The Tech Guy Episode 1883 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. 

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Podcasts. You love

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From people you trust.

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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, April 9th, 2022. This is episode 1,883. Enjoy the tech I podcast is brought to you by Melissa. The us postal service processes more than 98,000 address changes every day. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Try Melissa's APIs in the developer portal. It's easy to log on, sign up and start playing in the API sandbox. 24 7. Get started today with 1000 records. Cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit. Whoa. Hey, Hey. Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte the tech guy time to get cracking on the tech guy issues release the Kraken. 88 88. Ask Leo is the number tech guy two is here. Mr. Mikah Sargent. We missed you last week. Yeah. Happy to be back. Happy to it's good to have you. Yeah. Did you leave your collar somewhere while, while you were gone? Just like going vacation and they took your collar. I became a

Mikah Sargent (00:01:19):
Granddad and now I worked for

Leo Laporte (00:01:21):
Collars. I love it. The young people today. Yeah. You wear the collars that the old folks used to wear. You've switched. You've switched. You've swapped. We are here to talk tech for you. Not, not fashion. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo is the phone number. If you wanna do that, 88 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6 toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada, outside that area, you can still reach me by Skype or something like that. Reach us. You just have to use a Skype out and it should still be free because it's a toll free number in the us. 88, 88. Ask Leo, usually start the show with with news, just to get you in the mood. I don't know how that would get you in the mood. Maybe it get you out of the mood. More likely guess the big news this week, you covered it on your tech news weekly show.

Leo Laporte (00:02:16):
Elon Musk bought unbeknownst to us between January and March of this year, slowly inch by inch paying cash. When they say pay cash. I kind of imagine him sidling up to a window and do nuts and bucks. And I have a share Twitter, but, but using cash bought a significant, like $3 billion worth of Twitter, which turns out to be 9% of the company. He is now the largest shareholder of Twitter. Now most of the people, Mikah, I should tell you who, listen, this show are not Twitter users, right? In fact, most people are not Twitter users. As part of the problem Twitter's facing is that it never got the, the you know, popularity of Facebook or even of TikTok. I think exactly. It's kind of a specialized tool used by groups of different groups of people. Tech geeks journalists have loved Twitter.

Leo Laporte (00:03:13):
In fact, you'll Twitter has an outside outsized importance in culture because you know, all the news people are on it. And as a result, you know, anything gets tweeted. That's a story, especially when the last president was in office, cuz he would use that as to make pro proclamations. Right? Elon Musk is also a very well known Twitter user and kind of a troll in a weird, he uses Twitter in all sorts of weird ways to announce things he's gotten in trouble with his securities and exchange commission, for instance saying he's gonna take Tesla, his car company, private at wink, wink. What was it? $42 a share, no, you have 4 24, $20 a share. Mm wink, wink, nudge, nudge sec said really? And he said, well, no, I was, I didn't really have he said, he said in his tweet funding in place, no, I didn't really have funding in place.

Leo Laporte (00:04:10):
I just, you know, of course the stock went up, which meant his value went up. He's done that before with cryptocurrencies as well. So he's kind of, you know, the that's kinda shady activity it's pump and dump. They call it in the stock market where you flog a stock. Especially if you seem to have insider knowledge, everybody buys it up. Then you sell quickly and make a profit. He could have sold Twitter quickly and made a profit. As soon as it came out. He finally filed last week that he actually had done this. Even his filing was messed up by the way. And he and illegal in some respects, but he filed and Twitter stock went up 27%. If he'd sold it, he would've made a nice, a cool billion dollar profit, but he didn't. And that's interesting. I think he, I think, you know, he might want to own Twitter. It's not unusual if a stock holder comes and buys up that much of a company that they make that person, the CEO,

Mikah Sargent (00:05:12):
Except now he thinks Twitter's dying. Did you see this latest news?

Leo Laporte (00:05:16):
This is another troll post.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:17):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:05:18):
He's asking the question. He's a troll. He's a troll poll. He's asked is Twitter dying, but that's really not. I think what he's trying to get is an excuse to cha take it different ways. It's certainly scared Twitter employees so much. So, and this is unprecedented that they brought Elon Musk in to talk to the employees at an all hands meeting once what? So the information, and I think others are saying, you know, this is this is a, a process. They put him on the board, he got a board seat probably in, in a defensive measure cuz board members cannot try to take over the company. And they're prohibited from taking over the company, which is not to say he couldn't quit the board. And then three minutes later take over the company. I think that's his goal is he wants to run Twitter.

Leo Laporte (00:06:08):
And I think that they may end up making him CEO just to keep him from buying up the rest of the company. And again, I don't think most people care except that Twitter does have this outsized importance in our culture, in our society and particularly in in journalism. So people are a little concerned about what this now and the other thing that's so strange about Elon, you gotta admire him for what he's done with SpaceX today. Spacex put astronauts into the space station for the first tourist astronauts in the space station. Was that today? Well, they, they launched a couple of days ago and they they're in the space station now. That's I didn't realize that. Yeah, that's awesome. So that's four private, all private astronauts you know, they say, well, they're not space tourists. They're doing experiments. They're space tourists.

Leo Laporte (00:07:07):
They paid for the right to put these guys out there. The trip was put together by a company called Axiom space. They're a startup that's booking rides with SpaceX for anyone who can afford it, afford it. Yeah. We don't know how much cuz they don't say, but it's millions gotta be millions. Right? So you know, they've done this before a couple months ago. Remember they orbited some tourists now they're they're gonna be on the space station for eight days. They will conduct science. So they're not, you know, we conduct science, science, they're gonna have have dinner with the professional astronauts. That's part of the deal board, the football field size space station enjoy sweeping views of our home planet.

Leo Laporte (00:07:56):
One of them's an actual NASA astronaut Michael Lopez. Alire he's been in space four times before with NASA joined Axiom and so he's going, I, I don't, maybe he's like the he's like captain Kirk he's like taking them. I don't know. He must be the pilot. Previously we don't know how much because they, they won't say, but previously this goes prices 55 million a seat. Hmm. So you can imagine the other three guys are a millionaires billionaires, probably real estate tycoon. Larry Connor, 72 from Dayton, Ohio. Me let's make our contestants former shipping CEO, mark Paty 52 from Canada and from Israel, AAN stubby, he's 64, an Israeli businessman, former fighter. So these guys you know, this is the ultimate billionaire thing to do, right?

Mikah Sargent (00:09:00):
I mean, yeah, what else can

Leo Laporte (00:09:01):
You do? What else can you do? You can build a sailboat or go, go to space to space. So Elon did that. And you know, I mean, I dunno, I have such mixed feelings about outta Elon. Tesla is the most successful car company in the United States at this point, you know, just incredible success story. So I, I just don't, I don't know what to say. I just don't know what to say about Elon. We don't talk about Elon. Let's see, what else is going on? There was a great piece by the wonderful Taylor Lawrence in the Washington post about how internet, like she calls it, algo speak is changing our language. So it has to do with censorship mostly on TikTok. Where if you say a word like dead on TikTok, they will, they will down rank your video or even be lock it. So instead Tuckers will say alive, right? A lot of this stuff is for sexual kind of, kind of things. The, but it started with COVID. They didn't TikTok didn't want a lot of COVID misinformation. So they were blocking the word COVID. So people on TikTok began frame to it as the Backstreet boys reunion tour. I don't know why. I don't know why sex workers on TikTok call themselves accountants.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:30):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:10:30):
Okay. Instead of using the word porn, you can't use word the word porn. So they use the emoji for corn. You have to learn these this is this, the language of TikTok. They use the sunflower emoji to signify Ukraine instead of saying Lincoln bio, cuz apparently TikTok, not crazy about that. They'll say blink li and it fools the algorithm cuz it's just a computer. Right?

Mikah Sargent (00:10:53):
I saw someone hold up. They said, follow me on these platforms. And they held up instead of saying, follow me on Instagram, follow me on Twitter. They just held up a sheet of paper that had their ins information on it so that the algorithm didn't down, rank them talking about a different platform.

Leo Laporte (00:11:06):
I figure it's always a cat and mouse game. Yeah's gonna figure it out.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:11):
Figuring out

Leo Laporte (00:11:13):
The last year anti-vaccine groups perhaps elsewhere on Facebook began changing their names to dance party or dinner party. Anti-Vaccine influencers on Instagram, same thing, referring to vaccinated people as swimmers. You're a swimmer. I could tell you looked like a swimmer. I mean, this has gone on forever, you know, but it's very interesting. And it's, to me, it's interesting because you, you learn, you have to learn these as you, if you do TikTok you, I think I'm not telling regular TikTok is anything new, cuz they know this. Right. And there, you can't say or you might have run into trouble if you say LGBTQ. So they say leg booty. Right? Right. Cause that's kind of what it spells out leg booty. Okay. Got it. I'm just helping you nips NN KNS instead of nipples. NN NOPS I don't know. Anyway, I don't know if I, I could say nipples on the radio. Actually. I was just wondering, I say NPS NNS from now on. If we say NNS won't we say NPS eighty eight, eighty eight. Ask CLE the phone number. No there's only seven words. We can't say we're we're much more liberal than TikTok. 88, 88. Ask Leo, Leo port Mikah. Sargent. We're gonna take your calls. The tech guy too, right after this.

Leo Laporte (00:12:46):
Yes. I was showing Mikah. Mikah has elected despite my admonitions to learn Python for his first program language, which is actually a good idea. But I brought in cuz I told him, oh no learn lisp. This is the book one of many, but there, but this is a good book from Paul Graham. That's covers the entire language and it's, it's a nice size, nice size biblical 400 pages can take it with you. Yeah. Long outta print. This is kind of rare a rarity compared that to the two kind of definitive volumes on Python. Oh, I can't even lift this bigger than a phone look. Programming Python. That is, that is like the reference work. And it's got 1,543 pages. Of course I should say this came from an era when computer books sold better. If they were bigger and this is learning Python fun, fifth edition and combined combined this one's also a 1500 pages.

Leo Laporte (00:13:51):
So 3000 pages. But I bought these cuz I decided if Mikah can do it, I can do it. I I've written a lot of Python code in my day, but it was the old Python. That's the other problem I have with Python is Python 2.7 and now we're in the Python three world. So I had to get updated versions somewhere. My other Python book is here. I should find, I see a couple of pythons programming Python. There's the Pearl cookbook. There it is. Python book cook Python. The problem is that's all outta date cuz it's all Python. Two don't touch that. Python programming Python for the internet was the book. That was a for me, a breakthrough book, man. I, I re that's when I really got Python was with that one CGI and stuff like that. But unfortunately those days are gone. I gotta learn it all over again. But the advantage, I mean, in some ways this is the advantage of it, which is, and I have the no starch books, which people like I have the Python crash course, serious Python. Those are both good books, but they're not serious. They're not what this is, which is what I need, which is, you know, kind of for the programmer.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:11):
That's one of the curse words you can say

Leo Laporte (00:15:13):
On the radio unbreakable. There she is. Ladies, gentlemen, the unbreakable Kimmy. Shaer our phone angel Kimmy. Don't take no Shaffer. Hello Kimmy.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:26):
Hi.

Leo Laporte (00:15:27):
I saw you yesterday. I

Kim Schaffer (00:15:28):
Did see you yesterday. You were slumming it in know.

Leo Laporte (00:15:31):
Well I wasn't exactly slumming it. I know. Oh man.

Kim Schaffer (00:15:34):
I, I haven't walked around that place in a long time and it was nothing but boutique

Leo Laporte (00:15:38):
Shops. Oh it's so upscale. We were in LA spur, which is even like the, even more boutiquey. Yeah. And it was fun. I, you know, I go down and visit my daughter and we like to go to lunch down there. And where

Kim Schaffer (00:15:50):
You eat?

Leo Laporte (00:15:52):
Where did we eat? Oh, the sushi. Sushi co

Kim Schaffer (00:15:55):
Okay. Went to the sushi bar. We went to hog island and did not have oysters

Leo Laporte (00:15:59):
Hog. Island's good. Love we, we often go to hog island. Yeah.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:03):
Yeah. I miss my Marin brewing company though.

Leo Laporte (00:16:06):
They shut down. I know. I don't know why we're giving people a travel Of Marin.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:13):
If you ever take the ferry, go to

Leo Laporte (00:16:14):
You never want some sour and Shali yeah, maybe a little Brie on the side. How about a baked Brie?

Kim Schaffer (00:16:20):
Delicious girl cheese

Leo Laporte (00:16:21):
Delicious. Kim. Who should we start?

Kim Schaffer (00:16:25):
Let's go to Richard and Vernon, California. He actually, I think he has more of a question for you to wants to know if you've somewhere. That sounds kind of cool. And

Leo Laporte (00:16:34):
I think you be somewhere.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:36):
I think you'd be interested in this

Leo Laporte (00:16:37):
Place these days. I don't go anywhere.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:39):
Line four.

Leo Laporte (00:16:40):
Thank you, Kim. Hello Richard Leo. Leport Mike, a Sargent you're tech guys for the day. Welcome.

Caller 1 (00:16:47):
I'm I'm a long time listener.

Leo Laporte (00:16:49):
Nice. Thank you. It's great to have you. And

Caller 1 (00:16:53):
Since you have always talking about cameras, have you ever been to the Leica factory in Germany?

Leo Laporte (00:17:03):
I didn't know. You could go.

Caller 1 (00:17:05):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:17:06):
Oh yeah. I'm a Leica fan. I have Leica, which is kind of a classic name in cameras because some of the great street photographers, especially used like a cameras and they're still much beloved today by people like me with more money than cents. But but I have a, like a M three, which is their old film camera that I bought that came out in 1956 and I got it. Cause it's the same age as it it's holding up much better. Yeah. And then I have a, a, like a, a Q camera, which was a digital one. They put out, I do not have Chris Markt and I talk often about the, like a M 11, which just came out, which is a, I think a $9,000 a digital camera that doesn't have auto focus. It's a range. Finder's all like AZA. Traditionally, are you a, like a shooter?

Caller 1 (00:17:57):
Yes, I am my question is this one? You know, my question, I was there and the factory, so, but I text them first that I will come. And finally they have somebody that do the, the round around the factory. That's a person that special specialize in for the people that wants to see how they built

Leo Laporte (00:18:28):
The building. Looks like a lens, which I love. Isn't that great. It's in wet or Vetler right?

Caller 1 (00:18:36):
Yes. It is a very small town outside Frankford.

Leo Laporte (00:18:39):
Yeah. The only reason I know the name is cuz on every one of my lenses it says Vetler right. Yeah. That's nice. Oh, how fun? So you, you, it's not open to the public. You had to make an appointment.

Caller 1 (00:18:52):
Correct.

Leo Laporte (00:18:54):
But if you're, I mean, I imagine if you, if you've bought any like a gear that should kind of get you in the door because I mean, actually I've been to the, like a store in several towns. They're beautiful stores. I tried to buy a camera there once and I think, think I said you don't have enough money. I'm sorry, you can't buy a camera here. But so do they have a museum?

Caller 1 (00:19:20):
They have a nice show place in the stores when you come in, there's the storage, there's the beginning of the camera when they build it maybe a hundred years ago. Yeah. You know, and there's also a camera from that. Hitler used them.

Leo Laporte (00:19:39):
Oh yeah. Well of course it was yeah, yeah, yeah. It was around in during the war. How old is Liah?

Caller 1 (00:19:46):
I don't know exactly, but it's very close to the 100 years I think. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:19:52):
Oh, I am so jealous. So next time I'm in Frankfurt. I should make a side trip to SLA.

Caller 1 (00:19:57):
Yes. Outside Frankfurt is, yeah, that's a small town, but it's beautiful.

Leo Laporte (00:20:03):
I imagine that when you say factory there, they, it's not mass assemble. These are handmade, right? Like watches.

Caller 1 (00:20:11):
Yes. That's Henry me.

Leo Laporte (00:20:13):
Yeah. Beautiful. They they're beloved by people, not just as cameras, but as kind of industrial era works of art. They're, they're quite amazing. Like a great watch, you know, it's it's quite amazing. What do you what do you shoot with Richard?

Caller 1 (00:20:32):
Yeah, I had an M three too.

Leo Laporte (00:20:34):
Oh, nice. Yes.

Caller 1 (00:20:36):
Nice. But nobody come all with digital. So

Leo Laporte (00:20:38):
It's all digital. Yeah. I shot, I think only shot a few roles with the M three. Because honest as you know, as fun as it is, it's hard to get it processed and, and honestly digital is probably is better, but still it's just a beautiful thing to have. I have at my office at home and I look at it every once in a while, pull it out and say, you're, you're holding up. Well, Richard, thank you for calling. It's so nice to talk to you.

Caller 1 (00:21:06):
Yeah, because they are the first one I think with a digital and a regular

Leo Laporte (00:21:12):
Camera. They still do film. Yes. Thank you. Richard. Zane, Leo Laport. The tech guy, Scott Wilkinson coming in. This is somebody sent me this article by Jim Fisher from PC magazine was in the chat room. This is really cool. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull this up here.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:35):
Yeah. I love how they have most of the photos in black and white.

Leo Laporte (00:21:38):
He shot them with his M three. Oh that you put it in there. Excuse me. Nice job.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:43):
Oh, that's the M you have to go up higher. I just posted that. Cause I thought it was really cool. If you go higher in the chat, you'll see the actual link to the article

Leo Laporte (00:21:52):
Then how'd you find that that's you're so quick. Google fool

Mikah Sargent (00:21:55):
You're so they say Germany,

Leo Laporte (00:21:57):
Google, fool. Google's fool. So I love it. That the building is shaped like a lens. That's probably the museum. So this is a article by Jim fit. Sure. Who is a, like a shooter? He said many of the images taken with my vintage, like a M three and M monochro, which people love that that's digital and an SL two, which I played with and did not like the SL two very much was not. I was underwhelmed. That was one of their early digital efforts. And I was somewhat underwhelmed by it. Yeah. I love it's black and white. I bet you can tell which ones are filming. Which ones not Look at that. I treasure my like of stuff though. I have to say In a way a like a story is like a museum. They often have all that, all that stuff there. That's the factory floor. It's lunchtime. That's they don't make probably very many. Wow. Look at that. Can I film? Wow. Legend has it. There are 36 frames per role in a role of film because it matched the length of Oscar Bonox outstretched arms. That's how he measured lengths of film when loading cartridges in the dark room. Wow. First 35 millimeters. Still camera design. Oh, look at that.

Leo Laporte (00:23:38):
Wow. Like a me monocular orbited the moon in an early Apollo mission.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:46):
That's awesome. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:23:48):
Yeah. The, the astronauts used like us early on

Mikah Sargent (00:23:54):
The first Leica. Photo's

Leo Laporte (00:23:56):
The first as a roof on lights. You could stay at the ons lights hotel.

Mikah Sargent (00:24:02):
Wow. In the studio.

Leo Laporte (00:24:04):
This is a neat article. Thank you for that link. What is hip? This cat right here. Scott Wilkinson our home theater geek joins us every week to talk about big screen TVs. Surround sound. All that jazz. Hey Scotty.

