Ask the Tech Guys 2028 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.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, hey, hey, hey. It's time for Ask the Tech Guys. I'm Leo Laporte Coming up. You know what's smarter than your brand new AI PC, your car, sam O'Bool?

00:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Sam, it'll be here and explain all and I am Micah Sargent and we answer a listener question about why he keeps making voice recordings when he's just trying to send a message to a friend.

00:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was a good catch on Micah's part, plus the 2,000-word manuscript that even word can't swallow.

00:33 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It's all coming up next on Ask the Tech Guys Podcasts you love.

00:38 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
From people you trust.

00:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Twit. This is Ask the Tech Guys, with Micah Sargent and Leo Laporte, episode 2028, recorded Sunday, june 9th 2024. 2,000 tops. Well, hey, hey, hey, how are you today? Look who's here. Hello, it's Micah Sargent. Back from the past, back to life. It's so good to have you. I miss you terribly. My friend to life, it's so good to have you. I missed you terribly my friend.

01:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I missed you and I'm glad to be here. I missed all of you out there who tune in and ask us great questions. I'm always talking about all of you. When you know I'm having conversations with people and they ask me a question, I said I actually had that question come up on the show. I do Nice.

01:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's great. It's great to be back. That's why they call this. Ask the tech guys now. Last week thank you, alex lindsey, for filling in for mike and he answers questions every morning on office hours so he was very facile with the question answers. I bet thing he he fit right in. But that guy who was the week before just all by himself he was. So I did not like that at all. So I'm glad you're back. This is a show where you answer your tech questions at 888-724-2884. That's a phone, it is a phone.

01:55 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
What you can call a phone. Yes, yes, you can call that phone during the show to ask a question live on air. You can also call that phone number during the week where you can leave a voicemail that we will play back on the show and answer for you. We've got a couple of other ways to get in touch with us as well. You can email us, atg at twittv. When you email us, you can send text. It goes into this mailbox.

02:17
Yeah there's a little mailbox back there where our mail goes. If you're sending text, audio and video are also acceptable and of course, you can go to the URL calltwittv. We suggest going to it on your smartphone, because you've got a microphone and a camera all built in right there. But what that does is it takes you to our Zoom room where you hang out, and we ask that you do use the little button on Zoom that has a hand. You tap or click on that button to let us know that you have a question. Otherwise, we just think you're hanging out in the Zoom, which is fine, but by doing that, then we know you do have a question. Yes, so get in touch to ask your questions of these the tech guys.

03:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So top stories this week. I think we'll be talking about this a little bit more, I suspect on Twitter as well. We talked last week about Windows Recall. This is a feature of the new Copilot Plus PCs that Microsoft announced a couple of weeks ago. These are PCs with AI built in and the big feature that Microsoft was touting again it requires these specific PCs running Windows 11 Pro, but this specific feature was called Recall, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I do recall that, and the idea was as soon as you turn on the computer, every few seconds it records a screenshot of what you're doing and then assigns various AI to analyze that screenshot, to give you text and context and so forth, and puts it in a database. And then you can whole idea is sometime down the road say, hey, what was the name of that refrigerator I was looking at four months ago or whatever, and it'll pop right up. It's kind of like windows search on steroids you know everything you've ever done.

04:03
Immediately, security experts pointed out that it is also a very fat and juicy target for bad guys. Steve Gibson did a whole piece on it last Tuesday on security now, and the gist of it was this database on your computer isn't all that well protected and so would be accessible to anybody who got malware on your system. And so that's a real concern because, as we know, malware on people's systems, especially in Windows world, is very, very common. That's all the ransomware you hear about. All that stuff is, you know, trojans, malware on your system. And because the database was encryptedrosoft said with with bitlocker you would have to worry, except as soon as you log in, it unencrypts it. Uh, it was a sqlite database that was particularly easy, and so forth. So microsoft has heard all of the howls of pain and have made some changes. The biggest change is it's opt-in. Okay, so what it was before was automatic. It was wow, yeah, it was opt-out, and that was one real concern. Uh, people had that. That because people aren't going to know.

05:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Frankly, that's just the way that it is. It's the tyranny of the default.

05:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's just people do. They don't change they don't change settings so that's number one, and I think that's that's a good one. The only people who will have this on their systems are people who explicitly say yeah, yeah, I want that, or the fools who want it yeah. I don't know. Would you do this I?

05:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
don't know. Here's the thing. I want this feature but I want it more in my life than I do on my computer per se. But I like the idea of what this is capable of doing. That said, it is still enough of a privacy concern for me and a security concern for me that I don't think I would opt into it. Maybe I'd opt into it and try it on, but here's what it would be. It would be like using the family computer. You use the family computer knowing that everybody else has access to that computer and will potentially see what you've done on that computer. Or using a work computer knowing that you know work has installed a program on it to know what you're doing. It changes your behavior and I think if I had recall turned on on my Windows machine it would probably change my behavior just because I would know there's this eye in the background watching everything.

06:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The eye is ostensibly you.

06:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Even if I'm the eye, it's still like, ah, something's watching me. The elf is on the shelf and I don't want it there.

06:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They also responded to this issue of encryption BitLocker or any hard drive encryption scheme like FileVault on Apple, bitlocker on Windows when you log in it's unencrypted so you can use it. They said, no, no, we're going to keep it encrypted until you verify. With Windows Hello it will be just-in-time decryption. So that's probably a good thing. Recall Snapshots says Microsoft will only be decrypted and accessible when the user authenticates. So as soon as you say they put up a speed bump in as encrypted and accessible when the user authenticates. So as soon as you say they put up a speed bump in as soon as you say well, hey, what refrigerator did I look at four months ago? It'll look at you. Windows Hello is very fast if you have one of these Copilot Plus PCs because they have the camera. So it'll look at you and say, oh, yeah, that's Leo. It'll also have presence detection and they encrypted the search database.

07:21 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I think this answers most of the uh security concerns from people who weren't hair on fire right was up to this point, this was still a feature that wasn't available to the masses, right no, you can't buy a pc with it, unless you buy one of these co-pilot plus pcs which don't come out, by the way, till june 18th so good.

07:41
That means that no one, there's no harm, no foul. Yet they are kind of because I was almost going to complain a little bit about the idea that they didn't get it all figured out beforehand. But they are, they're figuring it out beforehand and that's good. Yeah, I think they listened, which is fantastic.

07:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's weird that they didn't understand how people would react to this, but anyway, they have, and you know, honestly, there are other tools react to this. But anyway, they have and you know, honestly, there are other tools that do this. In some ways, this is a little bit like Apple's time machine, right?

08:13 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Which is always recording versions of everything you did.

08:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's also like third-party tools. Remember, I bought the little rewind pin they call it Limitless now, but rewindai does the same thing on a macintosh. So and microsoft had some weird missing features. For instance, if you bought a new pc or reset the pc, your entire memory recall will be gone. Also, it wasn't saved to the cloud, it was just local.

08:39
That was a reasonable security protection, but it also meant it didn't persist. So, given that people get new machines every four, five, ten years, your whole database is only from the new machine on. So you know, I feel like we're working on it right? Yeah, absolutely, this is an ai feature and, uh, I think we all recognize that it would be really cool to have an assistant that knew everything about you.

09:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's what we want. Yeah, that context, because our brains are better equipped to do processing and understanding and problem solving and everything like that. Memory is something that we've kind of, as humans, adapted our brains for, and so if we could put some of those tasks, wouldn't that be onto something?

09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
else yeah, that would be great yeah anyway, I think that most of the fear about recall probably has been assuaged by this, except for the most uh, you know there'll be people will find a way to hate this, and already I'm seeing in a lot of places, especially reddit uh, what, what linux distro should I switch to? What Mac should I buy? You know how people are.

09:48 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
That's it, I'm done, I'm done with this Moving on.

09:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't care about me. Google's antitrust trial. In a decision Friday, the Justice Department lost a little bit of ground. They wanted a jury trial, which really, you know, a jury is never going to find in favor of the tech giant, they're going to find in favor of the little guy right so google did not want a jury trial, they wanted the judge to decide.

10:15
Well, google was able to convince the judge that, because they paid back, that the whole reason that the justice department wanted a jury trial is because they said that, uh, government employees were disadvantaged to the tune of about 750 000. They're they're they're going after google for this ad issue, right that they both sell and buy ads, that they, you know they're kind of self-dealing and and you know you might think google is a search engine. It's not, it's an ad-selling platform and so they're going after it for that. They sought monetary damages to compensate federal agencies that had purchased online ads, saying they were overcharged as a result of Google's anti-competitive contact. So what did Google do? This is so smart. They wrote them a check, they paid them back. In fact, they paid him back triple damages, because that's technically what they could have been forced to pay. So they paid three times $750,000, a little more than $2 million Interesting and they're done Two and a half million, whatever it is.

11:20 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So they're done. They will get a different trial or they won't get a trial.

11:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They'll get a different trial or they won't get a trial. They'll get a different trial. Judge Leone Brinkman will be the sole decider instead of a jury, but if you're Google, that's a huge victory, because you'd never know what a jury is going to do.

11:34 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And juries don't like big companies, so something that's interesting about that, and maybe some legal experts, or perhaps you know how often does the government sue on behalf of the government as opposed to suing on behalf of the people? Yeah, that's well, you know it's interesting.

11:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good question. Uh, I I think that the larger lawsuit is about anti-competitive behavior. It's antitrust lawsuit, but they were going to use this fact that the government had wasted money as a way to force a jury trial, so google did a little jiu-jitsu and said here's the check and you know what 2.3 million dollars and not have to face a jury, good deal it's a good deal on google uh, this is a bad deal and I'm curious what you all think about this.

12:23
well, one more story, then we'll get to our show. This is our show. We'll get to our call. Yeah, the state of New York has passed legislation that bans addictive social media algorithms for kids. It's the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation Act.

12:44 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Ah SAFE.

12:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, very good, you picked up on that. So the SAFE Act is now a law in New York State, because the governor well, actually, she hasn't yet signed it, but she's expected to sign it she posted on X, you said it. You said it. She posted on X celebrating the bill's passage. So it'll prohibit social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram from serving content to users under the age of 18 based on recommendation algorithms. Instead, they'll have to provide, if you're under 18, a reverse chronological feed.

13:21 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, can I pretend I'm under 18 so I can get the reverse chron feedback?

13:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, On the other hand, the reason they do that is not because they want to addict kids or adults, but because they've learned over time. That's a better experience it's a better experience.

13:36 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's how you more entertaining to go back into the app over and over again. Yeah, it's not about. Addictive is such a bloated word, that word I have trouble with how this is being framed. I think that it is important to. There was an earlier. I think it was done in New York. It was an earlier sort of action where they declared a state of emergency regarding social media. Now that, on the on the face of it, sounds ridiculous, but what it did was it freed up funds that they could then put towards research. Very cool that there's more research being done to understand and to truly, you know, pay attention to the impact, as opposed to sort of reactionary measures where we've all just kind of gone oh, addiction, they're addicted, addicted, addiction, yes, yes, yes. And then suddenly you've got these things coming into play Addiction is so loaded right.

14:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, they also had a measure in there that said no notifications to children between midnight and 6 am, and that was taken out. I think that's a good one. That was a good one no notifications to kids.

14:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's fair I wonder why they took it out.

14:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They said oh, it's an undue hardship for us to figure out how the real concern and I think it might have something to do with this is that it's undoubtedly that these social networks will will sue uh under first amendment, and it so they're just trying to lessen it, it will probably make it to the Supreme Court.

15:08
So we'll be interested to see. There is a trade group that represents all these companies called Net Choice and they are right now they have two. We're waiting to hear two big cases in the Supreme Court the Florida and Texas social media bills. So that's right now in front of the Supreme Court. That decision should come out any probably this week. That choice did get a preliminary injunction Ohio and Arkansas, possibly in California they're awaiting judgment stopping these social because many states have now enacted social media limitations or restrictions. Evan Greer of the nonprofit digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, which is not a lobbying arm of the big tech companies, did say if you can frame something as being about protecting kids, it automatically has more political weight behind. Well, of course it does. That makes sense. So we'll watch that with interest. I don't, yeah, I don't know. I think the non-chronological feed is okay. These companies don't want it. No, because they don't make as much money. But should they be making?

16:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
money off of kids under 18? Exactly, yeah, yeah, I suppose. Okay, that's a really good point and I think that, on the face of it, that is a reasonable change. I think it's what it suggests overall about how there's just this we've we've got to protect the kids from this new thing and you've talked about it before that it's just the latest wave of books, and then rock music and video games and everything else, and I don't know.

16:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One more. I said this was the last one, but I have to do this one and this is a public service announcement.

16:48
Yes, If your iPhone gets stolen. As you know, apple and I think this might be true of some Android phones, but I'm more familiar with the Apple thing they have something called Activation Lock where, unless you release your Apple device in Find my, you have to take it out, remove it, log in to your account and remove it. Uh, somebody can't use it. So before you sell it or give it away, you're supposed to now, if the reason this is in there is because if it gets stolen you do not want to do that, right, if it gets stolen, do not remove it from find.

17:22
My because the bad guys can never use your phone. Now this has led and I've seen this over and over again on Reddit and other places to a series of escalating text messages from the bad guys who stole your phone. Generally, what happens? They steal it in the US, ship it to China, where somebody's trying to unlock it. They cannot, they'll even take it apart, but Apple started putting activation locks on the parts as well, so they it really is of much less value to them unless they can convince you to remove your phone from find my and this is a piece in the Gothamists things the guys who stole my phone texted me to try to get me to unlock it, and it started very uh innocuously.

18:05
Yo, I bought an iphone 4. I'm 14, I'm using it, it has it, have your messages, emails, cards, banks notes and personal information on it, even your sim number that you transferred. I get your calls. It was not erased. Did you make an insurance claim? So? So now the gothamist is smart enough to say oh, you bought my stolen phone, ha ha, good luck, he's not going to release it. Now they, they're going to slowly try to scare him into releasing it. So, and I have to warn you, this gets pretty uh, vivid, um. So the next one came from apple apple store pay. Apple store pay your iphone 14 Pro is trying to pay with Apple Pay in USA. No period. To ensure the safety of your accounts period, please use the Find my app all caps to remove your Apple ID and cancel your payment method as soon as possible. No period this will unbind your Apple ID from another device. Apple Support Nope, not gonna do it. He did do the fine mine and noticed that it was at this point in Queens.

19:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Okay, I will say, by the way, that the author of the piece's name is Veronica D'Souza.

19:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I shouldn't say he, I should say Veronica. Sorry, veronica, yeah, I like to give credit to the authors. So then it goes to China, where this message appears your old iPhone 14 Pro is recycled by us. We're just recycling. We're not the ones who steal your phone. If you do not remove it, your old phone will be sold to other customers. Maybe they'll hack your phone or steal your credit card or contact your family. So we recommend you to remove it as soon as possible. We cooperate with AT&T, t-mobile, verizon, amazon and other companies in the business of second-hand mobile phones.

19:52
We will not steal your personal information but our customers come from all over the world and they will buy these second-hand phones if you do not remove it. Therefore, open the Find my app All caps, I don't know why. Maybe you to not remove it? Therefore, open the find my app all out all caps, I don't know why, maybe even the same person, so that we can restore the factory settings. Remove your personal data. If you don't remove it, our company will not be responsible for any loss caused to you. Hope you can understand. Thank you, uh. So she then says okay, I just removed it. Let me know if that worked. Thanks for recycling my phone. Even send him an emoji with hearts. Nice job, veronica.

20:25
To which the erase request you made didn't work. It was connected on Wi-Fi in China, then got jailbreak. It's still staying pending. It won't erase remotely. I'm telling you this because your phone is going to be auctioned on the black market with your personal information, everything about you. By the way, this is not true, really important for you. The reason I mentioned this it's encrypted. They cannot exactly, unless they guess your pin, but this is why you should at least have six digits and turn on that thing that says 10 bad guesses erased.

20:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So this is all after it's erased. The activation lock is still there.

20:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah they still can't sell it so you could erase it, because you have the button to erase it. So they're saying, oh no, it's got your personal information, including phone number address. Everything will be cloned. That's why I'm telling you to, so you can remove it from your device list and I will factory reset it manually and remove the number. She said she got this one May 14th from the Filipino number which had previously claimed to be some guy who'd accidentally bought my phone. They didn't even change the phone numbers. Wow, now your old phone has been disassembled, the camera and lcd have been sold, the motherboard has been jailbroken. You do not want to take it back because it does not belong to the law of the united states. Your apple id is still bound on it. It has opened apple pay and wait for the information of the bank bill after a month. This number is a one-off. You will never be able to reach me those exclamation points.

21:46
The erase request you made didn't work. It was connected on wi-fi in china. They got jailbreak. It's still saying pending. It won't erase remotely. I'm telling you this because the phone's gonna be auctioned on the black market with your personal information. Remove it and I will remove it. Uh, this is where things started escalating, says veronica de souza at the gothamist. Most of the messages, by the way, are identical the ones you see on reddit. They she calls it scammer copy pasta. Oh, interesting, yeah, it's copy and paste, they just said, because they don't even speak english in many cases, so they just send, oh wow the text.

22:19
They all use the same text here. Now the phone is in china, yikes, uh, in shenzhen, where the phone was made. It's back home, oh to where it belongs. So you know, she could still see that, right? Uh, my phone took a little trip 8049 miles now. Oh boy, cover your eyes, children. Yeah, so now they're getting really upset.

22:44
Listen, I'm gonna harass, wreck and ruin your sad, stupid, low, pathetic life. It is not removed. You mindless peasant, you're gonna be destroyed. I've killed or far less than a blank phone before and we will see if you're you value your life or the response. So you know how I'm presuming.

23:04
This is a profanity. Serious this is. I know who you are and where you live, and your whole family will get slaughtered. Oh my, I'm gonna beat, and you horribly. You effing piece of absolute garbage, waste of air, waste of skin. You and your family, I'm, I'm gonna murder. Y'all watch me. Oh, and the police? They cannot help you. They'll only take your statement and this number is a burner. Your best option is to remove it now. I'm angry. Now don't mess with me, and if you don't do what I say, you are going to I'm gonna come to your house on monday night, good god, and I'm gonna kill your whole family. I already told you what you do and if you don't get it removed by the end of the day, miami, miami, miami, gonna be looking for you and your family and blame me for not warning you. I don't know who miami is. Maybe miami's a gangster. Wait, chris from miami.

23:57
Maybe it's chris from miami. He's had a lot of coffee he's very aggro coming for your phone.

24:03
She said this is the last one. Now the key here is you. If your phone is stolen, you will get these messages, or may well get these messages, and they are scary, they are terrifying. They're a lot like we've talked about it before the extortion email where they say I know what you're doing, I've got videos of you and I'm going to give it to your whole family. These are bs. Ignore them. Do not release that phone because eventually they're just going to throw it in the Yangtze and that'll be that, because they can't do anything with it.

24:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Do not fall for it.

24:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep. By the way, they also sent two videos. One showed a hacker breaking into someone's iPhone and going through their camera roll. Another appeared to be a screen recording of a social video of a man showing off his gun. Veronica writes I guess this is supposed to be the guy named Miami who's going to come kill me and my whole family on Monday. I haven't heard from them since.

24:53 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Thank you, Veronica D'Souza. I'm so glad you're okay, Veronica.

24:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So glad you're okay. She's a WNYC and the Gothamist and it's good that she shared it and that's why I wanted to reshare it. Yes, indeed, so that you know this happens. It's meaningless. It's just the more they threaten, the more likely you'll cave. Ridiculous, ridiculous.

25:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's very ridiculous, ridiculous and upsetting.

25:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, I'm going to take a little break, a little pause in the pause that refreshes, and then we will get to your calls. So, if you will, anthony nielsen, filling in for our boy genius producer. Ah, ah, he's not here. It's not here. Uh, johnny's, johnny's, is he? Is he on vacation? Is he doing?

25:37
I don't know he just took a day off. Just took a day off. He's allowed. John ashley will be back someday, but the esteemed ai guru, anthony nielsen is filling in our show today.

25:48
Brought to you by fast mail how many? Okay, yesterday, this is very hard. In my house, lisa starts complaining. She said all of these mails emails from clients that I didn't get apparently they've gone into spam and all the mails I sent to them they didn't get. It's driving me crazy. And I said honey, if you value email, why are you using free email? She's using Gmail.

26:17
I said I stopped using Gmail 10 years ago. She said what do you use? I said you know who. I use Fastmail. You should be doing Fastmail. She said I don't want to move. I said it's easy. You can move everything over, all your folders, everything. Move it over to Fastmail and then your email will be better.

26:36
Fastmail is an independent, employee-owned email provider. For over 20 years I've been with them. For more than 10. For over 20 years I've been with them. For more than 10. I left Google 10 years ago because I finally got tired of no support. That stopped the spam. Any spam stopped working very well. It's the main reason I was on Gmail. I just I got tired of giving Google nothing except my hard-earned attention, so I got a private inbox with Fastmail and I've never turned back.

27:09
It's not just my email, by the way. I also stopped using Google Calendar. I use Fastmail Calendar, just like Google Calendar syncs to your phone, your Android or iOS device. I also use Fastmail's contacts. In fact, there's a real advantage to doing that, because anytime I want Fastmail not to throw stuff into spam, I add them to my contacts and I have Fastmail filters. Move anybody I know into the important folder. I never miss email.

27:34
Plus, fastmail's set up so your email goes through to everywhere, even the most finicky email companies. Google's one of them, because they support all of the email authentication protocols DMARC, spf, dkim. In fact, it's great because I use Fastmail with my domains as well. They don't host the website, they just host the mail, but it's automatically set up to use all that authentication. So when I send from a custom domain, in fact, fastmail even sells domains. So if you want to have a really professional email, not one that says at hotmailcom or aolcom or gmailcom, fastmail Fastmail is a premium inbox experience that puts your privacy first. Instead of ads and creepy data sharing, you get a clean interface with innovative features that value your time. They use open source software. They contribute back. They drive the development of open standards. They collaborate with other services to improve email contacts and calendars for everybody.

28:31
They're the good guys in this business. You pay for free email with your privacy. For as little as $5 a month you can get a private inbox with Fastmail and, by the way, that's in more than 20 global currencies. This is worldwide. Their new multi-user plans make Fastmail even more affordable for your household and business. Maybe I can get Lisa to go in the household account.

28:52
How about that? There's a Duo plan which gives secure private email to you and a partner at a reduced price. Their family plan up to six people Upgrade the whole family. And the business plan gives you powerful admin controls for the security and management of your company Fastmail. You can even send and receive emails from your own domain, manage multiple email addresses in one space. I have literally an unlimited number of email addresses. It's very easy, lisa, to download your data and import it into your Fastmail inbox. No need to leave important info behind when you switch.

29:25
I think arguably they've got a much better web interface, but you can use it with any email client and I use their iOS and Android clients. I think they're really, really good. Fastmail also works, you'll be happy to know, with password measures like 1Password or our sponsor, bitwarden. So they generate unique logins at the same time as they generate unique passwords for every account. It all goes in your Fastmail inbox, but the email address is unique to that account.

29:51
I can go on and on. You know I love Fastmail. I've been telling you for years if email is important to you, don't go with the free service. Spend a little money to get the best Fastmail service. Spend a little money to get the best Fastmail. Fastmail advancing open standards, leading industry cooperation. Together, we Fast mail and you are making email better for everyone. In fact, we're going to make it even better for you. Right now you can try fast mail free for 30 days and get 15% off your first year. Fastmailcom slash twit. Fastmailcom slash twit. All the smart monies on fast mail. It really is the right way to go. Okay, anthony Nielsen. Yes, what should we do? How about a voicemail?

30:42 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
A voicemail. Let's hear a voicemail.

30:45 - Joe (Guest)
Hi Leo, my name is Joe. I'm calling from San Jose, Costa Rica. Oh, I fly DJI drones. I have. I just tried to use the SD card from a DJI Mini 4 Pro in Windows and to open it and I cannot do it. I tried different card readers, I can't format it. I tried this part, I just it will not open. I can see it but I can't open it. So I put it back in the DJI controller, which is an RC2 controller, and it formats it instantly. So I know it's not the card. So anyway, that's very frustrating. If you can answer that for me, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

31:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, it's really nice to hear from Costa Rica.

31:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I was thinking it was just that switch on the side was turned on. You know that little lock switch on SD cards. But the fact that you're able to put it into the DJI and have it get formatted again suggests that that little switch thing is not turned on.

31:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What you described, joe, I have done. I have a DJI Mini Takes a have done. I have a dji mini. Uh, takes a mini micro sd, put it in there, go flying around, bug the neighbors and then land it. And uh which is for me it's the hard part is landing it and then.

32:07
But if you successfully land it and you get the micro sd card out, you should be able to read it on windows or mac. I you know what. I don't think I've ever tried it on Windows. I know I can read it on Mac, but you know that it's probably formatted FAT32, which is kind of a standard format. So why can't you read it on Windows? You're probably using an adapter. I would try different adapters to make sure it's not that adapter. The fact that you can format it again on your DJI means that the card probably isn't dead. Although a format does not test, usually they use they probably don't even give you a choice a quick format which doesn't in fact write to every sector of the drive. It just redoes the table of contents, the FAT file allocation table. So it's my guess that's a bad card. So anytime I have trouble with an SD card at all of any kind, I toss it, because once they go bad, they go bad and you're out of luck.

33:07
You might have some vital shots that you don't want to lose. So there is a tool that I've recommended in the past which I will See. You formatted it so you've lost whatever was on there. If this happens again and there's something you want to save, this is a free tool from CCleaner called Recova Recova, I like the name. It recovers stuff. This is designed specifically for SD cards, but you know there are other tools like this, but it does a good job, I think, of getting back. It used to be completely free. Looks like you probably can do the free one to get the file recovery. That's one of the tools. There are a number of other tools out there that work just fine.

33:55
Yeah, it might be fat 16, burke says but even then it should be readable. It's probably fat, though If I were a drone maker I would use fat, either 16 or 32. 16, you have limitations in the file size, so maybe 32, just so it could be read on Macs and PCs. I would always try it on another computer, with another reader, with another adapter, that kind of thing. But honestly, if you can't read it, even if it's formatted in the DJI remember they're not testing every sector it could still be bad. The FAT may be the only thing that it can write to, in which case you wouldn't be able to get any files off of it. So I would toss it. If there's something on it you need recover or or the like, but I would toss it.

34:39
Why take a chance? You know um. By the way, retcon5 in our discord says he used recover um and saved 2 000 photos from a card. So uh, wow, wow, that's um, that's good. Now, this was before. I think they were open source and got bought, I think, by a sea cleaner, but uh, oh, at least it's by. I haven't tried it. I haven't tried it since sea cleaner, yeah, sea cleaner is a good.

35:08 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, so I'm, I'm still, I'm still in my shaky phase because of mac bartender, so i'm'm like, oh, I got bought.

35:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, we should mention that, by the way. That is, if you use Bartender which I used to, I don't anymore but if you use Bartender, the company got bought and the new company's not being very forthcoming.

35:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yes. So first and foremost, I went around and installed it on my machines Mac Bartender, I actually have an episode of Hands on Mac about it but essentially what happened was, yes, the company got bought and when they bought it, the new company tried to change some of the certificates, but they released an update to the app without telling anyone.

35:49
That's really bad, and they didn't. The person who originally Sartee Studio made the app and the new company that bought it both did not say ahead of time that it was going to be purchased. What's great is that another app that I've talked about on Hands-On Mac that I think everybody should have called Mac Updater, which is a tool that quite literally just scans your Mac for all of its applications and then looks online for updates to those apps so you can always stay up to date. Well, the great thing about Mac Bartender, or, excuse me, about Mac Updater, is that the folks behind it make sure that it is the true and real update. Oh, good for them, true and real place.

36:27
And they did a bunch of research. So when people who use Mac Updater went to hit the refresh button, they popped up a prompt that said hey, we don't recommend downloading the new version of Mac bartender because we looked into it and this, this and this suggests that it might not be software that you should be using. There could be something nefarious installed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so that kind of forced Mac bartender to explain what had happened. And I read through the information from Sartee Studios, the post that said what happened and why the change happened, and I was not satisfied with the. It's a little suspicious, yeah, so I am now using a tool that is available in the App Store called I use Hidden.

37:13
Bar which is free.

37:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's what I'm using and there's a new one. So Hidden Bar is what I'm currently using, but there's a new one that's open source that, when this all happened, jordan Baird said hey, by the way, I've been working on one Ice. It's called and it's on GitHub, and that's also free and because it's open source, I think it's likely that you can be sure that it's going to be okay. It also has a lot of interesting features. Hidden Bar is almost identical to Bartender, a little lighter weight, which I don't mind.

37:44 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I actually like it, that it's simpler. I got it from. You can get it from the Mac App Store or you can just get it directly. You can use Homebrew to install it and I'm satisfied with it. Yeah, that's what I use. I haven't switched to ice, but I saw that and I says ice is has more of those in-depth features that mac bartender had right. So if you were like a bartender power user I was ice might be the one for you. I, yeah, I played around with it, but I always ended up going back to the simplified we should mention.

38:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't use this on the desktop because I don't need to.

38:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I only use it on my laptops because I have notches. I'd like it everywhere, because I just like a clean bar.

38:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have my menu bar icons go under the notch. Yeah, that's, and that's a failing on Apple's part. They should somehow handle that. Handle that, yeah, so that's why I use hidden bar. That's why I use, uh, hidden bar. All right, we're gonna try once again to see he's back. Uh, we have chris on the line. Chris, oh, chris, and then, okay, he. By the way, it looks like he found the, the device that failed. So let's talk to chris and then we will get back to headband guy.

38:54 - Chris (Caller)
Okay, chris, go miami, it's coffee, chris hi, coffee, chris, hello, I haven't been here in a hundred years, so, uh, I'm back. Well, you?

39:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
look great for having not been here for a hundred years, because you gotta well, are you wearing a?

39:08 - Chris (Caller)
mask. Today are you wearing no man? Oh, I don't know what that is. Oh my God.

39:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you going to Venice for Carnival? Is that your? What the heck is that?

39:20 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
There we go. There's Chris hey. Welcome to the show.

39:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hello Chris.

39:27 - Chris (Caller)
What's up? Okay, well, I don't want to watch me. How do I get to the point where I see you and Micah I don't want to see. Okay, there we go. Okay, good, all right. So perfect.

39:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are questions we cannot answer Just remember.

39:40 - Chris (Caller)
I know where you work. Stay out of Miami.

39:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, how many ounces, a little bit how many ounces. In there that looks like a 16 ounce at least.

39:50 - Chris (Caller)
That's two cups easy in one cup.

39:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Two cups easy, that's two cups easy in one cup. Two cups easy.

39:54 - Chris (Caller)
That's 16 ounces. Yeah, yeah, 16 ounces right there. So that's for you, Micah Sarge Clink. Hey, welcome back. By the way, Last week we had a wonderful guest with us there, and now you're with us back with us again.

40:08 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I am back, yeah.

40:09 - Chris (Caller)
I sent you some messages and hope that you're feeling well.

40:12 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Thank you, I appreciate the well wishes that and hope that you're feeling well.

40:14 - Chris (Caller)
Thank you, I appreciate the well wishes. That's very kind. It always pains us when you're not with us, because Leo falls apart.

40:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do, I really do. It's funny. You wouldn't know. I did this by myself for 20 years, right? It's like ah, that's true. What's happening? Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here? What can we do for?

40:27 - Chris (Caller)
It's Lindsay, because he's always wonderful.

40:32 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
I watch a lot of him on his.

40:33 - Chris (Caller)
Yeah, he was very, very good and it's very rare we get him. I won't keep you very long because I know that we want to get a lot of the new people in here that are probably hanging out in Zoom right now. But the new iPads are here and I'm definitely going to go with the because I have the 11-inch from a few years ago. I want to get the 13. But I don't think that that new finish that they have on the ipad, michael sergeant was like don't even go there because you can get and put that on the new ipad. So I was thinking about the one terabyte model, which looks really, really good because I need more real estate, and the 11 inch is good. I like the new one, but I like the idea of 13 inches. I want that larger format for, like my, my meetings and so on, so forth, but I was thinking about one terabyte because that's going to have that new process and you know, and you know the main reason, uh for getting a terabyte right micah yes, that's because you were going to get the best performance possible that's so thin it

41:28
disappears 16 gigs right in front of your layout. Boom, it's gone.

41:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There it is where did it go? It's so thin.

41:35 - Chris (Caller)
Where'd it go, love?

41:36 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
these Obviously more storage space. For some people that's plenty, but you get more RAM, you get better performance, double the RAM 16 gigs instead of 8.

41:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
16 versus 8. And you get all the cores.

41:48 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yes, and you get all the cores.

41:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not a bin to chip, right? Yeah, is there. What's the deal with the cores, though? I mean, uh, I know you're getting, you're getting all four of them, but I mean, what is their, honestly, difference? So, john, yeah, john, you bought the 512. And john was all upset jammer b, our studio manager, that he got the 512. He was going to turn this in and say I want the terabyte. And then everybody said, john, you're not going to notice the difference because the iPad is already way faster than anything you would ever do with it. So, john, you did not trade it in. So this is the 512 with a binned chip. It's got one less performance core. What do you think, john? Do you notice the difference? No, no, so it saves you money unless you need the storage. It's really more of a mental thing, right?

42:41 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I think it is a mental thing.

42:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because you and I, we didn't want to have the lesser iPad.

42:46 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I have the 512. Oh, you did, yeah, I have the 512 gigabytes. 11 inch iPad.

42:52
He's being careful with my money Exactly, as well as the fact that, no, at the time that I purchased it I didn't know there was a difference because I wanted to get it as quick as possible so we could do the review Right. But after hearing that there was a difference, I considered turning it in for the one terabyte, and then I myself used it and you know in in my review. By the way, everyone should go watch that ipad pro review. We'd love it if you did. Uh, twittertv slash hot, um, I talk about. Thank you, thank you. Do you address this?

43:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in the review exactly, and I talk about how you know, thank you.

43:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Uh, I talk about how there's. I have not. I could not run up against any issues with it, and the fact is, even in the before times, when the iPad Pro had an M1 chip in it, I would sometimes while I still had an Intel Mac would sometimes use the iPad to export video instead of using the Mac to do it, because the iPad was faster. So now we're seeing this huge performance improvement, regardless of whether you get the bind chip or the full power chip. I just don't see people running up against the extent of the system unless they are doing the absolute most they could possibly do, and that's just not most people, most people, are not ever going to see it run up against the uh, the the edges of the system. Maybe that will change when wwdc rolls around, but I still and leo's shaking his head, no, you could probably hear it rattling um, no, it's not changing so you know I.

44:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the only reason I say that is for the last four or five models of ipad I've always said oh, you know, this is someday is going to live up to its, and it never does, so I wouldn't count on that.

44:38 - Chris (Caller)
It's like gaming on the Mac. Well, I was also thinking about down the line too. I mean, you know you get the M4, which I guess is called the bin chip. I guess that would be the technical term you just used, micah. For the yeah if you get the one terabyte which includes that new M4 chip, because I have the M1 now. What's the point? I mean, if I plan, I'm planning for the future, so I don't know if they're going to be coming out with. Why am I seeing myself again?

45:03 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
OK, it's because we love to look at you. We're switching, I know, but I'd rather look at you.

45:10 - Chris (Caller)
I love myself. Yeah, but I is. I'm trying to think down the road a couple of years because I don't know when they're going to come out with another iPad, so I might with the one. Teraboy, I might want to add a lot on there.

45:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the biggest difference between your M1 and the new M4 is the screen, the OLED screen is noticeably beautiful the screen is miraculous. Unfortunately, it's not showing well because it's so bright, so much brighter than our cameras.

45:36 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I mean honestly, I forget sometimes and I pull open that iPad and I've just been on my Mac or I've been looking at something else and I go.

45:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to do everything.

45:46 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I wish this 11-inch screen was 15 inches.

45:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just gorgeous.

45:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I just turned it down, so look how beautiful it is.

45:52 - Chris (Caller)
I love those socks, by the way, leo, those are really cool.

45:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know, it's Pride Month and I am very proud that my mother made me these rainbow socks.

45:59 - Chris (Caller)
Oh, how is mom Mom's all right.

46:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mom's in that peaceful kingdom that one gets to if one gets to a certain age. The peace I like that, where all she really cares about is boxes of See's candy delivered Regularly about is, uh, boxes of c's candy delivered regularly, pretty much regularly, by her son. Uh, I'm now up to sending her six pounds a month.

46:20 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
oh my god, wow I want to answer you know what if you're 91, going on 92, amen, and yeah, you earned it.

46:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Her she's in great shape but her mind is, you know she's turning. She'd be becoming more childlike right, okay, yeah, and I can't think of a. They won't let her have booze, although her grandson has been apparently sneaking a little. Jim Bean, they won't let her have booze. She used to love her cocktail at night.

46:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Why so?

46:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, but anyway. But they let her have all the candy she wants. And I also told her you can tip people with candy. You can't tip them with money. They won't let you do that because they don't want nice little old ladies signing over their entire fortune to the help, right, but you can tip them with candy. So I think I'm hoping that much of that six pounds is going to people around her to be nice. But they are nice, they love her. They come by, they say is there anything we can do for you, mary? And she says no, but please have a candy.

47:22 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And if there's ever someone she doesn't like, she's like. I know you don't like coconut, so here's a coconut.

47:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the ones I don't like, yeah.

47:31 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
So thanks for asking.

47:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chris. So, uh, she's thanks for asking Chris, she's doing great.

47:34 - Chris (Caller)
Yes, no, no, you know, I love mom. Uh, mom, my mom's in California too. She's doing spectacular actually. But uh, how old's your mom? Uh, she's well, last time we checked she was 85.

47:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we should trade, because my mom's on the East coast and you're on the on the East coast. I'm on the West coast the west coast.

47:55 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Your mom's this is trade, and then I'll take your mom, you take mine. They won't, they probably won't notice your mom, just bring candy, she'll go leo, you look so good.

48:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You seem like you've lost weight. Where's the candy?

48:06 - Chris (Caller)
I think she'd know leo, you know I always say I love you just the way you are my friend. You're absolutely spectacular.

48:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, before I jump, uh so what are you gonna do? Are you gonna go with the? Yeah, which one to do? Are you going to go with the one terabyte?

48:17 - Chris (Caller)
Well, I'm going to go with the one terabyte because I want the 13-inch one. I want that M4 chip because I'm kind of looking down the road. I don't buy a new iPad every year, Actually the last one we got was about two years ago.

48:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the kind of thing that would be in the back of my mind all the time, like I don't have the best one, the new keyboard does like almost $400 for the aluminum. It is outrageous, but it's nice. It's nice, it's aluminum.

48:42 - Chris (Caller)
You're paying for that quality.

48:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're basically getting a laptop, and I think that's really what Apple has finally decided is look, we're going to make two laptops one with a detachable screen running iOS or iPadOS and one with an attached screen running macOS. Basically, if from a distance, this M2 MacBook Air looks exactly like my iPad M4 iPad Interesting, so there's very little difference. So I would say that's why Apple's doing this. They're going in that direction, yeah.

49:13 - Chris (Caller)
I don't mind doing it. I just want something moving forward and I like to keep up with the speed and the apps and everything. But I like the larger screen. It seems like you know, because I still use my iPhone 14 Pro.

49:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got the big screen. You got the 11-inch. I like the 14-inch yeah.

49:27 - Chris (Caller)
I can't do much with the 11-inch anymore because I think that, being in that world, it's sort of like I can't you know.

49:34
I want to spread the screen out a little bit and you can't really do that, so but you did a video recently, mike. It was really, really good on Eufy. You know the technology for the door for the locks. If you could drop me a link in in uh in the chat at some point whenever you get an opportunity, cause I am looking to remove ring permanently and just put what you did where I could just touch it and just unlock you should mention that's an ad.

49:55 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
They're a sponsor you want to know the link to that and I don't know is it in?

50:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, is it on?

50:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
it was very good, though, yeah yeah that's uh credit to anthony nielsen who yeah boy, they set that thing up like a major motion picture.

50:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think there was a. It was really good. It was a. There was a car chase posting it in explosions and you Explosions.

50:14 - Chris (Caller)
And you're moving Leo to a new house. No, no, I'm staying in the old place.

50:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're moving the studio because in about, I think, in a month.

50:22 - Chris (Caller)
Thank you, Micah.

50:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're going to shut this place down, so that's the big move, unfortunately, Well, I'm sorry to see you lose the studio you were excited about moving. You know I love the studio, but we just can't afford it.

50:34 - Chris (Caller)
It's expensive in California.

50:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and so we will save money. We still have a lease, but we will only be paying the lease. We won't be paying insurance and lights.

50:43 - Chris (Caller)
Well, you have my support, no matter what you want to do. Thank you, always there for you. We love our club members.

50:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I see you in the Discord. Thank you for your support.

50:51 - Chris (Caller)
Thank you Take care, chris, all the way. Thank you, take care Bye. Thank you for having me.

50:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did not Cheers. I did not ask Anthony do we have any special? Appearances today we have Sam Sam Abulsamet, our car guy, coming up in 10. But let's see, speaking of cars, I think we have a guy who's living in a BART train here. Let's see if we can. He showed us his piece his thing and he said I think I fixed it, so let's see Hello can you hear me?

51:21 - Jim (Caller)
Yay, we can hear you.

51:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you for calling, yes, yes.

51:31 - Jim (Caller)
Yes, sorry it's, let me get this stuff here off my screen. Yeah, it's a case of analog sabotage of digital. Uh, it is, I don't know if you can see it, it's a uh trrs headphone splitter, oh yeah, which makes the computer think that I've got a mic on my headphones so it disconnects, okay yeah, and I don't know why it says owner. It should say jim from hollywood hills that is from hollywood hills.

52:01
How are you? Yeah, it's. It's the guy with the massive, massive book manuscript, uh, that I talked to you about over a year ago, I forgot all about you.

52:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hi, good to see you.

52:15 - Jim (Caller)
Well, like Topsy, it keeps growing. It's now past 2,000 pages and 800,000 words Wow. I was at the Sending Gear Expo on Friday and I discovered that my sound cart weighs 325 pounds. I can now swap out two of the wheels for hub motor wheels and a battery, and it will climb up the ramp into my SUV. Oh I like that I'm struggling to push it.

52:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How nice. So how much does the book weigh?

52:48 - Jim (Caller)
Probably 324 pounds, refresh my memory and the memory of everybody who's watching.

52:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So anyhow, that's why Refresh my memory and the memory of everybody who's watching. What is the book about?

52:57 - Jim (Caller)
Okay, I'm a production sound mixer. I record the actors' voices during the production of television and films and now videos. And so many young people are coming into the business and they're completely disconnected from the real world. They stare at their phones, they play video games. So they get a 6 am call. They go out at 5 am, their car has a flat tire. They have no idea what to do. So it's a book about sound recording. Love it, and about 20% of it is how to change a flat tire and other things like that, so you don't get fired kids don't know anymore.

53:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, over your, over your left shoulder. There, that is your sound cart, I think. Right, no, what is that?

53:45 - Jim (Caller)
that is actually a spaceship from the original series, tv series v out of sync, let me got it right.

53:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I wasn't talking about the thing oh, over over your right shoulder. Let me see if I got this. I was talking about the thing on that side which is, I think, you and your sound card. Let's see the picture again, because I think that's you in a few years ago and there's more than if more than a few. Yeah, v hasn't been on. Oh, I loved v, though. What a great series that was. And there you are doing the sound recording for Dialogue, right.

54:18 - Jim (Caller)
Yeah, although actually that isn't on V, that's on the V set. This was from one of the five De Palma movies. I did Body Double and we ran out of stage space so we did all of our smaller sets on the old hangar deck from.

54:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
V. Wow, I love Body Double. I was really mad. I bought it from Apple and they cut out one of the best scenes in that movie because it was too adult. Yes, so I have the censored version of one of my favorite brian de palma films. That's a great movie. Yeah, love body double very nice.

54:59 - Jim (Caller)
I started with him on phantom of the paradise.

55:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my, then I did blow out then blow out another great movie yeah then untouchables and wound up with, uh, bonfire of the vanities were you on the untouchable set when they did the scene with the baby carriage going down the stairs? Oh yes, yes holy cow.

55:21
Yes, so for people who don't remember this, watch the movie again. But there is a shootout. What is it? A post office? I can't remember a government building of some kind. There's a shootout and, of course, a lot of civilians. There's a sailor diving out of the way and through the whole shootout you've got elliot ness, played by uh, uh costner. Is it costner? Yes, kevin costner, elliot ness, and he's shooting it out with the bad guys, the grum runners. And, uh, mother dives and the baby carriage gets loose and starts going down the stairs and dodging the bullets as it's going down the stairs. I won't tell you how it ends, but it ends happily. Let's put it that way. But that must have been an amazing. How many takes did they have to do for that?

56:11 - Jim (Caller)
Not many, but it's the rehearsal On some shots. Yeah, we rehearse for an entire day and don't shoot anything. Wow, because he likes, like his opening stuff, he has these amazing things and uh, in fact, uh, it's uh. At the beginning of blow we originally had a 20 minute single take of the weirdo looking through the windows in the girl's door Right, but it was considered too slow so they had to cut it up to speed it up. Wow, now the camera magazine only holds 11 minutes of film, so we had to cheat. He looks through the window, he sees a security guard, so he ducks down and his pov goes into blackness that's where we change the magazine and it comes back up again hey, is this all in the book?

57:07
uh a lot of it is yes I don't care about changing attire.

57:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know how to do that, yes, but I want to hear these anecdotes from the Brian De Palma folks. Well, I'll tell you.

57:15 - Jim (Caller)
before I got started on that book, I was writing secrets of a Hollywood voyeur. Oh how funny, because you listen to them. I've got a thousand pages of that. Sadly, my mentor, who was 10 years older than I, developed a deterioration of his memory and I'd mentioned a show he worked on. He had no memory of it at all. So I thought I'd better write down everything.

57:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and your memory is still good.

57:46 - Jim (Caller)
Yeah, yes, after I get my textbook out, I'll finish that one you know it's fun about Blowout.

57:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's about a sound guy, isn't it? Isn't it? He was yeah.

57:54 - Jim (Caller)
Yes, he was, and I was also the technical advisor on that show, oh nice. But I took my name off because every time Brian would ask how something's done and I'd tell him he'd say well, that's not exciting, that's not visual.

58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know that's. This is movies. This isn't real Right.

58:11 - Jim (Caller)
So Travolta's out recording wind sound effects with no windscreen on. Yeah, of course.

58:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's fine.

58:19 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
He said I will not put my name on that. I would love to hear the stories on this.

58:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is so great, wow. He hears an assassination attempt in his recording.

58:30 - Jim (Caller)
Yeah, and there was a guy who had shot a bunch of still frames so he made a movie out of it and sunk it up and saw the flash in the bushes.

58:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is based on a great Antonioni movie called one of my favorite movies, called Blow Up.

58:46 - Jim (Caller)
Blow Up yes.

58:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A photographer accidentally witnesses a murder or thinks he was witnessing a murder. Yeah, same idea, but sound instead of pictures. How fun is that? Well, anyway, we almost out of time because Sam's coming up. So what can we do for you, jim? Let me make it quick.

58:59 - Jim (Caller)
Yeah, I had a problem with my manuscript freezing the computer. I remember this, so I had a custom-made computer and now the task manager, when it freezes, shows only 20% CPU use and even less RAM, shows only 20% CPU use and even less RAM. So the 11th generation chip I have has four cores and eight threads. Would this likely to work a lot better if I buy one of the new ones with 20 cores?

59:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, this is not a problem of hardware, unfortunately. It's a problem of software. It's Microsoft Word. Yeah, and I haven't found anything better. I know We've talked about this before. Yeah, the manuscript in all 1,800 pages. How many pages is it now? I don't know. Over 2,000 now? Okay, all of these pages are in one file and Word it's not the. You can throw all the hardware you want at it. It's not going to solve the problem. Word is the problem. It's not designed. You got to divide, you got to chapter it up.

59:56 - Jim (Caller)
I'm sorry to say if you're going to keep using Word. It's in four volumes and I'm going to have to break it up Even more.

