Ask The Tech Guys 2033 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, hey, hey, hey. It's time for Ask the Tech Guys. I'm Leo Laporte Coming up. Our car guy, Sam Abuelsamid, will explain how complicated that car computer is.

0:00:09 - Mikah Sargent
And I am Mikah Sargent, and we talked to one listener who wants to know is it time to upgrade to a new Mac or can I just replace the battery of the one I have?

0:00:17 - Leo Laporte
And then how to get all the speakers in your house to play the same thing at the same time. Ask the Tech Guys is coming up next.

0:00:29 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:00:37 - Leo Laporte
This is Ask the Tech Guys, with Mikah Sargent and Leo Laporte, Episode 2033, recorded Sunday, July 14th 2024: A Weak Back. Well, hey, hey, hey, how are you today? It's time for us, the tech guys, that is tech guy number one, Mikah Sargent, and you're left, and that there is tech guy number two, Leo Laporte, on your right, and today we talk tech. Answer your questions. What else are we doing?

0:01:06 - Mikah Sargent
We do a song and dance.

0:01:08 - Leo Laporte
We do, we would the old soft shoe.

0:01:11 - Mikah Sargent
We talk about news News.

0:01:13 - Leo Laporte
And Sam Abuelsamid will join us. We'll talk about cars in 40 minutes.

0:01:19 - Mikah Sargent
We talk about news and make sure you don't snooze.

0:01:23 - Leo Laporte
FTC: federal Trade Commission. I've heard of them Good news they are. This is from TechTurtle fires a warning shot maybe too soon at eight companies over right to repair violations. So this is. I'm really glad they're starting to enforce this In a letter the agency sent to eight companies. They started with harley davidson two years ago. Uh, because harley said the use of third-party repair parts of facilities violated motorcycle warranties. They did the same thing against weber grills and westinghouse oh weber.

They say it runs afoul of the magnus and Moss Warranty Act enforced by the FTC that says no, no, you can have third parties fix your stuff. The agency has sent warning letters now to eight more companies Ares Health, blue Air, medify Air and Aranci. Those are four air purifiers, treadmill Maker in movement, but more to our audience's interest, gaming hardware companies, asrock, zotac and Gigabyte, all of which, all of whom have been telling consumers using third-party parts in repair shops violates product warranties. They don't, they can't, they shouldn't Illegal. Good news Right to repair, FTC said review your box stickers and warranty. I'm sorry, I didn't make you mean to make you laugh while you were drinking. Review your box stickers, dude, and your promo warranty materials. Make sure you don't imply warranty coverage is conditioned on the use of specific parts or services. I didn't know that that was illegal. Actually I should have read my Moss Magnuson warranty act more closely in school.

0:03:12 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know why I did. You knew it. Yeah, presumably at some point we've had somebody on Tech News Weekly who had talked about it, and that's why I knew about it. I will tell you this the FTC is getting real spicy lately and I'm really happy with them. They just there's an app called NGL which stands for not gonna lie, and that app just got a ding because it is marketing to children.

0:03:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and it is it's lying, it's lying and it's marketing material.

0:03:42 - Mikah Sargent
It's horribly doing it too. It's lying about what messages it's getting, and then it's lying and it's marketing material. It's horribly doing it too. It's lying about what messages it's getting, and then it's charging and there's a whole thing involved. It was extortion.

0:03:52 - Leo Laporte
So it would make up messages that were mean and then say for a price we could stop those.

0:04:00 - Mikah Sargent
Or you, at the very least, for a price you could figure out who sent them. But the problem is, when you paid the money, it wouldn't tell you because the messages were made up.

They weren't actually sent by another person. That is as bad as it gets, and it's super bad. And then the FTC is also doing an investigation right now into the dark patterns of online subscription services and is coming for blood when it comes to that as well. So I'm really pleased with what's going on there. I think we could see some stuff change for the better.

0:04:31 - Leo Laporte
Goldman Sachs, the investment bankers who are known for their brilliance. They have announced in an analyst's letter written by AI no, I'm applauding some guy. They have announced Applauding some guy. It's funny they're getting. This is they went public 25 years ago, so this is a picture of them celebrating the 25th anniversary.

0:04:54 - Mikah Sargent
Congratulations, Goldman Sachs. Wait, is that?

0:04:57 - Leo Laporte
We were all that younger 25 years ago Is that Julie Louis Dreyfus there on the right yeah that's right. Yeah, she's a no. No, it's not uh investment giant goldman sachs who makes the apple card. By the way, uh published a research and doesn't want to.

0:05:11 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, because it costs them too much money they said we're losing billions on all this consumer credit. We don't want to. Yeah, we don't want to work with the poor people. We want to go back to what we were doing before so they have analysts.

0:05:22 - Leo Laporte
You know, and analysts are really writing to investors and telling investors what you should invest in. They're concerned about the economic viability of AI, of generative AI. They note quote there's little to show for the huge amount of spending on generative AI infrastructure and questions whether this large spend will ever pay off in terms of AI benefits and returns. The paper is titled Gen AI Too Much Spend, too Little Benefit. I could probably have just read the title.

0:05:52 - Mikah Sargent
I was going to say. That tells you everything you need to know. They think that they're spending too much money on AI. For, I mean, what is investment except always hoping that the future is going to be brighter?

0:06:02 - Leo Laporte
Stock market is going up, up, up and all it takes to get your big bump in your stock is to say oh, by the way, we just added AI.

0:06:09 - Mikah Sargent
Guess what we did. And, of course, the companies who are behind the processing of AI are really valuable right now.

0:06:16 - Leo Laporte
They are making money, like NVIDIA. They're really making money and here's the thing.

0:06:19 - Mikah Sargent
You know, there's an argument to be made and they do actually in the report that even if in the long term there's no true, uh, potential for for a bunch of money to be made, it does take a while for these bubbles to burst. So while the bubble meantime, yeah, exactly, you can, you can make some money, you can get some, score some tulip bulbs as they.

0:06:44 - Leo Laporte
John Slenina is our space guru. Space guru Do you know what the fastest object ever made by human beings is?

0:06:52 - Mikah Sargent
And this is not the setup for a joke, and do you know how?

0:06:54 - Leo Laporte
fast it's going. Nasa's Parker Solar Probe, which is taking a close-up look at the sun's outer corona because you can't get any closer than the corona just equaled the record for the fastest moving man-made human object ever. Are you ready for how fast it's going? 394 736 miles per hour wow, that's faster than a teenager on a sunday night. That's amazing. I can't quite.

0:07:23 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know what to compare that to.

0:07:24 - Leo Laporte
Well, I could give you an example Fast enough to get from Washington DC to Tokyo in less than a minute. Wow, that's fast.

0:07:34 - Mikah Sargent
That's impressive it is impressive.

0:07:36 - Leo Laporte
It's on course, to get even faster. Its top speed will be 430,000 miles an hour, that's next year. Wow.

0:07:43 - Mikah Sargent
If we could say in comparison to a jet, you know it's, it's faster, 300. Well, yeah, definitely faster, but I mean it's 700 times faster than a jet, that would be something I could mock 500. There we go.

0:07:56 - Leo Laporte
That doesn't mean anything. Well, mock one is the speed of sound. It's 500 times faster than speed of sound, and a plane is, so if you shouted at it it would never get there.

0:08:08 - Mikah Sargent
It's weird how that works. Nevermind, don't bother, don't bother. Now what is its propulsion mechanism? The sun.

0:08:16 - Leo Laporte
It's slingshotting around and so it doesn't. Yeah, it's just whoosh, because the sun has a lot of gravity, as you might imagine. It's also very bright up there. I hear the probe is eventually going to get nice and close. This is science. Alert I love the writing To the swirling mass of ultra-hot plasma surrounding the sun and take a wealth of different measurements to help us improve our scientific understanding of it. I mean, the sun's the whole thing right, it's the whole kit and caboodle. Without that there ain't nothing. So very, very exciting. It's within 7.26 million kilometers of the sun's surface. Eventually get as close as 6 million kilometers. How close is that? It's more than the distance from Washington DC to Tokyo. I can tell you that. Gotta be. I can tell you that.

0:09:05 - Mikah Sargent
Gotta be.

0:09:05 - Leo Laporte
I can tell you that right now, at one stage the record for the fastest man-made object was held by a borehole cover on a nuclear test tube that was blasted into space after the bomb was detonated underground. Wow, the manhole cover went straight up at an estimated 150,000 miles an hour.

0:09:32 - Mikah Sargent
That's amazing, that's amazing.

0:09:35 - Leo Laporte
So that was, I think, inadvertent.

0:09:37 - Mikah Sargent
But this one See, that's the kind of trivia I love. They did on purpose. They said we'll do it.

0:09:43 - Leo Laporte
Now that manhole cover is now only the second fastest Poor manhole cover.

0:09:47 - Mikah Sargent
No one tell it. You know it's lived a good life.

0:09:51 - Leo Laporte
Okay, oh, I guess I probably should mention this. I love AT&T. As you know, we're very happy with the Death Star. They say that they have virtually its entire wireless user base has been hacked. A hundred as the entire user base has been hacked yeah, that does bear repeating, everyone, everyone everyone, yeah, including uh, text and calling data.

Yeah, everyone. They got att said thieves made off. They had little, um, you know hamburger masks. They made off with a half year's worth of calling and text data from virtually the entire wireless user base. The widest ranging breach yet in a campaign that has ensnared as many as 165 customers of Snowflake, which is a security program that you shouldn't use, apparently.

0:10:51 - Mikah Sargent
I mean, that's the thing. Snowflake has been at the root of several large breaches yeah, 165, actually, so it's not good and here's something important to understand. Yes, as far as we know, because they say you know call and text data. What does that mean? As far as we know, it is mostly the times and the numbers to which you are sending and the number that is receiving. It is not the actual messages themselves, because, of course, in many cases those are encrypted. Well there you go at&t. Good job, snowflake. Will you be hacked someday?

0:11:31 - Leo Laporte
you will yeah just all right by existing. Now, what do we do on this show? We answer questions. That was just a little brief interlude to get you ready for the main event. Half an hour hour, sam Ebbels, sam, and talking about cars Meanwhile, call us 888-724-2884. Do 888-724-ATTG? Ask the tech guys. Or you can use your phone and browser to enter the address Call dot, twit dot TV. And that will actually zoom us, zoom us, zoom us, calltwittv. And when you do get Zoomed in you will be speaking to no one, you will just be put in a lobby.

0:12:15 - Mikah Sargent
But eventually we will speak to you and at that point, you'll have to press star six if you're on the phone. If you're on the phone, if you call us, yeah, star six to unmute yourself If you are not on the phone. If you're on the phone, if you call us, yeah, star six to unmute yourself. If you are not on the phone, you'll see a little thing. You'll get moved into the on-air room and then we'll be able to bring you online you're watching?

0:12:32 - Leo Laporte
ask the tech guys. Calls are coming up. That's Mikah Sargent. I'm Leo Laporte. Happy sunday. Now, john ashley. I have given you a moment to prepare.

0:12:43 - Mikah Sargent
Oh that was the moment. Oh um, you've had your moment. I had my moment.

0:12:49 - John Ashley
I want to take a call and I'm gonna pick up, uh, we see a lot of long time call.

0:12:53 - Leo Laporte
You know many, many time callers, which is great. We love you, but we want to get some fresh people in as well, so let's first off.

0:12:59 - Mikah Sargent
I picked up on what he says somewhat regular, but we haven't heard from him in a while. Who's that? He's got the same name as me, but spelled with a C.

0:13:08 - Leo Laporte
Oh, micah from Maine. I like Micah from Maine. Hello, micah, he's our airplane guy. Hi, micah, join us in the ATG.

0:13:15 - Caller
I like you too, leo, I just thought I'd let you know. And, micah, how can I not love you? You have a great name.

0:13:21 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, great name truly.

0:13:24 - Leo Laporte
It's biblical. Yes, yeah, it is biblical. It's spelled with a C in the Bibble.

0:13:28 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, exactly Mine was supposed to be. The nurse misspelled it. My mom liked it, I like the K. I think it's kind of neat.

0:13:34 - Leo Laporte
yeah Well, mr Micah from Maine. What's new in aviation news?

0:13:40 - Caller
Well, I wanted to give you first of all. There are a couple of things I wanted to say, because I do have a question for you. But you were talking about the speed of that satellite and you were looking at comparisons and I thought I'd let you know that the highest speed of any passenger airliner is the 747-8. And at its highest speed it's cruising at Mach 0.85.

0:14:01 - Leo Laporte
Almost the speed of sound. Yeah yeah, now the Concorde was sup but but that doesn't fly, it can go up.

0:14:09 - Caller
It could have gone up to Mach two and it did, and it was very, very fast. Not particularly comfortable, but you were there so quick, you didn't really mind Couple of hours and I'm in Tokyo.

0:14:20 - Leo Laporte
Wow. So I didn't realize a 747 could go that fast. Though that's pretty cool, they don't routinely go that fast, they're more like 600 miles, 700 miles an hour, right.

0:14:29 - Caller
Well, which is pretty close to Mach 8.85, because the speed of sound is about 750 miles per hour.

0:14:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, there you go. It's slow. I didn't realize sound was so slow.

0:14:40 - Caller
That's why you see lightning. And then you know, you count and you hear the thunder.

0:14:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, do. That's why you see lightning. And then you know you count and you hear the thunder. Yeah, do you count to seven? Is that what you do?

0:14:47 - Caller
Seven seconds, you count the seconds and you divide by five, I believe, and that gives you the distance. Oh, I think I think it's five Something like that. Maybe it's seven. It's right around there Nice.

0:14:58 - Leo Laporte
I used to do that with my dad 1,00, 1001, 1002, 1003. And you hope you get to six or seven. Yeah, keep it out there.

0:15:07 - Caller
Yeah, if it's at the same time, you're in trouble. The other thing I wanted to mention the AT&T breach as well, because while, yes, it was AT&T that was breached, it affects everyone because they have the numbers that were texted or called. So, although I'm T-Mobile, I talk to AT&T people all the time that breach was taken.

0:15:28 - Leo Laporte
Me too.

0:15:28 - Caller
yeah, and if you're Verizon, it doesn't matter.

0:15:30 - Leo Laporte
So they know my number, yeah.

0:15:32 - Caller
Right. This is a national breach and I hope that something appropriate is done, although nothing will be.

