The Tech Guy Episode 1952 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 is Twit. Hi, this is Leo Laporte and this is my Tech Guy podcast. This show originally aired on the Premier Networks on Sunday, December 11th, 2022. This is episode 1952. Enjoy. Thanks for listening to this show. As an ad supported network, we are always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our qualified audience. Are you ready to grow your business? Reach out to advertise at quit tv and launch your campaign now. Well, hey, hey, hey. Or should I say ho ho, ho. It's time for the tech Guy. Show, show show. Leo Laporte here, your tech guy. Time to talk about computers in the internet and home theater and digital photography and smartphones and smart watches. Augmented reality, virtual reality, real reality, self-driving vehicles that don't self-drive all that stuff. 88. 88 Ask Leo, is the phone number (888) 827-5536.

(00:01:13):
Toll free from anywhere in the US or Canada. The phone lines are open. Kim Shaffer is taking your calls. 88 88. Ask Leo website. If you hear something on the show and you go, what? Or more likely I'd like to remember that <laugh>, then you just head on over to the show notes and everything's there. All the links. Tech guy labs.com, tech guy labs.com. And we'll put links there. We're not, we just don't just put links there. We'll put a transcript of the show there. It takes a couple of days, you know, a computer to figure it all out. And then we'll put a video and audio from the show there a couple of days later and all that, you know, so you don't, you know, this is all there. Everything. You need all the information. You don't have to write it down right now. Tech guy labs.com do remember that.

(00:02:07):
 Because if you forget you will then say, well, where can I find this? Show this Leo guy and you'll lose me. So don't lose me. Tech <laugh>, tech guy labs.com. 88 88. Ask Leah what happened in the news today, this week, quite a bit to a, to a busy week. Let's see. We, we could talk about a few different things. Elon Musk's Twitter files, I don't know where. We really cannot figure out what Mr. Musk is thinking or doing. He's now released and it's actually quite interesting. He's released. All the private communications are many, I doubt all, but many of the private communications amongst Twitter executives and their so-called trust and safety team about what to do about this or that. I think his goal is to say to show bias. Actually it's interesting because if you look through them there isn't a lot of bias.

(00:03:16):
What you really see is the, the kind of messy, difficult process of figuring out how to keep a social media site safe and happy. So let me, the premise, of course, starts with, you can't just let anything happen on the site. You really can't. The couple of reasons, and we have examples of where people have done that, and it's not, it's not gone well. A couple of reasons. One, of course, Twitter's revenue comes from advertisers. And advertisers notoriously don't want to be somewhere disgusting, <laugh>. So that's part one. That's problem number one. And you, you could probably fix that. Twitter's trying to fix that right now by saying, oh, we're gonna filter out stuff and your ads will never appear on anything that you don't like. That's a recipe ripe for disaster, I must say. But then there's another problem, which is it doesn't take long before your site turns into a hill site.

(00:04:16):
If you don't carefully prune the garden. It's, it's like a garden. A garden's a good metaphor. If you don't pull the weeds, the weeds take over. Cuz weeds grow faster than the the nice flowers. And this is true of hate and racism and disgusting stuff. It grows faster than the nice stuff. It pushes the nice stuff out. If you're a nice person, a generous person, a normal person. In fact, if you're a normal per, that's all we have to say. If you're normal, once all this stuff starts happening, you go, Ew. And you get outta there and the weeds take over. And we've seen this happen. There are sites where there is no moderation and best known as something called four chan. Don't go there. And then four Chan <laugh>, I guess they must have moderated a little bit, got some people unhappy. So people went to eight Chan <laugh> where it was really not moderated and it's terrible.

(00:05:03):
And what's sad is there's a, there's a splash zone. A splatter zone from four chan and eight chan now eight Koon. Because the people in there get all riled up and then they go out into the real world and act like jerks. They brigade, they do something called brig where they go in a, in un mass. It's like a, it's like an internet mob and and attack somebody or something. And this is happening a lot. And the, and the brigade you know, is organized inside these unmoderated sites. So Twitter from day one knew that, well, every social media site, Facebook, two TikTok, Snapchat knows you can't just let anything happen. You've gotta moderate. But it's very tough to know, well, what's gonna cause problems? You know, Twitter wanted to be for, from day one, the free speech wing of the free speech party.

(00:05:55):
That's what they said, which by the, by which they meant, you know, we really wanna focus on free speech. So internally, they really didn't want to ban anything. They didn't have to ban. But at the same time, they had these two constraints, advertisers and, you know, users, these two, these two pressures to keep the place cleaned up a little bit to pull the weeds. So it's actually interesting, I think Elon is, has a, you know, his agenda is see how jerky they were in their moderation efforts. And I don't think that's what you get out of this. I think if you look at it, of course he knows nobody will look at it cuz it's too much. So people are gonna look at the conclusions that Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss, the two, and I'll put this in very big air quotes, journalists that Elon has is tasked with looking through this stuff. They're coming up with, you know, the selective little bits, but read the whole thing, read, read as much as it is you can take. There's a good synopsis by Devin Colway, who's good on TechCrunch Musk's Twitter files offer a glimpse of the raw, complicated and thankless task of moderation.

(00:07:09):
Devin Devin Wrights Musk's obvious conviction that he's released some partisan Kraken is mistaken far from conspiracy or systemic abuse. The files are a valuable peak behind the curtain of moderation at scale. Hinting at the sfi and labors undertaken by every social media platform. It's for one thing, you can't do this in public because that just amplifies the stuff you're trying to hide away trying to put away. So to reveal too much would be Devin writes to expose the processes to abuse by spammers and scammers who indeed take advantage of every leaked or published detail while to reveal too little, eh, that leads to damaging reports and rumors as they lose control over the narrative. So it's tough and there's debate within, and that's one of the things you see immediately with with these Twitter files, is there's debate within Twitter over, well, what should we do? Should we do this? And they make mistakes. They've admitted they made mistake with you know, blocking that post story about the Hunter Biden laptop, but it was reversed within a day. And that's what also happens with moderation. You, you do something and then cooler heads prevailing. You go, no, no, no. That was a mistake. And they took it back. Take back, take it backies.

(00:08:29):
So if it's sort of interesting to see these conversations, and actually in some ways it's relieving. It's interesting because it's fascinating to see, you know, the processes involved are complex. It's hard to do this. It's hard. And I think one of the things Elon's starting to realize is it's hard <laugh> and his kind of snap judgments, oh, this'll be easy have turned out to be No, not, not, not quite so easy. For instance, he remember he brought back Kanye West after his antisemitic statements. Kanye immediately made another one. <Laugh> posted a, a star of David with a swastika inside. Oh, that's nice. That's nice. So Elon banned him again. See, there was a reason he was in the first place. Elon <laugh>. You see, you see it's complicated. It's hard. So the good article, I'll put a link in the show notes to to this Good Tech Crunch article.

(00:09:28):
 But, but what we're seeing here is how hard it is to do these social networks at scale. You know, and in a way, this is why I like what, what for some has replaced Twitter, which are these smaller social networks. Discord for your family is a great place. In fact one of my friend's, aunt Pruitt has his family and Slack, and they just have their own. It's private, so you don't have to moderate it. It's aunt and uncle and kids, and that's great. It's private. That's one way to do it. We have a, a a couple of social networks that I run. So that's how I know a little bit about Hall, how hard this is. We have a forum, you know, remember forums, they're still around for our podcast network work, twi.community. And we have what's called a Mastodon instance.

(00:10:11):
You might have heard that phrase quite a bit. Lot of people left Twitter to go to. And the nice thing about Macedon, instead of one giant blob, which like Twitter or Facebook, you many thousands of people run their own little servers. They moderate. I moderate my little server@twi.social, moderate it carefully. I spend time looking at it. But because there's only a few thousand people I can keep a handle on, it kick out people quickly if they cause problems. And so it's become a nice little conversation pit <laugh>. And the nice thing about Macedon is it can then you can follow people anywhere else on any of the other servers. So you do kind of get this global access with a kind of nice, quiet, local feel. It's an interesting way to, to solve this whole thing. Anyway, I could see how it's hard. Social's hard.

(00:11:00):
I think social may be falling by the wayside as we all get kind of a little bit tired of dooms scrolling through Twitter and Facebook, and we're just replacing it. I think with, with what we always ha wanted, which was entertainment. Tiktok has become YouTube have become kind of our new tv. And for people, you just go look at somebody under 25. Not, not too hard. They, they'll get creeped out, but just kind of watch. They're all, they don't watch tv. They're, they're watching YouTube and, and TikTok. It's entertaining, it's fun, it's quick, it's easy. Doesn't demand a lot of you <laugh>. Actually YouTube's great. Both are great. Cause you can, if you want, dig deeper and learn. But for the most time apart, it's just, you know, fun, entertaining. It's kind of like watching endless reruns of America's Funniest Home videos. Just without Bob Sagt. Just o just over and over and over again. 88. 88, ask Leo. That's the phone number. I'm dressed for Winter <laugh>, even though it's not really chilly in the studio. We've got our eLog of Vernon. The holidays are upon us. I'm gonna get some eggnog and we'll come back and answer some calls right after this.

(00:12:22):
Hello, Sam Aam. How

Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:25):
Are you? Hello, Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:12:26):
Hello, Sam. What's up? Fuck,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:31):
I got to try f s d beta this

Leo Laporte (00:12:33):
Week. Oh, wasn't that wonderful. Did you? Yeah. Did you see the article <laugh> about this, the video that they have on Tesla's site that implies that you know, this FSD has been around and drives beautifully. It was this, the

Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:52):
Legendary painted black video?

Leo Laporte (00:12:54):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The Los Angeles Times Tesla calls self-driving technology failure, not a fraud in their, in the lawsuit. It's not a fraud. No. And Elizabeth Holmes desire to,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:06):
To mean to not be able to do it

Leo Laporte (00:13:08):
Blood testing with a drop. That wasn't a fraud. That was just a, a, a failure of something ama that we imagined. That would be amazing.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:17):
We tried to fake it till we make it, and we didn't make it yet. And it

Leo Laporte (00:13:20):
Didn't have made it, it didn't make

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:21):
It. We're still faking

Leo Laporte (00:13:22):
It. We're faking it. For 15,000 to pop, I paid 5,000 on my Model X to, for that FSD capability. That was six years ago. Never happened.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:33):
And it's still not happening now. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:13:37):
Yeah. $5,000 I paid for the right to get it down the road. Now you pay $15,000.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:13:44):
Well, and, and one of the things, you know, typic, you know, traditionally when you buy a car and you know, you get options on there, those options stay with that car for the life of the car. Right? So if you buy a car with say, a sunroof, they, that sunroof stays there for the life of the car. And when you go to sell the car, that adds some value to the resell value of the car. But with these software defined features like F S D and Autopilot now when you sell a car, as soon as the, as soon as they get notification that the registration changed, they reach out and turn it off. And the second owner

Leo Laporte (00:14:23):
Doesn't, isn't it awful.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:25):
Has to pay for it again if they

Leo Laporte (00:14:26):
Want's. So terrible

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:28):
<Laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:14:29):
It's kind of amazing.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:31):
Yeah. I had a friend of mine finally got the FSD beta last week cuz they made the decision so that in, in order to be able to finally recognize all of the revenue from all the customers that are paid for FSD over the years, they they stopped doing what they were previously doing, which was you had to have a safety score of greater than like 97 or 98. And they just opened it up to everybody. They just shipped it out to everybody. So now they can recognize all that revenue. And my friend finally got it a week and a half ago, and after trying it out the first time he went to a store and bought a student driver sticker and put it on the truck

Leo Laporte (00:15:15):
Of his

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:15):
Car. <Laugh> nothing wouldn't get rear-ended. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:15:18):
Because I'm just learning. I'm learning. That's good. Tell that story on the air. That's hysterical. That's hysterical. So I, yeah, I'm curious what your experience has been with, is this FSD supposed to work on city streets as well as highways? Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:31):
Wow. It's supposed to be able, this, this is what's supposed to be able to turn these cars into robo taxis and Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:15:37):
<Laugh>. So we can make 30,000 a year on our

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:39):
Our taxes. There's a, there's a reason why nobody's making money on Tesla. Robo taxis. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Except for Elon.

Leo Laporte (00:15:45):
Well

Leo Laporte (00:15:47):
But it wasn't a failure. It wasn't fraud. It was just a failure of having high ambitions.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:54):
No, it's fraud <laugh>. That's,

Leo Laporte (00:15:58):
That's fraud. I reme, you know, I paid for it. And I remember I thought, I'm paying the Elon Tax and it's cuz I wanna support him. This is the bigger fraud that bothers me. I wanna support him in his mission to electrify the world and, and get rid of fossil fuels. And I thought, well, he's gonna, he says he's gonna make these luxury vehicles. And then,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:15):
And, and, and to his credit, you know, Tesla, he's

Leo Laporte (00:16:18):
Done that has, but he's never made the affordable Tesla,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16:21):
Right?

Leo Laporte (00:16:21):
No. Hey, we'll talk in a bit Too hot to what? Stop. She's too hot to <laugh> to answer the phones. I'm not little hot right now. I'm wearing my, you have many, many layers. I'm wearing my 49ers Super Bowl sweatshirt at Joe Robby Stadium, Miami, Florida, January 29th, 1995. I think that was, was at the catch of the catch too. It was one of them. And that, that was a generous gift from a listener. And then over that I'm wearing what you and I have determined as probably a fake Ah, yeah. Gold. It doesn't havers jacket

Kim Schaffer (00:16:55):
Telltale signs that

Leo Laporte (00:16:56):
Doesn't have,

Kim Schaffer (00:16:57):
So au authenticity

Leo Laporte (00:16:59):
Doesn't have that. A hologram on it. Yeah, the hologram. And then I just thought to top it off, I'd wear Santa Hat <laugh>. So actually it's an elf hat <laugh>

Kim Schaffer (00:17:08):
You, you, you're probably rather warm in there, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:17:11):
They're, they're taking bets in the chat room about how long I'll wear this, which means I'm gonna wear it forever.

Kim Schaffer (00:17:17):
I was gonna say 1132 <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:17:22):
And then I have a green based scarf just to make our son happy. No, it's not a Green Bay, but it is Green <laugh> hello Kim Scheffer phone. Angel. You're the one. You, you know, I hate this in interviews. It always mugs me where they interview somebody says, you are the president of the United States and <laugh>. It's like, I, he knows that. He knows that. You don't have to tell him all of his accomplishments. What they're doing is they're telling the audience, but instead they'd say, you and they should just say, let me introduce my guest, Kim Scheffer. She is our phone angel. She answers the calls, gets you on the air. See, that's better than saying, telling you what you do. You know what you do. Yeah, I know what I do. <Laugh>, Kim.

Kim Schaffer (00:18:03):
Hi.

Leo Laporte (00:18:04):
Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Have you finished your shopping?

Kim Schaffer (00:18:09):
I haven't started, but luckily for me, I have nobody to shop for. So <laugh>, I get

Leo Laporte (00:18:15):
To always pull in the sad card. Kim. I don't have,

Kim Schaffer (00:18:19):
I

Leo Laporte (00:18:19):
Don't <laugh>. I don't have

Kim Schaffer (00:18:22):
Children to buy for.

Leo Laporte (00:18:23):
I don't have Oh, Kim family

Kim Schaffer (00:18:24):
Members to buy for.

Leo Laporte (00:18:25):
Oh,

Kim Schaffer (00:18:26):
I have parents, but they're like, what do we need? Yeah, we're old

Leo Laporte (00:18:30):
<Laugh>. So Lisa and I said, no presents. This is one of those every, every few years you go no presents. Yeah. but we're, you know, of course we're gonna get presents. And, and grandpa Lisa's dad said, what do you mean? No, it's too late. He's been buying presents all year. So I think there'll be some presents under the tree. And then I, so I thought, well, I'm gonna get one present for the both of us.

Kim Schaffer (00:18:49):
Yeah, there you go. Yeah. A shared

Leo Laporte (00:18:52):
Experience. I'm not gonna tell you what it is now, I'll tell you after after I, after Christmas,

Kim Schaffer (00:18:55):
But I'll probably end up replacing this at some point, but maybe not for Christmas.

Leo Laporte (00:18:59):
Replacing what?

Kim Schaffer (00:19:00):
This old phone of mine.

Leo Laporte (00:19:02):
<Laugh>. Oh yeah. You need a new phone? Yeah.

Kim Schaffer (00:19:03):
Yeah. I'll buy myself a gift. Put

Leo Laporte (00:19:05):
Put that on your list. Maybe Santa will bring it. Maybe Santa will bring. Who should I talk to Here?

Kim Schaffer (00:19:10):
Let's go to Lamar. Now you help people cut the cord all the time. Yes. He needs you to help him get a cord.

Leo Laporte (00:19:17):
<Laugh>, get a cord.

Kim Schaffer (00:19:18):
He has nothing.

Leo Laporte (00:19:19):
I need a cord.

Kim Schaffer (00:19:19):
You need to start him out and he doesn't know where to start.

Leo Laporte (00:19:22):
<Laugh>. Thank you, Ms. Scheffer. You're welcome. Thank you. Hello, Marty. Leo, the tech guy. Welcome.

Caller 1 (00:19:28):
Hey, Leo, you

Leo Laporte (00:19:30):
Got, you don't have a cord. A cord

Caller 1 (00:19:32):
To, okay. Confession. I used to have Dish Network, but when they, when they dropped the Dodgers, I dropped them because that was half the reason I had it. Heck yeah. Heck yeah. So the, the only thing, and I used to have a plugin internet for my, for my ta for my computer, for my laptop. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But you, I, so you, when I dropped that, what, years ago, let's

Leo Laporte (00:20:00):
Forget the past. Let's talk about the future. What do you wanna do?

Caller 1 (00:20:05):
I, I, well, it all came to a head when I'm had to replace my, my big screen or my tv. And I made an impulse buy, and I bought a a, a 65 inch Samsung because I got a great, great deal on it. But the, the stupid thing has a remote, has a remote control that's voice activated and only has four buttons. And I'm supposed to plug that into the internet. What

Leo Laporte (00:20:31):
Do you, what do you wanna do? Let me ask you again. I know, okay, you got a tv, which means you've triggered the upgrade cascade. But what do you wanna do? You wanna watch tv, right?

Caller 1 (00:20:42):
Well, I, I'd, I'd like

Leo Laporte (00:20:43):
You wanna watch Dodgers games

Caller 1 (00:20:44):
Tv? I'd like, I'd like to watch, watch my Dodgers. Okay. I'd, I'd like to you know, and I, you know you know, that's a funny question. What do I want to do?

Leo Laporte (00:20:55):
Yeah, that's where you gotta go first is what am I, what am I trying to accomplish? And then I can tell you how to get there. But unless I know what you wanna do, I can't tell you.

Caller 1 (00:21:03):
Yeah. I'd like, I'd like to be able to plug my, my laptop or activate my laptop and use it

Leo Laporte (00:21:10):
On You want some, you want internet. And in fact, internet will solve a lot of this because internet also will bring you all the TV and stuff you want. So,

Caller 1 (00:21:18):
Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:21:19):
So you don't have an internet connection right now? Is that right?

Caller 1 (00:21:23):
I have nothing. All I, nothing, all I have is my smartphone.

Leo Laporte (00:21:25):
I got nothing. So you have some choices. Every area in the country. Well, almost every area in the country has one or two choices. About 86% of the country has a choice of cable or phone, internet, phone, internet coming to you over your phone lines. I don't generally recommend that these days it's slower cable's. Good. Now we have some more choices. The cellular companies, T-Mobile and Verizon are offering f what they call fixed wireless. They use their cellular networks for data. Now, I, I don't know about Bellflower. I don't know how are you, how's your cell signal? Is it pretty good?

