The Tech Guy Episode 1928

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.

... (00:00:02):
Podcasts. You love from people you trust this tweet.

Leo Laporte (00:00:11):
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my tech guy podcast. This show originally aired on the premier networks on Sunday, September 18th, 2022. This is episode 1928. Enjoy the tech eye podcast is brought to you by Unify Meeting from MIMO monitors. Unify simplifies your work life by combining your favorite video conferencing solutions into one reliable UN universal user interface. Visit Unify Meeting.com. Enter the code tech guy for 25% off a year's subscription. Or use the same code and get 25% off any of Nemo's seven inch displays. Why? Hey, Hey, how are you today? Leo Laporte here, the eTech guy. Time to talk computers, the internet home theater, digital photography, smartphone smart watches, augmented reality, virtual reality, real reality. 88 88. Ask Leo. Yeah, we could talk about refrigerators with the web browsers built in. We could talk light about electric vehicles that are just golf carts with computers on top.

Leo Laporte (00:01:15):
We could talk about any of that eighty eight eighty eight ask Leo is my phone number (888) 827-5536. That's toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada, outside that area. You could still reach me, but you'll have to use Skype or something like that. 88 88, ask Leo, there is a website and I mention this because sometimes you hear something on the show and you say, well, I wanna know more about that. Well, that's where the web website comes in handy, cuz we'll put all the links there. I know people like to know what's that song that Laura played our musical director and we put a playlist there on Sundays, takes a couple of days to get it there, playlist up there. We also put audio and video from all the shows. This is episode 19 28, 19 28. So if you go to tech guy labs.com, you'll see it all there.

Leo Laporte (00:02:10):
You will also see, I should mention we, we changed the website. We used to have its, you know, a standalone website and that, that really got a little too, too costly. So we had to do a big update and I saw the bill and I choked and I said, can't we can't. We just piggyback this on our podcast site. So that's what we're doing. It's on the, the podcast site. So don't be alarmed when you go to tech guy labs.com and it suddenly changes into twi.tv. That's the podcast site, this weekend tech.tv. But if you get there, one of the advantages of that, you can see all the other stuff we do all week long after the radio show, lots of geeky, geeky, geeky, stuffy, stuffy, big, big story. There are actually quite a few big stories this week. Quite a few. I don't even know where to start.

Leo Laporte (00:02:59):
I boy, I, I really, I don't. So there, so you know, cryptocurrency, right? <Laugh> you can't avoid it. There's a guy in the Denny's talking about it, you know, at the top of his lungs, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, crypto, crypto, crypto, blockchain, blah, and blah, blah, blah NFTs, blah, blah, blah. So you, I know you've heard about all this stuff. These are alternatives to the dollar, the Frank, the mark and the yen. They are well, I mean, they're all made up, right? <Laugh> they're made up by not my government, but just by some, some mathematicians somewhere sotoshi Nakamoto in the case of Bitcoin. And the idea is they are still what we call Fiat currencies and, and Fiat stands for the, is the Latin word for faith. I have faith that this thing is, is meaningful and is worth something. But unlike the us dollar, you know, it's not, it's not recognized everywhere and so forth.

Leo Laporte (00:03:57):
Although there are, you know, Bitcoin ATMs, I would stay away from those just, you know, that's just me, don't put hard earned American greenbacks in there to get some digital fluff. Cuz the digital fluff like Bitcoin goes up and down and up and down. I saw an analyst today said, oh, it's gonna hit a hundred thousand dollars. What it did get up to 60. So maybe that's not so strange. I don't know. It's it, it go, you know, look, the stock market goes up and down too. So I guess it's not any, it's not much different than the stock market currently. It's at $19,690 per Bitcoin. That's a lot of money. Especially since if you had realized that was gonna happen, you could have stocked up on Bitcoins for a couple of bucks. You could have got 50 Bitcoins and you'd be sitting pretty right now.

Leo Laporte (00:04:47):
But then there's this problem because is it gonna go to a hundred thousand? Cuz that's five times more. Maybe I should sit on a little anyway. One of the negatives on these cryptocurrencies there really isn't very nice is they they, in order to create them in order to avoid inflation, you know, in the, in the, you know, the dollar, the, the, the fed just says let's the government just says let's print some more and that's that. And that's kind of inflationary, you know? Or is it deflationary? I don't know. It's not good. <Laugh> these deflationary more dollars, same amount. I don't know. Anyway, it's not good. And they can just do it right. They used to tie it to gold. So they mean, at least they had to have some gold coins somewhere and some bank vault to match the number of dollars.

Leo Laporte (00:05:32):
But that was that's long gone. Now it's just, you know, prince and more, but Bitcoin, in order to avoid this problem, you have to use a powerful computer to do solve difficult math problems. I know I sound strange. I'm not kidding you. They solve these difficult math problems. And when they solve them, Ching, a little Bitcoin falls out of the computer. My friend, Steve gibon in the early days, you could take a regular everyday computer, put a Bitcoin minor. That's the software on it. It would it's it's for those mathematically inclined it is it is factoring primes hard problem. And it, so it does it. And he, so it let run overnight and chicken. The next morning he gets up and it dropped 50 Bitcoin, 50 they're worth 20,000. Now that's a million dollars bitching overnight on a regular computer, but that was years ago.

Leo Laporte (00:06:30):
And unfortunately <laugh> cuz at the time that's maybe, I don't know what 10 bucks, it wasn't worth a lot. Steve didn't take it seriously. And he reused the hard drives that the wallet that was storing the coin was on and it's gone. It's lost forever a million dollars. Boo. I don't talk to him about that because poor guy, I have seven Bitcoin in a wallet somewhere that I can't UN I can't remember the password to it's just sitting there that's $140,000, but you know, if I had had access to it, I, I might have cashed it in back when it was 5,000 saying, wow, look at that. I got five grand here, real American dollars. So that's Bitcoin in a nutshell, the problem is as, as it goes along over the years, it gets intentionally so harder and harder to mine. It. So you need bigger and bigger machines.

Leo Laporte (00:07:14):
You need graphics processors. Then you need specially designed ASIC chips that are specially designed for this. Then it becomes so hard to do that. You can't do it in California cuz power's too expensive. So you move all your mining machines to China next to a hydroelectric dam where power is virtually free. And now you can make some money. Those people they're called Bitcoin miners. Couple of years ago, China kicked them out. So they had to go other places. I know Bitcoin. I know some people who do this, you know, it, it's a, it's a, it's a balancing act between the cost of electricity and how much power this computer has to use to generate the Bitcoin. People have noticed, observed that all these cryptocurrencies use a lot of power. In fact, as much as a small nation, I mean so much so that you might say, it's not a good idea to make up imaginary money. If it's gonna burn the world down, right? The reason it, it it's estimated that one Bitcoin transaction takes 1,449 kilowatt hours. That's 50 days of power for the average us household. For one transaction, you go buy a pizza with a Bitcoin. You're using 50 days of energy.

Leo Laporte (00:08:33):
That's Cray, Cray, right? So there's another cryptocurrency, arguably maybe even more popular than Bitcoin called Ethereum E to the people in the know, if you go around these bros and they say, well, you got the E you got the E NFTs are primarily sold for E E T H E. Also used this system, this called proof of work that used a lot of energy until Thursday. This is actually, I know it's hard to believe that this is a big story, especially considering how much I have to explain just to even, <laugh> say what happened. But Thursday, the entire Ethereum blockchain moved from proof of work, very energy intensive to something they call proof of steak, which uses 99% less energy it's, which is interesting. It's much less costly, but also Bitcoin and Ethereum minors. Don't like it because their fancy expensive machines are no longer gonna make them any money.

Leo Laporte (00:09:38):
And in fact, it's gotten so expensive to mine, other coins, to look at other coins. There's lots of them, Sheena IBU named after the dog doge coin named after the meme. There's a lot of cryptocurrencies. None of them make enough money to cost, to justify the electric costs. So all of these guys, and there are thousands of them who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars each on Bitcoin mining rigs with, you know, giant computers, Ray, after Ray with GPUs and stuff, they're going, oh man, it's not profitable anymore. So they're, by the way, just get prepared. They're gonna flood the market. These GPUs are already on eBay and elsewhere. They're highly heavily used. Not sure I'd recommend them. And these are, they've been mining, you know, for all this time. But this E it was called the merge. The Ethereum merge. If you hear the merge, that's what's going on.

Leo Laporte (00:10:30):
That's what happened Thursday. And all these guys with these expensive Bitcoin monitors, they're making, you know, a quarter like 25 cents worth of Bitcoin a day. <Laugh> before paying for the electricity. It's just a it's upside down. So this is a huge shift. We're we're gonna watch with interest to see what happens you might say. Well, is that really the biggest story of the week? Well, let's just one. It's one. There's many. I'll talk about the rest. <Laugh> throughout the show. Yes. I have the new iPhone in front of me. It came out yesterday. I waited in line for eight whole minutes. I remember getting the first iPhone back in 2007, went down to the at and T store with a lawn chair, sat there for eight hours. At least before the store opened, went in hoping they would have an iPhone by the time, cuz I was like 30th in line.

Leo Laporte (00:11:21):
There were a lot of people hoping they'd have an iPhone. They did got the first iPhone that way. I still have it. It's right behind me today or yesterday went down to the mall, the apple store at the mall. I had an appointment, showed him my QR code on my old iPhone. And they said, yes, sir. Just get in line here. I thought, oh no, it's still a line. But it was, I timed it eight minutes to get a new iPhone. Is it worth it? Well, it's not just the eight minutes. It's the thousand plus dollars. Probably. If you have an iPhone relatively recent, anything iPhone eight, ten, eleven, twelve. You probably, you know, you're fine. You're fine. It's it's nice. It's nice. It has the dynamic island. It has a better camera, but nothing to write home about. I mean it's, you know, it's just the next iPhone every year. It's a little bit, a little bit better. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo. That's the phone number? That's another story. Lots of stories to talk about. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. Leo LePort the tech guy. We will take your calls in a bit. Sam bull Sam gonna talk cars. He's at the Detroit auto show. That's later the sound.

Leo Laporte (00:12:34):
This makes me move my big shoulder pads.

Kim Schaffer (00:12:38):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:12:38):
Kim Schaffer phone angel, the unbreakable phone angel. She's the one who answers your calls. Hello Kim? Hello. We had rain. The first rain we've had in six months, I believe. Yes. I

Kim Schaffer (00:12:48):
Know I was in shorts and a tank top yesterday and today I'm in flannel in boots. Go figure

Leo Laporte (00:12:54):
<Laugh> were you splashing around in the

Kim Schaffer (00:12:56):
Rain? I was not, but I could

Leo Laporte (00:12:59):
<Laugh> yeah, we don't in California. We have a rainy season

Kim Schaffer (00:13:05):
That comes every eight

Leo Laporte (00:13:06):
Years. Yeah. We've also been a massive drought so much so that in the west lakes are so depleted, the bodies are starting to show up.

Kim Schaffer (00:13:15):
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:13:15):
Like lake meat. We talked about that. Yeah. Where they, they that's where Vegas, you know where the mob throws the bodies. And now that lake meat is shrinking. Oh look

Kim Schaffer (00:13:25):
The unsolved mystery hole.

Leo Laporte (00:13:27):
That's where Joey bananas went. Oh. but this rain maybe that'll do a little bit

Kim Schaffer (00:13:33):
Help. We need to cover those bodies.

Leo Laporte (00:13:35):
Not cover 'em right up. It's also good for the plants and other living things. So we're very glad

Kim Schaffer (00:13:40):
We do provide agriculture to a lot of this world. So

Leo Laporte (00:13:43):
<Laugh> we know rainy season. Doesn't usually start this early. Doesn't it? I'm talking to a native here.

Kim Schaffer (00:13:48):
No, I don't think so.

Leo Laporte (00:13:49):
So good. That's a good sign. Perhaps. It is a good

Kim Schaffer (00:13:51):
Sign

Leo Laporte (00:13:51):
Perhaps. Who should I start the program with?

Kim Schaffer (00:13:55):
Let's go to Indiana and talk to Brian. I think his why is cams are doing some funny, funny business.

Leo Laporte (00:14:03):
Thank you, Kim. You're welcome. Brian Charleston, Indiana. Hello?

Caller 1 (00:14:08):
Yes, sir. Thank you for taking my call. Thanks

Leo Laporte (00:14:11):
For calling.

Caller 1 (00:14:13):
I started out with like four or five of these wise cans and the version two and

Leo Laporte (00:14:20):
Well, at least you have the version two, the version one cannot be fixed.

Caller 1 (00:14:24):
Right. And then I upgraded to the version three and I got four or five more of 'em. So I've got like eight cameras running and they notify me like constantly eight times an hour, you know?

Leo Laporte (00:14:37):
It's great. It's annoying. Cause you got the motion detection turned on. Right, right,

Caller 1 (00:14:41):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:14:42):
You can turn that down. You can say don't be so stop it. <Laugh> don't be so sensitive. And it's still notifying you eight times an hour. That's useless.

Caller 1 (00:14:53):
Right. So I decided to go ahead and get the wise home monitoring system thinking I would get more

Leo Laporte (00:14:59):
Control over. Sure. If it's not working well, spend more money on it.

Caller 1 (00:15:02):
Right. <laugh> well, it starts calling the cops. What?

Leo Laporte (00:15:07):
Well that's not good. Yeah. That's embarrassing. Stop showing up. Oh, that's not good. And in fact, they'll start charging you after a couple of times.

Caller 1 (00:15:14):
Right? I turned it off. I can't use it. How do I make this manageable?

Leo Laporte (00:15:19):
Oh, I do not. No. I do. I know either. Yeah. I, and I feel bad cuz I have for a long time recommended these they're very affordable, which is nice. Yeah. This is a company up in Seattle that said, you know, we can make good stuff without charging apple prices for it. And so they did accept you. You remember? And we talked about it. They got a little bit of trouble because they had a, a security flaw in the original wise cam. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:15:50):
First

Leo Laporte (00:15:50):
One. Yeah. They didn't tell anybody about until they got caught. And then they said, oh, we can't fix the version one. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so everybody, the version one is like, well, okay. I guess, I don't know if they gave you a discount anyway. It, it kind of has slowed me down recommending them. On the other hand, I still think they're, you know they're good quality for a low price. So you've turned down the sensitivity. I'm trying to remember. I haven't used a wise in a while. We have one somewhere here. Can you tell it what zones to watch?

Caller 1 (00:16:22):
Yeah, I think it's what I need to do is start moving the outside cameras in <laugh> the inside camera's out. Maybe. I don't know. I'm not a security expert. Maybe that's what I need is is somebody to come in here and say, Hey, okay, this is in the wrong spot.

Leo Laporte (00:16:40):
I think you can do it. I think you can do yourself, but look in the software. And I don't know some cameras like the nest cams, which I, I use at the house. You can name zones and you draw them they're triangles. So the camera sees that in triangle. And you can say, well, look, I haven't done that. Yeah. Cuz we don't. So for instance, our nest doorbell sees the street. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I don't want it to notify me when some, a car goes by I'm that's nothing. So I, so I make the zone just be the sidewalk right in front of the house. Right. So, and it's a, I said, don't look at anything else. If somebody's coming in from the side. Yeah. I'd like to know that somebody's coming down the path. Yeah. I'd like to know that, but I don't need to know if somebody's going by on the street. So I think you can do that. They're not triangles in the wise cam somebody's saying they're boxes, but you, so what you wanna do is create zones and, and probably it's notifying you so much because it sees birds or it's his flat

Caller 1 (00:17:33):
Arts. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:17:34):
Yeah, exactly. Those little guys in front of the car dealerships. So you don't <laugh> you don't, you make, so draw the boxes where you wanna know if there's motion and, and eliminate the area where you don't wanna know that I think will help. So I I'm told the wise cam does have that capability. It would be silly if it didn't for this very reason. Right. Right.

Caller 1 (00:17:56):
And I just haven't dialed that in.

