Ask the Tech Guys 1987 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):
Well, hey, hey, hey. It's time for Ask the Tech Guys. I'm Leo LaPorte and coming up my review of the, I've got it. Yours. Oh yeah, no. Somewhere the <laugh>, Samsung Flip five. It just came out and it's hard to find.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:15):
And I'm Mike a sergeant and we are gonna answer several questions about how to stretch your wifi.

Leo Laporte (00:00:21):
Then what's the best way to build the Monster Workstation pc? It's all coming up. Next on Ask the Tech Guys podcasts you love

Mikah Sargent (00:00:33):
From people you trust.

Leo Laporte (00:00:35):
This,

(00:00:40):
This is Ask The Tech Guys episode 1987, recorded Sunday, August 13th, 2023, two heels, no toe. This episode of Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by Myo. Myo Photos is a smart and powerful system that lets you easily organize, edit, and manage years of important documents, photos, and videos in an offline library hosted on any device. And it's free. Visit myo.com/twi and by ACI learning a C'S News. Cyber Skills is training. That's for everyone, not just the pros. Visit go dot aci learning.com/twit. Twit listeners will receive at least 20% off or as much as 65% off an IT Pro enterprise solution plan discount based on size of your team. And when you fill out the form, you'll get a proper quote tailored to your needs. And by Brook Linen Shop in store or online@brooklinen.com today to give yourself the cooling sleep you deserve this summer. Use the promo code tech guy for $20 off your online purchase of a hundred dollars or more. Plus free shipping on brook linen.com. Well, hey, hey, hey. How are y'all today?

Mikah Sargent (00:01:56):
That there

Leo Laporte (00:01:57):
Is Sailor man. Micah Sargent. Very stripey today. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:02:01):
Hoy the

Leo Laporte (00:02:01):
Hell. Leo. Oh, Hoy. Micah.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:03):
This is Leo LaPorte who is a cocktail server.

Leo Laporte (00:02:09):
<Laugh>. <laugh>. Thank you very much. Are you saying that 'cause I'm wearing a peach colored shirt.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:14):
It was the peach colored shirt and the loafers and the loafers doing

Leo Laporte (00:02:17):
It for me. Yeah. Lo and the green jacket, which really is green when I look at it. This is a foose Safari jackets. He's got flaps

Mikah Sargent (00:02:23):
And buttons. That was, you know, second as I was thinking more about it, I was thinking you could have been coming from Jurassic. If I

Leo Laporte (00:02:28):
Wore a pith helmet, I would be I have a pith helmet in the other room. You do. If make you feel better. You know, 'cause you have a complete access to my hat collection. I do.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:36):
Because a very special

Leo Laporte (00:02:37):
Key with the handoff of iOS today to Micah and Rosemary, I had to make the offer of all the hats mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that we have

Mikah Sargent (00:02:46):
Collected. And there are so many,

Leo Laporte (00:02:47):
I actually at home have two hat racks in my office. 'cause There's still many, many hats, <laugh>. And and I was talking to my mom on FaceTime, and I didn't realize it, but a hat rack over my shoulder. She said, what's that red thing on your hat rack? I said, oh, that's a Lucho Libre mask. But she said, what's that?

Mikah Sargent (00:03:06):
Oh, did you get to show her? I

Leo Laporte (00:03:08):
Put it on and it was terrified her. It's of course a Mexican wrestler's mask. San Francisco, 49 years Mexican wrestler's mask. So terrified her. So then I put it on one of the things and put a little hat on it.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:20):
Oh no. So

Leo Laporte (00:03:20):
Now it looks like there's a scary person wearing a Panama hat on my hat rack. <Laugh>. So much fun. I encourage everybody to get a hat rack. What are we gonna do today? Today? Hmm. We are gonna take your calls at call TWI tv. That's the zoom number?

Mikah Sargent (00:03:34):
Yes, that is indeed. Which we think the best way to go about doing that is just going on your phone into the browser, putting that

Leo Laporte (00:03:41):
In. Then you'll see, you know, you'll then see yourself mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and us and the microphone will work and it all works. Whoa. Did you see that? Did you see that? That's another thing we're gonna do, is we're gonna flip around and show you the Galaxy Z Flip five just came in nice and playing with it. Exciting. Trying to get people to be impressed. Yeah. <laugh>,

Mikah Sargent (00:04:03):
Try trying our

Leo Laporte (00:04:04):
Hardest. No one was impressed.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:06):
Also the phone number, if you'd like to call in with an actual phone, it's (888) 724-2884. You can call in anytime during the show and you will also pop up for us where we can choose you and bring you on. But what's great about that phone number is you can call any other time when we're not doing the show and leave a voicemail with your question.

Leo Laporte (00:04:29):
Ooh. I love that. And we do have, I think, a b batch of voicemails. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Now, Sam, normally this week, Sam a bull salmon. Our car guy would be here. He's not because he's driving a car, <laugh>

Mikah Sargent (00:04:40):
Driving a car into the forest.

Leo Laporte (00:04:42):
He's doing so Yes. Into the Pine Barrens. One of these

Mikah Sargent (00:04:45):
<Laugh>, just like that do in the movies, there are the

Leo Laporte (00:04:47):
Universal gestures. There's the hands going up and down for a car

Mikah Sargent (00:04:50):
Or milking a cow, one of the two. And then

Leo Laporte (00:04:52):
The, the do this call thing with the, with the, with the thumb and finger, which is either hang loose bra or call me <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:59):
And then this

Leo Laporte (00:05:01):
That's a hook 'em horns. Yeah. Yeah. Or rock and roll never forgets. Yeah. what are, do some other hand gestures? Let's not, let's

Mikah Sargent (00:05:09):
Stop there. No, there are a few <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:05:12):
So it's gonna be a lot of calls. And then the quick flip review and and that'll be that'll be that, that'll

Mikah Sargent (00:05:17):
Be that Emails, all that kind stuff. Emails. Yeah. At tg at TWI tv. We

Leo Laporte (00:05:21):
Don't, John Ashley's on vacation today. So Anthony Nielsen is producing the show. So he gets the privilege and honor of telling us what the heck to do.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:30):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But we do wanna start with the news, right?

Leo Laporte (00:05:33):
Oh, the news. Thank you, <laugh>. Oh, the news.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:37):
Oh, the news. Right. The news

Leo Laporte (00:05:39):
Of course Defcon is going on right now. And Black Hat. These are the two big hacker cons in in Las Vegas. In fact, somebody just told me in chat that Caesar's Palace, where where where Def Con's going on has just been cleared out due to a suspicious package. So there's always fun and games

Mikah Sargent (00:05:56):
Can ask you which of the two is the more kind of buttoned up black hat. And okay, so Black Hat is the more professional

Leo Laporte (00:06:03):
Conference. Yeah. That's the one that people from no such agency and the central investigation Authority go to and they meet the hackers and stuff, and then Defcon is follows and it's kind of more fun and games and stuff. But at both, you get presentations from people who have all year been working on hacks and security flaws, and they come up with some, for instance, Patrick Wardle, who we love. Yes. from objective c dot dev. He is a both a, a, a developer for Apple products, but also a security guy. He submitted to Apple a few months ago, a fix. You know, when you nowadays on, on modern versions of Mac oss, when you add a new program, it says a background task has been added. Yes. Which is a great little pop-up that lets you know that, oh gosh, you just dissolved Zoom and now it's gonna be running a little Zoom thing in the background.

(00:06:57):
And so that's very helpful. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And the secondary point of it, it started I think with Mac os Monterey, and I think it continues in Ventura and will certainly continue in Sonoma, but the problem was, Patrick found if somebody has root access to your computer, they can disable that. Oh. And so a hacker wants to do this. This is one of the reasons hap put this in, is to let you know if something's running in the background. Even, you know, if you just installed a program, if you just installed Zoom and, and it pops up, well, you expect that. But if all of a sudden you're just computing along and you get a background process has just been added, that's a little heads up that something bad's happened. I don't think Apple has fully explained to people

Mikah Sargent (00:07:36):
They have not

Leo Laporte (00:07:37):
Because they need to tell people that. Right. That that's, or that's a cause for concern. Otherwise, you just go, okay, thank you. But Patrick found out that if somebody has rude access, they could disable that. So he told Apple, apple, he says bandaid fixed it. They fixed it, sorta. And and so he found out, and he knows this because he has a program that does the same thing called

Mikah Sargent (00:07:59):
Knock, knock, knock,

Leo Laporte (00:08:00):
Knock and <laugh>. Do you promise every time I No

Mikah Sargent (00:08:04):
<Laugh>. Okay. Because if I do it, then you'll keep doing it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:08:07):
I'll, you're right. <Laugh>. You have discovered the secret to my psyche that he says because he wrote, knock, knock, he has an intimate knowledge of how Right. This might be disabled and bad guys might go. He says it's trivial to get around it. Now, is that a security flaw? No. You're no worse than you were before Monterey. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. 'cause It didn't, you know, previous versions of macOS didn't do it, but he's kind of mad at Apple. And this is the thing, he kind of, this is a little sketch. He, he broke the, the secret promise between security researchers and companies that you will tell us about this before you tell the world. He said, you know, I told Apple about the first one and they fixed it badly. I didn't tell 'em about the second one because I'm mad at them. They didn't fix it. Right. So that puts him a little bit on the sketch side. Yeah. That's nevertheless, we all now know what not to not.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:58):
I think the problem is once you start being alerted, then if you don't see it, then you expect that there's not a background thing installed. Right? Yeah. So once they've started telling you, you will, then the next time you install an app, where before I might've gone and checked, I'm not checking anymore because I'm expecting it to notify me. Right. So yeah, it is kind of, if you're gonna do it, you gotta do it and you gotta do it. Right. And they didn't do it right.

Leo Laporte (00:09:23):
Nope. They did it wrong. Big lawsuit. I'm a little miffed at this, you know, the, this, this wonderful thing. A guy named Brewster Kale, who sold his company, waste a o l made a little bit of money instead of going on, starting many more companies, he took that money and he started something called the Internet Archive. Okay. Which is the library of the world. He says, and he's quite right. He says, the problem with the internet is stuff disappears. But that's our history. And it's as if, you know, the Romans had just thrown everything on the phone. Well, they did. But <laugh>, it's, you know, you, you, you wanna keep as much of this for future generations. Yeah. Not 'cause it's relevant, but just because it's our history. So he said, because companies could routinely throw this stuff away, he created the internet archive and copied stuff.

(00:10:09):
And I remember interviewing him several times and he said, you know, I said, what about copyright? He said, or <laugh> worry about that later. It's, we're, we're, our position is we're a library. Uhhuh and libraries have the right to preserve this stuff, including old video games old movies and TV shows. And it turns out 78 records. So you would think 70 eights, right. Those are the old things that spin really fast. And very few people have record players anymore, let alone record players that play 70 eights. But they asked people to donate their 70 eights mm-hmm. <Affirmative> so they could digitize them. So they could preserve these records. That's

Mikah Sargent (00:10:45):
Awesome.

Leo Laporte (00:10:47):
Well, unfortunately, that includes Count Bassy and Frank Sinatra and the Universal Music Group. Big record label is now suing them, saying, you can't, I mean, I guess, you know, it's one thing to copy them, another thing to make them publicly available, but what's the point of a library if you don't open the collection to the public? And that's what you mgs unhappy about. It's the same reason the publishers are suing them over books because they were lending out digital copies of books. And, and Brewster's position and the internet archive's position is we're a library. We lend this is, this is important to preserve our history. Those 70 eights are gonna be unplayable going down the road. And if we don't preserve them, no one will. G's not making this effort.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:27):
That's what I was gonna say. If the group themselves is not doing it, then it's good. Someone is

Leo Laporte (00:11:33):
Binging Crosby's White Christmas, Chuck Berry's rollover Beethoven Duke Ellington's. It don't mean nothing if

Mikah Sargent (00:11:40):
Got that way.

Leo Laporte (00:11:41):
Very good

Mikah Sargent (00:11:42):
Up do up, do up. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:11:43):
Very, very good for a young person. So it's preserved in Micah's memory, but we would like to have a prison elsewhere. Have it

Mikah Sargent (00:11:48):
Elsewhere

Leo Laporte (00:11:49):
Please as well. So they say, oh, all of those songs are preserved on authorized streaming services. So they quote face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed. Right.

Mikah Sargent (00:12:03):
No, but yeah, because then that streaming service goes away. Right. Or I tell you

Leo Laporte (00:12:07):
What, it's a tough one. I I understand the right

Mikah Sargent (00:12:10):
Shoulders. I get both sides. Yeah, I do. I understand. I, I mean, what in an ideal world then, the Internet Archive archives this and only makes it available when it's no longer available. Is that what they want? Possibly.

Leo Laporte (00:12:21):
Maybe that's what should happen. I do think that the internet archive has a, plays a strong role. It's important part of our social fabric and it should be preserved and I think should be immune from these kinds of copyright lawsuits because it is a library preserving all.

Mikah Sargent (00:12:37):
If I could vote on that, I would absolutely vote. That way.

Leo Laporte (00:12:39):
This becomes more real because CNET just announced,

Mikah Sargent (00:12:42):
Oh my God,

Leo Laporte (00:12:43):
These knit witts, that they're just deleting all a lot of old content to quote, improve their ss e o ranking with Google. So Google has to share a little bit of blame. They want Google to think that they only have good fresh material on there and not old stuff. The problem is that old stuff is again, the archive of the history of the internet. And I understand, you know, we, we have, for instance, you can get every podcast we've ever done published.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:10):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:13:10):
Yeah. And it's on our website. We've not deleted those, but it costs us

Mikah Sargent (00:13:15):
To keep

Leo Laporte (00:13:15):
It Yeah. To keep it, it's expensive. And I guess, you know, seeing it as a reasonable you know, point that it maybe costing them, but there are things they could do, for instance, charging for access to their archives. The New York Times does that, that's Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:28):
Yeah. I, if I wanted to go back and get the paper on my birthday or something Right. I could buy that

Leo Laporte (00:13:33):
Yeah. So they can support the fact that they're storing this. It's text, it's not

Mikah Sargent (00:13:37):
Horrible. It's not gonna be a hard thing to sort

Leo Laporte (00:13:39):
You know, u s A today apparently is doing the same thing. And this is, I, it's throwing it away. And this is a bad thing. And, and partly it's Google's fault, I guess maybe it does affect the SS e o, but honestly, cnet, U S A today in a Newsweek time, all of these companies, you, this archive is part of our history's why? And that one

Mikah Sargent (00:13:59):
Seriously confuses me because, and and maybe this was explained somewhere and I did not come across it, but it was always my understanding that the way that you go up in Google rankings is by having the page, the link linked all across the web. Yeah. So one would think that the older the article, the more there is an opportunity for it to be linked from different places Yeah. As it's referenced. So to remove it's, it's almost like a credit score, you know, if you get rid of your oldest accounts and your credit drops score. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so I don't understand how deleting old stuff is going to improve ss e o if it means that you have these new articles that may not be linked across the web unless Google's search ranking is that changed? You know, that much changed going forward. But I'd love to hear Google's response to this specifically. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:14:48):
I will tell you what Google's response to this specifically is. Oh, good. So this was discovered by the way, credit to Gizmoto Gizmoto reporter Thomas Germaine got access to an internal CNET memo. This CNET never announced that they were gonna do this. CNET says, content proving Remo in internally only. So content pruning removes redirects or refreshes URLs that are no longer relevant or helpful to our audience, including outdated or redundant content that may confuse or frustrate users looking for up-to-date information. For example, a 1996 article about available a O L service tiers is no longer relevant or useful, also called Content deprecation. It sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant, and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results. Danny Sullivan, who we love, former founder of Search Engine Land, who is now a search liaison at Google directly according to Gizmoto, directly refuted C Net's, claims that this was an effective strategy. Amen. He posted this tweet just ahead of Jermaine's story. I'll show you the, what is it called? Is it a tweet? Oh gosh. Is it an X? Who knows? Who the hell Caress <laugh> are you deleting content from your site, says Google Search Liaison, because you somehow believe Google doesn't like old content. That's not a thing. Woo. Our guidance doesn't encourage this older content could still be helpful tool. Learn more about creating helpful content. Oh, we got an article, don't delete it.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:13):
I gotta say that last slide is so shady. Yeah. Learn more about creating helpful content. Cnet. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:19):
Cnet cnet who is also using AI to write junk articles and see

Mikah Sargent (00:16:24):
If you've got someone who is doing research about the history of the internet and they want to find that a o l article and it's not there anymore, then no, you're not being helpful to users. You're being unhelpful to users. Now you

Leo Laporte (00:16:36):
Could put a big red stamp on it, right? That says Archive or old

Mikah Sargent (00:16:41):
Or, yeah. There are a lot of sites that actually do that. You could do that. Apple's own support documents have that. This is no longer updated by Apple, but it's still there.

