The Tech Guy Episode 1949 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:02):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is tweet.

(00:00:11):
Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my Tech Guy podcast. Mike and I did this show on the Premier Networks on Saturday, December 3rd, 2022. This is episode 1949. Enjoy. The Tech Guy Podcast is brought to you by Melissa. Over 10,000 clients worldwide in industries like retail education, healthcare, insurance, finance, and government. Rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records playing free at melissa.com/twit and by Nureva. Nureva has simplified everything about meetings and classroom audio. You get great audio and systems that are easy to install and manage. Visit neva.com/twi and get 50% off one Neva HDL 300 system for midsize rooms when you get a live online demo and buy before December 16th, 2022. And by Cachefly. Cachefly is the only CVN built for throughput. Delivering rich media content up to 10 times faster than traditional delivery methods and 30% faster than other major CDNs. Learn how you can get your first month free at Cacheflycom. Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo Laporte here, the tech guy, time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smart phones, smart watches, all that jazz. 88. 88. Ask Leo is the phone number if you wanna join the conversation. 8 8 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6. Tollfree from anywhere in the US or Canada outside that area. What, what do they do? Mikah Sargent. If

Mikah Sargent (00:02:00):
They're outside of that area, they can use Skype or another sort of online dialing program. And hopefully it'll be free to call in.

Leo Laporte (00:02:08):
Wow, it's so nice to have help. <Laugh>. Hey, you did a nice thing for that Steve Martin guy.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:16):
Oh, this is true. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:02:18):
He sent you a shortcut,

Mikah Sargent (00:02:19):
Mr. Steve. 

Leo Laporte (00:02:21):
He asked us a couple weeks ago what, why the shortcut wasn't working. Basically

Mikah Sargent (00:02:26):
Had an email shortcut and he would start it and it would, you know, bring up the composed sheet. But if he needed to go get a note from another app or something like that, he'd swipe away to go get the information he needed. When he swiped back to fill in on the email, it went away.

Leo Laporte (00:02:41):
He would be gone. Yeah. Well, where did it go, by

Mikah Sargent (00:02:44):
The way? Well, so what he was using reasonably was the built in tool for sending an email. Yeah. But what it does is it pops up a modal dialogue. And for folks who don't know, that just means either it's there or it's not modal. And so the second he swiped away, he was actually swiping the entire text away. So I spoke to MyPal Rosemary Orchard from iOS today and said, what's going on here? And it ended up being a very simple way to fix it. Mail two links. So for the longest time, there are different kinds of URLs that sort of most computers, most operating systems understand,

Leo Laporte (00:03:21):
Like htt, like ht slash slash

Mikah Sargent (00:03:24):
Yeah. Another one is a phone number which

Leo Laporte (00:03:27):
I think phone slash slash believe it or not.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:29):
Yeah. Phone colon slash slash And then this one is mail to colon. And anything that you put after that, that becomes a link that most operating systems are gonna understand means, Hey, open up my email program and send this email.

Leo Laporte (00:03:43):
I call it the fiber, the fiber one link. There

Mikah Sargent (00:03:46):
You go. <Laugh> fiber one link. Yeah. so we basically created a shortcut that had all of that built in. It would just get the text of the for and then opened the url. Ah. And so it popped open the mail app instead of the, the modal dialogue. And so then he was able to swipe away if he

Leo Laporte (00:04:02):
Needed to. So cool. Yeah. Mr. Martin thank you. And said, yes, that did it. Yes. please tell them thanks so much. And I owe them at least a glancing nod. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:14):
Well, I will be cashing in my glancing nod at some point. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:04:18):
Watch Saturday live tonight. He, or Yeah, it's nice. Saturday Night Live that Martin's short and Steve Martin will be hosting. Oh, I, in fact, he first, what I sent on the shortcut said, well, I, I don't know if I can look at this. I'm after snl, that's kind of a humble brag. Yeah, yeah. I'll have to look at this after I host Saturday Night Live. I said, well, don't let those kids keep you up too late. <Laugh>. And then so apparently he has had time and looked for a glancing nod this evening to Rosemary Orchard and Mikah Sargant, our short apple shortcut gurus. I'm celebrating a little Okay. Something. I got a major award. You did?

Mikah Sargent (00:04:56):
That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:04:57):
I got a plaque. Well I've paid 80 bucks for it. I was gonna, was kinda, you know, one of those major awards where you buy it, it it has a nice, it's on a beautiful like oak panel, you know, suitable for hanging, which I will as soon as I'm done showing you this. Got a nice blue check mark. Well, it's gold cuz it's a beautiful gold play in honor of at Leo Laporte who had a verified Twitter account before they were available for purchase. That's me. Did you, do you have a blue check? I do. You should get one of these. Yeah. November, 2022, Vera forever, which I guess is who got my anti bugs. I will forever be verified thanks to Vera forever.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:38):
Very impressive. Honestly, look at that. You

Leo Laporte (00:05:41):
Know what I mean? Made a solid wood. I

Mikah Sargent (00:05:43):
Did a Google search for Vera forever and I am not Oh, that's cuz I misspelled it. Yeah. Ding,

Leo Laporte (00:05:47):
Ding, ding, ding, ding. Make sure you spell it. F o r e v e r. And it's got a blue check in the vera forever, so you know, it's real

Mikah Sargent (00:05:56):
<Laugh>. So that's how you

Leo Laporte (00:05:57):
Know. And no money goes to Elon Musk, I believe, I believe. Oh, Steve and Mar and Martin. Steve and Martin is a little confusing. Steve Martin and Martin Short are cohosting next week.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:09):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:06:10):
Apologies. Apologies.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:11):
So I've got a little bit of time before I thank you. A glancing

Leo Laporte (00:06:13):
Nod. You won't see a glancing nod tonight. <Laugh> next week for the glancing nod. Kiki Palmer. Oh, I love Kiki

Mikah Sargent (00:06:20):
Palmer. Oh, Kiki Palmer's on

Leo Laporte (00:06:21):
Tonight. Did you, have you seen? Nope.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:24):
I haven't seen Nope. Yet.

Leo Laporte (00:06:25):
Nope. Is not, I would say no to Nope. Except for Kiki Palmer. Okay. Which makes Nope, nope. Well, watchable. It's quite good.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:33):
It wasn't a full note, it was just a three quarters

Leo Laporte (00:06:35):
Note. Yeah. <laugh>. It's Uhuh now. It wasn't a great movie, but she is wonderful in it. I think it's her. She was like it is, she was a kid like in Aquila and the Bee, right? Yes, she was. Now she's a

Mikah Sargent (00:06:49):
Grownup. She is indeed. And

Leo Laporte (00:06:50):
Hysterical.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:51):
She's so funny.

Leo Laporte (00:06:52):
So good. Good for her.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:54):
And she's starting a television network.

Leo Laporte (00:06:57):
Yeah. Why not? You know, get an Oscar, start a television network. <Laugh> she didn't even get an Oscar and she started a television network. So good for her. Is there news?

Mikah Sargent (00:07:11):
I, you know, no,

Leo Laporte (00:07:13):
If you don't wanna talk about Twitter, there's not much to say. Yeah. I these days. I

Mikah Sargent (00:07:18):
<Laugh> there. I do actually, there is one thing I wanna talk about on the show today. The Verge was one site that reported on this. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:07:25):
Yeah. This is worth talking

Mikah Sargent (00:07:26):
About. Yes. Are you ready? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. This is the u this is from Anchor the UFE security cameras. Yeah. so there is a security researcher who has for quite a while kind of been keeping his eye on anchor's UV cameras, and has discovered that it is very easy or I should say trivial to access a stream of a camera with a little bit of an information about that camera using a program like vlc, which we've talked about VLC on the show before.

Leo Laporte (00:08:01):
But the trick, of course, is you have to find the special encoded address, the url, the mail to the male slash slash Yes. And it's not easily decipherable. However,

Mikah Sargent (00:08:15):
It, this is the problem is that it is using the serial number of a camera to do that. And as we all know, serial numbers are meant to identify a product throughout its entire life. Those numbers don't change.

Leo Laporte (00:08:28):
And they're often printed and stuck to the bottom of it on

Mikah Sargent (00:08:31):
The outside of the box.

Leo Laporte (00:08:31):
However, however, this is not something you should freak out about. That the real reason the Verge was angry and should be, and you should be too, is that UFE said, well, no, no, no. Nothing is ever sent to the internet. You're, it's a private camera. In fact, somebody asked us not so long ago, what's a camera? I don't need to send my photos and videos to the cloud, you know, a security camera. I don't have to send to the cloud. And we, I think Reem recommended the ufe. Yes.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:55):
Because their, their policy suggests promised everything's encrypted. You promised. And that was the other thing, is they finally did respond to the fact that photos were being uploaded to a server. It was an AWS server Amazon Web Service. They

Leo Laporte (00:09:11):
Kind of denied it emphatically.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:12):
Yes. And that's the thing, they, they came back to say, oh, actually yes, if you have notifications turned on, this does get uploaded. The server. They did not address the bigger issue, which was that the stream was not encrypted. Like they were saying. It was so not great and very disappointing because this is a company that says, Hey, everything that you have is stored locally. Hey, it's end to end encrypted. And hey, we do all of the motion detection and person identification on your devices. It doesn't involve the cloud at all. So you want to be able to, and

Leo Laporte (00:09:49):
That may the case, because what you're doing when you're using that special address is you're actually logging into the camera Right. Over the internet, but it is open to the internet. So that's problem number one. Yeah. and, you know, I should, I should say to anybody who's, who looks at something and says, oh, it, it, it notifies me on my phone that in order to do that, the only way it could do that, that has to go is going through the cloud. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, maybe not send, how has

Mikah Sargent (00:10:13):
Notifications work? Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:10:14):
Hey, speaking of the cloud, I got another one for you. I did find one. Amazon says, well, we lost 10 billion last year doing the Amazon Echo 10 billion. That's a lot of money to lose. Mm-Hmm. Did we talk about this last week? I think we did actually. I don't

Mikah Sargent (00:10:29):
Know. Well, you talked about it on twi, I believe, but

Leo Laporte (00:10:31):
I get confused to do so many shows. Well, if I didn't, I, it makes me wonder, what's the future of Amazon's echo? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, like if they're losing so much money, turns out they thought everybody would use the echo to buy stuff. You know, Hey, echo buy shaving cream. And I do, sometimes I say that and it says, last time you bought shaving cream, it was this now and now would you like to buy more of that? And I say, yes. And then, because I didn't want it to order stuff without my say. So I set a pin and it says, well, what's your pin? And I say, <laugh>, you know,

Mikah Sargent (00:11:07):
24 6 0 1 2 4 6 0 1.

Leo Laporte (00:11:09):
How'd

Mikah Sargent (00:11:09):
You know that? Oh, shoot. Believe that out <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:11:12):
And it goes, okay, ordered. And I think that's a nice feature. I've done that maybe a dozen times at most. Yeah. In five

Mikah Sargent (00:11:18):
Years. I'll tell you the one time I've ever used that feature is there was a deal where you could save like 50% on a dog toy. And so it was this

Leo Laporte (00:11:28):
Did your dog order it?

Mikah Sargent (00:11:29):
It was this little chicken. And I, and

Leo Laporte (00:11:30):
I'll resay, hang on. Got my a dog pot.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:33):
Exactly. I ordered it and then I got it in the mail. And it was this big <laugh> and <laugh>. I, I

Leo Laporte (00:11:38):
People was bigger than your

Mikah Sargent (00:11:39):
Dog. Bigger than my dog. Bigger

Leo Laporte (00:11:41):
Than both dogs combined.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:42):
<Laugh>. Yes, it was,

Leo Laporte (00:11:43):
It was a giant

Mikah Sargent (00:11:44):
Chicken was huge. A giant chicken giant.

Leo Laporte (00:11:46):
Was

Mikah Sargent (00:11:46):
It rubber? No, it was soft. So they like befriended it. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:11:51):
Oh, I don't wanna know what that means. Oh

Mikah Sargent (00:11:53):
Dear. That

Leo Laporte (00:11:53):
Sounds like a euphemism, if ever I heard one. Mr. Mikah, Sargant Mr. Leo Laporte. We are your two tech guys on the radio. Eighty eight eighty eight. Ask Leos the phone number, website tech guy labs.com, please give us a jingle. And we will take to the phones in a bit. Know Scott Wilkinson this week, but Johnny Jett coming up in the GWiz as well. Stay right here. Oh, and Rich tomorrow. That's right

Mikah Sargent (00:12:31):
Ma,

Leo Laporte (00:12:34):
Do do do do, do, do. I wish I'd thought of it. Really Do, do, do. Yeah. That's what they Amazon said is people do timers. <Laugh>, they say, play some music. I turn on the lights

Mikah Sargent (00:12:55):
Occasionally. I only ask trivia questions whenever I, you know how for

Leo Laporte (00:12:58):
A while I played Jeopardy, which was kind of fun.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:01):
Oh yeah. I never really played any games on it. Oh, do this. Okay, I'll do it. Ziggy activate the holiday theme.

Alexa (00:13:10):
Okay. Here's winter holiday theme. Welcome to the winter holiday theme.

Leo Laporte (00:13:18):
It's so pretty.

Alexa (00:13:19):
It is the season to put some jolly into setting timers. Ti the forecast, put some jolly and even jokes. And if you ever want to take down the decorations, just say, turn off holiday theme. Now let's start this season with a greeting. Just say hello.

Leo Laporte (00:13:39):
Hello.

Alexa (00:13:41):
Season's greetings. The holidays can be the busiest time of the year. And if you need help keeping track of time, here's the ad alarm. Oh, either way you have a new notification. Do you want to hear it?

Leo Laporte (00:13:54):
Yeah.

Alexa (00:13:57):
One new notification. Your nutrition tip is here. <Laugh>, when reaching for a snack, consider choosing low fat milk or yogurt instead of cheese. What the U S D A recommends this, since milk and yogurt have more potassium and less sodium than most cheese, if you want to grab some yogurt than what's

Leo Laporte (00:14:15):
Wrong with potassium and sodium

Alexa (00:14:16):
To your shopping list. Would you like me to do that?

Leo Laporte (00:14:19):
No.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:22):
I'll add some cheese to your shopping list.

Leo Laporte (00:14:25):
I've just added some dairy to your shopping list. Okay. Then as a button that says, report content <laugh> turning you off now

Mikah Sargent (00:14:34):
Before content for being so bad.

Leo Laporte (00:14:36):
The other thing they can, that you can do now with Zaggy is you can have the avatar theme.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:45):
Oh wow. That's a real branding play.

Leo Laporte (00:14:48):
Yeah. I keep seeing avatar ads in my echo show. And they really want Amazon must have invested. We're else. They're getting a whole bunch of advertising money. But are you, I mean, okay. How old are Avatar came out? 2009, I think. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> 13 years ago. So you were like four. No, you were, you were an adult, but barely. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:15:09):
I was 17.

Leo Laporte (00:15:10):
Yeah. Did you go see it?

Mikah Sargent (00:15:13):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:15:14):
Here's a trivia question. Hello. Here's a trivia question. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:18):
Oh boy.

Leo Laporte (00:15:20):
What is the all time highest grossing movie?

Mikah Sargent (00:15:26):
Wait, it's not Avatar.

Leo Laporte (00:15:27):
Avatar, okay. That's right. So I think they think the next one's gonna be the hot second Act. Oh, that's the hope. But do you have any desire to see it?

Mikah Sargent (00:15:36):
Not in theaters

Leo Laporte (00:15:37):
At all. Not even

Mikah Sargent (00:15:39):
At Holland. No. I'll watch it at home. I will.

Leo Laporte (00:15:41):
It looks dopey.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:43):
I don't know

Leo Laporte (00:15:44):
Dopey.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:46):
I don't know. <Laugh>, maybe.

Leo Laporte (00:15:48):
Geez, grt. It does, it has too much Saudi and potassium grommet. Oh, I do a nice Wednesday day. Or would be good.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:56):
Hey, that's good.

Leo Laporte (00:15:59):
Jeremiah's getting the idea. Isn't he calling for your love? Ms. Kim Shaer. She is our phone. Angel. Hi Kim. Hi.

Kim Schaffer (00:16:08):
I wonder if Laura

Leo Laporte (00:16:10):
Left him a note song

Kim Schaffer (00:16:11):
Or if he

Leo Laporte (00:16:12):
Chose it himself. Jeremiah, did you choose this song yourself? It was all, it was all Laura.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:16):
Oh, clever Laura. See

Kim Schaffer (00:16:18):
She leaves good notes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:19):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Hello. Kim Scher. Hi. Did you have a lovely week?

Kim Schaffer (00:16:24):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:25):
Did you get a plaque saying

Kim Schaffer (00:16:26):
I did not. I'm not verified on any of my counts. I'm not that. Did you

Leo Laporte (00:16:30):
Get a a, a special award? No, I

Kim Schaffer (00:16:33):
Did. However, you asked me if I was going to watch the World Cup and I have a friend

Leo Laporte (00:16:38):
Who let's

Kim Schaffer (00:16:39):
Not like soccer. So I went on Tuesday and watched the game with her and was really excited about this morning's game. And then I woke up and we were already losing <laugh>. Ah,

Leo Laporte (00:16:48):
Don't say anything. Oh,

Kim Schaffer (00:16:50):
Spoiler alert.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:51):
Oh, I see. It's

Kim Schaffer (00:16:52):
Over though. So I'm, yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:16:54):
That's no

Leo Laporte (00:16:54):
Support. If you don't know by now Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:56):
Then that's on you.

Leo Laporte (00:16:58):
I don't know. This is always a constant kind of conversation is when is something a spoiler? Like if I told you that Darth Vader was Obiwan Kenobi's cousin, a 40

Kim Schaffer (00:17:10):
Year old movie, spoiler.

Leo Laporte (00:17:11):
Would it be a spoiler? I mean, it would be if you hadn't seen the movie, but 40 that movie's boil.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:16):
Yeah. What's an acceptable spoiler

Leo Laporte (00:17:18):
Alert? Yeah. What's an acceptable

Kim Schaffer (00:17:19):
Based on how your listeners are not usually fans of Sports Ball? I'm not that worried about. That's okay.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:26):
It's okay. The ones that are

Leo Laporte (00:17:27):
Spoiler, the 49ers are gonna win on Sunday. The

Kim Schaffer (00:17:30):
Ones that are should have been watching at seven o'clock this morning are,

Leo Laporte (00:17:33):
I forgot. So I forgot. Yeah. Real fan. And I woke watching and then I saw, you know, I woke up a tut,

Kim Schaffer (00:17:39):
A Tudo zero lead. Yeah. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:17:41):
Yeah. I saw a tut and I said, oh, you know what? I was conflicted because of guitar. I didn't really want to watch the World Cup. I didn't wanna celebrate it. And so now I don't have to. No. If they'd wanted it been more of a conflict, but anyway, sport ball, what were we talking about? Let's get a caller

Kim Schaffer (00:17:59):
On it. Well, let's go back to what seems to be the topic lately. Mashed it on <laugh>. Never heard of it. What's

Leo Laporte (00:18:05):
That? I don't know. An extinct

Kim Schaffer (00:18:07):
It sounds like. Is heder that thing with the big Yeah, I think it's that. Can you do an elephant sound mega? Nope, I can't. I'm thinking of the huge shot. Nope, that's not Everybody stop. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,

Leo Laporte (00:18:26):
Kim. Hello. Hello. Derek calling all the way from Seattle. How are you sir?