Caller 1 (00:22:03):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:22:04):
If you have fast, reliable, and this is the key 5g, that's not a bad way to go. T-Mobile and Verizon both offer, and it's inexpensive if you're already a customer of these services. Residential internet, that's just a little, I got one from my daughter. It's a little thing. She's near the highway. That's usually a good sign. The highway is where all the cell networks are. And for 25 bucks a month, she gets very nice internet, good enough to watch tv good enough to do all sorts of things. So that's the first question is we gotta find you internet. But unfortunately, I'm out of time. Sam, bill, Sam, the car guy coming up, stay on the line. I'll help after off the air. So let me see. High speed internet.com/bellflower. Oh, you're kind of, let's see. You got, you can get at and t, which is really slow. 12 megabits. That's like nothing. You can't watch TV on 12 Megabits spectrum, your cable company. Do you have, you don't have a cable company? Probably.

Caller 1 (00:23:05):
I, well, I have, like I said, I have nothing right

Leo Laporte (00:23:07):
Now. You have nothing. So Spectrum offers besides cable TV in independently offers internet connection. Those are very, very fast. They go as fast as a gigabit spectrum. Yeah, because if you, if you, did you ever have cable TV in your house?

Caller 1 (00:23:22):
Well, like I said, I used, I used to have DishNet.

Leo Laporte (00:23:24):
Yeah. But before that would, was there ever, the question I'm, I really wanna know is, is there a cable drop in your house? In other words, did somebody ever in that house watch, watch cable?

Caller 1 (00:23:34):
I don't. I,

Leo Laporte (00:23:35):
Because they don't necessarily, they don't necessarily go to everywhere.

Caller 1 (00:23:41):
At one point, at one point I had, I had a a a router through through a a, the telephone service.

Leo Laporte (00:23:50):
Yeah, you don't want that. I'm looking at telephone service right now. At and t is so slow. You don't want that. The good news is Spectrum, frontier and EarthLink all offer fiber in some areas of Bellflower. So that might be worth looking. I'm gonna put, or you can just go to high speed internet.com. High speed and search for, these are the companies that you can contract with, but they haven't added yet to this system. This site is T-Mobile and Verizon. Who's your cell phone carrier?

Caller 1 (00:24:24):
Both T-Mobile and Verizon. I have

Leo Laporte (00:24:26):
Both. Okay. So the question's gonna be if either one of them gives you high, high bandwidth connection, you can even look at your phone at the top of your phone. You know where it shows your cellular connection. If it says you see, or UW next, if it says 5G with little tiny uc or uw, you have enough connection to actually get one of these residential things. And because you're already a customer, it's 25 bucks a month and it's about 150 megabits, which is plenty, plenty to watch what you want. Your TV for instance, has Netflix built in. So you connect your TV to that and you can watch Netflix. You wanna watch the Dodgers game. It means you're gonna have to get a service that offers local channels. The, now these are expensive, it's kind of up to you. But I use YouTube tv, which is 65 bucks a month.

(00:25:22):
It's basically a cable subscription, but you get all the locals and some other stuff. Okay. So there's some other, and there's others like Hulu also offers this. And Sling offers this. There's three companies that offer kind of internet, cable-like service. So you're gonna get those. You're gonna have to get a high bandwidth connection. Again, the best deal is probably gonna be T-Mobile or Verizon. If you have enough speed, then you're gonna have to get a provider to give you the local channels. If the, if, if the Dodgers is job one, you're gonna need YouTube, tv, Hulu, or Sling tv, cuz they will offer you your local channels.

Caller 1 (00:26:02):
Okay, well, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:26:05):
It's complicated, isn't it? But, but the other thing you could do is put a, are you close enough to put up an antenna?

Caller 1 (00:26:13):
Well that, you know, I, I've got that. I do, I do have a plugin antenna.

Leo Laporte (00:26:17):
Yeah. You might need more than a plugin. I don't know if you have a line of site to Mount Wilson. That's where most of the TV towers are. Yeah. Right. You could probably, it might take a directional antenna depending on how far you were. Here's the website to check that. It's tv fool.com. TV What? TV. F o o l Fool. You a fool. You got rid of your tv. Fool tv fool.com and you'll enter your zip code and it will give you an idea of what you can get with an antenna and what kind of antenna you'd need. Now I have to run because I hear the magic music signaling. The arrival of Santa Claus? No, of Samal. Sumit. Oh. If your team is on N B C, I don't know who carries the Dodgers games. You can get Peacock. Yeah, you can just get one cha. Just one, one network. It's complicated. It's time for Sam Bull Sam at our car guy, principal researcher at Guide House Insights. He is also the host of the Fabulous Wheel Bearings podcast@wheelbearings.media. Hello, Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:40):
Hello Leo. How

Leo Laporte (00:27:41):
Are you? I am well.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:42):
You look very toasty.

Leo Laporte (00:27:44):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Everybody's saying he must be sweating by now, but it's, it's a cool day in Petaluma. So I'm surviving. It's it's 70 degrees in here. I guess at some point I'm gonna have to strip down a little bit. So what's, what's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27:58):
Up in world to be wearing all that stuff?

Leo Laporte (00:27:59):
<Laugh>. I know, but it's festive. Don't you know what what I'll take off the scarf. Probably don't need that. What's up in the world of Sam Bull Salmon?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:08):
Well earlier this week I met up with a friend of mine that owns a Tesla Model three. Because he finally got his Tesla full self-driving beta software <laugh>. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:28:21):
Aren't you lucky? I didn't even know you could get that <laugh>.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:25):
Well up until from the time they initially launched it two years ago until a couple of weeks ago, it was in beta. Tesla was requiring anybody that wanted to participate in the beta Yeah. To have a safety score Perfect. Greater than about 97 or 90 Perfect. Score out of a hundred.

Leo Laporte (00:28:41):
And they don't measure. They're not saying you never had an accident. They're saying you stop and slow down at every stop sign sign and you do all that.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:47):
Yeah. It's, it's, it's all about, you know, measuring how fast you accelerate if you

Leo Laporte (00:28:50):
Jacket never see the speed

Sam Abuelsamid (00:28:52):
Limit. Yeah. And slamming on the brakes all the time. And so they, they generate the score and you know, the, the value of it is debatable, but at any rate, that's, that's how they, that's how they were using that was their, what they were using to decide who got into the beta and who didn't. Well, a couple of weeks ago they decide, yeah, you know what, we're just gonna let everybody have it. Yikes. Because because now now they can recognize the, the revenue that they've collected, you know, cuz people been paying anywhere from five to $15,000 over the last six years for full self-driving. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:29:27):
Wait a minute, for the right to buy full self-driving, cuz then isn't there a month

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:32):
The fee to get it when Yeah. No, that's separate. So you have the option of buying it as a one time purchase. Oh, okay. Or paying $200 a month for a subscription.

Leo Laporte (00:29:40):
So if I paid the 15th thou, I don't have to pay anything to do

Sam Abuelsamid (00:29:44):
It. That's correct. Nice. Okay. And so they you know, but while, you know, while they collected that money, they couldn't actually book it as revenue towards their profits until they actually delivered the product. So they had the money in the bank, they just couldn't count it towards their profits. So now they can, since they have technically delivered full self-driving to everybody, they can book all that revenue. The problem is that it's not actually full self-driving.

Leo Laporte (00:30:11):
Well, you have it. So tell me what

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:13):
What happens. I don't, I don't have it. A a friend of mine has it. I I had a chance you let

Leo Laporte (00:30:16):
Him drive, let him self drive you. Okay, good.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:19):
Yeah. Well, and I, I also had an opportunity to get behind the wheel for a while and, and try it out for myself. And when you, when you first get it, you go, there's a whole list of conditions. Like for example, you have to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel. It warns you that it may do the wrong thing at the absolute wrong time at, at, at any moment. And so you have to pay very close attention. So you can't just turn it on and then climb in the backseat and take a nap. You have to be paying attention because it can, and it will do the wrong thing many times. So

Leo Laporte (00:30:54):
That shouldn't, shouldn't be technically labeled full self-driving, right?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:30:59):
Correct. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:31:00):
What is that? That's level three autonomy. It's a kind of a driver's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:04):
Shift. Oh, it's actually, it's because you have to supervise it all the time. It, that actually counts as level two. Oh. So level two, you have to supervise it all the time. Level three, you don't have to supervise it all the time. You don't have to keep your eyes on the road. Yeah. But you do have to stay alert and be ready to take over, stay in the driver's seat about 10 seconds or so. Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:31:23):
And level four would be full self-driving.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:25):
Yeah. Level four requires no human supervision.

Leo Laporte (00:31:28):
We're, we're

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:29):
Not there yet. This is, no, this, this system's definitely not there

Leo Laporte (00:31:33):
Yet. We're half self-driving. Oh,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:35):
Yeah. I mean, it does some things really well, like keeping the car centered in the lane. Does that really well handles lane changes by itself very well. Good basic stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:31:45):
By the way, my Model X did that six years ago.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:49):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:31:50):
And my my mo Ford Maee does that right now. Okay. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:31:53):
Yeah. But so it does, it does that basic stuff pretty well. But so does, as you said, the Mae Yeah. Your Model X did the Cadillac years ago. Yeah. Cadillac super crews or, you know, GM super cruises does it very well. 

Leo Laporte (00:32:07):
Those are the easy things to

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:09):
Do. Those are, those are the relatively easy

Leo Laporte (00:32:11):
Things. Super crews in the Maee will only do it on highways, mapped highways. Correct. Tesla's saying it'll do this everywhere. Country roads, city town roads.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:20):
You can turn it on anywhere. Oh. And you know, we turn it on, you know, we pulled out of outta my friend's driveway a you know, put it in a destination in the navigation, activated it and then, you know, watched it go. Yeah. And it, you know, it does, it's not, it, it's far from

Leo Laporte (00:32:41):
How, how often did you have to take over? I guess that's really the

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:44):
Question. Pretty, pretty regularly. It, you know, it's how

Leo Laporte (00:32:48):
How far could it go without help?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:32:49):
So I'll, I'll give you, I'll give you an example. Yeah. You know, in, in different places there's you know, different, different locations have different road configurations and different things that, you know, you have to do. I mean, some places have a lot of roundabouts. Here in Michigan we have a, a phenomenon that's known as the Michigan left Turn <laugh>. So on some major thoroughfares like Woodward Avenue in Detroit and, and Telegraph Road these are like three lanes in each direction. They're big roads and they have a center median. And rather than try to allow traffic to make direct left turns at intersections, which is both dangerous and also, you know, not great for traffic flow, what they do is at, at the, just like 50 to a hundred yards beyond the intersection, they will have a cutout in the in the median. Yeah. Yeah. So you have another left turn lane. So basically you pull in there, you do a U-turn and then you make a right turn back. So you go back, you know, a hundred yards and do, and then do a right turn instead of doing a direct left turn. The f s D has no idea how to handle that. I don't think I would situation <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:33:52):
I, that's the strangest thing I ever heard

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:54):
It. It's, it's actually, I mean, one, once you see it, it's actually pretty

Leo Laporte (00:33:57):
Forward. Makes okay, yeah. Makes sense to human. Makes sense. Is that what we call an unprotected left turn? That's another thing. Self-Driven.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:03):
No, an unprotected left turn is when you're doing a, a direct left turn across traffic,

Leo Laporte (00:34:06):
Across traffic that's dangerous and hard and, and self-driving vehicles have a hard time. Now how come, wait, can't Waymo and Cruz, these are the self-driving taxis that we see in Phoenix and San Francisco. Can't they do this?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:34:20):
Well in San Francisco at least they don't. I have, I've never seen this kind of road configuration in San Francisco. Okay. Not sure if they have 'em in, in in Phoenix. Yeah. But the thing, the thing that they, the thing that those companies do is before they start testing, they go out and they do, they create high definition maps of the area where they're gonna operate and they label everything. So if you had this kind of road configuration, it would be labeled as, you know, if you need to make a left turn, this is, you know, you're gonna go, you know, beyond the intersection and you're gonna go on this lane that, and so it's, it has all those instructions in there. Tesla doesn't do that. They don't use high resolution maps, they just use standard street level maps and hope for the best <laugh>. Which

Leo Laporte (00:35:05):
We know that's a problem cuz if there's construction, that map is at a date and there's all sorts of problems or, or an accident or, or a pedestrian. All these things are not indicated on maps.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:14):
Yeah. So I would strongly recommend, you know, I'm, I'm not gonna say people shouldn't buy a Tesla. That's entirely up to you. I mean, they make very good electric cars. But I would recommend that if you are going to buy a Tesla, do not spend your money on this. It is not worth it. It's not worth spending $15,000 on this because it's neither functional nor safe. One of the things I learned very on early on in my engineering career work, you know, starting off on anti lock brake systems, no matter what the system does, it has to be consistent and predictable for the driver. Yeah. So it always has to behave in the same way. F s D is totally random about what about the things it does.

Leo Laporte (00:35:52):
So you have to kind of really stay on your toes cuz you don't know what's

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:55):
Going happen. You absolutely, yeah. You absolutely have to stay on your toes. Yeah. You have to keep your hands on the wheel. And worst of all that's not relaxing. They don't have an in, they don't have an instrument cluster in front of the driver. Yeah. You, you have to be watching the road, but you also have to watch the, the center screen and ke you know, so you're constantly going back and forth between the center screen and the road and there's just a little thing there that tells you what mode it's in. It's not good. It's not a good don't do this. Yeah. They should have a heads up display. Yeah. That puts it right in front of me.

Leo Laporte (00:36:24):
Didn't Elon say we're out of time, but didn't he say they're gonna add radar now? They've given up on the camera only

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:30):
Solution? Supposedly. Yeah. And I'll talk about that during the break. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:36:34):
Sam Abul, Sam car guy at Kit Kau Insights and Wheel Bearings podcast. Thanks Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:39):
Thank you Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:36:50):
So would you like to stay my friend?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:53):
Certainly. Can you

Leo Laporte (00:36:54):
Stay for the top of the hour?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36:56):
I can, I can do that too. Yeah. You I have nowhere to go today. Thank

Leo Laporte (00:36:59):
You, sir.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:00):
So as far as radar goes, Tesla used to have radar on their cars. They, what the configuration they had was 12 ultrasonic sensors, which are, those are those little buttons you see on your bumper. They're, they're short range sonar sensors is what they are. They're very low resolution. They're only good out to about 10, 15, maybe 20 feet at most. And they're designed for like parking assist. They're not designed for an application like, like automated driving. And then they also had a front long-range radar sensor which is just a standard type of low res, relatively low resolution millimeter wave radar that is used by pretty much every manufacturer in the world for their adaptive cruise control. And it works really good for that application. It can see what's directly in front of you, how far away it is and, and how fast it's moving, what the closing speed is.

(00:38:00):
 But again, fairly low resolution last year, Tesla decided, and then they also have eight cameras. They decided last year, oh, we don't need the radar sensor. And I think, you know, while they, they claimed that they could do everything with the cameras that they were doing with the radar. In fact, when they took out the radar sensor, the, the system actually lost some functionality, which they still haven't fully restored. But the that radar sensor, you know, has only had about 12 channels. So it, it didn't give you a lot of detail about what was in front of you could tell you if there's something there where it is, but not, not much detail. And they claimed that we can do what we were doing with the radar sensor with cameras. Which is, I can, if I had an hour, I could explain why that isn't true. But basically I think the real reason they took it out was because of the chip shortage. They probably couldn't get enough radar sensors and also the cost, you know. Yeah. Removing the radar sensor saved them about $40 in cost.

Leo Laporte (00:39:03):
What about this idea that the self-driving car's Mel Gammel is suggesting this in our discord will get better as over time as they learn the neural networks learns, right?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:19):
So yes and no. That is true to a point. So

Leo Laporte (00:39:23):
This is the worst therapy gonna be. So, so I mean that's fair, right? Well,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:26):
Not necessarily <laugh>. Oh they could get worse <laugh>. So the thing is, the neural networks don't learn in the car. They are not retrained in the vehicle. Right. The, the, the, once it's put into the vehicle, that neural net is static, you know, information goes sensor data,

Leo Laporte (00:39:44):
It's got model, but they can update that model with information,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:39:46):
They can update that model. Yeah. And the training happens in a data center somewhere, right. Based on collecting data from the cars, right. Sending it back up to a data center and then and then updating the, the train, the training of the model and then updating the fleet. But there's reasons why, you know, a camera only system is still not likely to ever be as good as a system that has multiple sensor types. And I'll talk more about that at the top of the hour. Okay. Or the, at the next break.

Leo Laporte (00:40:17):
It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Waymo's do a better job, right? I mean, I'm

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:26):
Not

Leo Laporte (00:40:26):
Absolutely, but they do do a better job, right? Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:40:28):
Yeah. No, they, they, they absolutely, you know, oth other systems work better and more reliably, they're more restricted in where they can work. They don't try to make them work everywhere. They, they put 'em in specific areas, right. And they tune them to work really well in those areas.

Leo Laporte (00:40:44):
Right, right. That's Blue Cruise. Yeah. Right. Yeah, exactly. Hang on, hang on. We'll be back at the top. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. Hey, hey everybody. Leo Laporte here. I am the founder and one of the hosts at the TWIT Podcast Network. I wanna talk to you a little bit about what we do here at twit because I think it's unique and I think for anybody who is bringing a product or a service to a tech audience, you need to know about what we do here at twit, we've built an amazing audience of engaged, intelligent, affluent listeners who listen to us and trust us when we recommend a product. Our mission statement is twit, is to build a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. Well already you should be, your ears should be, be perking up at that because highly engaged is good for you.

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(00:45:58):
Oh, jojo, get back. Jojo. Leo Laport, the tech guy. 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number. We were talking to Lamar. It was such a complicated issue that I really didn't have time to get to all the dets. Let me just summarize, because this is something I think a lot of people want to do. If you don't want to pay a cable bill or a satellite bill, you want to get your Dodger games, et cetera over the internet. A you need a fast enough internet to do that. And that could be anything from, I would say you probably want 50 megabit download speeds or better anything slower than that, you're really not gonna be able to, you know, do anything else. And the quality of the TV might not be great. Netflix says to watch HD or ultra hd, you need 25 megabits down.

(00:46:50):
But I think that's a little maybe over ambitious, let's say 50, just to be safe. So the first step to doing this is you gotta get some good internet. And we talked about a number of the possibilities. It's gonna vary in every area. The fastest internet you can get will be fiber. Very few areas have that. But if you have that as an option that's certainly something to look at. A lot of companies are offering fiber now including in Bellflower. Mostly though it's gonna be the most densely populated parts of town especially where the businesses are, because businesses will often pay more for higher speed internet. They need it, right? The next highest speed will be cable. So if you have if you have a cable drop in your house, if you've ever had cable TV in your house, you can still buy internet only from the cable company.

(00:47:40):
It costs a little more to get only the internet, not the tv. They wanna sell you. Well, they wanna sell you everything. They wanna sell you phone, cable, internet. They'll try to, they'll try to get you to buy the triple play. I think in some cases there's a quadruple play. I would not if I were you. That's kind up to you. So I would suggest that in probably you don't want to go with that. Just get the plain old cable. Ask them what's it like just for just internet. I mean, what's it like just for plain internet. And then the next step down is gonna be some sort of phone system DSL from your local phone company or somebody who provides to the local phone company. Dsl, the stuff that's coming in over, there's two copper wires for your phone into the house, usually isn't very fast, probably not adequate for watching a lot of tv.