Leo Laporte (00:16:49):
I really think it's an interesting issue. But I don't buy C Net's art argument. Remember their own now buy private equity Red Ventures, and they've done all sorts of waffle things to, you know, kind of make more money. You know, this is the problem with private equity. They borrow buy companies and then they've gotta somehow mm-hmm. <Affirmative> make it viable, package it up and resell it before the debt becomes due. It's just a nasty thing. And, and I think it's, this is, but it's a subject that we haven't really had to think about because the internet has felt like, well, it's this modern new thing. Well, it's not anymore. It's 30 years old. Right. There's a lot of important stuff on there. And in 50 years and a hundred years and 200 years, people are want, wanna want that information. So you know, we're not deleting our old stuff only because we can afford to keep it alive right now thanks to people like our club, tour members. But at some point it's gonna cost us money to keep it. And then I'm gonna have to make a decision. If we have no revenue, what do we do with the episodes? I think, you know, not to, not to say that our old podcasts are particularly valuable, but if you were a historian, wanted to know what was going on in 2005.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:58):
Exactly. It's a great way to find out.

Leo Laporte (00:18:00):
Wanted to hear about the release of the first iPhone in 2007, a hundred years from now. That's gonna be interesting, especially this year in their own voices. What people really thought about this, I think that's valuable.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:10):
Well, and think about not too terribly long ago, Squarespace was detailing its own history,

Leo Laporte (00:18:15):
Right? Oh, that was a really great

Mikah Sargent (00:18:17):
Piece. Yeah. And they were able to link to the first ad that they had done with podcasts, which just so happened to be on the Twit network. And that was because that content was still available right? Online.

Leo Laporte (00:18:27):
Yeah. Our content. Yeah. but I have to say, this is a age old story. There, there is no recording of Super Bowl one. Oh, they took the tape and they reused it. <Laugh>. There is no <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:39):
That actually just hurt my heart. I I They reused it, it

Leo Laporte (00:18:42):
I that because tape was expensive. Not that much. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:18:45):
That's so sad. Sad. Same

Leo Laporte (00:18:46):
Thing with the first for Johnny Carson's first Tonight Show, there's a lot of old TV that is disappearing. So all of this is to say Brewster Kale is doing God's work with the internet archive. CNET should not rely on the internet archive to do this. But thank goodness Brewster is, and this lawsuit from the music labels and the publishers, these lawsuits against the internet archive are really an assault on society and future generations knock it off.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:13):
Did someone tape over Christopher Columbus's landing too?

Leo Laporte (00:19:16):
Yeah. There's no record of that. Yeah. So we think we know what he said. That's one small step for a pilgrim. One giant leap <laugh>. I dunno what he said. Oh God. All right. Let's do let's do a quick ad and then our first calls of the of the day. Sounds good. At 8, 8, 8, 8. You know, you know the,

Mikah Sargent (00:19:37):
You know, you know the number. 7 2 4 2 8 8 4,

Leo Laporte (00:19:40):
You know the number. I know it. Did you dimo label it on your phone?

Mikah Sargent (00:19:43):
No, I read it on that little straight up

Leo Laporte (00:19:45):
There. Oh, it's there. Okay. <laugh>. So every once in a while I say to myself, I wish I had old pictures of John Celena at the TWI cottage. And you know what? Thanks to Mile Leo, I do this episode of Ask the Tech Guys is brought to you by my Leo. Remember that John? Yeah. Backdoor of the TTW Cottage. So let me tell you why I have this and how easy it is to find my Leo solved the biggest problem. It's kind of related to what we were just talking about. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> of my Leo photo archives. And not just photos, documents too. My Leo has O c R built in. So you can actually say, import my documents folder. What I love about my Leo is it's not putting my photos, documents, videos, and other things on the public internet. I am backing them up to all my machines.

(00:20:35):
I have a Sonology backing it up as well. Myo supports that and a variety of other things. You can even have Myo encrypt all that and put it on Google Drive or iCloud or OneDrive so that you do have a backup, but you're not giving it to the big tech companies. Myo Photos is something I've been looking for ever since Google bought Picasa and killed it. I've been looking for a way to organize my photos locally, to store them locally, to keep them private to myself. Myo Photos is a smart, powerful system that helps you keep all your digital assets organized, secure, and free from pry, prying eyes is completely offline. You, you back it up where you want it to back up and you know, they're completely protected. It is what we call damn Digital Asset Management done. Right. And I have to say, I am so glad because one of the things Myo Photos does is it automatically does the reason I could find John, it does all the face recognition in on machine, on device behind the scenes.

(00:21:34):
Beautiful. IT tags things effect. I can go to my myo photos and look at my tags and I have, you know, it does automatically, it does all these smart tagging things. Look, it does all the geolocation from the exif data. These are the face face IDs. So if I were looking for pictures of people from back when it also, let me open up the sidebar, has smart tags and look at the, the depth on the smart tags. So this is the activity smart tag balance, beam ballplayer, barbell baseball, basketball, parallel bars, pool table, scuba diver wedding. It's doing all this behind the scenes in the background. Now, I have to say, I did have to identify the first few faces so they know that's Micah Sargent. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But then it found even baby pictures of my kids. It knew. Oh yeah. That's Abby.

(00:22:21):
Yeah. Even though I only only tagged adult pictures of her, they could tell. I don't know how it knows. It's fantastic. It is amazing. I have all my photos in there. One of the other things it does, this is a photo either from Flicker or Instagram ITOd. I had it all. My Instagram. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I had it import. All my flicker tagged it as well. I just, and this is a big one for me. You know, I have 60 or 70,000 photos on Google Photos, but Google takeout, if you've ever tried to do it, it zips it up. Tags, it doesn't have the names. It does all sorts of awful things to it. My Leo understands the takeout files and automatically ingests them. Ah, brilliant. So I've got all my Google photos in here. Woo. And because it works with your devices file systems, and by the way, Mac, windows, iOS, Android, you don't need to spend time importing.

(00:23:13):
It just works. It says you want me to keep a copy of your documents folder? Yes. I can't believe I didn't know about Myo photos. Now I do. And here's the bottom line. The funny thing that I didn't even, I, I buried the lead. It's free, free on a single device. So you can start right now importing everything. If you want more features, there is a myo Photos plus subscription. I certainly did that the first thing I did. But you get to decide, download the free version and see, you don't need to rely on the cloud to keep files accessible. You get to choose thumbnails, optimized or originals on every device. So on my phone where I don't have as much storage, I only do thumbnails. And then if I want to get that image, I just click it, it downloads it from my other machines.

(00:23:58):
It's really incredible. Preserve your digital legacy today. Get myo photos for free. I've just scratched the surface of what Myo can do. Go to my Leo and, and please do this so that they know you saw it here. My fear is you're all just gonna download it without telling them you saw it here. M y l io.com/twit. That's all you have to do. You will wanna do that because there are some discounts as well that you'll find when you get there. Don't wait. Preserve your digital legacy today. Get my LEO photos for free today on your computer or your mobile device by going to the special Uur l. Please use this myo.com/twit. As one of our listeners, you're gonna have access to special offers for my Leo photos. Plus download myo photos free. Free right now, m y l i o.com/twit myo.com/twit. Please take a look.

(00:24:51):
I think you'll like this. I just, it's fun for me to find all these old pictures from the old days. I love that. Who is that man? Who's that? Man? <laugh> question. Mark Burke says he's never seen that photo. That's how old that photo is. All right. Let's get some calls on the air. Who do you think, Anthony, should I start with? Adler or Bob? Start? Start with Adler or Bob. All right. We'll get Adler and Bob on, but I will start with Adler Adler. Press star nine to unmute. Right? Am I right? Star six six. Don't press star nine. Who knows what happen? Hello. They take over the call. Hello Adler.

Caller Adler (00:25:31):
Hey everyone. Thanks for having me on.

Leo Laporte (00:25:34):
Welcome. Where are you calling from?

Caller Adler (00:25:36):
Bingham, Binghamton, New York. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:25:37):
I love Binghamton. That's where SUNY is. Oh, beautiful area. Yeah.

Caller Adler (00:25:41):
Great, great campus. And home of I B M as I mentioned on your former show. I always get there. Yes, yes. So wait a minute.

Leo Laporte (00:25:49):
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You're not gonna get away with this. We got video of you. What the hell are you, are you a collector of something? What is that on there? Everything

Caller Adler (00:25:58):
Collector of everything. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:26:00):
Whoa. Okay, I see DVDs. What are in the boxes in the closet?

Caller Adler (00:26:06):
Those are all Funko pops. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:26:08):
Funko Pop. Okay. And that's what's above you. Do you have every Funko Pop

Caller Adler (00:26:14):
<Laugh>? That would be about 10,000 of 'em, so definitely not. Wow, you just have

Leo Laporte (00:26:18):
Like 8,000 of them.

Caller Adler (00:26:20):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:26:21):
Pretty much. <Laugh> are the Funko popups, the Beanie Babies of the 21st century.

Caller Adler (00:26:26):
Funko pop collectors would wanna disagree with that. The main reason is Funko pops have a certain brand, a certain you know, Marvel. You know, if you're a Marvel collector. Yeah. You can collect the Marvel Funko pops without collecting all of them. If you like for me, I, I like ad icons, so anything that's ad related.

Leo Laporte (00:26:47):
Oh, that's interesting. Oh, they really got everything.

Mikah Sargent (00:26:49):
Do you have the office collection?

Caller Adler (00:26:52):
No, I, I'd

Leo Laporte (00:26:53):
Like the office see, but Michael would like that. Michael would like that. Right. my son, every, every other day we get a box about this size <laugh> and, and it has a Green Bay Packers Funko Pop in it. Oh, nice. And he has a very large collection of those. They're kind of like Bobbleheads.

Caller Adler (00:27:11):
Yep. Yeah. So some are actually bobbleheads because of the contract or the licensing deal that Funko has with whoever. So Star Wars and Disney, well, star Wars and Marvel, I think. No. Star Wars has to be on a base.

Leo Laporte (00:27:25):
Oh, interesting. And

Caller Adler (00:27:27):
Marvel has to be Bobbleheads, I believe.

Leo Laporte (00:27:29):
Oh, okay.

Caller Adler (00:27:30):
Because they can't have it via statue. 'cause That's another,

Leo Laporte (00:27:33):
Somebody else owns those rights. And do you keep 'em, it looks like you do sealed in the box.

Caller Adler (00:27:38):
Yep. Yep. And if they're higher price, they're in a hard case. So my most expensive one is the BooBerry right over there.

Mikah Sargent (00:27:48):
Like the, like the, the cereal.

Caller Adler (00:27:50):
Yep. Neat. So that's

Leo Laporte (00:27:52):
A, he likes ad logos. That's cool. Yeah.

Caller Adler (00:27:55):
And then all the like I've got firefighting ones over there 'cause I'm a volunteer firefighter. I have standup comedians over there. Like Oh, that's

Mikah Sargent (00:28:05):
Neat.

Caller Adler (00:28:06):
And then also music ones. Because as you can see, I, I got out somewhere there all the D v D or, or CDs. 'cause I, you know, talking earlier about the archive, what's interesting is with digital media versus physical media, you, you can't really collect physical media or I mean digital media, right? Like Amazon.

Leo Laporte (00:28:32):
Yeah. They own it. They're, they're let, they're kind of renting it to you. Yeah.

Caller Adler (00:28:36):
Yep. Yep. And then this is gonna be missed.

Leo Laporte (00:28:40):
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That was the big announcement that in September there Netflix is discontinuing the red envelopes. They're not mailing out tv. Yeah. And

Caller Adler (00:28:48):
They won't sell it to Redbox.

Leo Laporte (00:28:50):
Oh. Oh, Redbox wanted to buy it. And they said no, I

Mikah Sargent (00:28:53):
Didn't know that.

Leo Laporte (00:28:54):
Oh, that's disappointing.

Caller Adler (00:28:55):
That would be competition of course. But unfortunately Netflix itself has maybe seven or 8,000 titles on, on the streaming access right now. But they had 100,000 titles on their DVDs.

Leo Laporte (00:29:08):
That's the three little secret is they have not converted to D V D so many. I mean, they've not converted to streaming so many DVDs. Yeah. And that's, yeah, that's a, that's a loss.

Mikah Sargent (00:29:19):
It's, it's weird. Somehow every time I get one of those Netflix DVDs, it somehow gets converted to a digital version.

Leo Laporte (00:29:25):
<Laugh>. Wait a minute, wait

Caller Adler (00:29:26):
A minute.

Leo Laporte (00:29:27):
You still get the red envelope in the

Mikah Sargent (00:29:29):
Mail? I was for a while. I just started sending all of them back because of them closing down. But yeah, up to this point, they're, it's mostly because I have someone very close to me who likes weird, esoteric,

Leo Laporte (00:29:41):
You can't

Mikah Sargent (00:29:41):
Get 'em on streaming. Yeah. You can't get them on streaming. Yeah. And so I ended up subscribing to it. And then yeah, they, they arrived to me and then somehow they get made digital. I don't know how that happens, but they just show up in my library digital, and then I send them back.

Leo Laporte (00:29:54):
I think that's illegal. But we won't.

Mikah Sargent (00:29:57):
But I, whoever's doing it, yeah, it's <laugh>.

Caller Adler (00:30:03):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:30:03):
And you know what should be illegal is selling the blue blueberry funko pop for $92 when it's actually 1715 to $17 if you buy it.

Caller Adler (00:30:14):
Oh, that's a different one.

Leo Laporte (00:30:15):
Oh, that's not the one you, there's more than one blueberry.

Mikah Sargent (00:30:18):
More than one way to skin a BooBerry.

Caller Adler (00:30:20):
Yeah. So this one's metallic. They made 480. Oh, the value, what I rev value right now is about a thousand.

Mikah Sargent (00:30:27):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:30:28):
A thousand. So it is a good investment. Someone Wow.

Caller Adler (00:30:31):
Oh yeah. Someone right now is trying to trade the Freddie Funko character as Venom for a brand new Cadillac lyric. What? It's gonna train three of 'em.

Leo Laporte (00:30:42):
Okay. So you've got millions of dollars worth of Funko popups right there. If

Caller Adler (00:30:46):
Only, if only <laugh>. But a question that whole,

Leo Laporte (00:30:50):
I forgot about that. I'm much more interested in the Funko pops. Sorry. What can we do for you <laugh>?

Caller Adler (00:30:55):
Okay. well first he already successfully traded six of them for two Cadillac off

Mikah Sargent (00:31:00):
Plates. Oh. So this is a person who knows what they're doing. This

Leo Laporte (00:31:02):
Is a thing.

Caller Adler (00:31:03):
Yeah. So he was good at that. But I'm calling because I'm having an issue with Apple Mail. Okay. Where it crashes after downloading a certain amount. I've already rebuilt, I've removed and added the Apple Mail back on. I tried it on a different a different login. So I, I made a new account on my Mac and tried it there, so it's not, you know, it's not under my account. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> you know, the, the login. And it's not, I've got about eight different email accounts on there. So I was able to figure out which one it was by disabling each one and then finding out which one it was, which is my primary account through Spectrum. And so I, there must be some email, I'm guessing on the Spectrum server, which is not allowing, which is crashing the Apple Mail. Once it gets to that point, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to figure it out, either using the, the web mail a access that Spectrum has, it's a legacy Roadrunner account. Or if there's something maybe Spectrum has that can do an antivirus type thing or look for it.

