Ask the Tech Guys Episode 1981 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.
Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
Hey, hey, it's me, Leo LaPorte coming up a review of the most expensive earbuds I've ever purchased, and a little sidebar on Bluetooth codex.
Mikah Sargent (00:00:10):
And I'm Micah Sergeant, and we answer a great question, who exactly are VPNs for
Leo Laporte (00:00:15):
That, it's Johnny Jett with some great tips for travelers this summer. It's all coming up. Next, I'll ask the tech guys podcasts you love
Mikah Sargent (00:00:25):
From people you trust.
Leo Laporte (00:00:28):
This
Mikah Sargent (00:00:29):
Is tweet.
Leo Laporte (00:00:32):
This is Ask the tech guys with Micah Sargent and Leo LaPorte, episode 1981, recorded Sunday, July 2nd, 2023. You biggie me Smally as the tech guys is brought to you by electric E-Bikes. Rediscover your independence this summer with XP 3.0 from electric. Visit electric e-bikes dot com to learn more. Explore the epic models electric has to offer. And by twit as an ad supported network, we're always looking for new partners with products and services to benefit our audience. 99% of our audience listens to most or all of our episodes. You can grow your brand with authentic ad reads that always resonate with our audience. Reach out to advertise at twit tv and launch your campaign. Now
Mikah Sargent (00:01:23):
It's time for ask the tech guys with Leo LaPorte
Leo Laporte (00:01:27):
And Mike a sergeant. Hi. Hi Mike. A happy 4th of July.
Mikah Sargent (00:01:30):
Oh my goodness. It's coming up. Happy
Leo Laporte (00:01:32):
Fourth. Yeah. Day after tomorrow. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. We're gonna take the day off. So if you watch our Tuesday shows,
Mikah Sargent (00:01:36):
Don't
Leo Laporte (00:01:37):
<Laugh>. Well, you could, but they won't be fresh <laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (00:01:42):
Yeah. It'll be the stale pantry,
Leo Laporte (00:01:44):
But we're doing it today. This is fresh.
Mikah Sargent (00:01:46):
Yeah, this is fresh. This is new. This is the show. Ask the tech guys where you call in or zoom in or somehow get in touch with us so that you can ask your questions and have them answered live on air. Leo, what are some of the ways people can reach
Leo Laporte (00:02:00):
Out? Well, if you're on your computer or your phone, better yet, your phone call, Twitter tv and your browser pop up Zoom and we'll put you on video with us, which we like. You'll show up in our Stargate, but you can also call, we have a phone. (888) 724-2884. What is that spelled, John? That's 8 8 8 7 2 4
Mikah Sargent (00:02:23):
A
Leo Laporte (00:02:23):
Ttg. And that's so that's easy to remember. Yeah. So, sure. Seven. You can also email ATG at trip tv if you call that phone number. By the way, when we're not on the air, you can leave a message. So we have some voicemails. I'm told a Fistful. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> of voicemails. We have some emails, but we also have, I already see some callers. Before we get to that, are you gonna see the fireworks on Tuesday?
Mikah Sargent (00:02:47):
The No
Leo Laporte (00:02:48):
Petaluma's gonna have
Mikah Sargent (00:02:49):
Fireworks. Oh, I didn't know
Leo Laporte (00:02:50):
That. We're doing what they call high altitude fireworks. So you can, anywhere that you can see the sky in Petaluma, you should be able to see the fireworks.
Mikah Sargent (00:02:57):
Well then I'm definitely gonna see the fireworks.
Leo Laporte (00:02:58):
Many towns though, according to the New York Times, are no longer doing fireworks. They're doing drones. Oh. And the drones are cool, but they're missing something. I remember when I was at a lecture by St. The Stig, who is the former Formula one driver who drove for the the B B C TV show. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> about cars, I can't remember its name now, but the Stig Top Cure. Thank you. Benito's Younger than me. His brain's still working. <Laugh> the Stig s said I don't like Formula E, the electric cars, cuz there's no roar and rumble. Ah. Like there is a formula one. And and kind of that's what's true about drones. They don't explode. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (00:03:44):
That's one of my favorite moments of, you get the one firework that boom rattles. Yeah, exactly. Rattles your chest. That's part of it.
Leo Laporte (00:03:50):
The drones are cool. I mean, they could do a cooler things. I saw a, a drone show in the French region, Bordeaux region. I saw the video, not that I wasn't there where it, it formed a wine bottle. It formed a wine glass and then a bottle tipped and the wine poured outta the wine. That's for people all with lit up drones. So Yeah. Cuz your computer controls. But
Mikah Sargent (00:04:08):
When people were in the, the Revolutionary War and they looked up in the sky, there wasn't wine bottles pouring wine into glasses.
Leo Laporte (00:04:16):
American flag
Mikah Sargent (00:04:17):
Waving. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:04:18):
Screw the British. No, none of that. It's
Mikah Sargent (00:04:19):
Supposed to resemble warfare. Yeah. And there's rumbling. The bombs.
Leo Laporte (00:04:24):
Bombs. Bombs boing. Yeah. So I, yeah, I wonder if, I think drone shows are great for, let's say the Superbowl and places where, where you can't light things on fire and have big explosions. You know, Disneyland has a ex a firework show every single night in Disneyland next door, the California Adventure, they have a electric light show. Hmm. And I have to say the fi you look forward to the fireworks. Yeah. You're really, there's something about it. Yeah. So Elon Musk DDOSed Twitter this weekend. Oh
Mikah Sargent (00:04:53):
My God,
Leo Laporte (00:04:54):
That was hysterical. So <laugh>, so Musk was he, he says, oh, this is terrible. Everybody's scraping our content. So he set what they call limits on how many tweets you could see on Twitter. Yeah. And if you were blue check, I think this is what it was really all about, is to encourage Blue check check. You could watch thousand, you know, you could see thousand, I think 50,000 tweets. But if you were not verified, in other words, didn't pay $8 for a blue check, he calls it verified. I think it's
Mikah Sargent (00:05:25):
Not verified. It's paid.
Leo Laporte (00:05:27):
Yeah. only a thousand. And if you weren't even logged in, none. Zero zip. And unfortunately, the way they implemented it apparently brought Twitter down on Saturday morning. Twitter was gone because they, in effect, DDOSed themselves the way they did this. Rate limiting affected even Twitter's ability to, to show Twitter. Oh. And on Mastodon, there's a web developer who I follow Sheldon Chang, who said because a bug in Twitter's web app is constantly sending requests to Twitter in an infinite loop. Twitter is d dossing itself, which is, which on yesterday took the home feed down for most of the morning,
Mikah Sargent (00:06:11):
<Laugh> 10 requests to seconds to itself try and fetch content that never arrives. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:06:15):
Posted a video of the developer console on his browser. These are requests, unfulfilled requests, hundreds of requests a minute coming in.
Mikah Sargent (00:06:25):
So as more users become rate limited, then they're also causing this.
Leo Laporte (00:06:30):
What Sheldon said is, of course if I had been a nice person, I would've logged off immediately. But I, <laugh> evil Sheldon was in charge. And so I stayed on for a little while cuz everybody stayed on killed it. So anyway, I think it's back to, back to normal, but it just shows you, you fire all the engineers, <laugh>,
Mikah Sargent (00:06:48):
That's what's gonna happen. And you also like, implement things last minute. That's what's gonna happen as well.
Leo Laporte (00:06:53):
Yeah. Yeah. And I have to say, I feel sorry for the woman who they brought in as a, as a CEO of the company, cuz she can't fire the engineering team.
Mikah Sargent (00:07:02):
<Laugh>, I think it was Lisa Schmeer who at one point pointed out that a lot of times in Silicon, Silicon Valley, you see this happen when a company is worried about it go itself going under, they bring in a woman ceo. They did it with Melissa Mayer. Wow. at Yahoo. Yeah. She mentioned several others. She cited a couple other very interesting examples.
Leo Laporte (00:07:21):
HP did it with Carly Fee Arena. Interesting.
Mikah Sargent (00:07:26):
Interesting's a bummer.
Leo Laporte (00:07:26):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Let the lady handle it. Mm-Hmm.
Mikah Sargent (00:07:29):
<Affirmative>. And then it ends up going down. And then it's, you know, has
Leo Laporte (00:07:32):
June June 30th, a couple of days ago, the end of the line for many third party Reddit apps, Apollo of the best known, you interviewed Christian Selig, the mm-hmm. <Affirmative> creator of Apollo on Tech News Weekly last week. As, as, as they started Reddit started charging for access to its sites. Same, kinda the same issue as Twitter, which is they don't like these ai large language models scraping data for their benefit but not for the benefit of Twitter or Reddit. So Reddits gonna charge charging for access. And the many third party, not all, but many third party apps said, we can't afford
Mikah Sargent (00:08:08):
That. Yeah. I saw some of them did. Still, they figured out a deal with
Leo Laporte (00:08:11):
Reddit is still going. So but the real issue, of course, is the, the, the then revolt by Reddit moderators who said, Hey, wait a minute. This is a bridge too far. All the people who moderated the very famous Reddit asked me anything. I've done one where you get famous, or in my case, infamous people on <laugh>. And any, you can ask them any question. And that takes a lot of moderation. All those people were doing it for free. They've all said, well, you know, Reddit, if you wanna keep doing those, you can hire somebody. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But we ain't doing it for free anymore. I I don't know if Reddit will survive this So far. It has. We shall see. We shall see.
Mikah Sargent (00:08:46):
Yeah. The, the choice to have groups open back up their Reddit pages, their subreddits and several moderators. These sort of increasingly more vicious messages from the moderation team saying, and
Leo Laporte (00:09:01):
One, one thing that the moderators have done on some sites like this Sonology subreddit, is Markham not safe for work? There's a little switch they have. You could say, well, it is not safe for work. And why is that? It's of course is safe for work. It's just about a network. It's a storage solution. But it's a bad thing for Reddit because advertisers mostly say, no, we don't want to be on NSF w Got it. Subreddits. So it's a way of trying to take money away. I think it's just a matter of time before Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit and the Reddit management just takes the site away from those moderators and says, no, you know, it's not N S F W and we're,
Mikah Sargent (00:09:38):
That's where I think it's headed. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:09:41):
I think that's pretty much it except to say that we have a all in Studio Tut this afternoon. Father Robert is in town. So is Brianna Wu. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So is Ian Thompson. So that table over there is gonna be full of real live people in just a couple of hours. Father Robert is going, I'm, it's gonna be the official handover. Remember the Flipper Zero, the hacking tool that I had, the multi-tool for hackers. Father Robert is going to take it over because he has a, even though he's a Catholic priest, he apparently has a dark side <laugh>. So, so I'm gonna give it to my better Angel. I haven't done anything since since I got it. So it's good to him. Turns out, even though Amazon refuses to sell the flipper Zero, they have, they're on track to make 80 million.
(00:10:29):
Wow. 80 million worth of sales since they came out earlier this year. That's pretty darn good. Coming up in just a little bit we've got a, a visit from Johnny Jet, our travel guru. And I will tell you about a long journey I went on, but a journey in my own mind. <Laugh>, I bought these very expensive, the Deon calls 'em their pearl, p e r l, personal listening. And I said, well, let's go in for a penny for a pound for the pros. These are earbuds that say they are gonna shape the sound to your actual hearing automatically. But there's even more. The story is very interesting. It has a lot to do with Bluetooth codex. And more so a review of these Pearl Pros plus a discussion of high quality wireless listening. Does it exist?
Mikah Sargent (00:11:22):
Does it,
Leo Laporte (00:11:23):
But first we should get some calls. What do you say? Let's do it. Oh, and Scooter X says like everybody else around here. Hey, what's the status of your color E Ink project? <Laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (00:11:37):
Well, now Leo's coding in Pearl, so it's gonna be a while.
Leo Laporte (00:11:41):
No, no, I will, I will do it. I have to pick up some Python to do it. And that's what's slowed me down a little bit. But I I will, I'm not, I will do it. I promise I will. Tokyo, Tony has his hand up in our Zoom chat. Tokyo. Tony, come on down and join us in the Stargate. He calls himself Tokyo. Tony. Hi. Even he lives in Arizona. Hi, Tony.
Caller Tony (00:12:07):
How you doing?
Leo Laporte (00:12:08):
From Arizona? Yes,
Caller Tony (00:12:10):
That's correct.
Leo Laporte (00:12:11):
Top of his head is from Arizona. Anyway, <laugh>,
Caller Tony (00:12:13):
I, I prefer not to be on the video. Oh, you
Leo Laporte (00:12:15):
Don't have to be on video. Good, good. You're anonymous. Yeah, sorry. But I, I told you told me I think that you call yourself Tokyo Tony cuz you lived in Japan for quite some time.
Caller Tony (00:12:25):
That's correct. I lived there for 17 years.
Leo Laporte (00:12:28):
Wow. How come you came home?
Caller Tony (00:12:31):
For work? I, I, my son was he was getting into high school and I, I wanted, we actually lived in after that Singapore for 10 years.
Leo Laporte (00:12:40):
Ah, so if you had a choice between Tokyo and Singapore, which would you choose? I
Caller Tony (00:12:46):
Would choose Singapore for living. It's just a lot safer. Tokyo's very cramped. It's nice to be there in your twenties or thirties, but for a family, Singapore, you can't beat
Leo Laporte (00:12:54):
It. Yeah. It's safe. <Laugh>, that's for sure. That's for sure. It's also 80 degrees day and night all year round. <Laugh>.
Caller Tony (00:13:01):
Yeah. There's no weather, weather people there. It's the same. It's like groundhogs today. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:13:05):
Wow. I hear though that Dorians are very popular in Singapore and the prices have plummeted of late. Have you ever had a durian?
Caller Tony (00:13:14):
I've smelled them. That's all. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:13:16):
Enough. That was enough, right? Yeah. I'm told they taste better than they smell, but you know, I don't blame you for stealing. Couldn't get past it. What can we do for you, Tony?
Caller Tony (00:13:25):
Yeah, I've got two questions about routers. My router, I got an orbi router. It's a, it's a six wifi. Six.
Leo Laporte (00:13:32):
Okay.
Caller Tony (00:13:33):
And do I need to install any type of security stuff? It, it comes with, for example, on the app, the Armor app. And I've been using this and I get these strange messages from Armor saying, we blocked a malicious site you tried to, to go to, and that's some of my, my video server. They have a IMAX app separately. Yeah. I have no idea what URL it is. Is it actually necessary to have any type of security program or something for these routers? I know. Do I need to worry
Leo Laporte (00:13:59):
About that? I don't, I don't think so. All the routers offer some form of, not all, but many do some sort of upsell. The or the hero heroes offer a $99 a year plan. Does Orbi charge you for
Caller Tony (00:14:12):
Yeah, it's $40 for the first year, the 99 after that. But I just don't know if it's worth it.
Leo Laporte (00:14:16):
I don't think, I don't think you need, I would see what other features you get for that 99 bucks. That's a lot of money to spend. You can easily, if you want security you could do what I do. Look it, you know, in, in theory the router's gonna do the best job of security cuz it sees all the traffic and they can inspect the packets as they come in. It could see if they're hazardous. It, it, so there's a number of things it can do that something like my, my preferred choice which is next dns.io. Can't do, it's a DNS server. So it's sitting out there whenever you make a request, it could say, is this a malicious site? And block it. It could do some additional filtering, but it's never gonna be as good as stuff on the hardware. The question really is do I need it, it, one of the things I bet it does is add gets rid of ads. Yes,
Caller Tony (00:15:09):
Yes. Right. Of the the armor security software.
Leo Laporte (00:15:12):
Yeah. Does it get rid of
Caller Tony (00:15:12):
Ads? No. No. It just doesn't. No, that's surprisingly the only other, the only other thing it did was it said it blocked. I, I have a port that I'm forwarding and it blocked a malicious attack on a port forward. That's, but I just really don't know. I I mean, I've got a firewall set up on my computer. I
Leo Laporte (00:15:28):
Think you're fine. I mean, yeah, I, so I use ubiquity and ubiquity does also have a malicious attack software and I actually use it. I for instance, I forbid any incoming traffic from China, Russia, or Ukraine, cuz a lot, there's a lot of hacking attacks that come from those three countries. So, and I don't deal with any, the Ukraine's the only iffy one cuz some of the stuff I use is from Ukraine. But if, if I wanna download software for instance from you know, from a Mac fun or Macaw or whatever, I will, I will, I will say, okay, fine. Let's take the shields down, download it, then turn 'em back on. So there is some value to that, you know, just saying not, not no IP traffic from China. A lot of attacks, almost all the attacks on my sonology, for instance, come from China. And they, and probably your orbi can, can sense can using stateful pack, what they call stateful packeting inspection, can inspect the packets and send some malicious or malformed packets. So there is, there's absolutely security value to it. So that's why I don't wanna say turn it off. I don't, I'm not familiar with that particular software. Maybe it's not, you know, if you're getting Are they, they're all false positives, right? When you get those?
