The Tech Guy Episode 1890 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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Leo Laporte (00:00:06):
This. Is TWiT. Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my tech guy podcast. This show originally aired on the premier networks on Sunday, May 1st, 2022. Happy Mayday. This is episode 1,890. Enjoy tech eye podcast is brought to you by Melissa poor data. Quality can cost organizations an average of 15 million each year. 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, start playing in the API sandbox 24 7. Get started today with 1000 records clean for free melissa.com/twit and buy Acronis. Keep your digital world safe from all threats. With the only cyber protection solution that delivers a unique integration of data protection and cybersecurity all in one Acronis cyber protect home office, formerly Acronis true image. Go to go.acronis.com/techguy. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, how are you? Leo Laport you the tech guy, time to talk computers.
Leo Laporte (00:01:20):
The internet home theater did digital photography. We've got your smart phones here. We got your smart watches there. We've got the augmented reality, the virtual reality, the real reality we got all that stuff. Bitcoin NFTs, all that stuff. A anything with a chip in it, or I guess if you're talking the internet Bitcoin and NFTs, it doesn't have a chip in it, but its chip derived. Anything chip derived eighty eight eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number eighty eight eight eight two seven five five three six busy day ahead today. Sam will Sam coming up, our car guy, Chris Markot. Our photo guy will talk space with rod pile. He brought something up last week. I thought that was very interesting. The scientists who want to tell aliens where we are, Hey, over here. <Laugh> and it's kind of controversial, right?
Leo Laporte (00:02:19):
Two, two teams of astronomers are gonna send messages into to let aliens know that we're here. See, we've been listening for them for years, decades, really scanning the ether for radio signals from other planets, but we've never really made an attempt to contact the am. So now we're gonna do it. And you know, the only thing that reassures me in this is it it's space is big. It's really big. And there's very little chance that in fact, whatever we sent out will reach anybody for any reason. So I'm not gonna worry about it too much, but I gotta say, I understand why people are saying, Hey really? Is that a, that doesn't seems like maybe you shouldn't do that. I <laugh>, maybe that's a idea. Rod will join us a little later on. We talk about that and other there's lots of going on in the world of space these days and at home and at home, the city of Fort worth has decided now it would be a good time, make a little extra money on the side. They they're trying to think of what they could do. We could put a, a dog track in the basement, I guess have people bet. No, that's probably not good. So what they've done is they've put, they've built a Bitcoin mining room with three bit main, an minor S nine mining rigs. It'll run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And the climate rolled information technology wing of Fort worth city hall.
Leo Laporte (00:04:05):
Why not make a little money on the side? <Laugh> okay. I mean, honestly with three rigs, they're not spending a lot of money and they're also not gonna make a lot of money. They say it uses the same amount of is a household vacuum cleaner. <Laugh> okay. There's a little too much. If you ask me Bitcoin mania going on, I would just like to caution everyone once again, that Bitcoins and NFTs and web three, these are the buzzwords that Silicon valley wants you to sit up and pay attention to. How can I say this? They're they're speculative. It's like buying beanie babies. Okay. Now in the day you know, when people were buying beanie babies and putting 'em in the closet, no don't open them. Don't take the tags off. That was people saying, you know, someday these are gonna be worth something. Have you ever done that? Put something aside said someday, this Shera action figure mint in the box, that's gonna be worth something. So I'm putting that aside when you're a kid, maybe you're baseball cards. I'm gonna put that aside.
Leo Laporte (00:05:24):
That's fine. <Laugh> go ahead. Now. It'd be different. If you then went out and spent thousands of dollars on beanie babies with the idea that someday this is your retirement fund, cuz I, I I'm guessing, but I, I may be wrong, but I'm thinking those beanie babies are now worse, worth less than you paid for them. Even though they're mint in the box, that's called speculation. You're you're, you're guessing you're speculating that maybe the price will go up and you're gonna make money and that's what's going on with Bitcoin and it does go up, but it also goes down. It's not tied to anything. You could make the argument that like the stock market. Most of the things we invest in real estate, the stock market are also speculative. They go up and they go down, they're kind of tied to something, you know, real estate is property.
Leo Laporte (00:06:13):
It's, you know, you can use it while you're way for it to go up. And mostly it kind of goes up stocks, you know, they're tied sort of to the fortunes of the companies they represent. And so when the companies do well, the stock goes up, but it's still kind of speculative. I understand that. And which, and it doesn't stop me from putting money aside from my retirement, nor should it stop you, you, but I'm maybe drawing the line at Bitcoin mining rigs in the basement of the Fort worth city hall. I'm just <laugh>. I just, I don't know, get a, get a roulette wheel, just get a roulette wheel, invite some gamblers down.
Leo Laporte (00:06:53):
I, my only my complaint is how hard it's being hyped. And I want to point out that if you are a speculator, let's say you bought a lot of beanie babies. It would be in your interest to go around saying how great beanie babies were, how the future was in beanie babies. And boy, these beanie babies are really gonna worth be worth a lot of money someday, because if you do it well, enough, people will come to you and say, man, I gotta get in on that beanie baby thing. Can you sell me some of your beanie babies? And you go, whoa, I don't know. I love these beanie babies. Okay. Oh, I can part with one for $10,000. Thank you. The people hing it up. Stand the gain as, I guess what I'm saying, just mentioning, just mentioning, mentioning that. Do you like video games?
Leo Laporte (00:07:43):
Do you know somebody who does, there are people who say video games are like our art, like a novel or a painting or a symphony a symphony you know, composition, a Beethoven symphony they're art, and we should preserve them because really that's a, if you think about these video games are tied to, you know, your old Atari video console or your Sega Genesis. And when that goes away, you can't play the video game anymore. So Sony is building a game preservation team, a team that will try to preserve these works of art for future generations. This is like, you know, when motion pictures started, people didn't think of them as art. They were commerce, you know, and they haven't really done a lot to preserve them. Except in later years, we're starting to say, wait a minute, whoa, let's, you know, these early motion pictures, these are our sure technology's gone beyond that. But this is, this is somebody's creation. And in many respects are, are brilliant. We should preserve these. And so there's a great movement to preserve old film, which much of which was rotting away on film, stock and warehouses and so forth. Same thing with video games.
Leo Laporte (00:09:01):
And in the past it's been you know, amateurs, it's been been people like you and me enthusiasts, trying to preserve these games, writing what we call emulators that would play these games on modern hardware. And of course the companies that make the games are kind of, you know, trying to discourage that, calling it piracy. I don't think it was piracy. I think it was preserving, you know, who really is doing a good job and I gotta give them a lot of praise. The internet archive. Do you know about the internet archive, archive.org Guy named Bruce K a sold his startup company ways many, many moons ago to AOL that's how many moons ago it was made little money and said, I am gonna retire. And I'm gonna devote my life to preserving The internet, preserving this stuff that we are creating online and in games and so forth, a lot a nonprofit organization to preserve our history because it was, it's kind of, you know, a website goes down, it's gone, right? He has since preserved 681 billion webpages and more every day, all that's time, but not just webpages video games. You can even boot an, an old Macintosh computer. If you go to archive.org
Leo Laporte (00:10:28):
Podcasts, music In effect, he's preserving our culture culture that when you're right in the middle of it's throw away, it's disposable. Right? But as time goes by, you realize, no, we don't want to throw that out. That's that's in many ways, our history archive.org, if you haven't don't do it now, cuz you'll spend hours. Your, your life will <laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:10:54):
35 million books, 7.9 million homes and videos. Yes. They're preserving old movies, 14 million audio things, you know, podcasts and stuff. 2.3 million TV shows 839,000 games and other software programs, millions of images, concerts. It's brilliant. It's brilliant. Thank you. Brewster kale for doing that. And everybody who works at the archive because it's a nonprofit, there's no money in this. They're not selling it. They're they're letting anybody access it. And it's you, you know, if, if you, if, if you were gonna go on a desert island and you only had one, one website to take with you, that's the one it's effectively, it's becoming like the library of Congress, the, the archive. I mean, it's got everything from Canadian trade journals.
Leo Laporte (00:11:49):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:11:51):
To images from the Marshall space flight center. It's awesome to Donna the Buffalo, whatever that is. There's 1,013 items from Donna, the Buffalo <laugh>. I think those are concerts. I don't know. <Laugh> 88, 88 ask li maybe someday. One of my shows will be there eighty eight, eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number, website, tech guy labs.com. Let's get some questions and answers and suggestions going. What do you say next?
Leo Laporte (00:12:36):
So mud duck. We unfortunately when we built the brick house, you know, we took we got quite a few, I think, a more than a thousand donations to help us build it, which was wonderful. And I thank you. And each of you got a brick, they were actually little facade, bricks, little thin bricks. And fortunately <laugh> whenever our, whatever our contract, I didn't have anything to do with it. I, I absolved myself of all responsibility, our contractor Mord them onto plaster board throughout the hall. So you can go back and look at images affected one point. I think it's still on Google maps. There was a 3d you walk through where you could see all the bricks, but they were mortared to the wall. So when we were forced to move, then there's a story in itself. I'll tell someday we were forced to move outta the brick house, to this current studio.
Leo Laporte (00:13:27):
We took everything with us. All of the things that your money helped build, help, you know, basically made this happened. So none of that was lost, but many of the bricks were because they were, when you take 'em off the wall, the whole wall comes with the brick and you know, we investigated, well, what would it take to you know, with a wire whisk or something, get the plaster board and mortar off of those brick. We did quite a few, but it would've cost much, much more money. Here's an example. John is bringing me, this is pretty clean actually. So we took, we took these with us. And so we could, you know, this is actually a pretty good one. Most of 'em come off with a whole huge chunk of wall.
Jammer B (00:14:17):
We have a sample we're looking for it.
Leo Laporte (00:14:19):
So we saved a sample of these, a number of these. So for instance,
Leo Laporte (00:14:28):
I think this one actually was never mortared on. So this is what they looked like originally. Yeah, this was never murdered on. This was just this is what some people got. If you ordered your brick, you could also order a, a cheesy desk ornament, but this is what the bricks ended up. I think this is anyway. So we decided not to preserve them all <laugh> or re reorder them onto the new wall, cuz I've I felt like, well, the same thing's gonna happen. So that's essentially what happened to the bricks, but don't think that your contribution wasn't greatly appreciated. It helped us build it. Now let me tell you what happened to the brick house.
Leo Laporte (00:15:12):
So a company from San Diego called the patio company bought our, that whole building and it was attached that building next door to a restaurant and they told us, we're gonna turn the restaurant into a brew pub and we want to turn your space into the brewery. But until we do, we'd love you to stay for triple the rent and to which we politely declined. They had been told by our landlord, oh, don't worry, will never move out. They spent too much money on the studio. They were right about that. A quarter of one in a quarter million dollars on the studio. What he didn't understand is that studios are made to be moved there. It's just a set. So for instance, this whole thing behind me <laugh> I took, we took with us, oops. We took with us this desk, all of it was movable.
Leo Laporte (00:16:07):
So we took it and disappeared decamped to our new place. And as you know, I think if you watch our shows from today, they look very similar. Cuz the sets the same I missed the old place. I loved it and I felt bad that we had to move, but they, you know, they didn't give us much choice. Now it turns out, oh, it was a Ponzi scheme. The woman who ran the companies now in jail for 300 million in fraud and the old studio is now owned by the federal government. It's in receivership. So I'm hoping we can buy it back for a dollar that's that's my plan. Give me a phone. <Laugh> is this a teenager asking for a princess phone in her room or? Oh, I don't know. I don't know the song. Hello Kim Shaffer phone angel. Did you have a princess phone when you were young?
Kim Schaffer (00:16:59):
Not the princess phone. I had the, the clear one. They see all the inner workings. Ooh, fancy. And then it lit up when it, it lit up.
Leo Laporte (00:17:07):
Yeah. Yeah. It was just a clear princess phone.
Kim Schaffer (00:17:09):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:17:10):
Did you have it in your room? I did see this is parents be careful. <Laugh> cause sometimes you give your kids something and then it becomes their career <laugh> and, and little did your parents know that you would spend the rest of your life answering the phone? You know, what's so funny for radio
Kim Schaffer (00:17:25):
Shows in my real life. I hate talking on the phone. Me
Leo Laporte (00:17:27):
Too. Me too. Isn't that funny?
Kim Schaffer (00:17:29):
I text back. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:17:30):
Me too. Me. Isn't that so funny. I make very few phone calls, but all we do here is phone calls. Yeah. It's a little different this way though.
Kim Schaffer (00:17:37):
It is. I like talking to strangers, not people. I know. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:17:40):
Exactly. We get to meet really interesting people from all over the world. It's really kind of fun. So who should we meet first?
Kim Schaffer (00:17:47):
Well, let's go to Tom in LA. He wants to download some of his Instagram lives and I gave him a suggestion off the air, which I think might actually work for him. But thought you
Leo Laporte (00:17:58):
Might well, you better stay the line cuz I don't. I dunno what the answer is, honestly. Thank you Kim. Hello, Tom Leo. Leport the tech guy.
Caller 1 (00:18:07):
Hello Leo. Long time. I'm listener.
Leo Laporte (00:18:09):
Thanks caller. Thanks.
Caller 1 (00:18:12):
I have an archive of 30,000 photos that I took when I was working on ever lows, Raymond and I started an Instagram site and once a week I do a live interview and I cannot figure out how to download those approximately one hour our interviews,
Leo Laporte (00:18:30):
I would, I would frankly also save all those photos. What did you do when everybody loves Raymond?
Caller 1 (00:18:38):
I was a, a writer
Leo Laporte (00:18:39):
Producer. Nice. So you've got the history of, see, this is just what we were talking about. The internet archive history behind the scenes. I love behind the scenes stuff of a much beloved TV show. So I would try to save not only your, your reels and your stories, but I would try to save your images as well.
Caller 1 (00:19:00):
Yeah, well that, that's what motivat me. It motivated me. I started uploading them just to tell the story. So it's all.
Leo Laporte (00:19:08):
Oh yeah, What's the, what's the Instagram account cuz I wanna follow it. That's great.
Caller 1 (00:19:15):
Everyone of loves Raymond 360.
Leo Laporte (00:19:17):
Perfect. What a great name. Awesome. so there are, if you Google it a million tools to download stories from Instagram <affirmative>
Caller 1 (00:19:31):
Right. Well these aren't stories. These are my one. So every actually right after your show ends, I go live. Oh neat. And that's why I'm usually late for, because I'm listening to you a couple last
Leo Laporte (00:19:43):
<Laugh> don't be late <laugh>
Caller 1 (00:19:46):
But I, yeah, so I'll do an interview show I'll do alternating with a guest in the, on a guest and that's an hour long program. And so I thought, let me download it cuz I also want to make it, you know, do audio version only and also post it on YouTube. And I know its a different aspect ratio, but a lot of people that are,
Leo Laporte (00:20:04):
You should totally
Caller 1 (00:20:05):
Aren't aren't yeah, they aren't on Instagram necessarily so
Leo Laporte (00:20:09):
Well we've lost some of them like Doris May and Roberts and yeah, it'd be wonderful to have some of that stuff just forever. Yeah. Well,
Caller 1 (00:20:20):
I, I, I will say this because I always have my camera and I was a writer. It's probably the most documented yeah. Show in the history of TVs. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:20:30):
What does Ray Ramono think of the whole thing?
Caller 1 (00:20:34):
Ray we are very close friends, so
Leo Laporte (00:20:37):
Nice. He is. So he's supportive of this. Well, you
Caller 1 (00:20:39):
Know very much so, although he's not on Instagram or any social media, no matter how much I try and
Leo Laporte (00:20:45):
He's a wise wise, man, <laugh> nothing but hurt and pain follows. Good. So I, you know, this would be a great website, right? The, everybody loves Raymond 360 website. This is a permanent archive. I think this is so important. I love this idea. So so there are downloaders that will download your images, your stories, but how do you, so you're saying you do the interviews. Do you do them like as Instagram live?
Caller 1 (00:21:17):
Yeah, I saw And then it doesn't give the option to download no, some reason. And I try to do just a screen recording, which is clunky and it never gets through the full hour on my iPad. Oh. So I don't know if there's a copy. It, it feels like there has to be some code that someone that I can just past into a web browser or something.
Leo Laporte (00:21:43):
So you are doing the stream, this line from your phone, where are you streaming it from?
Caller 1 (00:21:50):
From, from an iPad.
Leo Laporte (00:21:51):
From an iPad. Instagram does not give you a way to save it. Their whole idea of this is it's well, you know, it's E and it's P thing. It's just you know but you can't, can you tell me now, cause I'm not an expert on this. Can you, if you're on Instagram, can you see this after the fact? Or can you only watch it live?
