Ask the Tech Guys Episode 1983 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):
It's time for as the tech guy, Mike has got the week off. So it's, you got me all me all the time and lots to talk about. We'll answer your questions. We'll also talk to Spaceman, rod Pyle about the latest Indian Moon exploration. Also a visit from Chris Marquardt. We're gonna get a brand new photo assignment and he'll review last month's photo assignment plus yes, the critter question of the day. It's all coming up. Next, unask, the Tech Guys. This show is brought to you by Cisco Meraki. Without a cloud managed network, businesses inevitably fall behind. Experience, the ease and efficiency of Meraki's single platform to elevate the place where your employees and customers come together. Cisco Meraki maximizes uptime and minimizes loss to digitally transform your organization, Meraki's intuitive interface, increased connectivity and multi-site management. Keep your organization operating seamlessly and securely wherever your team is. Let's Cisco Meraki's 24 7. Available support. Help your organizations remote, onsite, and hybrid teams always do their best work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twit.

(00:01:14):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Tweet. This is Ask the Tech guys with Mic Sergeant and Leo LaPorte. Episode 1983, recorded Sunday, July 16th, 2023. There's a shortcut for that. Ask The Tech Guys is brought to you by Cisco Meraki. With employees working in different locations, providing a unified work experience seems as easy as murdering cats. How do you bring in so many moving parts? The Meraki Cloud Managed Network. That's how. Learn how your organization can make hybrid work work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twit and by ACI learning IT skills get outdated in about 18 months. Launch or advance your career today with quality, affordable, entertaining training individuals. Use the code TWIT 30 for 30% off a standard or premium individual IT pro membership@go.acilearning.com slash twit and by Brooke Linen Summer is in full swing. And Brooke Linen is here to help you swap out winter warmth for easy breezy comfort with their award-winning sheets and home essentials.

(00:02:30):
Visit brooklinen.com today and get $20 off plus free shipping on orders of a hundred dollars plus with a Code Tech guy. It's time for asking the tech guys. Hello everybody. I'm Leo LaPorte. There's an empty chair over here, Micah Sergeant, another day off for Micah. Another we, for the first four years that he worked here, it never took vacation, so we kind of hammered on him. Take more vacation now he, he took it seriously. And that's so I'm all by myself like we used to do in the old days on the radio show. If you wanna ask a question, talk about tech, get some handholding on the information. Super Highway (888) 724-2884 is the phone number, (888) 724-2884. You can also use Zoom on your smartphone and call twit tv. Just enter that in the browser. Call twit tv. That'll launch Zoom and you'll be able to talk to us with audio and video.

(00:03:31):
You can also email. We've got a lot of emails right in the mailbox. ATG twit tv. By the way, that phone number's good all week, unlike the radio show that if you get me between two and five Eastern on Sunday, like right now, when we're doing the show we'll put you in the Zoom conference. You'll be able to hear the show. And then when I say hello, all you have to do is press star six to unmute. But if you call during the off hours, you can leave a voice message. And we, I, I believe John Ashley, producer, we have some good voice messages too. Some movement in the FTC versus Microsoft Action. You may remember on Tuesday, a lower court judge ruled in Microsoft's favor. FTC had looked for an injunction saying, God, these guys are gonna buy Activision Blizzard before we finish our investigation.

(00:04:29):
The administrative judge is supposed to rule on the FTC action in August. You remember also everybody except the UK and the US have approved it. The uk says, no, no, no. Cloud, cloud gaming is gonna be damaged. The FTC asked judge to temporary injunction. The the judge said no. After hearing testimony from Satya Nadel and a bunch of other people, he said, no, there's, or she said, there's no reason for an injunction. Well, the ninth Circuit immediate, you know, Microsoft FTC appealed and the ninth Circuit who received the appeal said, no, no. There's no reason. There's no reason to to change that. So there is really nothing at this point to stop Microsoft from just saying, okay, we're gonna buy 'em and let the chips fall where they may, if the if the Brits wanna sue us, fine.

(00:05:22):
So I think that's gonna happen. In fact, what's interesting, it feels like this happened over the weekend. Like it just happened. The Microsoft and Sony have made an agreement to make sure that call of Duty is remains on the PlayStation for many, many years to come, which is of course, what everybody thought would happen anyway. So I think that one's pretty much over the Brits, the uk competition authority may have something to say, but but in the US it's over. It's really over the Amazon Prime Day this week. Did you buy anything? Did you buy, so did you, yeah, so I was reading an interesting article about an Ottoman <laugh>, an ottoman that was 37% off on Prime Day. And somebody did some research, looked at Camel, camel, camel, you know what, you know, which has a price graph over time.

(00:06:22):
And it, this has happened with a number of items. These are Amazon sold and sold and fulfilled by Amazon. They, the price goes hum hum hum. They raise it right before Prime Day. They raise it to 113 bucks and then Prime Day back to the old price. 37% off. Apparently this happens quite a bit. So it's very, it's too late. I'm telling you, I'm mourning you the Prime day deals. Maybe look at Camel, camel, camel first to make sure that the price wasn't jacked up, you know, the week before Prime Day and then dropped on Prime Day to make you feel like you got a deal, which you didn't. According to USA Today. <Laugh>, I was reading this at breakfast. The number one thing people bought on Amazon Prime Day, the number one thing Temptation cat treats. So I'm looking at this and I'm thinking that that looks familiar.

(00:07:17):
And I looked up and there's a big bucket of those, these exact product on my kitchen table cuz that's what Lisa gets. The kitties love them. The kitties love them, and she just shakes the thing. And the cats come running no matter where they are, cuz they know it's time. The number one <laugh>, the number one seller on Amazon Prime Day was Cat Treats, by the way. It was almost 12 billion in two days. Amazon did a lot of selling. Whoops. Hey, come back here. No, I don't want to get my PC ready for the Amazon App store. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, here we go. The streaming stick was one of the most popular items shoppers bought on Prime Day. Yeah. You f you know, you figure you'll get a good deal on Amazon. Crap. Liquid IV packets. What the hell? <Laugh> on the on the diplomat.

(00:08:11):
This new show I'm watching with Carrie Russell on Netflix her husband gets kidnapped and he comes back and she says they have banana bag there in Britain. She's in the embassy. The US Embassy in Britain actually in the beautiful re i's residence. They have banana bags here. You know, that's a, it's an IV that replenishes your <laugh>. And they bring, and they bring the guy a plate of bananas. Anyway, maybe they should have brought him liquid IV packets, hydrate twice as fast with convenient packets that to turn any bottle or glass of water into delicious, refreshing, refreshing, electrolyte Dr. Electrolytes. It's what a body needs. You know what's in these packets? Salt, you're, it's very expensive. Salt. Okay, an echo <laugh>. There's a few other, they're all, it's all it's salts. <Laugh>, yes, an iv. Thank you Dr. Mom. A banana bags and IV with injectable vitamins in it.

(00:09:14):
It's called that because it's yellow, but they didn't understand that. So they just brought him a plate of bananas. <Laugh>. It's actually quite funny. The echo dot, the round one that looks like the Las Vegas sphere. Number four, the Blink Mini indoor pla be kind of fun to have the Las Vegas sphere in your house. Did you see the picture of that MSG sphere in Las Vegas? Like, looks like a giant basketball. This is gonna be, I don't know. It's gonna have it's gonna have a lot of advertising on the on the thing, I think eventually, but right now it's, it's pretty cool. Here's, it's the world's largest spherical structure.

(00:09:57):
And it looks like a big basketball on the horizon. That's it, right? It's giant. It can hold 18,000 people. It has hundreds of thousands of oh. Oh, let's stop the music. I know ZZ Top suing me. Look at that Giant basketball in the, if you, if you had a couple of drinks at your favorite casino and <laugh> and then you were driving down the street and saw that you might pull over. It looks photoshopped in it doesn't look real, does it? It's a l e d covered sphere. It's really quite amazing what it can do quite. I can't wait to see it. I I tried to buy tickets. U2 is gonna perform there in October and I tried to buy, they paid 2 billion to build that cost more than the Raiders stadium.

(00:10:53):
Unbelievable. I think we should that's, there's not a lot of news that, that was kind of the news of the week. Should we go right to the phone calls? Let's get some phone without Micah here to slow things down. We could probably whip through <laugh>, whip through some phone calls. Amazon Prime US shoppers spent 12.7 billion on Amazon in two days. It's the biggest Amazon Prime ever. The only thing that scares me is a big increase in customers using buy now. Pay later. That's dangerous. Right? That's B N P L. They call that. That's dangerous cuz you buy it, you can't afford it. And I'll pay for it later. N no problem. It's just a, basically a charge card, right? Oh, I forgot to mention the actors are on strike now. SAG after went out. So we've got the writers and the actors on strike, so it's probably gonna be for the next few months. There's gonna be a gap in your entertainment. So you should watch more twit.

Benito (00:11:58):
It's gonna be longer than

Leo Laporte (00:11:59):
That. Think it'll be, think it'll be years Benito. Well,

Benito (00:12:02):
Well they, because they stopped making stuff now. Yeah. The stuff they're making now

Leo Laporte (00:12:06):
Is, it's gonna take a while. Like next year we'll see a, a dearth. But you saw what the producer said to the writers. We're gonna wait until they start losing their homes, then they'll come back to the negotiating table

Benito (00:12:19):
Villain. Like cartoon villain

Leo Laporte (00:12:21):
Cartoon. Yeah. They might as well twist their mustache <laugh>. We wait until they lose everything, then they'll want to negotiate. Alright. Alright. A the phone number is (888) 724-2884. Dr. Jerome is on the line. I'm gonna go right to Dr. Jerome. He's our first caller in the Zoom. Join us in the Stargate. Hello, Jerome? Or do you call yourself Jerry?

Caller Jerry (00:13:01):
Hi, Leo. Do you hear me?

Leo Laporte (00:13:03):
I hear you. Great. Hello, Jerome? Hi,

Caller Jerry (00:13:06):
It's Jerry.

Leo Laporte (00:13:07):
Jerry, Dr. Jerry. You're, you're a dentist.

Caller Jerry (00:13:11):
I am.

Leo Laporte (00:13:12):
I got this. No, nevermind. I won't do that to you. <Laugh>. What's up Jerry? I'm

Caller Jerry (00:13:16):
A I'm a first time caller. A long time listener. Welcome. And I really appreciate your show, Leo. Thank you, Jerry. Where

Leo Laporte (00:13:26):
Are you calling from? It looks like it's, it can't possibly be snowy back there. No, that's not. No,

Caller Jerry (00:13:32):
It's Pacific Palisade. It's California.

Leo Laporte (00:13:34):
Beautiful. Love it.

Caller Jerry (00:13:36):
Yes. The reason I'm calling is I have an opportunity. I purchased a Q L E D Q Q N 95 B a few months ago, and it failed.

Leo Laporte (00:13:50):
Oh no, it failed.

Caller Jerry (00:13:51):
It failed badly. So this Best Buy is gonna replace it for me. That's the tv, but I have

Leo Laporte (00:13:58):
Some, that's the TV I bought Jerry.

Caller Jerry (00:14:00):
Is it,

Leo Laporte (00:14:01):
Did you get the 70 sevener?

Caller Jerry (00:14:04):
Oh, you're talking about the Q D L E O L E D.

Leo Laporte (00:14:07):
Yeah. Oh, what did you get?

Caller Jerry (00:14:09):
I, I have the q, the Q L E D.

Leo Laporte (00:14:12):
Oh, it's a Q led. Okay, got it.

Caller Jerry (00:14:14):
Yes, yes. However, that's just it. I have the opportunity to upgrade it now to the S 95 C. Yes. And that's the qd. L O L E D. Do it. I, I know that you got a, that TV or a similar one. Yes. What do you think

Leo Laporte (00:14:32):
About it? Love it. So, and, and by the way, Scott Wilkinson, our home theater guru, concurs so the q q lead you got is not an oled understand this. And I'm think exactly, it makes me mad that Samsung kind of is playing on the fact that people know about OLEDs and go, well, there's just a little line there in the <laugh>. It's no, but it's an lcd. It's an lcd. Now, the advantage of LCDs is they're bright. And so in a, a room like a room you're in that where it's lit. An LCD is very bright. The disadvantage oles, the oles look better. The color reproduction is much more accurate. The blacks are deeper. It's an incredible four K H D R tv. I love OLEDs of all kinds. But in the, in the past, the issue's been that they're not quite as bright. These QD quantum OLEDs are true OLEDs and they're much brighter. They're so bright that even in a room as lit as your room, they look fantastic.

Caller Jerry (00:15:30):
So yeah, I mean, when I saw it, it was jaw dropping.

Leo Laporte (00:15:33):
It's jaw dropping. Yeah. They're, they're really good. So you always, I think you always want an ol lead, not an LCD these days. You want an ol lead. And these Q D O LEDs, when they came out, I don't know if you remember, but Scott Wilkinson would say, oh, there's gonna be something big. It's ces a big announcement. That was it. Yes, that was it. Yes. And, and he was raving about 'em. I, there was a deal. Samsung offered a deal in the 70 sevener. And I said, all right, we're gonna replace a projector with something really bright for the living room. And I have to say I love it now. Then Scott came up and turned on filmmaker mode, which is the mode many TVs are putting in now at the of Yes, A lot of directors. And Tom Cruise did a plea. Please don't, you know, turn on filmmaker. So, and it kind of washed it out. I didn't like it very much. I put it back, I put it back to the bright nice colorful setting and I just love it. So don't be, don't let people like Scott the purists say, oh, no, no. It has to be the Phil Decker boat. It is a beautiful screen.

Caller Jerry (00:16:34):
Let me ask you, what about the fear of burning on such TVs?

Leo Laporte (00:16:39):
Yeah, no, I don't think you have to worry about that. I've had ole TVs now since they first came out. I've had no burn in issues at all,

Caller Jerry (00:16:46):
So, so you can pause them with no trouble.

Leo Laporte (00:16:49):
Yeah, I mean, most of these TVs will do something to protect the tv. They'll dim in some cases, they'll shift to pixel imperceptibly over and up and around. So they're slightly moving the content of the pixels.

Caller Jerry (00:17:03):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:17:04):
There were a couple of knocks on ole one is that one of the colors would fade. I think they fixed all of this stuff. I haven't had any issues. So

Caller Jerry (00:17:13):
The longevity is really good.

Leo Laporte (00:17:14):
I think so, yeah. Yeah. I think you'd be very happy with this. Is it the Samsung you're looking at?

Caller Jerry (00:17:20):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:17:21):
Yeah. That's the one I got. I really love it. Okay. I hate, now, I have to be honest, I really hate what LG and Samsung and the others have done with their smart TV sets. They have all this stuff, and really the main reason for it is so they can spy on you and sell, sell your viewing information onto marketers. And there's no way to kinda get rid of that except just not connected to the internet.

Caller Jerry (00:17:43):
All that bloat where you mean

Leo Laporte (00:17:44):
Yeah. All that crap. And every once in a while, you know, I'll accidentally hit the Netflix button and the TV's version of Netflix launches, which is not as good as Apple TVs or, or Roku's version. Oh, really? Things like that. Okay. But there's nothing you can do about it. All the manufacturers do this now. There's no, I would love it if they would just sell us a monitor with this QD OLED screen in it. But they don't. They won't. Okay. There are, there are computer monitors like this sounds, yeah, I believe me. If you can get this replace that Q lead, which is really an L C D with true oled, especially the new QD O lead, hesitate not.

Caller Jerry (00:18:22):
Thank you so much, Leo. I appreciate your help,

Leo Laporte (00:18:25):
Jerry. Great to talk to you. You're gonna call me back in a couple of months when you've, when you've had some time with it and let me know.

Caller Jerry (00:18:30):
Sounds good. You

Leo Laporte (00:18:31):
Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks, Jerry. Take care. Bye-Bye. All right. Do I have to press hang up or do you You do it, you do it for me. <Laugh>. We're still working on this, this system here. Now we're gonna talk to Larry. Larry's on the horn. Actually, Larry, if you will hold on for just a moment. I do have to do an ad before we go a little farther into this. And then, and then I will talk to Larry and answer his question. You're watching Ask the tech guys brought to you by Cisco Meraki, the a r the experts in cloud-based networking for hybrid work. And this is what's happening right now, right? Whether your employees are at home at a cabin in the mountains, I wish on a lounge chair at the beach, or like Larry sitting out in his field, he's outstanding in his field.

