Visit freestylebattery.com.
Marty and I were discussing this yesterday.
We're talking about the Bookshare price increase.
And if you're a Bookshare member who like me pays
for their own Bookshare membership,
you know that Bookshare membership was always $50.
So let's give them a primer on what Bookshare is exactly,
'cause I guarantee you a lot of people are gonna be,
well, wait, isn't Bard Bookshare or isn't Bookshare Bard?
So let's give them a little primer on what Bookshare is.
Right, yeah, that's good.
And so there are lots of ways
that blind people can get books, of course.
The traditional NLS National Library Service,
NLS tends to sort of cater to
The people that like to read for relaxation, and that's fine.
>> Casual readers.
>> Of course, you have to have a qualifying print disability.
The thing that separates Bookshare from NLS is that
Bookshare tends to have more academic content.
It tends to have more,
for people who like me are into lifelong learning,
students use it, they get their textbooks that way.
And, you know, students get Bookshare for free.
The problem is it caters mostly to students, but adults like me really like it because
I'm a lifelong learner.
I like to have access to academic things.
And unfortunately, they are increasing their annual fee from $50 to $80.
It's actually $79.99 or some crazy thing like that.
So basically $80.
So that's a pretty steep increase, I think, for people who pay for their own membership
like me because I'm not a student, so I don't get a free membership.
And I guess this is just my little mini rant.
I feel that for people like me, in the email they sent to all the members, they say that
they feel like the people in richer countries should be able to afford the price increase.
And of course, I'm considered being in a high income country.
I am not a high income person.
I can guarantee you that.
certainly everybody is suffering from the effects of inflation.
>> Yeah, definitely.
>> We know that every prices of everything are increasing.
They've said that they've not increased their prices
despite the fact that their costs are going up.
My little mini rant here is to say that many people like me who buy their own,
For example, I bought my own Mantis.
I think people might look at me and say,
"Oh, well, you have the money."
But it was a hardship for me to do that.
>> What is the Mantis exactly, just so people know?
>> It's a Braille display.
So it allows me to read my screens in Braille and read books in Braille.
It's just a wonderful device that I hook up to my phone or my Mac,
and it allows me to have braille output.
And the reason that I wanted that
is because I do a lot of volunteer work.
And unfortunately, volunteer work is not considered work.
So I'm not a student--
No, it's considered work, but for free,
you don't get paid.
Yeah, exactly.
By the way, this is National Volunteer Week,
so this, you know, as an aside.
I get a 30% price increase,
which is what it comes down to is drastic.
It's shocking to anyone.
But the other thing that I consider full transparency, I do not currently
pay for bookshare, so I will be open about that, but is the value you get
from bookshare still worth $6 a month?
And when you break it down monthly, it's like, oh, that's for all the books
that I get, that's not a lot, but when you go and take the pricing, almost
double it, it's sticker shock to people.
It is.
In fact, I was almost wondering, cause I take allergy medicine and it makes
me have really weird dreams. And it was at night when I saw this,
I'm like, I just see that up, it's going to increase 30 bucks.
So I think that's interesting about this too, is definitely
like I agree with Michael, it's going to be sticker shock when
you first hear how much the increase is. But even at the new
number, like if you're paying, you said what is it 80 now,
Lynn? Is that what you said it was?
It's going to be 80. Yeah, right. So next time it comes up. Yeah.
Even if you're at $80 a year, if you were to go to a bookstore and you were to buy
Five books that's going to cost you on the average $20 a book
And that's going to be way more
Than $80 a year if you were to go and buy books from the bookstore
You know at right full pop so on one hand. Yes, it seems to
be like a very expensive pay raise or monthly fee raise to the membership. But you could go on there
and you could download 10 books a day, 15 books a day if you want. I mean, you can't go into any
bookstore and down or purchase and let us see you have tons and tons of money, you know, 15,
20 books a day. There's just no way. It would be far, far, far more expensive.