Caller Tony (00:16:44):
Yeah, I, I guess so be, I don't know if what, what site? My, my video servers trying to, to request a URL for. Cause it doesn't, that's the shame about when in the, in the warning what the U R L is. This is unblock url. I go, I don't know what URL you're trying to unblock.
Mikah Sargent (00:17:02):
I've had that issue with ERO as well. That's this, the software is like black box. You don't know exactly what it's doing. And I've had issues just visiting normal sites because of it. So I've taken it down temporarily and been able to visit the site and then realized that it had just mist tagged something for a
Leo Laporte (00:17:17):
Long time on the radio show. If somebody had problems with accessing a site, I'd tell me, I'd say, tell me what security software you're running mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, because very frequently it was security software doing it. And this is the, I guess the, the, the tension between security and a, you know, complete free access security is gonna lock you down somewhat and sometimes you're gonna get false positives. You get a lot of them. Then I think it's not good security software. Yep. And that's the question, right? But on the other hand, that's a very valuable thing. My, my silently rejects malicious packets, malicious traffic. When I look at the log, there's a lot of it. I am not gonna turn that off. But the ubiquity does a very good job and it does it silently. I don't have too much trouble getting the sites that I want to. I used to run next dns and my wife complained that a lot of her sites wouldn't work. In fact, it's true. A lot of signup forms and so forth didn't. So I actually for her, I disable it. I leave it on for me. Cause I, I know what's going on. We had trouble
Mikah Sargent (00:18:20):
With the PlayStation network because of next dns. Yeah. It was having trouble connecting and doing
Leo Laporte (00:18:25):
Live stuff. Next is like a is like a pie hole. That's that raspberry pie security software. I think.
Caller Tony (00:18:32):
Is there something I can, I can use otherwise, other than Armor can, I actually, is there, oh yeah. Is there something I can run on the router itself?
Leo Laporte (00:18:39):
Oh yeah. There's a lot of choices like the fire wallow, which a lot of people, like, I think Stacy recommended that Stacy Higginbotham on on this week in Google, the firewall Walla is a bit of hardware, kind of a raspberry pi like device that sits between your router and the outside world. They have three different levels of protection as you can see. And it's fast. It's gigabit, so it's not gonna slow you down, but it's doing in hardware what that software's doing on your orbi. So that's an interesting alternative. There's a number of products like this, but you can see it's the, the fancy ones. I think 500 bucks. It's not cheap. Right. So you 4 85,
Caller Tony (00:19:23):
I'm just curious. Maybe it's not worth it. I just was thinking the basics of what the, the routers should block and my fireworks on my max firewalls on my max. It should be okay. Right? Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:19:31):
If you talk to not, I mean, hardly anybody's using these. Right. Right. So, and so I think you're probably all right. I, I guess ultimately this conversation comes down to, and we always use this term and I don't like it, but you're a threat model. In other words, how threatened are you? <Laugh>, you know, if you're working for a three letter agency, Adam McLean, Virginia, well then maybe you should run all the security software. You can get your little hands on. But you're a normal citizen. You're not probably the target of a nation state attack much more likely. Like all the rest of us, all the attacks are kind of network-wide kind of internet noise and that kind of thing. They're probably harmless as long as you do the right thing, you know, you don't open attachments, you, you're careful about the links. You click, you got, you're glad you have a firewall running on your systems.
(00:20:20):
Yep. The one thing I would do sometimes on a Mac that people don't do the firewalls on Windows and Mac are inbound only, it's not a bad idea to run something that looks at outbound traffic. Cuz if somebody does get into your system, the next thing they do is they contact, you know, home base. And so something like Little Snitch which is not paid. And then there's a, there's a good one and I can't remember the name of it. Yeah, don't think it either. From ob oh, I can't remember the name, but a good open source one, we've talked about it before mm-hmm. <Affirmative> objective Design does the, the little snitch, but I can't remember who does the free one. But there's a, there are little free programs you can run. I don't even run those, but if you're nervous, you can watch for outbound traffic.
(00:21:02):
Okay. Lulu, thank you very much. Doug. M it's called Lulu, l u l u. And it's open source and it's free. And it doesn't, it impinges a little, you know, we've talked in the past about you know, Steve always said and Steve Gibson and I are host of security now, always says, you know, you should run no script until you do. And then you go, well, I can't even use the internet. It's blocking all JavaScript can. Yeah, I'm safe, but I can't run any any JavaScript objective dash C sse e.org. It's a little pun on objective. See the language Lulu objective c.org. And I've used this. This is not very up.
Mikah Sargent (00:21:41):
Annoying me a little bit.
Leo Laporte (00:21:43):
It might annoy you a little bit. Did you run it for a while? Oh yeah.
Mikah Sargent (00:21:45):
Yeah. I just didn't end up need. I, yeah. I, I think for you and I, we, we do do a lot more stuff, but we just don't need all of this
Leo Laporte (00:21:52):
Stuff. Yeah. We are to some degree targets too. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So it's, our threat model is different than your threat model. I think you're fine. Tokyo, Tony. Okay. I think
Caller Tony (00:22:01):
You could just turn, but I have a very quick turn it off. Very simple. Second question. Should I turn on ipv six? Is there any benefit to do
Leo Laporte (00:22:07):
That? No. Okay. I mean, theoretically there's a benefit <laugh>
Mikah Sargent (00:22:13):
In theory for is there harm in turning it on, I guess? Yes. Oh, what's the harm?
Leo Laporte (00:22:19):
Well there are a lot of sites that don't support it. I mean, there's just issues with it that just because it, it's better in theory. So this goes back to Vince Surf and others the fathers of the internet saying we're gonna run l i p addresses. And Steve Gibson has covered this in the past at, for a while, IPV four, which is the one you're all used to, you know, 1 28 0.1 6.0 a dotted quad. But that runs out of addresses fairly quickly. And we were afraid, everybody was afraid that we were gonna run outta internet addresses cuz it's such a small number. Nobody anticipated that the entire world would be on the internet. But guess what happened? A couple of things happened. One, every, your router only uses one internet address. All that stuff behind the router has its own private address. So most people are only using one. And then there is also I s P level nat, which, which is helping even more. So it turns out the sky might have been falling, but we're temporarily holding it up. IPV six implementation has rolled out slowly and there are issues with it. You could turn on and see if you have any problems, but I don't think the point really is you don't need to turn it on. So why take the chance.
Caller Tony (00:23:30):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:23:31):
Eventually it's some point. Thanks too much. Somebody. The IPV six is the metric system. There you go. Eventually
Mikah Sargent (00:23:37):
We'll all switch over to
Leo Laporte (00:23:38):
It. Eventually we'll do it someday. Right?
Mikah Sargent (00:23:40):
<Laugh>. Eventually we'll stop doing daylight savings time. Daylight
Leo Laporte (00:23:43):
Saving time. So Tony, cuz you lived in Singapore and Japan for so long, you probably the metric systems, you know, you know it like in your head. Yeah.
Caller Tony (00:23:50):
The temperatures and, and and and distance. Yeah. Yeah. And weight was, I, I'm a lot, I'm a lot less heavy in metrics. <Laugh>,
Leo Laporte (00:23:58):
I only weighed stone. It's an amazing thing. <Laugh>. It's great. I prefer Stone myself. <Laugh>. Thank you Tokyo. Tony.
Caller Tony (00:24:05):
Thank you guys. Thank you
Leo Laporte (00:24:06):
So much. Yeah. I, I'll have to, I haven't done any research on IPV six in some time. My experience was I turned it on and things stopped working and I thought don't need it. And I think that's really the bottom line is you don't need it yet. I've got mine turned on and I've not had any issues. Okay. The IPV four does IPV four ip. That's why I was asking what what did I do wrong? Yeah. What most, what your router's probably gonna do is have both of them. Yeah. And since most sites will, most sites yet, a lot of stuff doesn't yet support IPV six. Exactly. you can't turn off IPV four, I guess, right? Yeah, exactly. So one or the other. No, that was my mistake. Yeah. I do see we got someone who called into the number 88. Wait, I shouldn't do that. Cause then I have to do 88 87. 2 4 2 8 8 4 <laugh>. You've fallen into the trap. I do. Every single time. 8 8 8 7 2 4. Eighttt G is the number. And we do have a wireless call. I yeah, we're we're all wide open for that. I see wireless call. Let's do I do I do that too? Do I send him to the breakout room? Now? You'll have to press star six to unmute wireless call. But go ahead and say hello.
Caller Mark (00:25:17):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
Leo Laporte (00:25:18):
Hey, there we go. We heard something. What's your name? What's your first name and where are you calling from?
Caller Mark (00:25:24):
My name is Mark. Hi
Leo Laporte (00:25:26):
Mark Malibu. What city are you from?
Caller Mark (00:25:28):
Oh, Malibu.
Leo Laporte (00:25:30):
Malibu. Oh, you're on the beach there. Is it a beautiful day in Malibu?
Caller Mark (00:25:35):
It's a beautiful day, but I'm on the the east side of Pacific Coast Highway. If you know where Malibu is, you know where Dukes restaurant is. Oh, I love Duke Canyon.
Leo Laporte (00:25:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Caller Mark (00:25:49):
Yeah. So you go, you go up the hill to the top of the hill. Yep. And I'm right there in that little ridge. So you look down on all
Leo Laporte (00:25:55):
Beautiful. Right now you look down on all the movie stars <laugh>.
Caller Mark (00:25:59):
Yep. As a matter of fact, when Sean Penn was married to a Madonna said it was about three quarters of a mile, I can see their, their footprint when they had a house over there, had the fire printed up. So it's just a footprint now. But I remember when they said they over there.
Leo Laporte (00:26:13):
Nice. Were there a lot of helicopters during the wedding? Flying overhead? <Laugh>.
Caller Mark (00:26:18):
Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's always like that. You know, can,
Leo Laporte (00:26:22):
What can we do for you, mark?
Caller Mark (00:26:25):
So here's the deal. I bought a I guess it's 2008. I bought a Toshiba Cos media edition. That's when they had Comp usa. Yes. Beautiful computer, you know. Yes. The, the, the keyboard was easy. The screen was clear. <Inaudible> speakers and I used it for a while. And then I just got busy with work and other projects. So I put it aside and started doing a lot of stuff with my Apple phone. I've had two Apple phones since then. So now I got some time and I wanna go back to use my computer because I have a lot of instructional discs and all that kind of stuff. And it just makes things easier. The problem is that when I haven't used it for so long, it went into the biosphere. Now this is Los Angeles, this, this company there stores here that can, you know, get it back or remediate it. Cause I wanna go back to start using it. And then
Leo Laporte (00:27:19):
So when it booted up, when it booted up, it went into bio set up. Did it, did it say I can't see the hard drives? I think that's probably what happened.
Caller Mark (00:27:29):
Well, it just said bio here. Yeah. Bio. It didn't, yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:27:32):
When it, when it does that, it does that. Normally a computer, you know, when it boots, it'll look at the master boot record on the hard drive go. Okay, good. The master boot records say go look at Windows start up. It'll all start up. If it can't see the hard drive, then it's gonna say, right, well I'm gonna go into setup. Now you can, in the bios, you can see what hardware is installed. You can see if it can even see the hard drive. So yeah. That computer has been sitting on a shelf for five, six years.
Caller Mark (00:28:02):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:28:03):
Yeah. It could well be that the hard drives,
Caller Mark (00:28:05):
But it's worth it. Yeah. So you, you're saying replace the hard drive. So,
Leo Laporte (00:28:09):
Well they may, you may not. Okay. So get ready for this. You may not need to replace the hard drives. If it's easy to open and I think it is with some screws on the bottom, open it up. Disconnect the hard drive. Reconnect it. Maybe after you disconnect it, whap it. Give it a good whap with a screwdriver handle. Cuz one of the things that happens with spinning hard drives, they call it distinction, the heads of the hard drives. If you let 'em sit for a while, nor they're not, they're supposed to retract, they're not supposed to touch the platter. But sometimes if you let it sit for a while, it'll hit the head of the platter and stick. And then there's not enough juice to get the platter spinning cuz of heart. I know you never heard of this. No, this is new. It sounds like I'm making it up, doesn't it?
(00:28:48):
<Laugh> Anyway, it's called, you could look it up. I'm not making it up. Stick fiction. Sometimes I'll whp with a screwdriver just enough to get that head free. So what I would do is open it up, take out the hard drive, whack it, <laugh> not, don't like dent it, don't beat it. Just, just to tap, just to kind of give it a little jolt, put it back in and try again. It may be either that the connection got loose or, you know, somehow corroded. So look and see if it's rusted and so forth. Make sure the battery isn't swollen. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And there's nothing leaking out of it. Sometimes that can happen. But if you, if you take it out, you look and make sure the connection's good, you whack it, put it back in nice firm connection, then try again. It might work. If it doesn't, is there stuff on the hard drive you need Mark?
Caller Mark (00:29:34):
Well, here's the thing. If it's not there, if they have to put another hard drive in, that would be okay. Cuz I have enough stuff where Okay. I can
Leo Laporte (00:29:44):
So you could put another
Caller Mark (00:29:45):
Home drive in on, but I want Yeah. So that's, that's what I want. So what it is, is and what I've heard that to, to, she has been sold several years ago. Yeah. So somebody else owns
Leo Laporte (00:29:55):
It. They don't make laptops. And
Caller Mark (00:29:56):
Then, you know, you go, so yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:29:59):
There's one other, there's one other other thing that the chat room Scooter X is bringing up in the chat room. There was a problem. Yeah. In the 20, mid 2010s, 20 14, 15 with capacitors leaking. And it is possible Scooter X is saying that the capacitor in the power supply has failed and the power supply is not coming on. I don't think that's, that may or may not be the case. You're seeing a screen, right? And you're seeing stuff on the screen, right?
Caller Mark (00:30:29):
Well, no, the only thing I'm seeing is all black. But I get the little text, you know bio at the top and that kind of stuff.
Leo Laporte (00:30:35):
Does it say
Caller Mark (00:30:36):
Press
Leo Laporte (00:30:36):
F 12 or anything like that? Does it give you
Caller Mark (00:30:39):
Any Yeah. That kind of stuff? Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:30:41):
So I think the power supply is working. It may not have enough juice to spin up that drive, but I think you're probably okay. What I would do is get, so take out the drive and, and see what it is. It's probably a two and a half inch laptop drive that's got, it's a a, it's got a special connector and it, and it looks like, you know, a credit card size drive a little thicker. Obviously if it's one of those, you can get an s s D to replace it. You're gonna have to f a solid state drive. That would be a big replacement. It would fix a lot of the problems. No, no.
Caller Mark (00:31:14):
It's worth it. Yeah, no. So what is, if you could refer me to one or two places, even if you guys have an outlet I could go to. Cause it's worth it to me to get it back up and, and, and moving so to speak. Mike
Leo Laporte (00:31:25):
Has found a site.
Caller Mark (00:31:26):
Cause you know, I don't,
Mikah Sargent (00:31:28):
Yeah. So basically you're wondering, you're asking our advice on where you can find a hard drive to replace, or are you asking for a place you can go where they will do it for you? Which of the two
Caller Mark (00:31:40):
That's Yeah. The place that would do it for me. The place that you say these people are very good, you know, that kind of stuff. Got it. Or, or you know, cause like a lot of times, like a lot of these music places, like, you know, you're buy a music book and they won't give you the disc. You have to go online, you know, who wants to be back. You know. So if you have like a UpToDate audio visual media center computer, which I don't even think they make anymore, but really somebody here in LA area, these guys take care of you.
Leo Laporte (00:32:11):
Here's a big problem. Appreci, I don't appreciate, think you wanna put a lot of money into this thing. I agree. It's a pen m so it's really slow. It's really old. It's somewhat out of date at this point. And you could bring it to Best Buy, you know, and get the, I want to call 'em the Goon Squad. Get the, get the Geek Squad.
Caller Mark (00:32:30):
I went there, I went there.
Leo Laporte (00:32:31):
What'd the Goon Squad
Caller Mark (00:32:32):
Say? I went there and they couldn't do it.
Leo Laporte (00:32:33):
They said no.
Caller Mark (00:32:34):
They said they, they, they couldn't do it. Yeah. They, they go for the stuff like the last two or three years. They go for the, they're not really
Leo Laporte (00:32:40):
Yeah, yeah.
Caller Mark (00:32:41):
Dedicated to like that. You know,
Leo Laporte (00:32:42):
They, they see a cheapskate coming a mile away. They say, I don't want to deal with Mark. He Yeah,
Caller Mark (00:32:46):
That's what, it's <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:32:47):
He's trying to get an old computer up and running. I think. Yeah, you could probably do it yourself.
Mikah Sargent (00:32:52):
I'm thinking you could do it. So I,
Leo Laporte (00:32:54):
I have faith in you, mark. All you need is a is a, is a screwdriver.
Mikah Sargent (00:32:57):
Pretty much a screwdriver. Yeah. The Cosio has, it's literally the hard drive has its own little area on the bottom of your laptop.
Leo Laporte (00:33:05):
So you can just get at it.