(00:19:18):
A cloud managed network provides the same exceptional work experience no matter where. And this is what employees want. And you may as well, if you're a, you know, a leader at a company that, that that is, you know, dealing with this, you may as well roll out the welcome Matt Hybrid work is here to stay. But you have to know this hybrid work works best in the cloud. It has perks of course, for both employees, but also for leaders workers. They can move faster. They deliver better results with a cloud managed network. Because no matter where they are, they get the same experience. And as a leader, you can automate distributed operations, build more sustainable workspaces and proactively protect the network. And protection is, is an absolute key hybrid worker, a priority for 78% of C-suite executives. This is of course, according to a I D G market pulse research report conducted for Meraki.

(00:20:09):
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(00:21:13):
You also can reserve workspaces or your employees can based on vacancy and employee profiles. Hot desking makes it easy for employees to find a place when they do come into work to sit down. And if you've got restricted environments, locations and the restricted environments can be booked in advance, you can even, Meraki will even let you do time-based door access so they can only get in when it's their turn. Right. Mobile device management, of course, that's integrated in devices and systems, allow it to manage, update and troubleshoot company owned devices no matter where the device is or where the employee is. Turn any space into a place of productivity and empower your organization. You know, they want it, you know, you gotta do it. Get the, they'll get the same exceptional experience no matter where they work. With Meraki and the Cisco suite of technology, learn how your organization can make hybrid work, work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twi. We thank him so much for supporting Ask the tech guys. Larry is out there working in his fields today. Hi <laugh>. Hi, Larry. It looks like a vineyard.

Caller Larry (00:22:22):
How are you doing?

Leo Laporte (00:22:23):
Are you in

Caller Larry (00:22:23):
A vineyard? I'm in I'm in, yeah. Temecula Valley Wine Country. Beautiful. And that is a picture that I took and then it's, you know, it's blue screen or green screened in. So yeah, we've, we've been living here for several years now and it's just been great. So, wow. So beautiful. Thank you for, for taking the call. I, I really want to thank you for all of the great advice over the years. I started listening to you on day one when you first started. You're kidding.

Leo Laporte (00:22:50):
2004.

Caller Larry (00:22:52):
Well, and when, when when you started on, on K F I. On K

Leo Laporte (00:22:55):
F I.

Caller Larry (00:22:56):
Yeah, I, I was driving around that day and, and I guess it was after Jeff left. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:23:01):
Jeff Levy.

Caller Larry (00:23:01):
Yep. And, and just been listening ever since. Oh. So, and, and, and you guys, I mean, just the last one I had purchased a 2015, or excuse me, a 15 inch MacBook Air. Yeah. And you did a review and weren't too crazy about it. And then you told me about open core legacy Patcher. Yes. I put that on the 2013 MacBook Pro, and it works great.

Leo Laporte (00:23:25):
Wonderful. Wonderful. This is, this is the, this is the little device driver, some afic, you know, apple aficionados written so that you can run the modern, you know, Ventura operating system on an older 2013 machine. Apple won't let you, but you're saying it works just fine. Everything works and, and you don't have any problems.

Caller Larry (00:23:44):
No, did and I upgraded the S s D, so it's 25% faster. Smart. That's smart. Sort It makes up for, yeah. So so it, it's working fine, but I need your help and advice today Yes. On a pattern project that I'm working on. Okay. I'm gonna be doing a documentary and it's gonna be mainly interviews. Probably half of them face-to-face. The other half will probably be on Zoom or some sort of video link. And so I wanna find out about video and audio. I did a film a while ago, but all of the technology has changed.

Leo Laporte (00:24:18):
Oh yeah. So

Caller Larry (00:24:20):
The first thing is on the video, I'm just thinking, just go simple. Go with my iPhone 14 pro and I should be fine. Right. You'd

Leo Laporte (00:24:30):
Be amazed <laugh> at the quality. Yeah. You can get out of these camera phones these days. They're better than any camcorder there is, by the way, no more market for camcorders. Right. Because people can get such great video 4k. You know, you may not need to shoot it in 4K depending on where you're gonna just, you know, put this. But if you're putting it on YouTube, you might as well shoot it in 4k.

Caller Larry (00:24:57):
Right. The last, the last one I did was done on a camcorder. Yeah. And it's 10 80 p and it doesn't, right. I mean, it looks okay. Right. But

Leo Laporte (00:25:07):
No, it's amazing. People are making movies with these. Now if you are Alex Lindsay, you're gonna go out and get a, you know, a black magic cinema 5K camera and all that stuff, but I think get a tripod, right? Yep. and there are a variety of de you know, clamps designed to hold the phone audio. You pro you, you, you actually seriously probably could use the audio on the phone, but I would get a lavalier mic. And there number of companies that make microphones that are designed to use with the iPhone they don't necessarily, you want wireless. Cuz you, you want, you don't want to have to have a wire going outta your phone. <Laugh>. So,

Caller Larry (00:25:46):
Yeah. So I'm, I'm, I'm looking, I looked at both the, you guys mentioned the anchor work. I looked at that. Yes. And I, I looked at the road go. Yeah. and I'm pretty impressed with that system.

Leo Laporte (00:25:57):
Yeah. I, I don't have one yet. I haven't reviewed it, but I have been very impressed with the wireless go. And it does. So we had, we had some really nice where they Swedish people in a few years ago on the new screensavers. They had developed this portable system and it would allow you to, you know, have a little pack on your belt and it would, it would buffer it locally. You'd have a Lalie or Mike, it would buffer it locally and then it would send it to the phone. This does the same thing. I hope that they sold their technology to road, but I have to tell you, and I've been using their, you know their microphone for a long time. It works really well. This looks exactly the same. So the idea is you're your, you and your subject will wear these, the lavalier mics, you talk it, it, you don't get any hiccups. It's not sending it to the phone via Bluetooth. It is, it's via Bluetooth, which isn't very fast, but it's, but it's sending data, not the audio. And and it buffers it locally. I think this is a really good idea.

Caller Larry (00:27:01):
Yeah. I'm, I'm looking at the two version, which comes with two mics. Yeah. And so, well,

Leo Laporte (00:27:06):
You need one free are, I don't know, are you gonna be part of the interview or you sometimes, you know, people like Errol Morris, they cut themselves out and they just use the, the subjects

Caller Larry (00:27:17):
I'm planning 99% of the time to be not there. Yeah. But row, the Row two Wireless has a feature where you can record one mic on I think the left track and Yeah. The other mic Yeah. On the right. So

Leo Laporte (00:27:29):
It makes it

Caller Larry (00:27:29):
Easy. I think that I can, I can edit that and at the end it, when I do the final, I can just put the single channel on both channels. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:27:39):
That's right. Okay. You, you, you mix it down as you wish. But the beauty is if you don't want your voice in it, sit far enough away so that his microphone's not picking you up. And then you'll be able to easily separate the two tracks. Now I, you know, the caveat is I haven't played with his, I have used road equipment before. They make very good equipment. They're very focused on this kind of prosumer market. And I think that they do a good job. So,

Caller Larry (00:28:04):
Yes. And, and should I, should I go with final Cut Pro, or should I go with iMovie?

Leo Laporte (00:28:11):
I think try it. Imovie. The beauty of it is iMovie is much simpler, will probably do everything you want. And if you needed to, you could easily move those projects over to Final Cut. Okay. So if at some point you say, you know, I can't do all the things I need to do. So, so is it gonna be a full length two hour documentary, or

Caller Larry (00:28:34):
What do you Well, I I think it's gonna end up being about an hour or so. Nice. What this is about is I, I sort of grew up in the magic world. In 56 years ago, there was a, a club in Long Beach called The Long Beach Mystics. And that club is produced many, many professional magicians over the years. And I wanna do a, a sort of a documentary. Well, I talked to those folks about, well, why did you get into Magic? Magic? Oh, that's great. Why did you stay magic? And that kind of thing. I Oh, that's great. But these people went through it. And I wa was going back through some of my material and I looked at, in 1967, I was on, we, we produced a magic show, and I was on the same bill with Steve Martin.

Leo Laporte (00:29:19):
Wow. Wow. Yeah. So how cool is

Caller Larry (00:29:22):
That? So I'm, I'm, so, I'm hoping to get people like Steve Martin and Neil Patrick Harris and some other people out of the, out of the magic world. And the whole idea here is to inspire young kids to get into magic. Because I thought it was really a wonderful way to, to grow up and stay out of trouble and all those kinds of things. And I'm hoping if this thing generates any income, I don't, you know, I'm not here to make money. Yeah. But if I can find some scholarships of kids to go to Magic Camp, so to speak,

Leo Laporte (00:29:54):
What a great idea.

Caller Larry (00:29:55):
And learn about magic and get inspired. So so I'm hoping there's, you know, I might do 50 or 60 interviews and then edit that down. Maybe it'll be less than an hour. Yeah. but the, I mean, the one I did for my wife several years ago, yeah. I shot 20 hours of film and I used 19 minutes. So <laugh>, so editing's, the key thing, I

Leo Laporte (00:30:18):
It is, it's absolutely the key thing. Send me an email and I'll send it along to Steve if you don't have a Okay. Way to connect to him. So there's pros and cons. The pro is you're coming in with a really lightweight rig. It's simple, it's easy, it's very non-threatening, right? So people who aren't used to being interviewed, they're gonna go, oh yeah, this is easy. The con the con I, we used to go out and shoot stuff with these big heavy beta cam sp cameras when the, when a little camera, or even a phone even in those days would've been fine. I asked the guys, why do you break your back with this 60 pound camera? Because it looks professional. Okay. There is, there is also this kind of thing like, well, he's shooting this with an iPhone, <laugh> and a road, Mike.

(00:31:03):
How serious can this be? So that's, that's a completely psychological thing, completely independent of the quality. Okay. The quality's gonna be fine, but, you know, sometimes it's the right thing because it's lightweight, it's simple, it's not intrusive. And so you can really have a conversation. People forget the cameras there. Sometimes people go, who is this Larry Guy <laugh>? You know, what is he doing? So it really, you know, better your subjects. I think this sounds like a fantastic project. I love this. Yeah. And I love it that we can, you know, I had a friend who's a professional documentarian spends 90% of its time raising money because it's so, in the old days it was so expensive. And, you know, it's just, and then you have to sh ask, get distribution. Nowadays you could do this with your iPhone and a cheap microphone and put it on YouTube and have a much larger audience.

(00:31:54):
And there's gonna be so much stuff documented that would not have been documented before. So, I love this. I'm thrilled that you're gonna do it, Larry. You're the guy to do it. I think this is a wonderful idea. This is the, they were from Austria, by the way, not from Sweden. This was the Austrian company. They were former a k g microphone people. And the product was called m I k M E, Mike, me, I still have the mike. Me and I still use it. And I think Rho and Joby and Anchor and a bunch of other companies have basically, you know, <laugh> stolen the idea. But I think this was a really great idea. I think those roads are probably great. And it turns out Aunt Pruitt does had a review of the Joby Wavo mics, which we have on our twit site that you might want to take a look at. But the idea is this simple portable microphone is very good quality and, and is unobtrusive. And,

Caller Larry (00:32:47):
And the the other issue that I discovered in doing that last movie is lighting is super

Leo Laporte (00:32:52):
Important. Oh, yeah. Well do it out in your, in your vineyard <laugh>.

Caller Larry (00:32:56):
Yeah. Well, back in the day when I did it, I would go into a different city. I would go over to a photography studio, rent the lights, and so on. I think now I can just use like a portable led d probably

Leo Laporte (00:33:07):
Can, probably can, I mean, the best is still outdoors. If you can get 'em to sit outdoors Okay. On their patio, or, you know, if they've got a vineyard behind them that's gonna always be the best. But you're, you know, you're right. It's funny, I think people, when they're making video think that the picture is the most important thing and it is important. But audio lighting those things are very important too. You can't forget that. So I agree with you. You gotta consider your lighting nowadays because there's so many influencers out there. El Gado is a very good source for portable lights that you can bring with you. They're relatively inexpensive and they're very bright. They do a good job. So look at the El Gado lights. A lot of people use those.

Caller Larry (00:33:50):
And then, then one, one last thing. I, I expect that half these interviews will be done via Zoom or something. How do I Oh, capture. How do I edit that?

Leo Laporte (00:34:01):
That's fine. Zoom will record that for you. Okay. and then you just, you'll get a standard video that you just edit, like anything else. So Yeah, that's, and,

Caller Larry (00:34:09):
And, and I can zoom in on let, let's say, can I do that?

Leo Laporte (00:34:14):
Wouldn't it be funny if you couldn't zoom on Zoom? No, you can't. But <laugh>, you, you know, so you're gonna have the picture, record it in the highest quality you can, but remember when you zoom in, it's gonna get a little more pixelated. You, you probably cannot zoom a whole lot, especially because your subjects are gonna be using junky laptop cameras for the most part. Right. Right. So they're gonna be sending, even if it is 10 80 p it's not gonna be great. 10 80 p So very often the image we get, what are you on right now?

Caller Larry (00:34:46):
I'm on a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro

Leo Laporte (00:34:49):
Looks very good. Yeah. Apple does pretty good jobs on their MacBooks.

Caller Larry (00:34:52):
They, yeah. I, I don't, I still don't think it's 10 80.

Leo Laporte (00:34:55):
No, it's not. They, they just, I think's Yeah, they just went to 10 80. Yeah. Apple's not the best, let's put it that way. I, I still use a standalone camera almost always. So, so if you're gonna be using Zoom, you're gonna have to sa you're gonna sacrifice a little bit. That's right.

Caller Larry (00:35:10):
Yeah. I'm gonna try and get as many of these live as I can. Yeah. there's a, I'm going to a believe, believe it or not, a magic convention in Las Vegas Oh, that's so cool. In August. So I'm gonna try and set up some times to, to, to see people and, and to do this. But I think it's a great way because many of these magicians ended up being real sure stars. Sure. And did lots of stuff at the Magic Castle. Sure. And so it's, it's really more of a, you know, like I said, a passion project. I love I love people that, that kind of, because Leo, back in the day, we didn't get in trouble. We didn't do drugs, stuff like that. We were just nerd, nerd ball just nerds kids. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:35:50):
You know, the magic

Caller Larry (00:35:51):
Nerds and, and, and, and this club, it was really cool because there was no adult supervision. Wow. It was just a bunch of teenagers. When, when I was on this, on this stage with with Steve, I was 17. He was 22.

Leo Laporte (00:36:07):
Wow.

Caller Larry (00:36:08):
And you know, full auditorium in Long Beach with, you know, 250 people. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:36:12):
I, I don't know if you stayed in touch, but if you haven't, I'd love to connect you. I'm sure he'd love to hear from you.

Caller Larry (00:36:16):
Yeah, I, I would love, I I, okay. You know, I just recently went back and looked at his book, you know, the one you mentioned last

Leo Laporte (00:36:22):
Week. Such a good book, isn't it?

Caller Larry (00:36:24):
And he talks

Leo Laporte (00:36:25):
About this the early days. Yeah, yeah. There was something about doing magic. You know, I think a Johnny Carson, Steve Martin, Orson Wells these amateur magicians, you have to learn how to command an audience. Right. It's a, it's very good training, I think for, for

Caller Larry (00:36:42):
Perform. Yeah. But I ended up in my career working in corporate, doing training gigs and leadership development training and so on. And, and all of that work that I did as a performer really helped in doing large speeches and facilitating groups and so on. It's <laugh> It was, it was great. And, and I'm hoping that I can inspire a couple of kids who oh, might go off on a little different direction to say, Hey, let's magic thing pretty cool.

Leo Laporte (00:37:09):
Let's bring back magic. Do people, I mean, yeah, there's Chris Angels, some of these, some of these hip yacht magicians I suppose are inspiring people. But I think a lot of people, Penn and Penn and Teller are pretty amazing. But I think a lot of people think about David Copperfield and stuff. Say That's the old hat. That's old fashioned. I, so I, yeah. Let's get some influencers doing magic <laugh>.

Caller Larry (00:37:30):
Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, funny is still funny, right. In other words, I agree. Agree. I agree. I, I went back and, and looked at two videos that Steve did and it's posted up on this site and they're, they're probably shot again 50 years ago. Wow. They're still funny. I mean, they're funny.

Leo Laporte (00:37:46):
Yeah. He was obviously, he was a great, he is a great, yeah.

Caller Larry (00:37:49):
So I, I'll send you a, a quick email. Please do. And, and, and I'll attach that bill from that, from that show.

Leo Laporte (00:37:58):
That would be great. Cuz then I could send that along leo@leoville.com.

Caller Larry (00:38:02):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:38:02):
Yeah. I will send it along. I can't make any promises, but I, but I would be glad to send it along for

Caller Larry (00:38:06):
You. Okay. Well Leo, thank you so much, Larry, for all the years that so many things I've learned from you and passed on to others. But I always give you credit.