Caller 1 (00:22:14):
No, it saves it, but it's, it saves it, which is great, but it's only on Instagram, so right. I, I, you know, I want to down, I wanna be able to upload it to YouTube at a future date, so thank goodness it saves it.
Leo Laporte (00:22:28):
So there are, are downloaders that's the most important thing it saves it. So the next thing to do is to get a, so, and you, you can do this on a, a computer cuz Instagram will let you, if you're logged in, go to that computer, play back that video. And then there are video downloaders, you know, there's some for Mozilla, somebody's saying video, download helper for Mozilla. Instant Graham actually has a way to do it. I think even official way. Let me see the chatrooms coming up with a, a bunch of ways to do this. I really want you to do this. This is, this would be such a great thing to save. Yeah. Look at this Instagram help. It's at help.instagram.how do I save a live video on Instagram? My phones camera roll. Yeah. That's as you're doing it, hang on. I gotta take a break. Sam bull salmon car guy coming up. I'll help you off the air Says you've you're only able to save a live broadcast right after you've ended it. So at the end of your interview, you, you sh it is too late for previous ones, but for now at the end of your interview, there's a button that says, save it onto your camera, onto your
Caller 1 (00:23:37):
Yeah. And it, it doesn't that doesn't show up and I don't know what,
Leo Laporte (00:23:41):
Oh, that's weird. Yes. Maybe cuz there's so long.
Caller 1 (00:23:46):
I
Leo Laporte (00:23:47):
Don't know when, when it's on Instagram is the full interview there. They, they put the whole hour there. Hundred percent. Oh that's great. I didn't know. You could do that. I thought they were all short little, really things. So we're
Caller 1 (00:23:59):
All the stories are short, but the inter the live can be long. Yeah. You know the story. Yeah. So it's, I, I just feel like there's something, there's gotta be some code that yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:24:11):
Accesses it. Yeah. Yeah. Instagram doesn't want doesn't make it easy, but there is that's exactly when you're on the web, for instance, on instagram.com and looking at that video and I presume you could play it back in your browser, it's downloading to your computer. It's just not saving it. So what you want is an application that in the background goes, yeah, I got it. I got that packet. Okay. I got that one. Okay. Saving that one, got 'em all. And at the end, has you have the whole thing? You will have to watch the whole video, but it will essentially record it. And, and it's just as, it's almost as if you were taking a video of it with your camera, but you you're, you're doing it, you know, digitally in the, in the computer. So 4k download.com is, is one the chatroom's saying I think a lot of the YouTube downloaders will probably work as well. There's we've got a lot links here from the chat room. There's a Mozilla, as I said, add on called video, download helper. Downey do, are you in a Mac or PC?
Caller 1 (00:25:15):
I'm on a Mac.
Leo Laporte (00:25:15):
Yeah. Downey, D O w N I E is the king of Mac. Downloaders let me see if it will do Instagram Dow, N I E it's for YouTube <affirmative> but I think you could give it any URL <laugh> anyway, this 4k download sounds good. And this says specifically YouTube, but I think what it really is, is, you know, you're playing video on the screen in order to do that, the computer has to download the video, packet it by packet. The only difference is it does and save it. Here's another one, Insta dp.com. So there are quite a few of these.
Caller 1 (00:25:54):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:25:54):
So you need one of these programs and you probably don't wanna do it on the iPad. You wanna do it on a, on a Mac,
Caller 1 (00:26:01):
Right, right, right, right.
Leo Laporte (00:26:02):
And
Caller 1 (00:26:03):
The latest MacBook pro.
Leo Laporte (00:26:04):
Yeah. Perfect. And it'll save, what are you working on these days?
Caller 1 (00:26:09):
I do it actually a children's educational program called Mr. Mr. Clown TV. It's like a Muppets type. We do remote. Yeah. Remote, remote zooms to classrooms around the world. Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:26:22):
How cool Mr. Clown.Tv.
Caller 1 (00:26:25):
Mr. Clown.Tv. Yeah. We, we took advantage of the downside of COVID, which is teachers had to adopt, you know, this global technology instantly of zoom. Right. You know? Well, I mean, you know, you know, but all of a sudden we were able to reach every classroom in the world versus having to go to this
Leo Laporte (00:26:42):
Looks great. And this is your own thing.
Caller 1 (00:26:44):
This I am Mr. Clown. I am, I've been a puppeteer forever, but I don't, I don't talk about that. In public.
Leo Laporte (00:26:52):
No one knows your name. It's okay. No one knows <laugh> it's not
Caller 1 (00:26:56):
As cool. Yeah, no, it's not as cool. No, I'm not hiding it, but it's not as cool to say. And I have a clown puppet. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:27:01):
If you say I'm a puppeteer, I know people kind of act funny. I know, I know. Believe me. Yeah.
Caller 1 (00:27:05):
It Guitar, you know, I'm a rock star. Oh. And
Leo Laporte (00:27:09):
I have a clown puppet and I have a clown puppet. Exactly. Yeah.
Caller 1 (00:27:13):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:27:14):
Hey Tom, what a pleasure talking to you. I really want you to do this. This is just what I was talking about. You know, when these shows are on people, don't take it that seriously. You know, there's gonna to be fans, we'll videotape it and whatever, but you have all this stuff that never is aired. That is a record of it. I think it's worth, totally worth putting on the web.
Caller 1 (00:27:34):
I have hundreds of hours of scenes videos also. I'll I'll email you Leo and let you know if it worked out.
Leo Laporte (00:27:41):
Would you? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I'll email back if it does it with some other ideas.
Caller 1 (00:27:45):
Awesome. Thank you so much, Leo.
Leo Laporte (00:27:47):
My pleasure, Tom, take care. All right.
Caller 1 (00:27:50):
Bye. Bye. Bye.
Leo Laporte (00:27:52):
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Leo Laporte (00:31:30):
You're gonna love it. 24 7 world renowned support. So you're never at a loss, make sure your customer contacts up to date, try Melissa's APIs and the developer portal. It's easy to log on. Sign up, start playing in the I sandbox Melissa M E L I S S a.com/twi that gets started today with 1000 records, clean for free melissa.com/twit. Thank you, Melissa, for supporting the tech I show thank you for supporting us by using that address. Melissa.Com/Twit it's time to talk automotive technology with Sam bull Sam he's the principal researcher at guide house insights. His podcast wheel bearings is available everywhere. Podcasts are offered, and he joins us every week to talk about automotive technology. Sam, are you in a museum today? Where are you?
Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:23):
No, that is an image from just over two years ago. Now actually, when GM first announced their TM EV platform
Leo Laporte (00:32:35):
This is the, what they call the skateboard for their electric vehicles.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:40):
Yep. This is the skateboard for the new generation of electric vehicles. So it's their new battery systems, their new motors and also their new energy recovery system that they have.
Leo Laporte (00:32:49):
That's the region for the brakes kind of,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:51):
Or no, no, this actually is something different. So the, the, the break, the regenerative breaking is one form of energy recovery. That's recovering kinetic energy. And, you know, if you remember back you know, to your science classes in high school you may remember the, the term conservation of energy energy can either be created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed from one form to another. So you can have kinetic energy, which is the energy you get from motion, potential energy. So if you lift something up in the air and then, you know, then you have potential energy until you drop it. In which case, then it gets converted to kinetic energy. As it falls, you can have thermal energy, which is heat energy. You can have light energy, you can have all, there's a lot of different forms of energy.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:38):
And so you know, all EVs and all hybrids have used kinetic energy recovery, that's regenerative breaking, cuz it's converting that kinetic energy of the, the vehicle's motion back into electrical energy that it stores in the battery that it can then use later to propel the vehicle. Well. the other, you know, I also mentioned thermal energy or heat energy, and that's another form of energy that you can recover in an EV. And so let me step back just a little bit to internal combustion engines, internal combustion engines, you have a bunch of energy in a liquid fuel that you burn. And in, in even the most E internal combustion engines, about 40% of the energy, the chemical energy that's in that fuel gets converted into kinetic energy for motion. The rest is mostly wasted. You know, it goes into mostly into heat energy. It's given off, you know, lot's lost to friction. It's lost to the heat, that's in the, in the coolant to keep the engine from melting down. But that coolant, that heat, that energy that goes into the coolant actually does get used and, and can be, can be useful. It's not completely wasted. One of the ways that it's used is when it's cold out and you need to turn on the heat in, in the cabin of your vehicle, this is,
Leo Laporte (00:35:01):
Is traditionally something that just kills your battery life on an electric vehicle,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:06):
Right? With an internal combustion engine. You have that source of heat that you're giving off from the engine that's normally waste, right? You can run that through heat, exchanger, heat up the air in your cabin. No problem. So you're not, you're not using any extra energy for that, but for a battery, you don't really have that the worst of heat waste heat, or not nearly as much. And so for EVs, what they've had to use up until now for the most part is what they call resistive heaters. So you know, this is basically taking energy, electrical energy from the battery, running it through essentially a giant resistor that heats up to heat, the air that you then pump into your cabin. And so that takes away range from your EV when you're when you're driving, when it's cold. And that's why, you know, one of the reasons why EVs get, you know, worse worse rain in cold weather,
Leo Laporte (00:35:57):
They like you to use the seat warmer instead of the cabin warmer. Cause it's a little less <laugh>,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:03):
It's, it's a more efficient way of keeping you comfortable in the, in the cabin. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there's an alternative though. It's called a heat pump.
Leo Laporte (00:36:10):
Okay. And a, well, I know about heat pumps in houses.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:14):
Yeah, well, same, same thing, same just on a smaller scale. So heat pump takes thermal energy from one source and transfers it to another source. Hence the name heat pump. And for house, when you're heating your house, it takes some of the thermal energy that's in the air, outside your house and heats up the air inside your house. And it can also work in the reverse fashion. So if it's, if it's hot and hot out, you can take the heat from inside your house and pump it outside. We've
Leo Laporte (00:36:45):
Been meaning to put those in that replace our front old gas furnaces with those yeah. Are they more efficient
Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:52):
They're way, way more efficient than any kind of at least down to a certain point, you know, when you get it's really, really cold then they're, they're not as efficient because it's just not as much heat that you can get from the air. But for the most part, for most people, it's, it's a much more efficient solution than a, than a furnace. But they also work great in EVs. Interesting. because what it can do is take some of that heat heat some of the thermal energy that's in the atmosphere and basically condense it down and, and pump it into your into your cabin. But there's also some sources, a little bit of heat that's generated in an EV primarily in the motors and in the battery. And so a heat pump can be used to transfer that energy around.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:38):
And G em announced this week that on all their new EVs, all their tum platform EVs, they're gonna have a heat pump system as standard equipment on all of them which they claim will give it about 10% more range. So it'll make, make it more efficient when it's, when it's colder out or when it's hot out. And one of the interesting ways that they're are using it is on the, the Hummer EV you know, this, this big hoking battery electric super truck that we've talked about a couple times before. One of the features of the Hummer EV is something they call WTF mode which does not stand for what the its actually Watts to freedom is, is they're rename. This sounds
Leo Laporte (00:38:21):
Like Elon might have made that one up
Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:23):
<Laugh> yeah, they're inspired by Elon. And this is, this is the mode. When you wanna get zero to 60 acceleration in three seconds with a 9,000 pound truck and what it does, it uses the heat pump cuz to, to get maximum performance outta the electric motor, you wanna cool down the motor, but at the same time, you also wanna warm up the battery a little bit to get it to its peak for energy output and get it right, right at, right at its optimum temperature. So what they do is they use the heat pump to draw heat from the electric motors, cool down motors, pump that into the battery to precondition it, to get it to the, the optimum temperature. And then you can get maximum acceleration. And similarly the Hummer is capable of charging on a DC fast charger up to 350 kilowats.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:10):
And, but to do that, you, again, you have to have the battery at that optimum temperature. And so when you put in a charger as your destination on the navigation system, it will as you approach the charger, as you drive towards the charger, it will precondition the battery. It'll use the heat pump to charge it up without using a lot of energy from the battery itself to warm it up. So this is a, a really cool feature. And we're, we're starting to see this more and more on EVs. Traditionally heat pumps have been a little more expensive than resistance heaters, but as they optimize them and design them design systems specifically for EVs and remove some of the other components they GMs claiming that this is about cost neutral to the traditional system. So it's about the same cost for the heat pump system on here as it is for the tra the resistance heater system. That's on the Chevy bolt that you have. Yeah. So, yeah. So we're, we're gonna see this on more and more EVs going
Leo Laporte (00:40:09):
Forward. GM is all in aren't they on on electric vehicles, they
Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:14):
Yeah, that's their plan. They
Leo Laporte (00:40:15):
Even said quarterly earnings report this past week that they were gonna tie executive compensation to success and EVs.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:24):
And I think that's one of the things they need to do to make sure that everybody's on board with the plan. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:40:28):
You get paid on how well our EVs are doing. Wow. And yeah, my wife is very happy. They announced an electric. I I'm blanking the name Corvette
Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:39):
Corvette.
Leo Laporte (00:40:39):
Yeah. I'm intentionally blanking the name cuz I know it'll be very, very expensive.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:44):
<Laugh> it won't be cheap, but it, you know, I mean, compared to, compared to some of the electric super cars out there, it'll probably be pretty reasonable. It'll probably be around a hundred thousand dollars. She'd
Leo Laporte (00:40:54):
Love a little red electric Corvette. Oh, she'd be so happy. Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:59):
That's probably coming about 20, 25. Perfect
Leo Laporte (00:41:01):
Timing. Sam apple salmon guide house insights, wheel bearings is his podcast. You can find it@wheelbearings.media and wherever finer podcasts are distributed. And of course you find him each week right here. Thank you, Sam.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:15):
You're welcome, Leo. Have a great week. Thank
Leo Laporte (00:41:17):
You. You two. Now let me set you up For your very own Sam Tasic adventure in the cybers sphere. All right. I only
Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:37):
Need to tomorrow morning, I'm flying to San Antonio to drive the Ford F-150 lightning.
Leo Laporte (00:41:44):
Oh, it's that it's finally official. Have you ever driven it
Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:48):
Before customers I've ridden in it? I have not driven it no before nobody except except for president Biden. Nobody, almost nobody outside of Ford has actually driven it. A lot of people have ridden shotgun along with the engineers, but this would be our first opportunity to, to drive it and get, you know, get our hands on the wheel and, and try it out and, and see what it can really do. Yeah. It should be really good. I was, I was at the event at the the Rouge electric fee eco center on Tuesday when they celebrated the the, the launch of production, even though they've actually been producing them for some time now they had the, the official celebration for production launch and they're starting to ship them this week to customers. So in, in the, the next few days, cus the first customers should be receiving their lightnings. A friend of mine who ordered one got his notification this week that his is gonna be built in two weeks time. So, oh,
Leo Laporte (00:42:43):
Exciting.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:44):
So lightning's lightning out there to customers. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:42:48):
I think Jerry just ordered one. I don't know. I, I, I, he asked me some
Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:51):
Question if he just, if he just ordered one then year, right. Something like that. Yeah. Probably be sometime late next year before he gets it. Yeah. They're, they're scrambling to build as many as they can. One of the things that Jim Farley, the Ford CEO said during the, during his presentation or during his speech was that they've actually been prioritizing allocations of chips and other components or the lightning. So customers looking for gas engine F one 50 S might have to actually wait a little bit longer as they're, they're making sure that they can build as many lightnings as they possibly can to meet the demand. Yeah. And
Leo Laporte (00:43:29):
Web 40 sevens, 30 threes asking an interesting question. He says don't Teslas use heat pumps,
Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:35):
Teslas do use heat pumps. GM's not the first to use a heat pump. Tesla uses heat pumps. Volkswagen has used heat pumps on some of their EVs the E golf a few years back had a,
Leo Laporte (00:43:46):
So I had a heat pump on my model X. I didn't even know it.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:50):
The model X did not have a heat pump, the model three of the model, Y do. Oh, I see your, your model X didn't have a heat pump, the new, the new fresh ones, new as well as the model three in the model. Y yeah. Have a heat pump now. Yeah. So they added that about a, they started installing those about a year and a half or so ago. And one of the, one of the comments in here and I mentioned, you know, heat pumps work great down to a certain point when it's really, really cold. Oh yeah. There's just no, not enough thermal energy in the air. Yeah. To, to, to be useful. So for, if you live somewhere where it gets really cold, like for example, new England or here in Michigan what you probably want for home heating is what they call a hybrid system where you would have a heat pump plus you know, a smaller gas furnace.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:44:35):
So the, the gas furnace kind of gets the temperature up to a certain point or, or some, some other type of furnace, not, it doesn't have to be gas, it can be whatever, but a furnace plus a heat pump so that the, the furnace takes care of the, the really cold stuff. Once it gets up to a certain point, then the heat pump can take over and get it up to, you know, comfortable temperature. So if you live somewhere where it gets, you know, down to the single digits or subzero temperatures that's that's, that's, that's the solution to use yeah. 47 33. It's. It hasn't been standard on all Teslas, I think in the last two and a half or three years, they've made it standard across the line. Yeah. Yeah. I twisted Mr. Yeah, the, I think, yeah, the model three was the first one to get it. And then the Y and then when last year when they launched the refreshed model S and model X they added a heat pumps system on those vehicles.
