The Tech Guy Episode 1867 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.

Speaker 1 (00:00:02):
Podcasts. You love

Speaker 2 (00:00:04):
From people you trust

Speaker 3 (00:00:06):
This. Is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:11):
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my tech guy podcast. This show originally aired on the premier radio networks on Saturday from boy 12th, 2022. This is episode 1,867. Enjoy if you would do me a favor once a year, we reach out to our audience and ask 'em to fill out our TWiT listeners survey helps us better understand you helps us sell advertising. We don't want to track you so it's completely voluntary, but that information's very handy for us. It'll take about 15 minutes, maybe, maybe less and again, completely voluntary, but it sure helps us go to twit.tv/survey 22 to take it. And thanks in advance. The Tech Guy podcast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. According to research, 90% of employers plan to enhance their employee experience this year. And if you need to add more employees, their ZipRecruiter ZipRecruiter technology finds qualified candidates for your job, and you can invite your top choices to apply. Try ZipRecruiter for free today at ziprecruiter.com/tech guy.

Leo Laporte (00:01:25):
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here. The Tech Guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, Samsung galaxy phones, and all that jazz. Eighty eight eighty eight, ask Leo it's the phone number. If you wanna call and talk high tech with me for the next three hours. That's what we do here. 8 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6 3 hours in most jurisdictions. I think some jurisdictions it's shorter. I'll give you as many hours as I can. 88 88 ask Leo website tech guy labs.com will take you to the podcast networks, page twit.tv, and you'll find all the episodes of the tech guy there. This is episode 1,867. Yes, we started at one. So that'll give you some idea how long, how long the, this thing has been going on. If you go there after the show, it takes a little while. We'll get all links from the show, all the things I talk about up there. There's a transcript now, which is nice. Cuz you can search the transcript, find the section you're interested in there's little time codes there. You can jump to it because we put audio and video there after the fact amazing all know that free, no sign up nothing. Tech guy labs.com. There is a cookie banner there

Leo Laporte (00:02:54):
SI

Leo Laporte (00:02:57):
SI somehow the notion that cookies of any kind or a bad thing has percolated through the world and, and eventually became incorporated into law in the EU, the European union. And that's why you see these cookie banners is there's a law that says, well, if you're gonna have cookies, you better, you better ask permission. And this came up for me the other day because I run a, my, my personal website is, is what they call a static blog. There's it's a very simple there's no blog engine behind it. There's just a bunch of HTML pages. There's some JavaScript and yeah, it turns out there's some cookies. So I had to put up a little cookie announcement and I said in a very snarky way on this cookie announcement. Yeah, like every other site in the world, I have cookies get over it.

Leo Laporte (00:03:48):
And then there's just a button that says, you know, I think learn more, which takes you to a completely Ady site that says here's what a cookie is. And hide cookies are used a variety of ways I had to put a cookie up is because I have a setting on my site that can go light mode or dark mode. Some people like the site to be dark text on a light background, like a newspaper black on white and some people, especially more nowadays like the dark mode. You've seen the dark mode where it's a black screen with light text. It's kind of funny cuz that's how it's all started in computing, right? Green or gray text on a, on a black screen. We've come back to that cuz it hurts your eyes. If you don't go out at all, if you're sitting in a darkened room all the time then you don't want a blazingly bright screen.

Leo Laporte (00:04:39):
And most people set their screens too. Anyway, it turns out and it hurts. I understand it hurts. Some devices now like the iPhone have a setting that says after sunset, before, you know when it's light out, go light mode when it's dark out, go dark mode, whatever. Anyway, I have a setting that lets you choose that's seems to me the best thing. There's a little button in the upper right hand corner, darker light. Right? Well, unless you wanna set that every single time you come and I guess we could do it that way. I set a cookie, I say, and it's on your site on your home computer. So it's it's per computer. It's actually per browser. It says a little thing in there that says for leo.fm, this person like stark mode, that's all, all, that's all, it's not gathering information on you or anything, but because that's a cookie, the European union regulations require me to put that silly banner up scaring people and annoying people cuz after all let's face it. When you see that, you just say, okay fine. Right? I guess some people might go through the cookies and S so all a cookie is, is a save a setting to your hard drive where people got upset about cookies is something another kind of cookie called third party cookies.

Leo Laporte (00:05:55):
And that gives, so the way cookies are set up only the site that set the cookie. In my case, only Leo FM can even see that cookie can read it. No one else can read it. But folks at Facebook and elsewhere have really messed it up for the rest of us because they figured out Google, oh wow. If we have a cookie, Like you log into Facebook, remember when you face log into Facebook, you don't have to log in again. And again, it remembers your that you were there. It actually saves a cookie, a token. It calls it that says, yeah, you're you. And just let you know, go on in and use Facebook. That's a convenience to you. But at the same time, Facebook sets cookies that identify you as you that's the Leo cookie. And then, oh, this was clever of them. They arranged with many other sites. You've seen it, the thumbs up like button, you see those on other sites or login with Facebook or any variety of little logins or Facebook logos or things like that. And all of those Belong to Facebook. See, see where I'm going here. The rules of cookies are only the originating site can read the cookie. Well, Facebook set the cookie, but it means that you go to another site with a Facebook like button. Facebook knows you're there. Cuz they see the, the like button, even if you don't click it, that code's coming from their site. So at the same time as they put the like button there, they can say, and by the way, who is this?

Leo Laporte (00:07:25):
So Facebook and, and, and Facebook is notorious for this. Even if you're not a member of Facebook will collect information about you. Every time you visit a site with a Facebook like button on it, you're saying, Hey, I'm here me. That's the thing that people should be worried about. And privacy advocates are worried about is this idea of tracking you around the web, even on other sites. I think if you think about it, the idea of a site can save settings like dark mode on your computer so that when you come back, it's dark mode or your password. So when you come back, you don't have to log in it again. That's, that's a convenience that isn't a privacy invasion. The privacy invasion comes from tracking you around to other sites. Unfortunately, This all got conflated together and the EU decided all cookies are bad cookies. And now we have to put up with this really silly announcement. And I think it opposite effect, cuz I think it just kind of it make it immunizes. You it you just, oh yeah, there it is again. Okay. Okay. Okay. I just want, was it the site?

Leo Laporte (00:08:33):
Of course there are better ways to to prevent cookies for instance. The browser Firefox has a built-in little Facebook sandboxing thing that says, you know, wherever you go, don't send a signal back to Facebook. The browser can do that. That's a better way to do it than making a law requiring a banner. That makes no sense. Anyway, there, it's gonna be interesting cuz now there's a new Nutrition labels are all the rage, right? That was actually a huge deal when they, the us started requiring nutrition labels on packaging. And I think that's been valuable. We can look at the calories, the sodium, the fat can pay, pay attention to that. Well now there's a, a privacy nutrition label Being proposed. And I think it's a great idea. Apple's gonna do this. That shows you very, it looks just like a privacy label and it tells you what stuff is going. This what stuff this site is collecting. I think this is a great idea. And I think some lawmakers now Are looking at the idea of making this universal. So you could, you know, whenever you go to a site You could say at the bottom, there's always a privacy link. Now, by the way, that is another, you're gonna have a privacy state policy and so forth and have a link to it. And that privacy link could have a privacy nutrition label that would be easy to read standardized. Everybody would understand what it is.

Leo Laporte (00:10:10):
I like that idea. That makes sense. That's better than a you cookies

Leo Laporte (00:10:17):
People. I think that's silly.

Leo Laporte (00:10:20):
Samsung had its event. It's a big event this week seven in the morning in my time. So I didn't, I didn't get up. I made somebody else do it works for me. Jason, thank you. Jason Hall got up 7:00 AM. He hosts our podcast about Android. All about Android. So yeah, that's fair. They announced the Samsung S 22 S 22. What is it? Plus an S 22 ultra. And you know, we give a lot of attention to apple when they come out and do iPhones every September. I think we should give as Samsung saying a little credit, Samsung stopped doing the note, which was a very popular phone. When it first came out, I was a big note fan and I had my little, little, I had my giant note phone and people li it was little it's little by today's standards, but people mocked me. What's that big phone you got there. Anybody with any sense has a smaller phone for a while Was better in phones. I mean, I'm talking 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago, smaller was better. Now bigger's better. Right? Samsung stopped making the note. But now they've got the S 22 ultra, which is the same size shape of the note. And it has the stylist. It's the note. They just ma they changed the name. That's all.

Leo Laporte (00:11:39):
So little problem on Samsung's website, you couldn't, it took forever to order it. You couldn't get in. Finally they get one, I'll have it. February 25th, there are some review units already out. We're starting to see reviews. Looks like a pretty nice phone. I'll give you my impressions once I've used it for a little bit.

Leo Laporte (00:11:57):
But I know there are a lot of you use Samsungs. And so I thought we should mention that new Samsung phone looks pretty good if you're in the market for a new Samsung phone, if you have a recent, you know, an S 10 or later, I wouldn't worry about it, but you know, Mike be still very happy with his S 20. He says in our chat room, eighty eight, eighty eight ask Leo's the phone number. I am gonna take your questions, your comments, your suggestions. Let's talk high tech. When I come back, don't forget. Scott Wilkinson has the week off cuz he is moving. So we'll have a lot more time. Scott's not here this week or next Wooey Whoah Samsung Galaxys 22 ultra will always be the note 22 to me says Android central. Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's a, that's absolutely case. It's a note. I can't wait to get it cuz I've always loved the note. Oh, it's silly. It's just a name. It is. It is the note. It's big. It's got a stylist. I think it's gonna be really nice. Yeah, you can order. Now the site is back up. Thank goodness.

Leo Laporte (00:13:21):
They've they've restored the site. In fact, I ordered because I couldn't get through to the Samsung site. I ordered it from Verizon, which wasn't as good a deal and required me to be a Verizon customer for a while, which I already am, but I I'm gonna use it with a Verizon SIM. So as soon as the Samsung site went back up that, that evening, I I canceled my Verizon order in order from Samsung, cuz there's a lot of Lot of you know, to give you a lot of,

Leo Laporte (00:13:59):
Oh yeah, yeah you do.

Leo Laporte (00:14:03):
Here's our telephone lady.

Kim Schaffer (00:14:05):
She stumped me with this one.

Leo Laporte (00:14:07):
I never heard this one before. We're trying D every time we introduce Kim sheer who answers a phone for the show? Our phone angel. Every time we introduce have a different phone song,

Kim Schaffer (00:14:17):
I feel like she had to dig deep for that one. That's

Leo Laporte (00:14:19):
Deep, deep tracks, deep cut,

Kim Schaffer (00:14:20):
Deep cuts. Where'd

Leo Laporte (00:14:21):
You get that? That professor, Laura, what is that? Who is that? Two

Professor Laura (00:14:24):
Basements down. It's Alice Cooper.

Leo Laporte (00:14:26):
Alice Cooper. It's Alice Cooper. And that is where you live two basements down. So it's perfect. It's perfect. Oh, how are you? Are you ready for the big game? The superb owl tomorrow?

Kim Schaffer (00:14:41):
Sure. Why not? You know an excuse to eat crappy food.

Leo Laporte (00:14:45):
I have to work. So

Kim Schaffer (00:14:47):
I know you're gonna start early though, right?

Leo Laporte (00:14:50):
Yeah. We're gonna try to start do a podcast in the on Sunday afternoons.

Kim Schaffer (00:14:53):
You'll get to catch Mary J Blige at halftime.

Leo Laporte (00:14:55):
I think I might get home in that time for the halftime show. We'll see, what time does the game start?

Kim Schaffer (00:14:59):
3 30, 3 30

Leo Laporte (00:15:00):
Our time three 30 San Pacific time.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:03):
I feel sorry for the east coast people kind of

Leo Laporte (00:15:06):
Cause that's 6 30, 6 30.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:08):
That's rough. I mean the game's gonna go till nine, you know?

Leo Laporte (00:15:11):
That's okay. Well that's

Kim Schaffer (00:15:12):
Okay. People want Monday after super bowl off.

Leo Laporte (00:15:16):
Oh really? Is that a thing?

Kim Schaffer (00:15:17):
Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Leo Laporte (00:15:19):
Super bowl Sunday. I wonder if it's, if it's bigger than ever because of the pandemic or, or what I think it is certainly more people watch the playoffs than ever before

Kim Schaffer (00:15:31):
This year was exciting.

Leo Laporte (00:15:32):
Yeah. And actually I think the super bowls gonna be as usual letdown after that.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:35):
Oh yeah. After the, after the postseason or whatever you call it, championship games,

Leo Laporte (00:15:41):
The super bowls gonna be amazing.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:42):
Yes. The only thing to watch will be the commercials in halftime show

Leo Laporte (00:15:45):
Commercials. Did you see the, sorry? That's funny. The echo commercial. Yes. I saw so been spewing it out in bits and pieces cuz it's a long commercial. Is that where it's many commercials. You can watch it all at once.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:58):
Colin, Jo and Scarlet Johan. Is

Leo Laporte (00:15:59):
That who that other guy is? He's the guy from Saturday live. That's

Kim Schaffer (00:16:02):
Her husband.

Leo Laporte (00:16:03):
Oh, I thought it was just some guy they're married. Oh, okay. Well that's good. Cuz they were in bed together. So that's a good thing. It's very funny at, well the first time I saw it, I said, boy, that actress looks a lot like Scarlet Johanson. It is. But it is.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:15):
It is. Yeah. I mean how he got her, I don't know. But he is funny. So I give him,

Leo Laporte (00:16:18):
Once you see him all together, it's actually a, a really it, the premise is, and they've always had

Kim Schaffer (00:16:24):
Breath mins.

Leo Laporte (00:16:25):
They've always had great super bowl ads, Amazon echo and this one and then they've always had you know, celebrities. Mm. And this one, the premise is if, if what if echo could read your mind? Yep. Not a good thing. It comes out. Good thing. Well, I won't spoil it cause I think people might wanna see it

Kim Schaffer (00:16:42):
Tomorrow. Well, I just gave a bit of a spoiler.

Leo Laporte (00:16:43):
Yeah. Nobody knows that. Who should I talk to first here?

Kim Schaffer (00:16:47):
I, so you talk high tech. Jamie wants to talk low tech. I love this question cuz we're in radio. So

Leo Laporte (00:16:54):
Low tech

Kim Schaffer (00:16:55):
Is radio gonna go away some day and Jamie and Tampa, Florida

Leo Laporte (00:17:00):
Just to chill down my spine.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:01):
I know I that's. I, I think it's a great question. Thanks

Leo Laporte (00:17:04):
Kim. I appreciate it. Hi Jamie Leo. Laporte the tech guy.

Caller #1 (00:17:09):
Hey Leah. How are you?

Leo Laporte (00:17:10):
I'm well, what's up

Caller #1 (00:17:13):
Well up in Tampa, Florida. I am a radio freak. I've been a radio Freaker ever since I was about five years old. And, and even though, you know, we got all the Pandoras and the apple music to the world. I still, I still get pretty much most of my music off the radio. Hmm. And I keep hearing, oh, radio is dying. Radio is gonna be dead in 10 years or five years, however much it is. Do you think radio is gonna go away sooner if, and if it's not going to go away, why not? You know, I mean, whether, I mean, whether no longer be a need for the traditional or sea, we all listen that some of us still use, right. People keep telling me radio's gonna die in X 90 years. Anyway.

Leo Laporte (00:17:48):
How roughly, how old are you Jamie?

Caller #1 (00:17:51):
I'm 29, almost

Leo Laporte (00:17:52):
30. You're a youngster. So that's really encouraging because the, the real question is not so much is radio gonna go away, but is PE are people your age gonna continue to listen to it? So the fact that you like it is really good in history technology, when new technologies, especially media technologies come along, they generally don't. They may become more important then, but they don't, they don't replace the predecesor. So there was some concern when movies came out that that would hurt radio didn't that when newspapers came out that would hurt radio or it would hurt newspapers or TV would hurt radio or, you know, and on and on and on the internet would kill TV and newspapers. So certainly the internet has not helped newspapers and magazines. They're all kind of suffering, but they survive in a new form. And I think that that's probably what's gonna happen with radio.

