Ask The Tech Guys 1961 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 (00:00:00):
It's time for Ask The Tech Guys a rare Saturday edition. I'm Leo Laporte coming up in just a bit. I'll show you some ways you can get music out of your computer and into your ears.
Mikah Sargent (00:00:09):
And I'm Mikah Sargent and I'm going to show you how you can extract files from your iPhone or iPad Backup
Leo Laporte (00:00:15):
Plus. While you shouldn't pick up a u SB key sitting in your parking lot and stick it in your computer. A look at bad USB all coming up. Next on Ask the Tech Bats podcasts you love
... (00:00:29):
From people you trust.
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This is TWI tweet.
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This is Ask the Tech Guys episode 1961, recorded Saturday, February 11th, 2023. Not My Hot Tub buddy. This episode of Ask the Tech Guys brought to you by eight Sleep good. Sleep is the ultimate game changer and the pod cover is the ultimate sleep machine. Go to eightsleep.com/twit to check out the pod cover and save $150 a checkup. Eight. Sleep currently ships within the us, Canada, the uk, and select countries in the EU and Australia. And buy Melissa over 10,000 clients worldwide in industries like retail education, healthcare, insurance, finance, and government. Rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit. 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,
Leo Laporte (00:01:52):
Hey, hey. Will everybody <laugh>?
(00:01:54):
Oh, here we are. It's an Ask the Tech guys on a Saturday. Oh,
Mikah Sargent (00:01:59):
This is
Leo Laporte (00:01:59):
Weird. Mikah Sargent on my left.
Mikah Sargent (00:02:02):
That is me and Leo Laporte on my left. <Laugh> Wait, <laugh> stage Rock word. Oh, got it on my right.
Leo Laporte (00:02:10):
Yeah. I don't know how it works. I don't know how. All this
Mikah Sargent (00:02:12):
Stuff, he's over there. Leo Laport.
Leo Laporte (00:02:14):
We are doing this show on a Saturday cuz tomorrow is Sunday.
Mikah Sargent (00:02:17):
Tomorrow is Sunday. The holy day where we rest
Leo Laporte (00:02:20):
The great day, the holy day that all of the United States gathers is probably the last thing that happens in the US where most of the country's watching. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. We're talking about the Super Bowl, of course. And for that reason, it's where advertisers want to be,
Mikah Sargent (00:02:37):
Right? Right.
Leo Laporte (00:02:38):
The Super Bowl this year and ad in the Super Bowl, $7 million for half a minute. So when you see the ads on the Super Bowl and you look at 'em <laugh> and you go, Hmm, that company has a lot of money to spend. And those are, well, this is gonna be very interesting this year because normally those are what we call branding ads. I'm, I've, because of twit learned a little bit about the ad industry and branding ads are just like what Coca-Cola or Budweiser does, just to get the name tied, get the name out there, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> they don't really focus too much on benefits. It's just, you know, it's the real thing. Coca-Cola or you're the Pepsi generation. Actually I'm the Pepsi generation <laugh> that kind of thing where it's just branding and it's just feel good. Goodwill. Pepsi this year is actually abandoning the halftime. I think they're still gonna have some ads. We'll see. And they bought, instead they bought several million dollars ads on Twitter. They're doing a Twitter
Mikah Sargent (00:03:35):
Takeover on
Leo Laporte (00:03:36):
Twitter. On Twitter as is Anhauser Busch Budweiser. Interesting. So I'm wondering, see, we are in an a, an ad recession right now. We're in a economic, so not quite a recession. Things are starting to look better. Jobs are good and inflation's going down, but people, businesses are really concerned. That's why you saw all those layoffs. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, holy cow. And it advertisers also have pulled back quite a bit, as you probably noticed. We don't have as many ads on our shows. So I'm really interested to see who's buying 7 million ads on the Super Bowl. Furthermore, I'm gonna guess, I may be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of these ads these days are not gonna be so much the branding ads, but more like the MyPillow guy ads, where it's call 807 7 3 and 4 4 9 9 right now and get $39 off four pillows for the price of one uhhuh.
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That kind of thing. That's what we call direct response advertising. It's frankly the kinda advertising you see on podcasts. When we started Tech TV in the early days that's all we had. When it's an unproven medium or a new medium, advertisers say we want, we want to know if it's working. We want to give out a number, or in our case, we give out a special url, you know we wanna know if it's working. Those are direct response ads. Usually when you see direct response ads, it means it's kind of a lower rent. Got
Mikah Sargent (00:04:56):
It. Because those big ones, that's the company going, well, I know
Leo Laporte (00:05:00):
Gonna be a bunch of 7 million, no big deal. We'll send a, sell a ton of Coke for 7 million. So it'll be very interesting to see. Tomorrow I'll be watching with interest. What kind of ads we get.
Mikah Sargent (00:05:11):
Do you know when twits ad is gonna be on there?
Leo Laporte (00:05:14):
I think we bought a takeover for the whole halftime. Nice. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (00:05:17):
Nice. So Rihanna's playing for us. Maybe
Leo Laporte (00:05:19):
Rihanna's playing. No, actually Apple did. And Apple, even Apple who has more money than anybody, right? I think they have almost more than 150 billion in cash. So 7 million is like, that's in the couch cushions right down here. Right. But even Apple is gonna do a lot of things to pay for that Rihanna concert they had, I don't know if you noticed, but Rihanna has pretty much taken over Apple Music. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (00:05:42):
And other services too. Instagram is all Rihanna right now. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:05:45):
Yeah. All Rihanna all the time. Yeah. So that's, I think that's kind of what happens is we gotta get our money back out of this. And then this is a sign of the times. You won't see, apparently you're not gonna see a lot of ads, okay. Is what I'm reading. But one ad you might see, but only in certain markets is ads from Dan o Dowd. Dan o Dowd is a California entrepreneur billionaire who has been buying for the last couple of years, anti Tesla ads. Oh. He is the guy who put up all those cutouts of children and then had the Tesla drive right through them. Got it. You might have seen that ad. He is gonna pour some money into Super Bowl ads, but not national. Not the 7 million ones, but they'll play in DC He's trying to get the legislators right.
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State capitals like our own. Sacramento, Atlanta, Albany, Tallahassee, Austin trying to get legislators to do something about Tesla's full self-driving. It's his, it's his thing that it's dangerous. That in fact, I think I'm reading on the Washington Post, that this ad is gonna show a model three running into a child sized mannequin crossing over the center line into oncoming traffic, driving past, do not enter sides, passing a school bus with the flashing stoplights on. You're not supposed to stop and hitting a stroller in the middle of the road. <Laugh>, Elon Musk says, this guy is nuts. Of course, I'm not convinced. I think he has a point. Shall we say that we're all in this beta test mm-hmm. <Affirmative> for full self-driving. So it'll be very interesting to, to see these ads. If you're in one of those markets, you'll, you'll see them. I think you remember there was a guy, maybe apocryphal some time ago named Ned Lu.
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And Ned Lud was a weaver. You know, he would, he would weave fabric by hand. And along came these new automated looms. The Jack Hart looms that didn't need weavers, they would just weave. And he got a bunch of his fellow weavers to destroy these looms. They were called the Ludite. That's where we got that name. I wonder if we're gonna have o Dite <laugh> in a, in a hundred years or 200 years, or people gonna look back and say, you know, there was his nut job. Right. Dan o Dowd. He didn't believe in self-driving cars. What is he Nuts? Everybody has them now. So we'll see. He might be the next Ned Lud. Wouldn't that be interesting? That would be interesting. Yeah. what else is news before we get to some calls? Call.Twi.Tv. That's how you get ahold of us in the Zoom.
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It's best to probably do that on a phone. Just pick up your phone, open up the browser and your phone and enter, call TWI tv Zoom will launch. And then now we know your camera's working, your microphone's working. And you can sit there with your arm up like this for about an hour, which is a <laugh> really good exercise for everybody. You know, you can put it down until we get in your workout. We call roll Sunday, but get in the queue. Call twit tv. We also have, I think we have some emails. Do we have any videos? This, that week? It's no video, but yeah, we do have some emails. Can we just get people to send us videos? Ask the tech guys@twit.tv if you're too shy or your arm is too limp to to to call in li email us. Ask the tech guys at Trip tv your questions.
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And it'd be nice if you want to record a 32nd video saying, Hey, here's my question. That way it's nice to see you. It makes it fun. That's one of the advantages. PC shipments, PC CPU shipments. The worst in 30 years, which actually means they're the worst in history. X 86 processors. This is from mercury Research. D Dean McCarran as a, as an analyst there. The a x 86 processor market has just endured the largest on quarter. We know this cause we saw Intel's results last week and on year declines in our 30 year history. Since they've been taking, keeping track of this stuff. People are just not buying PCs.
Mikah Sargent (00:09:46):
So those chips are exclusively made for PCs, but these companies are making chips for other things that are being purchased, right? It's not,
Leo Laporte (00:09:54):
No, it's bad all round. Okay. <laugh>. It's just bad. But, but it's probably just temporary, right? Everybody bought computers and technology during the pandemic,
Mikah Sargent (00:10:03):
So it's less steady. It
Leo Laporte (00:10:05):
May be Okay. We, you know, well, no one knows what's going on. It's, you know, it's a combination of inflation recession and then people got stuff during the pandemic so they'd have it. And, you know, I'm
Mikah Sargent (00:10:16):
Wondering what's the biggest driver of new computer purchases? I guess schools maybe. And if we're not in school, if we're at home, we're using personal computers. So then school education isn't buying as many new PCs.
Leo Laporte (00:10:28):
It's all of the above. Yeah. Right? Yeah, absolutely. It's all of the above. Finally, did you see, so <laugh>, so AI is the news, right? That's the big story all around. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And we've been talking, of course, we started talking way back round about Dolly and Dolly two from open ai and then chat. G P T came along doing text, stable diffusion, mid journey, doing graphics. There's even music AI now. It's going crazy. And of course, the big story last week was Microsoft admitted. Yeah, we're putting, we put a billion dollars into open AI and chat G P T, we're gonna put another $10 billion into it. Yeah. We're firing all these people. Pay no attention to that. We're gonna put another $10 billion into, and we're going to we're gonna put it into office. And then this week they announced they had a Snap press conference. They're gonna put it into Bing, bing. And of course, in order to use it, first of all, you have to sign up. It's not available yet, except for a few. And if you, when you sign up, bing suddenly becomes your default search edge becomes your default browser. It's a really, it's a, it's a naked land grab. Meanwhile, Google and Boo
Mikah Sargent (00:11:35):
<Laugh>, let's hop on it.
Leo Laporte (00:11:36):
<Laugh> and had an instant, pretty much an instant press conference the next day, five 30 in the morning our time. I didn't get up for it. To announce that we're gonna have Bard do the same thing. An experimental conversational AI service. See, they're worried that Bing will suddenly become the number one search engine using chat G p T. You can use bar to plan a friend's baby shower, compare two Oscar nominated movies, get lunch ideas based on what's in your fridge. Only problem <laugh>, when <laugh>, they put up a little in fact, I, I saw a story today that said some Google employees are a little miffed that Sundar Pacha rushed this out. Cuz it really wasn't Oh, really? Wasn't ready. Let me go to the the Google announcement on its on its Google blog because there's a little mistake in there. Let me find this.
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Writer's spotted it. And the new scientist, let's see, key Google keyword blog. I wanna show you the animated gift they put up of an example of an example search that you might do on the new Bard. I guess they're gonna put it in a search. I mean, that's really it. You know, one of, one of its most valuable things is instead of, and of course this is not good for people who make content like us, instead of going to those sites mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you ask the ai and the AI goes out and synopsize it. And then where, where is the where is the the post here? Oh, I should have, I thought, you know, I had, I had it up in the Virgin. I thought the virgins was animating, but I guess it, I guess it wasn't, let me see if I could find this one.
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This is a tweet from an astronomer at university of California Santa Cruz, where my dad taught. So I had kind of noticed this one. Oh, he's replying to the tweet from Google. Oh yeah, I see the, here it is. Here is, here's the anime. So here's an introducing bard and here's the animated thing where you would ask it, what new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope. Can I tell my nine year old about? And it says, well, in 2023, it, you know, it get pictures of the beginning of the universe in green. And the final thing is it took the very first picture of an exoplanet. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> a earth-like planet outside our own solar system. Well, no <laugh>, it didn't. Bruce McIntosh works as a University of California. Says, speaking of someone who imaged an exoplanet 14 years ago, fears like, you should find a better example.
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Can you believe they rushed this out so fast that they rushed it out with, and, and they, and they decided this is a good search, right? Let's do this. We'll put this on our blog. This is so exci with the wrong answer. No one fact checked what it was saying. No. Well, this is the problem, isn't it? With some of these things. I think <laugh> it's possible. And we'll see what Bing does to have a a, a an AI answer your search queries correctly. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> chat. G P t was never designed to do this. Apparently neither was barred Google's ai, but it's important that it be correct. Otherwise, that's not so good. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (00:14:51):
It's, it's hallucination is what they call it. Hallucination. When Yeah. When I call it,
Leo Laporte (00:14:55):
I call it
Mikah Sargent (00:14:56):
Mansplain, making an error.
Leo Laporte (00:14:57):
<Laugh>, it's confidently wrong.
Mikah Sargent (00:14:59):
Yeah. It, yeah, exactly. It, it can make up this data because it simply hallucinates based on what information is out there.
Leo Laporte (00:15:08):
All right. Coming up on the show, we've got some stuff. We've got, as I said, Daniel Suarez a little clip from our interview with him yesterday. I am gonna talk about digital to analog conversion. Awesome. And I'll show you I have a review unit, actually I bought it so it's not really a review unit. I have a review of something I bought for my wife that'll do that. The problem being computers, see music and sound as ones and zeros. Your ears see it as waveforms. How do you convert digital to analog? We'll talk about that and show you some devices that do that in just a little bit. Would you like to take a call or
Mikah Sargent (00:15:43):
Two? Ooh, let's go to the
Leo Laporte (00:15:44):
Phone. Let's go to the phone. Randy's been very patient. And I told Randy, I said I will, I will take you first cuz he got here before you did.
Mikah Sargent (00:15:52):
Wow. Nice. Good work
Leo Laporte (00:15:55):
Randy. And well done. Randy. Welcome to ask the tech guys.
Caller 1 (00:15:59):
Hello? You can hear me?
Leo Laporte (00:16:00):
Hear you great.
Mikah Sargent (00:16:01):
Yeah, you sound great. Are
Leo Laporte (00:16:02):
You out in Oh, great. Out in the great outdoors on the I see the lily pads. And where are you?
Caller 1 (00:16:08):
Actually I'm in Sarasota, Florida. That background is from Monet's Garden in Juvey France.
Leo Laporte (00:16:13):
Oh, I've been to Juveni. That's beautiful. That's the water lilies he painted. Have you been there? Have you been there?
Caller 1 (00:16:20):
We were there this last
Leo Laporte (00:16:21):
Fall. Isn't it beautiful?
Caller 1 (00:16:24):
It was, yes. Gorgeous.
Leo Laporte (00:16:25):
Yeah, it's amazing. Amazing. It's May
Caller 1 (00:16:27):
Flowers though.
Leo Laporte (00:16:28):
<Laugh>. Is that, is that your picture?
Caller 1 (00:16:30):
That's my picture. Very
Leo Laporte (00:16:31):
Nice.
Caller 1 (00:16:32):
With an iPhone.
Leo Laporte (00:16:34):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Look at that. Stunning. The only thing missing is that little Japanese bridge that's somewhere else I guess in
Caller 1 (00:16:40):
The Oh, that was someplace else. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:16:42):
<Laugh>. So what can we, what can we do for you
Caller 1 (00:16:44):
First of all, your banner shows, but this is Sunday, February 11th. I think you that needs to be fixed it. Oh
Mikah Sargent (00:16:51):
Cuz it's Saturday,
Leo Laporte (00:16:52):
February. February 11th date's. Right. The day's wrong. You normally do this on Sunday.