Leo Laporte (00:45:33):
All right. I'm gonna put you on hold. Do you Instagram for the top? Shabo Shabo Leo, LePort the tech guy, 88 88. Ask Leo Perry on the line from Glendale, California. Our next call. Hi. Hi Perry.
Caller 2 (00:45:49):
Hi, good afternoon. Or I should say, good morning. I'm looking at my notes here, and I'm thinking that I have a lot to unpack, but I'm gonna use your expertise to if I, if I may say Perra, so to speak,
Leo Laporte (00:46:03):
<Laugh> okay.
Caller 2 (00:46:08):
As I told you confidant Kim I'm work, I am on Chrome and I need to stay on Chrome because of our company's database. And unfortunately it keeps freezing. It freezes me out, and then I get the, that, that off snap routine. And,
Leo Laporte (00:46:27):
Oh, I hate that off snap. I hate it when that happens. Yeah. I
Caller 2 (00:46:31):
Mean, it's, it's,
Leo Laporte (00:46:31):
That's really a crashing is what that is. And you get that a lot on any particular page. Is it your company's database that gets that, or what's getting that, you know,
Caller 2 (00:46:43):
The funny part is it's a database is fine. I'm GL through that all day long. Okay. When I go on so I've done my due diligence and I've been weeks and I've been trying, that's why I finally come to you, sir. And the funny thing is, is that I go through all the steps five, you know, I've found like maybe six different ways to, to get to the same thing to unload these, these temporary internet files. And it, they keep coming and then I freeze. And then unfortunately there's one at the, at the
Leo Laporte (00:47:22):
So you're, you're doing, you're doing that because you think that's gonna fix the off snap. Is that why you're doing that?
Caller 2 (00:47:28):
Well? Right. I'm thinking that I'm
Leo Laporte (00:47:30):
So here's Google. Here's what Google says. Yes, yes. And maybe you've seen this page, I'll put it in the show notes. There's a fixed all snap page crashes on Google. And they do say, you know, first check your internet connection, duh. Okay. I'm sure it's fine. Then they do say clear your cash and talk about opening the page in an incognito window and then clearing cash and cookies. That is so a snap simply means a page crashed that tab crashed. And so there's lots of reasons that tab could crash. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> loading in some spurious content from a cash is what you're trying to fix. And that may or may not fix it. I gotta say that may or may not fix it. It also could be that you don't have enough Ram or that there, and this is possible that the page itself has a bug. So if it's always the same page as a snap, then those pages might be bugged. So you say, when you clear the cash, there's something left over
Caller 2 (00:48:29):
14. That's the same number I see over and over and over again. And it's it. It's the, it won't go away. And
Leo Laporte (00:48:37):
That's the name of the file?
Caller 2 (00:48:39):
No, forgive me. I'm sorry. 14.3 megabytes is what's left over. Oh. And, and I can't, I can't dump it. Okay. And so, and, and I have my be a advisor. You'll be proud of me. I have my bell, a advisor printout.
Leo Laporte (00:48:55):
<Laugh> that's very old school. Those are the good old days. Yeah, no, no, you don't need that. No, let's not go crazy here. Okay. <laugh> okay. You can't, so there's a few things you should try. If it's always a say same pages, it could just be the pages that are fault, but it could be their cash. If, if it's a variety of different pages, how much Ram do you have in your, your machine?
Caller 2 (00:49:21):
Let's see going over 16,
Leo Laporte (00:49:24):
Look at be, is it 16 gig machine?
Caller 2 (00:49:26):
Let's yeah. No, it's eight, eight.
Leo Laporte (00:49:29):
So that's a little low and Chrome, as you may or may not know is a pig. And so it's each give me my Ram. I want my Ram. So if it runs out of memory and some pages, you know Chrome lately has gotten more aggressive about, and you may have seen this message killing a page if it's using up a lot of memory. But if it page has a memory, leaker uses up a lot of memory. This happens a lot. You may be running out and that may be the cause of the O snap. So in other words, it could be more than this 14 megs leftover. I would try this. This is the next step beyond what you just did, which is resetting Chrome to its default. That is gonna C CLO every thing. And it should CLO those 14 megs.
Leo Laporte (00:50:15):
Okay. Okay. That is, that is in the advanced settings on your Chrome, there's something called reset and cleanup <laugh>. Now, before you do that, if your bookmarks are important, I would export those, save them, cuz you can then import them again after the cleanup, cuz it's gonna delete it's it's gonna take it back to everything that it was like when you first installed Chrome, but that's what you kind of want. The other thing you should look at is extensions that you have installed if you, of a custom theme, that could be the problem. And the final thing is to remember that Chrome, isn't the only version of Chrome out there. Google's Chrome li is based on an open source project called chrom. And there are, that's what your company's database requires. That's the rendering engine that Chrome use. And there are many other programs that do it.
Leo Laporte (00:51:09):
If you're on windows, Microsoft's edge also uses Chrome. It's using chrom. So it will work the same as Chrome on your company database. So will Aldi, so will brave. So will a number of third party browsers. In fact, most third party browsers now because it's open source, just say, yeah, we're gonna take the chromium rendering engine. That's the thing that actually draws the page. That's what your database needs. And, and then on top of it, put our own user interface, maybe have better privacy protections, you know, de Google it, things like that. So first thing I would do, let's go through the steps. You did the first thing I would've said, which is clear the cash didn't help. Next thing do reset Chrome. Don't forget to back up your bookmarks first, cuz you're gonna lose everything. Tabs default search engine, default homepage. All of it basically takes it back to the beginning. If that doesn't work completely uninstall Chrome. Are you on windows?
Caller 2 (00:52:05):
Yes. Yeah. And, and I've done. I've I've done. I've taking it out and then I put it back in and it's still, still had the issues and I'm looking at my bell arc and I only have four megs. It looks like I have
Leo Laporte (00:52:18):
Now wait a minute. Hold on. You only have four me left on your whole hard drive.
Caller 2 (00:52:23):
No, it says, it says slot channel a and channel B 24, 2048 times two. So that's telling me that I have four megs in there.
Leo Laporte (00:52:35):
Oh, not eight megs. Yeah. Four eggs, four eggs is very light. Is it a Chromebook or is it a it's a windows machine. Oh,
Caller 2 (00:52:43):
Oh yeah. It's a windows machine.
Leo Laporte (00:52:44):
Oh my gosh. How old is it?
Caller 2 (00:52:46):
Oh, okay. Promise not to laugh.
Leo Laporte (00:52:49):
No, not laughing. My,
Caller 2 (00:52:50):
My <laugh> my friend built it for me in 2014.
Leo Laporte (00:52:56):
Yeah. So four gigs even then was kinda lightweight. If that's really all you have, there's another way to see, which is just get about windows and see. But if that's all you have, then that could also be one of the sources of this, but at least we can try to clean up Chrome, you know? Okay. Restart Chrome, try using edge, which is the browser. Are you using windows 10?
Caller 2 (00:53:20):
Yes. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:53:21):
Professional. Yeah. So 10 comes with edge. If you don't have it, you can get it from the windows store. Try that. It might be a little better. It's gonna be very hard to run Chrome and four gigs Ram.
Caller 2 (00:53:34):
That's gonna be tough. It says
Caller 2 (00:53:36):
It, it says 2048, 2048. So I'm just, I
Leo Laporte (00:53:40):
Don't know if yeah, I mean, look at, do the, you know, in windows there's know you can go to about windows and it'll say how much Ram you have. If it's really four gigs, you know, one of the things you might wanna do, you probably is it laptop or desktop,
Caller 2 (00:53:54):
It's
Leo Laporte (00:53:54):
Desktop, desktop. Right. But you can go out and buy more Ram for it. And Ram's cheap. I would get you up to 16 gigs that might just solve the whole old snap go. Chrome might be saying, oh snap, this guy only has four gigs of Ram snap. That's light. It's
Caller 2 (00:54:09):
Funny that I've had this thing for so long and I've never had a problem
Leo Laporte (00:54:12):
With, well, yeah, because everything's getting bigger. Yeah. They expect everybody to have eight gigs minimum now. Oh. So everything's getting bigger and fatter. This is a bad trend. Remember we in Doss, we used to have 64 K And everything fit, but because that's all you had. So they wrote programs to fit that. But now that everybody has, you know, eight gigs, 16 gigs or more, when I buy a new machine, I don't buy anything less than 16 gigs.
Caller 2 (00:54:39):
If I'm gonna get into the solution. Okay. Done and done. If I wanted to rebuild my, my system doing a, you know doing memory,
Leo Laporte (00:54:48):
I wouldn't rebuild it. Yeah. I mean the two things you can do, I wouldn't rebuild it, but two things you can do are add some more memory and put an SSD, a solid state drive in there. Both will make huge differences. Leo Laport, the tech guy. It's 20, if it's really 2014. It probably has a fairly recent processor. And what does bell a say on the processor?
Caller 2 (00:55:11):
Let's see. Thank, thank you for staying on. Oh yeah, of course.
Leo Laporte (00:55:14):
I have to go pretty soon cause Sam's here, but go ahead.
Caller 2 (00:55:18):
Okay. Very quickly. And I did mention this to Kim or yourself that the fan on the processor processor seems to be humming. Does the,
Leo Laporte (00:55:30):
You know what, you know, what do you have a little, do you have a thousand bucks you could spend on a new computer.
Caller 2 (00:55:36):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:55:38):
20 fourteens. Not that old, honestly. It's not that old, but it sounds like you either need to replace the fan. It it's been it's laboring. And so I, I think you, you know, you could bring it to somebody she's tired. She's tired.
Caller 2 (00:55:57):
Yeah. She she's tired. She, okay. All right. Then
Leo Laporte (00:56:00):
You, if it were me, if for me, if you felt pretty handy with the whole thing, replacing the fan, you probably wanna re paste the process. Sesor there's thermal pace between it and the cooling thing. So when take the fan off, you replace the, you redo the paste. You'll need to watch a video or two on that, cuz it has to be done just right. You will wanna replace the spinning hard drive with a solid state drive. That's gonna make a huge performance improvement and then, oh
Caller 2 (00:56:25):
It, it is, it is. Forgive me, Leo. It is a Stella stick. Oh good. All right. Samsung. Yeah. So it's very, it's very small. So that's probably what I need to do is just get back, get into the 20th, 21st century,
Leo Laporte (00:56:36):
Go to Dell, you know, get a, get a desktop from Dell or cheap. You can use the same keyboard, mouse and monitor. You probably spent 600, 800 bucks. And it would be 10 times faster. And you, I don't think now watch this. You'll do all that. And oh, snap <laugh> so
Caller 2 (00:56:54):
No, right? No, you make me laugh. It's funny. No, give me a brand because when I was going through Dell ready to dump the thing. Yeah. Then I saw all these different, you know, modeled tiers and which one? Cause I wanna have one that's it'll last me for five years.
Leo Laporte (00:57:10):
So yeah, Dell does it based kind of like they have the consumer and then the, the work and then the professional and so forth. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> they have for home and for business, the least expensive ones when it comes to PCs, I think are the Inspirons they're they're quite good. If you want the fancier Dells, the X PS is their kind of premium line. They're very good. But just get Anon. You get a Nicera desktop with a 10th or 11th generation, actually. They're now selling what? Selling with 12th gen Intel processors. Get an I five, get 16 gigs of Ram. Get a terabyte hard drive. You're probably talking seven or 800 bucks in spon I N S P I R O N
Caller 2 (00:57:53):
I five and 16 megs and oh, okay. You're a lifesaver. I'm gonna do that. Cuz if, if I, and I know you gotta go. If I was gonna get a new one, I would end up putting the old one in the closet. It's my last one. The nice.
Leo Laporte (00:58:06):
Yeah. You're gonna have a nice look collection in the back there. <Laugh> yeah, sure. The nice thing is you can connect the old computer, the new one, copy all the data over. So you won't have to start over from scratch. Get the boss to buy it. He's making you use their silly da database. Oh,
Caller 2 (00:58:21):
I love it. Yeah. I <laugh> I'll drop your name at the
Leo Laporte (00:58:25):
Hey boss. Leo said you owe me a computer dude.
Caller 2 (00:58:28):
Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:58:28):
I love it. You're getting a do. All right. I gotta run.
Caller 2 (00:58:33):
Thank you, sir. Byebye,
Leo Laporte (00:58:34):
Take care. Bye-Bye all right, Sam. Sorry about that. Eating up your time. No worries. But I wanted to help that poor fellow. Yep. All yours friend.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:44):
All right. Right. So I can't remember who it was now. Somebody was asking about a replacement for a van for camping. He's currently got a old grand caravan. Yeah, there's some act actually some really good choices. And if you're looking right now at a replacement then I would suggest either the Toyota Sienna, which is standard now new Sienna launched last year is standard with hybrid powertrain. It's about 34, 35 miles per gallon or the Chrysler Pacifica plug-in hybrid which is great for around town. You get about 33, 34 miles of all electric range and can do most of your daily driving without using any gas at all. And then when you want to take a road trip and go camping, whatever, you can still keep right on driving and use it just as a regular hybrid and still gets mileage in the, in the thirties.
Sam Abuelsamid (00:59:40):
So that those would probably be your best choices if you were willing to wait until about 20, 24. Then I would suggest the V w I D buzz which is coming in 24 to the us market and that's gonna be all electric. So that one would be a great choice as well. Let's see. Te Dino is asking did, did I hear you correctly more range in EVs? I assume you're referring te Dino to the with with a heat pump system. Yes. you do get more range with a heat pump system because the, the traditional climate control system the resistance heater is you is just using energy from your battery and running it through a giant resistor to create heat, to heat the air. And then for the air conditioning system it works much like a traditional air air conditioning system, except because you don't have an engine to turn pulley for, to drive the compressor.
Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:41):
You are using motor to drive the compressor. And so a heat pump system eliminates a lot of that and makes the whole thing more efficient. Let's see else. Somebody else was talking about battery hybrids being a better solution than, than batteries. You know, it depends on your use case, you know, one of back going back over 15 years ago. Now, when I first started writing for auto blog, I wrote wrote an opinion piece back then in the fall of 2006 that you know, this was the end of the energy monoculture for transportation. And my premise there was that, you know, for the past century, you know, we've relied almost entirely on petroleum as our energy source for transportation and going forward. That's no longer gonna be the case. There is not a silver bullet.
Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:33):
I was actually just doing a webinar yesterday for or Friday for a client on a study that we did at work you know, decarboning for commercial fleets. And the reality is that, you know, electric is not necessarily the best solution for every application or at least battery. Electric's not necessarily the best solution. It is a great solution for probably the most number of applications, but not for everything. You know, batteries are big, heavy, but they're not great for long haul, for example, because they're so big and heavy and they take time to charge. So ideally what you want, there is something that can refuel quickly. So you have minimal downtime for, for the trucks and can go a long distance. And that's where hydrogen fuel cells are really great for that hybrids are also a great solution for a lot of people today, especially if you live in an area where there's where either you don't if you don't have access to off street parking and you're on charging, or you live, you know, in a more rural area where you don't have a whole lot of public charging infrastructure hybrids are a great solution.
Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:42):
They get you, you know, some, a lot of the benefits of electrification. But you know, you're, you're not limited by where you can charge, you can, you can still drive anywhere. And so I, I would not rule out a hybrid for anyone. You know, they're also still generally significantly more affordable than most equivalent battery electric vehicles. So it might, it may well be the better solution for you right now, a few years from now that may or may not be the case. We'll see how battery technology continues to, to evolve. But it, it, you know, hybrids are still a great solution, right, right now. Let's see what else we got here. Yeah, Tim Tim Stevens from CNET who's writing about his drive of the lucid air. I, I got a chance to drive the, the lucid about a month and a half ago.
Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:36):
I had a fairly short drive I'm looking forward to a longer drive with soon. But they, the current top end versions of the lucid air do have a range of over 500 miles. And they do it with a, a relatively modest battery size less than half the size of the battery in the the GMC Hummer because lucid their CEO, Peter Rawson, who's also CTO. It's put a lot of focus on energy efficiency, getting the you know, minimizing the losses throughout the system to get the most possible efficiency out of every kilowat hour of energy you've got stored in the batteries. When you do that, you can have still have significant range with a smaller, lighter battery pack. It's gonna be less expensive. So it's there, there's a, there's a lot of good work being done out there to make EVs more efficient and more affordable for everybody.
Leo Laporte (01:04:33):
Sam. You're wonderful. You're a wonderful fell. I thank you for your time and I wish you a wonderful week and beautiful downtown I'm Slan
Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:43):
All right. I will talk to
Leo Laporte (01:04:44):
You next Sunday. See, thanks, sir. Bye bye.
Leo Laporte (01:04:48):
Why? Hey, Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here. The tech guy time talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, all that jazz. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. If you have a question, a comment, a suggestion you'd like to talk high tech with me. I'd love to talk high tech with you. 8 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6, toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada, outside that area. You could still reach me, but you'd have to use Skype or something like that. 88, 88 alio we put links in the show notes to help our callers tech guy labs.com. That's free. There's no signup. The links are there AF couple of days after the show, we'll put all of the music links up from professor Laura, our musical director. There'll be audio from the show. There'll be video from the show. There'll even be a transcript, as I said, takes a couple of days, but that transcript's helpful.
Leo Laporte (01:05:46):
You can search it, find what you want. There's time codes, jump to that part of the show. So all of that is there free tech eye labs.com. Just go to episode 1,890 for a day 2022 that's today. So I talked a little more with our caller off the air afterwards and decided probably the best thing to do. He had a very light memory footprint. He says four gigabytes in this old PC, a friend had built for him and was having trouble getting Chrome to run and four gigabytes, I think nowadays you'll still see computers sold with eight gigabytes. Nobody sells anything with four, and if they do run <laugh> no, you don't want that eight, I guess. If it's windows maybe Mac, you could probably do that. A Chromebook of course four is okay. But not on a, on a, a windows or a Mac.
Leo Laporte (01:06:39):
I would go with 16. So he said, what should I get? And I'm just looking at Dell. I just bought a Dell laptop, but he wants a desktop. The inand are fairly inexpensive. Dell is now selling. I think they're one of the first to do this, the new Intel Alder lake chips, the 12th generation Intels. And that's why I bought a Dell laptop. Won't come for a couple of months. <Laugh> looks like the desktops come a little faster, but the laptop's not gonna come for a couple of months which I'm disappointed. Cause I wanted to take a look at these new Intel chips, the early testing early reports say that Intel has done a very good job with these 12th generat. They're copying a little bit. What arm and apple have been doing with their chips, as you might know, nowadays in the early days of computing, one chip, one core, one processor did it all.
Leo Laporte (01:07:35):
<Laugh> that was it single core. Then Intel came out with the duos. Remember those two, two process two in one chip. And the reason was they couldn't get the clock speeds any faster for a long time. It was like, oh, you know, your first IBM PC was 4.77 megahertz. That was the clock speed. That meant it could do roughly that many, a second. Some of the things, a addition and subtraction might take multiple operations, but roughly, you know, 4.7, 7 million operations per second. And as each computer came out every year, it'd be, you know, faster than there was 10 megahertz 90. I remember the first 90 megahertz computer I got. Oh, we were excited about that. That would've been roughly 19 93, 94. We were so excited about that. I remember playing with saying, it feels slippery. It's so fast. <Laugh> the 90 megahertz computer. Then we got it, you know, faster and faster.
Leo Laporte (01:08:41):
Eventually we got to one gigahertz, two gigahertz, three gigahertz, that's 3 billion operations a second, but then Intel hit a wall about four gigahertz for a variety of reasons, mostly to do with physics. They couldn't get any much faster engine at five gigahertz range, but it gets a little unreliable as you get faster and faster gets there's heat problems. There's issues, mostly it's reliability issues. So Intel said, what are we gonna do? Cuz the expecting us to get faster double every couple of years, what are we gonna do? Well, they came up with a solution which was put two in <laugh>. So if one, three gigahertz processor is fast, two should be twice as fast. No wait, hold on. It isn't because most of the, the programs you use even to this day, don't divide the work up into say, you do this, you do this, you do this, you do this.
Leo Laporte (01:09:44):
The, the multiprocesing they don't do that. They're all single threaded. A thread is one thing they're doing one thing at a time. So the base clock speed three or four gigahertz is actually the speed of the computer. For most things, running windows browsing, email, it's not using multiple processors. It's only when you get into editing photos and video and you know, fancy stuff that you really need multiple processors. Nevertheless, it's good. Marketing Intel said dual core duo two, twice as good, no, but sold a lot of computers. So then they did quad <laugh> and eight and on and on and on. So their current Intel Alder lake, depending on which one you get has four cores, six cores. If you get an I seven, it's got 12 cores. That's 12 pro processors all running at around four, somewhere between two and five gigahertz it's clock speed.
Leo Laporte (01:10:44):
It changes. And again, that's for efficiency. So when you're not doing a lot, it slows down most of the time, you're still only using one. If you look at a you know, you, you have a, a, a CPU meter, you can see the CPUs working, look at your activity monitor and you could see the CPU's working most of the time only one's doing anything. The rest of 'em going. Yeah, well, whenever you need me. So one of the things Intel's done in following in the footsteps of arm and apple, both of whom are looking for more efficient, lower power processing is add what they call efficiency cores. So now instead of 12 cores, all running at the same speed, they've got maybe eight, eight power cores, high speed core, and for efficiency, cores, and the efficiency cores, which use less power are running most of the time.
Leo Laporte (01:11:40):
And then when you need it, we get the big cores, which is most of the time, never you get the big cores. And of course they use more power. So all of this is to save power, save heat, make the machine run as well L without using as much juice. And that's what these new 12th generation processes for the first time, that to my knowledge from Intel are gonna do, they're gonna have efficiency course. Your iPhone has had that for years. Your Android phone has had that for years, but now Intel's doing it.
Leo Laporte (01:12:12):
So this will be I'm very interested in how they do this in, in how well it does it. This is Intel's response to apples. M one Qualcomm said this week in their quarterly earnings call that they too were going to use a new technology to try to make chips that are as efficient as apple apples, really driven the market. There M ones are so efficient. They use so little power. If you get one of the new max based on the M one chips, the fans never come on. I mean, actually they're on all the time, but they're on very low and you hardly hear 'em. In fact, unless you put your ear to the computer, I don't think you hear 'em at all. I have a max studio, I got my wife, the top of the line, max studio with a max, the M one max processor. And then gave it a really challenging problem. Something called photogrammetry, really hard problem. All 12 of the process of the cores are a pegged all the way, a hundred percent. All of them running like crazy, working hard, nothing dead silent, no fans, nothing just very quiet. There's a li actually it's not fair to, to save no fans. The fans always running, but it doesn't get faster. It doesn't get hotter. And so that's what Intel's saying, Hey man, we could do that. That's where the world's going.
Leo Laporte (01:13:27):
So should you care? No, because most of the time you're only using one core, but I'm gonna get one. I guess if you get a new computer, you probably should look at the 12th generation, cuz they should be lower power, more efficient and have some headroom, which is kind of what you want when you're really doing something you need. And surprisingly, there are things you do maybe browsing the net with a lot of graphics and things do need a lot of processor. If it needs it, it can kick it in and then back it down as it needs to be 88 88, ask Leah, we're gonna go back to the phones in just a second. Chris, Mark's coming up in about 15 minutes. He's our photo guy, lots to come, but I thought I should explain what's going on. Modern PCs, Leo port theca Ultra you're right. She's got the ultra. What was I saying?
Leo Laporte (01:14:24):
Hi Chris. Hello? How are you? How are you today? Good. One morning. Things going on. I'm going on? I'm actually, actually I spent the entire week up, up north where they all say Mo and Mo all the time. I knew that. That's why I said it. No I didn't. So we are going back to Bavaria for Christmas 20, 23, not this year, but next year we're gonna do a Passau to Buddha it's river cruise. And we're gonna spend Christmas Eves the new river. Yeah, the Dan we're gonna spend Christmas Eve in Regensburg and Christmas day and we're spend new year's Eve and new year's day in Vienna. I'm very excited. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Do you know what hotel in Regensburg? You're in no, we're in a boat. <Laugh> oh, you're on the boat or on the boat. So alright.
Leo Laporte (01:15:13):
Is there a really nice one there? Oh yes. That's where really reveal. That's where I went or the Orim okay. Op O R P H E E it's. It's a must. Must stay. Oh, well I think we start, I don't know. No, we start in Passal so I won't be able to do that. Ah, okay. That's where I think the oldest restaurant in the world was that I had those wonderful sausages and some very good that's possible. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we'll go back there. <Laugh> yep. Yep. That's cool. Yeah. I'm excited. We decided it's time to start traveling again in it's a lovely, it's a lovely part of Germany. Yeah. We really enjoyed it. We did that in 2015 and it was so nice. We thought, oh, we're gonna go back anyway. I'll be with you in about 10 minutes. I'm here. Do you have an email to me? Should I look for yes I do. I'll do the driving. I'll do the showing you that you can back me up. Jazzy. Woo Leo. Leport the tech I 88 88. Ask Leo Joe's on the line from Mabo New Jersey. Thanks for hanging on Joe.
Caller 3 (01:16:24):
Hi Leo. Good afternoon. Afternoon. My question for you is someone I ran into said he would give me a couple of video cameras. Nice. And he picked at swap meets or, you know, he picked them up very cheaply. He said there were about $20 a piece because they do have H DMI out. But the memory cards don't work in the, in the, you know exactly
Leo Laporte (01:16:58):
Who cares, right. If you're gonna use live, use 'em for live recording, live streaming.
Caller 3 (01:17:02):
Right. And what I wanted to know is there some way to pipe H DMI into a MacBook pro?
Leo Laporte (01:17:10):
Sure, sure. So despite the fact that many computers have HTM, I ports on them almost all cases. Those are outbound ports for connecting to a monitor, as opposed to an inbound port to connect into the computer. But there are plenty of ways to get HTM. I video into a computer. There is something you should now you already bought 'em You already bought em. Yeah. Yeah.
Caller 3 (01:17:35):
There's
Leo Laporte (01:17:36):
There's something you should check before you get all excited about this. Look up this camera model and see if it can do something called clean H DM. I
Caller 3 (01:17:44):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (01:17:45):
So cameras that have HTM, I out <affirmative> sometimes put all of the stuff you see on the view finder. <Laugh> like the battery level, the date, the time, all that stuff, they put that on the HTM. I
Caller 3 (01:18:00):
Mm-Hmm
Leo Laporte (01:18:01):
<Affirmative> and you don't want that. So you need to know if it has a setting in the settings for clean HTM. I, if you look up those cameras online, you will. Absolutely. We find out if it has H DM, I that's clean, otherwise it's not useful. And there're surprisingly large number of cameras that do not do that. I don't know why. Maybe they don't expect people to be streaming directly out of it. So that's the first thing to make sure you can get clean. H DM I, and then to get into your MacBook. Do you want to, you wanna use multiple cameras?
Caller 3 (01:18:31):
Well, here's the thing. He, he said, he'd give me, he said, as far as he's concerned, he threw them. He's been piping them into his windows. He's got a couple of windows powers and he uses capture boards from your favorite place.
Leo Laporte (01:18:51):
So you don't need a capture board cuz that's what a capture board does is convert analog to digital. You already got digital. All you need is an H DM I to thunder bowl adapter. So the simplest thing would be to go to apple and buy. They sell 'em an HDM it's got HTMI on one end, Thunderball in the other and make sure it's for connecting to a camera mm-hmm <affirmative> cause the HMI port on the MacBook, some of them have HMI now is out only outbound only. So you want an inbound, but you don't need to do anything. You just need to convert the HTM. I coming out the camera to Thunderbolt, cuz it's all digital. You don't need to capture anything. It's already bits. Oh, the reason I ask you, if you want to use all the cameras is in that case, I would recommend getting an inexpensive switcher black magic for a couple hundred bucks makes the a, a T E M mini.
Leo Laporte (01:19:41):
This is from black magic designs.com and the at mini will take four HTMI and then has one out thunder bowl, outbound that goes to your, your compete cuter. And it's a switcher just like like the big boys use on TV. So you could say camera one. Ready? Camera two camera two. Ready camera three, camera three. Get up to four cameras on the eight, 10 mini. So if you wanted to use 'em all at once, instead of just a single shot, if you wanted to have a single plus a, you know, a wide shot plus a two shot plus a closeup, you could do all of that.
Caller 3 (01:20:14):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (01:20:14):
So there's two ways to do it, but either way, all you need is to convert that HTM I to Thunderball
Caller 3 (01:20:20):
All right, this might be in keeping with it. My daughter just gave me, I it's a monitor because on it, it says TCI in, but it might be a Samsung full Samsung TV. I'm running a second monitor off my MacBook. Is it possible to run another monitor off this MacBook?
Leo Laporte (01:20:45):
It depends on the MacBook. Most of them you, which MacBook do you have?
Caller 3 (01:20:49):
Right? It's late 2013. Yeah, it does. The, the current version of, well, whatever the big server is 11.6 0.5.
Leo Laporte (01:20:59):
You won't go past that though with the current Mac OSS Monterey, but that's all right. You're you're big, sir. And you want to use multiple monitors, right? Absolutely. Should be no problem at all. Of course. You're gonna have to somehow get the connectors. There's an HTMI port on that Mac, I think. Yes.
Caller 3 (01:21:17):
Yeah. I'm running a second monitor off
Leo Laporte (01:21:20):
And then, and then you're gonna take so you're already running a second monitor, but you can run. I believe on that one. You can run another monitor. You need to either get a Thunderbolt out. I don't know if you have thunder bowl on th 2013. Yeah.
Caller 3 (01:21:34):
Two Thunderball ports.
Leo Laporte (01:21:35):
Okay. It's what, what you really want is display port mini display ports. So you have a display port. You connect that into a monitor. You'll need a monitor that supports display port.
Caller 3 (01:21:44):
All right. Now I see two Thunderball ports on here. I don't see any mini display port. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:21:51):
Thunderbolt carries video.
Caller 3 (01:21:53):
Mm-Hmm
Leo Laporte (01:21:53):
<Affirmative> so it's just a Thunderbolt to mini display port or actually in your, it depends on the monitor. You get the maxi display port it's up to you.
Caller 3 (01:22:02):
Yeah. Is, is there such a thing as a Thunderbolt queue doc, that you can buy? Sure.
Leo Laporte (01:22:10):
Go to go to other world computing they're at Mac sales.com. In fact, everything you want to do, all of this can be bought at other world computing. For the most part, they specialize in Mac stuff, not a sponsor, but I always get stuff from them and they sell Thunderbolt two docs. Absolutely.
Caller 3 (01:22:25):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> okay. Just one additional thing. We you're always saying when someone says something, gee, I'm so jealous.
Leo Laporte (01:22:34):
<Laugh> you wanna make me jealous? Is that what you wanna do? What do you got?
Caller 3 (01:22:40):
I ran into a guy in the in, in Costco. And he said that his car that he just bought. Yeah, he had, he's shipping it to Liverpool, England. And he's going to spend the next six months in, in Europe driving his car. And he says it it's a money saver because it's about hundred dollars a day to rent a car. You
Leo Laporte (01:23:05):
Absolutely. You drive it around all over the place. You go see where the Beatles started. It's good. It'd be great. Fun.
Caller 3 (01:23:13):
Go
Leo Laporte (01:23:13):
To Scotland. Go to Ireland. <Laugh> go to England. <Laugh> get on the ferry boat. Go to France. Oh yeah. That's the way to do it. When we were a kid, when I was a kid in 19 six we bought a Volkswagen and went to Germany from the United States, took a boat, took the SS United States to Germany and picked up the Volkswagen, drove all around Europe for a summer. And then we put it on the queen, Mary and sailed it home.
Caller 3 (01:23:41):
Right? That that's what this guy's gonna do. Except this is the second time he's done this. The first time he said he went to a car show. Someone expressed interest in this Mustang, 66 Mustang. Oh, he sold it, made a profit and paid for all
Leo Laporte (01:24:03):
Of good. Now I am jealous. Right? See, I should have kept that 66 Mustang. Darn it.
Caller 3 (01:24:09):
He's he's doing the same thing again. I, I, it's one of my dreams, except that my wife would never put up for six months in
Leo Laporte (01:24:18):
Here's. Here's my dream. We're gonna go to the Wolfsburg plant. We're gonna pick up Volkswagen's new ID, buzz Volkswagen camper. We're gonna drive it all around Europe. Then we're gonna get it on a boat and take it home. How about that?
