The Tech Guy Episode 1936 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte:
Podcasts you love from people you trust, this tweet. Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my Tech Guy podcast. This show originally aired on the Premier Networks on Sunday, October 16th, 2022. This is episode 1,936 and join this episode of The Tech Guy Podcast is brought to you by podium. Join more than 100,000 businesses that already use podium to streamline their customer interactions. See how podium can grow your business. Watch a demo today at podium.com/twit. and buy Shopify. Shopify makes it simple to sell to anyone from anywhere. This is Possibility powered by Shopify. Set up for free trial shopify.com/twit. All lowercase. Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo LaPorte here. The tech guy. It's Tech Guy Time. This is the show. This here show. This is the show where we talk about Tech Sent, hence the name The tech guy. I guess that's kind of self-explanatory.
Tech means what? Anything digital. The internet, Home theater. Smart phones coming up. Sam Ab Sam will talk about smart cars a little later on Rod Pile. Talk about space. Space. Chris Marwar will talk about digital photography. You get the idea Digital man. You can even call and ask a question, make a comment, make a suggestion. The phone number is eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leo 8 88 8 2 7 5 5 3 6. Toll free from anywhere in the US or Canada. You can call outside that area. That's okay. You just have to use Skype out or some sort of voice over in the internet Du Hickey to call it because it's a toll free number in the US though. It should be tollfree or cost free for you anywhere in the world. 8 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6. The website, tech guy labs.com has all the information you hear on the show. All the links, the music playlist on Sundays.
It has the we call 'em the notes plus audio and video from the show and a transcript to all of that@techguidelabs.com. No sign in, no login, nothing. You just go there. It's open. I don't want your information, I just want to give you the information. I don't need, It doesn't have to be reciprocal. You don't have to give me any information. Tech guide labs.com. This is episode 1936. 1936. One thing, not, this isn't like a TV show where it's episode 36 from season 19. Actually it could be, couldn't it? Come to think of it? Well, season 19 starts next year. <laugh>, Actually I should do some math. I don't know if we did seasons, this would be our 18th season. 18 years as the tech guy. Boy have things changed. One of the big changes. Artificial intelligence, we talk about that a lot of times when companies say we're using ai.
It's, that's just a marketing term in their eyes. It's not really artificial intelligence. But there are things, I'll tell you what, I'll give you a definition cuz computers, what computers are is just very fast calculators. But they're so fast that what they do can appear to be thinking to be magical. It isn't in most cases. It's definitely not magical and it's not really thinking either. In most cases, what a computer's doing is following logic rules given to it by a human or humans, the program. And it can, it's on rails. It can only go in those directions that the human wrote. That's traditional computers. And almost everything you do runs that way from Microsoft Office to you're making a phone call that's using just rules, logic defined by humans that the machine follows. Very fast calculator. But there is something called artificial intelligence or machine learning sometimes.
And the way machine learning the distinguishes itself from this old school kind of thing is it uses real world data as training sets. It absorbs it, adjust it, digests it, and internally makes its own rules up. No human makes up the rules. The computer makes up the rules. It digests all this information and says, Well, I notice this happens every time that happens. So this must be the case. So this is the new rule with artificial intelligence or machine learning is that process, right? Absorbing, digesting this information with artificial intelligence. Humans make rules, but they don't write programs. They just say, Look, this is your goal. So for instance AlphaGo, which is the smartest chess playing computer out there, it's actually the smartest game playing computer out there, was designed to learn how to play the game by giving the rules of the game and a goal, take the king.
And then it played billions of games against itself. It just real fast. Cause it dos it real fast. Doesn't have to, There's no human involvement and was able in four hours to play so many games that it started to see the rules make up its own program. It that's really the key. It wrote its own program and became better than a human. And it did that not just with chess, but it did it with an even harder game called Go and has Beat Hum humans. The best human players at Go. It could. And so when a car, for instance, is self-driving, which is by the way, I'm gonna put that in air quotes. When it's <laugh> doing what it does, it's doing it based on training from a whole bunch of sets of information. The most interesting example of this right now is this, and maybe you've seen it already, this art generated by artificial intelligence.
I hate the phrase artificial intelligence, There's no intelligence. It's artificial. Yes, but it's not like we think of intelligent it at all. It's just, but programs like Dolly two, which is created by Open ai, which is a kind of nonprofit artificial intelligence research organization funded by a bunch of companies, including Elon Musk Open AI is Dolly two. Then there's an open source one that's actually being is much more interesting to me called stable diffusion. You can run yourself if you have enough horsepower. Stable diffusion is a good example because it's open source. We know how it's been set up. It's been trained on images on the internet, millions of his images. It just goes out and scrapes these images from everywhere, from Pinterest, from Getty. We even know Getty, which is the big stock photo site that sell. A lot of times you'll see in the newspaper, in a magazine, on a website, Getty Images, they license an image.
Famous images, many of them we know that Getty Images even has been scraped cuz they put them publicly on the internet, but they put 'em with a big watermark. You say Getty Images and you have to buy it. If you wanna get rid of the watermark we know do that. Stable Fusion has used those images because many of the images come back with a big kind of what looks like a Getty image is watermark across it. <laugh>, like that's what it learned. <laugh>. Okay. And there are artists, Greg Gutowski is one who says, it's learned on all my art. It looked at my website and now you can say to a stable diffusion, paint a picture of the Queen of Monrovia as drawn by Greg Group. And that can be a description. That could be a description. So very, it's very interesting.
Up until recently you had to apply, there was a waiting list to use Dolly, Dolly two from open ai. Now the waiting list is over. Anybody can apply. And even more Microsoft this week, among all of its announcements announced its new surface notebooks and so forth, it announced it's, it's investing in Dolly two and bringing it to the new Microsoft Designer app, which is their version of Figma, which has got sold to Adobe for 20 billion. It it's gonna be part of that. So you can be doing your Microsoft designer, which you would do to design nine on birthday party invitations or company brochures. And now you can use Dolly two. You can say, What I need here is an image of Leonardo DiCaprio sailing to Spain in the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. And then it will make this image may actually make many of them.
You kind of can refine it and get it closer to what you want, then use it. That'll be part of Designer. But even more in Bing and Microsoft Edge and Bing search, there's an image creator tool and you'll be able to use Dolly toot. See, to me, this is a very interesting, I think step forward in artificial intelligence. Here is a thing, Don't get scared. It's not the Terminator, it's not Whopper, it's not not Skynet. It's just a bunch of big computers in the sky that given text prompts can generate images. And it is, I'm gonna say machine learning. I mean it is, I guess ai, an example of ai, No intelligence, but it's just got so many images and those, oh, it's very important that those images had words associated. So what happened is the computer just said, Okay, I have this image. I don't know what it is.
Computer doesn't know what it is, but their words. And it goes, well, these words must go to this image. Okay, keep that in mind. And when you get, that's what's interesting. It's what happened with Alpha Go. It's what happened with stable diffusion, with open AI's Dolly too is you get enough of these, there's some critical mass, some massive number, millions, billions of these images. And suddenly it can make inferences like a human would be. We infer that since every day, every morning in our whole lives, the sun has come up in the east, that that's what's gonna happen tomorrow morning. That's an inductive proof and inference we in because we don't know, but based on past experience. So that's all it's doing. It's inferring. It's an inference engine. I think that's inference engine would be so much better than artificial intelligence. Cause that's a scary thing.
This thing isn't gonna take over the world. It might take over art though. <laugh>, Wow. Pretty incredible what it's doing. And these images are sort of uncanny and sometimes disturbing and a little weird, Little weird. So just if you hear the term, that's what it is. It's not intelligence, it's machine learning. It's learned how to infer stuff and to put two and two together. And it's getting better at it. Interesting though. And we'll talk with Sam in a little bit about smart vehicles, but I think despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent now on teaching cars to drive, they're not very good at it. Why <laugh> humans were so unpredictable. 88. 88. That's the problem. If we're all machines, it'll be easy. 88. 88. Ask Leo. That's the phone number. (888) 827-5536. Talk to a human right. No artificial intelligence here at all. <laugh>. Leo Laporte, the tech guy.
Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho ho. Hi Sam. Hello, Leo. Hey you're in the white space that used to be occupied by Johnny. Ive, Yes. Is this a car designed by Johnny? Ive I don't think so, but it might be. You never know. You never know. This is the Sony Sony Vision. S oh two Sony? Yeah. Wow. I didn't know they had cars. Well, they don't yet. They showed their first concept called the Vision S, So one at 2020 ces. And then this year they showed off another one. The first one was this sedan. This one's a crossover. And then earlier this year Sony announced that they were forming a joint venture with Honda to build electric cars. Nice. And Honda will be responsible for the vehicle platform and manufacturing. And Sony will be responsible for the software. <laugh>. Well, there you go. So what could possibly go wrong?
Possibly go wrong. Wow. Sony's not the first company I'd go to for software. I, they'll also be making a bunch of sensors and electronics and things like that. But there they're gonna be responsible for the vehicle camera. They're camera people. They certainly know cameras. Yeah. Yeah. No. Well, yeah. I mean, they know how to make know, make the imaging sensors from everything I've read. And I guess they do a good job with their big cameras. Their phone cameras traditionally have not been great. The hardware's good, but the process, the Sony experience or not, but almost everybody's using Sony sensors, including Apple. Hell yeah. So yeah. Interesting. Yeah, you're right. The software's not so hot. And Doug m says the Shonda car. Oh, Sony Honda, Shonda. Yeah. From Shonda Rhymes. Yeah. Well, Honda's doing good engines. We know that. They've done very well in Formula One.
Yeah. Well this is gonna be electric though, so, Oh, well that'll be in trans, It's not coming till 2026. Oh, okay. I'll be dead by then, so it's okay. <laugh>. That's a long, that's the future. I don't have to worry about the future. Yeah. Loquacious. Wait till Apple makes a car. One large round button for a steering wheel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'll be on TWI later. Oh yes. That's gonna be fun. Thank you. Yeah. With Brianna and Daniel Rubino. Yay. Gonna be good. Gonna be good. All right. Well, we'll talk to you in 20 minutes or less. 30 15. Somewhere in between 15 and 30. I'll be here whenever you're ready. I'll be, I'm here. All right. Thanks sir. Mans a strong ladies, gentlemen, boys, and curls, children of all ages. It's time once again to say hello to the person in the booth in the back.
In the corner in the dark. Kim. Kim Scher. This is lovely Green lighting. A phone angel. It's not that dark. It is kind. Kinda looks like they don't, You're like in a dark room. You don't wanna expose the film or something. Don't wanna expose. Don't wanna expose the film. <laugh> Green is the color of the tech guy. Oh, is it chosen at random? Yes. From a palette of three colors. <laugh>, every show's got a different color. Every, You're right, every show. We do a, I don't know how many shows, 10 shows on the podcast network. Everyone has a different color for reasons no one understands. I would've picked purple, but that's just me, I think. Who has Purple John? Somebody else has Purple Mac. MacBook has Purple Mac. Mac break. Mac break. Weekly is purple <laugh>. So you can't, You can't, Yeah, I can't have purple.
Can't have purple <laugh>. Well, green is the color of money, so I'll take it. Oh yeah, I like that. And there's green within you too, so I'm just, There's no money in radio, but hey, what the hell. You know, we do it for the love of it. We don't do, it's always in our heart. And blood. <laugh> who? Blood mostly. Who should we? Blood, sweat and tears. Get some of that. Laura <laugh>. Lot of tears. Rusty in San Diego wants to maybe change his soul carrier and ISP and wants your opinion. Let's just throw 'em all out and start over. Yeah, just, Just start a new <laugh>. Why not? Thank you, Kim. You're welcome. Hello, Rusty. Congratulations to your San Diego Padres making their way. Oh, I have to push this button, don't I? Making their way into the playoffs. Through the playoffs beating our, depending on where you live, Beloved or hated Dodgers. <laugh>.

Caller 1:
Yes. It is a thin line.

Leo Laporte:
A thin line between Love and hate. So Rusty, you hate your isp.

Caller 1:
Yes.

Leo Laporte:
And you hate your mobile carrier. Are they the same?

Caller 1:
No, they're not the same. And what I'd like to do, Leo, is just not jump into the middle of nowhere. I wanted your opinion on it as to changing, so I don't actually cut my nose off despite my face.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, yeah. A lot of times we do that. We go, Yeah. Oh the heck with them. I remember my wife said, Oh the heck with Amazon, I'm not gonna use them anymore. And then, Oh, it's hard not to. They kind of dominate. So who is your is P

Caller 1:
ISP is Spectrum. Okay.

Leo Laporte:
And who is your mobile company?

Caller 1:
Verizon.

Leo Laporte:
Verizon, okay. Funny because you could get rid of Spectrum and use Verizon. You're in the same position as your isp. You're in the same position as almost everybody in the country where you're in a duopoly. Almost everybody in the country. I think it's something like 86% of America has a choice between two companies for their internet, the phone company and the cable company. If you're lucky, in many areas, there's only one. And

Caller 1:
Verizon does not cover the part of town I live in.

Leo Laporte:
Okay. So Verizon's out. But you do have to, There's only one cable company in almost every part of the world. I don't know how it is in San Diego, but I'm gonna guess that Spectrum is the only available cable company

Caller 1:
In this part of town. Yes.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, they have regional monopolies. So you and cable is, by the way, of all the ways you can get internet, the best would be fiber from anybody if they're a good company. Some of this depends on the company, of course, not just the technology, but fiber's, the fastest technology cable's the next fastest then comes often satellite stuff like starlink, Elon Musk, starlink. And then finally at the end is the phone company. If you're gonna abandon your cable company and you don't have a fiber option, then you're going to dsl, which is really a worse technology than cable internet. So that may be a case of leaping from the pan into the fire.

Caller 1:
I do remember that years ago you recommended DSL Extreme to us. And we used it for a long time until they got real popular and then slowed down.