0:15:38 - Leo Laporte
No, of course not. There's no law about it. Phone numbers, by the way, and not just cellular numbers. Yes, it was a cellular callers who were hacked, but if they call the landline, they got your landline too. Now, what could you do with those numbers? Though I mean it's not like. I mean people just guess my number randomly, they don't need my number. Are the names attached to the numbers?

0:15:59 - Caller
I wasn't sure. I think that they might have been in some cases not necessarily the number that was called, but they can put some scams because if they can follow it, they can put the calls, the numbers that are put together, and call their text regularly. You'll remember this.

0:16:13 - Leo Laporte
Micah from Maine and I think this will come as a revelation to Micah from Petaluma. But in years gone by, the phone company would actually send out a book that attached names to every number in town. Listen, you'd get a book on your doorstep.

0:16:28 - Mikah Sargent
Listen. One of my favorite things to do to wow the people around me was rip a phone book in half.

0:16:37 - Caller
What, you can rip a phone book in half. It takes a special technique.

0:16:40 - Mikah Sargent
My skinny little self could rip a phone book in half, and I was a child at the time, so I know about phone books.

0:16:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's your fault, ben. You kept ripping them in half. Now there's none left, don't you wish you'd saved a few? I wish.

0:16:52 - Mikah Sargent
I would have they were like where's the phone?

0:16:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I did that thing again. I did the trick.

0:16:57 - Mikah Sargent
Oh dear.

0:16:59 - Leo Laporte
In movies. I love one of the things that happens. Usually it's a gumshoe. They'll go in the phone booth. We used to have phones all over town in a glass booth and they'd go into the phone book and then inside it would be a book printed with all the names usually like a metal he'd go he'd look at his thumb and go find the name and number and then rip the page out like a menace and take it with him how does superman change?

0:17:22 - Caller
now you know really no wonder we haven't seen him in a long time.

0:17:29 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think isn't that a visual joke in the first Richard Donner Superman, where he runs to one of those half little kiosk phone booths and looks around and goes, um, that's funny. I don't know why he would go in a phone booth and change. It had glass walls, you could see what he was doing, true? Did he feel a little safer? Superman felt a little safer in a phone booth. I don't understand it myself. But you know we don't think about those things, you never just go of course that's where he goes, he closes the phone booth, takes off his clothes and he's superman.

So I tried that once.

0:17:59 - Mikah Sargent
It didn't never mind um. So what was your question? What's about Superman?

0:18:07 - Caller
I I have a sure motive, mic. I don't know if you guys are familiar.

0:18:11 - Leo Laporte
Very a big fan of those effect with Annie and Akko. Uh was going to the library and was trying to get one of these crappy USB mics he had working. I said, and you did it too, thank you, john Ashley. I said, send him a sure mv7 which is usb as well as a standard. You know, canon plug uh and a sure microphone, very good. But I have several of the motives.

0:18:35 - Caller
Because they make little ones, big ones, they make all kinds well, I have the tiny, tiny little one that was designed with a lightning port. Yes, it plugs into your iphone, yeah, right into the iphone. You could use it for recording video.

0:18:46 - Sam Abuelsamid
It was great for quick interviews in a large area, wonderful condenser microphone you could adjust the pickup angle.

0:18:53 - Leo Laporte
Really super yeah and it had a big muff on it, which I love.

0:18:57 - Caller
It had a big round ball on it yeah, absolutely no, it's great and I still use it on occasion. Great, and I still use it on occasion when I'm when I'm doing an interview. You know, I'll plug in my ATR 2100 with an adapter and that's perfect when I'm going back and forth, but if I need to get a whole scene, it's a great way to do it. I agree, you know my my iPad now has a USB port and my new iPhone is going to have that too. So what I've been looking for and what I purchased were some USB-C to lightning jacks. Now, I don't want a cable because that doesn't attach. I want a jack so I can still attach it the way that it used to. But all those jacks seem to be for power, right? Not? Not a microphone, not data and not headphones, and I'm wondering if you guys can help me find one. I looked all over, I've shopped, you know, the Amazon, and I've shopped around. I didn't know where to look. You know I bought a few, sent them back, tried a couple. Didn't work.

0:19:55 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if you guys had any idea that, uh, that MV uh emotive, uh, mike as well, and I just put it in a drawer cause I thought that's it, it's over, because it uses lightning. I didn't have your sense to say, well, is there some way to plug in? So you don't want a cable, you want it to do what it did, which is it nested nicely onto the phone and so it turned your phone into a microphone like this kind of.

0:20:21 - Caller
Yeah, it was wonderful, and I did get a cable and I got what are they called A bongo cord so I can attach it, but I can't find what I'm looking for that does what I need.

0:20:30 - Mikah Sargent
So the USB-C to lightning adapter lets you connect your lightning accessories to USB-C enabled iPhone or iPad. To provide three key functions charging, data and audio with the single adapter. They call it an adapter not a cable.

0:20:41 - Caller
That's important, but I'm pretty sure it's a cable, it's important, so I've got that, but I'm pretty sure it's a cable.

0:20:45 - Leo Laporte
It's not. It does. It has a little bit of cable on it, yeah.

0:20:49 - Caller
And I'm looking for the tiny little plug. It's only 2,900 rupees.

0:20:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't know why I'm looking for a tiny little plug. I don't know why I have rupees, that's just a jack.

0:21:05 - Caller
Like the old jacks, we your quarter inch, you know. Plug to a to an eighth, I see why.

0:21:07 - Mikah Sargent
You know, a jack is what I'm looking for, okay, not a cable at all, yeah, yeah, hmm, I don't know if you're going to find that, because here's the problem lightning is a license, expensive uh device, and so, by that very nature, or right?

0:21:20 - Caller
I've never seen a lightning to usb jack yeah they definitely make them, but they're all for power, yeah, and a lot of them will say not for use for data or not for use what do they call it? Uh, headphone, microphone or audio. But they'll say it real specifically, and I don't see if they make them for one, I don't see any reason why they couldn't make them for the other you know, here's one.

0:21:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, lightning male to usb3 female. Well, it's not lightning, it's I mean, it's not usbc, it's an on the go cable, though, which means it does data apple certified. Yeah, I see what your issue is here. I think you're just supposed to throw it out. What's wrong with you, don't you want to?

0:22:02 - Mikah Sargent
print a little collar for the USB-C to lightning adapter. That kept it rigid, so that way you know you could keep the microphone where, because I understand not wanting to just have the microphone dangling off of the end. So if you had, because the cable is only maybe it looks like it's maybe an inch of cable and so I've got it.

0:22:23 - Caller
I've got that cable. Oh, you have that one? I definitely I have it and it works and I can use, you know, like it's like a little bungee thing that I can use to kind of tighten it up and make it happen, but it's really uh, it can slide around and it's not, uh, it's not as elegant as a motor Burke could cut the cable between the two ends.

0:22:44 - Leo Laporte
It's just a question of wiring. You know, they just didn't in that adapter, they didn't want to put the extra wires for, or maybe you know what. Maybe it isn't just wiring, maybe it does need some coding.

0:22:55 - Mikah Sargent
Some space between the two or something, I don't know.

0:22:58 - Leo Laporte
It might need some hardware in there. I'm looking on Amazon and you're right. All of them say don't use this for audio.

0:23:05 - Caller
Right yeah, and they're cheap. They're you know, four for $10 or whatever.

0:23:12 - Leo Laporte
If you can find one, that's 30 bucks for it, but if this supports OTG, which is on the go.

0:23:16 - Caller
That's what it is Right. Yeah, and I couldn't find data.

0:23:20 - Leo Laporte
Right, yeah, so this is the wrong end, though See, it's got lightning in.

0:23:26 - Caller
Yeah, well, no, I need, I need lightning in. I'm looking for lightning in is what I need. I'm the one that I'm looking at oh, and you're probably looking at the same one is USB-C in with a lightning jack.

0:23:41 - Leo Laporte
No, no, this has, at least according to the picture. The lightning is going into the hole, so that's where your microphone would go into, and then that other end is a USB-C. That's what I need. Yeah, serial adapter, otg on the go, which usually means data is transmitted. You know, you just have to take a chance. I think it's $8. So it's not like the end of the world. It's from Renmu R-E-N-M-O-U. Let's see if we can read more about this. Lazarus, not compatible with OTG video audio. Son of a. I see one. Okay, I found one from Target.

0:24:23 - Mikah Sargent
I'll share in the Discord and then maybe Leo can pull it up. It also mentions OTG, but this time it says it does audio. The only thing I'm not seeing is if it's able to do yeah, charge, sync, data transfer, sound and voice. Oh. So yeah, check the Discord. I can't get into the Discord. Okay, it's X-Y-S-T Type in X-Y-S-T-U-S-B-C to like me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, x-y-s-t.

0:24:53 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's from X-Y-S-T. I don't know if it's going to be on Amazon, those guys are great, I do.

0:25:06 - Mikah Sargent
You have slack open. I'll slack it to you. Then you can pull it up. Slack it to me. I will slack it to me. Right, meow, there you go.

0:25:10 - Leo Laporte
There it is he's like x, y, s, t. It looks pretty. It's got a little uh grommet on it for something and a wallace and a wallace and a grommet. Yeah, the fact that I see the microphone logo on, but it's the wrong ND, right? This is not what you want.

0:25:27 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that is what he wants. I want lightning oh, shoot Lightning. Plug, oh, dang it.

0:25:32 - Leo Laporte
You got your lightning out of his reverse.

0:25:34 - Mikah Sargent
You're right.

0:25:36 - Leo Laporte
It's also out of stock. Dang it, but I love it.

0:25:40 - Mikah Sargent
It does have a microphone on it Makes me sad. I thought I had it.

0:25:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, we don't know, but maybe somebody in the lovely uh chat uh, this is. This is older because it was designed to make a usbc device work with an iphone. What you want is a device designed to work. I just put mine in a drawer. I'll be honest, mike, I just put mine in a drawer, I said it was good knowing you and went out and I'm on a zoom but you know, a rich computer guy like you can do that. I know You're an airplane geek like me.

0:26:08 - Caller
You know my $300 microphone. I just can't throw that away. Was it that expensive? Don't tell me that it was around $200, $300. I didn't realize.

0:26:18 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I think I might have found something from Newegg. They're good, I got it right this time in terms of the way that I like their name goes um, it shows usbc on one side, with it plugs into the phone lightning on the other, yes, and it says that it does charging and it does data transfer and it has an anti-loss loop oh, it does say not for audio headphones. Nice, this is wild how can you?

0:26:50 - Leo Laporte
transfer but not do audio. I might, you might contact sure and say hey, sure, yeah, what's your idea?

0:26:56 - Caller
I did contact. Sure, they said do what leo did they, yeah, no, they, well, they, they. They said get the uh, the, the apple cable and use a bongo cord. They even have it on their website. It's crazy that they don't make this little gadget, you know. Anyway, I don't know if off air. If it's possible, I could give you my Airplane Geeks email and if you hear of one that you could get it to me, it would be very, very handy. Well, keep looking.

0:27:25 - Leo Laporte
And, if I can find it, I think I have. I think you've emailed me in the past, haven't you?

0:27:34 - Caller
I believe I have back when Kim was with you, micah, just email the show email.

0:27:36 - Leo Laporte
We'll make sure. Email, the show email which is ATG at twittv. I will do that, micah, real pleasure. What else is going on? I always say, oh, I got to ask Micah from Maine about this when I read airline stories no doors have blown off. Well, boeing is in trouble, aren't they? Now they're actually Well, boeing took a plea deal.

0:27:57 - Caller
They really got away with it and the lawyers that are going against Boeing, for the passengers on, are very upset with that. They don't feel they were punished enough, but in the long run I think it's going to help them with their civil suits that are going through.

0:28:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so that's because it's an admission of guilt.

0:28:15 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it definitely is. But in other interesting news based on, you know, the heat that we've been experiencing, especially out there with you guys, they're having real trouble with like helicopter life flights. The helicopters, you know, have a hard time in high hot altitudes and so and it's also very difficult to keep the interiors cool. So we're going to be covering a story about that on this week's Airplane. Geeks about helicopters are having a hard time doing life flights. Well, that's not another. Another interesting issue on Southwest Airlines, again due to the heat and the way that they stock their sodas, is that Diet Coke is exploding all over the place and flight attendants are having a real hard time trying to serve Diet Coke because it's too warm when they open it up.

0:29:04 - Leo Laporte
They don't keep it refrigerated like some of the other airlines. Refrigerate it please. Airplane Geeks podcast airplanegeekscom. A lot of fun listening to it, mike, always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

0:29:17 - Caller
Thanks so much for having me on the show. Before you go, one more link.

0:29:21 - Leo Laporte
This is from ScooterX, who is a master of uh stuff. We need of uh, of google, a google master. I wish I could get my discord open. He says look for the tub ran, not turban tub ran. Otg lightning usb charging adapter. Two-in-one exclusive adapter for macbook.

0:29:43 - Mikah Sargent
See if it works oh yeah, because they do show microphones multiple times it's on amazon t-u-b-r-a-n microphone.

0:29:53 - Leo Laporte
It says the word microphone cubram otg lightning usb on amazon yes, see if you can find that, because it does specifically mention the Mikey phone.

0:30:07 - Caller
Wow yeah, $10.88. What a deal.

0:30:10 - Caller
I can't believe it. Thank you, scooter X, I hope it works.

0:30:13 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Scooter X. Oh, that's wonderful. Scooter X is always the guy for this stuff. He's a master of the equipment.

0:30:19 - Caller
Oh, and if I order now, 5% coupon. What a deal. Thank you so much. I knew you guys would save the day.

0:30:28 - Leo Laporte
Well, thanks to the chat room and our great club members. Thank you, take care, Mikah. Bye-bye, we do appreciate our club, we do. They are so smart and and it's really I think it's the whole point of what we do and have always been doing. Uh, on the tech guy show, which is, I always called him team tech guy and I always said this for 20 years. I said this. On the radio show show which is, I always called him team tech guy and I always said this for 20 years. I said this on the radio show. I can't answer every question, but you got a lot of people listening, a lot of people watching and many people in chat. Somebody's going to know the answer. So if you call and you ask and we can't get the answer for you pretty much guarantee ScooterX. ScooterX will and out of sync says you know, prime Day is just two days away you might want to hold off.

0:31:09 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, you could get a 15% coupon.

0:31:12 - Leo Laporte
Okay, yeah, should I do an email as we lead up to Sam Abul Sam, I think an email would be good. We got a stack of emails here from our fine audience.