(00:48:30):
So there you go. First thing you gotta do, get this, get the internet. Now once you've got, and, and this new thing that's very exciting is actually killing cable internet to some degree. I think it was more than 750,000 subscribers left cable entirely in the last quarter. That's amazing. Almost a million in the last quarter alone, last three months alone. And it's, it's believed that most of those people decided, I'm not gonna buy a cable television from the cable company. It's too expensive. I'm not gonna buy internet from the cable. C it's too expensive. And we think that many of them are going to these new fixed residential 5G systems from T-Mobile. And Verizon and T-Mobile and Verizon are pricing them very aggressively right now. Probably prices will go up once they get y'all locked in, but right now, if you're a subscriber already for phone service, you can get it for 25 bucks.

(00:49:25):
It's more than fast enough. It'll do the job. You, the, the one, you know, caveat is you have to be close to a 5G cell tower close enough to get good speeds. So you need to kind of figure out, well, what, and don't look at the map they provide you. But the phone companies lie. <Laugh> FCC now has a broadband map that might be more reliable. The best thing to do is if you have a phone is look and see if you're getting what T-Mobile calls the ultra capacity, uc, 5g. And you'll see that on your phone. 5G, uc inside your house. If you're getting that, oh gold, you're golden. Verizon calls it ultra wideband 5g uw. If you see those little letters up in the top corner of your phone, top right corner of your phone, you probably have enough bandwidth. They'll send, send you a little, you don't, you can install this yourself.

(00:50:14):
They'll send you a little box, tiny little thing size of a coffee can that you put in your house. It will connect to the 5G network and then give you wifi inside your house. And that will be be probably enough. I would put it near your television. The nice thing about this is it could be anywhere in the house. You can get a decent cellular signal. I'd put it near your television and then have a cable connecting cuz you all of these have a, a cable you know, ethernet jack. Connect the ethernet cable to your TV so that your TV at least is getting the best possible connection. And then you can use your laptops and so forth with the wifi and the rest of that house. So that now we got your internet. That's just the first half of cord cutting.

(00:50:57):
Now you gotta get your content and it just depends what you wanna watch. And that's a big depends. Netflix, most TVs have it. You can get a Roku or an Amazon Fire Stick and add Netflix, Amazon Prime. You can stream HBO o you can stream Major League baseball. If the Dodgers are what you care about, you can get that. Peacock sells n b NBC only. If you wanna get a more li cable-like package, then as I mentioned, sling tv, Hulu and and YouTube all offer for, you know, the same price you were paying the cable company, frankly local channels plus some extra channels. You know, like espn around six. I pay, I think 75 bucks a month for YouTube tv. It's nice though. It's nice. I can watch that everywhere. So that's, it's see how it's so complicated. And then I'm gonna add a third saying, which I mentioned because he is in Bellflower, he might well have good you know, clear line access to Mount Wilson where the television antennas in, in the southern California area are for most of the LA stations. If he could pick up those LA stations, the cheapest, best, highest quality way to watch the Dodgers games is that way to watch the local channels with an antenna. So that's that, you know, you have a little time to figure this out. Spring training is not for a few months. So there's the long answer to Lamar's short question. Bart on the line from Vancouver, Washington. Hi Bart.

Caller 2 (00:52:24):
Hey, how you doing? I'm

Leo Laporte (00:52:25):
Well. How are you?

Caller 2 (00:52:27):
I'm great. What's up? I, I've been using Time Machine for years.

Leo Laporte (00:52:33):
Apple's backup solution for the max.

Caller 2 (00:52:35):
Yep. And I noticed in my notes program app that I've been missing some some notes I ha need to look up. Is there any way that they're on Time Machine? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:52:53):
Time Machine backs up everything. So Time Machine has a very, apple is clever on this because normally when you back up something, you run a program, it makes a blob of everything. It puts it on an external hard drive. Apple doesn't do that. The Time Machine Interface, have you opened ever opened Time Machine?

Caller 2 (00:53:12):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:53:12):
It looks like a time machine and you can go back in time and what you'll see is your f is your finder from a different, every different point in time. What you wanna do is look at your notes and now this is the trick. You have to know where your notes are stored. You wanna look at your notes file from whenever you think Uhhuh, <affirmative> this stuff was there. And if, if, if it's there, then you know you're golden. So, but you need to know, and this is Get Ready. Are you ready?

Caller 2 (00:53:42):
<Laugh>? Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:53:44):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:53:44):
Because this is crazy. The notes are stored. I'm looking it up right now. It's a crazy long r l in your home directory. So you know when, whenever you create an account, it's probably called Bart. If I, if I were you, I'd make it Bart. So you whatever you log in with in that directory. So there'll be your BART directory. There'll be a folder called Library Uhhuh <affirmative>. Now normally you can't see that <laugh>, you have to hold down the option key. I'm gonna put a link so you can follow this on, on a webpage. That's, that's great. In the library. There's another folder called Group Containers, and in that folder there's a file called Get ready for this group.com.apple dot notes. Crazy. Yeah, don't write this down. I'm gonna, I've I'm gonna put <laugh>, I'm gonna put a website that you can follow <laugh>, but Uhhuh. So that's the file you're gonna be looking at in your time machine. I wonder if Time Machine, if we'd be really nice if Time Machine were smart enough that you could just like, go to that day and open notes and see what's there. But I don't know if you can do that.

Caller 2 (00:54:46):
No, I, I don't see notes

Leo Laporte (00:54:48):
Anywhere. Yeah. So there are also programs that you can buy to, to recover them, but, but the first thing to know is where the Max stores it and deleted notes will be there. So you can go back where we have another article from Handy recovery.com, Uhhuh, <affirmative> I think they're probably selling a program called Handy Recovery, but it does have a lot of other steps regardless that we'll, you can walk through to check. So that's probably what I would do. Leola port the tech guy, more calls after this handy recovery, speedy Recovery, I guess. They're not selling anything, they're just, this is a site for recovery, which is nice. All right, Sammy, you are gonna help me by giving me time to go get a cup of Joe.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:46):
All right. Let's do

Leo Laporte (00:55:47):
It. Thank you.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:55:48):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. All right. So to try and wrap up what I started talking about earlier with the way that Tesla is doing their sensors, they're, they're relying primarily on cameras. And cameras are a key part of any automated or assisted driving system. Because with the cameras, you, you have the ability to do object classification to look at the scene and try to understand what is in there. And that's where the the neural networks come into play, is to try to break up what's in that scene, you know, to detect the road, detect other vehicles, detect vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists, and understand what's in that scene around the vehicle. The problem with cameras, there's, there's a couple of problems with cameras. One is cameras are passive sensors, so they're collecting light that's coming in from any source, an unknown source.

(00:56:44):
So he doesn't know what the, where the source is or what the source is. And, you know, so it's collecting that data, but it doesn't, it can't it, it doesn't know where the objects are in physical space. Now, you can get over that by using cameras that are mounted in parallel with an overlapping view. You know, basically like our eyes work, you know, that's how we get our depth perception. We've got two visual sensors that are looking in the, mostly in most, for most people in the same direction, and seeing the same thing from slightly different angles. And then our brain can process that and provide depth perception. You can do the same thing with cameras. Subaru has been doing this for many years with their eyesight system. They, it's a stereo camera system, Mercedes-Benz. Other manufacturers are u al also use similar systems.

(00:57:35):
And if you have that, then you can use basic geometry and, and trigonometry to calculate exactly how far an object is away and where it is in physical space and 3D space around you. And you can get very accurate measurements that way. The problem is Tesla does not have their cameras configured that way. Tesla has eight cameras, three in the front two on the, the B pillars that look kind of forward into the sides. Two on the front fend that look to the back and sides, and then one on the back. And the three front cameras are all clustered together. And it's three, it's a trifocal camera. So you have a long range camera, a tele telephoto camera, basically a wide angle and an ultra wide angle camera. They give you different views, but they're all clustered together because of that. You, the, you can't really tell, you can't really use them to measure how far away something is.

(00:58:31):
So in order to, to measure distance with the Tesla configuration, you have to use something, those inference. So basically what you have, what the system does is it tries to classify what's in the view, figure out, okay, there's a car there, and then it, it's gonna use some estimate of how, what the area of that car is, how big that car is, and then based on how many pixels make up that view of that, that image of that car, it's gonna say, okay, I'm gonna estimate it's, you know, 20 f you know, 20 feet or a hundred feet or 300 feet away from me. And that when you, when you do that, that's fine if you actually know what the size of the vehicle is. But the problem is, and, and I dropped a link in the chat to a paper that I wrote last year.

(00:59:22):
 If you are, for example, you know, if you recognize that it's a van, and I use an example of a Ford Transit, which is a large full-size van and a Ford Transit Connect, which is a very much smaller van, and they look very similar from behind to the, the cameras, you know, all it's gonna recognize that it's a van. And if it assumes some size for that van, depending on which one it actually is, it's going to be way off in terms of its distance measurement, which is very problematic, which is why you want to use active sensors in conjunction with cameras. Active sensors are sensors that generate their own signal, look for a reflection coming back, and from that, they can calculate the distance to that object. So in the case of radar, it uses a radar signal, sends out radar pulses, and when that bounces back, it knows how fast that radio wave travels through through the atmosphere.

(01:00:21):
And it can calculate very accurately how far away the object is and how fast it's moving. Similarly with lidar, it does the same thing with light. With a, using a laser, it sends out light pulses or in some cases it's a continuous light wave and calculate based on, you know, noses the speed of light and can calculate exactly how far away an object is and how fast it's moving. The combination of that with cameras can now give you a very accurate view of the environment around the vehicle. This is what Tesla lacks. They lack those other sensors. Also, the, the the RGB cameras, the visible light cameras that they use you know, don't always work great in the dark, certainly can't work in fog. They or rain or heavy snow, they're, they can be obscured. And, you know, if you're driving into the sun in the early morning or in the evening at dusk it can also be easily blinded by that.

(01:01:20):
Other sensors can work in those other environments, which is why it's good to have different sensor modes that overlap and have different capabilities. And you combine those together. Now you can have a really robust view, which is really important because those neural nets as good as they've gotten, they're still not, they still don't process a lot of information as good as the human brain does. You know, we, we are evolved in a way and, and we process the information that comes from our senses in with a, we're able to filter through a lot of nuance and, and figure out a lot of things that neural nets, visual, visible or imaging neural nets still have a very difficult time with especially when it's in real time, things are moving and you have to make predictions about what it's going to do. Predicting is actually one of the hardest parts of an automated driving system predicting what other road users are going to do in the, the next three to five seconds. Because you have to do that before you can make a decision about what path are you gonna take through that environment. So you have to decide, is that cyclist gonna ch or that other vehicle, or that pedestrian going to suddenly move in front of me? You know, are they going to change directions? You

Leo Laporte (01:02:36):
Made a good point, which is humans are designed to do it one way and machines another way. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and we've designed our roads for humans so that Michigan jug handle turn and so forth is designed cuz we know humans can handle it. But if, if you were designing it for a machine, you wouldn't design it that way. In fact will

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:56):
Not necessarily, you just, you have to, but you have to teach the machine how to handle it,

Leo Laporte (01:02:59):
I think. Yeah, but I mean, I think this is the problem is that humans have such different capabilities from machines that machines have a hard time navigating environments designed for humans. Cuz it assumes, and

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:11):
Humans are

Leo Laporte (01:03:12):
Capabilities,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:12):
Humans are much more adaptable. We adapt to our, to changing environments very easily, whereas machines tend to be a lot less adaptable to subtle, subtle or, or major changes in their environment. You know, they're, they're designed for specific applications and if, if you take them out of that, they don't always work very well.

Leo Laporte (01:03:34):
Wow. So it's really two problems. One is the machine has to deal with humans, the other is that machine has to deal with hu environments designed for human capabilities on machine capabilities.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:44):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So it's, it's

Leo Laporte (01:03:46):
An interesting conundrum. You're not gonna rebuild

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:48):
The roads. Yeah. It, it's a, it's a really hard problem.

Leo Laporte (01:03:50):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:51):
Yeah. Yeah. I could see what, and this, and this is why it's taking so long to, you know, to get automated vehicles on the road in, in volume. Yeah. you know, we've got 'em in a few places. We've got 'em, you know, you've got some in San Francisco you've got some in Las Vegas, there's some in Phoenix there's a bunch in China in several different cities in China and Beijing, Guo and, and Shanghai where they're testing these things. But, you know, it's, the number of vehicles we're talking about is in the, in total globally is in the low thousands. Yeah. You know, maybe a few thousand vehicles in total. Right. and you know, in the US alone, we have over 290 million registered vehicles. So <laugh>, you know, we, our projection at Guide House is that in 2030, automated vehicles will make up less than 1% of the total vehicle fleet.

Leo Laporte (01:04:43):
Sam, you're a goodness gracious. Wonderful. Hell, a good guy to have on the radio show. Thank you.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:49):
Well, for as long as the radio show's around, I'll be glad to be a part of it.

Leo Laporte (01:04:53):
All right. Take care.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:55):
Talk to you next week. One more week, <laugh>. Yeah. Alright, bye bye.

Leo Laporte (01:05:00):
Hey, Bonino, can you put that elephant a shelf? Can, is there a way to put that on my I'll have to learn how to do that. I'd love to put that on the tv. Swinging my legs

(01:05:18):
Right there.

(01:05:20):
Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leola Port here, the tech guy in, and this is now time to talk computers in the internet and home theater and digital photography and smart watches and smartphones and smart people and not so smart cars. 88. 88 Ask Leo is the phone number? (888) 827-5536 to free from anywhere in the US or Canada. We also have a website, tech guy labs.com. And I've been putting, put a couple of articles there on how to recover those notes. Mac Apple's notes. Features really nice, actually. It's a pretty good notetaking app. I'm very good. Note taping app, taking app kinda like Google Keep, if you've ever used that. It's, they're very powerful. You can do interesting things in notes too. There's all sorts of hidden stuff in notes. Like you can enter an air, air airplane air flight, you know, UA 1260, and it will automatically update where the flight information, things like that.

(01:06:25):
Very useful. I did not mention, and we, we put a link in the show notes to, this actually turns out to be really good article@handyrecovery.com, which is I guess a, a, an editorial site designed around data recovery. And one of the things I didn't mention, but they mentioned is that you don't have to use Time machine. You may be able to find your deleted notes if in iCloud, most of us synchronize stuff like notes to iCloud and iCloud, if you are synchronizing to, it has a deleted notes folder that you can recover. So it would be actually in your iCloud notes app. So you go to icloud.com, log in with your Apple account, open the notes app. There's a web-based notes app, and at the bottom there's a recently deleted folder. And so it may well be even if you've deleted it on your machine it's living in iCloud. And then of course time machine is, is probably the last resort. The last resort. 88. 88. Ask Leo. So Dr. Mom, my good friend, Dr. Mom, how'd your how'd your cataract surgery go?

Caller 3 (01:07:33):
I didn't realize I couldn't see anything until I had it done. Now I'm suddenly going, whoa.

Leo Laporte (01:07:38):
Yeah, my mom had it done and she said, everything's so sharp. <Laugh>. Yeah. It's like the first time you get glasses. When I was in fourth grade, I got glasses. I went, oh, that's what I've been missing.

Caller 3 (01:07:49):
Yeah. I got, I've been wearing glasses since I was six years old. This is the first time, and I'm not gonna say how many years, but over 60, I woke up in the morning and could see where I was.

Leo Laporte (01:07:59):
Oh wow. Amazing. That's, yeah, I wake up and it's, it like I have to find my glasses and that's usually involves a lot of padding around <laugh> feeling, feeling furniture, feeling the floor <laugh>. Well anyway, good. I'm glad that went well. And you have the other eyes still to come. Yes.

Caller 3 (01:08:16):
Yep. Good. I'm gotta say, I'm very honored that you said you're talking to smart people and the next phone call you picked up was

Leo Laporte (01:08:22):
Mine. You're the smart one. I knew there was somebody. No, every if you're smart, just because you listen to this show makes you smart.

Caller 3 (01:08:31):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:08:32):
<Laugh>. So what's up in your world, doctor?

Caller 3 (01:08:35):
Well, this is gonna be my last call in for something that Amazon released on the Echoes. If you remember, in September they said they were going to turn the Echo Show 15 into a fire tv. They flipped the switch on that this week. Oh. Now a fire tv.

Leo Laporte (01:08:50):
Okay. So I have a show, I have one sitting right next to me. Is it, as it turns out, is it all the shows or do you have to get a new one?

Caller 3 (01:08:57):
Right now it is only the 15. It doesn't work for the 10, eight or five.

Leo Laporte (01:09:03):
Okay.

Caller 3 (01:09:03):
It's just the 15

Leo Laporte (01:09:04):
Pushing that away. <Laugh>, man, how do you activate it?

Caller 3 (01:09:09):
It just tells you it's there. Oh, it says you want us to install the software upgrade It installs, it restarts, and it's right there. And you have the full capability of a show of fire tv, which means now my 15 inch tap show is in the kitchen as kind of a family information, you know, put the grocery list and stuff like that on it. Yeah. Yeah. So when I'm cooking, if I wanna watch TV or something, I can turn it on

Leo Laporte (01:09:33):
Those shows. Those big shows that they released. I never got one of those. I thought that's too big. That's like a computer monitor. But you you bought one, huh?

Caller 3 (01:09:42):
I bought one because I had it for the kitchen. Now

Leo Laporte (01:09:44):
Do you hang it on the wall?

Caller 3 (01:09:47):
I got it under counter mount, so it's off

Leo Laporte (01:09:49):
The counter. So it, so, but it is kind of cool. So it's like a little, it's like a 15 inch TV basically now.

Caller 3 (01:09:54):
Except it has worse speakers than a 15 inch TV

Leo Laporte (01:09:57):
<Laugh>. Oh, well that's terrible.

Caller 3 (01:09:58):
15.

Leo Laporte (01:09:59):
That's awful. Can you attach separate speakers?

Caller 3 (01:10:03):
You can. If you wanna put Bluetooth speakers on. I will tell you for putting on the news, for watching a ball game, for listening to a podcast or something, it's fine. You gonna, you're not gonna wanna listen to music on that. It just, the sound isn't good. That's

Leo Laporte (01:10:15):
Another answer for Lomar. He could just get some internet service and then get one of these echo shows. Keep that in the kitchen. And he's good. He's got his Dodgers games right there.

Caller 3 (01:10:24):
Well, the point, no, but you have to have a subscription to YouTube tv.

Leo Laporte (01:10:27):
Oh, that,

Caller 3 (01:10:28):
You don't have to get

Leo Laporte (01:10:28):
That. Oh yeah, of course. There's always an extra thing, isn't there?

Caller 3 (01:10:32):
Now the other thing is they give you a little tiny onscreen remote you could go over and touch. It is terrible. It's

Leo Laporte (01:10:40):
Lagging. So don't spend, spend 10 bucks more and get the remote when you buy the Echo Show 15. Cuz they do sell it with a remote. Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:10:47):
The first thing they're gonna do is ask you, do you wanna buy a remote? And they have it at a discount price and they say, yeah. They say, okay, put it in the cart and you get it. And then you have the functionality. You want

Leo Laporte (01:10:57):
The Alexa voice remote. Third gen is the best way to navigate absent services of the fire TV experience.

Caller 3 (01:11:03):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:11:04):
All right. So you like it,

Caller 3 (01:11:06):
But I mean, as I said, for in the kitchen for I wanna watch the news. Yeah. I wanna watch a baseball game, you know, keep an eye on a football game. It's fine.

Leo Laporte (01:11:16):
We have our kitchen in the living room, so <laugh>, I just got a bigger TV <laugh> for that. $185 for the Echo Show. 15. But don't get the $185 version. Get the $195 version that comes with a remote. It sounds like that's your advice.

Caller 3 (01:11:32):
Or if you already had it second, the Fire TV's installed, they'll offer you. Do you wanna buy the remote for 10

Leo Laporte (01:11:38):
Bucks? Dr. Mom, you saw, I know you did the news that a Amazon loses a lot of money on this service. 10 billion last year.