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:20):
Hey Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:24:21):
How you doing? I'm great. Mikah. Sargent say hello to Mikah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:25):
Mikah. How you doing

Mikah Sargent (00:24:26):
Man? I'm doing well, Scott. Good to see ya. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:24:28):
Good, good. Good. Had a good vacation. I hope

Mikah Sargent (00:24:31):
I did. Yes. a very good concert. Did you go somewhere? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:24:36):
To a concert.

Mikah Sargent (00:24:36):
Yeah. We went to a concert. What'd you see? ALJ, Portugal, the man and cherry Glazer Glazer. Huh. But I was there to see ALJ.

Leo Laporte (00:24:45):
I like Portugal demand.

Mikah Sargent (00:24:47):
I had to wear two masks. Wow. Because people around me were hitting their cannabis and

Leo Laporte (00:24:53):
Oh, so here's another use for a mask and he checks you from the double.

Mikah Sargent (00:24:57):
The mask means I didn't have to. Oh, that's a good idea. Didn't take any,

Leo Laporte (00:25:01):
Keeping all my masks for exactly. That reason

Mikah Sargent (00:25:03):
Makes me too anxious.

Leo Laporte (00:25:05):
So Scott and I saw this article in life, hacker which is actual echo, something I've been saying for a long time, which is if you could buy a dumb TV.

Scott Wilkinson (00:25:14):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:25:15):
Why?

Scott Wilkinson (00:25:17):
Well, there are many reasons several anyway the smart TVs have these apps, right. Netflix and so on. But they also track you very carefully. Yeah. What you watch and your viewing habits so that they can ostensibly deliver you ads that are relevant to your lifestyle and interests, but they also sell this information to third party companies. And it's a little creepy. If you ask me, I, I want to turn it off and, and you can, in fact, I'll, I'll get to that in a minute. There's also another reason why smart TVs for using, for using as a streaming device are not a great idea. And that is that manufacturers of TVs do not, not keep the software updated.

Leo Laporte (00:26:10):
That's the, my reason you're buying something that is second in quality to an apple TV or a Roku

Scott Wilkinson (00:26:16):
Over a Roku. Right. And you, you keep a TV for a couple years, at least. Right. And I remember when we used to keep 'em for 15, but now it's two to five maybe. And they don't update the soft software. So by the, by the middle and end of the TV's life in your house, the software is woefully outta date. So, and, and you can't replace it with anything. I mean another TV, but if you get a Roku or an apple TV or a fire, a Amazon fire TV or something like that, you know, it, it get its updated regularly and you can replace it with something else. If you find something you like better, and they're not that expensive.

Leo Laporte (00:26:54):
I know, I know why people buy smart TVs though. And I, I know people who do it's it, it does one thing that does everything and you don't have to think of about it. It's very popular with cord cutters, for instance. Yeah. Yeah. Because now you just put in a, you know, especially if you're, you know, you're an apartment, young person, an apartment is inexpensive. They are less expensive because they're selling your information. So they make a much On this side. The latest offense, if you ask me Visio has started up ads on top of live TV programming.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:26):
Yes. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:27:27):
That's another, which reason not to get a smart

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:30):
TV. Yeah. Terrible. So this, this life hacker article, as you read you know, says, well, you could get a dumb TV. And I've said for a while. Yeah. Where, where,

Leo Laporte (00:27:40):
That's my question.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:42):
Where can you get a

Leo Laporte (00:27:42):
Dumb TV? Tell I tell you all the time. I don't want, I just want a TV. That's a monitor, basically like a computer monitor.

Scott Wilkinson (00:27:48):
Well, and this is one and this is one of their answers is get a computer monitor really well. Yeah. But the problem there is where are you gonna find a 55, 65, 75 inch computer monitor.

Leo Laporte (00:28:01):
Right.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:02):
I guess if you want to be big.

Leo Laporte (00:28:04):
So I have in front of me, a Samsung monitor, which is probably the same panel they put in their TVs, probably 300 bucks, but it's only 31 inches. Exactly. But it is 4k and it's HDR and all of those things. Yeah. I doubt it's full of array, local dimming. That's another thing they put

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:19):
That's another

Leo Laporte (00:28:20):
Into TVs. They don't put into monitors.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:22):
Exactly. And, and you're gonna get lower quality. You're gonna get edge lighting.

Leo Laporte (00:28:27):
Yeah. Just like monitors, make bad TVs, TVs make bad monitors.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:32):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:28:33):
Use, use it for the purposes, but you can, dumbify a smart TV.

Scott Wilkinson (00:28:38):
Sure. You can exactly. Simply don't connect it to the

Leo Laporte (00:28:42):
Internet. I never plug in plug. You know, I plug it in once to update the firmware maybe once in a while to see if there's an update. Right. Right. And after that disconnected, unfortunately, some TVs, my high sense projector every once in a while, like every other day says I'm not connected to the internet. I'm not connected to the internet. Yeah. That goes away after a minute. So, well,

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:03):
I found another interesting article in doing a little research on this from commando.com, Kim commando. You might know her. She has a great article on her site about how to disable all the tracking and all the, all the stuff that, that smart TVs do. Pretty detailed too. Cuz you can do it at the device level.

Leo Laporte (00:29:26):
Wait really? Can you, how, how do you dis handle

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:29):
It? It it's. She gives you step by step instructions.

Leo Laporte (00:29:32):
Yeah. I don't trust her one inch, but go

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:34):
Ahead. Oh you don't. Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte (00:29:36):
No she's horrible. Oh, okay. Anyway. Sorry. She sent me the article. I'd like to look at it. If you think it's doable, I be it's worth

Scott Wilkinson (00:29:43):
Well, I mean, you know, she, she says go into settings, go here, go there. What's how can that be wrong? Unless it's unless it

Leo Laporte (00:29:51):
Well, because is, is this the one that says yes, your smart TV is spying on you. Here's how to stop it. Is that the article?

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:01):
I, I don't remember. Now I have to look and

Leo Laporte (00:30:03):
See. So yeah, there are probably in the menus things you can do. It's been my experience. You turn them off and nothing happens.

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:12):
Ah, well there's that?

Leo Laporte (00:30:14):
I always turn personalized advertising off. I always turn advertising off. I still get it. So I don't think it's interest, unfortunately it's not really in their interest to do that. To be honest with you the best thing to do, not connect it to the internet, none of that stuff happening, whether that's right. Whether it thinks it is or not.

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:33):
Right. Except in your case of your high sense where it, every couple days it complains well,

Leo Laporte (00:30:37):
But yeah, I can live with that. Honestly can live with that. 

Scott Wilkinson (00:30:41):
You, can you click on something that says, nevermind,

Leo Laporte (00:30:43):
It goes away. It's it's up. It's when you first turn it on or every once in a while, pop it up. And then it goes away. The only bad thing is that the, the high sense and a lot of TVs have this now has a Netflix button you know, and have buttons to specific services, which I also think is a dopey thing to do. Obviously Netflix pays for that. Right. and EV every once in all hit it by accident and then it's kind of a, and then

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:07):
It get it. Yeah. Then it complains and oh, what am I gonna do?

Leo Laporte (00:31:11):
I only use the high sense remote to turn the TV off and on. Then I put it in a drawer Or touch it again.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:17):
Well, and what's your source? I mean, you could probably program your source remote to turn the TV on and off.

Leo Laporte (00:31:24):
Yeah. Maybe or if you get really fancy, you could probably use your router to firewall the TV to make, to make it think it's online, but it actually can't connect. Oh, that's I could easily do that with the kind of router I have, but that seems like a that's a black diamond tip.

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:42):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, if you're serious,

Leo Laporte (00:31:45):
If you search for disabled, smart TV, you'll find quite a few articles,

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:49):
Quite a few articles. I, I happen to find that one. I, I regret that

Leo Laporte (00:31:53):
Even Samsung has an article. Really?

Scott Wilkinson (00:31:56):
Yeah, I did. I missed that one. I know C I know CNET does.

Leo Laporte (00:31:59):
Here's one. I would trust consumer reports.org. If you're there you go. If you remember how to turn off smart TV snooping features.

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:07):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:32:07):
Chances are, this is, this, her article came from some of these articles. So yeah, I you're gonna, you're gonna get all of those benefits. I'm not go ahead and look at her article. That's fine. We'll put in a link in the show notes to the various things, or just Google disabled, smart TV TV. But again, I disabled smart TV. Yeah. I think that probably the best thing to do is just not, not connect it to the internet.

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:29):
That's right. That's right. That is the best thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. This, this life hacker thing also said, get, maybe get an outdoor TV, but those things are hell bright. Not, not good for indoors and super expensive.

Leo Laporte (00:32:43):
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:44):
They also said get a business display.

Leo Laporte (00:32:47):
Oh, that's interest. But you always pay more for business. Often business is better than you pay for it. Right, right.

Scott Wilkinson (00:32:53):
Oh, but it's not all, not always better. A lot of business displays. I, I looked at they're only for example,

Leo Laporte (00:32:59):
Oh, forget it.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:00):
Many of them are edge lit. Forget about it. Yeah. This is not what I want in my home theater.

Leo Laporte (00:33:05):
Scott Wilkinson home theater, geek contributor@techhive.com. And of course a regular on this show. Great to talk to you. Thank you, Scott.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:14):
You betcha

Leo Laporte (00:33:15):
Leola port Michael Sargent B tech guys. Well, it's not merely the tracking and you're right. A lot of people don't care about the tracking. It's not merely the tracking. It's also the dumb, smart software. It's not so good. Right. I think that's, for me, that's a lot of it too, which, and that's easily right. Easily solved. You just get a Roku.

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:36):
Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And I was gonna, the point at one point I was gonna make was the Roku and, or any of these streamer devices are also gonna track you.

Leo Laporte (00:33:49):
Well, that's true. That's a good point. Yeah. That's a very good

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:52):
Point. That's gonna be no different. You're gonna,

Leo Laporte (00:33:54):
You're gonna be tracked no matter where you are,

Scott Wilkinson (00:33:56):
As long as you're streaming, as long as you're connected to the internet, they're gonna track. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:33:59):
That's actually a, a good point. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:02):
So going into this dis, if you don't wanna be tracked going into this disabled, smart TV tracking, or

Leo Laporte (00:34:10):
If it does it,

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:12):
Which they all do,

Leo Laporte (00:34:14):
I'm sure. I mean, but if it actually does it, oh, oh,

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:16):
Oh yeah. If you go in and you set those controls and they actually do anything, they might just completely ineffective. Right. I hadn't thought of that. That's a good point.

Leo Laporte (00:34:26):
That's the reason I don't generally recommend Kim commando because she's not gonna be doing the research on whether it does it or not. She's just gonna,

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:36):
I, I regret bringing her up. Then's

Leo Laporte (00:34:39):
Sorry's okay. No, I don't care. I

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:40):
Didn't know. I didn't know.

Leo Laporte (00:34:42):
She's a, she's another radio host. She's a competing radio host.

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:46):
Oh really? Oh, oh no, I'm really

Leo Laporte (00:34:48):
Sorry. That's we're on many of the same stations, but also many not, I mean, where, where, where she is. Generally. I am not

Scott Wilkinson (00:34:56):
Her article looked pretty comprehensive to me, which is why I meant,

Leo Laporte (00:35:00):
Yeah. I mean, she has, she has staff that does that, but almost certainly they just combined a bunch of stuff from other people.

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:08):
Yeah. Sorry. But

Leo Laporte (00:35:09):
I would trust consumer reports I would trust. Oh, absolutely. You know?

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:13):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. CNET also has one, although that one was from 2016 or 2015.

Leo Laporte (00:35:17):
Yeah. Yeah. That's another problem. It's not gonna, you know, times have changed a lot.

Scott Wilkinson (00:35:22):
I know. I know. Well, bang.

Leo Laporte (00:35:30):
And then of course from the TWiT podcast network, I don't know what you found there. Kevin, that's funny TV block. Samsung can disable your Samsung smart TV. Oh, this is you and Matthew talking.

Mikah Sargent (00:35:46):
Yeah. This was back. They, and it was Samsung being, yeah. Being able to stop your TV from being used. Right. So the reverse

Leo Laporte (00:35:53):
Kind of, it was a it was a activation lock kind of thing.

Mikah Sargent (00:35:57):
Exactly. Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:01):
Yeah. Well, if, if that's been covered on Twitter, obviously that would've been the first thing I would've

Mikah Sargent (00:36:05):
Wanted. Oh no. Yeah. This is a different thing. Yeah,

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

Leo Laporte (00:36:16):
So a

Leo Laporte (00:36:16):
Little reading from learning Python,

Scott Wilkinson (00:36:21):
Right. I have to beat Mester is in the chat room saying any thoughts on the QD EDD story I shared with you last week and the answer is I didn't have a chance to do any research on it, but it's a, it's an interesting story. The way that they've configured the pixel matrix and how that can cause color fringing on some sharp boundaries. I have to do a little more research into that. So I haven't yet, sorry. I beat master. I let's see here. So just by a Chromecast FAPA says yeah. That's one, one solution.

Leo Laporte (00:37:07):
Oh, I bet Mike B would love to hear about Melissa. Everybody lives Melissa. Now they got, now I got everybody saying

Leo Laporte (00:37:16):
To, to an ad it's not too late. Time's 

Leo Laporte (00:37:23):
I know we don't wanna do that. So let's talk about our spa. Hate to do it at this break. To be honest with you, cuz it's such a short break, but you're making me do it. So I'm gonna do it. Melissa. Everybody loves Melissa. They're known as the address experts. And when I say every, everybody loves Melissa, I'm not making it up. They've been around for 37 years. They have a renewal rate of over 92%. Once people discover Melissa, they never leave. And the typical return on investment for Melissa customers, 25%, 25%, what does Melissa do? Well, it makes your contact list. Your address list, you supplier list, accurate people, move names, change, addresses, email, zip code, all of this stuff. Melissa can do it all and they can do it in any way. You like on-prem as a, as a FTP server, as a SAS solution, they even have an amazing API, which makes it very easy to add Melissa's address, checking to your software, customer service software or shopping cart software.

Leo Laporte (00:38:24):
Last year, Melissa had a record 30 billion with a B north American address. Lookups that's the most in its history, 30 billion. You could verify, not just addresses, but emails, phone numbers, names. You could do it in real time with Melissa, they respond instantly their global address verification service verifies addresses for more than 240 countries and territories. At the point of entry, they also eliminate duplicates. You don't need Gemini for this. You can use Melissa's data matching, which I mean I used to get from restoration hardware. I mean four of their very, very expensive catalogs, same name, same address they needed Melissa. I noticed by the way, I only get one. Now maybe they did do batch address cleaning. You can do identity verification. That's nice. Right? Very important. You can convert addresses into attitude and longitude. You can do email verification and you can do it any way you want.

Leo Laporte (00:39:19):
And of course it's your data and they treat it like the gold that it is. They undergo continuous independent security audits to make sure that they are safe, private and compliant. So two HIPAA, two HIPAA and GPR compliant as well. And of course, if you get a service level agreement, incredible global support, 24 7 from people who are very, very nice Melissa named the data quality magic quadrant by Gardner for the second year in a row. This year, G2 crowds 2022 report ranks Melissa as a leader in both address verification and data quality, make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Melissa, try their APIs in the developer portal. You can log on, sign in, start playing in the API sandbox 24 7, or take a look at the lookups apps for iOS and Google. Play with those as well. Get started today with 1000 records, clean for free at the site, melissa.com/twit. Please use that address. So they know you saw it here. Melissa.Com/Twit. Thank you, Melissa. And now on with the show Leo Laporte the tech guy, 88 88. Ask Leo Johnny's on the line from Atlanta, Georgia. Hi Johnny. Oh, I have I have your button on now. Go ahead. Hi Johnny.

Caller 2 (00:40:43):
Hey. Hey Leo. Hope. I hear me. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:40:47):
I hear you. Great little crackly. It's like a record, like an album. Yeah, yeah,

Caller 2 (00:40:52):
Yeah. I'm on my pixel six. I turned off wifi calling

Leo Laporte (00:40:54):
He's on vinyl now. That's why his vinyl, well, what can we do for you?

Caller 2 (00:41:00):
Hey, before I ask my question I didn't want to bring to your attention if you wanna wear. I follow a lot of people on YouTube technical people and one of 'em is what is his last name

Leo Laporte (00:41:14):
Line is tech tips. LTT

Caller 2 (00:41:16):
Seman. No. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:41:18):
Seman. Lon Seman. Okay. On TV.

Caller 2 (00:41:21):
Yeah. And he had a show this week called why nobody controls podcasting and it was kinda like a podcasting 1 0 1.

Leo Laporte (00:41:29):
Oh nice.

Caller 2 (00:41:30):
But in, in this, in this in this show, he really has a nice segment on you. You kidding One of the early pioneers.

Leo Laporte (00:41:40):
Oh, nice.

Caller 2 (00:41:40):
Of of podcast.

Leo Laporte (00:41:42):
I'm gonna have to, now I have to watch.

Caller 2 (00:41:45):
Yeah. He, he says one of his favorite podcasts still to this day is security now. 

Leo Laporte (00:41:52):
Great. Very popular. Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 2 (00:41:54):
So yeah. So he really gives you a plug. He uses some of your logos, so you should definitely go watch it.

Leo Laporte (00:42:00):
I, well, I thank you for the tip. I will, I'll make a, make a note of that. Thank you.

Caller 2 (00:42:05):
Okay. my question is I was like you early one of the early adopters of the, and so when it was discontinued it a few years ago, I just put mine in a drawer.

Leo Laporte (00:42:16):
Yeah, me too. I know they started,

Caller 2 (00:42:19):
I I've started. I mean, I, I, since they started back and I've heard you talk about it a couple of times over the last few months, I'm curious if you are using it, did you? Rehook your stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:42:30):
I haven't I should. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz I spent some of money on that. Al cam was a really cool car camera had two views forward. So it was always recording. You know, one of those dashboard cams that if you get in an accident, you have a record of it. It was also recording the cabin. It even had a really nice feature that you could talk to the person in the car. I used it several times to scare my wife. And that was because Al cam came with built in LTE, but they made a mistake when they sold the product. They really didn't price. It was more expensive. It was several hundred bucks, but they don't think they priced in the cost of the full-time LTE connection that the Al cuz you didn't have to pay for it. That part, there was no subscription.

Leo Laporte (00:43:13):
So I think cam basically ran outta money. I remember it was about two years ago, pictures of their shuttered office were just, everybody had left then along came another company that bought the assets and I think it was preso and and, or no, Presto's the name of the the, what you say, you said, okay. Pres to get Al cam to take a picture. That's right. That's right. And they, I apparently have revived Al cam. I think their focus I notice is on kind of business, B2B fleet solutions, that kind of thing. But I have not tried reengaging my existing camera, which I understand I can do. So I can't give you an answer. Is anybody, anybody in the chat room somebody says it's not Hooters that bought Alchem no, it's not. If somebody in the chat room has used the new Al Alchem, I think back in filling our chat room says good customer support.