Leo Laporte (00:18:47):
I don't, I can't think of a time even cars didn't kill buggies. They're still buggies. There're not a lot of 'em, but they have specialized uses. Here's the thing that, from my point of view, look, I like you. I love radio. I I've been doing it for 46 years. It's my, it's my not only my livelihood, it's my life blood. I love it. But what I, but I would've thought about it is what I don't love necessarily is having a transmitter in a tower, a radio station. What I love is audio, a person talking to you. And that goes for music too, right? Per a person. You know, you probably listen to the radio because you're gonna hear music. You don't have on your, on your streaming services, right. Or maybe you like the DJs who are announcing the songs or having fun in the morning and that kind of thing.

Leo Laporte (00:19:36):
And I think that's what we've learned from podcasts is it's really, in fact, the company that owns this show, iHeart media no longer can calls itself a radio company. They're, they're, they're, they're the number or one audio company in the world audio. So I think we'll always have audio, cuz there's plenty of times we can't list can't, you know, watch TV when we're driving when we're walking the dog, but there's time, but we still want audio entertainment. So I think podcasting has proven that that has a long, long life ahead of it. Terrestrial radio. Yeah. I don't see that going away. I think, I don't know. I have to look, I think audiences are down. So, you know, it's just like buggies it, I mean, that's the worst case scenario, right? Is that, that there'll be some Amish people who will listen to the radio, but nobody else, but I don't think it goes away. And so I think the best thing to, to keep in mind is that you love audio programming. However, it happens. Nice thing about radio live local that's unique. Leo Laport, the tech guy. So I, I feel like that's a really good question. History shows us these things don't go away. Even when there, when there are newer technologies they find new, new places. Why do you listen to the radio though? I'm curious, James.

Caller #1 (00:21:02):
Well, I listen to it for the DJs that I've known for years. Yeah. The people I listen in. Yeah. Another listen to it. Leo it's free. Yeah. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:21:12):
Not it's free. Okay.

Caller #1 (00:21:14):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm not paying for a bunch of streaming apps. Like I would for apple music or Pandora. It's it's, it's portable. I can take it with me. I can, you know, I can be, I, I live in Tampa, Florida, and we don't get you on the radio over here, but I can listen, but I can go on your website and pull up a station and I listen to right. All your lunch station to

Leo Laporte (00:21:35):
Carry your program. So, so you're not listening to the radio in a way when you're listening to this show, you're listening to it over the internet, but it's still radio it's audio content. Right. So I don't think that's gonna go in. And in fact, I think podcast S are really where radio is headed. So it, why it doesn't really matter to us how we get it. It's lovely to have something free and maybe not need internet to get it. That's really cool. Dr. Mom says, she thinks the FCC will auction off the frequencies. I don't see the first of all the am and FM banner are tiny compared to the band frequencies there auction off they're tiny. You know, you could, so it's, there's not a huge demand for that spectrum. Well, I mean, I guess there would be, but it's not, it's not a, a big swath of spectrum. So I don't think radio, I don't think, I don't think they'll ever sell off that frequency. I think there will always be radio. It may be more specialized know. It's neat to see what people are doing with lo with low power FM. Although the FCC has kind of dropped the ball on that a little bit, but people have little radio stations.

Caller #1 (00:22:37):
Yeah. And I, my first, my first job was at a low power at FM station. I I was the I was the weather reporter for a low power

Leo Laporte (00:22:45):
FMC. Isn't that great. But see that's hyper local it's super local, right?

Caller #1 (00:22:50):
Yeah, it was, it was a tiny R and B station I worked at and I was J T in the afternoon.

Leo Laporte (00:22:56):
That's awesome. First

Caller #1 (00:22:57):
Letter of my last name and, and I think another reason I was in Florida and our, and our weather here in Florida is very unpredictable. So you're know when your power's gonna go off where your Internet's gonna get knocked out. And so, so it's good to have that have that, you know, have a radio around because I mean, now, unless you lives, where, where the power goes out every single day or whatever, you know, there's, I mean, I, I don't, you know, I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day and they told me streaming isn't replacing radio is just telling listeners, Hey, if you wanna hear this particular radio station, here's another way to hear it. Yeah. You

Leo Laporte (00:23:30):
That's, that's the thing, when you say, if you say radio, you say transmitters and you know, and, and antennas, I guess that could be, I don't think even that's going away, but it doesn't matter from your point of view, as long as you can hear that content. So the idea of somebody playing music or, or somebody talking to you is actually bigger than ever. There's a, you know, there were a limited number of radio stations. There's millions of podcasts. Now there's millions of streaming music stations. So there's really, it's better than ever. It's bigger than ever. As long as you don't say, well, radio requires a trans you know, that has to come through the that's

Caller #1 (00:24:07):
What we thought. Yeah. That that's, that's what we thought years and years and years ago. And then, and then heck I'm I can, I was gonna tell you this. I was, I'm listening to your, your show right now on my a L E X a speaker with I'm listening to your KFI Philly. Yeah. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (00:24:24):
Yeah.

Caller #1 (00:24:25):
So, you know, I mean, I used, I used to have to Google what stations you were on, but now I don't have to worry

Leo Laporte (00:24:29):
About that. Yeah. KFI will always be on KFI I think cuz thanks to the auspices of their fabulous program until they

Caller #1 (00:24:35):
Get rid of you. Yeah. Until

Leo Laporte (00:24:36):
They get rid until I'm gone forever. Yeah. Hey Jamie, a pleasure talking to you. It's a great question. And I love radio too. I'm with you right there.

Caller #1 (00:24:44):
All right, friend. You take care and

Speaker 11 (00:24:47):
All right,

Leo Laporte (00:24:48):
I'll let you, I'll let you have that one. I don't have a dog in that hunt anymore. Leo Laporte the tech guy. Yes. On the radio and on the internet and everywhere else in between. Good to have you Mike. He who's in our chat room makes a really excellent point. Just like amateur radio commercial broadcasting has a huge, important role to play in emergencies. You make a really good point, Mike, when the electricity's out or you know, the, the internet is out and there's no other way to get information, you know, there's a hurricane or a tornado or an earthquake radio's here. You know, radio's a good, in fact I've always had, and I recommend everybody have a portable hand cranked radio or battery powered radio that you can use in a case like that. Cuz the radio stations will stay on and they will give you emergency information.

Leo Laporte (00:25:46):
That's very valuable. That by itself is a reason that radio will continue forever. Right? That's that's a very important point. Thank you Mike Noah, Scott Wilkinson. This hour Scott will be gone for a couple of weeks as he makes a move from the Southland to the central coast of California, the San a cruise, but we'll get 'em on in a couple of weeks. I know this is the worst time to lose Scott Wilkinson cuz tomorrow's a super bowl and a lot of people going out to buy TVs for the super bowl. But we know Scott actually I should get Mike on Mike taste test a lot of TVs as well. He likes the LGS, the EDS. I do two Sonys. He loves them. Samsung. It's really hard to go wrong these days with the TV for budget TVs, visios still a good one and even less expensive, two upstart Chinese models that are really trying to get in the market high sense and TCL also make excellent TVs.

Leo Laporte (00:26:47):
And if you're going out to get a TV to watch the big game, get the biggest one. You can afford 75 inches. Wouldn't be too big. Trust me. It's awesome. And get 4k and get HDR. They'll come to together. I don't care about smart TVs. You're gonna get a smart TV. I wish we could eliminate that. In fact, my advice is never connect that smart TV to the internet, use a Roku or an apple TV or some other device with better privacy and, and better frankly, software and hardware instead of that smart TV. But you know what, if you don't wanna buy another device and you got a Netflix built into your T go ahead and Roku built into your go ahead and use it. That's okay. It's okay. Just be aware that soon as you connect that TV to the internet it's phone and home saying we got one, I got a live one. Would you like know one? He's watching eighty eight, eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone over Jerry on the line from hat, Phil hat Hatfield, PA. Hello, Jerry. Good to talk to you again, Leo,

Caller #2 (00:27:49):
Haven't talked to you in a while.

Leo Laporte (00:27:51):
Been a long time. I'm glad to know. You're you're out there still working hard.

Caller #2 (00:27:56):
Leo, have you had any success retrieving your, your cryptocurrency?

Leo Laporte (00:28:01):
No, I haven't really even tried. So I, I should feel people in on this back when Bitcoin first started kind of more cuz I was kind of interested in it than anything else. I set up a, what they call a Bitcoin wallet up self hosted wallet. I didn't do it on a, an exchange. In fact, it's a good thing. If I'd put it on mountain GOs, for instance, which was very popular at the time, I would've lost everything, but I set up my, my own wallet. And then for a while we had, I put my Bitcoin ID. It's a long number. That's unique to you up on the website and said, if you wanna make a donation and people were nice, they were generous. And that wallet accumulated over time, 7.85 Bitcoin, which you know, in the early days was worth about a buck, 50, 50, it's worth a little more now it was worth a lot more a few months ago when Bitcoin hit $60,000 at Bitcoin, that's almost half a million dollars. Yeah. What is BTC now? Is it like down to 40?

Caller #2 (00:29:02):
I don't know. But Leo, I ran across a Youtube video the other day. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:29:07):
42.

Caller #2 (00:29:09):
Yeah. He, this hacker engineer cracked a Bitcoin wallet and got 2 billion for the owner.

Leo Laporte (00:29:16):
Nice. How much of it did he keep?

Caller #2 (00:29:18):
I don't know, but his name is Joe grand and he's on YouTube.

Leo Laporte (00:29:22):
I will watch it. Thank you. Thank you, Jerry. Yeah.

Caller #2 (00:29:27):
I'm extending away flying to you.

Leo Laporte (00:29:30):
Well, yeah, my wife would like it. Let's see. It's almost eight Bitcoin. That's $320,000. Yeah. It'd probably be worth trying to get, I'll tell you my philosophy on this, Jerry. First of all, the reason I can't get the Bitcoin out is because I wisely. I thought password protected that wallet, the wallet isn't very big. It's really just that long, a long private key. So Bitcoin uses that public private key cryptography. We've talked about before, where you can tell everybody what your private key is. That's that long Bitcoin address that I put up on the website. I actually put a QR code to make it easy. And then you have a private key, which no one is to know that unlocks the wallet and lets you transfer Bitcoin out of it. And I guess in this case, most crucially transfer Bitcoin somewhere like, I don't know, Coinbase and let them give you dollars for it.

Leo Laporte (00:30:25):
Cuz that's really, I mean, if I were gonna do that, if I could unlock it, that's probably what I would do. So if you just let that wallet fly around anybody who has it, that's your that's your, the wallet is simply your private key. That's all it really is. And so if I would were to let that out in the public, somebody could just say, well, that's mine. I got it. And that's it. There's no recourse. So the best thing to do, if you're gonna do that is protect. First of all, protect it. Don't let it get out, keep it, keep it close to your vest and protect it with a, a long, strong PO password, which I did. Unfortunately I did not cord the password, which is puzzling to me because even then I was using last pass. I mean, I, I'm not sure why I didn't my guess is I didn't take it seriously.

Leo Laporte (00:31:14):
And so I used some throwaway password, probably a variation of throwaway passwords. I've used for years on sites I don't care about. And so it's just a matter of figuring out what that is now, this hacker guy. Nice, good, great. My son for briefly, my my son Henry said, let me crack your wallet. I said, I'll give you a whole Bitcoin at $42,000 at today's prices. If, if you can crack it, he never did. What he wanted to do was send it off to some guys, a hacker consortium that says, we'll crack it for you for 10%. I said, dude, and this was at the time was only worth a quarter of a million. I said, dude, I am not gonna send a quarter million dollars to some guy thinking that he might take 10% and give the rest back. Would you do that?

Leo Laporte (00:32:02):
That's crazy. He said, well, I read about him in the wall street journal. I said, I don't care. Please do not give my Bitcoin wallet to some hackers. And I think it would be probably the same thing. If you have a, you know, nice. He gave somebody back at their $2 billion. Nice. Yeah. Okay. I'm not sure I'm gonna trust some guy to now if I can hack it, maybe on the other hand, I don't care because if I had been able to get in that wallet, I would've sold it a long time ago. Back when Bitcoin was a thousand bucks, I would've said I got me $7,800. I'm rich And it would be gone anyway. So I think of this more as a long term, hold Enforced by a forgotten password. It's my retirement. And someday when I have a lot of time on my hands, maybe I will try to get into that wallet and figure it out. You know, everybody's a white hat until you say, Hey, here's half a million dollars. Give me back 480,000, please. I am not gonna do that. I am not gonna do that. And then, then the other question is that I also have mixed feelings about Bitcoin as you've pro I talked about it last week,

Leo Laporte (00:33:21):
You know, I'm not sure I wanna facilitate this. There's all sorts of issues with cryptocurrency. There's the issue of the fact that it uses huge amount of energy.

Leo Laporte (00:33:32):
I mean a lot more, you know, the total amount of energy used by Bitcoin in a year is, is, is greater than some nations because Bitcoin is created by computers, doing complicated math problems. And they use a lot of energy by design. So that's problem. Number one, the other is' a huge speculative bubble. The people who have Bitcoin are desperate to make sure that the price stays up so that you will buy it so they can cash out. I don't wanna participate in that either. I am not a Bitcoin, bro. Thank you very much. I could beat, but I'm not Leo. Laporte the tech guy. Micah, did you, we should get the link. I, I don't know if we should publicize it or not. I guess somebody put the link in. Yeah. Oh yeah, sure. I'm gonna trust this guy.

Leo Laporte (00:34:35):
Okay. Let me,

Leo Laporte (00:34:36):
Let me just show you

Leo Laporte (00:34:37):
And

Leo Laporte (00:34:37):
You can be the judge

Leo Laporte (00:34:42):
I'm

Leo Laporte (00:34:42):
Going to, I'm gonna send this guy half a million dollars. Yeah. So he can hack. He can hack my wallet and give it back to me. No, I'm not. No, I'm not. And I'll tell you by the way. Sure. People are gonna say, but look, see, he gave back the $2 million. Well, we have his word for that. We don't know. He might have been that hacked his own wallet. Oh yeah. The customer was watching the whole process with him. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:35:22):
No,

Leo Laporte (00:35:27):
No. You can't do an escrow account. It doesn't work that way. If he has, if he figures out the password to the wallet, which he can't, by the way, that's the other side of this. If you had a bad password, you could, but there it's strong encryption. It's not just kind of some, you know, cipher it's strong encryption. So if I, as I, I hope I did used a good, long, strong password. It's not really not crackable, but let's say he did. He's got access to the wallet. He could immediately, within three seconds transfer the contents of the wallet to another Bitcoin address, unknown to me and it's gone, done. So I'm sure he is a nice guy. I have no, I don't know anything about him. Oh, it was pin protected. Well, of course that's no good. If it was four digit pin or even six digit pin, I can crack that. I can crack that in half an hour. Okay. Fine. If it's a, it's strong, it's RSA encryption. It's good. Strong. I use the Bitcoin core wallet, which is good. Strong encryption Course. I wouldn't have used anything else Uses AEs 2 56 CBC for the private key. That is not gonna be crackable. Unless, I mean, I guess you could with rainbow tables, if I used monkey 1, 2, 3, I didn't cuz I tried that

Leo Laporte (00:37:43):
You, you really couldn't brute force it Cuz it's salted multiple rounds of hashing. I mean they really do a good job. They do it right.

Leo Laporte (00:37:56):
I don't have Scott. I could do an ad right now. I could support our show. You could support our show with our fine advertisers. If you're not a member of club TWiT, it's the ads that keep this on the air of course club TWiT members. We thank you. Because you are helping a lot in this case. Our sponsor for the tech guy show this week is zip recruiter. I have to say the, I do love zip recruiter. We use them. We've used them to hire some of our best employees. One of our editors a bookkeeper, I think ZipRecruiter is a place to go both as somebody looking for work and somebody looking to hire. And I am very hopeful. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that this is gonna be the year employers go back and say, we need to and hire.

Leo Laporte (00:38:48):
And not only that, but we need to make it better for our employees. And I think that's good. According to a, a recent, recent study, 90% of employers, this is, I love this is music. My ears. Certainly it's true for us plan to make enhancing the employee experience a top priority in 2022. I think that's really a great thing. We, for instance, instituted four day work weeks at TWiT again, because employee retention's really important to any company when you hire and train somebody and they're fitting into the culture, you don't wanna lose. 'em Think about it as an employee. If you ever were an employee, if you haven't always been an owner, how, how, what could a, what could a company do to make you happier? Make your employees feel more valued by asking 'em questions, getting their feedback, their input, giving them a sense of a, a real sense, not a phony sense, but a real sense of agency of, of being involved in the work and making a difference in the work.