Caller 3 (01:24:30):
That's a, that's a dream.
Leo Laporte (01:24:31):
I like to dream pleasure talking to you. You did make me jealous. Joe, Leo Laport, the tech guy, camera guy, Chris mark coming. <Laugh> I'm liking that buzz. It's so cute, but I'm gonna get the California camper edition. I have to get it out. I have to get it here. They only sell it in California. You were on the United States in 57. Wow. Big island. Yeah. 67, 10 years later took the United States to Europe. We went to LA ARA in France and then coming home, took the queen, Mary probably from Cal or Dover home. And we had, and the reason we did that, we were gonna fly home. But the reason we did that is cuz we could put the car on the boat. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages. You know what happens to computers, hard drives, fail, coffee spills.
Leo Laporte (01:25:29):
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Leo Laporte (01:26:24):
Just blasts it onto the hard drive. And you're back up and running, never lose precious files or expensive applications. Of course you can always restore a full system, but this is nice. You can also pick and choose individual files from your image and restore those and Acronis true image now has a Chronus cloud. So you can back up what you want, where you want locally, but also to the Aros cloud where it's safe, restore your entire system to the same drive, the same computer or a brand new computer. Great way. When you've got a new system to just get it up and running immediately take that image. You've already made the image, right? You're making it all the time. Take it. You can even get it from in Theros cloud blasted on the new computer. You're good to go. You can create direct cloud to cloud backups too.
Leo Laporte (01:27:09):
This is really nice. You don't have to download all your email from your Microsoft 365 account. Then upload it. You can actually go directly from Microsoft 365 to Theros cloud your outlook.com mailbox. Your one drive zoo, right at cross it's fast takes no effort on your part, no download time or upload time. This is a really nice way to back up your Microsoft 365 account. And of course let's not forget the cybersecurity part of it. You could stop any cyber attack from damaging your data, your applications, your system block attacks in real time before malware or ran somewhere or crypto jackers could cause damage find any hidden infections lurking on your system with very flexible virus scans. So it's all in one, one pan of glass gives you everything you need. Reduce the cost, the complexity, the risk, the weight of using multiple solutions that don't know about each other, simplify your protection by managing everything through a single intuitive interface.
Leo Laporte (01:28:06):
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Chris Marquardt (01:29:35):
Third edition, third edition, a third edition
Leo Laporte (01:29:38):
Who would've thought it, who would've thought it?
Chris Marquardt (01:29:40):
I oh, I, I, we, we certainly did not expect this, this film photography topic to generate that much new stuff over the last like seven years. It's
Leo Laporte (01:29:52):
Been amazing. Yeah. Well, and you were the one who, you know, kind of talked me into it. I mean, I think it's a really, it's a great discipline and a lot of schools to this to a, when you take a photography class, they start you with film. Yep.
Chris Marquardt (01:30:07):
Yeah. Because cuz cuz there are no shortcuts and that means you have to learn the ropes in terms of composition and, and exposure and all the ization, all these kind of things. So, but
Leo Laporte (01:30:18):
Don't worry folks. We're not gonna get you get you taken film today. It's just a little inspiration for your photography, whether it's a, a camera phone or a fancy digital camera. What, what are we talking about? True. What's our lesson.
Chris Marquardt (01:30:32):
Well, I, I spent a week. I did a, a week of vacation at the sea on a island up in the north sea and I just returned from that. And of course I brought my camera and did some photography there. So I thought we'd talk about taking photos at the sea if you're on vacation or if you live near the sea, there's so many interesting, cool things to see and a lot of different angles to look at things from
Leo Laporte (01:31:01):
Agree. I love the sea.
Chris Marquardt (01:31:03):
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So a few things just let's look at some photos here. First thing, if you shoot at the sea, where do you put the horizon? The line between the sky and the sea, because <laugh>, it's not, it's not that obvious. And a lot of people will go to the rule of third and try to put it on one of these third lines, which yeah. Usually works. But my, my recommendation here is put the, put the horizon so that it's not in the way of something that is interesting looking in the picture. So let's say you have interesting clouds in the sky, give them space. If you, if the water in front us is interesting. If there's something interest in the water, give that space, just put it wherever it feels, right? Trust your trust, your gut. That is certainly the right thing to do then. Make sure, and that's, that's kind of a, a bit of a, one of my pet peeves, make sure to have the horizon release trade. If you, if you don't get it right within the camera, then straighten it afterwards.
Leo Laporte (01:32:07):
It can always fix post. Yeah.
Chris Marquardt (01:32:10):
And, and especially with the water with water, if that's out of whack for just a half a degree, it'll look like
Leo Laporte (01:32:15):
It's running downhill. It'll,
Chris Marquardt (01:32:17):
It'll be a bit of, of a problem. So that is something then what to include in a photo. I try often try to include some form of landscape E either some rocks in the foreground or some well, depending on where you are, you might have some, some other features there or even include features that are manmade in, in the, the front, like a, a railing on a boardwalk or I don't know ships in a, in a, in a marina for example which brings us to another thing. And that is reflections. As soon as we have water involved, a we have reflections of some sort, depending on how much wind there is, they might longer or, or, or well, less wind means stronger reflections. Let's put it that way around. So if, if it's a, an early morning, usually you have less waves and a bit more of the reflections, which can be really nice, which can add real calming symmetrical element to pictures.
Chris Marquardt (01:33:20):
So I like looking at reflections or using them. And then of course, very important if you're at to sea, the sunset and sunsets can be anywhere from really boring as in there's, there's the horizon, there's a sun, there's nothing else going on. Or you might have really interesting clouds in the sky. Something that the sun shines through. Maybe some interesting waves at the bottom. That is always, always interesting. The thing that I, I also like to do is you know, so, so you have this warm light come coming from the sun and then the camera sometimes tries to kind of counteract that and get it more in the neutral area and take some of the warmth out. So I like to bring some of the warmth back in, by, in, in, in, in the app, back on the computer or in, in, in, in the photos, up in my smartphone, I, I, I increased the warmth a bit, the white balance, the warmth, whatever that is called in, in Europe of choice. Always helpful, make it gold and you can make
Leo Laporte (01:34:33):
It golden if make
Chris Marquardt (01:34:34):
It golden. Yes, that's that's right. Another thing I'm a great fan of, and you get this sometimes at the sea is volumetric light. We've talked about this in the past it's light. That gets well, that has volume that has a shape. And that happens when there is missed in the air which does happen at the sea. And there is the sun being filtering through clouds, you get these streaks of light that are like, God rays, you know, they come from the sky and they look so majestic and light having volume is always cool for photography. And then I also like through new foreground elements, like in any landscape kind of shot, I like something in the foreground. You know,
Leo Laporte (01:35:24):
Everything's better with a little dog in it, I think.
Chris Marquardt (01:35:27):
And this, in this case, in this photo, a little dog in the foreground, now this, this adds several things, okay. We have a silhouette of a dog, which is not too much information, but it's nice. And we have a reflection because in the front you have a bit of a typo kind of situation. So it's, it's, it's a little things separated from the wavy sea. So that is more calm and gets better reflections. And that just combines a few of the things that we talked about. So I'm a fan of that. And I'm a fan of this, which if you look at that, it looks like rocks sticking out of fog.
Leo Laporte (01:36:08):
So pretty
Chris Marquardt (01:36:08):
That is, that is no fog. Oh, that is the sea. Because what the photographer did here is take a long exposure. We're talking 30 seconds a minute. So the photographer put a, put an ND filter on the camera, like a, like a very dark pair of sunglasses on the, on the lens. And what that does is it allows you to expose longer and get the motion in the water to, to play out over time and it's airs the motion and it gives it the surreal kind of feeling. And to end up with this very wispy kind of water surface, that is, it's hard to describe, but it, if you see it, the photo looks a bit strange, a bit artificial, a bit surreal, but it, it add that's a very, I think, a very calming kind of touch to
Leo Laporte (01:37:03):
It. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, mm-hmm, <affirmative> some really good ideas. We'll put a link to the gallery that Chris has put together into the show notes@techilabs.com. So you can look at the images, but some very inspiring ideas for things you might wanna, might want to do with your camera. Now, speaking of inspiration, we have a photo assignment and I want you to get to work. Cause there's only a few
Chris Marquardt (01:37:25):
Weeks,
Leo Laporte (01:37:26):
Only a few weeks left. He's holding up the slip that says elegant. That is the word. So what your assignment is, and by the way, it's not a competition. There are no prizes. The idea is just to get out there and take pictures. It's to go out and take an image with your camera, phone, whatever you got, Instamatic doesn't matter. Brownie doesn't matter of something that illustrates for you in your mind, the idea of the word, the concept elegant. And then if you get something you like upload it to flicker.com, we have a tech guy group there tag it, TG elegant. So Renee Silverman, our moderator knows that's that's your submission for the competition? No, it's not a competition for the assignment. And then, and then what we're about two weeks we only have about two weeks left. I would guess Chris. Yeah. Yep. So in a couple of weeks, Chris will pick three and talk about 'em on the radio. Chris Markt is@sensei.photo and of course joins us every week. Happy pictures, Chris.
Chris Marquardt (01:38:27):
Thanks for having me.
Chris Marquardt (01:38:32):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:38:42):
Thank you so much, sir.
Chris Marquardt (01:38:45):
And of course, most of the pictures I took this week were were of sheep <laugh> rabbit and GE, and so many animals on that, on that island. It was really relaxed.
Leo Laporte (01:38:56):
What was the name of the island? You were
Chris Marquardt (01:38:59):
Hell P E L L w O R M.
Leo Laporte (01:39:03):
I'm not
Chris Marquardt (01:39:03):
Familiar with it. Small island takes, takes 10 minutes with a car to drive from one side to the other.
Leo Laporte (01:39:09):
How nice. And you just stayed in a little bed and breakfast there. And
Chris Marquardt (01:39:13):
We, we rented a, a little vacation flat kind of thing right behind the right, right next to the sea. Just a two minute walk to the sea. And it was
Leo Laporte (01:39:24):
Did you take a bunch of pictures of the Alka?
Chris Marquardt (01:39:28):
We actually stayed right next to the Al Creek. The old kidding church. Oh, wow. It had a, it had a, it had a staple that broke off somewhere in the, I don't know, 18th entry or something, cuz it was built on sand and it was that's interesting.
Leo Laporte (01:39:43):
It sounds like a very nice relaxing
Chris Marquardt (01:39:46):
Vacation. That's what? That, that was exactly the point. Yeah. Relaxation
Leo Laporte (01:39:50):
Sounds wonderful.
Chris Marquardt (01:39:51):
It's not, not that much you can do on that island. Beautiful.
Leo Laporte (01:39:55):
How fun?
Chris Marquardt (01:39:56):
Lots of walks. It was
Leo Laporte (01:39:57):
Chill. My have been kind of cool still.
Chris Marquardt (01:40:00):
Well we had very sunny days and it's still kind of cool. Cuz the north sea is, is famous for, for having lots of wind and a bit of a chill. But Hey, I, I like that. I go to the Malaya. So that's true. I don't mind the call. It's warm
Leo Laporte (01:40:13):
To you. I like
Chris Marquardt (01:40:14):
The cold.
Leo Laporte (01:40:14):
<Laugh> how fun? Well, I'm glad. I'm glad you had a good vacation. We missed you, but I'm glad you're back.
Chris Marquardt (01:40:21):
I'm glad to be back.
Leo Laporte (01:40:22):
Yeah. Are you gonna post your pictures on Flicka
Chris Marquardt (01:40:26):
Yeah, probably likely. I'm still I'm I'm still in vacation mode. We just returned yesterday. So I still kind of settling back in.
Leo Laporte (01:40:35):
You do look tan, rested and relaxed. You do. All right, Chris, have a wonderful week. I'll see you next week.
Chris Marquardt (01:40:43):
See then take care. Bye
Leo Laporte (01:40:46):
Leo. Leport the tech guy? 88 88. Ask Leo deep track. No, that's good. Deep track Jay on the line from Houston, Texas. Our next caller. Hi Jay.
Caller 4 (01:40:57):
Hey Leo. Good to talk to you. Appreciate
Leo Laporte (01:40:59):
It. Well, I appreciate your calling. Thank you.
Caller 4 (01:41:02):
So here's what happened. I decided about six months ago, time to upgrade the phone. So I like an old timer. I looked in consumer reports and they liked the one plus and we've always used Motorola motor
Leo Laporte (01:41:16):
By the way. I'm an old timer. Two donut, not consumer reports. No, still the best.
Caller 4 (01:41:21):
I had a milestone birthday yesterday. I'm older than you.
Leo Laporte (01:41:23):
Oh congratulations. That's wonderful.
Caller 4 (01:41:26):
I knew Dwight Silverman when he had hair and when my hair was brown, that's how, that's how old I
Leo Laporte (01:41:32):
DWI the great Houston. The Chronicle columnist. Still a good friend. Glad to, glad to know you. You knew him when?
Caller 4 (01:41:41):
Oh yes. And I learned a lot from him over the years. So, so Leo, what I did was I thought, okay, the Modo G4 needed to go. Yeah. Kinda upgrade time.
Leo Laporte (01:41:50):
Okay.
Caller 4 (01:41:51):
Consumer reports liked the okay. Let me, I told Ken, let me get the numbers right? The one plus ignored N 10 5g. Yes. So I thought, okay, I'll upgrade to 5g. And I gotta tell you, I love the phone. It was refurbished, but it came with a three month warranty. So the phone worked fine except something that's really annoying twice. It will go, it'll go in and do some kind of an upgrade on its own. I don't know if it's upgrading the Android version or what. Yeah. And it's done it twice in six months. It did it a couple weeks ago. I woke up, wanted to check my Gmail and it said you can't access Gmail. Cause there's some kind of an up upgrade. So I turned the phone off and truth be told, I went back to sleep for a few minutes. <Laugh> I woke up and I got the old, like you're setting the phone up for the first time. Oh, I got the, it got the pick language. I'm like, oh, oh
Leo Laporte (01:42:49):
Again. Oh, did it erase everything?
Caller 4 (01:42:52):
What? Well, here's what it did. I have a, an app that will save my text messages and phone calls and my contacts were saved through Google through a Gmail account. So that was fine. But it is annoying cuz you have to go in and reset the you know, visual settings and then it,
Leo Laporte (01:43:11):
So it, it went back to scratch.
Caller 4 (01:43:14):
It went back to scratch. It
Leo Laporte (01:43:15):
Was an nothing, your pictures, everything that wore on there.
Caller 4 (01:43:18):
Well, photos, you know, I'm not big on photos preface this we're on the computer a lot for work.
Leo Laporte (01:43:24):
I'm just trying to get a sense of what happened. Did it wipe the phone as if you just got it fresh from the factory or was there some of your stuff still on there?
Caller 4 (01:43:34):
I use an app restore and it brought the text messages and I still had contacts and all that I had to,
Leo Laporte (01:43:42):
Yes. A lot of that will come sinking down from Google, even with a brand new phone. As soon as you're did you have to log into your Google account? I guess that's the question.
Caller 4 (01:43:51):
Yes I can. You did
Leo Laporte (01:43:52):
Back
Caller 4 (01:43:52):
In.
Leo Laporte (01:43:53):
So once you logged in contacts, come in, calendar comes in. A lot of the settings will come in. If you back up the phone to Google, most people do it's automatic then.
Caller 4 (01:44:01):
Well, okay now true. I gotta be honest. I'm not sure. Technically I backed up to Google. I keep getting these things. When I bought the phone, do you know you want to do it through a OnePlus or do it through Google, but I do have all the contacts back. The biggest problem is getting the apps that I've downloaded since I, and by the way, there's not that many, but you gotta go in with the username and password and, and do that. And just took, in fact, my wife was telling people, hello, you know, what's, what's Jay doing? Oh, he's busy.
Leo Laporte (01:44:34):
Yeah, this should not happen. Whatever happened is not normal and it shouldn't have happened. Okay. So by the way, one little trick for when you do have to restore your, you probably figured this out, restore your old apps. You can go to the Google play store and go into your, and it'll show you apps you've purchased. And there's even a tab on this phone, not on this phone. So you can quickly go to a tab. That'll say the apps that are not currently installed, but that you have installed in the past. That that's what I always do, but you're right. You'll still have to log in
Caller 4 (01:45:05):
How cheap I am. I don't think any of these apps are ones I paid. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:45:08):
They don't, they don't care. It's free and purchased. So not so much that you spent money for it. It just downloaded it. I don't know why they call it
Caller 4 (01:45:16):
Purchased. Well, I had to, you know, I, I, I downloaded them and then
Leo Laporte (01:45:20):
That's the problem is even if there's only a handful of 'em to log in and all that stuff is annoying. Most stuff. These days keeps its keeps the data online. So you probably didn't lose anything, but that is not supposed to happen. What happened to you is not supposed to happen.
