The Tech Guy Episode 1922 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:02):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT. Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my tech guy podcast. This show originally aired on the premier networks coast to coast on Sunday, August 28th, 2022. This is episode 1922. Enjoy the tech guy podcast is brought to you by Unify meeting from MIMO monitors. Unify simplifies your work life by combining your favorite video conferencing solutions to one reliable universal user interface. Visit unifymeeting.com and enter the code tech guy for 25% off a year's subscription. Or use the same code and get 25% off of any of Nemo's seven inch displays. Wow. Hey, Hey. Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here. The tech guy, time to talk technology. Well, is that mean? Well, computers, the internet home theater. Yes, digital photography. We would talk about space, the final frontier, anything with a chip in it. Eighty eight eighty eight.

Leo Laporte (00:01:13):
Ask Leo is the phone number (888) 827-5536 that's tollfree from anywhere in the us or Canada, outside that area. You can reach us by calling through Skype out or something like that. 88 88 ask Leo should be free worldwide, worldwide. Cool. Huh? Website also free worldwide. The tech, not the just tech, no definite article, just tech guy labs.com tech guy labs.com. And I mentioned that because if you hear something on the show and you say, oh, I gotta make a note of that website or that software or whatever. Don't worry. Cuz we put that all up on the website. After the fact tech guy labs.com transcripts in the show, go there, audio and video as well. It should take you right to the page. There'll be all the shows there. And this is the latest one episode 1922. We're in the roaring twenties kind of both ways.

Leo Laporte (00:02:09):
Aren't we? 88 88 ask Leah. Well, the invites went out a couple of days ago, the speculation was accurate. Apple will be having its iPhone event a week from Wednesday, which is a, usually they do it on Tuesdays, but labor days on the Monday. So September 7th, apple will have an event. The invites show an apple, either an Alka seltzer, apple dropping into a glass of water with bubbles coming off, or perhaps it's a space thing. And those are stars. It's kind of unclear. Maybe it is space because then the tagline is far out <laugh>, which I don't know what that means. There's usually when apple sends out invites a lot of, you know, Kremlinology looking at those, what does that mean? And and, and we think that the designers at apple who make these are just laughing, you know, quietly to themselves.

Leo Laporte (00:03:11):
<Laugh>, let's see what they make of this. Oh, there's one bit of speculation. It's been rumored for a couple of years now that apple would build in some sort of satellite capability into its iPhone so that if you're outside of cell range, you could still, you wouldn't be able to make phone calls, but you'd be able to send short texts, you know, kind of emergency things, that kind of stuff, which is a cool idea. And I think it might, you know, so you got that space theme and the invite far out and T-Mobile and SpaceX announced that they're gonna do the same thing for T-Mobile customers, connections to T-Mobile cell phones across the us, even in remote areas with no current wireless service.

Leo Laporte (00:04:02):
That's gonna start towards the, they're gonna start with text messaging in select markets before the end of 2023. So it's distant, but that might might be, you know, apple says, oh, well we better, you know, we've been the things you have to build that capability into the phones. You know, it requires a special radio in the phone. So it's gonna be a hardware manufacturer like apple. That's gonna announce it anyway, iPhone 14 a week from Wednesday and the rumors which were accurate on that also said that they would be available as usual, the following Fri, not the immediately following Friday a week from the following. How is there a way to say that the week this in the British probably have a way of saying it the week following after I don't anyway, the 16th, how that's a, that's a good way of saying it the 16th.

Leo Laporte (00:04:59):
So the events, the 17th, and then a week and a half later, the iPhones would start arriving at your door if you're really in an urgent need iPhones, for sure. Apple watch for sure. Including a new supposedly pro version that would be what's what's pro mean more expensive. Oh yeah, that's it. And probably AirPods. We kind of do AirPods. I don't pay attention to AirPods. I don't, I don't like them. I think they're overpriced. There's so many better choices. I just don't, I don't pay any attention, but apple fans, do you know? No, I don't think they'll be iPads or max announced on the seventh a week from Wednesday. I think other stuff, I think other stuff will be announced. No, I don't think other St I don't think there will be other stuff on the seventh.

Leo Laporte (00:05:53):
I think it will be announced. Other stuff will be announced in October. Okay. Enough of that, enough of that stuff. <Laugh> Micah who joins me on this tech guy every Saturday will be going to that event. So that's cool. He's gonna get to go down and visit the Steve jobs theater. Lot of people commenting asking me about last pass, cuz I know a lot of you do. It's the number one password manager we have for years recommended the use of password managers. Last pass is a very good one. They were hacked two weeks ago and bad guys, AKA threat actors. <Laugh> not Nicholas cage threat actors stole the company's source code and proprietary technical information. And what people are asking was, well that, what does that mean for me as a last pass user? Probably nothing at least last pass says no nobody, nobody, no passwords, no vaults were compromised.

Leo Laporte (00:06:56):
Portions of the source code and proprietary last past technical information. Now I have to say it. That could be bad depending on a couple of things. If there are, for instance, flaws in the source code, which are undiscovered, but the bad guys, the threat actors looking at the source code said, oh, look, look, here's a problem. That would be bad. And we don't know what the proprietary last pass technical information is. We don't know what that could be. So last pass says in response to the incident, we have deployed containment, mitigation measures it engaged, leading cyber security and forensics firm <laugh> while our investigations are ongoing, we have achieved a state of containment, which is different from the te a state of contentment, but you know, close a state of containment, implemented additional enhanced security measures and see no further evidence of unauthorized activity.

Leo Laporte (00:08:00):
Mm mm I'm. You know, I'm glad they told us they didn't tell us right away. Lawrence Abras from bleeping, computer.com for a good site knew about it two weeks ago, asked them about it. They didn't say anything that maybe they said, well, we had to investigate. We had, we had to, we had to think about it. You're supposed to tell people when there's a breach pretty quickly, you know, the law says 33 million people use last pass, a hundred thousand businesses. Always should be concerned when the, when a password manager is compromised because you know, you've got all the keys to your kingdom in there. I'll, I'll certainly keep an eye on this, but so far it doesn't look like there's a massive problem so far, and some nice news about Lieutenant hoorah. She's going to space for one final journey. You may remember. We talked about the passing of Michelle Nichols and she was Lieutenant her, the communications officer in start Trek. She passed away at the age of 89 last month and Thursday, a private company that specializes in space funerals.

Leo Laporte (00:09:19):
Yes, there is such a thing Celest announced they're gonna carry some of her cremated remains and a DNA sample to deep space. I mean, past where the past where the James web telescope is past the Lagar point way out there, where they will join the other planet's moons comments and asteroids in our solar system on a never ending journey through the cosmos. There are boldly going where no ashes have ever gone before. No, I, I made that part up. Actually it won't just be Michelle Nichols, the creator of star Trek, gene Roddenberry will be riding along well. His, his remains his wife, major Barrett Roddenberry who often played characters in star Trek will go along and Scotty cotton. I'm going into space. James Doon, also the legendary special effects, wizard, Douglas Trumble, who did special effects for close encounters in this 2001.

Leo Laporte (00:10:24):
And, and the motion, motion picture, first motion, picture of star Trek. He will be aboard. And then by the way, gene Roddenberry and his wife have been to space before, I guess, you know, they can take little bits. They went up in the space shuttle, Columbia in 1992 in 19. They really they're spreading them out in 1997. Some of his remains were loaded onto a rocket in the Canary islands, launched into earth orbit. They were up there for five years, but then re-entered. Yeah. But this time they're not coming back, they're gone. They'll be gone. Actually their remains were sent up two more times after that. <Laugh> so I guess there's not, I, this is a little morbid, but how much left is there? Anyway in 2020 Scotty's ashes were smuggle aboard the international space station by a millionaire video game creator and space tour, tourist, Richard Gart. Okay. You can, if you would like send some of your DNA or loved ones DNA up with this flight pricing starts at a mere $12,500 and they say it will be the most distant, permanent human repository outpost in our solar system. <Laugh> wow. Wow. 

Leo Laporte (00:11:53):
That's. I mean, it's cool. Right? It's kind of cool. I'll ask rod pile about it. Actually. Rod will probably be talking about the Artis launchers just coming up Monday, tomorrow. Very exciting. Rod, I think is gonna be he's driving up right now. I think he'll be in studio with his, if not, he'll be on the, on the phone from his car. He's coming up right now and he'll be here in a couple of hours. If, if all goes well, eighty eight, eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number, tech guy labs.com the website. Now you're up to date on space related stuff. <Laugh> we'll take your calls next. Stay right here.

Leo Laporte / Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:48):
Okay. Hello, Sam, bud. How are you? Hello, Leo I'm well, good. I was down in Southern California for the last few days. Oh. Spent some time driving around in a new Lexus RX. Ooh. And they lucid air grand touring. I see the lucid air behind you. Yeah. I'm nervous about the lucid because I heard, I, you know, read reports that, you know, they were, it was kind of, they were like having a trouble assembling them and, you know, office staff was coming in to assemble them and they were, you know, shipping parts via Amazon and stuff. But, but it's gonna, yeah. I mean, everybody's having trouble with getting cars built these days. Yeah. Including, you know the legacy automakers. But you know, for the startups like lucid and Rivian, they are particularly challenged because when there are shortages of certain components, suppliers are gonna say, well, I've got this company that I've been yeah.

Leo Laporte / Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:46):
Providing parts to for 40 years. And they build millions of cars a year and you build a few thousand cars. And so I'll, whatever's left over after I'm done shipping to these guys. You can have you're welcome to right. Which is, and not much. Yeah. And for, you know, both lucid and Rivian are having, having this experience right now. Yeah. and you know, even the even the legacies, you know, are not getting all the parts that they need. Just report a reporter called me earlier this week to ask about something, I guess GM is shipping some cars from one of their factories without the under hood installation mat. <Laugh> wow. Because they're, they're not getting, they don't have enough of them and you know, it doesn't affect the functionality car might be a little bit noisier. Right. you get, might get a little more engine noise. But you know, it's something that's easy for the dealer to add back in when they get the parts. But it, it, it, you know, the car still runs fine. Good, good. So I'll wait. I mean, I'm my lease, doesn't run out till Valentine's

Leo Laporte (00:14:50):
Day of 2024. So

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:53):
Yeah, you got some time, hopefully by then a lot of these supply chain issues will be sorted out. Yeah. and there will be a lot more EVs on the market. There's a bunch of new stuff coming out. The lucid is a lovely, lovely car to drive though. Oh

Leo Laporte (00:15:08):
Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:11):
But you know, the one I was driving was $154,000.

Leo Laporte (00:15:15):
Ooh. You, it should be lovely. Yeah. Should be very lovely.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:19):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But it's not perfect. Which is what I wanna talk about. Okay. Which is with how to reboot your car, how to, how to do a control out the lead on your car. Wow. Which I had to do essentially. Holy

Leo Laporte (00:15:32):
Cow. Hey, can you turn your Scarlet down? Just a tad? I think you're clipping a

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:39):
Little sure. How's that? Is that better?

Leo Laporte (00:15:41):
Yeah. Talk for a little more.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:43):
Okay. Yeah. So California was lovely this much week,

Leo Laporte (00:15:46):
Much better, much better. Okay. Thank you. All right. We'll talk in a few. Okay. Thank you, sir. Kim Scher, our phone angel is on the telephone line. Hello, Kim. You own so yesterday you were wearing a stripy outfit. And again, today you own many stripy outfits, but this is a different stripy outfit.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:08):
Yes. And you know what, what every Saturday and Sunday is very difficult for me. Why?

Leo Laporte (00:16:14):
Because, because you know, I'm gonna comment on your

Kim Schaffer (00:16:16):
Outfit. No, be not you, but just like, I feel like I have to wear something different every single day and God it's radio. It's like, you could put on a black

Leo Laporte (00:16:24):
Shirt, I'm wearing the same exact outfit I've worked for the last sex six days. No, you don't have to radio

Kim Schaffer (00:16:30):
Definitely on repeat, but I only have so much and I have way too much. <Laugh> this

Leo Laporte (00:16:36):
Is, this is really cute. This is a, you look like a, it, a

Kim Schaffer (00:16:39):
Tie dye. Well, yesterday wasn't really stripes. It was weird waves, but this is a, one of my plethora of tie dye that I have somehow accumulated over. COVID it's

Leo Laporte (00:16:49):
Cute. And it's, and it's kind of Renaissance sea with the puffy sleeves. I think it's, it's adorable. <Laugh> it's very nice. Just don't go down by San Quentin, just in case don't let's put it this way. That kind of don't hit don't hitchhike. I'll wear those near prison next week. Yeah. <Laugh>

Kim Schaffer (00:17:05):
San Quentin, by the way that some of the most beautiful property in Marin county and there's a freaking jail on,

Leo Laporte (00:17:12):
They have a view.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:13):
They have a

Leo Laporte (00:17:14):
View right there in the

Kim Schaffer (00:17:15):
Building. I used to take the ferry for like 16, 18 years and the prisoners would be out there. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:17:20):
They wave at you.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:20):
They wave at you when you're on the boat. It's nice.

Leo Laporte (00:17:23):
Yeah. I like to sing Johnny Cash songs as I'm sailing by <laugh>. I don't know why there's something about it. Hey, who should we start the show with? Let's

Kim Schaffer (00:17:32):
Go to Allen. Riverside Al his, his I think his Amazon products are acting up with his inter internets

Leo Laporte (00:17:40):
And he's calling me

Kim Schaffer (00:17:42):
<Laugh> well, yeah. Maybe Dr. Mom, call

Leo Laporte (00:17:44):
Jeff. Call Jeff Bezos. I call Jeff Bezos. Don't call me no, I'll talk to him Al Al in Riverside. Thank you, Kim. You're welcome. Welcome to the show. Leo Laport. The tech guy.

Caller 1 (00:17:53):
Yeah, right on man. This is very cool. Yeah. so I'm very close to changing internet providers because I think I'm out of troubleshooting options. I have a T-Mobile home internet service, which is, you know, a box that they give you.

Leo Laporte (00:18:14):
Yeah. That's the new, the new residential stuff. T-Mobile and Verizon are doing and, and the price is good. The speeds are good. Price is very good. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:18:22):
Yeah. So I have a, a PC and it has a, I put a, you know, an antenna thing on it and it works fine. I have a tablet that works fine. Obviously my phone I'm talking to Yon works fine. My brother gave me a smart TV. Yeah. that his son is gonna have to come over and show me how to work. But when it works, it works. I mean, when we turn it on, it works fine. It's

Leo Laporte (00:18:48):
Kind of embarrassing when the TV is smarter than you are. Isn't it? I,

Caller 1 (00:18:51):
Yeah. At least they call it smart. So you don't feel too bad.

Leo Laporte (00:18:55):
<Laugh> just complicated. Let's just call it a complicated TV instead of smart. It's not that smart. If, if it was smart, that's smart. I would just turn itself on and work. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:19:05):
That's a better word. Complicated TV.

Leo Laporte (00:19:08):
So what does the T-Mobile not work with, I guess is the

Caller 1 (00:19:12):
Question? It apparently seems to be the only culprits in my house are my three echo products.

Leo Laporte (00:19:17):
Okay. So it's not unusual for OT, internet of things, devices, and these echos are OT devices to have problems with wifi. If you have multi-band wifi, does that? I bet it does that. T-Mobile does five gigahertz as well as 2.4 gigahertz. Wifi. Yes.

Caller 1 (00:19:39):
Yeah. And I don't listen to the show all the time, but I listen to it enough to hear you tell the stories about, you know, take your vacuum cleaner down the street. You hook it to the 0.4.

Leo Laporte (00:19:47):
Yes. Take your echoes down the street. They won't work. It won't help. <Laugh> so see if you can, in the T-Mobile there's see if there is a setting or call T-Mobile and ask if there's a way they can do it to turn off temporarily, turn off the five gigahertz band.

Caller 1 (00:20:03):
There is. There is. And I have I've tried lots of different troubleshooting things, including getting a whole new box from T-Mobile. Cuz Amazon says it's them and they say it's Amazon and you know how that goes. So I, I spent a week or two with it just on the 2.4. There's a setting for that. And nothing got any better. Then I went back to just put it on the 5g and lock it on there and see how that goes. And any time I do this, you know, I'm like resetting all of my devices.

Leo Laporte (00:20:31):
Yeah. It's annoying. Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:20:34):
And cause it was on 2.4 and five. So I, I don't know any other troubleshooting things I need to do before. I just need to call a different internet provider. Cause I, I am really spoiled by these echo products. I I'm a totally blind person. Oh I love music to listen to

Leo Laporte (00:20:56):
Music. Yeah. Cuz there's no, yeah, you can do it all with your voice

Caller 1 (00:20:59):
And I just, as it stuff and you know, and it's, it is, you know, very, it is very, very cool. So I'm very spoiled with those things.