Just a small portion of a stack, and I almost forgot. If you'd like to be in the club and join us in the Discord twit.tv/clubtwit. Seven bucks a month, that's all. Join us. Alternative his from Dan. Alternative to Alexa for home group audio. Hi, leo and Mike, I love the show. Also a Club Twit member. Thank you, dan.

My fiance's parents are not super tech savvy but know how to use Alexa and other voice assistants. They're currently using echo devices around the house on a home. He's putting that quotes that's the label group mode for playing music throughout the house. So you say you know, hey, echo, play, play music on home and then all the speakers start off. The devices are all relatively newer and are set to update automatically, but frequently cut in or out or start making static sounds playing music on a variety of streaming services, but especially Sirius XM. Don't think it's an internet issue. I'm wondering if it's an Amazon device problem.

Is there a better alternative for streaming music throughout the house that has voice assistant capability and won't be as expensive as sonos? I understand I love sonos, but I feel like they would not like the app ui and they would want something voice controlled bass. I do. Uh, sonos does support echo as well as google voice, so you can talk to. Some sonos devices have microphones, um, but it is. It's awfully expensive.

The really the reason that people buy Sonos is because of this whole home audio. Yeah, they were the first to do it. Remember, google added it to its devices. Sonos sued and the judge ruled that the patent did not protect Sonos, that, in fact, google wasn't doing anything unusual, so you know they hadn't stolen the idea. So I think more and more devices, bluetooth devices, can do that multi-home audio without you know what. If it doesn't work, what you get is echo. It's like the sound is the song is playing here, but then a half second later there, and that's not a good. That's not a good thing, and Sonos really was the first to lick that. I'm not sure what the static is and all that stuff I've not heard of this as an issue.

0:33:38 - Mikah Sargent
I think you might try doing some troubleshooting in terms of having them play from another streaming service and see if it happens. You said that it particularly happens on Sirius XM radio, but do you know that for sure? If you try it on whatever music streaming service they have outside of that, if they try Spotify and it's not causing an issue where you're never hearing that static, then you know it is Sirius XM, specifically on that device, that's causing the issue. There are a number of other solutions, but none of them are inexpensive and I think would require too much work to kind of redo everything. They've already got this. They've invested in having these devices in multiple rooms. I think it'd be kind of a shame to replace everything with another whole home audio system like what google has or what apple has well, apple, and that's the other thing, and so you could get apple home pods and I think it would work better.

I think that that's a I don't know if that's cheaper than yeah. That's the thing.

0:34:38 - Leo Laporte
I don't think it's much cheaper than sonos, I think the speakers on the big home pod are actually better than the sonos speakers. I really like them and they do this around very nicely. They adapt to rooms very nicely. I think that they're probably a better choice. But what are they? 499 each.

0:34:53 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, a 399 that's yeah, I mean, and you, need two for a stereo pair.

0:34:59 - Leo Laporte
now you're really actually more expensive than sonos. The advantage, though, of having a homogeneous system is it all works together better. So all Sonos, whatever you choose to do exactly, it all works better. You know, you might look at is ultimate ears, ue, ue, boom. Yeah, those do a good job. They do the same kind of thing and you can put them all over the house. They have party mode.

0:35:28 - Mikah Sargent
That's what it's called.

0:35:28 - Leo Laporte
And I think that there is. I seriously think there's why they think now I'm getting the price in pounds sterling. They don't know where you are, they don't know where I am, so it's only 129 pounds sterling.

0:35:44 - Mikah Sargent
Do you have a VPN?

0:35:45 - Leo Laporte
running. I don't know what's going on. So that's the Boom 4, but I think they might make the problem with these. These are more designed to be portable, so let me see yeah, the Hyper Boom is In fact, father Robert brought this over. Yeah, that's portable too, though, and that is now. We're at 409 pounds sterling.

0:36:05 - Mikah Sargent
We're getting into the uh zonos, uh territory, but get a few of these little uh booms are great and they sound great for how small they are yeah, and I've had them around the house years now and I use it as a shower speaker and it's that one right there, yeah, and I have had it for seven years at this point, and it stays in the shower almost, except for whenever it's charging. Still works just fine after all these years, so they are really good uh devices and it's the speaker that I recommend to my family.

0:36:37 - Leo Laporte
Get the wonder boom for the boom, for the mega boom, for the ever boom, for why they have a cross on them. I don't know. The epic boom no, that's actually that plus and minus, but to me it looks a little, it doesn't look across yeah, um that that. So I think this is oh see, region united kingdom. Let's, let's um, let's make it india, so everything is consistent. No, let's not, because I don't the rupee.

0:37:02 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah I'm just really having trouble where I have to keep changing my currency conversion system. So if you could keep it in india, that'd be great, it would be nice um, I have a few of these and I really, really, really like them.

0:37:13 - Leo Laporte
I think that they're great and you can get the little, the little ones. The thing is they're supposed to be portable, but you can keep them plugged in. They just plug into a usb cable so you can keep them plugged in all around the house. But it is nice because you can. It's easy to reconfigure the Wonder Boom 4, which you can actually take swimming with you. As you see, there is a hundred bucks, so you put those all around the house and you're going to have a party.

0:37:38 - Mikah Sargent
I think that's oh, if that's a hundred bucks, then Get 10 of them. I was going to say no, I was going to say that's the same cost as a HomePod Mini. Right? So you then have the choice if you want to go kind of agnostic.

0:37:48 - Leo Laporte
I think they sound a little better than the HomePod Mini.

0:37:50 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I will say the HomePod Minis do not while their sound. I feel that their sound is good, but their volume is not you know what I use them for.

0:38:07 - Leo Laporte
They're not loud enough. Syrian rooms so I can talk to my house because I get lonely. Uh, I keep having this fantasy that I'm going to be able to say good morning, and every the lights will come on, the curtains will go up, the garage door open and close, open, close. You know it'll be talking coffee maker everyone yeah, I just, I like, like, like sleeping beauty you want to be be Mickey Mouse in that Fantasia thing?

0:38:25 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

0:38:29 - Leo Laporte
No, I'm thinking more like you know how sleep? Was it Snow White? Who was it with the dwarfs?

0:38:34 - Mikah Sargent
Who was it with the dwarfs? Yeah, snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. What is it with the dwarfs, snow White?

0:38:37 - Leo Laporte
I feel like I'm turning into Regis Philbin Dwarves. What is it with the dwarves?

0:38:42 - Mikah Sargent
They're sleepy, they're sleepy.

0:38:44 - Leo Laporte
They're dopey, they're grumpy. And what's the doc? What's his thing? Is he a doctor? Sleeping Beauty used to sing to the birds, oh yeah, while she's sweeping up. Oh that's.

0:38:55 - Mikah Sargent
Cinderella. Is that Cinderella, cinderella?

0:39:03 - Leo Laporte
You're watching. Ask the Befuddled Tech Guy and Micah, and we thank you for being here on the Twitch broadcast network.

0:39:09 - Mikah Sargent
I have a problem sitting still, and so what I use the HomePod minis for is I will turn on the audio for those, so that if we're watching a show, if I go upstairs I can still hear the show, or if I go into the kitchen, isn't?

0:39:22 - Leo Laporte
that nice.

0:39:22 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so I don't have to necessarily stay rooted.

0:39:24 - Leo Laporte
You don't need to hear and see the picture you can just hear.

0:39:27 - Mikah Sargent
It depends on the show, obviously that's a great idea.

0:39:29 - Leo Laporte
So you use home home whole home tv audio, exactly. Yeah, let us uh now adjourn or no, a join, let us now get with uh. Mr sam ebbles samid. He is a principal researcher at GuideHouse Insights. He is our car guy, the host of the Wheelbearings podcast, and joins us from beautiful Ypsilanti, michigan, which today looks like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

0:39:57 - Mikah Sargent
Wow that looks cool Hello there Sam.

0:39:59 - Caller
Hey, gentlemen, how are you today Doing?

0:40:00 - Leo Laporte
well, Great how are you? Good to see you too.

0:40:09 - Sam Abuelsamid
So the Celestique? Isn't that a Cadillac brand. It is a Cadillac and it's pronounced Celestic.

0:40:13 - Caller
Celestic Not.

0:40:13 - Sam Abuelsamid
Celestique.

0:40:14 - Leo Laporte
Nope, but do you spell it?

0:40:16 - Caller
with an I-Q.

0:40:16 - Leo Laporte
Optic.

0:40:18 - Mikah Sargent
Optic is spelled with a C. Actually, it's spelled with a slash Q.

0:40:22 - Sam Abuelsamid
So the Cadillac Optic is spelled with a Q, oh with a Q. So the Cadillac Optic is spelled with a Q. It's an optique.

0:40:27 - Leo Laporte
No, iq is the designation that Cadillac is putting in their model names for their electric vehicles. Okay, because it's smart, I get it. So I have been saying Celestic Optic. Now I understand why people were laughing behind their hands. What is that behind?

0:40:43 - Sam Abuelsamid
your back. You know what, though? A lot of people said it. So a few optic. Now I understand why people were laughing behind their hands. What is that, you know? You know what, though a lot of people say that yeah, um, so, uh, a few days ago I paid a visit to warren, michigan, to gm's tech center, and uh, down in the basement of the sloan engineering building, uh, they have a new lab that they started building last september. Uh, it is their software quality lab. And given how long you know GM and other automakers have been doing software, you would think that you know software quality lab would not be a new thing, but it is.

Gm, like most automakers, as we've been making this transition over the last few years to what they call software-defined vehicles. The complexity of software in vehicles has gotten has just exploded, compared to where it was 20, 25 years ago when I was doing automotive software for things like traction control and stability control and brake by wire. It has just gotten way more complicated. And the legacy automakers like GM and Ford and Volkswagen and Volvo, as they've been trying to do this, they've been struggling with how to test this stuff, how to set up their organizations to be able to develop software. Software because up until 10 years ago, when um, when tesla launched the model s, software was something that went into a vehicle when it was built and then it was never changed over the life of that vehicle.

The software in a vehicle it was, it was, it was static. So when a program, a new program, would launch, go into production, um, you know, there would would be a deadline usually a month, two months before job one, when everybody doing various software bits for that car pencils down, it's finished. It has to be done by that date. And then there was generally no updates to a vehicle once it was in production. But that has all changed.

Tesla, starting with the Model S, created this idea of oh, we can push software updates to vehicles over the air and we can add new functionality to vehicles years after they've been on the road. And so that means the software has to be set up in a totally different way and the processes for producing that software have to be set up in a totally different way. And the processes for producing that software have to be set up in a totally different way. And that's something that legacy automakers making that transition in their organizations and their processes has had to change and, if you recall, back in December, when GM after GM launched the Chevy Blazer EV in December, they actually had to put a stop sale on that vehicle and they didn't resume sales of it until about March of this year because there were so many software problems with it. That's not good, yeah. So this new software quality lab is designed to try to make sure that doesn't happen again.

0:43:44 - Leo Laporte
Why is it so hard? I mean, we've been making the computers have software. Why is it so hard? Is it the automakers don't have the skill set? No, they can hire good coders.

0:44:01 - Sam Abuelsamid
It's the nature of the kind of software and the way that it's being deployed. So when I was doing automotive software, you know it, the software was deeply embedded. It was tied very close to the hardware. So we, you know we were using, you know, relatively low power microcontrollers and the software that we wrote was very specific to that hardware and so you couldn't just go from you know, a TI chip or an NXP chip or an Intel chip and switch it around. You'd have to basically completely rewrite the software A lot of it. When I started we were writing Intel assembly code and the code was designed to never be changed.

Now you've got and all of the different functions in the car were basically siloed from each other. They didn't interact very much. Now you've got all these features that are software driven and there's a lot of interaction. And we're starting, we're now deploying an architecture where there's an abstraction layer. It's kind of it's a lot like the way Android and iOS work in that you know there's an application layer, so you got applications on the top. Those applications don't ever actually talk directly to the hardware, they talk to APIs. You know so there's this layer that separates the hardware from the applications, apis. You know. So there's this layer that separates the hardware from the applications, and so you call APIs if you want some data, and you call APIs when you want to send a signal to. You know. If you want to tell the brakes to apply, you know you call an API to do that, just like you would call an API to send, you know, to take a picture. You know to tell the imaging sensor to take a picture, you don't actually call the imaging sensor, you call an API to do that. And they're doing the same thing in cars now, you know, so that they can be able to make changes in the hardware and the software asynchronously. So we're shifting to a model that's much more like the traditional tech industry, but unlike the tech industry where safety wasn't really a concern, because if the applications on your phone crash, people don't usually die. Very often when an application crashes in your car, people can die. So you've got these two different mindsets of safety first and move fast and break things, kind of battling each other, and so it's finding a balance in there and trying to get the best of both of those worlds in there.

So what's cool about this new software lab is they have developed these new test benches. They've always had, you know, test benches where, for things like the infotainment system, you know, basically they would in the old days, like 10 years ago, they would just have a rack that had your infotainment display, your center infotainment display, and some switches and buttons, and engineers would sit there and they would test, you know, load software onto it and they would test stuff. And it was all done in person. And, uh, you know, it was comparatively simple compared to what we have today. Now we have these giant screens, usually multiple screens, in the car. Um, there's much more that's being controlled by the software and so these new test benches have there's versions of this for every vehicle configuration they have. The one behind me here on the screen is for the new Cadillac Celestic, but there's versions for the Chevy Silverado and the GMC Sierra and every other vehicle GM makes. They've got 300 of these now and they're adding more all the time.

And in addition to having all the screens, all the switches, there's also the radios and all of the ECUs, not just the infotainment unit, but all the ECUs in the vehicle, all the electronic control units, and the engineers can be sitting there at the bench testing stuff, loading software on and testing it. But these are all networked together as well, so they can run it remotely. So if they're working remotely or, for example, if an engineer in Israel, a developer in Israel or a developer in China or India wants to run tests on a bench in Warren, michigan, they can do that. They can log in and run their tests and then, when they're not being used by an individual, they can also run automated testing. And they're using GenAI to create all the different scenarios, all the different possible combinations and permutations of the way the controls could be manipulated in the vehicle, the signals that could be coming in to test all this stuff. So they're doing a lot more testing and they're tracking.