Caller 3 (01:11:46):
Oh, doesn't surprise me at all. They thought people were gonna use it to buy things. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:11:51):
Maybe not. Yeah, I use it occasionally. Like if I'm shaving and I run outta shaving cream, I'll say Echo buy more shaving cream. But it's a, it's a three step process. It's kind of annoying. It's not that easy. It's just good if you think you might forget it, so you just do it, you know. Right. Then when you run out, I used to remember the dash buttons. Amazon offered these for briefly for one brief shining moment <laugh> until it turned out to be a big problem. They offered a just a button with a, with a brand name on it like you know, paper towels and you'd supposed to stick it in your pantry next to your paper towel supply. And when you ran out, you'd push the button and the next day more paper towels would arrive. The problem is wags would come in and press the button all the time and <laugh> it was a

Caller 3 (01:12:34):
Mess. Remember the, I dunno if you remember, they also had a gadget. They were giving one called a wand and you could scan barcodes.

Leo Laporte (01:12:40):
I bought that too. I have 'em all, man. <Laugh>. I think I still have some dash buttons in my pantry. <Laugh> so happened was,

Caller 3 (01:12:49):
Yeah, they did. It didn't turn into a way of buying things through Amazon. I mean, I still get notifications. Hey, your printer's running low on Inc. You wanna buy it? And I say,

Leo Laporte (01:12:58):
No. Oh, I hate that. That drives me nuts. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. So given that they've lost 10 billion, what do you think the future, you're here, you're somebody who you love your echoes, you're the, you're the queen of the echo ecosystem. What do you think the future holds?

Caller 3 (01:13:17):
I'm not sure I, part of the reason I love it, if you remember, I'm a retired physician. I work for public health now, but I used to deal a lot of times with patients who were bedbound had very limited mobility and the ability to voice control lights, door locks and do things was a major bonus for these people.

Leo Laporte (01:13:33):
Yesterday, you may have heard, I, we had a, a guy on who wanted his 98 year old dad to be able to make phone calls and stuff. And I said, oh, get an echo. Yeah. Voice is great for older folks

Caller 3 (01:13:44):
Except they're turning off the telephone service on those. You can go echo to echo, but they're getting rid of the connect to your t phone service. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:13:51):
Good Jing. Dang it. <Laugh>.

Caller 3 (01:13:55):
I think they're dumping everything they thought was gonna be a profit center that people just didn't use.

Leo Laporte (01:14:00):
This is a problem. And this, I think this is gonna be a big problem with tech in general, is they cancel stuff if it doesn't make money. And then people get miffed and they, they feel like, I can't trust any of this stuff. So they stop using it, period. They didn't buy the next thing either and then it fails and that just proves they were right.

Caller 3 (01:14:20):
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't know where they're gonna go. I don't think they're gonna kill it in its entirety, but it's, I don't see a lot of new product development coming out. Remember the astro, that robot?

Leo Laporte (01:14:32):
Yeah. Whatever happened to that?

Caller 3 (01:14:33):
I think it <laugh>. Well, it's still, if you look, you can still request an invitation, but except for a couple of reviewers who got advanced copies, nobody I know ever got an astro.

Leo Laporte (01:14:44):
No. Nobody wants this robot and you can't get it. Even if you did, doctor, mom, always a pleasure. I'm gonna miss talking to you on a regular basis. Maybe I could convince you to listen to the podcast once in a while and call into the new ask the tech guys show once we start that next year.

Caller 3 (01:14:59):
I'll be happy to call in there when something new shows up.

Leo Laporte (01:15:01):
Love it. Thank you Dr. Mom. Well thank you. 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number more of your calls coming up in just a little bit. Also, Chris Marqui, our photo guy, I think, I can't remember if he's gonna be here or not this week. And Rod Poller, space guy all ahead. You stay right here. Still there, Dr. Mom, you still there? You still there? Don't go away. Yes,

Caller 3 (01:15:26):
I'm

Leo Laporte (01:15:27):
Here. Okay. I I had something I wanted to ask you, but now I forgot what it was. <Laugh>. Darn it.

Caller 3 (01:15:33):
Yes. You wanna take the Bivalent booster? Yes. You wanna keep wearing a mask? No, the latest variant.

Leo Laporte (01:15:39):
Oh, everybody's getting covid. You, you heard Rich Tomorrow's got it. Johnny Jets. Got it. Lisa and I have both started masking up again when we were in it anywhere indoors.

Caller 3 (01:15:49):
It's not just c o v, we're seeing the hospitals getting inundated with the flu.

Leo Laporte (01:15:54):
Flu and rsv. Rsv, yeah. Yep. I think Michael Har son has a flu. Flu. Yeah, he's he's pretty darn sick. I tested this morning and well tested regularly just to make sure, but I, I wish, you know, there is a flu test, isn't there?

Caller 3 (01:16:07):
Yes, there's a rapid test for flu, but they don't, you usually don't get those in the grocery stores.

Leo Laporte (01:16:12):
I wish they would distribute those. Those would be very handy.

Caller 3 (01:16:16):
It would be nice, but it's not cost, unfortunately, everything these days are cost effectiveness. Yeah, I know with the Covid it was such a disaster if somebody got it and infected everywhere. Right. I mean, I sit there, spend my days calling healthcare facilities like dental office offices. Right. Do you have a policy in place if you clean somebody's teeth and the next day they call you up and say, I guess what I have covid.

Leo Laporte (01:16:38):
Oh, okay. You know, God.

Caller 3 (01:16:40):
Oh, that's happening all the time. And mean, do you have to shut down?

Leo Laporte (01:16:43):
Yeah. Yeah. We don't, yeah, exactly. What would happen if, yeah. Ugh. it's a mess.

Caller 3 (01:16:50):
My biggest laugh right now Yeah. Is they had to change the name of Monkeypox to och.

Leo Laporte (01:16:54):
I saw that

Caller 3 (01:16:55):
Monkeys got offended.

Leo Laporte (01:16:56):
The poor monkeys. They were so unhappy. Why do you call them Monkeypox?

Caller 3 (01:17:03):
Because it's not actually from Monkey. Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (01:17:05):
<Affirmative>. It's from humans. So sound hogs. Hi. Gosh, I wish I could remember what I was gonna ask you Darn gone. It'll come to me. Well, you're listening to the show. I'll ask you and you can answer in the chat. Well,

Caller 3 (01:17:17):
I'll tell you what Leo, I'll be in the ch I'll be in the chat. Thank you. If you think remember what you wanna ask, take it and I'll answer it for you.

Leo Laporte (01:17:23):
<Laugh> my internet doctor. Ladies and gentlemen, <laugh>, how's San Diego? You're loving it. Are you glad you moved there?

Caller 3 (01:17:30):
Glad I moved there, but right now it is 45 degrees and rainy. And since I have to keep what the door in the room I sit in open so our puppy could go outside. Oh

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

Caller 3 (01:17:39):
I'm sitting here under two blankets with a cup of coffee.

Leo Laporte (01:17:42):
Oh boy. Yeah. You thought, oh, I'm leaving Long Island. I'm coming to sunny California. Ha ha. It's the same here. You don't

Caller 3 (01:17:49):
Have to shovel snow. Yeah, no snow, snow to

Leo Laporte (01:17:51):
Shovel. No, I did. I'll tell you what, we, we are so dry that rain. I really welcome rain. I really do. Even if it's cold and damp. All right, doctor, mom, stay. Well, when did you get your cataract surgery? Pretty recently, right?

Caller 3 (01:18:06):
Oh, it was Thursday. I drove home Saturday. Wow. Now I'm bugging him. When can I do the

Leo Laporte (01:18:12):
Other eye? Oh, that's so great. That's so great. How do you know you need it?

Caller 3 (01:18:18):
Well, in my case, I went to see the, you know, optometrist and he says the cataract in your left eye is getting bad.

Leo Laporte (01:18:23):
Oh, they can see it. Yeah.

Caller 3 (01:18:24):
The right, if your right eye was that bad, we'd take your driver's leg. The problem is it sneaks up. It sneaks up on you. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:18:30):
And did, oh, I know what I'm gonna ask you. Did you get correct a corrective lens?

Caller 3 (01:18:36):
Oh, of course. They take out the old lens. They put in a corrective

Leo Laporte (01:18:39):
Lens so you don't have to wear contacts.

Caller 3 (01:18:41):
Well, no, no. I went from 20 1200 in my

Leo Laporte (01:18:45):
Left. So this is better than lasik. So once you get the ca, once you get, so that, so, and the problem now, if your prescription changes, you're gonna have to get a new pair of glasses. But for now, you don't have to wear glasses.

Caller 3 (01:18:57):
No, I wear readers. I just got this just readers

Leo Laporte (01:18:59):
Corrected. Can you do monovision? So one is a reader eye and one is a long distance eye.

Caller 3 (01:19:05):
I actually, I actually tried that wearing two different contact lenses. I couldn't adapt to

Leo Laporte (01:19:09):
It. I do that now and I adapted. So I presume I could do that if I got cataract surgery. That's good.

Caller 3 (01:19:15):
Y you can just remember, you're gonna lose your depth per, you lose your depth perception when you do that

Leo Laporte (01:19:19):
Thing. Oh, I have magic eyes. I, I, I don't have stereo vision, so I have some sort of magical per depth perception. I don't probably from Oh,

Caller 3 (01:19:26):
I don't

Leo Laporte (01:19:26):
Have that cicadas or something. Hey, I, I have to run. Thank you. Always a pleasure, lil. Take care.

(01:19:37):
How do I do Emmy too? Okay, thank you. You rock. Leo LaPorte, the tech guy. 88. 88. Ask Leo. Ho, ho, ho, ho ho, ho Mary Chris Christmas. I've got <laugh>. I got a little elf on the shelf right there. That's nice. Swinging his legs, warming his back to the fire. I know you're listening and you're saying, Leo, it's radio. We don't see a thing. Just imagine if you will, we do have a video stream for the crazy people that wanna see a radio show on TV at twit.tv/live. Live.Twit.Tv also works. And there's a live stream. And you could see my little whoop, don't want to ruin the illusion by putting my hand through him. 88. 88 Ask Leo back to the phone. Sue is on the line from Redondo Beach, California. Hi Sue.

Caller 4 (01:20:40):
Hi Leo. Thanks for taking my call.

Leo Laporte (01:20:42):
Thank you for calling me. Well, hey, thank you. I appreciate it

Caller 4 (01:20:47):
Very much. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:20:50):
Uhoh, did you press the mute? You muted yourself. Sue, I can't hear you. Did you hear that? She just, can you hear me? Now? You're back.

Caller 4 (01:21:00):
Oh, sorry.

Leo Laporte (01:21:01):
I hate that these phones are supposed to know. Did you have it to your ear? And not mute, but invariably my cheekbones, my beautiful strong chiseled cheekbones. Push that mute button. <Laugh>. Clearly you have beautiful cheekbones as well. Oh,

Caller 4 (01:21:15):
I do, I do.

Leo Laporte (01:21:16):
<Laugh>. What's up? How did

Caller 4 (01:21:18):
You know?

Leo Laporte (01:21:18):
I know. I could just tell

Caller 4 (01:21:20):
<Laugh>. Well, my sister were having a debate yesterday. She lives in Arizona. She has cable. I don't, I just have regular old channels. And she said, well, you need to watch this show. It's so good. I said, I don't get it. I don't get anything but the old shows without cable. She goes, no, that's impossible. You get all the same shows. I do. She says, cbs, cbs and NBC is n nbc. Why don't I get the new shows <laugh>. See, does,

Leo Laporte (01:21:49):
I think she's walking. Oh, this is so complicated. Let me think about this. So what sh First of all, what is the show that she wants you to watch

Caller 4 (01:21:58):
Ghost? She said it's

Leo Laporte (01:22:00):
Hilarious and it's on N b nbc.

Caller 4 (01:22:02):
Well, no, she didn't tell me. Oh, I think she said CBS b I think. Okay. But it's a new show. Yeah, I don't, you know, I get done soon

Leo Laporte (01:22:09):
And I've seen the pre, I've seen the teases for this. They're are actually already in their second season and it's on cbs.

Caller 4 (01:22:17):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:22:17):
When you watch your local CBS BS channel, what are you watching?

Caller 4 (01:22:22):
Well, I get like what was that one with? Patricia Aqu cat <laugh>. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:22:28):
Gosh. You get those shows. But, but do, are you watching Channel two? Is that what you're watching? Well,

Caller 4 (01:22:33):
I, I watch mostly, you know, so

Leo Laporte (01:22:35):
Ghost Ghost is on channel two. <Laugh> <laugh>. You could watch it with there, you could watch it with streaming. It's on Pluto tv, paramount Plus and YouTube, but it's also on Channel two. And I think, I can't think of any reason. <Laugh>.

Caller 4 (01:22:51):
So why do I get like, Flintstones and, and, and, you know, house?

Leo Laporte (01:22:56):
I dunno. 

Caller 4 (01:22:58):
That's new. 

Leo Laporte (01:23:00):
I don't <laugh>, I dunno. You're so, you're, you're, you're watching channel, channel two, which is kcal, right? Do you know that? So check.

Caller 4 (01:23:11):
No, I don't know that. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:23:13):
So that's what you're, so the first thing you're gonna do, you're getting on this antenna. I don't think that Channel two in Los Angeles is playing anything different than CBS and Phoenix. I think you're just not watching it <laugh> at the right time. I think you get ghosts, in other words.

Caller 4 (01:23:29):
Okay, I

Leo Laporte (01:23:30):
Will. Yeah. It's a, it's at eight, it's at eight 30 on Thursdays. So here's my, here's my challenge to you and see if this is, by the way, very old school. This is not how most people these days watch tv. They do it on streaming on demand. I know. So you could watch it on demand, but if you wanna watch it on your antenna, you have to be there eight 30 <laugh> on Thursday on channel two. And then, and if you're not there, it's over. You're done. Unless you have a dvr or do you have maybe even a VCR r

Caller 4 (01:24:02):
I do. I do. Okay,

Leo Laporte (01:24:03):
So I a dvr. So set your DVR for Thursdays at 8:30 PM and you will have ghosts.

Caller 4 (01:24:09):
Okay. Now again, Dan going back to

Leo Laporte (01:24:12):
See, I don't think, so what I'm saying is the CBS B channel in, in LA is not gonna play different series than the CBS B channel in Phoenix, except in the rare occasion where a show, maybe for some reason in the local area, they don't want that show. You know there's too many gay couples in it and so they don't wanna show it. I don't think that's gonna be the case in C B S L A.

Caller 4 (01:24:35):
So, okay, there, there lies' my question. Can she get a different C B S than they choose to show me? No. Or, or N b NBC or No.

Leo Laporte (01:24:44):
Whatever The network is. The network. Now remember that for instance, kcal is owned, it is not owned by cbs. B I don't think you, it used to be in the old days, TV and radio stations might be owned by the network, but most of the time that's a, another company that is a, an affiliate of the network. And so they take the network shows they have the right not to take every show, but that's silly. The network has spent millions of dollars making and promoting ghosts and you can sell ads on it. As a local affiliate, why would you not put it in your schedule at the time? And everybody else is watching it. You almost certainly would mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So there are occasional differences. Yes. But in general, especially in the primetime lineup, you're gonna see the same thing. Now, Sunday morning, they're gonna have local shows. You'll know they're local cuz they're cheesy, they're gonna have local shows. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, same thing in the morning when you get up and it's good morning LA you're not gonna see that in Phoenix. She's gonna see Good Morning Phoenix.

Caller 4 (01:25:41):
Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte (01:25:42):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But the primetime lineups almost are always consistent. There have been a few cases for political, spiritual, moral, ethical reasons or whatever that local stations, local affiliates say, we're not carrying that show. Those people are crazy. I got it, I got it wrong. Channel two, kcals, channel nine owned by CBS Bs. Channel two is CBS

Caller 4 (01:26:06):
Channels two is CBS B. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Four is I think nbc. Yeah. So, so I should be getting, no matter if I have cable or not, the same shows that she's watching. Yes. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:26:17):
Yes. Cable doesn't change that. They will change the channel. You know, so you probably, for instance here, if I wanna watch channel two, I don't watch Channel oh two, I watch Channel 7 0 2. That's the high def version of Channel two. Okay. Cable does change the channel. Time zones change of course, but I'm giving you the Pacific time for ghosts.

Caller 4 (01:26:39):
Okay. And, and you said I should be able to get different shows by streaming. Am I paying for those

Leo Laporte (01:26:46):
Shows or? Yeah, you would be. So for instance, ghosts Can't, you can watch On Demand on Paramount Plus because Paramount produces it. And they're owned by cbs. It's CBS Viacom. So you could go you know, put on your Roku box or your Fire TV or your Apple tv. You could get the Paramount Plus app and pay and then pay for it. I do that for your for Yellowstone, for instance, I wanna see Yellowstone. Oh. So, so that's, lemme give you a website. The chatroom has a website that actually is a good way to find whatever it is on TV tonight.com.

Caller 4 (01:27:18):
On tv tonight.com.

Leo Laporte (01:27:20):
And it'll tell you in your local listing and your local time and your local channel what you can watch. And your cable, the channel might change, but everything else should be the same. Leola port, the tech guy. It's really complicated, isn't it? This is, this is what we're seeing from between Lamar and, and our last call that's what we're seeing is how crazy it's gotten. How do you know what to watch and when? Chris Mawa. Hi, Chris.

Chris Marquardt (01:27:54):
Hello.

Leo Laporte (01:27:55):
So you are here today. Are you're not here next week? Was that what it was?

Chris Marquardt (01:27:59):
No,

Leo Laporte (01:28:00):
I'm, you're here next week too.

Chris Marquardt (01:28:01):
I will be here. Yeah. Our last

Leo Laporte (01:28:03):
Last show is next week. Next week, yes. All right, good. Yes. Yes. All good. All right. I will talk to you in a few minutes. Do you want me to, I'll be here, get an email or anything?

Chris Marquardt (01:28:14):
No email, no nothing. I wanna speculate on a few things with you.

Leo Laporte (01:28:18):
Oh, I like that. That sounds like fun. Yes. All right. Talk in a few. So help me Venito with my elf on the shelf. <Laugh> oh. Now I can't figure out where Elf, this elf is gone. Okay, got it. So I get it and then I just, instead of me two, I use two. Oh, clever. So can I move this little feller around a little bit? You know, what I'm thinking is maybe let's make him a little smaller and hang him on the TV set just on the, on the left corner of the TV set there so it doesn't kick Chris in the face. <Laugh>. Thanks <laugh>.

(01:29:06):
Wow. Is there it TriCaster? Is there anything it can't do? <Laugh>. He's moving them. He's moving them. He's changing the XY coordinates. You wanna make 'em smaller too? Yeah. There you go. Oh, oh, oh. Hey little guy. Haha. That's so cute. Yeah. Now Mo I think is, yeah, that's perfect because I want it to be like, wait a minute. What <laugh>? I don't want, I don't want it to be obvious. I want it to be Go. What? Yeah, that guy <laugh>, stop tickling, tickling me, me, me, me. Bonito. You rock. Thank you, sir. I'll take the con back.

(01:29:59):
Isn't there a website somewhere that does all of, I don't know, it's just impossible. There is an app, actually, I should recommend this app called Broadcasts. There are several of these, but this is on iOS called Broadcasts that lets you list shows that you like to watch and then kind of helps you find it and also gives you notifications for when the next show is on. So that's a good app for people broadcasts. It does oh, wait a minute. That's the radio one. Nevermind. I'm sorry. Not broadcasts. What's it called? There's a TV one. What is it called? It's not broadcasts. It's called, I saw it on Reddit and I downloaded it, but I don't remember where it went. Would it be in news or information? No, the iPhone has, I have too many apps.