Caller 1 (00:18:33):
I'm doing great. How are you doing

Leo Laporte (00:18:34):
Today? We're well. What can we do

Mikah Sargent (00:18:35):
For you? Can you know Elephant sounds <laugh>?

Caller 1 (00:18:38):
Yes. that's already been completed by you. Thank you. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:18:41):
Yeah, I think we've really done it. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:18:44):
Yes. So I'm running my own Macon server and I'm trying to figure out how to customize it and you know, it's a brand new thing for a lot of people and I just want to get rid of the standard images so it can kind of look like my own. And I'm, I'm not quite sure where to,

Leo Laporte (00:18:57):
It's, there's two ways to do it. There's the easy way and there's the hard way. So I, I did it the easy way cuz I don't actually host the server. If you host it, it might not be so hard for you. I so you didn't. I am riding on a, a company called Mato Host, which is, so it's hosted Mastodon. We have our own Mastodon Mastodon I should explain is a social network. Very nice social network. It's a front end to something called the ERs, which is a massive kind of collaboration of a variety of different sites that can talk to one another. Okay. And and so Macon's one of them, there are many others, but Maan seems to be the number one choice for people fleeing the conflagration that is Twitter because it's very Twitter like and if you get enough of your Twitter friends on there, it really is pretty much the same as Twitter with some, you know, differences.

(00:19:53):
It's not as it's not owned by a company. There's no advertising and, and there's not as much pressure to do something that gets you followers. So as a result people are just mostly have conversations, things like they used to do on the internet. Running your own is possible because it is the fed averse. Everybody can have their own server. Generally, you, you would wanna join some other server where there are more people. But if you are technically literate, as you obviously are, Derek, easy peasy to run your own in a Docker container or on your own server. And it's not that easy peasy. If you know what you're doing, it's easy to run your own.

Caller 1 (00:20:29):
It was actually one of the most easier things for me to set up cuz I've set up a lot of stuff on Linux. And when I ran all the commands, I think I got one error message when I was setting it up and I fixed it. And then I ran the service and it was welcome to Macon. This is,

Leo Laporte (00:20:42):
Isn't that awesome?

Caller 1 (00:20:44):
Well, there you go. <Laugh>. So,

Leo Laporte (00:20:45):
So in server settings there's an appearance tab and you know, down in your admin and you can create a custom mascot. So if you go to twi.social, you'll see there is a Twit logo instead of the tooting elephant. That is the generic, that's the easy way. The hard way is less hard for you cuz you're running your own server. But the hard way is to change the CSS there. You can do custom CSS in the same, ah, the same page. So you can kind custom style, so you can make it look like whatever you want. And then of course, the easiest maybe way for you, since you have your own servers, you have access to all the source files for all the images and stuff. So you could just go in there and mess with it you know, and change 'em. But I, that's what I was trying to find. Yeah. If I, yeah, I don't know where they store those to be honest with you. So all I did was go into the admin and change the custom mascot. So instead of an elephant, you get a little twi guy running around in the mountains there. But that's about it. And

Caller 1 (00:21:47):
That was, and that was under preferences and appearance

Leo Laporte (00:21:50):
Yeah. For administration. So you get a special menu down below in under appearances. It's the far tab on the right.

Caller 1 (00:21:57):
Exactly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:21:58):
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You see that there. Say that there.

Caller 1 (00:22:01):
I see it.

Leo Laporte (00:22:02):
I'm a fan of the idea. We'll see how it turns out in practice, even before Twitter kind of started to fall apart and go downhill. I'm a fan of the idea of the way the worldwide web originally was intended, which is completely decentralized, not owned by a bunch of handful of massive companies. But, but each of us had a blog mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, and then the micro bloggings kind of cool because you don't have to write a big long article. You could write a few sentences. That's why Twitter took off. And in fact, it killed a lot of blogs. I hardly blog anymore because, you know, I, I can do micro blogging. And m is one of the ways to do that. And I think it's, it's quite fun. So

Caller 1 (00:22:43):
It's, it's I've actually happen to had this much fun on the social network.

Leo Laporte (00:22:47):
Yeah, I

Caller 1 (00:22:48):
Agree. Prior Facebook

Leo Laporte (00:22:50):
<Laugh>, it's kinda like how it used to be like the internet used to be decentralized owned by all of us. No, massive corporation. I like that. Hey, well have fun Derek. Thanks for calling Leo Laport, Mikah Sargant, your tech guys. So are you gonna are you gonna do a relay to kind of put some content in there or just follow a bunch of people? Cause if the only thing about doing your own instances is you don't get the fed, the federated timeline doesn't have much stuff in it.

Caller 1 (00:23:19):
Actually, I, I am federated. Oh, good. I've been actually interact, I, I'm following about 200 users and I got about 200 users following a me Perfect. My plan is actually to kind of create somewhat of a public server because there's a need for that right now. But I got some stuff that I need to move around. I'm running it in Ubuntu on VMware. I'm trying to move it to Prox box. So <laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:23:41):
Yeah, you could put it on a cloud like AIG Ocean or you, you know. Yeah. 

Caller 1 (00:23:46):
I just I don't want a 200.

Leo Laporte (00:23:48):
Yeah, well that's the problem. Yeah. But you'll see. So the other thing I would suggest, and what's really worked well for us is to make your instance not just a generally public instance, but of, of, of of a kind of some sort of affinity group. So for us as TWI listeners Yeah. But that way everybody has a kind of a common interest and also a common interest in keeping it nice. And you don't get trolls joining and stuff like that. Exactly. Yeah. So I, I think, yeah. So you got something you, something you do that you like, that you would like to make a server for.

Caller 1 (00:24:19):
Yeah. this is actually I mean Maslon reminds me the BBS days very

Leo Laporte (00:24:24):
Much. And

Caller 1 (00:24:25):
I actually re I don't know what the word is, but brought back the bbs that was in Humboldt County. Oh, how cute. Very big. And I, their original domain name and I bought another domain name. And I've been in contact with the original system operator to make sure I have do this. How cool It's back. And people, I'm, I, I just <laugh> I adjusted my volume to be a terabyte, but it's only a 300 gig ssd. So I'm kind of freaking out over to something.

Leo Laporte (00:24:55):
I I was, I did, you know, we, I have to approve every new user, which is a good gate on that. Yeah. And then the other thing is you just, you know, I ended up having adding, I ended up paying for a lot more resources than I, for the first three years I was running it, it was 15 euros a month. It's now three $50 a month. It got a little more expensive. But on the other hand you know, it's, it's for a company, so it's not like it's you know, just my personal thing. That's cool. A humbolt. Yeah. I ran a BBS in the nineties, so I I I I know exactly. Or actually maybe it was the eighties. Come to think of it, I know exactly how you feel. It's really fun. It was the eighties. Gosh, <laugh>. Holy cow. Yeah.

Caller 1 (00:25:32):
Minus the dialup sounds and phyto net.

Leo Laporte (00:25:34):
Yeah, it was a phyto net. So you had this, the Humboldt County Fido, huh

Caller 1 (00:25:40):
I didn't have it. Somebody else did. I mean, I it was a first class server running a Mac. Nice. is what it was running. Nice. And that was about when I started my online career and then I converted the aol and then here we are now. So yeah, it's just Humboldt County doesn't have a lot of a digital presence or a lot of help in that county. And so when I'm trying, I'm from Humboldt as well, and so I know that they need help. I love that.

Leo Laporte (00:26:09):
That's a great thing to do.

Caller 1 (00:26:11):
That's what I'm trying, when

Leo Laporte (00:26:12):
You got it all ready to go, come back on. I don't know how many Humboldt listeners we have, but come back on and plug it and, and we'll, we'll tell

Caller 1 (00:26:18):
People to join it. Call in on the new show. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:26:20):
Yeah. On the new show. There you go. Yes, Derek, it's a pleasure.

Caller 1 (00:26:24):
Fabulous. Thank you Leo and I guy you two. Have a great day. You too.

Leo Laporte (00:26:27):
Thank you all. Thanks. See ya. That's fun. Yeah, it's fun. It is very much like the old internet. It's just kind of people kind of chatting and it all comes back around. Yeah. It's nice. And I'm very quick to say bye-bye. Kick people off if they if they act out. Plus, the nice thing about Maite is you have under three dots under each toot you have some moderation options. One is to report it, but the other is to block the person or block their entire server. So you as an individual can also control your experience. So if you're seeing a lot of people from a server that you just don't like, you can say, right. Pay goodbye. You are the weakest link.

(00:27:12):
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Mikah Sargent (00:31:05):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:31:07):
I ask that question all the time. <Laugh>, Leo, Laporta, Mikah, Sargant, your tech guys, what you gonna do when you get outta jail?

Mikah Sargent (00:31:17):
I'm gonna have some fun.

Leo Laporte (00:31:19):
You could, you know, that song is, you could always say, well, I wanna dedicate that to Elizabeth Holmes in 14 years. You could always like, have some fun with it. Yeah. Right?

Mikah Sargent (00:31:28):
Yeah. There are a lot of people

Leo Laporte (00:31:29):
Gonna get outta jail someday. Going to jail. Going to jail. Mm. You're gonna have some fun. We do not have a Scott Wilkins, you might have noticed our home theater guru, but that's okay. A, we are in our own right home theater. Gus. Yeah. B

Mikah Sargent (00:31:48):
I You and I together can play one Tuba

Leo Laporte (00:31:52):
<Laugh>. No, no tuba. But I, a couple of notes. I do have a ello that I got from the last World Cup, actually a couple world cups ago. This is a south African Ello. Sweet. So the last, that was like 10 years, eight years ago, or I don't remember. You were there. Or you No, no, no. Somebody who was there. Remember how annoying it was watching on tv? Maybe you don't. You were probably I,

Mikah Sargent (00:32:12):
No, I remember people talking about it at

Leo Laporte (00:32:14):
Very least. I just stop making that joke. <Laugh>. 

Mikah Sargent (00:32:16):
I keep aging. It's weird. I

Leo Laporte (00:32:17):
Know. And somebody who was there, you know, cuz they were so annoying. Those movie was, I sound somebody who was there brought me this from South Africa,

Mikah Sargent (00:32:25):
Here, have this annoying

Leo Laporte (00:32:26):
Thing, have this thing that was annoying at the but now I can annoy people on the radio. <Laugh> 88. They love it. And they love it. 88. 88. Ask Leo. I know you don't love it. Please don't send me email. El is on the line. Oh, our good friend, Ellie, I haven't heard from you in a long time. From Honolulu, Hawaii. Hello Ellie.

Caller 2 (00:32:48):
Hi.

Leo Laporte (00:32:49):
It's been years.

Caller 2 (00:32:51):
Well, I talked to you last year at the beginning of this year actually. It's been, I told you about how I almost, I almost didn't make it through Covid, remember?

Leo Laporte (00:33:00):
I do. I remember that. And I'm glad you're here with us.

Caller 2 (00:33:03):
And I figured well, I gotta call you because I can't say, you know, you're gonna be leaving us and Aww.

Leo Laporte (00:33:10):
I'm not leaving you. I'm not leaving you. I'm just leaving the, the radio company.

Caller 2 (00:33:15):
I know

Leo Laporte (00:33:16):
<Laugh>. It's really not the same thing unless you identify strongly with the radio company. But it is weird for me because for 46 years I've been talking into a radio microphone with attached to a transmitter and a tower Uhhuh. And now I'll still be talking to Yeah, well and on tv there was a, yeah, there was a brief, brief period of time. Now we got a big shot on TV coming up. It's gonna take my job, which is great. Rich Durrow. He'll be joining us about now. I

Caller 2 (00:33:43):
Remember him.

Leo Laporte (00:33:44):
Yeah, he's great. So a you're, you're not, think of it, it's like a wedding. You're not losing a son, you're not losing a host, you're gaining a son. I don't know what it is. You're getting somebody and then I'm still gonna do the show on the internet in the old days, you know, I remember do you remember when Howard Stern took a job on satellite and left radio and took a job on satellite?

Caller 2 (00:34:05):
Yep. I

Leo Laporte (00:34:06):
Remember. And everybody said, well, there goes Howard by like, no one will ever know.

Caller 2 (00:34:10):
Well, unfortunately,

Leo Laporte (00:34:11):
Yeah, we'll never, we'll never hear from him again. Well, that didn't happen. And he made 400 thou million dollars, so it wasn't a terrible move. You know, anyway, so I'm not, I'm not, I'm just leaving. It is a little sad in my career after all this time cuz I loved radio. Get this Ellie, it'll be the first time in my life. I haven't worked for somebody.

Caller 2 (00:34:34):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:34:35):
Is that why? It's

Caller 2 (00:34:36):
Always, yeah. But still you're gonna be very busy being your own boss. That never ends.

Leo Laporte (00:34:41):
Well, we really know who the boss is around here. Don't worry like that. We do. Yeah. It ain't, it ain't me. <Laugh>. my lovely wife Lisa runs the show. So I guess in a way I'm still working for the man except she's a woman. The man's a woman. <Laugh> and

Caller 2 (00:34:55):
You gotta watch it now with pronouns.

Leo Laporte (00:34:56):
I know she's a great boss though. I love, I love her because I, you know, she's my wife. But it's gonna be pretty much the same thing except it's Mikah now and me. And we're gonna have a little more freedom, a little more latitude to to take some time. Or Mikah might. Cuz it'll be more like a, there'll be video too. So Mikah might stand up and say, let me show you this beautiful plaque that I just got, <laugh>. Something like that. That kind of thing. Anyway, Ellie, I'm glad. And you now, you stopped doing your website, right?

Caller 2 (00:35:25):
Oh, a long time ago.

Leo Laporte (00:35:26):
Yeah. Yeah. Ellie used to do a great guide to Hawaii for disabled visitors. Oh, neat. Yeah. Which is a really, was a really great idea. And, but, but I guess others have taken up the mantle. I hope they have. Anyway.

Caller 2 (00:35:40):
I hope so too.

Leo Laporte (00:35:41):
Yeah. Well that's great to hear from you. Thank you, Ellie.

Caller 2 (00:35:44):
But I have a question for you.

Leo Laporte (00:35:46):
Oh, good. Even better me go. That was my great fear. In fact, one of the reasons we didn't wanna say anything until the last day was I didn't want a bunch of people saying goodbye. But <laugh> questions are good. What do you, what do you got for us?

Caller 2 (00:35:59):
How do you, on the lock screen screen of the iPhone, how do you make it so that you can take your photos and have 'em keep rotating?

Mikah Sargent (00:36:07):
Yeah. This is actually a, a relatively new feature if you can believe it that you didn't use to be able to do this. But with the introduction of the latest version of iOS, you can now set up multiple photos to, to scroll through on your lock screen. So you have to actually be on the lock screen. So you'll want to hit whatever button it is on your phone to make it go to the lock screen. And then all you do is you tap and hold on that lock screen and it will let you choose. It shows customize. And then you can pick with, with the customized option, several different photos that will actually shuffle through them. Now I am going to include a link in the show notes that walks you through these steps much more in depth. But Leo's kinda working through it right now. So you'll wanna create a new lock screen. Probably Leo, if you go back to that last page <laugh>. And then you choose plus

Leo Laporte (00:37:08):
Lock screen and then cancel what I was doing. Okay. Plus, plus. Ah, see there's a blue plus button that adds a new one. Cause I've already done this Ellie, and I love it by the way. I have pictures of the boss rotating and

Mikah Sargent (00:37:21):
Then that up there that says photo shuffle and purple. Yeah. That is the one that you'd want. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:37:25):
And just lets you pick, you could choose people, pets, nature or cities

Mikah Sargent (00:37:29):
And you can choose how often it shuffles. It can give you a new photo, hourly. I think it lets you choose every time you wake the

Leo Laporte (00:37:34):
Phone. I do it on tap because I want to, you know, every

Mikah Sargent (00:37:37):
Time you tap you get to see new ones.

Leo Laporte (00:37:38):
And Lisa has Lisa puts kitty cats in there as well as people. That's, and then you choose which people. So she, so she chose her, me and her son. And some guy I, I've never met. I don't, he's very good looking. I don't know <laugh>. Anyway that's it. No, I'm kidding. And and so you can choose what you wanna rotate. I bet you have a lot of nature photos of of your beautiful island. And that would be a nice thing to mix in there Yeah. As well. And then you can either let the machine pick for you use featured photos or you select manually. I like to use featured photos. Me too.

Mikah Sargent (00:38:11):
It

Leo Laporte (00:38:12):
Just picks 'em, right?

Mikah Sargent (00:38:12):
It picks good photo and it, it tries to do ones that are in high quality. It uses a bunch of, you know, machine magic to try to pick out the ones that look the best. Yeah. And that way I don't end up getting weird screenshots that show up or anything

Leo Laporte (00:38:25):
Like that. Well there's, there's Lisa in Hawaii of all things at the, at the waterfalls there in the north, north shore of Oahu. So this is, this is is really fun cuz it's a different photo album every day in effect. Yeah. It's a lot of fun. And, and you can tap through 'em. It's really, it's a really great feature. Definitely something you wanna do.

Mikah Sargent (00:38:44):
And it's brand, I mean it's relatively new. Well

Leo Laporte (00:38:46):
You should say that. Don't you have to have iOS 16?

Mikah Sargent (00:38:48):
Yeah. Yeah. That's why I started with

Leo Laporte (00:38:50):
That. And do you have to have a special phone of any kind?

Mikah Sargent (00:38:52):
No, just as long as you have the latest version. So if your phone is new enough to have iOS 16 on it, it will let you do these special lock screens.

Leo Laporte (00:39:01):
Look how many of those I have. It's really, it's really fun. It's really great. Ellie, I hope that helps. We'll put thanks to Mikah. We will put a nice description of how to do that up on the te labs.com. And as you know, that's always free that by the way, another thing to mention will continue after we stop doing the radio show. Tech guy labs.com now points to our podcast network twit. And that's where the radio show the old, the tech, the new show will be asked could be called Ask the Tech Guys. We added an s it was point, you know what mic it cost me an extra 50 bucks, but it was worth it. Thank you. It was worth it. So I appreciate it. Ask the tech guys. So from now on, when you go to Tech Guy labs.com, starting next year, not till the, cuz we're gonna take Christmas and New Year's off of course, but starting December 8th, I mean January 8th 2023.