Mikah Sargent (00:16:56):
It's cuz we had a chat bot do it and
Leo Laporte (00:16:58):
Got it wrong. We asked chat G p t to write our lower third. Yeah. Thank you for correcting that. Whoop, cease
Caller 1 (00:17:04):
<Laugh>. I wonder if you talk about blacklisted IP address. I've never heard you talk about it before. I can give you the full story if you want it or for
Leo Laporte (00:17:15):
E for email purposes.
Caller 1 (00:17:17):
Yes. Yeah. We have, we have two homes the home here in Florida. We have Comcast for our internet. And we've had it for several years and we get our email. But our other home, we have a spectrum is our internet provider but not our email provider. And so when this summer when we were at that home we could not get our, we intermittently we could not get our email on our computers, which are both wifi and ethernet connected. We use the apple mail program and next to our names would pop up a triangle, which, and you click on it, it pops on message, which there's something about the IP at the IP address is blacklisted.
Leo Laporte (00:18:07):
Yeah.
Caller 1 (00:18:07):
Yeah. So we cannot, and then what happened intermittently? We had no problem getting our Gmail. If we used our phones through cellular, we had no problem. We could go to the Comcast website. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:18:22):
We could, we could fix this. Let me explain what's what's going on. It all started with spam and internet service providers like Comcast don't want you to be sending email from your own computer to the outside world in case you're a spammer. Right? So they block the smt, port smtp is 24 25, and they, or the, and or they may be doing what they're doing to you, which is saying, Hey, you know, you can't do this. Or it sounds like this might not even be Comcast, it might be coming out of your, whether it's spectrum or Comcast coming out of your house. And then the email server seeing your IP address is saying, oh, oh, no, no, no. And this is really too bad because it used to be, wasn't so hard to run your own email server. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it is no longer practical. In fact, I was trying to find that there's a great, there was a great piece a couple of months ago by a guy who for 25 years is running, running his own email and says, I finally gave up because Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, the biggies have dominated. And if you're not sending from one of them, they're probably gonna reject your email. So in your case, you're not trying to run an email server, I'm guessing.
Caller 1 (00:19:36):
Nope.
Leo Laporte (00:19:37):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Most people don't do that. So what this really is saying is you've misconfigured your email. Because if, normally what you do if you're sending email is you don't try to send it from your own system. You, you send it from Gmail, for instance, if you're using Gmail. And the way you do that is when you configure your mail client, you'll g you'll log into Gmail and you'll configure both an inbound server. Typically that's POP three or imap. In Gmail's case, they have their own special technology, but it's an inbound server. And you'll configure the outbound server, which is an SMTP server, and it'll be something like SMTP gmail.com and, and actually in with Gmail, you don't have to set that up. You just log into your Google account and most email clients will go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll, we'll send it through Gmail. If you're sending it through Gmail, you it, the recipient never sees your IP address. That doesn't come into the matter at all. Google sees it because you're using your mail client, but Google knows you, you're authenticated with Google. So for some reason, when you set up your outbound email, you didn't authenticate with the outbound server that using, is it Gmail that you use?
Caller 1 (00:20:49):
No, I use Comcast. Okay. A
Leo Laporte (00:20:52):
Mail. So the way Comcast works, same thing. You authenticate with Comcast servers, not by giving them your IP address, but by logging in. So I would if if you're using Webmail, this will never come up. But you're obviously using Apple Mail or, or Outlook or something like that. Right? Right,
Caller 1 (00:21:10):
Right. Apple
Leo Laporte (00:21:11):
Mail. Apple Mail. So what you wanna do is, is just start over. It won't, don't worry, it's not gonna delete any mail, but just start over. Setting up Apple Mail. And I'm trying to remember with Apple Mail. I don't know if Apple, I don't think it says Comcast. It'll say Google. It'll say Outlook. Yeah. Or choose POP or imap. Yeah, choose imap. Comcast will have instructions on how to set it up. It will involve you authenticating user in your Comcast login. The fact that you're getting mail means you've done that for the inbound portion. The fact that it's saying, wait a minute, <laugh>, you can't send mail from there means you have an out You, you're not authenticating on the outbound portion. Apple mail's trying to send it from your system. Can't do it. And it is too bad because in fact, we had a sponsor some time ago, they've just gone out of business, which is sad called Helm. And the whole idea of Helm was, well, you can run an email server, but in order to do that, they had to route your mail through their server and they had to set it all up with Google and Outlook and all these people that don't know we're okay. It's going through us. Is was a kind of a mess. It's really a, I think it's a bad thing because it, it, it's a response to spam, but it's, it means people can't run their own servers anymore. And it, but
Caller 1 (00:22:24):
Why does it happen in, in our other house where we're using our Spectrum provider and not in the house. And then hour, I'm using Comcast
Leo Laporte (00:22:32):
Because you've set the mail up in your, with Comcast, fine. You have to go back then to your spectrum setup, remove that and start over. Probably. I'm almost certain what's happening here is you're logged into Spectrum and you're trying to use Comcast as you're, as you're sending receiver. And Comcast says, well, you can't do that <laugh>. So it's a, it's a misconfiguration in the outbound email. Take it out, start over. Make sure you've got both inbound and outbound properly set up. As I remember, I, you can send using Comcast's outbound server from anywhere as long as you're properly authenticated. I don't think that's a problem. If it ends up being a problem, it a little inside tip. You don't have to use the same outbound center that you use for inbound. So a lot of people, for instance, say you're using Comcast Mail and using Spectrum Mail, you can have all your outbound mail go through Google if you want. All you have to do is set up the outbound server in your Apple mail to work with Google. Huh? Yeah. So there's no requirement that you have to inbound and outbound have to be the same server. So it's not unusual, in fact for a lot of people to, to get co you know, Comcast mail or Spectrum Mail, but use Google as their outbound mail. We gotta clip
Mikah Sargent (00:23:45):
That and share it on the internet. Cuz I don't think people know this
Leo Laporte (00:23:48):
<Laugh> that,
Mikah Sargent (00:23:48):
That's a good tip. I
Leo Laporte (00:23:49):
Have no idea. I would say in this case, spectrum is trying to protect its network from spammers. They say, well, you're not sending through our servers, you're authenticated as you, I'm pretty sure you could go into your Apple mail and reconfigure it so that it's sending it properly through Comcast. If Spectrum is being a real jerk, a really jerky jerk face <laugh>, maybe you'll have to configure it when you're in Florida to send it through Spectrum.
Caller 1 (00:24:17):
Well, people would tell me to like call Spectrum and get them to change my I e P address.
Leo Laporte (00:24:23):
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Your IP address should never come into the equation. Almost all residential IP addresses will be blocked because of anti spam. Right. They don't expect it from residential IP addresses. And this is the, the complaint is that really the big tech giants have taken over email. Email is no longer something everybody can use. So you have to send your outbound email through Comcast or Spectrum or Gmail or Fast Mail or whoever, you know, our sponsor, whoever you want. But you have to send it through them. You can't send it from your IP address. So your IP address is, is irrelevant in this question. All right.
Caller 1 (00:24:58):
I'll give it a
Leo Laporte (00:24:59):
Try. Hey, I appreciate the call. Thank you. It's great to to talk to you now. Do I have to, just a question, do I, I just press hang up. Is that all I have to do? Are we back to how we used to be? John? I don't remember how this works. It's so complicated. Yes. That's all I had to do. Nice. It's a magic button. It's a miracle. <Laugh>. what do you wanna do next? Mike is Sargent. Should we take another question or? Okay. All right. I can do that. Who's got his hands up? I see John in, he's got his hands up. But let me, John, let me figure out which John you are. There he is. And press the send to the breakout room. We're getting it, we're getting it down folks. Now John, you just have to unmute and say hello. Where are you calling from, John? Oh, it's down the guitar.
Caller 2 (00:25:46):
Got it. Hello. Hello.
Leo Laporte (00:25:48):
Hello John. What's up?
Caller 2 (00:25:49):
Alright, took me a minute to to click through all the settings and, and get it pulled up. I'm in
Leo Laporte (00:25:54):
Yeah,
Caller 2 (00:25:55):
I'm in St. Petersburg, Florida. So not far away. Tell from the last caller. You
Leo Laporte (00:25:59):
Know how I know cuz you got baseballs. You obviously go down to spring training, don't you?
Caller 2 (00:26:05):
Well, I, yes. And also I live right next to out here is the TRO and field where the rays play.
Leo Laporte (00:26:10):
Ah, nice.
Caller 2 (00:26:12):
Too bright to see, but I'm walking distance from a stadium.
Leo Laporte (00:26:15):
Oh. I've always wanted to be walking distance from a stadium. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that's pretty cool. I would then get season tickets and just spend my life at the stadium. That would be so much
Caller 2 (00:26:23):
Fun. Yeah. I try to go as much as I can. So I had a analogy NAS question. I'm, I'm set one up at a a business partner's house and I'm trying to log in from where I am and I'm at the, you know, maybe the, the limits of my technical knowledge here. So I made it pretty far. But if I use the, the link to log to the the NAS remotely, do I need to have a VPN to do that? No.
Leo Laporte (00:26:57):
There's two ways to do it with a Sonology. Sonology has, and then I would recommend this something called Quick Connect. You've seen that?
Caller 2 (00:27:03):
Yeah, that's what I'm using. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:27:04):
Yeah. So you will, you will name your nas, you know you know, I don't know John's, Johns Tampa Bay Rays NAS or whatever. It's <laugh>. Okay. And and dot quick connect dot two. And what happens is, this is called something called Nat traversal. You, when you go to your nas, it actually goes to sonology.com. Sonology resolves the local address cuz your IP address may be moving. It's, it's a moving target Resolves it says I see it and sends that connection down to John's nas. And I believe it's my understanding, once that connection's set up, now Sonology out of the mix. It's not like all your data's going through them, they just do the Nat traversal. So you can find your nas. That's the easiest if you want, it's non-trivial, but you can actually set up your NAS to log in via a direct via IP address. You have to open ports on your router 5,000 and 5,001. And it's complicated. That's why they set up Quick Connect. Quick Connect works fine. I don't think it's a privacy concern. That's
Mikah Sargent (00:28:11):
Why I was gonna say I suggest using that. Yeah, you can do the other, but it does get complicated after a while. Yes. If you've gotta change things.
Leo Laporte (00:28:16):
I actually have a domain name registered for my nass. Yes. And, and so I can type in, you know, leo's nas.com or I'm not gonna give out the address. Right. You get the idea and you know, usually I'll have to type FI colon 5,001 mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And you could do that. There are some things you can run on Sonology, and this is May, you may be running up against that are more tricky. For instance, if you wanted to run an email server or I run a sync things server, those kinds of things, they have to, then you do have to open ports on your router, on your firewall ORs some complicated things you have to do because they don't use Quick Connect. So if it's just logging into the nas, setting up the NASA installing stuff, using the program, Sonology provides the backup and so forth. Quick Connect is by far the easiest. A VPN won't help you at all.
Caller 2 (00:29:08):
Okay. Yeah. My reason for asking is I'm so over where the, the NAS is physically located, we shoot video and then I'll store the that on the nas. Right. And then from here, I I, when I log in to
Leo Laporte (00:29:21):
You wanna play it back to
Caller 2 (00:29:22):
Do it? Yeah. It's it plays back. You know, here's what I would do. A buffering.
Leo Laporte (00:29:27):
Yeah. Get up, get Plex. It's available in the app store for sonology. I don't think it's a third party app. I think it's, but it might be a third party app. But if you Google Plex Sonology set up a Plex server on your sonology, and then life gets much easier because basically that's a media server and now you can watch it. There are other kinds of media servers, sonology supports Apple's Media server technology. So if you were just on an Apple network with an Apple TV and Macintosh's and iPhones, that would be a good way to go. It supports samba, which is Windows Networking as well. But I think Plex is by far the easiest. Once you do that, now you might store other media on there because suddenly you're, you're,
Mikah Sargent (00:30:06):
And you've got like the thumbnails and the organization. Yeah. I mean there's so much that just gets built in with that, that makes it so much simpler than just looking at the files and hoping they load <laugh>. Yeah. It, it handles all of that for you.
Caller 2 (00:30:18):
So, so then do I take, if we're filming a video, do I put it onto Plex at, at the location? Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:30:24):
So Plex will be running on your nas, it's a server software. And you tell Plex what parts of the Sonology hold media files and it will look at those. It will index them. It'll give you an ice user interface. Makes it very easy to play 'em back. You can even open it to the outside world as well. If you do that, a lot of Plex owners do that, then you will have to do some port forwarding and things like that on your router.
Caller 2 (00:30:48):
Okay. So if I'm remote, like I'm not physically there, do I still go to Quick Connect to then go into Plex? No,
Leo Laporte (00:30:55):
No. Then yeah, now, so <laugh>, aas we should explain stands for Network attached storage. It's really a computer doesn't have a keyboard monitor mouse. It connects to your network usually via ethernet, via hardwire into your router. That NAS is visible internally using Quick Connect externally, you're now putting out on the public internet. That's a little more complicated and there's more security concerns. Honestly, it's one of the benefits of doing a Sonology, it's a very good way to do that. But now it gets a little bit more complicated if you wanna make Plex Public, a lot of people do. They say, Hey, view my v movie collection. You know you can do that, but you'll have to open ports. You'll have to set it up. You don't use Quick Connect for that. Quick Connect is only if you want to connect inside the house.
Caller 2 (00:31:41):
Okay. All right. Yeah. I'm, I've gotten into the, the deep water here. I can see that.
Leo Laporte (00:31:45):
Yeah, you're getting deep water, but that's all right. You live in the, you live in the waterfront. Mike b is reminding me to say, do not install the Sonology app store version of Plex. Better to go get it from Plex directly. The Plex store app is more up to date. And
Mikah Sargent (00:32:00):
Plex has great guides on how to do the proper installation. Yeah. So especially with, you're using a Sonology, it's a very common network attached storage. So they have the guides to walk you through how to do this. So
Leo Laporte (00:32:11):
If you really want to do this, it is well worth the effort.
Mikah Sargent (00:32:14):
I, I, I
Leo Laporte (00:32:15):
Agree. I think people who use this Love it. I guess you do. Yeah. but it's some work. You're gonna dive in. So you're gonna go to, is it plex.tv? You're gonna go to the Plex site and you're gonna read documentation. You're gonna read, there are posts everywhere about how to do this. Cuz so many people do it. You're gonna have to do some studying and read up and not listen to Leo, because <laugh>, you're, they're gonna be better details out there in the real world.
Caller 2 (00:32:41):
All right, well, you got me started at least. So
Leo Laporte (00:32:43):
Yeah, I think it's a lot of fun. I think it's a lot of fun. Mars Worm in our chat room says, remind the caller he'll need file bot to rename the media so Plex can see them. What? Oh my God. Oh boy. I can see the, I don't think that's true, but you could, you could. It gets complicated. It is well worth it. It is well worth it. Hey, it's great to talk to you.
Caller 2 (00:33:04):
Yeah, thanks Ray. Thanks for helping out.
Leo Laporte (00:33:06):
So you go to spring training.
Caller 2 (00:33:10):
The closest spring training here is actually the Yankees. They're at Stein Runner Field right down the road in Tampa. So I'll go check them out for spring training and when the season starts and I, I go see the race
Leo Laporte (00:33:20):
Stick with the raise. We used to go down to Scottsdale to see the giant spring training. It's, it used to be a small intimate affair. <Laugh> <laugh>. It's gotten a little bit bigger. Hey, a pleasure talking to you. Thanks. Thanks for calling. I appreciate it, John. Have fun. Thanks. Taking my call, call back as thanks as needed. <Laugh>.