Leo Laporte (00:38:15):
I, well, you don't have to gimme credit. My son does that too. He says, when I win an award, <laugh>, he's a, he's an internet chef, right. And he's, he's doing a lot of great stuff. He says, when I win an award, I'm gonna thank you. I said, you don't have to thank me. You're doing this all on your own. Larry, a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you. Great. And I can't wait to see the documentary. Really look forward to it. All right. You take care now. Do it now. Okay. Okay. Take care. Okay, bye. Bye. coming up in just a little bit, we are gonna talk to the Spaceman, rod Pyle. Also a little later on in the show, Chris Marwat will be joining us, but my producer John Ashley says, take a call. How do I know, which is a call when I see a phone number? That's a call, right? I see a cell phone. That's a call. Which one do you want me to do? Paul call the one that says, Paul, not call Paul and I of, there it is. I see it. Paul, welcome. Press star six to unmute. Hello Paul. It's a phone call. I don't know why I'm doing this. We won't be able to see him in our Stargate. Hi Paul. Hello. Welcome.

Caller Paul (00:39:22):
Yeah. this is Paul from Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville,

Leo Laporte (00:39:26):
Yeah. Louisville. Yeah. Right. That's how you say it. Louisville. It should

Caller Paul (00:39:29):
Be Louisville. Cause we're named after King Louis.

Leo Laporte (00:39:32):
King Louis. That's right. Yeah. Love Louisville. Yeah. What's up Paul? Yeah.

Caller Paul (00:39:36):
Anyway before I get to my a couple security questions, I wanna make a, I'm gonna go comment on the, and who called in last week about Wordle? His wife had like 500 in a row.

Leo Laporte (00:39:55):
Yeah. His wife was like two years straight or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Caller Paul (00:40:00):
Well, lemme just, I've been playing that for about a year. And my highest, and I discovered that I was not on the hard setting. My highest is 136.

Leo Laporte (00:40:11):
Wait a minute. That's not the, that's not the same Wordle. There's no, there's no, oh, you, your eyes is streak, but Wordle doesn't have a high hard setting, does it now? Oh, they've added that. Oh yeah, it does. Oh, they, they didn't used to. Oh. All

Caller Paul (00:40:26):
I, I just recently discovered that if you go into the Senate, I don't

Leo Laporte (00:40:29):
Want any, it's what it does. <Laugh>. Wow. Yeah. Ok. So you've got A3 six in a row. That's pretty good. Alright. Yeah.

Caller Paul (00:40:37):
Well anyway, the reason I thought it was kind of funny was that I'm sure you're aware of where of it, but there's what I like to call the rhyming wall. Wall in that, for example, if you have the word bound, b o u n d. Yeah. And you have the last four letters. O u n d o u

Leo Laporte (00:40:58):
N D.

Caller Paul (00:41:00):
There are like seven other

Leo Laporte (00:41:02):
I got that the other day. I had, I had,

Caller Paul (00:41:05):
You're bound to somewhere along the line, you're bound to not get. Right. That Cause it's based on luck. I just can't see <laugh>. There's

Leo Laporte (00:41:14):
Too, there's too many. I know. It drives me nuts. Yeah. My wife says, well, I just, I start with the most common word. And I said, I don't think that helps <laugh>. I don't, I think it's random. I don't think they're choosing the best known word. I had that happen the other day.

Caller Paul (00:41:32):
Terrible. I started with the first letter. Yeah. Know. And then, and, and then I'll go through all, all of them and then I miss it because I, I didn't, I I, you know, there were too many of rhyming words, but I call up the rhyming wall.

Leo Laporte (00:41:44):
I like that. I've been there, done that and don't like it. By the way, I'm now my John Salinas telling me the hard mo mode and I see the switches. Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses. Well, I always play that way anyway. I, I, that's the normal way to play. Right? Well,

Caller Paul (00:42:01):
Well here's the way I would do, here's, before I discovered that, what I would do is that if I were stuck, I would use, I would sacrifice a letter. You know, for example, I would come up with a word, right, right. That I knew was not in there.

Leo Laporte (00:42:15):
But it would give you a bunch of other letters. But that letter would give

Caller Paul (00:42:18):
Like a, it would gimme two more positions, you know, saying

Leo Laporte (00:42:23):
I've, I've done that as well. Can't do

Caller Paul (00:42:24):
That anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:42:25):
Not in hard mode. You've done that. Yeah. I used to do that too. I can't do that. But I always felt a little like, am I giving up? Cuz you only get what, six guesses. So giving away a whole guess is like is that what you called to ask about, is wordle?

Caller Paul (00:42:41):
Oh, I, I just wanted to make a comment before my security question. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:42:45):
That's right. You had some, because

Caller Paul (00:42:46):
They're really gonna just be opinions. They're not gonna be something where you have to solve a problem.

Leo Laporte (00:42:50):
Oh, thank God.

Caller Paul (00:42:52):
Gimme your opinion.

Caller Paul (00:42:54):
Yeah. Oh yeah. Just gimme your opinion. <Laugh>. first of all, I wanna talk to you about the phone carriers and social engineering or as sim jacking, you know, sim

Leo Laporte (00:43:08):
Jacking. Yes.

Caller Paul (00:43:10):
Right. Well, are you, are there any more, are there any carriers that are better at, at as

Leo Laporte (00:43:20):
Yeah. You know, I don't know. I have a, I have all the carriers as you know, as part of my job. And I I use Google PHI for the most part for my when they written cyst like my bank does and sending me a text message for the second factor. I will use Google Fi, the Google PHI number. Cuz I'm thinking, well, Google probably is better at security plus <laugh>, when you call customer support at Google, no one answers. So it's harder to do the sim jacking. Sim jacking is, is usually a social engineering feat where somebody calls and pretends to be you to the phone company. And, and you know, the, I I remember a very famous example where they would play a recording of a baby crying in the background, and a young woman would say, I can't reach my husband and the, and I have to reach him.

(00:44:07):
We have to take, the baby's got a spiking a fever and I can't. And, and somehow, you know, talk the customer service rep and underscore service, they're there to serve you into thinking she was the wife and giving her the key to this, the, the sim. That of course is something that you can prevent. And almost, I, as far as I know, all of the carriers do this now by having a pin. So if you're worried about sim jacking, somebody pretending to be you getting a new sim sent to them, or getting a phone unlocked so that they can use the eim so that they can then start getting your security codes and so forth. If you're worried about that, put a pin on your account. Okay. I've even heard though, recently of sim jacking. These people are very good social engineers getting around that, but that's a big barrier. It's kind of like two factor, because the thought

Caller Paul (00:45:04):
About that, but I haven't done it yet. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:45:05):
Turn it on. The rep also on the rep is supposed to say, okay, what's your pin before they do anything? And you have to have that. So I would turn that on. I don't think any carrier's been in any other, I haven't heard any reason to think that.

Caller Paul (00:45:18):
Is it also with an iPhone?

Leo Laporte (00:45:21):
Oh yeah. An iPhone. Oh yeah. In fact, it's worse with an iPhone because now they're using ES Simms. So it, you no longer had, you know, in the old days they had to send you a sim, there was this little delay, but now they can use, you can use an EIM to reset this thing. Yeah. That's, that's a problem. If somebody can call up, tell their carrier, Hey, you know, I, I, I don't know what whatever dog shaggy dog story, they, they tell 'em and, and get them to give them a new eim. You're in trouble. You're in trouble. So yeah. Turn on, absolutely. Turn on those those those pins, I think.

Caller Paul (00:45:57):
Yeah, I'll do that.

Leo Laporte (00:45:57):
Yeah. And I don't know if one company's better than the other, as I said, you know, okay. Just in my head, I think Google PHI is better, but I don't know if that's true.

Caller Paul (00:46:06):
Well the, the last security question is another poll that you talked, you and Steve thought about is iot security.

Leo Laporte (00:46:17):
Oh boy. Yeah.

Caller Paul (00:46:18):
And so I had, this is too easy of a solution and I have, or Steve talk about it, so it probably didn't go to work, but few months ago I got a thing in the mail. I currently have at t Fiber my internet service, but I got this thing in the mail for global 5G home service. Yeah. 55 bucks a month. Yeah. So I thought, well, wait a minute. I wonder if that would be an expensive solution to having that service in addition to my regular ATM

Leo Laporte (00:46:58):
As a redundancy. Right.

Caller Paul (00:47:01):
And put the eight, put the cameras and things, the IOT devices, ah, on the t t-mobile. What do you think about that as? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:47:09):
I mean, it's expensive. It's an additional 55 bucks a month, but that's not a bad idea. You have two separate networks. You need two separate routers. Although, wait a minute, now, let me think about that. That T-mobile and Verizon does this too. Residential thing is a wifi device. Right. So you just have them play beyond that. Yeah. That's a good, that's a very good idea. If you don't mind spending 55 bucks a month. Yeah. But they're completely

Caller Paul (00:47:31):
Separat. I thought about that. I dunno if I wanna do that. I, I've thought about maybe calling them, asking about that, you know, but

Leo Laporte (00:47:37):
I have I have the Verizon one, which is 25 bucks if you're already a Verizon subscriber. And I was very impressed by it. If you're close enough to the 5G tower, speed is good and consistent, which was worrying me a little bit. 25 bucks might be worth it, but 55, I dunno. I'll

Caller Paul (00:47:55):
Tell you, they're, they're not gonna any anyway near

Leo Laporte (00:47:58):
Not your fiber. No, no, no, no. But they're fine for iot. Yeah, they're fine for iot. Yeah, yeah,

Caller Paul (00:48:04):
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:48:05):
That's not a bad idea. I like it. If you don't mind spending the money, I think that's a good solution. Now, here's the one issue.

Caller Paul (00:48:10):
Hey, well, I'm surprised. I thought, I thought that you and Steve would have probably talked about that, but I don't, haven't heard it from you.

Leo Laporte (00:48:16):
Steve's not the most Steve is very conservative about new technology. Yeah. As you probably noticed. And so, oh, now he's not gonna, he's not gonna jump on the 5G residential bandwagon at any time soon. Me, that's my job. Right. I'm the early adopter. I try all this stuff because I wanna be able to talk about it to you. So my experience with it was, it was very good. I think this is a good idea. If you don't mind spending the money. Now, I have to say you know, the, the one issue with Steve's three dumb router method with a V A N certainly with this is there are some devices, not all, but some devices that you have to be on the same network as the device to control it. So for instance if I want to control I think maybe my Amazon devices, right?

(00:49:09):
And I think they think of this as security. I have to put, I have two VLANs in my house. I have Mora, which is the the secure VLAN for computers, for phones. And I have Godzilla, which is the separate, you know, walled off network for IOT devices. But if I wanna control my, you know, do my settings on my Echo or whatever, I have to actually join Godzilla. So you would have that pro potentially that problem that, oh, I've gotta switch over to the T-mobile network now to do things like play music or whatever. Not all of them. You have to understand how this works. In some cases, the device wants to talk directly over the same LAN to the iot device. Your, your phone or your computer to the IOT device. In some cases it goes out to a server and then back down.

(00:50:02):
In those cases, you don't have to worry about it. But in a case where you need to talk directly, you're gonna have to, you know, switch networks. Basically. I found out, I ended up putting most of our printers on the secure on Mora, on the secure network because I couldn't print <laugh> and I couldn't, I had to explain every time to Lisa. Yeah, you have to change to Godzilla if you wanna print. That didn't work so well. So that's something to be aware of. We've just got a couple of minutes till Rod Pyle joins us. Our spaceman, scooter X did send me an interesting news story. The F C C has announced a privacy task force with rules to protect sim jacking. I have to say I'm really pleased with the new chairperson. Jessica Rosen, Wassel of the fcc, she's very computer savvy and internet.

(00:50:52):
She's young, right? So she's, she's not a, a fuddy duddy. It, it has still has to be adopted by a full vote of the commission. But the idea is to protect consumers from sim swapping and poured out fraud. It doesn't, you know, this, this press release is nice, but it doesn't really explain how they're gonna do that. The task force coordinates across the agency on rulemaking enforcement. Yeah, I, you know, scooter X, did you read this? I can't figure out what they're proposing. The proposed report and order would revise the fccs consumer proprietary network information, CP N I and local number portability rules to require wireless providers to adopt secure methods of authenticating a customer before redirecting a phone number to a new device or provider. It sounds like they're gonna say, well, they have to have a pin or something like that.

(00:51:46):
It would also require wireless providers to immediately notify This is good customers when a SIM change report out request is made on your account. So at least you'd get a notice. Hey your wife just called with a baby crying in the background. We've, we've switched your phone to her. Is that okay? And you could say no. So I'm glad the fccs get involved. This, you know, it's weird that they weren't, it's weird that they didn't have rules on this, but now they at least are thinking about it. They haven't yet voted. Yes. you know, and the whole, the argument against it, of course it's a burden on the poor carriers who are just struggling by these small companies at Verizon and T-Mobile and at t just barely making it. And so, really we have to do pins. Really. Alright. Rod Pop coming up in just a little bit.

(00:52:37):
Our show today brought to you by a c i learning, I know you know the name it Pro. We've been talking about IT pro for a decade since they started as part of a c i learning. Now IT PRO has elevated, they're already highly entertaining bingeable short format content, you know, the number keeps going up. It used to be 6,800 hours, then it was 7,000 hours. Now it's 7,200 hours of on demand content to choose from. And it's, it's not, it's all fresh. They're making it fresh every day, Monday through Friday, and there's six studios every day. New episodes are added. A ACI learning provides world-class service from assisting you in choosing what learning path suits you best, all the way through helping you find the right career opportunity. You could fortify your expertise with access to self-paced IT training videos, interactive practice labs, certification practice tests one of one of it pro ACI learnings learners Felipe b tells us.

(00:53:41):
Wes, he was talking about one of the great edutain here. Wes. Wes is an awesome instructor, passed my two 20 dash 1101 on July 4th on the first try. Congratulations, Felipe. I come from a PA PR background, so not much knowledge in it, but I love it. So far, so many people switching careers into it. This is a great career to be in. He manages Felipe B goes on to say, Wes manages to explain concepts in a way you understand very well. Can't wait to start 2 20 11 0 2 now. That's so great. Congratulations, Felipe. Don't miss ACI Learnings Practice labs where you can test and experiment before deploying new apps or updates without compromising your live system. This is great for MSPs who are doing training with their team. They can, they can set stuff up and, hey, if it doesn't work, you just close the tab, start over, retake, practice it.

(00:54:35):
Certification tests. That's right. You have practice exams, so when you take the real test, you're ready for it. ACI Learning brings you IT. Practice exam questions from Microsoft, CompTIA, EC Council, pmi, all of the big certs. Look it, this is the bottom line. You can access every vendor, every skill you need to advance your IT career in one place. A C learning. They're the only official video training for CompTIA, Microsoft IT training, Cisco training, Linux training, apple Training, security Cloud and more. And of course, your personal account managers there for you every step of the way to make sure you're getting just what you need to be successful in your field. Like Felipe, learn it. Pass your certs, get your dream job. And oh yes, if you've got a business with an IT team, don't forget. ACI Learning has great training for you too. Learn more about ACI learning's, premium training options across Audit IT and cybersecurity readiness. Go dot aci learning.com/twit for individuals. Use the code TWIT 30, you'll get 30% off a standard or premium individual IT pro membership go dot aci learning.com/twit. We thank him so much for their support of Ask the Tech guys in this case. One guy Mike has got the week off, but I'm not alone. Let's play the Space Force theme.

(00:56:03):
Here's Rod Pile, the author of Look, I got the, I got the Pile pile, I've got the Interplanetary Robots. True stories of space exploration. I've got amazing stories of the Space Age. I've got Blueprint for a Battlestar. This guy's prolific. I've got of course, the Ad Astra magazine, which he edits for Space Society, the national space. And this is my favorite. Put this out on the anniversary of the first moon landing. First on the moon. What a beautiful book. Hi, rod Pyle.

Rod Pyle (00:56:38):
Hi Leo. How are

Leo Laporte (00:56:38):
You? Great to see you. Are you on your boat in Long Beach?

Rod Pyle (00:56:43):
Oh, I hope so. There's an awful lot of water around if I'm hand <laugh>. Hey, thanks for the book spread. That never happens.

Leo Laporte (00:56:52):
You have written how many books? Total? More than I ever wrote.

Rod Pyle (00:56:56):
20 if you include the NASA books.

Leo Laporte (00:56:59):
Wow. And are you working on a book right now?

Rod Pyle (00:57:03):
Well, I'm trying to you know, a few years ago if my agent sent stuff out, there was five or six publishers that were just kind of, at least one of them would sort of automatically snap up a contract. That's not happening. Now. It's a little slower.

