Ask The Tech Guys 1994 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Ask the Tech Guys. I'm Leo Laporte, Just a little bit. Scott Wilkinson will help us get our voice to match our mouth.

0:00:08 - Mikah Sargent
I'm Mikah Sargent and we answer a listener question about optimized battery versus that 80% limit on your iPhone.

0:00:15 - Leo Laporte
Then it's a tip from Travel Guru Johnny Jet, the one thing you should do to your iPad the next time you fly it's all coming up. Next, on Ask the Tech Guys. This is Ask the Tech Guys with Mikah Sargent and Leo Laporte, episode 1994. Recorded Sunday, october 1st 2023. Now cash-free.

Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by Fastmail. Reclaim your privacy, boost productivity and make email yours with Fastmail. Try it now free for 30 days at fastmail.com/twit. And by Mylio. Mylio Photos is a smart and powerful system that lets you easily organize, edit and manage years of important documents, photos and videos in an offline library hosted on any device. And it's free, don't wait. Visit mylio.com/twit. Listeners of this program get an ad-free version if they're members of Club Twit. $7 a month gives you ad-free versions of all of our shows, plus membership in the Club Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for Twit listeners. And finally the Twit Plus feed with shows like Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Linux Show, the Giz Fizz and more. Go to twittv slash club twit and thanks for your support. Well, hey, hey, hey, how are you today?

0:01:52 - Mikah Sargent
Leo Laporte here and Mikah Sargent here. Mikah, is that shirt an optical illusion? If you stare long enough, yes, I see Nixon's face in there, really. Yeah, maybe that's just me, might be just you. Now there's another optical illusion. Look at those snucks. If you stare long enough, you can see my dogs, missy and Henry. Oh, henry, yeah, here on my socks. Aw, aren't they cute.

0:02:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is a Christmas gift and they're delightful In fact, when I visited my sister, she has a Chihuahua, the sweetest Chihuahua, the adorable Chihuahua. She calls, she calls. I mean his real name is Chippy, but it's because he looks like he's got he's a blueberry muffin. He's got, he's got blueberry muffin eyes. So cute, very cute. Hello everybody, this is the show where you answer your tech questions in person, live. The phone number if you want to call in is 888-724-2884.

0:02:45 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, if you call that number live during the show, we'll answer it maybe.

0:02:48 - Leo Laporte
Sunday's 2 to 5 pm Eastern.

0:02:50 - Mikah Sargent
But if you call during the week whenever we're not doing the show live, you will be able to leave a voicemail and have your question answered on the air. So it's also an opportunity. That number is always open 888-724-2884. You can also head to calltwittv. We suggest doing it on your phone. If you head there while you're on your phone it'll pop open a little prompt for you to open up Zoom, and there you can connect with audio and video right from your phone and be able to ask your question live on air and appear here between us in the Ask the Tech Guys Stargate, as it were.

0:03:23 - Leo Laporte
Thank you so much for filling in for me on Mac Break Weekly and did you do Windows Weekly? Windows Weekly, yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks to Jason, and I'll fill in on the other shows so I could be in Green Bay, wisconsin, with our 20-year-old son, who's about to turn 21,. His 21st birthday gift from his mom a visit to the Green Bay Packers. So fun, thursday Night Football. Thanks to Brad, by the way, who let us get into the TNF truck, the Amazon trucks I should say nine of them. What a thing to see so many screens, so many buttons, and I said, yeah, in the early days, I would have like one little OLED screen to make sure the shading and gratings finises. Everything here is highly calibrated OLED. Wow, looks beautiful. It really looked good in there. So thank you, brad. I appreciate that. Thanks to Alex Lindsey, who hooked us up, as they say, but I'm watching, I'm reading and there's lots going on. This was a busy week.

0:04:21 - Mikah Sargent
It was a busy week and I was hoping I could actually start with an update from last week. You may remember that on last week's show, you and I talked a little bit about the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the iPhone 15. And we had a conversation about how the tech blogosphere tends to work, where sometimes there are viral videos.

0:04:48 - Leo Laporte
Here's our thumbnail for the show. Yeah, get a picture of me.

0:04:52 - Mikah Sargent
He bends the phone. The phone bends. Jerry rigs everything broke. It broke the iPhone the back. And then there's bending it by doing everything that you can do to break it. Consumer reports, which does standard tests actual, legitimate testing, did their standardized tests and found that the phone is incredibly structurally sound and is at least as good as the phones we've had thus far. Dopes, you're not going to get any YouTube views that way. What? How could you? No one's going to go watch this. There's nothing to watch. Now I have a question for you.

0:05:29 - Leo Laporte
Yes, did you, have you ever noticed any overheating on your new iPhone 15 Pro Max? So I didn't, nor did I. Yeah, I asked Lisa. She says well, sometimes it gets a little warm, but no, not hot.

0:05:43 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I never had the hot issue and I do use Instagram, so this, of course, is another thing that was kind of going by, that the iPhone was heating up. We actually talked about this on MacBrick Weekly and it turns out that there does seem to be some Well, Apple's admitting it. Yeah, Apple is saying that there's some level of overheating that's taking place depending on the apps that you're using. They say it's the apps fall and a bug.

0:06:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so they're going to push out an iOS 17 fix that will fix the heating issue. My concern whenever I hear that is oh, they're going to slow the phone down. Yeah, so it doesn't overheat. It's fine, it hasn't overheated for me. I don't want them to slow it down, but anyway, I you know I use Instagram, but not a lot. At least it uses it all the time she says it doesn't get hot.

0:06:27 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I didn't have the issue. Instagram, Uber and a few other third party apps were all the ones that were having this problem. Those are getting updates if they haven't already received an update.

0:06:38 - Leo Laporte
She says it also gets a little hot when she's charging, sometimes when fast charging. But I always expect that I was going to say that's, that's what you plug it in and it's charging as fast as it possibly is this little feaking run. Of course it's going to get a little warm.

0:06:50 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's, that's typical. I would expect the heat then.

0:06:54 - Leo Laporte
People are claiming, though, like 130 degrees, which would be like it, would, it would hurt.

0:06:58 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, there were some measurements done, so, yeah, if you've had that problems, be on the lookout for an update and make sure to we talked about this that you update to 17.0.2, as that has corrections for some zero days.

0:07:15 - Leo Laporte
Zero days? Very serious, get those. In fact, it wouldn't let you install the iPhone.

0:07:20 - Mikah Sargent
Right, yeah, I couldn't finish the process without it?

0:07:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, what else is new? Let's see there was a lot of stuff. Let's see, what should we talk about? I have a list here.

0:07:37 - Mikah Sargent
Apple search engine.

0:07:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, mark. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg kind of started a little speculation saying Apple was kind of thinking about doing its own search engine. I think that'd be smart for them to do it. I think if they were serious about it, though, they would have bought Neva, yeah, when it was for sale, or maybe they'll buy another. They did buy one kind of sort of search engine company, but they think they're not that serious about it.

0:08:03 - Mikah Sargent
To be honest, yeah, they have their own internal engine for doing search, tied to spotlight and tied to a few other systems within iOS and macOS, and so to see that it's got a name and everything. I think it's Pegasus, I don't recall. Yes, you're right, but that engine could be sort of built upon to become something more. However, as that piece points out, switching away from Google would actually hurt Apple too, because that deal is very lucrative for them. So it would have to really balance out that they could sell ads against it, that it would be robust enough that people would use it. And I think, importantly, there was a conversation about how during the because Google right now is in the midst of a monopoly discussion with the government and at EQ, testified that Apple was not working on a competitor in that space. So that isn't what we do in the case that any Q says, hey, we're not working on something. I think they're not.

0:09:09 - Leo Laporte
To be honest, and, frankly, considering how crappy Apple searches on the app store, I hope they don't. Yeah, I don't think that's their area of expertise. Now, they did hire John J Andrea from Google. He's running their AI division. There is some search in that. He has some expertise in search.

So maybe my favorite story of the week, though, was the CEO of Twitter, linda Jacarino, at the code conference, gave a little interview with Julia Borsden of CNBC. First of all, she she was already off put because right before her interview, they interviewed Yol Roth, the head of Twitter safety, who was fired and then doxxed by Elon Musk, who sicked his sick of fans. Now we know why they're called sick of fans because you sick of them on poor Yol, and it was a nasty, nasty scene. So she was upset that they talked to Yol at all. So she was off put at the beginning. And then she's like trying to defend and said, no, we're going to be profitable next year, darn it, and stuff like that. And at one point she holds up her iPhone. That might have been a little bit of a mistake. She's holding up her iPhone and people said, well, wait, wait, let's look at her screen. There's Instagram on there. There's Facebook on there. There ain't no X on her iPhone, not on the front page anyway. So you got to wonder does she use this thing?

0:10:29 - Mikah Sargent
I mean she says selling the previous CEO didn't have was like following four people or something. I don't know. This didn't surprise me too much, because the person in charge of the company, the people in charge of the company ever since we had Jack just don't seem to have the same interest in the product. I know how that is. I don't listen to podcasts.

0:10:50 - Leo Laporte
So it's kind of that way.

0:10:51 - Mikah Sargent
Once you know how the sausage is made when you're in the business.

0:10:54 - Leo Laporte
I listen to your podcast. You're wonderful, it's okay, you're good. It is a little weird that she anyway I thought that was. It's an interesting and contentious interview.

0:11:06 - Mikah Sargent
You should have seen the community notes on it, because so for folks who don't know, on X, formerly known as Twitter, people can sort of fact check things. There's a whole community of fact checkers and they're called community notes now, and the community notes on there were over and over and over again. We don't know for sure that this is the front page of her iPhone, we don't know that. It was just like everybody tried. Yeah, it was. It was silly. The whole thing, I think, is silly. It's just silly.

0:11:32 - Leo Laporte
It's all silly and I don't want to even talk about Elon Musk ever again. Good what?

0:11:38 - Mikah Sargent
about three.

0:11:40 - Leo Laporte
That's interesting, did you see and I hope you get a chance to see Lex Friedman's interview? Lex Friedman's interview with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, in which the do the entire interviews done in the quest three, the new, you know, vr nerd helmet and using this new technology that Facebook is rolling out called avatar codex, where they scan we don't know how much they haven't really revealed it but they take somebody like Snoop Dogg, who's one of them, or Mr Beast, and they scan them and get them to do a lot of different face expressions. I don't know how long that takes, but at some point they have a representation of Snoop Dogg in the, in the machine, and now he can be a character, and so he's going to be a character in many of Meta's products so that you could talk to him. He's not called Snoop Dogg. They give each of them their own name. The number of celebrities agreed to this.

But what was interesting is to watch Lex Friedman, who also had this process done to him, talk to Mark Zuckerberg, who's also in this black space, where it's really uncannily good, and I thought that this is going to be very interesting. This is a new use of AI. There you go. There's Lex. Now he's. That's not him. That's an image of him generated Okay, that's merely from the cameras of the Oculus three. Oh, it's a little uncanny valley, but not horribly so, and it has all the expressions you can see, very impressive. Yeah, so it's not Kodak. Our avatar is Kodak C O T E C avatar. So the lower thirds, the, the captions are quite accurate, but look at them together, and so this is what's interesting, and in front of cameras at all, this is simply with the cameras built in to their negatives built into this device.

I think Apple, with his vision pros, will probably be capable of something very similar. So I you know you know I'm an AI skeptic, but I think there are some uses of AI that are going to be very interesting, and that's that's one of them where you can, and, frankly, I guess the main reason I'm interested in is I want to retire and we have.

Leo, but we've always, when we do the round table shows and people are inside of a screen, we've always, since 2004, wanted to put them sitting at the table, right, right, and I think that those days are not so far off with that. The way that that looked, absolutely those days are not imagined. I mean, maybe I'm live, but Andy and I go sitting next to me, but he's generated, yeah, why not? I think we're very close to that. So that's kind of to me, kind of interesting. 80, sorry, 888, and I'm not going to do that. 8887242884 is the number I think we can take some calls in just a little bit. But first we should talk about the people who make this show possible, and of course I am talking about our club twit members, but not just our club twit members also are great sponsors. They show brought to you by my email solution for everybody.

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For over 20 years, Fastmail has been a leader in email privacy. They use the open source Cyrus IMAP server. Contribute back to it as little as $3 a month. You're going to get no ads, better spam filters, superior privacy. Oh, and I forgot the most important thing real customer support From real people. Fast mail. It'll be easy to move from your old email right into Fastmail. You can continue to have your old email address forward to Fastmail if you want. It is not. It is the email provider. Just ask your geek friends what they use. Fast mail reclaim your privacy. Boost productivity for as little as $3 a month with Fastmail. Try it now. Actually, it's free for the first 30 days at fastmailcom./twit Please use that address so that they know you saw it here. I've been using this for 10 years. I've been plugging it for 10 years. I finally got him to buy some ads. Thank you, let's get to our first call of the day. Who should it be? John Ashley, producer man.

0:19:03 - John Ashley
I think Ivan would be a good one to pick up.

0:19:05 - Leo Laporte
Well, you can pick him up. He's calling from Brisbane, which I understand is just down the peninsula here in Northern California. You mean a Brisbane, australia? Wow, hi Ivan, I've been to Brisbane, have you? I have Doesn't really make any difference, but I just wanted to say that. Hello Ivan. Oh, do I need to?

0:19:32 - John Ashley
do this? No, no, no, we got, we did it, we did it.

0:19:35 - Leo Laporte
You thought I was going to do it, but, john, you're now in charge of everything.

0:19:39 - John Ashley
Are you?

0:19:40 - Mikah Sargent
sure you want that, I do want that we're waiting for Ivan to join the room, so Ivan has been prompted to switch to the on-air room. Ivan needs to say yes, I want to switch to the on-air room.

0:19:52 - Leo Laporte
He has to say good-bye mate, and now he won't join. Yeah, that'll stop him cold. Oh, here we go. That was Leo's bad Australian that made him mad enough to get in there. Hey, ivan, welcome Press star six to unmute and join us in the Stargate. Hey, there he is, hi, ivan.

0:20:12 - Caller 1
Hi guys, Hi Mike, how are you doing? We're great.

0:20:16 - Leo Laporte
What's up in Brisbane, where it must be the middle of the night, oh, it is at 4.36 am.