Leo Laporte (00:44:14):
He has a residential owl cam. So yeah, I just don't know anything anything about it, but you're right. Since I have the owl cam, I probably should just try hooking it up again. They're selling the, what they call the owl cam classic four and five for less than the original $200 for the four and 2 69 for the five. It was good. Cause I had a very good camera built into it and I liked that. You could say, okay, Presto. And it would take a, it would take the last 30 seconds and it would upload it. So you'd have a copy of it offline. If somebody broke to try to steal it, it would take pictures of them and upload it before they got it. And of course you could really bug your spouse by talking to them on the animal cam, which was always great fun. I, I, I'm looking at the site now and it looks like it's a lower rent than it used to be. I'm wondering how this company is doing. This was a, you know, I thought these guys were really smarts startup guys, but they made a mistake. A lot of 'em do. They didn't really figure out how they were gonna stay alive. So I don't know what the new owners, how the new owners are doing call pass that's who bought them call pass.

Caller 2 (00:45:26):
I was looking at a replacement but I, you know, I don't like all these cheap ones that just plug into, you know, like a USB into the,

Leo Laporte (00:45:34):
Well, this was, that was the other thing that was cool about this is it used the ODB two port on your car, right. For powering itself. And it was smart enough not to drain your battery if the car was off and things like that. And it, and you could tr it came with a little tool to tuck the wires in as you went around the dashboard. So really was a very attractive installation. I used it for a long time, hoping I would get in a, a auto accident. So I have a record of it, nothing ever happened. So maybe that's why I didn't hook it up again. I never really used it. That

Caller 2 (00:46:05):
Brand. I was another brand I was looking at was from black view. Are you familiar with that company?

Leo Laporte (00:46:11):
I am not the only one that I know about and, and kind of recommend. And you know, honestly, this is something that there are many, many reviews of dash cams and stuff, and I, I probably would trust them, but the company Garin, who was in the business of GPS for a long time and then said, what are we gonna do now that everybody has a GPS in their phone? So they did two things. They started doing watches, but they also started doing dash cams. And I pretty consistently see them recommended as the best as, as very good dash cams. I've heard people talk about the black cam as well. It's inexpensive. It has has a lot of interesting features. I'm just not up on this on this particular area as much as I ought to be. Why do you want, let me ask you this. Why do you want a dash cam?

Caller 2 (00:47:05):
I think I like the security of it. Yeah. If I'm in an accident, but I guess I watch too many YouTube channels.

Leo Laporte (00:47:12):
Yeah. Cuz there's a lot of great footage, especially from Russia.

Caller 2 (00:47:18):
Yeah. And or all over the world. But I, I also worry about, even though I'm a big supporter of the, the police, I do worry about being falsely accused of something by sure. You know,

Leo Laporte (00:47:28):
Well, or your insurance company, you know, some, some gardening truck dropped a you know, rake in the road as I was driving along, I hid it and you know, messed up something on my car and I wanted the insurance company to pay for it. And they said, well, you weren't alert enough. And had I had dash cam footage of it, there was nothing I could do. I had to hit that. You know, I wasn't, I couldn't drive around it because there were cars around me and stuff. So yeah, there's, it can go both ways though, if the insurance company gets the footage and it turns out you were reading a book while driving the car, cuz it does have footage of you as well as of the accident. I also think if you have a teenager, good thing to have I, if you live in an area where, as we do Northern California in San Francisco where they're, break-ins all the time having footage of that, break-in, I don't know if it's gonna help much, the police don't seem to care very much, but at least you have some footage of it.

Leo Laporte (00:48:27):
So I feel like there are death definitely uses for it. And I would, I'm gonna, there are a number of good reviews, C net's road show. My friend Brian Cooley has a good best dash cam for 2022 listing. He does list the $130 Garman dash can mini two in there, but he talks about the next R beam, the van true N four. And the next base problem is there's so many of these now coming from Chinese companies, you know, that you have to think about what you want, for instance, do you want a microSD card in there? So it's recording all the time. Do you want GPS in there? How high quality picture do you want? Do you want a backup camera as well as a front camera? All of that stuff, but he has a pretty good article that, that describes these.

Leo Laporte (00:49:12):
And also more importantly, maybe gives you pictures of them because it is gonna sit in your windshield. You should also be aware that in some states there are limitations as to what you can put in a windshield. So you should check your local authorities. I put my owl cam behind the rear view mirror. So it was a fairly safe, was a and blocking anything. So yeah, I'll give you a, we'll put a link to the, in the show notes to this particular article from CNET, but I'm gonna have to defer to anybody in our audience who wants to talk about it or or this article and cuz I am not an expert. Leo Laport, the tech guy, the D ride 4k is on indie Gogo, 350 bucks. See, I I've been kind of burned by the owl cam. That's part of the problem is you and I spent money on this owl cam, Johnny, and, and, and then it was suddenly a, a worthless brick. So I'm reluctant to, I

Caller 2 (00:50:12):
Know, and I don't want, I don't wanna follow that again, but I, like I said, I, I think I stay paranoid cause I watched too many YouTube channels and you're right of Rex and the people being falsely accused of stuff and oh yeah. Dash cam I thought,

Leo Laporte (00:50:23):
Oh yeah. I mean, that's why I think that's why there were so many of 'em in Russia because there were just all sorts of incidents and people just at a self defense. Everybody had to have one and so you know, that's, I mean, cameras are cheap now they should be cameras everywhere. There's no reason not to. So I think it's probably a good idea. If you have a Tesla, you have cameras all around your car, then you have recordings of which is kind of interesting.

Caller 2 (00:50:49):
Yeah. When I wasn't, I wasn't sure of might. Can I cook up the outcome again again, without committing to anything?

Leo Laporte (00:50:55):
I think you have to sign up for a subscription. I think that's what stopped me. I have to, I'm gonna have to look. I, you know, it's been a while they sent an email out as you know, and said, you can, you can you can join again. So I don't know how it worked.

Caller 2 (00:51:14):
I just need to get it out of the drawer and hook it out and see. Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (00:51:19):
Yeah, I mean, it looks like it has all the same features as the original. Maybe it isn't a subscription. It's interesting.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:26):
Somebody in the chat saying, oh, plan is better because it's unlimited streaming and storage now.

Leo Laporte (00:51:31):
Nice. Okay. Okay. That's good.

Caller 2 (00:51:36):
Well, if I, if I end up hook up before you I'll, I'll give you a call back and

Leo Laporte (00:51:40):
Yeah. Let me know. And maybe somebody in will call to thanks, Johnny.

Caller 2 (00:51:45):
All right, Leo. Great

Leo Laporte (00:51:46):
Day. So much. My pleasure. Thank you. And now ladies and gentlemen, without further do most of Scott Wilkinson.

Scott Wilkinson (00:51:55):
Oh, well thank

Leo Laporte (00:51:56):
You. It's all yours. My friend

Scott Wilkinson (00:51:58):
Away, sir. Sign

Leo Laporte (00:51:59):
Up for, Yeah, maybe I, you know, I'll hook this up just to,

Mikah Sargent (00:52:05):
I'm surprised your machine doesn't have a built in and dash cam

Leo Laporte (00:52:10):
My machine, your machine mock, my mock E your

Mikah Sargent (00:52:13):
Days ex Machina

Scott Wilkinson (00:52:15):
Machine, the ex Machina, indeed. Jamie's just went to see the LA field perform Brookner ninth symphony.

Leo Laporte (00:52:24):
Oh, I love that.

Scott Wilkinson (00:52:25):
Oh man. That's I, I gotta admit that. It's one of the few things I miss about being in LA is going to hear the LA Phil at Walt Disney hall cuz man, those guys are great. And and he noticed that, that they were actually playing vokner tubas, which the Brookner symphony calls for. And he asked if I play the Vogner tuba and the answer is, well, I can get a reason sound out of it, but I don't play it really because it's more of a French horn. It's actually a member of the French horn family. More than the tuba family. I don't know why it's called a Vogner tuba other than Vogner probably had something to do with its development or at least you know, wrote for it. But it's a great, great sound. And I do allow Vogner tubas in tuba Christmas because they are Chronicle conical valved instruments and the, that that's good enough for me. Somebody asked me the other day if I allow trombones and the answer is no, I do not because they're cylindrical and they're slides. They're not vowed. Tubas are conically, conical, bore valve instruments. And so those are all fine trombones knit.

Scott Wilkinson (00:53:43):
Thank you. Redid acted. My audio, video and background look great. I'm glad to hear you say that. I I've been working on my set. I got a little more to go, but generally it's, it's gonna be great. Let's see. Fill the 99. Is there a strong reason to transition from harmony one remote to an LG magic remote? I don't know. I didn't know that the LG sold the magic remote separately or that it could be, be really be a universal remote. I'll tell you what I don't like about the LG magic remote, at least on L GTVs is it, it, they, they tried to make it like a mouse and you wave it in the air to move the cursor around on the screen. And I find that very confusing and, and not, it doesn't work very well, at least it didn't last time I tried it and it worked so poorly that I decided not to try it again.

Scott Wilkinson (00:54:41):
And I haven't looked at it in a while, so maybe I have to look at it again. Certainly the reason to transition away from harmony is that they no longer make harmonies. When I moved recently here to Santa Cruz, I did a purge in my equipment box and I got rid of all my universal remotes except the harmonies. And I haven't haven't started using them here in the new house yet, but I, I couldn't bear to get rid of my harmony remotes cuz they're so good. And I know Logitech no longer makes 'em they still support 'em I think I'm pretty sure you can hook 'em up to the internet and still make 'em work. So if you can find one online, somebody selling one I suspect it's probably still gonna be great.

Scott Wilkinson (00:55:35):
Let's see, because I didn't wanna drink the remotes Mike 33, 26 or LG remotes are annoying. Yes, I agree. No, now I drink heavy cream. Phil. The 99 says I have a 65 C one same sentiment. Yeah. Okay. So C one is just last year's ed, and if they have a magic remote and it does this weird air mouse thing, I, I find it completely annoying. And unusable twisted. Mr. Says her harmony should be supported for quite a while. So squeeze boxes were supported for at least five years after their death. Do you mean accordions? I'm not sure what you mean by squeeze boxes. Allen says asks what is more important for resolution? The amount of pixels or bitter better pixel modulation? I would have to say, well, what's more important for resolution. I mean, pixel modulation doesn't have much to do with resolution per se, but in terms of picture quality, after a certain point, I would say better pixel modulation. I would certainly rather have better modulation at 4k than less good modulation at eight K let's put it that way. Seattle AI or a one, I can't tell, take another or look at the LG magic remote. I like mine, but it took a bit to learn it. Yes I would. I'm not at all surprised.

Scott Wilkinson (00:57:15):
Let's see, Jim Jim Teez cuz they cost so much and they have a sentiment to you. Yeah, the Logitech remotes are pretty expensive. I can you get an LG magic remote by itself and will it be able to be programmed to use with anything? I doubt that anything but an LGTV will use that air remote business air mouse business. So maybe they'd be okay. Mike B squeeze box is a music server player. Oh, okay. I don't remember that one. Jammer B O AA jammer B good question. What's the difference between a Phil harmonic orchestra, LA Phil and a symphony orchestra, San Francisco symphony? I think there is no difference. I think they are synonymous why one orchestra would choose to call it self Phil harmonic and the other choose to call it self symphony. I don't know.

Scott Wilkinson (00:58:16):
I'll, I'll have to look into that. That's a really good question. Actually. I think they're synonymous. But it's a real, really good question here in Santa Cruz. We have the Santa Cruz symphony and we're gonna go see their first con my, my first concert with them at the end of the month. And I'm really looking forward to that pictures at an exhibition the Brookner orchestral piece called Cole nidra, which is based on the song slash prayer Cole nidra, which is used at the Jewish high holidays. My wife has sung it for many, many years. It's a beautiful song and it's also traditionally played on the cello. And so the Brookner orchestral version, cello solo part. So I'm really looking forward to seeing that and hearing that I think it's gonna be great. I used to play in the Santa Cruz symphony way back in the day when I was here in the 1970s, I, I was the Duba player and the personnel manager in the Santa Cruz symphony. So I'm looking forward to hearing what how far they've come since in the last 45 years. But I think it's gonna be a lot of fun, not the same as LA Phil or the San Francisco symphony. I will agree. It's got so big. Still good, still good.

Leo Laporte (00:59:46):
I was shocked when this came in the mail. I thought, what the hell?

Scott Wilkinson (00:59:51):
What, what what's going on over

Leo Laporte (00:59:52):
There? Oh, I'm just showing Mikah my original learning Python book, ah, compared today's learning Python book, which it's about five pound difference. Significant difference. All right. Thank you, Scott.

Mikah Sargent (01:00:05):
I thank you so much.

Leo Laporte (01:00:08):
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo? LePort here. The tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches. I introduce you to my tech guy two. Mike is Sargent. Hello? Hello. Also in the house with us, our Python expert. He's no, not yet. Not yet. You are studying though. That's cool. Yes, you're studying at Udacity, is that where you're taking course? And it's a beginning Python,

Mikah Sargent (01:00:37):
The beginning Python online course. And it's mostly focused on using it. It's no machine learning stuff. I'm not getting into that.

Leo Laporte (01:00:45):
Yeah, well, it's, Python's widely used by data scientists statisticians physicists because of the scientific and numeric capabilities, but yes, also widely used for for internet programming. Google uses Python's a good language. I was just cuz I had, I had learned Python back in the day when I was a young man many, many years. No, it was probably probably late nineties. Let me see when this book came out, cuz this is the original book called learning Python from the yeah, 1999. This came out and it's you know, it's a nice little book. Very, handies got everything you need to know to use Python about 350 pages. So I ordered, I thought, well Python's changed a lot since I played with it 20 years ago. So I ordered the new Python book. So this is the this is from 1999 learning Python. And this is the updated fifth edition which only came out about I think 2013, but boy things changed rapidly. So one of the it's interesting cause one of the reasons it's a good language to learn is because it does so much. It's so powerful. So widely supported so many libraries, so many things, but it also makes it hard to learn. Yeah. Because there's so much

Mikah Sargent (01:02:09):
Do so many different ways. Yeah. And unfortunately my mind loves to go all those different ways.

Leo Laporte (01:02:13):
It's bad if you're distractible. Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. Eighty eight, eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. That's why I often tell when parents call and say, what should Johnny learn? You know, mostly Johnny's gonna learn Python or JavaScript. That's probably let's face it. The most, most JavaScript, most popular language is to learn. But I always say, oh, learn lisp. And then they laugh.

Mikah Sargent (01:02:34):
Yeah. At one point I was Johnny,

Leo Laporte (01:02:36):
You were Johnny and you laughed.

Mikah Sargent (01:02:39):
I I'm still not

Leo Laporte (01:02:40):
Laughing though on that. The thing is this book which is Paul Graham's classic about list came out in, oh, I'm gonna say not so much earlier, 1996. So it's three years earlier than this learning Python volume it's even smaller and it hasn't changed exactly. There's no giant five pound version cuz well, Li's been around as long as I have. It's an old language but still good. Eighty eight eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number eighty eight, eight eight two seven five five three six. Let's go back to the phones. Mikah Leonard is on the line from San Diego. Hello Leonard. Hello Leonard

Caller 3 (01:03:19):
Afternoon. I have a problem when I put on the Google store and I get GrubHub for for a delivery it comes up on the left hand side of my screen and a green circle keeps going around and, and I try to put open and it doesn't or open.

Leo Laporte (01:03:47):
So tell me a little bit about what you're doing this on. Is it a phone?

Caller 3 (01:03:51):
Yeah, I have a a a a phone that's what do you call it? 

Leo Laporte (01:03:58):
Smartphone.

Caller 3 (01:03:59):
Oh

Leo Laporte (01:03:59):
Yeah, the motor. Yeah. Love the Motorola. So you have the GrubHub app or no,

Caller 3 (01:04:05):
No. Ah, come on. It just keeps

Leo Laporte (01:04:07):
That's what's going on. So this is a,

Caller 3 (01:04:10):
It won't open. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:04:11):
Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:04:11):
This is open. So nothing happens.

Leo Laporte (01:04:13):
Yeah. This is a, I think an unfortunate trend in smartphone these days, if you are. So you're in the Google app app or you're Googling it in the browser and you're trying to open GrubHub what GrubHub's trying to do, I promise you is say, you know, this would be a lot better. If you had the GrubHub app, they really want you to install an app. And honestly it would be better. You wouldn't have this problem, but I suspect what's happening is it's trying to, to pop up or it's trying to open a little message saying, get the app and it's failing for whatever reason. And so you're stuck, waiting for it to load. That's what that round and round means. Loading, loading, you know how computers go working?

Caller 3 (01:04:56):
Huh? I put open when I put open it keeps turning and turning, but up I put clothes. It just stops.

Leo Laporte (01:05:03):
Yeah, because you gave up, it never did get to open. It is the point. My suggestion go to the Google play store. You know, you have that app on there that allows you to install apps. Yeah. And that's where you look for GrubHub and I got it. Oh, you got the, you have the app.

Caller 3 (01:05:25):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:05:26):
Oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:05:26):
Sounds like Leonard's having trouble getting the apps download.

Caller 3 (01:05:30):
I have the, I have the it comes up on you know, the app on my screen and it says open in green. It says open. So I put down open and that green circle keeps circling. It's

Leo Laporte (01:05:44):
Not opening circling.

Caller 3 (01:05:45):
Okay. Nothing happens.

Leo Laporte (01:05:46):
All right. So now what you need to do is uninstall and reinstall. The app is messed up. So you have the orange app that says GrubHub, local food. It's got a little house with a fork and a knife in that, that you have that icon on your, on your, on your phone.

Caller 3 (01:06:03):
Yes, but I, I, I only have the, I have the problem with Uber too.

Leo Laporte (01:06:07):
Uber, Uber, Uber,

Caller 3 (01:06:09):
The same thing happens. It, it won't open.

Leo Laporte (01:06:12):
Okay. So for some reason, those apps are not opening. There really aren't a lot, lot of ways to fix this one thing, by the way, always a good choice, restart the phone. So you know, the button that turns the screen off, doesn't actually turn the phone off. It just, it's a, it looks like an on, off switch. It's not, it's a screen on off switch. So what you wanna do with that Motorola phone, I'm trying to remember. I think you press and hold it,

Mikah Sargent (01:06:39):
Press and hold the volume down button and the power button at the same time until the phone turns on press the volume down button until you see. 

Leo Laporte (01:06:49):
So that's the same as on an iPhone. That's cool. I guess they're maybe starting to standardize on how you do that. It's a lot of Android phones that used to be, you have to press it and hold it and then give you a pop up saying, well, what do you wanna do? There's so many things I can do. And you say, well, I want you to turn off. Let's see what this one's doing. Yeah, yeah. See that brings up the Google play store. So you're right. I guess the Google, Google assistance. So you wanna press volume down and, and, and the button now that was a screenshot. There it is volume up and the, and the on, off button and you'll see power off, always a, these are computers, restarting. The computer is always a good idea. If you're having weird problems like that.

Leo Laporte (01:07:32):
If you still get the spin, spin, spin, I can't open this. Then it's probably time to uninstall and install the app. And you know, you do that by pressing and holding it. And then it will say remove the app and you say, yeah, uninstall not remove uninstall the app and then go to the app store and download it again. It's damaged somehow. It's interesting that it's happening to both Uber and GrubHub. I can't think of any other reason why that might be happening. I would reboot the phone and then try reinstalling the apps. As long as you have internet access, you think it, if you didn't have internet access, that could be an issue. But I'm presuming you have internet access Mike, on the line from Rancho Cucamonga. Hello Mike.