Leo Laporte (00:57:17):
Oh yeah. That's life, right? Everything's slowing down all of

Rod Pyle (00:57:20):
A

Leo Laporte (00:57:20):
Sudden. Yeah. Yeah. I don't get it. So

Rod Pyle (00:57:22):
There, you know, there's some alternative publishers coming along and, and they're good hungrier. But the market's constantly changing. And every time I talk to my agent, he says, well, I say, how's the industry going? Goes, well, not as good as last time we spoke. And that's, that's a pretty regular thing for us. But yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:57:39):
Book, you know, you know people still read books. I listen to books all the time. Yeah. But I don't go to a bookstore to buy 'em anymore. I guess

Rod Pyle (00:57:47):
That's the thing. And a lot of people just aren't reading 'em in, in print and Right. But there's so much available online. It's, it can be hard to get people to, to part with 15 or 20 bucks. It's the

Leo Laporte (00:57:57):
Same for podcasting. I mean, there's so much. We're competing with a million other things you could be doing. Oh

Rod Pyle (00:58:03):
My God. God, you guys are getting hammered. It's not fair. Well, it's,

Leo Laporte (00:58:07):
But you know, it's great. I got, it's great for consumers cuz we have, you know, an infinite amount of content. It might be a little overwhelming sometimes, but at least there's no lack of stuff to consume. But it's not great so much for the creators. <Laugh>.

Rod Pyle (00:58:21):
Yes. No, you've probably seen, I, you do a lot of reading and I, I know you've seen those articles that were translated into Hindi and then back into English there probably.

Leo Laporte (00:58:29):
Oh, I see those.

Rod Pyle (00:58:30):
Yes. I think I've seen a couple that I wrote that had been cross trans. Oh, that's terrible.

Leo Laporte (00:58:35):
Oh, that's terrible.

Rod Pyle (00:58:36):
Wait, I wrote that <laugh>. That's,

Leo Laporte (00:58:39):
Oh, that's, it's terrible. Oh,

Rod Pyle (00:58:42):
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:58:43):
That's, that's just outright thievery, you know. So what's happening in this space world? You join us once a month to talk about, you know, space stuff. Yeah. It, it feels like things have also slowed down a little there. Or is that just my imagination?

Rod Pyle (00:59:01):
No, the investment slowed down a little bit. I mean, NASA's going at the same pace they always do, although the current budget may be flattening a bit. So they may have to trim a few things, which nobody's happy about. But, you know, if government's cutting back, government's cutting back. But internationally there's a big story that we covered on Friday on this weekend's space. But it was just a quick headline dip. India is launching, or did launch rather on Friday, Chandry three, which is a robotic lander and rover to the moon. And this follows Chandry two, which was launched in 2019, which crashed, unfortunately, they think due to a software error. This new one, Chand three will be landing on August 23rd if successful. That'll make India the fourth country to land robots on the moon.

Leo Laporte (00:59:52):
It's got a little crowded up there. We got the us we got China, we got India, who's the fourth country

Rod Pyle (00:59:59):
Russia. Russia

(01:00:00):
<laugh>. They, they landed to managed to land a a number of Lco Luna robots, which did quite well back in the seventies. That's, and they've got another one going up, we think next year, but, oh, really? But this one's cool because besides the fact it's India, there's a couple of really big cool factors here. One is, it's the first one to go to the South Pole, which is where we think all those big water deposits are. Ah, so that's, that could change a lot of things in terms of how excited people get about this. But the other thing is, and what really boggles my mind, it's India. So the total cost of this mission, and it's not clear if this includes operations, but so far, at least the cost of this mission is 73 million, which is a rounding error for us stuff. Little more than a rounding error. I mean, if the US did this, it would probably be 500 to 800 million, but 73 million is a real bar. The downside is it's very small. The rover's only about 57 pounds for comparison. Perseverance is about 2,200 pounds. Yeah. It's, and it's only gonna last about two weeks. The, the lunar day. So it's landing early in the two week lunar day. And we'll rve around for two weeks and sniff rocks and look for water deposits and, you know, do some prospecting. So we know it's up there. And I apologize, there's a helicopter going overhead.

Leo Laporte (01:01:15):
That's all right. I can hear you. Here they come. They're coming for you, rod. Well,

Rod Pyle (01:01:24):
Hey, there's a bunch of black suburbans pulling up on the dock

Leo Laporte (01:01:27):
<Laugh>. If, if six Navy seals come down ropes well, it was nice knowing you. And we'll see you next time.

Rod Pyle (01:01:35):
Oh, they just swim over and climb over the transit <laugh>. So Yeah, it's affordable, you know, and that, that's a great thing about the Indian program in China too. To an extent they can afford to do more with the same amount of money than we can, because, you know, the pay scales there and so forth. And also, interestingly, India has a really, really high percentage of women working on their, their space program, something over 50%.

Leo Laporte (01:02:00):
And I think it's, I mean, it's, it's co it's cooperative, not competitive, right? I mean, we scientists share what they learn with everybody else, right? They don't keep it to themselves. Russia might, but, well, it depends

Rod Pyle (01:02:11):
Who you talk to. You know, if you talk to the scientists, they say, yeah, you know, we're into sharing. And, and the governments know, some of the other countries doing this tend to want to share, you know, after they've had a profound success. NASA's a little more transparent than that. But if you talk to people in Congress, it's looked at, at least in terms of China and Russia, very much as a competition. Oh, that's too bad. About a month ago, meaningfully India signed onto the Artemis Accords just a day after Ecuador did good. Which are the agreements between the US and NASA and other countries to support our lunar landing program and participate in the lunar landing program. So that was a big step. So yeah, it really is very cooperative. And India's been a good partner so far.

Leo Laporte (01:02:57):
I have to note that it was on this day, 54 years ago that Apollo 11 was launched. This is the month, this is the months that we landed on the moon 54 years ago. It's pretty exciting.

Rod Pyle (01:03:13):
We go, we have to go to our Noom apps and see what we can eat to celebrate

Leo Laporte (01:03:17):
<Laugh>. I'll have a hotdog please. <Laugh>. Oh my dog. Yeah. if you wanna celebrate this 50 54. This was the 50th anniversary in 2019, but it's now 54. Yeah. Years later. Still to this day the space mission, we all, we all think about when we think of success in space are, how important is a manned mission like this com. Certainly, psychologically it's important, but from scientific point of view, compared to say what the Indian mission is doing, aren't we learning more from the rovers than we learned from human exploration?

Rod Pyle (01:03:57):
No, no, actually. Well, no, cuz the good thing about a rover is it's got some instrumentation on site that Apollo didn't have. But Apollo, as you say, was 50 plus years ago. People work much faster. And they have intuitive abilities. You know, you ask any, any planetary geologist and they'll say, man, if I was up on Mars, I could do what, what the perseverance rover's done in a couple of years. The

Leo Laporte (01:04:21):
Best,

Rod Pyle (01:04:22):
You know, they're just fast. And because the spacecraft are bigger, you can carry a lot more instrumentation and so forth. But as you point out, you know, there's also the psychological factor of national prestige and so forth, which is a lot of what's driving Indian China right now, you know? Yeah. They just, they, they wanna hit these milestones. Yeah. and again, you know, those Luna resources are a big asset in terms of all the stuff you could do with water once you find it. You can make rocket fuel, you can make breathable oxygen, drinkable water. There's also metal on the moon, tons of glass. So

Leo Laporte (01:04:53):
It really is about manned missions, or human, I should say, or per peopled missions in the long run. Cause we wanna send women up there for sure. Yeah,

Rod Pyle (01:05:02):
Yeah, yeah. Ultimately, I mean, that, that's where the, where the big money is. But you know, as you point out, I mean, we've learned so much of the robotic missions, they'll always go first and they're the precursors. Right. There's also another interesting story if you've got time. Sure. Which I like to call, don't take.

Leo Laporte (01:05:19):
Is it gonna be about the hard seltzer in space

Rod Pyle (01:05:23):
<Laugh>? No, it's about solar climate engineering

Leo Laporte (01:05:28):
Solar. Oh yeah. Oh, are you talking about cuz we had the first attempt to generate electricity in space this month, right? No, no.

Rod Pyle (01:05:39):
Yeah, yeah. There was this very small experiment to, to generate and beam electricity back to earth, which you bring. It's a good point you bring up because that is something that if deployed on a big enough scale could really put a dent in climate

Leo Laporte (01:05:52):
Change. Daniel Suarez has written about that. And it's right. It's, it's, it's doable. It's just the will to do it as always. And the will to spend. Yeah.

Rod Pyle (01:06:00):
That was something pioneered in the US in the seventies and then Yeah. Moved on to Asia and not Japan and China are looking at it. We're starting to look at it again. Now. This is climate geoengineering. This is the idea of injecting large amounts of aerosol particulates into the upper atmosphere. Oh. To try and reflect some of the sunlight back.

Leo Laporte (01:06:20):
This is what Neil Stevenson wrote about in <laugh>, what was it the term? 70? No, not seventies, the most recent one term. Termination shock. Termination shock. He had a giant gun firing <laugh> stuff in the atmosphere.

Rod Pyle (01:06:36):
So they're talking about, I mean, there's various ways to do it. You,

Leo Laporte (01:06:38):
There's, there's a problem at least in termination shock, which is you change, you fix the climate in one area, but you make it worse in other <laugh> the other areas. Well,

Rod Pyle (01:06:48):
So that's the, the big story here, you know, this is something that's been talked about for a long time. Very little experimentation done. But the big story is that the, what is it? The national Atmospheric research Research and something council, I've messed up my, those

Leo Laporte (01:07:05):
Guys. Those, yeah. Those guys. Yeah. Those

Rod Pyle (01:07:07):
Guys have a new super computer that's three and a half times faster as his predecessor. It's called Derecho, which means straight on hurricane in Spanish. And they're modeling, trying to model in advance what might happen if they try this. So basically it's like a, a human made huge volcanic eruption. Right. With stuff that's less toxic than sulfides. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:07:29):
The theory is, if you block some of the sun's energy coming to the surface, you might fix the overheating. The problem is, it also drastically changes the climate in unpredictable ways, cuz it's a chaotic system. Right. And some people may not be happy about what happens when you do

Rod Pyle (01:07:48):
This. Well, yeah. And so there's a little bit of a duck and cover aspect here, right? So there is concern about that, which is why they're using this new supercomputer. And I imagine eventually, hopefully it'd be able to use quantum computing to try and predict, you know, how this might, so one big concern is rainfall patterns and tropical storms, you know, how's it gonna affect that? Are they gonna get outta control?

Leo Laporte (01:08:09):
Well, this is what we've learned, isn't it? It's, it's happening right now where you have a heat dome over the US and we're getting the hottest temperatures ever. But that doesn't mean it's hot everywhere. It's cool and cooler in other places as a result. It's an uneven here. What, what's the temperature there in beautiful

Rod Pyle (01:08:29):
72

Leo Laporte (01:08:30):
Long Beach, what we're getting in the nineties up here. That's crazy.

Rod Pyle (01:08:34):
Well, when I go back up to Alhambra this afternoon, it'll be back up in the nineties. Yeah. But we're enjoying it all. We can't. I bet. I mean, the nice thing about doing this, this stuff in the atmosphere though, is if you foul it up, you can back off really fast. Right. There are other plans to put stuff out into space big, you know, swarms of spacecraft or some kind of particulate matter that would block sunlight out there. And basically you just build this big shield and leave it there if it's in the right orbit. Right, right. Problem is, if it doesn't work or if it creates more problems than it solves, you're sort of stuck with it. You know, it's

Leo Laporte (01:09:08):
Like a giant umbrella.

Rod Pyle (01:09:11):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Eventually that stuff will fall out and they'd have to do it fairly often. I was surprised though, that the costs, at least for pilot programs, are not as much as you'd expect. Yeah. They're the tens of billions as opposed to many billions of dollars. So this is something that could actually be done, at least to find out if it's gonna, if it's gonna work without making things worse. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:32):
Yeah. I think it was sulfur that they were firing up into the atmosphere to change the climate. But the problem was it was causing drought in some parts of the

Rod Pyle (01:09:43):
World and it causes acid, rain, and a, a bunch of other stuff. Yeah. I mean, the good thing about sulfurs is that that's what volcanoes do. So we kind of understand that. Right. There's also they've been looking at calcite or even just plain old salt that will do the same thing. Basically, you're kind of seeding clouds. Okay. And just, you know, you try it in a small version first Exactly. To make sure that what you want. Let's do a pilot, pilot program. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:10:09):
Let's do a pilot. Hey, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. Rod Pyle Rod is the host. If you love space, you gotta listen to this Week in Space. It's our weekly show. Rod hosts it with te malick of space.com a And what I love lately is he's been having a lot of great guests on, and it really is fun to hear different voices talking about different aspects of space exploration. It is an exciting

Rod Pyle (01:10:33):
Time. We're having a blast doing it. Good. So thanks to you guys.

Leo Laporte (01:10:36):
Well, and it's, it's one of our fastest growing shows. So good job on your part too. This week in space is at twit tv slash twists. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to it. Just search for this week in space. And of course you can always

Rod Pyle (01:10:49):
Search and I have lots of cool sunglasses.

Leo Laporte (01:10:51):
Do you? Is that Yes. Is that your thing? Now see, I have socks,

Rod Pyle (01:10:54):
That's my thing. Socks. I try wear

Leo Laporte (01:10:56):
Socks. But but unfortunately today I had my socks match my shirt and I look like Michael Jackson. It's not a good penny. Penny loafers and White Sox not. It turns out a very good thank you for that overhead shot. I appreciate that. Yeah. Bonito. Let's

Rod Pyle (01:11:10):
See a moonwalk. My,

Leo Laporte (01:11:13):
I almost wore one glittery glove. Hey, thank you. It's so great to see you Rod pile. I miss doing this every week with you, but I'm glad we could talk every month and keep up the great work on this weekend's space. Thank you.

Caller Brian (01:11:24):
Really appreciate it.

Leo Laporte (01:11:24):
You too. Have, have a great day, rod. Take care. Mark. I'm sorry, Brian on the line, our next caller via Zoom. Hello, Brian. Come on down into the Stargate, join us. It's great to see you. You're you're in the ocean today.

Caller Brian (01:11:45):
Hey, can you hear me? I hear

Leo Laporte (01:11:46):
You Great. Yes, welcome.

Caller Brian (01:11:48):
Okay, good. Now that's a picture of the beach here in Destin.

Leo Laporte (01:11:52):
Ah, it's so gorgeous. I, we're in

Caller Brian (01:11:53):
Destin, Florida. I

Leo Laporte (01:11:54):
Love that. Everybody's got green screens now. It's amazing. <Laugh>

Caller Brian (01:11:58):
Amazing. Yeah. Well, you don't wanna see you the all the junk in the back of my office

Leo Laporte (01:12:01):
Here, and that's why they do it, right? Yeah,

Caller Brian (01:12:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:12:05):
What can we do for you today, Brian?

Caller Brian (01:12:07):
So the time has come got the word from my girlfriend. You really need to look into hearing aids.

Leo Laporte (01:12:14):
Oh, yeah.

Caller Brian (01:12:15):
And I said, you know, Leo mentioned that about a year or so ago. Oh. But he asked what he did.

Leo Laporte (01:12:20):
It's always the spouse. Right. So there's two different, there's two different routes by the way. My audiologist told me. The reason is it's often the, for guys, it's often a, a female girlfriend or a wife because their voices that are higher register a little higher is right where our, you know, reduction in hearing is. So, in fact, it's harder for us to hear female voices than it is the lower male voice.

Caller Brian (01:12:47):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:12:48):
It makes sense that that's

Caller Brian (01:12:49):
Never had a guy tell me that, that I think, yeah. I, no. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:12:51):
You know, guys don't care. You can't hear me. I don't care. I can't hear you. So there's two paths these days. Now, and this is the good news, because the FDA approved and it took them many years that actually Congress approved. It took the FDA many years to get around to approving it over the counter hearing aids. So on the one hand, you have the very expensive audiologists supported hearing aids from companies like Starkey and Resound and acon. There're many companies, a

Caller Brian (01:13:23):
Ton of

Leo Laporte (01:13:23):
Them. Yeah. So, and, and I, you know, it's interesting, you know, Adam Curry has been very strongly outspoken against over-the-counter hearing aids, he says, and he's not wrong. There's a huge benefit to going to an audiologist. They test your hearing, they can give you a lot of advice about what's going on, and then they will sell you $6,000 hearing aids that are not covered by insurance or Medicare or anything. And that's infuriating. And it's, and it's really out of reach for most people. Those, those hearing aids, I, I've worn both Starkey and Resounds. I think right now Starkey has probably the cutting edge, but they're not nearly as cutting edge as what Silicon Valley has started to come up with. So these over-the-counter hearing aids, it is said, are fine for people with low to moderate hearing loss. If you have severe profound hearing loss, obviously you, you've gotta go to an audiologist and get a consultation. But it, but for most of us, because we're aging, we lose the high frequencies and and over-the-counter hearing aid can and often handle that very well. I have not tried the over-the-counter hearing aids. I actually, I don't, I really don't wear my hearing aids very often, by the way, this is another problem. My audiologist says, if you don't, you gotta wear 'em,

Caller Brian (01:14:46):
Dude. You don't use them.