Caller 4 (01:45:36):
Okay. Because what I wondered was is there's somewhere in the settings or do I go to Google play and I can not get any kind of an automatic update that another
Leo Laporte (01:45:46):
No, no updates should never do that. An update. First of all, you do want automatic updates. The ones that installs a are critical updates and you certainly want those. They're not just Android updates. There is a monthly critical update patch from Google. I don't remember if one plus automatically pushes those out in a timely fashion. Some carriers do some carriers don't but that's not what happened. You had a crash. You had a serious crash and I'm okay. It's a little confusing. I've never seen that behavior now. Unfortunately with Android, every phone is different. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so I don't know if this is something that typically happens at a, with a Nord or you bought this new. Yes.
Caller 4 (01:46:30):
Well Leo, I did buy it refurbished. Okay. I, I will say we've bought our phones. We were a little bit late into the smartphone area. We are on a computer a lot. We have one of the last high school reunion planning companies in the, in the country. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:46:45):
Neat.
Caller 4 (01:46:46):
There is such a thing. We've done it for 27 years. So we're on that's
Leo Laporte (01:46:50):
Cool. Next year is my 50th.
Caller 4 (01:46:54):
Oh. my 50th was last year. We headed you a little
Leo Laporte (01:46:58):
Bit. Oh gosh. I don't know if I want to go. I remember in college bartending the 50th reunion at my college of thinking how old those guys looked <laugh> Now I are one of them.
Caller 4 (01:47:12):
Well, I actually wrote a story for the Houston Chronicle two years ago. This was 2020, cuz we didn't do any in 2020 because of the pandemic. And someone found out that we're still in business, but we're having to sit it out. So I wrote a story. Yeah. That said high school reunions and social distancing are not a good match. No. And
Leo Laporte (01:47:32):
Are the reunions usually in the summertime?
Caller 4 (01:47:36):
Yeah. You know, we just got through doing four in April. Oh.
Leo Laporte (01:47:39):
So they're coming back.
Caller 4 (01:47:40):
Surprisingly. They drew really well. We normally didn't do that. I good. The problem is Houston is so hot in the summer. Oh right in the late spring. That's right. I think people like the idea of coming back when it wasn't 95 degrees and 90%. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:47:54):
I think you're right. <Laugh> you nailed that one.
Caller 4 (01:47:57):
So, okay. So you think the phone actually crashed
Leo Laporte (01:48:00):
It? It, what we, I hope you won't. I hope you'll forgive this crudity it barfed. And and it, and it really is not a normal thing. It, maybe if you got it refurbished, it was a good thing because maybe it's kind of now cleared itself out. But if that happens again, there's a hardware flaw with that phone.
Caller 4 (01:48:21):
Okay. I wondered about that.
Leo Laporte (01:48:22):
That's a hardware error that it looks like the firmware decided to reinstall itself and and to act as if it's a brand new phone that's not supposed, that should never happen. I've never seen that happen on any Android phone.
Caller 4 (01:48:36):
Okay. Cause Leo we've had different versions of MOG starting with the very first one. They're great time. There's enough. Yeah. Great phones, you know, especially for our use. And
Leo Laporte (01:48:45):
Here's the, I'll tell you it's too late now, but for future, I almost always say just get the Google phone and what they do is they release the major one, which you know, was a pixel six in the fall. And then right around now they'll announce a pixel six, a, which will be about half the price. It's still a little more expensive than that Nord, maybe 500 bucks, but it's not as expensive as the fall blown phone. And those are the ones I recommend for several reasons. Mostly because they get the Google updates in a, in the most prompt fashion cuz it's from Google. Okay. So for future, I would say, you know, look for the pixel, something a,
Caller 4 (01:49:26):
The,
Leo Laporte (01:49:27):
A versions of you pixels,
Caller 4 (01:49:28):
Do you think this problem happen necessarily because it's re refurbished no. Even happened with
Leo Laporte (01:49:34):
No, I don't know why it happened. It mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, it may be the reason you got it refurbished is because the original owner had that happen and said, I'm getting rid of it. Oh, okay. Refurbishment, won't correct. Something like that if right. Knock on wood and I am it won't happen again. If it starts to happen more than once that's too much of a pain get rid of it. Leo Laport, the tech guy. It should, it shouldn't happen ever at all. It's a, it's a weird thing.
Caller 4 (01:50:07):
Okay.
Leo Laporte (01:50:07):
So you,
Caller 4 (01:50:08):
That's what I thought, you know, I was PA I was patting myself on the back because I got it for around $200. Sure. And I know that they sell new and I'd always had good luck with refurbished.
Leo Laporte (01:50:20):
Who, who did the refurbishing is always the question
Caller 4 (01:50:24):
I bought it through best buy. And in fact that might be all right. Some, I was going through some stuff tossing out some stuff and I found a box that it came in and I looked at it and there was kind of a, a mark that said kind of that the refurbished refurbished was done and it got, it was and approved for sale. So,
Leo Laporte (01:50:44):
So may, so here's an example. I, I think it's probably true in Texas in California, if the box was opened, if it was used as a demo or if somebody bought it, opened it and immediately returned it, it cannot be sold as new. So they will sell it as refurbished often. That's a huge discount just because it was open. So maybe as good as new does it, were there any on the body, was it, were there any fine scratches or anything? Did it look? No,
Caller 4 (01:51:10):
Leo, it was really, it just, it looked pristine. So
Leo Laporte (01:51:12):
That's probably what it was.
Caller 4 (01:51:14):
And yeah, it was fine now I saved that tag that was on the side of the box. I'm gonna look at it again. And you know, when it's refurbished you can you think, I think it comes with the best buy right. Guarantees it for three. Right. And I actually bought it with an Amex card and perfect. Extend it for three more months. Smart man. Now those six, the six months are out.
Leo Laporte (01:51:36):
Oh, oh, well.
Caller 4 (01:51:38):
Yeah.
Caller 4 (01:51:39):
Okay. Well, yeah, I said it's, we're not on the phone a lot because we're on the computer a lot, you know, searching for people. Are we off the air now? Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:51:47):
Well, we're on a podcast, so you're not complete the anonymous.
Caller 4 (01:51:50):
Oh, no problem. Leo was gonna say if you're class, if you're in touch with, whoever's doing your reunion we are really good at locating.
Leo Laporte (01:51:57):
What's the name of the company?
Caller 4 (01:51:59):
It's reunions by class act. Okay. And our website is reunion, scoop.com. The scoop came from I used to be a newspaper reporter. That's how I met Dwight back. Oh, neat. Online enterprise. And it's not much to look at, but I've written every word on it. So hopefully it makes sense.
Leo Laporte (01:52:16):
And and your expertise is finding the alums.
Caller 4 (01:52:20):
Well, yes, we locate people. We find a place. I think the two main reasons we're still in business. Leo keep the price down. There's no reason to make it over $50. And with Facebook, the way Facebook has grown, it's easy for people to keep in touch. Yeah. Online. And they don't feel the need to meet in person. So we're good at finding people. We keep the price down, this looks
Leo Laporte (01:52:40):
Great. And I won't, yeah. If I get an email, I will refer it to them. Cause
Caller 4 (01:52:46):
I was gonna tell your organizers, we're good at finding people. So if they're still you know, you're obviously easy to find.
Leo Laporte (01:52:51):
Let's see if they find me <laugh>, that'll be the challenge.
Caller 4 (01:52:57):
Do they, do they send out anything or do they just assume that you,
Leo Laporte (01:53:01):
Well, let's see. I was class of 73. Okay. So it's a year out.
Caller 4 (01:53:08):
It'll be next year, right?
Leo Laporte (01:53:09):
Yeah. So I would think that somebody's thinking about it. I'm not on Facebook. That's probably the best place to go to figure that out.
Caller 4 (01:53:16):
Yeah. And you know, Leo, we've learned a lot, Facebook gives people license to you know, everybody's critics. So it think they know what they're doing and they'll, they'll do it someplace and they'll just assume, oh, it'll be like our 20 year reunion, 200 people will show up mm-hmm and then they realize that most of the Facebook group isn't gonna show up, but there's other people in the class who will show up. Right. So it's, it's an interesting way to make a living. We sort of coexisted with Facebook, you know, we know it's heard attendance, but it helps us get the word out. So obviously if someone in a class is a member of a Facebook group, we don't have to search for them because by them being a member they're already located. Right. So that helps a little bit too.
Leo Laporte (01:54:00):
Well, look for the class of 73 Santa Cruz high <laugh>.
Caller 4 (01:54:04):
Oh, you know, I thought you, you I thought you were from Rhode Island or new Hampton.
Leo Laporte (01:54:09):
I was, we moved when I was in ninth grade, we moved from Providence to Santa Cruz. So I graduated from Santa Cruz, high
Caller 4 (01:54:18):
Santa Cruz, high 73. Wow.
Leo Laporte (01:54:20):
Class is 70. I
Caller 4 (01:54:21):
Had no, I had no idea. And your Leo, your mom is still living. Right.
Leo Laporte (01:54:25):
She's alive. She's gonna to be 90 in January. She lives in Cranston. She moved back. I don't know why she had this beautiful farm in yeah. In Santa Cruz. And she said, no, all my, all my friends and family are back there. I'm going back. So my sister lives back there. She lives back there and I'm gonna go visit her any day now cuz
Caller 4 (01:54:44):
Helps keep an eye on her. We'll yeah. And it was great to get through you actually this has been bugging me for some time and I, I, in fact, while I was on hold, I'm looking up here. How to turn off Android updates on OnePlus nor 10. It talks about going into Google play store. But you're saying in this case, Leo, this shouldn't obviously shouldn't have happened. Should
Leo Laporte (01:55:04):
Not have happened. Updates should not do anything like that. What will normally happen in an update is it'll ask you, it'll say I've downloaded the up update. Would you like me to apply it? It will never do it automatically. You say, you should say yes at that time, but do do it when you go to bed because it will take a while. It'll apply the update. And then weirdly it has to go through every app and update that it recom compiles the, or so it redoes the app. So that's the thing that takes the longest time. But at that point it should come back and your phone should be exactly the same. You might get a little announcement saying, Hey, now you have the new version. Mostly you want, right. Those updates are supposed to come out every month. Those are security updates. And they're very important, especially in Android. Yes. Yeah.
Caller 4 (01:55:49):
Leo, do you think it would help? I keep getting these since this happened, the last time I get these notes from one plus saying, do you want to finish setting up your phone? Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:55:57):
That's interesting.
Caller 4 (01:55:58):
And I, I consider it a little bit intrusive. Should I actually say yes. Well,
Leo Laporte (01:56:03):
Just see what they want. They probably want you to create a OnePlus account. Don't this is a Chinese company. I'm not, you know, I okay. I wouldn't, I wouldn't give 'em any more information than you need to.
Caller 4 (01:56:14):
Okay. So don't create,
Leo Laporte (01:56:15):
They are very nice phones though. I, I think it's
Caller 4 (01:56:18):
Good choice. I really, it does everything we want, but we're holding off cuz my wife wanted the same phone. Not just yet. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:56:24):
Okay. Yeah. They sell noon now for about 500, about the same as a pixel six a will cost. So so get her a six a when those are announced in the next month or two. Okay.
Caller 4 (01:56:34):
That sounds good. Listen, Leo, it was great to talk to you. I've been listening. I was gonna say long time listener, first time complainer, but I, I didn't want you to didn't want you to,
Leo Laporte (01:56:44):
But not about me. I would've taken it personally. You know me. <Laugh> okay. Hey, it's a pleasure
Caller 4 (01:56:49):
Very much.
Leo Laporte (01:56:50):
Thank you. If you see Dwight say hi, I might see him before you do, but if you,
Caller 4 (01:56:55):
Well, he he wrote about an old time electronics place that hopefully will fix the CD player on my, my wife's ancient Corolla. So I'm gonna go there next week and tell them he he, Dwight
Leo Laporte (01:57:07):
Sent me that. Yeah, I loved Dwight.
Caller 4 (01:57:09):
It's a great Leo did you know a guy named Frank Emmett years ago who worked for compact? I told him many years ago. He compact had a store, you know, they were located here. Yeah. And they had a store on the north freeway called compact war works. And I mentioned, I said, well, I, I graduated from from, you know, who KK to Leo and, and Frank goes, oh, many years ago. I knew Leo. Oh, he's been involved with computers for many.
Leo Laporte (01:57:37):
The name is Didley familiar. And I may well have met him in the, I mean, compacts long gone. I might have met him in those days though. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Caller 4 (01:57:46):
Leo, I won't keep you, but thanks a bunch. We really
Leo Laporte (01:57:48):
Appreciate my pleasure, Jay. Thanks for calling
Caller 4 (01:57:51):
Right. You're welcome.
Leo Laporte (01:57:53):
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo Laport here, the tech guy, time to talk about computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, all that jazz. 88 88, ask Leo (888) 827-5536 is the phone number. If you wanna talk computers, the internet home theater, digital photography, I'm here for you. Baby website, tech guy labs.com. I'll put a link for a last caller. Who said he had a OnePlus Nord, which did automatic reset after updating. And I'll put a link because scooter X in our chat room has found an something on the OnePlus forums from a couple of years ago saying the phone did a factory reset after an update. Apparently it's something I maybe that's OnePlus has had a problem with in the past. So that could have been what happened. Now. This is two years ago, but maybe this is an issue OnePlus has and and knows about should not happen. Your phone should never reset itself back to factory settings. That's not only if you ask it to Michael Toga, California, Leo Laport, the TECA. Hi, Michael
... (01:59:15):
Found, oh, something on the
Leo Laporte (01:59:17):
Forums. Turn off that radio. Cuz I am on with you
... (01:59:22):
Saying the phone did
Leo Laporte (01:59:23):
A, it's not gonna happen, but you know, that's funny. That's really old school. Haven't had to do that in a long time. <Laugh> Mike, I'm gonna put you on hold as soon as you hear me say, turn off the radio, turn off the radio and I'll come back to you. Meanwhile, Micah's on the line from Maine. Hi Micah.
Caller 5 (01:59:39):
Hey Leo. Great to talk to you. And you just review, yield something about yourself that I had no idea about. And that is that you have been the tech guy since you were 12 years old.
Leo Laporte (01:59:49):
<Laugh> well, not really. When I was 12, we barely had rocks.
Caller 5 (01:59:55):
Yes, but the SS United States was the most highest tech ocean liner ever made to this.
Leo Laporte (02:00:02):
It's a Beau. It was a beautiful ship.
Caller 5 (02:00:06):
That's what I wanted to hear a little bit about, you know, there was no wood allowed on that ship except for the Maho and the piano and butcher block in the, in the kitchen. Oh,
Leo Laporte (02:00:15):
I didn't know that
Caller 5 (02:00:16):
Only wood allow. Yeah, because they were so concerned with fire safety and it was also filled with asbestos at the time. Oh
Leo Laporte (02:00:22):
Nice. And it,
Caller 5 (02:00:24):
And it was designed, it was paid for 50 million of it. It was 78 million ship. 50 million was paid for by the government to, so it could be easily converted to a troop ship and the other 28 million by the company that owned it. Oh, be darn float in Philadelphia. I dunno if you knew that.
Leo Laporte (02:00:39):
I did know. And it's sad because she's rusting away. She was decommissioned. Not so long after I sailed on her and has just been sitting there and
Caller 5 (02:00:48):
1969.
Leo Laporte (02:00:48):
Yeah. They're hoping that like the queen Mary, the other boat I sailed on when I was a kid that somebody will take her and turn her into a, you know, a, a, a attraction cuz yeah, the fastest ship at the time ever to cross the Atlantic on the under five
Caller 5 (02:01:04):
Days holds the world's record. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:01:06):
Still does the world's record.
Caller 5 (02:01:08):
No kidding. Yeah. 40 it's it's highest speed set in that for the ocean liner was 43 miles an hour. Holy
Leo Laporte (02:01:14):
Cow.
Caller 5 (02:01:15):
It's top speed. It could actually hit 49 miles an hour, which is incredible for something so big.
Leo Laporte (02:01:19):
Well, I was just a little a little kid, so I didn't, I didn't appreciate any of that. I did like the fact that you know, they had soup every night for dinner in the <laugh> in the dining room. I have to say though, it's interested contrast it, which was with a very modern ship with the ship. We sailed home on the queen, Mary, which was on its second to last voyage and was very much the opposite. A lot of wood you know, a classic ocean liner. And there were two very different experiences, both of which I fell in love with. And you know, it's made me a love boats ever since.