Mikah Sargent (00:33:06):
So just Yeah, you just get at it. I, we will include in our links in the show notes, which you can find at twit, do TV slash atg the page. And it has a walkthrough set of steps. It's got photographs and everything. And essentially you would just get a new hard drive and you can buy that in almost any place. You know, if you get it at Best Buy or you order it on Amazon or you any of these
Leo Laporte (00:33:32):
Places. There's some other issues though. Your CMOs battery may be dead.
Mikah Sargent (00:33:35):
I was, I was wondering about the Seamass
Leo Laporte (00:33:36):
Battery. We could put a link in the show notes for you to get a new one of those. They're about a buck. Two bucks.
Mikah Sargent (00:33:40):
You hear? No laptop
Caller Mark (00:33:41):
Though? We've gotta have a place in, in, we gotta have a place in, I dunno.
Leo Laporte (00:33:45):
In Malibu. I really don't. That's the problem. I don't, I'm just No,
Caller Mark (00:33:47):
No, no. I know Dukes, my car goes all over, so, okay.
Leo Laporte (00:33:51):
I know Dukes okay. But we're up here in Northern California and we're not I'm afraid experts. Okay. Alright. In repair places in Southern California. If, if the Geek Squad will handle it, one of the reasons the chatroom's telling me one of the reasons they don't like to handle dead lithium ion batteries. Cuz sometimes charging 'em up causes problems. And so they're nervous about that as well. If you could, if you could spare a few hundred bucks, I would, it would probably be a smarter thing instead of spending that money to repair it, to get a new one. To be honest with you. And
Mikah Sargent (00:34:22):
Your concern with getting a new one is that you won't be able to use these discs that you have. Is that, was that the, the big concern? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So this is a great thing too.
Caller Mark (00:34:31):
I have an instructional disc. Yeah, go ahead.
Mikah Sargent (00:34:34):
You can get for hardly any money on Amazon, an external disc drive a usb. Yeah. A US drive. Yeah. So even if you end up getting a laptop, you know, a new laptop, you just take that USB drive, you plug it into the side. Are they Mark?
Leo Laporte (00:34:49):
Are they, they floppy discs or CDs or DVDs?
Caller Mark (00:34:53):
Not even CDs or DVDs, things like that. You know, so what its for
Leo Laporte (00:34:57):
30 or 40 bucks, you can get a USB DVD drive. I have one cuz they don't build 'em into computers anymore like they did in that day. But honestly, a, a new computer, get a decent computer for five or 600 bucks. You plug in the flop the CD drive and you'll be able to watch those instructional discs still.
Caller Mark (00:35:16):
So there's no computer right now that would have that feature of having a a put it in a disc inside the computer. That's, that's done with it
Leo Laporte (00:35:24):
Saying, well, you could try going to a big box store like Costco or Sam's Club and c sometimes they have older models, but nah, nobody's putting CD ROMs into computers anymore, I don't think. Yeah,
Mikah Sargent (00:35:33):
Yeah. The technology.
Leo Laporte (00:35:35):
Wow. I know. It's
Mikah Sargent (00:35:36):
Just the dodo. Here's a portable
Caller Mark (00:35:39):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:35:39):
Here's a, here's a typical portable drive.
Mikah Sargent (00:35:41):
Yeah. We've got a one that, it even goes, it plays Blu-ray. It's from Pioneer. Yeah. we've got an overhead shop.
Leo Laporte (00:35:47):
Yes, I have one at home. You know, I never use it. It's it's pretty dusty cuz it's just sitting in a drawer. I've
Mikah Sargent (00:35:52):
Got one that when Apple used to make them, they don't make them anymore. But I still have one I bought in college and it Yeah, it just sits there.
Leo Laporte (00:35:58):
It's a USB three connection on the back of it, so it'd be fast enough to run Blueray. So I, you know, this is a tough one. I mean, ideally, I, ideally you'd get something, you could probably run those DVDs on a TV too. Yeah,
Mikah Sargent (00:36:15):
I thought, do you
Leo Laporte (00:36:15):
Need a computer
Mikah Sargent (00:36:16):
For it? Totally. You could. Yeah, it's
Caller Mark (00:36:19):
Like if you, well I just, I just go ahead. I just bought an 85 inch with the a dmi feature on it. Oh. And then I have a, a couple of video players. Yeah. Blue
Leo Laporte (00:36:30):
Red player. What happens when you put the disc into that? Yeah,
Caller Mark (00:36:33):
Well I have a technician coming by Wednesday and he's gonna hook it up. So I thought about that. Ok. See what happens.
Leo Laporte (00:36:38):
See what happens happens there. It just depends. If it's a Windows, if those discs are windows discs that need the Windows operating system or they're standalone discs that you could just watch on a regular DVD player let's hope they're the latter. Otherwise you'd have to get a new Windows pc. I don't think it's worth spending hundreds of dollars to get this thing working.
Mikah Sargent (00:36:55):
Yeah. Instead of trying to put a bunch of money into this older machine, it's well worth just getting a new one. I would say. So. And then, yeah, 30, 30, $40 on buying that external drive. And you're good to go for as long as those save DVDs last
Leo Laporte (00:37:10):
Save a little money and get a nice piece of of, of hula pie at Dukes for me. Well, yeah. <Laugh>
Caller Mark (00:37:20):
The restaurant over here is Joffrey. You ever been over
Leo Laporte (00:37:22):
I? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a funny, funny little place. I love Jre. Right off the pch, right? Yeah, you, yeah, yeah,
Caller Mark (00:37:30):
Yeah man. That's how we moving over here. You know, you wanna come by and pick it out?
Leo Laporte (00:37:34):
<Laugh>, I, you know, it's one of my favorite areas. I love driving the coast on the pch. It's so pretty, so beautiful. And today it must be gorgeous.
Caller Mark (00:37:42):
They got 30. Malibu is 25 miles long. It's like a strip of bacon and they got 33 billionaires. Yeah. Amazing. That's not include the people who are like eight 80 million, you know, selling million. Didn't
Leo Laporte (00:37:54):
<Laugh> didn't Beyonce just bought a new Jay-Z and Beyonce bought a new house on Malibu. I think. I thought I saw that. They
Caller Mark (00:38:01):
200 million paid cash for it.
Leo Laporte (00:38:03):
They paid cash.
Caller Mark (00:38:06):
Nice. Walking around money, you know, here take that. Know what I'm saying? Lemme
Leo Laporte (00:38:09):
See if I have that in my pants pocket. Yeah. Here you go. <Laugh>. I'll take it. Mark a pleasure talking to you. All right guys. Thanks Mark. I don't think we much help except to say it's not get a new machine. It's not worth fixing it. Probably. And I'll like, there's so many things wrong. Don't
Caller Mark (00:38:24):
Forget to eat your vegetables.
Leo Laporte (00:38:26):
Oh, why make it easy? Why do you say that? I can't eat my vegetables. I should eat my No,
Caller Mark (00:38:30):
I said don't forget to eat your vegetables.
Leo Laporte (00:38:32):
Ill, but why do you say that? Eat them. Do I look like I need to eat more? Are you the vegetable king of Malibu? No. That,
Caller Mark (00:38:38):
No, no. That's the key to everything man. It's the vegetables. That's, that's the secret sauce.
Leo Laporte (00:38:42):
Oh, I hate vegetables.
Mikah Sargent (00:38:44):
Longevity, right?
Leo Laporte (00:38:45):
<Laugh>.
Caller Mark (00:38:46):
Yeah. Damn
Leo Laporte (00:38:48):
Nation. I gotta eat more vegetables. If,
Mikah Sargent (00:38:50):
If it results in me having 200 million and walking around money, I'll eat every Do you
Leo Laporte (00:38:53):
Do think she's eating his vegetables?
Mikah Sargent (00:38:55):
I probably
Leo Laporte (00:38:56):
Beyonce. Definitely.
Mikah Sargent (00:38:57):
Definitely. She's eating her vegetables.
Leo Laporte (00:38:59):
Queen be Hey
Caller Mark (00:39:00):
Thanks. When you can pay that much money at the house you can have. Alright, take it easy man. Then you don't
Leo Laporte (00:39:03):
Have to eat vegetables. <Laugh>. See ya, mark.
Mikah Sargent (00:39:06):
Just filter out your body every three weeks or something.
Leo Laporte (00:39:09):
Let me think of the last time I had a vegetable.
Mikah Sargent (00:39:12):
Are you kidding? You eat vegetables?
Leo Laporte (00:39:13):
Come on. I had cream spinach last night.
Mikah Sargent (00:39:16):
I don't like spinach.
Leo Laporte (00:39:18):
Spinach is good for you. Is good for you. Creaming it not so good
Mikah Sargent (00:39:21):
For, for you. I just don't like how it,
Leo Laporte (00:39:23):
I wanna show you how I stay in shape. You wanna see how I stay in shape these
Mikah Sargent (00:39:27):
Days? I can't wait to see how you stay in.
Leo Laporte (00:39:28):
I love my e-bike. From, from electric. Vroom. Vroom. Electric e-bikes are so amazing. This is this is one of the models. This is one I've been riding around that I really like that folds up in all of that stuff. Summer and full swing. No better time to get out there. Thank you for hefting that. Very nicely done getting out there. <Laugh> getting out there and exploring and just in time Electric is bringing you a fast, fresh new ride. The XP three, it's their latest e-bike model featuring hydraulic hydraulic brakes. Snag your electric XP three e-bike this month. Experience freedom like never before. Electric E-bikes has created a mode of transportation anyone can ride with quality, feature filled models. Finance as low as 73 bucks a month. Your adventures won't cost a fortune. They all include powerful removable batteries. A bright L C D powered by the battery.
(00:40:27):
And there's a nice red back light as well. I like that. Seven speed gearing. Five levels of power assists to your right and get ready for this. The XP three's top speed is 28 miles an hour. It's the most popular e-bike in the industry. Newly reimagined starting at just 9 99 now. Right now I'm riding the cargo expedition, which is great. If you've got stuff to haul the cargo expedition e-bike makes it easy. With a carrying capacity of four 50 pounds. You can bring all your gear along for the ride. Just don't let Burke drop it. He takes it off. There's also the trike. They now have the industry's first fully foldable, fully assembled electric tricycle. The XP trike features a third wheel for stability and can accommodate a wide range of abilities and preferences. Here is the XP three all fold it up. I'm just taking it outta the trunk so you can go anywhere.
(00:41:23):
Go to the best trails in the area and unfold your bike. Take it outta the trunk and you're ready to go. I really love this bike. Pure throttle on too. That's really great. When you get to a stoplight you don't have to step on the gears and pedal your way at slow speed across the intersection. Just put that throttle and you got as much as 28 miles an hour. It's fantastic. Rediscover. Oh, by the way, did I mention they come fully assembled? Burke likes that cuz I've made him put my other ones together. Rome freely reach up to 28 miles an hour, the twist of a throttle or use their next level pedal assist system. Mike and I are riding around at cargo baskets, bags, comfort upgrades, even passenger accessories to specific e-bike models. I see a lot of families riding their electrics around these days.
(00:42:10):
It's really cool. They cost way less than the competition. They're foldable. They ship free. They come fully assembled. I I I gotta tell you, this is the bike for you. Rediscover your independence this summer with an X P 3.0 from electric L E C T R I c. Visit electric e-bikes dot com to learn more and explore the epic models. Electric has to offer L E C t r I c e-bikes dot com. I love my e-bike. It's so nice, you know, you know you still get the exercise by the way. People sometimes say, oh Leo, you're not getting exercise on your e-bike. Oh yeah, I paddle. You get as much or as little as you want, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I pedal when you, if you use the throttle Okay. You're, you're just riding happy. But what I like it is that I can, I can go, go out and I don't have to worry about hills cause that's, I know I'm gonna be able to get up those steep hills. Yeah. Having, it's so embarrassing. At least it goes up the hills and I have to get off and walk. So now we both have electric e-bikes in there. Great. Electric e-bikes dot com. I don't know what we should do next. What should we do next? Is Johnny at one Okay. An hour. Johnny Jets? We have some voicemails. Let's do a voicemail.
Caller Winston (00:43:27):
Hi, my name is Winston. I'm calling from Boston, Massachusetts. Hey Winston. And I wanted to ask a question about VPNs. Who are they actually for <laugh>? Are they for corporate users or the average home computer user? Someone who just uses a computer for watching movies at home or gaming or things like that? I I don't, I really don't understand who the VPN is for. Can you explain that? Thanks. Yes,
Leo Laporte (00:43:56):
We can. They started for, for corporate. That's my first experiences with vpn. In fact, it was on the radio show. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I needed to control the phone system in LA from up here in northern California. So they sent me this Cisco program that I put on my computer and let me log into the corporate network in LA securely. And that was the whole point of a vpn, virtual private network is I'm joining the corporate network securely over the internet and it encrypted my traffic and I was able to run the phone system and all that. It was kind of a janky system. It come a long way. I was gonna say a
Mikah Sargent (00:44:32):
Lot of people have bad relationships with VPNs. Yeah. Because of that. Yeah. I I, anecdotally I've heard five or six people, anytime you mention vpn, they, they're talking about their work. Oh. And they're grumbling about how corporate
Leo Laporte (00:44:42):
Vpn. Oh, well the good news is that's not what these commercial VPNs are. They work kind of the same way. In the case of Express V VPN R sponsor, you have a piece of software you put on your computer or your phone. You start it, you press the button. What it does is it makes a connection to VPN server. So in all cases, there's a client that was the Cisco client that I used to run for the radio station. And there's a server, which is usually on the network you want to join. The difference between a business VPN and a commercial VPN for consumers like Express V PN is instead of getting on the company server, you're getting on a server that they run that then lets you access the full public internet. So what are the advantages? Why wouldn't I just join the internet from my house instead of firing up a program, join the internet somewhere out there?
(00:45:34):
Well, there's several of them. First of all, everything that comes outta your computer, once you're on that VPN is encrypted. That was more important in the old days when we weren't running HTTPS everywhere. Right. You know, now we run secure browsers. When you log into your bank, Amazon pretty much everywhere, including our website. You're on a, you're on an encrypted connection. So it is encrypted. So that benefit has kind of disappeared. Although there is another benefit. If youre at a open wifi access point, a coffee shop, a cruise ship hotel, when you're running the V vpn, nobody else in the network can even see what you're doing or what your computer is. If even if you're on an HTTPS site in that environment, not running a vpn, they can see, oh, there's Leo's computer. You know, you probably gave it a name. Right? That's why I don't give my computers my name.
(00:46:22):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I say I give them, you know, weird code names. Oh, there's Leo's computer and they could start messing with it. They can use things like the wifi pineapple, which is freely available. Anybody can buy it. And one of the things the wifi pineapple do can do is impersonate other wifi access points. So one of the tricks bad guys might use, you're sitting in a coffee shop, you're on the internet, you're on the Starbucks wifi, this guy can see your computer. He can even query your computer, find out what wifi access points your computer knows about, and then say, oh, there's his home access point says Leo's home access point. Let me turn that sound off so you don't hear, here's Leo's home access point. And he can pretend it is that. Now my computer is gonna say, Hey, I know I'm on the Starbucks wifi, but look, we're home honey, we're home.
(00:47:13):
And that's a stronger connection. So it gets off the Starbucks wifi and gets onto the hacker's wifi pineapple. And now all the internet's being routed through the hacker's computer. Yes, it's encrypted <laugh>, but still, he's, he's now got network access to your computer. That's not a good thing. So that's, there's still some value to having a VPN running at an open wifi access point. The other advantage you have is yes, it's encrypted coming out. So your, whoever's providing the internet, you're internet service provider, your telecommunications provider, your cell company, they can't see what sites you're going to. All they see is a <laugh>. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (00:47:53):
Sounds like instead of brown adults
Leo Laporte (00:47:55):
Instead of Yeah. WW instead of Micah's going to see yahoo.com. Yeah.
(00:48:01):
Tho your ISPs and, and many telecommunications provider record that and sell it. They're, they're allowed to. So that's another potential privacy, not security issue, but privacy issue. The other, the other thing that happens is when you get to the end, when you get to the server, you're gonna come out onto the public internet. Well not with your IP address, but with the server's IP address, which is gonna be a VPN IP address. Now that has advantages and disadvantages. One, it's an IP address shared by everybody else, you know, many other people. So it doesn't identify you specifically. Now, I should really point out, if you're logged in, as most people are to Google, and you go to a Google search, even through a vpn, Google says, oh, hi Leo. Yep. They know what you're doing because you're logged in. So you would have to log out of Facebook, Google, all those things.
(00:48:52):
And now they don't know they're, who's this 100.3 0.4 0.5? It's nobody I know. So you're anonymous at that point. So if you run true an anonymity, remember that you're often giving up that anonymity by just logging into Google or Facebook or whoever else. So that's important to remember. But if you don't, if you have no connections to any of those servers, when you get on the internet, all they see is the IP address from the vpn. So that's privacy. That also has an advantage because, you know, if you wanna watch video TV in a country where there are I or country restrictions, you could pretend you're in that country. You could say, well I'm in England today, that's where the VPN server's running. Or I'm in Germany today. And so sometimes, not always that gets you around it. B B B C I player is really classic example.