Caller 1 (00:17:58):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:17:58):
Yeah. Just, just narrow down. I mean there's things somebody has a, a ring doorbell and he says, sunlight coming through this garage doors. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> triggers of alert. I mean, that's, you know? Yeah. You wanna kind of figure out if there's motion here. I want to know about it. There shouldn't be any there, but don't tell me about places where there is normally motion. Cuz I don't, that's not helpful. In fact it's causing a problem because I'm, I'm, you know, I'm getting alert, fatigue. I'm you know, you eventually, what you do is you say, well, don't tell me anymore. And now you might miss those alerts. That's always a problem with security stuff. You want just the alerts that you care about. Sam bull salmon car guy coming up. Yes. Spiderwebs, moths, giant moths.

Leo Laporte (00:18:51):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:18:56):
That kind of thing. Hey Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:19:00):
Hello, Leo. How's

Leo Laporte (00:19:02):
Life in Ilani.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:19:04):
Good yesterday. My wife and I and our dog went to Detroit to bell isle park. There's this really cool public garden there. Nice. And as we were driving into the park <laugh> my wife looked over and saw it was the Michigan tree climbing championships. Wow. Was going on? What fun? Yeah. So after done in the garden, we walked, walked across the, the roadway there into and checked out the tree climbing championship, basically it's it's for, you know, arborists competing, you know, to show their, their skills at getting up and up and down into trees. And actually one of the competitions was aerial rescue. And so they had like a big mannequin. So the, the climber had to get up in the tree and safely bring down the mannequin.

Leo Laporte (00:19:55):
That's kind of cool.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:19:57):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:19:58):
It was neat. Yeah, really cool. We had a call from IPSS yesterday asking about license plate cameras. And he said they've been made illegal in the city of IPSS city council voted against it, but then the county overruled them. And so, yeah, that's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:15):
Not, I know, I know that they were proposing to put them here in Ipsy. Yeah. but I couldn't remember seeing what ultimately what was the decision there?

Leo Laporte (00:20:23):
Well, I think Ipsy said no.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:25):
Yeah. Well I think, I think it's not, it's not that the, the city made them illegal, but just the, the city was going to have a bunch of them installed. And then they vote, there was a backlash against it. They voted against paying for the installation. But then I think, I think then Washau county may have decided to go ahead and do it anyway.

Leo Laporte (00:20:52):
I think that's exactly what he said.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:54):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:20:55):
Unfortunately <laugh>

Sam Abuelsamid (00:20:57):
Cause they, they are legal in Michigan.

Leo Laporte (00:21:00):
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:01):
But yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:21:02):
And that's what I said is look, you don't, you actually, the road, you don't have a right to passage on the road. Those you know, that's why you have to get a driver's license. It's not right. It's not like just walking around your neighborhood.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:15):
Driving is a privilege, not a privilege.

Leo Laporte (00:21:18):
So I think probably the courts will always say, yeah, that's fine. Driver's license cameras. You're on the road. You have a car. You, you know, that license is issued to you by the state. So we have the right to look at it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:30):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:21:32):
But I don't blame him. He was thinking, well, I think I've heard of some paint you could put on it or some, a filter you could put on it. So the cameras can't read it.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:21:40):
Yeah. There's, there's like little plastic films that you can get, you know, that you, you put a license frame, license plate frame on and, and then this film goes underneath it. And basically it's like a polarizing filter. So from the angles that the cameras are at, they can't do they work really read the plate. Yeah. they are illegal in a lot of places.

Leo Laporte (00:22:00):
That's what I was gonna, that's what I said to 'em as I said, well, if there is a technique, they have to be careful. It will be made illegal. Yes. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:07):
They're not, they're not illegal everywhere, but they are illegal in some locations. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:22:14):
<Laugh>

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:15):
Apparently retcon five has been an arborist for five years.

Leo Laporte (00:22:19):
<Laugh>

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:20):
We

Leo Laporte (00:22:22):
He's been an AR oh yeah. He's he's climbing the, this is retcon five as a child. Yeah. We, he

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:28):
We,

Leo Laporte (00:22:29):
Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:30):
We, we had, we had a couple of our trees trimmed last year. We've got this giant maple. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:22:35):
Those

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:35):
Guys, great canopy over our

Leo Laporte (00:22:37):
Backyard. You're brave.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:38):
Yeah. And watching those guys go up in the tree, they're, you know, 30, 40 feet up in the air and trimming off the branches. Crazy.

Leo Laporte (00:22:47):
It

Sam Abuelsamid (00:22:47):
Was amazing. Just it, it was like watching a monkey climbing around.

Leo Laporte (00:22:50):
Yeah. We have the same thing. We have giant eucalyptus. We have to have trimmed every four or five years cuz they get so they grow so fast. Hold on here. Hold on. The tech eye podcast brought to you today by MIMO monitors and their amazing Unify Meeting software. Now, if you use zoom or Google meet or Microsoft teams or all three, I do, we use all three, you know, different call, different people. They're gonna use different software and stu.

Leo Laporte (00:23:19):
Ff. It gets a little complicated. Doesn't it? I hang up every time we do our Google meet, we do a weekly meeting for the company and I hang up because the Google meet off button is where the zoom unmute button is. And invariably, I'm trying to unmute and I hang up, they just know it. They say, every time I join the, the, the call, they say, okay, he'll be right back.

Leo Laporte (00:23:40):
<Laugh> cause I click the unmute except it hangs up. That's what Unify Meeting solves one user interface for all your favorite video conferencing solutions. It's a universal user interface. Do you always know where the buttons are? It's a Unify Meeting. It's such a great idea. It's an intuitive software to simplify your work life, combining all your favorite video conferencing solutions into one reliable universal interface saves you time saves you the hassle. And I gotta tell you the best way to do this. To get one of these little seven inch MIMO monitors. They have actually different sizes, but plug in one of the little, I like the little seven inches, plug it in Unify Meetings, running on that monitor when it's not, when you're not a call, put your calendar. So, you know, when your next call is, all you do is you click the calendar and Unify Meeting the appropriate program, whatever program it is that that meeting's gonna be on launches.

Leo Laporte (00:24:34):
And if you're using it on the seven inch monitor, that will be your call monitor and on your computer monitor, you'll see the actual user interface, zoom or teams or meets. And that way you'll still have that access to that. But you'll have Unify Meeting in the little monitor. I think that's the really, really cool way to do it. Unify runs on windows. It's PC compatible. It's $35 and 88 cents for a whole year. And, and this is why I recommend it. If you buy one of those MIMO monitors, it's free. So it just comes with a monitor. So try unify for your team at work or try it for yourself. Unify meeting U N I F Y M E E T I N g.com. And by the way, if you decide to buy it, use the offer code tech guy and you get 25% off your subscription for the whole year or buy a MIMO seven inch display and get 25% off that and get unified meaning for free.

Leo Laporte (00:25:31):
Ah, now you're talking, this is great for people who are working kind of hybrid, right? Sometimes in the office, sometimes they're at home. Sometimes they're on the road, bring your MIMO monitor with you, plug it into your laptop. You're golden, you're golden. It's a great way to work. And 25% off when you use the offer code tech guy right now. So go to Unify Meeting.com. They have the displays there. You can get one of those seven inch displays or get Unify Meeting for 35 88 a year, a whole year, and take 25% off the top with the offer code tech guy. Please use that offer code too. So they know you sat here. Thank you, MIMO. Thank you. MIMO and Unify Meeting for supporting the tech guy show. Now back to the program, gentlemen, start your engines. Sam apples. Sam is here, principal researcher at guide house insights, podcaster wheel bearings.media. It looks like you're taking a ride in a Waymo. What are you doing back there?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:26:30):
Actually a cruise vehicle. I was in San Francisco earlier this week. A cruise, which is the automated driving company that is majority owned by general motors Honda, and a couple other companies are also investors was holding an open house at their headquarters on Bryant street. And they back in June of this year, they launched their public ride hailing service in parts of the city in

Leo Laporte (00:27:01):
I see him all over San Richmond district. Yeah, they got they're very visible. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:06):
Yeah. So right now they have a fleet of Chevrolet bolts that have been modified for self-driving. They

Leo Laporte (00:27:13):
Look like Ghostbuster cars, they got big things on the top and little in around, and all sorts

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:18):
Of stuff. They got all the LIDAR sensors and radars and cameras.

Leo Laporte (00:27:21):
Google's Waymo is also self-driving cab service in San Francisco. So it's all over the city. Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:28):
And, and way Waymo is still waiting on their permit to offer paid driverless rides in San Francisco. They've been doing it in, in Chandler Arizona for a while and just recently expanded into downtown Phoenix. And cruise has been doing it in, in San Francisco since June.

Leo Laporte (00:27:44):
So this is this video from your ride. Yeah. Yeah. So there's no driver in the front.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:50):
Nope. I was the only person in the car.

Leo Laporte (00:27:52):
So you hail it with an app.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:56):
Yep. It's just like using Uber or Lyft. You use the cruise app and, and it

Leo Laporte (00:27:59):
Cruises up to you San Francisco and there's nobody driving it and you just, you open the door. I would do. I would have some, you put in trepidation doing this.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:09):
You, you put in your destination in the app, just like you do with, with a Uber or Lyft. And when the, the car arrives you know, it'll let you know that it's there and you swipe to unlock the doors because there's nobody in there. So the doors are automatically locked. So you swipe on this, on your screen of your phone to unlock the doors and then you get in the car and once you're buckled in and the doors are closed the car, you know, there's a thing, a voice in the car that'll tell you you know, okay, we're ready to go. If you, if you sit there and don't buckle up you know, it says, you know, can't, I can't go anywhere until you put on your seatbelt. And then once, once you're all set, then the car just goes and it drives wherever you want. And you know, I, I had my first ride in an automated vehicle back in January, 2008. Yeah. So there's the

Leo Laporte (00:28:56):
There, you are going down the pine street in the Ghostbusters car. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:00):
Yeah. I, I had my first ride in an AV back at CES in 2008. And that was in the Chevy Tahoe that won the DARPA urban challenge. And, you know, that was in a driving around a course in the, what was then the gold lot at at the Las Vegas convention center. It's you know, that's now the, the site of the west hall convention center. And I've ridden in many AVS over the last, so

Leo Laporte (00:29:24):
You're used to

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:25):
15 years now. You're a little

Leo Laporte (00:29:25):
Used

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:26):
To this. Yeah. But this was the very scary time.

Leo Laporte (00:29:28):
There was no two. This

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:29):
Was the first time that I got into a car. Yeah. With no safety driver, no mind from the company. They just, you know, they handed me a loaner iPhone, cuz right now their app is only on iOS. They don't, they're still working on their Android app. So they loaned me an iPhone to use. But the cruise app and said, here you go, you know, we'll see you in about 30 or 40 minutes, you know, go wherever you want within the service

Leo Laporte (00:29:51):
App. What was it like? I mean, was it, it

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:54):
Was utterly uneventful, which is exactly the way it should be. Did it

Leo Laporte (00:29:58):
Cause appropriately? And did it drive really slow sometimes or

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:02):
I mean there were times. Yeah. Like for example towards the end of the ride, when we're getting back to the, the starting point and this is the other thing, there, there was, you know, there was no prescribed route, you know, so I could go anywhere I wanted in, in the part of San Francisco, they operate in, but at the, towards the end of the ride, there was a, a four way stop car came up to the four-way stop, stopped, started to move forward. And then just as it started to move a pedestrian decided to cross the street oh, right there in front of it. And so it stopped and, and waited for the pedestrian, same thing, a couple other places where it was making unprotected left turns, you know, it would pause and wait for the pedestrians to get clear. And then it, it proceeded along its route. So yeah, it was completely uneventful. It was exactly what you would want a really good cab driver to do

Leo Laporte (00:30:50):
Yeah. Which they don't do. Right. They drive like, yeah, exactly. Hogans. So do you think pedestrians like test it, like in San Francisco they say, oh, there's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:58):
A, oh, I'm sure there

Leo Laporte (00:30:59):
In

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:59):
Front of it so times. Yeah. Yeah. There are absolutely times when pedestrians will do that. And you know, that, that is one of the, the reasons why these cars do have to be a little more cautious. Sure. You don't want something like what, what Elon Musk talked about with a mad max mode for, for your automated driving, you

Leo Laporte (00:31:18):
Don't it to be aggressive. Why, so there's some parts of the city. It won't drive in. Why is that?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:22):
Well, yeah, so right now the, the California public utilities commission, which, which regulates taxi services and, and ride hailing services and so on you know, they, you have to get a permit from them and to start with the, the CPU C gave Drews a permit that allows them to operate between 10:00 PM and 5:30 AM within about a one third of the city of San Francisco. So, oh, okay. Northern Western park, like from the Richmond district across to the west, around, around golden gate park and out to the, the coast. Those are areas that are not, the traffic is not as heavy as in the financial district or some other parts of the city. And then they're, they're, they've, they've requested permission to expand that to the entire city and 24 hours a day. And they're still waiting on that permission from the CPU C, but they did announce on Monday, excuse me, that they are expanding they're adding service by the end of the year in Phoenix and Austin with driverless ride hailing.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:29):
So they'll be in, they plan to be in three cities by the end of this year. Which is, you know, if they can do that, especially Austin is gonna be interesting to watch because they haven't done any testing in Austin. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> they have been doing a lot of simulation of driving in Austin. They have been testing in, in Phoenix because they've been working with Walmart, doing deliveries, doing grocery deliveries. Mm. But they, this will, they'll be completely new into Austin. And the plan is to go in spend a couple of weeks, mapping the city and then launch the service. Wow. and they, they think they think they can do it. And so it'll be interesting to watch what happens in Austin over the next few months.

Leo Laporte (00:33:07):
Is it eerie a little bit sitting in that?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:10):
It, it is a little, yeah. You know, I mean, these things there's still limited in, in where they can operate you know, from a technical standpoint, not just the regulatory standpoint you know,

Leo Laporte (00:33:22):
Well, why is

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:24):
In really bad weather things,

Leo Laporte (00:33:25):
Things like that. Oh sure. Cause there cameras in the Lightar probably don't work as well. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> 

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:30):
And they do have to map where, you know, where they're driving in advance,

Leo Laporte (00:33:33):
I'm looking at your video, it looks like it's going pretty briskly down these these city streets. It's it's not hesitant. It's going kinda

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:42):
How

Leo Laporte (00:33:42):
You speed limit. It's kind of how you would drive you think. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:45):
Did

Leo Laporte (00:33:45):
It do anything weird at all with

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:47):
The flow of traffic? Did

Leo Laporte (00:33:48):
You do anything where you went home? That's nothing,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:50):
That's not robot, nothing strange at all.

Leo Laporte (00:33:52):
Is there a big button you can hit to stop

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:55):
It, get out? Yeah. There's a, there's a button. You sit in the back seat, there's a button right above you that says end ride and you press that button and the car will pull over the nearest safe spot. And then when you do that, and I actually tried this towards the end of my ride.

Leo Laporte (00:34:11):
Yeah, I would've too. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:12):
It'll pull over to the, the nearest safe spot. And then a, somebody from cruises control center will come on, you know, live a live operator and say, you know, is there anything I can help you with? You know, are you press the end ride button? Yeah. Yeah. And they just wanna check and make sure everything's cool. Right. and you know, if there's no problem, you know, I told them, you know, I was just, I was taking a test ride.

Leo Laporte (00:34:34):
I'm Samble Sam and I'm testing this, you

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:37):
Know who I am <laugh>. And so they you know, I just I'd explained eventually I was just testing it and you know, that there was no problem. Everything was good.