Leo Laporte (00:39:44):
The makes pay some attention to your company culture. Is it a, is it a, a culture that makes people want to come to work? We do things like lunch for the employees, snacks, things like that. Offer more learning opportunities. We also do that for our employees allow for more flexibility and work schedules. A lot of people wanna stay working from home. I think that's a great thing. Make time to connect, show more empathy. And if you do need to add more employees to your team, there's a way that works really well for both employers and employees. It's called zip recruiter. Well, I'll tell you, I love it as a hiring person because they use this matching technology. So, so cool. You post your job. Zip recruiter posted to a hundred plus job boards and social networks and all that stuff. So you're reaching out on a wide net, but they also have a million.

Leo Laporte (00:40:33):
I believe more than a million resumes, current resumes. Cause employer come looking for work to ZipRecruiter and they'll go through and see who has the qualifications to match your posting. And they'll, they'll tell you, Hey, here's somebody who might be a good fit. If you want invite them. It turns out if you invite somebody to apply for your job, they're flattered, right? They feel good. They're much more likely to apply much more to be the right employee, invite your top of choices to apply for your job. They apply faster. They follow through no wonder zip recruiters, the number one rated hiring site in the us. That's not just me. Although I do think that, but G2 ratings says it to their technology. So effective for we're out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter, get a quality candidate within the first day we get we've done us many times and often it's within the first hour.

Leo Laporte (00:41:27):
I'm always Lisa cuz Lisa does the posting. My wife ends our CEO and she'll say, wow, like an hour, like look at this. This is a great candidate. This is a great candidate. I think ZipRecruiter's amazing. I think it's amazing. Find the right employees for your workplace with ZipRecruiter. You can try it free right now. Go to ziprecruiter.com/tech guy. When you do that, by the way, it helps us cuz they say this, these guys listen to the tech guy show ziprecruiter.com/t E C H G U Y. Right. It's just the smartest way to hire. And I am a huge fan ziprecruiter.com/tech. I try it free today and you know, there's I, what, what's the harm? And I bet you, you will see too, just like we do those, those great candidates come rolling in ziprecruiter.com/tech guy. I'm hopeful. I think 20, 22 is gonna be a good, great year for both employers and employees.

Leo Laporte (00:42:29):
Ziprecruiter is doing what they can to help ziprecruiter.com/tech guy, Leo Laport, the tech guy, 88 88, ask Leo. It's funny how this has captured people's imagination drives. 'em Nuts that I have somewhere access to something that has 7.8, five Bitcoin in it drives 'em nuts. I don't, it doesn't for some reason doesn't bother me. You know, it, it wasn't money. I earned it wasn't money. I slaved hard for it was found money basically. And so it just doesn't bother me. It's interesting that though people have people have suggested, I get hypnotized people have suggested giving it to the wallet who hackers, the, the problem is actually, this is a good thing to understand the key in the Bitcoin wallet I use, which was from the Bitcoin and core distribution is generated using a public private key technology called AEs.

Leo Laporte (00:43:32):
It's using AEs 256 CBC, which is a very strong password encryption or data encryption technology. If the password is password, they can guess it they'll be able to brute force it. But if the password is a long, strong string of random digits, numbers and punctuation of maybe 10 or more characters, it would, it is impossible to root force. It, it, it literally there's no, you know, and it would take trillions of years. So the only way it could be cracked is if I use some poor passwords. So this underscores for everybody, the importance of using good passwords. Now, normally, you know, on your smartphone or a website, it won't let you try passwords very fast. You know, your phone in most cases only allow you to try 10 times. And then after the first few failed passwords, usually they say, okay, you're gonna have to take a 10 minute break.

Leo Laporte (00:44:33):
That kind of thing. They really slow it down. And there's a reason if it's gonna be crackable, brute, forcible, it has to be done very, very quickly. So hackers who have access to the device, not, you know, you can't do it on the phone, you can't do it on a website, but with a wallet, they can actually have the wallet on the, their hard drive. They can bang at that door without any limitations can try a hundred million passwords, a second 100 million passwords a second. So if the password is a word in the dictionary, a series of words in the dictionary or anything kind of simple, yes, it can be easily derived. You know, maybe it'll take a day or two, if it's truly long, random password, doesn't matter unless they get very lucky and accidentally, guess it in the first few days, it's gonna take a very like on the order of the life of the universe time to do it. So that's why you used good passwords. That's why 88, 88 asked Leo. And that's why I did. And of course that's why I can't get into my wallet, Randy, on the line from Seattle, Washington. Hello, Randy.

Caller #3 (00:45:44):
Hey Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:45:45):
Hey welcome.

Caller #3 (00:45:46):
Thank you. I have a question. I'm, I'm getting an iPad mini and I have a question from what I know you can buy the perfectly manufactured and packaged apple pencil for about $130 for about 20 to $30 or so you can get a third party pencil that is compatible with an iPad. That's has a battery that's rechargeable, or you can just use a stylist. In which case, when would you need one or the other?

Leo Laporte (00:46:17):
That's interesting. I have never the apple pencil's 99 bucks. I have never, and is rechargeable. Also. I have never used a third party pencil. You can use. In fact, there's all sorts of fun, YouTube videos that people use a sausages and other things on an iPhone and iPad because of the way it uses touch. Anything that has electric capacitance can be used, but the pencil is a different kind of thing. It's pressure sensitive. So it detects different pressures. If you're just using it to replace your finger, you can, you know, that's fine. You don't even need anything that's electrical. You can use a sausage. So there are plenty of fake of not fake, but non apple stylists that are just to replace a finger, their finger. That's not a big deal, but if you want the benefits of the apple pencil like pressure sensitivity and and the, and you know, ability to do different things with it, then you wanna be more careful.

Leo Laporte (00:47:20):
You don't wanna just get the $10, you know, finger replacement. There are companies that make, and I haven't tried them so called compatible apple pencils. I just always spend the 99 bucks. You're spending a lot on that mini by the way, love the mini right, love the mini and the reason you might want to get a good stylist for instance, is the minis small. And the screen is small. Some of the touch, what they call the touch, targets, the things you're tapping too small for your finger. And they'll be too small for a stylist that doesn't have a very fine point on it, like the apple pencil. So zag does make a what they call the zag pro stylist. I have never used it. It's half the price of the apple pencil. It looks like it's the same, but when I see universal capacitive tip, well, that's the back end though.

Leo Laporte (00:48:16):
So I, I would look at reviews maybe, and see maybe somebody will call and say, you know, are these things as good as using an apple pencil, but the apple pencil isn't so expensive that I feel, I feel like, oh, and I got it. That's an outrageous amount of money. And the things you can do with it are incredible. For instance, the apple pencil pairs immediately, when you on the iPad mini the new iPad, mini the apple pencil, and you can use either the first or the second generation, I recommend the second generation. It has a little magnet and it goes right on the side of the mini charges. The mini recognizes it a me it says, oh, I see you have the pencil. You know, I don't know. I, you know, I'm looking at reviews on Amazon and some people say I prefer the zag. I prefer it. But I don't have a lot of experience with third parties. In fact somebody in the chat room saying, you should look at the apple pencil prices on Amazon, because you might actually get it down to close to that price. He says he got his for 70. So get the, if, if you can afford it, get the apple pencil, it's gonna be the best experience.

Caller #3 (00:49:20):
I live with a few words for thought, yes, A pencil without lead is pointless.

Leo Laporte (00:49:28):
There is no lead in the apple Vel, but it has a very nice point. I love it. That's great. Yeah. Enjoy. You're gonna love, I think the new, the mini, you know, I have the, the giant iPad pro 12.9 inch, and I have the mini and I use the mini far more often. It's just a, it's more convenient. It's a better size. I just love it. I think it's a great size and a great thing. You know, if you really want a laptop replacement, the 12.9 is really a laptop replacement, but the mini is what a tablet should be a, a pocketable little device you can take with you. Did you get the LTE built in or no?

Caller #3 (00:50:07):
No, I didn't. I just got the wifi version.

Leo Laporte (00:50:09):
Yeah. Which is fine. Cuz WiFi's everywhere. I did get the LTE. And so I take the mini on trips and everywhere I am, because I just, I can always use it. It's like a big phone for a while. I was tempted to try using it as a phone. And if you get a service like Toone, which is a $5 a month or whatever, it'll use the internet on the, on the tablet gives you a real phone number. People can call, I think the mini can be used kind of as a phone, you

Caller #3 (00:50:35):
Know? Yes you can. I, I was reading about that.

Leo Laporte (00:50:38):
Yeah. So it's J if you wanted a really big phone, it's a great, it's a great choice. Anyway. Enjoy you got, I think you've made it a, an excellent choice. I should mention. I don't think there'll be another mini, but apple is rumored to be having an event about three weeks, March 8th at which they will. I think it's almost certain. We look, apple never says ahead time. In fact that date could change. Apple could change their mind. They could call the whole thing off. There's no guarantees in this world, but the rumors are strong and the indications are strong. They will announce a new iPad, but it will be the iPad air. It'll be a high end air. They refresh the mini not so long ago. And I think it's really fantastic. It has a type C connector instead of the lightning, which I think is, is great. It's more like a pro it's got the pro styling of the squared off corners. I just really like it. No, no, no. Headphone check apples just really eliminated he phone checks. Unfortunately, I, I still don't get that. I still don't understand it, but I do think the mini is great. In fact, I didn't mention that. Samsung announced also the Samsung note tab eight, their new tablet, very not nice tablet, apple priced. I still think the iPad. Is it when it comes to tablets?

Leo Laporte (00:52:07):
Yeah, there it's not the it's the iPad mini. I, they better announce a Mac mini. I don't know if they will on March eight. There's some evidence that they might, there's some thinking, not evidence. There's no evidence. The only thing we have is logic. There's some logic that says maybe they will announce a Mac mini on the eighth. If they do, I will be snaring one up iPad airs are nice. I, you know, it's funny. I either have the giant iPad or the tiny iPad. I, the mini middle sizes, you know, not for me. Yeah, so it could be with decks. I know. I think the, the app is interesting. In fact, I tried to buy one, but I couldn't. And by the time I got through, I changed my mind, but I tried to buy one on Wednesday. But Scribble is with the, yeah, pencil's very cool. Yeah. Why? Hey, Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here, the tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, all that jazz. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number (888) 827-5536, toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada. If you hear me talk about something on the air and you wanna know more, we'll put links up at our show notes, tech guy labs.com, tech guy labs.com. Now let's go to Tom in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Our next call. Hi Tom.

Caller #4 (00:53:53):
Hey Leo. How you doing?

Leo Laporte (00:53:54):
I'm wonderful. How are you?

Caller #4 (00:53:56):
Good living the dream living

Leo Laporte (00:53:58):
Dream. Yes, sir. Living

Caller #4 (00:54:00):
The dream.

Leo Laporte (00:54:01):
So

Caller #4 (00:54:01):
I, yeah. Yeah. So a, a quick question. I heard your son last week, I guess, had him on and what he was doing. That was wonderful. I have a son that's that's he's 26. So he is a video gamer and he does the mobile legends, which I guess is a mobile game, I guess. He's like, he's like top 10 in, in, in the world.

Leo Laporte (00:54:24):
No kidding. Wow.

Caller #4 (00:54:27):
Yeah. He's like nine or 10 or something like that. And the next American is like in the forties, but, so I guess the question to me is I'm trying to understand how they, they make money. I guess he's trying to do it through subscriptions and other things, but if he actually wants to go out and get a job, cuz he's, you know, he's got a high school education, but and he is got a year of college, but he doesn't have an engineering degree or anything like that. So what my question you would be, what type of entry level are jobs would be available for him? And I was just listening to ZipRecruiter.

Leo Laporte (00:55:02):
Yeah. Yeah. Is he living in home? Is that, is that what's going on to yeah. Yeah. We wanna gently nudge him out of the nest. I understand completely believe me been there, done that.

Caller #4 (00:55:15):
Maybe I'm not, maybe I'm not fully living this thing yet, but yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:55:20):
It's tough. I, you know, his generation, my son's generation, I, I feel for him cuz they've had to go through some really tough times in the last few years. So video games,

Leo Laporte (00:55:34):
You and I think in terms of jobs, you just said it right. Get a job. Right. And I always said that to, to my son. I said, you know, okay, you like cooking, get a, go to a work in a restaurant, go to the culinary academy, get a job. That's one that changed a little bit. Somebody who's really good at mobile legends can make money streaming on Twitch or YouTube with subscribers. There's you can make a lot of money. Now the problem is, you know, when we were kids, maybe we looked at the NBA and said, boy, you know, I'm gonna be an NBA star. They make 30 million a year. Right. and of course the chances of you and me become an NBA stars are, are slight. And it's a, it's a nice dream, but it's not a practical job plan. And I think it's somewhat the same for streaming. They, they call it let's play streams. Twitch is the biggest place. Twitch.Tv is he streaming there?

Caller #4 (00:56:38):
I do not know where he's streaming video.

Leo Laporte (00:56:40):
I really don't. Okay. So if he he's top 10 player, mobile legends, you know, probably people would watch him. It's gonna come down to much more though, than his ability to play the game. It's gonna come on down to his personality, his style, whether it's fun to watch him and all of that. There are jobs in the traditional sense that you can get in, if he's not a programmer, of course, that's one job at a video game place and he's not an artist. That's another job. There's a lot of jobs for artists designers, because it's one thing to write the game, but you still have to have beautiful backgrounds and scenery and players. There's also quality testers, QC where you, you basically, he is doing now, you go in and you play the game trying to find bugs. If he's very accomplished at gaming, that's what they need by the way, because these guys are gonna play games all day and they're gonna need to get through the game fast.

Leo Laporte (00:57:35):
They don't want somebody. Who's not a really talented gamer. So that's a possibility, although I'm not sure there are more jobs doing quality control for gaming. Then there are streaming on Twitch. In fact, I think there's a growing middle. This is really interesting, a growing middle class of streamers, who aren't making millions of dollars, but who can make a living. You know, my son is not making millions of dollars on TikTok, but he can make a living, you know, a living that you and I would say, Hey, that's pretty good for a 27 year old. Wow. You know, and maybe get his own place and get a girlfriend and start and start living life, going, get out of the bedroom. So it is really possible. So, you know, I'm a mixed mind. I was very much like you I said, you know, Henry, you gotta, you can't be doing in this.

Leo Laporte (00:58:25):
You gotta get a, a real job. But I think the world has changed a little bit. And what I, you know, a real job is a little different. If you are interested, I would go to twitch.tv and just see what people are doing there. There's a lot of it on YouTube as well. There's going to be more this, you know, Instagram has its own streaming service for Facebook. Facebook does too. And but the, the leaders right now are YouTube and Twitch, which is owned by Amazon by the way. Okay. And, and for instance, Twitch, I have a friend who makes a very, not again, not a millionaire, but he does Minecraft videos on twitch.tv. And you have a chat room. People have buttons in the, erm, they can donate, you can set up subscriptions. So they have recurring subscriptions. There's this service called Patreon, P a T R E O n.com that a lot of people use because you develop a fan base and you say, Hey, support me.

Leo Laporte (00:59:20):
And you'll get some special content, five bucks a month, 10 bucks a month. There's different tiers. So take a look at Patreon and Twitch. And if you're interested, but the, you know, obviously it's gonna be ultimately your son, that's gotta have to do the job, but sure. I would say be, be a little more open minded to the idea that it might not look exactly like it looked in our day. It is very different for these kids. You know, even even kids who are going to kind of more traditional work are often moving from job to job more often the whole idea of working somewhere right for 50 years or 40 years and getting a gold watch at the end, I don't think applies anymore because that's just not happen. So there are still, you know, kind of corporate jobs, but there's a lot more of gig.