(00:39:50):
Wow. that will automatically go to like's a new show. And if you've, if you already subscribed to the podcast too, nothing's gonna change for you. It's only for people listening to the radio. It's funny that Rich must have gotten his ears must have been burning cuz I just got a text from him saying, are we on? Oh yeah. I said, yes, we are one 15 a couple hours. Rich will join us. Ellie, great to talk to you. Thank you for the nice words. Remember, you can still listen. Just have to use the this newfangled thing called the internet to do it. And somebody, Mr. Bau in our chat room says, will the boss be joining you? Occasionally I would. I would bet the boss will show up. Mikah and I'll mostly be there. Leo and Mikah, your tech guys more calls after this. Rich is great. So you're gonna, you're gonna be in good hands. Very good hands. I should have said that on the air instead of on the podcast. But that's the case.

Mikah Sargent (00:40:54):
That's one of the downsides of the radio being

Leo Laporte (00:40:57):
Involved. Yeah. There's this comp, it's complicated. Wait,

Mikah Sargent (00:41:00):
Did I say that when I meant when I needed to

Leo Laporte (00:41:02):
Say? Right. Exactly. Exactly. Well that was a good one for you. I like that. 

Mikah Sargent (00:41:08):
That isn't

Leo Laporte (00:41:09):
A great, so fun, Lisa.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:10):
It's wild. It took so long for them to add these lock screen customers.

Leo Laporte (00:41:14):
Nice. There. Now Lisa put cats in there and so like, at least once a day she'll say, oh look,

Mikah Sargent (00:41:20):
She'll

Leo Laporte (00:41:21):
Forget the show. Yeah, show me the cat. Yeah. And it's great. There's so many good. She has a lot of pictures of the cat <laugh>, including the cat that they stole. The neighbors stole. Oh yeah. So we, she said, I gotta figure out how to get rid of him.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:32):
Did the neighbor move or

Leo Laporte (00:41:33):
That? Yeah, they moved. So

Mikah Sargent (00:41:35):
Did the cat go with them? Yeah, of

Leo Laporte (00:41:37):
Course.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:37):
That's so sad.

Leo Laporte (00:41:39):
Well, it's fine now, but it was, it was a source for some

Mikah Sargent (00:41:43):
That's so weird. Sense of loss. It's just such a weird thing to do.

Leo Laporte (00:41:46):
So our neighbors literally, we're in a cul-de-sac, so there's only 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 houses in the cul-de-sac. And our, our ginger cat Hamilton went missing a couple of years ago. It wasn't the first time he was at Tom. So, you know, they kind of wander. So we put up signs everywhere. We, we, we canvased the neighborhood signs. We had signs and we gave the neighbor one of those things, you know, have you seen our giddy, his name is Hamilton. He's chipped. And then we, he disappeared. So we thought, well, somebody has him or he got run over or something happened. And then about three or four months later, we saw him. We go and running over ham and the woman comes running outta the house. No, no, no, no. That's what they name him. I forgot. Now that's not Hamilton. That's a new, a different cat named Stanislaw Archie. That's what they name him. That's Archie. And we said, no, no, that's Hamilton. See I have the, I have the kitty pictures to No, no, it's Archie. And

Mikah Sargent (00:42:51):
Then just tell me you bought a scanner.

Leo Laporte (00:42:53):
Yeah. Well that's what she said. She said. She said, but he was chipped. She said, yeah, we brought it to the vet. I don't think they did. I think this is a lie. We brought it to the vet. They scanned it and they, and, and they called you and nobody answered. Nobody was home. But our dress would be on there. And it would've been apparent that, oh, that's your neighbor's cad. Yes. So I don't think they really did that. But anyway, they claimed that they did that. And then she said, well, don't, please don't tell our daughter Santa Claus brought him. And so was like,

Mikah Sargent (00:43:22):
Are you kidding me?

Leo Laporte (00:43:23):
Like, oh, great. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:25):
And then we found out they didn't even have a daughter.

Leo Laporte (00:43:27):
No, they did. She didn't have a daughter. We knew the daughter. Cause she, she'd come over, use her trampoline sometimes. So Archie slash Hamilton still came over. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we'd feed him, he'd pat him, visited with him, and then one day he's gone again. And then we noticed the neighbors moved. They didn't say goodbye or they didn't put up four sales, nothing. They just disappeared. And that was that with Hamilton. So it's kind of, it's kind of weird. Right.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:55):
That's very weird.

Leo Laporte (00:43:56):
It's kind of weird. I mean, oh, this happened to you Susie.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:59):
There's an abundance of cats in the world. <Laugh>, that's,

Leo Laporte (00:44:02):
There are far too many. Yeah. In my opinion. But well, the, the thing is Hamilton was kind of aggressive and mean and so I didn't, I don't think Lisa even might. It's just we would've liked to have known. Yeah. We've liked to have known

Mikah Sargent (00:44:17):
The sort of the,

Leo Laporte (00:44:18):
It's like weird

Mikah Sargent (00:44:19):
The cat, that this is not the cat. It's her cat.

Leo Laporte (00:44:22):
<Laugh>. How could you not know? We even, she even, we even gave a brochure to your husband saying, have you seen our cat?

Mikah Sargent (00:44:28):
Yeah. That's some How could you, shady

Leo Laporte (00:44:30):
Behavior. Behavior. It's shady. Anyway, the new neighbors just moved in, so we're keeping our cats inside for a while. Good.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:36):
Yeah. You have trauma. You, I understand,

Leo Laporte (00:44:39):
I know. It's jerky jerks. Sarah was Sarah called her out on him. We, I, we. Anyway, it was, it's a weird story. Ba ba b, ba b, Leo and Mikah, your tech guys. 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number. The website Tech guy labs.com. That's free. No charge. Wander in links. Go up there. Mikah's gonna put that little how too on how to get the slideshow on your lock screen on your iPhone. All sorts of stuff. After the fact. We also put a transcript of the show up. It's written by a computer. So it's not great, but it's okay. Getting better. It's getting better. Wait, we'll talk next hour maybe about chat G pt. Have you been playing with that? Yes. What? Anyway, we'll talk about that. The computer that can write limericks, but tech eye labs.com also has audio and video from the show after the fact.

(00:45:29):
All of that go there. It's there, it's there for you. This is episode 1949. Now somebody asked me, well, is Rich gonna be there to No, rich is doing his own thing. I don't know if Rich is gonna do video. I don't know what he is gonna do. I'll ask him. He's gonna be with us in about two hours. Cool. Hour and a half. I'll ask him. But that's gonna be where Mikah and I will be on the inter. That's gonna be, that's our home on the internet. And rich will have, I'm sure somewhere else. Wonderful for you. Joe is on the line from Knoxville, Tennessee. Hello Joe.

Caller 3 (00:46:00):
Hello. Hey, last weekend you had a guy call in that was wanting to do a wifi link between, I'm guessing his house and his workshop. Yeah. Workshop was a metal building. Yeah. Yeah. I've used ubiquity the local stations and nano stations for quite a while over the years. Yeah, I did a, I worked for a company. We did ip security cameras for a lot of public housing sites and some of the distances we were having to cover. We found these things work really great. The factory specs say they'll do 12 kilometers. What?

Leo Laporte (00:46:40):
Whoa. Those are, so these are, so first of all, I, I did the same thing in our house. Replaced a consumer wifi with ubiquity. Very happy with that. There, there can be problems with ubiquity with updates. Occasionally they'll put out a buggy update. So it's always good to be kind of wait and see, make sure everybody's got the update installed and working before you do it. But otherwise, ubiquity's great gear. But this is something special. I don't use this. So this is, is this a special ubiquity that's directional or how does it go? 12 kilometers?

Caller 3 (00:47:10):
It is a direct, a directional unit. The two different, the different versions. They've actually got 'em in three different frequencies. We've got 'em in 900 megahertz, 2.4 gig and five gig. Nice. the nano station is a smaller unit. You have a, a Poe power supply that you feed your data into. It feeds power and data to the unit.

Leo Laporte (00:47:37):
Okay. So it's in addition to what you've already got is that

Caller 3 (00:47:41):
Yeah, you just plug, basically you just plug it onto your existing network. Okay. If you wanna link to an remote,

Leo Laporte (00:47:47):
You'd have a router in addition to this. This is more like a, a transmitter. Okay.

Caller 3 (00:47:51):
Yeah. But then the local station actually has a secondary ethernet port on there that you could actually piggyback off to another low station. And cause we were doing some point to point, to point to get some distances we needed and we were having to jump between 900 megahertz and five gig. Cause you know, the 2.4 gig stuff, if it's going through trees, leaves soak up the microwave. Five gig is not, doesn't seem to be as susceptible to it. Nine megahertz doesn't really care if there's trees in a way, if we're not, what I've seen, and we were actually doing voiceover IP and then jumping back and forth. How

Leo Laporte (00:48:31):
Far? Not 12 kilometers.

Caller 3 (00:48:33):
We did I know on one location we were shooting three miles. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:48:38):
What? But that's kind of, that's you're you're aiming it, it's almost like a microwave at that point.

Caller 3 (00:48:43):
It's a point to point. You have to aim it. Yeah. These are rectangular units. There, the M two or an M fives or the two gig and the five gig. The

Leo Laporte (00:48:57):
So this is, is it expensive? Cause this is kinda high end commercial gear.

Caller 3 (00:49:02):
It's not that expensive. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:49:03):
They're like $90

Caller 3 (00:49:04):
Less. Yeah. Less than a hundred bucks a piece. What? I

Leo Laporte (00:49:07):
Know, I was shocked. Do you need to have a ubiquity router or can you use any router with

Caller 3 (00:49:12):
It? You can go into any router because basically what you do is you set it up it's got a, the wifi side and then it's got the land side. So you can set it up as a bridge. So you just plug onto your existing network. So it bridges that through the router and I mean through the, the, the, the one station that you set up as a, as the hotspot. And then the other one you set up the stations and on, I know on two or three locations we'd set up the, the main unit where the DVR was at. And then we had three or four buildings sort of spread around and it has a fairly wide beam on it. So we'd have like three different locations pointing back to the central location. And these were all poe. I mean

Leo Laporte (00:49:59):
That's called power over ethernet. We should explain that. It means you only have one cable. You don't have a separate power line and a network cable that it gives you power over.

Caller 3 (00:50:07):
And we were doing ptz cameras. Boom. And you can control 'em.

Leo Laporte (00:50:12):
I love how geeks we all have. We have this acronym language, we have to explain that to everybody. That's cool. So you could aim 'em up and down, left and right and and say, who's that over there in the, you know, in the backyard And you could point it and zoom in. Yeah.

Caller 3 (00:50:26):
Pretty cool. Yeah. We, it was interesting. One time I got a call from one of our customers says, Hey, can we pan this camera over and watch this house over here? I said, yeah, he can do that through your system. Why? What do you need to move it over there for? He said, oh, we got about 10 federal agents in our office right now and they're getting ready to do a raid on apartment <laugh>. I said, give me a minute so I can tune it in and watch it.

Leo Laporte (00:50:46):
Exactly. <laugh>. We live in a world that is on camera all the time now. It's kinda amazing. Yeah.

Caller 3 (00:50:53):
Yeah. I called in a few weeks ago about being on camera. I have the neighbor next door. Oh yeah. Watching my house.

Leo Laporte (00:50:59):
Yeah. Yeah, I remember. You're right. Did you, so you solved it. Is it has that I've

Caller 3 (00:51:04):
Been she was talk, that neighbor was talking to another neighbor and since then she's put a camera on the other side of the house watching that neighbor.

Leo Laporte (00:51:10):
She's got a better view on the other side. <Laugh>.

Caller 3 (00:51:13):
So

Leo Laporte (00:51:13):
Holy cow.

Caller 3 (00:51:14):
One camera's just not working anymore. It's just, it'll see light and dark.

Leo Laporte (00:51:18):
Yeah. I wonder why. So Joe, I appreciate you. You're obviously an expert on this stuff, so it's great to have you call in and fill us in. I appreciate that.

Caller 3 (00:51:28):
For your, your free time. You're gonna have what little of you're gonna be just being off the radio.

Leo Laporte (00:51:33):
I get to have brunch on Saturday. That's about it. <Laugh>. Thanks Joe. You're well. It's a pleasure. I like guys named Joe. I don't know why, but we have a lot of guys named Joe. I'm the whole, yeah. In our chat and in our discord and everything, everything's kind of interesting. A lot guys named Joe. They always seem like they're nice people. Also have an Uncle Joe's a very nice guy. Ah, 88 <laugh>, Arizona. Lou, I like Lou's as well. Hello, Lou.

Caller 4 (00:52:00):
Hey, I,

Leo Laporte (00:52:01):
It's the world's world's oldest comedian.

Caller 4 (00:52:06):
Well, I don't know if I'm the oldest, but I'm pretty close. I'm 81 now.

Leo Laporte (00:52:11):
Yeah. But Steve Martin's catching up with you. <Laugh>

Caller 4 (00:52:15):
<Laugh> percentage wise, but he'll never quite make

Leo Laporte (00:52:17):
It. He'll never quite make it. It's X's paradox. Yeah. What's up Arizona Lou?

Caller 4 (00:52:24):
Well, I solve my problem on my website, but I don't understand what it has to do with it. On Firefox, I wasn't able to watch any videos.

Leo Laporte (00:52:33):
Oh, that stinks

Caller 4 (00:52:34):
From my website. But I could from other websites. And I went into some of the settings and unchecked Cookies. Cookies. So it's accepting cookies now. I

Leo Laporte (00:52:48):
Oh, it was blocking 'em before. So I'm at your website, Arizona lu.com. And I'm gonna, I'm on Firefox cause that's all I use. And your, your videos are through YouTube, right? Yeah. So the YouTube place just fine. It's working just fine. But maybe YouTube wants to set cookies. That's possible.

Caller 4 (00:53:06):
Oh, because my website wasn't sending cookies.

Leo Laporte (00:53:09):
No, no. But you have the video that you have on your website is embedded from YouTube, isn't it?

Caller 4 (00:53:16):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:53:16):
Yeah. So remember when you do that on a website, any website, or anytime you do that on your website, when you put a embed and YouTube makes it easy. They even give you the code. They just say, here's the embed code. You just cut it and you paste it in your website. You're actually putting a little window in your website to the YouTube website. And this is, this is where people get a little funny about cookies. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Because now YouTube, even if you haven't left Arizona lou.com in order to play back that video, YouTube is in, you're in effect on YouTube. And so anything YouTube does, including, of course, it's Google Set or check cookies. Now here's one way you know it's doing that, because I'm, I'm logged into Google to YouTube, right? And when I go to that site, it knows it's me. I've got my settings and everything. That's cuz Google is actually in your website. So that's why you have to have cookies turned on. Leo and Mikah, your tech guys more to come right after this. All right. You ready?

(00:54:21):
Let's do a little, I'll make this bigger little g ptt chat. So we've all seen the AI art. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that's pretty getting pretty good. In fact, I'm been playing with that. I wanna do AI art for our hosts for Christmas. Give you all your own AI portraits. Oh, so fun. So you go to a this chat, right? And you can, and you can ask it stuff and the artificial intelligence respond. So I say, I'm saying write a limb about Leo and Mikah on the radio. Shall we see what it does? Yes. There once was a duo named Leo and Mikah, who loved to be on the radio and make ya with their smooth voices and clever jokes that keep you entertained with their playful yolks. Tuning in was a must. Or you surely make abl. That's brimming blanda with Mikah and Ya. <Laugh>. We better that. Let's do that again. Yeah. There once Were two hosts named Leo and Mikah who shared a radio show called Tech News Today and knows about you, Mikah. Whoa. They discuss the latest trends and tech gadgets that make amends. They're listeners tuned in every day. <Laugh>. Aww. We do another one. Yeah.

(00:55:29):
There once was a duo named Leah and Mikah. They had a show on the radio quite a hit a they played all the hits and took lots of fits. And their listeners loved them. No, FIBA <laugh>. Okay, let's go back to the last one. That was better. The

Mikah Sargent (00:55:41):
Second one was

Leo Laporte (00:55:41):
Great beta. Isn't that hysterical? Yeah. So this is done just like a stable diffusion with a prompt Uhhuh

Mikah Sargent (00:55:49):
Text prompt. Try this give a plot synopsis for a horror film starring two radio hosts, Mikah and Leo

Leo Laporte (00:56:14):
In the horror film, dead Air. Mikah and Leo are radio hosts who are preparing for their late, whoops. Oh no. Something went wrong.

Mikah Sargent (00:56:24):
It was so good.

Leo Laporte (00:56:25):
It crashed. What? Oh, it was starting so well. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:56:36):
That's upsetting.

Leo Laporte (00:56:37):
I am sad the, that once It was really good. It was gonna be a show called Dead Air. Huh? Did you break early Jeremiah? Okay. Felt like it came a little soon. <Laugh>. But maybe it's just me. You know, I've only been doing this for 19 years. Somebody do this on the other machine. Write a plot. I'll do a plot synopsis. That's what you said. Yeah. For a horror film.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:21):
Starring radio.

Leo Laporte (00:57:22):
Starring radio. Radio. Starring the tech guys. Nice. radio hosts. Mikah and Leo. In the horror film tech guys the Nightmare. Mikah and Leo are the hosts of a popular radio show where they discuss the latest in technologies and gadgets. However, when they receive a mysterious device from an unknown collar, they soon find themselves thrust into a nightmare world where technology turns against them as they try to make their way back to reality. Mikah and Leo must face off against a horde of killer robots and other terrifying technological creations. Along the way, they uncover a sinister plot involving a mad scientist who is using the device to merge the real world with the digital one. Wow. In the end, Mikah and Leo must use all their tech savvy and courage to defeat the mad scientist and save the world from a technological apocalypse. But will they be able to survive the nightmare and make it back to the real world before it's too late? Wow. Wow.

Mikah Sargent (00:58:43):
And so I've seen some folks who play with the stuff regularly. Yeah. They'll use chat g p t to create the plot synopsis and then they hop over to

Leo Laporte (00:58:51):
Then it,

Mikah Sargent (00:58:52):
No, they hop over to not stable diffusion, but

Leo Laporte (00:58:55):
GT three. Oh, they make a picture.

Mikah Sargent (00:58:56):
They do photos, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:58:58):
Oh, Dolly.

Mikah Sargent (00:59:00):
Or maybe it is Stable Diffusion. What's the one that's in Discord?

Leo Laporte (00:59:02):
Oh. No, no. That's it begins with an m 

Mikah Sargent (00:59:05):
Mid Journey. Mid Journey. Mid Journey. Yeah. They hope hop over to Mid Journey and they make the characters for the film and then they'll post both. Let me find the Twitter account cuz

Leo Laporte (00:59:13):
I think he That's cool. Yeah. There was somebody who solved the first advent of code in 10 seconds because of with gpt.