Leo Laporte (00:34:45):
This is a regular, everyday bolt. Eventually they would wanna make a car that doesn't have drivers seat seats and steering wheels and all that

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:52):
Stuff. And they do, they do have that it's called the cruise origin. And they right now, they're, they've been testing those for about a year and a half now at the GM proven grounds and also at mentum station near San Francisco. They're just waiting on approval from the national highway traffic safety administration to put these vehicles on public roads. Wow. Cause there's no steering wheel, no pedals. It's a little scary. It's a dedicated purpose. Built robo taxi

Leo Laporte (00:35:17):
Salmon, bull salmon. He, he takes a hit for us and survived guide house insights, wheel bearings.media. I'm sure we'll hear more on the podcast. Thank you, Sam. Wow. That's fascinating. More calls coming up next. I feel like we live in the future. I've never been in such a thing. So I feel like I would be scared, you know, I'd get in. I'd go. Oh,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:42):
Well, what you should do is download the cruise app on your, on your iPhone. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:35:47):
Go to San Francisco.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:49):
Well there, right now there's a waiting list. So it's like a lot of things, you know, when, when they're launching it they, they, they gradually add more and more people. So when create and go to create an account and add, add to the waiting, add yourself to the waiting list. Wow. And sometime in, in a few weeks time, probably you will get you'll get an email saying, Hey, we're ready to add you, you know, to give you access to, to the cruise service. And then you know, the next time you go into San Francisco you can take a ride and

Leo Laporte (00:36:20):
Try it out. I wonder if Lisa would get in with me or if she'd say no way, <laugh> wow. I'm nervous. But I think it's be, I mean, it looks, you know, what's interesting is it's not driving cautiously from the video I'm looking at. It's just it's it's as if there are human,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:36):
It's a, it's a little cautious in some respects, like for example you know, if it's going, if it needs to make a right turn at a red light, it will not proceed. It will wait until the light turns green to make a

Leo Laporte (00:36:47):
Turn. So as a driver, it's legal to make a right on the red in California, but

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:51):
It's not, it's not crawling along. I mean, it, if, if it's gonna be a viable thing, it's gotta be able to operate, you know, at the normal flow of traffic. And,

Leo Laporte (00:36:59):
Well, that was one of the problems in Arizona was people were getting mad at the Waymo mm-hmm <affirmative> cause they were so slow and cautious that they were holding up traffic and stuff. Hey, I'm gonna let, do you wanna do the top of the hour and do all of that? Sure.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:11):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:37:11):
Okay. I'm gonna go get a cup of coffee, give you a couple minutes. I'll be right back and then we'll do the top.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:18):
All right. So a little bit more about the the cruise origin. So this is a vehicle that was first revealed back in January, 2020 right before a few things changed. But it's been in development. It was designed by GM and Honda in partnership with, with the team at crews. And while we were touring their the cruise headquarters they had several of them there in the garage that they were working on doing various experiments with one of the one of the vehicles that they had in the in the garage had been modified cruise and, and GM had been working with a company called BraunAbility bran builds a lot of the the wheelchair accessible systems. They do modifications to mostly to minivans but also some other vehicles to make them wheelchair accessible.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:12):
And they, they do versions of Chrysler Pacifica and the Toyota Sienna and variety of other vehicles. And so they worked with bran to develop a wheelchair access system for the, for the origin. And so when you see the origin you know, it basically looks like a box and it's got both, it's got, it's a six seater, all the seats are facing the middle, so it's called carriage style seating. And then there's sliding doors on either side of the vehicle that automatically open and close with the wheelchair version they take out one of the, the seats on, in one corner and they raise the floor by about an inch or so, and then they have a ramp that slides underneath that floor through, you know, you've got these big wide sliding doors that open up the, the ramp comes, comes out, tips down.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:03):
So the the person in the chair can get up into the vehicle, they back into the, the space that's been left for wheelchair. And then they've designed an automatic locking mechanism that clamps onto the wheels of the chair to lock it in place for safety for the D for the duration of the ride and that the ramp pulls back into the vehicle and the doors closed and, and you're on your way. They hope to have the origins running on, on the streets in San Francisco, sometime in the first half of 2023. Again, it all depends on getting approval. They they've submitted the paperwork to the national highway traffic safety administration. But they they they're still waiting on that. So web 46, 47 and the chat asked can you do a drive with Tesla, FSD beta and compare it to Cruz, all that thought. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:40:03):
<Laugh> me in my car. <Laugh> Leo Laporte, the tech guy. Let's see, let's get back to the phones. Eighty eight eighty eight ask Leo is the phone number is actually Sunday in football season is a good time to call cause if a lot of our stations go to football and so if you've been thinking, oh, I'll never get in today is a good day to try. Anyway. John's on the line from Chatanooga Tennessee. Hello, John.

Caller 2 (00:40:33):
Hello, this is

Leo Laporte (00:40:36):
John, right? Yes. Hello, John.

Caller 2 (00:40:41):
Hello.

Leo Laporte (00:40:42):
What can I do for you?

Caller 2 (00:40:45):
So basically I'm trying to look for a, for a cheap laptop for over the road. I'm a truck driver.

Leo Laporte (00:40:52):
Nice. Okay. Are you driving right now?

Caller 2 (00:40:56):
No.

Leo Laporte (00:40:56):
No. Okay. It's not unusual, not unusual. I could tell you're on a nice headset though. A noise canceling headset that the truck driver's like. Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 2 (00:41:06):
So basically I'm looking at the Lenova think pads.

Leo Laporte (00:41:11):
I love them. They're not the cheapest. Well, but let me just explain that all manufacturers, many manufacturers have two lines, they have a consumer and a pro line, and the consumer lines are cheaper and also made with cheaper components. So, you know, they're not gonna be as good. They're not gonna be as fast. The screen's not gonna gonna be as good, the track. Pad's not gonna be with the keyboard. Think pad is Lenovo's business line, high end line. And so you're spending a little bit more, but you're honestly, I think it's worth it. If you can afford it, the quality is so much better.

Caller 2 (00:41:48):
The ones I've been looking at are the ones that are they're refurbished.

Leo Laporte (00:41:58):
Oh, okay. Do you think

Caller 2 (00:41:59):
That's still a good choice?

Leo Laporte (00:42:01):
My so refurbished depends on who's doing the refurbishing. So if it's, if it's from Lenovo, okay. Or maybe somebody you really trust best buy somebody, the problem with refurbished is sometimes you're buying somebody else's problems. Right. So, right. It depends why that laptop got on the refurb market. Generally when a manufacturer or a big retailer offers. And if it's a trustworthy retail offers refurbished it's because they're not allowed to sell open box goods is new. So if somebody buys a laptop takes it home, has buyers remorse, maybe doesn't even turn it on or, or turns it on and has Ugh, and turns it off and brings it back. They have to sell it as refurb. They have to sell it as used. So often that's a good deal, but, but I should point out you're not gonna get as much off, you know, apple sells refurbished max, and they're a hundred bucks off.

Leo Laporte (00:42:58):
They're not a huge amount off. So if it's half the price, it would've been sold at retail and it's a current version then that's suspect. But if it's if it's a decent discount and it's, it's a current version and here's the really important thing they offer the full warranty, then it's okay. So, and that's why you wanna buy it from a, at least from a retailer that is reputable, like a big box store, or, you know, that best, the big box stores like Costco and Sam's club and so forth. They, they have a really friendly return policy. You know, people could bring it back sometimes after two or three months and they'll say, okay, fine. So that may, and if that's the case, then you may be getting a really good deal on a laptop that's barely used, you know, it's the equivalent of a car that's driven a few thousand miles. So it's just, you gotta use your, your, no.

Caller 2 (00:43:53):
Okay. so what version of Linux do you think I could,

Leo Laporte (00:44:01):
Oh, you're gonna, now this is a whole other thing, which is I'm thrilled. You know, I don't know if you've been listening for very long, but I'm increasingly disgruntled with what Microsoft's been doing with windows there. They're putting advertising in it. They're doing all sorts of stuff and it's unreliable and it's, and it's insecure and it's buggy. And, you know, I, you know, I use windows for gaming. You, you know, some many businesses, our business department uses windows, cuz Excel and so forth. But if, if you're a home user and you can use Linux, I think you're gonna be better off. Linux is more reliable, more secure. It's not perfect. In fact, there's a big Linux, right. Issue going on right now, but it won't hit you as a, as a home user. Lenovos are a very good choice for Lenux.

Leo Laporte (00:44:50):
And in fact, some of the problems that a refurb has, you know, are hardware, but some of 'em are just software. You put Linux on there, you might eliminate all of that. You're starting completely fresh. I I'm a fan of a Linnux that will install absolutely easily on this ThinkPad. It'll probably everything will work, including the cameras, the, the fingerprint reader, the trackpad is it's called Manjaro M a N J a R O. You can download the installer for manjaro.org for free. You put it on a USB key. The new there's two new ThinkPads that are using a new Microsoft security chip called Pluton that have to go through extra steps to make it Linux compatible. Microsoft really looks like they don't want people to do this or maybe it's Lenovo. But other Lenovos, almost all the, any older Lenovo you get. In fact, that's usually the computer I buy to put Linux on. A lot of the Linux developers use think pads. It's a very good choice for Lenux and Manjaro will install flawlessly. And have you ever used Linux?

Caller 2 (00:45:57):
It's close to 20 years. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:45:59):
You'll you'll then be very pleased with the progress it's made. You've

Caller 2 (00:46:10):
Linux was probably a bunch to oh two from 2002.

Leo Laporte (00:46:14):
Yeah. It's come a long way. <Laugh> O Buntu is fine too. A lot of people that's kind of the default for everybody. I it's based on base version called Debian they're really two families in the Linux world. There's Debian, which is slow and reliable. They don't want to put the latest stuff on there, but if you've been using windows or Mac, you're used to having the latest browsers, the latest software and so forth Manjaro is based on arch, which is what we call a rolling distribution. And it usually has more re you know, they keep up to date with the latest versions of all the software. Well, Buntu, not so much. It's pretty good, but it's not quite as much. I prefer a rolling distro. Sometimes that can cause problems cuz it can break. And one of the reasons I recommend Manjaro instead of plain arch is Manjaro takes some extra steps to make sure they don't push out an update unless they've, it's less, it's been tested for a few weeks. So it's much less likely to break anything. I, I, I think Manjaro is what I put on all my machines now. I think it's very good. If you wanted a Buntu, there is a spin of a Buntu from the company that makes Linux laptops called system 76. It's called pop OS. It's very good. Also it's more a Buntu like yeah. Pop OS is very, if you like to Buntu you'll love pop OS.

Leo Laporte (00:47:29):
Hey enjoy. I think you're smart. I think if you're, if you're technically savvy enough to put Linux on, then a refurb might not be a bad thing cuz you, if you have issues, you'll kind of understand it. Make sure they have a good warranty. You're gonna save a lot of money. You save even more money cuz you don't have windows on there. You have a free operating system called Linux, which I think is very, very good as good. If not better than windows now always remember the problem is it doesn't necessarily run everything windows does. So if there's a windows program you need, you wanna make sure it will run. Under Linux. Linux has a bunch of compatibility software that usually you'll do that. I, for instance, there's a game I wanted to play. It's on steam called satisfactory, but it's for windows only.

Leo Laporte (00:48:14):
This is why a lot of people have windows machines to play games, but lately it's become easier and easier to run these windows only games on Lennox. I've been running it on a Lenux did a Twitch stream last night, it's called satisfactory. And I play it under steam's compatibility layer called proton and it worked great. So you know, honestly I don't even think Microsoft, these days cares. If you use windows, you know, they make money on it, but their future, they know their future is not operating systems. Their future is the cloud. And when you get to the cloud and you're using, you know, a computer that's running out there on the internet, the operating system doesn't make a lot of difference. So people are comfortable. They're used to windows. I know people hate it. When I say bad things about windows, they feel like, Hey, I'm team windows. And you're saying something against my team, you know, Hey, love it or leave it. Well, I left it <laugh> and tell everybody to leave it because Microsoft is, is their heart's not in this anymore. I'll be honest. They don't, they're really, their heart is not in it. Leo LePort the tech guy more calls coming just a bit.

Leo Laporte (00:49:26):
Yes. You'll love the jewel. Dr. Mom, the jeweler get a Bre traditional, if you like a traditional microwave, that Breville's a great choice. If you want the, the microwave that has recipes and is super smart. I am very happy with our June it's June, not ju or June oven. Okay. Sam Abel, Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:49:55):
All right.

Leo Laporte (00:49:56):
I give you the con you're in charge, man.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:49:59):
Okay. So continuing the discussion of the the cruise robo taxi service web 46 47 in the in the chat was asking about comparing it to Tesla's full self-driving beta. So first of all Tesla's system, despite the name is not self drive, not full self-driving, it is not fully autonomous and it is unlikely to ever be capable of fully automated driving without supervision at certainly not under all circumstances, it at best, it would probably be limited to operating under certain conditions certain weather or, you know traffic conditions. It's simply not robust enough with a camera only system to be safe, safe enough, to be able to remove all supervision from the system. It might be able to do unsupervised driving on highways. But it's, it's unlikely to ever be able to do the sort of thing that see the crews vehicle doing and also Waymo and Argo and emotional and a number of other companies that are developing these systems that are, have much more complete sensor packages and, and redundant computing.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:51:18):
You know, I, I don't have access to a Tesla, but I've seen enough videos of people testing the FSD beta that you know, I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that I would not trust the system to have anybody operating it without somebody overseeing it. It is simply not reliable enough. It has too there's too many times when it does things that are blatantly dangerous that it, it needs to be supervised. And which is exactly why Tesla says you must keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road. They say that right in the instructions. And it is nowhere near the capability of what these other systems like crews, Waymo, Argo, emotional by do, and, and others are able to do right now in terms of operating without without a human supervisor on board.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:52:17):
Somebody else had a question about whether they the cruise vehicles are monitored. Yes at this time they are all monitored which is part and, and, you know, said that you know, if the, if the system's being monitored, it's not autonomous, which is exactly why I don't use the term autonomous. And the industry, in fact, generally shys away from the term autonomous. They, they, what we usually use, what we usually say is automated driving. So right now in California, for example, part of the, the regulations that the CPU C has for driverless operations is that there has to be somebody monitoring the, the vehicles, you know, monitoring for any problems or, or anything else that that might be going wrong. You know, at, at, at some, at some stage you know, they will, they'll probably continue to be monitored.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:17):
But the number of vehicles that are monitored by, you know, by individuals within a control center will be increasing over time so that they they're, you don't have to constantly, you know, there doesn't have to be somebody constantly watching every vehicle. They're what they don't do is the vehicles are not remotely driven that, you know, that is done you know, that that's not a reliable enough system for remote driving because of ch challenges with connectivity you know, hitting cellular dead spots. So these vehicles if they, if the vehicle gets into a scenario where it's not sure what to do, it will pull over to a safe place and essentially call home and ask for, ask for assistance. And then an operator will come on, look at a live stream from the sensors and give the car some hints and directions as to what to do.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:54:18):
And then it's up to the car to proceed with actually executing on that and, and making that happen. So they're, they're monitored for, for now. But eventually they won't all be monitored. Let's see some Scott LV mentioned that this has been going on in Las Vegas since 2018 with Lyft. Yeah. And that's that that's emotional was doing that. Emotional is at the, when they started in 2018, it was it was actually active, which is a major automotive supplier. Motional is a joint venture between active and Hyundai. They, they formed this joint venture a couple of years ago and combined active's work on automated driving with Hyundai to develop a vehicle platform for them. So this, this is still ongoing in Las Vegas right now. Las Vegas is one of the cities where emotional is testing.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:14):
They're also testing in San Diego, Santa Monica Pittsburgh Boston and Singapore. They've been in Singapore since 2016 and they have been offering active and now emotional has been, has had several dozen of their vehicles operating on the Lyft network in Vegas since mid 2018. The last time was at CES in 2020. I took several rides with with the these vehicles on the lift network. And we're all fairly uneventful, but at this point they are actually still using safety drivers in those. So they are not fully driverless. They have safety operators in the vehicles. So if anything goes wrong and also the rules in Las Vegas until until now have been that they, the automated vehicles are not allowed to go in automated mode onto private property. So when they go into the hotel parking lots and so on to pick up and drop off passengers then the human drivers have to take over control.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:56:18):
So they're automated out on the main streets, but not not on the private property property that that is changing. And Las Vegas has planned to be one of the launch cities for emotional driverless service in 2023 along with probably San Diego and Singapore and maybe maybe a couple of other places. But if you go to Las Vegas today and use the lift app when you open it up for the first time, you will be prompted. You know, they'll tell you, you know, there's automated vehicles available. If they're, if they're around you know, would you be interested in riding in one? And if you opt in, then when the next time you request a ride, if there's one nearby they may send it to you. And it's just like using any other lift ride.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:57:06):
And they are replacing the BMWs that Scott mentioned with Hyundai ionic fives. Their new generation vehicles are, are ionic fives. They have the, the latest generation of active system on there or emotional system and they are those, those, those are being those are gonna probably gonna be swapped out on the lift fleet by, around the end of the year. I think they wanna try and have those running for in time for CES in January. Someone else asked about if if an AV kills a pedestrian and you're sitting in the back seat, are you responsible? First of all, any company, any AV company that doesn't take responsibility for anything that happens you should not go anywhere near those vehicles. And that includes Tesla. Tesla does not take responsibility.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:57:55):
The drive, the human is still responsible. If anything goes wrong with that system, Tesla does not accept responsibility. Cruise, if you're in a cruise vehicle or Argo, or any of these other vehicles you are not responsible. If anything goes wrong, the company is responsible and that is the way it should be. And you know, several auto makers like Volvo Mercedes-Benz and others have already announced publicly that when they do launch AVS, when the system is in automated mode they will accept liability for anything that happens. Any crashes that happen with those vehicles. So you, you know, if, if you're expected to be liable, when you're riding in a vehicle in the back seat, you should not be in that vehicle. You should just walk away. Yeah. Don't don't even go near it.