(00:49:39):
B b BBC says, look, the, we only want our content available to people who pay the license fees in England. So they're really aggressive about pursuing vpn access. But the only way they know, you're, I've asked around how do they know you're on a vp? N the only way they know you're on a VPN is by the IP address, the VPN's IP address. So that's why those addresses could be a disadvantage. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Cuz they go, yeah, we know a hundred Point one. Point one 0.1. That's express vpn. We're not gonna let you in. A good VPN service will rotate those. Yes. We'll buy new addresses. So some work better than others. I
Mikah Sargent (00:50:14):
Have, I have a, a friend who would watch an Australian show pretty regularly. Yeah. And my friend would have to watch it at the beginning of the month and then about seven or eight days in then, then catch on. The system would catch on. You'd have to wait until the next month to start watching again. Yeah. When left off.
Leo Laporte (00:50:30):
Yeah. That makes, that makes perfect sense. So I think that's the, those are the benefits. Yeah. And I think there are some genuine benefits. Do I run a VPN all the time? No. Cause they're disadvantages. It will slow you down. You're going through other people's servers. Sometimes. Not a lot. Depends on, you know, how good a VPN you have. Some people say, well, I'm just gonna run my own VPN outta my house. But that eliminates everything. But the security benefit.
Mikah Sargent (00:50:55):
Exactly. Cuz the IP is gonna be your ip,
Leo Laporte (00:50:57):
It's your IP address, but you still have the security benefit. So
Mikah Sargent (00:51:01):
To your original question of who's it for? Honestly, a VPN can be for everyone. It depends on your use case. So if your use case is like my friend who wants to watch Australian content while in the us that's a good use case. That's a good use case. Yeah. If you are trying to, if you end up, you regular, you're a, you're a, a writer to the stars and you regularly go to coffee shops and you're worried about your, I don't know, your mortal enemy stealing the work that you're doing, then it wouldn't be a bad idea to be running a VPN while you're at the coffee shop
Leo Laporte (00:51:31):
Again with a threat model. <Laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (00:51:33):
And what's your security posture? Leo <laugh>?
Leo Laporte (00:51:37):
Well, it's not very good. Let's set up,
Mikah Sargent (00:51:40):
I
Leo Laporte (00:51:40):
Know, right? Posture. Posture, check, <laugh>. So, you know, it used to be, you had to have one because of this coffee shop attack. And people, you know, there were, I remember being on a cruise ship and Randall Schwartz, who was a famous pearl guy, but also liked to hack around we'd get on the cruise ship. It was for a, a geek cruise. And Randall would sle up to you with a piece of paper, he'd say, is that your email password <laugh>? I'd say, yeah. Oh. He said, well, you're sending it through the clear on the ship because you're not using a vpn. Wow. Oh, nowadays, Gmail fast mail, all the good providers are encrypted. So he couldn't do that anymore. But when he did that, that was a real eyeopener. That was like, oh, you're sending these passwords in the clear. So we really, we needed VPNs a lot more before Secure.
(00:52:29):
H d TP became widespread credit Google for that, by the way. They really lobbied. We did push https everywhere. Yeah. So there's the answer. That's a good question. Yeah. Really good question. Yeah. And, and again, it depends on your threat model, your situation, your security posture and, and how much you like to watch Australian tv. <Laugh>, can I show you these? I have a little story. I'd love to hear about this. I want to get more Micah in the show so you can answer the next five calls, but, okay. But I, I want to, cuz there's a story that goes with this. So I got a email I usually, I shouldn't respond to these, but I fall for this stuff all the time from Deon which a well-known stereo company. In fact, I have dead on receivers mm-hmm. Throughout the house. So I paid attention and they said, we've got these new super good earbuds, the pearls, you should check 'em out. Pearl p e r capital L stands for personal listening. But it turns out, after I, and I bought 'em three 50 bucks, that's $150 more than my AirPods probes. Yeah. I thought, well,
Mikah Sargent (00:53:33):
But less than the AirPods max.
Leo Laporte (00:53:35):
Yeah. A lot less than the AirPods Max. But I thought, could you get better wireless sound? That's the key wireless. So first thing I'm gonna say is wired is always better. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, with the same devices, if you have wired headphones and, and, and so if you have really good wired headphones, you're always gonna get better sound because wireless has to compress. And in order to get the, you know, the sound through at a more limited bandwidth, sometimes they can press an awful lot. But that's when I went down the rabbit hole, and probably Benito, you're aware of a company called Noura, N U R A. About five years ago, they did a Kickstarter where they raised millions of dollars for s specialized Bluetooth headphones That would sound better. And they had a couple of secret sauces, one of which was that they would measure your ears kind of passively. You'd just sit there for a minute, they'd play some sounds, they'd measure your ears. And after they measured your ears, they would modify the sound of the headphones they made over the ear and earbuds. They'd measure the sound of the headphones or modify it to give you better sound. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So this is what they proposed as their personalized sound technology. The idea
Mikah Sargent (00:54:54):
Is personalized sound devices play a range of tones
Leo Laporte (00:54:57):
Which trigger you. They play a range of towns. They're Australian. Can you tell
Mikah Sargent (00:55:01):
Emissions
Leo Laporte (00:55:02):
Into your cochlear
Mikah Sargent (00:55:04):
Uses, hearing
Leo Laporte (00:55:05):
Information, and then they get it back somehow. I don't know how they've got eight microphones on these things, but somehow they get it back and they say, oh, this is what your here did. Now it works pretty well. I gotta say, I, I
Mikah Sargent (00:55:17):
Think I've seen that video before. Have you? As I was looking at the reactions. Yeah. I probably went to this page and thought about backing
Leo Laporte (00:55:23):
It. I did think about backing it, but then Deon bought this company, actually their parent company, Deon's parent company. Massimo bought it a few months maybe a year ago. And within a few months of buying it, they released these, these are identical in every way to the neuro, neuro truths, except that they've now put the denon name on, on the thing. Yes. Yeah. Even
Mikah Sargent (00:55:46):
The little pad is the same.
Leo Laporte (00:55:47):
Everything's the same <laugh>. So I thought, well I, you know, I, I didn't get it in the first place. Let me talk about why you might want this one is that technology, which they've rebranded Massimo, the parent company's automatic sensing technology. So that is kind of fun. In fact, I'll show you on my phone. I could show you my, now I ran it a few times. I thought, well if it's really is doing the right thing, you would see it, it should come up with the same result each time. Ooh. It kind of didn't. Oh,
Mikah Sargent (00:56:16):
<Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:56:18):
So, you know, but may, but I suppose that could also be because I was in a, maybe a different environment. I don't know. It also just like the air pods, it, it it tests your how the ear tips, cuz it comes with a variety, eart tips and even like a little outside ring that goes on it. And it helps you choose the one that gets the best seal. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, here's the personalized curve. Now this is a little weird way of, of showing it. <Laugh>, I've never seen anything quite like this. Looks
Mikah Sargent (00:56:49):
Like you dripped your pen ink on the path.
Leo Laporte (00:56:50):
Yeah. The theory is there's a circle there where orange is showing is where your deficit
Mikah Sargent (00:56:57):
Oh is.
Leo Laporte (00:56:57):
Okay. So my deficit at 12 o'clock is oh, one of the frequencies. And then it goes around. These are all the frequencies. So my deficits are here, but I can hear better in these frequencies. Right. Okay, cool. So this is the shape of my hearing curve. According to the Massimo Automatic sensing. And I have to say, they give you a chance to listen default and personalized. I've used this technology, apple offers it as well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> with the AirPods Pro. You can do, do what is much more like a, a traditional audiologist hearing test where you hear tones in your left and right ear and you push a button when you hear it. Samsung offers something similar for for Samsung's earbuds and on their Samsung phones. But those are all more traditional. This one, you just sit there for a while and listen to some tones and it generates this. I have to say, it definitely improved.
Mikah Sargent (00:57:50):
See, cuz I have, I, I find myself doubting myself when I'm doing those little tone tests. Right. I too much. I'm doing too much thinking about it. Am I
Leo Laporte (00:57:57):
Clicking right? Am I doing it right?
Mikah Sargent (00:57:58):
Do am I hearing it or am I making it up in my head? So something does it automatically, these are same
Leo Laporte (00:58:01):
Test I, I my audiologist will give me when I go into to get hearing aids. So it, you know, but this is different. This is something a little different and I suspect somewhat less accurate. Otherwise, audiologists would probably start using this one. Right. So once you've got it customized, you put it in and then you pair it. Now this is where I ended up going down a rabbit hole because as I said at the beginning, wired is always gonna be better. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So we're talking about Bluetooth here. Now, in order to understand what you're getting, what you're not getting, you have to understand Bluetooth codex compression, decompression algorithms. In the beginning, Bluetooth was designed, designed for those really silly Bluetooth headsets that Michael Douglas would wear. Right. And, you know, and Wall Street, that kind of thing. Hello and unusual. You know, you see people walking around wearing these all day. The sound quality was terrible. They were for one ear. They weren't for music, they were for phone calls. Eventually the Bluetooth sig came up with a two D p, which is a stereo high, theoretically high quality Bluetooth profile for music. And then underneath the A two D p, they started coming up with new ways of compressing the base compression. S B C almost everything can do. It's not great. It's low bandwidth. It doesn't give you a whole lot of quality, but it's universal. Is Apple,
Mikah Sargent (00:59:22):
Sorry, just to clarify, I
Leo Laporte (00:59:23):
Can't hear you. I've got potatoes in my ear. Go ahead.
Mikah Sargent (00:59:26):
Is s BBC that came after they started doing music, right?
Leo Laporte (00:59:30):
It's part of the adu TP a H
Mikah Sargent (00:59:33):
Two DP spec. So it was still better than what originally?
Leo Laporte (00:59:35):
First it was better than headset. Yes. Yes.
Mikah Sargent (00:59:37):
That's, that was my question. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:59:38):
Yeah, it was musical. And in fact, a lot of times you're listening to sbc when you pair Oh, in your car in a variety of different places. It's kind of the defacto that everybody uses. Got it. Apple decided to go their own way. So all the most recent Apple stuff uses aac. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is the same encoding that they use for the music when you listen to it. And in fact they say it's AAC 2 56 kilobit, which is pretty good. Not CD quality, but pretty good. But that's the only choice you have. Sony has their L DAC compression also. They claim nearly lossless. Very good. But the Bluetooth folks also created their own set standard. Now you see why it's a rabbit hole. Wow. Yeah. Called Apex. Ive, that one I've heard the hearing about Apex, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Apex has a number of different codex, different ways of doing it.
(01:00:30):
And the latest one which is Apex Lossless, it was sbc. Oh by the way, there was also EG two mp3, apple's a C. There was high efficiency aac. Because one of the things, one of the, I should mention, one of the problems is you don't want a Kodak that takes a lot of energy either to encode on the phone side or to decode on the earbud side. Cuz battery is at a PRI premium, right? So you, you've gotta balance audio quality bandwidth and how much computation you have to do. So all of these are ways to kind of balance all three of them. There's also a, a track, I think that's a Sony thing, but let's talk about Apex. Cuz Aptex is not specific to anybody in general. There's Aptex hd, which they cla claim. You're gonna see this claim a lot in all these Bluetooth codecs to be near Lossless. No <laugh>. There's Aptex Adaptive, which changes the encoding depending on the music. Oh. So if it's complex music, it says, well you're gonna need more bits, we're gonna need more bits. <Laugh>. I think so. And we're gonna do more computation. But then when the music is less complex, it will go down using less battery and and less bandwidth. So
Mikah Sargent (01:01:45):
If you're doing a phone call, it probably doesn't need all of that extra. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:01:48):
Got it. Absolutely. That's interesting. So yeah. So there's all these modifications. There are newer apexes now, and that's what intrigued me about this. There is something called Aptex Lossless, which the Aptex folks claim is as good as a cd. It is not nearly lossless. They say we are not compressing. Now it is 1.1 to 1.2 megabits a second. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So that's a lot of bandwidth going between your earbuds Wow. And the phone. But there's a second problem with Apex Lossless. Apex lossless. So it was announced in 2021. No one supports it. <Laugh>. I've been looking, dang. They're actually, that's not true. The Asis r OOG phones do some of the Zen phones do a number of weird Chinese phones like thehow me that you can't get support Apex Lossless, I don't own anything that supports Apex lossless. So in theory, these earbuds are capable of better sound than I can get.
(01:02:47):
Wow. Now they work fine with an iPhone, with a Samsung, with a Pixel, all of which can do some variation of a two dp, a C or L dac or and these, these supports every Kodak under the sun. Will it tell you which one it's using? It will, it will tell you. If you look, I, I ended up buying something creative offers for under 50 bucks. This, this is the, a weirdest little thing. It's a little dongle. It's a Bluetooth dongle, the B T W four. And you can plug this into anything that has a type C connector. So even though your, for instance, your laptop has you know, a variety of Bluetooth codex might even have, you know, if it's an Apple laptop, it has pretty good aac You can plug this in. It's got a little button you can press on it and it will let you go all the way up to Apex Adaptive, which is, you know, 279 to 420 kilobits.
(01:03:44):
It's about half the bandwidth of Aptex Lossless. So still not Lossless. Still not Lossless. Now I have played with this Uhhuh and it sounds pretty damn good. Yeah. So now that you understand the Codex, you, it will be helpful to understand that because now you understand why if you have an iPhone, you don't care about Apex, you don't care about Lossless unless you're willing to go out and buy this little dongle and plug it into your iPhone or your, or your laptop. I don't know if it works with an iPhone. It does work with Mac and PCs. If you have a PC that doesn't have Bluetooth, this is actually a nice way to add Bluetooth and pretty good quality. By the way, you might notice there's a couple of other things that it comes with. One is a microphone cuz this is intended also to be plugged into ps four or PS five controllers or an N antenna switch controllers to give you Bluetooth.
(01:04:39):
Oh, neat. Headphones, which is kind of cool. This is just an adapter for the type C to type A. But, so now you have a microphone so you can talk to your gaming buddies and you have the Apex adaptive anyway, the better quality aptex among others. So getting back to the Deon's, this is the Pearl Pro. So probably all that really you really care about is the sound quality. But I have to point out, you're not gonna hear the sound quality unless you have a device that's taking advantage of it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, do these sound better on an iPhone than the AirPods Pro? That's the first question I had to ask. Yes. Okay. That's a, so the hardware itself is better. It's better sounding hardware. It also has a a feature which some people will like and some people won't like, called immersion mode, which is really just base boost.
(01:05:31):
Got it. If you like base, this has incredible base. This is the best bass I've heard on any wireless earbuds anywhere. And you can turn it up even louder if you don't like bass. The good news is you can turn it down and it can sound more normal. The zero mode is pretty, he is heavy bass. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> kind of a kind of similar to the beats, the high ends are excellent. Very clear. The definition is good. The sound stage is good. But there's one thing the Air Budds do, the AirPod pros do that. The Deon's do not do spatial. Oh, the AirPods are using, oh, I'm sorry. I heard music and that's because I have these Zoom.
(01:06:12):
Are you playing music? Nobody. So spatial is interesting because Apple is supporting a standard, which is Dolby Atmos. Right. Dolby Dolby surround, which a lot of record companies have jumped on the bandwagon cuz it's Apple. And they said, oh great. So they've remixed stuff in Dolby. These do not support Dolby. They support a virtualized spatial from a company called D Rock. It's D Rock's virtuo. And it is not true spatial. It's simulated spatial. The advantage of that is it works with everything you listen to. The disadvantage is it's not the record company or the producer or the artist who made the sound stage is just being generated. But it is a nice full sound stage. Doesn't do head tracking. Now I don't think head tracking is such a good feature, to be honest with you. I, yeah. When I use the AirPods and I'm watching my Apple TV and I turn my head, the sound starts coming outta this year.
(01:07:08):
Cuz the TV's over there. Yeah. Who cares? I, yeah, I don't want that. That's silly. It's very silly. She could turn that off in the AirPods Pro. This doesn't do it at all. The sound quality though is better, I would say, than the AirPods Pro. So you're giving up some Apple specific features like transparency. This does have noise cancellation. It even has adaptive noise cancellations. Oh, nice. So if somebody talks to you, the noise cancellation shifts and you'll be able to talk to them and so forth. It's not as aggressive noise cancellation as the AirPods Pro. In fact, I'm not sure it would be as good in an airplane. I'll have to try this in an airplane. But it is air, it is noise cancellation. It gives you some isolation from your environment. Makes the music sound even better. You can turn that off.