Mikah Sargent (00:59:21):
Oh, that's funny.

Leo Laporte (00:59:22):
But he, but it didn't do as well in the second day or the third day. Just the first day. But he got on, the two people got on the leaderboard. In fact, I think they were one and two on the leaderboard using chat g PT to solve it, which is of course <laugh> Very frustrating. What

Mikah Sargent (00:59:37):
I loved too is that they then had the AI write a review of the film and just an absolute scathing review. Oh, that's so it's really funny.

Leo Laporte (00:59:47):
Oh, should I do that with this?

Mikah Sargent (00:59:49):
Yes. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:59:50):
So I

Mikah Sargent (00:59:50):
Might even be able to cause it write context,

Leo Laporte (00:59:52):
Isn't it? Yeah. A review of that film.

(01:00:00):
I recently saw the film Tech Guys the Nightmare starring Mikah and Leo and I was blown away. The plot was unique and terrifying with Mikah and Leo finding themselves trapped in a nightmare world where technology turns against them. The special effects were top notch. And the acting from both Mikah and Leo was excellent. One of the things that really stood out to me was the way the film explored the dangers of technology and the potential consequences of merging the real world with a digital one. It was a terrifying thought. And the film did a great job of bringing that idea to life. Wow. Let's say write a scathing <laugh>

(01:00:38):
Review of that film. <Laugh>. I recently had the displeasure of watching the film. The Tech Guys, the Nightmare starring Mike and Leo. I have to say it was a complete waste of time. The plot was nonsensical and the acting was wooden at best. The special effects were subpar, nothing to enhance the viewing experience effect. They were so poorly done. They actually took me outta the film entirely. In addition, the additionally the film's exploration of the dangers of technology fell flat and came across as preachy and heavy handed. Overall, I would not recommend Tech Guys the Nightmare to Anyone. It's a poorly made film that fails on almost every level. Avoid it at all costs. Wow. Okay. Now you can do Right. A conversation between two film critics

(01:01:34):
Who disagree violently over that film. Tech Guys A nightmare was a masterpiece. The plot was unique and the special effects were topnotch. Are you kidding me? That film was a complete disaster. The actor Williams Wouldn special effects were terrible. I can't appreciate, I can't believe you don't appreciate the will at way the film exploit Explore the Dangers technology. It was a thought provoking and timely message. Oh, please. The film's exploration of technology was heavy handed and preacher preachy. It had nothing to the viewing experience. I strongly disagree. The film was a thrilling ride from start to finish, and I would highly recommend it to anyone. I would not recommend it to anyone. It's a poorly made film that falls on, fails on almost every level. So it's kind of, they rehashed what they had already. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> said, you could see there's also, it's interesting a outline for a film review because they Yes. They, yeah, they follow. Yeah. They start with a plot and then they talk about the acting and then they talk about the special effects.

(01:02:37):
It's really interesting. And then the third pair, so they have an actual outline. This is kind of interesting, preachy. It was preachy. It's a little boiler platey. But honestly it's, it's more than just boiler plate because give me something that they, it wouldn't have any boiler played around about. Well, here we go. Write a limerick with made up words. Ooh. And then define the words. Oh, I love this. There once was a creature called a licit whose fur was as soft as it ticket. It. It aint only, it ate only pie and could fly so high. It was quite a remarkable licit. Ett a fictional creature with software and the ability to fly pie. A type of dessert made of fruit or custom <laugh>. That's pastry C crust. You didn't need to find that <laugh>. I was hoping for more made up words in there. Oh, I'll do that. Let's do it again. There once was a creature named whose skin was as tough as a Borg. It ate all in sight with its teeth so bright and left, nothing but rubble and gore. Oh, Zog Borg and rubble and gore. It defines, man, that's kind of weird.

(01:03:55):
I could maybe you tune it right? Just like you would with stable diffusion, you know, with six made up words.

(01:04:07):
Why? Hey, hey. How are you today? Leo Laport here, the tech guy with Mikah Sargant Tech guy too. Hello. Taking your calls, answering your questions, talking high tech at 88 88. Ask Leo. The website is tech guy labs.com. We should put some of these artificial intelligence generated poems about us up on the website. We are playing with something that just got opened up to the public from, there's a group called open ai.org. Elon Musk was one of the funders, a bunch of companies Google. The idea was let's create a non-profit to work on artificial intelligence for the greater good. And they've already released a few things. A artificial intelligence image generator called Dolly, and then Dolly too. You've probably seen some of the images. And, and in fact, once they did that, a number of other people have wrote, written similar programs like Stable Diffusion and Mid Journey to do the same thing.

(01:05:02):
So we're seeing these amazing AI images everywhere. Now, the way they work, and it upsets some artists, is they scan images off the public internet. Because it, the way artificial intelligence works right now is you feed it, you feed it with a lot of something and then let it make up rules about that. Something which you can then interact with that's real. You know, that's called machine learning. And the data set that you feed it. Well, if you're trying to teach it, chess would be a lot of chess games if you're trying to teach it. Art is images. And so all of these dolly two mid journey stable diffusion go out on the public internet. They don't go into your private photo library. Anything that's posted publicly, scan it. And so when you use it, you know, you can actually say and make it look like Ken Rutkowski is a well known illustrator and it will look his style. And Ken's not too happy about that. He said that's just because it's ingested all my images, which I gave, you know, I put on the internet for free. And now, so they're same people open ai.org have now got a chat bot called Chat. G P T G P T is another one of their tools, like Dolly. But it's a text based tool. So I fed it a few prompts. You tell it what to do and it will write it for you. Should I,

Mikah Sargent (01:06:21):
I, yeah. I want to. I'll just give you a quick one while you're looking at those. I said, give me a believable excuse for not attending the office Christmas party. Perfect. And make it rhyme. Perfect. And here's what it said back. I'm sorry, I can't make it. I have a terrible flu. I wouldn't want to spread it and ruin the party for you.

Leo Laporte (01:06:38):
Oh, <laugh>, that's great. You can use that for our get together next week. <Laugh>. There once was a lion named Leo who lived with a boy named Mikah. They roamed through the land with sword and hand and fought off all foes. Don't you know <laugh>? That has a little trouble. Yeah. How about a plot? Here's a, here's what a plot. Sy synopsis. You suggested this for a horror film starring the tech guys radio hosts Mikah and Leo. In the horror film tech guys the Nightmare. Mikah and Leo are the hosts of a popular radio show where they discuss the latest in technology in gadgets. However, when they receive a mysterious device from an unknown caller, they soon find themselves thrust into a nightmare world where technology turns against them. By the way, this is a great movie. We should write this. We should, in the end, Mike and Lee almost use all their tech savvy and courage to defeat the mad scientist and save the world from a technological apocalypse.

(01:07:40):
But will they be able to survive the nightmare and make it back to the real world before it's too late? Cuz it's a synopsis. It doesn't give you the end of the movie. Then I had them write reviews, positive and negative. <Laugh>. They were pretty funny. Here is a, should I do a limerick? Let me do this. A limerick with made up words then define the words. There once was a creature named Gork whose fur was as soft as a cork. It loved to frolic and play with a stick. But watch out for its sharp cork. The gork is a made up creature that has soft for in a sharp cork. A cork is a made up horn like appendage on the head of a lurk.

Mikah Sargent (01:08:19):
All right, pretty good. Write a short conversation between the first iPhone and the current iPhone 14. Oh, good. Here's the first iPhone. Yeah. Hey, what's up? I see you the latest iPhone model out there. You look pretty sleek and fancy. Yeah, I am. Apple has come a long way since you were released back in 2007. I have all the latest features in technology, including 5G connectivity, a state-of-the-art camera system, and an a 15 bionic chip for lightning fast performance. Wow. That sounds impressive. I only have a 3.5 inch display, two megapixel camera, and a slow processor.

Leo Laporte (01:08:50):
It knows all the specs.

Mikah Sargent (01:08:51):
I'm sure you can do a lot more than I could. Definitely. And with all these new features, I'm sure I'll be the go-to phone for a lot of people. But I have to give you credit. You started it all. Without you, there wouldn't be an iPhone 14 or any of the other models that came after you. Thanks. That means a lot to me. I may not have all the bells and whistles you have, but I'm proud of what I was able to accomplish in my time.

Leo Laporte (01:09:10):
It's a little dopey. It is.

Mikah Sargent (01:09:12):
But

Leo Laporte (01:09:13):
A computer wrote

Mikah Sargent (01:09:14):
It. Yeah. It just did this in seconds from me saying

Leo Laporte (01:09:17):
Out nothing. What's interesting is that people are using these computers. There's another one on GitHub co copilot to write computer code. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it actually is pretty good. In fact, somebody, there's a coding competition goes on in December called the Advent of code. It's an advent calendar of computer puzzles. And I I do it every year. I love it. A lot of our community does it. And somebody sat down and solved the first day puzzle in 10 seconds. He didn't do anything. He didn't even read the puzzle. He pasted it in to chat g p t and said, solve it. Solved. Yeah. You know, answer the last line. Cause the last line is what you need to do. And it did it, it did it in 10 seconds, which was enough to put it a number one on the leaderboard. The fastest solver. So you can mock this a little bit. Yeah. And it is a little mechanical, but, but I think this is text becoming very close now to what artificial intelligence art has been in the last month. Absolutely. We're It's unc it's kind of uncanny. It's not, you know, it's not gonna replace human artists or real writers. This is no William Faulkner here. But it's kind of amazing. And I suspect in fact we actually, it's already happened. It's been happening for years. A lot of newspapers will be partly written this way. Sports sections and financial sections are often written by artificial intelligence.

Mikah Sargent (01:10:38):
And I think one of the big things about this that is most impressive is how, what, especially with the, the text based ones, it's not so much with the the art ones, but how much you don't have to shape your wording to get a prompt that you want. You don't need to like you do with, if you're talking to Siri or one of the voice assistants, there are certain phrases that you need to say the right way in order to get it to do something. But I was just able to type that simple sentence of write a short conversation between the first iPhone and the current iPhone 14. I didn't have to say I need a conversation. I want it to be, you know, it, it is as understanding in plain language as it then creates in plain language. And I think that's what makes it so fun and easy for people to try.

Leo Laporte (01:11:22):
You can try it too. You have to create a free account at open ai. The website is chat.open ai.com. Somebody your chatroom said this has already had its 15 minutes of fame. Move on <laugh>. I don't know. I'm I'm more impressed by it than that. But you're right. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a little bit of a toy.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:41):
Yeah. But it's a fun toy

Leo Laporte (01:11:43):
<Laugh>. It's, you know, it's as good as a fidget spinner. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:11:46):
Exactly. More, more fun than a fi I mean, it's

Leo Laporte (01:11:49):
More fun than a fidget spinner.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:50):
It's incredible. I'm sorry. I don't care if you think it's only 15. I I it's incredible what it's able to do. I

Leo Laporte (01:11:55):
Write a limerick about an AI and a fidget spinner. There once was an AI so keen it could spin a fidget spinner with ease. It twirled around and around with not a single sound until it became a blur. So serene, maybe I should have it to a haiku instead. <Laugh> 88. 88 as Leo the phone number. We'll put a link to open AI in our website. Tech guy labs.com. Now we're gonna get back to the phones just a little bit and coming up in a little bit. Johnny Jet, our travel guy. Well, if he's feeling up to it and lots more stay here. Haven't met the new neighbors yet. We have to bake a

Mikah Sargent (01:12:51):
A trickle.

Leo Laporte (01:12:52):
I can't even finish this sentence cuz it's so unlikely we have to bake a tray of cookies and bring it over to them. I don't think Lisa will be doing that. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:02):
You have to. Or,

Leo Laporte (01:13:03):
Well, it's funny when we moved in, our, our neighbors did, which is very nice of them.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:07):
I don't trust people. I wouldn't eat them. That's my problem. It used

Leo Laporte (01:13:12):
To be. Yeah. Right. It used to be neighbors were like your neighbors and you liked them and you got along with 'em. You know, 'em, you borrowed their lawn mower. Or maybe that was just on tv.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:20):
I, I borrowed a lawn mower from a neighbor. Okay. I just wouldn't need anything from a neighbor. <Laugh>. I need to see, I need to know a person to see how clean they are. And somebody who has cats, I'm less likely to eat food from them because cats like to jump on countertops and that freaks me out.

Leo Laporte (01:13:35):
Write a haku about Steve Martin and Martin Short appearing on SNL next week. I don't know if it'll know what SNL is. Steve Martin and Martin Short together on snl. Again, comedy Delight. <Laugh>. Now write a sonnet about that to masters of Comedy. Take the stage their wit in humor on full display. The skits and jokes have us leave us in a rage of laughter. Unable to contain Steve Martin and Martin short side by side. Their chemistry and timing on point, their sketches. A joy to behold and abide. Leaving audiences in a fit of anoint what their appearances are. Rare to light. Bring back memories of days gone by their talent and charm. A pure sight leaving us all with a satisfied sigh. So let's raise a glass. Let's raise a glass and cheer to Steve and Martin. Appearing once more on SNL next

Mikah Sargent (01:14:34):
Year. Hmm. I asked it. Pretend you are competing in the mis universe competition. And answer the following question. Should napkins be banned? <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:14:46):
You're good

Mikah Sargent (01:14:47):
At this. Thank you. They, the bot responded As a contestant in the Miss Universe competition. I believe that napkins should not be banned. Napkins serve a very useful purpose in society. Providing a clean and convenient way to wipe our hands and faces when we need to. Banning napkins would not only be impractical, but it would also create a significant inconvenience for many people. Additionally, napkins can be made from recycled materials so they can be environment environmentally friendly if properly disposed of in conclusion, napkins should not be banned, but rather used responsibly and sustainable.

Leo Laporte (01:15:19):
That was better than 99% of Miss Universe contestants,

Mikah Sargent (01:15:23):
<Laugh>. Exactly, exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:15:25):
Asking about world peace.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:27):
Oh boy. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:31):
<Laugh> <laugh>. Should we end All Wars? Question Mark <laugh>. I believe that we should strive towards ending All Wars. War brings untold suffering and destruction to individuals, families, and entire communities. It takes a devastating toll on our planet and its resources. It is up to each and every one of us to work towards peace and harmony and to prioritize dialogue and negotiation over violence. And this sounds like a politician. Yeah. Let us commit to building a better, more peaceful

Leo Laporte (01:16:01):
World for

Mikah Sargent (01:16:01):
Considerations.

Leo Laporte (01:16:02):
Let to a better world. But you know what? That's good. Now you mix that with a AI that can do John f Kennedy's voice. And you got something I was

Mikah Sargent (01:16:10):
Gonna say. All we need now is the music AI

Leo Laporte (01:16:13):
Create and p music. Yeah. Yeah. Music AI are not good at, at least they haven't been. But you know what, I'm kind of thinking that we've, we've crossed a river a Rubicon here at some point because I, art used to be terrible and writing used to be terrible. And it's actually gotten decent.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:33):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>,

Leo Laporte (01:16:35):
It's kind of hard not to to stop playing with this, isn't it?

Mikah Sargent (01:16:38):
Yeah, it is. I mean, you, it's everything you can think of.

Leo Laporte (01:16:42):
And then people have figured out how to hack it already. There's a if you, if you search for Jailbreak chat g p t, you'll find an article about how people have figured out a way cuz it's not supposed to do mean stuff. Our show today brought to you by a a sponsor. I really like, whose timing is perfect. I'm talking about Neva. You know, people are coming back to work, but you still have a hybrid workforce. We certainly do, do people at home, people at work. People split the time between home work. That means your meeting rooms have to take a new shape. You know, there are people in the meeting room, but there are also people on Zoom or on you know, Google Meet or teams. And those people are, sometimes they're second class citizens. They're not hearing the meeting as well as you would like.

(01:17:31):
And if you're having an all hands on Zoom, you know, it's really important to hear what you have to say. Sure. You could go out and do what we used to do. We'd go out, we'd hire the pros, they'd come in, they'd put wires and DSPs and switches and all sorts of stuff all over the place. And that'll be a hundred thousand dollars please. And that You think I'm making that up? No, I'm not kidding. It's expensive. And then, oh, and by the way, every time you want to use it, you gotta have somebody come in and calibrate it and set it up. And then of course, you know, you've gotta wipe it all down. And you gotta have meetings set per participants separated by six feet. And it just gets crazy. It's really because it's got other things to worry about nowadays. Like, you know, ransomware and security Cloud, all of that stuff.

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(01:20:30):
Leo Laport, Mikah Sargant, your tech guys would've been nice to have this in high school to write your term papers. I would bet it would be as good as anything. A high school <laugh>. Yeah. Kid would write probably better.

Mikah Sargent (01:20:42):
But it would be easily the teachers that used that

Leo Laporte (01:20:45):
Would they know they use those? That's plagiarized. Plagiarized. But it's not plagiarized. It's generated uniquely.

Mikah Sargent (01:20:51):
Well, I guess if it's

Leo Laporte (01:20:52):
All new text, it's all new text. Yeah. Oh, I'm glad I'm not a high school teacher. That's all I could say. Paul is on the line from Glendale, California. Hi Paul. Welcome to the Tech Guys.

Caller 5 (01:21:03):
Hey, good afternoon Leo and Mikah. Good afternoon. My name, caller, probably last time caller it sounds like since you're gonna be up, but long time listener. Nice. Are you ready? <Laugh>. Hi. Here's my question. Okay, so I, I have my like dream retirement property up in northern Nevada that I'm finally starting to build on. And I'd like to put a, a camera up there to kinda watch the construction and you know, kinda keep an eye on things. So I, I figured my two choices were like wifi one. Cuz I have a neighbor that's probably 200 to 250 yards away from me that he says, Hey, I can hook into his system.

Leo Laporte (01:21:42):
Oh, that's nice of him. That's j Now you got a good neighbor up there. Yeah, that's a good

Caller 5 (01:21:47):
Neighbor. Oh my God. Awesome people up there. Awesome people. But I'm thinking that might be pretty far away for a,

Leo Laporte (01:21:53):
It's a little far. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:21:55):
Yeah. And then the other one, the other choice is cellular. Where I could put a game camera up with a mobile chip from a T-Mobile like I have, but my phone on a property doesn't quite get it. I either have to walk up the hill about a hundred feet or else go a little closer to the 3 95, which is a half mile away. And then I get reception.

Leo Laporte (01:22:16):
I think Joe solved this for us last hour. So 250 yards is probably longer than most wifi go. Although if it's completely open space and you had maybe I would, I would, well you can't get your neighbor to put in a special antenna just for you probably. But if he would, he could put in a directional antenna aimed at your property and then it would almost certainly work. There are lots of, you know, wifi like any radio waves can go a lot farther if you're aiming all the power in one direction. If you're, if you're omnidirectional or it's going all the power, same amount of power is going out everywhere. Obviously it's less strength than any one direction. So you might, you might try it. You know, it's, it's, it would be better and much more likely to work if your neighbor were willing.