Leo Laporte:
And honestly they were sponsored for many years of this show. In the early years all DSL companies have this problem, which is they have to ride on top of the incumbent phone company. In your case, Verizon and Verizon would much prefer to send you, sell you internet than let these upstarts, DSL Extreme have to do it. But the FCC said they had to. Right. Never happened on cable. FCC never said to cable companies, You've gotta share your physical plant. Which is too bad cuz then we'd have some competition. They never, The cable gets to own both the copper and the internet as well as the tv. They have a monopoly. The phone companies do not. So other companies can ride on Verizon's wires. So that's why <laugh> phone companies frequently will cut the copper. If they're given half a chance, they will cut the copper going to your house. That eliminates anybody else using their physical plant because they have the only way in. Does Verizon offer fiber in your area? Do you know?

Caller 1:
No, we don't have fiber yet. Okay. It, It's close, but it's not here yet.

Leo Laporte:
That would be, and it would still probably be with Verizon. That would be a good alternative. Fiber's fast. It doesn't have a lot of the problem. It doesn't have a lot of the problems DSL has with distance, doesn't have a lot of the problems cable companies have with too many users. So fiber's often a good choice. Okay. Do you know if there's anybody else, Sonic that offers fiber in your area? That would be the next thing.

Caller 1:
I couldn't find any online. Yeah. Yeah. I've talked to quite a few neighbors and most of them have dumped Spectrum. And in this area, Spectrum just has all kinds of trouble. And they've gone with at and t and all of them have told me they have not seen a big slowdown. Okay.

Leo Laporte:
Okay. Nobody can be that. That's more a statement of how poor spectrum has been because at and t DSL isn't capable of the speeds that Comcast or that cable is, but maybe spectrum's so bad it's better. Hang on, we gotta take a break. Sam. Bull Salmon coming up, we're gonna talk cars stay here. So that's a good, that's probably the best way to decide this, is to talk to the neighbors and say, How's it been for you? Is it you versus at and t is offering, Is that what they're calling it?

Caller 1:
I forget now. Yeah, they all just said that the second tier of at and t was working fine. Okay.

Leo Laporte:
So at and t has a fiber offering, but probably not in your neck of the woods. If they had the fiber, I'd say go with it. Unfortunately, for most of these most users, the at and t is Uverse is dsl. They may be offering something they call a DSL or a DSL two or a DSL plus, which is two lines, which gives you better speed. So if they are offering that it and Spectrum's terrible, which I'm not surprised to hear. Oh, at t is the telco in San Diego. So Verizon, you have Verizon phone. Oh, you have cell phone. Verizon.

Caller 1:
Yes. I

Leo Laporte:
That makes, Okay, now I understand. So you have cell phone, Verizon, you have at t is your phone company probably.

Caller 1:
I've had Spectrum do all of it there. Are I our cable TV and our

Leo Laporte:
Land? Yeah, they wanna own it all, don't they? So if you still have copper coming to your house from at and t they may offer, which you must because your neighbors have it they must offer a good solution. Do your neighbors say how fast it is? And here, here's the question. If you're gonna replace cable, you're gonna wanna watch you're watch TV on it, like Netflix and stuff, right?

Caller 1:
Yes, we are. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Okay,

Caller 1:
I'll those speeds on the cell phone, is it true that all these little companies that have come up are riding the backs of the big ones? And in other words, if I switch, am I still gonna have the same coverage that Rise?

Leo Laporte:
Just depends. So many of them are somebody who buys Verizon or T-Mobile or at and t coverage. Straight Talk is an example of an MV N o MIT mobile is an example. But then there's US Cellular, which is an actual cell company. But really there are only a handful of actual cell companies. T-Mobile Sprint, I'm sorry. Now T-Mobile, at and t, Verizon, US Cellular. Who are you thinking of going to?

Caller 1:
Nobody yet. I, I'm not happy with Verizon, but I do love their coverage.

Leo Laporte:
So you'll get similar coverage

Caller 1:
Straight talk or somebody like that.

Leo Laporte:
There'll be limits on some things because the Verizon proper customers get priority. So on a crowded line, if a lot of people are using it then you will get deprioritized. But that have, that's really happens rarely. So the nice thing is you can try these guys, usually they'll give you a one or two week trial period and without harm you can say, yeah, yeah, it's not working outta my house or it's not working out at work like that.

Caller 1:
I will do that. Yeah. And of on your opening statements today, I got to talk to a real person, not ai.

Leo Laporte:
Aren't you lucky? <laugh>,

Caller 1:
Thank you again for your help, Leo.

Leo Laporte:
My pleasure. I'm glad you listened. Thanks Rusty.

Caller 1:
Have a great day.

Leo Laporte:
You too. Take care. Our show brought to you by those great folks at Podium Love Podium. It's the ultimate text messaging platform, especially for small businesses. Small businesses are competing with these behemoths that have all the technology in the world and so they can do anything they want. But if you're a small business, sometimes that that's tough. You don't have a lot of budget, you don't have a lot of IT department, you don't have a lot of help. I want you to check out podium. It's been tough for small businesses. Supply chain issues, suddenly demand goes up, suddenly goes down. And the problem I think for a lot of us comes down to marketing. Getting the word out, communicating with our customers. Podium is a way to help your small business stay ahead of the curve with modern messaging tools that your customers love. And that's really important.
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Sam Abuelsamid:
Yeah, I feel like Johnny, Ive right now, except this is Fastest

Leo Laporte:
Car we've, When is Apple gonna make a car?

Sam Abuelsamid:
I remain, I have always been skeptical that they were ever actually do it because it doesn't fit with their business model of going into very high margin businesses. The auto industry has never been a high margin business. It's been profitable, but it's never been the kind of business that could generate 30 to 35 to 40% margins that Apple likes to charge for their products. So I remain dubious. Okay.

Leo Laporte:
And yet we see more and more consumer electronics companies getting into the car business.

Sam Abuelsamid:
We see them getting into the business of making stuff for cars, making software for cars maybe even doing some manufacturing like Foxcon is gonna start to do, but not necessarily having their own brand. So being contract manufacturers The car behind me in my white room here is something else entirely. This is a concept that showed up this year at ces. It was the second of two concepts from Sony. They revealed the first one at CES in 2020. This is the second one. They did the vision. So two, the vision at Cell one was an electric sedan and the S, So two is a crossover. And when we first saw the original one in 2020 it wasn't at all clear that Sony actually wanted to get into the car business, it seemed like of the car was more a platform to show off. Here's all the different things that we can make for automakers, whether it's their sensors or display technologies the electronics, all kinds of other components that we have on there. But a couple of months after CES this year Honda announced a deal with Sony to form a new joint venture called Sona ha. Sony Honda Mobility Company. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte:
Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid:
<affirmative> to build electric vehicles. And this week we got some more details on that. Honda made a separate announcement. In one announcement that they did, they announced that they were investing 700 million into some of their plants in central Ohio in Marysville, East Liberty in Anna, to retool assembly plants and powertrain plants to build EVs starting in late 2025, early 2026. And then they also announced that they previously announced a joint venture with LG to build a battery plant. And this week they announced that plant would be also located about 40 miles southwest of Columbus near where those other plants are. And that three and a half billion dollar plant would be in production by early 2026. Why

Leo Laporte:
Does Sony wanna get in the car business?

Sam Abuelsamid:
That's a really good question. <laugh>, particularly given the nature of how they're gonna split the workload with Honda on this. I mean Sony is, obviously, Sony already sells a lot of the imaging sensors, the camera sensors that are used in cars. Yeah, sure. For your driver assist systems. A lot of those are Sony sensors just like they sell a lot of sensors to smartphone companies and other camera makers. And they're doing displays which cars are having more and more and bigger displays in them. Why they would actually want to form a joint venture and get into the actual manufacturing of the cars is not clear. And it's even stranger now that this week we heard that Sony Honda Mobility will start production of vehicles, electric vehicles in Ohio in late 2025, early 2026, Honda will be responsible for the vehicle platform.

Leo Laporte:
Well, that's a relief. Honda at least knows how to make cars.

Sam Abuelsamid:
And Sony will be responsible for, they'll be supplying a lot of components, a lot of the electronics and sensors, but also they'll be responsible for the software platform. Whoa.

Leo Laporte:
Okay. Now that's a little surprising right now, believe it or not, Blackberry is, I think the dominant software provider for cars. Were there qnx, right.

Sam Abuelsamid:
For infotainment systems and some in instrument clusters and things like that. Yeah. QNX is very widely used. Although increasingly a lot of auto makers are shifting to various forms of Linux. GM next year is introducing a new software platform called lfi, which is built on top of Red Hat Linux. Interesting. But there's also an automotive grade Linux out there. Is it Google

Leo Laporte:
Also a player in

Sam Abuelsamid:
And Android Automotive. Yes. Yeah. Is big for the infotainment systems. And

Leo Laporte:
I suspect Apple would like to be a player in that area. Apple knows software, but Sony, I don't think Sony, I don't think of Sony as a software company

Sam Abuelsamid:
To the degree that Sony has a reputation for software, It's not a very good one, especially for their's phones. I mean their interfaces for the PlayStations. People love PlayStation, but they don't usually like the software on PlayStations. But that's

Leo Laporte:
A gaming machine. I don't think that's,

Sam Abuelsamid:
Yeah. But even on their smartphones their smartphone software has not been highly regarded over the years. So I'm not really sure what they bring to the table from a software perspective.

Leo Laporte:
Where does Honda right now, in this AR area? Do they make smart vehicles? They make some electrics? They,

Sam Abuelsamid:
No, they don't have any EVs right now. They, they have several hybrids. Their first new EV is coming out in 2024. They've got two that they're actually building with gm. GM is actually gonna be manufacturing them based on their Ultium architecture. The Honda prologue and the Acura CDX are coming out in 24 pair of electric crossovers. And then, well, I shouldn't say Honda is not building any EVs. They have a couple in Europe the Honda E, which is people have driven the Honda E Love it, but it's very small too small for the US market it, It's smaller even than the mini Cooper SE that your wife has. That's

Leo Laporte:
A tiny car. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid:
People, there's a lot of enthusiasts that would love to have the Honda E in the US market, but it's not coming here cuz it just would not sell well. But Honda's developing a new electric platform that is supposed to launch called the appropriate enough, their e platform launching in 2026. Why do you think

Leo Laporte:
They're teaming up with Sony then?

Sam Abuelsamid:
To be honest, I really don't. I think the only thing I can come up with is that it costs a lot of money to develop, but

Leo Laporte:
Sony's

Sam Abuelsamid:
Not a shift over to electric.

Leo Laporte:
Sony. Sony's been struggling.

Sam Abuelsamid:
True. But if they can split the costs between them, then it might work out. And maybe as part of a joint venture Honda gets some preferred pricing on some Sony hardware, on some Sony components that they use in both the joint venture vehicles as well as their own the displays. I

Leo Laporte:
Haven't looked at Sony's financials in a couple of years, but for a while they were losing so much money that their number one profit center was insurance. Their

Sam Abuelsamid:
Insurance

Leo Laporte:
In Japan. And I don't know if that's turned around or not, but they really had tumbled from their years as a giant into consumer electronics,

Sam Abuelsamid:
I think since the launch of the PS five. I think they're making money now. And I think their camera division is also doing pretty

Leo Laporte:
So cameras. They're very, very good cameras. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid:
Their cameras are very highly regarded. But the software not so much. So it it'll be interesting to watch.

Leo Laporte:
This is why it's a puzzle. It's not for their money. It's not for

Sam Abuelsamid:
Software. Honda is Intro Honda's adding Android Automotive starting next year. I

Leo Laporte:
Think it's Oh, so they're going See I think it's the brand Sony. I think it's a brand. It

Sam Abuelsamid:
Might be, Yeah,

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, yeah. Sam Bull. Sam listened to his podcast wheel bearings and of course join him here every week. Thanks Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid:
Thank you. Leo.

Leo Laporte:
I think it's the brand.

Sam Abuelsamid:
Yeah. Yeah. That could be,

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Sony the one and only and all that.

Sam Abuelsamid:
Yeah. Hey, maybe they'll start putting Walkmans into new Honda vehicles.

Leo Laporte:
Oh my God.

Sam Abuelsamid:
<laugh>. Have a little sport Walkman in the dashboard of your Honda. Yeah, sure.

Leo Laporte:
Why the heck not?

Sam Abuelsamid:
What could go wrong?

Leo Laporte:
What could possibly go wrong? Do you wish to stick for the next few minutes and

Sam Abuelsamid:
Yeah, I'll stick around for the segment. Okay. And then I have some stuff to do before we do twi.

Leo Laporte:
So all right. It's all yours all.

Sam Abuelsamid:
So earlier on in the chat, somebody mentioned, I think it might have been redacted mentioned that there <laugh> a friend of theirs who just bought a new Subaru in Massachusetts and was disappointed to learn after they purchased it that they could not get the Starling telematic system enabled. And I think we might have talked about this a couple of months ago back I think last November, or maybe it was the year before voters in Massachusetts voted in favor of a new right to repair law that requires manufacturers to make their telematics data accessible to third party service providers as in order to do diagnostics. Which to be honest, I was a little dubious of that particular I, I'm a big supporter of Right to Repair, but I was a little dubious about that particular regulation because giving more access to connected vehicle services can be problematic from a security standpoint for the vehicle.
And the third party service providers could already get that data directly if they had physical access to the vehicle through the diagnostics port. So I was a little dubious about that. But unfortunately, what Subaru's response to this new regulation was they said, okay from now on Subaru vehicles registered in, sold, or registered in Massachusetts will not have access to Starling's telematic service. So, or not Starling I forget Starling is SpaceX, but they, they'll not have access to our telematic service. And so redacted friend basically can't get the connected vehicle services in his new Subaru or her new Subaru. And that's an unfortunate response to the regulation. Like I said, the regulation is a little problematic.

Leo Laporte:
It's kind of guty. Cuz I think one of the potential risks is that people stop buying Subarus in Massachusetts, although I think that is the official state car. So maybe not.

Sam Abuelsamid:
I know it is in Vermont and New Hampshire. Yeah, I'm not sure about Massachusetts, but there are very popular there. So it is an unfortunate response. I think it would've been better to find another solution to this. See Webs short says my Honda Clarity plugin hybrid was a great car. Honda was losing money big time on the Clarity and discontinued it. Last year when I sold mine with ultra low mileage, I made $14,000. Pretty good. Nice. I

Leo Laporte:
Feel like I make money on my Mustang MA if I decided to sell it at the end of the lease. <laugh>.