0:20:24 - Mikah Sargent
Holy cow, oh my goodness.

0:20:25 - Caller 1
That's dedication.

0:20:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, thank you for calling. Thank you, ivan.

0:20:29 - Caller 1
That's okay. I was actually going back to 2015. I was your rep here in Brisbane for your New Year's Eve.

0:20:36 - Leo Laporte
That's awesome. I do remember that. Wow, that's awesome. Thank you for doing that. We had a 24-hour New Year's Eve party that we had every time zone and we had listeners call from every time zone, including Brisbane. Well, that's wonderful Welcome.

0:20:56 - Caller 1
I've got a. I seem to have a conflict between my Pixel Watch, my Pixel 6 Pro and my Android Auto head unit. Uh-oh, I've got them all connected, but at the moment, whenever I plug the phone in, when I get into the car, the head unit freezes. Ah, so you say you plug the?

0:21:19 - Leo Laporte
phone in Let me ask you a question Are you using Android Auto? Yes, so when you plug the phone in, what's supposed to happen? Is the phone's supposed to say oh hi, car, let's be in the Android Auto together? Have you checked your Android Auto settings in the Android settings?

0:21:40 - Caller 1
Yes, and it will work, and it works fine. It might work fine for five minutes or 10 minutes, and then it freezes, but then the screen just freezes. Yeah, and I have to unplug it and then plug it back in, and I'm doing that continually. Oh, that's so good, but I've sort of isolated the problem. That seems to be a conflict with the watch. So if I turn the watch off or I disconnect the Bluetooth from the watch to the phone, it works absolutely perfectly.

0:22:08 - John Ashley
Whoa, there's no issue.

0:22:09 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so that sounds like a handoff, a Bluetooth handoff issue. So the way carplay works is kind of interesting. It does you do have to have your phone paired with Bluetooth to the car, but it is using Wi-Fi, so the car in effect becomes a Wi-Fi access point that the phone joins. But I suspect if you've got two Bluetooth devices paired to your car, it might be getting confused by the watch and shifting away from the Bluetooth connection on the phone, something like that, which is then causing a bug the watch is not paired to the car.

0:22:46 - Caller 1
The watch is connected to the car. The watch is connected to the phone. Wow.

0:22:52 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's see Christy in our IRC doesn't have anything.

0:22:58 - Mikah Sargent
No, but Lunchbox. Steve in our Discord says that their Dodge had the same issue. Yeah, I think it's car related maybe. Yeah, an update for the vehicle itself fixed it. Is this a aftermarket installation or is it the one that came with the vehicle?

0:23:17 - Caller 1
No, it's an aftermarket second unit.

0:23:20 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, and you have his firmware.

0:23:22 - Leo Laporte
So what you need to do is check we think check with Kenwood and I think that that's the case. I've seen this happen Many times with older cars. You know you'll get an iOS update. Suddenly, car play stops working or you get an Android update. You're on Android 13.

0:23:39 - Caller 1
Yes.

0:23:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's hanging, and it's interesting that it's hanging. I think. Yeah, maybe it's. I think you're right. Now, of course, the watch is impaired to the head unit. The watch is paired to the phone, so it could be that the phone I don't know.

0:23:58 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, this is a tough one. It's almost like so yes, we know that the, the software and the interface is actually coming from the phone, not from the head unit itself, right? And so you plug it in and your phone projects this interface into your head unit and so something is happening where, when the phone gets a little message from the watch to hey, talk to me, then it is causing that projection to freeze on that aftermarket head unit. So, yeah, this, this is frustrating because clearly it's just some sort of of a bug where obviously, if the watch is not connected, then it works fine. But that's not an ideal world where we, you know you don't have your watch connected. Unfortunately, the only thing that we, you know the solution that we have would be to would be to make sure everything's updated. Some are suggesting, if you haven't done this already, forget the watch pairing in your phone.

And you can always start over. It is a pain in the butt, but I repaired it last night.

0:25:10 - Caller 1
Okay, that's a good thing. It's still the same issue. Whenever you connect the watch to the car, you hear it vibrate on my, on my wrist as it's connecting and then when it freezes. If you look at the watch, if there was music playing, it's still actually playing, but you can't hear it. The remote control is still showing as the music playing my watch.

0:25:31 - Leo Laporte
Is it a pixel watch or which watch is pixel? Pixel. And you're running Android 13 and you're running a what kind of phone?

0:25:43 - Caller 1
Pixel six.

0:25:44 - Leo Laporte
Pixel six, so it's all pixel. Very, it's an interest, it's a conundrum. I, oh my gut would be to check, at least check with Kenwood and see if they know there's a problem. The watch is fairly new, the phone's not, but the watch is a fairly new device and there may be some issue that they know about with with the watch.

0:26:05 - Mikah Sargent
Do you always plug in to use Android Auto? You don't ever do a wireless version of it.

0:26:13 - Caller 1
I don't, yeah, I don't have, it's was compatible.

0:26:16 - Mikah Sargent
Okay. So here's a suggestion that someone had that I think could be a good one to try. We talked about how Bluetooth does that initial pairing. But now that you've got that pairing going on between the phone and the head unit, you might consider going into the Kenwood device and disabling the Bluetooth radio, turn off Bluetooth pairing and then see if, after the Bluetooth pairing has been disabled, you can still plug in your phone, still get Android Auto working, and if at that point there's no sort of mixed messages between the three devices but instead it's just the, the phone, that has that wired connection to the head unit alone, does that make sense?

0:26:58 - Leo Laporte
Yep, sure, I'm also looking at a. Also looking at a Reddit thread here and the Android Auto subreddit Android Auto constantly disconnecting. This guy says I got a better cable, one with a higher transfer rate. And then somebody points out well, I don't know why that would have fixed it, because your head unit is probably USB 2.0. I would look at what the Kenwood bandwidth, you know what kind of USB is on the Kenwood bandwidth, and make sure you do a good kid, make sure you choose a good cable with that. It's interesting that the watch is impacting this. I mean, that's why I'm looking at Bluetooth.

0:27:42 - Caller 1
But if I turn the watch off or I turn on and pair the watch, it's isn't that interesting.

0:27:48 - Leo Laporte
It just doesn't ever it's a problem.

0:27:50 - Caller 1
Yeah, no, it's got to be Bluetooth, right, it's got to be.

0:27:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think maybe it's the phone thinking, the phone getting confused between where it's casting, to that at some point it's saying, oh, I'm not casting to the Kenwood, I'm casting the watch, but wait a minute, you can't cast the watch, I give up.

I feel like that, if the watch is the determining factor, the only way the watch and the phone know about each other is via Bluetooth. The Kenwood does not know about the watch, right, so it has to be some odd interaction that's happening at the phone level between the watch and the watch doesn't do Android Auto, but the watch is Bluetooth. What could we do to fix this, though, is a problem, I have to say. One of the things that I, you know, I see a lot on Reddit is problems with Android Auto, yeah, and problems, frankly, with CarPlay too, but Android Auto in particular, and I think part of that is because there's so many different phones, so many different versions of Android, so many different head ends, and now you're throwing in a pixel watch which the head end has never heard of. The phone is somehow. I mean, obviously you don't want to not have your watch paired to your phone.

0:29:08 - Caller 1
No, that's right. I can't be unpeering Bluetooth on and off every time I hop in and out of the car.

0:29:14 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly so I think let's try that suggestion I had for you and see if that will potentially fix the problem. It's again, it's not an elegant solution, which is unfortunate, but what's good about this show is that we will then hear from other folks who've had the same issue or similar issues. So let me have the solution.

0:29:36 - Leo Laporte
Pixel watch preventing Bluetooth connection with my car and Android Auto. Oh, this is in the Google Pixel Watch Help. Since getting my Pixel Watch, I've been unable to connect my phone to Pixel 6. Is this you? System via Bluetooth.

It cannot connect, but it's completely deleting my car from my safe Bluetooth devices on my phone. It sounds like this is a good example of I've seen, and then the recommended answer from a Gold product expert is I've seen reports in the past that WearOS could interfere with a phone connected to some car stereos. The solution in these cases was to go into the phone's Bluetooth settings and disable the phone calls profile for the watch. Disable the phone calls profile for the watch so you can take phone calls on your Pixel Watch, but if you at least it's worth a try. The phone would then go back to connecting to the car without a fight. Might be worth trying it. Some other answers. So what is that?

0:30:44 - Caller 1
changing the settings which the phone's.

0:30:48 - Leo Laporte
Bluetooth settings. So apparently there'll be a you know, I don't know, I don't have it in front of me. The phone calls profile for the watch. If you disable that, somebody else says just put the watch in airplane mode when you're driving. But you don't want that, I know.

0:31:17 - Mikah Sargent
Settings connected devices. Tap on your watch and disable the phone calls option. That's the phone calls profile.

0:31:26 - Leo Laporte
So another person says same problem. Even with the 2023 update to both the Pixel 6 and the watch, google told me to close my Bluetooth and LTE went in the car. That's so silly. That can't be a solution. That's Google's solution. Obviously, we know that works because you've done it, but that's obviously not the right answer. And then Google did respond and saying you know, we're checking on this. This was in January, though, of this year. Here's another guy saying I finally found the answer to my problem that not even Google could find. I called Google. They told me to power off my watch every time I use the car in the car. The problem was with Ford Sync. My first dealer fixed it. So that's me. That's me thinking now obviously you don't have Ford Sync, thinking that the Kenwood might have some fix for it, as well, yeah, some firmware.

At least that's the one thing we've been able to find turn off that watch profile in the settings on your phone. See if that helps. I don't think it's the Kenwood now that I really think about it. It really sounds like an interaction between the phone and the watch.

0:32:36 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly, and Google's solution just don't use your watch while you're in the car. That is ridiculous.

0:32:43 - Leo Laporte
You could set up a rule in your you know how you have your driving settings. When you get in the car and it pairs, it goes. Oh okay. And one of those, one of those rules could be turn off the Bluetooth, that's true, turn the watch. But you know, I mean, these are all not ideal, but at least some workarounds you might want to try. I'm glad you stayed up so late for this useless answer.

0:33:03 - Mikah Sargent
I wish we had a better one for you. I wish there was a button we could invent for you.

0:33:09 - Leo Laporte
But we're really glad you called yeah thank you and I appreciate it and I look forward to getting back to Brisbane soon. And thank you for helping us with the New Year's Eve show all those eight years ago. That was fun.

0:33:22 - Caller 1
It was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

0:33:23 - Leo Laporte
It was great we got the Sydney Harbor. You're in the same time zone as Sydney, right?

0:33:29 - Caller 1
Well, they just went to daylight saving yesterday. We don't acknowledge daylight saving. Good for you.

0:33:34 - Leo Laporte
Smart move, but you're on Queensland, so, uh, I wonder, oh, if you, if, oh, okay, that means they did celebrate their New Year's at a different hour than than you do in in in the Brisbane. That's right. They went to nail before, okay, so we had somebody in Sydney with the Sydney Harbor Bridge, and then we would go to Brisbane and see what's going on there. What do you do in New Year's Eve in Brisbane?

0:33:59 - Caller 1
Well pop.

0:34:03 - Leo Laporte
Hang out, drink some, drink some beer, enjoy the evening. Hey, it's a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for calling in. I'm sorry we weren't much help, but I feel like this is we're getting there somewhere with this profile, with this profile. That's one of the thing.

0:34:20 - Mikah Sargent
Bluetooth profiles. They're kind of reminds me of printer protocols. There are the. The manufacturers just put every single one on the device and then it's up to so many different people who are putting there you know that are all trying to play a game. They all get to choose, okay.

0:34:39 - Leo Laporte
So if this one's sort of works. This is a nightmare. Quippy in our Discord says my Bluetooth switches from my Garmin GPS device to my Samsung watch, to my car, randomly. Now, admittedly, this is carplay or Android Auto, not Bluetooth, but the Bluetooth does make the established connection. So during that switch, carplay could quite recently say oh wait, a minute, now I'm now carplaying the watch. And then also derecho in our Discord says Bluetooth profile conflicts are a real problem in general, even if you aren't battling it out with an Android watch. So I think we've kind of narrowed it down anyway for you. Have a great day, have a great morning. Yes, get some coffee, gentlemen. All right, take care.

It's so nice to hear from our friends all over the world. You know I was. I was thinking the other day. You know, I've had a national radio show and a national TV show, but podcasts are global. It is, it is, we're everywhere, baby, anyone who wants to listen to us anywhere in the world. There's a new technology, speaking of AI, that I'm very interested in. Spotify announced this week that they are going to take a handful of podcasts and translate them into other languages, but using the voice of the podcasters. So, and you've seen demos I don't know if you've seen demos of this, but all of a sudden, mike is speaking Spanish and we're so excited about that. I promise you, the minute the Spotify makes that generally available or invites us to participate, we will make, I think, at least a Spanish language version of these shows. I think that there's a big audience there. That's magnificent. I would love to do that. Yeah, really cool. All right, john Ashley, pick up another caller or should I do email?

0:36:22 - John Ashley
Let's do an email Do you do an email. Yeah, I wonder why I'm putting sugar in you. He's off to no good.

0:36:27 - Leo Laporte
I can tell when I hear that. So email, let's do an email. It's a little bit higher, it's something in the email that's worth looking at Uh-oh, let's print it upside down again.

Iphone 15 charging optimization. This is from Dave in Medina, ohio. I just received my new iPhone 15 Max Pro Max. I'd like to hear the pros and cons using optimized battery charging versus the 80% limit under the charging optimization menu. So this is something brand new that Apple added.

There is a switch now in your battery settings that you can say never go past 80%. You know, on many EVs, electric vehicles, the manufacturer recommends, unless you need all the range charged to 80%. Why, you might ask. Well, the reason is, when you charge 80%, you're not always using the same eight out of 10 battery cells. There's some wear leveling going on, and so the idea is we're going to get, at any given time, we're going to give a rest to a fifth of the cells in your battery, and that will extend the overall life of your battery.

Now Apple has always had or at least in recent versions optimized charging, where it notices what you need in the phone and then decides and you might have seen this from time to time when you plug in your phone or put it on your charger, you might have noticed that it says well, I'll optimize charging. In effect, I will reach 80% by 6 AM. So the question is do you do it manually to tell it always 80%? The advantage of that is you leave it at 80% and the days you know I'm going to need more you turn that off. Or do you let iPhone handle it itself? I've gone back and forth. I've decided to let iPhone handle itself.