Mikah Sargent (00:32:19):
So you were able to narrow, narrow it down to the spectrum email that you know, the rest of them, you could add them to your mail and you didn't have an issue. I, the first thing that comes to my mind would be to see what export options that Spectrum email has via the web portal. If it would let you export as Mbox dot MBO X for example. And basically what you would then do is pull that out, save it, and then you could safely and comfortably just essentially wipe the emails because you have them all in the inbox, the M B O X version, and then see if the account will then load without you having an issue. So it would essentially keep it from having to pull any email. Now I am assuming you're using POP with this and not

Caller Adler (00:33:16):
It's imap. It

Mikah Sargent (00:33:17):
Is imap and it's still doing that. So the

Leo Laporte (00:33:19):
First thing I would do, let, let me, I'm, I wanna make sure I heard it correctly. It crashes only when you try to view it in Apple Mail or does it crash when you turn to download it

Caller Adler (00:33:28):
As it's downloaded? As it's downloaded download. So you,

Leo Laporte (00:33:30):
You go to Spectrum account, it starts to download and then boom buoy.

Caller Adler (00:33:34):
Yeah. At some point about a thousand messages in of downloading.

Leo Laporte (00:33:38):
So the first thing I would do is actually rebuild,

Caller Adler (00:33:41):
Which I did

Leo Laporte (00:33:41):
The mailbox and you did do that And it still crashes on download. Yeah, it is, it's, it's possible that there's something malformed about some particular email on that spectrum IMAP server that is, but you don't know what mail it is so you can't delete it. Right.

Caller Adler (00:33:57):
That is right. And I, it works fine on my iPhone

Leo Laporte (00:34:00):
And you can get it on your iPhone. I dunno if it's on your iPhone, but you can never get the mail from Spectrum 'cause it goes ka bluey and mail goes away. Right. You know, you might try downloading something like Thunderbird some other third party imap email client and see if you can get it then. Mm-Hmm.

Caller Adler (00:34:15):
Then

Leo Laporte (00:34:17):
It, because it's probably something specific to Apple's mail trying to render it mm-hmm. <Affirmative> or something like that. It, I would certainly look at attachments mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. 'cause a plain text email is not gonna do that. I don't think, I don't think there's any way for a plain text email to do that. It is something about attachment that this,

Caller Adler (00:34:35):
It's, yeah. An antivirus doesn't hit anything. 'cause It crashes before it gets to that.

Leo Laporte (00:34:39):
So yeah, I would, I would download it's free download Firebird. I'm sorry. Thunderbird. And and, and set it up for that, just for that Spectrum account. No other account download all the mail. Now that doesn't get rid of the, the problematic email on the Spectrum account. But maybe then you can look at which one. You know, I would certainly look at some of the attachments. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and maybe if you don't mind deleting all of the emails that have attachments when you delete them. You have, it's the default setting in Thunderbird and also an Apple Mail when you are on an IMAP server that if you delete it locally, it then deletes it on the server. And this is the trick, is you want to get rid of the,

Caller Adler (00:35:18):
And I actually do have it set to not download anything. I mean, the attachments are still gonna be there, but I also do have it set to not download any of the U R L based images or things

Mikah Sargent (00:35:31):
Like that. Right. Like privacy mode kind of deal. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:35:33):
Good. 'cause That, that also, it's re I think I have to say plain text is never gonna crash anything. Right. There's just nothing going on there. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So it's gotta be something that's telling Apple Mail, oh, you need to process this thing. Mm-Hmm. And then Apple mail's crashing. Maybe it's an image that says I'm eight Gillian bytes of data or something that's crashing.

Caller Adler (00:35:56):
Yeah. And that's what I, on the web, the web based one, I also did it by size of file and there's nothing.

Leo Laporte (00:36:02):
Yeah. No, it's a, it's probably, so what I'm thinking, it's in the header of the, and it has to be something that Apple Mail will normally render. So when you open Apple Mail, you see images oh, you said you have it so it doesn't show images when you look at emails. Yep. It's not gonna be that. That's interesting. It's interesting. Attach, I don't know if Spectrum will let you rebuild that mailbox. That would be the another thing that you might do on their

Mikah Sargent (00:36:29):
Side. So one

Leo Laporte (00:36:29):
Of the things, one of the things that does happen with an IMAP server is it is I believe it's downloading an index as well as the mail. And it could be not an a specific email, but there's something in the index got corrupted on Spectrum's side. Mm-Hmm. And then it's downloading that, that would, that would absolutely cause a crash.

Mikah Sargent (00:36:51):
Yeah. I, so I, I like the idea of downloading a different email program and seeing if it's able to be accessed through the

Leo Laporte (00:36:58):
App. I bet's. I bet it won't because it's just, there's some bug in Apple's mail that's interacting with something in that Spectrum account.

Caller Adler (00:37:04):
Gotcha. That's definitely helpful. Yeah. I'll, I'll look into the, something

Leo Laporte (00:37:07):
To look at. Scooter X has found this Apple discussion. I can't see it 'cause I don't have chat open. Let me open up real quickly. Do you, can you see his, yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:37:18):
Let me pop this open. So someone says, after upgrading to 13.2 Ventura mail, now crashes now crashes immediately after opening for about one to two seconds. Huh. And people are talking about their spectrum email accounts. Oh. And when they turned off their Spectrum email account,

Leo Laporte (00:37:38):
Then it was working, oh. Something spectrum's doing.

Mikah Sargent (00:37:40):
So it, so it's not a specific message. Yeah. Everyone's mentioning Spectrum here. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:37:44):
So that's good. That's a really good clue. So it isn't in fact a message, it's something Spectrum's doing, which is probably sending some sort of malformed in index down that Apple mail's going. He, it's interesting that it works on iPhone, but it doesn't work on Mac. Yeah. And I,

Caller Adler (00:38:00):
And I have multiple spectrum emails, but this is the primary one I've been using for ages. It's the largest.

Mikah Sargent (00:38:07):
So I wonder if the size of it Yeah. If you're able to export an inbox archive of that and then kind of just

Leo Laporte (00:38:15):
Delete it.

Mikah Sargent (00:38:15):
Yeah. Basically go forward from there.

Leo Laporte (00:38:17):
And I would also see if there's some way to rebuild the I MAP archive on Spectrum itself. 'cause That's, I bet you what's going on. I'm almost, I, I would almost guarantee that what Spectrum has is some sort of buggy IMAP server that has created a an index that is malformed, that is getting downloaded prior to downloading the mail by the mail app. And the mail app is choking on it immediately. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So it's probably not a specific, I guarantee you now because it's happened to other people, it's not a specific message. It is some communication going on between Spectrum and apple Mail.

Caller Adler (00:38:52):
Awesome. I appreciate it guys.

Leo Laporte (00:38:53):
Yep. oh, interesting. Here's, here's, by the way, the solution I don't know if it's that from that thread deleted the Spectrum account <laugh>. That's scary. Created a new one with the same settings. Oh. Oh, I must have done that on mail. Yeah, I think you did that already. All mail messages of folders remain in text. So you'd already done that. Okay.

Caller Adler (00:39:13):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:39:14):
Well, we've given you some ideas, Adler, and I'm thrilled that we got a chance to see your Yeah. Amazing Fungo Pop pop collection. What's the, what's the most, what's the most You've sold one of these for

Caller Adler (00:39:24):
The most I've sold. I I do have a store that I, I'm trying to

Leo Laporte (00:39:30):
Tell us the name of it so we can give you a plug.

Caller Adler (00:39:33):
It's a b a i collectibles. The it's in the Binghamton, New York area. So yeah, b a i collectibles, it's just

Leo Laporte (00:39:41):
A little Oh, you have a brick and mortar store?

Caller Adler (00:39:43):
Yeah, it's a shop within a shop. So, or a vendor co-ops. Oh, rent space there. Oh. Oh.

Leo Laporte (00:39:47):
Yeah. So anytime anybody's in Binghamton, you know where to go. Look for Adler <laugh>.

Caller Adler (00:39:53):
Thank you much

Leo Laporte (00:39:53):
<Laugh>. Thank you. Hey Adler, it's great to talk to you. Thank you. Enjoy. Thank you. Interesting. I wonder what spectrum's up to. Well, yeah, we will never Hey, spectrum. No. Normally this time Sam Abbu Sam would be joining us, but he, I can't do it this week 'cause he's busy driving a nice fancy new automobile. So that means this Leo, we get to take more calls. Are you driving like this? Yeah, just like that. You're right. It looks more like milking a cow than driving a car, doesn't it? <Laugh>, to be honest. Hello? Bob. Bob, if you're playing the drinking game version of Ask the Tech guys. Well, you know what to do. Hi Bob.

Caller Bob (00:40:33):
Hi, you guys.

Leo Laporte (00:40:34):
Welcome. Where are you calling from? Can you hear me? Yeah, I hear you. Great. Great. Are you from

Caller Bob (00:40:38):
Santa Barbara.

Leo Laporte (00:40:38):
Nice. Is the weather beautiful down there?

Caller Bob (00:40:41):
It is. I bet. Absolutely beautiful

Leo Laporte (00:40:43):
Today. It's gorgeous. Say hi to Oprah and Prince Harry when you get a chance. <Laugh>. Yeah, actually that's Montecito. That's a little fancier up the coast. Just,

Caller Bob (00:40:51):
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte (00:40:53):
I love Santa Barbara though. So what can we do for you?

Caller Bob (00:40:56):
So I have a network question.

Leo Laporte (00:41:00):
Yes.

Caller Bob (00:41:01):
And my brother-in-law has a barn at a small office that he wants to run the wifi to. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> wants to be able to get wifi out there. And he happened to have a conduit running to the barn. Oh, good.

Leo Laporte (00:41:17):
So that's nice. He

Caller Bob (00:41:19):
Pulled in some ethernet. Good. And we're thinking either putting a, he'd like to have a, an access point at in the barn and then continue to signal onto this little office or whatever. So I'm wondering if using a, like a, a router at that in the barn, which would then, would that give them an access point? And then you know, so the

Leo Laporte (00:41:47):
Ethernet is

Caller Bob (00:41:48):
Coming. Continue a wifi. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:41:49):
The Ethernet's coming off of a router in the house, right. That he's pulling in. Yeah. Okay. So that's already routed. So yeah, the easiest thing to do would be to connect it to, not a router, but just a wifi access point. And they do make those TP link and others make those where you just plug the ethernet into it and it just becomes a radio. And then it's, it's a local radio right in there. 'cause You don't want a double route that's called double net where you have a gnat in the house. You don't want another router in the barn. 'cause That'd be double netting. I mean, you, if you can't find a plain old wifi access point, which is just a radio, you can always buy a more expensive router and turn off turn to put it in bridging mode, bridge mode. And then it turns off Nat. But honestly, just, there are a lot of companies that make plain old radio wifi access points for exactly this purpose, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I know TP link would've to be, I used to use one from TP Link. Go ahead.

Caller Bob (00:42:43):
What would it have to be the or preferable to use the same manufacturer?

Leo Laporte (00:42:48):
Nope. Doesn't matter.

Mikah Sargent (00:42:49):
Yeah, it doesn't matter at all.

Caller Bob (00:42:51):
An access point will automatically work.

Leo Laporte (00:42:53):
Yeah. Yeah. It just, it's just like it's plugged into the Yeah, it's Yes, exactly. Ethernet.

Caller Bob (00:42:57):
Yeah. And what about like a mesh router, one of the satellites? Would that,

Leo Laporte (00:43:03):
No, you don't function on that. Well, if he has a mesh, does he have an arrow on the other end or some other mesh? What's on the other end? Well, he,

Caller Bob (00:43:11):
He, he's gonna get a new router.

Leo Laporte (00:43:14):
If

Mikah Sargent (00:43:15):
So. Ah, if he, yeah, if he gets a new router and that router has the option for those sort of nos

Leo Laporte (00:43:22):
Or orbi does for instance.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:23):
Yeah. Or be then it would be okay to use one of those. You're

Leo Laporte (00:43:28):
Looking for something that's capable of using an ethernet backhaul. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that's what it's called. Yeah. It is a better way to use a mesh, because otherwise it has to use wireless for the backhaul and that takes up a channel. So yeah, I'm looking at TP link sells a wireless gigabit access point. This is just a wifi bridge. That's what you're looking for for $40. It's simple, it's inexpensive. And then

Caller Bob (00:43:51):
Could you extend from that? Does it have like two ethernet ports where you could go to this to the second location?

Leo Laporte (00:43:58):
No, no. This would be in the barn if you, if he's

Caller Bob (00:44:01):
Looking Yeah. But from the barn to the small office building.

Leo Laporte (00:44:04):
Oh, he's even got more <laugh>.

Caller Bob (00:44:06):
Yeah. He wants to go to ultimately, ultimately

Leo Laporte (00:44:09):
Two building, but there's buildings, no conduit to the small office building it's nearby.

Caller Bob (00:44:15):
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:15):
Then a router would probably be better with that. With Nat turned off, huh?

Leo Laporte (00:44:18):
No, I think this will work too. It

Mikah Sargent (00:44:20):
Still has this,

Leo Laporte (00:44:21):
Just this give you wifi. Yeah. This, this thing would give you wifi everywhere. How far away is the, is the office from the barn?

Caller Bob (00:44:29):
You know, I'm not sure

Leo Laporte (00:44:30):
If it's, if it's less a hundred feet, this would work fine. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>? You might have to put it in my window or something. Okay. yeah. But yeah, since the office doesn't have a conduit, it's gonna have to have wifi. So what you're saying is I need something powerful enough to start in the barn and reach the office and the barn has conduit back to the house where the main router would be, you know, if you got an orbi in the main house, the orbi, you then connect the ethernet, plug it in orbi base station has ethernet port, you plug it in. Then Orbi has satellites. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that take ethernet. You plug it in there. That's now the back haul. And it's all gonna be one network, which is nice. And orbies are very powerful. Should be able to, if the, if the office is nearest near enough, it should be able to reach the office without any problem. Okay. I think the TP link also has ethernet on the back, but that doesn't really solve your problem. Come to think of it because you don't have conduit to the small office. You need wifi to the small office. Is that right?

Caller Bob (00:45:32):
Well, as far as I know, yeah. I haven't actually been there to see what he's doing

Leo Laporte (00:45:37):
Yet. You need to do a site and you need to do a site as and and figure out exactly. But no, it's good that he put conduit into the barn. Yep. That solved the biggest problem. Yeah. And now it's just a question of finding the right, you know, little devices. If he has an ear in the house,

Mikah Sargent (00:45:53):
If he has an ear in the house and he buys a secondary ear, it will work

Leo Laporte (00:45:57):
In, do they have ethernet?

Mikah Sargent (00:45:58):
Yeah. And they have ethernet. Okay. So you could plug in, in fact, I've done that before in a setup that I had back in Missouri where it was ethernet to ethernet and then I took an ethernet cord, plugged it into the third one just so I had that backhaul going on. So yeah, if, if you went with that, that'd be good. But the orbi will work the same way. Any of those mesh routers are all going to cooperate quite well together.

Leo Laporte (00:46:21):
They all have. They ha But you gotta look for one that supports that ethernet back hole. Yeah. So just so you understand, the way a mesh works is here's a router that's doing regular wifi stuff, but it also has to talk to this secondary base station. And so it needs a back channel. We call it the backhaul, a back channel to this, that it's talking back and forth. Some routers share that bandwidth, which means then you're gonna have a decrease in, that's what a wifi extender does. It's going to be half as fast. 'cause It spends half the time talking to the base station and then half the time talking to your laptop. What you, that's one of the things mesh does is it has a backhaul, it's a, you know, an extra channel. But the best way to do a backhaul the fastest is have ethernet between the two. And then all the communication can happen over the ethernet, including your data and the, and the, the base station and the extender will both be spending all of their bandwidth talking to your devices. So that's a better way to do it.

Caller Bob (00:47:20):
Micah, you, you mentioned the Eros. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I, I know that's a lot more reasonable than Orbies now. It seems like the orbies are really expensive. Oh, interesting. They're like in the five, $600 range, it seems like for a Yeah. That's interesting.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:36):
I know Amazon. Yeah. You know, after Euro was acquired by Amazon Amazon has done what it can to make them very price effective. So I imagine that's a part of, part of why they are effecti.

Leo Laporte (00:47:49):
You may not effective, you may not like the hundred dollars a month. A hundred dollars a year subscription.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:52):
Yes. But you don't have to have that.