Caller 4 (01:08:19):
Hi Leo. Hey, so Leo, I've got, I've got a 27 inch iMac and it's time to upgrade, but I'm not sure I want to downgrade the screen size and go with the 24 inch iMac. So I'm thinking of getting a Mac mini and then the monitor of my choice.

Leo Laporte (01:08:39):
That's exactly what I just did. I replaced a 20 14 27 in Chim Mac with a $700 Mac mini M one, the new M one chip. I was a little more expensive than the base model cuz I wanted 16 gigs of run am. You might spend even a little bit more because you want a bigger, hard drive. I only got a tiny little hard drive cuz it's just for the studio. And then I went out and bought a $300 Samsung monitor that's 31 inches, no bezzles. And I think that's a very good choice.

Caller 4 (01:09:12):
So, so tell me what monitors do I want. Look for that are comparable in quality to what I would get in the 24. Ah,

Leo Laporte (01:09:21):
Oh boy. This is the question. Cause those monitors on your iMac are 5k now personally I, so there's two issues. One is that that's a 5k monitor. Apple does sell a Mac studio display, which will work with your mini. It's a 5k monitor. I don't think it's a very good monitor. Mikah, you have it. So you, you, I really like mine. I think it's a very, it's a very good display. Your it's the same, the other stuff as your old 27 IM act display, just, you know, basically it's the same. It it's an LG panel. It is only 60 Hertz refresh rate. The M one can go to 120 Hertz. It does not do HDR. The M one can drive, I'm driving an HDR monitor at 120 Hertz. So there are things the studio display and by the way, my monitor was a third.

Leo Laporte (01:10:13):
The cost. Yes. So the things the studio display cannot do that. I think a modern monitor should be able to do. Now, if you want 5k, you're gonna have to go with apple. I think, I don't think I don't may except maybe the LG ultra fine. The, yeah, that's the only one that I was, but it's not a great monitor. And in fact, I think the main reason apple sells the studio display is because people aren't unhappy with the 5k. But the good news is the 5k is not so expensive as the studio display. So if, well, wait a minute, 1299. Nevermind. That's ridiculous. There's only a few hundred bucks less. What size screen did you say you had before? 24, 27. He had the iMac. Oh, okay. I thought, I, what did I hear? 24. That's cuz that's what they're selling today. Right? He doesn't want that. Yeah. I don't blame you. So,

Caller 4 (01:11:01):
So let me clarify. I'm not a pro user, I'm not a professional. This is a family monitor. And so that needs, now that what you've said, I, I don't wanna spend the money to get a 5k monitor. No, I just don't wanna get deep monitor.

Leo Laporte (01:11:17):
So I got, and I regret it, but it's a good monitor, but it was only 363 bucks. The Samsung 31 inch. The problem is it's curved. I don't know. I mean, curved, I guess for a desk might not be a bad thing. It's a weird thing to get used to. I think Dell makes excellent monitors at very reasonable costs. The thing to know about Dell monitors is they have two grades. So they have ultra sharp, which are basically to compete with apple. So they're calibrated, they're higher quality. They're also more expensive. And then they have the lower kind of more grade monitors. And this I know, adds to the confusion. If I were you, I would get a ultra high Def Dell 4k monitor. It'll be half the price at even maybe even less. I mean like 450 bucks and you'll be much high, happier. I think

Mikah Sargent (01:12:15):
I'm a hundred percent agree. The Dell I've I've used 2 24 inch Dell ultra sharp monitors for they're working on like five years. They're beautiful. They're fantastic.

Leo Laporte (01:12:23):
Do you notice your studio display that expensive $1,500 display from apple is any better?

Mikah Sargent (01:12:28):
Yes I do because the Dell ultra sharps are not retina and these ones are this one is so for me, that did make a difference, but those ultra sharp monitors work just fine. And if it's a, it's a family computer, nobody needs to have this special two X, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then the, I think Adele monitor is a really good get

Leo Laporte (01:12:49):
Really. So retina is a marketing term. Apple uses describe dots per and if you have a very high dots per it's, you know, you can't see the dots. I don't think that matters. Get a Dell. It doesn't have to be an ultra sharp. I would get a bigger Dell might as well for less money,

Mikah Sargent (01:13:06):
Dude, you're getting a Dell

Leo Laporte (01:13:07):
And you can use HTMI or you're probably gonna wanna get one with display port or sir C type C connection, cuz that's gonna you the high frame rate. It will not give you a high frame rate on the H DM I

Mikah Sargent (01:13:19):
Port that's. The other good thing about the Dell monitors is they often have so many different options on the back of them to plug

Leo Laporte (01:13:24):
In this one I'm using at display port looks great, 120 frames per second. Leo Laporte the tech I mic a Sargent tech. I two more of you calls still to come. So in fact, if you're going in turn, in order of best, I would use display port the so, and what you're gonna get. And it might even come with a monitor is a type C. That's what cuz the, the, so the Mac mini has two type C Thunderbolt, four outputs and it has one H D I output. And you might be tempted to say, oh, I'm gonna use the H D I cuz I monitored as H D I, I would strongly suggest instead getting a $15 Thunderbolt, three to display port cable and get 'em on a sports display port. Then you get the high refresh rate. You get UHD, you get all the benefits and because you're gonna save so much money, you could get a, a, a 31 inch, you know, unfortunately, a lot of these, I even Dell is selling curved ones. I don't know why I don't like curved that much. Do I? My what? You know, my wife's 49 inches curved. This one is curved. I guess if you,

Mikah Sargent (01:14:43):
I think a 49 inch one makes sense to be curved.

Leo Laporte (01:14:45):
It is so big,

Mikah Sargent (01:14:46):
But anything less than that. And it's just, why, why are you curving my screen?

Leo Laporte (01:14:50):
I'm just trying to see the, a big, the biggest ones Dell sell that are not curved 4k, U H D screen size 30 inches or higher. Yeah, they do. They do sell an ultra sharp USBC 4k for 8, 8 9800 $90, which is a bunch.

Caller 4 (01:15:13):
So Leo, I've got another question for you. Sure. I've got two Thunderbolt ports on the back of my my iMac that I've never touched. I've never even thought about. Should I, I get any benefit of getting a Thunderbolt dock for my peripherals, nothing special, nothing, you know as opposed to just a standard dock.

Leo Laporte (01:15:38):
Well, yeah, so, so I they're much more expensive Thunderbolt docks. I don't know why. I think it's maybe the licensing for the Thunderbolt port or maybe it's the hardware it's also right now very hard to get Thunderbolt docks. Those are in part of the supply chain, probably them, if, if I, so that's a really good question. If you wanted to run a hard drive at, at full speed, 40 gigabits per second gigabit. Yeah. Gigabits per second. Then you need Thunderball three, but if you don't mind running at a hard drive at 10 gigabit gigabytes, a second, the USB 3.1 speed, then you don't need it. You just need USB. It doesn't really matter for anything else, but I think hard drives are what it matters for. You know, ethernet, that kind of thing. I have a other world computing or no, maybe it's anchor. I think you have an dock that is not Thunderball and it's great. And it's fine. It's all I need.

Caller 4 (01:16:40):
Perfect. Yeah. Perfect. And why, and why would I upgrade to 16 gigabytes of memory as opposed to just cause

Leo Laporte (01:16:47):
You cannot upgrade after the fact. And I think you really do want 16 gigs. That's my opinion. Okay. Go.

Caller 4 (01:16:54):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:16:55):
Great. You can't upgrade it, so it's gonna, you're gonna be stuck with it. And with eight gigs, you're gonna run into running outta memory on some programs for sure.

Caller 4 (01:17:04):
Super.

Leo Laporte (01:17:05):
Okay.

Caller 4 (01:17:06):
Thank you very much.

Leo Laporte (01:17:07):
Thank you. It, I think this is actually gonna be a better choice cuz just as you say, you have a better choice of monitors. The reason Apple's 5k is hard to get is because they actually have to put a support chip in there to run 5k. And so for now, anyway, 5k is just difficult, but 4k fine.

Caller 4 (01:17:31):
Yeah. I'm not a monitor snob. So I don't need that.

Leo Laporte (01:17:34):
You don't need that. No,

Caller 4 (01:17:36):
I, I just didn't wanna get a lousy monitor.

Leo Laporte (01:17:40):
I think if yeah, Dell ultra sharp is very good and you don't even need to get the ultra sharp. They have, Dell has some really excellent monitors, but I'm looking at 32 inch 4k USBC hub monitor. So it has the hub in it. $919 Dell ultra sharp. That's a hell of a monitor for, you know, 50% less than the Mac studio. Enjoy.

Caller 4 (01:18:04):
Thank you. You're

Leo Laporte (01:18:05):
Welcome. Thanks for the call.

Leo Laporte (01:18:11):
Put me in coach opening day was this week. It's very exciting. Baseball's back. It's on apple TV now on Friday they had some glitches, some issues I, I read about that. Yeah, but I, but I think ultimately it's gonna be 4k, which will be fun to watch baseball in 4k on your apple TV. Some people are complaining, they got major league baseball, the app supposed to be able to watch all the games, not the ones on apple TV. Oh Nope. Nope. Part of the deal, I guess with apple, Cheryl's on the line from marina valley, California. Hi Cheryl. Welcome.

Caller 5 (01:18:45):
Hi Leo. I've got I've had this problem with several, but when I turn our me phone, the first thing to get is a screen with apps and stuff and I don't 66 and no matter what I, to not make it stay on

Leo Laporte (01:19:14):
Six seconds is very short. Isn't it? Yes. Is it an iPhone or a Android phone?

Caller 5 (01:19:22):
Android. And you get an UN button, bring it back and bring it

Leo Laporte (01:19:25):
Back. Oh, I know. I hate that. I have turned that level up it's to save battery, but six seconds is way too short. Oh, I finally enjoy to see. No. Yeah. So in the settings, if you go to display under display, there's a thing called screen timeout.

Caller 5 (01:19:44):
Well it on the timeout, mine just says, timeout, I put it on 30 minutes one minute and two minutes and

Leo Laporte (01:19:51):
It's not paying attention to it.

Caller 5 (01:19:53):
No.

Leo Laporte (01:19:54):
Well, how annoying is that?

Caller 5 (01:19:56):
I think I actually lost seconds when I

Leo Laporte (01:20:01):
Actually, okay, so it's not doing the job, right? So you found the screen timeout section. In fact the shortest one is 15 seconds. So yeah, that's interesting. There,

Caller 1 (01:20:11):
There you go.

Leo Laporte (01:20:12):
That's interesting.

Caller 5 (01:20:14):
Could it be a problem with that? And the government phones for poor people. Yeah. Yeah. They give us bottom of the barrel. They don't

Leo Laporte (01:20:22):
Give you the best phones. Yeah. They so called Obama phones. But the other hand they're they're subsidized, which is nice. Do you know what the, what model of phone it is? What brand is it a Samsung?

Caller 5 (01:20:34):
Got it to my ear. Like the, I that's dark here.

Leo Laporte (01:20:38):
It's okay. But that is annoying that it goes dark. I it's a power saving thing. One thing I would do is turn the phone. Like I was telling our earlier caller reboot the phone, these are computers and they need to be rebooted more often than one would think. In fact for a while, Samsung actually had that in the settings reboot every day. Maybe they knew there was a problem. So try again, volume up and the

Caller 5 (01:21:04):
Paid. Good. So I ran over it. One has 10 years in crazy. You

Leo Laporte (01:21:09):
Ran over it.

Caller 1 (01:21:10):
Oh, ran over it

Leo Laporte (01:21:14):
On purpose.

Caller 1 (01:21:17):
No fell out. I fall. I looked around in dark. Didn't

Leo Laporte (01:21:21):
See. Oh, that's a terrible feeling.

Caller 5 (01:21:23):
I realized I lost it when I

Leo Laporte (01:21:29):
I think there's a power. I wonder if it's a power setting. If there's somewhere in the power settings, that's what I was thinking. Look in the battery settings. Make sure your battery. There's a number of settings, adaptive preferences, battery saver. Maybe don't try to save battery. Cuz six seconds is not enough. It should be at least 30 seconds I think. And I like to solve chest problems on my phone. It always turns off before I could solve the problem. So I'd set up to two minutes. Leo Laport, the tech guy Dwindle says I have a few devices I'd like to run over. Yeah. I'm not sure. Why it's turning off so soon. Look at, make sure your, your battery saver is not turned on. Okay. That might do it. That's under the battery settings.

Caller 5 (01:22:17):
I think, I think it is a it really prompts you to do that. I may have. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:22:22):
It's supposed to, it's supposed to only use it. When you get down to a certain level of battery. Now maybe your battery's dying. In which case it could be the battery saver is always on, but check. You'll see, it'll say whether the battery saving saver is on 

Caller 5 (01:22:37):
You mentioned rebooting. Well, I lose on my pictures.

Leo Laporte (01:22:40):
You won't lose a thing. You're not resetting. You're just rebooting. You're just, just like on a computer you're saying go to bed and start over again. So you press the volume and the on, off switch at the same time, which I have not done as you can see, it's it's technically very hard to do. I know I'm too old too. I wear there. I finally got it working, press those two at the same time. And you'll get a, a set of choices including power off. And if you power it off, all that does is it says, you know, re re you know, you could do restart. That would be okay as well. Do restart. You know what? That's fine. It's harmless. All it does is it shuts the phone down and starts it up again. Sometimes the phone know gets in a weird state and restarting it doesn't hurt.

Leo Laporte (01:23:28):
You know, it certainly you won't lose anything. The other option is, or suggestion I'd make is make sure battery savers is not turned on in the in the settings that you're not okay. Because if it's trying to save battery, maybe it would in fact then shut down fast, cuz it says, well, you're using up so much. Cause the number one thing that by the way, the number one thing that uses battery is the is the is the screen screen on time is huge part of that. So, oh, so it's, if it's trying to save battery, the first thing it's gonna do is turn on off the screen when it thinks you're not looking at it, there are other settings that could be there's settings. Like the reason I asked you, if you had a Samsung phone, Samsung has settings for, if you're looking at the phone, not turn off and things like that. And

Caller 5 (01:24:21):
You looking at,

Leo Laporte (01:24:22):
Yeah, it's called attention. So if you're paying attention, don't turn it off. Not all phones have that. I wish mine did

Caller 5 (01:24:33):
Actually know time you off the yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:24:44):
Yeah. It's one of those digging the dig in the settings and and it's, you know, these things are so complicated. It's, they're really more complicated than any human should have to endure. I'm apologize in advance. They're so complicated.

Caller 5 (01:25:07):
I love that.

Leo Laporte (01:25:09):
Yeah. Well I just saw an article, says people are going back to flip phones cuz they're so tired of how complicated these darn smartphone are.

Caller 5 (01:25:18):
Yeah. How big me,

Leo Laporte (01:25:20):
If you just use it as a phone, if you don't play words with friends or anything on it, then I would get a flip phone. They have govern phones

Caller 5 (01:25:30):
Put in your back pocket. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:25:32):
And you can probably a lot of em, you can even drive over 'em I wouldn't recommend it.

Caller 5 (01:25:40):
No.

Leo Laporte (01:25:41):
Hey Cheryl, a pleasure talking to you. I have to run Johnny jets here have a wonderful day. I hope I hope something we suggested helps

Caller 5 (01:25:49):
I too.

Leo Laporte (01:25:49):
Thank you. Take care.

Caller 5 (01:25:51):
Bye. Bye.

Leo Laporte (01:25:53):
He's been everywhere, man. He's Johnny jet, our traveling guru. He joins us every week to help us travel better with technology. And I tell you, we might need you this week. What a mess out there in plain land.

Johnny Jet (01:26:08):
Big time. I mean operation meltdowns all over. You know, they had thunderstorms in Florida, but what happened in Florida should not have happened with all the airlines except I think United actually did the best. Actually. I know they did the best, but jet blue, my sister was on jet blue, stuck. Just got out two days ago. But I heard from people from on south, wait a minute. She was stuck. She was stuck last week. She was stuck out. And until two days ago, yes, she got stuck for four or five. Holy cow, extra nights.

Leo Laporte (01:26:38):
Holy cow.

Johnny Jet (01:26:39):
And the airlines, you know, they claim weather so they don't have to pay for your hotel. They don't have to pay for their hotel period. But most of them do the big ones do just as a gesture of Goodwill. If you have, yeah man, if you have a delay overnight man, but then, you know, jet blue came out saying they're gonna buy spirit this week. They threw a counter offer in. They announced flights to London. I was like, whoa, whoa, you guys need to first get your, Your operations here. So that up. I mean, they don't have enough staff. There's no reason for an airline to put you on hold for hours, have a call back. They should have an automation automated. It's ridiculous agree. It infuriates me that I have so many readers had horror stories and they're just stuck.

Leo Laporte (01:27:19):
If jet blew by spirit, would they keep it still? Cuz jet blues a little higher left service, definitely time. Would they keep the, the, the spirit low cost airline going as the low cost airline or are they just buying the roots in the planes?

Johnny Jet (01:27:32):
What they need the planes. They have a lot of the same routes, but they need the routes. But I think, you know, there's, they, the manufacturers can't make airplanes quick enough and spirit has a large order. So they want those planes.

Leo Laporte (01:27:43):
So they may not be buying spirit, an airline. They be buying the spirit, the airplanes,

Johnny Jet (01:27:49):
They want the planes and you know, but spirit has really tight leg room. They also have, you know, one of the worst

Leo Laporte (01:27:56):
Oh, you have to pay for, carry on. You have to pay for, for everything. And that, of course the, the face value of the ticket is, is much lower. But you may end up paying as much just when you buy all

Johnny Jet (01:28:05):
The X. And it's also because spirit sells these fairs for like $9. They wanna stop that. That's one way to stop it. Oh, so you buy the

Leo Laporte (01:28:12):
Airline could, but yeah, but see that all get stopped by regulators, right? Is that

Johnny Jet (01:28:15):
I think I, I mean, it's gonna be a hoop for them to jump through. Yeah. So we'll see. But I, summer travel is gonna be a doozy. I wrote a post. I'll put it out. It it's, if you all these airlines are lacking staff, they can't hire enough gate agents, pilots. It's not just airlines. It's everything

Leo Laporte (01:28:32):
Everywhere.

Johnny Jet (01:28:33):
I know. But, but you really feel the impact when you're traveling because you're stuck. A lot of these places, people are stuck and then you need to have extra money to pay for these hotels. Fortunately, my other sister lives in Florida, so my sister was able, but stay there. Otherwise spring break Florida, it was $500 a night for a hotel room. Right. So you keep that in mind when you're traveling. Make sure also real quick, I heard you playing the baseball theme song right before.

Leo Laporte (01:28:58):
Oh, we love baseball. If yeah,

Johnny Jet (01:29:00):
If you have T-Mobile this week, you get MLB TV for

Leo Laporte (01:29:03):
Free. I signed

Johnny Jet (01:29:04):
Up, you sign up by Tuesday,

Leo Laporte (01:29:05):
Get there Tuesday. What is it? Their manic Tuesday thing.