Sam Abuelsamid:
It could be. Yeah. Let's see. Food bank. Well in fact one of the things to start doing with their EVs if you lease an for EV now you no longer have the option to buy it at the end of the lease. Right.

Leo Laporte:
I bought it back, turn it back in or lease to back when I could still get a buy.

Sam Abuelsamid:
Right. And so you might very well probably do it if you were to buy it, you could probably turn around and sell it for a profit. Yeah. Yeah. Alright, well I think we're just about our time.

Leo Laporte:
Thank you Sam. You rock. Have a wonderful afternoon. I'll see you this evening. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid:
I'll talk to you in a couple hours.

Leo Laporte:
Thank you, sir. All right.

Sam Abuelsamid:
Bye-bye.

Leo Laporte:
Leo Laport, the tech guy, 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number in the break. Sam and I were talking with the chat room about kind of an interesting story in Massachusetts with Subaru, Massachusetts recently passed a right to repair law. Were big on these right to repair laws because after all, when you buy a phone or a device or a tractor you should be able to fix it. It's yours. But a lot of companies lock it out. Apple's famous for that, right? They've changed their tune, but for a long time they fought the right to repair. They said, no, no, you know, have to repair it with our own parts and you can't. So Massachusetts passed was we're very early to pass a right to repair law. But one of the things that they required in the right to repair law has irritated Subaru
In the right to repair. They require that Subaru allow third party repair shops access to the telematics software. That's the software that runs in your car. Not to run the car itself, but to run the entertainment system. If you have OnStar, it would run OnStar, things like that. Subaru calls it's telematics star, not to be confused with Elon Musk's starlink and Subaru's response to this is to disable the telematics. So if you buy a Subaru in Massachusetts, as one of our chatters did, the dealer disables the telematics and Subarus suing over the law, which by the way was passed by referendum as a voter approved law.
Oh boy. <laugh> boy, you'd have to, Subarus are very popular. I understand in New England I have many family members who own Subarus and I guess they figure, well more people buy Subarus in Massachusetts even if they don't have the infotainment system. I don't know if you knew before you bought the car that your infotainment system wouldn't work, you might change your mind. This is one way to put pressure right on the government. Furthermore, I have to say it is possible it's illegal to disable starlink because of the right to repair law. So there's a battle shaping up in Massachusetts over this one. You know what? Right to repair is the right thing to do. You buy something, you should be able to fix it. You should be able to get the parts, you should be able to get the information. You should be able to fix it. Subaru's contention is that starlink safety and security is about your safety. It's got collision notification, remote ignition, start remote door lock and unlock stolen vehicle location, roadside assistance. It's kinda like OnStar, right? Maintenance notification vehicle health reports, diagnostic reports. And they think they don't want, they say no third party should be able to mess with that.
Hm. Well, we'll see. That's gonna be an interesting battle. I can see both sides on that actually. That's interesting. Let's go to a Thousand Oaks. Lynn is on the line next on the tech guy show. Hi Lynn.

Caller 2:
Hi. Great to speak with you Leo. I've listened to you for a long time.

Leo Laporte:
Wonderful. It's great to see to hear you. Thanks for calling

Caller 2:
<laugh>. I have a question on one of your shows you brought up that you back up all your files to iCloud and to Google Drive

Leo Laporte:
Photos. Yes. You encrypted. Yes. Yeah,

Caller 2:
They do encrypted. So all my tax information that I

Leo Laporte:
Back up. Yeah, you do not wanna back that stuff up because while it's encrypted in transit and maybe even encrypted in place both Google and Apple have access to it. We know this because

Caller 2:
I've already done that.

Leo Laporte:
<laugh>. Yeah. Well so all of that stuff is available to employees at those companies. And we know that because they do a variety of things. Google will scan Google Drive for instance, as I believe Apple will as well for child sexual boost material. You'd want them to do that. They don't wanna store it. If it were truly encrypted, they could not do that. So my advice with very important stuff that you don't want anybody to see, you're, by the way, you're probably, I'm sure you're safe. No Apple employer, Google employees gonna snoop through people's files. If they do, not only would they get fired, they'd get prosecuted immediately. But, But the possibility exists. And I should point out, anytime you put something on the internet, which is what the cloud is, there's always the risk that will get stolen. So remember a lot of celebrities some years ago had pictures on Apple's iCloud stolen and released to the public and it was very embarrassing. Now, you know, can't really fault Apple for this because it was a hack. But nevertheless that's the risk. So my advice, if you're gonna put anything with, for instance, an address and social security number in it, like your tax returns is to encrypt it before you upload it.

Caller 2:
So what I I'm trying to do is pull the stuff out of Google that I did and then what software would be best to use it to encrypt it.

Leo Laporte:
Well, usage, like I said, anytime you're putting in the internet, there's a risk, unless it is encrypted in such a way that it can't be, We know that Apple's iCloud for instance, they'll hand over information to law enforcement as we'll. Google. I mean there's a whole bunch of evidence that they don't encrypt that if somebody mm-hmm <affirmative> properly ask for it. But you can encrypt it before you upload it. And this is what I would suggest. There are a couple of services that are fully encrypted from end to end, but they're like, yes, there's one called Tray or IT T R E S O R I T <affirmative>. But because they do that, that's much more limited in what you can do with it. I would suggest much better to, you've got your tax returns on the drive on your Mac <affirmative> I would suggest running an encryption tool on it and then letting it back up. Now the encryption is in your hands, not apple's hands. And so they K if it were stolen or they handed it over or an employee wanted to look at it, they couldn't because you have encrypted it. It's my friend Steve Gibson. Our security group calls it pre-internet encryption or pie. And there are lots of little tools you can use to encrypt your files locally. You're on a Mac or an iPhone?

Caller 2:
Both.

Leo Laporte:
So I wouldn't put it on, I'll be honest, I would not put it on a phone because that is <affirmative> is in effect putting it on the internet. Phones are online at all times and they are hackable. So I wouldn't do that. But Apple has built in encryption. You can write or write, click on the file and say encrypt it. Well actually that's for the whole, Yeah, but when you upload it, it doesn't. So you need to get a third party program. I'm sorry cuz Apple's encryption is what we call full disk encryption. So I apologize, <affirmative>, that's file Vault. You should certainly have that turned on. But this is so complicated. When you log into your Apple in order for you to use your computer, it unlocks the file vault. All your stuff is now available to you. It's not encrypted obviously. Or you wouldn't be able to use it.
<affirmative> when it get, that is now uploaded iCloud as is not encrypted <affirmative>. So it's not encrypted when it gets to iCloud. So there isn't a built in file encryption, they're just full disc encryption. You should certainly use that way. If you give away or sell the computer, it gets stolen. It's no good to anybody. But I would then use an additional file encryption tool. One way to do this is with its preview, Apple's preview app does encryption <affirmative>. So you can open the, and you're probably using PDFs for your tax returns anyway, right? Yeah, yeah. So I think you can turn, make an encrypted PDF with apple's preview, which is that's, that would be good enough. That would certainly what I would do if you're stirring tax documents, some things that you would really don't want the world to see I would encrypt those locally. You could put them on a backup disc locally that's encrypted. That would be another way to do it. But when you upload it to cloud, good. But uploading to the cloud, you know, really gotta remember encrypt before you upload. If it's something private, there are a number of third party tools you can buy. Wind zip will do it on a Windows pre preview. Do it on a Mac. I would suggest doing that. Leo Laporte, the tech guy,
Unfortunately.
Yeah. The lot of services that use iCloud for backup if you're using, I guess somebody saying TurboTax, it will back it up to iCloud encrypted. So I mean, it's probably safe to trust Apple. I'm not saying you shouldn't trust Apple, but if you really got something you don't want somebody to see. There are keep, There are a lot of programs that we'll do if you search for a Mac OS file encryption there programs that'll do this. I would not put it on your phone. There's Okay. Yeah, that's not a secure place to put it, I don't think.

Caller 2:
I'm just getting real nervous because of all the scams and hacks out there that I'm getting the Amazon scams. Oh,

Leo Laporte:
Constant

Caller 2:
Scams.

Leo Laporte:
And that's why that's, I'd be careful about the iPhone. Most of those come through text messages on the phone. Right. And so that's the risk of putting stuff on your phone. Okay.

Caller 2:
Yeah. I have a VPN on my phone.

Leo Laporte:
Good for you. I hope that matters. Doesn't help the one you doesn't help. Ok, good. But it doesn't help be in some cases because if you're transmitting the file or a bad guy gets into your phone is transmitting the file, he has full access it to you. You have full access to it. It's

Caller 2:
Just because I allowed 'em in. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. So the phone is a bad place to put anything you really wanna keep secure.

Caller 2:
Okay. What I do do is anything I want secure, I put them in notes and then lock it.

Leo Laporte:
That's a good start. I have to see if Apple's notes, if that's using strong encryptions. So just because you can lock something doesn't mean it's fully encrypted. So let me just look and see. Okay. You want something, if you want it to see the word a e s encryption or r sa encryption secure features in notes. Let me look here. What apple's using for their encryption. Yes, good. When a user secures a note, a 16 bike key is derived from the user's passphrase using pbk DF two. That's the correct thing to do. N S HHA 2 56, that's the correct thing to do. And it's encrypted using AEs. That's strong encryption. So there you go.

Caller 2:
So I use that for all my passwords.

Leo Laporte:
Perfect. Yeah. And Apple's key chain is secured the same way Apple's key chain is secure. So you can use key chain as well. Oh good. Yeah. Great. Oh, this is good to know. You know what? Thanks for asking about that. Yeah, I'm seeing app. Apple did the right thing here. There is a lot of pressure from people for Apple to properly encrypt files on iCloud. They're really reluctant to do that because then they would have to tell it's troubling. Law enforcement doesn't want them to do that. Right. Because law enforcement uses that can subpoena them. And so <affirmative> Apple is cut. It's caught between a rock and a hard place. They would love to be able to say to law enforcement, Hey, we can't help you. It's encrypted. And for a while there was a move at Apple to do that. But I think they're reluctant. I don't think they want to get in that PR battle. Okay, great. Yeah. Hey, good question. Thank you. I appreciate it, Lynn. It's complicated, but it's the right question to be asking and I'm glad you're doing that. Absolutely. The right questions. Yeah, they wanted to do that and that's why they were doing that client side csam. Exactly. That's exactly right. Evil irc. That was the rumor. I think government calls them. Governments call them and say, You would better not do that

...:
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte:
And if you do, we're gonna go to the press and say Apple is supporting terrorists and child pornographers, it looks, it's a bad look. Yeah. Whether you can actually secure PDFs in the preview. So you secure them in preview or put them in your notes and secured it. Yeah, that's a very good way to do it. Yep. I'm really happy to see Apple does secure notes the right way. Very good. Yeah. What's going on, huh? With IO iPad OS 16 and Mac os Ventura <affirmative>, Mike B's gonna win his bet. You're gonna get a case of crabs from me, Mike. Sorry. We have a bet. He says that Apple will not do a public event. By the way, all the rumor mills say that too. I say, why would Apple pass up this opportunity? Yeah. Matter of days, which could be this week. I think it's gonna be next. I think Mark thinks it's gonna be the 24th, but we shall see 24th or 25th Apple's quarterly results are the 27th on Thursday. Okay, well that's not true. What do you mean nothing left to present? There's quite a bit left to present. Mac Minis on the M two MacBook Pros possibly imax, a new Apple tv. And there's lots to present. I a new iPad, a new iPad Pro. New iPad pros. Well, you sent me a case of lobsters. I'll send you a case of crabs. I think that was the, wasn't it? Or am I confused?
Apple has at least as much to announce as Microsoft announced last week. Of course, they didn't have an event. Did they? Just released a video at a prescribed time. That's probably what Apple by Justine. A bunch of stuff.
Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte here, the tech guy. It's time to talk about digital stuff. Computers, the internet, Home theater, digital photography, Chris Mark, water photographers coming up in a bit. Are you participating in Chris's assignment? Mysterious Good time of year to take pictures of mysterious things. We'll also talk about smart watches. I've got the new Apple Smart Watch Ultra, but Google announced it's smart. Watch the Pixel Watch this week. A lot of reviews starting to come in on the Pixel Watch. Actually, that was last week, wasn't it? But people are getting their Pixel watches this week and the reviews are out. I have a Pixel seven here. We could talk about that. Very nice. Very nice. The new Google phone. Google struggles because while they make nice phones, this is nicer yet even than the Pixel six, which was excellent.
They solved a lot of the little issues that the Pixel six had. They just can't make much headway against Samsung and Apple for some reason. They just, I don't know if it's, maybe the stores don't recommend if you don't in the us, if you don't get the cellular companies pushing your device, it's very hard to sell it. That's why Huawei pulled outta the market. They said once they had a deal with Verizon a couple of years ago US Commerce Department said, Don't buy Huawe. Their Chinese. Chinese. And so Verizon dumped them and Wawei said, Fine, we can't sell it in the us then we're not gonna spend any marketing money on a phone. You can't buy at the phone store. That's how people get their phones. I guess Microsoft did the same thing. They had a little phone q little phone called the Kin. I liked it. It was kind of more for kids. I think it was Verizon that sold it, but I guess even though Verizon had it on their product list, you'd go in a Verizon store, there'd be nowhere to be seen the salesperson say, No, you don't want that phone. Three months later, Microsoft throws in the towel. Throws in the towel. So it may well be that Galaxies and iPhones sell well because that's what the phone stores push in the us.
And maybe why the Pixel, which is a very credible phone. And eight ninety nine, it's less than the iPhone in the Samsung flagships. That's a good price. And they still don't sell that. Well, I think Google said that over the past five years, they've sold 27 million phones. That's how many phones Apple sells in three months or Samsung. 88. 88. Ask Leah, we answer questions about any of that technology stuff. If you've got a question, comment or suggestion. Jody's on the line from Huntington Beach, California. Hi, Jody.