Leo Laporte (00:21:06):
One more, one more thing to try from Dr. Mom, our echo expert. She's back in the chat room. We missed you, Dr. Mom. She says they tend to remember previously used networks. In fact, if you go to this, the Xa app in your phone, you'll see. Yeah. And in fact, even when you turn it on, it says, I remember this network, you're gonna have to clear it. You're gonna have to clear the devices so that it will start over.

Caller 1 (00:21:34):
I have done the factory on the device.

Leo Laporte (00:21:38):
Oh Cru.

Caller 1 (00:21:39):
Every time I switched it from one to the other, to the other, I did. Can

Leo Laporte (00:21:43):
You change the name of the 5g to something else so that you can explicitly join the 2.4 sometimes that's the other way to go say, you know, this is this is you know, Al's two, just one of them say Al's 5g, name it. That, and then you can avoid it. That's one other thing to try. Hey Sam Bo Sam car guy coming up next.

Caller 1 (00:22:06):
Thanks.

Leo Laporte (00:22:07):
Hmm. Don't go away yet. I just had a break. I had a break.

Caller 1 (00:22:11):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:22:12):
All right. Not a factory reset, but forget the network and that's stored with Amazon. So I guess

Caller 1 (00:22:20):
That would be in the app. That's on my phone. It be

Leo Laporte (00:22:22):
In the app. You wanna forget the networks in the app?

Caller 1 (00:22:25):
Forget the networks. Is it true though that the echoes are always looking for 2.4 and not 5g?

Leo Laporte (00:22:32):
I, I don't, I don't know that it shouldn't be joining a 5g network, but because it has the same name, it's possible that it did join the 5g network thinking, well I'm gonna have connectivity and then it didn't. So you wanna kind of, you want, I mean, that's all I can think of otherwise. Yeah. I mean, it should work. What, you know what I ended up doing, it's not gonna be practical with the T-Mobile residential service, but what I ended up doing is actually having a segregated V they call it a virtual network or V L just for IOT that's that's only 2.4 gigahertz. So there's no, this doesn't have this. Doesn't have a problem, so. Okay. I'm guessing, so a couple of things to try. One is if it'll let you name the different bandwidth spectrum names. Okay. That's one thing the other, but first thing I do, the easiest thing is check in that Alexa app. Okay. And see if you can forget those networks.

Caller 1 (00:23:30):
Okay. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:23:32):
All

Caller 1 (00:23:32):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:23:32):
Good luck.

Caller 1 (00:23:33):
Enjoy your program.

Leo Laporte (00:23:34):
Hey, I'm glad you listen. Thanks Al.

Caller 1 (00:23:36):
You bet. Take care

Leo Laporte (00:23:38):
Byebye. You're right. You're right. It is sponsored time. Isn't it? And I wanna tell you about the coolest thing ever. So let's turn that lady off and talk to you about MIMO monitors. M I M O monitors and their unify meeting project MIMO monitors are the global experts in video conferencing solution. In fact, stay tuned. Cause I got a great discount on their seven inch monitor that you plug into your computer. And then you, you just have all your conference calls on that. Whether you're working in the office, whether you're working remotely, maybe your hybrid back and forth, unify their solution, their software solution, unify meetings simplifies your work life by combining zoom, Microsoft teams and Google meet into one reliable program. So I mean, we all have this experience, right? We use Google meet for our company stuff. We use zoom <laugh> for all of our shows.

Leo Laporte (00:24:37):
And of course people are always zooming us. We use Microsoft teams, premier uses Microsoft teams. So I've got all three apps on my computer and it's like confusing. And invariably, when I'm using Google meet, I hang up because <laugh> the, the, where I think on zoom, the button to unmute my microphone is in the same position as the hang up button on meets. So I invariably hang up, they know, oh, you know, Leo's gonna disappear from the call and then come back cuz he hangs up by accident. That's why unify meeting is such a good idea. One single user interface for all three it's intuitive and easy use software solution that simplifies your work life by combining your favorite video conferencing solutions into one reliable universal interface, no more hanging up <laugh> for me. Anyway, it eliminates the hassle saves you time. Unify takes the guesswork, the frustration at a video conferencing, no matter what platform you're using, cuz the buttons, the commands are all in the same place.

Leo Laporte (00:25:38):
Even if you're on a zoom call, a teams call or a meet call. So really brilliant idea you can navigate between meetings easily. You don't have to worry about keeping track of different apps or, or, or updating the apps or whatever, always on your desktop, a never in your way unified meeting does something. I really like if you do a lot of these virtual meetings, it puts your calendar up. So you see what the next meeting is. And all you have to do is click it and boom that you're in the call with that standardized UI. I think that's so brilliant. Unify is ideal on a second or third display because then in fact, these seven inch MIMO monitors are great for unify because you just keep it running. So that's my calendar. And then when I have to go a meeting, I click that and boom, I'm in the call.

Leo Laporte (00:26:24):
You could still see if you want, if you have the second screen or the third screen, the original video conferencing UI on your primary screen. So if you want to change the settings in zoom or whatever, that's there, but, but unify meeting is on the little monitor doesn't you don't have to do it that way, but it's a really nice way to do it. It works on windows. It's PC compatible, 35, 88 for a whole year $35 and 88 cents for the whole year or when you buy. And this is the best way to go. A MIMO monitor display it's free. It's kind of with bundled with the display. So try unify for your team at work. You, they will love you. They will. Thank you. Try it for yourself. Unify meeting.com U N I FY M E E T I N g.com. Enter the code tech guy and you'll get 25% off a year's subscription.

Leo Laporte (00:27:15):
Or, and this is what I would do fix what I did use the same code to get 25% off any of MIMO seven inch display. So then you get the display and the unify meeting, right for free simplify with unify. I love this idea. Thank you. MIMO monitors for supporting the tech guy show. And we thank unify meeting as well, a great solution, unifymeeting.com. Don't forget the, the offer is tech guy. Thank you MIMO. Now back to the show. Yeah, I, you know, I've noticed that mom, it doctor, mom, mom. I noticed it. Mom, doctor, mom. She's not my mom. She's a doctor and a mom. But that was helpful for me with my mom because I got her a new Kindle and she doesn't remember her, you know, anything, her Amazon password, anything. But I made sure when I sent it to her that it was not a set up with my account, cuz that's the default, but there's little checkbox when you buy it.

Leo Laporte (00:28:16):
Don't don't, don't set up ahead of time. And the nice thing is when she got it, she turned it on and said, if you have a, a Kindle app on your phone, we can use that to set up. And she did. She opened her Kindle app and, and Amazon remembered the wifi, the wifi password, the log and everything. So it really, I was a little nervous about having to, you know, over the phone kind of help her set up the Kindle, but it worked very nicely. So I understand why they do it. I do understand why they do it. Yeah. I use GNO Alpine. I I use or no, I guess it's no, I use Nome everywhere. I like no KDE has too many settings. I don't want to customize it that much, but no is outta the box pretty much what I want. I have, I do use a number of extensions. I use the dock to panel extension, cuz I like it. I have a menu bar at the bottom and stuff like that. My chicken soup came out very nicely. Doc. I can be having chicken soup for dinner. I think unless rod shows up in which case I'll be having rod for dinner. No that's that came out wrong time to drive on out to I Salani Michigan to say hello to Sam at bull Sam principal researcher at guide house insights, podcaster@wheelbearings.media and my car guy. Hello Sam. You were in so you were in SoCal this week

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:58):
Was yeah, it's that last two days in Southern California flew into LA picked up a a lucid air grand touring, drove that up to Santa Barbara to drive another car.

Leo Laporte (00:30:12):
This look the lucid air and it's it's behind you in your, in your, in your video. It looks very luxurious. It's it's the kind of it is high end EV right?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:23):
It, it is very much a luxury EV the CTO and now CEO of lucid motors is a guy named Peter Robinson who prior to joining lucid, he was the chief engineer for the model S at Tesla. And I interviewed Peter on stage at south by Southwest this year. And you can, if you look look for south by Southwest Peter Rollinson or, or, or my name on YouTube, you can find that that interview we talked for about an hour and you know, this is a lovely car. It, you know, unlike the, the, the model X and the model X, which have luxury car pricing, they've never really felt very luxurious inside. They've they've always had kind of a cheaper feel to them compared to say a Mercedes or BMW. And this car really has that very premium feel to it, the materials to fit and finish and everything. And it was a fantastic car to drive. And I got to put a couple hundred miles on it over the last few days. Nice and was, was very impressed with it. That's

Leo Laporte (00:31:29):
One of the complaints I always had about Tesla there. You know, I had a model X, which was like $130,000. They're priced like luxury vehicles, but they never, they felt a little Spartan to me. They always felt a little Spartan having, having driven before the Tesla, a Audi a eight, a eight which is a luxury almost a limousine mm-hmm <affirmative>. I was a little disappointed by the model X, you know,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:54):
And, and one of the things I like about the, the lucid is it, I think it has a better balance of a combination of physical controls and virtual controls and touch.

Leo Laporte (00:32:04):
And that's why I didn't buy a model three cuz so many of the controls are on the screen.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:07):
Everything is in the touchscreen. So

Leo Laporte (00:32:09):
Interface, I feel like that's dangerous almost like I

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:11):
Don't, it's not only is it dangerous, but it's also extremely, it can be extremely inconvenient. As I learned, you know, the, in the case of the lucid you know, it's got physical controls for temperature and fan speed for the climate control for the transmission shift for the wipers. But <laugh> when on Friday morning when I went to put in a destination with, into the navigation as I was getting ready to go drive another car, which I'm not allowed to talk about just yet you know, I said, you know you know, navigate to prese winery and it responded and said yep, finding, finding directions to prese winery. And then that was it. It stopped cold. Yeah. The entire infotainment system just locked up saw, oh, wouldn't respond to any touches. Oh, nothing displayed. And so I'd said, okay. And I pulled up the directions on my phone. Yeah. And just turned up the volume for Google map. So

Leo Laporte (00:33:11):
You could still drive everything elsewhere.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:13):
Yeah. It, it drove the instrument cluster portion of the screen worked fine, just not the infotainment. So

Leo Laporte (00:33:18):
They separate, and I think this is a good thing. They separate those two

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:22):
Computers. Yeah. Well, and they, and they have to, for safety reasons, the instrument cluster has to be a safety rated system a real time system. Whereas the infotainment doesn't have to be. Yeah. but you know, as we get into more and more of these software defined vehicles you know, as, as people start to get these vehicles, one of the things that you'll wanna learn before you drive it, is that

Leo Laporte (00:33:45):
A really

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:46):
Reset is what is, what is the process for resetting? And back, back in the mid two thousands, when I was still working as an engineer, this is when Microsoft was first starting to get in trying to do car software. And they did the operating system's easy board used for their first generation of sync

Leo Laporte (00:34:00):
Control, all delete. Right?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:02):
Yeah. Well that, this was, this was the running joke you know, among engineers at the time and, and tech people, you know, if you, if you've got a car running Microsoft windows, you know what happens when it crashes, it inevitably crashes. It's like, well, you pull over, you have to close all the windows shut off the car, get out get back in, restart it and then reopen all your windows. You know, I mean, that was a, that was a joke at the time because you know, it didn't actually work that way, but today it's actually not that far off what you have to do. And, and some of the cases, some of these cars that are so software defined for example, if you have a Tesla and your infotainment system crashes, the, the two little scroll wheels on the steering wheel now, I guess you have to press and hold those for a few seconds. And that will force a reset of the system. Most of the time similarly for a Rivian, they've got scroll wheels and rockers on the steering wheel spokes, and you gotta press the outer portion of the rockers rocker switches for a few seconds to get it to reboot. Go

Leo Laporte (00:35:10):
Ahead and on my Mustang, mock there's that you have to hit three buttons. There's, it's kind of light control, all delete yeah. On the steering wheel. And I can never remember it, but fortunately, you know, it's they actually build the I the manual. Oh, well, wait a minute. The manual would be broken too, if the

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:27):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Well then this was the problem with the lucid. The owner's manual is digital in the infotainment system. So I couldn't look, look it up. Yeah. So I figured I'd drive a little bit and see, see if it timed out and reset itself. Cuz I've had other vehicles in the past that sometimes the system will crash and then it'll just reboot itself automatically after 20 minutes. It still hadn't reboot. Oh my gosh. So I pulled over and you know, pulled up my phone and, and looked up how to reboot lucid air. Yeah. And it turns out the, the process for doing a hard reset on the lucid air is to put on one of the turn signals doesn't matter which one cuz you all you're doing is using it as an indicator. You get out of the car, tap your key card on the lift,

Leo Laporte (00:36:08):
The killer out to lock the car, to do this,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:09):
Lock the door and then walk away out of range of the, of the key fob. So about 20, 25 feet away from the car. And then when you see the turn signal, stop and shut off, that's your clue that okay, the system has actually shut down. That's

Leo Laporte (00:36:23):
The deal breaker. I'm restart restarting. I'm not gonna do that. <Laugh> that I, if you can't restart it while you're driving, it that's really problematic. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:32):
That's not good. I mean, you know the software on all of these new EVs especially from legacy auto makers, but even, even from, rather from startups, but even from legacy auto automat, it's a computer. It's still very much my work in progress.

Leo Laporte (00:36:45):
My, my Tesla model X, I, it crashed a couple of times over three years, my mock has crashed twice over the last year and a half. It's not a big deal. You're driving. Everything's fine. Although I think I, because it crashed, I lost the cameras for backing up. So that's why you don't wanna have to stop get outta the car, walk away. You, you should be able to do it from the steering wheel, which you can on the, on the, both the Tesla and the Ford Maee I think lucid may have to justice.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:16):
And, and my guess is they probably will make some changes to that. I mean, they're, they're aware of this issue. Yeah. When I dropped off the car yesterday, I was talking to the, the rep about that and he said, yeah, that's, that's something they've seen. And I'm guessing that they will probably create a simpler process for forcing that reboot. We

Leo Laporte (00:37:33):
Probably shouldn't use the word crash when it comes to a computer system in a car we'll come up with another, another game.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:40):
Well, unfortunately, depending on what computer system it is, it could, could be crash, lead to a crash. I mean, you know, the infotainment system is probably not gonna cause a crash, but although

Leo Laporte (00:37:51):
The

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:51):
Frustra frustration of it could

Leo Laporte (00:37:52):
Cause over and over and over, I'm not gonna be happy.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:55):
Yeah. So you know, if you're, if you're getting a new car that has a lot of software to find stuff in it, make sure you figure out early on how to do a reboot because chances are at some point you're gonna, you are going to have to do that. Yeah. And you don't wanna do that when you're off somewhere remote where you don't have any cell signal to look it up on your phone. Good

Leo Laporte (00:38:15):
Point. So good point. Maybe put a little post-it note on the, on the steering wheel.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:19):
<Laugh> yeah, it doesn't note in the glove box. It

Leo Laporte (00:38:22):
Doesn't happen that fortunately, but you know, computer systems occasionally will get lost in space and you need to fix it. Wow. But otherwise you like

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:34):
The, the car. Oh yeah. I loved it. It was, it was fantastic. Nice. Fast. It's luxurious. It looks great. It really does look pretty. It's it's surprisingly roomy. Sam bull Sam. He gets to drive all the new cars. Lucky, lucky dog, principal researcher at guide house insights. Our car guy listened to his podcast wheel bearings. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Leo.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:05):
So they didn't put a paper manual in the elusive, like a book? No, not, not in the one that I was driving. Anyway. I don't, I don't think that's the, the car increasingly makers are doing that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't blame them. Yeah. At most what you get often in many newer cars is you know, one of those quick start guides. Right. You know, that's about it. Just like a computer. Yeah. It's just like technology, you know, Ford has a very nice manual, which I, I like to read the manual cover to cover the Chevy bolt bolted the mini did. And I like to do that, but I never remember the reset cuz you use it so seldom. So I was having to look that one up. I, I, I rarely look at the, I mean, because I jump in and out of different cars all the time, you know, I don't look at the manuals.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:48):
I try to see, you know, how intuitive is it right. To, to figure out how to do this stuff without reading the manual. Oh. And then, you know, I go to the manual as a last resort to figure out if there's something I just cannot find anywhere, then I will go to the manual and look up how to do it. Or <laugh> hit up YouTube or something like that. Right, right, right. But you know, and increasingly they're, they're not even doing printed manuals anymore. Do you want to stick around, answer some questions? Sure. Somebody, I know one thing, somebody, everybody, well, a couple people wanted to know is the range on the lucid. Yeah. So it, it depends on the configuration you get. So the one I had was the grand touring with the 21 inch wheels there. The base version of the grand touring is on 19 inch wheels.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:36):
So larger wheels will reduce your range because of the extra weight, extra rolling resistance. I think this version is about four hundred and eighty, seventy four hundred eighty miles. Holy cow. The, the, how big is the battery in that thing? 115 kilowatt hours. Holy that's a little bit bigger than what you get in the big, my Mustang's 80, the model, less and X to give you an idea. Yeah. No, you're you're oh, sorry. Yeah. 88 usable. Yeah. 93 total. Right. and I had a P 90 for the the model X 90, which is 90 kilowatt hours. Yeah. So the the version, this version with the 19 inch wheels is rated at 520 miles. Oh, so they're really push pushing that firsty yeah. And one of the, one of the things that Robinson really focused on in the design of this vehicle was on efficiency.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:41:30):
So they, you know, over the course of several years, you know, when I first saw this thing in late 2016 they, you know, they were, they, I saw the first prototype and did a VR walked around with Peter and with Derek Jenkins, Derek Jenkins, the head of design and then saw the, the physical prototype between that time. And, and when it actually made it into production, there was several years where they were trying to raise money that raised the capital to build the factory. And it wasn't clear that they were gonna make it and they were on the verge of bankruptcy multiple times. But they finally did raise the money and got their factory built. But in that interim, they did a lot of re-engineering work on it and learned a lot about efficiency of getting the maximum work out of the least amount of battery.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:22):
So this is one of the most efficient EVs you can get. They did a lot of redesign work on the, the battery pack on the power electronics. On the motors. The motors are very compact. You can actually fit the motors for this thing into a carry-on bag standard carry-on bag. And the trunk in this thing is big enough that you can actually put four standard carry-on bags in the trunk, like standing up on their side, nice in, in the trunk and another one in the front trunk. Nice. so there's, there's a lot of space in here and the back seat is much larger. There's a lot more passenger volume than the model S

Leo Laporte (00:42:59):
Wow. What's the lowest cost lucid gonna be? Do you know

Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:03):
The pure edition that comes out later this fall is gonna start at 87,000. Okay. Okay. And that, that will have a range of about 400 miles.