(01:23:11):
This is a lot to ask, but maybe if you bought it and you said you can keep it and use it for your own purposes down the road, do that. Yeah, radio Labs is a great place to get long distance wifi gear. In fact, they have a really nice set I always recommend because Radiolab I should say, because they have a lot of explanations and information. No, it's Radiolab I guess. Yeah. of how this stuff works and kind of will walk you through it and blah blah, blah. So radiolab.com they have your wireless and radio experts. They have point to point bridge kits, high power wifi cards and all of that stuff. Let me think now. So you're gonna get one camera or multiple cameras?

Caller 5 (01:23:57):
No, I just wanna put one camera, like put it up above and point it down on the on the build site where we're doing a kind of like, you know, you get the whole view. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:24:07):
You know, you don't need that much detail. Yeah. yeah, but I mean, put the, get a good zoom lens. <Laugh>, put the camera as close as you can to your neighbor or offer your neighbor. Look, I got this antenna I can plug in that will and then you aim it at my property and it'll work.

Caller 5 (01:24:24):
So do I need to have an antenna on my No, on my camera as

Leo Laporte (01:24:29):
Well? No, your camera is normally you, do you want one on both ends?

Caller 5 (01:24:35):
Cause I'm gonna put mine up on a, so solar is gonna probably power it. Right? That's, I'm gonna have 'em put up on a pole solar and, and with, it's probably on antenna and then it would be them are their thing. But I, I would need them to have an omni or a Yager antenna or whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:24:50):
Well, Yagi Y A G I is directional. And that's what some people would recommend. There are a variety of these. Again, look at Radiolab, you'll see all of the different kinds of stuff. Let me think about this. Normally because the camera is just transmitting, it might be that what you really wanna do is put it on your end cuz the well, but the camera does need to receive back. So Yeah. You need it on both ends. Cause the camera's gotta at the, it's not gonna get a lot of data back, but the data it's gonna get back is Yep, got it. Nope. Didn't get it. X and things like that. So

Caller 5 (01:25:24):
Is is that gonna be the cost efficient way to go? Or is it maybe a cellular one?

Leo Laporte (01:25:29):
Well you said the cellular didn't work too well or is it, is it, is it,

Caller 5 (01:25:33):
It it does, I'm wondering if I didn't put it like a, an extender or whatever

Leo Laporte (01:25:38):
Or an entire, if you put it high enough, it might actually work just fine. You said when you get up on the hill, a the cellular does work.

Caller 5 (01:25:45):
If I go maybe a hundred feet above the property Yeah. Up there, then I, I start to get

Leo Laporte (01:25:50):
It works better with line of sight. So Yeah. I mean that would be the easiest thing to do. Absolutely. And there are a number of cameras you can get that have that use cellular. So that's not, that's not a hard thing to do. Probably then you don't have to get your neighbor, you know, save, save that for later. When you want a cake. When you're at a flower and you need to borrow a cup, <laugh>, save it for later. Don't use up all your good will. What do you think, Mikah?

Caller 5 (01:26:14):
Before I even move there,

Leo Laporte (01:26:15):
Huh? Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:17):
I agree.

Leo Laporte (01:26:18):
Actually there, there is a well known sociological phenomenon. I'm sure there's a good name for it. Chris Matthews was the first to discover it in his books about politics called hardball. That if you get someone to do you a favor, they like you more. They get, in other words, you would think, I'm gonna give Mikah a cake that would make Mikah like me more. No. If I, if Mikah bakes me a cake and gives it to me, then he likes me more because it's reverse or something. I don't know. It's politics, <laugh>, you know. So in other words, you could make a better friend, believe it or not, by getting the guy to do this and you know, being nice about it, obviously. Yeah. I think though, if you've got cellular high, if you're high enough, you're gonna put it on a poll anyway. Cause you want to have that view. Right. I think that maybe the cellular is probably the way to go. What do you, Mikah, do you know? 

Mikah Sargent (01:27:09):
I don't have a recommendation for cellular unfortunately. Yeah. I'm so used to wifi connections.

Leo Laporte (01:27:16):
Yeah, I'm sure there are. I'm just trying to think. You know, I mean, cause

Caller 5 (01:27:24):
I stumped you guys. Wow. Well

Leo Laporte (01:27:25):
You didn't really Yeah, yeah. You stumped us. I was gonna defend ourselves a little bit. Yeah. <laugh>. Yeah. I was psychology today, September, 2010 to make a friend ask someone for a favor. How about that? Okay.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:43):
Ah, here we go. You know, Arlo makes a camera called the go

Leo Laporte (01:27:48):
To Arlo. Yeah. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:49):
It's l t e.

Leo Laporte (01:27:50):
Good. Arlo's a good brand. AR

Mikah Sargent (01:27:51):
Is a good brand. That's why. Yeah, that's why Was it stuck out for me?

Leo Laporte (01:27:54):
Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:27:55):
That that's a r l o. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:27:57):
That's correct. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:27:58):
And, and they're good. They're good quality cameras. You will be on the internet. <Laugh> just don't get upset. But yeah, totally, totally.

Caller 5 (01:28:09):
I'll, I'll check them out and if you think that's what it's gonna be in that and like you say, maybe an antenna I'd have to put there. I just didn't know which way would be better. Cellular wifi. Wifi.

Leo Laporte (01:28:19):
Well, yeah, wifi, you're gonna need to get some additional equipment and you're gonna have to have more Yeah. Cooperation from the neighbor. But as I said, that works good neighbor. That's a good way to make a better neighbor. Because, because I think because they have an investment in you. It's, it's the, I'm gonna call it the IKEA principle. It's well known fact that if you build your IKEA furniture, put a lot of effort into it, you love it better because you put so much effort into it.

Caller 5 (01:28:47):
I built that

Leo Laporte (01:28:48):
Actually the, I think now I'm looking at the name is the Ben Franklin effect.

Mikah Sargent (01:28:51):
The Ben Franklin effect. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:28:52):
Yeah, yeah. There's actually a name for it. <Laugh> Ben said he that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you, yourself have obliged. And he said it just like that.

Mikah Sargent (01:29:07):
Apparently when we ask someone to do us a favor, we're telling them that we think they have something we don't. Whether it be more intelligence, knowledge, skills or whatever. And so it is a bit of a booster for them. And so you're saying, Hey, I respect you, I admire you and I'm thankful to have you to be able to help me with something.

Leo Laporte (01:29:24):
We have learned something here, the Ben Franklin effect. But get the cellular. Forget Ben Franklin, get the cellular <laugh> or attach a key to a kite and no, that's, that's a Oh, that's a different thing. It's a different, Hey Johnny Jet, he's under the weather, but he is here with us to talk about traveling. He's coming up next as the tech guys continue, it's travel time. Johnny Jets, our travel guru is here. Johnny jet.com. He is sitting in front of the Christmas tree wearing his Christmas jams ready for Santa Claus. What do you, what do you want Santa Claus to bring you? Little Johnny?

Johnny Jet (01:30:14):
Oh man, that's a good question. I, I don't even know. I how I haven't got everything. I really have everything with my kids and my wife. I I, I don't need anything else.

Leo Laporte (01:30:22):
When you get to, you know, be a grown up and you have a family, I think that's what happens is you go, I'm gonna give you all gifts. I don't want anything. Totally.

Johnny Jet (01:30:30):
Yeah. And I got traffic now back to back to the site. I mean, after two years, that's a gift. Not as much Dr. That's a huge gift.

Leo Laporte (01:30:36):
That's a gift. I'm

Johnny Jet (01:30:37):
Very thankful. I'm very thankful.

Leo Laporte (01:30:38):
So here's an interesting question for you. We've been talking about the TSA numbers, the numbers of people going through airports. It's gone through the roof. It's right back to where it used to be almost. But I've heard you say business travel is dead.

Johnny Jet (01:30:51):
Well, that's not dead, but it's not, it's ordinary than what it used to be.

Leo Laporte (01:30:55):
I, I have a friend who's taken a job as a, as a travel consultant for a company, you know, doing, you know, the guy who arranges all the travel. And I said, you're not gonna be very busy.

Johnny Jet (01:31:05):
No, I think they will be.

Leo Laporte (01:31:07):
You

Johnny Jet (01:31:07):
Think so? Honestly, it's coming back. I remember when the pandemic began in 2021 of, I had friends in the industry, it wouldn't work for major hotel. And they said, you know what? We're not even trying to book conferences until 2022 or 2023. I was like, you're joking. They said it's gonna last three weeks. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know where these, you know, they got this inside information. But anyway, I've been invited to a lot of conferences. I'm going to some, I'm going to what in New York City next month. I'm going to one in Miami in a couple months. No, the conferences are back. Good.

Leo Laporte (01:31:37):
But, and business travel I guess is coming back bit by

Johnny Jet (01:31:39):
Bit. It's coming back. It's not, it's not a hundred percent. Yeah. So you can still find some good deals by the way, if you target business hotels, especially on weekends, you know, you can usually find a good deal. So that's, that's, that's one little travel hack also, by the way Costco has been, I've been, I keep getting their emails and right now they keep pushing their, they have a Southwest Airlines a gift gift card. If you spend $500, actually it's four 50. You spend four 50, you get a, you get a $500 gift card. So you can say $50 on Southwest flights. It's an easy 10% if you buy a lot of Southwest. So, and you want, you're allowed to limit a five of those. But that's a good little trouble hack.

Leo Laporte (01:32:23):
Now you've got a story on the website, johnny jet.com about American, American Airlines. And you, it's, this is a very good link. This made me click, made you click. American Airlines brings back its best online booking feature.

Johnny Jet (01:32:38):
Good.

Leo Laporte (01:32:39):
Maybe

Johnny Jet (01:32:39):
Google picked that store. Google picked it up. So I got mad traffic from it. What?

Leo Laporte (01:32:44):
So what is it? What is it?

Johnny Jet (01:32:46):
So, so a few months ago American said, you know what, they're gonna take away their hold feature. So American was the only US airline that I'm aware of that had a hold feature for free. So you could, you could go in, book your flight and put it on hold for 24 hours. You didn't need to put a credit card down. Every, every other airline you need to put your credit card down. But you still have 24 hours to cancel. No penalty as, as long as it was seven days or more your flight. That's a D O T rule. But American allows you to do it without a credit card. And so they said they're gonna get rid of it. They were testing it. Not everyone didn't have that option. I was one of, they, they blocked me from having that option except for mileage tickets.

(01:33:22):
But they just brought it back this week. Which is great news because you know, if, if you're someone who's always looking for the right flight or the right seat, or you need to work out your arrangements with someone else, your loved one or a hotel, you know, you go online and you can put it on hold. And you know what's also pretty cool is I have elite status on American Airlines top tier. Cause I've flown so much on them. I put a flight on hold the other day just when I was writing about this, just tested out for three days from now to go to New York and I just put it on hold and all of a sudden, a few hours later I got an email saying, you've been confirmed the business class free

Leo Laporte (01:33:51):
Upgrade. Wow. Oh, now you gotta go to New York, buddy.

Johnny Jet (01:33:54):
No, I'm not going out. Wait a minute.

Leo Laporte (01:33:57):
You're sick.

Johnny Jet (01:33:58):
Yes, I have Covid.

Leo Laporte (01:33:59):
Oh, I'm so sorry.

Johnny Jet (01:34:01):
My first time in since the pandemic that

Leo Laporte (01:34:04):
I'm getting it. I thought it was over.

Johnny Jet (01:34:06):
No. Are you kidding me? I I know so many people who are getting it right now.

Leo Laporte (01:34:10):
Yeah, yeah. But you're, but the good news is you got the vaccine. So it's a, it's a relatively mild case. You also got the plo, you got the oral good.

Johnny Jet (01:34:19):
I did. I'm taking this, these nasty pills. But you know what? They keep me outta the hospital. I'm, I'm very thankful. I'm very thankful to be living in this time and to be living, you know, I just call up a doctor and say, Hey, can you, you know, can you diagnose me? And he was like, Hey, get on this right now. And anyway.

Leo Laporte (01:34:37):
Nice.

Johnny Jet (01:34:38):
The point is that the American Airlines brought back this hold feature. So, you know, all you need to do is have an account with me and it's easy to sign up. I mean, they have millions, hundreds of millions of people who are registered and and just check it out.

Leo Laporte (01:34:52):
Very good. That's kind of like, you can do that with ho No, you have to give 'em a credit card. Can you do that with, with hotels? Yeah. You can make a reservation, right. Without a credit card. And then

Johnny Jet (01:35:03):
Some of that, it

Leo Laporte (01:35:04):
Used to be, it felt, it feels to me like that used to be how it was for everything. No, you make a reservation.

Johnny Jet (01:35:08):
It's hard. Now.

Leo Laporte (01:35:09):
Now even restaurants charge you if you make a reservation.

Johnny Jet (01:35:12):
If you cancel. Yeah, if you cancel within whatever you

Leo Laporte (01:35:15):
Went to restaurant last night for my birthday, they charge us 10 bucks each to make the reservation. What? And then towards the meal or anything. Yeah, it goes towards the meal. Oh, that's weird. Right? It is

Johnny Jet (01:35:26):
Weird. So one way around that, by the way, with hotels, let's say you let's say you get sick like me. And I was gonna suppose to stay at a hotel tomorrow. You know, you can go online and try or call 'em up and ask them to push it for a month from now where you're within the cancellation policy. Cuz most hotels are either 48 or 24 hours, depending on the destination. Some could be a week or even a month if you're going to Hawaii. But anyway, so you push it to that when you're within that cancellation policy and then you just call back and say, Hey, I'm not going. And then you get your money back. Do

Leo Laporte (01:35:58):
You have to give 'em your excuse? Do you have to say, I've got co

Johnny Jet (01:36:01):
I think it all depends on, no, I think it depends on the hotel. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:36:04):
Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:36:05):
But that's one little hack. Also another one I was talking about this week I wrote about is when you're traveling internationally, you know, make sure when you're paying with a credit card and they, they swipe your card and they say, oh, you're American. Would you like to pay in US dollars? Don't ever pay in US dollars when you're traveling abroad, always pay in local currency because that store, that hotel or whatever is gonna charge you a fee on their own. So they make money, they're gonna charge you a very small fee, but, you know, they keep doing it so much, they're making good money. So always, always have it charged in local currency. So, you know, Ty, you know, herds is, is notorious for it. You go to herds in London and they say, oh, would you like to pay in US dollars instead of pounds? No pounds. You wanna pay in pounds?

Leo Laporte (01:36:49):
Good

Johnny Jet (01:36:50):
Tip. And make sure and make sure your credit card, by the way, has no foreign transaction fees.

Leo Laporte (01:36:55):
I am going to ask for a Limerick about you. <Laugh>. I said write a limit about Johnny Jet, a travel expert who got C and this is what the AI wrote. There was a travel expert named Johnny Jet, who always had a great trip to Baguette, but when Covid came round, his travels were all grounded. Now Johnny's stuck at home and you bet he's upset. Poor Johnny Jet. You'll be better by, by by Christmas though, right?

Johnny Jet (01:37:27):
I hope I'm better by next week.

Leo Laporte (01:37:28):
Now your family's week. My, what are you doing next week?

Johnny Jet (01:37:31):
No, next week's. My last parents on your show. So

Leo Laporte (01:37:34):
That is not Johnny quitting. That's me by the way. I just wanna make that clear and you won't be here. On our, on our last, last Saturday the 17th, you're gonna take, you're traveling somewhere. Can you tell us

Johnny Jet (01:37:45):
Where it, like my flight gets delayed or postponed? And by the way, I bought these flights to go to Toronto back in February or March. Yeah. I paid 6,000 miles each way. Incredible deal. Right. And of course I find out that my kid has a Christmas conference for the same time Christmas concert for the same time. Oh, better flight is. So I had to, I had to scramble and buy new flights for the next day, which, you know, I had the best deal in the world. And then I went to almost the worst deal in the world. Oh no. But my trick is always book one way tickets because on the way back, I still had those 6,000 miles. If I bought that round trip, I would've lost the return deal. But because I bought one ways, I was able to keep the return for those 6,000 miles. So I only had to buy. Does that make sense to you? Yes. I know. I have c so

Leo Laporte (01:38:33):
Nothing makes sense. Second verse. Same as the first. He's longing to roam the world once more to see all the sites he's been dying for. But for now, he'll stay and dream of far away until the virus is no more Johnny Jet. Feel better. Will you dude? Hey, thank you. You could still go to his blog. Johnny jet.com subscribe to his free newsletters. They wonderful uses travel planning tools including airfare, booking finders. Follow him on Twitter. Are you still on the Twitter? Of course. Join our, join our Macon. He's also reluctant. Yeah, he's also, and

Johnny Jet (01:39:09):
I'm on there. I'm, I'm Ma Macon. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:39:11):
Good. Nice. I'm

Johnny Jet (01:39:12):
On yours. Twi social Johnny Jetta, TWI social.

Leo Laporte (01:39:15):
Nice. Leo and Johnny and Mikah. More calls after this. Nice. I guess I, I for, I guess I knew that.

Johnny Jet (01:39:24):
Yeah, we talked about it last week, but you know what? You, you had covid once, so you might

Leo Laporte (01:39:28):
Yes, I still have Covid brain. Lisa says she's still exhausted and, and feels like she had long covid. Like she had some, like some to her, her taste and smell didn't come back for like 12 weeks.

Johnny Jet (01:39:42):
Well, my taste is still there. Especially that, that

Leo Laporte (01:39:45):
Nastys that pill. Well maybe that's, that's the deal. There is, there is a thing that if you lose your taste and smell the disgusting tastes and smell come back first be because, you know, they're protecting you against eating bad stuff. So maybe you, you know,

Johnny Jet (01:40:01):
Good, I, you know, I need to get a healthier, so

Leo Laporte (01:40:04):
Yeah. Yeah. You won't want to eat anything. Yeah. All right. Hey, thanks Johnny. Feel better. Feel better my friend. Hey,

Johnny Jet (01:40:10):
You guys, take care. You

Leo Laporte (01:40:11):
Too. You as well. Bye bye. Yeah.

Johnny Jet (01:40:13):
Bye bye.

Leo Laporte (01:40:17):
Leo and Mikah, your tech guys 88. 88. Ask Leo. We're answering your calls right now. Jim on the line from Calabasas, California. Thanks for hanging on Jim.

Caller 6 (01:40:28):
Oh, I welcome. Thank you. I just wanted to thank both, both of you and Mikah for the great show. You have to help us with the computer problems out.

Leo Laporte (01:40:39):
You're very welcome. Thank you for listening.

Caller 6 (01:40:43):
And I do have a question for you. I have a a wireless net care wireless router and 900 dual band router that I bought back in 2011. And it's been working just fine. But recently I also have a net gear range extender with that wireless router and it works. But now I but the direct TV streaming system, hoping to get rid of my cable spectrum cable in this case. But I wanted to update and get a faster wireless router system from Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:41:30):
It's been 11 years and routers have made some real progress.