Caller 3:
Hi.

Leo Laporte:
Welcome.

Caller 3:
Leo. Yes. Thank you

Leo Laporte:
So much. Same

Caller 3:
You Joe,

Leo Laporte:
What can I <laugh> do for you?

Caller 3:
Well, I have MSN for my email and I haven't been receiving any for about three days and on my iPhone, on my Android phone, tablet, and my computer. And two days be, Yeah. So the day before I go,

Leo Laporte:
Oh, she's dropped the phone. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you're not driving.

Caller 3:
I'm not. I'm pulling over right now. Good. So

Leo Laporte:
I know I don't want you to get in trouble.

Caller 3:
Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. The day before I stopped receiving my email, I got something from allegedly from Microsoft. And I'm gonna read it to you right now. Okay. And it said to do something

Leo Laporte:
Oh, I bet you was for Microsoft. But of course you wanna be very careful. You're quite rightly suspicious. But Microsoft has moved MSN Mail to Outlook.

Caller 3:
Okay.

Leo Laporte:
So it's now outlook.com.

Caller 3:
Oh

Leo Laporte:
So

Caller 3:
Yesterday. Yesterday I saw Outlook to see if that would help.

Leo Laporte:
Well, you have to set it up. Yeah, you have to set it up. Okay. So the question I have for you is, do you use the web mail interface for msn? Do you use your browser to access your email? Yes. Okay. So you've MSN logged in there and you don't see any new email.

Caller 3:
No

Leo Laporte:
Thing is send yourself some email and it doesn't

Caller 3:
Full.

Leo Laporte:
It's full.

Caller 3:
That's what it says.

Leo Laporte:
Well, how about that, <laugh>? Okay. But it's not. Are you sure?

Caller 3:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Cause I look in the trash. Trash counts.

Caller 3:
<affirmative>. I can do the trash.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Empty the trash. Yeah, I do. What do the instructions in the email say?

Caller 3:
It says,

Leo Laporte:
I am a Nigerian prince and I want to give you 56 million.

Caller 3:
Yeah, it says Microsoft Statement. Verify your identity to keep your account active.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, that sounds suspicious.

Caller 3:
<laugh>. Yeah. And then there's, Wait, if I go to the sender and I click on that, it says it's from info crowd.ai.

Leo Laporte:
There you go. Throw that out. Yeah. It wouldn't be, if Microsoft sent you that email, wouldn't be from crowd.ai <laugh>. So you, boy, I have first of all, golf clap for you because you did exactly the right thing. It's like, well who sent this? And you see these 64 thirty9@gmail.com and you go, Yeah, that's not Microsoft. So ignore that. That's spam. And you didn't do anything right. No, you didn't respond to it. Yeah. That's just an attempt to hack you. We're all getting so much of that light right now, <affirmative>. And so normally you don't use Outlook or another mail program to get this. You're not using Apple Mail or anything like that. You go to the website to get your mail.

Caller 3:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I think so. First of all, if that message we're real, when you try to log in, not through the message, that's where they're trying to get you. They're trying to click a link in the message and there low and behold is your MSN login and you enter your account. And it's not really that it's just getting your password but if you go to msn com and you log into your mail and it doesn't say, Oh, you need to update or something, then that's just bogus. No. So you knew that was bogus, but I am worried that it says you've run out of room.
Well, if you don't, do you pay for msn? No, I don't. Out of space does happen on email programs. Microsoft gives you free. Well they do for Outlook 15 gigabytes, which is a ton of mail. I'm not sure what MSN gives you. It might be less than that. So if your storage is full, you first thing to do is empty the trash. You know, did that, They call it the deleted items, but that's the same thing. Maybe delete more also. Yeah, you did that. So you deleted a lot of stuff and you still are running outta space. Yeah, <affirmative>.
And of course when you're not paying for a service, you can't really expect to call them and say is broken. Right? Try. So there's one thing you can do that you might try, might solve this, which is to migrate your MSN account to outlook.com which is their more modern everything. That's what they want you to do. They've wanted you to do that for some time. Your email address at MSN will not stop working <affirmative>. So you still don't have to tell everybody, Oh, I have a new address. But you'll have just a new interface and I wonder if that might give you more space. So they've gone through, was Hotmail and <laugh>? Sure. And it was live <laugh>.
It's gone through a bunch of names and I think Microsoft wants everybody to move to Outlook. So that might be the thing to do. I'm looking to see how you can convert MSN email to Outlook cuz that's what you want to do. I don't know if there's, Yeah, so sign into the MSN client. Go to help settings. Click on settings, click on email. Oh no. Oh, it looks like, okay, click on importer export. Oh, this seems complicated. Then copy the email and save your MSN email. Oh, I guess this is just a backup. Backup. Now you can say, I don't, No, this is terrible. There's no way to migrate this. They don't give you a way to do this. I guess not. Thank you Microsoft <laugh>. So I take it back. They don't want you to go to Outlook or maybe they just want you to go away. I don't know. I don't know what the answer is to this. Honestly. It, you've deleted as much mail as you feel you can and it's still saying there's no room.

Caller 3:
Right. And I can't even send out Limit either.

Leo Laporte:
Oh wow. And then we go And again, you're using the Web's web address, right?

Caller 3:
That's correct.

Leo Laporte:
Okay. I don't know what's going on. I don't know. So one other thing you could do, something the Chapman's telling me is this seems like a good thing to check anyway. If your mail has been hacked, check the RSS subscriptions folder. Sometimes they put a rule in there to forward mail so you don't see it. You wanna make sure there's no rules in there modifying your email filtering. You don't. And if you checked for big attachments, like large files, if somebody sent you a 10 gigabyte file, that would give you the, it would just be one email with a giant file. Look at your attachments too.

Caller 3:
And it just little emails I don't get.

Leo Laporte:
This is frustrating and I honestly don't know what to tell you. I don't know of a fix for this cuz I'm not sure what's going wrong.

Caller 3:
She's looking around.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I don't know. Okay. Yeah, sorry. If somebody knows, Give us a ring. We wanna help Jody out. I'm Jody. I'm I, I'm a big bust here. I'm sorry.

Caller 3:
All right, thank you.

Leo Laporte:
You're welcome. I just don't know what's going on. Microsoft I guess still maintains msn. We get a lot of people very frequently with I'll, I'll be kind, I'll call them legacy email accounts to MSN or AOL or Hotmail. EarthLink and the world has kind of moved on from these and I think most people have kind of moved on as well to unfortunately they've just moved on to the next msn, which is Microsoft's free Outlook or Google's Gmail. Those are the two most popular emails in the world. Used to be Yahoo. But that's also kind of become legacy. And honestly, if emails, I know you don't wanna pay for email cuz you can get it free in so many places. But that's part of the problem is these companies, they're not, It is free. So A, they're not gonna support you and B, they're not, Their heart isn't in it <laugh>. So the software's not so up to date. So when you get older stuff like msn, I feel like it's try logging in with your MSN account to outlook.com. Maybe the next thing to try Jody Outlook is the modern Microsoft email and it's outlook.com and it's free as well. And I wonder if maybe your MSN mail isn't just sitting there.
You can access your MSN mail account from a desktop like the Apple mail program or the Microsoft Live mail program. I don't. Microsoft calls it anymore. So you can get desktop email. You might try that as well. I'll put a link in the show notes to how do you set up your desktop email? Just, I'm wondering what's going on and I just don't know. I think it's gotta be related to the fact that Microsoft has moved on from the legacy platform. A, if somebody knows, boy, give us a ring. 88. 88. Ashley is a phone number. (888) 827-5536. I hate striking out like that. I hate striking out like that. I just don't know what the what's going on. Why. It sounds like you got plenty of room. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. More trouble with email. I think a lot of that comes from the fact that people are using these free email accounts. You should really pay for email if you care about it. Hello Chris, Mark

Chris Marquardt:
And you. How is our connection today?

Leo Laporte:
It's okay. It does sound a little different. What's going on?

Chris Marquardt:
Oh, it looks different. It sounds different. My main workhorse AMEC Pro has died.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, no. Two

Chris Marquardt:
Days ago. So on an emergency setup right now it's wired to the Yeah,

Leo Laporte:
It's working.

Chris Marquardt:
It's not

Leo Laporte:
As pretty.

Chris Marquardt:
I know.

Leo Laporte:
I can see your, all I can

Chris Marquardt:
Do at this

Leo Laporte:
Point, <laugh>. No, it's fine. All

Chris Marquardt:
I can do at this point. So

Leo Laporte:
It's fine. I'm sorry your computer died. That sucks.

Chris Marquardt:
Yeah, I'm, wait, I'm waiting for a replacement.

Leo Laporte:
Oh good.

Chris Marquardt:
Well, not a replacement. I, I'm waiting for an M to

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, that's what I would do. Get outta the studio.

Chris Marquardt:
No, it's a MacBook

Leo Laporte:
Or a MacBook. That's fine. Yeah, that's what I would do because

Chris Marquardt:
And a display. Yeah, it's

Leo Laporte:
So much faster

Chris Marquardt:
Of the fixed desktop or over

Leo Laporte:
Here. Yeah, I retired my iMac Pro because it really wasn't, even though at the time that was the thing, but it was,

Chris Marquardt:
It was a good machine as it lasted. But this is lets it buy Intel. Yeah, I guess at this point. So yeah, we'll have to do it this way for this week and next week it'll take two weeks to deliver. So

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Okay. We'll talk in a minute.

Chris Marquardt:
You have an email by the way, just as a backup link in case something goes wrong here. I shall pull it up. We, we'll talk light again as we do every,

Leo Laporte:
I like light

Chris Marquardt:
Three, four months.

Leo Laporte:
Light is like light, light is good. And we'll shed a new light on the topic of light. That good? All right, talk soon. Leo Laport, the tech guy, 88. 88. Ask Leo Kef Brewer in our Discord who lives in the uk said something kind of surprising. He says, Interesting here, US folks suffering from endless spam emails and texts here in the uk. It's far less of an issue. I, So the fcc, we talk about this from time to time and it's probably worth mentioning again, the FCC has a framework for getting rid of spam robo calls and spam phone calls, and I hope spam texts as well. The framework is called Stir and Shaken. And the FCC has been laggard in enforcing it because of the, I'll tell you why. You wanna know why that they have their own reasons, but I'll tell you why.
<laugh> cause the phone companies make money on this junk. And so they're moving very slowly, as slowly as they possibly can because of phone companies and the FCC of a, ah, shall I say, a close relationship. So the FCC is finally booting off some sources of a lot of the problems these small carriers who don't even have building <laugh>, the ones that frankly the bad guys use. And so I'm hoping, and I've been hoping in vain for many years, that finally this scourge of spammy phone calls. I haven't gotten a lot of your car warranties expiring calls lately. Have those seem to be dying off? They're now moving to text. And I suspect this is why I really think it's the FCC finally cracking down on the originating companies mostly, almost all overseas. A lot of 'em in the Caribbean that are the source of these robocalls.
Now I want 'em to crack down on the texts. Now, don't in the us I don't know what it's like in the uk. The First Amendment protects politicians from spamming you <laugh>. So you will not get fewer robocalls as we approach an election, a midterm election here next month. You will not get fewer texts. You're gonna get a lot of those. I've been getting a lot of political solicitations. They can't stop those. They're protected. But you shouldn't get as many solicitations to get your auto warranty fixed or to buy a time share in Miami or anything like that. Let's hope. Let's hope they're starting to move on. This one. Let's go to well do I have time now? I think I've spoken too long and I'm not gonna have time to get to your roco but hang on. We will talk to Roco and Mike both on the line, both on hold between now and then.
However, Chris Mark Ward is here to talk mysteriously. That's his photo assignment. And we will also talk about light because that's what really photography of all kinds is all about. I have I don't know what camera phone Chris is using these days, but as I mentioned, I just got the pixel seven. I'll show him some and you some pictures from the Pixel seven. I'm really, really pleased with this dx o Mark just said it's the best camera phone. I think this, the Pixel seven, the iPhone 14 pro and the Samsung 20 twos are all about the same. They're all pretty darn close. You get great, great images with any of 'em, but I think it's only a matter of time before these become the dominant camera platforms. Leo LaPorte, the tech guy, let's all just move to England. The problem is, Kev, you've got Liz Trust. So you may <laugh> not have, have spam messages, but you have lives trust. So that's interesting. You don't get political spam either. First amendment, yeah. You may not have Liz Trust for long <laugh>. Wow. She is on her way to being the shortest lived prime minister in British history. I think we're close to it. Anyway.
Yeah, I think the camera is really good. I have to say in the pixel, I, let's see here, If I have some more images,
It's taken, for some reason, Google photos starts with a low res image. That's not the actual image. I don't know why it's so low res there. That's a higher res. That's from the wide angle. This was pretty, I have to say this was pretty dark. This is not lit. So this was yesterday, John, at the console in studio A. So that is not very well lit. That's, that's a dark little corner. And you can see it's done. A lot of brightening look underneath the desk here is, I guess if I pull this down, you can see that there's a, it's, you can see what's under the desk. Let's see, here's a kitco that was telephoto. This is wide again, it's got a nice telephoto. This is let's see, You should tell me here. This is from the, what's it say? You can't, I don't know what 6.81 millimeters means.
I think this is the normal lens. I think this is the one what they call the one x. And this is the two x really nice, very good detail. Here's a, some photo that was really tricky of a day of the dead altar. And it was in this half was in bright sunlight and this half was in shadow, but it did a pretty good job of evening that out. I thought I took that because I knew it would be a hard, tough picture to take. But what I didn't do is take these same images with the iPhone. I'm sorry to say. So I don't have a comparable, I'm very happy though, with the not only the cr Google stuff is very crisp, maybe even over sharpened, but the color is very good. The white balance is very good. There seems to be good detail. This is an example of the zoom.
So this was the wide of a tree in our backyard. That's the one X, that's the two x, that's the last digital, I mean optical zoom, I think the 10 x. Then this is more this digital. And you could see it gets quite ary by the time. I think that's th that's 30. I can't remember what the, It's pretty good. It's what, let's see, 0.5, one, two, and five. But when you go to five, then you get a slider that lets you, I dunno if we pixel peep the detail even on this. Zoomed in one is pretty good.
It's little smear. All right, let's do a show. Mock Shall <laugh>. This episode of the Tech guy brought to you by Shopify. One thing, my daughter, who is aspiring comedian, goes to a lot of open mic nights. And one things I love about the open mic night is gives everybody an equal opportunity, right? That's, in fact, one of the things I love about being a comic, for instance. Anybody can do it and it's merit based. It's completely democratic, it's open to all. That's also the thing I love about Get Ready for this one. Shopify. Shopify. In fact, Abby uses Shopify to sell her merch. Shopify is an all in one commerce platform that makes it simple for to start, run and grow a successful business. Oh, there you go. Another Shopify sale. Every minute new sellers around the globe are making their first sale with Shopify.
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Really nothing you can't do with Shopify third party apps. Everything you can think of on demand printing Abby uses that. Accounting chat bots. Everything you need to customize your business to your needs is already in your hands. With Shopify, with 24 7 support and free libraries full of educational content, Shopify's got you every step of the way. Whether you're ready to launch your business into the spotlight. When you're ready to do that, do it with Shopify. Get right up on the stage there. Say I am here world. Check it out. The commerce platform that backs millions of businesses both down the street and around the globe. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with your business. Go on, try Shopify. You can do it for free. Start selling anywhere. You'll be amazed how easy it is. Sign up for that free trial. shopify.com/twitt. That's all lowercase, S h o p I f y.com/twit. T I t shopify.com/twit starts selling online today. It's a very satisfying moment when you get that first Shopify sale. shopify.com/twit. And now back to the tech guy, Mama, don't take my coat of chrome. Maybe. I love the film and so does this guy right here. Film camera experts. Chris Marwar. He does a little digital too. I might add. He's my photo sensei at S E N S E I. Dot. Photo joins us every week to talk about photography. Hi Chris.