Leo Laporte (00:47:53):
You don't have to,

Mikah Sargent (00:47:54):
But that's just extra. Yeah. That'll get you a free password, man. Well, password manager, as part of it, you get to do some special networking stuff for blocking certain sites and parental controls, but without that subscription, you still get everything that you'd want to do with a router. That's just kind of the base that's built in. That Euro Plus subscription just lets you set up like filtering on the network ad blocking at the network level and has a few things built in like a free account with malware by, it's a free account with a password manager. And I can't think of what it's called now, but it's when you're out of the home and you want to be able to access while you're away and

Leo Laporte (00:48:39):
Remote management. I don't think you want to do that.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:41):
Yeah. All that stuff. Exactly. So no, <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:48:44):
I do that with my mom, though. I do have access to her ear because mom I, the, the re there. So here's the another criterion to consider. If the wifi from the main house is visible to the barn and the office, you would then want to use a single system like the Arrow or the Orbi, because you don't want that confusion. If it's so far away that it's not even visible, then the backhaul to Oh yeah. Wifi bridge would be more than adequate. So you

Caller Bob (00:49:17):
It's 150 feet to the barn.

Leo Laporte (00:49:18):
Yeah, it's right on the edge of wifi. So that's why he put the conduit in probably. Yeah, I think then it doesn't matter. You could take your pick. It's certainly the case that if you're using a mesh and you have an ethernet backhaul on the mesh, that's definitely the way to operate. Yep. If you're, if you wanna use a mesh, okay. But you don't need to use a mesh. He could just have a separate wifi bridge out there that is just gonna operate and then he can get, you know, an ASUS in the house or whatever else he wants.

Caller Bob (00:49:44):
Okay. All right. Hey,

Leo Laporte (00:49:46):
To talk to you. Thanks Bob.

Mikah Sargent (00:49:47):
Yeah, great

Leo Laporte (00:49:48):
Question. Have a good one. Say hi to all the people in Santa Barbara. It's beautiful. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about our our sponsors. There are, there are the studio sponsors. They're the people who bring you and have been all year. The the East Side studio. It's our friends at a c i learning. We love these guys. Now you may say, well, who are they? I never heard of them. Well, you've heard of it pro right? In today's IT talent shortage. Whether you're operating your own department or a part of a larger team, you gotta keep those skills up to date. 94%. Almost all CIOs and CISOs agree. Getting the right talent is, is Job one because there's such a, a shortage of talented IT professionals. Now that's good news. If you're trying to get a job in it, it's also important news.

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So when you go and fill out the form, you're gonna get a proper quote that's tailored to your needs. Please do this for yourself, do it for your staff, do it for your team. Go dot aci learning.com/twi. We thank 'em so much for their support. Ava Tech guys. Anthony says we should say hi to Campbell. I think it's not Campbell. I'm gonna guess it's Joe in Campbell, but let's find out. Hello Joe. Or maybe his name is Campbell's Joe <laugh>. Maybe he likes tomato soup. So much possibility. We just don't know. Is that the theme, Joe? I think it's for the chicken noodle something or Campbell. Hello? Hello. Are you Joe in Campbell or Campbell And Joe.

Caller Joe (00:54:04):
Joe in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Leo Laporte (00:54:06):
Okay. I don't know where the Campbell came from. <Laugh>. I <laugh>. There's a town

Caller Joe (00:54:10):
He probably picked up off a caller id. That's

Leo Laporte (00:54:12):
Probably it. Yeah, there's a town in in the Silicon Valley called Campbell. That's what I thought. Anyway, Joe from Knoxville. Hello. Welcome.

Caller Joe (00:54:21):
Yeah, I I'm gonna jump on two or three different things. About a year ago I called you about my Facebook account, got hijacked and I was an admin, or I am an admin for a cancer support group called Husband of Wi with Wives with cancer. And like in less than two minutes, I get three emails that come in. My password's been changed, my email address has been changed and my cell phone number had been changed.

Leo Laporte (00:54:47):
What kind of jerky? Son of a gun, that account. That's just awful.

Caller Joe (00:54:53):
Yeah. So I had to open a new Facebook account and then go back to get in touch with other guys in the group to get in touch with the original admin of the group to add me in as an admin. I was able to sneak in a new email address to the old account, and then I just let it sit there. It didn't fool with it. And then it took me about eight months to recover it, but I finally recovered it.

Leo Laporte (00:55:19):
Oh, Joe, I'm so sorry. And and God bless you for not only doing that, but for doing the work to get it back going.

Caller Joe (00:55:27):
Yeah. Yeah. My we're my wife's three and a half years out from her chemo surgery and radiation and cancer free. Yay.

Leo Laporte (00:55:36):
That's fantastic. Yay. Did she ring the bell and,

Caller Joe (00:55:41):
Oh, <laugh>. Yeah. <laugh>. Well, yeah, she definitely rang the bell when she finished her chemo. That's so good. And we see her oncologist in about a week and a half. Just as a follow up, when she was going through her chemo, she, my wife's a quilter mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and she was hand stitching pieces together to make quilt blocks. Oh. And then she started stitching the quilt blocks together to make the quilt top. Well, her oncologist, when he was in medical school, rented an apartment for an older lady who was a quilter. He learned to quilt.

Leo Laporte (00:56:13):
Whoa.

Caller Joe (00:56:13):
So he was watching her every time she was there for her chemo.

Leo Laporte (00:56:18):
She was doing her squares. Yeah.

Caller Joe (00:56:20):
Yeah. We're taking, she finished a quilt Oh. Several months ago. And the, the last time she went in, he was on vacation, so he wasn't there. He's supposed to be there this month for her visit, and she's taking the quilt in to show it. Oh. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:56:36):
That's fantastic. I wanna see a picture of the quilt if you Yeah, you if we can she get a chance? Post it. Oh, okay.

Caller Joe (00:56:41):
I'll send that to you. Yeah, I'd love to see it. There's, she's also a one of the leaders in a local quilting group, and they make quilts that they donate to East Tennessee Children's Hospital. Nice. Last year they donated over 400 quilts.

Leo Laporte (00:56:57):
Wow. Amazing. I think I wanna take up quilting <laugh>. This sounds like fun. <Laugh>. Do you do any quilting?

Caller Joe (00:57:03):
No.

Leo Laporte (00:57:05):
Dr. Mom says when she

Caller Joe (00:57:06):
Was on, she offered volunteers at a,

Leo Laporte (00:57:09):
Dr. Mom says when she was on, she offered

Caller Joe (00:57:10):
Volunteers at a fabric shop.

Leo Laporte (00:57:12):
Oh, nice. Cool. Dr. Mom, who is she? A fabric exchange physician cancer survivor, but also a textile lover. She, she actually goes to maker fairs and shows people how to knit and how to sew. She says, when I was on chemo, I tried to knit some socks and I was so high on meds, I made a sock with two heels and no toe <laugh>. Am I wearing that sock? I might be, it might be this one. I don't know. My mom made this one. It's got heels and toes, <laugh> heads. And too,

Caller Joe (00:57:41):
She also volunteers at a fabric exchange workshop. Nice. And people can bring in fabric to donate. And if you see fabric there that you want, you can take it. And she's teaching a class this week also over there. Oh, that's, that's sweet. Second thing I've heard you say that you, your mom, you're looking at moving her into an assisted living. It's

Leo Laporte (00:58:02):
Getting to be that time. Yeah.

Caller Joe (00:58:04):
Yeah. We, my dad worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratories and Wow. I'm also gonna relate this to that. He passed away a little over two years ago. If it was radioactive, he worked with it.

Leo Laporte (00:58:19):
Wow. How old? How old was he when he passed?

Caller Joe (00:58:25):
Almost 95. Well, there you go. And he was the only one in his division still alive. Wow. Yeah. He outlived everybody else by about 12 years. Wow. But he had Alzheimer's and he really did not know who we were for the last, he was diagnosed severe in 2008. Oh, that's tough. Asked the doctor in 2019 if he was severe, then what would you call it now? And he said they don't live this long normally. Wow. So, but when he worked at Oak Ridge National Labs, he in a few, have you seen the movie Oppenheimer yet?

Leo Laporte (00:59:00):
Just saw it on Friday. Yeah.

Caller Joe (00:59:05):
Dad met Oppenheimer Really in the late fifties, early sixties. What? And if you do a Google search for my dad's name, Kermit b Campbell stag Field, there's a link that comes up on Google, Oak Ridge National Labs, and it says 50th anniversary. Wow. And there's a picture of my dad holding a canister that came from the reactor at Stag Field. Oh my. And in a plastic bag he's holding, there's uranium from that canister in a plastic bag. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:59:43):
You know, Oppenheimer himself died at the age of 62. You know, I think that probably even as they were doing that work, they knew that they were risking their lives. But really having a uranium in a plastic bag is perhaps going a little,

Caller Joe (00:59:58):
Little far <laugh> in the last few years. Dad was alive. I bought a Geiger counter and went through the house.

Leo Laporte (01:00:03):
Oh, I bet. And did you find anything <laugh>? It was smart move.

Caller Joe (01:00:07):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:00:07):
Smart move. You did find something?

Caller Joe (01:00:11):
Yes. Wow. I have all of dad's, I have all of dad's ID badges from the day he started working at Oak Ridge. He was out for a few years because he was, went into the military. And then he came back and he went back to work at the labs, actually found out they pulled him out of isotopes division and moved him to Met methodology because of his exposures to radiation.

Leo Laporte (01:00:37):
What did you think of the movie and did you see Op, have you seen Oppenheimer? What'd you think of the movie?

Caller Joe (01:00:41):
Yes, I have. And I liked the, the parts that they showed about, you know, the recreate, basically the recreation of Stag Field.

Leo Laporte (01:00:49):
Yeah. I was much more interested in that early stuff. They focused a lot on that hearing. I think there was far too much. That was kind of the spine of it. Too much

Caller Joe (01:00:57):
On the

Leo Laporte (01:00:57):
Hearing. Yeah. Way too long. They could have cut an hour of that out easy. <Laugh>.

Caller Joe (01:01:01):
Yeah. I have actually one of the color photographs that was shot with my dad holding that canister of uranium and the Wow uranium in the bag, which was original pho photograph from the plant photographer.

Leo Laporte (01:01:15):
Wow. I'm looking for that photo. I haven't been able to find it, but he was, I'll I'll, it looks like he was a, I'll email that to you. It looks like he was a ham, huh?

Caller Joe (01:01:24):
Oh, yes. He was also a ham radio operator. Yeah. The last few years he was alive. I had people send Q S L cards to him. Oh. And we got over a thousand Q S L L cards from all over the world.

Leo Laporte (01:01:36):
That's amazing. That wonderful Community Nature Radio community is amazing.

Caller Joe (01:01:40):
And his call sign, I'm getting transferred to my oldest son, who's also a Hammer radio operator. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:01:46):
Nice

Caller Joe (01:01:47):
To keep that call going on. You

Leo Laporte (01:01:48):
Should. That's great. Yeah. I have, yeah. What was, what was his sign?

Caller Joe (01:01:51):
Yeah, he's got license in 63 WA four Oah, H

Leo Laporte (01:01:55):
Wa four H. And he's an old amateur, old amateur Hamm old amateur ham <laugh> <laugh>. That's a, that's a great call. I've got

Caller Joe (01:02:03):
His original radio. I've got his original radio fun. A Benton Harbor lunchbox, as they called it. Wow. A heath Kit Fixer.

Leo Laporte (01:02:11):
Oh, wow. How cool.

Caller Joe (01:02:13):
It looks like an old school metal lunchbox.

Leo Laporte (01:02:17):
But inside

Caller Joe (01:02:18):
Five tubes inside is

Leo Laporte (01:02:19):
Tubes

Caller Joe (01:02:20):
And it's crystal controlled and regenerative receive. So you could tune the receive frequency, but you had to have a crystal for the transmit frequency.

Leo Laporte (01:02:27):
Amazing.

Caller Joe (01:02:28):
Amazing. So, but my main, my question for the call today, main question is I'm needing a program, and I used to have one years ago when I worked for an I S P because we had a lot of servers on remote sites, and it was a program, it was called Net Info and I can't find it anymore. Oh, yeah. But what I, it would let me do, I could put in an IP address and it would do a pinging ever so many minutes. Yeah. And if the site didn't respond after, you know, so many consecutive pings, it would gimme a a, an alert.

Leo Laporte (01:03:00):
Right. there are a lot of, and

Caller Joe (01:03:03):
I can't find a go ahead. New prob program to, to replace that.

Leo Laporte (01:03:08):
Net Info is still available, it looks like for 39.95. $39 95 cents. But I don't think you need it. Are you on a Windows or a mec?

Caller Joe (01:03:21):
Windows.

Leo Laporte (01:03:22):
Windows. So Apple ships with tools that will do almost everything that Info did. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I don't know what you, you on windows. I'm not a Windows guru, but it looks like you can still buy net info if you wanted to. And it does all the same things. Who's,

Caller Joe (01:03:40):
Who's the publisher on that? I,

Leo Laporte (01:03:42):
It's bar. It's a T S A R F I n sar fin.com. And it is all of those network diagnostic tools. And it looks like this is current relative. Oh, well wait a minute. The final release was 2015. So, yeah, I mean, that doesn't mean it won't work. Right? It was done <laugh>. Yeah. it looks like you can download it from two cows or Saren directly. Okay. So you can at least still get net info if anybody in our chat or our Discord knows of a good net info replacement that's modern and UpToDate for Windows, you know, I, there's a lot of command line utilities. Linux and Mac allows things like the dig command that will, many of them will do the same thing. Yeah. But I don't And so is the only, is the only thing you want is pinging until fail and then alert.

Caller Joe (01:04:36):
Yeah. The, you know, I'm retired, but I've got some customers that that have video camera systems that are, you know, network based. And I like to be able to pinging them and if they, they go down, some of 'em I still have access to or I can call them and say, Hey, do check this and let me know what's what you see. And I just like to monitor the, some of the customers I've had, I've had customers for on camera systems for 25, 30 years,

Leo Laporte (01:05:06):
Years. There's a program I've used and I'm

Caller Joe (01:05:08):
Retired. I still love to keep up with them and keep them up and running.

Leo Laporte (01:05:12):
There's a program I've used for years that is free for Windows, and I think it's still up to date. It is the goofiest looking darn program you've ever seen called Tron. And that is free. Let me see if I can find the webpage. It's SS A N K K E Y. Oh boy. No, that's not it. That's a keynote page. So maybe all of this stuff is dead. Prox was something I used for years. It looked like it did the same thing. That net Info. Did I, you know, that's a good question. I don't, I don't know. Somebody has sent me two alternatives to, which is a great site and I'm seeing a bunch of software. Some of this brings back memories. <Laugh>. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Whatever you do though, don't

Caller Joe (01:06:03):
Use. Yeah. I'm seeing a lot of stuff that's,

Leo Laporte (01:06:04):
Yeah. Don't use the Solar Winds I IP address Tracker. That would be bad. How about Net Spy? That might be an interesting one. But you could still get an old version of net info. 2015 isn't that old? Yeah. Yeah. But it just feels like that should be,

Caller Joe (01:06:21):
I have multiple computers. If I have a couple of computers, I just have running some dedicated apps. Yeah. you know, I'm a Hammer radio operator also. And I do some A P R S stuff occasionally. And so I run a program sometimes to, you know, for tracking. A few years ago, my old, my youngest son took his grandmother to her high school reunion up in Virginia. So I put a two meter radio in the back with a G P Ss on it and went to a site where I could put in my call sign. And as he was going down the road, I could see exactly where they were going down the interstate. Of course I gave him a hard time about it. What do you mean doing 93 miles an hour on the interstate? <Laugh>?

Leo Laporte (01:07:02):
You can do that now with Google Maps. Hey, it's a, yeah, it's a pleasure talking to you. I'm sorry we don't have an exact duplicate. But keep watching. 'cause Somebody in the chat room will come up with something. I wish. I

Caller Joe (01:07:13):
Sure will. Thank

Leo Laporte (01:07:14):
You. A lot of these alternatives are outta date. You know, they just, I don't know why. Maybe, but because, but Mac and Linux come with tools that'll do all this builtin command light tools. Yeah. And I just wish Windows had a better solution for you. That's the only, the only trick, pleasure talking to you. And I'm glad you got that that group back up on on Facebook and Congrat. Yep. All the best to your wife. We've

Caller Joe (01:07:35):
Got about 900 members now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:07:37):
Woo. Yeah. That's fantastic. All the best to your wife. Congratulations.

Caller Joe (01:07:41):
Which is good and which is bad. We have

Leo Laporte (01:07:43):
Good support. It's a

Caller Joe (01:07:43):
Lot of people. Yeah. you know, we had one husband's wife passed a few days ago and he said he was gonna stay in the group to good. Be able to help others that went through the same thing. Good. So it's a good support group.