They're monitoring the utilization. As they get up to about 70% utilization on all the test benches, then they start adding more and so right now they've got about 300 of these in Warren. So right now they've got about 300 of these in Warren. They've sent some to Google because GM uses the Android Automotive OS for their infotainment, so Google's got some that they use for testing their stuff. They're also going to be sending some to Israel and India and to China, where they're testing different operating systems. So hopefully this will lead to some improvement. One of the other interesting things is in this lab they actually have femtocells for AT&T and Verizon and each one of these test benches has the antennas that they have on the car, the cellular antennas that they have on the car. Has the antennas that they have on the car, the cellular antennas that they have on the car so that they can test over-the-air updates, so they can push over-the-air updates to the test benches and make sure that those are going to work properly.

0:50:04 - Leo Laporte
Very cool. I'm glad that they're paying attention to software. You said you wrote an assembly language, Intel assembly language. What are they doing it now in C++?

0:50:16 - Sam Abuelsamid
They use a variety of different languages. Some of it is in C and C++. They use, I think, Rust for some things.

0:50:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh good, Rust is a nice language.

0:50:27 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, yeah, depending on what the applications are, they're written in a variety of different languages. Obviously, the Android applications that are running on the infotainment system, those are being written in Java or Kotlin, right? So there's a wide range of things that they use and all of it has to work together. All of it has to interoperate.

0:50:47 - Leo Laporte
It's interesting, I think more and more car companies. For a long time QNX, which is owned by BlackB.

0:50:51 - Sam Abuelsamid
Blackberry now was the real-time operating system choice of and they still use qnx in these two for some, for some parts, qnx and android auto. Yeah, there's, there's I mean there's multiple operating systems that are running some. This is part of why it's so complicated, because there's, you know, so um with the, the latest generation of gm's uh software platform. You know, I talked about that, that abstraction layer where you're abstracting the hardware away from the software. The lowest level of that stack is actually running Red Hat Linux, good, and then, and then you're running, and you're running this abstraction layer, and then you're running things like QNX and Android Automotive, and in some cases, I don't think GM's using automotive grade Linux, but you know some manufacturers use automotive grade Linux, some it's just, you know, other flavors of Linux, so there's a variety of different things that are running in containers on top of this. You know that's part of this middleware layer, and so that's part of what adds to all this complexity and so that's, that's part of what adds to all this complexity.

0:51:59 - Leo Laporte
And then, uh, is is one of the reasons they have multiple operating systems to separate the telematics from the entertainment system. Yeah, yeah, because they, because for security, you don't want one operating system that could do everything well, there's also, you know, some portions of the controls like, for example, the instrument cluster.

0:52:19 - Sam Abuelsamid
That stuff has to be real-time control, so you can't use, like, android to run your diagnostic alert lamps and your speedometer and things like that. That has to be a real-time control system. So that's where they're using QNX to run pieces like that and then using Android for the infotainment and using other things for the driver assist systems.

0:52:43 - Leo Laporte
So it's complicated, isn't it?

0:52:45 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, it's finding the right tools for the job.

0:52:49 - Leo Laporte
I think Tesla is much simpler, isn't it?

0:52:52 - Sam Abuelsamid
uh, no, no, no, they're, they're. You know, they also run multiple different uh systems in their stack as well.

0:52:59 - Leo Laporte
Okay, every everybody does that was the thing that at least I thought distinguished tesla is that they had a more of a silicon valley approach to uh, to cars it's it's still a multi-layer stack.

0:53:11 - Sam Abuelsamid
You know. Know, the thing that Tesla did that was really unique. First was starting to consolidate down the number of ECUs. So you know, when we started putting electronics and software into cars in the 1970s. So software in cars not a new phenomenon.

0:53:28 - Leo Laporte
We've been doing this for almost 50 years In the 70s.

0:53:30 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, since the 1970s.

0:53:31 - Leo Laporte
What was it in the 70s that it was uh operating? Uh, it started off with uh the engine yeah, well, even before fuel injection just some of the basic engine management system

0:53:41 - Sam Abuelsamid
and then transmissions and abs came along in 1978. Sure, um, and the thing is over time. You know there was this very uh, piecemeal approach to adding electronics and software to vehicles, based the way the supply chain worked automakers, if they wanted to add a new feature to a car, they would go to a supplier and they would buy. I'll use ABS as an example because that's something I worked on, but it applies to all kinds of things, like, you know, climate control systems. You know dual, multi-zone climate control and those fancy sequential tail lamps or turn signals that you have on modern cars.

All these things you buy a feature, and that feature would include a set of sensors, a set of actuators and an electronic control unit with some embedded software. And so you'd have to distribute all these ECUs around the vehicle for all these different functions. And you know they were on a network, on a CAN network, a controller area network, but it was a fairly slow network. They could share some data but they didn't really interact very much. And so modern cars, you might have as many as 100 to 125 ECUs around the vehicle, have as many as 100 to 125 ECUs around the vehicle or each discreet electronics and software, but they have to communicate with each other.

0:55:00 - Leo Laporte
It's a Frankenstein.

0:55:01 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, and what Tesla did was they started to consolidate these and put applications together in single ECUs. And that's what GM and other companies are doing now, and the next generation of what we call EE architectures electric, electrical and electronic architectures are getting down, you know, to under 10 ECUs.

0:55:22 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's much better, and so you're so look at the wiring harness on some of these cars. They got complicated systems.

0:55:30 - Mikah Sargent
So does that mean, though, that before, if your ABS wasn't working and it turned out that it was just the brake light switch that the car no longer had access to, you could just replace the brake light switch? But now, if you have fewer ECUs, when something goes wrong is it harder to fix? Is it more cost?

0:55:51 - Sam Abuelsamid
It can be harder to fix because you know you have to figure out, okay, is there a software problem, is it a hardware problem? Where, where's the hardware? And this is one of the reasons why automotive software is so complex, because a lot of it is diagnostics, diagnostic code, you know. So you know, especially for anything safety critical, there has to be diagnostics for for all of the things that could potentially go wrong, be diagnostics for all of the things that could potentially go wrong. And so you know, when I was doing this stuff, you know we spent a lot of time just developing the diagnostics algorithms to determine has the brake switch failed? Is a wheel speed sensor bad? Is an accelerometer bad? All of these things that could potentially go wrong.

And you know, because of the complexity, these things that could potentially go wrong. And you know, because of the complexity, you know, it's not easy for a technician, a service technician, to just, you know, replace a part. They have to figure out what do we have to replace. And so you need that combination of the software and the hardware working together to be able to service these things. So it's, you know, and it's funny, a few about three weeks ago I visited the Rivian Tech Center here in Michigan and Rivian just recently rolled out an update to the R1T and R1S their first two vehicles and they transitioned to a new EE architecture. Previously they had 17 main electronic control units, they now have five. Wow, and as part of this revamped architecture they eliminated 1.6 miles of wiring. Are you kidding? That's amazing. Yeah, a typical modern car that has a traditional EE architecture might have three to three and a half miles of wiring in the car. Oh my goodness, it weighs several hundred pounds and Rivian eliminated 46 pounds of copper wiring 1.6 miles of wire in this new system Amazing.

0:57:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, amazing.

0:57:53 - Mikah Sargent
I love having you on the show. I always learn something so interesting every time you're here. I appreciate it.

0:57:59 - Leo Laporte
Mr Sam Abul Sam Ed, principal Researcher at GuideHouse Insights. And, of course, if you love cars, you'll love Robbie, nicole and Sam talking about cars on Wheelbearings their podcast.

0:58:09 - Sam Abuelsamid
There's a fresh episode up now. We recorded it this morning. I just published it about an hour ago Nice.

0:58:13 - Leo Laporte
Wheelbearingsmedia. Thank you, sam, have a great day.

0:58:17 - Sam Abuelsamid
Thank you and hopefully I'll see you in the next couple of weeks. I'm going to be out in your neck of the woods for vacation, in Sonoma Vacation You're not driving somebody's vehicle, no Well. I'm driving somebody's vehicle that we're going to use while we're out there. But I'll be out there the last week of July for just relaxing.

0:58:38 - Leo Laporte
You should come visit us because we think that may be the last week of the studio. In fact, I will try to stop by. Do you think you could be here on what is the last Sunday in July, because I think that's the Sunday that Alex Lindsay wants to do a 3d version of twit suitable for use on vision pros and we want to have all live in studio.

0:59:02 - Sam Abuelsamid
Uh, yeah, I'm trying to make it an actual vacation, oh yeah.

0:59:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, excuse me, I don't want to tell your wife you'll be in 3d.

0:59:11 - Sam Abuelsamid
My friend, this is an opportunity.

0:59:12 - Caller
She sees me in 3D every day.

0:59:14 - Sam Abuelsamid
Oh yeah that's right?

0:59:16 - Leo Laporte
Well, no, I think it's great.

0:59:17 - Sam Abuelsamid
I will try to stop by, yeah do say hi.

0:59:19 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, we'll take you to dinner, all right. Thanks, sam Bye. Sam Take care.

Wow, that is going to be fun when Alex does this, and I think that we're Black Magi 29th. No, he's working with oh, they have a funny name Voodoo Stream Voodoo, I think, is the name of it. Let me just see. And they have special cameras and I think they probably use the Canon dual lens camera, yeah, and they're able to apparently stream it in such a fashion that everybody all five of you that have Vision Pros will be able to watch and you'll be able to see the back of my head at the same time as you see the front. It's Chuck.

1:00:02 - Mikah Sargent
Brenda, larry, who was?

1:00:06 - Leo Laporte
it. We love you guys.

1:00:07 - Mikah Sargent
Wally and Karen, good job on your Vision Pros.

1:00:11 - Leo Laporte
We'll give you a little more of a heads up as we get closer. Actually, it's pretty close, isn't it? It's only a few weeks off. Yeah, we wanted to do it. It's two weeks away. I believe it or not. I noticed that all the Christmas ornaments were out in the lobby and I think that's because we're actually cleaning the place out. Believe it or not, we expect to leave the studio in two weeks, and I had Anthony out. Believe it or not, we we expect to leave the studio in two weeks, and I had anthony nielsen and russell tammany, uh, out at the house looking at the attic and going how are we gonna do?

this, so that, uh, that'll be, uh, that'll be interesting. Yeah, one last hoorah before we turn off the lights it's there's so much happening in the next two weeks, it's going to be very sad for me. I mean, I have to say it's already pretty sad for me. I feel like it's the end of an era. But very few podcasts, except the richest, you know. The Howard Sterns and the Joe Rogans of the world have a dedicated studio Almost everybody. Even when you watch a news channel nowadays, they're all in their house.

1:01:12 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, everybody. Even when you watch a news channel nowadays, they're all in their house. Yeah, and even some of the biggest podcasts that are there uh, armchair expert, that's specifically in a house, yeah, so in an armchair, I guess in an armchair. I have an armchair. You have a very comfortable armchair yeah, I made micah sitting at the other day, if you if you, if you have a break-in in the next couple of weeks and that chair is gone, it wasn't that comfy. Yeah, it's a very comfy chair. Uh, our phone number 888-724-2884, 888-724-2884.

1:01:40 - Leo Laporte
You can zoom us, call dot twit, dot tv. Just go into the browser and enter that in uh, and we also have a stack of email we can get through, but john ashley, uh we have a phone caller that's peeking through the monitors. I see you.

1:01:59 - Mikah Sargent
Star six to unmute yourself and then give us your name and where you are calling from, from whence you hence the problem is I understand you don't know, it's you. So everybody on the phone right now say hi, oh, I tried, you did, it was good. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

1:02:18 - Leo Laporte
I, yeah, I thought that was gonna work. Yeah well, there would be a problem, because if they all said hi, then, and we said it's you, then they're all talking and they're all talking into each other we'll give them a second, because sometimes you know you put your phone down if you're waiting.

1:02:29 - Mikah Sargent
But uh, phone caller, it is you the phone caller. Star six to unmute phone caller alright, maybe let's do another email oh well, that's doable.

1:02:42 - Leo Laporte
I just happen to have them right here. How handy this comes from Jeannette. J-e-n-e-t. Jeannette like Jean Jeannette, hello there. What exactly does it mean? G-e-n-e-t. Genet like Jean Genet Hello there. Hello. What exactly does it mean when you sign in with Apple on sites? I hope we are not giving away our Apple ID and password. I use this to sign in with Day One. I love Day One's journaling program and a few others. Is it safe? Thank you, I have just become a club member this month. Merci bene, jean Genet. What is happening when you use an Apple ID to sign in?

1:03:20 - Mikah Sargent
So when you use an Apple ID to sign in, you have, first and foremost, you have two options. Apple specifically sets this up so you can do the option where you sign in with your Apple ID, using your Apple ID. By the way, these are very soon going to be renamed Apple accounts, so get prepared for that. They're no longer going to be called Apple IDs. So when you sign in with your Apple account, you are given the option to either use that email that is your Apple account so let's say Micah at Maccom or you can have it forward to your Apple account email. And I recommend doing that first and foremost because what's going to happen is, when you create the account, the system gets that email address. If you've chosen to use your Apple account email, then it'd be Micah at Maccom. But if you do that second option, the one that I recommend, it creates a bespoke email right there. That's something like edutemagnus764, at privateicloudcom, just like that. It's a random string of characters and numbers that will keep your email private and then when that system whatever you're signing up for, that service, whatever it happens to be emails you, it will email that account and then that account will send that email along to you.

So the most that you are giving away even if you choose to use your Apple account email to sign in you don't use the private option. The most you are giving away is your Apple account email. You are not giving away anything else. If you're prompted to sign into your Apple ID that forwards to Apple's website and you're logging into Apple to confirm that you're you, then the system will send a little token to the account that you're signing up for saying, yeah, they're actually them, but it's not forwarding your Apple ID password to that service at all. So the most that is ever exchanged is your username itself and in fact it doesn't even give over your name and other information. That's all stuff that you type in afterward. So you don't need to worry in that sense that when you use sign-in with Apple that you're giving over your password or anything like that. It's all locked separately and it's just a token exchange.

1:05:43 - Leo Laporte
And just for your own edification, that's how all of the sign-ins work Facebook, google, apple. It's using a technology called OAuth that is secure, that is reliable, and it does not exchange actual credentials with the site. It's just saying, hey, this is the person we know, we're vouching for, this guy who claims he's Mikah Sargent and it's him, and the site goes OK, fine, and then saves a cookie or saves a token so that it doesn't have to do that all over again. It's actually a great solution. I like it a lot and Apple was late to the game, but I think they're even more privacy forward than Google.

1:06:23 - Mikah Sargent
Because they offer that option to have it forwarded to the email instead of never giving them your email.