(01:07:51):
In fact, this has a lot of different taps that you can have four different taps, single tap, double tap, triple tap, tap and hold. And you can assign them to everything from turning the music up and down Next track activating your voice. Assistant Siri on an iPhone, Google Assistant on a pixel. You can have it pick up the phone. This does support phone. This is one thing. It might be a little bit better in the AirPods Pro, but this has four mics in each bud. Two of them are bone conduction. So the idea is this is gonna get better sound. I did record some sound if you want. Do you have sound from my computer? This is, I recorded just in a fairly quiet environment.
Leo Laporte (01:08:29):
So you can see this is recorded directly from the microphone. Pearl Pros. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:08:34):
I,
Leo Laporte (01:08:35):
It's not super rich and vibrant, but it's many audios. Okay. Certainly for a phone call.
Leo Laporte (01:08:41):
It's a little, it's good. You can hear the noise cancellation actually working. It's not full
Mikah Sargent (01:08:47):
Fidelity. Right. A little crackly.
Leo Laporte (01:08:49):
It's maybe a little bit better than the AirPods, but it's, it's interesting. They're trying to do something. The one place where it's really better is a variety of Bluetooth connections, including Bluetooth, lossless, AP Apex lossless. If you can find anything that plays it in theory, that should sound a lot better than anything else out there. I I think probably to most people, Apple's AAC 2 56 is gonna be as good to be honest with you. As Sony's ldoc is gonna be as good. It does have a better battery life. Eight hours on the earbuds and then 32 hours on the case. 32. So you basically can go forever. It's type C charging apple's rumored to be going to type C charging on the next generation AirPods. But right now it's lightning. So I like it that it's type C charging.
Mikah Sargent (01:09:32):
Will the battery life drop if you're using that better codec? Ah, that's
Leo Laporte (01:09:35):
A good question. It in charge charge
Mikah Sargent (01:09:38):
Test cause you don't have it. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:09:39):
The key to to having any the Apex stuff work is that's a snap. It's a, it's a Qualcomm technology. You have to have a Snapdragon processor on the phone side or the player side, and you have to have some specific Snapdragon Qualcomm chips on the earbuds side. And I think they're fairly efficient in terms of, of receiving the, the most of the calculation is done sending. Got it. So that's where it would mostly affect your performance. These are weather and sweat resistance. I, you know, a lot of earbuds have vocal cues for pairing and so forth. These are very good. It's a nice lady who's, who's very explicit. So she says, okay, now turn on the scan on your phone. Phone. Oh, that's all nice. That's nice. So I, I like that. I think they're very good. I would say these are probably as good as you can get in wireless.
(01:10:28):
Okay. Okay. Even better, at least raw sound quality than the AirPods Max, which I compared it to. And the Apples AirPods Pro. Even Max. Wow. Yeah, they're very good. They seal very well. They come with five different tips. There's lots of ways you can configure it. The negative I think, I think they're good looking. I don't know if you looked at this, the microphone, unlike the unlike the AirPods Pro, there's nothing hanging out of your ear. So when I put this in my ear, in fact, it's great for sleeping cuz when I put this in my ear, it's flat.
Mikah Sargent (01:10:58):
That's honestly what I was thinking about. Yeah. This for
Leo Laporte (01:11:00):
Sleeping. So you can actually, I don't know if you, if you listen to
Mikah Sargent (01:11:03):
Airbus, I listen to audio books when I sleep and I
Leo Laporte (01:11:05):
Do it with, yeah. So that was always the problem with the air AirPods. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if you thank you, she said, welcome back. Bluetooth connected. I like the prompts. So I'm now hearing music in this ear. But if I'm on a pillow,
Mikah Sargent (01:11:17):
It's not press flap against. Yeah. And there's
Leo Laporte (01:11:18):
No, maybe that's why the microphone maybe isn't as good as the AirPods Pro cuz there isn't a boom coming out. But I think it works now. I'm gonna stop the music by tapping once and it stops much like the EarPods. It's not, you don't have to do that weird stroking that you do on the AirPods to turn 'em up and down. You just tap, you just tap. One ear is up and one ear is down for you can set it the way you want. The negative is it's 150 bucks more than the AirPods Pro. It's $350. The surround is simulated. It's not real. And you're buying some technology that isn't yet widely available, which is apex losses. Oh, I forgot to mention, it's also wireless charging. So you Oh, nice. Put the bottom on your good, on your Apple charger, your G charger and old charger G supports G.
(01:12:03):
So there's some definite positives to this. The price is gonna be a stopper for a lot of people. Yeah. If I had to listen, if I was sitting here with my AirPods Pro versus the, the Deon Pearl Pros if sound quality were the most important thing, I'd probably listen to the Pearl Pros. But there are features on the AirPods you just don't get, especially on the iPhone. Things like that adaptive sound and the head turning and the true Dolby surround, which is I think quite nice on the Apple AirPods. So I know you were bonito very interested in these. Did you know about the neuro trues? Is that why you were interested? Or you
Mikah Sargent (01:12:39):
Just I didn't know about that. Yeah, but that sounds very interesting.
Leo Laporte (01:12:41):
Yeah, so this w when the neuro came out, people were crazy about this. Literally raised millions of dollars just for these 1.8 million on Kickstarter. And then they sold the Deon, which I find very frustrating. That
Mikah Sargent (01:12:54):
Is frustrating.
Leo Laporte (01:12:55):
But the good news is now these are much more widely available. You don't have to wait in line to get 'em, you don't have to go to Kickstarter to get 'em. You can buy these direct from Denon. Although I think they're already sold out that Pearl. There was a lot of interest when these came out. P e r L stands for personalized listening. And these are the pro models which cost a little bit more. In fact, I think it's probably worth getting the pros. So way too much information, poorly presented <laugh>,
Mikah Sargent (01:13:20):
Why do we think though, that it takes so long? It seems to take longer for people to hop on audio, the audio improvement train these days. Yeah. Is it because we're just all,
Leo Laporte (01:13:32):
Well, apple doesn't want to do it cuz it's Qualcomm. Right. And Apple doesn't wanna be tied to
Mikah Sargent (01:13:36):
Qualcomm. It's Qualcomm.
Leo Laporte (01:13:36):
So Apple's going its own way. Samsung doesn't want to do it because it doesn't, it does use Qualcomm chips in many of its phones. Xos its own chip and others. I think it also doesn't want to be too tied
Mikah Sargent (01:13:47):
Because then that's one more Qualcomm thing.
Leo Laporte (01:13:49):
Sony of course has their own thing that they do. So it's, it's a weird space. And I think there are people who don't like Aptex, maybe cuz it's Qualcomm, maybe because they think it doesn't quite sound as good. I could tell you using Apex Adaptive, which is the best I could get on these with the current devices that I have, including this cute little dongle from creative, formerly Creative Labs. It's the same people. It's a sound blaster people. It sounds better. It sounds very good to me. Hmm. it's richer, it's fuller music. The definition is better. The high end's very crisp and clear. The bass is remarkable. I think that's more the physics of the device than it is the actual drivers. I think they put a lot of energy and effort into designing the best possible ear, wireless earbuds, wireless being the gating factor.
(01:14:42):
And I think they've done a very good job. So if you have a apex device to play, that would certainly be a reason to look at this. Especially if some, sometime down the road you get Aptex Lossless. I look forward to hearing something in Aptex Lossless. I haven't yet. Maybe a Asen phone nine or the r o g. If you've got one of those phones, this might be the right earbud for you. Okay. Very cool. Boy, that was a long way to Nothing <laugh>. I disagree. I I found it very interesting. <Laugh> Well, that was the funny, all the question thing. I just thought, well, I'm gonna buy these earbuds and try 'em out instead. I had this brat hole that I Yeah, we learned all about Bluetooth. Bluetooth codex. Yeah. How there I, there are so many more than I, it's very complicated out there in the, in the wireless world.
(01:15:27):
This is why you kinda have to admire Apple, which has said no, we're just gonna do aac. Yeah, we know aac. Everybody's using aac. You know, already, if you're on the Apple platform, Apple's really simplified things quite a bit. But I have to say, Apple's not famous for sound quality. And I don't think any of the Apple devices, the AirPods, the AirPods Pro or the AirPods Max are great headphones. Right. Best headphones, wired period. Absolutely. No matter what period. Yeah. should we take a card? A call? What do you want to do? Why not? We've got some folks who've called in since we started. I kept them waiting. Should we go to the phones? Let's go to the phones. Let's go to the phones. Wireless caller. Press six to unmute. You are on the air with Ask the Tech Guys mic and Leah,
Caller Tom (01:16:12):
Michael, Leah, something like that. Nice to talk to you. That's
Leo Laporte (01:16:16):
Nice. To, to what's your first name? In what city?
Caller Tom (01:16:20):
Tom in Orange.
Leo Laporte (01:16:20):
Hi Tom. Welcome.
Caller Tom (01:16:23):
Thank you. Thank you.
Leo Laporte (01:16:25):
What can we
Caller Tom (01:16:25):
Do for you? That's my question. Yes, sir. I have a rather new Dein receiver that has Dolby Atmos. Obviously I cannot play Dolby Atmos music from my iPhone when I use Amazon music, even though the songs are encoded in Dolby Atmos. I believe I've got all the switches set to the proper positions. It's premium Amazon subscription.
Leo Laporte (01:16:51):
How are you
Caller Tom (01:16:52):
Connecting
Leo Laporte (01:16:52):
Your iPhone to your receiver? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>,
Caller Tom (01:16:56):
I tried to run a lightning connector to an adapter an H D M I adapter. And then I ran a H D M I cable to an input on the back of the Deni.
Leo Laporte (01:17:08):
So I'm gonna guess that the, what's not getting passed along that connection is the Atmos encoding. Yeah. That the iPhone
Caller Tom (01:17:18):
Comes up. Stereo up.
Leo Laporte (01:17:19):
Yeah. You're only getting stereo. The iPhone is, and this is where Apple is not gonna probably let you get into the guts of this, but I betting you the iPhone's looking at the connection and saying, yeah, that's a stereo. So we're gonna send you left and right and forget the Atmos. Atmos encoding mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, all that Dolby encoding is an, is an additional level on top of the sound, and it has to know that there's a Dolby decoder on the other end of it or the sound won't play. So yeah, I'm trying to think how, what would be the best way to connect.
Mikah Sargent (01:17:51):
So scooter X has posted in the chat from Dolby Forum and rather from the Dolby support site, and it says that Dolby Atmos on Amazon music, it just doesn't work on, they don't anything other than headphones. Yeah. You can only listen to it Wow. Through the headphones. So this seems to be a limitation of Amazon music which is unfortunate. I
Caller Tom (01:18:13):
Yeah, that's, that's disappointing. That's
Mikah Sargent (01:18:15):
Very disappointing.
Leo Laporte (01:18:16):
Now, I don't even know. I try with apple's music mm-hmm. <Affirmative> on my stereo, which is Dolby capable and my receiver threw an Apple tv, which in theory should all work. My receiver still says stereo
Mikah Sargent (01:18:30):
Really? So
Leo Laporte (01:18:31):
I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Yeah. I think it's hard to coerce to,
Mikah Sargent (01:18:35):
To flip the right switches.
Leo Laporte (01:18:36):
I'm unfortunately Yeah. To coerce at all. But that's too bad. The Apple, the Apple Music app has not been enabled for Atmos nor has it on the Apple TV version either. So if you, if you tried to play instead of from your iPhone from the Apple tv, you'd have the same problem.
Mikah Sargent (01:18:51):
Yeah. So am you should contact, I know what does this do? But Amazon Music needs to hop on that and get that turned on as opposed to passing it through. I would imagine that what's happening right now is they're going the best music listening experience you can have for Atmos is when you're listening via headphones. And so they really are, you know, trying to get people to listen to it through that experience. But with you, you've got this great dead on receiver that can do it. Yeah. You wanna hear it?
Caller Tom (01:19:21):
I, I've spent, I've spent a lot of money on my home theater system. I've got five 1.4 and Dolby Apples speakers in the ceiling when I listen to 4K DVDs Yeah. And stuff. It's just, it's just beautiful. You know, that F1 series on Netflix. But I like
Leo Laporte (01:19:38):
To I
Caller Tom (01:19:38):
The music. Yes, it sounds great, <laugh>, but I'm disappointed now that I can't get the the audio.
Leo Laporte (01:19:46):
Well, you could try Apple Music. I don't, you know, I bet you you'd have better results than I did. I, I've been fussing and feuding with it, and I'm not sure in theory, the Apple Music with a connected now it's connected via H D M I. Maybe I need to get the right H D M I cable to go into my receiver. The receiver can do Dolby. The in theory it should be doing 5.1. I don't have Atmos like you do, you've got the speakers in the ceiling. That's awesome. Wow. I'm even seeing that title doesn't have very few people have enabled that. Yeah. That's why Apple Music is probably your best bet. And then you'd be able to hear Apple Music spatial. Yeah. but because you could hd it'd be Yeah. Over the H D M I connection directly. Yeah. There's no adapters involved with anything. Yeah. I if, you know, if you haven't used up that free trial of Apple Music, that's the thing to do. Try the free trial, give it a go. Yeah. And then you'd at least get to get to hear what that sounds like. I, I love I have what you do, which is the Amazon HD music, and that's high res music mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which is nice. But it's stereo.
Caller Tom (01:20:55):
Yeah. Yeah. And I just I mean, I just don't wanna be tethered to the, to the headphones all the time. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:21:00):
I don't blame you. Yeah, exactly. Especially what you've got. But you're saying,
Caller Tom (01:21:04):
You, you're saying the Apple Music isn't Dolby Atmos either.
Leo Laporte (01:21:08):
It's, I, well that's probably me. Well, it's, it's, that's Dolby Atmos. So in theory it should show up as Dolby Atmos to your receiver, which should then decode it and get all the speakers fired up. In theory. I honestly, I
Caller Tom (01:21:21):
With true Dolby apples.
Leo Laporte (01:21:23):
Yes. Yeah. Leah was just saying he was having an issue getting his working. But that doesn't also mean, I still think conspiracy minded. And I've talked to a lot of people and I can't get a straight answer. Maybe Al Micah, with your connections at Apple, you can, that Apple really sees their spatial music as being binaural, as being designed for two speakers giving you Spatiality. Because I see what you're saying. They sell AirPods, AirPods Pro and AirPods Max are two speakers. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that's their preferred way for you to hear spatial that or two home pods or two home pods. Yeah. Which is again, but not 5.1. Right. You're not putting, so it's technically Dolby Atmos, but I'm wondering if Apple doesn't think of it that way. That Apple thinks of it as a binaural a two speaker solution because all of the calculations it's doing are designed to trick you with two speakers and then you're, you're getting to more of an audience.
(01:22:18):
Right. Because not everybody can afford to do that full experience. But if they focus on that binaural, I haven't got a straight answer from anybody. And the, I went out and bought a new 5.1 receiver mm-hmm. <Affirmative> specifically for this. And I've flipped every switch. Now I'm not convinced that I'm doing mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that I'm not doing something wrong. But I've really tried and it still comes outta two speakers. So now you get spatial outta two speakers, by the way. And it does fire up the sub, but yeah. Where's the rest of it? Where's, where's the, where's the, where's the helicopters flying over Head? You know, where's the submarine pinging me from behind? I don't know.
Caller Tom (01:22:57):
Well, I just, I just look at all the music that I, I pull up from my Amazon music app and I, I'd say nowadays at least 50% of 'em say they're recorded in the Be app
Leo Laporte (01:23:08):
For headphones, designed for headphones. Okay. Binaural. It's bi it's what we call binaural. Remember when Binaural was big? Got it. They would record albums with a and literal head, the head two microphones in the either ear. It's still the, the, the Whispery people still do that. The ASMR crowd still, they still do stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I am, I am, I am very confused about Apple's intent. Here it is. Dolby Ammos, which theoretically has up, you know, downward firing speakers left, right center Subres, maybe two rears if it's 7.2 or whatever. But I think that they really think of it as something designed for two speakers.
Caller Tom (01:23:56):
And I assume that these artists that record in Dolby Atmos are getting the music mixed in a, a full 5.1 7.1.
Leo Laporte (01:24:06):
Yes, I think so. I mean,
Caller Tom (01:24:07):
Type of a situation.
Leo Laporte (01:24:08):
There was actually just an article that on Tech News Weekly I talked about, I believe it was from the New York Times, talking about Apple's push into Dolby Atmos. And one of the things that was talked about in the piece was how from the get go, now many musicians are, and their producers especially, are doing this with spatial in mind because the, the companies that are really jumping into the Dolby Atmos are jumping on the Dolby Atmos train. They are genuinely thinking of this as the next step in making music valuable to the youths essentially. Again, and not, and not primarily for Apple users. Right. And this is where I get confused. So I'm on the Apple page about spatial music with Dolby Atmos and Apple Music. At no point do they mention any other playback solution, then two speakers, either their headphones Wow.