Leo Laporte (01:07:56):
Yeah. Wow.

Caller Joe (01:07:58):
Have a good evening.

Leo Laporte (01:07:59):
You too. Take care. Thanks so much. I thought you'd good time to talk about my little Oh yeah. My little friend. Say hello. I say hello to my little, I'm keeping it in my pocket here. 'cause That's the whole point of this, frankly, is to have a phone that folds and is small enough just to put in a purse or a pocket, or you put in your back pocket. It really is compact. This is Samsung just announced a couple of weeks ago, the Galaxy Z Flip five. Wow. The latest version I had the flip four. I love the idea to me this, so Samsung sounds a fold as Google does. That is more like a tablet folded in half. This is so compact and little. It's, it's really, I like it because it's little Samsung has done a few things to make this better than the previous one is the hinge now is slightly improved. So it doesn't have that closed pin appearance with a bigger opening at the end of the bottom. And I think the hinge is, is, is really nice, has a nice feel to it. They've also really increased the size of this front screen on here. And this can do all sorts of

Mikah Sargent (01:09:03):
Things. Whoa. Check that

Leo Laporte (01:09:04):
Out. Yeah. So this is do you have a variety of choices of screens you can have on here? And it also supports a variety. I like this one. 'cause It's pretty, it supports a variety of other apps as you slide. So there's my calendar, there's the weather, it's, there's my phone calls alarms. I have a stopwatch and a timer. And also my step counter, you know, Samsung Health. You can add maps and you can add messages. But it doesn't use any just old, any old app. That's on your device. Tap. This is a fun thing I can do. Watch. I'm gonna tap the camera. Actually, you have to slide. It took me a while to figure that out. I kept tapping it and nothing would happen. And now I can see myself <laugh>. Nice. So a great little selfie cam. Is it

Mikah Sargent (01:09:52):
Using the, one of the cameras at the bottom?

Leo Laporte (01:09:54):
It's using one of these. Yeah, that one. Got

Mikah Sargent (01:09:56):
It. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:09:57):
There's also a camera, a selfie cam inside. So when you open it up you know, now I have the selfie camera inside. It's, it's

Mikah Sargent (01:10:04):
A little sluggish.

Leo Laporte (01:10:06):
It actually, I don't think it is. I think that was the camera getting started. Let's try it again. Well, I mean, even

Mikah Sargent (01:10:10):
When you were swiping between things, I thought it had a

Leo Laporte (01:10:12):
Little delay on it. I think this is not gonna be as fast as the

Mikah Sargent (01:10:15):
Phone itself. So the outside screen's a little

Leo Laporte (01:10:17):
More. This has the same processor as in the Samsung SS 23 Ultra. So it's, it's the fastest Qualcomm Snap J that that's out there. I can't remember which version it

Mikah Sargent (01:10:26):
Is now. Is that the lock screen that you're on inside?

Leo Laporte (01:10:29):
No, this is my, I use a a very stripped down. That's cool. Launcher. That's cool. This one, I think one of the real advantages of Android over the iPhone is you can customize the launcher. This is this is called zero launcher or the simple af launcher. <Laugh> <laugh>. And what I do like about it is you slide to the right and the and the camera opens up, or you slide to the left and your phone opens up. I'm noticing. And then you can, there's a little bit. You're right. I don't think that that's, I think that that's a transition. I'm not sure. Got

Mikah Sargent (01:11:03):
It. The light as it's shining. You can see that

Leo Laporte (01:11:05):
Sea. Oh, you're talking about that. Oh yeah, you could definitely see that. So

Mikah Sargent (01:11:08):
Do you feel the seam

Leo Laporte (01:11:09):
Too? And you also feel it Interesting. Okay. It is a little hump. Some o owners of earlier flip phones have said that sometimes the screen dies at this point. Oh, I haven't had that experience. That's good. But that can be, there is still some question about the durability of, of folding screens. But you know, what you're, what you're basically saying is, and the way they do this is interesting. It has a flexible L c D screen and on top of it, they put very thin, flexible glass. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then on top of that, they put a plastic screen protector. Now I have to say, I do not like the feel, I'm gonna let you touch this in a little bit. I do not like the plasticy feel as screen protector. I don't use screen protectors. I like glass. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so I think that's a, that's a little bit of a disadvantage.

(01:11:53):
But you see, I don't think it's slow. I think it's just, yeah. That was much faster. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's just stuff was it's a, you know, it's a, you, I don't think you would say, oh, this phone, I'm giving up some features. You're just giving up perhaps some durability be, and you, you've got that little ridge in there. But you know, you have to angle it to see that. Otherwise it looks fine. You don't, and you feel it when your thumb's going over. But it's a smooth thing. I don't, I don't find it to be a, a disadvantage. I really do. Like, and I, I should have taken this launcher off frankly, before Vic. Let me do that real quickly and go back to the Galaxy launcher. 'cause People are going, well, that looks weird, but that's the launcher. That's not, and that's one of the things I love about let's go to apps and I can choose my default app here.

(01:12:40):
Change the launcher from the Zero Launcher <laugh>, the whole, call it the home app, the Zero Launcher to Samsung's one UI there that'll look a little bit more familiar to people who are used to Samsung's. And it actually looks a lot like an iPhone as well. You've got a doc here and so forth. I, I don't know. I love this pocket thing. Yeah, that's cool. I really think that's great. This comes in a variety of colors. When I was ordering, I couldn't get an order through on the nice green color I wanted for you. So all I got was kind of a gray, a neutral gray. It's not bad. Yeah. No. And that's, that's, by the way, that's what you're gonna put on the table, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It has wireless charging. In fact, it works in my car very nicely.

(01:13:22):
I put it right there and it wirelessly charges. That is nice. And because this is, you know, I can always tap that. It does sleep after a while, but I can always tap that to get into some of the features of it is the unlock touch. It's touch on the, you have touch or face. Okay. Or pin password, of course. And it is the the on off switch, the screen on off switch that is the touch. It's very fast. I personally prefer it to onscreen touch. I think it's a really nice feature. You know, I, the cameras are not quite up to the S 23 Ultra. There is in the Periscope lens. So you don't have that ultra zoom, but you do have a wide and a and a standard. They're both 12 bank of pixels. I think it's, I think it does a fine job unless you really need a super camera.

(01:14:09):
If what this, the market for this is, is to me, sensible, which is somebody who wants to do what I was doing, which is to keep this phone in your breast pocket. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> or your back pocket or your purse. Have it not occupy a lot of space. When it opens up, it's a 6.3 inch kind of standard phone size screen. It's a little as aspir ratio's a little weird. It's a little taller than then maybe you're used to I'll compare it to my iPhone and you can get a, a better look at at, at how it compares. I, I sh I have a giant pencil I could use for <laugh> size comparisons, but

Mikah Sargent (01:14:42):
That's probably pencil for scale,

Leo Laporte (01:14:43):
Pencil for scale. So you could see it's a little wider. I mean, little narrower tall.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:49):
Yeah. Just a tiny bit narrower. But it,

Leo Laporte (01:14:50):
And it, so that throws you off a little bit, but not, not terribly. The screens are good. I mean, the Samsung makes beautiful ole screens. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the screens are fantastic. Cameras are good using the same Sony sensors as all the world. It just lacks that extra wide zoom. And I, I think they've really improved it because of this full-size screen on the cover. That's cool. Is very useful. Yeah. And you know, if I start a, a stopwatch, let me unlock it. If I start a stopwatch, I can, I can just, you know, set it up here like this, you know? Yeah. It's also smart. For instance, the camera is smart about the fold. Watch what happens as I tilt it.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:29):
Ah, that's

Leo Laporte (01:15:29):
Neat. So that way I can use this as, you know, almost like a little tripod. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And and you know, they show that in the ads and it's smart enough to say, oh yeah, there's a fold. So I'm gonna put the picture above the fold. It could be like a little

Mikah Sargent (01:15:40):
Makeup compact if it's turned the other one. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:42):
Actually, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's just feel my, I

Mikah Sargent (01:15:45):
Just need to powder my numbers real quick. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:49):
Lisa does that all the time. <Laugh>. So that's pretty cool. That's, that's a good, a good point. I didn't think of that. Yeah, it's smart about that. And most of the apps that know about the phone of course are Samsung apps and so forth. But I think it, it does a, it does a very nice job. It's a nice, a nice piece of kit. Now it's a thousand bucks, but if you have another Samsung phone, Samsung, at least initially on all of these phones, is really generous on the trade-ins. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:16:13):
I heard the trade-ins were very generous.

Leo Laporte (01:16:15):
Yeah. I mean, basically if I had traded in my fold, my old fold, I could have gotten this for, for free, basically. So it's not it's not an expensive phone. If you have a trade in, if you don't Yeah. A thousand bucks. That's an iPhone price. But it is, it is a high-end phone. So I like it. Yeah. I think it's good. As long as you understand what you're getting. I would suggest here, lemme give it to you so you can, you can tell the folks at home how that screen feels. Yeah. Because that's as long as you, I would say go to the phone store and feel it.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:45):
Okay. I see what you mean. It's got a little bit of a grab. Yeah. It's grab as you're kind of moving around. I

Leo Laporte (01:16:49):
Like glass. I like the slipperiness of glass. Not everybody does. A lot of people put screen protectors on and there is, you cannot remove this screen protector. You're not supposed to. And if it bubbles up or, or, or curls, Samsung does have a program to replace it.

Mikah Sargent (01:17:03):
Okay. So you send it in, you need it

Leo Laporte (01:17:05):
For replacement it on Yeah. You Or bring it to a Samsung store. Yeah. You need to keep it on there for sure.

Mikah Sargent (01:17:09):
It's just a, a little bit grippy. It's, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:17:11):
It's weird, isn't it? Yeah. You get used to it. It didn't take long for me to get used to it. I

Mikah Sargent (01:17:16):
It's very light.

Leo Laporte (01:17:17):
Yeah. It's, yeah. That's important. Yeah. It's light, it's small, it's compact. It is really for people who, who want a full size feature, rich smartphone, but don't want it to take up all that

Mikah Sargent (01:17:29):
Space. And I have to say, I almost expected the hinge to be a little bit harder to, but it's very smooth.

Leo Laporte (01:17:34):
No, it's easy. It's a good, they've gotten better and better on the hinges. Yeah. That's really where most of the technology improvement it came.

Mikah Sargent (01:17:39):
And it looks super premium too. Yeah. It's, yeah. This is very well built. Yeah. The whole thing That's pretty nice.

Leo Laporte (01:17:46):
I took it to Oppenheimer, but nobody,

Mikah Sargent (01:17:48):
No one noticed,

Leo Laporte (01:17:49):
Noticed. Oh, let me just look at my new phone. <Laugh>, you know. No, nobody noticed though. I was hoping, I was hoping Those days are long gone when people get excited about the latest technology. Great movie. We saw it on the 70 millimeter film. Oh, did you? Imac screen from the fifth row. So, oh

Mikah Sargent (01:18:12):
No. Were you having to do one of these?

Leo Laporte (01:18:13):
It's pretty big. And you know, the, almost the very first shot is a closeup of Oppenheimer. The closeups are very close <laugh>. And you can see all the wrinkles. They claim that it's eight equivalent of 18 megapixels. Those frames are, you know, the, the film frame itself is 70 millimeters. It's almost, you know, seven centimeters diagonally. That's big. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so, yes. You have to be brave to be an actor on an IMAX 70 millimeter film. 'cause You see every,

Mikah Sargent (01:18:43):
Every

Leo Laporte (01:18:44):
Four defect, every hair I almost reached out and like

Mikah Sargent (01:18:47):
Plucked something.

Leo Laporte (01:18:48):
Yeah. I literally, you want to but it, it, I it was a good movie. It's overly long. It could easily be edited. Christopher Nolan is, knew those directors who has a lot of clout and no one says no to Chris. And they should have cut an hour out of that. But it's beautiful. And it looked great on the IMAX screen and I was glad to see it on there because I, there are very few filmmakers who had the cloud Exactly. To do a 70 millimeter IMAX film. It's expensive.

Mikah Sargent (01:19:16):
Especially one as long as this is where they had three hours where had to rebuild Yeah. The reels, yeah. To be able to support it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:19:23):
But I was, you know, I went down to the San Francisco Metron to see it. And I, I was very glad to see it. It was it was an enjoyable film. I, it's what's fun, I like to do this. I did this with the Dark Knight see it on the big screen and then go home and watch it on the little screen. And my experience with Dark Knight was, it was much more of a immersive and better film on the small screen. Mm. The big screen is so big. Yeah. Where do you look? It becomes the, the story almost, you know, you're, wow. Wow. That's big <laugh>, right?

Mikah Sargent (01:19:50):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:19:52):
And you can't really get immersed in the film. So I actually can't, I don't feel like I can judge the film until I see it on a regular screen or at home. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Then I will be able to judge it. Alright, we're gonna come back, take some more of your calls in just a little bit. You're watching Ask the tech (888) 724-2884 if you wanna phone in or use Zoom at call twit v our show today brought to you by my sheets. Your sheets too. Ooh, lovely sheets. Love my brick linens. I gotta get another seat set because, you know, we rotate. Same. I need to get another set. And then I tell, and I go to the lesser sheets and I go, I know we're not on Brook Linen this week, <laugh>, so I gotta get one more pair so I can rotate them.

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Caller Douglas (01:23:19):
Hello. Leo and Mike. What Micah? Hello. Good to

Leo Laporte (01:23:21):
See you. Where are you calling from? Doug?

Caller Douglas (01:23:24):
New Jersey.

Leo Laporte (01:23:25):
Beautiful. Downtown New Jersey.

Caller Douglas (01:23:28):
Actually Northwest New Jersey.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:29):
Beautiful northwest New Jersey

Caller Douglas (01:23:31):
Now. <Inaudible>.

Leo Laporte (01:23:33):
Yeah. That's the beautiful countryside. That's the nice part of New Jersey, I think. Yeah, the garden. That's where it becomes the garden state.

Caller Douglas (01:23:39):
Yeah. So about two weeks ago I acquired a new MacBook Pro Max. Congrats. I'm pretty happy with it. Having one issue copying files from one of my old hard drives and I copy them from my old Windows document folder over to the documents folder on the Mac Uhhuh. Which I think is also synced with iCloud. And I'm getting zero byte files.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:11):
Oh, dear.

Caller Douglas (01:24:13):
So I don't know why it's doing that. I've been on the phone with Apple.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:18):
That's them right now.

Leo Laporte (01:24:18):
Apples on the line.

Caller Douglas (01:24:22):
A spam call. Sorry.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:23):
Let's, well, let's, I already have a question for you. Yeah, what is your method of copying from one to the other?

Caller Douglas (01:24:31):
So I have the, the drive is plugged in as an external drive, Uhhuh <affirmative>. And I just select them and I hit copy. And then I go to the documents folder on the Mac and I hit Paste.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:43):
And when you say the drive,

Leo Laporte (01:24:45):
Oh, using copy and paste, you mean

Mikah Sargent (01:24:47):
The drive from the Windows machine. You've sort of taken it out. Yeah, put it into, okay. And then enclosure. Yeah. well there are a couple of things here. First and foremost, I'm wondering if there's some some, and now I'm think forgetting storage format issues that could be going on. But you're, you're able to see the drive, so that's, then it should be fine. Yeah. And

Caller Douglas (01:25:11):
It's not all, it's not all the files either. It's just some files, like a lot of files, but it's just, 'cause when I was on the phone with Apple, I'm using the Paragon N T F SS software. Uhhuh <affirmative>.

Leo Laporte (01:25:23):
Oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:25:23):
Got it. That's what I'm,

Leo Laporte (01:25:25):
Oh, okay. So this

Caller Douglas (01:25:26):
Tried to blame that, but I don't see why. So the

Leo Laporte (01:25:28):
Ex the external drive is an N T F SS drive. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Oh. But I copied

Caller Douglas (01:25:33):
It. I can read the files on the N D F S drive. I can modify things on the N N D SS drive. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:25:38):
The co what's happening really is the copy's failing and this is kind of, yeah, it's something Windows we're used to. Well it thinks it copied it and then, and then it moves to the next file. But it didn't, it just,

Caller Douglas (01:25:47):
I'm, I'm, I'm wondering if it has something to do with with iCloud, if I, if I click on the file and I do get info uhhuh <affirmative>, it'll say it zero bytes, but then it says, it says like, you know, 24 K on the disk.