Leo Laporte (01:00:05):
It's more of a gig economy where if you've got a skill, let's say you can design a website or you can you know, draw logos and stuff that you, I have a, a, my nephew is just got out of a art school and he's working. He got a job at a well known design firm, but he's also doing a lot of gig working and there's a lot of money and a living to be made if they have the skills and the discipline to, to, you know, continue to get work as a freelancer much. I think many more of your, of our kids' generation are freelancers than ever before. That's that so-called gig economy. So you and I, as ads, maybe we have to open our mind. I mean, look,

Caller #4 (01:00:47):
It's it's

Caller #4 (01:00:47):
I got the most open mind. You can bring

Leo Laporte (01:00:50):
I'm ready. He says, I, Tom sitting right next to you. I know exactly how you feel. My daughter's working to become a comedian. There's a, there's an interesting profession.

Caller #4 (01:01:04):
Yeah. Yeah.

Caller #4 (01:01:07):
You can be, you can be a comedian all your life, I guess. Yeah. I don't, I don't know about this stuff, but I, I, I will, I will keep an open mind. I continue to do that.

Leo Laporte (01:01:16):
Best thing to do is encourage him to figure out a way to support himself. Right. And the thing I think that's changed is there are a lot more way in a, in a way there are a lot more ways to do that than just going down and getting a job at the burger king like you and I did. Right. Actually it was from McDonald's for me. But you get the idea, Hey, a pleasure talking to you, Tom I'm with you. I know. I believe me. I'm right. I'm right there with you. I guess when, when I was young, you know, it was cut, cut your hair, turn down your music. You know, I mean, us old folks have always, you know, had, I guess always, I don't know, as long as I can remember had had trouble understanding the next generation and the way of life, but I think it's more dramatic than ever this COVID generation. They've had two years in just a weird limbo. The job market is very fragmented. The internet has kind of destroyed many kind of traditional businesses has invented many more new businesses. It's all different. And I don't know if the experience that we have we've had growing up and fighting our way in the world applies as much as it did. There's certainly many more ways to go than there ever were before Leo Laport, the tech I eighty eight, eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number. We'll get back to your calls right after this

Leo Laporte (01:03:04):
Is that Beyonce or Destiny's child? Who is it? No. Who is it? I don't even know who it is. How am I gonna be able to? Who is it? Shakira. Shakira, which year? 20 13, 20, 20. I have no memory. I don't even know who was in the super bowl in 2020, let alone, who played in the halftime halftime this year? What? Mary J Blige Kendrick Lamar Snoop dog. What is the deal with Snoop dog? He's he's like bigger than ever. It's all of a sudden, every it's like everywhere you go. Snoop dogs, Snoop talk 88, 80, huh?

Professor Laura (01:03:43):
He's

Leo Laporte (01:03:43):
Hustling. He's hustling every day. I'm hustling eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. Arthur on the line from Alton New Hampshire. Hello, Arthur.

Caller #5 (01:03:54):
Hi, Leo up here today. Probably more like California weather, but 

Leo Laporte (01:04:00):
Oh, tell me what is, what is warm in Alton, New Hampshire

Caller #5 (01:04:05):
For change? We've still got all foot and a half a snow on the ground.

Leo Laporte (01:04:07):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not that warm. Gotcha.

Caller #5 (01:04:12):
Say Leo, I've got a, a problem. That's been really bothering me for at least a year. Yeah. I have Chromebooks, which I absolutely, they do everything I'll ever want a computer to do, except for one thing. I like to listen to a am radio station in Boston and I'm out of range on the radio, but, and I understand they put their content up, live on online radio box and I heart radio. Okay. And I, I cannot access either one on either one of my Chromebooks. So

Leo Laporte (01:04:48):
You can't do it on a Chromebook. Huh? What do you, do you get in the error message or just, does it spin forever?

Caller #5 (01:04:54):
It says loading error. Yeah. When I, when I try to click on online radio box and that service can carries very many radio stations and I can access the others up and down, you can click right or click left and, and every other station comes up, plays mine. Most of 'em are music

Leo Laporte (01:05:16):
For iHeart. I'm not sure about radio box, but for iHeart, they have a a Chrome extension. So oh, I'm sorry. You have to go to the Android app. Does your Chromebook support Android?

Caller #5 (01:05:30):
I don't believe so. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:05:32):
So that's, that's a point of confusion. Cause newer Chromebooks do support the Google play store. And that, that is one way to get the at least iHeartRadio app. Let me see if they have wait a minute. Now it says they also have on the web store. So in your Chrome browser, you know, you can go to the web store and, and search for iHeartRadio. Cause apparently they also of a Chrome extension. Good for you, iHeart. Cuz that's what we're on. What was the other one? Radio box?

Caller #5 (01:06:03):
Yes. online radio box. That's the one that carries many stations, but they won't open up on my computer.

Leo Laporte (01:06:11):
Yeah. A lot of times these I'm not familiar with this one. A lot of times these companies have a player that is requires technic tech technologies that are not available on ChromeOS. Although you'd think it would work on Chrome because I wonder what player they're using. I can't, I can't tell,

Caller #5 (01:06:38):
Well, I, I should add you. My Chromebooks are both old. They're both no longer being updated by Google. Yeah. One is 

Leo Laporte (01:06:49):
That's why they can't do Android apps. They're older. Yeah.

Caller #5 (01:06:52):
Google pixel 2013 and it's a beautiful computer.

Leo Laporte (01:06:57):
It kills me. Google has not updated these and they are incredible. And then to add insult to injury, not only is not Google, not making new pixel books, they're no longer supporting the old ones. You know, Google is an extremely frustrating company cuz those pixel books are great.

Caller #5 (01:07:18):
Oh it's beautiful. It has the best computer. Best keyboard. Best yeah. Definition on the screen. You yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:07:25):
But they're not updating eventually you're gonna run into things that cuz you don't get new versions of Chrome. You're gonna run into things you can't do anymore. I don't think this is one of them. And again, this is another one where radio box does have an Android right. App. so you could do it in the app store. Let me see.

Caller #5 (01:07:45):
Would that be Google app store?

Leo Laporte (01:07:47):
Yeah, but that won't work on your Chromebooks cuz they're older. The CR all the Chromebooks sold in the last couple of years, support Android's app store, which means not all, but most Android apps will run on 'em, which gives you a much broader range of things you can do, including radio box and iHeart. Iheart is good though because they ha it looks like they have a Chrome web application. So I would look in, you know, when you're on your Chromebook hit the hamburger menu, that three line menu on the right, that looks nothing like a hamburger. And then in there, I think it's extensions, but you want to go to the web store and in the web store search for iHeart, and then you can install it as an extension and you should be able to play it. It doesn't look, I'm looking like at online radio box, they support the galaxy store, the Amazon on store, the Google play store, the apple store, of course, but they don't, it looks like they don't support the Chrome web store.

Leo Laporte (01:08:40):
That's it's funny, cuz that would be the easiest of the bunch to do. But they, they don't and apparently their browser or their player rather is something odd that the Chrome doesn't like they might fall. I know they're using flash. I don't know what they're using anymore. So yeah, this looks really like it as a great selection of music, but on iHeart to be fair. And I'm a little biased cuz I'm working for him, but iHeart has a very good app as well. What what's unfortunately happened in the early days of streaming, you could just go on a browser, almost any station and stream it. And then there were apps like radio box and others that were independent unaffiliated apps that would just aggregate these all and have players. And then you could find anything there. Nowadays the radio stations have taken control of their streams and they generally want you to go through Thea their special application for CBS or for iHeart. And so if you use, if you want to hear those radio stations, you have to figure out, all right, which app do I need for that one often going to the website of the radio station will tell you which apps they support you should, frankly.

Caller #5 (01:09:48):
So my solution might, might be a, a new Chromebook, a third Chromebook.

Leo Laporte (01:09:52):
Well, I hate to, honestly, there are a couple of reasons you might want to consider it one because it's very frustrating. I'm so mad at Google. That pixel book is great. You're right. It's got a fast processor, a lot of Ram. You spent a lot of money for it when it came out, but they have not, they they've taken it out of support. It doesn't get updates anymore. It's unheard of well, it's not cuz most companies do it. Unfortunately. it's very frustrating. It's probably not unsafe to use it, but it, over time it's gonna get less and less usable because you're not getting new versions of the browser and lots of sites are gonna start to require that. So at some point in the next few years, you're gonna have to get a new Chromebook. Do you wanna do it today? Sure. If you want, Samsung makes excellent ones. My favorites are made by Acer. Acer has some really nice Chromebooks you know, and prices range from 200 to a thousand bucks. I would say for you, you probably wanna spend around $500 for a high quality, fast Chromebook, and then you'll be able to use the story and a lot more things will be available as well.

Leo Laporte (01:11:04):
That's weird that you can't play radio box on the Chromebook. I'm not sure what's what's going on with that. Well

Caller #5 (01:11:11):
The S wouldn't go to waste. I have both these hook crap right in front of me. At the moment, if I get a third one, I'll have the third one. 

Leo Laporte (01:11:19):
Okay. So if you don't mind, you know, and you're not, and they're not throwing 'em out, Google should support it. There's no reason that they're not these are very fast, nice machines. There's they're not out of date.

Caller #5 (01:11:30):
Yeah. If it's Google currently made a, a new model I could and

Leo Laporte (01:11:34):
They don't make a new one. I mean the, the closest they have is the, is the go, which is not, I don't think anywhere near as good as the pixel book. Gosh, darn Google. What the heck? What the heck?

Caller #5 (01:11:46):
I, I, I love this machine. I just, you know it on YouTube. It's beautiful.

Leo Laporte (01:11:53):
And I've been recommending them cuz I, I really think Chromebooks are a great choice for most people. Try tunein.com. Salty corn bar is suggesting in our chat room, tunein.com, which is a website. Might have it. You should be able to play it off a website unless like radio box, they're using some sort of player that doesn't work on Chrome on why they would do that beyond me, but who knows, who knows

Caller #5 (01:12:19):
That would be Android store just type in,

Leo Laporte (01:12:25):
Well, it won't work on the Android store because your Chromebooks don't support it. But newer Chromebooks, newer Chromebooks come with the Google play store. Yeah.

Caller #5 (01:12:34):
Yep. I understand.

Leo Laporte (01:12:35):
So a new one would yeah.

Caller #5 (01:12:38):
Yep. Okay. All right. So you, you put my mind at rest. You you've answered my question.

Leo Laporte (01:12:44):
Fabulous. Thank you, Arthur. I appreciate it. Thanks again. I hope the snow. Well I hope it goes away I guess. Right? You want to go away?

Caller #5 (01:12:53):
I do. I do. I, but that's that's many, many years ago.

Leo Laporte (01:12:59):
I miss it, but I don't have to live with it.

Caller #5 (01:13:03):
It's 79 I've I've been there, done that, you

Leo Laporte (01:13:06):
Know? Yeah, yeah. No more shoveling for you now it's seven. It's gonna be 76 degrees this afternoon and sunny and in pedal Luma. So I think we

Caller #5 (01:13:17):
Have that about two or three months.

Leo Laporte (01:13:18):
Yeah. You'll get spring. That's the thing I miss about living in new England. I love the four seasons, but I don't miss the snow. You're right.

Caller #5 (01:13:26):
You're right. Yeah. Winters get longer right every year. Yeah, but I love the summers up here in spring and fall.

Leo Laporte (01:13:31):
Oh, summer New Hampshire. We used to go to east Ted New Hampshire every year for summer vacation. Love it. Beautiful.

Caller #5 (01:13:41):
Yeah. I knew, I knew you had roots in oh yeah. Austin area.

Leo Laporte (01:13:45):
Didn't you? Oh, IDU grew up in Providence. Oh yeah. And we would, we would go to New Hampshire. Oh, I loved east AltEd. That was beautiful. Beautiful.

Caller #5 (01:13:55):
Well changed up here in the last two years. It's pretty, you know, it's becoming a, almost a urban SP all the whole area.

Leo Laporte (01:14:03):
Oh, that's too bad. Is Alton in whereabouts in New Hampshire is Alton.

Caller #5 (01:14:09):
I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte (01:14:09):
Whereabouts in the New Hampshire are you? Oh

Caller #5 (01:14:12):
Right on lake Ben. Psaki

Leo Laporte (01:14:14):
Oh man. It's been discovered. That's the problem.

Caller #5 (01:14:18):
It is. Yeah. Houses, you know, on the lake that were five, 600,003 years ago. Now they're a million million. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:14:27):
I'm bummed out. I was, I was thinking of retiring up there. Oh, oh man. Oh man.

Caller #5 (01:14:36):
Well he unlocked that Bitcoin. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:14:39):
If I, if I get my wallet, Hey, a pleasure talking to you. Take care. Arthur there.

Caller #5 (01:14:45):
Thanks again, Leo. See ya.

Leo Laporte (01:14:47):
Bye. Hey Johnny jet.

Johnny Jet (01:14:49):
Hey Leo. How are you?

Leo Laporte (01:14:51):
I'm good. How's your dad?

Johnny Jet (01:14:53):
He's he's cured. He's out. Sure. It's

Leo Laporte (01:14:57):
Amazing.

Johnny Jet (01:14:58):
He's nothing. He had no side effects. Get

Leo Laporte (01:15:00):
The vaccine. There's a, there is the best poster boy for he's what? 93 93.

Johnny Jet (01:15:08):
Looks like my cousin. By the way, who was, who had a 15 on chance of living is actually gonna looks like, is gonna pull through.

Leo Laporte (01:15:14):
Oh hallelujah.

Johnny Jet (01:15:16):
But he wasn't vaccinated and he's still in the hospital.

Leo Laporte (01:15:20):
Yep. And he's younger.

Johnny Jet (01:15:23):
Definitely. 30 years younger.

Leo Laporte (01:15:25):
He's been everywhere, man. He is Johnny jet, our travel guru travel better with technology enjoying the, is it 88 degrees? Did I read that correctly in Southern California? It's

Johnny Jet (01:15:38):
88 right now.

Leo Laporte (01:15:39):
Oh, M

Johnny Jet (01:15:40):
Looking

Leo Laporte (01:15:40):
At my, what? G 88.

Johnny Jet (01:15:43):
It's been like that all week. So we've gone to the beach multiple times. Take a couple hours out. And what's, it's better than summer because there's hardly anyone beach and

Leo Laporte (01:15:54):
Any volleyball. Are you playing any volleyball or is it,

Johnny Jet (01:15:56):
You know what? My friends were not playing yesterday. I went down and they weren't there. They, they played on Wednesday, but

Leo Laporte (01:16:02):
Johnny's part of the big Huntington beach pickup league. Right?

Johnny Jet (01:16:05):
Manhattan beach,

Leo Laporte (01:16:06):
Manhattan beach. Okay. that's the, you know,

Johnny Jet (01:16:10):
A home of beach volleyball.

Leo Laporte (01:16:11):
Oh, it's awesome. It's so awesome.

Johnny Jet (01:16:13):
And it's where they have the Wimbledon, the beach volleyball every August.

Leo Laporte (01:16:16):
No, really? I didn't know that I

Johnny Jet (01:16:17):
That's the biggest tournament. Yeah. Oh, Manhattan beach. If you get, if you win it, you get your name on the pier. So you walk down the Manhattan beach pier, you'll see all the, the plaques of all the players who won it.

Leo Laporte (01:16:27):
Forget the winter Olympics. I'm going to the summer Olympics at Manhattan beach. So Johnny, I think travel is, is I don't, you know, it's a funny thing. I get I feel it, my bones, people are just done. Whether COVID is done with us, we are done with it. Agreed. Right. Agreed. And the mask mandates are being lifted and and people are getting out and about. And of course the first thing a lot of us wanna do is hit the road, Jack. Well,

Johnny Jet (01:16:53):
You know, know my mother-in-law is super cautious. I mean, we're very cautious, but my mother-in-law is even more. And my wife told me today that she just told her that we're going to Hawaii soon. And I said, oh boy, what did she say? And she said, you know what? It's about time. It's time to get out. And 

Leo Laporte (01:17:08):
I think we've discovered that a masks work and B the vaccines work. So we kind of know how to stay, how to do all the things that we wanna do and do it safely. Definitely. Right.

Johnny Jet (01:17:19):
Definitely. And you know what? The numbers are starting to show it yesterday. The TSA screened 1.9 million through and two years ago on the same day, pre pandemic 1.6. So,

Leo Laporte (01:17:33):
Wow. Although it's up, but that's what you'd expect pent up demand, right?