(01:24:58):
Or dual HomePod speakers. They do not. And they say, you know, if you wanna listen on other headphones, turn off automatic, but they don't mention a 5.1 or Atmos setup. So I'm, I I just i's interesting. It's not clear to me. I think as a come onto the record industry, they say Dolby Atmos and you can use the Dolby tool to mix it because they want these producers that you're talking about to say, oh yeah, we're making something everybody can listen to. Yes. But I think when you're use, I don't know, but I don't get it. I think when you're using Apple stuff that it's designed for two speakers, I've just, I've not been able to get anybody to tell me the truth on this one and I've not been able to do it with more. Well, yeah,
Caller Tom (01:25:43):
You guys made me feel a little better then cuz I think I've been doing everything right. Yeah. and I'll just have to use my headphones or hope for the something in the future.
Leo Laporte (01:25:53):
Yeah. Or go to or try, you know, get, do the trial or try. I'd love it if you do the trial and let us know. Yes. Because you're probably more adept. This, that you sound like an audio file. I'm just a bozo, but oh no. You know, I'm on the Dolby page, which Scooter X has sent us a link to and it implies that it will work with any, any device enabled with Dolby Atmos.
Mikah Sargent (01:26:16):
They do say yes any set of headphones or using the built-ins because you can also listen with a Dolby Atmos capable home theater speaker system, soundbar television, and of course they mentioned HomePod speakers.
Leo Laporte (01:26:27):
But will it fire up more than the left right speakers? I don't know.
Mikah Sargent (01:26:31):
Yeah. We don't know.
Leo Laporte (01:26:32):
Can I list, use my existing home theater system to listen to Dolby Atmos if you're existing Home Theaters system? Oh, we go Sports
Mikah Sargent (01:26:38):
Atmos. I found a support page from Apple. Let me get that over. And the, the title is Play Audio and Dolby Atmos or Surround Sound on your Apple tv. They talk about 5.1. Okay. They talk about but see they also mentioned stereo on it. So Yeah, you're onto something. I'm
Leo Laporte (01:26:53):
So confused, <laugh> so confused. Please.
Caller Tom (01:26:57):
And I assume Bluetooth will never work,
Leo Laporte (01:26:59):
Right? No, no, no. Forget Bluetooth. <Laugh>. Yeah.
Caller Tom (01:27:02):
Ok. Yes. There
Leo Laporte (01:27:03):
Is no, I don't know what they're doing with the, with the surround and Bluetooth, but I'm pretty sure it's not designed to work with five speakers or six speakers or seven or eight or nine or 10 speakers. Yeah. It's unclear. I think Apple's I think Apple's been somewhat unclear on this. Yeah. I wanna see a statement for them. Yeah. You can use it with your dent and receiver and your 7.2 system setup and all the speakers will be playing. What they may be saying is, yeah, you'll be using Dolby Atmos out of your left and right speakers, <laugh>. Right. Which is not what you want. So let us know. I want, I want you to go put your ear up against the surrounds and get on a ladder and see if the speakers at the ceiling are working. I want to know I can
Caller Tom (01:27:42):
Do that. That's dos not
Leo Laporte (01:27:43):
A problem. Call us back. Yeah, I'm
Caller Tom (01:27:45):
Gonna give it a shot. Thank you guys. I appreciate
Leo Laporte (01:27:46):
It. Great to talk to you. All right. Phone number is eight. Eight eight. Thank you. 7 2 4 28 84. So you have found a number of links.
Mikah Sargent (01:27:56):
Yeah, but again, it doesn't say
Leo Laporte (01:27:59):
Yeah,
Mikah Sargent (01:27:59):
But I do like there's this, the, the last link I shared has some great diagrams showing how to plug things in. So this is good for me cuz I could send this to people who are asking about it. And it walks you through the steps of getting everything plugged in properly. It says some soundbars don't support video formats like HDR 10 and Dolby Vision. In this case you can plug the TV into the soundbar to play sound in Dolby Atmos or you can plug your Apple tv, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, they, he, but again, it, what you're talking about here about it will take full advantage of the 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound system that you have. It's not saying that All
Leo Laporte (01:28:36):
Right. All right, we'll figure it out. Yeah. I should at least see on my receiver, which is Atmos enabled. It should say Dolby Atmos or at least Dolby on the receiver. And it doesn't, I don't know why it just says stereo. So I don't, let's see. Mac Bookey, N R I R C. I do listen to Dolby Atmos and Apple Music on my Sonos Arc and Sonos era speakers per perfectly. And his brother does it on his Denon Atmos setup. So there you go. Some, somebody in our chat room said she can, someone's got it working. <Laugh> and Leo, next time you're, you're watching something that allegedly is Dolby Atmos, press the menu button on your Apple TV remote. Yeah. And then you should see the Dolby Atmos logo. And if you don't, then for some reason it's not playing in Dolby Atmos. I think the Apple TV's doing the right thing.
(01:29:21):
It's the, oh, it's just once, it's getting, getting receivers going. I don't know what you're sending me. Rg. And it's just on music. It's not, it's movies and stuff are surround. Oh, that's good. I'm not, I'm getting surrounded on movies. It's the, it's the, it's the music. It's spatial what I, and I think this is what our color wanteds spacial music, you know, all it's going in all the Yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I'm not, I still think that when Apple says spatial, what they really mean is simulated Dolby Atmos through two speakers. But I'm, that's it. Yeah. That's, it's unclear. You know, one thing I can do too is apple put out a few logic programs from actual producers who did this. I'm gonna pull open one of those. They were case studies, essentially. I'm gonna pull open one of those and see how it was designed and see if it is targeting actual speakers or if it's just, oh, it's over here into the left of the head. Let's go to it says Pasadena, Maryland. Could that be a place? Let's see the little, we're gonna pick up this y this cell phone, I or a phone. And press star six to unmute. And you should be on the air with Micah and Leo. Ask the tech guys. Hello. Ah, who worked? What's your, what's your first name and what city are you calling from?
Caller Brenda (01:30:36):
My name is Brenda and I'm calling from near Fort Smith, Arkansas. Hi Brenda. And I spoke to you back in the 19 hundreds
Leo Laporte (01:30:43):
<Laugh> in the last century. Isn't that wild? We can say Oh yes. Back in the last century, you and I, before Micah was born, probably <laugh>, what did we talk about? What did we talk about back
Caller Brenda (01:30:57):
Then? I had a question about how to privately get on IRC so people couldn't track you and did you? And at the time there was no way to do it. Oh, but you sent me a webcam, which was great. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:31:09):
You mean you talked to us on tech tv?
Caller Brenda (01:31:13):
No, no. You af after I called, somebody came in the chat room and asked if they could send me a webcam and I was a little suspicious, but then they confirmed everything and they sent me a webcam.
Leo Laporte (01:31:22):
Wow. Didn't you have that webcam network going? Yeah. Yeah. Well that was tech TV days. I don't know. I don't know who that was sent webcam. Maybe it was us. I don't know. <Laugh>, what can we, it was Mike b wasn't it? <Laugh>, what can we do for you now? Brenda <laugh>, if you need help, if you need support for that webcam, I don't know. Yeah, yeah.
Caller Brenda (01:31:40):
<Laugh> my father was in the military and we're doing a lot of VA stuff and he recently passed away. Oh, I'm sorry. And I wanna back up this stuff, but it has very, very personal information. Yeah. And I put it on hard drives and things, but you know, if the house burns down, it doesn't matter how many hard drives I've put it on, but I wanna know what of the cloud stuff. I've seen some people tell me, oh, go to this one in New Zealand. It's cheap, but it may be gone tomorrow. I wanna know what your idea of somewhere safe to put this information that has very pri like social security numbers and things in it.
Leo Laporte (01:32:12):
Yeah, definitely. Don't put it on mega in New Zealand. Those guys are going to jail. Right. <laugh>. So I'm not sure I would trust them. <Laugh>. any cl any cloud you put it on is going to be a little bit of a risk. There is only one cloud service I know of that is fully end-to-end encrypted. And it's the one Steve Gibson recommends. It's sync S Y N c.com. And it is, and this is what you're looking for is end-to-end encryption. Every cloud service is encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest. Dropbox, apples iCloud, but the owners of the company have the keys. So if they decided, you know, they had a rogue employee, they could look at it. If the law enforcement came to them, they could look at it. And we know this is the case with almost all cloud providers. Sync.Com is the only one I know of that is fully ended and encrypted for all the data. There are some others that have encrypted enclaves, including Dropbox. Apple is going to offer mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I don't know if they've yet offered it a fully end-to-end encrypted solution. They're, they've been talking about it.
Mikah Sargent (01:33:28):
Yeah. It's, it's complicated to set up, but
Leo Laporte (01:33:30):
Yeah. Yeah. That's the
Mikah Sargent (01:33:31):
Advanced for the iCloud drive.
Leo Laporte (01:33:32):
Yeah. Yeah. I think here's my suggestion. Instead of putting it in the cloud at all mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, just put it on a second hard drive and take it to work.
Caller Brenda (01:33:44):
Okay. Or is at home <laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:33:45):
Or, or you know, so you got one at home and one at work. And unless Fort Smith at the falls into a sinkhole, you'll be all right. Or if you worried about that happening works at home, <laugh> Oh, work at home, works at home. That's not a good solution, do you? But give it to somebody else. Get it off, get it outta the house. You trust your family. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. <Laugh>. So send it to your sister brother.
Caller Brenda (01:34:06):
I do remember putting information on floppy drives thinking that would be backed up for too. No, it's not. That's my
Leo Laporte (01:34:12):
Concern's. So that is one of the advantages of cloud is that there, you're gonna presume they're gonna continue to, to make sure it's accessible over the internet. As long as they don't go outta business.
Caller Brenda (01:34:23):
Right.
Leo Laporte (01:34:24):
There's no guaranteeing.
Mikah Sargent (01:34:25):
Right. Yeah. There's no really that, that, this is a great question and I don't know Leo for you, but I always feel like sometimes some of our listeners have even more concern about, you know, the, the privacy aspect of some of these things. Cuz I back up my stuff to Backblaze for example, and I don't, I'm not worried about my social security number or my, I, you know, like I've got a scan of my photo ID that's in Backblaze, but I'm not concerned about that. But
Leo Laporte (01:34:55):
Technically it's not encrypted. That's right. Exactly. Yes. So here one thing you can do is what Steve Gibson for a while called p I convinced him to change it to pie pre-internet encryption <laugh>. He was, he was calling it pre egress encryption. Oh Lord. He, which was not good. So pre, so the idea is if you take a program encrypt dad's data first into one single encrypted blob, then you can put that on iCloud or Dropbox or anywhere. And that's completely safe because they can't, they don't have the key. All they see is a blob. Is it? How much data is it? Is it a lot of data? Brenda?
Caller Brenda (01:35:36):
It's I would say around a gig. Yeah. Because there's a lot of photos and maps and that
Leo Laporte (01:35:41):
Belong. Oh, that's so wonderful that you have that. Where did he serve?
Caller Brenda (01:35:44):
Yeah. he served for 21 years in the Air Force. He was in Vietnam, Thailand. Wow. a lot of places out there. Wow. And he was just recently approved for his service connected disability. So we're very proud of that. And we have all that information to back up.
Leo Laporte (01:35:59):
Oh good. Was it Agent Orange or?
Caller Brenda (01:36:02):
Yes, it was Agent Orange. And I have lupus and a brain condition caused by Agent Orange as well.
Leo Laporte (01:36:07):
Oh my goodness. So, oh, I'm so sorry. Sorry. So
Caller Brenda (01:36:11):
We're happy to have all that data. That's what did it.
Leo Laporte (01:36:13):
Absolutely. And you wanna save that? No, definitely that too. Yeah. You wanna preserve that too? Yeah. So yeah, encrypted first and you, there are a lot of ways to do it. The, probably the one that every, the open source one that everybody knows about is Vera Crypt, V E R A C R Y P T. It's free and you can encrypt, encrypt it with Vera Crypt. Don't lose the keys cuz that's, they're not gonna, there's no way to get 'em back. They're right. You can't, I mean, honestly, it's probably okay to use one of the zip programs. Many of them have strong, you want to end-to-end encryption that are is just as strong. So there's a lot of ways to do that. I would personally prefer that you do that than trust sync.com or OneDrive. Then if you do that, by the way, you can put it on two services. Exactly. So if you know Dropbox goes outta business, you've got it on Microsoft. Or if Microsoft goes into a business, you have it on Apple or if you have it on multiple services and no one can access it once you and they can't get to it once. Yeah. Once you've encrypted it. I think that's a good one. Okay, great. I'm sorry about your dad. But thanks. I thank you for your service and thank him for his service and I'm sorry about your health issues, but I'm glad you got a handle. Well,
Caller Brenda (01:37:26):
Hey. Oh yeah. There's a reason I have it and I can take care of it. I do accessibility training for the blind. I couldn't do that if I weren own. Oh. Oh, that's wonderful. So it's, it's all good.
Leo Laporte (01:37:35):
You, you have the, have a great attitude. That's very Thank you for what you do, honestly. Yeah.
Caller Brenda (01:37:39):
Well thank you. Thank you for your help and maybe I'll talk to you in the next century.
Leo Laporte (01:37:43):
<Laugh>. Every century. Brenda, we gotta talk. It's just part of the deal. Yeah. <laugh>.
Caller Brenda (01:37:47):
Thank
Leo Laporte (01:37:47):
You gentlemen. Thank you. Take care. Enjoy your neck Cam <laugh>. Now do I press the hangup? I don't even know how this thing works. Should we go to
Mikah Sargent (01:37:58):
I think I can hear the engine hum.
Leo Laporte (01:37:59):
Yeah, the engine hum. Johnny Jets firing up the engines. <Laugh> Johnny Jet. He's
Mikah Sargent (01:38:05):
Traveling down dust
Leo Laporte (01:38:06):
Traveling road. He's been everywhere. He's been everywhere. Johnny jet.com, our traveling guru. Hello John.
Mikah Sargent (01:38:14):
How you doing?
Leo Laporte (01:38:15):
You're not at home? No, I'm, no I'm not. Those look like the giant forests of Sumatra behind you.
Mikah Sargent (01:38:21):
<Laugh>. I'm not in Sumatra Are you
Leo Laporte (01:38:24):
In? But I do. Are you in our neighborhood? Because it could also be redwood. The the forests of of Northern California.
Mikah Sargent (01:38:31):
I'm right outside Toronto, Canada. Ah,
Leo Laporte (01:38:33):
Nice. Visiting the fam.
Mikah Sargent (01:38:35):
I am visiting the family. We just got in from Europe. Just went to six countries in 12 days and
Leo Laporte (01:38:42):
Wow.
Mikah Sargent (01:38:43):
Yeah. And I was set up in the other room in a much better location, but my in-laws just came in. The dogs here, the kids are running around crazy. And I was like, I better go, I better go in the guest bedroom.
Leo Laporte (01:38:52):
Nice to see you. It's good to see you as always. Johnny Jett was for many years a regular, not only in the radio show but on our Canadian TV show. And he joins us every month now on ask the tech guys to help us. Yes.
Mikah Sargent (01:39:05):
Every first Sunday,
Leo Laporte (01:39:06):
First Sunday travel month. Travel like a rockstar. So are you gonna be home for the fourth or are you gonna be in Toronto?
Mikah Sargent (01:39:12):
No, we're, we're in Toronto. We go back to la not until next week.
Leo Laporte (01:39:17):
No Canadian celebrations for our independence. Oh, that was Canada
Mikah Sargent (01:39:20):
Today. We had Canadian Day yesterday.
Leo Laporte (01:39:21):
Yeah, yeah, yesterday. Oh, that's good. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:39:24):
Heard it's a really good idea to travel on the fourth <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:39:28):
I was in, I was in, I've been on, I've been traveling on the fourth often. Often. I think I was in Russia on the fourth one year. I don't know what it is. Well I guess you traveled in the summer, don't we? So where did you go in Europe, John?
Mikah Sargent (01:39:42):
We flew, we flew to Barcelona, jumped on a cruise. Princess Cruises.
Leo Laporte (01:39:46):
Nice.
Mikah Sargent (01:39:47):
And, and did the enchantment of the seas, which I'm telling you with kids, it is the best.
Leo Laporte (01:39:52):
Did the kids enjoy it?
Mikah Sargent (01:39:54):
I was nervous. I was like, I don't know. Are they're gonna get seasick? It was their first cruise. They absolutely loved it. And
Leo Laporte (01:40:01):
Lots for them to do.
Mikah Sargent (01:40:04):
They was like kids club and we're like, really? We had no idea. We brought 'em to it and they were like, they didn't even want to come back to our cabin.
Leo Laporte (01:40:10):
<Laugh> <laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (01:40:11):
That's great. They, they loved it. And then we, you know, we went to, we went Toal, we went to France, we went to Italy, we went to the Vatican City, we went to my grand grandparents' Home island, <inaudible>. Wow. and then we would just, we flew through Germany, went down to downtown Munich and you know, it all happened. I bought, I bought the tickets two weeks before. Everything happened two weeks before.
Leo Laporte (01:40:36):
Now I'm confused cuz you said princess, but the enchantment of the sea is R C l, right?
Mikah Sargent (01:40:42):
No. Oh, sorry. The pri Enchanted Princess.