Leo Laporte (01:26:06):
And that's just because it's, and when you reserved that space, when

Mikah Sargent (01:26:09):
You click on any of these files, they're not opening. Right?

Caller Douglas (01:26:12):
Yeah. They say it's a zero. It's a, it's an empty file.

Leo Laporte (01:26:15):
Yeah. So here's a couple of things. First of

Caller Douglas (01:26:16):
All, if I copy file, if I copy files to other places on the drive, it seems to work fine. Oh, it's

Leo Laporte (01:26:22):
This, that's what I'm saying.

Caller Douglas (01:26:23):
It's just the documents

Leo Laporte (01:26:24):
Folder. Yeah. So you have it set up and I, this Apple does this by default and I really don't like it. But when you set up any new Mac by default, it copies the desktop and the documents folder. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> just those, just those two. Those those two. Yep. It, it actually puts 'em on iCloud and there's, their theory is, oh, we're gonna be great. We're gonna back up for people automatically. I don't like this behavior. I always, when I set up a new Mac, turn that off. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But that's what's going on right now. And I think that's interfering with a copy. So here's what I would suggest. Do that copy, but don't copy it to the documents folder. Copy it to a dummy folder. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Caller Douglas (01:27:00):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:27:01):
And then I like

Mikah Sargent (01:27:02):
To use the downloads folder because that is not synced.

Leo Laporte (01:27:05):
Some folder that's not synced to iCloud is the key, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> do that. Let it settle, let it complete. Copy and paste is not my favorite way to copy, but see if this works. And then once you've done that, drag those files up to the documents folder and let it sit even longer while it's copying it. 'cause It has to copy the iCloud. So in effect, what you're doing right now is you're doing two copies in one move and I don't like it. So copy to a local folder before you copy it to the documents folder.

Caller Douglas (01:27:35):
Okay. Like make a documents folder under downloads.

Leo Laporte (01:27:37):
Yeah. My special documents folder, whatever. And copy it there and wait, make sure that you've got the full copy and then you can drag those files to your documents folder and let iCloud do its thing. You've got two different processes going on at once. I think that's what's causing the problem.

Caller Douglas (01:27:51):
All right. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:27:52):
In general, I don't like to use the copy and paste for a large Yeah. Copy. I agree. It works. And it's really in theory on the Mac, just calling the normal copy command. You know, there's just several ways to invoke it. You could drag it, you can copy and paste it and you can even in your command line copy. I generally, if, if I were gonna do that on a regular basis, I would use the command line and a command line program called syc. Now the, you know, this is a very non gooey way of doing it, but syc Yeah,

Caller Douglas (01:28:24):
I'm familiar with, I'm familiar with SYC on Linux,

Leo Laporte (01:28:26):
So Yeah. Yeah. It's the same command. It's available on the Mac. If you don't, you, I don't know if it has the latest I use BREW to update all that stuff anyway. But you could use, that would be another way to do it. 'cause SY does verification. So SYC dash R a u, capital L source and, and destination, or it's a destination source. I always forget that. So I always have to look at the manual. And then that's gonna make sure that it worked. SYC is, is designed for copying over unreliable networks and things like that. Okay. So that's the secondary way to do it. I think you plan a is just do it to a local folder

Mikah Sargent (01:29:06):
First. Yep.

Caller Douglas (01:29:06):
Okay. I'll try. Hey,

Leo Laporte (01:29:08):
It's pleasure. Pleasure. So there,

Caller Douglas (01:29:10):
Is there anywhere where they have I have now I have my, my, my Mac is docked with a Thunderbolt docking station and I have my old keyboard plugged in. Is there anywhere that tells you what keys to use on a Windows keyboard to work with Mac for doing things like copy and paste and select and things like that? Or? That's a

Mikah Sargent (01:29:29):
Good question.

Leo Laporte (01:29:30):
Yeah. I have a key cron keyboard, a couple of key cron keyboards that have a switch that go from wind to Mac. But I've used Windows keyboards forever. Usually the Windows key is the command key.

Caller Douglas (01:29:41):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:29:42):
And the alt key is the option key.

Mikah Sargent (01:29:44):
Microsoft actually has its own page. Keyboard mappings using a PC keyboard on a Macintosh. Oh, okay. I'll make sure that makes it into the show notes. But,

Caller Douglas (01:29:54):
'Cause I was, I was, I've been looking at Mac U S B Mac keyboards 'cause I don't want a wireless keyboard. But everything's all these Chiclet keyboards and I don't like those. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:30:03):
Look at Key Kron if you don't mind spending a little money. I can you, John, can you hand me my key kron? It's over on the Lenovo. This I have now become a key KRON devotee and people were serious about keyboards often prefer this. Now you can spend a lot of money on this. I think this is a couple hundred bucks, maybe 300 bucks. And it should be, 'cause its, it weighs like 20 pounds <laugh>. Seriously here. Just feel how heavy that is. Oh my.

Mikah Sargent (01:30:28):
Why does it need to be this heavy?

Leo Laporte (01:30:31):
Because it's good <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:30:33):
That's how, you know, remember that's how you know the quality on

Caller Douglas (01:30:36):
My, on my shelf. I have like three or four old I B M Ps two keyboards.

Leo Laporte (01:30:41):
This is like that. And they have different switches

Caller Douglas (01:30:44):
There

Leo Laporte (01:30:44):
By them. Yeah. This is different switches. This is the kind of, the more clicky of the switches. I think this is their Yeah,

Caller Douglas (01:30:50):
But that doesn't have a numeric keypad.

Leo Laporte (01:30:52):
Well, you can get 'em with that too. The key Cru sells them all. Okay. That's key. Okay. But yeah, the main, the main reason I'm mentioning that is if you look on the back, can you do the over the shoulder shot here? If you look at the back, it's got a switch. It says WIN or mac. Oh, okay. And it comes with in the box a little key puller tool. And it comes with the windows key I, you see I have the Mac key on here comes the Windows key. It will also come with alt instead of option. Those are the real differences. Alt and option control's the same on both. This one has a fun backlighting capability. You can, has all sorts of different That's cool. Weird backlight possibilities. But the keys are not, they're not lit light up from inside. It's just underneath the key. I have it have it set so that it lights up when you hit a key. So it's kind of like a little feedback that you, you've hit a key, but it could do all sorts of things. But the main thing is these switches and the solidity of it, it's got a little, this one has a little knob, but it have a variety of 'em with including if you want to keep at a numeric keypad, they'll have

Caller Douglas (01:31:50):
That too. Yeah. I, I, I shocked a bunch of people by getting a Mac <laugh>. I was debating about, I was debating about a Mac studio or the MacBook and I was gonna wait because in another month or so we have a a sales tax holiday. Oh. Back to school. And I was also gonna be heading down towards Delaware, but then my my 10 year old Windows PC gave up the ghost. So I was kind of forced into buying the Mac.

Leo Laporte (01:32:21):
Yeah. That's the worst, isn't it? <Laugh>? I hate it when that I bought it. Hate it when that I

Caller Douglas (01:32:25):
Bought it off, I bought it off the refurbished store, so it saved about five.

Leo Laporte (01:32:29):
So New Jersey has a annual sales tax holiday for spec to school. We have one in Missouri as well. Yeah, what a great idea.

Caller Douglas (01:32:40):
And actually last year I got the email about it from Apple.

Leo Laporte (01:32:44):
Apple knows. Yeah. Yeah. So Well, we're expecting an Apple event pretty soon actually. But it won't be for computers most likely. Mark of Bloomberg says it's gonna be was it September, September 11th? Or no, 12th or 13th? September 12th or the 13th. Yeah. Which is a Tuesday or Wednesday the following week following Memorial Day holiday and that the new iPhones will be available

Caller Douglas (01:33:07):
On the I'm I'm gonna be, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be in Disney the week of, of labor Day. So I hope it's not that week.

Leo Laporte (01:33:12):
It won't be. Yeah, they won't do it. They know you're in Disney, they're not. Yeah, that's exactly. And then if there are New Mac and there probably will be New Max, but it won't be till October, I think. Yep. Yeah.

Caller Douglas (01:33:22):
Yeah. So we'll see. See what happens.

Leo Laporte (01:33:24):
Pleasure Douglas. Yeah. SYC is your friend. I use SYC whenever I'm not, whenever I want to make sure that I got every file, especially if I'm copying a lot of files. I I love SYC for that.

Caller Douglas (01:33:34):
Yeah. I, I called in a couple weeks ago with questions about my new big lens I got that was having trouble focusing. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:33:43):
I

Caller Douglas (01:33:43):
Remember that. Went to another air show. I went to another air show and I wasn't exactly pleased with the with the pictures because the, the exposures were all off Dre. But, but I mean, the, the pictures I got of the Blue Angels that I showed you guys. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:33:57):
Yes. Okay. Yes, I remember those. Yeah, those were incredible. Yeah.

Caller Douglas (01:34:01):
Well

Leo Laporte (01:34:01):
Keep, keep working with it.

Caller Douglas (01:34:02):
Haven't I haven't, I haven't had a chance to go out and take any lunar photos yet. So.

Leo Laporte (01:34:07):
Well, you missed two super moons in a row. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Caller Douglas (01:34:09):
Well it was weather. There was weather.

Leo Laporte (01:34:12):
Oh, that damn weather. I tell you every time New Jersey may have a sales tax amnesty, but you don't have our weather <laugh>. Hey, it's a pleasure talking to you, Douglas. I appreciate. I'm

Caller Douglas (01:34:22):
Not sure I I'm not sure I want San Francisco weather either.

Leo Laporte (01:34:25):
No, fair enough. It's cold. It's cold. As Mark Twain did not say, famously did not say the coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco. <Laugh> who's, show me that whiteboard again. Julian. Julian. All right. I think. Hey, good to talk to you Douglas. Thank you. Now Julian is getting Come on down. Come on down Julian. He's got his hand raised. Yep. And he made it to the, I love this pop breakout room. I am more and more convinced that these make the best keyboard I want. Just put on this is the compact one. It's Bluetooth as well as wire. Let's see. Can you feel how big that is?

Mikah Sargent (01:35:02):
Oh, right. Oh. And it's not too loud.

Leo Laporte (01:35:04):
Well, no. And they have different key caps, just like the, but they make Key Run now makes their own. Instead of using third party key caps. I'm very happy I got a second one. That's the Kate Q one Pro. I got the Q three Pro for home and brought this in. 'cause I like it so much. Hours in. What can we do for you, Julian? Where, first of all, where are you calling

Caller Julian (01:35:22):
From? Okay. Am I, am I coming through?

Leo Laporte (01:35:24):
Yes. No picture. Just sound. Okay.

Caller Julian (01:35:27):
Yeah, that's okay. Yeah. this is Julian, a k a tech. JB

Leo Laporte (01:35:31):
Oh tech jb. Hi Julian.

Caller Julian (01:35:33):
Yeah, I tried to change my Zoom name when I was on hold, but I guess the way you guys have it set up, you it doesn't let me do that. So <laugh> well,

Leo Laporte (01:35:42):
We know who you are now. That's that's all that matters. Julian Vargas, who is our blind listener who does consulting and for free, helps people with vision issues. Get the best technology, 8 1 8 7 9 4 9 5 5 4 or tech jv.com or help@techjv.com.

Caller Julian (01:36:03):
Alright. <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:36:04):
I just gave out all

Caller Julian (01:36:05):
Information so I was calling. Wow, you're good. <Laugh>.

Caller Julian (01:36:10):
So I was calling it, it's kind of similar to the question you had earlier about routers, but not quite as complex. I don't have out buildings or anything like that to try to feed. Basically probably about 10 years ago you were using the ACEs AC 3,200. Loved it. Yeah. And based on that recommendation, I bought it.

Leo Laporte (01:36:32):
I we're still using it here. John, aren't we in the studio? That is the demo router? I think that's the one we're using in the studio. I brought it in anyway, go ahead. Sorry.

Caller Julian (01:36:42):
So it's starting to do some flaky things, so I'm starting to think that maybe it's time to look at a replacement.

Leo Laporte (01:36:49):
Okay.

Caller Julian (01:36:49):
So I'm wondering what you would recommend that would be similar, you know, along those lines. As a ham, I particularly like antennas if possible. And that's one thing I love about this routers, lots of them <laugh> and it works quite well because of it, I think. But also I'm thinking about the future. I was looking at some of the newer stuff. I don't really need mesh, although, you know, if, if a mesh one is the better one to get, I'll, I'll consider it. I just want something that's rock solid, reliable like this asis and we'll support things like matter. And some of the stuff that's coming from home

Leo Laporte (01:37:26):
Automation that you just

Mikah Sargent (01:37:28):
Threw, you threw in the wrinkle.

Leo Laporte (01:37:29):
Big, big monkey wrench. Yeah. Because the ACEs are still good, but I don't think they matter. I think frankly Matt, what are matter?

Mikah Sargent (01:37:36):
Yeah, it's more, it's more the underlying protocol, which is thread that you're going to be one

Leo Laporte (01:37:42):
And is the router the thing that you really want it to support?

Mikah Sargent (01:37:45):
So this is the problem in theory, yes. If it's the router, then you don't have to worry about getting any other devices that will thread because you're making your router the thread device. But there, because of the way, actually, if you, if you didn't check out, you should watch this week's Tech News Weekly where we spoke to an individual who is covering this regular income, talks about the problems with it. But there's a

Leo Laporte (01:38:15):
Thing called the thread border

Mikah Sargent (01:38:16):
Router, the thread. And that's exactly what Yeah. Which

Leo Laporte (01:38:18):
Is a, it's not a router, it's just a standalone thread device that you put on your network that becomes the And

Mikah Sargent (01:38:24):
It is. Yes. And so if you go to the, if you go to thread group.org and then you go to the what is thread option, and you choose certified products that will show you the different routers that exist right now that are thread enabled. Obviously Google's is, yes. Era is, that's

Leo Laporte (01:38:46):
Oh, Euro is, oh, good. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (01:38:48):
So that this is a very limited group right now that I imagine is going to continue to grow. But I do want to point out that it's not necessarily necessary. That's kind of a mouthful. To make your router also the thread border router because you're going to find that there are many devices that support thread that you can put on your network to then kind of be the thread border router. So you don't have to go with Apple's stuff. All of Google's stuff like the Google Nest has it. And then there are many other third party products like the, many of the devices from Eve. There's also a smart hub that works. So if

Leo Laporte (01:39:38):
You Refrigerators

Mikah Sargent (01:39:39):
Yeah. Refrigerators. If you wanna go all in and make your router the thread border router, then yes, Euro is probably going to be your best bet. But you said you wanted wanted antenna and that is not something you're gonna get with

Leo Laporte (01:39:54):
Your, that doesn't Yeah. Nor does the Nest wifi. Yeah. both of those, because they wanna blend into your home. Just your little things that sit there. I think you should not worry so much about Thread.

Mikah Sargent (01:40:08):
I agree.

Leo Laporte (01:40:09):
The thread, the idea of thread is that just to, for people who say why, what is all this with Thread? It's for home automation. So you remember, maybe you remember when you first, when Hugh first came out with their light bulbs, you had to get a Hugh base station and that was then on your network and that communicated with the light bulbs and then smart things came out and they supported a variety of different protocols. So one smart things base station could control a lot of home automation stuff. Well, the matter group has finally come out with a standard and a thread router that in theory will control everything Stacy says. I bet it's your experience too. I'm not a big home automation guy. She says she still ends up needing dedicated base stations for a lot of devices. Yeah. That threads in its infancy, maybe down the road thread will sup support everything. But right now it doesn't. Having thread in your router or in some device doesn't really necessarily solve all your issues. I would choose your router based on wifi and worry about thread later. Do you have a bunch of devices that support thread?

Caller Julian (01:41:15):
I don't, but you know, I like to buy a rodder maybe every five to 10 years. Yeah. You wanna be the only reason I was, I was, yeah. That's the only reason I was looking at that. But I, it's not important to me at the moment. Do you have

Leo Laporte (01:41:26):
Any echo, echo devices?