0:38:19 - Mikah Sargent
That's what I do. So the 80% limit is new with iPhone 15. No other phones can do that and it is something. See, I don't like this new feature and the reason why is because I think it introduces too much anxiety into people's decisions about their batteries. I hear so much misinformation surrounding battery life on phones and charging and what people should do and shouldn't do, and if we would let go and let God, as someone wants to say, if you just let it do its thing, it does it very well, and that's why I think that the optimized battery charging thing works well.

So Apple, the system iOS, will start to learn from your behaviors over time.

It's a machine learning model that pays attention to when you're taking your phone off of a charger, when you're putting it on a charger, what kind of charger you're using, how much you're charging at a given time, how many times you take it off during the day. All of that information goes into the decision on how it should charge your phone and, if you ever need to, when Leo was just talking about that notification, if you tap on the notification that says optimized battery charging, if you tap and hold on it, you have the option to say actually I want you to charge it all the way right now. So if you decide you're the person that wants to be a little bit more involved and you get some control issues, well you can go ahead and switch to that mode. But the idea of always having a charge to 80%, I think is that was almost just an anxiety setting that got put in there because people were. I just want more control over it. I just need to know that it's working this way and I want it to work that way.

0:39:58 - Leo Laporte
Let me show you there's actually a ridiculous number of settings.

0:40:01 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, the battery's got a lot.

0:40:02 - Leo Laporte
So you have the over the shoulder shot of my phone. We need a no, is the camera off? Yes, okay, well, I would show you if I could. It's a little complicated. You have the battery, so you go into battery and then you'll see battery health and charging. This is on a new iPhone 15. And then you'll see another entry says charging optimization. That's where you have to go for all this, and then the choices are optimized battery charging, which both Mikah and I use, or 80% limit, which means your phone will never charge more than 80%. There's a second half to this.

Somebody in the chat room is pointing out in our discord. You might not want to let your phone go below 20% either. That's bad for batteries too is to discharge too much. So I would only do this if you really never use more than, say, 40 or 50 at most 60% of your battery life in a day. Because you're going to have 80%, you don't really want to go below 20%. The idea is, yeah, you're going to get more life out of your battery if you hardly ever use it. I don't know. You and I both buy new phones every year, so we don't really care. No, we're not trying to get five, six, seven years out of your battery. That would only be for people who really want to go many, many years without putting a new battery and, by the way, apple will. They will replace the battery.

Pretty reasonable if you put a new battery in your phone.

0:41:31 - Mikah Sargent
So of note too even if you have that 80% limit turned on, Apple will still occasionally I should say iOS will still occasionally charge your battery to 100%, even with that 80%, just to condition it for the yes, for the sake of charge limits.

0:41:46 - Leo Laporte
There's also a setting and it I guess it's on by default and I don't know if it makes any sense called clean energy charge.

0:41:52 - Mikah Sargent
It depends on your location. Yeah, so if you live in an area where the power grid is partially is partially powered by clean energy, what the phone will do is it will wait until it's a more clean energy time and we'll then charge your phone during that period of time.

0:42:09 - Leo Laporte
So you're saying that each and every iPhone checks to see what the electricity, what utility that you're using and then figures out when optimized. You know charging is and then does. I don't buy them, and if the utility.

0:42:25 - Mikah Sargent
if your utility in your location, in your geographical region, publishes the information into you know a readable API, I don't buy it.

0:42:35 - Leo Laporte
For instance, here in in Sonoma, because we're in Sonoma County, in Petaloma, you may have Pacific gas and electric, but you may also have Sonoma Clean Power, Right, how does it know which that I don't company? It doesn't. It can't look at the electrons and say, oh, that's clearly solar powered. Furthermore, to add questionable question, a question ability to this I use solar power and in fact most of the time when this is charging it's not charging from the grid in the daytime anyway, it's charging from solar power. So ideally, really, this should only charge in the daytime from my solar panels. But it doesn't know any of that. So I don't know it's on. I think it's on by default. I don't know. I'm sure I didn't turn it on. It is no harm, no foul, I think it's. It's probably more, to be honest, for show it's not on whenever you travel, because obviously it doesn't know the the energy.

0:43:36 - Mikah Sargent
Why not? Or sorry, because let me try that again the feature doesn't engage if you're charging habits or variable. So if you don't have like a statistical charging or you're in a new location, such as when you travel because of this and to get the carbon emission forecast for your area, some location settings must be turned on for clean energy charging to activate. So again, it's only what's published, what's available for them to actually read so this is really what Octavia Spencer made them do.

0:43:58 - Leo Laporte
I don't think they really wanted to do this. Now, this is, in my opinion, this is greenwashing. But okay, fine, it's no harm, you know we also, you know, sort of recycling Do we do it, every we can right.

Whether it makes a difference, we don't know. I just count color me a little bit skeptical on all of that I'm. My general opinion is and this is more and more true of a lot of things the operating system manufacturer, the hardware manufacturer, know what settings are best, and unless you have a strong reason to change those defaults, I would leave it. I wouldn't change it, I would leave it, but that's my thought At least. The defaults in terms of things like charging. You can have the nearscreen size, any font size you want, exactly. There's no reason to stick with that. Hey, guess what? What's up? Coming up, mr Scott Wilkinson, our home theater geek, and he's got a question from a listener that he is going to answer in just a bit as the Ask the Tech Guys show continues. But first let me talk a little bit about Mylio. Oh, I love Mylio. So you know, we just got back from a trip and I have Mylio on this computer. I have Mylio set up to automatically pull in photos from all my sources from Instagram, from Flickr, from my Apple Photos library, from my iPhones library and it creates for me a complete and utterly complete selection of all the photos I have in the world, and this is the best photo management tool ever and it's free. Mylio M-Y-L-I-O dot com, this is by date. I'll go to September of this year and you see, this is by date. I have all the pictures from our trip, pictures of us at the Packers Hall of Fame and, yes, I even have pictures of my Pokemon. By the way, I deleted that on my iPhone, but Mylio says, well, you know, you may still want that. Look how many photos I have in my library. I don't know if you can see this. It's tiny 205,000 photos. Now. I eliminated duplicates. I downloaded all the photos from every source, including Google's Takeout, and automatically Red Takeout imported those, removed the duplicates and now you can see on devices. This also shows you which devices. Now, if you get MyLeo Plus, you could put it on many devices and then you've got, in effect, a backup. You could choose whether you want the thumbnail versions, the optimized versions, the original versions. You see, it even tells you how much space that's gonna take up and how much hard drive it's gonna use up. This is amazing, but I'm just getting started.

It also has smart tanning. Look at all the different activities. Is there a ball player in any of my pictures? Apparently not. Oh, wait a minute, let me clear that. And just choose ball players. No, I don't have any ball players. Do I have barbells? Not yet. Parallel bars, pool tables, scuba divers. Let's go to weddings. Do I have bride pictures? Do I have groomed pictures? I do. All the people, all the people in my book. I choose, but you can even combine smart tags so I can have people with their eyes closed. I can have people with their eyes open. I can have brides with their eyes closed.

This is the most amazing way to manage your photos. A lot of us have been looking for a great way to keep track of your photos. This is the smartest photo album I've ever seen. The smartest way to organize your photos, to share your photos, to track your photos. And the best part about my Leo is you don't have to use a third party cloud service. You're not uploading your photos to Google or Facebook or anywhere else. By the way, you can pull all your Facebook photos into it as well. You can have your own backup if you want. My Leo will encrypt, so you can use iCloud or Google Drive or OneDrive as a backup, but it's fully encrypted, so nobody at those companies can see what you've uploaded.

My Leo makes it easy to search. It does all of the face recognition. So everybody, you do train it. You say that, yeah, that's Lisa, that's Mikah, and you pick a few photos and then it goes through all of those 200,000 photos I have and finds all the Mikahs On device, on device. It's all on device. I guess that's really the most important phrase. You can do it with your documents folder too, and it has optical character recognition built in, so if there's text in an image, it knows it. If you've got PDFs that don't have the text attached, it can turn it into text. All of your Google Docs, your Word Docs, all of this can be imported in. So this is really the ultimate document organization tool.

We talk about photos. It's called my Leo Photos and certainly it's great for that. D-duping is fantastic. It's very flexible. You can tell it how you want to D-dupe, you can check every duplicate before it deletes, or you can say, as I did after I looked at a few of them hey, I trust you, you got this and it goes through it. It is incredible. It is your new filing system for data. It's fast, it's smart and it's free.

Myleocom slash twit. M-y-l-i-ocom slash twit. Don't wait. The solution to digital management exists. This is the most amazing thing ever and I didn't have to do anything. It's got all my photos safe and secure. I'm backing it up to Synology. None of my photos go to any cloud. Myleo doesn't have a cloud. None of my photos go to any cloud. They're all stored locally and then backed up on my Synology NASs. I think this is so great.

Get Myleo photos for free today on your computer or mobile device Myleocom slash twit and then, when you want, to put it on everything which I ended up doing on my Android, on my iPhone, on my Windows, on my Mac, everywhere on my Synology. You can do that if you get Myleo photos plus Myleocom slash twit. But start by. You know you're skeptical. You probably are, I was so start by downloading it for free Myleo photos from Myleomyliocom slash twit. I guarantee you, once you see all it can do and get all your photos in there, you will be blown away and you probably will get the plus subscription because it's great to have it. I have it on every device and I don't ever have to think again. You know we're out there. We're taking so many pictures on our trip. I don't worry, they're backed up, they're stored, they're safe, they're on everything. Myleocom slash twit. Give it a try today. Scott Wilkinson Home Theater Geek. That's your new theme, and I'm sorry about that, hey Scott.

0:50:57 - Scott Wilkinson
Hey Leo, hey Mikah, Hiya.

0:51:00 - Leo Laporte
Good to see you. How are things in beautiful Santa Cruz? Ah, they are beautiful.

0:51:05 - Scott Wilkinson
Oh, I bet they are Truly beautiful. We have moved into our new house, oh nice, been here for a couple months and it is lovely so we sent you.

0:51:16 - Leo Laporte
I think we've been sending you many questions. Scott is now doing a weekly show. By the way, we should mention, If you're in Club Twit, Home Theater Geeks is back. Scott does it every week, so you can watch it every week. It's on the Twit Plus feed. All you have to do is be a member of Club Twit and I think that's by itself, and we're answering a lot of user questions on the show too, which is really fun.

0:51:37 - Scott Wilkinson
I really enjoyed doing that.

0:51:39 - Leo Laporte
If you're interested in AV, Home Audio, Home Theater, this is the man.

0:51:44 - Mikah Sargent
You've got HDMI CEC questions oh yeah, oh, yeah, yeah yeah.

0:51:52 - Leo Laporte
What's our question of the day to day?

0:51:54 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, it's from Jack in London, england. Oh lovely, hi Jack. Hey Jack. Yeah, he's got an LG 48-inch CX or C10.

0:52:06 - Leo Laporte
I hate when they use it. I kind of have that. Well, it's an LG C series.

0:52:10 - Scott Wilkinson
It's an LG C, but I don't remember which.

0:52:13 - Leo Laporte
What is that number that tells you what year it is?

0:52:16 - Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, exactly, ok, tells you what year it is and the CX is, I believe, 2020. The C1 is 2021. We're up to C3 now. Anyway, he's got a 48-inch OLED with a Sonos Arc soundbar very nice. And the Sonos Arc soundbar, which has only one HDMI connector, is plugged into the TV's HDMI eARC input, which also sends audio from the TV out to the soundbar, and that's how he's getting audio to the soundbar. So that's all fine, says. I believe it's set up correctly because when playing Dolby Atmos content, I look at the Sonos app and it says Atmos, great, wonderful.

In the TV settings he has a digital sound out set to pass through, which means that HDMI inputs are set to bitstream. So what that means is he's got all of his devices, his source devices connected to the TV. It's using the TV as the switcher, if you will, just choosing which source he's going to watch and listen to. And the problem is that he's suffering from audio sync issues and it's really frustrating because he has to change the TV dialogue sync in the Sonos app every time he switches inputs. For example, the LG Netflix app sync is on a setting of plus one, but the prime is plus five in order to get the voice and the picture Synchronized and he has two game consoles Xbox Series X and a PS5. Those have different settings as well. Now, his partner doesn't notice this, but it drives him nuts.

So is there anything you can do to fix it? Should I be running all my connections through something else instead of straightening the TV? Is there a better sound bar? You know that Sonos sound bar is very good, but it only has one HDMI input. One solution might be to get a sound bar and use the sound bar as the switcher rather than the TV, making it more like an AV receiver. But I looked into the LG OLED and I looked into the LG OLED's manual, dug kind of deep into it and found a number of things, looking mostly at the sound menu.

There's a sound out parameter and it can be set to a variety of things, but he has it undoubtedly set to HDMI ARC, which is correct, and there's a separate control in the sound menu, completely different from this, called EARC, enhanced Audio Return Channel, which just has a wider bandwidth than the original ARC, and he has to make sure that's set to on, which I'm sure it is, because things are working more or less Now. The manual says that when instant game response is on audio, delays may occur if sound out is set to HDMI ARC. Oh well, ok, and instant game response oddly well, maybe not so oddly is in the picture menu. So it probably disables some functions in the TV to minimize response time. Because when you're playing a game and he's got two game consoles connected, when you're playing a game you want the response of the TV to be as short as possible because you're doing real time interaction with the game. So I would turn instant game response off when you're not playing a game.

0:56:18 - Leo Laporte
Isn't there a game mode? I know there is. On my new Samsung there's a game mode that does all of those settings. Yes, yes.

0:56:28 - Scott Wilkinson
So if you turned off, game mode.

0:56:29 - Leo Laporte
Would it turn off all the other related games? Probably so.

0:56:34 - Scott Wilkinson
Yes, yes. So in other words, if you, want to avoid these syncing issues.

0:56:39 - Leo Laporte
Don't have game mode on.

0:56:41 - Scott Wilkinson
Right.

0:56:42 - Leo Laporte
Game mode also changes the picture in some pretty ugly ways. Correct, I wouldn't watch a movie in game mode. No, no, no, no, just a little.