Right. So, and I think that there's this also this mythology out there that blind people don't want to pay for anything.
And that is in my case, that is certainly not true. I do not mind paying for things. I don't expect to be given everything for free.
Now, they do say that if you find that it's a hardship, you can go on the website and ask for a
a discount.
So if you, I mean, they are allowing that, but I just wonder what happened to me, the
cost go up so much.
And I am not sure how many of us pay for our own bookshare because so many people get it
paid for some states, even I think California actually is one of the states where you can
get it the membership free.
So there are, I guess they're kind of figuring that it won't impact a lot of people.
But unfortunately, it does impact me and because...
And you know if it impacts you, it's going to impact other people.
I am sorry to report that if you guys get your discs by mail, well, you're going to
have to find another way to get your discs sent to you by mail because Netflix is going
to end that program. And the interesting thing is that I didn't really, I didn't even know
that Netflix still sent out stuff by mail. I mean, I know that that's how they started,
but I had no idea that they were still doing it. And the funny part about it is I saw the
story on AOL.com. I was going through my Google news and I saw it there and I saw that it was,
the story was carried on in several outlets, but one of them was AOL and I'm like,
"Gosh, I didn't even know AOL still existed."
I know. That's pretty weird, actually.
Yeah, that was weird. I felt like I was going through a time warp or something.
But yeah, so that's, they say that people, the people that get their DVDs by mail, they like it
because some of them don't have really good internets, you know, internet access. I know,
it's interesting as being on the Zoom calls, how many people just really don't have good internet.
You know, they're always breaking up.
It actually does. There's a few things here. And one is, Les, we were just talking about in the last story, you know, there's inflation, right? So you look at a digital product opposed to a physical product, right? So a digital product, they put it up there. It's endless. It's never going to run out. It's always there. People can stream it, stream it, stream it. You know, there's no, there's no love loss there, you know?
You know, right. Sorry about the physical product. What happens with the physical product? Someone has to, you know, pick the DVDs they want.
Then you have to have people going around and packaging up those DVDs, putting them in the mail, sending them to the people.
And then the people watch the DVDs and they got to turn around and they got to send them back.
And a lot of times I think when you send it back, Netflix was eating the cost of the postage both ways.
Right. Exactly.
So when you look at the money that they're spending on doing just the shipping alone
and paying people to pull the DVDs and put them back when they come back in, and how
many people really are watching DVDs at this point?
I mean, if you go to a store, like an electronic store, it's even hard to find a DVD player
anymore, you know?
I don't own one.
I think I have one on an old laptop somewhere in the house,
and I think my mom has an older TV
that has a DVD player on it.
But what they said was that people still like it
because they say that some films,
like some esoteric sort of unusual films,
they are not allowed to be streamed
for copyright reasons.
And so they could--
You go back to when Netflix started
and their whole business model was, you know,
sending out DVDs to people,
they'd watch them send it back, get more, right?
But as a couple of years into the business,
they decided to start doing a small feature
where some TV shows or some movies
would be available for streaming, right?
And they were kind of the first ones
to really kind of start that.
And in the beginning, it went well, people liked it,
and then they were able to add more and more
to the choices of things that you could stream
because nobody else was doing it.
And as years went on, all of these companies went,
well, wait, why are we giving all our content away?
We can have our own platform.
And then it started all of these companies popping up
with their own platforms and their own streaming services.
So you lose a lot of those shows due to licensing and all this other stuff on Netflix.
So I thought it was funny the other day they were saying, I was looking at the article and it was talking about how one of the founders, there were two founders and one of them wanted to test whether he could send a DVD through the post office.
So what he did is he got a Patsy Cline.