01:00:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It just means can't do global searches, and I know it's terrible. That's why we recommended scrivener and some other tools. But you really like word? Yeah?

01:00:10 - Jim (Caller)
I tried them, they, they can't handle it either.

01:00:12 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Yeah, yeah maybe one last question?

01:00:17 - Jim (Caller)
yes, one last question yes, can I get rid of the owner and get my name back there?

01:00:22 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
um, I don't know why. So typically, what you're going to do is you're going to put your cursor over the top of your video and in the bottom right hand corner, I believe it is, you'll see three dots. Um, yeah, uh, click on that and I think there's one that says change name or rename, okay, and then you just put your name all righty, I got it.

01:00:41 - Jim (Caller)
Thank you so much. A real pleasure, jim, I'd stay in touch.

01:00:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't wait. Yeah, I want to hear. Yeah, I want to read the book.

01:00:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I want to hear all these stories. I do know how to change a tire, but I bet there's some stuff in there that you'll be able to teach me.

01:00:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We will put a link in the show notes to a page from Scooter X of the best book writing software for writers.

01:01:05 - Jim (Caller)
I'm sorry to say Scrivener is number one on this list, but maybe there's some other things that will. Well, you know, I'll definitely check it out.

01:01:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, maybe there's some other things that might work as well. I'm not sure I trust this list, because the number four is Microsoft Excel, excuse me or Google Sheets For a book, a spreadsheet program, really. But there are some dedicated programs.

01:01:24 - Jim (Caller)
Yeah, no, no, I will definitely check them out and, of course and I joined your club too- oh, jim, I can support you that way.

01:01:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, please stay in touch, jim, thank you. Oh no, I, I will, I and finish the gd book, will you? Yeah, you've got people dying to read it.

01:01:40 - Jim (Caller)
I gotta read it. I I know, but, as I say, I wasinegear Expo and I found four things that I have to include. I love it, not just the electric wheels.

01:01:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
The audio book's going to take you a year.

01:01:51 - Jim (Caller)
I also love it that a sound guy.

01:01:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is what happens with tech people. We get too techie and your tip ring sleeve plug was failing. Yeah, or it's not failing. It was doing its job. No, no. The computer thought.

01:02:02 - Jim (Caller)
I had a mic here. The laptop failed because it thought you had a mic. Yeah, yeah.

01:02:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's great that you found it. I just love it. The sound guy had trouble, just shows you.

01:02:10
We do so much stuff that more things can go wrong. Jim, hey, the computer's smarter than I am. No, it's not, I promise you. It's great to talk to you. Thanks so much. Take care. Love that guy Me too. Doesn't that book sound amazing? Yes, I can't wait. I can't wait the stories of a sound man. Now it is time to take a little break, a little pause, and then Sam Abul-Samad, our car guy, is coming up to talk automobiles. You're watching, ask the Tech Guys with tech guys, with Micah Sargent and Leo Laporte. Sam Abul-Sam, oh, I saw him. I saw him. He peeked through. Sam Abul-Sam is here. He's principal researcher at GuideHouse Insights, he is the host of the Wheelbearings podcast with Robbie and Nicole and he is our regular expert on automotive technology. Hi Sam, hello, hello Leo, hello, micah, helloah, hello sam, welcome, good to see you. What is that raspberry pi looking device over your right shoulder there?

01:03:12 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
oh, that's only just just slightly more powerful than a raspberry?

01:03:16
um, it just just just barely, not much, but you know it's a little more powerful it's got a lot of ports there on the side, it seems yeah, well, over the last couple of weeks you guys have been talking, you know, on the various shows, a lot of ports there on the side, it seems. Yeah, over the last couple of weeks you guys have been talking on the various shows a lot about how many tops you know the Snapdragon X and the Apple M4s and all these things are producing, and so I just thought I'd throw the automotive version of that into the mix here.

01:03:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So tops, we should explain is the metric people use for AI engines and it stands for trillion operations per second. I don't know how good or bad it is, but it's what everybody uses. Apple's M4 iPad is 38 tops. The new Copilot Plus PCs run the Snapdragon Elite X, which goes to 48 tops. So that's the ballpark. How many tops for that thing?

01:04:09 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
So that board that's over my shoulder. There is an NVIDIA Drive Orin development board that has two Orin chips on there. The Orin is the current production generation of NVIDIA's top chip for doing uh, adas systems, driver systems. Each one of those does 250 tops, so there's 500.

01:04:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a little bit faster, just just a wee bit faster. Why does a car need so many tops?

01:04:45 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, if you're going to do automated driving, there's a lot of processing that goes on. I mean, you know because you're potentially, for example, if you're talking about a robo-taxi type of vehicle, you've typically got somewhere between 12 and 20 cameras around the vehicle. In most cases, on those types of vehicles you're looking at, you know, usually eight megapixel cameras, so you've got a lot of pixels to process. Plus, you might have anywhere from three to five LiDAR sensors, maybe 10 or so, 10 to 12 radar sensors, all of which have to be processed in real time, and you know. So you can't just sit around and wait for all of this stuff to happen, like you can. You know if you're putting a prompt into your browser window, you know if it takes. You know 5, 10 seconds, a minute, two minutes, not the end of the world, it doesn't really matter.

01:05:45
This stuff has to happen. You know in the span you have to process every one of those sensor signals in somewhere between 50 and 100 milliseconds. So it takes a lot of computing power to do that in a vehicle. And you know this is a dual Oren board. There's a Chinese company called Xiaopeng, or is it NIO, nio, nio. On some of their newer vehicles. They're using an NVIDIA system that has four orans in there, so 1,000 tops to do their driver assist systems in there. I had no idea.

01:06:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Compare that, say, to a Tesla with FSD. Do we know how much processing is in a Tesla? Yeah, about 140 tops.

01:06:34 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Okay, so this is a lot bigger. Yes, much more power, much more computing power on this than the current Tesla FSD computer.

01:06:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you should definitely not take your M4 iPad out for a ride.

01:06:48 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
No, definitely not. But keep in mind you know that the Tesla system only has eight cameras and they're only depending on what position they are on the vehicle. They're either 1.2 or 2.7 megapixels. Oh, that's ridiculous. So this is handling eight megapmegapixel camera images.

01:07:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And LiDAR probably as well right.

01:07:09 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, and can handle LiDAR and radar and all of the other stuff that also has to happen in real time, and you're also doing redundant calculations in here, typically using at least two different algorithms that are doing the same thing and cross-checking each other for safety. There are a couple of slight downsides to this, besides it being rather pricey.

01:07:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are there any cars with this in it now? Oh yeah, yeah, Like a Lucid or something right.

01:07:42 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
There's actually quite a few in China that have those. Lucid is not using the Orin right now. They're using it, I think, or maybe they are. No, they're not. They're not using the Orin at the moment, but that would explain why some cars are really pricey.

01:07:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, no inexpensive car would have this device in it. I would think.

01:08:04 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Not this one, but there are versions of this that are lower power or, depending on the type of system you're doing, so there are versions that can support lower power consumption and lower cost. Just this past week, rivian revealed their updated version of the R1T and R1S, their electric pickup and SUV. They have switched from their previous 8S system used an Ambarella CV2 chip. They're now using a dual-ORAN system so that they'll have the ability to add more capability to those vehicles like hands-free driving. Add more capability to those vehicles like hands-free driving.

01:08:49
Also, volvo started production this past week of the EX90 in Charleston, south Carolina, which is their new three-row electric SUV. It also has a dual Orin system for its ADAS. Next year, mercedes-benz is going to have some new vehicles that use Orin systems. So there's actually quite a few out there, and this is not even the top of the top of the line for NVIDIA. Starting at the end of this year or early 2025, the first vehicles from Zeker will be using the NVIDIA Thor chip, which is their next generation chip for driver-assistant automated driving. Thor does 2,000 tops from a single chip.

01:09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God. Now does this mean it's better at full self-driving Right, just because it's?

01:09:40 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
got more processing. It's faster, but is it?

01:09:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
better.

01:09:43 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It all depends on the software you're running and the sensors you're running. Yeah, there's a lot of other things involved in the training. It certainly has the potential to be better. Right, you know there's no guarantee. I mean, if you have software that doesn't do the job, you know, and if you don't do things like I talked about having redundant algorithms as well, as you know all the you need redundant hardware to do automated driving, but you also need redundant algorithms. So you're you're running um, you might be running an end to end uh neural network system uh, in parallel with a more deterministic, traditional rules based algorithm.

01:10:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why would a Zeekr have such a giant top? This is the Zeekr, by the way, which is, I think, a brand a lot of people are unfamiliar with. Yeah, I've never heard of it.

01:10:35 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, it's not sold here. It's a Chinese brand. It's part of Geely Group. Geely also happens to own Volvo and Polestar and Lincoln Co and quite a few other brands. Zeker.

01:10:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Z-E-E-K-R.

01:10:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
My little brother's name is Ezekiel and we used to call him Zeker. That was his nickname. Oh really, that's the only reason I know of Zeker.

01:10:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is this a really expensive vehicle.

01:11:03 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It's kind of a mid-range premium, roughly equivalent to, like a lexus so it's a luxury premium brand?

01:11:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, but it's not a. It's not a bentley, and you could currently only buy it in sweden, germany and the netherlands uh, in in europe.

01:11:20 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yes, uh, you can also buy it in China and some other countries in Asia. Okay, could I buy it and import it? No, at least not until let's see 2049. So it would have to be 25 years old before you can import it. I guess I won't do that. You're allowed to import cars that don't meet US safety requirements 25 years after they're built. Oh, so Okay.

01:11:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you can't buy a new Zeekr in 2049. You just have to wait. Buy a Zeekr today and wait until 2049.

01:11:57 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Buy a Zeekr today or buy a used one in 2049 and bring it in.

01:12:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I'm not going to buy any car that has side mirrors. I'm convinced that the future has no side mirrors, Just like Elon's, convinced there's no LiDAR In other countries.

01:12:15 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
that's already true.

01:12:18
You can already buy cars with no side mirrors. Yeah, they'll have like a little wing with a camera that hangs out where the mirrors are today and rather than a big old mirror that's. You know, I like that trying to drive through the air. Yeah, just have a little camera there that is looking back and then there'll be screens, uh, inside the car, um, somewhere near the base of the a pillar on either side. You know roughly where you would look for your mirrors, uh, and it'll project that information there on those screens.

01:12:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how I know I'm not going to want a Zeekr in 25 years because it still has mirrors.

01:12:54 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I believe they do have versions of those, or at least some of them, like the old one I think they have without mirrors. I've driven a few cars without side mirrors like that, but I've driven a few cars without side mirrors like that. Lotus, which is also now owned by Geely, is among the companies. They have their new Lotus, electra and Amaya EVs have no side mirrors.

01:13:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have cameras on the side. So I went to the Zeker 001 site and I think there's a language gulf here, because it says the luxury shooting break. What is that?

01:13:30 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Do I want that? A shooting break is a European term for a sort of wagon-like vehicle. Oh, that's a thing.

01:13:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We call them station wagons. A sporty, they call them oh, because you're going shooting with it.

01:13:44 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
That's kind of where it came from. Yeah, like you know, hunting vehicles. Yeah, you know that that the nobles would take out, you know, on the, on the uh, on the manor grounds darling bring around the shooting break.

01:13:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's, it's, it's an it's it's an english thing you know oh okay, so was right, it is a language problem because you know, england and America are two countries that share a different language, or something like that.

01:14:12 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, all right. So Countries divided by a common language. That's it. Thank you, churchill.

01:14:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Great. So it's interesting that they're putting so much computing power in these things.

01:14:25 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
There are a couple of other minor issues why you perhaps might not want to use these chips in your iPad or in a laptop. They consume a little bit of power. Each Orin consumes somewhere between 150 and 200 watts to drive it.

01:14:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yikes, that's a lot. It's like an Incan doesn't light bulb, yikes, to drive it.

01:14:47 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yikes, that's a lot. It's like an Incan doesn't light bulb, yikes. Yeah, exactly, I mean you know this chip. Keep in mind. This is an SOC that contains a bunch of high-end ARM cores. It contains a whole bunch of GPU cores. So the GPU cores in the Orin are the same cores, the same GPU microarchitecture, that you'll find in those H100 GPUs that all the AI companies seem to want, nice, and then also a bunch of Tensor cores and some various other AI accelerator cores. So there's about 200 million transistors in there. Maybe it's 200 billion.

01:15:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's got to be more than a million, it's got to be a billion.

01:15:34 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It's a big chip Because an M4 has like a trillion transistors in it, so yeah, so there's a lot of horsepower and, of course, because it's consuming so much power, it also needs to be liquid cooled, unless you want a liquid cooled iPad.

01:15:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, do they really need all this horsepower to drive?

01:15:57 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It depends on what you want. Like I said, it depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to try to make something that is actually remotely close to self-driving, yes. If you just want to do ABS and cruise control, no, you don't need that.

01:16:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I'm going to correct myself. The M4 iPad has 28 billion transistors.

01:16:18 - Richard (Caller)
Oh, thank you.

01:16:19 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Not a trillion.

01:16:21 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Then it was like somewhere in the order of 200 billion transistors on the Orin, 10 times the size of the iPad, and even more on Thor, which is the new one that's coming out. That one's 2,000 tops. That's amazing. That's amazing.

01:16:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sam Abul-Samad, the car guy, and now he's like the PC guy. Yeah, wow.

01:16:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You're really crossing the streams here. These are computers with wheels, basically, and yeah, yeah, absolutely back in my day, I just had to hit the thing with a wrench and it started working again.

01:16:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wheels and shooting brakes everything you need uh to to transport your gun.

01:16:58 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
When I started my engineering career. Um, micah, um, we were using intel uh adc 196 microcontrollers for abs. Oh wow, and those, uh they had, uh, it was a, it was a 12 megahertz chip, uh, that had 12k of rom, or 12k, yeah, 12k of rom on board and 64 bytes, not kilobytes 64, 64 bytes of RAM. Oh my God.

01:17:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's amazing, and we made an ABS system and you were able to make an ABS system. What is a? So I've got a car from 2014, which has ABS. Has that technology significantly improved or improved much?

01:17:39 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Oh yes.

01:17:40 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Yeah, I just didn't know if they had to.

01:17:42 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
What car do?

01:17:42 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
you have.

01:17:43 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's a Subaru Impreza.

01:17:45 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, no, it's absolutely way beyond anything we were doing in 1990.

01:17:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I didn't know. It was just like well, we've solved it. So do we really need to improve upon anti-lock braking?

01:17:56 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, anything in the last dozen years by default has electronic stability control as a minimum.

01:18:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had a 1998 Lada that still had a hand crank in the front to get it started, so I don't believe I don't believe that for a second in college starting up my lada in the snow. A whole lot of b.

01:18:19 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I know somebody who owned a lot. I grew up in canada where they actually sold lottadas for a number of years.

01:18:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the old.

01:18:24 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Soviet vehicles, and I cannot picture you driving a Lada Driving a Lada.

01:18:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The nice thing about it is you knew how fast you were going because you could see. In the hole in the floor you could see the road going by. Oh yeah, absolutely.

01:18:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It was a Flintstones vehicle, it was kind of like that Pretty much, yeah, yeah.

01:18:49 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I think it would be cool to have like a mirror, or not a mirror, but something clear. I don't know why I knew about that.

01:18:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you took a salt shaker and, you know, shook it in the general direction of a lotto, it would turn to iron oxide. The archaic lotta neva had a crank hole through its front bumper all the way until 1998. Yeah uh, but that was for farmers visiting rural areas in the soviet union, and you know if your battery went dead?

01:19:09 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
yeah, it's always good to have to start it a little. Starter right there wow, well, my, my friends at the uh, the youtube channel, tfl um, they actually have they. Last year they bought a 1914 model t and they've done a series of videos with that. They took it to a McDonald's drive-thru oh fun. And they also took it to a local Ford dealer. They're based in Boulder and they took it to a local Ford dealer for an oil change. That was quite entertaining. That's hilarious.