0:56:54 - Scott Wilkinson
Now, as a troubleshooting step, I might suggest trying setting sound out to the internal speakers and see if you still have the same problem. This is just a troubleshooting step, but it you know it might tell you something. Now, the most important one, I think the most important setting is called AV sync adjustment, which is probably saved with each input separately, so this can solve the problem. He says he has to go into the Sonos app every time you watch switches between Xbox and PlayStation 5, right and change the setting in the Sonos app. Well, no, you can do it in the TV and save that setting for the input that the Xbox is connected to and the input that the PS5 is connected to, and then you don't have to go and do it manually anymore. So that's the answer to that question.

0:57:53 - Mikah Sargent
The other thing I would see it's kind of easy.

0:57:57 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know, in the living room I have a very elaborate setup with a Denon AV receiver. As you know, scott, you've even struggled with it. Right, I did.

And I have that Samsung TV and it has a breakout box and all sorts of stuff. We had a house sitter while we were in Green Bay and I actually had. Lisa said that just before we left hey, do those instructions work? And I said, oh God, no, those are old. I take a picture of the remotes and label them and have five or six steps on how to do anything Watch TV. Now, that's the one in the living room, the one in the bedroom, which is that LG, by the way. I simplified the whole thing by connecting it to an Apple TV, and what an interesting thing happens is if you don't have anything else connected to it, you just have an Apple TV, the Apple remote. When you short press, it turns everything on and it gets it in the right place. Now you're only watching Apple TV, you're not watching the cable box. There is no cable box, you just want. And then when you long press the Apple remote, it turns everything off.

And I thought this is really how it should be Really nice, but CEC is so unreliable and unfortunately, in general. We have many, many devices hooked up to our television, not just one box.

0:59:17 - Scott Wilkinson
That's exactly right. The other advantage of having the Apple TV, as you pointed out, there you're not using the TV's internal streaming apps.

0:59:29 - Leo Laporte
No, the Apple TV apps and audio is handled by the Apple TV, that's exactly right, that's exactly right.

0:59:37 - Scott Wilkinson
So I might suggest you know for Jack in London if he watches a lot of the apps on the TV, get an Apple TV or a Roku or one of these main streaming devices. They're, you know, 100 bucks, 150 bucks. Apple TV is a little more expensive, but I use it. Roku's are very cheap.

1:00:00 - Leo Laporte
And if you want it the cheapest to fire TVs. I think they pay you now to get one.

1:00:07 - Scott Wilkinson
They're so cheap? Well, it's true, but they push a lot of Amazon ads at you too.

1:00:12 - Leo Laporte
I like Roku's great and Roku's down to 30.

1:00:14 - Scott Wilkinson
It's great.

1:00:14 - Leo Laporte
Between 30 and 50 bucks for 4K Right.

1:00:17 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, yeah, the UHD ones, the 4K ones are a little bit more, Are they? Okay, but under 100 bucks certainly, oh yeah, and then every time, and then you that plugs into an HDMI input on the TV and that would solve this problem. I think pretty well, Because the real problem is he goes from Amazon, from Prime, to Netflix or something within the TV. They all have different delays and I couldn't find anything in the manual that talked about these apps, these internal apps at all, much less how to change the audio delay on each one. I don't know that it's possible?

1:00:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the TV should handle that right. That's why you use ARC, the audio return channel. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. So that the TV can do the delaying or whatever it needs to do to make the picture and sound sync up, and then it sends it out to your cell Exactly.

1:01:12 - Mikah Sargent
And then all these protocols, different names.

1:01:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's probably CDC. Cdc is even the same everywhere.

1:01:18 - Mikah Sargent
What is it? Any cast or any net or something yeah that's crazy. It's so frustrating.

1:01:24 - Leo Laporte
We went to the Airbnb that we used. It was nice. He had TCL TVs everywhere with Roku built in. And because Roku was built in, I was able to log into our YouTube TV and our Amazon Prime. I logged into three or four services, but then I had to remember to log out as we were checking out, to go to ECB and log them out. I did Good. Good, I noticed that I was the only one who had. There were many other accounts available. Yes, yes. But it's so easy to forget. It's easy to forget.

Hotels have a better system where they forget when you check out, and that's a better way of doing it. But I'm increasingly liking this solution. Instead of paying $90, you know, for a three day stay at a hotel to watch TV, you just input your whatever your Amazon Prime or your Apple TV you know these TCL TVs actually had Apple TV plus on there and you know the app. Oh, really, wow. So it really nowadays, I think it's gotten a lot better for the very kind of stuff. Cool, roku Express 4K plus, which is their least expensive. 4k is $40. Wow, $40. You and I have the Ultra, which is their top top end streaming device.

1:02:37 - Scott Wilkinson
How much is that one that?

1:02:38 - Leo Laporte
adds Ethernet, that's a hundred bucks, a hundred bucks. It also has the higher end voice remote, the Roku voice remote, which I really like, right.

1:02:47 - Scott Wilkinson
And I will say, having an Ethernet connection, if you can, makes a big difference. Makes a big difference. Wi-fi streaming from the cloud, you know, can hang up, can stutter and it's a problem. Having a hard wire connection is much, much better.

1:03:03 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I was just pleased when the Apple TV updated the Ethernet port so that it was not the old. I can't remember what was it 10, 100 or whatever? 10, 100.

1:03:12 - Leo Laporte
I was waiting, I was hoping they would announce a new Apple TV. I was waiting to see if they did, because I have a pretty old one in my office at home and I thought I'd be nice to have a newer one. When they didn't, I bought the new remote because the old Apple TV remote was horrible, but the new remote and it does. By the way, I think it's the new remote that's doing all the work with the long press and the short press. The short press right, okay, cool. Scott Wilkinson he is a home theater geek. What do you got coming up on? Home theater geeks.

1:03:41 - Scott Wilkinson
Well, I will be answering more listener questions and I'm just now arranging to have on the show Robert Zone and a couple other people. They are doing the flat panel shootout as we speak. All right, they're doing it this weekend. Yesterday they did the 4K shootout Again it's that time of year, oh boy, that's right and today they're doing the 8K shootout. So they now do a 4K shootout and an 8K shootout, and I'm going to have them on the show as soon as I can schedule them on to talk about what the results were, because this is a very important thing, in my opinion.

They line up all the flagship TVs from the different companies and they have expert judges I mean golden eyes of Hollywood and so on come in and they've calibrated them all and they feed them all exactly the same signal, and everybody goes around and scores them on a bunch of different attributes like color accuracy and depth of black and so on and so forth, and one comes out almost every time. Sometimes there's a tie. You know, the king of 4K TVs and the king of 8K TVs, and so I'm really looking forward to seeing the results of that. I think it's going to be very exciting. How exciting.

1:05:09 - Leo Laporte
We, when we were in Green Bay Scott, you'll be interested we visited Amazon Prime's Thursday Night Football Trucks. They're nine of them, the remote trucks that they used to broadcast football games. It was an amazing experience. I want to thank the TD there, Brad, who let us come in and peek around.

1:05:28 - Scott Wilkinson
That's fun, isn't it? I love doing that.

1:05:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he says Amazon. I have it on my screen if you want to show it. He says Amazon spent. He said stupid money Buildings, let's put it this way Spared no expense building the most amazing control room on wheels yeah Look at that the other thing I thought you'd be interested.

They shoot everything on the field, at least for the Thursday Night Football games 4K, I'm sorry, 1080p, hdr. And all of these screens, by the way, are HDR screens in the truck. He said last year we sent out SDR, but this year we're sending out HDR, good, 1080p Good. You know, I wish it were 120 frames or 4K, but this is remember television and so they can't go too crazy. But 1080p is pretty good and of course it's 59.9, so it's fairly decent, right, right.

1:06:25 - Scott Wilkinson
And they probably upscale it to 4K for some broadcasts, you know.

1:06:31 - Leo Laporte
I have YouTube TV, which you know I pay a lot extra for so-called 4K YouTube TV. Yeah, Very few 4K broadcasts out there in the world. You know it's usually international events like the World Cups of soccer, where you have 4K, or the Olympics Native 4K anyway, yeah.

I think the American football is. They have so many cameras there and they have to move them around from city to city. I don't think they're quite ready for that yet, but Amazon, which spent a lot of money for Thursday Night Football, is doing 1080p high dynamic range, which is pretty good, well, that's great.

1:07:06 - Scott Wilkinson
High dynamic range, in my opinion, is far more important than increased pixel resolution. Yeah, really, they made the right choice there, yeah it looks good.

1:07:16 - Leo Laporte
You know you don't get HDR from your broadcaster, but you do get it on YouTube TV if you bought a Sunday ticket.

1:07:23 - Scott Wilkinson
Sure Streaming platforms yeah, absolutely.

1:07:26 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Scott Thanks so much my pleasure. When is Tuba Christmas? Do you know yet?

1:07:31 - Scott Wilkinson
Tuba Christmas, december 3rd Sunday afternoon at 3pm in Los Angeles. All information is available at tubacristamelacom.

1:07:42 - Leo Laporte
It's getting you know here. We are in spooky season, so that means Thanksgiving's just around the corner, and you know what that means. Tuba Christmas, tuba Christmas coming right up.

Thank you, scott, you bet Thank you Bye-bye. You're watching, Ask the Tech Guys. And, by the way, a reminder if you want to see more of Scott every week now he does his home theater geeks show. It's for our club members because they pay for it. We had to cancel the show originally because of the audience size and the lack of advertising, so we couldn't afford to do it, and this is always a problem. I don't want advertisers ever to drive what we can do. But if we can't build enough of an audience to drive advertising, it means we're paying for it out of pocket and we don't have pockets. You see, there's no pockets at all. So, as a result, we have to only do shows that are profitable. I hate to say it. However, the club makes it possible to do a lot more shows, so we have a lot of special shows in our club, including home theater geeks.

Mikah does the Hands On Macintosh show. Some of these, by the way, we put a handful of them out on YouTube so you can see what you're missing. Yes, so you feel terrible. You also Hands On Windows with Paul Therat. We've got the Untitled Linux show with Jonathan Bennett, the GizFiz with Dick D Bartolo Lots of special events. When is our escape room? Is that coming up pretty soon? Yeah, I got to prepare my brain for this.

1:09:05 - Mikah Sargent
It's a Thursday in October, so coming up.

1:09:08 - Leo Laporte
Lots of events coming up. Fireside Chat with John Scalzi this Thursday, 9 am if you're a sci-fi fan, that will be great. The escape room is October 26th. Stacy's Book Club's coming up the book this month. John Scalzi's Kaiju Preservation Society That'll be interesting. Renee Richie joins us for a Fireside Chat in November. Jeff Jarvis, doc Searls and I will do an old Farts Fireside Chat in December. And Anthony Nielsen, our AI guru, will join us early next year. That's just some of the events planned.

These are all in our club Twit Discord, which is another benefit of being a member. Not only do you get ad-free versions of all of our shows, all those special shows, you get access to the Discord where you can chat about anything, any geek subject, as well as the shows. It's not just chat about the shows, so we do have that. But we also have a huge number of forums that you can chat about All kinds of topics, including AI and dentistry and no, no, there's no dentistry. All of that stuff is in our Discord. Really fantastic, highly recommend and it's only seven bucks a month. So please, if you're not a club Twit member, I would love to have 100% of you join club Twit. That would make a huge difference. It would mean we could do a lot more programming like Scott's Home Theater Geeks, twittv, slash club, twit. Cheaper than cable. Better than cable says Lunchbox Steve, get Twit. Your brain will thank you.

Hey thank you, lunchbox, steve. That's a new slogan. We're going to get Twit. Your brain will thank you. All right, we're going to get some more calls in just a bit. You're watching. Ask the Tech guys, micah Sargent and Leo Laporte. 888-724-2884 is the phone number. Now is ATG at Twittv and you can also zoom us. Who's zoomin' who?

1:11:06 - Mikah Sargent
Calltwittv.

1:11:08 - John Ashley
There's actually a phone call that I would like to pick up.

1:11:11 - Leo Laporte
Pick it up, press the button. John Ashley, producer man, we missed you last week. By the way, anthony Nielsen filled in for John.

1:11:17 - John Ashley
Did you go somewhere? Yes, I actually went to Las Vegas to play Magic the Gathering and he won. No, I didn't win. I won something that paid for the trip and more. I didn't win the main prize, but you won. You still won, I won. What did you win? I won a card that I sold for $2,500. What, yeah? And what was the game? Were you just playing against? I was playing against other people in person, but was there a name for this tournament. Look up MagicCon Las Vegas.

1:11:49 - Leo Laporte
Were you on a stage with the people in the crowd going yeah, john Ashley, john Ashley. No, okay, did you go to the MSG sphere?

1:11:58 - John Ashley
while you were in Vegas, I actually stopped by, I took the monorail and I went by it Because the monorail Did you feel like you were living in the future. He was weird.

1:12:06 - Leo Laporte
Then you could take Elon Musk's boring tunnel to the convention center. We're starting to get images from the U2 concert. The sphere opened to the public this week with a concert from the Irish band U2. And it looked amazing. I don't know if you've seen these pictures yet. Let me see if I can find some pictures here of this. A number of people posted. They have the screen on the outside right, but they also have the screen on the inside. So while there's a stage, I bet if I check Linda Yaccarino's company I could find it. Let's see, I'll search for U2. Because I think, yeah, here we go. Here's somebody posted, so they use the screen inside, which is a giant sphere, and the stage is this little circle down here, see Whoa. So that all is doing stuff.

1:13:07 - John Ashley
That's the sphere.

1:13:08 - Leo Laporte
And there's almost 1600 speakers in the place.

1:13:11 - Mikah Sargent
This must be so expensive.

1:13:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I really wish I'd been able to go.

1:13:15 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, those are letters.

1:13:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, they can do anything they want that screen could be look there's. Oh, come on, that's amazing. That is, you want to go to Red Rocks.

1:13:26 - Mikah Sargent
John, I want to go to and by the way, most of that audience is fake. Yeah, I see it. It spreads out from there.

1:13:32 - Leo Laporte
It has a real kind of vision profile. That is miraculous. Thanks to. Let's see Trunkfans X account.

1:13:40 - Mikah Sargent
They can only build it in places where there's very little weather, or else It'd be so sad if something happened to it.