Leo Laporte (00:58:41):
Not my fault, man. I just sitting in the back seat. Yeah. If a cabby hits somebody and you're in the backseat, you're not reliable. Yeah, exactly. Why should it be liable

Sam Abuelsamid (00:58:49):
If you know, if, and if it's a software, if it's a piece of software that's driving the vehicle, whoever created that software should be liable. I

Leo Laporte (00:58:55):
Agree. Hey, thank you, Sam. That was really interesting. I really appreciate that update please. No problem. See him driving around

Sam Abuelsamid (00:59:03):
Next week. I won't be here. I will be on my way to Bozeman Montana.

Leo Laporte (00:59:07):
Well, have a wonderful time. Are you going fly fishing? Thank you.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:59:10):
No it's work. Okay. Thanks. You gotta drive a

Leo Laporte (00:59:13):
New Jeep take care. All right,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:59:14):
Bye.

Leo Laporte (00:59:16):
Well, Hey, Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte, the tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart cars, EVs self-driving vehicles, smart watches. Got the new iPhone. If you wanna ask me about that, iOS 16 came out this week. Next Saturday, I will have the new apple watch ultra because I like to live <laugh> on the edge. I'm I'm Mr. Extreme sports. No, no, but I wanna look like I am with that big honking thing in my wrist. I wanna tell you a little story. We begin the show. We'll go to the calls in just a second and 88 88, ask Leo little story about a kid. Just grew up a few miles from here in Sonoma county, in the wine country, kind of quiet bucolic countryside. He's about three years old. This was what he's 30 now.

Leo Laporte (01:00:09):
So 27 years ago, late nineties his parents bought a computer and he taught himself how to use it pretty good for a three year old, right? He says, I wasn't a very good student until I joined the robotics team at high school. And that got me very excited about the, the whole software computer thing, still his grades. Weren't good enough to get into the university of California at Berkeley hard school to get into these days state school here. He did get into a very good school though. He enrolled at brown university in his junior year, which was about 2012. He applied for fellowship run by billionaire financer, Peter teal, the guy who made a lot of money off of his initial investment in Facebook, the fellowship offered applicants. We talked about it when this happened 10 years ago, he said, Peter teel said, you know, don't go to college.

Leo Laporte (01:01:06):
I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars not to go to college, to drop out and form a company. Peter, Teal's kind of a nut job, but anyway, <laugh> this, our, our hero said, okay, I'll tell you, I'll tell you his name is Dylan field, Dylan field. He said, okay, I'll take that a hundred thousand dollars and I'll drop outta brown. Some might say a bad idea, but he found a little software company. First, he pitched software to modify drones, to monitor traffic and catch reckless drivers failed. So he thought, and he said, well, I, I would like to make web-based software for designers. Oh, even though they weren't sure he started with a friend from brown, Evan Wallace. They weren't sure if there were enough designers in the world to make it fly. He had a passion for it. So they created a company it's called Figma like a figment of your imagination. Figma. If the, for four years they lived on that a hundred thousand dollars. It took 'em four years to get the first product out the door.

Leo Laporte (01:02:11):
In fact, they were, they were working in an office above a bar in San Francisco. In fact, it was so bad that starting around at three o'clock on Fridays, they had to stop work, cuz it was just too noisy. <Laugh> they'd all go home. But especially during the pandemic designers, in fact, you might have heard the name, Figma designers have started to use Figma and they started to make money. They RA went out and raised some money, more money money, a hundred thousand dollars is engage very far. So in 2018 they raised enough money and be valued at 115 million. Well, that's a lot of money, but remember Dylan doesn't get that money. You know, that's money that goes into the payroll and so forth. In fact, he was living in a one bedroom apartment in the mission district, according to the wall street journal, he'd stopped for a dollar cup of coffee on the way to work.

Leo Laporte (01:02:59):
I mean, he, you know, it wasn't exactly the, the, the, the fancy life had another fundraising round last year. Figma was really taken, coming on strong during the COVID designers, working home freelancing gig workers, all love Figma. And in fact it scared Adobe, which makes Photoshop and, and illustrator and all the, you know, the expensive design software, cuz it was less expensive. They raised another bunch of money in last year given their value, 10 billion. Wow. $10 billion still though Dylan and, and company. They, you know, they, they didn't, they weren't flush. They had a little more, little more money. They had a little more, what they call runway. They could survive for a little longer, but Adobe started to worry a little bit. This, this company they're making they're, you know, they're not making money yet, but they're their, revenue's like hundreds of millions of dollars a year and it's coming outta our pocket, says Adobe. So they called him up and they said, what would you take to buy your company? Dylan said, well, I don't, I don't know. They, they, the wall street journal got wind into this, wrote a story. They, they said Adobe said, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta talk. Dylan said he was awake for all night as they, as they tried to figure out the price. Eventually Dylan field who was living in a one bedroom apartment of a above a bar in the mission district couple of years ago, made a deal for $20 billion.

Leo Laporte (01:04:39):
Maybe it wasn't a bad idea to drop out of brown. 10 years ago, $20 billion. He still has 10%. It's estimated to the company. That's gonna make him a two billionaire. He says, I I'm not a drinker. So I had a little bit of champagne <laugh> to celebrate. It's good though. He is a new father has a new baby. They, they were ready to go public. But then as you may know, the tech tech stock market froze up. And they said, you know, let's, let's let's go for this. Let's go for this. And he is now asked if he's a tech bro. The wall street journal said, are you a tech bro? And he said, I don't know. You tell me <laugh> congratulations. Small town guy grew up just down the street, dropped outta college. Cuz Peter teal said, well, I'll give you a hundred grand.

Leo Laporte (01:05:32):
If he dropped outta college, took that money, founded a company he's now company sold, sold for 20 billion, which is the largest acquisition of a private tech company. I think in history, amazing deal. Adobe stockholders. Weren't too happy about it, but I think Adobe had to do it because they were, they were gonna get their, their lunch at didn't have much of a choice. Now of course I sh Dylan don't start spending the billions because the regulatory approval still has to come through and all of that stuff. And, and by the way, half of it was cash, but half of it was Adobe stock and Adobe's stock price tumbled down the worst week since 2002 because of the news. But Adobe said, we gotta do this. This is, this is, there's no choice for us. I hate to tell those stories cuz for every one Dylan field, there's a hundred, maybe a thousand entrepreneurs who <laugh> didn't you know, it didn't happen and they're, you know, but I think it's a nice, a nice story of success. 20 billion for Figma, 88, 88. Ask Leo back to the phones we go and Dan's on the line from Bekins South Dakota. Hi Dan.

Caller 3 (01:06:58):
Hello,

Leo Laporte (01:06:58):
Welcome. What can I do for you?

Caller 3 (01:07:01):
Yeah, I'm proud owner of a new Promax here and I had one little problem downloading my backup. I I got it all downloaded, just using the phone almost like normal, but it wouldn't update to that 0.1 or 0.01, whatever that is.

Leo Laporte (01:07:20):
Oh, that's weird. Yeah. Youve what the new iPhone gets an update right out of the box and it says, it says it won't do it. Is it fully charged? Is it on the charger?

Caller 3 (01:07:30):
Well, when you go to the settings, I've fixed this since, but I thought it would bring it up to you soon.

Leo Laporte (01:07:35):
Okay, good. Yeah. 1601 is the official point release for the iPhone new iPhone. Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:07:41):
So after I got it down, down, it seemingly downloaded all the info that I needed to get going. And it seemed like the same point. I just had, you know, 12 pro before that.

Leo Laporte (01:07:51):
Yeah. That's what you, you did the exact, I had the same exact thing. 12 to 14. My recommendation is to do exactly what you did. The EIM is easy. You turn on the phone. It says, I see you have an account on the old phone. You want me to copy it over? You don't have to transfer the SIM. There is no SIM tray. It just, you just say, yeah, copy it over. And then it says, okay, and you want me to restore from your iCloud backup? And I said, yes. And about an hour later, it's identical. Except it's a new phone. Yep.

Caller 3 (01:08:21):
Yep. Same. Although when you go to the settings right after you ask for that, right after you ask for that download. Yeah. Or the backup it'll it'll say about to down or how did it say it? Something like about to download approximately 700 megabytes to finish out your install or something like that. Right. And I said that for two days

Leo Laporte (01:08:44):
<Laugh> oh, that's

Caller 3 (01:08:45):
Not good. I thought I'd give it. I thought I'd give it overnight, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And I really couldn't find anything on there that was incomplete. It would seem to be working as before, but I eventually just went back to factory and started

Leo Laporte (01:09:00):
Over

Caller 3 (01:09:01):
Re started over. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:02):
And the second time it went through pretty quickly.

Caller 3 (01:09:06):
Yeah. Yeah. Well I didn't, I didn't download the backup the second I just, okay. I didn't have the phone with me, so I just started from scratch and you know, like we always do.

Leo Laporte (01:09:15):
It's not a bad idea, reinstall, just the stuff you need. I had gone last week, gone through my old phone and deleted apps. I didn't need I think, you know, sometimes that happens. You had a hiccup in the download or at some point I was amazed, frankly, because it transferred over the SIM in the first couple of minutes, it was already taken phone calls at the old number. And then it was just a matter downloading the rest. And I did not try to update to 1601 until after it, in fact just said you can't do 16. Oh one until you finish restoring.

Caller 3 (01:09:45):
I, I would've left it for longer if I hadn't, but I wanted to, did you try

Leo Laporte (01:09:49):
Turning it off and on again? I know this sounds like a, a bad joke.

Caller 3 (01:09:52):
Yes. I've watched, I've watched for help.

Leo Laporte (01:09:55):
<Laugh>

Caller 3 (01:09:58):
Something oddly entertaining about listening to you solve serial printer problems back

Leo Laporte (01:10:02):
And forth. Oh, don't please. Don't I have nightmares still. <Laugh>

Caller 3 (01:10:07):
Little surreal talking to you, but I, you I'm glad I have a little bit smarter problems here, but

Leo Laporte (01:10:12):
Do you, do you like the new phone? Are you happy?

Caller 3 (01:10:14):
Oh yeah. I was a, you know, I'm I had a 10 S max and then I went down to like the mini type phone.

Leo Laporte (01:10:22):
Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:10:22):
Yeah. And then I went back to the pro kinda a regular sized phone. I was expecting more of almost a bigger phone,

Leo Laporte (01:10:28):
You know, what's funny, I'm putting it in my iPhone 12 case. It fits almost perfectly. The only thing that doesn't is the camera is just a little bit bigger. So on the iPhone 12 case, the, it gets cut off at the edge a little bit. Yeah, but for now, until I get my new iPhone 14 case, this is a, this is a, it fits perfectly right in the case, which is amazing in the switches are in the right spot. Yeah. I think

Caller 3 (01:10:57):
It's, I went to the, went to the max.

Leo Laporte (01:10:59):
Ah, so you had, you didn't have a max, so yeah. You couldn't reuse your case, but I had a 12 pro max and this is the same case as I use in the 12 Promax, which is yeah. However, I, you do will want a new case eventually because of that camera, it is a, it is just a little, little bit bigger. It's a big bump. It's such a big bump that when I put this thing on my easel to charge it, you know, in one of those key charging easels, the bump is so big. It kind of pushes it away from the back. It still charges, but it's a little tilted because of it. So it's a big camera bump. We've got the,

Caller 3 (01:11:35):
I've got the nice peak design. 

Leo Laporte (01:11:37):
Oh, I love that. Yeah. I have that too one. Yeah. That's really nice. I don't have it for the 14 yet. So I'm gonna have to order a new one, but yeah. Their,

Caller 3 (01:11:45):
Their case, their case just came out so nice.

Leo Laporte (01:11:47):
I will order that. Yeah. Yeah. I got the <laugh>. I have it right here. I got the whole kitten caboodle from peak design. I got the bicycle Mount the car, Mount the thing Mount on this Mount, the slim wall, the magnetic thing, the whole thing. This is a system. Yeah. You put the case on. Oh, and here's a charging stand. I'll have to start using that. At least I got a better,

Caller 3 (01:12:10):
You almost didn't get it before we, before the fourteens came out.

Leo Laporte (01:12:13):
Yeah. Now I have to order this thing for the 14. You know, oh boy. Anyway. Pleasure talking to you. I hear the kids in the background. I hope you're taking lots of good pictures of the kids.

Caller 3 (01:12:24):
Yep. We're at the zoo. So we're having oh, fun workout on the workout on the camera. This

Leo Laporte (01:12:28):
Is great. Yeah. Get some Teleo shots. Send me a link. I'd love to see 'em

Caller 3 (01:12:33):
All right. Thank

Leo Laporte (01:12:34):
You. Yeah. That's nice to have these the camera phones now are so good. You could go to the zoo and get a nice close up of the lion without risk in your life. I think that's a good thing. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. Leo Laporte, the tech guy more calls right after this. Leo Laporte, the tech guy, eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo the phone number. Chris mark wart photo guy coming up and this'll be fun. This will be an interesting one. Chris is gonna talk about getting your kids excited about photography. I like this. I like this, but let's go back to the phones right now anyway and say hi to Rick in San Diego. Hello, Rick,

Caller 4 (01:13:15):
How you doing Leo?

Leo Laporte (01:13:16):
I am great.

Caller 4 (01:13:19):
Hey, I got a question that seems kind of silly, but I'm having trouble getting my printer to connect to the new modem that at and T gave me.

Leo Laporte (01:13:28):
So it's a wi you have a wifi access point. I hope. Yes.

Caller 4 (01:13:33):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:13:33):
And you and you go into the printer. Does the printer have a little LCD screen on the front of it? That makes it a lot easier.

Caller 4 (01:13:41):
Yeah, it does. And I go into the, into the menu and I say, you know I can't remember off the top of my head, the ones that asked me, but

Leo Laporte (01:13:49):
Yeah, it has in the settings, in the it'll have a wifi setup. Don't use the WPS, just use the wifi setup and it'll scan and it should see your at T modem. Does it see it?

Caller 4 (01:14:03):
Yes, sir.

Leo Laporte (01:14:04):
Good. And then you click on that and it'll say, okay, what's the password. And you enter that.

Caller 4 (01:14:10):
Yep. Enter that in. And then, then it says, no good. No. Huh? No. But it, it worked for, you know, I actually was able to log into the wifi, I guess you called it the router.

Leo Laporte (01:14:23):
Yeah. You, so you, you able to do it with your phone or your computer and it works just fine. The, I, well,

Caller 4 (01:14:29):
I go in there and I can see the password to verify I got the right password. You

Leo Laporte (01:14:32):
Would think it's tricky. I'll tell you what it is tricky because you had that little key on the printer and, and it's very easy to get a uppercase or lowercase wrong or to type the wrong punctuation or whatever. So I would just bet that as long as you can see the password and you know, it's the right password. And when you log in with your computer, it works. So, you know, you have the password then it should be just a case of typing. It ain't exactly right. One possible problem that I, I should bring up. Is it an older printer?

Caller 4 (01:15:12):
It's probably five years old by now.

Leo Laporte (01:15:15):
So it, it is possible that the printer is doesn't support the, the encryption protocol that the router is using. So that, so there's a couple of things that can go wrong if you've got the password. Right. And I don't want to imply you're typing it wrong. It's just hard. I know it's hard to do, but if you're sure you you're typing it right then it's a couple. Yeah. Then there are a couple of possibilities. One you wanna make sure your printer may not support the five gigahertz band. In fact, if it's five years old, almost certainly doesn't it supports the 2.4 gigahertz band. So you wanna make sure, and this is tricky. This happens to a lot of O T devices that you join the right band and it, and the, and the printer will say, well, I see it. I see Rick's router.