Johnny Jet (01:17:38):
It is. And I, and I think you're gonna see a lot more of that. I make it will go up and down and hopefully no more variants will come out, but a lot of things are happening Australia after two years just announced they're opening up. It's coming, the Hawaii is dropping the booster requirement because they've realized they're losing a lot of business, especially to Florida and California. So, and frontier and spirit, actually this week announced that they're gonna merge.

Leo Laporte (01:18:03):
They're merging. Now. Those are the low cost airlines. Yep. So they're, you, you gotta be careful with them because the plane tickets inexpensive, but you might be paying for carry on, or

Johnny Jet (01:18:14):
I do not recommend flying in either one and full disclosure. I've never flown in either one. I bought a ticket on spirit once for like $15. And then when I went to check in, they wanted, they wouldn't even let me take my bag. So I was like, forget it. I rented a car in Florida, but you know, they're great for some people. So do make sure that you know what you're getting into. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:18:33):
And exactly. Do you think as a merged airline, they, they're not gonna change anything. They'll both be this, you know, they'll

Johnny Jet (01:18:39):
Well, they think they're gonna fly under one airline. Most likely frontier. The, the worst thing they're gonna do is take away. I, I hope they don't, but they're gonna take away spirits, big fat front first class seat. Can you hear my daughter? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:18:50):
Wanna run and get her?

Johnny Jet (01:18:51):
No, no. I do have a lollipop here for her. I think that, I think that will quieter down. I gave her an iPad, which she only gets when we're on the airplane. Oh, it's a, it's a special, special look at Olivia. Come here,

Leo Laporte (01:19:01):
Come here. Olivia.

Johnny Jet (01:19:03):
She'll see, she saw it now. She she's.

Leo Laporte (01:19:05):
Okay. She has the lollipop. She says, I don't need you. I don't need you anymore.

Johnny Jet (01:19:10):
She can sit right here. Yeah. So my wife had to go out with Mike.

Leo Laporte (01:19:13):
No, that's fine. We love family. No, that's great. Do, are you gonna take the kids anywhere? Oh, I think Olivia unplugged the internet connection. Cause Johnny, Johnny just froze solid. Oh, oh. The young lady had, you know, this happened with many of our hosts. Not just kids.

Johnny Jet (01:19:34):
Can you hear, can you hear me?

Leo Laporte (01:19:35):
Yeah. You're back now. Yeah. Yeah. What happened? She,

Johnny Jet (01:19:36):
She pulled my cord out.

Leo Laporte (01:19:37):
I knew she did. I knew it. I knew exactly what happened

Johnny Jet (01:19:40):
And I gave her the iPad and she's trying to get me to figure it out. What's wrong. The, the lock went on.

Leo Laporte (01:19:46):
Oh yeah. Unlocked this

Johnny Jet (01:19:47):
Anyway. So first Sarah airlines has a first class seat that frontier it doesn't and most people think they're gonna get rid of it, which is a shame because that was a really good deal. And as long as you don't check bags on, on spirit, I've heard good things. And if you know what, what you're getting into it, you know, but they are gonna create the fifth largest airline in the us. And I, I have no desire to fly it. Yeah. Cause you don't get miles. Yeah. And there's a lot of reasons. But anyway,

Leo Laporte (01:20:13):
So travel is back. I saw, I saw some of these Instagram posts. They got on a cruise ship and there were only 150 people on a boat built for 1500. Wow. I mean, I get, they probably had, you know, a really nice trip, but

Johnny Jet (01:20:28):
You can't get better than that.

Leo Laporte (01:20:29):
No, that's

Johnny Jet (01:20:30):
Pretty good. I mean, that's like, that's like running out your own ship. I mean, yeah. First of all, on those huge ships, you know, there are areas of the, of the ship where, you know, you are alone anyway. Even when it's

Leo Laporte (01:20:38):
Full, they're really big. That's right. They,

Johnny Jet (01:20:40):
They, they really are. Yeah. But so if you are traveling internationally, I do have a website for everyone. It's real basic, but what plug.info, what

Leo Laporte (01:20:49):
Plug? Oh, I need this people call me all the time saying I'm going to Bulgaria. What do they use exactly what

Johnny Jet (01:20:56):
They exactly. BG, all you do is answer two questions. You just say, where are you coming from? And where are you going? And it just shows you what you need. I always travel with a universal you know adapter, but I also carry local ones as well as a backup. And I wrote a post about it. And you know, I talked about my wife, you know, she's blown out her, her hair, curling iron or flat, whatever they call it. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:21:20):
Flat iron. Those, those you can really cause damage with. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:21:23):
So you gotta make sure that you're, by the way,

Leo Laporte (01:21:26):
Plug.Info folks, one plug.in fo.

Johnny Jet (01:21:29):
So I think you need a transformer for when you're using a hair, like a flat iron or something like that.

Leo Laporte (01:21:35):
Yes you do.

Johnny Jet (01:21:35):
Yes. But you don't need it for your laptop. Correct. I've never had a problem with my laptop,

Leo Laporte (01:21:40):
But again, this is, you know, it's a little tricky. You have to look at the, somewhere on the power supply, they'll be printed. What voltages it. And the problem is in the us, we use AC one 10. And as you travel around the world, not only is it a plug issue, but there's also a voltage issue and they'll often use two 20. And, but laptops, because they're selling 'em all over the world. And most of the time on the power brick, it'll say one 10 dash two 40, which is the range of voltage you can handle. So make sure that have

Johnny Jet (01:22:12):
You ever had one below Tanya,

Leo Laporte (01:22:15):
Lisa and I, we took a trip. I had brought with me a an adapter. Maybe it was, it was something that was, I unbeknownst to me one 10 only I blew out a success of places. We blew out the hotel in Venice lights are out. I had to call down hotel. Yeah. I at least our floor. Okay. We say electrician, it was an old monastery in Venice, you know? Okay. So then not learning, I got on the boat, blew out the cabin. Oh

Johnny Jet (01:22:47):
My gosh.

Leo Laporte (01:22:48):
So I should have realized then we got to I think it was bud. No, it was Istanbul blew out that hotel.

Johnny Jet (01:22:56):
Yeah. These old, old hotels. You really gotta be careful.

Leo Laporte (01:22:58):
I finally figured out why am I plugging this thing in? So you would think, I mean, there's a variety of things that can happen if you have the wrong voltage. I didn't think it would be blowing out the hotel, but I guess it's, I would think it would've overheated and blown out the device, but I guess anyway. Yes. Make sure you have not only the right plug, what plug that info, but the right voltage very important.

Johnny Jet (01:23:20):
Definitely. It reminds me of that movie with Ashton. Kucher when he was in Switzerland on a honeymoon. Did you see the, that?

Leo Laporte (01:23:25):
Oh, but I've lived it 10

Johnny Jet (01:23:26):
Years ago. Oh my God.

Leo Laporte (01:23:27):
I've lived. It

Johnny Jet (01:23:29):
I'll have to find it. It was a funny scene. Anyway, so that's, that's important when you travel internationally. And I also, when I travel internationally, I always carry a small power strip because there are places where there might only be one plug, but

Leo Laporte (01:23:41):
Again, make sure it's also rated. Yes. I think it was a power strip that I was using that blew everything

Johnny Jet (01:23:46):
Out. Oh, is it okay? Yeah. And so on the power strip, it we'll say 

Leo Laporte (01:23:50):
Yeah, make sure it can handle one. What you want one 10 dash two 40, which means it'll handle the entire range it's gonna see. There's also the issue of 50 Hertz or 60 Hertz that doesn't usually matter much unless there's a clock involved.

Johnny Jet (01:24:04):
And how about on a crew cruise ship? Because I've plugged those power strips and then cruise ships, because

Leo Laporte (01:24:08):
Many cruise ships are now wire have the same plugs as the us. Correct. And they're appropriate voltage. Like I said,

Johnny Jet (01:24:15):
Not in the

Leo Laporte (01:24:15):
Past this cruise ship, I did manage to blow out the cabin. They're very nice about it. It must happen all the time. It's a fuse. They reset it. Right?

Johnny Jet (01:24:25):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:24:26):
Johnny jet, you are the best. Johnny jet.com is his website. The newsletter@johnnyjet.com slash newsletter. The podcast he's on the Twitter, the Instagram and the YouTube. Thank you, Johnny.

Johnny Jet (01:24:37):
Thank you. Sit next to me.

Leo Laporte (01:24:47):
Yeah. So cute. Wait a minute. Let me get the picture up. Oh, look at there. She's enjoying her lollipop.

Johnny Jet (01:24:54):
Olivia continue. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:24:55):
Olivia. Hello. She's a beauty look. She's got her mom's looks. Oh, she's gorgeous.

Johnny Jet (01:25:02):
Thank, thank goodness.

Leo Laporte (01:25:04):
Awesome. Oh, she having a wonderful, wonderful family. I just think it's so I'm very fortunate, man. I remember those days. You, you, you know, when you get to my age and the kids are grown, you'll look back and say, oh, I want to go back and do that again. I now it's exhausting.

Johnny Jet (01:25:21):
It is

Leo Laporte (01:25:22):
Exhausting. Now it's exhausting.

Johnny Jet (01:25:23):
But I can see it when we, when we're on the beach, I see a lot of older couples walking by and they just had these smiles and I could see them, you know, reminiscing. And

Leo Laporte (01:25:33):
Because what happens is you forget how much work it was and how little sleep you got, et cetera, et cetera. You only remember how adorable they were. And so, you know, nostalgia and you go, oh, I missed those days. I missed those days.

Johnny Jet (01:25:47):
It's the best. It really is. Love those kids. If I knew it, I would've done it a lot earlier. Yeah. Yeah. But, well,

Leo Laporte (01:25:53):
I'm glad

Johnny Jet (01:25:53):
There we go. I'm glad I, but I got to see the world and hopefully I'm gonna be able to show these guys, the world, this

Leo Laporte (01:25:58):
Was your path. It worked out perfectly. My God don't change a thing. Everything's no, I'm, I'm very fortunate. My son has seen a, a portion of the world. Unfortunately. I love that. Olivia has not because I she's so young. She's the COVID generation. Yeah. Yeah. My son and I traveled all over the world. He's been in 20 countries. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's impressive. I hope, I hope one day my son will get to go to every country in the world. Wouldn't that be great? Yep. I hope I'm with them and my daughter. Yeah. And my wife. Yeah. Don't forget about her. Don't forget her. She's very important. All right. We'll go back and, and be with your beautiful girl. So, so who you going for? Rams or you're going for the Bangals. Yeah, because I hate the Rams. Even though Lisa says, no, we have to root for the NFC team.

Leo Laporte (01:26:43):
You know what? They don't. I, I was watching some interviews by pro players and they actually usually don't root for the same team in their, because there are rivals, how could you root for your divisional rival? But I used to think the same thing, but no Lisa says, no, no, you have to root for the Rams. I said, I am, I am not rooting for the Rams. And besides the have deserve it, the Rams will have another chance. I don't know about the bangles. So it's good. No, I, I, I disagree. You think the BES are? I think, I think the Bengals will be back. The, the Rams were just lucky. They they finally beat the Niners. Finally. No, they're not lucky. Pure luck. All right, right. Have a great one. You too. Take care, John. See, bye bye. All right. Leo Laport tech. I better interrupt the Snoop. Before we go too far. 88, 88, ask Leo, Laura, you need to have a signal. We have to have some sort of hand gesture when cuz Laura says you better come in soon. Fade. Fade it out. Mark. On the line from grand rapids, Michigan. Hey mark.

Caller #6 (01:27:53):
Hey Leo. How are you,

Leo Laporte (01:27:54):
Man? I'm wonderful. Thanks for holding on

Caller #6 (01:27:57):
My pleasure. My pleasure. Talk to you. Come on, man. I'll wait a long time.

Leo Laporte (01:28:02):
Oh, how long have you waited? How long years

Caller #6 (01:28:07):
I got on right before the commercial was great. Kimmy got me

Leo Laporte (01:28:10):
Right on. That's not bad. You're in you're in, you're in good hands, man. You, you must have friends up in high places, bribed miss Shaer or something. What's up.

Caller #6 (01:28:22):
Hey, you know, you guys been doing all this talking about you went back to the the Samsung 22, which everybody's saying it that's another note and then the iPads with their their pens and stylists. And it 

Leo Laporte (01:28:36):
I, when I say it's just, I'd say that's another note. I'm not saying it's just another note. I love the note. I was sad when Samsung says there will be no more notes. I'm thrilled. In fact, I've ordered the ultra because I'm thrilled to see it. It's the irony is I've never used a pen. I ha I love having a stylist. The, the idea of a stylist, the things you can do, like the note, remember you could pop the stylist out and start taking a note right way without unlocking the phone and just all those things. And I just never end up using them, but it's nice to know. They're there.

Caller #6 (01:29:08):
You remember the last time that experience was good though, was back when Palm ruled and Palm had stylists and they also had a bit of a software called graffiti graffiti. We had to learn a, a certain, you bet certain, you know motions and charact,

Leo Laporte (01:29:25):
A special alphabet just for the computer, because

Caller #6 (01:29:28):
Like a shorthand. Yeah, it

Leo Laporte (01:29:30):
Was, it wasn't hard

Caller #6 (01:29:31):
Worked. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:29:32):
It wasn't hard. My question, instead of writing a tee, you'd write like kind of a backwards L kind of, yeah, it was easy. Yeah.

Caller #6 (01:29:38):
It was, it was easy to learn. No, no. I love that. I love that. And I, what I'd really like is somebody to come out with a story of why Palm lost it all because they had it all. They had it everything before everybody else had it. But what about now? Is there software similar to that? That that's out there that's add on to the, to the you'd

Leo Laporte (01:30:01):
Like, you'd like to have graffiti back. Is that what you're saying?

Caller #6 (01:30:05):
Yes, sir.

Leo Laporte (01:30:05):
Yeah. So actually I know quite a bit of this story having been around for a few years I, in fact, interviewed Jeff Hawkins, the man who created graffiti in the Palm and asked him, tell me the story of graffiti. Why did you have a special alphabet? And he said at the time and processors were so limited, that was just very hard to dis ABI. That was the problem. Things like a T looked like other letters to the computer. They just couldn't figure out. So he said, instead of having you draw the down line and then cross line and us trying to figure out, does he mean an F? Does he mean an E? Does he mean a w what is he an X? Just draw a right angle. So it's, you know, as you remember, swipe from left to right, and then down faster stroke for humans, you never lift the pen off and not ambiguous for the computer, but here's, what's changed.

Leo Laporte (01:31:04):
And so Hawkins, you said, you know, I decided to, it's funny in computer science, sometimes they talk about this often in UI design, should the computer mold itself to the human or the human to the computer. And most of the time companies say, no, no, no, the computer should mold itself to the human. It's not a good experience if human have to relearn the alphabet, but this was an example. And I think Jeff was right of one case where the computer, the human should maybe learn me. It's not even mold itself. Look, meet the computer halfway. And graffiti was, you could write, I, I could write. And I bet you could too very fast in graffiti once you, once you got used to this reps.

Caller #6 (01:31:45):
Very definitely. Yeah, it was great. So,

Leo Laporte (01:31:47):
So what's changed is that computers are better. They're a lot better and they can now do a lot better job of understanding your handwriting. Microsoft started this by training on humans, artificial intelligence, to understand human handwriting turns out. That's a very hard thing to do, especially since our handwriting varies a lot. And my old friend, Jerry Portel, who was a great sci-fi author and wrote the chaos manner column for bite magazine honor. Remember him. Jerry was very proud because Microsoft came to him when they first started training on writing and said, can we use your handwriting? So Microsoft's handwriting recognition always worked better for Jerry than anyone else. It was, it was trained on Jerry's handwriting, but nowadays model,

Caller #6 (01:32:35):
Let me be the model.