Leo Laporte (01:14:47):
Yeah. and, but it's not uncommon. It, and it's partly because there is a, a stigma associated with wearing hearing aids. Although modern hearing aids, the battery and the electronics are behind the ear, and there's just a tiny filament going into the ear. You'd really have to look to see them, especially if you're, you have short hair, but if your hair's even a little bit longer, it pretty much hides that mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. but I do think the stigma is going away because so many people now wear headphones and, and Apple AirPods and stuff in their ears. It's less of a stigma than it used to be. But that is the thinking behind these, over the counter hearing aids is that, well, you know, maybe people just think you're wearing earbuds. In fact, apple has moved farther and farther in the direction of really providing hearing support.

(01:15:33):
There's a good article by Kevin Tofl on Stacy Higginbotham's site, Stacy on iot, about using apple's AirPods, AirPods pros specifically as, I don't wanna say hearing aids, but hearing support now you have to keep 'em in and the battery life isn't as good. So you might need to buy a couple of sets so you can swap 'em out, things like that. But the idea is, Apple's starting to offer a few features that are really interesting, transparency, but it's adaptive. This is gonna be a new feature of iOS 17 where it notices where you are with the noise. If there's a, you know, jackhammer, it'll re, it'll give you better noise protection. But if somebody's speaking to you, it'll actually boost that voice. And as you turn towards that person, which you tend to do, and somebody's speaking to you, it will say, okay, we're gonna amplify this direction and this voice. And they can actually work to some degree, to, to mitigate hearing loss. Reid Tap. Can, I

Caller Brian (01:16:31):
Dunno if you had, the problem I do is I go to a party and there's a bunch of conversations going on in a room, and I can hear the one across the room beautifully with the guy next to me. I have trouble hearing. So

Leo Laporte (01:16:41):
That's, that's exactly what any hearing aid should do. And Apple's very much doing This is tuning out the background noise. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and focusing it Starkey's resounds. And others have settings, like a party mode setting designed for this. Restaurants are a big one too. Most restaurants are way too loud. Mm-Hmm. And, and you hear all this background noise and you can't hear your, your partner as you're having dinner. So most of them will have some form of noise reduction and a directional feature. So this is all designed to help. But here's the thing that I learned. One of the reasons I got hearing aids is so that we could talk about this. I knew the over the counter was coming, and I knew people would wanna know. One of the things that happens with hearing aids is I, I expect for instance, to hear everything better.

(01:17:32):
And it isn't that hearing aids are not designed to improve your hearing. They're designed to, and this is a really important point to improve your comprehension of speakers who are speaking to you. So it's focused on the vocal frequencies, not the other ones. So it's not like music sounds better. It's not like you're hearing everything better. You're just able to understand people speaking to you better. That's a really important distinction. I was disappointed. I thought, well, it's gonna fix my hearing. Now. The good news is that's what AirPods are starting to do, and other devices where they do a hearing test and they amplify all the frequencies you're losing so that you get a, what you used to hear as a young person, get a full frequency reproduction. That's a very different thing than what a hearing aid is designed to do. So when you go into an audiologist and get a hearing aid, what you'll notice immediately is you don't hear any better <laugh>.

(01:18:28):
You just can understand what people are saying better and which is fine, but it's not exactly what I expected. You also hear high frequencies, at least for me, and I think probably for most people, it's the high frequencies that go as you age. Yeah. you also hear high frequencies. You stopped hearing like your feet on carpets, <laugh>, and the rustle of your clothing. Everything gets kind of weirdly. Wow. I, I've been missing that, but I know my, that noisy, I didn't really miss that <laugh>. So I'm, I'm very excited about the promise of, of what Apple and other companies Samsung are doing. And over the counter hearing aids, you might try. Do you use AirPods?

Caller Brian (01:19:12):
Yeah, I'm in right now.

Leo Laporte (01:19:13):
Okay. So you might try, there's a, a, a program, this is what Kevin Tofl recommended, called Mimi on the iPhone that does a hearing test. And you can do it with your, your AirPods and it can adjust. And Apple's adding this, I think iOS 17 will have this it will adjust your audio to match what you can hear. I tried recently I did a little mini review of the Deon pearls, P e r l earbuds. These are, these do an automatic hearing test. They place sounds into your ear for about a minute. You don't do anything. And then they adjust the sound. They do a pretty good job of adjusting the sound. So if you wanna hear more music, more you accurately everything that's a good way to go. And because of the new transparency features, the adaptive transparency features in the AirPods Pro, they may well be enough for your girlfriend.

(01:20:12):
You wear them when you go to, you know, now she may say, why are you always wearing your AirPods? And and I think that that's one of the things that's gonna change if people are gonna get used to that. But you will hear her better. You will hear less background noise. It actually adjusts to the speaker. It could do some really cool things that a normal hearing aid does not do. So I think in the long run we're gonna see some much more innovative, interesting stuff from the, from the tech companies with over the counter stuff. This is a huge market. Is it there

Caller Brian (01:20:45):
Yet? Or this is something

Leo Laporte (01:20:47):
That's Well, it's

Leo Laporte (01:20:48):
On the horizon. Well, it's on the horizon. Read Kevin Fels article. I think he makes he tells you how to do it. He describes Mimi and, and and the settings you need to do. And I do think that iOS 17 in the new transparent this is coming to the AirPods, bro, the adaptive transparency is perhaps gonna be enough if it's just, so this is the two roads to take. If what you really want is, I just wanna hear people talking to me. They're complaining. Yeah. I'm not hearing what they're saying. My girlfriend, my wife isn't Go to an audiologist. If you can afford it, spend 6,000 bucks that will fix that. If you wanna hear everything better music and everything better, then the AirPod Pros or some of these newer devices, like the dead on pearls, are there a lot less expensive.

(01:21:36):
You know, an AirPod Pro, which is about 200 bucks, you get five of them for a thousand bucks and you'd never run outta battery, or you probably don't need more than three. That's a considerable savings. So especially if you have very mild or moderate hearing loss, it might be worth trying this first before you $6,000 is a lot of, it's a lot. And it's very frustrating to me. You know, I, I bought my mom a pair of $6,000 resounds, or maybe they were Starkey. My father-in-law, I gave him my old pair when I tried another brand. The new Starkeys at which I have tried out are very, very good. And they do some of this adaptive stuff. They're, you know, they're getting, they see the competition coming down the road from Silicon Valley, and they're getting better. Mm-Hmm.

(01:22:26):
<affirmative>, but they're still a little fuddy daddy. They're a little old fashioned. So it's so expensive. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. I don't know. It bugs me that Medicare doesn't cover this. One of the things we know is that cognitive impairment is associated with hearing loss, and they think it's because you're getting more isolated from the world. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so your, your brain isn't as active. And so it's really important to keep your hearing up, just like it's important to keep your mobility up as we age. So I, I would, I wouldn't put this off. I would investigate it. And maybe since you've already got the AirPods, read Kevin's article it's on Stacy on iot. I'll put a link in the show notes and, and just try that. And I do think iOS 17, which is now out in public beta is gonna add some of these features. They have to up update the firmware. I think they're right now beta testing the firmware update on the AirPods. So that should be in the next few months.

Caller Brian (01:23:24):
Awesome. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (01:23:25):
Yeah. Great question. I appreciate it. Obviously you hear Okay. Right. It's just mild at this point.

Caller Brian (01:23:31):
It's, it's if I'm not looking at her and she's in the other part of the room, or the worst is when you go out to a restaurant or you're at a party hear. Yeah. I can't hear people straight across from me. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:41):
A hearing aid,

Caller Brian (01:23:42):
I'm reading lips. A lot of times a

Leo Laporte (01:23:43):
Hearing aid will fix that for sure. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. Yeah. Thank you. End up. Thank you. You end up adapting with other little tricks to keep people from knowing. Right. You don't hear what they're saying. Everybody's mumbling. All of a sudden. That's, my dad used to say that. Why is stop mumbling. I'm mumbling, dad. I'm not mumbling

Caller Brian (01:24:00):
<Laugh>. When I watch movies, I have to have closed caption on. Well, we

Leo Laporte (01:24:03):
All do. That's normal. That's right. Don't, don't judge your hearing by that. Hey, a pleasure talking to you. Have a wonderful day in beautiful Florida. Take care. I hope it's not too hot there for you.

Caller Brian (01:24:13):
It's terrible. <Laugh>. It's impressive.

Leo Laporte (01:24:16):
Oh, and it's humid too, right? Oh,

Caller Brian (01:24:18):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:24:18):
Yeah. Stay, stay inside then. Have a great day. Take care. Yep. Yeah. Take care. Appreciate it. Alright. Coming up in about half an hour, Chris Marquardt, our photo guy is gonna join us. But before we go to our next call, I think I should talk a little bit about my sheets. You know, as it gets hot, our sponsors brooklinen as it gets hot sometimes. Believe it or not, your sheets can become oppressive. Sleeping during the hot summer can be really tough. Whether you're trying to nap after some fun in the sun or you're just struggling to stay cool at night. I want you to check out Brook Linn's Award-winning bedding Brook Linen founded in Brooklyn in 2014 by Rich and Vicky. Their mission is to provide you with hotel quality, luxury bedding delivered directly to your door at a fair price. And I have to say, you can spend a lot for sheets.

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Brook linen, long staple cotton, everything they create is built to last. These are really nice sheets at a lot less than you'd pay for other people's stuff. Shop in store or online@brooklinen.com right now. Give yourself the cooling sleep you deserve. This summer offer code tech guy gets you $20 off your online purchase of a hundred dollars or more. Plus free shipping. Go to brook linen.com. That's B R O O K L I N E N. See it's a play on brooklyn brook linen.com. Use the promo code tech guy singular for $20 off, plus free shipping. We thank you so much, Linn, for supporting. Ask the Tech guy, should we do another phone call? You know, this is not in any chronological order. Is it? It looks like this wireless caller I think has been holding on the longest, so I'm gonna try them. My mom asked me, I was on the phone with my mom, who's 90 now, and wonderful. Very sharp. What's a meme? <Laugh>. And I had a, I had a, a little bit of difficulty, a long conversation with her, but yes, I know what you're thinking, John. It started with Richard Dawkins in the Selfish Gene. We'll talk about that in just a bit. What's your press star six. I think you did. I think I hear our caller. What's your first name and what city are you calling from?

Caller Wallace (01:28:28):
Wallace from Sacramento.

Leo Laporte (01:28:29):
Hey, is it Paul you said?

Caller Wallace (01:28:32):
Wallace. Wallace.

Leo Laporte (01:28:33):
Hi, Wallace from Sacramento. Welcome. What's up?

Caller Wallace (01:28:37):
Thanks Leo. Say I have a T-Mobile home internet and I wanted to have multiple ethernet tables come out of it. So I hooked it up to an old as RT 1200 router. And they, this firmware expired in March of 20. Is there any guess it's just security risk, huh?

Leo Laporte (01:29:03):
Well, I'll tell you a little bit more about this. Yeah, yeah. So first of all, this is what the earlier caller was talking about. This is what they now call this residential service using 5g. So T-Mobile and Verizon both offer it. If you're near a 5G tower, it can give you very speedy internet service. My daughter who lived near the freeway was getting 120 megabits down and about 30 or 40 up. Are you getting speeds close to that?

Caller Wallace (01:29:32):
I don't think so. The only problem I have is the TV is spotty when you hook it up

Leo Laporte (01:29:37):
To Yeah. So T-mobile and that's, so that's gonna be really the con the, the gating factor here is how close you are to those 5G towers. Cuz she was very close to the freeway, which is where most of the 5G towers are. She was getting very consistent high speed bandwidth. But this will not work as well for other people. And even though T-Mobile or Verizon may offer it in your area, does necessary, does not necessarily mean you're gonna get the best performance. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is it's a wifi device, so it's designed for you to join it via wifi. For most people, that's kind of how they use it. In order to have multiple wired devices on it, you does it, I don't know the T-mobile device, does it have an extra, an ethernet port on the back of it?

Caller Wallace (01:30:24):
No. Didn't I, I took one ethernet port outta the T-Mobile device and hooked it up to the router. So

Leo Laporte (01:30:29):
It does have, it does from the route. So it does, so it has a, it has, obviously it doesn't have to connect to anything. It's wireless, but it does have an ethernet port on it.

Caller Wallace (01:30:39):
Yeah, right. From

Leo Laporte (01:30:39):
What I have. So that's, so that's designed for you to put, in most cases what you would put on that is a switch, not a router. Because remember that, that the T-mobile device is also a router. So problem number one with your RT 1200 is you've got double that. You've got both things trying to route. So really what you want is not a router, but a switch. Now if you can take that RT 100 and turn it into a switch, in other words, turn off the the, the wifi and turn off the D H C P, the network address translation, then it's just a dumb switch. And it doesn't matter <laugh> if the firmware is outta date because it's not doing any of the routing, it's not doing any of the protection. The thing that's on the public internet is that T-mobile device, that's the router and that's protecting you. So in that case, it doesn't matter if the firmwares out date.

Caller Wallace (01:31:35):
I see.

Leo Laporte (01:31:37):
So are you, are you able to turn it, are you able to, excuse me, are you able to disable the DH DCP or, or routing or that? Can you turn that off? They sometimes they call it bridge mode if you can put it into bridge. Yeah, I don't

Caller Wallace (01:31:52):
Know. I,

Leo Laporte (01:31:53):
So there's two things. You know, you may be able to, I doubt it, but excuse me, you may be able to put T-Mobile into bridge mode, but then the router would be the security device. So you don't wanna do that. You wanna let the T-Mobile be a router and then that's protecting you and that's presumably kept up to date by T-Mobile. And then, you know, if the 12, if the RT 1200 is, is difficult to get working, get an inexpensive switch, a TP link or whatever, connect that to the T-mobile and then you'll have many, as many ports as you buy. You know, you could have four ports, 12 ports, 25 ports, 35 ports, whatever you need. And you don't have to worry about security because the T-mobile's doing all the work. You really that, that as, you don't want it to do routing you don't want it to do anything. You want it to be dumb.

Caller Wallace (01:32:45):
Okay, so turn off the,

Leo Laporte (01:32:48):
The wifi put in, put it, yeah. Turn off the wifi radios. I know you can do that and turn off D H C P, turn off routing, make it be in bridge mode and then it's just a switch. And if that, if you can't do that, a switch is 50 bucks or less, you know, 30 bucks. Okay. Yeah. How many devices are you connecting? Hardwired

Caller Wallace (01:33:08):
It be like two or three?

Leo Laporte (01:33:09):
Yeah, you get a, you can get a five port switch for 25 bucks.

Caller Wallace (01:33:14):
Okay. Yeah. Hear that. Or buy a new router, right? <Laugh>? I

Leo Laporte (01:33:17):
Would not buy another router because you got a router. Okay. That's, that's the T-Mobile. Do not buy another router. That's gonna be way too expensive. T outta saying something. A TP link Sport switches 15 bucks, or sorry, sport eight Port <laugh>, TP link eight port switches, like $15. They're cheap. Better to use that than a You don't want a router. The T-mobile's the router. Okay,

Caller Wallace (01:33:40):
I got it.

Leo Laporte (01:33:41):
Okay. Hey, appreciate the call. Good question. I, you know, and I, I think that, I hope that Verizon and T-Mobile offer you know, two week trials of these things because you don't know really until you set it up. Even your phone isn't gonna give you an idea of what bandwidth you're gonna be able to get from these things. It's also where you put it and they'll give you some instructions, I imagine. But you wanna put it near a window. Cause it's wireless, right? You don't wanna bury it in a closet somewhere. You want to get it near the outside the outdoors so that it can get the signal from those from those, there you go. That's a Tepe link. Five port gigabit unmanaged. That's what you want. Ethernet switch $15. That'll take one connection going from the T-mobile residential gateway into it.