Leo Laporte (01:16:05):
I'm gonna join it. And it joins the five and it doesn't print cuz it doesn't work or it doesn't join the network. Cause it says, I can't what, I don't know what this is. So that's trickier. One way to fix that is to have a and some routers will do this, a different name for the five gigahertz span, you know, Rick's Y five 5g and then make sure you join the 2.4. So that's one possible problem. The other one is the kind of encryption that new router is using. You wanna have encryption on wifi, otherwise all your stuff's just floating through the air. Anybody can read it and your printer may support WPA, but not WPA too. In which case you might have to change the encryption on the router to match Chris. Marwar next? Stay here. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages. It's time for our photo sensei. My photo sensei, Chris markWard@sensei.photo. He's a professional photographer author of many lovely books about photography, a photo coach@sensei.photo. He does photo workshops and he has the best photography podcast tips from the top floor TF ttf.com. Hello Chris.

Chris Marquardt (01:17:18):
Hey, thanks for having me always a pleasure. How is everything

Leo Laporte (01:17:21):
It's going great. I love your chosen topic today.

Chris Marquardt (01:17:27):
Yeah, I could sense some excitement there. I wanna talk about how to get kids excited about photography. Love. I love it because you, I think, I mean, I mean, as parents, you, you sometimes need to entertain your kids. You might want to have them do something creative. You wanna inspire them. You wanna plant a seed of sorts. So there's different ways to do this. And of course, I mean there's a whole bunch of apps that you can use. And I it's, it's not so super simple as it used to be because a camera used to be like something special and now every phone has multiple cameras. So but there are there's there's little apps and things. And of course, and then there's also physical photos. Let's start with the digital side of things first, like cloning yourself. Have you ever done that? Cloning

Leo Laporte (01:18:19):
Trying

Chris Marquardt (01:18:19):
Try to put yourself, put yourself in a photo multiple times. Kids love that. Kids love that apps

Leo Laporte (01:18:24):
For that. Yeah. Yeah. There's

Chris Marquardt (01:18:25):
There's apps for that. Like, like if you look in the different app stores, look for clone camera, there's like multiple of those or split camera. That will be the thing to search for. Some of them are free. Some of them cost a buck or two. And that makes it simple for kids to, I don't know, have themselves in the photo several times. And that's a fun thing. That's cute.

Leo Laporte (01:18:46):
Cause kids are egotists at root <laugh>. They don't know any better yet. So more of me is good. They say yes.

Chris Marquardt (01:18:54):
Yeah, sure. Making, not making stop motion movies. There's always fun in that kids can, yes. Can, can really get caught in that and stop and, and spend an entire afternoon trying to have some Lego figure figures move across the screen. So, but then what

Leo Laporte (01:19:14):
You're you you're Countryman at BOS do a really good stop motion

Chris Marquardt (01:19:21):
For example,

Leo Laporte (01:19:22):
Program. I really like, I want to give them a little plug it's called I stop motion and it, and it's for the max for example, but it's really fun to make little movies with that makes it easier. Yeah.

Chris Marquardt (01:19:33):
If you look, if you look at like there's stop motion studio for your smartphone and so, so plenty of, plenty of options there, but what I really want to get to is like physical photos, stuff that does not only keep your kids busy or entertained or creative, but also creates like a, like a physical memento of sorts. One of the things is get a, get a little printer. One of these I use the, the, what is it? Canon selfie printers which print like postcard size pictures, not affiliated, but that's one of the things that isn't expensive.

Leo Laporte (01:20:10):
P H I E self.

Chris Marquardt (01:20:13):
Yes. And you can, you can print from your straight from your phone and then, and it it's, it's easy and it's quick and it, again, it creates a memento example project, take a, take a stuffed animal on a photo adventure, make a photo story, right? There's there's or, or, or an object, something that kids, kids are attached to objects and things. So that will be something of create a photo time capsule, like really have physical photos that tell stories about whatever your life documents your life or the kid's life, and then have bury that somewhere in the guard for, to, to be dug out 20 years later. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:20:53):
I love that for example. Yeah. That's a great idea.

Chris Marquardt (01:20:57):
Simple, easy one. Yeah. another easy one is making a photo puzzle, like print on print, a photo on card stock, and then just cut it into pieces and you have a puzzle. And that can, that can last for a long time. A scavenger hunt. Yes. Again, a photographic scavenger hunt. Like how many, I don't know, collect things. How many, how many such and such can you catch with your camera objects of a specific color or something that begins with a certain letter or made from a specific material or has has a specific property. And you can pick that according to the age and what they learn about in school. So there's a really good way to tie in things with the things that they do anyway. So scavenger hunts done lots of those letter hunts, like we've, we've talked like years ago, we've talked about the alphabet project.

Chris Marquardt (01:21:58):
That's a letter hunt. Fine. We did that. That was one of those letters around you. Yeah, yeah. Yes. And what's even better like print them out and then get one of those, one of those wide frames, like a multiple aperture frame to then spell out a word or something, make it a physical thing, put it in the world, hang it up on the walls. Or put it on the fridge or the magnet that'll that'll yeah. Create something lasting instant film. That's where I would bring an instant film as well. Cause you will not just create a physical memory, but an instant one, it just pops into existence or you can watch it appear into existence.

Leo Laporte (01:22:38):
They still, they sell. In fact, I know not little kids, but preteens love these inst stacks cameras, which are like the oh,

Chris Marquardt (01:22:46):
Polaroid inst stacks, Fuji films. Biggest moneymaker is called in stacks. This ha is very, very popular. So I think kids don't really need that need to be pointed in this direction. I think they know. Here's one that, that might take your kids into the, like an analog photography, film, photography direction. Have you ever played with sun print paper? No. Or it's also called solar drawing paper or scientifically sci SCIO type paper. Oh, so there you go. You go, you go on onto your favorite shopping site. You'll get like 24 sheets for $10 X type paper is what the blueprints are based off. So you have this paper, which is UV sensitive. So you can do contact prints of things like put plants on this or some objects or even a negative of something. Oh, put it out in the sun for five minutes. Works best in summer, of course, because it's sensitive to UV and then you develop it by just washing it under the, under the cold water tab in the sink.

Leo Laporte (01:23:59):
Oh, that's

Chris Marquardt (01:24:00):
So cool. Water. It's it's not poisonous. And my earliest, my earliest DIY photographic memories circle around the Xeno type and this just ready made paper. It comes in a black bag. So it lasts for a long time and then you dry it and it it's this blue and white negative kind of picture that you can, again, iron hang up on your wall. And that is a lasting thing. So

Leo Laporte (01:24:29):
Our, when our kids were

Chris Marquardt (01:24:30):
Little, lots of different ways, we

Leo Laporte (01:24:31):
Did a lot of art projects, but I am not an artist. I can't draw. I can't. And so I always felt a little bit left out if I had only thought we could do these photo projects. So even kids who perhaps don't have fine motor skills enough to do nice drawings, anybody, any kid can do some really fun things. One thing we always did do, yes, the Macintosh comes with a very silly little program that you can run. They still come with it called photo booths. And I don't know about kids. You put kids in front of a photo booth and has those filters and it can do silly faces, hours, hours, and hours can be spent on the photo booth. But that's not a permanent thing, but it's still, I think a lot of fun for kids

Chris Marquardt (01:25:17):
To play with. Well, you could print 'em out.

Leo Laporte (01:25:19):
<Laugh> yeah, yeah. I guess you could, if you make something really good and I hate to say it, but I think that's one of the reasons young people love Snapchat because of the Snapchat filters. And I've done that with kids, which is do some silly turn your, yourself and your mom into a donkey that's loads of fun hours and hours of good times. <Laugh> Chris. Marwar, you're inspiring. I love this idea. Now. I just need some kids to try and on sense. Hey, mine are 30 and 27. They're not gonna, they're not gonna be interested. Say for that, that photo <laugh> go there. S E S se.photo. Find out what Chris is up to and don't forget his podcast, TF ttf.com tips from the top floor. Thank you, Chris.

Chris Marquardt (01:26:02):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (01:26:04):
Good ideas. I always felt left out cuz Jennifer do all these crafty things and I have, you know, I couldn't do it, but this would've been fun if I wish I'd thought of that. It's a great idea. They didn't have inst stacks back then, but

Chris Marquardt (01:26:20):
Well polo right back then.

Leo Laporte (01:26:23):
<Laugh> no wasn't that? So was in that middle period when we didn't have Polaroid, Polaroid was old and gone. Oh, okay. And inst stacks hadn't arrived yet.

Chris Marquardt (01:26:28):
Yeah. Yeah. Insta Instax is AMA is an amazing business. It's just amazing how much they, they sell some of that in different formats and sizes and the cameras with it. And

Leo Laporte (01:26:39):
That's probably the last portable point and shoot cause people, I mean, point and shoots are gone. Right. I mean, that's just it on point and shoots. Everybody's got a smartphone.

Chris Marquardt (01:26:50):
Yeah. But the physical, the physical photo is really the, the kids love that. Exactly. The cool thing. It's one of the, it's very different. It's

Leo Laporte (01:26:59):
Private, which I think kids are very aware of these days. Yeah. Yeah. Very smart. That,

Chris Marquardt (01:27:03):
Yeah, too. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:27:05):
Thank you, Chris. I didn't mention evil our assignment, but I'll mention it when we come back.

Chris Marquardt (01:27:13):
Yeah. Well review that next week.

Leo Laporte (01:27:16):
Next week. Evil Leo Laporte, the tech I eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo that's the phone number I didn't mention. Or Chris didn't mention that we still have a photo assignment one more week to do it. So Chris does this every month. He comes up with a word and idea and adjective and it's just excuse for you to get out and take some pictures, whether with your smart phone or your fancy camera, it doesn't matter. I love our subject this month. It is the word evil, evil. So <laugh> whatever that means to you go out and take a picture. Take many pictures. Really that's the point is get you out and taking photos. If you find one that you go, wow, that's great. Upload it to flicker.com tag it T G evil for tech guy, evil TGE evil and submit it to the tech guy group. A moderator. Renee Silverman will say, thank you for your submission. Chris is gonna look at all the submissions later this week. And next week, next Sunday, Chris will come by and pick three to talk about that's your only prize, just the potential for some notoriety on the radio evil. That's the subject on, we go with the phone calls next, Ken from Tacoma, Washington. Hi Ken.

Caller 5 (01:28:33):
Hi. I a long time li listener, I've been you interested in in Starlink, I'm an RVR. I do that 24 7. I travel all over the country and you know, I'm trying to decide whether it'd be good to get rid of my T-Mobile and my at and T and just do that or whether I should wait until it's been around a little while longer.

Leo Laporte (01:28:59):
Well, I know as you drive around, you've probably seen people with dish dishes on the, or Hughes net or exceed on their RV kind of a pain you want, you can't use 'em until you park and then you have to aim it. Sometimes they have automatic aims or motorized Amers or sometimes you're crawl, crawling up on the roof and aiming it. And then you do have satellite internet. Starlink is a really big improvement on that. But I think for most RVs these days, the idea of using the LTE cellular networks or the 5g cellular networks is probably I'm gonna guess what most of them are doing. I don't know. Is that, do you notice that a lot of people are using 5g? Like you can, you can get little routers, not the residential routers, cuz those have a fixed address, but they call 'em MiFis the little cards that you connect to the LTE and then you've got internet in the whole RV.

Caller 5 (01:29:54):
I, I started out with that. I started out with the Verizon.

Leo Laporte (01:29:57):
Right. And what's your experience with that

Caller 5 (01:29:59):
Kind of stopped working. Oh, and what I found out later was that Verizon seems to be the favorite of of RVers. Yeah. And it like, I, I went to the RV show in courtside, Arizona, and it literally didn't work because there were so many people used. Ah,

Leo Laporte (01:30:18):
Right. So too popular <laugh> right. Well that makes sense. Yeah. And the cell that's the problem with cell internet is it's you're dependent on the tower, the nearest tower and the amount of bandwidth to the tower. And if you're at a Koa or somewhere and everybody's using it, yeah. It's not gonna work very well. So Starlink does not have that problem. They, and, and by the way, Starlink, which was initially tied to an address they have now opened it up to people who are moving around. So if you go to starlink.com/rv, they do now offer it finally.

Caller 5 (01:30:51):
Yeah. It's 130 bucks, right. And $700 for the equipment. It's

Leo Laporte (01:30:56):
Crazy, isn't it? And

Caller 5 (01:30:57):
I've talked to a couple of people I'm in thousand trails and I've talked to a couple people who are in the parks. Who've had it and most of 'em have been pretty happy, but that's that that's a lot of money for something that's

Leo Laporte (01:31:10):
No kidding.

Caller 5 (01:31:11):
So new

Leo Laporte (01:31:12):
You know, star lake as itself is not that new now are a couple of downsides. I'm looking at the page, it looks like it's not, while you're driving, you're gonna park. You're gonna set it up. And they have it in every case, they have it in the dirt. <Laugh> not Starlink. Yep. You should know, requires an absolutely clear view of the sky in 360 degrees. And any obstructions, if you're parked, for instance, in a forest with trees will severely affect your performance. In fact may cut it off completely. It doesn't go through trees. So when you set up a star link, you need a clear view of the sky and notice the pictures they've got. There are people out in the fields <laugh>

Caller 5 (01:31:56):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:31:56):
True. They're not in a lot of the places you might wanna be, frankly, with your RV, forget the redwoods. So that's problem. Number one, it is you know, the good news about Starlink it's high speed. It's over a hundred megabits per second down. And it's a 10, 15, 20 up. Depends. you know, how good your view of the sky is and all that. And also it will just like Verizon, as more people use it, that bandwidth go down. But Elon keeps it's Elon Musk's company. He keeps launching satellites, right? They just launched another 60 this week. So every time they launch more satellites in theory, that increases capacity. He, I he's even offering now a higher speed for even more money. I had hopes when he talked about Starlink, initially that this was gonna be a way to make internet access globally available everywhere. Like every niche, every corner, every, every boat, every RV access would be everywhere. And as it turns out, I don't think that's Elon's plan. He's making the champagne of internet access. He's he's charge that's, he's charging a lot of money for it. And I don't think he's gonna have an affordable service now. That's probably good for you if you could afford it because it will keep the numbers down.

Leo Laporte (01:33:14):
I, everybody I know who has Starlink loves it. So, so far so good.

Caller 5 (01:33:21):
I I'm paying 90 bucks for T-Mobile right now.

Leo Laporte (01:33:23):
Right. So it's only a little you 40 bucks a month. More than that.

Caller 5 (01:33:26):
It's a little more, yeah, boy. The 700, you know, on the equipment. Although I I've, I have the iPad cost me 700. Yeah. So it ends up being quite about the, about the same thing. Q

Leo Laporte (01:33:39):
Is 454, 500 does. So is exceed. I mean, these you're buying a dish dishy MC dish face, they call it literally, right. I'm not kidding. <Laugh> it, yeah, it really depends on personally. I would stay with cellular because I think that this is getting built out. 5G is a really important technology. It's very fast. I see. More and more 5g. You see ultra capacity or UW ultra wide band depends on the carrier. I think Verizon calls it ultra wide band that they're rolling it out more and more and more, which is good because it'll, you know, as more and people use it, the saturation would be less of a problem as they put out more towers in higher speed to those towers. So I think that in the long run, that's probably gonna be the best way to go if you, if money's not an object and you don't mind these issues, particularly the issue of you need a clear view of the sky. I think Starling can work great. I just, I think that they really I'm looking at these pictures. They're, they're not really giving you the clear notion that you, you can't park in the woods. Do you like to park in the woods?

Caller 5 (01:34:55):
Well, most of the parks seem to put us in a spot where there are trees around us. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:01):
You, you won't want that,

Caller 5 (01:35:04):
But usually there's a, almost a big enough spot. I would imagine to where you could, you, you could use it. And most of the people in the parks I've talked to five different people who had it and they said it'd been working pretty good. Good.