Leo Laporte (01:32:36):
There is, there is a feature on, on iPads called scribble that they recently built in. That's very much like graffiti, any field where you could type text. If you have an apple pencil, you can tap on it. It'll open a little window and you can hand Ray. And what is amazing is we've come such a long way. It's very, very good at handwriting recognition, much like these computers and phones now are very good at voice recognition, much better than they used to be. So it's just, as computers have gotten smarter, faster, there's more memory and machine language training has gotten better. They've kind of abandoned this idea that we've gotta mold ourselves to the computer. So I would say when you, are you gonna get this new Samsung galaxy ultra

Caller #6 (01:33:25):
Not any time soon, but that's, you know, one of the things I have in the back of my mind when I decide to change,

Leo Laporte (01:33:30):
I'll tell you what, I've, I've ordered it. I'll get it February 25th on the 26th, two weeks from today, I will give you my impression. One of the very first things I'll look at is stylist hand writing recognition. I'll let you know if it's thank you very much, cause I, it is very

Caller #6 (01:33:44):
Important.

Leo Laporte (01:33:44):
I completely agree more and more. We're realizing that the, the, the interface between humans and computers is the, the tough part, the the sticking point in a lot of stuff is that, that human computer interface, they don't understand, you understand, and our voice better than you understand our handwriting better. And, and as computers get better at doing that, they'll be much more natural and easy to use. And I think that's very important companies understand it, and they're working on it. And I think we have great information. Yeah. I think we have gotten better. Jeff Hawkins, if you, if you're interested, wrote a really good book called on intelligence, he's a brain science, you he's a neuro scientist. In fact, his company that he works at now is called Numenta. They're trying, trying to invent computer chips that work the same way as the human brain, but he wrote an amazing book called on intelligence that talks about how the human brain works and how we're trying to understand it so that we can attempt to duplicate in computing, which is a very interesting task.

Leo Laporte (01:34:45):
A real challenge, mark, a pleasure talking to you. I've got my Palm pilot right behind me. I have several of them right behind me in my museum, but you know, they're there, there's another story I I've told before, but related to that, I was before the Palm came out, I was a fan of something called a cion PS. I O N the cion three, a from a British company. And it was a pocket computer about the size of an eyeglass case. When you opened the clamshell, there was a real keyboard, a Cordy keyboard. It had Le great software, but, but the one thing that was missing is that you couldn't easily get data into it and out of it. So if you had a computer and you had a calendar or an address book on the computer, you couldn't get into the cion. And I remember having lunch with the creator of the cion.

Leo Laporte (01:35:30):
I said, why don't you have some way of easily synchronizing with your computer? And he said, Leah, no one wants that. We're not going to do it. No one wants that. And I think people want that. And of course along came Palm a couple of years later, completely put him out of business because what did Palm have? It had that magic thing where you put it in the dock, you press the button, it would go, boo, do it, would copy everything off of the computer, boo. And it was, it had very fast, very accurate synchronization with your desktop. And that's what literally that, and graffiti put cion outta business. Jeff told me another thing in secret. He said, you know that button that you pressed on your, on your Palm pilot dock to get the docking going, you, we didn't really need that. We could have easily had it just start when you dock it. And that would've been fine. We didn't need to play the tune. We need to have a button. He said, but people like it. We did that for the people. They liked the push a button. They need a magic button. There, I wonder, I think there are probably some good books about that, about that. There is something called graffiti pro you can get on Android. That's interesting. Thank you. Asthmatic in our chat room, graffiti pro for Android. So if you want graffiti, I guess you could still do it. Leo Laport, the tech guy.

Leo Laporte (01:37:00):
This is funny. They say somebody in the shower said, when are you having a garage? Say, well, you know, one thing that's keeping me from retiring. By the way I bought the note, the note eight, eight, whatever, the Samsung ultra, I bought it from best buy, but we'll see, cuz thank you. It might be, he said, I think they have stock at best buy. We'll see best buy says some sort of weasel words. Like we'll get it to you as soon as we can. We shall see. No, in fact I have it,

Leo Laporte (01:37:35):
This cion successor. Lemme see if I have it here Somewhere. I have

Leo Laporte (01:37:42):
Now look at this museum.

Leo Laporte (01:37:50):
That's a,

Leo Laporte (01:37:51):
Oh, that's a ZTE. Oh, here it is. Yeah. So this was the company that was that made the pocket computer very much like the cion has even better kind of keys. I should I'll plug it in. I can Start it up. Is that the charging port? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Buzzed. And there were all sorts of it's the Gemini planet computers. So that's and this was very much like the cion five. I liked the three a See maybe it doesn't have enough juicy yet to it. Turn on. This is running Linux. As I remember, Does it matter where I plug in? Well, we'll charge it for a little while. See if it works up, But yep. That's another one. That'll that'll be available. And, and the estate sale. There's also all of these. The thing that's keeping me from retiring is I don't know what we're gonna do with all the garbage. I mean I mean these antiques, I could do a to series On just going through this stuff in the back. So

Leo Laporte (01:39:36):
Look at all this stuff off. There's the this is the first Android phone. This is the first netbook First iPhone. This is another iPhone

Leo Laporte (01:40:01):
Go

Leo Laporte (01:40:01):
Landscape, go landscape. Can I, can I hold it? Can I support it? This is Q cat. That was my first digital camera. Snapchat spec. That was the one PC per child. Original Original iPod. Why? Here's a galaxy note two. I think this must be the one I broke. There's a Blackberry. Ah, a Palm pilot.

Leo Laporte (01:41:13):
Oh, well you get the idea. There's a lot of crap back there. Where does he get all those amazing gadgets? Yeah, one of the iPhones I dunked in water. Maybe that's there. Sure. Yeah, There's a lot of stuff back there. Some of those, I mean, I, you know, I should just go through all of that. You just sold your 45 year old apple one Joey. You're kidding me. Did you make a lot of money on it? Was it running? Mitch? Wait, had an iPad apple one which he recondition so that it would be Saleable. I think, you know, some of them sell it auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now we go, now it's charging 0%. Wait a minute. You got half a million Joey. Come on. Really? Really? That's more than my Bitcoin wallet, dude. No, Joey you're you're teasing me. Did you auction it off? Wow. It was displayed on times. Square drinks are on Joey. Where should I look it up times? Square apple one. Oh, the Manhattan. Let's see. Fifth avenue apple One Check. Oh, Chaffee college, apple one. Okay. Did you get to keep the money?

Leo Laporte (01:43:24):
I hope incredibly rare. Chaffee college, apple, one sell at auction. This was black back in November for half a million. You had the wooden case? Joey. Oh, Oh man. Oh man.

Leo Laporte (01:43:49):
Congratulations. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte here. The tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, apple. One computers was talking with somebody in our chat room who some years ago bought an apple one in 1977 from a teacher at Chaffee college, an electronics professor who had bought it knew he sold it to his student. Who's I guess kept it in good shape. It was running. It was one of the original there's only 60 remaining apple, one computers, not the apple two. There were millions of those made the apple one. They were all handmade. And Steven, Steve Jobs's garage, this one had COA wood case. It wasn't a plastic case. It was a beautiful wood case. And our chatter sold it for half a million dollar. What? Wow. And the most amazing thing. That's not even the record for an apple. One computer one was sold in 2014 for 900, 5,000. So if you call me and say, what should I do with my 1998, Lenovo that's old and worn. And, and should I put Linux on? I'm just gonna say take good care of it. It might be worth something someday. Eighty eight, eighty eight. Ask Leo. That's the phone number? Fred on the line from Upland to California. Hello? Fred Leo Laporte.

Caller #7 (01:45:23):
Hey, how are you doing Leo?

Leo Laporte (01:45:24):
I'm well, how are you?

Caller #7 (01:45:27):
I'm doing pretty good. You're right up my alley. Today. You start out the show with talking the Samsungs, the, the phones, and we have two eight edges that are outta memory.

Leo Laporte (01:45:39):
Yeah. Might be time. Yeah.

Caller #7 (01:45:42):
Out time.

Leo Laporte (01:45:44):
Out of time. Out of pocket. Yeah, those are, those are great phones. You kept it for a long time. You owe yourself a new phone.

Caller #7 (01:45:52):
Yeah, we, we we actually have two portable chargers that we carry with them everywhere we go. And I actually got the recommendation out of the, the chat room, anchor, the anchor wireless. And I just stick that thing in my back pocket with the love. Those, it charges it all day long.

Leo Laporte (01:46:10):
Yeah. Love those. I have a bunch of those. We wrote through. Yeah.

Caller #7 (01:46:16):
So, so we were looking at the the Samsung ultra and we're with Verizon. And you had mentioned that you, you went to Samsung to order rather than

Leo Laporte (01:46:29):
It was complicated. The day of Wednesday Samsung site was down all day. You could not, but it was, it wasn't down in a good way. They, it, you went to pre-order and you did all the specs and all the things and the trade-ins and everything. And then it would spin and spin and spin and then say your, your card is empty. And I tried that a hundred times. So many people I know did nobody could buy. So I finally gave up and went to Verizon. Fortunately that night Samsung came back, they had a few better deals, you know, a few extra little do hickeys they were offering. And so I canceled the Verizon order and got it from Samsung. So I'm looking forward to it two weeks.

Caller #7 (01:47:10):
Yeah. So, so what we were looking at was, was really the storage on 'em and these are supposed to be up to one T, but Verizon doesn't have the one T and then, so that's

Leo Laporte (01:47:22):
Samsung may not too at this point because you know, these things sell out fast. So your S eight probably had at best 64 gigs on it, how much storage did it have? Do you know?

Caller #7 (01:47:34):
It had 32. Yeah. With 32 with 32 on the, on the 

Leo Laporte (01:47:39):
SD SD card. Right. So one thing you should know is they've dropped the SD cards. SD cards are always problematic on Android because you can pop them out so they could never put everyth on them. They were really only good for data photos and a few apps you could put on there as long as they didn't have widgets. Yeah.

Caller #7 (01:47:56):
And if you, if you put the apps on there, when the app updated, it would move back to the regular storage. Exactly. So,

Leo Laporte (01:48:02):
Yeah, it's always a little problematic.

Caller #7 (01:48:04):
So, so other than the Samsung, I mean, we like the Samsung we've had 'em for, for, for years. Is there, is there an alternative that might be better with Verizon or that

Leo Laporte (01:48:16):
They should all be fine with Verizon? What you don't really care about millimeter wave, which is Verizon's fastest. The one, when they talk about 5g, they're always talking about, oh, this millimeter wave is 10 gigabits per second. Yeah. If you're 80 feet from the tower and the towers are in some very limited areas, what you really care about is the two other bands, the low band, and, and now the mid band, what, what ultra, what Samsung or sorry, Verizon calls ultra wide band. That's much more pre prevalent and it works much at a be better distance. So it's much more likely you'll actually get it. Ultra wide band is rolling out very quickly. That's the one that AT&T and Verizon bought for billions of dollars. And then the FAA said, wait a minute, you can't use it. Airplanes will be falling outta the sky.

Leo Laporte (01:49:05):
They've worked that out for that story. Yeah. They've worked that out. Ultra wide band is fantastic. It's it's it's gigabit speed. It's gonna be much better than millimeter wave. Millimeter wave is silly. Don't we should never buy a phone just for the millimeter wave, unless, you know, you live within 800 feet of a tower, but ultra wide band and the low band are really good. Low band is essentially the same speed as LTE. Not much of an improvement. It's the ultra wide band, the middle band. That's gonna be very interesting. So, okay. Yes. And almost any phone you buy, if it says 5g will support it, you probably would want to ask that you don't have to buy it from Verizon though, for that to be the case, it's just a radio frequency. If they support those radio frequencies, they'll be okay.

Caller #7 (01:49:49):
Yeah. I was just looking at Verizon, just for the convenience like to go onto their website and say, upgrade my phone and they'll ship it to me at some point. And then basically all I have to do is turn it on and go through the steps rather than then have to buy it from a third party and then absolutely

Leo Laporte (01:50:05):
Nothing with that. Yeah. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, you know, I am gonna put a Verizon SIM in, it's gonna be a Verizon, but so Verizon probably sells I don't know for sure, but they probably sell the Motorola series. Those motos are very good, less expensive. And I think very good. I would say if you don't need the top of the line flagship phone, and if you've been using an S eight for the last 10 years, you probably don't. I would definitely look at the Google pixel five, a with 5g, and I think Verizon also sells that that's a $400 phone. That is because it's from Google gonna have all the Android up. It's a very clean version of Android. I think it's gonna be a good choice. So 

Caller #7 (01:50:54):
Okay. Yeah. Our, our, our main concern is because we, these are used for business is that our, our text messages, our phone call log, and any photos that we take, even though we back everything up to the cloud that these are, these are available on the phone. So if somebody yeah, calls me and says, Hey, five years ago, you did something for us,

Leo Laporte (01:51:17):
But you've been, you've

Caller #7 (01:51:19):
Been quickly looking,

Leo Laporte (01:51:20):
You've been suffering with 32 gigs, which is barely usable. So

Caller #7 (01:51:26):
Yeah, one. Yeah. And one of the phones I'll tell no notifications doesn't ring all that good stuff because it's

Leo Laporte (01:51:33):
Time,

Caller #7 (01:51:34):
It's absolutely full it's

Leo Laporte (01:51:35):
Back. Yeah. It's time. So even 128 gigs, which is the minimum, all of these phones have is four times more is gonna be probably adequate. But look at 2 56 the Samsung S 22 ultra comes in 28, 2 56, 5 12, which is the one I got by the way, there are differences in the models. You'll get more Ram. If you get the five, 12, or the one terabyte, you'll get 12, 12 gigabytes of Ram. I don't know if that's gonna make a difference or not. We'll have to wait and see, usually it does. So, but you know, 120, eight's probably more than adequate, but if you got 2 56 or five 12, you'd, you'd probably feel like you've got that's more than I laptop has. You're gonna be fine.

Caller #7 (01:52:17):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:52:19):
They don't support SD cards though. So, you know, what you buy is what you're gonna have going forever, right?

Caller #7 (01:52:25):
Yeah. I was disappointed when I couldn't replace the batteries in 'em. So

Leo Laporte (01:52:30):
I wanna correct myself, ultra Samsung calls. It's millimeter wave UW, say I'm con it's confusing. There is a mid band. I don't know what logo shows up on your screen when you get the mid band, but that's the one you care about. It's not UW, I guess UW is still that millimeter wave, which is Cly C, C Cly. Hey, thank you for the call. Enjoy you. Do you know what you're gonna get?

Caller #7 (01:52:54):
Well, right now, we're, we're looking at ordering the ultra, but we'll take a look at what Verizon has on their website. Yeah. At the, at the motto and the, and the Google phone's

Leo Laporte (01:53:04):
Kind, how much money you wanna spend. I mean, the Ultra's gonna have cameras that are mind boggling. I mean, the camera I've been looking at some of the reviews of the cameras. They're remarkable. So it might be worth taking a look at, Hey, I appreciate the call. Hey, enjoy your new phones. You've earned them.

Caller #7 (01:53:22):
Yeah. At the end of the

Leo Laporte (01:53:25):
88 88, ask Leo, I, I think to keep you as a customer, Verizon should give you a pretty good discount after all you've been paying for it all this time. Leo Laport, the TECA. No. Wow. I'd love that. So see band is U w B. Okay. There's my, there's the source of my confusion. T-Mobile calls it UC

Leo Laporte (01:53:56):
For ultra capacity or ultra confusing. And I only have, as I mentioned last week the experience of T-Mobile's UC once at the DMV, the apartment of motor vehicles, for some reason, must be close to the tower. It's close to the highway. And I guess the T-Mobile must have put a tower there. It's their old sprint towers. And I was blown away. I've never seen cell phone speed like that. It kind of was encouraging that. In fact, the phone could go that fast. This is an old, old, old last year's iPhone 12. And it was it was pretty remarkable. I was very impressed. Let me see if I can find that speed test. Yeah. 503 megabits down and 15 up. Now the thing is, I don't think you need faster than that ever. But on a phone anyway. Yeah. So, so it's really up to the carrier, what logo they show. But the good news is the, the ultra supports millimeter wave, mid band and low band. So Verizon with C band shows, UWB. Okay, Well at home you might want more than 500 of three megabits because you have multiple users, but on your phone, you're the only one using it. I can't think of what you would need more than, more than a hundred megabits for believe it, or believe me UW, UC and 5g plus are non-standard

Leo Laporte (01:55:46):
That's so that's the problem is there's no standard for instance, AT&T calls it 5G and it's LTE. I mean, so Verizon, Let me see five

Leo Laporte (01:56:04):
Low

Leo Laporte (01:56:04):
Logos. Okay. Oh, it's iPhone specific. So an iPhone. So that's why it varies depending on the phone. So on Verizon Millimeter wave is UW On the iPhone. UW B is their C band And on the low it'll be just 5g by itself, Ultra and frail ring. But that's on the iPhone.