1:06:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you could say don't even give them my email, and I think I use that whenever I can. I think it's a good solution. So, good question. Understand your concern. Don't worry, you're watching. Ask the Tech Guys Mikah Sargent, leo Laporte your questions too. Did we get the caller?

1:06:46 - John Ashley
no, unfortunately I got scared away. You know what we haven't done in a bit?

1:06:51 - Leo Laporte
yes, another email or voicemail. Oh, let's try it.

1:06:56 - Caller
I'm Steve from Phoenix Arizona. Hi Steve, my question has to do with AirPods on my studio. They don't work. When I get in the next room, the farther away I get, the worse it gets, and I'm wondering if I can get an extender for Bluetooth. Is there a product out there? Thanks for your help. Bye-bye.

1:07:27 - Mikah Sargent
This was a question that we also received via email. An answer yeah, so if you do call in, it may be a while before we get to you, but we ask, maybe let's not duplicate.

1:07:40 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think that that's you know, it happens.

1:07:43 - Mikah Sargent
But the point is what we suggested before. We had some kind of Bluetooth devices. The problem is, they're not really extenders, and so I think what we recommended at the time was playing out the audio on your phone and then carrying your phone around with you.

1:07:59 - Leo Laporte
Bluetooth doesn't. You know, in theory. Every time I say this, the people in Discord get mad at me. Bluetooth is designed to go 10 meters, 30 feet, and that's intentional because they don't want people to be picking up your Bluetooth across the city, so it's a limited range thing. Now, more, more modern bluetooth transmitters can go even farther 150 feet, scooter x, I said. You know they go 150, yeah, but they're designed to go 30 feet and that's pretty much it, unless you have some sort of special bluetooth transmitter which your phone or whatever device you're using isn't but I I'm I like the limitation because it means that other people aren't polluting my bluetooth exactly area yes, in some ways maybe bluetooth goes farther than it ought to.

Yeah, you know so. Uh, yeah, you can get a repeater. There's amplifiers and stuff, but I just take, put it on your phone and take your phone. That's what I do when I'm on a phone call. I don't try to, although it's invariable that I'll be on the phone with somebody and I'll walk out of the room forgetting. Yeah, that I'm. You know, it doesn't go forever.

1:09:05 - John Ashley
We got our caller back and I thought yeah, all right, caller, I think I'm muted himself.

1:09:10 - Caller
Hello caller hi micah, hi leo, hey, um, what's your first?

1:09:15 - Leo Laporte
what's your first name and where are you calling from?

1:09:18 - Caller
my. My name is Pacelli, you can call me Patch. I'm calling from Monterey, mexico. Hi, patch. Hi, it's so nice to meet you guys. It's an honor, leo. You actually helped me back when I was in high school around 2001 in my compact computer. Wow, it's been a long time.

1:09:38 - Leo Laporte
Have you moved to Monterey or are you there on vacation?

1:09:42 - Caller
No, I actually live here Nice.

1:09:44 - Leo Laporte
How do you like it?

1:09:46 - Caller
I love it. It's the best you should come visit. I always love when you mention Mexico City and your travels down here to Mexico. Yeah, you should bring Micah along.

1:09:56 - Leo Laporte
I'm a big fan, and Monterey, I think, do they have good fishing? Is it on the water? I can't remember now.

1:10:04 - Caller
No, it's actually right under Texas, so it's like the Colorado of Mexico.

1:10:10 - Mikah Sargent
so to speak the Colorado of Mexico you sold me because I love Colorado. Yeah, nice.

1:10:17 - Caller
It's an amazing place filled with mountains and lifeblocks wonderful and the best food.

1:10:22 - Leo Laporte
That's the key, isn't it? Yeah, nice. Well, what can we do?

1:10:26 - Mikah Sargent
for you patch if it's about that compact computer, I don't, I can't help you with a compact.

1:10:31 - Leo Laporte
That's too 23 years later.

1:10:35 - Caller
Yeah, exactly. No, unfortunately it's a max problem and and um, I've been having this issue from a long, uh, a little while. Um, I have a MacBook pro from mid 2015. It's a MacBook retina and it has, like the um, the recent um, macos moderate actually, and it's the 12.7.5.

And I've been having this issue that I've been seeing the forums lately where it has a battery issue the sort of MacBook Pro and whenever it starts degrading, the battery, like most electronics, doesn't last that long, so I have to have it plugged for a long time mostly, and those small cases where the battery dies and I connect it again and I restart the computer, the date and time is reset and when I try to make the changes, it said it automatically, it just appears. And when I try to make the changes it said it like automatically, it just appears like a certain time I think it's like December 2001, and all my applications can start. So I have to make the change manually every time the computer turns off. How old is this computer? It's around. Well, it's 2006 I bought it, 2016, I guess, so it's around nine, maybe eight years, I guess.

1:12:08 - Mikah Sargent
Maybe the batteries? Yeah, I think that the. So what's happening is the battery is so low that it's uh, I can't remember what apple calls it because they don't just call it cmos um, they, there's this whole little system that it has on it that has the time Parameter. Ram. Yeah, thank you, p-ram, p-ram, thank you.

That is resetting when that happens. But here's what I want to ask you Are you even the slightest bit handy? Yeah, I did a. Can you replace it? Yeah, a battery replacement. I did a battery replacement for a friend who had the same MacBook retina, the same MacBook pro retina that you have. Um, it's been a couple of years ago now, but I was able to do it in maybe four or five hours of work and it was night and day for the person. It worked like it was brand new. Ifixit has a fantastic kit.

1:13:01 - Leo Laporte
I'm just looking that up right now.

1:13:02 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah iFixit has and that's the kit that I use. So if you get the whole kit, they give you tools. It gives you the tools that you need. It gives you because you will need some. What's it called the finger polish? Finger polish remover is acetone.

1:13:16 - Leo Laporte
Is this the one retina MacBook 2016 battery replacement? Roughly yes.

1:13:31 - Mikah Sargent
It does require removing a lot of the components of the device. However, the tools are there, the instructions are there, everything is right there Now wait a minute.

1:13:35 - Leo Laporte
This isn't the laptop battery, this is a CMOS battery. No, no, no, there's not a separate battery.

1:13:39 - Mikah Sargent
There isn't the laptop battery. This is a cmos battery. No, no, there's. There's not a separate battery. There isn't a separate battery, so it's the actual.

1:13:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah oh, interesting, because on pcs in the old days they would either have the battery the little coin batteries or they would have a rechargeable battery, but it was replaceable right and that's just for backing up the parameter ram or the cmos ram. So this is this is apple doesn't have any separate right battery for it?

1:14:02 - Mikah Sargent
ah, I didn't know, not unlike the modern machine. So okay, um, but the process I, when you look at it, it's going to seem very involved because of how they used to make these macbook pro retinas. But, uh, if you're careful even the slightest bit, then you are able to do the complete reset of this and I think that's going to solve the problem for you. Uh, and even I mean just having a new battery and not having to always keep it plugged in is great, um, and it wasn't. It's only going to get less and less expensive because of you know how old the the machine is.

1:14:36 - Leo Laporte
So we should mention that apple will also do this yes, for a price yes no, it's not that expensive.

1:14:41 - Mikah Sargent
No, it's not it's not overly expensive. Um, it will be more expensive than doing it yourself, but again, that's up to you. But yeah, I just wanted to say that I was able to do the I fix it repair and it was like a whole new machine that he was able to have for, you know, five, six, seven more years because of it in the past whole new machine that he was able to have, for you know, five, six, seven more years because of it.

1:15:01 - Leo Laporte
In the past I have assumed that Micah, being the cultured frail slip of a lad that he is, had no, you know, manual skills. I have since learned that you are in fact very adept at this stuff and you're a fix it guy. I am a fix it guy. I had no idea.

1:15:18 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah he, he didn't see me doing plumbing or carpentry you do it all.

1:15:22 - Leo Laporte
So if you have a house that needs remodeling or you want a battery replacement in your laptop, call me up. This is the guy. Personally, I'd bring it to apple.

1:15:30 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, it's it's much easier that way but I fix.

1:15:33 - Leo Laporte
It is a great resource for this ifixitcom. They are a site that has been very active in promoting right to repair. They consider themselves the kind of the manual for the for the technical world, but you search for the exact model and they will have a step-by-step guide. They will sell you the battery. They even include the tools in the kit that you'll need to do this, and it isn't just for laptops, it's for cars and everything I've been watching.

1:16:06 - Caller
I was on the website and just like the battery alone just costs like 80 bucks and with the fix it costs around 90. Yeah. And.

1:16:15 - Leo Laporte
I thought that first up. I would ask Apple how much, just so you get a comparison. Yeah, run that by.

1:16:19 - Mikah Sargent
Apple first, just to see how much it would cost from that way.

1:16:23 - Leo Laporte
They have in the past offered very good deals on battery replacements because they understand that that's a part that's always going to go bad.

1:16:30 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I just have fun doing it and so I had so much fun getting to take it apart and see what's inside, but also to clean it. This machine had a bunch of dust and stuff. I was just a lot, I had a great time. So if that's your kind of thing, then I'm just I'm letting you know that it is completely possible to do it, that way and it feels good at the end it does.

It feels so good, cleaned it. It's brand new. Yeah, you put it all back together. It makes that chime when it turns on and you're like heck, yeah I just, I just did that.

1:16:56 - Caller
It's more gratifying to fix your own machine, absolutely yeah.

1:17:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah.

1:17:02 - Caller
John Deere, do you hear?

1:17:03 - Mikah Sargent
that Sorry.

1:17:06 - Caller
Yeah.

1:17:06 - Leo Laporte
John Deere doesn't like it.

1:17:08 - Caller
You've been really public about the recent MacBook Pro that you bought. Do you recommend just I mean obviously buying a new battery right now for this MacBook? It's the cheaper way, but would you recommend updating to the laptop computer that you recently bought? He loves his MacBook.

1:17:29 - Leo Laporte
Air.

1:17:29 - Mikah Sargent
I love my MacBook Air yeah even if you don't go all the way to the Pro again. The new MacBook Airs with Apple Silicon are just so much faster, so much better, so much quieter. Macbook Airs with Apple Silicon are just so much faster, so much better, so much quieter.

1:17:46 - Leo Laporte
My significant other has a MacBook Pro that is Intel and I can hear that thing upstairs most of the time. It's hot, it's loud and it's not even close to as fast. So you can repair this Intel MacBook, but you really are in the end of life for it, regardless of the battery situation, just because Apple has moved on from Intel.

So yeah, I just get too attached to it. I understand, yeah, and you know I remember for a long time we kept all our 2015 MacBook Pros because that was the last one with a good keyboard. They went to the butterfly the next year and we nobody wanted it, so ever the 2015 macbook pro was considered. You know the macbook pro. But all that has changed with the advent of apple silicon. It is really good now.

Here's something you should probably be aware of uh, apple, I bought an m3. As it turns out, the m3 chip you know, apple came out first with the m1 and then the m2 and they're now on the m3 is that, I believe, and I think most experts believe, is really just a transitional chip? It is. You note that the new ipad pros have the m4 in them now. Mark german of bloomberg, who seems pretty well connected on all this, says do do not expect an M4 MacBook until next year, maybe even a year from now that long, but that will probably if you can hold off another year and you're happy with what you got, you put a new battery and you can off another year, because I mean, this is not a small purchase. It's expensive, but if you can all offer you the year mean this is not a small purchase. It's expensive, uh, but if you can all offer you the year, I think the m4s chris is always the m5 yeah, it never really.

It's always going to be something I'm very happy with the m3 that I bought. The macbook pro micah and I both use our m2 based macbook airs and they're excellent. Um, I think either. You can't go wrong. I think going apple silicon is a is a smart move, but you should also know max out the storage and the memory, because they're not upgradable at all yeah, it's always a hassle with the memory and the RAM and everything.

1:19:49 - Caller
There's no more upgrades. Thank you so much for the recommendation patch.

1:19:54 - Leo Laporte
A real pleasure talking to you once again 23 years later. Great question stay in touch we'll talk in 20, a couple of decades take care bye-bye patch.

Uh, that's really sweet, that's really nice. If you're not a member of Club TWiT yet I do, I've mentioned it a couple of times. I want to have you join us in the club. It's a great place to be. There are people now in the club who just said oh no is, is twit going out of business? No, that is our fervent hope. What we're doing is we're we're entering the 21st century. Frankly, when I designed twit 20 years ago, I made it like a tv or a radio station and we built studios and it was wonderful. I mean, I really have enjoyed having these great studios. This is our third and I love the team that we put together and I love coming into work every day and well, now every a few days and seeing Mikah and John and JammerB and all on Burke and the crew. So it's sad for me to leave the studio but honestly, nobody does it that way anymore. The future of podcasting is really work from home.

Frankly the future of work is work from home, so we're just going to try that out. It also coincides with a drop in revenue from advertising, so what we're hoping is that we can sustain this operation by cutting back costs dramatically, by working from home and with your help, with the club. Seven dollars a month. You can pay more, by the way, if you think the value of twit is ten dollars a month or fifteen dollars a month. If you get that much value, you absolutely can pay more, but we wanted to make the floor something that we thought was pretty affordable.

Uh, for everybody, because we want everybody to be in the club. You get ad-free versions of all the shows we don't need to advertise to. You're supporting us. You get video for shows like Hands on Macintosh, Mikah's show, hands on Windows with Paul Thurott, the Untitled Linux Show, Sott Wilkinson, Home Theater Geeks. All of those you get video. You're supporting what we've just started doing now. We are now restreaming to every possible platform. We have people watching us right now on x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch, Kick, YouTube. Uh, that's part of what we're doing. We want to be more available to you, and that is still free, and it's going to be free as far as we can do that.

But by joining the club, you're supporting it. You're supporting it for people who can't afford to pay the $7. You're supporting it for yourself. So we invite you to join it. It's very simple Go to twit.tv/clubtwit. All the details, all the benefits are there. We have Micah's Crafting Corner once a month, Stacey's Book Club every other month. We have lots of events. I want my goal. What I see podcasting becoming is less like a radio show or a TV show and more like a get together, a community. And you know, Alex Lindsay is very inspiring with his office hours. I would like to see more of that. So one of the reasons I'm putting a studio up in my attic is so that I can go up, toddle upstairs, flip on a switch and start streaming right away.

1:23:01 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and uh, it's going to be in my basement.