Caller 5 (02:01:53):
Well, what people don't realize is they don't make ocean liners anymore. They make cruise ships. I completely different things. Kard
Leo Laporte (02:02:01):
Kard has, you know, some, you know, the queen Elizabeth too, and some kind of ocean liners, but there really are cruise ships aren't they?
Caller 5 (02:02:08):
Yeah. Yeah. Very different. Yeah. But I'm wondering if you have any actual memories of it cuz you you've been on the queen. Mary obviously probably as a, as a, as an adult as well since she's doc not so far, far away from you. Really?
Leo Laporte (02:02:20):
Yeah. No, it's quite a thing to go there and kind of go, oh, I vaguely remember this again. I was 11 years old. I'm trying to, I do remember the first impression of the United States. She was docked in New Jersey. I think she somewhere like Newark, it wasn't down in New York city, we went and I remember arriving and of course we were all dressed up because in 1967 this was fancy fancy. And I remember coming up to the boat and it see being stunned at how huge it was. It towered over us. And of course I was little, so anything would tower over me, but it did very much remember that I don't much remember anything of the actual voyage except the food of course, which
Caller 5 (02:03:06):
Was quite naturally,
Leo Laporte (02:03:07):
Which was quite good. <Laugh> <laugh> no, I remember on the queen Mary, I remember sitting on the deck chair, it was quite cold. It's an Atlantic crossing covered with blankets and the steward would come with a little cup of bullion. I thought that was pretty cool for you to sip as you were freezing on the deck.
Caller 5 (02:03:23):
Yeah, very traditional on the British ships to serve beef bullion. And and, and I remember at that age I was growing up in, in New Jersey we'd drive to Brooklyn to visit my folks and we, my grandparents and we drive down the west side highway and that's where all the, the ocean liners were. And I remember driving by the United States and, and the huge Mary huge and they were amazing to see. Yeah. And they're just not around anymore. Well, like I said, you, yeah, to see that rusting hall of the United States, when I go to, Philadelphia's still very, very sad.
Leo Laporte (02:03:54):
We've turned this into boat talk and I apologize, Micah, by the way is all about airplanes. And so he, he likes, obviously you like I do remember in 19, let's see it would've been in the early eighties sailing on one of the last sailings of the old Rotter dam, which was a, was an ocean liner that Holland America had converted into a cruise ship. And we went on a caribou being cruise on it. And it reminded me quite a bit of the old queen. I loved it. The old Rotterdam was a beautiful boat.
Caller 5 (02:04:25):
Beautiful. And it's the same with the the France was converted by I guess Holland America into the Norway and I that's right. She's gone now. Yeah. But she became a cruise ship as well.
Leo Laporte (02:04:34):
No, the France was, was what the great cruise ship. Everyone says, my mom sailed on it when she was a young woman to France. So there you go. Ocean liner talk. I had no idea it was high tech. That's very interesting.
Caller 5 (02:04:48):
No, the, the, the, the United States was the highest tech ocean liner ever built and, and one of the last ones ever built and just, just amazing when you, you look up the facts about it. And that's, that's why I called because it really was, it's a tech thing, you know, you
Leo Laporte (02:05:02):
Put out business by the airlines, I guess in transatlantic flights.
Caller 5 (02:05:06):
Absolutely. It was a Boeing 7 0 7. That, that, that killed her.
Leo Laporte (02:05:09):
Yeah. Was it PanAm? What were the, what was the big trans Atlantic carrier?
Caller 5 (02:05:13):
Panam PanAm was the first one to buy the 7 0 7 P world airways. Yeah. The old PanAms, they're the first ones to buy the 7 0 7 and the first one to fly the 7 47.
Leo Laporte (02:05:23):
Are there any 7 0 7 still in service?
Caller 5 (02:05:27):
It's funny. You should mention that because I'm writing a piece about that right now for the airplane geeks, because in a few weeks we'll be celebrating our 700th and seventh episode, 14 years. Oh,
Leo Laporte (02:05:40):
Congratulations. You're almost as thank you. Very, almost as long lived as our podcasts are. That's great.
Caller 5 (02:05:47):
Yeah, we, we we're getting there, but we only have to do it weekly, not twice a week, like you and we're only an hour and a half, so
Leo Laporte (02:05:52):
Yeah. We're yeah. We have 1800 episodes in the, in the bank now. Well, that's great. So what seven oh sevens are out there?
Caller 5 (02:06:01):
None, none. The, the, the air force still flies to KC 1 35, which is a 7 0 7, but there are no commercial seven oh sevens flying as far as I know.
Leo Laporte (02:06:11):
Oh, that's too bad. And maybe a little more up to date. What's going on with Boeing.
Caller 5 (02:06:17):
Oh, I don't the thing you need to remember about Boeing and is that Boeing is the name Boeing, but it's the company McDonald Douglas, ah, McDonald Douglas took Boeing's money bought and it, and trade bought Boeing, took the name and has been run by McDonald Douglas ever since. And it's not Boeing. We, which is very, very sad. The, the Boeing that we knew that created the B 17 and the B 17 is really what the, the world war II bomber is, what got them going and turned them into the company that changed the world. And then the, you know, the B 52, which is gonna be flying until long after we are dead. And the 7 0 7 is gone, the 7 47 is gone and they've had trouble ever since. In fact, they just canceled the well delayed the triple seven X project, which was supposed to be flying by now. And they're talking about maybe bringing it back in 2024. So
Leo Laporte (02:07:11):
It's, I will, because you've been so nice, Micah. I will put on the video for the show. A picture of me, my mom and my sister aboard the S says, United States, you see the PI there that says United States lines sailing out of New York Harbor in 1967. Micah pleasure talking to you. 88, 88, ask Leo, Leo Laport, the tech guy more. If your calls coming up just around the corner website, tech guy labs.com. And I guess I'll have to put that picture on tech. I labs won't I all right. <Laugh> more of your calls right after this. See how dressed up we were Micah. Oh, you can't, you can't see it probably. Oh, he is gone. Oh, well. Oh, well, Yeah. I was wearing a brown Tweed suit. It looks like <laugh>. Wow. I think my, yeah, this is us getting ready to go. Right? It's the same outfit, I think. And then Yeah. Oh, and my poor sister, Eva. That's that was her doll. She lost that over the side of the boat on the trip.
Leo Laporte (02:08:21):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:08:23):
A great tragedy. A great tragedy here. My mom and dad are on the boat also. I probably took that. Didn't learn. I hadn't learned about headroom yet. It's really fun to have those. That's really fun. Here. We are in I think this is Waterloo. I remember going to see the battlefield of Waterloo. Yeah. There's an another one Sailing away. I'll tell you it got in my brain. It got my brain. That's why I do cruising. I mean, I, I really would love to go on you know, actually the Probably should have joined the merchant Marine or something, but Should have gone see, Join the Navy to see, to see, Oh, here we go. Here's a picture of the boat of the SSE United States, I think. Or no, maybe this is the queen Mary. Now I'll have to, If I could see more of that stack, I would know. I think we're differently. Aren't we? Yeah, this is going home. That's the queen, Mary. I still have that raincoat. <Laugh> Here's my sister at Mosam shell. I remember that very well. Yeah. We got all the family slides converted And it's nice to have them all
Leo Laporte (02:10:04):
In the summertime, baby. Leo. LePort the tech guy. It is Mayday. I mean, not technically summer, but the first day of may. That's a that's that's when it all begins. Doesn't it? Rod pile astronaut space, man. Well, he is not really an astronaut, but a spaceman. He's no more an astronaut than I coming up in. Just a little bit to talk about space. Meanwhile, back to the phones we go, let's try Michael again in Togo. Hi, Michael.
Caller 6 (02:10:31):
Hey there, Leo. How you
Leo Laporte (02:10:32):
Doing? I am great. Welcome to the show,
Caller 6 (02:10:35):
Boy. Thanks for taking my call. I'll tell you. Well,
Leo Laporte (02:10:38):
Thanks for hanging on. I know you were on for a while, so I appreciate it.
Caller 6 (02:10:42):
There you go. Hey, I have a idea center. Lenovo desktop. Yes. And, and the, the date on the build for that unit was back in 2016. Well, all, all of the moving about us furniture and ha what have you we have seen to misplace the disc or the program operating system them 10.
Leo Laporte (02:11:14):
Oh, that's no problem. Who needs that? In fact, I'm surprised it came with a disc these days. They often don't.
Caller 6 (02:11:23):
Well, even though it came with a disc, it got misplaced.
Leo Laporte (02:11:27):
Yeah, you don't need it. So Microsoft offers it for free for download. What you, what you'll want is a thumb drive. I think you'll need a eight gigabyte thumb drive 16, to be better. You haven't need enough space to put the windows installer on it. That's what was on that disc. Now, there may be some specific Lenovo stuff on there. But you can get that after you install windows by going to the Novo site and getting what they call the drivers for windows 10. Yeah. It's probably a good idea. You wanna rebuild the machine? What are you doing? What do you need?
Caller 6 (02:12:04):
Well I also misplaced the operator's owner's manual for it. So there's a lot of
Leo Laporte (02:12:11):
It came with a manual. Wow.
Caller 6 (02:12:15):
Not just say that there would be some homework ahead of me.
Leo Laporte (02:12:19):
I can walk you through it. <Laugh> that's hysterical. The last computer I bought in a Macintosh Mac studio came with a manual that was a sheet of not even a big sheet of paper. It was a little tiny pamphlet that just said, look online. If you got any questions, you probably can get the manual as well from lenovo.com. They, they offer it for download. If you really wanna read it, what do you wanna do?
Caller 6 (02:12:44):
Well, I'm trying to wake it up because when I power it up, it goes to a blue screen with a lot of prompts on,
Leo Laporte (02:12:52):
Yeah, windows is, windows is dead so we can fix that. So a couple of things I'm gonna do for you. I'm gonna put a link in the show notes to the Microsoft media creation tool is what they call it, where you download a copy of the windows, 10 installer. And it wants to be, you could install on a CD, but really it wants to be installed on a thumb drive. That's the best way to, to do it. So you'll download that and it has instructions for putting it in a thumb drive. The only trick on this is you have to tell the idea center. Now don't boot from the internal hard drive. That's what keeps crashing. I want you to boot to the thumb drive. And there's a little setting in your setup that you turn, turn that on. You say it's a boot order setting. You say boot first to the thumb drive. It'll boot up. And it is, it's not a full windows. It's just a windows installer. You can walk through it. What I would suggest if you're having all these problems. Is there anything on that drive you want to get back?
Caller 6 (02:13:53):
Can actually, I don't, I don't believe when my daughter who was in, who was in college at the time. I don't believe at that.
Leo Laporte (02:14:02):
She probably got everything.
Caller 6 (02:14:04):
Yeah. Yeah. She took what she needed. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:14:07):
And so it, so it's not been used since then,
Caller 6 (02:14:10):
What?
Leo Laporte (02:14:10):
That it hasn't been used since then?
Caller 6 (02:14:13):
Correct.
Leo Laporte (02:14:14):
Okay. Can you get to windows at all or does it blue screen before you even get windows going
Caller 6 (02:14:20):
Blue screen before anyone? Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:14:22):
If you could get to windows, you know, at least get to a login. There is a reset command that's built into the computer, but since you can't get to windows, let's just wipe the whole hard drives, start over. And that's what this windows media creation tool will do for you. Once you install reinstall windows 10, by the way, you don't need a serial number because it had windows 10 on it before Microsoft already has it in the database, they say, oh yeah, that idea center is fine. You own it. So they'll, they'll authenticate it. No problem. The other link I'm gonna put in the show notes for you. So I'm gonna put that. So you know where to down and only get it from Microsoft. Don't get it from anybody else. Microsoft.Com download windows 10 disk image. It says. And then the other thing I'll put a link in to the show notes for you. If it's a value is where you can find Lenovo's manuals. So those manuals, you can download on another system or on a smartphone, they're just PDFs. And, and then you can read those. I don't think there's gonna be much of value in there. <Laugh> it's been a long time since the company actually put anything interesting in their manuals.
Caller 6 (02:15:34):
Yeah. I think that that's where things are headed. Yeah. In that
Leo Laporte (02:15:39):
During, yeah. I mean, I, honestly, I haven't seen a manual come with a computer in a long time that Mo all the manual ever has these days is a, is they don't even have a text is a picture of where the on off switch is and you know how to plug it in and turn it on. And then the rest is up to you. I'm sorry, you're on your own. So Lenova will have those instructions online. You'll also want to go there to get after you install the vanilla version of windows, which is what you'll get from Microsoft you'll install the specialized drivers that are for that particular machine. You'll also get those Villanova.
Caller 6 (02:16:17):
Well, the original, the original windows 10 was home version.
Leo Laporte (02:16:21):
That's fine. So get the home version. Yeah. Home is fine. No one needs pro pro is for businesses,
Caller 6 (02:16:29):
Right? Yeah. Oh, okay. I I'm gonna dig into your it's
Leo Laporte (02:16:35):
A little project. Yeah. It's a little project re recuperating the old lost idea center.
Caller 6 (02:16:42):
I love it. <Laugh> what is the, what is the ID on the show note tech
Leo Laporte (02:16:49):
Tech guy labs. And this is episode 1890. It won't be there right away. Takes us a day or two to get all that stuff up. But tomorrow everything should be up there.
Caller 6 (02:17:00):
1890 is the number
Leo Laporte (02:17:01):
1890. It was a good year.
Caller 6 (02:17:04):
Oh yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:17:05):
Thank you, Michael.
Caller 6 (02:17:07):
Hey, you're very welcome. And I appreci you being there for us.
Leo Laporte (02:17:10):
My pleasure. Yeah. On Mo on, on most modern machines, if you can at least get logged into windows, there is you go into the menu and there's a reset your PC just there as, as there is nowadays on most phones, a reset your PC to the factory op original settings. And in most cases, that will also give you a chance if you wish to preserve your data. So it just, all it does is reinstalls windows on top of the old windows. And usually that's enough to get things working. The only thing that you might wanna worry about, Michael, it's possible that in the period that it was sitting in the closet, the hard drive died. You know, it has serious flaws. In which case you may not be able to install windows. It may have a hard driving. You could replace that if you wish Leo Laport the TechCon he's our rocket man, rod pile editor, inchi of the beautiful ad Astra magazine.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:18:02):
There they are. He also has written many books, including interplanetary robots, true stories of pace, exploration, amazing stories of the space, age blueprint for a battle star and the world famous. Actually, I love this book, sorry. I'm just teasing you around. <Laugh> first on the moon, the Apollo 11 50th anniversary experience. He is our space guy host of this week in space with tar Malik space.com. Is there anything I've left out from your CV? No, it just, it looked like a K tell commercial where they used to throw all those records on the ground. Right. <Laugh> it's like, and you get this too.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:18:41):
Oh my goodness, Ron. It's good to see you. Good to see you. I like to check in with rod every week to make sure there's no asteroids hitting for heading for the the earth. Are we safe? Well, we are so, but, but first let me just address this RGO and comment about space station. Okay. Yeah. Everybody in the chat room wants to know the Russians say, that's it we're out after sanctions no more to do with ISS. We're done. We're going home. Thus for Daniel Tova we're well said. Yes. So, you know, this is just an increasing tempo of rhetoric from RGO. We know Brin's a blow hard. He's big. He is the head of the Russian space agency. He's the head of the Russian space, but not a scientist, not an astronaut, a political appointee. He's a, and this is guy Mr.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:19:24):
P, this guy, he, he is he's, he's in Mr. Putin's Palm. And, and he's the guy that said, you know, in 2014, when we were pushing back in Ukraine, maybe you want to take a trampoline to the space station. And then more recently, maybe you can fly your brooms up there. We have Elon. We don't need you goodbye. Kind of. Yeah. And, and after he made that broomstick comment, as you may have seen Elon put up a tweet that said the America broomstick with a picture of one of his rockets, which I thought was great. You know, so the Russians were partners in the beginning. This is of the space station. This is something that we set up at the fall of the Soviet union to a large extent to keep their scientists and engineers off the streets and from working with Iran and other hostile powers.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:20:06):
So it was kind of a charity project. I didn't know that it was kind of like, yeah, oh, you guys, you stay with us, we'll help you. We'll keep you busy. Yeah, that's interesting. But they had good hardware and we could use it. They had been preparing to build another space station. So we took some of those modules and they were one of them particularly is at the core of ours. So, you know, you could talk about UN lugging from the space station. You could talk about no longer cooperating. If you're Russia, those are two different things. There's some problems though. There's miles of cabling. There's a lot of stuff that you'd have to do to disconnect these modules. The Russian module in particular is old and creaky and full of cracks. And there's really nothing they'd wanna do with it except make a political point.