01:19:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'll tell you one thing. You don't want to do is get in a helicopter and fire fireworks after a Lamborghini. This is a YouTuber who decided that it would be really cool. This is the problem with YouTube it encourages extreme behavior. He thought it would be really cool to show two people in a helicopter shooting fireworks I'll show you At a Lamborghini that was driving to escape up in the desert there. He's now been charged with a federal crime facing up to 10 years in prison. Yeah, that seems very dangerous For bringing explosives. Yeah, that's just stupid. That's just dumb. All that for views, wow. Yeah, that's just stupid. That's just dumb. All that for views, wow.

01:20:29 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, if you want to view something, what you should do is go to the Wheelbearings YouTube channel, yeah, and view my walkthrough video of the Michigan Central Station. This is a train station in Detroit that had closed in 1988. These beautiful old train stations, they're so gorgeous. It was vacant for 36 years. Ford bought it in 2018, and they refurbished it, and they just had the grand opening ceremony this week for the train station.

01:21:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it like?

01:21:06 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
a station, is it it was. It was actually done by the same architects that did, uh, I think, penn station, the old penn station, oh, not the most beautiful station in new york, but this looks very, very yeah, it's. It's amazing when when you go through the save and that's great.

01:21:23
Yeah, I, yeah, I did a walkthrough there to show all the stuff that they did. They did some pretty amazing stuff, like finding the building. The first thing they had to do was pump 3.5 million gallons of water. It was filled with water. There were no windows, ground water, most of the roofs was destroyed. Yeah well, I mean from rain from three decades of rain.

01:21:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Unfortunately, this is going to be a short video because it's locked. No, no, no.

01:21:49 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
There we go. I stepped outside, not realizing you locked yourself out.

01:21:54 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Yeah, not realizing the door was locked.

01:21:55 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, it's magnificent, the building.

01:21:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I read an interesting article the other day. Why don't we build buildings like this anymore? We don't build ornate cathedrals to commerce anymore, because it's very expensive. It's extremely expensive. The craftspeople who did this are gone.

01:22:16 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, since 2018, over 3,100 people worked on the construction on the building Wow, plus several hundred researchers going through finding the plans, finding the designs for everything.

01:22:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did Ford do this just out of civic pride?

01:22:35 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, partly, they're going to be occupying several floors of the tower.

01:22:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's office space. Good, okay.

01:22:40 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
There's office space. There's going to be a hotel in there.

01:22:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But no trains anymore, I bet.

01:22:45 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Not yet. They are working with Amtrak office space. There's going to be a hotel in there, uh, but no trains anymore, I bet. Uh not yet. Um, they are working with, uh, amtrak, they're. They're having discussions with amtrak about restoring service to the station and, you know, having it be a working station again.

01:22:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, but you know some some, some elements of this.

01:22:59 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Uh, like the limestone. Uh, you know there was a lot of pieces that had been removed by scavengers over the years or that, just you know, fell off. You should see the Parthenon. Yeah, I have seen it. They, you know, they searched, you know they went to a bunch of different quarries to find, to try and find, limestone that matched what was there in the building, and they could not find anything that was the right match. And this is what you're showing right now is the pits on some of the columns. So in some areas of the building they left some of it as it was, without restoring it, to show the chapters of the building's history. But for the limestone, they actually tracked down the original quarry where they had got the limestone for the building and then it had been closed about the same time as the building was in the late 80s, so it had been closed for over 30 years. They tracked down the owner of the quarry, convinced them to reopen it temporarily so they could quarry more limestone to restore this building. That's amazing.

01:24:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The work they did is just unbelievable, yeah well, good, that's on the youtube channel for wheel bearings. Uh, just go to youtubecom, slash wheel bearings and, uh, there are a lot of wheel bearings. So it's at wheel bearings cast because it's a podcast, so it's a little easier to find it if you go to what 500? What I'm going to add, let's make it 502 subscribers. Look at that and look at that video. This is the very first video on the list, but you can also watch the show in there and so forth. Hey, sam, always a pleasure. Thank you for being here. My pleasure. Have a great day, guys. This man has thousands of tops, thousands of them. Take care, sam.

01:24:46 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I'm a bull Sam.

01:24:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Car guy and principal researcher at GuideHouse Insights. I want to show. It came to me. Remember we were talking to Jim and his book is 2,000 pages. It's too big for any normal word processor. Now I know Jim uses Windows, but I am reminded I reminded myself about this.

01:25:05
This is a WordPress I used for years on the Mac and it's still around. In fact it is now out for Apple Silicon called Nisys Writer. That has no theoretical limit on file size Wow and is designed to handle super big files, especially if you run it in draft mode. They have a formatted mode. Their default document format is very efficient. It's RTF, much more efficient than Word's DocX format. But also, if you put it in draft mode then you don't see all the formatting and it can handle thousands of pages. Now I realize, jim, that you'd have to go out and buy a Mac, but the good news is, if you find somebody with a Mac, they have, I think, a one-month free trial so you could download nicest writer pro load in your your, your book and see if you can use it. It has a very good search, grep style search. This is a really wonderful word processor. That never got the attention.

01:25:59 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Yeah, I was going to say I've never, heard of it.

01:26:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you're a Mac guy In the early days of Mac. This was really a remarkable word processor Nisus, n-i-s-u-s dot com. So, jim, if you could find somebody with a Mac or I happen to have a Mac, so if you just send me your manuscript, I promise not to read it If you just send me your manuscript, I will be glad to try it in NISIS. I have owned a copy of NISIS since the 80s. Believe it or not, I love it. Wow, it's a great little word processor. Okay, how nice. Okay, what should we do now, mr Anthony Nielsen, let's take a quick break and then come back with Richard, who's on the line. A quick break, richard, get ready, because we're going to go to you next on Ask the Tech Guys with Micah Sargent and Leo Laporte. All right, our next call is Richard.

01:26:59 - Richard (Caller)
Hello Richard, I'm doing all right Good. What I was wondering? I want to switch over to like a VoIP internet provider service, but I tried. I got a UMA system. Oh yeah, they've been around for ages. Uma will not allow me to transfer my landlines over, for some reason.

01:27:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you want to keep your phone number? Yes, this is funny. Landline's over for some reason. Oh, you want to keep your phone number? Yes, this is funny, this. We used to talk about this all the time and we haven't done much lately.

01:27:33 - Richard (Caller)
You know, most people don't have landlines anymore, they just use their cell phone yeah, I know I looked on uh videos for voip and most of them are either business or they're like four or six years old if they're talking about home service.

01:27:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we still use a VoIP service here in the business called RingCentral. They were a sponsor for a long time, I noticed. By the way, they have now added AI as one of their selling points. I think probably. How techie are you? I?

01:28:05 - Richard (Caller)
think probably if how techie are you? Not too bad? I mean, I do a lot of my own electronic stuff I'll build my own computers and stuff.

01:28:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
OK, there is an open source phone. I mean, it is like a phone system on steroids called Asterisk. It is free, so it's open source. You run it on a computer and it becomes your basically a PBX. If you wanted a very sophisticated phone system, asterisk has been for years the way to go. It is for a more techie person like you. You've built your own PC. You're certainly equipped to do this. It usually runs on Linux. You put it on a headless PC in the corner, connect it to the internet and then you get VoIP phones to go with it. So they have a variety of IP-based phones. They're mostly business-focused because this is really a PBX system. But if you want landline phones, I'm suspecting that you want a phone system because you have more sophisticated needs. Right, it's not just for a phone to put next to the bed, I would presume.

01:29:22 - Richard (Caller)
Well, mainly I wanted to get rid of the landlines, because my landlines are like 60 some bucks a piece.

01:29:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, oh, you know landlines yeah, now yeah I have two of them I think asterisk might not be a bad way to go. There's a great community around it. Uh, they have a forum, uh, and a wiki. I would, I would take a look at it anyway, just to see if it might be overkill. Oops, the wiki's down temporarily. It looks like might be overkill, but this is what we would. You know what the pros, you know, like the head, the really serious phone heads, would use otherwise. Yeah, there are commercial products, like uma ring central's one um, I checked like vonage.

01:30:09 - Richard (Caller)
I know vonage would switch my numbers over, but I'm not sure how well.

01:30:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is.

01:30:16 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I mean, it's kind of a dying categories is part of the problem somebody said that they did use uma and that they um struggled at first to transfer their landline but were eventually able to um.

01:30:28 - Richard (Caller)
I don't know how much you troubleshooted to get that to work, but yeah because I had called them and tried to talk to them to get it to transfer, but they said they can't transfer it at this time here's my biggest concern.

01:30:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a dying category, and if you're relying on any company to provide you with VoIP, I don't know how much longer they're going to be around. I mean frankly, copper phone lines are on the way out, right, so why do you need a phone line?

01:31:03 - Richard (Caller)
It's just. My parents use the phone line.

01:31:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay, it's something that they want to use, still has phone lines as people my age, uh, I know my in-laws um, they they have, they have call waiting but they don't know how to use it. So so you basically have to call. You have to call when they're not on the phone and I just hope, because they don't have an answer, they don't have nothing. And if you, it's like the old days, when you but that's because they're in their 70s and 80s and that's what they're used to uh, nobody under 30 has a landline anymore, I would guess except I think the service doesn't work out here either ah, now that's a good reason.

01:31:47
Tell me about your internet. What kind of internet can you get out there?

01:31:51 - Richard (Caller)
I actually got Starlink now and that works a lot better, because I do still have my old internet, which is a DSL on copper, and that is pretty painful, yeah, but the Starlink is really good is pretty painful.

01:32:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but the Starlink is really good. So do they offer? I would think they would offer a VoIP add-on, to be honest with you, but they don't. Huh, no, that's an opportunity for them. But I guess because most internet service providers do offer VoIP, right, if you have Comcast or Cox, any of them you can use. Yeah, this is wind stream. Yeah, you don't. Yeah, you're out in the in the boonies, which is great in a beautiful area. Um, here's one recommended by our chat room. I'm not familiar with it voipms. Voipms? Um voted best provider on Capterra. That's a good sign 85 cents a month. So this might be another one. I don't have any experience with this one, but you can transfer your current phone number.

01:32:55 - Richard (Caller)
It says yeah, that's the same thing Uma said, but for some reason this area that they cannot transfer the number.

01:33:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wonder then it's not Uma's fault or it's your carrier that maybe their federal law requires them to offer number portability. But a small carrier might be able to snake out of that by saying oh, we don't have some.

01:33:17 - Richard (Caller)
No, Windstream's not a very small carrier either.

01:33:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a name I know. Yeah, I wonder if Windstream is the issue.

01:33:25 - Richard (Caller)
Yeah, they could be. They're pretty difficult to work with because they bought our phone service here and then, when they bought it, they actually closed the main building down. There's no actual office in the area either.

01:33:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the sad, sad story of telecommunications in the United States. They do offer VoIP Windstream does, but it doesn't sound like you want to do that.

01:33:52 - Richard (Caller)
Yeah, because, like I said, I mean I've got a, you know, I've got one that one line that has the phone and the internet from them on it, and then one is just the phone and they only differ by like a dollar.

01:34:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so one's like 62 and the other one's 63 yeah, I think you're paying because you're living, uh, in the country. I'm sorry to say what would be a good alternative? You don't have cell cell's expensive anyway, right, it's gonna be more than $60 a month per line. You don't have good internet. I wonder if there's any Starlink VoIP providers.

01:34:31 - Richard (Caller)
Well, that's what I've got now for Starlink, but I don't know. Yeah, but I wonder if there's somebody that specifically works with Starlink. I know there's been. They're working with cell phone providers where you get cell service right off the Starlink satellites, but that's not active yet.

01:34:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, it does say UMA and MagicJack, which is the other big consumer VoIP company, work with Starlink, so that's a good sign. Have you tried MagicJack yet?

01:35:04 - Richard (Caller)
No, not yet. Like I said, I did get the UMA equipment and it works really good. But, like I said, they won't let me transfer my numbers over.

01:35:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm going to guess that is Windstream, not UMA. The UMA wants to, and I wonder if Windstream is somehow exempt from the Fed. Fcc requires number portability. That took a federal law to do that by way. That wasn't easy. These guys don't want to give that up. Um, you might have to change numbers. Uh, uma and magic jack are very similar.

01:35:36
Um, and then, of course, a lot of people use uh, you know things like microsoft teams or sky Skype, or you could buy a phone number from Skype. You might even be able to port it over to Skype. That might be a cheaper way to go. I used to have a when my daughter was living in France. I had a international calling plan for Skype. It was very inexpensive and I was able to talk to her all the time and it added video as well. See, if you can port it to either skype or google voice. If you have trouble porting it, then it's windstream, and then I would say a call to windstream. Good luck, yeah, and say look, what's your policy on porting? Why can't I get this stuff ported, especially if you?

01:36:22 - Richard (Caller)
match because we just have so much numbers too.

01:36:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's funny. I used to recommend ob talk. We really liked ob talk a lot. They are now gone, defunct. Um ob high was really cool. We used it with google voice for free phone service with a real number. I would look at, say if you could sign up with google voice and port your number over, or see if you can do magic jack and port your number over. If all of the services say yeah, we can't, then it's windstream yep, and then at least you know where to where to focus your energy call your member of congress.

01:36:59
What state are you in? Uh, minnesota. Call, uh, call amy klobuchar and say amy, honey, baby cookie, sweetie. Don't say that. Don't say that she's known to throw things. I would not say that that's probably a good idea. Yeah, um, well, yeah, this is, this is frustrating. I say I share your, uh, your pain. I don't know of a good way to do this. You are the, you're the, the place where you really need VoIP, frankly, and now that you have Starlink, at least you have. I mean, thank goodness for Starlink, yeah, and you're happy with that? Huh.

01:37:38 - Richard (Caller)
Yeah, well, when we got it at first, we got it in the wintertime and it worked good until summer came. Then the Leafs came and then it didn't work, so you gotta go now I put it on. Uh, I actually installed a tower and put it 55 feet up in the air and it works great.

01:37:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, awesome. What kind of speeds are you getting?

01:37:58 - Richard (Caller)
uh, about, uh, where we're getting. We're getting like about 250 megabytes per second. That's more than they actually they spec.

01:38:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's great, it's pretty good. The real key on VoIP is latency. What's your latency like? Do you know?

01:38:15 - Richard (Caller)
Um, I do believe the latency is like about around 30 milliseconds.

01:38:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it is as long as it's under a hundred. Uh, you know that might be a little lag, but 30 milliseconds is nothing. Um, I think it is as long as it's under 100,. You know that might be a little lag, but 30 milliseconds is nothing. So, yeah, I think you should be able to do something with Starlink. But the real issue is porting those numbers and you might have to tell mom and dad we need a new number. I'm sorry.

01:38:37 - Richard (Caller)
Yeah, because it's like we got so much stuff attached to those numbers too.

01:38:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know If you have it for a long time, I know those numbers.

01:38:48 - Richard (Caller)
I know if you have it for a long time, I know, um, let's see, here's an article. They've been here for 50 years, so there's a lot of stuff attached to them yeah, best voip services for starlink says uh, uma, magic jack.

01:38:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and then a company called ax voice, which is a hundred hundred dollars a year, um, so these would be things at least names you could look at. I'll put this in the show notes. It's an article from Blink Blink. I don't know who they are. I looked up specifically for VoIP services with Starlink and this is just an individual, I think. So that's good. He's not in the pocket of big tech like us. No, we're not, are we?

01:39:29 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
No, we're not. I can see your hands. They're not in any pockets.

01:39:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have no hands and no pockets. If only we were in the pocket of big tech. Any big tech company wants to come along and buy us. That's okay. Let me see, I don't know this. Ax voice no additional installation costs. Free voip phone adapter. So that's nice. You plug that into your ethernet port and then your phones continue to work, which is wonderful. Uh, they have a failover feature. This looks pretty good. Um, and it's supposedly you can port your number. All of these supposedly.

01:40:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I think ultimately this comes down to you just uh, trying another one, and if the porting still isn't working, then you just focus all of your energy and attention on the company and say sounds like that's what I'll have to do.

01:40:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep hey, it's a pleasure talking to you yep, yeah, I finally joined your club.

01:40:21 - Richard (Caller)
But I've watched you for many years.

01:40:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, bless you, thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the support. Have a great day. Bye-bye Summer's here in Minnesota. Thank goodness the snow has cleared the green leaves are coming out, it's 50 degrees instead of 30.