Caller 2 (00:33:37):
Okay. Well do
Leo Laporte (00:33:38):
All right. I I think I want to go to Jeff, do you wanna talk? I see you there. But I don't see your hand raised. I should probably go to people. Yeah, you do. All right. I'm not, push the button and we're gonna send Jeff in there. Ladies. Gentlemen. The newest senator from the state of Pennsylvania John Federman is on the line here. Oh, wait a minute. No, that's not John Federman. It's, it's Jeff. Hi Jeff. Hello. Jeff <laugh>. He's on his phone. So I, I just wanna show how great that works. Right. Check that out. Plus his arm's getting tired. <Laugh>.
Caller 3 (00:34:11):
Well, no, I'm at the my son's getting haircut.
Leo Laporte (00:34:15):
Oh, you're at the barbershop
Caller 3 (00:34:18):
For me on
Leo Laporte (00:34:19):
One haircut. We should
Caller 3 (00:34:21):
Can, yeah. <Laugh>. No, I, I don't need it. Believe me.
Leo Laporte (00:34:24):
Welcome. Where are you calling from?
Caller 3 (00:34:27):
Thank you. Thank you. It's pleasure. I'm in a place called New City, New York. It's near about 20 miles north of of New York City. Nice. New
Leo Laporte (00:34:34):
Suburbs. It's the new New New New York. The new New York.
Caller 3 (00:34:38):
New New York.
Leo Laporte (00:34:39):
I it doesn't look like a barbershop. You're in,
Caller 3 (00:34:43):
It's like a salon. So, yeah. Super cut. Super
Leo Laporte (00:34:46):
Cuts. Yeah. Love it.
Caller 3 (00:34:47):
Yeah, I, it's very quiet so I can go outside, but that's better.
Leo Laporte (00:34:51):
No, it sounds great either way. Sounds great. This is really a good test to the phone. Yeah. I like What kind of phone are you on?
Caller 3 (00:34:58):
I'm on the iPhone 13 and I got my AirPods,
Leo Laporte (00:35:01):
So Ah, that's why it sounds so good. Yeah. The noise. It's, it's, there's no background noise at all. What can we do for you?
Caller 3 (00:35:08):
I'm gonna visit my parents in Florida in a few weeks and I have a Ring doorbell, but I need something. I don't, I'm, I'm happy with it, but yet I know that there's other choices out there. And my dad is kind of technically challenged my mom. They want it, they live at like, you know, an area where other people have them already. Yeah. And is, you know, it's very, Skee has good wifi obviously, cause it's a small apartment, but I was gonna order, you know Amazon version ring and I don't know, Google, someone told me Google's better and he kind of has a Google Home device and he has Alexa. It's a mixed marriage there. One side of the bed, my mom has Alexa, the other side of the bed, he has Google <laugh>. So <laugh>. So,
Leo Laporte (00:35:46):
So you have to ask him who, who, who's gonna get up and answer the door.
Mikah Sargent (00:35:50):
<Laugh> who wins. So I'll tell you
Caller 3 (00:35:52):
This. Exactly, exactly.
Mikah Sargent (00:35:54):
You ha your, your instincts are correct. And you know what others have told you, the Google Nest doorbell is easily one of the best. And it is it, it works very well. The hardware's premium, it connects very easily and it has a very steady and steadfast, you know, use. And I think the simplicity is there as well. If you're looking for, you know, say you're kind of thinking, okay, I want to do this, but I don't wanna spend a bunch of money in case they end up not wanting to use it or they don't like it. That's where you may look at ufi. Of course UFI is, it's going to require someone with a little bit of technical savvy to get it set up. But if you're kind of trying to save some money, that might be your better bet. I really think that if you want the kind of be all end all, it's the nest. Do you still use a Nest at your house?
Leo Laporte (00:36:46):
I started with a ring. I had a ring for a long time. Loved them. That worked very well with Amazon's Echo. I replaced it with a hello, the Google Hello Doorbell. They worked very well with the Google Assistant. They kind of com both work with each, but I think they're both good. Scooter X is reminding us that in apartments, depends what the mm-hmm. <Affirmative> terms are. You may have some trouble replacing the doorbell. There are actually cameras that go in the peephole.
Mikah Sargent (00:37:13):
That's what I have. Yeah, you
Leo Laporte (00:37:14):
Have a peephole. I
Mikah Sargent (00:37:15):
Have people camera because that's from Google, an apartment. No, it is not, it is a ufi I think. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:37:21):
Yeah. So that might be better from an installation point of view. You're gonna do the installation, I'm figuring, right?
Caller 3 (00:37:29):
Yeah, cuz I already got them. You probably know the company Kangaroo. Yeah. but it didn't, it didn't do video. It just takes snapshots. Yeah. That's not good. They weren't really happy. It was very affordable. Like $30 at the time. Yeah. But ring is on sale for $70 on Amazon now.
Leo Laporte (00:37:42):
Just remember there's a monthly fee for all of these. Yep.
Caller 3 (00:37:46):
Right.
Leo Laporte (00:37:46):
I'm nervous about you fee only because they've been by security issues.
Mikah Sargent (00:37:50):
Yes. They did have a security issue that I, I, I feel comfortable with how it was addressed. But again, we're going back to, you are gonna end up having to do tech support from a distance. Google's Nest or Amazon's ring are gonna be your best bet there because of the ability to go, Hey, this is how we fix it. It's very easy to fix.
Leo Laporte (00:38:10):
It's also nice to use W Ring or Hello because if they have a door real doorbell that is powered mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, there's a little wire that comes from a DC transformer somewhere in the house, then you don't have to worry about batteries. Right. You just, it, it gets his power from the DC transformer and it just works. Otherwise they're battery powered and they periodically will have to charge 'em up, you know, disconnect them, plug 'em in, that kind of thing, which is kind of annoying. Okay. Do you have to do that with yours?
Mikah Sargent (00:38:39):
It is battery powered. Yeah. and I'm just now remembering it is a ring. It's a ring peephole cam. They don't even make that one anymore unfortunately. But I am always having to change the battery.
Leo Laporte (00:38:50):
I find that annoying.
Mikah Sargent (00:38:51):
Yeah, it is.
Leo Laporte (00:38:52):
So, but this is all gonna kinda be dependent on the, what you can do at this apartment complex. Like if they'll let you do, take out the old doorbells, it looks different. He said everybody's got one. So it sounds like that'll
Caller 3 (00:39:04):
Work. Yeah, I contacted the, the store manager already. Excellent. It should work. I contacted the store management, they said fine. So.
Leo Laporte (00:39:09):
Oh, lovely. Yeah. And if, and if they've got that wire, that power for the doorbell, most doorbells that light up do then you're, then that's really the best way to go. I think Ring is fine and one advantage if everybody in your complex has Ring Uhhuh <affirmative> is they have this social network called, is it neighbor or Neighbor Nextdoor.
Mikah Sargent (00:39:28):
Next story. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:39:29):
Something like that. And next door ring neighbor, they can see your camera. You could see their camera. You could send it to the police if there's trouble. <Laugh>. Some people don't like
Mikah Sargent (00:39:37):
That. Yeah. I'm not big on it, but
Leo Laporte (00:39:40):
I'm, you know, I'm taking in there live with a bunch of other older folks in a community who might well, like that kind of security. Right? Yeah.
Caller 3 (00:39:46):
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. That's probably the best way to go. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:39:50):
But I, if everybody else has it, there's a lot to be said for it, you know, you know, it works. They can join that network that, and, and they can, you know, everybody can see everybody else's. And
Mikah Sargent (00:40:00):
I'm, I'm also thinking about too, if other people are ha they have echoes it's somewhat likely that they will have what's called Amazon sidewalk. So that just kind of helps. Oh, that's to make sure that there's an, a connection for point a camera at all times. Yeah. So, yeah. And
Caller 3 (00:40:15):
It's, it's funny that you're mentioning that cuz I was gonna get them, they have to go downstairs and get the mail. I was gonna get them the sensor. Oh, nice. That ring makes also cause that sidewalk wifi there. Yeah. He's a sidewalk. So I was thinking that too. So sounds like I cut them off a
Mikah Sargent (00:40:28):
Little bit. Yeah. Sounds like you're
Leo Laporte (00:40:30):
A good boy, Jess.
Mikah Sargent (00:40:30):
Yeah. And that's, you're
Leo Laporte (00:40:31):
Good son
Caller 3 (00:40:33):
<Laugh>. Thank you. I'm gonna tell, I'm gonna show record this for my mother She'll who's
Leo Laporte (00:40:36):
Got, does mom have the echo on her side of the bed?
Caller 3 (00:40:40):
Yeah, she'll be,
Leo Laporte (00:40:40):
Yeah. Mom has the Echo
Mikah Sargent (00:40:42):
<Laugh> mom's the
Leo Laporte (00:40:42):
Winner. I was in the, I was doing a phone interview a couple of days ago and I have a Google assistant in my, and it shouts someone's at the front door and puts up a picture. I mean, that's cool for them to love that. Right. They don't have to get up. They could see who's there. I said, could you mind if I interrupt this interview and go and answer the door? And I answered it and the guy says, I'm here to drain the hot tub. I said, well, you're not here to drain my hot tub, buddy. I don't know. Oh no. He said, oh, what's your address? And it was the, was the neighbors. Oh. So they, so that is the disadvantage. Somebody rings the wrong bell. You still get that big announcement. But nevertheless it was,
Caller 3 (00:41:19):
Yeah. But I, and the mailbox by the way is awesome. Cause I have it programmed to say You've got Mail
Leo Laporte (00:41:25):
<Laugh>. You've got Mail <laugh>.
Caller 3 (00:41:26):
Yeah. That's awesome.
Leo Laporte (00:41:27):
You know, I, somewhere you can download that guy's voice from a o l, what was his name? D Derwood. Oh my goodness. You remember his name? Yeah, he he was very famous for a while in his retirement. He was for a few bucks you could ask him to record one for you <laugh>. And I had him record one and I don't know where it is. I wish I could find it. Ellwood Ellwood. Ellwood Edwards. Ellwood Edwards. That's right. And and he, I can't remember. He said something like, you've got mail. You twit <laugh>. It was great. I don't know what I'd do with it. I don't want to hear you've got mail ever again. Hey. No, I don't blame me. But your parents, Mike. Thank you Jeff. Hey Mike, have a good day. Hey, I hope you get a good haircut. <Laugh> the sun. Bye. Bye-Bye.
(00:42:19):
Let's see, we had a wonderful time yesterday talking with Daniel Suarez. He is, he's been on our interview show Triangulation five times. This is his fifth interview. Wow. Starting with his very first novel, which was a mind-bending novel called Demonn. If you haven't read it, it's still rec highly recommended. His seventh novel just came out. It's the successor to Delta V. We, we interviewed him for that. This is was called Critical Mass. It's just out, it's wonderful. But what's interesting about Daniel he's a space buff. He is really into space. In fact, before he did the interview with me, he was on this weekend space last week with Rod Pile and Tec Mallek talking about space. And we got started talking not just about the novel. And it's a fun novel and it's great plot and everything, but, but Daniel does something.
(00:43:09):
He's very brave. All of his stuff is either present time or near future. Ooh. In this case, this is 2038. And that's brave for a science fiction author because, you know, in about 15 years people are gonna know whether he was right or not, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But he wrote this because he's really wants us to start thinking about space. Not going to Mars, but about space as our, as a way to fix climate change, to fix inequality, to solve a lot of the world's problems. So I, I talked a little bit about that with him, and I asked him, I actually started by asking him about this cover, which is a picture of the moon and a space station above it. Here's what he had to say.
Daniel Suarez (00:43:53):
This is again, we wanted a human element, just the beginning of a human element, which is Clark Station, and then the moon, which is of course the critical mass in question. But it is, again, metaphorical because of course we want a critical mass of public opinion to realize how important this mass is. Very good. And we are so fortunate. Earth is incredibly fortunate that we have the moon so close to it's sitting
Leo Laporte (00:44:12):
Here waiting
Daniel Suarez (00:44:13):
For us. But it's also protected us for, you know, millions and billions of years from stray rocks
Leo Laporte (00:44:19):
That we're learning more and more how much the moon takes the it's incredible takes the hit for
Daniel Suarez (00:44:23):
Us. Yeah. And that and Jupiter helping us out. Yeah. So we are extremely fortunate, but this may be our gateway. Two space is, you know, near earth asteroids first, and then you take some of those resources to go to the moon. Now you could do the moon first, but it's gonna take a bigger investment up front. I
Leo Laporte (00:44:38):
Think the, as I think you've got it just right.
Daniel Suarez (00:44:41):
Yeah. Good. Go
Leo Laporte (00:44:42):
Get Ugu. Yeah. It's, we've already been there.
Daniel Suarez (00:44:45):
Well, there's also another probe that NASA is putting up in observatory. And I, John, I'm sorry if I get this wrong. I think it's neo wise, it's going up in 2025. We will know I'm operating on just my, my local ram here, <laugh>. But that is gonna be an observatory to try to chart all of the near earth objects. And if by looking in infrared, near infrared, it's gonna be able to see them. Now we think there are half a million of these near earth objects of various size. We believe there's none larger than a kilometer. And that would be like an extinction level event for at least
Leo Laporte (00:45:17):
Part of us. We don't hit
Daniel Suarez (00:45:18):
Us. Yeah. And a lot of these are, are, they're in, they cross earth orbit. And the ones we're totally blind to right now are the ones that come from the direction of the sun. And you'll see this occasionally when you look at the news because you can't
Leo Laporte (00:45:29):
See 'em. Oh,
Daniel Suarez (00:45:30):
We just discovered a rock
Leo Laporte (00:45:31):
Right where came
Daniel Suarez (00:45:32):
From. There it is breeze right. Close to us. Yeah. Oh, there we go. I got it. Right. You got
Leo Laporte (00:45:35):
It right.
Daniel Suarez (00:45:36):
I, there's so many spaceships in my head right now. It's
Leo Laporte (00:45:38):
Actually cool that we are doing all of this. It feels like we are in a renaissance of space exploration.
Daniel Suarez (00:45:42):
I truly believe that. And, and we just need, I, yeah, we need more and more people, billionaires and government officials who vote on these things as well as the general public to realize we really are on sort of the brink of a golden age if we make the right decisions. So we're, we're at a, I'd say a fork in the road. One way is a crisis and one way is a golden age. And I don't need to tell you which one I would prefer. We
Leo Laporte (00:46:04):
Choose. I really like that point. We are literally at that fork in the road.
Daniel Suarez (00:46:07):
We are that generation that other generations will point back to and say, oh, they were amazing. They
Leo Laporte (00:46:12):
Made the right choice. Or,
Daniel Suarez (00:46:13):
Or, ah,
Leo Laporte (00:46:13):
Those extinction event. Yeah. Reading the book, I highly recommend it. Critical mass is the name. It is of course a novel. It's science fiction, but it makes a very strong case for both governments and private industry. Go out, harvest asteroids do asteroid mining. There's a lot of money to be made for somebody like Elon Musk, <laugh>, right? If you just pay attention go up there, harvest that, build a base on the moon, continue to harvest materials, not bring them back to earth, but use them as a, a way to solve many of our problems. He described another part of the interview and I recommend watching the whole thing. It's on our triangulation feed. He described how we can solve our problems with power and carbon in the atmosphere, using space lasers, using giant solar receptors in the in the, in the in orbit geostationary orbit, sending energy down via microwave to rec tens gathering them giving us more than enough power for the entire globe.