Leo Laporte (00:43:11):
Thank you, Sam. Stick around for the top. Yep. All right. Leo LaPorte, the tech guy. Hope not the Sandman. I hope not putting you to sleep. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number, talking high tech with Carmine from Naples, Florida. How'd you do in the poker championships?

Caller 2 (00:43:33):
Well, I got knocked down on day three just before the money, but I did enter some other events and made some money there. So overall it was a good trip.

Leo Laporte (00:43:40):
It's respectable.

Caller 2 (00:43:41):
It's very fun. Yeah. Yeah. It's very, it was very fun. I didn't that what you, I just wanted to let you know, two to your suggestion for doing YouTube download. It did work with paramount plus, but I didn't get on TV, so I didn't bother giving it to my parents, but, you know, <laugh> it, it's one of those things next time that they work though next. Yeah. Next time. Next time. Yeah. There's always next year.

Leo Laporte (00:44:01):
So you are, so I have said in the past, yeah, that personal car ownership is ultimately doomed. I don't mean trucks. Obviously work vehicles. People are always gonna need, but there is a huge amount of waste in making, you know, we have three personal vehicles on my family. We need 'em right now because we go different places and so forth. But ultimately if ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft succeed and you have autonomous vehicles, the idea in my head coming in the coming years is you need to go somewhere. You'll get a car will come to you. You'll get in it and it'll drive you there. Instead of right now, my car's sitting in the parking, lot's gonna sit there for hours unused.

Caller 2 (00:44:52):
Right. So let me let me make a couple points on that. Number one the reason why the cars last, you know, 12 to 15 years is we don't use them

Leo Laporte (00:45:00):
Hardly use them. Yeah, that's true. Right.

Caller 2 (00:45:02):
So, so, so if everybody, if, if you had constantly cars on a road all the time, they would probably need to be replaced three to five years or something like that. Good point,

Leo Laporte (00:45:10):
Good point.

Caller 2 (00:45:11):
Yeah. Yeah. So but I think, I think your heart's in the right place on this. I just, I wanna make a couple points on it. I just wanna, I think what you're advocating for requires a more Americans to live in big cities, right? So according to pew research, which is a very reputable research firm they say that 19% of Americans only 19% are interested in living in big cities. And that's actually down from, from 23% before the pandemic. And my second point on this is that, you know, my, my parents immigrated from Europe. You know, they came here for a lot of freedoms and basically for a lot of quality of life and very few people in my parents' home country had single family homes, garages own their own cars, backyards, and so forth. I think that is the American dream. And they were basically dependent on others or the government for transportation. And I think while you're I think that's, this won't be acceptable with the vast majority of people, especially since we're a country that is built on immigration. And a lot of people came here for those types of freedoms and quality of life. So I,

Leo Laporte (00:46:14):
Yeah, I mean, some of the reasons people don't wanna live in cities is because the suburbs gutted the cities, right. People and be, and the suburbs existed because we built very strong interstate highway systems and we all had cars. So it it's, it's a little bit self-fulfilling. Yeah. I don't wanna live in the city because I don't wanna live in a concentrated area because we have the suburbs and we have cars and we have this highway system which made it possible. You know, it's not, it's not so much, this is my, you know, prescription for the future. I think it's just gonna happen. And certainly if you live in a cornfield in Nebraska, you're gonna need a vehicle <laugh> obviously, but on we also need to work on mass transit. I think mass transit would be preferable frankly, to a self-driving car share solutions, but we need to do both.

Leo Laporte (00:47:08):
We need a high speed rail system. And the real reason is because vehicles are killing this country. You know, it's dangerous to walk anywhere now. <Laugh> because there's so many cars the emissions from ice vehicles. I fortunately I think you know, we're moving away from gas vehicles, but right now the emissions from ice vehicles are significant contribution to global warming. So I just feel like we've kind of made it. I think we made a mistake at the turn of the last century going all in on gas fueled vehicles. And I know the American dream is all about driving your own car. <Laugh> across the country. We all wanna be Jack Carac on the road, but I think it in, in hindsight might not have been ideal. And of course there's also jet travel and cruise ship travel and all sorts of other kinds of travel that are problematic as well. I don't know you, so you don't think, I guess I should probably include Sam bull Sam in this conversation he's still here. Do you don't think that this idea of at least the majority, let's say the majority of personal vehicles replaced by mass transit and ride sharing, you don't think that's gonna happen?

Caller 2 (00:48:21):
I, I don't, I don't think it'll be acceptable to a vast majority of people. Yeah. I mean, I, I think, imagine a politician saying that you or advocating what you're advocating for, and again, I think your heart's in the right place. I'm very concerned about the environment I own an electric vehicle. Yeah. I think they're great. I think, I think everybody should buy an electric vehicle, but I, I think let's, let's imagine a politician running to precedent. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:48:42):
I agree what you're saying. Pretty unpalatable. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Know

Sam Abuelsamid (00:48:46):
What I,

Caller 2 (00:48:48):
So just another thing is that, you know, I have, you know, my parents came here for those, that quality of life and those freedoms, the white picket fence, the cars in the garage, the ability to go anywhere you want without being dependent on someone else.

Leo Laporte (00:49:03):
Sure. But that American dream seems to be going south pretty quick.

Caller 2 (00:49:07):
Well, I, I, you know, I, I don't wanna get into that, but it's just one of those things that, you know, we have to improve on. And I think you know, when you, when you are, when you were, you know, probably my age, I think, you know, frankly, the middle class was a lot stronger during the eighties and the nineties and it is now. Yeah. And I think, you know, if we look at some of the policies that were in place, then I think that that would fix a lot of those things. But any, in any event, I, I think that

Leo Laporte (00:49:33):
I wish I could ride my bike everywhere. My e-bike I wish I could walk more. In fact, I just mapped out a walking route. That's only gonna involve me, risking my life for about a third of it, because there's hardly any sidewalks in the in the area. I just, I feel like we could have done better now. Sam am I, you know, and I think this is a good conversation. I'm actually very glad you called Carmen, cuz I think it's a, your points of course are very well taken. What do you think, Sam?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:50:01):
I think that we actually do need to get far fewer vehicles on the road and have higher levels of utilization of the vehicles, especially with mass transit at, at transit systems. If you look at the fatality data from the last 10 years from, and if you take a look at the federal AC or fatal accident reporting system, for example, from NTTS a they the number of people dying in, from the vehicle occupants dying in crashes has actually been relatively flat at least until the last year and a half, two years where, you know, we had a lot of people driving a lot faster and a lot more recklessly during the pandemic. But prior to that, we had a relatively flat rate of fatalities for vehicle occupants.

Leo Laporte (00:50:47):
Yeah. Safety where saw has gone way up, however,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:50:49):
Where we saw the, the big increases. Yeah. Was pedestrians, pedestrians and cyclists. Yeah. Because cars are getting bigger, they're getting heavier. They have far worse visibility out of these, outta these big trucks and SUVs. A lot of times drivers in the vehicles just can't even see pedestrians. And so you're much more likely to get hit and killed if you're a pedestrian or a cyclist or a motorcyclist than you were 10 years ago. And for, from a sustainability standpoint, we just replacing all the gas vehicles with electric vehicles is not going to solve our problems. We actually need to use fewer vehicles, use them more efficiently because it's not just the emissions, the direct emissions from burning gasoline or diesel, but there's all kinds of other things we've got pollutants in the air from brake pads. We've got oh yeah. Tires,

Leo Laporte (00:51:45):
Tire, Detroit hits tires.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:51:46):
Yeah. Tires is one of the biggest things. One of the biggest causes of particular emissions is your tires. As you, as that rubber wears down, you're getting rubber particles in the air. That's getting into people's lungs and causing a lot of respiratory.

Leo Laporte (00:51:59):
There's a, there's a good argument for more mass transit. I mean, but obviously yeah, absolutely. In rural areas in suburbs, that's gonna be difficult. I understand. Yeah. And you know, we

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:09):
Need multiple modes of transportation. Yeah. There isn't one single solution. Yeah. You need a combination of, you know, shared smaller mobility personal, you know, personal vehicles, mass transit, micro mobility. You need all of these.

Leo Laporte (00:52:23):
One of the reasons people don't wanna live in cities is you can't walk around a city in cities, in Europe where there's no vehicles, no cars. It's incredible. We love it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> anyway. Thank you, Sam. Thank you. Carmine Leo Laporte the tech guy will be back with more after this I've been I mean you RA I mean, your points are excellent. Carmine, I, I completely agree with you. I've been a little bit propagandized by the subreddit F cars. <Laugh>

Caller 2 (00:52:56):
Yeah, I understand. And couple points I would like to make what Sam said and I a big, I'm a big fan of you, Sam. I listen to every Sunday. Neely goes you. Thank you. So, you know, thank you. Big fan. So you know, one of the problems with mass transit is that there's the crime. If you, you look in New York city, you know, I think the MTA had admitted. This is with, with all the crime on the, the subway it's down like 50% before the, since of pre pandemic levels. And remote work has lot to do with that too. But it, it, it it's, they predict it it'll take 30 years for mass transit to come back to 2019 levels in New York city. So because of all the, they cite crime and remote work as part of that. And as, as far as the cyclists, you know, I, I, I, I have sympathy, but to, to me, I, I think I think more people would have sympathy if the cyclist also advocated for rights to the roadway, but also to the same responsibilities to the roadway. So for example, if they paid like the registration fees and the tolls and the, and all the other fees for the drivers pay, I think more people would be kind of acceptable to having

Leo Laporte (00:54:03):
Only to pay gas taxes as a bicyclist. I'll pay the taxes on the gas. Yep.

Caller 2 (00:54:07):
I, I know you're but I'm be sure if I'm not sure if a lot of other people are frankly <laugh>. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:13):
Yeah. You know, I mean, paying, you know, paying some kind of usage fees, you know, to, to contribute to infrastructure development you know, for cyclists first,

Leo Laporte (00:54:22):
Get the infrastructure, no cyclists is gonna pay for the crap we have right now. It's deadly. We ride a bike out there.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:28):
Yeah. And, and the, you know, the reality is it's the, it's the big vehicles that are, you know, doing the damage to the roads. If everybody's riding bicycles, roads would last a hundred years, you know, it's, you know, four or five, six, you know, 8,000 pound, 9,000 pound humer EVs. That's what does damage to the roads? It's not bicycles and right. So the roads would last a lot longer and it wouldn't co we wouldn't have to spend it as much.

Leo Laporte (00:54:52):
I, I think though, Carmine you're right, no politician, it's not gonna happen. There's no political will to do this, and there's not gonna happen in this country. Politically economics might drive it. However I understand, I think, and these, those changes will happen slowly, but I do think that they will happen over time.

Caller 2 (00:55:09):
Yeah. But you, do you agree, Sam, do you agree that if, let's say for example, the Leo's scenario comes to pass and everybody, all the cars are self driving and to come to you and are used 20 hours day round the clock they would last a lot shorter in cars last now, right?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:24):
Oh, absolutely. But you know, the thing is you can also rearchitect these vehicles. So, I mean, you know, for example, if you look at taxi cabs, you know, that are running 24 hours a day, you know, look at New York city taxi cabs that are running 24 hours a day. You know, they don't have as long or generally don't have as long a lifespan as a personal use vehicle because they might be racking up, you know, 50, 75, a hundred thousand miles a year, as opposed to 15, 12 to 15,000 miles a year for the average vehicle. But you know, you can, you can architect those types of vehicles in a fundamentally different way if they're going to be a shared, used vehicle. So it does last, you know, you look at transit buses or school buses, you know, school buses you know, or transit buses last, you know, 12, 20 years or more depending on, on the use case.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:56:17):
And, you know, if you looked at it you know, for instead, you know, for robo taxi, for example, instead of taking a conventional vehicle that we have today and just slapping a bunch of sensors on it and having it drive itself and using that same type of vehicle architecture, you could use a similar model to commercial aircraft, you know, commercial aircraft. The airframe is designed to last 20 to 30 years, the engines you know, LA typically go about four to five years, I think between major overhauls. And usually every three to five years, you know, an airline will do a major overhaul in the plane where they will strip out the seats, strip out the carpet, strip out the interiors, clean everything up, put new seats in, or at least recover the seats, things like that. But the airframe itself continues flying for 25 years.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:57:10):
So if you designed these mobility vehicles in a similar kind of way, where for example, you could use a carbon fiber structure that is not particularly recyclable, but is very light and very strong, very durable. And then, you know, you could swap out the seats, you could swap out the motors, you know, every every, you know, five or 10 years you swap out the, some of the other electronics as those things get more advanced put in newer, lower cost, more efficient systems. So having something that is modular and, and, you know, can, can be kept in service, you know, keep the expensive parts in service for a long time while replacing some of the things that do wear out that, you know, you could, you could have a more sustainable system E transportation ecosystem that way.