1:13:46 - Leo Laporte
There's the stage. Wow, so I mean, we've all been to Lately. Concerts really are all about the projection system, so if you went to see Taylor Swift or anybody in the projection system, it's a big part of it. Yep, but other than like this, that's incredible and it dwarfs the. The performers are down here. They're the little people down there. Here's another shot from another angle. Yeah, it must have been amazing. John, you want to go see the wall in the MSG sphere? That would be something. Wow, that would be something. All right Now, you said we were going to take a phone call and meanwhile I've been stalling. They've been on the line for oh, hi, hi. What's your name and where are you calling from?

1:14:33 - Caller 2
I'm Chris from We'll call it Mobile Alabama. That's probably the closest place in the real city to me Close enough Hi. Chris. Well, y'all sound a lot better actually on the Zoom calls and even on the podcast, I guess. Well that's because we are professional broadcasters.

1:14:51 - Leo Laporte
I don't know why that is, but anyway, I'm glad you can hear me. What can we do for you?

1:14:56 - Caller 2
All right. Well, I got two questions, One hopefully simple. One might be a little more difficult my son. He is doing a bunch of YouTube videos now and running his own channel Wow, it's almost birthday time, oh. So I want to look at getting him a new computer, but he's also doing some 3d modeling at school. So I'm not sure if I need I'm not sure which way I need to go, whether I need to stick with windows like he has now, or if I need to finally get him to switch to the dark side and get a mat.

1:15:32 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know, neither of us are ever going to recommend windows machines, right?

1:15:40 - Mikah Sargent
This is the one area I don't know where I would hesitate, because when I think about the amount of content that's out there teaching someone how to do 3d modeling, how to do this like the youtubers and the gamers and the stream the youtubers and the gamers of the stream as I sound like an old man right now, but they are all windows you can use OBS studio to broadcast on a Mac.

1:16:05 - Leo Laporte
No, you can't.

1:16:06 - Mikah Sargent
I'm not saying that it's just that, when I think of learning more about how to do it, there's a lot of content from other people out there who are doing that. Now, again, when we're talking about graphics and modeling, yes, I do think that that Mac is the way to go.

1:16:21 - Leo Laporte
I also think Apple has a huge commitment to 3d right and especially because this vision pro headsets coming out. You know, I know if you asked Alex Lindsey he would say well, if you need to do really high end rendering, you're never going to get anything as powerful as a high end PC, but you're not planning on spending 10 grand on this and you're probably not doing photogrammetry and some of the things that take a lot of processor power. I think Apple's commitment to 3d, especially because they're going to be making products that will use 3d models, is really the determining factor here. Plus, you can get them and I would say there's a couple of ways you could go. I you know. Unfortunately, the iMac right now is underpowered. It's not the high device from the Apple folks, but these Mac minis. There's two really choices for you a Mac mini or a Mac studio, and I think you should look at, especially for a kid how old is he?

1:17:27 - Caller 2
16.

1:17:28 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is a little more challenging, is he game?

1:17:32 - Caller 2
He, he gains, but primarily on the switch.

1:17:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh good, Because that's, I mean, the one thing Apple is still laggard in is, is a high end triple A gaming, and PCs are so much better for that. But on the other hand, I don't think you want him to start putting a lot of energy into gaming. Get him something where he's going to put that same energy into his YouTube channel, into his 3d modeling, into learning, into coding, all of those things. I think the gaming is going to be a distraction, you know I. So if he's, if he wants to game, if he wants, you know the Mac is not a great choice for that. The Apple's trying. Apple's decided they're going to be a gaming platform. We shall see.

I would say you could get him. You want to get a Mac mini with enough RAM, so you want to get the 16 gigabyte RAM version. It's a little more expensive, you know, as as you add this stuff, you don't need to get the 12 core CPU, the 19 core GPU, although if you have the 300 bucks to spend that is going to it's, the difference is going to last longer. You're not going to. You know, in five years, say, you need a new one. Same thing with getting 32 gigs of memory, the one thing you absolutely should do, though, is put a lot of storage in this thing. Alex Lindsay on our Mac break weekly, who does a lot of this high end 3d graphics, says that the internal storage is much, much faster even than Thunderbolt 3 external storage, so get him at least a terabyte drive. That's probably enough. Again, it's going to depend on your budget, but I've just went by going to the high end processor 32 gigs of ram and a terabyte drive. I've driven this up to 2100 bucks. Now does he have a monitor?

1:19:15 - Caller 2
No, he doesn't. He's actually using a HP laptop we got during the pandemic, oh this will be so much better. Yeah, does he need a?

1:19:24 - Leo Laporte
laptop. Is he going to take it to school?

1:19:25 - Caller 2
or no. He doesn't take it to school. He likes the laptop so that he can sit in his bed and work on stuff and take it around with him.

1:19:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you can get him. I mean, if you're going to do that, this is for the same price that I just quoted you for that studio. This is a 16 inch MacBook Air, which would be fine.

1:19:43 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, honestly, the MacBook Air does so much more than it should. It's a very powerful machine.

1:19:48 - Leo Laporte
So that's going to be the. So that might be the better way to go if he does want to lie in bed and do it, and it has with the M2 processor. It has a lot of horsepower and you know.

1:19:58 - Mikah Sargent
I've been able to do video editing on it, absolutely, and I've got the 13 inch.

1:20:03 - Caller 2
So yeah, the only thing I would say video editing on it, but the Aethlon 3 processor right now, oh gosh. When I was.

1:20:14 - Mikah Sargent
Eight giga ram, oh geez yeah, when I was in high school I had a video show and I had to literally sit over our AC vent on the floor of our kitchen in order to keep it cool enough to finish rendering the video that I was doing.

So, yeah, I've definitely, you know, made it work with what I had. So you, you doing this is going to be such an incredible jump. The reason that I had asked those questions earlier is because, from my own experience, if I had, if I was already making videos and I was using applications and a system that I knew, switching machines and systems will build in a period of time where your son, you, will have to relearn how, like if we switched to iMovie or Final Cut or something like that. That's going to be a period of time of relearning. So that's why why I hesitate a little bit there. But if it's a, you know, cross platform tool or if there's a lot of activation energy right now at 16, that means you know you'll have that get up and go and that curiosity to change to a new program.

1:21:18 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, I don't think he's going to have a problem and he could use Blender and you know a number of open source tools on the Mac as well as you can on the on the.

1:21:29 - Caller 2
PC. I don't think there's any reason to get a PC.

1:21:32 - Leo Laporte
For video editing. He might even want to use DaVinci Resolve, which is free. A lot of people are starting to move to resolve. My own son, who's at TikTok and Instagram influencer with millions of followers and it editing is his whole thing. He's he's just cooking, but it's, but it's all about the editing he used. He started to move from Adobe Premiere to DaVinci Resolve, a free program, because it does everything he needs it to do and that's available on the Mac as well. I would look at a 15 inch Macbook.

Air right or should he get a? Should he get a pro? If you can do the pro, it's up to you. On the budget yeah, they say that I just spec down 16 inch MacBook Air with 24 gigs of RAM and a terabyte hard drive is $100 less than that Mac studio and comparably fast, and you won't have to buy a monitor because it has them on.

1:22:24 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, let's be real. Coming from the device that you just said, air is going to be so much more than that, and the great thing about it is this this could be the machine that lasts for quite a while. I think so.

1:22:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what I'm on right now, and you don't need a pro. You really do yeah.

1:22:39 - Mikah Sargent
I, I, I, now that I think about it, we're both using yours, you're using an air that's the midnight blue Bad for fingerprints.

1:22:45 - Leo Laporte
Bad for fingerprints, but cool looking. He's probably going to want that the age of 16.

1:22:49 - Mikah Sargent
You want the midnight, it's so I do put, yeah, I've got vinyl on the outside of it. But what she'll probably do as well, He'll put his God smack.

1:22:59 - Leo Laporte
Be so happy with it I'm, I can assure you I actually yeah, you should talk to my wife big Pokemon, she's Pokemoning and Green Bay Unbelievable. I had to too. I, yeah, I, you know what I think we've. They're going to be people who will say oh, you're crazy, you should get a windows machine. I find it very hard to recommend windows these days.

1:23:26 - Mikah Sargent
I especially Leo. The one thing that sold me is the desire to kind of subtly shift away from getting two into the gaming and focusing too much attention on that.

1:23:37 - Leo Laporte
It pushes him in the right direction. I like the idea of somebody in the discord says you can always get him a game pass, a X bucks game pass for 20 bucks a month and he could play all his games streaming. So there's always. There's always that there are options. Yeah, I think it's a bad idea to have.

1:23:52 - Caller 2
That's not all in there saying that, yeah, it might be, I think the username was definitely not Paul.

1:24:01 - Leo Laporte
I think for a 16 year old, a Mac is the right way to go If he decides he wants to get a coding. It's a UNIX box. I code, I use the Mac terminal, I use Emax and it's a fantastic coding platform. You don't have to do the Apple Swift stuff. With the X code you could do any coding you know. You can do Python there's. I can't think of a single thing. Battery life is stupid. It's amazing.

Yeah, for gaming is the only one thing that you'd be missing out on, and I do feel like app Apple's much more committed to 3D in the long run than Microsoft is they? I don't know what Microsoft's committed to by the way.

1:24:36 - Mikah Sargent
This is also not completely clear. What even are they committed?

1:24:39 - Leo Laporte
to Committed to. I have to say there's a big issue, a security issue now with Microsoft. We've been talking about this on security now We'll probably talk about it on Twitter this afternoon. I want to raise the alarm. You may remember us talking about Microsoft losing control of their signing certificates. What this was earlier this year? Because they lost control of their signing certificates. It's now they've I believe they've fixed it, but we don't know, after over those six months, how many certificates were signed, and this would impact everybody, from a consumer using Windows 11 to the biggest enterprises using Azure.

All of them are potentially compromised and the only way to fix this would be for it, a Microsoft, to deprecate all existing certificates and start over again. They can't do that. That would be a billion and a half users who suddenly would be logged out and would have to log in again. So there is going to be an on, in my opinion, an ongoing calamity that Microsoft cannot solve with security. I'm going to bring this up with Steve. We'll talk about it on Windows Weekly, I'm sure, but if you needed another reason to stay away from Microsoft products, this would be it, I think. I think, frankly, there's a huge problem. Yeah, that's wild.

1:26:05 - Caller 2
All the windows are open as as our friend to be a Microsoft admin, so I understand a lot of the you understand why?

1:26:12 - Leo Laporte
that's a problem that they, for six months bad guys had, without Microsoft's knowledge, access to the signing certificates. They could sign as many certificates as they wanted in that six months. We don't know where they are. We don't know where the phony certificates are. This is a calamity of. There's never been anything worse, in my opinion.

1:26:33 - Caller 2
And do we even know, even if Microsoft revoked them, whether or not the operating system would bother to acknowledge the revocation in the past with other certificates? They don't. It's a big problem with certificates.

1:26:45 - Leo Laporte
You don't really have a good revocation process. So yeah, well, I'm glad so you're. So you understand why this is potentially a hair on fire situation, I don't know, and Microsoft's trying not to talk about it. Frankly, I think a lot of security gurus are trying to talk about it because there's no fix. So it's kind of painful. I'm going to talk about it. I think it's a huge problem.

1:27:13 - Caller 2
So offer everybody a free copy of Call of Duty. There you go.

1:27:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, get if you want it. If you want to play Call of Duty, get an Xbox 3D, get a Mac. I think it's the way to go. Yep, yep.

1:27:24 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you for the question. It was a great one. Oh, you had another one, didn't you?

1:27:28 - Caller 2
Yeah, it's a little simpler. I've been digitally detoxifying for a while Good, and I don't even have a smartphone anymore, but I'm trying to get something a little bit newer. I can actually get something that that does larger than 70k files back and forth with the family for images. I don't know if you've ever, if you've seen anything. It's called a big flip to it is a kosher smartphone. It doesn't have. It has doesn't have internet. It doesn't have video.

1:28:01 - Leo Laporte
So you can use it on the Sabbath email. Wow, can you use it on the Sabbath?

1:28:07 - Caller 2
I'm not Jewish, I don't know, but I would think flip to it's inexpensive.

1:28:13 - Leo Laporte
I'll tell you one other thing I would. It's encrypted kosher OS. That's wild, I think. The one other thing I might consider I don't know anything about this phone, I'll look into it is the fair phone, which is a highly repairable Linux based smartphone. It's fully open and, as a result, I think you could really control it. Now, this is a flip phone, which means you don't have apps on here, and if that's what you're trying to avoid, I don't blame you.

1:28:41 - Caller 2
Then I'm trying to avoid anything like that. It actually runs Android 11.

1:28:46 - Leo Laporte
But they've somehow got me somehow blocked out the apps, I guess.

1:28:51 - Caller 2
I think they're running a custom version of the Android Interesting.

1:28:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't know anything about it. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be fine. I mean, you could, you could? There are plenty of companies, including Nokia, that still make what they call feature phones.

1:29:06 - Caller 2
But you and I wouldn't like that. Actually, what I'm talking about right now is the Nokia feature phone.

1:29:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so you can still get feature phones. I don't know if the fig phone would be.

1:29:13 - Caller 2
it's hysterical that it's kosher, that probably means you can use it on the Sabbath, but but I'm, but it feels like that might not be true.

1:29:22 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know what. Yeah, some people use Android phones and then just have a bunch of filters to lock them down so they don't have apps and things on them. That is another option where you can send.

1:29:33 - Leo Laporte
This does have ways calendar notes calculator. It has a music player. That's offline. Please note that, due to rabbitical advisement, video is not supported on the phone. Huh, that's one of the things that makes it kosher. What an interesting.

1:29:52 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so someone tried to send you video you wouldn't be able to play.

1:29:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah it's. I can't recommend against it. I don't know anything about it. It has nav. I don't think you could use it on a Sabbath, but you don't care about that. Yeah, I did, and I will recommend this from psychology today Breaking up with your smartphone.

You already know about this, dr Mitch Ablett. Now, this moment is the time to break free. He's got some solutions for people who want to kind of restore their attention to the world. Don't make me I was really observing this as I walked around and I don't think we're ever going to go back from this that most people now, at any point when they might conceivably be bored, will immediately open their phone, including at every meal. How many times are you sitting here? Go to go to a restaurant and everybody at the table is not interacting with each other. They're looking at their phone and this and it. You know what? This device is not going to go away. I don't think this is ever going to be fixed. I think this is the new normal. Yeah, but there is a real consequence to not allowing yourself to be bored.