Leo Laporte (02:20:46):
So they might abandon it in place. Critically. The Russians have been providing propulsion to keep the space station up in its proper orbit. But since I think at least 2018 NASAs has been experimenting with Northrop Grumman Cigna's delivery vessel, which is a capsule that takes cargo up there to use it, to reboot the orbit. And of course, Elon Musk has, has his dragon two capsules, which could do the same thing would take a little bit longer boosting, but they could do it. So this isn't the crisis. It's an inconvenience on the other side of the equation, the Russians need our money. Their space program is desperately underfunded. It's in crisis right now, because are we, we giving them money? I mean, or is that not included in the sanctions? Oh, okay. It's part of the space station agreement. So we, we are continuing to do that money and inkind yeah.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:21:34):
So there's, and there's a lot of prestige national prestigious stake here. So pulling out would be a significant ding to them. So personally, I think it's a lot of hot air, most journalists. I, I know, think so, but it could happen. It could happen. And if, then it might take SpaceX, I don't know, three or four months to get something ready to do the same job. Right. I'm I'm being glib. But I I think put Elon on 10 trampoline, send him to space station. Well, and, and SpaceX works fast and their hardware's good. So let's not about that. You saying we don't need the Russians and they need us more than we need them and they're not. Yeah. I'd say the latter. Yeah. I mean, we'd like to keep them in the game, but if it's, if they insist on leaving to make a point that's on them.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:22:19):
Right. Let's talk about asteroids though. Yes. I wanna know, are we, are we safe? Are okay. So asteroid 2008, ag 33 flew past Earth's orbit on April 28th, which is last Thursday. I oh, was it an, this is, well, it was 2 million miles. Oh, so that's a lot, that's eight times the distance of the moon, but in, you know, cosmic terms, that's pretty close. It's enough to get our attention. Yeah. You know, these come near to earth orbit and then go around the sun and then pass back out to the ER, solar system. This particular one is on a seven year circuit. Now it's between 1,120 600 feet across. So it's a big rock size of two super carriers or two empire state buildings roughly. Wow. So it's a great big rock probably. Is it a planet killer if it hit us, would it?
Leo Laporte (02:23:10):
No, it's a region killer. So it would take out, it could take out San Francisco or, or Manhattan, which is a big concern. A little uncertain, exactly how big the crater would be. If it hit, if it hit on land, it could be anywhere between five miles and 12 craters have hit. I mean, there are evidence of craters in Russia. There was one not so long ago. We had an asteroid probably is what killed the dinosaurs so much bigger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's probably worth it paying attention. It is. And let's remember ch Bens, which was about 20 times the size of the H Shima blast when, in terms of energy, released was only 60 feet across. Wow. So this is many, many multiples of that. Wow. So estimates are the explosion. If it exploded would be upwards the energy. Let's just say the energy upwards of 7,000 megatons and Russia's za Baba from back in the sixties was about 55 megatons.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:24:05):
So it's a big deal. So the important message here is it was a comfortable miss. It's not gonna be a risk in the near future unless it's orbit alters, but we need to see the rest of 'em. We still haven't charted all the big rocks out there. We definitely haven't charted the smaller ones and NASA and others. The Chinese are now taking up this cause as well, need funding to get more telescopes in orbit, get more telescope time on Earth's surface and start experimenting with messages with methods of, of intercepting these things and diverting them. You're not gonna blow 'em up. They're too big. But if you can divert their path far enough out, even by just a couple of degrees, they miss the earth. You know, you remember geometry, right? That angle keeps expanding. Yeah, they'd miss the earth, but that takes budgeting.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:24:50):
So as we've discussed before, we do have the dart mission, which is the double asteroid redirect test, which is gonna slam in September. October is gonna slam a little 1200 pound NASA spacecraft into a small rock called D DFOs. It's a little moon of a larger asteroid just to see if it works. And assuming that that is effective, then we're gonna start larger tests. And now the Chinese will talk about the same thing. And for my money, this might be one place where we can finally talk about international cooperation with the Chinese, because we're both doing the same thing. And it's a really good cause we're saving our patient this planet together. Yes. Yeah. And if the us gets taken out by a giant asteroid China's principle market collapses there in really bad shape, so, well, they might be repercussions reverberations, you think? Yeah. And there's 27,000 of these things at least.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:25:43):
Okay. Wow. That's, that's an estimate. So we want to know where they are and you know, we want to do more science to see if we can stop 'em from being a problem. Yeah. So in it's almost just a mess in this case do look up. Yes. <laugh> definitely, definitely look up, take it real and that, you know, the, the message is that movie, some people liked it. Some didn't a lot of people made fun of it, but, you know, do you think it was far off from reality? I don't. No. Well we'll know when something is headed our way, I guess, but it, well, climate change is headed our way. Yeah. Yeah. COVID was a good example as well. Yeah. Rod pile editor in chief at Astro, if you wanna S I it's, it's the official publication of the national space society go to space, dots dot org. And then if you want to hear Rod's podcast, you do that every Friday with TARC. I know you know that, but I'm just reminding you in case you forget, you go to it's fine. TWI T I T e.tv/t I TWI stands for this week in tech. So this weekend space is twist and you can listen or wherever you ever get your podcasts. Look for T I this week in space. All thanks to you, Lisa. Thanks to you. I just collect the money.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:27:04):
It's not get, not keep me that afraid. Not really fulltime job, Leo Laport think tech guy more calls right after this. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:27:19):
I just write the checks. Maybe I should say that I don't even do that. I don't know either. I just, I just show up, you show up Lisa plays, you, you work a lot. Lisa even said, Leo's just a, a work, an animal, you know, oh, how many hours a week of contact? Not that much. It's gone way down. It used to, to be a lot. I only work four days a week and I do on average four or five hours. Each of those four days, it's more like 20. It's not, it's not as much as it used to be. It used to, to be more like 30 that's a lot of air time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if it were, if I were on the radio four days, five days, a week, four hours a day, which most people don't do anymore, but that's about roughly the same.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:27:55):
So it's, that's a full-time job. So I guess it a, you know, that's what I think is easy for folks to forget. I mean, I was always kind of scared of radio, but when you look at what people like you and bill handle do, I mean, I just half of prep does it take, I'm just, I just half-ass it. I don't, <laugh> just tell anybody. I just show up and talk. No, I I do have producers for the other shows, not this show, but for the other shows who put together a rundown, but that's based on I'm I, and Lisa will tell you this I'm pretty much constantly going through feeds, looking for stories. So that's the prep, you know, readings keeping up on what's going on in tech someday. I won't have to do that. And I don't know what I'm gonna do with myself.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:28:39):
You're gonna on a lifelong cruise somewhere. Oh, you know this morning, I'm saying, okay, Lisa, now we could build up your stamina. We'll start with a two months there. And we'll slowly, we'll slowly work our way up. I think the last time I went outta a cruise was probably six years ago was only a week. And I think I gained seven pounds. You have to, not to. It's tough. The last cruise we went on, which was great before COVID yeah, there was a really good Naples pizza place. Stone oven, right outside our cabin, like 10 feet from our cabin. <Laugh> that was ill. Just go get a few slices, honey. He SP monopoly. It was called and the guy was nap. It was, it was incredible. Incredible. And yeah, it was, that was a bad thing. Well, so my shame, my, my downfall was the 24 hour little mini buffet with all the, the junky stuff that you really don't want to eat, but you do just cuz it's there.
Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:29:36):
Yeah. That's yeah. They have an ice cream station all day. Yeah. That's not good. Like don't do that. That's not good for people with weights. I've kind of I've yeah, yeah, no, I'm pretty careful about cuz it's tempting. The good news is you always have a lot of variety, so you can't eat a salad if you want. And so that's not well, and chips are big enough. Now you can, you can loop loop around the deck five or six times they got a pretty dark, at least it makes me do that. We do the, yeah. We go down to the gym road every day and then we'd hike at a rapid pace around the deck. <Laugh> oh, with all there's you know, usually on any cruise there's about five people who actually work out. Yeah. Well and you're one of them clearly. Thanks Lisa. She makes me, you are loved.
Leo Laporte (02:30:18):
Yes. Hey rod. A pleasure. Lisa keeps saying every time we go down she says, next time we go down south, we gotta visit Rod's boat. Yeah. Yeah. We'll let you know. We'll let you know. Thanks my friend. Take care. See ya. Bye. Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for letting me do this. I don't know. You know, I must have been good in early, early life or something because this is a, this is a wonderful, thank you to professor Laura, our musical director, who was always surprising me with her, the depth of her musical knowledge. Well done, Laura, thanks to Kim Shaffer. The phone angel she's the behind the scenes genius, who gets everybody ready for their appearances on national radio. Thanks to all of you who call in you are equal partners on this show without the calls. There is no show. And of course, thanks to all of you who listen without you. I don't know what I'd be doing. Wouldn't be this. So thank you. I appreciate it. Leport the tech guy time for a couple more calls before we wrap it up. Let's go to LA Jim's on the line. Hi Jim.
Caller 7 (02:31:22):
Hey Leo, how are you doing?
Leo Laporte (02:31:23):
I'm wonderful. Welcome. How are you?
Caller 7 (02:31:26):
Great. Great. Got a caution. I a cheap camera spy on my garden. Cause I got some garments trying to tear up my tomatoes. Aw
Leo Laporte (02:31:35):
Man.
Caller 7 (02:31:37):
So $20 camera off Amazon. It keeps telling me the SD card can't be found.
Leo Laporte (02:31:43):
Oh,
Caller 7 (02:31:44):
Does anything right to that? Or do I get rid of the camera?
Leo Laporte (02:31:46):
Do I? Well, so it's one of these cameras that has a little micro SD card you put in there to record. Yep. And the first thing I always do when I do this is use the software. Does camera have an app?
Caller 7 (02:32:02):
It had some I w F app or something. Okay. IWF cam.
Leo Laporte (02:32:06):
So go into the app and see if there is a way to format the memory card because every, every device ha might has different formats. You always want to format it. Whenever you put a memory card into any device, you want to use that device to format it. So try that first. If it says I can't see a card, then it it's possible. That card is bad. So try another one. Good news is SD cards are cheap. If it's not the card, then it could be the device itself is bad. So,
Caller 7 (02:32:37):
So nothing's ever right and code at all.
Leo Laporte (02:32:39):
Yeah, but I would for try formatting it often. That makes a big difference. Okay. Right.
Caller 7 (02:32:44):
Okay, cool. I'll do
Leo Laporte (02:32:44):
That. All right. Thanks for the call. I appreciate it. Jay next from Manasas park in Virginia, is that where the battlefield, the Manasas battlefield is?
Caller 8 (02:32:55):
Yes. In fact, I'm just walking past the burial site here. Wow. Limit. You have to, to get a special permit to get on, go on
Leo Laporte (02:33:03):
It. Goodness gracious. Wow. Well, a pleasure to talk to you. What can I do for you, sir?
Caller 8 (02:33:09):
Well, Leo, I'm glad to get a hold of you here today. I used the outlook, which I have used for, I know 25 years and the last couple of months in the outlook app on my computer, or if I go to outlook.com, any email I get with attachments, which are good attachments that I want. But if I do a reply a forward, or if another person that received that email also does a reply back from the sender. My attachments disappear.
Leo Laporte (02:33:47):
Yes. And that's a security thing. So it is a pain, but the reason Microsoft's doing this, their reasoning is attachments are the number one way. Viruses get onto a assist system. Now of course, anybody does business knows. We use attachments. I'm telling my wife all the time, don't send attachments. I've been saying I'm on this radio show almost as long as you've been using outlook, don't send attachments, but we still do. We need to. So as long as you're sure those attachments are okay, Then you're, then you can forward them. But there are limitations for instance I believe now this is a security update that came out a while ago. I believe now if it's still doing this that you might have to download that attachment and reattach it. So, okay.
Caller 8 (02:34:46):
It's very frustrating because if I get a, an email with the attachment yeah. I want this attachment. Yeah. But I think, well, I don't need to download it. I just have it as a reference, right. At some future point. But even if somebody comes in like this person set out and set this out to many people, if someone comes in and says, oh, thanks, Joe. For the email, the attachments then outlook puts it together on my email and the attachments disappear.
Caller 2 (02:35:20):
Yeah.
Caller 8 (02:35:21):
Now the only thing that has saved me is it doesn't happen on my phone, the outlook app on my phone. I can always get to the attachments.
Caller 2 (02:35:32):
Okay. But I
Caller 8 (02:35:33):
Can't on my computer. And so it's been very frustrating, but I, I can't go back and get to those attachments.
Leo Laporte (02:35:42):
Yeah, no, I understand. Generally Me look and see here, right? Click on the attachments, select slide all now your attachments will be selected, right? Click on them. Select copy, hit reply in the email. Yeah. There's a work around, but boy, is it a paint of in the butt? I, I honestly think this is Microsoft trying to protect you from yourself. <Laugh> but that's kind of annoying, especially if you're sure that this attachment is fine.
Caller 8 (02:36:10):
Yeah. From a person we've been working together, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A long time and he's sending out attachments of information and yeah,
Leo Laporte (02:36:21):
I think it's telling me, I'm just looking at Microsoft's various tech notes on this that you have to manually do this which is so you select the attachment, select copy or hit, you know, control C to copy it and then paste it in the reply. In other words at no longer automatically sends attachments, which is incredibly frustrating. But again, I think that that's, that's just there being secure,
Caller 8 (02:36:50):
But the part I'm frustrated with, if I don't even do anything, but something intercedes with that email, then I can't even go back if I try to go back.
Leo Laporte (02:37:00):
Yeah. It's gone
Caller 2 (02:37:01):
Email. Yeah. It's gone. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:37:06):
So
Caller 8 (02:37:07):
It's something they have. Okay. So at least I know it's something they are doing on purpose and not just me or my computer or something.
Leo Laporte (02:37:15):
No, no, no. I believe it is a it is something Microsoft's doing for security. They've really changed how outlook deals with attachments because it is the number one way viruses get sent. Let me just look and, and see which version of outlook are you using. Do you know how, what
Caller 8 (02:37:32):
Well, I, I have it tied in have 365, you know, I'm
Leo Laporte (02:37:36):
So it's up to date. Okay. So it's the most recent
Caller 8 (02:37:39):
Together with that.
Leo Laporte (02:37:40):
Yeah. Yeah.
Caller 8 (02:37:42):
And I have windows 11, I keep it up to date.
Leo Laporte (02:37:46):
I'm looking to the chat room, but none of them send attachments because they've been listening to me for years saying don't send attachments. So you see the paperclip icon, you know, you have an attachment.
Caller 8 (02:38:01):
Yeah. Yeah. In fact, and sometimes I'll see the email and see there's an attachment. And then I'll think, oh, you know, like a week later I'll say, oh, I need to go back. And
Leo Laporte (02:38:11):
Then it's gone check that
Caller 8 (02:38:13):
And it's gone. And then in fact, even when it's gone, I still see the paper clip. And
Leo Laporte (02:38:21):
Now this, this could be a separate issue, which is, if you have multiple people on that thread, are there multiple, like you're sending it to somebody and somebody's sending it on and somebody's sending it on that kind of thing.
Caller 8 (02:38:32):
Yeah. Or other people receive it also. And when they reply, you know, there may be like 50 of us that get the email and someone else will, will, will reply and say, Hey, thanks Joe, for sending this. And, and that goes into my email, you know?
Leo Laporte (02:38:49):
Yeah. Unfortunately,
Caller 8 (02:38:51):
And then it disappears for me also.
Leo Laporte (02:38:54):
I think you have to do it manually which is to copy that attachment, paste it into the next email as you reply, it it's a lot easier. And I would encourage you and everybody doing this to use OneDrive, put the file you're attaching in OneDrive and just send a link that link will automatically be forwarded along and send along. And then you're not sending files again and again, and again, you know, junking up the internet with many, many copies of the same thing, put it somewhere, put it on one, drive, everybody on windows has one driver somewhere like that and share that link. That's generally what I recommend people do. And I guess that's what Microsoft wants you to do. That's my guess. I'll I'll do some research. I'll look in, do it. Maybe we can talk about it next week, Jay. Thank you for the call.
Leo Laporte (02:39:40):
Thanks to all of you for the calls. I hear the music that tells me it's time to wrap it up for the week. Have a great safe, happy geek week. Enjoy the first day of may. I'll be back next time. Leo Laporte the tech guy take care. Well, that's it for the tech guy she go for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget. TWI T w I T it stands for this week@techandyoufinditattwi.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about windows and windows weekly, Macintosh, a Mac break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches on 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.