Caller 2 (00:58:04):
Yeah, I understand. I just think it, it's pretty tough because you know, that, that looks good on paper. I don't know how it would work practically, but we we'll see. I appreciate appreciate you having on though. I appreciate taking my question.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:19):
Yeah. Happy to talk about it. You know, I mean, to give you an example, you know, there are companies that are developing these types of vehicles for example, crews the company that's owned by GM and Honda that is developing automated driving systems in, you know, running them in, in San Francisco right now. You know, they, they have developed a vehicle called the origin, which is targeting to go into service in 2023. It's a purpose built robo taxi. It follows this kind of model where you have a structure, you know, it's designed specifically for this use case. It's not a converted conventional vehicle. So it is designed for this kind of mass transit commercial fleet use case. And it will be able to swap out those kinds of components, similar zoos and, and other companies are also developing similar types of vehicles.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:59:11):
So we will, we will see some of those types of vehicles on the roads and, you know, keeping them in, you know, if they're designed the right way, you can keep them in service for a long, long time, cuz things like electric motors, unlike internal combustion engines, electric motors can last far longer than an internal combustion engine. You can conceivably have motors that run for a million miles as opposed to, you know, a hundred, 150, maybe 200,000 miles before you require an overhaul on an internal combustion engine batteries, depending on what type of battery you use. You know, if you're using lithium iron phosphate batteries, again, those things can last a million miles. They don't have quite as much energy capacity as a nickel based battery, but they can they can be used for a very long time and they are cheaper.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:00):
They can be recharged many more times than the types of batteries we use in most EVs today. So there, there are ways around this and there, you know, companies are looking at what is, what is the best combination for different use cases. And I think the key is, and, you know, back when I first started writing professionally 16 years ago, one of the first kind of feature pieces that I wrote was about the end of the petroleum monoculture. You know, in, in nature, you know, monocultures are always a bad idea. They always eventually collapse because there's, there's, you get something, you know, and whether that's in nature, the same thing applies to technology as well. Monocultures are not a bad idea, a good idea. You want diversity of different types of solutions because, you know, as they say, you know, when, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:53):
You know, and the same is true for, for vehicles. If you, you know, the reality is in transportation, we have a lot of different needs in transportation. We have people that need to take you know, in some cases, you know, a lot of people following the same route day after day after day mass transit works right there, buses, subways, great solution there, but you also have, you know, coming off of those trunk roots, you have smaller, less dense roots where, you know, combinations of things like micro mobility, scooters, bikes, even robo taxis feeding into those trunk route, you know, can provide better solutions. Then you've got people who can't drive conventional vehicles because of physical limitations like eyesight or you know, other physical limitations. And, you know, a robo taxi, you know, is a great solution for getting those people around. Also, you know, automated, you know, smaller, automated commercial vehicles for doing deliveries. So the, the Mo moving to a more diverse transportation ecosystem is going to be essential to solving the kinds of problems that we have to deal with in the different kinds of environments that we live in, whether that's urban, suburban, or rural.

Leo Laporte (01:02:04):
Thank you, Sam. Thank you. Carmine, moving on, that's completed. <Laugh> have a great week and we'll talk to next week. All right. Take care. Bye-Bye why, Hey, Hey, how are you today? Leo? LePort here the tech guy, time to talk about computers and the internet and home theater. And yeah, we could debate some of the topics, some of the changing things around us. You know, one thing we haven't debated lately is artificial intelligence. Just you know, just saying <laugh> 88, 88, ask Leo. Remember we talked about the guy who worked at Google who said, oh my gosh, it's alive, it's alive. He was talking about Google's Lambda, which was able to have conversations that he felt were so impressive that he thought it had attained consciousness experts immediately, including Google weighed in and said, no, no, no, you're nuts. In fact, they fired him. You could say cover up, or you could say, no, no, you're nuts. I don't think we have any fear yet of computers becoming conscious in the sense that we are conscious. <Laugh> but you know, they're working on it. 88, 88, ask Leo. We could talk about that. Anything that's on your mind, I'm gonna go right back to the phone. So here, Jimmy's on the line from cotton town, Tennessee. Hello, Jimmy.

Caller 3 (01:03:31):
Hi Leo. This is actually Kenny from cotton town. Kenny.

Leo Laporte (01:03:34):
I always say I always, I know you're Kenny, what am I saying? Sorry about that. Yes. Welcome Kenny.

Caller 3 (01:03:41):
It's good to talk to you again. I figured I would catch you right before the labor day weekend. I thought I'd just give you a little update. Remember the last time that I called you. I said that I was going back to college. Yes. And I took, yeah. And originally my major was going to be basically retail. Well, I switched it to business analytics. And the reason I did that is because I wanted to incorporate some tech into it. Cuz you know, I listen to your show all the time and I'm just thinking myself, well, why, why am I messing around with something that I'm not interested in? And if you can do something that you're interested in, it opens up a world of different opinions. And it really has, as far as what I'm learning, especially in this upcoming semester, I'm learning accounting, I'm learning statistics and I'm learning how to program, which is the main reason I'm calling it.

Leo Laporte (01:04:36):
Excellent. Good. All three important. And I, you know, I agree with you. I tell this to my kids and I think so far it's worked out you will always succeed and do much better. If you do something you really care about, you're really interested in, it will work out don't force yourself to do something you don't like. I don't think that's a good solution. So good. I'm glad you, I'm glad you, you had that rev revelation and, and this started doing it. Yes. So what's your question. You wanna talk about programming? Is that what you, what you called for?

Caller 3 (01:05:08):
Yeah, yeah. Kind of cuz I know you're the Linux

Leo Laporte (01:05:11):
Guy, my favorite subject. <Laugh> I don't talk about coding much on the show because it is kind of a higher end topic for computers, but it's my hobby for sure. It's something I love doing. So what, what, where

Caller 3 (01:05:26):
I'm getting the kick out

Leo Laporte (01:05:27):
Of it. Yeah. What are you, are you studying Python? What are you studying?

Caller 3 (01:05:30):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Although I've hit sort of a brick wall in the web application because I'm using windows. So I figured I was might as well try to try and Python out on Linux to see if there's any difference. And I was wondering what version of Linux would you recommend me trying to look for?

Leo Laporte (01:05:50):
You have a PC. You're gonna put it on.

Caller 3 (01:05:53):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:05:54):
What kind of PC is it?

Caller 3 (01:05:57):
Well, I'm still using the Mac I'm using Carol's desktop.

Leo Laporte (01:06:01):
Oh, okay. So you're using a Mac, you know, I'll be honest if you're using a Mac, Linux is not really necessary because the stuff that you wanna study really is a, it requires a Unix and the Mac is a Unix. It has BSD under the hood. So I, before you rush off to, to get to know Linux, I would get to know the terminal on your Macintosh. And in particular, mm-hmm, <affirmative> a program called home brew, which is at B R E w dot S H on the internet. Home brew is like makes the Mac more Linux like in that it's a package manager. So when you, in, for instance, I see you can install for Python. You know, generally there are a number of ways to install Python. You probably don't wanna just install Python raw. You can do that in home brew, but you can also install some of the, you know, Python envelope installers, which is probably a better way to go with Python.

Leo Laporte (01:07:00):
Python's a little weird because ver there's so many different versions and they're so incompatible with one another. It's one of the reasons mm-hmm <affirmative> I don't like Python actually, but it is kind of probably the best that, and JavaScript probably the best languages to learn for for what you wanna do. So pie end, P Y E N V can be installed with home brew and then from then on you'll use it and PIP to continue to install other parts of, of the Python environment. So you don't need Linux if you want. I would install Linnux on a Mac. I think that's that's gilding the Lilly. If you had an old PC lying around my preferred Linux is called Manjaro M a N J a R O it's at manjaro.org. And it's, it's kind of the best of both worlds in a Linux.

Leo Laporte (01:07:52):
It's a rolling release. So it's always up to date, always the latest versions, but it also has some good security features and a very good package manager. So it's my kind of preferred Linux and it also other nice feature is it, it works with almost all PCs. One of the problems with Linux is a lot of PCs require proprietary drivers. Linux is a non-pro proprietary open operating system. And some Linux distros say, oh, we're not gonna install proprietary drivers. In fact, the folks who do Debbie and who are most famous for this saying, you know, we're gonna be pure. Just this week said we're gonna have to start looking at being less pure because people are having trouble getting it, working on a variety of PCs, installing Invidia drivers, for instance, on some PCs really does make life a lot easier. So being a purist with Linux is a problem. So I would take a look at brew on your Mac. I think everything you wanna do, including getting a great Python environment can be done on a Mac vs code runs on a Mac. That's a great way to program in Python. I think probably you have everything you need. I would start there anyway. I would try that. Okay.

Caller 3 (01:09:10):
Okay. That gives me some good ideas.

Leo Laporte (01:09:12):
Yeah. How exciting, what are you so you're is it beginning coding that you're learning?

Caller 3 (01:09:19):
Yeah, basically I, what I did is I actually installed Python on my parallels desktop of windows 11 version.

Leo Laporte (01:09:26):
Oh yeah, yeah, no, Python's much better on a Mac. Don't do it in windows. <Laugh>

Caller 3 (01:09:31):
Yeah. I'm starting,

Leo Laporte (01:09:31):
You're finding out that's very frustrating. Yeah, yeah. Do it on a Mac. Yeah. Hey, I, that congratulations, Kenny. I think your, you, your instinct was good. Do what you love pursue that. Absolutely. And good luck. Well, I keep, keep in touch so we know how you're progressing. Progressing.

Caller 3 (01:09:50):
Yeah. Well, with the way things are going with the courses that I'm learning, it's probably gonna be a long time before I's okay. Call you again. So

Leo Laporte (01:09:57):
Yeah. Yeah. Good. Get to work, buddy. <Laugh> yeah. Thanks Kenny.

Caller 3 (01:10:01):
I guess so.

Leo Laporte (01:10:02):
Congratulations, Leo. Congratulations. That's awesome. Now we go Louisville, Kentucky. Ben,

Leo Laporte (01:10:10):
Ben's

Leo Laporte (01:10:10):
Got the radio turned on a little loud. Turn that radio off. Ben. There we go. Hi Ben.

Caller 4 (01:10:16):
How you doing Leo?

Leo Laporte (01:10:17):
I'm great. Welcome.

Caller 4 (01:10:20):
I am having a Linode problem. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:10:22):
More Linux issues. Oh, the, the, the people on the radio stations are loving this. They say we need more Linux programming. <Laugh>

Caller 4 (01:10:30):
Yes, sir. Well, my Linode is being, do attacked and I don't know what to do about it.

Leo Laporte (01:10:36):
Okay. So Linode is a cloud provider a great cloud provider. It they run Linux in the cloud. In fact they were for a long time a sponsor of our shows they're owned by Akamai, which is a really nice company. In fact, Akamai has DDoS protection. So you might wanna inquire about that. So somebody's hitting your server, huh?

Caller 4 (01:11:01):
Yes. It's a it's a Debbie and nine server. The reason I went with nine is cause the particular game I'm trying most on requires that. Sure, sure. And the problem is, is that randomly today? I woke up to seeing that the server was this, the networking part that was disabled to protect it from this set of tag.

Leo Laporte (01:11:24):
Cause you were flooded. I looked

Caller 4 (01:11:25):
At and they, and I called their support. They sent me the logs and I don't know what the heck,

Leo Laporte (01:11:31):
Well, this is the problem. You're serving a game to the public and there's always some jerk out there. So usually a kid who thinks it'd be funny, haha. To bring you to your knees you don't probably don't wanna pay for it, but Leno does have DDoS protection. I'm sure they told you that.

Caller 4 (01:11:50):
No, they did not. Okay. But regardless I'm already paying like 60 bucks a month for the

Leo Laporte (01:11:57):
Dog. Oh yeah. You, you, you should be getting there. There, there, apparently they're basic Dedos is free to you. So no cost or maintenance for customers. So I would make sure you've got that switched on. And you know, this is, it's a shame, our our good friend, father, Robert Ballas air, he calls himself the digital Jesuit. He works in the Vatican. These days used to do shows for us, but the got called by a higher authority. And he set up a Minecraft server for the Pope. <Laugh> it sounds like I'm making this up. Doesn't it? The Vatican Minecraft server and immediately, immediately ran into all sorts of problems from people who, you know, well, for whatever reason wanted to take it down. He said later, yeah, I, we did this to find out, to root out the evil <laugh> in the land.

Leo Laporte (01:12:57):
All right. Maybe didn't say that exactly. But to find out who was gonna cause problems so that we could then protect against them. And I think Robert now is running in fact, a not only a Minecraft server, he's got other games he's got I think rust and factorial and they have been able to run those. Because in the early days, when he set up that Minecraft server, he kind of collected all of the <laugh> all of the addresses of all the people who were gonna attack him. Anytime you put up a public server, whether you do it for the Pope <laugh> or you do it for yourself, gamers are notorious. They just see it as another game. Right? it's just another game.

Leo Laporte (01:13:42):
I'm I'm happy to say, you can read about it. If you search for Vatican Minecraft server <laugh> you can read all about it. I'm happy to say Robert has figured out a way around it. I would check with Linode the way a denial of service attack works. They flood your network with illegitimate requests. The way the internet is set up, your server has to respond to a request. It can't ignore requests or nobody'd get in. So if they flood it with requests and then, then just don't care, but flood it with more requests, your server spends all its energy going. Yeah. What? Yeah. What, yeah. It's like as if they were tapping you on the shoulder. Yeah. What, yeah. What, and doesn't have time to do the rest of its job. It, it basically brings it down. It's a DDoS, a denial, actually the D in DDoS, the first D is distributed denial of service attack usually by flooding.

Leo Laporte (01:14:33):
So there are lots of companies. Amazon does this, a company called CloudFlare does this Linode will also do it. They throw a lot of bandwidth, big fat pipes out there so that the flooding, you know, doesn't stuff, the pipe doesn't fill it up and then they mitigate quickly. And usually they can handle this within a few seconds. I have to say, these attacks are getting worse and worse. Amazon just reported the largest DDoS attack of all time. It was able to mitigate it, fix it. The D is the first D is the problem. Distributed means it's not just one computer attacking you at many, be many, many, many thousands attacking you. How do somebody get a thousand computers? This is why we talk so often about keeping your system safe. It's not just for you, it's for everybody else out there. If your router has a flaw or a bug in it, and there are well known router flaws.

Leo Laporte (01:15:39):
If your computer has a flaw, it bad guys can take it over, commandeer it. You might not even know about it. And use your system are in an army of other systems to CLO somebody's server like Bens. That's the distributed denial of a service attack. These attacks now are getting so virulent that, that, and often it will be terabytes of data, a second terabytes of data, a second. Nobody can, you know, provide that kind of big fat pipe. So that's why you have to go to somebody to mitigate it. Like it's a pretty technical subject. It's an important subject for anybody who wants to run a server. And that's the problem. Ben, as you've opened yourself up, you're as soon as you're providing a public service welcome, <laugh> welcome to the public. Eighty, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. Chris mark Hartz back in town. He's been traveling around. He'll join us in about 15 minutes to talk photography. We'll take more of your calls too, in just a bit 88 88. Ask Leo Leo. Leport the tech guy. Hello Chrissy. How are ya? Hello? Hello? Hello. How did your Mo model three journey go?

Caller 5 (01:17:13):
Oh, without a hitch. It was the, the driving part was, was just as simple as you get it with the Tesla. Nice, nice. The, the supercharges almost all the way down the Romania itself is a bit thin, but there's enough. Third party one. So it wasn't

Leo Laporte (01:17:30):
Nice.

Caller 5 (01:17:30):
Wasn't a big deal. It was good. Was I, I, I was hoping for it to be simple. I did not expect it to be that simple, so

Leo Laporte (01:17:39):
Awesome.

Caller 5 (01:17:39):
Two and a half thousand miles.

Leo Laporte (01:17:41):
Wow. So you're ready to do that workshop

Caller 5 (01:17:45):
Next year. Yeah. Good. It'll happen. Good. Good. I, I went to check out Prague in a bit more detail. Oh. Spent some time in Budapest, which

Leo Laporte (01:17:55):
Very photograph,

Caller 5 (01:17:56):
Which I've never been to before. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:17:57):
Isn't it beautiful.

Caller 5 (01:17:58):
Beautiful. Yeah, it is so beautiful. Great places. I was to the big market hall. It's like, everything's it's good. And then I spent a couple of days with my friend in Sylvania where we did some scouting of like old 45 churches and things. Oh.

Leo Laporte (01:18:16):
Is, I mean, you know, we always think of vampires, but that's not, that's not what I mean. Is it like a normal country?

Caller 5 (01:18:25):
It's a normal country. It's it's, it's, it's not, it's not a super rich country, but it is like, there's there roads. There's like pav roads and stuff. They have electricity, they have water. It's a regular country, but, but like very, very old and traditional stuff. It's like Tuscany from a, from a climate point of view. Nice. Come on a vegetation point of view just in the east. They have great food. They have,

Leo Laporte (01:18:51):
Was it part, what was Sylvania part of

Caller 5 (01:18:54):
Anything? Romania.

Leo Laporte (01:18:55):
It's part of Romania.

Caller 5 (01:18:56):
It's the center of Romania.

Leo Laporte (01:18:58):
Okay. It's the middle of it's Romania. Romania. Pretty much. Yeah. Okay. Nice. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:19:01):
Nice. The Romania borders to the black sea, but, but I didn't go that far down. But yeah, Sylvania the old the it's it's an old part that was always under siege by the, by the auto mans. And that's why they built like old 45 churches, like, like 150 of them. It was really photogenic to the max. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:19:25):
Sounds wonderful.

Caller 5 (01:19:27):
It's fun.

Leo Laporte (01:19:27):
Sounds wonderful.

Caller 5 (01:19:28):
It's gonna be a fun tour.