(00:47:19):
Enough power to do things like desalinate water from the sea. So we solve our water problems, whoa, to whoa sequester carbon from the air so we can solve, you know, we've already put enough carbon in the air that it's gonna take decades before it starts getting cooler again. So there's a lot of things we can do and it's very exciting. And he's got a entire blueprint <laugh> in the, in the book. Highly recommend it. If you haven't read Delta V don't worry. You can read Critical Mass all by itself. Although I'd recommend all of Daniel's books all seven of 'em are really great novels. And what he's be, what has become his niche is talking about near the near future and technologies. We already have everything in this book we already have as as way as it ways of raising issues, talking about problems ahead, but also solving issues.
(00:48:04):
So it's some great stuff. Daniel Suarez was really nice to see him. TWIT tv slash T I is triangulation. It's also on our events feed, which is twit tv slash events. Explain what's going on with triangulation. We don't do it every week anymore, but we do it whenever. I think there's somebody great to bring in. And Daniel was an example. He's been on triangulation several times before, as I said. So it was, it's it's if he keep subscribed to the triangulation feed, you won't have to wait till I tell you. It'll just, oh look, there's a new show, another great interview. It's amazing. Yeah, he was a lot of fun. All right, let me see what hands are raised. I think we're gonna say hi to Joseph. He is, he says Blindfold man, phone man from Dalton, Georgia. Let me send him to the on-Air Studio and we'll say hi to Joseph as soon as he unmutes his microphone. No camera today. I think from, unless Joseph turns it on. Hi Joseph.
Caller 4 (00:49:04):
You've got Mail
Leo Laporte (00:49:06):
<Laugh>. Is that you or is that Ellwood? <Laugh>?
Caller 4 (00:49:09):
No, that's me. Just you doing Pulled up The old, pulled up the old sound file. I
Leo Laporte (00:49:14):
That was
Caller 4 (00:49:15):
Him. I got rid of aol.
Leo Laporte (00:49:16):
You've got mail. Lemme
Caller 4 (00:49:17):
Save these. Lemme just save these sound files. Nice. I saved them. So I've got, I've still got the thing that goes Welcome.
Leo Laporte (00:49:25):
Oh my gosh, you got mail? What else was it? Did, did they, was there a hangup sound?
Caller 4 (00:49:31):
I'm trying to remember. There was a door closing. I just heard. Oh, that I heard. Heard something. File's done.
Leo Laporte (00:49:37):
Files done. Wow. Young people are going, what are the hell are they talking about
Caller 4 (00:49:43):
<Laugh>? Yeah, because I had a modem bef this was before I got my I S D N, which I don't have now either, but anyway. Yeah.
Caller 4 (00:49:52):
But I, I wanted to comment on something you said. I wish I'd heard what you said. Quick enough to have avoided this thing, but I uhoh ordered, I saw on amazon.com it says 890. Oh no, what's oh 982 Gigabyte Flash drive. Oh no. 15. No, 95,
Leo Laporte (00:50:13):
$15.
Caller 4 (00:50:15):
Yes. And I thought, hey, that's a steal. And you know,
Leo Laporte (00:50:18):
I can get fixed. Yes, it was, but you, somebody unfortunately were the person getting stolen from
Caller 4 (00:50:22):
Yeah, unfortunately. So but at any rate, I had this weird feeling in my head. So I says, you know, it's offering me a couple of other, you know how Amazon offers you a choice to add Right. A couple of things with your order. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So I added two legit thumb drives, which I had her, you know, knew were pretty much legit Samsung. And one of the other ones can't think of it right now.
Leo Laporte (00:50:47):
Sandisk, maybe?
Caller 4 (00:50:49):
No, it wasn't SanDisk.
Leo Laporte (00:50:50):
Yeah.
Caller 4 (00:50:51):
Kingston, Western Digital Kingston. That's what it was.
Leo Laporte (00:50:53):
Kingston.
Caller 4 (00:50:54):
It was a Kingston. They were all metal thumb drives, you know, they looks, that thing looks real good. It looks fantastic. It's claims as waterproof. I might as well throw it in some water. But anyway,
Leo Laporte (00:51:04):
<Laugh>
Caller 4 (00:51:07):
And see what happens. I ran a tool and windows, and it claims that I can get maybe 29 gigs out of the thing. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:51:15):
It's not a terabyte drive,
Caller 4 (00:51:17):
It's No, no. I didn't want to devote, I, I started to a slow format just to see what happened, but I didn't want to keep my machine tied up. It said it was gonna be several days or something like that.
Leo Laporte (00:51:27):
There's reasons not to, other reasons not to use it. Yeah. You know, because they've scammed you. Right. And you heard us talking about these 16 terabyte drives. They were selling for a hundred bucks. That inside there was circuitry that said it's 16 gigs. There was also a tiny mini flash drive of about, you know, 50 gigs. So there was some storage on it. That sounds like you got a variant of that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it's a shame that sa that Amazon sells these Right. To be honest. But I guess just, you know, almost half of everything sold on the Amazon is sold by third party, and I guess it's too hard for them to keep track of this. I don't know. Probably. You certainly let them know. Scam it.
Caller 4 (00:52:16):
Yeah. I, I guess I should do that. I'm I passed my return window, but I guess I can put it in the reviews, although other people have already done that, so. Yeah.
Caller 4 (00:52:25):
I got a feeling Grace read the
Leo Laporte (00:52:26):
Reviews is a good, good advice. Yeah. Always.
Caller 4 (00:52:28):
That's what I should have done. Yeah. That's definitely what I should have done. Yeah. But the email thing, I go back far enough. I was doing email in Linux and had my own server set up, and I was using a service called T Z O. I don't know if that's one that's familiar to,
Leo Laporte (00:52:43):
I don't, I don't recognize the name. No.
Caller 4 (00:52:45):
Yeah. They would take your mail and hold it for you and forward it to your server, wherever it was, ah, when you logged in with the client or whatever, or, but I was curious about this. I said, you know, this spam thing is starting to be a problem. So just for the heck of it, I found a version of Linux that had the, that didn't have the security patches in it. And I installed it, and sure enough, as soon as I brought it up, data started going out of my system and someone had found my IP address and sent a spam mail out before I could do anything. So I said, yeah, I'm glad I got these security Wow.
Leo Laporte (00:53:22):
Updates. Wow. And that's exactly what happened, is that Yeah. Isps, you know, for a long time, Comcast did not want to ba block Port 25, the outbound email port, because they, they said it's gonna cost us too much money. Remember, Comcast, the biggest internet service front of the country, has millions of customers, at least, you know, maybe thousands of those customers were sending email out, and they knew if they turned off Port 25, they were just gonna get a bunch of inbound tech support calls. And that cost some money. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> a lot, you know, surprisingly, a large amount of money to have a call center and people answering the phone. So Comcast resisted for a long time, but eventually the internet community, I think, got to them and said, look, you're not helping anybody. For a while, almost all spam was coming through Comcast customers. That was a big, big deal, just like it happened to you to hack people, to use them to send outbound spam.
Caller 4 (00:54:15):
Now, was it metered back then?
Leo Laporte (00:54:17):
No, it wasn't a, a question metering, it was a question of spammers trying to A, hide their identity and B, find someone that would send spam for them. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Because if you say to a, a legitimate outbound email company, I'd like to send a million messages today. They go, yeah, no. But if I could take over your computer, Larry and say, <laugh> don't tell Larry, but we're gonna send a million messages. And you saw it, right? You saw the traffic. So, so that's, yeah. I just, I'm sorry, Joseph. Not Larry. I'm sorry Joseph.
Caller 4 (00:54:49):
No, no, that's quite alright. Yeah, they but yeah, I actually didn't see the traffic cuz being blind. I've come up with all kind of things over the years and one of the things I came up with was putting a, I don't know if you, you may remember these suction cup telephone pickups that they used to sell. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:55:06):
The old, the old modems. Yeah.
Caller 4 (00:55:08):
Hooked mine up to an amplifier. No, not a, not a
Leo Laporte (00:55:10):
Old modem. You had put it on the the Western Electric handset. Yes. And it would pick up the signal. Yeah.
Caller 4 (00:55:17):
So I hooked it up to an amplifier at old tape recorder I wasn't using anymore, basically. And I put it on a certain area of my computer where I could hear the sounds the computer was making. So data going out had one pitch and data coming in had another pitch. Wow. And aren't smart. The thing was scanning the keyboard and the, and the older computer I used, it was slower. You could actually tell when it was unzipping things and stuff like that. Oh my goodness. There was a certain kind of a rustling sound that it made when it unzipped the file. So,
Leo Laporte (00:55:48):
Wow.
Caller 4 (00:55:49):
I'm, so that's how I, I sort of discovered that Microsoft, I dunno if you remember this in, I think it was Doss six two and 6 22, they actually compressed some of their executables with a program called PK Light. Right. To make 'em a little bit smaller on the disc. Yep. And when I ran scan disc, I'm like, there's something funny going on. It sounds like this thing is uncompress something. And you know, when I found out about PK Light, I just said, let me just run it on this. And, and sure enough, it told me it was compressed with PK Light. And I said, well, that's interesting. I had no idea they did that. Yeah, Joseph, that's so cool.
Leo Laporte (00:56:25):
There's a wonderful, highly recommended documentary. I think it's on YouTube about the, the zip wars, particularly with pk. And I, I'm not gonna say what happened cuz I don't wanna misstate it, but it, there was huge controversy around PK Zipp and it's a fascinating documentary. I'll find, I'll find out. I'll put it in our show note
Caller 4 (00:56:50):
Links. Well, they got in trouble for you know, they had, they had, they got in trouble with whoever wrote the ARC program.
Leo Laporte (00:56:56):
Exactly. That's, that's what happened is the Arc folks,
Caller 4 (00:56:59):
You stole it. X Arc.
Leo Laporte (00:57:00):
Yep. And I was kind of aware of this at the time because I had written, there was no arc, which predated zip as a compression format. There was no arc for the Macintosh early days of the Macintosh. So I wrote a D ARC program that could at least open an uncompress programs that were compressed with ARC on PCs. Never got around to writing the ARC part of that, only the d the arc part of it. But it was very interesting to see how it worked. And and to, and to implement it myself in 68,000 assembly was quite interesting. Yeah, I'm f I'm gonna find that documentary because Yeah, there, the folks at ARC were not happy. <Laugh>.
Caller 4 (00:57:42):
Yeah, I can imagine. No, nobody ever is you know, Mike the Stack Electronics wasn't very happy with double Space. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:57:49):
Remember that? Yeah. Remember that? Yep.
Caller 4 (00:57:52):
I was trying to find,
Leo Laporte (00:57:53):
I said, remember the accusation was Ark was just a couple, a young couple created this thing and PK came along. Was his name Philip Kaplan? I can't remember what his name was. Phil
Caller 4 (00:58:03):
Katz.
Leo Laporte (00:58:04):
Katz, that's right. Phil Katz came along and took over <laugh>, shall we say. And yeah, I'm gonna see if I can find that, cuz I can't remember where I saw it. But it was a wonderful story about the golden age of of computing. I think it's called bending. Is it? Let me see if this is it. No, that's not it. That is not it. Well, I'll find it and I'll I'll add it afterwards as I often do.
Caller 4 (00:58:33):
And another thing I did was, back when I had my TI 99, I found that I could tune an FM radio at a certain frequency. I could sit it close to the TI and I could hear the things scanning the keyboard and doing what it did so I could tell when it was finished doing something. So, wow. We used little tricks like that. A gentleman from Decatur had you know, was doing that and I sort of knew that it might work, but I just said, let me just try this. And so it was a technique that I still wanna put a radio or I still wanna put a telephone pickup up to this machine. I've got
Leo Laporte (00:59:05):
Can you still buy those? Those are great. I don't know if the they would work anymore because everything's digital now, right?
Caller 4 (00:59:11):
Yeah. I'd have to have a, I I got an amp I could plug in, but yeah, the funny thing is, this computer I've got, I can actually put my ear to the back of this thing and turn it on and I can hear it. Some of the same sounds coming from the electronics. And I found that I could I had a, a thumb drive. It was actually a cartridge, and I could put that up to my ear and listen to that thing when I was sending data to it and from it. And, and I could hear noises from that. So I don't know what that's all about, but I'm, some of the electronics are actually making very minute noises.
Leo Laporte (00:59:45):
Oh yeah. In fact, we were very worried <laugh> speaking of the good old days when we started getting gigahertz processors hams especially, we're worried that now we're starting to, these processors are operating in the in the radio spectrum. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and interference in these processors might cause a real problem. Here's the documentary. It's called b b s, the documentary. You can get a D V D of it. I believe a lot of this is on is on YouTube. But it is a history of those days. And there's a couple of episodes they did on PK Zip, PK Ware, and the s e a are controversy in lawsuits and all of this stuff. It's a really wonderful
Caller 4 (01:00:31):
Documentary. I started to watch that.
Leo Laporte (01:00:32):
Yeah. Highly recommend it. They say the DVD is sold out, so I wonder if maybe it's okay now to watch it pirate versions on YouTube. I don't know <laugh>, but this, this is, I highly recommend it. It's really, it's really fascinating. Hey, a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for calling.
Caller 4 (01:00:50):
Oh, certainly. You take
Leo Laporte (01:00:51):
Care. Have a wonderful day, Joseph.
Caller 4 (01:00:54):
You
Leo Laporte (01:00:54):
Too. Take care. Bye-Bye. I want to give us give us a little mention of our sponsor. Yeah. Because I personally had a very good night's sleep. How about you? I absolutely did. Did you have a good night's sleep? I did. You know you could have a good night's sleep too if you happen to have aunt. Did you have a good night's sleep? Always, always. <Laugh>. If you happen to have what I have, what aunt has, what Mikah has, it's called the eight Sleep pod cover. Look, I don't have to tell Mikah this cuz he did a whole podcast about sleep. Sleep is key. It's nature's gentle nurse. It's the ultimate game changer. And the pod cover is the ultimate sleep machine. Consistent good sleep is so good for you besides your state of mind. It also reduces the likelihood of serious health issues.
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Generally what people want is they start warm and it cools off as they get into deeper and deeper sleep. That's telling your body. Okay, time for deep sleep now. And then I have mindset to warm up. It even will vibrate if you want a little silent alarm to wake you up. And and about eight o'clock in the morning. I'm just toasty and warm. There's only one problem. I don't want to get out of bed. <Laugh>, I'm awake, but I don't want to get out of bed. Especially on these cold nights. If you're in Australia, yeah, you can get the eight sleep cover too. And I know it's been a hot summer down south. Get the eight sleep and you will sleep better summer or winter. I think you'll save money too, because you don't have to turn on the heat at night of the air conditioning.
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It's much less expensive to just condition your bed than it is to heat the whole house. I love our eight sleep pod cover best in class temperature regulation sensors to track your health and sleep metrics. You don't have to wear anything, it just knows better sleep. It's the health habit you'll love sticking to night after night. Wake up fully energized with a pod cover so you can tackle whatever life throws at you. Go to eightsleep.com/twitt. Save $150 a checkout on the pod cover eight. Sleep currently ships within the us, Canada, the UK Select countries in the EU and in Australia. Eight sleep. E i g h t s l e e p eightsleep.com/twitt. All right, I think I'm gonna take a walk. Alright, because I wanted to, I, this is something we had a question last week. A guy wanted to add speakers to his Mac mm-hmm. <Affirmative>,
(01:05:39):
Right? And he wanted to know if the studio monitor or there is a monitor with speakers. And I said, no, no, you want external speakers. So let's talk a little bit about speakers and then maybe even going to the next level. Now, my ears, you're, you're a young guy. You have much better hearing than I do. My ears aren't probably good enough to really appreciate the difference. But if you care and you wanna really get the best sound, I'm gonna show you how you do. So exciting. So let me take a walk over to Radio Corner. Will you follow me? John, view of this device. This just came out. You remember the name Creative Labs? Do you remember the sound blaster that you had on your pc? The Sound Card PCs didn't have sound in the early days, but eventually you would, you know, they came out with these cards that you'd put in your PC and suddenly you'd get glorious sound coming outta your video game or your music app.