01:40:38
If you want to join the club, we would love to have you. We've got great people in there. It is the kind of place too, by the way. You can go into the club, ask these kinds of questions. The club has basically become a forum. We have a lot of different ways you can interact with us, but the club is my favorite because it supports our mission here. Seven bucks a month, now, I know that's maybe not everybody can afford that, but if you listen to more than one show on uh on on Twitter and you like the shows and you can afford seven bucks, I think it's worth it. Ad free versions of all the shows. Somebody said I'm not going to join. I like the ads. No, you're not joining to get the ad, for it's just a bonus feature. Right, you get additional content. Like Mike is crafting corner. Yes, that's coming up very soon. I'm so excited.

01:41:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
What is your first craft going to be? I'm going to be working on I think I'll still be working on a blanket at that point A granny square, actually a granny hexagon blanket that I've been working on. That's so cool but the idea is that everybody has different crafts they like to work on. We all get together and we're just crafting together.

01:41:39 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
We're just chatting while you're crafting?

01:41:41 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, and if Chatting while you're crafting, yeah, and if people have questions about knitting or crochet or something, then there'll be other people there too. So, yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. I know John Ashley's planning on being there with his Lego that he's building. See, that's a craft. Yeah, it's a craft, that's awesome. It absolutely is so all sorts of crafting people, june 19th at the time, 6 pm 6 pm Every third Wednesday of the month.

01:42:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, this is we really want to keep these activities going. Stacy's Book Club now we move that to the 27th 2 pm. We're going to be reading the book High Voltage. It's not too late, you've got a few weeks. You can read High Voltage, let's see. Oh and 10 am tomorrow, you and I will be watching the Apple keynote. You can watch our streams in the Club Twit Discord. You can chat with other Club Twit members all around the clock. You can also have the warm and fuzzy feeling that you're keeping the lights on.

01:42:36
As I had mentioned earlier, we're probably moving out of the studio just to save money. We're really trying to. We want to keep going, really trying to. We want to keep going. But at this point, uh, ad revenue has fallen so dramatically that we think we probably need you, your support now. I have to say the club growth has slowed and I think it's also possible that we've reached the, the limit, like everybody who is going to join the club has joined the club. Prove me wrong. Maybe you haven't joined the club. Twittv slash club twit. Um, twittv slash club twit. Uh, right, we got a phone call. Let's have a phone call. Press star. Hello leo. Oh, you've done, hi what's your?

01:43:23
first name and where are you calling from?

01:43:27 - Ben (Caller)
It's Ben Leo.

01:43:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Hi Ben Ben Leo, hello Ben Leo.

01:43:31 - Ben (Caller)
You remember me from your old Tech Guy podcast, don't you, of course, ben. What can we do for you? It's been a long dang time, old buddy, oh buddy.

01:43:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ben's on the line. Where city are you calling from, Ben?

01:43:45 - Ben (Caller)
Louisville, kentucky, louisville I remember you.

01:43:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do remember you, Ben. Actually yes, Since you said Louisville. Oh, is that Ben?

01:43:52 - Ben (Caller)
Well, how's it going, Micah?

01:43:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's going well. Thank you for asking.

01:44:00 - Ben (Caller)
Thank you for asking. I'm so excited for the dev conference tomorrow. You guys, it's not even funny.

01:44:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you an Apple guy, Ben? Are you a serious?

01:44:09 - Ben (Caller)
Apple user. Oh yes, as a matter of fact, I actually have a dev account with them actually, oh, you're a developer. Even nicer. Yes, yes, and I actually have a slight question about my 14 Pro that I wanted to talk to you about Well, you called the right place.

01:44:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is where you call. This is the place, man, right, right.

01:44:34 - Ben (Caller)
Well, I wanted to ask about upgrading it to the new OS Beta tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I don't know if I'm going to do it. To be truthful, I mean, right now it's running 17, five one, and the main complaint that I have is that, um, it's I've only had, like maybe you know, since the 14th came out and you know I've tested the betas I don't know how many daggone times throughout the years. And my biggest concern is, you know I was looking at the features that might have been leaked. I don't know if any of these are confirmed, but I know they're going to have a lot of AI stuff potentially, and I just don't know how well my 14 Pro would handle the new OS and I'm a little skeptical to do it just because you know. I know in the past Apple has said that not everything in the new OS is going to be compatible the, et cetera.

01:45:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no way that iOS 18 will be incompatible with the latest iphone. Absolutely guarantee you it will be. That's not the problem with betas. When you download a beta, you're running software that's not finished and it's guaranteed there will be bugs not because of the hardware you have the latest hardware but because of what apple's done.

01:46:03
Yeah, because there's bugs. That's why it's not a release version of the software. Now, in the past I have thinking it was my job. I have downloaded beta versions and I've invariably regretted it. There are people like Jason Snell who will do it right away. Micah Sargent will do it.

01:46:21 - Trent (Caller)
Let them take the arrows.

01:46:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ben, let them take the arrows and describe it to you now. There are some things and you're going to see. Tomorrow, 10 am, we're pacific. We're going to watch together, micah and I. Uh, you and I will be there watching with y'all good, wonderful, count on it, ben. So in fact go go in the club and then we can can all have conversations about what's going on, how much is your club thing a month, because I'm not in it right now.

01:46:49
Oh man, Finally I can get over $12,000. Seven bucks a month, Is that too much for you?

01:46:56 - Ben (Caller)
I will. No, that's not a big deal. I will gladly look into that, leo, just one less double cappuccino frappuccino.

01:47:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been sorry never mind, I was just joking go ahead.

01:47:12 - Ben (Caller)
I will gladly sign up to that, hopefully today, because you know that's a good time to join the club, because we'll be in the discord watching it was your iPhone original event that I originally watched and that's what got me into you and the whole shebang are you talking about when we did the 24 hours of iphone?

01:47:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is that the one you're talking about? And steve wasney? Called in that was like the iphone three. Yeah, I was.

01:47:41 - Ben (Caller)
I was watching that, leo.

01:47:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was actually on the line waiting to talk to you back then, oh nice, so we have been old friends for many a moon.

01:47:51 - Ben (Caller)
Yes, yes, and I have actually seen some of your Mac break episodes.

01:47:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the old days, the ones that we did with Alex. The video, yeah.

01:48:02 - Ben (Caller)
So, yes, yeah, and I actually I've actually seen some of your more recent ones, for the matter of fact, here's the suggestion and I've got to tell you, you guys, with Jason, and everything that was, oh my God.

01:48:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're good people. Jason, Andy, Alex, what a great team.

01:48:20 - Ben (Caller)
And I should tell you I've gotten the iPad recently, Leo, and that probably will get the iOS 18 first, just to see if I like it. Well, this is what I was going to say, Ben.

01:48:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me describe what we think is going to be in it. Of course, the definitive answer will be tomorrow, so you can see if there's something you might want, and my strong suggestion, our suggestion always is don't do it on your main device. Do it on a device that you can have be unreliable On a secondary device. We don't know how unreliable, especially when it first comes out Down the road. This won't be the public beta, right.

01:48:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Tomorrow will be the developer's beta.

01:48:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's the most buggy version.

01:49:02 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It's as buggy as it can be, and there are a couple of things, too, that I've always sort of given to people, because it's very easy for me to say, as someone who does install the beta early on, you all should wait. I understand, though, that desire right, but here's the thing. There are versions of Apple's iOS and iPadOS, et cetera that are small changes, and when those updates take place, it's a little less risky to jump into it. This is going to be one of those more risky ones, and I remember a friend of the show, serenity Caldwell, who actually works at Apple now. She and I used to work together at iMore, where Renee Ritchie and I were also there, and I remember her installing the beta on her main device and it bricking the device that night.

01:49:50
Oh gosh, I don't think it'll be that bad. It's not going to be that bad, but that was during the redesign of iOS from its older, skeuomorphic style to the new. Yeah, there was a huge shift, shift, and I think this is going to be based on the rumors. This is one of the bigger shifts. I don't think it was as big as that, but this is one of the bigger shifts.

01:50:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, for example, they say that you'll be able to move these icons around and leave gaps. This will be a big change to what this is called Springboard this is the app that's on the front of the iPhone that you will be able to move these around. That you'll be able to change the colors Some people like to have all the same color. Personally, I'm not that excited about that feature. The features you may get more excited about may not be available tomorrow. That's the AI features. Mark Gurman has said those won't come until next year. So they'll talk about things like an AI chat assistant that maybe you get you excited, but that may not be available tomorrow. So remember here's how the calendar works.

01:50:50
Tomorrow they'll announce a developer beta for ios, ipad os and maybe even mac os. Then sometime later, usually a month later, they'll announce a public beta. At the very least. Even though, ben, you are a developer, I would wait till the public beta at the very least, and I would not put it on a phone that you need. If you had an extra phone, maybe put it on that ipad. Maybe you don't mind not having full functionality on your ipad. I don't think it's going to brick anything.

01:51:20 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It has been a long time since it and, honestly, the way to fix bricking has gotten a lot better, so it's less of a concern, but it is still possible and I would hate for someone to be in a situation where they're doing it in a place and then they suddenly don't have access to the phone. And they need to have access. So just be mindful of that and that's why we recommend the secondary device or waiting until the public beta, because for the public beta it's a little bit more cleaned up. It still is going to have bugs, but there won't be as many and especially not show-stopping bugs. And with Apple redesigning in theory, according to people familiar with the matter Springboard at the very base, like that is at the base level of iOS.

01:52:01
Yeah, that's going to cause some issues.

01:52:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a good point.

01:52:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You don't want your front page to be crashing all the time.

01:52:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's connected to so much too in the system, and then there have been in the past bugs where you'd be on a phone call and it hangs up and hangs up your cellular tower, cellular radio stops working, all sorts of stuff.

01:52:18 - Trent (Caller)
I understand your enthusiasm.

01:52:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I shared that enthusiasm, but I no longer do. I don't even do the public beta anymore. I just wait. I let you guys do it.

01:52:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I used to convince other people to do the public beta. I stopped doing that, but I still do the beta.

01:52:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jason Snell will do it, micah will do it. I'm sure Alex will do it.

01:52:40 - Ben (Caller)
Jason's the guy to Listen to Jason. Leo, another thing, real quick, because I know we're running short on time and all that. But, leo, the Mac OS is one other thing I wanted to touch on. Now. The beta will probably be like. I'm honestly doubting it's going to be Intel compatible. What do you think?

01:53:03 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
The beta will be.

01:53:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, will this be the time that apple says?

01:53:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
no, intel, I mean they don't have any more intel machines, so what?

01:53:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did they say I think it's, I don't think it'll happen yet.

01:53:14 - Trent (Caller)
I mean, I don't remember what they said, but I think they guaranteed like five years I think.

01:53:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think well, I don't know. That's a really interesting question will apple say, because you know, even what they've said in the past may not apply. They may say you know what we decided? We're not going to support Intel with macOS. By the way, what do you think the name will be? Ben, do you have any idea? We're currently Sonoma.

01:53:37 - Ben (Caller)
Well, before we get to that, I actually think it'll be a whole Intel debacle. Do you have a lot of Intel? Well, I actually still have an Intel 11th Gen laptop that's running Sonoma on it.

01:53:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay, so you do have a dog in this hunt. Yeah, I've got the Hackintosh going on Well that one may well be broken those Hackintoshes, yeah they break every time.

01:54:09 - Ben (Caller)
Yes, I know, but you know I'm still gonna give it a whirl regardless, but you know either way um, as far as the name, uh, I don't know what they could possibly come up with after sonoma.

01:54:22
I mean, you know, like craig said, you know it's been 10 years and you know they said they wanted a list of California names that would carry them at least 10 years. So I mean, who knows what that crazy crack product marketing team will show us tomorrow? I mean, you know, we'll just have to find out, man, that's all I can say.

01:54:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's some betting going on, not for real money, for Bitcoin. I've seen Mammoth as one pick. Reddit has quite a few people in the Mac, or I guess it's the Apple subreddit, or I guess it's the Apple subreddit talking about what they think. There was a list let me see if I can find it of trademarks that Apple has registered along these lines. So that should narrow it down a little bit, because they're going to register the trademark first. Let me see if I can find it. Mammoth was one of them. It's been California, right them. It's been california, right, it's been california counties, I think ventura, sonoma, uh, but then there was um big was there, big sir, that's not a county.

01:55:35 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Yeah, that's a feature.

01:55:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was catalina which is again a feature. So, um, I'm not sure. Let me see what the mega thread for macOS? No, that's Sonoma. Let's see if I can find anything.

01:55:51 - Ben (Caller)
Well, you know, I mean whatever it is, you know, I mean it's probably going to have a lot of the same things.

01:55:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sad because for the last year we live in Sonoma County.

01:56:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
We've been the best county in the Apple world.

01:56:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It seems like that year went so fast. I feel like Miss America giving my crown up.

01:56:13 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I didn't make good enough use of it. I should have really gone for something. You don't know what you got until it's gone.

01:56:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I do say those aerial screensavers of our county really made it look prettier than it is. So I'm happy about no, it's very pretty county well, uh, yeah, and I well, either way, leo.

01:56:33 - Ben (Caller)
Um, I look forward to hopefully seeing you tomorrow, and you will, you, will? You ready for?

01:56:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the trademarks. I found them the list of known trademarks. All right, let's have a. Let's have a look. All right, ben, thanks for joining us. Yosemite, redwood, mammoth, california no, they would. I don't think they do redwood either.

01:56:52
It's too close to pacific stuff diablo, which is a mountain on the east san francisco bay area. Miramar, which is down in san diego, that's the naval air station Rincon. I hate that. No, it won't be Rincon. Redtail, condor, grizzly, those are all animals. Farallon, those are the islands. Tiburon, that is Spanish for shark, but is also an island in the San Francisco Bay. Interesting Skyline, I think, shasta.

01:57:19 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Ooh, Shasta sounds cool.

01:57:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I kind of like have they used Shasta? It feels like they've used it Shasta or Sequoia. This person thinks Sequoia, so we should have a little bet.

01:57:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I want Tiburon.

01:57:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tiburon yeah, I like that.

01:57:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Mac OS.

01:57:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tiburon Sounds good, I'm going to go Shasta, okay you're Shasta, we will find out.

01:57:38
Tomorrow sometime between 10 and 11 am Pacific Mike 10 and 11 am pacific mike and I will be streaming that live. Uh, we never put it on youtube because that's where the apple lawyers live, so don't look for us on youtube, it's very scaly. You can look for us in the club twit discord and we'll uh, we'll mention there where else you can watch it live. So we watch the event, we talk about the event. If you want the event clean without any kibitzing, then what?

01:58:07 - Jim (Caller)
are you putting?

01:58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yourself for no schvitzing, no kibitzing. Then you want to go to the Apple feed, but if you want to hear what we think, as Apple's doing it, and there'll be a few gasps, a few oh, my goodness, a few, that's a bad idea. All of that. Tomorrow, 10 am on Twit.

01:58:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And a lot of celebration when I get it right Mac OS Tiburon. He says Tiburon?

01:58:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Definitely not going to be Tiburon. I really like Shasta, so much so that I feel like they maybe have already used that. Isn't that a beverage? It is a beverage. That might be a problem. They trademarked it, but I don't know if they'll use it. Problem uh, they trademarked it, but I don't know if they'll use it. Mac os muscle beach that's what the discord?

01:58:49 - Richard (Caller)
bodega bay, bodega bay. That's where the birds happened?

01:58:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, I don't know. Knox, harrington, mac os, zizek's road, cooper, tino, now that's where they bring it home. That's too on the nose. Yeah, um, bringing it home, that's too on the nose. Yeah, um, san diego, I don't know. So here's uh, you put in a ours technical article on how long they're going to support it.

01:59:13 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
What do you think? Basically they're saying that the top they've done a study, kind of looking back at how uh apple, how soon apple drops off support. Um, it suggests that intel max will not be supported for much longer.

01:59:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all they're willing to say they're not willing to be going to more detail. So Ben's question was legit.

01:59:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, macs introduced in 2009 and 2015 could expect seven or eight years of Mac OS updates, so that 2023 might be the cutoff, because it says, the Macs that were released in 2016 and 2017 are only receiving about six years worth of updates, plus two years of security updates. That was a two-year drop compared to those released between 2009 and 2013.