Leo Laporte (01:19:31):
I can't wait. And we're gonna do I have your photo review? Email. So we'll do that.

Caller 5 (01:19:37):
We'll drive the, the slides and we, I have the fishbowl ready for the next one. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:19:43):
All right. We'll talk in 10. Yes. Thank you, sir. See

Caller 5 (01:19:46):
Then

Leo Laporte (01:19:48):
Leo Laport, the tech guy, eighty eight, eighty eight as Cleo. The phone number max is on the line lake with lake worth Florida. Hello, max.

Caller 6 (01:19:59):
Hello Leo. My friend. How are you?

Leo Laporte (01:20:01):
Oh, my friend max. I'm well, how are you?

Caller 6 (01:20:04):
Good. First of all, I am not a Virgin caller. You still wanna talk to me? <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:20:10):
Oh yeah, yeah, it's fine. Okay.

Caller 6 (01:20:13):
I wanna make sure that's okay.

Leo Laporte (01:20:15):
It's okay. You know what? It's up to Kim. She's the gatekeeper.

Caller 6 (01:20:18):
Yeah, I see. She's very nice to me. And

Leo Laporte (01:20:22):
Did she, did she say, well, I don't know, max. I don't know

Caller 6 (01:20:26):
<Laugh> but I complimented her on her dress on her shirt.

Leo Laporte (01:20:31):
Ah, see that's the secret? Yes. That's

Caller 6 (01:20:33):
The secret. That's exactly what it's see. I've learned a few things in my old, my old age, you know <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:20:40):
Max. I bet you're a sweet talking fella.

Caller 6 (01:20:43):
Oh no, no, no, no. Very simple, man. No simple, man. No,

Leo Laporte (01:20:48):
No, no. The, you don't, you don't, you don't know how to, how to sweet talk a lady. 

Caller 6 (01:20:53):
Well the lady and all that, but yes, I dunno. Yes. Once in a while,

Leo Laporte (01:21:00):
Kim, Kim, is he a sweet talk and fella? Yes, absolutely. I thought he was. I could tell he's sweet talked his way right on the air. Let me put it this way. After you called she put her flannel shirt on <laugh>.

Caller 6 (01:21:12):
Oh really?

Leo Laporte (01:21:13):
Yeah. She said, Hmm. Yeah. Okay. What can we do for you max?

Caller 6 (01:21:18):
Well, I, this is regarding the BS OD video D fatal arrow, windows 10 on Dell XBS laptop.

Leo Laporte (01:21:31):
A blue screen of death.

Caller 6 (01:21:35):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:21:35):
<Laugh> that's what BS OD stands for the blue screen of death. Usually B

Leo Laporte (01:21:41):
<Laugh> BS, O D you usually don't get a B. So I never heard anybody call it a B. So you usually don't get a blue screen death unless there is a significant error in windows because it means I can't <laugh> I can't go on, I can't, it can't recover. And usually that means there's a hardware problem or some program accessed the most vital part of memory. What they call ring zero and, and programs. User mode programs are not allowed to do that. Only drivers are. So generally, if you see a BS, O D it's a bad driver or a hardware problem, now you, you gave me some more like numbers and letters. Tell me again, what, what particular BS O D you're getting

Caller 6 (01:22:26):
Essentially the DS fatal error.

Leo Laporte (01:22:30):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So by the way, I should, I should warn you that when you see all of that additional stuff. Yeah. And then it does a memory dump and all that stuff. That's not for you that if you

Caller 6 (01:22:43):
Actually, actually, I looked at it and I provided that to Nvidia, but let me get to the point here.

Leo Laporte (01:22:48):
Well, hold on cuz you can't because guess what? We've used up all the time. I'll talk to you off the air. Invi is the right answer. It's a video card driver or a hardware failure. Chris mark work coming up. We're gonna talk photography. So yeah. So you talked to in video, cuz that that error said, this is a, this is a problem with a video card. Yeah.

Caller 6 (01:23:17):
Yeah. So, so essentially this happened Leo about two, two months ago when there was a new release of windows mm-hmm <affirmative> and I'm not the only one. Yeah. A lot of people who are running an XB X, the 95, 60 windows, 10 running the same problem. We tried many, many things. Finally, the only way to, for prevent this is to disable that 10 50 graphic card in the XBS <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:23:47):
Well, that's a fix. That's a fix. Is that? Yeah. You spent a little money on that. 10 50 back in the day.

Caller 6 (01:23:55):
That's exactly correct. Now the NVI on 3rd of August posted on Microsoft forum that they were able to duplicate the problem. Finally, after people start submitting the memory dump and they are working on the solution, but they have no idea when it's gonna get done in the meanwhile, Microsoft and Dell are very quiet. Nobody seeing anything about this problem and people and users are pulling their hair because disabling the 10 50, not supposed to be the option here, right? Because <laugh>, if you paid for this laptop now,

Leo Laporte (01:24:38):
So, so let me just tell you what's going on. So you understand the, the back and forth Microsoft pushed an update, which broke the Invidia driver. Microsoft at this point is saying Invidia, you need to fix your driver. Invidia is saying either it's possible. They're saying, oh Microsoft, it's your fault because your update broke it. You need to fix it. Or they may be saying, ah, that's an old card. We don't care about <laugh> we're not gonna fix it either way. There's nothing you can do. You disabled it. What I would suggest though, as a, as an experiment is installing an older Invidia driver. So what happens with video card drivers is there's usually four or around four different drivers, your card wasn't made by Nvidia. Who was it made by? Asus. MSI. Gigabyte. Yeah. So it was made by somebody else. So here's the four drivers that most video cards have Nvidia makes what's called a reference driver.

Leo Laporte (01:25:42):
So these are, you should try all four of these. Okay. And you should try earlier versions of all four of these. So Invidia makes a current reference driver, but they will also at their website have older reference drivers for that card. Okay. So that's, that's one, the manufacturer also has a driver. So you, if you could figure out who made that card and wasn't Invidia, they don't make cards. It was somebody else. You can get a driver from their site. Okay. So figure out who made that card, gigabyte, MSI, whoever Asus and go to their site, see what their driver. And again, if the current driver continues to cause problems go backwards to the one previous and the one after that, Microsoft also offers a driver <laugh> believe it or not, which may be what happened with the update from the Microsoft hardware quality lab.

Leo Laporte (01:26:34):
And those hardware quality lab approved drivers are often the worst drivers, but worth trying. So, so there are variety of different drivers that you can try. And I would try all from all three sources, Microsoft Nvidia and the, and the manufacturer, whoever that is VGAs and other manufacturers, there are quite a few manufacturers of Nvidia video cards. So you can open your, open your box up and look and see if you can't figure it out, you might be, you probably could figure it out just by looking at the windows device manager and see who the manufacturer is. So try, you're gonna have to open that anyway, to get rid of the old drivers. So try those and keep trying until you find one that doesn't crash. There will be one that crashes it's time. Once again, to welcome Chris mark, back to our microphones, he's been traveling all over Europe in his model, three testing out <laugh> the the experience for a workshop he's gonna be doing next year. Chris Marwar is not only a brilliant photographer. He's the best photo coach you'd ever find@sensei.photo se S E i.photo. And when he's not driving around Europe, when he is not going to Sylvania Prague, Budapest, he joins us on the radio. Hi Chris, we missed you.

Chris Marquardt (01:27:53):
It's so good to be back. Glad to be here. Good. Yeah, it was, it was a fun, it was a fun scouting trip verifying that this is actually doable Eastern European photo tour gonna happen next year.

Leo Laporte (01:28:05):
So, and what great places to take pictures. Yeah. I mean, beautiful

Chris Marquardt (01:28:10):
Places. And we, we, we go from, from Berlin to dress, to Prague, to Vienna, to Budapest, into Sylvania. It's a photo, it's a photo road trip with a very tiny small group. So

Leo Laporte (01:28:22):
Can it's probably already sold out. Yeah, it isn't, I would guess. Yes

Chris Marquardt (01:28:25):
It's. It's it's getting there. I'm I'm I'm doing two. So one, one on the way down, one on the way back. Oh good. So there will be there will be several groups that can participate

Leo Laporte (01:28:34):
Since say that photo, if you wanna know more, is that the place to go? Where should you go?

Chris Marquardt (01:28:38):
It's a good place. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:28:39):
Chris also hosts the longest running photo podcast in the world, tips from the top floor, which is awesome. TFT, tf.com. He does a future of photography podcast. He's got great books on wide angle photography, film photography. He's a, he is a master of all trades. And this week time to review our assignment

Chris Marquardt (01:29:02):
Friendly I'm to look at photos, the friendly assignment friendly and yeah, people have submitted friendly photos. There's a lot of them. And I'm really happy with what we got. So I have again, picked three photos to take a closer look at. And the first one is by Scott M legen friends. Interesting title friends, 22 a so,

Leo Laporte (01:29:29):
Oh, anyway, two little puppies in a Frisbee. Aw.

Chris Marquardt (01:29:35):
And, okay, so, so this is one of those moments and they, they're not just with a Frisbee. They are, they both have the Frisbee in their mouth returning it to their owner, probably. And I, it's just one of these moments which, which, which, which is, is the, the friendly part of the photo is of course they are friendly. They are friends, probably siblings. But then on the other hand, it's also the shape of the Frisbee that they have looks like a smiling mouth, which caught me when I looked at the thumbnail, I didn't even

Leo Laporte (01:30:10):
Think of that. It's a bit

Chris Marquardt (01:30:10):
Of a subconscious thing going on there. So for me, that was, that was one that I saw in the thumbnail went

Leo Laporte (01:30:17):
It's, it's no accident. I'm guessing that all three of these have animals in them.

Chris Marquardt (01:30:23):
It does help. Yes. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:30:25):
<Laugh>

Chris Marquardt (01:30:26):
So second one by Kevin Case, a friendly goat. So what we see is a gold, well, we do entro anthropomorphize animals. The goat is probably not really smiling, but it very much looks like

Leo Laporte (01:30:39):
He looks like he is, isn't

Chris Marquardt (01:30:39):
It? Yeah. Yeah. Teeth out and seems to be fairly relaxed and happy lying there on the ground.

Leo Laporte (01:30:46):
Goats are friendly. I will, I will vouch for that. Sometimes a little too friendly. Don't let him in the house.

Chris Marquardt (01:30:52):
<Laugh> yeah. And sometimes scary, but <laugh>, that's, that's in their eyes. He's got

Leo Laporte (01:30:57):
His eyes closed.

Chris Marquardt (01:30:57):
I know no one, his, his eyes closed. So that helps

Leo Laporte (01:31:00):
<Laugh>.

Chris Marquardt (01:31:01):
So Kevin Case friendly goat, and then last but not least by Gregory Chesney, smell you later. And this is, this is one of those moments. This is a candid shot, a street type of shot of a woman having the dog on a leash she's on the phone walking one way, and then there's another woman walking. The other way in the dog is pulling away on, on its leash. Cuz that other lady seems to be more interesting. So in there

Leo Laporte (01:31:31):
It's

Chris Marquardt (01:31:32):
One of these moments,

Leo Laporte (01:31:32):
Every dog does that. Yes. <Laugh>

Chris Marquardt (01:31:35):
Of course it does. And it's, it's one of these moments where you have to have the camera ready. It's one of these things that, yes, you, you wanna be ready. You don't wanna have to unpack the camera first and take it out of its camera protection thing and take the, take the, the, the cap off and switch it on. And this, this opportunity is gone in, in like within half a second. Looks

Leo Laporte (01:31:59):
Like this was taken out of the window of an apartment above, which is

Chris Marquardt (01:32:03):
Probably

Leo Laporte (01:32:04):
Yeah. Hysterical. Yeah,

Chris Marquardt (01:32:05):
Yeah, yeah. So, so good job, everyone. Really appreciate nice participating here.

Leo Laporte (01:32:12):
Well, you know what this means? Oh, time to the go to the fish pole.

Chris Marquardt (01:32:19):
<Laugh> the fish pole is here. And of course it's filled with adjectives and I'm going to draw one out of here and now it is going to be oh, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:32:35):
Evil, evil. What? Evil. Oh, I like that.

Chris Marquardt (01:32:38):
I about evil.

Leo Laporte (01:32:40):
Ooh, that's a good talk about unfriendly. Ooh. Maybe you could get that goat picture back, open its eyes,

Chris Marquardt (01:32:48):
Open the eyes. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:32:50):
That would be, that would be evil. So the way this works

Chris Marquardt (01:32:54):
Idea.

Leo Laporte (01:32:54):
Yeah. It's really, it's not a competition. There's no prizes. It's really just to get you out there taking pictures and incidentally, it doesn't have to be pictures with a fancy camera. I didn't look at the cameras on these, but I would bet you more than a few of them were done with, with smartphones. There's a Nikon D 7,000 for the goat. We don't know for the other one, but I bet you they're been done with the camera phones. That's okay. It's really just, you know, the more pictures you take, the better you're gonna be at photography. So go out and get an image that represents evil. Do not endanger yourself. No no Pentacles on the ground and, and no conjuring. It required here. But if you find when you go, oh, that's nice. Upload it to flicker.com. That's a free photo sharing site and send it to the tech guy group. Do us a favor and tag it, TG evil TG for the tech guy and evil. Just so we know that that's your submission, Renee Silverman, our fabulous moderator of the tech guy group will will accept you into the fold. And Chris in a month will review all those evil pictures. You're, you're taking a chance, Chris. You're really taking a

Chris Marquardt (01:34:05):
Chance. Yes, I, I think it'll be alright. And, and I wanna reiterate that what you just said about cameras. It when I did this scouting tour last week, I was out in the streets of Eastern Europe. And I'd say about a third of the pictures that I took there just for scouting purposes. I took with my smartphone. Yeah. And the cameras are so good. Now the, the post processing that's in those cameras in the pictures is so good that we really yeah, it does. It doesn't play any big role anymore.

Leo Laporte (01:34:39):
No, you know, it used to be, well, if you wanted a, tell a P shot, you needed a long lens on a special camera. Not even, not even that anymore. And Apple's new, iPhone's coming out a week from Wednesday and lots of rumors that its camera will, will be significantly improved. In fact, Apple's been stuck at 12 megapixels for several years and apparently this will be a much higher megapixel count, whether it will be,

Chris Marquardt (01:35:06):
That will be exciting.

Leo Laporte (01:35:07):
Wouldn't that be interesting? Yeah. I shoot. As you know, I shoot with a Sony that has 61 megapixels and you know, the advantage of that is you can crop it and zoom in, in effect. But honestly, most of the time I just carry my phone with me, my phone <laugh>,

Chris Marquardt (01:35:26):
It's the convenient option. I know the qualities really amazing.

Leo Laporte (01:35:30):
It's probably better than some of the great photographers of all time had the Ansel atoms and the all re Cartier results of the world. And wow. You know, probably, probably even better than those. I don't know.

Chris Marquardt (01:35:43):
That's where it helps. If you learn a bit more about composition and timing of photos and framing of things. Yeah. That's the key that becomes even more important. Cause technology takes care of all the rest right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:55):
Chris Marwar is@sensei.photo. S E N S E i.photo. Is everything there? Like if people wanted your books or they wanted to see your photos? Oh

Chris Marquardt (01:36:04):
Yeah. You can, you can find a link to my homepage there. And then that takes you to wherever you need to

Leo Laporte (01:36:10):
Be. Yeah. We don't send you to Chris marwar.com because it's spelled so strangely it's M a R Q U a R D T a few too many consonants. Chris, I wanna talk to your parents about that. Yes. But if you just, or for the podcast, TF ttf.com which is by the way, I must listen. Thank you so much, Chris mark. Welcome home. And we'll see you next week.

Chris Marquardt (01:36:33):
Thank you. Glad to be back.

Leo Laporte (01:36:34):
Leo Laport, the tech guy, more calls coming up. Fair. Nice, fair, nice evil boy. That's gonna be, that's gonna be very interesting. Yeah. Wow.

Chris Marquardt (01:36:51):
I know. I left. I left a few risky ones in there, so we'll

Leo Laporte (01:36:55):
See evil, evil. I'm glad that came up. Yeah. To have aula picture a perfect opposite to friendly. Yeah. You were in Sylvania. You could have gotten so many good evil shots should have

Chris Marquardt (01:37:09):
Placed evil closer to Halloween. Anyway. It

Leo Laporte (01:37:12):
What? It's close enough. It's close enough. In fact it's yeah, I think it's exactly. No, no. Cause it's September 28th. Yeah, you're right. It's a month off. That's all right. Octoberfest. It's the rehearsal part. It's your Octoberfest pictures. <Laugh>

Chris Marquardt (01:37:26):
Oh yeah. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:37:29):
All right, sir. Have a great,

Chris Marquardt (01:37:30):
I've never been to Reto Fest. What? Never before. No.