Leo Laporte (01:35:17):
They do have the ability to pause it, which is nice. You can say, I, I'm not gonna use it next month. You know, when you're home, which is great. And they won't bill you for it, walking around to ask, I think that's a good idea is walk around and ask people. I do. Cause

Caller 5 (01:35:31):
The, the T-Mobile when it's dead, it's dead. Right. And for some reason my pixel six won't let me plug into a TV like my

Leo Laporte (01:35:40):
Family too. Yeah. They, I think that the real travel troubles carriers don't want you to use your mobile broadband for residential or RV broadband. They really want you to have a special account for that. And they have all sorts of

Caller 5 (01:35:54):
T-Mobile let me use the iPad and I can plug it in the, that seems the worst, but okay. Not the, not the pixel. I don't know why.

Leo Laporte (01:36:01):
Oh, I don't know either. You know, I think you're doing the right research, which is not asking me <laugh> cause I'm not driving around with it, but ask other RV owners, if they seem happy with it and you can afford, you know, the setup and the monthly, I mean the setups 600 bucks. Now monthly's 135 bucks a month. Now it's not cheap. It is the champagne of portable internet

Caller 5 (01:36:25):
And I'm just afraid they're gonna change all the equipment by the time I buy it.

Leo Laporte (01:36:30):
That's a good question. This I'm looking at this dish actually looks like a newer dish than the old MC dish face. So maybe they've already done that. But yeah, you're right. It's technology, of course. It's what do you think? <Laugh> Leo Laporte, the tech guy, Scott in Las Vegas has suggested, I think this is good to check the RV forums as well. Okay. The good thing about RV is, is they share this information. You know, you, it's not, they don't keep it a secret.

Caller 5 (01:36:58):
I've watched you ever since the site.

Leo Laporte (01:37:00):
Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

Caller 5 (01:37:03):
Ken, all that TV stuff and everything.

Leo Laporte (01:37:06):
How much? Thank you. I, I very

Caller 5 (01:37:08):
Grateful. Oh, we're fantastic. I, I never miss you.

Leo Laporte (01:37:11):
How much time on the road do you spend a year?

Caller 5 (01:37:15):
I'd say about 75% of the time. Wow. I usually end up at my sisters for the holidays. Where's that? And, and the rest of the time, I, it, it's pretty cheap. I'm I'm living off of off of social security. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:37:29):
But I've always kind of wanted to do this. We're thinking of moving when I retire, when we retire up your way. We're looking at Seattle. But I always wanted to, I actually, what I wanted to do is get a boat <laugh> and do this in a boat. Yeah. I love a boat. Yeah. Afford it even more expensive.

Caller 5 (01:37:46):
It got really bad during the, during the, the gas thing though. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:37:51):
It, it expensive

Caller 5 (01:37:52):
That all really changed my financial situation. I was doing great before that, but once, once the gas came around, it, it kind of hurt me, but it's still a lot of fun and it's cheaper than living in my, and than living in my house that I sold.

Leo Laporte (01:38:06):
There you go.

Caller 5 (01:38:08):
You know,

Leo Laporte (01:38:08):
There you go. Is it just you can, or do you have a spouse or a dog or

Caller 5 (01:38:13):
Just me?

Leo Laporte (01:38:14):
You don't get lonely out there?

Caller 5 (01:38:16):
No, no, I, I, I, I, I like it.

Leo Laporte (01:38:19):
Good.

Caller 5 (01:38:20):
I do good. I'd have a dog, but my trailer's too small. Yeah. It's only 20 feet and I feel bad.

Leo Laporte (01:38:26):
Yeah. It'd be hard on a dog. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:38:28):
You'd have to be on a small dog. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:38:30):
I, I think stick with your T-Mobile and it's gonna get better. These, these guys really have a big commitment to rolling this stuff out.

Caller 5 (01:38:39):
Yeah. And, and I, I, it it's that kind of a company that kind of needs to try stuff for a little while. Right before you, right. You don't, you don't buy right into it that quickly, do you?

Leo Laporte (01:38:48):
No. I had a Starlink reservation. They cancel it for some reason. I don't know why maybe that maybe I'm just not in this area or something, but I, my hope was always that I could it probably won't happen, but get a star link on a boat and do the shows from a boat. <Laugh>,

Caller 5 (01:39:04):
That'd be great. Yeah. I've read that the boats work better than anything else.

Leo Laporte (01:39:08):
Yeah. Cuz they're in the, why say they have a full, you know, view of the sky and that works best. Yeah. Cause the satellites are moving, you know, they're not geos stationary, they're moving. So you need to kind of, you know, you need to be able to see them as they move into range and, and you need more than one to get full bandwidth. So, but

Caller 5 (01:39:27):
It just made that legal. Yes. Before it wa I, my understanding is only within the last couple of months, it wasn't even really, it would work. Oh really? To use it on a boat.

Leo Laporte (01:39:38):
Oh yeah. Yeah. He just announced that. In fact, the RV, same thing. I mean yeah, it was fully residential at first. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:39:46):
Why?

Leo Laporte (01:39:46):
Hey, it's a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for watching all these, all these 20. What is that? 25 years now.

Caller 5 (01:39:52):
And thank you for helping me the whole time.

Leo Laporte (01:39:55):
<Laugh> well, my pleasure, Ken. See you soon. Yeah. Take care. Bye bye. Are you wearing black?

Laura (01:40:05):
Yes. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:40:07):
Because you are mourn not the passing of the queen, the passing of the king Lowy Mays. Do you even know who Lowry Mays is? Absolutely. Do you really

Leo Laporte (01:40:25):
Well? Hey. Hey. Hey. How are you today? Leo LePort here. The tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smartphone, smart watches, all that jazz at 88 88, ask Leo 8, 8, 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6, toll free from anywhere in the us or Canada, outside that area. You could still use Skype out or something to to call us. We also of course have a website tech guy labs.com, tech guy labs.com. So I asked professor Laura, if she knew the name Lowry Mays, how do you know that name? Do you, you don't, you thought you did, you should know that name. He was the founder of clear channel communications, which oh yeah, that guy, she said <laugh> Corp. Did you get a corporate email? Yeah. I just wanted to mention this because of course this show is broadcast all over the country by premier radio networks, which is a subsidiary of iHeart media, which is in fact the new name or was the new name a few years ago of clear channel communications, Lowry Mays, the guy who started it in the early 1970s at San Antonio, Texas passed away September 12th in his home in San Antonio, but kind of a brilliant radio pioneer.

Leo Laporte (01:41:50):
He was 87. He was a petroleum engineer got into investment banking and co-signed a loan to purchase a radio station in San Antonio, K E E Z. Now this is 1972. This was an FM station and 1972 FM.

Leo Laporte (01:42:11):
It was kind of the weak sister to am, you know, am dominated the radio of course in the seventies. But FM was coming along. So I guess he thought, well, we can co-sign this, you know, unfortunately the original buyers, flopped who backed out and he was stuck in his Billy partner, Billy Joe, his Billy partner, his business partner, Billy Joe, McCombs, stuck with a property in which they had zero interest or experience a radio station. He did have a MBA from Harvard and he knew a little bit about building businesses. So he kind of threw his heart and soul into it and added more stations over the next 25 years added TV in the eighties bought a billboard business. You might remember clear channel billboards are still around. They spun that off some years ago. Concert promotion, business built one of the best performing companies of the 1990s, 8 billion in sales in 19 99, 70 $4 billion in sales in 1992. So million I'm sorry, in 1992. So really what is that? I can't do the math more than eight times the size in seven years.

Leo Laporte (01:43:27):
He eventually you know, had you had a little stroke handed over day to day operations to his sons, mark and Randall. And in nine in 2006, he sold the company to private equity firms, Thomas Lee and bank capital for $17.9 billion. Wow. 2014, we renamed ourselves iHeart media. Mr. Mays was a successful Texas billionaire. When asked why he sold clear channel when he did, he said, well, it was best for the family to sail and take the chips off the table. Lester Lowry Mays passed away this week, the founder of clear channel. So you should know his name. There should be a plaque on the wall, somewhere in that building down there in Sherman Oaks. Cuz he's the guy who put it all together. Eighty eight, eighty eight, ask Leo the phone number back to the phones. We go Kevin on the line from Porter ranch. Hello Kevin.

Caller 6 (01:44:29):
Hi Leo. Hey Kevin. In the words of river Phoenix, my captain, my captain. <Laugh> gotta help me.

Leo Laporte (01:44:37):
<Laugh> all right. What can I do? I'll stand up on the desk and help you. What can I do?

Caller 6 (01:44:42):
Well I'm standing with one foot on a desk. Okay,

Leo Laporte (01:44:46):
Good enough.

Caller 6 (01:44:46):
Good enough. Anyway I was on a cruise and we signed up for one of these real slow internet plans from the cruise ship, which basically you could text each other on the ship and they, we would put our, our phones in airplane mode. I don't know how that works on a boat, but you go into airplane mode. And so anyway, we would wait till we got cell services, which would be when we got into port. Right. So, but when we got to port and we got like four, three to four bars, we figured we were on 5g or 4g or whatever, come to find out. We got stuck with like maritime calls. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:45:29):
You got cellular at sea.

Caller 6 (01:45:32):
Oh yes. Oh. And we were,

Leo Laporte (01:45:35):
You have to, you know, this, they really need to be clearer about this. Yeah. boats. So there's two different things going on. Boats do have wifi and you can buy from the cruise company packages. It's terrible. It's usually using Inmarsat or some sort of Marine satellites. So the whole boat might have a couple of megabits for everybody on the boat. If, if, if you take a cruise, you should really think of yourself as being out to see and not try to work. But unfortunately my wife never stops working. So we always do that. And what you do is you wait till it's the middle of the night or very early morning before everybody gets up and then it's usable. As soon as everybody's up, you know, forget it. It's very slow, but there's another thing they offer. And this is deadly dangerous. It's and you'll notice on your phone at some point it will say cellular at sea. And that is Marine phone calls. You're exactly right. Dollars a minute.

Caller 6 (01:46:33):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:46:33):
Dollars a minute. And you've gotta be really careful. Here's the trick. Yeah. Turn it. Turn off roaming. Okay. Oh, cause that's what's happening is yourself. And honestly, I think these days, most cell providers will give you a warning. I know I got a warning from T-Mobile my carrier saying, Hey, turn off roaming cuz you,

Caller 6 (01:46:57):
I wish they, I wish they had warn as yeah, T-Mobile too. So yeah. I don't know what happened. O

Leo Laporte (01:47:03):
So then you get stuck with a hefty bill for basically maritime, as you said, maritime phone calls.

Caller 6 (01:47:09):
It must have roamed over it. We must have seen the cell service while we were. Cause we were just trying to make calls when we got into port.

Leo Laporte (01:47:16):
Yeah. But you were on the boat and the stronger signal might have been the cellular at sea signal and it slipped

Caller 6 (01:47:21):
Over and

Leo Laporte (01:47:21):
It slipped over. Exactly. So now if you're in a us port, you could turn off roaming. The problem is if you're in an international port, you do need roaming. So then you just have to be really, really careful and make sure that cellular at sea is not in effect. And they really, they need to give you a captain needs to come on the Intercom and say, don't use this, whatever you do.

Caller 6 (01:47:41):
We just, we saw nothing on the phone. It didn't say cellular at sea. I don't know what I can do. I'm well, well

Leo Laporte (01:47:47):
You could, you know what? That's an excuse to dispute it. I would go both to T-Mobile and say, you know, you should've told me and I don't see it on the phone and go to the cruise line and say, Hey, what's going on? Fortunately, this is all antiquated cruise lines. Realize people want internet and they don't want to pay a dollar a minute. So they are starting for instance, Royal Caribbeans and asked, we're gonna use Starlink. We were just talking about Elon Musk. Starlink. Yeah. They're putting Starlink in all the Royal Caribbean boats. Oh, okay. So I, you know, this is yeah. Lesson learned. How much was your bill?

Caller 6 (01:48:20):
Well the, the add-ons was well over 400 bucks. Ah, yeah. Yeah. So it's and I'm still fighting it, so yeah. Good. I'm gonna have to call T-Mobile again. Call

Leo Laporte (01:48:30):
T-Mobile call the cruise company. You weren't warned. You didn't know it. Didn't say cellular at, see, I've seen that on my phone. It says cellular at sea, but it's roaming to that.

Caller 6 (01:48:38):
Yeah. So it must have flipped to that,

Leo Laporte (01:48:40):
But I make a point whenever I'm on a cruise, we were just on a TWI cruise with all our podcast listeners and I made a point at the welcoming event to say, turn off roaming. You don't want that cellular at sea. It'll get ya.

Caller 6 (01:48:54):
Yeah. Oh, it was terrible. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:48:56):
I'm

Caller 6 (01:48:56):
So sorry. You so much, sir. You good? My captain though. All

Leo Laporte (01:48:59):
Right. I'm just not a great captain. <Laugh> I'll get off the desk now. <Laugh> thanks for the call. I appreciate it. Yeah. They, they really, I, you know, I sure they make money on it. So maybe they're not strongly the cruise line. They're not strongly incentive to let you know. Probably T-Mobile makes good money off of two. I would guess. I don't know you're going through the boat. You're not going through T T-Mobile's towers. That's why it's effective to turn off data. Roaming data roaming says when I'm in an area where I can't get a T-Mobile signal, I will let you do your phone. Use somebody else's signal. Now you're on land. That's gonna be some other local cell carrier that may also be expensive. So it is something to pay attention to when you're on a boat. If the boat offers cellular at sea, you're on, they are the carrier and they, they charge a lot of money for that. So it's really for emergency use only. It's the same thing as if you're on a, on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean and you make a phone call on their phone and you know, the phone in your room, you can make phone calls, but it's $2 to 60 cents a minute or something. I mean, not worth it in general, as you travel, turning off roaming is not a bad idea because if you roam to another network,

Leo Laporte (01:50:14):
You don't know what it costs, right? The other network's gonna charge you roaming fees. And those are usually higher, sometimes much, much higher than you're paying for your local cellular service. So it's probably a good idea as you go overseas to turn off roaming, you leave it on in the us, maybe because you know, you're in an area where T-Mobile is weak and Verizon's strong or vice versa, and you want it to, to use the other carrier. That's better than losing cell signal. Honestly, I just would turn it off in general. Just no roaming roaming, roaming. Isn't good. When in Rome you're paying a lot of money. That's the truth of the matter? 88 88 ask Leo. We got a couple minutes left. Nope, we don't. Let's take a break. <Laugh> thank you. Thank you, professor Laura for saving me for myself. Let's take a break and then I will take another call. Leo LePort Lee tech guy.

Laura (01:51:13):
I mean, technically

Leo Laporte (01:51:14):
You could, but no, no, no, no, no, no. Hit that button. I was lost for a minute. I didn't know where I was. I was roaming Roman in the glow. There you go. T-Mobile cell phone plants. International roaming plants, cruises.

Laura (01:51:39):
Ooh,

Leo Laporte (01:51:41):
Don't pull a Whoopie. I don't know what that is, but I won't. I promise you whatever that is. I won't pull it. So let's see which cruise line are you on? Check coverage. So let's say princess, I am on the princess diamond, whatever that is. Check coverage. Oh, that's not bad. The texts are only 50 cents a text. Not bad. Talk $6 a minute.

Laura (01:52:20):
<Laugh> $6

Leo Laporte (01:52:23):
A minute.

Leo Laporte (01:52:25):
Yeah. And you were in port, so you figured, oh, well no problem. I'll be using, you know, the ports cell signal will know. No, apparently not. So you wanna know how to turn off roaming. All right, let's do that. So first thing we'll do is I'll go to cellular and you'll see cellular data cellular data options, roaming on what, what, so, and this actually is gonna give you some choices here about what to roam to, and you could go into low data mode, but you know, probably it wouldn't be a bad thing. Just turn that off now. And, and then, you know, I think you're probably gonna be okay.

Leo Laporte (01:53:19):
I think you're going to be okay. Hello, Mr. Pile. Hey boss. How are you? I'm well, how are you? I'm pretty good. How's space. The final frontier wide, cold, and highly radioactive as, as always. <Laugh> but there's a few things going on we could talk about, so, okay. That's a good thing. I guess that the, we were talking about Starlink, that we're gonna launch some satellites today, but they scrubbed that. So that's yeah, I think did I read, they they've scrubbed that one four times, which is funny, cuz they normally like clock the weather's really bad. They, they just don't home. Yeah. They kind of, you know, cuz it's an, an inanimate payload and it seems they're, they're building these things like you make cupcakes, you know, coming off the end of the assembly line. Yeah. Yeah. Well they're building a hundred satellites a day or something.