01:59:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like Apple said they made a commitment. I know I thought they did too. Maybe I'm wrong on that. So ours says based on and you know, past history is no indicator of future performance, and you know past history is no indicator of future performance, indeed, but based on what Apple's done in the past, yeah, this might be the cliff if you're an Intel, a Mac user. It is always the cliff if you're a Hackintosh user, unfortunately, just you know. Mac OS Petaluma, I'm going with Shasta Asbestos, mac OS Asbestos. It's so hot I kind of like how it works.

02:00:28 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
We had to wrap it in fireproof material, maybe something with AI.

02:00:32 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Mac OS. How Well, that'd be like what? Mac OS, mac OS, silicon Valley.

02:00:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What would be an AI name Good AI name Mac OS Samantha. Mac OS Wopper. What would? What would be an ai uh name good ai mac os samantha. Mac mac os whopper whopper. Mac os whopper the forbin project, mac os colossus mac mac os in and out california.

02:01:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I hate california I.

02:01:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hate it. California AI, I hate it. Thank you, mashed Potato. He's always a master of these things. Mark Gurman did say no hardware tomorrow, but I have noticed major price drops in a lot of Apple hardware in the last week, so he may be wrong on that. We may see M4 laptops, which would be very interesting.

02:01:22 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That would be interesting, because the problem is they also have a beta version of Vision OS to announce tomorrow. So there's too much. You've got Watch OS, ios, ipad OS, mac OS and now Vision OS. Wow, how are they going to fit in room for also doing new hardware?

02:01:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You wouldn't name it Mac OS Diablo. I don't think they would either.

02:01:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I really don't. I think that's it causes problems.

02:01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah I don't know how they're gonna fit it all in. Maybe we should prepare for a bring lunch I'm actually gonna bring a catheter bring lunch and a catheter. We'll see you tomorrow, 10 am. Pacific. You're watching. Ask the tech guys that there is micah sargent. I'm leoorte On. We go with the show. And Mr Anthony Nielsen, should I do an email? I haven't done one all day, oh sure, well, I do have someone online.

02:02:12
Well, let's get that person and then I will do a quick lightning round of email. Who should we say hi to Come on in? Look at this. He's like posed in a studio. Did you pose for the prince charles official portrait? It looks like it. That's very good. Leo, hi, what's your name and where are you calling from?

02:02:33 - Trent (Caller)
hey, it's trent, I'm from tumblr ridge, british columbia, and I'm guys say again. I said I'm calling to apologize. Oh why, back around the third or fourth episode of the, the new iteration of the show, I had called in um, and I forget exactly why, but I think you were making fun of the names of the people in the in the chat and I was like I have no idea what, who I am in the chat, and so I was like in my phone trying to figure out what my name was and how to change it to my name. And so I was sitting there in there and I didn't hear what was happening and suddenly this note popped up that said the host would like you to join the meeting. And I was like, oh crap, I hit the wrong button and hung up. That was you.

02:03:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll never forgive you how could you ever?

02:03:29 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
no, that's fine, I don't even wait, did you say you're in canada and you just apologize for hitting the wrong button? Exactly right, oh, I get it now I still yeah typical.

02:03:40 - Trent (Caller)
Hey, I just had a quick question. I've got a wallet case for my iPhone and I'll be sitting there listening to a podcast and I will. You know. Somebody will send me a text message, I'll go to, I'll respond to it, I'll close the wallet case and the podcast will stop, inevitably, because somehow it has bumped the button to record a voice memo. Because somehow it has bumped the button to record a voice memo, so there's like two seconds, five seconds of audio that I've recorded to send to this person. How annoying. I have to stop that and close it. I'm just wondering if there's any way to turn that feature off in the iPhone 14.

02:04:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you think, when you close the front-facing part of the wallet, that it's hitting the little microphone and messages and starting to record? Is that?

02:04:31 - Trent (Caller)
Like that's a very small target, but that seems to be the only thing that's happening, because, like almost every.

02:04:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is. It's tiny, it's in the lower right, but you know.

02:04:41 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You have something capacitive that's able to touch there on your wallet case, you might have a magnet.

02:04:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So does the wallet case close from the left side? Yeah, so it's the corner, the lower right-hand corner of that is hitting something. I wonder if there's a magnet there or something like that it doesn't look like it.

02:05:04 - Trent (Caller)
Well, I can't show you the case because it's on my phone.

02:05:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Close it on us, just close it on us, let's see what it looks like. Oh, okay.

02:05:14 - Trent (Caller)
It's got this as a magnet, yeah yeah, yeah.

02:05:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The magnet kind of swings around and closes it up, but the corner it sounds like the corner is hitting that and it is that record, that button there that it's hitting.

02:05:26 - Trent (Caller)
Yeah, and the corner is basically I've got my driver's license, don't show the driver's license and that's about it there. So I'm just wondering if there's a way to disable that.

02:05:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can you disable voice dictation in messages?

02:05:40 - Trent (Caller)
I don't think you can. It's not even dictation. It's a voice memo right it records. It's not even dictation, it's a voice memo right.

02:05:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It records me sitting there going oh, bugger again. Yeah, okay, let me ask you this first you said you have a 14 Pro Yep, so you have the action Pro Max. Yeah, so you have the action button.

02:05:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you think it's hitting the action button? What?

02:05:58 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
does your action button do? What is it currently set a default, I think? Okay, then that's. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that it wasn't. When you were closing the case, it was accidentally pressing the action button which was, uh, triggering that voice. So the only thing I could think is that you could this is complicated, um, you could put an NFC tag in that wallet case. This is get ready and then you use a shortcut for a personal automation that says when the NFC tag is scanned, then and unfortunately I don't know 100 percent what action you would do you could probably do something like See, I don't know, I don't know.

02:06:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is. I'm looking at messages. There's no way to turn that off. That's just like.

02:06:53 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, voice messages is just, that's a hardwired feature.

02:06:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe in accessibility there'd be a way to turn that off. You might be disabling a lot of your of your phone's capabilities. Boy, that's a really. Anybody in the in the chat room have any suggestions? I?

02:07:20 - Trent (Caller)
mean the? The obvious one is is you? You just turn the screen off before you close it.

02:07:26 - Ben (Caller)
But half the time.

02:07:27 - Trent (Caller)
I'm trying to do that, but you know you miss the button.

02:07:32 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's what that NFC thing I was talking about could come in. I would get a better wallet case.

02:07:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, looks like you need a new one anyway. Yeah, it is getting a little beat up. Here's an excuse, brent, for you to get a nice new, shiny case. You know, the case I use now is not a wallet case. For years I've carried a wallet case, but they are bulky and I decided I'm not going to have something in front and I'm using the Peak Design case, which Alex Lindsay reminded me I own, and that way I can attach it when I ride my bike. It just goes on there and I have tripods, all sorts of stuff. I really like what the Peak Design case does, but it does not.

02:08:10 - Trent (Caller)
Unfortunately, there's the back thing around, because I've got a bunch of Peak Design stuff here too for my camera gear, but perfect. So if you're already a Peak Design user.

02:08:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is kind of a natural. It's a very secure hold. It also has an extra magnet in here. So I, uh, I put a magnet on my bedside table and when I go to bed I go put it right. Whack, it goes right on there and I plug it in and that becomes a uh, the desk, the bedside clock. Um, I really like this peak sign case, but it doesn't have that wallet thing, okay here's the other thing.

02:08:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
What other thing? So when I'm in an iMessage and I tap on that little microphone button that's in the message area, it only does dictation. It is not letting me send an audio message. So how in the world is yours triggering sending an audio message? Because I literally have to tap on the left side on the plus button plus now and then choose audio, and then it lets me send audio. So how come yours is can you go?

02:09:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are you getting? Are you getting the? Um, I can't show. Uh, let's see here I want to show. Uh, let's see something that won't matter if I show it. Okay, here we go. This is a. So if you hit this, then it does this. You're saying you're getting this audio recording thing.

02:09:38 - Trent (Caller)
That's the one, and it doesn't matter it's not just messages If I'm in Facebook any time that there's a dialing phone call. Oh my God, I just figured it out.

02:09:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I just figured it out. I don't know. No, sorry, I don't know that I have a solution for you. I figured out what's happening. So actually, there might be a solution to this. Though it is, let's see See.

02:10:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I get the dictation in the lower right. Okay, let's see um. See I get the dictation.

02:10:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Okay, so what you're going to do is you are going to go into messages and you're going to scroll all the way down to the bottom where it says audio messages, and in that setting there's an option that says raise to listen. You're going to listen what's happening is the the case is covering and they think that he's putting the phone up to his face.

02:10:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the proximity covering the proximity sense I think you're putting it up to your face.

02:10:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's what triggers that message recording. So if you turn off raise to listen in messages it says this Raise to listen allows you to quickly listen and reply to incoming audio messages by raising the phone to your ear. If you turn that off then when you close your case it won't trigger the audio recording.

02:10:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You fixed it. Turn off Rays to Listen. Turn off Rays to Listen. That's brilliant, that is inspired.

02:10:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
We got there my first day back and I have goosebumps, yeah.

02:10:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's what it is.

02:10:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's why it's starting to record You're covering and the proximity sensor is up here, right, yeah, so if I'm in an iMessage- conversation and I hold my phone up, I hear a chime and then I know, as I start talking, it's going to start recording a message. I pull away and I see the message and then I can send it. Yeah, that's what's happening.

02:11:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And MeTech in our Discord says this is his favorite wallet case. Discord says this is his favorite wallet case. So the vena v commute x wallet case for apple iphone 15 pro max mag, safe, compatible, military drop protection okay, so that's just a vote for a better case for you. This is not a wallet case, is it? Oh, I see? Oh, that's weird. This is a back wallet. He wants a front wall. He wants a flap.

02:11:45 - Trent (Caller)
Well, I don't I don't need a front wallet, I just like to be able to carry, like my driver's license and you know, the one or two pieces of id that I kind of need to have with me if you do peak design.

02:11:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you do the peak design case, they have a really good wallet there. It is that you can, because I like this better than the other ones. First of all, the magnet's stronger I've never lost it. Plus it has that little flap and the flap you pull on that the cards come out. I can never get the cards out of the apple wallet magsafe wallet. So this is a peak design magsafe wallet. I really like it. So see how that you pull that up. It only holds about three or four cards. You can't put a whole bunch of stuff in there.

02:12:27
But it is, but that's all yeah, I carry my driver's license, my uh my medicare card in case I get hit, and and a couple of credit cards. So four, four things in there, uh, but that is a really handy uh thing to have. So, if it's not the front flap that you care about, by the the way, we've solved your problem so you can keep your old case, but I think the Peak Design case with that MagSafe wallet, that's ended up being my perfect solution. Unlike a wallet case, you can't put money in it and a lot of cards, so I have to carry money in a separate place. You know, I still have a wallet, in other words. But yeah, for dry, like before I go out and drive, I whack, whack, so I have my driver's license right there, hey, but we fixed it. Turn off, thank you yay, turn off. Raise to answer.

02:13:17
Thank you, brent, and thank you and good luck with the whole King Charles thing. I love it. All right, quick email here. That was good. Yeah, wow, I'm impressed. Glad you're back, buddy. I would never have thought of that. All right, help From Chuck. We'll try Help me. Micah Kenobi, you're my only hope, it says. From beautiful Grand Rapids, chuck says I'm in need of your help. I use apple air tags to track my kitties oh.

02:13:51
So now I'm gonna say right away I can't help you don't put collars on cats because they break away and even still, they have to be breakaway, because cats are notorious for getting stuck and choking them.

02:14:02 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Frankly, even dogs I don't put I don't like to put collars on dogs breakaway be okay.

02:14:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, I'm sure, chuck being a nice, cat guy, Except when they're out.

02:14:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Obviously I'm not saying that.

02:14:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But there's a feature that seems to be missing that being notify me when tags comes into range, not leaves range, he would like a way to know that the cat is in the vicinity Right? I can't figure out how to do it with a tag and the find my item, so I was wondering. Maybe is there a way to do a shortcut okay.

02:14:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So here's the thing. I feel it is my duty as a person who's taken up the charge of protecting wildlife.

02:14:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which he does, by the way. In his spare time he dons special gloves to handle feral raccoons.

02:14:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I just saved a baby fox yesterday, see. See, he's a good guy. Given that, I want to just say something. I know people like to let their cats outside, but here's the problem we feed our cats, and when we feed our cats they are full, and so when they go outside, they do not chase down other animals because they want to eat them.

02:15:17
They chase them down because they are still partially wild and want to catch things and they just play with it and they play with it, and then those animals are hurt and dying and have no other thing to do. House cats are responsible for the deaths of more songbirds than any other creature, including feral cats, and are more often responsible for the suffering of songbirds. So that's all I want to say about that. Anyway, if you're wondering when your cat is coming back to your house because you've decided to let it outside for some reason, I don't know of a way to do this with Apple's AirTags, I would love it if Apple would add an action or a few for AirTags in shortcuts, but they don't currently do that, and so what I would recommend instead is using one of the app not apps, but devices that are specifically made for animal tracking.

02:16:16
There are a number of companies, and there's one company called Whistle Whistle Tag uh, whistle tag and they are gps pet trackers and they have functionality within the apps that are able to um, it's called geofence, yeah, geofence, yeah. So I recommend using a third party device, because air tags don't currently allow for the. When I'm back in it, it would be great if we could say this air tag is actually attached to a person, because what's cool is that Apple does allow that geofencing notification for people, um, but they have to have a phone or a watch or something else that has GPS.

02:16:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't work with just the air tag okay, and tile probably doesn't work or any of the other tags.

02:17:01 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh my, I was searching, but I don't, yeah, I don't, I don't know, because they don't think of them that way.

02:17:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just our cat is an outdoor cat. It's very hard, if you have a cat that's an outdoor cat, to say only indoors. Now, and I, I completely agree with you, uh, but they're, but it's not my cat right uh, the cats should be indoors.

02:17:21
only. This is is the number one. These are the annual average estimated bird mortality from the Fish and Wildlife Service. You can show this. This is in millions, I don't know. I think it's in millions. Wind turbines, oil pits, electrocution, communication towers, electrical lines, poison vehicles, building glass, and then feral and domestic cats 2.4 billion birds a year.

02:17:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I saw this image of a songbird rescue and they had made this. What is it mandala of all of the songbirds that they had to put down in the course of a month because they were attacked by cats? And it was this horribly morbid, beautiful mandala of these songbirds. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now. There are things you can do. You can build an indoor-outdoor, that's what we want to do.

02:18:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We want to build a jungle gym. Yeah, like a jungle gym, yeah. So they have a cat door, they go outside, but they're not really outside. They're in an outdoor giant playground. That's what we want to do.

02:18:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, that's super cool. That's what we recommend at Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue. We have a huge one there. This is a wildlife rescuer ladies and gentlemen, I really didn't want to get on my soapbox at the same time. Lisa told me.

02:18:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, Micah saves animals. She said all I do is sit at home and play video games. We all have our different hobbies. Anyway, thank you, chuck. That was a good question. Yeah, very good question. Looking for a Drobo successor, eleazar? Yeah, you know, eleazar, it's sad. Um, drobo went out of business and they were an advertiser for a long time. I still have a drobo, uh, but the company is gone.

02:19:15
He says I know I could get a synology, nas, that's what I use, but I don't want to run ethernet cable, buy mocha adapters and or upgrade my router to get the full benefit. Um, yeah, normally what you do is you put the synology next to your router, so you just go from your router to the synology. Mine's in the same wire, closet that the router is. But okay, I just want mass storage. Oh, he wants, like a usb, mass storage that can collect on pc and have data redundancy for protection. Is any of these a good alternative? Qnap I don't recommend qnap. They've had some security issues so I have a hard time recommending them. Owc's mercury, elite pro quad and their software radar, in fact, have that and use that.

02:20:00
Uh, that gives me, I think, eight terabytes on my Mac and that's a very nice way to do it and you can do it in RAID. What is it? Raid 1, right, which will mirrored RAID so that you do, you know, have a backup or any generic RAID box. Yeah, I, it sounds like you're on a Mac because of the OWC, that's Otherworldcomputing at MacSalescom, and they have quite a few good choices. They provide their own software for RAID, but Apple also has a simple RAID and that's why I just use the Apple RAID, because I don't want a third-party RAID solution that modifies my kernel and so forth. They have quite a few choices here. If you shop at maxsalescom, let me see if they have a special category for RAID. Yeah, I don't see specifically RAID, but a lot of these things are RAID devices.