(01:06:31):
Well, creatives still around. So there it is. The Sound Blaster Creative Labs is still around. This is a $275 box that you connect up to your computer. Now, whether you need it is another question entirely. So let me show you what we've got here set up. You probably know this, but just a refresher. The, the computer sound is all bits and bites. Ones and zeros, right? Not something you can hear. The sound you're hearing right now is a wave form that goes through the air. That's, that's the sound we're used to. This is digital. That's analog. So we need something to convert the bits and bys coming outta the computer, the digital into analog so we can hear it. Now, your computer already has this. It's called a Dak Digital to analog converter. In fact, because your computer has speakers which need analog inputs, we know your computer has a d and most computers also have a headphone jack as does this one.
(01:07:28):
That's an analog output. So you could just, and most people probably would, and I I don't just recommend it, plug in headphones and that's all you ever need, right? Or you could even plug in speakers to that. You'd have to have powered speakers and that's all you'd ever need. But if you want to go the next step and get something a little bit higher quality, I'm gonna show you some outboard decks devices that you can use outside your computer. Why would you wanna do that? Well, for a few reasons. Most computers, because they have to have a, a, a bill of parts that's affordable. Don't put the best quality digital analog converters in here, plus, especially on PCs. It's a noisy environment. There's a lot of electrical signaling going on in there. Sometimes after the DAK converts the sound to analog, other noises get in to that wire as it's leading out to your headphone jack.
(01:08:17):
So it's often better to convert the bits and bites outside the computer into analog sound. I brought along a couple of ways that we've been using to do that. This is in fact, I've talked about this. Mikah has one of these mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. This is from ifi. This is called the hip deck. This is a battery powered deck. So you charge it up before you go. There's a battery in here inside. It has a digital analog converter chip, and it has a headphone amplifier so you can plug in your headphones. It's got a little volume controls, even got base boost and stuff. So the idea is you'd hook this up to maybe your iPhone or your Android device or even a computer. It's more for travel because of the battery, right? We also have similar devices that are not battery powered, that get their juice either from plugging into the wall or plugging into the USB port.
(01:09:07):
This is a company called fio. Makes a lot of these. Notice the the logo here says Hi res audio. That's another reason people wanna do this. Often the digital analog converters in phones and computers don't take, can't handle the higher quality 24 bit audio, the 96 or or higher bit rate audio that you can buy online. So if you want a better quality audio, you need a better quality digital to analog converter. This is a very typical one. It, it has line out, it has coax optical out. It has spit if optical out it has a little u s BBC connector. That's how you're gonna connect it to your computer. And then in the front, you might connect your headphones balanced or unbalanced. And we'll talk about that a little bit too. It also has a little base boost. And then you've got a volume control.
(01:09:55):
So this is a headphone amp plus DAK FIO makes these, these are mostly under a hundred dollars. You can get fancier, certainly. And when we're talking fancy, I guess I'm gonna have to say that this sound blaster is pretty fancy. It gets its power from the computer. So I'm gonna hook it up here to the US BBC port on my laptop. In fact, you know what I'm gonna do so that you can see what's going on. Oops, it's not on this side. I'm gonna airplay this so that you can see the software, because sound blaster provides some software to do this. So there it is. There's the software the sound blaster X five. Now let's talk about a little bit about what this is. It is a d but it is a kind of a fancy deck. It has dual channel, high res DAX with fully balanced headphone by amplifier.
(01:10:48):
So normally a d like the two I've shown, you have a single digital analog chip in here and they connect up to your headphones. This one has one for the left channel and one for the right channel. There's kind of an unusual situation. The DAK in here comes from I think is it Sirius Logic? I should, I should remember this, but it's a big long number. It's a Sirius Logic. CS 43 19 8 43, 918 digital analog converter. If you're an audio file, you're gonna go, oh, that's terrible. Or, oh, that's pretty good. Depending on your, your bias here. This device right here is the is the sound blaster. What's cool is it doesn't plug into the wall. It's all the power it needs from the u Ussb connection to your computer. There it is. Lemme move this over so you can see it.
(01:11:40):
It also has toss link out, toss link in, which is interesting. You can take inputs from other places. This can be a USB host and then it has analog. Most of the time you're gonna use analog. This says analog in and analog out. This is not, however, a amplifier. So you'll be connecting this, as I mentioned to our caller last week, to powered speakers. I brought in an example of this. I mentioned the audio engines. This is the audio engine too. This is a powered speaker that you can connect to. You plug this into the wall. These do a really good job. You see, they're small. Maybe you get a subwoofer as I have at home as well. But these do a really good job for speakers. But they're powered. They have a built-in amplifier. They don't have a built-in deck. So you need a d plus an amplifier.
(01:12:25):
There is an amplifier in here. It's a headphone amplifier. Good enough to drive even the most demanding headphones. These are an example. These are plain arm magnetic headphones from high-fi man, very expensive headphones. And if you have, you know, audio file headphones that are high impedance, this would be a, a great choice cuz this could drive almost anything balanced or unbalanced. The more expensive headphones are, are this is a balanced input, but the most are unbalanced input. The most expensive headphones are balanced and they'll give you even better sound if you're an audio file. You know, I'm an old man, honestly, I use the headphone jack power connect the powered speakers. But I wanted to show you that you can do a little bit better. This actually I got for Lisa because she has some nice speakers and I wanted to drive those speakers powered speakers with a good quality amp coming out of her Mac Studio.
(01:13:18):
There's buttons on the front that let you choose whether you want headphones or you want speakers to be driven. There's a nice little knob on it for volume control. It's got a interface on it. You can read, I have to say it's a little bit of a cheap plastic box when you pick it up. You say there's nothing in here. And you're right, there's just a couple of circuit boards in here with the deck, but at least you know it does have the functionality you want, including eq. And that's where I'm gonna show you the software because on Windows or Mac, it comes with sound blaster software that lets you do a lot more than just a plug it in. It has an equalizer. I wish it were a parabolic equalizer. It's not. It's just kind of the standard equalizer, which just has a few frequencies that's better than nothing.
(01:14:05):
And it lets you correct for any oddities in your speakers or your headphones. You can choose the quality here. And you can see it can go all the way up to 32 bit th 384 kilohertz sample rate. So that's a, these are good daks. And again, each channel left and right has its own d it does have a microphone, Jack. I'm not sure I'd recommend it. It has a mini, you know, quarter inch microphone jack. Most professional microphones that we use have XLR in this does not have that I had ordered but have not yet received. So I didn't have have it for you today. I'll, maybe I'll show it to you next week. A similar device that has a XLR jack in it. We've used actually for a long time devices like this. This is the sound devices mixed pre has an excellent jack for microphone in.
(01:14:54):
This is actually a pretty good device pro, pro-level device. Well, these are buy more like 500 bucks, right? For these John, something like that. 600 bucks. Yeah. And they have they have, they hold an SD card, so you can actually record direct on here. Also bus powered via U s BBC or U S B A. These are more professional things. So this is twice the cost and, and probably has a pretty good deck in it. But if all you want is playback, I think the, the sound blaster is pretty cool. I'm glad the sound blaster name's still around. I have to say it's an excellent headphone amp. Sounds really good with my HiFi man. It connects directly up to a PC or a Mac. I guess it would connect anything with u sb audio out. They claim Bluetooth, they only support sbc, which is not the highest quality Bluetooth Kodak.
(01:15:38):
I think if you buy something like this, you're buying it because you're an audio file. You're gonna be using wired headphones or wired speakers. You're not gonna be using using Bluetooth. So I'm not sure that makes much of a difference. There are some gaming a aspects to this as well. A lot of gamers like to use headsets with a microphone. That's why it has that mini jack for the microphone, cuz that works better with, you know, that works with some headsets or the USB headsets. Sound Blaster makes some pretty good ones for gaming. So does Alien wear many other companies. You just plug those right in. And this would be an excellent amp for your gaming as well. No special effects, just stereo sound doesn't support Atmos. Dolby 5.1, 7.1. It's a stereo Dak with some extra features. I like it.
(01:16:23):
I mean, 275 bucks, lot of money. Not for my ears. Not recommended for somebody who doesn't care about sound. But if you're an audio file, you'll know the difference. And I think they've done a pretty nice job. This is their kind of top of the line product from creative. It's the sound blaster. I'm glad they kept that name around X five sound blaster X five. I would play some music for you, but you really wouldn't be able to hear this <laugh>. So there you go. I brought in a few things just to play with. Here's another one. This is what we sometimes use at home for some of our hosts. This has an XLR jack on the back for pro mics. That's what that cannon plug is. Headphone out. And then a big nice knob on the front. This converts a regular professional mic, like the hiles we use into SB for use in your computer. That's kind of the reverse. That's an A to D converter. Converts analog microphone inputs into digital. All right, have, have you seen enough? Let me walk back. We can take some more calls. You're watching. Ask the tech guys. You wanna do another call?
Mikah Sargent (01:17:28):
Let's do another call.
Leo Laporte (01:17:30):
Did you have any question? Yeah, somebody in the chat room says he likes Burr Brown, Dax, those are very good, very popular. Dax as well. Sirius Logic is popular. Texas Instruments. I mean, there are a lot of companies that make these chips and you'll get into big debates with audio files over which right, the best.
Mikah Sargent (01:17:47):
Well, this one has that. I can't tell the richness. You
Leo Laporte (01:17:49):
Like that ifi, right?
Mikah Sargent (01:17:50):
Yes, I do a lot. Absolutely. And,
Leo Laporte (01:17:53):
And you use that with
Mikah Sargent (01:17:54):
I use it with an iPhone, an iPad. When I am listening to albums and I want to, because on its own, the iPhone actually will tell you if you download the music in the highest quality you can get from Apple Music, it will not play back on the iPhone without what they say. Special hardware. Yeah. Like this. Yeah. And so being able to play it back with that and just hear the mouth sounds of the person who's singing is kind of impressive.
Leo Laporte (01:18:22):
Yeah. Sometimes people don't want to hear the mouth sounds.
Mikah Sargent (01:18:24):
I do <laugh> sometimes. Sometimes I just wanna barely hear what's even coming through.
Leo Laporte (01:18:30):
Yeah. Scott Wilkinson recommended the hip deck to me and I got a couple, I gave you one. It's I f i dash. What's the url? Yeah, I can't remember the url. I'm looking it up right now so I can show it to you. Ifi-Audio.Com. It's battery powered, so it's probably, it's not really intended as a, a permanent solution to hook up to a desktop. It's really for a, for portability. But I like it. It's a really cool idea and it has a very good he headphone app into it. So that's part of the, there's two parts to it, of course. There's a converting the, the digital to audio, the dak part. That's the chip. But then you have to do something with the output. The output's very low out of those chips. So you usually have an amplifier of some kind, a headphone amplifier if you're gonna plug in headphones or you'll plug it into speakers that have their own amplifier system on 'em. Let me go back to the phones here. Let's see who we've got. Who's got their hand now? Chris from Miami wants to come on, but I gotta
Mikah Sargent (01:19:30):
<Laugh>, we gotta prioritize some new folks.
Leo Laporte (01:19:33):
I gotta tell you, Chris you know, as we did with the radio show, we're gonna kinda limit you to once every couple of, a couple of weeks or months. So I apologize for that. Who else is interested? Guy, do you want to come on? I don't see some hands raised. Raise your hand if you'd like to. Come on. I figure if you're in here,
Mikah Sargent (01:19:49):
If you're in the lobby, a
Leo Laporte (01:19:50):
Problem. If you're in the lobby, join us. Right? It means you want to be on the air. Lemme me press guys' button, send them on and we will see him. I see Subaru will get to you as well in just a little bit. Hi, guy. You're on the air.
Caller 5 (01:20:06):
Hey, you there? Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:20:08):
Welcome.
Caller 5 (01:20:09):
Hey buddy, how you doing? I'm great. Hey hey, I, I have a question here. You know I work I work for a place that kind of, I provide tech support for for people as far as giving you know, finding solutions to look up information off of U USB keys that I find around <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:20:34):
Whoa, you don't really do that, do you? I just found this in the parking lot. What should I do with it? Should I
Caller 5 (01:20:40):
Well, no, no, no. Hear me out please. <Laugh>. so, you know, these are kind of like documents to i, I gotta retrieve for people and stuff. Ah,
Leo Laporte (01:20:49):
So they're there USB keys that they can no longer access.
Caller 5 (01:20:53):
Right? Right, right. Got it. So basically what I'm trying to do here is, is that I'm, I'm wanting to recover files from there the safest way possible, ah, to see if they're actually files that we need, like text documents and stuff like that. I was thinking of you know, kinda like a, you know, a you know, like a odd machine that, you know, I have running Linux and then you know, plug it in, see what's in there. It's not connected to the internet or anything like that, but it allows me to it allows me to look at the doc look at the document. And if if it's not needed and everything then I can say, okay, well, you know, I, I'm safe because it's one is not connected to a network. Two it's on a, it's on a machine that I can data wipe or anything like that. Right? What's the best way I, I know I could up update up clear the operating system and start fresh, but is there any other way that it could write to any kind of external memory? Yes. Like, I know bias memory.
Leo Laporte (01:21:59):
Let's, let's help you do this. So, first of all, you've got this u sb key. You don't really know what it's providence is. You don't know if it have malware on it. And notice what's the first thing that happens when you plug a SB key into a Windows machine. It's pops up, autoplay, <laugh>. It says, Hey, see what's on there? What, what? Now, fortunately that just went away, but fortunately these days, autoplay doesn't automatically, usually automatically what's launched, what's on there. But it's very trivial for a hacker to put something on here that automatically runs unless you've disabled autoplay. So the first thing to do if you're gonna do this is disable autoplay. Not a bad idea. Not to use windows. Cuz most malware is gonna be aimed at Windows. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> targeted at Windows. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So yeah, if you have a Linux computer, that's probably the best thing to do.
(01:22:45):
Run boot in the Linux. Run Linux. Not in the vm, but, you know, get, don't be running Windows even in the background. Run Linux a hundred percent. And then what I would do is before you even do anything, is clone the contents of the drive. So there are cloning tools. You can use DD in Linux, but would probably go out and get something like clone zilla that will take a injectable storage, removable storage like this and image it under the drive. Once you've got an image, you take this out and you put it away <laugh>. And then, and then you can actually use it. Use the image that you've got on your hard drive to extract any data. Probably a lot safer. There is something called Bad u sb Oh that can be on these things. They it's a hack that actually doesn't even show up as part of the storage.
(01:23:39):
It doesn't even have anything to do with autoplay. It's in the firmware. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And if you put a u sb key with bad u sb inside a computer, the chances are very good that you're gonna get you're gonna get hacked. You're gonna get something bad on your system. So you're right to be worried about this. Do a, do a little Googling of a bad u sb and you can see with the risks are I think even, I think bad USB can even infect Linux computers, cuz I don't think it operates at the at the operating system level. Let me just do a little, little search on this. Yeah, they put malicious software on the firmware and I don't think auto run has it could. So these have, for instance this is a, a article from Wikipedia, a programmable, if they have a programmable microcontroller, it can be reprogrammed.