Caller 6 (01:41:35):
I know, I see so many different models in

Leo Laporte (01:41:37):
This. Yeah. Be ready for some sticker shot cuz they're also like three times more expensive than they were when you bought that neck year.

Caller 6 (01:41:44):
And that's why I was, I'm calling to see what you'd recommend for an upgrade for what I'm doing with the

Leo Laporte (01:41:50):
How big is your house? How many square feet? Roughly?

Caller 6 (01:41:53):
It's about 2,800. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:41:56):
So typically a wifi router, and this is why you got an extender is good for about 1500 square feet. So you needed an extender cuz you had an extend, I think instead of extender these days, we probably want to go with this new thing they call mesh. But I gotta warn you, mesh costs. Now you don't use your N 900 for your cable modem or do you cuz they, they, there's an N 900 that will be a cable modem as well. Are you using it for that? In other words, does it plug into your coaxial cable or does it plug into a, a separate cable modem?

Caller 6 (01:42:29):
Well, I, I've got a separate cable modem.

Leo Laporte (01:42:31):
Okay, good. So you're good on that regard.

Caller 6 (01:42:33):
I have a Motorola DOCSIS 3.00,

Leo Laporte (01:42:36):
You're set dude. Good,

Mikah Sargent (01:42:37):
Good. Got

Leo Laporte (01:42:38):
The latest. Yeah, the N 900 has a built in cable modem. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. But you don't use it so you can absolutely take it out. What do you recommend Mikah for mesh

Mikah Sargent (01:42:48):
These days? Honestly because they're always good deals for this and because I have used it for years and also recommended to my family. It's Iro. That's e e r o.

Leo Laporte (01:42:59):
Leo is nodding his head. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:43:00):
Leo is very, yeah. Have you heard that rattling? That was cuz Leo is nodding his head vigorously. It's super simple to set up and it is they continue to get better in terms of, of connectivity. I have family members who live in Missouri and when they have problems, I can use my phone to help them with their internet problems.

Leo Laporte (01:43:22):
That's so cool. Isn't that And where I am using the Arrow app

Mikah Sargent (01:43:25):
Yeah, using the app. And so the, and, and plus the, the mesh wifi is great. And what I love too Jim, is you can start with a small investment and then work your way up if you want to. So I had a connection kit that had some little plugin devices that added to the wifi around my home. And then over time I've gone and purchased more of the stronger the, the better wifi connection and I makes it very simple to bring those in, in and switch out the old stuff. So this is something that's gonna last for you for a long time where, you know, you can swap out stuff as you need to to improve upon it. It works

Leo Laporte (01:44:00):
Great. The base unit, which will take the place of the N 900 is called the, the, the base unit <laugh>, the the, and then, and then you're gonna replace, then you're gonna add, replace the extender with a beacon. Those are the, instead of extenders, they're actually better than extenders. They do something a little bit different than an extender did. So I, you know, you can get, depending on, you can get the base unit and a single and a single yeah, the aero six with a single beacon for 139 bucks. That's actually pretty inexpensive. So normally I would say it's like three or 400 bucks for a base. And but the, it's owned by Amazon.

Mikah Sargent (01:44:41):
That's what I was gonna say. The company's owned by Amazon and that actually has led to some really good prices for these. And I was just thinking as you called, I, I really wish we could have talked to you a couple of weeks earlier cuz they had great Black Friday deals. They really did. Cyber Monday deals for these. So you may, if you can hold out, you may look for a good deal. But honestly at 139 to even up to $300, that is still

Leo Laporte (01:45:05):
The six plus is three units 4,500 square feet, you know that. But you don't need the plus unless you have wifi six E devices. So it's, there's a little bit of a kind of a study that you need to do. Do you have the, a late model iPhone or a late model laptop, something like that?

Caller 6 (01:45:27):
No, I don't. It's gonna update my cell phone, which is not too great. I was maybe gonna buy Atrac phone, but

Leo Laporte (01:45:39):
Yeah, so when you, so I think future proofing the aero six is fine. You, you don't need to go much, much past that. If, if you had a lot of new devices that use six e the latest, you might want to get a six E one. But I think you're, I think the six or the six plus either way would be fine. Six is probably all you need. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and that's 199 for three, three count, three units that supports up to 500 megabits per second, which is gonna be a lot faster. The other thing you, I, okay, I'm not gonna make it complicated. I'll stop there. Yeah. I was tempted <laugh> to say one more thing, but I won't, Jim. That's what you should get. Get the era.

Caller 6 (01:46:20):
Okay. And I forgot to mention that I'm also the wireless does go next door to my guest house. Ah,

Leo Laporte (01:46:29):
That's a good excuse for a be an extra beacon. Yep. Put one in your guest house. It'll be able to see your home, but it'll boost it up a little bit. It'll actually be a stronger signal in the guest

Mikah Sargent (01:46:38):
House. What's great with these is you can buy them independently or in

Leo Laporte (01:46:41):
A pack. Add 'em as you need

Mikah Sargent (01:46:42):
Them. Yeah. And so you can just, if you wanted to add one to the guest home so they start at $89. So you would just invest in one that goes in, in the guest home, and it'll connect to the main system you have in your home.

Leo Laporte (01:46:54):
Somebody in our chat room, because they're very good at finding deals, has finding found a deals. Thank you. Dry heat at slick deals.net for zero wifi, six, three units from Walmart at $119, $120 at Walmart. So Walmart still has some pretty good deals on on the Euros. That's, Ooh. Now wait a minute. I just clicked it. Now it's $109. So <laugh>

Mikah Sargent (01:47:19):
Gone down. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:47:20):
You know, if you go to the, if you go to you know, the store and look for routers, you're gonna see nowadays something that's the equivalent of that neck year for 300, $400. They've really raised the prices. So this is remarkable. The one thing you should remember about I, you don't have to do it, but they have a $99 a year Euro Pro subscription. It's not required, but it does add some features and probably is worth it.

Mikah Sargent (01:47:45):
I love it. Because along with it, you get some you get password manage well, okay. Again, we don't wanna overload you, but there's a lot of great stuff that you get that comes along with it. If you do the Euro Plus subscription,

Leo Laporte (01:47:56):
A lot of security, it does a better

Mikah Sargent (01:47:58):
Job blocking across the entire network, which is fantastic. So, but

Leo Laporte (01:48:01):
You don't have to do that. You can even hold off and see how you feel and so forth. The euros a very very good choice. The other thing I was gonna say, don't listen to this, Jim, the other thing I was gonna say is, interestingly, Amazon is starting to put this capability into their speakers. Yep. Remember we were talking about how they're losing so much money on Amazon Echoes. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they are now with many of the Echoes and all the new ones, putting repeaters for era

Mikah Sargent (01:48:29):
Euros built into them.

Leo Laporte (01:48:30):
Yeah. They have built in arrows. So maybe just get the base station and then maybe you want an, a echo speaker in another part of the house. That could be a, that could be a additional beacon. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:48:40):
I, this is, and what's cool about this, Leo, I've got two echos in my home. That could be I beacons, but it actually scans the wifi and says, oh, the signal's already strong enough. If we add more, we don't need to, not gonna do anything. Oh. So it's, it's not just, it's of turn it on. Yeah. That's what I love about it. It didn't just do it because it can, it said, well, you don't really need to turn this on. There's no reason to. Yeah. And in fact, too many, and you can start to make this

Leo Laporte (01:49:03):
Isn't, that's actually interesting insight that you don't necessarily get better results with more. Exactly.

Mikah Sargent (01:49:09):
It's like a noise cancell stuff. If you send a field that's exactly the same, back,

Leo Laporte (01:49:13):
Ah, the Walmart deal. Thank you. Trust Twisted. Mr. Chairman is a dual band, not tri band. You probably want,

Mikah Sargent (01:49:22):
Ah, so that's one of the older models, you

Leo Laporte (01:49:24):
Know? Yeah. Yeah. 88. 88. Ask Leo Mikah, Sargant Leo Laport taking your calls. Another hour to come. Rich tomorrow joins us next hour. And the GWiz stay right here.

(01:49:53):
Hey, the tech Guy show brought to you this week and every week, in fact for the last 15 years by Cachefly they bring you all of our shows cuz they're twits Content Delivery Network. That's really awesome. It means, and I bet you if you download the podcast, you might have noticed this. They always come fast. There's never a problem. There's never a hitch. That's cuz cash is the best 50 plus points of presence all over the world. So that means you're downloading all of our shows from a server that's geographically near you. That's why it's so fast. Plus because they have so many servers, they are completely reliable. In fact, in the last 12 months, cash has had 100% uptime. That's pretty, pretty amazing. Cachefly fly though is more than just content delivery. Cachefly is the leader in CDN technology. They've held the track record for high performing, ultra reliable content delivery for 20 years.

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Now, two decades. We started using them, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago when we first started. Twi whole world's moving to digital, right? Traffic patterns are spiking all over the place. That means for a lot of users, slow and bad internet videos, buffering, shoppers, abandoning carts and e-commerce sites cuz they don't like the things spinning and spinning and spinning. And then they gamers leave bad reviews and they got high latency. That's why you want Cachefly You don't get any of that with Cachefly Cachefly gives you q o e quality of experience for every one of your visitors. They pioneered the use of tcp anycast and innovation CDNs. Other CDNs are just catching up to quality of experience is the single most critical metric. When serving content simultaneously to a large and distributed audience on a global scale, your delivery stack could be your secret weapon.

(01:51:46):
Cachefly, we've talked before about their ultra low latency video streaming that can deliver video to more than a million concurrent users with sub one second latency. You got a game, you need a content delivery network to give your gamers faster downloads, zero lag glitches, outages gone for good. And that makes gamers happy. Right? Mobile content optimization for your site that offers automatic and simple image optimization. So your site loads faster on every device. Multiple CDNs mean you've got redundancy, you've got failover. Your traffic is intelligently balanced across multiple riders. So you get the shortest route. It mitigates against performance glitches. I could tell you as a cash customer for more than a decade, it's absolutely true. Incredible results. We're so happy with Cachefly Like, and you'll never pay for a service overlap again. Get flexible month to month billing for as long as you need it.

(01:52:43):
Discounts for fixed terms. Once you're happy, design your own contract when you switch to Cachefly That's what we did. We've been using cash since I think 2008, something like that. We wouldn't have it any other way. 3,500 clients, including many people in my business, in over 80 countries, organizations like us consistently choose cash for scalability, reliability, unrivaled performance. I couldn't give them a higher rating if I wanted to. It's a hundred percent. It's perfect every time. Cachefly. The only CDN built for throughput. Delivering rich media content up to 10 times faster than traditional delivery methods, up to 30 times faster than other major CDNs. Learn how you can get your first month free. Go to Cacheflycom. You've heard me say it for 15 years now at C A H E F L y.com Cachefly. Thank you Cachefly We really appreciate it. And now back to the tech of well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo Laport, Mikah Sargant, your tech guys here. 88. 88. Ask Leo. That's the phone number. (888) 827-5536. If you wanna join the, join the conversation. Get on here, rich tomorrow. The new tech guy will be joining us. Sue Rich on tech in just a few minutes. Dick t bar the GWiz coming up too. But first it's time for we need a song, <laugh> a scam. Alert.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:16):
Scam alert. Scam

Leo Laporte (01:54:17):
Alert. This is something that happened to you.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:19):
Scam alert. Yes. and

Leo Laporte (01:54:21):
You narrowly dodged.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:22):
We Yes, I did. We'll have to have chat. G t create some lyrics for us. But so scam alert I got a text message recently and right now it's the holidays. A lot of people are receiving packages at home or sending packages. I got a text message and it said, Hey you are your, your package. We're trying to make a delivery, but we need a little bit more information. Now that

Leo Laporte (01:54:43):
Happens normally

Mikah Sargent (01:54:44):
Yes. And right, right. It does. Usually it's an email. I will admit it doesn't usually come in a text message, but I was on guard because I had a package coming from overseas through the Royal Mail. And so I didn't know how that system worked. So, because I was waiting for that package, this caught my eye. So I went ahead and I looked into my own stuff and immediately or shortly after that figured out it was fake. But I wanted to go through the process to see how they were trying to scam and what they were trying to do to scam. So there was a little link in the text message, and it was this, you know, site that wasn't familiar, but was something to do with like shipping. So I, on my phone where I've got lots of protections in place, tapped on that link, opened it up in Safari, and it asked me for my name, my address, as if it was going to plug all that information.

Leo Laporte (01:55:35):
It even looked like the US Postal Service.

Mikah Sargent (01:55:36):
And here's the thing, the website looked exactly exactly like the, the US Postal Service website. The only difference between the two, because I wanted to see if someone were to go to this, how would they be able to tell? Looking at the URL would show you the difference. But think about you, you all, who are listening to the show, many of you are listening to the show, would think to do that, but not everybody's gonna think about that. The only difference on the page was that the copyright date in very tiny text at the bottom was for 2020 instead of 2022.

Leo Laporte (01:56:05):
Oh, you know what that means? They copied the US post service website back in

Mikah Sargent (01:56:09):
2020. Probably an export of it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Leo Laporte (01:56:11):
They just, because this is easy to do. Yeah. That's how you make it look like the real

Mikah Sargent (01:56:14):
Thing. Absolutely. So I typed in fake name. I think my name was like Todd, not gonna happen. Was my last

Leo Laporte (01:56:20):
Name. <Laugh> of the not gonna happens of Petaluma, of the

Mikah Sargent (01:56:25):
Very famous not gonna happen. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And I clicked next. And what happened on the next page, it said, we can make your redelivery. All we need is $6, which is the redelivery fee. Well, that's

Leo Laporte (01:56:37):
Not bad.

Mikah Sargent (01:56:37):
See, you got $6. Not that bad. But what's it asking for on that page? It's asking for your credit card information. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So it can make that charge. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> at that point, the bad actors who've made this website have your credit card information and are able to sell it on the dark web or do whatever it is that they wanna do with it. So it's what I think is special about this is the timing is special. It was smart to do it right now while people are getting packages or sending packages. Sure, sure. And then to only make it seem as if it's, oh, it's $6. So you're, you're, you're,

Leo Laporte (01:57:08):
You're right. How bad could this be

Mikah Sargent (01:57:10):
Necessarily? Exactly. You go, oh, $6 to pay for this. No, no. Big deal. And so I think if you,

Leo Laporte (01:57:16):
Do you think it had been $2, you would've fallen for it?

Mikah Sargent (01:57:18):
No. Cause <laugh>, luckily Todd,

Leo Laporte (01:57:21):
Not gonna happen. <Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (01:57:22):
Before I had ever gone to Thel, I knew. But I just think about people who don't have those same thoughts that we have in place. Those of us listening to this show, those of us who are hosting the show, who may get duped by something like that. And so I immediately took some screenshots, sent it out to my family members in a group chat. Yeah. I posted it on Facebook. Which I very rarely use Facebook, but I did for this. And I had former teachers of mine commenting on it to say, oh my goodness, I got something like this. Thank you for letting me know. They were sharing it with their family. And so that's what I want this to be, is you all I'm sure have family members, just let them know, Hey, if you get a weird text message, run it by me. Or something like that so that you, your family doesn't end up getting duped by this because it just was, it was just clever enough to kind of skate past some people's filters. And I, I just want people to be

Leo Laporte (01:58:13):
Aware. And it is the most scammer full time of the year.

Mikah Sargent (01:58:15):
It's

Leo Laporte (01:58:16):
The most scary. This is when they are out in force. Absolutely. And boy, nothing worse. Nothing will ruin your holidays more than getting scammed and getting a big credit card bill for something you didn't buy. Thank you. We should do that more. I think that's important. There are a lot of them out there. Eric, on the line from Vista, California, our next caller. Hi, Eric. Leo and Mikah. Hi Leo. How are you doing? Hi, Mikah. Hello. Welcome. What's up?

Caller 7 (01:58:42):
I heard you talk one one time about tinnitus, ringing in the ears.

Leo Laporte (01:58:47):
Oh, I got it. Bad. Yeah.

Caller 7 (01:58:49):
And is there like a feedback device or,

Leo Laporte (01:58:55):
I'm glad you asked. There's a very deep feedback going on right now. <Laugh>, but that's not the tinnitus. Yeah. So tinnitus, which is a ringing in the ears, is actually really common. A significant percentage of Americans have it. I think it's one in five, but I can't remember. And, and it can happen for a variety of reasons, but it, it is, as I understand it, and I have investigated a little bit because I've had it for a long time now nerve damage. So I think I probably did it. As a kid, I sat close to big speakers during concerts. I loved loud noise. And of course, as an occupational hazard, wearing headphones. In fact, anybody who wears headphones on a professionally is, is, is gonna be prone to this. Because what happens with the headphones is it's a vicious cycle.

(01:59:42):
You turn it up a little bit, you deafen yourself slightly. So you turn it up a little bit more, you turn. And over the years you end up listening quite loud. And you've, and you've damaged your hearing. There is no cure for tinnitus. I see this all the time. The last one recently I saw is not approved by the fda. In the US is a German company. They put electrodes on your tongue, <laugh> and electrodes on your temples. They, I somehow stimulate the VAs nerve play weird sounds through your ears. There's lots of people who claim there, there are fixes for this. And as best I can tell, there isn't, I mean, it's not approved by the fda. Kind of gives you a hint that, cuz I'll tell you what, if there was mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it would be a great market. There. There are a lot of people, some people, it's so bad.

(02:00:30):
 They, you know, it's really driving 'em nuts. It scare that scares me. I'll be honest with you. I hear it when it's, I hate to get it, you know, like in bed at night when it's quiet, I hear it. I don't hear it so much when there's noise. So that's is one of the solutions. In fact apple now with their AirPods will play background. Have you not, have you seen that setting? There's a background noise setting. Yes. The white noise in the background. And for some tonight as sufferers that's helpful because in fact I, I've played with it. Certain kinds of white noise actually mask the ringing in my ears. So that will help a little bit. So yeah, I think there are things that can make it, make you feel better about it. Mask it. But I keep looking for a cure.