Leo Laporte (01:37:33):
Do you have to go to Munich? Is that

Chris Marquardt (01:37:36):
Well? That's the, the official,

Leo Laporte (01:37:37):
That's where you have to go. It has to be Bavaria at least. Yeah.

Chris Marquardt (01:37:40):
It's so full of tourists. 

Leo Laporte (01:37:42):
Yeah. That's too bad

Chris Marquardt (01:37:43):
Locals.

Leo Laporte (01:37:43):
I still have my later hose and I'm ready if the call should come, I'll be in Munich.

Chris Marquardt (01:37:49):
<Laugh> if, if you come I'll join you.

Leo Laporte (01:37:51):
I would, I shoot. It's too bad. It's gotten, see all the good stuff is now. So jammed that it's no fun anymore. It's like, it's, it's been discovered. There's

Chris Marquardt (01:38:01):
There's alternative Octoberfest in other places, but it's of course not the

Leo Laporte (01:38:06):
Real, oh yeah. We have it here. I mean, I can go across the street to Octoberfest. Yeah.

Chris Marquardt (01:38:10):
I was in, I was at one in Dublin. One. So

Leo Laporte (01:38:12):
Dublin would be fun.

Chris Marquardt (01:38:13):
That was weird. That was super

Leo Laporte (01:38:15):
Weird. Dublin would be very fun. <Laugh> yeah. Thank you, sir. Have a wonderful week. Thank you. Take care. See you in a week. Bye. I know, in fact, I was thinking about that, Roberto, when I was mentioning that I used to give rides to visitors with ludicrous mode. <Laugh> I remember you said never again. <Laugh> can't do that in the Mustang. I'm I'm sorry. <Laugh> only, that was that was a foolish purchase. I I made with the with the Tesla. Never, never used. I never use it cuz I would black out Leo LaPorte tech guy. Don't you don't you say no one told me about you. No, we know. Got those evil ways. That's a good song for our photo assignment. Isn't it? Yeah. Now I get it. Change your evil ways. Leo Laporte the tech I eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. David's on the line from lake Arrowhead, California. Hi David.

Caller 7 (01:39:24):
Oh, Hey Leo. I'm this is David and I'm a big fan of yours for a long time.

Leo Laporte (01:39:28):
Oh, bless you. Thank you. I appreciate it. And

Caller 7 (01:39:30):
You know, I'm one of those evil people who move from the city to the rural areas.

Leo Laporte (01:39:35):
Oh, I don't blame you. I don't blame you beautiful, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 7 (01:39:40):
But it's just, I'm confused because you also have a, a mixed message in one segment saying everyone should live in the city and give up their cars. But we're also celebrating this photographer who travels around Europe and sports

Leo Laporte (01:39:53):
Car. It's an electric vehicle though. I might point out.

Caller 7 (01:39:56):
I understand. Yeah, but it's still, I mean our team.

Leo Laporte (01:39:59):
No, look, I'm not saying I, no, please. I'm not saying, I mean, this is, this is more a fantasy than anything else. I'm not saying it's here. <Laugh> I get it. I have a fan I've since I was a kid, I've had a fantasy. I've always thought, boy, it'd be really fun to bicycle on the interstates. Wouldn't that be awesome. Smooth. Oh, I would love it. Yeah. But then there's all these cars in the way, you know,

Caller 7 (01:40:21):
I, I, I get it. So I, I just, I, I just, I, I, I know your guest said your heart was in the right place. And I feel, feel that, I mean, is there some way for us to use technology in order to, for example, help improve the grids so we can support people in the city so we can fight crime better?

Leo Laporte (01:40:39):
Yeah. I think we can get there if we have the political will. And that was Carmine's point is politicians are never gonna get behind this cuz it would be too unpopular. Yeah, he's right. True. He's right. You ha it all requires the political will to do it. You know, what politic, what is political will? It's the, it's the agreement general agreement in society that we should be doing this. And you know, sometimes it happens in world war II. We all grew victory gardens. We not me, but true. Our parents things ha you know, after nine 11. And I think the country came together and had the political will maybe not their best idea to go after <laugh> the culprits in the wrong country, but that's okay. That happens. So will we ever get the political will to, you know, change the way this country's been built over the last hundred years? Probably not. Probably not. It's a little entrenched at this point. I would love to see though. Have you ever ridden the high speed trains in Europe or or Asia?

Caller 7 (01:41:38):
Oh, in Japan? Yes. They're

Leo Laporte (01:41:40):
Fan con incredible. And I, no,

Caller 7 (01:41:43):
You're, it's 20 seconds. It's never more than 20 seconds late, you

Leo Laporte (01:41:47):
Know? Yeah. Well, and the funny thing is when they tell you you're gonna have two minutes to get on and you better be on cuz they're not gonna wait for you. <Laugh> exactly. They'll they'll they apologize if they're 20 seconds late, they go, oh, we are so sorry that we are 20 seconds late, but I don't think that's gonna happen in the us there. You know, we're, we're trying, I hope we do. I'd like to see that I'd like to ride my, I have an electric bike, which means I can go almost anywhere comfortably, not faster than 20 miles an hour. So it's not, it wouldn't be a good interstate travel device, but I like getting around town on it. I'm just afraid to ride it because there's nowhere safe to ride it. There's barely anywhere safe to walk around here. It's true. You know, they didn't even put in sidewalks in much of this area, so yeah. That's life.

Caller 7 (01:42:36):
I, I appreciate it. I just wanted to bring up that, that part

Leo Laporte (01:42:38):
Of it. Oh, I understand. It's a fantasy. I have a fantasy. That's not reality. And it may never be real

Caller 7 (01:42:43):
<Laugh> yeah. Okay. Sounds good. Keep up the

Leo Laporte (01:42:46):
Great work. Hey, thank you for calling. It's great to talk to you. No, this is a good conversation. How does change happen fantasy, right? You first have to imagine it. You first have to conceive of it before you can make it happen. So I don't think it's a bad thing to say, oh, you know what, wouldn't it be interesting if, if we had good mass transit in high speed rail and you know, if a personal car ownership were, you know well, I don't know how you're gonna get rid of that. Right? People, people want their cars dwindle in our IRC chat says star Trek was a fantasy and now we all have smartphones <laugh> yeah. Right. <laugh> yeah. In fact, I it's absolutely the case. A great many of the scientific advances we have today were because when those scientists were kids, they read science fiction.

Leo Laporte (01:43:43):
And a lot of what people like Elon Musk are trying to do, including his neural link company, which is trying to put a, create a human brain to machine interface, doesn't come out of, oh, we really need this. It comes out of fantasy, comes out of reading sci-fi and saying, Hey, that'd be cool. The whole metaverse thing that mark Zuckerberg and meta is spending $10 billion a year to achieve comes out of science fiction. It has to be imagined first, first you have to dream it before you can believe it. Robert, on the line from Newport Richie, Florida. Hello, Robert.

Caller 8 (01:44:22):
Yeah, it was good afternoon. Loved your show. Leo. Thank you, sir. You, you were talking about artificial intelligence earlier and then just recently about evil. Well, I'll tell you how to put two of them together. <Laugh> on, on TV. There's a series on HBO, max called Westworld. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:44:40):
Now let me ask you cuz the last two I'm I'm still working on the most recent season. The last season. I didn't understand at all this season even worse. Do you understand what's going on, Robert? Have you seen the whole thing?

Caller 8 (01:44:52):
Well, the whole thing is it's all about Evan, Rachel Wood, playing Dolores, the beautiful robots that you fall in love with. And then Anthony Hopkins is the evil creator of the whole wild west part. And the point is that the, the robots or the cyborgs become so sophisticated, so aware of their abuses piled upon them, that they become conscious and then they begin a revolt. And so they, they create all kinds of havoc and chaos in the park. And of course, ed Harris has been there for 30 years as a guest, as a human guest. And he's been reeking havoc himself by shooting up all the robots.

Leo Laporte (01:45:31):
You, you, I, now I understand it. You're brilliant. Robert, thank you. <Laugh> that's a very precise description of it. Well done.

Caller 8 (01:45:40):
It's very well done though, with the technology and Jeffrey Wright as as

Leo Laporte (01:45:44):
I love Jeffrey Wright. Yeah.

Caller 8 (01:45:46):
And he turns out to be, he turns out to be a cyborg himself created by Anthony Hopkins as a companion spoiler

Leo Laporte (01:45:53):
Alert. Oh my God. It's just, <laugh> the other thing that really threw me after the first and second season of Westworld was it was out of order chronologically and they didn't. Yeah. They didn't really let you know that then it all kind of crystallizes. So I figure, well, I'm gonna keep, I'm kind of forcing myself to watch this most recent season.

Caller 8 (01:46:13):
Well, you know what it is, it's, it's the modern way of writing until televis

Leo Laporte (01:46:18):
Inside, out everything's inside out. Yeah.

Caller 8 (01:46:20):
Right. Prequel, sequel, pre sequel. And we get, sometimes there's a, a color change in the, in the video. It turns to blue for the past and technical for the present. Yeah. So you have to be aware of that. You gotta think real fast with this stuff, but it's so well done.

Leo Laporte (01:46:35):
All right. I'm gonna, Robert, you convinced me I'm gonna give it another chance.

Caller 8 (01:46:38):
Yeah I do.

Leo Laporte (01:46:39):
But, but I do have to say, and we were talking about how sci-fi kind of drives science. Sci-Fi has kind of consistently represented machine intelligence as dangerous from Hal 9,000 in 2001 to Colossus the Forin project Westworld, of course it's always represented as a danger to us.

Caller 8 (01:47:00):
Well, you know what it is, Leo, it's very juicy bait on that. It's juicy, it's juicy.

Leo Laporte (01:47:05):
Yes.

Caller 8 (01:47:06):
Society things. And down it goes, but

Leo Laporte (01:47:09):
Do you

Caller 8 (01:47:09):
Think down your throat

Leo Laporte (01:47:10):
That's fiction and maybe be because maybe, you know, fiction will prove to be true, but I think it's also possible that I've talked to many artificial intelligence researchers most famous Ray KW, who has been saying for some time, the singularity is near that. It's just a matter of a few years before machines are as intelligent as humans. And I said, well, that's yeah. I say, well, that's a bad thing. Isn't it? Ray? He says, no, no. I said, aren't they gonna wanna destroy us? He said, you've seen too many movies, Leo. They are going to love and respect us because we are their creators.

Caller 8 (01:47:44):
Well, that's what, that's what the, that's what the people in, in Westworld thought too. But after a while, oh, we get too big for their bridges. Oh man. <Laugh> okay. All those guns on, on the set, it's gonna be like,

Leo Laporte (01:47:59):
Terrifying like

Caller 8 (01:48:01):
That. Other fellow

Leo Laporte (01:48:01):
Terrifying. And yet, by the way even though science fiction tells us, AI is not gonna turn out. Well, we still are working as fast as our little brains can make it to create it. Aren't we, we're not slowing down.

Caller 8 (01:48:16):
It's a big market. People want that on the hook to do anything for that screen. All

Leo Laporte (01:48:21):
My God. I'm looking forward to Alexa saying, I'm sorry, Leo. I can't do that. Leo Laport the tech guy, but now okay. Don't <laugh> okay. We're off the air Robert now, but right. Okay. So Dolores, I get, but then she and I haven't finished it yet. Who is this other character that Evelyn Rachel would is playing? Who doesn't know any, are, is that gonna resolve itself at the end? Like, oh, that's Dolores not remembering who she is or what?

Caller 8 (01:48:53):
Well, you know, you know, Mave the

Leo Laporte (01:48:56):
Yeah. I love Mave. Yeah.

Caller 8 (01:48:58):
Rich. She was a beautiful, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:48:59):
She played Tandy. Tandy is amazing actress. I love her. Right.

Caller 8 (01:49:03):
Wonderful. Sandy, Sandy Newton. Yeah. And well she got to the point where she was fed up with the whole thing. She started rebelling, but she got on the train that far to get out of the park. Yeah. The memory implanted in her as a backstory about her daughter getting murdered. Right. The man and black, right. Brought her back into the park because that's how powerful that backstory was lodged in her. So she was compelled to,

Leo Laporte (01:49:31):
I remember that, that I saw that mm-hmm <affirmative> I saw that. But remember Dolores is now making up stories in this city,

Caller 8 (01:49:39):
Right? Uhhuh. Well, she's rebelling, she's making up her own reality.

Leo Laporte (01:49:43):
Oh. So it's still, is that, is that Dolores or who is that?

Caller 8 (01:49:47):
And as you know, that William, the young guest that comes in with

Leo Laporte (01:49:50):
Yes. And now William has showed up in Dolores's timeline, but he comes from the a hundred years ago. I don't understand.

Caller 8 (01:49:57):
Well, William William turns out to be the young man in black. Well

Leo Laporte (01:50:02):
That I know, but what, but now in, in the late in season four, he's turned up in the wrong timeline. I don't,

Caller 8 (01:50:10):
Well, that's it, it's a back and forth thing and it gets you confused because it's part of the AI. They want you to think as confused as the robots are,

Leo Laporte (01:50:19):
It's working

Caller 8 (01:50:21):
And it works.

Leo Laporte (01:50:23):
It's working,

Caller 8 (01:50:25):
You all around Leo. It's fantastic.

Leo Laporte (01:50:27):
Oh, so you're, you've finished. You've finished season four then. Yes.

Caller 8 (01:50:31):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:50:32):
All right. And is it worth it? Cuz I'm about halfway through and I'm starting to go. I can't, I, I don't what the

Caller 8 (01:50:38):
It's going. It's going to get into you like game of Thrones. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:50:41):
I'll keep watching you. I'll keep watching it. Hey, I really appreciate it. Robert pleasure talking to you.

Caller 8 (01:50:47):
Oh God. Bless and take care and thank you for the wonderful show.

Leo Laporte (01:50:50):
Oh you you're you're too kind. Thank you. My pleasure. Okay. Take care.

Caller 8 (01:50:54):
Labor day. Coming out. You

Leo Laporte (01:50:56):
Too. Okay. Yeah. I'll be working labor day. Still doing the thing. Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte here. The tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, anything with a chip in it. You know the computer stuff, the tech stuff. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leos the phone number (888) 827-5536. That's toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada. Rod pile is in a rocket ship on his way up to us. But I don't know if the traffic is bad in space. So I don't, I hope he's gonna make it before the end of the show. <Laugh> cause there's a lot of space news to talk about, including the Artimis Monday. It's a first test of the Artis rocket to go to the moon. This will be the moon that eventually will take humans back to the moon.

Leo Laporte (01:51:52):
After how many years has it been? You know, 30 years Artis one will do an unru test flight tomorrow. Fall goes well, should be beautiful if you know if you're <laugh>, if you're in the area, you, you it'll be 8:33 AM Eastern from the Kennedy space center in Florida. I, I love the night launches. It's not a night launches, a daytime launch, no humans aboard, although quite a few mannequins <laugh> and weird stuff, including an iPad with Amazon's echo built in actually no, the iPad. Okay. So there's <laugh> I'm sorry. The iPad is so that they can test the echo. The iPad will be running Cisco's WebEx, by the way, guess who's paying for this Amazon and Cisco and maybe even apple, right? We'll be running Amazon's off Cisco's WebEx. So that mission control can call the iPad and send commands to the Amazon echo on board.

Leo Laporte (01:53:00):
And why are they doing this? Well, I'll tell you the real reason, cuz Amazon gave him a lot of money, but ostensibly, so that astronauts can use voice commands. Oh yeah. Like, right. That's the way to do it. Put Amazon echo. Sure. I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about or worse. Motley crew girls, girls, girls playing now. No, that's not what? No. Open the pod bay door now. Deep, deep purple smoke on the water playing. No, anyway it will it will actually go to the moon orbit, the moon fact go beyond that 40,000 miles beyond it in a what they call a distant retrograde orbit, the first woman and the next man land in the moon, slated to arrive at the lunar south pole, late 20, 25. That'll be the third. So the first mission, unmanned mannequins only second mission will be manned next year or the year after probably, but they won't land on the moon.