Leo Laporte (01:40:46):
Oh yes. That's less confusing enc if you get the name of the boat, right? Yes,
Mikah Sargent (01:40:51):
Yes. Enchanted Princess. Correct. Ha. Have you been on it?
Leo Laporte (01:40:57):
I have not actually. I've never been on a princess cruise. That's the original Love boat, right? Totally. Captain Tubing Gopher, Julie. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:41:06):
Yeah. Well, they gave me, they gave me a 50% deal. So the last minute I was like, you know what? I found a cabin. It's very difficult to find cabins. I mean, almost everything is sold out. Oh, yeah. Flights. And I was just searching and I just kept finding, I just kept looking for flights and I found a great deal. I was able to get premium economy there and business back for cheaper than coach.
Leo Laporte (01:41:25):
Fun. This is not a probably, I'm guessing a good weekend to travel in the us.
Mikah Sargent (01:41:29):
No, it's terrible. I mean,
Leo Laporte (01:41:31):
Apparently Newark a mess right
Mikah Sargent (01:41:33):
Now. Yeah. Why did airlines happened? What was that? I mean, there, first of all, there's been very bad weather for the last seven days. There's been thunderstorms in, in the Northeast and Newark, you know all the airlines just, they max it out. So, so if, if there's, if there's fine, if the weather's fine, there's no problems. But once something goes wrong, then everything just hits the fan. Mm-Hmm. They just can't keep up. They don't cascade
Leo Laporte (01:41:56):
Enough enough staff cascade. Yeah, yeah,
Mikah Sargent (01:41:58):
Yeah. They don't have enough staff to, to back it up. So people get stuck. Their, their flight attendants, their, their, their pilots were stuck in different cities. It was similar to what happened at Christmas with Southwest. And and then to make matters worse, the ceo, who's a great guy, I've met him multiple times, but he made a bonehead decision by hiring a private jet for himself to get out of Newark to go to Denver.
Leo Laporte (01:42:19):
Oh, that did not look good, didn't he? Not a good luck. Every, all your passengers stuck in Newark and you're flying out in a private jet.
Mikah Sargent (01:42:26):
He should've, he should have spun it and made it. He could have been a hero by saying, you know what? I'm gonna grab some crew members that are stuck, or passengers, oh, I don't want to take a seat away from the other passengers and I'm gonna hire a private jet and then take 'em. He would've, he wouldn't looked like a hero instead of a zero. So yeah, he really messed up on that one. And it's too bad because he, he's been doing a good job until then.
Leo Laporte (01:42:49):
So easy though, these days to make a, everybody's
Mikah Sargent (01:42:51):
Watching
Leo Laporte (01:42:52):
Misstep. Yeah. Everybody knows what everybody's doing. Definitely Looks like the worst airport according to FlightAware's Misery Map right now is Chicago's O'Hare.
Mikah Sargent (01:43:01):
Is it? Okay. This morning was Newark.
Leo Laporte (01:43:02):
Yeah. Newark's still pretty bad, I think. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:43:05):
Yeah. And that's also another United Hub. So they're
Leo Laporte (01:43:08):
Newark's number two. We're number two. <Laugh>, we're number two. Then. Dallas, Fort Worth, Miami, LaGuardia, Boston.
Mikah Sargent (01:43:16):
It's gotten better since the last couple days. Yeah. Two days ago it was a mess. And then, but anyway, last week last month I should say. You know, I always look at the chat room after I end the call so I can answer questions. And I missed one. One was from iTech. He asked me, Hey, I'm traveling to Europe, specifically France is buying a local sim card, the best option for talking data. And you know what? Back then, I didn't know a month ago, but now I know. So I do have a T-Mobile phone, which does work really well, but when you get on a cruise ship, you gotta make sure you put that in airplane mode. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:43:48):
Yeah. You don't wanna do the sap, the cellular at sea. It's so expensive.
Mikah Sargent (01:43:53):
It's ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. So always I set a reminder every night or every afternoon Yep. When we come back from tourist to turn off turn on airplane mode. But my buddy Sebastian, who has cellular abroad, he recommended a company called U Biggie. Have you heard of them? No. Biggie. U B I G I. Maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong.
Leo Laporte (01:44:12):
Ubi, U B I G I, I think that's how you, that sounds like how you would pronounce it. It works for me. <Laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (01:44:17):
Okay. So anyway, U
Leo Laporte (01:44:18):
Biggie me small <laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (01:44:21):
Yeah. So anyways, it, it's for, for phones that have eims and I have a new iPhone 14
Leo Laporte (01:44:28):
Pro, ah, this is a new thing. So I
Mikah Sargent (01:44:30):
News, so I know people use Google phi. I've never used Google Phi, but when I, when my data started slowing down a little bit in Italy, I was like, you know what? I don't wanna mess around getting taxis and things. So I did sign up and I bought a plan for I think $14 for 10 gigabytes, which was way too much. I should have bought the, the plan lesser for one gigabyte, cuz I didn't even use one gigabyte for the there cause
Leo Laporte (01:44:53):
Wifi's everywhere now. But this is interesting cuz because of EIM, you don't lose your local phone number mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Exactly. Because you can have two sims in there. Right,
Mikah Sargent (01:45:04):
Exactly. So you can have both, you can keep your regular number. That way you're still getting phone calls. So with ubi e you it's, it's, it's for data, but you can use, you know, you can get on FaceTime or WhatsApp ev everyone in Europe uses WhatsApp. I mean, everyone around the world uses WhatsApp basically. I know. So, so definitely download WhatsApp. And by the way, if you are going to Europe and you're looking for taxis, I highly recommend free. Now have you heard of them?
Leo Laporte (01:45:28):
No. Free now actually Michael.
Mikah Sargent (01:45:31):
Yeah. My, actually my buddy Sebastian who's in, who lives half the year, or not half the year, but part of the year in Italy, he's like, this is the one you want. Not only just in Italy, but around Europe because,
Leo Laporte (01:45:41):
So it's the, it's kind of the Uber of Europe.
Mikah Sargent (01:45:45):
It's, but it's not Uber. It's taxis.
Leo Laporte (01:45:47):
Ah. So
Mikah Sargent (01:45:48):
In Italy especially, especially an Uber from my hotel to the train station was 33, 33 Euros. And a taxi was seven euros. And, but the problem is trying to get a taxi right now in Rome or in Europe. I mean, they are inundated with Americans and travelers from all over, but especially Americans, it is difficult. So with free now, but so many of the locals said they use it, they love it, but you do need to get yourself some time because a lot of the taxis either are too far away, they end up canceling on you or you need to cancel on them. And but it, it is the best way to keep the taxi drivers honest. You know, in Italy they know that, you know, it's known that some of these guys take the long Roy this way they can't. Cuz it works just like it works just like Uber. And you, you put your credit card in there. This way you don't have to, you don't have to exchange money. It's all on your credit card and it's really easy to use. But the problem is they don't have a lot of taxis right now that are open. Yeah. So if you are looking for one, you need to go to a taxi stand and try calling this. Try calling free now. I mean, we almost missed our train to Naples from Rome because we were pushing it. It was difficult to get a, a taxi.
Leo Laporte (01:47:03):
Did you end in Rome?
Mikah Sargent (01:47:05):
We ended in Rome Chita, which is not the greatest.
Leo Laporte (01:47:09):
No, that's not Rome. That's just a port. Yeah. But then you took a, did you go into the city?
Mikah Sargent (01:47:14):
Totally. We spent two nights. We got a hotels, I Rome spent two nights in love. I
Leo Laporte (01:47:17):
Do too. It's my new favorite of city. My favorite cities. Yeah. Rome, Paris, London. Great Cities. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:47:22):
My buddy Stewart, who is a cruise guy, he's like, you know what, get off the night before in Florence, just tell the ship in advance. Oh. And that way you can spend the time in Florence at night when all the cruise passengers are out. Yeah. And then take the train down to Rome. That's smart. Yeah. And you avoid the whole rush. Rush. Yes. Because the next morning it was a mad
Leo Laporte (01:47:43):
House. Yes. And there's nothing in Chivita Vic Sea. It's just nothing. Nothing. It's just a fort. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:47:48):
And, and my can, my taxi canceled on me the night before. Oh. So trying to get a ride was, I used free now I used everything. Uber couldn't get anything. I, I was like a, I was like a pigeon at the beach trying to get <laugh> potato chips. Every time a taxi or driver pulled up, I was just right in their face. And so was everyone else trying to get 'em. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:48:08):
My,
Mikah Sargent (01:48:08):
Oh. And I ended up, I ended up spending 350 euros just for a ride into Rome. Oh, yikes. That hour and 15 minutes.
Leo Laporte (01:48:14):
Yikes. Sheiks. Oh.
Mikah Sargent (01:48:16):
But it's hot, man. You just, you know, it is packed. I also was talking to my buddy Steve Perillo, who has Perillo tours. Oh yeah. And he helped me. He helped me secure. I see
Leo Laporte (01:48:24):
Their ads all the time. Go to Italy. I'm Steve Perillo. Come with me to Italy. <Laugh>. He's a friend of yours.
Mikah Sargent (01:48:31):
Yeah, he's a good friend of mine. He's a great guy. But his dad, I think it might have been his grandfather that started a company, but his dad was known as Mr. Italy. He's known
Leo Laporte (01:48:38):
Legendary. Yeah,
Mikah Sargent (01:48:40):
Definitely. But he's like, I interviewed him for my podcast. I haven't uploaded it yet, but he's like, I was like, what advice do you have for people going to Europe this summer? He's like, don't go. Yeah. This is a guy who runs tours in
Leo Laporte (01:48:51):
Italy. Yeah. No. Italy was crazy when we were, were there in the spring, in May, in April. People are, you know, now that they can travel, they're traveling. It's incredible. It's amazing. They really are. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:49:03):
But April is one of the busiest seasons. I learned that this trip as well. They said April May is packed for, and Steve said his busiest time of the year is September.
Leo Laporte (01:49:12):
Oh, interesting. Which I was
Mikah Sargent (01:49:13):
Shocked, but you
Leo Laporte (01:49:15):
Know, it's gonna get later and later. Right. As people try to avoid the crowds. I'm thinking, I'm going in December in Europe. Right. I'm going, I'm going for Christmas or something.
Mikah Sargent (01:49:24):
It's crazy. But that's crowded too, but, and it's cold. So I mean, I like, I like the warm weather, although I don't like the hot. Yeah. And it is hot. I mean, it's hotly.
Leo Laporte (01:49:32):
Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (01:49:33):
It really
Leo Laporte (01:49:33):
Is. Boy, you are full of good Dr. Those are really good trips. You biggie for your phone? I'm gonna have to, cause I have Google file and I have T-Mobile, but that sounds like a good way to go. Especially if you have an EIM phone.
Mikah Sargent (01:49:46):
Totally. And I just brought it up for here in Canada to see if it works and they said Yeah, I mean you can Nice, you can get Canada actually. And then I Yeah, but I put in France and the prices are cheap. Yeah. I mean you can get a three gigabytes for seven bucks. For seven bucks. You might as well download it that way if you're, if you're T-Mobile or whatever your phone
Leo Laporte (01:50:05):
Service is. Exactly.
Mikah Sargent (01:50:07):
It slows down. You just switch it. Yeah. You go into your settings cellular and change the primary. It's su super easy. It takes four minutes to set up and it's just nice little safety net to have
Leo Laporte (01:50:19):
And free now the for mobility to get a cab and many European cities free now. Yeah. Yeah. And Perillo, if you're going to Italy, <laugh>, I'll give your buddy Steve a plug. <Laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (01:50:31):
Yeah, he, he, I mean he's a great guy. And yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:50:35):
And I'll give you a plug. Go to johnny jet.com. That's his website. He's got free newsletters. He's got lots of travel tips. He's a great guy. He's got a YouTube channel. He's on Twitter, Instagram. And he's got electrical tape. What do you have? What's the gaffer's tape for? No,
Mikah Sargent (01:50:50):
This is, this is gaffer tape. Yeah. What's that for? Right before I got on my, my headset broke. So, I mean, all throughout Europe I was using gaffer tape for everything. <Laugh>. I mean my, my, my, my kids' headphones broke on the plane. That's like a nightmare. The, there was a light behind the TV that was so bright. I just threw a little piece off and put it right on the light. That's
Leo Laporte (01:51:09):
The best, that's the best reason for it. You can cover up all those LEDs. It's
Mikah Sargent (01:51:13):
Terrible lights,
Leo Laporte (01:51:13):
All totally all over the place. That's where you're trying to sleep.
Mikah Sargent (01:51:16):
And on the cruise ship, they had a sensor. So when you go to the bathroom in middle night, all of a sudden there's a whole room lights covered that. I covered that whole thing right up.
Leo Laporte (01:51:25):
Oh, I know. I wish I'd had that. Bring a, bring a,
Mikah Sargent (01:51:27):
This is so bring tape
Leo Laporte (01:51:29):
Gatherer tip of all, bring a roll of gaffer tape. Remind me, John, next time I leave town to take some gaffer's tape from the office.
Mikah Sargent (01:51:36):
<Laugh>, you can buy travel size now too. They have travel size, which is great. Before you throw
Leo Laporte (01:51:40):
It,
Mikah Sargent (01:51:41):
Throw it, throw travel size
Leo Laporte (01:51:43):
Tape. Go ahead. I'll, I'll catch it.
Mikah Sargent (01:51:46):
<Laugh>. Oh, Leo. That's
Leo Laporte (01:51:48):
A, that we have, we have, this is very expensive stuff I might add. Yeah. It's super pricey.
Mikah Sargent (01:51:52):
Yeah, but get the, get the travel one. It's tiny. Yeah. So don't you, you don't wanna carry that the bag. No, it's too big. Put it's in your carryon. You want this in your carryon
Leo Laporte (01:51:59):
Too big. Unless you make ahead of it. Then you can swer
Mikah Sargent (01:52:01):
You can buy like three rolls for I think 14 bucks
Leo Laporte (01:52:04):
Or something. No, that's not bad. Travel. Gaffer's take. You are full of great information. Johnny Jet. Always a pleasure. Safe travels home when you get to, how long are you gonna stay in Toronto?
Mikah Sargent (01:52:14):
We're we gotta go to New York. I I mean, we're traveling. You're traveling. I'm, I'm back. I'm finally back. Leon. He's traveling. He's doing while like everybody else. It's been three years. Dude. <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:52:24):
We're gonna get Micah on the road. He's never been anywhere.
Mikah Sargent (01:52:27):
<Laugh>. Well, Micah, I, I would love to take you man. You tell, I know you wanna, as long as we're not going Italy, I'm happy to take, you wanna
Leo Laporte (01:52:33):
Go to Italy? Where, what
Mikah Sargent (01:52:33):
Would be No, I said as long as we're not going down, what's the first I wanna to
Leo Laporte (01:52:36):
Japan first. Japan. Yeah. Oh, that's smart. I remember.
Mikah Sargent (01:52:39):
Let's
Leo Laporte (01:52:39):
Take, ask the tech guys on the road to Japan. Let's do it.
Mikah Sargent (01:52:42):
Let's do it. All right,
Leo Laporte (01:52:43):
We're ready. All right. All right. Thank you Johnny. Thank you so much. All right. Take care. Take care. Bye-Bye. Really? Japan. That's a good idea. Japan's wonderful. I've heard. Yeah. Singapore's good place for, for children in just in case you wanna know, did you wanna show me something? I already did it. Oh, I gotta do another one. There's a marker. Time is time is time is ticking. There you go. I just wanna pause briefly to invite those of you who watch, you know, I just saw a really cool thing on Squarespace. They're doing their, like, their 20 year history. And in 2009, Squarespace, which no one had ever heard of the time, took a flyer. Anthony Castellano great guy, said, you know, let's try podcast advertising. He bought one ad on twit they say on the site. So I gotta believe them that it was such a success that one third of their signups for the next year came from TWIT listeners.
(01:53:36):
Holy cow. Advertising on Twit works right now. It's a slow time. You're gonna get a great deal if you're interested in advertising. We put together a very good I think program for people who are new to podcast advertising. We take care of you. We'll hold your hands cuz we have a great team here. Half our listeners are in management positions. 65% are involved in company decision making. They're, we have a great audience, smart audience, and I would love to introduce your product to them. You'll get a full service continuity team. We'll write your copy for you. We'll help you with the graphics. You can get ads that are unique every time. As you know, Micah and I and other hosts, we, we read them live every time. We always overdeliver on impressions. We always make sure that you get as many impressions, if not more.
(01:54:28):
We also will help you. We got ad tech that helps you know whether your ads are working. We'll give you courtesy commercials you can share on your social media and your landing pages. I think Squarespace in fact has an ad from 2009 Wow. That I did on their landing page. That's amazing. Yeah. lots of free goodies, including mentions in our weekly newsletter that goes out to thousands of our listeners. Bonus ads, social media promotion. We know we work. So does Squarespace, sodas, it, pro sodas, authentic. The CEO of Authentic Mark McCreary, who, who did that early buy I think with Squarespace says we've partnered with Twit for 16 years. The feedback from many advertisers over 16 years across a range of product categories is that if ads and podcasts are gonna work for a brand, they're gonna work on twit shows. I think we do the best job anywhere.