1:31:07 - Mikah Sargent
Did you see the study? Oh, this is a study from actually quite a while back, but people were given the opportunity to sit in a room for between six and 15 minutes in complete silence, all by themselves, and there was one option you could either sit in complete silence all by yourself or you could shock yourself.

1:31:30 - Leo Laporte
And the number of people who chose to shock themselves instead of just sit silently in the room I would rather be in physical pain than sit by myself alone in silence, but I seriously think that this is almost an evolutionary step, that we are known and I just don't ever see us going back. I think this is just the new normal. Anyway, really excellent article in psychology today on how to weaken the phone habit. I admire you the fact that you've been able to do this, chris. Wow, bravo. How does your 16 year old feel about that?

1:32:07 - Caller 2
Yeah, he's just upset when he tries to send me memes that I only get visually small thumbnail I can really see that's a new way.

1:32:16 - Leo Laporte
by the way, that's the other thing I noticed is communicating instead of having conversation, people be on their phone and then they'll hold up the meme and show it to the other person and they go sure, laugh and then go back to this. I'm not, and I'm not, by the way, casting aspersions, I just think this is the way it is, but I mean a lot of things come out of being bored, including creativity, ambition, forward motion of all kinds.

1:32:45 - Mikah Sargent
Well, it's the loss of what is the term, the loss of delayed gratification. Oh, that too, and delayed gratification is something that's very important to instill resilience in people.

1:32:58 - Leo Laporte
So but we're designed to. If you can keep the brain buzzing at all times, then when there's a silence, you go nuts, and so we're designed really to be drawn into this. I don't blame smartphone manufacturers or app manufacturers or the technology industry they weren't really thinking about this but they have in fact created digital crack and we are now all addicted. So Bravo, chris, for going cold turkey. Wow, that must have been hard.

1:33:27 - Mikah Sargent
Did you have a patch or something?

1:33:30 - Caller 2
We all need screens. No, I wish I could say it was positive, but no, about 15 years ago I completely burned out from IT and shut down and disconnected everything I could, which unfortunately meant not listening to you all anymore. That's okay, or that's okay? I'm thrilled. But I've slowly allowed myself a little bit. I listened to all the podcasts I can. You know. I think that's okay. That's like reading a book.

1:34:01 - Leo Laporte
I listen to audio books. I don't think that that's as long as you. What I think is important is you do allow space to be just quiet and present, and that's what that's what this article in psychology today is about. Is getting mindfulness, he says, has become the leafy greens we need in our lives, I like that, and I think that that's true.

I think that people who practice it, though, will be few and far between in the future. I don't see a younger generation embracing that at all, even your son. He's lying in bed with a laptop, right? Yeah, hey, chris, it's great to talk to you. Congratulations on burning out. Have you noticed any benefits from your digital detox?

1:34:47 - Caller 2
Um, no, because I found other habits to pick up. Yeah.

1:34:51 - Mikah Sargent
Humans, human nature. What are you going to do? Happy birthday to the sun.

1:34:57 - Leo Laporte
I started smoking and drinking, so you know it's okay. Hey, Chris, it's a pleasure. Thanks so much. Oh, thank you. All right, Take care. I'm glad you're listening again. We don't want to be the part of the digital problem.

1:35:12 - Mikah Sargent
No, by any means. We have a digital problem, but we don't want to be part of the digital problem. We are the digital problem. Yeah, you can't take this away from me. I gotta do things. So how are you on that? You know, I put myself in situations so I have rules for myself, because I have to go to the pharmacy occasionally to get medication, and when I'm standing in line I don't let myself take it. But you notice everybody in the pharmacy Yep on their phones, even in the line at the grocery store.

1:35:40 - Leo Laporte
they used to put all the candy there and the people magazines because they knew you were going to be bored, so you would buy them. Now, don't even bother, just look at your phone the whole time.

1:35:49 - Mikah Sargent
You don't even have stuff there, they're on your phone.

1:35:51 - Leo Laporte
People are filling their gas tanks. They're on their phone. It's amazing. I actually practice this because everybody in my family does this, so I just don't have the phone out at meals, and it's really fascinating. Mostly I'm just sitting there looking around because everybody's busy. It's really, but I'm not being critical. I think this is just the way it is.

1:36:17 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah different for different folks and for many folks I feel like I mean, I guess, if I wanted to be, judgmental.

1:36:23 - Leo Laporte
You should probably be with the people you're physically with, rather than the people on your. If the people that you're physically with are a positive.

1:36:30 - Mikah Sargent
You know what I mean.

1:36:33 - Leo Laporte
If you're escaping from a situation that is uncomfortable for you or bad for you, then I understand.

1:36:37 - Mikah Sargent
But yeah, if it's a good thing spend the time with the people that are physically there, On, we go with the show In just a moment.

1:36:48 - Leo Laporte
You're watching Ask the Tech Guys with little Mikah Sargent and big Fat Leo LePort, so you don't need video. I'll just describe this. Oh, there you go, yeah.

1:36:58 - Mikah Sargent
Two individuals. Two people sitting on chairs. There is a fireplace roaring between them, yeah.

1:37:06 - Leo Laporte
All right. What should we do next? What Dinner compatible what? I've never heard that before. I'm not fat. I'm dinner compatible. Yeah, I have to say I found many lovely foods to eat in Green Bay, Wisconsin, including Most of them dairy brotwurst, cheese, curds and beer. It's heaven, oh man, it's heaven. Ladies and gentlemen, all right, what's going on? I think Do we have Johnny Jet.

1:37:35 - Mikah Sargent
I think Do we have Johnny Jet, is it?

1:37:37 - Leo Laporte
too early.

1:37:38 - Mikah Sargent
I see Johnny Jet.

1:37:40 - Leo Laporte
Let's do another call and then do Mr JJ. How about that Johnny Jet coming up? Oh, I'm sorry.

1:37:44 - John Ashley
I was on my phone, I was oh, I get it Pay attention. Well, yeah, Do we have a voicemail? Let's do a voicemail please. Yeah please.

1:37:54 - Voicemail Caller
Hi, this is Mike from Orlando. Hey, leo and Mikah. So I think on the September 10th show you had Carl call in about the issue with his location showing up in DC, even though he's in West Palm. I have the same problem and it started about the same time he did. I am not an affinity. I'm on spectrum and this happens at work and at home on two different computers. My laptop doesn't have the problem, but it is appearing on Chrome and in Maps. So I don't know if there's something you can think a little deeper, because it seems to be a bigger problem or maybe it's just a Florida problem. Thanks, and I hope you can take up something. And I'm going to say, obi-wan Kenobi, you are my only hope. Help me, obi-wan.

1:38:42 - Leo Laporte
Thank you Great to hear from you. You can always leave a message, by the way, if you call us when we're not on the air at 888-724-2884. I got so many emails from that call, I bet you did too. Yes, yeah, it's not an unusual situation, were they all from Florida? No, the emails, the mine were not, no, no, and people had a number of different kinds of solutions, which none of which I can remember at the moment.

1:39:08 - Mikah Sargent
Build a Faraday cage.

1:39:12 - Leo Laporte
You can't go to Google and tell them I'm not here, right, that would be one.

1:39:18 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, the problem is the inconsistency If you have to get to the right person and follow the right support chain for that to work, versus sort of getting held up or talking to someone who doesn't. So it doesn't work all the time. But yeah, if you can get to the right person in Google to say I'm not in this location and everything is telling me it is, then they can do some reset process internally and get you in the right place.

1:39:43 - Leo Laporte
Just looking through, our massive, voluminous emails and ask the tech guy to see if I could find some of the responses. It felt like there were a variety of different things. Here's the problem it all comes down to and we talked about this on the show this system of figuring out where you are based on IP address, geolocation via IP. In fact, if you go to a number of different IP, checking your internet protocol is your internet address. If you go to, for instance, ip chicken, which is What'd you call me IP chicken, which tells you what your IP address is, it will also say what your location is. Actually, this one does not, which is nice, but there are others that do. But notice when I do that, this is our IP address, but it also says additional information Ah, that's the IP. The internet service provider, sonicnet, so they own this pool of IP addresses, and then geolocation providers can ask Sonic, okay, in this pool, where are those people? And Sonic will say oh yeah, those are the SonomaCata users. It's not perfect, no, so the key is that your internet service provider is telling, in effect, these geolocation services where you are. If your internet service provider is in Washington DC, as it was in the case of our caller. It's gonna maybe say well, I'm in Washington DC. I don't know why that guy is. So here's another site. This is geolocationcom, and so, based on the IP address, there's where it puts me, which is actually pretty close to where we are, which is interesting, and maybe that Sonic is providing them with even more accurate information.

We are not. However, wait a minute, where does it think we are? Yeah, where is that? Where are we at LC Allen High School? Let's search, let's do that one again. I think that was a mistake. Yeah, santa Rosa. See, there we go. So we are not in Santa Rosa. That's the city to the north. That's actually the location of the Sonic offices. So what's happened is, yeah, in LC Allen High School, right in the middle there, that may even be Spurious Location. If it gets a general location, it'll do the geographic center of that circle. So I don't think that Sonic has offices in LC Allen High School. I think in fact, that's the geographic center of whatever radius Sonic has provided. Yeah, it says this is the postal code 95407. That's not ours. That's just what Sonic's reporting.

So the first thing is to go to the internet service provider and say what IP address are you reporting for this IP address. Maybe they'll fix that for you. Second step is to go to Google. Depends who's misplacing you. You can, with Google, even without talking to a representative, say no, no, I'm at this address, and sometimes that'll fix things.

I'm not sure if there's a fundamental fix. I think this is just because this is a bad system, this geolocation system. By the way, this is a bad system by IP address. It just doesn't work very well.

I've noticed, for instance, when we go on cruises, google will make a map of your trips and if you're using the internet that comes from the city you're in your mobile provider from that city. It knows where you are. As soon as you get back on the boat and the boat sails away, you go back to the home location of the boat. So my map from Google Maps was Fort Lauderdale, caribbean, fort Lauderdale, cuba, and I would make this trip within seconds, because it's constantly reverting to the geolocation of the provider and in the case of a cruise ship, the provider was the home office of the cruise ship in this case.

So I don't know if there's a fix. It's a bad system and, unfortunately, the good news is most mobile devices have GPS, so you can get that information, not your laptop, however, and that's most of the time when that problem occurs. Now, speaking of traveling, this would be a good time to travel to beautiful Huntington Beach, california, not Huntington. What beach are you on? Manhattan? Manhattan, you know why I get confused, because I think Manhattan's on the other coast, johnny.

1:44:30 - Mikah Sargent
Jet.

1:44:33 - Johnny Jet
But Huntington Beach is a good time to be there right now because they're doing the air show.

1:44:38 - Mikah Sargent
It doesn't have to be shut down because of the government shutdown, Because it's stalled. They can do their air show.

1:44:43 - Johnny Jet
You don't even realize that was going to shut down, you know what we're really going to shut down.

1:44:48 - Leo Laporte
Last week we showed you the Fat Bear contest and that was going to shut down as well from the National Park Service.

1:44:56 - Johnny Jet
Well, the parks are going to be open, except they weren't going to have any rangers.

1:45:00 - Mikah Sargent
You can't do the Fat Bear contest without rangers. I don't want to be around Fat Bears without me. I'm with you.

1:45:09 - Leo Laporte
In case you didn't see the news, they've extended it for 45 days. The government is not going to shut down. What happens to travel if there's a government shutdown?

1:45:18 - Johnny Jet
You know, the big thing is that they stopped training the new air traffic controllers, tsa agents and all these people. But for short term I don't think there's a huge impact, except there's no National Park Service. They don't have any people working there. So the TSA workers don't just go home TSA they're all essential Air traffic control, they're essential, so they'll be there.

1:45:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, according to Eric Times, if the government shuts down, air traffic controllers and TSA officers will continue to work, but they just won't get paid.

1:45:50 - Johnny Jet
Exactly. They have to go. They're going to quit.

1:45:54 - Leo Laporte
They get paid when the shutdown ends and there's money to pay them, but you're kind of relying on their goodwill oh money.

1:46:04 - Johnny Jet
It's crazy because people need a paycheck right, then they're going to find another job.

1:46:09 - Leo Laporte
What? And there is a shortage in ATC controllers, so the shutdown and training is also consequential, but the consequence gets pushed down the road. Anyway, good news it didn't happen. Yes, well, they always seem to dodge that bullet right at the last moment. But let's hope they keep doing it. I spent some time traveling, as you know, johnny, I went to Green Bay. One thing I noticed Chicago O'Hare has inordinately long taxi times. Have you noticed this?

In some cases, well, I haven't been O'Hare in a while, but Getting to the gate from where you land took half an hour. I felt like we were going for a ride in the country For half an hour.

1:46:52 - Johnny Jet
Within a half hour. Wow, I mean, it's taken 10, 15 minutes before we got there, I think you go through there all the time.

1:46:59 - Leo Laporte
What's relevant is because of winds and so forth, they're landing, what strip they're using and then how close that is to the terminal for that airline. We were on American Airlines, which I think it's a hub for American Airlines Definitely is. The problem is that we were going on the short haul American Eagle from Chicago to Green Bay, a little regional carrier, and they're a little even more distant.

1:47:28 - Johnny Jet
You got to hustle to that terminal.

1:47:30 - Leo Laporte
That was a lot of fun too. We ran, and then the flight was delayed, thank goodness.

1:47:35 - Johnny Jet
Well, I actually just booked a flight for Christmas and we were going to go through Chicago, then go to Toronto on a regional However, air travel, I feel great.

1:47:45 - Leo Laporte
I tested this morning, did not get COVID. I wore my mask out and I thought, oh the heck with it, let's live dangerously. The only thing is when people start coughing near me, I get the mask on right away. I always have the mask with me. That's important, but I think, despite the fact that COVID seems to be a little bit of an upswing, I think it's okay to travel. I noticed the flights were all full. People were getting around, yep.

1:48:14 - Johnny Jet
Still have a lot of people going through checkpoints.