Chris Marquardt:
Hey, how's it going today? It's

Leo Laporte:
Going great. Welcome to the Tech Guy Show. You wanted to talk about light?

Chris Marquardt:
Yeah, a little bit of digital <laugh>, little bit. Well, I wanna talk about light. I wanna talk about light because we do this here three times a year, four times a year, because it is the essence of photography. Light is key in photography. So this time around, I want to give you a few, let's say attributes that light has that help you in the future if you take pictures and if you look for interesting light. And they're very four very simple things. The first one's intensity light sources have determines the brightness of the light source. The second is the direction of the light source. So that determines where the shadows fall, how strong textures come out how nice portrait might look. Third attribute is the size of a light source. A bigger light source cast different shadows than a smaller light source. So if you look at the sun, that's a small light source cast.
Very harsh shadows. If you are lit by a bright wall, that is a big light source that reflects light and you end up with really soft shadows. You can see this in studio photographers. They have these big soft boxes. They're called soft boxes because they make soft shadows because they're big light sources. And the fourth though, we have intensity, direction, size, and color. Color is the fourth one of course, light throughout the day, the sun changes color in the evening and the morning you have this nice warm golden light. And then during the noon hours, it's more on the cool side. And if it's overcast, it tends to be more cool. So intensity, direction, size, and color. And with that, I wanna just look at a few pictures and talk about them, because all these pictures have one thing in common. I think they have really interesting light. Here's one by, so pretty renit stove. And what are we actually looking at? This is trending light, mammoth hot springs, Yellowstone National Park. So what we're looking at is one of those very, Okay, so let's try to determine a few things here. First of all, color of the light, right? Color as an important attribute. It's very warm. And you can see the sun setting right back there behind the clouds there. So there it's warm, low sunlight, which informs where shadows fall and things. So

Leo Laporte:
I always feel like photos, this are too good. They're Photoshop, <laugh>, Photoshop, they're paintings. No,

Chris Marquardt:
Not breathy, not really. I mean this one of a mountain by Dan L 2011. This is one of those shots that the Dan might have cranked up the colors just a little bit to intensify the saturation a bit. But what we're seeing here is a scene in the mountains, the sun is setting. So you get these glowing tops of the mountains. And here we see a very interesting phenomenon. Do you see this snowy face that is brightly lit? The snowy face of the mountain that is reflecting light up into the clouds. So you see that,

Leo Laporte:
Oh, it's so bright.

Chris Marquardt:
You see in the

Leo Laporte:
Cloud? Yeah,

Chris Marquardt:
Yeah. Is a reflection from the snow on the side of

Leo Laporte:
The mountain. That's cool.

Chris Marquardt:
And you can see how soft that is in the sky because it's a big light source that is pretty much illuminating it. And the warm color does its thing. So this

Leo Laporte:
Was taken with a Nikon cool picks a P 1000 point shoot. Wow. If

Chris Marquardt:
You find amazing lights, the camera is totally secondary. Here's one that I've found really intriguing. It's a long corridor. An old building might be an old, I don't know, old European hospital or something. And you have all these different light sources coming in through the windows that are, they look like they have shutters in front of them. So you have these streets of light against the ceiling. You have light streak coming in through the doorways on the right hand side. That's a long exposure. And that is just simply interesting light. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
So yeah, whenever also with point shoot, by the way. That's really interesting.

Chris Marquardt:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Here's a nature scene. I like the location. So we're seeing flowers in the foreground. Something in the foreground is always a good idea in a photo. And then the clouds make a really interesting light because, well, they make an interesting feature in the photo, but also they help the light to be a bit more diffused and not as straight on

Leo Laporte:
From Bonnie. Bonnie Moreland, who took the picture, does note that she waited three hours at this spot for the sun to go down for the light. And if you want perfect light, sometimes you need a lot of patience.

Chris Marquardt:
If you're a nature photographer, you will wait for things like this. For example what we see is silhouette clouds in the sky, the sun setting behind them. You don't see the sun really. But what you see is these light streaks that the sun creates. And it's not just the silhouette of a cloud, but do you see this little streak of light around the edges tracing the edge of the silhouette? Like

Leo Laporte:
A little rainbow almost. Yeah, it's pretty.

Chris Marquardt:
Yeah. So this is what we call edge light. And we use this in portraits as well. You put a light source behind,

Leo Laporte:
Usually on people's hair

Chris Marquardt:
Called hair light or shoulder light or rim lights. That's a nice method. And of course that combined with the warm sunset

Leo Laporte:
It's really pretty. Really pretty. Yeah.

Chris Marquardt:
And that's worth waiting for. That's worth waiting for unless you have a board family with you that might not

Leo Laporte:
Appreciate. Yeah, Bonnie did thank her husbands for his patience. <laugh>,

Chris Marquardt:
Here's an interesting one. A black and white shot of, I don't really know what that is. It looks like a stair from below. But the sun seems to shine in there and it creates all these weird geometric streaks of light. So you end up with, again, interesting light. Interesting light that you don't see every day. That's that. I have trained myself on getting an itchy finger when I see these kind of weird light situations and I have to take photos. It's something that I can't help.

Leo Laporte:
It's very geometric. Yeah, you do have to have an eye, otherwise you just walk past this stuff. You have to know, you have to be looking for. Yes. You have to

Chris Marquardt:
Train yourself. Yeah, you have to train yourself. And again, interesting sky balloon in there. The reflection does make it even more interesting. But the light itself, again, it's a very it is an interesting mixture of flat light and interesting features. And the balloon is lit by a more direct light source. So it looks like the sun is catching the balloon, which kind of sticks out this way. So it's a mixture of different lights.

Leo Laporte:
So this is a heck of a picture.

Chris Marquardt:
All that. Again, all that comes down. All these pictures come down to intensity of light, Direction of light, the size of the light source and the color of the light source. Those four things, intensity, direction, size of color, are pretty much the base, the bases of light. And whenever I look at a scene, those are kind of the four things that I'm looking for. Is there an interesting direction? Is something in the scene lit intensely and might stick out in an interesting way? Is the light source tiny? Does it make hard shadows or is it big light source that makes a very soft shadows?

Leo Laporte:
It spells discs, direction, intensity, source and color. Oh,

Chris Marquardt:
You found the acronym I was looking for one, it's disc.

Leo Laporte:
That's good. Right? That makes it easier, remember? Yeah.

Chris Marquardt:
The direction. Intensity

Leo Laporte:
To go source and color. It's crisp Mark's disc system. There we go. <laugh>, give it to you.

Chris Marquardt:
And I have that. Can I have that? You

Leo Laporte:
Can have that. It's all yours. It, it's really great to play with light. Of course on a radio show you can't see the light. But what we will do is put the pictures up on the show notes, a link to them. It's a flicker slideshow. And so you can see them all. And I think when you see them, they're, every one of them is a work of art. And it's all about the light. It's all about the light. The word of the month. Mysterious. Get your mysterious pictures in. Upload 'em to flicker, tag tg, mysterious. And Chris will be reviewing them in a couple of weeks. Leo Laporte, the tech guy with Chris. Mark. Thanks Chris.

Chris Marquardt:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte:
Nice beautiful images. It's funny, two of them were done with five Ds and three of them were done with point and shoots.

Chris Marquardt:
Yeah, I mean, as you showed in the segment before, I mean some of the smaller sensors zoom in, you might see some artifacts, but who

Leo Laporte:
Cares? Who cares? Seriously? Yeah, who cares. Yeah. You really, like somebody in the chair said don't, don't crop the cool picks photo. Yeah. But also a lot of these were very wide 16 millimeters for the first two.

Chris Marquardt:
Oh yeah. Some of them, yes. I mean if you wanna have interesting foreground being more wide angle helps. Yes. You can place a subject or an auxiliary subject in the foreground and then give the picture a bit more interest. Yeah. Like the flowers in the nature

Leo Laporte:
Shop, for example, right? Bonnie's picture. Yeah. I love that. Hair light on the mountains. Yep. That's

Chris Marquardt:
Again, if I really get antsy, if I see something like that, cuz I, I'll have to stop the car. I have to get out.

Leo Laporte:
I, it's a shot. I see a shot.

Chris Marquardt:
Light situations, I used to be like, eh, looks interesting. But it'll find something like that another time. But of more often than not, those are unique. Those don't just come back. So you have to take the opportunity of an interesting night situation.

Leo Laporte:
I have to place. Yeah,

Chris Marquardt:
Take that when you can because it's not gonna come back in the same way. Yep.

Leo Laporte:
Hey, great stuff. Thank you Chris. You'll be here next week.

Chris Marquardt:
I'll be here next week.

Leo Laporte:
See you then.

Chris Marquardt:
See you then. Take care. Care. Bye.

Leo Laporte:
<laugh>. Back again. Dito Dear <laugh>, That is hysterical. Charles might end up being fun just because he doesn't seem to have as much of a filter. Not having sat on the throne for all of his 70 some years, That's his back again dear. Yeah, <laugh>. Now what? Mis truss. Now what? Oh Lord. <laugh>. Oh my.
Yeah, the digital Zoom. I'm not, I agree with you both these cameras. John Gerard is saying don't necessarily say, Oh I can't use digital Zoom. Both these cameras do so much computational stuff that a small amount of digital zoom is not bad. I agree with you a hundred percent John. Yeah. Music doesn't disappoint does it? So many things in this world. Disappoint <laugh> Twitter, Elon Musk government. But music never disappoints. Leo Laporte the tech guy. I guess that's why we need it in our lives, huh? 88. 88. Ask Leo. I guess some music disappoints and sometimes the tech guy disappoints. But I hope you aren't disappointed, Roco that I had to put you on hold for another 15 minutes. Thank you for being patient. Roco from Valencia. Hello. Welcome. Well,

Caller 4:
There we go. Can you get me alone? Yeah,

Leo Laporte:
There you go. I hear you. Great. Welcome.

Caller 4:
Well that's a good thing I hold on here. I'm in front of a Starbucks sister. It's gotta come. Come on sometimes

Leo Laporte:
<laugh>. I'm so sorry. You sitting there, your mouth is watering. You looking at those fine beverages I need to go in. All right, well it's your turn and then you can go get a coffee.

Caller 4:
Okay, there you go. All right, very quickly, I think we spoke, we've spoken before and this is in regards to matching your or getting rid of the duplicates in your photos and then working the two libraries I have together and I've been procrastinating because of fact. It's, it's time consuming and I think you show me way for about getting rid of the duplicates, but I'm going back in to ask you again. How would I, what's the way or is there an easy way to get

Leo Laporte:
Rid? There's no, no good, easy way, but there are ways. So windows are Mac, first of all

Caller 4:
Also Mac, that's the proper one.

Leo Laporte:
Ok. So Apple has within its photos a duplicate detection and removal solution. I'm not sure it's the best. I would actually recommend a program, not free, but it does well called Gemini. Gemini two is the current version. I think it's unfortunately it's falling for the same. Yeah, it's from Mac Paw, M A C P A W falling for the same I'm sorry to say lure that a lot of software is its subscription. But that's good in some ways because you can just buy it for the year and then you'd get rid of duplicates. You don't wanna be too aggressive in getting rid of duplicates. I think some of us are a little O C D and mm-hmm <affirmative> generally with a computer, you don't want to be O C D because a storage space is cheap and you can have a pretty massive library in a terabyte, easily have it fully backed up, have it even stored in the cloud.
So I have duplicates. And the reason you don't wanna be too aggressive is some of those duplicates may either be similar images taken one right after the other or they may be edited images. So you have the original and you've slightly edited and maybe you don't want to get rid of the original, but you don't wanna lose the edit either. Gemini's very smart and a good duplicate remover will be this way. It will look at the contents of the file as opposed to just the name, creation date, metadata, that kind of stuff. And it will say, this is exactly the same file. We can eliminate this. But it will also say, here's two photos that look similar. <laugh> and put 'em side by side. So you can hand pick. And I think you certainly can eliminate photos that are files that are exact duplicates of one another. It goes through, it does a hash of the contents and it says these are matching hashes chances in one and a hundred million. This, it's different photos. It's the same photo. You can let it do that, but it also has a smart select feature. I think it's worth the money. Gemini two.

Caller 4:
Okay, two of this and that is the merging of the photos. What do you suggest on that? Merging the two libraries.