It's DVD and send it to his friend. I'm like some friend like
Okay, just send me a Patsy Cline DVD
But um, yeah, that was interesting and then
Of course, that's how they sort of were able to beat blockbuster because people liked
The idea of getting these movies in their mailbox and stuff like that
It was kind of it was interesting and new and of course now it was convenient
I mean, what if you work on Wednesday and you go,
"I'm going to be at home with the kids,"
or, "We'll have a date night at home," or whatever it is.
You can order your DVDs, they're there,
and you don't even have to go anywhere or do anything.
They just show up in your mailbox and there you go.
Now I will say with them discontinuing the DVD service,
which is not something companies usually do,
but they're giving you an actual bonus.
And the bonus is they're not going to change the price
of anyone's plan,
but they're going to bump up the quality of the video
that you're gonna be able to stream at no extra charge.
I think it's a little bit of a higher quality video.
It's not huge.
And this could be good or bad.
It may not make a huge difference.
I feel like the only way it's gonna make a huge difference
is if you're one of those who still has a giant TV
in your living room and you wanna watch movies that way.
But majority of people are watching movies
like on their phone or their iPad.
And really in those scenarios, I'm not sure that that high quality video is going to make that much of a difference really.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, I mean, it's sort of an end of an era, you know.
Right.
Now, with all that being said, there's another story coming out of Netflix and Lynn, what's that?
Well, apparently they are going to crack down on you guys who are sharing your password.
Right.
So what this means is, let's say I have an account and I pay and I go, "Hey, Lynn, here's my username and password."
And, "Hey, Michael, here's my username and password. You guys can log on and watch whatever you want, whenever you want. I don't care."
Or let's say you're a parent and you've got kids, right? And you don't want to pay multiple accounts.
You give your kids the username and password and say, "Get on there and watch whatever you want."
You know, you guys can just use my credentials to get in there.
Well, they're cracking down on that because they don't want to have five people using
one account.
That's not the point.
They want to have everyone paying for an account or get a family plan or something like that.
So, I'm just wondering, do they have family plans?
I mean, do they have things where you could conceivably?
I believe that they do have something.
I'm not exactly sure what the price structure is or exactly how it works, but I'm pretty
sure that there is a way and I think it's more money where you can go in and you can
choose a family plan, which would be more expensive than a one person plan or a single
user. And then you have up to, you know, five accounts that you can assign to people. So,
you know, you can assign, you know, account to you and then your three kids can have their
own and your husband can have one or whatever the case is. Right?
Right.
And I'm not sure how their pricing structure works on that.
It would be a kind of a similar thing to other companies
that do the same thing.
Like for example, both Spotify and Apple Music,
they have what's called a family plan.
And so for example, with Spotify, right?
You can either pay a flat rate for a single user
and then you can have unlimited usage for that flat rate
to listen to as much music as you want.
If you have family and you want to have all your family, kids, whatever,
you pay a little bit more money and then you get to sign up to five
accounts total. I want to say, I think it's five for Spotify.
So then each kid would get their own login and then they have their own
library, their own, all the things, right?
And that's not sharing with the whole family.
Only you see your individual plan and everybody else only sees their individual
So that's how it works for Spotify.
I believe Apple Music is pretty much a very similar way.
And I'm not sure how Netflix is doing it,
but I think they do have something similar.
And I think that's everything for this week.
Yeah, I think so.
And I really want to thank everybody for tuning in.
And it's good to be here.
I've got awesome teachers and that's a good thing.
Good thing for me and I hope to see you guys again in another podcast pretty soon.
Sorry about that.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks so much Lynn for being here.
We so appreciate having you.
And with that being said, if you guys have any comments, feedback, we're going to try
and do this news thing on Fridays.
So if you have any ideas, if you have a story you want to hear, or if you have any comments
or anything like that, feel free to email us at [email protected].
And we hope you guys have a great weekend.
Michael, say goodbye.
Goodbye.
And Lynn, thank you very much and say goodbye.
Goodbye, everyone.
Have a great week.
And I'm Marty.
Yep.
And I'm Marty, and we'll see you guys next time.
Awesome.
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