(01:34:30):
And then you'll have four other devices you can connect up to it. Simple, right? Very, very, very simple. And that's all you need. You don't need a managed switch unless you wanna do something much more tricky like VLANs or something like that. I would say unmanaged, you know, dumb switch is what you really need. It's almost a hub. They, they still call it a switch, but but it's really almost hub. All right, let's take some more calls. Let's see here. I got people, I got people waiting. I got people waiting. Let's go to John. I'm gonna send John to the breakout room. And John, if you will unmute and say hello as we take you on the tech guy show, ask the tech guys. Somebody said, where'd Micah go? I don't know. Do we know where Micah went? He went on vacation. We made him go on vacation. He hasn't used his vacation days. <Laugh>. I said, you gotta use him, man. You gotta go out, rest, relax, refresh. John, are you there? I don't see him. He's in there, but he his mic and camera are muted. I'm good. All right. Well Micah, let's, let's hang up on John and go to Micah. Our main man who's got his hand in the air. Mr. Kata. Mr. Kata. Hello Micah. I know he knows how to use the microphone. There he is though. Unmute yourself. You can't have, there

Caller Micah (01:36:13):
You go. You can't have a show without a Micah. It may be the wrong Micah, but nonetheless

Leo Laporte (01:36:17):
He's his Micah with a disappearing microphone. Look at that. That's so cool. How do you do that? That's a good trick. <Laugh>.

Caller Micah (01:36:22):
Well, you know, it's, it, it it's, it's my background. It sort of sometimes happens like that.

Leo Laporte (01:36:26):
Your your shirt is confusing. <Laugh>. They can't decide whether the shirt is the plane in the field or, or not. Yeah. Now what is this picture behind you? Micah is the host of the Airplane Geeks podcast.

Caller Micah (01:36:38):
One of the hosts. One of the hosts. I'm not the producer, I just, I'm a participant. And the picture behind me is from last year's Spur, wink Farm Pancake Breakfast and Flyin <laugh> it's in what you're seeing is normally a horse pasture <laugh>. Yep. Normally a horse pasture. It's right up on the bluffs of Maine looking over the ocean. It's a beautiful location. It's a farm that's that's owned by, by somebody and they open it up each year

Leo Laporte (01:37:04):
For, I'm thinking the Spur Winks. I might be wrong, but

Caller Micah (01:37:07):
No, it's owned by the Spragues actually. Okay. Spur Wink is a Spur, wink is a river. Oh, okay. The Spur Wink River. Okay. And and that's a Steerman aircraft that I caught just taking off. Nice. as as, as you can see, it's a

Leo Laporte (01:37:19):
Great shot. Yeah. It's floating in the air. That's a wonderful shot. Oh, Mike has disappeared.

Caller Micah (01:37:24):
Yeah. I wanted you to see the, the photo <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:37:27):
Wonderful. Micah, that's, that's great to talk to you. I just found out that my grandpa was raised on a farm called Journeys End. Ooh. In northeast pa, which is not a direction, but actually a town called Northeast. My mom told me, I said, oh, I never heard about that. Isn't that a great name for a Farm Journeys end.

Caller Micah (01:37:50):
It is great. And you know, Pennsylvania as we know, has some very strange names of that I will not get into now,

Leo Laporte (01:37:56):
But I know what you're talking about.

Caller Micah (01:37:58):
We, I think we all do

Leo Laporte (01:38:00):
<Laugh>. So what can we do for you, <laugh>?

Caller Micah (01:38:02):
Well, I was calling because I had heard about a new password organization, you know, a password saver keeper. Yeah, yeah. That I haven't heard you talk about. And it sounds like it might be a great deal cuz I'm also very cheap. It's Proton Pass. Are you familiar with them? Have you heard

Leo Laporte (01:38:19):
Anything about them? Yeah, so the, yeah, the folks who do Proton Mail which is an encrypted email service, I think they're out of Switzerland are starting to expand a little bit. I think they have a VPN and now they have yeah, a password manager. It is open source, which to me is, is number one. You really want to be able somebody to be able to review the, the code to make sure it's not, you know, passing your passwords along to the NSA or the CIA or something like that. I don't have any direct experience with it. There are quite a few reviews. I mean, basically password Man, first of all, use one and, and, and you know, we have a sponsor that's a password manager, but I don't use whatever better use one of from, of any kind than none at all.

(01:39:08):
Proton Pass does the basics that any password manager needs to do, which is, it generates passwords for you that are unique, long and strong. And then, and because of unique, long and strong, not memorable, but it remembers them for you in a password vault, which is encrypted. And only you can decrypt it. Okay. it looks like it does the email alias thing, which is nice. Of course. That's because proton mail is proton. It does mail as well. So I imagine it does that through Proton mail. Would you have to have a Proton Mail subscription? I'm not sure. But yeah, I mean I, this is, I have no reason to not say this is good. Does anybody Well, I current, go ahead.

Caller Micah (01:39:57):
I currently use Key Pass, but the problem was that I never let Key Pass create my its own passwords. And so I really need to go and, and there's no way to integrate that into my browser. So I want something that has browser integration and that I really need to probably change every single password that I have.

Leo Laporte (01:40:15):
You probably, probably should. Yeah. That I can,

Caller Micah (01:40:17):
Can do that easily with. I,

Leo Laporte (01:40:19):
I don't know if Proton Pass does this, most of the other big password managers do. So I would guess Proton Pass does which is review all your passwords to see if they are in the, have I been pod database and to see if they're duplicated. Those are the two things you wanna watch out for. So if you have been making up your own passwords, chances are it's, you know, something you can remember like your birthday off by a month or whatever,

Caller Micah (01:40:48):
Which there's an algorithm, you know, everybody has some crazy algorithm

Leo Laporte (01:40:51):
That anything you can remember is gonna be less secure than something you is completely random. And so it only depends on how complicated your algorithm is. But hackers are surprisingly adept at cracking passwords. So it's good to use a password manager. I noticed that it is because it's brand new. They're offering a lifetime subscription. So that's kind of interesting.

Caller Micah (01:41:16):
Yes, that's that's what caught my eye being the cheapskate that I am. Yeah. That right now, if you sign up for it by a certain date, that it's going to be $1 a month for the rest of your life forever. Yeah. Yeah. Which is pretty good.

Leo Laporte (01:41:29):
It would be incumbent on me to mention our sponsor Bit Warden, which is free forever. And if you want advanced features, like two-factor authentication is $10 a year. So it's a deal, but it's not the best deal out there.

Caller Micah (01:41:46):
If it's $10 a year, it's cheaper than $1 a month. It is. It's, or is it $10 a month?

Leo Laporte (01:41:50):
Yeah. there, I should also mention that, that there was a little controversy around Proton mail back in the, you know, I don't know, last year. I think about them perhaps being not as privacy focused as they claim to be. I think they handed over to law enforcement, which, you know, any male organization's gonna have to do this. They had, they do believe they handed over some information to Swiss law enforcement, but I don't have, you know, what you want really is, is a company that doesn't have the keys to your email. Right. And it's very, that's a very different issue than a password manager. Nobody who makes a and nobody decent makes a password manager that they have the keys to. That would be nuts. So

Caller Micah (01:42:42):
Well, wasn't there an issue with with another password manager? Your

Leo Laporte (01:42:47):
Yes, but you know, it's interesting. Lastpass, who was a longtime sponsor, lost control of the vaults through an error, a security error on their part. But those vaults were heavily encrypted in theory. And so far we have yet to see a, and this is almost a year later, we have yet to see anybody using those passwords. You know, a bad guy can get the vaults, but if they're encrypted with a strong password, it's not gonna be, it's not trivial for them to get into it. Now there is a potential risk if you didn't have a very good password, if your vault password is Monkey 1 23 <laugh> and they didn't do the proper PBK DF two hashing, which in some cases LastPass did not, then you could be vulnerable. But to my, to my knowledge, no one has stood up and said, oh yeah, my pa all my last pass passwords are leaked out and everybody's, you know, breaking into mys, I've yet to see that. So either whoever got it, didn't know what to do with it, or couldn't figure out how to crack it or, and something, it's this, it was a nation state, maybe China that did it and is using this for selective targeting of Chinese nationals. And maybe we wouldn't know about that. I, I have no reason to think Proton passes isn't fantastic. I mean, I think Proton Mail does a good job. They are under Swiss jurisdiction. That shouldn't matter if they encrypt things properly and I'm sure that they do. So yeah, try.

Caller Micah (01:44:24):
Well the other thing is even, even though bit Warden is not a sponsor of this particular program, they are a sponsor and you just, well, we

Leo Laporte (01:44:30):
Love Bit Ward and I loved Bit Ward before they were a sponsor. In fact, I, I was trying really hard to get 'em to sponsor cuz I've been recommending him for a long time. <Laugh> ever since last pass went belly up.

Caller Micah (01:44:42):
Yeah. But if they're only $10 a month that I'm better off going with. That way I can support one of your sponsors and pay even less.

Leo Laporte (01:44:48):
Yeah. And I, you know, it's possible that sometime Bit Warden might raise that and Proton Male is guaranteeing it for life. So maybe Proton Mail would be sensible. Bit Warden has told me, they promised me, cuz remember Last Pass had a good deal for the free tier. And then they said, yeah, we're not gonna do that anymore. And that upset a lot of people bit Warden. So I asked Bit Warden, is there any chance you would ever say it's not free? They said, we can't, we're open source. If we ever said we're gonna charge you for the free version, somebody would just fork it and say, nah, but we've got bit warden free. He said, it's not in our business model. We will never charge for the free version. So, and the free version is, you know, unlimited passwords, unlimited devices. There's only a few things you're missing.

(01:45:36):
I I it's worth $10 a year for me to do two-factor authentication. I would recommend that. So I I have no reason to think Proton Mail is not a good password manager. They have you know, invest investment from an a private equity firm. They have also taken money from the EU government. And I, I seem to remember, and I may be wrong on this, but I seem to remember that some metadata they did hand over some metadata which they're required to do to law enforcement. But I may be wrong on that. So I shouldn't I shouldn't repeat that. I think that, yeah, it should be good. It's fine. Use our sponsor. Okay. We like our sponsor. If you wanna support sponsors, that's good with me.

Caller Micah (01:46:23):
Well, I think that's probably a good idea. Yeah. Cause if I support your sponsors and I'm supporting you and <laugh> gotta support you, right? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:46:30):
Thank you Micah. It's always great to talk to you.

Caller Micah (01:46:32):
Take care. Thank have

Leo Laporte (01:46:33):
A great one. Take care. Bye-Bye. let's see here. I think you know what I was realizing, John Ashley, producer man, we haven't done any voicemails or emails. W oh, they're scrambling now behind the board. Would you like me to do one or the other? You should I do an email? Let's do an email. It requires an extension of my rotator cuff. Something I couldn't do if I were Tommy John. This is this is from Ike. Hi, Ike in Palmdale. Completely at random. I have not seen this. I have nothing up my sleeve. Hello, Leo and Micah. See hope the ra hope the week is going well. It is. Thank you. Ike. I've been a longtime listener to the radio show on podcasts on Twitter. I'm using lutu Linux. And I'm wondering, is there a way to import my MP3s to my iPhone? Oh, I wish Micah were here.

(01:47:34):
Cuz normally when you're connecting, you wanna put music on your iPhone you connect it to your device, your computer. Actually, nowadays nobody even owns music. They just subscribe <laugh> and they have a stream. But let's say you have some c some MP3s on your hard drive, you would use Apple's music tool or I, I can't. Does Apple still offer iTunes on Windows? They offer something on Windows. You'd connect it up to your computer with a cable and you'd copy it over that way. But of course that's not available for Linux. So how do you use Linux and an iPhone to copy music over? That's a really interesting question. I'm gonna bet there is an open source tool that will let you do this is be gonna be my guess. And in fact, my bet I would win this bet there is something called Lib i mobile device access your phone on Linux with its open source tool.

(01:48:40):
So as often as the case, you know, in in the world of open source software and particularly of Linux. No company owns Linux, right? Linux is, you know, out there, there are companies that make their versions of Linux. China just announced that they're making Kailin Linux which is the Chinese operating system. But many, many people make versions of Linux. And for the most part, the software you run on Linux is supported by people like you and me, enthusiasts. So it makes sense that there's somebody, or maybe many people out there who have iPhones, who have Linux, and they want to connect them. So somebody has written something called Lib i mobile device, which you can install probably using your package manager since you're on tu it would be apt. So you do pseudo APT install lib mobile device. I'll put a link on the show notes cuz there's some other things you might need.

(01:49:41):
You'll have to create a directory for your iPhone. I Fuse is the system tool that will let you read the hard drive of the iPhone. The iPhone will not complain. You'll say, oh, hey, you're connecting your computer. Should I trust it? You say yes, and then you'll be able to copy stuff over directly to your iPhone. So the answer Ike, is yes, you can, you can do this. You just have to find a tool that some enthusiast iPhone user has installed. Now. That's the first one I found when I Googled it. I'm sure there are more than just that one. And I don't even know if what the best one would be. But it's, it's absolutely the case in most cases. I think you'll find that enthusiasts have come along and, and written something for that. Alright, I wanna take a video call. I see the whiteboard behind him, but I can't see what his name is. What is Lou? Is that, oh, it's Arizona. Lou. I should have known Arizona. Lou is this Arizona LU that I'm pressing the button on Arizona. Lou, what do you send? Is that whiteboard full of nuclear equations? Are you designing? I

(01:50:55):
<laugh> a reactor. What's, what's that?

Caller Lou (01:50:58):
Can, can you hear me okay? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:51:00):
I hear you great.

Caller Lou (01:51:02):
Alright. Yeah, I'm, I'm on the phone. I figured I'd get better audio if I was phone.

Leo Laporte (01:51:06):
It actually sounds good on the phone. Yeah, you're work. It's working great.

Caller Lou (01:51:09):
I'm at, well, actually I'm at the Trenton Robinson Airport. Oh. Now on Ontario up, last night I did a show at the Morrisville Elks Lodge. And tomorrow night I'm doing a show for the Veterans Home in Delaware, Delaware Valley, veterans Home. So

Leo Laporte (01:51:32):
Lou, you're

Caller Lou (01:51:33):
John. I'm having

Leo Laporte (01:51:34):
Fun. You're amazing. I love I love it that you're going around and doing the, they're comedy shows. You, you bill yourself as the world's oldest comedian. I don't know if that's true, but I think George Burns was for a long time, <laugh>. But I think it's really great you're doing this and I know that you have a, an audience that loves seeing you. So thank you.

Caller Lou (01:51:54):
Well, hey. Yeah. And thanks for taking, I never know for sure how to get into your show, so I'm glad I got in.

Leo Laporte (01:52:01):
I am too. Arizona lou.com. If you wanna, if you wanna book Arizona, Lou at your at your event. He's a America's favorite old man <laugh>. Wait a minute.

Caller Lou (01:52:14):
Yep. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:52:15):
How old are you, Lou? You're not that old. How old are you?

Caller Lou (01:52:19):
Well, if I tell you when I was born, can you figure it out?

Leo Laporte (01:52:22):
I bet I can.

Caller Lou (01:52:24):
Okay. I was born in M cm X L I

Leo Laporte (01:52:28):
X l I. That's 41. So you aren't an old man. All you're true. Good. You're, you're, you're, you're youth that make you I know

Caller Lou (01:52:38):
I had my birthday yet this

Leo Laporte (01:52:40):
Year. Are you 80, 82?

Caller Lou (01:52:43):
I'm 81 because I haven't year. I'll be old in November.

Leo Laporte (01:52:48):
Okay, great. In November, I'll be old. Yeah, that's my, that's I'm in November too. That's when I'm gonna be old. <Laugh>.

Caller Lou (01:52:56):
Hey, cool. I'm, I'm the 28th. Are you?

Leo Laporte (01:53:00):
29Th day after you.

Caller Lou (01:53:03):
Well, how about that? Hello, Sage? Well, I, yeah, so we don't take everybody else's time. Yes. I've got a question about the club Twi and also about backing up my new Macintosh.

Leo Laporte (01:53:18):
Okay.

Caller Lou (01:53:21):
Now, from you, what you and Micah have said, the time machine is the way to go for backing up the Mac.

Leo Laporte (01:53:29):
It's certainly the easiest. Yes.

Caller Lou (01:53:32):
And I figure that it saved as a big blob.

Leo Laporte (01:53:36):
No, actually it copies the, no, it copies the structure of your files. So in a way unlike other backup dev, you know, a lot of backup programs do make this blob, which I'm not a fan of. Time Machine in a way is, is I believe, duplicating the structure of your of your hard drive on an external hard drive. So it should, it's, it's got a tool that you can browse through that stuff. But it, one of the things that's great about Time Machine, and this is why they call it Time Machine, it keeps versions of files too. So you can say, well, here's the jokes I wrote today, but I deleted a couple of jokes yesterday. You can go back to yesterday and see those jokes. So yeah, I think time machine's a good choice. Nobody should rely on one.