Leo Laporte (01:54:09):
And then the third mission Artemis three late 20, 25, and there will be a woman on it. If you get to Kennedy, you can watch it on NASA TV, but if you get to Kennedy, Jack Black will make an appearance. Chris Evans who's he that's is that he's he captain America? Sure. Kiki Palmer don't know who that is. Performances of the star Spangled banner by Josh Groban and Herme, Herby Hancock and America. The beautiful by the Philadelphia orchestra and cell yoyo ma they didn't have this back in 1969. Did they? When Apollo 11 went to the moon <laugh> there was nobody singing America. The beautiful on the way. NASA's gotten very sharp when it comes to public relations, they understand make this a show, make this a show. Also when makes it a show to me is the cameras on these vehicles now are so much better than they were back in the sixties and seventies, some beautiful, I expect beautiful images of the earth and the moon from the Orion spacecraft 42 day journey.

Leo Laporte (01:55:22):
It's gonna travel to the moon loop around at return to the earth. 1.3 million miles. It will get back splashing down off the coast of San Diego, October 10th, but expect a lot of beautiful images. The you'll also see commander Munn Campos. That's the mannequin who who's quote, and I'm doing this in air quotes, driving <laugh> the vehicle the mannequin or Quin will be visible in the, in the video feeds apparently. And in another tie in, if you have an echo, you can say, Hey, echo, how's the mission going? And it'll, it'll tell you, well, I'm up here in space and it's going wonderfully.

Leo Laporte (01:56:12):
Wow. It, it it's interesting because in 1969, there were no tie-ins <laugh> with camel <laugh> Coca-Cola no, they had tan, but I don't thinkt paid for it. Now they got an orchestra. They got Josh Groen they've got Amazon and Cisco pouring money into this thing. It's amazing. It's amazing. It's fascinating. I will be no, I I'm a cynic, but I will be watching. The countdown has already begun, began this morning. And tomorrow morning, if we are a go and you know, you sometimes, you know, without uncle Walter to tell us, well, we're on a hold. We won't, you know, somebody'll have to tell us that 30 minute countdown will start 40 minutes before the launch. I don't know what that means. <Laugh> but that's what it says. A 30 minute countdown will start 40 minutes before the launch, the launch director will pull the team to make sure every station is a go.

Leo Laporte (01:57:15):
I love that. You know, go, we are go go 15 minutes before the lift off at 10 minutes and counting things, kick into high gear as the spacecraft and rocket go through the final steps. Most of the action. That's what CNN's calling it. Action <laugh> takes place in the final minute. As the ground launch sequencer sends the command for the rocket flight computers, automated launching sequencer to take over about 30 seconds prior to the launch in the last few seconds, hydrogen will burn off the four RS 25 engines will start resulting in booster, ignition and liftoff. If all goes well at team minus zero. Well, I, I hope rod. I hope rod will get here in time in his rocket ship because I'd love to ask him about all of this. But if, if we get a chance, we will talk about it later in the hour. Meanwhile, let's go back to the phones. Jeffrey's on the line from Brooklyn. Hi Jeffrey.

Caller 9 (01:58:13):
Hi, good afternoon. I don't have a Mac, but I do have an iPad and iPhone and I use iCloud to access my photos and assign it to different albums. Yeah, I know on the Mac, they have something called smart album, which has the pictures we haven't assigned to other albums. But when you go on to the iCloud, they don't have that. So my general album, I don't know if I have 'em assigned to other albums. And I was wondering if there is a third party app or something that might do that.

Leo Laporte (01:58:52):
No, no, just do it on your iPad.

Caller 9 (01:58:55):
Yeah, but the iPad doesn't when I do it on my iPad, it doesn't have the smart album.

Leo Laporte (01:59:01):
Yeah, it does. So go into photos, the photos app on your iPad. Right? Right. And if you go to albums, you'll see my albums, you'll see shared albums, you'll see people and places. You'll see the categorization. You'll be able to add albums. If you want, you create new albums, you can using the people feature. And I,

Caller 9 (01:59:23):
Yeah, I know. And I, I did that and I signed other albums, but there's nothing called smart album, which says you have these photos in this smart album and you're having to assign 'em to sub albums. It's just not there as it is on the Mac. Huh?

Leo Laporte (01:59:40):
I thought all the features of the photos was available on all platforms.

Caller 9 (01:59:48):
No, that's why, that's why I'm calling you.

Leo Laporte (01:59:50):
Oh, that's interesting. Let me, let me, let me see here. Yeah. Okay. So cuz I use that feature. I love that feature. A smart album automatically gathers and displays photos. For instance, I have a smart album with my wife so that whenever I take a picture of her, it goes into photos. It sorts it out. And then it shares with her smart albums. You create on your Mac, don't appear in photos on your iPhone or iPad. That's interesting. Yeah, you are. Yeah. And you have to, you have to do it on the Mac. Yeah. I don't think there's a third party cuz only cuz apple wouldn't allow it. <Laugh> wow. That's really weird. So is that, why does apple do that? Is that so that you have to buy a Mac? That's why that's very odd. So the third party program that I would use is Google photos, which is free. Right. And it will do that on the phone. Of course it won't propagate to your apple photos, but you will at least have a way of seeing a smart album in Google photos. And,

Caller 9 (02:00:53):
And I do have Google. It's weird. I use it, you know? Yeah. Saying it's weird. I figured, you know, maybe you or I know Mike is an expert on

Leo Laporte (02:01:01):
I will ask Micah, but I can almost guarantee you apple would not allow some third party program to go in and do that. You could certainly, and you know, this, you could do access your photos in a third party photo program for instance, Adobe Lightroom and organize it in Lightroom. But it wouldn't propagate back to photos.

Caller 9 (02:01:25):
Yeah. Too much trouble, you know, that's, you know, I, I do have, you know, Amazon photos, I do have Google photos, you know, which has it. Yeah. I don't want to, but you know, so you, I don't know. So

Leo Laporte (02:01:37):
C send a feature request. There is a link and I'll put it in the show notes to feedback for I photos for iOS and iPads and just send 'em I, you know, if everybody listening <laugh> would say, Hey, come on, fix this. I bet you, I bet you, they would. I'm not sure it doesn't make sense that they don't, to be honest. And

Caller 9 (02:01:58):
It's been that way for a long time. And photos has been, you know, God knows how long. So

Leo Laporte (02:02:04):
Yeah, that's, that's really weird that they don't do that. I'm trying to think of what the business rationale. I mean, certainly they wouldn't do that to make people buy max that's nuts. There's enough horsepower. Gosh knows on your iPad, your iPads, you know, some iPads are faster than most Mac, you know, so there's, it's not a lack of horsepower. It's it's a strange thing that they wouldn't include it. It's not currently supported. The iPhone does not allow you to create smart albums and you will not be even, even if you created them on the Mac, you wouldn't be seeing them on the iPhone. That is ridiculous.

Caller 9 (02:02:42):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (02:02:44):
That's ridiculous. Well, thank you for telling me and I will, I'll certainly ask Micah, you know, Micah, besides joining us every Saturday on the radio show also has a show about iOS called iOS today with Rosemary orchard. And that's the kind of thing they should. They probably have talked about it. I don't know if you go to twit.tv/ios, you can see past episodes, but it's news to me. I didn't realize I, you know, it's funny, I guess I didn't, because I'm looking now on my phone and I don't see that album I created for my wife. The one that I share with her of pictures of her. That was a nice feature.

Leo Laporte (02:03:20):
I just, I don't, I'm sorry, Jeffrey. I don't have a, a fix for that one. Maybe somebody listening does eighty eight, eighty eight ask Leo the phone number. Leo Laport, the tech guy. And if there is a fix, we'll go to put it up on the tech guy labs.com. I will put the link to the apple site where you can complain. <Laugh> tech guy labs.com. Leo Laport, the techo Leo Laport, the tech guy, 88 88, ask Leo unknown. If rod Powell will make it here in time, but he's, he's coming as fast as he can as fast as he can in. Well, meanwhile, the conversation continues with Lenny in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Hello, Lenny,

Caller 10 (02:04:05):
How are you? Leo

Leo Laporte (02:04:06):
SLA. Good to talk to you. Welcome

Caller 10 (02:04:11):
Came to you. My same old same viewer from you since the screen savers and all that stuff. Nice

Leo Laporte (02:04:20):
SLA. And Canta in Canto. What what can we do for you today?

Caller 10 (02:04:25):
All right. We got two questions. The first one is about a, a Saturday receiver that I have a hopper tree from dish. These receiver has been giving me a lot of problems lately and it's recruiting all the time. Hey, I make the soft. We said the master clear said, and I called tech technical support. And they told me that the problem is with the power supply. And that is very incorrect because the power supply has like five or seven devices and it's working fine.

Leo Laporte (02:05:02):
Oh, they mean the power supply in the terminal box.

Caller 10 (02:05:07):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:05:07):
That's what they mean. Not your, not where you're plugging it into. And this is by the way, something that does die frequently. This, so your dish box does not have an external brick. It it's inside the box. Is there when you plug it in, is it just plug straight into the wall?

Caller 10 (02:05:23):
Exactly. Yeah. Cause I, I want, I want to, you know, you know, sometimes there are power outages normally here, especially in the tropicals in season. And we need to have like a backup battery. In some cases you mentioned area, but the thing is that the ditch is correctly pointed to the satellite, but the, the problem is with the receiver, you know? Yeah. Yeah. When they call, they told me that it is I, for me, it's not a valid decision.

Leo Laporte (02:05:51):
Well, the, the you can't. Okay. So power supplies, those bricks, external on laptops or internal on PCs and other devices, you know, lately they've been putting these inside the boxes. They fail, they do fail. They overheat, they get old, they fail. How old is the terminal? The receiver?

Caller 10 (02:06:14):
The receiver is like about three years.

Leo Laporte (02:06:16):
Yeah. So it could be that the on, off power, you know, cause power in Puerto Rico I know is inconsistent. So it, it could be mm-hmm <affirmative> it could be that, but I think it's these things die. Anyway, we, we have we have a lot of video cameras in the studio and their power supplies die very remarkably frequently. Okay. So it is something you can do yourself. If you feel like pretty handy, but you gotta be careful because you don't wanna open the power supply there's stuff in there that can zap you, but it is possible. I bet you, I fix it. I'm gonna look and see if I fix it has a dish power supply or receiver repair. Because if, if they do, yeah, they do. So they could, they could sell you the part. And then there'd be videos online. You could also look on YouTube. The, the trick is to get the part first. Okay. If you can get the part, you can replace it. Otherwise you gotta tell dish. I need a new one.

Caller 10 (02:07:28):
Yeah. I, I will

Leo Laporte (02:07:30):
Definitely, but they're gonna charge you. They're gonna charge you cuz it costs what four or 500 bucks to buy it in the, the first place. No,

Caller 10 (02:07:35):
No, but, but I have the insurance, ah,

Leo Laporte (02:07:38):
Insurance. Well then they should just then there's no conversation at all. Just say I want a new one.

Caller 10 (02:07:43):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:07:44):
It's not, it's not, when they say the power supply, they don't mean your power. I mean, they might, but too bad, too bad.

Caller 10 (02:07:51):
Obviously the other, the other devices are working a hundred percent

Leo Laporte (02:07:54):
Leo. No, no, no.

Caller 10 (02:07:56):
It has to do something with the receipt.

Leo Laporte (02:07:57):
It's them. And, and it is not at all unusual for these power supplies to fail the capacitors. Exactly. Sometimes they overheat, they wear out, they should simply replace

Caller 10 (02:08:05):
That. And I, and I bought these power and supply and Costco and you know, the Costco, they, they don't have any problems with the warranty and no,

Leo Laporte (02:08:13):
No, no. That's not what they mean. I hope when they say power supply, it's not your power. It's their problem. Do you have, is it a DVR? Do you have a lot of recordings on it?

Caller 10 (02:08:23):
Yeah. It's like a 50 pretend on the hard,

Leo Laporte (02:08:25):
Something like that. You, you will, if they replace it, they, you know, probably you'll have to send it to them and they there's no guarantee you'll get it back. So

Caller 10 (02:08:34):
I also heard a rumor that it's gonna be a new receiver. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:08:39):
Almost certainly. That's what'll happen

Caller 10 (02:08:41):
Or something like

Leo Laporte (02:08:42):
That. Yeah. Almost certainly. That's what'll happen. They won't fix it. They'll just send you a new one. So get those recordings off. If you can. Leo Laport the tech guy more calls right after this. Oh, I see. I see a hotline call hotline hotline. You'll just, is that rod talk to them when you get here, is that Rodney or what? He can't be on the air with us. What's going on? He's driving. What, what? He's driving. Oh, like okay. Well, if he's driving, I can't, he can't be on the air unless he wants to pull over. That's all right. It's all right. It's okay. Yeah. You could take the hard drive out <laugh> and ship it to him without the hard drive. I don't know if they'd take that. I don't know. <Laugh> was Lenny you said you had something else you wanted to ask too.

Caller 10 (02:09:42):
Yeah. yeah. I have a ultra nine gaming speaker Uhhuh that I bought recently on a prime sales event. And the thing is that the gaming speaker is compatible with the PlayStation five with the USB connection, but with the Xbox series X, they, you know that they eliminate the optical drive, right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:10:08):
Yep.

Caller 10 (02:10:08):
Yep. And the problem is that they don't re they, they don't synchronize Bluetooth or even USB. So frustration that I

Leo Laporte (02:10:19):
<Laugh> the only, the only possible solution is they do have HDM. I out that Xbox does the sound bar have HD, M I

Caller 10 (02:10:29):
The sound bar doesn't have an H D M I ah,

Leo Laporte (02:10:32):
A lot of sound bars have passed through. So you put the HTMI from the Xbox into the sound bar and then it passes it through and then you plug it into the TV. Cuz there is audio on H DM. I, so if the sound bar doesn't have HTM, I I don't know what you're gonna do. Oh, you, I know what you could do. If you had an AV receiver Uhhuh, you could plug the go put the Xbox through the receiver and have the receiver feed.

Caller 10 (02:10:58):
Yeah.

Caller 10 (02:10:59):
I got an LD ultra display monitor, but the problem is that the only port that it has has the T V port and the HD nine,

Leo Laporte (02:11:08):
It doesn't have an optical out auxiliary

Caller 10 (02:11:11):
Auxiliary. The only has the auxiliary headphones, but it doesn't work.

Leo Laporte (02:11:15):
Oh nuts.

Caller 10 (02:11:16):
Anyway. Anyway, I will wait for the the update for Xbox to see if they can synchronize Bluetooth devices on the meantime. And then I can use that. So I suppose that, I'm sorry. So anyway Leo, it's nice to meet you. My name is Lenny here. Call sunny, K four TV like television.

Leo Laporte (02:11:35):
Oh, nice to meet you to

Caller 10 (02:11:36):
Hear you in the meantime. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:11:38):
That's great. KP four TV, huh? Yeah. Nice. Hey, it's great to meet you at w six T WT. Have a great day. Seven, three, very

Caller 10 (02:11:46):
Good seven trees and have a good love future labor day weekend. You

Leo Laporte (02:11:50):
Okay? Thank you. You too, Lenny. It's good to know your listening and beautiful San Juan. Okay. I love San Juan. Hey, we do have spaceman rod pile. He is on the phone. He is on the phone. So play Elton John over <laugh> play Elton John music. He's in his rocket, but it's not quite fast enough to get here from all the way from San Jose rod pile space guy driving up. Hello rod.

Rod Pyle (02:12:25):
Hey, so four days of flights to get back from the Arctic and now it feels like four days on 19th avenue.

Leo Laporte (02:12:32):
<Laugh> oh, you're on 19th. Oh, you won't be here for a while. Okay. Good to know. Yeah. Good to know.

Rod Pyle (02:12:38):
Working it, working it,

Leo Laporte (02:12:39):
Isn't it funny? You know, you can you can get on the Artemis and you could be in the moon in a couple of days or <laugh> you can get stuck in traffic on highway two 80. Anyway. Welcome home. Are you glad to be back?

Rod Pyle (02:12:53):
Yeah. You know, the weirdest part of it was it it's a long way back. It's eight stops and, and that many flight segments to get back and you know, you're really victimized by the weather up north, if anything changes and there's fuel shortages and these little short jump prop planes and all that. But the weirdest thing was getting to, I guess it was Ottawa where you're transiting and we spent the night and it got dark. And I hadn't seen nighttime for

Leo Laporte (02:13:20):
Your first night in 30 days. Wow.

Rod Pyle (02:13:23):
Yeah. It was like, oh, wait a minute. That's right.

Leo Laporte (02:13:26):
<Laugh> the sun does go down.

Rod Pyle (02:13:28):
It was really quite God. But I have to tell you as a, a photographer and I'm not at the level you are, or, or the others are, you know, that are part of your club, but to have a three to four hour sunset every night.