Leo Laporte:
Merging them. That's a little more complicated isn't it? What I would do probably is merge then ddo.

Caller 4:
Okay, merge then. Okay. Yeah. I mean D merge.

Leo Laporte:
Cause you're gonna get Yeah, that's probably there. I don't think, I don't know if Gemini actually somebody's telling me Gemini's only 45 bucks forever. Good deal. Then they have upgrades and features. So you know, get the one version forever. So that's good. I

Caller 4:
Wrote that down. And by the way, you're British, so you're coming the plug <laugh> to see us

Leo Laporte:
<laugh>. Well go get some Starbucks and then you can go home and do the duplicate file. Find one last plug for Macpa. They're Ukrainian and they're working under very difficult circumstances. They deserve our $45. I think it's a good reason to send them some money.

Caller 4:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, well what the things before I let you go and that is you forgot one. Okay, and that's rubber baby buggy bumper,

Leo Laporte:
<laugh> rubber. I was doing tongue twisters during the break trying to loosen up my limb up my li I. So red leather, yellow leather. I like rubber baby buggy bumpers. I can say that one pretty well. I've practiced that one. Rubber baby buggy bumpers, <laugh>,

Caller 4:
Always nice talking.

Leo Laporte:
All right, take care. It's a pleasure talking to you. Go enjoy that Frappuccino, my friend. Have one on me there. Okay, so there is a subscription. If you get it for $20, then I guess a year, then it's a yearly renewal or you can buy it outright for $45. Okay. So you get to choose. I have to say I've used a lot of Duping Pro programs and there are quite a few for Windows as well. Gemini is easily the best one I've used. And as I said I photos purports to do it, but they quite probably wisely are not aggressive. You're far better to have a couple of copies of the same photo than to lose a copy of a photo. You really don't wanna lose. That's why it's a tricky thing to do. But we all do it. I think in general, maybe we can leave. I get calls from people say my registry, I wanna clean my registry or I wanna run a file cleaner. And sometimes you can't wanna be too OC D, not to be too tidy. Remember it's all there on the hard drive. Don't mess things up. You could go too far. Mike from Riverside next. Hi Mike. Leo Laport, the tech guy.

Caller 5:
Hello. Hey Mike. Alex, you can help me,

Leo Laporte:
I hope so.

Caller 5:
I have a Galaxy, a four, two 5g. And so I'll be sitting in a meeting and I might say something like Pacific Ocean and it just starts going Ocean sounds

Leo Laporte:
And it goes ocean sounds. It thinks, it thinks you're talking to Google Assistant or maybe it's Bixby. That's hysterical.

Caller 5:
Turn that off.

Leo Laporte:
So there is a setting on most Android phones. I'm not sure about that a series, but I'm pretty sure on most Android phones to say don't listen for the trigger word. Don't listen for, hey, you know who just wait till I press the on off button, the physical button. Most phones will allow this because for this very reason, you're sitting in a meeting and it's starting to talk to you. Happens to me all the time. So you wanna make the assistant not be listening. There's also maybe some good reasons not to do that for other reasons. If you go into assistant settings, at least in plain Android, you can say, Hey, I'm

Caller 5:
In settings now. Yeah, I'm in settings now. Connections, sounds, notifications.

Leo Laporte:
Let's see. Let's see if I can find it in here. Now I don't have the same phone and Samsung changes this all the, your be your best friend, frankly is the search settings and just search for assistant. And then you will see somewhere the ability, maybe it's under general, adjust how your assistant helps answers questions and gets things done. And then there's an on off switch. <laugh>, when off your assistant will no longer respond when you say, Hey, go. But I do believe, let me see if I, But I do believe you can press the on off button and it will listen to me, told

Caller 5:
Me it worked. Yeah, yeah. Somebody told me it worked that I could make it to where nothing will happen in the left side. Press the button to turn

Leo Laporte:
The phone. That's what I'm talking about. Yep, yep. Okay. It's in the setting somewhere. Hidden away. Hidden away. The problem is that Samsung modifies the settings and from, I'm looking at a Google phone, plain Android. So the settings might be somewhat different. That's why I just use the search and search for assistant. And it may take a little digging to find it. But yeah, the same thing on the iPhone. You can make it so that it's not listening. That's what you wanna do. Don't be listening to me, just respond when I press the button for a while. Google let you squeeze the phone. That was nice. But <laugh>, they stop doing that. You just, you'd squeeze it to wake it up. Now you do. You press the on off button. I, again, Samsung may do it slightly differently. Remember Samsung has its own assistant, Bixby so you might wanna turn off both the Google assistant and the Bixby assistant.
Hey, thanks for listening and I'm sorry you got ocean sounds. Maybe that's the phone trying to tell you, Hey, chill man, you should be go surfing. Forget this meeting. Leo Laport, the tech guy. Well hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo Laport here, the tech guy. Time to talk, computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, you know, all that stuff. My phone number, 88. 88. Ask Leo if you want call in and ask a question, make a comment, make a suggestion. Help me with a previous caller. Mm-hmm <affirmative> 88. 88. Ask Leo. That's always appreciated. Kent is next. He's on the line from Bennett, Colorado. Hello, Kent. Oh, let me push that button there. Hi Kent.

Caller 6:
Hello Leo.

Leo Laporte:
What can I do for you? Actually, what can you do from our caller from yesterday for our caller from yesterday.

Caller 6:
So I typically listen to your show when I'm out doing nonprofit stuff, so I can't exactly jump on and help. But your caller yesterday looking for file recoveries or his photos. Yes. I ran into a very similar issue that Dan was having where the partition just kind of did whatever it wanted to do and the computer kind of did whatever it wanted

Leo Laporte:
To do. <laugh>, he had an external hard drive that the files were just saying, I can't read this. I don't know what this is. It's garbage.

Caller 6:
Exactly. Yeah. Granted the same thing that on a ESX server. So I found a program called Photo Wreck.

Leo Laporte:
Photo

Caller 6:
Rack. It's okay. It's a little bit older program by a guy named Christopher Green Greener, I believe is how you say his last name. And what it did is it went through and scanned the drive. It didn't even bother with partition tables, it didn't bother with the table. Was it top the table content? Yeah, yeah, just through it. And anything it found that fit the format of a photo, it would put a name and copy the file off to a directory you provided. Yeah,

Leo Laporte:
I'm looking at the website. It says ignores the file system goes after the underlying data. So even if your file system's been damaged or reformatted, it can recover and hey, it's open source and free, which is awesome.

Caller 6:
Yep. Awesome. And I used it to recover. I had about four VMware virtuals on a ESX box and lost the drive and I was actually able to recover about 90% of all my files off those virtuals. And it didn't matter if they were Linux, Windows or a Mac.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, I'm gonna add this to my toolkit. This looks great. Thank you so much for the recommendation. Yeah, CG security.org is the website. It's all, it's old. They haven't updated it since 2019. Okay, that's good enough. These things don't change.

Caller 6:
I have Windows on the bo tune though.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. And the fact that it worked is great. It works on Windows dos, Linux, bsd, Solaris, and Mac o s 10. You might have to compile it because if you're using an oddball system, but if it's open source, which really makes it great, that's really cool. What a great recommendation. I'm gonna add this to my kit. Thank you Ken.

Caller 6:
And speaking of your toolkit this came up again as I'm out in the middle of nowhere doing stuff and listening to your show, I hear several callers kind of asking about the same thing over and over again. Like, Oh yeah, your last caller to wanna go about duplicate photos. Yep.

Leo Laporte:
Yep. He even has asked that question twice, <laugh>. Yeah.

Caller 6:
And one thing I thought of, and maybe you have it and you just haven't put it out there on the show enough, but do you have a top 10 no files?

Leo Laporte:
No, that's a great idea. That's a really good idea. And the old site, we did have some things like that, but we shut down the old site and we don't have anything like that right now. What a good idea. Put together, something like that. The problem is it changes all the time. So I <laugh> have to constantly update it. But you're right, we get in a way, I don't mind the same questions because well I already know the answer that helps. But B, I think if people keep asking the same questions it's because the same problems are coming up and yeah, of course somebody like you smart enough to go to the website and see if they can find that answer. But most people are just calling and if that's kind of the beauty of this is I'll answer your question even if I've heard it once or twice before, that's fine. But it's a good idea. I should put that together. I have in the past we've put together recommendations for the first five things you should do when you get a brand new wifi router, stuff like that. And all of that was on the old tech eye lab site, which just for budgetary reasons, we had to kill that a few months ago.

Caller 6:
Or maybe Leo's top toolkit ideas

Leo Laporte:
Or something. Yeah, well this would go in it for sure.

Caller 6:
Update it, Yeah. All the time.

Leo Laporte:
This would go in it. Kent, obviously you're more sophisticated user. Thank you for finding this. I love it when there's open source solutions that get the job done and this looks like Exactly

Caller 7:
Saw

Caller 6:
For a Mac and Windows version of it too.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, it's cross platform through it. Yeah, it's cross platform, which is great. Yeah, it's basically a Linux tool or a Unix tool that will run on any Unix platform. And he has a Windows version, which is great. <laugh>. So

Caller 6:
Hopefully I'll help out.

Leo Laporte:
Hey, thank you. I appreciate it. Great to have you listening Kent. Sure. Have a great day. Take care. Jerry is next from Bucks County. Hello Jerry.

Caller 7:
Hello Leo. Pardon? Pardon me. Was about to push up all my uniform likes tablet and it's dried.

Leo Laporte:
All the clay is dry. What are you gonna do? Well I suggest moistening it, covering it with a towel and let it sit overnight. And you should be able to use your q a form tablets once again the next day.

Caller 7:
Well my voice is from screaming at my printers.

Leo Laporte:
Oh Lord <laugh>, what have they done now Jerry?

Caller 7:
Well you know what if you don't use it for a while, the heads clogged up or seeing incorrect, it reads wrong. So I'm thinking about a laser printer.

Leo Laporte:
I'm making this recommendation frequently only because while inkjet is the best, if you wanna do photo printing, if you want good color, there are a lot of reasons you might want inkjet. The problem is if you don't use them a lot, the nozzles, which are very tiny, I mean actually the inkjet technology is kind of in a remarkable miracle of science. These are teeny weeny micro leader drops that they're spraying out in these tiny nozzles. But as a result, if you don't use 'em, the ink in the nozzle will dry and it can clog the nozzle and it, it's a constant problem. And it's why I moved to laser jet some years ago, or laser printing some years ago. Laser though is not as good for you. You can't do photo printing and the color in a laser printer is what they call business color.
If you get a color printer, it won't be rich color, it's just enough for a graph and things like that. But yeah, I prefer a laser printer. You don't have to use 'em as much. It's not as, They don't get clogged. It's not as expensive. It is initially, cause you get a toner cartridge might cost you $189 but that goes for a 5,000 sheets. So the cost per page on lasers is almost always lower. I use a brother, which makes very good laser printers, but there are a lot of companies that make excellent laser printers and now not as expensive. They used to be. That was the other thing was when Apple first put out the laser writer, which was the first laser printer based on a can cannon engine way back in the nineties it was, what was it? $5,000. It was very expensive, but laser printers, now you can get 'em for not as cheap as the ink jet cuz they ain't gonna make money back in ink cartridges. But under $200 easily get a good one.

Caller 7:
Leo did I hear you write last or so that they're doing something so that you printer only print some these sheets before it goes belly up.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, Renew. Yeah, this was Epson. They have in their inkjet printers, there's a sponge <laugh>, which absorbs the overflow and don't spill in down the side of your desk. And a number of people have reported that with particular Epson models, their printer will stop and say, Sorry, your sponge is full. Get a new printer. <laugh>. So there are fixes, in fact <laugh> if you go on YouTube and search for waste ink pad sponge, you can see how to replace it. Epson even sells them. But this has been a problem where it'll say service required on your Epson printer and it's all because just this little sponge is full. There are ways to fix this though. That's the good news. A lot of times these printer companies, they don't make much on UNK jets. They want you to buy new ink jets more often. <laugh>. So they find all sorts of inventive ways of getting you to <laugh>. Throw out your perfectly good printer. You can get a new sponge to replace that.

Caller 7:
Leo, have you heard of a pen laser?

Leo Laporte:
No. What's that?

Caller 7:
I don't know. <laugh>. 80 bucks. It's a monochrome on one. ADF Multi.

Leo Laporte:
I don't owe laser Printer. Not a laser. Laser. I don't pen what it Pentax? Pento.

Caller 7:
P A N T U M. Pento.

Leo Laporte:
No, I'm not familiar with that.

Caller 7:
Water. Chrome Wireless all in one adf. Multi-functional labor printer.

Leo Laporte:
Nice. My recommendation would go to PC magazine. They do a yearly printer roundup. They look at all of them. I'm very happy with brother. I have a brother printer that's about $120. HP makes the laser jets. Those are kind of the classic business printer, but there are plenty of HP laser jets under $200. If you want an all in one, you'll spend a little bit more the ability to zero a copy, not Xerox copy and fax and well,

Caller 7:
I

Leo Laporte:
Handle em. I'm looking at it on right now on Amazon for 99 bucks. Yeah, I don't know anybody who's used one of these, so I'm not sure I can recommend. But go with Brother or hp. Those are the quality names. Oh, well here's a review from Scooter X. Thank you. Scooter X, a review from PC Magazine of the Panto printer. I trust PC Mag. They're one of the last companies that still does these reviews. Three and a half stars. It's good. <laugh>. The low purchase price is bounced by a slightly high cost per page, but nice text quality, connection options and paper handling. Sounds good. Boy, that price, why not get two? They're cheap. Why not? <laugh>, I hope your voice recovers. Have you been singing yelling at the tv? I've been

...:
Screaming at my printers.

Leo Laporte:
<laugh>. Yelling at your printer. Noble Pursuit. All of us engage in from time to time. I hope you feel a little bit better. 88. 88. Ask Leo. That's the phone number. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. Rod Pile coming up our space guy. We'll talk about space and more of your calls too. Again. 88. 88. Ask Leo website, Tech guy labs.com. This from a John Hughes movie. Feels like Molly Ringwald is gonna pop in at any minute. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number. Back to the phones. We go. Let's see who's next year. John from St. George, Utah. Hello John.