(01:31:05):
Too many apps. Oh, what's it called now? Music Travel, other, and Oh, there it is. It's called Tid Bite. Nope, that's not it. <Laugh>. That's something else. I've got too many things. Oh, under Entertainment. Maybe. Let's see. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, it's time to talk photography with our photo guy, Chris Mark Ward. Hello, Chris. Happy, happy holidays. Hello. Happy holiday. It is to you two. It is you have your, your country invented Christmas. We have thanks to you. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Yes. We have, we have you, I think Germany invented the Christmas tree and the Christmas markets on the, the Rh,

Chris Marquardt (01:32:06):
Right?

Leo Laporte (01:32:07):
Santa Claus is ours.

Chris Marquardt (01:32:09):
They're, they're nice. They're beautiful. Yes. <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:32:12):
Chris

Chris Marquardt (01:32:12):
Is the glue. Blue wine and everything. You blue

Leo Laporte (01:32:15):
Wine comes from you. Yep. <laugh> and Beer. Beer you invented you invented Octoberfest. Chris is a photographer who does wonderful workshops. You can find out more at discover the top floor.com. He's got those Eastern European travel workshops coming up next year. He also, yeah, talks a lot about photography and teaches and coaches@sensei.photo, but he joins us every week to help us get better at photography.

Chris Marquardt (01:32:44):
What's the topic today? So today I wanna, I wanna speculate a bit with you because we have for the last, that's, it's over three months now, but we have for the last three plus months in a bit of an explosion in, in creativity in image generation. You, you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Dali, I'm talking about mid journey. I'm talking about stable diffusion, all these, all these machines that you can drop a piece of texting and it spits out an image and these things are getting better and more, more interesting. And and I do, one podcast is called The Future Photography. So it's, I always think about where is this all going in the future in terms of photography, because that does already influence visual art and it has a chance of getting into what we still consider photography, pointing a camera at something, taking a picture, and then working on that picture and publishing it somehow. And in, in addition to that, I've just recently come across a little app that puts these image generators on your smartphone. And I'm not talking about something that you type something in and it sends it out to the cloud and then the result comes back. No, there's an app now called Draw Things that puts Stable Diffusion on your phone. I'm talking, this

Leo Laporte (01:34:14):
Is better than Lens

Chris Marquardt (01:34:15):
On Cloud. It's on your device.

Leo Laporte (01:34:17):
We've been talking a lot about Lens, which is also stable. Diffusion one of those AI art generators, but you upload it to their servers, their servers run it and you

Chris Marquardt (01:34:26):
Download it. They do all the heavy lifting and everything. Yeah. But that is now possible to do on your phone in the desert offline, no connection. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:34:33):
I'm gonna download this. It's called Draw things. Huh?

Chris Marquardt (01:34:36):
Draw things. And that only after, only after three months of progress. So imagine imagine a camera having

Leo Laporte (01:34:45):
Background. We're moving so fast.

Chris Marquardt (01:34:46):
That was, that was one of these epiphanies that I recently had. And yeah. Yeah. And there are four, four brief, four, four things that I wanna briefly touch upon. And the first one is, of course with something like that on board in your camera. And by the way, that camera could of course be your smartphone. There could be a way to augment photos. You know, the AI cannot only do text to image, but it can also do image to image. So let's say you wanna make everyone in the photo smile. You just tell the ai, make everyone smile or open everyone's eyes because three of the group shot have have their eyes

Leo Laporte (01:35:19):
Closed. This, this is just around the

Chris Marquardt (01:35:21):
Corner. Put loose frog on everyone's head, you know? Yeah. This is around the corner. Oh my goodness. Second thing is AI in painting, usually we use in painting in a, in a photo editor to remove something like there's a lamppost or some garbage on the road or something we want to get rid of in you. But you paint over it and it goes away. Now imagine to paint over a part of the photo and give it a text prompt for that location to be filled with something else. Like, I dunno, this shot needs a palm tree in the background. Paint over part of the background and a palm tree pops up there cuz you give it a text from Palm Tree and it puts it in that empty spot. You know or I, I don't know. It's, it's the holidays. Replace that car <laugh> with a, with sand past sleigh, or change the glasses on someone's face, or put a hat on someone or turn that shirt blue with yellow polka dots.

(01:36:16):
Maybe you have, you have plenty of imagination. The third thing out of four is AI out painting That is possible today out painting is where you extend a scene. And this was possible be before we call it cons, context aware, extension of a scene. Like you, you just add a bit on the sides to make it a bit more wide angle. Now just imagine to you take a close up of something and then make it more wide angle and reveal that this is taking place in a space hanger. Right? Just extend the scene with what you want to extend it with. That will be in cameras and it's not too far away. And the fourth one, I think this is the most mind blowing. And again, I'm talking about something that I'm pretty sure will come. It's just a matter when, but it will come. And that is style transfer. It's also possible today where, just imagine you have a camera that has a winter wonderland mode. You don't have snow, but you want snow in the photo. Just enable winter wonderland mode. And you take a picture of something and you'll, the camera will turn it into a snow landscape for you.

Leo Laporte (01:37:29):
Wow. This is just around the corner. Really feel that? Or

Chris Marquardt (01:37:33):
Arctic ice mode or whatever. And you, you could, or, or, or or, or you take a photo and it spits it out in Picasso mode or in Rembrandt mode or in vermer mode. Like there's, it's, yeah, it's go, it's gonna change photography as we know it.

Leo Laporte (01:37:50):
This it's gonna happen. This program draw things is a little large. You should be prepared because

Chris Marquardt (01:37:56):
It Oh, it, it will download two gigabytes of a model. You can download different kinds of models. So there are specialized models. Interesting. It could be,

Leo Laporte (01:38:05):
Can I download a model that has me in it? Because that's what we're doing with this. Oh, if this verse this

Chris Marquardt (01:38:11):
The latest version, you can't, you can't load in a, a, a model that you trained on your own face. So now you can on your smartphone generate photos with you.

Leo Laporte (01:38:22):
Holy cow. Holy cow. This is so

Chris Marquardt (01:38:26):
We are, we're looking at, we are looking at this stuff. I'm, I'm pretty sure it'll, it won't ha it won't show up in your professional D S L R cuz these new things rarely do. Right. But it'll sneak into the, into, into camera apps on your smartphone.

Leo Laporte (01:38:41):
And is your iPhone fast enough to do this? And how long does it take to generate the image?

Chris Marquardt (01:38:47):
With a defaults? Possibly about a minute. Okay. It's not That's pretty

Leo Laporte (01:38:51):
Good. It's pretty doable. Yeah.

Chris Marquardt (01:38:53):
It's not like a fast, a fast graphics card, but it's, it's a miracle that they made the iPhone do it at all. Because that is, that is very memory and CPU limited. It'll, it'll, it'll empty your battery. So you you're gonna see it draining your battery quite quickly cuz it's a very compute intensive. But the fact that it's possible now and just extrapolate that a little bit into the future, the, the, the, the, the processor's getting faster, the algorithm's getting better. What is this, just

Leo Laporte (01:39:22):
As a photographer, does this worry you, it does mean that photography has a different meaning now, right? It's just starting point. It's

Chris Marquardt (01:39:31):
Liberating. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's making this whole thing accessible to more people Yeah. Who didn't have the skills. So it, it takes a lot of the, a lot of the people in the future probably won't need to know anything anymore about apertures and things. That's all skill-based things that I, I do pride myself in knowing these things and being able to apply them. But then on the other hand, I think it's very liberating if you, if you, if if you are more of a text based person said the same thing, explain things to

Leo Laporte (01:40:02):
The That's true. Generating your own images is amazing. I, I'd be more worried maybe if I were, it was an illustrator because some of the some of these illustrations that's generating are good enough to replace a, a professional illustrator, which is kind of amazing. In fact, I'm even seeing blog that

Chris Marquardt (01:40:20):
Use these at this point, we, we still have a, we still have the, have the have the AI and the humans going hand in hand and it's a tool. So we, we still have ways to go for these things to become truly creative. So it's, it's a bit of a, it's a tool at this point. It's, but a pretty, this

Leo Laporte (01:40:35):
Is the way of the world.

Chris Marquardt (01:40:36):
Pretty exciting. One

Leo Laporte (01:40:37):
Progress baby Chris Marwat there. Go, go to discover the top floor.com to find out about his upcoming workshops and sensate photo to get some coaching. And he joins us every week. We'll see you next week for our last photo guy episode. Thanks Chris.

Chris Marquardt (01:40:52):
See you then.

Leo Laporte (01:40:57):
It's still working, but I gave it 7 68 by 7 68 with a photo, photo photograph I took. Yeah, you should. Yeah. <laugh>, I kind of maybe made a mistake, but we'll see, we'll see

Chris Marquardt (01:41:08):
Two a 5 12, 2 a five 12 and, and set the, set the number of steps down to 15 or something.

Leo Laporte (01:41:14):
This is really in so you don't need lens really. It's, this is better than lens. It's just not as fast. Well it's in a way it is. It's as fast. Yeah. and you

Chris Marquardt (01:41:23):
Control it don't drain your battery. When, when, when, when the, when those squares fall with blue then it's, it's long. The longest progress bar in the world. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:41:32):
It's, that's okay. Very, very

Chris Marquardt (01:41:35):
Cool. Yeah. But you chose it, chose very high parameters.

Leo Laporte (01:41:38):
Oh, I did. I did crazy things. I did crazy things.

Chris Marquardt (01:41:41):
Yeah. It should probably return within 35 for 40, 50 seconds. That's what he normally does. Even even faster.

Leo Laporte (01:41:48):
I'm doing high resolution, you know, I'm doing, I'm using the sample <laugh> the sample text description, which is quite elaborate and

Chris Marquardt (01:42:01):
Yeah, that doesn't make a difference. The text description doesn't make a

Leo Laporte (01:42:03):
Difference. That doesn't make it longer.

Chris Marquardt (01:42:05):
It's just the more of the parameters. If you, you look at that top and

Leo Laporte (01:42:09):
Doesn't even look

Chris Marquardt (01:42:10):
Top and

Leo Laporte (01:42:11):
Anything like, cuz I gave it a picture. It didn't, it didn't. Maybe I have to check a button that says image to image. That's

Chris Marquardt (01:42:17):
Probably what it is. Press the, press the gear at the right top. And do you have several parameters you can

Leo Laporte (01:42:21):
Do? That's probably what I did wrong. Yeah. Image size, steps, guidance, scale strength,

Chris Marquardt (01:42:28):
Uhr. I reduce the steps to get to get an idea. And then if you have something that works well, you can keep the same seed and just increase the steps and have it render the final

Leo Laporte (01:42:38):
Three. So cool. Look at all these different models.

Chris Marquardt (01:42:41):
Each of them is like two gigabytes. So you need an empty phone.

Leo Laporte (01:42:45):
Glad I got a big phone, <laugh>. Oh my God. So I'm gonna Super Mario myself. But what I need to do is to tell it, to do image to image. Yeah. That's 1.6 gigs. This is really great. Wow. So it's downloading. Unfortunately we're in the studio and I'm on power, so none of this is gonna, you know, that's definitely how you wanna do it when you have

Chris Marquardt (01:43:09):
High speed, it also turns your phone into a nice hand warmer in case

Leo Laporte (01:43:12):
It's cold. Yeah, I bet it does. Yeah, it's kind of amazing. The the phone has enough. The eight 15 is enough processor power to do this.

Chris Marquardt (01:43:21):
I remarkable. I I think it taps into the neural course and uses those. I I, I'm not sure what exactly they do, but, well,

Leo Laporte (01:43:28):
And Apple has, and it may, when did this come out? Because Apple

Chris Marquardt (01:43:34):
Just, just a few weeks ago.

Leo Laporte (01:43:35):
Okay. Cuz Apple updated. They, they pie torch is what it normally uses and it needs an in Nvidia to be fast. A Apple recently did a a version that uses its own APIs and I wonder if this has

Chris Marquardt (01:43:50):
That they they did, but, but but it's still, I've, I've read, I've read up on it on, on GitHub. Yeah. It's still not, not a, not a full implementation. So the whole stable diffusion stuff doesn't fully run on it yet.

Leo Laporte (01:44:04):
So I wanna change the seed regularly. Okay. Image size. Yeah,

Chris Marquardt (01:44:08):
I think, I think that's something to tap on. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:44:10):
Yeah. High resolution fix. Okay. so

Chris Marquardt (01:44:14):
Reduce the number of steps for like a test run and take the high resolution fix out.

Leo Laporte (01:44:20):
Yeah, but I'm gonna leave that cuz I, I don't mind. I'm patient. But what I wanna do though is do image to image and I don't, do I have to write that in? Oh,

Chris Marquardt (01:44:29):
You can. No, no, you, you can, there's one of those, those buttons at the moment. See if

Leo Laporte (01:44:33):
I take the camera, it will take a picture. So I was taking a, a picture. Let's find a

Chris Marquardt (01:44:38):
Picture. Go think it's somewhere. I'm not sure if it's gida, but there's a website and it explains what those buttons do and one of them does image

Leo Laporte (01:44:43):
To image. So I'll use I'll use a picture of Lisa.

Chris Marquardt (01:44:48):
I think if you go into the settings, there's a, there's a strength setting that you have to reduce

Leo Laporte (01:44:53):
Useful when generating from an image. Oh, well value would give Oh, that's it. To save. Yes. That's the same in stable diffusion. It's how much of the image. Yes, how much of the art. So, okay. Yes. There you go. Now I'm gonna do it.

Chris Marquardt (01:45:08):
And that should,

Leo Laporte (01:45:09):
That's gonna take a while, but it's now gonna use I see. It's, it's gonna Super Mario Lisa. Yeah, well that's why I got an image that had nothing from the original because I had it set to a hundred percent. That's yeah. Oh, I gotta do a show. Thank

Chris Marquardt (01:45:23):
You Chris. All right. See,

Leo Laporte (01:45:28):
I don't need a man to keep me warm. I've got a fireplace right here. Leo LePort, the tech guy. Oh. And not only do I have a fireplace, I have an elf on the shelf sitting there on my fireplace who's, he's quite warm. Hey Sue, Sue was our last caller. The chat room I think has figured out from a clue you left us. What's going on for Sue I over unanswered. So Sue said she's trying to see ghosts on c b s. Instead. She goes to that channel and she's getting a bunch of old Flintstones shows. They figured that out. The chatroom is so smart and this is because nowadays TV channels, when you're watching them over the antenna have sub-channel. And so there's channel two, 2.1, but there's also channel two sub-channel 2.2, channel three sub-channel. There are multiple sub-channel. And and so what we think is that instead of going directly to channel two or channel 2.1 is it's sometimes called 2.1 is the original channel.

(01:46:36):
That's where ghosts will be. She is somehow accidentally going to a sub-channel. I think in fact somebody gave us a list of what kcal is doing on its sub-channel. And I think that's the problem is that one of them is I think the CW <laugh>. So that's why she's seeing the old TV show. So Sue, thanks to the chat room. We now know that you are not seeing channel two, you're seeing channel 2.2 or something like that. Not the cw, but you're seeing something Flintstones. So the fix for this, that's an interesting question. I think the problem is you need to re-scan because a few months ago, actually it's been, it's an ongoing process over the last year or two channels have been moving. You may have even seen, if you watched channel two, you might have even seen an announcement saying, Hey, we're moving on Friday.

(01:47:35):
So rescan, so in your TV, because you're or your tuner, whatever you're using to tune those over the air channels, there's a command to rescan that is go out and look for all the channels. Again, some have moved. If you rescan, you will get, and we'll put a link to why this is happening, fcc.gov/rescan. But if you rescan, all your channels will adjust. And then when you go to channel two, by default, unless you say otherwise, it should go to channel 2.1. I think that's what's happened is that 2.1 is moved, 2.1 has changed location and you're not getting 2.1. When you go to channel two, you're getting something else. 2.2, 2.3. Who knows? You might be getting the Flintstones channel from Montreal, Canada, I don't know, but you're not getting what you think you're getting. So re-scan and then you should get what you want.

(01:48:28):
Kcal, which I think is not channel two K a's channel nine, isn't it? So whatever channel two is K A L does is the CBSs alternative channel. That's what it is. So they have stadium on 9.3, cbs, alternative on 9.2, circle, whatever that is on 9.4, the home shopping network on 9.5 or 9.4 and home QVC a 9.5. So I suspect this is what happened. The channels moved. You didn't know. All of a sudden when you go to channel two on your tv, you're not getting channel two, you're getting some other channel which took over that frequency, but, and it's actually, it's good luck. It's chance that you're getting that channel, cuz you might just be getting nothing. So I think the chat room has figured this out. Thank you. Chat room. See, they're smart. They were thinking I have been playing with this program. Draw things that Chris just recommended. Okay. It's interesting. I'll admit it. I just generated a picture of my wife in the style of Super Mario. I can't say, I don't think it's exactly <laugh> what I was hoping for. <Laugh>.

(01:49:44):
It's a little more Mario like. Anyway. very fun. Very fun. So, <laugh> Sue, I hope you're still listening cuz everything I told you was wrong and, but thanks to the chat room. I think we now know what's right in Los Angeles. Channel 2.1 is CBS b s DT 2.2 is K is C B S D T two, two by three, DT three, and they have other content on there. Short answer, find the rescan command either on your TV or whatever you're using for a tuner and rescan the frequencies that should fix it. Darlene in Torrance, California. Hi Darlene, Leon LaPorte.

Caller 5 (01:50:28):
Hi Leo. The funny thing is, is that Sue is just a one town over from here.

Leo Laporte (01:50:34):
<Laugh>, are you getting the Flint on Channel two? <Laugh>,

Caller 5 (01:50:37):
The local TV guy that I was, you know, gonna recommend for her.

Leo Laporte (01:50:42):
Oh, how nice of you.

Caller 5 (01:50:44):
Anyway

Leo Laporte (01:50:46):
Did you re-scan when your, your net your channels asked you to do that? Do you even see most people you have done that. You have done that. So most people don't watch over antennas anymore. So for a lot of people it's like, well, it doesn't matter if it's only if you watch over an antenna,

Caller 5 (01:51:01):
Right? So you live in the past talked about a a, a personal email. I don't know if that's the right term. I am sick of spending half my day deleting spam.

Leo Laporte (01:51:17):
Oh, aren't we all?

Caller 5 (01:51:19):
And so I, I'm willing to pay a minimal amount for a, an email service.

Leo Laporte (01:51:27):
Unfortunately, I do think you should pay for an email service, but it's not for that reason. It's because then you'll get support of free service isn't gonna give you support. You, you'll have more control over et cetera. But unfortunately it doesn't mean you'll get better. Spam filtering. Spam filtering is, yeah, spam filtering is really hard. For years, the best spam filtering was actually not on a paid service. But on the free service Google offers Gmail,

Caller 5 (01:51:54):
Right? I have Gmail. 

Leo Laporte (01:51:56):
And for a while you were getting great, great spam filtering, but I've noticed of in the last year, it's gotten worse,

Caller 5 (01:52:02):
Right? I mean, I spend time deleting the spam folder as well as, you know, emails that keep popping.

Leo Laporte (01:52:11):
Of course. And, and, and this is kind of one of the things that's really ruined email for all of us is how much junk there is, right? A good email service and Google does offer this, but other services might even do better, will also give you the opportunity to do some of that filtering automatically. And that's what I do to kind of clean up my mailbox. For example, I have a filter, and you can do this on Gmail that says, if this person's not in my contact list, no, no, I'm sorry, I stated that wrong. And this is, this is the key here is to kind of do what we call a they call it a white list or a clear list where you say, this person I want, I know I wanna see. So I say if I, if a, if, if the person, the sender is in my contact list, in other words, if I know them, put that in a folder called, you know, I say it's important now, instead of having to go through the entire inbox, I go right to the important folder.