1:23:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh is it? Oh, good, you'll be nice and cool and I'll be really hot, but we'll still be able to do that and I think it's great. Now, I'd love sitting next to Micah, but, honestly, if, if this were two screens and it would it would be very similar from our point of view, absolutely, and from your point of view, it'd be identical. So I think that this is the way, a way to pursue what we're doing. It's just, it's reinventing Twit for the 21st century is what we're doing, even though Twit was born in the 21st century, but I can't say the 22nd century. We're not. We're not there yet. So, all right, we continue on on. Ask the Tech Guys with whatever John Ashley thinks is best. Well, you're holding that stack of emails. They're here. They're here. You can, by the way, call 888-724-2884 when we're on the air Sundays from 2 to 5 pm Eastern, but if you're not watching or listening at that time, live, you can also call and leave a message, like our last caller did, 888-724-2884, or email atg@twit.tv. That's what Jay did.

Hi Jay, hi Leo and Micah, I'm. You know. Yeah, my mom is 89 and losing her vision to AMD. I'm sorry. She describes it as looking through a QR code. Wow, her passion is to read, but she just can't do it any longer. You know, my dad is a 91. We'll turn 91 in a couple of weeks, my mom's 91, and they both love to read. They both love to read. Reading is. You know? I hope to. I look forward to retirement and having time to read In that chair of yours. It'll be in that nice comfy chair.

So Jay says I have a specific need. I have a family member. Well, this is a. We just we've switched gears here on a year and a half European trip, traveling solo and documenting this by sending an email out to the fam, but my mom can't read it.

Here's my ask, desire I'd like to use an app or program to read the words, create an audio file that I can save and send to her I live an hour and a half away so that she can play them on her iPad. I've tried apps on her iPad to read the screen but she you know it's hard for her. She can't seem to get the hang of it. So if I send her an audio file, an MP3 or a wave, then I could help her with. I found apps that will read the text, convert to audio, but nothing with it will save it as an audio file. It's like something that's open source. Or he would like something that's open source. Thanks for any and all help, for mama Love your show. You guys really do help us tech folks when we get stuck or have a need. Thank you, jay. That's a really good one. There are lots of ways to do this and what's really cool is.

1:25:41 - Mikah Sargent
Ai is getting so good with the voices, it could be a very nice voice as opposed to it doesn't sound like a machine anymore would 11 labs work for this?

1:25:49 - Leo Laporte
I'm just wondering. So 11 labs has reduced, released something they call reader, which is really awesome. It is an app, iphone or ipad and they've licensed. This is hysterical. We talked about this the other day the famous voices of sir lawrence, olivier, james, dean, burt, reynolds, judy, garland, but they also have very nice pleasant here's ryan, a pleasant reader.

Let me have to turn up my sound so you can make it a tiny bit better you could actually choose a voice that sounds like trust yourself, then you will know how to live. That's alice, here's sully. Don't smother each other. No one can grow in the shade. Oh, I like that nice voice, rich voice so um this app. This app will read texts and links and files. So now I don't know how this app may be too much for mom, but you said if you sent her an audio file that she'd be able to play it somehow.

1:26:55 - Mikah Sargent
If he has the app on his phone, can he export an audio file from the app?

1:27:00 - Leo Laporte
Let's see. Let me see if we can, uh, save it as a file yes, coming soon. Ah, so very safe and share. So this is a free app right now and this may be one of the reasons it's coming soon, as they want to, you know, have a paid version of that. But I have to say, the voices on this, 11 labs does the best, really the best stuff with this. So, um, I would take a look at this app. It's called reader. It's from 11 labs. Uh, down the road you'll be able to give it an email and have it record it and then save it and send it to mom. And if you could figure out some way to get mom to play it, there must be other. There are lots of voice synthesizers out there.

1:27:43 - Mikah Sargent
There must be. I wonder if voice stream reader would be able to. The problem is voice stream reader was just acquired by some company, if I remember correctly. So, but that might, let's see if I still have it. No, I've removed it because it got bad. Let's see if.

1:27:58 - Leo Laporte
I still have it. No, I've removed it because it got bad. But I mean you could just do it, right, you could? I think you're going to be reading the email anyway, so you could open voice memos, record it and then send it to mom, my 91-year-old mom. You know she's getting on and so it's harder for her to figure out how to do stuff, but she still can use the iPhone and I give her an iPad for her to figure out how to do stuff, but she still can use the iPhone and I give her an iPad.

So if I shared something to her text that was just an audio file that if she tapped it it would play, I think she should be able to do that. I would hope your mom could too as well. So that might be one way to do. It is to record it, share it via text or email and mom can just literally tap the text and it'll play it back. In fact, frankly, if you have an iphone, you can record it in the iphone's messages I don't know how long the audio recording the ones that are built in are very short, but if you go to voice memos and then share from there, they're much longer yeah, I don't think there's.

Yeah, I've. I don't think there's a limit. I've recorded at least half an hour on a voice memo. Yeah, so I don't think there's. Yeah, I've recorded at least half an hour on a voice memo. So I don't think there's much of a limit. There are lots of ways to do this.

1:29:05 - Mikah Sargent
I wonder if you don't need to do it from your phone. I wonder if 11 Labs Online would probably let you export a wave or some file 11labsai.

1:29:18 - Leo Laporte
They also let you train your, I think it's io, they also, uh, let you train your. I think it's on io, dio. Oh, you're right, they also, uh, let you train your own voice. So if you really wanted to get special, I think it's better not to do that. It's a little creepy and weird. Yeah, um, yeah, they do. They do text to speech. Yeah, you could just do it in there so then just export.

1:29:38 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so you paste the text in from there and then upon a time Mikah Sargent.

1:29:48 - Leo Laporte
I'll spell it sergeant because it'll pronounce it right. Actually that's not how you spell sergeant. Uh, was on a show and then I can use. You could choose those great voices. Um, I'll do Alice, cause we liked Dallas and I could play it.

1:30:06 - Mikah Sargent
Let's see if that how that works and I think yeah, so I logged in and I was able to download. It is an MP3 and then I could send that MP3. Perfect. So so that's, you don't even need the app to do that.

1:30:19 - Leo Laporte
You could just do that. That's cool. I don't know why I don't hear it. Is she talking? I don't hear it Anyway. And then, how much does it? So you logged in, so you have an account.

1:30:34 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and you get 10,000 quota um for free 10 000 characters for free.

1:30:43 - Leo Laporte
Well, unless your emailer is very prolific very worthy I think that should be sufficient. It might work for you. But for five dollars a month you get up to 30 minutes of audio, uh, for free. You can clone your voice, uh, you can. You can control it and they have real. I think their voices are really, their voices are good. Yeah, eleven labs dot I a. That's I a great question, really an interesting idea, isn't it all right, jay?

1:31:14 - John Ashley
oh, hello, hello, jay, hello. Uh, how about this phone caller right here who needs to hit star six to unmute themselves?

1:31:21 - Mikah Sargent
Hello phone caller. Hello phone caller. Star six.

1:31:26 - Caller
Okay, you mean just unmute. Yay, yeah, what's your first?

1:31:30 - Leo Laporte
name and where are you calling from? How about that?

1:31:34 - Caller
How about that? My name is Charles. I'm calling from San Francisco. I've been listening to Leo forever, it seems, at least the last 20 years, wow, and I enjoy the latest incarnation of the show with Micah Isn't it great yeah.

1:31:53 - Leo Laporte
Have we talked before? Charles? You sound familiar.

1:31:57 - Caller
We have. It's been a while, but damn, you've got a good memory for a guy my age.

1:32:03 - Leo Laporte
I remember you, sir, so yeah, isn't Micah a great addition to the show. I'm very pleased.

1:32:08 - Caller
He really is and I'm glad to see it moving. You know, another voice, another generation. That's the point. You may or may not recall, leo, I, like I said, I listened for a long time and I do a lot of.

I used to be an assistant tech trainer and a low vision guy, and I appreciate all you're doing with this last caller, who needs his mom to be able to read her email, but there's a much simpler solution, which is simply voiceover. She can invoke voiceover and ask voiceover to read her email, and voiceover will do a perfectly adequate job of doing that.

1:32:48 - Leo Laporte
Is that Mac only, or is that PC? She can do it through Siri.

1:32:53 - Caller
Siri, no, she can do it through Siri. Okay, so she wants to access Siri? She can ask Siri to read my email. Siri will read the headings of the emails and when she's ready to hear a particular email, she can tap on it and Siri will read her email.

1:33:14 - Mikah Sargent
Do you suggest a site or another place to go to learn how to go about that? Because I know that for the caller's mom the problem was trying to figure out what all you need to do to get these screen readers to work. So if there was a simple method that she could be taught, that might make it a little simpler that she could be taught.

1:33:39 - Caller
That might make it a little simpler. Well, she can hold down her button on her. If it's an iPad, she can hold down the right button and speak to Siri and just say read this, read what's on screen. Read my email with the command.

1:33:58 - Caller
Yeah.

1:34:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, here are your most recent unread emails.

1:34:09 - Caller
This read what's on screen. Yeah, yeah, I remember read it when, when they took that out.

1:34:11 - Leo Laporte
If you have, yeah, yeah, very cool so it gives you a forward. Yeah, that's neat, you know that's where it really is helpful. You know somebody with macular Very cool, so it gives you this Very straightforward. Yeah, that's neat, you know that's where it really is helpful. You know somebody with macular degeneration. You know your vision gets narrower and narrower and it's harder and harder to read and it's really helpful to have an assistive aide, somebody who can come over and train you, teach you and help you. Charles.

1:34:36 - Caller
Well, it is Go ahead. I was you, charles. Well, it is go ahead. I was gonna say it is, and there are a number of. You know Apple has a number of resources to do this and certainly the new innovations in iOS are going to help people be guided through this. But there are any number of resources online and another resource that, since mom may not be too fluent online, um, and might be assistive, would be, uh, YouTube. Youtube has excellent assistive free technology resources that are put out there from apple and from other places like hadley school that you know. The iphone is an extra. The whole ios system is just an extraordinary accessibility. That's great. It is the greatest accessibility tool of really all times in terms of giving people capabilities and you don't have to learn coding or anything difficult, you just talk to sir and hadley helpsorg hadley helpsorg.

1:35:40 - Leo Laporte
That's the hadley school. There's so many solutions. There are workshops and everything. That's really oh yeah, it's so encouraging.

1:35:48 - Caller
I know let me put it this way every productive line person I know they're most, I know their most, their key common accessibility device other than a cane and possibly a dog is going to be their iPhone.

1:36:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, with things like Be my Eyes.

1:36:08 - Caller
Consume and produce.

1:36:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.

1:36:11 - Caller
Go ahead.

1:36:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, things like Be my Eyes, that's a wonderful app. They're great yeah.

1:36:16 - Caller
So do you think AI is helping this and we're all beginning to work together?

1:36:19 - Leo Laporte
Do you think AI is helping this, Charles? Will it become ultimately even more useful?

1:36:25 - Caller
Oh, ai is helping this in so many ways, not just in terms of tools like Be my Eyes that you're talking about, and tools like Seeing AI. That literally is a free tool from Microsoft that gives me the ability to simply put my camera in front of a document and have that document read to me aloud, with no third party costly tool. Now, that capability has been around for a long time, but five years ago I'd have paid five grand for a tool that gives me that capability and it's stationary. Now, guess what? I have it in my pocket.

1:37:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, jaws, something like JAWS was so expensive and so complicated and it's gotten so much better.

1:37:14 - Caller
Yeah, and JAWS is still. This is a complex topic, which I was then expecting to get into you with, but JAWS is a specialized tool and has a lot of tools that Siri can't provide in terms of being able to give people the ability to manipulate, to edit, to control the content, and we still need those tools. And there's a cost for those tools to be developed to a very small niche audience, but, at the same time, not everybody can afford those. So we need the general tools as well, but it's more complicated and people don't produce tools like JAWS to make money and to get rich. Leo, there's a cost to producing no tool. Yes, uh, so we need both tools. It's it's a complicated subject and I appreciate sometimes how you advocate for the consumer about cost, but the subject is more complicated than just cost. No, I think we can get into that cost. No, I completely understand.

1:38:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, I completely understand, yeah, yeah.

1:38:22 - Caller
But in terms of an educational assist for, uh, for, for blind and low vision students, ai is great in terms of helping them access information and also helping them go through and have the patient to to, to go through uh, uh, uh, through math practices and other things that a teacher with 30 students might not be able to have the dedicated time to focus on a non-visual learner or other specialized neurodivergent learning students. So AI, to answer your original question I think it's a huge step in the right direction.

1:39:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, charles, it's always a pleasure. I'm glad to know that you're still with us.

1:39:07 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you so much, and I don't mean like not dead, I mean like you followed from the radio show.

1:39:13 - Caller
I'm glad to know that too.

1:39:15 - Leo Laporte
That came out wrong. Oh, I'm so glad you're still with us. I know that too, leo. That came out wrong. Oh, I'm so glad you're still with us. I know what you mean, my man. No, I meant you're with us on the show. Yeah, nice to know you still listen. I hear your happiness of that.

1:39:26 - Caller
Thank you, Leo, Thanks. Charles Glad to hear you're still doing it, my friend.

1:39:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm glad I'm still with us too. Take care, bye-bye. Wow, okay, um, do we have another guest today, or this? That was sam was uh. Miss our our guy, uh. But we do have another half hour, which means we have more chances to take your calls at 888 724-2884 or calltwittv if you want to use zoom and get on the call. John Ashley is coordinating. He's our producer, technical director, board op, a sound man, uh and boy genius. I was waiting for you to say that I was just waiting.

No much, esteemed boy genius. What can we, what can we do for you?

1:40:14 - John Ashley
You know, I think after that we need to take a quick little breather and collect our thoughts.

1:40:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh, think about what we did. I heard his feelings, you didn't. I'm gonna go stand in the corner. No, you're watching. Nobody puts baby as the tech guys Mikah Sargent on your left, Leo Laporte on the right. Show title right there. By the way, yes, nobody puts baby in the corner. The other day my wife mocked me because I said something like nobody puts honey in the corner, and she said what are you talking about? Anyway, it's from the movie Dirty Dancing, isn't it? Yes, jennifer Grey.

1:40:52 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, yes, famously also known as Honey, honey Baby.

1:40:56 - Leo Laporte
Honey Boo Boo.

1:41:01 - John Ashley
Anyway, let's take a call. Uh, I'm gonna ask our phone caller to uh unmute themselves oh, another caller, star six to unmute yourself.