02:21:01
So, yeah, I would be very comfortable with the Mercury or any, and I actually had a Sabrent for a while and there are a number of these that are designed for Windows as well, considering complementing my backup strategy with Backblazer S3. That's a good idea. So you want this. Is that old 3-2-1 backup thing, three kinds of backup, two different kinds of devices, one in the cloud. John SanDisk makes a G-Raid. That's a good, that's a very good one. Is that what you use. So, yeah, there's a lot of ways to do this. That you just connect directly. Thunderbolt's going to be more expensive If you're not running off the drive but you're just using it for backup USB would be fine. You don't need all that speed. You don't have to pay for all that speed, but I do. In other world, computer computing makes a number of these uh devices that are thunderbolt 4 a little expensive, but very fast, very fast, very, very fast. Some of them use ssds. The one I have has four m.2 cards in it, wow, wow. So it's really, yeah, it's really quite nice.

02:22:04
Passkey, an iCloud key chain. This is a tear from Malvern, pa. Hi, leo and Micah, I'm having an issue with passkeys. I have a passkey to log into the website stored in my iCloud key chain. That's the normal way you do it if you do it on an iPhone or a Mac. When I go to the site on my Mac and choose the option to log in with a paskey, it pops up the qr code to scan with my phone. That's how it does it, because it only doesn't. It won't sync, right? No? So something's stored in the enclave yeah, so it.

02:22:35 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
If you create it on your phone, it'll pop up a qr code and have you do it that way, because the phone is storing. Phone is the one that's storing it, but if the mac has it on there, then it should be doing it from the mac. So then when he does, this.

02:22:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He scans it and then he gets a message there are no matching pass keys saved in your iCloud keychain on the phone. When I go to my password settings on the phone, I can see the pass key in there. He says it was working fine for me the last time I logged in a few months ago, so I've had this problem as well.

02:23:03 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It stopped working. Yeah, for me. The last time I logged in a few months ago, so I've had this problem as well it stopped working, yeah, so here's what I recommend in that case. This is one of the things we talked about before. Passkeys work the best if you get rid of all of the other means of logging in. I don't recommend anyone do that just yet. No one should get rid of their passwords just yet we're not ready yet.

02:23:22
I found that the sort of first rollout of pass keys with iOS integration and macOS integration. I had to refresh all of those keys. I don't know what happened, but what I recommend doing is pick the device that you use more often to do the login and create the pass key using that device. So if that's on your Mac where you're mostly logging in, then go ahead and log in with a password to that site. Delete the pass key that you've, don't, delete it from iCloud. Go into your settings on that account and remove the pass key and then recreate it and then start there. Then the next time you get on your iPhone, I found that it works better if you created it on the Mac in the first place. Eventually this shouldn't matter and everything should be fine and hunky dory. Unfortunately, there are growing pains, and so I found that that worked for me. I wish I knew what had happened behind the scenes, but I simply do not. But by creating it on the Mac first, then it was easy to do it with my iPhone. Good tip.

02:24:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I personally don't like the idea of having it tied to an operating system.

02:24:30 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Yeah, remember, I use.

02:24:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Android and Windows and Linux. So my recommendation in the long run is to use a password manager, one password and Bitwarden. Both. Bitwarden our sponsor will store pass keys in the password manager and then they are everywhere and they work everywhere the password manager is installed and I found that to work pretty reliably.

02:24:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Me too.

02:24:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, yeah, okay.

02:24:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So, if you have to use iCloud Keychain, that's where my recommendation is Mac first, iphone later. But ultimately, yes, don't tie it to your operating system or any first party system, if you can help it.

02:25:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank, you Tare, I hope I'm saying your name right. Tahar, maybe, and for Eliezer name workout today. This is the other world computing device that I have, which is ridiculous. It is the OWC Express 4M2. It has four. It's Thunderbolt. Oh wow, that's nice Four NVMe M.2 SSD slots. So it's expensive because you get the container and then you put the slots in.

02:25:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
What's it connected to right now?

02:25:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A Mac Studio, or it was connected to a Mac Studio and right now it's sitting on my desk not connecting anything. Because the laptop is here, oh okay, but I dock it. However, that has not proven to be a great solution, because ideally, I would eject all the external drives before I disconnect and what I really want to do is just take the laptop, disconnect and go. But that really screws up this thing, especially because it's bus powered.

02:25:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, no yeah. Does it have an option for non-bus power?

02:26:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, maybe it's not bus powered. Anyway, I do hear it go, it gets upset.

02:26:06
No, it's not bus powered, but um, nevertheless, yeah, no it's unhappy you want to do this, so I feel like I should shut down my laptop every time, which is not good either. I might have to go get another mac studio, maybe your home machine. I brought it in here. Huh, I can take it back. Eh, maybe We'll see. I brought it in here because the laptop we were using, oh, but John got his laptop fixed All right, so maybe I will take it back. Do we have another call I should take?

02:26:43 - Trent (Caller)
Yes, we do actually.

02:26:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That face looks very familiar. Mm-hmm, let's pick up on a caller.

02:26:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, we've got a phone call Star six, star six. Oh, that's Cam.

02:27:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I believe so. Hello, hello, I can hear you. What city are you calling from Greetings. What's your first name?

02:27:08 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
All the way from Santa Rosa.

02:27:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I know who this is. Old Chef Guy. Our one and only fan in Santa Rosa. I vote for.

02:27:15 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Mac OS Garberville.

02:27:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Garberville, mac OS Garberville, it would be pretty funny. It would be a funny name I like Mac OS Weed. Yeah, they made that joke before. We like you're also in Sonoma County. We liked Mac OS Sonoma. That was a great name.

02:27:36 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
That was a great name. I don't think we need to attract more people to Sonoma County, though.

02:27:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, maybe not. You know people used to go to Napa, which is just over the hill here, as the wine country, but I think lately people have realized that Sonoma County is just as good, maybe better. John says Mac OS Kern.

02:27:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I like that. That's the typographer's edition. I'm telling you it's going to be.

02:28:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Shasta. He says it's going to be Tiburon. No, it's not. That means shark. It's going to be Shasta. He says it's going to be Tiburon.

02:28:06 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
No, it's not.

02:28:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That means shark. It's going to be Shasta. Yeah, svelte like a shark Fast like a shark.

02:28:09 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
I like Shasta.

02:28:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Shasta's a good one. It's just, it's a beverage. I don't think they do it. Shasta's good, okay.

02:28:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What can we do for?

02:28:21 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
you old chef guy. I'm voting with Leo. I think Chasta better than Tiburon.

02:28:25 - Trent (Caller)
I hope so.

02:28:28 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
I think last time we talked, leo, you were or I heard you on a show talk about building an AI container with data for a project you wanted to do research on, and I can't. You're probably learning some obscure programming language. No, no, no, you don't have to.

02:28:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have to, so this have to. You don't have to, so this is something. You don't have to build a container. You have to take a large language model it's already been trained, there are many and do something called RAG, which is Retrieval, augmented Generation RAG goes out, gets a bunch of documents, your choice of documents, and adds them to its knowledge base, and then you can, at that point, you can talk to the AI and say, based on the knowledge base that I've given you, answer some questions.

02:29:17
Now, the first time I did this, I did this with OpenAI's chat GPT. I built two custom GPTs. This is what convinced me, by the way, that AI is not just a flash in the pan, that there is actually some value to this. So the two custom GPTs I built have disappeared. Where are they there? They are. One is called the Common Lisper, because what I did and I'll actually go to show you the configuration so you can see what's going on here what I did is I gave it the programming language I use these days, which this is irrelevant to this discussion, but is CommonLisp. But what I did is because CommonLisp has been around for so long.

02:30:03
There are many, many open source books in PDF format as well as the documentation and so forth. So I uploaded these PDFs to ChatGPT and you can upload, I think, 20 files, so I have it looks like 12 now, so I have room for more. So I can just upload these from books that I have on here. Maybe I'll add automata theory and that's going to add it to the list of things, and then the queries that I give are to this oh, couldn't do it, I will not worry about that Are going to be to this particular RAG Retrieval Augmented Generation AI. Rag Retrieval Augmented Generation AI. Now that's using a subscription-based AI called OpenAI. You don't have to do that. There are a number of companies now or open source projects that do the same thing.

02:31:00
This one's called Anything LLM. It's on a Mac. It's free to download. This one's called anything llm. It's on a mac. It's free to download. With anything, all al, anything llm. You can choose the model that you want to use. You can uh also give it a key if you want to open ai, if you have a uh paid one. But you can choose these models.

02:31:20
I'm using something called mixtrel, which is designed for coding. These are what they call so-called open source LLMs. They are not open source in the sense that the source code is publicly available. They're open to be used freely. So open may be just all you need. But Lama from Meta is one. There are quite a few. So Mixtrol is another one from a French company.

02:31:44
So you choose the LLM, you will download it. They tend to be large. This one is 26 gigabytes. Maybe that's 2.6. Wow, is it 26? Yeah, it's very tiny. It looks like it's big. It's a 7 billion token database, which is quite large. Excuse me. So then you can do the same thing.

02:32:06
So now it has that LLM built in and now I can use with anything LLM. I can add documents to it, and so you might. That's kind of what recall is all about with windows. You might provide it with uh, here's, here's what you could do. Jim, who's writing that book, could give it all 2000 of his book and then he could query it about his book or anything that the book knows about. It uses the LLM to compose the answer. It still needs to understand language, but the answer is based on information from the documents you provided. So that is RAG. There are a number of ways to do it. There's another one called OLAMA Anything. Llm and Ollama are both Windows, mac and Linux, I believe, but there are quite a few of these now that hobbyists have cobbled together using RAG and it's a good thing to play with because it gives you a sense of, I think, the potential for AI. Let's say you're an auto mechanic and you could get every one of the manuals for the cars you work in all the children guides in there.

02:33:10
Instead of having to thumb through a greasy manual trying to find a part or trying to find a fix, you could just query the LLM and let it do the walking. And it works fairly well. I think this is, to me, the first thing I've seen that makes me think AI is something.

02:33:29 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Yeah, I had an author that I've interviewed for the show I do and he's a nootropics expert. So supplements that are cognitive enhancement aids, not drugs aids.

02:33:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that pronounced nootropics, not nootropics? I'm glad to know that Nootropics it's N-O-O Nootropics, not nootropics.

02:33:45 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
I'm glad to know that Nootropics it's.

02:33:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
N-O-O Nootropics.

02:33:47 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Yeah, okay, yes, correct, and so he had somebody build him. He didn't know how, because it's not his field, but you go to his site and you look something up and it's an AI database, same thing that somebody created out of his books and you search on a supplement and it answers in his tone yes, because that's how I knew it was something.

02:34:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes.

02:34:08 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Because it's totally answering in the tone of how he writes.

02:34:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my.

02:34:11
God, that is like great, you can do that, and I have done that with my common Lisper. You can give it. There's still, in effect, a prompt or an always prompt, in effect, a prompt or an always prompt. So in the configuration I've given it instructions that, uh, give me some inform, give it some information about how to answer. In my case I say a serious and concise persona. You know, first I did answer me like a professor, and that was a big mistake because it was. It went on and on and on and on and on. So you can also tune these to answer in a fashion you like. And so whoever made that AI for the nootropics guy said answer in my voice, answer in the voice that's in these books, and that's something LLMs are very good at.

02:35:08 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
It turns out that happens to be something they can do. So could I take transcripts of shows? Yes, could I take transcripts of shows and put them in there and have people search on my site and get information from the shows I've done and get information from the shows I've done.

02:35:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of the projects I always mean to get around to and have it is taking all the transcripts from SecurityNow and putting them in an LLM and then making a Steve Gibson AI. That'd be cool.

02:35:34 - Jim (Caller)
Now there is something to be aware of.

02:35:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They often talk about the number of tokens that an AI can address at once. They're getting bigger and bigger, but there is a limited size to the database that it can encompass um, and, and sometimes, sometimes, you know, uh, it's typically around the size of war and peace. So I, for instance, I don't think I could get an llm that would be able to see all of steve's uh transcripts there's almost uh, what is it? 9 999 shows, so you might be able to get all your transcripts in. We recommend Whisper AI as the transcribing tool. That's OpenAI's free transcription tool, so you can actually have a pipeline. I have a friend who does this. He recorded a conversation. It was automatically sent to whisper ai to transcribe. The transcription was then sent to chat gpt to analyze and then he had an automated prompt that said summarize the conversation and provide action items. That is a workflow you could do with apple shortcuts or a variety of other ways. That's fairly easy to do. I think it's just a small step now. Old chef guy, how many shows do I have in the database? Over 10,000 shows, I think it's hundreds of days worth of listening.

02:36:56
If we could get an LLM that could handle all of that, then channel it into 11 Labs has a very good voice synthesizer that can copy somebody's voice. Given enough samples, it's not very many minutes, but I give it a bunch of samples. That now knows how I speak, it knows what I say and it can duplicate my voice. We're almost there with video now. Sora can almost do video. Unfortunately, it's limited to a few minutes, but I think by the end of the year you'll be able to see two hour movies. That's what ashton kutcher thinks. He says hollywood's in trouble. You're going to be able to generate two-hour movies with ai. I think we could generate two-hour uh ask the tech guy episodes. Sure we gotta get you in there though.

02:37:37
Yeah, let's do it maybe you could be real and I'll be actual. Somebody would be ideal. I think in general, it's ideal to combine a human with the AI. The human provides a little bit of bumpers to protect you.

02:37:52 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Well, you did that a thousand years ago on CNET. What was that show called? It wasn't.

02:37:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
CNET. It was the site on MSNBC. I was a virtual character. I still had to dance around and do stuff. It wasn't artificial. Yet that's coming, hey, old chef guy, pleasure talking to you. It's a great question, great Thank you, gentlemen.

02:38:11 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Yeah, have a great day, I'll see you, I'm still voting for Shasta or Garberville.

02:38:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Shasta, Garberville or Kern, I'll see you at Trader Joe's yeah.

02:38:20 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
Take care, you bet Okay, thank you.

02:38:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bye, take care, bye-bye. I ran into Matrida Joe's last year. We're out of time. That's why I had to cut that one off, because you know me, I like to talk you and I will be back tomorrow morning, 10 am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC, 1700 UTC, for the Apple WWDC keynote. Should be a lot of AI stuff there Might even be. I wouldn't be surprised if it's hardware, maybe, and we'll find out what the next macOS is, macos Tiburon, shasta. We'll also be back. You'll be back Tuesday for iOS, today, right, and for MacBreak Weekly, and you're going to come in for MacBreak Weekly, which is great. We'll talk about the Apple event the day before. Obviously, thursday, Tech News Weekly you co-host that with a rotating cast of fabulous people, Absolutely.

02:39:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Do you know who's this Thursday? Yeah, that's going to be Amanda Silberling. Love Amanda.

02:39:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We had Emily on the Twit a couple of weeks ago. She was or maybe it was last week. She was great, Wonderful.

02:39:25 - Old Chef Guy (Caller)
I'm happy to hear that Good, good, good find yeah.

02:39:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then, of course, this week from today, for ask the tech guys, we do the show every Sunday, 11 am Pacific to 2 pm Eastern, I'm sorry, 11 am Pacific UTC. Stream it live on YouTube, because no Apple lawyers care about what we say here. That would be youtubecom slash twit, slash live. And if you want to be notified when we go live, because all of the shows go live at some point on YouTube, smash the bell and hit the subscribe and smash. You have to do both right. Subscribe and smash in. You have to do both right.

02:40:05 - Chris (Caller)
You got to do both.

02:40:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got to subscribe and smash in order to do that. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at techguylabscom. You can download audio or video. There is an entirely dedicated Ask the Tech Guys channel on YouTube. That's all the video. Best thing to do is subscribe on your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available and again you could choose audio or video.

02:40:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
What else? I think you covered all the bases other than call us during the week, 888-724-2884 to leave a voicemail, if you'd like yeah, and we love the voicemails too.

02:40:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can also email atg at triptv. I'm Leo Laporte. I'm Micah Sargent. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Have a great Geek. Week Bye-bye.