(02:01:12):
I wish there were a cure. That'd be a great thing. You don't have it right? No, I do not. But protect your, hear the bottom line. Protect your hearing. And most, most devices now, most phones will automatically limit it. Apple has a really nice feature for their Apple watch, where they'll actually tell you if the ambient noise is too loud, they'll put up an alert. They'll say, Hey, it's 98 db noise at this level for more than 10 minutes. Minutes can cause hearing damage. I wish I'd had that when I was a kid, but I didn't. Protect your ears and protect your little one's ears because they're even more sensitive than adults. And, and the worst thing is to have ring in your ears. I'm sorry <laugh>, that, that's happening to you, Eric. The only thing I could suggest is a little, sometimes background noise. What I, even music I'm not, I'm not aware of it now cuz we're talking. But if I listen for it, I can hear it. Yeah. So it's,

Mikah Sargent (02:02:08):
Yeah. The, the sort of thought of why it works the way that it does is your brain is essentially filling in what it expects should be there. And so it ends up getting louder and louder if you don't have anything in the background. So if you're playing something in the back, it's like people who slowly go blind. Their brain starts to invent things that are in front of their vision. You

Leo Laporte (02:02:29):
See what's going on in my brain. It's like a, like a phantom

Mikah Sargent (02:02:32):
Limb. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:02:33):
Only it's phantom

Mikah Sargent (02:02:33):
Sound. That's a really great way to put it. Yeah. Interesting. Like phantom limb. But for, for hero,

Leo Laporte (02:02:37):
I wonder, I think someday maybe there will be a biofeedback system or something. I'm sure I keep looking. I follow, there are various groups. There's I'm sure a tonight's group on Facebook. I follow one on Reddit. Just to kind of see if somebody does come up with something. But so far I think a lot of these are just somebody's good idea. Yep. Somebody's good idea. Sorry. Sorry. That's happened to you, Eric. Best not to think about it. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:02):
I mean, that is kind of the, the solution right now, unfortunately. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:03:06):
Some hearing aids. I I, you know, I asked my audiologist, I know a little bit about this from my, you know, wearing hearing aids and I asked my audiologist, he said, yeah, not much we can do. But some hearing aids will play sounds, it'll mask it. As I said, the EarPods will your iPhone has that capability for any, I think for any headphones, right?

Mikah Sargent (02:03:22):
Yep. I've included a link in the show notes to those. If you have an iPhone, they should do that on Android as

Leo Laporte (02:03:28):
Well. It's a great, it's a great feature. It's also good for people who can't focus. Yes. a lot of people with attention deficit disorder and other disorders I shouldn't even call them disorders differences in the brain and how it works. Noises distract them and, you know, they'll sometimes wear headphones in schools.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:47):
And there's, there's science to back this up. Because it actually, the, the first place that they started doing this was with sleep. We have shown, we've been able to show that if you play background noise when you are sleeping, particularly in loud cities like New York or in other places where there's lots of traffic by playing those background sounds, your brain ends up focusing on those in such a way that sudden sounds are not as likely to wake you from sleep. Hmm. And so the thought is that we can then transfer that to your wakefulness, where if there's a background sound that your brain gets to focus on, those sudden sounds that might pop up are less likely to pull you from that focus. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:04:24):
88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number. Rich Deur coming up. Stay right here. He's in his car. <Laugh> Zoom. Zoom. Hi Rich. You take this seriously. <Laugh>. He says, I pulled over. You don't have to call if it's not convenient.

Rich DeMuro (02:04:44):
This is, this is like one of two of my last weekends of my life. So I'm at my kid's basketball games. It's

Leo Laporte (02:04:50):
Really true. You should enjoy this while you, why

Rich DeMuro (02:04:52):
You got a taped look at you. You like this? I didn't have a, I didn't have a bandaid. This is I feel like this is the indication of quality of the new show that people can look forward to.

Leo Laporte (02:05:02):
<Laugh>. No, that's actually really good cuz we, I always say tell people not to use their iPhone headphones cuz they know they're right at the

Rich DeMuro (02:05:09):
Collar

Leo Laporte (02:05:09):
And it goes,

Rich DeMuro (02:05:11):
Oh yeah. And anything's gonna go on the new show. So it's just gonna, it's the quality's gonna

Leo Laporte (02:05:16):
No, it's not. Don't

Rich DeMuro (02:05:17):
Say that. Have you seen the stock market chart? Just the new

Leo Laporte (02:05:21):
Show. You are gonna, you are gonna take this show to the next level. Now it looks to me like you were writing in a Tesla.

Rich DeMuro (02:05:26):
I am. I can tell. I know you gave yours

Leo Laporte (02:05:29):
Up. I gave mine up and I But Cause

Rich DeMuro (02:05:32):
You had frozen door handles,

Leo Laporte (02:05:33):
Right? No, no, I just didn't. You

Rich DeMuro (02:05:35):
Know, you get you.

Leo Laporte (02:05:36):
I had a three year lease and I decided to try something else. It wasn't like I rejected the Tesla lease. It doesn't, like

Rich DeMuro (02:05:40):
I got it. And you know, what can you do?

Leo Laporte (02:05:43):
No, it's great. Is it a model three or a model y Rogue? What kind, what kind of Tesla

Rich DeMuro (02:05:47):
Is it? It's a model three.

Leo Laporte (02:05:48):
Nice. And you love it. I bet. Yeah.

Rich DeMuro (02:05:51):
I absolutely love it. And honestly you know, I think that people don't realize that when you have an electric car, it can function as an office because it's silent and you're idling. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. So you kind of like, don't, you know, it's, it's really, it kind of, I have done more in my car in the last year than I ever have because you're able to, I mean, I've, I've done radio hits all over the place from just, you know, stopping on the side of the road. People

Leo Laporte (02:06:15):
Don't realize this, but Rich is actually going through a carwash right now.

Rich DeMuro (02:06:18):
<Laugh>. And you can't see this. But I actually, here I'll, I'll, we're not on yet, but I'll, I actually have a desk. Oh my goodness.

Leo Laporte (02:06:24):
See, this is crazy. Whoa. Oh, you are. You gotta do a TV piece on This is

Rich DeMuro (02:06:30):
Ing Oh, it's, it's amazing. It's

Leo Laporte (02:06:32):
A new way of work.

Rich DeMuro (02:06:33):
I'm gonna telling you this is move outta my home and I'm gonna move into a car. A lot of people have done that in La

Leo Laporte (02:06:41):
<Laugh>. My

Rich DeMuro (02:06:43):
Dogs wouldn't be happy. But

Leo Laporte (02:06:44):
<Laugh> No, I have to say model three is so nice. You might wanna live in it. Yeah.

Rich DeMuro (02:06:49):
It's kinda like Van Life, but you know, just Tesla Life. Hashtag

Leo Laporte (02:06:54):
<Laugh>. Leah Laport Mike is sergeant. Your tech guys. Ladies and gentlemen from K TLAs Rich on tech. It's the rich himself. Rich d Mero joining us from his Tesla Model three as he hurdled down the highway. No, you're not on the, on the highway. You pulled over for this. Hi, rich

Rich DeMuro (02:07:12):
Richard, autopilot. Rich, kidding

Leo Laporte (02:07:14):
Rich has taken over the show. We're very excited to say January 7th. I've been asking him some, some tough technical questions. Will you have a chat room for the show? You should do that.

Rich DeMuro (02:07:27):
Leo, you're asking me the questions that every person is chatting me and asking me right now, and I'm like, I literally know No details except for the fact that the show will be called Rich on Tech. That's basically all we have. And the phone number I think we're gonna just keep it the same.

Leo Laporte (02:07:44):
Just don't mention that Leo Guy <laugh>.

Rich DeMuro (02:07:46):
Yeah. We're just gonna figure out what else it spells.

Leo Laporte (02:07:48):
It's rich. It's, I think it's 1 801 88 88. Ask Jed <laugh>. No. 180 8. 88. Ask chem <laugh>.

Rich DeMuro (02:08:02):
You know, there's gotta be a website where you can pop in a phone number and it tells you all the possible is informations of what it, it spells. So in a, in a money saving move, we are going to see what those combinations are and we're gonna put it up to a public.

Leo Laporte (02:08:15):
They can get you your own number. It should be Ask Rich. Let's see, what else do I need to ask you? Video. you're not doing video. It's gonna be audio. You're actually using the studios, which is nice cuz I I don't think I've ever been in the studios there in Sherman Oaks.

Rich DeMuro (02:08:30):
Yeah. The, the studios. You know, so it's, it's different to do a show in a studio because nobody does shows from studios ever since. I know. I mean, pandemic really sealed the deal with like, we don't need to be inside a studio. I mean, look it, right now I'm in the car, so I mean it, maybe I'll just do the show from the car <laugh> and I'll just do it in a different city every week. When

Leo Laporte (02:08:50):
I first started doing it 19 years ago, I did it from my house and I stopped doing that because it was too easy. It didn't, you, you kind of got outta bed, you mm-hmm. <Affirmative> slip. You put your slippers on, you slide down the hall to the studio and you put it on, you go, Hey, it's time for the tech guy. And I just, the energy level wasn't there. So, very early on I rented a, I rented a, a studio cuz I'm up here in Northern California. I wasn't gonna fly to LA every week. So I rented a studio up a room up here and made it a studio. And we've done that ever since. I'm so, I'm just so thrilled that you're taking over the show.

Rich DeMuro (02:09:27):
So I, you know, I I'm really looking forward to it. It's gonna be look mean. You have done, you have done such a great job with this show. You know, it's, it's been, I'm not kidding. The amount of emails that I've gotten about this transition, people are happy has been, people are so, they're, they're sad, but they're happy. You know, it's like, you know, they know that I've done the show before, so they're excited about that part. And, you know, we'll see what happens. I mean, it's gonna be a new show, but there's gonna be a lot of the same elements. It's just gonna be a little bit different, you know? I mean, it's, it's after 19 years, it's like a fresh coat of paint. You know what I mean? We'll see what happens. We don't know.

Leo Laporte (02:10:01):
There's a few people I wanna warn you about. There's Chris from Miami. Mikah from Maine. <Laugh>. No, no, I'm just kidding. Actually. The regulars are what? Part of what makes the show fun. We do limit it because otherwise people feel like, well, I guess I can't get in this, the same guys over and over. But the regulars, you're gonna get to know them. They're gonna love you. And of course I would not have considered this if Rich hadn't been able to take this over. Cuz he is an expert. And so you're in good hands. He will be able to, to help you. In fact one of the things we, we wanted to do, we're gonna get you a couple more times on the show before I take off is, is start talking about some holiday gifts. You've got little kids, right? How old are your kids?

Rich DeMuro (02:10:43):
My kids are eight and 11. In fact, I'm on the road now cause my kid has a basketball game. So this is one of the last Saturdays of my, I there's gonna be a a before Saturday taken up and an after Saturday. Like after, you know, when the show starts?

Leo Laporte (02:10:56):
Sorry, you get off at two. It's, it's cool, man. You got the afternoon free.

Rich DeMuro (02:11:00):
Oh yeah. No, I, I'm not complaining. It's gonna be, you know, it's just a, it's a change of pace, you know, it's a little bit different. I've enjoyed my weekends for very long. And now it's time to give back and, you know, honestly, give

Leo Laporte (02:11:12):
Me a weekend. Thank you very much. You,

Rich DeMuro (02:11:14):
You get the weekends, although I know you're still gonna do some stuff on Sunday. So

Leo Laporte (02:11:18):
Yeah. Mike and I are gonna do something similar but different on the internet on Sunday. You're gonna get the powerhouse, you're gonna get the 50,000 wa blow torch of Southern California. You're gonna get, I'm handing over to you the keys to 500 radio stations coast to coast. So you're gonna be, and I, you know, maybe Apple will let you into their events. They, they never did for me. No, you do go to the Apple events,

Rich DeMuro (02:11:41):
Don't you? I do. Go, maybe they'll stop letting me into the event. Maybe

Leo Laporte (02:11:44):
<Laugh>. Maybe that's the, they'll say, oh, you've got Leo's show. That's it. You're never coming. You're never coming in again.

Rich DeMuro (02:11:50):
No. It's funny though, because a lot of people have come out of the woodwork, you know, because they see it as an opportunity to get more, you know, publicity and things like this. So, I mean, there's a lot of well wishers, you know, people you haven't heard from in a while. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:12:02):
Oh, rich. Yeah. This is your cousin Joe. Remember way back when I I lent you $5? Yeah,

Rich DeMuro (02:12:11):
Yeah. No, it's, it's like, you know, we the KTLA thing, you know, so I'm on KTLA in Southern California.

Leo Laporte (02:12:16):
Yeah, I would think that's pretty, that's a pretty big deal that you get all the press releases and all that stuff.

Rich DeMuro (02:12:21):
I do, I do get a lot of stuff. Yeah. But the way I see this show is you see me on tv you know, you have a question. I get a lot of emails from people that I'm sitting there on the weekends answering. Now

Leo Laporte (02:12:31):
You can actually call him.

Rich DeMuro (02:12:32):
Exactly. So now the, now I'm changing, I'm putting my vacation responder on Leo, and it's gonna say, thank you for reaching Rich on Tech. Please call between hours of 11 and two on Saturday, nine. And here's the phone number. 88. 88. Ask Leo. Scratched out. I mean, ask Rich. 88.

Leo Laporte (02:12:50):
88. Ask Ken. And we'll figure out the rest after that. <Laugh> <laugh>. Hey, I have a bunch of emails I've been saving press releases. People from China who want you to try their new mattress lifter, I've got so much good stuff for you. I'll just, I'll just <laugh> I'll just pass it along. <Laugh>

Rich DeMuro (02:13:09):
I've gotten taken by some of those emails, by the way, when I first started getting them. I'm like, oh, this, this product, you know, and like, they want to send it to you and test it. All of sudden I realize that it's just a delicious. Also the Kickstarters, I've, I've been taken by a couple of those. Oh yeah. Where, when I first started at ktla, you see this product that's amazing. I've, my gosh, solves every problem I've ever had. It's a Kickstarter. I'm,

Leo Laporte (02:13:33):
I'm actually blocked from Kickstarter. Now my wife won't look at me. Rich Deur, ktla rich on tech.tv. We'll talk again next week. Bring us some Christmas holiday gift ideas. Okay, will do.

Rich DeMuro (02:13:46):
Thank you. Thanks.

Leo Laporte (02:13:51):
You're gonna get used to, well, you but tv. How many minutes do you get for a segment?

Rich DeMuro (02:13:57):
I get about three minutes on a good day. Yeah. Wow. Wow. This is gonna

Leo Laporte (02:14:01):
Feel like riches to you.

Rich DeMuro (02:14:04):
I joke. I mean, it's, it's really, I I see it as like office hours, you know? It's, it's really, yeah, you're gonna love it. Oh, this the

Leo Laporte (02:14:10):
Professor. Super fun. Really. I mean, it's, it's,

Rich DeMuro (02:14:13):
It's as almost I can answer the questions

Leo Laporte (02:14:16):
<Laugh>. Well, it, here's my advice. You know, just say, if you can't say, I don't know. Yeah. You know, that's why the chat room is a good thing to have. Yep. Because it's good to have a little help out there. Little help, little help from a chat room. And then you can blame them when, when it's wrong. And I like that too. <Laugh>. That's perfect. The chat told me

Rich DeMuro (02:14:36):
A screen for only the easiest calls. Hey, rich, is there an app? I can share pictures on social media. Perfect. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:14:42):
I, you know what, that's the's

Rich DeMuro (02:14:44):
Probably so easy. That's

Leo Laporte (02:14:45):
A good idea. Because the higher end calls leave people in the, in the lurch. You know, I I shouldn't take them anyway. So. And Master Bau mean, Mr. Bau says your podcast on Friday is very good. So you'll now have one B Friday and set. Are you gonna still do the Friday?

Rich DeMuro (02:15:03):
No, I'm, I can't wait. I'm done the podcast. <Laugh>. I

Leo Laporte (02:15:06):
Was just kidding. So you're gonna, but you'll have, but iHeart's can turn your show into a podcast. So you still have there

Rich DeMuro (02:15:10):
Be, yeah, there will be a podcast version. But the podcast that I'm doing now, which is called Rich On Tech, it's the same format. It's very similar. It'll just be, it'll be folded

Leo Laporte (02:15:18):
Away. The

Rich DeMuro (02:15:19):
Show's folded into the show. Exactly. Awesome. So it's, it's, you know, I, I'm, I'm mesmerized by this Back to the future setup underneath the TV here,

Leo Laporte (02:15:28):
<Laugh>,

Rich DeMuro (02:15:29):
It looks like I'm in the DeLorean <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:15:31):
That's an TER computer. And then there's a little virtual me there that's gonna answer your questions. I've got a little horsey. Yeah. I just, but, but, but it's all sorts of toys. This when I, when I die, this room is just gonna end up in a dumpster. So, no, that's all I can think about. Rich. Go have fun with your kids.

Rich DeMuro (02:15:54):
Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-Bye. Mic, goodbye Leo. See you guys next week. Bye-Bye.

Leo Laporte (02:16:01):
Leo and Mikah, your tech guys? We're we are every woman. No, no. 88. 88. Ask Leo. 88. 8 8 2 7 5 5 3 6 Tollfree from anywhere in the US or Canada. Dan is Dan. Dan is on the line from New Jersey. Hi Dan.

Caller 8 (02:16:21):
Hello, Leo. Welcome. Thanks for taking my call.

Leo Laporte (02:16:25):
My pleasure.

Caller 8 (02:16:25):
And I have a question. The first of all though, comment, you were speaking about you know, hearing issues. Yeah. I just, I just went to an IMAX theater to see the Wakanda movie.

Leo Laporte (02:16:42):
Were they really loud?

Caller 8 (02:16:44):
I had to leave. Oh no.

Leo Laporte (02:16:46):
Yeah,

Caller 8 (02:16:46):
During the credits, during, I mean, during the coming attractions,

Leo Laporte (02:16:50):
It's too loud nowadays. They turn up theaters way too loud.

Caller 8 (02:16:54):
My ears were hurting. Yeah. I mean, they were literally, pain was in my ears. That's

Leo Laporte (02:16:59):
Awful. I wear earplugs whenever I go to a concert, but boy, you shouldn't have to wear 'em at a movie. Except now you do. Now you do.

Caller 8 (02:17:07):
And they gave me the refund. And, you know, the manager said, I know. Bothers me too. But I mean, it was really painful. I mean, I don't, I, I forgot to wear my Apple watch, but I had a feeling it would've set, set

Leo Laporte (02:17:17):
It off by hundred dp. So the, there there movie theaters have instructions to the levels of which they're supposed to turn them up. And Imex especially, that's part of the settings. It'd be my guess that that theater has it turned up too loud. Cuz it should not be painfully loud. It should be loud. I

Caller 8 (02:17:37):
Exactly, my ears were hurting, like driving home.

Leo Laporte (02:17:40):
Yeah, yeah. No it shouldn't. And

Caller 8 (02:17:43):
I listen,

Leo Laporte (02:17:44):
I guess the thing to do, you did talk to management, but I think the do is to say, guys, check your levels. They're way too loud in the theater because they probably set them too, too loud for the theater. Although, I have to say, movies are louder than they ever were. And I, and I really don't like it. You understand them even less than Yeah. You can't understand the dialogue. But boy, you can hear those explosions a mile away. This

Caller 8 (02:18:04):
Looks like this was really over the top.