(01:24:35):
In other words, they flash the microcontroller. It emulates a keyboard once it's plugged in as an example, it's recognized as a keyboard and allowed to interact with a computer. It says almost as if the bad guy is sitting there typing at your keyboard. And then they can issue some commands. So read up on this is the thing that's most scary as far as I'm concerned, on u SB keys. And, and they, they call it a candy drop. Bad guys will put bad u ussb or other malware auto run malware on a u sb on a bunch of USB keys. They're cheap and leave a couple in the parking lot on, in the stairs in the parking garage or just outside a company Trixie that he wants to hack. You know, Broadcom used to be next door. And we'd find a little u USB keys just sitting out in the parking lot. <Laugh>,
(01:25:22):
Maybe they're even labeled Broadcom, right? Those are almost certainly not from Broadcom. Those are from bad guys who hope that somebody at Broadcom, which by the way did recently get hacked, will find this in the parking lot and stick it into their machine. So you really gotta be very, very, very careful. With these it's more than just the plain old auto run. If it's auto run, you know, turning off auto run using Linux is gonna help you. If it's bad. U usb, I don't know what you do about bad u sb. Steve Gibson has talked in the past about what he calls U USB condoms. <Laugh>. No, they won't work. What about, yeah, they won't work with these cuz what they're for is charging. So there's also a risk when you plug in, let's say you go to a bar and the, and at the bar there's a little device as there often is on the bar.
(01:26:14):
It says, Hey, charge your phone while you have a beer. And you plug into that. Except that that device isn't just a charger. It's got data. You know, u sb can has data and so it can get into your device while you're charging. So the U USB condom is just a simple thing. And I ha I actually carry one in my, in my, in my briefcase. Just a simple thing you put on your charger before you plug into the bar. It only passes charging power. It doesn't pass data. Yeah. But that's not gonna be any good for you because you want the data. You need the data. So, yeah, very interesting issue. You know, honestly, you're being a good Samaritan, but if you really do want to pursue this, I would pursue it very, very carefully. U bad U SB was revealed a black hat in 2014, so it's been around for a while.
(01:27:11):
There is a U S G dongle, which acts like a hardware firewall designed to prevent bad u sb style attacks. So that would be a condom that does pass data but doesn't pass bad U USB code in March, 2020, according to Wikipedia, the F b I said that the fin seven cybercrime group had been targeting companies in retail, restaurant and hotel industries with bad u sb attacks designed to deliver ransomware. So you find this in the parking lot, you go, Hey, I got a free USB key. You plug it in your computer, you happen to be at work. Suddenly everybody at work says, wait a minute, we're we're offline. Everything's been encrypted. You just infected your entire business. So I'd be very, very, very careful. One intended target was set a package in the mail, which contained a fake gift card from Best Buy as well as a U ussb flash drive with a letter saying, plug the drive into your computer, <laugh> to access a list of items that can be purchased with the gift card.
(01:28:15):
Who wouldn't do that? <Laugh> you? Cuz you've been watching this show. You would know when tested the U USB drive emulated a keyboard. You've seen that. That's how Yuba Keys work, right? Those USB keys, when you plug 'em in, they, they, they spit out a string of characters. That's because there's a standard even on Linux, unfortunately, for a human interface device when it sees, that's why you could plug in a mouse or a keyboard into any lance machine. And it works because it's understands it as a human interface device. Well understands these as one of those too. So I, I'll see if I can find, I've always
Mikah Sargent (01:28:49):
Wondered how these forensics folks do that. You know, I would love at times to get some of these devices and have a machine with the proper stuff cuz they're doing it. Somehow they know what they're doing to be able to find this. And I have always been curious if there's just some sort of quarantined machine, quarantined machine with special hardware. And you mentioned this hardware condom essentially. Yeah. that I had never heard of
Leo Laporte (01:29:13):
Before. This is a article from hexis.net about the US G dongle that protects you from bad U S B. But this was a few years ago. I don't know if anybody's still send selling this. It's a u USB condom that passes data, and that's the key. It has to pass data as well as as power. A guy named Robert Fisk is selling these directly if contact him, but it's also open source so you can build your own. And it's for the truly paranoid, you might even want to build your own U s G firmware
Mikah Sargent (01:29:52):
<Laugh>. If you, if
Leo Laporte (01:29:53):
You could, it's on GitHub,
Mikah Sargent (01:29:54):
Run a non-network computer with an operating system completely and ram then you'd just turn it off afterward. Everything would go
Leo Laporte (01:30:02):
Away. Or even if it's on hard drive and you wipe the drive out, wipe the drive
Mikah Sargent (01:30:05):
Every time. That's what, see, I get suspicious though that I missed the part. You know what I mean? The wipe didn't actually remove the part that's gone. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:30:11):
And, and you asked firmware reasonably, you asked, well, what about if you know, if attacks exactly the firmware in my system, and even if I reboot, am I still gonna be vulnerable? And I, you know, I'll be honest, I I don't know what kinds of attacks this U usb bad USB can initiate, but since it could type almost anything,
Mikah Sargent (01:30:32):
I'm worried.
Leo Laporte (01:30:34):
I'm worried.
Caller 5 (01:30:34):
Yeah. That's that's one of the things that I have in my travel toolkit is a Port of Powell that USB economy that you were talking about.
Leo Laporte (01:30:41):
Yeah. Yeah. That's the one Steve recommended. Yeah.
Caller 5 (01:30:44):
Yeah. That is just something that, you know, if you travel and everything, especially in airports and stuff like that,
Leo Laporte (01:30:51):
Always use the porta power.
Caller 5 (01:30:52):
Even, even if it's not a data port and everything. You just want to make sure that you have a porta power between your u SB connection and anything that you plug a u SB in, because
Leo Laporte (01:31:05):
I love this. You're smart. So you, you kind of knew there was what the risk was. And it's a legit question, how could I do this? And yeah, I imagine the law enforcement has ways and means mm-hmm. <Affirmative> probably a computer that that is, you know, air gapped and can be wiped or maybe doing it in ram. I still would worry, because remember, this is a hardware attack. So even if your're operating system's in ram,
Mikah Sargent (01:31:31):
We need to talk to those Red Hat folks. What do they do? Because they've, you know, you've got annual events,
Leo Laporte (01:31:35):
Black hat,
Mikah Sargent (01:31:36):
Sorry, black hat. Thank you Black Hats
Leo Laporte (01:31:38):
Folks. Yes. yeah. Well, they, I guess they don't let you bring USB drives into the building, but be my guess.
Mikah Sargent (01:31:46):
But they've discovered stuff. Yeah. So they're using machines that can do it and they're not worried about it.
Leo Laporte (01:31:51):
I am. It's a good, it's a great question. I don't know if we actually have, have the ultimate answer to that, but it's a really good question. Let us know if you find a way to do it. That, that one thing that I mentioned, the U S G dongle is on GitHub, so I guess you could build one of these and I'm not, I'm not sure how it works. I it's a kind of like a firewall basically, I guess.
Caller 5 (01:32:13):
Well, I, I posed a question to some friends of mine and stuff, you know, that like to top check and stuff, and I thought I'd call in and see if all your, your audience could could talk about it. I even had one guy who recommend that you know, I just buy a pie computer and sure. Put it on fly put on the little micro sb or the
Leo Laporte (01:32:33):
Key is air gap it, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because that's the, so the, the, the, the guys who did the ransomware, you put in the computer and even if it's a raspberry pie, if it's on your network, the very first thing that ransomware is gonna do is go out as a worm on your network and look for other machines that can affect. So air gap it from the network. Yeah. I guess you'd be all right. The worst that could happen is you lose your raspberry pie these days. That's a big thing. That's a big deal.
Caller 5 (01:32:58):
Well, they said the difference between a pie three and a PI three and the earlier versions of pie, you can still write to write to a firmware or, you know the older pies, you can't write to it because it's all stored on the the card and stuff. Right, right. Permission store in the card. So, you know, that's what, that's the kind, that's the solution I'm trying to say is that, you know, if if you know, if it's an older pie, you know, just chunk the card check, just
Leo Laporte (01:33:26):
Throw out the TF card and the, the, the micro SD and start over. Yeah, that's right. As long as it doesn't write to the firmware. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> the problem is you understand what the bad U ussb that the, that all the bad d s speed does is modify the firmware in the USB drive to spit out characters. Then it's up to the hacker what characters it spits out. So you don't, it doesn't specify what the attack is. So it could be in theory, it could be attack that attacks your firmware, it could write to your video card. It could, I mean, there's al the sky's the limit. And so we don't know what the attack would be. We just know that it's possible to modify these. So even without autoplay, even without anything at all on the storage, cuz the, the attack comes from the firmware. You could turn these into, you know, bad devices, attack devices. Right.
Caller 5 (01:34:13):
So I'd like to end, I'd like to end, I'd like to end my call with a little bit of gratitude. Mikah, I appreciate you. You're, you're a rising star in the tech community and everything. I do appreciate you very much as far as your input. That's Leo. I've been a longtime listener and everything. So, you know immense amount of gratitude to come up with intellectual conversation concerning technology. And I appreciate you and your network. I have very much.
Leo Laporte (01:34:37):
Oh God, you're very sweet. I thank, I know, I know for a lot of people who listen to the tech guy, it was a little disorienting that we were off the radio. Makes it harder to listen to. Some people said, well, I just want Leo, I don't want Mikah. But I agree with you guy. Mikah is the future, right? And yes sir. And if, if we got <laugh>, we got, I I'm not gonna be able to do this forever, <laugh>. So we gotta bring up the, the young people here. We gotta bring 'em up and get, get 'em going.
Caller 5 (01:35:01):
Oh, I, I, I forgot one more thing. Back in 1993 I was a I I was an admin for a first class client. B b s concerning your BBBS stuff. Yes. Earlier and everything. Yes. I was an admin for a first class kind by Soft Ark,
Leo Laporte (01:35:17):
Uhhuh <affirmative>. I remember the Mac user group. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Caller 5 (01:35:21):
It was the mini AOL version and everything. And that I started going into a YouTube hole, finding that BBB s <laugh> documentary and everything. That's awesome. Awesome. I'm just gonna have all sorts of memories. That's
Leo Laporte (01:35:32):
Awesome. Yeah. Watch that bbbs documentary. You will, you will absolutely go. Oh wow. Because I've forgotten half of that stuff. You know, you'll go, oh, I remember that now. That's great. Thank you guy, I appreciate it.
Caller 5 (01:35:44):
Thanks. Thank you, sir. Take you Michael.
Leo Laporte (01:35:46):
I'm looking at Stack Exchange detection of bad U s B Boy. In fact, this person's asking a similar question. We wanna be able to reuse flash drives that are, could potentially be affected by bad U S B. Let's see here. You will find a guide. Let's see if this is still around. What's interesting is we're still talking about bad U S B. It's was discovered nine years ago. Wow. And I don't think it's been ever been fixed. So this is from Heim Doll, how to fix the usb, bad USB security flaw less than 10 minutes. Well that's interesting. I wonder if you have to, you have to modify the firmware. Create a blacklist. All right. This might be, let's put this in the show notes. This is in Windows that use policy edit to, to blacklist. Maybe it's just preventing it USB drives.
(01:36:45):
I don't know. Yeah. Okay. This is a good one. Controlling the automatic installation of USB keyboards. Cuz that's required right when you put in the drive. Okay. Yeah. It has to turn into a keyboard. Or similarly for a Nick or Bluetooth, avoid automatic USB installation shows. Yeah. This is Windows specifically. Some of it is not gonna be useful. Like disabling USB ports. <Laugh> I, it's funny that this bad USB has not gone away. I think one of the in heim dollar course cells in antivirus, so that's probably their last recommendation. One of the things that remember is that this is a hard attack. That you have to have something that can modify the hardware, the firmware. You have to have a a chip chip burner kind of a, a device to do this. So not, it's not a trivial, it's ac that some script kitty could do.
(01:37:39):
It's it's something to be scared of. Takes wake. Takes wake. Let me do one more add and then we are gonna get some calls. You have some, you said you had some email? Yeah I've got an email and a demo, so. Oh, you have a demo too? I've got a demo too. Do you want to go over there? Do it? Do a I'll do it over there. Oh. If you wanna do the ad and I'll go over there. I'll do the ad while you're setting up. Sounds good. How's about that? Our show today brought to you by Melissa. Love these guys at Melissa, leading provider the leading provider I would say of global data quality, identity verification and address management solutions. They just announced a successful partnership with Tom. Tom, you know that name. The global provider in SAT nav satellite navigation for consumer use by layering Tom Tom's comprehensive global address data, location data and country data.
(01:38:28):
On top of Melissa's industry leading data quality, enrichment, and identity verification solutions. Militia has earned its reputation as the address experts. They're not sitting on their laurels though. I love that. They're getting better all the time. Let's talk about some of the issues when it comes to email or mail addresses. Snail mail addresses, if you're going to verify addresses, you gotta do it in multiple languages and multiple formats. Not every country's the same. That's where Tom Tom can come in. They ingest country data into a global standardized data set. They handle the various addressing nuances country by country, which means Melissa is now the best solution, efficient and seamless for going through your address list, fixing it up and making it work. You know, they don't have, I found out they don't have street numbers, house numbers in Venice, Italy, <laugh>, I don't know how they deliver mail, but they've got a system.
(01:39:26):
Tom, Tom supports it and Melissa does too as a result. That's why Melissa has global support across 240 countries and territories. We talked to Greg Brown, he's the VP of global marketing, Melissa. He said, by adding Tom Tom's rooftop precision capabilities to our solutions, Melissa customers can rest assured their data is not only clean and verified, but also pinpoint accurate and high value to business operations. This ensures that restaurants are found, packages are delivered to the right place on demand drivers find their passengers and so much more. You can see how important good data quality is to almost every single business. And bad data quality can cost you an average of 15 million every year. Of course, the longer it stays in your system, the more losses your business could accumulate by leveraging Tom Tom Maps points of interest, seven digit postal codes, address points and routing api.
(01:40:23):
Melissa provides a best of breed address engine critical to business needs worldwide. And they've been doing it forever. Since 1985. Melissa, we're gonna have to have a party in 20 thir 2025 40th anniversary party for Melissa, aren't we? That's gonna be awesome. Melissa is specializing in global intelligence solutions to help organizations unlock accurate data for a more compelling customer view. And by the way goes without saying, but I'm gonna say it anyway. Melissa takes care of your data like it's their own. They continually undergo independent security audits to reinforce their commitment to data security, privacy and compliance, their SOC two compliant hipaa, gdpr. So you know, your data is in the best hands. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records clean for free. Melissa.Com/Twit. We love these guys. Great company providing a much needed service for businesses everywhere. Melissa, m e l i s s a.com/twit. Thank you Melissa for supporting us. And you Dear listener, dear viewer, you support us when you use that address so that they know you saw it here. Melissa.Com/Twi. I'm gonna now throw you to the other side of the studio, <laugh> over to Radio Corner where Mikah has got a little demo for us. What you got there Mikah?
Mikah Sargent (01:41:50):
Yeah, so Khan has written in, says hello from Stockholm, Sweden, really enjoying the new show. I was wondering if you could help me with recovering my data from an iPhone backup. A few years ago, I messed up my iPhone but I have a backup file on my Mac. I don't have an iPhone anymore, but I would like to recover whatever it is in that backup file. There may be some photos on there of my late father that I just realized are not in my iCloud backup. The photos are very important as these were the last photos I took before he passed away in the first wave of covid. Oh, so sorry, Khan. Can you recommend a good recovery software that I can use and Khan? Yes, I can. So we've talked a lot about this application on the show before, and I'm actually using a demo version of it here.
(01:42:32):
I've this is amazing. And as you can say, I don't have it licensed on this machine although I do have a license on other machines. But I wanted to show what you can do without that. So right now I have an iPad plugged in. And so it is connected and I did a backup, but what I can do to show you that you don't need to have the device itself is I can unplug this. And so now the iPad is not plugged in anymore, but because I did a backup to this machine, I will click in the top right corner here where I can see the different backups that have taken place. And earlier today I did this backup and I've already clicked to view this backup. So what has brought up here are all of these options here on the left.