(01:53:11):
And I know those are messages from real people that I know. Similarly, I, for my wife, my mom, my sister, I put a v i p folder and I have those three addresses. If it comes from mom@gmail.com or or or sis gmail.com, put that in the v p folder or wife gmail.com. Put that in the VIP folder. So now when I check my mail, I don't look at the inbox. I look at first at important, first at vip, then an important, now there's a problem with this. You do get email from people you don't know that you wanna see.

Caller 5 (01:53:44):
Right? Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:53:45):
And so for that, you do have to go to the inbox. You can improve these filters over time so that you know, you move more of that into other folders. When I sign up for a service, I might, for instance, make a folder for that service and then make a filter that says, if this, if the email comes from ck put it in this folder so that it'll automatically filter it. That's where filters are really handy. There is, unfortunately you do have to go into the inbox from time to time and that will have spam in it. The way Google works, and the reason Gmail works so well, or used to anyway, is it's collaborative. So you help out by indicating if something spam press that spam button, cuz that helps everybody in the service. But I think the real problem is spammers are just getting better and better and they're getting around all the filters. Leo Laporte the tech guy, it's a co it's a complicated thing.

Caller 5 (01:54:40):
So paying for a service

Leo Laporte (01:54:41):
Isn't gonna fix it. Be, it might give you better filtering. So I use fast mail and Fast Mail has a very, but maybe this is a lot of work for you. Fast Mail is a very sophisticated filtering system. So it has Gmail like tags, but it also has other features that make it very powerful. But it's also with, with great power comes great complexity. So it may not be a good solution for you. Yeah, paying for service isn't gonna fix it. You're using the best already that there is.

Caller 5 (01:55:14):
Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (01:55:15):
Unfortunately. So yeah, this is, so you now have to get, you have to make white list. You have to kind of proactively say, oh, you know this, I know I wanna see this, so put this in a folder and I will always check this folder.

Caller 5 (01:55:28):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:55:29):
You know, that kind of thing. I

Caller 5 (01:55:30):
Don't, yeah. Cause like, I wanna occasionally see email from cvs.

Leo Laporte (01:55:39):
Well see. But then you can make a CVS folder.

Caller 5 (01:55:41):
Well, no, I mean, mean I'd be, yeah, but that's just one example. I mean Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:55:46):
I know, I know.

Caller 5 (01:55:46):
Make these, or maybe you wanna see every once in a while or Right.

Leo Laporte (01:55:50):
Yeah. See you can also make improved spam filters. This takes a little more sophistication. I don't think you can do this on Gmail, but for instance, if it's not in English, I just immediately move it to spam. Oh. Because I assume, well, if, if it's somebody I know, they're gonna write to me in English.

Caller 5 (01:56:11):
No, it's all in English.

Leo Laporte (01:56:13):
<Laugh>, unfortunately, there's plenty of spam in English <laugh>.

Caller 5 (01:56:16):
Yeah, exactly. That's junk. I just, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:56:20):
So you, you can do some things, but Google's doing a lot of the most, you know, smartest things already. You know, it's, it's, it's filtering out Viagra and, you know, I mean it's doing it, it's everything. It can, I don't know why Google started for a while. G Gmail was the best. I ran all my email through Gmail into my paid service because Gmail did a lot of the filtering. But lately it's just not been worth it. It doesn't do a very good job. And so I'm not sure why. I'm not sure why they've started to fail. Is it spammers are getting smarter, perhaps? Is it, is it I don't know what it is. Is it people aren't pressing the spam button in Gmail, because that's how Gmail gets trained. When you see a spam, if you, instead of deleting it, you press the spam button at the top. Right. That tells Gmail, oh, this is spam. And if 20 people say that, then Gmail's gonna not let that message ever go through again. That

Caller 5 (01:57:11):
Comes, I'm not really using Gmail, I'm using the mail program from Apple.

Leo Laporte (01:57:15):
Yeah. That's not it though. That's Gmail. Whatever you're connecting to with that. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:57:19):
Gmail.

Leo Laporte (01:57:20):
That's Gmail. Now the mail program with Apple has even more filtering and there is a, there is a third party program you can run on your Mac called Spam siv that adds additional filtering. So that might be the trick for you is to, is to buy a program called Spam siv. I've used this for years and it learns. What you do is you take a, a pile of your spam and you run it through spam siv and then it's more customized to, to you, pardon me.

Caller 5 (01:57:52):
Spam what?

Leo Laporte (01:57:53):
S P A M S I E V E. But the website is c command.com. It's, it's only 30 bucks. It's, I bought it years ago and I'm still using it. It, it is a good, it it'll help. The problem really is that you can't be too aggressive with spam filtering cuz then you're gonna miss stuff you want.

Caller 5 (01:58:15):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:58:16):
And this is, this is why it's so difficult, I think. So that's this is all spam filters are a form of blacklisting kind of saying, well, if, if the sender or the contents look like this block it, I think you're almost better off whitelisting saying, well, you know, these are from, this is from somebody I know, so don't block this. Right. You know that that's a little bit easier to do, but it's still gonna miss stuff. So maybe you do both. I do both. I do all three. Basically <laugh>, I do it all. I have a custom spam filter running on the server. The reason you wanna run on the server, use Gmails, for instance, is then it doesn't even download spam. SIV will download it. You, your Apple mail will still have to download everything. Then it runs it through Spam SIV locally, and then it sorts it out. So, you know, it's best to use both. But since Gmail's not doing a very good job anymore, you know, you might want to add spam for sure. Spam siv for sure.

Caller 5 (01:59:16):
Spam siv.

Leo Laporte (01:59:17):
Yeah. Okay. Like a siv like a calendar, you know?

Caller 5 (01:59:20):
Right. Yeah. Okay. I'll check on that.

Leo Laporte (01:59:22):
Their, their, their icon is a calendar, actually, now that I see it. <Laugh> it's very good, but it's not, nothing is perfect because spam is just so nasty now.

Caller 5 (01:59:33):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:59:35):
<Laugh> and buying a service will not help. No. Oh no. Sorry. I wish it would <laugh>. You do it for other reasons. Yeah.

Caller 5 (01:59:42):
Okay. Well, Merry Christmas.

Leo Laporte (01:59:43):
Merry Christmas. Thank you. Good luck

Caller 5 (01:59:45):
To you in

Leo Laporte (01:59:45):
Retirement. Thank you, <laugh>. Take care.

Caller 5 (01:59:48):
Semi-Retirement.

Leo Laporte (01:59:49):
Yeah. Only really, really not even retirement. <Laugh>. I'm gonna be doing as many shows as ever. Hey thank you. I appreciate your listening, Darlene. Take care. No ads today. So I I have a day off. So this is cool. This really, this program really is this is cool. This is Stable Diffusion on your iPhone. That's kind of amazing. That's really kind of amazing. So these are all the checkpoints you can download. Whoops. Let's go back to the settings model. They call 'em models, but they're checkpoint files. Oh, how about Disney? Or let's download classic animation. Now, every one of these is huge. This is everyone's 1.6 gigs <laugh> a Renaissance. Lisa would be fun, wouldn't it? All right. As soon as this downloads I'll try the Renaissance. Yeah, I mean, this is obviously, I have it at home on a, on a much more powerful machine with an Nvidia card and so forth. You mean white list for email ll text or do you mean? See, unfortunately I think this program is, is iOS only. And it may be a limitation of, you know, your processor on most Android phones probably is in insufficient to get the job done. That'd be my guess.

(02:01:40):
Okay. There's the classic anime animation. Ian Thompson is gonna be in studio with us on twit, which is very exciting. Also, let me just check real quickly Connie good Giamo and Alex Wilhelm via Zoom. So you said Renaissance lemme see if there is a renaissance. Modern Disney, arcane Hassan blend. Vango style spider verse Eldon ring paper cut. Well, that's fun. Balloon art ink punk and Sam does art. I might do paper cut. Well, let's try cast classic animation. New seed. I'm gonna turn up the maybe to 40%. All right. Now let's do an image. So I'm gonna find an image of me. Let me do Leo photos of Leo g la put and let's find a good one to a good headshot to turn into. Actually, I guess we could use one with me and Lisa. Yeah, let's do that. So we'll take that. And I'm going to do classic animation. What style should I do? Tron Legacy. Let's do classic animation. All right. And then I should change this. This is ridiculous. Classic Disney style. So I'm gonna cut down these parameters. That's ridiculous.

Laura (02:03:43):
Last hour. I were

Leo Laporte (02:03:51):
Last hour.

(02:04:04):
Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Leo LaPorte, you're the tech guy. Time to talk computers, the internet, home theater, digital photography, smartphones, smart watches. You get the, you get the drill. 88. 88. Ask Leo the phone number, eighty eight eight eight two seven five five three six to free from anywhere in the US or Canada. Website, tech guy labs.com, tech guy labs.com. And that's where all the links go and so forth. You know what I should find but we'll put the link to the FCC rescan instructions. But don't you find a link maybe also to explain all of this silliness. It's, you know, there's three, there's a themed every show. For some reason, the theme today is I just wanna watch tv <laugh>. How come it's so complicated? Wes in Dallas, Texas'. Next. Hi, Wes. Leo Laport, the tech guy.

Caller 6 (02:04:58):
Hey, Leo. Hey, Wes. Yes. I've been listening to you for a long time.

Leo Laporte (02:05:02):
Nice. Welcome.

Caller 6 (02:05:04):
I can give you a clue. I, back in the day you recommended Phillips Curro Black Television. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:05:13):
Beautiful Plasma TVs. I they were, they were, they were the king of the hill for a long time. Oh,

Caller 6 (02:05:19):
They sure were. And that's, that puppy's still running for me. Nice. And I'm fixing to get a nice big Sony to replace it, but I'm really glad to talk to you. Good. Back in mid, mid teens, I bought three imax I was, I was raised as a Windows guy, but I thought I'd get into video editing and kinda went overboard. So I've got these three imax, one of them's got almost zero hours on it, another one's got maybe a hundred hours. And the third one, I, I finally decided I could run Windows under bootcamp,

Leo Laporte (02:05:58):
Right?

Caller 6 (02:05:59):
So these puppies, these puppies are, they're about 20 15, 20 14. I'm I can only upgrade through big sir, 11.7 0.1. So my key question is, is bootcamp still gonna be able to run on those machines?

Leo Laporte (02:06:17):
It runs on any Intel Mac, it does not run on any of the newer Silicon. Apple, Silicon Max, the M one s and M two s. So, yes, bootcamp should run the, I guess the thing to check, first of all, upgrade it to the latest version. You can. You said Big Sir, huh?

Caller 6 (02:06:37):
Yeah. Big

Leo Laporte (02:06:38):
Left. And you'll have a bootcamp app

Caller 6 (02:06:40):
As far as it'll

Leo Laporte (02:06:41):
Go. Yeah. You'll have a bootcamp app on Big Sur. What boot, what bootcamp does is it takes your hard drive, splits it into it, partitions it and you'll get to decide how much is devoted to Windows and how much devoted to Mac. It then starts to install Windows on the Windows partition. And it, and it does that with a Windows, you know, install disc or you down, you can download the ISO of a current version of Windows to it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but you will also bootcamp will also download from Apple the drivers, the Windows drivers for that machine. And this is the real, this is where it's gonna work or it's not gonna work. If Apple has appropriate drivers for your current hardware, as old as it is. And if it has bootcamp on the, on the computer, I'm gonna guess they do have drivers, then everything will go swimmingly.

(02:07:36):
Cuz the drivers are specific. And remember Apple, because it makes its own hardware, may not have standard drivers. They have to make their own drivers as the hardware manufacturer. So if they've made those set of Apple drivers, the generic Windows install goes on there. You install the Apple drivers for the specific Apple hardware, mouse keyboard monitor, all of that stuff. And it should, it should give you a dual boot Macintosh that can start up either in Windows or Mac. I would just say try it. If it doesn't work, you can delete the Windows partition and continue.

Caller 6 (02:08:06):
I have been running Windows on one of those Mac, my Mac okay. For about three years. And it works, it works beautifully. Windows runs great on this, on these imax Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:08:16):
Wonderful.

Caller 6 (02:08:17):
As I listened to you, I'm concerned about end of support for,

Leo Laporte (02:08:23):
Oh, well,

Caller 6 (02:08:24):
Imax

Leo Laporte (02:08:24):
Yeah. So it's the same for an iMac as it would be for any Windows machine. This end of support comes not from Apple, but comes from Microsoft. So what version of Windows are you, are you, are you running

Caller 6 (02:08:36):
10 Windows, 10

Leo Laporte (02:08:38):
That goes through 2025? You'll, you'll continue to get updates. And they come from Microsoft, not from Apple, the Apple drivers. I doubt Apple updates those, particularly unless there's a security flaw, but you probably don't need to update them.

Caller 6 (02:08:55):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:08:57):
So so I guess that's a, that's, so I guess that's a legitimate question, which is, you know, first of all, as long as you have a Windows version that Microsoft's still supporting, you're gonna get the Windows patches. Then just like with any hardware, let's say yet Nvidia card, if Nvidia said, well, we're not gonna update that driver anymore. But that's really only a problem when you go to the next version of Windows. It's not so much of a problem as you stay, if you stay with Windows 10, I'm,

Caller 6 (02:09:23):
Yeah, I mean, it may not, may not qual hardware may not qualify for Windows 11.

Leo Laporte (02:09:28):
It probably almost certainly doesn't.

Caller 6 (02:09:30):
Right.

Leo Laporte (02:09:31):
So, so Apple par, you know, from time to time will update those drivers. Just like any hardware manufacturer, just like Nvidia would update those drivers. At some point, Apple's gonna stop updating them. But if they work with Windows 10, they're gonna continue to work with Windows 10. They may not have all the latest bug fixes or whatever, but that's not gonna be a problem. Apple's drivers are pretty solid. In fact, if you think about it, Apple's in a better position then most other hardware manufacturers, they know exactly what hardware you have. There's no, you know, they know precisely what it's made. So, unlike Nvidia, which has to figure out what all the other stuff is, apple knows. So their drivers are pretty stable. I've never seen an issue with their drivers. I think you'll be all right.

Caller 6 (02:10:14):
Oh, that's great. Yeah. I use I have a second question. And that's about encryption Okay. Of files is word I'm, I'm encrypting a word file that has, for example, some passwords on it. Okay. That I'm gonna pass on to my son. You know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm of your generation and do you like the encryption on Word?

Leo Laporte (02:10:40):
No, <laugh>. <Laugh>. No, no. <Laugh>. So don't, yeah, you, this is a good, this is a good example of a password manager would make life much, much, much easier. All the password managers have something called emergency access. I use Bit Warden one password last pass. They all do this where you can designate your son as your next of kin. And if something should happen to you, your son can request access to the vault and they'll get all your passwords. You can easily take the passwords you've got, put them in the, a password vault bit Warden is free. It's open source for an individual user. So that would be where I would go. Just get bit warden, get your passwords into Bit Warden. In fact, the nice thing about this is once you start using it, it will automatically save any new passwords you create. Right? It creates 'em for you and saves them.

(02:11:30):
And then you designate, I've done this with my wife and my daughter. I've designated them my survivors. And the way this works is kind of a dead man switch. What if you pass, then your next of kin has to contact, send an email to bit warden saying he's passed. Give me access. And the way they handle this, instead of requesting a death certificate or anything like that, is they send you an email and they said, are you dead? And if you don't respond and you get to set, you get to set the time limit. I set it for a week. If I don't respond within a week, then they send the pa the master password to unlock the vault to your next of kin and say, yep, he's gone. <Laugh>, it's all yours now. So that's a very nice way to do that. They call it emergency access. It bit Warden is free. So there's no cost to you to doing this. I think this is probably the, and because it's open source, it's gonna continue forever. I think this is a very good way to handle that problem. I You're smart. Definitely do this now because you know, you're not gonna, you're gonna be here for a long, long time, as am I, but you know, just in case it's good to have it. Sure. Yeah.

Caller 6 (02:12:38):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Just in case. Just

Leo Laporte (02:12:39):
In case.

Caller 6 (02:12:40):
That's good. Yeah. You've been very consistent in recommending Bet Warden. Cause it's open source. I

Leo Laporte (02:12:45):
Appreciate it. I I love the idea of open source, not only cuz it's free, that's really a secondary consideration cuz password managers aren't expensive. But because it is open source, you know, it works, you know it's doing the right thing. People are looking at it and it will continue on. Even if the company says, yeah, we don't wanna do this anymore, somebody else will take up the mantle because they have all the source codes. So it's a, it's a nice way to go. If you want something that's gonna last, it's gonna outlast you. That's the key. Right?

Caller 6 (02:13:10):
Well little bit warden back up to a local file.

Leo Laporte (02:13:14):
It will, you can do it either locally or you can use their cloud still free. Okay. I would use their cloud. They've secured it. Well. They do a good job. And that way you don't even have to think about backing it up. It just doesn't.

Caller 6 (02:13:28):
Yeah. I was just one.

Leo Laporte (02:13:30):
And if you do it that way, way by the way, then your son has easy access to it. If you've got it locally only, he has to still get into your computer and get it. But if you do it with their cloud, all he has to do is send him an email saying give me access.

Caller 6 (02:13:41):
Well, luckily he's a wizard too. <Laugh>, I retired. I wanted, well I wanted to travel and be a computer wizard. Nice. And that's photography.

Leo Laporte (02:13:51):
Hey, what a wonderful way to spend your, I hate to use this phrase, golden years <laugh>. Golden years. Golden years.

Caller 6 (02:14:00):
Well, well <laugh> years

Leo Laporte (02:14:02):
As, as someone in his golden years. I, I we're, we're, we're in the same boat. I would, I would, I would say this is, this is something everybody even knows not in their golden years should do. Cuz a bus can hit yet any time. You should always have this, you know bet safety, safety valve. I think it's a really good idea.

Caller 6 (02:14:21):
Well, I'm looking forward to transitioning to you and Micah in the new year. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:14:25):
We're not gone. I think people think, cuz we use the word retirement. I'm only retiring for my career 46 years in broadcast radio, but I'm still doing internet radio and internet tv. So

Caller 6 (02:14:38):
I

Leo Laporte (02:14:38):
Love it. I don't want, that's perfect for me. Right. So now there's no pressure. I can just do it as I want. And so it's a great way. I don't wanna retire where I don't have anything to do. So this way. And, and it's not like I work for a living. I just talk

Caller 6 (02:14:50):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:14:52):
I can talk forever.

Caller 6 (02:14:54):
Wonderful.

Leo Laporte (02:14:55):
Wes, a pleasure meeting you. Stay, stay tuned. Keep listening. Take take care. Yeah, we will continue to do so. The, just for those who don't know next Sunday, my last day on the radio. And, but the good news is Rich DeMiro is taking over. I would never have quit if I had, didn't know I had somebody really good who could take over. Rich tomorrow will turn this show into Rich on tech. That'll be every Saturday. And then Micah and I may know Micah Sergeant from the Saturday shows. He's been, I've been having him ghost me for the last seven or eight months just so he can learn the, the robes. So Micah and I will do something we're gonna call, ask the Tech guys, cuz there's two of us now. And we'll do that every Sunday in the same time slot.

(02:15:36):
So that is two to 5:00 PM Eastern Time. If you like watching and listening live, you can still do that, but you'll have to do it over the internet at live dot twit tv won't be on the radio anymore. That's what I'm retiring from. And there's still gonna be a podcast. So if you've already subscribed the podcast or if you go to tech guy labs.com to listen or watch, all of that's gonna be the same. You'll, you know, we're gonna take a little break for the holidays and we will come back. January 8th will be our first show of the new year. And it'll be me and Micah. Ask the tech guys. So you, in way you get This is good. You get more, not less. You get Rich Durrow on Saturdays and Micah and me on Sunday. So we're gonna take a little break. 88. 88. Ask Leo Rod pile space guy. It's coming up. There's lots to talk about in space. More of your calls too. Leo Laporte the tech guy. You stay right here.