Johnny Jet (01:29:09):
You, you gotta download their app that you, their two for Tuesdays

Leo Laporte (01:29:12):
Or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, I do it every year. T-Mobile Tuesdays. They do that every year. You get MLB the app and you get a full subscription.

Johnny Jet (01:29:21):
Yes. But it's only on your phone and, and maybe your actually I think it's just your phone

Leo Laporte (01:29:27):
Still. That's a heck of a deal.

Johnny Jet (01:29:29):
It is. It's $139. And I'm, you know, I, I watched the Yankees game last night, so you have to watch the games out of market. So you cannot watch your giants in San Francisco. Right. But you can watch 'em when they're playing in the Dodgers.

Leo Laporte (01:29:38):
Can you listen

Johnny Jet (01:29:40):
That

Leo Laporte (01:29:41):
Because I know with tuning in, I can listen to the radio. I

Johnny Jet (01:29:43):
Don't know about out of

Leo Laporte (01:29:44):
Market. Yeah. Anyway, I think it's nice. It's a, Little's that's only gonna be good till Tuesday, Tuesday morning, Tuesday morning. And then they have a new one.

Johnny Jet (01:29:52):
No, well, I mean

Leo Laporte (01:29:54):
Free chicken sandwich from Jack in the box. Next Tuesday,

Johnny Jet (01:29:56):
There are other

Leo Laporte (01:29:57):
Deals I would take. I would take the major league baseball over the free chicken.

Johnny Jet (01:30:02):
So that's how you get that. Also I, speaking of these airlines and operations, I've read the post this week called how to reach an airlines reservation agent without waiting, which is important. So if you're at the airport, you know, the first thing you wanna do is try and get to the airport club. If you, if they have one, you can pay, usually buy a membership for $50 a day pass. Or if they don't just stand in line, find a gate agent or a customer service agent. And if there's a vacant, engaged agent, you know, you can even wave a $20 bill cuz time is, is a essence of essence and, you know, get on the 800 number. See if they have a chat feature tweet 'em up. It's very important to do that. Also. there's international numbers call all their international number, especially like, you know, first line, one of the major carriers like American Delta United call London, or call Sydney using Skype, find out their number. Every website mentions writes down their international number number. And that way, you know, most likely you won't have to wait for hours. You might have to wait for 10 minutes, but that's a great way to ums. Save time.

Leo Laporte (01:31:03):
I got another tip for you. Yeah. Do not bite your flight attendant.

Johnny Jet (01:31:08):
Definitely don't do that.

Leo Laporte (01:31:10):
Two of the largest fines ever handed out

Johnny Jet (01:31:13):
81 grand

Leo Laporte (01:31:14):
$81,000.

Johnny Jet (01:31:17):
I, I read that.

Leo Laporte (01:31:19):
Wow. For a passenger, unruly passengers,

Johnny Jet (01:31:23):
A lunatic, if you bite a flight attendant, I mean seriously. 

Leo Laporte (01:31:30):
Yeah, one was, but I mean there, I can't remember. I have to get the the but these are from the FAA.

Johnny Jet (01:31:38):
Yes, but I dated a flight attendant for, for four

Leo Laporte (01:31:41):
Years. You did ever bid on all that time,

Johnny Jet (01:31:46):
But I learned how difficult their jobs are. That's

Leo Laporte (01:31:49):
Why I

Johnny Jet (01:31:49):
Horrible bringing actually I was bringing chocolates before I met

Leo Laporte (01:31:51):
Her. So a woman who is chocolates, I think in both cases, the, the the passenger threatened to open the cabin door. This is another thing you do not wanna do in flight. A woman who has not been public identified faces an $81,950. Civil fine. After SI officials said she threatened a flight attendant who ho she fell down. Flight attendant offered to help her. After a fall, she got up, tried to open the cabin door, hit butted bit and spit at crew members. You know, maybe she was having a breakdown. I mean, that's not normal

Johnny Jet (01:32:25):
Behavior. And well, now you wonder why airlines are having a hard time finding flight

Leo Laporte (01:32:29):
Attendants. The other one facing a $77,000. Fine. She tried to hug and kiss another passenger and then tried to quote exit during flight to,

Johnny Jet (01:32:40):
Well, you can't open the door. You don't have to worry about that. That door will is impossible to open.

Leo Laporte (01:32:43):
Do not open the doors. Do not try to open the doors. You will get a big fine.

Johnny Jet (01:32:48):
The flight attendant should have bit. Her is what should have

Leo Laporte (01:32:51):
Happened. Yeah, no, you're not allowed to bite back. Wow. I'm glad that these fines are getting handed out because this is, let's

Johnny Jet (01:33:01):
See if they get paid.

Leo Laporte (01:33:02):
Yeah. Right. You know,

Johnny Jet (01:33:03):
A lot of times they don't follow up.

Leo Laporte (01:33:04):
Yeah. But I noticed that that's when the FAA really gets serious is when you try to open a door in flight, do not. Okay. I mean, yeah. Do not.

Johnny Jet (01:33:14):
Yeah. I mean, I've flown, I don't know how many times, thousands of times I've never seen that or even come close to that. Yeah. So it's very,

Leo Laporte (01:33:21):
Let me add here. I think both cases, these people were having had breakdowns. I don't think this is normal behavior. This isn't bad behavior. This is mental illness. I think it's gotta be

Johnny Jet (01:33:32):
Definitely. Yeah. I think the, I think the pandemic had had the played a part. People,

Leo Laporte (01:33:36):
People are doing poorly, but we are back on the road again. Now I, there been coronavirus outbreaks in New York city and Washington DC and some of new England that we may be with this new variant. We may be going back. Is the FAA gonna lift mask mandates this month?

Johnny Jet (01:33:54):
I, I don't think they will. I think it's gonna be another month, but I think they eventually will. It all depends on hospitalizations. I mean, if people get sick, right. I think they're okay with it. They just don't want hospitalizations.

Leo Laporte (01:34:03):
The good news is at least in the, in the case of the Washington DC right. Illness is minor, minor illness. You know, all these people are vaccinated. And then, and nobody got seriously ill, which is great.

Johnny Jet (01:34:16):
Is on June 1st. They're gonna

Leo Laporte (01:34:17):
June 1st. You think,

Johnny Jet (01:34:18):
But anything can change. I mean, that's the thing with this minor. No one really knows.

Leo Laporte (01:34:23):
Well, you know how you find out, you listen to Johnny jet right here, right? That's

Johnny Jet (01:34:28):
Right. And I also have a number for Delta airlines. If you have travel within the, in the next 48 hours, you cannot call him. If you have a flight for three days from that, it has to be within 48 hours and you can get through within 15 minutes. I got this from Gary left one eight for I 5, 5, 4, 8 25 0 5.

Leo Laporte (01:34:44):
But the best way to get this information is to go to Johnny's website, Johnny jet.com. Subscribe to his newsletters. They're free. Johnny jet.com/newsletter. Listen to his podcast. It's free Johnny jet.com/podcast. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter and listen for him every week. Right here, going anywhere this week.

Johnny Jet (01:35:04):
I hope so.

Leo Laporte (01:35:05):
Johnny jet travel guy, safe travels. That's the right answer. I hope so. I hope so.

Johnny Jet (01:35:14):
My, my son is sick right now.

Leo Laporte (01:35:16):
Just keep,

Johnny Jet (01:35:16):
He's got a fever last night. Test him. Not yet. We're just about to, but we think he might hand foot and mouth because our neighbor said it's going around. He just said his hands hurt. I was like, what?

Leo Laporte (01:35:27):
Yeah. It's very contagious. Yeah. Despite the name. It's not, I don't think serious illness. It's the new childhood illness

Johnny Jet (01:35:35):
I've had it. He had

Leo Laporte (01:35:36):
It.

Johnny Jet (01:35:37):
Yeah. He had it three years ago. And I got, I had these dots in my hand and no one knew what they were. It's very infectious and his mouth was hurting and took him to the dentist. The doctor's like, I have no idea what it is. It's like what? I gotta get a new dentist.

Leo Laporte (01:35:50):
Yeah. It's like us. We had a 

Johnny Jet (01:35:54):
Right now.

Leo Laporte (01:35:55):
Oh, look at that. You getting a notification? Are you a big Dodgers fan?

Johnny Jet (01:35:59):
No Yankees. Oh, that's right. I grew up in Southern Connecticut. That's right.

Leo Laporte (01:36:03):
Yankees.

Johnny Jet (01:36:04):
I watched them beat the red Sox.

Leo Laporte (01:36:06):
How exciting? That's an exciting opening. That's a good home opener. Yeah. Yankee socks. Were they at the, the, the Fenway or

Johnny Jet (01:36:14):
No? They're in Yankee stadium. The house that Jetter built

Leo Laporte (01:36:18):
Jetter belt. Yeah, the Bronx Bombas. Okay. Okay. That's the Jeter belt. Cause the old was out the roof built. Exactly. But they're still in the Bronx. Aren't they? Oh,

Johnny Jet (01:36:29):
They're right next to each other. Each other. There you go. I've been to both. And I've been to world series of both stadiums and it was amazing

Leo Laporte (01:36:35):
Being a Yankees fan. Kind of like being a Lakers fan. Hey,

Johnny Jet (01:36:38):
Growing up, it was not like that.

Leo Laporte (01:36:41):
Oh, come on.

Johnny Jet (01:36:43):
Actually 78 and 79. The Yankees won, I think 81, 2, but then they didn't win until again to 95 I think.

Leo Laporte (01:36:49):
Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:36:50):
Or 96. I think the, I think the strike period was

Leo Laporte (01:36:53):
95. See, I'm a red Sox fan. So you're asking the wrong. I thought you

Johnny Jet (01:36:55):
Were. I thought you were a giants fan.

Leo Laporte (01:36:56):
Well, I'm a giants fan cause I live in new San Francisco now. But yeah, I understand. I grew up watching the red Sox. If you're a Yankees fan, I get to be a red Sox

Johnny Jet (01:37:04):
Fan Bucky dent. Lucky. D

Leo Laporte (01:37:06):
I two words for you. Yes, Carl Yasky all right. Hey, have a great week. I hope you. I do get to go somewhere and I hope you too. Your son feels better.

Johnny Jet (01:37:16):
Thank you. Little, have a

Leo Laporte (01:37:17):
Great week. Little Johnny jet. Little Jackie. No Johnny Little Jackie jet. All right. Take care. See you around. Bye Johnny. See ya,

??? (01:37:26):
John. I wanna

Leo Laporte (01:37:28):
You take it. All right. Oh, you know, I got it. Ready? There's target. There's target screen mode for older. It's not for all 2014 that they stopped doing that little Johnny. Yeah. I found my learning Python found book. Have you heard of 

Mikah Sargent (01:37:55):
Oh now I've forgotten what it's called

Leo Laporte (01:37:58):
Book

Mikah Sargent (01:37:59):
Just had it's a language. 

Leo Laporte (01:38:02):
Oh, I've heard of them fourth. Yeah, I'm a, a big fourth fan fourth fan. I love fourth. I there was one of the best computer books ever written was a book called starting fourth by Leo Brody. That really made it accessible. Well, forths fun. It's not, it's a very, it's a, it was originally designed. In fact, I interviewed the creator. Oh really? On tech TV many years ago, it was originally designed to control. It was an astronomer to control telescopes. It's works really well in embedded systems robotics because it's very compact and, and you can essentially, the way it works is you write a language, you write words instead of functions, and then you string 'em together. So Hey,

Mikah Sargent (01:38:43):
You point at star. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:38:45):
Basically kinda like apple. The other thing that's interesting is stack based, which is

Mikah Sargent (01:38:50):
That term I don't understand. Does that

Leo Laporte (01:38:51):
Mean that's complicated? Well, if you had a stack of dishes, instead of, you know, all programs, allocate memory for variables and then operate on the memory in fourth, you have a stack, which is pre-allocated and it's like a stack of dishes and you, so if you want add one plus one, the way you add one plus one on fourth is you put one on the stack, then you put another one on the stack. Then you put plus on the stack and it adds them. It is reverse Polish. Is the stack

Mikah Sargent (01:39:20):
In as big or as small as you wanted to be, or you only

Leo Laporte (01:39:23):
Oh, pretty much. Yeah. I mean there's some limits. Yeah. But that way of thinking works. It's cool. It's very interesting. It's just interesting though. Da da D do do da. I always think when I listen to songs like this, how much fun it would be to be the keyboard guy, da, da, da, da, da. I could do that. Leo Laport, the tech guy, tech guy, two Michael Sargent here on, we go with the show and the calls and Debbie and Anaheim. Hello? Debbie in Anaheim.

Caller 6 (01:39:56):
Hi. How are you Leah?

Leo Laporte (01:39:57):
I am. Well, how are you?

Caller 6 (01:39:59):
I'm good. I'm calling with something. That's probably a real easy problem and you probably can fix it in no time. This week I tried to log into my banking website and it kept telling me that my browser was out of date. Yes. So I went in and I checked what verse and I had, and it keeps telling me I need to have 76 or better for Firefox. Yeah. And I have 99.

Leo Laporte (01:40:26):
Right. So what the heck

Caller 6 (01:40:28):
It will not work

Leo Laporte (01:40:29):
90 nines current, by the way. It's the, it's the current version of Firefox good job.

Caller 6 (01:40:34):
And so I've, I've spent a lot of time trying to contact the and their it department. I went into the bank. I tried contacting Firefox. And I'm wondering if there's anything I can do if there's a setting that I have.

Leo Laporte (01:40:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is solvable. So you sure you have 99 of Firefox, you checked in the, about Firefox.

Caller 6 (01:40:57):
I did. I went in there and I went into help and Firefox. And it tells you my version. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:41:04):
And you're running windows 10, 10. Okay, good. One thing to try, I know you may not like it is to see it comes with a browser called edge is to see if you can go into the same site, you know, just copy and paste the URL and to edge and see if it works.

Caller 6 (01:41:21):
I, I did it with with Google and I can get in

Leo Laporte (01:41:26):
And you can't. Okay. You tried Chrome. You can't. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:41:28):
So that was their, that was their answer to the question. They said, well, why don't you just use another browser,

Leo Laporte (01:41:33):
But yeah, but we wanna know what's wrong. Yeah, exactly. By asking to do that though, they, and I have answered a lot of other subsidiary questions. For instance, if your date and time is wrong on your computer, sometimes that can cause a problem because the certificates, the bank uses to encrypt its traffic to use is time based. And if you are back in 1908, it will, it won't work. It'll say no, no, no, but that's not it either.

Caller 6 (01:41:59):
My day. My date and time is correct. I'm looking at it at the bottom. Good.

Leo Laporte (01:42:04):
I that's this is so it's the good news and the bad news is it's somehow tied to Firefox look at the extensions you're running in Firefox. Cause that's the other thing to start looking at under more tools. Is it more tools? No, it's always all the browsers are different. There's

Caller 6 (01:42:22):
More tools here,

Leo Laporte (01:42:23):
Right? Yeah. But that's not the, I think it's that's not where extensions live. I thought that's where they lived. It's I guess it's under, it's under oh yeah. It's under the settings. Okay. And at the bottom it says, and yes. And it says manager extensions. You wanna make sure that, you know, every extension that belongs and it's there and that you put it there.

Caller 6 (01:42:48):
Okay. Are

Leo Laporte (01:42:49):
You looking at 'em right now?

Caller 6 (01:42:50):
I am. So I have manager extensions and it has my I mouse and it has I have malware bites on my computer.

Leo Laporte (01:42:59):
Okay. Take that off.

Caller 6 (01:43:01):
Okay. So

Leo Laporte (01:43:02):
That off yo, you can just disable it for right now. That little blue button. You just turn that off. All right.

Caller 6 (01:43:05):
Yes. I get that.

Leo Laporte (01:43:06):
I have very often security software causes these problems. So, so, so you don't really need malware bites in your browser. What else do you have in there?

Caller 6 (01:43:16):
I have zoom on there.

Leo Laporte (01:43:17):
Yeah. That should be harmless

Caller 6 (01:43:19):
And my homepage and, oh, and

Leo Laporte (01:43:21):
What's my homepage.

Caller 6 (01:43:24):
Yahoo homepage.

Leo Laporte (01:43:25):
Ah, okay. Okay. Yeah, that should be harmless. And

Caller 6 (01:43:27):
Then the only other thing that's on there is honey, which is a shopping.

Leo Laporte (01:43:32):
My wife uses honey as well. Yeah. Yes. Try disabling malware bytes and see if it works.

Caller 6 (01:43:38):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:43:39):
Because it's not unusual for the problem with security. It can be over aggressive and it can get in the way and malware bite's extension might well be doing some proxying or something odd with your browser. So I would definitely you don't really need that. In fact, if you're really worried about malware windows has its own anti malware built in that's sufficient, no need to run an extension. Anything you give extension permiss to has has really has access to everything you do in the browser. So it's always a potential security and privacy risk. For instance, honey, one of the reasons honey is such a great thing is because they sell marketing information about you. They're watching everything you do. As long as you know, the, at who cares, cuz you're getting my wife every time she gets her Rakuten 10 check waves it in my face because I say, well, honey, you shouldn't be running that stuff. And she says, ah, she's got $38 right here that says I should be. So as long as you understand that, that's why they're giving you money. They're basically paying for it. You know, you, your marketing information, but that's harmless. Yeah. That's not a security issue.

Caller 6 (01:44:56):
All right. I have one more question. Sure. That's unrelated. Do I have to have one drive on here?

Leo Laporte (01:45:04):
No. And this is really annoying. Microsoft. It's

Caller 6 (01:45:06):
Very annoying. It pops up all the time and it makes,

Leo Laporte (01:45:08):
Oh, I know. I hate it. A mess. Yeah. And the Microsoft wants you to use one drive cuz they charge you for it. Ultimately, you know, it's free, you know, first one's free kid. And then, then as soon as you put anything significant on it it's a real problem. So turning it off is actually kind of hard because Microsoft really, really I'm really wants you to do it. So there are ways to disable it. What are you getting? You getting pop up?

Caller 6 (01:45:33):
Yes. It pops up a little window and it says when OneDrive isn't

Leo Laporte (01:45:37):
Why aren't you sign in? Yeah, yeah.

Caller 6 (01:45:39):
I just wanna get rid of it. Cause it's causing me problems.

Leo Laporte (01:45:42):
I don't blame you. So I'm gonna put a ridiculous article from Microsoft in the show notes of how to turn off OneDrive. It's so annoying. You can still, you won't lose any files. You can still go to onedrive.com, but honestly uninstalling. It is probably the best thing to do so. Right. If you, if you look for it in your add or remove programs and you find OneDrive just, just uninstall it, it won't bother you anymore. If you've started using it, you might not wanna do that. But if you haven't used it at all, just uninstall

Caller 6 (01:46:15):
It. I know they're always wanting me to use everything Microsoft and I prefer Firefox. And so they're always trying to get me to use everything.