1:41:08 - Mikah Sargent
Then give us your name and where you're calling from. I really have trouble saying where you're calling from. Where are you calling from? Where are you calling? Is what I would say like where are you calling from?

1:41:20 - Leo Laporte
where you come from clear lake, clear lake. Hey, what's your first name? It's ken hi ken.

1:41:27 - Caller
Welcome to the show. Hey guys, how are you?

1:41:30 - Leo Laporte
we're great. Is it really hot and clear like today? You've been having a hot week, I know know.

1:41:35 - Caller
Yeah, well, it's humid, it's hot and humid.

1:41:40 - Mikah Sargent
So it's not a dry heat, dang it.

1:41:45 - Caller
No, it's vacillated back and forth, but we've spent plenty of time in the water the last couple of days.

1:41:51 - Leo Laporte
Good yeah, cleolink's beautiful yeah, what can we do for you?

1:41:56 - Caller
I got a question about backing up my Macintosh and my phones and stuff. I've subscribed to iDrive for years and I'm getting all kinds of file errors because I'm also using iCloud Drive, using iCloud Drive. So I called iDrive and they said what I have to do in order to make iDrive work is to keep local copies on my Mac, which I think kind of defeats the purpose of the iCloud, and using that for my photos and all the excess data that won't fit on my Mac.

1:42:37 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, this is one of the most annoying things that has happened in modern macOS. So to explain for folks who are tuning in essentially, when you are doing an online backup, the online backup system is looking at the files that are stored locally on your device and they are making the copies and putting them online somewhere very far away in a server. However, if you use iCloud as a way to keep your it's by default, your desktop and your documents in line across all of your devices so that it parallels across all of your devices, but also to make it so that there's more storage space locally on your device, what happens is the system will automatically look at how you are using your files, look at the files that you haven't used in a while, look at the size of those files and then make educated guesses on what files can be pulled from your system, basically deleted from your system, and their copy online left as the copy that exists. That's what's happening with iCloud Now. When something like iDrive comes along to try to back up your system, it's only seeing a shell of a file there. It is not seeing the actual file, because iCloud has pulled the file off of your local drive and is just showing you kind of an alias of that file there locally. But iDrive cannot go to Apple's server in the cloud and grab that full file. It only is able to access what is actually stored on your machine.

So what all of these third-party backup programs are telling you to do is make it so that all those files are stored locally when the backup takes place. But if you have iCloud backup turned on, then what's going to happen is, as you're downloading files from iCloud back to your desktop or your documents folder, then the system is going to continue to intelligently remove files and store them in the cloud. So it's this stupid game of cat and mouse, as you're trying to download all of the files locally so that your third-party backup system can back up those files, as iCloud Drive continues to work in the background removing files from your computer. It's not compatible and unfortunately, the only solution that I have found is either having enough storage space on my machine that iCloud does not automatically remove files or just turning off that feature in the first place, and I hate that I should be able to have that feature going. And here's the thing that's in the first place, and I hate that I should be able to have that feature going. And here's the thing that's even worse about it.

Apple used to have a different system in place for applications and services that had access to your file system and was able to access your file system and present files to you. An example of this is Dropbox. Dropbox has what's called a finder integration that gives you the ability to see files and choose what files are stored locally, what files are stored in Dropbox. The system used to be one way. Apple updated the system so that all of those file providers had to kind of play in a sandbox, essentially, and in doing so it made it so that all of those file providers also have this issue.

So if I don't go into my remote backup solution and explicitly exclude Dropbox, the file that I have, or the folder, rather, that I have locally from my online backups, then I also run into errors, because Dropbox is also pulling files from local and storing them in the cloud Didn't used to be an issue, so it's just an error. It's a compatibility issue where these online automated systems can't play ball with something that's not talking, and I wish that Apple would set up an API so that the two could communicate, because what would be simple is this online backup system tells iCloud Drive hey, pull this file momentarily so I can back it up, and then you can release it back into the cloud again. That's not how it is, though.

1:46:55 - Caller
So I'm with you. Go ahead as convoluted as that sounds, it makes sense to me, but what my? I guess my ultimate question is for years when I had a small business, I really subscribed to the three, two, one backup philosophy and made sure that all my business data was conformed to that. So now that I'm retired and only have my personal data and so on, am I safe just using iCloud backup for my files?

1:47:29 - Mikah Sargent
I okay, Honestly, I think that if you have a time machine, if you have a local time machine backup, because time machine does play- ball.

1:47:41 - Caller
I do do that as well.

1:47:42 - Mikah Sargent
Good, good, if you have that then I think that for your personal files, using iCloud Drive as a backup solution and time machine as a backup solution because, again, time machine does play ball with iCloud Drive, it does temporarily bring the file down and then release it afterward play ball with iCloud Drive, it does temporarily bring the file down and then release it afterward then I think you're okay. What I have done on I've kind of prioritized on this MacBook Air. I don't worry about it. I just have iCloud Drive, not as one of the backup options. On my studio, the Mac Studio, which is the main machine that I use because I have enough storage space. I do go in and download everything from the cloud from time to time to make sure that my backup system is able to. So you can perhaps prioritize that way or you can just be comfortable knowing that you've got a time machine backup and that you are backing up to iCloud Drive.

There used to be a time where I would not have recommended that. Icloud Drive was an okay option for backup. That time has since passed. I think that it is a fine option, for you know, apple's worked out a lot of those kinks. Yeah.

1:48:53 - Caller
Yeah, it sounds like my redundancy is iDrive and that's not necessary doing iCloud and Time Machine no you really don't need iDrive.

1:49:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.

1:49:06 - Caller
Yeah, okay, it's nice to have. Thanks a lot guys.

1:49:09 - Leo Laporte
That has Our pleasure, scott, thank you. It's good to have, I mean, your 3-2-1 backup is exactly right, three copies original plus two backups, two different forms of backup and one in the cloud, but iCloud is your cloud. I think with the Time Machine iCloud combination is pretty darn good Because you can always with the Time Machine.

1:49:28 - Sam Abuelsamid
You're welcome, Scott.

1:49:29 - Leo Laporte
Time Machine, as we mentioned before, gives you the instant return of a single file or just a version. Fix. Have a good one, take care. Great question, yeah, great question. Uh, you think that bug?

1:49:42 - Mikah Sargent
it's a bug, you're saying well, no, it's not a bug, it's intentional. I mean, yeah, well, it is kind of a bug, what I don't know, what you call something that is intentional but should be fixed.

1:49:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah it's an error, yeah a thought mistake.

1:49:55 - Mikah Sargent
There's a thorn or something? Yeah, they need to introduce an API there, because that's the thing is that time machine knows what to do, so third parties should be given the ability to do the same, and the fact that they're not is a problem.

1:50:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and as Greg M says in our YouTube chat, with any backup system, test your backups, because you can't assume Right, assume always, you know, care and occasionally download a file or that kind of thing. Yeah, in fact, one of the one of the reasons I have many backup systems is because I don't want to test them, so I just figure one of them will work. I have had backups fail and that's really devastating.

1:50:34 - Mikah Sargent
You think I'm safe and then you're not yes, a misfeature, an undesirable feature, those are all great names for them.

1:50:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly, uh, let's see what else. How about another phone caller? Oh, I love it. Let's go 888-724-2884. Once you get in, hang on, and when we call on you, you just press star six to unmute. Uh, hello, leo, hey, welcome. What's your first name and where are you calling from?

1:51:04 - Caller
My first name is Mel. I'm from Columbus, ohio. Hi, mel, welcome. I was calling. I'm in a dilemma. It's time to get a new PC and there's lots of the AI stuff, that the new Intel stuff kind of has me intrigued. But I had gotten one of the. It's a Lenovo thing, it's a little gamepad, it's a Legion thing. It's like a gamepad and a PC all in one and my thought was I'll use this for a PC kind of. It's slightly wonky, but it actually works better than I thought.

1:51:40 - Leo Laporte
But this is like a steam drink.

1:51:41 - Caller
It's kind of a a handheld it's like a yeah, it's like a yeah, it's just like a steam deck, and, uh, it actually works pretty good and I travel all the time for work, so I have a work laptop, but I'd like to have, uh, something for fun, and this was this was all fun so do you use?

1:51:56 - Leo Laporte
it as a regular computer as well as a gaming device.

1:52:01 - Caller
Yeah, I'll take it. I compare it to a iPad for a screen. I can use an iPad for a second screen with it and it's got an 8-inch screen, so with an 11-inch iPad it actually works pretty good with a Bluetooth keyboard.

1:52:14 - Leo Laporte
And you have a keyboard, a Bluetooth keyboard, and a mouse. Now you've got a whole system.

1:52:23 - Caller
The only thing is it's not a laptop. So there's times when it would be nice just to have something to open and just work on. And I'm really and I'm really conflicted right now because I, I, I like my, I have an iPad that's older, it's not one of the M series, um, but I want something that I can just open up and have a keyboard ready and type on if I just need to do some email real quick or something like that. And I'm conflicted between getting like I saw the old airs are pretty inexpensive now or do I make the jump to an ipad with a keyboard case, one of the newer ipads, or maybe just find some kind of lightweight windows computer and like, the new surfaces look really cool and I used to have a surface and I love it, but, um, they're not cheap. There's too many.

1:53:10 - Leo Laporte
there's too, yeah, lots of options, too many choices, paralysis there's so many choices on the one hand, uh, I think it's a good idea, if you're going to get any apple device, to make sure you get an apple silicon based device, was we mentioned before. Intel's gone and while you can still buy them, I wouldn't. On the other hand, on windows, it's a little early to go all in on the Snapdragon X Elite. It's like while that is a great processor in many ways, the equivalent of Apple's Silicon support is not quite there yet. Microsoft has a very good compatibility layer. There's rapidly improving support, but things like Fortnite won't work on it because their anti-cheats won't work on the Snapdragon. They have to update their software. So software support will eventually, I think, be there for the Snapdragon, but you're early on that that.

So it's hard because I, on the one hand, like Lenovo, for instance, sells a co-pilot plus PC with 32 gigs of RAM and a terabyte drive. I mean, this is a nice laptop, an OLED screen for 1300 bucks. I think that's a very good price. So if you're going to go Windows, the question is is it time to get a Snapdragon? I would not get an Intel at this point on Windows. I think it might be worth waiting until the next Intel processor comes out later this year? Is it Lunar Lake? I can't remember. I've forgotten the designation.

1:54:42 - Caller
Okay, no, I don't understand.

1:54:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because I think that Intel at least will have better software support. On the other hand, I think in the long run, snapdragon might be the future of Windows. Macintosh is much more settled. The Apple Silicon's been out for a few years. Everybody supports it. It all works. There's nothing that doesn't work. In fact, I was really surprised. My favorite game, valheim, which has only been Windows and Linux for years, is available on Mac. Apple Silicon runs great on Apple Silicon, so we're seeing more and more. That's what made me get the Legion yeah.

1:55:15 - Sam Abuelsamid
I wanted something fun to play games.

1:55:18 - Caller
I'm not a big gamer. I just was like I needed something to be. We're of similar age and and it's like I don't have to go out and walk when I play a game, so I can stay and do that in one place. But uh, um, it was, it was, and what do you want?

1:55:34 - Leo Laporte
to do with it. Incredibly priced for what it was it is 700 bucks. It's a ryzen processor, 16 gigs of ram. It's. It's a real pc, you know? I mean it really is. If you attach a keyboard and a screen, I think you got a real, a real computer there what do you want to do with this?

1:55:48 - Caller
nothing I've tried to do and I can't. What do you want to do with this laptop If there's nothing I've tried to do, I can't do?

1:55:50 - Leo Laporte
What do you want to do with this laptop? This is the question.

1:55:53 - Caller
Just browsing and email and a little Word Get the Air.

1:55:59 - Leo Laporte
Get the cheap Air. It's an M1. Get that, you'll love it. The difference between the M1 and the M2 is this much Right? It's very little and if the price is right on an Apple M1 MacBook Air, that's exactly what you're looking for.

1:56:15 - Caller
Because it's almost cheaper than an iPad.

1:56:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, oh, it is. Once you add all the stuff to the iPad, you're talking laptop prices and, honestly, as good as iPad OS is I mean it's a good touch OS it isn't a desktop OS. It really isn't. And so there really isn't the software there. And this has always been the complaint about everybody who has an iPad is this is amazing hardware. Where's the software? And I think it's just a limitation of the operating system and the audience and so forth. Get a MacBook M1, MacBook Air, what is it? Are they talking $899? How much are they?

1:56:52 - Caller
Good question, I'm not sure about that Well, I was looking at the M1s and some of those are below $600. Wow.

1:56:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, get that. You would not notice the difference between that and an M2 or even an M3. You will not notice the difference. Is that on Apple's?

1:57:10 - Caller
refurb store is that? Uh, I bet it is. Apple has it. Uh, I've seen them. I've seen them at best buy maybe apple walmart everyone's probably seen some scream, and deal on them, I would, before you buy it from somebody else, I would go to the apple official apple free store store okay

1:57:25 - Leo Laporte
it's applecom slash shop slash refurbished.

1:57:29 - Mikah Sargent
I always recommend buying from apple before choosing the third party, just because a they like to upsell you and try to add in other things. But also I just have found that the service from apple is better if you just get it directly from apple.

1:57:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, refurbed macbook air with an m1. Uh, it is more expensive $759. But it is from Apple and, as a result, you'll have that guarantee too, a real Apple warranty. I think Best Buy is not awful, okay, but I just I like getting it from Apple. I just think that's a better idea. But yeah, that price is less than an iPad with a keyboard. True, you're going to love it.

1:58:09 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, I appreciate everything you guys have done. I've made it out to the studio there. I think I've been out there three times now over the past few years.

Years ago, I gave you a. I do safety for construction workers and I gave you a harness. I worked for the company that made harnesses for fall production and I gave you the harness that we made because it was featured in. Oh crap, what's the? Uh, the tv show in space? Uh, uh, the one where they're exploring, they've got? Uh, I forgot now it was on amazon, oh no no, no, oh, the expanse.

1:58:44 - Leo Laporte
You're talking about the expanse expanse.

1:58:46 - Caller
it was in the in the expanse. Yeah, it was they. They use some of our gear in the expanse Cool.

1:58:51 - Leo Laporte
And uh, could I jump? Could I attach it to something? Jump out a window and stuff like that he guarantees.

1:58:56 - Caller
Uh, if I gave you the rest of the stuff he says now, now I teach people that, so I contract with a government agency to do that. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's very kind of you.