(02:16:41):
Hello, rod. That hat is absolutely extraordinary. <Laugh> ho, ho ho. I was trying to think of the nicest word I could. That's the one that came out. Actually, I'm due to change. I was supposed to change my hats. Every every hour. So hold on, let me go get a every hour. Here's a hat here, right? Wow. I left your mic on. I hope you didn't say anything unto toured. Oh, no, I, I muttered about some of the some of the chat going on, but that was good. <Laugh> this hat. So how now you a special ability a Hershey's kiss? Yeah. Oh no, it's dead. We just put a new battery in too. It's dead. Jim, you know, when you guys start putting batteries in your hat, it's dead. How could it have died so quickly?

(02:17:31):
Was it a giz fist special? Yeah, maybe <laugh>. Yeah, it could be those batteries that last a couple of weeks. <Laugh>. Oh man. Aw. Maybe it was, maybe it was running all last night. I don't know. <Laugh>, does it play Jingle? Stuck with it. Now it's my hat now, baby. Well, I hear it Jing. That's something. Yes. All right. I will we will. And, you know, while in a little bit yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All ain't going in. How literally the text input should be treated. <Laugh>. All right. I'm just, I'm trying to do another, another stable diffusion generation. Oh, what? You're like triple messaging you today we got the hat. I ain't got way too, too much going on. That's me. I'm an A D D's son of a bitch. Classic animation. Christmas card generate. All right. Ooh. We'll be back right after this word from stable diffusion. Woohoo. Who?

(02:18:40):
I'm not sure if I like the future of this show. I hate change. <Laugh> <laugh>. Okay. Whatever you say. <Laugh>. I hate change too. But, you know, I'm sorry. What's kind of interesting? People are mad at me. Some people, not all, but some people are mad at me for doing this. And like, no, you owe us a radio show for the rest of your life. The only way out is death. All right. Well talk in a bit, rod. Is this 1952 <laugh>? 1952 is the year for this song also the episode number for this show. 1 9 52. It's not. When did that come? Well, it sounds like 1952 <laugh>. Let's just pretend it is <laugh> when you go to tech eye labs.com, the website, this is the episode 1952. Somebody told me, I didn't even know this. You can go to tech Eye labs.com/ 1952 and go right to the show. And that's where all the links to things we've mentioned quite a bit of stuff is up there. We'll put ta a transcript of the show there after the fact. And we'll also put audio and video from the show. So that's a good thing to remember. Tech guy labs.com. Carmine is on the line from Napal, Naples, Florida. Hi, Carmine.

Caller 7 (02:20:03):
Hey Leo. Congratulations on your Saturday retirement.

Leo Laporte (02:20:06):
Thank you. Yeah, that's a good, good way to put, put it. <Laugh> Lisa is, my wife's already said. Okay. First brunch. Where do you want to go? <Laugh>. <laugh>. I have a, I have many, many brunches planned after 19 years of no brunch. What can I do for you? Carmine? Thank you for the kind words. I appreciate it.

Caller 7 (02:20:23):
No problem. I, I don't know if you remember it, but I'm the one who called about the the World Series of Poker thing. I, I,

Leo Laporte (02:20:29):
How'd that go? Oh, yeah, we, you already told me it didn't go great. Well,

Caller 7 (02:20:33):
Yeah, it didn't, it didn't go too well. But, but we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll try it again

Leo Laporte (02:20:37):
Next. Do it again next year. Yeah. Poker, you know there's a lot of skill, but there's still luck. If you get bit on the river, you're going down. You did. Yeah, I did. <Laugh>. Yep. That's what happens. Even the best.

Caller 7 (02:20:52):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:20:52):
Yeah. I'm sorry. But next year. So, yeah. Was it expensive to enter or was like thousands, wasn't it?

Caller 7 (02:20:58):
10,000? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:01):
And that's gone.

Caller 7 (02:21:03):
Yeah, that's gone.

Leo Laporte (02:21:04):
<Laugh>. Oh, you got all your to save up.

Caller 7 (02:21:07):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, I'm actually planning another, another expensive trip. Uhoh <laugh> to, to to Dubai in a few weeks.

Leo Laporte (02:21:15):
Oh, that's gonna be fun. I've been to Dubai several times.

Caller 7 (02:21:19):
Yes. And I'm really, really excited. Good. taking, I've taken my wife life of kids along, so

Leo Laporte (02:21:25):
There's lots to see. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Yeah.

Caller 7 (02:21:28):
Yeah. Especially looking forward to the zip line. Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:21:31):
Try that out. And the malls, the, I mean, it's pretty amazing. So

Caller 7 (02:21:35):
Khalifa and everything. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:37):
How long are you gonna be there?

Caller 7 (02:21:39):
About two weeks.

Leo Laporte (02:21:40):
Oh, wow. Great.

Caller 7 (02:21:42):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:42):
Yeah. So what can I do to help? I'm wondering.

Caller 7 (02:21:44):
Yeah. So I'm wondering what your advice is. I'm making sure, you know, my cell phone would work correctly while I'm there and so forth. And if you have any advice on, you know, what to kind of avoid with the, the kind, the, the guidelines that they have there and

Leo Laporte (02:21:57):
So forth. Okay. Do not make out with your wife in public

Caller 7 (02:22:01):
<Laugh>. No, I know that

Leo Laporte (02:22:02):
<Laugh> because Dubai is a part of the United Arab Emirates. And the, the locals there are called Emiratis. And they're very conservative. It is not as strictly conservative as, let's say Saudi Arabia would be. But you won't find drinking outside of the tourist areas, the hotels, the restaurants that are to cater to the West. And, you know, tourism is a big part of their economy. So, and they understand the oil. Dubai does not have a lot of oil, oddly enough, so they understand that their subsidies, which come from other parts of the UAE, are gonna run out at some point. So they really are trying to build a tourist industry. That's why Dubai is turning into the Vegas of the Middle East. But there won't be any gambling. Drinking will be confined to the hotel and restaurants that cater to tourists. They have, there have been tourists who have gone there, who have been detained for signs of public displays of affection. So I wasn't joking. Don't be careful about that.

Caller 7 (02:23:02):
Oh, I know, I know. I, I read about that.

Leo Laporte (02:23:04):
Be respectful dress conservatively. Now, as far the phones, that's the real, that's my expertise. I was able to use all of our phones there, it was no problem. If you have T-Mobile, T-mobile offers kind of limited data connectivity overseas Dubai works I take, when I travel Google Fi with me, which is a T-Mobile based M V O, Google runs, and they have even better deals overseas. They give you basically it's the same price internationally as it is locally. And so I always bring a Google Fi phone with me, but it runs on the T-Mobile network. So T-Mobile would be fine. If you're on Verizon, at and t you will have to pay for international access. And okay. And that's, I would check before you go this may have changed, but last time I used it, Verizon made you buy day passes. So you went day by day and it was 25 bucks or something like that for a certain amount of data every day. If you're going for two weeks I do you, who's your carrier?

Caller 7 (02:24:07):
At and t.

Leo Laporte (02:24:08):
So at t is 10 bucks for a day pass internationally. Okay. That's not that bad. Yeah. But there's a, it's a limited amount of data, so you've gotta keep that in mind. The good news is, most of the places you go have wifi, this is true now everywhere in the world. So in your hotel, you're gonna use wifi. So my suggestion is to use a MAPS program. Google Maps will do this. It lets you download a local map at the hotel where it costs you nothing, and then you can use it locally once you get out and about. That's a really good way to go do everything. In other words, everything that you can do it while you're in a wifi, whether it's a hotel or restaurant or coffee shop. And then, but I have to say, Dubai is pretty sophisticated. So there's wifi a lot of places, even in the, the, the Burge the world's tallest building, we went up to the top there. And there was very good wifi <laugh>, the Burge Khalifa. Right.

Caller 7 (02:25:06):
So, I mean, did Site be kind of a strange question, but, you know, as, as a as a West Center, I'm kind of concerned about this, you know? Is there a way to kind of detect if there's some cameras in my hotel room or some, somebody,

Leo Laporte (02:25:18):
Oh, wow. This is, this is a,

Caller 7 (02:25:23):
Hello?

Leo Laporte (02:25:24):
I hear something in the background. Are you listening to some rap there? No. Yeah, go ahead. You're on break. I'm on break. I didn't even see the break happen. Okay, <laugh>, sorry about that. We're on the break. It's

Caller 7 (02:25:35):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:25:37):
<Laugh>. I hope it, I hope it interrupted at a good spot, Laura. I don't know how I missed that. I must be already, I'm on vacation time. <Laugh>, I don't, you know, this is something that Kim Commando does a lot of stuff on. There are these things you can buy that supposedly will have you find cameras. You're staying in a nice hotel, though, I imagine, right?

Caller 7 (02:25:58):
Yeah, we were staying at the Jamira Beach Hotel, so I don't, I don't,

Leo Laporte (02:26:02):
Oh my God, that's gonna be, I wanted my ma my wife was mad at me that we didn't get a, oh, that's such an expensive, fancy place. You're fine.

Caller 7 (02:26:11):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:26:12):
Yeah, you're fine.

Caller 7 (02:26:12):
I assume so. I mean, it's, I don't, I don't, it's not Russia. I'm just wondering. Yeah, I just,

Leo Laporte (02:26:15):
It's not Russia. And they, yeah. So I, I, we will put a article from Travel and Leisure that the chatroom's fine. How to check for hidden cameras. You can use a flashlight. There are special devices. I, I have never done this in my life.

Caller 7 (02:26:32):
<Laugh> Okay. <Laugh>. I'm a little paranoid,

Leo Laporte (02:26:34):
But Yeah, I don't blame you. But I, if you're staying at the Al Jamira, you're fine. <Laugh>.

Caller 7 (02:26:41):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:26:42):
That's fine. You're fine.

Caller 7 (02:26:44):
No, that's what my wife's told me. But you know, I'm a little <laugh> more

Leo Laporte (02:26:47):
Here. Yeah, yeah. That's the one that's like a sailboat.

Caller 7 (02:26:51):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:26:52):
Oh my God. This is like, you are spending more money per night than you spent to get into the poker game. I think much more

Caller 7 (02:27:01):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:27:02):
You're gonna have. I've, she's so mad. She said we should have stayed there at least one night. They come and get you in a Rolls Royce. You're gonna have such a good time. Actually, I think. No, wait a minute. They come and get you in a helicopter. You're gonna have a wonderful time. I wouldn't worry about it.

Caller 7 (02:27:17):
You'll definitely look forward to LA seeing the Palm Island.

Leo Laporte (02:27:20):
Yeah. Oh, it's beautiful. Yeah. Two weeks is a long time. I'm not sure I would want to, I didn't wanna spend two weeks in Vegas, but oh, you're gonna have such a great time. You're gonna have such a great time.

Caller 7 (02:27:30):
Sounds good. Yeah. I was trying to call yesterday when Johnny Jet was on, because I wanted to kind of get his opinion to you on Emirates. And what, what do you think? Cause I'm already booked, obviously, but I wanna

Leo Laporte / Rod Pyle (02:27:39):
Oh, I think you're, I mean, Emirates is a world class. Yeah. Price is no object to Dubai is made for rich people. So if you're, if you can afford to live the life in Dubai, you will live the life. It's incredible. But I would suggest, and we did this there's a website called Tours by Locals, where you can get somebody who lives there. I got a, I had a wonderful guide. Actually, we, I think we had two or three tours by locals where they took us around. And I, I wish I could remember the name of my guide. She was fantastic. They will show you the sites in a way, you know, one-on-one that's much better. Take the whole family. And they give you a, you can get a, a whole day if you want, or a half day, and they'll take you everywhere. Look tours by locals.com Dubai. There's some really good guides there. That's fun. We took the, there's a little boat that you go across the river that's fun. And that's kind of to the old town. Our guide took us to you know, coffee was invented in the Middle East. Oh, I gotta go. We'll talk. Sounds good. We'll talk later. Have a great trip. Thanks, Leo. Help you. Awesome. He's a rocket man. Mr. Rod Pile. Our rocket man. Our space guy,

(02:29:02):
Our rocket man burning out there in the fuel, in the space all alone, or whatever the, the heck whatever was singing. Rod Pile. He is our spaceman and the host of this weekends space on our TWI podcast network. TWI tv slash twists. He co-hosts with tec malik of space.com. He's also the editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's official magazine at Astra, which means to the Stars. That's right. He's also the author of Space 2.0, first on the Moon, and many other beautiful, wonderful books about space. It is honor and honor and a privilege to speak to Rod Pile every week on this show. Hi Rod. Wow. Will you talk to my friends and family and tell them you honor's, by the way. It's honor. I got my shirt. Look at that. What does it say this week? Weekend space shirt. Oh, your shirt.

(02:29:54):
Do we have this weekend? Space shirts? Yeah, I got it from your Mechi site. Oh, how about that twit.tv/store, everybody? Yeah. Get your on. You can even get a mug with his mug, I think. Oh God. No. I think it just says the logo. So <laugh>. Yeah, I think it just has the logo. Nobody would want my face on the mug we used. Cause they wanna be able to want the coffee. We used to do that with all of our hosts, but now we have now that we have stable diffusion, I think we might go back to getting artificial, I made a picture of my, I took a picture in this program that Chris Marqui recommended of my wife and me, and this is this is what it did. I <laugh>. I don't, it looked like Dick de Bartolo. Yeah, it looks like Mario.

(02:30:36):
I don't know what's going on. Anyway oh, that's we won't do that to you. Right? so maybe you'd want that on the mug. I don't know. So, hey, today, yes, we got our Artemis one capsule back. It was a spectacular splashdown. It was a success all round, wasn't it? It what a great loss. Everything went by the numbers. You know, there's some little tiny stuff, but as any engineer would tell you, all these things are doomed to succeed on Earth. And you send 'em out into space, and that's when you're putting the pedal in the metal to doing in the test. I'm pretty sure at Splash Down, which was at about nine 40 Pacific Time, that there were some big size of relief in the Boeing and Lockheed Martin boardrooms. Well, for a while it was some concern that they would never even get off the ground, so.

(02:31:22):
Yeah. Yeah. But my favorite moment, I mean, there's a lot to talk about, but I was, I was checking the video of the, of the messaging that showed up on Calisto, the A L E X, A clone that was on board so people could buy, just to recap this, people could buy a message. No, not it's free. Oh, free. But you could We did, we talked about this. Yeah. And this was this was on an iPad that was up there on the Artemis. Right, right. On the console. And so they were flashing messages by every few seconds. And of course, you know, they were evaluated to make sure that they were clean and all that. I was hoping to find mine. But what I did see right as it was about to reach its furthest distance for Earth was a message that says, we've been trying to reach you about your spacecraft. Expired word <laugh>.

(02:32:09):
Is this real brilliant? Is this real? Yeah. Yeah. No, it was on the stream from, from Lockheed Martin. That's his hyster. Somebody at Lockheed had a good sense of humor and passed that through. That's wonderful. Actually, I don't know if Yeah. They had a good sense of humor. The sender was named blocked <laugh>. Yeah. So pretty, pretty cool all the way around. We've been trying to make sure. Oh, yeah. Blocked. That's what you always get, don't you <laugh> when that call comes. That's hyster hysterical. Also note the splashdown happened on the 50th anniversary to the day of the Apollo 17 landing on the moon. That was the last trip to the moon, which Yeah. Which was coincidental, but it was a nice coincidence. Yeah. you know, it, it, it, it accomplished a lot of firsts. It went the farthest distance by about, I think 20,000 miles beyond the moon, which, you know, is, is for an uncured spacecraft.

(02:33:01):
Not a huge deal, but it's a good test. And it, when it entered the atmosphere, it came back very fast because this was a very large orbit. It performed for first time a skip maneuver, which is where it kind of bounces off the atmosphere once before coming in for a, a final plunge. Why would it do that? It helps them scrub off speed and it also lightens the G load. So when Apollo was coming back on these straight plunges into the atmosphere back in the sixties, seventies, you are subjecting those guys to seven or eight Gs, which is a lot. Yeah. You know, you, you've been a rollercoaster, you know, two Gs No, a lot. I, I, yeah. No. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So if you, if you break that into two bits, you can get it down to about four G's. So it makes it easier on the astronauts.

(02:33:43):
It makes it easier on the hardware. How, how long do they stay at four G's? That's tough. A couple minutes. But it, it'll also allows them to coast a bit and steer. So you're able to get a more accurate reentry. And this is something that you just couldn't do with the, with the navigation hardware back in the day when, let's not forget all that was done with slide rules and pencils. So we've got advantages now. So the the landing zone was moved from off just off the coast of San Diego to off the coast of Baja, California, a hundred plus miles south, because we had really bad weather here. And the sea, sea state was, was pretty tossed. So they moved it down towards the Mexican, the Baja Peninsula. But everything as you saw, just went like clockwork. Maximum temperature of the heat shield was about 5,000 degrees.

(02:34:31):
So one of the big things now, you know, this thing's coming back at MA 32, which is fast. It's about 25, 6,000 miles per hour. 32 times the speed of sound. Yeah. Wow. So it, it's blistering. And this heat shield is made for the same stuff that the Apollo heat shields are made from. It's called acot, but it was a, I think we talked about this one point. It's a new formulation they had. See they missed a bit. They should make it outta the same thing. They make those toy blister packs out of, cuz you cannot <laugh>, they could not get into those. That's true. It would be better. They do melt better because I've done that before, so. Oh, you can't melt them. Oh, okay. All right. But they had to reformulate the stuff cuz of EPA regulations, which, you know, give NASA a pass, but they didn't.

(02:35:15):
So they had some trouble. They, they only tested Orion once before in 2014. It didn't come back at this high speed. They had some cracking on the heat shield. So they're photographing it now. And we should hear by sometime tomorrow how it passed the test. But everything seems to go very well. And let's not forget, you know, we're going back to this kind of elemental, proven, trusted technology after 30 plus years of flying the space shuttle, which was kind of delicate. So it was good to see this do what they wanted it to do. I was sort of twitching and cheering and screaming in the chair. I, it's hard. It's amazing that we do so well. And part of the reason you did Artemis unmanned is so we could test this stuff mm-hmm. <Affirmative> without risking human lives. So big success, really. And so you could test calisto so you could order more shaming cream from <laugh> Luna Orbit or whatever, you know, <laugh>, you were talking about that earlier in the week, I think on was the big show.

(02:36:14):
Yeah. You know, you'd need were those things called tags where you had a push button where you could just, you know, you had Oh, the dash buttons, push buttons, the dash buttons. Yeah. Then anybody would walk by and push three times the course. So Amazon, so well thought this was a good idea. This is a good, this is a good example of why NASA tests without human occupants, <laugh> and Amazon does not. So they thought, oh, well just make these buttons that you push to reorder stuff. And they were a horrific failure. Amazon canceled 'em. Actually, I was disappointed. They did have this feature where if you had just ordered, you couldn't press it 20 times and get 20, you know, bags of kitty litter. They, they had an or until the order arrived, you couldn't order another one, I suppose. But anybody who's ever been taught to not flip up the clear plastic cover and hit the abort switch would probably be nervous around one of those things, don't you think? Yeah. Well it, it is in fact the case that any teenager worth his salt would figure out as soon as that package arrives on the doorstep, press that button again. Rod pile space dots.org. Thank you, Rob. It's been fun. Thank you.