(01:55:16):
So if you're interested in elevating your business, let us help visit advertise@twit.tv today and you can work with twit TV's world-class audience, advertise twit.tv. That's the email address. And Max or Ryan or Lisa will get back to you and we will get you on board. We look forward to that. I should also mention that for those members of Club Twit, they don't see any ads. Wanna encourage our Club TWIT members to keep on, keep it on. We really appreciate the support. If you're not a member of Club Twit, which you're not, cuz you're seeing this ad then you might want to go to twit tv slash club twit. It's $7 a month. We intentionally keep the price low so it's affordable for as many people as possible. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the really incredible discord.
(01:56:06):
What a Thursday? We had Stacy's book club at 9:00 AM with Anna Lee New's, newest The Terraforms. And then at 1:00 PM an interview at Pruitt did with Hugh Howie. Wow. The author. Wow. Of, you know, if you've seen Silo on Apple tv, that's the Wolf series. He what an what an incredible exclusive for club members. We do a lot of those. We're gonna do a lot more, including Micah's Hands on Macintosh Show, hands on Windows, Scott Wilkinson's, home Theater Geeks. I can go on and on. I think the club is a great value. It really helps us and and it helps yourself. Right? So go to twit tv slash club twit and subscribe. And we thank all of our club twit subscribers for making this show pod. We wouldn't be doing this show if it weren't for Club Twit to be honest. Exactly. Yeah. Mark, mark calls. Should we, should we do some? I see Robert on the line here. Let's put Robert
Mikah Sargent (01:57:00):
Robert's on the line.
Leo Laporte (01:57:01):
Robert on the line. Star six to unmute. Hello Robert.
Mikah Sargent (01:57:09):
Welcome to the show.
Leo Laporte (01:57:11):
Says Robert is is there, but I don't, I don't hear it. You want your gaffers tape back, don't you, <laugh>? No,
Mikah Sargent (01:57:18):
He's gotta set.
Leo Laporte (01:57:19):
Tell the timer for it. Tell this stuff. Costs a lot of money. This is pricey for 16 bucks, that's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I can't believe four for 16
Mikah Sargent (01:57:26):
Bucks. I got some Amazon Basics kind and it was expensive, so I can't imagine how some gaff quality kind was. It was
Leo Laporte (01:57:32):
Cheap. Gaffers tape. Don't get cheap. Well, I guess for covering up a light. Yeah. Doesn't really matter. Robert, are you there? One more chance, press star six. Hello. Let's do a voicemail while we're getting Robert on the line. What do you got?
Caller Jimmy (01:57:46):
Yeah, this is Jimmy Collin from the Charlotte area. Hi Jimmy. Icloud storage. Is there a way to store my photos and stuff in the cloud without them staying on my phone or my Mac? Cause I'm running outta space and the only thing I can seem to find online is turn it off. But at that point, you know, or if I delete anything from my Mac, it's gonna delete it from the cloud. But I don't wanna delete it. I just want it off my Mac.
Mikah Sargent (01:58:16):
<Laugh>. That's,
Leo Laporte (01:58:17):
This is
Mikah Sargent (01:58:18):
A great space. So you have two options here. And you know, one of them is set by default, so I'm wondering if you're even running out of space in this case. But basically on your Mac and also in the app on your iPhone, you have a setting and the setting is going to let you essentially save a small version of every photo and video locally. And then the full version is stored in the cloud.
Leo Laporte (01:58:45):
So it sounds like he doesn't even want the small version. Exactly. How big is the small version?
Mikah Sargent (01:58:49):
Well, so this is the thing. It does it all automatically. Yeah. And so it, you don't get a choice. Yeah. You don't get a choice. It will actually pull even older photos or photos that it thinks based on the ai, whether you are going to be looking at those or not from your, your device. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's smart. It's actually a smart system. I have
Leo Laporte (01:59:05):
Often though, if I go back to an older folder, it says, okay, downloading it shows you a little cause it downloads the full quality mm-hmm. <Affirmative> for you to share or to edit. And that's nice. Yes. You got the thumbnails.
Mikah Sargent (01:59:15):
Yes, exactly. So the first thing I would suggest is make sure that on both your iPhone and on your Mac, you do have the setting called Optimize Mac storage. Now, once we get to that point in the flow chart, if you have that turned on and you're still getting this no storage option, you can go the nuke route, which is essentially to use your iCloud drive as the place to store your photos.
Leo Laporte (01:59:40):
So store it in the cloud and I think this is what he was saying. Yeah, but not on my Mac.
Mikah Sargent (01:59:44):
But not on my Mac. Yeah. So essentially what you're gonna do is export your entire photo library, and you can do this from your Mac because it's going to then do the same thing on your iPhone. So you'd export your photo library, you could put it in if you wanted to an archive, or you could just keep it as is. You take that and you put it in your iCloud drive and then remove everything from your photo library on your Mac. Now here's the thing, obviously if you want to gain access to those photos and see everything that's there, you're not gonna have a lot of the same features. So it's gonna be a little bit more difficult for you to, for example, pull a wallpaper from a photo and put it on your phone because instead it's sort of the files app. So you may find yourself having to kind of resave photos from the files app back into your photos library. But this is a way to make that happen. So I think the reason you're not seeing any suggestions for how to do that online is because people are gonna go, why would you want to do that? But if that's what you wanna do, that's how you do it.
Leo Laporte (02:00:38):
And the chat room is screaming, they've been very well trained. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> saying if you only have one copy of something, it's not backed up. And that even if that one copy is in the iCloud, which is a pretty safe place, it might be prudent to take that blob that export that folder and put it on a hard drive, external drive or thumb drive and put it somewhere just so you have a copy of it. It's always nice to have a local copy as well as a cloud copy. I guess you, I mean I, if you're willing to do that, you don't really even need the iCloud. You could just copy it. I like having both.
Mikah Sargent (02:01:08):
Yeah. And someone did bring up a good point. If you don't have an issue with Google and its method of doing things, Google actually does include a pretty cool automatic feature in the Google Photos app that they call cleanup. And essentially, once you've backed up all of the photos from your iPhone to Google Photos, you can hit that cleanup button and it will also remove photos from the local library. Again, it's kind of the nuke option. So you do want to make sure that you're putting these photos somewhere else, you're making a copy of them. But that's also a possibility and it's a way that I've helped some family members who said, I'm out of storage space, what do I do? I had them download Google Photos and use that as the means to do
Leo Laporte (02:01:47):
It. That's a nice, and that's the key is it backs up to the cloud, but then it gives you the option to delete everything that's backed up to the cloud. Yeah. I wonder if Amazon Prime does that. If you have an Amazon Prime membership, you get unlimited backup at least until they pull the plug. But for now you get unlimited backup of all your photos in original quality, not even a reduced quality, which is what Google does. But I wonder, I have to look at the Amazon. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (02:02:08):
I haven't seen like a cleanup utility
Leo Laporte (02:02:10):
Yet. Oh, I've got it all copied. Can I delete it now? Yeah, that would be nice, wouldn't it?
Mikah Sargent (02:02:14):
Yeah, that's a good question though. I've heard people say that before. Yeah. And what I've always ended up doing is convincing them to spend $5 a month on more storage space <laugh>. Yeah. That's, that's what I would suggest to you. But I know that's not possible for everybody. I know that that's a hard sell. Or even the $12 a year that you're talking about iCloud. Yeah, exactly. Just increasing your iCloud storage. Oh, that yeah. That wouldn't save you locally
Leo Laporte (02:02:39):
Storage. Yeah. He still do what you suggested.
Mikah Sargent (02:02:41):
Yeah, that's a good point. Nevermind. so in that case it would not work for you.
Leo Laporte (02:02:45):
Buy a bigger hard drive would work for you. <Laugh>. All right. Should I do an email? John Ashley producer? Do some producing email. Voicemail voice email. Email. Email. Okay. Phone call. You don't blame me. Blame John. Ashley <laugh>. Aunt just walked in. Did you have a good interview with Hugh Howie? I bet it was incredible. It was great. Yeah, it was outstanding. Yeah. Club members, you gotta go check that out. We'll put that on Twitter plus feed, right? So they can
Mikah Sargent (02:03:18):
Listen. Yes. Yeah, I think it's there now.
Leo Laporte (02:03:20):
Bruce, Bruce writes, hello, Leo and Micah. Hi Bruce. Long time listener. After using years of using Microsoft Windows, started in 90 Windows 95, all the way through Windows 11. I finally took the plunge of becoming a Mac user. I blame you Micah. That's my fault. It's been very frustrating of late with Microsoft's updates continually causing blue screens on my older I seven HP desktop, which was operating just fine. So I got a Mac mini base, an M two based Mac Mini after learning. And this is just what an aunt did too, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. After learning the subtleties of how things are done in the Mac world, I'm glad I made the switch. Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks? <Laugh>? I did check out a few of your hands on Mac episodes. Oh, thank you. Found them very helpful. Thank you, Micah. Good.
Mikah Sargent (02:04:13):
I'm glad to hear that.
Leo Laporte (02:04:13):
But he has two questions. Do I need an antivirus program?
Mikah Sargent (02:04:17):
<Laugh>? No. Not even on Windows. Do you really need an antivirus program?
Leo Laporte (02:04:21):
You really don't. On Mac, they do a very good job of, of keeping you safe. I don't use one. You don't use one?
Mikah Sargent (02:04:26):
I don't use one. I there every once in a blue moon, I have a free subscription to malware bys. I'll download malware bys and do a scan. Just because my, my, what is it? My not my threat posture, but the other one. Your,
Leo Laporte (02:04:38):
Your threat. Now I forgot.
Mikah Sargent (02:04:40):
I know. Security, your
Leo Laporte (02:04:42):
Threat dynamic, whatever
Mikah Sargent (02:04:43):
It is.
Leo Laporte (02:04:44):
Your threat method.
Mikah Sargent (02:04:45):
Mine is heightened a little bit, so, but yes. No, you're fine.
Leo Laporte (02:04:49):
I'm having one of those days where I can't remember anything. Did you notice that? Yeah. It's, it's all slipping away from me. Two, I imported all my photos into the Mac. There we go. The one minor issue was the individual photos now show the date of import. Oh, rather the date of creation, which means I cannot sort by date anymore. Oh, can this be changed? Photo of viewer does allow me to view by year. So the creation date does exist somewhere, but not in the filing flow. It is in the filing flow. It's in what we call the extended information, abbreviated E X I F. And there's actually a really, it's a geeky, I've mentioned it before. There's a very geeky tool that, and I've used it, that lets you take, you run this program mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and it will go through all the photos and change the modification date if you wish. Or the file name to match the creation date, all of which is stored in the exif Perfect data. So it's called, it's free. It's from a guy named Phil Harvey. Hi Phil. Very geeky. It's called Exif Tool. And there's a Mac OS package. There's also a Windows version if you ever decide to go back. And then it's command line. So you're gonna have to learn the command line. And let me tell you, this thing has command line options till tomorrow. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (02:06:12):
Look at <laugh>,
Leo Laporte (02:06:12):
It goes on and on and on. There's really nothing it can't do, but it's gonna take a little while for you to understand it and craft a command line that'll do what you want it to do. Look at all the file formats it supports, not just, you know, JPEGs and and you know, traditional files.
Mikah Sargent (02:06:32):
Does Mr. Harvey provide any examples?
Leo Laporte (02:06:35):
<Laugh>, Mr. Harvey probably does, but because that would
Mikah Sargent (02:06:38):
Be helpful for someone who's not as
Leo Laporte (02:06:39):
Airline savvy. Yeah. Savvy. Yeah. So there's some, some examples. There we go. Yeah. it is complicated. I spent a little bit of time playing with it before I actually ran it.
Mikah Sargent (02:06:48):
Paul Harvey was the radio announcer. Empty Pockets.
Leo Laporte (02:06:51):
Paul Harvey.
Mikah Sargent (02:06:53):
Unless that was the
Leo Laporte (02:06:53):
Joke. Yeah. So this is, I I mean maybe I'm getting a little out, out over my skis here. I don't know if you want to use something this powerful, but it is the way to do it. This is what I did.
Mikah Sargent (02:07:03):
Yeah, and I'm wondering too, your method for bringing them in. Cuz if you just brought them in as files versus importing them directly into iCloud or into your Photos app, it may have properly sorted that data if you brought it directly in. So if you basically launched photos and said import, it may have been smarter about what it was doing when bringing them over versus bringing them into the finder first where that modified date is going to be more important. So I, I, I think that this tool is something well worth using. But you might try importing if you're maybe not as comfortable with the command line importing directly into the Photos app and seeing if that takes care of the issue where it's not finder that's going well. I think what's most important to you right now is when these were modified. And I would also recommend check out and episode of Hands on Mac, where I talk about The Finder and I talk about how you can make more sort options available to you within Finder. So you can easily right click and choose when these were cr you can sort by date, created, date added date, last opened all sorts of options that might be able to help you sort better as well.
Leo Laporte (02:08:13):
Oh, and look at this. Thank you. Scooter X, somebody has written a gooey graphic interface for Phil Harvey's exif tool. Oh, excellent. Which, which it's available Linux, Mac, and Windows. So it might make it a little bit easier for you to figure out what it's gonna do. I have not used this, but it's certainly worth taking a look at. My suggestion is before you run it on all the photos, create a a demo folder and try it, you know, make copies and try it on a handful just to make sure it's doing Exactly.
Mikah Sargent (02:08:41):
Beautiful. Yep. I,
Leo Laporte (02:08:43):
So now you know the rest of
Mikah Sargent (02:08:45):
The story. Great. The story. Yeah. <laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:08:47):
Your mom made you listen. Great
Mikah Sargent (02:08:49):
Grandparents, great grandma. And I would sit down and listen to Paul Harvey.
Leo Laporte (02:08:53):
Paul Harvey,
Mikah Sargent (02:08:55):
The rest of the
Leo Laporte (02:08:56):
Story. Could they <laugh>,
Mikah Sargent (02:08:59):
They wouldn't miss a day of Paul Harvey
Leo Laporte (02:09:01):
<Laugh>. I had a fan, I have a friend who was in Chicago, used to do a show outta Chicago who got in the elevator in there. And lo and behold is Paul Harvey and he said, hello, Americans. <Laugh>. <laugh>. Hey, we're outta time. We're done. We are. Hello. Goodbye. American Americans. <Laugh> thank you for joining us. We do ask the tech guys every Sunday right before the Twitch Show. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that's about 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern Time, 1800 utc. You don't have to watch live. You can get a download versions of the show at Twitter TV slash atg or on YouTube or better yet, subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll have it on your device and you can listen or watch we do audio and video. But if you like to watch live and if, if you do watch live, you can interact with us live.
(02:09:47):
You can make the phone call for instance. All you have to do is go to live twit tv. Actually, there's always something going on there. Yep. if we're not doing it live, we'll do reruns of the shows Live dot twit tv. And if you're watching live IRC twit tv is our open to all public. I r c the one Brenda was trying to get into Anonymously <laugh>. And there's also a discord where you can be anybody you want for club members only. But again, I hope you will watch and listen now remember the phone is open for all week, so you can call and leave a message for us. We're not on the air at 8 8 8 7 2 4 2 8 8 4. You can also email us Atg TWIT tv. We're getting lots of emails now. It's great. It's a lot of fun. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (02:10:36):
And a lot of voicemails too, which is great.
Leo Laporte (02:10:38):
Yeah. Thank you for your calls and for watching the show. We really appreciate it. Anything else to say?
Mikah Sargent (02:10:46):
No. I think that's it, honestly.
Leo Laporte (02:10:47):
Okay. Michael will be back.
Mikah Sargent (02:10:49):
Have a happy fourth
Leo Laporte (02:10:50):
If that's have a great fourth. Can you celebrate? Yeah. No shows on Tuesday for our international. Every every year I'll get an email saying what happened to the show Mac Break Weekly security now No. Show what happened? Ugh. Because they don't know July 4th holiday. It's
Mikah Sargent (02:11:05):
Because we switched to drones. They can't hear the fires, so they don't
Leo Laporte (02:11:07):
Know. They, they don't hear the explosion. Oh. So we send the whole team home. Everybody gets the day off, which is a good thing. But we will be back here. I'll be back here on Monday. You'll be Tech News Weekly on Thursday. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> with Jason Howell.
Mikah Sargent (02:11:22):
And then we'll be back next Sunday.
Leo Laporte (02:11:24):
No iOS today though. Tuesday,
Mikah Sargent (02:11:25):
No iOS today.
Leo Laporte (02:11:27):
We'll be back next Sunday. So thank you everybody. Thanks. We appreciate it. And have a great fourth and we'll see you next time on Ask the Tech guys. Have a great geek week now.