1:48:17 - Leo Laporte
Still record numbers in terms of the last four years. Dr Mom's mad at me but I'm sorry, dr Mom.

1:48:26 - Johnny Jet
I've never been to Green Bay, so I'm interested in it more.

1:48:28 - Leo Laporte
Green Bay's fantastic. I highly recommend it if you can go when there's a Packers game. I think it's a little sleepy when the Green Bay Packers aren't in town, but boy, when they get in town it's a party.

1:48:39 - Mikah Sargent
Unless you're intolerant to lactose, then there's not really a reason to go Cheese curds, baby, all the way, cheese curds.

1:48:46 - Johnny Jet
We were in San Diego a couple of weeks ago and the Padres were in town. I could not believe how sleepy San Diego was. I just don't remember it being this sleepy.

1:48:55 - Leo Laporte
That's why I like San Diego, go out to Coronado. It's quiet, we were right downtown.

1:49:01 - Johnny Jet
We stayed at the Hilton downtown and I was looking out at my wife's like there's really no one on the street Old town, San.

1:49:06 - Leo Laporte
Diego is great and some great Mexican food in Old Town, san Diego. I love that.

1:49:10 - Johnny Jet
Definitely, I mean you're right near the border.

1:49:11 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's wonderful. So what travel takeaways do you have, Mr Johnny? So I have a few.

1:49:17 - Johnny Jet
So actually I wrote a post this week because I was watching the last bit of the New York Yankees baseball season, which ends in like an hour. Oh yeah, I mean I love watching the Yankees and one of their announcers, david Cone. He's a big time pitcher and he was telling Michael K, who's the other announcer, how he left his iPad at the Guardia checkpoint. And you know Michael K is like so did you have any identifying information on it? He's like I didn't. I was like what? I mean, the guy travels all over for ESPN as well and he doesn't. He made such a rookie move. So I wrote this post. It actually went viral. I'm sure he's pissed at me because I wrote. New York Yankee legend and current baseball announcer makes rookie mistake at LaGuardia airport.

1:50:04 - Leo Laporte
I love it.

1:50:07 - Johnny Jet
But he did, I mean. So I wrote this post and I told my wife. I said listen, you got to listen to this banter right here between the two of them. So I replied it. I have MLB and she's like can you believe he made such a bonehead move? And she looked at me. She's like I'm like please tell me, you have your, all your electronics, have your name or and your phone number on it. And she's like shook her head.

1:50:29 - Leo Laporte
No, I was like, oh gosh, mind you have no excuse, so you should put a label on everything with your name.

1:50:37 - Johnny Jet
You can put your name and your phone number and your email. You can just put your first name if you don't want to put your last name. But this way when someone finds it at the security checkpoint, they can page you. Otherwise how are they going to page you? They're just going to put in loss and found if they're a good person.

1:50:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, I could tell you a story, though. If you're at the Green Bay airport, yep Twice the TSA guy came to the gate and said did anybody leave their glasses at the TSA? That's great Twice this guy. That's Green Bay.

That's a very nice small town. People are very friendly. Yeah, it was really sweet. And then he comes and says I got this medallion. It looks like a religious medallion, it looks like maybe that's the Virgin Mary, anybody and he goes yeah, that's fine, unbelievable, twice, that's awesome. So people do leave stuff. In fact, I remember when we were we had a backup advertiser on the radio show. They had a stunning statistic about the hundreds of thousands of laptops that are left at the security gates every year. Hundreds of thousands, that's very common.

1:51:40 - Johnny Jet
Well, I watched the following game and David Cohen says guess what? There's a happy ending. They found my laptop. It's lost and found. He contacted them. He said you know, he looked up the number I put it all on on this post and they emailed them back within 30 minutes. He emailed them and he said that they told him that they lose 90 to 100 iPads a day A day.

1:52:01 - Leo Laporte
At LaGuardia Every day. Wow, so I just leave a Kindle in a seat back pocket once Now you, if you leave something on the plane, you're never going to see it again, right?

1:52:11 - Johnny Jet
No, that's not necessarily true either. Actually, just a few months ago I left my backpack on the plane. It was right after my dad died, my head was not in the right place and I totally forgot. We always, we always carry a backpack with extra clothes because we learned the hard way. One time I, my son, threw up on my wife middle of the flight, actually right when the flight took off, and so she had to sit there with throw up on her because she didn't have a change of clothes and you know, people spill drinks all the time on people. Anyway, always carry a backpack with extra clothes. And also, in case that airline loses your luggage, if you check a bag you have, you have at least a backup for a day or two.

1:52:49 - Leo Laporte
So you're saying, okay, I'm going to do this. I got one of those labelers you know your brother label or I'm going to put my you think phone number is what you should put on all your stuff.

1:52:58 - Johnny Jet
I would put your phone number or your email. I think phone number is easier. I would put your name too. I'd say you know, leo, leo don't say the last name. You can say Leo L call me.

1:53:07 - Leo Laporte
I'm Leo L. Here's my phone number. I put it on the backside or something, or inside the case or whatever.

1:53:14 - Johnny Jet
Yeah, do it on your phone too.

1:53:16 - Leo Laporte
Have it on your phone my whole life.

1:53:19 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, my pretty phone. How about my money?

1:53:22 - Leo Laporte
clip? Should I? Should I put my name on the money clip?

1:53:26 - Johnny Jet
Yeah, you can just put like see ya, yeah, so what about my gold bars?

1:53:32 - Mikah Sargent
I?

1:53:32 - Leo Laporte
usually carry a wallet case for my phone and I don't have that right now, so I have a wad If I left this at the TSA, you think if I put my just put my name on the money clip there, I'd get that back?

1:53:46 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah you never know, actually, you really don't often make age comments, but this is the most like my great grandpa you've ever been. Oh my gosh, you never heard of a money clip kid.

1:53:56 - Leo Laporte
No, he was very much for the money clip Actually the older folks will roll it up and put a rubber band.

1:54:02 - Johnny Jet
They definitely, but also when you and when you're going through security. By the way, I've seen people leave their Rolexes because they go through security and then all of a sudden they're like you, beep, they go back and they have to put their their jewelry in another bin and then they forget about it. I'm like yo, here's your Rolex, so the best thing to do is take your wallet, your phone, everything and put it inside your bag. Don't leave it in the bin.

1:54:26 - Leo Laporte
Or I wear a Scott E vest every time I go to the airport with 41 pockets and I make sure everything's in that Scott E vest and then I put that on the belt and that way I'm never and I zip up the pockets, I'm never going to lose anything, yeah.

1:54:40 - Johnny Jet
Just this. Actually, I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago. Three Miami TSA agents got busted for stealing from people's bags. So what they would do is they would. They would see someone put their cash in their bag. I guess, yeah, and then they would flag that bag. Yeah, so then they'd pull that bag aside and the other person would distract the person. So if you ever get pulled to the side for your bag being flagged, or whatever, don't take your eyes off of it.

Right, I remember having I got, almost got an argument or a fight with a TSA agent because he's like look at me. I was like I'm not taking my eyes off my bag, buddy, wow. So I, I I could say I put my arms up and say go ahead, frisk me, but I'm keeping my eyes on my bag.

1:55:17 - Leo Laporte
Why would he want you to look at him? It sounds like they were up to no good. Who knows.

1:55:21 - Johnny Jet
But you know what, always keep your bags and when you push your bag, make sure you push your bag through the machine and then go through, don't just leave it on the on the conveyor belt.

1:55:31 - Leo Laporte
I actually write my name and phone number on every bill. That way, this one's mine, this one's mine. If you find a 20 and it's got my name on it, return it please. The reward is $20. You know, we were at the beautiful Lambeau Field, green Bay Packers Stadium, which, if you're a football fan, is so. You went to the game, we went to the game Incredible but they don't take cash anywhere inside the entire Lambeau Field. Isn't that a legal structure? Maybe not there. They have a machine at the entrance that you can take cash, turn it into a credit card that you can then use. That's good, but they refuse to take cash anywhere. And I was really thinking cash is probably in a few years.

1:56:14 - Mikah Sargent
We're not going to have cash. Oh, please don't say that You're going to get so many emails now. I don't think we are. I think we're going to have touch to pay everywhere. People who are so afraid of that future. Why are they afraid? Because they're drug dealers. I think that there's a lot of just sort of Luddite based fear, but then there's the people who think that the government is trying to control you and so then through that there's fear. Welcome to the third group. Welcome to the real world.

That believes that the loss of paper money and I'm saying this as someone with experience in this, the loss of paper money is the first One of the signs of revelation.

1:56:45 - Leo Laporte
Exactly yes.

1:56:48 - Mikah Sargent
I don't think they mention paper money no, no Okay.

1:56:51 - Leo Laporte
It's, yeah, it doesn't make sense.

1:56:54 - Mikah Sargent
I think this is insane because it's just insane.

1:56:58 - Leo Laporte
We can get rid of this now. A lot of airlines don't take cash.

1:57:02 - Johnny Jet
Yeah, no, they don't take cash in the airplane, yeah.

1:57:05 - Leo Laporte
And now the most air, most credit cards now have touched to pay. I think it's very good for the Apple watch because it really I mean man everywhere. I go now, I just Nice. The only thing, the reason I have. You might say why do you have this Wad of Crab? I say, why do you have this Wad of Cash? Then, Tipping, I always tip in cash.

1:57:23 - Johnny Jet
Oh yeah, definitely. Although I at the Hilton San Diego. I was at the other day. You know they had a QR code right on the desk saying you know, here's the way to tip our mate. I don't trust that. I don't trust that. I feel like they're going to skim off of it.

1:57:38 - Leo Laporte
Right, they're going to say there we go, one for you and one for me, one for you, I don't, I don't, I just want to give. I give the waiters, I give everybody. I give them cash because I figure they're going to put that in their pocket. They're going to keep that cash. That's theirs and I don't. I don't like going through a service or any of that stuff, but a lot of but more and more. That's what's happening as well.

1:57:57 - Johnny Jet
I go to the bank and I get $2 bills. I get a hundred or $200 and $2 bills and $5 bills. Yep, so it does, by the way, steve.

1:58:05 - Leo Laporte
Wozniak although when he gets his $2 bills he goes to the mint and he gets them uncut and then he'll put. One of the things he does Wozniak, the founder of Apple Computer, he's a prankster. One of the things he does is he gets him put into a pad, like, and then he tears off the pad and gives it to people and and then he likes to play around. He's like odds, kind of fit, you can have it, it's because people don't know First of all.

People don't know. They've never seen probably a mint fresh $2 bill. They may not even know such a thing exists, right.

1:58:37 - Mikah Sargent
So when you get off a bed, and the way that they look to the back of them, because it's so well designed they're so pretty in comparison to the other bills that you have.

1:58:45 - Leo Laporte
Was loves that he gets this. Sometimes they'll bring a sheet with them and scissors and he cuts off a $2 bill and gives it to them.

1:58:51 - Mikah Sargent
My great uncle. That's how, when we'd get birthday cards, he would give our little bit of cash in $2 bills always.

1:58:58 - Leo Laporte
I think it's great and so yeah, I always had $2 bills or silver dollars. You could get silver dollars, I think.

1:59:03 - Johnny Jet
Anyway. But tipping, by the way, has gotten out of control, especially during travel. I mean, there's places where there's no even manning the booth and they're asking for a tip.

1:59:11 - Leo Laporte
So you take, that's a whole other subject. Yeah, that's another. Nowadays this is a big topic because a lot of these payment systems you do the tap to pay, they spin it around and then you're supposed to give them a tip, but all you did was take my money. I'm supposed to give you a tip, but you know you gotta and you feel bad if you say no and they watch you.

1:59:29 - Johnny Jet
They feel bad, they're like okay, it's called the guilty tipping yeah.

1:59:33 - Leo Laporte
That's a hot topic right now. I don't mind, I am a big tipper Me too I, because I've worked in service industries. I've waited tables, I've done all that and I understand tips and I am a big tipper.

1:59:45 - Johnny Jet
I understand, but I'm not gonna tip you on, like, if I'm going to a takeout place, so does he even have a table?

1:59:51 - Leo Laporte
It's just ridiculous I know it's a little crazy. I do it. I tip him, I give him 25%, I don't know why. Wow, well, you know what?

1:59:58 - Johnny Jet
You know what. You know what. I'm good for you, but I you know what. So did David Cohn get his iPad back.

2:00:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he got it back. I see that you. I'm looking at the article. Tape your business card to the back of your stuff. That's what I do. I guess that's easier than writing it.

2:00:13 - Johnny Jet
It is. It's just more legible, yeah, but don't put your address. Don't ever put your home address Right Anywhere on your back.

2:00:19 - Mikah Sargent
Should I put my social security number, or yeah?

2:00:23 - Leo Laporte
I just read a review Give it to me. I think it was on the wire cutter of the best baggage tags, which is kind of crazy Wow.

Baggage tags, but they recommended and I bought. I bought about six of them. They recommended some silicone rubber baggage tags that you can have your address on them, but they don't show your address right, so they have to. In order to see your address, they have to take off the baggage tags and then I don't know if this is them. No, I bought these years ago. But see, this is bad. Most baggage tags are like this you got your name and your address on there and people who want to Mac on you Just put your phone number.

2:01:05 - Johnny Jet
Yeah, Just put well even then you're giving out your phone number.

2:01:08 - Leo Laporte
So I wire cutter recommended some baggage tags that have a little flap. They have to take the baggage tag off to look under the flap.

2:01:16 - Johnny Jet
This is one of mine, like I have one right here.

2:01:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a nice one. That's leather, so that's a nice one, let me see. So I'm just gonna look up this recommend.

2:01:26 - Johnny Jet
But you also put your address, or not your address? You put your contact information inside the bag as well outside, because sometimes they get torn off when they're going through those machines.

2:01:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, lisa always has her passport, a photocopy of her passport, in her bag. So here it is, believe it or not, the wire cutter, the best luggage tags, and they recommended I actually went out and I bought these. They recommended the Ovener silicone luggage tag. I like these metal attachments because they can't come off right. And then there's your name, but underneath here is your phone number, your address, so somebody has to actually have physical position in your bag and unscrew the tag.

I don't know, if that's so you have to take a second, like a little, a little a little, but I bought a few of them. I figured good enough for the wire cutter.

2:02:14 - Mikah Sargent
That's yeah.