(02:37:24):
You're gonna be here next week, right? Of course. Yes. Are you kidding? I wouldn't miss that for the, we we had that kind of allergic Allic tone. It's been fun. It's been fun. Oh, no, no, but now it's over. I have a little song to send you before next week. Oh my rocket man. <Laugh> burning out here in the fuel is going away. I, you know, I'll miss you terribly. I probably won't miss Harry Rocket man. Too much <laugh>. I found a better song. The David Bowie. There's a Starman waiting in the sky. I like Starman. You know, they always play A lot of radio stations will play Major Tom, when you come on talk about space. No, you wanna say, do you realize how depressing this song is? The sky drift? Yeah. Sitting in a tin can, right? Yeah. That's not a good song.

(02:38:18):
Don't play that. I'm a tear jerker. Yeah. Away. I have to figure out a way to, to up your your hat on anti for next week. That's gonna be tough. Oh, if the button worked, this would really have upped the Annie. A hundred percent. This thing sings to you, but I think we used it all up. We used up all the juice. Can you give me a reasonable Pax Simi? It goes have holy jolly Christmas, but the best part is there's a motor in this Makes it go <laugh> that makes it go around in, in rhythm to the music. Wow. It's kind of frustrating. I had Burke put a battery on this thing just a little while ago, and I don't know what's going on. <Laugh>, maybe it fell out. I don't, I don't know. He said the battery case was not screwed tight. Which it shouldn't be because Oh, that's just so children won't eat the battery.

(02:39:14):
Right. That, that when they put screws on battery cases, I decided to stop off Things fine. It makes me so bad. Yeah, they're ridiculous. Yeah, I understand the logic, but come on, just, you know. Well it's, you know, you figure out a way to do better that with, it's the same reason medicine bottles, for God's sake, if they put that silly warning, not do not ingest. Oh, wait a minute. There's oh, here. Oh, the, this is interesting. Do not eat this hat. I'll show you the battery compartment. It's kind of, it's kind of where your wig would go. Oh. A special, special location. Thank God we don't need here, <laugh>. Oh, look at, could I have actually No, no. And it popped out. That's what it is. Okay. It's kind. I have Oh, okay. I have fixed the battery. Wait a minute. Wow. It's that a little flap and everything. That's kind of scary. <Laugh>. Oh boy. Wow. And it lights up hat porn. Okay, well, there we go. Oh, what?

Leo Laporte (02:40:19):
Huh? Oh,

(02:40:21):
Okay. Thank you,

(02:40:23):
<laugh>.

(02:40:25):
I, you know, I don't get speechless very often, but I think this is one of those, this is my favorite hat. I've had this hat for some time. It's a very, very nice hat. All right, <laugh>. Well, you wanna get, you want another one? Here we go, <laugh>. All right, rod. Have a great night. I'll see you next week. Five. Come visit us sometime soon. Well, hey, and if you're in on Friday morning, early drop by our, our Christmas party show. We're recording. Oh, you doing a Christmas party show? Oh, fun. Yeah. All right. Maybe I may see. I just will.

Rod Pyle (02:41:00):
Okay. Take care. Thank you. Bye.

Leo Laporte (02:41:15):
Ground

(02:41:16):
Control to Major Tom. This is ground control to Major Tom. Here I am sitting in a tin can four for

(02:41:33):
The Bowie Changes box set. Oh God.

(02:41:41):
You've

(02:41:41):
Been waiting to play this, haven't you?

(02:41:44):
<Laugh>.

(02:41:48):
10, 9, 8, 7, 6. Two more shows to go. Two more and a quarter hour to go. The final countdown. Thank you. By the way, professor Laura has been a wonderful musical director. I, I, I just think you've added so much to the show, Laura, and I'm very pleased to say she will continue on. So you'll you will have the benefits of her musical knowledge on Rich on Tech coming up in the new year. I don't yet have word, but I believe I, a little bird told me that Kim Schaff or the phone Angel will also continue on with Rich, which is good news cuz she's really good at picking the best calls. So starting, that's gonna start January 7th. We're gonna take a little break for Christmas. I will be here next weekend. The 17th and the 18th. Final show's. The 18th. We'll take a little break cuz of course, Christmas Eve day and New Year's, even day. Nobody wants to work then. And and Rich will start January 7th. So this is, I guess the final countdown. Mike is on the line from Gulf Shore, Alabama. Hello, Mike.

Caller 8 (02:42:59):
Hey Leo. How are you doing today?

Leo Laporte (02:43:01):
I couldn't be better. How are you?

Caller 8 (02:43:04):
I'm doing great. Good. Congratulations on your

Leo Laporte (02:43:07):
Retirement. Thank you, sir. I look forward to sitting on the porch playing checkers.

Caller 8 (02:43:13):
Yeah, well once a radio guy always I

Leo Laporte (02:43:15):
Know, I know something. I will, I will, I will go to my grave with a microphone in my mouth. <Laugh>.

Caller 8 (02:43:22):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:43:24):
What can I, what can I do for you?

Caller 8 (02:43:26):
Well, Leo, guess what? I have a problem. What,

Leo Laporte (02:43:33):
Who, why is it everybody who calls has a problem? Why is that? Okay, go ahead with your problem. Go ahead,

Caller 8 (02:43:40):
<Laugh>. Well, I have a I have an iPhone 14. Yes. Who's got it? Yes. And the I've had this phone number for probably 10 years. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and I have advertised the phone number all over the world.

Leo Laporte (02:43:55):
Of course, in

Caller 8 (02:43:56):
Business, I'm in business for myself. Good.

Leo Laporte (02:43:59):
So you do that on purpose. You want everybody to know.

Caller 8 (02:44:02):
Yes. And I have to answer my phone. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:44:05):
Right, because you don't know who's calling. It could be a, a customer.

Caller 8 (02:44:09):
That's right. Okay. the last month or so, I have received a minimum <laugh> of 50 robocalls a day and as high as 190.

Leo Laporte (02:44:25):
Wow. In a day.

Caller 8 (02:44:27):
In a day.

Leo Laporte (02:44:29):
Holy cow.

Caller 8 (02:44:31):
And I'm just wondering if there's an app or anything that you might suggest.

Leo Laporte (02:44:36):
First thing is put yourself on the federal do not call list. There is one for cell phones that will then make it illegal to robocall you except for campaigns. First Amendment protects political robocalls, but the ones you're getting are your extended warranty is expiring. And yes. Would you like a timeshare in Cancun and that kind of thing? That's right. And those are illegal. Now here's the problem, robocallers the US Robocallers have definitely been cut back by getting arrested. This guy in Florida who perpetrated millions a day, he's gone. So they, you know, they're doing their best to fight him, but it's hard to fight the robocalls coming from overseas. And furthermore, it's really hard to stop the ones with spoofed numbers. I'm gonna bet many of those calls have your area code and maybe even your three digit exchange as they're returned.

(02:45:32):
They do. Yeah, they do. Those are, that's called neighbor spoofing and they do it because it's very effective cuz you look at that number and you go. Hey, that might be in the school calling or my doctor, or, yes, a customer. So that guy's probably in Romania, but he's spoofing it. Good news is the FCC this week shut down one of the big call spoofing sites, and I think they've indicated that they're going to do that more often. So, so look, this is something the FCC has dragged its feet on, but they're slowly getting it together. Together. We've talked before about caller ID at authentication, which the FCC has mandated. This is called Stir and Shaken. You might have heard me talk about it before. That's a pretty memorable name. The idea is that the authenticating telephone service, the, the originating telephone service authenticates that yes, this caller has that number and is calling from our service before passing along. And then the receiving service, your phone company looks and says, yes, this is an authenticated caller, and they are instructed by the fcc. If you don't see that authentication, do not pass that call through the FCC maintains a database. Get this of robocalls that can be passed through <laugh>.

Caller 8 (02:46:55):
Really?

Leo Laporte (02:46:56):
Yeah. The robocall mitigation database, the name would imply <laugh> that those are the people you can allow. No these are the ones you cannot block. But they are slowly squeezing those people. I think they were reluctant to cut off phone companies, international phone companies. Yeah, they're starting to do that. In fact this should in theory, completely end by June 30th of next year. That deadline has been slowly pushed forward and forward. I think it's finally happening June 30th of, of next year, 2023, where your local phone company may not accept a phone call that is not authenticated. At that point, the robocalls go away because as with any spam, they don't want you to know their real number.

Caller 8 (02:47:40):
A absolutely

Leo Laporte (02:47:41):
They want, they want, so they spoof the number. So things are happening. This one of the big spoofing services was just shut down. Actually, I think it was by Inter Paul. It wasn't, it wasn't by the fcc. It was by a law enforcement agency. The FCC has started to shrink the robocall mitigation database. So fewer and fewer phone systems can use the database again and again. And more and more. On and on. Bit by bit. We are shrinking 'em. I can't believe you're getting so many, Mike. That's appalling.

Caller 8 (02:48:08):
Yeah, I mean, they're coming in on one, on top of, of another.

Leo Laporte (02:48:12):
I mean that is, that is a very odd thing. I would go to. It's of limited use, but it might help the FCC do not call database. I do this for our landline. If you still have landlines and for the cell phone lines, that makes it a federal offense to call you Uhhuh <affirmative>. And so then it's overseas people only. But maybe, maybe you're, you're maybe these, I don't know what's going on, but that's certainly the first line of defense. Make sure you're in that database. I'll put a link to that database in the show note so you can just Google it. Well,

Caller 8 (02:48:42):
I called, I called at and t and complained and they said, well, that's just a, it's life. A new way of living

Leo Laporte (02:48:49):
Life in the big city, but it should be getting better. And at and t is mandated and must, according to the FCC, must block those unauthenticated calls. And then the exceptions to that are slowly shrinking. And in theory, you won't get anymore after, after June of next year. Let's see. We'll see.

Caller 8 (02:49:05):
There's no, there's no

Caller 9 (02:49:06):
App that can

Leo Laporte (02:49:07):
Handle it. Oh, yeah. At and t you should have Active Armor installed and use it. Okay. At, although Phone Comp, active Armor is at and t's brand name, but all the phone companies have Rob Robocall and spam filtering for both text messages and robocalls. The problem is, as soon as robocalls go away, it'll all be text messaging and that won't go away cuz that's a separate system. Right. But, you know, we're slow spam. Right. Spam just creeps in through all the cracks. It's like cockroaches. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> pretty hard to get rid of. But, but the, you know, the FCC is trying. I would, I would just keep working on it. And your phone company has a system. Yeah. Use, if you haven't installed Active Armor, that's free. And I would absolutely install that. Yeah.

Caller 9 (02:49:51):
Okay. Alright,

Leo Laporte (02:49:53):
Well, you have my deepest sympathy. Mike <laugh> <laugh>, you wanna give out your number here and really get the calls? <Laugh> <laugh>. No. No, please. Happy holidays. Take you have, take care. Have a nice Christmas. Thank you, Paul. I'm Mike Paul's next in Daily City. Hi Paul. Hi Paul.

Caller 9 (02:50:11):
Hey Leo.

Leo Laporte (02:50:13):
Hey, welcome.

Caller 9 (02:50:15):
Leo. Yes. This is Paul of Paul and Jennifer. We, you probably don't remember.

Leo Laporte (02:50:19):
Oh, I remember you too. Aw,

Caller 9 (02:50:22):
We gave you a crappy Bluetooth speaker. Well, mediocre <laugh>. But the thing was actually very good for audible. It's what I used it for. Leo thanks for everything. I have just two important things here and then a little question. I wanted to give a shout out a, a recognition to Lady Laura.

Leo Laporte (02:50:45):
Oh, I agree. Yeah.

Caller 9 (02:50:48):
She is amazing that, that is one talented, beautiful human being. Aw, that fine. And I will dismiss her. <Laugh>, as you probably know well, maybe don't remember. I've been in a professional broadcast engineer since 1969.

Leo Laporte (02:51:11):
The best people.

Caller 9 (02:51:13):
And yeah, I've spent the last 15, 16 years doing the black art of RF up at Sutro.

Leo Laporte (02:51:20):
Wow. Oh, you're at Sutro. Oh, I, I got to go up there once with Tim Poser when he was a chief.

Caller 9 (02:51:26):
Take you on a tour.

Leo Laporte (02:51:27):
I've been up there. Yeah. Yeah. Now you have to wear those mesh suits, don't you?

Caller 9 (02:51:32):
No, actually, the, the radiation's gone down with with.

Leo Laporte (02:51:36):
Oh, that's good. Hey, I, I gotta break. I gotta say goodbye to everybody. Hang on. I wanna talk to you some more. Leo Laport, the tech guy. Have a great geek week. Is it over? I can't, no, it's not, it's not. I can't hear. It's in the, it is really low in the background. Turn up the music. Laura, you still have a minute now? I still have a minute. Oh, nevermind. Paul. 30 seconds. Keep. Oh, now there's this. Now you said I had a minute. Now it's over. Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for being here. Join me next weekend. Last weekend for the tech guy. I'll see you then. Have a great geek week. Bye-Bye. Okay. <Laugh>, you had a minute. One. I, for some reason that music was been really low. The last few breaks. I can just hear you dimly in the background. Ah, okay. Sorry. And so I didn't hear it, but I hear it now. That's fine. I will I'll finish up with Paul and then I will do your thing over. Sorry, Paul <laugh>.

Caller 9 (02:52:29):
Oh no, no problem.

Leo Laporte (02:52:30):
Chaos here. As I, as the whole show falls apart and it's waning hours. <Laugh>. The Sutro is so cool. When I was the, when I went up there with Tim, and this was 30 years ago, there was a little shack in the, at the top, right? Is there still there?

Caller 9 (02:52:49):
Well actually there's you know, an elevator in the tower.

Leo Laporte (02:52:52):
There's an elevator we had to climb.

Caller 9 (02:52:55):
Oh, it must have been broken.

Leo Laporte (02:52:57):
No, no. Wait a minute. We didn't have to climb. There was an elevator that was ostensibly for two, but it was a very tight too. Yes, very tight. I remember that. And you,

Caller 9 (02:53:05):
And you're leaning sideways in one direction as

Leo Laporte (02:53:08):
You get, as you go up the leg, point

Caller 9 (02:53:10):
The waist, and then when you pass the waist, you're hanging out over nothing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:53:14):
It's like the Eiffel Tower. It's awesome. So I, there was a real treat, but and then there's a ladder that you climb a little bit to get the final, the final few feet. And I remember I got RF burns on my hands cuz at the time we didn't wear any protection and oh my gosh, I had little white marks on my hands. I said, what is that? He said, oh, those are just our RF burns. Don't worry about it. <Laugh>

Caller 9 (02:53:38):
Those from radio towers. But

Leo Laporte (02:53:40):
Yeah, <laugh>, those were the days. <Laugh>.

Caller 9 (02:53:43):
Yeah. Have you seen su since they put in the l e D lighting?

Leo Laporte (02:53:49):
No. Oh

Caller 9 (02:53:50):
No. Tower flashes in you all the lights at once.

Leo Laporte (02:53:55):
Oh, how beautiful.

Caller 9 (02:53:56):
They're they're white LEDs in the daytime and red LEDs at night. And it's phenomenal. If you ever watch kgo o's 11 o'clock news they often take a beauty shot from the I

Leo Laporte (02:54:10):
Oh, I'll, I'll look it, I'll look. Oh

Caller 9 (02:54:13):
Also, I don't know if you No. A few years ago, Sutra established a website and it's pretty darn good.

Leo Laporte (02:54:19):
Oh,

Caller 9 (02:54:20):
We're, we're off the radio and so it probably won't crash it, but it's, it's really, they did an excellent job. It's when, when they, when they copyrighted the tower or whatever you call it, they, they, they got a whole PR firm involved.

Leo Laporte (02:54:34):
I'm looking at it. This is great. Oh, this is so cool.

Caller 9 (02:54:39):
It's an amazing site. Yeah. again, the shout out to Laura, Laura is we must be of the same mind. And I, you know, I'm old enough to be your dad and happily married, but if <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:54:54):
I was 30. She has good taste years younger. Yeah. She has good taste in music. You

Caller 9 (02:55:00):
Know, one of these days if I ever make it down to LA again, I'd love to go get a tour of the knock there.

Leo Laporte (02:55:08):
Do they ever open the knock to engineers, people who know what they're doing? Laura? No. They would never let, it's, it's like probably since nine 11. It's like highly secure. But you, maybe you could pull some strings. You must know some chiefs. We had a great chief at K F I, John Paoli, who passed away. You might have known him Paul. And then and then I don't know anybody, any of the engineers now, but they're listening at the Knock. So if Paul calls, let him in, give him a tour, he can reciprocate with a, with a trip up. Super true tower.

Caller 9 (02:55:42):
Yes. the again and I in fact, I had you were talking about to, to Rob Laura stole my thunder. I was gonna call in and recommend a attune for Rob Hile because you remember Johnny Jet's theme song used to be leaving on a jet plane. Yeah. Which was kind of a sad song, but whatever. And then you found, you got the Johnny Cash.

Leo Laporte (02:56:10):
I think that's better, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

Caller 9 (02:56:12):
And Elton John is kind of a sad song too.

Leo Laporte (02:56:15):
I, yeah. A lot of the sad songs. Major Thomas is sad. A lot of the songs about spacer sad.

Caller 9 (02:56:21):
Laura stole my thunder. A couple of shows back coming out of the break before the break that you go, go to, to, to Rod. She played The Birds.

Leo Laporte (02:56:33):
Oh,

Caller 9 (02:56:33):
Hey, Mr. Space Man.

Leo Laporte (02:56:35):
Hey Mr. Space man. Yeah. I love that song. I didn't hear her play that You played that Laura. I must, yeah. A couple weeks ago. Oh, I must have been drunk. The Birds. Yeah, I they also did Eight Mile High. They, yeah. That's a good one. I like a Mr. Space man. She does have good taste. Paul. Give my regards to Jennifer. I have to run cuz I gotta, I gotta, poor Laura stuck here while we talk. I'll,

Caller 9 (02:57:00):
I'll be calling back on I next week. We'll probably be crazy for you. But I do have a, a couple of suggestions for the new show.

Leo Laporte (02:57:09):
Oh good. Well I'd love to hear 'em. Thanks Paul. Yeah.

Caller 9 (02:57:13):
Yeah. You've done such a great job as a communicator. You know, you, you know, the art and craft of radio and TV broadcasting like few people.

Leo Laporte (02:57:23):
It's very kind. Thank you.

Caller 9 (02:57:25):
And you know, I'll be there. I'm gonna give, of course Rich, I think he's great.

Leo Laporte (02:57:30):
Oh, rich is the TV guy. He'll be, he's great on the radio. He'll do a fabulous job. And I love it that we're not competing with him. I did not know, in fact, for a long time I thought he was gonna do Saturday and Sunday. So I was very pleased when he said, oh no, no, I'm not doing that. I'm just doing Saturday. I thought, oh, that's great. So we'll still do the internet version of the show and we won't be competing against each other, which is I think the best. Yeah,

Caller 9 (02:57:52):
Yeah. Okay. About that. And Micah is very good and he's

Leo Laporte (02:57:56):
Gonna be great. Yeah. He's, he's, he's the future. Yep. Hey, a pleasure talking to you Paul. Give my regards to Jennifer.

Caller 9 (02:58:05):
I sure will. And will be, you know, and as soon as you can open up again, I would love to come see a new

Leo Laporte (02:58:11):
Place. Yeah. You're just up, just down the road. Yeah. Deal. I'll wave at you as we go down to sfo. <Laugh>. Alright. Thanks Paul. Have a good one. Well, that's it for the Tech Guy Show for today. Thank you so much for being here. And don't forget TWiT, T W I T, it stands for this week at Tech and you find it@twit.tv, including the podcasts for this show. We talk about Windows and Windows Weekly, Macintosh on 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 guys show. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.The Tech Guy