Leo Laporte (02:13:42):
Oh wow. Plenty of time. The golden hour is golden eight hours.

Rod Pyle (02:13:48):
Yeah. Cause we used to, I was working TV spots, you know, we used to break our backs all day to try and get that three minute spot. Right. So just before the sunset we're losing

Leo Laporte (02:13:58):
The light. Oh no, we're not <laugh> yeah. Nevermind

Rod Pyle (02:14:03):
Colors chain to the clouds come and go. And it,

Leo Laporte (02:14:06):
So your reports are@space.com and then you're gonna put them on your own publication@astraspace.nss.org. So if people wanna read more now, I'm sorry that you're not gonna be in Florida tomorrow morning for Artis launch.

Rod Pyle (02:14:25):
I'm not, you know what I mean? That rocket's gonna launch at least four times cuz they got four sets of leftover shuttle parts to use up and they've got a, a flight manifest that includes at least four emissions, probably more, but at least four. So I wanna go for the second one. Okay. When, when you go and there aren't 2 million other people see

Leo Laporte (02:14:50):
It, I don't need Josh. Groen singing the star Spangled banner personally. They're making a party out this one.

Rod Pyle (02:14:58):
Yeah. Is

Leo Laporte (02:14:59):
That all just PR? Is that what's going on?

Rod Pyle (02:15:02):
Well, it it's partly that, but not PR in a negative sense. I mean the, the agency NASA is trying to learn how to do this stuff better. And as you remember, back in the holidays, it was all engineers and, and PR hacks doing the team on this 14 and counting main engine start and all that stuff. And you know, that's what we grew up with and I respected that, that now they are trying to reach out to a broader audience and make a little more appealing. And you know, they get a little tacky at times when they start reading all the advertisements for the sponsors of the rocket, that's taken off, whether it's, you know, Lockheed Martin or whoever, but they are trying to do a better job. Then it's gonna be interesting to see. I, I just, you know, so 5 33 tomorrow morning, local time, 8 33 Eastern time. I'll probably be up, but I really don't expect if you go for many hours cause

Leo Laporte (02:15:53):
4K stream on YouTube, if you wanna watch NASA's stream, it should look beautiful. I think it's a really goofy thing that they're putting an iPad with. Cisco's WebEx on it, up there with an Amazon echo so that they can test open the pod bay door. How, but you know, it's corporate money. It helps Toray the costs. So I guess it's okay. Yeah.

Rod Pyle (02:16:14):
And just don't please, if you're ever writing and the Orion capsule don't mention that your best friend got fired for his job or it'll probably fire the thrusters and St. Joe, the solar or something. And it's a, as you point out it's a really miniaturized system. So of course it's local to the, the capsule. It's not going back to servers at Amazon. So it's, it's probably, we gotta be pretty low fidelity in terms of what can handle good. But you know, if for the basic functions, okay, what's our fuel, our fuel load. Do we have,

Leo Laporte (02:16:40):
They won't accidentally play Janet Jackson's rhythm nation when you ask them to check the fuel. It's good. I like that. That's good.

Rod Pyle (02:16:47):
Well, who

Leo Laporte (02:16:47):
Knows? They might. I

Rod Pyle (02:16:49):
Mean, that makes part a lot, you know, during the Apollo program, we didn't hear about it at the time, but there were lots of gotchas that the other astronauts did for their friends going up there. So you, you know, your Pete Conrad and you'd get in the moon on Apollo 12, you'd open your, your, your cuff notebooks to start looking at chores. And somebody's taped pictures of Playboy playmate in a month in there. <Laugh> here to look for the Hills, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:17:14):
That's hysterical. I didn't know that

Rod Pyle (02:17:16):
<Laugh> oh yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:17:18):
Those guys.

Rod Pyle (02:17:19):
That's why you can find if you listen to those old down links, so the moon watch, you can hear every now and then they start laughing for no reason. And that's why it's all these, these practical jokes they're playing on each other. <Laugh> how, but we won't see that on Artis for a while. And yeah. You know, it's a more mature politically, correct NASA. So I doubt that'll make its way into the yeah. The new mission, but you know, so we got a launch window tomorrow and then on the second and then on the fifth. So personally I won't be surprised the slides cuz Boeings was struggling to get this rocket launch since their first projected date was 2016. But you know, it might just take off first thing in

Leo Laporte (02:17:53):
Morning. I mean you, you mean it's six years, late,

Rod Pyle (02:17:56):
Eight years, late. Eight

Leo Laporte (02:17:57):
Years late. Holy cow.

Rod Pyle (02:18:00):
No, you're right. Six years. Sorry. yeah, I mean,

Leo Laporte (02:18:03):
Okay now we know rod can't do mass, so don't send him up on the <laugh>. Oh good news. There's an Amazon echo and it can do math. So you're all right. You, yeah. There you go. You're protected

Rod Pyle (02:18:14):
In the right mood then. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:18:16):
That's the big space story. Is there anything else going on in your in your space world, in your space

Rod Pyle (02:18:21):
Suit? Well, you know, I haven't really had a chance to get caught up cause we got in late last night and I oh,

Leo Laporte (02:18:27):
Wow.

Rod Pyle (02:18:28):
But let's see, what have I heard? There was something we were just, you know, it was so frustrating up there because all I could do was reach out to you via GPS text, cuz we couldn't even get our email to work. That's

Leo Laporte (02:18:40):
Amazing. It's amazing. A web connect. You were really practically on Mars. We'll talk about that. Rod is driving up so we can talk you missed the radio show, but we'll talk on our our podcast this week in tech. You'll be one of our panelists. So we'll have lots to ask you. I'm gonna let you continue your drive so that you get here. <Laugh> okay. And we'll wait for, we'll wait for you rod. Don't worry. Don't worry. Thank

Rod Pyle (02:19:04):
You. No sweat.

Leo Laporte (02:19:05):
All right.

Rod Pyle (02:19:05):
I'll just come quietly. If I'm late

Leo Laporte (02:19:07):
Tiptoe in don't don't apparently there is gonna be a 360 degree VR experience of the launch according to scooter X that's. That's kind of cool. If you go to space.com, how to watch NASA's Artemis one moon launch live in a 360 degree VR experience. I saw the camera that they're using, which is, is pretty close. So I wonder if it's gonna get destroyed by the launch itself. It's a little weird to have 360 degrees of it because really you're gonna be looking at the rocket. What are you gonna you look backwards is nothing. So I, but Hey, if it's, you know, you feel like you're there right on the launchpad. Okay. I guess <laugh> what will you need to do that you'll need one of those 360 degree VR devices, an Oculus quest headset Felix and Paul studios are gonna be bringing that to the Oculus quest.

Leo Laporte (02:20:07):
You could also watch it on Facebook, on the space explorers page. Of course, that won't be VR. I mean, we'll be 360 degrees, but won't be VR. You can, you can turn, you can use your mouse to turn around and, and see what's going on behind you. That's about it. They're also though, and I think this is kind of cool. Gonna broadcast it to 200 domes and planetariums around the world. So you might, if you, if you're near a planetarium you might check and see, that would be cool to watch that launch there. And of course with those big speakers, many planetariums have very nice sound systems that could really rumble rumble your way into space. Looking forward to seeing that it's gonna be it's it's, you know, I I'm glad the space program is back and I'm glad rod is there to cover it for us.

Leo Laporte (02:20:56):
Rod Powell is the host of this week in space at twit.tv/t I S. He does that with space dot com's editor in chief te Mallek. And it's a great show every week talking about all things space, of course, rod joins us every Sunday. Soon he'll be back back on planet earth to, to talk about space. Leo Laport, the tech guy we're not done yet. One more segment to go before the weekend ends. You gimme a ring 88 88 ask Leah will take to the phones after this. Thank you for letting me be your tech guy this week and every week. I really appreciate it. Thanks to professor Laura, our musical director. She really does a great job. Keeping the hits, spinning to the wonderful Kim Schaffer who answers all your calls. Thanks to all of you who called and thanks. Most of all to those of you merely listen, you too serve <laugh> cause without you, they wouldn't let me do this. No way. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number, a few more calls before we wrap things up. Let's go first to Westchester. New York. Richard is on the line. Hi Richard.

Caller 11 (02:22:04):
Hi Leo. Number one. Thanks for being here. You, you brighten some of our technical days. Thank you. Thank

Leo Laporte (02:22:11):
You. That's very nice of you. Thanks. I appreciate it.

Caller 11 (02:22:15):
So I'm struggling again with an LG TV current and connecting to apple mini speakers. I, I put a couple in the house and I love the sound and they're just so easy to set up, but I don't know how to wirelessly jump from the LGTV to the speakers. It's a tough one.

Leo Laporte (02:22:38):
Yeah. that's an interesting conundrum. I know people have set up those home pod minis to do it. You don't wanna do wireless and that's really your only choice generally because wireless means there's gonna be some delay. If you, do you have an apple TV? That's really the first question.

Caller 11 (02:23:02):
Absolutely. Yes I do.

Leo Laporte (02:23:04):
Okay. So the good news is that's what it takes. You can do that. And the apple TV is gonna use airplay as opposed to Bluetooth to connect to those speakers. So, oh, hallelujah. But you have to do it in the apple TV. So assuming that they're both on the same wifi and they're assigned to the same room in the home app, <laugh> believe it or not. You'll do you have two of them to create a stereo pair?

Caller 11 (02:23:33):
Oh yes. I've got one. Two.

Leo Laporte (02:23:35):
Okay. And, and then assign that stereo pair. Two's plenty. I guess you could use more. I don't know. I'm looking at Apple's instructions assign that stereo pair to the same room as your apple TV in the home app. So apparently the home app wants to see them both in whatever it is, living room or whatever you've said it to be. Once you do that, if you turn on your apple TV, it'll say, oh, there's some, there's some home pods in the same room as me you'll you don't have to do anything else. It'll just pop up and you can it'll say, do you want, do you want to use those, those speakers as apple TV speakers? And you say, why? Why? Yes, yes I do. Thank you very much for asking and you're done. So that really, there's only one trick and that is to put them both in the same room,

Caller 11 (02:24:27):
Which I will do. And if for some reason, Artis doesn't take off, you know what I'm doing for you?

Leo Laporte (02:24:33):
<Laugh> oh, it's you you're responsible. Huh? You're the engineer, the flight engineer. That's awesome. Yeah, that'll be good to watch on your on your big screen L GT. It should look really really nice in 4k worked on it. Yeah. Yeah, no, I, I have heard of people using more than two. That would be, I don't know how to do that. That would be interesting. Incidentally, if you don't see the setup screen, there is a way to do it manually. If you go to settings, video and audio, audio output, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm gonna put in the show notes and in our chat room, I'm I put a link to the apple description of how to do this. And it, it is theoretically possible. As long as you have an apple TV that's I guess the only criterion that you absolutely have to have an apple TV to do this. I'd be curious if, if you can.

Caller 11 (02:25:24):
Excellent. Thank you, Richard, on target. And I wanted to apologize if at the beginning of the summer, I asked you the same problem there. And you had come back from COVID and I thought I had treated you poorly. What? Didn't cut you enough slack.

Leo Laporte (02:25:40):
Oh, no, not at all. Not at all. If I was on the radio, I deserve whatever Appium you threw at me.

Caller 11 (02:25:50):
<Laugh> but you're such a trooper to be out there right after COVID. And as a

Leo Laporte (02:25:56):
I did skip one. I did skip one show, but I came back the following week only because I had tested negative. I didn't come in without testing. First of course, as I do every week, when Mike is here, I don't wanna get anybody sick. That's for sure.

Caller 11 (02:26:10):
But, but you're a trooper. The show must go on

Leo Laporte (02:26:13):
The show must go on.

Caller 11 (02:26:15):
We appreciate it. By the way. I'm the guy who, sorry to interrupt you. Who was saved by a apple watch a year ago.

Leo Laporte (02:26:22):
I remember I remember Richard. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm so thrilled for the you. That's great.

Caller 11 (02:26:28):
And your suggestion about the cardio was spot

Leo Laporte (02:26:32):
On. Oh, good. Isn't that great. K a R D I a. It works with your smartphone and it's a two lead EKG that you can for, I think it was a hundred books. It's, it's really inexpensive from a live core. And it's really a good thing for anybody who has had AFib. It's a good thing to have. They even have a like credit card version of it. Now, the cardio mobile card. K a R D I a.com. Well, rich, I'm glad you're with us. <Laugh>

Caller 11 (02:26:59):
They? They, they also put out a six lead card.

Leo Laporte (02:27:02):
Oh, nice.

Caller 11 (02:27:05):
So anyway, I I'll let you go. I know. You're you got a lot going on. Thank you,

Leo Laporte (02:27:09):
Sir. My pleasure, Richard. Good to talk to you. Let's see. Charles's next? Sugarland, Texas. Hello Charles.

Caller 12 (02:27:17):
Hey Leo. How are you?

Leo Laporte (02:27:19):
I am well, how are you?

Caller 12 (02:27:21):
Good, good. Hey, listen, I'm gonna be taking a cruise Alaskan cruise.

Leo Laporte (02:27:26):
I just got off an Alaskan cruise.

Caller 12 (02:27:29):
I know. That's why I'm calling

Leo Laporte (02:27:31):
<Laugh> cause

Caller 12 (02:27:32):
I'm in the market. I'd like to get a camera and I want to get it now, or by the end of the year so that I can learn to use it. And I have a digital SLR, which I really don't want to take. And I'm, I'm looking at the new mirrorless cameras, but I also want to get your opinion because I know there was a person on the cruise who you raved about some.

Leo Laporte (02:27:55):
Oh, he had the Nikon, the new Nikon. Yeah. I looked

Caller 12 (02:27:59):
At that. I, I don't wanna spend, I was at 4,000. I think

Leo Laporte (02:28:02):
It's expensive. The Z seven spend that month. No after that.

Caller 12 (02:28:07):
No, to get some really good wildlife pictures. And we're doing the train north. Oh, cruising south.

Leo Laporte (02:28:14):
Oh, how fun we're

Caller 12 (02:28:15):
Gonna be. Yeah. So I'm, we're really looking forward to it.

Leo Laporte (02:28:19):
That train ride is a gorgeous train ride too. You're gonna, you're doing it right. That's great. So the reason he, you know, of obviously the Z seven, $3,000 body alone, that's pretty pricey. But he had also some very long lenses with that. And I think when you're going somewhere where you want wildlife pictures, whether it's it's bears catching salmon or, or bald Eagles, a long lens, a telephoto lens is critical. And that's why you know this, you have a DSLR. That's probably what you do with your DSLR. You, you have a variety of lenses. The nice thing about mirrorless, the bodies are smaller, but the lenses aren't <laugh> so, so the, it ends up being a little disproportionate. What, tell me about your DSLR. What make do you have now?

Caller 12 (02:29:05):
I have all can equipment. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:29:07):
And so you would probably wanna look at a can mirrorless because you can use your existing lenses with it.

Caller 12 (02:29:14):
Oh, I didn't know if you could. I

Leo Laporte (02:29:15):
Didn't. Yeah. And one of the advantages of mirrorless, in fact, you could probably use your cannon lenses with almost anything. I use mine with a Sony. One of the advantages of mirrorless is you can get adapters because the sensor is so close to the front. You can get adapters that will let almost any lens work with almost any body. So get an adapter can adapter and you will be able to use those cannon lenses with a, I use Sony. Sony's very good. They're less expensive models a as well. And if you're content not to have full frame, you'll really save with APSC. We just bought a micro four thirds camera for Lisa that she loves, which is her Olympus. Om, one another great choice. I, you know, I wouldn't put those cannon lenses on it because they're big. And the O om, one is small, but the new om one is excellent as well.

Leo Laporte (02:30:06):
Unfortunately, it's also a couple of thousand couple of thousand bucks. Hey, we're running outta time. Somebody says I, big island says the RX 10. I do agree from Sony is a great choice. It will go to 600 millimeters. It's a fixed lens, but much more compact. I do agree. The RX 10 is a great choice with the Sony sensors and it's zoom lens built in. So that, that actually might be the right way to go. Thank you. Big island. I'm out of time. I thank you so much for joining us. Remember all the show notes, everything I mention. We'll go@techguylabs.com. This is episode 1922. I wish you a great geek week and I hope I'll see you right back here. Next time, Leo Laport, the tech guy. Well, that's it for the tech guy show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget twit. I T it stands for this week at tech and you find it@twi.tv, including the podcast 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@twi.tv and I'll be back next week with another great tech guy show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.