Leo Laporte (01:46:22):
I just wanna say thank you for using Firefox. I really seriously Firefox, which used to be one of the big two browsers has shrunk in size of the last few years. In fact, the latest stats say that number one browser by far 80 to 90% is Chrome. Number two is now Microsoft edge, which is based on Chrome. Number three is safari and that's only apple users and Firefox is a distant force way behind and shrinking. And we need to have a, a, I believe a diverse ecosystem of browsers. It's good for security. If everything becomes Chrome or a Chrome derivative, that's very bad. So I use Firefox too. I think it's a great browser. I, all the features of it. I would just, I would just say, make sure the other thing Firefox does do your bank mate. Who's your, who's your bank

Caller 6 (01:47:16):
Chase.

Leo Laporte (01:47:16):
Okay. I don't think chase is gonna

Caller 6 (01:47:19):
Well, when I went into the bank today, cuz I went in and I talked to the manager and they said we use Firefox. And I said, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:47:25):
Well, there you go on

Caller 6 (01:47:26):
My end. So good for them. So I thought I'm gonna go home and call you. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:47:29):
I don't think there's anything chase is doing that would, would keep Firefox out. So it's probably the security software. I'm gonna be it malware bites.

Caller 6 (01:47:37):
Okay. All right. I'm gonna give that a try. Thank you so much, Leo. Thanks for

Leo Laporte (01:47:41):
The call.

Caller 6 (01:47:42):
All right. Have

Leo Laporte (01:47:42):
A great weekend. You too. Now we go on to John in St. George Utah. Hi John.

Caller 7 (01:47:50):
Hi Leo. You had a caller in earlier I was talking about getting rid of the, his iMac. I don't know what year it was and then getting Mac many.

Leo Laporte (01:48:08):
Yes.

Caller 7 (01:48:09):
And so my question was could, could he use his old iMac or if I came across an old iMac, could I use that as a display or monitor for iMac mini?

Mikah Sargent (01:48:23):
This is a fantastic question, John. Cuz a lot of people actually have this and that's partially because it used to be the case that yes, you could take an iMac and set it up as a display for another Mac. It could be any other Mac. You could have a MacBook pro or something else and plug it in and be able to use it. The problem is we've got to take a break. The

Leo Laporte (01:48:43):
Problem is we've got 10 seconds left. Yeah, it has to be pre 2014, right? Yes. To use target

Mikah Sargent (01:48:48):
Display

Leo Laporte (01:48:49):
Mode, screen mode. Okay. Target display mode. But if it's later than that, no apple took it away. Leo Laporte Mike a Sargent, your tech guys more to come right after this. I'm sorry. I forgot that we go out early or I wouldn't have gone to the caller. So yeah, the question is good, but it really depends on the age of the iMac.

Mikah Sargent (01:49:12):
Yeah. So what happened is that apple made a bunch of displays newer displays that require too much throughput. And so

Leo Laporte (01:49:18):
Oh, is that why?

Mikah Sargent (01:49:19):
Yeah. They ran out of an ability. You would've had to use two Thunderbolt cords in these modern Macs in order

Leo Laporte (01:49:24):
To, but to try it, you shut down the Mac, then you turn it on holding down option. So for target disc MOS, option tee for target display mode, is it option

Mikah Sargent (01:49:34):
D command F two

Leo Laporte (01:49:36):
Command F two. Oh well there you go. If you have a function key. That's one, one other thing that holds it

Mikah Sargent (01:49:43):
Back with those old max, you would,

Leo Laporte (01:49:44):
You would yeah. Command F

Mikah Sargent (01:49:46):
Two because both max have to be older. Even the one that you're playing.

Leo Laporte (01:49:49):
Oh, even the old one has. I mean the Mac has to

Mikah Sargent (01:49:52):
Be a 2019 or earlier for,

Leo Laporte (01:49:53):
So I couldn't do it with my M one and an old Mac, correct? Yeah.

Caller 7 (01:49:57):
Yeah. Well I discovered something when I was on hold. That might work. It's called Luna display from Adam.

Leo Laporte (01:50:03):
Luna's awesome.

Mikah Sargent (01:50:04):
Yep. That is an option. It's it's, it's a hacky option. It, it works, but you're buying the problem is device and

Leo Laporte (01:50:12):
The problem is you're now running them iMac, the old iMac as an iMac, it has to be running full bore, has to be booted up for, to use Luna or any of these screen sharing techniques. Luna has a little dongle that you put in, which I actually have. And I think Luna's a cool eyed D 

Mikah Sargent (01:50:28):
From the folks at Astropad, if you're looking we'll of course include a link in the show notes. So you

Leo Laporte (01:50:33):
Could put the Luna, Don dongle you'd have to boot up the iMac. The reason that these older IMAX are issues is cuz they can't go to Monterey. And so increasingly they're gonna be security problems. I guess if you don't put it on the, you're only use it as a monitor. It's not online. That's probably right. Yeah. Yeah. Luna is a good choice. So do you have one of these? Is that why this came up for you, John?

Caller 7 (01:50:56):
I have one of what?

Leo Laporte (01:50:56):
Old Mac old I

Caller 7 (01:50:59):
Mac, no, I have a, I have an M one Mac mini.

Mikah Sargent (01:51:02):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:51:02):
You're just thinking in terms of helping this caller. Yeah,

Caller 7 (01:51:05):
Well it, yeah. And also I, I I'm thinking, you know, I'd like to have a different monitor, a better monitor. Right now I just have a like 22 inch old 20 P oh

Leo Laporte (01:51:21):
Yeah, yeah. You need a better monitor

Caller 7 (01:51:23):
Slash monitor

Mikah Sargent (01:51:25):
With the Mac mini. You wouldn't be, if you've got an M one max not work target display mode. Yeah. You would have to do the Astropad thing if you wanted to use an older Mac for that. So your best, your better bet is getting a third party display. Like the ones we talked about earlier.

Leo Laporte (01:51:38):
So if you don't, if you don't already have the iMac lying around, then I wouldn't. Yeah.

Caller 7 (01:51:42):
Yeah. But I thought I, I might get lucky and find one of throw shop or garage.

Leo Laporte (01:51:49):
Yeah, you might. And then you have to buy Luna, which is not free. Yeah. you can get $200 monitors that are 10 times better than what you've got right now. So I would say that's probably the right route. I mean, yeah. You're, if you find it 2013 iMac, it's not gonna be more than 20 bucks. It's gonna be cheap. Luna's another what? 20 or 40 bucks?

Mikah Sargent (01:52:10):
Yeah, possibly Luna display is $140.

Leo Laporte (01:52:12):
Oh. And the Mac has to run by the way. It has to be bootable and running and it ha what what's the minimum, you know what? I bet it won't work. Cause I bet Luna requires a modern Mac.

Mikah Sargent (01:52:23):
That's a good

Leo Laporte (01:52:23):
Question. Go, go get a cheap display. You can get good displays 4k displays for a couple hundred bucks. Now that's the real, they're so cheap now.

Caller 7 (01:52:32):
Yeah. I I'd been thinking about maybe a, a, a TV, another TV, but the the 32 inch TVs I think only are seven 20 P exactly. 40 inch or 10, 10 80 P you have to go to 43 inch to get 4k. Right. I don't know if I want one that

Leo Laporte (01:52:51):
You'd be better off. Just I'm telling you this monitor I'm looking at, this is a great monitor. You could watch a TV on it too, by the way.

Caller 7 (01:52:57):
You're curved one.

Leo Laporte (01:52:57):
Yeah, 300 bucks, three, three something. Yeah. That's the, and that's a very modern, high, high dynamic range, high frame rate. If you're willing to get, you know, just a regular 4k monitor, it's a couple hundred bucks nowadays. They're very cheap.

Caller 7 (01:53:13):
Where did you get yours?

Leo Laporte (01:53:15):
Amon the world, famous Amazon. I'll tell you the exact model number and I'll tell you the exact price too, so that, you know, cuz I don't I'm, I'm probably understating it here. I think it was for some reason, 363 boxes stuck in my mind, but I'm running with an M one mini and it with a it's a Samsung 32 inch G Odyssey G five gaming monitor is what they call it. It's curve, which is a negative, but it was 2 99, 300 bucks. There is a 27 inch version of this. That is 2 89. So I'd spend the 10 bucks and get the 32 inch and actually curved is fine if you're just using it like a monitor. If I just sitting here, this would be great. It's cuz I'm off angle that it's weird that it's curved and I'm, I'm getting used to it.

Caller 7 (01:54:11):
So yeah, I sit pretty close to monitor. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:54:14):
That's a gr this is for 2 99. Fantastic monitor 140 it'll if you get the right cable, the display port cable off your mini it'll run 120 Hertz. It's one milli lag time, which is incredible for LCD 25, 60 by 1440 HDR, 10. So you can watch TV on this too. If you hooked up a, you know, or you hook your computer up and put Netflix on it or whatever, look beautiful.

Caller 7 (01:54:43):
Hey, have you heard of OZO audio?

Leo Laporte (01:54:47):
Ah,

Caller 7 (01:54:48):
Devices,

Leo Laporte (01:54:49):
Oso sounds dimly familiar. No. Tell me what it is.

Caller 7 (01:54:52):
Well, it's a AI proprietary software from NOK they like another cell phone manufacturer. Yeah. Yeah. And so I guess if you record something it's supposed to have much better sound and oh,

Leo Laporte (01:55:08):
I'll have to check it

Caller 7 (01:55:08):
Out type sound and and 

Leo Laporte (01:55:12):
It's spatial.

Caller 7 (01:55:12):
If he records something in Oso audio, it can be played on any player. It doesn't need any, ah kind of a question we

Leo Laporte (01:55:20):
Should do our shows in it. Oh, I know, I know that name. That was the $30,000 Oso camera Nokia sold. We actually did a show, an entire show on an OZO with that spatial sound. So that's interesting. They're doing the sound separately now cuz they did discontinue the OZO cameras.

Caller 7 (01:55:40):
Yeah, a VR camera. Yeah. Speed.

Leo Laporte (01:55:43):
Alex Lindsay had one, it looked like a soccer ball was hysterical and we shot a whole Mac break weekly on it. But it was so, but the video was so big. He never put it out the whole show because it was too huge. So I think we only did 10 minutes. Let me see if I find that. Yeah, I found that. So yeah. I, now I know, I know that name. Yeah. So that's cool that they're putting out just the audio portion of that. Yeah. 2016 Mac break weekly in 360 degrees with a Nokia OZO

Mikah Sargent (01:56:16):
Renee calling in on a studio display.

Leo Laporte (01:56:20):
That's wild. Yeah. I I'm have to check it out. So, so do you have to buy special hardware to record it or?

Caller 7 (01:56:30):
Well it's, it's it's software based. It's AI software and they license it to other cell phone manufacturer Phone.

Leo Laporte (01:56:38):
Okay. So you can't get it yourself?

Caller 7 (01:56:41):
Well it's so it's like got like a Nokia for example. I mean I, I had my eye in one that that has that feature right. Built in and there's a lot of different aspects of it. You know, you check that out. Maybe you can ask Scott, you know, I don't know if he has, I

Leo Laporte (01:56:59):
Will. I'll ask him about it. Yeah. This is the video that we're shooting in 360 in the old brick, you know, what's cool is, is a good record of the old studio there. You can see we, we, this was the best part of the old studio.

Mikah Sargent (01:57:13):
It was in 4k all the way back then.

Leo Laporte (01:57:15):
Yeah. Oh it was a $30,000 camera. It

Mikah Sargent (01:57:18):
Better be in 4k.

Leo Laporte (01:57:19):
Yeah. It was hugely expensive. Look at that. So the, the audio would've been an OZO audio as well, so that's interesting. That's what they're doing. They they're keeping the technology. I, this was a beautiful studio. I think the government is selling the building anyway. Thank you. John, I appreciate it. Hope we helped.

Caller 7 (01:57:39):
Oh, oh yeah. Thank you. Enjoy

Leo Laporte (01:57:41):
Your M one.

Mikah Sargent (01:57:42):
Yeah, absolutely.

Caller 7 (01:57:43):
Okay. Thanks Leah.

Leo Laporte (01:57:44):
Nice. Yeah, really? I'm honestly just as happy with the M one as I am with the studio. This is cool.

Mikah Sargent (01:57:52):
I know now I'm just playing. Isn't that cool? Yeah. This is really cool. And there's a cake on the dash.

Leo Laporte (01:57:58):
I must have been

Mikah Sargent (01:57:59):
500 episode.

Leo Laporte (01:58:00):
500 is episode 500. Cool. That's why? And did a cake on 800 hundred Look at that. This was such a nice place. You never

Mikah Sargent (01:58:10):
Saw this. I never got to see it. No.

Leo Laporte (01:58:12):
So this is the living room set was right over there. This was Lisa's office. She could stand there and glow at us through the window. My office was on the other side. Also had a window there. There's the OZO in the,

Mikah Sargent (01:58:26):
Oh, there's somebody who just walked in and they closed the door.

Leo Laporte (01:58:29):
Yeah, that was part of the problem. One of the reasons nobody ever liked this studio is cuz it was open. So all the people were working in the studio. There's radio corner. This was the TNW set right there.

Mikah Sargent (01:58:43):
What's that white thing up there.

Leo Laporte (01:58:47):
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte here. The tech guy time talk computers, the internet home theater, digital photography, smartphone smart cameras. Hour three of the tech guy show. I am here with Mikah Sargent tech guy too. Hello? Hello. And we're taking your calls. 8 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6 several times during the show I've said, oh, I'll put it in the show notes, but I forget, I always forget to tell you where those are. It's at. They're at tech guy labs.com tech guy labs.com. And this is episode 1883. Oh, we finally got in up to the 1880s. That's good. 1883. So you know, nowadays modern podcast, they do seasons. So I could say, you know, I guess I would say since this is 1,883 divided by, would you do a new season every year?

Mikah Sargent (01:59:43):
Probably. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:59:43):
Yeah. So this would be seasons seven season 18 episode, you know, 20. We do two a week. Oh, oh that's yeah. Well anyway, you get the idea. You got it. 1883. It's easy to remember, to be honest with you Danny or sorry. Yeah. Danny is on the line from San Marcos, California. Hello Danny.

Caller 8 (02:00:06):
Hey Leo. How you doing Marco? Good to

Mikah Sargent (02:00:09):
You. Hello? Good to see you.

Caller 8 (02:00:11):
I got a quick question for both of you guys first for you, Leo. I'm looking for a quality duplicate finder kind of like on the bit level rather than the title level. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:22):
Yeah, it does. Because you want to not base your duplicates on the name of the file or even the date of the file, but you wanna base it on the contents of the

Caller 8 (02:00:32):
File. Yeah. As if I did any, anything that's changed on that file.

Leo Laporte (02:00:36):
Yeah. The way they do it modern way they do it is with a, either a hash or a CR, which is just another form of hash where they actually take, they analyze the contents of the file in such a way that they produce a number, a long number. And if one bit has changed that number changes. So they're, and the reason they do it that way is it's faster than going one bit at a time, but it's absolutely effective. You will not eliminate duplicates even if they have different names, different creation, dates, and so forth. What kind of I, what kind of files are you doing it for images, music

Caller 8 (02:01:13):
All, everything, everything from video files to audio, to documents, any kind of file. You

Leo Laporte (02:01:19):
Got a, a lot of duplicates. Then the other question is Mac or PC.

Caller 8 (02:01:25):
Both but mainly Mac.

Mikah Sargent (02:01:28):
Well, we've got the answer for you. 

Leo Laporte (02:01:31):
The, you were the one who taught me about this program.

Mikah Sargent (02:01:33):
The wonderful folks at Mac Paul make an excellent application called Gemini it's on its second iteration. So Gemini two

Leo Laporte (02:01:39):
Highly recommended

Mikah Sargent (02:01:41):
It is a fantastic way to be able to find all sorts of duplicates. Be they files be they folders be they photos, et cetera. It's got a great built in UI for photos in particular so that you can find ones that are duplicates. And what I like is the Gemini two also for features the ability to kind of see similar photos. So you may only, you may

Leo Laporte (02:02:02):
Show 'em side by side even, and say, is this the same? I want

Mikah Sargent (02:02:05):
This, oh, I don't want this. As

Leo Laporte (02:02:06):
Soon as you edit a photo, it's technically not the same. Right? They edit copy. Exactly. But you may think of it as the same

Mikah Sargent (02:02:12):
And you can keep it running in the background. They've got this great duplicate monitor so that if you accidentally end up creating duplicates after you've done that first scan, it'll say, Hey, it looks like you doubled up on this. You may want to get rid of one of these options. I've run it on my network, attached storage on my PC itself and all over the place. Jim and I too honestly, is it's the first one I'm I recommend when people ask it's

Leo Laporte (02:02:36):
A subscription app, so you pay 20 bucks a year. But here's another reason to get it. MACPA is in Ukraine. It's a Ukrainian company and they're a great company, really smart, really good developers. And of course they're suffering thanks to the invasion of Ukraine. So you're supporting in a way you're standing with Ukraine just by buying MACPA you're getting a rate program, which we've been recommending for years. Anyway.

Caller 8 (02:03:04):
Got you. Yes, I'm on it.

Leo Laporte (02:03:05):
I'm on it. Yeah. So I highly rec now windows, there are other programs that do the same thing. This is iOS and Mac OS only. They do have an iOS version for this.

Caller 8 (02:03:14):
Okay. Now for Mike I quick question on Minecraft Java or bedrock.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:21):
I don't blame Minecraft. I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte (02:03:23):
I only play Java on my, I have four, five Minecraft servers running in the other room. They're all running on Java.

Caller 8 (02:03:32):
Okay. I, I,

Leo Laporte (02:03:33):
But you tell me, you tell me is bedrock bed, cuz I've never bedrock is the one you play on like Xbox and, and the when store and so forth is bedrock better is different. Right? You get realms and stuff like that.

Caller 8 (02:03:47):
From what I understand, I just I, I have a discussion with my 10 year old about Java on bedrock. Oh, what is your understand?

Leo Laporte (02:03:53):
What does your 10 year old prefer? That's what matters

Caller 8 (02:03:57):
He is right here. I prefer Java. Yay.

Leo Laporte (02:04:00):
Good man. It's the best. Isn't it?

Caller 8 (02:04:04):
I told her Java was full of security. Hold ghost.

Leo Laporte (02:04:06):
No, no, no. Not, not in this case cuz you're just running it standalone on the computer. It's just the language it was written and it's not a security problem at all. Here's the, here's a good tip though for your 10 year old for you for your 10 year old mine, Minecraft, you, you can get a raspberry pie that this is actually how I got started in Minecraft serving you can get a raspberry pie that has a version of Minecraft for Microsoft, with a plugin that lets you plug program it with Python. If you wanna get a 10 year old into computer programming, you tell 'em, you can build an entire castle with one command. You can design a beautiful city, make it entirely a whole program. One command. You just watch a there's a really good book for this, from those starch press on programming, learning how to program using Minecraft. Do you think your 10 year old might be interested in programming?