1:59:11 - Leo Laporte
Thank you and it's really good to talk to you, but no.

1:59:15 - Caller
I don't know if we're going to have studio tours of the attic.

1:59:18 - Leo Laporte
I don't think it's big enough to have studio tours of the attic.

1:59:20 - Caller
I don't think that's happening. I don't think that's happening. I don't think my wife will let me. I don't think, vic, just put a 360 camera up and occasionally. Oh, I'll definitely do that, vic. We already agreed.

1:59:30 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to put the Insta360 up so you can see the scope of the attic. Oh sweet.

1:59:35 - Caller
Hey, it's a pleasure talking to you. Well, thank you, leo. All righty, I appreciate everything. Take care my pleasure Thank you.

1:59:42 - Leo Laporte
That is the one thing I miss. We used to have live audiences in here pre-COVID and it was so much fun. I really miss that.

1:59:49 - Mikah Sargent
I know I will miss that Now you go into the attic and it's just filled with mannequins.

1:59:53 - Leo Laporte
It's really creepy. There's enough room in the attic for I got a couch up there, four or five people could. It'd be a little intimate, a little sweaty? Yeah, okay, maybe, yeah, we shouldn't.

2:00:03 - Mikah Sargent
No no.

2:00:11 - Leo Laporte
You can know you could just have your mannequins. I gotta the thing that they're pitching, that I do and I I don't know if I like this idea. The idea is that I sit at this table right and that the cameras and the monitors, everything are attached to the the back panel there. Okay, so you wouldn't even have a good view of me are you?

turning like this. No, I'm facing into it. The camera's right there in the middle and you were that close to it. Well, you know, that's the trick that you got to get it a little farther away. But a wider table. Uh, could do it? Yeah, I don't know. I'm confused but no, I'm confused too. Okay, but the but. The advantage is, if I raise the table, the everything the lights, the cameras, everything got it.

2:00:51 - Mikah Sargent
I guess that's kind of how my setup is, because every all my my lights on the desk, yeah, my camera's on the desk for years I did it that way.

2:00:58 - Leo Laporte
We had a, I had a. I have that big desk and we had colleen drilled holes in it and put cameras yeah, I've got three monitors, that's a long time ago.

Uh, what a world we live in. The world is is always, ever changing. Change is hard. I used to embrace change and I think in this job that's really important because we're always new stuff. But now I'm getting a little weepy and teary and saying, oh, I wish things didn't have to change. But but they do. That's the way it is. John Ashley, hi Never change. Well, don't ever change. Change is inevitable.

2:01:35 - Mikah Sargent
Is it inevitable? My cells are constantly changing. They are and exchanging.

2:01:39 - Leo Laporte
You know, it's a whole new person every few years.

2:01:41 - Mikah Sargent
That's what they say. Yeah, they also say. They also used to say you. They also used to say you only use 10% of your brain, but it's all hogwash.

2:01:50 - Leo Laporte
Somebody's saying it's all attached to the desk. It could be fun if there's an earthquake. It's true, in fact, I specifically said if there's an earthquake, I want everything to shake extremely so I could put the video out.

2:02:02 - Mikah Sargent
Be great for social media, oh do you remember that joke that I told about the chiropractor? Sure, it was about a week back. No, I don't remember that it was about a week back. I'm done. Bye. I promised my mom, who sent me that joke, that I would bring it up on some show. So there you go, mom. I just remembered.

2:02:27 - Leo Laporte
You're too young to be making dad jokes. Knock it off.

2:02:30 - Mikah Sargent
It was about a week it was about a week back, john. Ashley's out of here.

2:02:34 - Leo Laporte
He's left the studio. John Ashley left the studio. You chased the producer out, wow.

2:02:41 - Mikah Sargent
All right, what's next?

2:02:42 - John Ashley
John All right, how about we end the show with a video caller? Yeah, that'd be fun show with a video caller.

2:02:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah that'd be fun. Let's see what we got here Ba-ba-da-bam, ba-ba-da-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bam A turkey headdress.

2:02:56 - Caller
Wow, aaron from Asheville, massachusetts, the Apple Valley section of Asheville, massachusetts.

2:03:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh, beautiful part of the country. Hello, aaron, do you have turkeys, aaron? Oh, yeah, or is that a hat? Wild turkeys? Yeah, that's a wild turkey, beautiful. We have many, many wild turkeys and my wife has don't tell Fish and Game, but she started to feed them California Fish and Wildlife and then we got even more and now they tell each other come over here, yeah, they do. And then they have families and there's little. Every year there's more little turkeys.

Oh little babies, they're very sweet. Oh little babies. Yeah, she loves, she loves wildlife and she can't resist it. She like wants to feed it all the time. It's cute, it's sweet.

2:03:44 - Caller
Anyway, what can we do for you there, aaron? Well, first I've got a quick riddle for you, is it?

2:03:49 - Leo Laporte
about a week back. Go ahead.

2:03:53 - Caller
Around 1995, I think it was I installed OS2 on a computer, oh yes, and I paid either $50 or $60 to buy a web browser. My God to buy a web browser, my God, and ever since then and to this day, that is my primary web browser.

2:04:18 - Leo Laporte
So can you guess what it is? You bought it in 1995. You paid $50. It couldn't be Netscape Navigator. You're not still using that, are you? No, no, $50 you paid in 1995. Might have been 96. I mean, netscape was the paid browser at the time. In fact, I remember when Microsoft came out with Internet Explorer 3, I said it's all over for Netscape. Who's going to pay for a browser if Microsoft's giving it away? Let me think 19,. I don't know. You have to tell me, I don't know. Opera, opera, opera. Still use it and it's still good, although it's gone through a few new owners since then. I think, it's a Chinese company.

2:05:04 - Caller
How much does it cost these days? It?

2:05:05 - Leo Laporte
used to be Norwegian.

2:05:07 - Caller
Yeah, it still is, but it's owned by a Chinese company.

2:05:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, it's free. Now I mean all the yeah, yeah, it's been free for a while, yeah.

2:05:16 - Caller
But it's hard to remember, but back in the day, we paid for browsers.

2:05:19 - Leo Laporte
We bought them, yeah.

2:05:22 - Caller
And then you know you like what you get used to.

2:05:30 - Leo Laporte
Opera's a very good browser. I've got Firefox and Chrome. Opera's based now on Chromium, so it is basically a Chrome browser, but with a lot of nice features added on to it.

2:05:39 - Caller
I really like the speed dial feature and I haven't found any plug-in or app for any other browser that works as well as theirs does.

2:05:51 - Leo Laporte
What does the speed dial do?

2:05:55 - Caller
It's just a shortcut, ah. I mean, you know that's in a. You know they give you an icon on your desktop but they're nestable. So you can have all of your shortcuts for travel, you know, in one, an icon on your desktop but they're nestable, so you can have all of your oh like, automation shortcuts for, uh, travel. You know, and that's a good idea dial, or you know weather and another one and that kind of thing, and I just, you know, I like the way it works it's funny.

2:06:19 - Leo Laporte
It's an eternal issue, which is you know how do you organize your tabs or your bookmarks? It's always been the hardest thing to do in a browser. Now Opera has a browser. We talked about this on Windows Weekly on Wednesday. That's how I know about it. They have a version of Opera for gaming. Yeah, because, Paul is the browser explorer. Oh yeah, he's always using new browsers, but the idea is nowadays, with gaming streaming through your browser, a browser tuned for that particular use. Anyway, aaron, besides the riddle, do you have a question?

2:06:54 - Caller
Yeah, my question is what is so hard about supporting a time-based Google Authenticator compatible two-factor system that banks and credit cards?

2:07:12 - Leo Laporte
won't do it. Oh, that's a good question. Why is it that my bank still sends me?

2:07:18 - Mikah Sargent
a text message. Almost certainly because they've run the calculation of how much it's going to cost them to pay for support calls for people getting it set up. Yeah.

2:07:29 - Caller
People couldn't even make it. You're a geek Aaron.

2:07:32 - Leo Laporte
You understand it, it's easy, you get it. You're a geek. Everybody watching the show probably is. The problem is that banks are catering to a much wider audience and there are a lot of people who would go. Wait, I have to have an app on my phone to get into my bank account Even as an opt-in somebody's.

2:07:51 - Mikah Sargent
There are going to be so many people who end up opting in then they don't realize what they're doing, why it works. There'll be people calling going how is this different from getting a text? How do I set it up?

2:08:01 - Leo Laporte
It's just they don't want to pay for that, and you know, aaron, and we know that the reason you say this is a bad idea is because text messaging is not as secure as a time, a one time password from a time based authenticator program. That's a much more secure way to do it.

2:08:18 - Caller
My bank still uses secret questions. Oh, that's terrible. Love that.

2:08:24 - Leo Laporte
But everybody who watches this show knows you don't actually answer the question when they say what your favorite color is. You don't say purple, no, you say you make up something from your password manager.

2:08:36 - Caller
Well, my secret questions are randomly generated passwords, exactly that are longer than their password.

2:08:44 - Leo Laporte
That's what I do too. Yeah, yeah.

2:08:46 - Mikah Sargent
Even their regular password Exactly. Yeah, yeah, let's see.

2:08:49 - Caller
Yeah, yeah, even their regular password Exactly. Yeah, yeah, let's see. It's frustrating. The brokerage house that has my IRA a couple of months ago sent out emails and said we're going to do, you're going to be required to set up two-factor authentication as of this date, you know, a couple, few weeks in the future. And I said, great, you know. Then that date came and went and nothing happened. And then we got an email saying, oh, nevermind.

2:09:16 - Leo Laporte
It is. It is definitely a support issue. They just they think that normal people can't figure it out and they don't want to answer the questions, cause it is far, far secure, more secure, more secure now, admittedly. Uh, even a text message is more secure than not having any two-factor. Yeah, absolutely so. They're happy enough, I guess, with with that situation. But I agree with you, we should all be using, you know, google authenticator or it's like microsoft authenticator. I use actually it. It's funny because for a long time, I recommended Authy from a company called Twilio and Twilio just got breached and many Authy phone numbers were exfiltrated. I had already switched that to something open source and free, called 2FAS, or I guess that's two factor S 2FAS, and the reason I like it is because it saves an encrypted blob with all my secrets to icloud oh, that's google drive. So it makes it very easy to move around. I have my secrets, um, but it's a very good system anyway. Yeah, I I'm with you, aaron 100. Is that your turkey or just a turkey?

2:10:27 - Caller
that was a turkey that was displaying beside my driveway last over to the fire.

2:10:34 - Leo Laporte
We have that. It blows me away as peacock.

2:10:36 - Mikah Sargent
I can't believe all the peacocks here, I was dropping off a package at fedex the other day and I'm like how is there a peacock running around in front of me right now? That is wild. I love the peak.

2:10:46 - Leo Laporte
They're so cool they're annoying because they make loud, annoying noises.

2:10:50 - Caller
Do you have peacocks in Nashville? Say that again.

2:10:55 - Leo Laporte
Do you have peacocks in Nashville?

2:10:57 - Caller
I haven't seen any.

2:10:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'll send you some because we have extras. I'll just put it in a box.

2:11:02 - Mikah Sargent
Put it in a box outside of FedEx.

2:11:05 - Leo Laporte
Hey, a pleasure talking to you, Aaron. Thank you and thanks for the riddle. Thanks for bringing back the memories Back in the day when you could get somebody to give you money.

2:11:12 - Mikah Sargent
Do you remember?

2:11:13 - Leo Laporte
when you had to pay for browsers. Wow, wow.

2:11:17 - Mikah Sargent
Have a good one Up the hill both ways in the snow.

2:11:20 - Leo Laporte
Hey, thanks, take care. Bye-bye, and that wraps it up for this week's Ask the Tech. Guys, if you're watching live, stay tuned. This Week in Tech is coming up in just a few minutes, as we have to reset the studio, something we won't have to do in the attic, something we can't do. Good luck In the attic, if you. Yeah, peacocks are very loud. They're talking about the peacocks In the chat.

2:11:45 - Mikah Sargent
It's censoring the word.

2:11:46 - Leo Laporte
You can't say peacock in chat, apparently, so I it's censoring the word. You can't say peacock in chat, apparently, so I apologize for that. Um, yes, my friends, this show is every sunday. Uh, we do it around 11 am pacific 2 pm eastern, that would be roughly 1800 UTC, and you can watch us live, not just on YouTube now youtube.com/twit. LinkedIn, on Facebook, on X, on Twitch everywhere that there's live streaming, and we're thrilled about that. Thanks to the folks at ReStream for making that possible. It makes it so that everybody can watch and those chat rooms on those respective platforms are also open and we have a unified chat. We haven't yet figured out a way to put that unified chat into this, but it gives us a chance to hear from everybody, so that's really nice.

After the fact, you can watch the show on the website twit.tv/clubtwit or use the old techguylabs.com URL that redirects. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Ask the Tech Guys. But the best thing to do, subscribe in your favorite podcast player and that way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. And, of course, if you're in the club, if you're a Club Twit member, you have a special URL you can subscribe to. It's just for you and you alone. It has no ads in it. If you're not yet a member of the club, remember the club twit.tv/clubtwit. Join us. During the week. Can people leave us a?

2:13:10 - Mikah Sargent
question, they can. If you'd like to call us during the weekend, 888-724-2884,. You will be able to leave a voicemail that, as you've heard, will play back on the show. So we'd love to have you call us and leave a voicemail. Also, email us, atg@twit.v with your text, your audio, your audio, your video. All great ways to get in touch with us, yeah.

2:13:29 - Leo Laporte
And thank you to John Ashley, our producer. Jammer B - John Slanina, our longtime studio manager. He's been with us almost all 20 years and is really showing is a little bit the worst for wear. I'll be honest with you, so we're going to oh, I'm teasing, I'm older than him.

2:13:47 - Mikah Sargent
He has a beautiful hip.

2:13:48 - Leo Laporte
He has a brand new titanium hip, Thanks to Burke McQuinn, who fixes things, and, of course, our executive producer and my dear wife, Lisa Laporte. Thank you all of you for the good work you do, especially thanks to Mikah Sargent. He'll be back with Tech News Weekly on Thursday. iOS Today every other week with Rosemary Orchard. Ios Today every other week with Rosemary.

Orchard and here's the tech guys, hands on Mac in the club, and I think we're going to get you on Twig pretty soon too. That's right, yeah, so have a great geek week. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.