Caller 8:
Hi Leo. I took care of my mother during the last few years of her life, <affirmative>. And so I need to, She's passed away now and I'm trying to bring things up to speed. I let things, some things slide and I have an old Android phone has very little memory, but I have some guard villa security cameras I use as a nanny cam.

Leo Laporte:
Oh nice. Okay.

Caller 8:
And anyway there's a little memory on my phone. I did something kind of stupid. I was trying to delete something else, but I accidentally deleted the data for the Illa app on my phone. <laugh>. Okay. And they've gone outta business.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, they went outta business a couple years ago

Caller 8:
And I, I'm unable to access them. I know they're connecting to the wifi cause light on them is coming on.

Leo Laporte:
I'm looking at a Consumer Reports article from July, 2020. The reason they're writing about it is they had contacted Godzilla about security problems they found and the company went outta business immediately after. And now do you have a 360 caz? That camera does Just doesn't even work anymore.

Caller 8:
No, this probably one of their earlier models.

Leo Laporte:
So some of their models required many cameras stored your video on their servers. As soon as they shut down, those servers shut down. And those cameras basically according to consumer reports became useless because they can't, there's nowhere for them to contact to upload. But it's an interesting question

Caller 8:
That I wasn't uploading from the

Leo Laporte:
Cloud. It's an interesting question because the cameras internally still work and

Caller 8:
That's all I want.

Leo Laporte:
The problem is of course, the firmware because those cameras may be set up to connect back to the home office even if you're not storing documents, storing video there. So I'm, that's an interesting question. You'd like to continue to use the cameras.

Caller 8:
I know there are PK files on the internet for some of their software.

Leo Laporte:
So you think if you got the software back on your phone that you'd be able to access those cameras?

Caller 8:
Well, I don't know. I do have the app on the phone. I'm gonna switch to another phone and I don't know if

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, so those APKs, as long as you're very careful, those APK repository APK is the file format for apps on Android. It's like EXC and as long as you're careful about where you're getting it from, they're off. A lot of times you'll get malware this way. But if you're pretty sure this is the Godzilla app and this is a reliable source, it'd be fine to, it's called side loading. You don't install it through the play store. You have to check a box in the security settings and say, Yeah, I'm gonna download it from a website. But you can still install those. I'm looking at an article from bleeping computer from September of that year saying that these cameras were easily hacked. Which actually might be good for you <laugh>, because you could get into 'em. You don't need to get the help of the company.
It's very simple to hack these devices. Reading a post on bleeping computer from October of last year, I'm one of the researchers that exposed the security flaws, even got Amazon to pull the product for a couple of weeks. I was checking back on guard Zillow to dump the AWS creds once again when I noticed they were shut down. The hardwares actually fairly nice. We reversed engineered a lot of the software. But the former in all of our notes can be found on our GitLab server. And I'll give a link to that in the show notes into this post on bleeping computer. This guy is trying to find a community he can help enable to start building a backend for these cameras. So this might be worth checking into this guy's site, see what's, if anything has happened since last October. <affirmative> I imagine there's quite a few people who have them. Oh yeah. Oh, nope, nope, nope, nope. This doesn't,

Caller 8:
No, I was wondering. There's I think some software that will allow you to access if you have different kind of cameras access them all, which is another issue I have if I have some different kinds of cameras and I don't know, I

Leo Laporte:
Don't, this is

Caller 8:
Prefer that somehow

Leo Laporte:
This is quite a bit of hacking gonna be involved because basically what you've got here is a camera that expected to contact Godzilla's servers. You're gonna have to modify those cameras to make 'em work again. And I think that that is a nontrivial thing. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. Let me look and see. I had to take a break there. We got Rod pile coming up. Let me look and see if there is third party kind of software for stuff like this. This is gonna take some research on your part. Are you handy with this kind of thing?

Caller 8:
Well, I have a terminal degree in a science, so I'm okay <laugh>. I have some, but that doesn't mean I can't do stupid things and <laugh>.

Leo Laporte:
Well the good news is you can't be any worse than Nonfunctioning and that's what these cameras are right now. So my sense is looking at this guy's post, fortunately he's locked down his GitLab server now, but it looks like these cameras really even I What model do you have? Do you know?

Caller 8:
Oh I don't know offhand.

Leo Laporte:
So you were able to with your phone, See my thinking is that what your phone was doing was contacting the cameras not directly via their IP address but via Godzilla's servers. That's normally how it works. So even if you're not using their servers to store your video, cuz that you pay money for that you still had to contact the camera through the server. So it'd be my guess that even if you've got that app, it's not gonna work cuz those servers are down. But there's two rays of hope. First of all, it is a camera that's on the internet, so you do have an IP address. So if there's some way that you can hack into that camera and given that <laugh> a security flaw that they're using bad passwords, maybe you can hack into that camera just like a hacker would. So what you might wanna start looking at is ways to hack the guard cameras and see if you can get in there. They were very insecure, apparently that's not a good thing, except that <laugh> might be the path you used to get into it. I would be reluctant to put 'em online security flaws. Let anyone snoop on Guard Zilla Smart video camera recordings. But those are the recordings uploaded to Amazon's web servers. So maybe that's the issue. I mean, think it put the company on

Caller 8:
Business. I do have some screenshots from the past on my phone. I don't know if this

Leo Laporte:
Is gonna be, This is honestly, unless you're really up for this, more of a project than it's worth. Especially given that you can go to Wise and buy working cameras for 20 and 30 bucks. But I mean, so I'm not sure it'd be worth the effort.

Caller 8:
Yeah, I figure there are a lot of people out there. Probably had to own these and I just, Yeah, well

Leo Laporte:
I would keep an eye on the forums and so forth. Yeah, because somebody may figure it out, but honest, How much did you pay for the camera?

Caller 8:
I think they were 75 each. Yeah, at the time.

Leo Laporte:
I think you're lost that money basically. I hate to say it. Well, it's a shame. It feels like you should be able to use that. Right. Here's a camera. It's on the internet. It's got an IP address. I should be able to get into it. That might,

Caller 8:
Yeah. Aren't there apps and things that will monitor multiple IP cameras or IP viewers?

Leo Laporte:
There are. If that camera puts video over that IP address, the promise, you don't have a way to command and control that camera so that what that camera's, firmware is set up to do is contact a server in the cloud not to be available to you. So it doesn't mean you, if you went to that IP address. Oh look, there's video. I don't think that's the case.

Caller 8:
You're sure it had to be contacting their servers

Leo Laporte:
To work? I'm not sure. No, but that, given what I'm reading about, it looks like it did. So it's not like you could go to the IP address and suddenly see video. I gotta run. I gotta where's Oh, Rod's on the phone. Okay. I gotta do Rod on the phone here. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. Just to wrap things up, we were talking about these Godzilla cameras. When video cameras are insecure, that's a problem because they are pointed at your home. They're pointed sometimes inside your house. And if a bad guy on the internet can go see what's on those cameras, that's problematic. The attack on the Godzilla cameras were an attack on the Godzilla servers. I think it put the company out of business. Our caller wanted to use these cameras not by sending video to the server, but by sending video directly to his devices. Which may be possible and probably wouldn't be too insecure, except if you can see it <laugh>. I mean, a bad guy could see it too. I honestly think the best thing to do, I'm gonna reiterate my device is just, it's a money's gone. It's lost forever. Go get some other cameras. Now it's time to talk to our spaceman rod pile. Hello Rod pile. Wow.

Rod Pyle:
An analog room shot. Hi, how are you?

Leo Laporte:
Yep, I'm great. He's the author of so many great books about space, but also more importantly, editor in chief of the official publication of the National Space Society at Astra. And you can subscribe or get a copy@spacedots.org. What's new in Space Rod?

Rod Pyle:
Well, we got a few things on this in space this week. That's kind of complicated to say, isn't it? That's

Leo Laporte:
Your show this in space. Just call it Twist This's, your show twist that you do with te ballack from space.com on our podcast network. Tweet twi tv slash twist. Yes.

Rod Pyle:
Thanks to you. We got a nice conversation with Nancy Shabo, who is one of the science leads on the Dart mission. So she gave it Oh, a nice catch up on how much they deflected the as

Leo Laporte:
Aspir. It was a great success. They're saying, right?

Rod Pyle:
It many times what it was on the outskirts of their modeling, let's put it that way. But it was on the good side, not the best.

Leo Laporte:
It was more successful than they anticipated.

Rod Pyle:
Yeah. And so we talked about that. And then we talked about what's next? Things like the o surveyor camera that they want put up in orbit. It's a telescope that would help identify these things so that we can decide which ones we wanna hur spacecraft at and so forth. But coming up this week, the Orion Media shower, which is one of the big ones of the year, it's nice cuz it's not the dead of winter. Some of the other ones are. So you can actually get out there and enjoy yourself without freezing yourself. So that will peak on the dawn hours of October 21 and 22nd this week. And this shower is known for having a fairly high number of fast meteors that are bright and leave long trails. And something interesting for radio folks, because the in eyes trails reflect fm. If you have a radio, even a car radio, and you tune to a distance station, you can sometimes hear hises and pops and amplifications of the signal is, it bounces off of the ionized trail from these things.
We don't have much of a moon this year. The moon's gonna be a waning crescent. So if you get out there after midnight and you've got a clear shot at the sky, when I say clear shot of the sky, I mean somewhere dark. So not my backyard. Probably not your backyard, although Pallo is better than la. But you really want to get out as far as you can. And there's a web sky website called dark sky dot.org that covers the us Latin America and Europe. That will tell you where some of the darkest places are within driving distance of you. So that's a really good way to figure out where you might want to go. That's cool. Have you seen one before?

Leo Laporte:
A meteor shower?

Rod Pyle:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
I feel like I've seen shooting stars. That's kind of it, right? Yeah, they said the Percys, which is another big one. I would go out, I'd l look at the sky. I'm not, I'm impatient. You have to be patient enough to kind of just lie there in Wayne world and waiting for a shooting star. Now this one, tell me if I'm wrong. This is Haley's comment or Hall's comment as is more properly

Rod Pyle:
Produced. Another one.

Leo Laporte:
No, no, this is, Well,

Rod Pyle:
Is

Leo Laporte:
This one, I don't know why I asked you, cuz I know <laugh>. Yeah, you're at the Orion's Meteor shower often shortened to the Orion is the most prolific meteor shower associated with Haley's comment.

Rod Pyle:
There it is.

Leo Laporte:
Or Hall's comment. Oh,

Rod Pyle:
Here's why I was confused. It also causes the ADA Aquis in May. So I was

Leo Laporte:
Oh wow. You know how that is. Yeah.

Rod Pyle:
But yeah, effectively, I mean, these things are essentially just big gravel banks kind of drifting around these orbits. And the earth goes through it. And one of the reasons so many of 'em peak after midnight is because that's when the earth turns into its orbit and you're hitting 'em faster and they're burning up brighter. So you're not chasing 'em down. You're actually running into 'em. So they're fun. And you'll see one every few minutes. But like I said, this one tends to, I guess the pebbles are larger, so it tends to give you some really good displays. So that's cool.

Leo Laporte:
And it's nothing to fear, right? These are never gonna reach the earth. These meteor,

Rod Pyle:
No, they're, they're really gravel sized or smaller. Some of 'em are just size of grained dust or a p. Now, if one does get really bright and doesn't move from side to side, then you probably should worry. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger than I would

Leo Laporte:
<laugh>.

Rod Pyle:
Cause that's bad.

Leo Laporte:
Steve Martin wrote a play called Meteor or Shower when they're sitting down in the backyard watching the meteors and it, it's exactly what happens. It gets bigger and bigger and it blows a hole in one of the guys. And because it's Steve Martin, he's walking around with a smoking hole in his sweater. <laugh>.

Rod Pyle:
Yeah, of course. Every now and then they do run into things. There was another cool story though which I'm calling the universe of a Minecraft hammer. This kid, Christopher Slaton, I don't, maybe you saw the story, decided to try and model the known universe and Minecraft.

Leo Laporte:
I saw it and I immediately went to the next story because that's obviously impossible.

Rod Pyle:
Well, so yeah, there's a little bit of flexibility and latitude in the clickbait title. Yeah. What he did was he modeled the solar systems cause he thought that would be cool. Which is in itself a pretty big achievement cuz you're building these spheres and you have to manually light them. There's not apparently a way to do an external light source that automatically hits everything. So you have to manually light one side and that the other. And then you realize, oh gee, Saturns rings are tilted off the axis. So I've gotta actually build them a series of circular stairsteps. I mean the amount of labor, I mean, I like it because it's kind of, even though it digital, it's kind of an analog way of doing it. But he spent two months of, I don't know, 10 or 15 hours a day just sitting there sweating and probably eating Cheetos Mountain Dew and doing this thing. But well,

Leo Laporte:
He didn't just sit inside the New York Times said he also went out and skydived for some.

Rod Pyle:
Yeah, he skydived and did some star gazing and so forth. But when he got done with the solar system, he thought as we used to lying in bed, Well, when we were younger, What's beyond that? What's beyond that? What's beyond that? So he went on to do a black hole, a fairly convincing job of a black hole. Actually. Galactic clusters. Galaxies, clusters of galaxies. And then tried to do sort of a mega view of the galactic clusters in the universe. So I assume these are separate things. Cause who's got time to do

Leo Laporte:
This in Minecraft in a way that looks real. Have to lay a lot of bricks because Minecraft is very, very blocky. So you have to have a lot of bricks and then you have to get it a great distance from it to make it look real. That's quite a bit of crazy work. I don't know if this kid's got a future or what. <laugh> Well,

Rod Pyle:
I mean he's got his video he did on it, which is I think about 10 minutes long.

Leo Laporte:
3.3 million views.