Leo Laporte (01:57:12):
I dunno. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (01:57:18):
We talked about this last week and I looked it up Because T-Mobile, I saw this UC. I said, what is this UC? And that's when I, that's why I did a speed test Ultra capacity. So AT&T refers to low band. 5G is 5g. Millimeter wave is 5g plus on, AT&T Verizon U D. UW is millimeter wave Le Laport. The tech guy Scream and shout a, I love this song. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number tech guy labs.com. The website. Jim is on the line from Santa CLA, Rita, California. Hello, Jim.

Caller #8 (01:58:09):
Hi Leo. How

Leo Laporte (01:58:10):
Are you? I am very well. How are you?

Caller #8 (01:58:12):
I'm well, thank you. What do you think my PC junior for 1985 is worth?

Leo Laporte (01:58:17):
Well, it depends you have the chicklet keyboards, cause that's really where you go. The value goes through the roof, those little rubber keys. Wow. Wow. All right. That's a classic

Caller #8 (01:58:27):
Can look.

Leo Laporte (01:58:28):
The head is a classic. I don't know if it has any value, but I think the value's tied to the rarity. I mean, there are only 60 apple ones. I think there were a few more PC juniors that was a fascinating attempt by IBM to get into the home market. Which flopped?

Caller #8 (01:58:43):
Yes, it certainly did. Yes. Listen, just a couple quick questions. One is a simple one, but important to me. I'm trying to clean up the desktop on my iMac and I, I take a folder of photographs 10 or 20 of them grab the folder and drag it down to the icon on the bar below. And it transfers. Yes. yet it leaves that folder on the desktop. Yes. Can I now delete that desktop folder knowing that those pictures are in the photos?

Leo Laporte (01:59:14):
Yes.

Caller #8 (01:59:16):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:59:16):
But

Leo Laporte (01:59:18):
Just in case, just to make sure you might, in theory, yes. It's transferred 'em you can see why it doesn't delete 'em cuz it, you know, cuz it doesn't wanna scare you. But you can tell what's what I photos has copies of by going into the I photos library. And you do that by right. Clicking and showing package tense. Cuz it's not a, what says it's the library, isn't really a library. It's a folder. And in there there's another folder called original photos. Just the first time check to see if it's in original photos. If it is, you can throw away the originals.

Caller #8 (01:59:54):
Okay. And I can repeat that process without having to verify each time.

Leo Laporte (01:59:58):
Yes.

Caller #8 (01:59:59):
Right. Okay. Gotcha. Yes. Gotcha.

Leo Laporte (02:00:01):
I'm always nervous when I say that, cuz I don't want you to lose anything, but yes.

Caller #8 (02:00:05):
Yeah, I understand. I understand. And if it was, I I've tried to go back and look, but you know, what I'm doing is adding 20 pictures to my 10,000 pictures and it's sometimes difficult to find what I just oh

Leo Laporte (02:00:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Yeah. In sir, in theory, what you're really doing is copying,

Caller #8 (02:00:20):
Right.

Leo Laporte (02:00:21):
Not moving, but copying those photos, which means now you have two copies. I still, by the way, I still would back up those fold photos, you know, you have an external drive, you copy 'em onto, so you have two copies.

Caller #8 (02:00:34):
Right. And, and I've also got your the, I drive that I'm excellent looking up to as well. And, and, and the, the I'm also, my Mac is running out of storage unbelievably it's a year and a half, two years old. I've got a terabyte, but you know, between pictures and documents, I seem to have filled it up. Yeah. And, and so I'm looking at buying an external hard drive. And my question is this, once I get that external hard drive of four terabytes or whatever, and I take those fold and move them over to that, can I then, should I, can I delete them from my hard drive on the computer to free up that space? Is that what I should do?

Leo Laporte (02:01:12):
Yeah. And again, this is a case where it's not a backup. If you only have one copy, no matter where that copy lives. So if you're gonna delete the originals, make two copies, you've got eye drive, which is great. That's the cloud copy. In general, it'd be nice to have two local copies as well. Now you have three copies, two different storage media and one offline. That's the ideal. So-Called 3, 2, 1 backup. So yeah, but you, yeah. Yeah. You, you, at that point you've made a copy of it. You're not gonna lose them. The only there's the only hitch in the giddy up is, you know, copying, isn't perfect sometimes it copies and it misses a bit and it's corrupted. It can get corrupted. And it's really hard to verify that a copy worked. That's why a lot of backup programs will do a verify after copy routine just to check to see that they got a good copy of everything. Sure. So that might be another thing to add to your process. Make sure you got 'em

Caller #8 (02:02:08):
Okay. And, and my final question, Leon, thank you for your time is of course I've got a new, a new iMac that I replaced with an older iMac because the older iMac, which was 7, 8, 9 years old, was getting clunky. I'm now beginning to experience only after two years, the same type of problems with my new iMac. And, and I I've got I, is it gonna take 32? The memory I, I got half of what the options were. Right. You know, so I,

Leo Laporte (02:02:34):
32 plenty, you should never need more than 16 even, but 32 is more than enough. Absolutely

Caller #8 (02:02:39):
Things like IMO are not working properly. The voice isn't synced with the photo, with the picture, you know, with the

Leo Laporte (02:02:45):
Video. That's another matter. I don't, that's something else that okay. That, so what are you keeping your up to date with your Macs updates? Are you up to Monterey now?

Caller #8 (02:02:56):
I am, but while I try to, but it's that I can't load it because my scratch is full, whatever the hell.

Leo Laporte (02:03:01):
Ah, okay. This is important. So you are running outta storage, so you are right to be copying stuff off as best you can. You know, I bought the new Mac M one laptop with five, 12 gigabytes of storage, half what you have and with a little discipline, that's fine. But it does take things like, I only keep say the last, this year's photos on the hard drive and move everything else off to backup. You know, it requires the discipline to say, I'm gonna keep on my laptop. Only the stuff I'm gonna be using, you know, in the currently and I'll have in backups, everything else right. And so five twelves even enough if you do that, but right. It's always a hard to do that. I know.

Caller #8 (02:03:43):
Yes. I have no discipline.

Leo Laporte (02:03:44):
Yeah. So you we'll definitely get sluggish if the disc is full. Okay. So you're right. The first thing the you're you're doing the right thing. The first thing to do is get that, get at least modern operating systems, want a surprisingly large amount of free space on the hard drive, like 10 gigabytes. At least I'd like to see 50 gigabytes free. And then if it's still sluggish, it might be time to either rebuild the system, you know, backup data, start fresh. You can even refresh the operating system without rebuilding, you know, without modifying your data, those things, just like any other device, those things help.

Caller #8 (02:04:19):
Right.

Leo Laporte (02:04:20):
Shouldn't be sluggish at, at two years old. It shouldn't be

Caller #8 (02:04:23):
No should not be no I'm I'm annoyed. Yeah. And then if a program like IMO that I, it won't even let me close IMO. I open it up. It doesn't work properly. I go to hit the red button and it just locks up. I got,

Leo Laporte (02:04:34):
I think that's gonna be lack of hard drive space. I think that has to be okay. Yeah.

Caller #8 (02:04:37):
Gotcha. All right, Leo,

Leo Laporte (02:04:39):
Thank you. My pleasure, Jim. Good to talk to you. Yeah, it's a modern, you know, it's funny. We have so much storage. I mean, I'm, I'm laughing at myself saying, yeah, I only got five, 12 gigabytes on my new laptop. I was worried 512 gigabytes ton of storage. It wasn't so long ago we were buy a computer and it had a two gigabyte hard drive and it was so big, you know, we'd have to partition it to use it. I couldn't, you know, two gigabytes nowadays not enough to install an operating system. So just as the drives have gotten bigger, so have our requirements. I'm gonna say 50, you want 50 gigabytes free for an operating system to perform optimally. Remember it's using that for a variety of things, including storing, when you run out low on memory, storing stuff in and out of memory, you, you need a lot of free space on a modern operating system. So that's yeah, that's definitely part of the problem. Leo, Laporte the tech guy more calls coming up. So this Gemini Runs Runs Android, Which is kind of interesting.

Leo Laporte (02:06:07):
I

Leo Laporte (02:06:07):
Should plug it back in. That's

Leo Laporte (02:06:08):
Not fully charged.

Leo Laporte (02:06:12):
I think there's a SIM here, which is kind of interesting. I'm trying to figure out where the Sims go. As I remember the whole, this whole thing comes off Back in my, I remember when I got a 20 megabyte hard drive and I went crazy. I thought, oh my God, those, those what they were, RLL hard drives from Seagate. Two of them, I thought 40, 40 mega got bites. I'll never run out of room. We're doing super bowl halftime performers for $300. I don't know who this is from Memphis, Tennessee. Yeah. All right. Tell me who is it? Timberlake. That's Timberlake Is J is, is Janet Jackson with him? Oh yeah, there we go. I think I know what year that was. I'll never forget it. Jessica Simpson, Janet Jackson, P did he? Nelly kid rock. And in Timberlake reliant stadium, 2004, I'm looking at the list. Wikipedia has 'em all, all. So, and then they went through a period in the 2000 tens of single artists. I remember when we went to see the 49ers play in new Orleans, it was Beyonce. That was great at the super dome, 2 20 13, Bruno Mars, Katie Perry, just looking at, and then the weekend. Remember the weekend. Last. That was so weird. Last year. That was so weird. His house mirrors. That was so strange this year, Dr. Dre, Snoop dog, M and M Mary J Blige and Kendrick Lamar.

Leo Laporte (02:08:04):
And I can't feel my face. Leo Laport, the tech guy, 88 88. Ask Leo, Steven in Venice, California. Hi, Steven.

Caller #10 (02:08:12):
Hi. How

Leo Laporte (02:08:13):
Are you? I'm great. How are you?

Caller #10 (02:08:16):
I am, well, I just getting a scooter. I here. Yes. I have a question regarding iPad. Yes, sir. I'm sorry. I'm have to call you back. I have a yell at

Leo Laporte (02:08:33):
Me. Okay. Yeah, go ahead. We don't want anybody yelling at you. Hey, what are you doing on the phone? Now? Get off the phone. He's I should have known he's in Venice. He's he's down there in Venice beach. So I'll just, I'll just give you a moment. He hasn't hung up. So should we hear be

Caller #10 (02:08:53):
Angry about it?

Leo Laporte (02:08:54):
Huh? Yeah. He's he's still talking with the man. Yeah. I'll tell you what I'm gonna put you on hold. And if you would Kim, just, you know, keep an ear out when he is done with the altercation, We can get back. The GIZ was coming up and just, I know, I know. I know what you're thinking. Every saying, leave it up. Let's hear the fight. But this isn't this isn't TMZ. This is This isn't TMZ. Kim, are you listening now? Kim? Is there anything?

Caller #10 (02:09:31):
Yeah, he's still

Leo Laporte (02:09:32):
Talking. Still talking to the guy. Are they fighting? So he's on he obviously down on Venice beach.

Kim Schaffer (02:09:40):
I don't. Oh no. Oh, he might be coming back

Leo Laporte (02:09:42):
Is crazy people down there.

Kim Schaffer (02:09:44):
Are, are you there? Hello?

Kim Schaffer (02:09:51):
I'm glad you're not airing this

Leo Laporte (02:09:52):
Right now. Oh, is it bad? Is it getting bad? Are they swearing? This is actually better than hearing. I would be. It would upset my tummy to hear them actually fighting. But hearing your reaction is kind of fun.

Kim Schaffer (02:10:07):
He just said

Speaker 28 (02:10:08):
Somebody had a very small member.

Leo Laporte (02:10:10):
Oh no. Don't no. Oh my goodness. Holy cow. Oh, you know why it's 88 degrees and people have come out. They've they've shed their parks. They they've taken their masks off and they're down there on Venice beach and the sunshine and the roller skates. He hung up. He hung up poor guy. I hope he's okay. Do you

Speaker 27 (02:10:32):
Wanna just take a cold call?

Kim Schaffer (02:10:35):
You go, you get, you get somebody as soon as you say it's okay to talk to 'em. I'll talk to 'em. I don't, we, we actually went through all the calls. We usually do this towards the end, cuz in about five minutes, we're gonna put the Dick D Bartolo on and then wrap the show up. So we don't want people just be sitting on hold and never get to 'em. So we, we had cleared the lines and they, and Steve threw us a curve ball down there on vintage Venice beach. You know, I guess the pandemic's over we're back to fighting in the streets. Oh no, wait a minute. That never stopped. Did it all right. Soon as as soon as Kim, we got, we got the calls coming in. I, but Kim's got a, you know, she's got, she's gotta be very careful now. And and professor Lori, did you have your hand ho hovered over the the button? Oh yes. Yes. She was ready with the magic button. All right. Let's say hi to Michael and tolerance. Hello, Michael.

Caller #11 (02:11:30):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:11:30):
Thanks for saving us. Thanks for calling in. I appreciate it,

Caller #11 (02:11:34):
Dr. Leo.

Leo Laporte (02:11:35):
Yes, sir. I'm well, how are you?

Caller #11 (02:11:38):
We're doctors in ndom remember.

Leo Laporte (02:11:40):
Oh, yes, I do remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. We have Dr. Phds or PNS nerds of philosophy. I don't know. What can I do for you, Mr. Mr. Doctor?

Caller #11 (02:11:53):
I'm the old Rand Netcom IAM guy.

Leo Laporte (02:11:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Caller #11 (02:11:59):
Yeah. You guys talking a lot about various bandwidths,

Leo Laporte (02:12:03):
You know, it's so unclear. It's so unclear. Maybe you can help me understand all of this.

Caller #11 (02:12:09):
Well, I was gonna ask you because, oh no. I've got you know, I'm a broker now and I do a bunch of appraisals and I've got this really cool application. It's custom application that you answer a bunch of questions. You take photos and then you actually do a floor plan scan using your iPhone or super

Leo Laporte (02:12:29):
Cool

Caller #11 (02:12:30):
Android. It takes five minutes to do a floor scan and it provides the awesome.

Leo Laporte (02:12:35):
So you're basically doing the whole listing on your phone, including images and a, and a floor plan. It's

Caller #11 (02:12:40):
It's not a listing, it's basically an appraisal

Leo Laporte (02:12:42):
Appraisal. Okay.

Caller #11 (02:12:44):
For whatever reason for refi or something like that. Yep. So the application's called clear insight really doesn't matter, but it's all done on the phone and then it's uploaded on site and the problem I'm having is, and maybe you can answer this. I don't know what the packet signs for uploads to cell tower is, but if I try to upload, cause it's probably about 500 Meg to 700 Meg with all the questions, all the photos and then the floor scan, it basically uploads to the asset company. It runs it through AI and then provides all this information on the, on the back end. But if I upload via their local wifi, if I get their guest password it uploads in, you know, two minutes, I try over the cell network and I've got Verizon and I've got, you know, four bars it takes 10, 15, 20 minutes. Wow. It doesn't even start. So I'm just curious. 

Leo Laporte (02:13:47):
So it could be, Yeah, so it, yeah, it could be of course you know, as you know, it's asymmetric, so the downloads are always much faster than the uploads, even on cell networks. So it could be that, but there's you mentioned packet size that got me thinking, remember in the old days we used to set the Mt in our P P settings, which is

Caller #11 (02:14:12):
1530 seconds, wasn't it? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:14:13):
You remember? Yeah. You remember, so the idea was, you're gonna specify how big the packets are and that could be important because a packet that's too big than the maximum, the network will allow, just gets thrown out and you have to retransmit. So and, and it turns out, I didn't know this, but the MTUS for us cellular networks are smaller than the default on at home. Your home network for Verizon it's 1, 4, 2, 8.

Caller #11 (02:14:47):
Oh.

Leo Laporte (02:14:48):
So you might wanna set your Mt. Yeah. Your, your MTU certainly lower than the default 1500 maybe. And, and your Mr. You may be to 1420. You might wanna actually turn now, how do you do that? You got me probably it's in the APN settings. I don't, I don't know, but I would look in there, there is there under carriers under connections, there is, there are setting and I think MTU might still be in there. That's an old fashioned idea.