Caller Julian (01:41:29):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:41:30):
Echo. The later echo devices are all thread border routers. So all the Alexa devices. Yeah,

Caller Julian (01:41:36):
I know one of my one of, one of my the, the, the latest echo dot I think that I got that is like that,

Leo Laporte (01:41:43):
That will, and that, that all you need is one. Yep. So you got it. In other words, you already have a thread border router on your network, no need for another one. So choose a good router. Asus still makes great routers that look like spiders with all the antennas. If you're an antenna buff those are absolutely great routers. One of the things I like about, as is it's a somewhat open firmware solution. So you can use D D W R T and some of the other open firmware's on there. And actually their, their firmware is a version of it. So it's a very to me, if you're a geek and you love to play with all the settings in your router, that's amazing. When <laugh>, when I got an arrow, I was like, well, where's <laugh>? Where's all the settings?

Mikah Sargent (01:42:27):
Yeah. They, they, and that's, that's ended up being kinda the big issue. I, I wonder, Leo because you, you, you pointed out earlier, a lot of these routers, these modern routers are kind of forgetting the antenna for the point of having it blend in which is pushing people to have to go to the pro sumer or perhaps even professional market if they do want antennas. Do your does your setup at home do the different wifi access points that you have include?

Leo Laporte (01:42:59):
No, I'm ubiquity. So, yeah. Ubiquity is a prosumer system that I put in during the pandemic because I was tired of, honey, the internet's not working, by the way, this did not solve the problem, but it <laugh> it's a little bit better. So I have a big giant ubiquity router in my closet along with a big giant ubiquity switch in my closet, and then it wires come out of that into the ceiling and then go. And so there's ethernet drops everywhere, but also there's you know, in the hall it comes out and I plugged in it. It looks like a flying saucers. No antennas. I mean, they're in internal antennas. Antenna. Yeah. And it really is just essentially a big antenna because it's, it's just a wifi antenna, and it goes on the ceiling, it lights up and it looks like a flying saucer.

(01:43:49):
And it connects to the ethernet. It's powered over ethernet. And that works great, but I have five of 'em in the house. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we have a 5,000 square foot house, so it's all over. There's one in the garage. One per one K square feet. Yeah. I mean, it's, we have, we have 'em everywhere, but it solved the problem. There are no dead spots in the house at all. And when I sleep, I have interesting dreams, <laugh>. So I think I've really and if you turn off the lights, he glows. Yeah. Yeah. <Laugh> I'm not, I am not a big believer in the notion that wifi is bad for you. But there are some who say we're, it's spoiling yourselves. We have, we have saturated the house with wifi. It's everywhere. But I like it that way. And we even did put an ethernet everywhere.

(01:44:34):
You need ethernet. That's nice. Right. Your TVs, your computers, your desks and all that. So it's really just for laptops and phones and, and a lot of you know, devices like the Echo and the Google Assistant and stuff. I don't, I doubt, I guess we have thread 'cause I have echo modern echoes. Yeah. But and you have, you have the latest home pods. Yes, I do. Yeah. So you have those have thread, also thread in multiple ways everywhere. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there's threads, but I don't use them. So there, so ha. So I, well, I've, home automation to me is a flop. Right? I understand. I'm sorry. It's not gonna get better. It's just forget it. Forget you even thought of it, Leo. And I agree to disagree on that, but <laugh>, I've been around long enough, Julie, and I know what a flop is when I see one <laugh>. Okay. Hey Julian, enjoy your new router. It's great to talk to you, tech jv, it's great to have you on the show. And thank you for all you do. Tech jv.com

Caller John (01:45:36):
And thank you.

Leo Laporte (01:45:37):
Take care. Take care. Bye-Bye. You're watching, ask the tech guys, Mike, Sergeant and Leo LaPorte and another call coming up. Alright, we've got a call. Call and we've got a Zoom call. A Nous. A Nous. I like, I like people named a Nous. A Nous. Dude. we don't know who you are because you have call blocking turned on, but you're on the air. <Laugh>. Hi anonymous, what's your name?

Caller John (01:46:04):
Hello. Hello, this is John.

Leo Laporte (01:46:07):
Hi John. Hello. Where are you calling from?

Caller John (01:46:10):
I'm calling from Texas.

Leo Laporte (01:46:11):
Nice. Alright. What's up?

Caller John (01:46:14):
All right. I wanted to build a new PC because the one I had kind of died, but not just any like ordinary gaming pc. I wanted to make more of a workstation. Ah, but I want kind of your opinion.

Leo Laporte (01:46:30):
Are you what, what software are you using on your workstation?

Caller John (01:46:36):
Well, windows, but I kind of wanna make also dual boot into other TROs of Linux for other purposes.

Leo Laporte (01:46:43):
Okay. N PC run, Linux, windows Real. What client software are you using? Are you using, you know, AutoCAD? Are you doing photogrammetry? You say you want a workstation, you want power. What is that power for?

Caller John (01:47:01):
I want to get into Unreal.

Leo Laporte (01:47:04):
Oh, okay. Okay. So you want to use the Unreal Engine. And I think the, I think I'm pretty sure Unreal wants Nvidia. I'm guessing what's your budget? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because you can, you can spend a lot of money on a 40 90 if you want.

Caller John (01:47:22):
Well, here's the thing, it's not, I don't think I'm gonna buy everything all at once. I'm gonna probably buy it piece by piece.

Leo Laporte (01:47:29):
Yeah, that's smart.

Caller John (01:47:30):
Like as I, yes.

Leo Laporte (01:47:32):
So the, and Build, so the Unreal Engine five, according to Epic Games, wants a, at least a six core Zion <laugh> running at 3.4 gigahertz, 64 gigs of Ram 256 gigs of S Ss D internal two terabytes of ex external and a GForce R T X 28 Super. So actually this sounds fairly old because I, you know, I don't, I don't think I, Zon is the interesting thing on all this. Technically a workstation might be using a, a Xeon, that's their workstation chip, but it is not their fastest chip. It's really designed for throughput as much as anything else. So that's interesting that that's what Unreal is is asking for. I think you'd be fine. <Laugh>. now I'm on another, another page that says recommended hardware, a quad core Intel <laugh>. Oh my. And eight gigs of Ram. Yeah. Yeah. I think you would be fine. I would, if I were you, I'd go a m d I'd get a Ryzen seven. Those are gonna give you real throughput and power at a better cost. And at some point, if you're gonna use Linux, you can use Nvidia with Linux. But you're gonna have to use proprietary drivers.

Caller John (01:48:58):
I know that's kind of the, the trade off. Well, yeah, I'm willing to make

Leo Laporte (01:49:03):
It depends on how much G P U you need. Okay. Yeah. I I have not got enough experience with the Unreal Engine. This is one maybe for, for Alex Lindsay. I do know that Epic suggests an Nvidia card. I don't, I think there's no reason you shouldn't get an Nvidia card, but I would get an a md Ryzen seven for the core processor, and then I would get mm-hmm. <Affirmative> don't get a radio on. Get an Nvidia card and just get the best you can afford. 'cause You could spend $5,000 on a video card <laugh>. But, but for Unreal, you know you're gonna want it. Right. It's that's gonna mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, that's gonna be fun. They have, they support Ray tracing. So you're gonna want an Nvidia card that has hardware Ray tracing that means a mm-hmm. <Affirmative> a radi on 6,000 or higher, or an R T X 2000 or higher on the Nvidia side. Looks like they've got all sorts of interesting technologies that you want to have. You, you know, direct X 12 agility. Boy, there's a lot of stuff. They have virtual shadow maps. They just do all sorts of cool stuff. I mean, if you've seen Unreal. Have you seen Unreal five Engine? Yeah. It's incredible. Oh my God. Wow. mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, are you gonna do game development or what do you wanna do with it?

Caller John (01:50:22):
Oh yeah. Game development is my number one. Gaming and game development are the top uses. Linux will be for other purposes that are not game related. I kind of wanna isolate some of those. But my real question is it ha if I had the budget for it, would I be better off doubling up for that extra redundancy? Basically two of the very same machines, identical hardware, or I better off just waiting to get a Demoware server grade Right. Pro. because if I want, if I go the first route, I'm gonna get the 79 50. I

Leo Laporte (01:51:06):
Don't think any equivalent. I mean, why would you want redundant machines? Are you afraid that if it dies you're gonna be like, are you gonna be on deadline and things like that? Or?

Caller John (01:51:14):
Well, I don't want, because if I if I have to work on it, I want something to fall back on.

Leo Laporte (01:51:23):
Hmm. I don't know if I would get a redundant machine.

Caller John (01:51:26):
Don't want

Leo Laporte (01:51:27):
I mean, getting two machines, the second machine is probably never gonna get used. I mean, yeah, if it fails, you'd have a backup, but that's a lot a month, four or $5,000 to spend for something you may never use. I've never actually heard

Caller John (01:51:43):
Of that. Which is fine because I'm gonna

Leo Laporte (01:51:45):
<Laugh>

Caller John (01:51:46):
Because I could do swivel chairing and work on part of one scene on one machine and Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:51:53):
I guess you could. Yeah. Okay. Now you're getting really complicated 'cause you're gonna do distri distributed rendering and things like that gets a little bit more Yeah. But yeah, you could use them for that. This is way outta my league. Yeah. <laugh>. I was gonna say, you know what you do. Here's, here's what you do. Here's what you do. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know about Office Hours. Have you heard about that? Good idea. Office Hours Global. This is Alex Lindsay's thing that I've, it's fascinating. He does every day they have a Zoom call that hundreds of people watch and dozens join. I'm gonna put you on hold because I think somebody's calling you. But go to Office Hours. Go to Office Hours Global. And you can say, I want to, I want to join. And they'll send you the Zoom link. Then you can go in there and ask questions of people who are doing this work.

(01:52:44):
Now, today, they also have segments, if you look at their YouTube channel on using Unreal Engine and on hardware and stuff. But you can ask this exact question 'cause you're gonna have, there's some technical issues with distributed rendering and stuff. And this is way outta my pay grade, but I think they would talk about this on office hours. And most importantly, instead of talking to some guy off the top of my head, you'd be talking to people who are actually doing this right now. And they would have some, oh, okay. I think they would have better advice. I like the idea of a thread ripper. I love the idea of getting a m d on in on this. I think they give you more bang for your buck. I mean certainly Intel is, is racing ahead, but I, I feel like AMD's got some good solid gear. You're probably gonna go with Nvidia. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> the duplicate thing, I don't know. That's a lot. But if you know you're gonna be doing distributed rendering, okay. But then you're gonna want to have interconnects and stuff, and that gets much more complicated. Office hours got globals. They're gonna, they're gonna be much more helpful to you, I think.

Caller John (01:53:43):
Okay. I think the real question is, E even if you don't know anything or very limited knowledge in Unreal would you say that a threat record is about twice as reliable as each separate machine, hypothetical machine,

Leo Laporte (01:54:03):
So that you don't need the redundancy? I don't think thread Ripper is more reliable. No, I disagree. I think if you build a machine right, with appropriate cooling reliability is not gonna be an issue.

Caller John (01:54:16):
Or, or, or even with the <crosstalk>. No, the

Leo Laporte (01:54:18):
Really, the only reason to go a MD is more bang for your buck. Intel is still the king of the hill. It's just about more, more, more gang for your buck. You might go, somebody's given us, Keith five 12 has a YouTube of video on the level one John Falcon Northwest system is guide to the ultimate machine learning machine. That's a little bit of a different usage, but he's built a workstation. So level one Guide to the Ultimate Machine Learning Workstation, that's a new workstation. This is one where you just, you're just gonna have to do a lot of research and then you're gonna get a lot of options and then you have to decide what's important and what's not important to you. But I do think office hours will be helpful. Hey, I think this sounds like fun. Keep us posted on what you're, what you're writing.

Caller John (01:55:05):
Oh, okay. Because I want to make a platformer. Even the fact to start simple. Another thing is with the ram would you say that the E C C ram, because I know that it's gonna to be support on the thread ripper, is that gonna be more

Leo Laporte (01:55:22):
Reliable overall? Yeah, that's a good point. Versus, and AMD support for Thunderbolt isn't as good. So for interconnect you probably want Intel. So that's a really interesting point. E C C ram, I think it was, I wanna say it was Romero, was it John Romero? Who recently said you'd be nuts to be by a computer without E C C ram. E C C stands for error correction. And E C C RAM automatically in the background corrects bit flips. He, I believe it was him. He said that, that there are people are experiencing crashes on their systems because they aren't using E C C ram. Normally we say that more expensive RAM solution is for servers and mission critical things. But he says everybody should be using E C C RAM now because the price has come down a little bit because it's gonna improve the reliability drastically. I think for what you're talking about is probably a good idea to go with E C C ram. It is gonna be more expensive, but I think it's actually not a bad idea. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>,

Caller John (01:56:29):
I don't Oh, it

Leo Laporte (01:56:30):
Was Linus Tours. That's who said it. You're right. It was Linus Tour Vaults who said that everybody should be getting E C C ram. Just because if they don't use error correcting ram, they're gonna have unexplained crashes. Linus said, why don't PCs use error correcting ram? Because Intel <laugh> says Linus and it looks like he's flipping up the bird to non E C C ram, the misguided and ARS backwards policy of consumers don't need E C C made the market for E C C memory go away, says Linus, the arguments against E C C were always complete and utter garbage. Now even the memory manufacturers are starting to do E C C internally because they finally owned up to the fact they absolutely have to. So yes, E C C is a good idea.

Caller John (01:57:24):
Okay. But that's mostly for threat ripper and server grade, not for consumer grade. Yeah. Which is Well, but

Leo Laporte (01:57:31):
That was, and that's what line is point is they should have always made it e c even on consumer computers. 'cause That's why you have unexplained crashes. You know, we, we answer a lot of questions about behavior that is, you can't explain. Right? Why is that a zero file? I don't know. It just happens to be, but it's Linus position and he should know that a lot of that is 'cause a bit flips in your ram from cosmic rays or whatever. And if you had E C C, you wouldn't have that problem. He says another quote, this is from an RS Technica article that came out two years ago, quote. And the memory manufacturers claim it's because of economics in lower power and they are lying, I can't even say this word on, on national television. <Laugh>, let me once again, point to Ro Hammer about how these problems have existed for several generations already.

(01:58:20):
But these fers happily sold broken hardware to consumers and claimed it was an attack when it was always we're cutting corners. How many times has a row hammer? Like bit flip happened just by pure bad luck on real non attack loads. We'll never know because Intel was pushing bad stuff. <Laugh>, he uses bad words a lot to consumers. He was very angry. So get e c c <laugh> and good luck finding it on most computers. Ryzen does support E c C and tell does not. So that's another reason. Okay. Yeah. Another reason to go with Ryzen.

Caller John (01:59:01):
Okay. Yeah, that's, that would've been a plan all along.

Leo Laporte (01:59:04):
Yep. Gotta run. I'm very gotta run. We're out of time. Appreciate the call. It's great to talk to you. Let us know what you do. I'll play your platformer when it comes out. I'm excited. Let's,

Caller John (01:59:16):
It could be a while before that happens.

Leo Laporte (01:59:18):
I understand. <Laugh>. I've been playing Heim in beta for three years. I know <laugh>, I know how long this stuff takes. Is Ezra slower? I don't know. Is it slower enough to matter? I don't know. I think on a workstation, probably not. Most workstations, I think use error correcting Ram. We have time I think for another oh, you know what we haven't done. What's that? Voicemail else? Let's do a voicemail. Anthony, should I reach back here and stretch my rotator cuff and and risk injury? Or should we do a voicemail? Voicemail? Let's do voicemail. Okay. <laugh> <laugh>. Do a voicemail.

Caller Andrew (02:00:04):
Hi, my name is Andrew. I'm calling from West Palm Beach, Florida. I'm having an issue getting into my old email account. I lost the password to my email account and I changed my phone number so I can't get a notification on my old phone number and I don't know the password that I have on my profile. So I'm completely locked out. Yes. What can I do? I don't have any backup as far as I know. Yeah, please help me.

Leo Laporte (02:00:43):
Oh, that's so sad. So I'm guessing he's a a Gmail user. Yeah. He didn't say Yeah. Gmail and boy folks, if nothing else, this should be a cautionary tale. Google says in your and do your security checkup and it'll say, give us a backup phone number and a backup email. That's not Gmail. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Because you're gonna need that to recover it. Having lost that in the password. There's no one to call Gmail's a free service. They don't support you. No. If you are on Fast Mail our sponsor, I might say, well, you call 'em and they'll get you in. But no, you can't do that at Gmail. And, and for good reason, they're trying to protect your security. Your security or email is the number one security thing. Because if you know, you, your email is probably how you get password recovery. I mean, there's all sorts of stuff that goes through email. So you really, we were talking about this on security now on Tuesday with Steve Gibson. You really want to protect your email. Golly yes. I don't think there's

Mikah Sargent (02:01:42):
A solution. I don't Yeah, I don't know of anything that you could do short of working at Google <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:01:48):
Yeah. that's why they ask you to set up those extra backup things. Yeah. And your phone number changed. You Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (02:01:58):
I don't think there's anything you can do. I think you're locked outta this account.