Leo Laporte (02:18:07):
Part of the problem also is, is they used kind of not such good speakers. I've seen a movie, I've had the privilege of seeing a movie in George Lucas' theater. And it's loud, but it's perfect reproduction. And so it, it, it, it's, it's appropriately loud, I guess is what you would say. It's, it's the right loud. And it does not hurt your ears. It should. Right. You right. You should never be subject to ear damage. Yeah. No, that's not okay. I would complain, honestly, I would complain to management, but maybe they just feel like, you know, prob this is the other problem is most movie theaters now run unattended. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. There's just some guy and his job is to keep the popcorn popping and the rest of it's unattended. And probably that's what's happening anyway. What can we do for you today?

Caller 8 (02:18:55):
Oh, anyway, my son likes to play on his Xbox One grant Theft Auto. Yes. But he had decided that he likes to, he's learned about these things called mod.

Leo Laporte (02:19:09):
Yes.

Caller 8 (02:19:10):
Which is my patients of the games. But they're not available in the official versions. And, and we don't have a pc. We only have Max. And I think you can only play those games on PCs without like, you know, running, doing all kinds of you know, downloading to a, to its stick or something and then plugging it into the back of the, the, the Xbox One or something.

Leo Laporte (02:19:35):
There are ways to play Grand Theft Auto five on a Mac. I don't know how good they'd be. But since you're running Mods already, you're already getting in the hackery world of <laugh> excitement.

Caller 8 (02:19:47):
Well, well I haven't run the Mods yet cause like, but what I've done is actually, I, I, I purchased Parallels and Fri that, but the Mac is too old. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:19:59):
The performance performance is not ideal. If you have an older Mac, an Intel Mac, obviously you do, then I would try bootcamp, which actually installs Windows on your Mac. Yeah, that's

Caller 8 (02:20:09):
What I was saying. Right. And I have to, first of all, I'll just say it's a 2015 idac. So that's,

Leo Laporte (02:20:17):
I mean, honestly GTA's not gonna run well on it. What is it? Because you don't have a graphics card, you don't have very fast processor, seven year old computer. It's gonna be an unpleasant experience for your kid. That's one of the advantages of Xbox and, and consoles, is you don't have to think about it. And the games are tuned to run optimally on that particular hardware cuz they know what the hardware is. Soon as you get to PCs and Max, you don't know if he cares that much about it. How old is your kid?

Caller 8 (02:20:48):
Oh, he's like 19. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:20:49):
He should get a job. <Laugh>.

Caller 8 (02:20:52):
That's true. Well that's a whole other, and I'm his tech guy. So I mean, the thing is, if I actually though I noticed that the iMac now won't update anymore anyway. I mean it's got, it won't Ventura. So in a way, would it run with the M one, let's say if I got him a Mac Mini or you know, Christmas or something. So the,

Leo Laporte (02:21:13):
You think it, it's a double edged sword. So the New Max, by the way, Mac Mini is great in every respect, but the New Max no longer do bootcamp. In fact

Caller 8 (02:21:22):
I would still have to run it with parallel.

Leo Laporte (02:21:24):
Yeah. In fact, parallels, you can't use the real windows. You can only use Windows on Arm, which I'm sure GTA does not run well under.

Caller 8 (02:21:32):
Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:33):
Yeah. So, so that isn't gonna be an improvement. There, there, there are programs called, there's a program called Crossover, which I think GTA actually runs under, which is an, EM is kind of like an emulator for Windows. But all of this is gonna be pretty, pretty janky. It's not gonna be the ideal way to do it. It won't be nearly as good an experience as it is on his old Xbox.

Caller 8 (02:21:58):
Right.

Leo Laporte (02:21:58):
For less than it would cost to get the Mac Mini. On the other hand, you could get a PC that would run it fine.

Caller 8 (02:22:03):
Right, exactly. Then I'm going like, what am I doing? Buying him a pc? But I don't know anything about PCs unless there's like, you know, the bottom of the,

Leo Laporte (02:22:11):
He could learn this, he could learn it. He's a smart kid, right?

Mikah Sargent (02:22:16):
Yeah. You just, you say, Hey, here's the pc. Now the rest is up to you.

Caller 8 (02:22:20):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:22:21):
You're a nice dad. You're a nice dad. Dan. I I think there's really, for this kind of thing, you really need a pc. Yeah. I,

Caller 8 (02:22:32):
That's what it boils down to, unfortunately. Right, right. Okay. Well that's good cause that'll stop me from like bang my head against the, to

Leo Laporte (02:22:42):
Now the IS M one Max do run many great games and more all the time. And if he gets, you can run Steam on an M one and you can see all the Mac games that are available. They're not Grand Theft Auto, but other games are available. So, I mean it depends on how tight he is to Grand Theft Auto. Grand Theft Auto is for a pc really. Especially if you wanna remind. Right,

Caller 8 (02:23:04):
Right, right, right. Okay. But that's realistic.

Leo Laporte (02:23:07):
Yeah. And then, you know, I have to say the gaming scene, which was for a long time, terrible on Mac is improving a lot. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I'm starting to see, it's interesting, apple, you know, we were talking earlier about these AI painting programs like Stable Diffusion. You can run Stable Diffusion on a Mac, but it's kind of janky Apple. Apple of all people have just written drivers modifications for stable ai. So it runs as well on an M one Ultra as it does on an Nvidia card on a pc. I didn't know this. Why is Apple doing this? I don't know. But the, you know, cuz it, before you had a, there's a special program, there's a Modific and it didn't run very well. It would take minutes to draw one picture. Now it's back down to 10 seconds with these mods from Apple.

(02:23:53):
Wow. So I think Apple is aware of the fact that many people say, I wanna, you know, why do I have to get a PC to run AAA games? I wanna run 'em on my on my Mac. The problem is, of course, Apple's no longer Intel. It is running a processor they've designed and the M one now the M two. And so they have to either get game designers to write games for that processor and they're, by the way, I think they're putting a lot of effort into that. Or they have to do something on their own to improve it. But in this case, I think, you know, it's just, it's kind of up to you. If you feel like you're gonna have to do all the work, Dan then you know, maybe you will, you will learn how to use a PC <laugh>.

(02:24:40):
You will. It's not that hard. It's not that hard. I actually ended up buying a pc high end gaming PC cuz I wanted to play some games that I could only play on the pc. And, and you know, so it depends how committed you are to La Vita Grand Ottawa. <Laugh> 88. 88 as the, no, don't call that number cuz we are done. I can't believe it. We've got one more segment and you know, who's gonna be here to do that for us? Mad Magazine's, maddest writer. Dick de Bartolo joins the tech guys in just a bit with some junky gadget that I'm probably gonna end up buying. Cuz that's, that's what we do with Dick. Stay right here. Leo and Mikah, your tech guys. Oh, don't forget the website. Tech guy labs.com. Com. Dicky

Dick DeBartolo (02:25:31):
D Hey Leo, how you doing?

Leo Laporte (02:25:35):
Hi, I see you in your lumberjack shirt.

Dick DeBartolo (02:25:39):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:25:39):
He's a lu jacket. He's okay.

Dick DeBartolo (02:25:43):
He

Leo Laporte (02:25:43):
Works all night and they sleep all day. They puts on women's clothing. And did you see my, did you see my, my special award in honor of Leo Port with a verified Twitter account before they were available for purchase. Wow. Hanging that on the wall. That's my GI budget though. Shot <laugh>, ladies and gentlemen. Just going across our dance floor, Mr. Dick de Bartolo, Mads Madis writer and our gizmo wizard. We call him the Kiwi. Hey GWiz, how are you?

Dick DeBartolo (02:26:20):
You still talking to me? Even though you have that certificate that says you

Mikah Sargent (02:26:25):
So fancy?

Leo Laporte (02:26:27):
I have a plaque, a major award that says in honor of, at Leo Laporte who had a verified Twitter account before they were available for purchase. Wow. I'm gonna put that on the wall right next to my foot. My fake Emmy. So, oh, look at that. Oh, okay. No, that's a real Emmy. It's just a little,

Dick DeBartolo (02:26:45):
I I had a plaque but my dentist took it away. So I'm cool.

Mikah Sargent (02:26:49):
Dick. I've opened three days of of tinker Toys. Of Fidget toys in my advent calendar. You got a FID

Dick DeBartolo (02:26:58):
Advent

Mikah Sargent (02:26:59):
Calendar that was Dickie DE's

Dick DeBartolo (02:27:01):
Last

Mikah Sargent (02:27:01):
Week. So it, the first thing it came with were some clothes pins. And these are actually, I, at first I saw these little mini clothes pins and I thought,

Leo Laporte (02:27:10):
Why would you fidget fidget with those?

Mikah Sargent (02:27:12):
But it actually is quite fun to just fidget with a little clothes pin. These are holiday

Dick DeBartolo (02:27:16):
Things. Also, you could hang your Christmas stocking up with it. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:27:19):
Oh, I think that's the idea. Right. But it's

Mikah Sargent (02:27:21):
Fun to fidget

Leo Laporte (02:27:22):
With. Or if you, if you catch an elf, you could just hang 'em by their ears.

Mikah Sargent (02:27:26):
Yeah, right there on the

Leo Laporte (02:27:27):
Side. Like they right over the fireplace. Wow. Wow.

Mikah Sargent (02:27:31):
I a little popper bracelet. So this has

Dick DeBartolo (02:27:36):
Oh, which is nice.

Mikah Sargent (02:27:38):
Yes. And it folds up into a bracelet

Dick DeBartolo (02:27:40):
That,

Mikah Sargent (02:27:41):
And then this morning I opened up

Leo Laporte (02:27:44):
December. It's December 3rd. What did you get?

Dick DeBartolo (02:27:47):
Oh, that, those are great. Those are

Mikah Sargent (02:27:50):
Great. So I've been having a lot of fun with my, my advent calendar. <Laugh>

Dick DeBartolo (02:27:54):
Good pick. Well, I, I think I've, I think you'll buy today's gadget, Leo. I'm not so sure.

Leo Laporte (02:28:00):
Yeah, Mike apparently is a sucker.

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:03):
When I, when I set up on Amazon, I thought, how does fire and water work together? Oh, so they are the flame humidifiers.

Mikah Sargent (02:28:13):
Excuse

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:13):
Me. And yeah, it's a, it's a great idea and it works. Take a humidifier, light it from the, the bottom with LEDs and the mist coming out. Looks

Mikah Sargent (02:28:26):
Like

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:26):
Fire, looks like it's a mini fire.

Leo Laporte (02:28:30):
Oh,

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:31):
They

Leo Laporte (02:28:32):
And moist

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:33):
Red

Leo Laporte (02:28:33):
<Laugh> <laugh>.

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:35):
Now it's very funny. This is, this is what the manufacturer said. The soft warm light of the flame air diffuser makes it look like a fireplace. But then the cold mist makes you feel cool. <Laugh>. It's a visual and sensory novel. You

Leo Laporte (02:28:52):
Got two behind you.

Dick DeBartolo (02:28:54):
Well, I both

Mikah Sargent (02:28:55):
Look so cool.

Leo Laporte (02:28:56):
They look really cool. It looks like a fire.

Mikah Sargent (02:28:58):
I want it.

Dick DeBartolo (02:29:00):
And they are they cheap. Okay. The, the, the big one has a clock in it and a, and a very high capacity. You cannot shut the clock off, but you can just face the clock toward the wall. That was $29 or 29 99. And then it has remote control, which is a little wonky. You have to be close by for the remote, remote control to work. And then I said, you know what, I'm gonna get the little guy because that's only $23. I bought that and I like that too.

Leo Laporte (02:29:31):
I'm ordering it right now for our studio. For our new studio.

Dick DeBartolo (02:29:33):
Which one? Which one are you? Which one are

Leo Laporte (02:29:35):
You getting? I thought I get the one with the clock cuz people like to know what time it is. They do.

Dick DeBartolo (02:29:38):
Okay, there you go. When they watch the, okay, there you

Leo Laporte (02:29:41):
Go. That could be our new clock.

Mikah Sargent (02:29:42):
Oh, that's fun. Yeah, it's really mean looking. Now is it only red fire? Can you change the color of the L e

Dick DeBartolo (02:29:48):
D? No, no, no. The big one, you can adjust the color of not the color but the brightness of the flame. Got it. The little one, you can't, they both have, you can pick out an hour, like let it run for two hours or four hours. They both will shut off automatically when they run outta water. But the effect the effect is way better than I than I thought it would

Leo Laporte (02:30:15):
Be.

Mikah Sargent (02:30:15):
<Laugh>. That's really neat. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:30:20):
So there's the fidget to that. You just got Mikah. That's last week's whole calendar. And here's the fire and water and if you want,

Dick DeBartolo (02:30:27):
And I put a little, yeah, I put a little video up there of like

Leo Laporte (02:30:30):
You could see what it's like at

Dick DeBartolo (02:30:32):
Dick. Yes. The next gone

Leo Laporte (02:30:34):
The

Dick DeBartolo (02:30:34):
Mile to each other. So it only

Leo Laporte (02:30:36):
Looks cool. It's

Dick DeBartolo (02:30:36):
So cool looking. Don't they look? Looks

Leo Laporte (02:30:38):
Like an inferno.

Mikah Sargent (02:30:39):
And now I've got a gift idea for a family member. Thank you.

Dick DeBartolo (02:30:44):
No pro. No, I I was my list. Very impressed. The big guy every once in a while that you don't see too much flame on the left, but it, the the flames on the big one are very robust. It does look like it could do. I could roast the marshal. Yeah. I said, Dennis, take that. Frankfurt it down. That is

Leo Laporte (02:31:04):
Interesting. It's not chilling. It it's just chilling. It's

Dick DeBartolo (02:31:06):
Not, yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:31:08):
And they can use essential oils. Some loquacious is telling us in the chat room. Yes,

Dick DeBartolo (02:31:12):
Exactly. Also

Leo Laporte (02:31:14):
Can, could choose a enrollment for, I've

Mikah Sargent (02:31:16):
Got, I've got perfect for winter. I have have a cedar spruce and juniper. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (02:31:22):
It'll make the house smell

Dick DeBartolo (02:31:24):
Like Christmas.

Leo Laporte (02:31:24):
That's wonderful.

Dick DeBartolo (02:31:26):
And like a fire. And

Mikah Sargent (02:31:27):
I'll roast some chest nuts on it.

Dick DeBartolo (02:31:29):
Chest nuts. Roasting the cold mis flame.

Leo Laporte (02:31:34):
Dickie bartolo. You see now why we call him our gizmo wizard? He comes up with the weirdest stuff. I don't know where he finds it.

Dick DeBartolo (02:31:41):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:31:41):
Gwiz.Biz is the website. G I z w i z dot b i z. If you go there, here's what, here's my recommendation. You're gonna, you're gonna check the button that says the GWiz is is the tech guy. Cuz that's where you'll find this stuff. But don't stop there. There's gadget stick shows every month on World News. Now on abc, you get, you do that in the middle of the night.

Dick DeBartolo (02:32:04):
Well, I tape 'em at 1130 at night and then they run them during the night.

Leo Laporte (02:32:08):
Okay. That's the

Dick DeBartolo (02:32:10):
Sometimes like, yeah, this Sunday I'm gonna do two in a row so I don't have to go back.

Leo Laporte (02:32:14):
Nice. But there's other things like the, what the heck is it? Gun test, which is a chance you get two months to participate, to identify a closeup picture of a gizmo or a gadget. If you get it right, you're in the drawing for six copies of Mad Magazine Autographed by Dick right here. If you get it wrong. But you're clever, you're actually in the drawing for even more 12 autographs. Correct. Mad Magazines. What is that? I don't know. I'm looking at it. I can't tell. And this one goes through the end of the year. So you've got the

Dick DeBartolo (02:32:50):
End of this year.

Leo Laporte (02:32:50):
Three more weeks, I guess. Three or four more weeks exactly. To do this. Very exciting. Very exciting Dick. 

Dick DeBartolo (02:32:59):
I'm glad GWiz.

Mikah Sargent (02:33:00):
That's an indoor rain gauge.

Leo Laporte (02:33:03):
Oh it is. So you know how much it's rained inside. Exactly. When, if you have this mister, you might actually have some precipitation.

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:09):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:33:09):
You might, you might actually know. And don't forget the weekly GWiz show with OMG Chad at Gi Wiz dot. And you're gonna do a preview of those gadgets you're gonna show on World News now. I think so. That's exciting.

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:23):
Perfect. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (02:33:24):
All right, Dick, what are your plans for the holiday? You doing anything

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:27):
Special? This is it. I'm gonna sit here on every Saturday until I Dennis said, oh, wait a minute. No, Dick, come outta there. <Laugh>. Oh, it's over. It's over. It's over.

Leo Laporte (02:33:39):
Go home. You can't, I go home. But you can't stay here. Okay.

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:44):
I have no big plans. At some point we go down and we do you have a tree and go to a bar. Oh, my next week I have my fiber optic tree from the movie.

Leo Laporte (02:33:54):
Do you stir that at the Gadget Warehouse?

Dick DeBartolo (02:33:56):
I, I do. I do. Okay. I do.

Leo Laporte (02:34:00):
You leave it on at night for the

Dick DeBartolo (02:34:02):
Watchmen. Do you have a big Now now do you have an outdoor tree that you decorate?

Leo Laporte (02:34:05):
No. No. We have an we have an indoor tree. How about you? Indoor. Yeah, indoor this year in past we've gone and chopped downt trees and I've started to decide. I've decided I didn't wanna do that. It's kind of a paint in, in the, well also the neighbors were getting peed about. Well, we pretty much got all the trees, so I feel like they're fire hazards. They're also fire hazards once you, well, even afterwards when they dry out and they're just sitting out there. So we went to Costco, we got like a big tree and it's got lights built in. Nice. So I don't have to do that. It's good. Excellent. And, and then excellent. And it'll be there next year as well. Dickie d gi Wiz Biz. Thank you so much sir. Thank you. Have a wonderful week. Thank you Mikah Sargant.

(02:34:46):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's been a lot of fun. Always is. With Mikah. We'll see you next Saturday. Indeed. I'll be back here tomorrow for another tech guy Show. Thanks to Jeremiah filling in for Professor Laura. Did a great job this week. Jeremiah, Kim Shaffer, our phone. Angel, we thank you so much of course for getting people on the air. And most of all, I thank all of you who tune in and listen. And for those of you who call, we really appreciate it. Couldn't do the show without you. Right Mike? That is true. You and me. What would poems generated by artificial intelligence? Wait, maybe you should do some questions for <laugh>. Let's ask if they could give us some questions. Yeah. Yeah, that would be interesting. We'll figure it out. My printer isn't printing. What should I do? Have a great geek week. We'll see you next time.

(02:35:30):
Well, that's it for The Tech Guy Show for today. Thank you so much for being here. And don't forget twi, t i t It stands for this week at Tech and you find it@twi.tv, including the podcast for the 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@twit.tv and I'll be back next week with another great tech guy show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.