Leo Laporte (01:54:14):
Some crazy number. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess thunderstorms too thunderstorms. Yeah. Well, and you've been to Florida, you know, this time of year you get some great shows, but it's it's tech on launching. Yeah. It'd be nice. One of these days we're gonna find a place that is roughly equatorial that doesn't have all those issues, but you can't be Florida for convenience for transporting things. But you know, if you're close to the equator, maybe I don't know, Puerto Rico or something it's oh it doesn't ESA have a big facility in south America where they launch. Yeah. It's in crew Guyana, Guyana. That's right. That's France has that, which is good, but I mean it's, you know, it's way off the beaten path. So it does cost a bunch of time and money to, to get stuff down there. I mean the worst thing you have to do with Florida is float something through the Panama canal. If you need to barge it over there. Geez. But actually there's been talk some of the, the equatorial African nations of developing spade sports, which would be an, so that's the whole thing you wanna be close to the equator. Yeah. Cuz it just puts you right in line with where you want to go. Interesting and saves a lot of fuel getting there. All right, well talk in a few.

Leo Laporte (01:55:35):
What was it about the 21st of September that the earth wind and fire was so excited about? I don't, I don't know. There is a guy it's actually fun to watch a YouTuber who makes a video every 21st of September. Have you seen those they're hysterical? He started some years ago. And it was just, you know, kind of silly, like he thought, oh, I'll make a funny little, little video of the 21st of September and <laugh> and then it kind of got outta hand. I don't is he still doing it? Because the last one I saw there was a cast of thousands. His name is deme. Ed Juby, the long name, it's a hard name, a long name. He the man behind those he's made his last masterpiece. Oh no. This was from September 22nd of last year. Every year, since 2016, the comedian and scream writer de me at a Jube has made videos of himself dancing.

Leo Laporte (01:56:38):
The EWF September. The first video in the series relies on his absurd remix with the original lyrics replaced by some permutation of the words, his roommate at the time, encouraged him to share it online, which is kind of, you know, a silly little video. So I made a video myself dancing to it. I made a quick shirt with a stencil that I had and just posted that on Twitter. And they were like, oh, that's funny. So I'll find you, the, the first one is September 22nd, 2016. I'll put a link in the show notes to this the next year <laugh> he said, oh, maybe I should do another one. And maybe I'll upgrade it now every year he's he's been doing this and it's been getting crazier and crazier last year. I'm sad. He announced it'll be the last one. He is making it had a children's choir, a mariachi band, a rotating room to reveal a backyard, a choreographed dance party.

Leo Laporte (01:57:36):
I mean, it was bonkers <laugh> so I last year raffled off of painting, the proceeds went to some charities. I, I don't, I don't know why he's stopping, except that it must be taking a lot of his time and money. I I'm gonna bet we'll find out what is it Wednesday? Yep. I'm gonna bet that Demi is not done. I'm gonna bet. He's raised a million bucks for charity through these videos. That's incredible. But he did say last year, this is the last one. Yeah, I don't, I don't buy it. I think he's even doing it right now. Maybe he was at the, in and out yesterday for BKA Don and, and celebrating. I bet you I'm gonna bet you the 21st of September, do we know professor Laura musical director? Why 21st of September was such a big deal for earth, wind and fire? No, we don't know that. No, it's just a random date, but it is an internet holiday. Now Chris is on the line from Northridge, California. Hi, Chris, Leo LaPorte, the tech guy.

Caller 7 (01:58:55):
Hi. Hi Leo. How are

Leo Laporte (01:58:57):
You? I'm great. How are you?

Caller 7 (01:58:58):
Good. My friends question that I had about connecting wireless and wired networks together at the same time on a Mac

Leo Laporte (01:59:08):
Wired and wireless networks at the same time on a Mac. Okay. So you have a Mac that has a wifi porch.

Caller 7 (01:59:15):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:59:15):
And you have also an ethernet port on it

Caller 7 (01:59:21):
And a tole, you

Leo Laporte (01:59:21):
Know, you at the ethernet dongle, but you have ethernet. So that's hardwired and, and wireless. You can leave them both on if you go to your internet settings on the Mac, in the system preferences which is by the way, gonna be called settings starting next month. So I won't have to make up a new name for it every time if you go to system preferences, you'll see. When you go to the advanced tab that you can see all the different connections you have and you can order them, you can drag them. So on that Mac you'd wanna drag ethernet to the top, cuz that's probably the fastest I'm gonna guess. Yes, yes. That's the one you wanna use. So it won't use the wifi unless, I mean, the reasons you wanna leave on wifi, for instance, Apple's continuity, which does a handoff to a a phone or a iPad, that kind of thing that uses wifi. So if you turn off wifi, you'll lose some capability. So leave it on. Just make sure that Ethan it is at the top.

Caller 7 (02:00:19):
Well, the wifi still work. If there's another device that I need to connect to it via wifi. Yes,

Leo Laporte (02:00:26):
Yes. It, and it, and it may work. It may more likely work through the ethernet. Cause remember your E Ethan has connected probably to a wifi router at some point. Well,

Caller 7 (02:00:36):
So the ethernet is connected to a piano,

Leo Laporte (02:00:39):
A piano. Yeah. An internet piano

Caller 7 (02:00:44):
Kind of yes. So the, so that has to be, that has to be wired in order for the application. Ah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:52):
Oh, you're doing something. Okay. So you are, oh, alright. I should have asked this. I was assuming, as I have, for instance, on my Mac, I have an ethernet connection to the router, but I also have wifi. Your ethernet is not going to an internet connection. It's going to a piano. It's sharing your internet over the ethernet.

Caller 7 (02:01:10):
That's

Leo Laporte (02:01:10):
Right. Okay. Yeah. So obviously you have to use the wifi. In fact, you wanna drag that back to the top, cuz that's your preferred internet. That's your only internet connection. Then you're gonna do internet sharing over ethernet. And that's another technique. That's something else. Completely different. Got it. So you'll have to turn on. Let me see if apple still calls it internet sharing. That's what it used to be called. Yeah. You go to sharing and then select internet sharing from the list and the system preferences and it will then allow you to choose what you're sharing. So this way the piano gets his internet from your Mac, which is getting its internet from the wifi. Is that that's what you want, right? Yes. Yes. Internet sharing. It's in the sharing preference. Pain, not the network preference pain.

Caller 7 (02:02:01):
Got it.

Leo Laporte (02:02:01):
Okay, awesome. Yeah, that should work. Great. So it's an electronic piano synthesizer kind? No

Caller 7 (02:02:06):
It's an acoustic piano just

Leo Laporte (02:02:09):
But it's connected to the internet.

Caller 7 (02:02:11):
Yeah, because the keys move on an

Leo Laporte (02:02:13):
Oh, how cool. So it's like a player piano. I love it. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. That's how you do it rod. Pile's spaceman next. Oh yeah. You're going. So you're using the Mac and the max internet connection to share it to the piano. But that, that absolutely is doable. The Mac will do that. Just fine. Rod, rod pay.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:02:56):
I've been enjoying your Instagram posts, but I, I get the impression you guys eat out every night. It sounds like a good life. We do not. We do not. We have been eating out a lot lately. It's fun. Isn't it? Oh yeah. If you can afford it years being couped let, let me tell you how expensive this meal was. It was CRA, we got the bill and I was looking at it and then they had the tip suggestion. First of all, it was huge. Then I, the tip was $40. Right? Then the tip suggestion, it said, well, you could give 4% or 5% or 6%. I thought what? That's not right. So I looked in the bill and they had already billed us 20%. This was for party of four. And they wanted four or 5% of the, yeah, just a little extra. If you wanna give 'em a little extra.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:03:44):
Oh my God. Who does that? That's like a Europe thing. That's not this restaurant does that. We're not going back. Wow. Our is our Petaluma eatery expensive. Not normally this restaurant has been getting worse and worse. It's the, it was the best restaurant in town. Just the incredible small plates, seven courses, you know, one of those. Oh yeah. And and then they got, well, I say that like, I've been to one in the last 20 years, but yeah. Then they got a lot of attention from the local papers. San Francisco Chronicle says one of the 25 best restaurants in the bay area, blah, blah, blah. The food quality went down. They got somebody front of house upselling. So he brought us a wa bottle of wine, which I must have been $300. I didn't know at the time. Oh yeah, because we had ordered each of us a glass of red and he said, well, you might want to try <laugh> and I'll give you a taste. And I said, yeah, that's good. We'll take that. I should have asked. I'm such a jerk. Oh my God. Yeah. There's a restaurant from last night. So, so it was kind of a mind boggling bill. Like if you were going to a, me Michelin three star restaurant, except it's not.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:04:55):
Yeah. It was a hundred, $5 a person for the seven course meal. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. Yeah. But then <laugh> so Lisa and I are doing the math on the way back. Okay. Wait, there's more, there's 20% tip on that, but then how did it get to be that? And so we figured that must have been a $300 bottle of wine. Wow. Anyway, it was fi it was a great dinner. We, it turned, we, we got there, his two friends was really fun and we got there and there's sitting in the table next to us a friend more of acquaintance. So a guy I know, but he's longtime radio guy in the bay area used to run be the morning man at Kya. But he's kind of very famous Terry McGovern. And he said at the next table, so, you know, Terry, so that was kind of, so it ended up being a big kind of party.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:05:41):
Maybe they put his bill on mine. Yeah. Maybe some happened there. Wow. Yeah. So we have, I mean, being in St. Gabriel valley, we have lots of Asian food, particularly Chinese. We've got a place just around the corner from where we live that got a Midland Lin, you know, best emerging prize or something about four years ago at Chinese place. Shockingly though their prices didn't go up. The food stayed just as good. They, you know, they posted the sign out front, but they didn't make a big deal out of it. And you could still go up there and have a meal for two for, you know, 60 bucks, 50 bucks. I was kind of stunned.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:06:23):
Yeah. It's anyway, come on. You won't be eating out again for a while. We'll treat you as some affordable Chinese food. Anyway, I worked out the guy sitting in next to us. I think we're gonna do a show. So <laugh> oh, cool. Yeah. Did you say, dude, what kind of rays did you get to treat him here? We should do a show. No, he yeah, he's like legendary. He's the guy who it just said, came up with the name. Woo. He and George Lucas were driving on back roads and they hit something and went put, and tr said, when was that? And Terry goes, that's a whoop <laugh>, he's a lot of the incidental voices in star wars, stuff like that. He's got great stories. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Here we go. All right.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:07:11):
Well it's only a week since we've seen rod pile last, he is our space, man. The author of such great books as space, 2.0, the amazing stories of the space, age, interplanetary robots. I call this my pile pile. I've got all the books, the blueprint for a battle star, serious scientific explanations behind sci-fi greatest inventions. He's got, this is my favorite though. First on the moon, a 50th anniversary beautiful coffee table book about the Apollo 11 landing rod pile editor in chief, a Astra. Good to see you rod. Good. Not see you. And you, you sure you don't wanna become an agent <laugh> this is, I love the way you do that. This is good. Does bill handle do that for you on KFI? Oh, kind of a quick breezy and okay. That's all the pimping I'm gonna do for you today.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:08:02):
Does he mention at Astra magazine from space that SS are gonna work? Does he mention that? Well, I do. I do. So rod, rod to host a podcast for us, we're still not bill this weekend space which is all about space with te Mallek from the fabulous space.com. So you're up on the latest what's going on in the space race? Well, and by the way that the Friday's podcast was just posted the Friday afternoon is kind of a cool one. Cuz we got to chat with the mission architect for the dragonfly probe, which is a quad rotor, actually Okta rotor, cuz there's two rotors per pod drone. That's gonna be exploring Titan in the early 2030s. Saturn's moon Titan. And you know, it gotta list of the podcast, got the whole story, but basically the thing's gotta be, it's gotta nuclear fuel supply.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:08:54):
It's gotta be completely autonomous to a li white, large degree because you know, the messaging takes upwards of an hour to get out there. Wow. So you basically give it an order and say, okay, go over there. Don't go over the lake. Just, just explore the shoreline and it'll know to do that. Have, have fun, right? When you get work technology. Yep. Yeah. And these cuz these lakes are like methane and other hydrocarbons that are, you know, a hundred something degrees below zero Fahrenheit. So you don't wanna go in there, but that's not what we're here to talk about. Dave, we're here to talk about three or four other things. So first up just very briefly Artemis one woo latest, latest launch attempt is going to be on September 20. I at 8 37. I want be, I wanna bet bit that it will. I'm gonna seriously say this and I'm probably wrong. It will never get off the ground.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:09:44):
Hush your mouth. How could you, because I think, I think, I think there's about a 50, 50 chance for October and the other 50% being in 2023 for whatever reason, but I think October's got a good shot. That's what I bet Tark on the podcast for his chair, which he says, he's gonna refuse to give me, but so either the 27th or October 2nd pending the results of a fueling test or September 21st. So they've gotta pump it up full of gas again, see if everything leaks, you know, if we've learned anything it's the, you don't wanna use hydrogen in your rocket cuz it leaks. It's the smallest molecule. Yeah. Less slipperiest thing out there. Yeah. So it's it's high energy, which is good, but methane is good enough. Right. In other news NASA, as they promised, did announce a request for proposals for a second lunar Lander.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:10:38):
So as you know, for the last year plus they've been working with SpaceX on remaking Starship as a lunar Lander, which is was a bit of a head scratcher for some folks, but it looks like it's going okay, but blue origin, protested and sued and so on and so on. And that shut down the lunar landing lunar Lander program for about six months that was moving forward again as of about six months ago. And now NASA said, okay, you guys blue origin, you are the complainers, go ahead and line up and submit your proposal. So the whole point of this is a to get some competition, going to keep prices down and B so we gotta backup if something goes wrong. So as we saw with SpaceXs dragon and the Boeing Starliner, which still hasn't flown any astronauts it's good to have two systems cuz of one doesn't work <laugh> hopefully the other one will didn't so that's good.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:11:31):
Didn't Jeff Bezos. FLIC rocket blow up. Yeah. So that, but that was an unru flight. So that was a backup booster. That's the one William Shatner was in, well it's the system William Shater was using, but it wasn't the booster. No, it wasn't in that. Obviously we didn't blow him up, but it did abort properly scary. So that was good. So nobody, if there had been people would've they had been alright. Yeah. So they might have had some make and pains cuz it's, you know, when, when you abort basically the capsule says uhoh something's going wrong down below and it fires, they haven't escaped shoot rocket fuel boosters. Yeah. But it can generate significant G so it's good. Yeah. I mean, it wouldn't be a happy landing, but it'd be a landing <laugh> so yes, they're flying experiments and postcards that if you look in the last year's worth of a Astros, we have a little postcard insert in there.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:12:22):
You can fill out a postcard with a drawing or a message and send it to them and they fly it the capsule and then they mail it back to you and it's stamped flown in space. So bad news its flying that kind of stuff. But, but the good thing is it was like an unintended test of the awards. Yeah. They test them, right? Yeah. They tested it. Yeah. So that's good. Yeah. So let's hope they have better luck with Lander. So proposals are due in two months, which seems really fast, but they're on a fast track and they want them to be able to provide whatever they're gonna provide for lunar landing by the late 2020s. This is the SpaceX thing. This is the, the Sarner Lander built for Artemis. That SpaceX is building one and now they won second contender. So they're opening it up finally.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:13:04):
Oh, I see. So, oh, is Elon happy? So happy about that? You know, no, he shouldn't be on the one hand, on the other hand, when it comes to delivering astronauts, a space station, Boeing made him look pretty good by not being able to get Starliner to fly for years. Yeah. So, you know, maybe it's not a terrible thing. I think blue origin would do better, but remains to be seen cuz so far, all they've done is sore it flights. Yeah. So it's, it's kind of of a, kind of an open book, but here's an interesting one. Okay. UFOs. Oh, that's talk about UFOs for a while. Sure. Just call this coast to coast. Daytime. That's right. George. So so you remember the Navy released that footage? I think it was year before last, right? Yeah. Of a weirdly non ballistic thing flying around.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:13:56):
You were the tic-tac VI tic-tac UFOs and all that. And, and it had, it had already been out. So the Navy came out recently and said, look, there was a freedom of information, ask, act asking for more request. Yeah. And the Navy said, look, we released that stuff because it was already out there. We figured it couldn't do any more harm than it already had. We're not releasing anymore. Oh. That doesn't do any harm. We don't want you to see the other stuff we have. Right. What's the, so just release it. It's not that's worse. Well, so here's what the rep said. The release, this information will harm national security is it may provide adversaries the value, valuable information regarding department of defense, Navy operations vulnerabilities and or capabilities. Now that, you know, you could look at that and say, oh my God, it's project blue book again.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:14:42):
There's stonewalling. On the other hand, as we've talked about before, there is a growing body of suspicion and some evidence that some of these UFO sightings, especially the ones that, that are really weird are ours. Maybe be swarms of drones. They may be ours by the Chinese or the Russians or in adversaries. But what if they're ours, you do that well. But if you do that near cuz you know how these half and so often near fleet deployments, right? So if you do that near the Pacific fleet or a carry task force, they look at it and start banging away with radar and so forth. And an adversary can gain a lot of data on sure. How radar works, what the sweeps are like frequencies, all that kind of stuff. So by spoofing with those drones, they can actually get a lot of material.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:15:27):
So I think that's the big concern is that these are not, that they're expressed real, but that they're of terrestrial origin and maybe our adversaries maybe adversaries or maybe again, maybe ours. I mean just because there ours doesn't mean the Navy pilots or the Navy itself would even know it could be a top secret thing, need to know only. And any images of it would, would maybe give away information about what we're capable of so I can understand why that okay. So do that's important unidentified flying object or what do they call it these days? UAP unidentified aerial phenomenon. Doesn't equal alien. It equals right? I don't know. And in this case, yeah, exactly. In this case might not have been an alien might have been ours or theirs, but not, but we do need to keep an open mind that it might be so, oh, you just like to keep that going, moving on.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:16:19):
Nothing to see there's of course I do. There's no aliens. Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle tech guy. It's so far away. There's no aliens. Well, but again, as we've discussed, you know, so yeah. They're really far away. I find it unlikely that they build a big tin can just to fly out here. They coming at there. No, the hairless monkeys shoot each other. Yeah. But if there are multiverses, there's nothing to say. They can step from my closet and say hello. Oh, oh now, now <laugh> it's you watch too much TV now it's not. So watch's rather planet it. It's from somebody from another universe. Okay. Well, but you know, that's becoming increasingly accepted as a possibility. Possibility. There could be another video and another rod out there, but there's, you know what, there's no between reverse. There can't be. I'm the one on the air all the time.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:17:08):
And you're the guy that comes out for 10. There can't, there can't be, can't be very bad. It's you? If, if there are multiverses, there cannot be communication between them. There cannot be communication between could there be travel between them? No, that's communi no data can flow from different universes. I don't know. I'll make them numeric proof later. <Laugh> but I guarantee you it's provable out. It's a provable thing that you can't, that, that multiverses cannot intersect in any way. I'm sure that's gonna great to that point. Cuz I wanted to get one more thing out while we were what's that break here, Mr. PI. Well, this kind of a fun story. So menopause relief, thanks to NASA. You know, we're always looking for those spinoff benefits. Yeah. So in the 1980s, they're trying to develop better temperature regulating fabrics or space. They invent might all in space.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:17:59):
Not, not quite okay, but they normally use like water jackets, just like your your sleep eight bed cover, right? That's how space is cool themselves. Right? Because you can have a 500 degree up to 500 degree differential between the sunlight side and the, and the cold side. Right? So they develop this, this phase change fabric, which basically has at least as, as it's been used, is being used. Now it's got little micro capsules of wax in it. So as, as materials change phase from a liquid to a solid or, or back they either absorb or shed temperature. So this company called 51 apparel decided, Hey, you know, women suffer terribly from menopause and heat flashes. If we have this material that responds instantly to temperature changes, and then put an, a transmitting layer above it, we can actually absorb that heat from their body and then radiate it out as this, these little wax micro capsules change phase back and forth, which I thought was really cool.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:19:01):
What's the material called outlast outlast. And they use it for, is it out now that purpose, huh? Yeah. Yeah. 51 apparel carries it and they've licensed it to others. So this is a case of technology transfer from NASA, the private sector. Wow. And then private sector to the world. And they're using it for betting. They're using it for sports shoes. They're using it for sports, clothing seat covers, race, car drivers are using it. So it's a much less involved than complicated way of doing it than pumping water through little tools. Does it look like you're wearing a puffy blanket? No, it looks like, it looks like regular gym clothes. Right? So everything. Oh, that's cool. Because it's just little tiny beads of, of liquid wax. Isn't that cool. And it's so simple. I'm gonna buy some just to try it. I like that.