Caller 8 (02:05:02):
Yes. He would

Leo Laporte (02:05:04):
Learn to program in Python, which oh, that's what we're doing. Yeah. You will tell me. Michael will tell you is the best way to program. It's called learn to program with mine craft from the no starch press. It is so cool because we'll tell your 10 year old, for instance, in fact, this is one of the first programs you're right. You can build a bridge outta dynamite. It blows up as you cross it so much fun. It's a really I think it's a good way to get kids into programming with Python. It's a very good book. And,

Caller 8 (02:05:39):
And, and it's called learn to program,

Leo Laporte (02:05:41):
Learn to program with Minecraft by Craig Richardson. We'll have a link in the no starch press. It's a, it's actually wonderful. And it's nice because it's when you're a kid learning a program, it seemed very abstract. You know? So having something that they love all ready, Minecraft and showing them how you can build stuff in Minecraft as a program really connects with them. I think it's a very good way to teach a kid how to, how to program. So if he's interested in that really highly recommended, I actually interviewed Craig about this. You Demi has classes on this as well. This is mine. Crafton Python go together very nicely.

Caller 8 (02:06:21):
Yeah. he knows a couple languages already. Which ones are there? Benny. He sharp scratch Python and Java.

Leo Laporte (02:06:31):
Holy cow. You can teach us. Holy cow. Forget what I just said. He should be teaching us.

Caller 8 (02:06:39):
He's teaching me.

Leo Laporte (02:06:40):
That's good. Oh, he's a, he's definitely motivated. He's going places. That's really, really cool. Scratch is a great programming language for kids from MIT. Obviously that's one. He picked up in school. I don't know where he picked up C sharp. He's just, he's just a sharp kid. That's all. That's awesome. That's awesome.

Caller 8 (02:06:58):
Well, I appreciate you guys and keep it going.

Leo Laporte (02:07:01):
Java, baby. Not bedrock. Java. Thank you, Danny. Take care. Wow. That's amazing. See I know Cun. I know ma Python. I know scratch. I know Java. Wow man. Amazing. Yeah, it isn't, it that's but so not every kid is gonna be that inclined. Right, right. But boy, if you're a 10 year old today and you are so inclined, that's such the perfect time to be learning those languages too. I wish I'd learned all this stuff about this. Me too. Yeah. amazing. Amazing. 88 88. Ask Leo. We'll talk about anything. If you wanna talk tech, Mikah Sargent and I are here for another 45 minutes coming up Dick D Bartolo mad magazine's Madis writer with a crazy Gimo or gadget. You stay right here.

Leo Laporte (02:07:57):
C sharp by now. BD, Python. Fun. No big deal. It's so cute. So cute. You know, I'm really glad actually, in hindsight that he did this because it really it's a good capture. He is a capture hanging there. That is a sheep. Okay. Because that camera is at a head level for some people. Oh, like Jason, how so? The sheep is so that he doesn't walk into the cuz you can hardly see it. Oh yeah. It looks like it's in the background. Yeah. I see. Yeah. So yeah, that was just one of many little, this is the disco ball from the new year's Eve thing. I don't know if we have your balloon drop John that he spent so many is building. I don't know if that's visible. Who's bad. Are you bad? I'm not bad. I, no, no. We're good. Leo. LePort the tech guy. 88 88. Ask Leo asking the eternal question. Who's bad. Who's bad, Tom. On the line from Santa Cruz, California. Hi Tom.

Caller 9 (02:08:59):
Hey,

Leo Laporte (02:09:00):
Welcome. Come on over. Come on. Over to the phone, Tom, come here.

Caller 9 (02:09:03):
I am. Join the

Leo Laporte (02:09:04):
Show.

Caller 9 (02:09:05):
Hi, my wife joy called in for me when I was out. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:09:07):
That's fine. Hi joy. Thank you.

Caller 9 (02:09:11):
I just got a Microsoft surface go to tablet.

Leo Laporte (02:09:16):
Oh, you got one?

Caller 9 (02:09:18):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:09:18):
I'm jealous. I love those. Well, I mean, I love how they look.

Caller 9 (02:09:22):
I'm jealous. When I try to tell you the one I'm trying to, what I wanna do is obviously have be able to use the app on my desktop when I'm traveling or out of the house or downstairs

Leo Laporte (02:09:32):
Or yeah, it's a little portable tablet has an attachable keyboard and pen, very affordable.

Caller 9 (02:09:39):
However,

Leo Laporte (02:09:40):
However,

Caller 9 (02:09:41):
I've been using Chrome as my browser on my desktop uhoh and I wanted to use it on the laptop on, on the tablet too. Yeah. But I have to get to it from edge. Right. I go in and I, I, I Google, you know?

Leo Laporte (02:09:59):
Yeah. You go on ed type chrome.google.com. Yeah. And what happens

Caller 9 (02:10:03):
Says, you don't really need Chrome anymore. And I said, well, I wanna download it anyway. So I tried to download it. Yeah. And it, it won't do it, but you don't

Leo Laporte (02:10:14):
Need it. What do you want for what what's wrong with you?

Caller 9 (02:10:17):
I'm just,

Leo Laporte (02:10:19):
I know, I know

Caller 9 (02:10:21):
Here and I, one reason is I have certain bookmarks on Chrome on Chrome that I can take and independently put on my desktop, access them without bringing, I try to do that with the edge and it won't let me, which is annoying. And so all I wanna do, I mean, I got a few other, so

Leo Laporte (02:10:43):
There's a couple of possibilities. I I'm wondering when you got it, I don't do this anymore. But if it came with windows S windows 10.

Caller 9 (02:10:52):
Yes it does. Okay. You're in S mode and you wanna leave S mode.

Leo Laporte (02:10:57):
Yeah. You wanna leave S mode S mode. One of the reasons, one of so S which Microsoft will declines to tell us what the S stands for. Simple, safe, special, stupid. I don't know. It was designed to be more secure and only allow you to download apps from the Microsoft app store.

Caller 9 (02:11:19):
Oh.

Leo Laporte (02:11:20):
And that be, guess what doesn't include, include Chrome. So the solution to this is, and the nice thing is it's very quick and easy. Turn off S mode, and then it'll be a normal windows tablet, and you'll be able to put crumb on it. Just like he does do on any other windows.

Caller 9 (02:11:37):
I don't wanna turn off ES mode. Cause when I tried it didn't want to,

Leo Laporte (02:11:42):
It said, but what do you wanna do that for? Why would you want, why would you ever wanna turn off ES mode? Okay. So you, you, you do this in by, at your system, in the activation area.

Caller 9 (02:11:59):
Okay. That's down here on the lower left.

Leo Laporte (02:12:00):
Yeah. Control panel settings system activation. Right. And you'll see a switch out of S so let's see in the, oh, the boy they do make this complicated, by the way, I should warn you. Switching out of S mode is one way you can never go back. Okay. Oh, can't no, no. It's one way. Although you could, if you save the if you reinstall, I think it'll reinstall as S mode. I believe. I don't know.

Caller 9 (02:12:29):
Okay. Well, let's get out of S mode because I don't feel

Leo Laporte (02:12:33):
Anyway, there is a section that says, switch windows 11 pro, which is not what you wanna do, but, but there's a button that says go to the store and then you go to the store and that's where you switch out of S mode. Isn't that ironic?

Caller 9 (02:12:47):
Isn't that ironic now how I've got my, I click the little windows thing and it's got I don't see the store right here, but it's probably down this whole list of things, right?

Leo Laporte (02:13:02):
Microsoft. Yeah. You can actually go just open the store. Which if you hit windows key and type STO R E you'll get it. And you,

Caller 9 (02:13:09):
Yeah, well I've got it. Microsoft store.

Leo Laporte (02:13:11):
Yeah. And then search for S mode or switch out of S mode. And it's kind of like, you're installing an app. And then so you find switch out of S mode and you press the get button. Like you're installing an app, right. Except you're not what you're doing is you're turning off S mode, which is a very quick and simple thing to do. You don't, even as you turns out, you have full windows installed. You're just gonna flip a switch,

Caller 9 (02:13:36):
Switch outta S mode.

Leo Laporte (02:13:37):
Yeah. And press the, get, get it.

Caller 9 (02:13:41):
Yeah. Switch out S mode. You may wanna think,

Leo Laporte (02:13:43):
Oh my God. Thank you, Microsoft. Nobody wants S mode. Nobody. I think they were hoping that kids would want it like a, like a Chromebook, like in schools, even there, they turn it off. I think they stopped doing it. I think maybe not.

Caller 9 (02:13:59):
It is down for free jet. And then if it has a list of features. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:14:02):
It seems like you're getting something. You're not, it's like a registry entry. They're gonna switch, flip a switch. That's all.

Caller 9 (02:14:08):
Okay. Well, how do I get outta it? I don't see anybody

Leo Laporte (02:14:12):
Get

Caller 9 (02:14:12):
It. Oh, debt. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:14:13):
You're like, you're buying it, but you're not. I know, I know this is Microsoft logic. This is just the way they do it, but now you can put Chrome on there and anything else on there.

Caller 9 (02:14:25):
Oh, okay. So I just access Chrome from, from edge. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:14:29):
Just like you were go like you were doing at this time. It won't say no, you can't do that. Why would you ever, why would anybody ever wanna do things?

Caller 9 (02:14:37):
I've been pulling my hair out over this.

Leo Laporte (02:14:39):
No, forget about it.

Caller 9 (02:14:43):
Okay. Well there's, this will get me through I'll. I'll I'll let you talk to other people because I have some things that I'll probably burden the duke squad with later, but this was driving me nuts. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:14:54):
I don't blame you. No, I'm glad you called. Cause I think you're not alone. And that's a cute little device. I love the way the pen stows in the, I know

Mikah Sargent (02:15:00):
I like it too.

Leo Laporte (02:15:01):
It's not the fastest thing out there. It's a penny and gold processor and stuff, but you know, it's a cute little device. If it, if it's fast enough for what you want, do I think that's a good choice, Glen, on the line from Los Angeles, Leo Laport, the tech. Hi Glen.

Caller 10 (02:15:16):
Hi Leo. How are

Leo Laporte (02:15:17):
You? I'm great. How are you?

Caller 10 (02:15:20):
I couldn't be any better. Except I get too many emails. If I don't clear my box out on a daily basis, it accumulates up to 400 emails. Wow. 50% or which are emails I don't need or want. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:15:32):
So you're in the, in box zero club. You like to have nothing in your inbox?

Caller 10 (02:15:38):
No, I, I just want to have all my emails, unread. Yeah. So literally I put 'em I put 'em into the junk box. I try to whatever I do. They keep coming back. How do I fix that?

Leo Laporte (02:15:52):
Whatever I do. They keep, keep pulling me in. Exactly. Yeah. Honestly, I think this is sort of a problem with email. It's one of the reasons I don't, I no longer, you know, if you wanna reach me, Mikah, do you send me an email? No

Mikah Sargent (02:16:06):
Way.

Leo Laporte (02:16:08):
It's not the most efficient way to reach me. Cuz I get so many and stuff gets lost in the pile. And it's a pile. I am not of the inbox. Zero religion. There are people you look like the kind type that might be. I

Mikah Sargent (02:16:20):
Look like the kind that would, but no, I, I just, it's

Leo Laporte (02:16:24):
Too hard.

Mikah Sargent (02:16:24):
1500 unread emails and it just doesn't affect.

Leo Laporte (02:16:26):
So the secret with email, in my opinion is

Caller 10 (02:16:32):
I'm on, I'm on Ben and needles.

Leo Laporte (02:16:34):
Yeah. You're dying. Right? What, what program do you use for email? What do you use?

Caller 10 (02:16:38):
I'm using the, the iOS email that comes it's just called

Leo Laporte (02:16:42):
Mail iOS. No, that's good. What you, the reason I'm ask is cuz there's different terminology. Gmail calls them filters. No. What? Yeah, I think they call it what? No. What does Gmail call it? No, I can't remember rules or something. Labels that's it? Which is really a bad name for it. Apple mail calls, it filters. Sometimes they call it mail rules, but the secret is pre-procesing your email. I, as it's coming in and writing the right rules and I'll give you a few rules when we come back. Cuz there are some rules that I use that I think save a lot of time and then you're gonna have to make some of your own. But hang on. Leo Laport

Leo Laporte (02:17:28):
Rules are the key. My wife who also has a lot of email and can't doesn't have the luxury I do of not reading it cuz she's running the business. Got it. So she has many, many, many, many folders. Again with, with Gmail, you'd call 'em labels. You call 'em folders with apple mail. So make folders for like for instance, I have folders for family folders for clients. You know, you might even have a, if a, do a lot of business with somebody, a whole folder just for an individual client, but make folders sure. As a way of thinking about how do I wanna organize my mail and then you make rules, you can easily do it by going to a message that would typify that rule. Let's say I have a, I wanna have a Mica folder. I go to a message from Mikah, right?

Leo Laporte (02:18:13):
Click the message. And it even says make a rule from this message and you're gonna make a rule based on it could be a variety of things. It could be almost anything. The contents in the mail, the two, the from, or the subject most commonly you do it on subject or from, but here's a trick. Here's come blood tricks. I have one is I do it on. Okay. I, I don't know if apple mail will do this or not. My email server will do it where you say, if this person's not in my contact list, maybe make it, maybe put it differently. If this person is in my contact list, put that in a more important folder. That's like in important person. Got it, got it. If this, if, if I have, if I see an email that has unsubscribe in the body, I immediately move that to a mailing list folder.

Leo Laporte (02:19:02):
That's a big culprit. Right? Got it. Stuff that you thought you didn't subscribe to, but they say you did, or maybe accidentally did put those all in the mailing list folder. I will filter and I don't know if apple mail will do this. They have quite a few capabilities, but I don't think they have this. I could, you can filter on nation of origin. I don't want any email in Chinese cuz I can't read it. So I just eliminated. Sure, sure. So that's essentially in, in a nutshell, that's the trick is to write rules so that before you even open it, you've already got the mail kind of presorted for you.

Mikah Sargent (02:19:41):
It's important to know that.

Caller 10 (02:19:42):
So I get a,

Mikah Sargent (02:19:43):
Go ahead. Go ahead.

Caller 10 (02:19:45):
Oh no, no go Michael, were

Mikah Sargent (02:19:47):
You? I, I just wanted to let you know that if you're doing this from an iPhone, you will need to go to the browser, icloud.com and log in and then go to your mail in order to be able to

Leo Laporte (02:19:57):
Do it on the Mac.

Mikah Sargent (02:19:58):
Yeah. Unless you have a Mac, in which case you can do it there on the iPhone itself. It does not let you create these rules.

Leo Laporte (02:20:03):
Yeah. The other thing that's important is remember the rule go in order. So it's like a funnel you do. So like there's

Caller 10 (02:20:13):
Some, it's like doing a sort on a, on a, like doing a sort on an X Excel database

Leo Laporte (02:20:17):
Precisely. Oh, if you understand that your goal you're good.

Leo Laporte (02:20:20):
That's exactly right. Yeah. Okay. So the order of the sort matters, right? So in the same way, the order, the rules matters. So you might want to do, like for instance, I have rules up front like that, that no Chinese rule is right up front. There are a few people I send me junk mail, you know, I'm, I can't get off their dad joke, mailing list or whatever I put their address. And I say, if it comes from this person, just put it aside. You can have it go right to trash if you want.

Caller 10 (02:20:48):
So, so how do, how do you get to the rule piece of it? You say I right. Click on the email. So let's say let's, let's use a simple thing. I'm in, I'm in the contracting and building business. So let's say I get a home Depot junk mail from home Depot as a marketing thing. Not one of my bills. I get that in. I can right. Click on that and say what?

Leo Laporte (02:21:07):
So you've got it open a in front of you, right? Mikah?

Mikah Sargent (02:21:09):
Yeah. Does

Leo Laporte (02:21:10):
It have a right click make a rule? It doesn't no. Yeah. This is the promise. I use so many different mail programs. Not all of 'em have the CAD capabilities. So you cannot just click on an email and say, make a rule outta this

Mikah Sargent (02:21:22):
Email. No, it's not as that's

Leo Laporte (02:21:23):
A real failing. That's terrible. So that means you have to go into rules, which is in the, and what do they call it? Rules or filters.

Mikah Sargent (02:21:33):
They actually call it rules. Okay. So yeah, preferences. And then there's a rules option and you'll see that. And I, even if you're on your Mac I do recommend doing this on icloud.com because sometimes the Mac will only, well,

Leo Laporte (02:21:46):
Only if your mail is going through iCloud.

Mikah Sargent (02:21:48):
Yes, this is.

Leo Laporte (02:21:49):
So if you're not getting mail from MyCloud, that's not gonna help you at all. So,

Caller 10 (02:21:54):
So I have three, I have three mail sources to combine. I have a Gmail and outlook and an iCloud,

Leo Laporte (02:21:59):
Hold on a second. We're gonna come back. So I'm gonna help you here.

Leo Laporte (02:22:10):
I think Jeremiah just wants to play some disco. Oh, Leo Laport, the tech I, our disco DD deep B Barto segment coming up in about 15, but that's okay. A little extra disco. Doesn't hurt. We were on the line with Glen and I'm gonna spend more time with Glen on this because this is universal, which is email. I'm getting flooded with email. What do I do about it? And the specifics will vary depending on who you're using for email email program, you're using, for instance, as I said, if you're using Gmail in the browser, they don't even call it Ru well, they think they do. They have a funny,

Mikah Sargent (02:22:51):
I just checked and they call it filters,

Leo Laporte (02:22:53):
Filters. And then, but you're adding labels. You're actually not really filtering. In fact, Gmail has a unique ability to put the same mail into multiple labels. Yeah. Which is weird, which can

Mikah Sargent (02:23:04):
Also complete least circumvent labels. You don't,

Leo Laporte (02:23:06):
You can just do filters. Okay. So for, for Glen, he's using apple mail and he, you said, Glen, you have mail coming from three different email providers.

Caller 10 (02:23:18):
Yeah. Gmail, outlook and iCloud. And so I have a total right now looking at my inbox of 446 emails of which I, I have to go through and sort what I do is I click one at a time. I do it at like two in the morning. So I can't have any phone calls, no distractions. And I delete a hundred emails at a time. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:23:37):
I remember when Michael Powell was chairman of the FCC. I interviewed him, he was carrying a Blackberry at the time. This is many years ago on his belt. And, and one of the features of Blackberry was email. You could actually get email in your Blackberry, said, what do you use that for? He says, I use it to delete email so that before I get to the office, I've deleted 90% of the mail cuz I it's worthless. And this was 20 years ago. Right? So it's even more of a problem. Now the really the most useful thing and learn about emails, how to use these filters rules. Sometimes they call 'em rules. Sometimes they call 'em filters that will, before you even see the mail sorted out into folders. So you were saying off the year, you're saying one of the pro thing is you get you you're a contractor. So you get emails are two kinds from home Depot, you get bills. Yes. But you also get offers. And this is one of the biggest problems. This is one of the biggest problems with emails. Some is half the email's junk. Half of it's not.

Mikah Sargent (02:24:34):
It's okay to use the unsubscribe button too. Emails down, usually at the down at the very bottom of the email, there's a button or a link that you can click to unsubscribe. And this, of course it takes, look, you're gonna take a vacation for a week in order to take care of this. But I pretty liberally use that unsubscribe button.