Leo Laporte (02:02:01):
Yeah. Time for a new email address. Yeah. You know, can we make this a can we find a silver lining in this dark cloud? It's time to declare email bankruptcy. Yeah. I think this is a good thing to do from time to time anyway. It's just tell everybody, you know I got too many mail that I've not read. My backlog is too high. I just pretend I never got your email. If you really was important, send it again. And here's my new address, <laugh> and just declare email bankruptcy. You're outta luck, I think. And you know, that's a big deal. Let's check a vo a quick email. 'cause This, I think this one is applicable.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:37):
Is it printed right side up?

Leo Laporte (02:02:40):
It is. Wow. See, Anthony knows how to print things right side up. <Laugh>, he's a trained professional. This comes from Hugh.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:48):
Hi

Leo Laporte (02:02:48):
Hugh. Now he signs it respectfully. So that means he's gonna be mean. Oh

Mikah Sargent (02:02:52):
No. Oh no. Hold on. I gotta breathe for a second.

Leo Laporte (02:02:56):
When somebody says, with all due respect. Yeah. Or when they say, no offense,

Mikah Sargent (02:03:01):
But he had no offense. But

Leo Laporte (02:03:04):
Hi Leo and Micah

Mikah Sargent (02:03:06):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:03:07):
I've always wanted to in invest my home with smart home devices. I'm liking you more, Hugh. However, after buying into Nest by getting the thermostat and the Nest Protect, I felt betrayed by Nest when they sold out to Google. You are not alone, Hugh. And I've since thrown out my Nest Protect <laugh>. I still, wow. I still have the Nest thermostat, but it'll eventually replace it with a thermostat focused on privacy. I just discovered Eve and then I read, and then I read Stacey's article on Eve getting sold to a b B group. I don't know who a, this A b B is when they're at home, but I'm gonna have to read up on them. And I'd like to tell Stacey, this is my reason for not buying smart home devices. Yeah. If you're super privacy concern. Yep. I think that's legit. I

Mikah Sargent (02:03:49):
Agree. You

Leo Laporte (02:03:49):
Could run what are, what are the open source? There's Open Hab and there's another one that's more Oh

Mikah Sargent (02:03:54):
Yeah, yeah. Oh God.

Leo Laporte (02:03:56):
There are open source, there are platforms for smart homes. It's not that I think it will add nothing to my home, but privacy in my home is everything for me. And as long as these companies like Nest and Eve continue to be acquired by large companies with questionable privacy practices, I will continue to get up and flip my mechanical switches, which I do. And it's a good thing. I hope A b B keeps Eve's privacy promise. But I will ask Stacy about that on, on on Wednesday. Google initially didn't until they didn't. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, what do you think of Eve? Are you familiar with A B B I was about this week to buy the eve room air sensor and eve motion sensor, my local Apple store.

Mikah Sargent (02:04:32):
So I have known the folks at Eve, the c e o, the person in charge of their marketing and the person that is like their essentially chief technology officer for, they just recently took a long

Leo Laporte (02:04:45):
Time, took Mike on an all expense paid trip to Europe.

Mikah Sargent (02:04:48):
Didn't that, that is not at all <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:04:49):
Oh no, I'm sorry. It was on their ocean going yacht <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:04:52):
No, this is not true either. I've known these folks for a long time because of what I do and have talked to them regularly and the team directly at Eve they are whip smart and very knowledgeable and frankly have kind of helped to push some of the other folks in this space forward. So I still have a lot of trust in them, but I do understand the concern that when they're being purchased by some company, that that might result in, you know, them slowly moving their tentacles into what is good and making it bad. What it boils down to is kind of what we were just talking about. If you have that concern, the only way you can truly, fully, completely allay the concern is by just not using the stuff that you don't trust. There's no other way to, to to think about it.

(02:05:48):
I trust even enough as it currently stands and the companies it currently exists with continuing to do a good job. Because that was one of the things about Eve is that they do as much as they can locally. They're not about the you know, internet side of things where you send the commands to the server and the server. It's as much locally processing as possible because they wanted that privacy aspect. So for me, Eve, despite its acquisition by A B B continues to make devices that are controlled locally most of the time over HomeKit. And I, I'm good with it. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:06:23):
It's a good question. And you know, they just did this in June. I don't know enough about a B B I will ask Stacy. This is the open source home automation software that's most widely used. It's called Home Assistant. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> at home Assistant home assistant.io. And it is Privacy Forward because you're running the server. Yes. So you obviously you have to get stuff that is okay with that instead of phoning home everything that, you know, the cons, basic consumer grade stuff, all phones home. That's how it works. But if you get stuff that works with Home Assistant and a lot of stuff does, you can keep it all inside your house. And then you've got home automation and privacy and

Mikah Sargent (02:07:05):
It lets you do some pretty cool things. Oh, yeah. You can connect your TVs to it in many cases. And so every time I turn on the tv, I want you to do this. You can there were a bunch of, I could connect my toothbrush to home assistant if I wanted to. It's kind of incredible what is out there, but it also then tells you how much is actually sending out signals in your home. Yeah. Which can be kind of like, no

Leo Laporte (02:07:26):
Kidding. So ZigBee Z-Wave supported smart things has supported

Mikah Sargent (02:07:32):
Bluetooth. If you've got something that can actually Bluetooth or, you know, not hear Bluetooth, but pick up on

Leo Laporte (02:07:38):
Bluetooth. So does Home Assistant then stop these? Like the Echo? No, the Echo still has to, in order to work, it still has to phone home.

Mikah Sargent (02:07:45):
It, it does not, it You're not replacing the functionality. You're augmenting the functionality. Okay. So what Home Assistant does do is it lets you use devices out there that are just strictly network only local area, network only devices. You know, it'll, it'll support those different devices that don't have phone home capabilities. Whereas you may not see that with the Echo where that's part of the server, right. Or service. I mean,

Leo Laporte (02:08:12):
It does support Lutron's. Caseta, which a lot of people think is the best. They Yes. Smart Switches. I don't know if Lutron then still has to phone home. I think not

Mikah Sargent (02:08:21):
It, you would have to, you would have to block its ability to phone home, right? 'cause The Bridge is still going to look for more updates and Right. That kind of thing.

Leo Laporte (02:08:32):
But you could block it on your router Yep.

Mikah Sargent (02:08:34):
And then still work and still

Leo Laporte (02:08:34):
Get the functionality using Home Assistant.

Mikah Sargent (02:08:37):
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (02:08:37):
So Home Assistant is probably the, you know, if you really are privacy focused and don't want to get up and flip switches, that's probably the best

Mikah Sargent (02:08:44):
Way to go. And Home Assistant has an app. The one thing with Home Assistant is it is open source, which is good, but also all of the plugins are open source and occasionally made by individuals. And so if you go and get an obscure plugin for an obscure product that you've bought, you have to be certain that the code is not also doing some nefarious stuff. You know what I mean? Because it, it may be that you and three other people are the only one who've ever looked at that code and it turns out that it's like sharing your IP address with someone. So just be mindful as you're going through and installing new little plugins to occasionally take a look and, and see if the code lines up. That

Leo Laporte (02:09:21):
Was such a good question. I'm gonna do one more. Alright, let's do it. I'm really enjoying these. And these are again, not upside

Mikah Sargent (02:09:26):
Down. So, and this one says, you know what really grinds Mikey is <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:09:30):
It's a, you know, it's funny, we have, there's a certain, it seems to happen on all the shows where we get same questions in the same category, extending wifi coverage in my home. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Richard says, I recently moved into a new home and had at and t Fiber installed. Nice. Nice.

(02:09:46):
Unfortunately, I don't get good coverage at the other end of my home. Oh. Or outside my deck. What can I do to extend my wifi coverage? The at t fiber comes with its own box. It has to, to turn the wi the fiber into internet. And then that box, I'm guessing also is a router. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you could either get an extender for that router, but the easiest thing to do if it'll let you do it, and this really is, comes down to at and t, is put that router, the one that came from at and t into bridge mode and connect that to an arrow or an Orbi or any of the mesh routers. 'cause The whole point of the mesh router is to get to that corner of the house. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> where you don't have any coverage. And they do that by having a base station.

(02:10:28):
And then little secondary units, Euro calls 'em beacons or B calls 'em satellites. But they're not repeaters. Exactly. They kind of are ex or extenders. Even extenders don't quite do the same thing. They're just mesh. They, they spread the mesh out. The, one of the companies that used to make these, and I used to have a bunch of them. Comcast ended up I think buying them. They used to say, think of wifi as a light in your room, a reading light. You wouldn't try to read a book by a lamp that's two doors down, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you need a lamp in every room. I don't know if you need one in every room, but you'd certainly want to have them spread out throughout the house. Wifi is kind of like light, you know, it's radio. And so it does get stopped by things like doors, refrigerators, and you know what the worst thing is for wifi bodies?

Mikah Sargent (02:11:21):
Us. Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:11:23):
We are bags of water to wifi and it just stops the signal cold. So that's another reason why you put the wifi redder up above.

Mikah Sargent (02:11:31):
Alternatively, you could sell your home and get a smaller one. That is another option.

Leo Laporte (02:11:36):
That's a great idea. Yeah. Lisa and I were taking a walk down in Petaluma downtown, and there was this cute little house. We thought this would be, we could trade our big ridiculous house out in the country for this nice little Queen Anne style. Victorian. Oh, right downtown. You know where it was, John? It, it's around the corner from you and just a step or two away from the old cottage. And then we saw it didn't have a kitchen. <Laugh>. What? Yeah, so, well, it's been used as offices, but it's a cute old Victorian. But yeah, we thought, well, we're gonna have to put in a kitchen. It doesn't have a bathtub, so we're gonna have to put in a bath. It doesn't have a garage. It has a asphalt parking

Mikah Sargent (02:12:17):
Lot. No, I, it's, I think

Leo Laporte (02:12:18):
It's, I think we decided it was too much. Yeah, that's offload. Oh, John just turned the light back on by way. Thank you John. See John is really serves a purpose. John Jamer, B Sina, who is our studio manager. Benito. It's great to have you. I never say your last name 'cause I don't know if you're privacy focused or not, but Benito is a huge part of this show. Our, our technical director. Do you want me to say your last name or would you like to preserve?

Mikah Sargent (02:12:44):
It's Corleone.

Leo Laporte (02:12:46):
You don't wanna, I don't know your last name.

Mikah Sargent (02:12:47):
Spinto. Corleone.

Leo Laporte (02:12:48):
Corleone <laugh> is the godfather of the technical directors. We also thank Anthony Nielsen for filling in. Yes, thank you. Our normal producer John Ashley. What is John doing? Is he on vacation?

Mikah Sargent (02:13:01):
Yeah, he's vacationing.

Leo Laporte (02:13:02):
Is he going? Did he go somewhere?

Mikah Sargent (02:13:05):
I think so. Yeah. Time. I

Leo Laporte (02:13:06):
Don't talk to the employees. I have a rule <laugh>, so I never know what <laugh>

Mikah Sargent (02:13:11):
Only on camera. The moment the camera goes off, Leo says no words to me. No. It's really awkward.

Leo Laporte (02:13:15):
I don't talk to any of these people. <Laugh>. No. I just, I don't know. I never found out where John was going. I hope he's having a good time wherever he is. We thank you so much for joining us. Thank you this week. And ask the tech guys, it's so fun to do this with you. Thank

Mikah Sargent (02:13:28):
You. I enjoy it for being

Leo Laporte (02:13:29):
Here. Sailor Micah

Mikah Sargent (02:13:32):
A ho. Wait, how do you, what a boy. How do sailors say goodbye?

Mikah Sargent (02:13:36):
Avast. I'm going

Leo Laporte (02:13:37):
Down <laugh>. I don't know.

Mikah Sargent (02:13:39):
Bonvoy Hunt.

Leo Laporte (02:13:40):
Do you have I gotta I gotta ask you a question. Okay. Is, is it, is it an optical illusion or is it me? Do you have this shirt is what looks like navy blue stripes with little thin white stripes. Do you also have a shirt with white fat, white stripes and thin navy blue stripes?

Mikah Sargent (02:13:54):
Perhaps it is both. Is that what

Leo Laporte (02:13:56):
You're asking? I feel like you have both. Like you but not on one, not on at the same time. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (02:14:00):
You're wondering if I also have another shirt, shirt where

Leo Laporte (02:14:03):
The white is dominant.

Mikah Sargent (02:14:04):
Got it. I might, I

Leo Laporte (02:14:05):
Feel like you do.

Mikah Sargent (02:14:06):
Yeah, I think I do. <Laugh>. I like stripes <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:14:12):
Anyway, we do this show every <laugh>, I don't know what I'm, every Sunday we start, you know, a little after 10:11 AM Pacific, which is about 2:00 PM East Coast time. And we go usually till about four 30 East Coast time. One 30 Pacific Time. Tell you what, if you go, if you wanna watch us live and you can, that means you can call in live. Just tune in around 2:00 PM Eastern. Live TWI tv is the live feed. There's audio and video there. As you know, you can call, call twi tv. If you call during show hours, (888) 724-2884, you can be on the air with us. Otherwise you could just leave a message. Yes. And we can play the messages back as we just did. You can also email and that works anytime. ATG at twit tv. If you wanna watch live, do me a favor, join us in the chat room Team, tech guys, we call 'em scooter X and Company Reverb. Mike back in Philly Tech, Dino Dwindle Dr. Mom loquacious, they're such big helps to us. Yes,

Mikah Sargent (02:15:16):
We appreciate

Leo Laporte (02:15:17):
It. They're always looking up stuff for us. IRC twit tv and of course there's the Velvet Rope team too. Guy <laugh>. If you go behind the Velvet rope in the club, you can also join us in the Club Twit Discord, which is always a great place to be. In fact, if you're not a club member yet, can I encourage you, please, to join the Club. Seven bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows. The access to the Discord you get. Shows we don't put out otherwise only in the club. The club only shows include Micah's, HandsOn Macintosh, Paul Ott does Hands On Windows, the Untitled Linux Show with Jonathan Bennett. That gives Fizz with Dick d Bartolo, Scott Wilkinson's, home Theater Geeks, members only as well. We do use the club to launch new shows this week in space.

(02:16:03):
Started Club only, and then as it gained audience, we put it out in public. So that's the hope. We're not trying to keep anything from you. It's just the club members with their seven bucks support the development of all these shows. They actually pay for it. None of that money goes in my pocket. Or leases. It goes into keeping the staff employed, keeping shows going, keeping the lights on. Twit TV slash club twit. We we'd love to have you in the club and we welcome all of our club members. We thank them so much for their support. Thank you. Yes. anything else I need to say? I think that covered it. Yeah, if you subscribe to the show, you'll get it automatically. Audio or video, you can go to the website, twit tv slash atg or tech guy labs.com.

(02:16:49):
That still works. Yes. That'll take you to this special page. Once you're on that page, you can download shows there, but you can also click a link that'll, you know, open up your podcast application and, and put it in there. Or you could search for, ask the Tech guys in your podcast application. There's also a YouTube feed of Ask the Tech guys, so you can go there too. All of that's at Twitter TV slash atg along with the show notes. Thank you. Tech Dino. Show notes such as they are. We don't spend a lot of time on that. We got other things to do. Right. But we do have links. So if we, if we mention having links, you can find those there. And that's, somebody puts those up there. Yes. We don't know who I I know it, you know what's really, because I talked to the other one.

(02:17:26):
What's really cool, and Anthony is spearheading this, AI is getting better at, better at listening to a show, transcribing it, tagging it, and ultimately making better show notes than humans do. And I think within the next few months we're gonna start doing that. And I think that's gonna be, that's awesome. Really improvement. We'll have lots more links, lots more information about this show. I I would really like to do that. Yeah. thank you everybody. We'll see you next Sunday. Thanks. All right. Yes, we will. We'll be back. Ask the tech guys. Ask the tech guys. Leo Laport, Micah, Sergeant. Bye-Bye. Have a great geek week.