(01:43:17):
I can see the photos, the messages, the phone calls what's going on with Safari, even as far down as looking at the file system. So I can click on and I will click on file system here, and it's going to go into the backup that was just done and show me some of the stuff that was stored in this actual iPad backup. Now you've got different options here to kind of dig in. You know, you've gotta play around a little bit because depending on how old your iPhone is, how old the operating system is on it, these folders are going to be named differently. But typically you can find what you're looking for in the apps section or in some of these app group sections. The easier way to do this is instead of using the file system, you could just simply click on photos here, and then it will load those photos and you will be able to click to open any of these and export them right to your Mac.
(01:44:17):
As long as these, the backup is stored in the default location, you will have this stuff pop up automatically. If it's not stored in the default location. Amazing has an option for you in the settings to choose where these devices are backing up. And that will give you the ability to choose. And so, so you can see here default library location as well as the backup here and the default location for that backup. So then it will look in those places. You can add wherever you've got your backup stored. It'll pop it open right here, and immediately you can export everything as a folder, export all the data from the device, even export the raw files if you want to, or simply show and finder meaning that it will pop open that backup file and finder. You'll be able to click inside and get to those photos that you're looking for.
(01:45:07):
So amazing, incredible. I, as I said, this is just the free version. So you are able to do a lot with the trial within, I think it's the first 14 days. So give I amazing a shot and see if that works for you to be able to get that backup right off of your machine and get into it. I use this tool all the time for doing complete backups of my devices. One of the things that makes this different from what we have standard, cuz I could take this iPad and plug it in and in the finder I can do a backup. But the problem with that is I only have so much, so much storage on this computer, right? And if I wanna do a full backup of my iPhone, which has a lot of storage space, I need a place to put it so I can actually back up to my network attached storage directly and keep that off of my main machine. So, very handy and all encompassing. There's a lot that you can do with amazing, but the simple feature there is to dig into that backup that you made, get those photos off and you'll be good to go. So thank you for that question con
Leo Laporte (01:46:10):
You convinced me long ago to buy amazing, and I never looked back, never regretted it. Can you though, I'm curious, still back up your iPhone to your computer if I hook it up on a Mac mm-hmm. <Affirmative> can I still just make a, I could just still make a backup.
Mikah Sargent (01:46:27):
Yeah, you can absolutely do a normal backup. In fact, I'm amazing. That's a great thing about it is that most of the time it is doing the standard backup. Oh, interesting. That Apple already does. Oh, it's just, it knows how to get into those backups and Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:46:41):
Otherwise can able to access t not normally. You can't look at it. Correct. So why amazing is really just an interface to
Mikah Sargent (01:46:45):
That. Absolutely.
Leo Laporte (01:46:46):
Yeah. Interesting. Hey, Subaru is on the line while Mikah comes on back. Let's bring him in. Subaru is, are you? Hi Leo. He's a chili guy, right? Mikah? Yes, he is. He's the chill guy. <Laugh>, are you making some tomorrow for the big game Subaru?
Caller 6 (01:47:04):
I think I might,
Leo Laporte (01:47:07):
I I have your recipe. Mikah sent it to me. Yeah. So I should, I shouldn't have bought those two cans of Dennis and obviously I should have made my own from scratch. What can we do for you Subaru?
Caller 6 (01:47:18):
Oh, Leo. My OK data printer is not no,
Leo Laporte (01:47:20):
Stop it. Go away. Hang up on it.
Caller 6 (01:47:23):
No, sorry, sorry, sorry. Hang on. Subaru
Leo Laporte (01:47:26):
Is making fun of the fact that on the old radio show I used to get a lot of printer questions. Oh no. And there's not much you could do with a printer if it's not working except throw it out. They make 'em that way. But you don't have an Okie data. I hope
Caller 6 (01:47:40):
Not anymore. Okay. Hey, I've been using Steve Gibson's DNS Benchmark and another program called Name Bench and discovered that Comcast d n s is not very good.
Leo Laporte (01:47:53):
Yeah.
Caller 6 (01:47:54):
And I've been playing around inside my Windows computer and figure out how to use CloudFlare.
Leo Laporte (01:48:00):
Good. That's what
Caller 6 (01:48:01):
I used and I also was able to get into my Comcast modem and change it there. My question is, maybe you can clarify this is does the computer setting override what the modem is set at? If they're not the same,
Leo Laporte (01:48:23):
It can. Yeah. So let's talk, let's define some terms cuz obviously Super is a super user mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and he's doing some pretty sophisticated stuff here. When your computer, when you type into your browser, I want to go to yahoo.com. Your computer actually can't go to yahoo.com, it needs a phone number. It's just as if it's, I say on the telephone, I want to call Mikah Sargent. I need your phone number, right? So we have something called the domain name system that's like four 11 for computer domains. And, and the way it works is your browser first checks to see if it already knows, because maybe you visited Yahoo recently. It would be in the browser's cash or the computer operating system's cash of sites you've recently visited. And it'll go, oh, Yahoo, that's 1 68 0.1, 3.4. And then the browser can get there.
(01:49:16):
It needs that phone number to route across the internet. If the computer doesn't know, then the computer will go up to the next hire authority. Usually that's the internet service provider. Sometimes it's your router. Your router has a cash as well. So it might go to your router, router doesn't know. It goes to the internet service provider. Internet service provider doesn't know. It goes on up the chain all the way to the final authority. The big phone book in the sky, which is 13 servers scattered around the, the official Canonical DNS servers. So when you register a domain name, let's say I register leo laporte.com, I I bought that from let's say, our sponsor Hover. What Hover does is they say, okay, LEO laporte.com it goes to this address. And by the way, initially it doesn't go anywhere, but Hover, right Hover has a dummy address that it uses until you set up something, a website or something else, an email or whatever.
(01:50:15):
It just goes to hover. That's why when you see a brand new site often it just says hover.com. This site is not yet set up. That kind of thing. So it sends that information up to the big phone books in the sky, and those guys have every dot address, every internet address, and every English language or Lang. And by the way, it's every language and under the sun. So every address on the globe, and they have the lookup, they're the four 11 for all of those. So that's dns, the domain name system. It's actually a miraculous system that works quite well. If there are problems, you'll know, because so many sites will go off the internet, but for the most part it works flawlessly. So now that you understand that let's, let's talk about what, what Subaru is doing.
(01:51:04):
So you, I mentioned that if you don't know your computer, doesn't know, your router doesn't know what that address is, it asks the internet service provider. That's actually a mistake. That's a lie, because by default it will ask your I S P, but really it asks whatever the official d n s server is in your settings. So if you go and you look at your network settings, if there's nothing there, it uses the internet service provider's, DNS server, and all ISPs run a DNS server. But you can put something there, you can put something else there. You could put another DNS server in there. And most DNS servers are set up to be available to the public and usable. Google has a its own DNS servers you can use. Verizon has it. There's 8.888. There's 4 4, 4 4. We've mentioned Open DNS before. Subaru, you said you're using CloudFlare.
(01:51:58):
That's 1.1, 0.11. Pretty easy to remember. So you put that in either your computers network settings, you'll see if you go into network settings, I I could open that up. You'll see that there is a place you could put that in. But if you wanna put it in globally, you don't put anything in the computer's network settings and, and you put it in your router. You'll notice when you go to your network settings that your computer has an address for the router, usually, you know, 1 98 0.6, 1 68, 1 92, 1 68 1 1, wherever the router is. That's, that's the first place the computer's gonna go to check for D n s. But if there's nothing there, it will go to something in your d n s setting. So let's go into my advanced settings here. This is this is on Windows. I'm on. Boy, you know, I haven't, haven't looked at this Windows <laugh> interface in a long time.
Mikah Sargent (01:52:56):
We could show my screen if I'm still
Leo Laporte (01:52:58):
Connected. Yeah, are you connected? All right. So, so there's the adapt. There you go. That's a little more familiar to me. That's McIntosh.
Mikah Sargent (01:53:06):
Yeah, we've got the DNS servers. I don't know, should I save these out loud? It's fine I guess. There we go. So it's, should we not? No, no, it doesn't work. Okay. 10.1, 35 point 22 do 11 and then the same 12.
Leo Laporte (01:53:20):
So I'll give you a little hint. There are two non ratable IP address ranges. The ones that begin with 1 92 and the ones that begin with 10 dot, those are always internal. So by just when you tell me that I know that you are using a DNS server inside of inside the building because it's 10 dot right? So that's something we've set up. The reason you can say it out loud is nobody can access it because it's not routable. So they can't, if they type 10 dot, they'll get something in their building, not our Right. So we don't have to worry about that. But that's because we are on a corporate network and our IT department, aka Russell <laugh> set up a server for us. He's probably got it ratted out to somewhere else, maybe to Sonic Net one of our providers or Comcast, another provider.
(01:54:05):
But he does that all himself. So you can change that. But, but you asked the question, Subaru, you've changed it in your router. That's actually the best place to do it cuz that affects everybody. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So everybody's now using CloudFlare 1.111. The advantage of doing that. Well, there's several. You mentioned it's faster. Here's Steve's s Benchmark program. There are quite a few of them out there. The way it works is you, you run it and it will go out and it'll query a bunch of different name servers and tell you who's the fastest. You might add some's name servers. It probably doesn't have 1.1 0.1 in it. It probably also doesn't have Comcast or whoever your internet service providers is. So you might add those. There are other companies that make DNS benchmark Steves free@grc.com. So then you can find out who the fastest is. That's gonna vary of course, depending on time of day, you know who else is using it, things like that. Cloudflare's very fast. Is that the one you use? One? Yeah,
Mikah Sargent (01:55:05):
I use CloudFlare at home.
Leo Laporte (01:55:07):
I use op, I use for a long time. You used Open dns. Now I use Next dns. Next dns I io. That's a paid service. That adds a lot of other features because it turns out if you have to go through a DNS server to look up an address, you can do things like block addresses from your kids, right? Yes. Or, you know, hide your privacy. There's a lot of things you can do when you control a DNS server. So companies like CloudFlare, they have other, they have 1.1 0.1 0.1, which is their basic service. They have 1.1 0.1, 0.2 0.3, and I think they have four that do more and more to protect you from malware. Things like that. They're preventing you from going to sites that have bad stuff on them, things like that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So I think Cloudflare's a good one to use. Opendns is good. You can use Verizons, you can use Googles. There's a lot of companies that will allow you use their DNS servers, use whichever one is is faster. And I think you're fine. But to answer your base question, yeah, take the settings out of all the computers because
Mikah Sargent (01:56:10):
If you, if you don't touch it and you connect to your router, then it's going to listen through that. But the moment that you touch it in the settings and you change it, that's what's going to stick so well. Leo's saying is take the, if you put anything in there, take those out and let that universal choice that you've made on your router be the thing that gets disseminated to all the devices that you're using.
Leo Laporte (01:56:30):
I swear to God, I don't know what Windows is done with these settings. Yeah, where are they? Ah, here they are. Well, wait a minute. That says under ethernet, but I'm not on ethernet. . That's interesting. So I can, I don't know how this works to be honest with <laugh>. It's, it's crazy. It should be under wifi. Let's see. But under wifi, Twitter on air properties, I don't, I don't know what any of this stuff, I don't know where DNS is. Maybe if I just searched. How about that? Nowadays, modern operating systems, <laugh>
Mikah Sargent (01:57:01):
Let you
Leo Laporte (01:57:01):
Search you pretty much, and there's no results. So forget it.
Mikah Sargent (01:57:04):
That's fat a feeling.
Leo Laporte (01:57:06):
Boy, I gotta, I gotta learn windows. They've changed everything with Windows 11. I don't even know what this is, what's going on here, but yeah, that's the idea. If you haven't said 'em, if you haven't said a, a, a a server, then you, then you default is, is the router and you don't have to worry about anything. The router will handle that and it'll actually, it'll use your ISSP until you change the browser. Does that all make sense Subaru?
Caller 6 (01:57:27):
Thank you. It is much appreciated.
Leo Laporte (01:57:29):
Yeah. And do go do, look, go to 1.1, 0.11 and look at the various things that CloudFlare offers. Cuz you might want actually a more advanced system. Okay. than 1.1 0.1 0.1. And they talk about these other things. It's, it's, you know, cl I like CloudFlare. I really have a lot of respect for them. And Judy, we're friends with John Graham Cuming, their cto. It's a great, it's a great company. But some people are worried that CloudFlare is kind of nerfing up the Yeah. All of the internet. And of course, one of the reasons they give this away is because they now know everywhere you go they say they're the fastest DNS resolver on Earth. Well that's, that's pretty good. Speed does matter cuz that's the amount of time it takes from you entering yahoo.com to actually get into the page that that whole DNS thing has to, has to happen. I'm very happy with next dns. I I don't mind paying them for the, the privilege.
Caller 6 (01:58:27):
Judy Ru says Hi.
Leo Laporte (01:58:29):
Hi, Judy Ru Judy Ru. Hi. Thank you.
Caller 6 (01:58:32):
I just got back from Trader Joe's.
Leo Laporte (01:58:34):
Uhoh <laugh>. Kevin, let me guess. Did she buy some chili Mixings fixings <laugh>
Caller 6-1 (01:58:40):
Chips and caramelized onion dip and
Leo Laporte (01:58:43):
Oh, you're getting ready. The big game is coming. Yep. That's nice. Happy Saturday. All right, take care. Happy Saturday. Yeah, we're Lisa went out shopping. Thanks Subaru. Take care. Lisa went out shopping and she said I think we're having nine or 10 people over. She said, I was gonna get pizza, but maybe, we'll, maybe we'll have a cookout. I said, oh, good to know. That involves me. <Laugh> <laugh>, I'll be, I'll be getting ready for the cookout. <Laugh>. 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.
(01:59:46):
Our mission statement is twit, is to build a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. Boy, already you should be, your ears should be perking up at that because highly engaged is good for you. Tech enthusiasts, if that's who you're looking for, this is the place we do it by offering 'em the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world. And I hear from our audience all the time, part of that knowledge comes from our advertisers. We are very careful. We pick advertisers with great products, great services with integrity, and introduce them to our audience with authenticity and genuine enthusiasm. And that makes our host Red Ads different from anything else you can buy. We are literally bringing you to the attention of our audience and giving you a big fat endorsement. We like to create partnerships with trusted brands, brands who are in it for the long run, long-term partners that want to grow with us.
(02:00:46):
And we have so many great success stories. Tim Broom, who founded it Pro TV in 2013, started advertising with us on day one, has been with us ever since. He said, quote, we would not be where we are today without the Twit network. I think the proof is in the pudding. Advertisers like it Pro TV and Audible that have been with us for more than 10 years, they stick around because their ads work. And honestly, isn't that why you're buying advertising? You get a lot with twit. We have a very full service attitude. We almost think of it as kind of artisanal advertising, boutique advertising. You'll get a full service continuity team, people who are on the phone with you, who are in touch with you, who support you from, with everything from copywriting to graphic design. So you are not alone in this.
(02:01:38):
We embed our ads into the shows. They're not, they're not added later. They're part of the shows. In fact, often they're such a part of our shows that our other hosts will chime in on the ads saying, yeah, I love that. Or just the other day, <laugh>, one of our hosts said, man, I really gotta buy that <laugh>. That's an additional benefit to you because you're hearing people, our audience trusts saying, yeah, that sounds great. We deliver always overdeliver on impressions. So you know, you're gonna get the impressions you expect. The ads are unique every time. We don't pre-record them and roll them in. We are genuinely doing those ads in the middle of the show. We'll give you great onboarding services, ad tech with pod sites that's free for direct clients. Gives you a lot of reporting, gives you a great idea of how well your ads are working.