Leo Laporte (02:24:50):
It's good to unsubscribe for sure

Caller 10 (02:24:52):
You do. Right. All

Leo Laporte (02:24:53):
Right. Yeah. It's good to unsubscribe subscribe. Yeah. Whenever you think about it, a lot

Caller 10 (02:24:56):
Of, a lot of 'em don't gimme that

Leo Laporte (02:24:58):
A lot of 'em don't that option though. So this home Depot, this home Depot one probably is solvable with that filter I mentioned, which is look in the body of the email. If the word UN subscribe occurs, you don't wanna delete it. Cuz maybe it's a by accident. I don't know. Maybe somebody's written you an email and says unsubscribed. That seems unlikely. Move it into the mailing letter mailing list folder. And every once in a while you check that you, but, but probably in all likelihood marketing emails come from a different address dot home depot.com than bills dot home depot.com. It might be service@homedepot.com or bills. So look at the email address specifically and you can filter on that specifically. So if it's a bill, it probably is a different address than the marketing email. So look at that from address and filter on the, from address. One of the tricks I use, not every email program allows this, but is to say if this person's in my contact list, that should go in an important folder. Cause I know that person

Caller 10 (02:26:01):
Got it. And if it's not and that'll be in,

Leo Laporte (02:26:06):
Go ahead.

Caller 10 (02:26:07):
How do I get, how do I get to that filter though? That's the question?

Leo Laporte (02:26:10):
I don't know if apple mail allows it. I use that on fast mail and I'm not sure. Do you see a filter? Which if it's in the contact list, this is by the way this, it doesn't do it. So third party mailing programs. I use mail mate on the Mac, which will that mail made is a very nice I think it's 50 bucks email program. That's quite good. That will, that has

Caller 10 (02:26:31):
I, I pay, I pay 500 bucks. I pay 500 bucks.

Leo Laporte (02:26:35):
Why would mail made is not as elegant as apple mail, but it, but when it comes to this, it's got, it's a power tool. It has another feature like which is templates. You probably write the same email a lot. Thanks for your request for proposal. Here's my suggest, blah, blah, blah. And you probably write that a lot. You can have a template for that. And that's another reason I used mail mate. So mail mate is paid program that instead you use instead of apple mail, it has much better L filtering it's from F R E R O n.com little link, free.com. We'll put a link in the show notes, but it will let, it will let you filter on. I believe I should check this to make sure, but I believe it'll let you filter on contact list. And then that's nice because if some, if you do wanna get mail from somebody, you add them to the list.

Leo Laporte (02:27:26):
You're, it's not gonna go to spam. It's gonna go into an important folder and conversely email from somebody you don't know. And maybe that second, that second filter comes after that. Right. Then maybe that's the first filter we were talking off the air about the order of filters is important. When you make a filter, you'll notice this, it says you have a choice after the filter is executed. Do you want me to do more filters or do you want me to stop? And so just like your Excel sorts, you can sort once, or you can have another sort after the first sort. And that's another choice in the filters. Learning how to use email filters, I think is, is basically vital to being able to continue to use email. It's such a terrible,

Caller 10 (02:28:08):
Is there, is there like a YouTube? Is there like a YouTube or something?

Leo Laporte (02:28:11):
No, we should make one. I used to do a show called what was it inside? Mac? What? Hands on Mac, hands on Mac.

Mikah Sargent (02:28:21):
I, I, we do have links that we'll put in the show notes to the mail user guide specifically to the part creating rules and also Gmail's own guide for creating filters. So those will be in the show notes for you to just pop into directly and be able to see what you can create. But I know you're looking for kind of, oh, here are the top 10 filters that, that we use.

Leo Laporte (02:28:40):
And it's very specific. Of course. Yeah. I'm, I'm wondering if I did a hands on Mac on this. I talk about it a lot. I, if I didn't, I should do a special episode because over the years, in order to make email useful, I get more email than the average bear cuz you know, my email address has been around for 20 years and people kind of know, I even have standard response that canned responses I'll send out and all sorts of stuff. It's the only way to do it. But filtering is job one. Absolutely.

Caller 10 (02:29:09):
So, and filter's not something I ever even thought about. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:29:13):
Well you're doing it. You're just doing it by hand in the middle of the night. Yes,

Mikah Sargent (02:29:16):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:29:19):
Exactly. There is a rule of thumb with computer. If you do anything more than twice automated.

Caller 10 (02:29:24):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:29:25):
Yeah. Right. And you you're a spreadsheet guy. So you know that if you do anything more, more than a few times, it pays to spend the time to make it automatic.

Caller 10 (02:29:35):
That's great. Great conversation. I, I love everything you do. I love how unbelievably great you are with all of the callers and just your attitude, your tonality and how you treat people is just, it's an inspiration to us all on how to treat people. And I'm grateful for that.

Leo Laporte (02:29:50):
Aw Glen, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. That's very nice of you have a great day.

Caller 10 (02:29:56):
That's true. Take care. You too.

Leo Laporte (02:29:57):
Thank you. I'm gonna cry now. You better take over Michael.

Mikah Sargent (02:30:00):
I know that was very sweet. I, I got a little choke. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:30:04):
Yeah. On your, the best part about doing this show. Anybody who's been using for computers for a while and kind of understands how to use computers for a while, realizes that most people are stuck with the most complex stuff and have no idea what to do. Yep. My, my, my computer won't let me download Chrome. What the hell or, or my phone turns off its screen in six seconds and I have the so much empathy for people because it's, it is crazy. And it's evolved over time. You know, sometimes they think people, your age, millennials, you grew up with computer. You should have no trouble with it. That's not the case either. Yeah. In fact, I would submit, I, I was talking an old friend, Richard Hart who used to do a TV show on CNET about computers. And he's now teaching in college. And I said, oh, your students must be computer litera. He said, no, they're worse because we started and we started in computers. We had to learn how to use it. Cause nobody, we gotta be, figure it out. Cuz there was nowhere to go. It wasn't easy.

Mikah Sargent (02:31:09):
Right

Leo Laporte (02:31:10):
Kids today, they grew up with you. Know's much

Mikah Sargent (02:31:12):
Obscurity laid over the top.

Leo Laporte (02:31:13):
Yeah. There's so much on top of it. They never get to see underneath the hood. That's why it's great to see somebody 10 years old learning computer programming. That's really exciting. Dick D Bartolo coming up next.

Leo Laporte (02:31:35):
So the best, the best part of this, when we, when we got this studio, my thought was gonna be, this was, these were, this was a storefront. Was that we would have people pressing their nose against the window and all that. But what I didn't know, and I would now know, but I didn't know at the time is because this is a north facing window. I think it's north facing. Let me think. No, no, I'm sorry. West facing window that once the sun starts going down, it's shining right in this window. And so we ended up building these porthole to cut down the light and then it's got these treatments, it's got three or four layers of treatments. So you can see out,

Mikah Sargent (02:32:16):
But people

Leo Laporte (02:32:16):
Are, but nobody can see it. And it just looks like a mirror. So you see people walking by and they don't know what's going. Occasionally people would press their nose against it, but in a way, but still I like the idea of that. In fact, when we first started using this studio I did a show from here, we call the living room set. And when we first designed this set, I had the chairs as you would in normal studio in side and the camera's pointing in and it was too shallow. And somebody said, you know, you just turn it around, have the cameras pointing out. So you have all this depth behind you, which is much more interesting. Right? So that's why it's facing this way. But then somebody sent me an email saying, you know, I saw, I watched somebody walk by with a spoon in his hand, obviously going to lunch on the show. And he was very upset. Wow. And I said, well, that's the

Mikah Sargent (02:33:03):
Point? Yeah. People are working in the background. That's actually how we used to do it in the newsroom. We, the camera faced out towards the newsroom where all the writers were working. People would get up, get their coffee in the background. And it just was an interesting thing and made everything feel more alive

Leo Laporte (02:33:17):
That was invented by can Canadian guy named Moses what's his name? Moses

Mikah Sargent (02:33:25):
Maple

Leo Laporte (02:33:26):
Namer of it was city TV. I think that was his name. But he, yeah, he found his city TV was the first independent station in Canada in Toronto. And he came up with a concept of the opens studio that you see now everywhere. And I actually went up to city TV and took a lot of pictures of the original open studio when he first set it up. I remember reading about it at the time. Every desk had a drop where you could put a camera, lights, everything like in the floor. Wow. So that's, that's why we have those drops. Yeah. All over our studio. We had 'em here too, where you could open up the floor and there'd be a camera drop in there so that everything could be wired. And then the other thing, John came up with this, this rotated so that you, so what you did, and this is how soap operas work. They have sets all around a central camera position. So you can have many sets in one studio and then you just RO so you rotate, the TD would rotate in this thing around.

Mikah Sargent (02:34:25):
That's really cool.

Leo Laporte (02:34:26):
Isn't that awesome. That's really cool. And so, so, so it gave us this set, which is the round table set. It gave us the living room set over here. You can't see it, but there's this set behind here that has this time tunnel behind it. There's my, my office is almost identical to this office right there. This is the tech news weekly set for the news show. And this was the radio corner. So we had all those sets.

Mikah Sargent (02:34:51):
This is how I pictured TWiT looking the way.

Leo Laporte (02:34:56):
Yes. Is how it should look. If those, if those Ponzi schemers hadn't bought the building out from under us, this was the most amazing studio. The only incandescent lights in the whole studio were these for decorative lights. We had incandescent lights. Oh the gear light incandescent. Oh, that kept burning out. That was a bad choice. That was just a bad choice. This was a whole, oh, is that it was halogen. Okay. This crappy old table. We had forever. That table's funny. We finally replaced it. I did I stood on it and danced and that broke it. Oh no. Burke had to reinforc it. Yeah. But we wanted something funky. I didn't want it to look too. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Listeners of this program get an ad free version. If they're members of club TWiT $7 a month gives you ad free versions of all of our shows plus membership in the club, TWiT discord, a great clubhouse for TWiT listeners. And finally the TWiT plus feed with shows like Stacy's book club, the untitled Lenox show, the GIZ fizz and more go to twi.tv/club TWiT. And thanks for your support upside down. Right side up and every year in between it's it's Dickie, Barolo mad magazines, mad writer. And our is with hello, Dickie D oh, wait a minute. I have a button to push. I am very lax today. Hello, Dickie D welcome.

Dick DeBartolo (02:36:29):
Thank you. You good? Everything fine there.

Leo Laporte (02:36:33):
Yeah, I think so. It was like 80 degrees yesterday. Oh yeah. It was really nice. Oh wow. It was beautiful. Summer's here. This time is right for fighting in the streets. Other than that. No. How are things in Disneyland?

Leo Laporte (02:36:45):
Things I hear COVID back. I hear COVID S return. Yeah.

Dick DeBartolo (02:36:49):
It's it's terrible. Yeah. I mean, we went down to one and a half percent and now I think it's like back up to 15 or something,

Leo Laporte (02:36:56):
But the hospitalizations aren't yet.

Dick DeBartolo (02:36:58):
No, no, that that's the ones thing is that hospitalizations have not grown at all.

Leo Laporte (02:37:04):
Oh, I'm not gonna,

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:05):
I guess people who are getting it a vaccinated and, and are dealings

Leo Laporte (02:37:09):
At home. Yeah. I hope that's the case. Are people wearing mask again in Manhattan?

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:14):
Half and half? Yeah. For a while. People seem not to, but lately I noticed that a lot more people are starting to wear

Leo Laporte (02:37:23):
Masks. It's funny. We went through this period of like, and we're still in this, by the way. It's over. It's over. It's over.

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:29):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:37:30):
Yeah. And then all of a sudden it comes back. It's not over. No, it's very

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:34):
History repeats

Leo Laporte (02:37:35):
Itself. It's very difficult. So Dick always joins us every week to give us an update from Disneyland in Manhattan. Yeah. So

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:42):
This is not a, yeah. It's not a wacky gadget. Yes. And, and as a matter of fact, it's from anchor. So we all like anchor love

Leo Laporte (02:37:49):
Anchor.

Dick DeBartolo (02:37:50):
So anchor has started another brand called anchor may. And they had an event in New York on Tuesday night to introduce a 3d printer that was going on Kickstarter on Wednesday. And I met with Eric, the lines global head of anchor communications. And I said, you know, why are you doing a 3d printer? And, and he said, anchor's philosophy. And this is kind of interesting is when a new segment of the consumer market opens is not jump in with a lookalike product. So like with vacuums, we waited, examined the market and thought, well, you know, we should get in now because we can do this. And he said, with 3d printers, we kept examining the marketplace. And people didn't like how long it took to set it up. Yeah. How long it took to print. You have to

Leo Laporte (02:38:45):
Calibrate it every time.

Dick DeBartolo (02:38:46):
Yes. Yes, exactly. So we decided we would come in with one, you could set up in 10 to 15 minutes that you could speed the printing up, especially if it was not precision could, could speed it up five to seven times. What's available now. And also we installed an HD camera that is looking at the print job all the time. And if it sees anything go wrong, you can always be watching it. But if it sees something out of line, it starts to print. Oh, good. It doesn't print it.

Leo Laporte (02:39:15):
Doesn't print something of plastic printing, you know, Mr. Potato,

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:20):
I said, and what's the price? And he said, well, it's gonna go on kick's daughter at 4 99.

Leo Laporte (02:39:25):
Wow.

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:27):
Well, Leo, it went on and in an hour, in three hours they had passed a million and a half dollars. Oh my

Leo Laporte (02:39:34):
Gosh.

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:35):
Now they're up to the 5 99 print, but they're up to four and a quarter million dollars.

Leo Laporte (02:39:43):
Wow.

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:45):
I have never seen a Kickstarter project run like this.

Leo Laporte (02:39:52):
It's interesting. Cuz anchor's an established company presumably with resources.

Dick DeBartolo (02:39:58):
Exactly. Now the, this is by now get them in October. So I should point that out. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But people seemed really enamored with this printer and are jumping in and want

Leo Laporte (02:40:12):
One. It's so funny. 3D printing was gonna be the next big thing, right? That was years ago. Yes. And then everybody got one and realized, oh this is no fun

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:20):
Takes too long.

Mikah Sargent (02:40:21):
No, they break very easily. All

Leo Laporte (02:40:24):
Sorts of things mean we all loved the idea of 3d printed objects. If we could make them. And I have quite a few here in the studio, but I think it kind of died out. Well, I'd be interested if this, if this is really all it says it is. Yeah.

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:37):
Well, you know what? I got this, it was very funny because this morning what was this smart tech analyst it's called 3d printing reach $10.6 billion in 2021. So that's oh, that's not a bad. So was still buying all right. Oh yeah. Up to 18%.

Leo Laporte (02:40:56):
I have to point out this. Isn't the cheapest 3d printer out there.

Dick DeBartolo (02:40:59):
No, not at all.

Leo Laporte (02:41:00):
Yeah.

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:01):
Not at

Leo Laporte (02:41:01):
All. And I wonder Hank does anchor make stuff or they BR label like Belk and label stuff. Other people make, I don't know.

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:08):
You know, I I do not have the answer to that could like

Leo Laporte (02:41:12):
Anchor off. I buy a ton of it.

Dick DeBartolo (02:41:15):
Oh. So do I? Yeah. So do I, and, and when you see the name on it, there you figure it's gonna be first, all, they have incredible customer service. People emailing say, you know, I bought the thing that you recommended and didn't work. Right. And he said they, they replaced it in three days. And so there's a, there's a, a lot of value in, in the name. And, and it's entirely possible that, that they go to a company and say, you know what, you're building now. We want this done to it. We want this done to it. We want a HD camera put in there. I mean that, that's certainly entirely possible.

Leo Laporte (02:41:49):
3D printing is one of those things where there is an industrial use where it's really high and, and you know, people are serious about it. And then there's this hobbyist and this is at the hobbyist level price, hobbyist stuff, where it's just kind of fun and you print things and they, they look a little funky and 3d printed, but they're, you know, it's cool. You can make your own physical object with a computer. 

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:11):
I know I, I have a, a, a friend who's a like 90 and he went to the dentist and needed a new tooth.

Leo Laporte (02:42:18):
Oh, dentist are using him now. Yeah.

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:19):
Yes. And the dentist said can you sit here for an hour because I'll print you new tooth.

Leo Laporte (02:42:26):
Isn't that amazing with a prayer? Yeah, yeah.

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:29):
Yeah. But he used the red stuff. So I'm not sure it was up with that.

Leo Laporte (02:42:33):
You wanna make sure you use the tooth color

Dick DeBartolo (02:42:36):
Plastic. Yes. The tooth color. Right. So I was just, I was just making potty hats and we didn't have time to change the filaments.

Leo Laporte (02:42:43):
Somebody printed. This is a LIC from Dr. Who I'm, I'm holding up here. Did you do that, John? Yeah. Oh, this was our, this was something our, on our printer. We have one. Oh, okay. Well, we had one. What happened to that, John? Oh, was a maker by, yeah. It probably went, probably went with the father, Robert to ID Italy, but oh, now the Pope has his own treaty trail, but yeah. I mean, it's kind of cool, but after you play with it a little bit, I don't know what you do with it. No. Yeah. I, I have no useful one. Yeah. But I'm very, just wanna use it to replace things at break in my home, you know, knobs you've got, well, if you've got vacuum clip breaks or something, those or what I want to use it for. Yeah. If you have old gadgets where a gear goes.

Leo Laporte (02:43:30):
Yeah. Just print a gear. Yeah. Yeah. So well the price now it's gone up a little bit because they sold out all the 4 99 1. It's now 5 99. And it says you won't get it till November. Oh, the that's been pushed back. That's been pushed to to the MSRP will be seven to 59. It might be worth waiting, you know, to see 150 bucks more to see what the reviews say. I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I've had such bad experiences buying stuff on Kickstarter. Have you ever had bad stuff? Bought bad stuff? Well, you know what? I don't think I've ever backed a kickstart. Really. I had to be cut off because I bought so many. Oh man. I was such a sucker for everything on Kickstarter that finally I, somebody, somebody intervened and said, you know, Leo probably stop.

Leo Laporte (02:44:24):
Don't buy any more things. Dick Debar told, if you wanna read about it, Dick's got a link. Just go to GI whiz.biz. That's his website. G I Z E w I Z dot B I Z click the blue button that says the GIW visits, the tech guy. And you'll, you'll see all about it. There's video and, and stuff about this new anchor 3d printer. I'm so tempted. You also can play the what the heck. I know. See do it. No, the studio. I thought you were supposed to sell me some. Oh, sorry. Don't do it. Dick's also got the, what the heck is it contest a chance to win an autograph copy of mad, mad magazine? Lots of other stuff there at the website, including his podcast. GI wiz.tv. Thank you. Dickie. Do you have a great week? Okay, buddy. See you next week.

Leo Laporte (02:45:08):
See you next week. See you. Thank you Mike. As Sargent always a pleasure to have tech guy two, I'm gonna make you answer more calls. Sounds good. Next time. It's all Mikah all the time. Cuz that's the goal. We want to get you up to speed so I can take a time off or something. Thank you all for being here. Thanks to Jeremiah for being our musical director today. Kim Shaffer, our phone angel. Thanks. Most of all to you for listening, we really appreciate it. Have a great geek week. Well that's it for the tech eye show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget TWiT T w I T it stands for this week@techandyoufinditattwi.tv, including the podcasts for the show. We talk about windows and windows weekly Macintosh on Mac break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watch iOS today's 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.