Caller #11 (02:15:17):
Yeah. But that, that may actually help. Cause I was wondering about the packet size yeah. To, you know, the towers.

Leo Laporte (02:15:23):
Well see, because, because of your Netcom background, you know, about this stuff. So I'm we're maybe getting a little more advanced here. I don't, you know, it, it couldn't hurt. It might help. You don't want it too low because then you're sending too many packets and the overhead of each packet slows you down. You don't want it too big because they'll reject those extra large packets. So you want the just right. Goldilocks packet size and apparently on, on sell networks. It's, it's different. Verizon's 14, 28, 18 T is 14, 20, and others are 1430. So it who knew, but thanks to you. We now all know,

Caller #11 (02:16:03):
Accept good.

Leo Laporte (02:16:06):
Take, take a look at that. I'd be very curious, Michael, if that helps Leo Laport, the tech guy, the GWiz coming up. So not drop net necessarily might be re re reassembled. But again, that's a lot of overhead. So how fascinating it may also just be, I mean, imagine this Clarence is creating a pretty giant package to upload.

Caller #11 (02:16:28):
It is, like I said, it's probably well, each photo's high rise and there's typically, you know, 60, 70 photos. They're all too.

Leo Laporte (02:16:36):
So might be several hundred megabytes. You're trying to upload

Caller #11 (02:16:39):
Oh yeah. Easily. But over the wifi, you know, and that's assuming what, 10, 20, maybe 30 mega that max. Right? It, so in about two, two minutes over the cell, like I said, it either won't start or it can take five. Isn't

Leo Laporte (02:16:56):
That interesting. They may, and who knows, they may be doing some package shaping to protect their network. They may be doing some other stuff as well. I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Cause you're gonna, as you know using a lot of upload can actually hurt the download speeds and, and it may be that depending on how the cell tower is connected, the back haul, they may not want a lot of upstream traffic because it may under the downstream traffic. Right.

Caller #11 (02:17:31):
Most people aren't uploading a bolt load of data, so,

Leo Laporte (02:17:34):
Well, yeah. And that's the thing you would assume on a cell network. Oh, you know, I might, I might see some trickles of photos, but what you don't want is somebody uploading their entire photo library on the cell network. Right. So you might, you might in fact slow that down. I'm just looking at the ultra CAPA. I got on T-Mobile when I said I got 503 down. I only got 15 up, so 15. Yeah. So it's really very asymmetric as well. That's another, another issue you could run a speed test and see, well, wifi,

Caller #11 (02:18:02):
My wifi depending on where you are you know, you can get 30 or 40, right?

Leo Laporte (02:18:07):
Yeah. Wifi should be fine. Yeah. I don't know what my wifi is, but I'm sure it's, you know, pretty fast. It's interesting. Cause some clients

Caller #11 (02:18:13):
Don't, some clients don't wanna give their wifi password password and they don't have a guest password. Right. Cause I always tell them, give the guest password and then delete it when the persons gone. But 

Leo Laporte (02:18:25):
Yeah. I know. Let me just test my cause I was surprised that the iPhone 12 can get to 500 megabyte download. That's pretty remarkable. 

Caller #11 (02:18:35):
On the 

Leo Laporte (02:18:36):
On, on T-Mobile, on T-Mobile yeah, yeah. On sell. Yeah. I was really that's T-Mobile's new mid band 5g. It's funny. I'm on wifi here. And it's gigabit. Well actually it's 10 gigabit wifi, but it's only downloading 3 29. It is upload 360 2.

Caller #11 (02:18:54):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:18:57):
So that's a wifi issue. So it looks like that. I, I actually have more throughput on the cell radio than I do on the wifi radio. That's wild.

Caller #11 (02:19:06):
Yeah. My wifi, I get 400 down, but sometimes I get three 90 a up. So that's pretty symmetrical.

Leo Laporte (02:19:14):
That's that's nice

Caller #11 (02:19:16):
Cell towers. Aren't like that.

Leo Laporte (02:19:18):
No, they're very asymmetrical. Yeah. Yeah. So you have symmetric internet at home though. That's interesting.

Caller #11 (02:19:24):
Pretty much. Yeah. It's frontier needs to be files, but it's frontier.

Leo Laporte (02:19:28):
Oh, okay. So yeah. Yeah. Has frontier improved cuz they were terrible for a while.

Caller #11 (02:19:33):
Oh they were horrible at first. I, I cussed them out so much for the first year and they thought they were the Kings, but I said you bought the infrastructure. You bought the customers. You need to train them like the Verizon customers.

Leo Laporte (02:19:51):
Well it sounds like they're better. Yeah.

Caller #11 (02:19:53):
Oh yeah. They're definitely better. Definitely better. Good. I've had I don't know, five, nine up time. I've had very little,

Leo Laporte (02:20:00):
Oh that's good. Had

Caller #11 (02:20:01):
One one failure on the exterior access point. That was it.

Leo Laporte (02:20:07):
That ain't bad. Comcast goes out every six months for me. So that's not unusual. Michael, gotta run. Pleasure talking to another Dr. Nerd

Caller #11 (02:20:16):
Doctors and nerdom,

Leo Laporte (02:20:18):
We'll see you. We'll see you soon. Take care.

Caller #11 (02:20:20):
All right, bye.

Leo Laporte (02:20:22):
It's time to disco dance our way into America's hearts and minds with Dick DeBartolo mad magazine's Madis writer and our very own gizmo wizard. Hello? Dickie. D

Dick DeBartolo (02:20:36):
Leo, how are you doing pal?

Leo Laporte (02:20:37):
I am very well. Has S spring sprung in

Dick DeBartolo (02:20:41):
Gland. It has sprung for maybe five hours. It's 54 today. Who and I believe 17 tonight. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:20:52):
Oops.

Dick DeBartolo (02:20:52):
So we have some, a air heading this

Leo Laporte (02:20:54):
Way. Here comes the polar vortex.

Dick DeBartolo (02:20:57):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:21:02):
You know, we're a small thing we're I was before you, before you get to your kitchen. Yeah. Yeah. I'm last night. I had dinner with Michael I'll old friend. You probably remember Mike. Oh yeah,

Dick DeBartolo (02:21:10):
Yeah, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (02:21:12):
We, the three of us are in a small fraternity with some other people like Lance EOF who have presented gizmos and gadgets on live with Regis and Kelly Regis and Kathy Lee.

Dick DeBartolo (02:21:25):
Yes. Reg

Leo Laporte (02:21:26):
You know Lance is doing it now with Kelly and the other guy, Greg Canne, whoever it is. And no, it's not him. It's Ryan Goling no, it's not him. Yes. Kelly and Ryan, some guy named Ryan. Yes. Anyway you did it in the Kathy Lee era.

Dick DeBartolo (02:21:44):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:21:45):
Yes. And so did Mike, so did Mike. Yeah. How many years? How many years?

Dick DeBartolo (02:21:49):
I did it at least five years. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:52):
I remember they called me after nine 11, cuz nobody wanted to come to New York and they had, they wanted to talk about gizmos and gadgets shortly after nine 11, I think it was October. And I said, well, I'll come out. And that was the beginning of a 10 year relationship. I did quite a few until Regis retired. Yeah. Regis retired. And then so did I, I thought,

Dick DeBartolo (02:22:13):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:22:15):
Anyway, small fraternity and we, and another member of the, of the brotherhood I had dinner.

Dick DeBartolo (02:22:19):
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (02:22:21):
So Dick joins us every week with a gizmo or a gadget. You've run out of CES. Gizmos, I think.

Dick DeBartolo (02:22:27):
Yes. Yeah. Okay. Right. I have party light now. I, you know, I think you should get a party light.

Leo Laporte (02:22:34):
Right? I, I get everything you talk about Dick. Oh,

Dick DeBartolo (02:22:36):
Okay. Because I

Leo Laporte (02:22:37):
Got the upside down French press. I got 60 different clip on lamps.

Dick DeBartolo (02:22:44):
What do you got? Okay. So party light is a way to turn any room

Leo Laporte (02:22:50):
Into a party,

Dick DeBartolo (02:22:51):
Into a party. Okay. What I love about this Leo is that it runs USB, but has a built in battery. So Dennis and I went down to the park. This

Leo Laporte (02:23:03):
Is like those disco pretty injectors that you grew up. Yes.

Dick DeBartolo (02:23:07):
The thing is it's only $45, but it gives off great laser show by the way.

Leo Laporte (02:23:14):
And there is a video on website of him in the dark, at the park, all bundled up with his mad magazine baseball cap on, are you gonna throw a party in central?

Dick DeBartolo (02:23:26):
Well the Riverside park,

Leo Laporte (02:23:27):
Riverside park, no.

Dick DeBartolo (02:23:28):
Right. You know, I don't like to attract attention, but I, when I walk along with this, It's because the med hat's wearing out. People don't know med anymore,

Leo Laporte (02:23:37):
Not anymore, but now, so

Dick DeBartolo (02:23:39):
Now when they say, what is that? I go,

Leo Laporte (02:23:41):
It's a laser light show in my pocket,

Dick DeBartolo (02:23:44):
In my

Leo Laporte (02:23:44):
Holy cow.

Dick DeBartolo (02:23:46):
So it runs six to seven hours, depending on how many lasers you're using on batteries. And then you go back and it, it, it takes about six hours to recharge it. The thing is Liam, there's a big evergreen tree in, in, in Riverside park and Dennis and I said, I didn't know why they don't decorate that for Christmas. Well, if you put one of these laser lights on it, it glows enough that you could get away with not decorating a Christmas tree. If you just put one of these at the base shining up on the branches it it's really a fun idea. And then the best is when it is totally dark. When I took it down into the basement here, it in my building. Also, it's great. If your house is a mess, you have all the

Leo Laporte (02:24:34):
Lights, turn out the lights. Yeah.

Dick DeBartolo (02:24:35):
Turn out. Yeah. Turn out the lights and you don't have to clean anything. You just walk around.

Leo Laporte (02:24:40):
So it's, I'm watching your video. It seems like it's got a lot of different patterns. You just, it,

Dick DeBartolo (02:24:45):
According to the company has 128 and patterns. Oh, okay. And you, you, you come out, pick 'em out in three categories and then if you wanted to react to music, there are three sound

Leo Laporte (02:24:56):
Categories. Oh, you really can have a party.

Dick DeBartolo (02:24:58):
Yeah. Oh. And as I said, you know, when I was doing the, the disco houseboat, like 30 years ago, when I would go to MGM stage lighting, something like this, would've been thousands a thousand. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I just didn't.

Leo Laporte (02:25:13):
Well, and the thing is, you'd plug it in and the entire city of New York would go,

Dick DeBartolo (02:25:17):
Yes, that's exactly. You're exactly right. This is six Watts. The whole show,

Leo Laporte (02:25:22):
Cause LEDs are so efficient, but what's battery life like

Dick DeBartolo (02:25:26):
Six hours six to seven hours, six hours. If you're using just the lasers or the spotlights seven hours using both,

Leo Laporte (02:25:34):
They should feel this as the home rave kit, you could have a good that's. Yeah. Yeah. How much is it?

Dick DeBartolo (02:25:42):
46 bucks.

Leo Laporte (02:25:44):
Wow. If I can think of a use for it, I might get it. But what am I gonna do with this thing? I'm gonna have

Dick DeBartolo (02:25:50):
A party when no, when you have audiences back again. Yeah. Just have this on a wall because it, it looks fascinating. It gives people something to

Leo Laporte (02:25:59):
It's bright enough. Even if lights are on that, you can kind of see it. Yes,

Dick DeBartolo (02:26:02):
Exactly. Yeah. The studio lights on and, and you can, oh, actually my head makes it great.

Leo Laporte (02:26:07):
Is it on right now? Oh, look at that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. My, oh yeah. You've got some sort of disease. What? You better quick go to the,

Dick DeBartolo (02:26:14):
I have Lyme disease. Leo, when

Leo Laporte (02:26:16):
It's a lime have green

Dick DeBartolo (02:26:16):
Disease, Lyme green disease.

Leo Laporte (02:26:19):
Holy cow. That is very cool effect. 

Dick DeBartolo (02:26:24):
Now you gonna buy

Leo Laporte (02:26:25):
One. You, you have you and I should mention that Dick has, has his cranium especially prepared to be a screen for this.

Dick DeBartolo (02:26:32):
Oh yes. Yeah. Wow. Myra salmon it right before the

Leo Laporte (02:26:36):
Show, little car wax and you you're

Dick DeBartolo (02:26:40):
Set. I'm set.

Leo Laporte (02:26:41):
Wow. Look at that. That is kind of fun. All right. Well, there's a link on website, GI wiz.biz, click the button, the blue button with my face that says the GIZ Wiz visits, the tech guy. And you'll see that and everything else he's mentioned on on the show, including yes. I bought it the little inexpensive waterproof Bluetooth speaker from last week. I do, did not buy the C do boat. I,

Dick DeBartolo (02:27:09):
You buy

Leo Laporte (02:27:09):
The, I should mention French press.

Dick DeBartolo (02:27:10):
The speaker went down in price. Leo. It's 14 bucks now.

Leo Laporte (02:27:15):
Wow.

Dick DeBartolo (02:27:16):
1444. I know. Wow. Don't worry. I also paid 18. So

Leo Laporte (02:27:20):
I also did not buy the color changing BMW. So that's another problem. Oh, okay. You mentioned that I did not buy GIZ up is when you go there, there is another button to click. Well, there's quite a few. You can see what the product sticks mentions on his regular appearances on ABC's world news now, but you can also see the, what the heck is it contest a bunch of green. It looks like a washers for a garden hose. I don't think that's what they are, but it's a closeup. You look at it. What is it? What could it be? You identify it. And you're in the drawing for up to six autograph mad magazines for the right answer up to 12 for the best wrong answers.

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:04):
And your magazines are in the, all the April issue.

Leo Laporte (02:28:08):
Ooh, look at this. It's a dog balloon. What is it?

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:12):
It's Superman's dog. It's a movie coming out soon.

Leo Laporte (02:28:15):
There's a movie called Superman's dog.

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:17):
No, no, that it it's about Superman's dog. I think it's called Superman pets. I'm not even sure what it's

Leo Laporte (02:28:26):
Super pets. Well, it's super pet had a dog.

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:28):
I think it is super

Leo Laporte (02:28:29):
Pet. He would be able to fly.

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:31):
Mikah Sergeant said I'm buying one of those lights. So there I

Leo Laporte (02:28:34):
Sold one. Mike is gonna have a party and his oh. And by the way, with a, what the heck is it? You, you mustn't be a lot of right answers. You've put in a hint. You use both

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:44):
At the same time. Oh, I, I, I didn't want people when you buy this, you buy the two of them. So I didn't want people to, to say, well, you just, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:28:52):
They come as a pair. Exactly. Come as a pair. Hmm. Yes. GI wiz.bi. He also has mad magazine memorabilia match memorabilia for sale gizmo Hoy. For those of you who like to boat, cuz he's a big Abod boater all at his website, G I Z w I Z dot B Iz. And of course you and Chad Johnson do the GIW podcast@gwiz.tv every week now. And it's what

Dick DeBartolo (02:29:19):
Leo start seven, 10 years in 10 days.

Leo Laporte (02:29:23):
17Th year. That's that? You've beat friends. You beat Seinfeld. This is a amazing record.

Dick DeBartolo (02:29:32):
Yeah. Thank

Leo Laporte (02:29:32):
You. Dickie

Dick DeBartolo (02:29:33):
D okay buddy. Take care.

Leo Laporte (02:29:34):
Thanks to all of you for joining me. That's it for the tech guy. I'll see you next time. I'm Leola Laport have a great geek week.

Leo Laporte (02:29:42):
Well, that's it for the Tech Guy show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget. Twit T W I T it stands for this week at tech and you find it at twit.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about Windows and Windows Weekly, Macintosh on Macbreak, Weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches on iOS today. Security and Security Now. I mean, I can go on and on and on. And of course the big show every Sunday afternoon, this week in tech, you'll find it all at twit TV and I'll be back next week with another great tech guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.