Rod Pyle:
Slaves. Yeah. Three point, almost 3.4 now. And as you watch it, as you watching the videos going click, click, click, click. Smart people are clicking on. And as he pulls back for these things, they look pretty convincing. He also did, what was it, The pillars of God, that big nebula that we saw from the Hubble years ago. He modeled that. And a nebulous tough cuz it's just gas, right? Yeah. So it's,

Leo Laporte:
It's not easy modeling a gas with a Lego size bricks. But

Rod Pyle:
I don't think so. Can you make those things translucent or are they opaque? I've never played with it.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, I play a lot with it, but I don't remember any translucent materials. Well no, wait a minute. I take it back. There is glass. Yeah, it's a lot of work. He must, I mean, he's some sort of weird mod to do it probably. But that's all, there's number, there's a lot of bricks he's putting down there.

Rod Pyle:
He just shows how he modeled these galaxies, Nebula, and then pulls back and he moves it and it's a big solid thing. Right. That's cute. He has to go in and color it.

Leo Laporte:
That's cute. I hope he gets into a fine university as a result.

Rod Pyle:
Cluster of five

Leo Laporte:
On pile. Listen to this weekend space. Thank twi.tv/twi. Thank you. Twist. Thank you, Rob. Thank you,

Rod Pyle:
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte:
What? I mean? That's just bizarre.

Rod Pyle:
Why would you call him,

Leo Laporte:
Right? Yeah. That's just bizarre to do that. Yeah. I mean I, Yeah, You don't know how mind numbing numbingly boring this <laugh>. So it's so much worse than building it on a Lego, to be honest.

Rod Pyle:
Yeah. That's more our speed, huh?

Leo Laporte:
Obviously this kid wants to be a YouTube celeb.

Rod Pyle:
Well, I think he succeeded. And the video is, it's fast paced. It's fun to watch. It's cute. He's got a good sense of humor. Good for him. That the thing. Got it. So he's got a future doing something. I just don't think it's being God in building the universe.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. He's actually been doing YouTubes for a long time. He does long, big builds of all kinds in Minecraft. Well,

Rod Pyle:
It doesn't get much bigger than this does it?

Leo Laporte:
First you build a city, then you build a country, then you build a planet. Now you gotta build the universe.

Rod Pyle:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. He also does Van go? He did Starry Night in Minecraft.

Rod Pyle:
<laugh>. Oh, no kidding. Oh my

Leo Laporte:
Lord. Nobody puts tomato soup on it.

Rod Pyle:
I predict he'll be living with his parents for a while,

Leo Laporte:
<laugh> or not. I shouldn't mock it. I don't understand the modern world. I really don't.

Rod Pyle:
Well, I don't either. And I mean, look at the success your son's had. I mean,

Leo Laporte:
That's why I no longer pretend to know anything. If I told you how much he got for his book advance, you would pass out. No, you would pass out.

Rod Pyle:
Well, because advances are not what they used to be. So if

Leo Laporte:
This one was

Rod Pyle:
It's pass five figures. It's a miracle.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, it's in the six figures.

Rod Pyle:
Oh, I'm gonna spend the rest of the day in tears. Now. I

Leo Laporte:
Know.

Rod Pyle:
Now is it in the, Would that be in the cooking column? It's

Leo Laporte:
A cook cookbook. Yeah, it's cookbook.

Rod Pyle:
Wow.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I'm impressed.

Rod Pyle:
When's it gonna come out?

Leo Laporte:
Well, he's gotta write it first. <laugh>? Well, I don't know.

Rod Pyle:
Usually they give you a due

Leo Laporte:
Date. I'm sure he has a deadline. I'm sure he has. And he's a very hard working guy.

Rod Pyle:
Well, and so that should inspire you to write your

Leo Laporte:
Book now. No, never <laugh> written enough books. It's so hard. It's so much work.

Rod Pyle:
It's a pain.

Leo Laporte:
I love seeing him surpass his old man though. That's good. That's really good. I want him to do

Rod Pyle:
Well that's very generous of you. Cause

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, I know. Sometimes get jealous. Not, I'm not all jealous of him. He's doing really well. I

Rod Pyle:
Have a little moment of envy every now and then when I see my kid get his next job in his next job. I know. I'm sorry. I know how much more than me. Okay.

Leo Laporte:
You should be glad. You should be. So how old's your kid?

Rod Pyle:
He's 27. You

Leo Laporte:
Should be, Yeah. Same age as Henry Henry's 28. You should be glad. This is a tough time for Yeah, these kids. I mean, Michael's working hard at a full time job. It's not enough to live on. I mean it's a union job and everything, but it's just, Yeah. So if our kids are doing good, that's something to be proud of.

Caller 7:
Well see, that's very generous of you cuz when you said I should be proud, I thought you were talking more about how they're gonna support us in our old age.

Leo Laporte:
Well, I think that too, Henry always said that, Remember, I'm gonna choose your nursing home, so be nice to me.

Rod Pyle:
The crack. And

Leo Laporte:
Now I think he might be right.

Rod Pyle:
He might be, mm-hmm.

Leo Laporte:
<affirmative>

Rod Pyle:
<affirmative>. Now Lisa's gonna pick it first and then the question is, will she visit or not? So that's why I gotta be nice to Sherry is to make sure she actually visits me and the old folks home. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah, you're right. Lisa's picking it first. You, you're absolutely right. She says, No, no, this home will be your old folks home. I said, it already is. I hope it stays that way. That's all

Rod Pyle:
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte:
It already is. My old folks home.

Rod Pyle:
Very good.

Leo Laporte:
Once we put railings on the toilet, then I'll know.

Rod Pyle:
Oh

Leo Laporte:
Yeah,

Rod Pyle:
I was looking at the bathtub the other day at those steps. I

Leo Laporte:
Can't get in it.

Rod Pyle:
Thinking, do I need to handle yet?

Leo Laporte:
Not yet. Can't go there. Hey, thank you Rod.

Rod Pyle:
Just grab the Sharker, take bye

Leo Laporte:
Again. Thank you for letting me be your tech guy again. Thanks so much to Professor Laura. Musical director did Good job today. Did you play song from 1936 though? You I don't think you did. I don't think you did. You're missing your chance to play some really great oldies, but goodies, <laugh>, all the good stuff. Rudy Valley where I don't even think that's, I think that's before Rudy Valley. But anyway, Great job Professor Laura. I appreciate it. Thanks also to Kim Sheer, our phone. Angel. She answers your calls, gets you ready for your appearance on the national radio scene. And of course, thanks to all of you who listen and call in and put up with me every weekend. I can't thank you enough. Back to the phones. We got a time for a couple more calls. William in Seattle. Hello William.

Caller 9:
Hey first time caller. Welcome. First time fan. Nice to have you. Two questions for you. Yeah. Yeah. <laugh> a huge Amiga fan. I have an Amiga 1200. Wow. They still make accelerators today. <laugh>. They used to have PGA accelerators.

Leo Laporte:
They also make emulators, but Okay.

Caller 7:
Yeah. They make

Caller 9:
Emulators and accelerators for the real hardware. Nice. And I'm curious what happened at computer accelerators.

Leo Laporte:
You don't need <laugh> basically. So your Amiga 1200 is, how long ago did you get that? 1990s. Right?

Caller 9:
92 I think.

Leo Laporte:
Wow. And what do you do with it?

Caller 9:
Oh, just run old stuff and see how fast you can get. Just music videos and I can't remember the name off the top of the head. I'm kind of nervous.

Leo Laporte:
Oh, do you do the demo scene stuff? You make those?

Caller 9:
Yeah. The demo scene stuff. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. Oh fun. That was a big And it's kind of come back it there. <laugh>. Oh, massively. Yeah. It's kind of fun. So these accelerators would be sometimes more memory. Would they have more processors too?

Caller 9:
Generally they were more processing power or they had, Yeah,

Leo Laporte:
Let me look at one. Oh yeah, I see. Here's one that says, got a 68,030 processor 64 megs of Fast Ram. Oh look. P C M C I Friendly Purple Edition. So, okay. And they run around in a couple hundred bucks. The reason you don't see him on PCs is it's, it just, it's not the way a PC works these days. You don't just plug a card in to an expansion slot and have that processor take over. In fact, there are very few PCs you could even upgrade the processor. But there are very fast nowadays. You should try one. You probably don't need an accelerator is the other reason.

Caller 9:
Oh, I have a M two MacBook. Oh,

Leo Laporte:
Okay. Yeah. Very fast. Right? I still like it. Yeah. And that one you can't accelerate because this whole thing lives on that chip, including all the ram. So there's not an open platform like that. In fact, in a way, this is one of the things that made the Amiga interesting is they made this bus available. You could plug a card into the bus and add more memory or add a faster process. That's pretty impressive. Not something we do anymore.

Caller 9:
I have one more quick question. From your past screensavers, whatever happened that Michael Sergeant his name, right?

Leo Laporte:
No. So this is confusing cuz I work with a guy named Micah, Sergeant. We You're thinking of Martin Sergeant.

Caller 9:
Martin Sergeant, yes.

Leo Laporte:
He was a wonderful guy. He <laugh> used to do explainers for us. I remember one where he had wore a raincoat and he had a bunch of probably accelerator cards. <laugh> in the rank of <laugh> said, You wanna buy one. He, I love Martin. Very funny guy. He went off after Tech tv, ended it to work for one of the best ad agencies in San Francisco. He's a copywriter there. He did a podcast for us for a little while with Sarah Lane, also from the screensavers called this Weekend Fun. He actually wrote to me the other day, well, a couple months ago, and said, Could we bring this weekend fun back? Would you mind? I said, No, absolutely not. I'll give you the theme song. Anything you want to do. I would be glad to support that. But I haven't heard from him since He did. He has a, I'm sad to say he has a, I don't think this is private. He has multiple, No, not he's got Is it ms? Yeah. I think he's got ms. So he is got a long term chronic degenerative disease. So it's gotten harder for him to walk and so forth. We had him on a few times on our shows. I love the guy. I love the guy. Mm-hmm.

Caller 9:
He's a great guy. Very funny for the question. Yeah.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. The good old days. You live in the past, my friend,

Caller 9:
I'm trying to, Those Amiga 12 hundreds are going for almost a thousand dollars. What?

Leo Laporte:
So it's Enthusi. Is it mostly the demo scene that people are doing or making music or

Caller 9:
They're still making games for it? They're making software. They're still making What is it? It's Hippo. Hippo player to play music. Wow. The tracks for Amigo. Wow. People are going GitHub and Search Amigo. You can find hardware developers. You can find software developers. It's amazing people.

Leo Laporte:
Well, there's a couple things going on here. Of course, People's first computer is the one that had all the awe and amazement and an imprints on their mind. So people always have a fondness for that very first computer. Especially if it was a personal computer. Like the Amiga Paul Thra, who does our Windows Weekly show started on the Amiga and yeah. Still has a lot of love for it. I remember John c Devork loved his Amiga. He, he, In fact, it's interesting cuz the software that came with Amiga for video editing, it was very way ahead of its time still lives today. I in the New Tech TriCaster, in fact, it's what we use for our video switching. So in some ways the Amiga is still alive. Let me play a, Let me see if I can find a demo scene song I can play for people so they can hear it. It was basically eight bit music created with the Amiga Zone sound generating drive up software. Oh, it's a YouTuber. Oh, I hate YouTubers. He's gonna talk and talk and talk, but never play any of the music. Let's see if I can find some here. Nope, more YouTube talking.
If he stops talking, I can play this song. Yeah. Nope, nope, nope. It's a, It's fun. It's it's done with Amigo's Music Generators was one of the ways the Amigo was way ahead of its time. It was a very sophisticated computer for the 19th, early 1990s. Right.

Caller 9:
It was basically the infancy of electronic music. Pretty much. Yeah. A lot of vocals with just a lot of,

Leo Laporte:
I remember we used to go to the trade shows every year and we'd see Kiki Stockham with her video toaster on her Amiga showing us editing tricks we thought no personal computer could ever achieve. It was a very amazing computer four 40 years or 30 years ago. That's the key.

Caller 9:
Yeah. It's ridiculous. Well, thank you so much. Hey,

Leo Laporte:
A pleasure talking to you. Now that you know the way, come back. Okay.

Caller 9:
Absolutely. See

Leo Laporte:
You again, William. Take care. One more call, Michael in LA before we wrap things off. Hi Michael.

Caller 10:
Hi there. Oh, glad to finally get to, You've been doing this show for decades, right?

Leo Laporte:
Woo. 19 years. Woo.

Caller 10:
Wow. That's awesome.

Leo Laporte:
That's just this show. I mean, <laugh>, I did shows before this show even, but 19 years is the tech guy. Yeah. It'll be 19 years in January. Let's put it that one.

Caller 10:
How you keep all that in your brain? I have no idea. Oh,

Leo Laporte:
It's not there. It's like sawdust. It's leaking out as we speak.

Caller 10:
Oh, <laugh>. All the stuff you gotta know. It's like being one of those sports Sports talk

Leo Laporte:
Guys. The I listen sports guys. Yeah. And I'm amazed they can rattle off statistics, but I realize if it's something you love, it kind of goes in your head without a lot of effort.

Caller 10:
There you

Leo Laporte:
Go. And I guess that's, that's the story of my <laugh>. My life is without any effort, they're gonna put that on my tombstone.

Caller 10:
Well, anyway, let's wrap up the show with a really tough challenge. Yes sir. I cannot get Big Brother, also known as Google, to let me into my old email address. One that I've had for over three years.

Leo Laporte:
Yeah. You're outta luck buddy. You're outta luck. You just gotta keep trying and hope that some human responds when you get something for free. The support is gonna be terrible because support's expensive and they gotta pay for it. Losing your Google account is among the worst things that can happen to you. Keep trying. Don't give up. I know there's sending you things we gotta prove. You are who you say you are. They don't wanna make it easy to hack, but don't give up and everybody who has a Google account should remember back it all up because this could happen to you too. Leo Laporte, the tech guy. I'm done. Have a great geek week. See you next time. Well, that's it for The Tech Guy Show for today. Thank you so much for being here. And don't forget twit, T W I T. It stands for this week at Tech and you find it@twit.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, Security and Security now. I mean, I can go on and on. And of course, the big show every Sunday afternoon this week in tech. You'll find it all at twit tv and I'll be back next week with another great tech guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.