(02:02:28):
You'll get courtesy commercials. You actually can take our ads and share them across social media and landing pages. That really extends the reach. There are other free goodies too, including mentions in our weekly newsletter that sent to thousands of fans, engaged fans who really want to see this stuff. We give you bonus ads and social media promotion too. So if you want to be a long-term partner, introduce your product to a savvy engaged tech audience. Visit twit.tv/advertise. Check out those testimonials. Mark McCreary is the c e o of authentic. You probably know him one of the biggest original podcast advertising companies. We've been with him for 16 years. Mark said the feedback from many advertisers over 16 years across a range of product categories, everything from razors to computers, is that if ads and podcasts are gonna work for a brand, they're gonna work on Twitch shows.
(02:03:23):
I'm very proud of what we do because it's honest. It's got integrity, it's authentic, and it really is a great introduction to our audience of your brand. Our listeners are smart, they're engaged, they're tech savvy, they're dedicated to our network. And that's one of the reasons we only work with high integrity partners that we've personally and thoroughly vetted. I have absolute approval on everybody. If you've got a great product, I want to hear from you. Elevate your brand by reaching out today@advertisattwit.tv, break out of the advertising norm. Grow your brand with host Red ads on twit.tv. Visit TWI tv slash advertise for more details or you can email us, advertise@twit.tv if you're ready to launch your campaign now. I can't wait to see your product, so give us a ring. Do you have any other emails or is that, is that, that was the, the email I had to email of the day. Sorry. Yeah, the email of the day. The email of the day. Well then I think we could take a few more calls before we wrap this thing up. Let's see. Sounds good. Who else is in our Larry, I'm gonna pick up Larry. Larry, I'm sending you to the breakout room. I've been saying your name in vain this whole time. Hi Larry. Are you calling from, let's see if he's he's
Caller 7 (02:04:44):
Muted. Hey, I'm in Petaluma. Whoa.
Leo Laporte (02:04:48):
Down the road. A piece
Caller 7 (02:04:50):
Down the road. I, you took me by surprise. I hadn't put my hand up, but I tried to get in the last two weeks and here I am.
Leo Laporte (02:04:57):
You made it. The tail end of the show. Hello. Hello neighbor <laugh>, come on over for the Super Bowl. Everybody else in town is coming over. Hey.
Caller 7 (02:05:05):
Oh, gimme this. Send me the address. I'll
Leo Laporte (02:05:07):
Be <laugh>.
Caller 7 (02:05:09):
I'm actually about five minutes from your, from your your studio. Oh,
Leo Laporte (02:05:12):
Nice. I, you know, our studio is not yet open to the publics, cuz I don't, I think Covid isn't quite over yet. We've been I understand slowly bringing people in. You know, we had it was great. I had Daniel Suarez in yesterday for our triangulation. It was so nice to, to see a human. But we're still a little reluctant. I, you know, if it's just me, it's fine. But I don't want to, I I wanna protect our staff and Dean.
Caller 7 (02:05:35):
No, I I hear you. I'm still wearing masks when I go into public places.
Leo Laporte (02:05:40):
Yeah. People are
Caller 7 (02:05:40):
Looking at me kinda of off, but that's okay. Yep.
Mikah Sargent (02:05:42):
That's how I feel too. They look at me, but I don't
Leo Laporte (02:05:44):
Care. I saw you the other day at Petaluma Market. I thought, who's that weirdo? <Laugh>. <laugh>.
Mikah Sargent (02:05:49):
Yeah. You're the other person I see around town who's still
Leo Laporte (02:05:52):
Of mask. What's Mike doing? When's Larry, what can we do for you, Larry?
Caller 7 (02:05:55):
Well, I was calling about last pass, which I unceremoniously dumped about two months ago,
Leo Laporte (02:06:01):
As did many of us. Yes.
Caller 7 (02:06:03):
You know, and, but in the process I went from a I went from a paid plan, which I you had recommended several years ago and was happy with them until the the security breach. But in the meantime they've now got me free on the free, I have tried at least a dozen times to delete my account and it will not let me do it. I called, I tried their tech support, which is totally useless. And I'm just wondering, maybe I'm getting a little paranoid here, but I'm just wondering whether there's preventing people from actually deleting their accounts for some nefarious reasons. Maybe
Leo Laporte (02:06:37):
They think you'll just tire of it and, and just stick around and they won't lose you as a customer.
Caller 7 (02:06:42):
Yeah, I don't know. I mean the fact that my, I've I've, I've changed all my important passwords. And and I've gone to bitten warden as you recommended and so far I'm happy with them. But,
Leo Laporte (02:06:55):
But you're right. That last step is, in fact, Steve was talking about this a couple of weeks ago. Steve Gibson on a security, now you wanna delete your last pass vault so that they don't have access to your passwords. Cuz that vault still has your passwords right now if you've gone through the process, if you've moved over to another password manager and you've gone through the process of fixing your e your your passwords, which you probably still do no matter what, be you wanna do that because last pass did lose earlier versions of the vault. That's why people are leaving Last pass. They had a breach and the vaults were leaked by accident. The good news is those vaults are encrypted. It's gonna take a bad guy a lot of effort to get into them if they have a good, long, strong password. So you're probably okay, you're using a good long password, right?
Caller 7 (02:07:39):
Oh yeah, no, I've, I I changed all my passwords within Bit Warden and I think they're at least 14 to 16 characters.
Leo Laporte (02:07:46):
Yeah. And, and your master password should be long as close to random as you can get. Remember you gotta memorize it. So Right. And, and, and you should turn up on last pass even it's not too late to protect that vault. It's too late to protect the one that got away. But the reason you wanna delete the vault is in case Last Pass has another breach. Right, right. And there's no, you know, it happens once you could say, well now they'll make sure it never happens again. That's possible. Or it could be that whatever poor security practices they had have not been fixed. Usually it's that it's the ladder, right? When somebody gets breached, they often get breached again. Look at T-Mobile. I would say as long as you, you could, you can still log in the last pass cause your password's still there.
(02:08:32):
Turn up your, your mm-hmm. <Affirmative> password hash derivative function, your pbk DF two to the highest setting, it'll let you, usually that's 2 million. That protects you having a good and maybe change your password so it's really long and strong that protects you. And then you're gonna then if even if you can't delete it, I'd still try to delete it. But if you can't delete it, even if they had a breach, you have a long, strong password to put two factor, no two factor's not gonna help in that case. But put a long strong password and update up up the settings for your pbk DF two hash to the highest setting possible 2 million that's gonna protect you. That's gonna make it hard for a hacker. Hackers are gonna go after the low hanging fruit first. They can see how many, for instance, how many iterations on the hash. And so they're gonna go after people with iterations, you know, of a lower number one in some cases 500 in many cases. Those are the ones they're gonna go after.
Caller 7 (02:09:28):
Well, well I I did increase it after you talked about it a couple weeks ago. I didn't go that high. So I will go,
Leo Laporte (02:09:33):
Go as high as you can because now you don't care if it's slow to load cuz you're not using it. Right. Yeah. And there won't be anything in it so it'll load faster. Right. Right. But, and then the most important thing you already did, which is when you mo move to the new password manager now change your passwords, turn on two factor everywhere you can turn up your bit warden PBK. D F two. I turn mine up to 2 million a bit warden. It doesn't slow it down. Appreciably,
Caller 7 (02:09:56):
I think I did mine to 500. Maybe I should go
Leo Laporte (02:09:59):
Higher. It should be at least 500,000. I'm sure that you said that. Not 500. Yeah, 500,000. The bit warden was 100,000. 100. I think they recently went up to 300,000. You wanted as high as honestly, it doesn't slow things down that much. You want it as high as you can. What that does is it makes it harder to brute force.
Caller 7 (02:10:21):
Right. Having
Leo Laporte (02:10:21):
A good long password also makes it much harder to br brute force if you have a good long pa. I recently changed my password besides turning my now part of
Caller 7 (02:10:31):
My, part of my reason for wanting to call us, I'm wondering whether this is actually I'm wondering whether, whether other people are having this difficulty and whether this is actually intentional. I maybe I getting,
Leo Laporte (02:10:42):
I can't imagine it's intentional, but it's just a further sign of bad engineering.
Caller 7 (02:10:47):
Yeah. Well I don't know. I mean that, that when, what made me paranoid when you mentioned that, that they were bought by a venture capital firm. Yeah. And I thought, oh my God, that's an inside job here. You just
Leo Laporte (02:10:57):
Need to <laugh>. I think this is what happened. What Last Pass was a great company. Steve vetted it, talked to the founder, Joe Siegrist, but Joe left Company got bought by LogMeIn. Logmein then sold it to private equity company, private equity companies spun it out. So it's been through all these process, I have to say <laugh>, clearly their energies were put put on making it look good. It looks, it's really nice. User interface has gotten better and better. It's a really nice password manager on the surface, but I think they might have let go of some of the engineers who were responsible for keeping it secure. And that's, you know, it's, it's one thing to be look good on the surface. You gotta be good. You gotta be pretty under the hood too. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. So I think that's probably what happened. We don't know. I don't, you know and you're right. There may be the private there, there's no way they're saying don't let anybody delete their password vault. That, that that can't possibly be just keep trying. I don't know <laugh>, I and nobody in the chat room is saying they're having this trouble. Right. okay, good. I I deleted mine when I left last pass a couple of years ago.
Caller 7 (02:12:00):
Yeah. That was part of my purpose of calling is that if you got a barrage of other people.
Leo Laporte (02:12:04):
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's the reasonable, reasonable thing to ask. I've
Mikah Sargent (02:12:06):
Had a lot of people who had trouble changing their password on last pass after everything happened that first time when they went in and they tried to change it, they ended up having to call support and get support to do something behind the scenes, but actually deleting. I've not heard from too many people who've had a problem deleting. So that is interesting that you've ran into that issue.
Leo Laporte (02:12:30):
Yeah.
Caller 7 (02:12:30):
Yeah. They, they have two ways to do it. They have one with your passport or one without. I've done it both ways. When you say, I don't remember my password, they send you an email with a link and I've done that at least a half a dozen times and none of the none of them. What
Mikah Sargent (02:12:44):
Happens at the end when you say it doesn't work?
Caller 7 (02:12:47):
I get an error message saying account not deleted. Something went wrong, accounts not deleted. You
Leo Laporte (02:12:53):
Know, I'm wondering at this point you may have triggered security protections. So they, they may have said, oh, this guy's weird. We see all these weird stuff happening with this guy. Let's, you know, let's prevent him from changing anything. Let it rest for a few weeks. I don't, nobody in our nobody in our IRC or in our Discord is saying anything. So I, I don't think it's a common problem. I will check around, but I think this is probably, this often is the case. You know, when you, when you, when you change things cuz you're trying to get out of there, they see that as an attack <laugh> and they go, oh, lock it down, <laugh>. Now you can't change anything. Right? Yeah. Give it, give it a few. When
Caller 7 (02:13:32):
I con even when I contacted their, their help sup or their support, which I had to do through, they didn't really have a, a, a portal that I could find. So I went through their billing support portal and I, and I did get somebody to respond, but they basically kept saying, do the same thing you've already done. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:13:50):
Doesn't it? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they don't know. They have a notebook. They don't know. Yeah. all right. If I had any context there, I would ask, but I don't they don't like us anymore. <Laugh>.
Caller 7 (02:14:01):
<Laugh>. I wonder why. I
Leo Laporte (02:14:03):
Wonder why. Hey, a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for calling. Thanks for being so patient. I know you wanted to get in earlier. Yeah. Thank you for hanging in there with us. Thank you neighbor.
Caller 7 (02:14:12):
Neighbor. Thank you. See you.
Leo Laporte (02:14:13):
I'll see you at Pamela Market.
Caller 7 (02:14:14):
See you at the market.
Leo Laporte (02:14:15):
<Laugh>. So I'm gonna root for the the Kansas City Chiefs. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, okay. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and that young, if you'd like. Good looking fellow Patrick Mahomes tomorrow for the Super Bowl. I hope you found us. Glad you did. If you did, if you're watching this on Sunday saying what happened, we, we didn't want to compete with that big game that's gone. There
Mikah Sargent (02:14:37):
Are a lot of, there are lots of shows that didn't want to compete with the big game either. They they usually come out on Sundays. They ended up coming out. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:14:43):
Last of us came out Thursday for some reason. Yeah, yeah. So we are gonna do this week in Tech next a rare Sunday recording. So if you're watching live
Mikah Sargent (02:14:52):
Saturday recording
Leo Laporte (02:14:53):
A rare Saturday record. See even, I don't know <laugh> mic we're gonna do coming up in just a little bit as we reset the studio. People have been asking What's that I'm wearing?
Mikah Sargent (02:15:03):
I was wondering. It's a cool chip of Sunshine
Leo Laporte (02:15:05):
Chip. Yeah. I found this. I I was, I was okay. I have a lot of crap on my bureau and I was looking for something and I was rooting through it and I found this and I said, oh, I shouldn't wear that <laugh>. It is, it says something like, I was there at the Xbox one inch, one x launch. Oh neat. The fastest microprocessor in a gaming console.
Mikah Sargent (02:15:25):
The question is, did that lapel pin distract you then from finding whatever it was you were looking for in the
Leo Laporte (02:15:31):
Bureau? I forgot what I was looking for. <Laugh>, but I did find this. Good, good. Thank you all for being here. Thank you Mikah Sargent for taking us Saturday off and coming in and joining us. Yeah,
Mikah Sargent (02:15:41):
It was a delight.
Leo Laporte (02:15:42):
You'll find Mikah in many places on the network every Tuesday with ha with iOS today with Rosemary Orchard every Thursday with Jason Howell on Tech News Weekly every Saturday or Sunday depending, I guess every Sunday here on Ask the Tech Guys. What else, what else is going on? Do we have a club event coming up? We had a great event with Daniel Suarez, the club. Got to participate in that upcoming events Samal Salmon, it'll be March 2nd. Oh, exciting. And ask me anything with Sam. The book club ins in April. Sea of Tranquility, the book Get Reading. And one of our great editors, Victor Bona we're trying to do, ask Me Anythings inside Twits, if you will, with all of our staff one by one so you can meet the people who really make this all possible. People on the other side of the cameras.
(02:16:32):
If you're not a member of Club Twit, I would like to invite you to join. It really is a great place to hang out. We really owe our club members. They make a lot of things possible. Ads have been a little slow in the last six months actually since Covid. That's why we started the club. And so that revenue, that extra $7 a month really makes a big difference to our bottom line. Keeps the lights on, keeps everybody employed keeps the shows coming. There's some special shows you get as a club member. You, nobody can't get any other way. Like Mikah's Hands on McIntosh. Really great show about McIntosh. We've also got hands on Windows with Paul throughout the Untitled Linux Show with Jonathan Jonathan Bennett, GIZ Fizz with Dick d Bartolo, all these special events we have in there. You also get access to our Discord.
(02:17:17):
You get ad free versions of all the shows, so you wouldn't even hear this little ad. They're all cut out. And the Trip plus feed with things like you know, those special events and more stuff that happens before and after shows that we don't put out as a podcast. If you're interested, go to Twitter tv slash club Twitter. Thank you so much for doing that. Thank you so much for the support of all of our club members. We love our club members. We do I will be back in about a few minutes as as we get ready for this weekend Tech. Have a wonderful super Sunday <laugh> and we'll see you next time on. Ask the Tech guys
Rod Pyle (02:17:55):
Smile. Hi everybody.
(02:17:57):
Hey. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-Chief, Ad Astra Magazine. And each week I' joined with my co-host to bring you this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the Final Frontier. We talk to NASA chiefs, space scientists, engineers, educators and artists. And sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space books and tv. And we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So whether you're an armchair adventurer or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars Rocket, join us on this weekend space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time.