Caller Lou (01:54:19):
No. If I accidentally delete a file, can I individually Yeah. Look at files and you

Leo Laporte (01:54:25):
Get it back When you run Time machine, it goes woo. And you get a finder from yesterday or the day before or the day before and you can get stuff back. It's using a a linking uses hard links to do it. It's kind of a complicated concept, but it, but it absolutely does a great job of, of, of backup. But I would say never rely on a single form of backup. So you should have a secondary form of backup, ideally offsite in the cloud. So if the time machine fails or that hard drive dies, maybe there's a fire and you lose the computer and the backup, you've got something else out there. So, you know, I Drive comes with Max I, you know, you, it's already probably, unless you told it not to backing up your Documents folder, that may be all you care about. You got the time machine for locally and you got the I Drive in case of Disaster.

Caller Lou (01:55:14):
Now can I take, I, I bought a new five terabyte drive Perfect. For my backup for the Mac.

Leo Laporte (01:55:22):
Yep. When you plug

Caller Lou (01:55:23):
That in, can I get another one? Yeah. And can I copy that over? Can I just copy from One Drive to the other so I have a second backup to send to some other location? You could

Leo Laporte (01:55:33):
Do that. Yeah. Yeah. Use there's a program I recommend, there's two. One is super-duper the other's Carbon copy cl either one and it, and so get the five terabytes. As soon as you plug it in, apple will say, you wanna use this as a time machine? And you say Yes and you're done with that. This is the other one you plug in and it says, you wanna use this as a time machine. You say No, run carbon copy cloner, make a clone of the entire internal drive on your Mac to that other drive and then take that somewhere or, or mail it. Steve Gibson used to mail CD ROMs to his mom. That was a while ago. You know,

Caller Lou (01:56:11):
So, so I take it that I can't, I can't drag and drop the time machine blob or whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:56:18):
I wouldn't do that. No, don't back. Don't duplicate Time machine. It's very tightly con connected to your computer. Just use some other program to make a backup. Okay. and I think, I think Carbon Copy Clone is the one, or Super duper, super Duper is really good. Both of those, by the way, will make Bootable backups. So if you're internal hard drive dies, you can plug in that five terabyte that, not the Time Machine one, but the other one and, and booted up to that. And now you're, you're good.

Caller Lou (01:56:45):
Yeah. Yeah. And my old Windows, I had ease.

Leo Laporte (01:56:48):
Yeah. This is so much better than Ease Us, which did make a blob by the way. Now I understand the question. Good choice.

Caller Lou (01:56:56):
That Blob was individually file accessible. I don't know if it'd work on the map.

Leo Laporte (01:57:00):
Yeah. But you had to use their software. Ok. Ask to do that. Yeah, go ahead.

Caller Lou (01:57:05):
Club Twit, if I, what I do is I download the podcast and put 'em on a MP3 player. Now how if I do that, how will it know that I'm in Club Twit and how will it change my

Leo Laporte (01:57:22):
Experience? So when you join Club Twit, $7 a month, $84 a year. There's family plans and corporate plans. Twit tv slash plug.

Caller Lou (01:57:29):
Plug plug. Alright.

Leo Laporte (01:57:31):
Plug plug. When you join Club Twit, we send you unique URLs for all the shows unique feeds that you can subscribe to in your podcast client that are just for you. The ad free versions of the show, they download just as any other podcast would. So you could do anything you want with them afterwards, their MP3 files, but our editors make free versions of the show. But to get those, you need to use the special feed that we'll give you when you join the club. Everybody gets a unique one.

Caller Lou (01:58:06):
Now, see, I don't, I don't I don't join any podcast subscriptions. Well, you

Leo Laporte (01:58:15):
Don't

Caller Lou (01:58:15):
Have to. I just go to your website. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:58:17):
You don't have to. So if you get 'em from the website, you won't get ad free versions. You'll get the ad versions. You'll still have a wonderful feeling of supporting what we do here at Twitter. But you won't get ad free versions. Oh yes. The only way to get ad free versions is to use the special address we give you and we give you one for every show that is a R s s feed for a client. The client will then download those. We don't put 'em out in public. That's how we keep people from spreading it around.

Caller Lou (01:58:48):
Yeah, yeah. And I don't, I don't use RSS client. Yeah. So I just do the download option.

Leo Laporte (01:58:55):
You would have to, if you wanna do, if you wanna do the ad free versions, there is an fa a very good faq. If you go to twit tv slash club twit, click the link the for frequently asked questions, it explains that whole process. Okay. And the reason, you know, we do this because, oh right, yeah. The service we use member full. This is how they do it. They do it automatically. Makes it very easy for us. And you know, I think a lot of club members do what you do. They download from the website and they just say, well, I'm gonna get the ads. If I wanted to ad free versions, I would get, I recommend Pocket Casts. It's very nice free podcast player on iOS and Android and subscribe. Or you can use Apple Podcasts on your brand New Mac and subscribe to those special feeds that you'll get as a member. And then you'll get the ad free versions of the show and you can put 'em anywhere you want. Once you got 'em. They're MP3 files, just like any other, you can do anything you want with them. Except don't sell 'em on the open on the black market. We wouldn't want that.

Caller Lou (01:59:53):
No, of course not. <Laugh>. And so, so to get the rss, do you have to do that like through your iPhone?

Leo Laporte (02:00:00):
No, no. You can use Apple's podcasts and Mac or your cell phone. No, you can do it on your Mac with podcasts. You can do it in your browser. Yeah. It's an RSS feed so it almost anything will open it and, and read it. You can use an SS reader I think not all browsers, but some browsers will take the SS feed and show you the files. Lots of different ways to

Caller Lou (02:00:20):
Do it. You know, I have a link to you guys on my website.

Leo Laporte (02:00:23):
Keep up the good work. We, we plug you every time. Yeah. Arizona lou.com. Thank you Lou.

Caller Lou (02:00:31):
Hey, thanks a lot. Leo, I listened to you. I remember when you went to turn over to show 200 on K ffi. Can you

Leo Laporte (02:00:38):
Believe we are now at 1983? Wow. <laugh>, or as you would say. Yep.

Caller Lou (02:00:46):
Last night was my 1442

Leo Laporte (02:00:50):
As you would say.

Caller Lou (02:00:51):
My show. 1442.

Leo Laporte (02:00:52):
Let's see, let's see. M let me see if I can do this. Cm I x i i I <laugh>.

Caller Lou (02:01:05):
Well that's when you were born.

Leo Laporte (02:01:07):
No, that's the show. Episode number 1983. If I were born in 83, I'd be a young a Spring Chicken

Caller Lou (02:01:14):
<Laugh>. Thank

Leo Laporte (02:01:14):
You Lou. Have a great week. Enjoy your next show. Alright, take care Lou. Thank you. Hey, coming up Photo guy, Chris Marquardt. It's time for a photo review next on the horn with us. Chris Marquardt photo guy. He is@chrismarquardt.com. Although if you wanna go on any of his amazing photo safaris, you'll want to go to discover the top floor.com. I was just, just organizing my bookshelf and I found the book on Wide Angle Photography, the book on film photography. Chris is prolific and joins us every month to help us take better photos. Hi Chris.

Chris Marquardt (02:01:58):
Hey, thanks for having me. How's

Leo Laporte (02:02:00):
It going? Going? it's going great. We are wonderful. We are suffering under 93 degree temperatures. How is it in, in beautiful Germany right now?

Chris Marquardt (02:02:09):
It was okay today, but we'll, we'll, it'll, it'll ratchet up over the next few days again. So

Leo Laporte (02:02:15):
Summertime, same.

Chris Marquardt (02:02:16):
So, so thing

Leo Laporte (02:02:17):
Happened here, so I forgot. What was our assignment this week?

Chris Marquardt (02:02:20):
The assignment was tasty. Tasty had tasty photos taken by

Leo Laporte (02:02:26):
Tasty.

Chris Marquardt (02:02:26):
Let, let see, let me bring that up here on the screen by 25 people who sent in.

Leo Laporte (02:02:31):
Ooh, that pizza's got me photos. Mm,

Chris Marquardt (02:02:34):
Well, tasty. Tasty, tasty. So as usual, I have taken time looking through them and admiring all of them and tasty

Leo Laporte (02:02:44):
Pigs, <laugh>,

Chris Marquardt (02:02:46):
Tasty things. So here's, here's the first one I chose. Oh, look

Leo Laporte (02:02:50):
At that. That is gorgeous. Blue

Chris Marquardt (02:02:51):
Sky over aquatic titled underscore 62 4 0 1 1 0 0. Okay. Anyway, <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:03:02):
Chris hates it when you don't name your files. We'll call this. I like it. We'll call this Searching for the nectar of life.

Chris Marquardt (02:03:09):
Yes. It's a hummingbird and it is it's drinking from a flower inflight. Technically very challenging photo cuz you need to have the focus nailed and you have to have a fast shutter speed. You can see the, in the front, you can see the, the wing.

Leo Laporte (02:03:25):
They're a little blurred.

Chris Marquardt (02:03:25):
Motion blurred,

Leo Laporte (02:03:26):
Which I kinda like. Right. So, you know, they're moving. Yeah,

Chris Marquardt (02:03:30):
Very true. Also, what the photographer did is the put something black behind it. Yes. That's, that's like in a studio situation. Yes. And probably black cardboard, probably nothing. Nothing. Super. How

Leo Laporte (02:03:43):
Do you do that? Scaring away the hummingbird. Maybe you put it there first. Huh?

Chris Marquardt (02:03:48):
Put it there first and then walk away. So I don't think the bird really minds and it doesn't need, it doesn't take a lot of, like, it doesn't have to be huge cuz if you use the telephoto lens, you Right. Will only capture a very small square. So it doesn't

Leo Laporte (02:04:01):
Have to be, is there information about the shot in the exif on this one?

Chris Marquardt (02:04:05):
There is an information there. It is been taken with an Olympus em one X. Nice. So nice. That's 1600th of a second. You will need that for a photo like that.

Leo Laporte (02:04:17):
It's an, a psc camera. I think.

Chris Marquardt (02:04:21):
No flash. Just I would think just sunlight. Four,

Leo Laporte (02:04:25):
400 millimeters, which, because of the crop factor. That's a 600. That's

Chris Marquardt (02:04:30):
800

Leo Laporte (02:04:30):
Millimeters or 800? Yeah. Wow. Oh

Chris Marquardt (02:04:32):
No. Apsc is about 600. Yeah. 600

Leo Laporte (02:04:34):
Millimeters. Wow. That's a long. Yeah, he was far away. But what a great shot.

Chris Marquardt (02:04:40):
Well, love it with, with a hummingbird. You better be far away cuz I think they're, yeah. Scare him away. Easily scared. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (02:04:46):
Next

Chris Marquardt (02:04:47):
One I chose,

Leo Laporte (02:04:48):
Plus blue sky aquatic a plus. Wonderful.

Chris Marquardt (02:04:50):
Next one by buy four bite titled window shopping. And mm-hmm. This is one of those photos. It's a street photo. It tells a story. You

Leo Laporte (02:04:58):
See person, it's some Korean barbecue. I love the Korean barbecue. Yum, yum.

Chris Marquardt (02:05:04):
Looking in through the window. So you, you can, you can literally like, not just smell the smells, the food smells there, but you can, you can see what the person is thinking. There's some, some appetite, some hunger involved here. And checking out what to have in the barbecue. Nice little streak.

Leo Laporte (02:05:22):
What's interesting, first of all, I think it's Chinese, not Korean. I can't tell. Yeah, it's Chinese. But the other thing is it's in America because of that. A sign in the window. I think it's probably in Los Angeles, but that's lovely. Probably. I am hungry now.

Chris Marquardt (02:05:36):
And, and it has multiple layers. You see the person, you see the food, you see the people inside the window, but with reflections of the street on, on, on the top. So it, unlike window photos in general, cuz they add more layers to the top. It's a little,

Leo Laporte (02:05:50):
To me a little messy. Like there's, it

Chris Marquardt (02:05:52):
Is. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:05:52):
Yeah.

Chris Marquardt (02:05:53):
I'm not, it is, but the, the subject is very clear. There's the person standing looking, so there's no, oh, Joe

Leo Laporte (02:05:58):
Says it's Brooklyn. Joe is our there you go. Joe is our street photographer from the New York area. He took it. There we go. All right. Nice shot Joe. Good job. Once again, Joe has made it to the finals.

Chris Marquardt (02:06:11):
<Laugh>. And last but not least, here's the photo. By Byron, I'm mean Sunnyside beverage. There's a description you're taking in key Largo. Florida's nice and said 93 degrees Fahrenheit. This frozen lemonade quickly melted overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. So we're, we're seeing some lemonade on a little table. It's a beach. There's some, I dunno what that's a barbecue in the background. Probably a sunset situation. We can see this in the sky. It's nicely focused. It's a bit dynamic. A bit of a tilt there. And yeah, if, if I, if I was, if it, if it was 93 degrees out there, I would like one of those drinks.

Leo Laporte (02:06:53):
Nice. Nice. You really get a sense of atmosphere Yeah. In that shot. Yeah.

Chris Marquardt (02:07:00):
And the, and the focus in the, in the shot with the rest being out of focus gives it a very clear subject. A very clear, yeah. Like indication what this is about. So there we go. Three photos chosen. All

Leo Laporte (02:07:12):
Of them. Very tasty. Congratulations.

Chris Marquardt (02:07:15):
Very, very tasty.

Leo Laporte (02:07:17):
Now you know what this means. We gotta go to the fishbowl and find a new subject for our photo assignments. Here's

Chris Marquardt (02:07:26):
Fish ball. And lemme put this away. The next is, oh, I like this one a lot. Crowded.

Leo Laporte (02:07:40):
Oh yeah.

Chris Marquardt (02:07:41):
Now crowded. Let, let me, let me think of, of a, of a couple of tips and things. Cuz I think if you take a picture of something crowded, it doesn't have to be like a crowd of people, right? You can interpret this in other ways as well. I don't know, crowded sock drawer or <laugh> or or several bees fighting over a flower or something like that could be crowded. I think it's really helpful if you choose a subject, like make it clear who's being crowded in, who's, who's, who's the, the important part of the picture. So just a little tip here. Crowded. I, I have like 10 ideas already how I would approach that.

Leo Laporte (02:08:23):
Very good. Crowded. Now, how does this work? Well, first of all, this is not a competition. This is an assignment. This is to get you out there taking pictures. So what I want you all to do is go look around. I don't know what crowded means to you. That's the part of the fun of this for us, is seeing how people interpret this word. But when you get a shot that says to you, this is crowded, upload it to flicker.com. That's a free photo sharing site. And then tag it TG for tech guys. Crowded, tg, crowded, all one word. That's the tag. And submit it to our group. If you go to flicker.com, you'll see a number groups. Click the groups on the menu. After you've joined, it's free to do this. You're looking for the tech guy group. You'll know you're in the right place because there are 13,999 members. Wow. Wow. One member. That's wild. Short of 14,000, 7,700 photos. Here's the photo pool, some of the tasty shots. Our moderator, the wonderful Renee Silverman, who does this all for free. Thank you, Renee. You're very generous. She's a great photographer in her own right. Will have a preci of the assignment from the fishbowl. In fact, she already does. Look at that. She's fast.

Chris Marquardt (02:09:47):
She's she's fast. How did she know that on top of this? Well, she's watching. I guess

Leo Laporte (02:09:51):
You didn't, you didn't like tell her ahead time you were gonna pick crowded in a

Chris Marquardt (02:09:55):
Fishbowl. No, of course not. I, I, I think she has that, that editor open for the assignment.

Leo Laporte (02:10:00):
Press send <laugh>

Chris Marquardt (02:10:01):
It, it it, it must, it must, it happens within seconds. This, I'm

Leo Laporte (02:10:05):
Very impressed, Renee. It's miracle. Yes, you're good. You're really good. So you have a month, four weeks before Chris comes back. You can't submit more than one photo a week. So make sure you, you know, you really got the one, the one that pops. And you have until you have to have taken the picture before July 16th. We want you to take new pictures. That's the whole point of this. Get you out there. And you have till August to what is it, the second week of August, or the third week of

Chris Marquardt (02:10:31):
August? It's the third week of August. August, August. I think it's the 20th, I think.

Leo Laporte (02:10:35):
Okay. So you got a little time. Get out there, get some crowded shots, Joe, go down to Coney Island and get some crowd <laugh>, get some crowded shots. I don't know what crowd means. It could be something else. It could be a lot of ants on an anthill. Who knows? That's the whole point. We wanna see your images submitted to the tech guy group on Flicker, and we look forward to having Chris back next week. Go to discover the top floor.com for Chris's trips. Are you booked up now?