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:19:49):
Are you gonna put it on your, your clinging on chair? Yeah. Do they have it for guys? <Laugh> I think they actually, I think you can actually buy fabric, but I don't know if it's from that company. Right. Very interesting. But I always thought that was really neat. You know, we hear about it's better than the Fisher's space pin talking. Right. Space pen, and you know, coding for optics. Yeah. Tans around first. But so this is something that's actually useful for a lot of people that are suffering. I think that's cool and forth. So there we go. Thank you Mr. Rod pile. Thank you. Good to see you. Good luck with your aliens. Okay. <laugh> thanks.

Leo Laporte (02:20:30):
Thank you for letting me be your tech guy. Thank you to professor Laura. Our musical director does a lovely job spin in the hits. I hope you survived the 21st of September on Wednesday. What do you think? You think there'll be a video? I think there's gonna be a video. I think, I think Demi's just teasing us. Thanks to Kim Schaffer. Our phone angel who answers the phones gets you on the air. Appreciate it. Of course. Mostly I thank you for letting me be your tech guy, listening to the show calling in. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's it's been a very good, how many years have they been doing this? 30 years. It's a long time, but Hey, I'm lucky. I'm a lucky guy. I know it. I know it. Cynthia's beats working for a living. Cynthia's on the line from Brentwood Cal. Yes. Oh yes. Hi Cynthia. Hi. Hi, welcome.

Caller 8 (02:21:26):
Thank you. I have a question regarding e-bikes.

Leo Laporte (02:21:30):
Oh, I love them. Yeah. Yeah. One. Okay.

Caller 8 (02:21:33):
Yes. Two and a half years ago you recommended the rad bike.

Leo Laporte (02:21:35):
That's the one I have. Yes. Ah,

Caller 8 (02:21:37):
Thank you. Because I recommended it to 25 of our oh dear 65 year old residents here in our community. Yeah. And they all love their rad bikes.

Leo Laporte (02:21:46):
Rad power is the name of the company and the reason. So I did a lot of research and certainly you can spend a lot more on an electric bike. These are battery powered, best bikes mm-hmm <affirmative> but the powers were fairly inexpensive, mean more than a regular bike, about $1,500. But I've had mine now for that whole two years and I love it. I,

Caller 8 (02:22:06):
Me too 9,000 miles and I'm 75 years old. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:22:11):
See that's who this is. I mean, it's good for anybody, but especially for people who like us who are a little older, who may not have the endurance and stamina and knees more importantly to go up steep Hills, this that's right. You still, and I've seen a lot of, of research. It says you still are getting a significant portion of the exercise you would get. Yes. Yes. And you get out there because you can now do it.

Caller 8 (02:22:32):
Yes. And we live in the country, out in Brentwood here and it is beautiful out here. They have great trails. The question I have is you just mentioned something about the helmet, the oh your yes. Your Bluetooth helmet. Yeah. Okay. First, what kind did you get? And the other question is, can you communicate on the phone? Can, can you call someone on the phone? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:22:54):
Huh? It's not the best. Okay. It's not the best speaker in the world. Oh it sounds, you know, I like this <laugh> oh, you can make calls. I listen to books. It's from a, can you

Caller 8 (02:23:05):
Do conference? Can you do conference calls? Because we have like 11, like 12 of us on a bike ride. Sure.

Leo Laporte (02:23:11):
If you, you wanna, you can do whatever your phone can do. So it's, it's Bluetooth to your phone. Mm-Hmm that's why I keep my phone with me on my bike rides. In fact, I have a little handlebar Mount. So do I the one I have, which I like a lot is from Leval. L I V a L L mm-hmm <affirmative>. They make a variety of very interesting cycling helmets. Obviously you must wear a helmet, right? Oh yes. And some of them have Bluetooth in them. What I like about it even more than that is it has turn signals on it.

Leo Laporte (02:23:46):
So it light, it has lights in the back that are blinking. Look, I'm so scared. Cuz I ride on streets. Yeah. Where there're three ton vehicles whizzing by me within a foot mm-hmm <affirmative> so I have, you know, I wear a vest. I have blinking lights all over my, my bike and my helmet blinks, but then it also has a little button you put on the handlebar and when you press it, when you're gonna turn left, it goes, wow. It goes, I really like it. It also has Bluetooth in it. Yeah. I can't remember what I spent for it. They're probably more, I would guess they're more expensive, but okay.

Caller 8 (02:24:18):
Oh yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:24:19):
Yeah. Yeah. I think they're and they're nice looking. They don't look like you're, you know, a lot of bicyclists I see are dressed for the tour defrost. You know what I'm saying? <Laugh> they're wearing the tight pants, the weird shirt. They got their sponsors on it. Like they're going somewhere and, and they weigh those aerodynamic helmets that make you look kind of okay. A little bit toy.

Caller 8 (02:24:39):
No, not, not with an e-bike. You don't wear those. No,

Leo Laporte (02:24:41):
That would be silly. So the bling helmet, which I think is what I have, it looks, it's just a round helmet. It doesn't look so okay. Basically. But I love it. That it has brake lights, the newer ones have brake lights. They have turn signals. They have an anti, a loss alarm. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and you can listen to your phone. It's not the, I wish it were better speakers. Yes. What you should get and you tell all your friends to get is these new iPhones and the new apple watches have crash detection.

Caller 8 (02:25:10):
Oh

Leo Laporte (02:25:11):
Yeah. That's a really good idea. So if you fall off your bike, it will call emergency services. Oh

Caller 8 (02:25:16):
Yes. Okay. And we have it all set up. Our, our iPhones are all set up with medical ID and, and they, oh,

Leo Laporte (02:25:21):
I'm so happy to hear that. Yeah. Cynthia, this is great. So you go, how big is your group?

Caller 8 (02:25:26):
Oh, a group's name is pedal pushers and, and the men's group is called easy writers. And our, our, we have about oh, 30. Oh, that's fun. Don't write in group. No, no. We just put an all call and we write about five, ten, ten in a group. And then we split off of, we have more than 10. Yeah. We're really safe. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:25:45):
That's really cool. There's also a walkie talkie function on these helmets. Four groups. Really? Yeah. These are newer. I don't have this one yet, but this is a new, I'm just looking at the Leval. B H 51. Neo range has all the features.

Caller 8 (02:26:01):
Oh, okay. The smart helmet. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:26:02):
Yeah. Smart helmet.

Caller 8 (02:26:03):
Okay. Yeah, I got it. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:26:05):
Yeah. And I've had this Leval for a long time. The only draws back is when, just like your bike. When you get home, you have to plug it in

Caller 8 (02:26:11):
<Laugh> oh yeah. That's true. That's that's that's fine. But you know, when, when you have a group of women, we need to talk <laugh> yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:26:17):
Okay. So the easy rider don't want these helmets, but the pedal pushers, they might the pedal

Caller 8 (02:26:22):
Pushers too.

Leo Laporte (02:26:23):
<Laugh> Hey, a pleasure talking to see. I'm so glad that you got the rad powers.

Caller 8 (02:26:29):
Yes. And thank you very much for the recommendation. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:26:31):
I'm so I'm so glad I ride mine all the time. I love it. Yes.

Caller 8 (02:26:34):
Yeah. We have a lot of people out here. Wonderful. Thank you very much.

Leo Laporte (02:26:38):
I'll be in Brentwood at any minute. Now I'm just gonna ride right up there and see you there. I mean, e-bikes are taking off. They really are. And I have, I got a tricycle, like a, like an adult tricycle because it has a big, better lack of a better word cargo area on the thing. So I can ride into town and shop and load it up. And that's why it's a tricycle because you don't want to have to balance all that stuff and just, and ride back. And it's an e-bike. So it's as easy as driving a car. It's really a lot of fun. You still get to, you still get to bicycle and you get exercise. Cause you're still pedaling, but they go up to 20 miles an hour. Some of them like the RA powers have throttles. I like that. For when you stop at a red light or a stop sign, you don't have to Ugh, pedal so hard, Ugh. To get started or going to way low gear. You just turn the throttle and you go, you go forward. Now you can keep pedaling. So it's I just love it. One more call before we wrap it up. Tony in Upland, California. Hi Tony.

Caller 9 (02:27:42):
Hey, how are you?

Leo Laporte (02:27:43):
I'm well, how are you

Caller 9 (02:27:46):
Doing fine. Thanks for taking my call. Listen, I didn't want to bother you, but I checked all the, the TWI TV and the, the, all the data I did my research. I couldn't find the answer I'm looking for. So you're the last resort.

Leo Laporte (02:27:59):
Oh, oh, okay.

Caller 9 (02:28:01):
It's the old mini DV archiving question again. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:28:05):
Lord. You have many DV. These are the, this was a, a very high quality digital tape format for cam quarters 20 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, all of our tech TV shows were shot on MiniDV.

Caller 9 (02:28:19):
Well, I got 27 of the family history. Yeah. And the thing that I was challenged with was that some of the professional services I made sure before I was gonna opt jump in and they're great for some people, but for me, I want a little more cuz the professional services simply play and record the content. Right. I wanted, I wanted the data because it has the time and dates, stamp. Ah, I wanted the ones and zeros and I've got a and my old tower, which I don't use anymore, but I still have it. I was trying to, I can't figure this one out. And

Leo Laporte (02:28:56):
So, so here's the system. You need a mini DV cam quarter. You got that right?

Caller 9 (02:29:01):
I do.

Leo Laporte (02:29:01):
Yeah. And so that's nice because that allows you to put the in indicia on the screen for a little bit and then turn it off and on something that a service Bureau's not gonna do, you might wanna leave it on the whole time, but I imagine to turn it on at the beginning and turning it off so you can control that. Cause you have the camcorder. Now you need a video captured device for your computer and there in some computers yet you said you have a tower. You can buy a video capture card that will go in a slot or you can buy an external video captured device. Probably that's the easiest and least expensive. El Gato still makes video capture cards that go in the PCI slots, but they also make external for about half the price, external video capture devices. You wanna get one that will work with the mini DVS ports and will have USB or better yet Thunderbolt into your computer. And then you just use their software record. I'll give you a link in the show notes. Leo Laporte, the tech guy.

Leo Laporte (02:30:03):
This is an article from popular mechanics earlier this year. So it's, that's part of the problem is, is it changes, you know, rapidly, but I'll put a link in the show notes to this popular mechanics article, the 10 best capture cards for recording and streaming. The El Gado is really big. Is another company almost impossible to spell called HAPO H a U P P a U G E. HAPO makes 'em as well. Aver media. It's funny. It's the same companies that have been doing this all the time. The best overall they say $158 at Amazon is the HD 60 from El Gado, external capture card streaming record in 10 80 P 60 HDR, 10 4k ultra, low latency, et cetera, et cetera. You do. You just wanna make sure though this one goes to a Mac, so this is not what you want.

Leo Laporte (02:30:55):
Actually, you wanna get one that goes to a PC, but they make 'em as well, but you wanna make sure it has the right inputs. So I'm not sure what your camcorder outputs, but you wanna make sure it has the same inputs as your camcorder's outputs and then ideally Thunderbolt into your computer. Cause you want, want a high speed connection. Delgado does make a 10 80 P 60 capture PCI capture card, the HD 60. So that's the same version, but it goes in the, in the slot, in your computer. That's probably the one. Now that's as long as it has the right connectors.

Leo Laporte (02:31:28):
Well, that's it for the tech guy show for today. Thank you so much for being here and don't forget TWI T I T it stands for this week at tech and you find it@twi.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about windows and windows weekly, Macintosh, a Mac break, weekly iPads, iPhones, apple watches on iOS, today's security and security. Now, I mean, I can go on and on. And of course the big show every Sunday afternoon, this weekend tech you'll find it all@twit.tv and I'll be back next week with another great tech guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.