2:02:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Sounds about right. Yeah, so our heat says in our IOC it seems like you have to have a PhD to travel. I know that's good.

2:02:23 - Johnny Jet
That's the great thing about travel You're learning every time. I've flown so much, I still learn every single flight.

2:02:29 - Leo Laporte
Part of traveling, I think, is putting yourself in a manageable stressful situation, that that little level of stress is good for you because it forces you out of your comfort zone. Comfort zone, yeah, yup. Anyway, I kind of I always, when we're getting on the plane, I'm going to oh gosh, will I have the right money? You know, we're going to be able to find the hotel with a taxi driver speaking. There's all of these worries, and then, of course, it always works out great. Some of the best travel experiences I've had are where things don't go well and you make friends.

2:03:03 - Johnny Jet
That's usually the case, yeah.

2:03:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's cool. So don't have to print out boarding passes anymore. Did you notice that? They were all on my phone in my Apple wallet? Wow, and when I first did that, I remember people looked funny. In fact, they didn't want to get in line behind you Because they were worried. They were worried you're fumbling with your phone Right, right, and now I sometimes even put it on my watch. Yeah, yeah, I haven't Crazy.

2:03:31 - Johnny Jet
But I still print mine out a lot of the times, or at least have it. Do you recommend doing that On my computer, just because you know if your phone battery dies or your phone locks up and you don't want to hold up the line it's happened to me before but and also like to keep it for the record. I'm kind of a pack rat when it comes to travel. I keep you know if I get upgraded to first class, I keep those menus. I keep all my boarding cards. I have all my boarding passes from when I was a kid. Wow.

Well, and hotel room keys, especially cool ones, Gotta say thank you for recommending Flighty.

2:04:06 - Leo Laporte
It's not free, it's a subscription. Yep, they don't even have a family plan, so I had to buy it. Lisa said I'll let you be in charge. But, man, it knew You've even said this that Flighty will know before the desk person will know. I'm waiting for a flight to go to see my mom. I'm waiting for flight to Boston and Flighty says relax, you got a couple of hours. And on the thing on the board I'm sitting at the gate. It says flight boards in 15 minutes and the guys you know getting ready to board and stuff, and I'm going. Yeah, I don't think so. Minutes before the flight's supposed to board, he gets on the thing and says we can't find the flight attendants, so the boarding is going to be delayed. I know that was a perverication, by the way, cause what was really going on was there were storms in Boston and that's why Flighty knew. And I don't know why the guy at the desk made up a story about not being able to find the flight attendants.

2:05:00 - Johnny Jet
It should be the other way around. They usually do it the other way around, so they don't set a storm instead of a person. Cover your hotel bill yeah.

2:05:05 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think maybe he really that was the problem, but the flight attendants knew that the flight wasn't going to leave, so they didn't show up, they just weren't there. They go we know we got an hour. Anyway, flighty, it's an app only on iOS, weirdly, but it is a great app and now that with Mac OS Sonoma, I have a Flighty widget.

2:05:22 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and it's so nice having the little widget that pops up for live activity as well. Whenever we were in Denver, I was letting everybody else know oh, our terminal, is our gate changed?

2:05:34 - Leo Laporte
It's fantastic, oh, this is happening you know it before anybody does, before they announce it, before anything, if you fly a lot, you'd have to fly a lot to just what is it? It's not cheap.

2:05:43 - Johnny Jet
It's 50 bucks, it's $50.

2:05:45 - Leo Laporte
$50 a year, but so you'd have to fly a lot to make it worthwhile. But if you fly once a month or more, this thing is a lifesaver. I know when my next flight is. It shows you what the equipment's going to be, what time it's going to leave everything.

2:06:00 - Johnny Jet
And they'll tell you if the equipment changes, which is important because sometimes the airlines swap out the aircraft and that might make your seat change.

2:06:08 - Leo Laporte
They even have a.

2:06:09 - Johnny Jet
If you like certain seats, like I do, you want to jump on it.

2:06:12 - Leo Laporte
ASAP. They have an Apple Watch app which shows your progress, how much longer the flight's going to be, and it has a little map of the flight. I just this is a great. This is an app for I'm glad you like it.

2:06:22 - Mikah Sargent
It's even great, for they have like a section where you can track your friends' flights. So there've been a few times when my mom came to visit, when I had somebody you could send people a flight. You could send people a flight and then I could also be aware okay, picking up from the airport, oh, your gate's changed. So I know to not get you at this gate, but to get you there or whatever it happens to be. So it's great for tracking other people's flights as well.

2:06:41 - Leo Laporte
Right, Favorite airport Johnny.

2:06:45 - Johnny Jet
Oh, favorite airport in the US or internationally, Even Internationally Singapore, I mean you can't beat Changi.

2:06:50 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that thing, that's like a place you could go visit. You could make that the destination and just visit yeah.

2:06:57 - Johnny Jet
Definitely, which is why it wins airport of the year every year. I mean it's beautiful, yeah. But in the US, you know what? I love the new LAX international terminal and I also love Detroit, their new airport, and LaGuardia. Actually, some of the new LaGuardia terminals are amazing, worst airport.

2:07:17 - Leo Laporte
They just need to walk a ton oh yeah worse, everybody agrees it's Newark. Yes.

2:07:22 - Johnny Jet
Yeah, yeah.

2:07:23 - Leo Laporte
JFK's not great either yeah.

2:07:26 - Johnny Jet
Yeah, newark's pretty bad. We were just in Newark multiple times this summer, but I don't know if it's the worst, but it's pretty bad.

2:07:34 - Leo Laporte
Jd Power says Minneapolis St Paul's number one, SFO's number two. It really does depend on terminal. As worst, yeah, as best. Sfo has great terminals and some nice the hurry milk terminal is awesome. Oh, the milk terminal that's where we flew into and out of is the brand new terminal. It's amazing. Yeah, they even have and you would like it a restaurant called Little Chihuahua. Oh, really, yes.

2:07:58 - Johnny Jet
That JD survey, by the way, jd Power survey, it actually gone up the people's. What's the word they used?

2:08:06 - Leo Laporte
It's because of the food Satisfaction.

2:08:07 - Johnny Jet
Satisfaction. Thank you, because of the food, and one thing the airports have done which is smart is that they've had local food eateries come into their airports.

2:08:16 - Leo Laporte
I have to say it's a huge difference. Good idea.

2:08:18 - Johnny Jet
Huge difference In Boston.

2:08:20 - Leo Laporte
I had a Mark Wahlberger. Johnnyjetcom is his website. He's got free newsletters there. He's got all sorts of free services. Fondleman also on Instagram and to X and everywhere else all the social networks at JohnnyJet JJ always a pleasure.

2:08:40 - Johnny Jet
You guys have a great month. Thank you so much. Thank you, you take care, safe travels.

2:08:44 - Leo Laporte
It's always fun talking travel, isn't it? Yeah, the Mark Wahlberger, the $78 hamburger, was it really? No, oh, ha, ha, ha ha. But you did see David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, saying oh yeah, his, was it on Instagram, his picture of his hamburger and fries and bourbon. And he says this is what's wrong with America $78. But people figured out is that burger is only $8. The fries are $4. That bourbon, that was probably the fifth in a series. That's where you get the $78.

2:09:18 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, it was all alcohol.

2:09:21 - Leo Laporte
I don't drink, so I'm not worried about it. Let's see, we got a few more minutes on the show.

2:09:26 - John Ashley
Do you want to wrap it up with just a quick email, maybe Dealers choice Email?

2:09:30 - Mikah Sargent
Oh right, Email oh the sound of email Don't forget you got to stretch out the arm a little bit.

2:09:36 - John Ashley
You know, yeah, yeah, there you go.

2:09:39 - Leo Laporte
Lisa and I played a little football catch in Green Bay oh fun, we're both walking around with a split summer. It's the if you don't throw a lot, it gets sore very quickly. Google podcast demise from Nathan. Hi Nathan, hello Nathan. What's NK? Oh, that's. Maybe that's his initials. Ok, with the announcement that Google will be rolling their podcast product into YouTube music. By the way, not thrilled about this. Do you have any suggestions for your favorite alternative podcast product? I'm an Android user, so that's been my go-to for the last five to six years. I don't particularly like the YouTube platform, hence my desire to switch to something new. Yeah, I use YouTube music and I hate it that they're mixing. Everybody does. They're mixing podcasts. Spotify does it too. In with the music. I want music. If I want podcasts, I'll use a podcast app. What?

2:10:32 - Mikah Sargent
do you recommend Pocket Casts on Android? It's the same app that I use on iOS Pocket Casts. What's great about it is you can use it on the web if you want to. I mean, it is a multi-platform application and when?

2:10:45 - Leo Laporte
you have an account which is free and sign in. All your platforms have the same podcast.

2:10:52 - Mikah Sargent
All of it syncs. The play and pause are synced as well. It's a great app and I don't have another recommendation. I think it's fantastic, no me too.

2:11:03 - Leo Laporte
I prefer it over iTunes. I prefer it over Google podcasts. There are some others If your only audio and your iOS, of course. Overcast is very popular because that's Marco Arment's app and it's a great app. It's very beautiful, very nicely done, great UI. Pocket Cast UI maybe not the best in the world, but it works and once you get used to it, it's fantastic. It's an interesting story. They were independent, purchased by Public Radio. Public Radio, for some reason, said enough and sold it off, and now I think they're back into being. I think automatic owns them.

2:11:43 - Mikah Sargent
The folks who make WordPress.

2:11:45 - Leo Laporte
OK, so they're not independent. They're owned by the WordPress folks. That's actually the best possible outcome, because they really are very, very good and they understand open source and they understand free and so good.

2:12:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and from what I've heard from the folks at Pocket Cast, it's a great pairing with automatic, so glad to hear that.

2:12:09 - Leo Laporte
That's wonderful. Yeah, I think for the foreseeable future this is going to be the choice. We know that the number one correct me if I'm wrong, patrick, if you're watching Patrick Delahanti, our engineer knows the number one way people download our shows, I believe, is still iTunes, but it's gotten to be a small. It used to be 80%. It's got to be a smaller and smaller fraction of the audience. I think Pocket Cast, if it's not number one, is a very close number two now, so I know many of you also use it. So subscribe to Ask the Tech Guys. In your Pocket Cast Just search for Ask the Tech Guys or go to techgyelabscom. That's our website. You'll get our show notes there soon to be new and improved. Have we started using Claude for the show notes yet? Soon to be claudified, claude for the transcripts.

2:13:00 - John Ashley
Yeah, where are the show notes? Oh, no, so we're using Claude to help supplement our show notes.

2:13:07 - Leo Laporte
Yes, so you are.

2:13:08 - John Ashley
We're supplementing it.

2:13:09 - Leo Laporte
So a human will, of course, review all of.

2:13:13 - Mikah Sargent
Claude's suggestions, and then Claude will provide the vitamin C and other supplements.

2:13:16 - Leo Laporte
This is actually really impressive what we started doing for most of our shows, I think, eventually all of our shows. We do have transcripts created by Podium. Those are AI, also created, I think. And then we have Claude, which is the AI for Manthropic. Go through it and summarize it and that becomes our show note partner.

2:13:38 - John Ashley
Yes, we're also. I don't want to put John out of work or anything. Well, that's why I'm saying it's supplementing our show notes. Ok, you feel like it's doing a good job. It's definitely good in some aspects.

2:13:50 - Mikah Sargent
It can collect all those beautiful links that we have during the show, so we have to add the links.

2:13:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we're still adding links.

2:13:57 - John Ashley
It's helping us to curate our show notes and we're making edits as necessary. Nice.

2:14:02 - Leo Laporte
So the way the show notes work. If you go to techguylabscom, each show has a page dedicated to it. This is last week's show, 1993. There's a text-based, bullet-pointed list of things we talked about and there's a link to the transcript there. That takes a few days to get up, of course, but then we actually have clickable links to everything that we talked about. So we separate those out for historic reasons, I think. But that's the show notes. They're at techguylabscom, You'll know when you're there.

By the way, there's also a link to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Pocket Casts. So the easiest way to subscribe click the Pocket Cast link and it'll automatically populate that. We also have RSS for everything else and there's a link to our YouTube channel dedicated to Ask the Tech Guys If you want to ask a question live on the show. We're live every Sunday from 2 to 5 PM Eastern, that's 11 AM to 2 PM Pacific Time. Now we are currently still in summertime. We will be till the weekend after Halloween, so it's 1800 UTC. That will change the weekend after Halloween, but right now, 1800 UTC to a watch live and do watch live if you can. Otherwise, of course, it's a podcast, so you can subscribe, download and listen at your leisure, you catch a lot of Mikah Sargent. He is on iOS today every Tuesday morning, he is on Tech News Weekly every Thursday and he does hands-on Macintosh for our club members and also publish on Thursdays.

Yeah, On Thursdays and then, of course, this show on Sundays. Would you like to do another show, Because I have some ideas. Oh, ok, we'll talk about that after I want to use Mikah till he's shriveled up like a raisin.

He's going to shrink me down, get all the juice out of Mikah, while we can. We thank you for being here. I'm Leo Laporta. You catch me from time to time on the shows. I will be here for the next couple of weeks that I am going to go back east and you're going to have to do the show. Oh no, I'm going to do the shows for moms.

OK, we've got it all set up. I'm going to do the show for moms. It'll be a lot of fun. The week of October 16th. And what else do we have to tell people?

2:16:09 - Mikah Sargent
I mean you've done everything. Again, call us during the week 887-242884. E-mails you don't just have to send text, you can send us video or audio. Yeah, ATGittotv. And thank you so much for your questions. They help us do this show every week and we love being able to help you out with what you've got. It's a lot of fun.

2:16:31 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for joining us. Stay tuned this week in tech coming up next if you're watching live, and we will see you all next week on Ask the Tech guys. I'm Leo Laporte.

2:16:41 - Mikah Sargent
And I'm Mikah Sargent. Have a great Geek Week. Bye-bye, bye-bye.

2:16:45 - Rod Pyle
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra Magazine, and each week I join with my co-host to bring you, this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the final frontier. We talk to NASA, chief space scientists, engineers, educators and artists, and sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space books and TV, and we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So, whether you're an armchair adventurer or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars rocket, join us on this week in space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time.