Chris Marquardt (02:11:06):
One spot left for the first leg of the Eastern European electric photo road trip. Berlin. Dres in park, Vienna, Budapest, Transylvania. One spot left

Leo Laporte (02:11:16):
I wanna go to is Transylvania, as picturesque as it sounds.

Chris Marquardt (02:11:22):
Picture. Yes. Yes it is. And Transylvania is very li very much like Tuscany, Italy from in terms of the atmosphere and everything. Oh, so, okay. It's, it's beautiful spot. A really beautiful spot.

Leo Laporte (02:11:35):
So here it is. Discover the top floor.com and you can see all of the workshops he's got coming up, all the tourists. He's got coming up. And tell me when you go back to Bhutan, because that's, that's the one I'm waiting for. I really want to do that

Chris Marquardt (02:11:51):
Next, next fall looks more and more likely. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:11:53):
Yeah. Not fall 2024. Fall 2024. Perfect timing. I'm gonna talk to Lisa. Looking,

Chris Marquardt (02:12:01):
Looking, very, very likely

Leo Laporte (02:12:02):
The happiest place on earth. Thank you Chris. It's always a pleasure. You always make me happy and happy photography to you all. Take care.

Chris Marquardt (02:12:13):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (02:12:13):
Thank you. Discover the top floor.com. Alright, well I want to go back in time a little bit. Going back to last week. You remember, remember we had a call from Sean in Griffith Park. He had scanned a bunch of family photos, but the scanner was too dumb to crop it down. So there's these big borders around all the photos. He wanted to know if there was an, a way to easily remove those on his Macintosh. Micah gave him kind of a preliminary answer. I offered some tools, but Micah said, let me ask Rosemary Orchard, who is a shortcut guru on iOS today, the show they do together on Tuesdays, if she has an answer and guess what she did, Rosemary Orchard and iOS today, watch.

Rosemary Orchard (02:12:55):
The first thing that I did, which is what you want to do if you're going to be doing anything like this at all, is I actually manually cropped those two images. Now, you don't wanna manually crop all of them, obviously that's beside the point. We're looking to automate this. But by manually cropping the image, then when I get the info of it, I can actually see the size. So I can see that the landscape one is 887 pixels by 671 pixels. And if I get the info on the other one, which is the portrait one, it's 658 pixels by 983. So I'm hoping that all of these, these pictures are gonna be a sort of similar size when they are, you know, the same physical size. So if they're five by seven, they're gonna be somewhere between say 600 and 700 pixels.

(02:13:41):
In on, on the, on the shorter side. So we need to start with figuring out, first of all we need to know if the picture that we're looking at is landscape or portrait. Because if it's portrait, we're gonna be, you know, trying to get the, the size off the top and the bottom or the, the gray off the top and the bottom. And if it's landscape, we wanna get it off the left and the right. So that's the first part. And the second part is what size of image is this? Is this a five by seven image or is this a six by four image? Because that's gonna tell us how much we need to, you know, crop this down. So I've started with a shortcut because this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna solve this using shortcuts.

(02:14:21):
I'll just make shortcuts full screen. So I have select photos to start with cuz you're gonna need to select the photos. And then you're gonna want to make sure that you open up the select photos and choose select multiple. And so what I can also do here is I can turn off selecting live photos and videos, which will narrow it down a little bit. But you do wanna make sure that you select multiple because otherwise it's gonna be a really, really, really, really long game of press the play button, choose a picture, press the play button, choose a picture, press the play. You, you get the mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah, it's gonna be very frustrating. So to start with, we're gonna want to actually get some dimensions from our image and just have a look and see if it's a landscape image or a portrait image.

(02:15:02):
So there's this really useful little action called get details of image where we can do something like get the width and then if I just duplicate this one, then I can change that to height and then I can say if, so to start with, we're just gonna say, okay, if our height there we go is greater than our width, and I'll just tap in there and insert the width, then ta-da. We know that this is portrait, right? Oh, because that's, that's how, how, how that works, right? If you've got something that's taller than it is wide, it's a portrait image. And so I'll just type that in there. Oops. If I could spell the word portrait, that would be very useful. And then I'll just duplicate that and I'll pop landscape into the other side of it. Okay, so now, now we know this and I'm going to hope that both of the images that Sean was kind enough to send are actually both either five by seven or six by four.

(02:16:00):
Either way, I'm hoping they're the same size uhhuh, because then that's gonna give me a little bit of information with which I can do some magic guesstimating. Okay? So this one landscape is 887 pixels by 671. And the portrait one is just tap on the right button there to get the info. 658 by 983. So this isn't gonna be an exact science, but we're gonna get pretty close, I hope. So what we're gonna do is we're going to say now, so if, so we know here that we are looking on landscape images, we wanna crop off the sides mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So it's the longer side that we need to crop off the side size on. So we're gonna check, actually we're gonna use the the, the shorter dimension just to figure out which size of image this is because that one's the one that's been pre cropped by the Xerox scanner, right?

(02:16:52):
So in, in the case of the height being greater than the width, we actually wanna check the width option. So we're gonna say if the width, and I'm only gonna work through this on, on one of these just to give people an idea because otherwise it'll be quite repetitive. So if our width is between, and this is a really useful little feature and shortcuts and I'm just gonna say 620 and let me just double check the other one. Da da da of the height on there, that was 671. So I'll just say 700. Cuz that gives us, that gives us an approximate idea. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> of what this is. Then I'll just say that this is, I'm gonna guess five by seven. I don't know, I'm not very good at guessing. The what is imperial, imperial measurements?

(02:17:40):
Yeah, I'm not very good at guessing. Those and also I don't have a physical point of these pictures. You know so I'm, I'm just gonna take a wild guess that this is a five by seven. And I'll just duplicate that little comment and pop it into the otherwise and say five by four. Four by six, right? That's the other six, four by six five by four. That's, it's all the same thing, right? So we know that this one, or we're saying this one's probably this. So now we know that our width is between those two dimensions. So now we're gonna use, oops if I tap into the right thing, then I can use a crop image action. So the crop image action, we actually want to crop our, and I'll tap and hold on image here, select variable.

(02:18:24):
And then I can go up and I can choose my repeat item, which is the photo that I'm currently working on. Now I can crop this in the center. So we know that our width is fine, we don't want our width to change, but and this is a portrait image. Okay? So in our uncropped image we had it at oops da da it was wait for it, da da. That was 2,154 pixels high. Wow. and then the cropped version of the image is just going to double check there. 983 mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Okay, so I'm just gonna pop in a thousand just to, you know, give ourselves a bit of room cuz I prefer to under crop rather than over crop, right? So you can always tweak this afterwards. Now you could use some really fancy maths in here. You can use the calculate function built into shortcuts to figure out exactly.

(02:19:20):
Okay, so I've got a formula that I've made up based on this, so I know if it's exactly this number of pixels and width gotta be that number of pixels and height and so on and so forth, by all means go for it. I'm trying to keep this really simple. And then after you've cropped your image at the end of the repeat loop, I would suggest you pop in a save two photo album. And then you're just going to save that. And then you might even wanna make a new photo album for these which you know, you can then pop everything into because that way you can, I'll just create, create one up here. There we go. You can even create it in shortcuts so I don't have to leave shortcuts. And yeah, there we go. So now that we've got that, I'm only gonna select the uncropped one of the portrait version because that's all I've set up here. But what should happen, fingers crossed, is when I go into photos, there should now be another one, which look at that, it's not perfect, right? You can make adjustments.

Leo Laporte (02:20:22):
Exactly.

Rosemary Orchard (02:20:22):
Yeah, yeah. You, you, you can tweak this to figure it out. There was a weird sort of white, extra secondary white background on the po photos that I was sent. But the great thing about the crop action in shortcuts is it's doing it from the center. So you could change it to say, do it from the top left, top right, bottom, left, bottom right. And there's also custom where you can choose to do it from particular coordinates. Oh, interesting. So you can definitely look into this and figure out what it is that you wanna do with this. But I suspect that cropping from the center is gonna be the way to go because then you just need to know, okay, am I keeping like all of the width or all of the height? Because in the alternative version, landscape version, you would take the original height of the image and keep that and then just insert a width to, to figure it out. So I hope that this will give Sean an idea of where to get started and how sort this so that all of those pictures from his father-in-law can be shared digitally with family members so that they don't get lost.

Leo Laporte (02:21:23):
Oh man, Rosemary, I love the British accent. Rosemary is so good. <Laugh>. So a couple of things you learned there, which is one is that there's a lot of power in short shortcuts which is kind of a scripting language for iOS and Mac os and is is pretty darn powerful. And even something as kind of manual and specific as this you can do in shortcuts. I think that's really awesome. Thank you Rosemary. And make sure if you're an iOS user, whether it's iPhone, iPad, apple watch, apple TV that you watch iOS today, every Tuesday morning, 9:00 AM Pacific noon Eastern with Micah Sargent and the wonderful Rosemary Orchard mic. Micah's wonderful too. Micah, we'll be back next week by the way. So I think we have time for one more call. I'm gonna send him over or her over to our zoom. Make sure you press star six to unmute and welcome to ask the tech guys.

Caller Greg (02:22:25):
Hey, can you hear

Leo Laporte (02:22:26):
Me? I can hear you. What's your name and where are you calling from?

Caller Greg (02:22:31):
Greg. Greg Mellon. I'm calling from Monkton, new Brunswick, Canada. Hi,

Leo Laporte (02:22:36):
Greg from Monkton. How are you?

Caller Greg (02:22:39):
I'm, I'm doing fine. How are

Leo Laporte (02:22:40):
You? I'm great. What can I do for you on this fine day?

Caller Greg (02:22:46):
Okay, so we are our family like got our, got ourselves a new printer. Oh, brother, A

Leo Laporte (02:22:55):
Printer question. Thank you so much, John. Ashley <laugh> gone. Come on Greg. I'm just teasing. Yeah,

Caller Greg (02:23:02):
It it's a, it's a brother brother model. I

Leo Laporte (02:23:05):
Like it. Is it a laser printer?

Caller Greg (02:23:10):
I, I'm, I'm not sure, but the model yeah is mfd. Yeah, a 1205 W

Leo Laporte (02:23:18):
Yeah, it is a laser printer. That's their multifunction laser printer. That's quite a, quite a nice printer actually. I think you'll like it.

Caller Greg (02:23:27):
Yeah. Yeah. And we just got it like, not, not too long ago. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:23:32):
Actually it is but here's where it's an inkjet. I'm sorry. Yeah, I have a, a, a brother MFC 1720, which is laser. So I thought, oh, that must be laser, but now that I'm looking at it, it is a tank wireless multifunction three in one color inkjet printer.

Caller Greg (02:23:49):
Yeah. So here's where the issue is coming in into play. We are tr we're trying to set it up and apparently it's given me a, like a detection saying no, no machine found. But we've typed the IP address on my computer, Susan's computer and my father's desktop computer Yeah. To no avail.

Leo Laporte (02:24:14):
So that's not how

Caller Greg (02:24:17):
No, no. My, my question is, I'd like to know how do I get like rid of that like display and to actually have the, the actual like model display on the setup thing?

Leo Laporte (02:24:33):
Okay, so first of all, it has an app, which is unfortunate, but you might want to try getting the mobile connect app just to make sure you're setting it up. It'll walk you through the setup. Step one is to get the printer on your network and it does it via wifi, I believe. So you're gonna use the front panel. What does a printer, even this is such an inexpensive printer, maybe it doesn't have, it looks like it doesn't have a front panel. How do you I guess you have to use the app to set this up. Okay. So you have the app, I presume? Yeah,

Caller Greg (02:25:09):
Yeah. Or, or I can use a USB cable. I think my father may have gotten a USB cable. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:25:16):
That will only let you use it with one computer at that point. And then you have to set up the computer to share it if you wanna do that better to set it up, but to use to use wifi. So get, so you have the app on your phone and you set up the printer, put it on your wifi network, is that correct?

Caller Greg (02:25:34):
We're, we're trying to do it via like the desktop. There's like a wifi like router somewhere.

Leo Laporte (02:25:44):
There's a wifi router somewhere. Do you have a wifi

Caller Greg (02:25:48):
Router? So wi, I think a ri wifi like some somewhere in my house.

Leo Laporte (02:25:55):
Oh yes, you have wi your house has wifi, is that right?

Caller Greg (02:25:59):
Yes. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:26:00):
Yes. Okay. That, that scared me. I thought you were maybe borrowing somebody else's. No, you have wifi in the house. Okay, good. So, you know I'm looking at this page here to make sure that this thing supports wifi. I'm sure it does. It says print copy and scan feed just can be accessed from your mobile device using the brother mobile Connect. What you wanna do, here's how you wanna do it. You don't, you're doing it I think backwards. What you wanna do is set up the printer to be on your wifi network. I think you'll use the app to do that. Cause it doesn't look like it's such an inexpensive printer. It doesn't look like it has a screen on the printer. So you'll use the app to do that. Get it on your wifi network for that. You will need the name of your wifi network and the password if you've protected it, which I hope you have. Once the printer's on your wifi network. And as long as you're on the same wifi network as all your computers, when you add a, you know, you do the ad printer function on your computer, it will, it should see that printer and actually show you, it should say brother M F C J 1205, right there on the screen. You press the ad button and then you should be able to just, that printer should work. You do not enter an IP address. Do not do that. Okay.

Caller Greg (02:27:25):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:27:25):
Do you understand what I'm saying? Okay. You don't, you don't wanna do that. You wanna, you're gonna use on your max you're gonna use Bon <laugh>, which is, which is very poor choice for a name, for a a, they used to call it Rendezvous. I guess they really wanted to call it something French. You're gonna use Bonjour to discover the printer. It'll discover it by name and then add it. And that should all be fairly automatic. You do not need to enter in the IP address of the printer. So the steps, again, join the wifi network with a printer. Once the printer is effectively on your wifi network and the app says, yeah, you're on the wifi and your app can see it on the phone, then you go to each printer you do on Windows. There's a control panel or a a system setting that is for adding a printer.

(02:28:12):
You should just be able to see it. You don't have to enter anything. And once you see it, then you can add it. Don't do anything with an IP address. That's a recipe for disaster. Okay? That is the kind of in the long run that you could do that. There is a way to do it manually like that, but, but unless there's something strange going on. Let see, I'm looking at this printer and it is such an inexpensive printer. I'm, I'm worried it doesn't, it has wireless direct, which means it creates a wifi access point. Yeah, no, you should be able to wireless direct or connect locally. Works with a, works with Amazon's Echo. They've gotten a little too smart on some of these. I think that's the way to do it. Use the app or look at the manual. I know that didn't come with one, but online there is a full manual under the support tab for this printer.

(02:29:00):
And it will walk you through the setup process so that you can you can use this hardwired will work fine with one device. Your dad's device probably, right? He's the boss of the house. But I think in the long run that's a problem because then you're kind of saying, well, this is the only computer that can print. If you want to have it print on other computers, you have to share it. That's not good from your dad's computer. I think you want to just follow the manual, walk through the steps. This is such an inexpensive printer. I think they have left out some of the features that would make it easier to set up. It's a simple setup. Ah, scooter X says go to setup Do brother.com and it'll walk you through it. That's good. So go on your Mac os, go to setup, do brother.com and it'll walk you through it.

(02:29:54):
All right. Hey, that's it. We're outta time. You had to gimme the printer question, didn't you? You had to get that in there. No, they didn't know ahead of time. Michael will be back next week. We do ask the tech guys every Sunday right before twit. It's kind of a, the way we get the week started, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, 1800 utc. You can watch us do it live from beginning to end live twit tv. There's audio and video there. If you're watching live chat, live at IRC dot twit tv. Of course, club members can't get go behind the going behind the velvet rope and join us in the club twit discord. Either way, I appreciate people who join us in the chat rooms because it really helps me. You're my kind of my extra brain and scooter X and the rest are often very helpful and like you just was in this solving these problems.

(02:30:46):
If, but you don't have to watch live because it's a podcast. So you can actually get it on your podcast player or even download it from the website, TWIT TV slash atg. While you're there, you'll see a button for the YouTube channel. Yes, there's a dedicated Ask The Tech Guys YouTube channel. You'll also see links to various podcast players. So you can just add it instantly. Of course, if you have a favorite podcast player you can search for, ask the Tech guys. You'll find it right away. Once you subscribe, cost nothing to subscribe, but once you subscribe, you'll get it every week. Soon as we're done, we'll edit all up, put it out. You'll get it Sunday evening. Thank you all for joining us. I I appreciate it. Club Threat members, a tip of the hat to you for making this show possible. Of course, all of our sponsors, Mike and Sergeant, will be back next week. I'm Leo LaPorte. We'll see you next time. I'll ask the tech guys. Have a great geek. Wait, bye-Bye.